economistadentata Economista, Phd student, mum, all purpose stresshead. Not necessarily in that order, on good days all 4 simultaneously.

One question politicians often get asked in order to prove their ‘real world’ credentials is the price of eg a loaf of bread, a pint of milk etc. This seems a rather silly exercise, on its own, tbh, as knowing how much milk costs doesn’t necessarily make someone a good bet to be Chancellor, for example, any more than not knowing should render someone automatically ineligible.   By their policies shall ye know them, not the content of their fridge.

More interesting to me, is whether they understand the social effects of anyincreasein these prices, whether through inflation or taxation.  Whenever I consider these issues, the following quote comes to mind:

‘When the Lieutenant of Paris goes to his desk-today, last year, every year- the first piece of information he requires concerns the price of a loaf in the bakers’ shops of Paris.  If Les Halles is well supplied with flour, then the bakers of the city and the faubourgs will satisfy their customers, and the thousand itinerant bakers will bring their bread in to the markets in the Marais, in Saint-Paul, in the Palais-Royal and in Les Halles itself.

Bread is the main concern.

The supply lines are tight, precise, monitored.  What the bakers have left over at the end of the day must be sold off cheap; the destitute do not eat till night falls on the market.

All goes well; but then when the harvest fails-in 1770, say, or in 1772 or 1774-an inexorable price rise begins; in the autumn of 1774 a four-pound loaf costs eleven sous, but by the spring the price is up to fourteen.  Wages do not rise…..Not the strike but the bread riot is the most familiar resort of the working man, and thus the temperature and rainfall over some distant cornfield connects directly with the tension headaches of the Lieutenant of Paris.’

From ‘A Place of Greater Safety’ by Hilary Mantel.

Poverty, social disorder, economics.  Everything connects.  Any politician who tries to insist otherwise demonstrates a real world ignorance that worries me far more than his/her not knowing the precise cost of his/her groceries.

Yet again, trenches are being dug, foxholes constructed in the ongoing public and political hostilities between theists & atheists.  So, I thought I’d don my blue helmet and try to contribute something positive about the work of the Church from an atheist.

I’m an atheist and I love our local vicar. 

I know.  Iknow.  I’m not meant to, am I?  I should be raging about patriarchal belief systems of oppression, or stone age fundamentalists or whatever other spluttering epithet Lord Carey has induced in my co-not-religionists this morning.

So, why do I admire Father R. so much?

Firstly, because he liveshere, both in the sense of ‘just around the corner’ and being involved in his community.  By ‘involved’, I don’t mean ‘sits on committees’ either, although he does that too.  I’m as likely to see him in the local Co-Op as I am in the local paper.  He knows this place and its people.

When we first moved here, a few years ago, I was slightly stunned to open my front door to Father R.  ‘I’m not religious, I’m afraid’  ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m not here to convert you-I just saw someone had moved in and thought I’d say hello’. Further to this, he is always, genuinely, welcoming to everyone who wants to enter his Church.   An example of this was a few years back, when I retired from being a school governor:

The school holds its Easter assemblies in the Church, and it was at one of these that the school wanted to say ‘Goodbye and Thank You’ to 2 retiring governors.  I had one of my paroxysms of fretting about it being hypocritical of me to attend, given my atheism, and so was planning not to come.  The Father R. didn’t push, or patronise, but very gently pointed out that it would be sad for the children to not be able to say goodbye, and wasn’t it for their sake that I had wanted to become a governor in the first place?

Thus rebuked (and rightly so), I went to the service, was given flowers and of course, cried buckets.  I had been reminded, in the nicest possible way, of the importance of trying to put others before myself, which I’m sure we can all agree would be a good thing for all of us to do more often.

The school in question, btw, isnota faith school.  It may have been in the past (there’s a door between the playground and the church backyard, which is a bit of a giveaway), but it is now a ‘bog standard’ local community school.  Father R doesn’t have to be involved as part of his job, but he clearly sees it as ‘his’ local school too.  The majority of the children on ‘his patch’ attend.  So he’s there, in good times and bad.  He walks alongside his community and in doing so helps us stay connected to one another.

There are, I’m sure, platoons of urban theorists/planners who could discuss the role of schools and churches as ‘community hubs’, as ‘social spaces’.  One of the things that makes me sad about the sort of contretemps Carey has stirred up this morning, (and has doubtless not been helped by actions from some atheists either) is that it erodes trust between theists and atheists, making some on both sides forget, if only briefly, our common humanity which more than any building, listed or not, is the foundation stone of a healthy society, as well as a healthy Church.

I have said elsewhere that theists can sometimes forget that just as their faith presents them with challenges, so too does atheism to those of us without a faith.  It can be daunting, knowing (or believing) that this is all that there is.    I believe, passionately, that the root of tolerance is a willingness to at least try to imagine things from another’s point of view.  People like Fr R. don’t make me envy the religious, as such, but to wonder what it must be like to have that presence in one’s life.  I cannot see how this could possibly be a bad thing.

I was challenged on Twitter this morning as to whether a reason I admire Fr R. so much is because he doesn’t ‘remotely challenge my atheism’.  That couldn’t be more wrong-he does, precisely because he doesn’t merely lecture from the pulpit (or the pages of a newspaper), using the authority of his position, but ratherliveshis beliefs.  By doing so, he is one of the people who makes me think about more than myself, and not only to try to be better, kinder, more tolerant to others, but to think through the consequences of my beliefs on others, especially those more vulnerable than I. 

It’s not for me to say who is and who isn’t a good priest.  But I know a good person when I see one.  If Lord Carey wants the Church to be protected against persecution, it is priests like Father R that represent its best hope.  His God and his Church should be proud of him.  We all are, even the atheists.

Watching Paul Mason’s Newsnight report last night on the ‘abortion wars’ in the USA, I was struck by the use of the word Holocaust to describe the granting of the right to choose to abort to women.

But first, an admission of ignorance:  I am not a specialist in either reproductive rights or the Holocaust.  But I am a human being, and a woman and therefore have an interest in this issue.  Having said that,  this is, for better or worse, definitely an opinion piece.  Apologies in advance.

Allowing access to abortion is not like allowing the Holocaust.  No really, it isn’t.

By ‘the Holocaust’ I mean, of course, the systematic, calculated, legally enforced killing of men, women and children for no other reason than their being Jewish.  I know about (& am as horrified by) the killing of other groups-the homosexual, the disabled, Roma, amongst others but the central moral resonance derives from the attempted genocide of all Jews.  All of them.

Allowing women access to abortion does not allow the systematic, calculated, legally enforced killing of all foetuses for no other reason than their being such. 

For me, any comparison of the two needs to at least acknowledge these points: their intention and philosophical origins, eugenics, the degree of compulsion present and universality.

So, the intention: The Holocaust was an attempt to wipe Jewish people from the face of the earth.  The ‘reasons’ for this, I don’t intend to discuss, as it’s clear to me they’re not reasons in the sense of ‘causes’ but rather justificatory of an action which it is perfectly clear would have happened anyway.

The philosophical origins?   Well, again, there was a long history of anti-Semitism in Europe before the Nazi state, but that does not explain the Holocaust: the Holocaust was unique in its totality.

In order for the comparison to hold, there has to be an intention to kill all foetuses and history of hatred towards all foetuses, without any exception.  This is clearly not the case in the US-the existence and influence of the prolife movement in itself proves this.

The aspect of eugenics is one that troubles me greatly, as it should:  Those against abortion often argue that by according a lesser status to a potentially viable human life, as opposed to a foetus at a later stage of development, or indeed a baby, prochoicers are thinking eugenically-Life A has less intrinsic worth than Life B despite their common humanity.

My response is this: it is the woman, a human capable of moral action, and the person arguably most concerned with the well-being of any child ex-or in-utero that is the decision-maker.  It is on her conscious, conscience-bearing body that any medical procedure will be performed.  With her consent.  By offering a woman who wishes to terminate a pregnancy the choice to do so, is not to act eugenically, because eugenic thinking does not allow for choice on behalf of any of the people most affected. 

It is often claimed that eugenicist intent on the part of providers reveals itself in the higher rates of abortion amongst the poor, the disabled or African-American women.  I think this is to conflate one or several sub-class(es), with a whole class (poor/disabled/African-American foetuses) with all foetuses: we must remember the Holocaust was the attempted killing of all Jews, not just some of them.

In addition to which there may well be confounding factors:  where contraception is harder to access, abortion may be more prevalent as a form of birth control.  Or where support for parents of disabled children is not present, mothers may feel they will not be able to cope: Neither of these scenarios is ideal, to put it mildly, but nor will these issues be addressed by restricting access to abortion.

This also applies to the matter of female infanticide.  I am a woman, and it is claimed that in some parts of the world female foetuses are more likely to be aborted than males.  I would argue that we will not solve any cultural contempt for women as people by restricting their access to abortion- femicide and denial of choice are part of the same problem.

A further thought has occurred to me; the genocidal/eugenicist comparison that the prolife movement in the US uses is that of the Holocaust in Europe.  The Native American peoples of the United States were removed from their homes, starved, beaten and were killed out of hand for no other reason than their ethnicity and I do rather wonder why it is not cited in this debate.  I specifically wonder about a. its being (literally) too close to home and b. its invocation leading to some uncomfortable political questions about the murkier aspects of the US’s ‘manifest destiny’ and self-proclaimed status as ‘leader of the free world’.

For me where this comparison really falls down is in regards to compulsion:

No-one is forced by the US government to have an abortion.  If anyone can provide me with an example where a woman was compelled by the government, using the force of the law to abort her child against her wishes I will of course link to it.  It shouldn’t need saying that it would be morally repugnant.  It needs to be said, strongly, that there are no railroads leading to any Marie Stopes clinic of which I am aware, no guards on the doors to prevent escape.  Moral suasion (if one accepts that it occurs) is not the same thing as a totalitarian state.  The former can be resisted where the structures surrounding an individual promote liberty-the latter finds individual freedom to be inimical.

Globally, there have been both proven cases and allegations of forced abortion. Again, it shouldn’t need saying, but for the avoidance of any doubt:  These cases are as revolting to me as they are to those who are opposed to every abortion.  However, these cases do not make a freely-chosen termination a genocidal act.

In addition to which, the abortion providers are themselves acting freely, which was not the case in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps-a significant proportion of guards, for example, were acting to save their own lives, by enabling the murder of others. Others may feel able to judge the rights and wrongs of such cases: I cannot.

In the interests of fairness, I do need to acknowledge the cases concerning health workers opposed to abortion on moral grounds, who have felt compelled to leave their jobs (or were fired?) due to not being allowed to exercise their conscience rights at work.  However, under the Nazi regime, there were no conscience rights in the camp (or anywhere else!).  There is a significant difference, I feel, between losing one’s job and losing one’s life.

Reading back through this, I feel utter misery that the debate has come to this:  the evocation of one of mankind’s worst moments enlisted, arguably, to shut down the exercise of moral choice by free women acting in a democracy governed by laws.

Moral choice and the freedom to act in accordance with one’s conscience.  The thing that was absent in the camps, the thing we need to protect now.