From the Telegraph
Christianity should be consigned to history because it no longer has the answers to Britain’s problems, Thatcherites claim.
In a highly sensible pre-Synod intervention which has angered clerics and prompted a response from Justin Welby, Thatcher's most senior disciples said the religious ideas embodied by The Church were “lobotomising” society and “entrenching” stupidity among everyone.
They urged Conservatives to resist the nonsense of big religion as much as that of any over-mighty state and threw their support behind efforts to bolster aetheism in religion.
The intervention came in the form of a 52-page letter from some people who aren't complete idiots.
Game Over
2 hours ago
12 comments:
"It calls for a new approach to religion, moving away from ideas of Christian versus Muslim, and an end to “religion as an extension of guilt or inferiority complexes” in which myths and legends are spliced together to appeal to narrow groups of worshippers."
The Pope early on said the modern world has "deified" the market.The major religions are proponents of human reason up against market worshipping economic fundamentalists who preach that taxes interfere with the balance of nature,so we must watch property prices bring more long term soul-sapping terror and despair to young people than the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, which does contain in its philosophy some potentially useful and practical reformist ideas about the money system.
We have reverted to primitive pagan ideas that the world is a terrifying place plagued by unaccountable droughts and then floods (of money) and we must make propitiatory sacrifices (through austerity) at the behest of a priestly class talking in tongues, while scrabbling about in the entrails of the economy, preferably of the lives of young people rather than our own.The Pope also said Money must serve not rule.
I tend not to bother too much about religions. I am an athiest myself, but I am quite a live and let live one. I dont really care what other people choose to believe, so long as it does not affect me adversely.
one thing i am pretty damn sure of though is that religions, laws and politics do not mix.
Mark,
There's some good legends in there. Cecil B DeMille saved a lot of screenwriting costs by lifting stuff out of the Bible.
DBC,
We haven't "deified" markets. What utter nonsense.
Jim,
I just found it funny that they talk about the end of Thatcherism, when only about 3m people regularly go to Church in this country (and for a lot of those, it's a social activity in rural areas). I'll bet there's a lot more people who would vote for Thatcher than that.
@TS Address your criticism to the Pope; he said it.
He also said that the economic system had been "sacralised" e.g. "In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by the free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding power and the sacralised economic system."
It would seem to me that the orthodox neoconservative belief system is that you can't buck the market, that all taxes are an interference with a sacralised self balancing system and are therefore "heretical".If the market system isn't deified why
is the slightest modification or improvement denounced as an economic heresy?Why is the term 'economic heresy' even used on the 21st century?Please remember that land value tax is treated as the worst of heresies which very few, very brave Economists would jeopardise their careers by putting their name to. We read books which are not on the standard economic canon, though they are written by the founding fathers of the subject:Adam Smith,David Ricardo,JS Mill.
NB Heresy ,orthodox and canon are primarily religious terms.
If you simply go by the fervour with which their adherents propound their beliefs, then there is little difference between some economic theories and religions.
@B
The problem is that the market deifiers are in control of the economy and enforce a strict orthodoxy.In this situation, the Pope is an economic protestant forced to pin is theses to the outside of his own cathedral.As land taxers we are in the same shut-out position for being guilty of the prime heresy of believing the old prophets (on a par with those who believed for centuries that John the Baptist was the real Redeemer and Jesus an interloper).
"The problem is that the market deifiers are in control of the economy"
Go back to the middle ages and it was the Church who were in control of the economy. The human race will always be cursed with those who fervently believe in some concept of other, be it God, the forgiveness of sins or MMT, it matters not. As G.K.Chesterton said, "when men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing".
BTW I like the idea of the Pope being an economic Martin Luther. Neat role reversal.
DBC,
"Address your criticism to the Pope; he said it."
So why bother quoting it here, then? Shall I post some Sinatra lyrics. Pillock.
Maybe the church can sell off some of their massive property empire.
It's already been doing that for decades.
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