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.
Saturday, 30 April 2011
Let's get physical
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.
"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.
Friday, 1 April 2011
'Bible's Hidden Secrets' concluded
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.
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.
Thursday, 24 March 2011
'God's Wife' (BBC2 series 'Bible's Buried Secrets')
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 :
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?
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?
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
God doesn't exist. Or maybe God does.
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.
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.
Monday, 20 December 2010
Review of The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen (winner of the Man Booker Prize)
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.
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.
Friday, 10 December 2010
Missing the Beauty
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.
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.
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