Eyre Lines

Dear America,

I find I am again horrified at an episode of mass violence using firearms in the USA, and my prayers go out to those who have been injured or who are mourning family or friends.

The trouble is that word “again”. It seems to be happening every week or so. Surely, by now, the mood must be “enough is enough; we have to do something about this”? Look, we are not all that different from people in the States over here, and I can recall three instances of mass shootings, in 1987 (Hungerford), 1996 (Dunblane) and 2010 (Cumbria). Two of those also involved schools, which I think gives the lie to the idea that the phenomenon in the States targets schools because they tend to be gun free zones. The Hungerford and Dunblane shooters could have chosen almost anywhere with confidence that it would be gun-free, but chose schools anyhow.

Yes, I know we have a significantly smaller population, about a sixth of that in the States. This might mean that we might have expected instead of three shootings in 28 years, about 18 if we had had an equal population.

Not one a week, as it seems is the case with you at present.

“But”, I hear, “We’re a very different country”. I’m not all that convinced by this argument. Certainly there’s a far larger population of people not of British origin which you’ve accumulated over the last 250 years, but we share a language and, frankly, a large amount of our culture (as US domination of English speaking media is huge), and, of course, the bases of our legal systems.

Now, there’s the rub, potentially. We don’t have a written constitution, at least not one which can supersede legislation and see it struck down (we do have a constitution of sorts, but it’s partly in legislation no more protected than any other legislation and partly in longstanding custom – and most of that longstanding custom we exported along with the early settlers).

This article highlights the problem, the Second Amendment. For anyone reading this who does not have it burned into their consciousness already, it reads “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The article I link to quite reasonably asks what contribution is being made to the establishment or maintenance of a “well regulated militia” by the current state of US law, which allows more or less any individual to own a gun, and often to carry it around in public, sometimes even concealed. As far as I can see, there are no militias (except a few self-described groups on the extreme lunatic fringe, many of whom also deny being citizens), let alone well regulated ones.

I could readily have seen, on the basis of the strict wording of the amendment, the limitation of possession of all firearms to people who were members in good standing of a formally constituted militia, with (inter alia) rules as to the abilities of those allowed to bear arms, their character and stability, and their conduct while in that position. This would be a situation rather analagous to that in Switzerland, in which all men (at least for the moment, just men) are called up, do national service and are then members of the reserve – and they hold weapons, which can be denied them for good cause (see the previous sentence). The authors of that article don’t go quite that far. Unfortunately, they probably also underestimate the power of the Supreme Court decision in DC -v- Heller.

Now, I know that a future Supreme Court could in theory overturn this. However, Supreme Courts have been historically reluctant to go entirely against stated previous decisions of the same court, usually looking to distinguish the situation in front of them so that the previous decision can at least arguably still be regarded as correct. That decision includes the words “The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.” This could well be fatal to any future argument that only the possession of arms in furtherance of membership of a militia (and a well-regulated one at that) should be protected.

The court decision also includes the words “The “militia” comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense.”  This, of course, completely negates any suggestion that the class of people (as long as they are male and physically capable) cannot be restricted – even, it would seem, by the requirement that the militia be “well regulated”, something which the court seems to have conveniently forgotten. They also stated  “But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home. ” This was to justify their decision that in particular handguns, possession of which had previously been prohibited in certain circumstances, were legitimate weapons of self defence, giving it a plausible link back to the first (militia) clause of the amendment.

There were a few positive elements – the court was at pains to state that the decision did not permit machine guns, and I think that can colourably be made to include all automatic and semi-automatic weapons (being new weapons not available at the time the amendment was drafted). As did the UK government after Hungerford, I think an immediate blanket ban on the private possession of these is probably not within the Heller decision.

However, it is also interesting to note the Court’s interpretation of “militia” as being all able bodied men. Actually, this was not the way a militia was constituted in the 18th century, either in the fledgling USA (except very briefly immediately prior to the introduction of the amendment) or in the British law previously in force. Militias were volunteer organisations raised by and led by prominent local men; they were entirely capable of (and did) exclude men they did not think of as of good character, and they were organised and had rules – which is what I am confident those drafting the amendment had in mind by using the words “well regulated”. While yes, they did welcome people bringing their own weapons where they had weapons which would be of use in a military action, these were in general not handguns, which were not particularly useful in the kind of military engagement of the day.

The preservation of (as the court saw it) a right of self defence. Much consideration seems to have been given to the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which was seen as restoring the right of Protestants to bear arms inter alia for their own defence which had been taken away by James II, crucially while allowing Catholics to remain armed. Throughout the history of interpretation of this in England, it has stressed  the wording in the Bill of Rights “That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law.” Note the words “as allowed by law”, which were consistently considered to allow government to restrict the possession and use of arms by individuals and groups which it considered inimical to good order, and also the words “suitable to their conditions”, which was code for “It’s fine for the aristocracy and landed gentry, but you’re in trouble if you’re a peasant”.

Of course, in the UK, Parliament is never bound by any previous Act of Parliament, and the “right” to bear arms has been reduced by stages, particularly following Hungerford and Dunblane, to a very restricted one; non-automatic rifles and shotguns for sporting use only, kept under secure lock and key and owned only by those who get a licence, which is not all that readily come by for anyone not owning significant land; handguns only in licensed gun clubs. That is where a right to bear arms “as allowed by law” has ended up in the UK…

So, while a new Supreme Court might not want to overturn the previous court’s statement of law, it seems to me that they might determine that the court in DC -v- Heller misdirected itself on the facts. Militias were not what they thought they were, and neither was the pre-existing right to bear arms independent of restriction by law. The lack of any mention of “well regulated” is also something which could lead to a finding of self-misdirection, it seems to me.

I do not really see good reason why the USA should not aim at moving towards a similar level of restriction to ours, but a first step would, I think, be an immediate ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Australia has, after all, managed a similar transition, and they too are a recovering frontier nation… This might be possible with a more liberal minded Supreme Court, it might require another amendment to the Constitution – but amendments have been passed before this with rather less concrete evidence of continuing harm to the population. Amendments have been passed removing earlier bad amendments. Don’t tell me this could never happen with the Second Amendment; it hasn’t been tried yet.

An immediate response to this tends to be “this would remove the guns from all the law abiding citizens and leave the criminals free to use them at will”. This is, of course, true, but it is the situation in England (and many other countries), and by and large English criminals do not use guns. The reason is that the penalties for possession and use of a gun are far greater than those for crimes committed without these, and on the whole, our criminals are not completely stupid. That may, of course, not work in the States, given that the penalties for relatively trivial offences (particularly connected with drugs) are draconian – but a revision of US sentencing policy would be no bad thing for a number of other reasons, not least to provide a perceptible difference in tariff. I can also see the thinking running “I’m going to get locked up for life for possession of this kilo of drugs anyhow, so I may as well be armed and shoot a few people to try to avoid capture, because it won’t make any difference”.

I also see very little evidence that an armed citizenry provides any sensible deterrent to criminals. Indeed this article outlines some recent research which demonstrates that more guns means more crime, not less, among other things. This one undermines the unscientific survey which is commonly used as an argument that guns prevent large amounts of crime. It also focuses a little on the number of accidents which occur, often fatally, due to guns in homes.

Just in passing, please don’t way “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. Weapons of mass destruction don’t kill people, people using weapons of mass destruction kill people, but we can still get very upset at the concept of mere possession of such weapons. Unless it’s by us, of course. The thing is, the term “mass destruction” highlights the problem – they let you kill a whole load of people more easily.

So do guns.

They also let you kill people at a distance, removing some of the visceral revulsion which most of us feel about killing hand to hand.

So do guns.

Similarly, don’t tell me this is just a mental health problem, unless you’re going to explain to me why people in the States are so much crazier than those anywhere else. Yes, substantial good can be done by a mental health system which identifies threats and acts to manage at risk people, but as that article comments, the mentally ill aren’t a significantly greater threat than the notionally normal (and around one in four will at some point suffer some form of mental illness from depression upward); as it also highlights, if you have someone with this kind of mindset, guns let them do a lot more damage.

Well, there may be an answer or two. Firstly, the version of US culture peddled by TV and movies is a very violent one, in which by and large problems are solved by violence. You can watch whole series of an UK police procedural and never see anyone getting shot; the same cannot be said for the US equivalent, one of which (Chicago PD) is advertised here with the phrase “They have the right to remain violent”. There would seem to be an addiction to what Rene Girard called “the myth of redemptive violence”. This is an “eye for an eye” world at the very least (often glorifying more than just equivalent violence). Girard suggested that a prominent understanding of the crucifixion should be the rejection by God of all such concepts; Jesus is “the last scapegoat”, and no more should be contemplated. Addictions can be treated; I might suggest a communal twelve step programme starting “we are powerless over violence and our lives have become unmanageable”.

Secondly, and connected to that, the States is the one place I know of where the term “gun nut” is of widespread application. Let’s face it, that’s where the term comes from. An Australian comedian has recently commented, rightly I think, that the true reason why gun control is resisted boils down to “F*** off, I like guns”. Why is this? It seems somehow bound up in ideas of masculinity and power; almost all the mass shootings seem to be by men who feel disempowered, and it would seem that guns make them feel powerful again.

I am no more sympathetic to people who want to wave their penis substitutes around in public than I am to those who want to do the same with the real thing.

Both categories should, in my view, be locked up and given intensive therapy until cured. Let’s face it, that’s the attitude we take to someone who says “F*** off, I like crystal meth”.

Consider the path to gun control as the path to rehabilitation, preferably starting with an extended detox. Until that happens, yes, you’re communally addicts, and that is indeed a form of mental illness.

Bo Sanders has provocatively titled a post “There is no Kingdom of God”. A man after my own heart – I like provocative titles. Watch the video – it’s only 8 minutes, and he makes a lot of really good points, not all of which I repeat here.

The problem he sees is that the term doesn’t translate “basilea tou Theou” well for a modern audience (and I might suggest particularly one in the States, which is a Republic).

The thing is, the use of the term, which literally means something more like “Empire of God” or “Imperial rule of God” was a direct subversion of the term “basilea tou Romes”, i.e. the Empire of Rome. The basilea tou Theou was completely unlike the Roman Empire, of course, and the identical formulation there was designed to accentuate the difference.

At the time of the earliest English translations, “Kingdom of God” was, I think, actually a fairly good translation, because at the time England was a Kingdom with a King who had some imperial pretensions and was very nearly an absolute monarch, as the Roman Emperors were; the counterpoint still worked and had some subversive power. It doesn’t work in England nearly as well these days, as the monarchy has become a nearly powerless constitutional monarchy and the fount of power is Parliament, and it works even less well in the United States, where citizens don’t even live under a nominal monarchy or empire.

Granted, it could well be argued that the USA is a functional Empire, with places ruled but without a say in government and a number of “client states” which are nominally independent but in effect operate as instructed by America.The trouble is, most of the population probably don’t believe that to be the case.

I have seen and heard people using other terms, and “commonwealth” is not uncommon – the trouble is, most of these fail to give the subversive element as they themselves have unhelpful baggage (in the case of “commonwealth” it is specifically the historic use of the term for democracies, and a democracy, I would argue, is significantly closer to a system of organising ourselves which Jesus might not want to subvert). Of those which Bo mentions, “Government” is possibly my favorite, particularly as “Government” already has a fair amount of negative baggage associated, as “basilea” did in the first century.

What about the hyphenated terms? Sadly, I don’t like “kin-dom” as it sounds rather twee, although it is clever; “un-kingdom” and “anti-empire” seem to me too direct, lacking the subversive element which was present in the original use of the common term for the Roman oppression, the sense of direct opposition “An Empire but totally unlike the existing Empire”. However, any of these might do – certainly if an unfamiliar term is used, it will alert us to the fact that “Kingdom” needs a bit more understanding.

I might, for instance, suggest once in a while slipping in “the Anarchy of God” for the shock effect – it lacks the sense of subversion, but certainly wakes one up to the fact that Jesus’ basilea is not a top down autocracy. I think he might have quite liked Peter Kropotkin’s ideas about how (not to) organise a state!

On the whole, though, I rather favour trying out “Nation of God”. There’s an awful lot to subvert in our concepts of nation these days;for the nation to which we belong to include axiomatically all people (“no Jew nor Greek…”, the hated Samaritan and the traditional enemy Syrophonecian) is, I think, jarring enough to gain some really good traction, at least until we become over-used to it. It certainly puts a new light on our reluctance to welcome refugees… It also echoes the situation of the Israelites as the People of God, so bursting out of all previously traditional markers for who is in and who is out, as was necessary to include the Gentiles, is doubly accentuated.

Also, and I think particularly in the States, it’s the principal thing to which loyalty is regularly claimed over and above loyalty to God. We regularly discuss whether we can trust a politician whose principal loyalty is to his or her concept of God, possibly to the exclusion of loyalty to our hugely restricted view of nation. Early Christians regularly suffered martyrdom for exactly this reason – they refused to worship Caesar, which was seen as being traitorous.

What price do we pay for our oaths of allegiance, our oaths on taking office?

My facebook feed is full of Syrian refugees. Ian Everett’s piece of beat poetry runs along the same lines as an article by Giles Fraser. Very different approaches, but the same message – welcome them all.

It wasn’t full of this prior to a picture of a drowned toddler. I’m wondering what it is about this particular picture sparked peoples’ compassion, given that there have been plenty of previous photographs of drowned migrants, some of them assuredly from Syria. I wonder why similar levels of compassion haven’t been sparked by other photos of dead children – Palestinian, for instance, Nigerian, Eritrean, Sudanese, Iraqui… the list could go on for a while.

Thousands of refugees have travelled through Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary and Austria, and been wholly unwelcome in each of them – well, apart from Turkey, which is currently host to nearly 2 million Syrians anyhow; recently some thousands have been let through Austria to Germany, and Germany has welcomed them with open arms.

Germany? That should produce a bit of cognitive dissonance in a lot of Britons, whose stereotype of Germans emphatically doesn’t include welcoming strangers, particularly if they’re of a slightly darker hue than the Aryan ideal. They don’t have to look back 70 years to find justification for that stereotype, either – Germany has not been a bed of roses for its substantial population of Turkish migrant workers for many years much more recently than that, and it still has a fairly strong xenophobic streak in some of the population.

I do not criticise Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia or Hungary for lack of  compassion – none of them are rich countries, and Greece, Macedonia and Serbia rank as poor. Listening to interviews with the migrants, they don’t want to stay in those countries anyhow; they don’t see opportunity there, and they’re probably right. Almost universally, they have set their sights on Germany as their promised land.

Austria, however, is not poor. It’s just unwelcoming.

And, frankly, so has been the UK so far. Cameron has just announced that we will take a significant number of refugees, though we’ll take them from the UN camps just outside the Syrian borders, and we’ll take families, rather than single men. I think he has the right attitude apart from the number – 20,000 (and that over 5 years!) isn’t remotely as many as I think we could or should take, particularly compared with Germany’s position – Angela Merkel expects to welcome 800,000 refugees this year. This is probably a first for me, approving of any aspect of any policy which Cameron expresses – and yes, I do ask myself how he will equate a willingness to take even a few thousand Syrian refugees when his Secretary of State for Work and Pensions doesn’t think our current unemployed need to be fed, clothed or housed adequately. Of course, my answer is that we should look after both.

Cameron suggests that we are a Christian nation as reason to do this. Admittedly, we have an established church, and “Church of England” is the default religious designation, but on that I think he’s wrong. A Christian nation wouldn’t have elected him in the first place, given his attitude to the poor, disabled and needy. Under 5% of us attend church on an average Sunday; that doesn’t look like a “Christian nation” to me. However, there is, particularly among the 60% or so who voted for someone else, a residual undercurrent of Christian values, so perhaps he isn’t completely wrong.

Now, I like Giles Fraser’s writing, but I have to take issue with this article. Yes, it is true that ancient Israel were enjoined to treat the sojourner in their land as they would a native, and that they were also enjoined to leave a margin to provide food for the poor (not especially the sojourner), but none of that refers to whether you invite foreigners into your land to sojourn in the first place. On that point, the Old Testament is at best silent – and at worst, it has a very dim view of citizens of neighbouring countries such as Amelekites, Canaanites, Phonecians, Moabites, Ammonites – and again, this list could go on substantially. Appropriate action in their cases ranged from extermination of every last member of the nation to merely approving taking them as slaves…

I think that in order to make his case, he needed to go New Testament. Love your neighbour as yourself (Matt. 22:39) is the start point; the parable of the Good Samaritan goes on to define as your neighbour someone of another nation (and at that one considered an enemy, and a set of dangerous heretics at that), and we may extend that by considering Jesus’ treatment of the Centurion (an officer of an occupying enemy force) or the Syrophonecian woman (a member of a nation which Israel had had a mandate to wipe out) – that last was a lectionary reading for at least some people at the weekend. Our neighbour is anyone, and probably someone different from us – maybe an enemy, maybe someone we are brought up to despise, maybe just one of those people we don’t notice, like (in Biblical times) women or children.

So yes, the Syrian refugees are our neighbours, and perhaps especially the drowned toddler.

The snag is, it’s not that simple. The homeless in our own country are also our neighbours, and if we haven’t helped them, why are we thinking of helping someone whose own nearer neighbours haven’t? Isn’t our neighbour supremely the person in need who is actually next to us now?

They’re also not that simple because of something I keep noticing in the pictures of multitudes of migrants, at Calais, at a Budapest station, at the Macedonian border, in boats crossing the Mediterranean. By and large, what I’m seeing isn’t women or children, it’s young men between, maybe, 18 and 35. Where are the women and children, the old? Why are they leaving the more vulnerable members of their families behind? I listen to interviews with them, and too many times, slipped in among the dangers and uncertainties of living in a war-torn society, is the statement that they don’t want to be conscripted to fight themselves (though many of them seem happy to be threatening to border guards or transport drivers). Are we looking at a collection of draft dodgers, and does that mean they aren’t legitimate? (I have a certain amount of sympathy with draft dodgers, as I believe the witness of the Gospels is hugely in favour of non-violence, though for me that might not hold up in the face of armed struggle in my own country – at the least, I’d want to stay and assist as a noncombatant).

I add to that the concern of a former Army intelligence officer with whom I was chatting recently about this; he pointed out that were he an organiser for Al Quaeda or Isis, he’d be slipping some committed fighters in among the refugees, as there would be no easier way to get them into the country to stir up trouble later. I don’t think there’s any chance that this isn’t something which has occurred to those organisers, so it’s almost certainly happening.

That’s where I think that on this occasion, Cameron is perhaps being really far sighted – if we take first orphans and families, we are probably not taking the draft dodger or the undercover terrorist.

But we should be doing far more. We should particularly be doing more in the light of the fact that even were the armed struggle to be resolved tomorrow (in whichever direction and however that were achieved), there seems strong evidence that the origins of the struggle in Syria lie in the fact that the country started being affected by drought around 2006, and by 2011 there were over 1.5 million internally displaced people who could no longer exist farming. It seems likely both that this is the result of climate change and that it is not going to improve in the forseeable future, and therefore Syria has a significant surplus population problem in any event. Neighbouring countries are similarly somewhat affected by the drought, so moving there is not a long term solution.

We should not merely welcome refugees for the duration of the struggle, therefore, we should welcome them as prospective citizens.

 

If you’ve watched or listened to any episodes of Global Christian Perspectives, you’ll have probably grasped the fact that my co-host Elgin Hushbeck and myself don’t see eye to eye on very much, whether it be Christianity or politics. One of the points on which we differ most is the question of social welfare; Elgin has gone so far as to write a book “What is wrong with Social Justice”.

One aspect of Social Justice, to my mind, is providing for the poor, the sick and the disadvantaged. I see this as an absolute Christian duty. Elgin, on the other hand, thinks that social security can “encourage a culture of dependency” and as such is a bad thing. This, to me, has the ring of pronouncements by Ian Duncan Smith and others in our current Conservative government; Mr. Smith has the weird notion that it is actually helping people to strip them of their social safety net, as they need the spur of absolute destitution to persuade them to get a job.

In the world IDS lives in, it seems that there are abundant jobs which are well within the capabilities of all the people who are receiving benefits, including those who are partially (and sometimes extensively) disabled, and all they need is to be bullied in order for them to go out and get a job. I am not sure where this world is, but it isn’t the Britain of 2015, and it equally wouldn’t be the USA of 2015.

I have three really major problems with this approach. The first is that no sane person who is able to go out and do a job which will return a reasonable wage sufficient to live on adequately is going to sit back and try to subsist on the level of benefits which either government currently provides. While I keep hearing people on the right talking of hearing someone say “You’re a fool to work when you can live on benefits”, I have yet to hear anyone actually say that, and no-one I know who is living on social security or disablement benefits would not give their eye teeth to be able to get a job which would provide them with a reasonable standard of living.

Of course, in actuality the lowest paid jobs, which are generally all that is available to the less able, do not actually pay enough to keep someone clothed, housed and fed adequately, at least not unless you work two or three of them; in addition, there just are not enough jobs. IDS is saying “Just go and pick an apple from that tree”, and you look, and there is no apple on the tree. This is just wanton cruelty. That, however, leads me on to my second problem.

I spend some of my time as, in effect, a kind of technologist; I do some part time work with a company which develops and optimises chemical processes. This helps me appreciate the thrust of technology, as does a long-term interest in history. Technology enables us to save labour, to produce more using less labour. In the process, it removes less skilled jobs, but in fairness it tends to create more skilled jobs. Unfortunately, a sizeable proportion of humanity are not able to acquire the kind of skills which are increasingly required in order to earn enough to live on. This is particularly pointed as technology is now replacing even the actions which used to require a fairly high level of intelligence and many years of training. I could joke and say that not everyone is ever going to be able to be a brain surgeon, however much tuition and practice they have, but actually there’s some danger that even brain surgeons may be replaced by robots in the future…

Of course, there are always going to be jobs in personal service, but care assistants and burger flippers are never paid enough to live on.

I know that this directly contradicts what seems to be a portion of the myth of America, that if you only work hard enough, you have the opportunity to become rich ( a myth which seems at the moment to have corrupted the minds of our Conservative party). The trouble is, it is a myth not in the sense of an inspiring story by which you can live, but in the sense of a falsehood.  You can work 120 hour weeks in most of our low paid jobs and still never have a hope of managing a really decent standard of living, let alone becoming rich.

If we are to have a future in which most people have a decent standard of living, it seems to me that we are going to need to start valuing people for being human, rather than for what they can do – because we increasingly are not going to need humans to do anything.

I should perhaps remind Christians that we regularly pray “Give us this day our daily bread”, relying on God to provide this. God’s hands for achieving this are, in my way of seeing things, those of other people. Jesus lauds the lilies of the field, who toil not neither do they spin (in the KJV, which I tend to remember). Clearly, he does not think that working is an essential in order for God to provide.

My third problem with this outlook is this. It assumes that being dependent is a thoroughly bad thing. Another plank of the American way is individualism, the cult of the man who is not dependent on anyone but makes his own way, proudly refusing all assistance.

However, as a species we are born the most dependent on earth; we do not become truly able to cope for ourselves for years, whereas even other live-birth mammals manage the feat within at most about a year. Unless we are eking out an existence as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers in some third world country, we continue to be dependent in ways which individualism would like to deny; we are dependent on the culture we live in, and the contributions of all the other people (and, these days, machines) in it; we are specialised in what we can actually do (assuming we are lucky enough to be born with the capacity to learn an useful trade and the health to pursue it) and depend on other people who are specialised in their own ways.

I blogged about some aspects of this issue from a different perspective recently, where I suggested that the least we should expect from our community is that it provide for Maslow’s levels one and two; we also have a need for Maslow’s level three, love and belonging. It is, to me, fundamentally wrong that we regard ourselves as primarily individuals without responsibilities to each other; “No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main” as John Donne memorably wrote.

Indeed, the Bible from very early times talks about the tribe, the people, the children, the group, the disciples, the Church. Not much about the individual, and even there, I think that should be read against the background of an assumption that the listeners and readers understood that they were a people of God, not individuals of God.

This has been a lesson which I have learned only with huge difficulty; I’m an introvert and have always suffered from some social anxiety (and now have a fully fledged anxiety disorder), so groups of people are not my favorite location; I’m a solitary contemplative in terms of my deepest spiritual practice (I seem to have had that foisted on me, not that it was in any way contrary to my nature); I’ve always thought that I should make my own way in the world, reliant on no-one else (such as my parents and their willingness to pay for an extended education); I was born with a decent mind and natural abilities which have made it easy for me to acquire skills in several areas and change direction when one became difficult or impossible to pursue. I should be a natural candidate for thinking that I, as an individual, am the captain of my ship, the master of my fate. However, illness and minor disability has taught me that I am absolutely dependent on others; I would not be here absent a twelve step community which recovers as a group where no individual could recover by themselves, or absent a wife and family. Or absent God.

I suggest that we should confess our dependence, accept it and strive to give effect to the economy of God, in which no person should go unprovided with food, shelter or clothing. Or love.

Following my previous post, which dealt with boundaries we draw when considering moral issues, and attempted to problematise where we draw some of those boundaries, I watched an episode of “The Bridge” which brought up some linked thoughts.

I hasten to say that I don’t usually enjoy having to read films and TV programmes (the series is in Swedish and Danish with subtitles), particularly when the language is close enough to my own to keep making me think that if I listened just a bit harder I would understand it (I live in a part of England with a lot of dialect and accent influence from Scandinavia), but I got sucked in by a somewhat bizarre start point (which got more bizarre before the end of the first episode) and by the interplay of two detectives with hugely different characters, one of whom is “a bit diferent”.

In that episode, the background is that an apparently socially conscious serial killer has kidnapped a bus full of schoolchildren and has promised to let them go, but on the condition that buildings belonging to five companies all of whom profit from child labour (in effect, slavery) are burned (slightly complicated by the fact that the perpetrator has identified them only by what they sell…). This becoming public, various people duly go and commit arson, and there’s a nailbiting finish as there’s a fire at a chocolate factory moments before the deadline runs out, and the box saying “chocolate” winks out; in the newspaper offices where this is being watched, a cheer goes up – and the viewer is inclined to cheer with them.

The thing is, even in that episode, you have to think that the background is that everyone dealing with those companies has been contributing to child slavery; why is it that five schoolchildren of the same nationality have to be in danger of dying in order to focus people’s minds on the destruction of the lives of many more children in other countries? Why do we think that very significant acts of arson against private property should be celebrated, and do we think that those five children’s lives are worth enough to justify this criminal behaviour? Why especially as, in order to save a little money ourselves, we have been buying from the slave-labour companies?

Earlier episodes, in fact, highlighted the lack of concern of many people to the death of several homeless people, an immigrant and the ambivalence of the slow, public death of a very violent robber and bully by the draining of his blood.

One cannot avoid thinking that there’s huge concern about five children, but very little about those homeless people, an immigrant and the violent guy. We may, perhaps, say that all life is sacred, but we act as if children are more valuable than adults as long as those adults are people we don’t identify with or who aren’t of specific economic benefit to us (there’s an issue in a later episode about how a rich guy who has killed someone by drunk driving has got away with it, for instance). We act as if the mere fact of the life of a child is valuable, but the quality of the lives of a greater number of children is not.

In fact, we seem to think that children, including the unborn, have infinite value (as long as they’re fairly much like us), but adults have a specific financial value, and those who are socially marginal have little or none. At least, we do outside the realm of the UK courts, where the value of a human life is routinely assessed based largely on earning potential; this tends to result in fairly low figures for infants, whose earning potential cannot be assessed. Things are somewhat different in the US courts, where damages are assessed by juries; I’ve occasionally suggested that as the value of a life is incalculable, the States puts a mind-blowingly high value on it, while the UK basically says it has no value in and of itself, just what it can be predicted to provide for others in the future.

In fact, things are different in a lot of other places and cultures, from the far lower amounts which some systems allocate to any lives to those which are still operating (if not notionally, then on a cultural level)  according to the kind of rules which operated in Biblical times, when children were basically of no value at all until they’d reached the age of a month and were a possession of their father thereafter until some arbitrary age when they were decreed adult (if male) or married off (if female) – or even those of still earlier times when unwanted children were just discarded, exposed to the elements and the local wildlife which was in those days generally entirely capable of eating a baby or three.

We also seem to have an elevated view of the character of children – “innocents” is the watchword there. I don’t think this is due to Jesus’ statements in Matt. 19:14 or Matt. 18:3, either; both were largely ignored in the notionally Christian western Europe until at the earliest the early 19th century. However, psychological studies seem to demonstrate that the very young are fundamentally sociopathic narcissists, who think only of self (once they form the idea that “self” is not continuous with the rest of the world) and are born manipulative; my own observation of children doesn’t disagree. Only later do a sizeable proportion become socialised and fit to be regarded, in my eyes, as fully human. Some, of course, avoid this socialisation and become criminals or company executives.

We then proceed to have a confused idea of when to promote people to having full adult responsibility. Not infrequently, we allow teenagers to fight for us, but not to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco; ages of consent for sex vary vastly depending on what country you are in, as do ages of legal liability for criminal offences and ages when the punishment of offenders is upgraded to “adult”. In this week’s Global Christian perspectives, Elgin Hushbeck bemoaned the fact that we allow teenagers freedom without responsibility, but we also impute some of them with responsibility without freedom. It is hardly surprising that many of them seem confused as to what they actually are!

It seems to me that we are operating by taboo when we so protect the very young, a taboo which I think was born of Victorian sentimentality (which, on the good side, also ended child labour). We are not operating logically, nor are we operating out of the Christian value of valuing life irrespective of its utility to society or conformity with social norms. What motivates us is taboo, prejudice and, sometimes, xenophobia. This really will not do.

Personally, I think this is an area in which we have to make hard moral choices, as indeed some of the cast of “The Bridge” are presented with. We could say that the mere existence of human life is a good so great that anything else should be sacrificed in comparison. In that case, we would also, in order to be rational, have to forswear capital punishment, war and lethal force in self-defence or even law enforcement. I suggest that rationality would also demand that we then also collectively provide for every human life within our society to at least a basic level, say level 2 (so that both physiological and safety needs are provided for everyone); maybe even level 3, providing also for love and belonging. The mere presence of life, it seems to me, is not sufficient when that life is going to be, as Thomas Hobbes put it “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

Alternatively, we can attempt the extremely difficult task faced by the courts in cases of civil actions for wrongful death, and value every life as dispassionately as we can. And if we do this, as the experience of the courts shows, the very young and the very old have very little value.

What price the busload of children under that paradigm?

 

I don’t usually stray into issues around the acceptance (or otherwise) of homosexuality and same sex marriage. However, my attention has been drawn to a couple of really excellent blog posts.

The first of these is from Larry Behrendt, on Jewish-Christian intersections. Always stimulating and thought-provoking, Larry concentrates on issues around how and why Judaism and Christianity parted company, and what we can now do to overcome the historically nasty relationship between the two ( for which most of the blame lies with Christianity). In it, Larry points out that there is a good argument for saying that the “clobber text” in respect of homosexuality in Leviticus 20 can reasonably be read as indicating “taboo” rather than anything stronger, and as being culturally and temporally specific and not of general application; he points out (particularly interesting to me) that the same word, to-ehvah used of whatever is targeted by Lev. 20:13, is used of lending at interest and of investing for profit.

Now, if that be the case, using the usual biblical translation of “to-ehvah”, I can happily proclaim that capitalism is an abomination which should be taboo. This is going to preach!

The second is from J. Daniel Kirk, an evangelical professor at a fairly conservative seminary. Now, I like listening to Daniel (who is currently a regular contributor to Homebrewed Christianity’s Lectiocast, a resource for preachers working from the Lectionary). I like reading him. But he comes from a far more conservative strain of Christianity than I can really be comfortable with.

Here, however, it seems to me that he hits the issue squarely on the nail, and with superb force of argument. Certain people, he starts out, cannot be part of the community of God. Liberals (theological and social) should not stop reading there… the argument proceeds to make the point that the trajectory of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament regularly sets aside older exclusivist statements and replaces them with new, inclusivist ones, and asks why we cannot do the same here, despite Daniel thinking that the “clobber text” scriptures probably do actually target homosexuality in general rather than, as various very inventive interpreters have been doing recently, merely certain specific actions. I am still not certain I can go along with that portion of Larry’s argument, although I do find the in-depth look at the translation of Lev. 20 very interesting.

One reason why I have not commented is that about 40 years ago, I found myself asked by a friend, who is now in a same-sex marriage, to look at those clobber texts and tell him what I thought they meant for his clearly inborn sexual orientation, as he was a committed Christian. Much as I would have liked to reassure him, I cane to much the same conclusion as Daniel does – although you can argue about them, they probably evidence an exclusion of anyone with same-sex orientation both in Leviticus/Deuteronomy and in Paul’s letters, and said that I could wish that he might consider a different religious tradition (at the time, I was still exploring many religious traditions and could best have been described as a freelance monotheist of the panentheist variety). It was not possible at the time, and all I could suggest was that he reject those passages as not applicable. I did not see the internal justification which Daniel exposes for considering them as “timed out”.

Now, both Larry, in his more general thinking, and Daniel have provided ways in which the deselection of these passages as relevant to us here and now can be justified, and add to my earlier conclusion – that Christianity understands God as loving before anything else, and that he would not support the condemnation of exclusion of anyone on the basis of something they were born with. They have done it without the need to hold anything other than the highest view of scripture, as well. My thanks to both – and I wish I’d had their analyses 40 years ago!

Courtesy of a link from a post at Partially Examined Life’s facebook feed, I listened to a talk by Catherine Malabou recently. (“Emotional Life in a Neurobiological Age”) I don’t necessarily recommend listening unless you’re both philosophically inclined and reasonably comfortable with “continental philosophy” to be honest; I’m not really either of those things, but keep plugging away at PEL in the hopes that one day I will be comfortable with the more philosophical end of theology.

There are, however, some very interesting parts of her thesis, particularly for me. She is particularly interested in the phenomenon of loss of affect, i.e. people who develop an inability to feel emotion.  This is well established as a result of brain lesions and of epileptic absences, and she comments further that it can be the result of  PTSD or profound depression.

That is where my interest is piqued, as I have personal experience of being in this state, described by her, in which it may be that the reasoning faculties are completely intact, but the person suffering the condition is entirely unable to make decisions as they are wholly apathetic as to the result. I have been there, done that and, as they say, bought the t-shirt, and in hindsight it may well have been a subconscious self-preservation mechanism which finally tipped me over into it, as before that I was actively suicidal; after the depression (and or PTSD) became that severe, there was no longer any particular reason to prefer death over life (or, of course, vice versa), so I was relatively safe as long as I had a minder to ensure (for instance) that I did get out of the way of oncoming buses.

This may all appear of only historic interest to me on a personal basis, but she goes on to comment on the phenomenon when applied to a body of people in a political milieu; as she says, though I paraphrase, if the people can be persuaded to feel a total lack of ability to alter anything, and in addition develop an apathy towards the situation, then those ruling them have won unbridled power.

Looking back after our hotly debated recent election, it seems to me that this syndrome affected a substantial number of previous Liberal Democrat voters and workers between 2010 and 2015. If they had been anything like left-leaning, the idea of a coalition with the Tories was anathema in the first place, and thus even after being rarities for the LibDems and getting an MP of their party elected, as happened in 52 constituencies in 2010, their perception was that they just got a Conservative government anyhow. Why bother?

OK, granted the coalition did not do some of the nastier things the Conservatives will now push through, and did not cut as hard and as fast as the Tories wanted (which as per my last post would have been at a minimum unnecessary and more probably  have earned a total lack of recovery and calls for even more austerity). The left-leaning LD, however, was never looking for small adjustments in the direction of reduction of the welfare state, but of increases to it, not reduced taxes for the wealthy but substantial increases.  From their point of view, the coalition was a total fail.

Depression, the Church and the Social Gospel

In conscience, I cannot be other than a “left-leaning” Liberal Democrat myself.  I completely fail to see how it is possible to take seriously the agenda laid out in the Sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 25 and not to attempt to ensure that the body of which we are all, perforce, part, namely the United Kingdom, complies with the obligations to support the poor, the sick and the otherwise disadvantaged, to welcome the stranger and, well, just be civilised.

Don’t tell me that “the poor will always be with us” – perhaps they will, but that doesn’t negate the imperative to reduce poverty. Indeed, it seems to me emblematic of the depressive “we can’t make any difference” attitude.

Don’t tell me that this is the responsibility of the churches. Firstly, with single-figure percentages of regular attenders on Sundays and even less who take the absolute instruction to assist the poor seriously, they are in no position to do that. Secondly, they don’t even manage to do that for their own members. There should be no churches where there are regular attenders who are homeless, for instance – no church I know of has a congregation with less spare bedrooms than the number of homeless members. OK, I grant that if that situation were put right, there soon would be churches in that situation as news of their generosity of spirit spread! Here again, the depressive “we can’t fill the need, so why do anything” seems to me to come into play.

Equally, don’t tell me that this is taking from the individual and giving to “the government” as if government was something apart from the people; as we live in a Democracy, the government is not different from the people, it is the joint expression of the community. (If you consider, probably with some justification, that the government doesn’t express the community very well, the remedy is to revise the way in which we govern ourselves, not to stop it fulfilling a communitarian ethos – indeed, if you stop it fulfilling a communitarian ethos, it will become something other than an expression of the community). If you live in a community, or trade in a community, you should contribute to it. You do, of course, have a vote – unless we’re talking of a commercial trading entity, in which case you have persuasive muscle well beyond a mere vote.

Once it is established that you should contribute to it, given that you have a vote, it being a democracy, you will (I hope) vote for provisions which comply with the directions of Matthew 5-6 and Matthew 25 in any event, and if you are a Christian there should be no “I hope” about it. How, I ask, can you at the same time consider that the poor, the sick and the marginalized should be cared for and vote for an administration which does not intend to do this? I would hope that further than that, you would involve yourself actively in the political process, working for parties which would pursue a “Sermon on the Mount” policy. We are not, here, talking of “render unto Caesar” separation from the ruling power, as you are yourself a part of the ruling power.

If you do not do this, whether your psychological state is indeed the depressive, disconnected apathy Catherine Malabou speaks of or just a decision not to be involved, the effect is exactly the same as if you were indeed apathetic, depressive and disconnected. You will be contributing to rule by those who do not adhere to Jesus’ precepts.

Small groups at my church are looking at Acts 2:43-47 over the course of four weeks: ⁴³ Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. ⁴⁴ All who believed were together and had all things in common; ⁴⁵ they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. ⁴⁶ Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home^] and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, ⁴⁷ praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

This passage, it seems to me, holds out a picture of the early church in Jerusalem as the ideal of how we should live as Christians, and indeed the themes for these four weeks are along those lines.

However, it gives me a problem; I do not hold my property or income in common with others (well, apart from my wife and, before they left home, my children). I will grant that the way the passage is being presented, it is not arguing that we should actually be forming a communist group, but that is the way it reads if you take it reasonably literally, and I do not see any reason not to take it literally.

In particular, I note that shortly after this passage is the tale of Ananias and Saphira (Acts 5:1-11), in which Ananias sells a plot of land, but gives only part of the proceeds, with his wife’s knowledge, to the community; both of them are struck dead when confronted by Peter. Now, the immediate response when I raised this argument with a group member who is considerably more conservative and literalistic than I am myself was that the fault of Ananias and Saphira was lying to the community and representing that they had paid in the whole of the proceeds (which is certainly what Peter reproaches them with, but is not apparent from the account of what they actually did), and that we should not take either passage as advocating communistic living, but only considerable generosity.

I could make the same argument myself, and I have, over many years, but it doesn’t seem to me to be more than an excuse for not living fully into the Christian life. Granted, I have a great sympathy with Maya Angelou’s celebrated comment “I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‘I’m a Christian. “I think, ‘Already? You already got it?’ I’m working at it, which means that I try to be as kind and fair and generous and respectful and courteous to every human being.” This is a place where I fall down, and am likely to keep falling down.

It seems to me entirely in line with Jesus’ teaching as we know it: the story of the rich young man which appears in all the synoptic gospels ends in him going away saddened because he is not going to sell all he possesses and give the proceeds to the poor.

That said, I don’t think my church, or any other church I know of, is actually going to be doing this (and not just the person who downplayed my argument). Indeed, aside from a few notable individuals such as St. Francis, it doesn’t seem to have been the norm except in the very early church – and I strongly suspect the reason is that it isn’t actually viable. After all, we find in Romans 15:25-28 that Paul is taking a subscription to the Jerusalem church, and I can’t help thinking this might be because they ran out of money…

I’ve no taste for being the only person around doing this, quite apart from the fact that as things are, it would land me too on the list of those asking for charity (or, at least, State support as due to my health I couldn’t now expect to be able to support myself by my own labour), nor for being one of a small number who do it, landing them communally in the same position. I do wonder, however, how much that is real pragmatism and how much a frantic wiggling to avoid the consequences of really following Jesus.

Could a communitarian ethos work in a wider sense, I wonder? Just to push the pragmatic view a bit more, however, I can’t find an example of a completely communitarian society of substantial size anywhere. The countries where communism has been tried are object examples of failure (though, to be fair, none of them has actually achieved a truly communitarian society – the vast majority of them look like something between dictatorships and oligarchies). Note that when I say “failure” there, I am not talking of measures of success such as gross national product, national or individual wealth or income; the failures have been in not providing a free society and in not producing a system in which everyone is provided for “according to their needs” and is reasonably content.

I do know of a reasonably substantial number of small groups which have seemed to operate the communitarian principle with some success (not, of course, material or monetary success, but those are not only not relevant to the objective but arguably completely contrary to it), but those seem to rely partly on being small and partly on operating within a larger society which works on a market economy basis, often by accepting social payments, or by having a backer who does not operate by these rules and supports the community from excess income. I do note that the model for the slightly later church seems to have been groups supported by such rich backers, and it seems to have persisted where communitarian living has in general not.

The nearest to examples of success I can find are social democratic countries, in particular the Scandinavian ones, but there seem to me problems there: some have taken steps back from egalitarianism recently and reduced welfare spending on the basis that their welfare states were proving unsupportable (and I suspect globalisation to be the main culprit; it is difficult to maintain a welfare state when in direct competition with capitalist states operating wage slavery systems, and they worked much better before globalisation really took off), and also the populations do not actually seem to be as content as one would hope – the suicide rates, for instance, seem rather high, as do incidences of depression.

There is, however, an aspect I have not yet considered, and this is very much a feature of the story of the rich young man. “Jesus answered, ‘If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me’. When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.” (Matt. 19:21-22). There is a great freedom in letting go of an attachment to worldly possessions and wealth, both of which can easily obsess the mind to the exclusion of any kind of spirituality, and even just enjoying life; I know this not because I’ve ever voluntarily given away all or even most of my possessions, but because circumstances took them away for a time, during which I had an estimated “net worth” which was substantially negative and no reasonable prospect of employment due to illness. Now that I again have a positive net worth, can actually work again to a limited extent and have a modest but adequate pension income, I am, I think, on the right side of a paradigm change with respect to money and possessions.

I grant that giving away everything you have is a draconian way of achieving that freedom, but it may, I think, be the only option for some of us, and I think the rich young man saw that, and knew himself unable to take that step.

Against all this pragmatism, however, is the bare fact that Jesus consistently spoke against money and possessions and in favour of leaving everything and following him. That at least makes it an objective to be aimed towards, even if it’s an unattainable ideal. There is within me an urge to just believe and do, and trust that the outcome will be good, but it remains balanced by a reluctance to take a step when every indication is that it would be a disaster.

With Maya Angelou, the best I can say is that I’m working at it.

I’ve now listened to the introductory talk to Homebrewed Christianity’s new High Gravity class “Paul, Rupture, Revelation, Revolution” (£20 well spent, to my mind!) a couple of times and watched the live stream of the session on Jacob Taubes “The Political Theology of Paul”.

And I’m feeling oppressed, as Tripp Fuller suggests Daniel Kirk (author of “Jesus I have loved, but Paul?”) might be doing in the introductory talk. Actually, I’m feeling oppressed by Tripp as well as by Daniel, courtesy of some remarks about liberals and progressives and a lampoon of Borg and Crossan (hey, I’m a liberal, I’m going to like them!), and by Taubes due to remarks he makes about liberals. Tripp is hugely engaging when he goes off on one of this enthusiastic excurses, but I can’t go all the way with him. Assuming, that is, that he is not just playing a part (as I know he is well able to do). He may just be being jocular or provocative, or indulging an ongoing contest with Pete, but the repetition makes it difficult for me to treat it as just jocular. Perhaps, however, he is establishing a thesis to set against the antithesis of Pete, Taubes, Badiou and Zizek?

The thing is, I’m targeted by the term “liberal”. I really have little option about being identified as a theological liberal, progressive in at least some senses, with a radical edge (happily, no-one said anything nasty about radicals). The thing is, this is because I interpret scripture in a way typically seen as “liberal” and, to be fair, that’s the best description of my political stance in the UK as well, although it wouldn’t do in the States, where I’d probably be regarded as alarmingly leftist.

I don’t, for instance, consider that a physical resurrection is a remotely likely occurrence, not only on the grounds that biology and physics militate against anything like that happening (I’m methodologically if not quite ontologically naturalistic) but also on the basis that, wearing my hat as a retired lawyer and treating the gospel accounts as eyewitness, the conclusion I arrive at is that what they report experiencing is overwhelmingly likely to have been a set of apparitions. It’s possible that some of those may have been tangible apparitions, but I’ve experienced a tangible apparition (of Jesus) myself in circumstances in which I’m pretty confident there was no material body present – apart from my own. Daniel and Tripp both talked as if belief in this is really important. The best I can deliver in response is to say that I can’t absolutely exclude the possibility that their view is correct, but I consider it very unlikely – hardly a basis for “faith”!

I don’t see this kind of belief as important. I ask myself what it would mean to me for some random person to resurrect in circumstances in which the reports were incontrovertible, and whether there would be any difference between that meaning to me and the one resulting from my acceptance that there were apparitions. The answer is, basically “no”. I understand by resurrection a concept which is wider than any reanimation and which can apply to things other than people – although to them as well. After all, I’ve been resurrected in a sense myself (I spent some years severely clinically depressed, and when that lifted, I definitely felt “returned from the dead”). Similarly it makes no difference to me whether other physical miracles actually happened or whether that is just how the people of the day experienced them subjectively and incorporated them into their thinking. As Pete says, these are “radically subjective experiences”.

That is, in fact, not the limit of my theological liberalism. While, as a result of personal experience (of the peak unitive mystical variety) I tend to think that that-which-is-God is real (and immanent, and something akin to panentheist even if this is not quite an adequate description), I can similarly entertain the idea that the only place in which God is actually ever present is in the concept-space of my mind and those of others. (Possibly, it is only in the concept-spaces of thinking entities that anything which can reasonably be regarded as non-material actually exists, granted that what is material is in terms of current science not nearly so material as it appears – materiality is just another illusion, albeit one which we would be foolish to act against.) I am not even confident that regarding God as a “person” represents the ultimate truth of the matter, but I find that God can be and is sometimes experienced as a person.

I do not need God to be in Godself anything more than that. Similarly, for my devotion to Jesus to be operative, I do not need him to have worked any miracles, risen from the dead or have done anything more than have prophesied against the power structures of his day and laid down some principles which I can aspire to as an ideal but never meet`. As I demonstrated in some years of arguing Christianity against a set of very vocal atheists, this means that I can often talk to atheists without the need to argue any claim which is impossible for them to accept.

Granted, I have a permanent problem talking with anyone with a confirmed supernatural theist viewpoint, which probably includes Daniel, may include Tripp and definitely includes Paul. The nearest I can come to accepting this is to avoid actual dogmatism that that-which-is-God is not as they conceive Godself to be. Even if the resultant expectation that miracles will happen on a daily basis if you just believe strongly enough that they will is, to me,  in fact false, I can acknowledge that there are some provable advantages in adopting that mindset – though I do find that difficult to adopt with any deep conviction. My hope there is a long way short of confidence in things unseen.

I am, however, entirely on board with both Tripp’s and Peter Rollins’ attitude that it is pointless just to play with concepts and come to some compromises with the structures of the day (and I mention that in my experience, conservative and evangelical churches are just as guilty of this as are “liberal” or “progressive” ones). To my mind, both Jesus and Paul (who I admit I have not yet loved, although he grows on me) laid down some very radical principles on which they expected followers of Jesus/Christ to operate, and which are entirely inconsistent with the current wisdom of the world and its power structures, just as they were at the time they were teaching. I am as a result someone whose aims and priorities are politically and economically wholly out of line with those of my times, and this is what might allow me to lay claim to the title “radical” – unlike the portrait of liberals painted by Tripp and Taubes, I accept that I am called on to follow, and to act as nearly as possible in accordance with those radical principles. I may not be very good at it, but am not deceived by the economic and political orthodoxies.

Intellectual acceptance, in my book, is nothing like what is meant in the scriptures by “faith”, and it is insufficient to found anything. What is needed is action – it is implausible to claim that you actually believe something unless your actions speak to that, unless the ideas inhabiting your conscious concept space and which you voice actually produce your actions, unless the transcendent collapses into the immanent, much as a probability density collapses into something observable in quantum physics. Daniel refers to this from 2 Corinthians, in which Paul talks of observing actions not words.

But where does that leave us with our three authors? Taubes was Jewish, and quoted with some approval Nietzsche’s flaming criticism of Jesus; Badiou and Zizek are both atheists, and indeed Badiou adverts in his introduction to the fact that he just does not believe in the major facts which Paul very clearly did believe and which allowed Paul to challenge the structures and thinking of the day, and later has an excursus arguing that Paul was antagonistic to arguing from actual evidence in a logical way. Pete mentions the fascination of the atheists with the fact that Paul clearly “really believed” – how on earth can they appropriate any of Paul’s thinking without some similar belief of their own? Much is made in the introductory talk and discussion of Paul’s insistence that faith in/of Christ is the key to all of his thinking, the key to any breaking of the assumptions of Jewish exceptionalism on the one hand and Roman Imperialism on the other. How do the atheists attempt some form of faith? Come to that, how do I attempt it, given that what I can state I believe beyond reasonable doubt is massively short of what Daniel, or (apparently) Tripp, or Paul, or Jesus believed?

Are we looking here at justification not by faith in Christ, but along with some of the new Perspective on Paul writers, justification by the faithfulness of Christ (which can then be appropriated by following Him without, perhaps, the need to possess that faith yourself)?

To be entirely honest, Taubes book and what I have to date read of Badiou’s both give me the appearance of playing with concepts, of appropriating some ideas and structures from Paul and subverting them to their own agendas, reading them in the light of a much different basic narrative, much as Taubes (quoting Nietzsche) complains Christian authors did reading the whole Hebrew scriptures as prefiguring Christ, down to any mention of a wooden object (and some non-wooden ones) being taken as a reference to the cross. But then, from some standpoint what I have written about my own approaches above may seem to some to be a similar exercise – I am indeed accommodating how I think about these concepts to an overriding approach of naturalism, even if not to an acceptance of power structures and market economics.

That said, as Taubes points out, neither Jesus nor Paul was entirely innocent in reinterpreting the Hebrew scriptures against what anyone else in the time would have regarded as their meaning.

Perhaps Pete Rollins is on track, when he says that what he is interested in is not what Paul believed, but what he was doing in what he believed (to paraphrase). I can regard something as a narrative which it is open for me to live into irrespective of whether the narrative is factually based; “I do not know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true”.  Badiou, indeed, talks of truth revealed in a rupture, possibly acknowledging that he accepts a truth being revealed here, athough Badiou’s concept of “truth” is nonstandard, and I am not convinced I have yet grasped it. But then, Badiou flatly describes the resurrection as a lie.

Is it, perhaps, the case that whereas Tripp criticises people in churches who talk of faith in Christ but act as worshippers of Mammon (and I heartily agree), we are here looking at people who talk atheist but act like followers of Christ? After all, I know quite a few atheists who act Catholic!

So, 4 million on the streets in France today. Charlie Hebdo’s 1 million issue will sell out. Absolute stacks of people thus end up supporting a paper which most of them  (well, apart from around 50,000) rightly wouldn’t have had any time for a few days ago.

14 years ago, Al Queda managed to hit the USA on a nerve by attacking the World Trade Centre. I could argue that there followed a major over-reaction which served the interests of Al Quaeda in polarising the world, and bringing all-out conflict closer. Osama was probably delighted beyond measure.

France’s nerve is her intellectuals, her edgy satirists, and they’ve been attacked now. OK, so I’m a cynic, but I fancy the reaction so far may please the terrorist puppet-masters in Syria (or Yemen, or wherever) thoroughly. Please let it stop at a mass demonstration and a sellout mega-issue of this rag, and not escalate further.

That is my final prayer for today. Peace. Salaam. Shalom. Paix. Ca suffit, hein?