BBC: Cardinal says Believers may be partly responsible for the decline in faith

[Synnical]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7390941.stm

Respect atheists', says cardinal
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor (Diocesan handout pic)
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor urges deeper understanding between believers and non-believers

The Archbishop of Westminster has urged Christians to treat atheists and agnostics with "deep esteem".

Believers may be partly responsible for the decline in faith by losing sense of the mystery and treating God as a "fact in the world", he said in a lecture.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor called for more understanding and appreciation between believers and non-believers.

But the leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales said that Britain must not become "a God-free zone".

Later, he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme why he thought it was dangerous to be governed by reason alone.

He said saying that "supposedly faithless societies" ruled only by reason were like those created by Hitler and Stalin, ripe for "terror and oppression".

Last year, Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor complained of a "new secularist intolerance of religion" and the state's "increasing acceptance" of anti-religious views.

To stem this tide, he said Christians must understand they have something in common with those who do not believe.

God is not a "fact in the world" as though God could be treated as "one thing among other things to be empirically investigated" and affirmed or denied on the "basis of observation", said Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor.

Can you say Pascal's Wager? But you know that already. I'm being redundant.

-Cindy in Fort Lauderdale

[NoodleBoy]

1. wow, get one thing a little right and then another as wrong as always.

"People who are a-holes about religion turn some people off of religion."

You win an internet for stating the obvious.

"Atheism was the foundation for tyrannical ideologies that led to the murder of millions of people."

You lose ten thousand internets for repeating one of the dumbest lies about atheists ever concocted.

[moggie]

2. It's worse than that

He goes beyond merely dissing atheism. It's more fundamental than that: he claims that reason is dangerous. Reason, which has healed the sick, fed the hungry, and lifted people out of poverty. On the other hand, reason has made the priest class increasingly superfluous, so I suppose you can see where he's coming from.

[YankeyMCC]

3. WTF?

Call for understanding and then go on to blame reason for horrible regimes?

[trotsky]

4. It's an olive branch!

We unwashed heathens should be grateful!

[MrMonk]

5. Stalin and Hitler governed by reason?

The Cardinal needs to brush up on 20th century history.

[onager]

6. Ain't that the truth.

He can start by viewing "Triumph of the Will." All the rapturous faces in that one, gazing up at the Gott-Fuehrer, are NOT showing a strong bias toward reason.

(Edit): I just thought of an even better example, since a believer could justifiably carp that "TotW" is a propaganda movie. There's a famous film clip of Hitler and Goering on a balcony in Berlin, June 1940, the day France surrendered. The camera pans the screaming masses and the sheer intensity of the worship in those faces is frightening.

[progressoid]

7. Oh sure, that makes a lot of sense...

Especially since I had that full frontal lobotomy.

[Synnical]

8. Op Ed Response: Atheists don't have voids they ache to fill

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/thomas-sutcliffe/thomas-sutcliffe-atheists-dont-have-voids-they-ache-to-fill-827087.html

Tuesday, 13 May 2008

When I heard that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor had called for greater understanding and dialogue between believers and non-believers, I felt my knees jerk with an atheistic reflex. If you really want some kind of concordat between us, I thought, how about this: "When you stop talking about God, we will too".

And curiously, when I actually read the full text of the Cardinal's lecture, that wasn't a million miles away from what he was saying. Enough miles to form an unbridgeable gap, I would have thought, but not a million – since one of the central themes of the Cardinal's address was that the way in which Christians talk about God influences the way in which atheists do.

His point, crudely summarised, was that 18th- and 19th-century attempts to construct a rational and provable God had simply encouraged atheists – because of their serial failures to stem the tide of disbelief. And it's not just that this was a bad chess move, which the player regrets as he sees checkmate looming, but that it ignored doubts which the Cardinal argues should be central to any Christian's faith.

.. .

And it's at this point that it seems to me Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor stubs his foot on an immovable obstacle without even recognising that he might have broken his toe. What he doesn't seem to register is that very few atheists think of themselves as non-believers, carrying around with them a vacancy that they ache to fill. Atheists are believers already – in a cosmology that has no space for a supernatural actor of unbounded benevolence and knowledge.

. . .

The Cardinal concludes by arguing that a life that excludes God is a life without meaning or hope – a line that, addressed to believers in church, no doubt found a receptive audience. Outside church, addressed to me, it sounded like an insult – precisely the kind of reductive clarity that he was notionally arguing against. He's right that Christians and atheists can have more things in common than is sometimes acknowledged, but God – however vaguely or dubiously described – is never going to be one of them.

Emphasis mine.

-Cindy in Fort Lauderdale