Son of Perdition is no son of mine

From time to time I deliberately subject myself to books that I suspect are not going to be stimulating literary treats. It was in this frame of mind that I bought Son of Perdition, a novel by Wendy Alec (writing as W Alec), the co-founder of GOD TV (which I didn’t know when I bought it).

My first piece of advice to Ms Alec – or, at least, the team responsible for her cover art and bindings – is, if you’re going to write a novel that is part of a series, somewhere you should show which part of the series the book constitutes. Nowhere on the front or rear covers, spine, or opening pages does it inform you that this is the third in a proposed series of seven novels. In consequence, I was well into it before I began to suspect there was a whole lot of backstory I was missing.

Anyway, the plot: Lucifer kicks off the Apocalypse by begetting a child in a weird kind of virgin birth, whereby he clones his own genetic material. The boy, Adrian De Vere, is one of three brothers (as is Lucifer, whose brothers are Michael & Gabriel), and the two triads of brothers give their name to the series: Chronicles of Brothers. Adrian is now President of the EU, and in the aftermath of the Third World War he is the most powerful man in the world. His ascent to that position has been assured by the Illuminati (yes, them again), guided through Satanic ritual and running the world through a combination of global financial control, military black ops and total media dominance.

No conspiracy theory is left untouched, with 9/11, the credit crunch and economic meltdown all attributable to this shadowy council of 13. Meanwhile, in the First Heaven the angelic forces are marshalling to wage war and fight Armageddon, while in Hell Lucifer’s host is growing stronger and some now are beginning to walk the earth…

All of which is a set-up for a great supernatural thriller, which Ms Alec does not provide. Partly this is a question of technique. Ms Alec has never met an adjective she didn’t like (like? She’s practically co-habiting with them), which has led to such fine examples of the literary art as:

His face, although strangely scarred, was regal. The wide brow and straight patrician nose framed imperious sapphire eyes that held a mesmerising beauty.

His thick raven hair was silvering at the edges. On a normal day, he wore it pulled back fastidiously into a braid bound by a simple black band….

But today was not a normal day and this evening De Molay’s gleaming tresses fell loose to the shoulders of an exquisitely tailored Domenico Vacca suit that accentuated the well-honed body beneath it.

And so on and so forth for 393 interminable pages. One wonders if this is now the style encouraged after the success of such literary luminaries as Dan Brown. Dan Brown, incidentally, comes under fire in a neat little sideswipe on page 160:

“According to last decade’s pop culture, [the Illuminati] were a renaissance-era society of great thinkers who were expelled from Rome and hunted down mercilessly by the Vatican”

“Poppycock! Fiction writers.” The professor pursed his lips in annoyance. “A flagrant flight of the imagination.”

All of which makes for rollicking good – if somewhat hypocritical – fun for devotees of metafictional references. But the game of spot the literary heritage does not stop there. There are echoes of J.R.R. Tolkien in her insistence on naming every possible geographical feature and every conceivable rank or title. Sometimes these arrive in a veritable avalanche. And, like an avalanche, one feels that the relentless deluge could easily overwhelm whole villages in a matter of seconds. Take, for example, this masterful presentation of extraneous and irrelevant detail:

Charsoc the Dark, Chief High Priest of the Fallen, bowed deeply. Charsoc’s fall from the First Heaven had been second only to his nefarious Master’s. Formerly one of Yehovah’s eight High Elders of the First Heaven and second only in rank to Jether the Just, Charsoc had sunk effortlessly to become the most depraved of Lucifer’s Necromancer kings. He was Governor of the dreaded Warlock Kings of the West and the Dark Cabal Grand Wizards.

One wonders if the caps lock on her computer had developed an intermittent fault.

There are, I was once told, three types of writing. There is writing that is visible because it is bad. There is writing that is invisible – writing that conveys the story without interfering with it. Then there is writing that is visible because it is good – such as is utilised by China Mieville, who can (if I open ‘Perdido Street Station’ at random) produce such examples as

A few grey blocks rose from the streets like weeds in a cesspool, their concrete seeping and rotten. Many were unfinished, with splayed iron supports fanning out from the ghosts of roofs, rusting, bleeding with the rain and the damp, staining the skin of the buildings.

Ms. Alec’s writing, sadly, falls into the first category. It actively interferes with the narrative. It is like a clock whose ticking, once you become aware of it, proves impossible to ignore.

All this, of course, is mere superficial criticism. There are much deeper and more interesting things to discuss. There is, for example, a vein of American conservative Christianity running through the work like a faultline, and, like a faultline, it is where things tend to break down. There are the old prejudices fashionably repackaged: the devil incarnate is a Jesuit (the old idea that the Roman Catholic Church is somehow facilitative of Satan’s endgame); perfidious Europe is to be the source of the World Government (because the most popular of the books in this vein, the books by Jenkins and LaHaye and Alec and Lindsey, all see the downfall of America as being critical. That’s right – no American could be the Antichrist…); and good ol’ American conservatives are particularly singled out for elimination since they offer too serious a threat for the antichrist to countenance:

“Then, gentlemen, our coup d’etat – the United States sovereignty will be permanently eliminated.” Piers Aspinall, chief of British Intelligence Services, removed his spectacles and breathed on the lenses.

“In the first phase of the North American Union we launch the Amero currency and introduce mandatory gun control.”

He leaned back leisurely in his chair.

“We divide the world into ten superblocs. Then stage a false-flag incident – nuclear or bioterror, weaponised Avian flu, smallpox – ushering in martial law and mandatory vaccination.” He removed a perfectly pressed, linen handkerchief and polished the lenses. “We eradicate resisters. Patriots. Constitutionalists…Christians.”

This particular passage occurs just six pages into the novel, and it’s nice to see the political ducks that for the more rabidly Conservative  constitute ‘demonstrations of evil intent’ lined up so neatly in a row: destruction of the American dollar, mandatory gun control, mandatory vaccinations, the death of ‘Patriots’ and ‘Constitutionalists’. It’s all so au fait it could make you weep. She’s got Avian flu! On the previous page she namechecks the 2008 market crash, the Patriot Act, bin Laden’s apparent kidney problems, the Iraq war and even the precise contents of Nawaf al-Hazmi‘s car. This is a novel designed to appeal to the more frighteningly ‘Christian’ members of the Tea Party. You know the ones: they’re the people who put the ‘mentalist’ into ‘Fundamentalist’.

And, of course, no cliché is left unexploited. Where would Americans be without British villains? (Incidentally, the goodwill Ms. Alec generates with me, a devoted reader of thrillers, through the correct use of the term ‘false-flag’, is immediately dissipated through her referral to British Intelligence Services. Either she is referring generally to the British intelligence services – note the absence of capital letters, since this is not a proper name – or she means either the British Secret Intelligence Service [popularly if inaccurately known as 'MI6'] or the British Security Service ['MI5'].) Even the chapter titles have the inescapable ring of the familiar to them: ‘Raiders of the Ark’, ‘Dark Night of the Soul’, ‘Dark Clouds on the Horizon’ (an interesting chapter, since you may not have been aware of the vital role the shipping forecast has to play in the end times), ‘The Cold Light of Day’, ‘Bolt from the Blue’, ‘Skeletons in the Closet’…

You know, just once I would like to see someone get a bit inventive with this kind of thing. Why not a Malaysian antichrist? A Japanese? A Cambodian? A Paraguayan? An Australian? It’s all so Western (and particularly American) -centric. To call this stuff formulaic is to insult the infinite and majestic variation of formulae. And then there’s the dialogue. Milton‘s demons had a looser and more modern turn of phrase than Ms. Alec’s, who appears – throughout, and with every character of every race – to have mistaken ‘pomposity’ for ‘majesty’. Even I, on the side of the angels, felt an urgent desire to give the Archangel Michael a good swift kick in the pants. It is also the case that everyone’s dialogue is festooned with adverbial modifiers. People seldom simply say things: they say them with ‘foreboding’ or ‘mutter darkly’ or ‘grimly’ or ‘cheekily’ or ‘sadly’ or any other of the gamut of emotions that, had the author been more competent, we would already have known from the context. Even when we do know from the context those adverbs are there to keep you on the straight and narrow.

The bits where she lets her imagination run riot are, I grant you, more entertaining: I quite like the idea of comets lighting the frozen skies of Hell, or Lucifer breeding an army of underworld creatures for the forthcoming War. (I’m sure I’ve come across that idea before, the idea of hybridising ‘evil races’ for footsoldiers. Oh yes, how silly of me: the Uruk-Hai. Tolkien’s influence, as I have said before, looms large.) But it’s not enough, not nearly enough, to save a manuscript staggering under the weight of its inadequacies.

Jim Macdonald, who reviewed the book, described Ms Alec as ‘obviously a master of the fantasy genre‘.Mr Macdonald, poor, lost soul that he is, has clearly only been exposed to the worst that the fantasy genre could offer. Ms Alec is not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett or Michael Moorcock or HP Lovecraft or Stephen King or…well, you get the idea. There is a banquet of fantasia on offer at the moment, in comparison to which Ms Alec’s contribution seems an ill-made cupcake sat on by an elephant – flat, uninspiring and leaving a nasty taste in the mouth. To other would-be authors, I recommend it as an educational tool and an encouragement. It is deeply, deeply educational in the ‘how not to do it’ sense. And it is very encouraging because it’s dreadful and it still got published. There is indeed hope for us all.

Your moment of zen for today:

LMS Jubilee 'Australia' snakes under the road bridge on 'Tynedale'

Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan & Derelict

An exercise in scrapbooking.

* * * * *

James Devon, in my physics class, wondering aloud why, if lightning hits the surface of the planet many times per second, every second, no one has yet found a way to harness all that energy. Robin McLoughlin, our physics teacher, not answering the question: “Keep having ideas. When I was your age I was full of them. And then they started to dry up, and I grew up. Keep having ideas.”

* * * * *

Stephen Macartney performing in class, retuning the guitar to do so. I didn’t know you were allowed to do that. There are new notes.

* * * * *

A cassette tape wearing thin, Dark Side of the Moon cycling through tenuous repetitions into faded oblivion (the music, somehow, remains). Yetis under London. Webs across the Underground. Later there will be strange dreams that never end.

* * * * *

Cicero: “A praetorian guard of pansies.” I wonder who put alliteration to this end.

* * * * *

“Don’t take the car out tonight Gavin.” “Why not?” “It’s green.” This world is not appropriate.

* * * * *

I move the rook and win. My father smiles. I do not.

* * * * *

He thinks no one is looking and he fills his breast pocket with chunks of watermelon. The juice immediately stains his shirt. The galley staff affect not to notice. He leaves a few minutes later. There is not enough watermelon for everyone. We had no more to give.

* * * * *

A gift of prawns from the Faroe Islands celebrate their birthday. There is cake.

* * * * *

The threads come together. The end of the novel finally comes into focus. In a few more hours it will be done and I will, in some sense, have lost a friend.

* * * * *

The country is stone and water and dark, silent forest. I do not know where the birds have gone. Or the butterflies.

* * * * *

Fully up to date - an L1 on a mixed goods.

Reason and Sticky Buns

There are times, Dear Reader, when I am heartily sick of, and fed up with, the behaviour of Christians. And the reason I get so annoyed and dispirited by it is that the people who are behaving badly have no excuse, and ought to know better.

There are a couple of situations of this type on my personal radar at the minute. I know one pastor who is being maligned in the press (both secular and ecclesiastical) for no good reason, on the basis of either inadequate understanding or inadequate theology. I know a church where incredibly destructive and misinformed gossip is placing huge strain on the eldership for no very good reason that I can see. And I am angry about this, because both those elders and that minister are my friends, and what is being done to them is spectacularly unfair.

I love Doctor Who. But I disagree with the Doctor’s oft-repeated mantra (at least since Christopher Ecclestone) that “people are brilliant!” People aren’t brilliant. People can be brilliant, but it’s not their ground state. I think Calvin’s doctrine of Total Depravity a far more clear-sighted and unromanticised view of the nature of humanity. I think Yeats was right when he talked about ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. I was told recently, on the basis of my Screwtape Letters, that I have ‘a real insight into the nature of the human heart’. That’s a nice compliment to receive, and I am grateful for it, but there are times I wonder if ‘you have a real insight into the nature of cesspools’ isn’t equally applicable.

And all that’s fine. I am entirely comfortable with thinking of humanity at its worst because I know I share in it. I am no better. I can, on occasion, be every bit as small-minded, petty, vindictive and unpleasant as anybody else – like, for instance, you, Dear Reader. But what really grieves me about the situation facing this minister and these elders is that it would be relatively simple to resolve these situations if everybody was prepared to sit down and talk about it. As the minister’s opponents have discovered, it is easy to sit at a computer and make comments that one would baulk at in a face-to-face encounter. As the gossipers have discovered, the last thing you want is to meet with the people who could make clear the situation. To do so wrecks the deliciousness of being in the group ‘that knows what the real problem is’.

I am sometimes accused – with a fair degree of accuracy, I must acknowledge – of being overly intellectual, of not engaging with anything on an emotional level. And, mea culpa, I acknowledge this to be true. I do over-emphasise rationality. I do have a tendency to lock emotions away in a box. But in situations like these, I think that approach a strength rather than a weakness. I am, I admit, angry on an emotional level – these things are happening to people I care about. But I am nevertheless clear-thinking enough to see why they’re happening – and even to see how they can be made to stop.

But here’s the thing. It is not my place to resolve any of these situations. I am not a member of the church where the eldership is being worked against. I am not a minister to leap into inter-ministerial disputes, nor am I a journalist to take other journalists to task for sloppy reporting, inadequate reasoning and poisonous personal attacks. (And I’m not going to mention Rosemary Goring by name, so you won’t know to whom I refer). But dear God all the people involved in these situations, of whatever stripe, faction or persuasion, are meant to be Christians, so why they can’t begin to live up to the name is beyond me. Is it too much fun being unpleasant? Is it too entertaining? Or is it that it’s too hard to behave as we are commanded?

Love God. Love thy neighbour. These are Christ’s two commandments, and if they were taken on board things would improve almost instantaneously. There would have to be acknowledgement, first off, that things have been badly handled. This is what’s called humility, and God knows it’s a painful business. But it is essential, and remarkably effective at leading to productive meetings, productive relationships and productive churches.

All this is Theology 101. I am not a proper theologian by any means (my brother occupies that niche in my family), but this is firstly plain old common sense and secondly such a basic biblical principle that one wonders how it could have been overlooked in the first place.

Following humility, there would be discourse. Tempers would be left outside with the coats, while inside rationality and sticky buns would hold full sway. (Incidentally, can I recommend “Rationality and Sticky Buns” as the format for all church meetings about everything, ever? Seriously, how is that not a winning recipe?)

And following the discourse? I think Abraham Lincoln put it best, in his second inaugural address:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in…

That, I submit, is to be our aspiration. But it can’t happen until the high horses are dismounted, the mutterings are quelled, and straightforward conversation in humility occurs. This may not seem like much of a conclusion – it’s certainly no bombshell – but I can’t see a flaw in it. However, until it happens, I suspect I will remain angry, and sad, and wishing that people would be as good as Doctor Who believes they are.

Here is today’s moment of Zen:

Oh look. A rational, sensible approach to putting out fires.

Making the internet just that little bit worse

Good afternoon, dear readers!

I swither between thinking the internet a very good thing and a very bad thing, and my reason for adopting either position is in fact the same in both cases: anyone can say anything. And while you might think this is a neat little segue into a discussion of Ryan Giggs, in fact it isn’t. It’s a segue into Yahoo Answers.

On Yahoo Answers you can ask, or answer, any question. I have started doing this in the last week or so, and it ought to come as no surprise to those who know me that I’ve been looking mostly at the ‘Poetry’ section. There I’ve been able to help with the technical and formal questions (what is trochaic tetrameter? How are sonnets constructed?), which I find very rewarding. Something, however, that makes me grit my teeth and move on are (for example) the 14-year-old Emo kids romanticising suicide.

The best poetry advice I was ever given was offered to me by Donald Cairnduff, the head of English at my school, who, when I was starting to write poetry myself, offered 4 words of criticism that proved massively useful and ought to be dispensed to teenagers as a matter of national policy. The 4 words were “Angst is never interesting.“

Other 4-word credos that might prove equally useful to the Yahoo Answers crowd of poetic teens are You aren’t Sylvia Plath and Pay attention to rhythm. If we expand beyond 4 words, we can include You aren’t as disillusioned as you think you are, You don’t know as much as you think you do about this, and Punctuation is really, really important.

However, I said I was going to make the internet just a little bit worse, and I intend to do that by subjecting you all to one of my poems. It was published in October in Causeway/Cabhsair, published by the University of Aberdeen. It’s a sonnet (if you want to get really technical, it’s a Shakespearean sonnet according to rhyme but with modern metrical flexibility – so there) called ‘Sunnyside’, which was the name of the farm my grandfather grew up on in Comber, Northern Ireland.

Sunnyside

The carthorses are clop-shuffling in the yard
In their trap and tackle, trace and trim,
All muddied at the feathers from the field ploughed
And furrowed, turned by God Save The King.
Behind them, hunched over with potatoes
For the sowing, by seventy years
Of memories to come, my grandfather follows
The horses in their buckle, brass and gear;
Enacting his own plantation of Ulster
In uneasy years between bigger wars
Than that which sets grown men to mutter -
In the church halls and on the threshing floors -
Of the Free State and the simple truth
That troubles come of troubled youth.

The Baby, the Bathwater and the Methodist Minister

One of the hardest things about this particular blog post was coming up with the title (something of a recent theme with me: I got badly stuck the other day when I realised the title of the current chapter I’m working on in The Wings of the Dawn didn’t match the contents of that chapter, and that I had to change to something else. Inspiration deserted me for a while, but now ‘TUMBLEDOWN’ has become ‘Unrespited’. Hurrah!). In this instance, though, it wasn’t too few options that was the problem but rather too many. ‘How To Lose More Than You Think’ was an option; so too was ‘Nothing To Fear’ and ‘The Not-So-Bitter End’.

What, you enquire politely, on earth am I talking about?

As it turns out, this is one occasion on which a more robust approach to language is fully justified. You would have been far better to ask what the hell I am talking about…

There is a Methodist (ex) minister called Chad Holtz, who last month was fired from his position in a United Methodist church in North Carolina. He wrote this blog post, What I Lost Losing Hell, in which he announced his renunciation of the traditional doctrine of Hell as a place of punishment or even as a place at all. His congregation (who had apparently had difficulties beforehand: Holtz refers to this post as ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’) then dismissed him from the pastorship.

First of all, let me say that Holtz’s position seems to have been honestly come by. It was apparently the result of long years of doubt concerning the nature of Hell, followed by an epiphanic realisation after reading Rob Bell’s now-notorious book ‘Love Wins‘. Holtz lays out four primary ‘losses’ that occured following his abandonment of orthodoxy. He lost his ‘Belief in Belief’; he lost ‘Fear as a motivator’; he lost ‘the right to hate his enemy’; and he lost ‘the holy huddle’.

I want to take this blog and do two things with it. First, I want to respond to Holtz’s four losses; secondly, I want to explore the implications of ‘losing Hell’ – something Holtz does not do. And, again, I want to remind you that I have great respect for Mr Holtz. No one can doubt his sincerity (someone prepared to lose their job over their theological position clearly means it). But I do consider him to be sincerely wrong.

1.) ‘I lost my belief in belief’ – which, as Holtz paints it, means ‘I lost my belief in my own agency. I lost my belief that anything I can do ultimately affects my eternal standing with God. He is in control; therefore, what I do does not matter.’

There are – it seems to me – very fundamental questions raised here about the nature of man’s relationship with God, and I believe Mr Holtz’s position answers those questions incorrectly. He answers them in the same way that Robert Wringhim, the protagonist of James Hogg’s ‘Confessions of a Justified Sinner‘, asserts his position in relation to Divine judgement: God has made his mind up on the matter, and nothing we do can change that position (since God Himself is unchanging). This – as with every other point Holtz makes – discounts what Christ had to say on the subject. (Note to atheists, postmodernists, comparative moralists and other strange creatures: all my responses will be based primarily on what Jesus had to say, rather than, say, Paul, or John the Divine – both of whom are, apparently, easier to discount as authoritative commentators). The point is reiterated more famously in the verse following this one, but since I’m keeping to what Jesus actually said, John 3:15 records Christ as saying “everyone who believes may have eternal life in [the Son of God]“. The act of believing in the Son of God is of pivotal importance. And it is an individual decision.

Where Holtz comes unstuck is, I think, in his interpretation of predestination.

The best metaphor for the answer to the tricky question of predestination vs free will that I can think of lies in the somewhat abtruse realm of particle physics. Everyone knows that light travels as a wave. Most people know that when it hits something, it does so as a particle called a photon. Now, is light a wave or a particle? Answer: both, depending on the circumstance (or, to put it another way, depending on how you look at it). Is it predestination or free will? Both, depending on how you look at it. Add to that the fact that God, in a very real and literal way, exists outside of space and time, and you realise that language itself was never really designed to have to cope with these sorts of concepts and theologians are doing their best. But to reiterate: choices matter. What I choose to do or not do matters. It’s important. It has consequences. Waving one’s hands in the air and saying God will deal with it all is not something espoused or recommended in Scripture. As the saying goes: “Pray like prayer’s the only thing that works and work like work’s the only thing that works.” So when Mr Holtz says that he has lost his ‘belief in belief’, he is also making the much more serious and far-reaching claim that he has lost his belief that it is possible to know God. That it is possible to draw near to Him just because we want to. Remember, God has promised to make himself accessible to all: Holtz’s position stands against this.

2.) ‘I lost the ability to use fear as a motivator’. Holtz splits this into two subcategories: He could no longer frighten himself into behaving better (apparently even when already a Christian); and he could no longer frighten others into accepting Christ.

On this first point I admit to confusion. Two things confuse me. Firstly, if he was a Christian, why was he worried about Hell at all? Christ on the cross had taken that option off the table. Secondly, as a Christian, why did he depend upon fear and not love as a motivation for his charitable actions? Neither of these concerns make any sense to me: perhaps someone in the comments section below could point me in the right direction?

His second point, about frightening others, is much more sensible. I dislike greatly those speakers who preach nothing but hellfire and brimstone. That was not Christ’s emphasis, nor should be theirs. Tell instead about our Father in Heaven, slow to chide and swift to bless, so loving that he encourages us to enjoy Him forever.

However…

Don’t lose Hell completely. You mustn’t. Otherwise Salvation looks like a pretty ropy concept: what is there, exactly, that we should be ‘saved’ from? Christ talked about Hell (something all-too-frequently overlooked by the ‘Jesus was just a good moral teacher’ brigade is that all the really terrifying stuff in the New Testament is described by Him, not Paul or John). Christ was big on saving people: He talked about it all the time. Only infrequently did He mention Hell. That, I submit, is the proper pattern for these discussions.

3.) ‘I lost the right to hate my enemy’. Holtz describes the sense of smug satisfaction that he enjoyed knowing that the enemies of God and of him (apparently a single category) would suffer eternal torment. First of all, let me again applaud his honesty. For far too many Christian speakers a ‘problem’ or ‘moral failing’ is something that happens to other people. But let’s be quite clear that this attitude is a moral failing. I do not judge Mr Holtz: I merely record the attitude he held for what it is. But what strikes me as peculier is his terminology: by what possible theology does he defend his use of the word ‘right’? He had no more right to hate His enemies than I have a right to live underwater and breathe through gills. I may be pleased at the expedited removal from this world of Osama bin Laden, insofar as I believe he has earned that punishment and he can no longer seek to hurt others, but I do not have the right to dance in the streets at the news, and nor do I have the right to gloat at the prospect of his eternal judgement. Even at my worst (and I am well aware that I can have a spectacular worst) I don’t think I could find comfort in the prospect of eternal suffering for someone whom I hate. What Mr Holtz is describing here seems to me to be a remarkable failure of empathy, more than anything else. And empathy is important, not just for Christians (although “When Jesus saw her [Mary] weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. ‘Where have you laid him [Lazarus]?’ he asked. ‘Come and see, Lord,’ they replied. Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him.’”) but for good human beings. The abject failure of it here is a real problem. Even more so since ‘losing Hell’ doesn’t actually fix it. Losing Hell speaks to nothing of the attitude, merely the image that the attitude fixated upon. Losing the image just creates the opportunity for a new image to take its place.

4.) “I lost my place in a tribe”. The infamous holy huddle. Of all the things I detest in church congregations and organisations, clique-dom is probably the greatest. It is defined through exclusion, exits for isolation, sits in judgement and corrodes its way through the greater Body of which it is a part. It is nothing but poisonous, and it stands in such stark antipathy towards the Christian message that we discussed earlier (“whoever believes in me…”).

But that’s not what Mr Holtz is describing. He is describing something else entirely, although I’m not sure he knows why it is different (I will explain the difference in more depth below). People who believe what Christ explicitly tells them are not a ‘clique’. They are not a ‘huddle’. They are not a ‘coterie’. They are Christians. They are members of the body of Christ. When Mr Holtz feels rejected by that body he should not be surprised: he is like an organ from an incompatible donor. The differences are too great, and too severe, to make him capable of functioning usefully within it. This is why his church in North Carolina had no choice but to remove him from office.

So those are my responses to Holtz’s four points. Earlier I mentioned that the other thing I wanted to was explain why Hell is important, and why it is not just bathwater but the baby too. Here we go:

1. If there is no punishment of wrongdoing there is no justice to be found in God.
2. If there is no justice in God there is no way to determine if worshipping Him is right or wrong. You cannot tell good from bad when there is no judgement.
3. If there is no Hell then Christ was a liar when He talked about it.
4. If there is no Hell then no one need be saved, since there is nothing to be saved from (see above). There is no Good News. There is no News at all.
5. If there is no Hell then Christ need not have been sacrificed.
6. If Christ need not have been sacrificed then God His father is callous, cruel and uncaring.
7. If there is no Hell then sin must be allowed to enter into the presence of God: God is not holy. God is not sacred. God is not God.

These are some of the reasons why I believe Chad Holtz to have been sincerely wrong, and some of the implications his position holds for him. I wish him luck, and pray he examines his situation clearly, but I cannot agree with him.

And now, your moment of Zen:

A 9F 2-10-0 heavy freight locomotives emerges from the tunnel

The Evil of Banality

Some people who until recently I considered my friends introduced me to Rebecca Black’s ‘song’ “Friday“. In brief, in “Friday” everything that could possibly go wrong with a song, has. It puts me in mind of an old Muppets sketch where a piece of music is given to The Electric Mayhem and they are asked ‘what can you do with this?’. Zoot – the saxophonist – replies ‘well, if you give me a match, I can put it out of its misery’.

I don’t wish to be overly harsh on Rebecca. She’s 13. Her problem is that her problems are those of a 13-year-old, and even then they are the problems of a well-off middle-class white American. They therefore don’t make for particularly good source material for a song. There’s no narrative, there’s no friction, there’s no hook. There’s no hook musically either – there’s no real melody to speak of, no interesting chord progression, no complexity. It’s a song written – both lyrically and musically – in crayon.

At this point I am not going to trot out that hackneyed old untruth that one should only write what one knows. If that were true we would have no science-fiction or fantasy. A much more accurate aphorism, therefore, is that one should only write about that with which one can empathise. It is this power of imaginative association, the ability to understand, that gives literature most of its power and almost all of its value. It is what enables ‘poetry after Auschwitz’; it is why Seamus Heaney was able to write that he was one ‘who would connive / in civilised outrage / yet understand the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge.’ There is always a complicity between the author and the thing authored, and however many tricks are employed to avoid that juxtaposition, in the end it remains inescapable.

I read widely, and I have read some truly awful books. I have read Stephanie Meyer. I have read Tim LaHaye & Jerry B. Jenkins. But what I don’t understand – and I know I’ve said this before, but bear with me – is why there are so many Christian authors who are simply appalling at being authors. In the light of the aforementioned complicity, I find this worrying.

I will try to set out my questions as simply and as clearly as possible, so that if any of you have any answers you can provide them. These are not rhetorical questions: I really want to know.

1. Popular Christian books appear to be written for idiots. With a popular science book on a complex subject – like, for instance, quantum mechanics – I would expect the more basic, premise-establishing opening chapters to lead into progressively more detailed chapters on the subject. I would expect the basic ideas to appear and then be enhanced as additional, more complicated information appears. This is not a progression I see in similarly themed Christian books. You want an understanding of Grace? God is good, so He is gracious to us! And…err…that’s it! That isn’t an argument, it isn’t the progression of an idea facilitating comprehension. It just leaves the idea stranded, gasping for life like a fish left flapping on a beach. Why does this happen? Why are no theologians first getting down in the muck with us plebs, and then lifting us out of it? Who is the theological equivalent of Ben Goldacre or Jack Cohen or – heaven forefend – Richard Dawkins?

A further problem presents itself. If Christian books are written for idiots, and treat the people reading them as idiots, and the authors appear to offer no deeper insight or path toward conclusion, can we really blame the rational secularists who treat all Christians as idiots? If everything suggests Christians are intellectually subluminescent, can we honestly find fault in – for example – Christopher Hitchins if he concludes that Christians don’t really think the difficulties of their faith through?

2. Christian prose is either manic or comatose. (This may be a larger problem than mere literature: there seems to be an increasing polarisation of church services along similar lines too). That which is not incendiary is pedestrian; that which is not hidebound is frenetic. “God is good all the time” may well be true (and a great truth at that), but saying it for 300 pages with only minor changes in vocabulary does not a worthwhile book make. So my question is, where are the good writers? Where are the men and women whose technical ability matches their desire to write in the first place? I can think of very few, and the only one still alive is Adrian Plass.

3. There being so much bad Christian literature about, what is the excuse that can be offered in its defence? This, to me, is perhaps the most intractable problem of all. Modern Christian music may well be (and in my opinion, mostly is) ‘fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music’, as one eloquent apologist once put it (though he then defended it, not because it wasn’t sixth-rate, but because it was sung with genuine devotion, which is the more important thing), but how do we defend such a thing in terms of its quality? How can we? Where did the idea of doing one’s utmost for His highest fall by the wayside? That is of course to take the worst view of it – that the people involved in the hymn’s or book’s creation were too lazy to make a good job of it. But it is not much less troubling if we are more charitable. Suppose this doggerel really is the best the author could do – does this confer more worth on it? No one doubts their devotion – only their merit. At its best Christian art is among the very best of all art ever made – Michaelangelo’s David, Da Vinci’s Last Supper, the poetry of Dante and Milton and Donne and Hopkins, the Book of Common Prayer, the music of Bach and Handel – all can stand up to be counted with the greatest achievements of the human race. My question now is, why has there been such a sharp and catastrophic falling off of genuine worth? It didn’t used to be the case that the devil gets all the best tunes – but ask me to choose between the complete works of Hillsongs and the complete works of Led Zeppelin and I know who I’d consider more aesthetically worthwhile.

I know there is an argument against this. The argument usually runs something along the lines of “Well yes, musically, Led Zeppelin are probably better. But the lyrics aren’t as edifying, and that’s the point of Christian music.” This is not a good argument, and it’s an argument that I’ve heard before. It used to be advanced by proponents of badly-written Science-Fiction. “Yes, I know the characterisation is paper-thin, and the plot is pedestrian – but the ideas are spectacular.” In the case of Christian Music, the defence – as was offered above – was that the devotion of the listener was what mattered. But doesn’t that sidle away from the real problem? There would be no need to mount that defence if the music itself was impervious to musical criticism. I return to the original question: why must we put up with fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music when our God is worth the best of both? Why shouldn’t Christianity’s music be vibrant, its lyrics fresh and deep, its literature illuminating and intoxicating? Shouldn’t it, in fact, be more likely to be these things, given the nature of the One to whom it is primarily offered?

4. Are we, as Christians, so hamstrung by the defence mounted above – that the devotion is the important thing – that we have become unable or unwilling to winnow out the chaff of the qualitively unacceptable? There is a song in a hymnbook that begins with the immortal lines “I want to be a blooming tree / Bear more fruit than Sainsbury’s”. Leaving aside the sheer ludicrous crashing awfulness of the thing, what concerns me more is a) no one was prepared to say that this really is not good enough for the hymnbook, and b) now that it’s in the hymnbook, some people will feel obliged to sing it. There are other great examples of the same sort of thing. What does “Rise up church on broken wings” actually mean? It’s my job to deconstruct metaphors, ones much more elaborate than this, but the ones I deal with on a daily basis have some kind of connection to the thing they talk about. This is an interesting image, but not one that appears tethered to any kind of sustained metaphor, or even perceived reality, concerning the nature of the Christian church today[1].

This sort of thing concerns me. I’ve never quite been able to suppress or move past the idea that Christians are ambassadors for Christ. Christian art, therefore, must be able to stand as art, first and foremost, whose aim is to glorify God. Our aesthetic sensibilities are as God-given as any other part of our beings. That which offends them, almost certainly, is not the greatest offering we could bring to He who offered all for us. It is also unlikely to impress those who are not Christians. I sometimes wonder how tone-deaf, and how insensitive to suffering, would be the god who considered ‘Great is the Darkness’, with its hideous clash of music and lyrics, the greatest hymn offered in his name.

So in conclusion, and to compress my arguments to their shortest possible form, my questions would be these: Why do we offer God such paltry fare? Why do we consider this acceptable? Why does there not appear to be a more strenuous discernment in what is, or is not, ‘good’ in terms of Christian art? Where can one go for legitimate, grown-up edification? And how have we managed to get ourselves into this mess in the first place?

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Finally, some good music (non-Christian, but you were expecting that by now, weren’t you?) Via the wonder of Facebook, I have reconnected with an old friend from my school days, Stephen Macartney (in fact I believe we even went to nursery school together!). Stephen is in a band called Farriers, and they – it turns out – are seriously good. But you need not merely take my word for it. The link above will take you to a downloadable 5-track EP (you know it’s worth the £3. You do. You know this because you can listen to all the tracks in order to determine this) that will demonstrate their listenability. Below, I provide the Farriers live in Lagan Meadows. Enjoy!

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[1] The complete verse is:

Rise up church with broken wings
Fill this place with songs again
Of our God who reigns on high
By His grace again we’ll fly

Screwtape’s Prostrate Exam

The devil Ragwort, though usually entirely in favour of encouraging corporeal excess, has found himself recently stymied by Lent. Ragwort, a ‘big picture’ manager if ever there was one, had no idea that there existed among the Christians of the Scottish Sector a widespread belief in the importance of self-denial. His outrage has clearly reached his superior, Screwtape, who has taken the time to respond with some sage words of advice and encouragement. Screwtape, a devil whose seniority has been earned through hard work, experience and skill, can still run circles round his underlings…

 

 

My dear Ragwort,

I wonder sometimes if you really are as naïf as you seem. The reports filter down to me, you know; most assuredly do I have my informants in your department even as you try to recruit some in mine (oh yes, I know all about that. I will deal with the matter, and with you, in due course). The story seems straightforward: you have been blindsided by a social phenomenon you ought to have seen coming, and as a result you have been sending increasingly frantic and incoherent policy diktats into the field. Meanwhile, the resulting confusion in the ranks allows souls to slip through our fingers.

This will not do.

But I understand the source of your confusion. You have been unable to distinguish between those acts of abstention caused by a moral decision and those caused by mere cultural conformity. There is, as it happens, some excuse: most of the patients themselves are victims of the same confusion. I think it is probably best that I lay out for you now what is going on, and what the High Command says we ought to do about it. That way we can get things back on track as soon as possible.

You are responsible for the Scottish Sector. Therefore, there are two very specific cultural influences at work. There is the Roman Catholic concept of Lent, and there is the Calvinist concept of self-denial. Although these would normally work against one another, on this particular issue they converge. This is not because they are naturally convergent, but because you are dealing with a social belief rather than an individual one. In other words, if you say something often enough, and in broad enough terms, it will become accepted even though it may not actually be true (remember they know no history, and those who do would never believe themselves susceptible to the technique one of our agents referred to as ‘The Big Lie’). So if we say that Lent is an inescapable part of the Christian tradition, and that Calvin preached a dour, strict abstention from everything not explicitly commanded biblically, it does not matter what the facts are: we are endeavouring to create a perception that supersedes such trivialities. In this way we have created a popular belief that Calvinist Scotland is as well suited as was the Soviet Union to the aphorism that “that which is not commanded is forbidden: the trick is to remember which is which”.

What we are trying to do, in this specific instance, is remove independent volition from the act of fasting. If our Christian patients choose to fast, let them do so because they feel they do not, in fact, have a choice. Let them believe tradition demands it, or doctrine compels it, or duty requires it. What we want to get them away from, more than anything else, is a desire to better know the Enemy.

For that is the purpose of the voluntary abstention. The time occupied by eating (in the traditional sense) or whatever else they forego (in the more modern sense) should be occupied with communion with their Lord. Our job, therefore, is to ensure that that does not happen. I am well aware of the difficulties. Fasting, through its very nature, removes from us one of our best weapons: sensual pleasure. Of course there is no vice in the pleasure itself: rather, it becomes such when it rates a higher priority in the patient’s will than knowledge of and obedience to the Enemy. This is the primary goal of all our sensual temptations. Gluttony is a sin not because enjoying food is bad but because elevating mere sensual satisfaction to a position superior even to that of their God is a sin.

The overarching sin I am describing, the sin to which gluttony is subordinate, has a name, but we have spent centuries disguising it. It is of course Idolatry. What else could it be? Whatever else occupies the space in our patients’ hearts that the Enemy designed solely to fit Himself is by definition an idol. It doesn’t matter what that idol actually is. I have known a love of football damn a man as efficiently as a love of Our Father Below. The important thing is that it forcibly excludes the Enemy from the place He most wants to be. You will seldom see a more naked example of the struggle our tempters mount against the Enemy than in that secret enclave of the heart. There, there is where the war will be lost or won: that is where the battle for the soul rages between Heaven and Hell, each side wooing the patient either to virtue or vice, the Enemy or us. It is stark. It is unequivocal. And it is of ultimate importance.

This is why fasting is in itself important. Fasting offers a real and practical defence against some of our most sophisticated stratagems for encouraging idolatry. It is a forcible reminder of the old truth that man does not live by bread alone. Through temporary abstinence it encourages an acknowledgement of the bountiful nature of God’s provision. It ensures the Enemy is elevated to precisely that position we most want Him not to occupy in our patients’ hearts. They concentrate on Him, and in so doing they cannot fill their heads with the kind of tat and dross we most want them to be concerned with. You know of course that under usual circumstances we achieve much more by keeping thoughts out of their heads than by putting things in – but if their thoughts do start to wander down perilous paths we must distract them. The discipline imposed by fasting forefends against this. If a patient starts to fast, and for good, personal reasons, our position is for the moment precarious indeed.

Our solution is to take refuge in the old certainties of human moral frailty. Let us suppose you have a patient who is fasting, who is determinedly seeking the Enemy. Our position is very bad – but it is not yet hopeless. It is not hopeless because we can always draw the patient’s attention to what they are doing rather than why they are doing it. This distinction is important. Instead of having patients concerned with fasting to better know God, we want to encourage them to become more like the Pharisee praying on the street corner. If they must be holy, let us poison that holiness with pride, and a desire to accumulate spiritual brownie points. Let them desire to be known as a holy person amongst their fellows. You know how it is done. It is always about subtlety. A half-smile, a wink, a slight incline of the head – these are the betrayals we must encourage, partly because our patients are almost (but not quite!) unaware of them themselves. As soon as we redirect our patients’ thoughts away from the Enemy and towards themselves, we foster the most corrosive form of idolatry of all: the elevation of the self.

Let them prostrate themselves before that golden calf. Let them focus all their energies on serving their own desires. Let them put their own interests at the centre of their personal universes. Let their modes of dress and speech and behaviour ensure their conformity with those examples of humanity they most admire (I trust you are continuing to push the Celebrity agenda in Scotland? Our replacing saints with nonentities is of paramount importance), and all in order to ‘fit in’ or ‘be like folk’. The folk we want them to be like, of course, are equally self-obsessed, and so we generate the delightful – and vastly amusing – situation whereby everyone is trying to be like everyone else for reasons purely to do with selfish vanity and not because anything they copy is inherently worth emulating.

In so doing we simultaneously encourage self-worship while introducing a nagging, never-quite-articulated fear that there is nothing really different about the self that they worship, nothing to distinguish them from a seething mass of undifferentiated humanity. This will, apart from anything else, excite an ever-greater fervour in their idolatry – through effort alone they will hope to make themselves worthy of the attention they crave. The irony is that this effort will have precisely the opposite effect, making them ever more insular, ever more isolated (this is why the Enemy makes such an issue of fellowship, since it defends against this). The idols we most want to create in Scotland, Ragwort, are hollow gods as insubstantial as the mist in the glens – because that is what we have reduced our patients to. Let them prostrate themselves before their own selfishness, and let the fulfilment of that selfishness achieve nothing at all. While the Enemy promises to fill and then overflow His sons and daughters, idolatry is an Ourobouros – a snake forever eating its own tail. If you encourage it properly, we will have all eternity to enjoy the bewildered horror its eventual exposure will reveal.

In the meantime, I remain, as ever,

Your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Under-Secretary for Inhuman Resources

White Wine in the Sun

Here’s an interesting example of irony for you. This is a song by Tim Minchin in which, among other things, he takes a dig at Christianity.

But he ends up with as good a description of Heaven as any I’ve heard. I love this song.

“All virtue is summed up in dealing justly”

Some of you, I’m sure, will have been following the case of Peter and Hazelmary Bull, a Christian couple who own the Chymorvah Hotel near Penzance. When they refused to let a room to a gay couple, they were taken to court on grounds of discrimination. The couple won their case, and the Bulls have been fined. You can read the BBC report here.

There has been commentary, as you might imagine, from gay rights groups and Christian conservatives, either praising or condemning the court ruling. Although it was never intended to be such, this blog has become as much about my Christian perspective on things as anything else, and I thought it was worth discussing the story. Apart from anything else, I have been giving the matter some thought, and I thought it best to explain my reasons for thinking what I do in as coherent a manner as possible – I am one of those people who make most sense when written down. I am somewhat less eloquent in the flesh!

So let me begin with where I stand, before I ‘take you through my working’. I agree with the Court’s decision. I think the Bulls acted illegally and were rightly punished for doing so. I also think that the law, in this instance, is fair, and that they do not have a faith-based argument justifying their decision to disregard it. This position will, I know, not endear me to certain people. I understand their perspective. I hope they will come to understand mine.

At the heart of the matter, as I see it, is a simple principle that has been (I think completely) overlooked. It is this: it is not possible to compel someone to virtue.

This is important. Just as the physical universe has certain ‘fundamental constants’ – the speed of light, Planck’s constant, the temperature of absolute zero – so too does the moral and spiritual universe, and I think this is one of them. Nor is it, as might be argued, a matter of philology, or mere cleverness with words. These terms have real weight. You see, ‘virtue’ is not the same thing as simply ‘doing right’. You can compel someone to do the right thing: you cannot, as I said, compel someone to virtue. This is because ‘Virtue’ is not only doing what is right but it is wanting to do right before one does it. This is why it is said that virtue is its own reward: the reward is in the fulfilment of the desire.

The Bulls’ defence in court was that they considered the couples’ marriage invalid in light of their religious position, and that, in keeping with their policy on all unmarried couples regardless of gender, they would not make available a twin room.

This is the point at which the principle must be invoked. By attempting to keep the couple separated for a weekend, did the Bulls think they were preventing sinful conduct? They may have prevented physical congress, but that occurs after the sin, as Christ made quite clear in the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5:28). The Bulls’ actions prevented no sin, and made no one any more righteous in the eyes of God. I wonder too if the couple is rigorous and consistent in their belief. Did they throw out those who over-ate at breakfast? Who took the Lord’s name in vain? Who were uncharitable, or selfish, or lost their temper?

Which leads me to my second point. There needs to be a contract drawn up between people so that they know what they can and cannot do. There is such a thing. It is the law of the land, the legislation passed by the government that determines acceptable standards of behaviour for everyone under their authority. And let us not be mistaken – the Bulls are under that authority, and submitted to it totally as soon as they took, or were prepared to accept, payment for the room.

This is why the canard about ‘the hotel is their own home’ is such a red herring, and ought to be dismissed as such. If I invite someone into my home as my guest, I am entitled to ask for certain standards of behaviour from them. If, however, I accept payment, then my requests must be subordinate to the law of the land. To do so is simply to render unto Caesar that which is legitimately Caesar’s. If we put the shoe on the other foot for a moment, can you imagine the outcry if couples staying in a (nominally secular) hotel run by a devout Muslim couple were required by the owner to have the women dress in full burqua?

Civil partnerships are equal in law to heterosexual marriages. To treat them as though this is not the case is legally unacceptable.

There is a further point to be made here. My friend Russell makes it in his blog, but it bears repeating. It cannot, it must not, be the business of Christians to turn sinners away from the doors. Every church would be empty immediately as a direct result. All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God – Christians and non-Christians alike. Christians are, as the phrase has it, saved. They are rescued. They are salvaged from a fate quite literally worse than death. And this is the case because Christ, in infinite mercy and grace and love, does not turn away those who come to Him in all humility.

I know the situation is not directly comparable. But it still bothers me to see Christians say “I do not approve of your lifestyle. You will find no love here. Go from this place, because unless you allow us to moderate your behaviour for you, you must fester in your sin far from me, since I have no interest in showing you what the God of Compassion looks like”.

I have phrased that deliberately strongly. I may be doing the Bulls a grave injustice in applying it to their situation, and if I have overstepped the mark, I apologise. But I have seen that attitude, or something very like it, markedly increase in recent years, and I do not think I am alone in finding it abhorrent.

There needs to be reasoned debate and discussion on this and other topics, and so far the Christian church is doing a pretty woeful job of facilitating it. I do not know why we fall down on the job so badly on this. Is it the same as the political debate in America, where the 80% of perfectly normal, well-mannered, considerate people are drowned out by the 20% out-and-out crazies? I hope not, and fear it might be.

I mentioned earlier that this blog post was unlikely to endear me to certain people. Some of them, like the reliably uninformed and faithfully unconsidered Christian Voice, I could care less about. Others, who shall remain nameless, I care about a great deal, because I respect their opinions a great deal. The difference is that I know the opinions of these latter individuals to have come about after due consideration and genuine thought. This, I think, rather sums up my position on the nature of the broader debate: I don’t care what you think, I just want to you have done the thinking required to form an informed opinion on the matter.

I don’t do New Years’ Resolutions, by and large, but here is one that I hope will stick not just in 2011 but for the rest of the life of this blog, however long that might be. My resolution is that I will not post hastily-formed opinions on here, but that I will instead endeavour to maintain a level of rational discourse and debate that is sustained by cool contemplation, rather than heated invective.

Except for when I talk about the Twilight series, obviously. In every way, and in every format, it’s just dreadful.

And instead of finishing with a pictorial moment of zen, I offer you a recent Starlingford youtube video in its stead. Enjoy!

Never Mind The Bedrocks – part 2.

In Never Mind The Bedrocks – part 1 I began to get into the discussion concerning evolution vs. creationism. To summarise the previous post, I made the following points: Intelligent Design is creationism in disguise, and it is not science. There is overwhelming evidence that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old; that life has existed in many and varied forms over hundreds of millions of years; and there is excellent scientific data concerning the origins of the solar system. I have also said that there is a near-phobic Fundamentalist Christian response to evolution and science in general, and that some of the claims made by Christians of this stripe are completely insupportable either by Biblical teaching or social observation.

I’m going to carry on now by looking at the use – the dangerous use – of the concept ‘need’.

This idea cuts to the very heart of the debate. It’s right in the middle of a Dawkins statement with which I agree – “You do not require God to explain the complexity of the natural world” – and implied in a statement with which I do not agree – “Christianity exists to answer the question of our origin”.

Let’s take the latter first, because it impinges on the former. The response in both cases boils down to the same answer: You require God to explain the existence of God.

At first glance this seems tautological. It is not. It is the same philosophical point as is made in the statement “I see a chair before me, therefore chairs exist.” So this is the first hurdle to overcome in a fundamental (not Fundamental!) miscommunication between Science and Christianity. I know no Christian, none at all (and, not to boast or anything, but I know several hundred), who is a Christian because they said “I find the Darwinian theory of speciation abhorrent: I will therefore become a Christian, since it offers an alternative.” Christianity is not in the business of explaining humanity’s origins: Christianity is in the business of explaining humanity’s relationship to God. The committed (as opposed to nominal) Christians I know are almost infinitely more concerned with their relationship to Christ than their relationship to primates. So that is my first objection, my first perception of a category error in the debate: Christianity takes as its symbol a fish not because it spends endless hours worrying about whether or not fish were the ancestors of all land animals but because the letters of the word ‘fish’, in Greek, could be rearranged to form the word ‘Christ’. Evolutionary science and Christianity have completely different focal points.

I should take this opportunity to expand on this point, and to answer the criticism that could be made of my ‘chairs’ analogy: “Yes, but we can all see chairs. We don’t have to have faith in them”. (My comments here, I hope, will also go some way to answering the charge that there is no ‘evidence’ that supports the adoption of a religious position). It is not the case that there is no evidence in favour of the existence of God, or more specifically the Christian God: it is simply the case that all the evidence that does exist is anecdotal. This is an important distinction. It is a question of subjectivity. If someone says to you “I believe in buses because I rode on one once”, that is a rather different statement to “I believe in buses because it comforts me to believe in buses”. In neither instance can you see a bus to prove the assertion that buses exist; but we must surely have to take the former argument for their existence rather more seriously than the latter. This is where Dawkins, in The God Delusion, comes badly unstuck. In it he takes the Bible (in my analogy, a bus timetable) and arguments of the latter, consolatory type and concludes that there is no such thing as a God. He dismisses arguments of the former type as mere delusion. And while I make no claim for the objectivity of the former claim, there is something more compelling than Dawkins is willing to admit in the similarity of millions of shared God-experiences of the type to which Christians routinely refer. In other words, if millions of people say they have ridden on buses, and the descriptions of those rides overwhelmingly agree, it is more persuasive a position to conclude that buses may exist in the manner described by people who believe they have ridden on them than to conclude that these people have, in their millions over two thousand years, invented the same delusional experience.

Note that I am only talking, at this point, about the Christian God. If we broaden the terms of our engagement to incorporate God as a divine figure alluded to in other world religions (in the Middle East there are nearly a billion believers in trains, while in India they have many forms of taxi) then the case for the existence of public transportation becomes almost overwhelming (I fear I may be enjoying this metaphor too much!). But all the evidence is still subjective, i.e. it is not susceptible to wilful replication under laboratory conditions. This is the great disconnect between the scientists and the religious. “If you wish to convince me of the existence of God, then show Him to me,” says the scientist – and despite what certain Fundamentalist groups might say, that is not an unreasonable position. But the scientists do not appear willing to accept the utter reasonableness of the religious person’s response: “God is greater, holier, and far more powerful than I. How on earth do you expect me to instruct Him to do anything?”

Architeuthis Dux, seen live in the wild for the first time

For many years Architeuthis Dux, the Giant Squid, was an animal for which a great deal of subjective evidence existed in the form of anecdotal reports and eyewitness observations – but the animal was not formally known to science until examples washed ashore and they could be scientifically examined, thus demonstrating with unarguable solidity the reality of their existence. It was only in 2005 that the first live Giant Squid were filmed and photographed at a depth of 3,000 feet 600 miles off the coast of Japan. The position of the Giant Squid now is that it is an accepted scientific reality. The Christian is in a similar position, though, to one of the old squid eyewitnesses before the animal was formally identified by science. And he faces the same problem: he knows what he saw and he also knows science will not accept it unless it is presented with an example to dissect and examine. And that is completely fine. That is how science is meant to operate. It is also why Dawkins says he is not an atheist so much as a teapot agnostic. His problem is that someday, like a fisherman walking along a beach in Japan or New Zealand, he might stumble across something that forces him to rethink his whole position on the existence of something he had not hitherto believed in.

Exactly the same problem about evidential presentation reoccurs with miracles. “If such a thing happened,” says the scientist, “then it ought to be replicable.” But the mistake here is that the scientist, while perfectly capable of studying it, sees the process of the miracle itself as the thing to replicate, while the religious person has to try to explain that it is not possible to replicate the deliberate interference of a supernatural entity in the natural order of things. In other words, scientists will never have a miracle to dissect until God steps in and performs one under laboratory conditions. And God is not subject to the whims of the scientists who would wish such a thing. Therefore, it might be truer to say that the problem is one of definition: the scientist sees the purported miracle as an exceptional process working in the natural world, while the believer sees the miracle as an act of Divine Will. And obviously the latter cannot be replicated by man, thus enabling the sceptical scientist to conclude that there are no such thing as miracles. Essentially, the scientist wants to study a by-product while ignoring the actual source of the phenomenon. Given that the source is not replicable, is it any wonder that the by-product remains absent?

However, that is something of a digression. Let us return to something on which Dawkins and I are in agreement. In fact let’s take two things, because they connect: “There ought not to be unchallengeable ideas at the centre of a religion” and “Atheism is a religious position that has no bearing on one’s patriotism or citizenship.” The connection here is in the spirit of inquiry. And let us be quite clear: the Bible does not condemn this. Job is a prime example. Job asked God some awfully big questions and, in what must count as one of the most terrifying conversations in the whole of recorded history, received some awfully big answers in return. Here is the point: Job was not instructed not to ask. Job was perfectly entitled to ask what was going on. Christ’s disciples regularly queried what He was up to. The idea that “why?” or “why not?” are not permissible questions to direct at the doctrines central to the Christian faith is untrue. It is also dangerous. It encourages precisely those abuses of authority in Christian leaders that detractors of religion gleefully highlight, and by which Christian followers are embarrassed and horrified.

Questions are important. Questioning one’s spiritual leaders helps to ensure that heresy in both thought and deed is avoided; questioning God, as Job discovered, is a route to revelation. And I can think of few better pathways to understanding Christianity than to ask “What does the Bible mean when it says this?” It is by interrogating the Bible, God and my fellow Christians that my Christianity grows. This is why I say there are no Great Unchallengeables. Everything is up for discussion. It has to be. Otherwise, wilful ignorance is all that’s left, and I can’t imagine God being impressed at the deliberate atrophying of the critical faculties He intended us to put to good use. Douglas Adams, much though I adore The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, was dead wrong when he said “There are some things you can’t ask about religion. Why not? Because you just can’t!” I can think of no honest question that dishonours God or Christianity by the asking of it – and I speak as someone who, at one stage, was pretty convinced that if God existed then He was a despicable sadist. This is not a position I now hold, as you can probably tell (!), but I am fairly sure God was not offended by my asking Him to demonstrate that He was something other than the cruel and callous manipulator I thought Him to be.

Neither of these positions has had any effect on my patriotism (such as it is) or my ability to function as a citizen of my country. (I’m from Northern Ireland, by the way, where if anything overly-enthusiastic endorsements of a particular religious perspective have caused nothing but trouble – or Troubles). Patriotism is about sensing one belongs, and being willing to defend that sense of belonging both for other people (‘dying for one’s country’) or oneself (‘killing for one’s country’). Citizenship is about participating in a society and abiding by the ethics it endorses – and although my religion informs my ethical position the two things are not coterminous, which was Bush Sr’s mistake. Human beings have an inherent moral sense – what we call the conscience. It unarguably exists, and though I might believe (as I do) that its existence is an argument in favour of a moral God, such a belief makes no difference to the manner of its operation. In other words, you don’t have to be a Christian to know the difference between right and wrong.

This ties in, again, to the American fetish for a single unified society, united in its beliefs – ‘One Nation Under God’. Bizarrely, in a country where one of the most damning political epithets is ‘socialist’, there is a marked intolerance for independent belief. Good Americans, in this regard, are independently wealthy but not independent thinkers.

As a Christian, I believe in heaven and hell, and I believe in the Great Commission whereby Christ instructed His followers to go out into the world and make disciples of all nations. I believe in the need for salvation, because I believe Hell to be a catastrophic reality from which people need to be saved. For those reasons, I believe ‘One Nation Under God’ to be a good thing, because to me it is exactly the same as having written ‘One Nation Saved From Eternal Destruction’. But I also believe that there is a big difference between saying “You ought to believe this” and “You must believe this”. Whatever free will we have in the matter of faith, it is not up to governments to legislate, or majority opinion to enforce, any one position on anyone. As the Bible makes clear repeatedly, God desires to be loved by His creations, and you cannot order someone to ‘love’ anything. (Where love does exist, incidentally, it cannot be proven to exist scientifically!)

However, once again having surpassed 2,000 words on the topic, I think it’s time to take a breather. But this discussion will continue in ‘Never Mind The Bedrocks – part 3′, in which I intend to look at Adam and Eve, what it means to be human, a common misconception concerning Cartesian philosophy, the problem of speciation, the religious imagination, and the concept of wonder. Stay tuned, folks!

 

A V3 pulls a suburban service over the calm waters of Starlingford Lough