SOF North Oxfordshire

January Meeting

2012-01-13T18:04:00.000Z

Monday 16th January, 7.30 pm
at Hugh & Rosemary's home

At our last meeting we started a discussion stimulated by Don Cupitt's latest book and Ian Stubbs' review of it (see below). We plan to continue this month where we left off in December. Duncan Wilson identified issues that he felt had not been adequately addressed and agreed to start the meeting with a brief outline of his concerns. This should be another interesting and stimulating evening.

December Meeting

2011-09-15T09:29:00.000+01:00

Tuesday 20th December, 7.30 pm

at Hugh and Rosemary's home

We will be reviewing our November Seminar with Tony Windross and taking a preliminary look at Don Cupitt's new book: Turns of Phrase: Radical Theology from A-Z, after which we will take a seasonal break with mulled wine and mince pies.

Ian Stubbs has put an interesting review of Turns of Phrase on the Amazon site. You can read it here. And you can read the entry in the book on God, a 'leading' idea, here. This is where we might begin our discussion.

Calendar

2010-01-01T16:02:00.061Z

North Oxford Group Meetings

Autumn/Winter 2011/12

19th September - Are we asking the right questions?

November 21st - Report on the Oxford Day Conference

November 26th - Seminar: 'In Conversation with Tony Windross'

December 20th - More talk and mulled wine and mince pies
January 16th - Turns of Phrase: Radical Theology from A-Z (Part II)
February 20th - First of our discussions on Rites of Passage: Death, Funerals & Thanksgiving.

Other dates for your diary -

SoFiC Day Conference 2012

Sea of Faith in the Churches (SoFiC) is a special interest group within the Sea of Faith Network that explores the interface between church and SoF, and is open to anyone who is interested. It provides a meeting place for those SOF members (and their friends) who find themselves in the midst of, or hovering on the edge of, the Christian Church.

Saturday 10 March 2012
Kensington Unitarian Church, Notting Hill, London

BEING CHURCH - on a rising tide?

Speakers will include Brian Mountford, Vicar of the University Church, Oxford, Fellow of St Hilda's College, and author of the book Christian Atheist: Belonging without Believing

Sea of Faith National Conference 2012

Friday 13 – Sunday 15 July 2012 at the University of Leicester

“Work and Worth”

Principal speakers will include: Professor Femi Oyebode, (Professor of Psychiatry , University of Birmingham) & Professor Harriet Bradley (University of Bristol)

About Sea of Faith

2010-01-01T00:04:00.003Z

Sea of Faith is a network of groups and individuals who share the understanding that religions and religious faith are human creations and explore together the implications of such an understanding for their moral, spiritual, and social values.

SOF has no creed. It explores the implications for spiritual, social, educational and ecological issues that arise from embracing the provisional nature of religious insight.

It welcomes people from all faith and humanist communities, and those with no involvement in any organised religion. The membership reflects a range of experiential, intuitive and intellectual concerns.

The Network took its name from a BBC television series The Sea of Faith, presented in 1984 by Don Cupitt, then Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The television series and the accompanying book had in their turn drawn their title from Matthew Arnold's poem of the 1860s, Dover Beach.

Cupitt argued that we should cease to mourn the decay of traditional beliefs. Instead he offered a vision for the future of religious faith as entirely human, centred in spiritual and ethical activity.

This vision prompted an exploratory conference in 1988. Further conferences have been held annually and it was out of these that the Sea of Faith Network emerged. There are local groups spread throughout the country.

These are autonomous bodies, some meeting monthly, some quarterly, some preferring open, unstructured discussion, others organising lectures, workshops and one-day events. Members receive bi-monthly newsletters and magazines, written primarily by the membership.

There are also Sea of Faith networks in New Zealand and Australia.

WIndross Poster

2009-12-31T23:08:00.000Z

2009-12-31T17:09:00.000Z

A review of Turns of Phrase on Amazon by Ian Stubbs.
Ian is Priest-in-Charge of All Saints, Glossop, and is a longstanding member of Sea of Faith.

DonCupitt is the Hadron Collider of religious thinking. His mind is like atheological, high energy particle accelerator bringing ideas from a range ofdisciplines into creative attraction and collision, re-writing theology andadvancing our understanding of the possibilities of being religious inpost-modernity. This book could be seen as a notebook of his experiments inwhat he terms head-on theology.

Cupitt is the only theologian, certainly in Britain, to take post-modernculture seriously enough to develop theology from within. The book title issignificant because his key starting point is language, that we construe ourworld, give it meaning, in language and in the continuous turning ofconversation. He uses the poetic metaphor of the fountain to express thisexperience of language constantly bubbling up in our consciousness and intolife-giving expression. Cupitt argues that we have no access to `raw' dataoutside of language. Facts are already interpretations and are always open tore-interpretation. Not just in the visual arts but in the sciences and in lifegenerally, we make and re-make the picture. There is no outside meaning; lifeis what we make of it. There is no absolute fixed Truth, our values areconstantly being renegotiated and truth is the current consensus. Truth is nowfallible but is not solipsistic or relativistic. It is not doing things `myway' as some critics have tried to argue. Rather, truth has becomedemocratised, Cupitt observes, as hypotheses are put forward and critically tested.Truth is no longer absolute or revealed but continuously renegotiated like artor literary criticism. In my view this helps us to see, for example, why publictheology wedded to theism is a non-starter. It either speaks in secular termsand has nothing really distinctive to offer or appeals to revealed truth andputs itself out of the debate. When people want to look for meaningful accountsof what it means to be alive in the 21st century they don't tend to look to theChurch.

The understanding, that we shape our world and give life meaning in language,leads to the notion that all our ideas, outlooks, values including ourreligious ideas are products of history. We can now write the history of Godand what is now important is not that people believe in God, but what they meanby God. In the last few hundred years all areas of life can be understoodwithout reference to an eternal and transcendent source of truth and power. Itis this experience which has been known as the death of God. The old theisticlanguage, argues Cupitt, no longer has meaning nor does any real work. It isdefended only by reactionaries who wish to impose traditional values and hangon to authority, especially over women. More liberal Christians will refer toconcepts like a Christian vision for society, meaning perhaps a more generoussociety. So God, says Cupitt, can still have meaning but in the sense of thatto which we aspire, a guiding spiritual idea, a pearl of great price. in hisrecent thinking Cupitt, as he describes, has tended to take his leave of thisidea and simply to equate God with Life. He observes this is what is happeningmore generally in ordinary language, in the number of `Life' idioms nowcommonplace, for example, `life is what you make of it', or `she loved life'.The result of this change for Cupitt is to encourage us all to embrace the`whole of life', to say yes to the whole package. I think his most moving andpoetic expression of this is `going solar'; burning ourselves out like the sun,living without resentment, losing ourselves in reckless living and loving.
Cupitt traces the death of God not only in science and philosophy but also inhis reading of the Bible from Genesis to Pentecost as a gradual handing over ofthe world by God to humanity and of God's progressive dispersal. Aftercenturies of ideological capture by ecclesiastical theology the Kingdom of Godannounced by Jesus is at last being realised within postmodernity where life,including that of the cosmos, is constantly pouring out and passing away. AsCupitt puts it, with powerful resonances of Jesus, all life is dying, includingthe life of God. In Jesus `the immortal dies' as Charles Wesley expressed it inhis hymn. It is only now in postmodernity, when ecclesiastical theology of theKingdom postponed has died, that we are able to fully grasp the significance ofthis. The Kingdom of God, or Republic or Realm, is here and within us. WhatJesus was passionate about is now possible; God is fully dispersed into peopleand we are able to fully appropriate Jesus' concerns with the space betweenpeople, how they let go of themselves, live generously and without jealousy,rivalry and hostility; even how they may love their enemies. Jesus invites usto die daily and to embrace death as part of life.

Anyone who takes funerals will be aware that ideas about what happens afterdeath have been changing. Funerals now are typically a celebration of the lifeof the person. There is an increasing acceptance that death is final, that wereally are returning to stardust and that maybe we will live on for a time inthe lives of those we leave behind. I was surprised, as a parish priest, at thenumber of people who commented favourably on Steve Jobs' Buddhist-likeobservation that, "Death is very likely to be the single best invention oflife because death is life's change agent". Polls suggest that about halfof the UK population believe that this life is all we have and agree withCupitt and John Lennon that there is, `Above us Only Sky'. The Church's funeralrites are out of kilter with this view. I would like to argue, followingCupitt, that there is space within Christianity for those with such a view.Orthodox Christianity has always been circumspect about the afterlife and it isdifficult to sort out what has been merely been taken over from Greekphilosophy. Some will want to go on believing in some sort of afterlife, butcan there not be a place for followers of the Way of Jesus who do not? Forthose who believe that this life is all we have and don't look for an eternalreward? What an opportunity for the Church of England's Liturgical Commissionto produce a new funeral rite!

For Luther reason was the Devil's whore. For some Cupitt is the Devil (not hiswhore or merely his chaplain) and Cupitt wanted to call his book The Devil'sDictionary. Some may well think about his ideas and be afraid, very afraid. Hispublishers have given the book a more homely, commonplace title and Cupitthopes it may be kept by the bedside and turned to when one turns in. His ideais that one thought may turn to another, until his way of thinking sinks in andthe reader discovers and recognises a world already familiar.

The Big Questions

2009-12-31T13:35:00.000Z

For those of you who missed the broadcast here is the final section of the programme in which Dinah Livingstone and David Paterson talked on 'Christianity without God'.

You can also watch in on YouTube by clicking here.

March Meeting

2009-11-25T15:40:00.000Z

Monday 21st March

7.30 pm
at Hugh & Rosemary's home

We are thinking this month about the 400th Anniversary of the King James Authorised Version of the Bible. We decided at our last meeting that we would pick a passage and look at the way it has been re-translated and re-written over the years to adjust our changing knowledge of the world and of ourselves, our changing needs and our changing values.

The passage the we picked was Matthew 5 - the Sermon on the Mount. A sheet with 3 different versions - 1 ancient, 2 modern - will be sent out to those on the mailing list, something to get the ball rolling.

January Meeting

2009-11-24T15:58:00.000Z

Monday 24th January

7.30 pm
at Hugh & Rosemary's home

Please note that we are meeting on the 4th Monday in January this year, not the 3rd. Last year we had to suspend our series of Lent conversations after two successful weeks and we resolved to return to them at a later date. We thought that when we meet on Monday (24th January) we could try to pick up where were left off. The theme, you will remember, was "Living with Uncertainty" and the subject of the next two meetings were to be: "Atonement: the challenge of reconciliation" and "Sacrifice: the challenge of self-denial". In May 2008 we discussed Richard Holloway's book "On Forgiveness" and I recalled passages in it that might provide us with a starting point. Sections from the third chapter can be read here.

After the break, I hope we will have some time to discuss Don Cupitt's new book "The Fountain: A Secular Theology". In our time, he, says, religion is no longer about gaining immortality, or the forgiveness of our sins: it is about becoming reconciled to our life's transience, to time and death. This ultra-clear and secular 'theology' therefore centres around the image of the Fountain, which close-up, is all noisy, rushing transience, but when we step back becomes a healing, unifying symbol of life's perpetual self-renewal. Don dedicates the book 'to members of Sea of Faith, with my gratitude'.

December Meeting

2009-11-22T09:16:00.000Z

Monday 20th December
7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

We are invited to our annual Christmas meeting in Hightown Road, but we have to do a little work before we can have our mulled wine and mince pies. Duncan will be leading a discussion on his excellent paper that continues our discussion from last time on the work of hospital chaplains.

We asked to bring something seasonal to share after the break - a reading, some music, a picture or any object that has significance for us.

November Meeting

2009-11-21T09:59:00.000Z

Monday 15th November
7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

There is a change of subject for November. At our last meeting we started to discuss the questions put to us by the Radcliffe Hospitals Chaplaincy:

"We are much concerned on a day to day basis with questions of pain & suffering, and how we can reconcile these with the idea of a loving God. Also how we can nurture hope in people who are struggling."

We hope to continue this discussion this month and see if we make any progress in developing a distinctively 'Sea of Faith' insight.

Lent Group

2009-11-20T18:43:00.000Z

We are hoping that there might be an opportunity to continue this conversation sometime in the not too distant future. Watch this space.

LIVING WITH UNCERTAINTY

“We can’t be sure”
“We’ll never know”

At first sight, not very secure ground on which to try different ways of thinking about Easter. In five conversations during Lent we hope to explore the implications of our uncertainty. We will surely find no simple answers, but, by recognising that our understanding of the world is ever changing and we face an uncertain future, we can perhaps begin to learn how to live without them.

These sessions begin from the point of view that even though we can no longer be sure about yesterday's certainties, religion remains important to many, if not the majority, and appears to be intrinsic to our humanity.

We set out neither to undermine traditional beliefs nor remove doubt. Those seeking certainty will not find it here. Rather, we will be exploring uncertainty as a positive, and arguably the only honest, position for adult, thinking Christians in our post-modern age.

When I was a child, I thought as a child.....when I became a man I put childish ways behind me... (1 Cor 13. v11)

Equally, we will not set out to undermine those holding more traditional positions but simply to support people through a process that offers not simple answers but the excitement and stimulation of exploration with those on the same journey.

This is not a series of five seminars, but a conversation in five parts, and like all good conversations it will takes its own course. The titles for each week, suggesting a different aspect of the Easter story, are starting points, not destinations.

There will be five sessions on Tuesday evenings, 7.30 – 9.30 pm

Week 1 - Tuesday 23rd February
Uncertainty: the challenge of not knowing

Week 2 - Tuesday 2nd March
Temptation: the challenge of choice

Week 3 - Tuesday 9th March
Sacrifice: the challenge of self-denial

Week 4 - Tuesday 16th March
Atonement: the challenge of reconciliation

Week 5 - Tuesday 23rd March
Easter: the challenge of new beginnings

For further information please call
Oliver Essame on 01280 850293
email: sofn.northoxford@gmail.com

October Meeting

2009-11-20T17:51:00.000Z

Monday 25th October
7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

After our last meeting I asked Andrew, our newest member, if there was anything that he would like to us to discuss. He has given it a great deal of thought and has produced a paper - title: "A Religious Experience?" - which develops some of the ideas we were discussing in September and relates them to his own experience. I am sending a copy to our regular attenders. If you planning to come, but have not received a copy please email me (address on the right).

September Meeting

2009-11-19T10:16:00.000Z

Monday 20th September
7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

Several of our members listened with interest to a discussion on BBC4's "In Our Time" in May of William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience and asked that we make it the subject of one of our meetings. So, by popular demand, we shall taking the programme as the starting point for the September meeting. If you didn't hear the original broadcast, or would like to listen again, please click on the link below.

William James is not an easy read, but if you would like a taste of the book, you will find an interesting selection of quotations from it here on Wikiquote.

August Meeting

2009-11-18T18:52:00.000Z

Monday 16th August

7.30 pm at
Gerard and Mary's home

Gerard and Mary Sullivan have invited us to their home for our summer meeting. He will be providing us with something to talk about, so there is no 'homework' this time. Please email or call Oliver for instructions on getting there; we should try to share lifts as much as possible.

July Meeting

2009-11-17T19:04:00.000Z

Monday 19th July
7.00 for 7.30 pm at
The Joiner's Arms, Bloxham

This is our annual social meeting postponed from February. Friends and partners are welcome. The plan is to meet for drinks in the bar from 7.00; we shall eat at 7.30. If you were not at the last meeting and would like to come, or if you would to book an extra place, please call or email Carole Vincent - 01295 720809, carolejv@care4free.net.

The Joiners Arms, Bloxham
01295 720223
www.thejoinersarms.com
See you there!

What a pleasant evening - thank you!

June Meeting

2009-11-16T09:49:00.000Z

Monday 21st June

7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

Those of us who went to hear Don Cupitt in Oxford in January will remember that he read us a passage from his latest book, this was published at the end of May. His talk was recorded so we hope to be able to play a short excerpt before we discuss the central theme of the book. This is how his publisher describes it:

"For two centuries and more our culture has been secular, and no religious doctrine now plays a constitutive part in any established branch of knowledge. Yet if God is dead, he won't lie down, and reminders of the old faith still pervade our language, the built environment, our art and our literature. Most important, themes of the old theology are currently returning to us in new and strange guises. Thus God, the strict Judge who searches our hearts and demands inner integrity, returns in the critical thinking which makes everyone trained it his own hardest taskmaster . Again, the biblical idea that the world is made by the utterance of language returns in modern poetry and linguistic philosophy. By assembling such reminders, Don Cupitt shows that a surprising amount of traditional Christian belief, including a new Grand Narrative and a non-metaphysical theology, is currently returning to us in secular form."

May Meeting

2009-11-15T20:39:00.000Z

Monday 17th May

7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

The subject of our discussion will be posted here as soon as possible

April Meeting

2009-11-14T18:43:00.000Z

Monday 18th January

7.30 pm at
Judith & George's home

We get a scent in our nostrils of what a fully-realised human life could look like and we conduct experiments in life and in thought about how to achieve it and then pass on our findings to others, not as binding commands, but as good advice. Ironically much of what turns up as dogmatic utterance is good advice. Some other bits of it, though, have been overtaken by better knowledge of how societies, bodies and psyches actually function. We should claim the right, on a personal level, to pick and choose. To swallow-whole a dogmatic system may seem, to the purveyors of that system, a loyal thing to do. To the thinking person it is folly.

Paths of faith are made by people of faith walking them.

(We have postponed our annual social meeting until we can all be there)

February Meeting

2009-11-13T14:54:00.000Z

Monday 15th February
7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

Karen Armstrong's
'The Case for God'

We shall be spending a little time on our plans for the alternative Lent group (see below), then, after a short introduction, we shall be exploring some of the themes of Karen Armstrong's latest book.

Karen Armstrong argues that, historically, atheism has rarely been a denial of the sacred itself but instead has nearly always rejected a particular conception of God. During the modern period, the Christians of the West developed a theology that was radically different from that of the pre-modern age. Tracing the history of faith from the Palaeolithic era to the present, Armstrong shows that until recently science and religion were not at war with each other. But science has changed the conversation. The meaning of words such as 'belief, 'faith' and 'mystery' has been entirely altered, so that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God and, indeed, reason itself — in a way that our ancestors would have found astonishing.

2009-09-01T18:59:00.000+01:00

From Turns of Phrase, Radical Theology from A to Z, by on Cupitt (SCM 2011)

God, a 'leading' idea. In some recent books I havebeen trying to state a replacement for Christianity's Grand Narrative theology,a great quasi-historical myth of cosmic Creation, Fall and Redemption. My newstory is a theology of the history of religions, which purports to show how itwas not God but religious thought which slowly dragged us .out of ouranimal background and made us what we are today. For example, I replace 'Godcreated us' with 'the Idea of God made us what we are'.

God wasthe developing role-model: as we aspired after him we were gradually taught byhim how we too could be free, conscious, mobile selves, able to use language toorder our world and to pledge ourselves to act consistently in it. Godpersuaded us of the possibility of becoming conscious subjects: God was thefirst I AM. And God showed us how we can convert Chaos into an ordered, unifiedCosmos; God persuaded us that it is possible 'to see into someone else's mind'and 'read their thoughts'; and God persuaded us that it is possible to make andto keep promises, vows and covenants. God was also the first moral being.

I haveargued (rightly or wrongly) that the very first forerunner of the idea of Godwas the totem animal. Gradually, the sacred world became more elaborate. In theBronze Age it similarly provided a model for the emergent city state. The SkyFather deals chiefly with law, and lesser attendant divinities deal withagriculture, fertility, metalworking, war and so on. All along, the sacredworld was the realm in which we tried out gradually more organized and unifiedideas of ourselves, of the state, of the Cosmos and of God. God developed a fewsteps ahead of us, luring us forward.

Of these four domains - the self, society,the world and God - God was the first to become fully unified, roughly throughthe development of philosophical theism from Philo Judaeus to Augustine (thatis between the first and the fourth centuries AD). The Cosmos arguably at lastbecomes fully unified during the seventeenth century and the state (perhaps) inpeople like Frederick the Great. The full unification of the self comes last ofall, because it cannot come about until the I-Thou relationship between theself and God has been superseded, by the so-called 'Death' of God that finallysets us free. Perhaps it may be better to re-describe the Death of God as the'internalization of God'. Giving up his own objective reality, God dies into usand sets us free.

The Godwho led us at last beyond our ancestral theological realism can still bevenerated and loved, just as our own dead parents can be. He and they 'lookdown' benignly upon us.

See Theology'sStrange Return (2010) and A NewGreat Story (2010). See also Deathof God; Heterologous thinking; Grand Narrative theology, etc

Article from Sofia no. 93

2008-11-12T15:12:00.000Z

Challenges, Questions, Answers: Thinking about Disability and Genetics

Tom Shakespeare raises some questions about disability and bioethics.

Mapping the Territory

The challenge I offer the SOF network is situated in the context of four different issues. In this article, I will first map that territory, then ask what a non-realist approach to theology might offer as an ethical or spiritual response, and then end with some key questions to which I hope answers may begin to be found.

The first development is the transformation that the disability rights movement (politics) and disability studies (academic) have made to our understandings of disability and difference. Broadly, disability has usually been understood in terms of deficit - things that individual bodies or minds cannot do, or can only do badly. Words like 'invalid' and 'retarded' and 'crippled' and 'deaf and dumb' connote some of the negative values that have surrounded disability.

Since the late sixties, disabled people themselves have challenged this pathological approach, often labelled 'the medical model'. Campaigners have claimed that disability is like race, gender and sexuality: in other words, a social issue, not a personal problem. Attention has focused on the barriers that exclude people, not the individual medical diagnoses that people might have. This attention to the ways in which society disables brings to mind Hebrews 12.13: 'Make a level path for my feet, so that the lame be not disabled'. In other words, do not add to the difficulties which people with impairments already have, by socially and physically excluding them.

This revolutionary approach to disability has not been all good. In my view, identity politics can have negative aspects - it sometimes becomes inward-looking, fosters self-segregation, imposes a single identity and voice on what is usually a plurality of perspectives and experiences. I worry that disability cannot be celebrated so easily as being a woman, or gay, or from a particular ethnic tradition: for some people, impairment is tragic or damaging. Maybe the analogy is not with gender, race, sexuality but should be with poverty: we want to respect people in poverty, but we also want to remove poverty and prevent it occurring in future.

The second development is the extraordinary developments in biomedicine that have occurred in recent decades, particularly the sequencing of the Human Genome, advances in stem cell research, and new possibilities for diagnosing, and ultimately treating, disease. In some ways, genetic research dissolves the minority group approach of the disability movement: it shows we all carry up to 100 genetic mutations in our genome, we are all impaired. Genetics also reminds us that we are unequal: some people have better genes than others, translating into better health, higher intelligence, more talent. Unequal outcomes are not just a matter of unequal opportunities.

Biomedicine is an example of what has been called the 'Baconian project', after the seventeenth-century scientist and thinker Francis Bacon. The term refers to the ambition to use science to eliminate suffering and maximise choice, to rid humans of the burden of fate. The question is, how far does this go? How do we decide, as a society, about the costs and benefits of particular technologies? What choices should we make in our own lives?

Third, bioethics is the philosophical and social response to the challenge of biomedicine. In Britain, the field is dominated by analytical philosophy, which draws on the thinking of utilitarianism and Kantian deontology. The contemporary bioethicist looks at problems posed by genetics or other biotechnologies in a rational, logical and consistent way. She, or more often he, would tend to dismiss emotional or faith-based perspectives, looking for evidence that a particular innovation would lead to harm to anyone. Notions such as 'it's unnatural' or 'we are playing god' would be given short shrift. The 'bioethics toolkit' deploys four key principles: beneficence (do good), non-maleficence (do no harm), justice and autonomy. In practice, it is usually autonomy that prevails: individuals should be able to do what they like, as long as they do not harm others, for example the idea of reproductive autonomy.

A Finnish colleague once suggested that bioethics sees disability purely in terms of killing: abortion issues at the beginning of life, assisted suicide and euthanasia issues at the end of life. Disability activists have been enraged by the arguments of prominent bioethicists such as Peter Singer and John Harris, who see disability as a wholly negative experience best avoided. More widely, bioethics is ill equipped to deal with limitations of the 'Baconian project', because it draws on the same intellectual foundations of the Enlightenment. Robert Song argues that this is what hampers Jurgen Habermas' recent attempt to develop a critique of biomedicine. There is a need to find another way of thinking about nature, including our human nature, which goes beyond trying to subdue and control it. Also, John H Evans has suggested that the problem with bioethics is that it explores the means, not the ultimate ends. He thinks this is because there is no agreement on what our goals should be, in contemporary pluralist society. Therefore we spend our time arguing about procedural issues, not questions of ultimate value.

Fourth, Christian theology has been generally conservative in its response to biomedical advances. Christians are less negative about suffering than utilitarian bioethicists, and more concerned about the value of the embryo (life begins at conception), and life in general. The notion of humans being created in God's image can translate into a reluctance to manipulate or improve on the species. This could be contrasted with a Jewish theological approach, based on tikkun, the idea of humanity as unfinished, and humans as co-creators with God: this partly explains the importance of science and medicine in Jewish culture, and the strength of biomedical research in Israel. Judaism does not tend to have concerns about the early embryo (up to 40 days the embryo is 'as water').

On disability, Christianity has mixed messages: disabled people are objects of charity, or of healing missions, but they are also valued because of equal worth in the eyes of God. For example, the L'Arche communities inspired by Jean Vanier have enabled people with intellectual impairment to live alongside non-disabled people in the community. The visually impaired theologian John Hull writes that Jesus 'first accepts the infirmities of humanity by healing them, but finally he accepts the infirmities of humanity by participating in them, by becoming one of them'. He quotes Isaiah 53:3: 'He was despised, shunned by all, pain-racked and afflicted by disease.' Disabled theologian Nancy Eiesland, who died in 2009, wrote of Christ as a person with physical impairment in The Disabled God (2004), where she challenges the church to remove barriers: 'People with disabilities will accept no less than the church's acknowledgement of us as historical actors and theological subjects and its active engagement in eliminating stigmatising social practices and theological orientations from its midst.' (p.67)

What would a Non-realist Position look like?

I am not a theologian, not a scientist and not a philosopher. But I am interested in coming to an ethical and religious understanding of contemporary disability and biomedicine. My trajectory echoes many in the SOF movement: brought up an Anglican, lost my faith at University, came to Quakerism at the age of 30.1 read and valued The Sea of Faith, read the non-realist Quaker John McMurray (1891 - 1976), and would identify myself as a religious humanist, although not entirely sure what the implications of that are.

Probably the best account of the implications of this position for bioethics is Richard Hollo way's Godless Morality, where he argues: 'It is better to leave God out of the moral debate and find good human reasons for supporting the system or approach we advocate, without having recourse to divinely clinching arguments.' I agree. But I do wonder then, what is the added value of the 'religious' part of religious humanist? Is there a difference between the perspective or values of the non-realist religious perspective and the secular bioethics perspective?

What appeals to me in secular bioethics is that it is not woolly. It is rational, accessible and offers clear answers. But I recognise that it does so by eliminating all that is complicated about human social life: relationships, feelings, emotions. For that reason, I prefer alternative bioethics, arising from feminist approaches or from Aristotelian virtue ethics, which emphasises living virtuously and trying to promote human flourishing. But virtue ethics does not help when faced with a specific dilemma around a genetic test or a new technology.

Asking the Questions

I realise that we can't answer any question definitively, and that it's better to accept the diversity of opinion. But I do feel we need to develop a platform, a place from which to begin to answer questions. Bioethicistslike John Harris are always ready to provide answers, and so are religious fundamentalists. Therefore it behoves us to think about the issues and come up with some broad ideas for answers. Questions which I do not feel contemporary bioethics answers well, questions which arise from my own research and experience, include the following:

On prenatal diagnosis and selective termination: does it matter if we eliminate disability? Screening is currently incomplete and imperfect, so this is a hypothetical question, but it is interesting to think about whether disability is part of natural diversity, and therefore valuable, or whether it is something which we can and should prevent, to improve human wellbeing. We were pleased to eliminate smallpox... Would it matter if there were no more people with Down's syndrome in the population?

On pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (embryo selection): lay people often respond to the idea of choosing embryos to be free of disease, or to be the preferred sex, or even to have other preferred characteristics, by saying 'Children should be a gift not a commodity'. What, in a post-religious world, does this mean, and does it capture something important about parenting, something which our emphasis on choice and control ignores?
On enhancement of human characteristics, through genetics or pharmaceuticals or nanotechnology: how far should this go? We compensate people for the social lottery (welfare state, redistributive taxation). Should we now compensate people for the natural lottery (the genes you are born with)? Jackie Leach Scully has distinguished between nudges (small improvements, like helping everyone to live to 80) and transformations (living to 150). The former might be desirable, the latter unacceptable. But add together the nudges and you get a transformation.

I want to find answers to these questions which are more humane than those provided by bioethics, and less conservative than those provided by most orthodox theology. I want to ensure that disabled people are included and respected, but I also want to improve health and prevent disease.

Final thoughts

Many of our immediate reactions to biomedical innovations can be summed up in terms of the 'yuck factor': we disapprove of that with which we are unfamiliar. So, in time, humans have found railways, cars, birth control, heart transplants and assisted conception to be unacceptable, unnatural and even 'playing God'. Now, we accept all of these as beneficial and progressive. So we should be cautious about our immediate reactions, and ask some more rigorous questions about who might be harmed, and what of value might be lost.
Personally, I do not object to any of the biomedical advances I have described, but I do worry about our overall direction of travel. Like US ethicist Dan Callahan, I believe that the exponential growth of medicine cannot go on: it is unaffordable on a global scale, and it prevents us coming to terms with the limitations of our embodiment, and finding meaning in the predicament we face: being born, being mortal, being frail. Robert Song asks how can sickness be integrated into a morally valuable life which has come to terms with finitude, and how are we to care for each other, as vulnerable human beings: 'our greatest task is to learn our own humanity'.
Finally, perhaps it is relevant to cite Luke 14: 12-24, the parable of the Great Feast. When the rich man's invitations to prominent people are rejected, he tells his servants to invite others to his table: 'Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.' Perhaps that says something important about the values which should predominate in our discussions.

Tom Shakespeare is a Research Fellow at Newcastle University. His publications include Disability Rights and Wrongs (Routledge, London 2006).

Further reading
Eiesland, N. L. (1994). The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Nashville: Abington Press
John Harris (2007) Enhancing Evolution: the ethical case for making better people, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
John M Hull (2003) A Spirituality of Disability: The Christian Heritage as both Problem and Potential, Studies in Christian Ethics, vol.16 no. 2, pp. 21-35
Hans Reinders (2008) Receiving the gift of friendship: profound disability, theological anthropology and ethics, Grand Rapids: Wm B Erdmans Publishing.
Jackie Leach Scully (2008) Disability Bioethics: moral bodies, moral difference, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Tom Shakespeare (2006) Disability Rights and Wrongs, London: Routledge.
Robert Song (2002) Human Genetics: Fabricating the Future. Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press.
John Swinton & Brian Brock (editors) ( 2007) Theology, Disability and the New Genetics: Why Science Needs the Church. London: T & T Clark.
Jean Vanier (1999) Becoming Human, Mahwah: Paulist Press.

October Meeting

2008-11-12T13:07:00.000Z

Monday 19th October
7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

Challenges, Questions, Answers:
Thinking about Disability and Genetics

At this month's meeting we shall be exploring some of the issues raised by Tom Shakespeare's talk at this year's annual conference. Most of you have a copy of the latest edition of Sofia - the talk is on page 8; you can also find it by clicking here.

We could begin by addressing the three questions he asks us to discuss and see where that leads us:

Does it matter if we eliminate disability?

What, in a post-religious world, should we think about pre-implantation genetic diagnosis?

Enhancement of human characteristics - how far should we go?

Tom Shakespeare, Research Fellow at Newcastle University, is a social scientist and disability advocate, currently working as a consultant to the World Health Organization. He has written and broadcast widely on issues of disability, science and ethics, and his books include Genetics Politics: from Eugenics to Genome and Disability Rights and Wrongs. He is a member of the Religious Society of Friends.

September Meeting

2008-11-11T10:59:00.000Z

Monday 28th September
7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

Don Cupitt's
'Jesus & Philosophy'

We shall be spending a little time discussing the recent Oxford conference, then, after a short introduction, we shall be exploring some of the themes of Don Cupitt's new book. The preface to the book is reproduced here . This is the blurb from the back cover:

"For a generation after his death his surviving associates preserved good traditions about the message of Jesus. Then disaster struck: it began to be believed that he was risen, exalted to heaven, and soon to return to establish his kingdom on earth. A cult of Jesus' person and fictitious lives of him quickly followed; and the surviving traditions of his actual teaching became totally blurred - as they still are.

Since then, nobody has ventured to assess Jesus seriously, as a thinker. But today, as the supernatural beliefs fade, and better reconstructions of his teaching have become available, Don Cupitt thinks we can at least question Jesus from the standpoint of philosophy. Just how original and important is he? What is the status of his ideas: was he a religious figure at all, and why did he arouse such fierce antagonism?

The Jesus who emerges from this enquiry is an astonishing figure, and much bigger than the insipid Christ of popular faith."

If you have time you may also like to listen to Don talking at 'Philosophy Bites' on non-realism about God; it is a useful introduction and with some relevance to this discussion. You will find the podcast here; it is just over 15 minutes long.

August Meeting

2008-11-10T15:12:00.000Z

Monday 17th August
7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

The Excesses of Religion:
Cause or effect?

In an article in The Guardian Review on Saturday 8th August, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips asked "what does our fascination with the uncontrollable appetites of others reveal about ourselves?" In the final section he looks at excesses in religious belief and behaviour and in our response to, and need for, religion. You can find the whole article here or read just the final section here (I will be sending this to members).

We will also spend some time at this meeting reporting back on the Conference at Banbury School in June and on the Sea of Faith National Conference in July.

Oxford Regional Conference

2008-11-09T20:21:00.000Z

Insatiable Creatures

2008-11-08T15:40:00.003Z

from
Insatiable creatures

Bankers' bonuses, eating disorders, celebrity orgies - nothing makes headlines like excess. So what does our fascination with the uncontrollable appetites of others reveal about ourselves, asks psychoanalyst Adam Phillips

The Guardian, Saturday 8 August 2009

We can't talk about religion without talking about excess; which doesn't mean, of course, that everyone who is religious is a fanatic. But it does mean that religious beliefs of any significance matter a great deal to those who hold them. Indeed they will sometimes sacrifice their lives and the lives of other people for them; their relationship to their gods can be the most important thing in their lives. By definition these gods must be more powerful than the people who believe in them; indeed they are often deemed to be both omniscient and omnipotent. So by human standards gods are excessively powerful, though we are more inclined to think of other people's gods as excessive, and of our own as having just the right amount of power.

Once you begin to imply, as Milton sometimes does in Paradise Lost, that God may be excessively punitive, you put yourself in the odd position of judging God. If we are not believers we are struck by two things; first, that deities seem to be, by definition, excessive - excessively punitive, excessively loving, excessively demanding, and excessively in need of people's devotion. And second, that religious believers, even moderate ones, seem to have excessive confidence in their gods, and are excessively eager to please them, not to mention excuse their apparent failings. The more extreme sceptics of religion, often in rather patronising ways, find the whole thing rather childish: as if religious believers - that is, most of the people who have ever lived - are just people who have never got over being frightened of their parents, people who couldn't bear the thought of losing their parents' love and protection. But where do the sceptics get their knowledge of what is excessive from? How does anyone know what too much belief is? Do we believe too much in science now? We call people religious fanatics when they believe things that we don't, and when they believe things in ways that we don't. God is not called a religious fanatic by the people who believe in him. Islamic fundamentalists think that we believe too much in democratic freedoms and consumer capitalism; we think they believe too much in Islam. It is the hope of modern liberals that we can all talk about the things that matter most to us without losing our tempers or killing people. Do we believe this too much?

What mattered most to most people, until very recently, was their relationship with their gods, and gods, traditionally, have been to die for; one of the things people have been able to do, in the name of religion, is sacrifice their lives and the lives of others. If we think this is excessive - we are horrified by suicide bombers in the Middle East, or Buddhist monks setting fire to themselves in Vietnam - are we saying anything more than that this is absolutely unacceptable behaviour and we must do what we can to prevent it?

What people use their religious beliefs to do - what they do in the name of their religions - might make us wonder not simply what should we believe, but what kind of thing is a belief? Clearly a belief can be something that permits you to kill people. Our religious beliefs may be the tools we use to manage - to legitimate and contain - the excesses of our nature. So from a psychoanalytic point of view we don't only have to say, as Freud said, that religion is for people who are frightened of growing up. We can say, though, that we have delegated to a figure called God all the excesses we find most troubling in ourselves, which broadly speaking are our excessive love for ourselves and others, and our excessive punitiveness. God in this view carries the part of ourselves that asks too much of us, that is endlessly demanding, that wants us to be better than we are; that is, in short, excessively moralistic.

It is, of course, excessive in the most misleading way to suggest that all religious fanatics are the same, or even similar; even describing someone as a religious fanatic puts one in the position of supposedly knowing what the right way to believe is. A fanatic, the Anglican Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is someone "inspired" or "possessed" by "a deity or demon", someone "frenzied", someone "affected by excessive and mistaken enthusiasm"; clearly not our kind of person. I want to presume that religious fanatics are people who are willing to do whatever harm is necessary to protect and promote their religious beliefs, which are the things that matter most to them in their lives. What might make someone believe and behave in this way (many people, incidentally, feel similarly about their children, but they are not called children fanatics)?

There are three possible ways of accounting for what we call religious fanaticism. First, that excessive belief is called up to stifle excessive doubt, as if the fanatic is saying to himself: if I don't continually prove my belief in this extreme way what will be revealed is my extreme faithlessness, or despair, or confusion, or even emptiness. We could call this excess as reassurance. Second, excessive acts of belief are required to persuade other people, as if the fanatic is saying to himself "what matters most in the world to me will not be listened to, or considered, or thought about or even noticed unless a dramatic statement is made". We could call this excess to ensure recognition. In both these accounts the religious fanatic is described as a kind of strategist, as a person with a project; as someone who knows what he wants to say, what he wants to achieve. Being excessive in words or actions, in inflammatory rhetoric or violent actions is a form of communication; conversion by other means. What the religious fanatic knows is just how contagious excess can be. Excessive words and actions are haunting, they make one's presence felt; they make people excessive in their responses. Priests, Nietzsche wrote, have shown almost inexhaustible ingenuity in exploring the implications of this one question: how is an excess of emotion to be attained? If you can make people excessively emotional you can manipulate them, and one of the best ways of making them excessively emotional is to do something excessive to them. Suicide bombers don't convert people, but they make the existence of their religion unforgettable, undismissible.

There is, though, a third possibility, the one that I want to end on because it seems to me potentially the most interesting, though perhaps the most daunting. This is that the religious fanatic is someone for whom something about themselves and their lives is too much; and because not knowing what that it is so disturbing they need to locate it as soon as possible. Because the state of frustration cannot be borne - because it is literally unbearable, as long-term personal and political injustice always is - it requires an extreme solution.

In this account our excessive behaviour shows us how obscure we are to ourselves or how we obscure ourselves; how our frustrations, odd as this may seem, are excessively difficult to locate, to formulate. Wherever and whenever we are excessive in our lives it is the sign of an as yet unknown deprivation. Our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.

• On Balance, a book of essays by Adam Phillips, will be published next year.

May Meeting

2008-11-07T19:35:00.000Z

Monday 18th May
7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

Wired for Creationism -
Is God an accident?

The following is an introduction to an interview from the December 2005 edition on The Atlantic. I thought the interview and the article to which it refers mights serve as a basis for our discussion in May. You find the full interview here and the article Is God an Accident? here. I shall send printable version to members before the meeting.

Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, is an author and researcher who studies human belief in the supernatural. He is also the father of two small boys who have theories of their own. One evening, Bloom recalls, his six-year-old son Max burst out, "You can make me go to bed, but you can't make me go to sleep. It's my brain!" Intrigued, Bloom pressed his son to say more about his brain and how it worked. Max explained that his brain was responsible for thinking and perceiving but not for more intimate experiences such as dreaming, loving, or feeling sad. "That's what I do," Max informed his father, "though my brain might help me out."

Bloom takes note when his children, or any other children, wax philosophical about the body and the soul. As a rationalist and a self-declared atheist, he rejects all notions of spirits, deities, and the afterlife. As a researcher, however, he has discovered that children are predisposed to divide the world into two categories: the physical and the immaterial. Five-month-old babies show clear signs of understanding the basic properties of objects; for example, that they are solid, will fall if dropped, and do not spontaneously disappear. These infants also show signs of responding to and understanding the world of emotions and personal relations—recognizing familiar voices, for instance, and responding to happiness or fear.

As Bloom puts it, these two sets of abilities "can be seen as akin to two distinct computers, running separate programs." With this kind of dual psychological wiring, he argues, it is no wonder that the majority of humans believe in the concept of souls as separate from bodies, which in turn leads to spirituality and faith in the afterlife. To Bloom, all religions everywhere are essentially variations on the same theme. He draws no real distinction between East and West, or between First-World and Third-World nations. What interests him is the human tendency to "see intention where only artifice or accident exists." Unlike many of his fellow atheists, Bloom is not content to simply dismiss religious people as misguided. Instead, he questions why a belief in the divine dominates virtually every culture on earth.

In his December 2005 article in The Atlantic, provocatively titled "Is God an Accident?," Bloom concludes that "the universal themes of religion are not learned." Taking his cues from Darwin, Bloom posits that our spiritual tendencies emerged somewhere in the evolutionary process, most likely as "accidental by-products" of other traits. As a species, humans have an unprecedented knack for finding patterns and reading intentions. Unfortunately, to Bloom's mind, this tendency to read intelligence into everything sometimes gets out of hand:

People have a terrible eye for randomness. If you show them a string of heads and tails that was produced by a random-number generator, they tend to think it was rigged—it looks orderly to them, too orderly. After 9/11 people claimed to see Satan in the billowing smoke from the World Trade Center. Before that some people were stirred by the Nun Bun, a baked good that bore an eerie resemblance to Mother Teresa. In November of 2004 someone posted on eBay a five-year-old grilled-cheese sandwich that looked remarkably like the Virgin Mary; it sold for $28,000 ... Older readers who lived their formative years before CDs and MPEGs might remember listening for the significant and sometimes scatological messages that were said to come from records playing backwards.

Bloom sums up his own worldview by inverting the old Hans Christian Andersen tale to proclaim, "the clothes have no emperor." The "clothes," to Bloom's mind, are the physical objects that make up the world: oceans and landforms that took shape over slow millennia, creatures that evolved through natural selection, gray matter that generates all of our thoughts and behavior. That the majority of people on earth are inclined to perceive all of this as the externalization of something boundless and meaningful is, according to Bloom, an evolutionary fluke; not evidence for an all-powerful Being. Even so, his work with children has left Bloom convinced that all humans, even his own children, will inevitably see design and divinity in the world: "Creationism—and belief in God," he writes, "is bred in the bone."

February Meeting

2008-11-07T11:33:00.000Z

Our Annual Social Evening was postponed because of the weather - several inches of snow - and will be held in April.

March Meeting

2008-11-06T18:29:00.001Z

Monday 16th March
7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

Desert Island Lines

This meeting is about the written word. We are asked to bring examples - of any kind: prose or verse, from great literature to tabloid journalism - that have inspired, moved, or supported us in any way in our search for meaning and understanding. You can read from your choices if you must but the idea is talk about the effect they have and why they have it.

Reading for January 2009 pt 2

2008-11-03T18:30:00.001Z

From sofia no 89, September 2008

Don Cupitt's Conference workshop had the title of his forthcoming book, which he introduces thus:

The meaning of 'the West' is defined by the Vatican in terms of the Catholic Church, the West's oldest and greatest institution, and by the French secularists at the EU in terms of the values of the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution. I offer a radical-Christian interpretation: Working out in history the implications of its own leading ideas, Christianity has gradually evolved beyond its 'church' form, and has become modern Western culture. This new culture, chiefly based on critical thinking and on humanitarian ethics, is now becoming fully globalised.

Scrupulosity

I have suggested already that Western culture has, with astonishing success, taken various features of religion and extraverted and secularised them, applying them to the conduct of everyday affairs. The upshot is that Christianity, which until the Enlightenment was a religion, has gradually become the moral flavour of a whole culture, and is now almost globalised.
One of these features is the scrupulous, meticulous, observant, finicky, punctilious, assiduous and indeed 'religious' following of prescribed routines and procedures. The starting-point here is the performance of religious rituals: all over the world complex liturgical Calendars of feasts, fasts, and other holy days are very exactly observed and complex rituals are performed, and nobody seems to have any difficulty with the idea that if the ritual is correctly done, with everything in just the right order, then it works ex opere operate (just by the doing of the work, as Roman Catholic doctrine has it). This nicety or punctiliousness about religious observances is the norm, and is taken utterly for granted in many a third-world country where it has so far proved impossible to persuade people that the same meticulousness, if applied to a whole range of small everyday matters like maintaining the water supply, or enforcing the building regulations, would be very highly beneficial to everyone. No: the fact is that people everywhere take the appropriateness of religious scrupulosity entirely for granted (it must be done, it must be done now, and it must be done in the correct order), but they simply hate the thought of being equally scrupulous about health and safety regulations, or about punctuality, or about the maintenance of society's infrastructure.

An interesting compromise-solution to this problem comes from Japan, where the making of a good sword involves a lengthy technological routine. How are people to be persuaded to remember the sequence of forging operations accurately? Answer, by interweaving the technical procedure with a religious ritual. People always remember how to perform a religious ritual in the correct order. So they are taught the whole ritual, and they are taught the associations between each stage of the ritual and the corresponding technical operation; and now they know how to do the whole thing correctly, with the ritual sequence acting as the template and aide-memoire which ensures that the technical jobs are all done, and done in the right order.
This is interesting and amusing, but we are still left with the intellectual puzzle: Why is it that religion is so much more memorable than anything else? The best answer I can give is that religious ideas, rituals, teachings and so on are always storylike, and have the very strong memorability of the best stories and melodies.

The second feature of religion that has already been quoted seems to apply only to monotheistic religions. I refer to the great importance of being scrupulously and systematically self-critical when you examine your own conscience before God. To attain the goal of the religious life you must purify yourself thoroughly, which means that you must be ruthlessly honest with yourself, seeking out and purging every last little bit of error and self-deception. God, it is said, is holy and all-knowing, and all human hearts lie open to his gaze, so that you cannot hope to approach God unless you are inwardly completely pure. There is a simile in the background here: just as one bad apple may corrupt and spoil a whole basket of apples, so one unacknowledged and unabsolved sin is enough to make you quite unfit and unable to endure the holy gaze of God.
Extraverted and secularised, this religious self-examination becomes critical thinking, and in particular the scientific method. The only way to truth, real truth, is by a thorough and systematic investigation which considers all possibilities, and by the rigorous expulsion of all detectable errors from your system of knowledge.

It is important to stress that the one and only religious way to knowledge that is important here is critical sri/-examination in the search for purity of heart before God. Two-and-a-half millennia ago critical self-questioning was important in the development of religious asceticism, of psychological reflection, and even of philosophy itself. But all other religious ways to knowledge seem quite content to remain firmly non-critical. The custom was and is merely to accumulate and guard tradition and to treat every bit of it as more or less equally authoritative, without any critical purging. Thus in Christianity the four canonical Gospels were simply added together to produce a 'Harmony of the Gospels', just as your School Nativity Play to this day adds Luke's infancy narrative to Matthew's, and then throws in a little embroidery for good measure. Before critical scholarship came along hardly anyone had ever said openly that the Jesus of St John's Gospel and the Jesus of St Mark's Gospel are so different from each other that they simply cannot possibly be, both of them, equally and fully authoritative portraits of one and the same man. But that is how it was: traditional religious faith often incorporated conflicting themes and materials, but people seemed not to notice it. At any rate, attempts at critical tidying-up have always been very unpopular. People do not want to have their cherished beliefs tidied up for them, and least of all at Christmas time.

For our present purposes however it is sufficient to limit our attention to the penitent and the ascetic who undertake a scrupulous, rigorous self-examination in the quest for inner truthfulness, or purity of heart. In the background is the awesome, terrible figure of an infinitely holy and demanding heavenly Father, who sets us the very highest standards. We are trying to do his Will by meeting his demands - and there I hope the reader may already have thought of two of the greatest figures in the history of science, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. Newton, a posthumous (i.e., a child born after the death of his earthly father, like Sartre), was highly-conscious of a special relationship to his heavenly Father; and Darwin gives in his correspondence a strong impression of one who is trying to live up to the exacting standards set him by a very strong earthly father. Both men, in their different ways, give some indication of the religious background and the psychological cost of the scientific method. Religious, and even perhaps neurotic, scrupulosity is turned outwards so that it becomes intellectual scrupulosity — with startling results. Suddenly, we have a hugely powerful new tool.

Compare a traditional Herbal with a modern Flora. The Herbal follows the same pattern as the Harmony of the Gospels, by simply piling up everything, good or bad, that Tradition supplies. So the Herbal will typically list all the names of a plant, supply a picture of it, describe its medicinal virtues and its astrological affinities, cite all the references to it in Classical literature, and so on until it has supplied several pages of jumbled, miscellaneous information. The modern Flora is quite different. It cuts out all the literary references, the folklore, the astrology, the medicinal properties and so on, and sticks strictly to botany. There is a careful technical description designed to help the field botanist to identify the species accurately. There is information about habitat, distribution and abundance. Here we note that, above all, the modern Flora contains no errors. The Herbal is an antique shop, a jumble of bygones, with almost none of its statements ever having been publicly tested, whereas behind the Flora there is a really stringent ethics of knowledge. Quite simply, neurotic scrupulosity, extraverted and applied to the construction of systems of knowledge, has proved hugely powerful. So much so that modern Western natural science is far and away the best and most powerful way to knowledge that human beings have ever devised.

Darwin's biography well illustrates the main points. As eventually published, The Origin of Species (1859) took the form of a lengthy cumulative argument worked up in considerable detail and over many years. In the nature of the case, much of what Darwin was proposing could at that time neither be modelled mathematically nor tested experimentally. He was attempting something like a Baconian induction, and he saw clearly that everything depended upon the facts being reliable, and all the arguments carefully considered. Darwin was diligent in reading expositions of the 'Design' explanation of adaptation, and in reading the relevant philosophers. In his letters he is collecting all the relevant facts and arguments he can get, and he specially thanks people for sending him facts and arguments that appear to tell against his theory. He really needs to be made aware of, to weigh, and to deal with every possible objection to his theory before he publishes it. Darwin took such pains over his great work that one readily understands his invalidism. He was very high-anxiety and he clearly shows us the connection between traditional religious and moral scrupulosity (anxiety about one's own purity of heart and motive) and modern Western intellectual scrupulosity.

The history of Western intellectual standards and their progressive refinement over the last few centuries is scarcely yet written; but one day it will be written, and it will be very instructive. Two centuries ago, and even more recently, it was sufficient for a medical pioneer to test a new medical procedure upon himself and a new surgical procedure on his patients. Today, it costs around a billion US dollars to develop an important new drug and bring it to market, because field trials have perforce become so large-scale and expensive.

In these reflections about religious scrupulosity and its transfer into various secular contexts we have learnt something about the religious significance of modern Western culture.
First, in the modern state the old distinction between the secular and the sacred realms has been transformed into the distinction between private life (in which you may, and indeed should, put first the interests of yourself and your own family members) and public service (in which you must disinterestedly follow prescribed routines to the letter). The public servant is an administrator, or in Greek, a 'deacon'. The public realm is like God, those who work for it are 'civil servants' or 'ministers', and the highest standards of impartiality or disinterestedness are required. Interestingly, the Greek word liturgy (leitourgia) means both public service and the worship of the gods. Both require the same 'religious' punctiliousness: you must be a 'stickler', an interesting old word with a long history.

Secondly, modern Western culture depends upon knowledge, knowledge acquired by critical method, and tested by critical standards that are themselves also subject to continual critical assessment and reformulation. A particular tenet or assertion counts as part of the body of public knowledge if it is currently accepted as such by the relevant learned society, is taught in the universities, and is acceptable from an expert witness giving testimony in a court of law. And as we have found earlier, there is an exact analogy: just as in medieval Christian piety believers were required to carry out a stringent and comprehensive self-examination to make themselves fit to stand before God, so in modern Western culture any candidate for the status of being public knowledge must be capable of surviving stringent and comprehensive critical testing before it can be deemed fit to stand in public.

Thirdly, not only does modern Western culture give great religious significance to the public realm and public service, but also its commitment to critical thinking and testing requires it to be a continuously self-critical and self-reforming type of society, which is all the time reviewing and developing what it counts as being public knowledge and publicly-established values. Unlike any previous culture, modern Western culture since the Enlightenment has attempted continual moral self-criticism and self-improvement by legislation. We have tried to make ourselves morally better by reviewing and raising our public standards for the treatment of prisoners, of the insane, of slaves, of serfs, bonded workers and day-labourers, of animals, of children, of wounded soldiers, of women, of racial minorities, of sexual minorities, of the disabled and many other groups. The Western state has become ethical; it actively works to improve the moral standards of the population, and to this extent the modern Western state remains highly Christian, even after the Death of God and after the end of the Church. There is much more Christianity around now than ever there was in the Ages of Faith.

Fourth, and lastly, it is worth pointing out that the modern world expects Christian standards of the West. People in the poor countries expect the West to feel rather guilty about being so rich, and to acknowledge a duty to 'redistribute' its surplus wealth. They expect the West to acknowledge the sinfulness of colonialism and the slave trade, and to disburse annual development aid, humanitarian aid, and (nowadays) even reparations. They rather expect the West to go on about individual human rights, about democracy and the rule of law, and so on. In short, the rest of the world has a great range of moral expectations of the West, and tries hard to exploit them. But the poor countries don't have the same expectation of other religions and culture-areas. Nobody seriously expects the Turks to apologize to the Armenians, or the Egyptian Arabs to repent of their long domination of the Copts. Nobody expects Indians to dwell on the evils of the Mughal Empire as much as they dwell on the evils of the British Empire, or the Zanzibaris to demand repentance and reparations for so many centuries of slave-trading in dhows down the East African coast.

In short, the world assumes that the West is Christian at heart, and that it is much more susceptible to moral appeals, arguments, and even blackmail than is any other religion or culture-area. The world assumes (rightly, it seems) that Christian values do still greatly influence Western behaviour. Many commentators assume that Christianity is a dying faith, whereas Islam is very much alive. Because other faiths and cultures show absolutely no inclination to be self-critical in public, they can confidently assert their own moral superiority and the West's relative decadence. But are rich oil sheiks apologizing to black East Africa for slavery, and offering aid without strings? Seemingly not, despite the fact that Almsgiving (Zdkat) is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. On the whole, the world notes that only the West, along with some institutions created by it such as the UN and the great humanitarian charities, still takes religious values sufficiently seriously to be persuaded to give money and personal service, unconditionally and on a large scale, over many years, to the needy.

Again I am led to the view that Christianity is doing better in its afterlife as 'Western culture' than ever it did as a religion - if you will allow me to reckon an organization like Medecins sans Frontieres as belonging to the history of Christianity.

'Scrupulosity' is a chapter from Don Cupitt's new book The Meaning of the West forthcoming from SCM Press in November 2008.

Reading for January 2009 pt 1

2008-11-02T18:24:00.003Z

THE MEANING OF THE WEST
AN APOLOGIA FOR SECULAR CHRISTIANITY

DON CUPITT
2008, SCM Press

Preface

How should Western culture define itself? What are the core values to which the member states of the European Union are committed? There has been some controversy recently between those who wish to answer such questions in secular, Enlightenment terms (liberal democracy, the rule of law, freedom and individual human rights), and those who see Western culture as being rooted in the Christian and Jewish religions. I begin this book by arguing that the unique dynamism of the West - its fast-growing, science-based industrial civilization, its intellectual energy, and its liberal humanitarian ethics - is at every point dependent upon the West's greatest invention, the 'critical' type of thinking, which in turn is Christian in its origin and inspiration. For example, the liberal-democratic kind of society that we have today, and which is uniquely creative because it is continuously self-criticizing and self-reforming, derives from the older ideas that the Church is (or should be) that kind of society - Ecclesia semper reformanda - and that the committed individual believer should be that kind of person.

At this point a second line of argument emerges. If the modern West is the child of Christianity, it is surely a very late offspring, born only from its mother's death. Since about 1750 Christianity the religion, the Christian Church, has been slowly dying. How ironical that the greatest achievements of Christianity - the emergence of the first large-scale free societies in which most human beings, and not just the leading groups, can enjoy a full span of life in good health, peace and prosperity, along with a number of unique moral achievements such as the emancipation of women - all this, which derives from the ancient biblical dream of a better world, has actually come about only in the period of the terminal decline of religion. It seems that Christian self-criticism, by undermining metaphysical philosophy and the authority of both the Bible and the Church, has liberated and democratized the West to the point where, in the welfare state, the Corporal Works of Mercy are now public policy. Strange: in the so-called 'ages of faith' the state was very cruel; but now, after Christianity, the state has become startlingly Christian. It cares for all.

This paradox prompts me to develop the second line of argument, which is that we should give up thinking of Christianity as being merely a religion, and one of 'the world religions'. Instead we should begin to think of Christianity as a Utopian cultural movement, which, emerging as and when it did, had in the short term to take the form of a religion, but which eventually burst out of its religious chrysalis and became the modern world.

The original Jesus remains historically controversial, but there is at least a case for saying that he was a Jewish teacher in the tradition of prophets like Jeremiah. He was critical of organized religion and tradition, and seems to have had little fresh to say either about God, or about sin and redemption. Instead, his chief concern was to convey a Utopian vision of what human life could, should, and perhaps soon would, be. However, the ancient Graeco-Roman world was a harsh slave society, and after Jesus' execution it was clear that there was little chance of any early realization of his dream. So he was seen as waiting in the heavenly world, from which he would one day return to earth to establish his Kingdom. The Utopian vision was thus deferred, projected into the heavenly world and the far future, and Christianity slowly developed into a religion of eternal salvation from sin at the end of time. An officer-class of professional clergy maintained order among the waiting faithful during the interim period.

The Church gradually became very authoritarian and other-worldly in its orientation. But its language and its historical drive continued to seek its own self-secularization. 'Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven', said the Lord's Prayer, and the Church's doctrine continued to speak of God as 'becoming man', and of God's Spirit as becoming diffused through the human world. Many religions include myths which declare that in the original Golden Age the heavenly and earthly worlds were one, but that as a result of some disaster the heavenly world withdrew from earth. Christianity more than any other faith seeks to regain Paradise by bringing heaven back down to this earth and so re-unifying the two worlds. As during the later Middle Ages West European Christians began to develop a richer and more humanistic urban culture, Christianity began at last to seek its own full self-secularization. In all the major phases of cultural expansion that followed in the next four or five centuries (around AD 1300-1800) we see the original Utopian and this-worldly humanism bursting out of its stiff religious shell. Woman and domestic life; dress and fashion; printing, and literature for the laity; travel, trade and exploration; Protestantism and the discovery of individual subjectivity; the Enlightenment and an explosion of new knowledge; Romanticism; the democratic revolutions and the industrial revolution; liberal democracy and the rule of law, socialism and feminism - in all this we see the huge energy of the modern world exploding out of the constricting religion-based civilization that had preceded it; or, better (as I would say), we see the original Utopian religious humanism coming back down to earth and realizing itself at last. Instead of the old medieval universe of heaven, earth and hell, everything, but everything, eventually becomes internal to our human history, our human world of life, our human world of language. And this radical-humanist world — the world of everyday life, the world of the novel — is simply Christianity itself realized, or objectified. God has, at last, fully become human and only human.

For many years I laboured to reconcile Church-Christianity and the modern world. I now see that the critics were right, and it cannot be done. Church-Christianity is gradually becoming more and more counter-cultural (a euphemism for 'irrational') and reactionary as it declines. But now I ask: Why try to save the Church? It has been historically obsolete for about two centuries. We should let it go, and instead learn to see in modern Western culture itself the human and Christian values that we will need to proclaim and defend in the future. As we do this, we develop a new 'secular Christian apologetics'. We discard the institutional side of Christianity, authoritarian and power-hungry, with its supernatural doctrines, and instead we follow out the historical development of Christian spirituality and ethics.

December Meeting

2008-11-01T09:37:00.000Z

Monday 15th December
7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

Non-realist Worship: Paradox or Possibility?
Is worship compatible with substitute concepts of 'God' ?

George Fryer poses these questions: how do we square 'acts of worship', inbuilt with expressions of God's existence, with the SoF position that the notion of 'god' is a purely human invention? How do we reconcile what we say with what we think?

For our homework, George has written a short introduction which you can find here.

November Meeting

2008-10-30T18:33:00.025Z

Monday 17th November

7.30 pm

at Hugh & Rosemary's home

Deer Hunting With Jesus
Guns, Votes, Debt and Delusion in Redneck America

Hugh has been reading the book and will introduce the discussion: he has asked that we read Chapter 5 before the meeting. You will find it here or I can send you the text as an attachment (email me at sofn.northoxford.@gmail.com). You can learn more about the author, Joe Bageant, and watch him talking about the book at his blogsite.

A relevant, and more than a little alarming, link is http://www.raptureready.com/index.php

October Meeting

2008-10-15T18:33:00.003+01:00

Monday 20th October

7.30 pm

at Hugh & Rosemary's home

Does Religion Make People Nicer?

This is part of the task we have been set: "Much of the debate around The New Atheism is polarised and focused on negative stereotypes of religions and religious believers. Believers are alienated by what they perceive to be selective and one-sided criticism of religion, and even many atheists are put off by the stridency of the debate. The New Atheism does, however, raise important questions: in an era where religion seems to underlie much of the political tension in the world, we need to be able to criticise religion in a way that is well-reasoned, objective and acceptable to both believers and non-believers.
We hope to gather input from both believers and nonbelievers; this will allow us to determine to what extent believers and nonbelievers agree on how to evaluate religious behaviours; to what extent believers from different traditions agree on how to evaluate religious behaviours, and, by extension, whether these different groups would agree in their judgements about specific actions by specific religions."

Oliver read Ronald Bailey's article from Reason by way of introduction. Read it here

Preface to Jesus & Philosophy

2008-10-12T14:32:00.000+01:00

This book is an attempt to right an historic wrong - or at least, to fill a rather surprising gap. Around 20 years or so after his death, the fiery and very interesting Jewish teacher Jesus of Nazareth began to be idolized by his own followers. Like the Buddha, he was made into the personification of his own teaching, and given an exalted cosmic status. Within a few decades he had been so completely buried by supernatural beliefs about himself that in all the years since, it has been very difficult to make out his own voice, and quite impossible to take him seriously as a thinker. Like royalty, gods are not to be taken seriously: they are to be praised just for being there.

Matters were made even worse when the few surviving good traditions of Jesus' teaching were supplemented by quantities of newly invented and highly tendentious material, and the whole embedded in almost entirely fictional biographies.

Nietzsche greatly feared this worst of all fates, but largely escaped it himself. Karl Marx suffered it, but today with the decay of communism there is a chance that he may be rehabilitated. In Germany, there are already signs of a renewed interest in him.

In the case of Jesus, the critical kind of thinking that is the West's greatest asset has by now broken down the vast dogmatic superstructure built over him, and has gradually refined our successive attempts to recover his original message. Furthermore, it has also changed our moral philosophy and created a new climate in which it has become easier to hear him. We can now at last ask ourselves: Can the original Jesus, after Christianity, stand on his own feet as a major figure in the history of ethics? Is the long-dead historical Jesus now of more interest to us than the risen divine Christ that he was made into?

For the chapters in this book I have made use of the work of such leading contemporary scholars as Geza Vermes, E. P. Sanders and John Dominic Crossan. Particularly useful has been the work of the late R. W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar. It was done very thoroughly, with the materials, the method, and the criteria of judgement all quite transparent. Despite the (perhaps envious) criticism of some haughty Europeans, I have consulted them constantly, and have disagreed with them only occasionally. I quote nothing as from Jesus except material to which they gave a red or pink coding, the idea being that this policy brings us at least a generation closer to the original Jesus than our canonical Gospels, which are (frankly) a bit of a muddle. An alternative and perhaps equally good policy would have been simply to stick to Q; but unfortunately we do not have a sufficiently coherent and agreed reconstruction of Q that I can quote.

Q, it should be said in parenthesis here, is the term used by Gospel critics to describe a hypothetical sayings-Gospel, written somewhere between the years 50 and 70 CE, and drawn upon extensively by both Matthew and Luke. When in the late 1950s the Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas became available, it too turned out to be a sayings-Gospel. Together with a few other scraps of evidence, Q and Thomas suggest that the earliest Gospels were sayings-collections, with very little narrative or biographical material.
Jesus, then, was originally not the Saviour, nor the Messiah, but simply a moral teacher. Sometimes his sayings were accompanied by symbolic actions, such as touching the sick or holding open meals, which were like enactments of his message. He believed there could be, there must be - and perhaps that there soon would be - a world in which human beings simply accepted each other, without the wariness, the rivalry, the disdain, the enmity, the suspicion, the envy, the lust, and the repugnance that are everywhere typical first responses to another person. For his earliest followers, something of Jesus' own charisma still attached to his words, and from the 50s there began the elaborate process of supernaturalizing Jesus' person, his life and his religious status. The sayings-Gospels were developed into narrative Gospels, Jesus' healing touch became the performance of healing-miracles, his open meals foreshadowed the Church's Eucharist, and so on. Jesus became, first the Messiah, and then a risen, exalted, heavenly, and eventually even coequally divine figure, an Incarnate Lord and a cosmic King and Saviour.

These developments were not arbitrary. They amounted to an admission that the full realization of Jesus' ethical vision within history was not at present possible, and had been postponed. Meanwhile, he was waiting offstage in the supernatural world, until the moment when he was scheduled to return to earth to establish his kingdom. But the generations went by, until the Church had been waiting vigilantly for so long that it forgot what it was waiting for, and began to treat itself as 'indefectible' and its dogmas as 'immutable'. This idolatry of itself broke the Church's last remaining link with the historical Jesus, and in the long run is proving fatal to it.

That is all water under the bridge by now. Here we try to understand what the original Jesus was on about, and to assess his place in the history of ethics.

I am not at all a New Testament scholar, and this book is written from the point of view of an ethical theorist, or moral philosopher. I'm asking: Is Jesus a figure of real intellectual interest? He was obviously not himself a philosopher, nor was he what we would call a critical thinker. He was a rather secular moral teacher, an Eastern sage, a teacher of wisdom. But did he contribute something unique about morality to our tradition, something that stays with us, and will stay with us even after Christianity has gone? Yes, I think he did. He was the most important pioneer in antiquity of a kind of radical humanism in ethics that is still up to date and challenging even today.
Many people will say that we do not know enough, with enough certainty, about the teaching of Jesus to justify this book's method and conclusions, and it is indeed true that traditional Plato-to-Kant Western philosophy always supposed itself to be dealing with a world of a priori truths of reason, and would have been very unhappy about basing a philosophical argument upon merely historical - and therefore merely probable - premisses.

In reply, I say that the whole of our knowledge of the human world prior to the invention of printing rests upon physical evidence that will always be open to various interpretations, and manuscript evidence that is always some steps away from the original holograph. All our historical knowledge is fallible, but since the human life-world - a fluid, everchanging and multiperspectival world - is now all we have and all we'll ever have, human philosophy simply ought not to be too puritanical. Compare the evidence for Jesus and his message with the available evidence for Muhammad and for the Buddha. Few people doubt that we have a reasonably clear view of what the latter two great figures were all about. In the case of Jesus, it is true, there is the extra difficulty that layer upon layer of theological interpretation of him was superimposed relatively early on. But when all that is stripped away, Jesus' core message turns out to be not so very different from what many ordinary people have long supposed it to have been.

So I believe we have enough to go on: enough to support my main contention, that at the beginning of Christian tradition there was an extraordinary innovation in ethics. It involved a shift from realism to emotivism, as the moral standard itself was brought down from heaven and relocated in the world of human feelings and relationships, the world of 'the heart'.

Some early readers of this book have wondered why I never mention two of the most popular summaries of Jesus' teaching, namely 'The Lord's Summary of the Law' in two great commandments (Mark 12.29-31 and parallels), and the closely related 'Golden Rule' (Q/Luke 6.31 = Q/Matthew 7.12; cf. Gospel of Thomas 6.3). In these sayings, the early Church pictures Jesus as quoting Scripture, his own contemporary Hillel, and popular wisdom. But the sayings do not express Jesus' own teaching, because they confirm rational self-love, and they tend to assimilate love to justice. Accordingly they were graded only grey (the third grade) by the Jesus Seminar, do not get into The Gospel of Jesus, and are not further discussed here. As Jesus reportedly puts it: 'If you do good to those who do good to you, what merit is there in that?' (Gospel of Jesus 7.4; Q/Luke 7.33). In his view, it is essential that we should think and love beyond mere reciprocity - as I'll be saying at some length.

D.C.
Cambridge, 2009

August Meeting

2008-08-17T19:06:00.016+01:00

Wednesday 27th August
Visit to the
Shri Swaminarayan Mandir

Instead of customary monthly meeting on the 3rd Monday, we are visiting the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Neasden on Wednesday 27th August. Our visit is booked for 11.00 am. Some will be driving there; if you are taking the train, then the current plan is to meet at Banbury Station at 8.50 and take the 9.15 train to London.
Watch this space for further details.

The Mandir website (www.mandir.org) is pretty comprehensive. Directions, information for visitors and regulations as to dress and behaviour can be found at
www.mandir.org/infogallery/index.htm

George Fryer on Worship

2008-07-09T10:18:00.000+01:00

Is worship compatible with substitute concepts of 'God' ?

How do we square 'acts of worship', inbuilt with expressions of God's existence, with the SoF position that the notion of 'god' is a purely human invention? How do we reconcile what we say with what we think?

It is a sort of defence to repeat the concept of man being a 'worshipping animal'? How can we truly dismiss the appeal to people, of all beliefs and none, of domestic and inter-national 'Acts of Remembrance', and equally the regular tide of 'Rites of Passage'? Would we not be the poorer without liturgies associated with births, marriages and deaths, with their significance for the cycles of life?

All liturgies have the common characteristics of words and movement, at the very least symbolic, but intended to generate common bonds of belief. A common faith needs to be expressed in concepts which are, inevitably, abstract. A belief system presumes that 'the majority* has accepted them - either taken as their 'tablets of stone' or, at the least, capable of adapting to them in varying ways. Is this equally the position for the SoF?

Anne Ashworth's thoughts on this matter, published in sofia is entitled 'Non-realist Worship - Paradise or Possibility'? She begins reminding us that the purpose of common liturgical elements - i.e. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Intercession, Petition, Meditation, Dedication, Benediction - were all meant to be addressed to a transcendent deity. All can be directed at God: but no 'handles' in this catechism, as she accepts, are as emotive as descriptions of the mutual feelings such as grace, love, fellowship', &c.

********************

I confess to having constant difficulty with most liturgical confessions and professions. The Eucharist - the most frequently experienced liturgy - contains formulae and definitions to which I take real exception. - I won't here explode about the use of the word 'sin' (or sins), but it is an example of a short-hand for too many varieties of unacceptable attitudes for one definition to stand for them all - and certainly without relating them to moral standards of'non-sinfulness'. (Clearly we have here a problem which is encapsulated in the BCP's language along with the unmentioned positive alternatives to sin, as defined through the beneficent concepts of'resurrection', the Holy Spirit, and Joy - all largely missing.)

There are several prayers and professions of faith in the Eucharistic liturgy which raise difficulties in 'inclusive' worship; but I prefer to ignore them and concentrate on the approved Creeds. These are the primary confession for most Christians. - The CofE. for example, not a being a 'confessional' Church, does not consider incorporating the 39 Articles into any of its principal service! Yet it includes credal statements which were honed over a millenium earlier, which no longer relate automatically with priorities in today's doctrinal considerations.
Sadly none of the 'simpler' alternatives to the accepted creeds, available for more casual use, say much that is truly memorable, and no one has yet dared to come up with a truly sensitive version. (Is this, possibly, a SofF challenge?) To regain integrity, creedal statements need to be related more clearly to acts of confession; and yet there is at present virtually no clear relationship.

Most acts of worship include readings from the Bible, hymnody, and intercessions.
These may be deemed less controversial. But any re-reading of the subjects covered reveals contentious matter. Much of the Bible can today only be considered symbolic in character - even the four-fold direct testimonies to the alleged words and actions of Jesus. Most, in the remainder of the Bible is unrelated to today's experiences unless explained in its historic context. Hymnody is ever susceptible to variations in theological emphasis and, except for successful musical settings, cannot in many cases be deemed adequate to current thinking.

Clearly, there is a big job ahead for someone! But there can be no expectation of a fundamental re-appraisal for the majority of worshippers - possibly until such time as most people feel themselves totally disenfranchised from any truly common form of worship.

My own answer to the situation is probably subversive - but clearly justified. I am gradually devising a corpus of worship material which chimes in with the main structure of the Eucharist. This I employ personally by silent recitation while the commonly accepted version is being spoken. I accept that if everyone did this, then the whole notion of 'common worship' would break down. But maybe this is what has to happen first, to whatever degree as makes the rebellion clear.

This is something that could easily be undertaken by today's 'dissenters'. It would become an 'uncommon' form of common worship which would permit anyone with the opportunity to say what they are really thinking without (at least initially) standing out. The alternative, of not accepting anything to do with organised acts of worship, may be uncompromisingly honest, but is rather like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. It is neither healthy to deny a human need nor to exclude oneself from social involvement.

This may sound somewhat like a plea for yet another revision of the authorised texts! I expect, however, that they will survive, just like the Roman Mass (in Latin), desperately at odds with the more informal worship of the emerging Church, modelling its resources to local need. And perhaps this is what will become more the norm, though I believe that the 'grand model' of the Church Triumphant will continue to persist in eclectic centres. But maybe by then (how long is that?) there could be a corpus of SoF liturgies which allow almost endless variety. And would that not be a foretaste of heaven itself, where all worship honestly in their hearts, irrespective of the agreed formularies which are available for any who refuse (or refrain) from doing their own thing?

********************

One thing remains. We need to remember that liturgical involvement gives access to a spiritual dimension whether we accept it then and there or another time (or none). Engagement in worship sets up a resonance with aspects of a dimension of life greater than any that is always readily acknowledged. This dimension is generated by an energy - what even now is sometimes called 'the power of God'. This manifests itself through the concepts of Creation, Spiritual gifting, and 'Resurrection Life', through which it is normally expressed. It is produced, I believe, through a non-material being which mankind, to be benefited by, indeed from a force greater than regularly understood. The apprehension of this energy is the beginning of religion.

2007-02-03T18:48:00.003Z

Deer Hunting With Jesus
Guns, Votes, Debt and Delusion in Redneck America

by Joe Bageant

Portobello Books Ltd
ISBN-10: 1846271525
ISBN-13: 978-1846271526

Chapter 5
THE COVERT KINGDOM
They plead upon the blood of Jesus for a theocratic state

The political movement we call the religious right, based largely on fundamentalist churches, has deeply changed American politics. Let’s not kid ourselves: every person reading this will be contending with it in many ways for the rest of their lives. There will be no exceptions.

– Fred Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy

The fellow perched on the lawn tractor giving me directions is huge. He wears a "Git 'er Done!" ball cap, a yellow nylon net T-shirt with tufts of chest hair sticking through, and camo flip-flops, and he weighs almost as much as the tractor itself. Its little black tires smush deeper into the wet sod as he speaks: "Yew go raht down heer two blocks past the trailer court and tern left on Dale Earnhardt Lane." Only in the American South could you get such a set of directions from such an unlikely character. (Doubters are invited to enter "Dale Earnhardt Lane, 25401" into Yahoo! Maps.) I am sure some readers are smirking at a class of people who would name a street after a guy whose main achievement was driving in a circle at 200 miles per hour for years on end until he finally bit the big one. Some unsympathetic souls would say, "That's what you get, you damned dumb motherfucker." But not me. As a liberal (ahem!), I revere life.

The fact that I have to ask directions to the church where my younger brother is a pastor is some indicator of how often I attend services. Nevertheless, Brother Mike warmly embraces me when I do manage to show up at Shenandoah Bible Baptist Church. Shenandoah Bible is not a megachurch, but it's large as local praise temples go, with more than a thousand members and some two hundred children enrolled in its fundamentalist Christian school. Built in that featureless architectural style of the 1960s, this wheat-colored brick-and-glass structure sitting in an expanse of green could be part of any of the low, spread-out office campuses so common in this country, were it not for the three steel crosses creating a slim spire at the top.

Brother Mike has been preacher, youth pastor, bus outreach manager, and general all-round wrangler for God at this church since 1974. That was the year Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, Nixon resigned, and Brother Mike was born-again in Christ. For thirty of the thirty-one years since then, he and his wife June lived in a church-supplied mobile home on the church property. Only in 2006, with retirement staring them in the face, did they move into a middle-class ranch house of their own, again with help from the church.

My brother's church is what is known as an independent Baptist church. It is independent enough of your world and mine that he says things like, "I helped cast out a demon the other day, Joey. I wish you could have been there." Independent fundamentalist churches are theologically wooly places whose belief systems can accommodate just about any interpretation of the Good Book that a "Preacher Bob" or a "Pastor Donnie" can come up with. Members of the clergy arise from within the church ranks and are usually poorly educated, though, like most Americans, they do not see themselves that way. Lack of a broad higher education is a hallmark of fundamentalist ministers and goes completely unremarked by their congregations, in whose eyes a two-year technical school or community college, and especially a seminary of their own, is on par with nearly any of the vile secular universities. In fact, the "Bible colleges" are better because they don't teach philosophy, science, the arts, or literature in any form a secular person would recognize.

This rejection of "fancy learnin'" has been a feature of American fundamentalism since the backwoods-stump church days, and it continues to provide the nation with charismatic literalists whose analytical abilities are minimal. If you combine that with more than thirty years of Christian school growth (rooted in the antidesegregation movement), more than 2 million fundamentalist Christian school students nationally, and millions more fundamentalist kids in the public school system, you can begin to understand why so many states find themselves revamping their educational systems so that the teachings of Darwin can be replaced by the fables of Adam and Eve and we can all be reassured that David slew Goliath despite the complete lack of evidence that either existed.

The members of Shenandoah Bible Baptist are ultraright politically, though they don't think so. They consider themselves "mainstream," and if numbers tell the story, they have a better claim to that label than the liberals whom they outnumber.

Being very certain that God exists is a mainstream characteristic. Seventy-six percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics, and one-third of Jews are "absolutely certain," according to Harris polls. The members of Shenandoah Bible are also in the mainstream when it comes to their level of education. They are among the three-quarters of Americans who seem satisfied just to finish high school or who think that a year or so of any sort of training after high school is enough. (Liberals can be grateful they are not all registered voters. As it stands, Christian fundamentalists make up 25 percent of those entitled to vote, according to the Pew Research Center, and 20 million of America's 50 million fundamentalists voted in the last two elections.)

Pollsters agree that church attendance is among the best indicators of whether a voter is liberal or conservative. Sixty-two percent of working-class Americans attend church, and 89 percent of all Americans take their faith seriously enough to make it to church several times a year. Thirty-six percent of them attend church at least twice a month.

Gallup surveys show that one-quarter to one-third of the U.S. population identifies itself as "born-again" evangelicals, a large umbrella that includes liberal born-agains such as Jimmy Carter and even a few Christian Greens. There is more diversity among fundamentalists than is generally understood by the secular public. But taken as a whole, fundamentalists have three things in common: They are whiter than Aunt Nelly's napkin, and, for the most part, they are working class and have only high school educations.

Yet some evangelicals stand apart from the mainstream in one important way: They would scrap the Constitution and institute "Biblical Law," the rules of the Old Testament, and they take the long view toward the establishment of a theocratic state. Others believe we are rapidly entering the End Times and the fulfilment of the darkest biblical prophecies. Like many of their Scots-Irish ancestors, they see a theocracy of one sort or another as a necessary part of the End Times, and, though few publicly say so, some are not averse to a nuclear war in the Middle East, ideally with the help of Israel.

As Brother Mike puts it, "Israel is the key to everything. When the state of Israel was founded, the End Times were set in motion." To wit, the Messiah can return to earth only after an apocalypse in Israel called Armageddon, which a minority of influential fundamentalists are promoting with all their power so that The End can take place. The first requirement was establishment of the state of Israel. Done. The next is Israel's occupation of the Middle East as a return of its "Biblical lands." Which means more wars. Radical Christian conservatives believe that peace cannot ever lead to Christ's return, and indeed impedes the thousand-year Reign of Christ, and that anyone promoting peace is a tool of Satan. Fundamentalists support any and all wars Middle Eastern, and many consider the deaths of their own children as a kind of holy martyrdom. "He (or she) died protecting this country's Christian values." You hear it over and over from the most radical parents of those killed. The parade of deaths, however, has shaken at least a few loose from the militaristic Christian fold.

End Times theology, or premillennialism (a once obscure doctrine conceived by John Nelson Darby of the Plymouth Brethren in 1827), has many variants. All of them boil down to the idea that history is scripted by God and will soon come to an apocalyptic conclusion according to his plan. Your only hope is to accept Jesus as your personal Savior. Then, if you happen to be a member of the Rapturist cult of End Times believers, God will "rapture you up" just as he launches seven years of horror and death upon the earth. An Antichrist will arise, and worldwide war will be the norm. Billions will die. Fundamentalist Christians look around at AIDS, warfare across the globe, crime, the rise of narco-states, and ecological collapse, and they see confirmation of God's plan. Rev. Rich Lang of Trinity United Methodist Church in Seattle says, "This theology of despair is very seductive and it is shaping the spirituality of millions of Christians today."

Hard-core End Times fundamentalists apply their interpretation of the Bible to all things in life, including modern world politics, with predictably strange conclusions:

The United Nations is a tool of the Antichrist. America alone must spread the gospel around the world.
There is no need to worry about the environment because we are not going to need this earth much longer.
Israel is to be defended at all costs and even encouraged to expand, because the Bible declares that Israel must rule all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates in order for End Times prophecy to be fulfilled.
God will provide a Christian leader to shepherd the American flock as they become his chosen people to extend the gospel worldwide and rid the earth of evil.

Meanwhile, there is the work of "reconstructing" our country and achieving "dominion" over it, as required by certain core End Times theologies. "Reconstructionist" plans are as hard and unforgiving as a gravestone. Capital punishment, central to the Reconstructionist ideal, is prescribed for a wide range of crimes, including abandonment of the faith, blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, striking a parent, and "unchastity before marriage" (by women only). Biblically correct methods of execution include stoning, the sword, hanging, and burning. Stoning is preferred, according to Gary North, self-styled Reconstructionist economist, because stones are plentiful and cheap. Biblical law would also eliminate labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools. The late Reconstruction theologian David Chilton declared, "The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics."

Incidentally, the Republic of Jesus' as described by some End Times cults would be not only a legal hell but an ecological one as well. Pure Rapturist doctrine (all types of Rapturists argue over whose doctrine is purest) calls for scrapping environmental protection of all kinds, because there will be no need for this planet once the Rapture occurs.

You may not have heard of Reconstructionists such as R. J. Rushdoony or David Chilton or Gary North. But individually and together they have influenced more contemporary American minds than Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and Howard Zinn combined. Christian Reconstructionism and Dominionism are by no means the dominant strains of fundamentalism these days, nor have they ever been. But since the 1970s, through hundreds of books and college classes, the doctrine of Reconstructionism has come to permeate not only the religious right but mainstream churches as well, through demonstrative Charismatic movements such as Pentecostalism, which focuses on healing, prophecy, and gifts such as the ability to "speak in tongues." Pentecostals lined up behind Christian media mogul Pat Robertson in the 1970s and 1980s, making him rich and powerful. .In return, he gave them the power and confidence to launch emotionally and politically charged movements such as the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade (thereby elevating the humble zygote into previously unimaginable news value).

This push toward a theocracy and the infiltration of mainstream Protestantism by religious extremists was one of the biggest underreported political stories of the second half of the twentieth century. Religious reporters all but ran from it, partly because they must please all the churches they cover. But many of them didn't even see it happening. Yet thousands of mainstream Methodist, Presbyterian, and other Protestant churches were pushed inexorably rightward, often without even realizing it. Clearly the Methodist church down the street from my house does not understand what it has become. Other mainstream churches with more progressive leadership flinched and bowed to the radicals at every turn. They had to if they wanted to retain or gain members swept up in the evangelical movement. So what if the most fervent of these people declared that lesbianism was rampant in the nation's middle school restrooms and vowed to reconstruct America to fit Leviticus?

Pastor Jeff Owens has just begun the announcements when I scoot into the rearmost pew of Shenandoah Bible Baptist Church. "All men who want to go to the big gun show and shooters' exposition in Claysburg sign up for the bus after service," he says. "Men ten years old and older who want to get certified in gun safety meet in the Persian Room." He goes on to announce the Young Fundamentalist meeting and the Adult and Teen "Soul-Winning" meeting. Also on the menu are gender-segregated events such as "It's a Girl Thing!" (for girls thirteen to eighteen years old) and "Singspiration Around the Bonfire"(ladies only). It's a busy place.

Pastor Jeff is one of those unnervingly wholesome, spotlessly groomed fundamentalists, the kind with the relentlessly zappy 300-volt smile that borders on hysteria. He's always psyched, eyes ever alert, presumably for souls to save. Pastor Jeff preaches in the old style, growing increasingly loud as the sermon progresses. What his voice lacks in sonorousness, he makes up for in exclamation and exhortation, and he hammers his lines over and over using a southern technique that has served everyone from Martin Luther King to Oral Roberts: repetition and rhythm.

"To me there are no little problems," he tells the congregation. "To me there are no little matters in this life." The litany of things that are not little to Pastor Jeff lasts a full minute, and in the end "To me" is far more deeply ingrained than the list of things that are not so little. Yet each item on the list seems to hit home with listeners. "To me there are no little Christian watch nights, because on the most ordinary nights one of our daughters' virginity might be saved. And to me there are no little problems and no little people ... no poor people …The richest people here tonight [as if there were any rich people in the congregation] have not the value of the widow's mite. Have not as much worth in God's eyes as those of you who put one dollar in the plate. To me you can never be little or lost or insignificant because to God you can never be litde. There are no little things in this world. No little deeds, no little sins, no little acts of kindness, and no little people here tonight!"

This message of worthiness is balm to those who do the thankless work of this world and suffer the purest snub of all: invisibility. Most people here tonight do not have careers; they have jobs, and they exist as part of the background of the lives of the professional and semiprofessional middle classes. After all, somebody has to groom the dogs and wire the doctor's new $60,000 kitchen. Somebody has to collect all the quarters from the Laundromats and drive the semitrailers to the Pottery Barn warehouse.

Meanwhile, the plate is smoothly passed and Pastor Jeff slips into the offering pitch. The variety of these pitches never ceases to amaze. "God is generous with you every day! Right?" Now thankful for the simple drawing of breath, everyone replies, "Yes! Praise him!" "Therefore," yells Pastor Jeff, "why are you so stingy on this occasion to repay him?" There is a roar of agreement. A sign on the wall shows that the church members put their money where their mouth is: It says SBBC has donated one and a half million dollars for missionary work, a hefty chunk of change for working folks.

The congregation mumbles along behind the choir in a hymn. One thing is certain: Nobody ever came to this or to any modern fundamentalist church for the music. The mushy new music strives to sound as un-hymnlike as possible and succeeds. It is bland, with predictable, graceless melodies and awkward notes thrown in occasionally to make the songs sound complex and "composed." Only a church music director or a Christian publishing company could love it. This morning's selections are somewhat less bland than usual; they include a rather strange song that is a mixture of childish singsong and gory imagery, with lyrics such as "Jesus used me as a canvas and He signed it at the bottom with His name in blood." Shenandoah Bible Baptist is not one of your guitar-and-drums-up-front-beside-the-pulpit Pentecostal churches. It is more representative of the churches of heartland America's truck drivers, bookkeepers, small contractors, tire mechanics, bank tellers, and grocery clerks—holders of the disposable jobs in our insecure new economy.

Those working people have plenty of reasons to feel economically insecure because they take it in the shorts whenever Wall Street gets moody. Still, they claim to believe they have an equal shot at being as successful as anyone else in America, despite the fact that they are merely interchangeable parts in the American production and service machinery. They are good cogs and show great deference toward any type of authority. At work many are treated like children. For example, companies in these parts require employees to bring in written notes from doctors if they use their sick days. The first time a medical receptionist asked me if I wanted "a written excuse from the doctor for your boss," I thought I'd heard her wrong and asked her to repeat it.

Fundamentalist religion demands gratitude for what God grants. So these people are grateful to be earning three bucks above minimum wage: "After all, aren't we better-off than our parents were?" Maybe, but most of their parents had health insurance and got by without both spouses having to work. They own more "stuff" than their parents ever had. They pay more for a pair of brand-name sneakers for their children than their parents paid for an entire month's groceries. So if the number on the paycheck is bigger than in former times and the house is full of gadgets, well, they figure they have plenty for which to be grateful even if they do have to buy groceries with a credit card from time to time. People are starving in India, right? Judging from the wall-to-wall double-wide rumps in the pews, no one is starving here. God provides Big Macs and supermarket bakery cakes. There's plenty to be grateful for, but more than anything else, there is being a part of this church community. Unlike public schools or civic organizations,-the fundamentalist church is one of the few social structures still functioning in America, and it welcomes everyone, rich or poor, good or bad.

If you look across the congregations of these churches, you will see these certainly aren't bad people—just working stiffs whose interior lives were clobbered by the late twentieth century. Their’s is part of the global revival of fundamentalism that occurred when materialism rose triumphant in the wake of the Enlightenment. (Poor dear Enlightenment! So brief! Then smashed by two world wars, Verdun, Dresden, Auschwitz, the gulags, nuclear weapons, and now impending ecological disaster.) Two generations of them were raised in Christian schools amid the unyielding hostility and fear stoked by the Cold War. Is it any wonder they are so drawn to the Apocalypse? From home as they know it in this nation, they look out the window and what they see does look like the end of the world.

Middle-of-the-road Jews, Unitarians, Protestants, and Catholics, not to mention the secular humanists among us, cannot imagine how complete a lifestyle the cultish fundamentalist churches provide. This self-referential culture is so focused on religion and conviction that it was bound to come to see the larger secular society as its persecutor and all authority other than God's, especially that of the government, as corrupt. There is not much they can do about the fact that so many Americans prefer the Sunday sports page to two hours of Bible study on "The Stick of Ephraim." But they discovered they could do something about the government: Infiltrate it. "Train up the Joshua Generation."

Fundamentalist strategists make it clear in their writings that the purpose of homeschooling and Christian academies is to create the right-wing Christian cadres of the future. The goal is to place ever-increasing numbers of believers in positions of governmental influence. "The apathy of other Americans can become a blessing and advantage to Christians," wrote Mark A. Beliles and Stephen K. McDowell in America's Providential History, one of the major textbooks of the Christian homeschool movement. Now we find the Joshua Generation replacing federal judges with fundamentalist Christians and putting them into law firms, banks, police forces,-and the military as "faith-based force multipliers" for God's coming Christian rule.

The training of Christian cadres is far more sophisticated than nonfundamentalists realize. By now, most informed people probably know that the homeschoolers have a university network, with dozens of campuses across the nation, each with its own smiling Christian pod people, each school a clone of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. But how many outsiders know the depth and specificity of political indoctrination in these schools?

For example, Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia, a college exclusively for Christian homeschoolers, offers programs in strategic government intelligence, law, and foreign policy, all with a strict, Bible-based "Christian worldview." Patrick Henry is so heavily funded by the Christian right it can offer classes below cost.

Seven percent of all internships handed out by the Bush administration went to Patrick Henry students, and many more went to graduates of similarly religious rightist colleges. The administration also recruited from the faculties of these schools, appointing right-wing Christian activist Kay Coles James, former dean of the Robertson School of Government at Pat Robertson's Regent University, as director of the U.S. of Office of Personnel Management. What better position from which to recruit fundamentalists? Scratch any of these supposed academics and you are likely to find a Christian zealot. I know because I have made the mistake of inviting a few of these folks to cocktail parties. One university department head told me he is moving to rural Mississippi where he can better re-create the lifestyle of the antebellum South and its "Confederate Christian values."

Meanwhile, when the Rapture comes, Christians with the right credentials will fly away. But you and I, dear reader, will probably be among those who suffer a thousand-year plague of boils. So stock up on antibiotics because, according to the "Rapture Index," the end is near. See for yourself at www.raptureready.com. Part novelty, part obsession, the index is described as the "Dow Jones industrial average of end-time activity" and a "prophetic speedometer." It tracks forty-five categories—among them false Christs, plagues, inflation, beast government, and ecumenism—and assigns points to each indicating how predictive of the Rapture it is. As I write this, the index stands at 160, perilously dose to critical mass, when people like us will be smitten under a sky filled with deliriously happy naked flying Christians.

It's easy to ridicule the notion of the Rapture—the time when God takes up all saved Christians before he lets loose slaughter, pestilence, and torture upon the earth—but I have lived with it as the backdrop of my entire life. My own father believed in the Rapture until the day he died, and the last time I saw him alive we talked about it. He asked me, "Will you be saved? Will you be there with me on Canaan's shore?" I feigned belief in it to give a dying man solace. But that was the spiritual stuff of families, and living and dying, religion in its rightful place, the way it is supposed to be, personal and intimate—not political.

Watching Brother Mike from the back row as he goes about his work down front of the church—all those graceful tasks preachers and associate preachers do when they are not sermonizing— one would never guess that he is at the center of a national storm. At fifty-eight, he is intelligent and sensitive looking in that manly way one sees in Levitra commercials and on the golf course—that affluent suburban look. I think about his Dominionist views, and I wonder whether the gracefully graying man with the Levitra smile would stone a homosexual if the harshest sort of Dominionism were to triumph. I sort of doubt it. But then I never thought I'd see the day when he cast out demons either.

Brother Mike understands that he and his flock are at a pivotal point in modern political history, although they would put it in terms of the hand of Satan or demons afoot in the world. Yet he seems to be a happy man, even as I toss and turn anxiously over the state of things. He would say that my soul is troubling me and that I need to be washed in the blood and redeemed by the grace of him who bled for our sins. I'd say that I am troubled by the distinct impression of approaching trihorned fascism— part Christian, part military, part corporate.

Our roads diverged forty years ago when I escaped the Christian environment to eat LSD, consider Buddhism, and let a couple of marriages go to hell. Eventually, to my family's amazement and relief, I managed to come to rest with a far better woman than I deserve, two dogs, and blood pressure high enough to keep me a respectable distance from the scotch bottle.

Whether I laugh or cry over this chasm between brothers, we end all our meetings and phone calls with the words "I love you." And we do love each other. And I can see Mike's genuine pain that I am not saved. One more time I, the prodigal brother, snatched from proffered grace by pride's certain hand pulling me back into its own dominion, back across the waters of Babylon, a river so deep and wide even blood and brotherhood cannot breach it. Who am I to say that hand is not the hand of a demon?

I am snatched from these reveries by Pastor Jeff's remarks to the congregation on God's relationship with ugly women. He tells a joke: A drunk says to a woman in a checkout line, "I can tell that you're single." "How?" she asks. "Because of the items I purchased?" "No, because you're ugly," the drunk replies. Pastor Jeff adds, "Plenty of you ladies in our congregation can be thankful that there are no ugly women in the eyes of God!"

Now there is a line you will never hear in the sermons of your average rabbi or priest. As in, "Hello, folks, and a special howdy to all you ugly women out there. God loves ya anyway!"

Finally comes the altar call to be saved. Tonight about a dozen people get saved, and as usual most of the respondents are teenagers. This is in no way surprising; at least half the people I know have been saved a couple of times. The first time around it's probably thanks to teenage hormones. The next time it might be courtesy of the divorce. But all will be baptized in the backlit artificial stone dunking pool behind the podium, which is standard in churches where members must "go under" for baptism to be legitimate. Churches are now too sophisticated to baptize God's children in God's rivers. The rivers are too polluted and lack a sound and video system. But I can remember back to the baptisms in the Shenandoah River, and much as I may seem a heathen today, I would give anything to go down to some shaded old riverbank singing and shouting at a good foot-washing Baptist three-times-under baptism—some place that smells like bass leaping in the cool riverine haze while big old snapping turtles watch from a sunny rock offshore.

I would also someday like to watch Brother Mike or Pastor Jeff cast out the aforementioned demons. But a good exorcism— a word Baptists dislike for its taint of Catholicism—can't just be summoned with the snap of the fingers. About the only way I am likely to experience a Baptist exorcism is to be the object of one.

After the worship service, I approach Brother Mike about exorcism: "I gotta ask you, Brother Mike," I said, "do you cast out demons often?"

I must say here that one of the biggest quandaries in writing this book is that people trust me not to make fools of them. Brother Mike talks straight and is never evasive. It's the trust of a brother.

"I've encountered demons no more than six times in my life," he said. "I've only had a couple of direct casting-out experiences. But I think there are a lot more demons around that we do not recognize. Remember the maniac of Gadarenes? The guy in the Bible who was running around naked in the graveyard with two thousand demons in him? He's in the Bible twice: Mark 5:1 and Luke 8:26. Jesus cast the demons into a herd of swine. My most recent casting-out was in a young man twenty years old. His dad had come to me and said he thought his son was demon possessed. The boy was involved in drugs and sex. Drug dealers are sorcerers, part of Satan's power of the air now ruling here on earth to a large extent. Revelation 8 shows the connection."

"What do you do? Lay on hands or what?"

"We use scripture read aloud. Particularly those scriptures on the blood of Christ. The Devil hates the blood of Christ, and God promised the power in the blood. This young man said he could actually lie in bed and feel his girlfriend in his arms even though she wasn't there. He liked wild music, drink, and drugs. He talked to me for two hours, and all the time he had this dark look about him. So I looked into his eyes and said: 'I think you are demon possessed. Do you think you are? Do you think you have demons?' He said yes. I told him, ‘Then you cannot get victory.'"

"Hell, little brother. What does a demon do when you try to cast him out?"

"Well, these demons never talked back to me, though sometimes they do. We started to pray, and the boy got up and ran. I pinned him to the door, and he started to growl at me just like a wild dog. And so here's what I did: I just plead the blood. The name of Christ has power, and the blood is where the real power is. After he calmed down a little, we sat him back in the chair, and his dad went to get two other preachers. We surrounded the boy and began to pray. He growled and tried again to run. We held him down in the chair for about twenty minutes or so, all three of us praying at the same time. We prayed loud. When you are fighting a spiritual battle like that, it gets real loud. Finally he went limp, and I think that is when the demon left. After that he was exhausted. He later got saved. That was several years ago, and he's still in the church."

"After an ordeal like that, I'll bet he is!"

Brother Mike tells me that Satan has an invisible army of demons doing his bidding and that every demon is different. He says demons will take up residence in a house and stay there for years.

"Me and Preacher [the church's founder] and two other guys cleared demons out of my son's father-in-law's house. Demons were exposing themselves, to my son's father-in-law [who is, incidentally, a well-placed U.S. government administrator]. A black form with red eyes actually came into the room and stood over the bed. It scared the wife and kids to death. We got out the Book of Hebrews, chapters 9 and 10, where it talks about the blood and the victory. We went into every room and commanded the demons to leave in the name of Christ. We asked them to reveal themselves. We called them cowards in the face of God. They never came back."

"Geesh! The Baptist church has certainly gotten livelier since the days when I went to church."

I often make light here of millions of Americans whose magical thinking about the Bible resembles Dungeons and Dragons more than religious contemplation. I have to. It helps me deal with the fact that my own family believes in demons. Of course, my brother and I both care deeply about each other, though even as graying older men we still have great difficulty expressing it.

He is about to retire from the church, and I am still a bit surprised my little brother is a preacher at all, though I shouldn't be. We have any number of "brush preachers" in our family tree, Pentecostals and Baptists mainly. Pictures of them hang along my staircase, men like Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin, an angry-looking skinny old man with spectacles, dressed in a white suit and posed with legs crossed on a southern lawn, under trees, sitting on a straight-backed chair—and as always, with a Bible in his lap. And my parents did meet at a Billy Graham tent revival during the Second World War, marrying shortly afterward. The fact that I was born less than nine months after they married testifies to the Reverend Graham's charisma.

Sometimes I look at the framed photo of Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin, a Holiness Pentecostal preacher. My mother and her siblings hid under the bed when they saw his cadaverous white-suited frame approaching along the dusty road through the scrub pines. He was a carpenter—a damned good one on those occasions when he could find an employer who could stand to be around him. He sometimes killed copperhead snakes with his cane as he walked the roads with his Bible and muttered that they were "adders in the path of the righteous." According to family legend, he once took his cane to a woman who refused to quit pumping water from a well on a Sunday, and in his sermons he advocated that Christians band together and wage open war on nonbelievers. He never invited sinners to the altar to be saved (not that any nonbeliever would have had the balls to attend one of his services). Tar-and-feather the flappers, he said, and hang the bootleggers. Family members now long dead used to tell me that he saw Warren G. Harding as the Devil's disciple because Harding supported women's suffrage and had "nigger blood." Some of them agreed with him.

Looking at his photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of the many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America's oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream—not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I'll toast you from hell.

You don't need a degree in sociology to see that the most obvious class indicator in America is religious belief and that religious zeal is concentrated in lower-class and working-class whites. One look at Brother Charlie casting a demon out of a Camaro engine block tells the story. Working-class whites have always been evangelical Protestants, and cartoons and newspaper stories depicting unruly lower-class religious fervor, spirit-filled altar calls, and manipulating or raving evangelist preachers can be found as far back as the l820s. It was seen then as hick folly and still is, and the places where it flourishes, the places where millions of working Americans live, are still viewed as low class. Less than desirable. Paul Fussell puts it very nicely in his book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System:

Another way to judge a place's undesirability is to measure the degree to which religious fundamentalism is identified with it. Akron, Ohio ... is fatally known as the home of the Rex Humbard Ministry, the way Greenville, South Carolina, is known as the seat of Bob Jones University, and Wheaton, Illinois, is identified with Wheaton College and remembered thus as the forging ground of the great Billy Graham. Likewise Garden Grove, California, locus of the Rev. Robert Schuller, famous for his automatic smile and his cheerful Cathedral of glass. Can a higher-class person live in Lynchburg, Virginia? Probably not, since that town is the origin of Dr. Jerry Falwell's radio emissions, the site of his church and the mailing address for free-will offerings. Indeed, it seems that no high-class person can live in any place strongly associated with religious prophecy or miracle.

By that standard there can be absolutely no hope for Winchester, Virginia. No cultured person with more than two fingers of forehead could possibly live enjoyably on an intellectual plane. On a simple four-block walk to the tavern, I pass two Pentecostal outfits, the Second Chance Church, and an "Institute for the Study of Creation Science" with television sets tuned into God on display in a front window and with its speakers bellowing the creationist message to passersby:

If primates gave birth to creatures that gave birth to human beings, then why aren't they still doing it? Why aren't we seeing primates giving birth to man-apes today? Look around. See any? Of course not. There's the disproof of evolution right before your eyes!

How on earth could anyone accept such evolution as ape sex versus logic, much less foist it on other people? Of course millions of them were actually taught that in Christian schools back when they were little Joshuas. But many millions more who never set foot in a Christian school accept it because it sounds to them like a good scientific argument. Plus it is easy to understand and supports their resentment of egghead scientists, who are too damned smart-assed anyway.

This is a uniquely American form of ignorance. With about half of all Americans ranging from minimally literate to functionally illiterate, truth falls before the scythe of rumor and the lust for spectacle. These Americans have eyes, which is to say the camera to shoot what is around them, but they have no intellectual software to edit or make sense of it all. Thus we find millions of fundamentalists producing their own mind movies of American reality, in which the secretary general of the United Nations is the Antichrist and the "Clinton crime family" deals in cocaine and is linked to the Gambino family. In these movies abortion doctors are microwaving and eating fetuses, according to testimony given by antiabortionists before a Kansas House subcommittee, and crowds of good folks get teary-eyed as Rev. Pat Evans of the NASCAR "Racing for Jesus Ministries" rumbles onto the track. Evangelical NASCAR? Yup. ABC called it America's "unapologetically evangelical sport." I can see you, dear reader, running and holding your head and screaming at the thought. Yet it's true. At Bristol and Talladega the earth is shaking for Jaaaayzus!

Pappy Baldwin, you may be relishing the triumph of ignorance and the clamor of the righteous rabble for the lynching of Darwin's ghost yet one more time. But they are having far too much fun at Talladega, aren't they? Tough beans, because nobody can stop ignorant folks from having ignorant fun and spectacle, which is pretty much the only kind of fun and spectacle available in this country. Still, you'd be proud of the clan of Joshuas who sprang from your loins, proud of the grisly and indelible promise of the Rapture you stamped on your descendants, me among them.

One September day when I was in the third grade, I got off the school bus and walked up the red dust-powdered lane to my house only to find no one there. The smudgy white front door of the old frame house stood open. My footsteps on the unpainted gray porch creaked in the fall stillness. With increasing panic, I went through every room and then ran around the outside of the house sobbing, in the grip of the most horrific loneliness and terror. I believed with all my heart that the Rapture had come and that all my family had been taken up to heaven, leaving me alone on earth to face God's terrible wrath. As it turned out, they were at a neighbor's house scarcely three hundred yards down the road and returned in a few minutes. But it took me hours to calm down. I dreamed about it for years afterward.

Since then I have spoken to others raised in fundamentalist families who had the same childhood experience of coming home and thinking everyone had been "raptured up." The Rapture is very real to people in whom its glorious and grisly promise has been instilled and cultivated since birth. Even those who escape fundamentalism agree its marks are permanent. We may no longer believe in being raptured up, but the grim fundamentalist architecture of the soul stands in the background of our days. An apocalyptic starkness remains somewhere inside us, one that tinges all our feelings and thoughts of higher matters. Especially about death, oh beautiful and terrible death, for naked eternity is more real to us than to those born into secular humanism.

Over the past few years I've received mail from hundreds of folks like me, the different ones who fled and became lawyers and teachers and therapists and car mechanics, dope dealers and stockbrokers and waitresses. And every one of them has felt that fearful emptiness, that inner lightning illuminating the carnage of lost souls, in the face of which we are meaningless and can only plead upon the blood of Jesus.

Pleading upon the blood of Jesus. I never heard that expression while growing up. Scary as biblical language seemed then, there is something more ominous about today's fundamentalist terminology. Close observers of conservative American Christianity know that it has grown darker and more blood oriented over the past few decades. Sermons speak of "pleading the blood of Jesus," "blood redemption," and "doctrine of the blood." As Diane Christian, professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, wrote, "There is a big leap from the liberation of Exodus, when Jews sprinkled blood on their doorposts, to the salvation proposed by Christians, in which blood is drunk by a community of faith. The Christian community not only lives after death by the blood of their Christ; but they feed on it in life. What can this mean, to drink blood?"

It is a safe guess that it does not mean turn the other cheek.

I had dinner with Brother Mike's family back around the time the television networks were showing the dismembered U.S. civilian bodies strung up on the bridge at Fallujah and Mel Gibson's bloody Christ was hanging in agony in every movie house in the country. The overwrought emotionalism of these and other media blood offerings of the week coincided approximately with the Easter season, if I remember correctly. Not a word about it was spoken among my family and fundamentalist friends as far as I know, at least not to me. No one needed to. Brother Mike's children and wife and everyone else in their world were in complete agreement about what needed to be done in the Holy Land. They knew their president would take care of matters. Fallujah soon enough got its horrific payback for those TV images—and got it with the unconditional support of the Bageant family and the Shenandoah Bible Baptist Church.

Only another liberal raised in a fundamentalist clan can understand what a strange, sometimes downright hellish circumstance it is—how such a family can despise everything you believe in, see you as a humanist instrument of Satan, yet still love you and be right there for you when your back goes out or a divorce shatters your life. How they can never fail to invite you to the family's Thanksgiving dinner.

It must be plain that I do not find much conversational fat to chew around the Thanksgiving table. Politically and spiritually, my family and I may be said to be dire enemies. Love and loathing coexist. There is talk but no communication. At times it seems we are speaking to one another through an unearthly veil, wherein each party knows it is speaking to an alien. There is a sort of high, eerie, mental whine in the air. This is the sound of mutually incomprehensible worlds hurtling toward destiny, passing with great psychological friction, obvious to all yet acknowledged by none.

After a lifetime of identity conflict, I have come to accept that these are my people—by blood, even if not politically or spiritually. I have prayed with them, mourned with them, and celebrated their weddings. I share their rude tastes and humor, and I am marked by the same fundamentalist God-instilled self-loathing. No matter how much I may change or improve my condition, I cannot escape their pathos. I go forward, yet I remain. I wait anxiously and strive for change, for relief from what feels like an increased stifling of personal liberty, beauty, art, and self-realization in America. They wait in spooky calmness for Jesus.

Meanwhile, I am jolted by periodic reminders of fundamentalism's dark magical thinking. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I loaned my brother my old truck until he could get his engine rebuilt. A week later he returned the truck with sincere thanks, a smile, and an armload of frozen deer meat—most of it tenderloin, the stuff a hunter keeps for himself.

On the vent window of my old truck is a four-inch decal, a silhouette of two square dancers (my father-in-law, who gave me the truck, was a square dancer). When I climbed into the truck the next day, I noticed that the square dancers were covered over on both the inside and the outside with duct tape. I knew instantly why the decal was taped over. For spiritual protection. After all, we cannot be riding around in trucks with demonic emblems blasting out invisible rays of Satan's "Power of the Air," can we?

When I look at the fundamentalists I know personally, I see many kind, brave, and hardworking people, embodying all those things an American is supposed to be. But knowing what they used to be and what they have become, I see something else. I see that one of the most significant yet least understood political events in America is the conversion of millions of people from apolitical Christians into Christian political activists. Despite of claims of independence, their churches have been deeply manipulated by their own power-hungry leadership and by the Republican Party, beginning in the Reagan years.

Future historians, however, may remember our political tumult as a lesser story in the end, because the current religious fervor may simply be the fourth in a series of Great Awakenings that have shaped America. None of the Awakenings involved the majority of Americans—most of them, like most of us today, were too busy with their lives to get involved in one of the great movements of their times. None of the Awakenings was about politics, but all of them had profound long-term political and social effects. The First Great Awakening occurred in the 1730s and 1740s, the Second in the 1820s and 1830s, the Third in the 1880s and early 1900s. The first-three Awakenings were revivalist movements, not attempts to change government. It may well be that we are, seeing the Fourth Awakening and that historians one day will document it as beginning in 1973 with the publication of R.J. Rushdoony's seminal The Institutes of Biblical Law. We will not know for some time; each previous Awakening took from twenty to thirty years to unfold and peak.

If this does prove to be the Fourth Awakening, then ours will have been the most radical of all. The First Awakening's James Davenport was seen as an insane extremist because he claimed to be able to distinguish the saved from the damned. Now all people are presumed to be damned until saved according to church specifications. We no longer even get a running start on the Devil! Davenport also believed in the banning and burning of books, even as Awakened preachers of the era declared the med for universal access to education because "at the foot of the cross the ground is level." If the preachers and participants of those earlier Awakenings saw Davenport as too extreme, then they would find Ted Haggard, Tim LaHaye, and many of today's leaders—men so powerful they advise the president—crazier than shithouse rats. Right up there with Grandpa Baldwin.

Fortune willing, this movement in American history— which is by no means over, since radical fundamentalism has managed to keep growing steadily in influence through both Democratic and Republican administrations—will be remembered as a dark time we managed to get through. Otherwise, one shudders to think of the outcome.

Backed by the faithful support of hardworking American Christians who seldom fully comprehend their leadership's agenda, zealous evangelical leaders will have no less than the "inevitable victory God has promised his new chosen people," according to the founding masters of the covert kingdom. Screw the Jews, they blew their chance. The 2008 elections, regardless of the outcome, will not change the fact that millions of Americans are under the spell of an extraordinarily dangerous mass psychosis. Maybe the philosopher Nietzsche was right: "One is not 'converted' to Christianity—one must first be sick enough for it."

Now I know I have cast a mighty wide net here, but only because these fish are many and slippery. No matter what one writes, fundamentalists come back with "Oh, but I am not that brand of fundamentalist." Then they launch into the tortuous doctrinal hairsplitting only they understand because nobody else in his or her right mind would bother reading such convoluted tomes. And by the time one finishes writing about them, they have shape-shifted into some slightly newer version of the same old game. Still, there is the fact that most ordinary fundamentalists don't like being directly associated with such extreme radicalism as Reconstructionism. Fundamentalists tell me, "No, I am not a Reconstructionist. Almost nobody is." Or "I am not a Premillen-nialist, I'm a Postmillennialist," or a "Midtribulationist" or... Whatever the arcane differentiation, they sure as hell share some of the same DNA.

I will spare you the agony of fundamentalist taxonomy and its mind-numbing explorations of theonomy and Erastianism. But if you are disposed toward self-punishment, you can take it upon yourself to learn the differences between Dominionism, Pretribulationisrn, Midtribulationism, Posttribulationism, Pre-raillennialism, and Millennialism. You can spend ten years discussing them with ordinary fundamentalists of every stripe, and you still won't understand what has been going on with all those cults.

-How did things arrive at this pass? Fred Clarkson, a New England Yankee with a streak of liberty a mile wide, has been thinking and writing about this longer than anybody I know. His book on the subject, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracys, is a classic. He tells me that things got this far partly because of the energies of their leadership but more "because the rest of us were asleep at the wheel. They outsmarted as, they were organized, and they won fair and square." No demonic masterminds—or not as many or as masterly as we sometimes like to think, anyway. No handful of bogeymen or Dick Cheneys of fundamentalism we can point to as the root cause. There have been and still are plenty of slick leaders and operators, but in the end there is no quick television shot of the bad guy or guys.

The good news, Clarkson tells me, is that they came to power primarily through elections and can be dealt with in the same way: "Anyone who wishes to displace them needs to become more engaged in electoral politics than just watching it on television. You need to become engaged and bring your friends. And your family."

Just like the Christian right did.

The very nature of liberalism, with its emphasis on diversity and individuality, makes it hard to organize.. The bigger problem, though, is that liberals, like most other Americans, have lost the skills of grassroots organization, not to mention the will. Clark-son observes, "Every good citizen should learn how to be a good activist—or a good candidate. Yes, it may mean making some choices, like less television and surfing the Internet. But that is how a constitutional democracy is organized. That's the way it works. If we abandon the playing field to the other side, they win by default." (If you are inspired to take immediate action, Wellstone Action at www.wellstoneaction.org has an excellent program and a manual. You can also find a very good reading list and discussion group at www.Talk2Action.org.)

Besides learning more about the religious right, we need to learn how to talk about them calmly and thoughtfully. "This is how good plans can be made," Clarkson tells me with Yankee practicality. The religious right these days claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, but "they seek to restore a theocratic order that never was, not since the ratification of the Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution overthrew 150 years of colonial theocracies and theocratic wannabes. And when it was accomplished, Benjamin Franklin said, 'You have a republic, if you can keep it.' So let's keep it."

Once we have learned the lay of the land, Clarkson adds, "We need to figure out who we can talk to and who we can't." When you get down to the guy in the church pew, he says, "You will find that most conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists do not want a theocracy and are not inclined to civil war here or in the Middle East. Their intellectual and political leaders may be, but most of the congregation just wants to pursue happiness in pretty much the same way as everyone else. It is time to get to know our neighbors." A couple of nights on the phone with Fred Clarkson convinced me he's right about that, even if he is a New England Yankee. Count me in.

But it sure as hell won't be easy, not down here where Satan's red-eyed demons howl like dogs and hover above us, suspended by mysterious aerial powers of the Devil himself.

October homework

2007-02-02T19:00:00.012Z

Does Religion Make People Nicer?
Only if they think Sky Big Brother is watching

Ronald Bailey | October 7, 2008

In his new movie Religulous, comedian Bill Maher makes wicked fun of the religiously credulous. But it turns out that the folks who believe in talking snakes and seventy-two virgins per martyr may be on to something. As whacky as some dogmas are, religions do appear to encourage generosity and honesty. At least that is the claim made in a fascinating review article, "The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality" (subscription required) published in the current issue of Science.

Evolutionary biologists argue that there's nothing surprising about genetically related individuals making sacrifices for their kin: They are helping some of their own genes get passed along to the next generation. But what might cause people to make sacrifices for the good of unrelated strangers? Here, according to University of British Columbia social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff, religion plays a key role.

The authors have winnowed three decades of empirical evidence looking for examples of religious prosociality, which they define as "the idea that religions facilitate acts that benefit others at a personal cost." Specifically, their hypothesis is that religion encourages people to sacrifice their individual fitness for the benefit of unrelated individuals or for their group. For example, young men may risk sacrificing themselves in war to protect their tribe. So how does religion encourage prosociality? The answer is that being watched by a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky tends to make believers nervous about being selfish.

This observation accords with numerous studies showing that people behave better when they think that someone may be watching them. For example, one remarkable study in 2006 found that just being under the gaze of eyes on a poster nearly tripled the contributions to an office coffee kitty. Exposing participants in a laboratory economic game to computer-generated eyespots while they played made them twice as generous as those who were not. Another study found that participants in a laboratory economic game were nearly four times stingier with other players when they thought they were anonymous than when they thought they were being observed. In other words, watched people are nicer people. Why should that be? It's because we want to have the reputation of being cooperative and prosocial so that other people, especially strangers, will want to cooperate with us.

"The cognitive awareness of gods is likely to heighten prosocial reputational concerns among believers, just as the cognitive awareness of human watchers does among believers and non-believers alike," hypothesize the authors. But supernatural oversight is even better because it "offers the powerful advantage that cooperative interactions can be observed even in the absence of social monitoring."

So does religion work, in the sense of encouraging prosocial other-regarding behavior? It depends. In one famous 1973 study, degrees of religiosity did not predict which students would stop to help someone lying on a sidewalk appearing to be sick. However, in another experiment, two players would simultaneously decide how much money to withdraw from the same envelope—if their combined withdrawals exceeded the amount in the envelope, neither would get any money. Systematically, less money was withdrawn when the game was played at religious kibbutzim than when it was played at secular kibbutzim. This finding supported the researchers' prediction that "men who participate in communal prayer most frequently will exhibit the highest levels of cooperation."

So why do religious believers tend cooperate more? In one illuminating study cited by the researchers, volunteers were given the option to raise money for a sick child's medical bills. Some would-be volunteers were told that it was very likely that they would be asked to help, while others were told that there was only a small chance that they would be called on. "In the latter condition, participants could reap the social benefits of feeling (or appearing) helpful without the cost of the actual altruistic act. Only in the latter situation was a link between religiosity and volunteering evident," claim Norenzayan and Shariff. Religion played a role when it appeared that volunteering would improve one's reputation without much personal cost.

Even more interesting are studies that find that invoking an unseen watcher enhances moral behavior. In one amazing experiment, when participants were told that the ghost of a dead student was haunting the experimental room, they cheated less on a computer test. Other researchers report that when experimental subjects were primed with religious words, they cheated significantly less on a subsequent task. Similarly, Norenzayan and Shariff found that subjects in experimental economic games were more generous when God concepts were implicitly activated before play.

The authors hypothesize that the belief in morally concerned gods who keep track of who's been naughty or nice helps create and stabilize large-scale societies. "Large groups, which until recently lacked institutionalized social-monitoring mechanisms, are vulnerable to collapse because of high rates of freeloading. If unwavering and pervasive belief in moralizing gods buffered against such freeloading, then belief in such gods should be more likely in larger human groups where the threat of freeloading is most acute," suggest the authors. In fact, a cross cultural analysis of 186 societies confirms this prediction: The larger a society, the more likely its members believe in deities that are concerned about human morality.

In small hunter-gatherer bands or subsistence farming villages, it's pretty easy to keep track of just how cooperative your neighbors are. But when groups grow to encompass thousands and eventually millions of strangers, a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky can watch how your fellow citizens behave when you can't. And even better, Sky Big Brother can punish them with eternal damnation if they swindle you. One big downside is that groups have different Sky Big Brothers, which means that "the same mechanisms involved in ingroup altruism may also facilitate outgroup antagonism." In other words, kill the infidels!

Shariff and Norenzayan note that while religion remains a powerful facilitator of prosociality in large groups, modern societies have devised secular replacements for Sky Big Brother, including courts, police, and other contract-enforcing institutions. Also, the modern world is headed toward a transparent society in which social monitoring will be nearly as omnipresent as that of a hunter-gatherer band. Increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies will enable anyone to assess your reputation for prosociality with a few mouse clicks. Sky Big Brother is being outsourced to the Web.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

From reasononline: http://www.reason.com/news/show/129304.html

September Meeting

2007-02-01T18:32:00.000Z

So many of us cannot make our usual date in September that we are not meeting this month

On Forgiveness

2007-01-20T16:15:00.001Z

Richard Holloway
(Canongate Books, 2002)

from Chapter 3: Managing the Chaos

Finding the right title for a book is an art. Some good books have lousy titles and some good titles are fig leaves over bad books. One of the best book titles I have ever come across was by John Stuart Collis, a popular writer about science and nature. The title was The Worm Forgives the Plough. I never read the book, but I fancied I knew what it was about, because it had a title that immediately communicated a strong idea. I assumed the book was about the symbiosis of the natural world, its ecological connectedness. Of course, it is an example of the sympathetic fallacy to imagine that the worm actively and intentionally forgives the plough as it is being sliced in half, but it's not hard to get the idea. Nature is a great food chain and all living creatures live off and depend upon one another. That is the inescapable reality of things, but there is a tragic grandeur to it, suggesting that we are all part of a great system of sacrifice and mutuality.
. . .
That is the way of all the earth. The pain of consciousness is that we have projected our own emotions on to the indifferent processes of nature and embroidered it with our own sense of loss and tragedy. We are compulsive anthropomorphisers who read our own pain and sorrow into the lives of other species. Nevertheless, there can be a mysterious comfort in accepting the nature of a universe in which the worm is crushed by the grieving plough and in which hunters weep over the beauty of the birds they slaughter. There's an astonishingly moving meditation right at the end of Camus' The Outsider, when the condemned man Meursault lies on the bunk in his prison cell:
I must have had a longish sleep, for, when I woke, the stars were shining down on my face. Sounds of the countryside came faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. The marvellous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded through me like a tide . . . gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.
I would like to suggest that this mood of acceptance of the benign indifference of the world is close to the springs of what we mean by forgiveness. Fatalism is not quite the right word here, though Nietzsche told us to love fate, to have what he called amor fati, to say yes to the unavoidable necessity of things. The normal sense of the word fatalism is too passive for the experience I am trying to uncover. The mood I am after is more celebratory than resigned. It actively says yes to the tragic reality of life, including the facts of pain and loss. Two instinctive responses lie behind this affirmation: that there is, first of all, a wise, sometimes rueful, awareness that the universe is bigger than us and will get us all in the end; and, secondly, that to completely understand any human act, including what we would describe as a wicked act, we would have to know all the facts of the universe. To know all would be to forgive all, to know all would be to accept the necessity of the worm-crushing plough and the need for hunters to feed their young, not to mention all the other ways in which we exploit one another. We have to begin our search for understanding and wisdom by accepting that in the great chain of being all effects have causes that are themselves the effects of causes that were effected by causes, going back all the way to that mysterious uncaused cause we call the Big Bang. This is not quite the same thing as saying that everything is so absolutely mechanistically determined that there is no point in judging people for the way they act. Though it is true that we all tend to judge too quickly, it seems to be intrinsic to our nature to discriminate between types of conduct, some of which we blame, some of which we praise. What we are less good at recognising is that the scope of human freedom is surprisingly slight and fragile. An understanding of this may lie behind Hannah Arendt's distinction between the need to forgive the person who has wounded us, while continuing to condemn what the person has done. This is a difficult balance to sustain, but it seems to be important to hold these two apparently opposing values in some kind of equilibrium: the need to reclaim the future for humanity by forgiving its offenders, by refusing to let their past actions simply stop time, as it were, and freeze it at a particular moment of passion or madness or carelessness or forgetfulness or confusion; while, at the same time, retaining the moral ability to identify the actions themselves as bad, as things that should never have been done.
There is a tragic fact here that needs to be faced. The reason we want to be able to forgive individuals, while retaining the important ability to judge their actions, is that we know that personal action is the fruit of character and that character is largely predetermined by factors that are not in our control. The most tragic contemporary version of this hideous dilemma is the sexual abuse of children. Apart from the kind of opportunist sexual use of children that may sometimes be an outlet for ordinary adult lust, most compulsive abusers seem to have been made that way by external circumstances. We know that many, if not all, abusers were themselves abused from an early age. We know that they are emotionally fixated on children. We know that they persuade themselves that the relations they have with children are freely consented to. Sexual abuse of children is at the extreme end of our tolerance meter, but it does illustrate the tragic dilemma that faces a human being whose character has been formed in a way that is totally unacceptable to the rest of the human community. Actions are the result of character and our characters seem to be stamped upon us from the beginning, like a kind of predestined fate, for good or evil. It is theoretically possible to reform or remould the character into a different pattern, but major developmental changes rarely seem to occur in the human psyche. The most we can usually hope for is the strength to develop avoidance strategies that may help us to manage our compulsions in less destructive ways. Nevertheless, extraordinary transformations do sometimes occur.
I once had a discussion with a scholarly psychiatrist about the offending behaviour of the violent young men who tragically pack our prisons. We agreed that most of these men had been formed by circumstances beyond their control. Can nothing be done with or for them? I asked. Yes, he said, we can work to change the determinants, the factors that produce or influence our conduct. We know that this can lead to profound behavioural change in characters that appear to be already formed beyond reformation. There are many stories of tough and violent men whose lives were radically redirected by altering the circumstances that determined their conduct. By educating them, by increasing their self-worth and thereby enabling their enormous energy to express itself in positive, sometimes artistic ways, amazing changes can occur, as several notable examples from within the recent history of Scotland's hard men will prove. I once sat in on a group session at Grendon Prison for major offenders and saw this process at work. The men were all serious criminals serving life sentences. They had applied to join this therapeutic community because they had all reached a point, after years in prison, at which they wanted to alter the pattern of their own behaviour and change the inner determinants of their characters. Observing the dialectic that operated in that brutally honest group session was fascinating. A fundamental element in the process was that they had to acknowledge and own the reality of the terrible things they had done, while, at the same time and without turning it into an excuse, they had to recognise that they themselves had been moulded by circumstances that were not in their control. What made the difference, what gave them back the future, was the decision to try to take control of their own destiny, probably for the first time in their lives. Part of the process involved a radical kind of self-forgiveness that meant accepting the way the universe had formed them. This was dynamic forgiveness in action, but the interesting thing to note about it was that it was almost entirely contained within the drama of the offender's own life. So far, we have not brought the victim onto the stage. As a matter of fact, part of the process of rehabilitation for major criminals probably ought to involve carefully organised encounters with their victims, if each consents to the process. This would mean a switch from retributive justice, pure punishment, to restorative justice, which is based on the concept of reparation. Reparation repairs the damage done by the crime, either by some act of material restoration, such as payment or service, or by some kind of symbolic gesture such as willingness to cooperate in special programmes of training or therapy.
Creative forgiveness can have a life-changing impact on all the actors in the tragedies of humanity, but I want to stick with offenders for the moment. What we are looking for is the injection of a dynamic force into the logjam that will get the clogged river moving again: in the case of the offender, something that will break up and re-form the character that is locked in certain patterns of destructive habit. There are many human arenas where this process can begin. For example, the emphasis on self-acceptance leading to self-forgiveness, which will, in turn, lead to personal change, is a fundamental part of psycho-therapy. In the language of person-centred therapy, the counsellor offers the client empathy and unconditional positive regard, no matter what is being revealed. This creates a space of safety where the client, often burdened with guilt and self-hatred, is able to see himself or herself as a creature caught in the web of being, who has acted, however badly, from within a particular history that is itself part of a larger history that is part of all history. I read somewhere that the origins of the First World War of 1914-18 could be traced back to the building of the Great Wall of China more than 2,000 years earlier. Chou en Lai made a similar point when he said that it was still too early to know whether the French Revolution had been successful. Behind these sweeping claims lies the assumption that human history is connected or joined-up, so to make particular judgments about parts of the process is always going to be inaccurate and incomplete. The same point was made by many commentators after September 11, 2001: terrorists are bred by circumstances, they do not come fully formed from the womb of hell; they are made by history not Satan. So are we all, which is why we must all learn the art of forgiving, and the hardest place to start is in the struggle with our own guilt.
We are all different from each other, of course, but most of us seem to be quite good at forgiving or understanding human weakness in people we love, at sticking with our friends through the painful consequences of their mistakes. It is much more difficult to apply the same generosity to ourselves.
. . .
Knowledge of our failings is important if we are to live the examined life, but complete honesty will involve finding the balance between our good points and our bad. In any case, the real motive for self-examination is not so that we can beat ourselves up for being miserable sinners, but so that we can grow in self-knowledge and manage our relationships a bit more wisely. We should be honest about what we have done badly, but we should also acknowledge what we have done well in our journey through life. Most lives are achievements that have had their share of sorrow and endurance. The point I am making here is that we have to bring to the examined life a kind of objectivity that enables us to look at ourselves with compassionate impartiality.
If forgiving ourselves is difficult enough, finding the energy to forgive others can be almost impossible. This can lead to an excruciating double bind, in which our inability to forgive adds guilt to the pain that is already in our souls, because now we have to acknowledge that we continue to hold grudges, can't let things go and walk away, but endlessly proceed from wrong to wrong like a rat caught in a cage. Listening to people caught in this predicament makes one painfully aware of how apt the trapped-animal analogy is. At the root of the word 'obsession' is the Latin for being under siege and that is what this state of mind feels like. Compulsive obsessive disorders are wrackingly repetitive, as the mind drives the body through endless rituals and routines without surcease. The inability to forgive and let go can feel like that. The offence, the assault upon the body or soul of the victim, is endlessly reprised. The details of the insult or brutality or infidelity are exhaustively rehearsed to anyone who will listen, and the mind and heart are permanently under siege as memory plays the injury over and over, just the way TV endlessly repeats news clips of catastrophes, like those shots of the hijacked planes plunging into the Twin Towers in Manhattan. If these public tragedies can play endlessly in our minds, think of the undying effect on people of hurt that violated their trust in others. It is the destruction of trust that is the damning thing here, except that it is the victim who suffers damnation, as the abuse is relived or the memory of the broken promise runs round the mind in a loop that nothing seems able to stop.
We must apply exactly the same strategy to the guilt of the victim who cannot forgive as we did to the guilt of the offender who seeks forgiveness: unconditional positive regard, deep understanding and an honest acknowledgment that this is the way things are and that they have been made that way by factors that are not in the person's control. We only add to the trauma if we try to urge or hurry people into a forgiveness they are humanly incapable of offering. We find an eloquent example of this in the South African Truth Commission. In the essay from which I have already quoted, Derrida tells us that Archbishop Tutu recounted how one day a black woman came to testify before the Commission. Her husband had been tortured then killed by police officers. She speaks in one of the eleven languages officially recognised by the Commission, and Archbishop Tutu, who seems to speak them all, translates her words in this way: 'A commission or a government cannot forgive. Only I, eventually, could do it. (And I am not ready to forgive.)'6 It is possible to acknowledge the fact that only the act of forgiveness can release the victim from the treadmill of the past, while understanding how humanly impossible it is to grant that forgiveness. We have to say an unconditional yes to the inability to forgive; indeed, we may have to go further and acknowledge the appropriate moral force of the refusal to forgive and the sense of revulsion that the very thought of forgiveness induces in the victim. For parents even to begin to imagine forgiving the man who has stalked, abducted, violated and murdered their beloved six-year-old daughter, whose remembered smile still breaks their hearts, is against every good and natural impulse of their being.
This is why the severe conditionality that we sometimes hear in the words of Jesus about forgiveness begins to jar with us, such as these verses from Matthew, chapter 6: '[14] For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; [15] but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.' We could perhaps take some of the harshness out of that text by observing that it is an observable truth that the inability or refusal to forgive can be a sentence of psychic imprisonment that locks the person for ever into the remembrance of the original trespass. Just as forgiveness gives the offender the capacity to move away from the moment of trespass and regain the future; so the victim's inability to forgive makes it impossible for her to move on into the future. I cannot read the conditionality in these words of Jesus as anything other than tragically descriptive: we cannot order people to forgive, but we can recognise that their inability to forgive may have the tragic effect of binding them to the past and condemning them to a life-sentence of bitterness. Sometimes there is a strength and grandeur in the refusal to forgive. Something of this comes through the words of the woman who spoke to the Truth Commission and it is certainly what we find in the great Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who dedicated his whole life to the unforgiving search for those who were responsible for the murder of millions of his people. The refusal to forgive can be the righteous thing to do, the thing that justice commands. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the inability or refusal to forgive, though it may be morally appropriate, always extends the reign of the original sin into the future, so that it can end up dominating a whole life or the life of a whole people.
We see this process pitilessly at work in those chronic ethnic and religious feuds that sentence generations of people to decades, sometimes centuries, of bitterness and bloodshed. In our own era, the most emblematic example of humanity's capacity for trapping itself in chronic and intractable conflict is provided by the violence that has surrounded the State of Israel since its inception half a century ago. It had been the tragic fate of the Jewish people to be scattered throughout the earth for centuries, persecuted and despised wherever they settled. And it was in Christian Europe in the twentieth century that the monstrous decision was taken to try to rid them from the earth. The longing to return to Palestine, in order to escape from their long and bitter exile, gave birth to Zionism and the violent emergence of the State of Israel. The tragedy was that the return of one lost people to their ancient homeland created a new exiled community, the Palestinians. Every day we witness the terrible wounds these crucified communities inflict on each other, with neither side able to feel the other's pain. Neither community seems capable of forgiving the past in order to discover a new and better future. It appears that they would rather go on dying separately than try to learn to live alongside each other. I shall spend more time in the next chapter exploring this intractably unforgiving element in human nature; for the moment I simply want to note the painful paradoxes inherent in both the command and the refusal to forgive.
The saying of Jesus about the need to forgive others if we are ourselves to be forgiven, seems to stress the conditional nature of forgiveness in the life of the person who has been offended: if we are not prepared to forgive those who have trespassed against us, then the time will surely come when we ourselves will be denied the forgiveness we need. As someone once put it, our previous refusal to forgive will have destroyed the bridge we ourselves now need to cross. But conditional forgiveness has a slightly different meaning when it is applied to the sinner seeking forgiveness. Here the conditionality expresses itself through the demand for repentance followed by confession, before forgiveness is granted. This way of managing the mechanics of forgiveness is very clear in the Christian tradition, but it is also a strong human instinct: we expect people to own up to what they have done, especially during those spectacles we all enjoy so much today, when a well-known figure, such as a politician, has been caught in a trespass against the code of public life. People who earn their living advising our leaders on managing these situations always say that it is best, if they are guilty, to own up immediately and make a clean breast of it. I am always embarrassed at the way they are also encouraged to abase themselves and express boundless sorrow for the offence, as though the public were the victim of the trespass. There must be a way of being honest about a fault without indulging in that kind of public abasement, but it does not seem to be a part of the confessional ritual of public life at the moment. Behind these ordeals of televised humiliation there lies an element of the truth I have been circling in this chapter: the best way to stop the impact of a particular act from thrusting into the rest of our lives and stealing the future from us is to acknowledge it and, by confession and absolution, cut off its power to metastasise. This is the wisdom that lies behind the Christian tradition of the confession of sin. Confession may have been over-emphasised in church and may have drained a lot of psychic energy from believers, who had to spend so much time avoiding the bad and examining themselves to see if they had fallen into it that they had little energy left for actively pursuing the good. The fact that Jesus seemed to think that outcasts and sinners were usually more loving than the virtuous was probably because, having given up the struggle against the sins of the flesh, they had more energy left to tackle the more deadly sins of the spirit. While all that may be true, it has been wise of Christianity to insist that confession is good for the soul. Here is how the first chapter of the First Letter of John puts it: '[8] If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. [9] If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.' The conditionality of forgiveness was the basis for the emergence of the discipline of private confession in the Christian tradition. Inevitably, it became too forensic and intrusive over the years. By making it compulsory before the reception of holy communion, the Church trivialised it and weakened its particular usefulness to souls heavily burdened with guilt. Nevertheless, through a ritual of repentance leading to the authoritative pronouncement of absolution, confession has provided a practical method of release for troubled souls for centuries. The fact that the practice still goes on in different ways, though the confessionals in church have been largely abandoned, is testimony to the efficacy of the process itself, whether it is done through a priest, a psycho-therapist or your best friend in the pub after a drink too many. It is the instinct to look at what we have made of ourselves and try, before it is too late, to do something about it.
. . .
The traditional way to read the parable of the prodigal son is to interpret it as an example of conditional forgiveness at work, through the process of repentance, leading to confession, followed by re-instatement. The focus is usually on the moment of self-realisation when the wayward son 'came to himself and decided to go to his father and confess the sin he had committed. This moment of repentance, which means a radical change of mind, is the act that triggers forgiveness. Behind it is the theory that you cannot receive or make active use of forgiveness until you acknowledge that you need it. A moment spent reflecting on the psychological phenomenon known as 'denial' seems to be relevant here. As long as we go on denying that we have a problem with something that is actually disabling us we are not in a position to deal with it. The purpose of coming to ourselves and admitting our true condition is so that we can start dealing with the difficulty and stop running away from it. Repentance followed by confession is the sequence that opens us to the changing power of forgiveness. I, as the victim, may already have forgiven you and moved on, but unless you can admit to the trespass the value of my forgiveness will lie there like an uncashed cheque.
That is still the most usual way to read this parable and the theory of forgiveness that has been based upon it. Repentance is change of heart and mind. It acknowledges the reality of what we have done, the kind of persons we are. It is a radical honesty that comes as an enormous relief to the troubled spirit; it is the moment when we stop running from the truth about ourselves. It is normally the prelude to a new kind of self-management that begins by confessing and trying to repair the damage we have done to others in the past. Like the prodigal son, we come to ourselves and go to the one we have hurt and confess our fault. But there is another, more radical, reading of this parable that may provide a clue to understanding my epigraph from Derrida. I want to add to that conundrum a further paradox that reverses the normal order of repentance followed by confession: there is a kind of forgiveness that is so absolute and unconditional that it can create repentance in the heart that has been hardened against change. Although the path of conditional forgiveness - the path of repentance, confession and re-instatement - is the one we follow most commonly in our daily relations with each other, I want in the next chapter to explore the experience of unconditional forgiveness, a forgiveness so total and so generous that it can sometimes redirect the path of history.

July Meeting

2007-01-17T22:29:00.000Z

Monday 21st July

7.30 pm

at Hugh & Rosemary's home

Should lines be drawn?

As the Anglican bishops of the world, or at least most of them, meet at the Lambeth Conference and seek to find a way of holding their communion together in the face of apparently irreconcilable differences, I thought we might consider whether there might still be issues that would create such a crisis for us. I don't meant within the Sea of Faith, but within our communities, with our circles of friends or within our families. And I don't mean issues of morality; I think we accept that moral and ethical values are the subject of continuous re-negotiation. I mean issues of faith and belief. Could you - do you - find any beliefs so reprehensible or unpalatable that you consider breaking with those who held them?

Where would you draw the line?

Why would you draw the line?

Should you draw the line?

Perhaps the Sea of Faith should be standing by with an eraser.

June Meeting

2007-01-16T12:52:00.000Z

Tuesday 17th June

7.30 pm

at Hugh & Rosemary's home

The Times They are a-Changing

(Please note that this meeting is on Tuesday, not our usual 3rd Monday of the month. Back to normal in July.)

There is no homework this month. The subject of the meeting is 'memory' - both individual and collective. We will be thinking generally about the importance of memory to the continual 'process of creation' that life is and, in particular, about how the ways in which we remember and recall have changed in recent years and how our differing images of the past shape the way in which we view the future. We have often talked about how the sense of a personal narrative is important to each of us; as the way we view the past changes, how do we maintain the integrity of our stories?

May Meeting

2007-01-15T10:44:00.000Z

Monday 19th May

7.30 pm

at Hugh & Rosemary's home

On Forgiveness

Repair the evil done to you with
Something that is better. And Lo!
The enemy who did evil to you may
Turn into a close and true friend
from the Muslim Scriptures

The real beauty and power of forgiveness is that
it can deliver the future to us
Richard Holloway

Suggested further reading: Chapter 34 of The Thoughtful Guide to Faith by Tony Windross

Tony Windross on Forgiveness

2007-01-14T10:54:00.002Z

THINKING ABOUT FORGIVENESS

Ch 34 of The Thoughtful Guide to Faith by Tony Windross.

'Forgive and forget' is very sound advice, but a lot easier said than done! To forgive someone is to wipe the slate clean and start again, just like repentance. Indeed, many people would say that forgiveness requires repentance, but it doesn't. However it does require imagination as well as the ability to empathise. It might also require mitigating circumstances, which reduce the culpability of the person - he did it because he had a troubled childhood, or because he's insane, or whatever.

Life operates on a ratchet, so there's never any possibility of going back. We can never undo things so as to have another go at the past: once something is done, it's done, and can never be undone. Forgiveness is the best we can manage in our attempt to make the best of what has gone wrong, which was why Jesus spoke so much about it, and indeed advocated forgiveness without limit. And although this may be seen as completely impractical, it unequivocally set the tone of his teaching. The baying mobs that gather outside courtrooms or around the front doors of supposed paedophiles show just how hard many people find it to do anything positive with their feelings of anger and repulsion (and this is so whether or not they are involved in religion). But it also shows how crucial forgiveness actually is if people are not to create hell on earth.

To bear a grudge, to continue a family quarrel for years and years, is a very effective way of poisoning our own soul (see Chapter 14) as well as those of the people around us, quite apart from its effect on the other party to the dispute. Some people have thick skins, and either don't get hurt terribly much by quarrels, or can recover quickly from wounds caused by harsh or careless words. Others, however, may lack such internal resources, with the result that even a relatively minor incident may gnaw away at them, and maybe even eventually destroy them.

The more culpable we think someone is, the harder we will find it to forgive them - it is likely to be easier to forgive someone who has caused the death of a loved one through careless driving than as the result of premeditated murder. Although we cannot wind the clock back, forgiveness does give us a way of undoing some of the damage that past wrongs have brought about, and is the only way we can escape the tyranny of the past, and prevent it from robbing us of the future. Forgiveness is important because otherwise we can become fossilised, trapped in the past like an insect in amber.

Tragedies can stop the clock, can freeze time in someone's life, or in the life of an entire family. There is the time-before-the-event, and the time-after, when things can 'never be the same again'. Forgiveness is about breaking the log-jam, about getting things moving, about starting the clock again. And this applies not only to victims, but also to perpetrators: until and unless there is self-acceptance (which is repentance) there can never be self-forgiveness; and without that there is no way of moving forward and escaping the power of the past to entrap and enslave in a downward spiral of self-hatred which gets expressed in a violent lashing-out at anyone and everyone within reach.

Forgiveness requires a measure of imagination in that it depends on a recognition that each of us operates within a causal nexus of inconceivable complexity. We choose to act, but our freedom to choose is circumscribed and constrained by our genetic endowment and our

own personal history. The terrorism of September 11^th grew out of a climate of despair and was nourished by religious fanaticism. To try and understand why people do terrible things is part of the process of learning to forgive them; not in the sense of belittling the enormity of their actions, but in the sense of seeing those actions as part of a wider picture, and therefore of relieving them of the entire burden of blame. This is a very delicate area, and there are bound to be those who object to what they see as an attempt to avoid anyone having to accept the responsibility that is rightly theirs. But the alternative is even less palatable: assuming that 'evil men' have no antecedents, and spring ready-formed from nowhere. To forgive is to acknowledge that we are all frail and fallible, that we all have weaknesses, that we are all sinners. It does not mean closing our eyes to horror, but being unwilling to cast the first stone.

Forgiveness may require time, and it will certainly involve effort -an effort of will. It requires us to refuse to be imprisoned by the past, and to want to reach out to the new life that is the future. Religious bigotry is alive and well in Northern Ireland, where the endless reliving of ancient battles and struggles enables the flames of old hatreds to burn with undimmed ferocity. Santayana noted that 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it', mistakes and all; but it is equally true that those who won't let the past go are condemned never to live fully in the present.

For some people forgiveness may be impossible, and although in some cases such a reaction is completely understandable, it is nevertheless regrettable, because it condemns those involved to an endless round of hatred and bitterness. It is sometimes thought that closure may be achieved if a sufficiently extreme punishment is exacted on the guilty party, but this is probably a forlorn hope. Forgiveness and justice are both considered 'good things', but they may be mutually incompatible. Justice is about redressing imbalances by linking the past and the present, whilst forgiveness is about fresh starts and writing off past debts.

Despair can paralyse, whilst hope can energise. If we can see no way forward we may sink into lethargy and self-pity, but if a plan of campaign is produced we can throw ourselves into the project and draw upon hitherto-unknown wells of strength. This can certainly happen in the case of revenge, because it allows us to focus, not simply on being mad, but on getting even. Revenge is a completely natural and normal response, which is why Christianity is so unreasonable! Jesus wouldn't have anything to do with revenge, and demands (if we take him seriously) that we too turn our backs on it. Forgiveness is the opposite of revenge: it doesn't try to work out what punishment is appropriate, what someone 'deserves'. In fact it refuses to have anything to do with punishment at all, and instead looks at what is needed if some good is to be salvaged from what may be an unspeakably awful situation.

To the Christian, life is a gift from God; this means that life, our life, is contingent, accidental - it might not have been. For the fact that it is, that we are, we ought to be unceasingly grateful, and celebrate each new day as yet another free gift, whatever it may bring. To forgive is to embrace the realisation that nothing is ours by right, and whatever is taken from us we cannot demand or expect any form of restitution (which is what retributive punishment amounts to): 'freely ye have received, freely give'. (Matthew 10: 8) Those who have no sense of the gracious givenness of life will have no corresponding sense of reciprocity: if you don't think that you've received anything, you may not feel that giving (including forgiving) is a normal part of being human. 'To give and not to count the cost' is an alien idea to many people, who view life instead as a sort of calculus, operating according to rules of strict fairness, where 'getting one's just deserts' is the central principle. Christianity offers a different picture, which can be commended both on religious grounds, and on the grounds that it offers a much better route to human flourishing. In fact, of course, these two grounds turn out to be identical, two ways of saying exactly the same thing.

The essence of forgiveness is acceptance, and this has unconditional: it can never be a case of 'forgiveness if'. Life's slings and arrows are accepted with a shrug, even those deliberately despatched by other people. And people's frailties and failings are also accepted with as much tenderness as we can muster. By trying to salvage something from the hopes and dreams that human wilfulness and cruelty have shattered, forgiveness aims to achieve some form of redemption. The traditional Christian view is that this is what Christ came to do, and if we follow his teachings on forgiveness we can ensure that he did not die in vain; that the new life he hoped to bring is realised in and through us, as we show that it really is possible to break free from the shackles of the past and start again: day after day after day.

April Meeting

2007-01-13T01:25:00.001Z

Monday 21st April

7.30 pm

at Hugh & Rosemary's home

Don Cupitt - where are you now?

Don Cupitt described his opening words in a recent debate with Brian Hebblethwaite, his one time pupil, long term friend and constant protagonist, as 'a very short and simple statement of my current views'. It is reproduced in the March edition of sofia and here with the title 'Talking with Dinosaurs'. It is very conscise, closely argued and, in places, quite contentious - even for us. There may be too much in it for us to tackle in a single meeting, although it is only about 1500 words, but I think if we could all read it before the 21st it might make for an interesting evening.

March Meeting

2007-01-12T11:00:00.000Z

Monday 17th March

7.30 pm

at Hugh & Rosemary's home

We are going to looking at the theme of this year's conference: exploring the act of creation in both religion and the arts.

You are asked to bring with you to show, play or read (or perhaps just talk about) a work of art or craft that has been an important influence on the way you feel or think about religion. This can be in any medium - the only restriction being that it should not be a specifically religious or devotional work, i.e. no requiems, masses, or oratorios, no churches or cathedrals, no pietas or madonnas.

2007-01-10T01:26:00.001Z

Talking With Dinosaurs

Don Cupitt offers his opening words in his recent debate with Brian Hebblethwaite as ‘a very short and simple statement of my current views’.

Until the late seventeenth century West Europeans still lived in a traditional culture. Their world-view was religious. The really-important knowledge that people lived by all came down to them from God, via Tradition, by divine Revelation, or by direct illumination of the mind. To receive knowledge you had to purify yourself so that you could become morally fit to receive it. As for secular, man-made knowledge, it did exist but it was not highly esteemed, and the Middle Ages have left us no books about how to build cathedrals or warships. Of course not: that kind of knowledge was simply refined craft-skill, as indeed it was in other similar civilizations.

In the 1660s the last great literary works of the old Western Christian culture were published: the Book of Common Prayer, Paradise Lost, and The Pilgrim’s Progress. In 1678 appeared Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe, the last top-level attempt to defend the traditional Christian-Platonist philosophy of nature. Then in 1687 appeared Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, and everything began to change. It was now beyond doubt that the Moderns had surpassed the Ancients, and that unaided human reason could produce a system of mathematical physics far superior to anything previously available. The old religious cosmology immediately began to die, and the thinkers of the Enlightenment reconstructed Western culture around the human subject and the new secular and critical type of thinking. Instead of everything being seen as coming down from God, everything was henceforth to be seen from the point of view of the individual human being who uses his senses, his reason, his critical judgment, his creative imagination, and (of course) his conversation with others to build and to test out his own knowledge of the world – and indeed of himself, as well.

The resulting changes were very far-reaching. For example, the old ethics of obedience to revealed Divine Law was gradually replaced by a new ethic based upon sympathetic human fellow-feeling. Ethics has become steadily more humanitarian. Similarly the old Politics of absolute Monarchy, which subjects us all to a Super-person who is exalted over us begins to be replaced by liberal democratic Politics, a new Quakerish kind of politics in which Supreme Authority has come down from the world above and is dispersed into ordinary human beings. Gradually, the State itself has become humanitarian. In religious thought, God is increasingly replaced by human religious experience and the world religions are seen as local cultural formations. As it begins to be understood that we human beings have all by ourselves gradually developed our own language our own knowledge and our own world-view from within, and that we human beings are ourselves the only judges of truth, it begins to be possible to speak of the human mind as creative. We alone have made it all. We are the creators of our own world, we are the only judges. Where in the past God had been in effect the Lord of history, and therefore the only historical agent, human beings now begin especially after the French Revolution to see themselves as collectively the makers of their own history. We alone are responsible.

In these vast cultural changes we see a progressive transfer of powers from God to man, an extraordinary event which Christianity itself foresaw and described as the kenosis of God. God is content to become just mortal and human-in-the-world: God disperses himself into humans: God democratises himself. The Universe turns inside-out, and God dies into humankind. Thus the old Christian dogmas of the Incarnation and Trinity foresaw what has now happened. As St Paul once put it: ‘all things are yours.’

By today the upshot is this. Instead of a created Cosmos, made and upheld by God’s own supremely powerful Word of command, we now have only our world, an evolving improvisation formed and continually growing within our human conversation. Objective reality, and indeed all the old ‘absolutes’ and ‘timeless verities’ that people once lived by, are now gone. We live by continual improvisation We, our knowledge and our world are utterly transient, but life is still liveable on that basis, and our transient world is still beautiful.

In general philosophy we used to think in terms of three great entities, God, the World, and the human Soul. Today we need to give up that vocabulary and talk instead of only two great entities, Life and My Life. ‘Life’ is the going-on of things in the human life-world, which is an endless and outsideless (but of course finite) flowing process of exchange, exchange that is both physical and symbolic. Thus our world is a flowing process of energies-read-as-meanings. And within this process there is a cluster of goings-on that I identify as being me, my Life. I’m a chain of steps in the general dance of everything. I’m only small, but I can contribute something to the dance of the whole before I go.

Against this background the modern religious task is to forget the past, to learn to see and accept life for what it is, and to fling ourselves into the dance. This dance of language, all this, is all there is. As ordinary people nowadays put it, one should learn to live life to its fullest. And this new kind of religion is not quite as new as you may think because, according to the most recent reconstructions of his teaching, it was taught with admirable force and clarity by the original Jesus. The end of the old Christian metaphysics has helped to make possible the rediscovery of Jesus.

I conclude this lightning summary by saying that under today’s conditions it is still possible to live one’s life in the way that Jesus introduced, indeed, it’s better than that, because in many respects modern society is much more Christian than ever it was in the so-called ‘ages of faith’. Think of everyday institutions like the National Health Service, or the United Nations Organisation. Think of our worldwide humanitarian aid, and our concern for human rights. To a remarkable degree, the Christian ethic and spirituality – a spirituality of stringent self-examination and perpetual reform, and an ethic that seeks immediate commitment to life and to one’s fellow-humans – is still alive and still developing in Western culture.

So the world is much more Christian than it was in the past, but the situation of the Church is less happy. It is still stuck in a premodern, precritical world, living in denial and in rapid decline. This has happened for the reason that Dostoyevsky gives in his famous chapter in which Christ comes to Rome and is rejected by the Grand Inquisitor. The Church has forgotten that it was only a temporary formation and is intended to yield, when the time comes, to the greater reality that it is preparing us for. The Church has made an idol of itself, its way to salvation, and its own structures. It does not know how to let go – even though its own members know in their hearts that the Church’s vision of the cosmos and its entire doctrine-system is now a write-off. Blustering, embittered, living in denial and retreating into fundamentalism, the Church simply has not got the strength any more to be honest with itself.

Here is one example of the galloping collapse of traditional faith that is now going on: in the last twenty years funerals and memorial services in our culture have entirely given up the traditional Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. The laity have largely taken over the design and the content of funerary rites, and have re-described them as a ‘Thanksgiving for the life’ and a ‘Celebration of the life’ of the dead person. The whole occasion has thus been transformed into the ritual closure of a life. And that is all. So it is that every funeral we attend now confirms that the disappearance of the supernatural world has already taken place. The clergy, and in particular the Bishops, haven’t had the strength, or even the will, to stop it.

In my travels I have seen how around the world people in many cultures try to cling to a few shreds and tatters of their traditional beliefs alongside the advancing global culture that they cannot resist. I have experienced for example in China the way bits and pieces of the traditional herbal medicine are still kept going in corners where they won’t do much harm, alongside the new science-based Western medicine. We in the West ourselves do the same. We can scarcely deny the overwhelming superiority of real, science-based Western medicine, but we somehow want to keep little bits of magical, pre-scientific ‘alternative’ medicine as well. It is a thoroughly inconsistent and silly thing to do, but most of us Westerners do something like that. It was we who gave birth to modern culture: it is our child, but somehow even we cannot yet bring ourselves to love it.

Such is the position that Brian Hebblethwaite is in. He is a (sort-of) modern. But he’s living in denial, fighting to keep alive a vision of the world that died over 300 years ago, and that now doesn’t work at all. I can’t say he’s flatly wrong, because on my view there is no objective truth. People can, and undoubtedly do, live in and by all sorts of strange visions of the world. But I do say that if the conversation goes on long enough my vision of the human condition will eventually be found to be far more intellectually consistent and far more productive of lasting human happiness. If there goes on being a human race at all, I’ll eventually be found to be in the right. But Brian and I will both of us be long gone by then, so we personally will never know which of us was right.

December Meeting

2007-01-07T12:01:00.000Z

Monday 17th December

7.30 pm
at Hugh & Rosemary's home

Stephen Mitchell, the current chair of Sea of Faith, has written a challenging Thought Bubble this month: Will the real Jesus lie down? You can read it here. We decided at our November meeting that this would make a suitable subject for December. Not too much to read - and topical.

November Meeting

2007-01-06T09:33:00.000Z

Monday 19th November

7.30 pm
at Hugh & Rosemary's home

The Templeton Foundation recently instituted a series of online discussions on what it calls the 'Big Questions'. The first of these was 'Does The Universe Have A Purpose?'. A dozen academics were invited to submit short, 600 words or so, answers. Their contributions can be found here; I thought they might provide a starting point for our discussion in November. I don't think you need to read them all, and certainly not all at once - perhaps one a day for 12 days!

Oliver

To comment click here

Gerard in Portholes

Gerard has written a short, thought-provoking piece on the future of the Sea of Faith which he submitted to the editor of sofia. It was deemed to be more suitable for Portholes, the newsletter for members, and it appears in the October edition; it is reproduced here for the benefit of any non-members who might be interested in what he has to say.

Thinking aloud ...... about whales, minnows and driftwood

2007-01-05T15:32:00.000Z

by Gerard Sullivan
from Portholes (October 2007)

I don't know about you but I've had a bellyful of anniversaries this year, two Ruby Weddings and then the SOF Conference's twentieth. Don't get me wrong – it was a good conference and I was sorry to have to leave early after the celebratory dinner. But if after twenty years the conference and the network membership is smaller than it was when I joined abaout fifteen years ago, something ain't right.

The concrete questionnaire exercise we played at conference, physically clustering our individual responses along a line on the floor representing a spectrum of views, was both amusing and serious. When the results were distilled by the time of the AGM I understand the proposed actions circulating to alleviate the network's financial stress in the short term were greater contributions from the diminishing band of loyalists and a cut in some activities such as the number of issues of the magazine. In effect, this is the standard business approach of increasing income and lowering costs to get more profit. Is this really a solution or a stopgap?

Maybe it's because I was reading a cute little management book[1] that set me off on a few unoriginal musings starting with the question, What is the SOF network and who does it serve? Judging by the turnover of members it seems to me from casual empiricism that the network is a kind of staging post, a refuelling depot for people in transition. Often they are people who have felt stymied by a restrictive religious institutional background who feel liberated when they join the SOF by meeting others with whom they can exchange similar experiences. But isn't that a shrinking market?

Younger generations seem to be deluged with unfettered freedom characterised by higher incomes, libertarian sexual mores, the spread of internet social and commercial communications and the fairly general abandonment of deference. Some could be drowning in a sea of uncertainties and temporary affiliations and relationships. Paradoxically, rather than liberation they may be looking for solid endeavours with a clarity of purpose such as, development projects to alleviate the poor, environmental protest campaigns, single issue political or charitable advocacy, thus escaping from the jungle of postmodern relativism.

Against this background of sweeping generalisations, SOF, I think, has a problem. Outside the articulate writings of Don Cupitt, David Boulton and others, in a sense, SOF defines itself somewhat negatively in terms of what it is not. For example, it is variously described as non-realist, anti-fundamentalism, non-doctrinal and definitely not a church or a movement. It's much harder to flag the more amorphous positives which could be marketed among an unsuspecting public. Even the one phrase around which the network coheres, more or less, namely, 'explores and promotes religious faith as a human creation', is controversial, constantly debated and reviewed. Some members clearly don't like the idea of promoting anything since it smacks of proselytising. I confess to finding 'religious faith' a bit iffy. We are not a faith community are we? Rightly or wrongly, if I tell my friends I'm going to a conference about religious faith I fancy they would get completely the wrong impression.

There are a handful of big producers of orthodox religions out there, let's call them whales, that are surrounded by a host of tiny minnows in competition for our attention with their alternative messages. As one of the latter, have we the desire or the potential to grow into a bigger fish? Or analogously, quoting Churchill, 'We are all worms but I do believe I am a glow-worm'.

Okay, I know I've dropped a few, unloved by many, management speak concepts around the place in the course of this piece such as, business, market, producers, message (aca mission), competition, but the internal SOF debate is presumably about the survival and success of SOF as an organisation and business organisations know a thing or two about that from which we can learn. The management guru, Peter Drucker, started the ball rolling years ago by asking basic questions like, 'What's our business? Who's the customer? What does the customer value?' (I seem to remember a young consultant led us in a similar questioning exercise at one of our conferences.) Arguably, we too are in the value creation business. How do we define the value added to people's lives as seen by the recipients of what we do as a network? After we've done that – no easy task –looking at the thousands of competitive minnows swimming around outside the oligopoly world of the whales (the few dominant sellers of religion) how does SOF grow into a salmon (or brighter glow-worm)? In essence, with a strategy which makes the organisation do better than the alternatives on offer by being different.

Here's an outline case study of a non-profit organisation.[2] Elderhostel in the United States was set up in 1975 with a mission to help older adults enjoy new interests from high quality, affordable, educational programmes. It had a simple business model with customers who were retired with plenty of flexible time available (just like many SOFists!) and products consisting of short courses provided by universities which benefited from better use of their facilities and additional income. From a summer programme for 220 people in New Hampshire, Elderhostel grew to become a worldwide movement with more than 200,000 participants a year in 50 countries.

Elderhostel had a clear goal in overcoming the 'wasteful, tragic process of disengagement'[3] for people growing old in America and was different in that it sought to change that process using old people themselves as agents of change. Hence the goal of strategy as better performance against competing alternatives, was achieved by being different. It turned Elderhostel into an effective organisation.

One of our strengths in the Sea of Faith is our open-mindedness but as G K Chesterton once remarked, 'Having an open mind is like having an open mouth. Sooner or later you have to bite on something.' If we cannot articulate our mission and differentiate it sufficiently to get others to buy our brand, I fear we'll become like other bits of driftwood eddying away in the whirlpool of alternative religious products. On the other hand if that's too gloomy a prospect to contemplate, perhaps being a good staging post welcoming weary wayfarers, is not such a bad thing after all.

[1] Joan Magretta, What Management Is, Profile Books Ltd, London, 2003.

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid, p66.

Roger Scruton - summary

2007-01-05T15:31:00.000Z

Roger Scruton argues that the concerns of decent, sceptical people about the revival of superstitious cults and the conflict between secular freedoms and religious edicts are not adequately answered by the “wake-up call to reason” of the evangelical atheists (Hawkins, Hitchens et al.) The religion that they oppose is a caricature. He asserts that many Enlightenment thinkers, having also shown claims of faith to be without rational foundation, concluded that religion does not originate only in the pursuit of knowledge or of consolation. Doctrine can easily refuted; religion must be essentially something else.

For post-Enlightenment thinkers the monotheistic belief systems were crystallisations of the emotional need which found expression in both the myths and rituals of antiquity:

“A myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period before human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly. It does not explain the causal origins of our world, but rehearses its permanent spiritual significance.”

Thus the emergence of monotheism from polytheism was not a process of discovery but of a form of self-creation, of self-discovery “through which we understand the place of the subject in a world of objects”.

In more recent times Niezsche, Wagner and their successors have concentrated on the place of the sacred in human life.

This thing had its primary reality not in myths or theology or doctrine, but in rituals, in moments that stand outside time, in which the loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is confronted and overcome, through immersion in the group—an idea that was later to be made foundational to the sociology of religion by Durkheim. By calling these moments "sacred," we recognise both their complex social meaning and also the respite that they offer from alienation.

For the remainder of the article Scruton looks at these themes in the work of one writer, Rene Gerard, the French literary critic, historian and philosopher and in particular Violence and the Sacred (1972). For, he says it is ...

Girard's theory, it seems to me, that most urgently needs to be debated, now that atheist triumphalism is sweeping all nuances away. For it helps us understand questions that even atheists must confront, and that their dogmatic certainties otherwise obscure: what is religion; what draws people to it; and how is it tamed?

Girard argues that

violence and sexual obsession are not caused by religion, as the new atheists are wont to claim, but that religion is an attempt to find a solution.
Guilt and the idea of sin are born of the resentment of the slave, which cannot express itself in violence and so is turned against itself. Christianity is a form of self-directed violence, which conceals a resentment against every form of human mastery
The primeval condition of society is one of conflict. It is an effort to resolve this conflict that the experience of the sacred is born.
Primitive societies are invaded by “mimetic desire” as rivals struggle to match each other's social and material acquisitions.
Theses conflicts are resolved by identifying a scapegoat. Through his death, the scapegoat purges society of its accumulated violence. The scapegoat's resulting sanctity is the long-term echo of the awe, relief and visceral re-attachment to the community that was experienced at his death.

To repeat: religion is not the source of violence but the solution to it—the overcoming of mimetic desire and the transcending of the resentments and jealousies into which human communities are tempted by their competitive dynamic.

Scruton is not entirely happy with Girard's analysis and points out several shortcomings. In spite of this, he argues that he should not be neglected:

Girard has reminded us of truths that we would rather forget—in particular the truth that religion is not primarily about God but about the sacred, and that the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated (the routine tribute paid to it in modern societies) but never destroyed. Always the need for it will arise, for it is in the nature of rational beings like us to live at the edge of things, experiencing our alienation and longing for the sudden reversal that will once again join us to the centre.

and concludes

Of course, you don't have to follow Girard into those obscure and controversial regions in order to endorse his view of the sacred as a human universal. Nor do you have to accept the cosmology of monotheism in order to understand why it is that this experience of the sacred should attach itself to the three great transitions—the three rites of passage—which mark the cyclical continuity of human societies. Birth, copulation and death are the moments when time stands still, when we look on the world from a point at its edge, when we experience our dependence and contingency, and when we are apt to be filled with an entirely reasonable awe. It is from such moments, replete with emotional knowledge, that religion begins. The rational person is not the one who scoffs at all religions, but the one who tries to discover which of them, if any, can make sense of those things, and, while doing so, draw the poison of resentment.

Roger Scruton in Prospect

2007-01-04T15:26:00.000Z

Issue 137 , August 2007

The sacred and the human

by Roger Scruton

Today's atheist polemics ignore the main insight of the anthropology of religion—that religion is not primarily about God, but about the human need for the sacred. As René Girard argues, religion is not the cause of violence, but the solution to it

Roger Scruton is a philosopher and a research professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, Virginia

It is not surprising that decent, sceptical people, observing the revival in our time of superstitious cults, the conflict between secular freedoms and religious edicts, and the murderousness of radical Islamism, should be receptive to the anti-religious polemics of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others. The "sleep of reason" has brought forth monsters, just as Goya foretold in his engraving. How are we to rectify this, except through a wake-up call to reason, of the kind that the evangelical atheists are now shouting from their pulpits?

What is a little more surprising is the extent to which religion is caricatured by its current opponents, who seem to see in it nothing more than a system of unfounded beliefs about the cosmos—beliefs that, to the extent that they conflict with the scientific worldview, are heading straight for refutation. Thus Hitchens, in his relentlessly one-sided diatribe God is Not Great, writes: "One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody… had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs)."

Hitchens is an intelligent and widely read man who recognises that the arguments most useful to him were well known 200 years ago. His book takes us through territory charted by Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant, and nobody familiar with the Enlightenment can believe that our contemporary imitators have added anything to its stance against religion, whatever examples they can add to the list of religiously motivated crimes. However, Enlightenment thinkers, having shown the claims of faith to be without rational foundation, did not then dismiss religion, as one might dismiss a refuted theory. Many went on to conclude that religion must have some other origin than the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and some other psychic function than consolation. The ease with which the common doctrines of religion could be refuted alerted men like Jacobi, Schiller and Schelling to the idea that religion is not, in essence, a matter of doctrine, but of something else. And they set out to discover what that might be.

Thus was born the anthropology of religion. For thinkers in the immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment, it was not faith, but faiths in the plural, that composed the primary subject matter of theology. Hence the appearance of books like CF Dupuis's Origine de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle (1795), and the busy decipherment of oriental religions by the Bengal Asiatic Society, whose proceedings began to appear in Calcutta in 1788. For post-Enlightenment thinkers, the monotheistic belief systems were not related to ancient myths and rituals as science to superstition, or logic to magic. Rather, they were crystallisations of the emotional need which found expression both in the myths and rituals of antiquity and in the Vedas and Upanishads of the Hindus. This thought led Georg Creuzer, whose Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker appeared between 1810 and 1812, to represent myth as a distinctive operation of the human psyche. A myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period before human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly. It does not explain the causal origins of our world, but rehearses its permanent spiritual significance.

If you look at ancient religion in this way, then inevitably your vision of the Judeo-Christian canon changes. The Genesis story of the creation is easily refuted as an account of historical events: how can there be days without a sun, man without a woman, life without death? Read as a myth, however, this naive-seeming text reveals itself as a study of the human condition. The story of the fall is, Hegel wrote (in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1827), "not just a contingent history but the eternal and necessary history of humanity." It conveys truths about freedom, about guilt, about man, woman and their relationship, about our relation to nature and mortality. For Hegel, myths and rituals are forms of self-discovery, through which we understand the place of the subject in a world of objects, and the inner freedom that conditions all that we do. The emergence of monotheism from the polytheistic religions of antiquity is not so much a discovery as a form of self-creation, as the spirit learns to recognise itself in the whole of things, and to overcome its finitude.

Between those early ventures into the anthropology of religion and the later studies of James Frazer, Emile Durkheim and the Freudians, two thinkers stand out as the founders of a new intellectual enterprise—an enterprise which seems not to have been noticed by Hitchens, Dawkins or Daniel Dennett. The thinkers are Nietzsche and Wagner, and the intellectual enterprise is that of showing the place of the sacred in human life, and the kind of knowledge and understanding that comes to us through the experience of sacred things. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, and Wagner, in Tristan, The Ring and Parsifal, as well as in his writings on tragedy and religion, painted a picture that, while rooted in the post-Enlightenment tradition, placed the concept of the sacred at the centre of the anthropology of religion. The lesson that both thinkers took from the Greeks was that you could subtract the gods and their stories from Greek religion without taking away the most important thing. This thing had its primary reality not in myths or theology or doctrine, but in rituals, in moments that stand outside time, in which the loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is confronted and overcome, through immersion in the group—an idea that was later to be made foundational to the sociology of religion by Durkheim. By calling these moments "sacred," we recognise both their complex social meaning and also the respite that they offer from alienation.

The attempt by Nietzsche and Wagner to understand the concept of the sacred was taken forward not by anthropologists but by theologians and critics—Rudolf Otto in Das Heilige (1917), Georges Bataille in L'Érotisme (1957), Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane (1957), and, most explicitly and shockingly, René Girard in La violence et le sacré (1972). It is Girard's theory, it seems to me, that most urgently needs to be debated, now that atheist triumphalism is sweeping all nuances away. For it helps us understand questions that even atheists must confront, and that their dogmatic certainties otherwise obscure: what is religion; what draws people to it; and how is it tamed?

Girard begins from an observation no impartial reader of the Hebrew Bible or the Koran can fail to make, which is that religion may offer peace, but has its roots in violence. The God presented in these writings is often angry, given to fits of destruction and seldom deserving of the epithets bestowed upon him in the Koran—al-rahmân al-rahîm, "the compassionate, the merciful." He makes outrageous and bloodthirsty demands—such as the demand that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. He is obsessed with the genitals and adamant that they should be mutilated in his honour—a theme that has been explored by Jack Miles in his riveting book God: A Biography (1995). Thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens conclude that religion is the cause of this violence and sexual obsession, and that the crimes committed in the name of religion can be seen as the definitive disproof of it. Not so, argues Girard. Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence comes from another source, and there is no society without it since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to live together. The same can be said of the religious obsession with sexuality: religion is not its cause, but an attempt to resolve it.

Girard's theory is best understood as a kind of inversion of an idea of Nietzsche's. In his later writings, Nietzsche expounded a kind of creation myth, by way of accounting for the structure of modern society. On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) envisages a primeval human society, reduced to near universal slavery by the "beasts of prey"—the strong, self-affirming, healthy egoists who impose their desires on others by the force of their nature. The master race maintains its position by punishing all deviation on the part of the slaves—just as we punish a disobedient horse. The slave, too timid and demoralised to rebel, receives this punishment as a retribution. Because he cannot exact revenge, the slave expends his resentment on himself, coming to think of his condition as in some way deserved. Thus is born the sense of guilt and the idea of sin. The resentment of the slave explains, for Nietzsche, the entire theological and moral vision of Christianity. Christianity owes its power to the resentment upon which it feeds: resentment which, because it cannot express itself in violence, remains turned against itself. Thus arises the ethic of compassion, the mortification of the flesh and the life-denying routines of the "slave morality." Christianity is a form of self-directed violence, which conceals a deep resentment against every form of human mastery.

That "genealogy" of Christian morals was effectively exploded by Max Scheler in his book Ressentiment (1912). Scheler argues that the Christian ethic of agape and forgiveness is not an expression of resentment but rather the only way to overcome it. Nevertheless, there is surely an important truth concealed within Nietzsche's wild generalisations. Resentment remains a fundamental component in our social emotions, and it is widely prevalent in modern societies. The 20th century was the century of resentment. How else do you explain the mass murders of the communists and the Nazis, the seething animosities of Lenin and Hitler, the genocides of Mao and Pol Pot? The ideas and emotions behind the totalitarian movements of the 20th century are targeted: they identify a class of enemy whose privileges and property have been unjustly acquired. Religion plays no real part in the ensuing destruction, and indeed is usually included among the targets.

Girard's theory, like Nietzsche's, is expressed as a genealogy, or a "creation myth": a fanciful description of the origins of human society from which to derive an account of its present structure. (It is significant that Girard came to the anthropology of religion from literary criticism.) And like Nietzsche, Girard sees the primeval condition of society as one of conflict. It is in the effort to resolve this conflict that the experience of the sacred is born. This experience comes to us in many forms—religious ritual, prayer, tragedy—but its true origin is in acts of communal violence. Primitive societies are invaded by "mimetic desire," as rivals struggle to match each other's social and material acquisitions, so heightening antagonism and precipitating the cycle of revenge. The solution is to identify a victim, one marked by fate as outside the community and therefore not entitled to vengeance against it, who can be the target of the accumulated bloodlust, and who can bring the chain of retribution to an end. Scapegoating is society's way of recreating "difference" and so restoring itself. By uniting against the scapegoat, people are released from their rivalries and reconciled. Through his death, the scapegoat purges society of its accumulated violence. The scapegoat's resulting sanctity is the long-term echo of the awe, relief and visceral re-attachment to the community that was experienced at his death.

According to Girard, the need for sacrificial scapegoating is implanted in the human psyche, arising from the attempt to form a durable community in which the moral life can be successfully pursued. One purpose of the theatre is to provide fictional substitutes for the original crime, and so to obtain the benefit of moral renewal without the horrific cost. In Girard's view, a tragedy like Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is a way of retelling the story of what was originally a ritual sacrifice in which the victim can be sacrificed without renewing the cycle of revenge. The victim is both sacrificed and sacred, the source of the city's plagues and their cure.

In many Old Testament stories, we see the ancient Israelites wrestling with this sacrificial urge. The stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac and Sodom and Gomorrah are residues of extended conflicts, by which ritual was diverted from the human victim and attached first to animal sacrifices, and finally to sacred words. By this process a viable morality emerged from competition and conflict, and from the visceral rivalries of sexual predation. To repeat: religion is not the source of violence but the solution to it—the overcoming of mimetic desire and the transcending of the resentments and jealousies into which human communities are tempted by their competitive dynamic.

It is in just this way, Girard argues, that we should see the achievement of Christianity. In his study of the scapegoat, Le Bouc émissaire (1982), Girard identifies Christ as a new kind of victim—one who offers himself for sacrifice, and who, in doing so, shows that he understands what is going on. The words "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" are pivotal for Girard. They involve a recognition of the need for sacrifice, if the guilt and resentment of the community is to be appeased and transcended, and the added recognition that this function must be concealed. Only those ignorant of the source of their hatred can be healed by its expression, for only they can proceed with a clear conscience towards the tragic climax. The climax, however, is not the death of the scapegoat but the experience of sacred awe, as the victim, at the moment of death, forgives his tormentors. This is the moment of transcendence, in which even the cruellest of persecutors can learn to humble himself and to renounce his vengeful passion. Through his acceptance of his sacrifical role, Christ made the "love of neighbour"—which had featured in the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible as the standard to which humanity should aspire—into a reality in the hearts of those who meditate upon his gesture. Christ's submission purified society and religion of the need for sacrificial murder: his conscious self-sacrifice is therefore, Girard suggests, rightly thought of as a redemption, and we should not be surprised if, when we turn away from our Christian legacy, as Nazis and communists did, the hecatombs of victims reappear.

Girard's account of the Passion is amplified by many references to Freud and Lévi-Strauss, and by a conviction that religion and tragedy are, as Nietzsche argued, adjacent in the human psyche, comparable receptacles for the experience of sacred awe. The experience of the sacred is not an irrational residue of primitive fears, nor is it a form of superstition that will one day be chased away by science. It is a solution to the accumulated aggression which lies in the heart of human communities. That is how Girard explains the peace and celebration that attends the ritual of communion—the sense of renewal which must always itself be renewed. Girard takes himself to be describing deep features of the human condition, which can be observed as well in the mystery cults of antiquity and the local shrines of Hinduism as in the everyday "miracle" of the Eucharist.

There are many features of Girard's theory that can be criticised—not least the idea that human institutions can be explained through creation myths. We need more evidence than is contained in a creation myth for the view that our "original" condition is one of vengeful competition. And the alleged "mimetic" nature of human competition is underjustified. Moreover, there are other plausible explanations of the ancient ritual of animal sacrifice besides the one offered by Girard; and the success of the Christian ethic has other causes besides the mystical reversal that allegedly occurred on the cross. The growth of towns under Roman imperial jurisdiction meant that people were in daily contact with "the other," and living under competing urges both to exclude and to forgive. Why is that not an equal factor in explaining the rapid spread of a gospel of disinterested love?

Such criticisms do not, it seems to me, account for the comparative neglect of Girard's ideas. Girard's thesis has been received with the same dismissive indifference as Nietzsche's in The Birth of Tragedy, and though he has been honoured with a siège (seat) at the Académie française, the honour has come only now, as Girard approaches his 90th year. I suspect that, like Nietzsche, Girard has reminded us of truths that we would rather forget—in particular the truth that religion is not primarily about God but about the sacred, and that the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated (the routine tribute paid to it in modern societies) but never destroyed. Always the need for it will arise, for it is in the nature of rational beings like us to live at the edge of things, experiencing our alienation and longing for the sudden reversal that will once again join us to the centre. For Girard, that reversal is a kind of self-forgiveness, as the concealed aggressions of our social life are transcended—washed in the blood of the lamb.

Girard's genealogy casts an anthropological light on the Christian ethic and on the meaning of the Eucharist; but it is not just an anthropological theory. Girard himself treats it as a piece of theology. For him, it is a kind of proof of the Christian religion and of the divinity of Jesus. And in a striking article in the Stanford Italian Review (1986), he suggests that the path that has led him from the inner meaning of the Eucharist to the truth of Christianity was one followed by Wagner in Parsifal, and one along which even Nietzsche reluctantly strayed, under the influence of Wagner's masterpiece.

Of course, you don't have to follow Girard into those obscure and controversial regions in order to endorse his view of the sacred as a human universal. Nor do you have to accept the cosmology of monotheism in order to understand why it is that this experience of the sacred should attach itself to the three great transitions—the three rites of passage—which mark the cyclical continuity of human societies. Birth, copulation and death are the moments when time stands still, when we look on the world from a point at its edge, when we experience our dependence and contingency, and when we are apt to be filled with an entirely reasonable awe. It is from such moments, replete with emotional knowledge, that religion begins. The rational person is not the one who scoffs at all religions, but the one who tries to discover which of them, if any, can make sense of those things, and, while doing so, draw the poison of resentment.

October Meeting

2007-01-03T18:38:00.000Z

Monday, 15th October
7.30 pm
at the home of
Judith & George Macey

We will be discussing some of the issues raised by Roger Scruton* in his article 'The Sacred and the Human' in the August edition of Prospect magazine. I have put it here (or you can follow this link to Prospect); let me know if you would like a printable version. I plan to post a summary of the article here a couple of days before the meeting so don't worry if you don't have the time, or the inclination, to read the whole thing.

*There is also a Wikipedia article about Roger Scruton here

For a map showing the location of Judith & George's house click here, please call or email for more precise instructions.

Oliver

Tim Jackson at Conference

2007-01-02T15:20:00.000Z

Where on Earth will it End?

consumerism as theodicy

Where on Earth will it end? It’s a rhetorical question at one level… It betrays a sense of frustration about the general direction things are going in. Perhaps a little nostalgia in relation to the perceived virtues of the not so recent past. And a clear sense of concern about what’s coming down the road at us.

Where on earth will it all end?

It’s also, of course, a quite genuine inquiry: what can we find out about our own personal destiny? what is the fate of our kind of society? where exactly is the endpoint of all our human striving? A set of real, foundational questions about our existence, about social progress and about the human condition.

And the sense of rhetorical concern is not unrelated to those deeper foundational questions. They clearly betray a kind of anxiety, what Anthony Giddens – following Freud – described as a pervasive ‘ontological insecurity’. A kind of existential angst about ourselves. About our loved ones. About the fate of humanity. And these days perhaps – who knows – about the planet.

Where on earth will it all end?

Our fear is, of course, that it will end badly. For us. For others. For the planet.

As Professor of Sustainable Development you’d expect me of course to talk about the planet. These days you can hardly open a newspaper or turn on the television without being confronted by global catastrophe. Imagine what that’s like coming home after a days work! Talk about a busman’s holiday.

But actually I don’t want to dwell on that. I want to talk about the positive side of consumerism. Or at least.. the side of consumerism that betrays our society for what it is. A society in search of answers. Answers to deep foundational questions about ourselves and our place in the universe. Questions like:

Where on earth will it end?

My subtitle contains my thesis.

Theodicy is a difficult theological concept, and it’s telling that we have no better one to address what I consider to be one of the most fundamental issues we face.

Broadly speaking theodicy is the attempt to come to terms with the existence of ‘suffering’ and ‘evil’ in our lives. In religious language, theodicy asks the question: why should a caring God allow evil to prosper and the innocent to suffer? But it turns out that theodicy is not just a religious concept. In fact something very like it plays an absolutely vital role in our everyday lives.

The broad argument I am going to make is that consumerism, ironically, has become a kind of secular theodicy. In some quite precise ways, consumerism has grappled and continues to grapple with foundational questions about our destiny. About social progress. And if we want to counter consumerism, I shall argue, we have to understand that. And offer some other less damaging ways of grappling with them.

But first I want to take you back to the middle of the nineteenth century – to the year 1851 when this little girl was alive. Interestingly, it’s a point in history at which theodicy, in its religious sense, really began to hit the buffers.

But my story is more personal than that. It’s a true story. And it concerns this girl.

I want you to imagine if you can a windswept, stormy day in middle England. I know that’s hard from the perspective of this glorious British summer! But I want you to imagine it’s raining like it’s never rained before.

Annie here is 10 this year. But before she reaches her 10^th birthday she is already suffering from stomach cramps, headaches, dizziness and difficulties in breathing. It’s clear to her parents that something has to be done. So one day in late March her father prises the tearful Annie from her mother’s reluctant farewell embrace and together with her sister Henrietta and their nurse, Fanny, they undertake the arduous journey north to Dr James Gully’s famous water cure establishment in Malvern.

Her father’s trust in the water cure is supreme. Only a few months previously he himself has been a patient in Malvern. What was wrong with him we’re not entirely sure. Probably some kind of nervous dysfunction. Something that was treatable by a water cure.

At any rate, he is so confident that a water cure will be effective that, he heads back to London to get some work done – more on the work later – leaving Annie in the care of her nurse and the good Dr Gully.

Two weeks later, he was summoned back to Malvern. Annie had taken a turn for the worse. Poor Henrietta was dispatched to nearby relatives. Charles – the father’s name was Charles – took up a constant vigil by Annie’s bedside, and wrote every day to his wife Emma to report on the almost hourly ‘struggle between life & death’ that Annie endured.

Racked with a violent diarrhoea, losing strength by the day, writhing in agony on her sick bed, Annie would occasionally make pathetic attempts to sing her favourite hymns. But it was becoming obvious to everyone that she was losing the fight. By the morning of Wednesday the 23rd April, the girl lay motionless on her bed, wasted but tranquil, as the storm clouds gathered outside.

Her father sat by the window, staring into the dull grey Malvern hills, weeping quietly, waiting for the inevitable. A little time later, as Desmond and Moore (1991, 383-4) describe the scene:

‘The wind picked up. Charles and Fanny moved closer to the bed. Annie lay still, unconscious. It was just twelve oclock midday. Thunder began to sound, great peals far above them – the mighty knell of Nature. They edged nearer and heard the breathing stop. She was dead.’

The story of Annie’s death is one of ordinary human tragedy. An unhappy but not uncommon tale; certainly not in the mid nineteenth century; or even today, when a child dies through poverty every three seconds and almost every single human life is crossed at some point by personal tragedy. Annie’s death also serves to illustrate the subject matter of this paper.

Theodicy, in a very personal and quite precise way, was the challenge facing Charles and Emma in the aftermath of Annie’s death.

And each of them reacted differently to the challenge. When no word came from Malvern on the day of Annie’s death, Emma had realised immediately that the struggle was over. So that by the time Charles’s letter arrived she was able to bear the knowledge ‘sweetly and gently’, crying ‘without violence… as if it had all happened long ago’. A devout Christian, she turned to her faith for support, hoping to ‘attain some feeling of submission to the will of Heaven’.

For Charles, Annie’s death achieved an almost cosmological significance. Hours after the death, he was found still by the bedside, weeping inconsolably. What he later desribed as an ‘insufferable grief’ served to shatter his belief in a moral and just universe and convince him of the underlying cruelty of nature. The cruelty of Annie’s suffering also sounded the deathknell for his already teetering belief in Christianity.

In the wake of her death, he threw himself with ever greater fervour into his life’s work: the formulation of one of the most influential scientific theories of the last two hundred years; a theory in which suffering and cruelty became the engine of evolutionary progress; a theory in which, as some latter-day philosophers have declared, there was no longer any room for God.

It’s a very personal story. But the divide between Emma and Charles also serves to symbolise the changing role and status of religion in human affairs. In Emma’s world, the appropriate place to search for consolation over the loss of Annie was still her faith. For Charles, and for an increasing proportion of the Western world in the intervening 150 years, things had changed.

The world after Darwin – yes, you’ve guessed it, the girl’s father was Charles Darwin – became an increasingly secular place. God was dead, trumpeted Nietsche; religion was ‘knocked to pieces’, said George Bernard Shaw: ‘and where there had been God, a cause, a faith that the universe was ordered, and therefore a sense of moral responsibility as part of that order, there was now an utter void. Chaos had come again. The effect at first was exhilarating,’ wrote Shaw. ‘We had the runaway child’s sense of freedom before it gets hungry and lonely and frightened..’

And in those words lie the question… the same question I started with. The demise of God left open the question of meaning, the function of theodicy, in the modern world.

The argument I want to explore today is that some part of this function has become ‘internalised’ within consumerism itself, in some more or less precise ways. This isn’t to suggest that religious theodicy is no longer relevant, or that a consumerist theodicy is even remotely successful. But if this is happening. If this is what’s going on, then it’s a pretty important thing to face up to.

My argument relies on a broadly sociological view of religion, drawn largely from the writing of Peter Berger and others. In this view, every society is faced with the problem of constructing and maintaining its social world, or ‘nomos’. This socially-constructed framework can be thought of as the set of assumptions, understandings, rules, maxims, norms, taboos and rituals which together bring order and meaning to human lives.

Religion plays several key roles in ‘world maintenance’. In particular it allows us to make sense of our existence in relation to a higher ‘sacred’ order (cognitive meaning). It also provides a framework for moral governance (moral meaning). Finally, by offering a transcendent reality, it allows us to confront the question of our own mortality and the loss of those we love (emotional meaning).

Berger called this overarching framework of meaning a sacred canopy. And he suggested that this sacred canopy was a vital function in every kind of society. The ‘sacred canopy’ is all that keeps us from despair, from anomie, the dark chaotic meaningless void that threatens constantly to overturn us.

Central to the task of world maintenance is the question of theodicy. As I’ve already intimated, religious theodicy was for a long time associated quite precisely with the need to reconcile belief in an omnipotent and benevolent god with the existence of evil and suffering in the world.

But theodicy is also an important concept in the sociology of religion and can be framed in non-theological terms. For example, Berger defined theodicy as the (religious) legitimation of ‘anomic’ phenomena – that is to say, as the attempt to defend the existing ‘nomos’ or world view against the ever-present threats to meaning that assault it.

These threats arise in particular as a result of suffering, loss and our own mortality. Put differently, theodicy attempts to cope with the discrepancy between our ideals and visions and the reality of the world with which we are daily confronted.

In ordinary laymen’s terms, theodicy can be construed as the attempt to ‘make sense of’ our lives. Faced with persistent injustice, the prosperity of ill-doers, the persecution of the righteous, how should we seek to live? What kind of morality are we to live by? Confronted with our own mortality, the persistence of suffering, the sorrow of bereavement, where should we turn for solace? How are we to protect the authority of compassion and the promise of love? Where, in short, are we to find meaning in our lives?

To be effective in its role of legitimation or sense-making, a theodicy must possess certain key characteristics. I want to distinguish for you six inter-related aspects of theodicy: justice, reward, consolation, ‘ontological security’, transcendance, and eschatology. Eschatology is the study of last or final things. In fact it’s concerned quite precisely with my opening question, with ‘how things turn out in the end’.

There are clear links between these different functions and they work together to defend us against anomie and protect the sacred canopy. Together they have to demonstrate that the sacred order does not discriminate arbitrarily between different individuals (justice). A key element in maintaining this sense of justice is to ensure that some form of mechanism exists which dispenses compensations consistently in relation to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviours (reward).

This compensatory mechanism is challenged by two specific conditions in the real world. The first of these is the persistence – and sometimes even the flourishing – of wrong-doers. The idea that ‘evil’ may prosper is deeply disturbing to the set of moral meanings established in society. Nonetheless it can, with some effort, be legitimated within broadly secular moral codes and practices.

A more intractable challenge is presented by the sometimes arbitrary incursions of suffering and loss with which we are always confronted (either individually or collectively) at some point in our lives. These have two specific forms: one is related to the loss of our loved ones; the second arises from our awareness of our own mortality. A credible theodicy must therefore offer plausible compensatory functions in the face of bereavement and suffering (consolation). It must also provide us with a working defence against the pervasive anxiety engendered by awareness of our own mortality (ontological security).

Some of the compensatory mechanisms established through theodicy may operate within the constraints of this world. But the challenge of providing an entirely secular compensatory mechanism is immense, particularly in the face of loss and existential anxiety. Most theodicies draw in part on compensatory mechanisms which operate in some other (transcendental) realm, perhaps at some future point in time (eschatology).

The importance of the functions of transcendance and eschatology to theodicy is quite precisely to establish and maintain the authenticity of this other compensatory realm.

A response from a participant in a study carried out at the University of Surrey illustrates how theodicial functions operate even on a day-to-day level for religious people:

‘You know, sometimes, something that really opened my eyes the other day driving on the M3 motorway. Traffic terrible, and my husband is not going to go this Sunday to church, or my eldest daughter baptise my grandchildren, and that makes me very, very sad, very unhappy. And on the motorway near Winchester, going past and these grey skies, a horrible time, raining. And there is this little bit of light, and there on the motorway there is a cross somewhere on a hill, and the light was shining on this cross and I was sitting down there under the rain, I have a meeting at nine o’clock, and I am sitting down there watching and this light shining on this cross and I say, yes you are there..’

Female, Roman Catholic, 50s

This response suggests a number of different theodicial functions. For instance it suggests access to consolation for life’s woes. The curious other-worldly quality of the light on the cross has elements of transcendance; and the symbolism of the cross as a metaphor for the redemption and future salvation of ordinary sinners also evokes a kind of eschatology.

Given the declining role of religion (especially in Western Europe) and the importance of religion and theodicy in world maintenance, it is an obvious question to ask: how does modern society maintain its world view? How does it defend itself against anomie? What structures and devices allow it to establish cognitive, moral and emotional meaning in the world? And how are these meanings legitimated in the face of suffering and loss? In other words where is the consumerist theodicy?

I want to argue of course that modern society has internalised a number of specific functions of world maintenance within the dynamics and organisation of consumerism. Since every society needs a sacred canopy. And since every sacred canopy must be defended or legitimated, it would be quite surprising if this were not the case for the consumer society as well.

But at first sight, the idea that material commodities play any part in the establishment of the socially constructed nomos is an odd one.

From a functional perspective, one thinks of material goods mainly as fulfilling certain essential physical or physiological tasks in the world. Psychological and social tasks are more obviously construed in terms of less material constructs: thoughts, conversations, norms, institutions perhaps. How is it that goods themselves can be asked to do this work?

This is one of the key lessons from the sociology of consumption.

It is now broadly accepted that material things are deeply implicated in the social and psychological aspects of our lives. This role depends heavily on the human tendency to imbue material artefacts with symbolic meaning. And this ability provides an extremely influential ‘osmosis’ between the physical and the cultural world, between material and ‘non-material’ aspects of our lives.

Consider this wonderful example from one of the respondents in Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton’s delightful study on the construction of meaning through everyday domestic objects. It illustrates my point perfectly. The respondent, an 8 year old North American boy, is asked by the interviewer: ‘What do all your special objects, taken together mean to you?’. He replies:

‘They make me feel like I’m part of the world’

‘How do they do that?’

‘Because when I look at them, I keep my eyes on them and I think what they mean. Like I have a bank from the First National, and when I look at it I think what it means. It means money for our cities and our country, it means tax for the government. My stuffed bunny reminds me of wildlife, all the rabbits and dogs and cats. That toy animal over there reminds me of circuses and the way they train animals so they don’t get hurt. That’s what I mean. All my special things make me feel like I’m part of the world.’

You can probably supply plenty of your own examples of the ‘evocative power’ of material goods. Broadly speaking the view of consumer society which emerges from this literature can be summed up by acknowledging with Mary Douglas that:

‘[a]n individual’s main objective in consumption is to help create the social world and to find a credible place in it.’

Material goods, in other words, are deeply implicated in the task of world construction and maintenance, in a social, as much as in a physical sense

But the question remains: how does the consumer society address the critical question of theodicy? In particular, can we find evidence of the key functions identified in religious theodicies? Let’s look first to the question of justice.

In fact we find concerns about justice in the distribution of consumer goods runs like a constant refrain through modern society. It is evident in the language of consumer sovereignty, equal opportunity, fair trade and freedom of choice. Evidence of the importance of fairness is also uncovered in qualitative studies of consumer attitudes. Why should only the privileged few have access to the delights of fast cars, big houses and holidays in the sun? The consumerist ideal must allow everyone the possibility of this access if it is not to be condemned from within.

At the macro-economic level, the entire ethos of consumerism is ‘legitimated’ by allegiance to the idea that consumption growth is a ‘rising tide’ that will (eventually) ‘raise all boats’.

Here’s Joss Stone to remind us of the symbolic importance of the car in modern society… The idea that consumerism offers to reward people for ‘good’ behaviour is also very widespread. A meritocratic society heralds high consumption lifestyles and celebrity status as the pinnacle of social achievement. And the discourse around consumption as a reward for good behaviour is also evident in consumer studies as the following quote illustrates:

‘My Cadillac has become to me a thing I deserve. I wonder if others say things. I’ve had comments: ‘You’re rich,’ from customers. They may even resent it – I don’t care. It shows you make so much more money. It represents my right to own something associated with successful people.’

Even those with religious backgrounds tend to use the metaphor of reward to legitimate consumption behaviour, as the following response from our qualitative study of religious groups illustrates:

‘But I find myself standing in the middle of a shop and actually praying, having an argument with God, I really don’t need that. No you don’t need it, but you’re allowed to treat yourself sometimes.’

The link between consumption and ontological security – the management of deep underlying uncertainties about mortality and our place in the world – is also well-supported by the evidence.

‘The human animal is a beast that dies’ said Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. ‘And if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys. And I think the reason he buys everything he can is that in the back of his mind, he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life ever-lasting.’

And what precisely are we to make of President Bush’s epoch defining call to arms in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. ‘Mrs Bush and I would like to encourage Americans everywhere to go out shopping.’

A particularly telling contribution to the evidence comes from something called terror management theory which has its roots in Ernest Becker’s groundbreaking book ‘The Denial of Death’.

Modern psychological experiments show that when people are exposed to cues that make them more aware of death – heightened mortality salience, it’s called – they tend to act to enhance their own self-esteem and protect their cultural world view. In a consumer society, self-esteem striving typically has profoundly materialistic outcomes. Just like George Bush asks them to. People go out shopping. Fascinatingly, however, there is also evidence to suggest that this urge is moderated in people who express strong allegiance to some particular faith.

Our apparent addiction to material things cannot entirely be construed in hedonistic or materialistic ways. Yes perhaps there is something pathological about the intensity with which we cling to material goods. ‘Hollow hands clasp ludicrous possessions,’ wrote Ernest Dichter in 1964. ‘Because they are links in the chain of life. If it breaks they are truly lost.’

But material goods also facilitate consolation. Sacred goods remind us of those we love, of dreams we hold, of our hopes for the future. At a more mundane level the seemingly endless availability consoles us for the temporary nature of our lives, for our disappointments and failures. It assures us that society holds out the promise of better lives (for us and for our descendents) in the future.

Transcendence also runs like a current through our relationship to consumer goods. From Colin Campbell’s concept of ‘hedonic dreaming’ to Russell Belk’s explorations of sacredness and consumer desire, the evidence suggests that we use commodities both to dream of higher things and sometimes quite literally to escape or get away from it all.

Isn’t this slide wonderful? All this and heaven too. It’s certainly suggestive of a consumerist eschatology. The final state of affairs is not final at all. Rather it’s a continually increasing flow of goods, making the world a better and better place. Not just for us but for our descendants.

The evocative power of material things allows us to protect our ideals from the harsh scrutiny of daylight by offering us continual hope for a better world. But for goods to serve the cause of hope, as Grant McCracken has pointed out, they must be inexaustible in supply. And it is precisely their failure truly to embody our ideals that makes them so successful in recovering ‘displaced meaning’.

But there’s obviously something slightly perverse about this vision as well.

The endgame played out by consumerism is at one level one in which the ability to go on consuming for generation after generation is the ultimate goal. A kind of heaven on earth, if not for us, then for our descendants. Vincent Miller has argued however, that consumer desire has completely ‘derailed‘ eschatology by allowing desire itself to become the object of human striving.

‘Consumer seduction is constituted against a horizon of possibility. It is constantly looking beyond the present for more fulfilling alternatives. Expectation is endlessly aroused. But.. this expectation is as shallow as it is broad. Joy is sought in desire itself. Consumer anticipation is at heart a way of accommodating the endless repeat of the same, of finding pleasure in a world without hope.’

The consumer eschatology in this view is a kind of anti-eschatology – a study in denial of the fear that things will ultimately turn out badly – for all of us.

So in summary, what I’ve tried to show is that consumerism has appropriated at least some of the functions of theodicy through the role that material commodities play in our lives.

As I’ve indicated, this theodicy is not entirely pathological. But it is clearly flawed. Its conceptualisation of justice is tenuous, its framing and disbursement of rewards is iniquitous, it is deeply but perhaps perversely seductive in offering a rather fleeting kind of ontological security, one that needs continually to be reinforced by engaging in yet more consumption. It does provide for a form of transcendence, but the degree to which this facilitates any real hope or consolation for our losses is suspect.

Far from creating a credible eschatology, consumerism appears to be a continuous exercise in denial of our own mortality and of the widespread suffering in the world. And as Kenneth Surin has remarked:

'A theodicy is not worth heeding if it does not allow the screams of our society to be heard.’

In the final analysis, though, it’s clear that consumerism cannot be ‘countered’ by exhortation, religious or otherwise. If consumption places such a vital role in the construction and maintenance of our social world, then asking people to give up material commodities is asking them to risk a kind of social suicide. People will resist threats to identity. They will resist threats to meaning. They will ask quite legitimate questions of the motives of the moral persuaders.

So the task of countering consumerism must start with the building of alternative theodicies: the building of meaning structures, communities of meaning perhaps, that lie outside the realm of the market; and a deep re-engagement with the ‘problem of pain’. Credible answers to the deep foundational questions that continue to haunt us.

Where on earth will it end?

Ultimately, of course, as Annie’s death reminds us… it pretty much always ends badly. At the individual level. It ends in suffering. Of one kind or another. Our own death. The death of our loved ones. The Buddhist obsession with suffering is of course profoundly distasteful to modern western attitudes. Which may be why we hear much more about the upside of Buddhist, about enlightenment.

But the contemplation of death serves a very useful purpose. It reminds us constantly of the emptiness of consumer society. Of the emptiness of consumerist lives. It serves to remind us that there’s more at stake here. The suffering of others. Persistent poverty. The extinction of species. The health of the global climate. The fate of this ‘disappearing world’ still hangs in the balance. Alongside our own more parochial concerns. Whatever the theodicy that we come up with. And let’s hope we manage to. This probably has to be the starting point.

September Meeting

2007-01-01T20:00:00.000Z

Monday 17th September

7.30 pm
at the home of
Hugh & Rosemary Jones

Welcome back after the summer break! We will start with a brief report on the Annual Conference on 'The Good Life' which was held at Leicester University at the end of July. We had three very good speakers and most of those who there seemed to think that it was one of our best conferences.

They were particularly impressed by Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey, who spoke on 'Consumerism as Theodicy'. A theory that needs some explaining and is worthy of further exploration. The text of his talk in on the homework page, click here. I thought we might take this as a starting point for our discussion. We will start with a short introduction, so don't panic if you don't have the time, or the inclination, to read it. If you take the SoF magazine, sofia, you will find an edited version there.

Oliver

Brian Hebblethwaite

2006-01-01T12:12:00.000Z

The Reverend Canon Brian Leslie Hebblethwaite, philosophical theologian, was born in Bristol, England, on 3 January 1939 to local politician Cyril Hebblethwaite (Lord Mayor of Bristol, 1966–1967), and his wife, Annie Sarah (née Nash). Hebblethwaite entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1957, graduating B.A. in 1961 and M.A. in 1967. He also studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge, completing B.A. (1963), M.A. (1968) and B.D. (1984) degrees. He undertook ministerial training at Westcott House, Cambridge, from 1962 to 1965 and was ordained to the priesthood of the Church of England in 1966. He also studied at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1964–1965.

Hebblethwaite served as Fellow and Dean of Chapel at Queens’ College, Cambridge, from 1969 to 1994 and as Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge from 1973 to 1999. He was appointed Canon Theologian at Leicester Cathedral in 1983 and served in this role until 2001. He married Emma Sian Disley in 1991, and they have a daughter, Alexandra (the marriage was dissolved in 2004). In 1994 he resigned his Deanship at Cambridge and was made Life Fellow of Queens’ College.

Canon Hebblethwaite now lives in retirement near Ely in Cambridgeshire. His books include: Evil, Suffering and Religion (1976; rev. ed., 2000); The Problems of Theology (1980); The Adequacy of Christian Ethics (1981); The Christian Hope (1984); The Incarnation: Collected Essays in Christology (1987); The Ocean of Truth: A Defence of Objective Theism (1988); The Essence of Christianity: A Fresh Look at the Nicene Creed (1996); Ethics and Religion in a Pluralistic Age (1997); Philosophical Theology and Christian Doctrine (2004); and In Defence of Christianity (2005). He co-edited Christianity and Other Religions (1980) with John Hick. Julius Lipner has edited a forthcoming book about Canon Hebblethwaite’s work entitled Truth, Religious Dialogue and Dynamic Orthodoxy: Reflections on the Work of Brian Hebblethwaite (2005).

Dover Beach

2006-01-01T11:05:00.000Z

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

SOF North Oxfordshire

January Meeting

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Calendar

About Sea of Faith

WIndross Poster

The Big Questions

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Lent Group

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Article from Sofia no. 93

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Oxford Regional Conference

Insatiable Creatures

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Reading for January 2009 pt 2

Reading for January 2009 pt 1

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Preface to Jesus & Philosophy

August Meeting

George Fryer on Worship

October homework

Does Religion Make People Nicer? Only if they think Sky Big Brother is watching

September Meeting

On Forgiveness

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Tony Windross on Forgiveness

THINKING ABOUT FORGIVENESS

April Meeting

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Thinking aloud ...... about whales, minnows and driftwood

Roger Scruton - summary

Roger Scruton in Prospect

October Meeting

Tim Jackson at Conference

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Brian Hebblethwaite

Dover Beach

Does Religion Make People Nicer?
Only if they think Sky Big Brother is watching