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C-of-E Foolery
February 8th, 2008I often worry about my friends in the U.K. Ignore for the moment the other burdens under which they suffer: Strict gun control, Ken Livingstone, English cuisine. Only the Jews have known more suffering.
So I should not have been surprised when the very pillar of their moral structure — in convoluted logic heretofore unknown outside of Parliament — abdicated his duty and laid all of the U.K. open to brutal and insane autocracy.
No, I already mentioned Livingstone once. This is something different.
In a theological pas de deux unseen since the inquisition turned pagans into alter boys, the Archbishop of Canterbury recently said that elements of Islamic Sharia law would be adopted by the British legal system.
This, from the same realm that gave us the Magna Carta Libertatum? My, how the morally mighty have fallen.
Archbishop Rowan Williams, who may have had a little too much communion wine, suggested that incorporating Sharia law into British common law would improve community relations and aid in integrating immigrant Muslims into British society.
I fear he missed the basic concept of integrating immigrants. Immigrants are supposed to adopt the culture and laws of their new homes. Otherwise they would be much happier in their old ones.
Laws are the rules by which people agree to live. We create laws in order to have predictable avenues for protecting ourselves from other people, and from the government. But as the syphilitic Archbishop noted:
“Nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that has sometimes been associated with the practice of [Sharia] law …”
I guess this means we must assume Williams to be insane until he changes his mind on this issue.
The problem with theological law — including any that this asinine archbishop may favor — is that such laws are the inventions of clerics, and not agreed upon by the population at large. Thus nobody except high priests, imams, and yes, archbishops, can decide what the laws will be. Thus innocent people become tyrannized by those who make a living pretending to represent Gawd.
Maybe that’s William’s end game. Perhaps he prefers judgement by ecclesiastic tribunal, where his interpretation of scripture becomes the law. Perhaps he intends to be a modern day Girolamo Savonarola and bring an end to the enlightenment of civil society composed of secular law.
To my friends in the U.K., allow me to suggest there is a witch among you, and that it should be dispatched in the traditional manner.
