The Brightest Sparks of Britatheism Are Just Glitter In the Lime Light

From RMJ's blog, I  got to this video of an "Intelligence Squared" "Oxford style debate" on the proposition “The Catholic Church is a Force for Good in the World”.   The debate was held in Central Hall Westminster in London on October 21st 2009.  The big draw was certainly those great historians and scholars, Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens.   They were up against the incredible star power of Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe.   I know it's going to shake your expectations to their very foundations but the crowd that roster of debaters drew our to listen in London came down rather heavily on the atheist - Catholic bashing side, side.   I know, what a surprise.

I have never been very big on formal debating, on a stage with a voting audience, as a useful way to learn things and come to conclusions.  It is are a form of show biz, entertainment, first and foremost.   As compared to even a lackadaisical perusal of real scholarship, debates are at least as likely to lead you to a faulty conclusion based on superficial thinking and performance talent as they are to lead to a sound conclusion.  Reality, on the other hand, seems to be rather resistant to that method of attack.  Especially taking performance talent into the mix.  In this particular case, with the combined erudition of Fry and Hitchens presented to the kind of British audience who would come out to hear them, it is a virtual guarantee of a confirmation of predispositions.  Nothing new was likely to be learned.  I didn't hear anything I hadn't before, debunked lies included.  "Oxford style debate" has a tendency to do that.  It has a lot in common with another show biz style stunt, James Randi's completely bogus "Million Dollar Challenge" which precludes any science happening.

Apparently listening to the entire thing was even too much for the atheist attention span because a tiny fragment of Fry going on like a 19th century British Catholic-baiter has been the most circulated part of it.  In one blog post it was asserted:

Stephen Fry is the kind of person to avoid debating against. He's basically a huge brain piloting a finely tuned public speaking machine.

"A huge brain"?  Perhaps that was based on his head-size because I didn't hear anything that would lead me to believe that.  Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt that Fry isn't actually stupid.  He is, though, a thoroughly superficial and pedestrian middle-brow Brit who went into show biz after going to one of the big-name Brit training grounds in the common received POV.  Cambridge, in his case.   And he says nothing daring or original or especially informed.  The money shot consists of this assertion:

But on the other hand we must remember the point that was made that the church is very loose on moral evils because although they try to accuse people like me who believe in empiricism and the enlightenment of somehow what they call moral relativism as if it's some appalling sin whereas what it actually means is thought  they, they, for example, thought that slavery was perfectly fine absolutely OK and then they didn't.   What's the point of the Catholic Church if they say,  Oh, well we couldn't know any better because nobody else did. [Said with that kind of dramatic outrage that only a Brit anti-Catholic with a posh education and acting experience can ] Then what are you for!

I guess that the "brain" of Stephen Fry was more focused on the Cambridge Footlights than on the history of his university, which was chartered and authorized by several medieval Popes as well as originally staffed by clerics well into the modern period.  Not to mention the foundations of virtually all other early universities in England and Europe.  Apparently Fry suspects there was no "thought" going on there until it became, first, safely Anglican and then atheist dominated.

Not to mention the beginnings of empiricism or the fact that quite a number of bright lights of the "enlightenment" had no problem with slavery, some of the early figures in the "enlightenment" were slave holders, themselves.  

The Catholic history on slavery covers the gamut from the authorization and practice of slavery to it being specifically forbidden in many specific instances and strongly discouraged by other Catholics, including popes.  Any institution that has lasted the best part of two thousand years is bound to amass a record full of compromise, depravity and their opposite.  It is kind of funny for the self-appointed champion of reason AND relativism to insist on a consistent record in this one instance.   Apparently his relativism is also relative, especially when it is relatively convenient for him to appeal to the prejudice of his audience.  Ironically, for Fry's declaration, one of the Catholic theologians who held it was sometimes morally justifiable to hold people in slavery was the early empiricist, Thomas Aquinas.  Though I strongly suspect that Fry doesn't really know much about empiricism or its intellectual history.   It sounds more like a slogan coming from him.

Along side the history of papal and ecclesiastical permission of slavery, there is the long history of Catholic criticism of slavery and, in some rare cases, successfully agitating for its abolition, which goes back a lot farther than any atheistic effort I'm aware of.  I've mentioned the early success of St. Patrick in abolishing slavery in Ireland only to have it re-established during the English occupation.  There were Catholic institutions and religious orders that were dedicated to buying people out of slavery.  

There is no doubt that the papacy and many bishops and many Catholics were morally compromised by slavery and the economic-political system which benefited from slavery but they were hardly alone.  I remember once listening to Carl Sagan admit the paucity of rationalist and materialist anti-slavery literature and remarking on how surprising that was.   Considering that you have to hold moral positions that can't be discovered in materialism to even assert that slavery is a violation of objectively real rights and a violation of real moral obligations to respect those, there isn't anything surprising in that omission from the "empirical" and "enlightened" literature.  In 18th century America it was the Quaker saint, John Woolman, who dedicated his life to convincing people to free slaves, not Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.   One interesting point to make is that it was the very devout Catholic, Toussaint Louverture, who was  the man who overthrew slavery in the liberated Haiti which the combined forces of the American Enlightenment fought tooth and nail to sabotage for fear that it would endanger the slave power which most of them were the beneficiaries of.

If forced to participate in this kind of dog and pony show, I'd have answered Fry's Thomas Huxley moment** by pointing out that it was irrelevant to the proposition of the debate.  The question isn't whether or not the Catholic Church in the past supported slavery,  the proposition was stated in the present tense, it is a proposition about the Catholic Church today, in which slavery is officially condemned as immoral.   Present day Catholics just as anyone else alive today is not answerable to the sins of the past, they are responsible for their own actions.  That is also true of institutions.  Present day Catholics are answerable for their own actions, for better and for worse.

Catholic religion, unlike atheism, teaches the moral necessity of examination of conscience and the confession AND CESSATION of sin and a righting of wrongs.  If that is inconsistently practiced by people who hold that as a moral necessity, it is certainly less likely to be practiced by people who don't believe there is any requirement.

In recent history atheists who hold political power have been noticeably ready to use slave labor.  I am fairly certain that more people are held in slavery, born into slavery, destroyed by slavery in the 100% atheist controlled North Korea and China than in the entirely of the Catholic church today.   Modern popes of roughly the period of those atheist governments, from Leo III  to John Paul II have explicitly condemned slave holding.   In 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, which led to one of the major institutions practicing slave labor in the 20th century, Benedict XV outlawed slavery under cannon law.   The condemnation of slavery was incorporated by Vatican II into the pastoral constitutions of the church, reaffirmed by John Paul II (by far, not my favorite of recent popes, I'll note in passing).

The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such acts: "Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator"

While I don't agree with some of that passage, I'd  ask Fry where he finds such a definitive condemnation of slavery - especially in its widest meaning today -  in his version of atheist "relativism".

*  See the point about atheism being presented as a reliable guarantee of intellectual status, entirely divorced from the substance of what is said.   That goes especially for the long oral and written literature of atheist lore, especially that emerging from Brits.  Quite a lot of that is no more based in actual fact than some of the more widely believed lore among biblical fundamentalists, though, I'll be frank, I was unhappy, as an opponent of fundamentalism,  to find out that among fundamentalist intellectuals, there's more of a chance that they'll have looked at the available written records.   I suspect that is due to fundamentalists not enjoying the same status in superficial intellectualism that atheists claim for themselves.

**  That is as portrayed in Brit costume dramas of the totally phony and largely mythical confrontation between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, part and parcel of the lore of Britatheism.