As If….

“Now the law is regarded purely as an instrument of regulating our personal affairs, completely separate from morality and religion.” Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, speaking in a Lords debate on a bill which will make it easier for gay and lesbian couples to have children by artificial means. Would it were indeed separate from religion. To infer that the law is separate from morality is a piece of typical religionist arrogance which equates religion, frequently a loopy farrago of mad-as-a-meat-axe treatment of anyone ‘other’ and equally batty, but marginally less lethal, diktats on what you can put in your alimentary canal, with ethics, suggesting that there can be no morality separate from religion and overlooking the existence of Socrates for one. This, remember, is the cult that predicates all morality on the ‘Judæo-Christian tradition’ as if the genocidal behaviour of the deity of the Hebrew scriptures, Blake’s Nobodaddy, a figure whose petulance makes the general outlook of two year olds look mature, was any role model for ethical behaviour. As Hitchens has eloquently pointed out it is not necessary to be religious to be moral. And where did Dr Sentamu deliver this wee jeremiad about the diminishing influence of religion on the process of law-making? In the House of Lords, a law-making chamber where he and several of his fellow prelates sit as representatives of a church whose origins lie clearly in the satyriasis of Henry VIII. A small irony failure here, Dr S: why should you and other men in frocks have this right to a voice in the law-making of the land? Who exactly do you represent and how many of them are there? And how can we vote you out?”

Guest post. This gadgie. Read him and put on list of ‘to read’.