Trimorphic metanoia

You eat what you think you're not

2011-04-24T10:17:00.001+01:00

Interesting conversation around the lunch table at work last week occasioned by an awareness of rising world food prices. Half of the team are vegetarian, half not. We discussed the aesthetics of eating insects (I discovered the Japanese sometimes eat both bees and grasshoppers), and the ethics of cannibalism.

I'd be prepared to bet a considerable sum of money that you're not a cannibal (if I'm wrong, you can claim your money, but be prepared for me to go to the police) and slightly less money that, if you're a vegetarian, you feel less bad about eating fish than about eating animals, and that your objections to eating insects would be more aesthetic and health-related than moral. There seems to be a principle at work here: the closer an organism is to us on the tree of life, the more uneasy we feel about eating it.

The operation of this principle is slightly obscured by the fact that, in the west at least, the animals that it's culturally acceptable for us to eat are not the closest ones to us on the tree. Most people eat cows, pigs, sheep and chickens without worrying too much, though they wouldn't like to have to kill them in person, and generally prefer not to see their corpses in undismembered form. In the UK at least, we don't generally eat horses; they're considered more intelligent than cows, sheep and pigs. And we certainly wouldn't eat cats and dogs unless the supermarket supply chains were very severely disrupted, because they share our lives and we relate to them as one sentient being to another. In different cultures, the line is drawn in different places. We Brits look down on the French for eating horse meat, but the Japanese are horrified that we eat rabbits.

But even if you feel OK about eating all the above, how would you feel about lemurs? Baboons? Gibbons? Gorillas, even if they weren't threatened with extinction? Chimpanzees? Neanderthals, if there still were any around? Somewhere in that sequence, I bet you will have said: no, that is not for me. At some point, the unease due to a feeling of similarity overrides hunger.

We have to draw the line somewhere, and it'll always be arbitrary to some degree; all life is related, and all life has to eat. But maybe this perspective can provoke a reconsideration of why we draw our personal line where we do, and whether it makes sense to move it. For myself, I know that it was no coincidence that I became vegetarian (except for the occasional relapse when confronted by spaghetti carbonara) during the period of my life I was working intensively with the amazingly similar DNA sequences of superficially very different species, several of whose phenotypes were regularly on offer in the campus restaurant.

This blog is not dead...

2010-12-17T21:49:00.002Z

...it's just taking a back seat for a while. I'm planning a book, provisionally entitled "Bruising the Serpent", bringing together most of the themes dealt with in this blog, and more.

The phrase "The Revealed Jesus" has been going around in my mind for quite a while. Paul talks in several places about Jesus being revealed to him and to the other apostles. If you're interested, have a look at my new blog, which is focused on the reality of Paul's Jesus, the historical unreality of "Jesus of Nazareth" as portrayed in the four gospels, and the implications of holding both those views at once. There is also a web site, which doesn't contain much at the moment, but is intended as a halfway house between the relative chaos of the blog and the relative organization of the book (if it ever appears).

In the mean time, posts on all sorts of other topics may appear here from time to time.

Stop digging and enjoy life

2010-04-03T14:21:00.002+01:00

Since it's soon going to be election time in the UK, I'd like to celebrate some of the fatuous nonsense spoken by politicians over the years.

Last week, there was a great example from Gordon Brown, who called high-speed web access "the electricity of the digital age". Does this mean I can use the internet to heat my house or charge up my bicycle light? No? Sorry, Gordon, but the electricity of the digital age is, it would seem, plain old electricity. Computers can't function without it, which is quite a problem given the fact of dwindling fuel supplies and your (and previous) governments neglecting to frame any coherent energy policy to deal with them. You can't solve the real problems of the physical world by escaping into the mental world of data and information.

And another, from former US President Calvin Coolidge, quoted with approval in this week's Big Issue: "The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." Well, yes, except when the problem in question is (a) one of those that doesn't actually have a solution, or (b) one of those caused by our having chosen to proceed in precisely the wrong direction. There is another, wiser saying: "If you're in a hole, stop digging".

Unfortunately for all of us, the problem of "saving the planet" (actually saving ourselves -- the planet will still be there whatever happens) falls into both category (a) and category (b). Don't take my word for it; listen to Professor James Lovelock's interview with the BBC this week. We have pulled the trigger on global warming, and nothing we can now do will reverse that. We just have to hope that when the earth finishes its transition to the new state we have nudged it towards, it is one that will support at least some of our descendants. In the mean time, Lovelock says, all you can do is "enjoy life while you can".

Of course, the vast majority of people don't wish to know this, which is why no political party hoping to get elected can afford to tell people the truth or talk realistically about the most important issues. For example, a leaflet came through my door today from a party that claims it will "tackel climate change so our grandchildren don't have to suffer". The Greens at least have policies that can move us (or could have moved us, if applied in time) in the right direction, and to some extent reduce the degree of suffering that is to come. But even they seem wedded, in public at any rate, to the fiction that we are only facing a "category (b)" problem: in other words, that there is still time to sort things out without us suffering the very unpleasant consequences of our collective failure to take note of the warning voices of at least the last forty years. The nature of urgent warnings is that at some point, if they are not heeded, the thing warned about becomes inevitable, and the unpalatable truth is that we have now passed that point. Our problem has become a predicament, which can only be lived with and adapted to, not solved. We can no longer stop our canoe going over the waterfall. All we can do (perhaps all we ever could do) is prepare ourselves for the descent, practically, emotionally and above all spiritually, offer our lives to God, and do our best to trust the flow.

Decoding the Temples

2010-03-31T21:48:00.004+01:00

BBC7 have been re-running another Paul Temple radio mystery from the 1950s, this one entitled The Gilbert Case. I am an avid listener, though it took me a bit of time to figure out why. The plots are not exactly memorable; when I manage to retain them at all, they tend to run together so thoroughly in my mind that I cannot reconstruct a single one. In fact the main mysterious element, as far as I'm concerned, arises every time the BBC re-runs one of them, and I have to figure out whether I've heard that particular one before or merely listened to half a dozen others with almost identical titles and story lines. Dora tells me she feels much the same about most of the jokes I tell.

At the end of nearly every series, we discover that the bad guys are foreigners, usually European ones, and the bad stuff they do involves drugs. It's not clear that the author, Francis Durbridge, actually knew anything at all about drugs except that they were generally dangerous, always immoral, and in the final analysis not very clever. Exactly the same remarks could be made about his opinion of foreigners, though it's also possible that the reason he put so many of them into his stories was merely to give Paul and his intrepid wife an excuse for frequent glamorous international travel at a time when few of his audience could have dreamed of ever affording it for themselves.

It is Paul's wife who intrigues me the most, though. In some ways she epitomizes the ideal feminine stereotype of the 1950s: beautiful, unfailingly well-mannered, never moody or unreasonable, and frequently quite resourceful in a high-heeled sort of way. But despite that, it's not ultimately clear why Paul bothers with her. While he holds down two jobs (private detective and fiction writer) to support the couple's lavish lifestyle, she never does a stroke of work, spending most of her time in clothes shops and at the hairdresser. And in one important respect she departs from the fifties ideal: she never displays the least propensity to bear her husband any children. So what is she there for?

A clue can, perhaps, be found in her name: Steve. Is she all that she seems? Back then it would of course not have been at all OK to live openly as a gay couple. What better way, then, to circumvent the narrow mindedness of the times than for one member of the partnership to live as a woman in every respect except the obvious biologically impossible one. Especially since "Steve" so clearly enjoys dressing up.

On reflection, Durbridge may in fact be a master of the meta-narrative. After listening to a few near-identical runs of the same basic material, one's mind is almost forced to pay attention at another level, like a Zen meditator who stares for hours at the same blank wall. Are there further surprises in store for the discerning listener? I shall replay my recordings of Paul Temple And The Gregory/Sullivan/Vandyke/Jonathan/Margo Mystery/Case/Affair (delete as appropriate) and see what other intriguing patterns may emerge from the paintwork.

What we came here for

2010-03-21T11:14:00.007Z

I've just read of the sad death of Lesley Duncan, a wonderful singer and fine songwriter who was active in the early 1970s but never achieved anything like the fame she deserved. In my teens, I recorded a half-hour session she did for the BBC's "In Concert" programme, and it's been with me ever since.

Reading the tributes on her web site it's clear she was loved for herself as well as for her music. She will be missed by many. Her best-remembered song is simply called "Love Song"; I'll reproduce the words here. They speak to me not only of the person she must have been, but of the meaning of death, and the goal of the mystical journey I was writing about yesterday.

Thank you, Lesley, and good journeying.

The words I have to say
May well be simple but they're true
Until you give your love
there's nothing more that we can do

Love is the opening door
Love is what we came here for
No-one could offer you more
Do you know what I mean?
Have your eyes really seen?

You say it's very hard
To leave behind the life we knew
But there's no other way
And now it's really up to you

Love is the key we must turn
Truth is the flame we must burn
Freedom the lesson we must learn
Do you know what I mean?
Have your eyes really seen?

Reuniting the parents

2010-03-20T11:50:00.002Z

About ten years ago, I received an e-mail from an American teenager who was trying to trace her father. About all she knew about him was his name, which happened to be the same as mine, and she was systematically contacting everyone she could find on the internet with that name to find out whether they were willing to admit to having begotten a child with a specific woman in a specific place in the US some time in 1982. I knew it wasn't me -- I was thousands of miles away at the time, getting very depressed about my PhD research -- but I really admired her determination, and sent a reply encouraging her not to give up until she either found him or exhausted every possibility. She thanked me very nicely, but that was our last contact, and I am sad now that I didn't ask her to let me know how her quest turned out.

Finding and making contact with a parent who's disappeared seems to be an essential part of placing ourselves in the bigger picture, of discovering who we are, what we've inherited, what's coloured our perceptions, and what's unique to us. And I've been struck by just how important a harmonious relationship between Dora and me is to The Bean. When I'm going out and happen to kiss him goodbye first, he often imperiously instructs me to "Kiss Mummy!" too.

The same dynamics seem to operate in the realm of our spiritual parentage. Those of us who find a home within a religious tradition tend at some point to want to find out about things that formed that inheritance and made it distinct from other parts of the same "family", or from other families. My own spiritual home has mostly been within the Church of England, and so it's been important to me to understand something about the Reformation and to evaluate what those who walked away from the Church of Rome gained by doing so, and (more apparent to me these days) what they lost. Others in different branches of the family may have a greater burden of history on their shoulders; I used to regularly pass the meeting place of what I think called itself the "Greater Bibleway Pentecostal Apostolic Church", which sounded as if its members would have had at least four additional schisms to come to terms with.

But the split I want to focus on today is the very earliest one in Christian history: the second-century one that resulted in the two separate streams known today as Gnosticism and Orthodoxy. In a certain sense, these two are the original parents of all today's Christians. Orthodoxy is the mother who's always been there, who we (mostly) love, and who takes care of us; Gnosticism is the father who disappeared so early on that we don't remember him. When mother speaks about father at all, she invariably bad-mouths him; he was dualistic, elitist, world-hating, indulged in "speculations", swung wildly between extreme asceticism and appalling promiscuity, and (the final nail in the coffin) was an irredeemable heretic. Not far below the surface is the message: you, my child, carry his genetic payload, so you'd better make sure you don't turn out like him, or you'll make me (and God) very upset.

After a while, though, the time comes when the child wants to find his or her own place to stand, in order to make a realistic evaluation of both parents. Was mother always right? Could father really have been quite that bad? Answering those questions is going to be greatly helped by hearing father's side of the story in his own words, if we possibly can. How did it all seem to him? What did he really value, and how did he behave? What were his good and bad points? What did he love about our mother, and what couldn't he stand about her?

In a narrow historical sense, our gnostic father died many centuries ago. Gnostics were already a minority among Christians when, along with the pagans, the adherents of the mystery religions, and everyone else who disagreed with the official line, they were driven to extinction in fourth century after the (orthodox) church formed its unholy alliance with the power of the Roman state. But Gnosticism in the wider sense keeps surfacing to a greater or lesser extent: in the Cathars, in the insights of many of the mystics within the structure of the church, in Theosophy and Anthroposophy, in the thinking of Carl Jung, and today in the whole diverse collection of spiritualities often conveniently labeled (especially by those who don't like them very much) "New Age".

But we don't have to rely on these new expressions alone. Thanks largely to the dramatic discovery of a cache of gnostic writings in a cave at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1946, the original Gnosticism is better able to speak for itself today than it has been at any time since the days of Constantine. Partly because of that find, Gnosticism as a movement that consciously identifies itself with that original is becoming increasingly popular today. Its best-known spokesman is Bishop Stephan Hoeller, whose writings and audio lectures are well worth giving some attention to.

You will get a very different picture of Gnosticism from Hoeller than the one you will pick up from most academic writings on the subject. Academics tend to focus on Gnostic beliefs, which were many and varied; so varied, in fact, that one influential modern commentator has argued that "Gnosticism" as a category is actually invalid. Gnosticism was, and is, a world view, but it is not primarily that. As Hoeller makes clear, Gnosticism is primarily about gnosis; you could at one time even get a T-shirt on the web with the wonderfully double-edged slogan "Gnosis: it's not what you think". That is, not only is gnosis probably not what you think it is, but more importantly, it isn't a matter of thinking or believing at all. It's an inner knowing or illumination. Gnostic theologies flow out of and support that illumination; gnostic scriptures seem primarily intended to foster it, to bring about and maintain a restructuring of consciousness rather than a change of mind. Without gnosis, nothing in Gnosticism makes sense; it collapses into a two-dimensional mass of wildly implausible and, to most people, not particularly interesting "speculations".

So what is this "knowing"? By its nature, its content not something that can be defined in words, only alluded to. The gnostic "Hymn of the Pearl" tells of the son of royal parents who is sent down to "Egypt" to retrieve a pearl. But when he gets there, he falls into a deep sleep and forgets who he is. He is eventually awakened by "a letter sealed by the king":

"At its voice and the sound of its rustling I awoke and rose from my sleep. I took it, kissed it, broke its seal, and read. And the words written on my heart were in the letter for me to read. I remembered that I was the son of kings and my free soul longed for its own kind. I remembered the pearl for which I was sent down into Egypt...".

The Gospel of Thomas talks about gnosis this way. When Jesus asks his disciples "Compare me to something, and tell me what I am like", Thomas is not satisfied with the other disciples' answers, that Jesus is a just messenger or a wise philosopher. He admits, "Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like". Jesus responds "I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you are intoxicated from the bubbling spring I tended." He then takes Thomas aside and speaks three sayings to him, which Thomas refuses to divulge to his friends, otherwise "you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come out of the rocks and consume you".

And Song 11 of the semi-gnostic Odes of Solomon reads like this:

"My heart was cloven and there appeared a flower, and grace sprang up, and fruit from the Lord, for the highest one split me with his holy spirit, exposed my love for him, and filled me with his love. His splitting of my heart was my salvation, and I followed the way of his peace, the way of truth. From the beginning to the end I received his knowledge and sat on the rock of truth where he placed me. Speaking waters came near my lip from the vast fountain of the Lord, and I drank, and was drunk with the living waters that never die, and my drunkenness gave me knowledge."

All of this was forced underground when the non-gnostic group within the church defined itself as orthodox and the gnostics as heretics. Gnosis itself was of course not lost; it breaks out in (and indeed perhaps is responsible for) every religious tradition, and mysticism developed in Christianity even so. But Stephan Hoeller in one of his introductory lectures argues that traditional Christian theology is not supportive of such insights, and that great mystics like St John of the Cross struggled to frame their insights within its categories. As a result, mysticism has always been pushed to the margins of Christianity and regarded with suspicion, whereas if the gnostic view had prevailed, it would have been supported and given a central position.

So was father right, and mother wrong? It's not that simple. Reading the gnostic scriptures and comparing them to the ones that made it into the New Testament, it's very clear that the former concentrate mainly on knowledge and truth, while the latter stress love. Both, surely, are essential to full humanness. Paul, whose writings predate the split and who was respected by the gnostics as much as by the orthodox, shows how the two emphases need not conflict. In Ephesians he (or someone slightly later, but still prior to the split, writing in his name) prays "that you may have power ... to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge -- that you may be filled to the measure of all the fulness of God". That vision, of a direct experiential knowing of the truth which is love, has not often been realised over the centuries. Perhaps, after two milennia, we are at last in a position where we can begin in ourselves the reconciliation of our spiritual parents, and move in direction of the reality that Paul prayed we would experience all those years ago.

Over a barrel

2010-03-14T11:50:00.007Z

The International Energy Agency (IEA) produced an interesting statement on Friday on the global oil situation. It reported that China's oil demand had jumped by an "astonishing" 28% over the year ending in January 2010, and predicted that global oil demand this year would be 86.6 million barrels per day (mbpd). On the same day, oil briefly touched $83 per barrel, a price that has not been seen since the panic of summer 2008.

However, the IEA reassures us that these high prices are due to "heightening of geopolitical tensions affecting some producing countries", which presumably will go away when world peace breaks out as it surely must do quite soon; and that there are "ample physical oil supplies" -- as opposed, I can only assume, to the supplies of the mental oil that you need to apply to understand the IEA's slippery logic, or the spiritual oil we will all be in sore need of when the true implications of peak oil really sink in.

Let's look at the facts. According to this spreadsheet from the US Energy Information Administration, who seem to be the best source of the relevant numbers, oil production passed 85 mbpd for the first time in spring 2005, and since then has plateaued, only exceeding 86 mbpd in one month, July 2008, when it briefly touched 86.6, the level the IEA is predicting as the average for 2010. During that month, the price spiked to an all-time high of $147 per barrel.

No-one is denying that there is still plenty of oil in the ground, although the most realistic estimates are that it is now, to use the title of an excellent book by Jeremy Leggett, "half gone". The more immediate questions are, how much of the stuff can we get at, at what cost, and how fast can we pump it? The evidence from the last five years' production and price data is that even with huge price incentives, production levels above 86 mpbd cannot be sustained.

Thus if the IEA's prediction is correct, oil demand this year will be above what can be produced. Not by much, but the history of oil crises over recent decades shows that the oil price is highly inelastic: even a small shortfall in supply leads to a very large increase in price.

And at some point -- a small number of years, or maybe only months -- we will find ourselves on the down side of the oil peak, where even sustaining current production levels will prove impossible, while demand, presumably, will continue to surge, from developing countries headed by China if not from OECD ones. All this implies very high energy prices, which will put the brakes on the kind of economic recovery that the politicians assume is just round the corner.

It has seemed to me for some time that the usual kinds of investments, of the sort that are traditionally used to fund pensions, for example, are just not a sensible place to put money any more, because they are based on an assumption of continuing economic growth that is impossible without cheap energy. Such investments are therefore much more likely to lose you your shirt than provide you with a comfortable retirement. It makes far more sense to pay off your debts, and then put any spare cash into energy saving measures like home insulation and, depending on where you live, renewable energy generation in its various forms: solar water heating, wind turbines, or whatever. Other ways of reducing your dependence on fossil fuels are also well worth considering: changing your lifestyle so you don't need a car; growing your own food; learning skills that will still be in demand when our current globalized economy is no longer affordable, and which you can practise well into old age.

Denial, etc

2010-02-07T16:17:00.008Z

I've been aware for some time of the growing backlash against attempts to get people to take climate change seriously. The web version of almost every article on the topic in the mainstream media that allows comments to be left is these days deluged with contemptuous, angry dismissals of what is increasingly called the "agw theory" ("agw" standing for "anthropogenic global warming", and apparently not even meriting capital letters). Examples can be found here and here. And just the other day, a BBC poll of a thousand British adults found that only 26% agree that "climate change is happening and is now established as largely man-made"; that's down from 41% as recently as November.

Why is this happening? Surely not because millions of people have suddenly decided to devote hours of their lives to a detailed examination and careful assessment of the evidence, and have come to the startling conclusion that it's all bunk. No, a more plausible explanation is (in my view, and after detailed examination of the evidence, of course) to be found in the murkier reaches of human psychology.

Things are polarising, I think, precisely because the evidence is suddenly so overwhelming and was presented with such force in the media in the run up to Copenhagen. People have become increasingly aware, at least in one corner of their minds, of how serious the situation is, and how much they would need to give up to make a real difference to the outcome. They're not willing to do it, and rather than admit this to themselves, they find it easier to pretend things aren't as they are.

Some years ago, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist working with the dying, developed a model of the way people "deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness or catastrophic loss". Kubler-Ross suggested that there were five stages in the process, which must not be rushed: denial ("this can't be happening"), anger ("it's not fair"), bargaining ("I will give my life savings if..."), depression ("why bother with anything?") and acceptance ("I can't fight it, I may as well prepare for it"). The applicability of the model to reactions to the news of personal terminal illness has been questioned, but so far, it seems to describe pretty well many people's reactions to the bad news embodied in the evidence for (among other things) climate change.

Judging from the BBC survey and the web comments I referred to, most people currently seem to be at the denial or anger stage, sometimes both at once; the anger can take the form of "if I can't do anything about it, don't you dare bother me with having to think about it". Bargaining is exemplified by scientific and political attempts to "fix the problem" through exciting new technologies and policies, holding out the promise that we can avert catastrophe without having to undergo any unpleasant self-discipline. Depression is the silent stage; these people don't talk about it much, don't campaign, but tend to have a very clear view of the prospects. I have been surprised at how many people I've talked to, often after a few drinks, have expressed themselves in this way.

And acceptance? Well, to the extent that the Kubler-Ross model applies, that's the stage to aim for, I suppose. It is probably the only firm basis for long-term, consistent and constructive action, not to avert catastrophe (we're past the bargaining stage here, remember), but to cushion the descent: to save what and who we can, to ensure that as many of the good things about being human survive and are nurtured.

Me? Well, we all like to think we're at the upper end of any developmental scale we're presented with, and I do try and practice acceptance. But I feel very depressed a lot of the time, especially when I think about The Bean and his prospects; I was, I now believe, immobilised at that stage for almost a decade. There is still enough of the bargainer within me to make me read stories of miraculous new energy sources with great interest and to at least drop leaflets through doors for the Green Party. I don't think I ever suffered from denial, but I do feel angry, even though simply through the accident of where I was born, I have contributed a lot more to our unresolvable mess than most people on the planet.

You?

Forget the environment

2010-02-07T15:40:00.000Z

I've just come back from hearing a sermon by Peter Owen-Jones entitled "Christianity and Environment". It was absolutely the best talk I've heard in a church, or probably anywhere, for at least several decades, which is about as far back as I can remember. His tone was very quiet, very thoughtful, very serious. Three things stayed with me; I didn't take notes, so the following may only be an approximation, and I apologise for any inaccuracies.

One: "Make no mistake -- catastrophe is coming". Said not at all in the traditional thundering tones of apocalyptic preaching, but with great sadness.

Two: an exhortation, many times repeated, to allow ourselves to feel the harm that is being done to others, other species, future generations. He quoted Wendell Berry a lot. All four of the main power structures that drive Western culture -- its governments, corporations, universities, and religions -- are united in completely disregarding our inclusion in all of life and our dependence on the non-human. Christianity is stuck in a cul-de-sac of intellectualism which prevents it from the depth of feeling that is warranted.

Three: there is no salvation for the individual that does not include the whole of life.

Some reflections, which owe more than a little to the writings of the Archdruid.

Survival is in the balance. Survival of what?

Not of the planet, or of life on it. Life will go on, in some form, and exhortations to "save the planet" are as silly as they are misleading. People who exhort us to attempt it usually really mean they want us to try to save the planet's ability to support the current numbers and lifestyle of homo sapiens, which is something quite different.

Nor, secondly, of that lifestyle. It cannot survive. The opportunity to save it, if it ever existed, was jettisoned around 1980, when neoconservatism (oddly named, since it had very little intention of conserving anything) came to the fore and encouraged us to conveniently forget any notion of living within limits. In the ensuing thirty years, human numbers and consumption have mushroomed, resources have been depleted, and greenhouse gas concentrations have climbed way past the danger level. Catastrophe, as Peter said, is coming.

Nor, probably, of our species as a whole. The feedback mechanisms set in process by the global warming might make the planet unlivable for humans, but we are a global species, and the chances are that some places will remain habitable for at least small numbers.

But what we do still have a choice about is whether and how we manage the "long descent" into whatever deindustrial future awaits us. Are we going to pretend that journey never has to happen, make no preparations for it, and thereby worsen its effects still further? Or is it time to start packing whatever we think is most worth saving from our cultural heritage?

For me, the thing that is (in principle) most worth saving is Christianity itself. I don't dispute the responsibility the church bears, both past and present, through its myths and its behaviours for bringing about the multiple crises that threaten us. But somewhere inside the morass of confusion, rubbish and sheer poison is buried a pearl of great price which it would, to understate the case absurdly, pay us not to lose hold of.

And I don't think it will survive unless it can transform itself to the extent that sermons like Peter's are commonplace, rather than the exception I have been waiting twenty years to hear.

As a minor corollary of all this, I would like to make a modest proposal: that we forget the "environment", in the sense of dropping the word from our vocabulary. It really isn't helpful. It means "that which is around (us)"; it implicitly encourages a focus on humanity as the principal actors on the world stage, with the rest of physical reality clustered around in a rather shadowy supporting role. That is precisely the attitude that has got us into our current predicament.

So just as soon as I can think of a suitable alternative term, I had better retag several dozen posts in this blog, including the one you are reading now. The fact that I can't immediately come up with a suggestion myself is an indication of how deeply immersed in the anthropocentric world view I myself am. Less enmeshed readers may wish to help me out here.

The truth will out

2010-01-10T09:54:00.002Z

The Bean (nearly 3 now) returns to kindergarten tomorrow, after three weeks break that have more or less coincided with all the snow and ice here in Flatchester. Dora has been feeling the cold, and has also sometimes found it hard to think of enough things for her and him to do together while I've been at work. Usually the reported activities consist of swimming at the gym, visits to and from friends, shopping, trips to the Botanical Garden and so on.

Early this morning, however, I had a conversation with The Bean which cast a rather different light on things. The following is as near verbatim as I can remember.

Bean: Daddy drink beer!

Trimorph: No, I don't drink beer in the mornings, because it makes me sleepy.

Bean: That's a shame.

Trimorph: I drink tea in the mornings, water at lunchtime, and water or beer in the evenings. What do you drink?

Bean: I drink beer all day long!

Trimorph (startled): Do you? Do you drink it at home?

Bean: No, I go to the pub.

Trimorph: Really? You go to the pub by yourself?

Bean: No, I go with Mummy!

When confronted with a report of this dialogue, Dora was unable even to fashion a coherent denial, instead opening and closing her mouth in a manner somewhat reminiscent of a fish.

Regular readers of this blog, if there are any, will I'm sure be awaiting any further revelations with interest.

Life in the arctic

2010-01-09T10:57:00.005Z

We have been having interesting times with the weather in the UK. On the very day that the Copenhagen climate conference collapsed in complete disarray, opening the way more clearly than ever to runaway global warming, the temperature in Europe plummeted, and here in Flatchester we awoke to a thick covering of snow. It briefly disappeared over the Christmas-New Year week, but is now back again, and I spent several hours this week sticking clingfilm (Saran wrap) over our conservatory windows in a possibly vain effort to keep Dora's and my blood circulating through our extremities (The Bean seems immune to the cold, happily watching me do so in a temperature of 9C/48F while wearing only his pyjamas).

But life had to go on more or less as normal, and I still have to negotiate my daily six mile cycle journey to work from one edge of Flatchester to the opposite edge. It's a challenge, owing to the unfortunate structure of local politics. Fully a quarter of journeys within Flatchester itself are by bicycle, but unfortunately, all things to do with roads and paths are under the control not of the cycle-friendly Liberal Democrat City Council but of the County Council, which is run by Conservatives almost entirely representing areas outside the city itself. Many of them seem to view Flatchester only as a place to drive into and park their cars. As a result, copious amounts of salt and grit were dumped on major roads to keep them clear, but nothing whatever was done to enable cyclists to stay mobile. Cycling across snow and ice is tricky, but the only alternative, that of negotiating major motor routes in poor visibility with the cycle lanes blocked, is potentially lethal.

At first all this was just a challenge, but eventually I came off and cracked my head on the ground. This knocked my brain back into a curmudgeonly state from which I had managed to stay clear since this post last year. I'm better now (I think), but the following letter, published in the Flatchester News this week, was the result.

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Dear Sirs,

I would like to thank the County Council for laying on such a magical Snow And Ice Challenge for Flatchester cyclists in the week before Christmas.

Within hours of the first heavy snowfall, all the major motor routes were boringly gritted and usable. But what a treat was in store for cyclists! How we thrilled at the mountains of sludge filling the cycle lanes, and the chance they gave us to dart in and out of the traffic! And the off-road cycle paths, including the much-used National Cycle Routes, were thoughtfully left in their beautiful snowy pristine state for our enjoyment all week long.

But the master stroke came on Christmas Eve, after the Council apparently tore up their stated policy of gritting all routes after five days of freezing temperatures. Rain fell on the snow and then froze, so that we had a chance to do as much bicycle ice skating as we wanted without having to pay a penny for it. How I laughed when I fell off on the National Route across Flatchester Common, banging my head on the ground and giving myself a nice whiplash injury to remember the experience by all through Christmas! Ho ho ho.

And of course, nobody was the least bit inconvenienced by all this fun, because as all Shire-dwelling Tory councillors know, bicycles are really only for leisure use, and anyone who has a proper job that they have to get to on time every morning is bound to have a proper SUV in their garage that they can hop into whenever the weather is bad.

I am looking forward to another chance to test my circus skills in the New Year, but I feel it is only fair to suggest that the poor motorists be given a turn next time. After all, we cyclists have had things our own way in icy weather for so many years now, it would be churlish not to offer the same privilege to other road users for once.

Yours faithfully,

Trimorph

The Undercover Economist

2009-12-12T14:38:00.009Z

I've just finished reading "The Undercover Economist" by Financial Times journalist Tim Harford, and would recommend it to anyone interested in the workings either of the world as a whole or of the minds of economists. Harford tackles complex issues with a lightness of touch that makes the book a joy to read. In places, I probably sounded like a mad person, bursting out in laughter while not interacting with any other human being.

Harford sets out to explain how economics can make sense of a lot of things in the world around us that would otherwise be mysterious. He starts with coffee. Given that the price of a cappuccino from a stall in Waterloo Station is so much higher that the cost of production, who makes all the profit? Why do the different drinks on sale in that same stall differ in price by far more than any difference in the ingredients cost or the time taken to assemble them? It's all explained. Harford then takes us on a tour of how supermarkets manipulate their customers; externalities (when a transaction has a cost paid by people not party to it); why poor countries are poor (mainly corrupt leadership -- the chapter on his visit to Cameroon is unforgettable); and the merits of globalisation (yes, he loves the stuff).

The brand of economics that Harford expounds is probably best described as a useful analysis of the kinds of economic behaviour that people exhibit in a world powered by cheap energy that can be used without any foreseeable limits and that everyone assumes is always going to stay cheap. He argues that trade barriers in the form of import duties cannot be the best thing for the environment, because pollution is caused by transport per se, not specifically by crossing national boundaries. For example less damage is caused by transporting an item by sea from Japan to Los Angeles as part of a bulk shipment than by then ferrying it by lorry a couple of hundred miles inland to where it is to be sold.

His argument in favour of globalisation is basically that it is the most efficient way to help poorer countries achieve something more like the level of prosperity of rich ones. There is no real analysis, however, of how the planet could possibly support such a massive increase in both resource use and pollution. He states (p223) that "it seems likely, though we do not know at the moment, that the richest countries in the world are just reaching the point where even energy consumption per head is about to stop rising. After all, our cars and domestic appliances get more efficient every year, and when we all have two cars and an air-conditioned house, it's hard to see where extra energy demand will come from." But this is just laughable. First of all, the evidence is clear that the richer you get, the more energy you tend to burn; for example, people earning over £60,000 in the UK fly four times per year on average. And anyway, by the time seven billion people each have two cars and an air-conditioned house, it will already be far, far too late to avert climate catastrophe, even assuming such a fantastic state of wealth could be achieved given the energy resources available to us.

It's not at all that Harford dismisses climate change. He actually cares about it quite a lot, and makes some interesting points. One of the funniest passages in the book is when he arrives at a public meeting hosted by an environmental group. At the door he is asked how he travelled to the meeting, so that the group can calculate his carbon footprint and plant trees to offset it. He approves of planting trees, and therefore tells them he has arrived by anthracite-powered steamer from Australia. The ensuing analysis of the whole principle of expiation by offsetting is very thought-provoking.

No, the problem is more that he displays almost no sense of history; of the fact that things change in major ways over time, and civilisations rise and (universally, except for our current global one so far) fall. Because of this, his book pays little attention to intergenerational externalities (things we do now affect not just other people today, but all our descendants), and absolutely none to peak oil and the resulting energy crises that we face. So there is no discussion of how the arguments he puts forward through the book need to be modified given the falsehood of his (unstated) assumption of "cheap energy forever" and the importance of the intergenerational factor. Harford comes across as a genuinely nice and engaging person with an active social conscience, but at the same time, as a perfect example of someone completely hoodwinked by what the Archdruid calls the myth of progress: all of history has been leading up to the present, and all past forms of society are merely poor approximations to what we currently enjoy. And he's all the more worth reading for that reason, because in that respect he typifies the vast majority not just of economists but of politicians, business people, educators and the rest of the people who run things.

Harford's analyses may work very well for the present -- and that's why I'm recommending the book, because it is worth understanding how things are currently working, not least because such an understanding can affect, among other things, the kinds of measures that one sees as likely to be effective in dealing with climate change and peak oil. He has, for example, convinced me that any worthwhile action must take the form either of an enforceable legal constraint with real sanctions attached, or of a (financial or material) incentive to behave in the right way. His book has helped me to appreciate that by and large, people act in their own perceived self-interest, and we can't expect to sort things out by elevating their consciousness. But as a guide to the medium and long term future, Harford's perspective is woefully myopic. If that's what you're after, take a look at the Archdruid's writing (see above) and "Collapse" by Jared Diamond.

The Foolish Virgins

2009-12-12T13:11:00.007Z

To pick up one of the threads from my last post: Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace, chapter on "Necessity and Obedience") writes:

"The Foolish Virgins: The meaning of this story is that at the moment when we become conscious that we have to make a choice, the choice is already made for good or ill."

I think of this a lot in connection with the Copenhagen conference on climate change, which is at its halfway stage as I write. I know that many of those pressing for firm action on greenhouse gas emissions are doing so because they believe that if such action is taken, most of the good things about life in the richer parts of the world can be preserved. I am fully in favour of such action, but am not so sanguine about the resulting prospects. It won't preserve what we have; it can only cushion the decline, although that's valuable enough.

I remember reading some words by Jonathon Porritt some time ago. I can't find the quote now, but it was something like this: "I believe we have around twenty years to turn things around. Not to agree to do it, or start to do it, or put the frameworks in place to do it, but actually to do it." It was about twenty years ago that he wrote that. And I think his assessment was probably about right. Which is unfortunate, given that on a global scale, the last twenty years have been characterised by doing approximately nothing to prepare either for climate change or for peak oil. In fact, we have moved a very long way in the wrong direction. Did we know about the issues during those two decades? Some of us did, consciously; others doubtless didn't; and still others did know, but managed to render their knowledge unconscious so that they wouldn't have to face it.

There is a modern-day relevance of the Simone Weil quote above that she couldn't possibly have been aware of when she wrote it in the 1940s. What was the predicament faced by the foolish virgins (Matthew 25:1-13)? Oil, and more specifically, the lack of a sufficient supply of the stuff when it really mattered.

Remembering Kirsty

2009-12-12T11:57:00.005Z

Last week a routine visit to the dentist revealed holes in two of my back teeth, one of them worryingly large. The dentist said she would try to fill it but that there was only about a fifty-fifty chance it would work, and muttered darkly about root canal procedures.

I returned a few days later for the drilling and filling to be performed. Dora had reminded me to breathe from my abdomen to keep the energy as low as possible in my body. I did so, and was largely able just to observe any discomfort, not react to it. This worked so well that after a few minutes, my main problem was simply boredom. I found myself pondering how fortunate I was to be able to access modern dentistry carried out by a first-rate practitioner. That is one of things that I expect to miss the most if things start to fall apart in the decades to come.

As the dentist and her assistant were about to get to work, what should come on the radio but "Fairytale of New York" by Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl. I had heard MacGowan perform with the Pogues fifteen years before, and remember his facial appearance rather more clearly than the music. I commented that there was someone with teeth much worse even than mine, but to my surprise, neither of these dental specialists knew what I was talking about. If you don't either, have a look at these "before and after" pictures -- it seems he's finally got them sorted.

But it's the other member of the duo, Kirsty MacColl, that I really want to write about here. I never heard her perform, but have much enjoyed listening to her soulful, moving and often very funny songs ever since Dora introduced me to them ten years ago, not long before Kirsty was tragically killed. When I returned home from the dentist, I saw on the BBC news web site that the campaign mounted by her friends and family to have her death properly investigated had been wound up.

There can be no more heroic way to leave this life than to save someone else's by doing so, and it looks as though that is exactly what Kirsty MacColl did: rushing to push her son out of the way of a fast-moving speedboat, which then smashed into her. I have sometimes wondered whether I would be capable of that kind of sacrifice for The Bean if a similar situation arose. There is no way to know, but I can only imagine the whole thing happened so fast for Kirsty that she had no time to assess the risks to herself and her son and make any kind of conscious decision. Her body would have acted before her mind could even start to think. And a reaction like that can only be the result of an ongoing attitude of heart. Very often, our decision is made before we become aware of any need for making one, and when that happens, which way it goes depends on how we have chosen to shape our souls over the years.

On a more mundane note, three days on, I am happy to report that my teeth appear to be in good shape, and I am determined to take better care of them, as I trust Shane MacGowan will also be doing with his.

Mine's a beer

2009-11-17T20:49:00.003Z

Richard Heinberg is one of the best-known peak oil writers and speakers around the place. Over the weekend, I listened to a "bad news, good news" pair of talks here (click on "Writings") by Heinberg and the owner of the site, permaculture pioneer David Holmgren.

Heinberg explained how when wine is made, the yeast population in the vat increases exponentially as it consumes the sugar in the grapes, then almost equally rapidly dies off as it's poisoned by the alcohol it's created by doing so. This process, or at least the first part of it, has striking similarities to the rapid growth of human population over the last few centuries on the back of fossil fuel energy. Heinberg posed the question "Are humans more intelligent than yeast?". Individually I think some of us probably are, but collectively, it's not clear to me we'll do any better in practice.

There are actually three ways a fermentation can go, though, exemplified by the processes of making sweet wine, dry wine and beer. To make a dry wine, you ensure there's just enough sugar in the solution for the yeast to produce as much alcohol as it can (about 12%-14%) before killing itself. Then you have as strong a drink as you can get without additional procedures like distillation, and virtually no left-over sugar. To make a sweet wine, you put in more sugar than the yeast can use; by the time it poisons itself, there's still plenty left over. When you make beer, you go in the other direction, and put in a lot less sugar; the fermentation then stops when the sugar's gone, while the alcohol concentration is still low enough (around 5%) for the yeast to survive. Its population crashes through starvation, not through poisoning. If you then decant the beer into bottles, you can add a little extra sugar to each one and the surviving yeast will ferment that too, creating a nice "head" to the beer.

In our human situation, the sugar is the oil in the ground, and the alcohol is the carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Depending on how the system is set up, the fossil fuel party might come to end when the oil's gone (beer), when the pollutants get too concentrated (sweet wine), or when both happen about the same time (dry wine).

As I understand it, our situation is most like a "medium sweet" wine: climate change is the more serious threat, but peak oil is only a little behind it, and its effects may well be felt earlier, just as the yeast may start to notice a reduction in the available sugar before it's overwhelmed by alcohol poisoning.

Can we collectively make this whole analogy inapplicable by our intelligent approach to these two challenges? As Heinberg says in his talk, that's the experiment that's going to be carried out this century. I'd bet that the analogy will apply, except that if I'm right, neither the bookies nor I are likely to be around when it's time to collect my winnings. If we do make it through, though, it's likely to be because of a deep change in attitudes, rather than because of some wizzo new eco-friendly technology coming along in the nick of time to rescue us. The Archdruid explains why, again using the analogy of a microbial culture.

A spirituality for the descent

2009-11-14T15:56:00.005Z

Looking back on this blog, I'm aware that nearly everything I've written since July has been on an environmental theme, and mostly pretty gloomy in tone. Yet the heading of this blog still promises "a trialogue between ... mainstream Christianity, Gnosticism and scientific rationalism", and I don't feel like altering that, because I think environmental matters are central to any such trialogue taking place at this point in our history. But maybe it's time to redress the balance a bit.

Here's the question. What kind of spirituality, if any, is adequate in the face of a future that at worst (in the case of runaway climate change) holds extinction of our species, and at best what the Archdruid refers to as the "long descent", a slow but nevertheless very thorough step-by-step process of the "catabolic collapse" of civilisation?

And for me personally, if there is no longer an easy hope that things will get better, or even stay as they are, in the future, there is also a corresponding loss of the past. It is often said that for Christians, the central fact of history is the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ. It is the proof that God is real, that God cares, that there is (in spite of the above) hope for the future. I feel in my depths that Christianity is true, yet having put a lot of effort over the last few years into evaluating the historical evidence, I can no longer believe that anyone at all like the Jesus of the gospels ever lived on this earth. If the Christian myth holds any truth at all -- and I am convinced it does -- then it must be located somewhere outside literal history. This is the way the second half of the New Testament speaks, and I continue to value those writings, but I find the reality they point me to is almost entirely an inner one. A God who intervenes in history, either in the Incarnation or to pull us out of the pit into which we've now collectively dug ourselves, seems barely believable; and I cannot help feeling that as an aching loss. Thus there is another question: what kind of spirituality can address this loss of the past, as well as that of the future?

I have recently come across the writings of the French Catholic mystic Simone Weil (a tip for those keen to avoid embarrassment at mystic parties: it's pronounced "Vey", not "Vile"). I had been aware of her for many years as someone I ought to read one day, and had even felt a kind of affinity for her owing to the fact that we share a birthday, but it had never gone further than that until I was introduced to her work at a meeting of a church house group I've become part of recently (I may even start going to the church itself at some point).

I don't have a full answer to my question "what kind of spirituality ...?", but I am pretty clear about one part of it. It needs to arise from the life of someone who has in some way lived in the future, in the sense of having personally undergone some of the unpleasant things that almost certainly lie in wait for us on the downslope of "Hubbert's Peak" of oil production. And Weil certainly qualifies. She suffered plenty: some of it involuntary (persistent, agonising headaches), much of it voluntary. And she lived out her principles in a way very few of us do: she fought for the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War -- or more strictly, she cooked for them, owing to her pacifist convictions; was effectively exiled from her home country by the German invasion; and not long afterwards, died from voluntary starvation undertaken out of identification with her countrypeople suffering under the Nazi jackboot. So she probably comes as close to being a "person of the future" as anyone past or present can.

Her major work, "Gravity and Grace", was compiled after her death by the man to whom she entrusted her notes. The book is accordingly a sequence of short chapters, each consisting in turn of a sequence of often dense paragraph-length comments of unnerving directness. Here are a few, from the chapter "Detachment".

Affliction in itself is not enough for the attainment of total detachment ... To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world.

This reminded me of Morrissey's words: "I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving / England is mine and it owes me a living...". It's as absurd as he makes it sound, and we all do it, I suspect.

Two ways of renouncing material possessions:

To give them up with a view to some spiritual advantage.

To conceive of them and feel them as conducive to spiritual well-being (for example: hunger, fatigue and humiliation cloud the mind and hinder meditation) and yet to renounce them.

Only the second kind of renunciation means nakedness of spirit.

Furthermore, material goods would scarcely be dangerous if they were seen in isolation and not bound up with spiritual advantage.

We must give up everything that is not grace and not even desire grace.

For me, an example of the first kind of renunciation is simplifying my life to leave time and energy for prayer: minimising time spent in front of the television, alcohol consumption, and so on. Not really a problem. The second kind would be to give up the very things that support my meditation: enough sleep, enough to eat, peace and quiet, a regular routine. That would be a hundred times as hard.

We must leave on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality ... The belief in the providential ordering of events -- in short, the "consolations" which are ordinarily sought in religion.

To love God through and across the destruction of Troy and of Carthage -- and with no consolation. Love is not consolation, it is light.

This is the kind of writing I can well imagine sustaining me as our present-day Troys and Carthages begin to shudder from the impacts of catabolic collapse.

Choosing to collapse

2009-11-14T14:32:00.007Z

I'm nearing the end of Jared Diamond's excellent book "Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive". Diamond surveys many civilizations through history that have either collapsed (Easter Island, the Greenland Norse, the Maya) or managed to avoid doing so (the Iceland Norse, Tokugawa Japan). He identifies five sets of factors that can threaten a collapse: inadvertent environmental degradation by humans; climate change, whether natural or human-induced; hostile neighbours; the withdrawal of contact or support by friendly neighbours; and the society's own choice of response to those challenges. He finds that when they occur, collapses tend to be caused by several factors acting together, rather than by just one. But the society's choice of response always seems to be pretty important.

Near the end of the book, there is a chapter entitled "Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?". This time, he highlights four kinds of (overlapping) reason. Groups may not realise that what they are doing will be disastrous, for example the introduction of rabbits and foxes into Australia by nineteenth-century settlers. Secondly, when the problem does arrive, the group may initially fail to notice it, either because they lack the science to measure it (loss of soil nutrients, for example), or because it happens slowly and is masked by random variations (climate change). Thirdly, when they do notice it, they may not even try to solve it. This is typically a matter of "rational bad behaviour", or the tragedy of the commons, where lots of individuals or subgroups acting in their own self-interest combine to produce an effect that is against the interests of the whole; but it also sometimes involves "irrational bad behaviour", where people cling to attitudes and beliefs that lead them to act in ways that are not even in their own interests. And fourthly, when a society does try to solve the problems, it may fail: it may not have the know-how required, or it may simply be too late.

Of course, the reason all this is of much more than academic interest today is that Diamond's analyses apply in clear ways to today's global society. There have been several surveys recently that suggest that a majority of people believe that human activities do not cause climate change; and this is as true in Britain as it is in the US, so we can't (just) blame religious fundamentalism. That is, most of us are stuck at the "failing to notice" stage; and in our case, it is obviously not because the information is not available, but because we either refuse to look at it or refuse to believe it. Of those who do accept the evidence, I think the large majority are at the "not even trying to solve it" stage; it all seems too huge, so why should they bother to change their (rational) bad behaviour? Nearly all the people I know outside the environmental movement are in this camp. And perhaps they have a point; the minority of the minority, those who both accept the crisis and are determined to do something, may now find it's too late. Just today, the UK's Institute for Mechanical Engineers published a report saying that the Government's plans for an 80% CO2 reduction by 2050 were unachievable. And even if that report is wrong, it may be beside the point: the same week, it's been reported that China has now overtaken the US as the world's leading CO2 producer, with 20% of the global share; and neither they nor the Indians are proposing any reductions in the next decades. It will be a miracle if anything really substantial comes out of the Copenhagen conference starting in three weeks time. The richer countries (their politicians, anyway) are mostly ready to make some cuts, but the poorer ones understandably want to be able to catch up.

But my sense of outrage over all this is gradually being tempered by an acceptance that it was perhaps inevitable from the start. I'm more and more persuaded that the most important feature of the last few centuries of Western and, increasingly, global history has been the appearance of cheap energy: first, human energy, in form of slaves and conquered empires; then coal; and finally oil. The benefits of all this (to those who do benefit) are so major that as far as I'm aware, there has never been a large society in history that has not done its best to grab as much of it as possible. And now the fossil fuel bonanza is starting to end (oil production has peaked, while population is still rising), with consequences that people will not happily accept, while the challenge of voluntarily relinquishing the luxuries to which we have become accustomed, for the sake of the planet, is one to which very, very few people are anywhere near being willing to take on.

Alongside Diamond, I've also been reading the Archdruid Report systematically over the last few weeks. While I don't think anyone could truthfully say they exactly enjoy reading such gloomy stuff, I have nevertheless appreciated the author John Michael Greer's clarity of thought and particularly his unmasking of the tendencies most of us have either to place blind faith in "progress" or (more of a temptation in my case) to go to the other pole and expect imminent doom.

Against those in the "progress" camp, Greer argues that what we face is not a problem but a predicament. A problem has a solution, while a predicament does not, and can only be adjusted to. Up until about the 1970s, the environmental crisis was a problem which could have been solved, with some useful contributions towards a solution being pioneered in the way of developments in renewable energy production in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. But then the price of oil dropped again, partly as a result those very efforts, and what Margaret Thatcher used to call "our great car economy" roared off once more towards the edge of the metaphorical cliff.

But actually, unless runaway climate change sets in (and that's a big "unless"), the "cliff" metaphor may not be the right one. Against the "doomsters", what Greer argues (and Diamond also shows) from examination of the historical evidence is that what he calls "catabolic collapse" is much more likely: a sequence of partial collapses with periods of stability or partial recovery in between, occurring over a scale of perhaps a century or two, which in their cumulative effect are indeed catastrophic, but taken individually, or even taken over the course of a single human lifetime, are somewhat less than that. Life will go on; it will just be a very different kind of life, accompanied much more visibly by death in its traditional forms (famine, pestilence and war) than anything we fortunate First Worlders have ever known.

I was out delivering leaflets this morning for "The Green Party -- a party you can trust for fairness, honesty, and to build a healthy future for all." While I do think they can be trusted in the fairness and honesty departments, I hardly believe any longer that a "healthy future for all" is achievable. All the same, there are practical things we can do (growing our own food, traditional medicine, community building) to cushion the shock of the decline. The sooner we start doing those things, the more effective they will be (note to self: learn to grow vegetables), and political campaigning may be as good a way as any to wake people up.

Before it's too late?

2009-10-25T10:02:00.001Z

I spent half an hour yesterday afternoon outside Flatchester Guildhall with a group of Buddhists, chanting ‘sabbe satta sukhi hontu’ ("may all beings be well" in Pali) 350 times. The event was one of 5,200 worldwide co-ordinated by 350.org to try to focus world leaders' minds on the need for an effective deal at the Climate Change conference at Copenhagen in December. The number 350, by the way, was chosen because 350 parts per million is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere beyond which we are serious danger of climate catastrophe. We're currently on about 387.

It felt important to do something public in this regard, and a number of people stopped to talk to us, though far more just walked past. The local Green Party candidate was one who stopped for a chat, though no-one from any other political party put in an appearance. I was also a little sad that although there are many more Christians than Buddhists in Flatchester, none of them appeared to find the issue sufficiently important to organize an event themselves.

I have also fired off a letter to our revered leader Gordon Brown, secretary for Climate Change Ed Miliband, and both my local members of parliament (we've had a boundary change since the last election). I doubt if the former two will ever even see it. The latter two should, though. But whether anyone takes any notice or not, the chanting and the letter are at least two things, however small, that I'll be able to point back to in future years when apologising to my son for not doing a whole lot more.

Here's most of the letter. You are quite welcome to make whatever use of it you wish in writing to your own politician(s). But please do something.

----

Dear Mr Brown,

I am writing this letter on behalf of my son, who at two years old is too young to have an opinion, but who, much more than I do, faces a life that looks likely to ruined by the world's failure to adequately address climate change.

I read this week of your straight talking on climate change to the Major Economics Forum. You are quite right. The UK, and indeed the rest of the world, does indeed face a catastrophe if a deal is not agreed in Copenhagen. You and I are far from alone in realising this. Yesterday I was privileged to be part one of the 5,200 events world-wide co-ordinated by 350.org to demand an effective agreement. There is certainly a growing sense of urgency among all kinds of people.

I do feel, however, that other world leaders might be more inclined to listen to your wise words if they were backed up by actions. I was actually very surprised to read what you had said. Could this be the leader of the same government whose own energy adviser David MacKay has labelled claimed UK emissions reductions since 1990 “an illusion”? Whose former sustainable development adviser Jonathon Porritt accused it of “failing to match green rhetoric with action”? Whose plans to generate 15% of energy from renewables by 2020 were assessed earlier this year as “virtually impossible to meet” by the Energy Research Centre (ERC) given current policies? Whose own Committee on Climate Change warned this month that a “step change” is needed in those policies? Whose most visible response to the financial crisis is to try to stimulate the car industry with bribes to motorists of £2,000 to trade in their used cars and buy any new cars that take their fancy, no matter how much gas they guzzle? A government that only a year ago approved the expansion of Stansted Airport, and even more recently that of Heathrow? And all this despite your party having been in power for a dozen years and climate change having been widely recognized as a serious threat for much longer than that.

I suggest that the most effective thing you could do in the run-up to Copenhagen is to make a very public U-turn on these disastrous policies, and listen to the likes of Porritt, MacKay, the CCC and the ERC who are well placed to suggest better ones that might at last put this country on the path to true sustainability. Cancellation of the new runway plans would be a good starting point. All political parties also need to acknowledge publicly what all of you must already know, that climate change and peak oil in particular mean that we have to accept limits and restraints to our consumption and not promise the electorate “growth” as a means to solve all current problems. Until your deeds match your words and your words match reality, I strongly suspect the rest of the world will quite reasonably regard speeches like the one you gave this week as so breathtakingly hypocritical as to amount to nothing better than an insult to your hearers' intelligence.

Please, let's see some real action in advance of these vital negotiations, or your legacy will be one of abject failure on this most important of all issues, and my son's inheritance will be a ruined planet, a life of increasing deprivation and quite possibly an early death.

Yours sincerely

Trimorph

A view from the peak

2009-10-10T17:54:00.002+01:00

Dora, The Bean and I spent last weekend in the Peak District in Derbyshire (England), a mostly desolate and in places quite stunning region of hills, moors and valleys. I enjoyed some superlative beer produced by Peak Brewery, while The Bean was equally appreciative of the Peak Dairy ice cream. I found myself reflecting that it's a shame the climate there is too cold to grow olives, otherwise we would doubtless have encountered a producer called Peak Oil.

Not entirely coincidentally, I have been thinking about the connections between climate change and peak oil. Climate change has an increasingly high profile these days but most people seem less aware of the fact that the world's oil supply has probably peaked over the last few years and will now slowly start to decline, while demand will certainly rise, if only because of the rapidly increasing "development" of middle-income countries. The result can only be shortages and price increases, the latter being quite severe as history shows that oil prices are extremely sensitive to the difference between demand and supply; a mere 5% shortfall during the 1970s oil crisis led to a tripling in price, for example.

Which is the more serious problem? Do the limits to oil supplies mean we don't need to worry so much about CO2 emissions? No; there's still plenty of the stuff in the ground, not to speak of all the coal and natural gas, so if we burn everything we know we can get at, the climate will be in big trouble. On the other hand, the effects of peak oil may well become apparent in everyday life before those of climate change do. We could be talking of a few years for many of them, rather than decades.

Which is, in a way, encouraging. Many people seem (in practice) to oppose measures that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions because of the effect such things will have on their lifestyle. They imagine that if we can somehow make the "climate thing" go away, what James Kunstler calls the "happy motoring fiesta" can go on indefinitely. But it won't; it'll get more and more expensive and unreliable, as will (still more) air travel.

In other words, the choice isn't actually between "doing the right thing" and continuing to enjoy our current lifestyles. It's between saying goodbye to our current lifestyles in a coordinated and planned way, under a treaty of the kind that I hope will be agreed at the UN climate conference in December, or saying goodbye to them through the chaos of random oil shocks, price hikes and shortages, perhaps with (more) resource wars thrown in. Do we want to just let the transition happen to us against our will, or do we want to manage it in a dignified way?

Dora thinks my reasoning here is deficient, though, and she's usually right. She says that (a) most people will think talk of peak oil is crying wolf, just like the Millennium Bug, the population bomb and nuclear war, and (b) most people's reaction to the impending disappearance of some perceived good thing is to get as much of it as they can, while they still can (I certainly experienced some of the latter tendency within myself when I tasted that Peak Brewery beer; the best stuff doesn't travel very well, so we can't get it here in Flatchester).

On the other hand, a series of increasingly severe shocks and shortages, demonstrably caused by our over-reliance on cheap fossil-fuel energy, may be just the thing required to bring us all to our senses without (immediately) actually killing too many of us. We live in interesting times.

The Pagan Christ: an opportunity missed?

2009-10-10T16:26:00.003+01:00

I have been reading "The Pagan Christ" by Tom Harpur, a Canadian journalist, Rhodes Scholar and former Anglican priest and professor of Greek and New Testament at the University of Toronto.

I first came across Harpur when he made a guest apperance on the endlessly fascinating Jesus Mysteries discussion list, a forum which manages to achieve consistently high standards of both scholarship and respectful debate. He was treated with something approaching reverence by some participants there, so I had high hopes of the book, especially as Harpur is, like myself, a member of that very rare breed, a Christian who doesn't believe in a historical Jesus.

Harpur's argument, based on those of the earlier scholars Alvin Boyd Kuhn and Gerald Massey, is that the gospels essentially consist of Egyptian myths associated with Horus and Osiris, transplanted to a fictional figure in first-century Palestine. They were never intended by their authors to be taken literally, and it is a major tragedy that by doing so, the church lost sight of the inner truth that they contain.

So far, I'm with him, at least regarding the tragedy part. I don't know nearly enough about Egyptian religion to assess the connections, but I regard his thesis as at least a priori plausible.

Sadly, though, he hasn't impressed me so far with his style of argument. Here's an example, from page 52:

"The earliest Church Fathers themselves admit that they took the high, symbolic, esoteric (or secret) wisdom that the Christian movement had inherited from Paganism -- from Platonic philosophy and the Mystery Religions -- and explained it, or rather downgraded it, by means of vulgar fables for the illiterate mob."

How is anyone supposed to evaluate such a claim? Which church fathers? And what did they actually say? Surely not a straight "we admit it, we have gone and downgraded Pagan esoteric wisdom to hoodwink all you illiterates"! Harpur must be putting his own spin on some original source or sources, but he doesn't tell us which ones, so we have no way of knowing whether his paraphrase is fair or not.

And then on page 93 we read, "Jesus, all four gospels declare, was baptized in the river Jordan by his cousin John". I don't think so. Only Luke states that the two were even related (the Greek word is less specific than "cousin"). And more seriously, while three of the gospels indeed do say that John baptized Jesus, John's account (1:29-34) carefully avoids saying so, despite having the two meet while John is baptizing; John the gospel writer's christology is simply too high to allow Jesus to be baptized like any other sinner. This howler is all the more embarrassing given Harpur's statement a few pages later (p101) that he has "studied John's Gospel for years and taught it to seminary students."

Both of these examples display, I think, a journalistic rather than a scholarly attitude to the original texts which makes me hesitate to trust Harpur's claims about the connections of the Jesus story with Egyptian traditions, about which I know very little. This is such a shame, as I suspect that in spite of all the above, Harpur (and Kuhn and Massey) could well be right in their main thesis, which is a fascinating and inspiring one. I will continue to read, and will at least credit Harpur with making me want to remedy my current ignorance of the Egyptian dimension.

How to kill vampires

2009-10-10T15:50:00.008+01:00

For some light relief from all this end-of-civilisation stuff, I have just spent a couple of happy half hours killing vampires, or at least identifying them for liquidation. I thought I would share the details with you, as not only has it been a lot of fun, it also promises to save our household significant amounts of money and reduce our carbon footprint into the bargain. Your pockets could probably benefit in the same way, as could your planet, which I believe we share.

The vampires in question are not the traditional kind with the long side teeth, but the kind that live in your house, sucking electricity out of your sockets when you think there's nothing going on. I have the chapter on gadgets in David MacKay's wonderful book on sustainable energy to thank for pointing out the full extent of their activities, and a group whose "carbon conversations" course I am attending for lending me an energy meter (a Wetekom PM-30-UK, for the record), which I think costs about £10 to buy.

So here is what the devices in our house suck out of our pockets when they're doing absolutely nothing of any use. To be clear, I'm talking about what has been the usual situation in our house until now: the devices themselves are switched off, but are left plugged in, with the wall switch on.

We pay about 14.1 pence per kilowatt hour, so if a vampire is running all the time, it costs us £1.24 per year for every watt it consumes. For shock value, I will express everything in pounds per year rather than actual power consumptions. American readers should add about half as much again to each figure to get the equivalent number of dollars, and Europeans add about 5% to get Euros.

Starting with audio: our much-listened to digital radio (a Pure Evoke 2) costs us £27 per year. Or to be specific, the radio itself only seems to cost us £4 per year; the real culprit is the transformer, which sucks away £23 per year even when the radio's not plugged into it. And we have another one down in Dora's studio, so that's £54 in total. Our CD player/radio in the next room is positively abstemious by comparison, sucking out a mere £9 per year, while the phone base and handset cost £12. So, £75 per year is wasted on not listening to radio or music or talking to our friends. We don't have a TV, in case you're wondering.

Dora's hair styler sucks £27 per year even when switched off. Or at least, it would if she didn't make sure it's always switched off at the wall socket when not in use, for the sake of The Bean's fingers when he accidentally turns it on (he calls this device "Ow! Very Hot"). Meanwhile, the bread machine costs us £21 per year even before it makes us any bread.

Then we push open the creaking door of my study and encounter, among the dark and cobwebs, the nest of computer equipment. Here is where the real horror starts. (Dora can feel very virtuous at this point: her wonderful 6-year-old Dell Inspiron laptop consumes no measurable power at all in standby mode).

The computer itself (6 year old Dell Latitude desktop) costs £15 per year when turned off, and the monitor £9 a year on standby (nothing when actually switched off). Not too bad, you might think. But wait, what are those little gizmos in the corner of the room? Well, there's the laser printer: £21 per year on standby (nothing when switched off); the colour deskjet (£19 per year); the cable modem (£17); the wireless router (£27, nearly all of which is consumed by the transformer); and the speakers (£19); totalling a whopping £108 per year, not counting the colour printer, which we normally do leave off.

I make that a total of £204 (about $322 or 218 Euros) per year, just for the stuff which we usually leave switched on. Using MacKay's figure (page 335) of 580 grams CO2 per kWH of UK electricity, we are therefore paying £204 to pump 0.84 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, completely against our wishes. That's even more than the £180 (0.74 tons) per year I estimate we saved by changing nine of our light bulbs a few months ago.

I once knew an old woman who believed you should always turn off electric sockets at the wall otherwise the electricity would leak into the air. I used to laugh at her, but now I can see she was more than half right.

Joining the fragments

2009-10-01T21:01:00.007+01:00

Some fragments on this "future" thing, following on from my last post.

Two conversations last weekend at a reunion with people from student days, both fuelled by the large amounts of excellent wine brought up from the college cellar.

The first: with the chief economist of a government department. He is more sanguine than me that the world will somehow find a way through its current problems. He somewhat discounts talk of future resource wars as originating largely from those in or linked to the military establishment keen to shore up funding for their services. He believes the world's major powers would much rather trade than fight when things get tough. Millions may starve, but the system will not collapse.

I respect his views. He is a committed lifelong socialist and works in a senior position that ought to mean he knows what he's talking about. But then, he is an economist, which if Mr Greer is right, gives him a very particular pair of spectacles to wear.

Another conversation, the same evening, with a UK hospital consultant in infectious diseases. He listens to my talk of climate change and how to deal with it. We have quite an interesting discussion. Then there is a pause. He looks down, and quietly says, "But it's probably really too late now, isn't it."

And a third, earlier in the week, with a Sri Lankan friend, also a respected specialist in his particular field. "All this stuff about saving energy -- it's just First World guilt. It falls so far short of what's really needed it's laughable."

It dawns on me that a lot of people have quite a good idea of what's likely to happen. It's not that they're wilfully ignorant, or that they've repressed this bleak vision of the future and lost all awareness of it. As Ralph Metzner argues in his chapter of "Ecopsychology" (ed. Roszak, Gomes and Kanner, 1995), it's more that they dissociate: yes, they know it's all going to happen, but they think and act as if it's going to happen to someone else, or in another future, or in another world that somehow won't involve them or the people they love. Not a comfortable place to be in, but less painful than bringing the dissociated parts together. I do this too, a lot of the time, because properly joined-up thinking is just too exhausting. To the extent that I do practice it, I walk around feeling as if I've just witnessed a traffic accident.

If dissociation rather than denial or ignorance is the norm, then what is needed is not so much to persuade as to help people (starting with ourselves) find ways to face what they are already persuaded of. A much gentler, more co-operative process.

On a purely human level, healing the split is probably impossible, given how bad things have got. But there are other levels open to us. At least, that is what I am in search of.

The future

2009-10-01T20:23:00.008+01:00

Prompted largely by the arrival of my son in my life two years ago, I have been trying to understand as best I can how the rest of this century is likely to pan out. In other words, the world in which my son is going to live his life.

It seems to me that whatever happens, we are going to see very major changes. The big question is whether we are going to deal effectively with climate change. If we don't, we are headed for catastrophe. But even if we do, we are headed for very, very difficult times. The Leonard Cohen song with the same title as this post talks about how "things are going to slide in all directions ... the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overcome the order of the soul." I think he's right, and I think the "soul" in question is primarily at the collective level.

Recent work by Jim Hansen of NASA suggests that we must get the CO2 concentration in atmosphere back below 350 parts per million as soon as we possibly can. We are currently at about 386, rising at 2 ppm per year, and the longer we stay above 350, the more chance that trends like the melting of polar ice and the release of methane from bogs in Siberia will accelerate and turn into unstoppable positive feedbacks. I've heard the following metaphor for the way we're messing with the climate: we're driving a fast car in thick fog near the edge of the cliff; we don't know quite where the edge is, so we'd better stop before we drive over it. But if Hansen's right, that's inadequate. We're already so near the edge we can hear the cliff crumbling away beneath us, so that just stopping isn't enough: we need to reverse away from the edge as quickly as we possibly can, knowing all the while that at any moment, even after we've finally come to our senses and begun to act accordingly, the whole thing could give way and plunge us into the sea.

Meanwhile James Lovelock of Gaia hypothesis fame has been writing about his new model, which takes account of feedback between living organisms and non-life processes, in a way that mainstream models (on which the IPCC projections are based) do not. Lovelock's model predicts that at some point, if we keep raising CO2 levels or fail to reduce them, the climate will suddenly flip into a state 6 degrees centigrade warmer than the present. We can't at the moment tell when that will be or at what concentration, but the danger is ever-present. And if such a big rise happens, we're done for, certainly as a civilisation and perhaps even as a species -- mass extinctions will then certainly take place, and in any such event, it tends to be the large creatures at the top of the food chain that are most vulnerable.

I don't think any of this is unduly alarmist. Events especially in the polar regions since 2007 have been right at the upper end of previous predictions. Scientists from Britain's Meteorological Office presented a keynote talk this week at an international conference called "four degrees and beyond". It all suddenly looks much, much more serious and urgent than it did before (and it was pretty urgent even a while ago, in my opinion). So the UN Copenhagen conference in December is crucial. We simply must have a deal, to reduce emissions and get concentrations down, and fast. And we need to let our politicians know we absolutely require them to safeguard humanity's future.

If we do manage to do that (and I have to say I'm not optimistic), and if the climate responds favourably, then we are likely before too long to face another kind of challenge: that envisaged by the "peak oil" theorists like Kunstler and Greer. The oil "peak" will actually be of our own making -- we cannot use all the oil in the ground, even the easily-available stuff, without pumping far too much CO2 into the air. But when fossil fuel use starts to decline, for whatever reason, it's going to affect everything. We will have to decide collectively how to apportion energy sources between growing food, keeping warm (or cool), building/making stuff and travelling around. If we simply let the market decide there will be mass famine and chaos on a scale far beyond anything the world has ever seen. Unlike the climate switch which could happen suddenly (a decade or so) at any time, the kind of civilisational decline envisaged by the peak-oilers is likely to be gradual -- maybe a couple of centuries -- but enormous nevertheless. Modern technology will cease to be widespread. No mass travel, no mass media, no internet, no mass publishing, no reliable electricity or gas. It is likely to look much more like the middle ages or even the dark ages than the modern era.

It seems to me there are therefore three sorts of things worth putting one's energy into.

The first is to make as much noise as possible to persuade the powers that be to limit climate change as far as possible. This autumn is the key time for that, if it is not already too late.

The second is to plan for a future in which this effort is successful. What do we really think is worth preserving from our culture, and how are we going to do it? What skills should we be passing on to our children? What spiritual traditions, and how? Practically, how are we going to preserve what's best about the world's learning? Computer discs and CDs will be unreadable. Paper rots after a century or two. Can we distill what's really valuable to a level that people will be willing to copy by hand?

And the third (perhaps also needed for the second) is to plan for the climate-mitigation effort being unsuccessful. Then we face mass death and possibly extinction. What meaning does it then have that each of us is on this earth at such a time? Is it possible to speak of a purpose to life in such circumstances? Perhaps not, if you have a purely this-worldly perspective. But if you believe in some form of survival, the picture changes, or so it seems to me. In any event, "being with" our culture then shifts into a mode analogous to a vigil for the dying. Quite a challenge, to put it mildly, and one I am only starting to try to get my head around.

The big picture

2009-09-06T16:11:00.007+01:00

This is my version of the world myth. I don't think I believe it's literally true, but that may only be because I doubt that the real truth of these matters (whatever it is) is at all the kind of thing that can be perceived by the human mind in literal terms. Nevertheless, I try to live my life in accordance with it.

Long ago, there was a superior intelligence who was also an inferior god, but only knew the first of those two things about himself. Let's call him Yaldabaoth.

Yaldabaoth set a Grand Experiment in motion. The experiment was called Earth, and it was essentially a run of a great genetic algorithm. Life arose, and explored many different forms, advancing, withdrawing, retracing its path, serpent-like. He wanted to see what would happen: which forms would be successful, would be fittest, would survive, would outcompete the others through their cleverness, adaptability and brutality.

The complexity and mathematical beauty of this process was dazzling. In fact, it dazzled Yaldabaoth so thoroughly that he could see nothing else except the Experiment and his own reflected cleverness. In particular, he failed to see another agency at work in the interstices of his creation, poking here, adjusting there, injecting beauty, majesty, love, selflessness, the reflection of a glory from beyond. This agency was, in fact, his own mother. Let's call her Sophia.

Eventually, after billions of years, a creature arose which was a strange hybrid of the selfish instincts finely tuned by the forces of Yaldabaoth's Experiment, and the qualities that Sophia had introduced to the mix. When Yaldabaoth noticed these latter, he was furious. He couldn't understand how they had got there (at least, he chose not to), but he was very, very cross, nevertheless.

And he shouted into the darkness beyond his dazzlement to whichever power was ultimately responsible for contaminating his project. He vowed that, whatever this contamination was, it would not prevail against the sheer instinctual inertia that was his own proudest achievement. "Give these creatures enough power", he yelled, "and they will destroy themselves and their entire world. These things you call 'grace', 'altruism' and 'love' shall prove inadequate to save them."

The darkness answered only with silence, but Yaldabaoth sensed his challenge had been heard.

Then, when the time had fully come, a Presence appeared before Yaldabaoth and his cohorts, right in the control room of their Experiment. This Presence looked to them like a blinding light, painful to their eyes, far outshining their bedazzlement at their own cleverness. Yet it was yielding and vulnerable at the same time. It even had hands, which it held out to them.

"Come home", it said. "I love you".

Yaldabaoth panicked. If this uninvited influence were to spread into his Experiment, the whole thing would be ruined. He instructed his cohorts to deal with it in any way they could.

Which they did, without any difficulty. They were strong, and the Presence was weak, or at least so it appeared to them. They strung it up, and the light died.

But shortly afterwards, it reappeared, even brighter, even more blinding. And this time, they were unable to prevent the light being noticed, often repeatedly and consistently, by some of the creatures in the Experiment. Those creatures made their own myths, about dying and rising Saviour Gods, about light overcoming darkness, about love casting out fear. Try as he might (and he really did), Yaldabaoth could not stamp this influence out.

But Yaldabaoth still remembered his original challenge. He gave the creatures power, or nudged them into finding it for themselves: to increase in numbers, in prosperity, in the burden they placed on the Earth. He gave them the power to destroy themselves, each other and their world. At the same time, he did his best to hide from them the truth about who they were, and to befuddle and distract them with false satisfactions: power, money, sex, success, television, drugs, travel, all driven by an exquisitely-evolved engine of fear and greed. He stopped the light breaking through whenever he could; and when it did shine out despite his best efforts, he did his best to make sure they were so fascinated by the games he had given them that they did not notice (or were able to pretend they did not). Or, failing all else, when they did notice, he persuaded them that it was nothing to do with them, or not really a problem, or just to frightening to think about. Anything to avert a steady gaze.

Eventually, the time came when there were so many of these creatures, living in such a distracted, chaotic and heavy-handed way, that the Earth teetered on the brink of collapse: of mass extinctions, of desertification, of diebacks, of a sudden switch of the planetary climate into a state unlivable for most species including their own. They could see this was the case; that they needed to change, for their own survival.

"There", screamed Yaldabaoth into the darkness. "Despite your meddling, despite sending your Blinding Terrorist into my experiment, despite all you have done, they will still destroy themselves. They know what they are doing, but their instincts are too strong for them to stop themselves. I have won! My experiment has worked! Your idiotic, uninvited Love and Self-Giving have not been enough!".

Down on the surface of the planet, the creatures were dimly aware of these goings on. But by and large, they chose not to notice. They were just too busy, making too much noise: having fun, or living a nightmare, or both at the same time.

And the Universe held its breath, waiting to see what would happen.

Facing unfairness

2009-09-06T09:26:00.008+01:00

What will be achieved at the climate negotiations at Copenhagen in December?

I put this question to a climate-change economist I met yesterday, and his answer was pessimistic: not enough. Despite Obama's good intentions, the American offer on emissions reductions will have been severely watered down by US senators in the pay of industry. And now today comes this piece of cheerful news from the BBC: the Indian government has released a report promising (threatening?) that that country's greenhouse gas emissions will more than triple over the next two decades:

"According to the report, India's greenhouse gas emissions will rise from about 1.2bn tonnes at present to between 4bn and 7bn by 2030.

Releasing the document, India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh said it demonstrated his country's seriousness towards climate change.

At the same time he argued that the world should not worry about the threat posed by India's carbon emissions, since its per-capita emissions would never exceed that of developed countries."

I suspect this is just spin, intended to make sure developed countries come up with some really serious proposals; in which case, Ramesh is perhaps to be congratulated. But if he really does mean it, he is demonstrating an astonishing degree of either ignorance or stupidity. The scientific consensus is that CO2 emissions need to drop to only about 10-20% of their current 35bn tonnes per year by 2050 -- that is, to 7bn tonnes at most -- if we are to have a reasonable chance of averting disaster. That's the same as the upper end of the forecast for India -- but it's for the whole world. In other words, even if all the rest of the world drops its emissions to zero, India on its own is promising to make sure we edge right up to the brink of the precipice.

Let's be very clear. It's not fair. Yes, the developed countries have caused nearly all the problem so far. Yes, they did it by exploiting the rest of the world, who have been kept in poverty as a result. Yes, they should take the lead in reducing emissions and be generous in sharing resources and technology to allow poorer countries to follow.

All true. But the earth's climate system has no notion of "fair". It just reacts to the sum total of emissions, regardless of which countries produce them.

We have a choice. Either we put fairness first, and accept that developing countries have a right to follow the same disastrous course that developed ones already have. And then we all suffer the consequences of climate catastrophe together. That's fair -- though actually, not quite, because countries with hotter climates and more low-lying areas will reap the whirlwind even before the rest of us do.

Or we focus on doing what needs to be done, and while doing our very best to be fair too, we make sure we never regard justice as an excuse for ignoring what the scientific evidence is telling us must happen.

The rediscovery of beauty

2009-08-16T11:22:00.007+01:00

I spent last weekend at the Flatchester Rock Festival with my 13-year-old nephew, who like every other private person in this blog had better receive a pseudonym. As he's Morph's son, let's call him Morpheus (short for Morphou Huios -- if my Greek can be stretched that far without breaking). The whole thing was quite an event for him: not only was this his first festival, it was the first time he'd even heard a live rock band. By the end of the weekend he must have heard about fifty, though a few only for as much time as it took for us to walk into a tent, grimace at each other and then walk out again.

The festival was quite an event for me too. Specifically, on the scale of sheer enjoyment it was one of the best weekends I've ever had. Only a few of the bands playing were famous, even in rock circles, and we missed most of those because they tended to play last (and delayed) on each day, and The Bean wakes up expecting to be entertained (by me) at a time in the morning that most rock heroes don't even know exists. So the high points for both Morpheus and me were lesser-known bands, many of them playing on a small alternative stage with only a hundred or so people in the tent. A week later, the overriding impression it left me with is one I would never have expected from a muddy, rough-round-the-edges and often very loud event: a memory and ongoing feeling of almost indescribable beauty. This was enabled and enhanced by the atmosphere created by the hard-working organizers: it was a festival created by and for music lovers, and as such it was "amateur" in the very best sense, with friendly faces everywhere. So it was possible to really relax and soak up what was on offer. (I would like to put it on record that the other magnificent effort that enabled us to have such a good time was Dora's, who did much more of her fair share of Bean care over the three and a half days of the festival).

Here's what happened, in diary form. You can find nearly all the bands on MySpace...

Thursday. 7 pm. Off on our bikes for the four-mile ride to the festival, half on roads, half on progressively narrowing paths. It's raining a bit. Musical highlights: two fine tribute bands. First up, the Pure Floyd show, who after all these years kindle in me a glimmer of understanding of why some people like Pink Floyd so very much (and also of why such people tend to be somewhat depressed). Then the tempo speeds up with Who's Next?, who have a singer and guitarist who look impressively like Daltrey and Townsend, a drummer who plays in mad Keith Moon fashion, and a bass player who looks like...well, Uncle Ernie. They perform most of Tommy. A thoroughly good time is had by all. Meanwhile, the rain sets in, then intensifies into a downpour, which continues long into the night. The alternative stage closes down early as the electrics are about to be flooded. The main stage manages to carry on, but we head off at about eleven. The first half mile is through a semi-flooded field. We are soaked, and I can hardly see anything. Halfway to the road, Morpheus comments "It might sound funny, but I'm really enjoying this".

Friday. Off on the bikes again; but halfway there, Morpheus has a puncture. I head for home to collect the repair kit, but on the way, decide I'd rather get the car instead, lest it happens again on the way home in the dark and the wet. We drive up and down the motorway without meaning to, but eventually figure out where the vehicle entrance to the festival actually is.

Highlight one: Dead Like Harry on main stage. Tuneful, soulful music, and an eye-catching lead singer. To me they seem uncannily similar to the (now sadly defunct) Coastal Dune, who I heard twice at Greenbelt a few years ago: great songs, great atmosphere, but too much in the middle of the frequency range, with keyboards, two guitars and a female voice. It sounds a bit of a muddy mess, like the grass underfoot. But then halfway through the set, one of the guitarists flicks a switch on his instrument and starts playing lead. The mix clears like the sun coming out, the music steps up several levels, and all is wonderful. If the guitarist keeps his switch flicked over that way then I predict a great future for them.

Highlight two: Mostly Autumn. Absolutely breathtaking, and the overall highlight of the weekend for me. Their music is of such dazzling beauty that it overshadows even that of the three female members of this eight-piece band. I cannot remember ever being so moved by a live performance. How did they create this stuff? I kept thinking: ten years ago, there was no such band, no such music, and then this comes into being. Then it was not, now it is. Ex nihilo, or so it seems. Truth, beauty and goodness, all rolled into one package. Plato would have loved it.

We went home after they finished; it was time to go anyway, but I was glad to leave, as I wanted to stay as long as possible on the emotional plane that Mostly Autumn had lifted me to.

Saturday. Ran round the house like crazy in the morning, catching up with all the weekend tasks and fixing the puncture. After lunch, we headed to the festival again, this time with The Bean (ticket price for under tens: one pound). Weather good now, but still muddy underfoot. The Bean found the festival "interesting"; he is not very tolerant of loud music. I had hoped he would enjoy the Sonic Manipulator, a rap artist busking in a full space suit and making all sorts of weird electronic noises; but The Bean immediately designated him a Scary Man, and wanted to be anywhere but near him ("Walk!"). An ice cream provided the perfect antidote.

Dora came and fetched The Bean in the car, somewhat to his disappointment, and Morpheus and I made our way to the alternative stage, to discover a programme organised by the Classic Rock society. The last four bands were very different, but all superb: Tinyfish, Dee Expus, Manning and Solstice. I bought Dee Expus's CD and have been listening to it all week. I think it is one I will be returning to year after year, as I will to the music of the other bands when I get hold of it. Certainly it was the only time in my life I have listened to four bands in a row over a period of five or six hours and wanted all of them to play longer.

Sunday. The last day. Some tedious patches, but with three real highlights. The first was a young band called Morph (their real name; nothing to do with the pseudonymous Morph and Morpheus characters in this blog). Four teenagers, two of them brothers, the lead guitarist with his torso on view and the word "SEX" tattooed in large letters between his navel and his waistband (I am certain that having anything tattooed just there would be enough to put me off that particular activity for a prolonged period of time, but it's different when you're nineteen, I suppose). From that thumbnail sketch, one might have imagined the music would be loud, aggressive and boring, but it was only the first of those. The Deep Purple influence was obvious, especially from the singer, who has a really exceptional voice. Afterwards I wandered over to buy a CD from their stall, which was staffed by three very pleased-looking forty-something-ish women who I can only imagine must have been their mothers. (I'm sure Deep Purple never went on tour with their mothers, though I think Frank Zappa and his band did, unless I misunderstood something).

Highlight two was Simon McBride, a wonderfully talented blues guitarist who was due to play on main stage but who, owing to delays there even longer than the previous day, was relegated to the blues tent. His loss, but very much our gain, as we were able to sit a few feet away and watch an outstanding display of lightning-speed virtuosity.

After Simon was banished from the stage after a mere two encores, we went to listen to Focus on main stage. I remember their hits from my teenage years, as did many of the audience. But they were late on stage (despite Simon McBride being moved and another band cancelling), and when they did appear, were, well, boring, in my very subjective opinion. I remember thinking, this is the kind of music that punk was reacting against back in 1976.

We wandered back to the alternative tent and were immediately captivated by something totally different: Sons of Albion. Snarling, spare, guitar-and-voice music, played by an invisible band in clouds of smoke illuminated from behind by glaring red lights. I had never heard anything like it before, and was quite blown away. To our huge frustration, it turned out we had walked in only fifteen minutes from the end of their set. Next time, I will not wait around for any more overblown seventies rock giants, but will head straight for the people I've never heard of before, on the reasonable assumption that they were invited because they are very, very good indeed.

Bring on the snack hamsters

2009-07-27T20:21:00.006+01:00

You might think the British government would be a little embarrassed. Sir Jonathon Porritt, their official advisor on sustainable development for the last nine years, has left his post and blasted his former employers with choice phrases like these: "...dogmatically following an outdated Thatcherite model of economic growth regardless of the social and environmental consequence...massive failure of political leadership...deep hypocrisy...the UK [is] a world leader in green rhetoric...on key issues...Labour ministers should feel an abiding shame".

The government of course put out a statement about its "leadership on climate change" being "rooted in a strong record at home", which the figures hardly support. But they needn't have bothered responding, because the electorate just don't care. I would have expected this story to be treated as major news, but I'd be wrong. It didn't even make the top ten. Here is the list of stories in the BBC news web site's "most read" column as it appeared beside the Porritt story when I first found it:

* Playful dolphin strands NZ woman
* Natasha Richardson dies aged 45
* Top Gear star to build Lego house
* Spotify sets its sights on iPhone
* Snake 'befriends' snack hamster
* Iced coffees 'a meal in a drink'
* Price cuts to trim Ryanair profit
* Store stops father buying alcohol
* Blackmail goalkeeper at new club
* Police apologise for death error

Half of these stories are prime silly season stuff, another one is four months old, and the rest, important though they doubtless are for the individuals directly concerned, are hardly going to affect the rest of us in any noticeable way. I have a strong sense of the entire nation putting their hands over their eyes, sticking their tongues out and going "Blah, blah, blah" as loud as they can to drown out the disturbing voices of people like Porritt.

But maybe I'm wrong, and fate will finally catch up with us not in the form of runaway warming, famine or massive sea-level rises, but with us all being stranded by dolphins miles from our lego houses, longing for an iced coffee while wondering nervously if we too can befriend those hamster-loving snakes slithering threateningly towards us.

I was comforted a little by another recent BBC headline, though: "Flu risk 'still low' after death." Presumably that means the virus isn't easily transmitted by ectoplasmic contact.

Mysticism for Protestants

2009-07-25T14:59:00.002+01:00

I have just finished book two of Watchman Nee's trilogy, "The Spiritual Man". It is certainly the most exciting, inspiring, challenging, thought-provoking and sometimes downright terrifying writing I have come across since I was introduced to "Meditations on the Tarot" nearly fifteen years ago.

Nee's milieu was the evangelical Protestantism that Western missionaries planted in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He stresses the absolutely necessity of conversion, of regeneration, of believing in the saving death and resurrection of Christ, in a way that I think any conventional evangelical believer today would completely agree with. But he then builds on those basics in a way that is (from what I've seen) not often expressed, but is absolutely true and authentic. And after I'd been reading for a while, much of it also seemed strangely familiar.

It seems to me that what Nee is doing, at least in the first two books, is to map out the Christian's journey in a very similar way to St John of the Cross (and, for those who know "Meditations on the Tarot", letter Twelve of that book, on the Hanged Man). More specifically, he is writing about exactly the same journey and mapping the same territory, but in very different language: twentieth century rather than medieval, and Protestant rather than Catholic. As a result, I find the whole thing far more alive, immediate and stimulating than reading St John, wonderful though he is, and much more immediately applicable than much of "Meditations". As a result, I can see myself enthusiastic recommending the book to many people who would be suspicious of any representative of the Counter Reformation and downright hostile to any book with the word "Tarot" in the title.

I said Nee's writing is sometimes terrifying, and here's why. Like the other two authors, a central theme is this: we need to give away self if we are to make any significant spiritual process. That's scary, whether we think of it in terms of "taking up our cross" (Nee, and the gospels of course), or the nights of sense and spirit (St John), or disidentifying with ego (Buddhism) or living upside down in the grip of celestial gravity (the Hanged Man). None of these metaphors refer to any kind of self-improvement or moral advance. They are much more radical than that. They are talking about a total trust, a self-giving love and a disregard for one's personal happiness and even survival that are hardly ever encountered and that I for one can barely envisage myself (if that is the right pronoun) ever attaining.

The mirror of slavery

2009-07-25T14:20:00.007+01:00

I have been listening to Dan Carlin's wonderful "Hardcore History" podcasts. Dan specialises in trying to help his listeners grasp what it must have been like to be a participant in some of the dramatic times of history: the Punic Wars, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and so on. He really succeeds in creating mental images that I for one will not forget in a hurry. I recommend the podcasts to anyone who can handle that kind of imagery.

One of his recent podcasts was about slavery. What was it like to be a slave, and in particular, what was it like to be a slave owner? Dan pointed out that slaves are the most amazing labour-saving devices: they do all the hard, time-consuming work that you would otherwise have to do yourself. As a result, the people at the top of the hierarchy in slave-owning societies (i.e. most societies since civilisation began) had in some ways an easier life than most of us today in the developed world. He made an analogy between slaves and cars. Paying someone to work for you by the hour or day is like taking a taxi: no initial investment, but quite a high cost per mile. Whereas owning a slave is like owning a car: a significant initial cost, but then (relative to taxis or paid servants) cheap to run.

Dan also read out some of the things people in slave-owning societies wrote in an attempt to justify the practice. They created the myth of the "happy slave", and tried to argue that black slaves in the US were much better off than their ancestors in Africa had been. Such arguments seem (and are) idiotic today, but they're interesting in that they show evidence of people whose consciences clearly were bothering them, but who were loath to oppose slavery because of the work it saved them. And lest the rest of us feel too smug, he also pointed out that slavery tended to occur in places and times where there was a supply of available slaves and where there would otherwise have been a shortage of labour for menial tasks. The inference is: most societies that haven't enslaved others, have mainly done so not because of any moral superiority but either because they couldn't (no available weaker nations) or because they didn't have much need to.

The slave-car analogy set me thinking. Modern democracies don't have slavery -- at least not direct, on-the-premises, "chattel slavery" like that of a couple of centuries ago. But maybe that's not so much, or not only, because of the awakened consciences of campaigners like William Wilberforce. Maybe it's mostly because at the time of Wilberforce's campaign, and a little later, of the American Civil War, the industrial revolution was kicking in enough to provide an alternative supply of labour-saving devices. So the owners could free their slaves and not be plunged into poverty as a result, thus combining relief to the conscience (and freedom from the fear of a slave revolt) with continued comfort. A real win-win.

I would be the last to argue that such a transition was on balance not a good thing. But it has left us with other problems. Most of our present-day labour savings result from using fossil fuels: to ferry us around, to grow cheap food, to make all our stuff. And now peak oil and climate change are starting to bite. So we need to stop, just as our ancestors needed to abolish slavery.

The cost of slavery was paid in an obvious and immediate way by the slaves themselves, and the owners tried to justify it by distancing themselves from their slaves, seeing them as essentially different from themselves because of their race; or by pretending that enslaving them had somehow done them a favour; or by the familiar refrain "what can I do?". Or, I'm sure, just by ignoring the issue as best they could.

The cost of our fossil-fuel dependence is mostly not paid in the present (though the Ogoni people in Nigeria, for example, might have some views on that generalisation). But it will be paid by our children and grandchildren. Their suffering may be just as intense, but we are distant from it because it's mostly not happening yet, and many of the people it will happen to aren't even born yet. Thus we employ very similar psychological defences. We discount our descendants' suffering because they are remote from us in time. Some of us (though fewer these days, as the evidence mounts) deny climate change is real or will do any harm. We expect governments or technology to deal with the problem for us ("what can I do?"). And we carry on driving our cars, flying away for our cheap holidays and running our patio heaters while trying to avoid thinking about the whole thing as much as possible.

I believe our descendants, if we have any, will, as the film title has it, indeed look back on our age as "The Age of Stupid", and find our rationalizations as laughable and contemptible as we rightly find those of people at the top of the pile in the age(s) of slavery.

Maybe nuclear fusion will come to the rescue and provide us with carbon-free cheap energy in time, or maybe we will have to do what no group of humans has ever done in large numbers up to this time: voluntarily sacrifice a significant degree of comfort for the sake of others.

In the mean time, next time you're out travelling by any means other than your own muscle power or power from the wind turbine or solar panel on your roof, you might like to imagine your car is being pulled by a gang of slaves, or that your plane is a galley being rowed by a couple of hundred of them.

And that those slaves look a little like you, because they are your grandchildren.

Actually, I suspect you probably won't like to imagine that -- and indeed, even Dora thinks my suggesting it is well over the top. But I hope the image stays with you anyway, just as some of Dan Carlin's graphic descriptions have stayed with me. It's not comfortable or pleasant, but if it reflects reality, I make no apology for it.

One small step for mankind

2009-07-09T21:16:00.007+01:00

So the G8 nations are proposing an 80% cut in their CO2 emissions by 2050.

When I heard the news, I felt a weight I had been carrying for years lift partially, just for a moment. Perhaps our species will survive. Maybe even our civilisation will survive. The odds for both have just got a bit better. We have been driving the car towards the edge of the cliff, and have at last agreed to turn the wheel a bit.

But it's not enough. Here's why.

The idea is to avoid a rise of more than 2 degrees centigrade in average world temperatures compared to 1900 levels. That is reckoned to be the level above which there is serious risk of a tipping point being reached: of something catastrophic and irreversible, a positive feedback mechanism that sets off runaway warming.

Problem 1: even 2 degrees may well be unsafe. Specifically, the Greenland ice sheet will probably melt if temperatures in Greenland rise by more than 2.7 degrees. That would certainly qualify as a tipping point. And sadly, indications so far are that the temperature rises in polar regions are going to be more than the global average. So 2 degrees worldwide will probably mean 3 degrees in Greenland. Too much.

Problem 2: a cut of 80% by industrial countries would not anywhere near be matched by the rest of the world (they have just rejected a 50% target as I write). And recent research (figure 1.8 here) suggests that even a 70% cut overall would still leave us with a 16 to 43% chance of exceeding 2 degrees. Russian roulette with several chambers loaded.

Problem 3: talk is cheap, especially when it comes to making a promise your descendants will have to keep. Nobody seems to want to agree to any binding targets any time soonish, like 2020. The UK government is among those blowing the loudest about the need to do something, yet their record is a combination of pathetic (minimal funding for renewable energy, few incentives for people to get out of their cars) and downright counterproductive (major expansions to two of London's three airports). The result has been a minuscule reduction in the country's CO2 emissions. They try to make it look good by talking about "net" reductions, but it turns out that "net" means after discounting emissions they've traded away at a price that they and the rest of the EU set at a laughably low level by issuing too many permits. The planet's atmosphere really isn't interested in creative accounting.

But on the plus side, the current proposals are a whole lot better than what was agreed at Kyoto and then torpedoed by the US and Australia. Both those countries now have much more sensible leaders. And as more research is done and more of the present-day effects of climate change begin to bite, minds can only be concentrated further. We can hope for agreements in the future that really do reflect what the scientists tell us is needed.

There's a long way to go, but it's odd to feel the human species might have a future after all. Not a bad way to celebrate what Blogspot tells me is my hundredth post here.

Why should I care?

2009-07-05T19:43:00.013+01:00

I've just finished reading a really excellent and thoroughly enjoyable (often laugh-out-loud) book called "Sustainable energy without the hot air", by David MacKay. Like many of the best books these days, it's available free to download in full, yet people are still buying it in large numbers, if the big display shelf where I found my copy, right in the front entrance of Flatchester's biggest bookshop, is anything to go by.

MacKay is (among many, other, things) a fine mathematician, and his book is in essence a plea for us to observe the laws of arithmetic when it comes to planning how to meet our future energy requirements. Think we should break our fossil fuel habit? MacKay agrees, but says we should be clear about how we're then going to arrange to produce as much energy as we consume. What combinations of better homebuilding and insulation, changes in travel habits, building facilities for wind and solar power, and so on, will actually add up? And what about nuclear? It looks as though very few organizations -- not only political parties, but environmental campaigning groups too -- have really done their sums; or if they have, they're a bit reticent about it. And MacKay has thoughtfully structured his material so that all the maths beyond GCSE level (taken by age 16 or so, for those outside the UK) is shoved into the second half of the book, so even our dear members of Parliament should be able to understand what he's getting at by reading the first half. In fact, given the importance of the issue and the clarity and good sense of the book, it seems to me there's no excuse for any of them not to do so. If they're not comfortable with GCSE-level maths, I don't want them representing me in the first place.

There's plenty there for the individual, too, to help us see how to lower our own carbon footprint. I've often allowed myself to be sabotaged before making changes by not knowing how important one potential action is compared to another. How many fewer miles would I need to drive in a year to save the same amount of fossil fuel energy as I would by turning down the house's central heating thermostat by one degree? And how does that compare to the energy saved (in feeding nitrogen-fertilised grain to livestock) by eating a vegan diet? What's the best way for me to rationalize the "stuff" in my life as it travels through the stages of the product life cycle as MacKay names them: from "goods" in the shop, to "clutter" in my house, to "rubbish" down at the tip?

I discovered answers to all those questions. The book is explicitly not about economics, just technical feasibility, but I also worked out that investing £180 pounds in nine light bulbs (not cheap, I know, but they are supposed to last many years) should save £75 per year on our household bills; where else can you get a return on investment of over 40%? And that even the more expensive things like solar panels, external wall insulation and (if you don't have a gas supply) air-source heat pumps could at least deliver the same kind of returns as you can get these days by putting money the bank.

Maybe the cleverest thing about this book, though, is that it's not mainly about climate change. MacKay makes the point that there are actually three compelling reasons for us to switch away from fossil fuels. Climate change is certainly one, but there's also energy security (do we want to be always getting our essential supplies from unstable or potentially hostile parts of the world?) and "peak oil": the fact that fossil fuels (in liquid form, anyway) are going to run out before too long, and increase hugely in price long before they do that.

I wonder, in fact, if environmental campaigners should adopt MacKay's broader emphasis more generally. Of course, climate change is the really big issue; of the three, only it has the potential to topple our civilisation and even wipe out our species altogether. But precisely because of that, many people are too frightened to pay it proper attention, and erect well-worn psychological defences: ignoring it, joking about it, or pretending it's still "just a theory". There's also the undeniable fact that whatever I do -- and even, whatever my country, acting alone, does -- it probably won't make a lot of difference. And anyway, the really catastrophic consequences will probably be suffered by our grandchildren, not by us. Because of all this, the whole issue tends to be surrounded by what Douglas Adams called an SEP field. SEP stands for "Somebody Else's Problem", and the field in question renders things invisible when they're too scary or too far outside our everyday experience for us to make sense of.

But your country or mine can do something to safeguard its own energy security in the face of political disruption and peak oil; and we have to, or we will experience the consequences not in two generations time but in the next few years. If I live in some kind of democracy, maybe I can even influence that a little bit. And unlike the prospect of severe climate disruption, I can quite easily imagine (especially if I lived in Britain in the 1970s, or eastern Europe much more recently) what regular power cuts would be like. Disruptive, unpleasant, well worth avoiding, but mostly not catastrophic. The kind of threat we can get our heads around and act to avoid.

I think a switch of emphasis like this is a much better way to deal with people's terror and feelings of powerlessness than the sugar coating and manipulativeness typified by the futerra approach in the UK which I wrote about a few months ago. If you don't want to think about climate change, OK, but you should still care about sustainable energy for other reasons, and there are things you can do, and things you can pressure your elected representatives to do, that will help to solve the energy problem, and by a happy coincidence, be just what the climate needs too.

Next step: can someone write a book on environmental economics that deals with the money side of things as well as MacKay has dealt with the technical aspects?

Why did you come here?

2009-06-26T07:01:00.010+01:00

News of the sudden death of Michael Jackson prompted a train of thoughts and memories about music, talent, life and its purpose.

I was born in the same year as Michael Jackson. I was a few days old when the Munich plane crash wiped out most of what must have been the most promising club team English football had ever produced up to that point, and a year old when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died in another crash in Iowa. Both disasters killed hugely talented young men in their twenties or even teens, with so much to offer the world. It must have been the last thing any of them were expecting.

I admit that both of these faraway events rather passed me by at the time, but I do remember the Jackson Five appearing on the scene in the late sixties and early seventies. Songs like "I want you back" and "The love you say" brought me out in goose bumps even then, and I still think they're among the best pop ever produced. But Michael Jackson peaked early, in my view. Not long afterwards, he brought out what I think was his first solo single, a syrupy song called "Ben" about his pet rat, and I stopped listening to him. By the time the rest of the world got so excited about "Thriller", I had long since switched off, and have never been able to perceive his "later" (post-1972) music as anything other than superficial.

But of course I was aware of his fame, his wealth and the strange stories that always seemed to surround him. I have no clear idea which if any of the rumours might have been true, but he always seemed to me like someone who spent his life searching: for love, for the childhood he was never allowed to have, for real, deep satisfaction; ultimately, the hunger for a knowledge of God which underlies all our yearnings.

And now, suddenly, he's gone.

Despite all Jackson's success, it doesn't look to me as if he ever found what he was searching for. He seemed a larger than life illustration of the saying, "What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?" Hearing of his death is making me evaluate my own life and priorities. I believe we all, in a sense, chose to come here, chose to be incarnated into this life, this time, this place, and there is a purpose in doing so that we need to discover.

Other musicians seem to have found theirs. Sometimes it means the end of their musical careers, sometimes not. Bono has committed to spend the rest of his life working to end poverty. Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil left the band (who decided to wind up as a result) to go into the Australian Parliament as Environment Minister in Kevin Rudd's administration. Even less famously, I recently learned that Lee Parvis of the Oysterband has hung up his drumsticks to concentrate on his work as a prison psychotherapist; I had seen the Oysters many times in concert and on the basis of Lee's appearance, was not surprised to learn of his prison connections, but the psychotherapist bit was news to me.

And in each of those cases, the last, or most recent, albums those people released was, in my view, of lasting value. U2's "No line on the horizon" has not been off my MP3 player since it got onto it; "Magnificent" is one of the best songs of worship I've ever heard. Midnight Oil's "Capricornia" seemed to sum up all that was best about the peak of their career, the sublime albums "Diesel and Dust", "Blue Sky Mining" and "Earth and Sun and Moon". And the Oysterband's "Meet you there", the last one Lee played on, is nearly as good as their two earlier albums that form part of the soundtrack of my life, "Deserters" and "Holy Bandits".

All of these musicians seem, from what little I know about them, to have found their path in life; and a side effect has been a deepening and renewing of their music at a relatively advanced age. I could mention others: Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Cockburn, Yusuf Islam. Yet that kind of true maturity and (I imagine) true satisfaction seems to have eluded Michael Jackson right up to his sudden end.

We never know when it's coming, or whether it will be sudden or gradual. Now is the time to intuit or discover our life purpose if we don't already know it, and to live it out as best we can, whether it's a deepening of our current path or a courageous leap onto a completely new one.

----------------

Update, three days later: I find it sad and ironic that at least part of what led to Michael Jackson's death was apparently the stress of preparing for a long string of concerts he had agreed to give in order to try and earn his way out of debt. And now his records are selling better than they have for years, presumably leading to lots of money accruing to his estate that, had it arrived in time, might have saved him from working himself to death.

I think it's always better to express appreciation for people while they're still alive. Feel free to leave yours here. As far as I'm aware, there's no particular hurry in my case, but you never know, I suppose.

Eternal life is the spirit

2009-06-25T07:13:00.000+01:00

In Book Two of "The Spiritual Man", Watchman Nee deals with the three main functions of the spirit: intuition, communion with God, and conscience. As already discussed, the spirit is quite separate from the soul, whose faculties are reason, emotion and will, and which is identified with the mind or brain.

I have just finished the chapter on intuition, and light bulbs are going on all over the place. Here is part of what he says (page 83 in the 1968 CFP edition):

The new life which invades us at regeneration brings with it many inherent abilities, not the least of which is the intuitive power of knowing God.

Does it hence mean that man's mind or brain is totally useless? Of course not. It obviously has its part to play. But we need to remember that intellect is of secondary, not of primary, importance. We do not sense God and the realities of God by our intellect; else eternal life would be meaningless. This eternal life or new life is the spirit mentioned in John 3. We apprehend God through this newly obtained eternal life or spirit. The mind's role is to explain to our outward man what we know in our spirit and additionally to form it into words for others to understand. ... Although a believing man may have the best of minds, his teaching is nevertheless not to be derived from his thinking ... His mind merely cooperates with his spirit in communicating to others the revelation his intuition has received. The brain is but the transmitting, not the receiving, mechanism of spiritual knowledge.

God communes with us entirely in the spirit. Save by its intuition there is no way of knowing God. In his spirit man soars into the eternal unseen realm of God. Intuition may be characterized as the brain of the inner sanctuary.

So...eternal life is the spirit; the spirit is the eternal part of us. This is a message that can be discerned in many spiritual traditions. The part of us that survives death is not any part that we conventionally regard as "us": the body or the mind. Which means that if our spirits are dead or we have no awareness of this innermost component of ourselves, eternal life is effectively meaningless. In Nee's framework this all becomes almost obvious: the soul results from the breathing of spirit into the body (Gen 2:6) and as such is inescapably bound to the body. Which implies that when the body dies, and the brain dies with it, the soul dies too. And what is left is the eternal part, the spirit, which is the only part of us that can commune with God. So that eternal life is communion with God, and it therefore happens now as well as into eternity.

And so it is our task to identify with the spirit, not with the mind or soul. This shift in the centre of consciousness is again stressed in many traditions and is a lifetime's work. But it must have a definite starting point: we must be born again, because in our natural, fallen state, our spirits are dead, and none of these wonders can be realised. This is no mere moral transformation; it is a hidden miracle of resurrection that (eventually, if we let it) brings about a fundamental structural change. We are not who we once thought we were. Not at all.

Beyond the soul

2009-06-21T16:46:00.006+01:00

This is the first of what I hope will be a number of posts on the writings of Watchman Nee, particularly "The Spiritual Man" (henceforth TSM, to save me typing).

Of the many books published under Nee's name, this is the only one he actually sat down and wrote. The others are all collated from transcripts of talks he gave over the years. It is a fairly systematic treatment of the spiritual journey, based on Nee's reading of the Bible and particularly Paul.

And I am finding it the most important and most rewarding book I have read for years. Along with Meditations on the Tarot (MOTT, if we're doing acronyms), I think it is actually the most rewarding book I have ever read. Although there are vast differences between the two books, it seems to me their intentions are similar in important ways. Both aim to initiate the reader into encountering the living God, and steadily to deepen and strengthen that encounter into an abiding state and a reshaped personality. TSM is a superb exposition of Protestant spirituality, while MOTT does the same from a Hermetic Catholic standpoint.

Nee begins TSM by telling us that the usual view of human beings as consisting of body and soul is inaccurate. "The Word of God does not divide man into the two parts of soul and body. It treats man, rather, as tripartite -- spirit, soul and body." If this sounds like hair splitting, he goes on to say that distinguishing spirit from soul "is an issue of supreme importance for it affects tremendously the spiritual life of a believer."

In other words, if we don't understand this distinction, experience it, and act on it, we'll never get off first base. It was a very similar conviction that led me to call this blog "Trimorphic metanoia" (three-formed repentance) in the first place.

Nee quotes Genesis 2:7: "And God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." This breath is man's spirit; a created spirit, distinct from the uncreated Holy Spirit, but with affinity to it. And it is the mingling of spirit and body that produces soul.

The faculties of the soul are will, emotion and reason; it is very close to what we might more often today call the "mind", and it is the aspect of us with which most of us probably identify. The spirit is more mysterious. Its faculties are intuition, conscience and communion with God. God's original intention was for the spirit to be the directing part of the human person, responsive to God, with the soul following the promptings of the spirit and acting through the body. But what happened in the fall was that the soul took charge, expanded far beyond its intended limits, and stifled the spirit to death. This unfortunate and near-universal restructuring of the human person is what Paul refers to as "the flesh".

When someone comes to faith, not only is the spirit revived, reversing (at least potentially) the effect of the fall, but something much greater happens: the uncreated Spirit of God takes residence within our human spirits and brings us into relationship with God through Christ's sacrifice on the cross. And from that point on, it is a matter of making what is objectively true, or true within the spirit, also a matter of subjective and lived-out experience, as the spirit is strengthened and the soul and body are realigned to operate under the spirit's direction.

This is where our co-operation is required: not to effect the changes ourselves -- that is God's doing -- but to consent to the process by doing our best to let go of our selfishness and "take up our cross"; indeed, to recognize ourselves (our fallen selves) as already crucified with Christ.

There is of course far more that Nee has to say, and I encourage you to read the man himself. But for now, I want to look at a question that I imagine was not uppermost in anyone's mind in Shanghai in 1927-8 when Nee was writing, but is much more to the fore today.

And that is: if Nee is right, what is the role of psychotherapy? If we experience emotional pain, what should we be looking for: for our soul to be healed (that is, after all, the literal meaning of "psychotherapy"), or for our spirits to be made alive and our whole being to be restructured? Should we seek to save our life (soul; often the same word in the original) or lose it? For a long time I experienced a conflict here. Psychotherapy seemed very necessary to me as long as I was stuck with my pain, but from a certain point of view it seemed selfish and self-indulgent, and I always suspected that however much it "worked", it could never lead me into real happiness. Freud, after all, is on record as saying that the goal of psychoanalysis is to change neurotic misery into ordinary human unhappiness. An exchange worth making, certainly, but perhaps not the last word on anything.

I think it's helpful here to be clear on the distinction between the soul as an "organ" of the total person -- created by God, and just as much a part of His intentions as the body and the spirit -- and the fallen state in which the soul is calling the shots. Nee refers to these, respectively, as the "soulical" level of being (parallel to the physical and spiritual) and the "soulish" state (which needs to be restructured into true spirituality).

The very fact that he (or his translators from the Chinese) found it necessary to invent these two terms shows how foreign the distinction is to our usual way of thinking. But if we can grasp it, the answer becomes obvious. If your soul is hurting, you should have no more hesitation in getting treatment for it than you would if you experienced physical pain. But however much emotional (soulical) healing we undergo, we still need to consent to God's restructuring of our lives: the replacement of soulishness by spirituality, losing our lives (souls) in order to find them. The author Guy Claxton summed this up very nicely: "you can't give away a self that's hurting". Or in other words: seek your soul's healing, so that you can give it away.

And having grasped that, we may immediately be faced with a need for discernment: how much is my ongoing sense of dissatisfaction and incompleteness due to emotional wounding (or physical imbalance for that matter) and how much is it because I am being called to, but resisting, something that goes much deeper?

Perhaps we can only pray for God to shed his light on this. A good place to start might be a verse that Watchman Nee makes a lot of, Hebrews 4:12: "For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart".

It sounds very much like divine surgery, and it will not happen unless we sign the consent form.

An anonymous goodbye

2009-06-05T14:00:00.002+01:00

The following is a message I posted to an on-line community of people who used to be involved in a New Age centre here in Flatchester, now sadly defunct. It's a kind of obituary for someone who had a very major influence on the course of my life. I have changed his name and omitted a few other details to preserve the anonymity that characterises this blog. But I hope you will enjoy reading it anyway. Those who know who I mean will know who I mean, and those who don't, don't really need to. I believe the subject of my message would agree with that sentiment if he were still here to read it.

---------------

Hello everyone,

I know that I am not the only one on this list who benefited from sessions with the Jungian therapist John Smith. And I suspect there may be some of you who I don't know who also went to John, and that many of those who didn't will have heard him mentioned more than once.

I learned yesterday that John died a couple of months ago. The news only reached me through a bare mention of his name in the funeral listings in the magazine of our parish church. It was not unexpected -- he was old, and seemed quite physically frail even when I was in therapy with him in the mid-nineties -- but I still found it a bit of a shock. On the other hand it was somehow typical of his unassuming way of presenting himself that he should just appear in a list with several other people, without even the "Rev." before his name.

I had a look on the web for an obituary, and the only one I found was from a newspaper in the city where he was born. It gives details of his family and of the first part of his life. But in doing so, it misses out rather a lot, to say the least. John must have conducted several tens of thousands of therapy sessions over the years, and the extent and depth of his influence will probably never be fully appreciated. He used to say "Flatchester is the size of a teacup", and I think a large fraction of its tea leaves, at least those of a certain cast of mind, must have spent fruitful hours sitting in his (well-appointed) garden shed. I will just share a few memories which I hope will at least exemplify his influence in a fragmentary and highly incomplete way.

I had heard John speak at a couple of meetings before I became his client. The main image I remember from those talks is his "egg" diagram of the psyche, with squiggly lines to show the currents flowing in the unconscious, and a little bubble at the top to represent the conscious mind. He stated with some certainty that 97% of the psyche was unconscious. That figure in fact varied between 95% and 98% in different things he said to me over the years, but I'm sure he was more or less on target. I wish I had asked him how he was able to quantify it so exactly and why it went up and down slightly over time, but the occasion never quite seemed to be right.

At any rate, those talks impressed on me that here was a source of profound wisdom. When within a year of hearing him, my own 97% started to erupt through the other 3% in a way it had never done before, and a certain degree of chaos ensued, I knew who I had to call. I was aware that he saw a lot of people, and because I was worried he wouldn't have a space for me, I remember saying to him on the phone that I thought I would probably only need half a dozen sessions to sort myself out. It was typical of his measured approach that I didn't even hear him suppress a guffaw. He just said "Well, we'll see how we go". Four years later, I was still going to see him, which I'm sure didn't surprise him at all.

Ken Wilber defines psychotherapy as a process of "learning to tell the truth about our insides", and with hindsight I think a radical change of world view and self-view was the main thing I got from John. He really helped me to see and experience the fact that I lived out of two centres, not just one, and that there were multiple forces active within me. It took me a while to realise that whatever I came out with, he would gently try to bring the other side of it out to be looked at too. His favourite image was that of the "committee" around the table -- he must have asked me at least six times "did I mention this to you before?". The table had the ego at one end, various archetypal forces down both sides and the mysterious half-glimpsed figure of the Self at the far end. Making decisions should be a process of ensuring all voices are heard and really feel heard. And then eventually you just have to act. As someone who is a prime case of "I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure", that was a very helpful model as I changed just about everything in my own life at the time -- I still supported the same football team by the time I'd finished, but that was about it.

Another of John's refrains was that we are all "fallen, finite, fallible fucked-up sods", a phrase which I think you would probably have to hear in his soft-spoken mid-Atlantic accent to fully appreciate. That thoroughly Christian insight seemed to me to be the source of his humility. He certainly applied it to himself, and I think it was also at the root of the gentle and respectful way he treated his clients. He never played any of the power games that many therapists are trained to indulge in. It was always entirely up to me what we talked about, how long I continued in therapy and, within the constraints of his diary, how often and when I came to see him. He was even very relaxed about my indulging in other kinds of therapeutic work while I was in therapy with him, not imagining he could necessarily offer me everything I needed. The only time he ever got really cross with me was when I unthinkingly referred to something as "just a symbol". You should never use that phrase within earshot of a committed Jungian, and I don't think it's ever passed my lips in conversation since.

The money side of things was always handled very simply. He gave his clients a two-line bill every month, created using an ancient typewriter for years after everyone else had switched to word processors, and never seemed to worry if I forgot my cheque book several times in a row. The typewriter also creaked into action on one occasion when I asked him to write me a reference for a counselling course I was applying to, and he insisted not only on showing it to me before he sent it off but on my being happy with what it said.

There is more I could say, but I won't, either because it's too personal to me or because it would break someone else's confidentiality. Suffice it to say that John is my model for the last decades of the human lifespan. If I could live my life with anything like his depth and integrity and be used to help even a fraction of the number of people that he helped, I believe I would have fulfilled my calling.

Observing pain, again

2009-05-31T15:03:00.005+01:00

This post is an attempt at a response to my friend Roger Buck's two recent comments on a post I made a while ago, "Observing pain".

I suggested there that there there were two components to pain: a primary sensation, and a secondary emotional reaction to that sensation; and that I had begun to find a way to "step down" the overall intensity by merely "noticing" the former so as to reduce the latter. I ended by wondering whether there was a specifically Christian "take" on this topic, given that what I had been practising was really Eastern in origin.

Roger asked,

If you believed in a Christ carrying a cross do you think he would be trying to manage that pain? Reduce it down?

Roger's "if you believed..." is, I think, because he and I disagree on whether the gospel stories of Jesus are historically true. He believes they are; I don't. I take them as symbolically true, which as I tried to make clear here, doesn't lessen their power for me at all.

So Roger's question opened up a dimension I hadn't thought about. I realised no, I don't think Jesus would be trying to do that. In fact, Matthew 27:34 says that before he was crucified, he was offered wine to drink to reduce the pain, but refused it.

The extra dimension, of course, is that of whether and when suffering can have a redemptive quality. At one extreme, the suffering of Jesus clearly did. That is why he went to the cross. At the other, almost banale extreme, it didn't occur to me that the kind of pain I described in my post, of a broken collarbone and an injection, could help to redeem anything except possibly my own attitudes. But then Roger says, "some of my important experiences with pain have been when I have just let my heart go out to all those suffering in the world." Maybe if I had let my heart go out too, I would have experienced something different.

And then there is the strange verse from Colossians (1:24), where Paul (or whoever actually wrote it; opinions differ) says "I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church". This suggests that it is not only Jesus' sufferings that can be redemptive, but (if I read it right) that there was something missing in what he suffered. I don't know what to make of that, because it doesn't seem to be an idea that finds any resonance elsewhere in the Bible. But Sheila Cassidy, a doctor who was tortured in Pinochet's Chile, comments as follows on this verse at the end of her book "Sharing the darkness" (pp162-163):

Perhaps then we can see Christ's redemptive act as an ongoing drama in which we are all players. The question which I ask myself as I write this is: can we see all unmerited suffering as redemptive? Or is its redemptive power contingent on the sufferer's mental attitude? One thinks of examples of the heroic fortitude of people like Therese of Lisieux, offering her suffering from terminal tuberculosis to God. Much nearer home, I recall a young Catholic woman dying of cancer who asked me one day, 'How can I use my suffering for others?' It is hard to imagine that such an offering is rejected; the pain of these women must somehow be taken up like a holocaust and used we know not how.

I sense that, to put it mildly, I need to do a lot more work on all this. For now, let me extend and revise what I said before. Perhaps there are (potentially) three components to pain: the primary sensation, the secondary emotional reaction, and, for some at least, the redemptive component. The first will, perhaps, always be there. The second will or can reduce as we heal psychologically, grow spiritually, and, in Ken Wilber's words, "learn to tell the truth about our insides". But the gradual disidentification with purely selfish concerns which enables the secondary component to be reduced will also, if we let it, open us to the third, redemptive component. I say "if we let it" because Buddhism, as I understand it, at least in its original form, seems not to step into this territory; it promises liberation from suffering, so that the idea of redemptive suffering for others, if not entirely absent, is at least not a major feature. But the Christian path does invite us to "take up our cross" and move in this direction.

Perhaps this is one aspect of what the author of Meditations on the Tarot (letter six) says are two ways to transcend selfishness, or the basic heart attitude of "me real, you not real". One is the Eastern way: "me not real, you not real". The other is the Christian: "me real, you real". Maybe the secondary component of pain has at its root the attitude "Why is this happening to me, the only real being, the being at the centre of the universe? It's not fair!". Either method of transcending selfishness should be able to deal with that. But it would make sense for the redemptive aspect only to be present for those rare people (I believe they are sometimes called "saints") who genuinely do view others as "real".

Spring forward, fall back

2009-05-31T11:35:00.006+01:00

I read once that former US President Calvin Coolidge was a man of very few words, something that those close to him understandably found frustrating. Once he returned home from church and his wife tried to engage him in conversation. "What was the sermon about, dear?". "Sin", replied Coolidge. "And what did the preacher say about it?". "He was agin it".

I'm inclined to think this story must be apocryphal; surely anyone who hated talking that much would never have persuaded the nation to vote for him in the first place. But it does provide me with a jumping-off point for this post. What if, instead of "Sin", Coolidge had said "Evolution"? Would the preacher have been "agin" that too?

I'm not talking here about whether evolution is a fact or not, because the evidence for it is absolutely overwhelming. Rather, I'm asking: given that all of life in fact did develop in this way, should we regard that as a (partial) fulfilment of God's plan?

Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution, would I'm sure give an enthusiastic "yes" to that question, as would the "Einstein of consciousness" Ken Wilber, whose many books present an inspiring vision of the long journey from biological life to self-awareness to ego and beyond to transpersonal realms that most of us have only ever glimpsed. Wilber's catch phrase for the developmental process is "transcend and include": at each stage of development, whether personal or corporate, we need to transcend our current stage, which is almost bound to involve temporarily rejecting some of its perspectives; but then we need to include those perspectives in the new, wider level of consciousness we have reached. As a child grows to adulthood, he or she passes through adolescence, and it is normal and healthy to reject at least some parental values quite decisively in the process. But as adults, we all need to come to a mature evaluation of our parents, appreciate their struggles and limitations, and include in our own lives the really valuable things they were able to offer us.

But Dowd's and Wilber's perspective is not the mainstream Christian view, as I understand it. The early chapters of Genesis talk of the Fall of humanity. Eve and then Adam chose to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, an act of disobedience that resulted in their relationship to God being broken or, to put it another way, their spirits dying. Traditionally, this has been viewed as an unmitigated disaster, from which the only recovery was by means of sin being forgiven through Christ's death on the cross. Watchman Nee, in The Normal Christian Life and The Spiritual Man, is very clear that the Fall was not what God had intended, but a departure from that intention. The anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot argues in the same way. And anyone who believes humankind evolved from other forms of life must I think, if they give any credit at all to the story of the Fall, regard it as a metaphor for some important step in consciousness taken by our remote ancestors. Long ago we had no "knowledge of good and evil"; then, somehow, we did; and in important respects at least, that was seen as a Big Problem.

And this poses a major dilemma for me, because I have the greatest respect for Dowd, Wilber, Nee and the author of Meditations, all of whose books I have found inspiring, thought-provoking, and a significant help along my spiritual path. I would love to get all four of them in the same room to discuss the matter, but unfortunately, only the first two are still with us, and all four of them are probably busy doing other things. So I will try to address the question in future posts. Now would be a great time for you to leap in with a comment if you are so minded.

Unfolding as it should?

2009-05-31T10:58:00.005+01:00

An extremely worrying number: 389.47.

This is the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, in parts per million (ppm), reported by Mauna Loa Observatory in April. It is 2.31 ppm bigger than the measurement from a year before. Not only is the concentration going up, but the rate at which it is doing so is also going up. It is an accelerating process, because more CO2 means forests die, soils dry out, more CO2 still is released as a result, and round and round it goes.

The excellent booklet "A Green New Deal", which sets out the most sensible response I have so far seen proposed to the environmental and credit crunches we are experiencing, contains this sobering paragraph (p16):

"In April 2008 NASA's top climatologist, Jim Hansen, said feedbacks [such as the above] mean the sensitivity of the climate to the heat-trapping abilities of greenhouse gases is twice the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] estimate. He called for a global effort to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 ppm -- well below current levels. This would entail huge and rapid reductions in emissions and some physical removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, too."

In other words, if Hansen is right -- and he's probably the world's highest-profile climatologist -- then it's no longer a matter of trying to switch as soon as we can to a low-carbon economy to avoid concentrations rising to disastrous levels. We may well have already passed that point, and we now need not only to switch right away from fossil fuels but to undo past damage with geoengineering techniques. If we don't, we face indefinitely accelerating warming that will melt the icecaps, dry out the rain forests, make much of the planet uninhabitable and most of the rest of it no use for growing food. This will almost certainly mean the wholesale collapse of civilization and quite possibly the extinction of the human race altogether. If that seems like an extreme statement, remember that large-scale changes in climate, like those at the ends of the Permian and Cretaceous ages, invariably do appear to wipe out most large species on earth at the time.

And I have to say that I don't think our changes of avoiding this look very good. The Chinese are still building several coal-fired power stations a week. Barack Obama's attempts to move the US in the right direction are being watered down by senators funded by the oil industry. The British government is hell-bent on expanding the country's airports. And at the individual level, very few people seem at all concerned to reduce their own carbon footprint. It's all too far in the future, too far away, and they don't want to have to think about it. Individuals and industry say government should act, but governments (at least democratically elected ones) won't do anything significant for fear of upsetting their electorates. Perhaps we are just not the kind of species that can cope with a situation like the one we face.

A while ago, I wondered whether there is any kind of spirituality that makes sense in the face of what may well be to come. Can we come up with any perspective that still allows us to say, as the old poem has it, "no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should"?

I can only imagine two. One is the other-worldly one, in which some members of the human race (usually those who believe the tenets of a specific religion or sect) are promised eternal life well away from this troubled world, which is therefore not a primary concern. The last time I heard a church sermon, some weeks ago now, the preacher was arguing from 1 Peter that this world is only a temporary residence in which we are "aliens and strangers". He likened it to taking a walk in the park as opposed to being in our own home: it's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. He didn't mention what seemed obvious to me, that you are much less likely to bother to clear up the rubbish you see in the park than what lands on the floor in your own kitchen. Whatever the truth of the immortality or otherwise of the human spirit, I don't think such a world view has any moral integrity whatsoever today.

An alternative is presented by Michael Dowd in "Thank God for Evolution", which you can download for free. Dowd points out the good news of evolution in "deep time". Although extinctions do happen, the universe never seems to "forget" any genuine innovations. The disappearance of the dinosaurs opened the way for many mammalian species to evolve, including eventually ourselves. In human history, the Black Death of the fourteenth century eventually led to many of the shackles of the medieval world view being thrown off. He says (p56), on the basis of much more evidence than I can include here,

...the Universe seems resolutely determined to take bad news and turn it into new creativity. That is, on the other side of Good Friday is Easter Sunday. And so the first insight, the first affirmation of faith and confidence in the gospel of evolution, is that the Universe can be trusted. Specifically, it can be trusted to move in the direction of greater diversity, complexity, awareness, intimacy and speed of change. It can be trusted to preserve its breakthroughs. And it can be trusted to provide a wealth of problems and breakdowns that fuel the creative process.

I'm still only part way through Dowd's book, so I don't want to say anything more definite about it just yet. But he certainly is offering a message of integrity and hope that welcomes the truth, however difficult it is. And one thing I am sure of is that effective action to safeguard our planet is much more likely to arise from a place of hope than one of despair.

No trouble with Normal

2009-05-31T08:18:00.006+01:00

As one of the great Bruce Cockburn's louder songs has it,

Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage
Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage
Suddenly it's repression, moratorium on rights
What did they think the politics of panic would invite?
Person in the street shrugs -- "Security comes first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse
The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

This Thursday is the twentieth anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre, when the forces of the Chinese government gunned down hundreds, possibly thousands of pro-democracy activists in Beijing. It is an event I shall never forget; a pivotal moment when a certain kind of hope died. Like many other people I wrote a furious letter to the Chinese embassy straight afterwards; a pathetic and futile gesture, no doubt, but perhaps slightly better than no gesture at all.

Since then, I have deliberately never visited the country (maybe they wouldn't let me in anyway, after that letter), and once turned down an informal offer of a job that would have required me to do so. In the two decades since the massacre, the Chinese economy has grown enormously and begun to wreak environmental havoc even more effectively than other countries that have doing so much longer; and everyone seems to behave as if things are "normal" most of the time, despite occasional publicity about Tibet. There was talk after the massacre about the "mandate of Heaven" which Chinese rulers are traditionally supposed to possess; a mandate that Heaven can withdraw if the rulers exceed certain limits of despotism. If so, Heaven seems to be taking its time.

Another, related anniversary passed yesterday: that of the death in 1972 of Watchman Nee, after twenty years imprisonment for his faith by the same Chinese state apparatus who later sent the tanks into Tienanmen Square. Nee was a Christian writer and church leader whose legacy is a series of quite wonderful books. His best-known is "The Normal Christian Life": a life that "normal" not in the sense of what is "usual" among Christians, but of what is "normative", and actually rather rare. It is nothing less than the life of Christ himself expressed in the life of the individual believer. Nee's message: God has done it all through the death and resurrection of Christ, and our job is not to try to live a good life by our own efforts but to step aside and let him live his life through us. We are in Christ, and Christ is in us.

Unlike the kind of "normal" that, as Cockburn observes, only gets worse, Nee's "Normal", like the life it describes, only gets better. I first read the book thirty years ago and it made a huge impression on me then, though I don't think I really "got it" even so. Recently I reacquired a copy and found to my amazement that I'd only ever read, or at least only remembered, the first half. The second half goes still deeper. I've just started another, less well-known book of his, "The Spiritual Man", which is even better; a treasure beyond price, and all the more amazing for the fact that he was still in his twenties when he wrote it (in 1928, so he can perhaps be forgiven for the not very inclusive title).

I haven't really tried to express here what Nee actually says. That task is well beyond me, but fortunately I don't have to attempt it, because both books are available free on line; just click the links above. When you've read them, you might want to check in back here, as I expect to be blogging about Nee's writings more in the future.

Never mind the symbolics?

2009-05-23T20:37:00.005+01:00

Symbolism, rather like faith, gets a bit of a rough ride in Western culture. The phrase "just a symbol" is in widespread use (608,000 Google hits when I checked), suggesting a lot of us believe that any symbol is distinctly second-rate, and that it would be far better to get hold of the literal thing that it symbolises. And when I hear someone speak of something being "symbolically true", I sometimes wonder if what they're really saying is "I don't think this really is true, but it makes me feel good, so I don't want to let go of it".

By symbols, I mean those mysterious, allusive, numinous, paradoxical and apparently nonsensical metaphors, images and impressions that continually surface in our individual and collective dreams, prayers and imaginations, and that we can never exhaust or pin down. For me, they are what makes life worth living, and I think it is high time we reinstated them as first-class citizens. Here are my hard-nosed, rational reasons for that claim.

Our brains have been shaped by millions of years of evolution to one "purpose" only: to help us survive and pass our genes on to the next generation. As a result, your brain and mine -- or, if you prefer, your ego and mine -- are exquisitely tuned to the tasks of surviving and prospering in the world. We have good reason to expect that faced with any problem out there in the physical world, we should at least be able to make a good stab at solving it. An essential part of that problem-solving process is to understand how things are: to grasp the (literal) truth about them.

But there has been a near-universal consensus among human cultures -- with our own standing out as the only partial exception -- that there is more to reality than the everyday, mundane, outer world. There is what one might call a "spiritual dimension". But that dimension does not exert selectional pressures on our brains; or at least, not nearly to the same degree as physical realities do. And therefore we should not be surprised if our brains, or our egos, are not particularly good at comprehending the spiritual.

An analogy may be helpful here. Our eyes have limits, just as our brains do. Optical microscopes allow us to see small objects "as they really are" -- i.e. roughly as they would look to us if they were many times bigger. We can see how they literally look, as it were. But that only works for objects larger than the wavelength of visible light. For smaller things, we have to use radiation with smaller wavelengths which we can't directly see. To figure out the structures of crystals, for example, the preferred technique is X-ray crystallography. It gives us diffraction patterns, images that we can see -- but those images are not pictures of the crystal structure. Rather, they are data from which the structure can (sometimes) be inferred indirectly after a lot of head scratching and computer work. One could say that the diffraction images symbolise the true structure.

In other words, if we want to engage with things beyond mundane reality, we should expect those things to impress themselves upon us symbolically, not literally. Our brains have just not evolved to be able to grasp the literal truth about such things. And it's not that the symbols are some kind of code which, if only we could break it, would enable us to grasp that elusive literal reality; that's where the X-ray analogy breaks down. In the case of things that transcend the limits of the brain, rather than just those of the eye, the symbols are themselves the best understanding we're ever going to get, at least in this life.

In fact, it's not just that we shouldn't be surprised when the spiritual comes to us in symbols. We should actually be very suspicious of any claim that it ever comes to us literally. Having it arrive precisely on the "wavelength" to which evolution has tuned our brains would be a coincidence so amazing as to be thoroughly suspect.

So we're left with two possibilities. One is that symbolic truth is absolutely genuine and supremely valuable, because it's the best and the only kind of truth available to us about the most important things in life. And the other is that there is no role for symbolic truth, or only an inferior role, because there is nothing of any consequence beyond mundane reality; and then we are living in what Ken Wilber calls "Flatland", where the dimension of depth or spirit is collapsed out of existence.

Therefore, an encounter with the divine in the realm of symbols is the ideal; a life limited by a rationalistic world view to literal perceptions of the mundane is tragically constrained, but at least logically consistent; but fundamentalism of any kind -- any claim to a literal understanding of the spiritual -- is out, for good evolutionary reasons. Though I expect any fundamentalists who've read right down to here would take that as just one more reason not to believe in evolution.

A serious pile-up

2009-05-21T21:12:00.007+01:00

Dora often laughs at me for always reading several books at once rather than finishing one and only then going on to the next. The situation is extreme at the moment: I am in the middle of fourteen books simultaneously, in the sense that I have started to read them, found them worthwhile, and intend to continue when I can. So to try and find a way through the quagmire I am going to list all my current part-finished reads to see if there is any kind of pattern to be found. Maybe you can see one where I can't. Maybe you can tell me there's one I simply must finish, or another I shouldn't bother with.

In approximate order of how near I've got to finishing them...

"The Shack", by Wm Paul Young. Seems to be many people's favourite read in Christian fiction this year. I sped along through the more novelistic part at the beginning, then slowed markedly when the hero arrived at the Shack, very strange things started to happen, and the book took a markedly more theological turn.

"The Normal Christian Life", by Watchman Nee. Having first discovered this thirty years ago and found it formative reading, I recently re-acquired it and realised, to my amazement, that I only ever read the first half back then. It is Spirit-inspired, mind-blowing writing, and I intend to write about it properly here soon.

"Quicksilver", by Neal Stephenson. Science, adventure and plague in seventeenth-century England, featuring everyone you've ever heard of from that period. It's over nine hundred pages, and that's just the first volume. How did he ever find time to write it? Doesn't he have a proper job?

"The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead", by Stephan Hoeller. Dense stuff. Spirit-expanding stuff. I was enjoying it, but now I can't find it.

"The elements of New Testament Greek", by Jeremy Duff. A book I would like to have got to the end of and really digested. I bought it when I realised how English translations of the New Testament are so often mistranslations caused by the historical-Jesus assumption.

"Real World Haskell", by O'Sullivan, Goerzen and Stewart. I would like to be fluent in Haskell even more than I would like to be fluent in Greek; and at the moment, it seems slightly more likely to happen.

"Global Warning: the last chance for change", by Paul Brown, the Guardian's environment editor. Another big book, about a big topic, but a very accessible one. Can we still come through climate change in one piece? The author thinks so.

"Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning", by Chris Bishop; "Bayesian Data Analyis", by Gelman et al; "Highly Structured Stochastic Systems", by Green et al. If I could get this stuff nailed down I really would be able to see the wood for the trees.

"Thank God for Evolution", by Michael Dowd. Dowd is a recovering fundamentalist who has been bitten by the "great story" of evolution -- so much so that he and his wife gave up their home and have spent the last seven years travelling around America in a van to spread the word. This is possibly the most enthusiastically-written book I've ever come across. I sense that he and I are wrestling with some of the same pairs of opposites. I also notice that he has written a fast-selling book endorsed by five recent Nobel Laureates, whereas I'm still struggling to get above three hits a day on this blog.

"The Essence of the Gnostics", by Bernard Simon. A chance find the other day. Full of sweeping assertions unaccompanied by any supporting references to original source material, which is a shame, because some of the assertions are quite enlightening.

"Jesus and the Eyewitnesses", by Richard Bauckham. I really tried hard to read this, and still feel I ought to, but the author lives on such a different planet from me that I find it extremely difficult to do so; he fails even to mention (I think; there's no index) counter-evidence that seems compelling to me. The book doesn't belong to me and I ought to give it back.

"Meditations on the Tarot", by Anonymous. I actually have finished this several times, and am part way through it again. I expect I always will be. The alternative would be not to read it any more, which I cannot imagine ever happening.

And those are just the books I've got started on; there are as many again waiting for me to make any headway with them at all.

At least this explains why I seem to have very little time to watch television, which must be good for my brain, even if the books aren't.

---

Update, May 23rd: Two steps forward, one step back. I have found my copy of "The Gnostic Jung". I have finished "The Normal Christian Life" (but then encountered another little book stitched into the back of it). And I have remembered another book I'm in the middle of: Joanna Macy's "World as lover, world as self", which I am more likely to get on with finishing now, having seen "The Age of Stupid" yesterday evening. If you haven't been to see it yet, rush out (by bike or on foot) and do so immediately. Then rush straight to your country's seat of government, grab your representative by the collar, and yell "Do something! Our children's lives are more important than your damned career!". Then put your representative down, and stand over him/her until you have verified your instructions have been carried out in full.

Sixteen more hours of fatherhood

2009-05-16T20:52:00.009+01:00

Just over a year ago, Dora went to a wedding on the far side of the country, leaving me to look after The Bean (then one and a bit, now two and a bit) all day for the first time. I wrote an hour-by-hour account of that experience here. Re-reading it brings back to me the mixture of pride, looming chaos, emotional intensity and increasing exhaustion that I felt that day. My post ended, "After waking once in a panic, The Bean sleeps peacefully, still clutching his bottle. When Dora returns, she will probably find me doing exactly the same."

Today, Dora has gone off to another wedding, leaving me in charge again. What a difference a year makes. The chaos and exhaustion have definitely lessened, though the other stuff is still there.

Hour one. I wake up first, and creep quietly out of the bedroom. I am moving at the speed of smell: very slowly, to avoid waking The Bean, and I won't be having a shower (too loud) until later. The Bean wakes up anyway, but groans quietly to himself long enough for me to meditate.

Hour two. I fetch him from his cot. "Down", he says, meaning "pick me up". We wash and dress with much less fuss than usual, and head for breakfast. "Shreddies". "More shreddies". "More shreddies". He is eating well today.

Hour three. We drive Dora to the station and watch her go through the ticket barrier. "Mummy gone. Train. Track". The chance to inspect the latter two seems to be ample compensation for the former.

Hour four. Visit to book sale at large warehouse near the station, where we meet Gabriel, Gabrielle and Gabble. Each of us three adults agree to look after both children for five minutes while the other two browse for books. Despite her advanced stage of pregnancy, Gabrielle keeps them enthralled with an enthusiastic display of gymnastics and amateur dramatics. Gabriel manages to get them both sitting quietly on the floor looking at books. When it's my turn, they fight each other trying to press the buttons on the same book at the same time, then run off in opposite directions. Fortunately there is only one exit from the place and I have a developed positional sense after watching so much football, but even so, after one stint on duty, I decide we will go home. I buy several books for The Bean, but find nothing that appeals to me personally among the piles of trashy novels, non-initial parts of interesting-looking fantasy series, and compendia of sporting and political facts. However, Gabrielle has somehow managed to locate a copy of "The Essence of the Gnostics" by Bernard Simon for me, which I figure has to be worth the outlay of a pound.

Hours five and six. A quick turnaround at home, and we are off to a local Baptist church which is holding a craft morning for children, presumably in order to evangelise the locals, though it's very low-key. We arrive with an Indian friend and her equally Indian son, who is the same age as The Bean. When we sign in, she and I are asked if we're married to each other. I feel vaguely flattered by this question given the more than twenty-year age gap between us, but The Bean has very definite blue eyes and blond hair, and I wonder what freak of genetics the questioner imagines could have produced twins of such striking non-identicalness.

We spend a contented hour gluing coloured sand onto paper and making snakes out of clay. I wonder why my friend's snake is so lifelike, with impressively alert eyes and a realistic forked tongue, while mine looks like a blind, tongueless worm with a cigarette up each nostril. I console myself with the thought that at least I can draw a back view of an elephant, then discover that realising it in clay is much harder.

The Bean finds several things to interest him on the stage. One is a drum kit, which by a superhuman exercise of will he manages to keep his hands off. The second is a large cross, decorated with fragments of pottery bearing people's names, and realistic-looking red stains running down it. "Oh, dear," says The Bean. The third is a boy wearing a tiger mask; although this boy is behaving in an entirely un-tigerish manner, The Bean is unable to distinguish symbolism from literal reality and is very perturbed. Judging by the profusion of texts from the Gospel of Matthew around the walls, he is not the only one on the premises who is challenged in this way. We return home for lunch.

Hour seven. Yummy food, thoughtfully cooked by Dora during the week. We listen to the News Quiz on the radio. Then I turn it off, thinking I should really pay more attention to The Bean. "Off", he says immediately, meaning "turn it back on".

Hours eight, nine and most of ten. The Bean sleeps. I wash up, book a ticket for the local rock festival, answer e-mails, and read a large chunk of "The Normal Christian Life", a fabulous exposition by Watchman Nee, based on Romans 5 to 8, of what is really supposed to be normative in Christian experience. It is arguably also a better exposition of the essence of Gnosticism than Simon's book, if the first chapter of the latter is anything to go by, though I don't suppose either of them would thank me for saying so.

Eventually The Bean wakes. "Boy. Tiger. Mummy. Train," he says, as soon as I go in to fetch him. I reassure him that it was indeed only a boy, not a tiger, and he's not here now anyway, while Mummy will soon be on the train again to come home. He is further reassured by some singing. He is fascinated by watches, and his favourite song at the moment is "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", because he thinks it's about a watch. (How so? "How I wonder watch you are", of course).

Hour eleven. Football in the garden. It's a full-sized ball, and he really knows how to kick it. We then spend half an hour climbing onto a bench and jumping off together. It was my idea initially, but every time I try to stop, I am recalled with "More. Daddy". Eventually I lie down on the grass exhausted, and for what seems like an hour but is probably only two minutes, he sits astride my stomach, bouncing up and down delightedly. Then we play with a very small plastic ball, and he reaches a developmental milestone: he is able to catch it! At least, he manages to do so when he adopts the pose of a worshipper about to receive the communion bread, and I throw the ball from short range precisely into his cupped palms.

Hour twelve. Out down the road on his trike (or rather, he is on it, while I push). We discover a digger on the far side of a fence, and I lift him up to see. Then we sit beside the main road, watching the vehicles pass. "Bus. Man (van). Red car. Lorry?". But there are no lorries, because it's Saturday. We go back past the fence. "Digger". At home, we watch a short video of a man who has conceived and executed an impressive and moving dance routine in which his partner is a large New Holland digger, to the accompaniment of an operatic aria. Because almost the whole thing is dubbed into Lithuanian, I am unable to determine how seriously he takes himself, but I recommend it to anyone with a taste for the surreal and/or a small child. I was reminded of the story of the woman who claimed to be married to the Berlin Wall.

Hour thirteen. Tea. Much to my and (later) his mother's amazement, The Bean has decided he likes strong cheddar, although not as much as he likes grapes, yoghurt, shreddies or diggers. Then bath time, whose highlights for The Bean are (a) the chance to exit the bath by leaping soaking wet off the edge into my lap, and (b) a short story about a small digger who after various trials and tribulations eventually finds a satisfying role in life planting flowers. I put him in his cot, settle him down, and leave the room. "Bye bye", he says, and blows me several kisses.

Hours fourteen to sixteen. The Bean sleeps. I am pleasantly tired, and feel no need (yet) to resort to the bottle.

The number of the fish

2009-05-09T20:25:00.019+01:00

Today seems to be a day for playing with numbers.

Several months ago, I described a memorable occasion when The Bean was looking at a picture of his uncle, and solemnly pronounced "Shish" (fish). This verdict was repeated often enough over the ensuing weeks that I was sure he really meant something by it; but what he meant, I had no idea. I really didn't think his uncle looked any more like a fish than most men do in their wedding photos.

This week, it all became clear. The pronouncement was a prophecy. The Bean's uncle and his wife have just bought a house, whose number, spookily enough, is 153: the "number of the fish".

153 is a remarkable number. In much the same way that 42 fascinates fans of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 153 fascinated the Pythagoreans, a group of ancient Greek mathematical mystics. Here are some of the unusual things about it:

153 is the sum of the cubes of its own digits: 1x1x1 + 5x5x5 + 3x3x3 = 153. In fact, if you start with any number that divides by three and repeatedly replace it by the sum of the cubes of its digits in this way, you eventually end up with 153.
153 is a triangle number. If you make a triangle of red balls like the ones on a snooker table, but have seventeen rows of them rather than just five, then there are 153 balls. And it happens that the prime factors of 153 (the prime numbers which, when multiplied together, give 153) are 17, 3, and 3.
153 is the sum of the first five factorials: 1 + 2x1 + 3x2x1 + 4x3x2x1 + 5x4x3x2x1 = 153.

But the reason it's called the number of the fish is because of the so-called vesica piscis, or "bladder of the fish": two intersecting circles of equal size, with the centre of each one lying on the circumference of the other, so that a vertical fish-like shape is formed. The Pythagoreans worked out that the ratio of the width of this figure to its height is almost exactly (to within one part in 7,000) 265 to 153, or 5x53 to 153. In fact, the precise value is the square root of three. Not only self-acknowledged trimorphs such as your author but trinitarian mystics in general may find it interesting how the number three occurs repeatedly in all these formulae.

According to Robert Price (The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, page 158; why couldn't he have mentioned it five pages earlier?), there is a story from Iamblichus (Life of Pythagoras, 8) in which Pythagoras, a strict vegetarian, comes across a group fishermen hauling in a large catch. He asks them if they will throw them back if he can tell them the exact number of them. They agree; he correctly names the number; and the fish are returned alive to the water. This story has uncanny similarities to the (much later) account in the last chapter of John's gospel where Jesus, after his resurrection, comes across the disciples, who had been fishing all night but caught nothing. He tells them to put the net down on the right side of the boat. They do so, and immediately haul in a large catch.

The strange thing is that it is John, not Iamblichus, who tells us that there were 153 fish, a detail which adds nothing to the plot of John's story but which would have been understood as a clear Pythagorean reference to educated people of those times. I wonder whether all this may have something to do, either as cause or as consequence, with the choice of the fish symbol for Jesus among the early Christians.

I wish the The Bean's uncle and aunt all the joys of the Fish in their new home -- especially as before the year is out there will be three of them living there. And while we're on the subject of numbers, I hope another of The Bean's pronouncements, repeated several times recently, doesn't come true for them, at least not unless they really want it to: "One, two, three -- nine!".

Four play

2009-05-09T09:31:00.011+01:00

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claims that there is a systematic relationship between the language we speak and the way we see the world. A corollary is that the more important something is to a world view, the more words for it there are likely to be in the language in question. In support of this:

The ancient Greeks had four words for love: agape, eros, philia, storge.

And four words for knowledge: gnosis, episteme, nous, techne. (Thanks to Troy Pierce for pointing this out to me, and thereby inspiring this meditation on fourness).

Aristotle knew four kinds of cause: material, formal, efficient, final.

The Inuit have only four words for snow: aput, gana, piqsirpoq, qimuqsuq; not forty, or two thousand, as is sometimes claimed.

Some eminent Cardinals write forewords that upset traditionalists.

Politicians have forty words for "blind panic", all carefully chosen to sound vaguely reassuring.

West Bromwich Albion fans have four hundred words for relegation,
very few of which I am allowed to reproduce here. As I write, they are heroically resisting the apparently inevitable; but history shows that, like an ancient nature god, the Albion are fated repeatedly to sink from sight, be seen no more in the Premier League for a season or two, and then come back to life, only to succumb again in short order. I am proud to count myself as a supporter of a team that so ably symbolises the underlying rhythm of the created order, even if they're not much good at anything else.

The ego speaks

2009-05-04T14:10:00.008+01:00

I decided I would like to create more personal kind of image for this blog, so I've replaced the rather abstract "chalice" graphic with the photo of myself on the right. It's not a very recent one, I admit. It appears my parents didn't have a colour camera back then, or even a proper plumbed-in bath to put me in. But I think the picture goes well with the blog because it expresses the same mixture of amazement, delight and bewilderment with what life has to offer that I still feel most of the time.

While I'm writing on a personal note, I will also suggest that if you'd like to make sure you don't miss any of the rather irregular postings I make here, you create yourself an account at Bloglines and add this blog and others that you like to it. Then you can visit your Bloglines page whenever you want and see what new postings all your favourite writers have created for you to read. I don't usually make technical recommendations here but Bloglines is different. In fact it is, as I believe I have heard young people say, way cool.

And of course, do send details of this blog to everyone you know who may be interested, because despite trying every day to open myself to the divine influence and transcend my ego, I am like all bloggers still actually a megalomaniac at heart, and would love my words to be read by thousands and thousands of people who really have much better things to do. There are various widgets on the right hand side of the page that you may be able to click to help that to happen, though as you can probably tell, I haven't figured out yet how most of them work.

Faith no more?

2009-05-03T11:17:00.008+01:00

"Faith" seems to have a bit of a bad reputation in certain circles these days. Many people, particularly many atheists, seem to think it refers to a decision to believe something without sufficient evidence, or even against the evidence, on the basis of external authorities like the Bible or religious leaders. If this is all that faith means, then it certainly seems like a poor thing beside the knowledge that can be gained by carefully examining the evidence.

And it's not just atheists. Carl Jung, who would certainly not have accepted that label, was once asked in an interview "Do you believe in God?". He answered, "I don't have to believe -- I know"; thereby implicitly contrasting mere belief (based on theorizing, or others' reports) with direct experience. "Faith", to modern ears, has something of this aura of the second-hand to it. Knowledge, surely, is far better.

The words for "knowledge" in Latin and Greek have both found their way into modern English, but in rather different guises. The Latin word was "scientia", from which we get our "science" -- the modern way of knowing par excellence, at least about things we can observe with our senses. The Greek word, meanwhile, was "gnosis", which, to the extent it is understood at all today by English speakers, refers to something much more mysterious -- a direct, intuitive apprehension of realities that go well beyond what science can get a grip on.

In my experience, most of the people who value science as a way of knowing would be highly dubious about gnosis, often denying that it can tell us about anything real whatsoever; while those to whom gnosis is a core reality, while not going so far as to claim that science has no value at all, tend to be very wary of it, and are quick to point out its limitations and its potential for misuse.

And yet for me, they increasingly look like two aspects of the same calling. I would like to draw out some of parallels between them, and in the process, I hope, to cast "faith" in a different and more positive light.

Recently I've much enjoyed listening to Alex Tsakiris's Skeptiko podcasts, in which he interviews various people active in or interested in some of the topics around the fringe of modern science -- things like telepathy, mediumship and near-death experiences. Alex seems to me like a genuine sceptic -- he is genuinely open to all interpretations, and his favourite phrase is "Follow the data!". I think this is what both the scientist and the gnostic do -- or at least, it's what they should be doing if they're true to their respective callings.

But then the question comes up, what is the "data"? How widely should the net be thrown? The data of everyday experience surely has to be included in any attempt to make sense of things. But one important parallel is that both scientists and mystics (I could say "gnostics", but that word has a more specific meaning than I want) insist it has to be more than that.

The mystics also want to include the data that can be gained by non-ordinary experience -- through meditation, the consumption of magic mushrooms or a host of other practices. And this is where the difficulty starts. I count myself immensely fortunate that ever since I started to meditate almost twenty years ago, I have found the rewards easily enough to draw me in further and encourage me to continue. There have been quite long dry patches, but never so long or so intense as to cause me to forget what the whole thing is about. Having built up a regular and sustained practice I now find the spiritual dimension I experience through it to be every bit as real as the everyday, although in a very different way. And yet I know that others have attempted the same path and given up, because they have not experienced the same rewards. It's certainly not that they haven't tried as hard, because I don't think I have tried hard -- I have been helped along by grace. And it's a real mystery to me why this isn't a more common experience.

The difficulty in all this for our question of what should be accepted as "knowledge" is that the data that meditative practice offers are simply not available to most people -- at least in the short term, and perhaps not ever. So should it be accepted as real? The philosopher of spirituality Ken Wilber certainly thinks so; he constantly draws out the underlying similarities between the fruits of spiritual practice by people in many different traditions, and argues that they are so widespread that they do have to be accepted. Yet those without the experience are often understandably dubious.

Yet one important parallel is this: exactly the same thing happens in science. The raw data of science can very seldom be appreciated directly by the untrained observer. Much more often, they only make any sense to people with years of training, either in the specific scientific discipline, or in mathematics, or both. And just as -- perhaps -- not everyone's brains are "wired up" in such a way that meditation will ever work for them, so not everyone is ever going to gain the required expertise in even one science, let alone all of them.

The result: most people end up taking most scientific results on "faith", in the sense I used it at the beginning of this article: a trust in the authority (expertise and integrity) of specialists. And this is really no different from the way in which many religious people take on trust what was originally discovered by, or revealed to, the mystics at the root of their tradition.

So faith is, at worst, a necessary evil. We are finite beings, and neither in the rational nor the spiritual realm can we directly experience all that is to be experienced. So we take things on trust from others who have made the journey. And to the extent that the "specialists" can be trusted -- which is something that should constantly be questioned! -- trust is just the sensible thing to do.

It may look as if I'm arguing for a two-tier humanity here: the elite few who really "get it", and the rest who just stand on the sidelines and accept (or not) what the elite tell them. But it's not like that. The explorers (scientists or mystics) need to, and do, exercise faith just as much as the non-specialists.

When you're learning science or mathematics, you have to trust (have faith in) established dogma enough to put the time and effort into learning the subject yourself. If you only ever accept things that you can directly experience and understand, you will never be able to see enough of the big picture to make any progress. And even for established scientists, there is a role for the non-rational: for a "leap of faith" that a particular theory or set of experiments is worth pursuing, when the data isn't there to fully support such a view.

Likewise with the spiritual journey. Hebrews 11:1 (NIV) tells us that faith is "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see". But that sounds like a pretty tall order to me. A translation I like better is that it's "the substantiating of what we hope for": a process of making something that's initially rather nebulous steadily more substantial. The more you practice, initially on the basis of a rather uncertain trust, the more real it all becomes. Likewise, Paul in many places emphasises the role of faith, in its subtle interplay with grace (Eph 2:8), as the very process through which we are saved.

But then the objection can be raised: how do I get started? Why should I have even a little bit of faith in something of which, initially, I have no experience at all? In fact, this is an issue not just at the beginning, but at all points in the journey where the way ahead is not clear. We can get becalmed by doubt almost anywhere, it seems, and there appears to be no way ahead, or just as bad, thousands of them.

In Meditations on the Tarot (p596) we are told:

Doubt is more than a psychological state of indecision; it is the soul's sojourn in the intermediary sphere between the two fields of attraction -- terrestrial and celestial -- from which there is no other means of escape than a pure and simple act of faith, issuing from the soul itself without heaven and earth taking any part in it...[a trial] where the following is at stake: either an act of faith, or despair and madness.

Sometimes, it seems, we're left without any "data", in the form of either heavenly intuitions or earthly sensing, and we just have to decide: it's better to pray and make a wild guess, or leap, than to stay stuck.

And at that point I had better stop, because whether you are at such a point, and if so, which way you should jump, is for you to discern, not for me to guess, wildly or otherwise.

A day as a doorkeeper

2009-04-30T20:51:00.011+01:00

Dora, The Bean and I spent last week on holiday in Paris, seeing the sights, visiting numerous playgrounds and enjoying the excellent French bread and strawberries, though not usually on the same plate. The traditional influence of "Paris in the spring" seemed especially powerful for The Bean, who showed a much greater interest than usual in the opposite sex.

He seems mostly to be attracted to older women -- six or seven years old, compared to his two years and two months. He shows no sign of any bashfulness, walking right up to his quarry, pointing at her and announcing to everyone in the vicinity, "Girl!". Then he studies her closely, lowers his pointing finger and declaims "Shoes!". English girls are usually a little embarrassed by this treatment, but most of the French ones seemed merely bemused, either because French girls are naturally more self-confident or because they didn't have a clue what he was saying. In fact his attentions were often far from unwelcome; one of the girls that caught his eye impressed me no end by confiding to me in English that she thought he was "very beautiful" too.

Two of the famous places we visited were Versailles palace gardens and Chartres cathedral. Versailles is of course impressive and, in a certain sense, beautiful; but it is a product of the "age of reason", from the seventeenth century onwards. To me its beauty seemed soulless, shallow and egotistical, a statement of pride and power over others. They built it that big and ornate because they could. A very modern sort of place, really.

Chartres was altogether different. I wanted to go there partly because Meditations on the Tarot is dedicated to Our Lady of Chartres. Surely the unknown author of the book must have experienced something profound there. I was not disappointed. If you ever find yourself in the area, pay a visit if you possibly can.

The town is an hour out of Paris on the train, far enough to deter many tourists, and we happened to visit on a Monday, which is the closest France seems to come to a non-shopping day. So there were no crowds. The building is magnificent; certainly the most powerful expression I've ever encountered of medieval Christian spirituality. Its power comes partly from its coherence; it was built in a relatively small number of decades at the start of the thirteenth century, and whether by luck or divine providence, has suffered very little from the destructive effects of wars, revolutions and reformations over the centuries.

A breathtaking story is told in the stonework on the outside of the building and in the magnificent windows, for whose appreciation (I assume) the inside of the cathedral is kept pleasingly gloomy. Between them, the windows and the stones seem to cover the entire medieval Christian narrative and world view, from Adam and Eve through to the gospels and beyond, reaching up to heaven as much as depicting events on earth. The cathedral is dedicated to Mary, who is everywhere as mother of Jesus and Queen of Heaven; and something of the reality she carries managed to seep through even into my hard-wired Protestant skull, so much so that I began to sense more fully than I have before (though not clearly enough to write about here, yet) some aspect of the feminine which is central to Catholic spirituality but which Protestantism woefully misses. Or perhaps instead of "aspect of the feminine" it would be better to refer to the spiritual presence of which human femininity itself (the girls with the shoes?) is but a reflection.

In some ways, our day was frustrating. The famous labyrinth was under cover, we could only stay for a few hours, and Dora and I could only go into the building one at a time, because when we took The Bean in, he decided the most fun was to be had by screaming at the top of his voice to test the echo. But even so, the day had quite a profound effect on me, and after digesting the experience in a long meditation the following morning, I spent the rest of our time in France feeling much more grounded and balanced than I usually do. Now I'm back at home and back at work, it is all slowly fading; today I'm closer to Versailles than to Chartres. But Ken Wilber writes about how "peak experiences" (sudden unexpected and temporary experiences of the numinous) can turn out to be "peek experiences" (glimpses of what will eventually become an abiding state). It all depends on how we integrate them, or allow them to be integrated in us by grace.

"Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked." Psalm 84:10, NIV.

Metaphorically?

2009-04-30T19:51:00.003+01:00

When is a metaphor not a metaphor? I was amused by two unusual linguistic twists that came my way over the last few days, one intentional, the other presumably not.

The first was a pithy aphorism in a blog somewhere (sorry, I've forgotten whose):

"Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticize them, you will be a mile away, and you will have their shoes."

I think this is sound advice, especially for cyclists or pedestrians aggrieved at the behaviour of drivers of large and lethal lumps of metal weighing several tons, like the one who swerved around me, missing me by inches as I was walking across a zebra crossing yesterday...and this was after I'd returned to Flatchester from Paris...

The second gem was part of a piece on BBC Radio Four's Sunday programme, prompted by a call from the National Secular Society for hospital chaplains no longer to be funded by the National Health Service. After hearing from various members of the clergy, the presenter posed the question, "While the chaplaincy system may be changing, what is the experience of patients on the hospital floor now?"

If it was me, I expect I would want someone to help me get back into my bed, but no-one in the programme seemed to think this obvious point was worth discussing.

Massaging the message

2009-03-21T21:01:00.019Z

Sometimes I let my more curmudgeonly side have free rein. Tonight is one of those times.

I recently came into possession of two booklets by a consultancy called futerra (in lower case), who appear to have been commissioned by the UK government's Climate Change Communications Working Group to advise on how best to motivate the changes in behaviour that are needed if the worst effects of climate change are to be avoided. (I mean they want to motivate individuals, not the government itself, of course. That would be a complete waste of effort, as the recent decisions to expand Heathrow and Stansted airports have made perfectly clear).

The booklets are masterpieces in a number of ways. I was particularly struck by these paragraphs:

"Give something (even if it's small) and people feel beholden to do as you ask."

"Fairness is important and people hate it when others benefit from breaking the rules. Reassure people that there's a level playing field."

"Catch me when I'm open to change. There are times of big changes in our lives: getting married, moving house, starting a new job, having a baby or retiring. People are far more open to change in these 'transition zones', because their habits are all in flux."

"Partnered delivery of messages will be more successful. Experience shows that partnered delivery is often a key component for projects that are large, complex and have many stakeholders

And best of all:

"Egg-headed scientists are important messengers: they have authority, and reassure people that someone understands the complicated issue of climate change. But we need common-sense and likeable intermediaries as well, to translate the opaque pronouncements of scientists into practical and obvious advice".

I have just e-mailed them, telling them how impressed I was by that last paragraph, and commenting:

Congratulations on packing four well-known shortcomings of scientists into one short paragraph. It is of course quite true that we are all bald (even the women), are incapable of clear communication, and by implication have no common sense or emotional warmth. You missed a few, though. As you can easily verify by watching Dr Who and the James Bond films, we invariably also have very poor dress sense, and a good number of us are mad and/or evil into the bargain.

Can I suggest that in the next edition you might word the case for a mix of skills the other way round? Something like this:

'Sharp-suited marketing and PR people are important messengers: they put things in simple, practical terms and make people feel good about their message. But we need sincere and serious technical specialists as well, to translate the glib oversimplifications of marketeers into authoritative and scientifically rigorous arguments.'

Actually, I'm not really serious in suggesting that. After all, it would never do to caricature a whole profession with a string of tired and inaccurate stereotypes, would it?

Yours...

P.S. What on earth is "partnered delivery" (paragraph 20 of "the rules of the game")? Is it connected to your suggestion in paragraph 24 of "new rules: new game" that people will be particularly open to messages about climate change when they're having a baby? If not, could you translate this no doubt practical and obvious phrase into an opaque pronouncement that I might have a chance of being able to understand?

I will await their reply with interest. But for now I can say that
if the task of bringing about the profound change of heart, attitude and behaviour required for us to have any chance of avoiding unmitigated climatic disaster is to be reduced to the level of a marketing campaign, complete with deliberate emotional manipulation ("give something...and people feel beholden") and dubious reassurances ("there's a level playing field" -- where? Wembley Stadium, maybe?), then I think my despair about our prospects is just about total.

Praying with the animals

2009-03-21T15:16:00.003Z

In a true syncretistic fashion, Dora and I have decided to go vegan for Lent, after she was encouraged to do so in her Buddhist (Community of Interbeing) group.

Having more or less avoided animal products for a few weeks now, it's time to take stock. It appears to be a multiple win-win so far. Not only are (we hope) the planet and the animals we would otherwise have caused to be slaughtered benefiting, but we are enjoying the diet and feeling good. It's been no sacrifice at all. I have discovered I really like soya milk and soya yoghurt, and houmus serves as a good cheese substitute. It may be the smell of bacon that does for me in the end, but up to now it hasn't bothered me.

There is an interesting article here about the psychological tangle that carnivorous humans have been in ever since we evolved the capacity to emphathize. (Actually the article's about a lot of other things too, but you can find the passage I'm referring to by searching for the word "elaborate"). We are keenly aware that animals don't want to be killed and have adopted all sorts of mental ploys to enable ourselves to feel OK when doing so. The author of the article assumes that we're stuck with the conundrum -- that "we need to kill". If veganism is as viable as it seems to be, then he's wrong on that specific point, but I sense that he's right about the psychology -- that this dilemma is very ancient and runs very deep, so much so that it may had a major influence on our whole conception of how it feels to be human.

What I am wondering is whether our almost universal feeling of wrongness, of separation from God or from the spiritual heart of things, however you want to phrase it, is in large part caused by eating animals and by otherwise exploiting them. And if so, whether stopping doing those things could be of fairly direct psychospiritual benefit. Or in other words, following a vegan diet may help us to pray.

It says in 1 Peter 3:7 that husbands should be considerate to their wives and respect them, otherwise they will "find it impossible to pray properly" (Phillips translation). It is not too much of a stretch to claim that the same applies to all our relationships, not just marriage. But perhaps it extends even further, to members of other animal species besides our own. If it does, we should not be surprised if we experience the same negative side-effects when we don't treat animals with respect or consideration, and the corresponding benefits when we do.

Some pastoral speculations

2009-03-07T19:27:00.010Z

The so-called Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, are probably one of the less-visited regions of the New Testament. Although they claim to have been written by Paul, many scholars believe they were by one of his later followers, because the concerns they address seem to reflect a later stage of church development than that seen in the earlier Pauline letters.

But despite their possible late date, they show (almost! -- see below) no signs of any belief in the historical Jesus described in the four gospels. The epistle to Titus is particularly telling. It begins with a reference to "a faith and knowledge ... which God ... promised before the beginning of time, and at his appointed season he brought his word to light through ..."

At this point, one might expect the sentence to continue with something like "... sending his Son into the world" or "... sending Jesus to die for our sins". Surely that, according to the conventional understanding, is how God "brought his word to light". But no, the author continues: " ... the preaching entrusted to me by the command of God our Saviour" (Titus 1:2-3, NIV). So there is a strong implication here that either that the author thought Paul's preaching was a more important revelation of God than the incarnation of Jesus himself, or that the author knew nothing of any such recent incarnation.

1 Timothy starts in a similarly interesting, though frustratingly vague, vein. In 1:3-4, the writer urges Timothy to "stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain men not to teach false doctrines any longer nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies". Paul Treblico in "The Early Christians in Ephesus from Paul to Ignatius" (page 215) thinks that these "myths" would not have been Gnostic ones, because the Pastorals do not reflect, and are too early for, the developed Gnosticism that such a description might fit. Instead, he argues from the rest of 1 Timothy 1 that there appears to have been some specifically Jewish dimension to the "myths". He also says that the term "genealogies" "would probably be broader than simple lists of descendants" and "can be personal histories or biographies". The reference to "godless myths and old wives' tales" (1 Tim 4:7, NIV) would support the latter assertion: a "genealogy" can only be an old wives' tale if it is more than a mere list of names.

This made me wonder whether the "myths and genealogies" might have been precisely the stories of the historical Jesus that could have been beginning to circulate around the time the Pastorals were written. Of course, there's no way to be sure, but if Treblico is right, both the "Jewish dimension" and the "personal histories" tags would fit exactly, especially in the light of the importance that the church increasingly came to attach to the idea of apostolic authority originating from Jesus and passed down through the generations. Elaine Pagels in her various books shows how crucial what one might call the "spiritual genealogy" of apostolic succession was in enabling what in due course became the Catholic Church to win the battle against the Gnostics. Their claim that they got their doctrines through a chain of command originating with Jesus himself came to be seen as superior to the Gnostics' individual and often conflicting revelations.

And there's more. The title of Treblico's book highlights the connection between Ephesus, where these "false doctrines" were being propounded, and Ignatius. Ignatius was bishop of Antioch (some way away) but wrote a letter to the Ephesians, so he clearly had an important connection with them. And it is Ignatius' writings, particularly his letter to the Trallians, that give us what may well be our earliest clear mention of the historical-Jesus story outside the four gospels. Alvar Ellegard in "Jesus One Hundred Years Before Christ" has Ignatius in the frame for masterminding the process of spreading the historical Jesus doctrine precisely in order to combat the Gnostics as indicated above. So who knows, maybe he got the story from "certain men" in Ephesus, or maybe they got it from him.

I have submitted a question about this to Dr Robert Price at the "Bible Geek" site for inclusion in his podcast, so we'll see what he thinks. I fully expect my neat theory to be thoroughly disassembled by someone who knows far more about all this than I do, but he is always very gentlemanly about it when he does that to people's questions.

In case you want to check out Treblico's arguments, the text of the relevant pages of his book currently come out top of a Google search on the phrase "myths and genealogies", though I should make it clear that I have picked up his remarks and run with them in a direction he would probably not agree with.

---

I originally said that these letters show no signs of any belief in the historical Jesus. However, I had missed 1 Tim 6:13, which says that "Christ Jesus ... while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession". That would be a clear counterexample if genuine. So it looks as if there are three possibilities. The first is that I'm just wrong, and Paul knew of the historical Jesus of the gospels. The second, which appears to be a majority position among scholars, is that 1 Timothy was written in the second century, when the belief in the historical Jesus was becoming widespread anyway.

The third possibility is that, even if Paul did write the original version, the phrase "while testifying before Pontius Pilate" is a later addition. I am not an expert on these things, and am wary of hypothesizing interpolations -- not because I don't believe they occur, but because it can be too convenient a way to deal with otherwise awkward pieces of evidence. Having said that, it does look as if this phrase is the kind of "clarificatory" remark that might have started its life as a marginal note by one copyist and then been written into the main text by a later one. Also, the Greek verb "martureo" (testify) is relatively rare in the seven epistles almost universally agreed to be by Paul, compared to the rest of the New Testament. In other words, it doesn't read much like him, although he does occasionally use it.

Heaven is a place on earth

2009-02-18T20:43:00.015Z

Two days ago, it being Monday, I found myself in session two of the Event, an evangelistic (and evangelical) offering of food, talks and discussion kindly hosted by the folks at a church in the centre of town.

This time I was better prepared, both mentally and sartorially, wearing my "Order of Nazorean Essenes" T-shirt purchased from the Gnosis.org web site. I'm still not exactly sure how a Nazorean is to be distinguished from a Nazarene or a Nazirite, but the picture is cool and the shirt is warm, and it triggered a conversation with an evangelical (and potentially evangelistic) fellow-attender in which I confessed that my Essene sympathies were accompanied by regular reading of Meditations on the Tarot. He said I should steer clear of it, because he thought the Tarot was a product of Forbidden Religions prohibited in the Old Testament (actually it appears to date from 13th-century Italy, unless one accepts the occultist view that it was invented in ancient Egypt and stored in the astral plane until it emerged during the Renaissance). I do sometimes think that if the anonymous author had mixed with the kind of people I mix with, he would have given his book another title, preferably containing the phrase "Bible study", for the benefit of all those who feel confident in their ability to judge a book accurately by its title alone.

The topic for the evening was Jesus' midnight interview with Nicodemus in John 3. Jesus says Nicodemus needs to be born from above. Nicodemus mishears this as "born again" and asks how he can go back into his mother's womb; remember that back then, "born again" did not then have the very specific associations it has now, and would simply have meant what Nicodemus assumed. Interestingly, the misunderstanding would only be possible in Greek, not Aramaic or Hebrew, as only Greek uses the same word for "from above" and "again". So one is led to assume that these two Jewish residents of Palestine had decided to forgo their native Aramaic and speak Greek for the evening. It's also interesting that while Nicodemus is described as a "ruler of the people" (presumably a member of the Sanhedrin), the name "Nicodemus" means exactly "ruler of the people" in Greek -- although on the other hand it was also apparently a common name in first-century Palestine.

I am a big fan of this passage (even if it does spring entirely from John's inspired Greek-speaking imagination) because I think the "born again / born from above" metaphor points to a mysterious and life-changing experience which is central to what human existence is meant to be about. But sadly the discussion around our table turned to the subject of what criterion is used to decide whether each of us "goes to heaven" or to the other place. I hope it is a summary rather than a travesty of the discussion if I say it seemed to be generally accepted that the Bible teaches that "if you believe in Jesus, you'll go to heaven, otherwise you'll go to hell".

But actually, it doesn't. After the meeting, I separated out in my mind the various passages that bear on the subject and realised that the above summary/travesty bears very little relation to what the New Testament says, for at least two separate reasons. I think it would be helpful if those trying to spread the word were to be clear about all this, not least because the prospect of frying for all eternity as a result of unbelief is one that strikes many people as so outrageous that it can effectively prevent any serious consideration of what this "born from above" business might actually be about.

Firstly, as far as I am aware, nowhere does the Bible teach that any of us will "go to heaven". There is an allusion in Philippians (1:23-24) to what sounds like a disembodied state of being with God after death, but that's about all. A far more widespread belief, explicitly taught by Paul (e.g. 1 Cor 15) and assumed in the synoptic gospels (e.g. Luke 20:27-40), is that the future, for believers at least, involves resurrection. At the very end of the Bible, the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven to earth. As the theologian Jurgen Moltmann put it, heaven is the "realm of God's potentiality", out of which all good things come. It is not a place to which people (other than Jesus after his ascension) go. Our future is on earth, according to the text. Maybe if Christians believed that, they would care more about the way we are trashing the planet.

So what about the other place? Unless I am forgetting something, there is not a word about unbelievers "going to hell" in John's gospel or any of Paul's epistles. Hell does feature very dramatically as a destination in the other gospels (especially Matthew) and in Revelation. But in those gospels, it is clear that the criterion for being sent there is not unbelief, but rather bad actions and thoughts: refusing to care for those in need (Matthew 25:31-46), or sins such as anger or lust (Matthew 5:22,29,30; 18:1-9). John talks of "condemnation" and Paul of "death", but in neither case is there any specific imagery, nor is it even clear the state is a permanent one. The general picture seems to be that the more Judaic half of the New Testament (synoptic gospels, Revelation, James) talks about hell as a destination and behaviour as the criterion, whereas the more Gnostic half (John, Paul) talks about belief as a matter of life or death, but does not equate death with hell, nor assume it is necessarily a permanent condition.

In other words, the New Testament speaks with (at least) two voices. One voice says the righteous are resurrected and the wicked go to hell. The other says the believers are resurrected and the unbelievers are (non-specifically) condemned. Neither says anyone goes to heaven, nor that unbelief can result in being relocated to the flames.

At least, that is my reading of it, but there's always a chance I'm completely wrong. As Robert Price said in a recent podcast on a slightly different topic, "I guess we'll only find out the answer when we get to heaven. Or at least, you guys will. I won't be there, so you'll have to send me an asbestos telegram".

Angels rush in

2009-02-15T19:17:00.008Z

I have enjoyed listening to a debate on the resurrection of Jesus between Dwight Wright, evangelical apologist with a silly name, and Robert Price, arch-sceptic with an eminently sensible name and self-styled "Bible Geek". It was interesting to ponder the high-speed cuts and thrusts in slow motion after the event.

I felt that Price won hands down, but then I suppose I would. At any rate, Wright distinguished himself by denying, against the last two centuries of mainstream scholarly opinion, that Matthew and Luke quoted anything from Mark, and by claiming that both Josephus and "Tacticus" (I think he meant Tacitus) mentioned the Roman guard that Matthew's gospel says was placed on Jesus' tomb; neither of them does, any more than do Mark, Luke or John. But the best bit was when they debated the discrepancies between the four gospel accounts of the appearances to the women who went to the tomb early on Easter morning. It went like this...

Wright: Do you really expect for any testimony of someone's life as varied and as powerful as Jesus Christ to be exactly the same?

Price: I would if it's a question of whether the women saw the risen Jesus himself as in two gospels, or pointedly did not in the others. I'd say we've got a serious problem.

Wright: But the two gospels do not deny that the women...

Price: Oh, that's like your wife saying "Hey, where did you go tonight?" "Oh, I went to the store", you're just leaving out the fact that you also went to the brothel. It's true as far as it goes but you're not telling the whole story. That's just lying. Nobody's convinced by that kind of evasion.

Wright: Wow.

Price: That's what you would be saying here, like, "they just decided not to mention the irrelevant fact that the women saw Jesus Christ Raised From The Dead!! No, it's much more important to say that they saw an angel."

Wright: Well, I find that humorous on both accounts, in both its presentation and its idiocy, but --

Price: Now there's a real answer, there's a substantial answer...

-----

An amusing twist on this is that actually three of the gospels say that Jesus himself appeared to one or more of the women. But Mark's gospel only says this in a final passage (16:9-20) which reads like a rather awkward postscript and which even the highly mainstream New International Version points out is not present in the most reliable early manuscripts. The main part of Mark, like Luke but unlike Matthew or John, only mentions the women seeing one or more angels, thus giving us the two-against-two split that featured in the debate. So assuming (as Price must do, and I certainly agree; does Wright, I wonder?) that Mark 16:9-20 was a later addition, it seems that even in the early church, Christians were aware of the problem posed by precisely the point that Price makes. Had they too regarded it as "idiocy", they would hardly have thought it necessary to add to what was presumably already coming to be regarded as inspired scripture.

Jogging the surgeon's elbow

2009-02-10T21:22:00.009Z

I suppose I should call myself a "recovering evangelical". Normally I manage to steer clear of evangelical churches but every now and then, something happens and I find myself wandering into one again, propping up the pew and indulging in old bad habits. I'd managed to stay church-free since leaving St Saliva's last summer, but yesterday my resolve weakened, and I found myself at an Event, the first evening of a five-session course of talks, free food and open discussion at one of the largest churches in Flatchester.

I chose this particular event because it seemed likely to provide an opportunity to meet others interested in discussing issues of Christian origins, truth, meaning, and all the stuff I drone on about so much in this blog. And so it proved, to a large extent. There were around a hundred people in attendance -- about ten times as many as I'd expected -- all seated round tables to eat and talk. Our table seemed about equally balanced between evangelical Christians, atheists, and people just interested in finding out more; making up the numbers were one guy who had been passing by when he was dragged inside by the vicar, and myself as the token heretic.

We were several times exhorted to take a hard look at the evidence, but it turned out this meant only to look at certain pieces of it in one particular way. At the side of the room was a display of books and leaflets arguing the evangelical view of Jesus. There were none, I was unsurprised to discover, arguing a more mainstream, scholarly-consensus type of view, let alone any of the more hard-core mythicist material authored by Wells, Doherty, Price, Ellegard and others who have received positive mention in this blog over the months. Well, they were hardly going to shoot themselves in the foot, at least not deliberately, and it was their table, as well as their food, so I didn't feel I could complain (yet).

I talked more than I usually do, and I think I must have come over as slightly mad, arguing on the side of the atheists one moment and on the Christian side the next. I was unable to remain silent when it was asserted that there is good documentary evidence outside the New Testament for the historicity of the gospel narratives, and, still more incredibly, when it was claimed that the gospels of Matthew and John were both written by the direct disciples of Jesus bearing those names. Throughout, in both the talks and the literature on display, it was either assumed or asserted that either the story of Jesus is true (in the literal, historical sense) or the whole thing is a lie and we might as well pack up and go off to the pub for the evening.

And I realised after I got home that it was this last theme that bothered me more than anything else. I became aware that I was feeling a paradoxical combination of guilt at having talked too much and frustration at not having allowed myself to say more. I think it's very likely that some people will make a Christian commitment as a result of this course, and I felt rather as a surgeon might feel, watching a colleague perform a life-saving operation but knowing that, unless I can intervene, he is following a procedure that will inevitably lead to him leaving a large surgical instrument inside the patient, with serious long-term consequences. I wanted to jog his arm to try and stop him doing that, but I knew that if I jogged it too hard, the operation would fail altogether and the patient would never regain consciousness.

In case the analogy is obscure: the operation itself is to induce, persuade, cajole and attract people to start to relate consciously to God for the first time, and that is a life-giving procedure in the best sense which I am more than a little in awe of and certainly do not want to interrupt. And the large and superfluous surgical instrument is the impoverished view of truth (if something isn't a literal fact it must be a total fabrication) which forces people to buy into all the bunkum about historicity when they come to faith, and additionally causes them to look for God "out there" -- in the external world -- rather than within themselves. I know, because I have seen it happen to plenty of friends over the years, that such a combination does not provide a firm foundation when doubts start to surface or when a supportive church community is no longer available for one reason or another. Where do you go when the outer evidence that supported your faith all crumbles away and you have never learned how to enter silence and encounter the "Kingdom within"? To the pub, maybe, which proves the evangelicals were right all along, in an odd sense.

I plan to go back next week, if only to find out what happens next.

Puppies unharmed after all

2009-02-07T13:34:00.003Z

Two mornings a week, I drop The Bean off at nursery on my way in to work. I am always happy to leave him there because the staff are just about the gentlest, most caring group of people anyone could wish to meet.

At the end of every session, they write a one-page report on what he has been doing. Imagine my horror on Thursday when I read that he "had fun getting messy whilst doing a puppy sticking." And then my relief when I noticed in another section of the report "Craft activity: puppy picture".

Sense, nonsense, statistics and the Talpiot Tomb

2009-02-04T21:15:00.023Z

This is, I think, going to be the last entry in the "Netzarim" thread. I have been trying to interact responsibly with Netzarim members and be open to what they have to say, but I have reached the end of the road. Let me say at the outset, though, that I have appreciated my interactions with group members Eliyahu and Anders, and am grateful to them for leading me to look at some interesting material. They have both exemplified the kind of robust but respectful disagreement with what I write that I am very happy to respond to.

But this is why I've decided to move on. Yesterday, Anders pointed me to the story of the Talpiot Tomb, which some, including it would seem the Netzarim, believe is the tomb of the historical Jesus, or Ribi Yehoshua. Anders provided me with the following quote:

"Prof. of Statistics Andrey Feuerverger has demonstrated that, contrary to the mathematically-challenged critics of the Yaaqov ossuary, the chances that the ossuaries in the Talpiot Tomb aren't those of the family of the 1st-century Pharisee Ribi Yehoshua are 1:1600 (Feuerverger, Prof. Andrey -- The Final Word, http://projecteuclid.org/aoas). [Quote: Paqid Yirmeyahu ha-Tzadiq]"

The said Paqid Yirmeyahu ha-Tzadiq (in English, "Overseer Jeremiah the Righteous One") is the leader of the Netzarim group. My first contact with the Netzarim was when he left a comment on this blog telling me I was "believing in nonsense" and that I should "learn some history" at his web site. One surprising bit of history I learned from his site was that Paul the apostle was a "Hellenist Turkish-Jew", despite the rest of the world believing that the Turks only arrived in Paul's part of the world around a thousand years after he lived. But perhaps that widespread belief is "nonsense" too.

However, it's the statistical claim quoted above that I want to talk about today. Google only serves up the quote under two postings by Anders himself, where they are not attributed to Yirmeyahu, but I have no reason to assume the attribution is incorrect. It certainly reads like a piece of Yirmeyahu's prose, with its characteristic superfluous hyphenation and its dismissiveness of those with ideas different from his own.

Yirmeyahu (assuming it is he) says that the chances the ossuaries aren't those of Ribi Yehoshua are 1:1600 (one in sixteen hundred). This implies that the chance that they are his is 1599 in 1600. And he quotes Andrey Feuerverger, a statistician in a senior position at Toronto University, as the source of this estimate; the "projecteuclid" pointer is to the Annals of Applied Statistics, a respected journal that has published Feuerverger's paper on the subject. That is, he is telling us that a top-class mathematician has calculated that there's more than a 99.9% chance that the ossuaries are Ribi Yehoshua's -- and that therefore, by clear though unstated implication, Christian stories of the empty tomb are almost certainly hogwash, and the Netzarim are right about the original Yehoshua. So the stakes are pretty high if you're in either of those camps.

The trouble is that Feuerverger, in his published paper which is, he tells us, the only place to look for his views on the matter, says no such thing -- or at least, that is the case for the near-final draft linked to from note 23 at the bottom of this page (the final version not being viewable for free, sadly). Even on a cursory reading, it is abundantly clear from section 11 of the paper in particular that Feuerverger is (very sensibly) only conducting a hypothesis test within the framework of classical statistics. That is, the 1:1600 figure is not, as Yirmeyahu claims, an estimate of the probability that the tomb is not that of Ribi Yehoshua. It is an estimate of the probability that, assuming that it is not his tomb, the inscriptions on the ossuaries would contain a cluster of names resembling those in the gospels as closely as they do. In statistical jargon, it is a conditional probability of the inscription evidence given the null hypothesis of no connection with Jesus/Yehoshua's family, not a posterior probability that there is a connection.

These two things may look similar, but they are entirely different, and confusing them as Yirmeyahu has done is an example of one version of the "prosecutor's fallacy", an all too common (and sometimes tragic) mistake made by those with limited mathematical understanding. If you don't see what the difference is, I hope the following story will help. (And I hope you come back here and re-read this if you're ever called to serve on a jury for a case involving DNA evidence or other statistical arguments. Someone's freedom or even their life could depend on it).

Suppose you and I meet for the first time, and I tell you I have magic powers, and can affect physical objects by the power of my thoughts alone. Understandably you are very sceptical, so you ask me to prove it.

"OK", I say. "But before I do, please write down on a piece of paper your current estimate of the probability that I really do have these powers". You think it's pretty unlikely, but you don't absolutely want to rule it out, so you write "1/1,000,000" on the paper, and because you feel a bit embarrassed, you put it away in your pocket before I can see it.

Then I say, "Take a coin out of your wallet. Look at it closely and make sure it's an ordinary coin, with a head and a tail, and no obvious damage. Then, start tossing it. I won't go near it, but every time it's in the air, I will exert my mind power and make it come down heads."

Ha, you think. You toss the coin. Heads. Lucky, you think. You toss it again. Heads again. And again. And again. Eleven times in a row.

"OK, stop." I say. "Now do you believe me? After all, the odds against that happening by chance are a half, times a half, eleven times. That's 1:2048."

"Yes, that's right", you say, frowning a little.

"So to put it another way," I go on, crossing my fingers behind my back and hoping no mathematicians are listening, "the chance that I don't have magic powers is a mere 1 in 2048. In other words, there's more than a 99.9% chance that I do. Is that enough for you?"

Now you definitely feel uncomfortable. Having seen all those heads, you feel less sure than before that I'm a charlatan, but on balance you still think I am. You certainly don't agree with my 99.9% claim. Surely something is wrong with my argument. What about that 1:1,000,000 number on the paper in your pocket? A million is a lot more than two thousand, after all. So you ask me if we can carry on with the experiment.

I agree. You toss the coin nine more times, and it's heads every time once again. But I am starting to look tired. "Stop", I say. "Sorry, but doing magic gives me a headache. I'm exhausted. That'll have to be it. Twenty heads in total, that's odds of more than a million (two multiplied by itself 20 times) to one. Surely you're convinced now?".

Now you are (or ought to be) very confused indeed. In fact, if you stick with your original estimate of the prior odds (in your pocket), you should be about as confused as it's possible to be. The two figures of one million should roughly cancel, so you should now say, having seen my demonstration, that you think it's fifty-fifty whether I can do magic or not. Note: fifty-fifty, not a million to one in favour of my powers. The prior odds are as important as the evidence that you subsequently witnessed. And this also means that, at the point when you had only seen eleven coin tosses, your odds for whether I could do magic were not 2048 to 1 as I tried to hoodwink you into believing, but 2048 to 1,000,000, or about 500 to one against. Obviously, this number depends entirely on your prior estimate, which you made independently of and prior to my demonstration, on the basis of your existing beliefs about the world.

Now let's switch from my magic powers (which, in case you're wondering, I don't have, as far as I'm aware) back to the Talpiot inscriptions. What Feuerverger is quite correctly saying is that, given various assumptions that he does his best to justify, the inscriptions being as close to the gospel names as they are is slightly less remarkable (1:1600 or thereabouts) than seeing a sequence of eleven heads in a row after I told you that's what I would cause to happen (1:2048) -- in both cases, given what statisticians call the "null hypothesis", that the claim being assessed (that it's Jesus's tomb, or that I have magic powers) is false and any apparent evidence for it is coincidental.

But what Feuerverger carefully does not do is to hazard a guess at a prior estimate (the piece of paper in the pocket). That is up to historians and archaeologists, not statisticians, and he is well aware of that, as various quotes from him on the web make clear. In other words, he doesn't claim what Yirmeyahu says he claims, because he doesn't have the other number he would need, being only a statistician. I don't have that number either, so I'm not going to say whether I think the claims about the tomb are right or not, though it does appear that the vast majority of experts don't think they are.

In summary, Feuerverger is doing something sensible and very interesting, but Yirmeyahu is completely misinterpreting him. The epithet "mathematically-challenged" (with or without the hyphen) now firmly points back at him, and I regard the repeated Netzarim claims that their system is based on logic and evidence as no more reliable than their leader's grasp of mathematical reasoning (or of Turkish history), and therefore not worth any further attention on my part.

And to forestall what may be the Netzarim objection that I haven't properly investigated the core of their beliefs (which is true), I will make another analogy. Suppose I want to buy a car, and suppose that I know almost nothing about cars except that I have quite a good knowledge of radio aerials and door handles. Someone tries to sell me a car, but I'm worried it may be a lemon. So before I pay a lot of money to a garage to check it out properly, I carefully inspect the aerial and the door handles. I notice that the aerial is rusting and that the handles are not those that the car originally came with. They could easily be replaced, and I have not looked at the important stuff, like the engine, at all, but still I feel entirely justified in declining the purchase, simply because what little I can evaluate convinces me that this unlikely enough to be a trustworthy vehicle that it's not worth investing anything further in it.

Reply to Eliyahu

2009-02-02T22:11:00.010Z

This post is, as promised, a reply to Eliyahu's two comments here. Other readers might want to read the whole Netzarim thread in this blog to get a sense of the story so far.

Eliyahu, thanks again for joining this conversation. I have appreciated your clarity and straightforwardness. There are many things I could say, but I will limit myself to two.

I had a look at the Netzarim Web Cafe as you suggested. I must admit I was disappointed. I didn't see anything there which challenges or disagrees with Netzarim beliefs. Rather, all I see is people humbly asking Yirmeyahu questions and gratefully receiving his wise answers. I don't really want to interact with anyone that way, unless I have prior reason to believe they are in possession of a wisdom and integrity far beyond my own. I could name several people I would place in that category, but I'm afraid that on the evidence available to me, Yirmeyahu isn't close to being among them, given his (I felt) insulting comments about the beliefs of a total stranger and his subsequent failure to answer the (I think very reasonable) question I asked him in response.

You say "Go back and try the Netzarim website until you start understanding." I'm afraid that won't do. Look at it from the reader's point of view: there are tens of thousands of web sites out there with all kinds of different messages, and quite a few of them communicate very effectively. If you (collectively) are really serious about reaching out to non-Jews -- as indeed you ought to be, if you believe that their "future in this life and after depends on it" -- then you have to be be willing to do the hard work of translating your message into a language they can understand. I mean "language" both in the narrow sense, of using words and concepts that readers can grasp without the use of a glossary, and in the broader sense of mental landscape or world view. It can be a huge task, and will involve listening to feedback from people like me which might sometimes be painful or difficult to hear, rather than just assuming you already have all the answers and know the best way to communicate them. But if you are serious about your mission, you will do it. If you do, I will read the results with interest, but until then, I think I've taken this as far as I'm willing to.

I fear all this sounds more negative than I would have wished, given that you have engaged with me very constructively. But it is my honest reaction to the material. I would only add that quite apart from the cultural issues, it is very hard to communicate across paradigms, as I observed in the post that started all this off, and I believe that is what we have been trying and perhaps failing to do. Anyway, I send you my best wishes.

Fish in the family

2009-02-01T21:09:00.012Z

Legend has it that someone a number of generations back in my family tree was a decidedly eccentric character, who every week would walk to the local fishmonger's, select a fish for his dinner and walk home again, pulling it behind him on a piece of string. Presumably he found that the bumps, bruises and road dust added subtlety to the flavour.

This man's name has not survived the passing of the generations, but perhaps his fish-appreciation gene has. Recently some friends gave his distant descendant The Bean (now nearly two) a book called "Where's the fish?", in which a small goldfish magically flies out of his tank and is then seen at various locations around the house, disguised as a flower, a sweet, or a blob on the curtain. The Bean takes great delight in pointing to him on each page and proclaiming "Shish".

Last week, having reached the end of this tome, he picked up a photo of Dora's brother getting married, pointed at him and confidently asserted "Shish". When presented with another wedding picture of the same hapless individual, he repeated his pronouncement. And the same thing happened several days later, on a morning when we hadn't even been looking at the fish book. I wish he had enough language to explain whether it's just Dora's brother who looks like a fish to him, or men in general, or specifically men in suits. I suspect it's the last of these, as he has never seen me wearing a suit since he started to talk, and has never called me a fish (to my face, at least).

I have written before in this blog about mythological aspects of fishhood, and the subject continues to fascinate me. Many people know that the symbol the early Christians used for Christ was a fish (the Greek word for fish forming an acronym for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour"), and the astrologically-minded also point out that Christianity began at the start of of the age of Pisces. And of course the gospels have stories about miraculous catches of fish and some of the disciples being fishermen.

In Hebrew and Aramaic, "Jesus" is the same name as "Joshua", and there is at least one interesting parallel between the two. This too leads into some fishy territory. Robert Price, in one of his "Bible Geek" MP3 downloads, says that the description "Joshua, son of Nun" (Numbers 11:28) is a very strange one, because Nun is not a Hebrew personal name, but means "fish". Price speculates that this is because Joshua, like all the other early Biblical heroes, was originally a god before the Jews became monotheists. This particular god was believed to be responsible for the earthquake that flattened Jericho, and apparently also to be the son of the fish god, Dagon. Sadly, Price doesn't address the obvious alternative theory that "Nun" was simply Joshua's father's nickname, perhaps inspired by his wedding photos.

It would be fascinating to follow up some of these strands, in the hope of one day discovering exactly what kind of fish is bumping along at the end of them.

Hopelessly Hellenic

2009-01-30T22:08:00.012Z

A week has gone by since Yirmeyahu's not-so-polite comment on my "Christianity 1.0" posting, and it's beginning to look as if he's not going to return to read my reply to him and engage in any dialogue. So I thought that I had better do as he said and attempt to "learn some history" at his Netzarim site.

It was not easy. The site bristles with underlinings, changes of font and colour, variable line spacings, unexplained phonetic symbols, and crossings-out of words he does not like, especially "Jesus". Computer geeks like me call this garish style of web design "shouting", with good reason.

Then just when I thought I might be getting somewhere despite the style of delivery, I would be derailed by a Hebrew word that I did not understand. (I will freely admit there are not many Hebrew words that I do understand). The site has an extensive glossary, but it complicates things to have to refer to it every few lines, and I finally admitted defeat when I came across an article with the snappy title "Spirit of (Torah-defined) Qodesh Cannot Mingle With ie-hav-dil, Physical khol".

I did learn several things, though. Or at least I think I did.

The most obvious thing was that Yirmeyahu -- or to give him his full title, "Netzarim Paqid 16, The Honorable Paqid of the Netzarim, Yirmeyahu Ben-David" -- is absolutely convinced of the correctness of his own beliefs, and if I don't agree with them, not only am I "believing nonsense" as he told me directly in his comment, but I must be misojudaic, which is even worse than being anti-Semitic. (It appears this would be the case even if I was Jewish).

I also learned that the very worst thing anyone of a religious persuasion can be is Hellenic, as apparently virtually all Christians have been at least since they supplanted the true Jerusalem church after the Romans put down the Bar Kochba rebellion in 135 AD. The chief inspiration of these Hellenic Christians was the "apostate Paul", who was in rebellion against the true "Ribi Yehoshua" and invented his own idolatrous Christ figure.

The third thing was that the said apostate Paul was a "Hellenist Turkish-Jew". With my eager history-student hat on, I could not help remembering that the Turks did not arrive in Paul's part of the world until many centuries after he lived. I expect Yirmeyahu would say that the phrase is legitimate because Paul came from what is now Turkey. But by that reasoning, the Emperor Constantine was a Serb, Augustine of Hippo was an Algerian, and Daniel, Abraham and perhaps Adam and Eve into the bargain were all Iraqis, a conclusion I can well imagine Yirmeyahu might not be entirely comfortable with.

I also failed to learn several things.

One was anything about what Ribi Yehoshua said or did, or how we might know anything significant about the true pre-135 AD Jewish church if the beastly Gentiles destroyed all the evidence. Indeed, I couldn't really see much sign of anything Yirmeyahu might believe that would differentiate him significantly from mainstream Orthodox Judaism.

Another thing I failed to learn was anything at all that might attract me, as a hopelessly Hellenized non-Jew mired in sin and idolatrous Christ-worship, to find out more. The whole site seemed motivated mainly by anger against the Church for what it's done to Jews and Judaism over the centuries. I don't in any way wish to minimize the truly appalling ways Christians have often treated Jews, or the undoubted misojudaism in some parts of the New Testament itself, particularly John's gospel. But if Yirmeyahu wants to reach out to others, something positive is needed. Does God love us? I believe so, but if I didn't, I don't think I would pick up that piece of good news from Yirmeyahu's writings.

I think I eventually gleaned from the site that Yirmeyahu accepts the gospel of Matthew, at least in part, but possibly none of the rest of the New Testament. That is a neat move, in a way. At one stroke, he escapes the need to worry about the massive contradictions between the four gospels (there is only one reliable one), and about why Paul and the other apostate apostles never mention the earthly life of Jesus/Yehoshua (they knew about him all right, but they wanted to bury the evidence).

As a mathematician, I find such logical consistency aesthetically pleasing, but whether there's any truth in it is another matter.

Yirmeyahu, if you see this, we can still talk.

The writing on the door

2009-01-28T20:16:00.003Z

One of the more dramatic share price stories of recent months has been that of Barclays' Bank, whose shares lost 70% of their value over the course of 10 days as a result of various rumours, and then rather surprisingly gained 70% (which of course didn't take them back to anywhere near where they were before) after the Chairman wrote everyone a letter saying everything was OK really. Whether he had his fingers crossed behind his back as he dictated his missive is not recorded.

I was cycling to work this morning and saw a graffito written in the dirt on the back door of a van. Usually such efforts display the rather limited originality of old favourites such as "clean me". But this is Flatchester, which has a world-famous university and the country's highest percentage of people who know that "erudite" is not a type of glue*. It must have been one of their number who had inscribed carefully in the grime on this particular van, "Faster than a Barclays' share".

It seems to me there has never been a better time to lay up treasure in heaven, even though it would presumably fall outside the scope of the Government's deposit protection scheme.

*In case you're wondering which research council squandered your taxes on the study that came up with that particular result, let me remind you that 90% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

In praise of defeat

2009-01-26T18:41:00.003Z

I don't usually have a lot of time for Calvinism, but when it comes to supporting a football (soccer) team, the doctrine of predestination makes a lot of sense. Some are born to support multi-millionaire teams like Manchester United and Chelsea and can spend their lives suffused with the joy and vicarious glory of regular additions of bling to the club's trophy cabinet. Others, like me, end up as West Bromwich Albion fans, with all the gloom and misery that entails. "Success" for us consists of managing to stay in the Premier League for more than one season at a time while avoiding too many six-goal thrashings by the rich boys. You might wonder why we do it, but we can't really remember a time when we weren't Albion supporters, and it doesn't feel as if any free choice was ever involved.

I recently attended a reunion of mathematics students from my college. There were participants ranging from a 1937 entrant right up (or down) to current students. I was very struck by how friendly everyone was; unlike other such events I have been to, no-one seemed to have any points to prove or egos that needed massaging or propping up. People I remembered well, or only a little, or not at all, were all equally happy to talk, and about all sorts of subjects. Age, academic position, choice of career, and worldly success just didn't seem to matter.

I think part of the reason for this may have been the effect that studying maths full time tends to have on people. It's like being a West Bromwich Albion supporter: there are no easy victories, many defeats, and a lot of hard slog. This is true at all levels of mathematical ability, because either at some stage you decide the whole thing's too hard to carry on with and you admit defeat and go and do something easier, or you stay put and make it your career, and in that case you can look forward to years of following fruitless leads, chasing the wind and being plain baffled. There are huge potential satisfactions too, but it weeds out those with certain kinds of fragile ego, and instills plenty of humility in the rest. I've come to believe that the end result is, on average, quite a psychologically healthy population.

Christianity is, of course, meant to be the same in a sense. You only get in there when you realize you need help, that you need rescuing, that you need God. There is no room for self-regarding pride.

I'm not saying there are no arrogant Christians or arrogant mathematicians. There certainly are; and there may even be a few arrogant Albion fans, though I can't remember meeting any. But in every case, I think pride is a sign of having forgotten what the "beautiful game", whichever one it is, is all about.

Christianity 1.0

2009-01-22T21:32:00.009Z

I've been listening to some audio downloads featuring the self-styled Bible Geek, Dr Robert Price, a theology professor, former member of the Jesus Seminar and co-founder of the even more interesting Jesus Project, which aims to bring several dozen experts together over a period of five years to really sift through the evidence for and against the existence of a (first-century, under-Pontius-Pilate) Jesus.

One of the most interesting downloads is a recording of a debate at UCLA between Price and Gregory Boyd, a conservative scholar and co-author of "The Jesus Legend: a case for the historical reliability of the Synoptic Jesus tradition." I haven't read the book, but it is reputed to be one of the best of a (small) bunch that argue against the "Jesus Myth" position held by Price, Wells, Doherty and others (including me). Price certainly respects Boyd, while he is caustically dismissive of many other conservatives for what he sees as their lack of true scholarship.

I was interested to observe my own reactions in listening to the debate. I was unsurprised that I found Price's arguments by and large convincing. I was surprised, though, at how weak Boyd's seemed to me and how many obvious objections occurred to me. I thought he spent a lot of time arguing against positions that Price does not hold and had not argued for.

But I expect other listeners, with different views from mine, would have reacted in exactly the opposite way. Why is this?

I'm sure it's not (or at least not always) a matter of intelligence or well-informedness. That is, I think we are dealing here with something beyond reason, beyond rational persuasion. Thomas Kuhn's notion of the "paradigm" is helpful here. A paradigm is a way, shared by many individuals in a culture, of organizing one's understanding of a whole area of life. It determines what seems plausible or obvious and what seems unlikely or impossible: sometimes so impossible as not to deserve serious consideration. It also determines what sorts of evidence one is drawn to look at. The human mind has a strong propensity towards "confirmation bias" which draws one's attention to evidence that tends to confirm views one already holds. Presumably this has some sort of survival value, but it's exactly the opposite of what the scientific method requires.

So paradigms are tenacious things. Paradigm changes only occur within a culture when the new paradigm makes so much better sense than the old that, even if existing believers in the old never change their minds, the new generation will be drawn to the new paradigm. Cases in point are the Copernican revolution and (an incomplete shift, given the continuing popularity of creationism) Darwinian evolution. One could construct a list of new paradigms that have not succeeded yet, but might one day: for example Rupert Sheldrake's scientific work, ecologically-based awareness, and of course the "Jesus myth" paradigm.

Thus our holding the views that we do has an only partially rational basis. At least as important (I suspect much more so for most people) is how different views make us feel. It's something between disconcerting and terrifying for many people to go against the tide and switch to a minority paradigm or to one that none of their friends believe in. Equally important is how a given paradigm reassures us, or fails to. It's undeniably comforting (independently of whether it's true) to believe that God cares for each of us individually and that everything that happens is part of a lovingly-crafted plan.

I think these non-rational factors are the main reason that Price and his friends have persuaded so few conservative Christians to change their views. In particular, it seems to be generally assumed that if you buy into the "Jesus myth", you necessarily lose your faith, and that of course can (at least beforehand) seem like a big disaster, socially, emotionally, and not least in terms of one's eternal destiny.

So here's an alternative. It's a personal one, but maybe it will make enough sense to you to suggest that an authentic Christian faith does not have to be dependent on belief in a historical Jesus of the kind portrayed in the four Gospels.

If the Jesus myth proponents are right, then first century Christians had no knowledge of the life on earth of a Gospel-style historical Jesus. (I'm assuming a date for the Gospels of around AD 100 here). But they did, to put it mildly, appear to have an extremely vibrant faith, expressed very well in the epistles of the New Testament.

Now there is a widespread assumption among evangelical Christians that the original, first-century form of Christianity is the best and is the one we should aspire to. Subsequent centuries, especially from the time of Constantine, provide a pretty dismal story of compromise with worldly power and a loss of spiritual vitality. But back in the first century, things were really buzzing: miracles, evangelization, genuine community, faithfulness in the face of severe persecution. That's one reason why most evangelicals pay so little attention to any (post-Biblical) Christian history.

I have to admit that that assumption is one that I have always carried with me, from my years as an evangelical right up to the present, irrespective of my complete change of mind about what first-century Christians actually believed. I have always found reading the New Testament epistles rewarding. There's plenty I don't agree with, but I find them straightforward (they fairly clearly are what they seem to be, letters from Christian leaders to churches, warts and all), and most importantly, I have a gut conviction that they speak the truth about God, about Christ and about how spiritual life is to be found and developed.

In contrast, even when I believed the Gospels expressed (approximate) historical truth, I was bothered by something about them. I could well imagine being a member of one of the churches Paul wrote to, but the atmosphere of the gospels always seemed far removed from ordinary life. In their style, they seemed halfway (though only halfway) to being legends.

Because of this, I've found that discarding any belief in their historical veracity has simplified my faith and allowed me to relate to God in a much more uncomplicated way. I now have something more like a clear combination of convictions about some things and outright disbelief in others, rather than a lukewarm mishmash of doubting faith. This has helped my prayer life enormously and I think I am much happier for that.

If "Christianity 1.0" -- the first-century kind -- worked for Paul and all his friends, then why shouldn't something analogous (though inevitably different, because of the huge cultural gap between now and then) work just as well for us too?

In fact, why shouldn't it be better than version 2.0, in which, if the Jesus Myth paradigm is correct, some major and quite unnecessary bugs were introduced?

A national disgrace

2009-01-18T10:26:00.010Z

This week I am ashamed to be British.

You may somewhere along the line have picked up the idea that the UK is doing its best to lead the world in tackling climate change. Well, if it is, it's now leading it in exactly the wrong direction. On Thursday, the government announced that it would allow Heathrow Airport to be expanded with a third runway. This was done without our elected representatives in Parliament even being allowed to vote on it. The MP whose constituency includes Heathrow called this shoddy procedure a "national disgrace", and was promptly ejected from the chamber for manhandling the mace (something MPs only ever do when they're really, really cross, because they know it will get them thrown out). And this MP is a member of the governing party, from which I trust he will now resign if he is a man of integrity. [Update, four months later: he still hasn't. Amusingly, though, the front page of his web site gives no clue to which party he belongs to. You have to poke about a bit to find the dreaded word "Labour"].

Air travel surely must be the first thing to be reduced if any government anywhere ever decides it's serious about climate change. Not only is it hugely more damaging to the environment than other forms of transport, but most of it is unnecessary. We have to keep warm, we have to eat, we have to get to work, and a lot of this requires CO2 to be emitted, at least in the short to medium term. But we hardly ever really have to fly.

At least we now know why the government has created the new ministerial post of Climate Change Secretary. After all, they have a Health Secretary to maximize the nation's health, and an Education Secretary to bring about as much education as possible, so why should we ever have imagined the Climate Change Secretary would be an exception to the rule?

I am really, really cross, and plan to manhandle the next mace I come across.

Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue

2009-01-17T14:17:00.005Z

So Obama is going to Washington by train.

It's a nice eco-friendly gesture, but I'm getting anxious already. What if the train is late, as trains so often are, and Bush claims four more years by dint of his successor not showing up for the ceremony?

Music for life

2009-01-11T21:20:00.016Z

I've put together an hour or so of my favourite music, much of it enthused about elsewhere in this blog, and called it Trimorph's music for life, both because I find it life-giving, and because I've been listening to some of it since I was fourteen, so I'll probably be stuck with it for the rest of my life.

It's very eclectic. If you hate one track, just click on to the next, which with any luck will be totally different. If you get to the end of the list that way in no time at all, well, thanks for having a go.

I love it when people listen to some music I play and say "ohh..." as a place in their heart opens up that's never been opened before. It happens all too rarely, though every single song in "music for life" represents one time it's happened to me (except maybe for a couple which sneaked in on the strength of merely being really good tunes).

Some late-night musings on the tracks follow.

"Leave out all the rest", Linkin Park.

"When my time comes
Forget the wrong that I've done
Help me leave behind some reason to be missed
And don't resent me, but when you're feeling empty
Keep me in your memory, leave out all the rest...
I'm strong on the surface, not all the way through..."

When my time comes, this is the song I hope those close to me will listen to. It's much gentler than the rest of Linkin Park's music. But the rest, with all its anguished screaming, is equally wonderful. Listen, and be healed.

"The King Will Come", Wishbone Ash

My favourite track from what has been my favourite album ever since 1973. Twin lead guitars played to absolute and total perfection. King Jesus or King Arthur? Neither seems likely to turn up any time soon, but maybe the mist rising over cold English fields in the early morning is enough.

"Charming the Flames", Fields

How come this band is so completely obscure? Does raw, oozing, overflowing, superfluous musical genius count for nothing whatsoever? Why did they cancel their Flatchester gig in autumn 2008? Is there no justice? "Fate, fragile in our hands..."

"A Dream like Mine", Bruce Cockburn

"When you know even for a moment
that it's your time
Then you can walk with the power
of a thousand generations"

Bruce has been playing for about thousand generations it seems, and walking with power through every album. A true pilgrim.

"By Northern Light", Oysterband

"Walking away
You were walking away for ever
No more to say
End of heart's endeavour
Fear and beauty shake my heart
Memories pursue me
Not to let them break my heart
I let the wave roll through me"

Let it roll. It does end, and when it does, only the beauty remains.

Another song by these guys made me agree to walk two hundred miles through northern Spain along the road to Santiago in 1998 on my first date with Dora.

"Warakurna", Midnight Oil

"There is enough, the law is carved in granite...
This land must change or land must burn."

Discovering Midnight Oil was my musical landmark of the nineties. Their singer Peter Garrett left the band to try to change the land by becoming the Australian Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts. If his second career is even half as inspired as his first, then the land will change.

"Heaven", Live

"I don't need no one to tell me about heaven
I look at my daughter, and I believe."

Mine's a boy, but I know just what he means.

"The Future", Leonard Cohen

"Things are going to slide in all directions...
The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold
And it's overcome the order of the soul...
When they said 'Repent', I wonder what they meant...
Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima..."

I hope we listen, because I really don't think it's possible to fudge that particular choice.

"To Another Abyss", Bad Religion

"To another abyss
To no avail
The search is bound to fail...
So long ago I set sail
And it chills me to the bone
That I'm so far away from home"

Mystical atheism, achieving the marriage of opposites through ruthless honesty and very loud guitar playing. They'd probably hate to hear me say so, but this song reminds me strongly of St John of the Cross, who wrote similarly of "one abyss calling to another abyss".

"Vicarious", Tool

"I don't want to think about what has come to pass
I don't want to think about what will come of us
I just want to live this moment knowing what I am...
Vicariously I live while the whole world dies
You all needn't choose your own lie"

There is such a creature within each of us. The music is beyond words, so I won't try.

"Ballad of Big and Rich", Big and Rich

I was listening to this track while climbing a very long hill on another very long walk with Dora (she was some way ahead) when I missed a turning and we spent an hour searching for each other through brambles, rocks, and two-thousand-year-old ruins. But without the energy it gave me, I probably wouldn't have made it to the top at all.

"Not Ready to Make Nice", Dixie Chicks

"Forgive? Sounds good...Forget? I'm not sure I could.
They say time heals everything, but I'm still waiting...
I'm not ready to make nice, I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell,
I can't bring myself to do what it is you think I should..."

Don't rush to judgment, but don't rush to forgiveness either.

"So Shall It Be", k d lang

"I can exist being caught by your kiss
Willingly
Or grant you control
Of my body and soul
Ask it and so shall it be."

Can music ever reach absolute perfection? Listen, and decide for yourself.

"Second Choice", Any Trouble

"A simple life is all I need
Two shots of fantasy and one of make-believe..."

This song is not great, or epic, or epoch-making, or mystical, but I find myself listening to it and the rest of the album over and over again. This band of hugely talented but uniformly ugly musicians proved beyond all reasonable doubt that good looks are the only absolute requirement for commercial success.

"Love is Stronger than Death", The The

"Love, love, love, is stronger than death...
When the rivers run high and the tears run dry...
When everything that dies shall rise"

Someone I cared about took his own life, and I think about him whenever I listen to this. You can play it at my funeral, too. The lyrics are appropriately copyrighted by "Lazarus Ltd".

"Rain Down", Delirious

"Living water we desire,
to flood our hearts with holy fire
Rain down ...
Give me strength to cross this water..."

Being in this band for sixteen years has made all the members' hair fall out, except for the lead singer. But I expect they would say it was worth it. I sneaked into one of their concerts as a token heretic, and thought they were pretty good.

"I wish we'd all been ready", Larry Norman

"Life was filled with guns and war
And everyone got trampled on the floor.
I wish we'd all been ready. ...
There's no time to change your mind,
The Son has come and you've been left behind."

As Dr Robert Price will explain to you, the theology behind this song is all wrong, even if you believe in a literal second coming of Jesus (for myself, I have enough trouble believing in the first). But Larry Norman, who died last year, was unquestionably the pioneer of Christian rock music. His final message read, "I feel like a prize in a box of cracker jacks with God's hand reaching down to pick me up ... Goodbye, farewell, we will meet again."

Just look

2009-01-11T14:19:00.008Z

This blog is officially about three things: mainstream Christianity, Gnosticism and science. But I'm aware there's been relatively little science and even less Gnosticism in it recently. So maybe it's time to put those three unlikely bedfellows on parade here. What is at the core of them? What's the attraction?

Christianity (even though I can't believe most of its truth claims these days) offers a spiritual path that I think is superior to any other I have ever encountered. It is the road to life, par excellence, through loving relationship with God, who is, in a way I can no even begin to make sense of, human as well as divine. I am aware that is a strong statement, and I have no wish to denigrate any other spiritual paths, so I should be clear that I am writing completely subjectively. For me to jettison Christian faith would be a betrayal at the deepest level.

It is therefore a source of ongoing pain to me that I don't find that the traditional evidence for the existence of a literal, historical Jesus stacks up. It isolates me: in broad-brush terms, I can truly relax neither with the atheists (with whom I agree only about external history) nor with the Christians (with whom I share a connection to the Divine but few beliefs -- and beliefs are really important).

Science is for me a spiritual discipline. In any sphere, its ongoing challenge is to look as dispassionately as possible at evidence. What is true is independent of what I already think is true or would like to be true. Just looking at evidence like this can be very challenging. It leads to a lot of self-questioning: am I really admitting the full spectrum of evidence or only what tends to confirm what I already believe? My attempts to do this right are what lead me to be both a mystic and a sceptic. A mystic, because I dare not discount the experiential evidence of prayer and meditation. A sceptic, because the writings of Wells, Ellegard and others about the origins of Christianity ring very true to me. It's not comfortable, but I don't see that I can stand anywhere else.

By the way, I recommend the podcasts on the skeptiko web site as a fine example of true scientific scepticism: an attempt to give full weight to all the evidence about the nature of the universe, rather than, as most so-called sceptics do, to dismiss what doesn't fit into a neat rationalist framework.

I struggle with Gnosticism. That's partly because although Flatchester is overrun with both Christians and scientists, self-confessed or even aspiring gnostics are either absent or in hiding, and it's tough to plough on without a community. But it's also because the Gnostic scriptures from the early centuries of the Christian era are full of weird images. I can believe in their literal truth even less than that of the four gospels -- and indeed, I don't think their authors intended them to be taken literally. No, Gnosticism, as an -ism or philosophy, will never make sense on its own. What's important is gnosis: the direct experiential knowing of ultimate reality. If there's something real there -- and I think there is -- then the many writings have to be seen as organized around it, as being intended as aids to entering more deeply into gnosis and of making it an ongoing state rather than an occasional glimpse or "peek experience".

So I try to be as open as possible to all kinds of truth: evidential/rational, symbolic, sensory, meditative, intuitive. To me, Christianity, science and Gnosticism are vehicles for different (though overlapping) kinds of truth, and I would ignore any one of them at my peril. I need to continue to "just look", with eyes as wide open as possible, including the ones in the back of my head, if I can find them.

If and when I get to be old enough, I would like to found the University of the Third Eye.

Radiate, don't coagulate

2009-01-11T13:44:00.010Z

I keep quoting bits from "Meditations on the Tarot" in this blog. Perhaps you stop reading when I do.

Many people have never looked seriously at the Tarot and are suspicious of it, or downright uncomfortable. It conjures up some rather disturbing images...the Tower of Destruction, Death, the Hanged Man. How can it have anything in common with Christian faith? Well, maybe these images aren't what they first seem.

I've been looking at the "Hanged Man" chapter in "Meditations" recently. The picture on the card in the Marseilles deck (used in the book) is not that of an executed corpse on a gibbet. It's of a man, very much alive, hanging upside down by one foot, with his hands tied behind his back. It must be a painful position, but he looks relaxed, even nonchalant. Paradoxes abounding.

The French name of the card is "Le Pendu", which I think could be translated "The suspended one". The author of Meditations starts his discussion of it by introducing the theme of gravitation: ordinary earthly gravitation which pulls us downwards, or pulls massive bodies towards each other, and celestial gravitation, or attraction from above, towards God. The one leads to coagulation, to the ultimately idolatrous absolutization of relative, created things. The other, celestial, one leads to radiation: "The righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father" (Matthew 13:43).

Quoting Galatians 5:17, about the desires of the flesh and of the Spirit being opposed to each other, the author says:

These "opposing desires" are the tendencies through which the two gravitational fields manifest themselves. The man who lives in the grip of gravitation of "this world" at the expense of the gravitation of "heaven" is the "carnal man"; he who lives in equilibrium between the two gravitational fields is the "psychic man"; and, lastly, the one who lives under the sway of the gravitation of "heaven" is the "spiritual man" ...The Hanged Man represents the condition of one in the life of whom gravitation from above has replaced that from below.

So instead of being a gruesome image of death, the "Hanged Man" begins to look more like an invitation to life, an example to follow.

There are many more surprises, and much wisdom, in the Tarot, and in the book of Meditations on it. I also recommend the on-line book on the Tarot in the "Church of Yahweh" website -- and indeed, the whole site. Its author shows no signs of having read "Meditations", but also finds the Tarot images symbolic of the Christian spiritual path.

May we be with the Force

2008-12-20T20:40:00.012Z

This post is pretty much a follow-on to the previous one, "The world within", which I recommend you read first if this one is not to make even less sense than it probably will anyway. Here, I want to weave together the work of two people from different religious traditions, writing forty years apart, who have probably never heard of each other, but who are, I think, saying something very similar and vitally important.

Along with Joanna Macy's "World as Lover, World as Self", which I talked about last time, I have been reading Letter XI of Meditations on the Tarot, "Force" (see "Worth a look", above right, for more on this astonishing book). The "Force" card from the Tarot deck shows a woman effortlessly holding apart the jaws of a lion. The anonymous author of the book starts by observing that this immediately presents us with a puzzle. No woman can exert sufficient force, in the commonly-understood sense, to overcome a lion's jaws. So something other than "brute force" must be meant here.

The title of Macy's book arises from its first chapter, where she presents four ways of looking at the world: world as battlefield, world as trap, world as lover, world as self. Not surprisingly, she is less than keen on the first two, particularly "world as battlefield", which is where we picture existence as a battle between good and evil, with ourselves (of course) on the side of good. Many environmental campaigners see life in that way, and it leads, she says, to self-righteousness, frustration and burnout.

I think she is right. I think that kind of us-versus-them campaigning is an (entirely understandable) example of trying to wage war through conventional force; moral and intellectual force rather than physical force, but force nonetheless. The jaws of our world-destroying economic system cannot be overcome in that way. If you're going to stare into the throat of the Beast, your courage is to be saluted, but you'd better come up with a more effective strategy.

For the author of "Meditations", (true) Force has many names. It is the life force ("zoe" rather than "bios", for the Greek scholars). It is the waters flowing from the throne of God. It is holy animality, the kingdom of God in and through the unconscious. It is virginity. It is Mary.

He quotes the Emerald Tablet, the core text of Hermeticism, which says that Force "overcometh every subtle thing and doth penetrate every solid substance". He asks how it is that Force can overcome solid obstacles, and answers himself this way:

"By action opposite to that of explosion, i.e. by emollient action. With regard to a mental obstacle presented by a rigid intellectual system, Force will not occupy itself with the mental formation itself, but will admit its breath into the heart of the person concerned. The heart having tasted life ("zoe"), the creative movement of life will pass its breath to the head and will breathe movement into the mental formation. This latter, having been set in motion -- not by doubt, but rather by creative elan -- will lose its rigidity and become fluid. It is thus that the liquefaction of crystallised mental formations is effected.

"With regard to psychic [psychological] obstacles, it is again emollient action which effects the transformation of a psychic complex from rigidity into sensitivity. Here again it is the breath of life which dissolves the complex, by way of the heart so that the mistrust, fear or hate concentrated in the complex is dispersed and the soul is left free of the blinding influence of the psychic complex."

We will start to change when we get a glimpse of the world as our lover; of the world as our self. Then we will be able to really take on board the science and the moral arguments. Then we will not have to force ourselves to tread more lightly on the earth. It will hurt too much to do anything else.

We will change when we fall in love.

O breath of life, come sweeping through us.

The world within

2008-12-18T22:00:00.011Z

This will be one of those posts where it's a relief to be anonymous.

I have been stuck for years, and I want to get unstuck.

I was a campaigner for a long time. My parents were environmentalists, and belonged to the Green Party before it was even called the Green Party. During the eighties, I was active in CND. Then the Berlin Wall came down, and my focus shifted away from nuclear weapons to a more gradual but just as deadly threat to life, that of climate change. For five years I slogged away in Green organizations, both Christian and secular. During that time, environmental issues rose up the political agenda. But...in practice, nothing much changed.

I was left with questions. Why did the vast majority of people, even those with the intelligence and opportunity to really appreciate the situation, just not do anything significant about it? I used to knock on people's doors during election campaigns to try to get them to vote Green. Nearly everyone was friendly, but the most typical response was "well, we recycle our newspapers..." -- as if that was one tenth of one per cent of an adequate response to what they and the rest of us were doing to wreck the planet. I also saw how the effectiveness of campaigns was limited by the personalities of those who ran them. A lot of the campaigners, almost certainly including myself, were just a pain to work with.

These two factors caused me to look inwards, to try to understand people's motivation (or lack of it) and why personalities so often sabotaged the work. I got into psychotherapy and eventually trained and worked for a while as a counsellor. I also started meditating every day, and have kept at it; the practice has become the linchpin of my life. Together, these two things brought me alive and made me feel much more vital and more human. Whether I was nicer to be with is for others to judge, but I certainly liked myself much better.

After about five years of this, I quite suddenly felt I'd done enough work healing the past. My personal pain, at least in the sense of things I could link to my childhood, had pretty much gone. It felt like stepping out into a wide open space. I left therapy and soon afterwards stopped my counselling work. I just didn't feel I needed to do it any more.

Then, over a couple of years, everything went wrong, or so it seemed. I went numb. I stopped wanting to be with people. Meditation became an empty emptiness, not a full one. My energy veered away from emotional matters to intellectual ones. The words of a song by Leonard Cohen seemed to express it well: "Things are going to slide, slide in all directions; won't be nothing you can measure any more. The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overcome the order of the soul." The song was called "The Future", and I despaired of the human race ever coming to its senses. George Bush's "victory" over Al Gore in the 2000 US presidential election epitomized that. There seemed no point in going back to any campaigning. I continued to try to limit my personal environmental impact as much as possible, not because I thought it would make any difference in the end, but just in order to allow myself to have some self-respect.

I have been stuck in that despair for nearly ten years. It hasn't been fun. Neither therapy nor antidepressants have really touched it. I have never been someone who can habitually shift my attention away from what I believe to be the truth in favour of something more cheerful. I have thought a lot about death, personal and planetary, and have tried to develop a spiritual life that stares it in the face and carves out some meaning to existence in spite of it. But it's been very inward-looking.

Now, at last, something is shifting. This year, the election news from the US is, I think, very, very good. Obama seems to me to be not just likeable and inspiring but highly intelligent, a genuinely good man, and perhaps above all, deeply sensible. Maybe this will look silly in a year's time, but I do expect him to make a serious attempt to point his country and the world in a saner direction. For the last couple of mornings, as I've woken up, a prayer has surfaced: "Oh God, please keep him safe". The ending of Bush's disastrous presidency symbolizes something vital within me, too, though I can't give a name to it.

I have been reading. One book is called "Global Warning: the last chance for change". The author, who is the Guardian newspaper's long-time environment correspondent, insists that change is possible, but he shows just how close we are to the tipping point where the carbon dioxide we've already pumped into the atmosphere is likely to trigger positive feedback loops, leading to runaway warming that would make the earth largely or totally uninhabitable for human beings. We must change, radically and very, very soon. A few years, not a few decades. If Obama doesn't grasp the opportunity, the next person to step up to the plate may be too late.

I've also started to read Joanna Macy's "World as lover, world as self". She writes from a Buddhist position, and emphasizes how embedded we are in the world, and the world in us. I chose the title of this post, "The World Within", to refer not (just) to the inner world but to the outer world with which we have such a strong connection that it is effectively inside us, too. If Planet Earth is shrieking in pain and close to death then anyone with a heart cannot escape the resulting suffering (and we all have hearts, open or closed).

My self-diagnosis: the world situation is so painful to me that I have shut myself down and only allowed myself to know about it intellectually. Macy has a chapter on "Despair Work" which is very affirming of despair. She describes a ritual where participants gather in a circle around four objects: dead leaves for despair; a stone for fear; a stick for anger; and an empty bowl for confusion. They each pick one of these things up and say whatever comes. I want to pick them all up together and just scream. I know all of them far, far better than I would have chosen to.

Joanna Macy insists that it's not just the campaigners, or ex-campaigners, who feel this stuff. It's virtually everyone. Those who appear indifferent, who choose to live their lives as if there was no crisis, do so not because they are unaware of its seriousness but because they cannot bear to look at it squarely. Hence the many and widespread forms of self-medication: alcohol, computer games, fast cars, television and all the rest; a broken relationship with Mother Earth hurts at least as much as a broken relationship with one's literal parents. Hence, also, the relentless increase, in both numbers and severity, of mental illness in its various forms. Effectively, nearly everyone is insane. That's the only explanation for our collective idiocy.

I don't know exactly what I'll do, but even if a positive outcome for the planet is very much in doubt, I know I'd rather spend my life acting with integrity than acting without it or not acting at all.

Lost for words

2008-12-06T13:53:00.002Z

A wonderful moment on the Today programme on BBC Radio Four on Thursday, very early. (Yes, I was up with The Bean).

The programme was being hosted by two regular presenters, John Humphyrs and Sarah Montague. Humphrys is famous as a masterful interviewer, who for decades has been getting the better of seasoned politicians of all colours, and has written a book called "Lost for Words", which he himself never is. Well, almost never. It went like this...

Humphrys (reviewing the newspapers): "There's a story here about a 176-year-old tortoise on St Helena who is reckoned to be the world's oldest living animal. It says that he's lost his sight in one eye, but he obviously doesn't let that cramp his style, as he regularly mates with three females. That's quite something, isn't it. 176 years old, and he's got three mistresses."

Montague: "Oh to be a tortoise, eh, John?"

Humphrys: "Er, um...er..."

Dream

2008-11-13T22:16:00.001Z

Scene One: someone I used to work with years ago, and with whom I've never felt a particularly close connection, says to me: "There's an enormous amount of fear in your life. You must find a way to let go of it."

Scene Two: a close friend, one of the wisest and most compassionate people I know, says: "You have to search for the light. Really, really search for it. And keep on searching. Don't ever give up." Her male counterpart (who? there's no such person in "real" life) silently nods his agreement.

I wake up, thoughtful. Yes, this has to be my focus. For the next several days, meditation is easy, silence is deep and total, I am calm. It brings back memories of a time in my life when I often felt this way. I read David Spangler and Eileen Caddy, two Findhorn pioneers I've paid almost no attention to for years.

I realise that somehow, the "fear" my first friend was referring to is closely linked to "Christianity", or at least the version of it that still sloshes around in my system.

Mission to the humans

2008-11-10T21:58:00.008Z

Do you know your apes from your monkeys? Do you know who you are? I believe it can be a useful spiritual exercise to ponder our close connections to our ape and monkey brothers and sisters.

A useful though not infallible rule of thumb is: if it's got a tail, it's a monkey, otherwise it's an ape. So we're apes, along with the chimps, gorillas, orang utans and gibbons, while the baboons, mandrills and macaques are the other lot. Though actually, we're monkeys really, because the apes evolved as an offshoot of the monkeys.

Around seven million years ago, our ape ancestors lived in the forests right across central Africa. Then the climate dried out, the trees in the east largely disappeared, and the apes there were forced onto the savannah of modern-day Ethiopia and Kenya, a challenging environment which eventually led them to evolve the capabilities to exterminate other species, invent Creationism and write interminable blog postings, though apparently not yet to develop a spiritual practice capable of eradicating the longstanding family tendency to fight each other over territory. Meanwhile, their cousins further west became the gorillas, chimps and bonobos, with whom we still share 99% of our DNA.

Could it even be that the Garden of Eden story originates in dim memories of a more innocent life in the forests from which our forebears were evicted? If so, would the Bonobo Bible read very differently from ours?

According to Wikipedia (so it must be true), a group of monkeys may be referred to as a mission. Perhaps, in that case, they have a message for us. Perhaps we had better listen before it's too late.

A touch of class

2008-11-10T21:42:00.002Z

The Bean has had an ear infection recently. Coincidentally, Dora's dentist told her that we really do have the clean his teeth thoroughly whether he likes it or not. And to cap it all, his (the Bean's) fingernails had got rather long. Therefore after his bath on Friday, he was subjected to a long sequence of medical interventions: cutting his fingernails, syringing antibiotic yellow goo into his mouth, cleaning his teeth, and pouring olive oil into both ears. He was understandably upset after all this, and couldn't sleep, so we watched a recording of the Eagles playing in a BBC studio in 1972.

Between us, he and I had what must be the two commonest reactions to the Eagles. I was blown away by their first class musicianship and songwriting. He meanwhile went to straight to sleep and started snoring loudly.

On Saturday morning, the three of us made a foray into another world: that of the English "upper class"; I prefer to use the term "owning class" as it sounds less, well, one-up. The Bean will be ready for school in a mere three years time, so the foray in question was a visit to the open day of a local prep school, which I will call St Fees, in honour of the fees.

We were greeted at the door by the headmaster's wife (that's how she introduced herself). She did that nose-wrinkling thing that only owning-class English women seem to be able to perform and which I last saw demonstrated in the early eighties. Everybody seemed very friendly, but having just stepped off our bikes, we felt slightly underdressed, both on our own behalf and on the Bean's, who soon concluded this was a good school because it had puddles to jump in. Before long he looked decidedly oik-like.

The headmaster gave a presentation, accompanied by two of what he called "visual aids", which as far as I could tell from the back of the room were actually children, but seemed to be there mainly as evidence of the quality of the finished product churned out by the school. The head sounded just like Alan Bennett in his sermon from Beyond the Fringe. Dora said she thought people like him had disappeared at least fifteen years ago. The two products, er, children, talking about the stripes on their house ties, about being prefects, and about their hopes of going on to even more expensive secondary schools.

We left after this his talk, having stayed for much less time than we intended. It wasn't that we were unimpressed with the staff or the facilities. Nor was it the fact that we couldn't afford the fees; we knew that before we went. It was, on my part, more a strong feeling of "these people are not like me". And schools like this are probably the main way the British class system perpetuates itself.

So why are we thinking of sending him to a fee-paying school? Given my views, is it hypocrisy even to consider it? Or if the education on offer there might be better for him (which at another school it might well be), do I have the right to put my political views before his wellbeing? Am I really indecisive or do I just like sitting on the fence?

Delirious in the long run

2008-10-25T12:32:00.002+01:00

I'm returning after something of a gap that might have led readers (are there any out there?) to conclude that my writing daemon had departed... well, it did seem to take a leave of absence over the summer, but let's have another try.

I think the real reason for the hiatus was not the departure of any daemon but my departure from St Saliva's. I haven't been back, though I never made a conscious decision not to. That whole style of Christianity now seems to me to be surrounded by a thick fog of unreality and make-believe. All those enthusiastic people gather together all the time to convince themselves of things that will make them happy (and it really works, I think) without looking much about whether those things are really true or not. In the year or so I was there I don't remember hearing anyone, in either a sermon or conversation, asking questions about the (lack of) historical evidence and the (abundantly present) human capacity for self-deception.

I feel sad about it, really. I wish I lived in a universe where that stuff was true. But I don't think I do. I do think the Gnostics, the early Christians, the mystics and the meditators are onto something, but history, past, present or future, doesn't seem to be where that something will be found.

In what seems to have been a kind of "goodbye to all that", I went along to a Delirious concert a week or so ago. If you don't know them, Delirious are a Christian rock band who have been going for fifteen years or so. Christian rock concerts are a bit different from the usual kind: people apologise when they bump into while jumping up and down, nobody (except me) buys any beer, and the clapping and cheering always seems a bit ambiguous in its meaning between appreciation of the band and worship of God. I was there partly on my own account but also to take along a couple of teenagers I know. We all cycled successfully into town and back despite (I later learned) one of them never having cycled round a roundabout before.

Delirious are clearly U2-influenced but have a unique sound of their own are much more explicitly Christian in their lyrics and between-song patter. This was their farewell tour, and the patter was delivered by the only member of the band with any hair left. I don't know whether the other four in the group had done a gig at Chernobyl while the singer was resting his voice. Probably not. Anyway, he talked about how initially they had had dreams of making it really big and playing in stadiums...that never happened, and what is meaningful to them now about what they've produced is the fact that it's provided part of the sound track to many people's lives. I know what he means. My life has a sound track too, and with different music or no music, it would have been a life with a different flavour. Even after Delirious shut up shop, at least some of their fans will continue to listen to what they've produced for the rest of their lives. At least, I think so. It amazes me how many people either have no vivid musical memory or just treat music as a mild anaesthetic against the tendency of their minds to raise uncomfortable questions when things get too quiet.

All this set me to thinking about what music has really lasted in my life and what music from today (by which I mean anything recorded after about 1990, I suppose) might last through this century. I was a teenager in the seventies. I mostly preferred rock to pop, but wasn't clear to me then that of the music in the singles charts, it would be Slade, Abba, Bob Marley and David Bowie who would still be listened to today while the Osmonds, David Cassidy, Gary Glitter (as far as his music's concerned, anyway) and the Bay City Rollers thankfully only seem to feature in nostalgia programmes on the TV. With hindsight...well, it's obvious that the pop music that's lasted was actually the good stuff.

So what recent stuff is going to last? Hard to tell, but in the past year I've really enjoyed Fields, Tool, Seth Lakeman, Live, Linkin Park and (I blush only slightly) Madonna. Between them, they range from heavy rock through high-powered folk to pop and disco, but like Delirious, they've each found a way to say something unique and life-enriching. Bowie and even Abba were like that in the seventies. So now you know which of your CDs to hold on to in the hope of their becoming collector's items in 2050.

Fields

2008-08-13T21:10:00.006+01:00

Today was my last day cycling to work at Largebrain. I don't finish there until Friday, but tomorrow I'm at home looking after The Bean and on Friday I'm taking the car in to bring home a large quantity of books (all my own property, rest assured).

The weather was perfect on the way in: cool, sunny, almost no wind, and that special washed-clean quality that the fields of the English countryside have after a bout of rain. I listened to "Everything Last Winter" by Fields on the way in. They were a random discovery on myspace more than eighteen months ago (I know it was that long, because that's how old The Bean is, and I don't have time for things like browsing myspace any more). They play tuneful, thoughtful, warm, rhythmic music, a mix of acoustic and electric, filling every corner of the soundscape. I hope they get the success they deserve.

The ride home again seemed to be surrounded by another kind of field, the improbability field of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. First I encountered a taxi driver, lost inside the Largebrain campus. This was odd, as they usually pick customers up at the entrance. Two minutes later, as usual, I pulled off the road out of the village to cross the river by the footbridge rather than drive through the ford as the cars do. As I did so, two other cyclists sped past me, straight into the river and out the other side -- or at least, that's what they'd planned. Whether they were trying to show off to me or each other I'm not sure, but their plan was not realised. The river is only a few inches deep, but it is, as they remarked from the semi-recumbent and mostly immersed postures in which they found themselves, slippery. Fortunately they were both embarrassed rather than hurt, so I proceeded without offering to pull them out. I had never seen even one cyclist undergo this before, although I did once come across a van driver standing on the bonnet of his vehicle there during a flood. The improbability factor seemed to be mounting.

A few minutes later it started raining, so I pulled up and put my rain gear on. The two cyclists from the ford sped past me as I did so; I suppose they had no remaining dryness to preserve. Then the rain stopped. After a while I stopped again and took my rain gear off, which made it start raining again. I've never had any success with other forms of ceremonial magic but the jacket and plastic trousers often seem to have this powerful effect on the weather.

I feel sad that I won't be doing this ride any more, but I suppose if the thing I enjoy most about a job is commuting to and from it, it's a sign that it's time to move on.

A few months ago I wrote about four characters I often used to pass going the other way along my route. For a while now I've seen the Pixie most days, but there's been no sign at all of the others. It's not hard to imagine that Sugababe has after all met her poser in a Ferrari, and Sideways Chinese may finally have been blown too sideways to ride any more, but I'm mystified by the disappearance of Hairy Pete. Maybe he is telecommuting; I can't believe he's stopped work altogether or there should have been reports of a major IT failure somewhere in town.

A sobering thought: maybe he was working at the place I'm going to, and I'll be walking in the door just in time to enjoy all the chaos caused by his departure.

Or worse: have they employed me to sort out the chaos? Sorry folks, I'm not nearly hairy enough to accomplish magic of that depth and complexity...

On the road

2008-08-06T17:14:00.010+01:00

On Saturday night Dora had a dream in which I took The Bean out and allowed him to play on the motorway. Were I really to do such a thing, it would be not only irresponsible but definitely illegal, and Dora would be very cross, which in her dream she indeed was.

On Sunday morning, it being holiday time, we all set off in the car to visit Morph and her family on the south coast. About fifteen miles from home, the traffic on the motorway slowed to a complete halt. Everyone sat there for a long time. Then emergency vehicles started to weave their way past us. Clearly something bad had happened an indeterminate distance ahead of us.

Eventually, people started to emerge from their cars, to wander around, walk their dogs, share their life stories and sprint up the embankment for comfort breaks. I unstrapped The Bean from his seat and allowed him to play (closely supervised and on reins) on the motorway. He had a wonderful time splashing in puddles, commenting on passing fire engines, aeroplanes and dogs, and repeatedly inspecting the biggest and best drain covers he had ever seen.

Then we discovered we had left the side lights of the car on and the battery had gone flat. Oddly this turn of events had not found a place in Dora's prophetic dream; the unconscious seems not to be very concerned about giving the ego information that would actually be "useful". But we managed to find another driver with jump leads and a third who was able to manoeuvre his car so that his battery was close enough to ours for the leads to bridge the gap between them. Before long our car was operational once more. (In Britain this kind of co-operation among strangers in adversity is known as "Dunkirk spirit" after the last time it broke out on a large scale, in 1940). After a mere two hours, we were rolling again and, following another longish stop to refuel ourselves, we reached our destination only six hours after we had set out, which had we been travelling by horse, bus or bicycle we would have viewed as remarkably quick.

The Bean had a nice journey, composed as it was mainly of sleeping, eating, listening to his favourite music and playing on the motorway. He was able to enjoy it because he had no idea where we were going or how long it was supposed to take us to get there, so that he was unable to manufacture any of the mental suffering that his parents had had years of practice in creating for themselves. Observing his example, we mostly managed not to do so either, and arrived in good spirits at the House of Morph, where The Bean charmed everyone present by switching rapidly between waving, showing off his biceps, blowing raspberries and demonstrating his best impression of a smoker's cough, learned from a recent visitor.

As a result of this experience, I would recommend travelling with a young child as a good way to reduce stress on long journeys, though I suppose I had better add the rider that my advice is subject to change in the light of other experiences.

Imagine a river

2008-07-19T06:32:00.004+01:00

Imagine a fast-flowing river, coursing down over boulders and constantly throwing droplets of water up into the air.

We are those droplets, large and small, high-flying and low-flying. We separate out from the great single body of the river and are launched into the air, held together only by surface tension. As we fly, we absorb oxygen, life, experience, consciousness. We may lose impurities or pick up new ones. Eventually, after a shorter or longer time, we fall back into the river and dissolve. The whole process repeats indefinitely, but the river gradually gets more and more oxygenated.

Perhaps sometimes a drop absorbs so much oxygen it can take no more and is fully conscious. Then when it falls back into the river it has no need to be launched again. It has contributed all it can.

Most of us droplets mistake the surface tension of individuality for a real boundary and imagine we really are separate. But experiences of love and beauty can give the lie to that, as can concentrated and sustained interior silence.

From this perspective, there is no grief, no longing, no fear of other, fear of destruction, fear of death. The river is striving to become fully conscious. That's all.

Saying goodbye

2008-07-14T20:34:00.002+01:00

Well, the deed is done. After finding St Saliva's increasingly hard going, I've decided to pull out, at least from group meetings. I feel sad about it, but I can't see an alternative. For the record, here is the message I sent to the larger weekday group I've been part of, modified only to conform to the anonymity requirements of this blog.

* * * *

Hi everyone,

After a bit over a year of being involved in St Saliva's, I've decided to withdraw, at least from weekday meetings. I'm not sure if I'll continue coming to the early communion service. Maybe sometimes.

It's been a difficult decision, not least because of the very warm and relaxed welcome I've had, and I thought it would be better to say something about why I'm pulling out, rather than just disappearing silently. I apologise in advance that some of you will be scratching your heads trying to figure out who I am. If that's the case, feel free to hit Delete.

I came back to St Saliva's after 15 years away as a kind of experiment. I wanted to find out whether what I had in common with you all at the "heart" level of faith would prove stronger than some definite differences of view at the "head" level. The experiment has been successful in the sense that it's yielded a clear result: a negative one. I've learned that it's not really possible to separate out the levels after all. Whatever we truly believe affects the totality of our experience, and so just as shared beliefs bind people together, unshared ones inevitably create barriers.

The belief which (I imagine) none of you will share is this. My understanding of Christian origins is that the four gospels are not historical fact even in broad terms, and that Paul and the other writers of all but the very late epistles had no knowledge of a historical Jesus who had lived on earth in their own recent past. Nevertheless what they all have to say is to be taken seriously because they were writing about something very real indeed. If you're curious about why I believe such strange things (I find most people aren't!), have a look here:

http://trimorph.blogspot.com/search/label/jesus

I recommend you read the posts in chronological order, i.e. from the bottom not from the top, so that you catch the logical progression of my thought, just in case it turns out to have any.

In case I don't reappear, I wish you all the best for the future. Christian fellowship is a wonderful thing when it really works and St Saliva's is very good at cultivating it.

Trimorph

The Knight of Nonsense

2008-07-12T21:48:00.007+01:00

Recently Dora and I watched a DVD of one of my favourite films, Don Juan DeMarco. I should warn you at the start that this posting contains spoilers for the film. I recommend you watch it if you haven't already, and then come back and read this. I would hate to deprive you of the chance of a thoroughly enjoyable evening's entertainment.

Well, I'm almost sure you'll ignore my advice, but having given it I can at least proceed with a clear conscience. So here goes.

In this fine film, Johnny Depp plays Don Juan, "the greatest lover in the world, who has made love to over a thousand women", but is tormented by his rejection by the one woman he really loves. Or at least, Depp plays a man who wears a cape and domino mask, is irresistible to women, appears to believe he is Don Juan, and tells a life story to back up that belief. But the film is set not in medieval Spain but in modern-day America, and "Don Juan" soon finds himself in a mental hospital. There, he starts therapy with a psychiatrist (Marlon Brando) who, far from curing him of his delusion, is himself sucked into a romantic, Hispanic alternative reality, so that by the end of the film he is declaring, in a newly-acquired Spanish accent, "I am the world's greatest psychiatrist. I have cured over a thousand patients...".

While on one level the film is a mystery (can this really be Don Juan?) it becomes increasingly clear that the romantic life story is so fantastic that it must be a delusion. But the twist is that when people start to believe in it, their lives light up, their relationships are rekindled, they begin to smile and dance. Don Juan's madness, if that's what it is, is life-enhancing. As the film ended with everybody happy and smiling and deep into the land of whimsy, I felt it was asking its audience to make a choice between truth and joy, reality and happiness.

In contrast to Depp's "Knight of Nonsense", St John of the Cross writes of the Night of Sense. At a certain point in the spiritual journey, God takes away all "sensible consolations" (felt experiences) and apparently leaves one to plod on through faith alone. It is a process of purification, designed to wean us from dependence on emotional gratification and lead us to a more mature faith.

Of course, when you find yourself in an arid state of this kind, it is nice to be able to reassure yourself that this is because you have passed beyond the stage of development of those around you who are still enjoying a sense of God's presence. But there is an alternative possibility: that you have just gone wrong and wandered off the path. St John does his best to set out criteria for discerning between these two states, but it can be hard for those with a healthy dose of self-doubt to apply them with any certainty.

One thing I am certain of, though, is that St John is stating a deep truth when he writes about this Night. But it seems to me that, at least for people like myself who read far too many books and analyze too much, the "sensible consolations" are not just direct experiences of God. They also include comforting beliefs: that God is personally concerned for us, that he sent his son to die for our sins and rise again, that we are destined for heaven if we believe, and so on. I don't deny that that belief system is challenging and, if taken seriously, can move people way beyond their comfort zones into acts of real dedication and self-sacrifice, sometimes even of their lives. But it is nevertheless also very comforting and reassuring to think one has a handle on the truth and is moving in the right direction, or at least that one knows what that direction is.

I know, because I did it myself for years, that it is entirely possible to use faith as a prop like this: to rationalize oneself into a more or less virtuous and fairly comfortable life, to enjoy a sense (usually fairly indistinct) of relationship with God and assurance of ultimate salvation, and not to have to ask too many really hard questions. In the words of the evangelical author Os Guinness, "Most Christians would rather die than think." Probably an overstatement, but it makes the point pretty effectively.

I am going to stick my neck out here and say that I think churches are full of people who would "rather die than think", at least to the extent that they would rather live in Don Juan DeMarco territory than really examine what's true and risk their faith being torpedoed by what they find. If it feels good, they'll do it, and if it threatens to make them feel bad, they'll refuse to look at it.

It happens outside the churches too. I've heard a number of people say "I don't feel I need God". Well, tough. If God is real, you'd better wake up and smell the communion wine, because the fact of his existence places unavoidable demands on you whether you feel you need him or not. And conversely, if he isn't real, then no feeling of need that you might have is going to change that, and your need will remain unmet.

At least at the current stage of my life, I think I'm constitutionally incapable of going for the feelgood option just because it feels good. That's why I find conventional Christianity impossible. As other postings on this blog should make clear, I don't think its associated truth claims hold water. I feel very disappointed about that, because I expect I'd be much happier if I lived in a universe where they were true (or if I could convince myself I lived in such a universe even if I really didn't). But as it is, I can't help viewing the gospel narratives as tales of "Senor Jesus de Marco(s)" (de Mateo, de Lucas, de Juan): wonderful, enlivening, inspiring, but...they never actually happened.

Perhaps this belief of mine (independently of whether I'm right or not) is the form that the night of sense has to take for me. Otherwise I would be too comfortable to really move forward. Or perhaps it's that I've finally noticed that reality is just mundane; what you see is what you get, and that's all. My faith has evaporated, and any further attempt at spiritual practice is merely meditative horse-flogging.

It's worth pointing out, though, that there is a third, Gnostic, possibility, beyond "Don Juan" and mundanity, that is not usually considered. This is that there is a world beyond the sense-perceptible one from which deeper impulses occasionally break through, sometimes transformatively. But the everyday world is run by the archons: the New Testament's "principalities and powers", the "world rulers of the present darkness". These are spiritual beings -- godlike, but not God -- who will do everything in their power to convince us humans that this world is all there is. Whether by handing us misery, contentment or a mixture of the two, or by presenting us with the appearance of a world that can be explained without any reference to God, they do a pretty good job, so that most people, most of the time, are fooled. But the archons are not all-powerful: sometimes they slip up, and the light breaks in, until they notice their mistake and hurriedly seal up the crack again. CS Lewis's "Screwtape Letters" offers a wonderful behind-the-scenes glimpse of these characters at work (although Lewis would certainly not have agreed with me about Gnosticism).

This week at least, I find that this Gnostic world view is the one that that does most justice to what I observe inside and outside myself. It also happens to be significantly more comforting than the next most plausible competitor, this-worldly nihilism, a fact that worries me slightly, given the above.

I expect I will keep banging away at these topics, so that in twenty years time, even if I am no nearer the truth, I will at least be able to adopt a fake Spanish accent and proudly proclaim "I am the world's greatest blogger. I have written over a thousand posts...".

Wind of change

2008-06-22T16:40:00.003+01:00

It's midsummer, when the days switch from lengthening to shortening, and there is a powerful energy in the air. It's very hot, but there's a strong, gusty wind blowing too; not a combination England is used to.

There is a wind blowing through my life too. It's simultaneously disorientating, empowering, alarming and exhilarating in its different aspects.

While Largebrain Labs is a great place to work, I feel I've reached the limit of what I can achieve (and therefore earn) there, and have been thinking about switching back into the field I used to be in before I went to Largebrain. I put out feelers for a few jobs, and attended one interview, but the process seemed to run into the sand. Then suddenly this week I got an e-mail about another interview, here in Flatchester. Within days, I had been to see the company concerned and negotiated terms. Now I just need to see and sign the contract, and it'll all be definite. My future suddenly looks totally different. I feel sad to be leaving Largebrain, but excited about the challenge ahead of me. Throughout, I have had a sense of co-operating with a powerful, no-nonsense sort of energy. I knew what to do at each stage, didn't feel particularly anxious, and it has all (so far) worked out the way I hoped.

The Bean is going through a big change, too. A week ago, someone asked me whether he was walking yet, and I answered "not really". The answer would now be an unqualified "yes". We don't have a baby any more. We have a toddler. He seems pretty excited about it, and delights in walking around, stopping, turning corners, coming back again, just for the sake of it.

Meanwhile the phenomenon of sudden change showed itself in its darkest aspect this week just outside the front gate of Largebrain. In the middle of the night, a couple of hundred yards from the site of the car crash a few months ago in which our receptionist was killed, someone dumped a burning body in a lay-by and drove off. Another young woman, although the police couldn't even figure that out for a couple of days. It seems, at least, that she was already dead when set ablaze. A man has now been charged with her murder. Although, apart from the accident of location, this tragic story has nothing to do with Largebrain or anyone who works there, I feel the fact that it happened so close by will always colour my memories of the place.

These events have made this week feel like a loud and somewhat discordant symphony. The bass note, in my own life, has been provided by rediscovering breathing meditation. Old, basic stuff which I had forgotten, to my cost. William Johnston in "The Mirror Mind" reminded me of it. Breathe through the nose. Breathe slowly, especially on the outbreath. Breathe not into the chest but into what Japanese Zen Buddhists call the tanden, the "field of the elixir" an inch below the navel. This way, as you breathe in, your belly expands, and contracts again when you breathe out. I find it instills a deep peace in me quite quickly. It is a wordless experience; as far as it is "about" anything, it is about an infinite and impersonal oneness or nothingness. I have a hard time fitting it in with anything that goes on in church, and am wondering whether I will keep on going there. I still feel pulled and attracted to doing so, but I don't know why, and it makes less rational sense than ever. Still, if I operated only on rationality, I would never have ended up there (or perhaps anywhere) in the first place. The wind blows where it will, and often there is no making sense of it; perhaps the gut and the heart can understand it better than the head.

Pull the other one: another take

2008-06-16T16:27:00.004+01:00

I've been looking after The Bean this weekend while Dora has a very well-earned break. This meant that rather than going to the early communion service at St Saliva's on my own as I usually do, I took him with me to the main morning bash, complete with loud music group, longish sermon and (the big attraction for me, I will admit) creche facilities.

The theme of the service was healing, based on the story of Jesus healing the blind man in John 9. The preacher talked about how God still heals today, how we have to watch out for dodgy alternative forms of healing with a spiritual focus which are not in the name of Jesus, and how it will always be mysterious why some people are not healed. I found the last point particularly apposite because there was a blind woman with her guide dog sitting beside me. She seemed to be a regular attender, and I wondered how many sermons on blind men being healed she had sat through during her life. Perhaps more idly, I then wondered why Jesus seems to have healed numerous blind men but no blind women; in fact, as far as I can remember, the only adult woman Jesus is recorded as having healed physically had a specifically gynaecological condition.

After the sermon, the worship leader invited anyone who wanted prayer for healing either to come up to the front to be prayed for or to ask those around them to do so. As far as I could see, very few did. Someone came and pointedly asked the woman beside me if there was anything she wanted prayer for, but she firmly said no thanks. There were a number of potentially rousing choruses sung during the service, but the singing was, to be blunt, consistently weedy, and afterwards I wondered how many of the people there truly believed what they were singing about, and whether they had overwhelmingly not requested prayer because they were all bursting with good health, or whether there was perhaps another reason.

It's not that I don't believe miraculous physical healings happen. I entitled a strongly sceptical recent post "Pull the other one" but it seems that sometimes God has the last laugh and does exactly that. I have heard two separate stories of people with one leg shorter than the other being prayed for, and the shorter leg growing to match the longer. These particular cases are not urban myths: in one case I heard the story told on the radio by someone I had known in church years before, and the other I heard last week, where someone told me she had recently seen it happen with her own eyes. I have no reason not to trust either the integrity or the judgment of the people involved; one was married to a doctor, who fully backed up his wife's story. But I would love to know whether symmetry was achieved by the leg bones actually lengthening or whether it was a matter of muscles releasing a long-held pattern of tension. The latter could, I think, be called psychological healing, but if it was the former, I do not have an explanation.

The Bean and I have covered about forty miles on the bicycle over the last three days, most of it through beautiful countryside in fine early summer weather. In its gentle way it has been a kind of meditative healing process for us. Very often we both felt tired and out of sorts before we set off, but the riding seems to have strengthened our connection with each other and with the natural world. I don't think either of us has experienced a change in leg length, but then that wasn't what we went out for.

Tool of the unconscious

2008-06-15T14:52:00.009+01:00

I've had several exchanges with people recently which have set me thinking about the different levels at which we hear and understand things. I suppose I had always assumed that, as long as you have the ears, the brain and the time, it's better to hear things clearly and understand them in depth. But maybe that's not always so.

Around the time that "Cool4Christ" T-shirt magnate Kev introduced himself to me and I commented that I had heard of fools for Christ but not cool for Christ, a friend of mine appeared wearing a T-shirt with a word on the front that could have been either "cool" or "fool". I asked him, and he said it was in fact "Tool", the name of a Californian band he really liked. Soon afterwards I found myself in possession of a Tool CD (10000 Days) of my very own. It is quite mind-blowing stuff. The words are clearly full of meaning but 95% of them are incomprehensible, and they're not given in the sleeve notes. The band seem to want you to work a bit for your musical enjoyment. I listened to about half of the CD on the way to work one day and it was a strangely dreamlike experience; or more exactly, it was like waking up from a dream, carrying the feeling of its meaningfulness with me but unable to grasp what the meaning actually was. Here's a sample...

I then looked up the words on the web, and listened while reading. It was a completely different experience: just as absorbing, but entirely conscious. It seemed to me that by putting their CD together the way they did, Tool were trying to bypass the conscious mind and speak to the unconscious, and that listening without the words was truer to their intention. It unlocked, or hinted at, a depth of meaning that the additional information took away.

Then yesterday, I met an English student who wanted to research James Joyce. I told her I had tried to read Joyce years ago but found him, well, incomprehensible. She said that it's important to read Joyce at the right speed: not skim-reading, or you won't get anything, but not at reading-aloud pace, or you'll get too bogged down in the individual sentences and miss the big picture. An intermediate pace will give you the best chance of hearing him. Perhaps, although she didn't say this, a pace that would engage the unconscious and bypass the conscious.

A couple of weeks ago some other people were telling me they'd listened to some Bible downloads from "Faith comes by hearing": simply the text of the Bible read aloud. But they'd started to call it "Doubt comes by hearing" and eventually given up with it, because they found that if they listened for half an hour they were left with fifteen unanswerable questions. In the light of the above, perhaps they were listening at too conscious, too rational a level.

I think one of their fifteen questions could easily have been the one that Anne-Marie raises in her comment on my last posting. Why is it that two of the gospels (Matthew and Mark) portray both the thieves who were crucified with Jesus as unrepentant, while one (Luke) describes a conversation with Jesus in which one of them repents? And if the whole story sounds too implausible to accept, is there any way one can respond other than simply dismissing it? What would a Gnostic response be, for example?

I felt rather put on the spot by this question; no-one has ever asked me to represent a Gnostic point of view on something before, and I don't qualified to do so: I know too little about Gnosticism, and I have too little experience of gnosis itself. But here is a take on it that would at least, I hope, be nearer a Gnostic view than the literalist view that Matthew, Mark and Luke are writing history. (Gnostics are not much interested in history, by the way, according to Stephan Hoeller at the Gnosis archive. The free audio downloads of his lectures there are a great place to get started with all things Gnostic. He really is qualified to speak, at both levels).

Some years ago I had a very wise Jungian therapist who was also an Anglican minister. He told me that the best image he knew for the Self is that of Christ crucified between two thieves. I don't know where that insight came from -- whether it was original to him, or thought up by someone else, perhaps even by Jung himself, the most famous Gnostic of the twentieth century -- and I wish now I had asked him to elaborate. But I wonder if one could develop it like this.

The two thieves are the other parts of the psyche that may be in rebellion against the true Self. The Self is, as it were, stuck with their company, and wants to bring them to wholeness. In a sense, we are thieves, or parts of us are. So maybe the different Gospel versions of the story are telling us we have a choice: either we can be in rebellion and not follow at all where the Self wants to lead us, or we can partially (one of the thieves) decide to follow. But there are only those two choices: there is no third version of the story in which both thieves repent. We have to be realistic: our best efforts to consent to God's presence within us will only be partially sincere. If we see this, we'll see there's a battle to be fought, but will perhaps not be so hard on ourselves or on others as if we imagined this third version was a possibility.

So notice what this way of looking at it does. It broadens things out from the impossible "did he or didn't he" question, at which the conscious mind (mine, anyway) simply throws up its hands. And it focuses attention on how each of us are going to respond. The drama is unfolding now, in each one of us. Just as Tool sound better when listened to without a crib sheet, and Joyce is better read at medium pace, so not believing in the historicity of the crucifixion story can increase its power, because it stops us standing at two thousand years remove from it. If it happens at all, it happens right here and now.

Pull the other one

2008-06-11T22:15:00.008+01:00

I've got my sceptical hat firmly wedged onto my head today, so please bear with me.

Recently at St Saliva's I had a conversation with someone who said he believed everything in the four gospels was literally true. I thought I would try to list a "top ten" of inconsistencies between the gospels which I cannot see how to reconcile in a way that makes all the writers tell the literal truth. In the end I came up with seven compelling examples, so there's a space for you to suggest three more.

I decided that minor discrepancies aren't of interest: it doesn't really matter whether the women who went to anoint Jesus' body after his death saw one angel (Matthew) or two (Luke). While both versions cannot be precisely true, failing to do an accurate angel count at such a moment would be quite understandable. But the discrepancies I list below are a lot more serious.

* In Matthew (1:18-2:23), Jesus is born in Bethlehem, the Magi visit him, and then Joseph takes the family into hiding in Egypt after a warning from an angel, and later takes them to live "in a place called Nazareth", with no indication he has ever been there before. In Luke (2:1-40), the family originates in Nazareth and Jesus is only born in Bethlehem because they are forced to travel there for a census (of which there is no other record, inside or outside the gospels). They then visit the temple, receive various prophecies and return to Nazareth. No Magi, no flight to Egypt, and the journey to Nazareth is a homecoming, not a new beginning. Matthew and Luke do at least agree on the central claim that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin, but strangely, Mark and John seem not to regard that fact as worth mentioning even in passing.

* In Matthew (1:6-16), the male line of Jesus' ancestry is traced back through Joseph to David in 27 generations. In Luke (3:23-31) a totally different, 42-generation male line from Joseph to David is given. They cannot both be right unless Joseph had two fathers or one set (contrary to what the text actually says) was really Mary's ancestry; and even then, one set of ancestors would have had to consistently reproduce at a much younger age than the other lot.

* Did Peter walk on the water? In Matthew 14, Mark 6 and John 6, after the feeding of the five thousand, the disciples are out in a boat on the lake and see Jesus walking towards them. In John, the climax of the story is that Peter gets out of the boat and walks towards Jesus over the waves, then starts to sink as his faith wavers. But strangely, in Matthew and Mark, there is no mention of this.

* What prompted the Jewish authorities to have Jesus arrested? In Mark (11:18), it was his driving the money changers out of the temple. In John (11:45-53), it was his raising Lazarus from the dead, while the money changers are despatched right at the beginning of his ministry. If John is right and the Lazarus miracle was so decisive, why don't the other gospels even give it a mention?

* Matthew (27:52-53) tells us that at the moment Jesus died, "the earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus' resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people". This sounds like an unforgettable and highly public sequence of events, which makes it odd that neither historians of the period nor even the other gospel writers make any mention of it.

* In Matthew (27:3-5), Judas is overcome by remorse at having betrayed Jesus, and goes and hangs himself. In Acts (1:18-19), he shows no signs of remorse, but goes out and buys a field with his thirty pieces of silver, whereupon his body bursts open and his intestines spill out.

* In Matthew (28:7,16) the angel at the tomb says the disciples should go to a mountain in Galilee, where Jesus appears to them, and the gospel ends. But in Luke, all the post-resurrection appearances happen in and around Jerusalem, and Jesus ascends into heaven at Bethany, just outside Jerusalem. Luke's story continues in Acts 1, where Jesus explicitly tells the disciples (1:4) not to leave Jerusalem. John uses both locations: chapter 20 has some appearances take place in Jerusalem, and the gospel then seems to end (20:30-31), but then another chapter is added, with another appearance to the disciples who are now inexplicably fishing on Lake Tiberias in Galilee.

It seems to be that these different versions of events cannot all be true. They constitute, of course, only a small minority of all the stories told in the gospels, but if the gospel writers can be seen to be unreliable witnesses in some places, how much trust can be placed in them in others? And set all this beside the apparent total lack of any knowledge of Jesus' life and teachings (other than the last supper, death and resurrection) in Paul's writing and all the other New Testament epistles except for the very late ones. Do the gospels really seem like "gospel truth" to you in a literal sense? If not, do they have to be dismissed as "mere fiction", or is it possible that their authors had something vital to say but never intended it to be taken literally? It seems to me the only possible responses to this stuff are atheism and gnosticism. We each have to make our choice.

Not historical, but real?

2008-06-06T07:12:00.007+01:00

I want to have another crack at the questions of Christian origins that I last discussed some time ago. (To see other posts in this series, click on "Jesus" under "Labels" on the right).

This topic fascinates me because I feel pulled in two contradictory directions depending on how I approach it. One the one hand I can read the New Testament, and books that take it as basically historical, and experience the power of the Jesus figure or Christ figure as portrayed there. I sense a degree and depth of reality there that I do not approach in any other way.

On the other hand I read material about how Christianity originated, and it is the stuff from the "sceptical wing" that seems far more plausible. When I only focus on that, my experience of the living Christ evaporates.

I am unable to successfully stifle either my spirit or my rational mind. (And putting it that way, it's obviously a good thing that I can't).

My recent reading has included, on the one hand, the gospel of John, and Valentin Tomberg's meditation on it in "Covenant of the Heart" ("Lazarus, come forth"); and also William Johnston's "The Mirror Mind", looking at Christian and Buddhist perspectives on spirituality from the Christian side. Both Tomberg and Johnston assume historicity; Tomberg heavily so, Johnston a little more lightly. On the other hand, I've also been reading Burton Mack's "A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins", and a truly wonderful novel that might be read as a fictionalization of one point in Mack's space of possibilities, "My Name was Judas" by G.K. Stead.

Mack's work is stimulating for me because he assumes what I call an "outer ordinary" position: that there was a historical Jesus, but that he was an ordinary human, albeit a remarkable character. This is in contrast to the "outer non-existent" writers like George Wells and Hans Ellegard, who give a (to me more convincing) account of Christianity having arisen without any first-century historical Jesus.

Mack is unusual among academic theologians in acknowledging the existence of Wells at all. He references him briefly in a footnote (p6), with the comment that "Scholars with theological interests have scarcely taken note of this literature". He then proceeds to take no further note of it himself, assuming a historical Jesus of some kind, despite having acknowledged right at the outset (p3) that "The origins of Christianity are known to lie on the other side of limits set by the nature of the texts at the scholar's disposal and the nature of the history that can be reconstructed from them." His comment reminds me of the search for the origins of the universe itself, where the laws of physics as we have them are known not to apply before a certain point in the expansion of the universe; the very early stages of the Big Bang itself are on the other side of the limits of our knowledge.

Undeterred, Mack sets off to reconstruct what he can. I don't pretend to be able to follow his methodology, but his conclusions are fascinating. He identifies disparate movements of "Jesus people" in first century Palestine, who preserve and develop different sets of memories of Jesus' life and teaching, but without giving much or any attention to his death and resurrection. The movement in which the layers of the Q source were created is one example. He also talks about a very different "Christ cult" in the diaspora, the cult to which Paul belonged, in which "a mythology sprang up about Jesus as a divine being" (p100). He says that "To account for this surprising phenomenon has been one of the most difficult challenges confronting the historian" (p101): to explain how this cult developed, in only two decades or so, a mythology based around the death and resurrection of Christ while apparently forgetting all about the earthly life and teaching of the Jesus who started it all off. He comments (p101) "One has to assume that Jesus people were involved in the beginnings of the Christ cult, of course". Well, one thing I have learned recently is to be alerted by phrases like "of course", "clearly" and "obviously" to the presence of steps in an argument that are anything but self-evident.

Mack has half convinced me, though. I don't believe "Jesus people" in the sense that Mack means it can have been involved in the beginnings of the Christ cult because, as Ellegard in particular argues, those beginnings must be much earlier. But I do now think it's possible, or even likely, that the beginnings of the gospel material not to be found in the other parts of the New Testament, in particular the teachings and dialogues with opponents, lie with a historical person in first-century Galilee who would have been some kind of wandering preacher -- a Judaized Cynic philosopher. If such a person existed, he might easily have been called Jesus (Yeshua, Yehoshua), and would certainly have been a remarkable personality.

If that's the case, then the really interesting question is how the heart of the Christian religion, and (most of) the New Testament as we now have it, developed in the second half of the first century. Even if based on an existing Christ cult originating from diaspora Essene communities and/or on memories of a Palestinian preacher, a lot of creative thinking would have gone on, driven (as Mack argues) by the social needs of the communities in which it happened. Today we would tend to see such creativity, if then written down as if historical fact, as downright dishonest; we would view the action of writing a document in someone else's name (e.g. 1 and 2 Peter) as equally dishonest, a plain forgery. But that wasn't how first-century culture saw things. And I wonder if it's legitimate to say that the writing of the New Testament was indeed inspired -- that the writers, and the prophets whose ideas they may have borrowed, worked with the material at hand (Christ cult, memories of Jesus) to fashion an expression of "the true self of the human race" (C.H. Dodd "The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel") that has never been equalled.

That is: the New Testament shows us (many different) pictures of how the true Self (in the sense that I mean it here) of humanity would look if completely lived out in one human being. If historical research increasingly suggests that that did not literally happen, then those of who have always assumed that it did need to do a lot of rearranging of our mental furniture, which will probably be difficult and painful; but we don't need to give up our religion. If anything, freeing it from the constraints of alleged historicity will give it all the more power to be seen for what it really is.