Awake early meant that I was able to watch the Andrew Marr show which included Anthony Sher and a well known South African actor who are appearing in an African styled interpretation of the Tempest with a colonial occupation and freedom seeking theme, and a reminder of an earlier episode of the History of Christianity series which explained how Christianity looked the other way as millions of African were killed or survived the journey into slavery and a life long physical and sexual abuse as well as loss of their cultural identity. A second suitable subject for Sunday was the widespread abuse of their position as Parliamentarians by using he system to claim the maximum expenses allowances, and the performance of Home Secretary was pathetic as she appeared to lose the moral argument when she that the officials advised her and that anyway what she was doing was cheaper than the Grace and Favour home previous Home Secretaries were entitled to and which and been sold to help the public purse. Surely we have the right to expect that Ministers will have sufficient self confidence and personal and political integrity to challenge officials when necessary. Andrew Marr hit the appropriate nail on the head by mentioning that when he became a journalist everyone exploited expenses to the maximum and you created problems for yourself if you did not go along with the culture. What the Home Secretary and her colleagues on both sides of the House are failing to recognise is the universal public contempt for all politicians especially Labour Party Ministers who were supposed to furthering the interests of ordinary workers but have been revealed not just as putting their noses in the trough as those in the so called wealth creating activities but were directly responsible for the culture of personal wealth accumulation which has now led millions to lose their work and some their homes. The problem she and Prime Minister Brown face is that the public has seen through the argument that what happened in the UK is part a world wide development as if this was some kind of excuse instead of admission that politicians in all the countries concerned were guilty of spiritual bankruptcy as well as financial incompetence.
I have some sympathy with the fundamental Christians of the central states of the USA who attempt to retain the basic moral values of their faith until they attempt the belief that the Old Testament should be taken literally and that the universe was created over a week and have made an multi million dollar theme park which alleges that human beings were created at the same time as dinosaurs. Science versus Christianity and Christianity versus science, was the theme of this weekend’s episode of the History of Christianity.
Professor Colin Blakemore who became Professor of physiology at Oxford University at the age of 35 years and the youngest person to be invited to deliver the Reith lectures presented a balance history of how the Catholic church embraced the development of science, then persecuted and put its development and is now, to varying degrees, adjusting its view of the Old and New Testaments to take account of scientific discoveries. He showed that at first the church supported the scientific approach as it presumed it would endorse the official view of creation.
For 1500 years after the birth of Christ the belief system was that the earth was centre of the universe but Copernicus worked out that the earth moved around the sun. It was another hundred years before his work was taken up by Galileo Galilei 1564 to 1642 and his work created the present day scientific system of enquiry, observation and testing theory through practice. Unfortunately his work coincided with the threat to the power of Catholicism from the torture by the Inquisition unless he recanted heretical statements. Galileo had drawn upon the argument of St Augustine that the Bible should not be regarded as the dictated word of God but a contemporary way of explaining the nature of the Jewish and then Catholic system of beliefs. His persecution put back scientific progress until the Age of Enlightenment. This age of Reason was to have a special significance in my life as when I first went into adult education at Ruskin College Oxford I was thrust into the study of, Mozart, Hobbs, Locke, John Wilkes, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, James Boswell, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin Diderot, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Alex De Tocqueville , Alex de Toocville, and the French Encyclopedistes, the German Adam Weishaupt to who founded the Illuminate, Spinoza, Of some 50 major figures only one Ceasre Beccaria was Italian and known for his work on Crime and Punishment which condemned torture and the death penalty, and making suicide punishable.
Professor Blakemore went to Italy and to the Papal Observatory at the Castell Gandolpho. The Papa; Summer residence overlooking a lake and where the small village is full of religious shops, pubs, hotels and churches, where on my visit, there was a wedding, the second within a couple of days witnessed, the first being at the original Monastery church of the Benedictine Order at Subacio where he spent a number of years living as a hermit in cave like cell. At the Observatory the scientist priest in charge explained that Catholics and most Christians now understood that the testaments were books of their time to communicate a faith rather than historical documents and were not the direct word of God or of Jesus of Nazareth for that matter. The Catholic mind and that of most Christian now understand the evolution of human beings from apes, as well as the known evidence of the development of earth and the universe. This does not detract from the central beliefs, moral and life systems which contemporary Christians attempt to live by. There is a gigantic gulf between them and an the Anglican Vicar at Oxford who even challenged many of the central beliefs about the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the fundamentalists in the USA who stick to creationism as a six day wonder and who argue that any scientific evidence which conforms to their values and beliefs is good and acceptable science and that anything which does not is bad science and reprehensible.
Now here is my dilemma. Most of the fundamentalist are neither mad or bad and the way that the majority live is commendable and merits approbation, but on their understanding of the origins of universe and on the writings known as the Bible they are wrong and dangerously wrong. On the other hand the way many of those who only accept the scientific view of creation live is a matter of concern as in addition to explaining what has been they are instrumental in the potential destruction of planet earth, and not its salvation.
The evil of irrationality was the subject of Lark Rise to Candleford where hatred had been built up between two villages because in a previous generation one village had accused a woman who was known to be good and truthful of stealing a hive of their bees. In fact one the older characters in the series remembered her grandmother doing so but had been too frightened and embarrassed to revealing he truth, Suspending irrationality was a prerequisite for the next episode of Lost where at least three of survivors get back to the Island although the other three had set off to do so.
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