If Douglas Murray sees fit to appear on TBQs, who am I to sneer ?
Still, most people see the programme as sensationalistic and pugilistic. Poppy and corny; it provides light relief from the heavy religio/ political programming on either side. Jeremy Kyleisation of the Sunday morning ‘God’ slot.
True, TBQs’s front row is usually full of the BBC’s go-to controversialists, but last Sunday morning, despite the presence of Anne-Marie Waters and Peter Hitchens who looks increasingly like a parrot, no-one got heated enough to get Nicky hushing everyone and begging them not to all talk at once. Perhaps in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist incident people felt slightly less obliged to tiptoe round the religion of peace, but it was interesting to hear the claim that unless the perpetrator is caught in the act crying “Allahu Ackbar,” citing Islam as a motivating factor in a given terrorist attack is speculative and uncalled-for.
Less platitudinous was the second Big Question about confidentiality within the Catholic confessional, and is it/should it be sacrosanct?
Nicky Campbell seemed to be working on the assumption that all paedophile priests must have gone behind the black curtain to confess to a colleague at some point, reliant on celestial confidentiality and redemption, and exemption from hellfire without all the fuss and bother of going to prison.
Not being a Catholic, I know not if holy fathers treat each other like doctors and dentists do, but I always thought that the confessional was designed to absolve the guilt / scare the bejesus out of lesser mortals, like children and the subservient.
In an age of counselling and psychiatric therapy, is priestly absolution an efficacious method of dealing with guilt and shame? The TBQs debate danced round the issue without tackling the fundamental business of original sin, confession and absolution, concepts which seem like hangovers from the dark ages, which, sorry Catholics, should be done away with..
