It is worth printing this article from the English "Church Times" The article is called "Nature, red in tooth and claw"...without Googling what is the origin of the quotation?
The author, Giles Fraser, is Rector of Putney in the Diocese of London.
Does the existence of the Christian Right in the US constitute a disproof of the theory of intelligent design? The conservatives' latest fad is a film about penguins; and, just as they did with The Passion of the Christ, they have been bussing the faithful to the cinema.
The March of the Penguins has now become the second-highest-grossing documentary of all time, behind Fahrenheit 9/11 . It tells how a group of penguins trek across the ice to mate, and then huddle together to protect their eggs in freezing temperatures. Christian conservatives love it because, apparently, these penguins demonstrate the inherent naturalness of Christian family values.
Out of curiosity and mischievousness, I did a web search for "penguins" and "homosexuality", and chanced upon several versions of this story: "A German zoo's plans to tempt its gay penguins to go straight by importing more females has been declared a failure. The female penguins were flown in especially from Sweden in an effort to encourage the Humboldt penguins at the Bremerhaven Zoo to reproduce. But the six homosexual penguins showed no interest in their new female companions and remained faithful to each other. Zoo Director Heike Kueck said: 'The relationships were apparently too strong.'"
The existence of gay penguins - it would seem, in permanent, faithful, and stable relationships - throws into question the ways in which conservative Christians throw out terms such as natural and unnatural. "Natural" is a slippery word. Often it functions as some sort of divine kite-mark, offering a moral nihil obstat from the creator. Even atheists use natural as a mark of moral approval.
But I don't get it. Is cancer natural? Is the way the cat cruelly plays with the dying bird natural? Was Hurricane Katrina natural? Likewise, to call something unnatural indicates profound disapproval. But why? Is democracy natural, or a piece of Mozart, or most of the drugs that save lives every day?
What is topsy-turvy about the commitment of conservatives to Pingu's family values is that, while they bang on about natural and unnatural relationships, they consistently ignore the real threat to the natural: global warming.
Furthermore, though they prefer intelligent design to evolution, when it comes to politics, they are Darwinian, red in tooth and claw. In the light of the inequalities exposed in New Orleans, it is perplexing that conservative Christians don't seem to appreciate that it is the politicians they voted for who really subscribe to an ideology of the survival of the fittest.
5 comments:
Hey! My name is Alan, and I write a blog called The California Conservative.
I saw a comment that you made on someone's blog re. language and the issue of abortion. I wanted to thank you for your objectivity. I was taken back by the fact that you could compare President Bush to Stalin and Hitler, but that debate is for another day.
You seem to be very educated. I wish I were. I'd be interested to have your comments on my treatment of the Creation v. Evolution issue.
Thanks manoj for your comment to my weblog.
You say many of my comments seem out of place for a priest...I guess that is dependent on what you think a priest ought to be. It seems to me that it is important for a priest to give witness to the truth, and that I try to do. Probably not very well.
Too often priests (and other holy people) have fallen back on the privilege to withdraw from contentious issues...as a Christian this is not something that I observe Jesus doing.
So I try to follow him.
St Paul says ...it is for freedom that we have been set free...I take this to heart and think that I should be trying to set people free and also to live a free life myself.
How do you feel about people agreeing with you? Does it depend on who?
Not quite sure, Jim,what your point is. I must admit there are a couple of things about people agreeing with me:
1)I don't find anonymous comment terribly helpful because so much of what is said is tied up in knowing who and what a person is.
Would you for example want to agree "that children should be disciplined" with a person who you know believes discipline means laying into them with a strap.
2)I also got into trouble the other day for saying about the Sapir-Warff hypothesis which is about the influence of language on behaviour:
"Another dimension of this is that in order to dismiss the hypothesis you have to assume that simple folk are going to critically analyse language. Now we know that we just don't do this, otherwise no one would have believed Hitler, Stalin or Bush!"
An American friend was surprised that Pres Bush should be linked with Hitler and Stalin.
Which rather made my point that language is not neutral
[You will need to go to this site " http://thelanguageguy.blogspot.com/" and read through the article 'Language and the Abortion Controversy' and then some of the (82) replies to understand what this is about]
3)I am also not tolerant of pretentious verbage which seems to be more intent on misleading rather than clarifying. More is not necessarily better.
What ever happens to contentious issues?
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