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.

David Paterson thinks about... The Love of Wisdom

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.

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

Rob Wheeler thinks about... The Impossibilility of God

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

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.