Boy, What an Idiot!
Civitas, 8 September 2006
Today’s Times contains a report about a former University of Cambridge Chaplain and ordained Anglican priest whom the Church of England has apparently given license to continue to officiate at its services, despite his having converted to Hinduism, having changed his name to Ananda, and his having gone in for blessing daily a Hindu congregation daily in a Hindu ritual using fire connected with its snake god Nagar.
A photograph accompanying the report shows the Anglican priest praying before a statue of the Hindu elephant god, Ganesh.
When I read the story, the word ‘IDIOT’ immediately sprang to mind, but not quite for the reasons you might think.
As an impoverished undergraduate I made the easiest money I ever have, as I recall what back then was the princely sum of a fiver, by submitting the winning entry in a weekly competition run by the long since defunct journal Punch which invited readers to explain for what the acronym IDIOT stood.
I explained it stood for an organisation whose full title was ‘Inter-Deic Integrator of Original Theisms’. This body, I explained, had been created with the aim of persuading the deities held sacred by each of the world’s main religions of their respective individual excellences. It hoped thereby, I wrote, that these various deities would eventually unite to create GOD that is, a Greater Ontological Deity, which consortium would be a sort of UN of all-powerful powers.
In having thought as I did upon reading today’s story, it should not be supposed I considered dimly of the Anglican priest for having converted to Hinduism. This is a religion, or more strictly an assortment of religions, for which, like him, I too have the highest regard.
I do think silly, however, the justification for his form of religious synchretism which he is eported to have given in his book Trading Faith: Global Religion in an Age of Rapid Change which is that ‘Hinduism accepts the divinity of Jesus and is an especially tolerant and open faith’.
Doubtless, what the good reverend says about Hinduism is true. But, that no more shows Christians can or should acknowledge and worship Hindu deities than does the fact that Jesus recognised the divinity of the God whom Jews believe in and worship means that Jews can and should return the compliment and recognise the divinity of Jesus and pray to him, or that Christians and Jews and Christians both can and should admit Muhammed to be a prophet and accept is teachings simply because he recognised Moses and Jesus to have been divinely inspired.
Ah well, each to his own, I suppose were matters of faith are concerned.
I remain deeply sceptical, however, that the reverend’s regular prayers to Ganesh, traditionally, the Hindu god of good fortune, will indefinitely spare him being debarred from practising as an Anglican priest, given that the office of his diocese is also reported as having denied any knowledge of his conversion to Hinduism until this week.