Towards a non-Christian Church

Plans are afoot in Cilycwm village to put part of the church to secular use. This has made me think hard about how I feel about the church and its place in our communities.

Being part of a religious community is something that has been woven into  the social fabric of human life for as long as homo sapiens has been around.  Until very recently various forms of religion offered the only way we could come to terms with the mystery of our existence, and they have always required their followers to believe in something – to have a creed. The Church (in its broadest sense) has always been about belief.  As a lifelong atheist I can only believe in things for which I can see some evidence.  If something is mysterious I suspend my belief until better evidence becomes available, and science has produced a rising tide of better evidence.  Most of the mysteries of life have been unraveled and this puts those who hold a religious faith in a very difficult position. Faith – the belief in some inexplicable supernatural power which shapes our lives – seems to me to be moving  in two opposing directions.

On one side we have the typical British village church with its dwindling congregation of ageing believers, and on the other the aggressive fundamentalist believers, the Tea Party Christians and the Muslim suicide bombers. The village church congregations are dwindling because, in our society, the science of evolution has moved into the mainstream.  It now offers a completely convincing explanation for all the complexities of life on earth. It is very difficult for educated people in Western democracies to justify a belief in God in purely rational terms.

Here in Wales we live in a society which is largely tolerant, peaceful, secular, materialist and rational, and we are very fortunate that we do. The attempts by Evangelist Christian groups to re-fill the chapels have so far not succeeded. Even the old animosity between church and chapel has largely died out. It is not uncommon for the small church and chapel congregations to share the best building available to them. As in much of Britain, churches and chapels are only full at the special times: funerals, weddings, Christmas and Easter.

Why do so many of us suspend our disbelief on these occasions? Some see this as a convenient hypocrisy, but I think it shows us something very important. We all have an instinctive desire to celebrate the important turning points in our lives with some kind of ceremony – something which raises our spirits, heightens our emotions.  We need a connection to the sublime, the holy (a word derived from “whole”).  This has always been the function of Art, and it is no accident that Art and Religion have historically been close bedfellows.  Great Art takes us out of ourselves, connects us to the universe, raises our spirits (note the holy metaphor in “spirits”) and makes us feel that our lives have purpose.  Yet why should we feel obliged to believe in something called God to make us whole?  Isn’t the miracle of life on earth sublime enough?

Increasingly in our society we are not obliged to believe, but if we want the religious community to continue to relieve us of this obligation, we should reciprocate: we should accept in humility that for very many of us the sublime cannot be dislocated from the notion of God.  In previous centuries it was commonplace for Christians to persecute other Christians for heresy – for believing in a different way. Even in places like Northern Ireland or the Vatican it would be difficult to find anyone professing to be Christian who  believes we should kill and torture other Christians because they worship in a different way. Religious tolerance has been one of the great achievements of our times, and if the biggest division now is between the Religious and the non-Religious then the same spirit of tolerance should operate. In such a climate it would be impossible to recruit suicide bombers. I do not believe in the concept of evil, but it is hard to find a better way to describe the mindset of those who indoctrinate suicide bombers.

The whole idea of suicide bombers is totally alien to our culture, so let us Thank God or Thank Goodness for that, and let us pray or plan that it never takes root here.

Why do children misbehave?

And why do parents punish them for it?

As with most aspects of human behaviour, evolution has the answer, and yet again I’m indebted to the inestimable Steven Pinker for illuminating it in “The Better Angels of our Nature”.

He charts the history of violence against children, and concludes that mental and physical torture of children “for their own good” was common until very recently.  Starting from the evolutionary axiom that our behaviour is conditioned by the survival of our genes,  it seems odd that we should attack our offspring who represent our only chance of passing on those genes.  Look a little deeper and the answer is clear and simple. It is certainly in the parent’s interest that the child survives, but the best chance the parent has to pass on its genes is to have many children survive. The parent must therefore share out its time and resources with the children it has now and those it might have in the future. 

The interest of each child however is quite different. The child is in direct competition with its siblings for the food and protection of the parent and is instinctively driven to demand more than the “fair share” which the parent wishes to give.

This conflict between parent and child is unavoidable and can only be resolved by constant negotiation in which each side will use whatever arguments or tricks it can to prevail. 

Why has it taken us so long to understand this simple truth?

What's the risk?

Reading Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature” is a lesson in the life affirming properties of good statistics. His subject – violence –is one that arouses strong emotions, feelings that constantly lead us to conclusions that are wildly inaccurate. The danger of terrorism is a good example. He almost gets emotional stating the case that the threat of terrorism in America is tiny compared to almost all other dangers to life and limb.

“The number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying.” He quotes a study that concludes that 1500 Americans died in car accidents because, fearing terrorist attacks, they chose to drive rather than fly. Less than 3000 people died in the 11/9 attacks (I refuse to use the illogical US method of abbreviating dates) yet every year more than 40,000 Americans die in traffic accidents, 20,000 in falls, 18,000 in homicides etc.

His thesis is counter-intuitive: that we are now enjoying the least violent period in human history. On page 235 (of 1025 – it’s a hefty read) he lists the “twenty  worst things that people have done to each other” and most of them we’ve never heard of.  Top of the list is the An Lushan revolt in 8^th century China which,  over a period of 8 years,  killed 40 million people –two thirds of the country’s population and a sixth of the world’s. Its modern equivalent would be 430 million.

If you think our society is violent just imagine that 8 years ago, ( in 2007, the year I think of as the “year of the mud” because of awful effect the wet summer had on festivals) an inner city riot escalated into a full scale rebellion, which has just petered out.  In this short period 40 million of us have died, and only 20 million remain.

The worst the 20^th century could manage was the second world war which including, as all the figures quoted do, deaths from starvation etc. killed 55 million.  Since then, according to Pinker, it’s been downhill all the way.

Thanks to modern statistics we can now get a very clear picture of what has actually been going on since life began. Even taking the view that there is no such thing as absolute truth, simply by collecting information and comparing it with other information we can arrive at conclusions which are much closer to absolute truth than were possible in previous centuries.  You don’t, for example, have to “believe” in evolution; the build up of statistical information shows quite clearly that it is the best explanation for the development of life.

The problem is our brains have not evolved to adapt to this situation. It was instant emotional reaction which enabled the first homo sapiens to survive in small bands of hunter-gatherers, and George W Bush’s “War on Terror” is a symptom of the damage this mindset can do in the 21^st century. To quote Pinker: “The 9/11 (11/9!) attacks sent the United States into two wars that have taken far more American and British lives than the hijackers did, to say nothing of the lives of Afghans and Iraqis. “

Why have we permitted our media to behave as if this accumulation of knowledge didn’t exist? Why do so many parents think that their children are at great risk from strangers when the statistics show that family members are a far greater danger? Why do people think that old ladies are in constant danger of physical attack when the danger is much greater to young men? The answer to these and many similar questions is that the media get more money by exaggerating our instinctive fears than be giving us the facts.

Why I hate Christmas (and why I don’t)

If I could change it, my Christmas would focus on the good things -

“Peace on earth and goodwill to all men” (and women of course)

It’s a time when we suspend our normal lives for a few days. We suspend the strife and stress of everyday life, we try to see the good in people we have little in common with – especially family members.

It’s a winter festival – so we celebrate the joys of winter – good food and drink, real fires, clear frosty nights, the muted colours and clarity of the landscape in winter.

It’s a time for parties, feasts, warmth, love and friendship

We would sing together and laugh together.  

But the rest would have to go:

It would have nothing to do with the birth of Christ. Nobody knows when Christ was born but the least likely date is mid December.  I’d still call it Christmas though because to change the name would offend lots of people I like and respect.

It would not be Pagan either – we don’t need any religious or pseudo-religious excuse to celebrate the turning of the year.

There would be no Christmas shopping. We would give gifts to those we love but not things we had bought.  If I couldn’t make or write or picture something for them I would give them something I already owned.   People would stop spending ridiculous amounts of money giving people STUFF they don’t need.

We would refuse to adopt American ideas of Christmas like SANTA CLAUS, and those horrible Christmas songs like “White Christmas”.

We would do away with all the “Dickensian” rubbish and return to an older more austere form of celebration. Dickens would go back on the Eng Lit bookshelf where he belongs, and all the mawkish Victorian carols would be banned.

We would stop sending Christmas cards to people we scarcely know and wouldn’t recognise in the street.  We would write personal messages to people we like and admire who otherwise we might lose touch with.

We would get rid of everything fake -  fake snow, plastic santas, fake conifers, fake log fires, fake goodwill, false sentiment

People would be fined for wasting electricity on gaudy lighting displays

Bah Humbug! Scrooge was right about the humbug but recognised in the end that the real message of Christmas was a good one.  So why not get rid of the humbug and keep the good stuff?

Food prices up again

The BBC News announces: 

"Food prices look set to rise after poor UK harvests due to recent wet weather." Further down the article says:

“Meanwhile, the global price of wheat has risen by some 30% over the past 12 months, adding to fears over rises in food prices”.

It’s easy to see the connection between the cost of food produced in Britain and the bad summer. We’ve had bad summers before, and we’ve had food price rises before. It’s the global bit that’s interesting – and frightening.  For 40 years or more the Green movement has been saying that there are not enough resources in the world to sustain the human population at Western levels of consumption, and that was before we knew about global warming.  From the eighties until fairly recently the “business as usual” proponents of “sustainable growth” have fought back as human technical ingenuity found ways to keep expanding the availability of those resources. 

They did that by expanding the use of fossil fuels, and it is this expansion which is driving climate change. This view is now very widely understood, but it is not at all easy to understand the completeness of the vicious circle we’ve got into, and perhaps the most difficult is why we got into it. The how is to do with the laws of entropy and the why is to do with the laws of evolution. Both are explained in this book, but it’s not easy reading: http://www.amazon.com/Too-Smart-our-Own-Good/dp/052176436X

I’ve tried to explain my understanding of these things here (My 2012).

Many now believe that it’s too late to do anything about it and that huge change is about to overtake the whole world. I prefer to believe that we will only start getting real when we are at the brink of catastrophe. Every news item like this brings that point closer.