Lost in the Moral Maze

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

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

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

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?

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!

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

'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.