More Bishop Bashing

Natalie Solent has links to the blogospheric bashing of the wainscot-faced bishops.

To which we must now add, via Normblog, that just man Nick Cohen, and the saintly Rev. Peter Mullen.

Cohen -

Saddam Hussein was responsible for the deaths of more Muslims than any other modern tyrant. One million died after he launched his war against Iran. Between 100,000 and 150,000 died in his war against Kuwait. Back home his police state murdered about 300,000 Iraqis and Kurds.

Admittedly, not all the dead were Muslims. In the mass graves are the bodies of Assyrian Christians, whose memory you might have expected the C of E to honour, and Iraqis, Kurds, Iranians and Kuwaitis who didn't believe in any god. Still, we have 1,250,000 Muslim corpses.

I'm an atheist. But if I'm wrong about the afterlife, the bishops may one day have to explain the moral basis of their toleration of mass murder to a higher authority than newspaper scribblers.


Mullen -

"Bishops and Synods in the Church of England have pronounced on every issue from glue sniffing to the hydrogen bomb these last twenty-five years. They want us to believe that they are lending us the divine perspective on matters too intransigent for professional political or military remedies. Thus they declare on the rightness or wrongness of all wars, they enter the minutiae of every aspect of social policy from the future of the inner cities to the operation of the coffee market.

Such gestures of assistance would be most welcome if only the bishops had demonstrated their competence in matters happening in their own backyard, so to speak. But instead we find that their theological and liturgical policies over the last thirty years have emptied the churches. These men are not faithful shepherds."