Critiques of pure reason

Father Ted's Housekeeper, Mrs Doyle doesn't get it about various things:

Football! Football! Football! What you men see in it, I don't know! A load of men kicking a bit of leather around a field! Tscha! I don't know... you men. The things you think are great fun! Like going to the films. A load of men sitting around looking at films. And rollercoasters! A load of men in a big rollercoaster going up and down on a metal track. And fishing! A load of men fishing! And sailing! A load of men in a boat, floating about in the water! And shouting! A load of men going around shouting! And so forth.

Now, imagine Mrs Doyle got her own TV show to pontificate about Soccer, films, rollercoasters, fishing and sailing. You don't have to imagine. She has been, only it isn't Mrs Doyle, it's Mr Dawkins, and the subject isn't any of the above, it's religion, superstition, homeopathy and faith — topics he has as much feeling for (and understanding of) as Mrs Doyle has about her pet hates.

However fluent and vituperative someone may be, however clever they think they are, anyone who can't see all kinds of difference between water dowsing, fortune telling, Roman Catholicism and Islamism, plainly doesn't know diddly squat about any of them. Soccer, film, rollercoasters, fishing, sailing and shouting are manifestly not variant forms of the same thing, as anyone who knew anything much about any of them could tell you.

The simple fact is that millions of people all over the world experience God in all sorts of diverse ways all the time. Like all personal encounters these experiences are multi-faceted, unpredictable, impossible to standardise or often even to describe. Yet it happens every day. You could try and understand what's going on, or you could simply rubbish anyone who doesn't share your own antique brand of naïve materialist positivism as mad, bad and/or dangerous.

One reviewer (Wackos IV: the child of science) suggests the whole show is essentially infantile. James Hannam gives one historian of science's view ("I suppose his fans will lap it up, but Dawkins is rapidly turning into a caricature of himself"). I'd also like to note two other reactions.

(1) The UK Guardian newspaper carries a perceptive and thoughtful analysis by John Cornwell, director of the Science and Human Dimension project at Jesus College (University of Cambridge) called The Importance of Doubt. Cornwell suggests that Dawkins

simply does not get the point of pluralist societies under secular auspices. Nor does he credit believers with the capacity to be pluralists and democrats, even though members of the great world religions have contributed to the formation and preservation of pluralism, and resistance to its opposite - totalitarianism - in the modern period.

Cornwell's socio-political conclusion makes the whole current antsy atheist enterprise look rather self-defeating:

Put bluntly, The God Delusion is liable to persuade religious fundamentalists that a pluralist secular society is every bit as hostile to the practice of faith as they ever thought it to be. By urging the elimination of religion in the name of all that civil society holds dear, Dawkins is inviting fundamentalists to be even more fundamentalist. His book, then, is a counsel of despair as well as an incitement to the very thing he deplores and seeks to remedy.

Meanwhile the UK Satirical magazine Private Eye, has its own spoof script for the Dawkins show. This piece isn't on the web, so you'll just have to go get it from the news stands, but here's a taster:

Professor Richard Dawkins (for it is he): It is frightening to think that in the 21st century there are millions of people all over the world who believe they can change the future by a simple act involving a birthday cake.
cut to shot of family group clustered around Marks & Spencer chocolate cake covered in lit candles. Woman blows out candles while the rest of her family shout 'go on, mum — make a wish!." Close up of woman with eyes closed, accompanied by sinister music. Cut to Dawkins, looking shocked and incredulous.

Dawkins (interviewing woman): Mrs Simpkins, can I ask you what you think you were doing just now?

Mrs Simpkins: Well, I just made a wish while I was blowing out the candles, like I always do.

Dawkins: And you really thought that what you were wishing for would in some mysterious way come true?

Mrs Simpkins: Well you never know... ... ...

Dawkins: As a Control test, tell me what it is you wished for?

Family: Don't tell him, mum, or it won't come true.

Well, you get the idea. Here's the conclusion

Dawkins: So there we have it. Everyone in the world is mad except me, and very, very dangerous.

Big or Dispersed Corporate? Hard or Fluid Lines? Starfish or Spider?

An interesting post on Mike Croghan's Rude Armchair Theology Blog, about open and closed social networks.

Social networks like Facebook and Myspace require you to sign up to participate and then keep you within their "walled gardens." Mike was railing against them, then became a Facebook addict! But not before reading this BBC piece by Canadian Networking Guru Michael Geist, suggesting the future belongs to walled gardens that manage to to pull down their walls a bit, if not a lot.

This got me going about Church. How grasping and imperialistic is the way people do Church? Some denomintions require a hell of a signing up to pass go, and others wall their gardens high, to the point that some of their members end up believing their denomination is the whole bang shoot, or at any rate the normative model. Incredible, but true.

Which brings me onto starfish and spiders. Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom describe two types of organisations. Spiders derive their strength from command 'n control and centralisation. They are powerful and mobile, but, here comes the catch, bash the body/head complex and the thing dies; so a lot of their energy goes into resourcing and defending the centre. Starfish are strong and powerful but in a different way. You chop one leg off, it scuttles off and becomes another starfish. There's a hilarious tale in the book about some beefy Aussies who charged off down the beach in their tiny speedos to go deal with the starfish on the reef. When they got the machetes out they had 300 starfish, and by the end of the day they had 3,000. That's the power of starfish, and to tap it you have to be a radically decentralised network, but strongly held.

The Church is obviously both starfish and spider. Viewed as a whole (sorry your holiness) the Christian Church is rather more starfish than spider. That's how the early Church grew in the face of persecution. That's why when Christians gather for conferences like, say, Kirchentag, Greenbelt or the Leadership Summit there's an obvious unity much bigger than any denomination. You don't have to work out the head office niceties to get you going. It just happens.

And the Church of England? By historical accident, whilst holding onto historic accountability lines, it has devolved authority radically, in a subtle and complex way — Incumbents and parishes have had tremendous autonomy, and Dioceses have traveled light. Right on, I say, but being starfish involves a high degree of trust... Do we have it within us to be the kind of (Starfish) organisation that, if Michael Geist is right, the world really needs, or are we going to put our energy into chasing after empire dreams, empire games?

Who's Back? What from?

Click This

Or This

Ian got some Spiritual Toffee to chew on

So did the Chair & Vice Chair of the Methodist Conference

Try this (Andy Goodliff)

or this for some music

or a thinking/praying movie

even (Cardboard) Gordon Broon in the Beer Tent

pix

...must do it some time...

Friends, enemies and neighbours — Seeing everything as it is?

We took Nick & Anna to the Living Rainforest, which turns out to be near Newbury.
— a lot of greenery, some fascinating critters and a very handsome chameleon.

Over in the Pupa cabinet I saw something I'd never before — a butterfly being born. It said something powerful about how everything hangs together in one seamless whole, and the fragility of it all.

In the Ken Robinson creative thinking talk I posted from TED, he quoted Jonas Salk (the Polio Vaccine pioneer) as saying:

"If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all life on earth would end. If all human beings were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all forms of life on earth would flourish."

What is this factor about people, this radical rejection of Genesis 2:15, that makes us narrow, unwittingly destructive and toxic? In the bookshop was a book of eco-pioneering voices including, surprisingly perhaps, an artcile on G. K. Chesterton. He was quoted as saying "We make our friends. We make our enemies. But God makes our Neighbours."

Jesus has powerful things to say to his followers about their "neighbours." Your neighbour is not the person you choose, or the person with whom you have affinity. It is any person who is cast into your path in any need. How you respond to the challenge of encountering them is the Test of Discipleship, not your ortho-anything defined by some abstract standard.

In how we do Church, In our interaction with the real world, we need to go figure. We will be known for what we really are, friends of God (or not), by our fruits not our intentions.

How can we learn to Think Different?

Thanks to Steve Whitmore for reminding me about the talk that alerted him to TED, which I looked up after he told me about it at Willow Creek.

In it Sir Ken Robinson talks about the effect of schooling systems around the world on Creativity, Do Schools kill Creativity? Sir Ken draws attention to the inherently multidisciplinary way the learning brain works, thriving on Diversity, Dynamically interactive and aware of acute Distinctions between sometimes incompatible things. He defines Creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value, and, boy, do we need some if we are to survive, let alone flourish in future.

An uncertain and increasingly complex world demands real liberation for the mind, possibility thinking and creativity, embracing paradox. We need to grow out of the kind of wooden Eagle Comic scientism of the modern age we're being peddled by some of today's secularists and the battened down cramming of the National Curiculum, or all we will end up doing is "strip-mining the earth" to destruction.

Whether you're a teacher, a thinker, a leader, or, actually a theologian, If you have an interest in survival you have an interest in Education and you need to drop what you're doing for the next 20 minutes and watch this!

Bishop's Finger?

I don't speak Portuguese, so I've no idea if or how it's supposed to be funny, but just for the holiday weekend, I gather there's an interesting and artistic piece of, er, Episcopal firmware, in the City of Braga. A fuller explanation can be found here.

Suits over Stormont — Leadership Secrets of the Grey Men

What did they want? The Status Quo! When did they want it? Now!

A chronic theme of the Northern Ireland troubles has been the desperate shortage of gifted leaders — With one or two honorable exceptions, the order of the day for all sides, especially the government, has been mediocrity, limited vision and playing to a sectional home crowd.

Real leadership has been emergent — who could have guessed, even comparatively recently, that Ian Paisley would be first minster, and Gerry Adams his deputy? Yet they have been the people who cared enough and had the stickability to come out ahead... perhaps.

Here are 5 colleagues' or historians' assessments of NI political leaders since 1943:

1. "A very limited and extremely wooden man... far out of his depth."
   
   
2. "With a small coterie of advisers, his administration sometimes resembled a medieval court, and the roots of his personal power are perilously shallow."
   
   
3. "A massive intelligence, only partly in gear, which moved sideways towards the problem like a crab, and then scuttled back into its hole without actually coming to grips with it."
   
   
4. "a good, kind and able minister who became trapped by his office, and was too exhausted to realise he had little more to offer..." "I don't mind him wrestling with his conscience for ages over every issue. What I mind is the result always seems to be a draw."
   
   
5. "His semidetached style of government, which had allowed him plenty of time for running his estate in Fermanagh, the indulgence of his beloved fishing and shooting, and occasional long winter cruises in sunnier climates, was increasingly seen as dangerously anachronistic. He became the butt of an effective NILP campaign against "part time" or "amateur" government"
   

And here come the Men in Grey — Status Quo Defenders...

• [A] Reginald Maudling, Home Secretary, 1970-2 (minister responsible for Bloody Sunday)
  
  
• [B] Basil Brooke, NI PM, 1943-63
  
  
• [C] Captain Terence O'Neil, NI PM, 1963-9
  
  
• [D] Major James Chichester-Clark, NI PM 1969-71
  
  
• [E] Merlyn Rees, NI Secretary of State, 1974-6
  

Can you guess which historical assessment goes with which Grey Man? If so, er, you could impress the neighbours and even, perhaps, win the coveted award of a virtual Mars Bar.

Finally, as a bonus, there's a supplementary competition "What was he smoking?" One of these five leaders did have a Greater Vision. He realised how small and isolated the six counties would increasingly become in Ireland, and hatched a characteristically barren scheme to drain Lough Neagh and turn it into a seventh county. But which one?

Waiting — a forgotten part of real discipleship

Rosie our Vicar preached a sermon I found really perceptive and helpful at this morning's 8.00 in Great Missenden, on the almost forgotten Christian virtue of Patience.

14 times the New Testament speaks of its centrality for life, and as a fruit of the Spirit. Unfortunately, from terrorists to supermarket shoppers, whatever it is, we want it our way, we want it Now, and nothing less will do. Not to have an instant solution is the ultimate failure. There's no such thing any more as a season for which we wait, not even for strawberries. Perhaps that's one reason so many people can't get no satisfaction, and are so angry and unhappy, scanning the bookshop for a 'How To' Book that will somehow take the waiting out of wanting.

But think how patient God is all the time! In us, Patience is a fruit of the Spirit that grows, in due season, as we wait in hope. The Eucharist itself is the joyful expectation of an unfulfilled hope — an act of patience.

So exactly the people to break bread with are the people you can't stand, whilst you wait, with them, for something better. That's exactly the point of the ruddy thing! Hang up on them and you cut yourself off, because God hasn't hung up on them yet, even if you have.

Food for thought.

Biovisions — Rich, beautiful Diversity in a single Cell

David Bolinsky is a medical illustrator, whose company, Xvivo, has been working to illustrate creatively the dynamics of life to Harvard students for a programme called Biovisions. Thanks to Patrick Mayfield and Steve Whitmore, as another spin off of this year's Leadership Summit I've been exploring TED Talks, creative ideas from some of the world's greatest thinkers sponsored by BMW. David's work (which he introduces in this video) is just incredible. A single cell contains all manner of diversity of form and activity within it. Christians can hold at the back of their mind the biological pictures of the Church in the NT. Static institutional images and models are pathetically inadequate, given the beautiful dynamic diversity and relatedness of everything God called 'good' because that's the way he wanted it, through and through!

Nigerian Archbishop implements Genesis 27:22

The comprehensive and informative Thinking Anglicans, carries a story from Pat Ashworth in the Church Times, based on Computer Data of a recent "personal" statement by Archbishop Peter Akinola. Most of it appears in fact to have been penned by US and UK Traditionalists. TA also gives US satirical comment. The statement on TA from a Nigerian press officer resorts to every junior brief's desperate last resort — the suggestion that his client may in fact have been circumstantially at the location, 3,000 miles away, using his friend's computer. Like you do. Chelmsford Anglican Mainstream posts instructions to prevent getting caught this way again. Not that they'd do it again, of course, but inquiring minds want to know.

The prima facie evidence is as sure as a speed camera. No point arguing the facts, but Does it matter?

Victorian politicos didn't have Microsoft Word, but experienced this predicament (left). Surely clergy, trained as we are on J, D E & P, should be able to cope — very few of us ever have a truly original thought. Archbishop Runcie, famously, used Gary Bennett (the mercurial tragic Oxford Don, not the back-up catcher for the St Louis Cardinals) for his stuff. An Australian RC Archbishop was caught earlier this year using Terry Eagleton's brilliant LRB review of Dawkins' book without, er, quite having time to acknowledge his source. We juniors, by and large, have to write our own stuff.

Historically, it's useful to know which "Global South" stuff really comes from the "Global (wild) West", but as a student of leadership I wonder, does getting other people to write your personal statements really matter, and if so, how?

Final Wilson Family Postcard from Belfast

Some people thought we were crazy going on holiday to Belfast. "Are you sure?" someone asked me with real concern in their voice a few days before we went.

Just for the record, it's worked out brilliantly for everyone. This city is rebuilding, and it's a good time to visit. Many people the English side of the water are prejudiced about Northern Ireland, so the queues are small. This week has turned round forty years of negative media Northern Ireland images for me.

People have been amazing. There's good and bad in everyone, everywhere, but along with a certain 'in your face' quality, we've seldom encountered such kindness and honesty elsewhere:

1. "Was it safe?" people asked. When I lost my wallet containing cash and everything in a swimming pool in Lisburn, Ray (14), who found it, took it straight round to the police station, no ifs ands or buts. Any big city has its dangers, but there's a fundamental honesty about the place here you don't find everywhere.
   
   
2. Hotel staff (in a no frills place) went out of their way to be friendly to the children, and help us out, way beyond the call of duty.
   
   
3. When we had bought £40 of lunch for the children at Belfast Zoo, we realised they didn't take debit cards at the café till, and hadn't the cash to cover it. The lady at the till got us to write our address on the bill, and they'll send it when they get round to it.

And so we could continue. Everything I'd heard about the personal qualities of people here was borne out many times over. We've also had one or two amazing family meals out. The land is beautiful, and prices for everything are lower than in England.

We're all really glad we ignored the propaganda and enjoyed a fantastic holiday together in a beautiful place!

Holiday Fun Covenant Competition — Calling all Historians!

In February 1638, in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, Scots noblemen, gentry, clergy and burgesses signed a National Covenant, committing themselves under God to preserving the purity of the Kirk.

My distant ancestor Margaret Wilson is alleged to have been drowned in the Solway Firth by Episcopalians for the sake of the Covenant. Margaret, if you're reading this up there and wondering how your great great great something grandson ended up as a bishop, just take it as evidence that things are rarely as bad as they seem in the long term and in the end, er, everything is relative.

The Covenant was wildly popular, and, in the short term, sorted out the bishops and King Charles. But hang on — Jesus said you know something's value by its fruits, not its origin or its popularity. The Covenant's unintended consequence was the Salami Slicing of the Kirk, accelerating after 1843 into various iterations of wee and free. Amongst other eventual descendants of the Covenant, you can number the Ku Klux Klan.

On 28 September 1912, Sir Edward Carson signed Ulster's Solemn League and Covenant. It mobilised Unionists, but its prime unintended consequence was 85 years of Civil War in the province. The PLO Covenant inaugurated er, the PLO. And just to show that covenanting doesn't stop you being covenanted against, the Hamas Covenant constituted a movement to destroy the PLO, as well as the Israelis.

Even in far-away galaxies, Covenants can be divisive. I am told, by those who know far more about this sort of thing than I ever could, that the Jedi Covenant certainly was:

There were no lengths that the Covenant would not go in order to prevent the rise of the Sith. The Covenant's Coruscant leadership sanctioned the Padawan Massacre of Taris after the four masters had a vision of the destruction wrought by Mandalorian Wars, Jedi Civil War and the First Jedi Purge. It appeared to be carried out by a Sith Lord in a red environmental suit, which might have served as a symbol that one of their Padawans would fall to the dark side, considering they were all wearing that same suit at the time the visions took place.

So there's a handy cut out 'n keep guide to a few Covenants.

We in the Anglican Communion have been discussing our own Covenant (see below), which of course doesn't involve beefing up our organisation to exclude Sith, establishing Coruscant leadership, or Purging errant Jedi.

But I wondered, and this is a historical not a theological enquiry, can anyone out there think of a "Covenant" (outside the Bible) in this or any other Galaxy, which, in the perspective of history has engendered unity?

A (virtual) Mars Bar reward, at least, goes to anyone who can help me out here... It's not a perfectly serious exercise, but enquiring minds would like to know...

Mainstays of Moralism or Mavens of Mirth?

My new found suspicion that Belfast may be the secret Mecca of Merriment took a bit of a bashing yesterday when I encountered Exhibit A (Left) — a classic dance venue, the Floral Hall, looking even less inviting than some Churches I have encountered.

But soft! Soon afterwards I encountered Exhibit B (Right/ below) — Acorn Coach and Minibus Hire of County Antrim. Is a "Church Run" anything like what the Royal Navy calls a "Run Ashore"? Could you book a "Night Club Run" for a Church? Or a "Church Run" for a Night Club?

Serious Whimsy outbreak in East Belfast

Belfast has not historically been famous for vibrant irony and whimsy fun, so I was more than pleasantly surprised to find a chip shop (with a website) in the heart of Protestant East Belfast which could yet turn the city into a world centre of merriment.

The originator of the slogan, Sir Edward Carson, however, does not look like someone who would find this kind of thing amusing...

Signs of the Times in Stroke City

Nope. It's still there, Derry, in spite of all the confusion on this subject at Northern Ireland Railways.

But things are moving forward... The famous Free Derry sign is looking what Noel Coward would call "terribly Pink."

Work is also being done to incorporate some jolly stone-throwers and a Bernadette Devlin MP lookalike, armed to the teeth with, er, an official IRA Megaphone. Prods, of course, don't use megaphones. The Revd Ian Paisley proved conclusively years ago they don't need them.






The whole City has also been working on its image. In various places around the town its cheery traditional (and deeply symbolic, you may feel) coat of arms:

is giving way to the following namby-pamby rebranding, including the D-word:Incredible as it may seem, the times they are a'changing, even in London/Derry, which some are beginning to call "Stroke City" — an ingenious way to name the place without annoying anyone, except the medical profession, perhaps...

Progress may disappoint a Mexican tourist I encountered up on the walls who asked me if I knew where she could find "Bloody Sunday." She seemed rather put out when I told her she had shown up 35 years too late. She seemed to think it was a regular local custom, like the Olney Pancake Race. Which, of course, some of the locals seem to think it is, too.

A Leprechaun told him to say it...

There's a story doing the rounds here in the province about a bemused New Zealand tourist who was told by railway clerk that she couldn't buy a ticket to Derry because "Derry doesn't exist." Like all sorts of things round here, this happening is the tip of an iceberg which has been rolling (officially) since 2003.

Shock! Horror! Have the wee folk snapped up the Bogside?

We're off to investigate today

Divis Flats, Falls Road, Sandy Row, Shankhill — redeeming some names from the curse of the past....

For as long as I can remember Belfast was a war zone. It seems incredible that people so decent, caring and pleasant should have descended into civil war for the best part of forty years. Belfast now is in full recovery, building everywhere to put behind it the legacy of the troubles. Thank God.

There's a particular theological challenge here. Jesus said people would know the genuineness of faith not by its content, or its conformity to some ideal specification, but by its fruits. How could religion bear such bitter fruit?

Dawkins, of course, would say it was religion wot done it. Dawkins has a point. Sometimes, as the Chief Rabbi tactfully puts it, people believe too much. But you don't have to know very much about the troubles to see that religious identity was only a background factor. Sir Edward Carson wasn't a religious leader, as such, nor were those who have driven this strife ever since. It's about far more than religion, and most religious people on all sides tried consistently to ameliorate the worst of it, rather than stoke it up. Anyway, the hypothesis that atheism somehow stops you being violent is ridiculous: most of the great Mass Murderers of the last century — Mao, Stalin, etc. — were, in fact, secularists.

As history begins to emerge from the headlines and slogans, here's one crude tentative hypothesis, overheard on the streets. It states that these nice people were let down catastrophically by their leaders, at all levels, including the highest echelons of the British government. Wilson, Heath and Callaghan governments committed their fair share of cock-ups and bad tactical calls, but were essentially carried along by forces beyond their ken, reacting tactically to something they didn't really understand, and couldn't think through strategically.

The shocking, culpable failure came in the late 80's when the UK government pulled up the draw bridge, pursuing illusory military solutions to a non-military problem. Thousands died whilst they sat on their spotty behinds, trying to sound hard for Fleet Street, throwing shedloads of money at increasingly ingenious security measures — anything except the one thing needful.

History awards surprising prizes. I was never keen on the Major government, but they turned things round. Often panned by Fleet Street as weak and vacillating, Major had the imagination and moral courage to see there was no military solution, and the problem wasn't going to go away unless he did something. Far from the line that "you can't talk to people like that" that played to the gallery at home but accomplished nothing, Major (and, eventually, Trimble) came to see that the people they really needed to talk to were the enemy. Until that happened nothing was going to change.

Well there's a tentative historical hypothesis, from which we learn...

1. Wars on terrorism are, by definition, exercises in pointlessness and futility because they attack the symptom not the cause. When you win the hearts of people of goodwill, you win. There is no military solution — the lesson the British learnt at great cost in Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus, Aden, etc. etc., and Northern Ireland.
   
   
2. Positive change happened here, and in South Africa, when the two sides sat down together and talked. The role of leaders is to bring people together. Any fool can cheerlead abusive songs from their own camp. It takes courage and real leadership to talk; and until someone develops that courage and leadership you are descending into a deep abyss, from which it will take years to emerge. If you feel the urge to walk out, turn it round now, and get listening, get talking.
   
   
3. We have to find a more Christlike way of doing Christianity, for God's sake, for the peace and salvation of the world, for our own souls' good.
   
   St Paul's letters to Corinth dealt functionally with the bizarre phenomenon of schism among Christians — the body that rips itself apart for the sake of politics and being right, the Christian who fixes on a leader who comes to matter more than Christ. In Ephesians 2 he hits the heart of the matter — Christ has broken down every dividing wall of hostility that stands between people — race, or identity, or history. Who are we to rebuild them?
   
   Posture and manipulate as much as we will, in the end we have to sit down in peace as children of one heavenly Father. We are all laden with culture, expectation and identity. As we lay down those burdens for what they are, we will be free to discover each other the way God sees us, with perfect understanding and hope, and begin to live a bit of the life of the world to come now. That's how redemption works on the ground.