The headline sounded promising: "‘Respect atheists’, says Cardinal." Unfortunately, and somewhat predictably, the story itself is a little different from what the headline suggests:
"I want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep
esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives
of those who believe."
Which sounds less like what I’d hoped for (though I don’t truly know what I
really hoped for) and more like what I should really have expected, which is
"love thy neighbour." You wouldn’t think that was bad, and to be fair I don’t,
entirely, but I dislike the way it’s framed.
There was also this:
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.
Which, well, is one of those pieces of reasoning that I find to be more than a
bit ridiculous, especially when said out loud. The problem is, of course, that
it amounts to an argument from personal credulity, which is also know as an
argument from ignorance.
The thing that really rankled me, though, for I’m hardly surprised to hear any
of the above from dear old Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, is the way the headline
was written.
And to tell the truth, I’d much rather that he’d said "You should treat
atheists and agnostics with respect. Because, like you, they’re human
beings."
Graham Binns is a photographer, writer, musician and software developer from Lancaster, England, with a bizarre imagingation, a penchant for odd t-shirts and a magnificent hat.
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