Dick Wolff's blog

Rowan Williams to meet Richard Dawkins

2012-01-20T12:15:00.004Z

On February 23rd there is to be a debate/discussion in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, between Rowan Willams (theologian, poet, and Archbishop of Canterbury) and Richard Dawkins (scientist, rationalist philosopher and anti-religion campaigner), chaired by Sir Anthony Kenny (eminent philosopher, ex-Catholic priest, agnostic, former pro-Vice Chancellor of Oxford University). My colleague Revd Dr Margaret Yee has organised it. The event was sold out within three hours. Details here. The event will be recorded and available online, and may be live streamed.

People have been invited to submit questions for the panel. The subject under discussion is The Nature of Human Beings and the Question of their Ultimate Origin

These are my two :

QUESTION 1

Is the sense of wonder "that there IS anything at all" :

(a) an interesting but ultimately valueless human experience (best
kept that way lest people's desire for explanations lead to conflict),

or

(b) the unresolvable puzzle that lies at the heart of what makes us
distinctively human, and therefore the starting- (and ending-) point
for all intellectual endeavour?

(n.b. "that there IS anything at all" is not at all the same thing as
asking how or why what there is came to be.)

QUESTION 2

In your view, is a religion :

(a) a social structure based on propositional beliefs about the nature
of reality? Or is it more akin to :

(b) a language -- a mesh of interdependent words, concepts, rituals
and stories -- within which differing ideas about the nature of
reality are in a constant state of flux?

God Rest Ye Merry Money-Men

2011-12-07T12:51:00.004Z

If we must sing Christmas carols before Christmas, rather than in the Christmas season (which begins at midnight on Christmas Eve), let's at least sing carols that match the season of rampant commercialism and Advent concern about future world leadership. I've penned a little ditty for the season :

God rest you merry money-men

1.
God rest you merry money-men
let nothing you dismay :
remember that our government
will not stand in your way.
However much you screw it up
you'll still get bonus pay

. . . so it's tidings of comfort and joy for Bullingdon Boys,
yes it's tidings of comfort and joy!

2.
You've got the politicians tamed
like monkeys in a zoo;
Besides, an awful lot of them
are wheeler-dealers, too!
You're "all in it together" (1) —
there's little we can do.

. . . but it's tidings of comfort and joy for Bullingdon Boys,
yes it's tidings of comfort and joy!

3.
If tax is inconvenient
there is no need to shout.
Your Man in Inland Revenue (2)
will help you sort it out
with dodgy deals in Switzerland —
the tax-avoider's tout.

. . . yes, it's tidings of comfort and joy for Bullingdon Boys,
yes it's tidings of comfort and joy!

4.
So Christmas has come early for
financiers one and all.
Mervyn King can fulminate (3)
but, safe in marble halls (4)
the one per cent (5) can celebrate;
the rest go to the wall

. . . but it's tidings of comfort and joy for Bullingdon Boys
yes it's tidings of comfort and joy!

Footnotes :

(1) a Conservative Party election slogan in 2010

(2) ('dodgy' Dave Hartnett, that is : Inland Revenue chief, currently trying to explain to a Parliamentary Select Committee why he went to Switzerland behind the backs of his own department and after a suitable slap-up meal offered one of the most unscrupulous transnational finance houses, Goldman Sachs, a hefty £10 million discount on their UK tax dues)

(3) a reference to recent remarks by the boss of the Bank of England, who has made barely-veiled comments about extravagant payouts to City bosses when their firms need to be amassing all the capital they can for the sake of their financial resilience.

(4) reference to an old music hall song, "I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls, with vassals and serfs at my side; And of all who assembled within those walls, that I was the hope and the pride."

(5) the world-wide 'Occupy' movement slogan : "we are the 99 per cent". The one per cent (in the USA) being the ones owning 38% of the wealth and receiving nearly a quarter of the nation's total income.

my visit to OccupyLSX

2011-11-25T15:57:00.003Z

I managed to wangle a few hours at the OccupyLSX protest camp at St Pauls Cathedral this week : I don't trust media reporting of things like this and thought it better to find out for myself. About 100 tents, I'd say, including the welcome/info tent, the multi-faith prayer tent, the first aid station, the kitchen tent, the coffee bar tent (all free food, by the way — guests and donations welcome), the Tent University for seminars, linked to the library ('Starbooks', opposite Starbucks). Photo album here.

I met all sorts : a retired theatre director, a supply teacher, an archaeologist between digs, American students, local workers popping in to help with the kitchen or whatever, visiting speakers, some seriously knowledgeable and professional activists and organisers, a few drifters and layabouts, and one complete nutcase from Merseyside in a smart suit. Oh, and a sharp-witted Irish street poet hanging around the fringe extracting money from people. I joined in a seminar led by some lovely young anarchists who'd never led anything like it before and weren't much good — but once people started challenging their ideas they revealed a much greater wisdom than first impressions gave. People were extremely interested in my Christian input, and Jesus was very highly thought of — the 'Big Man'. Then we had a pretty technical talk on Land Value Tax from a former Vice-Chair of the old Greater London Council, the notorious (to some) Dave Wetzel. There was a bit of street theatre, which had led a local bank branch to close its doors. "A bank closed by poetry" was the claim.

There was a full programme of events. A lot of effort was spent on making sure the camp remained harmonious, welcoming, safe and tidy, with notices up reminding people not to make a noise when prayers were being said in the Cathedral (whose staff, after the initial mishandling, maintain constant friendly contact). Inevitably the camp has attracted some of the very vulnerable, marginal people in London who've gone there because they find a welcome they don't find anywhere else. They were unsurprised, albeit disappointed, that the London Evening Standard had twisted this into a front page headline "Needle bins at St Paul's camp to beat junkie health hazard".

The twice-daily Assembly ('Church Meeting') where policies are thrashed out and occupiers are briefed about similar events happening worldwide, was a mixture of good discussion and tedious debate about admin and procedure. Sound familiar? I saw the 'elders' of the camp preparing for the meeting in Starbucks beforehand. They'd a lot on their plate : they've just planted a 'mission church' by occupying a large building in Hackney (left vacant by the multinational bank UBS for years) and turning it into a 'Bank of Ideas' (http://www.bankofideas.org.uk/welcome/) and community centre. Quite apart from the logistics of getting that running there were all the court hearings to prepare for.

At the heart of this are thoroughly organised, very inventive and creative people with determination and a passion for a better society. Like us, they can't describe the 'Kingdom of God' in all its details, but they know what is not'kingdom-like' and are trying to explore and model a different way.

My overall impression : "All the right questions, right spirit, right organisation. Living out a lot of the answers." All in all, just what I'd want the United Reformed Church to be, and in many ways, perhaps, what we are already in a very unobtrusive way. Except, perhaps, without the passion and spirit.

the triumphal procession of the Fortnum & Mason 145

2011-11-17T20:10:00.003Z

So, ten of the protestors that 'occupied' Fortnum & Mason to highlight the company's tax avoidance have been done for 'aggravated trespass' - a new law introduced in 2003. I'm not sure how entering a shop during opening hours and sitting down, and then leaving when requested (clearing up as you go) can be described as 'aggravated trespass'. Video footage taken at the time shows shoppers continuing to shop during the 'aggravated trespass', and a police inspector telling them that they will be allowed to go shortly provided they turn left out of the store so as to keep them separate from a more aggressive demonstration up the road. They were then 'kettled', all arrested, and many kept for 15 hours or more in the police station.

The understanding of the Atonement that is most powerful for me is that which Paul (if it is indeed Paul) describes in Colossians 2 : 14, 15 where Jesus's ignominious execution by the 'principalities and powers' is recast as those same powers being led as captives in Christ's triumphal procession - Roman imperial imagery turned on its head. What he describes as being 'nailed to a cross' we might describe as 'being outed' . . "now we can see The System as it really is, with all its injustice and ugliness exposed for all to see, and know that for all its pomp it cannot stand."

That, I am sure, will be the effect of this abuse of power by the Met Police and the courts - it will rebound in the form of a generation radicalised, with any cosy illusions about the British State shattered. While senior government officials run off to Switzerland to do backhand deals with global companies to allow them to avoid paying billions of UK tax, while investment bankers rob a generation of its prospects and pay themselves obscene bonuses for doing so, while their political stooges run behind them collecting their ordure and tipping it on the heads of the poor and vulnerable, those who dare to shout that The System is broken and no longer fit for purpose are done for aggravated trespass. Now we see it : no more illusions.

It's true that I lost my illusions about the British State - and especially the Met Police - years ago. A generation ago, in fact. The war waged on the people the prime minister of the day called the 'Enemy Within', and the covert operations against peace activists, destroyed my faith in the beneficence of the State for good. But just because we see here power doing what power will always do - protect privilege, protect its own power, victimise the weak - doesn't mean that it doesn't still make me angry.

Donate to the appeal costs to keep that triumphal march rolling.

three critiques of St Pauls

2011-11-07T09:06:00.002Z

see http://www.faith-theology.com/2011/11/st-paul.html : three pithy quotes on the failure of St Pauls to seize the moment offered by the Occupy protest, and recognise it - as I might put it - as a visitation from God. Although originally intended primarily as a witness against the idolatry of global finance, 'Occupy' has in the process exposed the fundamental weakness of a form of Christian witness inextricably linked to power and privilege.

Mark 13 : 1 - 2 -- "As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!” “Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

thank you, Giles Fraser

2011-10-27T22:04:00.003+01:00

letter posted today to Revd Dr Giles Fraser, until today a Canon of St Paul's Cathedral in London :

Dear Dr Fraser,

I write to express my appreciation of the stand you have taken over the protest mounted by the 'Occupy London Stock Exchange' at St Paul's, which is echoed by similar protests across the world.

Over the last thirty years we have seen another 'occupation' going on : a progressive 'occupation' of supposedly democratic structures by financial power. An 'occupation' very much more damaging to the 'health and safety' of vast numbers of people. I trace the start of this 'occupation' to Margaret Thatcher's prime ministership — a Prime Minister who believed that business people were the sort of people who knew best how to run things. As indeed they did : they ran things so well that they took much of our manufacturing industry overseas. The financiers took their place, but by the time this happened finance had gone truly global, breaking the human bonds that bound it such that powerful financial institutions could bring whole countries to their knees. These institutions have proved adept — with a little assistance from HMRC — at offshoring their profits to avoid tax responsibilities, accountable to no one save themselves.

We have ended up with the sorry spectacle of our elected politicians running scared of the press and even more scared of the markets. For myself, I believe that we elect politicians (of which, in a humble way, I am one, as a Green member of Oxford City Council) to provide the ethical rules by which finance and business run. I'm not sure what else politicians are there for, really, apart perhaps from avoiding wars. Maybe I am naïve in believing that in fact it is in business's interest to have the playing field marked out and the rules defined and policed. An ungoverned financial sector (which is pretty much what we now have) was inevitably going to lead to mayhem; and it always was going to rebound hardest on the people at the bottom of the pile who (according to my understanding of the Hebrew scriptures) are precisely the people 'kings' are there to defend.

The penetration of financiers into the corridors of power is very deep. If some of the blogs I read are to be believed, their penetration into the corridors of power in the Church of England — and St Paul's Cathedral in particular — is also significant.

As a United Reformed Church minister, I have been brought up to believe in the separation of powers of Church and State. Perhaps the equivalent of this for our time needs to be the separation of powers of State and the New Religion of the great god Mammon whose temples rise to the sky around St Paul's, asserting their dominance.

When the 'Occupy' protest first began outside St Paul's I felt that this would be a crucial test of the Church's witness against the principalities and powers. We prayed for you at Temple Cowley URC that Sunday morning, as we reflected on the Gospel reading, "Render to Cæsar . . ." I prayed that the cathedral would stand the test, because its witness was not just its witness only, but on behalf of the whole ecumenical Church in these islands. (Most of those watching the protest from a distance have little sense of the distinctions between churches.) When, to my dismay, comments leaked out that St Paul's was concerned about its loss of revenue, I hoped that the Church of England would step up to the plate with its backing, and made a small donation myself. But it was an ominous sign. In recent days, it was becoming increasingly clear that the cathedral was going to 'revert to type' as a pillar of the Establishment, the church of kings and princes — confirming every stereotype and hampering the Christian mission for another generation.

Your resignation restores my hope that there is some Christian faith lurking in the Church, even in its most Establishment bastions . . . and even if those with that faith have to resign to prove it. I hope the brothers and sisters you leave behind will reflect hard on their priorities and 'decide this day whom they will serve'. And I wish you the very best for your own future.

a letter to the Bahraini ambassador

2011-10-22T14:34:00.001+01:00

posted Saturday :

Her Excellency Mrs. Alice Thomas Samaan
Bahrain Embassy - London
30 Belgrave Square
LONDON, SW1X 8QB

Dear Mrs Samaan,
You will be all too aware, as are many in this country, of the 15 year sentences passed against a number of doctors and nurses in Bahrain for treating casualties of disturbances earlier this year. I believe that their appeal commences tomorrow (Sunday).

I imagine that as Bahraini ambassador in the UK you must be deeply embarrassed by this treatment of medical staff for doing what every doctor in the world knows is a doctor's primary responsibility, regardless of circumstances. The fact that, it seems, your country's government and legal profession seem unaware of this basic promise speaks volumes about their understanding of what it means either to be a nation or to be a human being, let alone a doctor. I can just imagine how many people will want to serve in Bahrain's hospitals now . . . I hope that other countries' hospitals will gain from Bahrain's loss.

I cannot imagine that there is anything in the moral code of any of the world's main religions that would consider the treatment of casualties a punishable offence. I am sure that there is no such teaching anywhere in Islam, and there is certainly nothing of this in my own Christian tradition. Even if the people they treated had been enemy soldiers at war with Bahrain, the Geneva Conventions would require the wounds of enemy combatants to be treated by Bahrain's doctors. I need to make this clear, because the claims of some in your government that the injured were effectively enemy combatants is utterly irrelevant, even if it were true (which I don't know). Is Bahrain not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions?

It is true that those conventions have been sorely breached by US and British forces in Iraq and elsewhere, but you will be aware that this led to an outcry of embarrassment from the public and disciplinary action against those responsible — although that disciplinary action did not, in my view, go nearly far or high enough. It is the responsibility of those in the highest positions to make clear what standards are applying. Any suggestion that abuse of prisoners will not be dealt with immediately and robustly creates conditions lower down the chain of command where abuse is almost guaranteed to happen. That is why it is particularly alarming to see a government not only tolerating brutal treatment of its own people, but even penalising those who do their duty to the wounded.

I have to say that, inevitably, this is a sign of the beginning of the end for any state, because it has started to cease functioning as a state. Instead it is starting to function as an élite at war with its own people. Its days are inevitably numbered because it cannot last. The end may come swiftly, or after many years of misery and brutality, but come it will.
I did not know much about Bahrain before, although I have passed through briefly en route for India. The little I now know about it is that it is a state that is beginning to fail, cut off from the world and living by values that reflect no understanding of what makes a nation's life worth living, and no respect for individual human life — even the human life of its own citizens.

I hope you will speak into the closed world of your country's rulers and at least tell them what an embarrassing position they are putting you in. In your position, I would be resigning, I think : I couldn't bear the humiliation. But maybe it is not too late to prevent the inevitable decline into a failed state, if you can persuade your rulers to overturn these bizarre convictions.

Yours sincerely,

video clips on bible books

2011-10-20T16:00:00.002+01:00

. . . an intriguing collection of short videos from theology staff at the University of Nottingham, one for each book of the Bible.

http://www.bibledex.com/index.html

Self-esteem and violence

2011-10-18T11:02:00.002+01:00

In my post Atrocity and 'Humanity' below I reflected on the Norwegian mass-killer Breivik and referred to ". . a profoundly low self-esteem, coupled with an inflated ego". I remember at the time pondering on this strange coupling of two apparently conflicting characteristics.

There was an interview with Stephen Pinker on Radio 4 this morning. He has a new book coming out, The Better Angels of our Nature in which, apparently, he suggests that the human race is becoming progressively less violent, and tries to find out what we're doing right. I have to admit that, given the appallingly violent history of the last century in terms of the sheer numbers of human beings killed by their fellow human beings this seems a strange starting point.

But in the interview there was a brief discussion about self-esteem. He said that the theory that violent behaviour can be caused by low self-esteem has never had any real factual analysis behind it, and that the opposite is in fact true. It is caused by having too much self-esteem.

I must admit, that rings more true; but the implications - for example, for penal policy - are a bit disquieting.

Come, all you shoppers

2011-10-01T17:26:00.002+01:00

Harvest Festival time again. Here's a song wot I wrote a few years back, to fit the hymn tune (originally an English traditional tune) 'Kingsfold'. It's offered with a respectful nod to the memory of the late Sydney Carter, who wrote ‘Come, all you makers’.

1 Come, all you shoppers of the world
and sing with me today
Oh, join me on the journey
we mark this Harvest day.
I travel in Creation
I’ll travel to its end
I share its joy and sorrow through
the Holy One I send.

2. I’ll travel by the tilling and planting of the earth
the weeding, watering, mulching
that gives the seed new birth.
I’ll travel by the harvesting
of crops — of grape and grain,
the skills of those who labour
for you ‘by hand or brain’ (footnote 1)

3. I’ll travel with the oxcart
from paddy, pen or field
the haggling of the market
and the driving of a deal
with those who drive the road trains
refrigeration cold
from silo to container
and down into the hold

4. I’m there at port and warehouse
by packing belt and crate
I share the migrant worker’s
low-paid, uncertain fate
I watch the politicians
of subsidy and trade
the ones who fix the prices
the ones who dole out aid

5. I crouch beside the peasant
whose harvest can’t compete
with a million tons of surplus
from a subsidised élite.
And then, by truck and trolley,
and supermarket shelf
I reach your kitchen table
. . . and watch you feed yourself

6. I’d love to share the stories
of those I’ve travelled with —
the pain, the exploitation,
the skill, initiative,
relief and celebration
of harvest gathered in,
which is no less mysterious
for coming in a tin.

7. But the more that you’re not interested
or ‘haven’t got the time’
the more the new creation’s fruits
will wither on the vine. (footnote 2)
Supply chains will be broken
wars divide the lands
the earth itself be poisoned . .
hear now, and understand!

Now come, you shoppers of the world
Pause! Give thanks! and shout
till justice flows like rivers (footnote 3)
For that’s what I’m about.

footnote 1 : from the old ‘Clause 4’ of the Labour Party constitution, unfortunately long since dropped : “to secure for the producers by hand or brain the full fruits of their industry”

footnote 2 : see John 15 : 5 - 6; Mark 4 : 3 - 9; Mark 11 : 12 - 14, 20 - 21

footnote 3 : Amos 5 : 23 - 24

The tortoise of Christ

2011-09-06T08:49:00.001+01:00

I found myself reflecting recently that the Church, all too often, is a bit like a tortoise. Slow-moving and cumbersome. Wrinkly and old. Silent. Encased in buildings built like fortresses into which, shy creature that it is, it frequently retreats when it senses danger.
Maybe this is why, during a church service, you will often hear the words :
"As Jesus' tortoise, so we pray :
Our Father, who art in heaven . . ."

(from an original one-liner by Milton Jones)

Smokin' prayer

2011-08-04T22:04:00.001+01:00

thank you, Lord, for Sudoku fuel and for my smokin' wife . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBt2mYnTumQ&feature=player_embedded

What's that about?

Seduced by the gods

2011-08-02T10:48:00.006+01:00

A discussion thread on the 'Theos' think tank website http://bit.ly/oc8Dia asks (in the context of the Norwegian atrocity) "Are we responsible for our actions?"

For me the most powerful practical theology is in Walter Wink's trilogy on the 'principalities and powers' (he has sections on the Biblical theology of angels, gods, demons, elemental spirits, 'the satan' &c)- the "invisible forces that determine human existence" which are the 'air which we breathe'. Forces which are part of the Creation and there to bring blessing, but which, if 'worshipped', bring curses instead. The fundamental 'sin' is idolatry : allowing 'that which is less than God' to override the worship of God.

In that sense, the Breiviks and Winehouses of this world are all too human, and only different in terms of the degree and particularity of their 'idolatry'. Wink writes of the gods seducing us, and then leading us off the dance floor into the dark, which sounds like a pretty accurate description of what has happened (particularly in the case of Breivik - I don't think we know the circumstances surrounding Amy Winehouse's death).

Paul of Tarsus (if it is he who wrote Ephesians) warns us that we are contending not against human beings but against these 'spiritual forces in the heavenly realms'; elsewhere he castigates Christians for being seduced by angels when it's their duty to 'preach' to the angels. (Wink argues that these forces are immutable : 'they have to do what they have to do' - it is only humans that have the freedom).

The fight against fanatic xenophobia, then, shouldn't get drawn into hypothetical speculation regarding to what degree Breivik retained any personal freedom of choice (or whether he had effectively surrendered it - been seduced off the dance floor - such that there was no going back). It has to be countered by

a) discerning the components of his spiritual idolatry e.g. the herd or pack instinct, the longing for some sort of 'purity', the sense of nationhood and racial affinity (but a dangerous conflation of the two), the sober celebration of the power of violence or whatever, with

b) a thousand and one mini-strategies that celebrate the blessings that those things can bring (for such blessings do exist) and which warn, challenge and oppose all the many ways in which those instincts start to override the call of God to 'love your neighbour, and even your enemy'.

The spiritual challenge is to avoid what René Girard calls 'mimetic violence' - the challenge (as Wink puts it) of 'not becoming what we hate'.

Atrocity and 'Humanity'

2011-07-28T11:15:00.002+01:00

In a Church Meeting discussion last night about what it means to offer a 'radical welcome' to people, someone made the point that we need to be able to see past the labels to the 'humanity' beneath. Stereotyping sells papers, makes complex matters appear simple, and appeases people's own tribal or pack instincts.

Seumas Milne, writing in today's Guardian (http://bit.ly/pyrUCF), dismisses the arguments of those who suggest that the Norwegian mass murderer Breivik is insane. I'm sure Milne is correct : Breivik had planned his 'political' strategy for years in consultation with extreme right-wing Islamophobic groups in England and elsewhere. He lives in a world in which a moderate Muslim is only a cover for violent extremist Muslims, a world in which any politician who makes a noise that they can construe as being sympathetic to Islam (in the words of columnist Melanie Phillips, whom Breivik apparently quotes at length in his manifesto) is "at best a stupid mouthpiece of those who are bamboozling Britain into Islamisation, and at worst a supporter of that process." (see http://bit.ly/neU37p ) This is the woman that the BBC chooses to put on 'the Moral Maze' - see earlier post - the woman who smells anti-semitism in every critical comment about the Israeli government who nonetheless condemns the British Muslim community for its "inflated and perverse sense of its own victimisation". Am I glad I don't live in her world of stereotypes, labels and conspiracy theories.

I get the same sense of frustration when I read that 'all Christians believe X', 'all Muslims believe Y' - or at least, if they don't believe X or Y then they implicitly support those who do. It's not true. I remember a conversation I had with a respected Jewish rabbi who was telling me about a series of inter-faith conferences he attended. Within a couple of hours of assembling, the conservative and fundamentalist Muslims, Jews and Christians would have gathered at one end of the room, and the liberal-minded ones at the other. If Breivik hadn't been a "white Christian" fanatic, but born in Pakistan instead, he would have been a fanatical Muslim mass murderer. The skin colour and religion is just an excuse, irrelevant in itself. Every religion has verses in its scriptures that can be pressed into service to justify mass homicide, provided they are taken in isolation. You don't have to be insane to become a fanatic - just have . . . I don't know . . a profoundly low self-esteem, coupled with an inflated ego, a touch of an inability to see things from others' perspective and perhaps mostly an addiction to conversations that fuel that tribal sense of heroic self-righteousness (which I'm sure must be quite enjoyable and addictive).

Seumas Milne might have noted that the Guardian's immediate initial response to the atrocity as soon as the news broke was to identify the likely perpetrator as an Islamic extremist. Ironic that the same evening as the killing, the English Defence League firebombed a mosque (in Luton, I think) and daubed it with slogans. According to Melanie Phillips, as a white Christian I must be an apologist for such acts - irrevocably tainted as I am by racial and religious association. In fact it is people like her who are the apologists, not only for the EDL and the Breiviks, but for the Islamic fanatics too.

The problem with looking for the common 'humanity' in each other is that 'humanity' can be - as we see - both beautiful and gracious but also disgusting and brutal. There are choices to be made all along the line about what constitutes 'humanity' - something that I believe is a fundamental weakness in the (secular) Humanist project. For me, I'm inclined to follow the Quaker advice to 'look for that which is of Christ in everyone'.

Murdoch's only doing what comes naturally - it's the politicians who fail to govern that should 'consider their position'

2011-07-08T20:45:00.001+01:00

There is no such thing as 'business ethics'. The essence of business is making money : that's all business is. We shouldn't complain too much if a business like News Corporation scours the gutters, abuses human rights and bribes policemen to beat its rivals in the marketplace. Like a cat with a bird, it's only doing what comes naturally. We're dealing here, not with human beings, but with what the Apostle Paul called the 'principalities and powers' (Ephesians 6:12) :

"We are not fighting against humans. We are fighting against forces and authorities and against rulers of darkness and powers in the spiritual world." (The 'rulers of darkness' are not humans like Rupert Murdoch; these are 'spiritual' forces, beyond any single human.)

Any ethics in business has to be supplied by human beings. Yes, we can hope that the human beings employed in the business have ethical standards and apply them. Realistically, though, that isn't going to happen unless ethical behaviour is rewarded. It has to be rewarded from within - the people at the top must define the ethical position. In News International that clearly doesn't happen and hasn't happened for a long time. Rebekah Brooks is absolutely implicated. Murdoch's (and her) ethics are 'do what is necessary to make money'. He and his underlings don't need to instruct junior journalists to hack voicemails. They don't even need to know they're doing it. As long as those journalists could be confident that they would be commended for anything that steals a march on rival newspapers, some of them were bound to do it - like the soldiers that torture prisoners because there is a top-down culture of impunity. Or like the famous assassins of Thomas à Becket, who overheard the king wishing his Archbishop dead, and murdered him on his own altar steps. The king - according to the story at least - had himself whipped through the streets of London as a public penance. I can't wait . . .

Of course, every purchaser of the Sun and the News of the World has also rewarded Murdoch's empire with their custom. The 'customer is always right' in business. As long as someone is prepared to buy gutter journalism, gutter journalism will exist. But it's not realistic to hope the market for gutter journalism will dry up, any more than it is realistic to hope that people like Coulson, Brooks and Murdoch suddenly see the light.

So if it's too much to hope that media moguls in a competitive world will behave ethically, because it's too much to hope that their market will dry up, who will supply the ethics?

Isn't that what we have politicians and judiciary for? In fact, isn't that almost their sole function?

What we have had for the past thirty years is a political culture of hand-washing and avoidance of responsibility.

The old Tory ideology is "You can't expect the common people to know how to run a country. The best people to do that are those who already know how to run a country estate, keep the peasants employed and all that." In the 80s that culture changed and went downmarket. Now it was big businessmen who were likely to be the best at running things (except, of course, they did that so well they shifted most of our manufacturing industry to the Far East because it was more profitable). That meant the only real big businessmen left in the country were the financiers. And how the Blair government feted them! Now of course we know that the financiers weren't terribly interested in running the country either - much more interested of getting as much of their tax liability offshore as they could.

In this whole sorry mess, then, the real culpability lies with our political leaders for failing to govern - for failing to do the job we put them there to do. For failing to supply the ethics to a fundamentally unethical world of business and finance - in fact, for doing the exact opposite and transferring responsibility for governance on to them. And alongside them - and this is a tawdry story yet to fully emerge - stand the police. It seems pretty clear that investigations into phone hacking were blocked at a very senior level in the Met. And unless it was just one rogue policeman passing on phone numbers (like it was 'just one rogue journalist' Mulcaire) I expect to see heads roll at top level in the Met - a police force that's shown itself stunningly short of ethics in recent years and tried to spit out the only Commissioner who showed signs of having any.

400 years ago, bloody civil war fuelled by religious bigotry led to a separation of the power of the Church (the Rupert Murdoch of its day) from politics. Well, theoretically. Now it is time for an enforced separation of powers between politics and big business and finance. Rebekah Brooks shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the gates of Downing Street - or Cameron's dining table. All MPs - or if not that, at least Cabinet members - should automatically be required to resign from their business interests.

And David Cameron, rather than Rebekah Brooks, should be the one 'considering his position'. We need a clean sweep and a culture change at the heart of British politics.

Sharon Shoesmith

2011-05-28T14:20:00.003+01:00

Dreadful interview by John Humphreys on R4 'Today' prog this morning. He didn't ask a single question about the inquiry into Sharon Shoesmith's dismissal as Head of Child Services (or whatever the job title was) for Haringey Borough at the command of Ed Balls. He arrogantly said "the nation wants to know who to blame" (or words to that effect). So he speaks for the nation? He certainly doesn't speak for me!

As I understood what she was trying to say - she didn't get much of a chance, and could have perhaps said it more clearly - she wasn't arguing that she shouldn't have been dismissed. (Humphreys clearly assumed she was). Only that her summary dismissal on the instructions of a politician, without a proper inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Peter Connolly's death, is unlikely to be the best way of improving the way statutory agencies deal with children at risk - and the focus absolutely has to be on learning the lessons and improving procedures. Scapegoating may make people feel better, it may sell newspapers and enable politicians to exonerate themselves but it doesn't actually enable lessons to be learned. It's not in the interest of 39,000 children at risk. In fact it may encourage a culture of secrecy and dishonesty and put them more at risk. It's irresponsible. And we are equally entitled to ask whether government has been giving the necessary resources to social services departments : it's an eye-watering caseload in many cases.

I think she's dead right, and dearly hope the appeal is lost. I have no idea as to whether she should have been dismissed, and if so on what grounds. The stupidity is that the manner of her dismissal means we will probably never know whether she should have been.

Morris as 'Sacrament without Word'

2011-04-30T09:50:00.002+01:00

Currently preparing my sermon for tomorrow, which will be delivered wearing morris dance costume, since this year May Day is on a Sunday. I've long been fascinated (as a somewhat lapsed dancer) by a powerful ritual that has lost all contact with its original meaning - we're left with speculation. Yet there's probably more proper (that is, ritual, rather than social) morris danced in churches at Morris Ring meetings than at neo-pagan events.

Hopefully I'll get a link up to the finished article. Meanwhile, early to bed tonight to be up at 4:15. As a local councillor for the Magdalen Bridge area I have a particular interest in the policing of a very recent "tradition" : extremely drunk students jumping into the river from a height of 10m - a river that currently has only 80cm of water in it in places.

Let's get physical

2011-04-30T09:35:00.003+01:00

An old mate of mine - Jon Cape - has been selected to present a paper at a 'Consciousness Studies' conference in Stockholm (http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/) this week. I found the abstract for his paper really interesting :

"Despite the huge popularity of reality shows, the nature of reality is hardly a popular subject. Well it sort of is - put God in the title of a book and - for or against Him - you can draw an audience. And yet much of the classical 'God versus the atheists' debate generates more heat than light. It does so because so many of the assumptions behind both sides of that debate remain unexamined, at least outside a fairly narrow and specialist philosophical circle. I thoroughly disagree with Socrates. The unexamined life can certainly be worth living. But unexamined assumptions can at least be fun to explore.

When it comes to the nature of reality, what is the dominant outlook? For many, the answer is so obvious it doesn't merit a name. Still less does it merit examination. Within the worlds of science and philosophy, the prevalent outlook, if named at all, is physicalism - sometimes dressed as scientific naturalism.

Physicalism in western philosophical tradition is a version of monism. Monism took battle with dualism and monism won. Monism thought the world was composed of one kind of stuff. Dualism opted for two. Monism had two types. These two types were called idealism and physicalism. In today's language, to show idealism is to aim for perfection, whether this is realistic or not. Supporters of idealism may or may not have been idealistic in this popular sense. For them, reality was basically one thing and that thing was mental or spiritual in nature. Physical reality flowed from this. Physicalists took the opposite view and won the day. Science would hardly make sense otherwise, would it? Physicalism became, and by and large it remains, the only show in town, the emperor whose writ is law in most of modern intellectual life. In many parts of the physical, biological and social sciences, to appear to question this holy writ is to seriously damage your wealth, professional prospects and credibility amongst your peers. Thus we find arguments which might run the risk of giving this appearance being carefully prefaced by a denial of any such intention. But the empire is much larger. For many of us in all walks of life, we might not give a second's thought to the emperor. But he quietly informs what we can think about the world and our place in it.

Physicalism is often presented as if it is simply science, or what science tells us about reality. But this is not so. Physicalism is one view of reality. It is a dominant view, indeed an emperor in today's world. The emperor's clothes are high fashion. But is he really naked?

In this talk, the conventional wisdom of today, physicalism, will be given a philosophical grilling much in the way that Anthony Freeman ('God In Us', 1993) has done so ably with regard to conventional wisdoms of yesterday."

Watch this space for a link to the eventual paper.

'Bible's Hidden Secrets' concluded

2011-04-01T10:49:00.002+01:00

Francesca Stavrakopoulou's series concluded with an exploration of the real meaning of the Garden of Eden. She suggested that the story refers to the Jerusalem Temple of Solomon's day. That is not at all far-fetched; however, in the first programme of the series she made much of the lack of any archaeological evidence for the existence of such a temple, and suggested that Solomon did not inherit a united nation capable of building such a grand edifice. You can't have it both ways!

The 'Deuteronomic' Biblical writers want their readers to understand that David didn't build a temple, not because he didn't have the power, but because God didn't need him to (2 Sam 7 : 5 - 7). Solomon's version (according to 1 Kings 5 : 3) is that David was not militarily secure enough. Whilst there may not be archæological evidence, there is an enormous amount of written evidence for the existence of Solmon's Temple, with detailed descriptions of it which Stavrakopoulou herself drew on. We even have the contract with Hiram, King of Tyre, for the felling of a vast numbers of cedar trees in Lebanon in 1 Kings 5 using conscript labour (a mass destruction whose legacy remains, and which was lamented by the prophets e.g. Jer 22 : 13 - 16).

As Margaret Barker has clearly described, the Solomonic Temple was a representation in built form of the seven days of creation as described in Genesis 1, and the Adam figure is the figure representative of humankind in the form of the royal high priest, who alone may enter the Most Holy Place. But is there not a 'chicken and egg' situation here? Yes, it is possible that the story of the so-called 'Fall' of Adam and Eve postdates Solomon's Temple and refers to it. It is likely that Solomon's Temple is constructed on the basis of a pre-existing creation story. Yet it also seems likely that the Hebrew creation story was refined during the exile to draw a clear distinction from the bloodthirsty creation myths of the Babylonians. The final editors felt it logical, clearly, to put these two creation stories and the story of the Garden together; but they are stories that refer back to the lost temple in Jerusalem, which itself was constructed on the basis of the creation story. That suggests that the material out of which these stories were constructed predate the Temple, possibly by centuries. It seems far more likely that this part of Genesis is knitting together well-established ancient Hebrew stories and giving them a contemporary twist.

I couldn't help noticing how Stavrakopoulou skirted round the most obvious garden reference : that of Babylon itself, whose royal gardens were one of the wonders of the world. Babylon (just as much as Jerusalem) leaves its fingerprints all over this Genesis text, as it does that other 'priestly' writing we find in Ezekiel (a Hebrew prophet in exile in Babylon). Ezekiel's detailed description of the Jerusalem Temple he dreams of (Ezek 40 &ff) directly echoes architectural descriptions of Marduk's temple in Babylon, the cuneiform tablet of which was exhibited at the British Museum a couple of years ago.

In the BBC programme, a false distinction was made between Adam as a historical royal/priestly figure and as an archetypal/original human. The whole point of the high priestly role is precisely to become the archetypal human for the sake of making effective atonement with God. The kingly high priest/Messiah in the temple is both. The reason she made this false distinction was because of the evident dislike and difficulty she has with the myth of 'original sin' that she thinks the story of the Garden contains. She tries to dispense with it by pinning the meaning of the story to a particular historical figure. This is simply not possible with a story that has gone through such a complex editing process that it has embedded within it multiple references.

She would have done better to ask whether the story of Adam and Eve in Eden is a story of a 'Fall' into 'sin' at all. Is it a 'moral' story? I don't see it has much to do with morality as such. It's the apostle Paul that we have to thank for that reading, which the institutional Church has capitalised on over centuries to keep women in their place and retain its ideological power. But that's only one possible reading of the text. As a description of the human condition it is profound. It asks and seeks to answer 'what is it about Adam (the 'earth creature') that is different from all other creatures?' and the answer is correct : not that humans are 'sinners' but that they are too inquisitive for their own good. (There are many other messages too). The consequences of that ability to question and push boundaries are not a 'punishment for sin' by an angry God but simply an inevitable consequence. 'Pandora has opened her box'. The 'genie is out of the bottle', and cannot be put back in. There's even the suggestion that this development is God's will (God creates the serpent, after all), and there is almost a sorrowful tone in the voice of God as God describes the tension and trouble that being a God invokes! The story of the suffering Messiah flows naturally from this.

The impression I am left with from the series is that Stavrakopoulou knows a lot about archæology, and a lot about the Bible, but does not know enough about the world of biblical theology. At every turn she has gone to people who articulate what she imagines to be the classic, almost cariacature, teachings of Christianity : creationism, original sin, a degraded view of women, strict monotheism etc., - but has not honoured the rich variety of interpretations and continual wrestling with the inherited texts that have always been part of the Christian tradition. Sydney Carter once wrote : "the function of the Bible is to force us to create", and though I found the series stimulating, it didn't really offer a life-enhancing alternative reading. Because, I think, it wasn't looking for one.

'God's Wife' (BBC2 series 'Bible's Buried Secrets')

2011-03-24T10:01:00.003Z

BBC2, Tuesdays 9:00pm)

What a strange programme this was! Francesca Stavrakopoulou 'exposed' how the Bible 'lies' to us about monotheism, yet the evidence she drew was from the Bible itself! Even more strangely, she implied that because the inhabitants of Israel before 600BC were polytheists rather than monotheists that somehow monotheism 'isn't true'. I'm fairly sure this was the result of poor editing by people who assumed that a programme about a subject they presumed to be fundamentally uninteresting and of no contemporary relevance would need to be made a bit more racy and provocative. Unfortunately (as I go on to argue) they missed the point, which was nothing to do with the trustworthiness of the Bible (whatever that means).

To those who keep half an eye on biblical studies there was nothing particularly new here. It's obvious that the Hebrew scriptures - or at least the so-called 'Deuteronomic History' books of the Bible - tell a story of a continual struggle against Canaanite religion. But as Stavrakopoulou pointed out (and as I 've been saying in sermons for years) that struggle took centuries to find success, only perhaps achieving it after the Babylonian Exile of the 6th century BC.

I was amazed she didn't cite one of the key texts - Jeremiah 44 - where Jeremiah is attributing the destruction of the nation to its failure to observe a strict monotheism, while his opponents - refugees in Egypt - argue fiercely that the rot set in when a religious purge by monotheistic reformers (initiated by the king Josiah) suppressed all worship (by women, mainly) of the Queen of Heaven :

Jeremiah, what do we care if you speak in the LORD's name? We refuse to listen! We have promised to worship the goddess Astarte, the Queen of Heaven, [a] and that is exactly what we are going to do. We will burn incense and offer sacrifices of wine to her, just as we, our ancestors, our kings, and our leaders did when we lived in Jerusalem and the other towns of Judah. We had plenty of food back then. We were well off, and nothing bad ever happened to us. But since the time we stopped burning incense and offering wine sacrifices to her, we have been dying from war and hunger. Then the women said, "When we lived in Judah, we worshiped the Queen of Heaven and offered sacrifices of wine and special loaves of bread shaped like her. Our husbands knew what we were doing, and they approved of it."

Jeremiah 44 : 16 - 19

More radical is Margaret Barker's work on the worship and imagery in Solomon's Temple (c.1000 BC) and her suggestion that the early Christians - most notably the writer of Revelation - understood Jesus to be fulfilling in himself not only the role of High Priest and the symbols of the second Temple (recently completed by Herod), but that he and his mother were in some sense a restoration of the the first, Solomonic, temple with its holy artefacts : the ark, the snake, the tree, the cherubim, the image of the goddess Wisdom, the 'cakes' etc.

But underlying the presentation of the 'hidden story' of the Bible (with its insinuations of cover-ups and the Bible's untrustworthiness) Stavrakopoulou was actually presenting two genuine arguments of genuine contemporary relevance, which the editors either missed or sought to play down.

The first, which was given about one minute of the programme, is that monotheism is bad for women and that having a fertility goddess as a male god's consort is better for women. That is a question well worth asking, but none of the evidence necessary to tackle that question was found in the programme. There is plenty of evidence that objectifying women as procreators doesn't necessarily do them any favours. According to the monotheists' story as told in the Bible, they struggled against temple prostitution and child sacrifice, for instance.

The second argument was provocative enough never to be stated outright in the programme. The claim of the Jews to be a distinctive people, separated from all others by their monotheism, bequeathed a Promised Land almost from time immemorial by a 'jealous' God who opposes all polytheistic tendencies is vitally important as the guiding myth for Zionist Israel's policy of suppressing and driving out the present 'Canaanites', the Palestinians. Stavrakopoulou argued, effectively, "But you're all Canaanites! The myth of the exclusive inheritance of the Promised Land by monotheists comes not in Abraham's time but later than the 6th century BC exile in Babylon - 500 years after David and Solomon." Now this (in my mind) undoubtedly correct assertion is far more interesting than supposed cover-ups in the Bible. But I suspect it was too risky for the editors to spell out. I wonder why?

God doesn't exist. Or maybe God does.

2011-02-09T11:09:00.001Z

Recent post to a URC blog where, yet again, Christians with their backs to the wall are defending the 'existence' of God :

The use of the word 'exist' creates more heat than light. It's fairly clear to me that God doesn't "exist". The universe exists. God is a word we use for "that which is the reason anything exists at all" and "which holds it in existence". The trouble with arguing that God "exists" is that God then has to be some sort of super-existing being - more powerful, more knowing etc - and all too often ends up being modelled on human images of super-existence. Which tend to become oppressive. That's why the crucified Christ is so key.

Trinity makes sense to me as God-that-doesn't-exist / God-in-human-expression / God that enables humans to recognise the one in the other.

Religion is extremely dangerous and extremely justice-and-peace-making. It is extremely beautiful and extremely ugly. Extremely damaging and extremely healing. That's one reason why organised/institutional religion must be separated from the State (which has the monopoly on the use of force). However, the religious instinct is, I believe, hard-wired into human beings. If we don't worship God (who doesn't exist) we will worship Mars (power of force), or Mammon, or Aphrodite or something else that clearly does. As Walter Wink writes, if we worship these real but invisible forces, they will lead us off into the dark.

The religious instinct tends to lead people to cluster or coagulate around communal religious myths and (eventually) institutional structures - it's never just a private matter. Organised religion is an inevitability. The idea that religion can be eliminated is fatuous.

Precisely because it is so dangerous - and potentially beautiful - it must be done well. It can only be 'done well' from the inside - legal constraints (ultimately, persecution) from outside government that isn't religious can only go so far.

All the energy expended by people arguing that God doesn't 'exist' is largely wasted, because God doesn't (or does, depending what you mean). A better discussion might be whether God is present or absent, whether God speaks or has finished speaking. A religion is more like a language than a set of propositions (let alone an organisation). The best way to get constructive, healing religion rather than destructive religion, is to use the language and argue for it from the inside, grounding it in the truth - which includes the truths that science is revealing. Good religion can adapt to new truths - the world religions wouldn't have survived for millennia if they hadn't got the inbuilt ability to adapt.

Review of The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen (winner of the Man Booker Prize)

2010-12-20T16:31:00.002Z

Howard Jacobsen's novel is an exploration of 'Jewishness'. Three of its four central characters — two widowers and a single woman — are Jewish, and the fourth isn't, but wants to be. Really, he wants to be anything other than the person he is. He's an intelligent man but utterly indecisive and unable to commit to anything. He becomes increasingly irritating to the reader, as no doubt he's meant to — a bit like Kenneth Branagh's TV version of 'Wallander' (for those who followed it). He wants to be someone with a secure identity, snuggled up in a blanket of Jewishness. But he also wants to be part of a slightly exotic, exclusive, élite sort of community, with its hidden understandings and its own language. At one point, he is shocked to be accused of anti-semitism, but actually there's probably truth in the accusation : he wants 'Jewishness' for purely selfish reasons, because he's a deeply self-centred man.

He's the only Gentile that really features in the book at all apart from his estranged wives and their sons, and the (deceased) wife of his friend — who had converted to Judaism. I found this rather disturbing. Is the book a sort of parable, in which this man is supposed to represent the Gentile world? It would have been interesting, and more true to life, to have seen some non-Jewish (even Christian) characters who were secure in their religious identity, rather than confused and envious of the strong sense of identity shared (despite their differences) by the Jewish characters in the book. Such people do exist.

For me, Christians are, anyway, 'Jews by grace'; adopted children of their parent people, the Jews. It's true that Paul the apostle never convinced the Jewish leadership of his day of this, and that for two thousand years Christians have behaved as if their 'faith parents' were aliens, but the underlying sense in this book is that, indeed, Jews can never escape being a special, unique, rather alien group. But if Christians are 'Jews by grace', with a shared early history, then this is less true. It would have been good to see the idea reflected somewhere. As it is, Christian faith goes unnoticed in the book, which is a pity since Christian attitudes towards Judaism have changed radically in the last 50 years (although there are pockets where the old attitudes survive).

The arguments between the characters (which happen against a backdrop of grief, since two of the characters are recent widowers) all orbit round the question of what a Jew should make of the present Israeli state. This (Jacobsen wants us to know) is an enormously complex and emotive issue, not least for Jews, overshadowed as it inevitably is with the history of the Holocaust. At one key point, the character who is so angered and dismayed by what the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians that he chairs an organisation called 'ASHamed Jews', rounds on a questioner at a public meeting saying "How dare you, a non-Jew, . . even think you can tell Jews what sort of country they may live in, when it is you, a European Gentile, who made a separate country for Jews necessary?"

This argument swirls round the book endlessly, until I was left with a sense that Jacobsen wanted me to back off from even thinking about it . . . as if he was saying "this is a complex and emotive issue, and Jews themselves have so many strong and contradictory feelings about it that there's nothing you could think that we haven't already thought." And there's just that little uneasy feeling that he thinks non-Jews have forfeited their right to have an opinion about it, anyway.

It was some time after reading it that I found myself reflecting that there is no character in the book that really expresses the dangerous fundamentalism that drives the Zionist settlers in the West Bank. There's a passing reference to a settler who, on being evicted by the Israeli government, has shot an Arab family on a bus in Israel. But the only character in the book who reflects on this believes that "thou shalt not kill is emblazoned on the hearts of Jews", so "he is not one of ours". The trouble is, he is. These people have a major influence on the current Israeli government, which is actually doing very little to discourage settlers. They cannot be dismissed so easily. I'm sure that it is indeed very complex — but actually, some things are simple, and much of what is being done to the Palestinians is not excused by saying 'it's complex'. It's simply wrong, and needs to stop — complexity is no excuse.

Plot-wise (for those who like a story), the book starts promisingly; but the plot gets less and less interesting, and eventually peters out. That's quite a fashionable thing for novels to do these days, but it wouldn't satisfy those who prefer Mills & Boon endings. However, I have to say that it is beautifully written and, at least in the first half, very funny.

Missing the Beauty

2010-12-10T22:54:00.003Z

From the Washington Post, a story of what happened when one of the finest violinists in the world went busking on the Washington DC Metro. Making me wonder how much beauty I fail to see.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html?hpid=topnews

As an occasional busker myself, the one thing that didn't happen (which happens to me) is people coming to chat with you while you're playing, as if the playing requires no effort or concentration. As if you're playing a CD.

Paranoid religious leaders (contd)

2010-09-20T11:03:00.002+01:00

Meanwhile in Amritsar diocese, in the northern Punjab, Muslim mobs burnt a Christian-run school to the ground and were narrowly prevented from burning down a (Christian-run) hospital as well. This followed a TV programme broadcast from Iran showing copies of the Qur'an being burnt in the USA (though as I understand it, so-called 'Pastor' Jones didn't actually do this).

The village school at Tangmarg catered to over 500 students – all of them Muslims – drawn from 150 villages.

"They were protesting against Qur'an desecration and in the process, they burnt two Qur'ans kept at the library and the headmaster's room – reducing the entire school building to ashes. In the name of protest, they destroyed the school that educated their children," lamented Bishop Samantaroy. "Look at the irony."

Religious leaders need to weigh their words very carefully before airing their paranoia.

Paranoid religious leaders

2010-09-17T18:17:00.002+01:00

This week's Oxford Times reports Dr Taj Hargey of the 'Oxford Islamic Congregation' criticising Christian leaders for failing to publicly condemn the threat of another obscure 'religious leader' (Terry Jones of Florida) to burn copies of the Qur'an. "Where were the loud denunciations from any prominent British religious figure, including those in Oxford?", he is reported as saying. "The deafening silence . . sends a chilling message to Britain's Muslims."

Well, there's none so blind as those who will not see. The Archbishop of Canterbury's annual Eid message - his greeting to Muslim communities in Britain - reads, "In this country there are those who speak maliciously about religion in general and often against Islam in particular; demonstrations in many of our cities are intended to provoke; and in other parts of the world the threat to desecrate scriptures is deeply deplorable and to be strongly condemned by all people."

What Mr Hargey seems to be saying is that the onus is on Christian leaders to reassure him continually and personally, and that if they don't he is entitled to feel threatened. I would have thought that as a religious leader it would be his job to find out what other religious leaders are saying. This is a kind of defensive and inward-looking religious leadership the world could do without. Little better than Terry Jones, in fact.

Servant Leadership

2010-06-22T08:51:00.002+01:00

Life's been so busy since being elected as a city councillor that I've hardly had time to post. A brief summary of some of the things I've been up to is on my other blog at www.greenwolff.blogspot.com

A theme that crops up continually is that of consultation. It's very clear that the 'ruling' party believes in making all the decisions behind closed doors then putting the proposals out - late in the day - for ratification. They call it 'consultation' but that has become a dirty word in the public's mind.

The belief, presumably, is that this is an efficient and effective way of decision making. Well, maybe it is in a conventional company, or an army, or maybe a university (the leader of the council is HR Director for Oxford Brookes University). Unfortunately a city council is not the same sort of beast. It is elected 'bottom-up' by its 'customers' to deliver whatever services the 'customers' say they want (plus, of course, fulfilling its statutory obligations).

For myself, I believe that a more effective way still can be to go to the widest possible public consultation at the earliest possible opportunity, once it is known what the issue that needs resolving is. There are ways of running such consultations that avoid the many pitfalls. As it is, I get the clear impression that consultation is seen as an irritation, especially if it leads to creative ideas 'we didn't think of'. I think they think the only consultation that counts is when people vote every two years.

The United Reformed Church has its 'shapers' - people who drive 'from the top' - but fundamentally it works by consensus. The Bible is the 'supreme authority for the faith and conduct of God's people' - BUT - no-one can force on you their interpretation of it. That is something that has to be worked out together. It's that balance between the Christ who is "Lord" but also "Servant", who wins the victory by giving away his life and power. Our current leaders no doubt wish to be public servants, but haven't quite cottoned on to what that really means.

"Unholier than thou"

2010-05-27T08:49:00.003+01:00

Friends are getting married in a Registry Office, but have asked for a Christian service of blessing as part of the ceremony. The law forbids any religious input into a secular ceremony, so I'm having to devise a service that starts with the 'legal bits' done "godlessly" by the Registrar, who then leaves, and then continues with promises, exchange of rings, blessing etc. But we didn't want the legal promises to be completely sparse. So we suggested that the following was said :

"I XX take you XX to be my lawful wedded X (i.e. the legally required words)
to have and to hold
from this day forward
for better for worse
for richer for poorer
in sickness and in health
till death parts us"

No reference to God, and nothing religious in that, but the Registrar deems it unacceptable. The reason? It's a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer (which it sort of is, albeit with the line "in accordance with God's holy will" removed. Actually these lines are found in the wedding services of most Christian churches in the UK, I'd imagine.)

busk

2010-05-12T09:02:00.003+01:00

. . . just off for the city centre where I'll be busking for Christian Aid all day. Owing to some unimaginative attempts by a city council officer to get more control over such things, the only covered public space in town (which isn't owned by the City Council anyway) has been decreed out of bounds, so I've had to go through the hoops getting charitable collection licence and (separate) busking licence, and have to keep moving from place to place every hour. Ugh.

an auspicious encounter

2010-05-09T20:03:00.002+01:00

A strangely auspicious event this (Sunday) afternoon : two days after being elected to Oxford City Council as a Green Party member, my wife Karen and I were cycling back from a party in Iffley along the Isis towpath. We got separated when I stopped to take a picture for two foreign visitors and after finding each other again ended up taking an unintended route back across the grassy Port Meadow.

As we approached the Trap Grounds allotments we encountered a group of twenty or so parishioners and choirboys from St Margarets Church processing in their cassocks and choir vestments behind a large silver crucifix, swinging incense as they went.

We stayed with them as they blessed the vegetable allotments and prayed for their fruitfulness, then the meadow and river, then back over to the canal, blessing the railway en route to the children's playground next door to the school where Karen teaches. It was very moving to hear the famous Gospel passage "Jesus said . . let the little children come to me" in the context of a playground, and to see the swings and climbing frames censed.

Somehow everything about it reflected the spiritual heart of the Green vision; the simple liturgy and ritual with its completely serious intent was the 'carrier' for a light-hearted and inclusive social occasion. The bizarre nature of the encounter and the amazing coincidence of the timing seemed to augur well for the ministry ahead.

"Try, try, try a little harder . . ."

2010-04-20T15:32:00.002+01:00

So sang Janis Joplin, noticing that the hookers who hit the streets at noon did more business than she did, getting up mid-afternoon.

Not exactly the best parallel, but : I'm hard at work canvassing as Green Party candidate in St Mary's Ward for Oxford City Council election. It strikes me that in order to get people to give up ten minutes of their time to call in at a polling station and put a cross on a piece of paper - a privilege that, though hard-won, costs them nothing - every one of 4,000 or so doors will be knocked on at least twice in the space of a month and have three separate news-sheet and/or leaflet drops. The stall will be up and running outside Cowley Road Tescos every Saturday for three hours. And then about 30% will respond (though, who knows, maybe it will be better this time).

And we sit in our churches hoping that people will just come - not just once for ten minutes but weekly, for at least an hour . . .

. . . and again

2010-04-09T18:47:00.002+01:00

On the day we were treated to a depressing and pointless shouting match about National Insurance contributions during Prime Minister's Questions - again, given the lead story by the BBC - elsewhere in Parliament something significant actually happened. A bill was passed making it much more difficult for so-called 'Vulture Funds' to prey on the world's poorest - see http://www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk/Landmark%20Law%20Passed%20to%20Tackle%20Vulture%20Funds+6006.twl

BBC News fails again

2010-04-04T16:51:00.001+01:00

Somebody senior in the BBC's radio news management is determined to seize any opportunity to knock Archbishop Rowan Williams. After the fiasco of the 'sharia law for Britain' episode in 2008 you'd have thought they'd have learned. But somebody thought it newsworthy to give last night's leading main news headline to a leaked interview in which Rowan Williams referred to the worrying possibility of the Roman Catholic Church losing "all credibility" in Ireland. Senior Catholic prelates were reported as 'dismayed' by the 'outburst'.

If so, then presumably they were even more dismayed by their own pope's 'outburst' in a pastoral letter they were instructed to have read in their parishes the week before in which Benedict XVI prayed that "the (Roman Catholic) Church in Ireland will overcome the present crisis and become once more a convincing witness to the truth and goodness of Almighty God", described a "present crisis" in which "child sexual abuse . . has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings", and told his "brother bishops" that "some of you and your predecessors failed, at times grievously, to apply the long-established norms of canon law to the crime of child abuse. . . grave errors of judgment were made and failures of leadership occurred. All this has seriously undermined your credibility." Rowan Williams referred to the humiliation being suffered by innocent priests on the streets, echoing the pope's own words to the "priests and Religious of Ireland" : "many of you feel personally discouraged, even abandoned . . tainted by association." In some Dublin parishes, Mass attendance has plummeted by two thirds.

But underlying this non-news item lies either a piece of (possibly malicious) mischief or a complete misunderstanding of the Church. What the news chief is looking to stir up is a division between the Roman Catholic and Anglican Church - it's the only way I can make sense of such a non-story as a headline.

But nowhere in the Church have I heard any sense of schadenfreude expressed about the Catholic Church's misfortune. All Christians - Catholics and non-Catholics alike - are tainted by the abuses. Willams's tone is not an accusatory one but a sympathetic one. None of us wants to see the Christian faith losing credibility. And every religious organisation knows that 'there for but for the grace of God go we' - as, no doubt, does every Education Authority, Social Services Department etc.

Cosmological mind blowing

2010-03-10T10:29:00.002Z

Last night's Horizon on BBC2 looked at the current state of cosmological theory. How refreshing to have a prime time TV prog that managed to deal with real science of the most mind-boggling sort without either dumbing down or being unintelligible. Mind you, it would have been better as a radio programme. How do you portray a Big Bang lasting a quadrillionth of a second followed by a ballooning of the universe over billions of years.

One thing you shouldn't do is make the Big Bang go 'bang!' - since it would happen in total silence. Sound does not travel in the vacuum of space. This always irritates me in spacey-type films; especially since vast power being released in total silence would be a far more powerful image.

The mind-bending concepts of 'dark matter' (we can't detect >75% of the matter in our universe), 'dark energy' and, even more creepily, 'dark flow' (suggesting that our universe is not the only one) fill me with awe. Like the Psalmist said "When I look up at your heavens, the work of your fingers, at the moon and the stars you have set in place, what is a frail mortal, that you should be mindful of him, a human being, that you should take notice of him?" (Psalm 8 : 3 - 4). The truth of the universe, majestic and incomprehensible to the 5th Century BC poet is actually far more wonderful than s/he could remotely begin to imagine.

Israel : Privilege without Responsibility?

2010-03-01T10:59:00.000Z

Radio 4's Start the Week this morning gave some time to discussing a new book by Anthony Julius - Trials of the Diaspora : a history of anti-semitism in England. The panellists discussed the difference between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism.

There is little doubt that the creation of the state of Israel was bound to set up conflict for generations. One tragedy emerging from another, if the word 'tragedy' can be used without letting human decision-makers off the hook. There is little doubt of the reality of anti-semitism. Although it is many years since I myself have been aware of it, I'm sure it remains under the surface. Whether the sort of (anti-)Jewish jokes that were common at my secondary school still do the rounds in the playgrounds I don't know. And that anti-semitism still exists in the world of the far-right and of fundamentalist Islam is obvious. The imam of Oxford's central mosque (long since sacked by the mosque committee), with whom East Oxford's church leaders met regularly in the months after September 11th 2001, had no hesitation in informing us that the New York atrocity was organised by Jews to bring down the US's wrath on Muslims. ("No Jews went into work in the World Trade Centre that day," he informed us with a straight face.)

And yet the government of Israel has behaved brutally - under provocation, of course - meting out injustice and humiliation on the Palestinian people and ignoring the resolutions of the so-called 'international community'. The settlers have sequestered Palestinian farms and olive groves, distorting legal process to do it, rendering Arab Israelis third-class citizens in their own country. How strange that Tony Blair, in the latter days of his reign when he was most seduced by power, didn't call for an invasion of Israel (as he suggested to the Chilcott inquiry we should now be considering against Iran).

There is a very nasty and dangerous dynamic operating here. When the State of Israel is criticised for its abuses and atrocities, the criticism is rebuffed as anti-semitism. Anti-semitism - which is real - is used as a shield to defend the indefensible. This is a highly risky strategy, because it is so exasperating and offensive that it reinforces the impression of the Jewish leadership as irrational, aggressive and paranoid - even more dangerous.

I have to recognise, of course, that maybe I am anti-semitic and unwilling to admit it. But many professing Christians are in a different place from where we were a century ago - partly as a result of deep reflection on Christian complicity in the holocaust :

a) Jesus, our Lord, was a Jew and never ceased being one. He never rejected the Torah, although not all teachers of the period shared the same interpretation of Moses' law. He was probably a claimant to the High Priesthood - at least, much of what he is reported as saying and doing makes most sense if this is how he understood his calling.

b) The first Church was deeply Jewish, worshipping regularly in the Temple and holding strictly to Torah observance. The first leader of the Church, James the Lord's brother, was widely respected in Jerusalem at a time when the religious and political Judaean leadership was compromised and in disarray.

c) In our Bible Study we are studying the book of Revelation : and it is a revelation to read its writer condemning 'Balaam'and his 'synagogue of Satan' : 'Balaam' is, I am sure, the apostle Paul, and 'Jezebel' his convert Lydia.

d) Paul's mission was widely rejected for compromising Jewish standards of observance in order to draw Gentiles into the Jewish covenant. Certainly, down the centuries his message has been understood to imply that the Jewish law was now superseded by a more 'spiritual' encounter with God in Christ. Certainly, when under attack from the majority Jewish Christians, he gives as good as he gets (see his letter to the Galatians). But the whole thrust of his message is that the Jews are God's chosen people, and now by an act of sheer grace, Gentiles have been brought into that covenant.

I fully understand why a Jew might not accept me, a Christian, as such - but in my own understanding I am a Jew-by-grace. A Messianic Jew, I suppose, under the high priesthood-to-end-all-priesthood of Jesus. Up to the year 100 or so, the Jewish scriptures are my faith history. As a Jew-by-grace, I belong to a people chosen by God for a very particular witness. We are called to be the 'priestly nation' among the nations.

That does not mean special privileges or superiority; it can mean being the lightning-conductor for the wrath of the nations and the evil in the world - as Jesus himself was. But what it most certainly does mean is being called to be the people who are most ruthlessly honest with themselves, most humble before the face of God, most able to admit their faults and best equipped to correct them.

The Church has failed spectacularly in this calling in the past - especially when it has allied itself with power. But the State of Israel, too, is failing in this regard. Unwilling to admit the abuses, lashing out when criticised, self-righteous, and turning a deaf ear to its own internal 'prophets'. The prophets and the 'Deuteronomist' perpetually reminded Israel that if it failed to 'act justly, seek mercy and walk humbly with her God' that one way or another it would be deposed. 'I chastise those whom I love' says God. The privilege of 'chosenness' is a privilege that gives Israel a particular and demanding vocation amongst the nations. If Israeli governments (in unholy alliance with extremist religious movements) continue the way they are it can only be a matter of time before the Jewish people once again find themselves finding their 'chosenness' a bitter cup. Anti-semitism is the other side of the coin from 'chosenness', and I don't dispute the chosenness - I dare to believe I share it in Christ.

The Bible invites us to expect much of Israel. Isaiah offers the image of the nations streaming up to Mount Zion because 'here is a people that have got it right'. Present-day Israeli governments are demanding special privilege without accepting the responsibility that goes with it.

Bullying

2010-02-23T09:52:00.003Z

What a dismal low our politics has sunk to! Has the difference between the "main" parties become so insignificant that it has come to this?

Bullying happens in the church, unfortunately, and we have procedures for recognising and dealing with it. It is not the same as people being irascible. Bullying has distinct characteristics :

- it focuses on and exploits people's sense of inadequacy (and everybody, no matter what they say, senses personal inadequacy). In this respect it is "satanic" in the true sense - it tells people "You're no good, are you?" "You can't do this, can you?" Mere aggression may be upsetting, even intimidating, but it doesn't necessarily implant that worm of self-doubt. Bullying can take place without any overt aggression at all.

- it tends to take place over a long period of time, gradually undermining a person's sense of self-worth, often through barely noticeable things - a passing word, a glance, a minor action e.g. bypassing someone in decision-making, leaving someone 'out of the loop', going behind someone's back, giving someone a task without giving them the resources to do it.

- it often also tries to recruit others into reinforcing this pattern by colluding with it. It is at this point that it becomes most dangerous.

I don't know what happens in military training nowadays, but in the past carefully controlled bullying has been an important part of the training process - it grooms people to become torturers in their own right once they are set free to take their own resulting sense of self-loathing out on more vulnerable people.

I have heard nothing in the discussions about what may or may not have been going on in the office at No.10 that refers to bullying as such at all.

New blog launched

2010-02-23T09:42:00.002Z

As I become increasingly involved in Oxford Green politics, my blog posts are tending to deviate away from the original focus of this blog. Also there is a danger of a blurring between my 'professional' life as a church minister and my political life as an individual.

I've therefore launched Green Wolff, a new blog at http://www.greenwolff.blogspot.com

your carbon pinprick

2010-02-19T13:22:00.006Z

The Bishops of Oxford and London and others are going to reduce their carbon footprint for Lent by (amongst other things) reducing their mobile phone usage. I've done a quick rough calculation :

An hour on a mobile phone equates (at a rough calculation) to leaving a 100w light bulb on for 50 seconds.

It wouldn't consume enough energy to remotely begin to start your car, let alone drive it! It might heat the glow-plugs of your diesel car up (i.e. turning on the ignition) before you actually try starting it.

A typical surge-protected 8-way multiplug, if left switched on (but with nothing plugged into it) is roughly equivalent to having 20 mobile phones permanently in use. The one I've got (no longer using) used 43 watts doing nothing. According to another rough calculation : over the course of a year, that's equivalent to boiling 5,000 kettles of water for two people. It would take my mobile phone about a day and a half to boil the same kettle.

In fact, the 'Carbon Fast' suggestions for Lent from Tear Fund (see http://www.tearfund.org/webdocs/website/Campaigning/CarbonFast09/Carbon%20Fast%202010%20actions%20for%20web.pdf) which is what the bishops are signing up to is a good list of suggestions. Looks like it's their PR people that don't quite get it.

to be 'free' is to be 'free for relation'

2010-02-11T12:38:00.002Z

Rowan Williams's address to the Church of England General Synod (see http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2752 ) is a helpful and practical overview of the meaning of freedom.

"The freedom claimed, for example, by the Episcopal Church (in the United States) to ordain a partnered homosexual bishop is, simply as a matter of fact, something that has a devastating impact on the freedom of, say, the Malaysian Christian to proclaim the faith without being cast as an enemy of public morality and risking both credibility and personal safety. It hardly needs to be added that the freedom that might be claimed by an African Anglican to support anti-gay legislation likewise has a serious impact on the credibility of the gospel in our setting. And in the Communion we have no supreme executive to make the decisions that might settle how the balance of freedom might be worked out."

He challenges the individualistic understanding of freedom :

"This, you see, is where the Christian understanding of freedom has a distinctive contribution to make to the broader discussion of liberties in society. Christian freedom as St Paul spells it out is always freedom from isolation – from the isolation of sin, separating us from God, and the isolation of competing self-interest that divides us from each other. To be free is to be free for relation; free to contribute what is given to us into the life of the neighbour, for the sake of their formation in Christ's likeness."

And he urges people to resist seeing others in two dimensions rather than three. Reality is more complex. He describes the hard practical work on gun crime that the Episcopal Church in the USA, stereotyped as a liberal talk-shop, is doing in the Bronx and the compassionate work the Church in Uganda - typecast as passionately homophobic and Biblically literalist - is doing in the rehabilitation of child soldiers and the continuing, intensely demanding work with victims of trauma and HIV.

"Put the gun down, Mr Hoggart . ."

2010-02-07T16:04:00.002Z

A response to Simmon Hoggart's article about climate change 'true believers' in this Saturday's Guardian (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/feb/06/climate-change-simon-hoggarts-week) :

If Simon Hoggart is 'agnostic' about man-made global warming leading to irreversible climate change then he must be allowing for the possibility that the warnings are correct. What probability of that would he need in order to support urgent action on carbon reduction? One in six? If I played Russian roulette it would seem rather silly to boast that I was 'agnostic' about whether the spun cassette had landed on the one loaded chamber before pulling the trigger. But as I understand it, the scientific consensus is that at least five of the six chambers are loaded, most of them not with blanks. In which case we're talking, not about 'agnosticism' but stupidity. The fact that the 'gun' is pointed at the world's poor and our unborn grandchildren adds reckless irresponsibility to the score card.

Now factor in the quite separate issue of the probability that global demand for oil will outstrip maximum possible supply within eight years.

Now consider the low risk involved in action : weigh up the possibility that a low-carbon economy is not only achievable but that it could offer more political stability and a better quality of life to more people on the planet than the present set-up has proved capable of delivering.

Add it all together, and you have to conclude that his article is both silly and dangerously irresponsible. This is nothing to do with religious faith. I don't have to be a 'true believer' to say 'Put the gun down, Mr Hoggart. You don't have to do this.'

We can't afford cynicism

2010-02-05T12:20:00.002Z

The BBC has been responsible for some excellent programming lately : Radio 4's 'Analysis' last week was a thorough piece on Green thinking (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00q3cnl) even if a bit too negative for my liking.

But there are times when I want to throw something at the TV or radio. If I hear one more time 'good news' that the 'economy is growing' I may not be responsible for my actions. If we really want the economy to 'grow' in this sense, the best thing would be to engineer thousands of deaths in multiple car pileups - because that will make money whizz round the system nicely. How long will it be before the BBC gets the message that 'economic growth' (as measured by GDP) means virtually nothing?

Last night's main TV news allowed us to wallow further in the MPs expenses scandal, without actually learning anything. The real scandal never got a mention. The real question that I've never heard anyone ask or answer is 'who set up the allowances system in the first place, and why?' There was a passing mention that the MPs themselves set it up. True up to a point : but as I understand it, that was back in the 1970s, i.e. virtually none of the MPs currently in Parliament were responsible. Sure they could have challenged it at any time since, and it is no credit to Parliament that no-one (so far as I know) did.

It's exasperating because it encourages cynicism about politics and politicians. It encourages people to imagine that the world would be a better place without politicians. A more stupid notion I can't imagine, given that politics is about how power is distributed and used. A world without politicians is complete anarchy. We can't afford cynicism.

Many years ago I chaired a Church Meeting in which we discussed a letter we'd received from Ken Livingstone's GLC. One lady said she'd not got any time for politicians - they were all a waste of space. Sitting next to her was her husband, recently out of hospital where he'd received life-saving heart surgery. I had to remind her that without politicians she'd have been a widow.

Jesus' Green Manifesto

2010-01-28T17:38:00.001Z

With an election looming, the Greens (along with other parties) are finalising their manifestos. Sunday's set reading was the account of Jesus delivering his manifesto in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4 : 14 - 21). He is declaring that he is the one who is to usher in the year of the great Jubilee.

The 'spiritual economics' of Jubilee are closely related to the spiritual economics of Sabbath, and are delineated in Leviticus 25. Leviticus is often picked on for what seem to us as its occasional obscure legalisms, and its passing prohibition of same-sex intercourse. But here we have a complete economic programme, which has many resonances with (green) New Economics. I wonder where the Church would be now if it had poured the same energy into promoting Jubilee economics as it has into ensuring compliance with the one verse edict on same-sex relations.

The presumption of Jubilee economics is that "there is enough for all, if we learn how to share it", and that human appetites for more - always more - are not natural. We live in a world where we are taught that we have a birthright to always 'more'. The fact that we have to be indoctrinated with this suggests that greed is less natural than we suppose, and that most people are content with 'enough'. Gordon Brown wants everyone to 'aspire' to more — this is (as David Byrne of Talking Heads sang) 'The Road to Nowhere'.

In Jubilee economics, every citizen has a guaranteed stake (in a plot of land) and a responsibility to tend that land in order to be self-sufficient, with enough surplus to help the foreigner and those who fall on hard times. If the citizen falls on hard times they can sell some of their land for cash; and if matters get worse they can become hired workers with no land. But in the 49th year all the land is allowed to lie fallow - the land itself is given a break (and we relearn that the earth can provide enough even without human interference) - after which the enlarged estates are broken up and the plots returned to their original owning families. The landowner who buys land is effectively buying a lease, and the land value reflects how much of the maximum 49 year lease remains.

Imagine that instead of borrowing large sums of money to buy property, and only owning it 100% after paying it off with interest, you have a property by birthright which (if you need to) you can lease part of to financial institutions for cash - but never actually sell in perpetuity.

The Green Party's tax proposals on Citizens' Income, Inheritance Tax and Land Value Tax (see http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/mfssec.html#Tax) seem to me like a step in that direction, given that we are no longer an agrarian society.

The story goes on to say that Jesus got lynched by the congregation - but that was for saying that other nations were likely to 'get the message' before his own.

money to burn

2010-01-26T10:19:00.003Z

Yesterday I got a Conservative Party glossy election brochure through the door. On page 6 there's a couple of paragraphs on the environment, which they seem to think has "rather slipped off the agenda" in "recent months" - Copenhagen fuss and Daily Express front pages notwithstanding (see earlier blogs).

On reading the fourth paragraph I didn't know whether to laugh or cry :

"We will give every household in Britain the chance to save money on their heating bills and help reduce our CO2 emissions by requiring every gas and electricity bill to show what people would have paid under the lowest tariff available — and what they need to do to move on to it."

So the less you pay per unit for your gas and electricity, the less CO2 you're responsible for releasing? I suppose that might just work if you reduced your gas usage and compensated for the loss of heat by burning banknotes to the value of the money you'd saved. There's more than a few bankers who could heat their entire homes that way. There again, I've an idea that destroying banknotes is a criminal offence (whereas presumably gambling people's savings away isn't).

Soul for sale

2010-01-21T10:23:00.002Z

Notorious American televangelist Pat Robertson recently revealed that the suffering of the Haitians owes its origins to a pact the former slaves made with the Devil prior to an uprising against their French masters in 1791.

Letters from Satan himself have appeared elsewhere in the blogosphere resenting this defamation of character. He says that the deal is he only gives his converts a bad time after they've died, and keeps his part of the bargain by giving them a good time this side of the curtain. That's the deal.

Meanwhile, the soul of Pat Robertson has gone up for sale on EBay for you to do what you will with - in the form of a voodoo doll that you can stick pins in, flush down the loo or whatever (Proceeds to Médecins Sans Frontières). Accessories included with the doll are "Pat's very own Holy Bible, and Bag of money taken from real Americans!"

This morning it was removed by EBay as the seller "could not verify the existence of Pat Robertson's soul". (Well, so the story goes). But I think the product has been amended (er, how?) and is back up there again.

Personally, I'd have thought at least part of the reason for the Haitians poor infrastructure is the fact that the tiny country still carries $890 million of international debt.

Russian Roulette with the grandchildren

2010-01-06T18:33:00.003Z

The Daily Express has printed a shockingly awful front page today, claiming that the current weather conditions prove that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a conspiracy. You wonder whether it's ever worth responding to these things, but on the grounds that a drip will eventually bore a hole in granite, I sent the following :

The Express 'prides itself on strong views and opinions' (unquote). Not truthful or balanced opinions, just strong ones. Unfortunately, when it comes to global warming/climate change, opinions without evidence, knowledge and understanding are just noise.

Unfortunately, the science involves collecting vast amounts of data from many different fields of study and identifying very faint patterns. Like it or not, we and our politicians are in the hands of the scientists who have access to that data and the means to interpret it. Whilst it's possible that 5% of scientists have a political agenda and perverse motivation, it seems a bit unlikely that 95% (in countries across the world with completely different political systems) share in some global conspiracy. I don't understand what they're supposed to be gaining from it if it is a conspiracy. Short term research grants? Is that worth prostituting your reputation for? And why would any politician want to believe the scientists' predictions, given that it creates enormous additional political challenges - on top of all the others? I just don't understand why it's in anybody's interest to spin such a conspiracy.

95% of scientists directly involved in climate studies seem to agree that we are faced with climate change as a result of human-generated carbon emissions. Of the other 5%, from the limited information I've seen, about half are funded by the oil and coal industry. If there is any actual evidence of conspiracy it's in the right-wing 'free market' think tanks and oil industry links to prominent 'deniers'.

I'm not hearing much dispute about the likely consequences if long range climate change is a reality (however it may be caused) - the consequences are extremely severe, not just for the physical environment but for the political chaos it might unleash. Your editorial comment asserts "if global warming is still occurring it is by no means disastrous for this country". So Africa and Latin America can go hang! Brazil and India are rapidly becoming world superpowers - what kind of strategy is that? What might be the implications of 20 million refugees from Bangladesh alone?

Even if only 10% of climate scientists were expressing alarm about AGW we ought to be seriously concerned and taking immediate steps to reduce carbon emissions in case that 10% were right. One thing's for certain, if a warming trend has been established there will be no quick fix.

A 'balanced opinion' would then report that 1 in 10 scientists believed in man-made global warming - but those odds would be more than compensated for by the extreme consequences of their being right. If I play Russian Roulette there's only a one in six chance of blowing my head off . . . but "on balance", I'd rather not play Russian roulette, thanks.

But in fact more than 9 out of 10 are warning of extremely severe consequences of inaction.

There's nothing clever or 'balanced' about playing Russian Roulette with all but one of the revolver's chambers loaded - and pointing the gun at your baby granddaughter, not your own head. And there is nothing balanced or clever about printing the irresponsible article you have done today.

Rowan Williams podcast

2009-12-21T21:58:00.002Z

Masterful interview : Simon Mayo with Archbishop Rowan Williams covering a range of thorny issues. Williams speaks so clearly and concisely, and without hesitation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/mayo#playepisode4

Copenhagen the new Bethlehem

2009-12-18T20:26:00.003Z

Any readers who intend to be at any of my Christmas services may prefer not to read the sneak preview of my address, which attempts to relate what has just happened at Copenhagen to the Christmas story. For those that do, however, it may be found on the 'Articles and Sermons' page at http://www.urctemplecowley.org.uk/

There are two addresses : the first suggests that Humanity is experiencing a very real Advent season as it enters the 'end game' of its existence on earth. The second argues for hope in the face of the apparent failure of the talks, for the longed-for Messianic leadership may yet prove to have been born in that outsized warehouse.

2009-12-04T23:15:00.003Z

Hot Air time for climate change deniers

2009-12-04T10:36:00.002Z

Last week George Monbiot warned of the consequences of the email hack at UEA and called on the Professor Phil Jones of the department to resign. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov/25/monbiot-climate-leak-crisis-response The emails include things like this : (Phil Jones :)"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

This was all the excuse the Saudi Arabian delegates to Copenhagen needed to say they intended to slow down action on climate change until the science was more certain, and it was all the excuse BBC's 'Today' programme needed to put the tedious Philip Stott on again. Jonathan Porritt made a pretty poor show of challenging Stott's assertion that the whole Man-made climate change thesis is a small and vulnerable point of convergence on which a vast pyramid of assembled data rests. It's rubbish, of course - a completely false and misleading analogy, but the leaked emails certainly make it look as if this is what's going on.

It seems to me that if, in the space of 150 years, the human race releases into the thin skin of gas that envelopes our planet (look up some images and see how thin it really is) solar energy locked up in the form of carbon that took 100 million years or so to lay down, the onus is on those scientists who say that this should have no effect to prove it.

OFSTED on Faith Schools

2009-12-04T10:26:00.003Z

Those who support so-called 'faith schools' (i.e. schools run by religious groups - not 'faiths') are celebrating a recent OFSTED report that concludes that they do not undermine 'community cohesion'.

What none of the reports I've read (including the BBC) note is that OFSTED was not reviewing state 'faith schools' but independent religious foundation schools. It is true that by and large they found that these independent schools were not socially divisive in their teaching. But they're socially divisive in that only those can afford to pay can send their children there - the report notes that pupils sometimes have to withdraw because their parents can't afford to keep them there, and that when they do they don't feel nearly so included. The report also notes that their pupils are generally not representative of the local community in which the school is set.

So middle-class kids from out of town get a balanced education. Good.

Looking into the eyes of Pilate

2009-11-23T11:46:00.003Z

address to Wessex Synod, 21 Nov 09 responding to the following paragraph in the Synod Executive report :

On behalf of the Ministries Committee of the General Assembly, the Synod is required to verify that all stipendiary ministers and Church Related Community Workers are legally entitled to work in the United Kingdom. It is hoped that as far as possible this process of verification can be completed at the meeting of Synod, to which all ministers have been asked to bring their passports or other documents.

I did not think it right that this paragraph of the Synod Executive report should pass without note. This is a first for the United Reformed Church - to witness the demeaning spectacle of ministers queueing to present their passports for photocopying by Synod staff. We have not been here before. I wanted to draw attention to it, because the majority of members of Synod may not even be aware that this has been happening over lunch.

What this represents is one more step in the creeping criminalisation of the inhabitants of this island.

In the strange world of immigration law, you are guilty until you can prove your innocence. Not so very long ago it was only foreign-looking people or newly-arrived people that were presumed to be aliens until they could show papers to prove they were here legally. More recently, aliens who dared to work here without a permit have been redefined as criminals. Now, it seems, we are all criminals - we are all presumed guilty of working here illegally - until we can prove otherwise.

And now the screw has been given one more turn : if we ministers can't or won't prove our entitlement to be working here, our General Secretary faces criminal prosecution. Further still - the Home Office will punish our church by denying work permits to any overseas minister whom we might like to call, and by expelling those that we have here now.

Without going into the detail of what is going on here, what this exercise represents is (to use a Biblical image) the smearing of blood on the 'doorpost' of our Church's 'household' to ward off the avenging angel - in this case, the avenging angel of the State, not a liberating God.

Friends, this is not a benign angel. Only last Monday I sat through a court hearing in which one of my church adherents was appealing against removal from this country. I witnessed the demeaning spectacle of a Home Office lawyer trying to separate a little boy from his father on a legal technicality that took no account of the actual circumstances of the people involved. He even suggested that it was adequate for an 8-year old to maintain contact with his father by email. How far is this from the gracious God, whom we celebrated at the beginning of our meeting as knowing and caring for every hair on our head? How ironic that the lectionary readings for this Sunday offer us Daniel's night vision of the arrogant powers getting their comeuppance in the divine courtroom, and Jesus standing before Pilate in all his vulnerability. Believe me, we are not dealing with benign forces here; we are looking into the eyes of Pilate.

And, like Pilate, this avenging angel is not very discriminating. The same barrister who was defending this appeal (who is a member of my church) told me last night that in the last two years she has had to fight on two occasions to get people released from detention centres prior to their deportation - one had been detained for two months, the other for three - both of whom had full British passports. So even a British passport may be inadequate protection!

Thank you for allowing me to speak, moderator. I did not think that this silent sorry spectacle should pass without some spiritual discernment and perhaps a prayer of lamentation. I very much hope that I am not the only one in this room who shares this deep regret and sense of foreboding. Indeed, I know from a few conversations already that I am not alone. But I wonder whether you would be willing to test the feeling of the meeting on this matter? I have no resolution to bring - there is nothing, after all, to be done about it now, and certainly not without a proper examination of the issues. But it would be valuable, I think, to have an indication of Synod's feeling.

(The moderator asked those who shared the sentiments expressed to indicate. No count was taken, but I myself could see perhaps one or two hands not raised amongst the two hundred or so present).

Calvin Girl

2009-11-18T13:51:00.002Z

Further to previous, if you prefer something a little less Lutheran and a little more Reformed :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-iuB6PPxis&feature=player_embedded

Mirabile Dictu!

2009-11-18T13:39:00.001Z

(Latin for "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!")
from the Faith and Theology blog by Ben Myers . . a little song about Martin Luther, from the lectionary blog Rumors. Sung to the tune of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious":

When I was just ein junger Mann I studied canon law;
While Erfurt was a challenge, it was just to please my Pa.
Then came the storm, the lightning struck, I called upon Saint Anne,
I shaved my head, I took my vows, an Augustinian! Oh...

Chorus:Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation
Speak your mind against them and face excommunication!
Nail your theses to the door, let's start a Reformation!
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation!

When Tetzel came near Wittenberg, St Peter's profits soared,
I wrote a little notice for the All Saints' Bull'tin board:
"You cannot purchase merits, for we're justified by grace!
Here's 95 more reasons, Brother Tetzel, in your face!" Oh...

Chorus

They loved my tracts, adored my wit, all were exempleror;
The Pope, however, hauled me up before the Emperor.
"Are these your books? Do you recant?" King Charles did demand,
"I will not change my Diet, Sir, God help me here I stand!" Oh...

Chorus

Let's raise our steins and Concord Books while gathered in this place,
And spread the word that 'catholic' is spelled with lower case;
The Word remains unfettered when the Spirit gets her chance,
So come on, Katy, drop your lute, and join us in our dance! Oh...

Funeral directors overstep the mark?

2009-10-23T11:04:00.001+01:00

I’ve had a bit of a narrow escape : I’m doing a funeral today and went to see the family three days ago. As I was leaving the house, something they said suggested that they had requested that “the curtain should not be closed”. I checked, and it was true. The funeral director had not passed on this important bit of information, and they had not specifically asked me. It sort of slipped out by accident. Partly for reasons I give below, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. So we could have had a situation where they suddenly found themselves, at the most sensitive point of the service, facing a closing curtain they didn’t expect. I was not happy, and have raised it with the funeral director concerned. It has made me think a little bit harder about what’s going on here and thought I ought to share it.

I’d be interested to know whether you agree with me, and if so, whether any collective response is appropriate.

I suggested to the funeral director that rather than putting the idea of leaving out the Committal into people’s heads they should leave it to the family themselves to suggest it - at least, as long as it is a Christian funeral to be conducted by me as a Christian minister. The response was that ‘some families prefer it’. Choice is everything . . .

As far as I am aware, there is no Christian funeral liturgy or service that misses out the Committal : I feel the funeral directors are overstepping their boundary in deciding what the content of a Christian service should be. The funeral director was under the impression that ‘the Committal’ was the name given to ‘the whole service’; I think that ‘the Committal’ is that bit of the service (around which the whole thing revolves psychologically) which starts with the words “Therefore . . we commit his/her body to . . etc.” and is followed by the lowering of the coffin or the closing of the curtain.

To me, the ‘we’ in that sentence is important : this is the Christian community, united in grief and supporting one another, ‘handing over’ a loved one to God - together. Leave the Committal out (as I will have to do this afternoon, I guess) and you’re left with individuals ‘walking out on’ the deceased; although I shall suggest that they each take the time to stand before the coffin, acknowledge the deceased and make their own private act of ‘letting go’ in their hearts before leaving. In other words, it will become an individualistic thing. But still not a committal - the committal is more than a thought process. It’s a physical act.
When I used to conduct West Indian burials in London, the family would all help to fill in the grave then and there. I’m fairly sure that as part of a Hindu funeral a couple of men are deputed to accompany the body through the entire cremation process - no leaving it behind a curtain on the catafalque. Not closing the curtain is equivalent to leaving the coffin on the ground beside the grave.

Take out an act of committal of any sort and, it seems to me, you’re left not with a funeral service but a service of thanksgiving. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s not a funeral. In a funeral we stare death down in the light of faith. The curtain, for me, has particularly strong resonance - the lectionary is in Hebrews at the moment . . . The curtain in the Jerusalem Temple represented the material creation, but what was beyond it remained ‘most holy’ and obscure. The curtain represented the limit to our mortal vision, but also carried the promise of something more wonderful. It is very appropriate to be left staring at a curtain.
For myself I have said to the funeral director concerned that if they know they are going to ask me to conduct the funeral

> that they do not suggest to the family that they leave out the Committal, or offer it as a ‘choice’. It is my job, not the funeral director’s, to discuss with the family the content of a Christian funeral, and though I’m happy to accommodate their wishes, I would rather they made an informed decision.

> that if the family, on their own initiative, request it, then to be absolutely sure that this information is conveyed to me before I meet them so I can discuss it.

> that I would not feel it appropriate to suggest it to them myself because in my view Christian funerals include Committals (and I’ve been asked presumably to conduct a Christian funeral). Therefore if the funeral director does not pass on such a request and the family don’t mention it to me so that (in ignorance) I close the curtain and people are upset, I shall explain that the responsibility to communicate this rested with them and the funeral director because it is not normal Christian practice.

In all this, it is not my intention to be awkward, and if, after thinking it through with me, the family genuinely want to leave out the Committal then I have my ‘plan B’ as described above.

What I am uneasy about is funeral directors deciding what is and what isn’t a Christian funeral and then either presenting me with a fait accompli, or (worse) creating a situation where I unwittingly cause pastoral hurt.

It’s bad enough that they sell printed orders to people and are pressing me for the order of service before I’ve even had a chance to meet the family. It seems they want it both ways :

> they assume that the order of service is predetermined such that I can tell them what it is before consulting the family. (As a URC minister I can be a lot more flexible than that). But . .

> feel that they can offer the family (but not me) choice over whether to include an essential element of a Christian funeral.
What do you think?

the Age of Stupid

2009-10-01T08:12:00.003+01:00

Went with our Bible Study group last night to see 'Age of Stupid' last night at a village hall in Kidlington, north of Oxford. (See http://www.ageofstupid.net/) In a sense, there was little in the film that we didn't already know, but there were some memorable images : the old Alpine mountain guide taking a party of people down 150m of ladders on to a glacier that, in his youth, he used to step on to. The look of devastation on the face of the guy seeking planning application for a wind farm on an old bomber airfield, voted down 10 to 1 by councillors in the wake of local protest. The look of smug satisfaction on the faces of the protest organisers and - a truly memorable moment - the expression on the face of the lead campaigner when asked whether she was concerned about global warming. It was a fantastic combination of initial incomprehension, followed by a sort of hysterical desire to please the questioner with the answer he wanted (hysterical, because she realised that her actions betrayed the exact opposite). No actor could reproduce it.

The most telling observation, for me, was the reflection by Mark Lynas that whilst the human species seems well-wired to respond powerfully and imaginatively to immediate crises like attack or earthquake, it seems that we just don't have the mental collective capacity to respond to crises that have a thirty-year time lag. I have a nasty feeling that this is true. Maybe it's that mysterious thing that Paul called 'sin' : "the good thing I want to do I find I can't".

What surprised me most last night was the turn-out. A good three hundred people were there (including the local MP) : tickets had sold out days before.

Dec 5th is a mass demonstration in London (http://www.the-wave.org.uk/). See you there.

Faith Schools article in Reform

2009-09-28T22:49:00.002+01:00

Text of my article published in October's 'Reform' magazine :

'Faith Schools' : can consumer choice deliver 'community cohesion'?

Politicians think parental choice in education is a vote-winner. They like private/public partnerships so they're quite happy for mosques to run schools on their behalf. But they also want community cohesion.

'Faith schools' can help community cohesion across nationality and race — in our local Roman Catholic congregation, 54 languages are spoken. BUT : this is at the cost of creating division between 'faith communities' — and also within them. 'Faith school' is a misleading term. I know of a URC that lost families to its neighbouring Anglican church because the local church school required parents and children to attend the parish church.

A 'faith school' generally means a school run by a particular religious organisation, not a faith, and not all churches and mosques are ecumenical in outlook. Many haven't any sense of accountability even to other churches of their own faith.

What's important is what children — our future citizens — need in order to play an educated part in our democracy.

Sure, parental choice is an important issue. It is entirely reasonable for me, as a Christian taxpayer, to ask that at the very least the state school they attend doesn't undermine or marginalise Christian faith. The same would apply if I were Muslim. Broaden that faith, deepen it, maybe — but sadly the (otherwise excellent) state school my children went to didn't really 'do God' at all. Moral thinking — yes, it was done well, but divorced from any religious context. No RE was offered at GCSE or A-level, no assemblies (it's changed since they left).

Religious Education is supposedly a national curriculum requirement, but delivery is patchy and not the responsibility of central government. It is largely taught by non-specialists working from textbooks, and is no longer inspected by OFSTED. I have sat in on a few RE lessons that have made my hair stand on end. Our local authority's RE Advisor post — she is the only external support our 'non-faith schools' have — is under threat. Government (both national and local) is dodging its real challenge and responsibility in the name of 'parental choice'. Which parents? What choice?

We live in a world in which religious tensions — both between and withinreligions — are increasingly important, but it's also one in which religious motivation will inspire and pioneer creative solutions to global problems. Children with no experience of a religious tradition need a lot more than a few facts about festivals and the odd moral story from different faiths. They need to 'get inside' the conceptual language of faith, see how faith tradition and spirituality shapes all of life, by encountering a religious peer group. How will they do that if religious people stick to their own schools?

Children also need to see the enormous breadth even within one faith tradition, and see how conflicts arise and are resolved within them. That is far better done by a school that encourages maximum involvement by a wide range of religious people but is free of control by any one religious organisation. Children need to discover that a religion isn't a set of propositions so much as a living world language in which people with widely different approaches argue over the deep issues of human life. Simplistic suggestions, common in RE textbooks, that "all Christians believe X, all Muslims believe Y" are profoundly unhelpful. In fact there is often greater mutual understanding between people across the faith 'divide' than between various groups within a world faith.

No government could offer every parent a free choice of school for their children — it's simply not 'do-able'. What could be delivered is living religious formation relevant to every child's background in every school, alongside children of other backgrounds. This could be done with accountability. That's the real choice parents need — to be able to shape and contribute to what their school offers. I see no reason why all secondary schools should not encourage students from Christian homes to delve deeply into their inherited faith tradition by offering appropriate courses and maybe appropriate after-school clubs. A wide variety of local religious groups would be pleased to help deliver this. Why should their Muslim fellow-students not be encouraged to delve into shari'a law for GCSE, or learn about Muslim finance in economics? We might even end up with students debating religious issues with more real knowledge about the deep implications of faith than their parents. The alternative is for parents to be faced either with 'non-faith' schools which discourage their children from exploring faith for themselves, or schools run by an organisation from a different faith or different denomination from their own. And they probably won't have a choice which.

Denominational schools, however good they are, work against the very grain of 'comprehensiveness' in our dangerous world. They introduce separation and narrowness where real encounter and breadth is needed; and they stand to create 'non-faith' schools by default — schools which drive wedges between religious families and their children at a crucial stage of development.

The Reformed tradition has for 350 years believed in separating the power of religious institutions from the State, but that is exactly what church and mosque schools represent : giving religious organisations power over state education. I don't understand why the URC was not amongst the first signatories to the Accord Coalition, which calls for broad-based, balanced education for all.

Conservative Anglican website promotes Civil Partnerships

2009-07-15T09:19:00.002+01:00

Had to laugh : conservative 'Anglican Mainstream' website http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/?p=12825, which is carrying a critique of this year's Greenbelt Festival for having gay and lesbian speakers, also carries advertising for "Civil Partnership Photos . . Natural, unobtrusive, reportage photography for civil partnerships. See www.kelvinbrown.co.uk"

Either 'google ads' pick what ads to include on a random basis, or someone at Google has a sense of humour.

Lisa Nolland, who is very concerned about 'orthodox' Christians being 'hounded out' of their local churches for, er, not being gay?, clearly ought to get along to Greenbelt and join the debate. I think she'd find she wouldn't be hounded out. But then that might upset her sense of righteous paranoia.

RE : review or abolish?

2009-07-03T19:34:00.002+01:00

I've just received an invitation from the Accord Coalition to support a petition for a complete review of Religious Education. This is the invitation :

"Accord is supporting a campaign to make religious education objective and balanced for which we need your help. We think that RE should teach about a wide range of different beliefs (religious and non-religious), not tell children what they ought to believe. Although all schools are legally required to teach RE, at the moment there is no statutory guidance on what they must teach. While community and voluntary controlled schools at least follow a syllabus that is agreed locally, voluntary aided religious schools are free to teach the lessons in any way they see fit.

The government has recently conducted a review of religious education but we believe that it has failed to address the partiality and lack of balance of RE in many schools. Because the current inadequacies in the way that RE is taught are a result of primary legislation, we believe that the laws governing RE should be reviewed."

My response :

I'm having a bit of a problem with the idea of this petition. I am a supporter of Accord, but not because I want a 'balance' of 'beliefs' to be taught in all schools. I certainly wouldn't want the State defining what it considered a 'balance' of 'beliefs'! I'm a Christian supporter of Accord who objects fundamentally to the idea of a state school being run by a local religious institution, but I'm afraid that although I can see much to respect in other faith traditions, I believe Christian thinking and praxis holds the key to them all. The idea of a 'balance of beliefs' just doesn't work. It actually means reaching for the 'lowest common denominator' and is yet another way of marginalising faith (not 'belief', for faith is not just propositional and has to be lived to make sense).

That said, I believe all students should have the opportunity to dig deep into their own inherited faith in every state school - or, if they wish, dig deep into another faith tradition. Many people have little idea what belonging to a 'worldwide faith community' involves. I'm not even sure RE should be taught at all, as such.

So maybe I think RE needs reviewing, and maybe I think it needs abolishing completely and replacing with serious courses in New Testament theology, shari'a law, the Rig Veda, Christian liturgy or whatever. Trouble is, there'd be no teacher qualified to teach such things.

That the universe exists at all . . .

2009-06-23T14:59:00.002+01:00

A recent post by me on Stephen Law's blog :

A debate on whether the universe points to God is pretty much guaranteed to be a waste of time. Philosophical 'proofs' for the existence of God were never intended to be 'proofs', only to prove that God isn't necessarily an irrational hypothesis. The 'proof from design' was the weakest of the lot, and discredited within decades of Paley's death.

The fundamental thing that theology addresses is not how the universe came to exist, how it works etc. It puzzles over the fact that it exists at all. For some people this is a pointless question - it just does, and that's all that needs to be said. Bertrand Russell asserted this in a famous debate in the 50s, I seem to recall. That the universe exists at all is not a question science is interested in - the point is to understand what we've got. Evolutionary theory, cosmological theory are fascinating and can add to a sense of wonder at the universe's ordered complexity, but ultimately they are irrelevant to the deeper wonder that there is anything at all.

Some of us think that the question is not pointless. I would go so far as to say that wonder and reflection that anything exists at all is probably the most fundamental human experience, and we would do well to construct all our thinking from that starting point. That is because the existence of this universe is a 'miracle' (by definition : it necessarily comes 'before' the physical laws of nature, which are intrinsic to the universe). If this universe (with its laws) is possible 'ex nihilo' what else is possible? The fact that this universe is rationally understandable by science makes it more miraculous rather than less. This is not to argue that 'God exists' - a god that existed would be by definition a created thing. When theologians talk about 'mystery' they're not talking about 'the God of the gaps' as a way of avoiding good scientific enquiry, they're talking about something that science simply cannot address because it is necessarily outside the physical laws of science.

Theology is not an argument for the existence of deities - there are plenty of 'deities' around (money, sex/Aphrodite, power/Ares, Dionysus etc) and there's nothing remarkable about that - theology is an attempt to respond to the fact that there is anything (including 'gods') at all. Some people don't see any point in doing that. Fine, up to a point. The danger in that is that it limits truth to measurable existence, and since the physical universe is morally neutral that ultimately anchors all truth and morality in human mind (Kant - Stephen's baseline). But we are beginning to realise that our anthropocentric (human-centred) models are not serving us well. Theology is starting to make a serious comeback in philosophy, political science and several of the Humanities. It is - always has been - 'queen of the sciences', but (as Mr Spock might say) "not science as we know it, Captain."

12 Reasons for joining the Greens

2009-06-04T17:09:00.001+01:00

I've expanded my reasons for the decision to join the Green Party in a short paper "12 Reasons why this Christian is joining the Green Party" at :

http://www.avlx67.dsl.pipex.com/page11.html

Time for Change : voting Green

2009-06-03T10:17:00.004+01:00

I started out a socialist. I had five years as a mining engineer in the National Coal Board; it may not have been the most efficient mining industry in the world but it had an excellent safety record considering it's the most dangerous sort of mining operation in the world. I was proud to work for it. Then came Thatcher. The mantra at Rolls Royce (where I was chaplain) was "Remember, we're not primarily here to make gas turbines - we're here to make money." Well, we've all seen where that leads. We've reached the end of that road. New Labour ditched any socialist vision (apart from the NHS) and I'm not hearing any real vision from any of the other main parties. There's no vision left in the bank, just top-down managerialism.

We all know what the real crisis is, but although the 'main' parties are happy to bolt on a bit of greenery to their core ethos, that's all it is - bolted on, not grafted in, and it will soon wither. I've been reading around Green politics since the mid-80s. The Green Party is the only one that comes near to taking humanity's relationship with the environment as the starting point for its political thinking, the platform on which all subsequent policy is built. There was a time when the only thing Green candidates had to offer was that starting platform; they seemed to have no real policy on poverty, or redistribution of wealth, or unemployment, or health care. That has now changed. Here in Oxford, people like the late-lamented Mike Woodin and current MEP Caroline Lucas have helped to create a party worthy of government.

I've voted Green in Euro and local elections for some time now, but the time has now come to vote according to conscience (not just strategically) in the next General Election, which may be sooner than we think.

And if some form of proportional representation is to come - and again, I think its time has come - then in order for people to have a relationship with their candidates (one of the problems with PR) then they need to join the political parties. So I shall be joining the Green Party this week.

Euro Election : the Christian Party

2009-06-02T17:35:00.003+01:00

Recently attended a hustings meeting for the Euro Election candidates hosted by St Michael in the Northgate, Oxford. I was bemused by the presence of 'The Christian Party'. It's fairly obvious, I'd have thought, that Christians have a very wide range of political opinions - far too wide to corral into a single functional manifesto. The British National Party seem fairly sure that Jesus would vote for them . . .

Should I take it that they are unaware of this, and think Christianity is only the limited Christianity they know? Their candidate didn't seem to see this as a problem, and focussed not on policies but on values. But I'd be hard pressed to distinguish between the values he articulated and the values articulated by several other candidates - although to be fair to him, he articulated them much better. The unique 'selling point' must, then, be something to do with religion.

So what's their policy on faith schools? Turkey's accession to the EU? Community cohesion in a society comprising many religious groups?

I'm left confused. I can see a point in having a cross-party Christian caucus in the Parliament where Christians can argue it out using Christian language and concepts; but not a Christian Party.

See what you make of it : http://www.votechristian.info/

Consumption trumps production in carbon emissions

2009-05-28T12:28:00.004+01:00

Interesting point made recently on George Monbiot's pages : If China is producing loads of manufactured goods for export to the UK - stuff that formerly we produced here - who should be deemed responsible for the resultant carbon emissions?

It's our consumption rather than (e.g.) China's production that's the generator, isn't it?

See http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/may/27/monbiot-stern-east-west-deadlock-co2

Psalm 82

2009-05-22T22:16:00.002+01:00

When all the gods have come together
the Lord God judges them and says :
'How long will you keep judging unfairly
and favouring evil people?
Be fair to the poor and to orphans.
Defend the helpless and everyone in need.
Rescue the weak and homeless
from the powerful hands of heartless people.

None of you know or understand a thing.
You live in darkness,
while the foundations of the earth tremble.

I, the Most High God, say that all of you are gods
and also my own children.
But you will die, just like everyone else,
including powerful rulers."

Do something, God! Judge the nations of the earth;
they belong to you.

MPs Allowances

2009-05-22T10:08:00.002+01:00

A friend has sent me a 'joke' for me to 'enjoy'. It portrays British MPs as ungrateful self-serving scroungers and ends with the moral : "And that, my friends, illustrates the fundamental difference between the citizens of our country and the Members of Parliament. Vote very carefully next year."

I have been moved to respond :

There are a large number of MPs who have not drawn on their legal entitlement (let alone been dishonest), whose careers now stand to be wrecked by those who have, thanks to journalists whose salaries often far exceed theirs and a stupid system of allowances that developed as a way of avoiding having to publicly increase MPs salaries (which are amongst the lowest in western Europe).

It is the allowance system itself that was morally dishonest, albeit legal and supported across the house. The disgrace is that Parliament resorted to that stupidity as a means of trying to avoid public accountability, and part of the difficulty was that Parliament itself was setting its own people's salaries.

It would have been far better - way back - to have had a proper, open, public discussion about how MPs actually ought to be remunerated. There would have been a lot of shouting about how a £67k salary was outrageous - but then most people have little idea what e.g. secondary school head teachers or partners of law firms get paid. And I have no idea myself as to whether MPs are expected to pay staff and office expenses out of that. In the end it would have settled down, probably on a salary level considerably higher.

To 'go behind the public's back' with the allowances system was insulting to the public's intelligence and good sense. I'm not sure who was really responsible for that decision but I'm sure it wasn't the run-of-the-mill MPs, who simply inherited the system. The Speaker was caught having to defend the indefensible on behalf of his colleagues.

Some have milked the allowance to the limit, presuming that they were safe to do so without it becoming public. A couple (out of 640) have gone beyond the limit into potentially illegal territory.

Most MPs — and I've known a good few — are model citizens, though like most of us they can get out of touch with reality. Especially those who come from very wealthy backgrounds - to hear some of them talk you'd think they still inhabit the 18th century. Most are no different from anyone else. When many citizens of this country abuse their allowances (not expenses) e.g. by treating sick leave entitlement as 'holiday entitlement' or making sure they're not underspent on their annual budgets it doesn't threaten the jobs of their colleagues : I have a lot of sympathy for those in marginal seats that can see their careers disappearing as voters, whipped up to treat them like scapegoats, and not 'thinking carefully' as the joke suggests, vote instead for half-baked or dangerous alternatives like the BNP or UKIP.

Feel free to circulate my response to your circulation list! As you see, I get twitchy when I smell self-righteousness and scapegoating. There is an outrage here, but we're in danger of picking the wrong target. Where did the secretive, dishonest and insulting allowances system originate? Whose idea was it? How long has it been in operation in its present form? Are its originators keeping their heads down, or are they long since retired?

European Elections

2009-05-14T10:21:00.007+01:00

On Monday May 11, Radio 4's 'Today' programme ran an item on the forthcoming European elections. The jist of it was "people aren't interested in the election and are ambivalent about being in the EU in the first place". It wasn't terribly difficult to produce evidence of this : a reporter had gone out on the streets somewhere in the Wirral and asked people what they thought of the EU. The only person who offered anything like a fact was a man who said it cost us too much : "40 million pounds a day". This was a quote from a UK Independence Party billboard, if I'm not mistaken - except I think the actual billboard says euros, not pounds. UKIP runs on a 'Britain out of Europe' ticket, although looking at the actual speeches and tabled questions from the UKIP MEPs for our constituency they seem to act more as a 'loyal opposition', querying budgets &c.

What would have been far more interesting would have been if they'd asked people what they actually knew about the actual work of the EU. My guess is (based partly on my own lack of knowledge despite having been involved to some extent with EU affairs in the past, and having visited the Parliament twice) that most Brits know next to nothing about what it does.

Compared with our own secretive government and the general user-unfriendliness of its websites, the European Parliament's website http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/public/default_en.htm, is a doddle and very informative.

Most of what the EU does, it seems to me, is terribly tedious background work on harmonisation which is absolutely necessary and could only be done by something like the EU. Maybe that's why nobody knows what it does - it's just too boring to report. I'm sure that to some extent it's a gravy train - but, hey, nobody does the gravy train like a British MP!

"Judæo-Christian" tradition

2009-05-08T11:04:00.002+01:00

Last night I attended a forum organised by the Veritas Foundation in which Rabbi Dr Naftali Brawer (Head of Jewish-Muslim Relations for the Chief Rabbi of the U.K.)
Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali (Bishop of Rochester) and Prof Tariq Ramadan (Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford) debated the role of the Abrahamic faiths in the public domain.

Many interesting things were said, which may find their way on to this blog. One thing that caused some sparkiness was the bishop's reference to the "Judæo-Christian tradition". Tariq Ramadan said - quite rightly, in my view - that this is a post-Second World War construction of the Christian world in recognition of its failures to denounce the Nazi holocaust. It rankled him because it excludes Islam, which has not been without influence on 'the tradition', especially in the mediæval period.

150 years ago most Christians wouldn't have known what 'Judæo-Christian tradition' meant : for them, Jesus was a Christian, persecuted by 'the Jews', and the 'Old Testament - read 'correctly' - pointed exclusively to Jesus. Christian scholars only started recognising that maybe Jesus was Jewish in the late 1800s. Even today, I bet most Christians don't know that he never stopped being Jewish.

I think one can overdo the Muslim influence on European culture. Although it's not negligible (especially in Oxford, where the Oxford college is modelled on the mosques/madrassas of the Middle East), it's only recently that Muslims have really become 'insiders' in Europe. But I'm suspicious of the way the phrase 'Judæo-Christian tradition' is now being used. Melanie Phillips is one that (if I recall) uses it a lot. It's becoming a phrase of the 'pro-Israel' (and anti-Muslim) lobby. The bishop, to my surprise, seemed unaware of this and described it as a simple 'fact'. If it originally served its purpose in challenging anti-Jewish thought in Christian thinking, it is now becoming a liability for quite different reasons.

Whistleblowing nurses

2009-04-30T11:37:00.002+01:00

Following the Panorama programme in 2005 (which I didn't see) in which neglect and abuse of vulnerable elderly residents in a nursing home was exposed with the help of nurse Margaret Haywood, she was disciplined by the Nursing & Midwifery Council and struck off.

The Royal College of Nursing has launched an online petition to support their appeal against what they consider to be an unnecessarily harsh 'sentence'.

I do not know all the facts of the case - the RCN presumably aren't publishing these because they are 'sub judice' - but according to Jenni Murray writing in the Guardian this week, the residents and their families (with one exception) had given permission for the filming, and all appropriate routes for raising concerns had already been taken.

Seems to me that when all you have left to bring any quality to your life is human relationships and your dignity, nothing is more important than treating people with dignity, and any such treatment should automatically be right at the top of any institution's priorities.

Alma Mater?

2009-04-30T11:20:00.005+01:00

An excellent short service of welcome for the new Ecumenical Chaplain (Andy Markey) to Oxford Brookes University yesterday included a concise expression of the university's hopes of the Chaplaincy from Mike Ratcliffe, the Director of Academic & Student Affairs. I was struck by his quotation from an 1854 volume of lectures by John Henry Newman on The Idea of a University in which he argues that a university training

aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspirations, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political powers, and refining the intercourse of private life.

I'm not sure I entirely understand all of that, or necessarily agree with it, but it's 'full of meat' to say the least. Although clearly 'of its time' it does present a challenge to contemporary universities which, in Newman's words, are in danger of becoming "a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill" rather than "an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one".

Paul on Redemption

2009-04-27T21:08:00.003+01:00

Brondos's book (see reading list, right) might cause a bit of a stir if left on the shelves at your neighbourhood Evangelical church, but it's a clear, thoroughgoing attempt to read Paul and the synoptic gospels without imposing later doctrines on the text. To whet the appetite, here's a paragraph from the introduction :

For Paul, Jesus' death did not save anyone or reconcile anyone to God; it did not have "redemptive effects." According to his letters, while Paul regarded Jesus' death as sacrificial, he did not teach that it expiated sins, propitiated God, or exhausted God's wrath at sin, or that human sin was judged, taken away or atoned for on the cross. Nor did Paul maintain that Jesus' death liberated humanity from sin, death, the devil, or the power of evil. Paul did not regard Jesus as as corporate or representative figure who summed up or included others, so that what was true of him was thereby true of them as well. Nor did he believe that Jesus had died as humanity's substitute or representative, or in order to make it possible for God to forgive sins while remaining righteous. Jesus' death, for Paul, was not the basis upon which people were justified or their sins forgiven; neither was it some kind of cosmic event that put an end to the world as it was and ushered in a new age. Our sinful humanity was not destroyed, put to death, renewed or transformed when Jesus was crucified. In Paul's thought, Jesus did not die for the purpose of setting an example for others to follow; revealing some truth about God, humanity or the world; enabling people to participate in his death and resurrection; or providing them with a means of transfer from this age into the new one. Believers are not saved by trusting in the efficacy of Christ's death for their salvation. All of these ideas are foreign to Paul's thought, and they lead to a distorted image of the apostle.

You might wonder whether there is anything left once that is all stripped away, but . . well, you'd have to read to find out!

Should the taxpayer fund hospital chaplains?

2009-04-08T14:52:00.003+01:00

Ekklesia reports on the National Secular Society's recent call for hospital chaplains to be funded by churches, not the taxpayer. See http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/9181/

They have an interesting point. The Scottish Roman Catholic spokesman seems to suggest that their church wouldn't want their priests to be state employees - (because it might compromise them somehow?) Free Churches, especially 'gathered churches' such as those of my tradition, have tended to stress the importance of practical commitment to, and engagement with, a church congregation as a mark of a Christian, as opposed to a general faith stance that's independent of church membership. "You can't be a Christian in isolation", it is sometimes said. Certainly I would expect to provide 'chaplaincy support' to my own members.

So should baptised non-church attenders who claim Christian faith receive an equivalent support at the taxpayers' expense? Hmm. That's not to say that hospital chaplains don't do an excellent job.

Stephen Law : The War for Children's Minds

2009-04-07T10:23:00.003+01:00

Last Friday, I attended a debate on "Is Britain becoming too secular?" organised by the Oxford Literary Festival, and was impressed by Stephen Law from Heythrop College, London. Bought his book (see right), dipped into it, and found I wanted to keep going to the end.

It's a clear, concise and readable defence of 'liberalism', and he is at pains to argue that liberalism (whose clearest exponent, he argues, is Kant) is the only true challenge to relativism - despite the fact that liberalism is frequently accused of being relativist. He challenges the importance other commonly assumed 'opposites', such as theism versus atheism, (he cites research demonstrating that what distinguished those Germans who opposed Hitler, harboured Jews etc. was not their religiosity but their liberalism - the fact that they thought for themselves) and draws a clear distinction between free thinking and freedom of action. (He strongly challenges the idea that liberals are laissez-faire in the political realm). The opposite of liberalism is authoritarianism, and he works through many arguments that authoritarians (religious or otherwise) use to suggest that liberalism inevitably leads to moral and political chaos, demonstrating that the opposite is true.

He is, in keeping with his message, respectful of religion and religious thought (but not of authoritarian religion of course) despite, probably, being atheist himself. However, like so many people he is inclined to see a religion as basically a 'set of philosophical propositions', when (in my view) a religion is more like a language - you can argue pretty much anything with that language if you really want, but before you can use it properly you do actually have to know the texts and the stories - all of them. This has implications for religious formation of children. He's also (at one point) rather too inclined to assume that religion is inherently tribal. Of course, it often is, but there is also evidence that those most secure and confident within their own religious framework are not thereby likely to see people of other religious traditions as 'other'.

It's an excellent book, however, and particularly instructive for my own United Reformed Church I would have thought. It suggests that the URC is inherently liberal - within our structure Evangelicals also have to be Liberal (responsible for their own Evangelicalism, and not autocratic).

2009-03-31T14:15:00.003+01:00

Rowan Williams speakly clearly and lucidly on Radio 4's 'Today' programme

http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2359

The media is wont to suggest that Williams-speak is impenetrable and obscure; but that's usually when the audience he's been invited to address has a better command of the English language than jobbing journalists. He's not one for 'dumbing down' just because the press is there, thank God. But this short interview demonstrates his ability to match his language to his audience.

All aboard the God bus

2009-03-30T12:36:00.005+01:00

I have an idea that the reason why many people don't go to church services is because they believe that people are responsible for developing their own 'spirituality' and don't want to commit to what they presume is a 'fixed package'.

On Sunday we tried a 'Café Church' format in which, rather than (as it were) everybody boarding a tour bus for a fixed tour with running commentary all the way, in this case the 'sights' (that is, 'stations' for prayer, for reflection, for socialising, for singing etc.) were spread out around the building and people were given a printed guide map. So they were free to come and go as they pleased, and spend as much time at as many of the 'stations' as they wanted to. In other words : take responsibility for their own spirituality and worship.

The members, with a couple of exceptions, didn't seem able to handle it, and most of them didn't even come! Sounds like the 'fixed tour' is what they're comfortable with, and they're not even willing to try anything else.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw. Any suggestions?

All things bright & beautiful - again

2009-03-18T15:27:00.005Z

One of the consequences of the 'unchurching' of society reveals itself every time I do a funeral or wedding. The last forty years have produced an explosion in hymn-writing as the church has dealt with enormous changes in society and culture. Obviously it takes time for the 'classics' to emerge and the hymns that don't grab the imagination of the people to disappear, but there are plenty of modern 'classic' hymns that will survive generations. The song repertoire of non-churchgoers sometimes seems frozen in the Victorian period it seems. Contemporary culture - at least, in England - simply doesn't produce songs for people to sing together to mark a death or celebrate a wedding. At recent weddings, the couple has dispensed with singing altogether, and Celine Dion gets played - again.

People say they want 'a hymn that everyone knows', but there is no longer any such thing. I don't have an overview of the repertoire in church junior schools, but the secular school I visit regularly (where the singing is excellent) has its own unique - and very good - repertoire, which doesn't include any 'hymns that everyone knows'. And I imagine that due to the pressures successive governments have put on the school curriculum, collective singing has disappeared from senior schools altogether.

It seems terribly sad to me (albeit rather inevitable given the huge changes in society), that we've lost the music that could bring several generations together singing at crucial rites of passage. But it's also exasperating : so many people judge Christianity and call it 'out of date' when all they really know about it is one or two Victorian hymns - in many cases, the naffest ones. And yet there's so much really good stuff being written.

Wasn't it Joni Mitchell who sang ". . you don't know what you've lost till it's gone"?

Did Jesus have a big nose?

2009-03-16T10:21:00.001Z

I'm recently appointed as a URC rep on Oxfordshire's SACRE (Standing Advisory Committee on Religious Education). My first meeting was a waste of time : neither the chair nor County RE Advisor were there, and the meeting ended an hour early having achieved little. Plus I got a parking ticket! At last week's meeting we learned that there are moves afoot to scale back the County RE Advisor's post.

State-funded Denominational church schools generally have their diocesan education advisers to turn to. (The URC has never run state schools, believing - until recently - that the powers of state and church should be separate, and therefore state schools should not be affiliated to religious institutions). For the unaffiliated schools, the County RE Advisor is it - all they have.

: RE is the only subject the County has a statutory obligation to provide for.

: 53% of RE teaching in England's schools is delivered by teachers with no specialist knowledge of the subject.

: RE teaching is no longer subject to OFSTED inspection. There is no mechanism for finding out what is going on in the classrooms.

: SACRE has no actual power other than offering general advice.

And they're proposing to cut back what little oversight there is?

A couple of years ago I sat in on a number of RE lessons in different schools around Oxford. In one lesson a child wanted to know why Martin Luther King "hated white people" - and the teacher didn't know how to answer. In another Year 9 class we were treated to a 10-minute rambling monologue on what Jesus looked like. Because he was Jewish, he probably had a big nose, apparently. I wanted to crawl under the desk in embarrassment and alarm, and many of the children seemed equally as amazed at what they were hearing. An RE textbook published by Heinemann was circulated approvingly round the SACRE meeting. In it, I learned that the URC has women 'priests'. Given that the constitution of most Reformed Churches (the biggest family of Christian churches in the world, with more adherents than Roman Catholicism) is based on the idea that priesthood should not be vested in individuals for life, but in the collective - i.e. we don't even accept male priests - this is an absolutely basic error.

But RE is only a Cinderella subject in the eyes of the education system. The demand for Philosophy of Religion with Ethics at AS level is rocketing. It's important because it teaches, not what to think, but how to think. As an example of what we're dealing with : in an AS group, after a careful exploration of Descartes' philosophy, one student dismissed it by saying "At the end of the day, it was only his opinion." The idea that you arrive at opinions only after weighing all other opinions and arguing your case is counter-cultural. Am I the only one who thinks it important?

Letters expressing concern in our denominational magazine and suggesting ways in which we might engage as a church just a little with these issues has produced no response at all.

Jesus Madonna

2009-03-06T14:15:00.003Z

Nice to see that Madonna's got married again : to a hunky guy 28 years her junior, name of Jesus Luz (= 'Jesus Light' . . . or is that 'Jesus Lite'?)

Honestly! It's so obvious : she only wants him for his name.

Frustrated in Babylon

2009-02-27T16:08:00.001Z

Went to see the Babylon exhibition at the British Museum yesterday. Was hoping to get to the lecture From Jerusalem to Babylon : new thoughts on the Babylonian exile, but despite trying to book 2 weeks before it was sold out, and I couldn't get in.

Good exhibition - the cuneiform tablets are exquisite, and it's quite something to see the 'Cyrus Cylinder' : the imperial edict that ended the Judæans exile in 539BCE. But I'm often frustrated at exhibitions like this because they don't give a real sense of the sociology of the place : what was Babylon's population? How many Jews were living there, and under what conditions? How many exiles from other states were also there? How did Babylonian religion really work? Apparently the British Museum has 130,000 cuneiform tablets : they must know a bit more than what we know from the Old Testament. That's why it was frustrating not getting into the lecture.

I'm trying to get hold of a transcript, or a pointer to further reading. If you're interested, watch this space.

Lost in the Moral Maze

2009-02-25T15:42:00.002Z

Last week was the 500th edition of Radio 4's 'The Moral Maze' - a programme which, like 'Thought For The Day', rarely fails to disappoint.

They chose to celebrate by asking the question 'what is the root of morality? Is it ultimately religious?' (well, that's my synopsis of the question they addressed, which was rather more long-winded).

I've posted a synopsis of the whole discussion followed by a critique of it on the Temple Cowley URC website (see 'links', right) together with a sermon based on it.

The discussion was fundamentally confused and inconclusive, partly because (as is usually the case on The Moral Maze) the people don't listen to each other and impose their own prejudices, but mainly because :

: most of the speakers were unable to recognise that the word 'God' refers, almost by definition in the Abrahamic faith traditions, to something that cannot be conceived and held in the human mind. The media bods behind the BBC seem to have this firm conviction that 'God' is some 'entity' that we can imagine in our minds, and of course the atheist participants concur wholeheartedly. For them, God is a human invention or superstition. In fact anything that can be created by the human mind cannot by definition be 'God' and we are condemning ourselves to forever talking at cross purposes.

: most of the speakers didn't seem to be able to distinguish between God and religion. Religion is a human response to the divine. The assumption that this is confined to 'conventional religious institutions' or even conventional religious language introduced a demarcation that made a proper dialogue impossible. Religion includes any behaviour that is a response to 'gods' (or 'idols') too. Thus, behaviour based on giving ultimate value to (say) the 'free market', or 'sex', constitutes religious behaviour - in these cases, idolatrous religious behaviour that inevitably demands sacrificial victims.

Sunday night saw Colin Blakemore, here in Oxford, present the seventh in the TV series Christianity : a History which again, true to form, perpetuated these misunderstandings. That was, until he interviewed the Revd David Paterson - an Anglican priest who's proved popular as a guest preacher at Temple Cowley URC. This is as I remember the conversation (which I recorded, so I could check)

Blakemore : So do you think the universe was created by God?
Paterson : No.
Blakemore : Do you believe in the virgin birth?
Paterson : No.
Blakemore : Do you believe Jesus even existed?
Paterson : Yes, I think he probably did.
Blakemore : So what, for you, is God?
Paterson : God is who I fell in love with and wanted to give my life to.
Blakemore : (lost for words).

Great TV moment! (Even if I might not go all the way with David P).

Bus Advert competition

2009-02-12T11:24:00.002Z

See http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2009/02/atheist-bus-signs-caption-contest.html for a bus poster caption contest. My favourites :

THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD. But what would I know? I'm only a bus.

There's probably no driver. Now stop worrying and enjoy the ride.

Mister boojah boojah says: relax - no one is in charge.

You are a figment of God's imagination :How cool is that? Probably.

There's probably no dog. So stop complaining, and enjoy your taco.

THANK GOD FOR ATHEISTS.

Probably? No. There's God. Now stop worrying and enjoy new life.

There is probably no such a thing as a bus.

"The fool has said in his heart, 'there is no bus' . . ."

There is no God. Disagree? Step in front of this bus and prove me wrong.

Why did Jesus cross the road? To get you to the other side.

There's probably no life . . unless you stop worrying . . and enjoy your God.

There's probably no God, but there's definitely an economy. So stop worrying and buy something.

Epiphany : a glimpse of the workings

2009-01-25T15:22:00.003Z

Sarah suggests a Christmas message should be followed by a thought for Epiphany. Fair cop.

I suppose 'Epiphany' implies 'revelation'. This links with a question posed by Margaret Yee here in Oxford in a series of lectures on Austin Farrer : does theology have anything of value to add to the sum of our (scientific) knowledge? I think many of those who say they 'believe in God' are 'deists' at root : God was around in the beginning, set the created universe going like a gigantic mechanism, and then left us to it, having no more to do with it.

With all the celebration of Darwin that we'll get this year we'll hear plenty of that.

'Epiphany' suggests to me that every little new understanding - even small incremental scientific insights wrung out of vast number-crunching exercises and mind-numbingly tedious data collection (such as Darwin had to engage in before he could see an evolutionary pattern) are, as I found myself proclaiming in an Epiphany address :

"a result of "Aha!" moments — "Eureka!" moments, as God couldn't resist the urge to interfere in our world and give the poor scientist a hint. Rip a little hole in our universe to let the scientist get a deeper glimpse of the workings."

Perhaps 'Epiphany' suggests a subtler and more intuitive understanding of the true process by which truth (including scientific truth) is arrived at. But I don't think that means you can expect to bypass the hard work.

A Christmas message

2008-12-24T21:50:00.001Z

At the heart of the most holy, uncreated God, there is an image of humanness.
"Well", a sceptic might say, "there's no surprise there! When human beings imagine their gods, of course they imagine them in human form." But be careful! Christians, Jews and Muslims know perfectly well that any god that we can imagine — that is, create an image of in our minds — is not, cannot be, the most holy, uncreated God.

For a few 1st century Jews to have come to believe that there is real human-ness at the heart of the divine was a shocking thing, and it is one reason why the first church became separated from its Jewish roots. But those first Christians didn't sort of 'work out' that there is humanness at the heart of God. Nor was it wishful thinking. Their encounter with Jesus led them to believe that God had revealed it to them. And although there is much that is myth-like about the Christmas story, they couldn't have made it up unless their experience of 'divine humanity' in Jesus had led them to it.

We live in an age where people aren't much into gods. We don't think about them, don't believe in them. Spirits maybe, but not gods. So we can turn out easy slogans that 'Jesus is God' lazily without realising what an impossible mystery that is. It's because we're not terribly interested in divinity, actually. But we do live in an age when people in the West are becoming increasingly uncertain about what it means to be human — a full human being. Does it mean having lots of money and sex? Does it mean looking good? Does it mean having hundreds of 'friends' on Facebook? Or does it mean needing nobody, being self-sufficient? Does it mean having the right to take your own life when you think you've had enough? What does it mean to be fully human, exactly?

I don't think many of us really know what being fully human involves. Most of our lives are lived in the shallow end of the swimming pool of life. I think very few people really get into the deep end of what being human is about. It's a bit scary there, when you can't touch the bottom. But it's in the deep end of life that human-ness is found to be divine, 'eternal'. And there, deep human-ness takes the form of timeless, selfless love. If it isn't there deep down (even though it may be hidden) we've lost our humanity.

Most of the time these hidden depths of the real fully-human soul are hidden from us. We're wrapped in the swaddling-bands of our compulsions : our urge to succeed, to be loved, to be forgiven, to be recognised, to be strong, to be someone. There's nothing particularly wrong with all that, although it's when that stuff is all there is that human beings become most horrible. The trouble is that all that neediness hides the deep humanity — the Jesus-like, divine humanity — beneath.

That divine humanity deep down doesn't yearn to be loved : it knows it already is. It doesn't need recognition from other people : it knows its name is already listed among the saints of God. It doesn't need to be strong : its power is in its total, utter humility. It doesn't need to be someone : it knows it is Someone's. And therefore our divine, deep humanity is effortlessly selfless and timeless.

Christmas is called the Feast of the Incarnation. Incarnation means God becoming flesh, the divine becoming human. Christian rulers turned incarnation into a doctrine — a theory, a belief test a Christian had to pass. But it isn't a theory, really. It's a task for us — a challenge. The Christmas challenge is to reach past our need to be recognised, to be forgiven, our need to succeed, to be strong, to be self-sufficient — our need to feel the comforting bottom of the pool of shallow life with our toes, and instead to push further out into life where we no longer need those things, because we are relying solely on the love of God to keep us afloat.
That's the Christmas challenge.

But the Christmas assurance is that deep in our humanity there really is a God of selfless and timeless love, born to set his people free.

Christmas banned in Oxford?

2008-11-03T12:59:00.003Z

Lot of fuss in Oxford following the Council's 'politically correct' decision to rename the Christmas Celebration in town as a 'Winter Festival' so as not to cause offence to members of other faiths. Whose spokespeople, interestingly, have been the first to complain!

But I cannot help recalling that in the 1650s Parliament (my 'Puritan' faith-ancestors, I suppose) tried to ban Christmas celebrations on the grounds that the worldly excess they involved was inappropriate. No political correctness there! (even though Cromwell's Parliament extended toleration to Jews and Muslims.)

I think a council officer has suggested it's still a Christmas celebration because they're keeping the Christmas tree - which is a legacy of pre-Christian pagan worship completely unconnected with the Christmas story! There's a £10,000 Santa's grotto in nearby Templars Square Centre - an interesting piece of commercial 'installation art' - which has very little to do with any Christian festival, but is much closer to the heart of the actual festival.

Let's face it : what we're supposedly celebrating in the town centre is not the incarnation; it's . . well, a Winter Festival! A Christmas festival close to the Biblical account might focus more on the dreams of the homeless, the persecuted and the refugee for liberation. And there's plenty of those in Oxford. They're the ones most likely to be excluded from the spend-fest.

Ban Art!

2008-10-23T19:11:00.003+01:00

Gilbert & George have offered the world a simple manifesto as part of a Serpentine Gallery show : 'Ban Religion'.

That's about as sensible as saying 'Ban Art'.

Atheist Spirituality

2008-10-06T17:05:00.001+01:00

'The Book of Atheist Spirituality' by André Comte-Sponville is an intriguing recent read. (It was the closest thing to a theological book in Borders bookshop, which nonetheless had four bookcases of tarot, astrology, occult, self-help meditation etc). Though an atheist, the author values his Catholic background and sees much that is valuable in religion. He recognises the need for 'communion' - that sense of a common bond or shared values that creates community. He recognises that religion creates communion, but argues that communion does not require religious faith. I'm not sure, however, that he manages to escape a general problem with atheism - that there are as many atheisms as there are atheists, and the only thing they really have in common is what they all reject, namely, belief in God ('God' defined in a particular way, that is).

He works with a broad definition of religion first offered by Durkheim, but then (recognising that there are major non-theistic religions) narrows it down to "a belief in one or several deities". Effectively, then, he redefines religion so as to 'ex-communicate' himself.

The strangest thing about the book is that his spirituality is ultimately grounded in a religious experience. In the middle of the book he says "one of the rare things I know for certain is that God has never spoken to me"; but then grounds his 'atheist spirituality' on a series of profound religious experiences that he describes in his final chapter! Nothing in those experiences as he describes them conflict with anything that a Christian would recognise as an experience of God, although by the selective reference to one or two Christian mystics he attempts to suggest it cannot have been that. The experience was one of immanence, not transcendence (so it can't have been God . .); a warm and glowing experience of the absence of God. I was left feeling that God had tried to raise his sights and show him that the god he had come to lose faith in was far too small and mechanical to be the real thing; but his religious intellectual baggage just couldn't let him admit it.

How can the Church do that to people? I hope that in my witness I don't shrink God down to some doctrine so narrow that it forces people like him to define themselves as outside Christian communion.

Accord Coalition launched

2008-09-05T16:34:00.002+01:00

Good to learn of the launch of the Accord Coalition (www.accordcoalition.org.uk) which describes itself as "a new broad-based coalition calling for inclusive schools and an end to special arrangements for state funded religious schools".

At last we have something that demonstrates that opposition to state-funded church- or mosque-schools comes as much from people with religious affiliation as from those without.

My own opposition to religious organisations running state schools is rooted in a number of theological issues :

1) Reformed theology insists on separation of powers of Church and State.

2) Segregationist schools are a denial of an incarnational approach

3) Segregational schools undermine true catholicity / ecumenicity

4) Segregationist schools promote a privatised / sectarian image of religion which is a denial of its true nature.

"Everyone's entitled to their opinion . ."

2008-07-31T18:45:00.002+01:00

Recent internet dialogues have produced the inevitable crop of anti-religionists professing that they would die for my right to believe in what they consider a dangerous and irrational superstition. This has led me to conclude that people who say "everyone's entitled to their opinion" are likely to either

(a) not really care much about anyone else's opinion, because they can't see that mere opinions actually make any difference to anything,

(b) are wanting to avoid the unpleasantness of serious discussion, in case they find their own opinions challenged : it's the 'get-out clause', or

(c) despise other people's opinions, but don't want to sound bigoted or intolerant.

Sometimes, a mixture of all three.

The truth, however, (whether religious or secular) is not handed down to us on a plate. It has to be negotiated the hard way, every inch of the way. Toleration simply means that we don't win arguments by using coercion; it doesn't mean you have to respect the beliefs of someone who has not earned that respect through serious engagement.

the Registrar who won't

2008-07-11T15:00:00.002+01:00

Bit of stuff going around the blogosphere about the Registrar who is asking to be excused conducting Civil Partnerships on grounds that it's against her religion.

Some argue that it isn't against her religion - she's wrong. Others (the anti-religionists) saying 'why should appeals to religious conviction be granted special favours'. Both of these are red herrings, really.

Quakers appeals against conscripted military service were accepted because to be a Quaker is to be a pacifist - but most national religious organisations don't require the signing of a pacifist pledge. The issue is not whether same-sex partnerships are acceptable to Christianity as a religion, but whether opposition to same-sex partnerships is a fundamental aspect of her particular church. Actually, I think that would be hard to prove.

There are presumably many atheists who cannot accept same-sex partnerships, but are there any national secular membership organisations that require members to sign their opposition to them? The question of 'special favours for religion' can only be demonstrated here if there are such organisations, and their members are overruled.

On the conscription issue, the membership of the Quakers was relevant not (I think) because it's a religious society, but because long-term membership of the Quakers was acceptable as evidence that the person claiming exemption wasn't just looking for an excuse to evade their responsibility but was appealing genuinely to conscience. It's the question of evidence that is crucial.

The United Reformed Church enshrines rights of conscience in its constitution. It put that into practice when, in 1981, it merged with the Churches of Christ who had never accepted the practice of baptising infants. Former Churches of Christ ministers were not obliged (after the merger) to baptise infants if it was against their conscience. But if they personally couldn't, they did have to arrange for another minister to do it.

Therefore, provided a court can be convinced that the lady's objection is a genuine conscience issue for her (and actually that might be quite difficult to prove) she should be similiarly granted exemption from her responsibility.

2008-07-07T09:30:00.002+01:00

There's a very revealing comment from 'Carniphage' on my 'little anti-religious martyrs' post. I wonder how typical it is of the anti-religion school. Carniphage clearly believes that the natural human condition is atheism - that religion is something loaded on to a child 'from outside' as it were, whereas left to its own devices it wouldn't be religious. Let's leave aside for the moment the question of the impossibility of any child being born outside a human culture (the only way that could be achieved would be by immediately putting the child in a darkened sound-proof box - but even that, clearly, would be imposing something).

Carniphage is coming from the exact opposite end of the spectrum from me. It seems evident to me that religion and religious behaviour is intrinsic to human nature. Only yesterday, down at the Cowley Carnival, a DJ (dressed as Doctor Death) was dispensing shots of Bourbon whisky to punters who came down the front - by pouring it straight down their throats! (Was this an *intentional* imitation of a Christian eucharist?) The struggle is not between religion and no-religion but between bad religion and good religion. Atheism has its value as a corrective to some forms of bad religion, to be sure, but it even defines itself in relation to religion, and it has no coherence, single focus or common language in itself. Christianity is probably a dynamic balance of at least five 'religious understandings' which are mutually contradictory at many points, but at least it maintains (though it's a struggle) a common theological language, and has a clear focus : Jesus of Nazareth.

Therefore the idea of treating religion as if it were a single thing, imposed upon naturally non-religious subjects is grossly mistaken. If public policy were shaped by people who think like this (and there are plenty of them in the media), the actual effect will be to exaggerate the more fundamentalist forms of religion. Certainly Richard Dawkins is at a loss to know how to deal with Christians like me. All he can do is define me as a 'sexed-up atheist'. The trouble is, to do that he must break one of his own scientific rules : 'don't ignore and twist the data to fit your theory'. If I worship God and follow Christ, and there's behavioural evidence to prove it, don't describe this as a form of atheism! I recognise that I impute religious behaviour to atheists - but that is quite acceptable, as the Cowley Carnival example above demonstrates.

In many senses, the most anti-religious figure in history was Jesus. In Mark 11 he describes how if you have enough 'faith' the entire Temple Mount has no more meaning for you, then goes on to say, effectively, that the Temple is replaced in his new community by the simple (but incredibly challenging) call to 'forgive one another'.

Media disappears up own backside

2008-07-04T09:10:00.004+01:00

Well, well. Five months on, the Lord Chief Justice reiterates and endorses what the Archbishop said.

The BBC Today programme insists on referring to the issue as controversial - more accurately as 'having caused controversy when it was aired by the archbishop'.

So effectively, the narcissistic media reports its *own coverage* as news, not the news item itself, which wasn't particularly controversial at all. Eventually it will disappear up its own backside.

On the other hand, I suppose the incipient religious hatred and bigotry in the media, revealed by their initial response, *was* quite newsworthy. Though somehow I don't suppose they'd see it that way.

Jeremy Paxman by candlelight

2008-05-22T10:09:00.003+01:00

Did anyone else see the Newsnight coverage of the first day's Parliamentary debates on human embryology? Presumably in order to portray the fact that there are deep underlying issues to do with the 'Meaning of Life' (the headline projected on the backdrop) the reporter was filmed sitting under statues of the Virgin Mary in the gloom of an old church behind flickering candles.

Er, what? It was difficult to tell whether the tell-tale Paxman raised eyebrow flickered when they cut back to studio.

As far as I recall, there was no specific reference to the Catholic moral position, or 'playing God' or anything - the incongruity just kind of hung there. What to make of it?

Creating little anti-religious martyrs?

2008-05-16T10:28:00.006+01:00

The British Humanist Association has recently called for the law to allow children of 'sufficient maturity, intelligence and understanding' to be given the right to absent themselves from 'compulsory' acts of worship in schools regardless of their parents wishes :
(see http://www.humanism.org.uk/site/cms/newsarticleview.asp?article=2448

The implication is that people can be made to worship against their will, which is an infringement of their human rights. At first sight this is a ludicrous suggestion. No one can be 'forced' to think or feel (or not think and feel) things — what goes on in the private thoughts of people is inaccessible to outsiders and immutable. The suggestion that sitting passively in a school assembly whilst someone else says a prayer is tantamount to being 'forced to worship' is daft. At the most extreme it is 'forcing' the passive attender to tolerate other people saying prayers — or praying them. (A very good reason, I would have thought, for insisting that they attend, since toleration is in itself a valuable lesson.) Mere attendance at an act of worship implies no personal belief. If I attend (as I have done) gatherings sponsored by the British Humanist Association, should I absent myself if I want to have a prayerful thought? Should I avoid going into a mosque because I am not a Muslim? The BHA, not normally known for intolerance and divisiveness, has lost the plot, hasn't it, and needs to rethink?

On the other hand, I'm reminded that the early Christians were thrown to the lions — as 'atheists' — for refusing to burn a pinch of incense to the Roman Emperor as a god once a year. In all other respects they were model citizens (or so I like to believe) but this was the 'thin end of the wedge'. Other Christians, on the other hand — the so-called 'Gnostics' — took the view that what mattered was not external practice but deep inner knowledge. To the one who 'knows God', the pinch of incense to the emperor was meaningless, and therefore harmless. Needless to say, there was no love lost between the different Christian camps.

It seems to me that the dividing line comes somewhere where inner private thoughts are translated into outward actions — a pinch of incense, genuflection, a spoken prayer or sung hymn or whatever — the failure to perform which brings sanctions from those with power. (That equally includes the opposite situations in which atheist authority oppresses overt religious practice).

But if that is the case, the safest option is to insist on passive attendance in school assembly — attendance that doesn't require active statements of belief or whatever on the part of those present.

To refuse to attend such a gathering would an overt non-religious act. I'm far from convinced that many 'mature, intelligent and understanding' *Christian adults* really have much understanding the full *breadth* of what Christianity is, and most of the things many atheists tell me I believe in are often crude and simplistic cariacatures of what it's about, with a heavy emphasis on philosophical propositions (which are rarely the concern of religious believers anyway). Whenever you read a statement "(all) Christians believe x" you can be fairly sure the writer doesn't know many Christians.

There's an assumption here that the purpose of RE lessons is to help students decide whether henceforth they will have anything to do with the whole world/language that is Christianity, or whether they will boycott any activity with a religious dimension. The idea that a few exam-oriented lessons on all the world faiths, taught by someone who may well not be a practising member of any religious community, can begin to express the holistic breadth that constitutes a 'world faith' is completely laughable! No world faith can be described in a few propositional statements or peeks at the 'exotic' behaviour of religious people, as the BHA are implying here. I find it hard to accept that anyone, let alone under-15s who have had no opportunity, independently of their parents, to really explore religious worlds in any depth — let alone breadth — could be violated by sitting passively in an act of worship.

'Doing God' in school assemblies is, anyway, a risky enterprise for the would-be evangelist. Richard Dawkins learned what he learned about religion that way!

I'm not even convinced that inviting someone to (for instance) say the Lord's prayer out loud is 'making them express faith' — provided it is not coercive and failure to do it brings no sanctions. To recite traditional formulae doesn't imply personal faith, any more than me singing along with Jimi Hendrix makes me a 'Voodoo Chile'. On the other hand, for authority to insist on the 'pinch of incense' or the saying of a prayer on pain of sanctions is to have already passed from the realm of personal faith (or lack of it) and into the political realm. It's at that point that religion has become an instrument of political power, so it's at that point that the language of 'rights' starts making sense.

But which secular school is going to punish a child that keeps quiet when the Lord's Prayer is said? Perhaps the BHA demand is a back door way of undermining faith schools, where presumably the performing of religious ritual in various ways is supposedly part of the ethos. I disagree with state 'faith schools' as strongly as the BHA, albeit for different reasons. But there are much more direct and effective ways of secularising state schooling without trying to create little anti-religious martyrs.

Age a blessing?

2008-04-24T09:57:00.002+01:00

We celebrated one of our church member's 100th birthday this week. Churches sometimes beat themselves up over having such a high average age, but hey : a 100-year old pushes the average up a bit!

I was struck how in Isaiah 65:17ff old age is seen as a sign of blessing, and that when the 'kingdom' fully comes, people who die younger than that will be deemed unlucky. Not that old age isn't a real struggle for many : but that our society is such that people can live to that age is something to give thanks for. What's the average life expectancy in Zimbabwe? Under 40, isn't it?

Recent goings-on

2008-04-21T12:23:00.003+01:00

Recently back from Venice where Karen & I have been celebrating our Silver Wedding. Seen enough frescoes of the "Purity & Truth defeat Grubby Mercantilism (or whatever) in the clouds" variety (together with double-buttocked cherubs) to last a lifetime - yes, I know it's great art, but . . I was left not knowing whether such images were intended as a moral reminder to those inclined to lapse, or an opportunity to portray your wife as a great beauty and pillar of virtue. However, the history book said that the cult of celebrity was greatly discouraged in Venice. Went to some great concerts . . and what an interesting political history Venice has. In the 14th century, they had an elected Doge with greatly restricted personal power but important representative role. (OK, he was only elected by the aristocracy, but it's a start) He wasn't allowed out of Venice much, and that only with an escort. One wonders what would have become of Britain if Charles 1st had been similarly constrained.

We went by overnight train. Magical to walk straight out of the station on to a landing stage on the Grand Canal, even if the splendid building opposite did have an enormous Calvin Klein advert all over it (how could they?)

Went to see recent Mike Leigh film 'Happy Go Lucky' on Saturday. Is it like a rather dull episode of 'East Enders' or is there more to it than that? I find my thoughts continually drifting back to it, so I think there is. The central character, Poppy, is irritatingly flippant and shallow most of the time, yet reveals moments of depth and firm principle. She's both (apparently) self-indulgent and clueless about the impact she's having on people, yet at other times forgiving, compassionate and risk-taking for the sake of others. Both irresponsible and irresponsible. Reviews have suggested it's little more than a 'feel-good' film. I'm not so sure. I felt it was an astute observation on much of contemporary British society. I'm left wondering where she's going to end up - married, with a crushing mortgage like her sister? Or single, disillusioned and in a rut? Or still a joyous free spirit in old age, whatever happens? Go see it, see what you make of it.

Blair does God

2008-04-05T14:30:00.003+01:00

Plenty of cynical comment in the media about the 'Bliar - sorry, Blair Faith Foundation' but Tony's address on Faith & Globalisation needs to be read before reading other people's sniping at it. The text is up at : http://tonyblairoffice.org/2008/04/speech-on-faith-globalisation.html

Seems to me like a concise, helpful statement of where faith fits in the globalised world. It says nothing that people working in the field haven't been saying (and acting on) for decades; but the trouble is that nobody (including Tony) listens to *those* people. (In Oxford, Christian and Muslim leaders have been engaging with one another intensely since 11/9 addressing practical issues of peacemaking.)

Will they listen to Blair, though, or is he 'damaged goods'? First, let's acknowledge that bad people can do good things, and good people can do bad things : there's a smug self-righteousness around that allows people to be lazy. Just because Iraq was a huge political, moral, religious, legal mistake doesn't mean Tony has nothing to say on 'faith and globalisation'.

The problem is that he hasn't acknowledged it - he still defends it. He is still tainted with the suspicion that he just believed, in the teeth of the evidence, that "it was the right thing to do". As Menzies Campbell commented: "You just can't argue with someone who 'just knows' what is right." The people tried to argue - especially the people he now commends in his speech - but he knew better.

I don't know where this leaves me. I welcome the high-profile raising of the 'faith and globalisation' initiative, but really wish it wasn't him doing it.

Bishops & Prime Ministers with whips

2008-03-27T11:01:00.004Z

The Prime Minister has this week had to acknowledge that some MPs owe loyalty to their religious community as well as the Party and the State. Under pressure of a rebellion in the ranks, he allowed a bill on human embryology to go to a free vote, instead of a whipped one. Roman Catholic bishops had been wielding their own whips in the preceding few days.

BBC's Passion

2008-03-18T14:27:00.002Z

Televising an account of Holy Week for national TV is an interesting exercise in bringing religion into the public sphere without offending either religious communities or those who reject religious faith. Fortunately, the particular genius of the Holy Week story is that it bridges the worlds of Roman Empire and established religion, and critiques both. And who can argue with telling a story (as opposed to presenting belief propositions)?

This BBC production is the most credible account I have ever seen (although as yet only the first two episodes have been screened). It has managed to avoid stereotyping Jesus as some human/divine weirdo, or political revolutionary, or guy with sexual or masochistic hangups, and the real dilemmas faced by Pilate and Caiaphas the High Priest are presented such that if you were Caiaphas, presented with the information he is presented with, you would have to follow his logic to its gruesome conclusion. Pilate's historically-attested brutality is not softened, but he also is not one of those Hollywood baddies who for no apparent reason just want to be bad.

The storyline seems to be following John's Gospel closer than the other accounts. As in John, Jesus has prescient knowledge of what the future holds for him, yet presses ahead nonetheless. This would have been a little weird for me a few years ago, until I read Margaret Barker's 'Temple Theology' in which she argues that the historical Jesus consciously took upon himself the missionary role of the High Priest (as a way of non-violently 'deposing' Caiaphas in the popular imagination) and took it to its logical conclusion by 'becoming God for the people' in the great Atonement sacrifice.

The story challenges all the neat boxes and labels that are often used when discussing religion and secular society.

Oaths of (British) allegiance?

2008-03-11T09:02:00.002Z

A Government commission set up by the Prime Minister and convened by Lord Goldsmith has just published its findings on the question of British identity. Is there a loss of sense of identity and cohesion in the country ('country' being UK and Northern Ireland), and if so, what is to be done? Radio 4's 'Today' programme, true to form, attempted to twist the whole thing into a debate about 'Britishness' (as opposed to 'citizenship') and focus exclusively on the idea of people swearing an oath of allegiance to the Queen. No doubt the papers will follow suit, and the opportunity for a serious discussion will again be lost.

Despite John Humphreys best efforts, Lord Goldsmith did manage to get through that the issue is citizenship not Britishness, and that the idea of an oath of allegiance to the Queen is only one of a number of different possibilities. As to why there is a concern at all, he didn't make a very good case, focussing as he did on people's mobility around the country (do I feel less British because I've lived all over the UK?) and the impact of the internet and television. He mentioned how major football teams no longer draw their support locally - a significantly *un*revealing fact, I'd have thought.

He managed to steer it away from a discussion about the impact of immigration - although did cite the success of civil ceremonies introduced by the government for people taking British citizenship. I've been to one and it was, in a curious and rather ramshackle way (in true British style??) moving - very clearly so for many of the participants.

There seemed to be a tacit agreement 'Don't talk about the War' - yet I'd have thought the bonding experience of the Second World War played a major part in welding a sense of national cohesion for my parents' generation. Maybe that's why the media has been so interested in the story of servicemen in Peterborough being advised not to wear uniforms when off duty in public for fear of abuse. Just goes to show that embarking on unjustifiable wars with no popular support can't be guaranteed to work for national cohesion, especially if it tarnishes large numbers of your own citizens with the 'potential terrorist' brush.

However, there is a big issue underlying all this. We live (as Archbishop Williams pointed out) in a country where people have multiple allegiances. I guess I feel (in order of priority) Christian, British, European (significant ancestry is German), English, a Londoner. And also, to some extent, I feel like a 'person of faith' in a country where religion is often patronised, marginalised and insulted. (That's not to say it doesn't sometimes deserve it).

Swearing of oaths is not on, to the Queen or anything else. Not only is it unacceptable for many Christians, but I suspect for Muslims too. However, a public ceremony at which young people coming of age take on the responsibility of citizenship, accept for themselves their obligation to the laws and institutions of the (secular) State - and, perhaps, their responsibility to work for their continued reform (which for a Christian has to be part of the package) - sounds like quite a good idea. Apart from anything else, it might create some pressure to do some real citizenship education in schools. Things have improved a bit since I first emerged as a graduate in 1973 knowing absolutely nothing about how the country is run. Patriotic symbols and myths take on a dangerous tone when they become a substitute for knowledge about how the State actually operates.

Citizens are less likely to participate actively in the continual reformation of our State through the democratic process if they are isolated individuals. Belonging to religious institutions and political parties where some serious thought can (and does) go on about what constitutes good government, where character can be formed and experience gained has to be part of the story.

Blasphemy legalised

2008-03-07T12:39:00.002Z

Did I gather that at last the so-called 'Blasphemy Laws' were struck out of the rulebook this week?

The laws' purpose (according to the Parliamentary debate) was effectively to protect the essential tenets of the Established Church from slander and thus prevent civil strife. It was ineffective because it never defined what the essential tenets were. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York supported its abolition because they said (as I understand it) its essential purpose was the prevention of civil strife and we now have other legislation relating to religious discrimination and religious hatred that does this far more effectively.

My own MP, Evan Harris, proposed abolition in the Commons and thought the House would be impressed that Richard Dawkins ("who is much admired") supported it. Given that the entirely unadmirable Dawkins enjoys insulting religious believers with a relish it seemed a chancy tactic and betrayed an anti-religion agenda. His list of supporters included all the currently fashionable well-known religion-bashers in the UK. Whether the Archbishops' support was a disappointment to him I don't know.

What I find distressing is not so much people like Dawkins *insulting* religious beliefs as their wilfully *misrepresenting* them, claiming that the 'Aunt Sally' they've set up is the truth. That's the real insult. But just as insult and misrepresentation undermine work for justice and peace, so can laws that try to protect ideas rather than people. So good riddance to the Blasphemy Laws anyway.

Saying grace ungracefully

2008-03-06T09:06:00.004Z

page 2 of this week's 'Oxford Times' : "Argument at Trinity College over scholars being made to say grace"

"Over the past few weeks, a number of scholars and exhibitioners at Trinity College have refused to recite the meal-time prayer. A response by the chaplain, demanding that the prizewinners say grace, has opened up a rift between the students and the college's governing body. In an email sent to students by the Revd Emma Percy, she wrote : "The personal beliefs of the individual are incidental; the role requires them to speak the words that the college community wish to be said on their behalf." The chaplain also argued that reciting the prayer was not a religious ritual but a tradition that scholars and exhibitioners were obliged to take part in. She added: "There seems to be some confusion about the difference between personal and public prayer, the individual and the role. . . The scholar/exhibitioner is asked to recite the grace; it is a personal matter whether they also pray it," she added.

. . a [subsequent] motion to the Junior Common Room stated that ". . the obligation to say the words of the grace amounts to forced participation in a religious ceremony. . . a scholarship or an exhibition is an award for academic achievement, and should not involve any religious obligation." At the JCR meeting, a motion was passed by 27 votes to 17 to write to the governing body requesting a change in college rules, removing the obligation for scholars and exhibitioners to recite grace. [end of quotations].

I imagine that what is being asked of the students concerned is not to offer a prayer of their own, but to recite the traditional college grace, which is probably in Latin and goes back to mediaeval times. It is normal practice in most Oxford colleges and probably only relates to formal college dinners once a week, although in some colleges every evening hall dinner is formal. Meals at such dinners are not served canteen fashion. Everyone gathers for dinner, and when all are in place, silence is called and the meal starts together - a civilised practice, I think, which befits a college community, not a collection of individuals. The grace signifies the start of the meal.

This little story highlights the confusions we have arrived at over the secular and the religious. I'm with the chaplain on this one. A prayer is a poem until its hearer (or reciter) prays it. That corresponds with Reformed theology in which the communion bread only becomes the 'communion of the Body of Christ' when it is received in faith. The Latin grace provides an opportunity for those members of college who wish to inwardly give thanks in whatever way they choose (a Muslim could be giving thanks in one way, a humanist in another - why should we assume only religious people are thankful for a meal, and the work that it represents?). Its being in Latin (probably) allows such scope. The only grounds for refusing to give the college members such an opportunity is on the grounds that it is harmful to encourage them to consider being thankful.

What the protesting students are doing is claiming that religion is an individualistic, privatised matter to be banished from the secular sphere. ('Secular' misunderstood as 'we don't do God here' - see earlier post). That said, if I were the chaplain faced with someone claiming s/he can't recite a prayer without also praying it I would be inclined not to force it. The important thing is that college pauses to give thanks. I might note that Aristotle said that the mark of an educated person is that they are able to hold thoughts in their head and take them seriously without agreeing with them - it leaves me wondering whether the students have really thought it through. There are many humanists and atheists who nonetheless enjoy singing the (religious) works of Bach without, presumably, feeling that their rights are being trampled on.

What's the point of an Archbishop?

2008-03-04T17:49:00.003Z

Interesting to note that BBC Radio 4 ran a programme this morning, "What's the point of the Archbishop of Canterbury?" It was the first in a weekly series. I don't know when it was recorded, and whether it was subsequent to the media fiasco over his lecture. It was depressing to hear vox pop interviews on the streets of Manchester where people were asked if they could identify his face on a photograph and they were saying things like "Isn't that the church bloke that thinks we should have shari'a law in Britain?"

Couldn't hear the whole programme, but it seemed to be grinding (in a grudging sort of way) towards an appreciation of the role.