fry and fry again
i watched a debate between a bishop, catholic mp, a writer, and stephen fry on the subject “is the catholic church a force for good in the world”. if you’re curious, it’s here.
it’s quite good and very british in style in that everyone first gets uninterrupted long statements, then the audience asks questions in ‘bulk’ so to speak, after which people get time to respond to the questions in any way they see fit, and when that is over, a closing statement is made. no cross talk and yelling.
what jumped out at me is that at one point stephen fry makes a very valid point that i never quite formulated clearly about the fact that catholic church has been on the side of what it now considers to be poor moral choices, including being pro-slavery and killing people who owned non-latin bibles. the excuse it used for not apologizing for all those times was that this was a product of it’s time and should be judged as such.
the problem, as stephen fry points out, is that the catholic church is supposed to be an absolute moral compass, and if your moral compass isn’t able to tell you that slavery is wrong until society catches up, then it’s not a compass, it’s stick floating downstream.
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one thing that goes unsaid in the debate btw is this apparent belief on the MPs side that without the catholic church people would absolutely lack guidance and devolve into an animal world of murder and rape, while stephen fry thinks we’d transcend into a humanist morality. both are probably wrong, but i think part of their lack of communication has to do with that issue.
i’m biased here in that i do hate the “oh, you’re atheist? so you’re immoral then right?” train of thought, but i also think that religion is often just a veneer for simplistic phobias that won’t disappear even after you admit that they’re not divine in nature.
which is why i’m glad that the debate concentrated on the actual actions and policies of the catholic church (condoms, hiding child abuse) since those are the actual effects the church as an entity, and not religion, has on the world.
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i will also say that the final result was heartening, and separately that the british MP sounds like a monty python parody of a woman. it’s that voice they use for “i don’t like spam” or “penguins don’t come from africa”. i’m amazed anyone has it in real life, i always thought it was a silly bit of overacting.