He has a seat in the Lords. So he's a British lawmaker.

It's absurd that's the case, but that's the case. His sharia law thing is an attempt to extend the absurdity to other religions.

The best article I've seen about this is from a Christian

theologian and Guardian contributor:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/simon_barrow/2008/02/williams_response_freedom_beyo.html

Clearly the Archbishop hasn't nearly thought this matter through enough. He hasn't considered a woman's position under Sharia. Does he really think that all of the women who left Strict Islamic countries to come to the U.K. want to be followed by Sharia? Surely not! Better to stick with what he knows, God's business and leave the laws of the land to the Parliament.

Someone's bound to come along and say that you can't judge religion by the same standard as science and logic.

OK ...

What I meant by that is not that someone uses a computer to prove that god exists, it's simply *internal logic*. All I ask is that the words theists use mean either what they would usually mean, or that the change of meaning is explained ... or at the very least that the meaning stays broadly consistent.

'God' is obviously a sliding signifier ... but while it's OK if the word means something different to *different people*, when it means different things *to the same person* in the *same paragraph*, it stops being in any way meaningful.

If a zookeeper, say, was describing an animal and said it was a mammal, then said it was a cat, then said it had wings, then when someone said it wasn't a mammal, it was a reptile and the zookeeper announced he meant mammal 'metaphorically' ... you wouldn't sit in awe of the zookeeper, you'd think he was, essentially, full of crap. When a theologian like Rowan Williams does it about God, the faithful see it as a sign of how 'nuanced' his position is.

'cats are mammals' means something. It even means something if by cat you meant 'dog', and by mammal you meant 'furry'. It even makes sense if you mean 'Wednesday' instead of 'cat' and 'colour' instead of 'mammal'. 'Wednesday is a colour' is a statement that makes sense. It's a false statement, but it's testable.

So many of the words theists use either mean everything or nothing. When the Christian God of the Bible was disproved, suddenly the Bible was a metaphor and God's like a cosmic consciousness energy thing, sort of like the Force. Cool, so Rowan Williams can do backflips and levitate things? Er, no, that was only a metaphor. This is only to be expected from a religion that fought *wars* over whether something that looked, smelled, tasted, felt and sounded like a wafer was a wafer, but it's absolutely fair enough for people to get suspicious if your belief system hinges, to coin a phrase on what the exact definition of 'is' is.

If religion is about truth and ultimate meaning - or even points in that direction - then there can't possibly be any harm in testing it to see how truthful it is. If our language is inadequate to the task, then we try to work out a better, *more* precise language. And if it makes predictive or scientific claims that can be tested, then if it fails those tests, or is caught fudging the results, it's absolutely fair comment to say that.

Theists should not recoil from words like 'evidence' and 'testable' and 'logic' like a vampire from sunlight. But they do, they always do.

There's something in that, but I think you can take it one step further and it reveals the big false premise in the Archbishop's belief system:

He equates 'Christianity' with 'all Christianity'.

If you asked him whether Adam and Eve existed, whether he has a 'personal relationship' with Jesus, whether homosexuality was a sin, whether abortion should be illegal, whether global warming exists, whether natural disasters are 'God's punishment' and whether Muslims worshipped a different God to him, he would answer 'no' to all of them. The only one that he'd even have to think about is abortion. Not only that, the Archbishop, whose schtick is basically to equivocate and keep things vague, *has* said no.

If you asked a typical American Christian fundamentalist, they'd answer 'yes' to most if not all of them. They wouldn't have any angst or trouble answering the questions.

'Christian' is not a useful description. It isn't just a broad church and a big tent, it contains people who don't just take different views on issues, they take the *opposite* view. On every single hot button issue, the Archbishop of Canterbury would agree with 'secular liberals' over his fellow Christians.

Now ... most people faced with that would perhaps, I don't know, wonder about it. But, no, Christians decide that the problem is the atheists. Once again, the basic illogic of faith goes unexamined, untested and unchallenged.

Secularists seek to dissolve all intermediate bodies with claims on the loyalty of the person: church, family, business.

I'm about as secularist as it's possible to get and my primary loyalty is to my family.

In fact family is really my only loyalty. State and business deserve no loyalty from me since they have no loyalty to me, all they wish to do is use and abuse me for their own purposes.

I have no church and desire none so loyalty to a church is a moot point for me.

I deplore the archbishop's statement but not because I suspect he is trying to sneak religion back into the public square by some sort of alliance with the Muslims. Rather it further undermines the influence of Christianity by equating it with Islam. IAC, I am mused when the writer speaks of "myths" without acknowledging that secularism has its own myth with an attendent faith. An important part of this myth is the delusion that society is composed of autonomous individuals who lives their lives without any permanent relationships except that of subject of an all powerful state. Secularists seek to dissolve all intermediate bodies with claims on the loyalty of the person: church, family, business. In their universe only the polis, or maybe only the cosmopolis matters.