In God We Doubt

As someone who spends longer than can ever be considered healthy obsessing about theological issues, I have come to remarkably few conclusions. So few, that I have been forced to subscribe to Olin Miller's assertion that "to be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it". I guess that's my cynical pragmatism at work.

However that doesn't stop me wishing I could believe in something - really believe in a way that gives my life a purpose I can dedicate myself to, rather than forcing myself to swallow a grain of truth surrounded by a load of claptrap for the sake of a little solace, which seems to be the failure of most religious texts I've explored. Many people say that historical context and exegisis brings more clarity. But, no matter how much I read, I'm simply not there yet.

I also consider it rather unfair that so many so called Holy Books have rocked up on the earth's shores. It's hard enough working out, after many years of painstaking research, whether one of them stacks up let alone comparing them to the beliefs of Incas, Hare Krishna's or even just the other major world religions.

So imagine how pleased I was to discover this excerpt from a new book by John Humphrys entitled In God We Doubt. I remember the marxist vicar Giles Fraser well from my time at Wadham when he was our college chaplain.

One particular sermon of his on The Matrix and the meaning of modern life was instrumental in changing my understanding of British society at the tender age of 19, an understanding only reinforced by works like Affluenza and I Fought the Law which, despite their slightly hysterical tone, have helped prevent me ever becoming a fully functional member of a society obsessed by consumption, pleasure, and distraction.

As Humphrys himself acknowledges "For those of us who are neither believers nor atheists it can be very difficult. Doubters are left in the deeply unsatisfactory position of finding the existence of God unprovable and implausible, and the comfort of faith unachievable. But at the same time we find the reality of belief undeniable".

I agree with him that while most attempts to justify belief in God seem hopelessly naive, the hopelessness of postmodernist thought, in which we are supposed to be satisfied with a life of pleasure with nothing at the end of it, doesn't make a great deal of sense either. In fact, if human beings, like other creatures, were supposed to exist happily without a sense of an external creator why did they all go to such great lengths to create one?

After all is said and done, "There remains what the atheist philosopher AC Grayling calls “the lingering splinter in the mind . . . a sense of yearning for the absolute”. There is a profound longing for something that will stimulate and satisfy emotionally and spiritually.

In the end our choice, as Humprhys points out, is to accept the conclusion reached by Jean-Paul Sartre that “There is no purpose to existence, only nothingness” or see the purpose in religion either as revealed truth, and therefore meaning, or as a social tool that is somehow in tune with the needs of human nature, and without which we function less well.

I suspect this will be top of my wish list for my birthday.

Losing our Religion

I came across a comment in today's Times by Britain's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks which struck me as true.

I respect the Rabbi greatly because he is one of the few religious leaders whose writings provide a cogent critique of modern Western ethics and can appeal to readers beyond narrow sectarian confines.

This is what he has to say on the relationship between belief in God and what it means to be a human being which, in turn, has major implications for each individual's sense of purpose and of moral responsibility.

Religion claims human beings were granted dominion over all the earth. And while many would take issue with this interpretation in today's secular climate, the fact of the matter is that our dominion has never been so noticeable, so widespread, nor so destructive as it is today.

Fish stocks are almost exhausted.

Rising sea levels and global warming bring flooding and desertification in equal measure, reducing the amount of available farmland and forcing record numbers to migrate from their stricken homelands.

Species and languages are dying at unprecedented rates as globalisation's ugly cousin, homogeneity, attacks the world's natural diversity in the search for a quick profit or a sous to feed a growing family.

This is dominion all right. But it is thoughtless tyranny, dominion of the worst kind. Human beings, many argue, have a moral responsibility to themselves, to future generations, to the planet itself, to preserve the fruits of nature and cease their destructive behaviour.

But on what basis?

Rabbi Sacks points out that in the monotheistic religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam,
dominion is and must be interpreted as stewardship: the recognition that living things are to serve humanity but human beings, as part of their dominion, are required to look after all living creatures.

On this reading, failure to care for the thing we exert power over is equivalent to acting inhumanly, to being inhumane in our treatment of other living things. For Rabbi Sacks, a God-centred view of human existence is one in which man (through his intelligence, his judgement, and his love for creation) can elevate himself to the viewpoint of the divine.

Failure to harness this spiritual side, however, results in an abasement that puts us on a par with non-sentient creatures.

An abasement born, if you will, of wilful ignorance because mankind's capacity for intelligent thought and forward planning is far far greater than that of other mammals. They exist. We order existence. Failure to exercise what clerics call God-given reason is thus the equivalent of acting against our (better) nature.

By contrast, modern scientific thought - as it is used by humanists and other secular groups - defines humanity as something far more limited and, fundamentally, pre-programmed: as Rabbi Sacks points out, "we are part of nature; nothing more".

A statement published in 1997 by members of the International Academy of Humanism, and distinguished scientists, philosophers and novelists, defines homo sapiens as a member of the animal kingdom stating:

"Human capabilities appear to differ in degree, not in kind, from those found among the higher animals.

Humankind's rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover.”

This in turn gives rise to questions about the nature of our responsibility towards the planet and its creatures.

If we are programmed to be selfish, greedy, and destructive what possible reason could we have for stopping such tendencies for moral reasons rather than reasons of self interest?

I am not suggesting for one moment that the non-religious don't have a sense of ethics. I am simply saying that different definitions of humanity lead us to employ different forms of rationale.

Note that much of the current discussion on climate change is not about the rights and wrongs of exterminating animal and fish species, it's about ensuring their sustainable use for economic growth.

Under this way of seeing it does not matter much if the salmon comes from a salmon farm or lives wild. The essential point is that it is there for human consumption.

The modern view of human beings stresses our biology. In turn, we objectify animals, seeing them only as the source of meat or leather, as opposed to beings which have an equal right to inhabit the earth and are deserving of reasonable treatment.

If you have ever looked in a cow's eyes, let alone stroked your neighbour's cat as it sits on your knee, you will have had the feeling that a being, any being, is a good deal more than that.

Rabbi Sacks writes that "When human beings lose faith in God they lose faith in human beings" and indeed, the sacredness of creation.

Why?

Because without an extra-biological purpose informing our actions, he claims, "We will have knowledge without wisdom, technology without reticence, choice without conscience, power without restraint".

Only when we rediscover life as a miracle of creation, instead of trying to maximise its returns, will we rediscover our full potential as human beings.

East Meets West

Two monologues do not a dialogue make. And I am afraid that Europe's Year of Intercultural Dialogue is going to founder on this rather crucial distinction. I just sat through a protocol meeting with the Grand Mufti of Syria and his entourage in which the 'conversation' went something like this.

Us: "We are delighted to welcome you here to the European Parliament. Intercultural Dialogue is very important"

Them: "We are delighted to come to the European Parliament. Intercultural Dialogue is very important"

Us: "We hope we can promote unity and discourage extremism through this dialogue"

Them: "We also hope we can promote unity and discourage extremism through this dialogue"

Us: "Religion and politics must be separated"

Them: "Indeed they should. Diversity is God's will. That's why the Jews should never have moved to the holy land from Sanaa or Aleppo or anywhere else in the Middle East. By applying a policy of ethnic exclusivity to an area sacred to all three monotheistic religions and desecrating human dignity they have shown that their state is an historical aberration. Wasn't life better when for thousands of years they lived in peaceful coexistence with their Muslim rulers?" (OK, I'm paraphrasing here, the Mufti actually employed rather conciliatory language which, when analysed afterwards, actually contains this message).

Us: "Time is running short, we are glad you are committed to discussing diversity and secularism. We'll talk about this another time".

Constructive, no?

Having said that, the Grand Mufti (who I assumed to be a fully paid up doyen of the religious establishment but is also a fully paid up member of the political establishment since he is appointed by the government) also said a number of things that merit a mention. He is clearly quite an eloquent chap.

• A blinkered focus on Sacred Texts stops Jews and Arabs finding a peaceful solution to the problem, whether it be insistence on a Jewish Homeland or the Muslim's exclusive 'right' to rule all territory previously belonged to the Ottoman Caliph.


• Any solution must be negotiated politically. Blood begets blood. Syria will negotiate a peaceful return of the Golan Heights and is ready to extend the hand of friendship to Israel


• Europe must not close the door to any side which desires dialogue, including Hamas. Respect for diversity can only come from respecting each other which in turn means respecting the importance of free expression.


• All states should be secular. Religion is not a matter for politics. It is based on the personal relationship between men and God. As such, the state should not, inter alia, enforce things like prayer - signifying that the all-encompassing Shari'a practiced in some Muslim states oversteps the boundaries of good governance.

It may not be dialogue. But it's always good to see someone else's point of view. Too often in Europe we speak amongst ourselves and then claim to have mastered the problem. More exposure to other perspectives is definitely welcome.

EU Should Stop Being A Schoolyard Bully

Subsidiarity - the principle that government power ought to reside at the lowest possible level - is a concept beloved of Liberal Democrats. However, too many of our elected members are a little vague on what that means in practice.

You see subsidiarity should mean it's the council which handles your bin collection; regional and national government which organises matters like education policy and road building; and the EU which does things countries can't handle alone like combat climate change.

So far, so good. But the problem with power - and the backbone of traditional liberal thinking - is that, if their remit is unchecked, law-makers will attempt to intrude ever further into the realm of the personal. Sunsidiarity should be accompanied by a healthy respect for the limits of the law and the need for smaller government.

Now the EU is a byword for big government and I am more than a trifle bemused by its endless efforts to overstep the mark. When not making laws for the sake of making laws, or making policy on a lowest common denominator basis, it is busy issuing resolutions on areas over which it has no competence, from Foreign Policy to - bizarrely - school uniforms.

The issue? Banning hijab for Muslim school girls across the EU. You see, in a report on Children's Rights to be voted tomorrow at the European Parliament's plenary session paragraph 127 "Urges Member States to ban headscarves and hijab at least at primary school, in order to anchor more firmly the right to be a child and to ensure genuine and unenforced freedom of choice at a later age" which passed in committee with a considerable majority.

Now think what you like about the issue of hijab, especially for under 16's. I personally agree with the logic behind this paragraph, which, according to Committee members, is to ensure young girls get to participate fully in things like swimming and gymnastics without having their parents' preferences thrust upon them - especially important in primary schools where none but the most fundamentalist of zealots could consider a girl to have attained puberty. I'm not sure I like the 'at least' qualification, as it smacks a little of cultural hegemony, but at least it's only a suggestion.

However that is beside the point.

This is a clear cut case of Europe overstepping its mandate and interfering, in a nanny state sort of way, with decisions that can be dealt with perfectly adequately at the level of the school board, let alone local or national government. Surely these are issues which communitites should deal with on their own, in full consultation with local parents, if we are serious about 'integrating diversity', as the jargon goes.

The top down approach of a bunch of privileged, mostly middle aged, white people - however well intentioned - runs entirely against the grain of what is feted as Europe's Year of Intercultural Dialogue. Of all people, Europe's Liberals and Democrats should agree with this. But we're supporting the report anyway, despite murmurings of opposition from the likes of Sarah Ludford MEP. It is definitely time for a policy rethink.

Putting the Pieces Together

''Lebanon is more than a country - it is a message.'' So said the Pope when he visited Beirut in 1997, as the country was picking up the pieces of civil war and its way towards peaceful coexistence. ''A country of many religious faiths, Lebanon has shown that these different faiths can live together in peace, brotherhood and cooperation.''

Since then, Hariri's assassination, the 2006 war with Israel, and the recent murder of General Francois Hajj - tipped to become head of the army as part of the effort to resolve Lebanon's presidential impasse - have strained that metaphor to breaking point. But its relevance remains.

If Christians, Sunnis, Shia, Druse, and Jewish people cannot live in peace in Lebanon - where they have coexisted for millennia - what hope is there for the modern multicultural state, where doctrines of ethno-natural unity are increasingly challenged (the far right would say 'undermined') by migration and labour mobility?

Prior to this, my first trip to Lebanon, I would have been equally sceptical . Constant reference to sectarian tension across the media over the past few months seemed to point to the fact that these people simply couldn't live together, despite the best efforts of an elite political class to find consensus. Yet on arrival I found that the opposite is true.

Most people I met, from all sides of the religious spectrum, agreed they couldn't trust their politicians and that it is foreign interference, not personal grievance, which is responsible for much of the tension. Many also point to the quota system, whereby posts are parcelled out by politicians on strict sectarian lines, as a major factor in discouraging national unity. Change, they believe, can only come from the bottom up when citizens - tired of war, enmity and insecurity - take on their leaders and demand a fresh start.

It has worked before. Mass demonstrations following the murder of former PM Rafik Hariri, where sixty percent of the country, largely peacefully, picketed the parliament - leaving only young children, the elderly, and infirm at home - forced the Syrians out. And although Damascus' influence still hangs over the country, popular protest has largely delegitimised it.

I wouldn't want to speak too soon on the Lebanese situation. As my travelling companion pointed out, you only start to understand Lebanon once you realise how complicated the whole country is. However I do believe, from my brief exposure to its form of multiculturalism, that this country can give Europe some pointers when it comes to countering the recent upsurge in support for extreme right ideologies.

From what I was told, Lebanon's problems stem from politicisation of difference in the aftermath of Ottoman occupation, both during the French protectorat where Christians were given the upper hand, and post-independence, as part of the struggle over who had the right to claim the country for its respective tradition.

Conversely, the rise of racism and xenophobia in Europe is linked to the perceived threat to our dominant cultural norms by recent immigrants, be these norms secular - as is the case in France - or religious. Whether it's bans on Christmas nativity plays or bans on headscarves, there's a war being fought on our continent on whose sensitivities win the day. Yet one thing we have not realised -that the Lebanese have, after decades of fruitless civil war - is that there can be no winner in these stand offs.

We can - and they did - argue long and hard about who has the 'right' to dominant cultural expression but if we cannot recognise the diversity that exists on the ground (much of which, in Europe's case, was simply airbrushed out of the history books for the fiction of national unity in the face of minority cultures ) then we will never reach a resolution to current problems.

With time, Britain absorbed the Angles, the Saxons, the Picts, the Vikings, the Normans and the Danes. It welcomed Jews, Irish and Italians who now fit seemlessly into our understanding of who we, the British people, are. Why should we not expect the same from the cultures of recent migrants, while acknowledging that it will take a while for the rough edges to be smoothed through cultural acclimatisation?

The Lebanese example does not show sects mixing to the point of homogeneity - as Europe's integrationists, and many policy makers, increasingly demand. It does not demand an iron secularism, that precludes religious debate, for nowhere is religion a stronger force than in this tiny territory. Equally, experience of war exposes the pretence of the extreme right that the majority can simply exercise an iron fist over the minority and 'send them all back home' without a measure of violent payback.

With 12% of Europe's population of migrant descent, and growing, we are well past the point where people should seriously be entertaining old ethno-national ideas of cultural supremacy. But we are. A 2004 poll revealed that 33% of Europeans consider themselves racist, yet Europe needs migrants like never before to support its growth and social services in the face of population decline. Why? One reason must be the propensity for our leaders, like the Lebanese, to use these problems to their own advantage and create electoral dividends.

When people like you and me stop simply listening to media scaremongering, and go out and meet our neighbours, learn to understand their differences, and start to treat them as human beings, then - and only then - will we find the kind of solutions we can all learn to live with.

A Marriage Made in Hell?

Scots are ascetic, Calvinist people. You can tell by our dress, our food, our temperament. Plain, unadorned, drab even, at first glance, this grim picture is leavened with an irony and self-deprecation that brings colour to our culture and saves us from ourselves.

Perhaps things are changing now: the glitz of a Glasgow night out, all fishnet tights and sequined tops, bespeaks a society unafraid of enjoyment though still too repressed to be capable of it while sober. Yet Scotland is still very much a product of, and prisoner of, mentalities ushered in during the Reformation. Mentalities which have affected Scottish cultural life in myriad different ways.

George Mackay Brown called us the "Knox-ruined nation". Works of religious art, rivalled only by those existent in Flanders, were destroyed by the iconoclasts in the mid 1500s. Along with them, he says, went a tradition of song, theatre, and story-telling going back to pagan times. After Knox, many argue, Scotland lost its medieval Catholic colour and staggered out of the Reformation in mournful black.

Like a modern-day Iraq or Afghanistan our nation turned its back on the 'heretic' past to embrace the austerity and uniformity of fundamentalist Protestantanism - an ideology that eschewed the power of images or words to bring our fallen humanity closer to God and scorned its ability to comfort in times of need. And it is only in recent times, when the Kirk lost its moral and social authority, that Scotland has opened up to change.

This is one, perhaps even the prevailing, reading of the legacy of the Scottish Reformation on Scottish culture. But is Scotland really as artistically stunted as some critics have suggested? Richard Holloway, former Anglican Bishop of Edinburgh and patron of the Scottish arts set out to explore this question when he gave the St Andrew's Day lecture on "religion and art: a marriage made in hell" at Scotland House last night.

I was aware of Bishop Holloway's rather unconventional approach to religion. After all, he famously said that the Bible was an anachronism that needed to be updated to reflect liberal humanist ethics. He has led campaigns to ordain gay priests and ensure equality for all in the church, regardless of sexual orientation. He is a member of the BMA steering group on ethics and genetics and come out in favour of embryo research. He likes High Anglican traditions and incense, for heaven's sake. So I rather expected he would second Mackay Brown's point.

He started as if he were going to do so, by claiming that Scotland had never understood the basic distinction between the artist, and their often dubious morals, and the majestic sublimity of their work which, despite its lowly origins, could speak the language of beauty and truth. 'Love the sinner, hate the sin' wasn't in vogue in Knox's fire and brimstone sermons. Scots were taught humanity was weak, fallen, and above all, never to be pitied by an angry God demanding vengeance. Art could not mediate the divine, or even reflect its atributes. And therefore it too, must be corrupted and ultimately without value.

Yet, Holloway postulates that it is precisely the overwhelming rejection of human comfort, beauty, and weakness by Scotland's established church which led to the development of a strong, counter-cultural literary movement - one which had many adherents in a population with few other outlets for imagining. It led to the Scottish enlightenment, to David Hume and Walter Scott, to a 'literate, argumentative nation that exalted words, and still does'.

What Scotland's great writers did, he feels, was make room for weakness, for comfort, for hope while still retaining the Reformation sense that life was destined to be miserable, difficult, and short. That is why so much of our literature, labeled 'miserabilist' by some, is in fact infused by the empathy which comes from those who are used to suffering, who know they have fallen, who have sympathy for the failings of others - of artists whose lives were often broken and difficult.

In this respect, he argues, the Reformation had misunderstood its own sacred texts. Jesus preached compassion and mercy, not fear and terror. Scottish literature was simply reclaiming the moral ground that the official religious authorities had squandered - and it was its compassion that made it morally valid.

To that extent, Holloway believes, art and the Bible share a common purpose: to explore the tension between good and evil, between despair and hope, that is an integral part of human existence and needs to be explained somehow, whether through poetry, myth, or sacred writing.
Although he believes personally that the Bible is a human creation which reflects the values and (often misogynist) expectations of its time, putting him at odds with more mainstream literalist Christians), he also argues that the overarching themes it addresses - the themes, after all of all great literature - are universal and relevant to all human beings.

As such, he says, it makes no difference whether ethics are explored in the Bible or any other artistic work. The important thing is not the origin, divine or otherwise, but its usefulness to making our lives, and the lives of others, as beautiful, just, and fair as they possibly can be.

To which all I can say is 'Amen to that".