Signposts (Blog)

A prayer

12/10/2016

Lord, may we do good.

May we always act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God.

When we see injustice, may we loose the chains.
When we see oppression, may we break the yoke.

May we feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and clothe the naked.

May we never turn away from any sister or brother in God.

For in serving others, we are loving them,
And in loving others, we are loving God.

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A prayer for forgiveness

12/10/2016

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Lord, forgive me my silent sins.

The unthinking judgements I pass on others.

The grudges I bear and will not put down.

The casual assumptions I make about those I do not know.

The divisions I create in my mind to separate me from others.

The disparaging thoughts that allow me to feel superior to others.

Silence is no defence.

I know that I shall be judged as I have judged.

Lord, forgive me.

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Automatons for Jesus?

12/10/2016

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There is a regrettable trait in some interpretations of Christianity that portrays the ideal Christian as a sort of automaton, a marionette with no will, ideas or identity of its own. Everything we bring to the relationship with God is condemned and it appeals to God to replace sinful human agency with divine will.

Surely the whole point of God's creation is that we are given our own soul, our own mind, our own agency. The whole point of God's teaching is that the agency is ours. Without that nothing makes sense.

God loves us with endless patience, so we are promised help and protection and guidance and forgiveness, but God is not interested in robots, God wants relationship with individuals, creative and constructive, building with the gifts we have.

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Agape

19/12/2013

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Is it possible to live
in this right way?

Open heartedly, caring
For all the same?

Loving every stranger
As my own skin?

Is it possible, truly
To love like this?

Not fearing the deep closeness
Of Agape.

Could the holy openness
Endure viewing

The gaping wounds of life,
Inflicted evil,

The relentless replay of
Cain and Abel?

Would this not be a living
crucifixion

of loving kindness? Nailed
by bloodsoaked news

Transfixed to the cross of
powerless love?

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Love

8/8/2013

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What does it feel like, to love God?
At times
In baffled anger I have raged.

More times
Though, I have ignored, or doubted.

And yet,
Sometimes
Inexplicably, I am drawn.
Is there a love unrequited
To which I must, this time, respond?

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The Gap

8/8/2013

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God's presence is in the absence,
The shaped emptiness that shows
Where He and She, was.

Leaving us, alone?
To ponder the gap.

Trying to patch it
With theology,
Cover it with rites,
or asserting that,
fundamentally,
there's no gap at all.

Waiting for those times
we are sure enough
That our humanness can fill it,
Shaped into the space God has left.

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The creation

6/8/2013

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A couple of days ago I came across online arguments and discussions of the later work of the scientist and militant atheist Peter Atkins. It was mostly what you'd expect; Atkins giving God both barrels and declaring he'd blasted deities into oblivion, believers saying that whatever Atkins thought he was aiming at wasn't any sort of god they'd recognize. Pretty futile. I read Atkins' book The Creation in the 1980s and I was impressed, indeed it made a great impression on me, but it seemed at the time (and still does) that it was not at all as harmful to faith as he assumed it would be. Perhaps if I believed in the sort of god he propped up as his Aunt Sally I would have been more dismayed. The ultimate reduction of matter into energy seems a way of understanding God as Mind.

Most debate seems to centre on his account of how 'something' appeared out of 'nothing', which essentially means understanding nothing, 0, as the result of 1 + -1. Such an understanding is compatible with the traditional explanation of a creation from the void by a creator God.

Atkins' weaknesses are curious ones, coming from a combination of scientism, nihilism and arrogance. One gets the feeling that a whole chunk of his brain is missing. He gives the impression, indeed he seems at pains to impress upon us, that he doesn't think truth can be conveyed by anything other than scientific discourse, that understanding not based on scientific methodology is of no value, and that human concerns not related to the acquisition of knowledge of scientific 'facts' are unworthy of consideration.

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The social need for God

6/8/2013

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There can be little doubt that as an ideology neo-liberalism is dead. It survives because it is believed that there is no political alternative to it that isn't even worse.

No political alternative. With the recent impotence of the political Left in the West, it has been the Churches that have provided the only alternative vision.

God has been left as the only source of value that is not wholly compromised by neo-liberalism's relentless reduction of all life to the status of commodity, and the Churches left as the only organised radical opposition.

So how do the forces of neo-liberalism react? Is there any connexion between the relentless reductionism of neo-liberalism and the relentless reductionism of militant atheism. Perhaps not intentionally, and indeed some of those most hostile to religion regard themselves as politically Left wing, but they are fulfilling a crucial role for neo-liberalism by undermining the religious concepts that are challenging the dominance of materialist commodification. Their replacement of universal and authoritative 'values' with provisional, variable, transitory and consumer-based 'choices' fits neatly with the rule of the market and the supremacy of capital.

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What is it to be 'religious'?

22/7/2013

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In many ways my worldview and that of an intelligent humanist are not too dissimilar. I certainly am likely to find him or her more congenial intellectual company than a Bible-literalist Evangelical Christian.

And yet, despite the huge dissimilarities between us, I share one essential characteristic with that Evangelical, a characteristic that, for the militant atheist, places me irrevocably in the camp of irrational superstition. That is, of course, that I also practice religion.

Now it has been observed that one of the curiosities of our age is how militant atheists seem unable to deal satisfactorily with the full reality of religious belief, in all its diversity over time and space. Invariably it seems they are drawn to their standard caricatures. God cannot really be anything other than a bearded old man in the sky and theological formulations like 'Ground of our Being' get them quite angry.

It ought be clear that any understanding of what religion is, and what it is not, has to encompass an extremely wide range of different beliefs, attitudes and practices, but nevertheless it is true that something really does link me with Buddhist, a Southern Baptist and a Jew and places me in that camp to which Professor Dawkins, for example, expresses deep and sweeping hostility.

So what is it that distinguishes a religious person? It's not belief in a God. It's not belief in an afterlife. It's not rituals. It's not even the act of worship. The Ethical Church had that. Faith comes into it but how?

I would argue that what marks out 'religionists' is they, we, believe meaning and purpose are there to be discovered. They are, in some way, intrinsic in the way things are. How they are intrinsic, is where the variety of religious belief comes in.

There is no proof for this. There are evidences that a religious person may cite in support, and those evidences may be examined and tested and criticized, but it comes down to faith. Faith that there is meaning inherent in the world.

Humanists, by contrast, do not have such a faith and argue that the lack of proof (indeed the lack of possibility of proof) for the hope behind faith is conclusive. Each person, therefore, has the responsibility to create his or own purpose and whatever meaning they can invent, using whatever sources they wish, science, reason, empathy. Of course, in theory an atheist could have no truck with any notion of meaning at all but I suspect such nihilism, whatever its intellectual strength, has very limited appeal.

This means, of course, that a humanist may arrive at very nearly the same moral and existential conclusions as I do; they may well be using many of the same sources that I take to be underlying truths, for example the Sermon on the Mount, as their building blocks to construct meaning for themselves. This is a likely scenario, for it takes a particular degree of bloody-mindedness to reject all the religiously-shaped cultural norms of the society in which you live.

So in terms of what I believe about my purpose and even how I arrive there (that is, what sources I use), I may be closer to an atheist than to a fundamentalist Christian but nevertheless, we will both find the matter of faith stands between us and regard the other's case as in that way unsatisfactory.

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The limits of humanism

20/7/2013

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The British Humanist Association website has a banner display which features a number of eminent supporters offering reasons for supporting the BHA.

Now obviously these are quotes, not arguments, yet they point to an obvious problem in trying to construct an alternative to faith, especially one based on science, whatever is meant by that.

For example, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, an eminent physicist and current BHA President states, 'Reason, decency, tolerance, empathy and hope are human traits that we should aspire to, not because we seek reward of eternal life or because we fear the punishment of a supernatural being, but because they define our humanity.

I have a strong sense of awe and wonder in the world, which my cells are so fleetingly a part of, that goes far deeper for me than anything religious faith can offer'.

Well, yes. But hatred, malice, fear and xenophobia are also evidently human traits that also define our humanity (as in fact the best religion recognizes). So we come back to the core issue, why pick certain traits and not others? It is not a given. It is only 'obvious' if you are approaching from a certain perspective: a perspective that has been shaped much more by centuries of culture than any scientific discoveries.

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What's here

A quick look at the 'blogosphere' shows that the nature of the medium means it is all too easy for a 'blog' to convey the impression that its compiler is, at best, self-indulgent and verbose, and at worst, a narcissistic bore. Religious blogs are by no means immune from this.

However, while I shall try to avoid sharing my each and every passing thought with you, there is a use for a space for shorter, more ephemeral pieces of writing, and on this website, that's here. These pieces are likely to be frequently revised, sometimes rewritten and occasionally removed.

ewayfarers@gmail.com

A prayer

A prayer for forgiveness

Automatons for Jesus?

Agape

Love

The Gap

The creation

The social need for God

What is it to be 'religious'?

The limits of humanism

What's here

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