Giles Fraser speaks the truth

I've said some things about Giles Fraser on this blog in the past, but recently — since his resignation from St Paul's — he's been pleasingly unpredictable, and my previous minimal respect for him has grown. He still says stuff I disagree with, but his performance on this morning's Thought for the Day makes me want to put previous disagreements aside. As I soaked in the bath I could hardly believe what was coming out of the radio: no-nonsense speaking of truth to power — and on Thought for the Day!

Well done Giles.

Downloadable mp3 from here, for 30 days:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/thought/thought_20130304-1117a.mp3

Streaming audio here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p015vmw9

Text transcript from BBC website:

This morning the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland is waking up to one of the biggest crises in its modern history. A few weeks ago, Cardinal Keith O’Brien was expecting to be in Rome electing the next Pope. Now he’s in disgrace, vowing that he’ll never again take part in public life.

We still don’t know the details of what he did, simply that he’s admitted to sexual misconduct amongst his fellow priests. Charges of hypocrisy have been swift to follow. This month last year, the Cardinal was on this very programme attacking gay marriage as evidence for the “degeneration of society into immorality”. Indeed, he insisted: “if the UK does go in for same sex marriage it is indeed shaming our country.”

So why is it that all the churches - and not just the Roman Catholic church - seem to attract so many gay men who are themselves so virulently hostile to homosexuality? Perhaps it has to do with a misplaced sense of shame about being gay, a sense of shame that they go on to reinforce by being vocal supporters of the very theology that they themselves have been the victims of. As the novelist Roz Kaveney tweeted yesterday: “I feel sorry for O'Brien. I hope one day he realises that the sense of sexual sinfulness the Church forced on him was an abuse.” And that “O'Brien needs to distinguish between his sexual desires and his bad behaviour and not see all of it as sin.” I totally agree.

The election of a new Pope provides an opportunity for real change. The culture of secrecy that fearfully hides this bad behaviour – and not least the clerical abuse of children – needs dismantling from its very foundations. Inappropriate sexual relationships, relationships that trade on unequal power and enforced silence, are the product of an unwillingness to speak honestly, openly and compassionately about sex in general and homosexuality in particular. The importance of marriage as being available to both gay and straight people – and indeed to priests – is that it allows sexual desire to be rightly located in loving and stable relationships. I know there are people who see things differently, but I’m sorry: the churches’ condemnation of homosexuality has forced gay sex into the shadows, thus again reinforcing a sense of shame that, for me, is the real source of abuse.

Things may now be changing. It is encouraging that four priests have had the courage to speak out against a Cardinal – though one of them has expressed the fear that the Catholic church would “crush him” if they could. This is precisely the climate of fear that does so much to create the conditions of clerical abuse.

“It seems to me that there is nowhere to hide now,” said Diarmaid MacCulloch, the professor of the history of the church at Oxford University in a recent interview. He goes on: “We have had two Popes in succession that have denied that the church needed to change at all. The Roman church has to face realities that it has steadily avoided facing for the last thirty years.” And I might add, not just the Roman church, but my own church too.

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Clearly I'm not alone in my assessment of this particular TftD:
http://www.platitudes.org.uk/platblog/index.php?entry=entry130304-081648

Am I no true atheist?

I'm a bit worried about my credentials as an atheist ("gnu" or otherwise). I know who the Four Horsemen are, but I couldn't tell you which came first (was it Dennett or Harris?). Off the top of my head I can't give you the entire URL for Pharyngula, nor can I reliably list all the hosts of the Atheist Experience TV show. I know there were lots of historical figures who professed atheism, but I certainly couldn't list them.

As if these failings weren't serious enough, I find I'm also unable to recite the full title of Charles Darwin's seminal work known for short as The Origin. Surely no true atheist would fail so miserably at declaring atheism's central dogmas?

Oh wait. Atheism has no dogmas, so I've nothing to declare but my lack of belief in a god or gods.

In an amusing but spurious bit of table-turning, this morning Richard Dawkins found himself being put on the spot by Giles Fraser on the Today Programme. Dawkins was unable to reel off the The Origin's full title when challenged to do so, and for this embarrassing blanking of mind in the heat of a live radio discussion some Christians have unjustly accused him of hypocrisy.

To those Christians I would say you're missing the point. Listen to the radio piece itself:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9696000/9696135.stm

Here's the Today Programme's page on it:

Research carried out by for a secularist foundation has suggested that most of those who describe themselves as Christian in Britain have only a low level of belief and practice of the religion.

A poll carried out by Ipsos-Mori for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science indicated that half of those in Britain who say they are Christian rarely go to church while nearly 60% do not read the Bible.

Prof Richard Dawkins, founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, told the Today programme's Justin Webb that most people who call themselves Christian merely "tick the Christian box".

When asked whether the figures told us anything of use, Professor Dawkins insisted it "told us an awful lot" because it puts into doubt the place of Christian practices in society such as bishops in House of Lords and the presence of faith schools.

However Reverend Giles Fraser, former Canon Chancellor of St Paul's, called the findings "extraordinary" and maintained that it was not fair to trump people's "self identification" as Christians.

He said that "there are all sorts of ways to express Christianity" and that we should not be "purging religion from the public square".

Dawkins' fumbling with The Origin's full title was cringe-making but irrelevant, and here's why. Charles Darwin's On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection — Or The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life is not a sacred text. Dawkins might have been expected, given his area of expertise, to rise to Fraser's challenge, but the fact that on this occasion he was unable to do so means nothing more than that he had a temporary memory lapse. Such lapses are not unusual — most people have them. This particular lapse doesn't mean that Dawkins isn't a "true atheist", nor does it mean the points he was making aren't valid.

Giles Fraser tried, as religionists often do, to make atheism and Christianity somehow equivalent — two sides of the same coin. They're not. Christianity has sacred scripture containing common beliefs about supernatural events and persons, along with "moral" laws and "moral" guidance. Atheism has none of these things. All atheism has is lack of belief in any deity.

The survey in question, however, shows that a majority of people who self-identify as Christians don't meet the criteria that Christianity is commonly taken to involve. They don't know the scripture, they don't hold the beliefs and they don't follow the guidance. Their self-identification should not, therefore, be taken by policy-makers as an indication that a majority of people hold to Christian beliefs, when clearly they don't. There are religious factions in government, however, who seem so desperate to preserve religion's disproportionate influence, they are willing to misrepresent what people believe.

Giles Fraser claims it's unfair to say that people who self-identify as Christians are not really Christian just because they don't know the scripture, don't hold the beliefs and don't follow the guidance. In effect he's saying that just because people who are atheists in all but name still self-identify as Christian, it's unfair to describe them as not Christian. Maybe he's right; people should be allowed to call themselves whatever they want. But this shouldn't give the government an excuse to impose "Christian" laws on a population who, despite what they say, are clearly not Christian in the generally accepted meaning of the term.

And if atheists have no dogmas, can't recite a creed, and don't read Darwin — this too is no excuse for imposing "Christian" law.

Giles for the Day

The Rev Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral has come up with some weird suggestions for appropriate responses to crises in the past, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at his advice for dealing with the outbreak of rioting and looting throughout the country last week.

While the media and the Government pondered the correct action to take to stem the lawlessness, Giles Fraser had an altogether "alternative" solution:

Do nothing.

I'm surprised he didn't suggest lighting a candle, as he has before. Presumably this crisis was so serious it required the full force of moral action to nip it in the bud. You might think it was a bit late for that, but when the action suggested is in fact inaction, it doesn't really matter precisely when you don't do it.

Glory in the the advice of the Giles here, for a limited time:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00jq9jw

Or read the transcript:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00jq9jw
(Yes, it's the same link — streaming audio and text on the same page.)

Or if you're a glutton for punishment, get the podcast:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/thought

(It's been suggested to me that I'd be a lot happier if I avoided Thought for the Day in general, and Giles Fraser in particular. But I listen to the BBC's premier morning radio news programme — Today — and sometimes I just can't avoid the Godspot. Fortunately my blood pressure is commendably normal, so a bit of witless pomposity does no more than limber up the critical faculties at the start of the day.)

Theology for the masses

It's less than a week since The Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral, informed us on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day that America's financial problems were foreshadowed in the Garden of Eden. Now he's berating politicians for using fancy phrases that don't mean anything.

Not that theologians would do anything like that, of course — though Giles does acknowledge dismissals of theology as "unrealistic stargazing" and "the musings of unworldly philosophers with their heads in the clouds". However, says Giles, "...theology, like blue-sky thinking, is the attempt to see things in the widest possible context." Or to put it in a way comprehensible to the ordinary bloke and blokesse (that is, those who are so lacking in the finer subtleties of academe they can't tell exegesis from hermeneutics), theology is like a zoom lens pulling back to its widest setting. That's right, theology lets us see everything. But just in case said bloke and blokesse get a bit cocky by being shown how easy theology really is, Giles tosses in a snippet of Latin to keep them in their place.

Lest we think he's off on a flight of fancy, he warns us, "Of course the practical minded are not wrong to worry that all this abstract reflection can easily slip its anchor with reality." Next, to reinforce his cultural credibility he quotes a verse of poetry. By this time we're approaching the end of his allotted three-and-a-half minutes, and though Giles has dutifully included something theological (remembering to dumb it down for the hoi poloi), thrown in some Latin and even some poetry — he's so far not mentioned God.

But never fear — the flight of fancy may be postponed but it's not forgotten: God is everywhere! And God is in the details!

"One might even say," Giles continues, "that this incarnation of theology of God-become-human is the original localism." One might, but what would it mean if one did?

Whatever the "original localism" might be, Giles won't let those stick-in-the-muds obsessed with practical reality blunt our wild speculations. "Indeed, too often, talk of 'being realistic' is just code for a failure of the imagination."

Wild speculation, apparently, is essential to politics, just as it is to theology. I think the "practical minded" may be right. Giles Fraser slipped his anchor long ago.

Theology isn't all hermeneutics and exegesis

Theology is such a useful subject. You can apply it to anything and nobody can contradict you. It uses strange words like "hermeneutics" and "exegesis", which allow you — if you're so inclined — to bamboozle the uninitiated. But the greatest thing about theology is that with it you can sound superficially intellectual even without the big words. All you need to do is link what you're saying back to scripture, and you will imbue your mundane rhetoric with the authority of holy writ.

But be careful not to overdo it, otherwise your fatuous ramblings could be seen for what they are, and you'll be in danger of exposure as an intellectual fraud.

Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral, doesn't use the big words when he's on Radio Four's Thought for the Day. Three minutes isn't really enough to get down and dirty with the exegetical ramifications of a Bible verse, especially not at breakfast time. As for hermeneutics, unless they can be eaten with milk, sugar and added bran his audience probably isn't interested.

On Tuesday morning Giles took his cue from Rowan Williams and talked about debt. He laid out his relevant qualifications, just so we can be in no doubt of his authority on the subject. "I'm not an economist," he said. Nevertheless he went on to explain that America's current problems are the the same as those of Adam and Eve, and the reason Greece needs to be bailed out by the Eurozone is because of "the fall of man".

I'm not a theologian, but it seems to me that the Rev. Canon Dr. Giles Fraser has once again amply demonstrated theology's utility¹ and its relevance to the modern world.

Behold — for thirty days and thirty nights — the Fraser thought here (mp3):
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/thought/thought_20110727-1110a.mp3

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1. I think there should be an "f" in that word somewhere.

The Rev. Canon Dr. Giles Fraser, Sniper-in-Chief

Giles Fraser

Is Giles Fraser attending the World Atheist Convention in Dublin this weekend? I don't know what he was expecting, but he seems to have been surprised by one of the speakers, Richard Green of Atheism UK (whom I was pleased to meet at the most recent Winchester Skeptics in the Pub). Anyway, Fraser has written up his reaction in the Guardian.

What is distinctive about Atheism UK, Green insists, is that it's an atheist organisation for all atheists, including those not committed to humanism. "We cater for atheists who are not humanists," he says.

A laudable goal, I would have thought. I'm all for inclusion. But Fraser manages to look down his nose at it.

These days, atheists who are not humanists are an unfamiliar breed. Most atheists, and in particular the new atheists, regard themselves as committed humanists. Indeed, they are new in name only for they appeal back to the atheistic humanism of the Enlightenment, with its optimism about human nature and strong belief in the power of human reason and the inevitability of progress.

It's no good castigating the "new" atheists for not being new — this soubriquet was coined not by the likes of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Dennett, but by their detractors (such as, dare I suggest, the Rev. Canon Dr. Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral).

The sunny optimism of the Enlightenment – not least its commitment to progress and a sense of the intrinsic goodness of human nature – was profoundly dented by the horrors of the first world war and the Nazi death camps.

Three paragraphs in, and we're on to the Nazis. Well done Giles!

The Enlightenment hadn't found another word for sin.

Why on earth would it need to?

And just as Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, a developing anti-humanism started to announce what, in less gender-conscious times, Foucault was to call "the death of man". Indeed, Nietzsche himself insisted the belief in humanity was itself just a hangover from a belief in God and, once God was eradicated, the belief in human beings would follow the same way.

It may come as a surprise to Fraser, but Nietzsche is not the atheist God — because, well, you know, it's in the description: "atheist". Nor do atheists, or even humanists, need a belief in human beings. Speaking about belief in this way is simply a misuse of the term, much like bemoaning atheistic denial of "sin".

Richard Green's "atheists who are not humanists" could meet in a phone box. Indeed, the new atheists simply duck the challenge made by atheistic anti-humanism, believing their expensive scientific toys can outflank the alleged conceptual weakness of their humanism.

Aside from the pejorative sniping it doesn't surprise me that Fraser makes a specific quantitative claim without backing it up. And who says that "atheists who are not humanists" are in favour of anti-humanism (whatever that is)? As for expensive scientific toys outflanking the alleged conceptual weakness of their humanism — what does that even mean?

Thus they dismiss the significance of philosophy just as much as they have always done of theology – as if the two were fundamentally in cahoots.

I see little evidence of atheists or humanists dismissing the whole of philosophy (A. C. Grayling,  Daniel C. Dennett, Stephen Law — to mention just three atheist philosophers off the top of my head). As for theology, Giles you can keep it. I've no use for your kind of theology, especially as you seem to believe it doesn't even have to be true.

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Eric MacDonald has read Fraser's peanut and dismembers it with a sledgehammer.

A Moral Maze — of science and morality (BBC Radio 4)

On Wednesday BBC Radio 4 concluded the present series of the Moral Maze, its weekly live panel discussion on topical issues of morality. Unlike most other radio discussion panels, the Moral Maze adopts a cross-examination format, calling witnesses one by one to be quizzed by the regulars. As it's a live show, things can sometimes get a bit heated. (This also depends on which of the regulars are on the show in any given week, and who is chairing the panel — David Aaronovitch has temporarily replaced Michael Buerk for the latter part of this series. Melanie Phillips' more incendiary views often spark fireworks, though she wasn't on this week.)

The topic on Wednesday was science and morality, and two of the witnesses were Giles Fraser and Jerry Coyne. Fraser doesn't seem to have learned from his encounter with Sam Harris (but Fraser's views appear remarkably ill-defined at the best of times, especially on Thought for the Day). He impaled himself categorically on one horn of the Euthyphro dilemma by stating that God's morality is not intrinsic to God but external to him (which surely makes him less of a god). But theology has never been Fraser's strong point.

Jerry Coyne dealt patiently with his interrogators' questions, but clearly could have used more time to develop his responses. In some ways he was an untypical choice for this topic (maybe they couldn't get Sam Harris), but nevertheless he did well.

The audio can be streamed from the Moral Maze website or direct from iPlayer:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b011jv8m
Check out Jerry Coyne's two posts on his blog Why Evolution is True:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/i-iz-on-moral-maze-today/
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/moral-maze-podcast/

Giles Fraser lays aside his woolly mantle to review Sam Harris

Tonight Sam Harris is discussing morality with Giles Fraser. As I previously blogged, this is the event nearest to me, out of Sam Harris's three announced appearances on his UK book tour. Nevertheless I decided not to get a ticket because so far I've been severely underwhelmed by Giles Fraser (his recent spot on the Today Programme with A. C. Grayling is an example).

Earlier today, however, I discovered that last Saturday Guardian Online published Giles Fraser's review of The Moral Landscape, and reading it I found myself wishing I had swallowed my misgivings and arranged to attend the discussion. (The fact that IQ2 decided not to live-stream the event after all, is but one more regret.)

So what is it about Fraser's review that has brought on my change of heart? Mostly it's because he seems to have cast off the woolly mantle that has to date muffled anything of his I've come across. He reviews The Moral Landscape in a forthright manner, with hardly any wishy-washy equivocation. I still think he's wrong in most of what he says about the book, but his review convinces me that his discussion with its author would be more interesting than I had thought.

Fraser takes some potshots at Harris, but I think they misfire. For instance, on David Hume's point that you can't derive values from facts:

But Harris will have none of it. Science has sold itself cheap. The peace treaty must be torn up. Science can indeed tell us about morality. Indeed, science can determine morality.

Fraser also commits — on a grand scale — what might be called the "not my religion" fallacy:

With regard to the god Harris describes, I am a much more convinced atheist than he – even though I am a priest. For Harris asks constantly for evidence, with the implication that if he discovered some, he would change his mind. My own line would be that even if the god he described was proved to exist, I would see it as my moral duty to be an atheist.

He goes on to imply that he's heard it all before:

What is presented as Harris's big new idea is really just reheated utilitarianism with wellbeing in place of pleasure.

I also think Fraser has missed one of Harris's key points:

There are so many problems with utilitarianism, it's a pity Harris does so little to address them. How can one quantify the sum total of wellbeing produced by a single action when the potential consequences of any particular action are infinite? So keen is he to turn morality into science that Harris presses on regardless. His demand is that all morality be calibrated on a single scale. Yet if one observes what it is that people call good (and isn't observation a scientific golden rule?), instead of assuming what good ought to look like, one surely recognises very different sorts of moral value.

It seems to me that Harris does indeed address this — it's what I understand by there being different peaks in the moral landscape. Fraser legitimately raises the necessity of some kind of metric for determining how high up the peaks or deep in the valleys moral actions are, as have other critics, but Harris isn't saying he's got all the answers. He's asking for science to be brought to bear on moral questions. Fraser, however, won't have it:

Harris sees the great moral battle of our day as one between belief and unbelief. I see it as between those who insist that the world be captured by a single philosophy and those who don't.

Here we see Fraser's woolly equivocation breaking through once more. It sounds to me like a plea not just for pluralistic society but for pluralistic belief. Such is, after all, the Anglican way.

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UPDATE 2011-04-13:
The mp3 audio of the Fraser/Harris discussion can be downloaded here:
http://iq2.podbean.com/mf/feed/bhegmw/sam-harris-IQ2.mp3

A Secular Bible — and barely disguised disdain

The Today Programme this morning featured a discussion between "famous atheist" A. C. Grayling and Thought for the Day regular the Rev Canon Dr Giles Fraser. Grayling was on to plug his latest book, The Good Book: A Secular Bible — characterized as an atheist version of the Christian Bible. He's an accomplished philosopher with a knack for plain speaking without rancour, and so this is one I'll be checking out.

Giles Fraser — he of woolly theology — was apparently on as "balance". Despite his remarkable claim that very few Christians hold to the idea that belief in God is a necessary precondition for morality¹, he could not restrain the typical disdain theists reserve for anyone of a godless persuasion who dares to imagine that a fully engaged life can be lived in the absence of a god. It was all jolly banter in the studio, but with a noticeably condescending subtext.

I doubt, however, that any of this will have put off Grayling from his book-promotion — nor should it. Compared to him, Fraser comes across as an intellectual midget whose jovial ripostes may make for a mildly entertaining end to the BBC's flagship morning news radio programme, but beyond that they are of little consequence.

Incidentally the Guardian has an extensive interview with A. C. Grayling that may serve as an antidote to the foregoing Fraser-frustration:
AC Grayling: 'How can you be a militant atheist? It's like sleeping furiously' | Books | The Guardian

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1. So few Christians hold to this belief, and yet atheists debating theists encounter it all the time.

Sam Harris — three UK appearances

Last night I eagerly followed a link on Twitter to discover that Sam Harris is coming to the UK next month, and will appear in London, Bristol and Cambridge. This is something for which I'd been on the look-out, as I'm a big fan of Sam Harris's writing. I have to admit that The Moral Landscape doesn't have quite the literary sparkle of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, but I nevertheless consider it a highly important work.

Naturally I'd like an opportunity to hear Harris speak in person. My anticipation has been dampened, however, on discovering that his appearance nearest to me — 11th April in London — will be a discussion with the Rev Giles Fraser. Who on earth thought that would be a good idea? To me it seems like a complete mismatch. Giles Fraser is a woolly-thinking theologian whose utterances on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day range from the somnolently bland to the jaw-droppingly vacuous.

Sam Harris's appearance at the Cambridge Wordfest on 16th April will be a discussion with Ian McEwan. That's something I'd be keen to hear, though Cambridge is a bit far from Portsmouth for an evening event. The other date, 13th April at the Bristol Festival of Ideas, appears to be Harris on his own, and is even farther from me. Regrettably, therefore, I may just content myself with the Intelligence Squared live video stream from the 11th April London event.

(I note from the Lecture Schedule on Sam Harris's website that he is this very day debating William Lane Craig — I wonder if a recording will be made available....)

The theodicy of Haiti doesn't bear thinking about (so let's not)

I get my first news of the day from BBC Radio 4, specifically the Today Programme. Yesterday regular host John Humphrys asked¹ the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, why God allowed such terrible suffering to be inflicted on the innocent people of Haiti. The Archbishop didn't have a coherent answer, though he did at least condemn Pat Robertson's ugly accusation (that the Haitians had it coming because their ancestors made a pact with the devil):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5TE99sAbwM



The Today Programme  audio stream for Thursday, January 14th is available here (scroll down to 0831):
http://news.bbc.co.uk//today/hi/today/newsid_8458000/8458361.stm

Or download an mp3 of the relevant clip from RapidShare here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/335314721/Today_JohnSentamu_Haiti_BBCR4i-20100114.mp3

"Stories of survival are emerging from the rubble in Haiti. Troy Livesay, of the Christian charity World Wide Village, lives with his family in Port au Prince and has written a moving account in the Guardian about his family's survival. He begs people to prey for Haitians. Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, comments on how people turn to God during times of disaster."

( Troy Livesay's Guardian account is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/13/survivors-tale-haiti-blog-extract )

When disaster strikes the innocent, theodicy is revealed as the empty wailing of those who know they have no excuses for their supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God, but this morning on Thought for the Day theodicy's guilty vacuity was brought to a new low by Giles Fraser:

"...at a moment like this, I prefer to leave the arguments to others. For me this is a time quietly to light a candle for the people of Haiti, and to offer them up to God in my prayers. May the souls of the departed rest in peace."

Well thanks a bunch Giles! I'm sure your candle and prayers will be so effective in helping the Haitians in their dire plight, and might even convince them that — despite appearances — God loves them after all! (I'm sorry, but when I heard this execrable peroration this morning I uttered an extremely audible profanity.) This isn't the first time the Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser has used Thought for the Day to hide behind verbal obfuscation, and it illustrates precisely why the slot should be opened up to secular humanist viewpoints.

RealMedia audio stream:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/realmedia/thought/t20100115.ram

Podcast audio:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/thought/thought_20100115-1008a.mp3

Download mp3 from RapidShare:
http://rapidshare.com/files/335825978/Thought__15_JAN_10.mp3

The script for Giles Fraser's thought should be is now available soon; meanwhile you can read an alternative interpretation at Platitude of the Day.

UPDATE 2010-01-19: On Saturday's Today Programme, atheist philosopher A. C. Grayling was asked to respond to both John Sentamu and Giles Fraser. He was calmly rational (as always), but scheduled at the very end of the programme he had insufficient time to deal in full with the idiocy that is theodicy. The vacuous blatherings of Messrs Sentamu and Fraser last week have been rightly castigated across the blogosphere — Manic Street Preacher's recent post contrasts similarly reprehensible, knee-jerk statements in response to tragedy with those displaying a more compassionate outlook.

The audio stream of A. C. Grayling's valiant but time-constrained effort is available here (scroll down to 0854):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8462000/8462906.stm

Or you can download the clip from RapidShare as an mp3:
http://rapidshare.com/files/337961781/Today_ACGrayling_Haiti_BBCR4i-20100116.mp3

¹UPDATE 2010-01-22: A transcript of John Humphrys' conversation with Archbishop John Sentamu is available at the JREF Swift blog.