Category: blog

Five Giants by Josh Philip Saunders

Structural sin

Cover image credit
‘Five Giants’, Illustration by Josh Philip Saunders. Further details available at: https://joshphilipsaunders.co.uk/Five-Giants
Commissioned by the RSA for their work on ‘Britain’s New Giants’

Christianity needs a concept of structural sin

For many people in the western world, their ideas of good and evil are heavily influenced by Christianity, even if they are not religious. The Church teaches children that a sin is an act they do. Those children grow up into adults who don’t understand how they, without doing anything particularly evil themselves as an individual, can still be part of much wider problems, like structural racism, inequality, poverty and environmental damage. These are all ‘structural sins’, and our ability to respond to them is stunted by our inability to understand our role in them.

Stuck with an idea that we are only responsible for our own direct actions, we end up unable to deal with any problems that lie outside our most obvious responsibilities as a solitary individual.

In secular politics, more people are now starting to understand and think about institutional or structural racism and structural inequalities. Secular society is learning the language it needs to describe systemic oppression. Christianity also needs a concept of structural sin.

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Photograph of sculpture depicting 'homeless jesus'

Why I’m voting Labour

It’s hard to know where to start, to put into writing why I will be voting Labour. I could write pages on austerity, inequality, the NHS, Brexit, Northern Ireland and myriad issues, but I would probably only be adding to the huge amount of noise already around you. You can already read volumes on all the issues if you want to. For the purpose of this post, I’d rather just explain how I personally vote, and to take a look at the ‘big picture’.

My starting point when it comes to voting is pretty well summed up by this quote from Hubert Humphrey, who served as Vice President under Lyndon B. Johnson.

‘The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped’

In other words, which party will most improve the lives of the worst off and most vulnerable people in our society.

When there are people living in terrible situations, surely the priority has to be with alleviating that suffering and until we’ve addressed that, policies aimed at making already comfortable lives a little more pleasurable really shouldn’t come into our decision making.

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Why would atheists want to be part of the church?

This is the third blog post in the series about Christian Atheism. Links to the previous posts are below:

  1. Why is an atheist getting confirmed?
  2. Our obsession with belief
  3. Why would atheists want to be part of the church?
  4. (Planned) What does religious language mean to Christian Atheists?

My last blog post argued that people often overstate the importance of holding certain metaphysical beliefs to being Christian, at the expense of other important aspects such as community, living ethically, sacred space and enjoying cultural heritage. I’m not going to write at length about what the church offers, that is a matter for your personal preference and taste. But I do want to answer the question of why an atheist might want to be part of a church, despite not sharing all the beliefs of other members, and why the church ought to include these people.

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Our obsession with belief

This is the second blog post in the series about Christian Atheism. Links to the previous and following posts are below:

  1. Why is an atheist getting confirmed?
  2. Our obsession with belief
  3. Why would atheists want to be part of the church?
  4. (Planned) What does religious language mean to Christian Atheists?

In my last post, I wrote about there being a credible and meaningful, non-fairytale and non-supernatural way to be Christian, without believing impossible or unlikely things. That leaves people wondering (1) Why would someone who doesn’t believe in the supernatural god want to be part of the Church? And (2) How can an atheist find religious language meaningful? Sadly – and despite my best attempts – a blog post on religious language is either too brief to do the philosophy justice, or too long and dense to be readable. Instead, I’ll use my next two blogs to:

Continue reading “Our obsession with belief”

Why is an atheist getting confirmed?

This is the first blog post in the series about Christian Atheism. Links to the following posts are below:

  1. Why is an atheist getting confirmed?
  2. Our obsession with belief
  3. Why would atheists want to be part of the church?
  4. (Planned) What does religious language mean to Christian Atheists?

‘But to ask, ‘Do you believe in God?’ is rather like asking, ‘How long is a piece of string?’ Show me the piece of string and I will tell you how long it is. Tell me what sort of God you have in mind and I will tell you whether I believe in him (or her? Or it?)’ –

Anthony Freeman, God in Us: A case for Christian Humanism

As a few of you might know, I’m being confirmed this September at St Pauls Bow Common, a liberal anglo-catholic church in East London. More of you probably know that I’m an atheist. I’m not writing this post to argue about the existence of god – though I’m happy to discuss that separately. I’m writing to explain what I mean when I say I’m an atheist but that I’m also a Christian, because I realise that to most people those will be contradictory things.

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