As St Thomas Aquinas wrote, "Tantum ergo (ch - ch)"

“Alleluia, (ch - ch) alleuia! (ch - ch)”

Paul Inwood

It must be real: the man owns up to having written it.

A tree without roots

From Mercator, an excellent illustration here of Chesterton's dictum that when people stop believing in God, they will believe in anything.

It seems that Alain de Botton has proposed the building of an atheists' temple and wants the sentiment, religiosity, and morality without the theology which created it. As the great sage is reported to have said,

One can be left cold by the doctrines of the Christian Trinity and the Buddhist Fivefold Path, and yet at the same time be interested in the ways in which religions deliver sermons, promote morality, engender a spirit of community, make use of art and architecture, inspire travels, train minds and encourage gratitude at the beauty of spring.

This is simply sentimentality, and as Oscar Wilde wrote,

A sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

This kind of non-thinking reminds me of the scene towards the end of  Huxley's Brave New World in which the Savage, a Catholic, whips himself penitentially, and the Ford-worshiping onlookers copy him, without understanding, in an orgy of sado-masochistic self-flagellation. 

If (as God forbid) I were to lose all religious belief, morality, apart from unenlighened self-interest, would have no appeal whatsoever.

I see Trevor Philllips is at it again

I see that Trevor Philllips is at it again - Daily Telegraph report, reportedly saying,

“To me there’s nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn’t apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn’t work.”

Keith Porteous Wood, director of the National Secular Society, said Mr Phillips was “absolutely right”. “If society has decided that it wants to ensure by law that every citizen of this country has equal rights, then there cannot be endless exemptions for religious bodies or anyone else,” he said.“There is no such thing as partial equality, and every time an exemption is made, someone else’s rights are compromised."

One might ask these two great thinkers to consider, whether there is a right to adopt, as opposed to a right to be adopted. The first relates to the adopter as the primary possessor of a right and the child as a commodity to which everyone is entitled. The second makes the welfare of the child paramount.

Or have I missed something?