The value of lies

J&M on-topic as usual. This follows the recent House of Lords speech by the Arch-Bishop of Canterbury, a cynical abuse of religious privilege, in which he claimed (with no evidence) that children who attend non-religious schools lack "values" and that successive Governments have inserted a "weak, secular and functional narrative" in place of "historic Christian-based understanding". Perish the thought that we end up with a "functional" society, is he claiming that it would be better to have a dysfunctional one, perhaps run by a few men in frocks (like him)?

Many people have pointed out the obvious errors and omissions in his claims, Welby clearly has a cynical political agenda here, i.e. that of promoting more Church run schools for the purposes of indoctrinating children into his own preferred religious cult. Whatever we need in this multi-faith, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, interconnected world of ours today, it almost certainly isn't more Christianity from an organisation that's in terminal decline! It would be like trying to counter the de-industrialisation of our country by training more coal-miners. In the same way that societies tried Communism, Nazism and Totalitarianism in the 20th Century, we also tried religion and theocracy back in the middle-ages, they didn't work, and all ended in rivers of blood, it's time to move on.

The "elephant in the room" for many people here is the myth that there's such a thing as "Christian values". It's something that declining religions like his seem to love to promote and cling onto, for them, it must seem like a life-raft in a sea of increasing irrelevance. Unfortunately if you talk to most non-religious people these days, they (from evidence and experience) interpret "Christian values" to imply the high-profile negative Christian "issues" things like child molesting, misogyny, gay scandals, intransigence, science-denial, exploiting the poor, political manipulation, worldly power and unfair material wealth. On the other hand, the things that modern Christians tend to claim (as opposed to what their holy book actually says) as their "values" would be things like, charity, tolerance, peace, love, forgiveness and all of that. The problem for them is that these things are plainly accessible and desirable to all of us, the rest of their superstitious baggage seems contentious, unnecessary or simply unbelievable to most of us in the West. I suppose you could argue that at least non-believers have these desired values in common with Christians, but even then it's somewhat of a stretch to conclude that these values are particularly "Christian", I would go so far as to say they are "human" values, desirable because we are a highly-social mammal with alarmingly apocalyptic faculties for killing one another.

The evolution of our values is slow and gradual, sometimes acting across many generations, but, every now and again we experience a tipping point in our moral landscape. For example, realizing that there's no such thing as a "witch" or that Women are indeed equal to Men. There was a point in time when the majority agreed (at least here in the UK) that it's not OK to own other people as property or that homosexual people do in fact deserve equal treatment under the law, rather than being thrown in jail. Our values change, it's a demonstrable fact. In my view we should embrace that reality or else I fear our "values" will face the same fate that Welby's organisation seems unable to extricate itself from, i.e. a gradual slide into obscurity and division.