© Roger M Tagg 2016
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
Richard Holloway was, until 2000, Bishop of Edinburgh, Scotland - in the Scottish Episcopal Church (a member of the Anglican Communion). He now works as a writer, reviewer and broadcaster.
He resigned as bishop because of the differences of his views on modern issues such as homosexuality with those of the church's mainstream. He had been bishop since 1986.
This book is partly an autobiography, and partly an apologia.
I would have to admit to being very close to his views on a wide range of things to do with living.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Prologue | 10 | "From somewhere I have been afflicted with the gift of confidence, of appearing to be knowledgeable about something I am actually making up as I go along." |
| "The toughest lesson life teaches is the difference between who you wanted to be and who you actually are." | ||
| 10-11 |
"... I know now that roads choose us and what they unfold before us is not the person we want to be, but the person we already are, the person time slowly discloses to us." | |
| 15 | "What I was actually good at was looking the part ..." | |
| 1940 -1956 | 38 | "... the thrillers and Westerns [films he went to] fortified a tendency, later amplified by religion, not only to hazard roles I was not cut out for, but also to see life in theatrical rather than prosaic terms." |
| 39 | "What mattered to my friends in the playground on those Monday mornings was that I took them out of themselves with my fictions, not that I hadn't actually seen the movies I described to them. Implicit in my fraudulence was a theory of religion, though it would take me years to figure it [that] out. | |
| 40 |
"We become true deceivers when we understand the purpose of our deceptions, when we admit that the stories we tell carry their own meaning within them, even if there is no objective reality beyond [behind?] them, no movie actually seen, no stone actually rolled away from the tomb." | |
| "... many preachers become imposters to themselves out of tenderness towards their hearers. [RT: The hearers don't want to hear that you are making it all up.] | ||
| "... for years I was to revel in the power of stories to challenge and console." | ||
| 41 | "... I was looking for transcendence ..." - especially when walking alone on the hills. | |
| 74 | "Sadly, Christianity has been more intent on repressing and misrepresenting sex than on helping people manage it wisely." He goes on to suggest in words what the Church perhaps should be saying. | |
| 75 | "... myth, which is the narrative form of all religions." | |
| "The best myths have immediacy. We get them, see ourselves through them. They are mirrors." | ||
| St Augustine of Hippo's take was that "had Adam and Eve not eaten of the tree, they would have propagated children without ... the desire that is the engine of sexuality". [RT: by implication, Sin] So presumably "all chastity must fight ... this urge". [RT: Christianity still seems hung up on this one.] | ||
| 77 | "... because of its gross misunderstanding of the real nature of sex, Christianity has become a dangerous and untrustworthy guide on the subject." | |
| 1958 -1967 | 108 |
"The biggest discovery was that there was a world outside religion. I had been so intent on following God that I had paid little attention to the world he was supposed to love." |
| 120 | "... a demand came through Jesus that could be separated from questions about God ... he said it was actions not words that God was interested in, mercy and justice not professions of belief. ... It wasn't creeds he wanted, but the battle against oppression." | |
| "This was still a cruel unequal world, as cruel as when Jesus had startled its leaders by telling them God was not on their side, but on the side of those they trampled on. The beautiful thing about this line was that it parked the supernatural question in a lay-by - permanently." | ||
| 123 | "... troubled men could become instruments of grace for others but never for themselves. They saved others, themselves they cannot save. | |
| 138 | "The idea that there existed an immutable Good that drew the heart and made it unsatisfied till it rested in it was one of the themes of Christian theology ..." | |
| 142 |
"Religions are full of these separation strategies [like who's allowed to take communion with whom]. Though the expressed rationale behind them varies enormously, fear is a strong factor: fear of ritual or racial pollution, fear of the anger of the jealous god; and the ancient clerical fear of letting their constituents be seduced by rival claimants." | |
| 144 |
"We need institutions, but they are always instrumental goods, good for something else. That something else is human flourishing, which is an intrinsic good, good in itself." | |
| "Religions are a famous battleground in this debate, because they imagine their rules and regulations are not just another variant of human arbitrariness, but have immutable transcendental authority behind them, a delusion Jesus challenged." | ||
| But ... "Most people prefer the familiar scales of stability to the jazz of creative morality". | ||
| 150 | "... I actually felt a strong revulsion against the morality-policing aspect of religion that was such a strong element in the Scottish tradition." | |
| 151 | "All institutions over-claim for themselves and end up believing more in their own existence than the vision that propelled them into existence in the first place." | |
| "Religions may belong as vehicles of longing for mysteries beyond description, but they end up claiming exclusive rights to them." | ||
| 152 | "They shift from poetry to packaging. Which is what people want." | |
| "They don't want to spend years wandering in the wilderness of doubt. They want the promised land of certainty, and religious realists are quick to provide it for the." | ||
| "The erection of infallible systems of belief is a well-understood device to still humanity's fear of being lost in life's dark wood without a compass." | ||
| Adam Phillips: "Supreme conviction is a self-cure for infestation of doubts." | ||
| Hume: "Errors in philosophy are only ridiculous; errors in religion are dangerous." | ||
| 153 | "... to be an effective gatherer [of large congregations - or of clients to sell anything to] you had to be excessive in your beliefs." | |
| 159 | "... agnosticism ... encourages us to live gratefully with uncertainty ..." But it "can lead to intellectual smugness ..." | |
| 160 | For atheists "God is not dead, he never was". But ... "there is no sense from them of the momentousness of what has happened" - or the 'empty space'. | |
| 1968 | 175 | "The revolt [1968 US campus demos on Vietnam and civil rights] seemed more like a bout of religious apocalyptic fever than a movement for planned reform." |
| -1984 | 176 |
"... I'd had it with the human lust for paradises. Humanity's longing for them was its most dangerous drug. Why couldn't we settle for making the world not perfect, but less savage and more gentle?" |
| 177 |
"Pity is sorrow at another's sorrow, pain at another's pain. To feel another's sorrow! That has to be the way out of human hatred. Pity! Yet it is a word some despise. And not just revolutionaries and ideologues for whom pity is always treason, because it blunts the edge of cruelty, their chosen weapon." | |
| 178 | "... maybe we had to pity ourselves in order to pity others." | |
| 179 |
"The fixed and certain word is lethally effective. This is why the people of the Maybe are ineffective. ... Maybe the compulsion to impose their values on others has been undermined by the pity they feel for them, even as they feel it for themselves." | |
| 184 | "The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is uncertainty." | |
| 185 | "Believers are not encouraged to take the plunge of faith, they are invited to swear to the certainty of a series of historic claims that come in propositional form. That is why religious history is so full of disputes over competing interpretations of the certainties contained in the faith package." | |
| 186 | "How does such hard and punishing certainty emerge from the existential gamble of faith? Paradoxically, it is lack of faith and fear of doubt that prompt it." | |
| "If you want to sell anything, whether a commercial product or an ideology, hyper-conviction is an essential element in the transaction." | ||
| "Pooling your doubts, sharing your uncertainties ... will never persuade multitudes." | ||
| 195 |
"Religion names the dead [e.g. remembrance books, monuments, walls etc] in protest as well as hope, and God is the object of the protest as well as the hope." But the dead, and God, do not speak back to us. | |
| 196 |
"The hope of religion can be neither proved nor extinguished in this life, and we cannot know whether there is another life in which the matter will be finally resolved. This is why there is so much noise on both sides of the debate about religion, noise being the thickest overcoat available to cover us against the chill of uncertainty." | |
| 203-4 | "As with erotic longing in general, religious longing promises much but delivers little. And it is not hard to diagnose the problem. It is the unavailability of the Great Lover. If sex with an available person can be problematic, it is infinitely more problematic with the Great Absence." | |
| 205 | People need to feel some ecstasy, so "That's what the Pentecostal or Charismatic movement did for its practitioners in the Seventies." | |
| 207 | "The history of religion is full of revivals like this, attempts to experience the god in new ways and whip up enthusiasm and inspiration among his followers." | |
| 208 | "... escape into ecstasy can be demonic as well as benign. There can be ecstatic destruction and genocide as well as ecstatic joy and release." [Nürnberg rally?] | |
| 209 | The Church's "biggest theological challenge has been to keep them believing in a God who saves the world, in spite of powerful evidence to the contrary". | |
| 210 | "Bad religion can be comforting, a blanket that protects us against the chilly winds of an empty universe, but it can be dangerous too." | |
| "Belief in the imminence of the Second Coming became the preserve of the Christian Right in America, where it became one of the most powerful weapons in America's culture wars ... a conspiracy of humanists, liberals and feminists, who are out to destroy the family and eliminate Christian values from the US." | ||
| 211 | Jerry Falwell though we shouldn't bother about degrading our environment on the plane, because "Jesus would be back soon to end the world, so we should use it before we lose it." | |
| 223 |
"We fed the hungry and visited those in prison and clothed the naked and tried to share our goods with the poor. But the dead did not rise, the lame did not walk, the blind did not see." | |
| 224 | "Maybe religion was best understood not as a science to explain why there was suffering, but as a way of gathering people round the mystery of suffering." | |
| 225 |
Where was God in Auschwitz? "...dead ... and we are alone in a pitiless universe. ... or dying beside us ... [?] Whatever my answer ... he was no longer the God I had started out with." | |
| 237 |
"However, the first law of institutions is their own survival. They rarely dissolve themselves when they have accomplished what they set out to achieve. When it looks as if their significance is fading, they go into revival mode." | |
| 249 |
"Americans believe in belonging as passionately as they believe in believing. The shadows on this astonishing democratic energy are the conformism and outbreaks of group-thinking that regularly afflict the nation." | |
| 250 | "It is as if America suffers from an auto-immune deficiency disorder that attacks the antibodies of scepticism and irony, which are there to protect us from the toxins of social hysteria and group rage." | |
| 1986 | 271 | "No wonder [because of his father's attitude to laws] I cam to believe that Jesus's most subversive claim rendered all social and religious law provisional ..." |
| -2000 | 272 | Wittgenstein: "... to be religious is to know that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter, and that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life have still not been tackled at all." |
| 276 | Bruce Chatwin "believed that most of the ills we suffer are the result of settling down, not moving on; of trying to possess and exploit creation, instead of treating it with the courtesy of passing guests". | |
| 284 | "We know they [the Gospels] are heavily edited documents ... That is why some scholars are sceptical about the words that have been put into his [Jesus's] mouth by the gospel writers." But, RH says, not in the case of the Good Samaritan story. | |
| 284-5 | "Their heart [the Priest and Levite] prompted compassion, their religion prompted caution, and they followed their religion. But in the Samaritan ... compassion overcomes ..." | |
| 285 | Conservative Evangelicals didn't like this approach - it was 'interpretation' of text we have been given "from Outside". | |
| 287 | RH was not really a believer in hands-on Apostolic Succession, in particular in determining who's IN and who's OUT. [RT: I remember arguing the same as a student 55 years ago.] | |
| 288-9 | "Patriarchal religion may add a transcendental spin to male assertiveness ... but it is essentially a subgenre of the universal power game among men, the only difference being that its pretentions extend the action into the next world as well as controlling it in this one." | |
| 290 | Virginia Woolf thought that male exhibitionism and power games, as well as "demonstrating superiority over other people ... encourages a disposition towards war." | |
| 292 | "I had seen the crisis (HIV & AIDS, in Boston) bring out the best and worst in people, but it was the best that prevailed and, in the end, it silenced the taunting voices of the Christian Right." | |
| 293 | "I was already clear that there was no point in negotiating with fundamentalists." | |
| 298 | "There are more things to admire in the Church than to despise." | |
| "The congregations that were growing, the ones good at evangelizing, were the scary ones, the ones that spoke with absolute conviction about everything. Conviction sells. Did that mean that uncertain, unjudging Christianity was on the way out? Or was there something we could do about it?" | ||
| 299 | "I felt there was something unhealthy about an approach to Church growth that worked by persuading people they were suffering from a terminal disease called Sin for which only their Church had the cure." | |
| 300 | John Saxbee wrote that we ought to listen "to two tunes at the same time", rather than switching on and off between religion and the modern world. | |
| 301 | "Was there a gap for the Church that accepted the theologically confused because it acknowledged its own theological confusion?" | |
| "I was uncomfortable with high-octane believers and high-performance spiritual achievers." | ||
| 315 | "The problem for the Church in the twentieth century was that many of the pressures for human emancipation were coming from the secular rather than the religious sphere, and Christianity is always suspicious of moral imperatives it did not invent, seeing itself as the uniquely qualified conscience of humanity." | |
| "It is hard for institutions that believe they are divinely inspired and guided [,] to admit they are wrong about anything." | ||
| "The Church can never just do the right thing because it is the right thing to do; it has to find religious reasons for doing it." | ||
| 318 | In "Anglo-Catholicism there was nostalgia for the strong leader who would navigate the flux of history and pilot the Church infallibly through its storms." | |
| "This kind of nostalgia ... is at the root of all totalitarian systems: religious, political, intellectual." | ||
| "It is the longing for permanence and stability in the chaos and tumult of history; the need for something that abides ..." | ||
| "Unfortunately, there are no magical deliverers who can deliver us from ourselves and our muddles." | ||
| "Nevertheless, I find it hard to deny others the consolation of believing they have found one that works for them." | ||
| "Anglicanism had never claimed that kind of infallibility for itself. It knew it was a muddle; a muddled Church for muddled people." [RT: Onya - that's what I need!] | ||
| 319 | Robert Runcie "was an instinctive Anglican of the old English type that distrusted enthusiasm and ideology. A devout pragmatist, he believed that institutions were best kept together by adaptive changes ..." | |
| 323 | "A Nigerian bishop had been spreading the rumour at Lambeth [conference of 1998] that my [RH's] support for gay liberation was because my daughters were lesbians." [Which was of course untrue] | |
| "... there was a profound sickness at the heart of so-called Biblical morality, if it could lead to such hatred and cruelty." | ||
| 325 | "My problem was not so much with God as with increasing disbelief in religion's claim to possess precise information about his opinions, including his sexual and gender preferences." | |
| "The ceaseless flow of history was a big problem for religion, especially in those versions that believed they had received a timeless revelation that answered every question and solved every problem." | ||
| 327 | The theme of RH's book 'Godless Morality' (1999) was: "Might it not be better, since God's opinions seem to be so constantly misunderstood or so varied, to leave him out of our moral disputes and debate them on good human grounds?" | |
| 335 | "I felt glutted with the verbal promiscuity of religion and the absolute confidence with which it talked about what was beyond our knowing." | |
| 336 | For RH, religious language "confidently claimed to make present that which I experienced as absence; though it was an absence that sometimes feels like a presence, the way the dead sometimes leave an impression on rooms they spent their lives in." | |
| "The best I had been able to do was to persuade myself and others to choose to live as if the absence had a presence that was unconditional love." | ||
| After resigning, RH gathered all his sermons "together and put them in black bin bags. | ||
| Epilogue | 341 | "I wanted nothing more to do with the men in pink dresses and their vehement opinions." |
| 343 | "Was religion a lie? Not necessarily, but it was a mistake ... The mistake was to think religion was more than human." | |
| "I was less sure whether God was also just a human invention, but I was quite sure religion was. It was a work of the human imagination, a work of art - an opera - and could be appreciated as such." | ||
| "The real issue was whether it should be given more authority over us than any other work of art, especially it it is the kind of authority that overrides our own better judgments." | ||
| "It is one thing to be in a state of ignorance - to believe that women are inferior to men, that gays are an abomination ...it is another thing to go on holding that opinion in the face of clear evidence to the contrary ..." | ||
| 343-4 | "Authority does not prove, it pronounces; rules rather than reasons; issues fatwas. It refuses to negotiate." | |
| 344 | "Because the Bible tells me so ... and so does the Pope" is no longer good enough. [RT: I take this as an aspect of the gradual subordination, over the last few centuries, of authority (claimed by physical force or status in some organization) to evidence and human consideration.] | |
| "I don't mind you sticking to a 3,000 year old myth of creation that says God made the universe in six days. It's eccentric, but I can live with it unless you try to impose your eccentricity on everyone else. But where women and gays are concerned it is not just an eccentric opinion, it is an active injustice, a sovereign cruelty. I have to withstand that. ... Your opinion gives hate crimes respectability." | ||
| "... because of asserting your authority rather than debating the issue, you open the whole religious enterprise to derision ..." | ||
| 345 | "Don't abandon it (religion), any more than we ought to abandon the other great flawed cruel epics of the human imagination: but don't listen to its mad voices." | |
| "I wanted to keep religion around, purged of cruelty, because it gave us a space to wonder and listen within. ... religion's poetry could still touch us, make us weep, make us tender, and take us out of ourselves into the possibility of a courageous pity." | ||
| 348 | "I am tugged still by the possibility of the transcendent. But only whispers and tugs; nothing louder or more violent." | |
| "Religion's insecurity makes it shout not whisper, strike with the fist in the face not tug gently with the fingers on the sleeve." | ||
| But, "Who could be persuaded by my whisper?" | ||
| "... I no longer want to persuade anyone to believe anything - except that cruelty, especially theological cruelty, has to be opposed ..." | ||
| 349-50 | "Norse mythology showed me again that the way we act does not so much make us as reveal us; our response to circumstance shows us not what we want to be but who we actually are." | |
| 351 | Nietzsche: "My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is ... all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity ..." | |
| "... it is not strictly correct to say the Dealer [RT: God? Fate?] bears all the responsibility for the hand (as in card games). You played it, after all, and some things you could have done differently." |
I don't have a lot to add. It reads as a very honest personal account. I found I agreed with most of his positions.
My question would be - where do we go from here? Is it the basis of a future style of 'build your own' philosophy of life? Are there any existing sects that could move along these lines?
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 8th June 2016
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .