Many people don’t think I have any, I am so distanced from them. “Meditate on the circle!’? God’s way is the way of the circle, the cycles of nature, the circle of the sun, the moon, the planets and stars, the cycles of death and rebirth. We do not know him as we think we know him, nor do we own him as we think we own him. He belongs to all. What we do know is that the world was created out of love by a God of joy and humour. Our hands were made for holding other hands, our feet for dancing, and my dream and prayer would be that one day all the world would take part in this circle dance of love. ‘‘Dance then wherever you may be / For I am the Lord of the Dance said he | And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be...’’ From Professor Dumpty I see that in the recent dialogue between yourself and the Humanist press a certain Mr Anthony Freeman is charged in the New Humanist with using ‘‘Humpty-Dumpty language’’ in saying ‘‘Yes, I do believe in God, and one of the things I believe about God is that he does not exist’’, The reference to myself is presumably to the celebrated exchange I had in 1872 with a girl called Alice, in which I remarked that ‘‘When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less’’. Alice retorted that ‘‘The question is whether you can make words mean different things,’’ to which I answered: ‘‘The question is, which is to be master - that’s all’’.
Since those far-off days, many distinguished pupils -Wittgenstein, Derrida, Cupitt - have followed and developed my argument that words are our servants, not our masters, and that human usage is what confers meaning on them. A dictionary does not provide fixed definitions of a word but indications of the several layers of meaning a word has accumulated in usage. Thus it is useless to call on a dictionary as the final arbiter of the meaning of ‘*God”’ or ‘‘religion’’, unless the dictionary is so up-to-date that it includes the new, creative and exploratory ways in which such words are being used today, and can even anticipate the meanings they will embrace tomorrow.
This is not to say that it is sensible to say ‘‘good’’ when I mean ‘evil’? or ‘‘egg’’ when I mean ‘‘bacon’’. But it does serve to remind us that it is pre-1872 thinking to imagine that ‘‘God’’ and ‘“‘religion’”’ have fixed meanings determined by a dictionary writer. - Professor H Dumpty, The Wall, Looking-Glass University.
Christian humanism For several years I went to a church where the vicar made sure the style and content of the worship there was in line with his christian humanist beliefs. Ever since, I have not been able to go to church without wanting to reform the service and reorganise the interior - (the altar could be moved, those pews could be got rid of, etc).
I agree with Angela Barkshire (SoF 17). We could put together a christian humanist service. We could even plan a humanist liturgical year covering the whole range of human, animal and environmental concerns. However, we would probably be creating difficulties for ourselves if we sought to exclude God entirely from such an enterprise.
We would probably end up visiting the National Gallery and avoiding the Sainsbury Wing! Angela proves the point by admitting that she is moved by religious music.
On the whole, the religious works I like best are those which have a good deal of humanism in them. When we listen to the Glagolitic Mass we are not in a cathedral but among the tall pine forests of Czechoslovakia, and the bells Janacek wants us to hear are those which hang round the necks of a flock of sheep. In Britten’s War Requiem the poet invokes a curse upon the guns of war while the chorus sings the Dies Irae. The Hosanna in Excelsis leads us to a vision - of young soldiers’ corpses.
There is an interesting article called ‘‘Cupitt and Art’? in SoF Spring 1991 which suggests parallels between the work of Cupitt and the music of Michael Tippett. This would be a good starting point for finding out how contemporary music can give us insights into the beliefless christianity we are currently exploring. So it’s off to the local library to look for Tippet’s Third Symphony! - Janet Barnard, 21 Larkham Close, Matson, Gloucester. [See also ‘‘Postscripts’’. - ED.] Why turn the other cheek?
When World War Two was declared I was in my late teens and expecting to be called up pretty promptly. I considered myself more or less an atheist: my family and I had never been near a church or a parson. I had no doubt that I should register as a conscientious objector on vaguely humanitarian and political grounds - but a political objector who was a pacifist, and a pacifist who had become one through the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. How could all this hold together rationally?
I very much wanted to believe it could, mainly because, though I believed in the beauty and truth of his teaching, I did not consider Jesus a divine person. This I tried, not very sucessfully, to explain to tribunals, and to maintain as a logical position in the years ahead - in prison, in Civil Defence and in the coal mines, in all of which places I rubbed shoulders with both purely religious and purely political objectors. The former were usually Jehovah’s Witnesses whose fundamentalism was so primitive that I could scarcely consider them Christians.
And the latter I could not understand for it seemed they must shift their ground whenever the political scene changed. And deep down inside me I could not understand myself either.
Was the teaching of Jesus divine, though he himself wasn’t? For on merely rational grounds, turning the other cheek was a mug’s game; and in the final event, to allow yourself to be killed rather than to kill was so superhuman it seemed to demand some divine imperative.
So, in a nutshell, though I could dismiss with an indulghent smile all such stuff as ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost”’ and ‘he rose from the dead’’, I couldn’t so easily dismiss the teachings of Jesus. That teaching seemed to require a God somewhere or other. Worse, to my human mind, was the suspicion that pacifism in itself was a form of fundamentalism.
Am [a bit of a fraud? Have I any right to be a SoFer? - Rev Peter Gamble, 2 Lawn Road, Guildford, Surey GU2 SDE. ‘Facing up to morality’ Perhaps other members will have read and may comment on the above title and the article by Baroness Warnock in the Sunday Times Culture Section, April 10 1994. She was introducing her Sunday Times Lunchtime Lecture (delivered on June 22) and she suggests that in order to make moral decisions there has to be an element of “‘love”’ for noble values such as truthfulness and fairness; we have to “‘feel’’ that these principles are worth upholding. She presents the difference between adhering to a code of moral rules (which we may or may not wish to do) and the ‘‘love’’ felt for principles which are timeless and ‘‘above’’ rules. You seek to uphold them in order to ‘‘give back”’ to life and because of their worth.
I think this element of emotion in upholding a moral code, which she describes, is the ‘‘inspired’’ dimension.
Its understanding is my debt to Christianity, and to other people who strive to lead, or have led, noble lives.
In answer to the question ‘‘What is it that I seek?’’ Baroness Wamock seems to say ‘‘A noble life and a moral code with an element of feeling’’. That describes it precisely. - Elizabeth Reid, Grace Cottage, Abbotsford Road, North Berwick, Scotland.
A minimal creed I was rather alarmed when I heard Don Cupitt say he wanted a ‘‘minimal creed’’ for Sea of Faith. Part of me says ‘“‘Let people find out for themselves what we’re about’; it’s useless to try to tell them, they must experience it for themselves, as Anthony Freeman and David Hart tell us they did, and as I did in 1963. But having said that, perhaps we can try to put into words what we have experienced, or what we have leamed that our experiences imply. I offer the following for debate: “I believe that life has meaning (or value, worth, significance) in and of itself without recourse to further explanation (or justification). I believe that life is good and to be fully enjoyed. I believe that nature, this earth and ourselves are ‘all we know and all we need to know’. “‘T believe that all human beings (including me!) are of value, regardless of race, skin colour, gender, national grouping, religious belief, age, health, wealth, sexual orientation, or criminality (I am a probation officer). “I believe it is better that people eat rather than hunger, drink rather than thirst, be clothed rather than cold, be in good health rather than be sick, be in communication with others rather than be isolated; should be in a position to make as many choices as possible; that all religions should be respected so long as they are not oppressing others. “I believe it is better to be in constructive relationship with others than destructive, that it is better to enjoy life than not. I believe in the truth, and I believe it will make us free. I believe in getting in touch with my unconscious.
I believe it is better to be kind to others than unkind. I believe it is better to love rather than be indifferent.”’ That should do us for argument for the next twenty years!
Some may find it too mundane, but mundane means ‘‘of the earth’, We are mundane, and proud of it! - Will Watson, 79 Grosvenor Road, Muswell Hill, London N10 2DU. [Don Cupitt has not proposed a creed, minimal or otherwise, for Sea of Faith. He was talking in the context of a wider need for post-modern society to seek some minimal basis for social cohesion. - ED.] Objective God You say that the SoF statement that religious faith is a human creation means that religion is derived from mankind, rather than from an objective God as Christian orthodoxy has it. But are you sure the two statements are comparable?
Is not the SoF statement shorthand for saying ‘‘religious concepts, like all concepts, are formulated (created?) by human beings’’?
Are not the two statements supplementary rather than alternative? Cannot one say that the Christian orthodox religious faith (like all religious faiths) that God is objective, is a concept formulated by human beings? Is not the SoF statement a psychological one relating to conception in general, rather than a theological one relating to religion in particular? - George Parker, 183 Passfield Avenue, Easleigh, Hants SOSO SNE.
What is to be done?
One of the states of being I experienced during my last foray to the UK was a despair over the way things are being changed (BR, the NHS, etc) in order to conform to the monstrous and obsolete ideology which this government seems determined to push through whatever the consequences.
Historically the church has been seen as being part of the catalyst for social change. At the moment the established church in the UK, as a whole, is not fulfilling this role. I think that there is a role for SoF to play - in ‘‘goosing’’ the established church, among other things. I didn’t join SoF just because it had some sort of neat insight concerning the ‘‘reality’’ of the Deity - something my peers in my religious group and I dealt with a couple of decades ago - but because I felt that if people were concerned enough to explore religious faith with any notion of radicality and openness then they would sense that the pitiful state of the social situation was a direct result of the way religious faith had been observed and practised wince WWI, and that something could be done about it.
I became interested in SoF exactly because I envisaged that its activities could result in some sort of change to the status quo - in the UK at least. If SoF is unable to make a connection between its asumed mandate to explore religious faith and the social situation in the UK which causes both you and me to despair; if we at our annual conference and at our local group meetings cannot feel an urgency about and a purpose to our deliberations for the sake of those who are suffering and in need, and to whom the manifestation of our religious faith should be directed, then we are nothing. - Adam Thomson, Rue A Defender of faith I see no good reason why SoF should be the only journal in the land other than the Beano Annual to stay silent on Charles Windsor’s musings on his future role, so here goes. (The views expressed here are not necessarily the views of the Network, the Steering Committee, the editor, Don Cupitt - or even the writer).
First, Charles did not say he wanted to be head of all faiths. He has no ambition to be Chief Rabbi, Pope, Head Mullah, Chairman of the Methodist Conference, Top Quaker, Ultimate Yogic Flyer or President of the Sea of Faith Network. To express any such ambition would be as daft as Tony Blair confessing that he’d like to lead the Tories, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and the Natural Law Party all at once. Talk to the trees he may, but our king-clect is not that unhinged.
What he did say, of course, was that he wondered whether it might just be possible for him to be seen as “‘defender of faith’? rather than Defender of the (C of E) Faith, and he went on to say that by ‘‘faith’? he meant “‘the divine that, I think, is in all of us’’. Quite how he would defend the divine within humanity was not spelt out, and the concept needs a bit of working on. But it makes a lot more sense than the Defender of the Faith notion, tying him as it does to the headship of one particular religious grouping to which he does not seem specially attached. Of course, the bishops won’t let him get away with it, but thanks, Charles, for opening the debate, Post-humanism in music Janet Barnard’s letter on the previous page prompted me to look up the article in the Spring 1991 SoF magazine (by John Florance) to which she refers. I have long been a Tippett fan, encountering him first as a peace activist (I edited CND’s paper Sanity, he was President of the Peace Pledge Union). Later, in celebration of his 85th birthday, I made a film about him, focusing on the marvellous Third Symphony, which he conducted himself, probably for the last time, as his remaining energies (still formidable) are devoted to composition.
Religious music is phenomenally popular today among non-religious people - witness the climb to the top of the CD charts of a recording of Gregorian chant. Tippett professes no religion, but his music, much of it setting texts of his own writing, is as deeply expressive of value and the human spirit as any avowedly ‘‘spiritual’’ work.
His oratorio ‘‘A Child of Our Time’’ (1941) remains one of his most popular works, built around a narrative telling of an anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany, and substituting Negro spirituals for Lutheran chorales. The more complex ‘‘Mask of Time’’ of forty years later “offers fragments or scenes from a possible ‘epiphany’ for today’. But the Third Symphony is perhaps the work that most clearly belongs to a post-humanist age. It rehearses but rejects the optimistic humanism of Becthoven’s Ninth, rehearses and rejects the optimism of Martin Luther King’s “‘I have a dream’’ speech, but insists that every time the human aspiration is crushed, we have no option but to find new ways of voicing it. Humanism, Tippett seems to say, is dead: long live humanism. This is religious music for our time.
From the Whale’s mouth In a fair and stimulating piece on SoF in the ‘‘New Statesman’’ (April 1) Kirsty Milne quotes Joh Whale, editor of the ‘‘Church Times’’, to the effect that Anthony Freeman, Don Cupitt and Sea of Faith have time on their side. ‘Some of what we’re arguing about now will eventually pass into orthodoxy,’’ Whale forecasts. ‘‘As Christianity becomes harder to defend as a religion of literal truth, symbol will become more important.’? And as if to mark this understanding, the ‘‘Church Times’’, historically hostile to Cupitt’s output, ran a rave review of After All. Even more remarkably, the evangelical “‘Church of England Newspaper’’ has listed After All in its top ten religious books. Take care, Don, you are in danger of being declared acceptable.
SOF pen pals Carole Evans of 46 Eaton Park Road, Palmers Green, London N13 4EL, writes on behalf of Network members who have difficulty in meeting like-minded people, often because even their local group is too far distant. Why not an SoF pen friends scheme? she asks. If others are interested, let us know and we’ll see what can be done.
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