Saccharine Religious Mythology

Today is Saint David’s day. Seeing a leek adorning the Google homepage this morning gave the impetus for me to search Wikipedia for the relevant hagiography. Old Saint Dave was a Welsh archbishop who founded a monastery and advocated an ascetic lifestyle, requiring the monks in his charge to plough the land without the use of the technology of the day, which gives us a glimpse in to the religious mindset. He also forbade his followers from eating meat and drinking beer (not much fun) which makes me wonder if he was familiar with what the New Testament said about such matters (maybe the version he had said something different). The miracle associated with Saint David allegedly occurred during the Synod of Brefi where he was preaching against Pelagius, who was another British monk. Some of the people at the back of the crowd complained that they could neither see nor hear David. At this point, the ground beneath David’s feet swelled up in to a small hillock, raising him up (no doubt symbolically as well as physically) so that everyone had a clear view. This is all great fun but you would have to be a few leeks short of a vegetable patch to actually believe that happened. As the Humanist Saint David (Hume), our country’s greatest philosopher said in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

"no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish”.

What are we to think of Saint David’s miraculous ascent up the axis mundi.

Is any of this of interest?

Some people who don’t believe in God and don’t approve of the things that clerics say go a step further in declaring religion and religious history a non-subject. They say that the plethora of religious beliefs across the globe are all false and that a second conclusion follows, that all religion is passé , irrelevant, uninteresting and not worthy of study. This is a non sequitur. The current president of the National Secular Society thinks that there are too many programmes about religion on British TV. He has recently been asking who is interested in and watches programmes such as the recent series from the BBC, Christianity: A History and Channel 4’s Around the World in 80 Faiths. Well, I’m a secularist as well as being a Humanist and I liked watching both series. Many people are fascinated by learning about Stonehenge but this does not suggest that such people are necessarily druids or pagan. The history of Britain and Europe is intertwined with the history of its religious traditions and to fail to be interested in looking at how religious thought has developed around the globe is to be uninterested in the development of human civilization. Crucially, the smorgasbord of beliefs presented by Anglican vicar Peter Owen Jones included a section on Atheism. Admittedly he didn’t present Humanists in a particularly good light, travelling to Russia to visit a meeting of rationalists. His comment that the meeting seemed a bit dull when compared to the dramatic and colourful religious traditions he had visited had some truth in it because the truth can seem bland to people living on a diet of saccharine religious mythology. No doubt Richard Dawkins would say that the challenge for Humanists is to excite people with a sense of wonder at the real world and to go out and create appropriate art and symbolism to reflect that wonder.
I think that it is important that we maintain an awareness of the religious heritage of the British Isles through religious education in our schools and through the maintenance of historic sites. I have never been to Saint David’s cathedral in Wales which is supposedly built on the site of the old monastery. Would students benefit from visiting such a building as part of their education? Is there any educational value in reflecting on Saint David’s denunciation of the Pelagian heresy. I think such a discussion provides an excellent entry in to even more interesting discussions about the nature of free will - to philosophy proper.

Photos by
Casper Gutman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jesus_Chapel_St_David.jpg)
Chris Rivers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:StDavidsCathedral.jpg)
Andreas F. Borchert

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clonard_RC_Church_St_Finian_02_Detail_2007_08_26.jpg)