Skip to main content
Mary Honeyball MEP

In recent months, this blog may have given the impression that Mary Honeyball MEP was a figure of Paisleyite proportions. Links to sites such as 'Mother Reilly meets the Vampire', 'The Magic Roundabout' and 'The Da Vinci Code' may have conveyed the impression, based only upon Ms Honeyball's stated opinions and speeches, that she was attached to a bigoted caricature of my church. Further depictions of her as some sort of unelected, latter-day Titus Oates for abortionists may have furthered that impression.

However, we should not as citizens allow the culture wars to break out here.

If public language is radicalised, and if we are all driven into last ditches, or brought to enjoy the thrill of crises of conscience when we could as free people find things we could work together on, only those who have an interest in an atomised, warring society, where all are suspicious of all, will win.

If the standard we take from the internet is the viral abuse and exhilarating release of pouring out our scorn, and if stress and anger poured over each other becomes the norm, we will all lose out.

If the internet becomes an i-pod for the mind to self-righteously download only opinions we like, rather than a doorway to discussions, we all lose out.

Instead, the networking, innovative, connecting, and debating potential of the internet, which involves some necessary hypocrisy or wilful ignorance, or just a cheery open mind, could deliver the beginning of a way out of the long, sapping economic crisis that is in front of us.

I have no intention of fighting in the dark in my own small flailing way if I don't have to.

There are, after all, things to do. The west needs to restore its patrimony; we need to take back from the financiers and chancers the things that the public should control; we need to work out energy solutions to the long crisis of peak oil; we need to get away from banks and share markets being the only sort of investors that anyone can turn to.

I do not see an appaling level of abortions, crime, social breakdown, the foisting of contraceptives on Africans as a cure for conscience, and life-hating green cults masquerading as science as things that citizens, of faith or none, can accept. The issue is that free people have to respect each other as they seek to persuade. There is too much bile and too much narcissism around.

We need to restore reasons to make life worth living as citizens, whether we happen to be believers or not. Great things begin in small ways because we are all small, in the end, and our spiritual disagreements can be judged in eternity. We should not spend our short time on earth making life a little cheaper, or shabbier, or building up a lonely culture of death.

So, in one small way, I am going to put my little spat with Mary Honeyball down and respond to whoever wrote her blog last night by saying that her views on religion, and mine, shouldn't get in the way of our disputing points together as citizens. If there are sides to be drawn up over traumatic issues, we should be on either without bad will, and in free conscience, and with respect.

I now have a link to The Batty Blogger on my sidebar. That is a flying pig in the picture. Have some manners if you have any comments.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Congressional Healthcare Bill in America I spent a good deal of this morning and yesterday reading over the proposed American healthcare bill (or at least, a compound version; there appear to be five doing the rounds). I don't want to blog on the details of it immediately. It's also a bill, which may well stall in the Senate or be overtaken by events, and which could yet be critically amended. It is the product of Congress, not the administration per se, and the lawyers have not yet got at it. I had some instant worries about it though. In no particular order, I'll list them; Firstly, it can't allow individuals to choose their doctor and treatment in the long run; instead, it will practically formalise the role of doctors as salaried employees of large medical groups. Sarah Palin is onto something with the idea that this will then allow essentially ideological or non-medical outlooks on, say, euthanasia, abortion, transgender issues, or non-emergency treatments of c...
6 comments
Read more
William Orpen There are four major Christian traditions, which are of course Catholic, Orthodox, Armenian and Coptic. Some sects and cults also exist, like the Moonies or Anglicanism. Yet in some bizarre way this weekend, protestant contributions to something other than the seizure of churches have been making their way into my consciousness. I suppose that the first indication of this trend was a reflection in an old copy of Gibbon that he actually became cultured because of Calvinism. Packed off to Switzerland because he went Catholic at an otherwise boring Oxford, Gibbon fell in love with Suzanne Cuchod, and with Greek because of instruction from a Calvinist mentor. It's an odd thing--I keep coming across indications of Calvinists who could have fun, though they doubtless thought that they would pay for it later, and whose political intelligence was second to none. Althusius springs to mind, for instance. But then what am I thinking, I thought to myself? I've sat on balconi...
11 comments
Read more
Damon Buffini I'm not quite sure what to make of this story. Damon Buffini, a multi-millionaire in the City, and a very accomplished man, seems to have heard staff he regarded as lazy and ungrateful at the upper levels of management complaining about restaurants. He subsequently forced them all to eat two-day old Big Macs whilst reminding them of how lucky they are. It's nice to know that Saturn--in the form of a sort of globalisation guevara--could force his children to eat rather than devouring them, as in Goya's painting. How broken do people have to be not to walk out, though? I guess from his point of view, if they had any spine they'd be in business on their own. The whole thing is horribly fascinating.
Post a Comment
Read more