Bishop John Spong

I had the privilege of attending a lecture by Bishop John Shelby Spong this week. I had no idea what I was in for as I am staunchly anti-religion. I was wondering whether I would be able to sit through a religious lecture even while I was driving to the event. Within 5 minutes I was glad I had gone.

I hadn't done any research on Bishop Spong and had no idea who he was, how renowned he was, or more importantly, how progressive his ideas are. Spong is an unapologetic Reformist of Catholicism and Religion in general. I don't want to try and outline his ideas here as they are articulately outlined on his site. I do encourage you to read his site and his wikipedia entry.

I found the talk engrossing. Completely different to what I was expecting. I went in with defenses up ready to shoot holes in everything the speaker would say. During the talk I could hardly fault a single thing. Everyone should listen to this guy, the pious, the atheist, the agnostic and the everywhere in between. I'll be buying some of his books for sure.

Atheists and Aliens.

As indicated by my previous post, I am now a tin foil hat wearing UFO conspiracy theorist (the foil is to stop the aliens from frying my brain with their mad mind control skillz). Last night I was listening to Late Night Live which was a lecture by Michel Onfrey, the author of the Atheist Manifesto. While answering a question from an audience member, he claimed that Atheists can not believe in UFOs. That doesn't seem right to me.

If that is the case, wouldn't Atheism be just as ignorant as Christianity or another religion? It would seem so to me. There seems to me to be at the very least some evidence to support the existence of life outside this planet. Now, part of Atheism is denouncing the notion that human beings are privileged in some astronomical or spiritual way. In other words, we are meat and bones brought about through slow and gradual evolution. That I agree with. But if you say that we are the only life in the whole freakin universe, doesn't that indicate some privilege?

I think what Michel is describing could be called fundamentalist Atheism. Something which he explicitly stated he was not advocating in a following question. Needless to say, fundamentalist anything is a bad doctrine to subscribe to. I don't believe in God because of a decisive lack of evidence. As much as I detest religion, if evidence was provided that verified it I would be forced to believe, but I would still detest it.

I sat, thought and made my mind up on the issue based on experience and reason. Some call that Agnosticism. It's a fine line, but I don't see it the same. I have made a decision, but am not so fucking ignorant to revise that decision if presented with something that either contradicts my version of truth or is an aspect that I hadn't considered. Anything else is fundamentalist in my opinion.

For whatever reason (Yahweh or some other fairy tale creature blessed us with it I suppose) we have the ability to postulate. Best we take advantage of that. Any ideology not devoted to reason, evidence and knowledge is flawed. Even if it's primary argument is the lack of those qualities in opposing ideologies.

Catholic Weddings.

I attended my first Catholic wedding ceremony on the weekend. While it was enjoyable from the point of view of seeing two friends from high school get married, I couldn't help but take notice (and offense) of the language and procedures of the thing.

I could probably count the number of wedding ceremonies I have been to on one hand, with all up until now being distinctly irreligious. It now seems a bit naive, but I kind of thought that an irreligious wedding was now the default with a conscious decision being needed to have a religious wedding. I am not exactly sure why I thought this, most likely due to my biased experience.

The most interesting thing to me was that the whole ceremony was unbelievably sexist. The priest (right title?) very rarely actually addressed the bride. It was very clear that the whole thing was about the groom 'taking a wife'. Why does any woman put up with this? Maybe just this ceremony was particularly sexist, I don't know.

Another thing, I didn't realise that you could use the phrase 'Christian Law', as in 'Do you promise to bring future children up to obey Christian Law?'. Two things, why doesn't the child get a choice? The thing hasn't even been born yet and it's religion is already determined? And isn't that an insult to the word 'Law'? Doesn't Law strive to be just and fair (admittedly sometimes failing in practice)? How can someone call archaic instructions based on mysticism, xenophobia, homophobia, gynophobia, metathesiophobia and racism 'Law'?