Category Archives: faith

Her Excellency, at last

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Women bishops.  What exactly is the problem?

The arguments against seem essentially to be:


- Jesus didn’t have female disciples amongst the twelve.
Given he was so counter-cultural, if it mattered to him surely he would have done.

- Women were clearly excluded by Paul in his letters to the early church.
1 Corinthinans 14, 34-35 is the best known passage covering this.

- Tradition matters, women have never held these positions and why should we bow to modernity when we resist other secularist, relativist approaches.
After all, of the church had bent to every cultural change there would be church weddings for divorced people, gay marriage…

- Man has dominion over woman, and not the other way around.
This is clear from Adam and Eve, was the cultural norm of Old Testament society and is explicitly set out in Paul’s letters.

If you want to read some more about the arguments against, then Bibleprobe is probably the site for you.  If you are of a liberal disposition, you might want to bolt your computer to a table so you don’t accidentally throw it across the room.

What are the arguments in favour of women clergy?

Well, let’s start by attempting some redress of the antis argument. The Catholic website www.womenpriests.org sets out seven good reasons, but let’s focus in on a few…

- there were indeed no female disciples in the twelve – but Jesus was counter-cultural in his treatment of women.
(see this excellent article at www.freeminds.org and this one at the Sophia Network which sets out these arguments far more clearly than I could have done alone).
Jewish men did not speak to women in public as Jesus did (Samaritan woman by the well in John 4).  Jesus comforted the widow of Nain and had compassion on a prostitute.
Women did not take part in public prayer and were segregated within the Temple. But Jesus preached to women and men alike.
And look at the roles of women in Jesus’s life.
Without the artificial conflation of Mary Magdalene with a prostitute mentioned in preceding verses, and without the ridiculous over-interpretation of a “kiss on the mouth” in the gnostic gospel of Philip, we can see the importance and privilege of her role – and she was one of the first to see the resurrected Jesus.
Martha and Mary hosted Jesus equally to their brother Lazarus and studied at his feet.
Joanna and Susanna seem to have funded Jesus’s mission (Luke 8), and Phoebe and Priscilla were early church leaders, and the Freemind article lists further examples of both Biblical and early church history examples of women in senior ministry.
By the way, while none of the named twelve were women, it would have been odd indeed if women had not been present at the Last Supper – it was an all- family meal of religious significance!  Just because the medieval artists excluded them doesn’t mean that they weren’t there…

- Paul was writing to specific churches in specific circumstances
Leaving aside the idea that Paul is such an advocate of celibacy and the inferior status of women because he was himself divorced, what circumstances at the time would mean Paul would take a particularly strong line?
At Ephesus, the cult of Artemis, where women were understood to be superior to men, was the starting place for many of the new Christians.  Another possibility would be the bizarre Gnostic heresies at that time that the women were spreading false doctrines about.
In Corinth, the influence of the Oracle at Delphi was a problem – over-enthusiasm about speaking in tongues amongst the women in the congregation seemed to be linking them too closely with the way the women supported the high priest there.
So relegating women to a quiet, submissive role, allowing men trained in Christian theology to set the direction and not to make a “local version” incorporating rites from other religion.

- Tradition does not exist completely unchanged – why uphold some elements and abandon others?
There is evidence that women were church leaders in early Christian history.  The banning of women from leadership roles in the fifth century shows that they were leading prior to that – so why should we uphold a decision made by Fifth century men over previous decisions?
We also need to question why the word meaning “Deacon” was translated identically for Phoebe and male church leaders in some parts of the Bible, then translated as “servant” in other parts, and that it is the latter that is used to justify saying that she had a different status.

Women are now more educated, more likely to have jobs outside the home, can vote equally to men and are no longer the property of their fathers and passed to be their husband’s property on marriage.  They can own property and income in their own right and – like Joanna and Susanna – can dispose of that income as they wish.
Presumably there were many opponents, male and female, of each of those changes.
But no one outside the Taliban would now argue that as men have always been educated only men should be educated outside the home.

Is Christianity just misogynist?
Arguments about this sort of thing give succour to the theme that actually Christianity is just misogynist.

Radical 1970s feminists tried to reestablish the scared feminine (as indeed does Dan Brown) on the grounds that Christianity has been pursued over the centuries in such a way as to subjugate women.

God (the father) creates Adam (a man) and from Adam’s rib creates Eve (a woman), the only time in the history of humanity that woman has been born of man.(it does – who God chooses to speak for him is very important and we surely should not be narrowing our view of who is “acceptable” when the story of Christianity is that God doesn’t go for the big and obvious…)

Eve not only gives into temptation from the serpent, she also persuades Adam to do so too, and so he is punished for listening to her.

With women set up as the fall guy from the beginning, is it any wonder that church tradition – whether Judaism or Christianity- excluded women from official leadership roles?

If you read the comments added to newspaper websites on this story today, you’ll see a whole load of neoatheist sniping, saying who cares (fine) or that women must be allowed to “propagate lies” equally with men (not fine).

This suggests that this doesn’t matter, but it does.
The real argument to have is the battle against the world that believes what we believe to be at best lunacy and at worst dangerous lies.
The lesson of Christianity’s history is that who God chooses to speak for him is very important and we surely should not be narrowing our view of who is “acceptable” when it is clear that God doesn’t go for the big and obvious…

Churchquest 2010: an update

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Short post this one – we’ve found a church.

Everyone seems lovely, we’ve been made very welcome.

And we guessed quickly.  My husband said as we walked into the village hall in which the service is held that he had a good feeling about it.  And for me, his happiness there is a fundamental element.

Sermons are interesting, bible-based and on the passage of the day. While the services do go on a bit, it’s ok and nothing that choosing shorter passages wouldn’t cure…

Child-friendly songs with actions are sung as well as more devotional and upbeat adult ones.
My son waves ribbon banners with other kids because he wants to and says “I like church!” completedly unprompted.  He mainly likes the carpet with the toy box – the Sunday School is for children a bit older than him…
There’s a worship band, an overhead screen, coffee after the service and sometimes bacon sandwiches beforehand.
The service is 11am, so the Sunday lie-in is not completely gone.

We’ve already been invited to social stuff – I’ve had a women’s social evening, and there’s just so much going on.  And there’s a whole world of old people visited, families guided and more that I’ve not even mentioned yet.

This seems to be a church with the holy spirit working within it.  And we can see that it is good.

Churchquest 2010…

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Well, we’ve been here long enough and done enough unpacking that we can’t avoid it any longer…  we need to find a church.
There’s probably a lot of people that think – why bother?  Surely if you’ve done without one this long you’ve found there are plenty of other things you can do on a Sunday morning?
The truth is that both my husband and I are better people when we are going to church regularly.
We’re nicer to each other, which makes for a happier house, and we think more about other people in the comunity and beyond.
So we’ve started to try to find a church that we’ll like as much as St Mark’s Battersea.

The problem is that St Mark’s is a really amazing church.
It’s big, for a start.  It’s an urban church to which people are willing to travel.
It works in the community (running a kind of half-way house for young offenders, running Alpha at Wandsworth prison…) and people that are helped by the church often join the congregation.  The morning service that we used to go to was so popular that they actually had to split it in two, and even then there are enough children attending that the groups could be split by school year. The music – incorporating both band and organ – was  uplifting, and while primarily Graham Kendrick/ New Wine/ GreenBelt worship type songs, has more traditional hymns mixed in too.  The sermons were based on the reading of the day, really explaining the gospel helping you to go away are really read the bible for all its worth.

Ashford, for the size of its population has a phenomenal number of churches (something at work here, perhaps?), so there’s plenty of options to try.

There are a few things which influence the church we’re going to go to:
1)  we need the church to be a member of the Churches Together in Ashford partnership (this is important for primary school places);
2) we want it to be within about 15 minutes of home (means we get integrated into the local community, actions undertaken by the church for the community should be taking place where we can actually see the results, increases our chances of making friends in the local area, also means my husband can stay in bed later on a Sunday morning);
3) we’re looking for a service as similar to St Mark’s (and indeed my previous churches The Bible Talks at Christchurch Mayfair and Holy Trinity Brussels): liberal evangelical, encouraging thought, questioning, Bible-based preaching, catchy music…
4) we’re looking for a welcoming, friendly, mixed age service, with good children’s groups;
5) I’m looking for a homegroup that is on a day I can attend and where my son is also welcome… or where I have the possibility of setting one up that runs like that…

Two further thoughts.
Firstly , we heard this morning (more of which in a seperate post) that churches preaching to unbelievers need really good sermons, and churches preaching to believers need really good prayers.  My problem is that I still need both, not because I’m an unbeliever, but because I still pray for help with my unbelief…
Secondly, CS Lewis in the Screwtape letters and in setting out the fundamentals of Mere Christianity really goes to town on the idea that you should go to the nearest church of whatever domination and congregation, and not seek a church full of people like you.
Well, possibly. But it’s easier to get my husband to come to church at all when he feels like he belongs.

So off we go on Churchquest 2010.  I’ll keep you posted…

Epigenetics and the Guardian, or what happens when science becomes religion?

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There was a fascinating piece in the Guardian today by Oliver Burkeman entitled “Why everything you’ve been told about evolution is wrong“.  Essentially a review of the ideas in a book by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini “What Darwin got wrong” and another “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong” by David Shenk (although the immediate riposte by Adam Rutherford said Burkeman had not been tough enough in critiquing the books), the article asked what if – 150 years after the theory of evolution was published – what we think we know about it actually inaccurate?

Burkeman stresses that while what’s being talked about in terms of epigenetics is not new, and is not a filip to creationists, but that it is likely to drive evolutionary biologists mad.   And when you read the comments below his article on the Guardian online, how right he was.  What vitriol!  What scathing nastiness – at one point a G2 subeditor intervened to point out that the article had in fact been read by two scientists with phDs prior to publication – and even this was attacked.

Rutherford attacks him for the Darwin Was Wrong type headline. 
But Burkeman’s article basically says that – Darwin knew he was starting the process of understanding the world in a new way, not delivering a complete package that would remain untouched.
Reading the article, it seems to me that the point Burkeman is making is not primarily that Darwin Was Wrong, but that a simplistic understanding of popular science means that the general public’s understanding of genetics affects means that something like learning more about epigenetics means that thinking about its implications feels revolutionary (probably doesn’t if you are a geneticist scientist, but most of us are not).  In that way, he is not, as Rutherford suggests, saying that evolutionary biological science cannot already encompass the idea that modifications to the structure of DNA changes its behaviour. He is saying that the public understanding of evolutionary biology is unlikely to be able to cope with such an idea in its simplistic understanding of genetics.

Burkeman’s carefully balanced article is quick to point out that it only the simplistic understanding that is overthrown.  He points out that we are taught to believe that genes are permanent and unalterable other than by random mutation. 
We’re further taught that natural selection is from a random selection of these potentially randomly mutated genes and cannot be affected by environmental factors.  And we’re told that it is simply not the case that certain genes are more likely to be naturally selected to give the next generation a survival advantage, but actually that those genes that are passed on to offspring may or may not confer advantage to an individual offspring, randomly, and that offspring is more likely to have a “better” set of genes for the environment in which the offspring later finds itself and from which their offspring in turn will be produced (the less well adapted for the environment offspring die out).  

He uses incredibly derisory language about pro-creationist author Ann Coulter but noted that her comment that treating survival as the only measure of fitness in “survival of the fittest” was effectively a tenet of faith in the American scientific community ”perhaps uniquely among all arguments ever made by Coulter, feels persuasive” (you’d think he’d endoresed her as a champion of evolutionary biology if you only read the comments…)
He admits that it’s possible that Fodor’s thesis (essentially that not every trait a creature possesses is necessarily adaptive, that pop-Darwinists separate traits into those that are selected randomly and those that are selected for their usefulness, but that this can’t be the case because selecting for implies some sort of consciousness in the process) might be nonsense, and even points out that natural selection  is

 probably not a bankrupt concept, as Fodor claims. But nor should laypeople assume that it’s self-evidently simple and exhaustively true.

And basically, I’m with Burkeman in not being sure that everyone understands that it’s not about “selecting for” i.e. that there is something wrong with the idea that “science proves that polar bears that have white fur because they live in a place where passing on the white fur gene is advantageous”. (NB that’s white meaning colourless, in the sense that the horrible “grey” hairs I have are not really grey but colourless and only appear grey against the lovely brown ones that remain, really weird that the commetns board went wild on that one…)
But even if I underestimate the great British public’s depth of understanding of genetics, it seems that, guess what?  It may all be a bit more complicated than that. 

How do those that believe we simply pass on our genes and that the circumstances are pitiless, blind and indifferent explain the bred-for-generations scatterbrained mice put in a stimulating environment and producing later generations of offspring with superior memory skills even though the offspring are not kept in the stimulating environment?  Surely that shows that how the grandparent mice were nurtured affects the nature of the later generations (or were those grandparent and parent mice demonstrating nurturing behaviour learned from their environment in raising the younger generations? Some how I can’t think that the experiment included giving the chance to the mice to practice their parenting skills and to encourage the baby mice to do braintraining exercises…) 

Take the issue of viruses.  Viruses seem to play a role in affecting organisms at a genetic level too, not just genes.  We may all be a bit more interconnected with other species and other organisms than we perhaps thought. 
Rutherford says that knowing this enhances evolutionary theory, rather than contradicting it.  It probably does, if you have a deep enough understanding of it. 
But this in itself raises a question about whether we are simply the product of our genes which are unconsciously fulfilling their purpose (selfishly, to be replicated) and morality is therefore something that we invent for ourselves and therefore timebound and relative.  If viruses affect our genes and their likelihood of being passed on, then restricting the likelihood of viruses that could impact negatively on future generations might be important.   
And more widely, if environmental factors affecting the genes that our offspring inherit could include the learning that we undertake as well as our diet, our stress levels and more, then the political and social case for combatting poverty, educating to the very highest standard possible and a whole range of policies need real reconsideration. 
Nurture could be affecting nature.
Or is this a case of a little knowledge being dangerously over interpreted?

So it’s the common misuse of the genetic evolutionary story to make pronouncements on moral behaviours (ach, well, men are more prone to sleeping around because you can’t overturn milennia of evolution) and, similarly, the apparent eagerness of some of the high priests of the Darwinian scientific atheistic faith group to treat each of these pronouncements as another nail in the coffin of any theist worldview that  Burkeman was criticising.

But Rutherford’s response is worth considering a bit more too. 
He seems basically to be saying that by even daring to talk about Fodor’s book as containing interesting ideas that – to the general public with a superficial understanding of genes and evolution rather than deeply knowledgable evolutionary biologists – might seem “mindblowing”, that Burkeman is boosting the case of creationists.
Utter rubbish.
I’ve heard that sort of argument before. 
Usually from fundamentalist creationists themselves, to whom the sort of stripped back New Testament matters more than Leviticus, no death penalty, gay life partnerships are a good thing Christianity that Protestants in Europe increasingly tend to believe in is anathema.
Or from believers or clergy that say that that women priests are against women’s nature and that Jesus would not have wanted them.
It’s basically saying that unless discussions on issues that you may be feel are already settled are headlined “Why the people raising about this are credulous fools and don’t understand why we’ve proved that our view is right” then they are implicitly condoning the subject of the discussion. You’re either completely with us, or you’re against us.

Well, ok. Actually a little bit of me has some sympathy. 
If you accept that for some people evolutionary biology is in fact a belief system, and that belief systems are both simple on the surface and quite complex, and that they matter to believers because they are true and the basis on which you build your life, then you can begin to understand the somewhat agressive approach that believers can sometimes take when someone misunderstands the more difficult concepts.  

As a Christian, it worries me that people profess Christianity, but don’t actually seem to understand it.  
If my faith is just about a sky god, and that if you live a good life you’ll go and live with him forever and see everyone that’s died before you again, then a huge number of people are Christian.  
But that’s a simplified version that makes no attempt to understand Jesus’s death and ressurection and why it happened, and what it means for us in terms of how we get to spend eternity with God and what being good actually means. People don’t often really know about the age of the gospels, the reality of crucifixtion on a human body,  the fulfillment of the Jewish law… and without all that stuff, you either have a weak or a bad God not worth worshipping.
It worries me, because it’s important that people know so that they have the chance to accept Jesus’s gift to us, but it doesn’t anger me as it often does really dogmatic Christians (and yes there’s a fair few out there). 

I think it is important to discuss, to debate, exegesis or midrash has long been part of the religious tradition of the Abrahamic faiths (I may have mentioned this before…).  It means engaging with believers to sort out what you believe, discussing new ways of looking at it, new ideas and evidence.
But these days it probably also means engaging with non-believers, people of other faiths, some of whom you may find common cause with on some points but accepting that on some you probably won’t. But usually you can try to end up in a place where you can have a discussion and not just hurl insults at each other – call it interfaith dialogue if you must.
Science also has a way of doing this – when a new discovery is made that challenges the old, it is examined (in journals, in the press, in debate, in books) and eventually, if robust enough the old goes, or is adapted to accept the new and so the new becomes the norm.  In that old John Maynard Keynes quote that I love you can sum it up as:

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

But Rutherford concludes:

Unfortunately though, to the knowledgeable, it is a disappointing combination of at best misleading distortion, and at worst plain wrongheadedness. Now we have to clean up the mess.

Believe me, people of other faiths know this too. It’s how most Christians feel about the God Delusion which presented not only a distortion of our beliefs but old discussions as if they were new and knock down arguments.

But then we also know that Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship with God.
And evolutionary biological atheism is in the eyes of its believers not a religion either, it’s science. 
But it’s funny how the language is so similar, don’t you think?

Mea culpa, dimitte mihi

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Another of my Lent thoughts.

I’ve been thinking about forgiveness.
I’m wondering what the impact is of living a life unforgiven – both from the point of view of forgiveness for something you have done, or from the perspective of just not being able to forgive something done to you.

I like to think I’m good at forgiveness.
The boyfriends who dumped me?  You know what, you were probably right.  It was awful at the time. But I’ve a lovely husband and an adorable son and wouldn’t have it any other way.  That wouldn’t have been possible without you. See?  Easy.

But forgiveness is not easy.

Simon Wiesenthal’s book “The Sunflower” detailing his experience during the holocaust shows how seriously the concept needs to be taken.  Could you have offered forgiveness in his position?

People that impress me are not the Beckhams and the rich and famous. These people have done well for themselves, but ultimately they are not really heroic.  This week we went to Warrington (not the town centre, just the IKEA) and we talked about what it mean to us.  To my husband who grew up in that area, it’s the memories of his childhood.  To me, from nearly 300 miles away, Warrington is a name with other connections – sad ones.  I think of the IRA bomb that killed two children.   Colin Parry, father of Tim, is a hero.  His forgiveness of the people that murdered his son so indiscriminately, so futilely, and his continued pursuit of peace are what impresses.  “Forgive and not forget” is at the heart of his message. 
And there must be days when he has to deal with the people that did this when the anger, the hurt, these things ressurge and forgiveness seems impossible. 
Forgiveness after all, seems to me to be dynamic – it has to be worked at and remembered or it slips away. 
And always the question, if it was you, could you forgive?

The scale of forgiveness required can be awesome.  Can you forgive, but not forget, and move on at more than an individual level?  Well, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa had a go at it after apartheid and is generally thought to have succeeded.

In Matthew 18:21- 22, Peter asks Jesus “How many times shall I forgive my brother? Seven times?” 
And Jesus says, “not seven times but seventy times seven (seventy seven times in other translations)”. 
Obviously he didn’t say the bit in brackets… and the actual number is not important, the point of the story is that the Law (for which the rabbis at the time has said forgiving twice was sufficient) is now being fulfilled by Jesus who was saying that forgiveness mattered so much that it should not be a simple matter of enumeration. 
And it may be even more important than that.   In Matthew 6:14-15 Jesus says ”For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”
Jesus forgave on behalf of God, with an audacity that shocked (in claiming to forgive sins commited against others and against God, which is God’s prerogative, he was claiming to be God). 
And we are called to forgive too.  It’s there in the Lord’s prayer – forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.  We say these words but do we think about what they actually mean? Is forgiveness for ourselves conditional?  Is refusing to forgive a sin?  
Who are we to stand in judgement over others?  It’s not just about specks and planks in our eyes, it’s about how we stand in God’s eyes. And it’s by God’s grace that we can be forgiven, given how badly we measure up against his standards.  To see what I mean try Philip Yancy’s “What’s so amazing about grace?” – still one of my favourite books 7 years after being given a copy by a friend from church. 

Of course recognising the importance of forgiveness is not just a Christian thing.  Google “why is it important to forgive?” and you get 10,700,000 results, and that’s only in English. From this life coach to this islamic questions website, there’s recognition that peace in your heart can only come from forgiveness.  
Lily Tomlin summarises forgiveness like this:  “To forgive is to give up all hope for a better past“.
It’s about letting go, stopping trying to “what if” the past away, stopping trying to rewrite it, stopping trying to find someone to blame, stopping the anger.  And it is so, so hard.  But not being able to forgive burns, eats away, and hurts you so much.  And that’s whether you can’t forgive others, or whether you feel unforgiven and can’t forgive yourself.  It’s no wonder that everyone encourages you to try.

So we have to make an active choice to forgive, and once we’ve done so, we need to remember that we have done so, and why we have done so, and to not bring it all up again with all the anger and hurt as fresh as the day it happened.  And it’s easy to talk about it, easy to know that we should forgive as everyone tell us to, easy to believe that of course we’ve forgiven but that it’s somehow ok still to be angry and recount and mull and… Lilly Tomlin’s right.  We have to give up all hope for a better past.
  
Can we live a full and healthy life without forgiving? The only references I’ve found to this are people talking about never forgiving an abusive parent, but not allowing it to interfere with them getting on with their lives.  Every other reference to forgiveness on the internet (and I’ve been looking at this for an hour or so now) says that only by forgiving can life be lived to the full.  

I’m not good at forgiving.  I’ve just been extrordinarily lucky in my life to be able to.  So far.
And it’s not easy at all.
But the freedom, the grace that comes with being forgiven and from letting go and forgiving, that’s worth the inner battle.

Lent – not just a past participle…

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Embarrassing incident at work today. 

As I walked through reception I saw a colleague I barely know with a dirty mark on her forehead.  I thought about telling her, but decided as she was about to get into a mirrored lift that she’d see it herself in good time. 

But when I got back upstairs, I saw another colleague with a mark and said “ok, I’ve missed something, what’s the mark about?”

“It’s Ash Wednesday”, said my colleague.
Of course it is. What a fool I felt.

I made pancakes last night for Shrove Tuesday (embarrassingly good since they were made from a Betty Crocker instant batter shaker, and it made me wonder why I’d bothered making them by hand so many years). 
I won my only real school prize for Scripture, writing an essay on the origins and meaning of pancake day (see this post for more detail).  As they said on the TV news yesterday, we’re all so used to thinking about pancakes and live in such a relatively prosperous and increasingly secular society that we’re forgetting that they symbolise something.

But the ash marks reminded me that not everyone’s forgetting. 
My colleague mentioned the services that were taking place at Westminster Cathedral and asked me if I too was Roman Catholic, to which I replied no, C of E, and that I’ve not seen that for years (the universal tradition is to burn last year’s palm crosses from Palm Sunday to make the ash, which in itself is a symbolic act).
She suggested looking up the Westminster Abbey website to see if my denomination was doing it too, which was kind of her.  One thing about working on equalities issues is that – far from the way that we see equalities described as being about the sweeping away and secularisation of society – it’s about celebrating and recognising our diversity and that that’s what makes life interesting.

But it reminds me of a conversation with a friend last week.  We talked about giving things up for Lent and how hard it was this year (I’m trying to give up fruitless worrying about the future, she’s giving up alcohol).  Both are small, commemorative acts of personal use rather than big dramatic acts clearly visible to all.

She mentioned that her parents were unlikely to consider what she’d given up “enough”, but she hoped that it would be understood and would not be held against her getting a pass to heaven.
I’ve pondered this last point, because its on this precise issue that we pass for the cultural to the spiritual and a small but significant difference of view.
It’s easy to forget what is cultural (rememberance of the 40 days in the wilderness) with what is spiritually necessary (that is acceptance of Jesus’s gift to us, God’s forgiveness, that the price of our sin has been paid and God’s law fulfilled). It’s not about trying to fulfil a standard – Jesus’s whole message was effectively that this is pointless as no one on their own merit will ever be good enough to meet God’s perfection.
We’ve seen this reflected in so much of religion, both within Christianity and in other faiths, the hope that by setting rules that must be obeyed you’ll be more what God is looking for, or trying to buy your way in to God’s good books through good behaviour. And of course we know that rules that set out to help can become a hindrance by being too hard to meet or becoming the aim themselves rather than the glory of God. 
Christians know from Jesus that nothing they do will be good enough, that it’s faith in Jesus (known as justification by faith) but even then the issue is complicated, with James 2:24 in the New Testament the point being made is that what you believe modifies your actions. As wikipedia sets out unusually clearly, true faith in God results in a desire to follow his instruction to love one another, and thus would result in good deeds.  But that’s difficult to get your head round – resulting in many heretical positions down the centuries.

Lent reminds us of a hardship endured, and ultimately a sacrifice made for us. It reminds us to lend part of our thoughts to this, for this short period (the classic 40 days to Easter).
But Lent is not just the past participle of “to lend”, it’s a real thing affecting the way in which millions of people in the UK live their lives (and with larger population for C&E Europe, possibly a growing number).  We may not have the parading in sackcloth and ashes of the mediaeval world but the connotations of fasting and repentance (conveyed by lack of decoration in church) and regarding the world a little more contemplatively do echo on.  Typically we’ve hung onto the fun of the pancaking feasting which the population forgets the follow-up fasting.

But the echoes are now rebounding more loudly.  Combined with increasing willingness to show religious faith publicly, whether wearing headscarf , turban, skullcap or cross, even if there are consequences because to those doing it it’s a mark of what is important in their lives. The ash marks are both traditional and the latest manifestation of this. Yes they are symbols, the symbol of the thing rather than the thing itself, but symbols matter.

Let’s think about it, while we digest.

Chaos, meaning and patterns in the randomness

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fractal21(image c/o www.coolmath.com)

I don’t know if you have managed to catch the BBC4 programme the Secret Life of Chaos, fronted by Jim Al-Khalili, a lecturer from my alma mater…if you didn’t you missed a treat.  A truly thought provoking piece of TV and one that makes you question everything you know.

For me, this programme had the appeal that sci fi had as a teenager.  And when you get down to how to find order in chaos and fractals, then it’s pushing all the right buttons to get your mind buzzing.  Al-Khalili makes great use of Mandelbrot pictures to explain chaos and self-replication. And the pictures are truly incredible – he noted that Mandelbrot’s fractals had been called the “thumbprint of God” because of their infinite complexity, but zooming into each piece of the Mandelbrot patterns to find yet more tiny versions is amazing. You can make you own with the www.coolmath.com fractal generator, of course…
And that chaos, far from being random, is a pattern repeated again and again throughout nature. The programme illustrated this with examples of all sizes, from coastal erosion to bird flight to the construction of our own lungs.

Al-Khalili said that can use chaos theory therefore to show that complex can be the result of simple – branching over many generations leads to greater and greater complexity.
This was presented as though it was thought to be a revolutionary idea.
Actually anyone in a bureaucratic office environment knows that must be the case – a simple instruction from on high to do X results in a number of people needing to talk to other people , making arrangements, using different pieces of technology, attempting to balance different things that are affected by that simple command to “make it so”.  Of course it is just possible that our brains have evoled in such a way as to make the simple complicated…

To illustrate that evolution is the tool that best demonstrates this repetitive pattern and branching, the programme used the model of computers that evolve their own programming.  The computer was programmed to get some virtual robot legs to get up and walk and then move a body. If the effort succeeded that model was allowed to “breed” giving birth to the next generation of model and within 5 generations there was a notable improvement in getting the robot walking, but then left to run the programme enabled many amazing things to happen, illustrated with beautifully programmed robot bodies wrestling and slamming into walls etc.
The interesting thing here was that the computer itself programmed amazing things that no human programmer would have done. But to me that was not the only interesting thing. The analogy made was that this is evolution in action, the random mutations that give advantage leading to improved versions (with no value judgement of what improvement means).  But that’s not the case, is it? 
The programme was set up with a purpose (to see what a computer could do with self-evolving programming), the computer was given a set of simple but clear instructions by a human programmer (find which models are successful in achieving an aim and when you find them, breed them to create the next generation to model evolution). It was not, in the words of Bill Bryson “nothing, which exploded”, the programme was programmed into the computer like a message in its DNA.  So basically it was all set in train by an intelligent designer. Oh.
Now you know I’m no creationist – I understand that the Bible is a document formed of the writings of many different individuals over a long span of history but with a common unifying theme and “God breathed” message.
I have no problem with God so loving the world that he set it to run and develop through evolution and on discovering that free will meant sometimes his creations deliberately choosing imperfectly, showing that although we’ve corrupted what he’s intended for us but that he loves us anyway and if we ask him wholeheartedly to, the price of our wrongdoing is paid and he forgives us. But I’ve no truck with the sort of creator Terry Pratchett sketches out, adjusting the wings of insects or giving elephants wheels.
Does chaos theory and fractal maths mean there’s no room for God the programmer?
More of this in a minute.
 
But before I get too complicated myself, there’s a few things that this truly interesting programme raised for me that I’d like to put out for further thought and discussion:

1) ultimately the question of where we come from has one of two answers: something must either come from something (God made it, ex deus), or from nothing (it just happened, ex nihilo). Knowing the tools by which the changes happen doesn’t affect the need to know and understand this;

2) I’m still not clear, no matter what the level of complexity that can arise from the very simple, how life can come from this self-replicating process. Despite Frankenstein being so incorporated into our outlook that some forget it’s fiction, and despite the attempts to create life in a test tube (though not with the gases that were around at the time that life is thought to have started) we still have not managed to create life from scratch and nothing in this programme showed how inanimate dust from an explosion went from inanimate to self-replicating.  To me, know that complexity comes from simplicity does not change this question of how life comes to exist;

3) As a knockdown “proof” of evolution as the only answer to the “how” question, as set out above I’m not sure what the “evolving computer programme” actually shows… something that’s come from the evolutionary process uses it’s mind to create a computer that responds to programming by evolving it?

4) then there’s the problem, as always, of Jesus.

And it comes down to this – either he did what we think he did (and I’ve gone into this at length in other posts), or he didn’t.
If he didn’t, then fair enough, let’s go with the fractal mathematics and the science of patterns explains chaos and the purpose of life is to self-replicate with meaningless mutation occasionally lending advantage.  I personally find this bleak, depressing and unconvincing.  It means the only answer to “why” is “it doesn’t matter, it’s just because”, that the genes are in control and that our brains have evolved to ask “why” without even a genetic advantage through learning. And I know bleak doesn’t mean wrong just because it’s not a nice thing – I just wonder how people that seriously believe that this is thecase get out of bed in the morning…

But if Jesus did what Christians think he did, then we’ve a responsibility to look at what he said and did, to understand that there is a personal and loving God who responds to prayer but nevertheless is unwilling to catch every sparrow or aeroplane. 
This is not a comfortable concept for some people – for example Eddie Izzard contends that God can’t exist because otherwise he’d just flicked off Hitler’s head.  But Christians say that God loves us and gives us choices - we say that he relies on human agents to challenge evil because otherwise we’d be puppets so the God that we worship expects us to come up with ways of overcoming evil without him intervening as directly as he had to in the past. I like the threading a needle analogy that Lee Strobel  tells to explain this point (the daughter of an interviewee wanted to learn to sew, but she keep stabbing herself in the finger while trying to thread a needle, but he resists the urge to just take over and do it for her – she needs to learn to do it herself and when she does the triumph and pride in her newfound ability is worth so much more, and of course equips her with a new life skill).
It’s the mad, bad or God dilemma. Again. 
But while fractals help us explain chaos (and also look pretty) this reductionist approach to the complex world around us doesn’t help us think about this so well documented, so hugely interpreted event, and what is pretty much THE decision that needs to be come to in life. 
I guess what it’s saying is that ressurection is not the norm, doesn’t fit the pattern and therefore didn’t happen (so mad for saying what he said and everyone after bad for perpetuating it?)
But with the best investigation of the evidence that I can do separated by 2000 and a language divide, I can only conclude that it did happen.
So if chaos is not really random but following the patterns of fractal mathematics, and patterns are self-replicating, and Jesus rose from the dead, then there’s hope.  We’re promised that by Jesus paying the price for our sin, we’ll also be raised from the dead.  

One further thought.  If you look at church history, from church formation, pinning down and developing beliefs, schisming, debate and interpretation you have to accept that branching and complexity from simplicity can be seen even there – fractal patterns in an organisational structures context.

Finally, there’s a joke that tickles me…
 In the future a scientist says to God, “we don’t need you.  We can now create the spark of life, and create computers that evolve by themselves. We’re so confident that we challenge you to produce a new being, from scratch. If you’re really omnipotent, you’ll accept the challenge”
And God forms a being from the dust, a beautiful creature into which he breathes life, gives it a loving kiss on the forehead and lets it go off to live its life.
The scientist bends down and takes a handful of dust, but God shakes his head: “uhuh – you get your own dust”…

Please pray for Haiti

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News reports are now coming out about the full extent of the disaster following the earthquake and landslides in Haiti.
I’ve just read a quote from Louis-Gerard Gilles, doctor and former senator who is helping survivors in Haiti, in the Evening Standard.  He said “Haiti needs to pray. We all need to pray together”. 
So give to the disaster emergency appeals if you can, but if there’s nothing else you feel you can do, please spare a prayer for the population of Haiti, and let’s look for the small miracles that give hope in this awful situation.

Happy Hanukkah, still

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So, today is the third day of Hanukkah (an eight day festival), the Jewish festival celebrating the (thanks to The New Statesman God Blog for reminding me of that and that Maccabees is not just a book dropped from the protestant version of the bible, nor just a pop group).

The New Statesman piece points to the building up of Hanukkah in America, perhaps primarily because of its proximity to Christmas, but it is entirely up to a faiths followers to decide the relative importance of that faith’s different festivals to them: as a child Christmas meant a lot more to me than Easter but as an adult Easter Sunday is the more important of the Christian festivals (although I guess if I was of another denomination I might prize Good Friday more?)

The reference in the New Statesman piece to Winterval was amusing – Birmingham City Council coined the word in 1997 to encompass a long period of celebration of different celebrations from Hallowe’en to New Year’s Eve including festivals for different faiths and secular traditions too.  
But the term is used nowadays to describe enforced institutional secularisation – particularly the attempts by over-politically correct organisations to avoid any possible offence being caused to non-Christians. 
The funny thing is, and perhaps I hang out with the more liberal end of the churchgoing Christian spectrum but I’m not sure that I do, I’m not sure I know any of my Christian friends who would not want to see Eid or Diwalhi celebrated or ban yule logs or firstfooting.  That said, we tend to be the sort of people who are saddened by the likes of Dan Brown proclaiming that the Da Vinci Code is grounded in fact but regarded its publication as a useful chance to discuss our faith with others in a context that they rather than we brought up.
And I don’t know anyone that practises another faith who doesn’t try to spend Christmas together with their family and open presents (although I admit I don’t currently know and Jehovah’s witnesses). 
I’ll freely admit to not having read it but I gather that the humanists have got a guide out at the moment with tips for enjoying a God-free Christmas, but using the term Christmas in the title…
So who, exactly, is offended by the term Christmas?

But I digress.

I wish everyone that wishes to be wished it a Happy Hanukkah and I’ll take an early chance to wish you, dear reader, a Merry Christmas.

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Advent thoughts: if it’s good enough for Africa…

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While searching the web for something this morning I was really surprised to find this thought-provoking article by Matthew Parris on the importance of faith in liberating Africa (especially surpised as I was looking for a Giles Coren piece on an obesity tax…).  I know it’s a year old and probably done to death in commentaries last year, but reading it I really wanted a chance to talk about it.
Here’s an extract:

But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

In many ways this article is beautiful:  while the activities of aid workers and NGOs are important, only the actions of the missionaries bring a change in the heart, standing tall, liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world, a directness in their dealings with others.  Parris puts this down to:

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I’ve just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

In other words, Christianity as practised by the missionaries (and indeed the non-proselytizing aid workers) gives a sense of self to the believer, enabling and empowering rather than enslaving and cowing.  This is culturally at odds with many of the community actions and tribal religions that are in place and the difference in attitude of new Christians is amazing and, Parris seems to imply, better this way of encouraging self-belief and modernisation than the alternatives that are out there.

This is interesting from two perspectives, which make the article a bit less beautiful…
1) As an atheist, is it patronising for Parris to suggest that Christianity is a good for Africans for getting beyond tribal beliefs in Africa, given that he doesn’t actually think it’s true?
Or is truth only of concern once you are modernised?

2) If Christianity has such amazing uplifting properties that are good for the people of Africa, giving a sense of self-worth built on a direct relationship between God and man, could it not be that those are exactly the things that we are missing and in need of here in the western world too?
Or does it not matter for us because we’ve already modernised and grown beyond such superstitions?

I don’t have any answers.  I suspect only Matthew Parris really knows what he was getting at, and he admits that what he sees is incompatible with or inexplicable by his new world view. 

For me, the idea that Christianity is a helpful stepping stone but not ultimately true is close to the Marx/ Engels “religion is the opiate of the masses“ approach to life – an illusory happiness which can be set aside in order that they find “real” happiness. 
According to the rather fabulous Marx exhibition at the Karl Marx Haus in Trier, Marx had an exceptionally unhappy life, had a child with his housekeeper and two of his children commited suicide – so I’d be pretty clear that whatever this alternative source of happiness he was seeking, he didn’t find it. 
I wonder why this element of Marxist thought is not as discredited in the popular mind as the rest of communism?  (Incidentally, I maintain that we’ve not actually seen a real Marxist communist society yet – except perhaps early Christian communities:

“And all that believed were together, and had all things common; 45 And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. 46 And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, 47 Praising God, and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.” (Acts 2:44-47) )

But there is another perspective.  Perhaps Christianity lifts and inspires because it is true.
 
Christianity is undergoing a real boom in Africa not just because of the sense of self that a direct relationship with Jesus inspires but because what Jesus did, the society that he lived in, these things speak directly to many people in Africa in a way that we in the developed world have forgotten.   
Perhaps the liberation that comes from being an individual known to and knowing God personally is that missing element in life?
When you look at society today, the things that are prized (fame, money, advantage over others, being important, slick argument, “being yourself” in the Big Brother sense of saying exactly what you think without thought of the consequences for others in so doing, having the best of everything, doing exactly what you want to do) are about power and exerting that sense of self. 
Few people that get sucked into this belief system think about the consequences for their self, but the sense that something’s missing (the God-shaped hole) is often there in the statements that the “successful” people give to the press (being a reasonable person I’m compelled to point out this comments thread from the Daylight Atheism website that points out that confident atheists are also happy and that the posters seem to see it as a security-hole based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - but I see it as the Self-actualisation stage of Maslow rather than the Safety stage) .  And as is being seen in Africa, if embraced, that freedom can change worlds.

So how have we got ourselves to a stage where we are rejecting that freedom and regarding it as something that’s ok for others (even for liberating an enire continent) but just not for us?
Stephan Joubert, on the blog at www.echurch.co.za writes: 

One of my favorite quotes is that of Ernst Kaesemann, a well-known German theologian of the previous century. Just listen to what he writes as he’s thinking about Jesus: “People and institutions do not like to be kept continually on the alert, and they have constantly devised screens to protect themselves from too much heat. In fact, they have even managed to reduce Jesus’ red-hot message, which promised to kindle a fire throughout the world, to room temperature.”

If you look at church history through the centuries, that is just what has happened: sects appeared trying to rationalise what had happened (Jesus can’t have been human, he could only have been human, bodily ressurection wasn’t expected and therefore may be only spiritual ressurection took place, secret knowledge or good works required in addition to faith in Jesus in order to be saved… and so on).  Evidence if any were needed that the oldest message of the ressurection was hard to understand even then…
(Another aside – that ressurection was the key focus of faith in Jesus is clear from Paul’s letter here 1 Cor. 15:3-4: “ For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and that he was buried and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.”) 
People in the UK tend to think Christianity’s about a bunch of old men in dresses with unworldly eyes or fuzzy beards, debating the morality of homosexuality and, dressed up smartly looking down on or turning away those who need access to that message of unconditional love.  Of course the church is not just its clergy (and in any case many clergy these days are younger, and/ or women) but the people that believe, and we need to be out there, spreading the word and helping people to be spiritually as well as physically whole.

And that’s an aspiration that’s not old fashioned, or unneeded where I am. 
And in looking forward, it’s the perfect thought for advent.