Saturday 4 January 2014

The Playful Lightness of Depth

This is a response to The Inquirer article dated 4th January, although I saw it a day early and accounts for my response being a day earlier in construction than the original!

Reverend Bill Darlison's long piece in The Inquirer (4 January 2014) has much to commend it, but needs challenging on its central point about the 'new orthodoxy', as if dissent is a virtue in itself.

At the same time we have Larry Bode in the same issue declaring that he has gone off to the Sunday Assembly, where he will find interesting talks using that new orthodoxy.

Bill declares the new orthodoxy to be "scientism", whereas Larry will find speakers discussing findings of investigative and mathematical science.

I don't mind 'walking backwards' (Spike Milligan fashion) with Bill into the glitter and colour of religious feeling and sentiment, but I certainly do object to finding alternative explanations for reality in magick and the supernatural.

The fact is that mathematical and investigative science delivers results. I'm aware that they feed into broad patterns of understanding that change and change dramatically as the results change, but falsification is a powerful tool towards what we best know, and tis includes strong paradoxes at the edges of science and mathematics.

What Joseph Priestley the dissenter or Isaac Newton the dissenting conformer could do in their day is no longer available. Let's be clear here about terms. Magick is where humans have godly powers and participate in and warp some strange realities, and the supernatural is where God intervenes usually through humans. Newton was one fantastic scientist and mathematician, but he thought he could apply those principles to a hidden code in biblical text - gematria. In other words, he could combine science and maths with a form of magick through text. Priestley, on the other hand, was a materialist, so he could combine belief in chemical processes with miracles happening by God via Jesus's hands and mind and indeed he believed in the biggest miracle of the resurrection. But we now realise that biology does not allow a dead brain to reconstitute - it rots and damages so rapidly - and we also understand the limitations of historiography. This is why so much of even evangelical theology today is about 'text' and 'encounter' and has become largely ahistorical.

It has to be said, too, in response to the article, that corners of the Anglican Church are far more intellectual than Unitarianism, but this is because the theologians are ever more skilled at twisting theological terms into appearing as one shape when it means to retain itself like another. This, I suggest, is a waste of intellectual effort, and we don't find it with Unitarians and this, as such, to Unitarian credit.

But the alternative, for religious enrichment, of going back into magick (like astrology, for example) as an explanation for anything is even more regressive and simply fanciful. For example, many people these days are into such as Tarot cards and the like to explain life patterns. But do the history of how Tarot arose and you see yet again that here is no more than a fanciful invention of some individuals regarding the Egyptian God Thoth for which there was no original Book of Thoth  beyond the Greek Corpus Hermeticum. Over and again the sort of connections the magicians want to claim fail their own tests. But, I am told, people will pay £50 for a "skilled" reading. Skilled at what, exactly?

Now I don't mind a bit of, say, 'four elements' expression with a bit of wind-direction as a left-field way of saying something that draws on more than the factual, just I would do rewritten eucharists, but it is the equivalent of doing communal art that draws on the past. It does not explain anything, except living in the past. Otherwise we end up going down the road of a Henry Lincoln, who set up all kinds of improbable "probable" connections between things that owe more to the imagination than any testing. Dan Brown drew on all this, and he is a novelist. And the magicians are forever criticising actual probability!

But the further fallacy is that there is some other objective alternative. Pope Benedict might have thought there was, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams set up such a detailed narrative theology that he acted as if there was. That's why he was a multiculturalist - because he could hop between narrative world views, including world scriptures, just as he did between languages, just as he could immerse himself within the rules of poetry.

The question remains one of spiritual depth and how to achieve it without going down a road of self-deception. How do you achieve something perhaps science-like that isn't science, or history-like that isn't history, or some other method of guided searching?

I knew an Anglican minister of religion who once said to me, "What if it is all make-believe?" and then insisted he was no liberal because he stayed with the tradition as a whole for its 'spiritual benefits'. It's a kind of knowing self-deception when, for everything else, he joined the modern world for how to explain something, such as (explicitly) the Dawkins explanation for biology and evolved life. This approach is called by some Radical Orthodoxy, though the truly Radical Orthodox get so inside their bubble that they recreate a platonist universe and dismiss the outside world. They abuse postmodern space to become premodern self-deceivers.

The alternative is a kind of acceptance of a flatness to reality, of a kind of lightness to all this wanted depth. My answer to Bill and others is perhaps an acceptance of the unbearable lightness of being, and that the depth thing is only ever a form of play.

I doubt Sunday Assembly would suit me (despite much agreement) simply because there the God and religious language is excluded. I still have uses for it, even in a soft non-realist or relatively atheistic manner. There are still discussions to revisit and inherited ideas and visions to include and not exclude. There is clearly a lot of discussion and argument to be had. We are people of now, and not pre-moderns and we do it with a light touch. And I would retain these views, even in a falling aircraft.

We are tribal beings, we set up depth-systems of engaging that involve exchange or give and take. But our once elaborate means of give and take are seen through, just as the really modern magicians - the illusionists - see through the tricks of perception. We see through these old constructions now, including when we change perspective about how the facts fit together.

I doubt Sunday Assembly would suit me (despite much agreement) simply because there the God and religious language is excluded. I still have uses for it, even in a soft non-realist or relatively atheistic manner. There are still discussions to revisit and inherited ideas and visions to include and not exclude. There is clearly a lot of discussion and argument to be had. We are people of now, and not pre-moderns and we do it with a light touch. And I would retain these views, even in a falling aircraft.

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