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About Emma C Williams

Emma C Williams is a teacher, a freelance writer and an author of Young Adult fiction. Originally from Berkshire, she studied Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London, and went on to research in the field of Neoplatonism, completing a PhD thesis on Iamblichus' De Mysteriis in 1999. You can follow her on Twitter @emma_c_williams and visit her website www.emmacwilliams.com to view more of her recent work.

The ‘good news’

December 15, 2016 by Emma C Williams

‘All I had done was to nurse from my heart. How could it be harmful to tell someone about Jesus?’

These are the words of Sarah Kuteh, an experienced nurse, who is suing Darent Valley Hospital in Dartford for unfair dismissal with the backing of the Christian Legal Centre.

Kuteh was dismissed in August following complaints from patients that she had held ‘unwanted discussions’ about her Christian faith with them. She was issued with a written warning in April this year, and claims to have modified her behaviour since; yet the hospital reportedly received three further complaints from patients, after which Kuteh was suspended pending an investigation and ultimately sacked.

There has been predictable outcry from the converted. As one commentator says on the Christian Concern Facebook page, ‘What a wonderful nurse. That is exactly the sort of person I would want nearby for myself or a family member when facing their own mortality in a time of serious illness. This action is totally unjustified and a further example of our PC society gone mad. God bless you!’

But let us imagine for a moment an alternative scenario, in which an experienced nurse is a committed and vocal atheist. When interviewing a frail old lady who volunteers for the Patient Information Form that she is a member of the Church of England, our nurse informs her enthusiastically and with love in her heart that there is no God, and that grasping this truth has made her happy. Supporting a grieving relative, who whispers through his tears the sincerely-held belief that he will see his dead wife again, she butts in to inform him that this is not the case, and assures him that he will find strength and happiness in embracing the truth.

Unthinkable, is it not? Yet it is this kind of cruel and insulting imposition which some Christians defend and practise. My own experience of it has been regular and appalling. Perhaps the worst example was when an evangelical colleague told me that a dead friend was ‘in a better place’; the friend was in his thirties and had died very suddenly, leaving his partner – a much closer friend – with her world and her future smashed to pieces.

The repeated inability of many believers to grasp just how heinous this kind of behaviour is truly baffles me – and yet is Christianity itself not founded upon the principle of sharing the Good News? In Kuteh’s own words ‘how could telling anyone about Jesus Christ really be harmful to any patient?’

To a believer, this is presumably irrefutable: when your mindset is transfixed by the alternative reality that salvation awaits the converted, the desire to proselytise to those who are touching fingertips with their own mortality must be difficult to resist. But it must be resisted, for the sake of empathy and compassion – which is exactly why the hospital issued guidelines to its staff advising them explicitly to observe restraint when it comes to their personal beliefs. This is not about ‘political correctness’ – it is about professionalism and humanity.

Listening to the interview given to camera by Kuteh, one cannot doubt her sincerity. In her view, she was giving patients strength: “I have had to reassure [patients] based on the joy and peace that I really have found in the Lord.” In the absence of full evidence, I make no comment on the fairness or unfairness of her dismissal, and trust that those involved in the legal processes will make a judgement based upon the detailed evidence brought before them – there may well be a case to answer if the investigation was not handled in the appropriate manner, as Kuteh has claimed.

Yet this story is another reminder that empathy is one of the most crucial characteristics for those who work in health care – the ability to listen to others and to support them without judgement or imposition, whatever their belief-set. Without this capacity at the centre of our approach – and even with the best and sincerest of intentions – we risk insult, harm and distress to those who are at their most vulnerable.

Filed Under: Comment, Ethics, Health, Humanism Tagged With: christian legal centre, christianity, employment, faith, religion, sarah kuteh, workplace

Man’s inhumanity to man: a humanist perspective on the crucifixion story

March 24, 2016 by Emma C Williams

Hermann Vogel's Death of Spartacus, showing the Roman general's capture shortly before his crucifixion

Hermann Vogel’s Death of Spartacus, showing the Thracian gladiator’s capture, shortly before his crucifixion

Historical, mythical or legendary, the crucifixion of Christ represents the story of many. Whether or not the man called Jesus existed – and the modern scholarly view on this seems to range from ‘probably’ to ‘possibly’ – the gospel narrative reflects a wider human story, the story of thousands upon thousands of nameless and forgotten individuals who were crucified at the hands of the Roman state.

For anyone who assumes that crucifixion was an unusual or extraordinary event in Roman times, they should consider the case of the rebels led by Spartacus. This low-born Thracian gladiator-slave led a revolt so successful that it caused considerable embarrassment to the ruling Senate. When Crassus finally crushed the rebellion in 71 BCE, he ordered the crucifixion of an estimated 6,000 slave-rebels along the Appian Way, the main road leading out from the city of Rome; he also brought back the ruthless practice of decimation to punish and terrorise the cohort of soldiers that he deemed to have failed him the most in his earlier attempts to quash the rebellion.

Crucifixion was public and humiliating – deliberately so – and its use in the case of the slave-rebels illustrates several important points about this notorious and brutal method of execution. Its aim was to demean the victim and intimidate the observer – this was what happened to you when you challenged the Roman rule of law. Crucifixion was a servile supplicium – reserved for slaves and foreigners, non-Roman citizens, deserting soldiers, pirates and insurgents; wealthy Roman men were often removed from society due to political machinations or the whim of current authority, but never was crucifixion used to dispense with them.

In its broadest definition, crucifixion meant that the victim was impaled and/or tied to some form of frame, cross, stake or tree and left to hang for anything from several hours to several days. Causes of death included exhaustion and shock brought on by extreme pain and exsanguination (sometimes in part from a scourging prior to the crucifixion), heart failure and/or pulmonary collapse from the immense pressure put upon the victim’s heart and lungs;  the victim’s demise could be hastened dramatically by increasing the intensity of this pressure, hence the common practice of breaking the legs to precipitate collapse. It was a sadistic and grotesque formula for murder, exploited in extremis by the Romans.

It is not clear whether the emperor Constantine outlawed crucifixion in the 4th Century CE, as is claimed by Christian triumphalist writers, but certainly it had been outlawed in the Roman empire by the mid 5th century. However, the Classical world is not the only context in which this abhorrent method of slaughter has been practised. Japanese haritsuke started with the execution of 26 Christians in Nagasaki in 1597 and recurred intermittently up until the last century. Islam has also subsumed the practice, with verse 5:33 of the Qur’an calling for the crucifixion of those who wage war against Allah or the Prophet. Crucifixion is still practised in some Islamic countries and there have been recently documented cases in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Yemen; it is most commonly used to make a degrading and threatening showpiece of the victim’s body rather than as a method of execution, but this is not exclusively the case.

‘The Easter story means nothing to a humanist from a spiritual perspective… Yet each year the human side of the Easter story can serve as a sober reminder of man’s inhumanity to man.’

The Easter story means nothing to a humanist from a spiritual perspective; we do not believe that Christ was the son of God, nor do we believe that he died for our sins and was resurrected. Yet each year the human side of the Easter story can serve as a sober reminder of man’s inhumanity to man. In a modern context, we can and should take action by giving support to the work of organisations such as Amnesty International, who campaign tirelessly and effectively against the use of torture and capital punishment right across the globe.

But as a Classicist, I cannot help but see the story of Christ as a legend within its ancient milieu and recall the incalculable number of wasted human lives that resonate through its narrative. In the name of Roman civilisation, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were tortured and crucified, forgotten souls with no afforded legacy of reverence or pious gratitude to preserve them in the conscious minds of the living.

At this time of year, I choose to remember them.

Filed Under: Comment, Culture Tagged With: classics, crucifixion, easter, gladiators, history, jesus, myth, mythology

Why parents shouldn’t support ‘Operation Christmas Child’

October 14, 2015 by Emma C Williams

What could be the harm in sending a Christmas gift to a child in need? At this time of year, schools all across the country are taking part in the Christmas Box appeal, and the task is superficially noble: ask your child to fill a decorated box with toys and essential items and the charity will deliver them to a child who is living in poverty. It’s a tangible, personal way of giving, and it’s immensely popular.

But Operation Christmas Child is run by Samaritan’s Purse, a huge and zealous organisation led by Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham. Not only is the organisation openly homophobic, it seeks to proselytise in a manner that most people, including liberal Christians, find unacceptable. As a humanist, I am naturally disquieted by the idea of people performing evangelical work with the intended purpose of conversion; but I am positively offended when this work is performed at the expense of vulnerable children in desperate situations across the globe.

Several other charitable organisations and reputable businesses, including the Cooperative, have withdrawn their support for Operation Christmas Child.[i]  The charity Save The Children has questioned its effectiveness and expressed concerns about the use of evangelism in the context of people in need. Some leading teachers’ Unions, including the NASUWT,  have pointed out the difficult position that schools are placing themselves in when they support such charities without giving careful thought to their stated mission. But despite all of this, hundreds of schools will still take part in Operation Christmas Child this year, unwittingly supporting the work of a right-wing evangelical organisation, with little or no idea of what it stands for.[ii]

Homophobia

It is clear from the Samaritan’s Purse website and Franklin Graham’s social media pages that the organisation has a homophobic agenda. Recently Graham has been raising funds to support Aaron and Melissa Klein, who not only refused to provide services for a lesbian couple in their bakery in Oregon but even quoted Leviticus at a member of the couple’s family. It gets worse. Following consumer complaints posted online by the couple and leading to intervention by the Oregon Department of Justice, Aaron Klein sought support from others by publishing the discrimination complaint on his Facebook account, including the names and shared address of the complainants. This led to the couple receiving homophobic verbal attacks and death threats; they were even concerned that they might lose their foster children (whom they have since adopted). The couple pushed ahead with legal action and the Kleins were ultimately ordered to pay $135,000 in damages for the emotional suffering that they caused. Franklin Graham’s version of events is that the Kleins are conscientious objectors who have ‘done nothing wrong’. He uses their story to fuel resentment against equality laws and curry favour for the ridiculous notion that US Christians experience ‘persecution’, something which seems to have become something of an obsession for him.

This is just one example of the organisation’s homophobia as it seeks to uphold ‘the Biblical definition’ of marriage.  Samaritan’s Purse has also given considerable financial support to the campaign against marriage equality in the USA and Graham has made his own homophobia abundantly clear both in his words and in his deeds. He’s also got some startlingly ignorant opinions about gender.

Proselytising

Many UK representatives hotly defend Operation Christmas Child and claim to have seen no evidence of evangelism or of the accusation that the boxes are distributed with ‘strings attached’. These people are either disingenuous or incredibly naïve. A cursory glance at the charity’s own website provides a wealth of evidence that the explicit, stated purpose of Operation Christmas Child is to convert the child who receives the gift and to encourage them to convert their families. The mission statement says that ‘every gift-filled shoe box is a powerful tool for evangelism and discipleship – transforming the lives of children around the world through the Good News of Jesus Christ’. As one of the representatives in India puts it in this promotional film, ‘children become the harvesters’ for Jesus.  Religious literature is distributed, often in the children’s own language, and this is the charity’s own description of how it is used:

Some of the evangelical literature sent with shoeboxes to impoverished children

Some of the evangelical literature sent with shoeboxes to impoverished children

‘Through The Greatest Journey discipleship programme, boys and girls can become faithful followers of Jesus Christ. Samaritan’s Purse developed The Greatest Journey as a dynamic, interactive Bible study for use in countries around the world where Operation Christmas Child distributes gift-filled shoeboxes. Wherever possible, children receiving shoeboxes are invited to enrol on The Greatest Journey; 2.8 million children have enrolled on this programme since the curriculum was first developed in 2008.’

Many schools either downplay or indeed appear completely ignorant of this aspect of the charity’s work, and UK representatives of Operation Christmas Child will claim that the spreading of the word extends no further than a small booklet of bible stories that may be handed out with the boxes. This is simply not true, or at least it is not true in all cases. Much of the literature used by Samaritan’s Purse demonstrates a clear and direct attempt to convert the young, and the charity aims to enrol children in their brainwashing programme wherever possible.

Numerous critics have observed that Samaritan’s Purse volunteers overseas are often more interested in conversion than provision. According to the President of Operation USA, an international relief organisation, Samaritan’s Purse organised a religious festival after the hurricane in Nicaragua in 1999 and pressurised local churches into taking thousands of children to a baseball stadium in Managua to hear Graham preach; at a time when resources were scarce and people were in desperate need, the money could have been so much better spent on basic supplies and rebuilding work rather than on proselytising. In 2003 the organisation was criticised in the New York Times for holding prayer meetings before it provided help to the people of El Salvador to build the temporary homes that had been provided by US Government funding; interviews with some of the locals reveal that volunteers had distributed religious literature and asked them to accept Jesus Christ as their saviour. Samaritan’s Purse also funded the distribution of Arabic Bibles in Iraq after the war and sent hundreds of volunteers into the country  with the mission of bringing Muslims to Christ. In 2008 they compromised both government-funded aid and diplomacy by attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity following the tsunami in Banda Aceh. After the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the organisation was criticised in the liberal press for pouring money into evangelising rather than into aid; Graham claimed that the people of Haiti’s spiritual needs were the most urgent concern for his organisation, and he was supported in his endeavours by the ever-delightful Sarah Palin.

One of the reasons why so many people in the UK are completely oblivious to the extreme agenda of Samaritan’s Purse is that it is deliberately not promoted here, to the extent that many earnest and well-meaning volunteers remain blissfully unaware of its sinister nature. This is an excerpt from one of the organisation’s own statements about their UK-based operation, and it implies that there may well be practices that even those who work for the charity in the UK are completely unaware of:

‘Please be assured that the commitment of Samaritan’s Purse to evangelism is as strong as ever. … However, there is a difference in the way the boxes are processed in the UK for overseas shipment. The UK program removes all religious items … and forwards any Christian literature to our National Leadership Teams working in countries where shoebox gifts are distributed, so the Christian literature can be used with children. … The Gospel is also presented locally as part of the distribution of the gifts, and wherever possible, children are offered a Gospel storybook written in their own language called The Greatest Gift of All. Many children are also invited to enrol in a 10-lesson follow-up Bible study program, and upon completion receive a New Testament as a graduation gift.’

In the USA, where evangelism is broadly accepted and commonplace in many parts of the country, the evangelical message is better understood both by donors and by volunteers. In this country, most volunteers and participants in the scheme cling to the notion that if they haven’t seen it then it doesn’t go on. Do not be fooled – it does.

Suggested alternatives

If your local school is irretrievably wedded to the idea of a Christian shoebox scheme, the BHA advise that Link to Hope don’t distribute any literature with their boxes. The Rotary Club also runs a similar scheme and they at least have a proven track record when it comes to providing worthwhile aid within the developing world.  But most charities with a genuine desire to bring change to the developing world and to lift children out of poverty now reject the Christmas box model; donors may well have the best of intentions, but sending a shoe box full of gifts is ultimately a grossly inefficient and environmentally questionable way to give. If your school would like to back a more effective scheme with tangible outcomes you could suggest that they look at those run by Plan UK, Oxfam, Save the Children, Aquabox or Good Gifts.


[i] The delivery service DHL have withdrawn their support, as have the South Wales Fire service. Oxfam have also made it clear that they do not support this organisation. Even some Christian organisations  and individual Christian volunteers are detaching themselves from Samaritan’s Purse due to concerns about the extreme nature of the message.

[ii] Many websites state that concerns have been raised by the Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education (SACRE). While they offer no national policy on Operation Christmas Child, it has certainly been discussed at local SACREs across the country and some SACREs, for example in Cambridgeshire, have written to their local schools about the concerns. Minutes from the Isle of Wight group describe Operation Christmas Child as “a long-standing issue” yet one that they don’t consider to be their concern, which seems pretty extraordinary. In Surrey, our SACREs have spoken to local representatives of Operation Christmas Child and seem to accept wholesale their reassurances, which they give here. They have not investigated further.

Filed Under: Ethics, Humanism, Parenting Tagged With: operation christmas child, Samaritan's Purse, shoebox appeal

Seven Biblical arguments against homosexuality (and why they’re rubbish)

August 17, 2015 by Emma C Williams

About a year ago, I found myself in a horribly frustrating debate with an evangelical Christian about equal marriage. Realising that he was never going to be convinced by the liberal view unless I could debate with him on the terms of his choice, I found myself frustrated by my hazy grasp of the scriptures that he held so dear. I was convinced that he could be challenged based upon the Bible, but I was not confident enough in my knowledge and understanding of it to do so. I vowed to remedy the situation, and to arm myself for the future.

Why bother? Well, I care more about supporting the human rights of LGBT people than I do about convincing others of my own emphatically non-religious worldview. The chances of me persuading an evangelical Christian to ‘dump’ God and move on are pretty slim – indeed, I do not consider it my place to attempt a one-to-one de-conversion; but I do consider it my place, my duty even, to defend the human rights of others. My acquaintance was an intelligent and sensitive man, with huge doses of what I would call humanity (but what he would call the love of God), and I have hope that he might have listened to an alternative reading of the scriptures.

People can’t choose the community that they’re born into, and too many LGBT people have been rejected by their own; too many have suffered appalling internal conflict, revolting prejudice and unacceptable treatment.[i] Too many members of these communities have endured or been forced to endure ‘conversion therapy’, including an extraordinary number of the pastors who peddle this kind of hatred. It’s an appalling approach that is campaigning hard to win the argument in some parts of America. It has to stop, and we have to engage.

In this article I examine the key passages from the Bible cited by conservative Christians as the standard ‘killer blows’ for liberals when it comes to equality. Rather appropriately for a collection of Bible passages, there are seven of them. Unless otherwise stated, translations are from the New English Bible, as it’s the one I grew up with and the one on my shelf. This, however, brings me to the most crucial thing to bear in mind when squaring up to a conservative Bible-believer – few of them give any thought to the fact that they are quoting from a translation. This renders their interpretations easily dismissible from the outset, for as we shall see, the translation (and biased mistranslation) of some words in the Bible is absolutely crucial to this discussion.[ii]

Adam and Steve

'Wait, so your name isn't Steve?' (Painting by Hendrick Goltzius)

‘Wait, so your name isn’t Steve?’ (Painting by Hendrick Goltzius)

As gay Christian Matthew Vines points in his emotionally-charged lecture on this topic, God says in Genesis 2.18, ‘it is not good for the man to be alone; I will provide a partner for him.’ But in Genesis 1-2, God creates Adam and Eve – not Adam and Steve, as conservative evangelicals seem to find it so pleasing to point out. If your potential adversary is a Bible literalist, then he or she will believe that Adam and Eve actually existed and were created by God in exactly the manner that the Bible describes. However, he or she will still have to accept that this twosome cannot constitute an exemplary paradigm for how modern couples should live – and I’m not just talking about naturism. For example, the only way that Adam and Eve could populate the world is by producing children who would procreate with each other (and/or with them), a necessary side effect of their unique situation. This is just one example of how Bible literalists have no choice but to admit that the prototype couple of Adam and Eve must be taken as symbolic, at least on some levels, and not applied wholesale to modern adult relationships. As soon as they are forced to admit this, almost everything is open to question.

Most Christians see Adam and Eve as a part of a creation myth; they accept that their existence was metaphorical and that they represent the origins of mankind as a species. Prior to the halcyon days of modern science, it is indeed a fact that the world would not have been peopled without the predominance of heterosexual relations. In communities fighting for survival, ‘wasted seed’ no doubt becomes an issue, hence perhaps God’s punishment of Onan in Genesis 38.8-10. Well, really. So what? With the population of the earth now at an estimated 7 billion and predicted to rise to around 11 billion by the end of the century, nobody can possibly argue that peopling the planet is a pressing concern for us now.

The Sin of Sodom

In Genesis 19 we find the widely misunderstood story of Sodom. Two of God’s angels visit the town of Sodom in disguise and are welcomed warmly by an allegedly righteous man named Lot (although I shall say more about his purported moral fibre later on). That night, all the other men from the town surround the house and demand that the visitors be brought out ‘so that we can have intercourse with them.’ When Lot tries to bargain with them, the crowd becomes violent and starts beating the door down. Whoa … hang on. Alarming, isn’t it? The fact that God later punishes Sodom and nearby Gomorrah with fire and brimstone is cited by conservative Christians as concrete evidence that Jehovah disapproves of homosexuality… so let’s explore this bizarre story in more detail.

First and foremost, the term ‘Sodomite’ simply means ‘inhabitant of Sodom,’ though it is the modern, homophobic use of this word that dominates people’s thinking today; any Bible translation (or excitable preacher) using the word ‘Sodomite’ to mean anything other than ‘inhabitant of Sodom’ is biased and frankly ignorant. Many reputable scholars (both Christian and non-Christian) argue that the story of Sodom was actually a traditional lesson in the importance of welcoming strangers,[iii] a motif that can be found throughout the ancient world. The ancient concept of what the Greeks called xenia, the friendship extended between host and guest, was sacred and central to ancient morality, and numerous stories that reflect its importance can be found in Classical mythology.[iv] In the Hebrew tradition, the harsh nomadic existence of the early Jewish people meant that the custom of welcoming travel-weary strangers was essential to their survival, and Genesis 19 is just one of numerous Biblical references to its import.[v]

No one's favourite Bible story: Lot and his daughters (Goltzius)

No one’s favourite Bible story: Lot and his daughters (Goltzius)

The fact that the townsmen of Sodom threaten to gang-rape their male visitors is interpreted by conservative Christians as an example of unbridled homosexual lust; but the threat of violent rape is not about sex and it’s certainly not about sexuality. Indeed, to suggest as much is both offensive and ill-informed. Sexual violence is a weapon of power and control, and male rape is sometimes used in violent homophobic attacks. Research indicates that male rape has actually been used more frequently in some conflicts  than the rape of women; it is used to humiliate and degrade the enemy. The violent threat to Lot’s guests in the story represents a declaration of hostility towards strangers – an interpretation supported by the fact that as the crowd’s threats become more aggressive they turn upon Lot himself, saying ‘this man has come and settled here as an alien, and does he now take it upon himself to judge us?’ The Hebrew here can also be rendered as ‘foreigner’, ‘stranger’ or ‘immigrant,’ and the behaviour of the crowd demonstrates a negative hostility to outsiders. So, exactly as the scholars argue, the primary ‘sin of Sodom’ should be understood to mean threatening and rejecting a visitor as your enemy, rather than welcoming him as your guest.[vi]

Finally, a word about Lot’s behaviour in this undeniably horrid little story. Despite the endless debates between conservative and liberal Christians over this section of the Bible, few of them seem particularly interested in talking about the mention of Lot’s daughters. So let’s complete the delightful tale: while the townsmen were surrounding Lot’s house and threatening his guests with rape, ‘Lot went out … and said, ‘Look: I have two daughters, both virgins; let me bring them out to you and you can do what you like with them; but do not touch these men, because they have come under the shelter of my roof’’. (Genesis 19.6-8). So the ‘righteous’ Lot offers up his daughters to be gang-raped in place of his two guests, and yet conservative Christians cite this passage as a lesson in sexual morality for the modern world.

An abomination?

Next we come to Leviticus, the third book of the Hebrew Bible, and the two passages perhaps most often quoted on this topic. Leviticus 18.22 states that ‘you shall not lie with a man as with a woman: that is an abomination.’ In Leviticus 20.13 it also says, ‘if a man has intercourse with a man as with a woman, they both commit an abomination. They shall be put to death; their blood shall be on their own heads.’

At first glance, this might seem unequivocal. However, the book of Leviticus is a list of traditional, ritual mores for the time, and the overwhelming majority of its instructions and exhortations are comfortably ignored by modern Christians. While it is true that Leviticus proscribes sex between men, it also forbids the eating of rabbit (11.6), pork (11.7) and shellfish (11.9-12), the wearing of mixed fibres (19.19) and cutting the sides of your hair (19.27). Got a tattoo? Then you’re in big trouble according to Leviticus 19.28, which is bad news for all those hick town dudes who’ve had Leviticus 18.22 tattooed on their butts.

Let us now examine the word ‘abomination’, which conservatives quote with such horrifying relish and which causes such understandable upset.[vii] ‘Abomination’ is a commonly used but rather loaded and potentially misleading translation of the Hebrew word tow’ebah, which had a culturally-specific meaning. It was used of anything that went against the long list of ritually acceptable practices and behaviours described, and was applied to many of the prohibitions mentioned above. According to Leviticus, it is just as much of an ‘abomination’ to eat a bacon sandwich or a shrimp salad as it is to ‘lie with a man as with a woman’, so unless conservative Christians want to start eating kosher, they’d better re-think their stance on this one. This inconvenient fact is ignored by right-wing preachers, who cite this passage over and over, emphasising the English word ‘abomination’. The reality is that the same Hebrew word is used throughout the Old Testament to condemn numerous practices that the majority of Christians, including their preachers, will carry out on a regular basis.

Some conservative readers of the Bible, such as Robert A. Gagnon, acknowledge the wider list of prohibitions but they maintain that sex between men is still presented as a worse kind of ‘abomination’ than some of the others listed above. They use two key arguments for this. Firstly, they point out that sex between men is listed alongside other sex acts that are plainly immoral, such as incest and bestiality. Secondly, they point out that Leviticus 20.13 threatens death as the appropriate punishment for sex between men – presumably suggesting that God felt pretty strongly about it. Well, most of us would probably agree that incest and bestiality are morally wrong. This is a conclusion that one can draw not from reading it in the Bible, but through sound, enlightened, and informed reasoning. For sexual intercourse to be morally acceptable it should be consensual (which bestiality cannot be) and it should not cause harm (which bestiality might and incest does, both in terms of its psychological impact and its potential biological consequences). On the other hand, having sex with your wife at certain times of the month, also prohibited in this section of Leviticus, is not considered to be immoral by most modern Christians; so why therefore should consensual sex between adult partners of the same gender be? Finally, the fact that death is listed as the punishment for intercourse between two men can be easily dismissed; the same punishment is threatened for blaspheming (Leviticus 24.16) and for working on the Sabbath (Exodus 31.14), so by my reckoning most of us are in serious trouble, including most Christians.

The New Testament: it’s all Greek to them

As liberal Christians often point out, you will not find any direct prohibitions against homosexuality in the Gospels, so conservative Christians rely on the Letters of Paul for their New Testament ammunition.

In 1 Corinthians 6.9-11 and 1 Timothy 1.10, Paul gives an inventory of ‘unrighteous’ people, who will not ‘inherit the kingdom of God.’ A colourful collection of wrongdoings are catalogued as possible barriers to the promised land, and the New Testament translation here excels itself by listing one of the sins as ‘homosexual perversion.’ Wow! To someone who reads the translation in ignorance of the original text, this kind of language is pretty unambiguous. They might, however, be surprised were they to look at the King James version, an English translation produced some 400 years earlier, which mentions the ‘effeminate’ and ‘abusers of themselves with mankind.’ On the other hand, the New International Version of the Bible, commonly used in America, says ‘men who have sex with men.’ So what on earth is going on? Let’s see.[viii]

The Greek word that the King James version translates as ‘effeminate’ at 1 Corinthians 6.9 is malakos, a term that is used in a wide range of surviving Greek texts. Its original sense was ‘soft’ or ‘pliable’ but when applied to people it was often used to mean something like ‘weak-willed’ or ‘lazy’, not schooled in the ways of righteous or philosophical thinking.[ix] The word was also used in a derogatory fashion to describe men who had been too much exposed to the finer, more decadent things in life, and in this sense it could imply a man who behaved in a less than ‘manly’ fashion according to the ancient ideal. Finally, it was also applied to younger males who cultivated feminine wiles and/or who allowed themselves to be penetrated during sexual activity.  This accusation could be applied in a heterosexual as well as in a homosexual context, and had far more do with the ancient suspicion of all things female than it did with a negative view of attraction between men.[x]

The next word that we need to tackle is the Greek word arsenokoites. Paul uses this word in both passages, and these are its only two appearances in the Bible; unfortunately they are also the first appearances of this word that we have preserved Greek literature, which means that its meaning is somewhat obscure to us. The very fact that Paul uses an unusual and possibly new term here is potentially interesting, as there were numerous Greek words that he could have used to refer to homosexual activity, had he so chosen. However, this may not be significant at all; the problem with ancient texts is that the meaning of any particular word may well have been clear to the author and to his immediate audience, and only seems obscure to us due to our lack of sources. The best thing that we can do therefore is to look more closely at the text itself.[xi]

Arsenokoites is a compound word, a combination of a Greek word for ‘man’ or ‘male’ (arsen) and ‘marital bed’ (koite). Just as in English, this word for ‘bed’ could be used euphemistically in Greek to mean ‘have sex with’ – so does it not simply mean ‘men who have sex with men’, exactly as the New International Version of the Bible translates? Well, quite possibly not. Cannon points out that in Paul’s list of sins in 1 Timothy 1.10, arsenokoites appears in between the words pornos and andrapodistes. The word pornos most commonly meant a male who prostitutes his body. Its female equivalent (porne) meant ‘harlot’ or ‘prostitute’ and the equivalent verb ‘to be or to become a prostitute’. Andrapodistes meant ‘slave-dealer’, ‘kidnapper’ or ‘man-stealer’ – it was used of one who kidnaps others and sells them into slavery, or of one who steals another man’s slaves. Cannon explores in detail the fact that Paul lists his ‘sins’ in groups of closely-related meaning, and he draws the conclusion that by ‘pornos, arsenokoites and andrapodistes’ he meant something like ‘male prostitutes, the males who lie [with them], and the slave dealers [who procure them].’

There are certainly many scholars who argue that Paul’s use of the word arsenokoites refers to people who exploit others in a sexual context.[xii] The exploitative use of younger males (often slaves) for sexual gratification was widespread in the ancient world, and it was quite likely to have been the only kind of sex between males that Paul had even heard of. I would argue that to extrapolate from Paul a prohibition on modern, adult, consensual relationships is to misunderstand the world in which he lived and to misinterpret his experience and probable mindset at the time.

 

A good old-fashioned orgy

In Romans 1.26-27 Paul discusses the Gentiles’ descent into idolatry and their rejection of God. He says here that, as a result of their behaviour, God abandoned them and let them live without Him. ‘In consequence, I say, God has given them up to shameful passions. Their women have exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and their men in turn, giving up natural relations with women, burn with lust for one another.’

This is perhaps the most problematic passage of them all. It is also the only time that sexual activity between women is mentioned in the Bible, and it doesn’t sound too positive, does it? Some scholars argue that Paul is talking very simply about what he saw as the heterosexual norm versus a clear disapproval of all homosexual relations. Others, including Matthew Vines, cling to the notion that the problem presented here is of heterosexual people performing homosexual acts, therefore somehow rejecting their ‘true’ nature; Paul does indeed use a Greek term which means something like ‘innate’ or ‘inborn’ to refer to their heterosexual leanings, and Vines argues from this that he is talking not about people who are gay but about people who ‘turn against their own nature’. Cannon even goes so far as to point out that according to this understanding (i.e. the belief that Paul is criticising people who turn against their innate sexual orientation), ‘it would be a sin for a homosexual to engage in heterosexual sex.’ But I’m afraid I don’t buy it. This interpretation is asking us to believe that when Paul talked about people turning ‘against nature’[xiii] he meant no malice towards those who experience same-sex attraction from birth. This is pretty tenuous, and I struggle to accept that this would have been his mindset at the time. Another danger with this approach is that we simply exchange one set of prejudices for another – is someone who has felt predominantly drawn to people of the opposite sex for most of their life then prohibited from experiencing and acting upon any form of same-sex attraction in later life? As liberals, this would put us on very dangerous ground.

So how should Christians reconcile what Paul says here with a modern, liberal stance? Well, a more convincing and less problematic argument is that, as so often where sexual morality is discussed in the Bible, Romans 1.26-27 is actually talking about lust or debauchery. The passage is believed by many to be a reference to orgiastic behaviour, and while the pagan practice of ‘sacred sexual orgies’ perhaps didn’t go on quite as much as some of the early Christian writers would have us believe, there is little doubt that this was certainly the view of pagan ritual as seen from the outside. It is therefore entirely plausible that Paul was writing in a disapproving tone about the general practices that he believed took place among ‘idolaters,’ which would include all forms of uninhibited sexual activity outside of a committed (and yes, in his experience, heterosexual) relationship. It is therefore reasonable for liberal Christians to argue that committed homosexual relationships are acceptable, since they do not actually go against the spirit of the prohibitions issued here by Paul.

Conclusions: love wins?

The passages in the Old Testament are easy to dismiss. The paradigm of Adam and Eve is symbolic, the story of Sodom represents an example of hostility to strangers in the form of threatened sexual assault, and the prohibition in Leviticus is just one of a series of culturally-based proscriptions that modern Christians are happy to ignore. In the New Testament, the only possible mentions of homosexual activity are made in reference to licentious and lustful behaviour and quite possibly to sexual exploitation. They therefore have nothing more to do with homosexual relationships than they do with heterosexual ones.

It is all too easy for those of us who are not emotionally attached to these ancient texts to dismiss them as irrelevant – to us, frankly, they are. But if we are to persuade more Christians to accept and welcome gay members of their community – a situation that is craved and deserved by so many – then we have to engage with the debate on their terms and to support the liberal Christians who are attempting to lead change.

Few Christians will have given this matter anything like as much thought as I have over the last few days of research, and I hope to be able to stand my ground when I next find myself in a corner with someone who uses the Bible to excuse and defend their own prejudices. I hope very much that you will too.

 


 

[i] Witness the case of Vicky Beeching, Christian rock star and darling of the conservative Bible belt – until she spoke out about equal marriage and came out in August 2014.

[ii] Here are just some examples of spectacularly ignorant homophobic preaching, based entirely on a so-called ‘analysis’ of the Bible’s words in an English translation: ‘what does the Bible say about homosexuality‘ ‘Homosexuality and the Bible‘ ‘a Christian view of sodomites.’ Please don’t watch them if you think they might upset you – some of the things said are truly horrible.

[iii] For example Peter J. Sorensen, ‘The Lost Commandments: the sacred rites of hospitality.’ This analysis by Suzanne Scholz of how Genesis 19 is dealt with on the internet is a  cautionary reminder of just how much nonsense there is on the web. She doesn’t draw any conclusions about the meaning of the passage, simply explores how many conflicting accounts there are about it on the internet from a scholarly perspective.

[iv] For example the story of Baucis and Philemon told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and as a running theme throughout Homer’s Odyssey.

[v] For example Genesis 18.1-8; Genesis 47.7-12; Leviticus 19.10; Leviticus 19.33-34.

[vi] The very fact that the ‘sins of Sodom’ do not equate to homosexuality but do equate to poor hospitality and lack of charity is confirmed within the Bible itself, both in the Old Testament (Ezekiel 16.49-50) and the New Testament (Luke 10.8-12).

[vii] See here Ian McKellen expressing his emotional outrage at this word. Sir Ian makes it his business to remove the offending passages of Leviticus from every Bible he finds!

[viii] Here are links to the two relevant passages in Greek: 1 Corinthians 6.9-11  and 1 Timothy 1.10.

[ix] For some outstandingly detailed references on this see footnotes 23-25 in this scholarly article by Dale B. Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University.

[x] See the article by Dale B Martin for an examination of this in depth.

[xi] Here Cannon’s article is hugely helpful because he gives the Greek words in their original form and then explores the various ways in which they have been translated in modern times. Even more detailed and enlightening is the article by Dale B Martin.

[xii] Dale B Martin explores a 2nd century Christian treatise by Theophilus of Antioch which seems to support this reading: here a list of sexual sins is followed by a list of economic misdemeanours (thieves, plunderers, robbers) and it is among the latter that arsenokoites appears, suggesting that by the second century at least the word had a very definite link to monetary exploitation rather than to a specific sex act.

[xiii] We need to be careful about terminology here again. Paul uses the Greek phrase para phusin, and the exact meaning of this phrase in late antiquity was one of the central questions of my spectacularly obscure PhD. One easy way to translate it in the context of what Paul is saying here is indeed ‘unnatural’ or ‘against nature’ but it also meant ‘uncustomary’ – as it no doubt does when he uses it to refer to the notion of men wearing their hair long in 1 Corinthians 11.14 (translated extremely poorly as ‘a disgrace’ in the New English Bible). Matthew Vines therefore argues that para phusin is a culturally specific term that relates to custom, not to innate biology. I’m afraid that I can’t agree with him on that, but he’s right that translating the phrase is not straightforward. It can also mean ‘paranormal’ or ‘supernatural’ and is used in a positive sense to describe how God has enabled Jews and Gentiles to cleave together in Romans 11.24.

Filed Under: Ethics, Politics Tagged With: bible, christianity, evangelical christianity, homosexuality, religion

Righteous anger and the death of Leelah Alcorn

January 13, 2015 by Emma C Williams

In death, Leelah (pictured above) plead for better treatment of transgender people

In death, Leelah (pictured above) plead for better treatment of transgender people

The recent suicide of a transgender teenager in Ohio is a painful reminder of the worst that can happen when empathy fails us.

In a distressing suicide note, scheduled to appear on her blog within hours of her death, Leelah Alcorn outlined a litany of failings by her parents, most of which appear to have been driven by religious dogma, ignorance and prejudice. In an interview with CNN, the teenager’s mother asserted that she and her husband loved ‘unconditionally’ the dead child that she still insists was her confused and troubled son. As for the gender dysphoria, described so harrowingly in her child’s own suicide note? ‘We don’t support that, religiously,’ she said.

The angry responses to Leelah’s death have been powerful and unsurprising. LGBT activist Dan Savage called for Leelah’s parents to be prosecuted: ‘[they] threw her in front of that truck. They should be ashamed—but first they need to be shamed. Charges should be brought.’ Leelah’s family postponed her funeral and wake due to threats, and hundreds of people have sent enraged messages to the teenager’s mother, accusing her of driving her child to suicide. Online rallying calls urge others to send messages too, providing links to the mother’s Facebook profile and advice on how to contact her and her husband. ‘Let’s all message that woman on Facebook,’ one tweeter exhorts; another has even published what he claims to be the family’s home address. In an ever-growing barrage of furious tweets, Leelah’s parents have been called everything from ‘murderers’ and ‘monsters’ through to ‘demons.’ It makes for horrifying reading, and while I understand the anger, I am disquieted by the lack of humanity shown.

Most people seem to take it for granted that Leelah’s parents feel neither grief nor guilt as a result of their child’s suicide, and some state this supposition as a fact. Others appear to assume that the family’s sorrow and remorse will have been triggered by the actions of online crusaders, and gloat that Leelah’s mother has now blocked all outside messages: ‘Carla Alcorn locked her FB profile. Good. Fuck you. I hope the fear and guilt plagues you and your husband for the rest of your lives.’  The messages are abundant, and increasingly violent: ‘I hope the entire world gives Carla Alcorn hell;’ ‘I hope you wake up every morning and vomit over the guilt you must feel from torturing your beautiful daughter;’ ‘you’ve got blood on your hands, … bitch.’ Most striking of all are the catalogue of self-satisfied statements, in which the authors crow about the lengthy and vitriolic messages they claim to have sent to Leelah’s family: one example reads, ‘sent carla wood alcorn a really long message i basically told her she was going to hell but said it eloquently (kinda).’ One can only imagine its hideous content.

So here’s a thought experiment for those online accusers, safely ensconced behind their keyboards and so confident in the apparent rectitude of their vitriol. Shunned by her community, guilt-ridden, grieving for the child that she clearly failed and confused by the clash between her inherited religious beliefs, the closeted nature of a conservative state and the caustic self-righteousness of her accusers, Carla Wood Alcorn also commits suicide. What would her accusers think then? While some of them, I am prepared to admit, might think ‘good riddance,’ others I am sure would feel responsible. Would they be responsible? Well, partly. This is the power and the danger of social media – we can say anything to anyone, at any time – no time for reflection, no time for regret. It is out there – for better or for worse – just as Leelah’s anguished suicide note is out there, despite her family’s attempts to remove it. Leelah’s own rage at her parents is palpable – ‘Mom and Dad: fuck you.’ She had a right to feel angry, and her parents will have to live with that painful legacy; it is not for the rest of us to hijack those emotions and claim them as our own.

Now I am the first to understand anger. Believe me, I get it. I am someone who rants – I rant and I rave. My favourite topics are all the ones that you’re supposed to avoid at dinnertime. I have risked embarrassment for my husband by calling other men out on sexist remarks, rather than just laugh along like you’re supposed to when a chap engages in ‘jovial banter’ over drinks. I have fought with colleagues over numerous issues, most recently equal marriage, and provoked mortified silences and awkward relations as a result. I will do it again. I have a reputation for speaking out – or shouting out – whatever the social situation and trust me, I am not always popular for it. Thanks to all this, I have lost a few friends into the bargain.

Aristotle believed that there is such a thing as righteous anger: there are times, he said, when not only is it right to be angry, it would be wrong not to be so; the trick, however, is knowing what to be angry about, when to express it, how to express it, and to whom – that’s what is difficult. Blind rage is wrong, he argued, and it is particularly dangerous when it arises from pure emotion, as opposed to reason. Now I reserve the right to embarrass someone at the dinner table, most especially when the table is my own; and with all due respect to Aristotle, I believe that everyone has the right to feel however they wish to, and to express those feelings, within certain parameters. It is entirely natural and understandable that some people have felt unbridled rage towards Leelah’s parents, especially those members of the trans community who have experienced the kind of ignorance and gross misunderstanding that she found herself exposed to. But is it someone’s right to express that anger towards Leelah’s family, so directly and so viciously? Tragic and preventable as her death clearly was, I think it is not.

So where should we direct our righteous anger? Tragically, Leelah’s suicide is anything but unusual. A recent survey indicated that almost half of young transgender people attempt suicide here in the UK, and this shocking statistic is borne out by other recent studies in the USA. Wouldn’t we be better to focus our energies on making things better, to ‘fix society’ as Leelah herself exhorts us to do? In her note, Leelah lays blame very clearly on her parents, but also on the church they belonged to and the Christian counsellors she was forced to see. Shouldn’t our anger be directed at the ignorant self-appointed moralists, those who try to dictate to others how they should live, the pastors keen to say that Leelah did not exist and that Josh was a confused boy who was somehow abused and corrupted by the LGBT community, despite limited access to their support? Instead of sending hateful messages to Leelah’s own family, people should sign the petition to ban transgender conversion therapy, a change in the law that could have a direct impact on improving the lives and prospects of young people like Leelah, and lead a change of hearts and minds in the process.

By all means, be angry at Leelah’s death. But when someone directs their anger at the parents of a child who has just committed suicide? That’s a very bold stance to take. It’s the stance of someone so confident that they have never erred as to be spectacularly foolish in my eyes. A young person is dead. Blame religion. Blame suburban small-mindedness and ignorance. Blame us all for not fighting hard enough and acting swiftly enough to bring the changes that Leelah herself could have benefitted from. And let’s stand together to make those changes: in our schools, in our communities and in our families. Let’s make things better.

The last words belong to Leelah, and her instructions are clear: ‘the only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say ‘that’s fucked up’ and fix it. Fix society. Please.’

Filed Under: International, LGBT, Parenting, The Internet Tagged With: bullying, LGBT, suicide, transgender, Twitter

In the customs of our ancestors

December 11, 2014 by Emma C Williams

It was a shock last month to find out that the school teacher I remember most fondly had died. It was even more of a shock to find myself organising his funeral.

Tony was a difficult man to define. A magnetic personality, he threw himself into school life with passion and verve, yet it was painfully obvious to many of us that his private life was a lonely one. As someone with virtually no family and with a tendency to push even those that he cared for away, my beloved Classics master was left lying in a hospital mortuary for over a fortnight whilst a solicitor, his sole executor, waited and hoped that a friend or a colleague would come forward for him.  For reasons that still escape me, nobody did.

A ritualistic response to death is one of the things that defines us as a species. Tentative evidence of burial or funerary caching goes back to the Stone Age, and it seems clear that our earliest ancestors began interring their dead, sometimes with personal effects. Interestingly, some anthropologists immediately jump to the conclusion that these relics must be evidence for a belief in some kind of afterlife, in which it was assumed that the deceased individual would require the tools of his trade; others are more cautious, and argue that grave goods are simply evidence of individualisation and respect – religious or not, we like to bury a person’s things with them, as symbolic markers of who they were and the impact that they had on the world.

Certainly, everyone that knew Tony would have been acutely aware that he would not have wanted a fuss. I am told that it took some persuading to make him attend his own retirement party, a fact that does not surprise me in the least. However, people still went to the trouble to convince him, and with good reason: retirement parties matter. People want to offer their thanks and to acknowledge the contribution that somebody has made, however much a man like Tony would have waved his hands dismissively and insisted that he had been simply doing his job.

In the same way, but even more so, funerals matter. They matter because someone has lived; they matter because someone has died; they matter because we have to say farewell to their body and, in that inevitable moment, accept that they are gone. ‘People talk about “going through” grief,’ a friend once said to me; ‘the truth is that it goes through you.’ We can’t escape the physical, the visceral nature of loss, and our farewell to the corporeal entity that was once a vibrant individual is a painful but inescapable necessity. For all these reasons, I could not stand by and leave my dearest old teacher’s send-off to the reluctant whim of his legal executor. I simply couldn’t bear it.

Tony left no instructions, but from my memories of him, one decision was mercifully clear: without hesitation, I asked the funeral director to book a humanist celebrant. Those of you who have read some of my previous articles will know the kind of school that I attended and therefore where Tony worked, an institution shrouded in religious superstition and dogma. Tony had a profound influence on me by modelling informed dissent; this was a man who pointedly read a book in the Chapel services he was obliged to attend, and who summarised religion quite simply as ‘a load of old hooey.’ In a tightly-controlled environment, where religious doctrine ruled and questions were ignored, it was frankly thrilling.

The other decisions I had to make for him were much harder, but I was fortunate to have the proactive support of another ex-pupil. She suggested a poem that she had studied with him, Poem 101 by Catullus, a poignant tribute to his dead brother from which the title of this article is taken; she was willing to read the poem for us in the original Latin, and she did so magnificently. I chose music that reflected Tony’s career as a Classicist, from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and from Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. Who knows what he would have made of it all, but I hoped it was acceptable. I was also lucky enough to have the services of an outstanding Celebrant, accredited by the BHA and meticulous in his approach. Philip Scott drove all the way from Reading to meet me at my place of work in Woking, for he insisted that we must meet in person and not discuss the funeral over the phone. He listened with care and asked searching questions, he chased up the few leads that I was able to give him and ultimately he pieced together a moving yet respectful tribute to a man who was intensely private – a difficult task indeed.

Planning Tony’s funeral with minimal support has been challenging and stressful. There were times when I doubted myself, when I agonised about the decisions that I was making and fretted that I was making the wrong ones. For several nights in a row, I barely slept. But despite all of this, I would do it again in a heartbeat.  Tony’s legacy lives on in the lives that he touched and I am just one of so many students that owe him the due honour and respect that he deserves. As Aristotle said, teachers who inspire children successfully should be held in the highest esteem; a parent gives life to a child, a teacher shows them the art of living well.

 

Filed Under: Ceremonies

Ask me no questions

November 7, 2014 by Emma C Williams

'Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lie.' Emma C Williams relates an incident on Twitter. Photo: Derek Bridges

‘Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.’ Emma C Williams relates an incident on Twitter. Photo: Derek Bridges

About a month ago, and this is unusual, I found myself stunned into silence by a lay preacher. Don’t get me wrong, the silence was short-lived. But, for a brief moment, I was dumbfounded.

At the time, I was curious to know how a person of faith could accept the fact that mankind is a product of evolution but still claim that we’re unique in our possession of a soul. Whilst I don’t personally believe that there is such a thing as the ‘soul,’ it’s an important tenet for a Christian; I was curious to know whether he thought that the soul had evolved along with us, or whether God just popped it in one day. You know. On a whim. When He’d run out of Sudoku puzzles and got bored with inventing new parasites.

Now since then I have done some reading on the subject and discovered that there is considerable theological debate in this area – a debate almost as pointless as the one about how many angels can dance on a pinhead in my humble opinion, but that’s neither here nor there. At the time, I was genuinely curious and fascinated to hear what this preacher had to say.

Anyway. I asked my big question, bounding into his timeline like an enthusiastic puppy, and was greeted with the following reply:

‘I’m afraid it’s not a question that’s ever bothered me.’

Sniff. Disappointing.

Not to be deterred, I pushed my nose in further, determined that this preacher, this man who stands before others and makes the claim that their naturally mortal ‘soul’ (whatever that is) can be granted the gift of immortality by the Grace of God (whatever that is), this man must surely be intrigued by a question that explores the very nature of the soul itself?

In the end, he answered as follows:

‘It’s one of the things I don’t understand about atheists that they need answers to questions that most of us who have a faith aren’t concerned about.’

Wow. I mean … wow.

Okay, I didn’t expect ‘an answer’ as I suspected at the time that there wasn’t one (although the Catholic church, if you’re interested, has some entertainingly specific guidance on this very theme). What I did expect, perhaps naively, was a response deserving of respect; something like, ‘I don’t know, I’d really need to think about that one,’ or ‘I don’t know but I bet [insert name of highly-respected theological Prof here] has something to say about it, I’ll look it up.’ To come back with ‘it’s not a question that’s ever bothered me’ followed by a patronising chastisement for being a typical atheist asking silly questions not only left me open-mouthed but took me right back to being at Church school. There my atheism was cemented in place quite unintentionally but quite brilliantly by the fact that I was ridiculed for asking questions.

Personally, I don’t understand how anyone can agree with the evidence that mankind evolved but refuse to accept that there is therefore nothing special about us other than the fact that we are a truly brilliant ape. And this particular ape has questions – lots of them; telling me that those questions are uninteresting or unimportant to you will only make me suspect, rightly or wrongly, that you fear the answers.

So, like it or not, my dear preacher … I’m still asking.

Filed Under: Atheism Tagged With: atheism, Twitter

Those who can’t preach

September 25, 2014 by Emma C Williams

‘Teaching is personal – it has to be,’ says Emma C Williams

My first novel contained a thought experiment in which a somewhat inept RE teacher finds herself out of a job. Her demise came as a result of one well-meaning but thoughtless response to a vulnerable student, and as I crafted the tale I felt sympathy with that character, even as I fashioned her downfall.

As a teacher, I fear it’s impossible to keep your thoughts, emotions and biases out of the classroom completely, however hard you might try. Teaching is personal – it has to be. We throw ourselves into it and, if I believed in the soul, I would say that teaching is a part of mine. It’s also immediate, and it’s not like the construction of a carefully-worded article. It’s us, in the flesh, on our feet, all the time: as an educator, a guide, a philosopher, a fool, a blagger, a gatekeeper and a showman. Speaking as a teacher and indeed as a person who could probably benefit from closing her mouth on occasion, I felt a certain sympathy for my ill-fated creation, even though her views differed wildly from my own.

But there is a darker story behind the tale that I told, a real version which dates back to the early 1980s, when I was on the other side of the desk. You know, the good old days when some schools still had corporal punishment and teachers could say whatever they liked? I share the real incident now as an illustration of the sort of thing that can happen when preaching is allowed to enter the classroom.

In my final year at a Church of England all-girls primary school, the headmistress took it upon herself to give us a talk on ‘the facts of life’ or ‘body matters’ as she called them. There was a general sense of excitement and trepidation amongst most of the girls, but I remember being bored during much of the talk; it was pretty tame stuff and besides, I already knew ‘the facts’ from home. Despite my disinterest, I have a hazy recollection of zoning back into the room as the head was intoning her views on abortion.

Abortion was wrong. Fact. If we had ‘sinned’ (by having sex before marriage), and in doing so had gone and got ourselves pregnant, then that child must be born. Something told me that her views were a little extreme, but before I had even had time to make sense of them in my head, I suddenly heard my name and then realised that everyone was looking at me. In her eagerness to make her point, our headmistress had decided to cite me as an example of someone who could ‘quite easily’ have been lost to the world as a result of a termination.

Head swimming, I tried to make sense of what she was saying. My parents were happily married, so how did my home situation fit with the den of iniquity she had been describing thus far? As far as I could gather, due to the fact that I have a mild version of a condition called Goldenhar syndrome (which does not, by the way, affect anything other than certain aspects of my appearance) my parents might have decided not to have me. Now, there was a thought! But the headmistress put her hand on my shoulder, warmly and benevolently, and turned me to face my classmates. ‘Wouldn’t that have been terrible?’ she asked them. They all nodded, dutifully.

Now it may not surprise you to know that my ten-year-old self had not exactly contemplated my own termination as a possibility before. I was blessed with loving parents, who made me feel like the most important thing in their lives. Why on earth would the idea have occurred to me?

Quite why this headteacher felt it her place to introduce me to the idea seems impossible to fathom – until, of course, one remembers her convictions. I’m quite sure she thought she’d done a marvellous deed, and I wonder to this day to what extent she succeeded; did she persuade the majority of girls in that room of her beliefs? I do hope not.

My objection to her tactics, speaking not as the person affected but as a teaching professional, is this: it was clearly more important to her to preach her morality than it was to consider the individual welfare of a child in her class. And that, I believe, is the biggest danger with preaching.

Filed Under: Education, Women's health Tagged With: Abortion, Religious Education, teaching

Losing my religion – how my ‘faith’ school nurtured an atheist

August 28, 2014 by Emma C Williams

Children are naturally curious.

Children are naturally curious. But they’re also susceptible and impressionable. Emma C Williams shares her experience of education in a ‘faith’ school – but does it match up to yours?

My school was proudly old-fashioned. Questions were viewed with suspicion and contempt, especially in the context of religion. We were not allowed to study RE as a subject, since exposure to a variety of religious views would have ‘confused’ us. Instead, we had Divinity with the School Chaplain: we read passages from the Bible and he explained them.

My parents were deliberately neutral in their stance, and so I came to my religious schooling with a completely open mind – in many ways, an easy convert. I was profoundly respectful of what I assumed were the sincerely-held beliefs of those around me and I would bow my head during prayers. I was utterly fascinated by the ritual of Chapel, and knew all the traditional hymns; I can still sing most of them all the way through, much to my husband’s consternation, and can recite the Creed, some of the Psalms, the Lord’s Prayer and several others.

While I would listen with interest during the Sermon, it took me a long time to realise that I was pretty much the only one doing so. On an increasing number of occasions I would find myself enraged by the message that we had been given in Chapel, or puzzled by the hypocrisy of our situation. If Jesus said to ‘sell all thou hast and give to the poor,’ what were we doing in an expensive boarding school? Did God honestly care how I performed in my exams – didn’t He have something more important to worry about? And why on earth did I have to pray for the Queen? Ignored by the staff and ridiculed by my peers, it became clear to me that most people neither listened to nor cared about the lessons that we were taught by the Reverend. Even he didn’t seem to care that much. Yet when I questioned the charade, I was bullied for it – by students and some of the staff.

Atheists are often accused of being ‘angry’ and I guess it’s hard for believers to comprehend the unpleasant mix of condescension, prejudice and paranoia that some of us have faced, growing up in a society that tends to equate faith with morality. Soon after I started attending school, I went to a meeting that was announced for ‘all students who are not Christians.’ In my innocence, I failed to realize that this was a euphemistic way of gathering our tiny handful of Muslim students so that their non-attendance at Chapel could be agreed. The Housemistress nearly fainted when I showed up, the only girl in the room without a headscarf. She asked me what on earth I was doing there, so I explained that I didn’t believe in God and was therefore not a Christian. She told me not to be so ridiculous, said that my views ‘didn’t count’ and sent me away. That was probably the first time that I felt really angry.

Despite the pressure (or perhaps because of it – I was a rebellious child at heart), I became more and more convinced during my childhood that an unswerving acceptance of a bundle of ancient writings made very little sense. In addition, a school rife with bullying was a fine place to observe that religious beliefs have no effect on a person’s humanity. Over the years I watched some of the worst bullies in the school pass through their Confirmation ceremony, in which they agreed to ‘turn away from everything which was evil or sinful.’ Some of them became servers in Chapel. My distaste for the whole sham increased, and by the time I reached University I was thoroughly relieved to be away from it.

Yet given that we’re all a product of our experiences, I sometimes wonder what kind of person I would be had I not attended such an old-fashioned ‘faith’ school. I fully support the BHA’s campaign against them, as in principle I believe that every child should have an education that is free in every sense – not least free from indoctrination and prejudice. Yet for me, my experiences shaped my convictions – and not in the way that the school had intended. Maybe I’m unusual, but if my story is anything to go by and you want to nurture an atheist, then I guess you proceed as follows: send them to a ‘faith’ school, ladle on plenty of hypocrisy and tell them not to ask questions. The result may surprise you.

 

Filed Under: Atheism, Education, Humanism

Good without god – a letter to the faithful

August 21, 2014 by Emma C Williams

washing up

Must everything we do have some cosmic significance? Photo: Crishna Simmons

How do you sleep at night? Or get up in the morning? Doesn’t life seem pointless?

The religious conviction that a life without God is somehow one devoid of meaning has always baffled me. Personally, I see the situation in reverse, for I struggle to understand how the faithful deal with the following.

Life is mundane – it’s inevitable. There are forms to fill in, dishes to be washed and toenails to be cut. I do struggle to grasp how someone of faith gets through the unavoidable tedium of an average day whilst maintaining a conviction that life resonates with cosmic meaning. Demonstrably, much of the time, it doesn’t. Furthermore, and unless you live in the Bible Belt of America, the majority of your days must be spent mixing with people of different faiths or indeed no faith at all (hello!) However worthwhile your job might seem, I wonder how you motivate yourself to care about it when you believe that most of your colleagues and clients are destined for hell – whether for you that means oblivion, the absence of God, or the fiery furnace.

Life is cruel – or it can be. Whilst religious people claim that their faith is a comfort, this is another train of thought that I cannot get my head round. If your baby is sick and you pray fervently to God to save him, how can you still trust your God when your baby dies? Was God not listening? Then He abandoned you. Could He not help? Then He is impotent and prayer is pointless. Was He testing you? Then He’s one sick-minded ruler. For those of us without faith, a devastating loss such as the death of a child is not something that we somehow have to reconcile with the paradoxical belief that an all-powerful and all-loving God still cares about us. It just …. happens. It’s terrible, it’s heart-breaking and it’s unfair. And it happens.

Life is insignificant – in the span of the universe. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m starting to come to the conclusion that the convictions held by Creationists, as barking mad and as scientifically untenable as they are, make more sense than those held by the majority of moderate Christians. Why? Well, let’s just take a couple of points that we know to be the facts (unless you’re a Creationist, of course). The earth is around 5 or 6 billion years old. Dinosaurs roamed upon it for c. 65 million years. By comparison, homo sapiens has only been knocking around for roughly 200,000 years. Why on earth do we think we’re so important as to be made in the Creator’s image? From a Christian point of view, we then have to accept the bizarre notion that humans had to wait 198,000 years for the Messiah to pop up in a spectacularly unpromising part of the world. For an all-powerful being, God does make things difficult, doesn’t He?

For me, religion does not bring meaning, for it fails to explain anything even remotely to my satisfaction. As Dawkins said in his letter to his daughter, tradition, authority and revelation are three very poor reasons for accepting something to be true. For me, inventing a supernatural significance in order to give myself a sense of purpose is an empty and pointless exercise.

So where do we find meaning in our lives? Well, it will be different for everyone. An older lady once said to me that life is a series of moments, and increasingly I think she is right. It is hugely important to me to be present in the here and now as much as I can. To feel filled with awe and wonder as I look straight into the eyes of an urban fox. To watch a pond-skater as it whisks across the surface of the water, and to be in a position to realise that the pond is their universe. To gaze at the stars and remind myself that some of them may not be there any more. To stroke a purring cat. To stand on a limestone pavement and be told by a more knowledgeable friend that it was formed over tens of thousands of years.

This world and this life – with its inevitable tedium, its inescapable pain and its relative insignificance – is astonishing. For me, that is more than enough.

Filed Under: Humanism

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