Wagist

An Interesting Debate About Organized Religion

Posted on November 10, 2009 by Dan Linehan

It’s hard for me to be told I’m evil, because I think of myself as someone who is filled with love.

- Stephen Fry.

This week marked my first time watching the British TV show, ‘Intelligence Squared.‘ I had the pleasure of viewing a fairly enthralling debate involving Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry. They appeared opposite two representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, Archbishop Onaiyekan (of Abuja, Nigeria) and Ann Widdecombe, a conservative member of British Parliament.

The mission of Intelligence Squared is to air programs using an ‘Oxford style’ debate format on a pre-selected topic. Each of the four speakers presents an opening statement to make their case, following that, a few audience questions are answered, and then each speaker proceeds to give a brief closing statement. At the end of the show, the audience is polled to see how many members were convinced to change their opinions on the topic at hand, and from that poll it’s determined which side of the debate was more convincing.

Below is the “edited version” of the debate. It clocks in at around 45 minutes, and is worth watching in its entirety.

Dedicating your life to an organization

Archbishop Onaiyekan is the first to speak. He immediately makes the point that the central question being discussed here is more than simply a matter of debate to him, in fact, it’s quite personal. He has dedicated his life to the Catholic Church, so the answer to the question of ‘Whether the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world’ is obvious to him, in fact, he doesn’t seem sure how anyone could believe otherwise.

There is a certain myopic perspective at work here that I think can be seen with many religious practitioners. Imagine how difficult it would be to look this question objectively when it entirely calls your own life’s work into question. Even if you do have doubts about specific parts of the church doctrines you are proselytize, which is easier: to admit that the Church might be wrong, and is therefore not really infallible, or to simply push those doubts aside and ignore them under the pretense of faith?

How one chooses to make that choice tends to be the central conflict between religion and science. Science says to embrace doubt, religion says to take things on faith. Of course, when you are take things strictly on faith they are non-falsifiable, which is great for the church, but tends to reap disastrous outcomes for many of its followers.

The lesson here is twofold. The first is to be wary of dedicating your life to any organization, especially one that prescribes faith as a virtue. Faith should always be backed up with evidence, lest we be deceived.

Secondly, if you do find out that you’re dedicated any aspect your life to a belief or philosophy that you later find out is non-ideal, don’t be afraid to change. It’s never too late for us to change our lives, right up until the day we die. We can always reorient ourselves to a more positively focused direction, but to do so we have to be willing to admit that what we were doing before was non-ideal. We have to be unafraid to change once we know that it is proper to do so. There’s no shame in doing this, in fact, the real thing to be ashamed of is continuing to live a lie.

The Catholic obsession with sex

Obsession with sex and sexual morality is not merely a Catholic issue. In fact, most religions get very hung up on sexual morality. However, it is fair to say that the Catholic Church is even more extreme in its teachings than most other sects of Christianity. Not many organizations require all of their members to take lifelong vows of celibacy, for instance.

Since the Catholic Church is supposedly teaching us the inerrant word of God concerning this topic, it’s important to make sure that what they are teaching us is correct. And presumably, the inerrant word of God would hold up to a bit of scrutiny.

The central tenant of the Catholic teachings on sexual morality is that sexual acts have to be entirely centered around procreation in order to be moral.

Which raises the question, is procreation really the only valid reason to have sex?

By all accounts, the answer is staunchly, no. Humans are highly social animals, and there are all sorts of reasons for us to engage in sex. We can have sex just for the sake of companionship. We can have sex as an expression of romantic love, or as an expression of power, as an act of lust, a sign of affection, as side benefit of a long term friendship, and so on. The permutations are practically endless.

While sex may be our only method through which we procreate, procreation is not at all the only reason we have sex.

In fact, the urge to have sex is so deeply ingrained in our psychology that if we can’t have sex with other people most of us will just go ahead and have sex with ourselves. Something like 95% of adults masturbate on a regular basis, resulting in billions of sexual acts that have absolutely no chance of resulting in offspring.

Consensual sex between two adults is a win-win situation. Both parties are willingly engaged in the act and both (hopefully) enjoy it. Lots of sex happens without the intention of creating a child, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

According to the Catholic Church, having sex simply because it’s fun is a mortal sin. This makes billions of people needlessly terrified of an act that is, by all accounts, one of the most natural and normal things a mammal can do. And this is precisely why many people perceive the Catholic Church as having an deeply unhealthy perspective on sex by any modern definition.

Stephen Fry touches on this topic twenty-seven minutes into the debate.

They will say, we, with our permissive society and our rude jokes, are obsessed [with sex], but no. We have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly. Because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous, and dark and difficult. it’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting.

What Stephen Fry describes is a textbook, healthy definition of sex. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church continues to ignore all the fallout that has come from their condemnations of non-procreative sex.

Claims of infallibility

The Pope claims to be the infallible incarnation of God on Earth. While this is a supposition that should looked upon skeptically at any time, the fully dubious nature of the claim actually has light shone brightly on it during during this debate, at a time when you would least expect it.

During Ann Widdecombe’s opening statements, at the seventeen minute mark of the debate, she says the following:

[Christopher Hitchens] seems to think, that the Catholic Church, should have had some unique insight that demonstrably, was lacking in society as a whole. Do not expect the Catholic Church, somehow, when that was the state of knowledge at the time, to have acted in a unique and completely different way.

Wouldn’t that be exactly what we would expect from an organization making a claim of Papal infallibility?

If we can’t expect the Catholic Church to act with any more wisdom than other organizations are at the time, then what is the point? Doesn’t admitting this fully drive home the lie of Papal infallibility?

If the Catholic Church is preaching the inerrant word of God, what else would we expect other than a perspective that is timeless, and perfect in it’s authority?

The cognitive dissonance that comes from Ann Widdecombe’s statement that the Church only knows what is right or wrong in hindsight, is amazing to me. If the Church is unable to discern right from wrong because their teachings are only a product of society’s knowledge of the time, then much of the dogma it teaches is wrong by definition.

Ann Widdecombe has essentially admitted that the Catholic Church doesn’t know more than any other organization at any given time. That there is no supernatural hand guiding its actions, that its teachings are merely a product of whatever the cultural norms are at the time.

Which is just what we suspected all along, isn’t it?