Rowan Williams: fucking idiot
I have already had cause to denounce the stupidity and superficiality of this ludicrous bearded buffoon, for some inexplicable reason considered a ‘deep thinker’ in some way qualified to pronounce upon affairs of the real world in a way that your average Guardian-reading wine-bar bore isn’t:
His latest ignorant, pompous pronouncement concerns the so-called “credit cruch” (“recession” to you and me) . According to Bleating Beardie it’ll do us all a bit of good: it’s a “reality check” that should be used to question: “What we are making or what are we accumulating wealth for?”
Fair enough, I can hear some of you say, and not that far from a Marxist analysis, at least in terms of verbiage. But Beardie then went on to attack Brown’s meagre proposals for increased spending and a VAT cut as a way to tackle the downturn, and came up with the extraordinary statement that: “It seems a bit like the addict returning to the drug. When the bible uses the word ‘repentance’, it doesn’t just mean beating your breast, it means getting a new perspective, and that is perhaps what we are shrinking away from.”
Does this bearded imbecile have the faintest idea of what the recession means in practice for working class people? Does he understand the meaning of the words “redundancy” , “bankruptcy” or “repossession”?
His one single piece of self awareness was when he confessed during the interview (to BBC’ Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme) that it was “suicidally silly” of him to get involved in the debate. But he doesn’t even seem to properly understand how unfortunate his use of the word “suicide” was in this context.
Shiraz Socialist 
maxdunbar said,
December 18, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Absolutely.
Don’t forget – these people love recession and hard times. Happy people don’t convert but people who are suffering are more likely to turn to the church.
The big myth is that the Archbishop says a few silly things but is basically a good inclusive liberal. His position on sharia and exemptions to equality law shows that he’s nothing but an old-fashioned religious conservative.
tcd said,
December 18, 2008 at 9:08 pm
well the role of religion is to sell the masses their sufering as a redeeming force, and to relegate material conditions in this world to obedience of a metaphysical morality. likewise we have the moralistic reaching of the “consumerism” of society etc. instead of an explicit appeal to the masses to stand up against the looting being carried out by the bosses (today the banks, tomorrow the car manufacturers, etc.)
As for Rowan Williams being a liberal, yes, he is. He respects the secular state and division of powers, by which the chrch stays out of capitalisms ability to degrade the material conditions of the masses, and these same clergy then parasitically take advantage of the same capitalist misery in order to push their agenda on the desperate. If he was not a liberal, and was a conservative in the classic sense, then he would be demanding church intervention into the “private sphere” (economics), to try to keep a lid on social polarisation.
As it is he stays true to to, to paraphrase Marx, the purification of “religion from the material world, and the material world from religion”, i.e. morality without any material demands. In this sense a classic liberal, and reactionary precisely because of that.
tcd said,
December 18, 2008 at 9:28 pm
likewise we have the moralistic preaching of the “consumerism” of society
corrected
Voltaire's Priest said,
December 18, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Whereas you as a revolutionary socialist would like to see religion and the state fused then, tcd?
Red Maria said,
December 19, 2008 at 12:45 am
Cantuar’s comments on the credit crunch (I don’t think the requisite two consecutive quarters of negative growth have yet been confirmed) are sufficiently otherwordly to qualify as silly.
But what is this nonsense that Williams is an “old-fashioned religious conservative”? If he were a religious conservative he wouldn’t take the position he does on Sharia law. A religious conservative, in so far as that term has any meaning – and frequently it doesn’t – would reject any accomodation with Sharia law and would in fact insist on the absolute necessity of evangelising to non Christians. The synod is going to debate this very issue at its next meeting and leading the charge on that front will be +Rochester, who is the one of the foremost critics of Williams’ line on Sharia.
And neither is Cantuar’s affirmation of the basic right of freedom of thought, conscience and religion any indication of religious conservativism other than in the minds of the authoritarian anti-religion brigade.
But it really is to step into a lurid anti-religious fantasy world to read that “these people”, presumably Christians, “love recession and hard times” and psychobabbling bilge to opine that this is because “happy people” don’t convert whereas people who are suffering seek the comforts of the Church. This isn’t cynical, it’s ignorant prejudice dressed up as worldly wisdom. It’s juvenile crap.
Once again I’m struck by just how thin secularists’ knowledge of Christianity is and how shoddy their criticisms of it are.
Voltaire's Priest said,
December 19, 2008 at 7:55 am
Or indeed certain Christians’ understanding of word “secularism”. They aren’t mutually exclusive terms…
Red Maria said,
December 19, 2008 at 8:41 am
Perhaps not theoretically but in practice they are, not least because of the way self-styled “secularists” understand the term and apply it. Max Dunbar was more revealing than I think he intended to be in his other – equally bad – post on religionanpolitrix a few days ago. “I feel another anti-faith post coming on,” he stated. Quite so. Let’s be clear about this, a lot of that which goes by the name “secuarlism” is anti-religion. It is authoritarian in its opposition to basic democratic rights, such as conscientious objection; grounded in ignorance (cf Dunbar’s fatuous comment that Williams is an “old fashioned religious conservative”) and characterised by profoundly unpleasant prejudices.
maxdunbar said,
December 19, 2008 at 9:17 am
1) We won’t get anywhere on this debate just by quoting Marx – wise as he was.
2) Secularism is not ‘anti-religion’. Secular systems guarantee freedom of religion as well as freedom from religion.
3) Pacifism is arguably one of the worst things to come out of the Christian faith – this idea of non resistance to evil. It is not an honourable position.
4) It’s also a fact that religious movements target people who are unhappy and unstable. This is why there is so much faith-based welfare in prisons, substance abuse programmes, homeless shelters, and the like.
5) Rowan Williams is a conservative. No two ways about it. He rejects basic equality legislation and wants to introduce, in part, a theocratic system of law.
To call Williams a ‘liberal’ is to rob the term of its meaning.
Red Maria said,
December 19, 2008 at 10:09 am
2) In theory, secularism may not be anti-religion. And it is claimed that secularism guarantees religious freedom. But I repeat that as demonstrated by its adherents’ output, in practice secularism is anti-religion. Moreover in its current incarnation, not only does secularism NOT guarantee religious freedom, it undermines it by seeking to chip away at basic democratic rights.
3) Conscientious objection does NOT just amount to pacifism, it encompasses the full gamut of conscience issues. Pacifism is strongly associated with Quakers and its a moot point as to whether they are Christians, the traditional Christian approach to aggression, that is the theory of Just War was delineated by St Thomas Aquinas. Nonetheless, for all that Max may consider pacifism a silly idea, people are entitled in any democracy worthy of the name to hold whatever ideas they like.
4) It may be a fact that some religious movements, particularly New Religious Movements (NRMs) target the unhappy and unstable, though facts are subject to interpretion. But to suggest that mainstream religious groups which offer succour and charity to the needy are targeting them is pure prejudice. Christians are commanded to love their neighbour, to feed the sick, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned and comfort the bereaved and are not told to do so for ulterior purposes. The fact that there are faith-based welfare programmes, substance-abuse programmes and homeless shelters demonstrates nothing more than the fact of their existence. To suggest that Christians, or “these people” as Max referred to them, love recession and hard times is plain silly.
5) Rowan Williams is not a conservative. Anyone who says that he is knows nothing substantive about Christianity, Anglicanism or the man.
maxdunbar said,
December 19, 2008 at 10:37 am
1) In practice, secularism is not anti-religion. In fact secular societies treat religious people much better than religious ones.
As a Christian, would you rather live in New York or Tehran?
2) Interesting point about conscientious objection – so is the Archbishop ‘conscientiously objecting’ to basic equalities legislation?
3) It’s simply a fact that people who are happy, fulfilled, content and with few anxieties do not tend towards religious conversion.
I suppose outcomes beat motives every time but I think it’s worth examining the growing intrusion of faith-based movements into a welfare state that doesn’t need or want them.
Remember that not all Christians will be as virtuous as you.
It’s also worth looking at the international ‘happiness capita’ (I think there actually is such a thing) of countries and seeing the amount of general happiness in secular societies as opposed to theocratic ones.
I think the results would be instructive.
4) Listen. Rowan Williams has advocated a discriminatory and misogynist version of religious law. He objects to very basic anti-discrimination legislation. He may be a ‘liberal’ by the miserable standards of his co-religionists but I am using the terms of reasonable discourse.
Euripides Trousers said,
December 19, 2008 at 11:31 am
Where did he object to very basic anti-discrimination legislation? I’m interested.
I don’t read anything into his stupid comments about sharia law. He has never advocated sharia law, just made some idiotic uber-liberal relativist comments about accommodating with it.
Red Maria said,
December 19, 2008 at 12:38 pm
As a Christian I would rather live where I do because that is where I am comfortable. But New York or Tehran? Why those examples? Why not Valetta or Pyong Yang?
2) You know the answer. The Archbishop and many others, it must be said, objected to legislation which rides roughshod over conscience rights and forces the closure or forcible secularisation of Catholic adoption agencies. Legislation which undermines the fundamental right to freedom of conscience, thought and belief is an affront to liberty and yes, even religious believers are entitled to liberty.
3) I strongly doubt whether the supposition that happy, contented fulfilled do not tend towards religious belief has been proven beyond reasonable doubt. Any study which has reported such findings could be taken as demonstrating the proposition that Atheists and Agnostics are prone to inordinate self-flattery.
Your comments are tendentious, Max. Faith-based movements are not “intruding” into the welfare state, they are offering a service, just as many non-religious organisations are. As to the desires of the welfare state, I wasn’t aware that it had any.
I do not claim to be virtuous and neither do any Christians that I know of. I object to the gratuitous impugning of an entire group of people and call it what it is: pure prejudice.
I’m sure if you were to look at measurements of happiness per capita you would be able to find all manner of things which would fascinate and absorb and maybe even discern a pattern whereby “secular” socities have a higher proportion of happy people living in them than theocracies at any given time. But you know the old thing about the higher consumption of ice-lollies and increased incidence of road traffic accidents in summer months – correlation does not equal causation.
4) No. Williams does NOT object to very basic anti-discrimination legislation, he objects to legislation which undermines the basic democratic right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, which treats children and adoption as goods and services and which forcibly closes or secularises Catholic adoption agencies. Any characterisation of Rowan Williams as conservative fails to meet the standards of reasonable discourse and places itself firmly in the fatuous category. Not only that, Max’s comments fairly crackle with anti-Christian vituperation. Christians are “these people”, who “love recessions and hard times” with “miserable standards”, who “target people who are unhappy and unstable” and on and on. This isn’t reasonable discourse; this is poisonous prejudice. If such unpleasant sentiments are considered to be reasonable discourse by “secularists” it shows what extremists they are.
maxdunbar said,
December 19, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Maria
What you don’t seem to understand is that secular societies like America or Germany actually offer more protection to believers like yourself than the theocratic world, much of which persecutes Christians.
Your definition of ‘conscience’ seems to mean ‘prejudice’. It’s like saying that white racist shopkeepers have a right of conscience not to serve black people. If that’s the great Christian tradition of conscientious objection then it is clear that this tradition is as morally bankrupt as that of pacifism and, indeed, most theist ideas and concepts.
The fact is that religion thrives mostly in the developing world – which is no doubt why it is still the developing world. Over the last few decades the rich world has moved towards a process of secularisation as it’s become more economically powerful. For the poor world the converse applies.
Face it, any society where the priests are in charge is likely to be some nightmare totalitarian state where ninety per cent of the population are dirt poor. This kind of society is not known for producing happiness, to put it charitably.
As for faith based welfare. It is well documented that the government is giving away a shitload of money to any group with the word ‘faith’ in its title. I am concerned that this represents a possible future move backwards – to a society where all social services are handled (badly) by the faithful, just as they were before the welfare state existed. To quote Pragna Patel in Feminist Legal Studies:
‘This development happens also to fit neatly into a wider neo-conservative agenda, which sees as essential the privatisation of what were once considered to be vital state functions such as schooling and welfare provision. Faith groups have therefore been placed at the heart of the regeneration of communities and as a direct result, religion is becoming increasingly entrenched within state institutions at central and local levels, and is reflected at all levels of state policy.’
This is why lefties should be worried about faith-based welfare.
I’m sure the loss of Catholic adoption agencies will be mourned throughout the land but ‘basic democratic rights’ do not include the right to discriminate. That’s why we no longer see ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ signs in hotel windows. No one is suppressing Christian freedom of speech, thought and religion – apart from the ruling classes of several Middle Eastern states.
Rowan Williams wants his church to retain discrimination against gay people. He also advocates a medieval and discriminatory legal system that pisses on the face of both human rights and the rule of law. To describe him as a liberal is to strip that term of all meaningful substance.
And for the record I am not prejudiced against Christians. Criticism of religion is not criticism of a people, however much you would like it to be so.
Brigada Flores Magon said,
December 19, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Why should ‘bearded’ be such an instant term of obloquy for you? This is of the accidence and not the essence [to employ somewhat Thomist terms] of the man surely? Marx and Bakunin, different politically in so many ways, were both bearded. So were Kropotkin and Rudolf Rocker. Nasty fuckers of the 20th century, such as Stalin and Hitler and Mao, were either moustached or clean-shaven. What’s your beef with beardies?
Jim Denham said,
December 19, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Keith Flett. for a start.
Jim Denham said,
December 19, 2008 at 8:27 pm
There is someone more stupid than Rowan Williams…and even more stupid than Madeleine Bunting…
Caroline Lucas! Try this,
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/caroline-lucas-to-stop-the-terrorists-we-must-know-the-roots-of-terrorism-1203618.html
in today’s Indie. On how many points, and in how many ways…can you be wrong?
Richard Bayley said,
December 19, 2008 at 8:58 pm
“It’s a moot point whether they are Christians”, says Red Maria of the Quakers….. FUCK YEAH, the counter-reformation starts on Shiraz Socialist!!!!! What utter drivel…….
Mike said,
December 20, 2008 at 12:29 am
Post #13 “No one is suppressing Christian freedom of speech, thought and religion.”
The trouble is that this is not exactly correct. Freedom of religious conscience is forbidden if it contravenes a number of laws. And that is how it should be.
The problem is that some wuch laws are deeply stupid. So forcing the closure of cafflick adoption agencies will not guarantee a single gay couple the opportunity to adopt. But it will mean that those cafflick who give up their childern for various reasons will not be able to have their children brought up in the faith they would like. A rather pointless achievement.
What Max does not seem to know is that his secular countries offer protection to religious groups far greater than Engerland does with its state cult. And theres rub the state cult ought to be scrapped and have its overly generous subsides and orivilkiges removed.
And whats wrong with being prejudiced against the Xians?
modernityblog said,
December 20, 2008 at 1:38 am
prejudiced – irrational fear or hatred of the “other”
or http://www.thefreedictionary.com/prejudiced
hmm, probably a lot
Voltaire's Priest said,
December 20, 2008 at 9:04 am
Maria; the reason he offered New York or Tehran is that one is secular and one isn’t. Put a different way, your rights as a religious Christian are better protected under secular-democratic governmental systems than they are under theocratic ones. That is quite clearly true, and I fail to see why you’re continuing to make spurious objections when in point of fact you are as much of a supporter of secular goverment as Max is – unless you’ve become an advocate of making the Pope head of state during the past week.
Re. “faith based organisations merely offering a service”, that is not always true. There’s a gulf between the Sally Army running homeless hostels or St Patrick’s Church running a soup kitchen on the one hand, and “pro-life pregnancy counselling” or groups offering people services tied to an acceptance of their ideology on the other. The one is fine (and entirely confined to the voluntary sector anyway), the other is highly politically charged and has no place in the helping professions.
tcd said,
December 22, 2008 at 9:36 pm
“Whereas you as a revolutionary socialist would like to see religion and the state fused then, tcd?”
No why do you say that? You would have to be quite desperate for an argument, or a moron, to extrapolate that from my whole quote. I said Rowan Williams is reactionary because he is a liberal. Not that he would be less reactionary if he was a conservative. But he would be an entirely different beast. Little point in defending the liberal state against the phantom threat of conservative retrocession to a pre-bourgeois age of feudalism, when that threat is out of the question, is pretty pointless.
“maxdunbar said,
December 19, 2008 at 9:17 am
1) We won’t get anywhere on this debate just by quoting Marx – wise as he was.
2) Secularism is not ‘anti-religion’. Secular systems guarantee freedom of religion as well as freedom from religion.
3) Pacifism is arguably one of the worst things to come out of the Christian faith – this idea of non resistance to evil. It is not an honourable position.
4) It’s also a fact that religious movements target people who are unhappy and unstable. This is why there is so much faith-based welfare in prisons, substance abuse programmes, homeless shelters, and the like.
5) Rowan Williams is a conservative. No two ways about it. He rejects basic equality legislation and wants to introduce, in part, a theocratic system of law.
To call Williams a ‘liberal’ is to rob the term of its meaning”
I think 1.) is called a strawman, because no-one is advocating “just quoting Marx”.
Listen, where I am from we call people like you “charquero”, i.e “puddler” – meaning they splash from argument to argument liek puddle to puddle, wetting their feet a little, touching on a hundred different concepts they have no interest in really understanding.
You claim to think Marx is wise but I doubt you know what he said about secularism and relations between religion and the state, so why are you making a value judgement on something you don’t knwo shit about?
In fact the reason I quote Marx to you specificially is because your position in pre-Marx, you simultaneously dismiss Marx’s arguments as out of date whilst spewing some ludicrous vision of the progressive bourgeois liberal state securing personal freedoms against religious conservatism, and then you think you’re telling us something new!
Marx over century and a half ago owever was explaining how these revolutions, while progressive at the time, had now turned in on themselves, that religion in the industrialised countries had been suitably placed at the service of the bourgeoisie and expelled from the sphere of economics, thus garuanteeing a secural state, which respects no morality other than that of private property, a morality which religion, “purified from the material”, now bows to.
In such a society it’s quite easy to see how the church can exploit the same poverty, alienation and degradation of humanity which capitalism causes and which the bourgeois state protects and enforces, and take advantage to concentrate the populace on non-material, moral concerns, thus serving the interests of the bourgeoisie, and its own clerical interests. Misogygny and homophobia therefore are hardly alien to secular bourgeois society, they are an inherent part of it, seeing as private property depends on the family unit and capitalism depends on the poverty of the majority.
So in a “liberal” society, as Victorian England was for example, there is no reason why gays and women wouldn’t face brutal day to day discrimination from popular opinion: a popular opinion which a secural state responds to happilly: or is the US toay not a liberal society. for example?
Which brings us to another flaw of yours: you don’t know what “liberal” means. Maybe for your next article you could research (have you ever researched anything before writing?) the history of the term “liberal”, and the full implications of the aplication today of liberalisms fundamentl pillar: the protection of private property above all else and a rejection of “social engineering” which instead lets the religious lobby operate freely.
Dickie Ticker said,
July 9, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Williams was merely mumbling the obvious: you can’t run a sustainable economy on speculation, asset bubbles, and easy credit. He went on to call for a return to productive manufacturing as the basis for growth.
Unfortunately ‘Shiraz Socialist’ responds to criticism of the Labour Party like an angry little trot at freshers fair.