Hate Thy Neighbour

Over at the other place, I've written a couple of times over the years in response to posts on the Christian Medical Fellowship's blog.  (Now I look, it's more than a couple.)  I have a strange fascination with it, you see.  But the fact that the other blog is associated with an august academic body means that I have to restrain myself.  I don't think I have to do that here.

First, though, why do I have it on my RSS to begin with?  Well, there's something about the combination of utter bewilderment by the world, the staggering poverty of the reasoning, the ability to misunderstand things that're really quite straightforward, and a compulsion to crowbar a Biblical verse into every second paragraph that I find compelling.  But the fundamentalism does sometimes grate; some of the attitudes there are - to use a word that the contributors there almost certainly think relates to actual historical fact - antediluvian.  And they stop the posts being quite as funny as they might be.

Peter Saunders' latest is a grotesque example of all that's wrong with the CMF.  "We live in times when the very foundations of our civilisation are being destroyed," he begins.

[T]he NHS with its burgeoning needs and shrinking budgets, mounting national debt, political and economic uncertainty following ‘Brexit’, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, creeping atheism and secular humanism.

See the problem here?  The utter lack of perspective?  Even if you think that these things are bad - on which, more anon - I'd wager that the very foundations of our civilisation are not being destroyed.  At most, they're changing.  Saunders has form when it comes to secularism, though.  It's one of the things he simply doesn't understand.  He's used the phrase "secular fundamentalism" as though it actually exists, for example (in a piece that offers a defence of the pointless genital mutilation of male children, to boot).  He thinks that Britain is "slid[ing] into secularism".  He doesn't seem to notice (a) that secularism is perfectly compatible with Christianity - and arguably draws some of its intellectual strength from the Christian idea that one should render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's: a doctrine that is quite possibly an early call for a separation between religion and politics; (b) that, as such, a commitment to secularism is precisely the thing that guarantees his right to publish this gibberish irrespective of prevailing religious views; and (c) he is in no way representative of what most Christians think anyway.  (Maybe he's a bit takfiri when the mood takes him.)

But then again, I've thought for a while that there's the whiff of the theocrat about Peter.  I thought I'd written something to that effect elsewhere, though I can't seem to find it right now.


And creeping atheism?  It's a set of claims about the (non-)existence of deities.  It's not dry rot.

Anyway: he continues:

The mountains of our culture, those institutions which shape its trajectory: our parliaments, courts, universities, medical institutions and the worlds of art, media and entertainment, seem increasingly to be run by people who do not share our Christian beliefs and values.

As if we should - and as if the admirable values espoused by most Christians are admirable because they're Christian, rather than the sorts of values that any halfway decent person would espouse.  Theocracy.  Ugh.

Peter really hates anything that isn't quite to his taste: he thinks that

Marriage and the family are threatened by same-sex unions, ‘gender fluidity’, internet pornography, gene editing, abortion and euthanasia.
Broken families, broken communities, broken institutions, a broken country.

I don't know how marriage and the family are threatened by any of those things, unless you endorse a particularly restricted and restrictive view of either.  My parents have been married for 45 years; I don't think that that marriage has been made any vulnerable by the possibility that people with a common genital configuration can enter into the same legal arrangement.  And even if you do accept that non-traditional sexuality is a threat to marriage or the family, what've gene editing and euthanasia got to do with it?

It gets worse:

But what if churches were to think even bigger like Wilberforce and his fellow Christian professionals from the ‘Clapham Sect’: Christian GP surgeries and hospitals, socially responsible businesses, legal advice and advocacy, schools and universities, serving in the political corridors of power?

Might we, by God’s grace, take Britain back? That is our challenge.

Can you think of anything more horrible than GP surgeries, hospitals, businesses, legal advisors, and educators who operate according to the CMF's principles?

It would be taking Britain back, in a sense.  Several centuries.