To: World Congress of Faiths, 2 Market St., Oxford, OX1 3EF I wish to join WCF. Enclosed is my check for 220 ($30 US) __ 1 wish to register for WCF/LARF Leicester. Check enclosed ___ Email Address Founded 1936 SOF 47 / May 2001 by Seafarer I tried to make sense of Roy Hattersley's comments, in the wake of Tony Blair's address to the Christian Socialist Movement, that Christianity and socialism don't mix, Roy's preference being for socialism.
He regaled us with memories of his childhood attendance at Socialist Sunday School, where, instead of "God save the king" they sang Ebenezer Elliott's hymn, "When wilt thou save the people, O God of mercy, when?" - which continues, in wonderfully hectoring style, "The people, Lord, the people! Not thrones or crowns, but men?" Great stuff! But what Mr Hattersley failed to recognise is that the hymn - written if I remember rightly, for the Chartists - is addressed to God, even if that "God of mercy" bit is clearly sarcastic, and that exasperated repetition of "the people, Lord, the people" suggests that the Poor Old Chap has lost the divine plot. But he hasn't been written out of the script, as he is in the "Internationale", where "No saviour from on high delivers...". The hymn Hattersley so admires is hardly a model of secular-socialist thinking.
But still more confused are Roy's musings on his hero RH Tawney. Where Christians are stuck with the bible, he says, socialists have Tawney's Equality. What he appears to have forgotten is that Tawney's egalitarian socialism was derived directly from a radical Christian view of social justice. No Christian socialism, no Tawney: no Tawney, no Hattersley. Back to Socialist Sunday School, Roy!
QUOTE UNQUOTE “We philosophers and free spirits feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old gods are dead’, as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations. At long last the horizon appears free to us again...; at long last our ship may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never been such an open sea!” The Gay Science, Nietzsche.
COUNTENANCE DIVINE Well, now we know what Jesus looked like, courtesy of the BBC and some computer graphics: Anthony Scher having an off day in Merchant of Venice...
The BBC's Son of Cod was quite astoundingly bad. "I now know the gospels are historical", Jeremy Bowen informed us. There was "strong evidence" that Jesus was born in a cave, and astrology (astrology!) suggested that there really was a bright star over Bethlehem in AD 6 (when "we now know" Jesus was really born). The story of the three wise men was true too: they came "from the east", Petra was east of Bethlehem, and Petra was a centre of the frankincense and myrrh trade! Obvious!
There were solemn reconstructions of the games "we now know Jesus would have played" as a boy: pat-ball, and something involving a kind of Lego animal on wheels.
Bowen had to admit to less certainty when it came to the virgin birth: there was "no scientific evidence for it", he dared to suggest - though "we now know" Mary was unmarried!
The computerised reconstructions of Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem were rather more impressive, but it is hard to put much faith in their accuracy, given the historical naivity of the programme's whole approach. And when it came to the much-hyped reconstruction of the countenance divine, based on fleshing out a skull which could have belonged to any first-century Jew, wholly unconnected to Jesus, the programme descended into farce. And to think that it was the BBC which once made The Sea of Faith...