Clare’s blog, aka rantspace

This is still a very nebulous concept – as opposed to a fully formulated thought that I’m so indignant about that I have to blog But hopefully it will become more concrete as I type, or as people respond to it.

It seems to me that a great deal of the church insistence on correct doctrine (which – in conservative denominations – pushes against such things as the acceptance of gay clergy and the ordination of women) is caused by needing to feel that they can define who is a member, or is entitled to be one, and who isn’t. The benefit of this, for them, is that drawing such a hard line makes it easy to enforce the rules: you break them, you’re out. Or at least you get punished till you realise how bad you are. And the difficulty for denominations who don’t draw such a strong line, but allow their members freedom of conscience (no, the Catholic Church doesn’t really, whatever individual priests or bishops might tell you), is that they risk the edges of their organisation becoming so blurred that they cease to be a definite organisation.

And while I think that flexibility in religious belief and doctrine is desirable, I see that the end result might well be to cause that denomination to fall into the dust. This would then leave the conservative denominations self-righteously triumphant, claiming that “things that are not of god will fail” (Acts 5:38-39). So what is the answer to the fact that liberalism – by definition – doesn’t aggressively compel membership, yet is crucial to providing a balance to conservatism?

As part of my website, I have a list of literary references to clergy sexual abuse. The reason I began the list was because I was tired of devout churchgoers telling me it was a modern phenomenon, and rare. My contention was that it was not only longstanding, but so much a part of the social psyche that casual references to it abound throughout the ages. So then I had to prove that (for the sceptics, natch!).

In modern times, the ultimate example is undoubtedly The Thorn Birds, although arguments run rife as to whether it really constitutes abuse (see the above link to my site for further discussion of that). But I found references from Oscar Wilde’s era (1800s), Chaucer (1300s) and right back to 120AD. So now I’m inviting anyone who comes across such a reference in their reading to add it here as a comment, to help me build my website list.

Not a title that narrows it down very much, really, when we’re talking about the church! But in this case, it’s about the arrogance of conservative members of the worldwide Anglican communion (about 1000 in total, a quarter of whom are bishops), who are at present in a meeting in Jerusalem which will probably see them deciding to boycott the next Lambeth Conference. There’s a nice article in The Age which more than adequately demonstrates their arrogance. Here are some excerpts, along with explanations of the arrogance for those who aren’t attuned to seeing it:

1) Peter Jensen asserts that the conference members are “the true keepers of the authority of the Bible.”
Arrogance: To suggest that just because they think (oops, sorry – know) their interpretation of the bible is right, that they are somehow “the true keepers” of its authority! Surely it’s God who is the keeper of scriptural authority??

2) Jensen also says “the Christian church has a constitution which is the Bible…it’s as if you’re a member of a [club] and you decide to break the rules…That’s understandable to the man on the street, surely.”
Arrogance no.1: Jensen and his conservative cohorts, again, are asserting that the rules they decide are the right ones actually are.
Arrogance no.2: [Unspoken translation] “Even the idiots who are just ordinary people can understand this when I’ve explained it so clearly, can’t they?”

3) Jensen said the church would not reunite until the current divisions over human sexuality were resolved. “There is no reason why we should leave the Anglican Church because we have not shifted. It is others who have shifted.”
Arrogance no.1: Knowing that because they’ve believed it for years, they must be right. (Supporters of slavery justified that from the bible, too, until Wilberforce and others worked on persuading them to a new viewpoint, which they finally found more biblical.)
Arrogance no.2: The assertion that if unity is to be restored, it’s “those others” who will have to return to the conservatives, rather than finding ways to compromise or move forward amicably. (Even given their assumption that they’re right, it’s still not the way forward in a contentious issue to just keep telling the other party that they’re wrong and they have to change!)

This all leads to another blog entry (as yet unwritten) about the need (or not) for definition of who’s “in the club” and who isn’t, and – with regard to the church – who makes the definition and how.

There are two types of sceptics, I’ve decided. There are those who debunk claims of the “miraculous” by finding and offering a rational scientific explanation, and there are those who debunk any claim they don’t understand and/or that hasn’t been proven. And many of those in the second category will describe themselves as scientists, but I contend that this is a travesty of the fundamental nature of science. True scientists ought to be a) seeking knowledge (which is, after all, what the word science means), and b) acknowledging that there are things which science hasn’t yet been able to find an explanation for – which doesn’t mean there isn’t one! In other words, a true scientist doesn’t say “I can’t prove it, therefore it isn’t true”, but rather “I can’t explain it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true; research is necessary to find out enough to be able to decide”.

How does this relate to clergy abuse or the church? Well actually, I’ve been following the news articles about Pier Giorgio Frassati (deceased) being flown out to Sydney for WYD, and noticed a claim that when they exhumed him as part of the preparation for sainthood, his body was uncorrupted. A little internet digging on the conditions of his burial turned up not only what I was looking for (entombed in the family vault), but other claims of incorruptibility among “the saints” of the church. And on another site discussing it (comprising, let it be said, one obviously devout Catholic and many sceptics), I found a link to an article in The Skeptic journal (p.35) about the whole issue. Now having previously been exposed to those who run The Skeptic, I think many of them are so keen on being sceptical that they lose sight of being rational, so I was a little reluctant to follow that link. However, it was worth reading as a quite rational counter-argument to the devout and unquestioning Catholic on the discussion site.

And that was where I began thinking about what characterises scepticism, and how it overlaps or conflicts with a truly scientific enquiring mindset. Naturally, of course, the whole thing also bore out what I have previously argued about faith: that blind belief in what the church says is a recipe for disaster. Or at least for being thought an idiot!
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Oh, and by the way – if you had any thoughts of visiting Frassati’s dead body as it lies in state in St Mary’s Cathedral during WYD, to check out the claims of incorruptibility, don’t bother. The coffin will be closed.

I recently heard of an instance of adult abuse (not clergy related), which was particularly interesting to me because of the grooming dynamic that occurred. A woman in her early thirties was invited to a threesome by a colleague and his wife. She declined, not being in the least interested. Next thing was, she’d changed jobs, but the ex-colleague found out (not from her) what hours she was working and when she would be arriving home. He met her as she got off the train, walked her home, invited himself in for a drink and then urged her to draw him naked. She ended up with pencil and sketchbook in her hand, having not known at what point to stop this process (or more specifically, not knowing how to do it without being rude).

And this is the essence of the grooming technique – that the stages of boundary invasion come in small enough steps that the rudeness required to repel them seems extreme for the level of offence, yet by the time one is beyond all point of going along with it, one feels complicit for not having called a halt at an earlier stage. And all our upbringing and training is geared to politeness and avoidance of being rude, which effectively constrains us from acting self-protectively in such circumstances.

In this instance, the woman probably had the following options along the way (all of them rude to some degree):
1) when she saw the guy at the station, and he began to walk her home, to say “I’m sorry, but I don’t want you to walk with me.” And if he persisted, to walk to the police station instead and (assuming he followed) to accuse him of harrassing her.
2) When she got to her front door, and he invited himself in, to say “I’m sorry, but I don’t want you to come in.” And if he persisted, to say “look, I really don’t like you, and you’re not welcome here.”
3) When he suggested drawing him naked, to tell him to leave the house. And if he refused, to insist, with the threat of calling the police if he didn’t go.
4) And if he continued to the point of undressing himself (which, if she did the previous options, is fairly unlikely), the best option, in my opinion, would be to go to the fridge, get a glass of nice cold water, and throw it on him!

One further option, the threat of which could be used at any stage, but the actuality most certainly should be used afterwards, is to tell his wife. Naturally, though, if one has been drawn in by the grooming process, the feeling of complicity makes that an extremely difficult option. Groomers count on that, of course. And in this case, it is further complicated by his wife having been party to the original threesome suggestion. All the same, it seems quite likely that she wouldn’t approve of him acting independently, and probably didn’t know he did it. And the only way, when it’s a past event, to break the secrecy of complicity (and make it obvious that you didn’t want it or ask for it) is to tell.

But the point of this musing is that there is no way to repel grooming approaches without being ruder than seems warranted by the circumstances. So the training we give our children MUST include teaching that when the need arises to act self-protectively, rudeness is not only ok, it’s mandatory.
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Note: For more info on grooming and what we should teach our children, check out the “dynamics of abuse” and “protecting children” sections of my website.

Fairy tales are recognised by sociologists and psychologists as a vital part of children’s growth and development, particularly in the context of their understanding of the adult world. And those of us who remember the pre-Disney, unsanitised versions of old fairy tales (the wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother and the woodcutter slits him open to get them out; Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off portions of their feet to fit into the glass slipper; and Hansl and Gretel push the witch into the fire rather than just running away) know that the sanitisation is a reflection of our increasingly sanitised life. Gone are the days when children had to understand that life was fraught with danger and death. Danger is greatly reduced by our urban and heavily circumscribed lives, and death is pushed into nursing homes and hospitals, where children rarely see it.

But the still-present danger of fairy tales (and other similarly simplistic stories), in my opinion, is the portrayal of the good guys as always the good guys, and the bad guys as always the bad guys. And the more sanitised the stories are, the easier it is to recognise which is which. The bad guys are instantly dislikeable (think fairytale stepmothers). Or they’re ugly (bad witches always have hooked chins and warts on their noses, right? And good ones are beautiful, naturally).

The danger of all this lies in the subtle teaching to children that they’ll always be able to tell a bad guy when they see one. That, of course, puts them at risk because they can fail to exercise prudent caution about someone they decide is a good guy. And it seems that adults suffer from the same misapprehension. How often is a clergy abuse (or incest, or child pornography) disclosure about a “respectable” person greeted with the response “but I know him and he’s not like that”. Or “he’s such a nice guy, it couldn’t possibly be true”. These adults don’t seem to realise that they are still bound by the simplistic format of fairy tales, where the good guys and the bad guys are both easy to pick, and uncompromisingly good (or bad) all through.

And while this reaction has also been touched on in my blog entry on compartmentalism (3rd May), I think it’s important to see how little it’s recognised for what it is – a reliance on one’s own personal assessment of a person based on the image they present, which may be vastly different to what they’re like underneath.

So how do you tell a good guy from a bad guy? The simple answer is, of course, that you can’t. The essence of humanity is that we’re not good all through, or bad all through. And our surface image is governed, to a good extent, by what’s acceptable in society. So the more bad we are, the more the surface image can be discrepant from our actions, and it behoves us all to recognise that. So next time you’re reading a fairy tale (aka fiction story), take a moment to check your own reactions – do you know who the bad guy is from the start? If you do, welcome to the UNreal world!

It has been posited that, given the existence of god is unprovable, religious belief is caused by our own internal needs – suggestions often made are a fear of death, or an inchoate longing for something outside/beyond ourselves and our known world. But I’d like to run with a proposition made in a recent Mensa magazine (if only I could find the damn thing I could tell you by whom, and in which issue!). And that is, that belief in god is driven by a need for control. Control of ourselves (doctrine of heaven and hell gives motivation, and defined moral code gives method), but also control of events around us (propitiate things/people more powerful than us, and they hopefully won’t do bad stuff to us) and people (an established hierarchy allows control of lower ranking people by higher ranking people).

And this argument makes quite a lot of sense to me, particularly given the illogicality of some christian doctrines. Take, for instance, the idea of justifying why bad things happen to christians. If the world is purely random, there’s no dilemma, of course. But if there’s a loving all-powerful god in control, then there IS a dilemma. A god who requires that we do good automatically implies that those who do good are looked on more favourably – otherwise why bother? But a god who then allows those who do good to suffer, and has the power to intervene but chooses not to, is fundamentally inconsistent. A common explanation for that inconsistency is that we don’t understand all god’s purposes, and if we did, we’d understand why the bad thing (anything you nominate) happened. But that argument presupposes that we don’t really understand what defines love. That if only we saw the reason for something, it would make us say “oh, ok – I thought that was a non-loving action; now I see it’s actually loving”. Yet being able to recognise loving actions from non-loving is at the heart of christianity. We cannot be expected to act in a loving way (as is required by christianity) without understanding what “a loving way” is. And it doesn’t make sense to suspend that understanding when analysing our concept of god.

Take an example suggested by my uncle in a recent conversation. Remember Sophie Delezio – the little girl severely burned by a car crashing into her preschool, and later knocked flying on a pedestrian crossing? If Superman had been flying overhead when she was about to cross that road (the second incident), it seems highly likely that he would have swooped down and caught her up out of the way, thereby preventing a further round of suffering and operations for her. (We’re assuming, here, that Superman has the power to see all that would come out of either his action or non-action.) Our instinctive grasp of what would be a loving action is a protective action. Christians would probably say “ah yes, but god knows everything; he may have seen that it would be good for her to suffer”. Come again?? I thought god didn’t want us to suffer? Oh, that’s right – I forgot! Some good may come out of our suffering, such as helping others. Which is, of course, assuming that god is incapable of bring about good without making us suffer. A strange limitation for a supposedly limitless god!

Or another example – a friend of my uncle (the same one as previously mentioned) who was in a car accident, who now thanks god for [His]* protection of her, because her spinning car had a lucky escape from hitting a pole that probably would have killed her. But my reaction is – what sort of half-assed protection is that anyway? If god was out to protect her, why not prevent the accident entirely?

It seems to me that the only justification for believing in a god who can totally protect us but doesn’t, is in order to feel some measure of control over events – either directly or vicariously. And if someone wants to believe that, then they’ll find every possible logical or illogical argument to back it up when it’s called into question.

But getting back to the idea that christianity is intrinsically about control… Establishing moral codes is about control of society. Prayer is about control of events. Obedience to god is about control (through minimisation) of bad stuff happening. Conversion is about control of what our life after death will be. And church hierarchy is about control of those within the system.

And if this is so, then what alarms me is that it may be – by definition – impossible to eradicate exertion of control in church systems. And if you can’t eradicate control, you can’t eradicate abuse.

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*Footnote: I don’t believe in a male god, nor do I ascribe a capital letter to god’s pronoun; however, I do use such a term in the context of referring to the conservative christian construct of god.

Further note: The friend of my uncle, mentioned in the fourth last paragraph as being thankful for god’s protection in a car accident, is now – about 2 years later – suffering from a fatal brain tumour.  Personally, I would rather have gone quickly in the car accident!  And her church is praying for their own sinfulness because “the devil is attacking them”.  In other words, in order to justify a doctrine of a protective god, bad happenings have to be ascribed to either our own badness or some evil external agency.  See how a doctrine of an all-powerful, all-loving god leads to a) the necessity of a devil, and b) self-criticism?