Eyre Lines

There is a line of thinking, including Slavoj Zizek, Todd McGowan and Peter Rollins, very much based in one interpretation of Hegel, which claims that there is a split, or divide, or rupture, or antagonism, or inconsistency which is ontologically part of existence – in other words, it is fundamental to things as they exist.

I have difficulty with this concept for a number of reasons. Firstly, I’m a mystic, and a part of many if not all mystics’ viewpoint of the world is that it is fundamentally non-dual, i.e. not essentially divided at all. I don’t, of course, have any basis for claiming this to anyone who isn’t themselves a mystic. They don’t have access to the mode of perception which yields this insight (and yes, I acknowledge that that insight might be flawed, though it is massively difficult for me to work on the basis that it is).

Secondly, I’ve a strong tendency to accept Kant’s determination (inasmuch as I understand him) that we cannot know things in themselves (ding an sich) and thus any ontology we may put forward is inevitably speculative, something which may or may not be the case but which cannot be proved to be the case. In this Kant is very much in agreement with David Hume, who I can read much more easily than I can Kant. Under this proviso, the most an ontology of division or antagonism could be is a speculation – but in that case, the only reason for adopting it would be that it was useful in producing other concepts about reality which had practical application.

What, however, is the outcome of assuming such a division? Principally, it might possibly help to explain such phenomena as wave-particle duality, quantum uncertainty or even, perhaps, the outcome of Godel’s incompleteness theorem. Possibly also the “bicameral mind” or the ego/superego conflict in human psychology.

And yet, my own assumption about our conceptual structures is that language (which is, let’s face it, what we have to work with – I don’t think painting a picture would assist all that much, nor writing a piece of music) is fundamentally inadequate to express the fullness of what actually exists. Again, I’ll pray in aid Godel, this time as a fundamental principle – any system of thinking (ok, any system sufficiently complex to incorporate mathematics) cannot at the same time be consistent and complete. Either there will be an inconsistency or there will be actualities which the system cannot describe adequately.

What’s more, human thought always starts with a division into this and not-this (the archetypal essay question which starts “compare and contrast…” springs to mind. Derrida famously opined that all concepts are dependent on other concepts, this being the simplest example – defining something by what it is not. It brings to mind an issue I had when I started working with a UV-vis spectrophotometer in the lab where I worked part time for a while. I noticed rather rapidly that all my traces for a particular chemical had a radical disconinuity in them at one point, and was musing aloud about what might produce that, when my partner-in-chemistry told me that at that wavelength, the machine switched bulbs. Thus, the discontinuity was not in the spectrum, it was an artefact of the measuring apparatus. Of course, it is only reasonable to consider our minds as part of the measuring apparatus as well – and if our concept-structures have a radical discontinuity (i.e. an inbuilt desire to divide and separate, rather like an old bra advert claimed of its product) then we should be cautious in speculating that there is also a radical discontinuity in what we are observing.

My third difficulty is that among the various speculative ontologies on offer, Whitehead’s process ontology seems to offer the best fit for modern Physics (my degree subject before I went over to the dark side and studied Law). Process emphasises movement and development rather than static things (substances) with qualities or essences and relation, such that it is difficult to “think process” and also think that there are hard and fast divisions between things. It fits wonderfully, for example, with quantum non-locality (which is so far away from substance ontology as to be near-opposite). Incidentally, Kant regarded substance as a fiction – but bearing in mind that any speculative scheme is, in a way, a fiction, that doesn’t say as much as it might appear to. Of course, I don’t rule out the possibility that more than one ontology may be needed to explain what we observe – after all, I cut my teeth on wave-particle duality!

I have a substantial sympathy with the position of nominalism – not so much that of the mediaeval scholastics, but as espoused by Carnap, whose ideas about scientific method seem pretty reasonable to me. It does seem to me that what we can actually claim exists is particulars (granted, under process, those are moving targets…) and that generalities (universals) are drawn from those and have something of the character of a cartoon image – they are recognisably linked with the real things, but lack something in the process of making it more widely applicable. We can agree that yes, Tom and Jerry are respectively a cat and a mouse, but not any actual cat or mouse – which enables the cartoon characters to do things which would be impossible for real animals.

Here’s my question, though. How would you go about deciding whether any particular division/split/rupture/antagonism/inconsistency was baked into the structure of reality, or was an artefact of human cognition with no actual reality? I’m at a loss to see how we could…

“Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries “Hold! Enough!””
Macbeth, act 5 scene 8

I have written before about needs and wants in relation to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and about property, and whether it can be considered a right. I’m currently following a Philosophy Portal course on the early Marx, which has got as far as Marx’s papers on the antithesis of capital and labour and on private property and labour. The two pieces do interlock – if, as I posit in the second post, the claim that anything is mine which I am not actually using at the time is dubious (the distinction between Heidegger’s “zuhanden”, something which I am actually using, and his “forhanden”, something which is available but not actually in use), it is definitely arguable that by asserting my ownership of things I am not actually using, I am in a way (certainly according to Proudhon) stealing them from people who could be using them. Private property, in other words, is theft.

Maslow’s hierarchy works like this. There are, at the bottom, physiological needs (air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing and reproduction). Next come safety needs (personal security, employment, resources, health and property – OK, that last I’d suggest should only be what Marx identifies as personal property, i.e. everything within the zuhanden category and a fair amount of the forhanden, on the basis that those might well be in frequent use, just not at this moment). Then comes love and belonging, esteem and finally self-actualisation.

I would argue that physiological needs should be regarded as a basic human right, and one which a society with any claim to be civilised should ensure for all its citizens. In conscience, once those have been satisfied, one could argue that the “safety” level is contra “take no thought for the morrow” as Jesus enjoins. It’s to at least some extent “surplus”. As I outline in the first of those pieces, I spent a good deal of my life ensnared by a feeling that I needed to ensure that security not just for today, but permanently. It’s what James Clavell, in “Noble House”, refers to as having “drop dead money” – the ability to tell anyone who asks you to do something to “drop dead”, because you don’t need whatever they are offering you. You already have enough.

Now Marx paints a picture of the capitalist as someone who can never have enough. Mahatma Gandhi asserted, “the world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed” and Marx would no doubt have agreed. Marx also, and I think much more reasonably, argues that the capitalist most fears losing his capital and becoming a worker, or possibly one of the homeless. Given that most of the people I know have the bulk of their supposed capital “invested” in the house they live in (and that certainly applies to me), the two are perhaps pretty much synonymous. In the case of the majority of people, wanting a bit more is probably more likely to be due to insecurity than to greed, which I note is a deadly sin, whether under the name of greed/avarice or gluttony (envy is part of that set as well, for a possible trifecta of sins). But the very rich are well beyond the point where that kind of insecurity is remotely logical. They could lose 99% of their wealth and still be comfortable for life.

I have a great deal of sympathy with those who suggest that once someone has reached the status of billionaire* they should be taxed the entire additional amount which they receive over, say, a million a year and be given a medal saying “I won capitalism”. I might not want to go as far as either the Marxian elimination of private property (as opposed to personal) or my musing in the second piece, but that sounds eminently reasonable to me. My own target for “drop dead money” was a million pounds, back in the 1990s. It would arguably have to be more now, were it not for the fact that I am now looking at a definitely limited number of years during which I might need any of it, and frankly, were my wife and myeslf to sell our house, we could live off the sale price for 30 years or more, assuming a lack of rampant inflation – and I don’t expect to make 100.

So I don’t really understand the mindset which already has, say, a billion pounds in assets, multiple houses and yachts and no need to do anything (other than, I’d argue, the moral obligation to plough some of the money back into good causes) but carries on trying to get more, to expand their interests and their money at the expense of everyone else (even their fellow billionaires). Is it, at least in part, due to Girardian mimetic desire (my neighbour has more than I do so I need to have more)? In that respect, I’ve written about my very wise mother’s influence on me, trying to remove mimetic desire from me (largely successfully). Is it because they are drunk on power (money is power – the ability to buy anyone who hasn’t yet got their version of “drop dead money” is incredibly damaging to society, particularly when it reaches the point of being able to buy governments)? Or is it because they are desperately and illogically fearful of not having enough?

So, to the billionaires, I say “hold, enough”. Stop what you’ve been doing and enjoy the fruits of your labours. Stop buying politicians. Stop buying up the labour of anyone who is creative (billionaires typically make money because they’ve bought the time of people who actually innovate, where the billionaire doesn’t). Let other people (or companies) compete with the thing which made you rich, rather than try to bankrupt them or buy them up so they don’t compete any more.

And yes, I suppose I’ll be damned for this argument!

 

*Billionaire in dollars, pounds or euros – there was a time before Italy entered the Euro when I was arguably close to being a Lire billionaire, and I was certainly a Lire millionaire. But then, in those days, new cars cost over a million Lire…

I’ve been watching the “no kings” protests in the USA with a lot of sympathy. I am not in favour of individuals with arbitrary power over others, or indeed any power which is not checked by some neutral third party. That is exactly the reason why the USA has three branches of government, executive, legislature and judiciary, and the function of the judiciary is to prevent abuses of their position by the executive or legislature. Although it isn’t enshrined in a constitution in the same way as in the States, the UK also has a judiciary which is not afraid to curb excesses of executive power, albeit there have been some shifts in what the legislature allows the courts to do in this respect which have somewhat curbed the courts’ abilities. In the States, in theory a constitutional amendment would be necessary to limit the courts in the same way, so I am distressed to see the US Supreme Court disallowing injunctions against governmental actions in the lower courts and by procedural changes which would render it prohibitively expensive to mount such actions.

But I’m not American, so this is not my circus, not my monkeys.

However, quite a bit of the rhetoric around “No Kings” has brought up again the allegations in the Declaration of Independence regarding King George III, including imposing taxes without consent, cutting off trade, obstructing justice, quartering troops, and waging war against the colonists. Indeed, the DOI paints George as a complete tyrant.

The thing is, no king of England after 1649 has seriously attempted to wield that kind of power. 1649 is, of course the year when our Parliament decided to chop off Charles I’s head for attempting many of those abuses, which had progressively become outside the accepted power of a monarch over the previous 400 years or so. His son James II, after the restoration of the monarchy, displayed some similar impulses, largely around attempting to reverse the country’s adoption of Protestantism, and was quietly deposed in favour of his daugher Mary, who was both safely protestant and married to William of Orange, who was well schooled in being a very limited monarch in his home country (the Netherlands).

Charles I’s elder son, Charles II, is said to have summed up his position well in a counter to a ditty which said “Here lies our mutton-eating King/whose word no man relies on/ who never said a foolish thing/nor ever did a wise one”, to which Charles responded “My sayings are my own, my actions are my ministers”. That was fairly true of him (let’s face it, look what happened to his brother) but became progressively more true over following years, to the extent that by 100 years later, it really wasn’t true that George III could be regarded as tyrannical – at least, not in repect of Britain. He was also King of Hanover, where he had significantly greater power, including raising troops.

To quote from Wikipedia, “Up to this point, in the words of Professor Peter Thomas, George’s “hopes were centred on a political solution, and he always bowed to his cabinet’s opinions even when sceptical of their success. The detailed evidence of the years from 1763 to 1775 tends to exonerate George III from any real responsibility for theAmerican Revolution.” That point was the Intolerable Acts, which I deal with in the next paragraph.

Of course, that is not to say that the colonists didn’t have legitimate grievances, just that those grievances were, in truth, against the parliament of Great Britain and the ministers which that parliament proposed to the King. A succession of Prime Ministers were responsible (with the support of parliament) including George Grenville, Lord Rockingham, William Pitt the elder, the Duke of Grafton and finally Lord North. North was largely responsible for what the colonists called “the Intolerable Acts”, which were designed to punish Massachusetts for dumping tea in Boston harbour, and instead lit the blue touch paper which led to outright rebellion with, of course, the backing of parliament. Of course, the “tea party” was a reaction to the imposition of taxes (which had mostly not previously been levied), notably on tea and on documents requiring a “stamp” – which included newsapapers, so especially angering those most likely to have independence-oriented thoughts. From the British side, they had just won the Seven Years War, ending the threat to the colonies from the French possessions in Québec, Acadia and Louisiana, and wanted the colonies to contribute to the cost of that war.

I think my main message at this point is “Yes, Trump is bad, and he’s acting like the version of a king which the colonists complained about – but please don’t compare him with George III, who was caught in the ‘my actions are my ministers’ trap”. Trump would be better compared with one of the mediaeval kings – possibly Edward II (who I note was deposed and quietly murdered). My secondary message is “Act like this, and the consequences could include losing your head”.

I can’t, however, leave the topic without putting forward a couple of other things the colonists were probably offended by, but which aren’t mentioned in the DOI. The first is the 1763 proclamation by the King (acting as instructed by his prime minister) that westward expansion of the colonies should cease, the westward territory becoming an Indian reserve (in part in thanks to the Indians for support in the war against the French). Stopping the colonists going west would not have been popular, though it’s dubious whether the proclamation could have carried any weight. The second is more subtle. In 1772, the English court of Kings Bench decided Somersett’s case, which determined that slavery was not part of English law and thus a slave brought to England automatically became free. I don’t expect that the colonists were concerned that floods of slaves would cross to England and become free, but that case was effectively the “writing on the wall” – slavery was going to be abolished by Britain. Admittedly, various cases after that sought to distinguish Somersett and roll back the principle, but in 1807 Britain abolished the slave trade and in 1833 abolished slavery throughout British possessions*. It would take another war for that to happen in the USA.

Benjamin Franklin wrote after Somersett’s case “O Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single Slave that happens to land on thy coasts, while thy Merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity!” as part of a trend of writers to seize on the case and extend its principle – clearly at least one of the founding fathers was well acquainted with that movement of sentiment, though I note that the charge of hypocrisy could have been levelled at the slave-owning Franklin.

*The government compensated the slave owners, taking a huge loan for the purpose – which was finally paid off in 2015…

I’ve long had the view that the earlier parts of the Bible tend to display a god-concept which, to me, looks uncomfortably like an old-fashioned oriental despot. That isn’t remotely consistent with my peak mystical experiences, which include something like omnibenevolence as well as a well of power which could wipe me out in an instant – but which eventuality is never going to happen, to me or anyone else (much as I might think some people deserve that*).

I’ve tended to view this as an inevitable result of what a people with only very undeveloped concepts of societal organisation and power thinking about an entity (if that’s the right word) with a level of power which would have to be described as divine would come up with. Let’s face it, the Greek and Roman gods were generally thought of as arbitrary, picking favourites and generally behaving in a manner which in a human would be considered despicable in any reasonably liberal circles. I’ve been encouraged by the biblical counter-narrative which, I think, becomes more prominent the later the writing is through the Hebrew scriptures, of real omnibenevolence, underlined by the narrative of Jesus’ statements which tend overwhelmingly in the direction of love – neighbours, yes, but even enemies (such as Samaritans and Romans).

And yet… I’ve looked at the recent career of Donald Trump and seen the relentless self-aggrandisement and fawning (and entirely misplaced) adulation of his Republican MAGA supporters, and thought that if one only had their narrative to work with, Trump would be seen as all-knowing, all-powerful (which he’s uncomfortably close to being, so far as an individual human can be) and as the best thing since sliced bread, and I think about the narrative which has God nearly wipe out humanity shortly after the start of the narrative and then repeatedly command the wiping out of other nations – Amalekites, Philistines, Moabites and more. (And who arguably condemns the whole of humanity on the basis of one bad choice by a couple of people who on the face of the story lacked the knowledge of good and evil…) And I wonder whether just possibly that is the true situation…

Faced with a despotic and erratic ruler, one would naturally think of praising their mercy and kindness in the perhaps vain hope that they might be flattered and show something like that.

Of course, historical despots always ruled because the people permitted and encouraged their behaviour, which tended to be accompanied by wild statements about their personal characteristics (to avoid their narcissistic wrath), and also (because people on the whole had a shrewd suspicion that the emperor had no clothes) with a rapid turning on anyone who suggested that the despot was in some way flawed. I see suggestions that criticising Trump should result in penalties up to and including imprisonment and deportation and shudder. Sadly, I see a lot of self-proclaimed Christians spending a LOT of time praising God and perhaps even more criticising or fighting people who don’t share their opinion – and I have in mind that we still have blasphemy laws in my country. As if an omnipotent deity could be in the slightest way harmed by some random human’s ideas, even if expressed (say) as vigorously as by a Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

I think my worry is unfounded. But I think the evidence shows that quite a lot of my fellow Christians think that God is actually like that…

* I do hold open the possibility that all will not be saved because some will choose oblivion rather than fellowship with God – and more importantly people they hate… which leads me to wonder whether, if offered oblivion or eternal fellowship with the Trump-like god-concept, I wouldn’t choose oblivion.

I’ve repeatedly been asked by individuals I’ve met for the first time or by groups I’ve joined to give a short explanation of where I’m coming from in religious (and sometimes philosophical) terms, and in conscience, all my attempts to do that briefly have been more or less failures. One online group, for instance, decided to label me “atheist”, which is, I suppose, correct for several God-concepts which I don’t or  can’t easily bring myself to use (such as the supernatural “Mr. Fix-it” – “the god who wears his knickers outside his tights”, as I’ve put it) but which is horribly misleading. As this doesn’t have to be an elevator pitch, I feel able to expand the narrative – no doubt too much!

Where I am is, in short, a mostly retired septuagenarian (inasmuch as I’m not retired or caring for a disabled wife, I’m a part-time theological editor and an occasional consultant with a company doing research and development in industrial chemistry – plus I’ve written a couple of books, one published (“A Holy Mystery” on the Trinity) and one, currently undergoing an agonisingly long editing process, on the development of the UK parliamentary system. My best subject at school (i.e. aged 18) was History, I did a degree in Physics (theoretical option) and then went to Law College. Any expertise I have in theology and biblical studies probably emanates from several years as chief moderator (“sysop”) of the Christianity section of the Religion Forum of Compuserve (and now, I suppose, AoL). Oh, and I’m a mystic (had it not been for that, I’d probably have remained a completely secular reductive materialist). Probably a panentheist, for want of any better term. I’ve written a lot about mystical experience, which you can find by searching “mystic” in this blog and also here.

A fuller history is definitely needed… and parts of it probably echo some of the thinking behind James Burke’s “Connections” series, which I recommend. It’s maybe a bit dated now, coming from the 70s to 90s, but I love the way in which it shows how various events which you’d think were unconnected gave rise to scientific or technological discoveries.

I was born a preacher’s kid; my father was a Methodist lay preacher (like his father and grandfather before him) and my mother soloed frequently with the church choir. As such, I was obviously going to be packed off to Sunday school at the earliest possible opportunity. I think that was when I was about 4.

The thing was, I was a precocious little toerag, and asked questions all the time, and the explanations given by the Sunday School teachers didn’t remotely satisfy me. This led to me being, by about the age of 7, an atheist. Everything they were telling me was, to my mind, somewhere between bunk and fairy story. What is more, I was an evangelical athiest. Had Richard Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists been well-known at the time, I’d probably have been a great fan, but this was around 1960, and “The Selfish Gene” didn’t arrive until 1976. Being evangelical about it meant, of course, that I tried to persuade my fellow Sunday School students – and the teachers – that they too should be atheists. At 9 I parted company with Sunday School “by mutual agreement”, which is to say the School asked my parents not to send me there any more, and I was only too delighted not to go.

I had absolutely no thought at the time that this was a huge embarrassment to my parents. It also stopped mum singing in the choir, which she loved to do. Remember – toerag…

Anyhow, I went through school preferring scientific subjects, or at least somewhat scientific ones. I included history in that, not only because I was pretty good at it but because it seemed to me to deal with human behaviour in a way that, say, biology didn’t (psychology, sociology and politics were not offered at my school in those days). I read Machiavelli and Clausewitz (OK, I also read some Nietzsche). I was enthused about reductive scientific materialism as promising to explain everything, in due time. That was a part of my later decision to do a degree in Physics (rather than History, which was actually my better subject), plus a naive belief that STEM subjects were best for a future career.

And then, aged 13 or 14, I was lying on my bed during the summer vacation, appreciating the sun streaming through the window and, for a moment, setting on one side the book I was reading (I’ve no memory of what it was, but in those days I was reading all the 3 books I was allowed weekly from the library and also all the 6 books my parents got out – so it might have been SF or fantasy, it might have been adventure or crime, or it could have been history or biography). And something happened.

It was, as I later pieced together, a peak mystical experience. It was what Jean-Luc Marion describes as a “saturated phenomenon”. The boundaries of self disappeared, and left me at the same time conscious of being nothing beside the immensity of whatever it was I was experiencing and at the same time one with it, so all and nothing simultaneously. I fancied myself able to see for miles – light years, indeed – and nearby things with a kind of x-ray vision. Smell, touch and taste were likewise overwhelmed. And it was ecstatic. I’ve since written that it was “better than sex, drugs and rock & roll” – I couldn’t have written that then, because I hadn’t experienced any of them.

As I wrote about here, I had strong suspicions that something had gone seriously wrong with me. However, my GP seemed to think I was neurologically OK, and I could eliminate all of the likely candidates for producing similar experiences “artificially”. I might well have written it off as “just one of those things”, as quite a few people I’ve spoken with who have turned out to have had a somewhat similar experience and were not religious have done, but shortly after that my parents happened to take me to a lecture given by a local schoolteacher entitled “The mystical experience” and I listened rapt as he described accounts of experiences which were somewhat similar to mine. He made reference to a book by F.C. Happold “Mysticism: a Study and an Anthology” which I proceeded to go and buy, and I was cemented in my belief that what had happened to me was, indeed, a mystical experience. OK, a lot of the mystics in that book were Christian, which brought in, quite often, language with which I wasn’t comfortable, but Happold’s premise was that this was a form of experience which was common to very many religious traditions, and people’s accounts inevitably brought in some of the baggage of their belief-systems. And most of the mystics referred to this as an experience of God.

The thing was, it was a very good experience indeed, and I wanted more of the same. As a friend from the Religion Forum later commented, I was Jonesing for a repeat – addictive after one dose! Thus I spent a lot of time in my late teens and university years trying to find ways of producing similar experience. This was, admittedly, a form of sensation-seeking. (FWIW, most of the commonly used psychedelics weren’t available to me at the time, and the few I was offered were, frankly, disappointing compared with that initial experience.) I turned more to tinkering with physical conditions, to regimes of meditation and to playing with various concept-structures in an attempt to promote a repeat. I eventually decided that, while various things (some of them positively dangerous, such as partial asphyxiation) could probably increase the likelihood of a peak experience, but none, singly or in combination, could guarantee it. However, I did, over some years, arrive at a position where I could more or less at will drop into a meditative state which had much the same characteristics, although at a much lower intensity (I called this the “edge” of a full blooded mystical experience). It did have the major advantage that I could actually be in such a state and do other things at the same time!

Very occasionally, I had further peak experiences – maybe another three or four in total. One massively important take-home from these was that, as in such experience I perceived the boundary between myself and others as being at least somewhat fictional, what I did to others I was effectively doing to myself. From this (or possibly a side effect of the experience, or both) emerged a huge dose of empathy, which was something of a shock to the previously self-centered Chris (that’s when I started apologising to my parents…) Another was that in the process of the first peak experience, my whole life to date seemed exposed to me, and presented for judgment – and again, this was a major shock to the system. Indeed, it seemed to me as if this was the judgment referred to in the gospels, rather than anything in the remote future. I was, I may say, not very impressed with myself! I changed quite a bit as a result of these intuitions – and it’s worth mentioning that all this was very much a self-verifying experience – it felt absolutely true. Even if, with hindsight, I can question whether some of the information content was actually veridical, I would require a lot of evidence against it in order not to feel that I had been given an insight into the way things actually are.

I was at the same time exploring many religious traditions not just to appropriate their contemplative practices but also in an attempt to find language of expression for what I’d experienced beyond what a small group of mystics could offer. Generally I avoided the Christian ones, as I still had something of a revulsion towards that kind of language. I did find that Buddhism (particularly Zen), Taoism and Advaita Vedanta seemed to have the “best fit” for my experience, but in order to adopt any of those properly, I’d have to learn the culture (and possibly language) which they came from – and I was on the one hand somewhat lazy and on the other devoid of groups of practitioners of any of them in my area (that was then – now we have a Buddhist centre less than 10 miles away!). I thus gravitated towards speaking of mystical experience in broadly Christian language without accepting many of the biblical story-structures. However, I also kept several other concept-structures, including the kabbalistic one (not much like the American appropriation of kabbalah…) and some aspects of the Western systems of ritual magic (after all, one ritual within that was “to attain the knowledge and conversation of your holy guardian angel”!).

And there I left things for quite a while. After determining that Physics didn’t promise me the career path I had hoped for (partly because I’d found myself most interested in an area of Physics which wasn’t a grant magnet, partly because I was unsure that my maths was up to that area) I went to Law College, qualified as a solicitor, got married to a lady whose interests didn’t include the kind of practices I’d been playing with – in truth, a “cultural Christian” – and got involved in local politics.

In the interests of displaying “connections”, I was sharing a G&T with my former Religious Instruction teacher (who introduced me to Aquinas while I was still at school) in an university vacation when the subject of politics came up, and I said I had no-one to vote for. “But” he said “There’s always a Labour and a Conservative candidate”. “Yes”, I replied “But I don’t like either of them”. He, for what it’s worth, was also a local Labour councillor at Town and District level. I admitted to liking the Liberals (having been pitchforked into representing them at a school mock election some years earlier and, to most people’s surprise, winning – and converting myself to supporting them, having been deluged with policy statements and election materials, which none of the other parties offered their candidates). He suggested that if I had no Liberal candidate to vote for (and there hadn’t been a Liberal, i.e. third party, candidate locally since the 1940s) I should stand myself, and even suggested which ward I should stand for. So I got reluctant agreement from the supposedly local Liberal party, which was run from and centered about 15 miles away, to run my own campaign under their banner. The second time of trying, I got elected – with a wafer-thin majority which I kept up for the next four elections. (Jude swore me to secrecy about him having suggested that I stand and in which ward, but he’s now retired from politics so it’s probably OK).

This meant that after about eight years on the council, my turn came up to be mayor for a year. The council had been split between Labour and Conservative pretty much equally for decades, and the two parties had agreed that each councillor be offered the position of mayor once everyone who had been elected before them (and wanted to take the position) had been mayor. As it happened, four of the councillors who predated me and hadn’t had a turn while I was there were no longer on the council by then, so my turn came up earlier than the 11 years I’d have expected.

The first official engagement was the twinning trip to Carentan in Normandy, and I was told I’d have to make a speech at the twinning dinner. In French. Now, French had been one of my bunch of A-levels, so I thought that would be easy. I sat down in front of a blank sheet of paper – and three hours later got up from a still blank piece of paper. I found some inspiration then – a friend who had a French wife and spoke French at home – and I asked him to help me with a speech.

He performed magnificently, with a speech in perfect colloquial French with suitable political jokes, and I started on making sure I understood all of it and could pronounce it decently (I’d done a French exchange trip with my school in my teens, and the family I was with spent all their efforts on improving my accent, which more or less came back to me). When we got to Carentan I found they’d recently had a calamity when an arsonist set fire to part of their Town Hall, and inserted a line about that into the speech. On the night, I delivered it, and then set off back to my seat, at which one of the French members stopped me and said “I don’t think all of our English visitors will have understood that – could you do it again in English”. So I did – and it was obvious that I was translating it in the process.

So the French reaction was “Here’s a young(ish) English mayor who comes here, writes a speech in colloquial French (because of the town hall reference it was assumed to date from during the visit), not translated from English, and gives it in a pretty fair accent. He’s fluent! Which was, of course, far from the truth, but earned me another speech, this time extempore, at the other end of the trip (for which I rehashed some of the introductory speech and cut it short). The next year the French came to us, and I got asked to translate. Simultaneously, in two cases. I have the greatest possible respect for simultaneous translators – it’s a completely different skill set from just speaking another language, and an order of magnitude more difficult! (No, I didn’t do a particularly good job).

I therefore felt I could do to keep up my French between twinning trips, and went into Compuserve’s forums, looking for French language ones. The Canada Forum Quebec section, for instance. The Foreign Languages forum French section. And the same in the European Forum.

In the European Forum I found myself after some time discussing religion with a set of French and Belgian atheists. My argument, very gently developed, was that there was a form of experience of something – I labelled it [    ], as a something yet to be named, a box (which, incidentally could eventually hold the letters d-i-e-u), and many of them actually agreed that yes, they had felt/experienced something roughly similar to what I described – something numinous, perhaps, something surprising, something really rather wonderful. I likened it to the feeling of “getting” a joke, of discovering something new, perhaps in science, to the impact of wide stretches of nature or that of great art or architecture. Perhaps the contents of the box were just a mirror in which we saw ourselves for the first time? And they went along with me until I tried to stick the letters d-i-e-u on it as a label, at which point they universally back-pedalled like crazy.

A friend remarked on me doing this (the thread “Dieu?” had gone on for over a year and several thousand messages) and invited me to come and argue with some of the resident atheists in the MENSA forum – she was a staff member there. I demurred, as I’m not a MENSA member (I never took the test – another friend did and got rejected, and I avoided it out of solidarity) but was cajoled into doing so. I didn’t restrict myself to religion, of course, but was the resident “token theist”. There it might have stuck, but the friend who invited me had a major falling-out with some of the other staff and left in high dudgeon, and again out of solidarity I left with her – and having the urge to carry on discussing religion, went to the Religion Forum. That was the scene of lots of atheist -v- fundamentalist spats, and I decided to try to calm the waters and see (as I had in EurFor) if I could find some common ground, and hopefully stop all the fundys getting banned for passing moral judgment on everyone else, and sometimes each other. After about two weeks I got invited to become a sysop (moderator) with particular responsibility for the Christianity section. I complained that I did not self-identify as a Christian, and was told “Not to worry, you seem to have the respect of both the atheists and the fundys”.

RF had, some time earlier, absorbed the Free Thought forum, which meant there were a couple of sections devoted to atheism and free-thinking, and the denizens of the Christianity section used to stray into those, and into the Judaism section, and try to convert people – which was hugely frowned on, and also invited forays from the Jews and Atheists into the Christianity section (less frequently into the then Episcopalian or RC sections). I was in the UK, so well-suited to pick up late-night forays by US or Canadian posters, so got to be a more general sweeper-up of arguments, and where possible, conciliator of them.

After about a year, I got private messages more or less at the same time from two Anglican lay readers who were regulars, both telling me that I was most definitely a Christian (granted, from their liberal-Christian standpoint). I argued, but came to kind of agree with them – then one of them added “And you see moderating this forum as a pastoral mission”. Which I denied flatly. But after thinking about it, I had to agree with that as well. I should stress that none of the fundamentalist Christians I was exchanging messages with would have been likely to admit that I was a Christian – the best I could maybe do was “heretic”. But by their standards, I was pretty much indistinguishable from the forum atheists!

A few years doing that gave me well over the mythical “10,000 hours” talking Christianity – it was at the time a very active forum, putting on maybe a couple of thousand messages a day. That was in the days when Compuserve was a subscription service; when AoL took over and opened the forums to general unpaid access, the quality of discussion declined markedly, the regular members went elsewhere, and while the forum still survives (sort of), it doesn’t have the message count or interest which it did in those days.

Fast forward a little more, and I had a bit of a mental collapse following the legal system turning and biting me – indeed, I was deeply clinically depressed for something like 17 years in all, had a generalised anxiety disorder and was diagnosed with PTSD into the bargain. Being an intelligent kind of guy, I tried self-medicating depression and anxiety with alcohol, a depressive drug which makes you anxious when you stop taking it, and that gave me a fourth problem to deal with. That led to the collapse of my legal practice, insolvency and institutionalisation for some time, from which I emerged in 2013, unable to resume practice as a solicitor or, indeed, anything which involved even trivial levels of stress. I need to thank AA and NA, despite not being a poster boy for either, for helping me get out of one of those problems, and The Retreat in York (now closed) and Dr. Gill Smith for helping me with the others. I still have many contacts in the twelve-step and mental health communities, and do some volunteer work with my local NHS mental health trust.

Incidentally, AA and my church both thought that they were probably responsible for my abrupt exit from the deepest depression. However, that had involved me changing antidepressant (due to a shortage of the previous one) and being put on sertraline. After about a week I was significantly worse, and I made an urgent GP appointment and pleaded for her to do something, as I didn’t feel safe for myself, and possibly others (she said she’d watched me walk up the corridor to her, and that was sufficient for her to be convinced she needed to do something…). She switched me to mirtazipine, ramping down the sertraline as I upped the mirtazipine – and the day after I took the first mirtazipine, not only did I not feel depressed, I was manic, and stayed that way for twelve days (just after the last sertraline dose). My wife said it was like living with an AD/HD fourteen year old. I got an insight into friends who are bipolar and resist medication because it robs them of the highs. (Incidentally, I had a couple of repeat appointments with my GP to monitor my condition, and she was getting somewhat worried, but the mania subsided of it’s own accord – and FWIW, I would love to be able to go back to that high say one day a fortnight, but no more!). Personally I think it probably stemmed as much as anything from my GP having accepted that I was in trouble and acting instantly, which was not something I’d been used to from the medical/psychological establishment.

At around that point, the sponsor of the RF Christianity section reached out to me and asked if I’d like to do some proofreading for his company, which publishes Christian literature – theology, bible study and devotional – as a kind of rehabilitation. I agreed; fairly shortly it became obvious that I couldn’t just proofread, I wanted to tweak the text. By stages, I came to be “Editor-in-Chief” at Energion Publications, which sounds far grander than it actually is. (Another friend reached out similarly, and I spent some years working part time in his Chemistry lab – the idea was that my degree gave me basic familiarity with scientific method and with the kind of apparatus involved…). The first of those, of course, also gave me a lot more experience with theology and biblical studies.

And the owner of Energion persuaded me that I should blog, which I did, initially fairly frequently, but more recently very spasmodically. I found that I’d already written about most things which really interested me – and that led to me saying, in conversation with Henry, that I thought I’d covered all the main points of Christian doctrine in some way. He said I hadn’t done Trinity, which was true (I’m not a committed Trinitarian) – and I set to write a blog post on the topic, influenced by the fact that virtually no-one I knew in the pews at church was not some kind of heretic on the subject (and most clergy who I listened to were also not quite in line with total orthodoxy) and also that two friends at church were going on to ordination, and both asked me to help them with their Bishop’s interview, the then Archbishop being known to ask candidates about their view of the Trinity. Once that reached 10,000 words, I commented to Henry that it wasn’t really a blog post any more, and he suggested I expand it into a short book in his “Topical Line Drives” series. So I now have a book on theology in print!

One of the authors I edit for Energion, by the way, refers to me as his “unsaved friend”, as evidence (if needed) that for a wide spectrum of Christians I’m not one. Equally, for most atheists, I’m a Christian – or a sort-of Christian, given that I agree with most of the standard atheistic criticisms of religion, and Christianity in particular.

This has been thrown into the forefront of my thinking by Slavoj Zizek’s recent book “Christian Atheism” on which Philosophy Portal has recently done a course. Am I an atheist? I’m certainly as much an atheist as the early Christians were accused of being because they denied the reality of the Roman gods (including in the category of gods, perhaps especially, the Emperors). I’m an atheist of sorts as far as many Conservative Christians are concerned. But I don’t know. I certainly can’t live with the concept of the God who has direct agency in the world – I am hugely skeptical about all claims of miracles, including those in scripture – and indeed a God who had to keep interfering with his creation in order to readjust it strikes me as a bit like the guy who drives a beat-up old car and forever has his head under the bonnet. A divine creation should, surely, work a little better than that. And yet my peak mystical experiences have seemed to me as if they are an intervention from outside me.

Equally, I may or may not be a Christian. Certainly the author I referenced above doesn’t think I am one, at least not yet. If I am, I’m not a very good one. I follow the red-letter statements of Jesus in the synoptic gospels to a significant extent, but not so assiduously as to abandon mother, father or family, or to give everything I have to the poor, which is possibly what following Jesus should entail (Matt. 19:5, 19:21). I will readily admit to being a panentheistic mystic with a largely Christian praxis and language of expression. But I’m not the kind of Christian Atheist whom Zizek imagines. Zizek is, above all, a philosopher with a psychoanalytic bent, and looks to give a philosophical and psychoanalytic account. I am not a philosopher – indeed, talking some years ago with Keith Ward, who is the only person I’ve ever come across who has MA and DD degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, he asked me if I found a particular rendition of the ontological argument for the existence of God interesting (in which case I was probably a philosopher) or pointless (in which case I wasn’t). I found it pointless. OK, I’d previously wrestled for around a week with a similar proof from Alvin Plantinga, and finally managed to delve into the excess verbiage enough to satisfy myself that it was the same old ontological argument i’d seen from Aquinas, which I thought was rubbish (I think such arguments assume the point they wish to prove, though it’s sometimes very well disguised…)

I’m also very sceptical about psychoanalysis. Admittedly, I’ve never gone through analysis – the NHS locally is also sceptical about psychoanalysis and is reluctant to provide it as a service, and I’ve never been in a position where I felt the rather large amount of money it costs (and the amount of time it takes) was warranted by the more or less complete failure of the discipline to offer substantive changes which would make my life easier. I look at the structures psycohanalysis proposes for the human conscious and unconscious (yes, including that one) and am not at all sure that those categories are more useful than, say, Myers-Briggs or spirodynamics (and I personally find transactional analysis categories more illuminating). Do I need psychoanalysis to persuade me that the “big other” does not exist? No, that’s a conclusion I reached in my teens. And it isn’t an aspect of God which I ever thought was likely to be the case… Subjectively, in mystical experience, big – yes. Other – well, sort of, but also very much not other.

But it’s all a way of interpreting scripture, and I consider all ways of interpreting scripture interesting, even if they don’t resonate with me. There does not have to be a single valid answer. Light can be a wave and a particle…

“God, the Divine Eros of the Universe, is the origin of the prophetic restlessness that reveals the distance between our current personal and social structure and what could be in God’s realm of Shalom.  The ultimate source of the order of the universe, God is also the primary challenger to the status quo. The 8^th century BCE prophet Amos experiences God’s dream for the world and seeks to embody the Divine dream in the lives of the Northern Kingdom of Israel: 

Let justice roll down like water
            and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.  (Amos 5:24)

God inspires the laughter of children, the devotion of scientists and parents, the creativity of poets and musicians, and the protest of prophets. God is the inner voice inspiring the cries of those who protest against unlimited war, human trafficking, environmental degradation, economic injustice, demagoguery, racism, and white nationalism.”  So writes Bruce Epperly in his new book “The God of the Growing Edge” (at the point of writing, forthcoming from Energion Publications).

It has tended in recent times to be the case in theology that we see the opening words of Genesis “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day…” as indicating an ordering of what was previously chaotic “without form and void” rather than the older idea of “creatio ex nihilo” (creation out of nothing). Certainly, God is then seen in a lot of scripture as the force of order – God gives rather copious instructions to the Israelites (Judaism has counted 613 commandments, not just 10) and is then seen as enforcing those against the hapless Israelites time and time again. And yet, as Bruce points out here, there is a constant countervailing force of disruption of the status quo, of questioning the priestly wisdom, which runs through the prophetic tradition – and this arguably chaotic activity is also sponsored by God. One can perhaps recall the passage from Isaiah “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.“

In passing, I should mention that “tohu wabohu” in the Hebrew (“without form and void”) cannot on the face of the words of the passage (as early Latin theologians wrongly argued), mean absolute nonexistence. There is an earth. There is a deep (“tehom”, which some scholars link linguistically to Tiamat, the Babylonian’s chaotic serpent slain by Marduk in their creation myth), and there are waters. We are not, therefore, looking at creation out of nothing “creatio ex nihilo”. It is clearly an imposition of order, just as in Gen. 2:19 God presents animals to Adam for him to name – this is a first alphabeticisation of the animal kingdom, an ordering of it. Indeed, it might be argued that naming of things is the actual act of creation of them (perhaps a very strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Naming something is traditionally held to give you power over it, and while the concept is sometimes scoffed at as a “magical” idea, it seems to me that the process of categorisation of things does give us a sense of control. We feel better if a doctor  can give a name to the complaint we’re suffering from, even if there’s no cure proffered. It certainly is an idea prominent in some magical traditions, but it seems to me that it also betrays a psychological reality. And if, indeed, tehom is a form of Tiamat, then rather than a slaying of the forces of chaos (the deep, waters) this is a story of chaos being tamed – at least somewhat – by naming, categorisation. Indeed, we often feel that if we can name something we have some control over it…

Against the reservation of destruction to God in creation, however, perhaps the most major Biblical story of God causing destruction is the Flood, though I rather prefer the Tower of Babel, where God intervenes specifically to prevent too much uniformity (something I might like to see mobilised against Macdonalds, Starbucks, Hilton and many others). Of course, in the current world, linguistic uniformity is a threat – English is probably the likely winner there, though Mandarin and Spanish are worthy contenders. I wonder in passing whether this is as much of a threat as is monoculture, particularly of cereal crops – one very specific plant disease could wipe out a massive amount of food production, as imagined by the Science Fiction book “The Death of Grass”. I don’t personally subscribe to the stong form of Sapir-Whorf, but am well aware that I think differently in English and French, and that there are concepts in French and Koine Greek (to name just two) which I can’t express with any accuracy in English. How much does the supremacy of English suppress possible thoughts, I wonder? How much might it do so if it were to become the true world language?

Then, too, I need to note the current of particularly scholastic theology starting with Augustine and continuing at least as far as Altizer’s “God and the Nothing” (chapter 4) equating evil with the privation of being or, in other words, nothingness, In this conception, the Genesis creation establishes evil not just by the action of Adam and Eve in Gen. 2-3 (which I’ve questioned elsewhere) but by the very act of creation in Gen. 1. However, I cannot (for the reasons listed here) regard that as establishing a nothingness, and so as establishing evil. Nothing, in addition, is just nothing, and so is not some particular thing (i.e. evil) nor is it the absence of a specific thing (i.e. good). The nothing of Gen. 1 is at most the nothing of my son, when asked what he’s seen on a trip out “Nothing”, he responds, despite haveing had his eyes open the whole time. Nothing, in other words, which he can name, nothing he can bring into control by alphabeticising it.

Most seriously, however, it seems to me that life is perched on a balance between order and chaos. Too much order, and you have something which is unchangeable – and the only things which are unchangeable are dead (and I apologise to theologians who hold that God is immutable… to me, their god-concept seems more like an impersonal law of nature than anything god-like). Too much chaos, and everything falls apart. Life requires the ability to grow – and yes, the ability to decline and die. Thus Bruce’s title “The God of the Growing Edge” is very appropriate, although he does not make an order -v- chaos point in the book!

At this point it occurs to me that there are some in the Radical Theology tradition (if it can be called a tradition) who would say “so God is the divide between order and chaos” (following a tendency to state that God is a cut, a tension, an opposition – and nothing more). Again I have to say that this feels too impersonal, too much like a law of nature. I incline towards the position taken by Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp in “The Predicament of Belief”  in saying that, for me, God is nothing if not personal – and persons are not simple (they also very reasonably find quite a few other positive statements to make about God, not all of which I’m with them on). Of course, to be a person is to be alive, and as I’ve remarked, life is by its nature perched on the divide between order and chaos, but I don’t feel that that is a full explanation of why God has this ambivalent position (among the many other potential ambivalent positions God may have…).

It follows, therefore, that I cannot associate God with either entropy nor with negentropy, though it seems to me that life is the chief negentropic force in the universe, and it feels slightly “off” not to associate God with life. As I’ve remarked, however, life seems to me to require a balance between order and chaos, so presumably between entropy and negentropy as well.

I just knew it was going to happen. People are backing up on their previous support of proportional representation on the basis that if we had PR, there would be a lot more Reform MPs. The strongest expression of that I’ve seen today is, in talking of Reform “demanding PR so they can bring more nazis in”.

They are, of course, right. And that is absolutely no reason not to have PR: we are a representative democracy, and parliament should therefore represent the views of the UK electorate – and it doesn’t.

Even some supporters of my old party, the Liberal Democrats, have been saying “But look, under PR, there would be a load more Reform MPs than LibDem MPs”. Probably yes. But we are a representative democracy. OK, the party has the highest number of MPs since 1923, with 71.

I’ve been seeing comments like “this is a sweeping mandate for Labour”. No, it isn’t. They got 34% of the votes. 34%, and a 174 majority – they have nearly two thirds of the House of Commons. And that is just wrong.

For the benefit of the LibDems, under an accurate PR, they would have 78 MPs, so they’re still underrepresented. Reform would have 91. But the Greens would have 45, not 4, and few LibDem supporters I know would be upset with that. OK, the Conservatives would have 156, so they’re now slightly underrepresented as well (a novelty for them!). Labour, of course, would have around 221 rather than the 412 they currently sport.

Nervous left-leaning people should rather easily be able to work out that the right-leaning parties (Con and Ref) wouldn’t remotely have a majority, but Labour plus LibDem plus Greens definitely would have, and that is a very conceivable coalition. And if 14% of the country favours Reform, they should have 14% of the MPs (they already have had a disproportionate amount of air time, at least with the BBC…)

Now, this election (as the by-election we had here last year) I voted Labour. Mostly I voted that way tactically, as I really dislike the Tories these days; OK, I quite like Keir Mather (who got elected both times, this time with a doubled majority) but while I respect Starmer’s abilities and character, so far as I can know those, he has positioned the party somewhere right of where the Conservative Party of my youth used to be. It isn’t a Socialist party any more, so far as I can see – the LibDems are probably still more socialist than they are, even though they have also moved rightwards. The most socialist party with MPs (if you exclude Jeremy Corbyn, who hasn’t formed his own party but is back as an independent) is probably the Greens.

I would like to be able to vote for the party which most closely represents my views. I would like to be able to cast a positive vote for a party I like, rather than a negative one against a party I dislike, and I think my view is shared by a massive number of people. Indeed, thinking back to my days of knocking on people’s doors soliciting their votes, more than half of those I talked to were voting the way they did because they disliked either Labour of Conservative, not because they actually liked the other one of that pair.

And that would also free the parties from the need to try to move their policies to capture a slice of the electorate which concerns them, which has fuelled Labour’s great leap rightward under Blair and ongoing and is currently fuelling Conservative hand-wringing discussions of whether they can be more like Reform. Or, as the commenter I started with would put it, more Nazi. This is also, I fear, why despite the fact that around two-thirds of the country would vote to rejoin the EU, given the chance, none of the three major parties were prepared to commit to it in their manifestoes (and, of course, Reform don’t think Brexit has gone far enough!).

Please can this be the last national election where I’m forced to vote negatively…

Finally got round to watching Oppenheimer with Nel, Eleanor and Christian last week. I was impressed with it, not so much for the exposure of Oppenheimer’s sex life, which I hadn’t known about and was frankly wholly uninterested in, but for a really good rendition of the horror of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings without actually using significant shock material, and its effect on Oppenheimer, and also the exposure of the machinations which led to Openheimer’s security clearance being revoked and his career blighted.

This was material close to my heart. As a physics undergraduate in the 70’s, one of the physics professors at the time and my college tutor had both worked on the Manhattan project and both had major guilt complexes about their involvement. I’d become aware of the threat of nuclear war at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when I was 8, and have lived with that threat ever since, though it became somewhat less all-encompassing when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. At 16, I painted a picture of an industrial wasteland with a mushroom cloud in the background, titled “The sinks of iniquity, the haunts of the ungodly”, in which the explosion was the beautiful thing, and the rest of the scene ugly. I was reminded of that when Nel commented that the explosion was, in an awful way, beautiful. It was an awful beauty, epitomising the word “awful”. An entirely fitting reference for the texts Oppenheimer quotes from the Bhagavad Gita “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” and “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one” in my opinion, though I gather an Indian official has decided that the use of these quotations (attributed to Krishna) is an insult to Hindus, notably to non-violent Hindus.

I don’t remotely think that Oppenheimer meant any insult – more a strong admiration for this major work of literature. He clearly admired Indian civilisation enough to learn Sanskrit, after all. Perhaps the Indian official was aping the attitudes of some Muslims who regard the Koran as something divine, and take any apparent disrespect of it as a cause for violence, not something I’ve tended to associate with Hinduism. But then, there are those within Christianity who adhere to “the Bible is the word of God” school of thought (ignoring the text in John 1 which clearly states that Christ is the logos, the word of God) and would clearly like to feel able to take the same view – and, in the past, some have. That is by-the-by for my purposes – the Gita, and Hindu theology, clearly identifies Krishna as being not only the source of good but also the source of destruction. Of course, the Koran also has passages identifying Allah as the source of destruction (for instance 47:10) and the Bible contains Isaiah 45:7.

Unjust prosecutions are also something I have strong feelings about, having struggled against a few of them, once with some success (although whether you can repair that kind of damage is a moot point).

1962 to 1989 were not just fear-engendering in the same way as most of my friends and family, either. Firstly, I had a keen appreciation of the effects of nuclear explosions from my time studying physics, but also during the latter half of that period, as someone involved in local politics with a science degree, I was enlisted as a volunteer Civil Defence Scientific Advisor, which meant regular training in predicting fallout in various blast scenarios and the assurance that in the event of a nuclear alert, I’d be summoned to go with others to an underground facility in order to do that in earnest. I’ll note that I wouldn’t have been allowed to take my family with me, which meant that I’d have had an agonising decision if that ever came to pass – and I’m not sure I’d have abandoned them. It did not, of course, happen, and the government of the day abandoned the Civil Defence volunteer system in the early 90s, with it vanishing completely by 1993 – although local councils were still theoretically obliged to have plans and infrastructure in place against the event.

In conscience, I’m not sure the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union ended my nervousness about possible nuclear threats. There are still huge nuclear stockpiles in the hands of Russia, the USA and China, and quite a few countries (including my own) have some nuclear capability. It isn’t certain that all of the former Soviet republics have eliminated stockpiles of nuclear weapons which were on their soil, and Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea (at the least) have nuclear weapons. The fact that India and Pakistan both have this capability and have actually been at war with each other in the meantime is deeply worrying, though it seems unlikely that either of them (or, indeed, North Korea or Israel) would detonate something which would have much of an effect here. The situation is different with Russia, which is currently at war with an European country in the form of Ukraine, and which has threatened several others which are actually members of NATO – in effect, we do have a Russia -v- the West war ongoing at the moment. This is a serious source of concern, given that both Russia and the USA have doctrines regarding use of nukes which are not foolproof.

Indeed, the Ukraine war is more of a concern in terms of threat to my country than is the Israeli assault on Gaza. That does not seem to have the capability of spreading to here – the Ukraine conflict does. I don’t think I’m exhibiting any racism by being more concerned about Ukraine (and about the fact that our media seems to be forgetting about Ukraine) as has been suggested by some acquaintances. I feel the same horror (and helplessness) when I learn of civilian deaths in either location, admittedly far more of those recently in Gaza, and I bitterly resent the fact that my government continues (as at the point of writing) to provide weapons to Israel to continue the one-sided slaughter of Palestinians. I do not want to be complicit in that genocide, and my government makes me. The thing is, the Gaza conflict is not going to spread to here. Ukraine could do…

Do I wish that Oppenheimer and his team had not developed the bomb? Nor really. The science was already there, and someone would have done it, if not then, then in the intervening years. Do I think that Truman should not have dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? That’s difficult for me. My own country’s bomber command under Harris (who was the pawn of Churchill in that) caused as much and more devastation in Dresden, Leipzig and Hamburg using conventional weapons in an attempt to break the will of the population, not attacking purely military targets. Hiroshima seems to me at least marginally justified when weighed against the probable loss of life in an invasion of Japan, despite also being a broadly civilian target. Nagasaki? Well, it seems that might have been more to prove to the Russians that it could be done again than out of any need to convince Japan – Truman did not wait long enough between the two to know if resistance had been crushed. Killing perhaps another 70,000 civilians in order to make that point? Well, that starts sounding like Israel’s attitude to Palestinians.

 

I’ve just come across the political philosopher John Grey. Here’s a conversation he had with Aaron Bastani. It makes for depressing listening to me, as I think he’s right on a lot of his points (and not as far off the mark as I’d wish for on others).

Of course, the title (“Everything you know about the future is wrong”) is sensationalist and outstrips the ambit of the actual conversation. However, some extremely good points fall out of it. First is the complete negation of Francis Fukayama’s thesis of “The End of History”. I think Fukayama himself has been moving away from the idea that we have arrived (or very nearly arrived) at an inevitable historical conclusion in which Western style liberal democracy had, in effect, won history – we were, per Fukayama, at a situation in which it was inevitable that the whole world would adopt the ideas of liberal democracy, but Grey is adamant that in actuality we passed the point of maximum liberal democracy just after the Soviet Union collapsed. when it did seem that some kind of Western democratic system was inevitable. In fact he points out not only that populist movements have taken root in the USA (and to an extent in Britain) but also that much of Europe is showing signs of a resurgence of far-right nationalist populism.

I could also point out the more or less universal failure of the West’s fatuous “nation building” programme – Grey is absolutely right that a significant proportion of people (and I think a majority in most countries in the world) don’t really want democracy. A reasonably benevolent dictatorship seems much more to their taste – and possibly even a not-very-benevolent dictatorship as long as, to use the terminology of pre-war Germany, “the trains run on time”.

OK, he does point to that as a reason why we might actually celebrate the fact that Brexit has happened and we are not inevitably wedded to Europe, and to my eyes that is a huge overstatement. Yes, there are resurgent nationalist-populist movements all over Europe, and he points to Germany and France as examples (as I write, indeed, Holland has elected a far-right party as its largest). In fact, there are no European countries I know which are free of such impulses. But nowhere is there a working majority (at least as yet) and if there were, I fancy that its worst excesses would probably be tempered by EU membership (and, as Grey remarks, membership of the Euro, which it would be extremely difficult to disentangle a country from).

He points out, rightly, I think, that membership of the EU precludes a socialist government – it’s a fundamentally liberal-democratic, economically neoliberal organisation. However, I think he underplays the fact that this is largely irrelevant for the UK – as long as our economy is tied in to global markets and in particular as long as we have a national debt, I don’t think very much socialism is possible for us (and I don’t see Starmer trying it). What I’d have liked to see him discuss (and maybe he does this elsewhere) is the fact that neoliberal economics, which was part of Fukayama’s end of history, is doomed, and we (and the rest of the world) is going to have to institute some other way of doing things. The climate crisis is one factor which is going to make the dependence on growth of neoliberal economics impossible, but at the moment I rather fancy that the advances in AI are going to render most people’s jobs redundant first, at which point we have a massive demand hole. Clearly people with no income can’t afford to keep on buying consumer goods, and I can’t see our billionaire classes willingly spreading out their mountains of cash in order to keep the machinery of capitalism going for at least a while. This guy touches on the problem, but mostly sees pluses in AI.

It seems ironic that the way we are likely to stop being a society revolving round ever-increasing consuming and producing is to make production costs of many things (particularly entertainment and intellectual property) trivially small, while removing the actual markets for these things…

I was reading about the thinking of a pastor regarding pronouns and God. They try to make a habit of using “she” and “her” of God, and I can’t remotely criticise that from a theological point of view, though I’m an old guy who has spent over 50 years in environments where God was most definitely “he” and “him”, and the use of female designators jars a bit with me – it shifts my attention to gender, where in all probability the aspect of that-which-is-God has nothing to do with gender. And I thought “I could probably cause a stir in those circles by using “it””. After all, “it” is the way we, in English, denote something which does not have a sex, or is neutral as regards sex and gender. Let’s face it, I’d be in even more trouble there if I started talking about sexual organs in respect of God, though I assume Jesus had a penis and testes, and trinitarian thinking in Christianity, plus the traditional interpretation of the introduction to the Fourth Gospel, both identify Jesus as God – in some way, at least. (The “word” in the title might refer to a pronoun – but see below).

The thing is, if I want to think of God in terms of a person (and again, that is definitely trinitarian thinking, though in that paradigm there may be three persons), I need to think about gender. And at least some of the time I do want to think of God in those terms. Clayton and Knapp, in “The Predicament of Belief” do suggest that we should relate to God as a person, or at least as person-like, and I think that has to be right – huge numbers of mystics have written or spoken of God in that kind of language, and that cannot be ignored (my own testimony would be that I sometimes experience God in that kind of way). More mystics, I think, than those who have written or spoken of God as being some kind of impersonal force or principle (which I can also attest to, and which is common among Eastern traditions).

Clearly, I approach the question of what-it-is-that-is God as a scientist, not as a philosophical theologian. So much talk about God says, in effect, “start with your doctrine of God” or “define God”, and I think that is exactly the wrong way to approach the issue. There is a phenomenon. It, or something very like it, is attested by very many people. Those among them who seem to me to be trying the hardest to describe what this phenomenon is, starting from the phenomenon rather than some tiny aspect of what someone has previously written about God, are the mystics. This is company I’m very comfortable with, having had mystical experience thrust upon me in my teens and having spent a lot of time in my teens and 20’s trying to develop a way of entering the mystical space reasonably reliably (I never did hit on a guaranteed way of doing that, merely various factors which tended to make it more likely).

As my second paragraph rather indicates, I never did arrive at a definition on which I felt I could build any dogmatic theology. It’s not just the “personal/impersonal” dichotomy there, there’s also the transcendent/immanent dichotomy. I note that in finding dichotomies in my attempts to describe that-which-is-God I do not indicate that I subscribe to Peter Rollins concept of an ontological split or opposition at the heart of existence – I think that is going too far on the basis of the available evidence, given that our thinking seems to me to throw up dichotomies wherever I look; I think that human cognition creates dichotomies, and whether or not there actually is a dichotomy there has to be uncertain. Indeed, where Pete sees oppositions, I am more inclined to see fuzziness. Philosophy, it seems to me, tends to a misplaced confidence in its ability to be precise.

In the case of theology, perhaps because it ultimately (in my opinion) has to draw on mystical experience, and one of the features of mystical experience is just that “coincidenta oppositorum” (coincidence of opposites) which I’ve outlined some of above, an even greater problem is that it tries to over-specify. Perhaps at the root of that is taking similes from the mystics (God is like a father, for instance) and making them into specifications (God is our father), which clearly meets with problems when we also encounter scripture which says God is (or at least is like) our mother.

But let’s also look in more detail at the introduction to the Fourth Gospel for a moment. The NIV version says:- 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

⁶ There was a man sent from God whose name was John. ⁷ He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. ⁸ He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

⁹ The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. ¹⁰ He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. ¹¹ He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. ¹² Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— ¹³ children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

¹⁴ The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Let’s think about that a bit. What do we actually mean by “Word” (which is capitalised in this version of the text)? Well, we certainly don’t mean just a collection of letters which, taken together, signify some thing (or action, or…). I was alerted to the fact that there may be more to this wording than meets the eye when, some years ago, I bought myself a Bible de Jérusalem in order not to be constantly translating from English when discussing Christianity online with some French people, and found to my surprise that the translation in French of the original Greek word, logos, was “verbe”. I would instinctively have rendered “word” as “mot”, but “verbe” carries a strong significance of being an action. As it happens, I would have been less surprised if I’d bought a different French translation, as all the others I know of use the term “parole” instead (which carries an equally strong significance of being something spoken), but I’d still have felt the pull of the English word “word”, which has no particular connotation either of action or of being spoken. (As an aside, it’s a thing, which makes me think of my comments above – it isn’t a person…)

That made me look at what this greek word “logos” actually meant to the Greeks using it in the past. What I found was that it meant in classical Greek something like “rationally understandable principle”, which makes a lot of sense when inserted into John 1:1-5 in the place of “word”. But then I happened on an account of what Philo of Alexandria wrote about “logos” in the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, which blew my mind.

Philo was a hugely prominent Jewish philosopher and theologian from Alexandria in the early years of the first century. He was very active at and before the time of Jesus’ ministry, and for a few years after that, and was a sufficiently respected individual to be selected to head a delegation of Alexandrian Jews to the Emperor Caligula in around 38 CE, but has been largely sidelined in Jewish intellectual circles since then, possibly because he wrote in Greek, which was already under pressure in Judaism as not being the authentic language and also perhaps because his writings have been so attractive to Christians; he was quoted widely by several of the early Church Fathers including Clement of Alexandria and Origen.

As you can see from the linked article, Philo had twelve meanings for the term “logos”. Among them are:-
The utterance of God (“parole” as a French translation?);
First-born son of God (well, that could explain a lot about the Christology of the Fourth Gospel!);
Immanent reason (that seems fairly close to the classical meaning of “logos”);
Mediator of the physical universe (very definitely a fount of Christology) and intermediary between the divine and man;
The Angel of the Lord (which seems to be close to the idea of Jesus which is evidenced in the synoptic gospels);
Manna and wisdom (I’ll come back to this);
God him, her or it’s self (on which one builds trinity).

There is a huge amount of reasoning and exegesis behind Philo’s set of meanings, but the element I’d like to focus on at the moment is that he effectively equates uses of wisdom (“sophia” in Greek) in the Hebrew Scriptures with “logos”, which is primarily, prior to the New Testament, a Greek philosophical term and not one from the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures from which Greek speakers generally drew their scriptural references). In passing, in the Hebrew Scriptures, wisdom is “chokmah”, word is “davar” or “memra” – and in Hebrew too “davar” and “memra” like “parole” carry a suggestion of being spoken; davar/memra and chokmah are generally regarded as very distinct – except by Philo and those following him. Much of the meaning Philo advances is in fact attributions for wisdom drawn from Proverbs – the most obvious example, to my eyes, is Prov. 8:22-36. However, there’s also Psalm 33, which has a different term for word in the Hebrew (bid-bar, “by the word”), which is translated “logos” in the Septuagint, so Philo had some significant clues in the pre-existing text.

Picking up on my earlier comment, that theology tends to over-specify, Philo’s set of meanings might well be thought of as an example of that (and one which ends up carried over into the huge set of titles of Jesus!). Starting at the end, God=manna=wisdom=his own angel=mediator=reason=his own son=utterance. It is, frankly, enough to make one throw up one’s hands in confusion – they can’t, surely, all be simultaneously correct? However, I do see one possibility, and that’s again picking up from earlier, the fact that I see things as fuzzy, as incompletely defined, and not infrequently as being best described as a coincidence of opposites. If things are indeed fuzzy, there may still be some aspect of all of this terminology which does apply, or something which it is pointing at which is not directly communicable, at least at the moment.

So God may be father-like and mother-like without us positing hermaphroditism (or gender fluidity, these days).

I’ve still no idea what pronoun to use, though…