On Judgement Day our attempts to be religious will testify against us. They'll seek to gobble us up; so we need to defang them in this lifetime.
A holy book may tell believers to compel unbelievers to believe, and to kill them if they refuse to believe. Notwithstanding the the fact that you can't really force someone to believe something, believers may obediently drench whole empires in blood trying to fulfill the command. And you know what God will say to them on Judgement Day?
He'll say, ‘How hard, exactly, did you work to make people believe before resorting to the sword? How winsome did you make yourself? Did you intoxicate the whole world with your kindness and generosity? How much did you contribute to culture and architecture and science and wisdom and world peace and tolerance and community and laughter before you thought, “Enough of that. These people won’t listen. Let’s decapitate them”? Did you go as far as you could possibly go before you picked up your sword?’
The answer, of course, will have to be no. You can never go far enough.
God will continue: ‘So you had the effrontery to kill people who I created, who I made myself, because you found it too taxing to win them over with your goodness and reasonableness and creativity?’
The believers will be miffed. ‘You said we could kill, Lord.’
‘I fixed an impossible precondition to your lust for violence.’
‘How were we to know?’
‘Didn't get the hint when I said that I am love? When I said I am all-merciful?’
‘You tricked us, Lord.’
‘I tricked the evil in you to come out of hiding and show itself.’
That's the kind of conversation you'll hear on Judgement Day.
Is there a chance that you might be in need of mercy on that day? If so, in the days leading up to that day, it's best to err on the side of mercy. That's how you defang your religion.
Reuters, today: In a landmark trans-denominational ruling by the Pope, an evangelical has had his fish sticker revoked for discourteous driving and stealing allotted parking spaces.
‘He was advertising his allegiance to Christ while acting like a dufus,’ said the Pope. ‘If evangelical leaders aren’t going to set limits concerning use of vehicular fish, Rome will have to do it for them.’
The evangelical, Frank, is reported to be ‘confused’ by the papal intervention. ‘I don’t recall the bible saying that the Keys of St Peter work on a Nissan Micra,’ he told reporters.
Appearing before the Vatican, Frank’s wife defended her husband with the following impassioned speech:
‘Has my husband disgraced the Christian religion by displaying a fish sticker while behaving like a moron? I confess there is some truth to the allegation. But is it not truer to say that the fish sticker is an admission that one has confessed one's wretchedness before heaven and is crying out to be cleansed of precisely the kind of crimes my husband wallows in? Is it not the case that the public has been ill-educated regarding the significance of the fish, and has taken it to mean a badge of holiness?
‘My husband Frank, good sirs, is anything but holy. I would submit that any holiness – nay, basic decency – that exists in him is wholly miraculous in nature. That fish sticker on his car proclaims the hope – his hope and, in particular, mine - that my husband will not always persist in bad driving, parking-space theft, belching at the dinner table, and watching our next door neighbour Glenda sunbathe in a bikini that appears to have been fashioned by spiders. And one day, when Frank gets his act together, learns to parallel-park and submits to a haircut and a scale and polish, the world will be able to see that fish sticker and join me in giving thanks to God for his reformation.
‘We Christians should not try to give the impression that ours is a religion of morality, of goodness, of ethical standards and clean living. It is not. Claiming membership of the Body of Christ is an admission of moral bankruptcy. My husband’s fish sticker does not say, “I uphold high moral standards, so please refrain from using coarse language around me.” It says: “I’m not nice. I drive like an enraged monkey. I am frequently lecherous. I have to be positively bullied into washing my neck. I may or may not do a good job of concealing my unpleasantness to you, but I have confessed it openly to God and have consented to the slow but inevitable demise of the unpleasant person who owns this fish sticker. Rest assured that everything unpleasant about me is dead, and the only reason it persists is because God sees fit to make my transition from wretch to saint gradual, so as not to submit my wife to a fatal shock.”
‘The sticker says: “God counts me as dead, and so should you. My bad driving and perversity and my indiscretion at last year’s office party are being phased out of existence; everything you rightly dislike about me is being strangled to death, and one day will exist no more. Someone new is emerging from within this oaf with no table manners, and that new person is the one you will meet in heaven, God willing, by which time the owner of this fish sticker will have been utterly obliterated.” In other words, your holinesses, that fish sticker says: “I am wicked, but don’t worry – I’m under a death sentence.”’
Next door neighbour Lorraine testifies that since the revoking of his fish sticker and his wife’s disappearance to Rome, Frank has become ‘something of a softie.’ ‘He’s spent the last three days at his bedroom window with a pair of binoculars,’ Lorraine giggled. ‘I never figured him for the ornithology type.’
As you know, our Roman Catholic and Orthodox friends believe in the intercession of saints. They ask the saints to petition Jesus on our behalf, much as we might ask a devout friend to put in a word for us. Whatever you think of that practice - and it's not something you should dismiss without hearing the arguments - here's something that tickled me.
A few years ago I asked an Orthodox bishop in Yorkshire why he'd dedicated his little monastery to St Anne, the mother of Mary.
'Do you ever disobey your mother?' he asked me.
'Sometimes,' I said.
'Do you ever disobey your grandmother?'
'No,' I said.
'That's why we dedicated the monastery to St Anne.'
It seems that even in heaven, the laws of family apply...
Both men, you’ll remember, offer sacrifices to God. Cain’s is an offering of crops, whereas Abel offers a blood sacrifice. God likes Abel’s offering but rejects Cain’s. Cain, angry, kills Abel. Taken as a simple historical narrative, the story yields little. We don’t learn why God prefers flesh to fauna. God comes across as both bloodthirsty and ungrateful. The standard moral of the story? Don't kill your brother just because God doesn't like your prize-winning marrows. It’s only when we begin to speculate about the wider significance of the story that things get interesting. The anthropologist Rene Girard, for example, thinks that the story is about the original meaning and function of sacrifice, namely the channeling (and therefore the containment) of violence in human societies. As modern ethology has shown, thwarted violence always seeks a surrogate victim, and so in societies that (unlike ours) don’t have centralised, powerful, theoretically impartial judiciaries and police forces, acts of violence can lead to orgies of recrimination, intractable blood feuds, geometric escalations of bloodshed. Violence is like a plague, and in order to contain it, societies have treated those things associated with violence as taboo. Girard’s overwhelmingly powerful argument is that blood sacrifice, in all tribal societies throughout history, has served as a means by which communities’ pent-up violence can be discharged in a ritually contained manner. The positing of ‘gods’ as beneficiaries of the blood sacrifice essentially conceals the mundane functions of sacrifice from the community, and legitimises the operation. For Girard, the Cain and Abel story – irrespective of whether it refers to an actual historical event – captures the whole meaning of the sacrificial system: Cain’s sacrifice does not involve violence, and so it does not absorb his animosity towards his brother. His murder of Abel somehow necessitates the formal institution of the violence-limiting sacrificial cult that becomes Hebrew religion, and which God ordains in order to create social order. (Note that God later claims to hate these sacrifices, which supports the view that sacrifices were a necessary evil.) It could be that stories like that of Cain and Abel encapsulate seismic cultural shifts in microcosmic stories involving a small number of characters who may or may not have also been real historical people. When we try to force them (for non-biblically warranted reasons) to conform to a straightforwardly ‘historical’ model of truth, we rob them of their vast scope, just as we would if we argued that Jesus’s parables are all literally true. The irony is that a reading like Girard’s reveals the full historical significance of the bible passage rather than diminishes it. The story of Cain and Abel is (among many other things) the story of how Judaism – as a matter of historical fact – became, by necessity, and as an act of divine wisdom and mercy, a sacrificial religion. Look at the story of Abraham and Isaac that Christopher Hitchens finds so morally revolting. God asks Abraham to kill his own child to prove his faithfulness. Isaac is then put through a hideous ordeal of thinking his own father is going to stab him to death. What's not to like about that? True, we can read this as an instructive example of someone putting God first and demonstrating faith. But look: how would we really feel if a faithful, sane Christian at our church turned up one Sunday and confided in a shaky voice that that God had asked him to stab his son to death? Would we urge him to be faithful? Would we even think it possible that the man was right in believing that God wanted him to do this? Heaven forbid! We would tie the guy to a pew and call the police. What if, like the story of Cain and Abel, the story of Abraham and Isaac captures in capsule-form the truth (historical and otherwise) of a seismic shift in culture, a new stage in God’s relationship with humans? We know that many civilisations exalted human sacrifice over non-human sacrifice (even those that didn’t exalt human sacrifice have tended to ‘anthropomorphise’ the animals they sacrificed – see Girard again). What if the story of Abraham and Isaac describes the momentous revelation that came to the Jewish people, perhaps originally through a real man named Abraham, that the worthiness of a sacrifice depends not on what is killed, but on the inward, personal sacrifice made by the sacrificer? The story shows, in capsule form, the historic shift from a focus on the external form of worship to a focus on the internal motive - a shift that has developed throughout the history of the Jews. This was the momentous shift that served to preclude human sacrifice from Jewish religion. We fundamentalists believe that all scriptural stories are rooted in real encounters between God and real humans: to affirm this is just to affirm the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the historic changes that occur on the basis of these cataclysmic encounters can be captured in capsule form without diminishing their historicity. It’s a matter of literary convention. We can argue for the truth – and yes, the infallibility or inerrancy – of the bible without acting as though it’s nothing but straight reportage.
All this online pugilism between Christians of different stripes! All these forum fencing-matches about free will and predestination and law and grace and evolution and intelligent design and miracles! All these arguments that might never have arisen if the Good Lord had produced for us a clearer bible, one that really spelled things out! A catechism, rather than a collection of stories, poems, genealogies, aphorisms...
Why are we so often angry at each other and so seldom irked at God?
Here's something to think about next time you see an online argument between a Christian who believes in miracles and one who believes that miracles belonged to the time of the apostles (ie a cessationist):
The cessationist has at some point prayed really, really hard for a miracle - and got diddly squat. The cessationist is some guy whose cancer didn't go away, or whose daughter died, or whose wife left, you name it. And instead of hating God, our cessationist friend has changed theological positions to make room for a God who didn't come through for him in any clear way.
Want to tell him to believe in miracles? Good luck! But don't rant hatefully at him - he may not be the dogmatist you think he is.
In every theological argument, you'll find at least two people who are trying so damned hard to be charitable towards God that they sometimes forget to be charitable towards each other. But God is sturdy enough to take human anger on the chin. Humans, on the other hand, break.
That person who believes in election? The person who believes in free will? Scrapping like hoods on some internet discussion board? God could have spoken decisively on this issue, and God didn't. Or maybe God did speak, through the Church of Rome - in which case, God should have done a whole lot more to preserve the unity of the church. And don't tell me that the bible is clear on these issues. There are very brainy and very holy people on both sides of every controversy.
By all means adopt the atheist solution to the problem and deny that God exists. But if you're averse to that move, let's not despise each other over issues on which God has not spoken loudly enough. We're in the same boat.
One thing binds us all together: we live in a more or less silent universe. Let's admit it! It's probably more silent than religious people say it is, and less silent than atheists say it is: but it is a universe in which someone can cry out to an invisible God and not receive any reply. It's a universe in which someone else always seems to be experiencing the miracles, and in which cries of 'It's a miracle!' sometimes seem obscene in the face of so many unanswered prayers. As Sheri put it recently on her blog, 'Do you really believe the Sudanese don't pray?'
In the face of this divine silence, we can never be anything more than co-seekers, and this should give us solidarity.
This seekers' solidarity should be the basis of every discussion about doctrine. Moreover, it should be the basis of our communion with each other. We should always be willing to at least imagine what might crouch behind the arras of a person's theological position, the stories behind the convictions. We should declare at the beginning of each exchange: We are on the same side. Let's end this exchange having gained an even greater sense of solidarity, irrespective of whether we move closer to an actual agreement. It's worth a try, isn't it?
Maybe if we achieved real solidarity in the face of God's silence, we'd discover that the possiblity of creating solidarity is why God opted to refuse to arbitrate on so many issues in the first place.
Maybe God's silence is a necessary condition of human solidarity. Maybe the compassion we might feel towards our fellow seekers is the thing that we, as seekers, are supposed to find.
You know when you start to find the sound of your own voice horrible? Has anyone else had that regarding blogging? Anyway... Been slightly repelled lately by the idea of writing anything, whether posts or comments, although I've been keeping up with my neighbours' blogs (some wonderful stuff going around, by the way). So by way of keeping my oar in, I'm responding to Sheri's tag (thanks Sheri), which I've been putting off for a week now:
The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.
1. What was I doing 10 years ago?
A postgraduate course at the University of Birmingham; rehearsing for a play (we took it to the Edinburgh Festival that summer and did surprisingly well); supply teaching. I got a literary agent in 1998, thanks to a sort of anti-self-help m/s I wrote mostly while drunk, and was being paraded around publishing houses and touted hilariously as 'the new Dale Carnegie', so I thought I was on the verge of becoming famous. I crumbled in every meeting I had with editors. It was just disastrous.
2. What are 5 things on my to-do list for today?
1. Write this
2. Work until my brain has turned to jam
3. After work, visit a 92 year old Irish woman called Rosaleen.
4. Pick up some fish 'n' chips to eat on the walk home from Rose's. She lives near one of the best fish 'n' chip shops in Birmingham.
5. Make 45 minute overdue catch-up phone call to a friend during remainder of walk home.
3. Snacks I enjoy:
In the office we're into peanut butter on rice crackers in a big way. Mmm, healthy.
4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
Can it be a UK billion (£1000,000,000,000)?
First: suffer paralysis over the immense moral responsibility. While trying to figure out how best to serve humanity, start buying a couple of little treats for myself and my loved ones. End up with so many treats I have to buy some new cupboards etc. Figure I still have plenty left for humanity. Suddenly my loved ones and I have all these cupboards. Buy some houses for the cupboards to go in. Buy more stuff to fill houses. Buy a special house I can go to when I want to refelct on how best to serve humanity with the money I have left. Pretty soon my life is a Snoop Dogg video. Get into legal trouble because someone ODs while I was letting one of my many bitches fly my gold plane and there was a big panic and my plane crashed into an orphanage. My gold plane! Get depressed. Pay millions for therapy. Therapist suggests I visit an ashram in India. Go to India. Come back and find my houses burned down by the boyfriend of that cow who crashed my gold plane. My gold plane! My houses! Die alone, broke, wishing that I'd just given it to charity. But which charity? Still don't know. Any, I suppose.
5. Places I have lived:
Lancashire (0-10), Reading (11-19), Surrey (19-22 - English degree), Kent (22-23 - teacher training), Birmingham (postgrad). Still in Brum.
6. Jobs I have had:
Busboy, cleaner, singing waiter, teacher, admin guy, resourcer (now). Was an actual novelist for a while, until the advance ran out and I couldn't write the follow-up I'd been commissioned to write and I ended up working for my future mother in law. Have nearly finished writing something else.
7. Bloggers I am tagging who I will enjoy getting to know better:
Sorry to bend the rules, but I'm tagging any of my neighbours who'd like to do this. I know some have done it already, but my lunch break is over and I haven't time to cross people off my list, so my apologies to you folks for the double tag.
Fellow Nick Drake fan Scott Small over on Not In Me has been so kind (or imprudent) as to let me post some reflections on heaven and suburbia on his upliftingly lovely blog There's Treasure Everywhere. If you're feeling whimsical please do pop over and give it a read, as well as the other posts there, and grace us with your thoughts!
Ta,
Nick.
I was mad about mythology as a teenager, and considered myself a sophisticated pagan after the model of Murry Hope, all of whose books I’d read and mildly understood. If Science had no way to talk about the cosmic intelligence I witnessed in the eternal struggle between birds and tortoises, then Murry’s mythology and magic did. Indeed, the fact that ancient cultures saw their gods as animating different aspects of nature seemed to me a validation of ancient thinking. To describe natural phenomena in anthropomorphic terms is to affirm something obviously true: that humans themselves belong to the realm of natural phenomena, and that every quality we think of as peculiarly human is also, in some way, writ large in nature as a whole.
Apparently, though, it was primitive to ascribe human qualities to nature, nature being, all said, a bunch of molecules moving around. On the other hand, it was perfectly scientific to describe every aspect of the human experience in terms of a bunch of molecules moving around. Perfectly acceptable, that is, to my second year English teacher, who first got me thinking about this odd way of thinking.
Our English teacher had once been a nun and now she was, like many teachers, a secular humanist. Unlike most secular humanist teachers, though, she was a proselytising humanist, the kind who would scrap a lesson on Wilfred Owen and instead give a slide show introducing us to humanist ethics. Her lecture on the finality of death made several pupils weep. We all suspected that we would have liked her more if we’d known her back when she was a nun. Partly this was because she wore a hairpiece, and we thought it funny to speculate that her autobiography could have been titled A Wig and a Prayer. But, also, there was only so much raw reductionist materialism a bunch of children like us could take. When you are a young person and the glorious adventure of your life is still spread before you, barely sniffed at, you don’t want someone in a wig telling you that it has absolutely no meaning save that which you pretend it has.
One Summer day when we all wanted to go home she looked at us, this zoo-enclosure of adolescent humans simmering with boredom and various lusts on our sweaty plastic chairs, and she told us that the only reason humans loved each other was chemicals. I even remember the name of one of the love-chemicals: vasopressin. Apparently it was vasopressin that stopped me from loving anyone else while I was fixated on Michelle Harkness. Another time she told us that, ‘from the point of view of nature’, there was no division or distinction between each of us and our school-books and the ceiling and the air: all was a continuum of molecules, and if you searched for anything else amidst the molecules, you were guaranteed to find nothing, not even your own self. The personality, free-will, God, all that stuff belonged to the realm of ideas. ‘Maturity,’ she said, ‘is learning to admit that ideas are not real things.’
Our English teacher would have seen in my dealings with ancient deities an attempt to personally drag the world back into the cruel and haunted darkness of superstition and witchery. She had nothing but scorn for primitive, pre-scientific notions of gods who caused hurricanes with their anger. But I thought that those primitives had a point. For a start, the gods never really represented to ancient people mere links in the material causal chain; they represented the imperceptible stuff going on behind events; they provided an interface between natural phenomena and human values. (That’s why sun gods Ra and Apollo didn’t look much like the sun.) A myth about moral order could also be a myth about cosmic order and political order and the lunar calendar, as well as containing some good corn recipes. But, more important, if human emotions are just physical and biological and chemical events, and elemental cataclysms are just physical and biological and chemical events, then what is wrong with describing one in terms of the other? My teacher thought that human subjective phenomena and natural objective phenomena were ultimately the same thing; but she laughed at the ancients, who said that human subjective phenomena and natural objective phenomena were ultimately the same thing.
Anyone with a passing acquaintance with Kant and Schopenhauer will have heard of the distinction between phenomena – objects in the world of experience – and noumena – things as they are ‘in themselves,’ quite apart from how they look, smell, taste, sound and feel, and quite apart from the categories of understanding that the human mind imposes (including time, space and causality). For Kant, it is impossible to know what a thing is ‘like’ in itself. (Berkeley, of course, argued that it doesn’t exist ‘in itself,’ outside our experience – only experience exists; the content and substance of experience are the same thing.) For Schopenhauer, there is one crucial exception to the law of the unknowablility of noumena: each one of us is a ‘thing-in-itself’, and as we are self-conscious, we have some kind of experience of at least one thing-in-itself.
There’s a parallel here with what the ancients were doing when they saw intelligent agency lurking behind the observable universe. The ancients could observe the universe, as can we; and like us, they knew of one thing that does not belong purely to the realm of the observable: the experience of being a conscious, thinking agent. So when faced with the question of what exists behind, or guides, physical phenomena, their answer was, in effect: ‘The only other thing that we know for sure exists – subjective consciousness’. When the ancients described the inner nature of things in terms of intelligence, consciousness, thought, even emotion, they were building a picture of the universe with materials they had ‘to hand’, as it were. That’s not as naïve, or as unscientific, as my English teacher thought. If you disallow that move, then you’re left with the view that the inner nature of things is unknowable; you’re left explaining objective phenomena in terms of other objective phenomena, without ever getting behind the phenomena. If you’re going to leave a gap that big, someone's always going to try to fit some kind of deity back into it…
(click here for laws of nature pt 1)
As a child, while floating in the waters of sleep, going under then bobbing back up, waiting to sink, I would very often become aware of strange things going on in my brain. It was as though I were eavesdropping on conversations taking place at deeper levels of my mind. No, not conversations – exchanges of coded data. Sometimes monologues. Pure intelligence, ideas communicated in extraordinary languages, passing through the arid intellectual wasteland of my own brain en route to somewhere greener. Three or four times I overheard rolling streams of information and realised, after struggling to decipher them, that they were in the form of music. Once (and only once) I had a distinct feeling that, at some very deep and murky level, my mind merged with other minds, opened out into a shared source.
It thrilled and scared me that the universe could be so transparent, that a boy could peek behind the fabric of it and see the mechanics of the operation. It was akin to when you crash a game on your friend’s ZX Spectrum home computer and suddenly the animated picture vanishes and you are confronted with pages of stark mysterious code. It was like looking at a fashion-watch with a clear plastic face that revealed the workings. But why shouldn’t I see the workings? After all, I was part of the workings.
I could not articulate my understanding that the universe surged with intelligence. Neither did I have anyone to whom I could articulate it without appearing deranged. As a big fan of the ZX Spectrum home computer (my friend Gary owned one), I suppose I could have used the analogy that the cosmos, in my experience, was like hardware, and the laws of the cosmos were like a program, and the relationship between the two somehow generated reality. Indeed, nature seemed to me to be ‘programmed’ in not just one but a variety of incredibly sophisticated languages (at least one consisting of weird music), just as computer software is written in different languages, each language having particular strengths and applications. I could have said that, to me, ‘the gods’ were nothing less than the various programs that ordered the cosmos. The languages in which the programs were written were the gods’ voices, and the gods’ mythological representations were just how the programs looked when played on the hardware of human imagination. But I lacked the nerve and the vocabulary to try to explain any of that to Gary or to any other human. I assumed that I would take these feelings to the grave.
I was doing Physics homework with my friends Gary and Wayne. We had one decent brain between us, and it was in Gary’s head, so we did our homework at his house. He never did homework himself, but he would answer our questions. He was an early version of Google. I remember having a sudden crisis because I realised that I didn’t know what the laws of nature were. I asked Gary.
‘There’s loads of them,’ he said. ‘Like gravity. And millions of others.’
‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘What I’m saying is, what are they? Are they chemicals?’
My friends marvelled at my ignorance. ‘They’re forces, you gimp,’ Wayne snorted.
But I was experiencing a kind of block. What exactly was a force? And what told forces how to behave if not the laws of nature? So, again, what exactly was a law of nature? Where were these laws kept? Did they inhabit things, like little pilots? If so, who was coordinating the pilots? What coordinated the pilots if not the laws of nature? So, yet again, what exactly was a law of nature? Something material? How could a thing that directed matter be itself material?
The truth is that I was panicking because I thought that I was supposed to know what a law of nature was for my Science GCSE coursework. But of course nobody knows. Even Gary did not know.
On reflection, it struck me as an alarming oversight, the fact that no teacher had ever even mentioned to us what the laws of nature were actually made of, or where they resided, or how they acted upon anything. The question did not even come up!
I did not press Gary on the subject.
This bewilderment about the universe’s underpinnings hit me from time to time. Not often. I remember the feeling of frustrated curiosity I had when I read in the school library about certain birds that had learned to drop rocks on tortoises to break their shells. The book didn’t so much as peck at the most pressing questions I had, such as: How had they learned to do that? Had a few clever birds pioneered the practice? If so, how had the knowledge been passed on to other birds and to avian posterity? Something must have moved the species to evolve this behaviour; but I could see nothing analogous to this ‘something’ in the physical world.
There was one obvious thing to which I could liken this ‘something’. Unfortunately, it happened to be the one thing that I suspected my Science teacher wouldn’t want me to ascribe to nature, the only thing in the realm of my empirical experience that was not material - namely, my experience of thinking. I assumed it was naïve of me to suspect that the evolutionary process thinks, or does anything like thinking. But nobody had any better explanations of what the process of evolution, as distinct from its effects, actually consisted of.
True, I had a brain, and Nature did not. Did that settle the question of whether Nature had a thought-life? My instincts told me no. I could not say I ever experienced my brain generating intelligence, and my sister would have corroborated this. My feeling was that my brain somehow limited the intelligence flowing into it – trapped and channelled and synthesised and usually squandered it. Could not the relationship between intelligence and brains be like the relationship between radio signals and radios? (I found radio signals mysterious, too.) Radios don’t generate music purely from within themselves; they don’t contain little people holding guitars. And perhaps brains don’t generate thoughts.
Regarding the birds with rocks, the GCSE Science explanation was that if a behaviour or a physical development proves helpful to a species’ survival and propagation, it becomes part of that species’ bag of tricks. Nature repeats itself imperfectly; aberrations occur; some aberrations prove useful and facilitate survival and reproduction and so are integrated into the species. Over time, species transform. All well and good. But about those rocks. How many birds must have accidentally carried rocks into the air, and then, while trying to ignore the cheap laughter of other birds, accidentally dropped their rocks on tortoises and then noticed the unfortunate tortoise flailing unclothed and flown down and got themselves some good chow before an evolutionary mechanism earmarked the behaviour for inclusion in the repertoire of that species? Surely some kind of top-down teleological problem-solving system was helping to direct this drama. I had no problem with the theory of evolution. But it seemed disingenuous to describe evolution purely from the bottom-up, claiming that ‘simple’ mechanisms did all the work, with no reference to any interesting built-in goals that the evolutionary process might have. Only half the story was being told.
I never cared much where life or the universe came from. I was perfectly content to discover material reasons. No, what I have always wanted to know was what those things that direct and order physical universe - the laws of nature and logic and mathematics – actually are. In failing to talk about the substance of the laws of nature, or even to come up with non-loaded terms in which to conduct debate, secondary school science ceded discussion of some of the most fascinating aspects of nature to mysticism. I like to think that a lot of my early mystical thinking was simply the continuation of scientific thinking by other means. Not through wilful weirdness but by default.
When you are a teenager, your personality seems like something separate from you. You are aware that you are a person who experiences things, but you are also aware that the person you are is one of the things you experience - the most immediate thing, in fact, and among the most alien. Your image – the way you seem, especially to yourself – is at the same time something you are, something you experience, and something you have a particular relationship with. Some people hate the person they see themselves as being. Some people love that person. The kind of relationship you have with yourself determines what kind of person you are, and the kind of person you are determines what kind of person you are, and the kind of person you see yourself as being - or think others you think others see you as being - determines what kind of person you are. It is a complicated business, being a person. The complexities are highlighted in youth.
By age fourteen I neither hated nor liked my self-image; I had no fixed ideas about what kind of person I was. Consequently I never knew how to act in any situation. For many years this lack of persona was like a living death, only worse. At least real zombies are supposed to act like animate cadavers – it’s their job - but I assumed that everybody expected me to display the characteristics of the living. To meet their unspoken demands I felt pressured to invent characteristics from one moment to the next. It was exhausting. Sometimes I wished I could view myself from the outside, in action, during those rare times when I was not consciously trying to act like some character I’d seen in a film, so I could see if I had traits I didn’t know about. Once I considered asking someone close to me - my mother, for example, to describe me in, say, five words - so I could have some idea about who I was. But I didn’t have the nerve to ask. It did not seem preposterous to imagine that she would have had me committed.
Whenever I had the television to myself at home, I would watch videos of films my family had taped from the telly, and I’d wonder which of the characters I could profitably become. One of my favourite films was a comedy teen-movie called The Sure Thing, about a cheeky but loveable rogue who somehow wins the heart of a beautiful but stuck-up girl. I often felt I would make a great cheeky guy, and would write lists of the cheeky things that the cheeky guy did, so I could do them too. But then I’d watch The Breakfast Club, which featured a guy who was cool and moody and wore big boots and lots of layers of grungy clothing. After a few minutes of watching that, I wouldn’t be so sure about being cheeky. I’d consider being brash and smart-mouthed. But then I would watch my dad’s copy of First Blood, about a quiet but psychopathic soldier called John Rambo, and then it would be time to walk the dog and I still wouldn’t know who I was, and anyway, Rambo was not the best role model for a skinny boy who did not own a machine gun.
At school, I would ask myself from one moment to the next what such-and-such a character would do in my situation, a policy that usually resulted in paralysis.
My mother didn’t approve of me trying to model myself on characters from films. She always said to me: Just be yourself.
What on earth did that mean?
God, of course, did not have identity crises. Lucky God, I thought. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity came to represent, to me, the doctrine of an enviably healthy personality. Like me, God was conscious of himself; unlike me, he knew everything about himself, and did not have to wonder whether to emulate Rambo. Like me, God had a relationship with his self-image, but unlike me, his was positive, because he liked his self-image and didn’t have to change it every day.
The bible told me that Christ was ‘the image of the invisible God’, and though I didn’t understand this, I liked to think of God in the following, possibly blasphemous terms. God (I thought) looks at himself and sees somebody perfect; but in a sort of shy, bashful way, he refuses to take the credit for himself, and so honours his marvellous identity as though from a distance. I could relate to this idea because sometimes, at night, I would talk to myself as though ‘myself’ was a separate person who had deep wisdom and could offer me advice. The relationship between God and his image was like that, I assumed, only even better, because God’s image, about which God knows everything, actually possesses laudable traits. This relationship God has with himself is, therefore, not self-love, but other-love; and as God’s image is one with him and shares all his attributes, including intelligence and other things, his image can reciprocate that love. This relationship, as an elderly guest preacher at my church once said, is the original, primordial Father-Son relationship. (You could say that creation’s relationship with itself constitutes a cosmic Mother-Child relationship, but that would take us way off topic.)
Of course, we can conceive of a God who doesn’t have this ‘other’ focus and who therefore is a different kind of deity. The particular mode of the Christian God’s relationship with his image, with its other-focus, defines what sort of person the Christian God is – defines him, as the apostle John