According to the Sunday Times, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams has said that the US wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain during its imperial heyday.
Interviewed by a British Muslim magazine, he criticises Western civilisation saying "Our modern western definition of humanity is clearly not working very well. There is something about western modernity which really does eat away at the soul".
Continuing he says "If the soul is, to give the most minimal definition, that dimension of us which is most fundamentally in conscious relation with the Creator, then those things which speed us up and harden us are going to get in the way of the soul. We don’t know how to talk about it any longer but it is language that we still reach for." In short, it appears to be something about the pace of life getting in the way of religion. Hmmm. He doesn't seem shy about spending the fruits of hard work though.
He also says "The more our education system is dominated by functionalism, skills, productivity, and the more our whole society is determined by that kind of mythology, the harder it is for the religious voice to be heard. There is a real abrasion between lots of the forms of modernity and religion". He has a point about education being vocational not educational, but to claim that work is a mythology given HIS job as a professional proponent of mythology, is a joke. He is right there is abrasion between modernity and religion - but I would say it is reason and religion.
Meanwhile while saying that the Muslims world must acknowledge that its "political solutions were not the most impressive" we commends praying five times a day. He calls for more engagement between communities, fine in its own right, but also to, in his words "help Muslims see that "not everything about the West is destructive, secular and undermining of virtue."
Not everything no, he isn't exactly a defender of it is he?
Ah to end the links between the church and state completely!
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