Overwriting History

I posted some time ago about the fact that I was very doubtful of the value of prosecuting an extremely elderly woman who’d once, as a very young woman and for a short space of time, held a clerical position at Auschwitz.  I find myself thinking along similar lines now, but sort of in the opposite direction.  This is probably a bit controversial, so I shall attempt to tread carefully.

The UK Government has announced that it will officially pardon thousands of men who were convicted of homosexuality back in the days when it was against the law in this country.  Approximately 65,000 men were convicted under these laws, of whom 15,000 are still alive.

Since I’m very much in favour of equality on grounds of sexuality, and certainly don’t think that homosexuality should be illegal, I find myself in the slightly awkward mental position of nonetheless thinking that this isn’t a particularly good idea.  It smacks very much of not only wanting to judge the past by modern standards, but of wanting to reach back in time and correct its mistakes, even if only retroactively and in most cases posthumously.

I’m all for looking at the past and learning lessons from it, where possible.  We can examine with horror the idea that gay men were convicted simply of being gay, but I see no value whatsoever in retroactively pardoning thousands of men, most of whom are beyond caring in case.  At the times in which these crimes were committed, they were just that; crimes.  Should they have been crimes?  Nowadays we think not.  From the article: “Justice Minister Sam Gyimah said it was "hugely important that we pardon people convicted of historical sexual offences who would be innocent of any crime today".”  I think this is the crux.  If they were living today, they would, very rightly, be innocent of any crime.  However, they were not living today.

I am uncomfortable with what seems to me to be the arrogance (’chronological snobbery’ as Lewis called it) of riding roughshod over the values of other times.  We don’t have to agree with them (in many cases I would find it monstrous to do so), but to impose our values onto the past, I think, diminishes both the past and ourselves.

For hundreds of years, executions were legally conducted in this country.  I would see no value in posthumously finding all of our executioners guilty of murder, because we no longer consider the death penalty to be morally defensible.  I can understand that those people who are still alive and who were convicted of homosexuality have a stronger case, since those convictions could still conceivably affect their lives today, but even then it seems too much like rewriting the past to suit our own values.  Until comparatively recently, corporal punishment was considered perfectly acceptable in schools.  To my knowledge no-one is suggesting that we should round up all the old school teachers and try them for child abuse, and find all the dead ones guilty in absentia.  We now consider homophobia to be wrong, but to my knowledge this proposal does not suggest that we also try the original instigators of the anti-homosexuality laws for homophobic hate crimes.  To do so would be completely pointless.

In effect, what we’re saying with this is not simply ’We no longer think that these acts ought to be a crime’ but that ’These acts have now never been a crime, because we no longer think that they ought to have been in the first place.’

It also seems like apologising for the acts of other people.  I equally see little value in the great-great grandchildren of some colonial oppressor or other apologising to the great-great grandchildren of the people they oppressed for the things the one lot of ancestors did to the other.  You’re apologising to somebody for what somebody else did to somebody else again, and I’m not convinced of the value of it.  Perhaps if my ancestors had been tortured and persecuted I would, but it still seems to me to be a somewhat self-indulgent exercise in salving our consciences for a thing that we didn’t do in the first place.

I think that rewriting history to suit ourselves, to make ourselves feel better because we don’t happen to agree with decisions made decades before most of us were born, is a very slippery and dangerous slope.  Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, as the adage goes, and to me this merely serves to lessen the impact of the lessons that we ought to be learning.  To my modern sensibilities, it seems absurd and unjust that people should ever have been prosecuted simply for being homosexual, but the fact that they were helps sharpens my desire to ensure that we achieve true equality in the here and now, and help stamp out this injustice in those places in which it still exists today; a job which is very far from complete.  Changing the past in this way is, if anything, a needless distraction from that job.

Changing Notions of an Unchanging God

I don’t feel that I have anything to say about the events in Orlando that hasn’t already been said numerous times, and more eloquently than I could manage.  I don’t feel the need to express a deep sadness and frustration, because they ought to be so automatic from every single person that it can be safely assumed that I feel them.  They have been expressed by other people, and I have nothing further of any value to add.

However, naturally the events have sparked a lot of debate.  The BBC opened up the story for comment, and inevitably a small number of people blamed ‘religion’ for the attacks.  I wearily took up my keyboard to try and explain why I think they’re wrong.  During this exchange, the traditional Christian views of homosexuality were raised and used a springboard to attack Christianity as a whole.  I pointed out that I’m a practicing Christian with no problems whatsoever with homosexuality, and that I considered that each part of the Bible needs to be understood within its own historical and cultural context.  I received the following reply:

“A single question: as a practicing Christian, do you believe your God is now very happy with homosexuals, and will embrace them without condemnation or concidering (sic) them to have sinned?”

Unfortunately, this occurred during my lunch break, and I didn’t see that message until the next day when the thread had already been closed.  The BBC’s format of 300 characters and a maximum posting rate of once every five minutes is deeply frustrating when you’re trying to articulate a complex point, so I would like to try and answer that question here.

It will be easiest to deal with this a piece at a time.  Firstly then, do I considered that God is now happy with homosexuals?  No, of course not.  I think that He’s always been happy with them.  God is unchanging.  I should clarify and say that by ‘happy’, what I mean is that I don’t believe that God considers homosexuality, in and of itself, to be a sin.  Same-sex couples are as prone to sins as anyone else; adultery (both physical and in the heart), jealousy, anger, pridefulness etc.  However a gay person is not any more inherently sinful than a heterosexual or asexual person.

What I believe has changed is people’s views of both what God considers to be sinful, and more importantly, their notions of God Himself.  I do not believe that a lot of the Old Testament is literally true.  Instead, I view it almost as a record of humanity’s evolving understanding of God, from one tribal deity amongst others, to the sole, strict and authoritarian ruler of the universe, and ultimately to the creating, giving, loving, sustaining God of the Incarnation and the Redemption.  It is not the case that God has changed His mind, it is that we never properly understood it in the first place.  Five hundred years ago, the educated classes thought that there were four elements.  Nowadays that’s jumped to one hundred and eighteen.  No-one believes that a hundred and fourteen elements have popped into existence in the last couple of centuries; it’s merely that our understanding of the world has developed.  I believe that the same is true of our understanding of God.  In the same way, I don’t by any means think that we have achieved a perfect understanding of God today, even so far as humans would be capable of it.  No doubt our understanding will continue to change and evolve as we received fresh insights and revelations.

Is God ‘very happy with homosexuals’?  No more or less so than with anybody else, which is probably to say that no, he isn’t, very.  They are human beings, and as frail and prone to failure as everybody else, and just as inclined to self-centeredness and pride and bitterness and anger.  Sadly, because so many have received so much ill-feeling and outright abuse from the hands of both the church and individual Christians, perhaps fewer of them are likely to turn to God for help, which would make Him happier.  However, that doesn’t mean that He loves them any the less.

Lastly then, do I believe that God will ‘embrace them without condemnation, or considering them to have sinned’?  Possibly a deeper question than the asker realises.  To take the last part first, will He consider them not to have sinned?  No of course not, because inevitably they will have done, but I don’t believe that He will consider being homosexual, in and of itself, as being amongst those sins.

Do I believe that He will ‘embrace them without condemnation’?  Yes.  A thousand times yes.  They can shrug off that embrace; they can duck aside from it; but if they want it, then yes, because God has taken on the condemnation that is rightfully theirs as sinful human beings, has expunged it and absolved them, has offered His all-embracing and all-consuming love to them, as He has to every human being.    If they want to be, then yes, He will embrace them without condemnation, because that is what my God does.  He is a God of love, of compassion, of forgiveness, and of grace, and all who believe in Him shall not perish, no matter who they were or are, or what they have done.

That is my God.

Post 100: What I Believe

This is my one hundredth post!  I’m shocked; I had no idea that I had so much to say, or so much inclination to say it.  What’s even more shocking is that apparently there are also people with an inclination to read it.  Since you, by dint of reading these words are clearly one of these wise and tasteful people, then all I can say is thank you.  According to the Blogger statistics, this blog has received 8563 views, including 947 in the last month alone.  I’ve read that many of these will actually just be Googlebots at work, and not real people, so the statistics are misleading, but hopefully some of what I’ve written has helped those Googlebots, and led them to determine to be better, purer Googlebots than they were before.  Either way, Googlebots (turns out I quite like saying ‘Googlebots’) notwithstanding, I suddenly feel a weird nervousness and sense of responsibility.  I suddenly feel like I ought to be writing important things about important things, rather than merely airing my ill-informed opinions on whatever happens to have caught my fancy on a given day.

Well, as a strategy it’s worked so far, so I’ll stick with it for now.  However, I thought that for my 100^th post, I’d maybe do something slightly different.  I make constant allusions to my own beliefs, religious and political, but I’ve never really outlined what they actually are.  This post then will be a vague summary of what it is I believe, at the time of writing.  Again, why you’d care what I believe I have no idea, except that it might provide some sort of context for my other posts, and make it easier to argue with me.

If asked, I would classify myself as a moderate in most things.  I would call myself a moderate Christian, since I seem to be more theologically liberal than most conservatives, and more conservative than most liberals.  Politically and socially I would say that I’m the same.

During my late teens and very early twenties, the beliefs of my childhood blurred into a vague deism.  As I got older, I started to read about Christianity, almost out of curiosity, and started to reformulate my beliefs according to what made sense to me and seemed best.  I found myself reading Chesterton’s ‘Orthodoxy’.  Early on in the book, he writes, “I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.”  It almost perfectly encapsulated my own experience, in that my carefully thought-out heterodoxy turned out to mirror both Methodist theology and Methodist social policies almost (but not quite) exactly.

Theologically then, I can recite the Creed with only minor mental caveats.  I believe in God, in the Trinity, in the divinity of Christ and in the virgin birth (although this latter I consider to be a fairly unimportant point, true or false).  I believe in miracles, in the crucifixion, the resurrection and the ascension.  I believe in a form of original sin, but I believe it to be the genetically ingrained self-centred legacy of a period of our evolution during which self-centredness was a survival trait, and a period which we have now left behind as spiritual creatures.  I believe in the substitutionary atonement of Christ, and that God’s prevenient Grace is offered to all people, who are free to take or reject it as they choose, and to do so more than once.  I believe in prayer and social religion, in human free will and that God has chosen to subordinate His sovereignty to it, and allow us to make our own choices and live with the consequences of them.  I believe in an immortal soul, and in existence after death.  I do not believe in Hell, in the traditional sense, but might go so far as to believe either in isolation from God, or in simple annihilation of the soul.  I believe that this world is a preparation for the next, although I have no idea what form that might take.

I believe in a single catholic (note the lower case 'c') church, one body made of many different parts, and despite significant historical and contemporary wrongs, that it is overwhelmingly a power for good.  I believe that the Bible is divinely inspired, but written by fallible but highly-learned men, and not that it is in and of itself the perfect word of God.  I believe it to be an authority, but not a final or absolute one.  I believe that it must be understood within the historical and social contexts within which it was written, and with an understanding, as far as possible, of the individuals who wrote it, their biases and prejudices.  I believe in evolution, and in the Big Bang (pending better theories).  I believe the account of creation in Genesis to be allegorical at best, and that science has revealed many stories of the Bible to be untrue.  I believe in science as our greatest tool for revealing and understanding the vast, wondrous and beautiful universe in which we live, but I believe that there are questions that science is not and never will be in a position to answer.

Socially, I believe that all people are born equal.  Gender, skin colour, religion (or lack thereof) and sexuality should be considered completely unimportant compared to a person’s ethics, morals and character.  I believe that people of varying and even opposing backgrounds, beliefs and opinions can, should and do co-exist, converse and discuss in a spirit of mutual respect and compassion.  I do not believe homosexuality or homosexual sex to be intrinsically wrong.  My understanding of marriage is that it is a lifelong, monogamous relationship between two people.  The gender of the people involved I do not consider to be at all important next to that lifelong, monogamous commitment.

I do believe abortion to be very wrong.  I acknowledge that there are circumstances in which it is a lesser evil, and therefore permissible, but it is an evil nonetheless. I believe it to be nothing other than the killing of a human being, whose only crime is to inconveniently exist.  I believe that no human being is unwanted.  Similarly, I utterly oppose the death penalty, in all circumstances.  I believe euthanasia and assisted suicide to be wrong.  I believe that life is sacred and not to be thrown away.

I believe that we have a moral duty and a divine imperative to shelter the homeless, feed the starving, support the poor, and welcome the stranger.  I believe that society has a responsibility to look after its most vulnerable members, and that no-one is outside of society.  I believe that there are no foreigners, no outsiders, merely human beings; no Them, merely Us, and that we should all work together for the good of all.  I believe that there are no absolute rights, but many absolute responsibilities, that no-one has the right not to be disagreed with, not to be offended, not to be opposed, but that everybody has the responsibility to speak courteously and kindly, even in disagreement or opposition.

Perhaps most importantly, I believe that I do not have all the answers, do not know all the facts, have not considered all the viewpoints, am not free of biases and prejudices of my own.  These are my beliefs, but they are not set in stone.  They can and ought to change with new insights and new information, and as such I believe that I ought to listen respectfully to those whose beliefs differ to mine, even if they seem very wrong to me.  These are my beliefs, but I don’t claim that they are correct, merely that they are mine.

I believe that that is probably enough for now.  This then is what I believe, but not my reasons for believing it.  They would probably fill a lengthy and rather boring book that I have even less inclination to write than you do to read.

This has been rather a long post, but hopefully it hasn’t been a completely pointless one, and has clarified my position on a few things.  I wonder what I’ll end up writing about for my next hundred posts…?