Aeons ago the Heresiarch posted about the 'debate' between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens in Toronto on whether religion benefits the human race, the world, and the universe. I hadn't bothered with it until a few days ago when I heard it broadcast on Radio 4; even then I couldn't manage more than the opening statements by both participants before boredom got the better of me. You know exactly what the protagonists are going to say in these circumstances; the only interest lies in discovering exactly how it's going to be said and, as the Heresiarch points out, Mr Hitchens's contribution was far more elegant.
My main conclusion was that the discussion was not merely sterile, but entirely wrong-headed. I find myself continually insisting that there are such things as 'religions', ideological structures and traditions based on various propositions, but 'religion' is usually too vague a category to be helpful. And the outset of this debate made the point. The core and heart of Mr Hitchens's argument was this, wonderfully modulated and beautifully delivered phrase:
"Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. I'll repeat that. Created sick, and then ordered to be well."
The repetition shows how important it is in Mr Hitchens's thinking. But it seems to me that it's a criticism not of religion in general, but of Christianity. The tension in Christianity between the doctrine of the inevitable human tendency to sin and the command to be holy generates huge theological difficulties and, it could be argued, psychological stress which human beings can do without. But it is, I think, unique to this particular religious tradition. Allah, for instance, demands only that human beings follow a few easily-enumerated rules; the deities of many animist traditions make no moral demands on their adherents at all; Buddhist or Daoist traditions again have very clear statements of what human beings have to do in order to live the good life which fall well within the bounds of possibility. Only Christianity has this inescapable tension between divine perfection and inborn human frailty, and even then there have been Christian heretics who've thought differently.
Religions are different and teach different things. Atheist campaigners prefer to tackle a single phenomenon, 'religion', but what they think religion is seems usually to be their own creation drawn from real ideologies - Christianity, for instance - and arguing about that construction seems to me to be the merest pointlessness. It's as sterile as discussing whether 'politics' is good for the world.
Friday, 17 December 2010
Monday, 13 December 2010
A Little Light Art
I've posted before about the Crypt Gallery space at St Pancras Church in London and also about Illumini which organises artistic events around the capital. This Sunday we combined the two by going to Illumini's charming 'Cryptmas' event at St Pancras, which spattered the whole space with fake snow and filled the niches and corridors with a series of light-based artworks inspired by Christmas customs, present-giving, angels, and the whole of the festive season. Even the gigantic glowing animatronic winged skull wasn't particularly eerie, I thought, and instead it was all rather innocuously delightful.
Tuesday, 7 December 2010
The Calling
Today is St Ambrose's Day. I told our small congregation the famous story of how Ambrose moved from being a Roman governor to Bishop of Milan after trying to restore peace in a particularly rowdy public meeting called to elect the new bishop, and a child's voice calling out from the crowd, 'Ambrose for Bishop!' Quite something when he wasn't even baptised at that stage.
'I've always liked that story about Ambrose', said Fred, who is our longest-serving server and who usually serves the Tuesday mass, 'because it happened to me'. He then told me how he went to church when he was little, but stopped as he got older and then a bit later was walking past the church when a voice called out 'Fred!'. There was nobody there and he thought nothing of it, but then it kept happening whenever he went past the church, and only stopped when he started going again. Fred's great-grandson was confirmed last month, so there are now four generations of his family involved with the church. Of course there are any number of natural explanations, but that doesn't really matter. From Fred, a story like that was very unexpected.
'I've always liked that story about Ambrose', said Fred, who is our longest-serving server and who usually serves the Tuesday mass, 'because it happened to me'. He then told me how he went to church when he was little, but stopped as he got older and then a bit later was walking past the church when a voice called out 'Fred!'. There was nobody there and he thought nothing of it, but then it kept happening whenever he went past the church, and only stopped when he started going again. Fred's great-grandson was confirmed last month, so there are now four generations of his family involved with the church. Of course there are any number of natural explanations, but that doesn't really matter. From Fred, a story like that was very unexpected.
Friday, 3 December 2010
The Cemetery Looked Lovely
A friend asked why I haven't put up any photographs of Swanvale Halt in the snow. It hasn't been particularly picturesque so far and in any case I have little to thank the bad weather for, as a saucepan resting on a towel sit in my kitchen to catch the drips coming through the ceiling from what is presumably a ruptured pipe. But I wish I'd had a camera with me this afternoon, or that it would have been decent to use it. We had a funeral of a popular local man, with probably something around 200 people in the church, and for the first time in days the sun came out for the occasion. The Council had gritted the steep hill to the cemetery specially, and by the time we got there the sun was straking across the hilltop turning the snow a beautiful blue-white. The cemetery staff had even cleared the snow to make a path to the graveside, revealing the dark green of the grass underneath. It's usually a bleak, windswept place, but never looked lovelier than it did this afternoon.
Mystery
... which means, in New Testament speak, something revealed rather than something concealed. I forgot to mention that at Widelake House the other day as I came round bringing the residents communion one lady was crying and murmuring, 'That poor girl, God bless her, that poor young girl'. I sometimes tell people that the Eucharist involves a collapse of time, a movement of humans into God's eternal time in which sequential chronology is no longer paramount (which modern physics and neuroscience suggests may be close to scientific, as well as intuitive religious, truth), and have heard about the similar collapse of time and sequence in people with dementia or in the final stages of life. On this occasion both ran together. I don't know what was going on in the lady's mind, though of course God does: it is both mysterious and Mystery.
Wednesday, 1 December 2010
More Persecuted Christians, Poor Dears
You may know I have a thing about whingeing Christians. Former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey's reappearance to sponsor 'Not Ashamed Day', the launch of a campaign encouraging Christians to be Out and Proud about their faith in the face of "well-meaning political correctness, multiculturalism and overt opposition to Christianity", has prompted me to post about something that came under my nose the other day.
The local churches in this area tend to swap newsletters. We don't as such, because we have a parish-wide newsletter that gets delivered to shops, institutions and homes, but we do get the magazines produced by the others. One headed a piece 'For the first time ever, the Christmas tree in the White House will be called a Holiday Tree this year. The following was written by Ben Stein and recited by him on CBS Sunday Morning Commentary' and there follows a considerable number of words attributed to Mr Stein, the right-wing US Jewish commentator and sometime comedian saying how, as a Jew, he has no objection to the Christian Christmas and rather approves of it as a sign that the American nation has not abandoned God, because we screw up when we do.
It was the bit about the White House Christmas tree that caught my attention. Was this really true, or was this another instance of Obama-bashing rumour-mongering by the US Christian Right? You only get one guess. According to Snopes, this rumour has been circulating since mid-2009 and has apparently kept going this year. This year, as last, the Obamas received the Christmas tree in a horse-drawn wagon emblazoned with the words CHRISTMAS TREE (bit of a giveaway, that) while a military band played 'O Christmas Tree'. Get the message? It's a story that neatly encapsulates the absolute conviction many US Christians have that Mr Obama is hell-bent on subverting the Constitution, banning Christianity, nationalising people's underwear, baking their babies etc. etc. It also helps British Christians work themselves into a frenzy about how the world is turning against them, and how everyone kowtows to the Muslims instead (when Christians moan about being 'treated unfairly', what they really mean is 'those Muslims get special treatment, what about us?').
But it's worse than that. This particular church is not full of frothing fundamentalists, but presumably they don't mind carrying a piece by Ben Stein because they haven't checked who he is - if they had, they'd have discovered he is a pro-life evolution-denier who once declared 'science leads you to killing people'. In fact his views are interestingly varied, but you can't say he is an uncontroversial figure.
AND not all the words quoted are even his. The second column-and-a-half is described, again, by Snopes as an anonymous coda which began circulating and being attributed to Mr Stein in about 2006. Though our local version misses out the offensive and untrue stuff about Dr Benjamin Spock, which you can read in the Snopes article, should you want, it does compound the error by adding 'My best regards, honestly and respectfully, Ben Stein' at the end. But I don't doubt that it's just been lifted wholesale from some website, or received in an email, without actually being checked.
None of this, for heaven's sake, took a lot of digging out; it required just a few minutes with Google, and a basic scepticism of the claim that Christianity is being systematically marginalised and 'pushed around'. Anyone could have found out very easily that virtually nothing in the article is true; anyone to whom it might occur that there could be any doubt about it, of course.
Sadly British Christians are now all too willing to believe this dishonest rubbish without checking, because it fits in with their own sense of being marginalised. It's claptrap. I continue to marvel, as an ordained priest of the Established Church, at the colossal degree of privilege I enjoy even on the most informal levels. A trivial example: a shop in the village is being redeveloped. I called in yesterday to find out what was happening. As I asked I could tell the foreman was a bit suspicious until I pointed out I was the vicar (sic) whereupon the suspicion cleared and we got into a conversation about his church- and school-going habits of years ago. It was assumed (rightly I like to think) by this non- or at least inactively Christian person that as parish priest I have a legitimate reason for wanting to know what's going on in the community I'm responsible for. This is the real world rather than the one imagined from the newsdesk of the Daily Mail, or Bishop Carey's study for that matter.
Thankfully some important voices in the Church of England are not going unquestioningly along with this. The Bishop of Croydon simply swept all the Not Ashamed! nonsense aside on Channel 4. 'I hardly think that we're a beleaguered minority. We're everywhere'. Quite.
The local churches in this area tend to swap newsletters. We don't as such, because we have a parish-wide newsletter that gets delivered to shops, institutions and homes, but we do get the magazines produced by the others. One headed a piece 'For the first time ever, the Christmas tree in the White House will be called a Holiday Tree this year. The following was written by Ben Stein and recited by him on CBS Sunday Morning Commentary' and there follows a considerable number of words attributed to Mr Stein, the right-wing US Jewish commentator and sometime comedian saying how, as a Jew, he has no objection to the Christian Christmas and rather approves of it as a sign that the American nation has not abandoned God, because we screw up when we do.
It was the bit about the White House Christmas tree that caught my attention. Was this really true, or was this another instance of Obama-bashing rumour-mongering by the US Christian Right? You only get one guess. According to Snopes, this rumour has been circulating since mid-2009 and has apparently kept going this year. This year, as last, the Obamas received the Christmas tree in a horse-drawn wagon emblazoned with the words CHRISTMAS TREE (bit of a giveaway, that) while a military band played 'O Christmas Tree'. Get the message? It's a story that neatly encapsulates the absolute conviction many US Christians have that Mr Obama is hell-bent on subverting the Constitution, banning Christianity, nationalising people's underwear, baking their babies etc. etc. It also helps British Christians work themselves into a frenzy about how the world is turning against them, and how everyone kowtows to the Muslims instead (when Christians moan about being 'treated unfairly', what they really mean is 'those Muslims get special treatment, what about us?').
But it's worse than that. This particular church is not full of frothing fundamentalists, but presumably they don't mind carrying a piece by Ben Stein because they haven't checked who he is - if they had, they'd have discovered he is a pro-life evolution-denier who once declared 'science leads you to killing people'. In fact his views are interestingly varied, but you can't say he is an uncontroversial figure.
AND not all the words quoted are even his. The second column-and-a-half is described, again, by Snopes as an anonymous coda which began circulating and being attributed to Mr Stein in about 2006. Though our local version misses out the offensive and untrue stuff about Dr Benjamin Spock, which you can read in the Snopes article, should you want, it does compound the error by adding 'My best regards, honestly and respectfully, Ben Stein' at the end. But I don't doubt that it's just been lifted wholesale from some website, or received in an email, without actually being checked.
None of this, for heaven's sake, took a lot of digging out; it required just a few minutes with Google, and a basic scepticism of the claim that Christianity is being systematically marginalised and 'pushed around'. Anyone could have found out very easily that virtually nothing in the article is true; anyone to whom it might occur that there could be any doubt about it, of course.
Sadly British Christians are now all too willing to believe this dishonest rubbish without checking, because it fits in with their own sense of being marginalised. It's claptrap. I continue to marvel, as an ordained priest of the Established Church, at the colossal degree of privilege I enjoy even on the most informal levels. A trivial example: a shop in the village is being redeveloped. I called in yesterday to find out what was happening. As I asked I could tell the foreman was a bit suspicious until I pointed out I was the vicar (sic) whereupon the suspicion cleared and we got into a conversation about his church- and school-going habits of years ago. It was assumed (rightly I like to think) by this non- or at least inactively Christian person that as parish priest I have a legitimate reason for wanting to know what's going on in the community I'm responsible for. This is the real world rather than the one imagined from the newsdesk of the Daily Mail, or Bishop Carey's study for that matter.
Thankfully some important voices in the Church of England are not going unquestioningly along with this. The Bishop of Croydon simply swept all the Not Ashamed! nonsense aside on Channel 4. 'I hardly think that we're a beleaguered minority. We're everywhere'. Quite.
Ah, It's Yourself
Here is a small photograph of Jesus looking rather sorry for himself.
I was taking the service at Widelake House and turned the page of the service booklet to find a consecrated Host laser-bonded to the paper. It's not what you expect. Presumably on a previous occasion one of the residents half-sucked their Saviour, didn't fancy him much and deposited him back on the booklet, to be dutifully gathered up and put away for several weeks. Procedure in these circumstances is to bury or burn the Host. Weather conditions make burying a little impractical, so incineration was the order.
I was taking the service at Widelake House and turned the page of the service booklet to find a consecrated Host laser-bonded to the paper. It's not what you expect. Presumably on a previous occasion one of the residents half-sucked their Saviour, didn't fancy him much and deposited him back on the booklet, to be dutifully gathered up and put away for several weeks. Procedure in these circumstances is to bury or burn the Host. Weather conditions make burying a little impractical, so incineration was the order.
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