Rob Wheeler thinks about... Misfortune

Is it possible to suffer a misfortune or a harm of which we are completely unaware? At first sight the idea seem ridiculous. It's like someone telling you they have just discovered that yesterday they had been suffering a toothache all day but were quite unaware of it at the time!

Consider the following situation, however...

John is universally judged to be a competent manager. A new project is mooted by higher management and "water-cooler" conversations lead to the informal proposal that John should be earmarked to lead the project. It will mean a higher salary for him, more responsibility, higher status and greater job satisfaction. Everyone agrees that he is the right man for the job and that he would enjoy the challenge. However, Alan has it in for John and fabricates evidence that John has had mental problems in the past. The management simply accept what Alan says on face value and quietly drop the idea of promoting John to project leader. Years later, after all the characters in our drama have passed away, John's biographer comes across evidence of Alan's deceit. He judges that what Alan did harmed John and writes in the biography that John's career was blighted by the malice of Alan.

The biographer's judgement seems to me to be quite correct. Had Alan not acted in the way that he did John would have experienced a benefit that, in the event, he was denied. Alan has clearly done John a harm. But the problem is that this contradicts our previous intuition for John has not experienced anything disagreeable.

Many people balk at the idea that a third-party's judgement (such as the biographer's) can override or somehow negate the subjective judgement of the person themselves. After all, what right have I got to gainsay your claim that you are happy? Surely you are the ultimate authority on your own happiness? However, if we insist that a misfortune is only a misfortune if you experience it then we have to conclude that Alan has done John no harm. Furthermore, any betrayal, gossip, infidelity or theft that remains undiscovered is never wrong in itself. It only becomes wrong when it is discovered and the resultant distress is experienced; what renders something wrong is only consequent bad experiences.

This would put a colleague who learnt about Alan's deceit in a paradoxical position. If he informs John about the loss of the job opportunity, John will feel anger and disappointment and so the colleague automatically will come to share responsibility with Alan for causing a harm to John! Without his action John will not have suffered anger and disappointment. This clearly goes against our common sense beliefs about harms for we usually praise people who bring injustices to light - not blame them for causing distress - even though their actions may lead to the experience of distress. If John discovers the wrong done to him by Alan through his colleague's information then the distress he experiences will be as a result of what Alan did - not as a result of he colleague bringing it to light. The colleague cannot share the blame of the harm just for making John aware of it. In addition, the law does not treat the wrongness of a crime as consisting in the distressing awareness of it. If a fraud was committed two months ago it was wrong then - not just when I discover and report it.

I think the problem of our contradictory intuitions lies in what appears to be a conflict between two opposing viewpoints. On the one hand we have the first-person viewpoint of John ("I am happy and contented") and the third-person viewpoint of the biographer ("John has suffered and so is unhappy"). It seems illegitimate for someone to make such a judgement in the face of an authoritative judgement made by a person about their own state of mind.

The answer is that the third-person perspective is bit more subtle than I have described it. The biographer is not really saying "I judge John to have suffered a misfortune". Rather, he is putting himself in John's place, empathetically, and saying "If John had known about Alan's action then I judge he would have been distressed because he would recognise that an objective harm had been done to him. Therefore, he has suffered a misfortune even though he did not discover the deceit and experienced the distress".

The implication of this is that our individual lives cannot be seen and evaluated simply in terms of our here and now subjectivity - the flow of conscious experiences - but have to be viewed as stories in an objective world in which the third-person perspective is as important as the first.

David Paterson thinks about - Revelation

Since the dawn of consciousness (whenever that was) humans have been exploring their experiences and forming constructs which enable them to perceive, use and predict things better. From that point of view revelation is a constant function of humanity, especially of certain gifted and dedicated individuals.

I think that in "exploring and promoting religious faith as a human creation" (which is the Sea of Faith mission statement) we are valuing a wide variety of revelations. However, we also need to acknowledge that no revelation is privileged. All have to be checked for their truth, relevance and appropriateness. I think it's important that none should be discarded. Modernity is not privileged either.

We may at any time need to revisit ancient insights to get out of the mess we continually get ourselves into.

The great traditions of revelation -- of the Tao, off Krishna and Advaita Vedanta, of the Buddha, of the Old Testament prophets, of the story of Jesus, of the Qur'an, the Guru Granth Sahib, Baha'ullah an many others -- are there to be valued, assessed and reviewed for all humanity and for all time.

Stephen Broughton thinks about... The Great Oak

At the bottom of my garden stood a great oak tree. It was there when a ‘select development of executive style developments’ was hastily assembled, which housed me and my family for about 12 years. It was there when a hundred years before, the Council created a Municipal Cemetery, an oasis of peace and sadness the other side of my garden fence. A place to visit, to remember, to bring flowers, to show love, to show you cared, to think of all the ‘if onlys’ which make up each person’s life story.

Each autumn, the Great Oak shed its harvest of acorns, a feast for the grey squirrels that lived their lives in its branches. Some they buried as a winter store some lay undiscovered to grow into trees for another generation, as the Great Oak had become the gift of a generation now long forgotten.

At the first Sea Of Faith Conference, held on a cold but bright day many years ago, we gathered to talk about things most of us had never talked about in public before. How the world of religious thought no longer gave us answers that made sense, no longer helped us make sense of our lives. We discovered that we shared a common conclusion that it just didn’t work any longer.

It was all going very well, when a lady sitting in front of me (I used to remember her name but sadly no more) asked the distinguished panel of speakers, ‘but what about the heart?’ It was a question that has never been answered and I speak as someone who has read, sometimes over and over, most of the words written so beautifully by Don Cupitt. Don who I first met as an earnest Theology Undergraduate in 1967.

The lady, whose question lived longer than the memory of who she was, went on to say that intellectual discussion was all very well but making sense of your life was for her an affair of the emotions. Whatever common sense told you was all very well but some of us, maybe most of us, live our lives through our feelings about things. It was an affair of the heart.

However atheistic my intellect has made me, my heart lives in the certain knowledge that the person I created as a choirboy in the 1950’s, the Jesus of the story books lives with me as an ever-present friend and guide. A person without whom I could never have survived as long as I have. Day by day he’s there telling me that all will be well. That if there is only one set of footprints in the sand, they are his carrying me through.

The acorns from the Great Oak feed me as they feed the grey squirrels.

It helps to have a positive mental approach to things. To think of life as a cup half full. To value what you have and not to be dragged down by what you don’t have, by the pain and the suffering we all endure. There are doubtless many ways of doing this but the one that works for me, the acorn that feeds me, is the certain knowledge that he is there for me as he has always been. Even though he probably never existed in the real world. Even though if he did we can never know anything about him.

The Great Oak disappears and the squirrels with it. Acorns fall no more. The winter store is bare. I can’t imagine such a world. The intellect tells us we don’t need it any more. Maybe we can use the Internet as we used cemeteries, a place to show your feelings, to make sense of life. But what of the people in the select development of executive style dwellings? How barren will their lives be? Is the problem of the heart to be solved by another generation of wonder drugs from Glaxo Smith Kline Beecham?

The Sea of Faith had had its day, has run its course, has ebbed and now runs down the pebbles on Dover Beach. Sadly the question was never answered. What about the heart? The Great Oak is no more. The world will look for its answers somewhere else.

Noel Cheer thinks about... Religion

The religious lexicon is in a mess. Much of the confusion that we encounter in discussing religion results from simple but significant differences in the meanings assigned to words. It can be assumed that some of the meaning assignments are done so as to gain rhetorical advantage.

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This article deals with only one of the many confused meanings, that of the word religion. The article ends with a plea to clarify the meanings that we apply to words so that sensible and essential discourse can take place. Since dictionaries record word usage of the past (and, at best, the immediate past) they are of little help in these fast-chaging times. This article draws on ideas from the late Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Canadian historian of religion, who held that there is a significant distinction to be made between religion and a religion. The first is an abstraction, while the second is a cultural entity rooted in historical processes.

If we can agree that all humans have a capacity for rising above our animal substrate for example by valuing love over power or mercy over revenge or beauty over ugliness (or even in merely recognising such categories) then we might agree to call this spirituality. Nothing important depends on using this particular word, the main advantage is that it gives continuity with earlier cultures. There is nothing about spirituality that compels us to speculate about other worlds or angels or to employ metaphors masquerading as concrete entities. This spiritual capacity may be unacknowledged, unexercised or even denied, but observation favours us agreeing that it is present in most human beings. Even atheists. Once a person starts to reflect on this urge to transcend the merely animal, then religion comes into operation. By this we mean that religion is the personal belief and meaning system of an individual human being, whether or not it is populated with super-natural entities. It is the umbrella name for our awareness of spirituality and the desire to celebrate and exercise it.

When we talk of a religion (or religions ) then we are talking of a path of faith, such as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and so on. They each have a history and they change over time, usually in response to other historical phenomena. To lessen confusion, there is some value in abandoning the word religion in its several forms and substituting the word faith to name personal piety, and path of faith to name the formalised expression of it the company that we keep while we do. This may bring us into another lexical debacle because many people who are hostile to religion equate the word faith with gullibility. But that is another article.

The neo-atheist assault on all things religious being mounted in the popular (that is non-scholastic) press by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris depends on using the terms religion, belief and faith in ways that label people who act in those ways as intellectually discreditable. The degree to which they misappropriate the meaning of religion is well exemplified in this excerpt from the preface of Dawkins The God Delusion.

Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers', no Northern Ireland `troubles', no `honour killings', no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money ('God wants you to give till it hurts'). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it.

If Dawkins, and the rest of us, were to use the word religion (or faith) to name, objectively and non-perjoratively, the self-acknowledged spirituality of a person, and to use a religion (or path of faith) to characterise a cultural entitity located in time, and often also in space, then the real discourse could begin. Benefits of understanding could flow across traditional dividing lines between paths of faith and also between those who are dedicated to a particlar path of faith and those who deny that such a course is appropriate. The level of debate offered by Dawkins is banal. The greater debate promises enormous benefits of mutual understanding and world peace and a means to address the excesses in religious expression that Dawkins claims are typical of the depredations that religion brings.

Clarifying our terms of reference will help to see religion as enormously variable in its application from the sublime to the diabolical.

Maurice Sanders thinks about... Travel

Travel has a lot of baggage. And not just the sort that Ryanair hates so much, but conceptual baggage that disables debate about the purpose, means and ethics of travel and blocks access to wider, but connected, issues of population growth, environmental degradation and climate change.

In historical and cultural terms, travel is linked to the idea of journey and discovery. Human beings have always made journeys even if the motivations for making them differed widely. For some, simple adventure was the prime mover whilst for others trade and profit provided sufficient cause. Perhaps a distinction should be made here between mass migrations that were forced on whole peoples - and still are - and the choice that individuals made to temporarily leave behind their present circumstances in order to make a journey from which they intended to return. Simply put there is an important distinction to be made between migrants and travellers. Travellers see their journeys in terms of a return to a starting point. Migrants have a one way ticket.

Whilst travellers may have been motivated by a variety of causes for which they could give reasons, their journeys were encompassed, in a very real sense, by a geographical conception of the world. It was out there and could be measured by the clock, compass and calendar. Moreover, for travellers up until the 20th century, a journey was in many ways a tabula rasa upon which providence would write a daily entry. Indeed, the open-ended nature of the journey was part of the attraction for the traveller and for the subsequent reader of accounts of them. In cultural and psychological terms, the journey was a process of moving from a state of unknowing to knowing about the world. Maps, both physical and mental, were integral to this type of relationship with the world.

The second half of the 20th century saw significant growth in another type of travel which is popularly referred to as tourism. True, the Grand Tour was a feature of the lives a few wealthy individuals from the cultural elites of Europe but even they were bound by the constraints of time and distance. Now mass tourism will take a person for a weekend in Estonia, a shopping trip to New York or even a ‘fortnight’s backpacking adventure’ as a recent article in 'The Observer' described it. At this point it may be tempting to repeat all the traditional criticisms of mass tourism made by those who claim that tourism is just holidaymaking in a warmer place rather than travel as understood in the wider historical and cultural sense. However, this argument could be turned on its head by saying that at least holidaymaking in Majorca for two weeks with the kids is authentic, unpretentious fun that makes none of the cultural claims that travel makes for itself. Does it matter that the journey from airport to airport via an airplane would be better described as a transfer rather than a journey?

Rather than takes sides in what may be an arid debate about what holidays are for it may be more rewarding to look at what both have in common in terms of wider cultural and psychological implications. What seems to have happened to many people in the West, whether they are gap year backpackers or two week holidaymakes, shoppers in New York or art lovers in Florence, is that the link between travel and geography has been broken to be replaced by travel and lifestyle. For many, where you are is only important to the extent that it adds to a personal narrative that is rooted in specific, social, economic and cultural conditions back home. Just as big game hunters used to hang the heads of their kills on the walls of their houses back home so the modern traveller displays the digitised images of the Great Wall of China and the Sydney Opera House as evidence that these have been seen and thereby added to stock of commodities that find a place of an on-going narrative of consumption in mature capitalist economies. Trophy holidays are a big part of the modern traveller’s desire to travel.

Does it matter as long as they enjoyed themselves? At one level probably not. It is far better to enter someone else’s country as a visitor, however described, than as a soldier or an imperialist. But does it not lead to a commodification of the world and its visual treasures and the concomitant fragmentation of the world as a geographical whole? As long as the link between travel and geography was clear then physics, chemistry and biology were always within touching distance in terms of our shared understanding of the place of human beings in the world. Modern travel has encouraged people to travel to be rather than to see. This has made it difficult for individuals to think of themselves in terms of membership of a species bound by constraints of geography and environment like every other species. Everyone’s got their own sat/nav but no one’s got the map.

Stephen Mitchell thinks about... The Real Jesus

Will the real Jesus lie down?

A while ago, Sea of Faith published a little book called Will the Real Jesus stand up? David Boulton wrote it to coincide with the a visit to Britain by the late Robert Funk of the Jesus Seminar. It's a wonderful collection of different interpretations of Jesus in words and pictures. (It's still available from SoF for £2.50 incl p&p.)

Today, there's an unholy alliance between some Christians and atheists in wanting the real, historical Jesus to stand up. For Christians the argument is simple: we follow Jesus and therefore we need to know who Jesus really was and what he really said and did. For the atheists the argument goes like this: Christians make claims about Jesus so we need to know who Jesus really was and what he really said and did to show that those claims are false. My argument is that the real, historical Jesus hasn't much to do with faith at all, Let the real Jesus lie down.

Don't misunderstand me, as a historical puzzle, who Jesus was, and what we can know about him, is endlessly fascinating. Trying to deduce which sayings of Jesus are original and which gospel accounts are more historical can be addictive. But . . and it's a big but . . it hasn't got much to do with faith.

First, Christians are not Jesusians. They don't follow Jesus, they follow Christ. Indeed they don't follow Christ, they are in Christ. As Paul says they are baptised into Christ, died and risen with Christ, one body in Christ, a new creation in Christ. A Christian's faith journey doesn't begin by investigating the real, historical Jesus and making a decision about him. It begins in the community of faith and baptism into Christ.

Second, it's in the community of faith that Christians read their bible. And for them, the bible isn't a history book, it is, they say, the living word of God. They don't therefore try to extract from its pages the real, historical truth, or the one true message. They perform the scriptures. They look for them to speak to them in their situation today. In the theological college, those old forms of criticism - source criticism, form criticism and redaction criticism - have given way to reader-response criticism, narrative criticism, deconstructive criticism, social criticism and feminist criticism. The job of the preacher is not to dig out the one true historical meaning from the text but to make meaning with the text.

Third, theological doctrines cannot be proved and disproved by historical research. The classic example is the resurrection. When Christians say in their services "The Lord is here" or "Christ is risen" they quite clearly don't mean that a 2,000 year old Palestinian man has just walked into their service. In the gospel stories, the risen Christ does not appear as a resuscitated corpse. The disciples don't say "Oh, we thought you were dead! You've come back to life." Jesus hasn't been brought back to life to die again like Lazarus. This is the risen, glorified Christ in a risen, glorified body. Resurrection is not demonstrated by history. It's demonstrated in the lives of those who have been "raised with Christ" and "live the risen life". As Paul puts it: if there is no resurrection, no living the risen life, what's the point?

And fourth, the fulcrum of faith is now. Faith doesn't revolve around the axis of the year dot or even the year 32 CE. It hinges on the present. Anything that tempts us away from engaging with the present should be put behind. To say the historical Jesus is a devil in disguise maybe a step too far. At least let the real Jesus lie down.

Noel Cheer thinks about... The Crucifixion

For the decreasing number of people who celebrate Easter in any religious sense there seem to be two contrary views of what it's all about: Jesus died for us and Jesus lived for us.

That Jesus died for us has been asserted, in one form or another, since the early days of Christianity. From at least the time of the theologian Origen, early in the 3rd century, up till Archbishop Anselm late in the 11th, the prevailing idea was that the Devil held hostage the souls of sinful people and that God redeemed them by offering his perfect son Jesus. The story said that God turned over Jesus to the Devil but then beat the Devil by bringing Jesus back from the dead. This story came to be called "Christus Victor" — Christ in triumph.

Anselm, who was an Archbishop of Canterbury before the RCs and the C of Es went their separate ways, thought that the presence of the Devil was not a good look and rewrote the story to say that God, out of his anger at sinful mankind, found it necessary to sacrifice his son in our place.

When 20th century Protestant Christian fundamentalism got underway in the 1920s, this view (called 'Substitutionary Atonement') was declared to be one of the Fundamentals of Christian orthodoxy. It remains part of classical Christianity right across the denominational spectrum, even though it is no longer even a good metaphor. Its archaic brutality renders it long overdue for repudiation as Gibson’s reli-porn snuff movie, 'The Passion of the Christ', so graphically demonstrates.

There is a growing body of people, some just inside the Christian Church and many outside, who say that all this is emotionally and spiritually unhealthy and that Jesus deserves a better memory. They take the view that the basic biblical record talks about Jesus as an itinerant teacher and healer from the unsophisticated northern province of Galilee who came into Jerusalem with the simplest of all appeals to faith — love God with everything you’ve got and put the wellbeing of your neighbour on a par with your own. And, while you’re at it, love your enemies — it just might turn them into friends.

The developing Christian church failed to promote the teachings of Jesus and instead turned him into a sort of cosmic redeemer figure.

If we, in the 21st century, are going to reject the God killed his son story, which has been called the ultimate in child abuse, what lasting significance do we see in the crucifixion?

The evidence is clear, at least to this writer, that when unflinching personal integrity deliberately confronts naked and corrupt systemic power, the power will always win at least in the short run. Jesus did not die for the sins of the world — he died because of the sins of the world. Jesus was murdered because he confronted the power-brokerage system of his day. That’s the Good Friday bit.

The record shows that his followers were at first gutted, but later came to realise that all that the God-intoxicate sage from Galilee had stood for, still stood.

The Easter Sunday message says that Jesus was raised from the dead. His enemies hadn’t said the last word and neither had death. So, using the thought forms of their day, his followers said that God has raised Jesus from the dead . In other words his life and teachings had been vindicated.

Today we are left with fragments of his teaching, even fewer fragments of his actions and 20 centuries of a huge supporting cast of chaps and mostly chaps in long gowns, painting colourfully elaborate pictures.

My portrait of Jesus utterly rejects the slaughtered-lamb-and-scapegoat motif. It ignores the synthesis with classical Greek philosophy — especially Plato’s denigration of the world. It ignores Constantine's grab for imperial power.

It ignores Aquinas' brilliant but irrelevant merger with Aristotle; it ignores the Victorian sentimentalism of "gentle Jesus meek and mild".

My portrait is of the man of nearly twenty centuries ago who talked passionately of a mode of living so rich that it deserved to be called "God’s Kingdom".

And, in that sense, he is still with us.