Passing the Legislation

The Church fo England House of Bishops has decided... and a new Clause 5 (1) (c) has been decided. It's this:

the selection of male bishops and male priests in a manner which respects the grounds on which parochial church councils issue Letters of Request under section 3

In other words it is looser wording: still forcing a selection of a male bishop or priest who would be theologically and ecclesiastically of the grounds of the Letter of Request. But the diocesan (male or female) still does it, and respect is a loose word. So a Conservative Evangelical parish might get an Anglo-Catholic if that Anglo-Catholic met the grounds of the Letter of Request. Humm - expect very precise letters of request. Or one might say, "Well I think my action does respect your Letter of Request, and, after all, I am the diocesan bishop."

Unfortunately, there is a foundational problem. The bishops have passed the text but it came from the submission of the Rev. Janet Appleby. This implies a teaching ministry and headship from Rev. Janet Appleby as the source of the text and therefore would be unacceptable to Conservative Evangelicals. Had she suggested this to a group of women, or children in Sunday School, then it might have been something for them to chat about. But as a source of the key text for the future of Conservative Evangelicalism it won't do. The irony of the bishops, chuckle churckle, that 'this came from a woman after all, come on then you women and support it', might backfire. Conservative Evangelicals were never very good at irony - literalists aren't.

In any case the whole delegate/ derived argument may well satisfy traditionalist Anglo-Catholicism, who can ignore how a compatible bishop or priest came about so long as he is unpolluted in his derivation (no female hands hovered over his consecration), but it won't satisfy the Protestant for whom there is no derived order (a mystic thing) but where there is only delegation.

After all, if she delegates a bishop, or a compatible minister, she has exercised headship and presumably she would retain the power to remove (under the usual rules) what she has given.

November is the best shot at it that the equality folks will have. The Anglo-Catholics may well concede and occupy their remaining rabbit holes. The Conservative Evangelicals may simply not be strong enough. But if the opposition grows, then, in years to come when the legislation returns, Conservative Evangelicals will be all the stronger in a more sectarian Church. On the other hand, if the legislation passes, the Conservative Evangelicals will have to resort to entryism or escape, and they might just take their sectarianism with them, especially if there is a quick number of female bishops and a good proportion quickly. There'll be a more liberal outlook and the Conservative Evangelicals will be on the back foot from then on.

Personally I don't care for bishops, except as superintendents that facilitate better activity and management across congregations, and would hope that female bishops might undermine the hierarchical attitude that has accompanied bishops in the past. Usually, though, women priests make no impact on liturgical doctrines and beliefs so I'm not too hopeful.

Pub Philosophy

Sunday evening I was in the pub with my mates and it was another example of that Monty Python sketch - "Hello, I've come for an argument." "No you haven't." "Yes I have - oh very good." "No it isn't." "Oh yes it is. Hang on, this isn't an argument, it's just contradiction." "No it isn't."

My friends just like to have an argument, no matter what I say. Afterwards one said, "Will this be in your blog?" I said, "No, but will be a few words in my diary." As I said to the other in his shop this morning, I've changed my mind. So here it is, also in the blog.

I was telling them of thrashing about with Ps and Bs trying to remember a core postmodernist philosopher, and I went to my library shelves and it was Jacques Derrida. So what is postmodernist and I said it is a non-foundationalist philosopher, a poststructuralist.

Ah it's just jargon. No it is not just jargon. It's short hand. Asked how to be a philosopher I said you learn the language and what it is trying to get at, and what it is trying to get at is understand the epistemology of things, what is the meaning of meaning, and I referred to the linguistic turn which Derrida represented.

Now this is in a pub, and I'm drinking lime and lemonade, and my friends are on the stronger stuff. A question was, who are philosophers and who are not. I said well Jesus and Lenin were not philosophers, but Hegel and Marx were. One knew Marx borrowed from Hegel - yes, he did, but Hegel was a philosopher of spirit, I said, and Marx of effectively technological foundationalism. More jargon. For Hegel, thesis led to anti-thesis and then synthesis, whereas for Marx a paticular level of development and social organisation led to opposition and that producing a new stage [though hardly a synthesis, more a replacement]. Socialism (rather, communism) was a technological expectation of plenty, or no shortage of resources.

They tried to claim that socialism was natural, and I mentioned the "religious communists" who went to America and were authoritarian amongst themselves; they cited native Red Indians and not just hunter gatherers where resources were plentiful and followed. They said these groups had chiefs who listened to meetings. But I said that as soon as people settle, issues of boundaries appear and thus property. Not in their case (but no evidence offered). As for socialism being "natural", I said just look at greedy children. I said that if children have to be told not to be greedy (which they conceded) then it is not natural. They just went on insisting it was, but then that's pub talk. No mention of the severe sanctions the native Indians used either amongst themselves or to the unwelcome visitor.

So, here we are: I've blogged on this part of the pub talk as well as put an entry in my diary.

Church-Off Sunday

So here I am on my first non-church Sunday in - well, years and years. If there was a 'Sunday off' before I'd use it to visit somewhere else. This time I've gone nowhere, not even to a church two streets away.

I visited the Sutton church during a heavy snowfall in 2010 along with fifteen others including some refugees from other places. The sermon was evangelical in content and the lay reader treated people like idiots, and so that was a decision not to return there. Evangelical religion is a kind of intellectual nonsense and if they don't know it they ought to read some simple books on science. And I have no desire to go elsewhere. I know a friend who once migrated from the Unitarians to an intelligent Anglo-Catholic church, although that priest has since gone, and so anyway so had the ex-Unitarian. He didn't stay long.

And the question has to be asked, as I do more on hymns than I'd do towards providing for a Sunday (building up the stock, handling a new choir CD): would I, starting from here, go to any church at all? The answer might be no.

The other day in bed I had in my head one of those blockages where I tried to remember the name of the central postmodernist for our times. I was thrashing my brain around Ps and Bs but could not get the name, so went to my Cupitt books and one in particular, The Long Legged Fly, and found Jacques Derrida straight away. The result is a few of his hovering in the bathroom and about. His Lenin book, that is the 'What is to be Done?', is Radicals and the Future of the Church (1989). It calls for a kind of subversive existence, one that he now rejects. Indeed I reject the central argument of the book, which is the difference between accommodating liberals, for whom the myth is a semi-realist viewpoint, and the radicals, where the myth is a human made-it-all-up useful pathway.

I don't accept Cupitt's blanket across the board non-realism anyway. It applies to religion like art, as he puts it, but there is something different about research in the sciences and social sciences that delivers negative answers to the ones we'd like. We don't make that up: they are powerful narratives because they do reflect truth. I'm not a language fundamentalist even if language is awkward even for the scientist and leads to imprecision. Of course there are schemes of understanding and these can shift, but they shift because of the nuisance of factual discoveries through research. So I am with Cupitt some of the way, regarding language and narrative and schemes of understanding, but end up as a semi-realist in science and social science (measuring culture with the tribal issue of evolved sociobiology nagging).

I reject his then central argument because the problem is not liberalism as such but Christianity. Such (about Christianity) is Cupitt's own discovery. I go much further than him too, in that for me the central problem is the cult of Jesus itself. He wrote a book on Jesus's sayings that was virtually realist and historiography-warning busting: Jesus and Philosophy, 2009). The whole thing turns, and wrongly, on a focus on the man. Much of what Jesus said is interesting, useful, but a lot of it was just plain wrong as a man of his time. He made it up too, along with those he borrowed his ideas from. Cupitt and his Jesus Seminar mates haven't rescued Jesus but sanitised him for a Western audience.

Unitarians also say the worship of Jesus as a deity is a mistake, but then they went and compromised and made him a supreme brother or some such. Francis Newman got it right, when he said Jesus was not morally perfect (and then advocated a pure theism). As to his moral perfection, in some sort of league table: how do we know? We don't know. Indeed there are attitudes to Gentiles and animals that suggest ethical imperfection despite the Gentile wrapping. His ethical perfection is a dogma and comes wrapped up in the theology that dishes up answers before the questions get asked.

The Unitarians haven't escaped the legacy. Well, some have 'moved on' but others still dig in the same hole. Well, that's fine, and people do, and I have too, but let's not then get contradictory. Some Unitarians proclaim their liberal Christianity, and they are like cars going around a roundabout and never come off.

There is no way to be subversive within Christianity: the religion itself is corrupting. It forces anti-ethical positions. You can just about get away with a Jesus-like focus outwards to God, though his God was a supernatural last-days nonsense. The only question is, why would you want to do it - to preserve the place of Jesus? Just let him join the list of sages of old.

In terms of a religious path or three, it comes with taking the kind of spirituality method that has grown up in Christianity and stripping it out into a religious humanism. When you do this, the issue of whether it is non-realist or realist (it remains non-realist, but it is better) actually matters less. The task is to make sacred the major narrative streams of the day provided from outside theology, rather than create a sacred-secular divide (and definitely not the postliberal rubbish of Platonic Christianity or role performance Christianity that splits religion and the secular).

So having come to such a view, I find a lot of Unitarianism just frustrating and 'gimme that old-time religion'. It's 'easy listening' religion. The idea has potential but the reality isn't there but a sort of sugary deposit.

My view is also consistent with Unitarian evolution. A star turn [in more ways than one, perhaps] of Unitarianism in the UK tells us it is not radical because it doesn't embrace questions like astrology and synchronicity. That's not radicalism. It might be plurality, and every idea has a right to be expressed and subjected to argument, but it is more consistent with Liberal Catholicism (of the early twentieth century) and its turn towards magic in ritual. I don't mind a bit of ritual - art is a good leg up. But romanticism was about as far as Unitarians could adopt the non-rational, and magic became self-destructive (as among the Free Catholics). I regard astrology as bunk, because its self-explanation is a nonsense of associations, rather like a Henry Lincoln saying this could be this and then could be that. Same as probability given the kind of 'cause' you see on Deal or No Deal and Noel Edmonds talking about 'strategy'. But in making the secular sacred, there is nothing wrong with liturgical expression, nothing wrong with the personal and the transcending, nothing wrong with shorthand theological words to express a greater oversight.

I'd like to see a new liturgical book from the Unitarians - funnily enough, I've been writing liturgies that could go into one book (and it includes one that raids the Christian tradition, and one that feels traditional but isn't), but of course plurality makes such a book difficult to produce - and I've been trying to address that through identifying the main tendencies within the movement. Unitarianism has become a church of individualist preachers: and, after all, who am I but one more individual?

The problem is that the main tendency within the movement is an absence of self-understanding, or one drawn from a decrepid past. In such a lack of sense of the future, and in the tough conditions of Great Britain, it just faces a journey towards conking out structurally, leaving a few individuals as the Last of the Mohicans. But it was warned about this long ago, and did nothing much then.

C of E, Diana and Jesus the Nutter

"God an' Bennett," said Elizabeth to her father in his study. "It says 'ere, in the Daily Express, father, that the Church of England believes that Jesus could have been utterly super bonkers and a complete heading case. The very Second Person of the Holy Trinity, no less."
"Ask your husband, Mr Darcy, for who can refuse the word of a man like him, if you can go and see Mr Collins for an explanation," said her father.

At the rectory in Kent Elizabeth found the reverend gentleman in much distress, and she barely had asked the question of the truth of the matter, when he said, "My dear cousin, the Rt. Hon. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is most upset at the finding of the Church, that Our Lord and several Apostles could have indeed been somewhat at nineteen shillings and sixpence to the pound."
"But," said his other visitor, the scholarly Rev. Edward Casaubon, down for the day from Middlemarch, "let's look at the evidence. And this is something that I have discovered across the religion, indeed across the religions in my and Dorothea's actions of classifying and cataloguing. Even Camden Farebrother is forced to agree with my findings."
"Do go on,"said Elizabeth, who was texting her elder sister to let her know that she had arrived safely.
"Indeed doooo," said Mr Collins, "for a number of parishioners might actually read the Daily Express or Daily Telegraph or indeed any daily newspaper and think the Church of England has gone completely off its rocker. I am most distressed still according to the Daily Express that we do not know who killed the late Princess of Wales in her desire to travel around with that Mohammaden. I do wish they'd get on with building the Channel Tunnel so that we can visit and help sort that one out."
"Oh dear," said Elizabeth, "Lydia is going to 'ave a Mac in Tyre while on her trivels. I don't know how we can ever get over the disgrace. I shall write to her and put mee letter into an e'lope."
"Are you most distressed my dear for how you can possibly wear the embarrassment?" asked Mr Collins.
"No, more I wish to hear oh Israel what Mr Causabon has to say. And stop being such a fecking tasser."
"Well," said Causabon, "his mother thought he was a bit of a loner and she kept her eye on him for a long while. Imagine he becomes a builder in the nearby Roman city of Syphillis and then gets religion, taking his placard saying the world as we know it is about to come to an end. He goes to a wedding and starts adding to the wine to get everyone drunk, and as far as we know he never did the decent thing with Mary Magdalene."
"My wedding might with Fitzwilliam was something I'll never forget. Talk about giving me one. I was walking one leg at a time the next morning," said Elizabeth.
"That so could have been me,"said Mr Collins.
"I feel sickly," said Elizabeth.
Mr Causabon went on, "It was a close run thing as to who was barmier than the other - John the Dipper or Jesus the Nazarene. I mean, Jesus thought that by acting out the suffering servant God would actually move heaven down to earth. Mother no doubt wanted to take Jesus home: 'Yeshua,' she said, 'return to the family, put the family first.' The Jews have been wary of Messiahs ever since the Romans crushed Jerusalem. But when we get to Paul of Tarsus, no one was more off his trolley than him. Even if there was an earthquake, he got a few flashes and voices in his head on that Damascus Road and he had highly switchable tendencies. And his first letter was to Greeks in Europe, and not only that but people thought Christians were so bonkers that they wrote letters in his name after he was dead."
"I feel this is too much for my congregation," said Mr Collins, "who are likely to become mentally ill at the very thought of it. After all, the Alpha Course looking at German biblical criticism left many wanting to get drunk in the local ale house afterwards."
"I am bound to be an atheist," said Elizabeth, "after this."
"Do not distress yourself so," said Mr Collins, "and let me arrange for you to receive a bicycle so that you can return to Pemberley this very evening."
"From here in Kent, you Kent?"
"It is a very fast mode of transport," said Mr Collins. "Imagine the Channel Tunnel full of cyclists. Gosh, the Tour of France might even come into England."
"Now you are being ridiculous," said Mr Causabon. "The number of false beliefs, belief in demons, absence of reality that we modernisers are achieving, suggests a first century of psychosis, neurosis, schizophrenia, memory loss and general all-round religion. And then Mohammad in the cave: what was that all about?" wondered Mr Causabon as an after-thought.

No General Religious Right

I don't think there is a general religious right, that adds to the general set of rights. There is a right to be religious, that is to follow your religion, but not a right that covers all others. This perhaps subtle difference manifests itself in no particular right to wear a symbol of a religion, if that was to be dangerous or unhealthy or contradict a principle of revealing an identity (at certain fixed points), but then beyond these people should be free to pursue religion including religious dress. So there is an unresolved issue about Sikhs and carrying a knife and not wearing helmets on motorcycles. We have granted rights there that perhaps should not have been granted: the religion might have, for example, produced non-sharp knives to carry and designs on to helmets that suggest head coverings.

There should be no blasphemy law nor even a law demanding respect: respect is something we give freely, not told, and we cannot restrict the critic and comic. Institutional religion should set itself up freely, and people can freely restrict themselves if they want, but it cannot tell others what to do beyond the social consensus. It seems to me that the social demand to have 'marriage' as an all-encompassing legal term for the joining of two people into a strong partnership should not be undermined by special religious pleading, and whilst no religion should be forced to carry out the ceremony (and therefore this means an end to religious establishment) nor should the State nor religious groups be prevented from carrying out a straightforwardly equally applied ceremony that recognises the freely-entered strong bond (if religions have that direct function).

Nothing prevents religion from arguing its case into the public space, but law emerges through principles established both through struggle and consensus, and the general principle for law is that of liberty and equality together, each facilitating the other. Where religion denies this combination, religion should be private and for private consent into any particularl community. Such community has no collective rights over an individual, who is always free to leave such communities - but the only community one cannot leave is that of the State, and this is why liberty and equality are so fundamental.

Against His Master's Voice (In this case's HMV)

Frankly I don't like recycled sermons. This is where someone turns up and tells you another's sermon, and does so at a level of detail that means it's written and in front. Well it was because it is also online and I'd read the original. You are short-changed by the pretender giving the sermon.

The argument in the original was for a radicalism in Unitarianism that includes the like of seeing Christianity as having origins in Egyptian religion, the perspective of astrology and seeing coincidences as somehow coming together. Those in opposition are somehow not radical. Somehow a measure of the limited perspective of Unitarianism is that more would welcome Richard Dawkins to a Unitarian church than Rowan Williams, the retiring Archbishop of Canterbury.

Well I would, definitely, because Richard Dawkins speaks clearly and directly, whereas Rowan Williams is a professor of double-talk, where theology is a kind of cover for stating things he doesn't really believe or believes in such a convoluted fashion that he deceives himself.

There is a difference between pluralism with positive toleration and radicalism. I'm all in favour of pluralism and so I've no objection to someone who wants to push stranger ideas and even astrology. But then the definition of radical and including a Unitarian identity is that of rational and reasonable religion and that means I'll argue against you. The common narratives for science - for astronomy - happen to be evidence based. Astrology is not evidence based, and only proves there is one born every minute. There is no causal relationship between planetary positions billions of miles apart and a trip down your mother's birth canal on a spinning earth. If there is synchronicity between events then you end up in a puppet and chain type of life, with some sort of dance between joined up symbols of your own language. What are the chances of THAT happening - well, hundred per cent once they have happened: all shuffled cards in a pack turn over and have a sequence.

This is not radicalism. Radicalism is making the common narratives that are evidence based religious again. It is significant that this is religious humanism, in the sense that humanism is a code word for these evolutionary and chaos-system understandings. Reinventing superstition or thinking whacky theories of religious origins (who cares where Christianity came from anyway?) is not radical but irresponsible. There is a place for the careful work of history guided by historiography and not the kind of associationalism that was seen with the likes of Henry Lincoln, where this 'could have been' related to that and then that to something else, ending up with the bizarrest of associations.

The preacher today said he agreed with almost all of the sermon he received, but at the end wasn't sure he agreed with the astrology. Well, radicalism is always about roots. The roots of the liberal search are to discern. This is not discernment but scattergun unreasoning.

Now there is a tradition of romanticism with the rationalism, and this should not be lost either. Art and the aesthetic is important and needs reaffirming. We are not Puritans. But art is art and always subjective, and of course religion is subjective (or postmodern narrative). Religion is, but science and history isn't, and religion is not alternative science or history. That is the mistake made here. Symbolism to assist a religious path, a sort of ethical insight and appreciation of life, is not about alternative realities.

The same argument is to be made to postmodern Christian Platonists. Just do some research. The radical approach is to make the secular religious, but not to lose sight that the secular was found for good reason - by good reason.

Supertrams

Imagine Supertrams in Hull - I have. The alternative, I think, is separate concrete roads making unique speedy links through built up areas joining up some roads that cars cannot complete.