man of glibness

Dr Tim Hawkes, PA*, headmaster of The King's School, Paramatta

As I've said, I don't intend this to be a conversation with George Pell anymore, but I'm still tempted. Just looking at references to Pell on google (looking for my own blog actually, but it's slipped off the radar), I find enough material there for a lifetime's blogging. Trouble is, I find enough material everywhere for a lifetime's blogging.

What I want to reflect on is a lifetime of bemusement over faith-based belief systems. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they're all equally foreign, whether in their moderate or fundamentalist forms.

I'm very grateful to be living in a secular state, a more secular state than the USA, because faith-based belief systems can be quite frightening. Many believers are looking for converts and bemoaning their lack of political power. I feel it's part of my duty to keep their hands off those reins.

It's not hard to find examples of scary believers, but here's one, via Barista or Road to Surfdom, can't remember which.

Tim Hawkes is a headmaster (no, not a new-fangled 'Principal') of a prestigious Sydney school. To judge from the photo on the SMH site, he has a born-to-rule snoot about him, which I admit raises a desire for disdain. He has chosen to write a piece on a pot-boiler called The Da Vinci Code, or perhaps rather on the film (tenth-rate, by all accounts) based on it, since that's just been released.

Unsurprisingly, Hawkes is given to magisterial pronouncements. Here's one that caught my eye - and was in fact intended to, since it stood alone in its own spaced para:

In a society made vulnerable through only a nominal understanding of its own faith, it would appear that many who read The Da Vinci Code are questioning their Sunday School instruction.

A revealing sentence, suggesting that those who question their Sunday School instruction do so because they're 'vulnerable'. Clearly, to Hawkes, it would be better to be 'invulnerable' and not to question. A very loaded term indeed, this 'vulnerable'. Of course, given the choice between vulnerability and faith, I know what I'd choose, but really there's no either/or. Hawkes chooses not to face the fact that for many in our society faith is not an issue, and Sunday School, for better or worse, is a long-forgotten institution. Whether or not this makes us more 'vulnerable' (to what I wonder? To thinking perhaps?) is probably a matter of faith.

Hawkes is fond of using that most chilling of words in his religion, 'heretical'. I swear I could whiff the scorching flesh and hear the screams as I read his scornful dismissals of the 'discredited' non-Biblical texts that the novel/film relied on. He based his dismissal on nothing more than that they were written at a later date than the 'accepted' gospels. The fact is, though, that there's no evidence that any of the texts were eye-witness accounts of the life of Jesus, and we have no real way of knowing that any account of Jesus' life is more accurate than any other. Certainly we can't take temporal closeness to the events of the life as a reliable guide to accuracy - ask any investigating officer.

A much more amusing piece of silliness occurs when Hawkes takes issue with a 'factual error' in the book/novel relating to Jesus' divinity:

Among his errors are [the statement that]... - Jesus was not God: The very earliest Christian writings declare with absolute constancy and consistency that Jesus was considered God, even in his own lifetime.

Hawkes appears to overlook the fact that no amount of declarations of a person's 'godness' by members of his particular cult actually makes that person a god, but be that as it may, the 'absolute constancy' of the declarations is surely questionable. Having read a version of the Bible myself recently, I recall being struck by how little Jesus' divinity was mentioned, if at all. However, that needs further investigation. I'm deeply suspcious, though, of Hawkes' absolutism. His whole presentation is full of shallow self-confidence. A man to be kept well clear of the reins.

*Pompous Arsehole