R4 Today (28 Feb): Tom Holland interview equating trans debate to the Reformation

[boatyardblues]

Tom Holland précis: only a small number of people so not sure why its so heated (“roiling”), society is a bit behind in its thinking, we just need to be nice to the oppressed. I think Justin was interviewing but he made the point some people feel like the trans stuff was agreed at a meeting by a group of youngsters and the rest of us didn’t get the email. (Nice one!)

Anyway, what a load of shite. If you try to unilaterally change the meaning of words and upend scientifically observable reality and then try and force it on everyone, it affects every man, woman and child in society - not just the “tiny number” of people pushing it. As for the ‘be nice’ argument - well, we should consider the needs of everyone in society to have their rights, bodily autonomy, dignity and safety respected.

Another shouter at the radio here. He may not e explicitly come down on the side of TRAs, but by placing the TRAs on the side that included universities, institutions etc etc and describing that side as “progressive “, his view of those who won’t do the Christian thing and think about the poor, oppressed minority was very clear.

That there was absolutely no challenge from the male interviewer to either “progressive” or “oppressed”, and the piece was essentially an extended advert for the Trans take on Lent thing they’re running will tip me into my first ever formal complaint.

My memory of learning about the Reformation was that Martin Luther was fed up to the back teeth with the Roman Catholic church peddling crap like paying for 'indulgences' in which the church pretended the purchase would mean your dead relative would spend less time in purgatory before getting to Heaven.

In this sense, surely the original Protestant Reformation was more like feminism - trying to call out an exploitative, controlling regime.

In England in Mary I's reign horrific burnings took place as she desperately tried to force everyone back to Catholicism. This seems much more like the TRA witchhunts of people who won't comply with an ideology that seeks to take their rights away again.

Male and female are Christian constructs?

You heard it it here, everyone! The concept of human sexual dimorphism was invented by Christians, and that's why none of the parts of the world where Christianity has not historically dominated had any concept of man versus woman until Christians turned up. Ancient China was a gender roles free paradise, because no Christians, and the ancient Egyptians had no idea how to differentiate between men and women or even that men and women might be a thing.

Is this what happens when your mind is so open that your brain falls out?

I thought I’d misheard when I heard that. What a dodo.

Yeah but Antibles the Reformation seems sensible at first sight until you think it through and remember that the supposedly better way was still promoting sky fairies, just with more internally consistent rules for the fantasy.

Ooh now, I'm seeing an analogy with self-id and current GRA. No GC in sight, it is off in a lab inventing telescopes.

Surely the point is that the Reformation involved one set of people forcibly enforcing their own personal politics on others against freedom of belief, thoughts, choices and autonomy, backed up by a terrifying regime involving trials, burnings and executions. Which side was doing the burning changed intermittently, but that's the evil. Not whether or not one side was right enough to justify the murder, slaughter and abandonment of all morals and tolerance for others.

Sky fairies is an unnecessarily rude dismissal of other people's beliefs. The answer, for hundreds of years, has been successfully live and let live alongside each other, it's just been interrupted periodically by groups trying this kind of madness. Syphillitic madness played quite a large role, so did sociopathy.

I’m fairy certain that the just shall live by faith alone wasn’t a call for self ID.

It was more of a renouncement of the Catholic Church claiming that special people could be guaranteed to get into heaven if they paid enough money and followed the special rules.

(this is mostly copied from a Facebook comment I made this morning so apologies if you're in the same group and this looks familiar!)

He wasn't likening the trans issue specifically to the reformation. The trans issue was being used as an example of the social changes we've seen since the 60s around sex in particular, and saying that a period of such social change may be as significant as the reformation but that we're too close to it in history to give it a snappy title yet.

I think the trans stuff was chosen as the example because of Rachel Mann's Lent talk and it seemed to be another way to talk about trans and religion at the same time. I agree with a pp that the today prog seem to be having trouble filling their airtime at the moment.

What TH is really good on is how Christianity has shaped the way the modern west thinks, even if people are much less likely to be Christian now.

For instance, that in the trans issue there is a clash between the fact that sex is physical and immutable (and some Christians will believe this connected to the book of genesis rather than purely scientifically), and that Christianity has always had within it the principle that vulnerable people should be protected. (Of course in this conversation it was a given that the vulnerable people are the trans community rather than women - but I don't think that was completely TH's fault.)

I think the choice of Rachel Mann for the lent talks is deranged and the talk about the 'journey of a trans woman into her identity' being parallel with Jesus' journey to the cross borderline blasphemous. (I'm not suggesting that anyone other than Christians would care about the blasphemy issue.)

Yeah but Antibles the Reformation seems sensible at first sight until you think it through and remember that the supposedly better way was still promoting sky fairies, just with more internally consistent rules for the fantasy.

Yes! I was just musing really that, as the name implies, the original motivation was not to set up a whole new church but Martin Luther protesting about the practices of the church, the way it exploited and frightened people, held the reins of power and the supposed ear of God , all the ostentation etc, so I always had a vague sense of there being a social justice and general moral element to that as opposed to it being purely doctrinal. In a world where religion held sway so totally, how hard it must have been to speak up and argue for any reform, let alone atheism (not that he wanted to!).

Anyway, my issue would be with someone on the radio comparing women's sex-based rights with the greedy roman catholic church and trans ideology being the cleansing movement of the reformation! Although freezer's post implies it wasn't quite like that - I didn't hear the original piece.