Kinispots and Faculae

I wanted to put two nonsense words up there as the title but strangely the second one exists; it is the plural of the bright regions of the sun’s photosphere. DON’T GO AND LOOK FOR IT!

I wanted to watch the programme about Patrick Henry College on Channel 4 last night but I forgot about it. I had to content myself with getting annoyed about their statement of faith. The fact that this college apparently supplies the highest number of interns to the White House is very worrying. While the current incumbent is at least too canny to state this level of belief in the literalness of the Bible, I can see some seriously dangerous back-pedalling coming in the future. The bit about all those who die outside of Christ being confined in conscious torment for eternity is arrogant and cruel in the extreme. Even the Catholic Church seems about to abolish the concept of Limbo for unbaptised children (apparently partly in the face of the fact that most Moslems believe that ALL children go to Paradise) so PHC seems to be moving against the tide. I also discovered that Dante placed Saladin in Limbo along with Virgil and the other worthies rather than in hell as I imagined, though thinking about it I always had a sneaking respect for Saladin though this may have been reinforced by recent likening of current issues to Crusades. This fits with my view of the Knights Templar being better people than the normal view of them but again this is probably to do with current reading rather than any established belief of mine. It shows how much of the world only survives because people do respect other views rather than being arrogantly dismissive of them. There must be a dichotomy between the morality of being a Christian (at least as far as the morality that I see being a Christian virtue) and not being able to accept the existence of truth in any other religions. Indeed this must be true of any religion with a moral basis. I think I may be straying into the area of Moral relativism (or possibly logical positivism) but as I don’t know what any of these ‘isms’ actually mean I think I should steer clear of them.

In a nutshell you can :-

a. Believe that your religious views are right and everyone else’s are completely wrong and that they will burn in hell for being wrong. At least you are sticking to your religion. The point here is where you draw the line – see Emo Philips’ joke.
Remember – without faith I am nothing.

b. Believe that everyone is right and that all religions are a view into a sort of pool of spirituality – if you have a decent set of moral beliefs then you accept anything up to a point. This is definitely Moral relativism which is a bad thing for both PHC and the Vatican.

c. Realise that all this back-and-forth introduces so much doubt about what is right that you have to start thinking that only experience and scientific experiment can document the ‘truth’. Is this empiricism?

I suppose this leans dangerously into Philosophy, again something I know little about having got all I know from Sophie’s World.

All of this is noise – watch out for PHC is what I really mean.

All of this entry has been sound tracked by Gregorian Chant by the way.