Below is an article in the Telegraph that is very important for reading and discussion. Do we see what has happened in this case? This is written by the former Anglican Bishop of Rochester, The Rt. Rev Dr Michael Nazir -Ali. Let the readers understand!Please do read it all here.Lord Justice Laws's judgment on the Gary McFarlane case in the Court of Appeal – that legislation for the protection of views held purely on religious ground cannot be justified – has driven a coach and horses through the ancient association of the Christian faith with the constitutional and legal basis of British society.
Everything from the Coronation Oath onwards suggests that there is an inextricable link between the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the Bible and the institutions, the values and the virtues of British society. If this judgment is allowed to stand, the aggressive secularists will have had their way.
It also raises a number of fundamental questions to which answers need to be provided. Will there be, once again, a religious bar to holding office? We have already had a rash of cases involving magistrates unable to serve on the bench because of their Christian beliefs, registrars losing their jobs because they cannot, in conscience, officiate at civil partnerships, paediatricians unable to serve on adoption panels… Will this trickle gradually become a flood, so that rather than conforming to the Church of England, the new discrimination tests will involve conforming to the secular religion as promoted by Lord Justice Laws?
1 comments:
It's a good piece, but I really think that all the theologians do is play the game according to the secularists' rules. That is a game they cannot win, because the rules have been created to ensure they cannot win.
What is needed is a philosophical critique. Given the retreat of so much cock-sure secularist philosophy in the 20th Century, it is hard to take Lord Justice Laws's judgment on faith seriously. Is he unaware of the way in which logical positivism dissolved in its own acid, thereby opening the way for a return of metaphysics? What of the work of Plantinga in epistemology - showing the judge's "A belief is only rational if and only if it can be proved" assumption, is self-defeating? Or Anscombe's work showing how any position is riddled with unprovable assumptions? And all that silly stuff about subjectivism - does he have no understanding of the basis of the idea of the equality of homosexual relationship with heterosexual ones? Is he unaware of the resurgence in Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics (see here for an excellent summary of why) which makes the denial of natural law anything but rational?
He really does appear to think secularism = neutrality. All that tells us is that he is unable to critique his own position even by his own premises. He sums up the philosophical ignorance, the intellectual indolence and the moral arrogance of contemporary secularism. The fact that it comes from a head wearing an old wig doesn't make it any less daft. It just gives it power to impose the injustice.
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