Category: Christianity

In the last ten years or so, the issue of abuse of children by adults has become very high profile.  Nor is this wrong; such evil men deserve severe punishment.  But I am disturbed by evidence that this accusation is being itself abused, as a tool to gratify religious hatred.  Three news reports, all from the BBC, all recent, may be taken as an example.

Yesterday Stephen Douglas-Hogg, who taught at St. Pauls Cathedral Choir school in the 1980’s, was convicted of abusing a series of pupils there.  Here is the BBC news report.

 Last week the BBC reported that the Jesuit order in the UK is being sued by a wealthy lawyer over allegations that a pervert priest abused him in the 1970’s at a Catholic school.  The priest is long dead.  The case is too long ago for any normal case to proceed.  But the judge ruled the case can go ahead, and charged the Jesuit order the enormous sum of half the plaintiff’s costs — £200,000 — before any question of right or wrong is established.

The following day the BBC reported that children were being sold into prostitution from a council orphanage near Heathrow Airport.  More than 80 had “vanished”, although a Hillingdon council spokeman complacently claimed that “only” 4 had been sold into brothels from the orphanage this year, so things were improving.  I saw the BBC local news report that day, which was full of remarks such as “to be fair to the council”.

In the first case, there seems no suggestion that the school is at fault.   There are no calls to sue the education authority.

In the second special permission is granted to sue, and the defendants — a voluntary organisation, remember — are forced to pay over a huge sum to their attacker.  Reading this, I felt the implication was that this was fine.

In the third, a council with a duty of care is happy that four children have vanished, almost certainly into prostitution. The establishment merely tut-tut’s at their negligence.

This seems to suggest that there is one rule for the Catholics, and another for everyone else.

But will not any organisation that deals with the young find a certain number of evil men try to seep in?  In the 1970’s, indeed, we all “knew” for certain that such things hardly ever occurred, so no-one looked for them.  Clergy are accustomed to be on the receiving end of false allegations, and the culture of the times was against going public.

Yet I recall in the 80’s that we read in Private Eye about the Kincora boys home scandal, where an orphange was run as a brothel for gay senior members of the Northern Ireland establishment.  A footnote to Auberon Waugh’s diaries adds laconically that “this scandal never broke.”   There was no question of demonising the whole political order there.  The scandal, indeed, has never broken.  Who even remembers it?  But of course those responsible were not Catholic priests, but politicians.  That’s alright, then?

We can argue that those who could have stopped something are responsible too, although when we are discussing a voluntary society, we might reflect on the limited powers that such have.

But why bother?  Don’t the above reports show that the “power to stop this” argument is just a pretext to sue the innocent?  For if the Jesuits are guilty, so is St. Pauls; doubly so is Hillingdon Council, for what is happening in broad daylight right now.  Yet the council leader relies on a stale excuse, and no man suggests that he should be arrested or fined £200,000.  The choir school issues a new code of conduct and all is well.

In Boston, in the USA, I believe that similar accusations have been used as a pretext to sue dioceses, seize churches, confiscate vast sums of money contributed for charitable purposes by ordinary people.  The wicked priests who committed the abuse, of course, are unaffected by all this.  But I feel deep unease when the state starts seizing churches.  It’s almost a litmus test of declining freedom.

Why target the Catholics?  Is it because they are almost the only body which resists the agenda of the selfish generation who today run the political establishment? Who else that matters is standing up against the values of that group?  Most Christian groups are politically insignificant.

It is an ancient hate-ploy to accuse Christians of child abuse; since everyone loathes the latter it serves to undermine their moral authority and acts as a pretext to seize their property.   Diocletian used the same methods.  Nor is it confined to the church: in the US women getting divorced have been advised by lawyers to make false accusations of child abuse against their husbands in order to gain custody, or so I am told.  The revulsion for the accusation drowns out the possibility that the accusation may be false or malicious; to be accused is to be guilty.

How, precisely, could the Catholics have avoided this problem?  It is not easy to see how.  By holding in 1970 the attitudes of 2000?  To demand such is dishonest, surely?  If they could not have avoided this, on what basis is all this just?  Everyone knows that the Catholics are against child abuse.  On the other hand those like Peter Tatchell who call for the age of homosexual consent to fall to 14 face no opprobrium, and receive fawning interviews in major newspapers.

If organisations are responsible for what goes on — and why should they not? — then let us see those who believe this put it into practice when it affects them.  But if only Catholics are targeted, surely hate, not justice, is the agenda here?

Meanwhile last night the BBC broadcast yet another anti-Catholic programme, this a stale story about some Irish bishop knocking up his housekeeper. 

I am not a Catholic, but I am disturbed by all this.  Isn’t the church being attacked, not because it endorses under-age sex, but precisely because it does not do so? because alone among major organisations in the UK and USA, it objects to it? 

I do not use my PC on Sundays — I’d go mad if I sat on it seven days a week! — so I thought that I would post this in advance!

It is good Friday, I’m at home, and the sun is shining.  Some days it all just comes to you!  I wish you all a happy Easter.

How probable is it that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead? James McGrath has been posting on this here and here, and quotes Bart Ehrman to the effect that it is utterly unlikely, and suggests that we cannot know by historical investigation whether such a thing happened. Each is articulating a religious opinion, of course, rather than anything on which scholarship as such has something to say, as they are entitled to do. 

It seems to me that these arguments only be made by making some assumptions which won’t bear examination.

Non-mathematicians frequently have difficulty with probability. Most people would imagine that if you flip a coin five times and it comes up heads each time, that it is more probable that next time it will come up tails. In truth the probability that it will come up heads remains unchanged at 50%.

We all know that miracles do not happen very often. That is a direct observation and may be taken as a fact. But the actual probability that any given event is a miracle must be unknown to us. We have no way to calculate this, for rare events.

I think that it would be useful here to stop talking about miracles specifically, and to discuss the general case: the “rare event” in history.  To discuss miracles brings in all sorts of prejudices which hamper the investigation.

Are we really being invited to say that rare events do not happen very often — indeed! — that what often happens must be what usually happens, and therefore, in loose terms based on gut feeling, that any given event other things being equal is “most likely” to be a common event than a rare one?

I think that we are — and so we are not saying something very profound here. Once we define an event as rare, we define it as “not usual.” This is just semantics. Most events in our lives are indeed commonplace.

But if we argue from rarity to what actually “must” be happening, doesn’t this involve the same fallacy as the coin-flipping earlier? There is a logical fallacy here. Surely it tells us precisely nothing as to whether a particular rare event did indeed happen, or whether a particular coin-toss will give one result or another. It only tells us a generality.

To argue that rare events never happen is a simply a mistake. For example, we all know that it is not very often that the taxman will give us a refund! We do not therefore presume that refunds never happen.

Dr McGrath would no doubt interject at this point that he doesn’t deny that miracles — rare events — might happen; only that we cannot know from studying the historical record if they do, since any evidence that appears is “more likely” to be a mistake than genuine.

Unfortunately the same logic applies to this argument. Can we never know if rare events occur? Imagine that a statement appears that in 2002 the taxman gave me a refund. Why should we ignore this? Surely we would sift the evidence?

In general, we should not do history by deciding in advance what is “most likely” to have happened in the past and then finding reasons to ignore whatever the evidence actually says. We need to let the historical record speak, and then assess that narrative in the light of other portions of the historical record. We may consider that a rare event did not in fact happen; but we should hardly decide this before considering the evidence. Still less should we refuse to consider evidence, on the grounds that an event is rare!

Now I am aware that some will be getting impatient with me here. They will feel that I am missing the point. I think that a common feeling is underlying all of this discontent, unstated, which I will now drag out of its hiding place and into the sunlight. It’s something like this:

“All religious claims that miracles happen are lies.”

or possibly

“Religious claims are more likely to be lies than other claims.”

We all find this feeling in our minds, whatever our beliefs. If we conduct a thought-experiment and imagine that a statue of the virgin spoke, the first instinct of all of us is a knee-jerk suspicion that it is a lie. But this is what we call a “prejudice”.

We need to decide whether we are doing history, or merely decorating our prejudice with snippets of historical data. It is no doubt the case that most references to miracles in classical texts are bogus. But if we intend to discover whether a specific miracle did or did not happen, we cannot simply appeal to this prejudice, which we might accept in cases where we are not directly investigating this issue. When we wish to decide whether a rare event did indeed happen, we must investigate it directly, rationally, and examine the evidence.

This is the problem with the kind of argument being made; that it evades the evidence in favour of a pre-judgement. No valid conclusion can be reached this way.

To argue that most miracles are fake therefore all miracles are fake is merely a prejudice. It tells us nothing about whether a given miracle was actually fake.

To argue that we cannot know whether any miracles are genuine because anyone who mentions one is “probably” lying is merely a form of words to express the same prejudice. What we think probable may be the only thing that we will believe; but if so, we will never learn anything that we do not already know.

Enough talk about “likely” or “probably”, disguising a non-rational secularism: for every event let us examine the data — all of the data — and go where it leads us. Scholarship can only advance when we address the difficult pieces of data, and open our minds.