A Pusillanimous Priest.

This morning Radio Four had "Humphrys in search of God", interviewing Rowan Williams. John Humphrys is an ex-believer, and the purpose of the program is that he asks leaders of three religions to convert him back. Given that Humphries is a journalist, it is no surprise that it was the good old fashioned Problem of Evil which did for his faith. As a consequence, much of the focus of the program was on that area.

It was a truly painful experience listening to Williams negotiate the twists and turns of the architecture of nonsense which he has had to construct in order to find some evidence of God in the world. What it seems to amount to is that if people pray and are generally sort of holy, then they weaken the membrane between this world and God's, and occasionally some good stuff gets through to help people cope with all the pain and misery of existence. And that's about it. It's as if he's an atheist who feels a duty to pray because he can't think of anything else useful to do for the world.

Strange; so often we atheists are accused of nihilism. Whereas, it seems to me that the world is a neutral place which we can fill with true glory and beauty if and when we so choose. In other words, I live with and through hope every day. Williams, on the other hand, seems to see the world as a horrible place, so horrible that he has to explain any good he can find in it as God's work, because he can't imagine that it just comes from people. (Or, indeed, nature, chance, and all those other wonderful things). Wretched man.

Fascinatingly, at the end he says "God alone can judge how much of your resistance to God is culpable, due to selfishness, laziness of spirit, bloodymindedness, and how much is just due to whatever got in the way." I despise with all my being this idea that there is some sort of moral responsibility to accept God, but it is easy to see how this offers Williams his own get out clause. In his worldview, God is in all the good bits, and so he is doing good just by believing. That must be comforting to a man whose moral cowardice was written large, in public, in his pitiful climbdown over gay priests. Bugger off and write your rubbish poetry, say I.