SOF 48 / July 2001 4 In our July 2000 issue we published the editor's proposals for "10 hypotheses" to kick-start a debate on what Sea of Faith members might feel they can affirm together. After publishing comments in succeeding issues, we ran a revised version in May, making it clear that we were not proposing a "creed or set of articles to which SoF members might be expected to sign up", but offering "a personal and provisional view of what SoF is for", inviting readers to "take what you find useful, leave what you find useless, and add what for you may be missing".
Continuing the debate, Salvationist DUNCAN PARK sounds a war-cry against the "10 Hypos", asking is this a creed i see before me?
You've got to keep on your toes in this liberation business.
Only last month, in my column in the Oz SoF Bulletin, I was cheerfully lampooning the Old Powers for flashing their stinky relics in public (traipsing half of St Theresa around Ireland) when I caught sight of something that looked suspiciously like an old bone in my own backyard.
I had ignored the 10 Hypotheses before (as a rule, I don't read lists and never lists of ten) but it kept appearing, like Banquo' s ghost, following me around the known world demanding "read me". So I did, and nearly fell off my chair.
Here, in squeaky postmodern Sea of Faith, was the newest relic on the planet: the fusty remains of 20th century Humanism, all taxidermied up in religious mode and introduced in ex cathedra tones - a creed-in-waiting, a candidate worthy of radical devotion. How, in the name of Cupitt could this creature have slipped past the radical swords that protect our doctrine-free paradise? I felt as if I had been mugged.
Not that there's anything wrong with any one of the supremely inoffensive 10 Hypos - indeed you could add another ten and they still wouldn't tickle a hair in the nose of, well, anyone really. And here was my first, and most profound, shock: there was no shock. No "Wow!" factor.
No gut-churning "Yes!" No fission, no chemistry. Perhaps we've got too used to preaching to the converted and stating the blindingly obvious. To argue with the kind of "new humanism" the 10 Hypos promotes would be like arguing with hygiene or justice or the twelve times table.
There's only one thing worse than being terribly wrong and that's being merely right. These ten noble (selfevident) truths were merely equal to the sum of their parts - ergo, no interest.
Okay, let's face it - dull. About as far from the ecstatic immanence of realised eschatology as it's possible to get.
They belong to the Yuri Gagarin "I didn't see any God up there" school of theology. Well, no, you wouldn't, Yuri, not if you're looking for the Supreme Toothfairy. But we aren't.
Hypothesis: "A proposition or principle put forth or stated merely as a basis for reasoning and argument... A provisional supposition which serves as a starting-point for further investigation" - Shorter OED. No set of statements about religious faith will ever tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This naturally holds good for the hypotheses that follow.
Then I thought, what the hell, at least this metaphysical pond life isn't going to disembowel anyone. A bag of old rationalisms might be no nearer the centrelessness of being than a bag of old bones and word relics (however cunningly nuanced) be as physical as St Theresa's elbow, but why quibble - let them have their bloodless relic. Why shouldn't Sofers have a little something to fill the creedshaped hole in the Network, a nice linguistic bone to chew SOF 48 / July 2001 those ©ffi] PET 0 CD, , in full [Hypothesis: "A proposition or principle put forth or stated merely as a basis for reasoning and argument... A provisional supposition which serves as a starting-point for further investigation" - Shorter 0E13] No set of statements about religious faith will ever tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This naturally holds good for the hypotheses that follow.
All religions, faith systen-is and varieties of religious or spiritual faith and practice are human constructs: part of the wondrous complex of experience, imagination, accumulated knowledge, creativity and reflective consciousness which we call culture. We may speak of the divine, the transcendent and the ultimate, but do so in the understanding that these are human concepts. Human communities created them. Human communities made it all up.
We live a natural life in a natural world, which is made intelligible to us through the signs and symbols of language. We may speak of the supernatural, but we do so in the understanding that this too is a human concept, the product of human imagination, story-telling and myth-making.
As religion is the product of the creative impulse, so too are its gods and godesses, angels and devils. They are human creations, made by human communities, reflecting our rich variety of histories, languages and cultures. "All deities reside in the human breast" (Blake). This is no less true of the god of the great monotheist traditions, the god named God. The Creator God is our creation, the Father God our projection, the Saviour God our own solution to our own inadequacies and alienation. Heaven is the best we can imagine, hell the worst, and both are here and now.
Sacred scriptures, stories and songs have provided sense, meaning and purpose, have helped us see visions and dream dreams; but the are fallible and subject to criticism and reinterpretation. To belittle them impoverishes our heritage, but to elevate them into expressions of eternal truth is dangerous.
Our faith is "religious" in the depth of its seriousness and the sincerity of its commitment: but it is also "secular" in the literal sense of its being of this world and for this age. In a world where the supernatural is natural and the divine is human, the sacred and the secular are one. As we secularize our faith, so we also sacralize our lives. That is our commitment.
We are believers. We choose to believe and have faith in the values of "mercy, pity, peace and love", and things which are "true, honest, just, lovely and of good report". The worship of God as an inspiration and symbol affirms these values as expressions of the wholly human spirit.
True religion is incomplete and delusory unless it is concerned with injustice and suffering, particularly among the powerless and hungry. False religion invokes a crude supernaturalism to validate authority, sanctify power, provoke fear and superstition, foster division and gull the gullible. It offers heaven as compensation for earthly woes or reward for obedience, and threatens hell for disobedience, making God a tyrant, and religion itself the instrument of tyranny.
The life of faith is a life of change, growth, renewal: a life of exploration and experimentation, of making new discoveries and discarding them when they fail us. It is a life on the ocean wave, not one that seeks the seclusion of a safe harbour. It is for the seeker, not the finder; for those who would make meaning and purpose rather than buy them off the peg. It demands hope, charity, determination - and a sense of humour.
We lay no claim to eternal truth. But we cherish the best in our heritage of faith, tradition and practice as we cherish the best in our heritage of music, poetry, the arts, the sciences, and everything that gives imaginative expression to the wholly human spirit. We made it, and because we made it we can refashion it to meet our changing needs, understandings and experience. To explore and promote religious faith as a human creation, a human recreation, a human responsibility, and as a source of delight to ourselves and an affirmation of our sense of responsibility for the welfare of our living world: this is our challenge and our adventure.
SOF 48 / July 2001 6 on, an intellectual rosary for orthodox nonrealists? Okay, so Humanism is campaigning to be the "inverted comma" orthodoxy of Sea of Faith. Well, why not?
But something oddly cold hovered about this otherwise anodyne "discussion starter" that made me shiver. And question. Was this humanist "relic" infected with the credal virus that could develop into full-blown dogma and bigtime discussion stopper? Was an "old" agenda lurking behind this "all creeds bad, this creed good" brave new agenda? Was this a manifesto masquerading as a "debate"?
I had already felt a chill wind blowing through the Network: a blizzard of Rationalist/Humanist conferences, articles, editorials, speakers and themes that threatened to turn this exotic theological jungle into a frozen Narnia of critical (and barren) philosophy. Are we to assume that this is the natural ideological climate of Sea of Faith? Are the Hypos the harmless-looking snowfall that marks the start of an ice-age - just another little snowfall, only it doesn't thaw? Even more to the point, have we acknowledged the dark side of the human deity that approaches over this religious wasteland?
For starters, let's nail the myth that "old" (neo-Darwinist) Humanism and "new" (humanitarian) humanism are best buddies. Old Humanism went mad frog-marching to the music of Wagner and the bowdlerised philosophy of Neitzsche. God-becoming-man got a lot of people crucified, but, by Christ, man-becoming-God was an incarnation from hell. Old Humanism acted-out Dante's Inferno with such convincing realism it turned the 20th century into the bloodbath of history. Let us recall Humanism's inhumanity to man: the gulags, the death camps, the Great Leaps Forward. Let them remind us that we don't need a big crazy answer. If the past had the answers we wouldn't still be asking the questions. No, the "new" non-ideological humanism has its roots in the future and holds to a philosophy that doesn't exist yet. A bit like the "Kingdom", come to think about it.
Sea of Faith is not a clarion call to the Humanist Diaspora (or even a Humanists Anonymous rehab programme). I certainly didn't come to Sea of Faith to get what the British Humanist Association could already offer - or to stare at my own finger instead of Jesus', or Buddha's or Whoever's-I-fancy. Neither is it a new homeland for the lost tribes of atheism. Those who imagine that God's existential difficulties signal any hope whatsoever for a revival of classical atheism have fallen off the zeitgeist and completely missed the postmodern Rapture. Atheism died with God. Some of us actually came here to explore religion (free from supernaturalist taboos) with a view to revitalising (and subverting) our own, much valued, traditions. Certainly, exploring religion as a human creation might seem a small step for hard-boiled rationalists and hip nihilists (who would rather Sea of Faith explore "human creation as a religion") but it's a great leap forward for religious-kind.
Okay, lets vote. Hands up all SoFers who want to be born-again Humanists? No, let's not. Because Sea of Faith is not a democracy. We are a spiritual anarchy where everyone, not just the majority, counts. We can no more "vote" on the 10 Hypos than we can vote on whether to invade Poland. The very notion that Sea of Faith could have any "orthodoxy" (even if 10 out of 9 SoFers prefer it) is counter-premise. Any attempt to define what we are for betrays what we are because it assumes the Network has a function beyond being, that it exists for something-inparticular. In fact, Sea of Faith is a space, not a place. A sanctuary, not a movement. A therapy, not an ideology. A home for spiritual anarchists and internal emigres. A community of outsiders for whom any direction is the wrong direction and all positions are impositions. That is the genius of this Network. As long as we have no "position" we can inhabit (and subvert) all positions and our enemies can fire their bullets into the fog. The Hypos will delight only those who want to nail us to the religious map - recycled Humanists, gottcha!
However it's not the call to any "ism" that worries me most about the 10 Hypos but the "urge to control" coming from the "high-command" within all of us, the Tidy Kingdom that can't handle the ragged isness of Kingdom Come freedom. The disembodied will-to-power that wants this motley bunch of religious hippies, poets, visionaries, rebels, right-pains-in-the-arse, protesters, prophets, heretics, geniuses, fools, misfits and saviours of the world to sing from the same songsheet; to march towards a "mainstream view"; to declare heretical all soft-headed nebulousities, to outlaw all unprovable ineffables, to discipline all the paradoxical, mystical, otherworldly epiphanous claptrap of experiential religion and to affirm and assert the ten - well, anythings, really. Ten is a nice definite number, don't you think?
I both understand and reject the lack of faith in Sea of Faith's survivability that the 10 Hypotheses represent. Of course no-one who has experienced this beautiful community of outsiders wants it to evaporate into the void. But we were never going to be much good at nonrealist flower-arranging. We don't need tidying up.
We need burning up. And we ain't "going" anywhere because we're already there. This is as good as it gets.
To the military tendency within us all, I plead - please get your tanks off our lawn - and take the bloodless relic with you - because it's our lawn and we want to play on it.
The author of the 10 Hypotheses cloth protest too much that this is a "take it or leave it" document (tucked away in the centre pages of the magazine). But it's really quite simple - if it looks like a creed, sounds like a creed and smells like a creed, then it is a creed (despite the inverted commas winking at me from the introduction). Call me cynical but I can well imagine the ease with which these would disappear if the10 Hypos caught the public mood.
And they are just pedantic enough to do that.