Eyre Lines

I’ve a bit of a weakness for superheroes, and it seems to me that I’m pretty average that way. I loved “Heroes” (which most unfortunately lost it’s way and got cancelled after four series to the intense distress of many fans), quite like “Alphas”, liked the sideways take of “Misfits” and am partial to the odd Marvel or DC comics film, which keep coming out on a regular basis.

And, as far as I’m concerned, God isn’t anything like that. As I’ve written before, God doesn’t wear his knickers outside his tights. I like the idea that God might intervene supernaturally to rescue his favoured people (possibly even me) just fine, (though see below) but I would be astonished if that were ever to happen, or if it actually happened at any time in history. Including in the Bible…

I was listening to a guest at Alpha this week explaining his reactions, in this case to the “Why and how should I read the Bible” talk, and feeling that there’s still a very large gap between some well-respected liberal Christian writers and the “feel” of the average church. He was explaining seeing the texts as allegorical and metaphorical, including the miracles described (which he sees as purely plot devices), and I was so with him – and he was clearly seeing this as a reason why he could not be “part of” the church. It isn’t part of the Alpha course for helpers to provide answers in the discussions, so I stayed quiet. But I don’t see this as a valid reason for not being part of the church myself. I used to – for rather a long time I used to, in fact, but I’ve read John Shelby Spong and John Dominic Crossan and Robert Funk and Marcus Borg and many others who are entirely comfortable with a demythologised (and sometimes remythologised) Bible as still being a text to take seriously, though not literally. They seem to manage, so I should be able to – and I think, so should he.

I’ve also spent years debating religion on The Religion Forum (which used to be far more active than it has been lately) and found that once you get beyond “he worked a miracle so you must take him seriously” (I already take him very seriously indeed, so let’s move on), all the meaning which is extracted from miracles is of the metaphorical or allegorical kind. What is the meaning of taking five loaves and two fishes and feeding 5,000, after all? (This, incidentally, impresses me the more having been involved in the feeding of 50-80 for five Wednesday evenings now!). It isn’t limited to “well, this guy could multiply food in a marvellous way 2000 years ago”. No, it speaks to a culture of sharing, it speaks to God being sufficient for all and not exclusive to a few, it speaks to overcoming cultural barriers and fear of the “unclean”, and I could go on for quite a while. And none of this is dependent on how five loaves and two fishes became sufficient.

The “big one” is, of course, the Resurrection. I’ve written about this recently more than once. How can you be a Christian and not believe in a bodily, physical resurrection, you might ask. And I’d reply that firstly the evidence of the gospels is, on the whole, against a bodily resuscitation (which is more like what is being talked of) and secondly that Paul appears not to have believed in one, though he did believe in resurrection (and how!). But it was a spiritual resurrection. And that is not something for which you expect or need suspensions of natural law as you do for most miracles. Everything else works perfectly well whether or not you accept that the dead body lodged in the tomb revived at some point and started walking through walls and travelling substantial distances without passing through the intervening space. And similarly everything else about the New Testament works perfectly well whether or not you believe that Jesus (or God) was working a few magic tricks. OK, real magic rather than just illusion, but tricks nonetheless.

Incidentally, I except the healing miracles in general from this scepticism. Medical miracles do happen from time to time, and I do not think we have begun to understand the extent to which the mind can, on occasion, make the body do things which are impossible in normal circumstances.

It isn’t just a matter of sticking to a hard scientific dogma here, either. If I consider that Jesus worked miracles, I can see no particular reason why I can say that the noted Jewish rabbis of around the same time, Honi the Circle Drawer and Eliezar did not work miracles as well. Or a host of later Islamic notables, or earlier Buddhist or Taoist sages. Or, indeed, that the stories of Nero Redivivus are not true, or that the emperors Augustus (of Rome) and Alexander (of Macedon) were not miraculously conceived. Christianity has absolutely no monopoly on the miraculous, and the miracles do not advance us by being factual rather than allegorical. I may even be in difficulty accepting that Elvis has not been resurrected…

However, there’s more than that. I may not think of God the Creator in the same way as the Biblical literalist, but the God who can speak an universe into being (according to John 1 and, possibly, Genesis 1), who is omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient is not going to need to tinker with His creation with magic tricks. I will grant you that the only one of those “omnis” which I think it anything like correct is omnipresence (I can’t get away from that, it’s how I experience God), but I do think that the general impression is correct even if the reductio ad absurdum implicit in “omni” is not. God does not need to tinker with his creation, because he made it and, according to Genesis, he saw that it was good. Very good, in fact. And if it is good by God’s standards, that is beyond my pay scale to criticise.

And yet, apparently, the God who, according to Paul, is apparent in every part of creation such that we are without excuse in not accepting him (Rom. 1:19-20) is thought to need to suspend natural law in a few cases in order to demonstrate that Jesus is special?

No, I’m afraid I don’t see that.

What I do see is a God who is beyond and above that. Even though I’m a sucker for magic tricks and superheroes.

And that has some more consequences which I’ll look at in a further post.

Last Sunday was Remembrance Sunday; Monday (the 11th of the 11th) being Remembrance Day proper. For friends who aren’t from the UK, firstly this commemorates the armistice signed at Compiégne which took effect at 11 o’clock on the 11th of November 1918 and effectively brought World War I to an end, and is the commemoration of those who have given their lives in the service of the country in war. During the weeks leading up to it, imitation poppies are worn, bought by a donation to the Royal British Legion, a charity for servicemen and their families, which recall the poppies which grew in profusion throughout the fields of Flanders where the greatest fighting of the Western Front took place. In the States, this is “Veterans Day”, with some of the same connotations. There’s a rather good blog post about the difference here.

11/11 18 was the end of the “Great War”, called at the time “the war to end all wars”.

Would that that title had been correct.

It is, however, the war which has had the greatest impression on me, due to two things. In 1968 at the age of 14 I went on an exchange holiday to Northern France, exchanging with a young French lad of my age. When he came over here, we took him to see some local sights and also up to Edinburgh, talking about the “auld alliance” between Scotland and France prior to the complex arrangement whereby Scots monarchs acquired the English throne for a while and, by and large, the English acquired Scotland. When I went over there, a large proportion of what I saw was the WWI battlefields and the cemeteries associated with them. And the rows of white headstones seemed to go on for ever… I walked for quite a while in one of them, looking at the names and not infrequently lack of names on them. It was, for me, an intense experience.

It was also clear, looking at the ground within a local wood where Hervé liked to cycle (pre BMX but pretending it was moto-cross), that the ground was still scarred 50 years later with the relics of trenches and bomb craters all over the area; it went on for miles and miles. The sheer scale of devastation struck me really forcibly, and I began reading about the history of the period. It was the first war in which slaughter was truly made into an industrial process, and, for the most part, was largely futile as neither side could break out of the trench systems for some three years, just pushing forward and back in an ebb and flow of constant carnage.

The year after that, Selby Abbey had its 900th anniversary, and the town had a festival (in which my parents were prominent organisers). One event was a reunion at the British Legion club in town of a lot of First World War ex-servicemen (that year also being the 50th anniversary of the formal termination of hostilities, which was in 1919). I went along, and was privileged to hear some of the old soldiers actually talking about what it had been like to fight. Some of them were survivors of the Bradford Pals. This was the 16th and 18th batallions of the West Yorkshire regiment. On July 1st 1916, 2000 of the Pals emerged from their trenches to attack on the Somme in the morning; by lunchtime 1,770 of them were killed or wounded. As they were raised from local areas, this meant that something like three quarters of the young men of these areas would never return. Whole streets had lost an entire generation. Part of this I learned from listening to them talk, part I had to research. Some of them, however, were willing to open up a bit, something which my father (who served in the RAF in World War II) was never really willing to do. Several of them had been about the age I was then when they lied about their ages in order to enlist at 16 rather than 18, because it was their patriotic duty, so I could engage with the person they had been a little, and feel all the more for the late adolescence they had never had.

I never felt the same about the Second World War as about the first, anyhow. The second was against a foe who I could reasonably consider sufficiently dangerous and evil to require all possible efforts to be made to wipe them out; not so the first. The German rulers of WWI were not particularly evil and frankly were not even particularly dangerous to England (though they were to France); we entered that war because of our involvement in one of two networks of alliances which had been built up to provide a balance in Europe, which network melted down as a result of an assassination in Sarajevo. We had no particular interests in the conflict between Austria and its Balkan nationalist separatists, but Russia did, and it was allied with France, and so were we and Italy, and Germany was allied with Austria and Turkey, and suddenly the fragile balance of European alliances fell apart. Or alternatively, it can be regarded allegorically as a bar fight...

Once that happened, Germany invaded France, and after a short period of “war of movement” bogged down in trench warfare which lasted over three years and stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border through Belgium and northern France. It wasn’t the first taste of trench warfare with machine guns which the world had seen (and previous experiments should have convinced everyone concerned that this was a very nasty way to kill off a very large number of soldiers) but it was the biggest by far. For three years, England, France, Belgium and Germany poured their young people into a country-wide industrial mincing machine and received back the shreds of a generation. The generals didn’t know what else to do, hoping above all reason for a “breakthrough”, which was not going to come until some improvements in technology allowed that and the German economy was faltering seriously in continuing to provide an endless supply of munitions. Italy and Austria were busy doing the same in the Alps between their two countries as well, and for a brief period we threw the young of New Zealand and Australia against prepared Turkish positions at Gallipoli to similar effect.

So when we get to that time of year when almost everyone on the street is wearing a poppy, this is what I remember. The sheer waste of millions of young lives. We remember the armistice of 1918 rather than the peace treaty (Versailles, 1919) which finally ended the war because at the time veterans objected to any celebration of victory, and I am in complete agreement with them. As the blog post I linked to above indicates, for the most part we remember in a low-key and dignified way, pace some people who feel that the whole thing has now been co-opted by politicians and media into something more akin to a celebration of more recent wars. We remember loss, not victory.

And it can be argued that Versailles was not really a victory, because the peace treaty was perhaps the worst which has ever been negotiated. Its scheme of reparations against Germany did much to ensure the collapse of the German economy in the 1920s and 30s and produce immense resentment in Germany which gave the background in which Hitler could rise to power, such that in a very real sense World War II was just the “second half” of World War I. The associated treaties were as bad; the botched settlement in the Balkans can be argued to have been partly responsible for the various more recent Balkan conflicts including Bosnia and Kosovo, and the settlement in the Middle East out of the collapsed Ottoman Empire (Turkey) bears considerable responsibility for conflict in (for example) Palestine, Syria and Iraq, which is still an unfinished story.

It wasn’t the war to end all wars; in a sense it hasn’t actually completely ended yet itself, as the repercussions rumble on. I suppose that if you regard the second World War as merely a continuation, it may have ended all wars within Europe, as most of the countries involved are now part of the European Union (the original motivation of which was to stop this happening again) and are fairly unlikely to go to war with each other again, and that is no mean feat considering the previous history of the continent. But it was an appalling and abhorrent waste of a generation from several countries, many of whom went to battle filled with patriotic zeal. That is also large in my remembering when I wear a poppy, and during the rest of the year when I consider that wars are still occurring, and wasting the potential of young lives and the hopes of generations, and that patriotic zeal is often part of the picture. Eric Bogle wrote about this, and his words “It all happened again, and again and again and again and again” ring in my ears.

There has been a Christian concept of “just war” since theologians became aware that Christianity was becoming the religion of the then premier world power and they felt a need to curry favour with the secular power and circumvent the ethos of non-violence which had previously characterised Christianity (to my mind, in complete consistency with the gospel). World War I was not one of them on any reading of the theory. World War II, however, just might have been – unless you see it as a continuation of World War I, in which case it was preventable and should have been prevented not by “appeasing Hitler” but by not getting into the position, through war, where Hitler could rise to power. Almost none of the subsequent wars have been “just” in the Christian sense, but that isn’t something we seem to reflect on much these days.

But the poppies in particular urge us to reflect on World War I, and that should be sufficient to convict us that war is a very great evil indeed. And that it is still the eleventh hour, almost too late for us to stop, and “study war no more”  – but not quite.

Every so often when I mention to one of my friends who is not religious that I’m going to church, they say “Say one for me”.

And, of course, I do, though I have serious reservations about any form of petitionary prayer which is not aimed squarely at receiving some form of enhanced consciousness for myself – for instance “Come, Holy Spirit” or “Please Lord, help me understand this!”.

The thing is, it seems to me they’re asking me to have a personal relationship with God on their behalf, to function, if you like, as a kind of priest. To intercede, to use my connection on their behalf, to capitalise on my (seriously faulty) piety to make up for their own lack of it.

Which would be absolutely fine in my eyes if I thought there was the slightest chance that it would work. But I don’t. A personal relationship means that there should be no need for an intervening third party (well, not most of the time, at any rate – I have some history of acting as an advocate and as a mediator, and don’t underestimate the value of those roles, but they apply only when there’s a serious problem which needs to be resolved, and it’s generally essential that the person I represent be present…)

It’s like asking someone else to do your Steps for you in a Twelve Step programme. You can help and encourage someone do them themselves, you can explain them, you can help dispel intellectual barriers to doing them, but you can’t actually do them for someone.

The first times this happened to me were when I was between 19 and 22, and having worked hard for a few years following my initial “zap” experience, had developed a spiritual practice which seemed to encourage and facilitate frequent further experience of the presence of God and had developed a set of ideas as to how and why this worked. Animated by the kind of spirit which led to this blog post, I was happy to share my conclusions with anyone who was interested in listening, while exploring all possible avenues as to how to improve my praxis and my understandings.

The snag is, people kept expecting that I could somehow transfer my experience directly to them, that by hanging on my every word and by regarding me as a leader, somehow it would mean that they would have the same experience, without having had the same original experience or having done the hard work of developing the praxis. I could communicate the understandings just fine (although I was less successful in persuading people that these were provisional and interim understandings and that I was still working on improving them), but I could not pass on the consciousness of the presence of God except occasionally (erratically) and for very limited periods of time. I could tell them what my praxis was and had been (as by then I had refined it to something very streamlined and minimalist), but as I knew it was building on an initial peak spiritual experience for which I had not worked in the slightest and for which I could propose no explanation (other than “grace” or “just one of those things”), I wasn’t confident that following the praxis would deliver them the same quality of experience (and by and large, my scepticism on that point seemed justified).

I found I was being referred to by some as “the Guru of Castle” (“Castle” being the nickname for my college), and I didn’t want to be a guru. Not, at any rate, unless I could reliably induce a “zap” experience in someone, and probably not even then, as my understandings were so provisional. They also didn’t fit neatly into any one faith tradition at the time (some may argue that they still don’t 40 years later!), so becoming a functioning part of one of those was not an option; I’d have had to form my own variant faith, and I was entirely confident that I lacked the ability and assurance to do that. Besides that, God was definitely not calling me to do that! What I seemed called to do was to launch out into the “normal” world, with employment, house, mortgage, wife, family and, in some way, combine that with personal spirituality.

[In case you’re wondering, my thinking at the time included elements of Christianity, Sufism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Paganism and Kabbalah. That may not be an exhaustive list!]

It seems to me, though, that there’s a very widespread wish among people for others to be holy (or spiritual, or learned, or committed, or observant) on their behalf. I don’t particularly feel that, but neither do I feel that it’s my calling to do that for anyone else – well, perhaps apart from “learned” in a small way, doing the intellectual heavy lifting and helping provide some intellectual answers occasionally.

So that brings me to my thinking about priests and other clergy. In this, I am definitely Protestant; I think the “priesthood of all believers” concept is vital. I don’t, in other words, think that having someone else act as intercessor for you is a valid concept except, perhaps, for a few special occasions. Thus, for instance, much as I may currently feel that Pope Francis is a person I could cheerfully follow, I couldn’t be Catholic, as he’s only the second pope during my lifetime who might fill that role. I’m not even really comfortable with the situation in the Anglican church, where only ordained clergy can perform the sacraments (though that’s something I swallow in favour of what has to be the broadest Church in existence). I don’t value the existence of monastic orders as, somehow, giving me vicarious sanctity if I support them, for instance.

Of course, what I do value is a system which allows some people to specialise in theory and to provide newer and alternative understandings (and praxes), and also people who have perfected a praxis and can teach it to others. Someone who can act as an example of praxis is clearly desirable. I also value the possibility of, for a period, joining an intentional community which has a strong praxis and devotes it’s time to this; somewhere to go on retreat. This is how I see the main functions of clergy, including monastics.

So, what do I think about “say one for me”? I recall Psalm 139:-
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
    you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down,
    and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
    O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before,
    and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
    it is so high that I cannot attain it.
Where can I go from your spirit?
    Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
    if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
    and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
    and the light around me become night’,
even the darkness is not dark to you;
    the night is as bright as the day,
    for darkness is as light to you.

If someone says to me “say one for me”, they have already said one for themselves. God is with them and knows their thoughts, even if they have no consciousness of that themselves.

And I’ll put in a word or two for them as well.

 

 

Still taking a break from Douglas Campbell, I’ve just finished “Why God Won’t Go Away” (Brain Science and the Biology of Belief) by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili and Vince Rause.

I was expecting to find a fair bit in this, both from the title and the Amazon blurb, and from a mention by another blog (I can’t remember which, but wish I could). I didn’t expect to have a (to me) complete and satisfactory explanation in terms of supported scientific opinion of how mystical experience actually works, and I was enthralled. OK, I may be a very sad person, where a book on Neurotheology is the best page-turner I’ve read this year, but there you are!

However, “Why God…” doesn’t just deal with mystical, peak spiritual experiences of the kind which relatively few people seem to experience; the book is not important only to mystics and would-be mystics, it also speaks about the general religious experience of mankind, as less extreme manifestations of the same general neurological and psychological principles. It places religious experiences, experiences of the divine presence, experiences of spiritual uplift as entirely normal and natural mechanisms in terms of brain structure and cognitive psychology. Anyone who has ever wondered exactly what is going on when they feel (for example) a sense of presence on entering a church can find in these pages what is going on in their minds, and know that it is entirely normal.

That, of course, is why God won’t go away, despite the wishes of prominent public atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. The ability to be conscious of God is hard wired into our neurology, and Paul was at least to some extent right in saying “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20). Clearly this is correct taking people en masse. However I’m less satisfied that Paul was justified in going on to say that everyone was without excuse (if this is taken individually), as the authors quote reputable research indicating that less than 50% of people actually testify to this kind of experience (actually, around 35%). Allowing for a considerable proportion who have the experience but at so low a level as to be imperceptible, there are still going to be plenty of people for whom the perception of God just doesn’t happen. It didn’t happen to me until my mid teens. How is it reasonable to say that when no experience confirms the existence of God, then you are still without excuse for not accepting his existence? I don’t, therefore, blame Hitchens and Dawkins for their lack of belief, just for their assumption that everyone else is exactly like them – and that is an assumption I made myself at around the age of 9 and persisted with until I was 15, though I plead youth and ignorance…

Of course, as the authors admit, all their research does is show how religious experience is processed in neurological and psychological terms. It doesn’t demonstrate that there is anything more than signals in the nervous system to give rise to this experience. On the other hand, as they point out, the same can be said for any experience we have – it’s all reducible to signals in our nervous systems; in addition, it is somewhat challenging to think that evolution has, in this case, pre-wired us to be delusional (rather than perceive something useful, such as ultimate reality).

For those of us who have had more powerful experiences, however, this book opens up a much needed set of understandings. I am one of these – I’ve touched on my initial “zap” experience a few times, a peak spiritual experience which came “out of the blue” when I was in my mid teens.

Some reading this will have seen exchanges between myself and the recently deceased and much missed George Ashley on The Religion Forum in the late 90s regarding the mystical experience. George was an experimental psychologist and an atheist, and the to-and-fro with him helped me immeasurably in arriving at much the same kind of conclusions as the writers of this book reach, though entirely without the backing of large amounts of published research in psychology and neurology which they bring to bear here (and despite that, it’s an immensely readable and approachable book). I’ve been trying to get to grips with this since the very early days after my original “zap”, which turned me in the space of an afternoon from an evangelical atheist to a believer of sorts. This book would have been very helpful at that time – but as it wasn’t published until 12 years ago, it wasn’t available!

In a slightly different world, I might have diverted into the biological sciences and been doing this kind of research myself, but at 15, I’d already given up biology and was clearly better suited to physics. Nonetheless, I did view myself (with one part of my thinking) as an experimental subject, and as the experimental subject was myself, was able to pursue some experiments which I’d probably have been arrested for trying on anyone else! A sample size of 1 is not going to convince anyone, however, and in any event I never really “wrote things up” in those days. It was purely for my own information – and initially, some reassurance that, as Newburg et al determine, having a major mystical experience with no identifiable cause is not actually proof positive of mental disorder*. Indeed, it is far from that. Even if a minority perception, it is still massively widespread (something which was news to me, as I’ve had little success in finding others who will attest to this kind of peak experience outside the ranks of the serious religious, mostly of the monastic variety).

The writers usefully mention most if not all of the conclusions which I’d come to about methods of provoking and accentuating such experience as well, such as fasting, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, chants and ritual. They even incline towards thinking that drugs don’t produce the same experience (though there may be similarities), which was a conclusion I arrived at as well (many years ago, it must be said!) and that it was distinguishable from schizophrenic symptoms, which I also strongly suspected having compared notes with a couple of schizophrenics. I could, however, criticise their acceptance of Michael Persinger’s results with Extremely Low Frequency electromagnetic radiation, as subsequent research has failed to substantiate that, which is a pity, as it is the only “quick fix” route I’m aware of to something at least somewhat like my own peak experience. Indeed, the chief technique I can suggest as being likely to work is a very large amount of practice, and I’m not sure even that will work in the case of someone who hasn’t had some low-level experience of the same kind. I’d have liked to see some experimental data along those lines referred to, rather than just using very practiced meditators.

All in all, a book I would strongly recommend.

 

* If you’ve read through my blog, you’ll know that I have since suffered from a degree of mental disorder, particularly severe depression. However, this was not the case in my teens and 20s when I was investigating the phenomenon as best I could and developing a personal meditation practice.

 

 

 

There has been some discussion in the blogosphere recently about good and evil (James McGrath’s facebook feed has more of it), generally along the lines of whether God can be regarded as entirely good, and if good can exist without evil, and if so whether there must perforce be an “evil” deity (I would assume “Satan”) and whether therefore this evil deity must necessarily be equal to as well as opposite to a good God. In the process there has been mention of Taoism, and how it regards “good” as being attained from a balancing of yin and yang, positive and negative aspects. Those positive and negative aspects are sometimes confused with “good and evil”. There is also discussion as to whether this Taoist viewpoint can possibly coexist with Christianity.

So far as Taoism is concerned, I don’t think the fact that Taoism is a religion means automatically that Christians need to reject the yin-yang concept; Taoism is also a philosophy (the religious aspects are not fundamental to the philosophy), and Christianity should, I think, be able to adapt itself to being seen in the light of more than one overarching philosophy (though I’m inclined to think that the adaptation to scientific-rationalist materialism is fraught with problems resolvable only via some species of post-modernism).

I am naturally tempted to quote Isaiah 45:7 “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (KJV – most other translations avoid “evil” but still have much of the same sense, and the Hebrew definitely has in part the sense of “evil” as well as “calamity” or “disaster”), and to point out that the “satan” of the Hebrew Scriptures is determinedly an agent of God, most notably in Job. I am inclined to think that the Satan of the New Testament represents an element of dualist thinking creeping into Judaism (via the intertestamentals, notably Sirach, Jubilees, Wisdom and overwhelmingly Enoch).

I don’t relate well to dualism. My own experience (the “zap”) pretty much precludes there being more than one deity or deity-like entity in existence (using “existence” in a very loose way indeed). The Jewish tradition which developed into Christianity became possibly the most ardently monotheist religious tradition of any (and no, I don’t think this is particularly dented in theory by trinitarianism, however much the practice may start looking like tritheism). I am therefore predisposed to see the dualist tendency of the intertestamentals as being an aberration which we could do to move beyond, rather than as an innovation to be adopted and incorporated. My recent post about fatted calves indicates pretty well how I am obliged to see the relationship of God with creation.

As such, the Taoist concept of balancing positive and negative to produce a “good” result (which nonetheless may not be “good” from the perspective of some part of it) has some attractions. It goes beyond the concept of thesis-antithesis-synthesis with which I am very comfortable (and which is a sound corrective to “either-of” thinking), and gives the possibility of thinking of things as inevitably both-one-and-the-other, rather than as eliding the opposites and thus losing any benefit of making a distinction in the first place. It also resonates well with the Isaiah 45 quotation.

However, I am inclined to think that there is a basic error in the whole “good -v- evil” dichotomy, and that is in using the terms without a referent. I start with evil; I cannot conceive of absolute evil, for many reasons including that it would be instantly self-destructive. If I can’t do that, it becomes difficult to think of absolute good.

Indeed, when I settle down to think of what “good” or “evil” is, I inevitably end up asking myself “relative to who or what?” The vast majority of things which occur can be seen to be “good” in relation to something while being “bad” in relation to something else, even without invoking any general principle of good relative to A must be bad relative to not A (which does not invariably work, as sometimes cooperative strategies function well). Indeed, I have yet to see some “good” effect on anything or anyone which I cannot see as “bad” in relation to something or someone else. There are, of course, quite independent of religion, concepts of morality and ethics which prefer the good of the many to the good of the one as being logically superior (though taking this to extremes results in extremely painful decisions which most people would balk at). However, I end up finding it very difficult to accept that any absolute good or absolute bad (or evil) can be said to exist, at least not in the real world.

It is, of course, clear that an absolute morality can be constructed by appealing to something independent of material reality. Certain philosophies (for example political philosophies) will do, for instance, and probably all religions will do. The first depend on some abstract principles which are “above” any effects on humans (or any lower form of existence), the second on God; that which is good in relation to God is an absolute good, as God (at least a monotheistic God) is absolute where everything else is relative. However, then to say “God is good” becomes a redundancy; of course God is good to God (and conversely, referring back to an earlier argument, Satan must be evil to Satan, and therefore cease to be). It seems to me that we have in the Hebrew scriptures at least a near approach to this position, which (to adjust a well known phrase) is basically “God commands it, I do it, that settles it”.

Despite Paul’s apparent attitude in Romans 3:10-18 (in which “all have sinned” and the Law is held up as impossible to follow adequately), in Phil. 3:6 he says he is “as to righteousness under the law, blameless”, and this rather confirms the position of some observant Jews of my acquaintance, who do not find strict adherence to all of the 613 mitzvot difficult (let alone impossible) even as massively extended by generations of rabbis “placing a fence around the Torah” and extending their scope to as not to come even vaguely close to actually contavening one of those. They don’t actually say “God commands it, I do it, that settles it”, but this is close to their position.

I can see the attraction of that; a detailed code rather smaller than the list of laws of most developed nations (which one is also expected to follow perfectly by the civil authorities!) which is all that God requires of you as a condition of being righteous, i.e. “good”. But I am not Jewish, I was not brought up Jewish, I am through and through a Jesus-follower with the sermon on the mount (Matt. 5-7 cf Lk. 6:12-49) prominent in my consciousness as a standard – and that asks that we be “perfect, as our father in heaven is perfect”, that we not even bear anger towards our fellow men (or call them “fool”), that omissions are as worthy of blame as commissions. And that, as was pointed out in the second Alpha talk last night, is impossible for everyone.

I therefore don’t have the “God commands it, I do it, that settles it” position, just a “God commands it through Jesus in his lifetime teachings, I get as close as I can to doing it, nothing is settled by it”. The talk (as I’ve adverted to previously) presented a straight PSA answer to why I should nonetheless feel secure; I can’t swallow PSA myself, and will be adverting to the reasons shortly (I hope, should I ever finish writing the relevant post series). In point of fact, I experience God (and Jesus), I love and trust God (and Jesus) and that is sufficient. Sure, I can never feel smug about being perfect and never will do, but that’s OK with me – and actually, for all their theoretical reliance on Torah observance, my Jewish friends tend also to feel they can always do more and better.

But really, this only tells me (or my Jewish friends) what I should do and not do, it does not give me any overarching concept of good and evil. As I outlined recently, my very existence is from the point of view of some organisms or entities a bad thing, a sin, an evil – and yet from the Godly point of view in Genesis 1, it is at least in principle good. My experience forces me to see God in everything, everything in God, and “everything” includes bad things, even evil things, includes “natural evil” in the form of natural disasters and accidents. Is this a Taoist yin and yang position after all? It certainly arrives at much the same position. Beyond that, I can really see no alternative to complete relativism.

My own balance is found in trying to tread lightly on the world (rather than any insects), in trying to treat my fellow humans as I would treat Jesus (mindful of Matt. 25) and in attempting to remember always that the earth and all that is in it is sacred, holy, in God, and to be treasured and taken care of.

This morning I listened again to the curate reading from John (3:16) “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”.

I’m in the process, among other things, of catching up with Richard Beck’s outstanding “Experimental Theology” blog, which I discovered about three months ago. I’ve made it from the beginning up to mid 2011 so far, and one of the recurring themes is Universalism. Prof. Beck is an Universalist. He makes a very good case for Universalism, as you can see if you follow that link (and others with that tag – there are quite a few of them!). As a psychologist, he has also written about death anxiety being at the root of a great deal of Christian theology.

In conscience, I’m not really best targeted by the passage from John, as I have no fear of death at all. I have a very healthy fear of many of the means of getting from here to there, mind you! The reason lies partly in the content and nature of my original peak spiritual experience (which I’ll call the “zap”), but also in the thought that my consciousness goes offline every night (well, nearly every night now I’ve got reduced insomnia) and until I wake up, I could well die and never know about it. My late Uncle John passed away like that many years ago; fell asleep reading his morning newspaper and just never woke up. I’ve always thought that you couldn’t design a better way of leaving life, whether or not there is something beyond that.

There were, however, a few aspects of the zap which are pertinent. One was the dissolving of the boundary between “self” and “other”, a complete oneness with everything, animate and inanimate, near and far, human and divine. The sufi Baba Kuhi of Shiraz wrote about this kind of experience, saying “In the market, in the cloister, only God I saw; in the valley and on the mountain, only God I saw”. Meister Eckhart said “Thou shalt know him without image, without semblance and without means. – ‘But for me to know God thus, with nothing between, I must be all but he, he all but me’. – I say, God must be very I, I very God, so consummately one that this he and this I are one is, in this isness working one work eternally…” All things were God, in which I “lived and breathed and had my being” as someone else said, well before Teilhard de Chardin suggested the “Milieu Divin” ground of all being concept.

That boundary has never really returned in fullness (it was previously absolute); one effect of this was to become significantly empathic (the pre-zap Chris was NOT noted for empathy) which is a somewhat mixed blessing – yes, I can be far more responsive to the needs of others, but also I tend to soak up emotions from others and become too affected by them (which means that in order to function at all, I often have to wall off my emotions, which has a distinct downside). Another, though, is to see the Chris inhabiting this particular structure of bone and flesh as nothing like the whole extent of that-which-is-Chris; if this bit dies, the whole of that-which-is-Chris doesn’t (though I grant the continuity of consciousness is likely to be somewhat lacking!).

It is, incidentally, very difficult to have this kind of consciousness and not “love your neighbour as yourself”, or regard your neighbour as Jesus, aka God in disguise as is set out in Matthew 25:31-45 ending “Truly I say to you, as you did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me”. For they ARE you. And, indeed, they are more than you.

I may go away (indeed, I expect to) but God endures, and therefore I endure. Another aspect of the zap is the strong desire to conform myself to God, to become a part of God which is more in tune with the rest, less of a discordant note. I see echoes of that in the concept of the Church as the body of Christ, in which I occasionally say that I am the ingrowing toenail. I have aspirations to be less irritating than that! My best template for that is Jesus, who I inescapably regard as having had this consciousness (only more so, probably more so than anyone else who has lived); I seek to cultivate Christ-in-me, and as I do so that-which-is-Chris will diminish. I doubt the process will be anything like complete during my life!

An important aspect of the zap was the feeling that, if I could just let myself go a little more, the ecstasy of union with God could be complete – but that my “self” would in the process be extinguished; there would be nothing but God. The image of a moth in a candle flame came to me, but as an image of intense joy. The first time, that scared me, and as a result I pulled back, but I have pulled back less on subsequent occasions and think that I may soon be able to let go completely, if another zap of that intensity is granted me (I practice the presence of God as best I can, but it seems to me that the more intense zaps are given, not worked for). Baba Kuhi ends by saying “But when I looked with God’s eyes – only God I saw. I passed away into nothingness, I vanished, and lo, I was the All-living – only God I saw”. Eckhart writes “But he manifests as different and the soul is destined to know things as they are and conceive things as they are when, seized thereof, she plunges into the bottomless well of the divine nature and becomes so one with God that she herself would say that she is God” but also, speaking of the soul, “Wherefore God has left her one little point from which to get back to herself and find herself as creature. For it is of the very essence of the soul that she is powerless to plumb the depths of her creator”. Perhaps he is right, and the process will always stop just short of complete extinguishment of the self. But perhaps not, and that is an ecstatic end.

On one occasion several years ago, I was in serious fear of death, as someone far more physically powerful than me was pounding me. Yes, it hurt – but thinking I might die, a strange peace came over me as I looked forward to the ecstatic reunion with God which death would provide. Maybe that might reduce my fear of physical pain? Probably not, as generally I’m not expecting to die from it. As it happened, the disconnect of me smiling seraphically while this guy hit me was sufficient to make him stop and ask why I was doing it – I said “it’s only pain” and he walked away, confused.

I expect, therefore, that at my death, that which is other-than-God will be destroyed, that which is God will remain, cannot but remain. The Theologia Germanica says “Nothing burns in Hell save self-will, therefore it has been said ‘put off thy self-will and there will be no Hell’ “. I intend that there should be as little that is not God as possible at that time, but expect that the remainder will burn, be burned away, indeed. This is very akin to Dr. Beck’s concept of Hell as a purification prior to universal salvation.

So, am I an Universalist? I’m attracted by Dr. Beck’s thinking, and certainly I expect everyone regardless of their beliefs and actions to arrive at the same point. However, I am not so confident that all will survive the refiner’s fire of Hell (be it ever so brief). I have met people in whom any spark of the divine seems exceptionally weak; I can envisage that rather than submit to the fire of cleansing, a few may be able to elect to resist, and that they may remain in that condition forever, or even that in a very few, the spark of the divine may have been extinguished completely during their lifetime, and there remains nothing but self. Some of those I have met, for instance, have been sociopaths. I am not particularly optimistic for them.

And so I think I have to accept the Arminian view of salvation, which acknowledges God’s wish that we all be saved and our freedom to choose, but effectively denies that in this salvation God is omnipotent.

There is one final aspect of the zap which has a bearing, and that is that it appears to give a glimpse into eternity. That eternity is not, as most seem to think, a very VERY unimaginably long time, it is atemporal. The zap is a “timeless moment”, in which all that is and has been is as one (possibly all that will be as well, although I cannot confirm). As such, all that you have been and done and are during your life is present, and this can be an extremely painful situation, alleviated only by the knowledge of God’s love and acceptance (of the essence of you, not of your actions). Perhaps it is possible not to repent in a powerful zap, I don’t know; I certainly couldn’t have withstood it’s force.

In this atemporality, my life just represents a set of boundaries; once I did not exist, as I had not been born, in the future I will not exist (in one sense, at least) as I will be dead. All that is between those remains, atemporal, eternal. In this, there can be no annihilation, no unmaking of what has been. I have to an extent had one foot in this atemporality much of the last 45 years, as my cultivation of conscious contact with God, the practising of the Presence of God, has developed. Beside that, temporal limits appear irrelevant.

Timor mortis non conturbat me.

 

Last year, allegations about Jimmy Saville sexually abusing children became big news; Saville had been a very significant figure in television aimed at the young, and was a fixture of the youth of many of us. They were assuredly true; he had been a prolific sexual offender behind the public face of entertainer and very significant philanthropist, and most of his victims had been under age. It would appear that he used his position and status to indulge his tastes. He was perhaps best known for hosting the TV programme “Jim’ll fix it” in which children were given experiences they had only been able to dream of, often seriously ill or disabled children. He gave them the “experience of a lifetime” – and I am now wondering if that expression is more barbed than I would once have credited in many cases.

Following that, police investigations continued, and many other well known figures have been similarly accused. I rather suspect that Operation Yewtree is to a considerable extent a reflex reaction to the fact that the ire of society cannot now be taken out on Saville; suddenly when it was announced there were a very large number of scared rock stars, DJs and other “personalities” of the 60s and 70s, certainly (when the absolute boundary of 16 as an age of consent was for a time not taken terribly seriously). This week, Rolf Harris has appeared in court, similarly charged (though with only a small fraction of the offences which could be laid at Saville’s door).

Very many people felt a huge sense of betrayal by Saville, who had been immensely popular up until his death in 2011. I was not actually one of them; I didn’t like his flagrant self-promotion, and his public manner grated on me. Quite a few people have told me since the allegations became known that they didn’t like him because they “found him creepy”; I didn’t tend to hear that much beforehand, and I’m not sure it isn’t reconstituted memory. I don’t know that I “found him creepy”, but I definitely didn’t like him, while having to acknowledge that he had done huge things for a number of charities. Of course, hindsight tells us that these were largely childrens’ charities, and part of the motive was probably to increase his ability to molest young people.

This is not the case with Rolf Harris, however. Him, I have always liked. He had a talent for writing somewhat humorous songs of the kind which (sometimes irritatingly) stick in your memory, he has an engaging personality and is an extremely talented artist; an excellent all round entertainer. I would so like the allegations to prove unfounded, but I fear they won’t (I’m particularly concerned about an apparent pornographic image from 2012; the impact of 40 year old matters with no further bad deeds can, perhaps, be somewhat discounted, but this is fresh). Seeing pictures of him going to court, I noted that I’d never seen him in public looking anything other than ebulliant. He did not look ebulliant, he looked hunted. Perhaps he deserves that, perhaps not – but something which I used to treasure has been damaged, perhaps broken.

Saville was a well known Catholic (and was honoured by a previous Pope), so the issue of weighing good deeds and bad is particularly apposite in his case. Of course, his position is between him and God now, but there has been a huge amount of public vilification and I’m confident that if you took a vote, the consensus would be that he is damned. I’m not sure the same would have been the case had it emerged, for instance, that he had been a prolific wife-beater or something of the sort. Sexual offences seem to loom larger in our weighing of good and evil than non-sexual offences, and sexual offences against children are, for many, the “unforgivable sin”.

This is very much the case within the prison system; sexual offenders generally are picked on, and frequently end up in “vulnerable prisoner” units or wings; convicted child molesters are virtually guaranteed physical violence with a considerable risk of fatal violence unless they are on a vulnerable prisoner unit from start, and even then paedophiles are not safe. Rapists regard them as untouchable too. There is nothing so reviled as a “nonce” in prison, where murderers and armed robbers are looked up to. I’m inclined to think that prison attitudes just write large those of society, but largely without the morality – except in the case of sexual offences.

The law more generally puts sexual offences in a different class. Aside those crimes carrying a life sentence and the sometime iniquitous IPP sentence, many of  those who serve their sentence and wait long enough are effectively absolved by the system under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. Sexual offenders, however, go on the Sexual Offences Register for life.

There is some logic behind this; sexual preferences are not readily (if ever) changed, and if these are directed to the young or are otherwise illegal, the law cannot, it seems, assume that sexual offenders are ever “safe”. I’m not convinced that larcenous preferences or violent tendencies are readily changed either, mind you; there is, however, an expectation that the impulses can be controlled.

Society, therefore, does not forgive sexual offences or consider that the guilt can be expiated by prison, time or good works. To listen to some Christians, neither does God. Some even consider that the mere fact of being homosexual is sufficient to damn you unconditionally (and as a sexual preference, that too cannot readily if ever be changed). Society more generally seems to think that crimes can be expiated, or that good deeds may outweigh crimes which have been “paid for” (there is one well known actor in the UK who has a past conviction for murder, which is now not much mentioned, for instance) – but not in the case of sexual offences. In Saville’s case, he did, I have to acknowledge, an immense amount of good raising charitable contributions, but it is now as nothing when he is remembered by most people.

And yet Christianity in general holds that any sin can be absolved, can be washed clean, can be saved from. There is nothing so horrendous (with the possible exception of “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” whatever that may be), that it cannot end in redemption. Saville, as a practising Catholic, was presumably given absolution and is therefore presumably “saved”, though society would never have accepted him again had he still been alive. If Harris proves to be guilty, what about him? Indeed, if we take Matt. 5:28 seriously, what about most of the rest of us? I assume that the passage can be modernised into gender equality, and that a modern Jesus might have said “if you look on someone with lust in your heart, you are guilty of rape” rather than adultery (which has rather lost its sting these days).

Without wishing to deny justice to anyone wronged, I hope that Harris is found not guilty. But if he isn’t, I am going to need to wrestle with the balance of the combination in one person of a lot of good and a taboo failing, and to lament the fact that society will probably not feel able to see any balance there.

But is this not really the position of many, most or even all of us, our own faults perhaps not, quite, being taboo?

Lord, have mercy.

Over at Jewish-Christian Intersections, Larry Behrendt has started a series on Problem Texts, and I’ve been spending some time exchanging comments with him. The second of these deals with Deuteronomy 20:16-17, which reads:-

¹⁶ However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. ¹⁷ Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. (NIV from Bible Gateway).

It seems to me that this reveals a vitally important issue to deal with for both Judaism and Christianity (and also for Islam, which also shares a degree of allegiance to the Hebrew Scriptures). As I touch on below, this is just one of a host of injunctions to violence in the earlier books of the Bible, and not just violence but extreme, genocidal violence in total war. We have here what all the religions of the book regard as inspired scripture in which God is portrayed not merely as accepting, but as approving and instructing xenophobia, genocide and wars of annihilation. Historically in Christianity, the words “smite the Amalekites” have occurred far too many times in wars (and sometimes not even in wars) to justify extreme, exterminating violence; violence without compassion or remorse.

There are, I know, groups within all of the religions of the book nowadays who accept these passages literally and are prepared to act on them, just so long as they can identify another group as Amalekites or Hittites (or, as we see later, home grown idolaters).

I think Larry sensibly chooses Deuteronomy 20, as it is part of the Torah (for Christians, the Pentateuch), which is arguably in both cases the most foundational group of texts in scripture. Not only is this scripture, therefore, but it is the earliest and (at least in Judaism) most revered part of scripture. It is also not quite as extreme as the injunctions regarding the Amalekites (Deut. 25:17-19) which, as they provide three of the 613 Jewish commandments or mitzvot, are of another level of difficulty.

It is, I believe, supremely necessary to find ways of dealing with these texts, and unless we wish to regress several thousand years, not by following those groups which regard them as evidencing revelation for the nations of today, and not merely regarding them as obsolete (or, as Anthony LeDonne comments in a reply to Larry, lead us to a Marcionite rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures). They are scripture, they are capable of great damage, and they must be addressed fully.

Larry writes:- “If I adopt an historical perspective, I can easily dismiss this text – it’s not historically likely that the Israelites conquered Canaan in the way the Bible describes. But if this conquest never happened, why does the Old Testament remember God’s war instructions in this way? And worse, what kind of God would order the wholesale murder of conquered men, women and children? What happened to the God who was willing to spare Sodom if there were ten righteous people living there? Were there not ten righteous people among all of the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites?”

My immediate response was “So, what we have in Deut. 20:16-17 is a situation where the Israelites have appreciated that they have a relationship with God and that God is good in respect of them; they haven’t yet grasped that God is the God of the Canaanites as well or that the good of the Canaanites is something to be taken into account. They have a partial revelation (otherwise, why bother with prophets/rabbinic schools/yeshivas or prophets/Jesus/Paul/theologians?).

The problem with this way of presenting it is that some will say that even at the earliest stage, the whole revelation is already there. This is possibly implicit in Torah-only thinking, it’s certainly implicit in some conservative Christian explanation. As a result of that, there’s a danger of being caught up by the Myth of Redemptive Violence (http://www2.goshen.edu/~joanna…).” I was there quoting an article by Walter Wink, author of the “Powers” trilogy, which I highly recommend.

I am, of course, advancing an idea of progressive revelation; I amplify that later by saying:-

“… Religious traditions undergo continuous development… If I follow Isa. 55:8 and 1 Cor. 13:12, I can argue from scripture both that it is entirely right that they do so and that there will always be more work to do (thus securing the theologians’ future employment). I don’t merely think of this in terms of “progressive revelation” in the sense that God grants revelation in bits and pieces as he considers humanity to be capable of receiving it (although I do think that that tends to be the effect); I also consider either that the revelation may be in effect constant but (1) mediated to such an extent by the recipient’s capacity to understand (whether by virtue of language, philosophy, societal imprinting or otherwise) that nothing more than what we now see was capable of being transmitted, (2) that there may have been much fuller expressions of revelation, but that the fact that the society of the time was incapable of understanding or appreciating them meant that they were ignored or deliberately adjusted by third parties, or (3) that the recipient received what he could, thought “I can’t possibly say all of this” and deliberately moderated it to what he judged the audience could receive.

I don’t know how you would tell which of those had been the case with a particular writing. I suspect that no.2b or no.3 might display some characteristics in writing fluency if the passages hadn’t been redacted afterwards, but I’m not equipped to judge that kind of thing.

Incidentally, no.2a represents a kind of “natural selection of inspired writing”, which I think could be a powerful concept, and nos. 2&3 illustrate ways in which you could explain (the passage from Ephesians 5 discussed previously); complete gender equality was an unattainable objective in the circumstances of the time.

However, following the above lines of thinking, I do note that Deut. 20:10-15 displays a technique which would probably have been regarded pre-5th century BCE as fairly morally advanced, namely always to offer surrender to a city and content ones self with forced labour thereafter; sadly this was not extended to the immediately neighbouring “usual suspects”, 16-17 being an exception to that rule. I could definitely see this as still a case of God moving the Israelites as far as it was possible to move them in the moral climate of the time”.

In one of those coincidences which part of me dismisses as such and another part suspects of being divine providence, a sermon I heard yesterday drew on 2 Chronicles 14:1-13 and 16:1-12 in order to illustrate the importance of and benefits of reliance on God as helper. However, if you read through the missing portion, you find a charming tale of ethnic cleansing and religious intolerance in pursuit of a Judah free from the presence, worship or worshippers of idols. Personally, I would never want to preach from texts with this kind of context without addressing the disconnect between the morality displayed there and that which is taken as advanced in the society in which I live.

(There is also a series on violence in scripture starting at Patheos today, and a recent book on the subject. A surfeit of coincidences?)

I do think that the Myth of Redemptive Violence is very active in the historical parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, and it also figures greatly in the various New Testament apocalyptic passages, notably Revelation but including the apocalypses in Mark 13, Matthew 24-25 and to an extent Luke 21:7-28. However, I think that in the passages from Deuteronomy and Chronicles there are also another two factors which are operative.

The first of these is that “bit players are expendable” – as Terry Pratchett comments, when the cry “Guards, guards” goes up, you know that a set of people are going to arrive and be killed or, at the least, neutralised. The story does not expect that we should have any identification with the guards. I have some difficulty reading the book of Job, for instance, which is a good example of this. I have no doubt that the writer did not remotely expect the reader to be agonised by the massive injustice wreaked upon Job’s children with the sole intent of teaching Job a lesson, but my focus goes to them immediately. They are, however, bit players, and to an extent the idol-worshippers of 2 Chronicles and the Hittites and others of Deuteronomy are bit players; we are not expected, I think, to consider their positions; it is the internal situation of Judah and Israel which matter.

The other factor is the sheer tribal egocentricity and xenophobia of the tale (which feeds into what I indicated above). The Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, and the worshippers of idols are “other”, to be feared and shunned and utterly destroyed. Orson Scott Card writes in “Ender’s Game” and “Speaker for the Dead” (extended with lesser effect through “Xenocide” and “Children of the Mind” a splendid dissection of the moralities surrounding his invented categories in which the “other” can be placed. There is Utlanning (a member of the same species from another place), Framling (same species but from another planet), Raman (a different species with which communication is possible) and Varelse, a different species with which communication is impossible (there is also Djur, which lack the capacity for thought and self-awareness).

It is always the case in Card’s universe that the Ultanning or the Framling is definitely “one of us”; the Raman may be attacked, but their position needs to be considered and accommodation with them is possible, but the Varelse needs to be exterminated, as there is no possibility of accommodation. The first two books hinge on the initial categorisation of an insectoid species as Varelse, the realisation that they are in fact Raman, and the resulting moral situation and then the extension to something (a virus, in fact) which appears to be Djur, even more requiring extermination.

In Deuteronomy 20, earlier on rules are set down for warfare with other nations which are, arguably, morally advanced for the time; they are treated as Raman (much on a par with the Levitical instructions for relationships with domestic animals – another species which can be communicated with), and “one of us” clearly doesn’t extend quite as far as that yet. However, the specific exceptions are those given in vv. 16-17, which are treated as Varelse, requiring to be exterminated – and they are by and large the closest nations to the historic Israelites, countering what would be the normal assumption that the named nations would be Framling to the Raman previously considered, in other words to be treated better, as being more “one of us”. But they are not; they are to be largely exterminated.

The assumption I make here is that in the historical actuality (which as Larry links to was probably not that the Israelites entered Canaan with a divine mandate to take it over, but a situation where they coexisted uneasily with neighbours from a very early stage) relationships had become based on a series of revenge attacks, probably initially based in Mimetic Rivalry, the various nations competing for resources, land, population and status, and the resulting vendetta appearing impossible to resolve; there was too much “bad blood”. It’s also possible that a result of the mimetic rivalry was to “scapegoat” neighbouring nations.

We should not here forget the more extreme case case than the Hittites et al., namely that of the Amalekites as mentioned above (Deut. 25:17-19, Judges 6, 7, 10, 15, 20, 27, 30; 2 Samuel 1, 8; 1 Chronicles 4) where the failure of Saul to eliminate every last one of them was grounds for his losing his mandate as King, and there remain three commands among the 613 relating to them, one of which is still to eliminate every Amalekite descendant. This is a clear vendetta situation.

The opposition in a vendetta situation becomes, effectively, Varelse; they cannot be made peace with, accommodated or accepted not because they cannot be communicated with, but because their attitude prevents any understanding; they will not listen. I think that we have the textual relics here of a set of vendettas with immediately neighbouring nations.

Once the other is Varelse, of course, they are not regarded as human. Morality ceases to enter into the equation, as the non-human is not entitled to moral consideration; the wasp stings and you swat it, wasps sting you regularly and you destroy the nest.

When you get to 2 Chronicles 15, however, you are seeing something slightly different; the idol worshippers are definitely either “us” or at worst Utlanning. Where do we get the extermination reaction? I think the answer is seen in the fact that they follow a different religious meme, and one which is seen as contagious. They are therefore harbouring something analogous to a virus, which on Card’s scale is Djur. The only answer to a virus is elimination. In Card’s imaginary universe in “Speaker” and “Xenocide”, it is the unfortunate fact that the virus is housed in a planetary population; it still must be eliminated because of the degree of threat, and so the population will be “collateral damage”. In Chronicles, the idolatrous religious meme is housed in the idolaters, with the same result.

I have to ask myself here what level of divine inspiration would be necessary to overcome a societal identification of a nation or group as Varelse or Djur, and the answer I arrive at is “cataclysmic”. If the recipient could indeed make any sense of a divine instruction to treat Djur or Varelse as “one of us”, the instruction would either fall on completely deaf ears or would be modified by the recipient to something less incomprehensible – for instance, a shift in regard of former “Varelse”, incomprehensible foreigners who might have been exterminated, to the more beneficial status of Raman/Framling, having a status somewhere between a beast of burden or slave and a foreign resident in the society. This occurs in Deut. 20:10.

Of course, all religions can look to later scriptures to modify what they see here; the period of the Prophets in Judah and Israel led by stages to very considerable modifications of the earlier calls to violence to establish and make strong the “people of God”; the start of one such can be seen in 2 Chronicles 16:1-12, where potentially non-violent reliance on God’s aid is placed above paying another neighbouring state to act against the perceived enemy (in this case Israel); that trend continues. By the beginning of the first century CE, Jesus’ injunctions against violence (which are too numerous to address here) were not a massive stretch from the position of Judaism generally, although I would maintain that they were radical in their effect. However, we need to justify why we take the later scripture over the earlier (and Larry has mentioned that in Judaism this becomes particularly difficult).

Some schools of thought in Christianity would appeal to the concept of “dispensations”, ascribing these passages to the dispensation of Law, and stating that this is superseded by the dispensation of Christ, of Grace or of the Church. This will at some point in the future be superseded again by the Millenial, Kingdom or Zion dispensation. I have problems with this concept for a number of reasons. First, it does nothing to answer the issue as to why God’s commandments to us in one age are different from those in another age, if they were valid in the earlier one. Secondly, it involves supersession of Judaism; while this is a different argument, I find it impossible to extract from Jesus’ words as reported by the gospel writers the concept that this thoroughly Jewish preacher and teacher (and that is not intended to be an exhaustive description) intended to do away with the system of Law in which he operated rather than to reform and amplify it. Lastly, it is normally connected with an understanding of the last (or penultimate) dispensation of the Kingdom as involving an apocalyptic and extremely violent change affecting the entire earth (as one interpretation of Revelation would argue), which I see as being so tainted with the Myth of Redemptive Violence rejected by Jesus as to be worthy of wholesale rejection.

I thus return to the concept of progressive revelation in a less quantised manner, as proceeding steadily through multiple prophets (in which I would include Jesus, Paul and, reluctantly, the author of the Fourth Gospel) and continuing, albeit in a more subdued way, through multiple subsequent theologians or, on the Jewish side, Rabbis.

I do however need to address the issue as to whether this progressive revelation has in all cases resulted in moral advance, rather than moral retreat. In fact I do not think this is the case; the previous “problem passage” discussed was Ephesians 5:22-24 (which advocates subjection of women to their husbands). My considered opinion of that passage is that it constitutes a retreat from the more advanced sentiment of Galatians 3:28 “[In Christ] there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. In the same way while I regard Augustine as being inspired to make an advance in respect of some things (such as the requirement not to read scripture literally when that results in conflict with the evidence of creation), I consider that his doctrine of original sin was retrogressive, fixing Genesis 2-3 with an over-literal interpretation.

So, why do I feel such confidence that in this respect the advance must be in the direction of reducing human violence and renouncing revenge? In the first place this is what the Spirit tells me is the case. However, that is my own personal experience and cannot be more than minimally persuasive to others. Secondly, however, it is part of a broad arc of movement throughout the Hebrew scriptures which progressively reduces occasions when violence is to be permitted or endorsed, just as the arc of equality of humankind moves from the tentative steps of recognising some rights of slaves and foreigners in the Law through Gal. 3:28 to, I hope, the realisation that tribes, races and nations are all as naught against the requirement to love our neighbour as ourself.

And we do not do that by violence, still less war, still less total war and genocide. Scripture points away from these things in stages, but leaves us in these passages with a reminder of where we have come from. This, perhaps, is the wisdom of the redactors of the Hebrew Scriptures; that they retain the reminder.

John Philip Newell quotes, writing of Celtic Christianity:

“We are created, writes George MacDonald, ‘not out of nothing . .. but out of God’s own endless glory’

To me, this is self-evident; as a panentheist, there is nothing that is not God (though the material universe is not equivalent to God); the act of creation was a creation out of God’s own substance; “in the image of God” then referring to the universe as “the image of God”, a part of that-which-is-God in the same way as is “the glory of God” or, indeed, “the logos of God”.

Genesis then goes on to talk of Adam and Eve, and that story I consider to be a metaphor of the origin in humanity of the ability to self-reflect (and they saw that they were naked, and were ashamed). Created out of the very stuff of God, his children become self-aware, and have self-will.

In the manner of all good parents, God then permits them to exercise that free will without wholesale interference (and the Biblical record indicates this as reducing in extent as history progresses); he is thus permitting part of himself to become “other” than himself.

This, I see as the original act of divine kenosis (self-emptying), which is paralleled in Paul’s inspiration in Philippians 2:7 “but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant”.

This brings me to a comment I recently shared on facebook:-

“After the crucifixion of Jesus you just can’t kill anyone with confidence anymore. You have to deeply question your motives for violence; to consider the possibility that the person you have so righteously nailed to the cross just might be God Incarnate.” (Richard Beck paraphrasing Heim)

For me, it is not merely a possibility. It is an actuality. When Jesus speaks in Matt. 25:31ff of our actions towards others being actions towards him, I take this entirely literally; Jesus speaks for (and is) God, and we are doing these things to God.

Incidentally, I recommend Richard Beck’s whole series “The Voice of the Scapegoat” from which the Heim quotation comes. It presents an understanding of the crucifixion which I can most thoroughly endorse.

What follows is a copy of an exchange between myself and Henry Neufeld (proprietor of Energion Publications, inter alia) in The Religion Forum. My original questions are paraphrased from “Living the Questions” and, I believe, emanate from John Dominic Crossan; these are in turquoise; Henry’s responses are in Magenta.

H>> Because I’m editing a book titled Philosophy for Believers, and the chapter I’m working on is titled “Aristotle’s Akrasia and Self-Deception” I figured that due to akrasia I would act against my better judgment and answer your questions.

1. What is the character of your God (when you think about God, what are you imagining)?

H>> Like you, I regard God as largely unknowable. If I’m tense about the definition of “knowledge” I would have to say “unknowable.” That which cannot be demonstrated cannot be properly said to be known.

I like to remember that “know” and “understand” are close to “comprehend”, which has a secondary meaning of “include”, and that underlines to us that both know and understand ultimately require us to observe from a larger framework that the thing being described (for example to compare and contrast). And there is no such framework…

H>> But more than this, I would take two different routes to imagining God. The first is more philosophical. It is to call God “the ground of all being.” This is the conviction, perhaps, that the sensible universe isn’t up to self existence, so there must be something else. I do not regard this as a proof or demonstration. It is quite possible to attribute the self-existence I attribute to God as ground of all being to the sensible universe as well. I’m not entirely sure that the difference between those two approaches actually matters. In addition, calling this the ground of all being does not necessarily lead to the Christian God or any other kind of defined God.

Which could merely be the principle I expressed previously being applied to the universe 😉 In describing “universe” we require an hypothetical framework larger than the universe, in which the universe is just one element. For the mathematical physicist, therefore, God could be a necessary but not necessarily real concept.

I’m currently playing with a possible description of God as “the ground of all meaningfulness” myself.

H>> The other way I think about God is through the view of spiritual experience. Here, of course, I cannot demonstrate that what I experience results from an external cause of any kind. Nonetheless I have my experience. I relate my experience to yours, and I view this experience through the tradition in which I was brought up, which I abandoned and then reappropriated. It’s language works for me. And yes, I treat Christian Scripture as the collected experience of God  by the people within that tradition.

As do I. Yes, the language works fairly well for those who are fluent in it (and better if they do not mistake the terms in it for scientific ones <g>). We are able better to communicate, to share this type of experience through the use of such language (including concept-structures) and, I think, to ascertain that there is essentially one experience which is shared, rather than different experiences which can be successfully contrasted and categorised. Further, this may enable us more fully to appreciate our own experiences by being better able to describe them to ourselves.

2. What is the content of your faith (what do you believe in – merely to say you have faith is not sufficient, as Al-Quaeda have faith…)?

H>> The content of my faith is, in fact, the God that I experience. I express this in Christian language. I know that I have the experience, but I cannot demonstrate this. The number of doctrines I believe about God is very small, because I am constantly noticing that there are others who disagree with me on many, many details, who also experience God. While they differ with me on many things, I can recognize (or believe) that we are talking about one thing in different words. One of the most profoundly spiritual people I ever met was a Muslim Imam. I spent time studying with him and was tremendously impressed. We were able to connect on many points. The single most profound extended spiritual experience of my life came from studying a commentary on Leviticus written by a conservative Rabbi, Jacob Milgrom.

Do I come to believe additional things based on this experience? Certainly I do. There is a certain non-rational realm of my existence and thinking. I am frequently told by atheist or agnostic friends that I am a very reasonable person, but that I have failed to go all the way, that my rationality breaks down at a certain point. They are indeed correct. Well, I’m not always that reasonable, but I do go beyond what is rationally demonstrable.

You may enjoy my recent blogpost on the Heresy of all Doctrines <g> Here, I agree with you pretty much completely; I can share experience with people of many different faith traditions and see them to be in essence one, but do need either to adopt the language and concept structure of one of us or to negotiate a common language and concept structure (and commonly the language of “scientific rationalist” is not a very conducive means of expression <g>).

Personally, I’m not convinced that I have in fact failed to go all the way; I’m confident that the language of “scientific rationalist” is not an adequately communicative, complete and clear way of describing the whole of my experience (or that of others), and the languages of mathematics and symbolic logic are subsets of that and less adequate, although more powerful in their allocated fields. I have, at least, gone as far as the current limitations of my language, concept structures and intellect allow. I think, subject to correction.

3. What is the function of your church (for which read any religious or spiritual organised group)? (What are you coming together for? “Worship” is not an adequate answer)

H>> Community in all its aspects. More specifically, for me the church is the vehicle through which I can serve. In choosing a church I will be looking for a community impact and how I can be a part of that. This is witnessing, in my view.

The commandments being to love God and to love your neighbour, both can be practiced by yourself, but both are in many ways more productively practiced in common with others (helping your neighbour clearly gains in all sorts of ways from being done communally).

Loving God, understanding and appreciating God, comes more readily from witnessing to and sharing with others, and through discussion, debate and the refining of concepts. To me, at least.

4. What is the purpose of your worship (or other spiritual practice)? (How does God want to be worshipped? Is prayer important, and why?)

H>> The purpose of worship, as in a worship service, in my view, is the connection with God. In other words, I want to experience God’s presence and get the encouragement and strength that gives me. In prayer, I am doing this apart from the broader community, but the purpose of prayer is communion with God, not getting God to do some things that I decide God ought to do.

Nonetheless, I don’t like the structure of the question, because I believe that for one connected with God, all right action and all seeking is worship. So I worship by thinking, I worship by sharing, I worship by writing, and I worship by serving in any way. The worship service in which I seek the experience of God is really a minor part of what I would call worship. My personal time of prayer is also a minor part. It is when I am no longer on my knees that I truly enter into the worship God intends.

I agree with you about prayer, though for me prayer is also about better knowing myself in the context of my relationship with God.

I particularly like you talking of worshipping by doing things which might not normally be regarded as worship; insofar as it is done conscious of a desire to do what is pleasing to God, what is not worship?

H>> Those are my imaginings. If I expressed them in a totally Christian context, you would hear much more Christian vocabulary. That’s our shared experience and symbolism. Here I try to distill the essence.

I did post it in Interfaith <g>

Sometimes, though, I think the use of Christian vocabulary conceals rather than elucidates; we use words without really considering what they mean.