Readers Letters to the Media

#1 28th December 2011, 05:28 PM

My local newspaper is The Adelaide Advertiser and the religion debate occasionally makes it onto the readers letter page.

Today (28.12.11) I read a submission that I found very interesting and would like to share with you.

It is entitled "Reason Not Belief" and was written by a gentleman named Liam Hanna.

I telephoned Liam and he was happy to give me permission to post his letter.

Interestingly, Liam told me he was an ex Roman Catholic seminarian, who, I believe, followed a similar path of disenchantment to our own Mr Black.

The letter is quite long and I'm surprised that the newspaper published it in its entirety.

Anyway, here it is:

Quote:

I applaud Fr McGrath's call (Advertiser 24 December) for greater debate on the issue of whether our quest to achieve 'right living' is driven by
religion or reason.

I raise a few debating points.

The repeated claim by the religious camp that only through religion can humanity practise ethics or a moral life is false. The long tradition of highly ethical rational humanists is evidence of this position and indeed can be seen as evidence of humanism preceding the controlling myths of the various primitive religions.

Religion is subjective and opinion-based, ethics is not; to link the two as synonymous as Fr McGrath does, is a debating trick not to be allowed.

The rational humanist argues consistently that true freedom does indeed come from doing as we ought, according to reason and not the period-and culture-bound interpretations of those who claim to speak with gods.

On this latter point, Fr McGrath's church (I assume the Catholic) has a strong record of moral relativism. They have burned as heretics or killed millions who disagreed with their infallible dogmatic pronouncements, only to back away from such dogmas in later times.

Evidence of these backdowns abound. Only within the last hundred years have they given up on the teaching that the Garden of Eden story in Genesis literally explained the origins of the universe and humanity; unfortunately, their persuasive ignorance lives on in those of the Bible belt mentality.

They have consigned untold millions to hell-fire punishment for eternity for such mortal sins as missing mass on Sunday, eating meat on Friday or enjoying sexual pleasure from consensual adult sex outside of marriage .... and even within marriage if not according to the Church's rubrics.

Rivers of blood flowed during the Reformation over the Church's defence of the dogma of transubstantiation, that powerful mind control of the faithful whereby the priest by incanting five magic/sacred words brought the very substance of the god-head to the altar.

There will be few church-men who will stand by such bizarre beliefs in contemporary debate. Indeed, there is a headlong rush away from such medieval dogma in the face of educated derision.

And I would dearly love to debate the collapse of the Church's theology of sin, redemption and hell-fire damnation that follows on with rational inevitability from Benedict XVI's disavowal of the theology of Limbo.

Now there's a debate and in the interests of delivering a rational humanity from the influence of those who make up stories to explain the unknown, bring it on.

LIAM HANNA, Glenelg