religion » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

“Cheese!” I suppose we should say

Catholic Church, civilisation, conditionality, religion, unclassifiable No Responses »

May 242013

Watch the following video. Millions already have – yet it was only published three days ago. A lovely game of point-of-view, too. Top-notch stuff, whether true or not.

http://youtu.be/zdtD19tXX30

Frame is everything, especially in a visual world. This from Pope Francis, for example:

He told the story of a Catholic who asked a priest if even atheists had been redeemed by Jesus.

“Even them, everyone,” the pope answered, according to Vatican Radio. “We all have the duty to do good,” he said.

“Just do good, and we’ll find a meeting point,” the pope said in a hypothetical reply to the hypothetical comment: “But I don’t believe. I’m an atheist.”

“You couldn’t get more hopeful,” I imagine many of you are thinking. Me? It just makes me wonder if even the Pope has fallen in with those who would create a conditional world – a world where what we do is far more important than what we are.

As I say, frame is everything in a visual world – and there’s nothing more visual than a pope who knows how to speak to the masses via the tools and media they are most comfortable with. Even when unconditionality is the last thing on his mind.

Maybe I’m being picky here – let it be clear, for the moment I find Pope Francis a real breath of fresh air. But I still feel unsure of where I should stand in other contexts: if we’re talking about my children, for example, my love is absolutely unconditional. Why, then, can’t society be built on similar foundations? Why must we choose, instead, to monetise life so?

Why must our civilisations measure us so religiously – even as religions are the last thing on their mind?

More importantly, how is that one of our biggest religions also finds it this easy to do?

Does no one care to love any more outside the framing impact of these artificial boundaries?

And this impossibility that our societies might just allow us to be – doesn’t it also serve to explain a jot why our lives are becoming so mentally ill-advised?

For it’s truly paradoxical that in a supposedly hyper-individualist world, one should feel this fearful obligation to conform to certain norms rather than discover oneself in all one’s uniqueness.

Frame, as I say, is everything in a world where what we see has become more important than what we think.

And this is, quite sadly, where too many of us now find ourselves.

“Cheese!” I suppose we should say.

No?

Are Cameron & Co acting like witch doctors?

Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, government, in a hole, pork-barrel politics, prejudice, private sector, privilege, privileged white men, professional politicos, public sector, religion, revolving doors 1 Response »

Jan 282013

Kevin describes Michael Gove’s dogmatic approach to politics thus:

Last week’s announcement by Michael Gove that AS Levels would no longer count towards an A Level grade was a classic example of making policy based on dogma not evidence.

The rest of his post bears careful reading as a historical account of hysterical behaviours.

Meanwhile, I am reminded of the recent campaigns by the UK Coalition government to undermine the prestige of professionals such as lawyers, doctors, nurses and teachers (more here) as the former proceeded with what I believe is its manifest intention to destroy the impact of evidence-based approaches on decision-making and replace them with the prejudice-driven irrationalities of CEO-types everywhere.

As the nexus and revolving doors between poor private-industry practice and lazy public-sector behaviours grow evermore significant, so it would seem that a new generation and class of witch doctors is filling the space a broader religion once occupied. It must be a little like what happens when mainstream parties decide to rid themselves of the triangulation surrounding the ill-conceived subject of immigration. All of a sudden, in unpleasant response, right-wing splinter groups set themselves up and begin to cream off the disaffected voters from both sides of the political spectrum. It seems there is no true or persistent way of ridding ourselves of prejudice these days. Instead, we must make it our own – deflect it and rewrite its horrible discourse so that what we say and do and see at least sounds nicer than it did.

And so it is thus: whilst New Labour, in many cases, brought a terrible rationalism to its policy-making (the number-crunching of people multiplied a millionfold it would seem), and even as it was brought down by the foolish faith of Blair, doing God precisely when it said it didn’t as it launched the world on its crusade against evil, even so it would appear that it was for most of its winning streak a generally evidence-based beast. Yet at the same time it is clear there were all these Conservative politicians in the twin wildernesses of opposition and their own prejudices.

No outlet on the battlefields of power; no opportunity to express and impose for more than a terribly impotent decade.

No surprise, then, that the politicians who now rule prefer to rule out of knee-jerk instinct and impulse than sensible debate and rational conclusion.

In the absence of widespread religion, a kind of superstition many would argue, it is the witch doctors of 21st century decision-making who rule: those who are made in the image of pyramidal attitudes everywhere; those who hanker after their undemocratic powers to do and undo; those we call politicians and whom we love to call names; those who rule our lives without particular qualification except – that is – the ability to sway the directions of history through ridiculous force of personality.

And we are now at the mercy of a complex society which is being run on the high-octane fuel of miserable misleadingness.

“What to do! What to do!” is all I can exclaim.

When those in power refuse to believe in science is when religion and superstition have won the game.

And, right now, I really do think that’s where we’re heading.

Not at the hand of priests, churches or faith-leaders.

Rather, at the hand of the least qualified and least productive decision-makers in history.

The UK Coalition government and its hangers-on.

Witch doctors to a century.

Entrepreneurs, evangelists, conservative radicals – the circle is now complete

a con, entrepreneurs, God, money, politicians, religion No Responses »

Sep 232012

I think entrepreneurs – and how certain politicians see the concept of entrepreneurship – are tearing our Judeo-Christian societies apart. The argument I subscribe to is nothing new:

Entrepreneurship is the act of being an entrepreneur or “one who undertakes innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods“.

Meanwhile, our love of Mammon – or our dislike of the blessed beast – inspires every waking moment of both those who believe in God, as well as those who don’t (the bold is mine):

Christians began to use the name of Mammon as a pejorative, a term that was used to describe gluttony and unjust worldly gain in Biblical literature. It was personified as a false god in the New Testament.{Mt.6.24; Lk.16.13} The term is often used to refer to excessive materialism or greed as a negative influence.

The Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible explains “mammon is a Semetic word for money or riches.”^[5] The International Children’s Bible (ICB) uses the wording, “You cannot serve God and money at the same time.”^[6]

So must we really continue to ignore the contradictions – in particular, in the more traditional political parties?

How can they square – in their moments of reflection at least – their avowed and almost aggressive belief in serving a celestial deity which does not allow itself to be distracted by the charms of money alongside an earth-ridden obsession with using pecuniary-focussed ambitions to solve the vast majority of society’s quandaries? And what implications does this have for a decent and rational functioning of our civilisations?

The incongruences at a fundamental and soulful level must surely create their own pain: psychologically, the pressure must be unbearable. To claim that one is a practising Christian or Jew – or at the very least to depend for your status and lifestyle on those who have such belief systems – and at the same time use money to achieve absolutely all one’s major aims … how do you live with that? How can you remain in one wholesome mental piece?

And so it is that a society which depends on the very idea of entrepreneurship to convince the “plebians” (a grand class of people if there ever was one) that riches are within the reach of all of them – even when this manifestly cannot be the case – is being gnawed sadly away at by what should be an otherwise productive set of understandings.

Politicians and business leaders (synonyms these days, in fact) who claim to do God and then serve the cause of Mammon … it’s the oldest accusation of hypocrisy in the book. But whilst they simply filled their pockets, and let the rest of us more or less be … well, who cared?

The problem is that it’s now getting personal. If you don’t have an entrepreneurial spirit, you’re judged to be close to nothing in latterday society. And if you are an entrepreneurial soul but don’t get motivated by the pursuit and objective of concentrating wealth unjustly, you have no way out nor any alternative to giving in: our Judeo-Christian 21st century society only sanctions the wildly aggressive, infinitely expansionary and wholly unreasonable goal of world domination.

And, when you come to think about it, perhaps this is hardly surprising. What, after all, does any evangelical knocker-of-doors worth his or her black diary want of the rest of the planet – if not a total and absolute submission to their religious instincts to win over everyone to their cause?

Entrepreneurs, evangelists, conservative radicals – the circle is now complete.

The only people finding themselves excluded from the equation being those who love others – not for what they do but for what they are …

How gay marriage could lead me back to Catholicism

Catholic Church, childhood, children, gay marriage, gays and lesbians, home truths, on a high, political beliefs, religion, sexual orientation, sorted No Responses »

Mar 112012

Marriage isn’t always easy. Staying together with the same person for decades may have its ups and downs for both parties. So far, so clichéd.

But a cliché doesn’t mean a falsehood.

Tom and Norman have said masses of good sense on the subject of this post already. I come very late to the party. I’d just like to add a couple of sentences here.

I’m a very lapsed Catholic, whose Catholicism at the beginning of this blog’s life can be seen to be quite reverential. My world was a better world for going to Mass every Sunday. That I have to admit. But it wasn’t necessarily a more accurate world. If I hadn’t lapsed before the cases of child abuse came to light, I would have lapsed for sure as a result. But I had already begun to lapse before then. Something didn’t quite click for me as the person I was becoming.

My wife is a Catholic too – a Spanish Catholic. But her relationship with God has of late become very personal and private. Perhaps, if I still have a relationship with this deity, that may one day become my way forward.

If it ever happens as described above, I will surely come to realise that the cipher and filter that is the Roman Catholic Church is a gauze which impedes a clearer vision of what God might really mean.

If God does exist, then love is not defined by the sex of its participants but, rather, by the essence of its practice.

And if you are still finding this hard to believe and comprehend, tell me then who is best placed to bring up our youth? A man who has never given full expression to his love and passion for a woman, who has suffered for his beliefs and sense of self – and who only wants to support people in their real love for one another? Or a man who has never given full expression to his love and passion for a woman, who has suffered for his beliefs and sense of self – and who only wants to support people in their real love for one another?

For I’m inclined to believe that, in some things at least, Roman Catholic priests, gays and lesbians have far more in common the one with the other than any of the sides is prepared to contemplate. Drill down to their real experiences – and we may find on more than one occasion that the suffering each may have survived, in order to be the real individuals they were all along, is not all that dissimilar.

The question really is, which of the two sides is being more honest with itself as a result of those experiences – and is, therefore, better placed to participate sincerely and constructively in society?

Which of the two is exhibiting such a fearless attachment to the truth?

And who – for example – would you rather care for your children?

When it comes down to it, it’s the people who count. Not their sex – or their religious or political beliefs. You convince me you’re essentially good and can truly be trusted – and that’s all I’ll ever need in order to believe in you.

So the day a Roman Catholic priest is able to marry ~~his~~ her ~~boyfriend~~ girlfriend in my local church is the day I shall once more darken the doors of that church – for that will be the day God and the Church coincide as one.

A day which shall make me forever happy and at peace.

A day which shall signpost a true humanity at large.

A virtual Christianity for the 21st century, anyone?

Christian ethics, Christianity, economy, Facebook, iPad, online world, religion, sociopaths, tablet PCs, unclassifiable, virtual boss, virtual PA No Responses »

Jan 302012

My training in almost everything is fairly limited. I have a curious and distracted intelligence which works best when I am working with others like myself – that is to say, an intelligence which works quite infuriatingly when this is not a given.

I have never, however, managed to achieve a job status which might have corresponded even to this intelligence – nor, indeed, served to make it productive. Neither in Spain nor in Britain have I ever, in my life, earned more than the average national wage.

Not even once.

Not even close.

What does this mean? Have I been wrong all my life in the way I have taken my opportunities? Do I simply not care enough about how most people prefer to measure success? Is my intelligence simply useless? Or is something else operating here which I am unable to fathom?

How can we decide when something is right? How can I decide – in my life and in my society?

These are the questions I pose this evening.

In the past, religious morals and commandments of all sorts – heavily and widely folded into our cultures and ways of seeing – took these kinds of decisions on our behalf. Successive belief systems replaced religious dogma with an unthinking politicisation of the decision-making processes – which, again, allowed us a relative freedom from having to choose. And it’s at that point I believe we currently find ourselves unsurely: in a place where those who command us, despite the prevailing sociocultural currents, continue to use politics not to liberate us but, rather, to subjugate us profoundly – as profoundly as any religious stream of thought ever did.

Something, perhaps, we actually need a little more of.

Let me explain.

I’m not saying we need what subjugation brings. Subjugation is wrong – quite anti-human. But subjugation, like the small Mediterranean island with perhaps only one or two corner shops to compete for business and time, doesn’t half simplify the effort of getting out of bed in the morning and deciding what to do next.

It occurred to me this morning that what we needed far more than Apple’s virtual PA Siri is something which, instead of telling us what we want to know, tells us what we need to hear. A virtual boss, if you like, is how I initially described it. Something which fashions the limits we need.

Maybe what I really meant, though, was a virtual priest.

For Facebook and its ilk – with all their sociopathic instincts – are about as anti-Christ as you could get. And I don’t mean this in the religious sense of the Devil and all His works. After all, Christ had an underlying coherence to everything He said – there was structure and pattern: something we could almost mathematically appreciate. The sociopathic economy, on the other hand, believes in everything and absolutely nothing.

I certainly don’t know whether even a small proportion of my life has borne witness to a man who knows how to take the right decisions. But, whilst my life is relatively insignificant to a wider world, the question I ask – how we might know we are right – is not only of value but surely needs to be examined.

Too much of what happens is effected by people who are trading on their pasts as if this were all some guarantee of future efficiency. Civilisation is becoming so very complex that there is no way even a reasonably educated soul can possibly work out whether the specialist he has before him is telling the truth or propagating porkies. And yet the need to know, to be able to decide, to feel comfortable the decision is the right one … all of this is becoming evermore imperiously necessary to the extent that if we do not find a way that is not based on some kind of blind faith, we shall drown in our own awful uncertainties.

No. It’s not that virtual PA which simply serves to offer us even more choices that we need. It’s the whole bloody shooting-match of an entirely brand new belief system – a system which helps us to accurately limit our options to a realistic and sustainable level on what is clearly an evermore complex planet … that’s what we really miss in our civilisation – and what’s making life so very trying right now.

A virtual Christianity, then, anyone? Jokes about tablet PCs coming down from Mount Apple notwithstanding, it might not be a bad idea. Based on clever algorithms which we could trust implicitly, perhaps open sourced and thus easily examinable, serving to give us back our certainties after a century and a half of relativism – surely we could manage in a single generation to do away with so much of this 21st century existentialist pain.

Couldn’t we?

Dawkins believes in God after all (or more on the man in the mirror)

a con, Coalition cuts, education, God, religion, Richard Dawkins, secular society, tuition fees No Responses »

Jun 052011

Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in God as we know Him but, rather, in that face he sees in the mirror every morning. Read this story from the Guardian today, if you don’t care to give me the benefit of the doubt:

University lecturers and students reacted with dismay on Sunday after a group of leading British academics took a step towards the establishment of an elite US-style university system in the UK by launching a new private college offering £18,000-a-year courses.

AC Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the universities of London and Oxford, will welcome next year the first students to the New College of the Humanities to study for degrees in English, philosophy, history, economics and law taught by academics from Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge.

There is a starry lineup of professorial talent: Richard Dawkins will teach evolutionary biology and science literacy; Niall Ferguson will lecture on economics and economic history; and Steven Pinker will teach philosophy and psychology.

I do so fear the lack of humility of those who refuse to admit the possibility of an overlording supernatural being. Not because I believe they are logically wrong. After all, in many circumstances, people who believe in the absence of an afterlife will do everything in their power to avoid prejudicing the present. I can’t remember who it was who said something along the lines of “If you must travel by plane, travel with an airline from a mainly secular country” – but they were right.

Unfortunately, that very lack of humility may also lead such individuals to the rankest of acts – as, in fact, this case demonstrates. When you don’t believe in God, the temptation to set yourself up as your very own version of the Lord Almighty on earth, and then overcharge the wealthy for the honour, must be overwhelming. Anyone who believes they are in absolute possession of the truth is prone to making such a mistake: in this, Mr Dawkins is no different from any other fundamentalist out there. As the Guardian article reports, those responsible for the initiative would like to assure the rest of us that their teaching is worth so much more than the vast majority of us can ever aspire to:

“It is the economic reality,” [Grayling] said. “The £9,000 cap is completely unsustainable. The true cost is way more and that ceiling is going to have to be burst. Other universities might also think ‘either we sink or go independent’. Almost all of [the professors signed up] have served our time with decades in public sector higher education and we have seen it get more and more difficult. It is quite a struggle now to see into the future with how we can cope with these cuts. Either you stand on the sidelines deploring what is happening or you jump in and do something about it.”

So, whilst we’re on the subject of quoting from those far better than ourselves, who was it, then, who claimed that man was made in the image of God? For now it’s clear that if this was ever true, Mr Dawkins and friends have managed to fundamentally reverse the process: this is clearly, and quite irreversibly, a case of God being made in the image of man.

And a rather unpleasant, incoherent and self-satisfied one at that.