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Church and State: Should never mix...

I don't understand why this should be such a problem in England when Anglican clergy are blessing Civil Partnerships on practically a daily basis in Scotland.

I know of a number of people (including myself) who are visiting Scotland primarily so that they can have a blessing conducted in a church and I fail to see what makes the CoE so reticent to join the 21st century.

I think that we need to be a little careful when using "move with the times" arguments. Both Stalinists and Nazis used this sort of rhetoric to great effect.
Let's leave fashion out of the equation- in fact tradition may well prove to be a more reliable (though never infallible) guide in morality.

Graham Veale
Armagh

And no, I'm not comparing the homosexual rights movement to Fascism - I'm just saying this style of argument has it's dangers.

Graham:

You're quite wrong. Mussolini called his group fascists because he wanted to return to the glories of ancient Rome. Similarly, Hitler saw the Nazis as latter-day Teutonic Knights. Both wanted to return to a mythical past.

Northern Ireland has tended to be a traditional, conservative society, and it hasn't done it much good. In fact, some of can only dream of a more liberal, progressive Ulster.

Good luck to you, Antisyzygy.

gveale is doesnt take long on W+T before a commenter gets a reputation on the basis of their comments. I would say you have already built a reputation for missing the point and offering over the top responses. The Nazi reference is another case in point. You can't use the Nazi analogy in one post then come back with a second post saying, "Oh, and by the way, I am not comparing the 'homosexual movement' to Nazis." You already made the comparison and the comparion is disgraceful, expecially since gay men wore a pink triangle in Nazi death camps alongside jews wearing yellow stars.

A lesson for everyone here: you can't bring the Nazis into an argument in most cases without losing the plot or losing the argument. The analogy with Nazis is very rarely relevant, accurate or responsible.

The other thing is the term 'homosexual movement'. We are not talking about a political movement here. We are talking about gay PEOPLE here. Ordinary men and women living their lives and trying to be left alone. Most gay people are not members of any gay rights group or movement as you put it. They just want to live in a society where they have equal rights, including the right to have a marriage or partnership that is equal in status to heterosexual people.

p.s, I don't think there is a heterosexual movement either.

Brian
If I'm wrong I'm in very good company - I' refer you to my sources.

1) Richard Overy - The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, chapters 6, 7 and 9 (p637-638 + pp269 -285 wil be of particular interest)

2) Richard Evans - The Third Reich in Power, chapter 3(pp306-320 and 497 - 503 will again be of particular interest).

3) Michael Burleigh - The Third Reich: A New History. It's worth comparing Evans and Burleigh, who take slightly differenr positions on Nazism and religion. (Both are agreed that Hitler had no time for Himmlers myth-making however, and expected Christianity to die with the advance of modern science)

4) Robert Gellately - Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, which I'm currently reading, so I'll get back to you on details.

and

5) Martin Kitchen - Nazi Germany: A Critical Introduction, which is a brilliant read.

However, I did make a lazy connection between Fascism and the Nationalist Socialist movement. So it was fair to draw my attention to Mussolini. I'll take your word that he was leading a conservative movement. Hitler could play to the conservative gallery, and was quite happy to Romanticise the past, but he viewed Nationalist Socialism as a modern movement. He appealed to the young, the idealistic and the educated. As did Lenin.

In any case it is clear that a) I've based my statement on good sources, and b) I really need to get out more.

Graham Veale
Armagh

Godwin's Law in three posts?

Thats impressive.

s_law

Augustine of Clippo
Thankyou for your helpful comments. I will try to post more constructively in future.

I made my point in a clumsy manner (apologies) but all I meant was this- "move with the times" has been used to advance some very good ideas (cross party cooperation in Ulster) and some very bad ideas. I don't think it is a very good argument or a very wise slogan. I also think it is prejudicial against those of us who would want to use tradition to inform our beliefs.

This does not say anything, one way or the other about the morality of gay marriages. The scholar John Boswell argues from tradition to the acceptability of Homosexual unions, and the New Teatament critic Robin Scroggs argues that the New Testament texts would support homosexual unions.

I added a supplementary post to make it clear that my point was about the "join the 21st century" slogan(which we all use) and not the issue of gay marriage. As you correctly point out, it was too little, too late.

There is NO gay rights movement in Western civilization? Stonewall? Outrage? When did I suggest that every homosexual was part of the movement? That part of your post was not generous. I could see how someone could infer that I was drawing a connection between the Gay Rights movement, and less savory political movements. But did you honestly think that I was comparing all gay people to Neo-Nazis?

Graham Veale

antisyzygy (if that is your real name)

Guilty as charged. Should have stuck to Stalinists. They're much more cuddly.

Graham Veale

Graham:

You list several sources, including the Burleigh book which I have, but you don't say what they conclude about the Nazi's 'modernism'.

I have to say that any totalitarian system looks backward rather than forward, no matter what the leader says. It represents dictatorship, imposition of a backward ideology, oppression of opponents, censorship etc.

Modern liberal pluralist democracy is the 21st century model. That is what antisyzygy means.

Brian
Read the relevant chapters in Burleigh. But you would find Evans more convincing, as Burleigh is a committed Roman Catholic. Trust me, the Kitchen book is a great read.

Totalitarianism would be impossible outside of modernity - you need a certain infastructure to get it off the ground. Furthermore, totalitarianism tries to dominate all areas of life - Religious worldviews aren't tolerated. One of Orwell's points in "1984" was that Totalitarians continually rewrite the past to justify their present actions. They are not really that interested in History, and definitely have no time for tradition.
But we're agreed on the pluarlist democracy - and we're agreed that Ulster's tribalism means we haven't got one. And I don't want to be totally constrained by tradition. We need to keep trying new approaches.

By the way can you recommend anything on Mussolini?

I don't really think Stalinists are cuddly. And I shouldn't have mentioned the Nazi's. I've just made myself a really easy target for Antisyzgy again.

Graham Veale
Armagh

Graham:

Your meaning of 'totalitarianism' is a technical one. Hitler greatly admired Frederick the great and wanted to revive the idea of a German Empire. Nothing 'modern about this'.

German soldiers in WW2 had 'Gott mit ums' (God with us) on their belt buckles, the motto of the Royal House of Prussia. Nothing modern about this.

Nazi anti-semitism was hardly 'modern' either. Anti-semitism was present in Christianity for centuries and there were pogroms in Germany and other European countries in the Middle Ages.

Autocracy is an ancient idea of ruling. It certainly isn't modern, whereas liberal democracy is.

You say that in totalitarian regimes a religious worldwide was not tolerated. Nonsense. Both Hitler and Mussolini made Concordats with the Vatican. Hitler believed in a muscular Christianity, wrote that in 'defending myself against the Jews I am doing the Lord's work', and claimed that he had been sent from Austria by God to be the ruler of the German nation.

A good book on Mussolini is Christopher Hibbert's biography, which is very amusing, but may not be what you are looking for (ie. non-existent evidence that Mussolini's regime was anti-Christian).

Brian
I refer you again to my sources - my grasp of 20th Century History is abysmal, but I won't attribute the same to five first class modern scholars. In those books you will find chapters of information about Nazi and Communist hostility to Christianity. The same chapters will provide you with an abundance of information about the Christian failure to oppose the Reich; Evans gives a very balanced picture of Niemoller.
Yes I'm aware of Concordat; Hitler was pragmatic. Unfortunately, so was the Catholic Centre Party. Hitler was quite content to let Christianity die of "natural causes", and eventually gave up on Nazi attempts to rewrite Christianity.
Gellately would attach more blame to Conservatives than Burleigh. There is no doubt that the conservative yearning for an authoritian solution was necessary for Hitler's rise to power. So I don't want to be a slave to tradition. Or to slogans.

Orwells point was that Totalitarians rewrite the past to control the future. A Conservative wants to be part of a tradition, not to invent one for the sake of social control.

Thanks for the Hibbert biography - it occurred to me that there was a pretty big hole in my reading. I was ignoring Franco and Mussolini. Thanks for the critique.

Graham Veale

A "Fatal Attraction"

I wasn't aware that I was "targetting" anyone.

Oh, only kidding, antisyzygy. I thought post 8 was a good reply. I learned a bit of pop culture, and it made me chuckle, and you made your point without being too harsh. I don't feel "targetted".

Graham Veale

I think it's ludicrous to throw in Franco with Mussolini and Hitler - there is no comparison. Franco made no attempt to take over the world, merely wanted to stop communists taking over Spain. The problem was he had to hang on to power to stop them getting back in. And of course look what they've done to Spain since they came back again.


Graham - I would avoid any book recommended by Brian - likely to be full of ideology.

To get back to the point of the post, one can hear the hammering sounds of the coffin lid being closed on the Anglican Communion - survivors may swim for the nearest Roman port.

Graham:

Smasher positively drips of ideology, i.e. Catholic ideology, such as the reference to the 'Roman port', which of course is replete with ancient papal ideology.

What Smasher means about Franco is that he was a Catholic leader who survived the war, unlike Hitler and Mussolini. He was a fascist, nevertheless, though not of the dynamic variety displayed by the other two Catholic leaders and by Pavelic, Codreanu and Degrelle, all Catholic fascist leaders in Europe in the 1930s/40s. In 1977 Degrelle said: "I used to be a Hitlerite and I still am one, up to the day I die". he said in a 1977 interview. He also denied the existence of the Holocaust.


There is nothing really ideological about Hibbert's book, in contrast to some that you list, Graham. It is an amusing biography which has a lot of fun describing Mussolini's love life.

Smasher-lagru
I'm sorry - there's a body of opinion that says Franco was a nice guy?


Graham Veale

Brian
I already acknowledged that Burleigh has an axe to grind. (His books are received well in the secular press). But Richard Evans - who is explicit in "the Coming of the Third Reich" that he is in some measure responding to Burleigh? Martin Kitchen? Richard Overy? Come on Brian. I'll grant that Michael Argyle (who wrote the book on "Psychology and Religion") attended Church; but the book is a standard text in the Psychology degree at QUB; and I only found out he had some form of Christian belief after I read the book. You wouldn't detect "ideology" in it's pages. If anything, a bias against conservative Protestantism seems apparent.

Bash away at me for bias Brian, but it is very unfair to impute it to these authors.

Graham Veale

(P.S. By the way, I've been checking out the Hibbert book, and it looks very good. So once again, thanks.)

I doubt if Franco was a particularly nice person - however, it is nonsensical to compare him to Mussolini and Hitler. The communists in Spain murdered thousands of innocent bishops, priests, brothers, nuns and laypeople. Aged Carmelite and Poor Clare sisters raped and mutilated. That's what Franco was stopping. But he stopped within Spain. He had no plans to take over the world and he has many people who will make an attempt to place his memory in a proper context, instead of simply listing him as a fascist.

Brian knows that Hitler wasn't a catholic, he just likes to pretend.