83 – Mayday! Mayday!

Dear Editor, I think that the letter from Patti Whaley and Rob Wheeler (Sofia Jan 2007) does not come up to the standards that they set in their last sentence, promoting reason and condemning rhetoric. The writers object to Cardenal’s ‘216 countries invaded’ claim. They make vague, judgemental and unsubstantiated comments in the two sentences starting ‘I’ve seen the list…’ Simply making claim and counter-claim enlightens no one. If the writers wish to question the number they should produce, or at least reference, the facts which justify their refutation. Moreover, Cardenal’s implied criticism of the USA would be no less valid if it had invaded only 100 countries rather than 200 Then comes the strange sentence about putting Bush on a par with Stalin’s gulags and the Nazi Gestapo It is far from clear how one can put on a par a person on the one hand, and a prison camp or a police organisation on the other.

Nonetheless, Cardenal makes no reference to the Nazis other than using the word ‘gestapo’ to indicate a political police organisation and makes only a single comparison between Hitler and Bush namely their ability to start wars. He makes no reference to Stalin.

The reference to gulags is a quote from Amnesty International and the word gulag is no longer restricted to Stalin’s prison camps, any more than the term concentration camp is restricted to British camps in South Africa. Whilst Cardenal makes allusions to Hitler, the published words cannot reasonably be interpreted to justify the assertion that he is claiming that Bush has travelled as far as Hitler. To conclude that they do might be described by those with an interest in rhetoric as ‘simply hysterical.’ Of course, if you have a specific objective, to call a spade a spade is not always the best strategy. If one did equate Bush and Hitler there would be some, perhaps those who are unwilling to face up to the reality that the emergence of another Hitler-like figure is still possible, who would argue that there are significant differences between Bush and Hitler (For example, Hitler was not without some talent as a writer, he probably had the excuse of being mentally ill and he did not avoid conscription to the trenches in World War I.) Having done that, they can then rationalise not even listening to the message. Moreover it may not be necessary to directly draw the comparison. The facts can speak for themselves. Hitler accused other countries of preparing to attack Germany or Germans as a prelude to his invading them. Hitler regarded some people (Jews, gypsies and the mentally ill) as less human than others. Hitler authorised arbitrary arrest and detention without trial or access to lawyers. Hitler’s regime sanctioned torture and extrajudicial execution. Bush’s record on similar issues is available for the world to see. People can draw their own conclusions about the similarities and the differences. They do not need politicians, priests or the Sea of Faith to tell them what to think. However in today’s world, where governments are all too keen to conceal evidence, we need all the help we can get in ascertaining what the facts really are.

— Peter Bore, Birkdale, Australia

Dear Editor, Open up to God by Anthony Freeman in Sofia 82 contained much that interested me, but I had a problem with his use of the term ‘Christ’. The distinction between the undoubtedly human Jesus, and the post-Resurrection Christ, with whom the Church of today claims to be in a living relationship, is an important one. But the first time Freeman uses ‘Christ’, it is to speak of ‘Christ’s human mind’. So it seems that for him ‘Christ’ is a synonym for ‘Jesus’.

But this creates a difficulty that need not exist. The post-Resurrection Christ, the Christ of the 21st Century Church, is, essentially by definition, divine.

Nothing to establish, nothing to argue about there, no matter how radical you may want to be.

About the human Jesus, it is surely equally selfevident that, as Freeman says, ‘his human mind arose from the complex physiology of his body, especially his brain and nervous system’. But I cannot see why anyone in the 21st Century would want to go on to say of Jesus: ‘just as the mind or soul is not an added ingredient to the human body, but an integral and emergent feature of it, so [Jesus’] divinity is not an added ingredient to his human person, but an integral feature of it...’ unless he were desperately trying to re-package traditional, orthodox dogma to make it appear to be consistent with modern knowledge.

It seems to me that Anthony Freeman has got himself into a tangle that he might have avoided if he had made use of the usual distinction in meaning and usage between ‘Christ’ and ‘Jesus’. It makes very good sense to me to suggest that the human Jesus attained a fuller degree of what humanness can be, than anyone before him or than most people since. But I cannot see what we gain by trying to label this fullness ‘divinity’.

— Donald Feist, Dunedin, New Zealand

Regarding Anthony Freeman’s article Open up to God, which appeared in the March 2007 issue:– at least two objections need to be raised against Freeman’s postulate that God is an emergent property and resultant of the human mind and body, and that He is a stage of the natural process of evolution.

Firstly, this stage is said to be ‘ultimate’. Yet, from a genuinely scientific and biological standpoint, no evolutionary stage can be regarded with absolute certainty as final. Such certainty is ruled out by the fact that natural laws are only statistical and probabilistic. Hence it is simply anti-scientific to pontificate on this matter, and in the apparently arbitrary way that Freeman does.

Secondly, the usual view of so-called ‘emergents’ from the evolutionary process is that they do not power the process from which they have emerged/ resulted. But Freeman, referring to the emergence of Deity, says that ‘the creator emerges at the end of the creative process’. This appears to mean that Deity actually engineers His own appearance; the ‘creator’ must, logically, be driving a process which is ‘creative’, and therefore must be anterior to it, not a product of it. On these obvious objections, Freeman may wish to comment.

— Tom Rubens, London

Why do I wake today to the sound of my grandfather sharpening his razor on that ancient strop of his? It surely can’t have anything to do with that article about = ‘emergent properties’ I read just before going to sleep!

A curious article, right enough. I couldn’t quite see why, for instance, the writer was treating as reality – even as some sort of ‘emergent’ reality – an entity whose existence he seemed so keen to sideline. All right, Jesus of Nazareth was in some ways a rather exceptional person, so seemingly exceptional in his own day that his followers made exceptional claims concerning him, claims expressed however in terms of which we can now make little sense – terms like ‘heaven-inspired prophet’ and ‘Son of God’. Why indeed do we even feel the need to make sense of such terms, when we can find perfectly acceptable interpretations of the supposed facts without them?

Try the likes of this:

A young man of no great learning but claiming (not unlike some before him) a certain depth of insight into the ethical doctrines of his tribe, gifted also perhaps with the gifts of healing, sets out on an evangelical mission. He is soon hailed by many as the long looked-for prophet who will herald the coming of their god’s ‘rule of righteousness’, such being the religious climate of his day. Accepting this view of himself and his mission, he heads for Jerusalem to make his mark where it really matters, staging there the sort of entry whose symbolic purport is plain for all to discern, and proceeding, on the strength of his reception, to make a violent attack against the ‘ungodly’ establishment on its most prestigious of all sites. The ‘ungodly’ establishment sees to it that he pays the price which is not at all what he believed would happen. Overwhelmed by uncomprehending despair, he dies the savage death decreed for rebels of his generation, accepting nevertheless that this is the will of his Heavenly Father and trusting perhaps that the promised ‘rule of righteousness’ will be somehow speeded by his suffering. A truly tragic tale of great goodness and even greater delusion, but ending with an uncertain but inextinguishable hope.

Understandably the stuff of drama, as in the greatly moving liturgies of Holy Week.

Openness, I agree, we need; openness even to the point of an admission that there exist in heaven and earth things as yet undreamed of. But it is no part of openness to cling to what we have no further use for.

And no, it isn’t the flip-flop of my granddad’s razor I’m hearing in the mind’s ear. It’s the ulnar motions of our far more distant ancestor, as he hums his favourite ditty:

ENTIA NON SUNT MULTIPLICANDA PRAETER NECESSITATEM!

— Bill Brown, Aboyne, Aberdeenshire

Anthony Freeman is the managing editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Would he be someone who could write an article for Sofia on Mysticism? I think that is an important element in world religions. Mystics are just as relevant as philosophers!

— Molly Rosenthal, Llanrhaeadr, Denbigh

In issue 82, Don writes: ‘Which is the universal creator whose activity forms us and our world: is it the God of the three Abrahamic religions or is it the ceaseless flow of human language…?’ Just those two alternatives?

What about the non-Abrahamic faiths and the philosophical traditions that accompany them? Most of them do not, I think, give rise to the monotheism which developed out of a jealous tribal God.

To my mind, the Sea of Faith Network exists to explore the totality of human religious thought which is indeed a ‘ceaseless flow of human language’, and we have no good reason for rejecting it, unless we insist on regarding the fundamentalist monotheistic parody as normative. There are many ways of understanding the word ‘God’. These do not have to be competing truth claims; outside the monotheistic tradition they rarely have that flavour; rather, they are sources of inspiration and cosmic awe. They do not depend on the objective existence of the perceived god; that idea hardly occurs.

Perhaps only in the Abrahamic faiths does the concept of God as a Being ‘out there’ take centre stage; and it could well be argued – as indeed Sea of Faithers do – that that sort of objectivity (or ‘realism’) is out of place there too. The mystics of Judaism, Christianity and Islam often have more in common with their cousins further East than with their co-religionists.

Maybe the other faith traditions of the world have something to teach the Abrahamic faiths about finding a thoroughly humanist god in the depths of their own tradition. That might be better than ditching the term ‘God’ altogether, thus (you might say) throwing out some valuable bath water with the baby!

I think Don colludes with Western myopia when he suggests that the traditions of the Sikhs and Baha’is, Radhakrishnan, Vivekananda, Tagore and Gandhi are dead. And what about Buddhism and the Tao, and indigenous animism and neo-paganism all over the world? They are not dead; beleaguered yes, and ignored by the West because we consider our own civilisation to be superior to all others. This arrogance is, I think, a major source of the great danger our world is in. We need the old Gods precisely because they are human creations – symbols of our creativity for which we must learn to take full collective responsibility.

— David Paterson, Oxford

In his helpful review of The God Problem: Alternatives to Fundamentalism by Nigel Leaves, Michael Morton mentions that Leaves finds non-realism the most intellectually authentic and compelling reading of Christian faith, while worrying that it will be hard for people to abandon the more emotionally appealing belief in the Supreme Being that has sustained society for so long. Morton rightly maintains that non-realism can only be taken seriously if it can identify itself as a continuation and interpretation of traditional faith, which, as Leaves implies, springs from both emotion and intellect. Therefore, in this age of non-realism, our search for faith in God may have the greatest chance for success if we can combine both emotion and intellect in our quest.

Don Cupitt writes in Radicals and the Future of the Church that we need a church, because ‘It is a theatre in which we solemnly enact our deepest feelings.’ The theatre analogy points to how non-realism could work in real churches.

When we go to the theatre, we usually suspend disbelief naturally and easily to enter into the world of the actors who by speech and action evoke in us in turn actions, feelings, experiences and thoughts. So, likewise, during a religious service we may also suspend disbelief, and have religious feelings and experiences. We create the play of and about God and perform our creation for ourselves and others who also are creators and performers.

— Peter McNamara, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Dear Humans, God here (via one of you, as always).

This is a letter I should have written to you long ago.

It is to request you to be considerate to me, and sensible to yourselves, by not trying to contact me.

While billions of you, on one half of the earth, are asleep as I dictate this, on the other half, billions of you are awake so that, unfortunately, millions of that lot are busy addressing me. Most, if not all of you, manage to get some daily sleep, but because of the babel directed at me: the praying, begging, thanking, cursing, complaining, praising, etc., I get no sleep whatsoever. Also, you don’t seem to have realised that whenever there are more than one of you addressing me (which is always the case), I cannot understand what anyone is saying. All I can hear is a roar and all I can see is a huge variety of facial expressions. The only way I could ever be able to understand what was being said would be if you all spoke with one voice, and you know as well as I do that that will never happen. Please stop wasting your time then, trying to contact me; as you can see, it’s a hopeless situation. Try to contact instead, a friend who would be able to hear your voice alone, enjoy your company and perhaps thank you or help you.

Yours sincerely and I hope, helpfully, God via Peter Mavromatis pmavroma@tassie.net.au

— Peter Mavromatis