After atheism can religion be rebuilt?

For philosopher Paul Ricoeur, religion after atheism must be built on the hermeneutics of suspicion, that is to say, it is concerned with the suspicion that enables ‘doing away with idols’ but also the hope that comes from  ‘paying attention to symbols’.

Of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, whom he regarded as the ‘masters of suspicion’, Ricoeur said:

“All three clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a ‘destructive’ critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting.” (Ricoeur 1970:33)

Suspicion is not cynicism. Neither is it scepticism, because it operates in he hope that there is some truth to be found beyond demystification. Suspicion is not an end in itself. It is a method of approaching truth in ‘critical openness’.

Of Freud, Ricoeur says:

‘One should not be in a hurry to correct this reductive hermeneutics bur rather should stay with it, for it will not be suppressed but retained in a more comprehensive hermeneutics’  (1970: 447)

In this new art of interpreting, this ‘more comprehensive hermeneutics’,  Ricoeur is looking for a ‘metaphor-faith beyond demythologization’, ‘a second naivete beyond iconoclasm’ (Ricoeur 1977, quoted in White 1995: 91)

He says ‘An idol must die so a symbol of being may begin to speak’ (Ricoeur 1974: 467).

Applying the hermeneutics of suspicion to Ricoeur

The question begged by Ricoeur’s approach is: if we stop interpreting literally (the idols) and start interpreting symbolically (the symbols), what is the symbolism symbolic of? What are the metaphors of his ‘metaphor-faith’ metaphors of? Symbolic and metaphorical interpretation imply that meaning is perpetually deferred. And yet Ricoeur writes of a symbol of being, as though the meaning of the symbolism can in fact be pinned down.  So which is it to be? Here it can be seen how it is possible, perhaps necessary, to go beyond Ricoeur, as did Derrida, his sometime assistant, and see the metaphorical as going all the way down.

References

Hans-Georg Gadamer, 1984 “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects eds. G. Shapiro and A. Sica. Amhurst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Roy J. Howard, 1982 Three Faces of Hermeneutics Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Kearney, Richard, 2004. On Paul Ricœur: The Owl of Minerva. London: Ashgate.

Grant R. Osborne, 1991The Hermeneutical Spiral Downers Grove: IVP.

Paul Ricoeur, 1973 “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation” Philosophy Today 17.

Paul Ricoeur, 1967 The Symbol of Evil, trans. E. Buchanan, New York: Harper & Row.

Paul Ricoeur, 1977 The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning trans. R. Czerny. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Paul Ricoeur, 1975 “Biblical Hermeneutics” Semeia 4 (1975): 33.

Paul Ricoeur, 1978 “Explanation and Understanding: On Some Remarkable Connections Among the Theory of the Text, Theory of Action, and Theory of History” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, eds. C. Reagen and D. Stewart. Boston: Beacon Press, 149-166.

Paul Ricoeur, 1970 Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Paul Ricoeur, 1973 “Ethics and Culture: Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue,” Philosophy Today 17 : 153-165.

Paul Ricoeur, 1974 [1969] The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics ed. D. Ihde Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Paul Ricoeur, 1995 “Philosophy and Religious Language,” in Figuring the Sacred, Mark I. Wallace ed. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

David Stewart, 1989 “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Journal of Literature and Theology 3: 296-307.

Anthony Thisleton, 1992 New Horizons in Hermeneutics Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

Erin White, 1991 “Between Suspicion and Hope: Paul Ricoeur’s Vital Hermeneutic,” Journal of Literature and Theology 5: 311-321.

White, Erin, 1995 Religion and the Hermeneutics of Gender: An Examination of the Work of Paul Ricoeur. Chapter 3 of Ursula King, ed, Religion and Gender, Oxford: Blackwell, 77-99.

Rowan Williams, 1988 “The Suspicion of Suspicion: Wittgenstein and Bonhoeffer” in The Grammar of the Heart: New Essays in Moral Philosophy and Theology, ed. R. H. Bell, San Francisco: Harper & Row.

The last few years have seen a deep questioning of the central tenets of the theory of secularisation. Far from growing less religious, as the prophets of the post-war period supposed to be our destiny, the world has become more infused with religious attitudes than ever. It is now intellectually respectable, if not yet fully intelligible,  to talk and write about a 'post-secular' age. At the same time it is possible to re-examine the high points of the supposedly nonreligious era we have now passed beyond, and see it anew as the site and source of an intense and distinctive spirituality.  It is strange for an art collection like the Methodist Church's Collection of Modern Christian Art to have almost no abstract works in the collection, as though properly religious art could only ever be representational. Yet until recently abstract art was regarded by many religious people as at the vanguard of a world without form, without meaning, and  - ultimately - without God. If non-representational art was somehow non-traditional then it was also, so it was feared, non-religious. It is possible now, however to reappraise this view.

In the late 1960's and early 1970's Patrick Heron produced a large number of canvases and silkscreen prints on paper, based on bright, interlocking abstract shapes. As though to forestall the possibility of overlooking the artist's obsession with colour, they had titles such as 'Blue and deep violet with orange brown and green'. The following reflections were inspired by a screenprint of Patrick Heron's at the Tate, which is typical of his work at that time. Perhaps to emphasise its abstract qualities it is titled January 1973:14.

1. what makes this image seem alive? Something to do with the way our eyes insist on bringing some colours to the foreground and some to the background. It just happens, we can't help it. Is it about what the colours are, or about what we are, in a phenomenological sense? Patrick Heron was fascinated by the rejection of illusory depth exhibited by American abstract expressonists. He explored it obsessively and in many respects went beyond it. For Heron this was a formal question in art theory, but it can also be said to have religious implications - the relationship between what is 'out there' and how we perceive it.

2. 'Creative emptiness' was one of the things that attracted Patrick Heron to artists such as Rothko and de Koonig. With them, Heron challenges the viewer with 'the troublesome subject'. If it is not about figuration, what is the painting about? What is the point? Don't these non-representational shapes want us to make something of them? Don't some have their backs to one another? Don't some encompass others, or offer enclosure, and others interlock? (Critics call these his 'jigsaw paintings'). Rothko denied that his work was abstract, and  Patrick Heron repeatedly noted that no work can be entirely abstract. When we try to pin down representation it recedes, but doesn't entirely disappear:

"abstract form is at its most potent when it has in some way incorporated into itself an unmistakable reference to an external object," (1955, quoted in Gooding 1998).

Bonnard, Femme au Chat

3.

What is the relationship between the colours/shapes themselves, and why does relationship seem to be an appropriate term to use? The relationship seems really important. In the 1940s Patrick Heron wrote about the 'alloverness' of paintings by Bonnard and Matisse and said 'the forms of objects in a picture…hardly exist in isolation from the total configuration'. Heron's rigorous formalism is perhaps offputting to many, but alternatively it can be seen as a kind of framework for a deep sense of humanity.

4. Why do different parts of the painting seem to evoke different feelings or moods? There's meaning, but there isn't... but there is. Patrick Heron, who was a notable art critic, said when he visited Australia in 1973, 'What one was looking for... was a full emptiness , or an empty fullness', and I think this comes to the point. In my view a case can be made that Heron is recording in art something quite close to the philosophy of the Buddhist Heart Sutra, with its well-known formulation, 'form is emptiness, emptiness form'. This emptiness, sunyata, has been taken by much western philosophy to be a version of nihilism (as Roger-Pol Droit critiques in The Cult of Nothingness). But for Heron, the emptiness amounts to an entirely interconnected plenitude - it is a full emptiness. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, 'and what is form empty of? It is empty of separate identity' (The Heart of Understanding, 1988. See 3, above).

5. Looking at Patrick Heron's abstractions, one may feel quite sure the natural world is there, neither in nor out of view, as it were. At any rate it hasn't gone away. Heron disliked American critic Clement Greenberg's claim that British abstract art was no more than 'landscape imagery in disguise', not least because Heron wanted to show in his art and criticism that Americans didn't invent abstract expressionism as Greenberg also claimed, but that it was already a strong European tradition, and Britons such as himself could teach the Americans a thing or too. In fact he thought he had, with his seminal painting 'Vertical Light', for instance.

Zennor Hill

However, I think Greenberg's point remains valid. When Heron moved to Zennor in Cornwall the environment was a great spur to his painting. Zennor was also an inspiration to D.H. Lawrence, who finished Women in Love there and wrote to John Middleon Murray and Katherine Mansfield: 'At Zennor one sees infinite Atlantic, all peacock-mingled colours, and the gorse is sunshine itself already... when I looked down at Zennor I knew it was the promised land, and that a new heaven and a new earth would take place.' (The Selected Letters of D.H.Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000: 123) Heron must have caught something of this spirit for he said ‘This is a landscape that has altered my life, the house in its setting is the source of all my painting’. He wrote to Herbert Read, another art critic: 'I wish you could see the place in its Mediterranean brilliance of light and colour! Yesterday though, we were wreathed in mist all day: hot, steamy stuff which made the rocks and bushes into grey Chinese silhouettes…’ . It is significant that for Heron the mist turns landscape into art. There is something in Heron's work that is strongly reminiscent of  Zen non-representation, the sublimation of nature into art and back again, as in a Zen garden (and one could examine further Heron's approach to scale in this context), as in the eighth ox-herding picture by Tensho Shubun at Kyoto, where all that is left of representation is an empty circle, but that is not the end of the cycle of paintings.

6. This link is clear in the work of another Cornish artist, Trevor Bell, whom Heron the critic championed in 1958 as 'the greatest painter under 30'. http://www.modbritart.com/media/wdmodernmedia/TB_001-048web2.pdf According to Chris Stephens of the Tate, they were both part of a 1950s revival of the sublime in British art. What he says of Bell, could also apply to Heron: ' images of infinity that inevitably conjure up intimations of mortality. They are not mournful, however, for that recognition of finality and infinity is a moment of great enlightenment.'

Cezanne, Bibemus Quarry

7.

So what is the point of paying attention to paintings like these? Two quotations may illuminate this question: "The Landscape becomes reflective, human and thinks itself through me. I make it an object, let it project itself and endure within my painting.... I become the subjective consciousness of the landscape, and my painting becomes its objective consciousness.” Paul Cézanne, quoted in Joyce Medina, 1955 Cézanne and Modernism: The Poetics of Painting, State University of New York Press.

"I have always claimed that painting's prime function is to dictate what the world looks like ... What we imagine to be the 'objective' look of everything and anything is largely a complex, a weave of textures, forms and colours which we have learned, more or less unconsciously, from painting, and have superimposed upon external reality. The actual 'objective' appearance of things (of anything and everything) is something that does not exist..." Patrick Heron, 1996 “Solid Space in Cézanne”, Modern Painters Vol 9 (1).

8. It is worth reflecting not only on the work of Patrick Heron itself, but also on what happened to it. In 2004 the so-called Momart Brit Art fire destroyed 50 of Heron's most significant works. Should we be devastated, as his daughters reportedly were? Or should we agree with Tracy Emin, some of whose key work was also turned to ash: 'It's only art'? Transience. See point 6.

9. What has all this to do with Christianity? I've long been interested in what Buddhism has to bring to the Christian tradition. Similar to the quote above from the Heart Sutra is a statement by the ancient Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna: 'The limits of nirvana are the limits of samsara. Between the two also there is not the slightest difference whatsoever.' The radical theologian Don Cupitt identifies this identity of supposed opposites as part of the Christian tradition too: 'Identity of loving God and loving one's neighbour. Identity of faith and works. Identity of this life and eternal life. Identity of the holy and the common. Identity of perfect self-affirmation and perfect self-surrender'. (in John Lane and Maya Kumar Mitchell, eds, 2000 Only Connect,  Dartington, Devon: Green Books, p. 125)

In the 'empty fullness' of Patrick Heron's art one sees the visual expression of this Buddhist-Christian identity. The identity of surface and depth, abstraction and representation, landscape (nature) and art (culture),  the impossible and the possible God. If the term 'post-secular' is to emerge with a meaning, it will need to do so in relation to art such as Patrick Heron's.

[written 20.9.2008; edited 12.7.2012]

Michael Reiss, clergyman and director of education at the Royal Society, a leading science organisation, has been misquoted as saying creationism should be taught in schools. This is what he actually said .

Audio of Prof Michael Reiss

His main point seems to be that creationism is not really a simple error that can be corrected in a 50 minute science lesson. Rather, it’s part of a bigger worldview that can only really be challenged by being engaged with.

The closest Reiss comes to suggesting creationism should be taught is the following: ‘If questions or issues about creationism and intelligent design arise during science lessons they can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works.’

In other words, he’s really not advocating the teaching of creationism, but discussing it rather than ignoring it.

But this hasn’t stopped some people calling for his resignation.

As a media story this has been whipped up by the Guardian/Observer, and by it’s science editor, Robin McKie in particular. To be specific, it is disingenuous to headline Prof Reiss’s remarks as ‘teach creationism says top scientist’   Interestingly the newspaper’s website appears to have changed the original headline to respond to Prof Reiss’s complaint about it. It is also disingenuous to claim that a ‘Creationism call divides Royal Society’. It may be that Robin McKie has no control over the headlines of his own articles, which in this context are more inflammatory than the articles themselves, but one would have thought that the job title ‘editor’ would suggest that he does.

I was taught high school chemistry by a fundamentalist Christian who believed the world was created literally in six days and who seriously expected the literal end of the world before the year 2000. We knew this because when asked directly he (reluctantly) told us. He left teaching to become a full-time pastor of a charismatic sect, but not before he had fairly comprehensively put me off chemistry.

[caption id=“attachment_116” align=“alignright” width=“180” caption=“Portrait of DF Strauss. Source: Wikipedia”][/caption]

These views were incompatible with the mainstream Christian community I had grown up in, let alone with the modern history of chemistry. Indeed a historical survey of the Christian reception of evolution in the United Kingdom shows quite clearly that Darwin’s views were fairly unproblematic for the Anglican Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Methodist Church, the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) and the Baptist Church. It was only later, and at the margins, that a few sects and pressure groups began to challenge it. Much more challenging were the views of German theologians and Biblical scholars – for instance George Eliot’s translation of DF Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, which was published in English in 1860 and labelled by Lord Shaftesbury as ‘the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell’ (Clark, 1973, p. 94). Interestingly the Church of England website fails to mention the widespread and early acceptance of Darwin’s ideas by church bodies, focussing instead on the admittedly vociferous opposition by the Bishop of Oxford, William Wilberforce.

The difficulty we have in working out how to teach children about science and religion is that we have a problem at the level of society with the concept of ‘facts’. It would be simple if we could just teach that facts are facts, that science is made up of facts and religion is not. In broad survey such a statement may be approximately correct, but when we drill down to the level of the individual facts we see a long and dirty trail of argument, conflict, false starts, misrepresentations and dissent. In fact (see: even our language conspires against us!) the scientific method itself proposes just the opposite: that what we call ‘facts’ are really only the current state of provisional theories. Even the most assured results of scientific enquiry, according to the scientific method, should only ever be treated as provisional. To deny this, and claim that there are some theories that no-one denies (or should deny) and that these constitute ‘the truth’ is highly dangerous. On this attractive but mistaken view facts are unproblematically the theories everyone has stopped arguing about. This is dangerous because it is often precisely our comfortable assumptions that need to be challenged. It isn’t comfortable to be constantly uncomfortable, but this is what the scientific method requires. It’s a problem when it comes to matters such as evolution or the age of the universe or the speed of light, because we don’t like the idea that these things could be provisional. We, and especially children, are supposed to believe in these, not merely hold them as provisional  and therefore changeable theories.

In this sense, belief and the need for belief is rampant in science and science teaching. We just don’t like to admit it.

Wouldn’t it confuse children if we expected them to accept that all facts are provisional? Well, I don’t think our society should worry too much about this. It is really a non-problem. For example, we universally teach small children to believe in the existence of Father Christmas as a ‘fact’, then expect them to have grown out of this falsehood by the time they are about eight or ten years old. Schools go along with this deception as much as anyone else. If we actually cared about the truth we wouldn’t do this to children. But we don’t so we do.

Imagine the headline: Royal Society claims Santa is imaginary! Now that really would cause resignations.

In spite of what we teach them about Santa, children work out his reality for themselves one way or another. In the same way, even when we teach children that facts are not provisional, they are still capable of working out for themselves what is actually going on. My point is that rather than hiding it from them till they are ‘old enough to understand’ we should be discussing provisionality fairly early on, making the truth of the matter easier rather than harder to deal with.

I came across a recent blog post lamenting the loss of rote learning of the Catechism in the Episcopalian Church. It seemed a fairly nostalgic piece but It got me thinking: how good was rote learning? What was the point? And so I made a quick mental list of the things I can remember remembering by heart.

• Book 4 of Xenophon's Anabasis in Greek
• Mark's Gospel in Greek
• Aristophanes' The Frogs
• Various Shakespeare speeches
• Keats' Ode to Autumn
• The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (highlights)
• Sketches by Monty Python (by mistake)
• the lyrics of scores of pop songs, but never the second verse
• various orders of worship, Christian and Buddhist
• some Psalms

These days kids learn things by heart because they want to. Last week I asked my daughter’s friends if they could say how many chapters there are in all seven volumes of Harry Potter. I thought that would stump them. Instead they worked it out, then recited the chapter names. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the first sentence of each chapter. You could tell they were winging it a bit, but on the whole it was pretty impressive.

The last chapter of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 has haunted me since I read it. The hero, Montag, whose job has been to burn books, is on the run when he comes across a small group of outlaws who are preserving the culture through this new Dark Age. How do they do it? They have memorised small chunks of literature. Montag is told there are many such people and when they get together a whole book will coalesce in the retelling.

Me, I feel this underestimates the value of a purely oral culture, at the same time as praising a partially oral culture. But all the same, it’s a poignant scene.

So here’s my question:

what have you learnt by heart, and do you feel it has been ‘worthwhile’ (as defined by you)?

What is the relationship between belief and rule-keeping? Which matters more in religion? These comments follow from a previous post on this matter.

The Guardian’s Face to Faith column has an interesting comment by Geoffrey Alderman on the life of Benzion Dunner, a prominent member of London’s Orthodox Jewish community, who died earlier this year.

Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks said: “Benzion Dunner was an outstanding exemplar of Jewish values and Jewish responsibility. He was a person of exceptional chesed, much of whose work was done quietly behind the scenes and was all the more impressive for that. Our hearts go out to the members of his family, whose grief we share. His memory will endure as a source of blessing and inspiration.”

The question is how the community of which he was a part should respond to this. Alderman seems to think it’s sad “that practically no one among the sectarian-orthodox is prepared to condemn his behaviour”.

The issue seems to be how someone who doesn’t keep the rules is to be regarded. Is condemnation appropriate?

It seems there is more to it than merely belief or obedience. There is also belonging. This matters enormously. And in the case of Benzion Dunner, his standing in his community, not his rule-keeping, is what he is being remembered for. And this standing comes from exemplary chesed, not from perfection.

No one can be good at everything; all of us have our weak points. In this case, it seems, fatal drug-taking.

But belonging, as much as believing or obeying, may be the mark of a good, if flawed, life.

Magic requires rules. Here is what anthropologist Marcel Mauss has to say:

‘Far from being the simple expression of individual emotions, magic takes every opportunity to coerce actions and locutions. Everything is fixed and becomes precisely determined. Rules and patterns are imposed. Magical formulas are muttered or sung on one note to special rhythms …Gestures are regulated with an equally fine precision. The magician does everything in a rhythmical fashion as in dancing: and ritual rules tell him which hand or finger he should use, which foot he should step forward with. When he sits, stands up, lies down, jumps, shouts, walks in any direction, it is because it is all prescribed. Even when he is alone he is not freer than the priest at his altar… Moreover, words are pronounced or actions are performed facing a certain direction, the most common rule being that the magician should face the direction of the person at whom the rite is aimed.’

Marcel Mauss, General Theory of Magic [1950] tr. Robert Brain, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, p.58. Quoted in Ian Hunt 2002, ‘Escape Routine’ accessed at http://www.simonpattersonart.com/essays/essays_escape.html

The Thinking Anglicans website, http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk, is worth a look. Curiously I have been unable to locate its sister website, unthinkinganglicans.org.uk and wonder if there might be any takers out there. While the dnsserver claims: ‘the domain name does not exist’, I am tempted to ask whether this statement is epistemologically defensible.

A while back Rabbi Jonathan Romain wrote thoughtfully on some Jewish approaches to the existence or non-existence of God.

The heading of this article is ‘Jews don’t have to believe – if they do what he says’. And clearly this needs a little unpacking.

It may make a certain sort of sense to ‘do what he says’ if you believe in the kind of God who expects obedience. But what if you don’t? If there is no ‘he’ what is the justification for keeping his law? Three questions arise in particular.

First, It’s fairly obvious that if you insist on obeying the commandments of a deity whose existence you deny, and have no considered reasons for doing so, you are in an untenable position in the long-term. So could there be good and sustainable reasons for this behaviour?

Second, there is an aporia in Romain’s piece – a question going begging. At the start he writes as though a decline in synagogue attendance is some kind of problem to be lamented and he identifies Jewish atheism or agnosticism as the culprit.

‘No wonder they do not come back to pray to a God they reckon is absent.’

But by the end, he seems to be excusing the non-attenders on the grounds that Judaism isn’t consensually about belief in any case. The lingering question, then, is whether it matters that synagogues are reportedly emptying. And if it does, would a return to dogmatic belief be any kind of solution, or just promote further alienation?

Third (or eighth and ninth if you’re actually counting), the tradition itself does seem to have an ongoing debate about the significance of attitudes to rules, which Romain seems to skip over rather lightly. This was why the Christian Reformers critiqued what they saw as the ‘legalism’ of the Roman Catholic Church. As they read the Bible for themselves, especially the Prophets, they became exposed to a strand of religious thought that prioritised disposition over practice, epitomised by the rather ungainly but significant metaphor of the law written in the heart. This debate continues into the present. Is it enough merely to keep the letter of the law? Don’t you also need at least a little respect for its spirit?

One partial resolution of these questions might be to see religious observance as a kind of game to be played.

Like any game it’s more fun if you have a set of rules, and almost impossible to continue if you don’t. It’s interesting that almost no one claims a supernatural being invented the rules of games, and yet game-playing is massively and enduringly popular. Conversely, the experience of being coerced into playing a rule-based game, as in a million school sports lessons in the rain, is usually very negative; it’s only when we freely consent to the rules, without authoritarianism, that the game becomes enjoyable. As anyone who has played games will tell you, the rules look fixed but really they’re contestable, and the evolving debate about the rules is a significant part of what makes the game socially worthwhile. Finally, and perhaps more than anything else, it’s a social thing: if you won’t play along, you’re missing out on all the fun.

Perhaps if synagogues and churches were more like that – more ludic in their disposition – they’d have more punters.

In case it is supposed that the analogy between religious practice and a game is frivolous, it should be remembered that games, as well as religious practice, can be very serious things.

The forthcoming TV drama God on Trial gives an example of a seriously playful approach to the problem of evil.

Objectors might argue that a really significant difference between a religion and a game has been overlooked: the difference being the divinity itself. After all, who ever heard of people getting together to behave as though fictional beings really existed? Actually, this is the main premise of fantasy role-playing games. These have taken the Internet and what used to be called ‘the younger generation’ by storm and may well point towards a viable future for religious practice. A concern would be that these ‘massively multiplayer games’ seem to encourage, to put it mildly, a certain lack of ethical seriousness. But hasn’t this always been the dilemma of religionists in an ethically frivolous world? And in any case, with a few notable exceptions this concern probably mistakes form for substance. Beneath the pixie dust and hidden deep in the alien bases lies a far-reaching ongoing experiment in character formation (a phrase the fans of Ignatius Loyola and Gary Gygax would be equally comfortable with). Far from denigrating ethics, games and their rules can actually establish an environment in which ethical behaviour is modelled, learned, and even mastered. In realising this aspiration the games known as religions can and should play an important part.

[caption id=“attachment_38” align=“alignnone” width=“240” caption=“The Gaol Chapel at Lincoln Castle  www.flickr.com/photos/th…"][/caption]

According to the Guardian newspaper Sweden is going to ban the teaching of religious doctrine ‘as though it were true’. It may well be a move to try to crack down on Islamic schools, about which Swedes seem either worried or paranoid, depending on your viewpoint.

Could they not try teaching the critical skills necessary to judge for oneself whether something is likely to be true?

Religious schools don’t indoctrinate children by giving them a diet of facts, true or untrue. They do it by creating a community of faith and learning to which students become emotionally attached. In a sense, then, it doesn’t matter what is taught overtly, the mere existence of a network of relationships is enough for a religious school to impact strongly on its students and their families.

One way of making this relational influence difficult was tried in the Nineteenth Century in Lincoln Castle Gaol in England. The chapel was designed so each prisoner would be able to see the preacher, but be completely unaware of the existence of their neighbouring prisoners. That way they would have the good influence of religion without the negative influence of other criminals.

I’m planning to attend a public debate on religion, organised by Intelligence Squared. The motion is ‘We’d be better off without religion’, and the speakers include Victor Stenger, who wrote God, the Failed Hypothesis - How Science Shows that God does not Exist. I checked this out recently.

The blurb about Professor Stenger says:

Stenger maintains that plausible natural explanations exist for for all observable phenomena and there is strong scientific evidence against anything mystical or supernatural in the universe.

Not only does the universe show no evidence for God, it looks exactly as it would be expected to look if there is no God.

I’m not disagreeing with Stenger. It isn’t that there are two different types of evidence, that used by atheist scientists such as Stenger, and the evidence used by believers. It’s actually all the same. I think Stenger would agree with this. He seems to think the existence of God should be empirically observable as a series of  anomalies in the laws of physics. Many theists would agree with this. For example, miracles, by definition, are things that don’t normally happen, and are not explicable using scientific explanations that exclude the divine. What differs between this kind of believers and non-believers is not the available evidence, but the interpretation. Using a materialist framework of interpretation, Stenger can show how there is nothing supernatural and how the very category is suspect. Using a different framework of interpretation, believers can show how the existence of God is credible, especially if categories such as Faith are considered. So the disagreement is about different approaches to interpretation at least as much as it is about the evidence itself. Stenger seems to be of the opinion that there is only one valid method of interpretation and that is the scientific method. This is clearly untenable, since all sorts of human activity depend on non-scientific frameworks of interpretation (eg love, revenge, ethics, etc).

Although some scientists would probably dispute Stenger’s claims that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God (or of anything supernatural), I am prepared to take his view seriously. Since he has been involved in identifying quarks and gluons, he probably knows something about physics.

I think, though, that his definition of God, while admittedly one used by many believers, is contestable. Is it necessary for God to be doing anything different from the laws of physics? Stenger thinks it is. If God’s existence is a scientific hypothesis then according to Stenger it fails.

But there is a different type of believer/non-believer. This type doesn’t regard God as a scientific hypothesis, but as a human creation, analogous to a work of art or an artistic practice. On this view God exists because humans created him. There are many non-believers in this kind of God, including most theists. It seems Stenger would agree with them, since he, like them, would probably regard this kind of God as no God at all. So Stenger has a great deal in common with the religious believers after all. The more he tries to distance himself from them, the closer they move together.

There’s a summary of Stenger’s argument here.

I’m interested right now in Jaime Laura’s latest book, Christian Texts for Aztecs. This is the second of two works exploring the ways in which Christian missionaries in the Americas adapted their message for an Aztec audience, and were themselves in turn somewhat adapted by that environment. An image that is particularly striking is that of the ‘sunburst’ monstrance, an artefact with which anyone who has attended much Catholic worship will be familiar.

[caption id=“attachment_27” align=“alignnone” width=“225” caption=“Before the Christian encounter with Aztec culture (Source)"][/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_28” align=“alignnone” width=“225” caption=“After the encounter with the New World (Source)"][/caption]

The gold came from Mexico, but did the design too? The question is, to what extent was the design of such artefacts influenced by existing depictions of Aztec deities surrounded by a sunburst motif? And to what extent does the solar design represent an innovation, accentuating a theme - Christ as “Sun of righteousness” - that was already present in Christian theology, but rendered more prominent by implicit comparison with Aztec sun gods?

[caption id=“attachment_29” align=“alignnone” width=“225” caption=“Did this kind of Aztec design influence the missionaries? (Source)"][/caption]

Why is it that when you glance over at organised religion you find yourself in the middle of an argument? Take the Anglicans at their Lambeth Bishops' conference. Isn’t it a bit confusing to be led to think Christians are in it for the chance to meet God in person, only to discover the leadership is completely preoccupied with organising who’s having sex with whom? They’ll say it’s a serious concern for God’s intentions for human relationships, about right and wrong. But if God’s so bothered, why doesn’t someone cut to the chase and ask him what he thinks? Now it seems these bishops have been asking and have  received a very clear message from God which they can now reveal to the world.

The only problem is, the clear message conflicts with itself, depending on exactly which Bishop was listening carefully. Back in the real world, we would just draw an analogy here with democracy, and get on with it. But the bishops, it seems, just can’t get on with each other any more. One side, in refusing to take disgust seriously, is breaking with a venerable tradition of finding certain things abominable and having nothing to do with them. The other side, in taking disgust very seriously, can’t make any distinction between ethics (good or bad) and mores (usual or unusual), except when it comes to rock badgers (look them up). One side is threatening to boycott the conference and perhaps even split the church. The other side is threatening to let it happen.

If the church does split there will probably have to be a new name. ‘Anglicans who aren’t gay and don’t even like gays’ may not have been taken, and may be apposite, especially given its connotation of repressed homophilia. But no doubt we’ll have to put up with some self-serving nonsense like Confessing Anglicans, Real Anglicans or True Anglicans. The other lot will probably carry on being plain old Anglicans, except where they’re plain old Episcopalians (the distinctions here are probably enough to start another argument, so let’s not ask).

Clearly it doesn’t have much to do with God - unless God’s perfections stretch to perfect pedantry.

When these kinds of arguments take place it makes it very clear that the church is not primarily about religion, as claimed and as commonly understood, but about whether homosexuals, women and other ‘minorities’ should be discriminated  against. In other words, the church is an arena for the continuation of debates that should have ended a long time ago, and elsewhere have.

So will the arguing be good for Truth with a capital T?

Is there a sense in the Vatican's reply to the rumours about the Pope's clothing choice that he shouldn't be wearing designer accessories? Why not? It is restated that he's a 'simple and sober' man, when in point of fact he isn't: he's the Pope. A simple man wouldn't wear all the outfits that popes traditionally wear, Prada or no Prada. The reason for the disclaimer is that the Catholic Church is the quintessential Hierarchical organisation, and as such the leadership must be seen to be institutionally splendid while also personally unremarkable. Opulent vestments are permissible but signs of individual ostentation, or indeed, individuality, are slightly distasteful and  off-message. This is in stark contrast to the way the mass media treats the Pope. With its Individualist orientation, the media obviously sees the Pope as a celebrity, and his shoes and shades are to be celebrated as making him more uniquely him. Anything the Pope does to subvert the uniform is great, and newsworthy - at least to Esquire Magazine, which made him 'accessorizer of the year' ('have a signature... make it your own').

This seems a fine line to tread. The trick seems to be to act like a star while denying you're one, and hope we won't notice the incongruity. How's he doing?

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote:

‘Atheism is not limited in meaning to the mere negation and destruction of religion, but …rather, it opens up the horizon for something else, for a type of faith that might be called …a postreligious faith or a faith for a postreligious age. …it looks back toward what it denies and forward toward what it makes possible.' (Ricoeur, P. 1974 The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 440).

It is interesting to see what kind of opening up the populist atheism of writers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins is leading to.