So it seems that pope Francis has convened an ‘urgent’ meeting of senior clerics of the church to take place this October in which they will discuss all the major issues that the church is confronting. He had earlier asked them to canvass the views of their members on these issues prior to the meeting and those results are currently being tallied, so that the discussions will reflect the actual concerns of people.
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Science and religion share a long history of controversy and even hostility. Mathematics and religion, not so much. There could be many reasons for this, the primary one being that there is some similarity in the way that both mathematics and theology operate. Both seek to create self-contained systems based on axioms that are assumed to be true. In the case of mathematics, the axioms depend upon the field of mathematics being studied while in the case of theology, the fundamental axiom is that ‘god exists’.
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We have seen many examples recently of religious people claiming that their religious freedoms are being violated because they cannot practice discrimination or they wish to avoid complying with laws that they object to. But now comes a curious reversal in which religious people are suing because they are being prevented from being inclusive and accepting
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The state of religion in Britain is pretty confused. The country has an established state-supported church and funds parochial schools out of taxpayer funds while at the same time has very low levels of religiosity as measured by attendance in churches.
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In the film Philomena that I reviewed earlier, the nuns that took in the young pregnant Philomena and then sold her child into adoption against her will were portrayed as overtly mean and cruel, mostly older women with stern expressions, except for the young nun who assisted her with her delivery and gave her a surreptitiously taken photograph of her child that she treasured all her life.
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Another day, another depressing report about the level of ignorance of basic science in America. This one is based on a representative sample of 1,012 people over the age of 18. You can see the full survey results here, and the first set of items is the one that made the news.
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I have been brooding about the sad case of Syble Rossiter, the 12-year old child who died of diabetes complications because her parents withheld life-saving treatment from her because of their belief that faith would heal her. These entirely preventable tragedies are unfortunately not uncommon. I wrote in February about Herbert and Catherine Schaible whose 8-month old child had also died unnecessarily.
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Syble Rossiter, the child of Travis and Wenona Rossiter, died of diabetes complications at the tender age of 12 because her parents withheld life-saving treatment from her because they believed in faith healing. The child’s decline was so noticeable that her teacher questioned the parents as to why she was losing so much weight. The family belongs to the fundamentalist Church of the First Born in Albany that “believes traditional medical treatment is sinful, and instead trust in God to heal them through faith”.
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It appears that not only is church attendance declining overall, church leaders fear that religion and churchgoing is becoming increasingly seen as something that mainly women do, which is likely to lead to even greater male defections from religious institutions. Stephen Colbert looks at some novel attempts to boost attendance and to also give worship a more manly image.
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This quite poignant article looks at the anguish of clergy who realize that they either no longer believe in a god or have serious doubts. The problems seem to start during the seminary years and appears to be quite widespread which makes one wonder how many clergy are actually closeted non-believers.
In interviews with 32 men and women from Pentecostal, evangelical, mainline Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Mormon backgrounds, they discovered that many, like Dunphy, started wrestling with doubt in seminary.
Most said they kept quiet out of fear of disappointing others or because they didn’t have anyone to talk things through with.
“I wanted to believe in God; all those years, I wanted to,” one former Presbyterian clergywoman says in the book of her time in seminary. “I wasn’t really sure if I did or not, but I wanted to.”
…And once the seminarians were leading congregations, they reported even more isolation and frustration.
“You do a lot of crying,” a Mormon bishop says in the book. “You try to talk to your wife about it, but she’s still pretty orthodox, so it’s hard on her. You’re alone. You’ve got no one to talk to because you’re a bishop … So it tears you apart.”
If there is one job where you need to be totally in sync with your institution’s mission, it has be to that of religious clergy. Having to tell people all the time to believe in something that you yourself think is false could well lead to at least misery, if not depression and eventual breakdown.