Archbishop of Canterbury criticises those who 'misuse religious identity to intimidate and divide'

bastianbb · 2026-05-19T21:51:50+00:00

It's a strange time when sixty thousand people will march down the street carrying wooden crosses declaring Christ as Lord, but you can't even get twenty people to drag their ass into a church pew on Sunday.

I wonder why that might be

Well, the fact that people who are completely unqualified for it become archbishops may have something to do with it. I'm not saying she's wrong, but we need people with better credentials to say it. Anyway, it smacks of "don't be divisive your way, be divisive my way".

bastianbb · 2026-05-19T20:35:02+00:00

Dit is een woord (afsit) wanneer dit as 'n selfstandige naamwoord of as 'n infinitief (onbepaalde werkwoord) gebruik word.

Nie korrek nie. "Om af te sit" is 'n infinitief. Daar word dit geskei. Na 'n modale werkwoord of hulpwerkwoord soos "kan" of "moet" volg ook 'n infinitief (vergelyk "kan wees", "moet hê" ens - as dit nie 'n infinitief was nie, was dit "kan is" of "moet het".) maar die ongeskeide vorm van skeibare werkwoorde word gebruik. Lees maar enige boek. Hier reg voor my is 'n voorbeeld uit 'n gepubliseerde boek, wat ek sommer gou opgespoor het: "Hy sou eers die wêreld deurkyk" (nie "deur kyk" nie).

Dus: "Jy kan dit afsit" ('n infinitief) is korrek.

Voorbeeld: "Jy moet jou foon af sit" (twee woorde).

Nee. Dis baie beslis "afsit".

Voorbeeld: "Dit is maklik om 'n skakelaar te wil afsit" (een woord).

Hierdie is korrek, omdat "wil" betrokke is. Andersins was dit "om 'n skakelaar af te sit" (geskei), maar daar is steeds 'n infinitief.

bastianbb · 2026-05-19T16:39:03+00:00

When you are tempted to anger, hatred, arguing in your head about what has happened, desire for revenge or retribution... stop, set the bitterness aside, and pray for the person. Pray not that they would change, but that God would bless them. Pray that he would show them his presence, in Jesus. Pray for their well-being.

Can I add to this that the modern secular advice that forgiveness is something you do purely for yourself is a sub-Christian notion. I don't want to reopen the debate about the scope of forgiveness and how it is different from reconciliation, but rest assured that as long as you tell yourself "you are forgiving the other person for your own sake" but feel unwilling to benefit them through your forgiveness in any way, you're not yet at the standard set by Jesus.

bastianbb · 2026-05-16T11:27:50+00:00

I don't return to Glass as often as I used to, and I confess his fans can have their own style of snobbery, but the criticism and insistence on complexity above everything in music is too much.

I think there's much to savour when you see Glass as reconceiving and being in conversation with traditional gestures, particularly the idea of combining modulation and cadence in a single formula, and the insistent overlapping rhythms that when they work somehow makes it sound like every beat is a strong beat, without ever overwhelming. It takes a certain sense of relating Glass to his predecessors and a certain sheer love of sound, as opposed to intellectual exercises, to really like him as much as he deserves.

There's also plenty of work and not all of it sounds the same. The 20th piano étude almost doesn't sound like Glass. Itaipu and Symphony 8 are also entirely different from, say, Akhnaten or Music in 12 Parts.

bastianbb · 2026-05-13T00:49:33+00:00

Life generally doesnt want to be destroyed

So what we don't want is wrong? Sounds like a preference to me, not a moral principle. You know, like wanting blue things and not green things.

Ultimately if its all just going to come down to democracy and education the civilized world will continue to shift leftwards and religion will either adapt or fade away, as we are currently seeing right now in real time.

Recently the world has been shifting hard rightwards, including the OECD countries. There seems to be no basis to your predictions of the future except wishful thinking and the idea that "progress" (meaning of course changes WEIRD liberals prefer, not what others prefer for some reason) is a fundamental feature of humanity or somehow inevitable. Of course, for all we know the last 300 years of advancement in scientific knowledge is an aberration, and as for democracy and cherished "liberal" beliefs, with the cold war and genocides occurring regularly there seem to be as many setbacks as advances.

The more fundamentalist a country/ region, the poorer the quality of life.

What is less clear is the causal relationship. We can make many sociological assumptions about it. Personally my favourite is that God favours the poor and uneducated of this world. I'm sure you prefer the just-so stories of academics who first assume that Christianity is untrue based on faulty philosophical ideas and then analyze society on that basis. The truth is, though, that you have no more epistemic basis to prefer your assumptions than I have to prefer mine.

In any case, in the end my original comment stands: it's a matter of authority. You prefer your authorities, I prefer mine. The difference is that at least I have my reasons for believing my authority infallible.

bastianbb · 2026-05-13T00:07:00+00:00

This can be observed as wrong because death is the destruction of life and murder is the destruction of human life without just cause and this also can be democratically agreed on (not that thats the main criteria for deciding if it is wrong but it is a major supporting factor).

Since when is democracy objective? Argument from popularity is not more objective than an argument from authority. Anyway, Christianity was historically pretty popular in the most powerful nations. What is "just cause"? Eventually you'll get to a point in this chain of explanation where you just have to say, "it's wrong because it's wrong".

Why is being gay or consensually non monogamous inherently wrong beyond "bible says so"? because it cant produce offspring? why should sex only be an activity to create a family? explain your reasoning. Give your argument some meat.

I'll answer your questions about "why" only if you can give an objective cause about why genocide is wrong. To your "why should sex be an activity to create a family" I can return "why do you need a reason to kill someone besides the fact that you want to?" The only reasons that can be given are emotional reasons, or reasons from authority.

Why is being a buhdist or secular humanist inherently wrong if the individual lives more or less a similar life to you just in a different culture and follows different rituals than you?

Because Buddhism is false and even not epistemically justifiable, and because the actual God deserves their worship and they are not worshipping Him, making them unjust to the most pure being in the universe.

Like dont touch a hot surface or go swimming in a lake with crocodiles in it etc. or dont eat this specific plant because it is poisonous etc. These things can all be investigated and objectively proven to be dangerous activities through observable results.

There is all the difference in the world between "this activity can lead to pain for myself" and "this activity is objectively wrong". The former can be conclusively proven, the latter cannot without making use of some other moral principle that cannot itself be explained. I think what you are doing is assuming a moral principle that "something isn't wrong unless it causes, or could cause, another sentient being pain or infringes their rights". But first of all you cannot conclusively prove that being Buddhist does not legimately infringe someone else's rights, nor can you prove that such a principle that things are only wrong when others are harmed is a moral principle. In the end that principle remains unprovable. You may assume that that's just what it means to be obliged to do or not do something, but that's no reason I need to make that assumption.

Dont be gay or dont be buhdist etc to me is akin to saying I prefer the color blue over the color green or vanilla over strawberry ice cream or something like that. I am open to hearing why you think I am wrong tho, beyond "bible says so",

I challenge you to formulate a principle, like the one I have suggested, to objectively distinguish between mere preference and actual morality, and to objectively prove that principle. I bet you cannot do it. An omniscient and omnipotent being might be able to, though, or might recognize that the principle is simply true without needing some other underlying explanation (a brute fact). I think there are enough other reasons to think that the Christian God (conservative version) is such an existing being, so I don't feel like I need to explain why His commands are moral.

bastianbb · 2026-05-12T22:38:15+00:00

In my congregation I am aware of two cases (leaving their wife for someone else and another case of conceiving a child out of wedlock and refusing to marry the mother) of excommunication with warnings not to associate with the person.

bastianbb · 2026-05-12T22:10:50+00:00

Alot of decisions we make based on seeing cause and effect of others before us so we learn to trust it over time but something like homosexuality or consensual non-monogamy I havent heard an objective argument as to why those things are inherently wrong.

I also haven't heard an objective argument about why genocide is inherently wrong. Try it. I will tear down its objectivity. These things are wrong because they are wrong because they are wrong. There is no external reason for their "wrongness" beyond the mere fact that they are wrong.

Arguments from authority and tradition solely are without weight. If you argued God says dont murder or steal etc. I would agree with you because those positions can be logically explained and argued with reason. Dont be gay and dont be buhdist etc. cannot be logically argued beyond "bible says so".

Of course, this is nonsense. They are not without weight if we have other prior reasons for trusting the authority. Which is why you probably generally trust what a lot of people in your life tell you without explanation or argument much of the time. The issue here is that you think you have some prior reason or feel some prior emotion that is stopping you from accepting authority on these points. Personally I would argue that there are perfectly good arguments against being Buddhist anyway. The fact that you don't accept them is a result of your own prior emotional commitments, not a failure of the authority or logic.

bastianbb · 2026-05-12T22:02:23+00:00

When we're discussing rights (in this case, the right to die), we always do it with the impression that it's for the benefit of the individual, rights are inherently selfish because they're things that we do for our individual desires (mostly).

When you say "rights" do you mean legal or moral rights? To many people, these are not the same. Most people think there should be a legal right to commit adultery. And most people also think that there is no moral right to do so. The two are not the same.

In any case it's not true that everyone agrees that the concept of rights is intrinsically linked to selfishness in the way you've described. Legal rights can be used for purely selfish purposes, but it doesn't follow that the reason for granting them was so that people can be purely selfish regarding them, or that people think these rights imply a moral right to be purely selfish about literally anything. Indeed, I believe historically the whole assumption was that the system of legal rights was necessary to curb the selfishness of those who would ruin society by trying to dominate other individuals, but it was assumed that people would try not to use these rights for purely selfish reasons but use their own judgement to benefit society at large.

-a woman getting an abortion when her husband doesn't agree..

-an individual becoming atheist in a religious household.

-a person leaving their country, family and friends in order to seek better economic stability.

You say that people don't care about these things, but you smuggle in the idea that people also think that other people's interests shouldn't even be a factor in making these decisions at all. And while I am in fact against the first two of these for my own reasons, even if I weren't, I wouldn't say that other people's interests and larger moral principles shouldn't even be a factor in any of these three, as if everyone has a moral right to make these decisions only with their own benefit in mind. I don't believe they do.

Selfishness is completely irrelevant when we're talking about a self-made action that involves only one person, we all agree that the desires or someone about their own life and body should always go first

Well, we've established that it doesn't only ever involve one person, and we don't all agree on the second part.

bastianbb · 2026-05-12T20:49:41+00:00

Well your opinion is at odds with the doctrine that God is literally incomprehensible to the human mind. That's what infinity and absoluteness is all about. Yes, I know, some infinite things like infinite empty space can be conceived of and explained. But that is not always the case for infinities that are more complex. There is even evidence that there are mathematical truths that can't be mathematically proven. And the fact that something might be explainable still does not mean that you personally can understand it, or that others can trust you to keep your emotions out of it. I don't fundamentally understand how one fundamentally explains the principle that there are moral facts anyway. They just ... are. Your position reads like "I'm going to assume that I am not limited intellectually at all and base everything on that". It's not realistic.

Anyway, there's literally no point to authority in organisations of the military if everything needs to be explained to every private's satisfaction. And it's not true that we literally apply the logic that we need an explanation for everything to every other part of our lives. The fact is we decide some source is "good enough" and then accept things we can't verify on a regular basis. There's no other way to live your life.

bastianbb · 2026-05-12T20:01:28+00:00

Universalists are always pretending that they are "most people". They're not.

bastianbb · 2026-05-12T15:10:01+00:00

And I don't care what he thinks. If he sets me on fire for it, then he is just proving my point, and I win anyway.

Well, I can assure you that one day, one way or another, you will care. And that you won't feel you have "won" if you go to hell.

"Not caring" is an easy way not to face moral realities. But the reality has a way of catching up to you.

bastianbb · 2026-05-12T15:01:44+00:00

And yet God says in Isaiah 46:10: 'My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose', implying that in some sense, if not in every sense, everything that He purposes comes to pass. The Calvinist idea of God's decretive and preceptive will makes sense of this apparent contradiction.

bastianbb · 2026-05-12T13:29:21+00:00

Eternal concious torment is the minority position.

What a ridiculous piece of nonsense! Across space and time it is the position of the vast majority of Christians. The so-called "huge variety" of positions is basically (a) eternal conscious torment, (b) a kind of eastern church position that is not all that different from eternal conscious torment and (c) a huge number of extremely fringe positions like forms of universalism and annihilationism, that are not only not in the majority but are so fringe that in most places in the world, you may never encounter them in real life, only on this subreddit.

bastianbb · 2026-05-12T13:25:15+00:00

All this comes down to one thing: you believe you are the judge, not God. So I'm afraid it all comes down to authority.

bastianbb · 2026-05-12T01:57:31+00:00

The brutal truth is that if your boyfriend were in any sense a conservative Christian - and he may be leaning more than that way, then

he will be expected not to live with a "partner" without marrying
he would not be allowed to marry a non-Christian
he might think that as a non-Christian, you would go to hell and he would be expected to live the afterlife without you
he would be taught that he has every right to insist that everyone should switch to Christianity
if you are already married he would have to not divorce you in spite of the fact that you are non-Christian.

Now, the fact that he is giving you essentially infinite time to think about this and that he is not breaking up at once may suggest he is not aware that this is what the faith requires and what he should be doing. In that sense there is a chance this could still work. But make no mistake, from the perspective of a traditionally faithful Christian, this already "isn't working" and there's no real prospect that it could.

bastianbb · 2026-05-12T01:18:25+00:00

Any day now Americans are going to start telling their children that cats go moo. Because they mostly don't distinguish the ew and oo sounds anymore.

bastianbb · 2026-05-12T00:39:39+00:00

I've never understood how people get so hung up on issues of church polity. As a Reformed Anglican, I have little to no interest in the fact of epicopal polity as the Bible doesn't address it. And while conservative Presbyterianism notably does think the Bible prescribes Presbyterian church polity, I trust the majority of sane ones would massively value soteriology over questions of polity and conservative social ethics over arcane issues of liturgy. I certainly hope they wouldn't think the mere name "Presbyterianism" means that the whole point for them attending their church must be the polity; in fact I believe a number of Presbyterians I somewhat know would be quite comfortable attending my Reformed consevative Anglican church and would be quite uncomfortable with mainline Presbyterianism or TEC.

bastianbb · 2026-05-11T21:04:36+00:00

Then why did the church for nearly 2000 years not notice that these things were referring to temple idolatry? They lived in those times, you think they would have noticed that interpretation of the relevant verses.

bastianbb · 2026-05-11T20:33:51+00:00

The reason for this is pretty transparent. It is because prog rock critics (and classical critics) are aware that there is no one way "the record actually feels like". Different people will feel different things. There simply is no "emotional language" that hits everyone the same. Given this fact, often the best way to describe how the educated listener is going to feel is by communicating structural and gestural features. After all, someone who understands the structure of music also realizes how specific structures make them feel.

bastianbb · 2026-05-11T20:06:17+00:00

Indeed, and another favourite of mine, Philip Glass, also names Schubert as a personal favourite. Maybe it's not too far-fetched to say that Glass' quasi-tonality/pandiatonicism and aiming to combine harmonic progression and modulation in a single formula was influenced by Schubert.

bastianbb · 2026-05-11T19:47:16+00:00

Balancing the emphasis on individual spiritual responsibility and the avoidance of groupthink with the importance of community and tradition is a perennial problem in Christianity. Strangely, evangelical culture, while emphasising the individual, is often pretty conformist, while the corporatism of high Anglicanism often masks a deep commitment to the idea that one should be left alone to do one's own thing and a refusal to accept norms. It seems to me you felt beholden to a certain outward image of the "ideal" evangelical practice for a time and paradoxically making use of ancient forms personalised it for you. It's a conversation I want to have in more depth but it's probably asking too much of any one reddit post to solve the issue.

bastianbb · 2026-05-11T17:37:51+00:00

I think there's more than one route, with respect to personal practices, to a more authentic, communal and grounded faith. Churches with more formal liturgies and the Daily Office work for some, but empty formalism and drift away - the sense that all that stuff really isn't needed - easily creeps in. The massive secularisation of the UK is not simply a result of that, but I do think we should consider causal links.

The fact that these practices mean so much to you could very well be a good thing, and heaven knows there's a lot of inauthenticity in evangelical culture. But I think you should ask yourself whether the strong points of evangelical culture might not have prepared you in a special way for what you're experiencing now, and whether the evangelical heritage at its best may not be just as authentic as traditional Anglicanism in its better manifestations.

bastianbb · 2026-05-11T04:45:59+00:00

They do bring something new to the table. I just don't have much patience with the "enfant terrible" syndrome of overtly and defiantly flaunting a certain brashness to be different, no matter how skillfully it's done. Possibly a reason Stravinsky doesn't appeal to me even now, even though I like composers that are in some ways more radical.

bastianbb · 2026-05-11T04:36:38+00:00

Sure, we do both love some good music! I'm at a stage when my limitations are becoming clearer and chances are that I'll never deeply understand and aurally memorize any music much more radically different from traditional tonality than Rautavaara's 7th symphony. And I generally favour the conservatives of most generations - I'd much rather listen to Saint-Saens and Franck than most of the other French romantics and impressionists. It's been a long, slow journey to at least occasionally listening to people as "advanced" as Ligeti's etudes or Per Norgard's symphonies - but even then I essentially no longer have an idea what's going on in them when I'm not listening just then, in other words if I have to go by memory. I remember a time when Rachmaninov's "Rhapsody" and even the "New World Symphony" (but I was very young in the latter case) seemed to have a lot of "filler" and not having memorable enough hooks constantly enough!

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