From Jesus to Church?

How did they get from the simple carpenter of Nazareth to the institutional Church, and why?

Over Easter various UK media have been preparing us breathlessly for the Archbishop of Canterbry to denounce the RC church as having lost all credibility in Ireland, indeed a 14 second soundbite implying this was carefully trailed by the BBC, and some of the ignorant and foolish fell for this advertising puff.

When Andrew Marr’s Start the Week symposium went out yesterday morning it became instantly obvious that one tiny soundbite had been culled for advertising purposes from a small section of a sentence in what was actually a highly intelligent discussion involving a fascinating cast of characters, masterfully chaired by Andrew Marr. In 45 minutes of radio, almost nothing was said about the RC Church and the travails of that particular denomination — I think I counted four sentences. The rest was a brilliant discussion of how a simple message becomes institutionalised, for good and evil — UK public radio, in fact, at its very best!

The notion that all institutionalisation is badis one core idea of Philip Pullman’s new book, and paticpants were Andrew Marr (Political commentator) Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury), Philip Pullman (novelist and atheist), Mona Siddiqui (Muslim and academic) and David Baddiel (comedian, who describes himself as “10/10 atheist”).

The debate, available for a week on iPlayer and, I believe as a podcast. I found this section fascinating — very much the money shot. It reflects ideas I remember sketching as a possible first chapter for a book twenty years ago, but being rather too busy in my day job of being an urban vicar for it to come to anything...

AM

In many ways Philip Pullman is novelizing or fictionalizing... the institution and the essence?

RW

I think one of the main themes to come out of Philip’s book is that very strong sense that the price you pay for transmitting a spiritual vision in institutional terms can be very high. And the question sometimes is not so much about the nature of the vision as about the price you want to pay for sustaining it. The argument of the book, if I read it rightly, is that Christianity has paid too high a price. I obviously think not, but..

PP
You’re absolutely right. That’s what I’m saying...

AM

Is it possible to have an effective transmitted religious life that doesn’t have large institutional structures around it?

RW
I think it’s quite hard to imagine because you look at movements which try quite systematically to avoid that, and fifty years down the line you see mysteriously that the surface is beginning to harden. You’re beginning to get institutional transmission. Look at even the history of the Society of Friends, which I suppose in the Christian spectrum is the most anti-institutional of all. It still swings inexorably towards that, because you need some way of recognizing from generation to generation that you’re taking about the same vision. What matters is not, to me, so much whether you have the institution or not as whether the institution has in it enough things to rein you in, to draw you back to where you started and give you a real ground for saying ‘wait a minute! That’s not it...’.

DB
It may be the case, though, that the urge to institutionalize is with all parts of human endeavor because even atheists have the Humanist Association... There are atheist schisms, there certainly are. People define themselves as agnostic or atheist or whatever. It might seem like the most individual choice, but there is a need to communicate whatever belief you have.

MS
There is a difference, however, between institutionalized expressions of religion which give context to religious expression and context to people and reference points, and then how sacred the people who are the leaders within that structure become, and I think we need to differentiate between that.

PP

The process seems to me always that there’s a great original visionary who says “a time is coming soon when heaven will be fulfilled and earth will be full of plenty and delight and wonder” and so on, and then it doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t happen and it goes on not happening and eventually the people who want to preserve this vision have to set up institutions to validate their own positions.

AM

but there also have to be rules, don’t there, because all religions have a vision of the good life and what is a good way of living and that requires rules, and therefore somebody to...

RW

That’s a vision that has a shape, and therefore you can’t say anything counts as a good life, but the temptation then is to push that more and more and more towards codes, where you can tick boxes, and.. present your score at the end, and that is one of the things that the Gospels do really try to undermine and, actually not just the gospels. I think that it’s a great fallacy to say that there’s a big difference between Jewish and Christian Scripture on this. Something of this is going on in a lot of what we call the Old Testament, as well.

PP

Bureaucracy always overcomes vision. It’s a tragedy, and it always will be a tragedy.

AM

But if you’ve got stories which have a strong moral or ethical content and people are forced to go back and reading the stories again and reinterpreting the stories, isn’t that part of the answer to the constant fossilization or hardening caused by the structures?

PP

Bureaucracy will always be undermined by stories, but int he end bureaucracy will always win. That’s why I think it’s a tragedy.

RW

In that sense you're saying a tragedy with no possible way out. the bureaucracy always wins. I think I’d say the stories are stronger than that. I hate saying that to a novelist! But I think stories are very very tough...

DB
But isn’t part of the point of Philip's book that the bureaucracy is set up, as it were, to inject another element into the original story. i.e. to preserve what Philip talked about as a greater truth that is nothing to do with history i.e. to take what might be a story of a man who just said some good things, and make it into a much much great more powerful thing. And that’s what the bureaucracy is set up to do.

RW

That seems to me a bit more intentional than the way a lot of these things work. What I see as I read the New Testament is a central event, the life of Jesus, the words of Jesus, the death of Jesus, and for me also the resurrection of Jesus, causing such an... explosion of ideas and puzzles that the language that already exists can’t cope with, that you have a very complicated period during which the language is settling down in new ways, and you then begin to see the emergence of what we’re calling a bureaucracy, an institutional structure to hold it all. But it’s not quite as though someone comes along and says, “That’s a really good idea here, I’ll market it for you...”


All I would add is that the authority of the Church does not lie in itself. There is a dangerous delusory tendency towards what Pullman calls the magisterium, and ultimately it can compromise and can even undermine the source of faith. The Church’s real authority is emergent, and lies in its capacity to transmit the story authentically.

The measure of its success is not that it swells into a mighty institutional empire, but that it is still possible, even after all the refractive and corrupting influence of the human beings who make up the transmission chain, to distinguish Jesus’ message from its original context, and to attempt to live it in another. The story continues to judge the medium through which it is transmitted. This is the key insight of the Reformation, and the essence a Reformed Catholic Church, to hold that the Church is always accountable to the Word and its original founder.

This programme struck me as a very much more interesting and significant dialogue between sincere atheists and Christians/ Muslims than stale idiotic sixth form knockabout...

Doubting Doubt

Much as I may disagree with many of Peter Tatchell’s views and methods, I respect his passion and sincerity. I’m interested (h/t Church Mouse) in his account of why he is a secular humanist:

Religion is the world’s single greatest fount of obscurantism, prejudice, superstition and oppression. It has caused misery to billions of people worldwide for millennia, and continues to do so in many parts of the world. As a human rights campaigner motivated by love and compassion for other people, I would be betraying my humanitarian values to embrace religious beliefs.
...
By the time I turned 20, rationality finally triumphed over superstition and dogma. I didn’t need God any more. I was intelligent, confident and mature enough to live without the security blanket of religion and its theological account of the universe. Accordingly, I renounced religion and embraced reason, science and an ethics based on love and compassion. I don’t need God to tell me what is right and wrong. We humans are quite capable of figuring it out for ourselves.

What particularly interests me is that, coming from a similar generation but with a loving and decent (but not Evangelical Christian) upbringing, his description of his formation in atheism rings a bell for me. A similar process led me in precisely the opposite direction as a teenager, from atheism to faith. Bearing that in mind, I'd fill in a similar form, perhaps, a bit like this:

Religion, like politics or sex, is part of being human. There’s good religion and bad religion, some healthy, some toxic. Failing to realise that made atheism seem clever. I had high ideals, but a limited capacity to distinguish between my own passionate feelings and a higher truth and calling which I have not yet attained, but towards which I could still struggle. Faith in God prevents me always externalising the foe, and reminds me that I have to struggle within myself to be the kind of change I want to see in the world, or all my efforts will be no more than anger and opinionations self-righteously aimed at others.

As a teenager, I realised that although I didn’t need God, better people than me had searched seriously for him. He did not exist as an object, in the way I had crudely imagined as a child. I became intrigued by the elusive possibilities this raised. Following up this perception was rather like the 3-d image in a magic eye picture emerging from what had seemed a simple, if complex, 2-d one.

Thus it dawned on me that things are not, in fact, always what they seem, and reality has many planes and dimensions. In a universe where something as basic as number theory cannot be anchored entirely securely in rational axioms, I came to see that human reason could not possibly be the measure of everything, but pointed beyond itself. Grasping reality would require awareness of hermeneutics, and a sense of history, as well as my own opinions.

Accordingly, I searched beyond simplistic secularism and began to grasp the complexity of life. I studied history, and engaged with the languages and content of Biblical texts on an adult level. I don’t need God to tell me what is right. I do, however, find his spirit gives me more wisdom, grace and power to live than I can generate within myself. We humans are quite capable of figuring it out for ourselves, but frustratingly incapable of delivering the goods on the basis of passion, and our own time- and ego-bound reason and emtion.

The Importance of Sincere Atheism

Atheism is to Christianity what Baldness is to hairdressing — a poor substitute, you may feel, but an important “absolute zero” calibration for the thermometer. Ben Myers is an Australian theologian from Sydney, who has researched the writings of Samuel Becket. As the Global Atheist Convention opens in Melbourne he offers some fascinating theological reflection.

Ben points out that Karl Barth used to begin his courses with the atheism of Feuerbach, because he believed that until you had journeyed beyond the “God” constructed by Bourgeois conformists in their blindness and blandness, with their easy certainties, you could not begin to journey towards the Real Thing. Ben goes on to suggest:

The real test of the Convention will be its willingness to resist easy certainties, its capacity to accommodate vigorous difference and debate (I nearly said to accommodate doubt). I’ve attended many theology conferences, and most of the time you’d be hard pressed to find two people in the room who actually agree with each other. Unquestioning agreement and lack of argumentativeness are always sure signs that a tradition has stagnated. The purpose of a conference or convention is not to celebrate our sameness, but to join together in a shared project of intellectual inquisitiveness and exploration. The Atheist Convention will be a worthwhile event if it creates a space for this kind of inquisitiveness, if divergent views are seen not as departures from the party line but as opportunities for argument and discussion, if the mood is one of questioning and exploration rather than certainty and collective self-affirmation.

Above all, the Convention will be a success if it cultivates serious reflection and resists the cheap allure of slogans and marketing gimmickry. I wonder what Samuel Beckett would have thought of an atheism so easy and so confident that it can fit on the front of a T-shirt or the side of a bus. Atheism as a lifestyle choice – an atheism you can believe in. Frankly, I suspect Beckett would sooner have believed in God.

Reflecting on my own teenage struggles in coming to faith, it took me a while to learn it was actually possible to doubt doubt itself — to achieve radical free thought, if you like. That’s the zone in which God’s reality first began reallly to dawn on me, rather than a Charismatic meeting or similar. I’m not saying there's any partcular virtue in that. It’s just the way the penny dropped for me. Perhaps, as Barth suggested, faith needs the astringent of taking atheism seriously (as it has since the Book of Job), to prevent itself from mushing down into mental idolatry. If so, genuine dialogue between sincere atheists and Christians could genuinely have as much to offer Christians as atheists.

Blind Rage Slays Children

One dark, disturbing part stood out for medieval carollers among the stories connected with Jesus’ birth:

Herod, the King, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His soldiers in their strength and might,
All children young to slay.

For the original readers of St Matthew’s gospel, however, the story was very much less shocking than it is to us, with our post-Christendom sensibilities and Christ derived values:

1. This incident was very much business as usual in the ancient world. In any political, social or environmental crisis, guess who bears the heaviest burden? The poor and vulnerable... it’s not the way things should be, by Christian standards, but it’s the way they usually have been. It is still, disturbingly, more the case than we would want to think...
   
   
2. Pre Christian people shared the almost universal fatalism about the activity of tyrants. What they got up to was largely their own affair, and without a sense that history was heading anywehere in particular, let alone the coming of Christ as universal judge, there was no ultimate bar to which they could be held to account. So you simply accepted that they got up to some funny old things. The vulnerable didn’t matter by comparison.
   
   
3. Most ancients saw the child as, at best, a half-formed adult. Dumping of excess children was commonplace in most ancient societies, sweetened only, on occasion, by a vague hope of kindly fate. The then radical notion that the child was a complete person, entitled to full respect, was very much a Christian thing in the ancient mediterranean world. It stemmed directly from the shockingly new way Jesus had treated children and talked about them, and taught his disciples to think of them.
   
   
4. The pre-Christian mediterranean world was no place for the squeamish: from public crucifixion to the use of condemned prisoners as playthings in the arena, life was cheap and expendable in a way you would have to go to the great atheist states of the twentieth century (Stalin’s and Mao’s) to parallel.

This story stands witness to a reverence for life that is still disturbingly absent, and that many people, including the institutional Churches, still struggle to express fully. So...

1. How readily do we tolerate the environmental and financial injustices of our age which magnify the miseries of the poor and vulnerable? From lack of clean water to environmental disaster, from Child poverty to twaddle about trickledown, we live with this stuff far too easily, if not quite as easily as ancients did with Herod and his ilk.
   
   
2. How do we, Christians or not, treat the vulnerable and marginalised? Do we take them seriously? Are people ever blamed and persecuted for simply being how they are? It was rage that slew the innocents — the role of anger in our discourse is well worth reflecting upon in the light of this disturbing fact.
   
   
3. The value Christ sets on children makes the work of protecting Children especially central. This is why betrayal of children by their pastors, or any attempt by any institutional church to cover up what is going on, is so shameful. It’s possible, as child protection bishop for this diocese, to see this high volume job (for example we hold the process for about 6,000 CRB registrations) as a mainly administrative matter. It’s not. It means nothing without a culture of openness and mutual knowledge within which anomalies show up as anomalies, and are followed up. And when you go beyond preventative child protection, we may ask ask what gifts and attitudes are we giving to our children as resources for living, how much of our time, or are they mainly seen as problems merely to be tolerated, personal trophies for their parents, or teeny consumers?
   
   
4. It’s fascinating how often outsiders, including atheists, radically critique Christians on radically Christian grounds. We are berated not for excesses of compassion, understanding and the values of the Sermon on the Mount, but for deficiencies in them. Philosophically that’s an interesting backhand complement, you may say. But it poses a read challenge. It simply will not do to underestimate such critique because of the source — To the extent it’s true, it’s true and requires our urgent attention.
   

A Case for God?

There’s a popular narrative some atheists trip out on that seems to think everybody alive before about 1960, certainly 1860, was simply a complete and utter bloody fool. They just believed in a big interventionist sky pixie called God on the basis of a completely literal reading of the Bible because they were too naïve and thick to know any better. Really? Did they not have brains?

New model atheists also sometimes play off soundbites from one religious tradition against another to prove they’re all rubbish. If there were anything in any of them, they would all say the same thing. To test this approach, you need someone who has actually studied more than one religion historically to find out what they actually have or haven’t said, and how, and why, as a matter of fact, they have developed.

Enter Karen Armstrong. You might agree or not with her conclusions, but she is unquestionably one of the most learned and perceptive historians of comparative religion in the world. She knows a bucketful of languages, history, philosophy and poetry. She is not particularly orthodox or signed up to anything, but she undoubtedly knows her stuff, and has a real knack for getting ideas across.

This is what she says:

We are talking far too much about God these days and what we say is often facile... In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be readily accessible to anybody... There is also a tendency to assume that, even though we now live in a totally transformed world and have an entirely different world-view, people have always thought about God in exactly the same way as we do today. But despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive. In some ways the modern God resembles the High God of remote antiquity, a theology that was unanimously either jettisoned or radically reinterpreted because it was found to be inept.

She goes on to map out historically those images of God, old and new, that have developed within the world’s major religious traditions over the past 12,000 years. It’s a briliant compact work of historical description — I managed to read it in an 8 hour flight.

The basic idea is that all kinds of sophisticated visions, practises and subtleties flourished in the pre-modern world with a surprisingly high degree of mutual respect, understanding and flashes of emergent coherence. During the early modern period tooled up renaissance people fell in love with the idea of absolute certainty. When they couldn't quite attain it, they over compensated by constructing various formulations of provisional truth to be peddled as absolutes.

Thereby they lost much of the directness, openness, discipline, poetry and praxis of religion. All meanings were narrowed and noddied up for use as polemical rocks. Selective ignorance and paranoia bred fundamentalisms various, including atheistic ones. These are increasingly angry and desperate means of licensing the self to wallow in one, defined over and against all the others.

Taking this narrowed rationalistic approach is very limiting; like playing opera on tinny little speakers. We need to learn how to learn again and wake up to the possibilities for unlocking truth that is not intellectually reductionist and ultimately fascistic. It’s a plea for the recovery of something that wouldn't have needed saying until comparatively recently — that God’s a big lad, and he can look after himself, and we can enjoy the sutlety, poetry and joy of discovering him for ourselves best in communities that are logged in and logged on, not fundamentalist blockhouses.

What’s really going on out there

Timothy Garton Ash is one of the very few people around with the depth and breadth of historical understanding to produce genuine contemorary history. His new Book, Facts are Subversive, contains short essays, mostly originally written for newspapers, but far too good to let go for tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping. At this year’s Kirchentag I was struck by the skill, good humour and perspective TGA brought to a shared seminar with Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel. He knows his way round the issues of the age, and has real critical insight about Europe (“If the EU were to apply to join the EU it would be refused”) without losing his grasp on the positive achievements of the whole project.

These essays range from big questions of definition and identity (“Islam in Europe”) to well known flashpoints (“The strange toppling of Slobodan Milosevic”, “9/11”) and contemporary predicaments (“Beauty and the Beast in Burma”). His main interests, as Oxford professor of European Studies, have been foreign policy — there is an extraordinary insider’s account of an attempt to brief George W. Bush about Yoorp, and another about Obama’s inauguration. To every subject he brings deft precision, like a peanuts cartoon — inscape in context.

TGA’s standpoint is classically Liberal. He articulates what the word could and should mean as more than just a hysterical reactionaries’ catch-all ra-ra term of abuse.

Only when we are prepared to allow our own most sacred cows to be poked in the eye can we credibly demand that Islamists, Turks and others do the same. This is a time not for erecting taboos but for dismantling them. We must practise what we preach.

TGA is also highly articulate about the difference between secularism and new model atheism.

I do not believe there is a God and therefore assume that some 2007 years ago a couple called Joseph and Mary just had a baby. But what a man he turned out to be! Like the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, I can’t get anywhere with Christ as God, but as a human being Jesus Christ seems to me a constant and wonderful inspiration — perhaps even, as Burckhardt put it, “the most beautiful figure in world history.” And some of his later imitators didn’t do so badly, either.

As historians get down to work on Bush foreign policy, TGA draws up a preliminary balance sheet, measured against the administration’s stated aims at the outset. He is no knee-jerk anti-Republican, indeed much of his journalism as I remember from the period tried to encourage people to stand back and give Bush what benefit of the doubt they could. As the roll begins to be called up yonder, however, as a former advisor to Bush, he has to conclude:

In every vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five years has taken a bad situation and made it worse

He then forensically sketches the whole “amazing bloody catastrophe ” —

• Afghanistan worse (more dangerous and hospitable to terrorists),
• Pakistan worse (even more unstable, radical and effective as a clearing station and training camp for terrorists from all over the world)
  
• Iraq worse (now radicalised and unstable),
• Iran worse (newly prestigious, confident and dabbling in WMD),
• Israel worse (more worried, less secure and self-confident),
• Palestine worse (with a new radical terrorist government)
• Lebanon worse (Bush scored an accidental early goal in the Cedar revolution, but latterly managed to muck it all up by undermining the very government he had supported, so, on balance, less stable).
• Egypt, the Islamists are now scoring at the ballot box as well as with their AK47’s: worse.
  

The score is 8-1, then. The 1 was Gaddafi. We can credit Bush with a phenomenal performance, especially when his team was the only superteam in the league, with no serious opposition. Again and again, he played blinders, kicking the ball into his own net, stunning the occasional goalkeeper in the process. Hucknall Town played Manchester United and after 90 minutes the score is 8-1 to the giantkillers, 7 of them own goals, and the Manchester goal itself is a cracked and wobbling ruin with bigger holes in the net. Such is the trainwreck courageous and innocent young men and women are now dying to try and recover, as, tragically, horribly, the coffins come home.

For me, the jewels in the crown of this collection, however, are TGA’s essays on Gunther Grass and George Orwell. Most of the pieces are very short. Keep this book for train journeys and occasional reading. Agree or disagree with his conclusions, it flags up the real issues, remarkably consistently for a collection of occasional pieces. TGA lays out in historical order the events and alarums of our age in a way nobody else has yet managed, and I salute it as a tremendous and surprisingly readable achievement.

Personalised Atheist Buses. Enjoy!

Gadget of the year! An Atheist Bus slogan generator, to help you make your very own atheist bus. I was too hurried to come up with anything funny this afternoon, but I’m sure you’ll all do better. Go play with it and enjoy yourselves, Children. Just tell me what you all came up with...

So long, then, John Updike

Since Roger’s Version, back in 1986, with its crazy notion of someone who thinks they can prove God on a college computer, and a sex scene with Tertullian on the side, I’ve been intrigued by John Updike’s playful mix of high theology well hidden, Song of Solomon sex scenes, and down-to-earth honesty about the frustrations of suburban captivity.
John McTavish says Updike was

a Christian, but not a Christian novelist in the sense that his work forces an explicitly Christian message onto the reader. On the contrary, precisely because Updike is a Christian he believes the novelist should portray the human condition with unsparing honesty, expressing his "basic duty to God" in writing "the most truthful and fullest books" he can.

Updike slept with a well-thumbed copy of Karl Barth’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans by his bedside. As you do. Clear Christian conviction, with zero pietism, underlay everything he wrote, like the drums in a jazz group. He produced some genuinely fresh expressions of faith:

if the first article of the Creed stands, the rest follows as water flows downhill. That God, at a remote place and time, took upon Himself the form of a Syrian carpenter and walked the earth willfully healing and abusing and affirming and grieving, appeared to me quite in the character of the Author of the grass..

No time to write a learned essay like the tremendous ones by Ben Myers and, especially, John McTavish, but could we all spare a reflective moment for an Updike poem about resurrection?

Seven Stanzas at Easter


Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Now that’s theology for now! It doesn’t come from tinkering with the crown jewels, or swapping tough diamonds for smooth glass; you cut ’em rough and set ’em playfully where they belong... in the midst of life.

Sir John Mortimer RIP

I was delighted to read the Times account of Sir John Mortimer’s funeral at Turville Church, Buckinghamshire. Among great tributes from his massed friends and admirers, the tip of a huge iceberg, I am glad to know the Vicar did a good job holding things together in Church, and capturing the spirit:

“Sir John called himself an atheist for Christ. He always came to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. But he emphatically did not believe in life after death.
My hope,” she added, “is that he has had a wonderful surprise.”

The C of E at its best, I thought. And the Atheism? It sounds as though God views atheism as a harmless eccentricity, which probably doesn’t really exist as much as people think, infinitely better than pretending to believe, which is a ruddy menace...

Atheist Secrets and Lies...

Secret Tweet is fascinating — people can post their inner secret thoughts for all to see, anonymously. Recent examples include “I’m alone in life and I hate it” and “I’m an an atheist, yet in times of desperation I plead with God.” That’s confession. There’s a screen for anonymous reactions. Is that absolution? ’fraid not. Many, but not all Comments are sympathetic. This second tweet drew fury from one ranting atheist:

I don’t wanna be anonymous! I’m @MissJia and I think you’re full of shit. You can’t call yourself an atheist, denouncing God but then reaching out to him in your time of need! That’s some ole selfish bullshit. Either you’re an atheist who doesn’t practice or believe or you don’t. But don't be wishy washy with God b/c that shit aint right.”

Remember Maurice Bendrix (in Graham Greene’s End of the Affair): “Oh God, I hate you so much. It’s as bad as if you existed.” Plainly atheists count among their number rabid fundamentalist bigots every bit as fiery and intolerant as the ones you get among Christians, Druids, Branch Dravidians and Druze. It’s one in the eye for the demonstrably false notion that it’s religion causes crazy fundamentalism, rather than human folly and wickedness.

Secret Tweet is the ultimte Twitter stream for nosy people. It’s definitely going into my talk on prayer next week in Chesham. This morning I noticed “I don't want to lose weight. I just want to find someone who loves me as I am.” Food for thought...

But finding someone ain’t the end of yo’ troubles. Steve and Leigh Buttell from Sydney, got married recently. Eighteen months and several thousand dollars later they experienced a dream wedding, followed by a A$3,850 wedding night in what turned out to be Indiana Jones’ Temple of Doom:

By the time the group left three days later, the newlyweds had allegedly found maggots described by the groom as "the size of chocolate bullets'' in their wedding bed and a dead bat, covered in maggots, above their bedhead.

One guest awoke at 1.30am with a reaction to what he believed were insect bites and spent the night on a couch. Other guests fled their room in the middle of the night when a bat emerged from the fireplace and "flapped around the room''.

The newlyweds abandoned their suite on the wedding night after allegedly pulling back the sheets to find maggots in their bed, believed to have come from the dead bat on a shelf above their bed. The couple sought refuge on a blow-up mattress on the floor of a cottage occupied by Mrs Buttell's father and grandparents...

The cottages' owner, Sam Haymes, waived the outstanding $1850 and gave a bottle of sparkling wine as an apology, but Mr Mason was not satisfied with the offer. The family said the complaint was not about money. Mr Mason said: "Mr Haymes was apologetic and polite and removed the dead bat, but in my view it shouldn't have happened.'

Quite. Finally for this morning, Marcus Warren twitters the dumbest Inaugural line ever uttered by a US President, before the 43rd President (43rd dimmest, as well) invented the Bushism, from one Richard Milhous Nixon in 1969:

The American Dream does not come to those who fall asleep.

And, of course, a dead bat above the bedhead is one way to stay awake after hours. That’s how Aussies do it.

Atheist Bus Campaign Lookalike?

Perhaps those of us who’ve dabbled in professional design see life differently, but I can’t get away from a disturbing Lookalike comparison: The Atheist (Agnostic?) Bus Campaign & Dunkin Donuts.

Are they by any chance related?
Are the Donuts people covertly subverting the Eucharist?
Is Dawkins new model Upbeat Evangelical Atheist Religion, in fact, Baptist and thus potentially into dunkin’?
I think we should be told...



seeking lasting hapinessssssssssssssssissss sseeking fleeting happiness
by profound life philosophysssssssssssssssssby sugared comfort snacks of
sweeping the nationsssssssssssssssssisssssssdubious nutritional value

London Atheist ads: Shome mishtake?

I’m with Simon Barrow about the new London bus atheist poster ads campaign:

To those without a huge vested interest in promoting or dissing religion, this probably looks a slightly odd initiative. Frankly, the slogan is a bit anodyne. It's the non-believing equivalent of "God may very well exist. Now have a nice day". But it will probably still be enough to upset counter-evangelists of the kind who like to tell everybody they are going to hell for not subscribing to their particular doctrine, and who think atheism is very, very naughty.

I wonder what impact this kind of campaign has, though? It will appeal to those who like that kind of thing, no doubt. And in part it seems to have been born out of resentment towards comparatively prodigious (and extremely well-funded) religious advertising. But apart from raising brand awareness, I suspect that the vast majority of people will be as sceptical about being sold unbelief as they are about being sold belief. Well, unless someone is thinking of throwing in a free set of wine glasses or something.

Perhaps this particular ad is more agnostic than atheist, and we still have to await a genuinely atheist poster ad. The wording puts me in mind of a brilliantly funny song by the world’s first Atheist Gospel Singer, Susan Werner, which I sometimes play in the car for a chuckle.

Actually I suppose, like the ads, the song’s more agnostic than atheist, really. The humerous twist at the end is a refreshing break from the characteristic grinding pig ignorance associated with Dawkins and chums over here. Nothing in the ad isn’t in the Bible anyway — its line is characteristic of some strands in the Wisdom Tradition. And because God is implicit in everything, anything that raises the question actually helps people on their own journey towards him — as the sermon on the mount says, those who seek, find. It happens every day, and whilst these ads may well annoy people of a fundamentalist persuasion, they will raise a big question creatively for some people who might not have prayed Psalm 49 at a Cathedral evensong or read the book of Job recently...

Purely Secular Society — Historical (Norman) Wisdom

There was a slightly whining piece in yesterday's London Times by Carol Sarler, wishing everyone would just shut up about religion. The op-ed comments, which pretty much conformed to John P. Murdoch's Law, included a suggestion from Mr Chris Thomas from Oxford that "there never has been such a thing as a purely secular society." Not so, Chris. There have been various purely secular societies, embracing atheism as a public truth.

So for the historically challenged, here's a brief cut out 'n keep guide to those purely secular societies you may have missed during the twentieth century:

Soviet Russia — Most enduring (1917-1989): Atheists sometimes imply Stalin was some kind of closet Christian because he trained for the priesthood, but forget to add that he dropped out and embraced views on God that sound eerily identical to Professor Dawkins'. Anyway the whole thing was far bigger than Stalin. Estimates of deaths vary from 37 million to the high 70's, depending on whether you restrict the body count to those the régime killed directly during its various purges, or include famine and war victims. Produced Good Hatchet-faced Heavies and lousy submarines.

Honecker's East Germany — High culture in a dreary climate. Grey was the new Black, and the trains ran on time. Highly efficient secret police (Stasi) with pretty much everyone spying on everyone else, and the Trabant Car — proof that environmental disasters do come in small packages. Bred the world's finest androgynous female athletes, for those with Benny Hill/ Professor Peach sexual proclivities.

Chairman Mao's China — a great inspiration to secular idealists all over the world a few years ago. The literature is just being written that chronicles the concomitant violence, and there's no reliable body count yet, but we are talking millions. Gone soft on its atheist principles of late, but Tiananmen Square showed there was still some life in the old dog in 1989, even without the Great Helmsman.


Emver Hoxha's Albania — Balkan atheist societies made up in quality for what they lacked in quantity. Bible bashing Pastor Wurmbrand in Roumania was locked in a hole for four years. Albania was the most efficient, with very few movements in and out for forty years, and a seemingly endless supply of Norman Wisdom movies to fill the gap left by organised religion.

I wonder which of these purely secular societies Chris would like us all to live in?

Can anyone think of a society that espouses/ espoused atheism as public truth they would care to live in?