While Christians in Latin America were (rightly) calling for agency, empowerment and drastic emergency measures, Williams found himself saying almost the opposite.

In British society, where Anglicanism is established, the church's task is to give away power, to divest itself of security and privilege, to use its own voice to negotiate on behalf of more vulnerable social groups.

This is a sort of liberation theology in reverse: a political theology articulated from above, rather than from below.

That was the whole point of Williams's controversial 2008 lecture on "Civil and Religious Law in England." His remarks on Islamic Shari'a law were greeted with cries of alarm and incredulity: tabloid papers ran hysterical headlines about "a victory for terrorists" or "a victory for al Qaeda," while one Home Office minister complained that Williams wanted Britain "to fundamentally change the rule of law."

For a week or two, the whole world seemed to be clamouring for the Archbishop's resignation.

But of course Williams was not trying to displace British law with Islamic law, nor to reduce all social orders to the same level, nor again merely to promote facile sentiments of liberal broad-mindedness.

He was, in fact, raising the simple Hegelian question: given that British societies include Muslim communities, is it possible to understand the ends of those Muslim communities as part of what is good for the whole society?

How might the church - a community that still enjoys a lingering glow of cultural legitimacy - use its own cultural privilege to model this process of the public negotiation of goods?

Williams's aim was to promote this Hegelian style of public engagement, where what is good for any single community becomes part of the vision of what is good for all.

Nothing could have more eloquently proved the importance of the Archbishop's lecture than the vociferous animosity of its reception.

In a climate of deeply entrenched segregation, suspicion and thinly veiled cultural hostility, his words were taken as an ominous threat - as though he had betrayed his own side in a culture war.

But if Christ is risen and the church is catholic, then there can be no "sides" and the church's role is to dismantle the whole logic of side-taking.


http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/12/05/3383800.htm?WT.svl=featuredSitesScroller

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The role of religion, not mentioned in this circular illusionary argument, is POWER... A specific power to control individual humans who roam within a social/moral construct, by indoctrinating an accepted limited behaviour. This, like the secular codification of behaviour, is mostly done to foster better general survival, presently touted with a "mostly peaceful" mercantile activity (though selling weapons for war is highly lucrative), all profitable to a society as a whole. Not all societies have the same limits or the degree of limits within — and in their contacts with other societies ... This is in a great part my discussion in "The Age of Deceit". Inasmuch the way societies are constructed with "firewalls" — or protection from loopiness of dangerous individuals within and protection from"external" pressures.

The churches of all kinds are presently the product of middle-age political systems in which most individuals had only very basic rights (or no rights at all), unless they were clergy, noble or kings. The kings needed the power of the church to brainwash the masses into believing that their kingly powers were god-given rights. This actually was an adaptation of earlier systems of "governance" in which the pharaohs of Egypt had a very prominent outright role but not exclusive to them alone. Babylon and Nineveh had their own history in shaping the Judeo-Christian-Muslim beliefs system of laws...

In order to make individual accept restriction of individual freedom, the fear of god is used as a tool to make people avoid "transgressions" that are seen and ritualised as bad for the society, while if one trespasses, the idea of the benevolence of god is used in christian religions to "forgive", while strong physical punishment (including barbaric death induction) is used to varying degree by most muslim branches.

To control individuals, the secular society use derivatives that have parallels in the christian/muslim systems of reward and punishment while minimising the barbaric element of punishment. The punishments used in secular society are deprivation of rights and money — as well as, in extreme cases, the penalty of "painless" death, though this is an ongoing contentious issue.

There is overlaps of purpose between the secular and the religious aspects, though in most western societies, the separation of "powers" is clearly stated but quite often muddled in deals and general population brainwahing trends, while in muslim countries, the secular is nearly non-existent: all the decision concerning behaviour of people is judged under "strict" sharia law.

Religions ritualise our disbelief of reality to foster belief in things that don't exist except in the frame of the erroneous concept of god... In many ways these beliefs contain enormous contradictions, including a demand for god to dispense humility upon us while we behave like the king pins of the evolutionary game — believing we are god's angels wile the rest of life is just a support mechanism to our self-importance..

It is my humble view that as societies evolve, the secular aspect of law should prevail. It should have prevailed long ago, but the dark forces of power and control are powerful... But as we are witnessing in the "Arab spring", the influence of religions is a hard one to shake. The religious nuts have won the elections...

So, the roundabout discussion from the archbishop and the analysis by Benjamin Myers are wading in mud — the added idea of god infiltration our uncertainty... The idea of god is of course irrelevant to our existence and quite a recent development in human history. The idea and our weird record of the idea of god in the bible and the koran, strongly contradicts the scientific information. The idea of god is only a relative moment in the development of humans, as it makes us fall into the apron of  the concept of a superior being while dismissing the evidence of evolution. Of course too, the pedlars of the idea of god sometimes strongly deny their unscientific approach to life is against science and fiddle their books so their mobile (cell) phones work in the secular earthly environment...

It's all well to talk about other religion in a ecumenical fashion while loosing track of the human animality and downgrading our relationship with other creatures. It would be best at this time to understand the power of our stylistic activities, without having to refer to god. Style is a development of a changing evolving nature. Most creatures show a sign of style in their own evolution (or lack thereof) that define within limits of species reproduction the "colour of their feathers" in interactions so to speak. For humans style is bathed in dealing with a greater dimension of evolving uncertainty.

The god concept has been a very crude and simplistic kitchen sink plug to this uncertainty. For whatever reason — probably having an evolved far greater than necessary memory space than needed for survival alone — humans grasped the space and time in which we relatively short-live individually, with greater understanding of "origins, of relative longer time frames and undefined space — all this increasing the inevitable uncertainty of it, which for many people can be "frightening".

Thus god created space and time with us in this soup to redeem ourselves from something we never did in an arcane past that never existed: end of quest — we know everything.... This garbage, of course, is erroneously followed by the god giveth the laws... Some of which are barely passable but most are horrendously stupid, mostly in contradiction with nature and dangerous for the future development of humankind...

Open your eyes... We live on a little planet that gave life a weird and accidental opportunity to develop via a series of chaotic steps in which elements of chemistry complexly organised themselves according to particular environmental factors at certain points in relative time. Whether some of these elements came from outer space, or not, is irrelevant.

This created evolutionary lines of "species" going back to 4 billion years until the human species appeared out of this evolutionary moire. Parallel species of humans (say Neanderthals) have sunk — either killed or absorbed in the greater fornication desires to procreate by our more adapted and adaptable species.

Now this desire to procreate in order for the species to survive and our increasing desires for stylistic comfort are our masterpiece and our possible downfall. We have reached plague proportion and we are destroying the planet that invented our life and that of other species...

We need to wake up to the reality of relativity and condemn any attempt to frame our piddly existence with the glory of being god's fallen angels. We are but a tiny unimportant specks on a very tiny dot of spacial universe. Our own importance is to ourselves, as individuals and as social beings. It is far better to be responsible to this small great idea rather than being fearful of a godly creator that tells us to go and kill the infidels while keeping women at a submissive distance behind the men.

Religion is glorious crap.