Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC




Date/Time 12 Jul 2014 1:34:57pm
A very interesting if slightly long piece let down perhaps by a sub-editor's headline. There's so much more to this than just an exploration of Anglicanism's relationship with sexuality.

If I have a quibble with Kirby's analyses then it is a major one in that while I see parallels between legalese and Christian apologetics I also see one major difference between the law and religion based upon their quite different relationship with evidence.

I think it is that relationship with evidence that we have in the law, itself derived from democratic authority, and secular society that allows us to take the more progressive view of sexuality than the church is apt to promote.

I'm not a religious person so my take on what the Bible says about homosexuality concerns me no more than it might that because the old testament God appears incredibly bent upon killing heathen tribes like the Amalekites then my Christian neighbours might take leave to slaughter us in the night.

Nor in the case of a recent trial in a US Bible Belt state, where a mother claimed God told her to slaughter her child, was the notion that there could ever be any verdict apart from murder or insanity even considered. Do we think it amazing that the judge, jury and all the counsel as committed Christians were not even for a moment persuaded to consider the prospect that God spake unto this woman as the Bible says he did to Abraham? It appears not.

Yet on issues of sexuality around, women's roles, contraception, abortion, stem cell research, homosexuality and now same sex marriage each step of the way towards progress is met with reticence borne of traditional resistance to change. And to the same extent that these changes have gained currency with the support of scientific advances in understanding and technology then it is precisely because religion relies for its very existence upon the notion of something beyond nature that it finds it preferable to ignore the evidence when it comes to human sexuality.

Our sexuality is after all something that we've always struggled to control often by misplacing emphasis on repression in a traditional context, rather than on understanding and enjoyment of realities modern thinking has come to appreciate. There's a whole history of of fear of our own strong urges the consequences of which we've only in our lifetimes started to be liberated from in terms of reproductive freedoms and disease control. And it is a pity that religion finds itself pitted against something that has such wonderful possibilities for human well-being as that.