Thought Bubbles

Rob Wheeler thinks about... Misfortune

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:11:00 +0000

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 indeed harm John and writes in his 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 his 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

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:02:00 +0000

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.

Rob Wheeler thinks about... Metaphors

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:00:00 +0000

Theologians often claim that the nature of God is so far beyond our understanding that he must be completely unknowable to our finite, mortal minds. We must therefore approach describing him indirectly through metaphor, symbols and figures of speech. These are applied to God as rough and ready approximations. The best we can do is point to his unknowable nature using inevitably inadequate comparisons with what we do know.

A metaphor is a way of explaining or illuminating something unfamiliar by comparing it with something with which we are more familiar. The whole of human language is suffused with metaphors and could not operate without them. However, for a metaphor to work the creator of the metaphor has to have to have direct access to both parts -- the familiar bit, to which we make the comparison, and the unfamiliar bit which we are trying to illuminate by means of the comparison. If you don't have access to both parts then you cannot coin the metaphor in the first place let alone know whether it is is accurate. Remember -- metaphors can be completely wrong. For instance if a boxer were to fight with huge determination and effort and I said "He fought like a Three-toed Sloth" I would not only cause you to groan at the cliched poverty of my imagination, I would have completely misled you. The metaphor would have been inaccurate.

To take another example: in describing John's tenacity in debate I might say "He worries away at an argument like a terrier". Unless I both perceive John's style of argument directly and I know what a terrier is like then I cannot create the metaphor. You, as listener, only know about terriers (unless you are from a culture that knows nothing of dogs at all - in which case the metaphor is lost on you). You have never seen John but the comparison with a terrier works as it is something with which you are familiar.

Metaphors about God are fine when you simply consider yourself as the recipient of the metaphor. The obscure nature of God can be grasped through the more familiar image that the metaphor offers us. But who creates the metaphor in the first place? How is it possible, and how can the coiner check that the metaphor is accurate?

If the metaphors came to us from an impeccably authoritative source -- from, say, an angel, who had direct access to God then we would not have a problem (except establishing the authority in the first place!). Thus Muslims may have a strong argument here, for their revelation was dictated by Gabriel himself. However, for Liberal Christians, and others who do not believe in Revealed Religion, there is a big problem. If the humans who create the metaphors of Divinity have no special access to God then they cannot know that their metaphors are accurate. To return to our previous example: if I had never seen John argue then I can have no idea of what an accurate metaphor for his style would look like - and if I can't see God directly then I cannot even begin to generate a metaphor to characterise Him.

In the case of God, different types of believer use different metaphors to describe his nature. Some believers will talk of God as an implacable absolutist monarch, so incensed by humanity's disobedience that he is quite happy to see them destroyed by suicide bombers. Others will describe God as a loving father, ready to forgive his creation before they have even repented. How do you adjudicate between these contradictory metaphors? The only way is go back to the original and judge it against the two alternative comparators. However, as we have already established in the case of God, this is impossible because one end of the metaphor, the ineffible Godhead, is beyond human knowledge and experience.

I would therefore suggest that NOTHING can be said of the ineffable precisely because it is beyond experience. We cannot even say it exists. So in Wittgenstein's words, "Whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent".

David Paterson thinks about - Incarnation

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:59:00 +0000

This Christian doctrine lies within a wider spectrum which includes at the one end the pagan concept of animism - the Divine is in everything and everything is Divine - and at the other, concepts of revealed books, in which the spirit is made not flesh but word. It is interesting that Christianity spans quite a wide range of that spectrum.

In the fourth Gospel, the concept of incarnation rests first on the personification of "The Word" with antecedents in the Hebrew wisdom literature's personification of the Logos - the Word. The writer of St John's Gospel identifies the man Jesus with this personifying of the divine. At this stage in the development of Christian thought there's a lot in common with the Hindu concept of the Avatar, and some Indian Christians are redeveloping this. However, Catholic Christianity did not go that way but developed the doctrine of the Trinity instead, effectively "taking the manhood of the Christ into the Godhead".

Incarnation in the wider sense is, I think, still a valuable insight, seeing the divine in the physical and mundane. It is consistent, in quite a powerful way, with the principle of Sea of Faith's "religion as a human creation". In becoming Man, God breaks down the barrier between the heavenly and the earthly. The veil in the temple is torn in two.

We may rightly reject Incarnation as a Christian dogma, but as a profound myth it is very powerful.

Rob Wheeler thinks about - Faith

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:56:00 +0000

At a recent talk I attended the Secular Humanist speaker dismissed faith as simply believing something without reason - or even against reason. Religious friends, on the other hand, often talk about their belief in the existence of God as a matter of faith. It seems to me that both of these positions are mistaken in various ways.

It was Wittgenstein who coined the idea that if you want to know the meaning of a word then you should examine how it's used in everyday life: there is no source of meaning other than collective usage.

In the case of faith I think it is beholden upon us to look at how it is used in everyday cases in order to truly understand what it means. Perhaps the best explication of faith is one I recall from my Sunday School days. The story is told of the great Victorian tight-rope walker Blondin who crossed the Niagara Falls on a tightrope in the late 1850s. On one occasion he walked across blindfold, pushing a wheelbarrow. Having performed this feat he turned to a bystander and asked him if he believed that he, Blondin, could perform the feat again, but this time with a load in the barrow. The onlooker had no hesitation in saying "Yes - of course you can do it!". At this Blondin said, "Then jump in the barrow and I'll take you across". Predictably the onlooker demurred.

I think this story brings out several important features of faith. Firstly, that faith is a practical matter. It is about commitment to action - even if that action is simply waiting passively and patiently for something to happen. Belief, in contrast, is an assertion that so-and-so is the case. It does not necessarily entail action. It is therefore quite consistent to say that one believes in God but has no faith in him. I expect that many people who assent to Theistic belief in opinion surveys are simply of the opinion that God exists but have no personal faith or trust in him as such. Indeed, this must be the attitude of Satan in the Book of Job as he chats to God in the heavenly realm quite a bit. He obviously is convinced that God exists but it would be absurd to attribute faith to him on that basis.

Sometimes the distinction is made between 'belief-that' and 'belief-in'. To 'believe-that' is to assent to the truth of a statement while 'belief-in' is to take a risk on it and commit yourself to acting on that belief. It is one thing to say that you 'believe-that' God exists (merely assent) and quite a different thing to say that you 'believe-in' God as your saviour (making a life commitment or having faith). However, to 'believe-in' logically presupposes 'belief-that'. Faith is a transitive verb and always implies a person or state of affairs in which one has faith. My religious friends are therefore mistaken, I would argue, when they say they have "faith that God exists". God's existence is a matter of belief and not faith. Faith can only be exercised after belief has first been established.

But my Humanist friend is also wrong in her analysis of faith, for if there is logically a state of affairs that you have faith in then one can always give reasons for one's faith. In a weak sense then, faith can be said to be rational - although it does not follow from this that one has good or sufficient reasons for one's faith. That is something that has to examined on a case-by-case basis as there are no universal rules by which you can determine whether any action is rational.

Madame Butterfly, in the eponymous opera, has faith that Pinkerton will return to be her husband and to be a father to their child. She has good reasons to trust him but is sorely betrayed at the end of the opera when he arrives with his new wife to claim the child and take it away. Butterfly's faith does not pay off in the end but that does not render it irrational. She had good reasons from her point of view, to trust Pinkerton. However, it demonstrates that it is always possible to describe a state of affairs that amounts to one's faith either succeeding or failing to pay off. Indeed, I would want to say that unless you can state up-front what faithfulness or betrayal would amount to in a situation, then your claim faith has no content.

Faith is always a matter of judgement in the face of incomplete information. Faith is therefore an ineradicable part of human life because we frequently have to commit ourselves to action without certainty. But it is only a necessity, never a virtue.

Stephen Broughton thinks about... The Great Oak

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:42:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:12:00 +0000

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.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:40:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 15:13:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:28:00 +0000

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.

David Paterson thinks about... The Love of Wisdom

noreply@blogger.com (Bubble Master) — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:21:00 +0000

Here lies a tree, which Owl, a bird,
was fond of when it stood on end

So begins a wonderfully daft poem by Winnie the Pooh, celebrating an heroic event. And, if you don’t know the story (or, worse still, only know the Pooh stories in their Disney version), see A A Milne’s 'House at Pooh Corner' The story is about how Piglet rescued Owl and Pooh from Owl’s ruined house when the tree it was in blew down.

Sing ho! for Piglet
(PIGLET) Ho !

I think the best wisdom is usually a bit heroic, with a warm, loving, celebratory sort of daftness. And anyway, owls are always wise aren’t they? (this one could even spell his own name – WOL).

THE LOVE OF WISDOM. English is a wonderful language – you can make almost any phrase have more than one meaning. The love of wisdom – that’s “philosophy”, isn’t it? Plato and all that jazz? Well, yes, and we’ll come back to that later. But what about “the love which Wisdom gives” – the love which (perhaps only?) Wisdom possesses – the love of Wisdom, Wisdom’s love? (And I’ve just noticed that a capital W crept in while I wasn’t looking!)

Wisdom has a sort of personality. She’s someone to talk to and listen to; she loves you and teaches you to love. Or so many religions have thought. The Hebrew scriptures include the Wisdom literature in which Wisdom is the creative force of Yahweh, who dances with him to create the world. In Sanatana Dharma (“Hinduism” as the Europeans call it) Sarasvati, Kali, Radha, Sita and many other Goddesses, representing a whole range of feminine human traits, hold the creative power of the Three Worlds while their male counterparts fight the battles, make all the noise and steal most of the limelight.

To personify an idea like that is to make a way of talking to ourselves and each other about it, a way to explore and understand it. Don Cupitt has often said “There is nothing outside language”. Perhaps we might say that there are many languages, and they are together outside-less not in the sense of any denial of things that cannot be put into words, but simply in the sense that languages are the ways we humans continuously reach out to make sense of it-all. We detect, reflect, understand, invent an ever-increasing all-that-is. And so the personification of Wisdom is closely related to the personification of the Logos, the Word.

To love Wisdom is to love the world – the world within, the world between and the world beyond. To love it-all. Every new thing we discover, invent, or even just imagine becomes a new part of it-all, forever infinitely large, forever infinitely small, forever expanding our experience. There is no need to seek transcendence in divine figures existing outside it-all (what could that possibly mean?), transcendence starts for us in the complexity of our own brains which perform functions too many and too fast for consciousness. And that’s only the start. The myriad interchanges and changes between my thinking and yours, this language and that, our species and others on this planet, and (maybe someday) from other planets too – to love it-all is an epic journey of exploration, in which we learn to have enough wisdom to enjoy and celebrate it-all and not destroy it with our unwise loves and desires.

But back to “Plato and all that jazz” The historical legacy of Greek philosophy is very great, but it’s only one of many ways of loving wisdom. Different human languages are good at different things: Latin to combine the hard-edged word structure the Christian Fathers wanted for producing strict dogma, Sanskrit for many-layered “both-and” words with multiple meanings, Arabic for the intricacies of law-making, and so many, many more, all with their own unmatched insights. No one tradition – no one language – even begins to embrace the whole of human wisdom. And that’s only considering the national and regional languages – how about the language of physics, the language of music, or of mathematics, poetry or art; and the languages of myth and mysticism, the language of our physical bodies and our relationships with each other and with other life forms, the basic inner magic of DNA? Languages which we create and which create us.

Wisdom is a dialogue of body, mind and spirit, of learning to live together in community. To love Wisdom is to wish to talk to her, to listen to her. May she teach us to love wisely.

***

David Paterson is a retired C of E clergyman and a Sea of Faith Trustee

Rob Wheeler thinks about... The Impossibilility of God

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:04:00 +0000

In a moment of uncharacteristic humility Richard Dawkins writes:

"...like...other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable".(Why There Almost Certainly is No God, Huffington Post, 23 Oct 2006)

Where Dawkins goes wrong is in thinking that "God" is an empirical hypothesis which attempts to explain features of the world in the same way as physics and chemistry. Fundamentalists may indeed give this impression but their literalism is a 20th century invention reflecting the modernist worldview just as much as Dawkin's science and, as such, is a departure from Christian tradition. In Christian orthodoxy God is not an empirical explanation but a metaphysical account and, as every philosophy undergrduate knows, a metaphysical theory is consistent with every state of the world. So you can't settle the matter of God's existence simply by referring to observable facts.

However, I believe we can go further than Dawkins does and make the bold claim that it is indeed possible to prove that God does not exist. But it is not done by experiment or examination of facts but by logic and conceptual analysis. We can say that God is not just probably or actually non-existent—he is impossible and cannot (logically) exist!

I want to claim that in the same way square-circles, married-batchelors and the largest-possible-number are impossible (because they entail self-contradiction) the very concept of God contains so many internal contradictions that it is empty of content. As in the case of many other internally incoherent ideas this is not immediately evident. Take the notion of time travel as we see it depicted in H G Well's 'The Time Machine'. At a schematic level we can enjoy the idea of someone travelling backward and forward in time because we ignore the absurdity of treating time as if it had the same properties as space. When we analyse it closely we see how it falls apart as a notion.

The a-theistic argument that takes this approach is known as "The Argument from Incompatible Properties". It is quite ancient and can even be found in the Buddhist Pali scriptures.

It goes like this:

Names refer not to things as such but to descriptions (this enables us to refer to fictional entities). To ascribe contradictory properties to something is to both assert a description and take it back at the same time—and they just cancel each other out. The name is thereby rendered empty and meaningless with no reference.

Traditionally God is envisaged as an agent who creates the world, sustains it, guides it providentially, intervenes in it miraculously, reveals his nature and will through it and rolls up it up at the end of time applying justice to all moral beings. However God is also Perfect, Immutible and Eternal. It is therefore impossible for such a being to do anything. If he is perfect he will have no needs or wants and so have no motivation to create a world in the first place let alone act within it. If he is unchanging and eternal, action is impossible because acting is a process with states before and after the action. Without time and change action is impossible.

God's omnipresence and omniscience are incompatible with his personhood because being a person involves seeing the world from a specific point of view. An omnipresent and omniscient being would know every point of view simultaneously which is not to have any point of view at all. Again—acting from no point of view at all is incoherent

Transcence and omnipresence contradict each other in that a transcendent being is completely above and beyond the world while an omnipresent God is present in every part of it.

God is said to be perfectly just and perfectly merciful. In our impefect world justice and mercy are traded off against each other but a perfect being cannot trade off, he must exemplify both virtues completely. Justice means giving to a person what is due to them but when we treat someone mercifully we cede the right to give them what they deserve. You cannot treat the same person justly and mercifully at the same time.

These are just a few of the internal contradictions in the concept. Space prevents me from elaborating or dealing with counter-arguments. You might object that I'm being a bit too literal in my interpretation of language about God. Such use of words is common in fantasy fiction and poetry. Well, I'm happy to concede that. "God" is a poetic fiction. Indeed, I think that's the answer!

Elaine Godden thinks about... Education

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:30:00 +0000

What should we teach our children? Well certainly the National Curriculum hasn't lived up to its promise, though we probably needed one. What we have is rigid in its methods of teaching while outside school hours kids can take in whatever they please from a largely unregulated media. Paradoxically, the content that's so grindingly taught is slavishly related to what's likely to appeal to them once they've gone home.

In state schools—pupils in Arts and Humanities at least—are given what they are expected to enjoy, based on the kinds of activities that are believed to be their preferred way of life. Thus book have to be easily read, racy, trendy and appeal to their ambitions to acquire money and possessions, to copy their hollow idols and to enjoy without effort.

Classics are largely avoided because they require pupils to think and form reasoned judgements, to imagine what they cannot see. Music Lessons encourage children to ape the popular tunes of the day; they're given a keyboard to play and told they're composing. Listening to classics is out for the same reason that good literature is out, and only those with parents who can afford it are given instrumental tuition.

These days a child is taught to read (if s/he's lucky) and then, having acquired the skill, given little to stimulate his/her desire for literature. Vocabulary in set books must not stetch, grammar and punctuation must not matter, content must reflect the status quo of the child who relies on visual images and seeks to emulate the characters within. Grammar is taught but superficially and half-heartedly. Obviously it's there in their books and relatively accurate, but attention is not drawn to it. Clause analysis may have been too severely hammered into children's minds years ago, but still a degree of understanding of how a sentence works is necessary, so long as it underpins and is related to what they read and write. As it is, the average school-leaver is content to know how to send "txt" messages.

Children don't lack imagination, but it rarely departs from what they see on TV or in computer games, and these are nearly always centred on acquisition and violence. Good children's literature is still being written but it means little to readers unless it's served up like the inferior stuff is—in TV plays or films—and so one brand is confused with the other, and corrupting the good is much more often the result than improving the bad. Even drama, as a school subject, doesn't help matters. Pupils never read good plays outside text books, they're told to improvise from their own experiences, again overwhelmingly influenced by the visual media.

School choirs and school orchestras, except in exceptional state schools, are rare now. Instrumental tuition is not funded and there are not enough pianist teachers to introduce children to musical structure; music played in assemblies is almost never classical or jazz. "Classical" is a dirty word, regarded with derision or accused of causing a headache. You can't expect a child to compose without theoretical knowledge, just as you need grammar to enable them to write creatively. Theory can't be taught without a teacher who knows the stuff himself and can introduce examples of recorded music or play chords on the piano to illustrate lessons.

Teachers can't be blamed for all this, and there aren't enough of them anyway; far more need to be employed and paid for out of the taxes from obscenely paid business giants, sports stars and celebrities. No, teachers mostly grew up with the same educational experiences as their pupils. Teachers and their employers are dominated by the commercial world—but they don't have to submit to it. No one, unfortunately, can stop the continuous blast of the modern media, but perhaps children could be protected from it during their school years.

Time after school could be devoted to the introduction of good literature and music—and art. Of course this would have to be in a relaxed atmosphere; any follow-up would have to be confined to lessons earlier in the day. Unfair to overworked teachers? Of course, but there are plenty of retired and other interested parties who could be paid to oversee these sessions without needing teaching qualifications. Voluntary attendance could be extended to weekends and holidays.

Rescued from a diet of violence and pap, children could begin to aspire to appreciation of the arts rather than setting their sights purely on ambitions to acquire money and material goods. Many would also aspire to become creative themselves. Such experiences would inspire justice, humanity, care for the environment and peace.

John Pearson thinks about... Love

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 16:35:00 +0000

My wife has put me in the dog-house. Leastways, if we had a dog (instead of two cats ) I’d be there. And the dog would most likely have been taken indoors and told how much she loved him - because he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, question the sentiment.

I have made the fatal mistake of not just questioning the existence of God but, worse still it seems, the nature of Love. I dared to suggest it is not some supernatural force between one person to another - between people and places, people and objects even - that we cannot truly understand or explain (and which, consequently, like God-matters, should not be examined too closely).

I am hurt - for this should not be interpreted as suggesting (as her indoors with the dog – if we had one - wrongly concludes) that I myself do not love her, our daughters and so on. As it happens, I do not in fact love the cats, though I can see how folk might, just as they might love food, holidays, money, cars.

It’s just that there is nothing mysterious or other-worldly about love - surely? It is born of familiarity, comfort and/or satisfaction (of whatever kind) with or from a person or object, a place, an experience. The act of loving (No, not just THAT act!) is born of chemical, mechanical and electrical responses and operations conditioned and driven by the factors just referred to. Both nature and nurture therefore, but nothing supernatural or incomprehensible -surely?

King Lear’s daughter Cordelia declares, with no malice I hope, that she loves her father "according to [her] bond".

It is this "bond" that determines and powers love. It is something we should be able to understand and work with. Thus it should be possible to show one party that they have cause, or a particular responsibility, to love another or, as in the case of the battered wife, can and probably should "let go". From our earliest days those from a happy home are taught to love and anybody denied this experience must find it a difficult concept. In this context, those inexperienced in receiving and learning to give love will find it more difficult relating to people (although easier with animals or inanimate objects perhaps?)

There are romantic images built on heart-centred rather than brain-centred reactions: "he/she broke my heart" and so on. Sweet maybe, but a load of cobblers! Your heart is that clever pump that keeps you going till such time as it irrevocably stops. It is your brain that tells you that you are "in love", "out of love" and so on: that amazing organ which through its chemicals and electronics - its strange powers of storage and recall - "logs on" to certain people, places, things, tastes, smells and so on. It can also "log off".

Those with Autism or Asperger’s syndrome provide the living proof of this last point surely? They are said to have difficulty forming and maintaining loving relationships ("Hmm, rather like you!", I hear her cry from indoors). Similarly the elderly, if they fall victim to dementia, gradually lose the capacity to feel or show affection for those to whom they owe it the most. In the former case(s) the machinery has failed to log on as it should, whilst in the latter it has logged off. In either case there's a fault in the wiring.

This is not to say that one should not work at it - that there should be no love in the world. I am not suggesting that we fight the tendency, which is bred into us or in some other way instilled,
of showing basic human care, both for those close at hand and the more abstract hoards of the starving in some foreign land.

I would hope that Richard Dawkins, so admirably clear thinking about "God" might agree with me about the above. As a scientist he should.

Can those who share my total dismissal of "God" remain all weak-kneed and silly about love?

Rob Wheeler thinks about.... Tolerance

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 16:12:00 +0000

Tolerance is a very misunderstood virtue. It is often confused with indifference; thought to entail moral relativism; to consist simply of a warm feeling; to involve an insoluble paradox and to amount to no more than good manners. I want to argue that all these are mistakes.

When we tolerate a practice, belief, attitude or institution in society we are tacitly asserting that the object of our tolerance is objectionable in some way. However, we believe that tolerating it results in a better outcome for us all than if we were to suppress the offensive object. Furthermore, authentic toleration has to be voluntary. If it is enforced then we are simply suffering or enduring the object. On the other hand, if we were merely indifferent to the object, having no strong feelings one way or the other, then we could not be said to tolerate it at all. Nevertheless, it may be that in some cases the cultivation of an attitude of indifference is the most virtuous course. For instance suppose someone had a deeply felt antagonism for members of other races, believing that all but the northern white races are inferior. It is possible that she could develop a tolerant practice in the sense that she scrupulously treated everyone, regardless of race, in a fair and non-discriminatory way. But would we praise such a person for their "tolerance"? Indeed not. The original racism is a form of intolerance and should be eradicated rather than adding a layer of tolerance to negate it. The correct course is that she should become indifferent to race rather than be tolerant or intolerant of it.

Some people believe that to be tolerant you have to adopt an attitude of moral relativism, believing that there are no universal moral truths or principles. The relativist believes that the "truth" of a moral judgement is relative to the framework (normally a culture or subculture) within which it is made. As the relativist denies a privileged position to any moral belief, including her own, this should, on the face of it, guarantee that everyone tolerates everyone else. Unfortunately, relativism is logically self-defeating when examined closely. Tolerance itself is a substantive moral prescription: one that the relativist believes everyone should adopt. But if his relativism is correct then the prescription can only apply to his own perspective (or culture). If someone from another culture does not believe in tolerance then the relativist can say nothing to him. The relativist is like someone who is sitting in a tree and saws off the branch he is sitting on! In the end all the relativist can do is adopt an attitude of indifference or resort to force. An appeal to the other person's tolerance is impossible, for any reasons he gives to the other will be relevant only from his own, personal, perspective.

The so-called "paradox of tolerance" lies in the fact that in tolerating what we find objectionable we appear to be committing ourselves to tolerating intolerance! But if the intolerant are successful in gaining political power though our championing of their civil freedoms despite our objections to them, then we could end up with an intolerant society. Tolerance thereby appears to be self defeating! However, this apparent contradiction can be easily resolved by realising that tolerance is not just a feeling or attitude but a substantive moral principle that we expect everyone in an open, liberal society to sign up to. Tolerance requires reciprocity and so it is quite consistent to coerce those who want to opt out and deny the moral norm, for failure to do so would undermine that very norm.

In polite society the notion of tolerance has nowadays become somewhat confused with civility and good manners. While these are good in themselves they are not values that are necessarily entailed by tolerance. Looking back to the early years of Quakerism, one of the paragons of tolerant organisations in history, we find that the founder George Fox was not above riding a horse into an Anglican church and declaring the congregation damned to hell! His concept of tolerance was more robust than ours. It meant that you did not use violent coercion or persecution against those with whom you disagreed. But it did not rule out outspoken criticism and it did not require that you were polite to them. I think that in these days of multicultural Britain, when we often tip-toe around cultural and religious differences, we have something to learn from old GF. A tolerant society does not insulate you from having your believes and sensibilities questioned and criticised. It simply defends your own right to enter into critical discussion with others and not to suffer violence or coercion when you do.

Rodney Codd thinks about... Gurus

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:12:00 +0000

As everyone knows, the celebrated sage of Greek antiquity, Diogenes of Sinope, lived the simplest of lives in a barrel, relying on the most minimal of material possessions to sustain him. However, his fame spred so widely troughout the ancient world that it turned him into a major celebrity, bringing him to the attention of the emperor Alexander himself, and attracting many students.

One day, while sitting outside his barrel, warming himself in the sun, Digenese was approached by a post-graduate student who wanted to be supervised on a doctoral programme. The student gushed with praise of Diogenes whom he treated with obsequious respect.

"Diogenese", he said, "you are the greatest philospher who has ever lived. I have read every word you have written: articles and books. I have watched every TV interview you have ever given. I have downloaded every podcast of every lecture you have delivered. I have attended seminars on every subject you teach and have spent my life-savings attending courses on your wisdom. I agree with everything you teach and I take every opportunity to inform others your ideas and to refute your opponents".

Diogenese looked glum.

The student continued, "I want to enrole in your study centre as a residential student so I can meet with you daily and learn at first-hand all your theories, emulate all your attitudes and absorb all your values".

Diogenese looked miserable.

"However", continued the student, "I have to warn you that after a few years studying under you I will begin to find mistakes in your teachings. I will identify prejudices, fallacies and sophistries here and there. I will pick trivial arguments with you just in order to show up some small error you have committed".

Diogenese started to smile a little.

"Later, the student said, "I will take the opportunity to publicly criticise your ideas and pour scorn on everything you teach. I will distance myself from your ideas and express embarrassment that I ever took your facile and fallacious ideas seriously. Eventually, I will deny that I ever learnt anything from you, or even knew you, and I will deride the absurd suggestion that I could ever have been your student".

Diogenese was smiling broadly now.

"Finally there will come a time", said the student, "when I will forget that you ever taught me. I will set up as a sage myself and those few ideas of yours that I continue to cherish I will claim as my own and forget that they originated from you. It will then be as if you had never existed".

At this Diogenese could contain himself no longer. He leapt to his feet with glee. "Yes, Yes!, he exclaimed, "of course I will be your supervisor for you truly know what it is to be a student!".

It was amongst the pre-socratic schools of philosophy that the idea of progress in knowledge through critical discussion was first invented. The idea that one might criticise the master outright and thereby modify and improve his ideas was utterly radical at the time. Up until then we find dogmatic schools of thought in religions and cosmological philosophies whose function is solely to impart a pure doctrine to the next generation unchanged from its formulation by the original master.

All thought in such schools consists of assertion, dogma and condemnation of error - never in dialogue and argument. The only *reasons* given for a doctrine are its derivation from orthodox tradition. The authority of the master and his legitimate heirs is paramount and it is vital never to admit new ideas from any other source.

Of course, in practice new ideas are introduced all the time, but it is never admitted that they are new. The heretic claims his doctrine is a return to the original, pure, orthodoxy or to a more accurate interpretation. The result is normally schism. A new school is formed with its own new dogmas - although the novelty is always denied.

There can never be a history of the development of ideas in this context as all ideas are ascribed to the master. All we can do is reconstruct a history of schism and a history of defence of true doctrine against heretics. There cannot be critical, rational discussion in a school - only arguments against dissenters, heretics and competing schools.

The principal heirs in the modern world to this classical tradition of critical reason are science and scholarship: the process of questioning and testing received opinion and modifying knowledge by discovering error. Science, has a genuine history of development and embodies real progress. However, regretably, the dogmatic schools are also still with us in the form of various New Age cults, pseudo-science theories, magical and occult traditions and so called "Complementary and Alternative Medicines". Unreason remains attractive!

Penny Mawdsley thinks about... Being a Sceptic

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Fri, 11 May 2007 13:29:00 +0000

The other day I came across a quaint little book, In Search of Truth, by Abel J. Jones (1945). This advocated that intending philosophers should undertake a thorough self-examination before embarking on any serious contemplation. It was essential to start by “knowing oneself”. The idea was that by tackling a series of rigorous questions the disciplined thinker’s mind could be cleared (altogether?) of the raft of prejudices and assumptions accrued from infancy onwards. Critical enquiry, the author contended, could begin only when these had been exposed, recognised for what they are, acknowledged, confronted and ditched.

I have always admired people who can readily pick up on a specious argument. Such people seem to possess naturally suspicious minds, predisposed to doubt. They are not always comfortable to be with. You make some mild remark and they jump on you like a ton of bricks. You can never second-guess them. They are seldom swayed by popular opinion – even fashionably “educated” opinion – when making up their minds where they stand on this or that. These folk are able to absorb and flush out the weakness of an argument in a jiffy, and can frame a coherent and confident riposte in the time their slower-witted companions are merely taking it in. My honest self-appraisal, much to my disappointment, leads me to conclude that my attitude to life is not anything like as questioning as it could – or should – be. Reluctantly I conclude that I am not a natural sceptic.

It surely can’t be good to be taken for a sucker - and conversely, a sceptical approach to life and the world would seem to be worth cultivating if it is possible to do so.. I’d like to know for sure whether the key to the “default to doubt” is a symptom of high intelligence, a temperamental inclination, a fine balance of the two - or something which anyone can nurture, possibly even in adult life? Further, if one is prone to question and to doubt in one sphere of life or field of knowledge, can one learn to transfer this approach to another?

Assuming one can train oneself to question assumptions at every turn, is there be a price to pay? I suspect that at the least one might lose friends and have a difficult time at parties. Could I really live without some basic “convictions” (presumably a full-blooded sceptic is always ready to rethink positions about everything – even contingency and openmindedness)? Would I always be willing to let go of arguments beyond the point at which I could logically defend them? Emotions, loyalties and identity can all too easily get in the way of clear thinking, I fear, and can cloud arguments, especially when one is stressed or tired.

Socrates may well have observed that “All I know is that I know nothing”, but this pure scepticism seems to me to be sterile, unproductive and leads nowhere. If you are sceptical about everything you have to be sceptical about your own scepticism – ultimately and unhelpfully you find yourself on the solipsist’s path, doubting whether it is possible to have any knowledge of the external world outside the mind.

There is clearly a tension between the theoretical ways we acquire knowledge (by inductive and deductive reasoning and the empirical method) and the actual manner in which we form, maintain and pass on ideas about the world, which is far more complex. While we know to beware of the bias of so-called experts and authority figures, and to understand the limitations and provisional nature of all sources of information that we acquire we must equally cautious about relying on our own experience. Can we trust our own deepest motivations in pursuing the search for truth? We are all prone to bias arising not only from the limitations of our perception but also of our social and cultural identity. Indeed, and most concerning of all, perhaps, is the possibility that our species has actually evolved in such a way that we find it easier to form beliefs than to criticise them, it being useful for group survival.

The most that I personally can hope for is to develop my own “lite” version of scepticism – to try at least to sharpen up my critical faculties to cope better with the challenges of everyday life: To be more fully aware of media tactics, political propaganda and unscientific claims made about food, medicines, therapies, new technologies would be a start. To become more reliably informed in such areas without at the same time lazily dismissing anomalous views based on too rigid a conception of scientific method would be my aim. Cynical though I maybe about my motivation I’m certainly prepared to try to become more open-minded – and sceptical in my daily life.

***

Penny is currently Chair of Sea of Faith

Rob Wheeler thinks about... Loving your enemies

noreply@blogger.com (Thought Bubbles) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 08:40:00 +0000

I was discussing forgiveness with a Jewish friend who objected to the smug way Christians frequently talk about loving their enemies. "It's all very well for them", he said, "but no one has tried to wipe out their entire race. Am I supposed to love Hitler?" He wasn't advocating unrestrained vengeance but I think he felt that feeling love for someone as monstrous as Hitler was somehow a betrayal of his moral values in general and his own race in particular.

Of course the standard Christian response is to assert that Jesus was not talking about love in the usual sense entailing intense intimacy and warm emotion. His love was a matter of attitude and did not involve "feeling" anything in particular.

But what kind of a love is it that involves no emotional element? Have you ever seen it depicted in a novel? Elsewhere, Jesus talks about the need for his followers to "hate" their father and mother (Luke 14:26). Is this supposed to be a species of "emotionless dislike"? Surely the formula "unemotional love" is just a fudge invented to rationalize what is clearly an absurd imperative. But perhaps that's what it's supposed to be.

I think what Jesus was getting at can be illuminated by considering three features of his teaching that are frequently overlooked.

FIRSTLY, Jesus was not an ethicist let alone a philosopher. He did not promulgate a theory of good action or a systematised code of conduct. He was a rabbi in the Wisdom tradition uttering pithy aphorisms and parables. He had far more in common with Aesop than Aristotle. That's not to say that Jesus did not have general moral principles. He was a first century Jew (not a Christian - note) and derived his ethics from his Judaism. However, when his fellow Jews did not take up Christianity in a big way the apostles, and Paul in particular, altered their marketing strategy and tried selling it to the Gentiles instead - with spectacular success. However, being severed from its Jewish roots, all that was left of Christian ethical teaching was a loose set of out-of-context sayings and stories - hardly enough on which to run a civil state, let alone a private life. Consequently, Christian ethical teaching has, since the earliest days, been a cobbling together of whatever ethical ideas were current in the host society, decorated with the sayings of Jesus to provide them with a specious authority.

The fact is, aphorisms do not embody general principles. They are literary "snapshots" depicting in a vivid manner typical human scenarios and plausible responses. We make a mistake if we treat them as codes of conduct rather than goads to thinking. Take, for example, two very cliched English sayings: "Too many cooks spoil the broth" and "Many hands make light work". If we understand them as general principles they contradict each other. But that's not how they work. They are intended draw our attention to "typical" human situations not "general" ones. "Love your enemies", therefore, should not be read as a universal moral rule. Rather, it is intended to suggest that we adopt the simple attitude of generosity to others - even those with whom we are in conflict. It does not prescribe specific behaviour.

SECONDLY, Jesus, being more of a litterateur than a philosopher, frequently used figures of speech such as deliberate paradox and hyperbole (eg, camels going through eyes of needles and beams of wood in neighbours' eyes). In the case of "loving your enemy" the absurdity and over-statement, and the way that it flies in the face of common sense, is a way of stimulating the listener into reflecting on their relationships with their enemies.

THIRDLY, when Jesus uttered an aphorism it was frequently declared as an antithesis to conventional interpretations of the Jewish tradition. ("In the past you were told... but I tell you..."). In this case Jesus is contrasting loving enemies with the old rule of an eye-for-an-eye. Mind you, the latter was an improvement on previous codes in the Ancient World where it was legitimate to impose greater suffering on the offender than they had caused you in the first place. Here Jesus is saying that we should rachet-up our response to the next level which is to renounce strict calculations of revenge and be open-handed.

So is that it? Is Jesus merely saying "be generous"? Yes - I think that's all it amounts to. Everything else is a reading-back into the words of Jesus our current values and ideals. But "love your enemies" is not a trivial point. It's simply not a complete philosophy of life which, I am afraid, many people look to Jesus for.

Pam Wheeler thinks about… The Good Family

noreply@blogger.com (Bubble Master) — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:51:00 +0000

I grew up in an extended family in Birmingham that was misguidedly scattered throughout the city in waves of slum clearance. My parents struggled with their marriage and parenting in the nuclear family structure enforced upon them. I moved hundreds of miles away at eighteen and never returned. An urgent personal need to search for understanding drove me to train and work professionally with children and families. I made cerebral progress but failed to be able to apply the learning to myself until I had married and given birth to a daughter. It mattered to me to become a good parent and to do so involved leaving the marriage and working hard to prevent my own painful experiences of being parented from being projected on to my child. I found support in friendships and discovered that having to effectively re-parent myself in order to become a good mother has been a healing process. I kept my distance but stayed in extremely limited contact with my family in Birmingham. I am gradually feeling confident enough to increase the contacts and I am contemplating a return to Birmingham after a gap of forty years. What follows summarises my thoughts about what constitutes a good family based on both personal experience and my profession.

To be good, a family need not live under one roof in a single household though reasonable geographical proximity is prerequisite.

It consists of at least three generations of people biologically related yet able to encompass members who are fostered, adopted or intimate friends.

It forms a network that combines resources to achieve key aims and protect shared interests while remaining tolerant and encouraging of individual expression, achievement and difference. It has permeable boundaries and is the resilient base-unit of a good society.

Notions of single-parent, two-parent or same gender partnership families and civil, religious or no marriage, amount to nothing more than rearranging the same furniture in the same interior space.

Members understand that appropriate commitment in the wealth and variety of relationships that exist within the good family yields maximum freedom consistent with personal security, happiness and fulfilment.

Strong boundaries between generations contribute to age-appropriate individual acceptance of responsibility for self and others, the good parenting of children, the supporting of their primary caregivers and the empowerment of members living with disabilities. Within and across generations, members of the good family respect, listen to, learn from and delight in each other.

Every child has one or two primary caregivers to whom she or he is special. Primary caregivers in the good family will have experienced skilled parenting when they were children or will have gained the wisdom to separate their own issues (arising from not having been well parented) when acting in the primary caregiver role. Primary caregivers offer unqualified love. They are consistently available over time and adapt their parenting to the different stages of child development, always facilitating the growth of self-esteem, confidence, special interests and aptitudes, social responsibility, and the capacity for self-sufficiency in the child onwards through adulthood. The good family supports primary caregivers and all adults take active secondary responsibility for the welfare of every child.

Two adults may benefit from being special to each other, taking a particular interest in each other’s well-being, sharing their deepest emotions and innermost thoughts and expressing their sexuality. Sustaining commitment through the turbulence caused by ongoing personal growth and development and the changing needs of each other, also the weathering of crises over time, strengthens the benefits to be gained from such partnerships. They may further thrive through sharing the primary caregiving role towards a child or children. In the good family such partnerships are supported and prevented from being overwhelmed by unrealistic expectations or excessive exclusivity.

The good family does not define a member by any disability or particular strength she or he possesses. All are recognised as equal in terms of basic human needs.

The good family is the repository of learning from preceding generations. It does not become fearful or rejecting when a member faces death. Instead it provides the mutual support necessary to survive and mature through the shared experience of loss, and celebrates the memory of those who die.

The good family thrives best in the good society.

Patti Whaley thinks about... The Future

noreply@blogger.com (Bubble Master) — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:53:00 +0000

Consider PD James' Children of Men not as the rather conventional thriller that it turns out to be, with "The Good Guys" racing to save "The Only Hope for the Human Race" from "The Bad Guys", but as a dystopian thought experiment.

The book's premise, as you doubtless know by now, is that the human race can no longer reproduce, and is condemned to watch itself die a slow, whimpering death. In the first few chapters, before the conventional thriller takes over, PD James takes time to spell out some of the implications of this premise: the ache for children, the loss of interest in sex, the general ennui, the organised group suicides.

For me, this part of the book ended all too soon. Could we go back and explore that a bit further? How much of your life, how many of your daily routines and projects, would cease to have any meaning without an assumed future generation to carry on your work? Would you bother learning anything new? give to charity? campaign, or vote? invest in the stock market? plant trees? recycle your aluminum cans? fall in love and marry?

How many of our jobs would still matter? We would still want food, of course, electricity, cars, dentists, policemen; but would there be much point in the educational system, the legal system, the publishing industry, the campaigning charities, the construction industry, or that huge financial machine known as The City? For politicians, only three or four issues would continue to matter: utilities, care for the elderly, keeping us amused and safe enough to end out our days with a semblance of order and dignity. Would we still have any motivation to be responsible, honorable, unselfish -- or even to get out of bed in the morning?

My point is simple: the implicit future gives meaning to practically everything we do. When environmentalists talk about the need to prevent catastrophic climate change, they often speak about our responsibility to future generations. They invoke this as a general moral principle, a sort of Kantian duty to the unborn that might somehow motivate us to change the way we live now; as if, without this duty, our only care would be to ensure that the end of our own life was comfortable. Après moi le déluge -- or in this case, perhaps, après moi le désert.

If we were religious in the conventional Biblical sense, the end of civilisation might not matter to us; perhaps God means it to end anyway, and besides the meaning for our lives would lie in our eternal life, not in this temporal one. But for most of us, any meaning we have lies in this life, because there is no other. We know this, and are no longer surprised at it. What we don't so often articulate is how much of that meaning is tied up with an assumption of continuing life. Not our own personal lives, which will come to an end; but the continuation of human civilization -- imperfect, of course, but still somehow splendid, and still striving to be better. Our lives rest on this assumption as surely as the lives of conventional Christians rest in God; we might even say, to borrow from orthodox theology, that the future is that in which we live and move and have our being.

"Time past and time future", wrote Eliot, "point to one end, which is always present." Why pretend to worry about the future unborn? If civilisation dies out before they are born, they will never know the difference. The real focus of concern is ourselves, our own lives. We think about the future, campaign for it, invest in it, worry about it, practically all the time; our lives would be empty without it. So forget some falsely unselfish duty to some vague future generation: saving the future is really about saving ourselves -- from meaninglessness, from emptiness, from the end of hope. "I can understand now", says PD James' hero, "how the aristocrats and great landowners with no hope of posterity leave their estates untended...Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses...seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defenses shored up against our ruins."

***
Patti currently works as Director of Resources for Forum for the Future. Prior to working at the Forum she worked at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, initially as Director of Information Technology and subsequently as Deputy Secretary General.

"Grumpy Old Man" thinks about... Failure

noreply@blogger.com (Bubble Master) — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:21:00 +0000

I know a thing or two about failure, and how it gets in the way. Three attempts at my driving test; re-sits in my O Levels (as they then were); pretty poor A Levels; general low ability or attention-span or something, preventing me following one ambition, to be a Barrister. Poor eyesight getting in the way of the other two: entry to the Navy as a deck officer, which I should have liked, and to the Air Force as a pilot, which I should have LOVED.

Apart from the above, life has been pretty good, I suppose!

So what is all this rant about? Basically, I am getting quite worn down by the PC sort of drive by/within society at every level to deny failure. Where Hoodies cause havoc; where parents (young inadequate ones generally) grossly neglect their children; where released criminals and/or “loonies” attack and kill the innocent - it's never their fault as such; it's "poor home life"; "lack of appropriate support agencies". Turn the spotlight on the “support agencies: the armies of Police, Probation Officers, Social Workers, Health Visitors and so on. Its always some “breakdown in communication“, never anybody’s fault, never failure (of “systems” maybe) but never of/by the people responsible.

According to the clear-cut terminology of 40 years ago, you "Passed", or you "Failed" - simple as that. Passing your Eleven Plus meant advance to GO - collect a future. Failing your Eleven Plus meant do not advance to GO (possibly, in some cases, go straight to jail (albeit with a few years at a Comprehensive in between). As I am not in jail you will gather that (exceptionally for me) I passed!

I now work in Higher Education, at a "New University". Perhaps because it is "New", though I am led to believe this is not so, the word failure is just not allowed. Much too final-seeming. Much too upsetting for the student, his/her family and friends and so on. Those students who cannot reach the (to my mind) pathetically low 30% which affords them the possibility of condonement in a subject, are said to have been "Referred": given a re-sit as the chance to retrieve the situation. And believe me, a reported mark of less than 30% really takes some getting down to, so enormous is the economic pressure (the need for "bums on seats" - fee income) and the desire to satisfy "the customer" (the student or his/her sponsor). Academic integrity is thrown straight out of the window by my bosses in favour of a blanket policy of ordering us to fix the marks to arrive at a "respectable" average pass rate. No matter how lazy such low-performing students may be - most making no effort whatsoever to prepare between lecture and seminar, and possibly in some cases none for exams either - they get in through the back door in this way. Thus, a mark of 30 becomes 40 to produce a pass, or 20 becomes 30 (a 50% "mark-up") to facilitate condonement.

In my own day as an undergraduate on this same course (you will have seen this next bit coming) one had to obtain an overall average in any year of 50%, 40% in each subject, two re-sits maximum. How many of us progressed from Year One to Year Two? 18 out of 35. Nowadays, to progress to the next year, a student need only get an overall average of 40%, and can fail a number of modules, (oops, wrong word, sorry!) provided they catch up before they leave.

I am reminded here of the old chestnut about an airline pilot who when faced with landing his plane suddenly announced that he’d missed the week when they were learning how to land! Similar jokes relate to medics and certain surgical procedures. I can’t help thinking it fortunate that the subject I teach is not of life-or-death importance to the world as I "certify" so many folk who don’t know much about it!

What does this lead to? Cause for another TBubble perhaps on the "Blame Culture" – whereby nobody is responsible for their own fate? "Ambulance chasing" lawyers encourage us to claim for every bit of bad luck whatever befell us. We sue McDonalds for not warning us that, in excess, their foods will make us fat... and so on!

What has this last to do with failure? It is the outcome of telling ourselves, telling each other, that nothing is OUR fault. WE are not to blame. It cannot be that WE have failed to take responsibility for our lives; there must be somebody else out there we can blame.

***
The writer of this Grumpy Old Thought Bubble is a 53 year old lecturer in Higher Education. Wishing not to "fail" to retain employment he has asked for his name to remain anonymous. (Rumour has it that he has been approached by the Daily Mail. They like his style!)