Contents
Articles
- Against the West, Dominic Kirkham
- Toxic Religion in the American Empire, Michael Northcott
- The Harm Done by Religion Today, Jennifer Jeynes
- Correction: John Cornford's Poems
Reviews
- Debating Humanism, Tom Rubens
- Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers Vol. 4, Philip Knight
- An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire, Jason C. Bivins
- Andy Goldsworthy's Project The Beauty of Creation at Bretton Hall Sculpture Park, Anna Sutcliffe
- After the Church: Divine Encounter in a Sexual Age, Ruth Scott
- The Meanest Flower, Christopher Truman
- The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army, Cicely Herbert
Poetry
- The Larger View, David Paterson
- Flying, Anne Ashworth
Regulars and Occasionals
- Moveable Feasts, Brian Docherty
- Current Affair: Humanism and the Secular, Owl
Editorial
Kirkham points out the similarities between fundamentalist Christianity and Islam that make them feel they ‘have much to agree with about their common enemy: the West’ and its secular values. He shows that ‘this is not simply a conflict of the West versus Islam but something more complex.’ What we have is ‘a rather confused “quadrille” of uncertain “partners” – motivated by differing mentalities. There are those in both the West and East united in looking backward, but to differing pasts. Then there are those looking forward, but to something different from the present.’ Northcott suggests that the public religion of the United States is America itself and its totem the American flag. He argues that this religion is fed on the human sacrifice not only of enemies but also (and crucially) of America’s own young people in wars. As he says, his thesis is controversial (and see Jason C. Bivins’ review of Northcott’s book on page 22). Nevertheless, Bush does believe that God told him to invade Iraq and that America has a sacred mission to ‘rid the world of evil’ in a holy War against Terror, for which there is no end in sight.
Many US Christian fundamentalists share this vision of America as God’s chosen instrument. For ‘the sacred vision of America as standing in some crucial and exceptional sense at the end of history, as the first and last truly Biblical nation, has played a key role in the history of America.’ How, Northcott asks, has American Christianity ceded the public sphere to this murderous civil religion of America? He argues that ‘a core part of the answer lies in the church-state relationship carved out by the Founding Fathers which left the churches in charge of the faith and religious experiences of Americans, and the State in charge of their bodies.’ The public cult of America grew out of Protestant Christianity and its privatisation of religion.
Rejecting religious persecution and the tyranny of a theocratic state, religious liberty in America was based on the idea that religion is a private matter between an individual and his or her god. But the price of that precious, hard-won freedom of conscience was a withdrawal from the public sphere, leaving a vacuum into which ‘the civil religion of America’ could rush. Indeed, there is a pact between the two, as churches of many denominations fly the American flag. This reminded me of the story of the ‘seven worse devils’ rushing into the house that had been left ‘empty and swept’ (Mt 12:43; Lk11:24).
The liberation theologian Jon Sobrino defines an idol as ‘a false god that demands and feeds on death’; his criterion for discerning these idols of death is a humanist one. In Northcott’s analysis the cult of America with its totem flag is a form of idolatry because this ‘America’ demands and feeds on death. And by that definition, the god of the suicide bomber is also an idol. So what god is not an idol? In the ‘apophatic’ tradition of ‘negative theology’ God is not that, not that, not that, John of the Cross’s nada. In the Christian story of incarnation God ‘empties himself’ into humanity. Of course in orthodox theology he does not thereby cease to be God, but perhaps that is an impossibility. Isn’t creating supernatural beings to legitimise your values just a way of giving them clout? If religions are human creations, clergy will have no divine moral authority to put ‘windows into men’s souls’ or women’s wombs. Finally, the only appropriate place for humans to look for values is among, between human beings, one of whom was Jesus.
When we ‘come down to the place just right’, the human creation of a religion that is not dangerous must reject idols that demand and feed on death for the pursuit of a humanity that is wise and kind. In a human trinity recalling/reclaiming the traditional divine trinity, it will try to pour its energy into Dangerous Religion editorial Some kinds of religion do harm; some kill many people.They are dangerous.
John Andrew Storey David Paterson John Andrew Storey was a Unitarian Minister and hymn writer.This hymn is published in The Common Quest: Selected Writings of John Andrew Storey, edited by Charles Hughes and Sylvia Storey (Lindsey Press, London 2000). David Paterson is a SoF Trustee. wisdom and kindness, which will be regarded as inseparable. To avoid the ‘seven worse devils’, the pursuit must be both personal for each individual, and social for humanity as a whole species on Earth.
Neither do wisdom and kindness come cheap. For example, Archbishop Romero’s plea from his pulpit to ‘Stop the killing!’ was wise and kind, and it cost him his life.
There is the question of how we define ‘religion’.
The Ethical Society at Conway Hall had a long debate about changing one of its stated objects from ‘cultivation of a rational religious sentiment’ to ‘the cultivation of a rational and humane way of life’ precisely because the word religion was seen by some as too tainted with supernaturalism. In the end they did change their mission statement. On the other hand, if we start by taking it for granted that all religions are human creations, whether their objects of worship, their gods or idols, are regarded as supernatural or not, then perhaps religion – of one sort or another – will prove to be inevitable.
It becomes a matter of discernment. Sometimes some members of SoF speak as if getting rid of the supernatural and seeing religion as a human creation is an end in itself and solves the problem.
Clearly this is not the case. In the last issue of Sofia Tim Jackson wrote about consumerism as a religion or ‘theodicy’, as he called it. There are all sorts of non-supernatural religions or those in which the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ are inextricably tangled; some of them, at least, are harmful or foster illusions. Any religion that demands and feeds on death is idolatrous. The human pursuit of wisdom and kindness against the idols of death is of its nature a constant struggle, a constant conversation (a social activity) requiring humility, as in the great kenosis hymn Christ ‘being found in human form, humbled himself’ (Php 2:8.) And in that struggle, that conversation, the idea of religion as a ‘smorgasbord’ of privatised ‘spiritualities’ is woefully inadequate.
Sofia Letters Editor Ken Smith, Bridleways, Haling Grove, South Croydon CR2 6DQ revkevin19@hotmail.co.uk Thank you Dear Editor, At this year’s Conference, members of the Network kindly presented me with some very acceptable bottles of wine, and a pair of fine wine glasses. Only when I got home and unpacked them did I see that they are engraved with the SoF logo. This is just to say a heartfelt general thank you: the friendship and support of other members over the years has meant as much to me as to anyone. We have done well to reach and pass our twentieth anniversary.
— Don Cupitt, Cambridge
Dear Editor I was very grateful for Penny Mawdsley’s review of my book Doing Theology in Altab Ali Park. However, I was a bit alarmed that she assumed I was a liberal. I have never been a liberal either theologically or politically. I have always been an orthodox Catholic and a socialist. If I gave the impression of being a liberal, I apologise.
— Ken Leech, Mossley
A secular theodicy Dear Editor, It has often struck me that the task of finding an ‘alternative theodicy’ (Tim Jackson) or a spirituality which ‘re-sacralises the earth’ (Jonathon Porritt) is the key challenge facing the post-religious. To anyone having grown up under the ‘sacred canopy’ of religious meaning the spiritual emptiness that lies beyond, or ‘with-out’ it, must seem unbearable. Yet, as one who has made this transition, the answer is that this is not so.
Abetter metaphor than ‘canopy’ would be ‘conveyor belt’: once one has had the courage to step off the grand Judaeo-Christian (and, one must add, Islamic) conveyor of predestined purposefulness, with its busy anticipatory activity, the immediate impact is not one of emptiness but ‘earthiness’ – a coming down to earth, to a calmer awareness of the present moment; that this is it, everything .This sense is not without precedents in religious spirituality: one thinks of the ‘quietism’ of De Caussade and, further a-field, Buddha, whose greatest sermon was simply to point to the lotus flower. For me earth spirituality now has three main strands: the aesthetic impact of the natural world in its awesome presence – time to savour what nature presents; the conceptual understanding of the evolutionary processes that have brought us to the present moment – time to understand nature’s genesis; the ontological (or existential) individuality of entities which now stand before us in the unique depth of inviolable otherness or wildness – time to defer to what nature is.
In contrast to the religious fantasies of transcendence, the earth/nature confronts us with the mystery of complexity – of which we are a part, not as masters of the world but its tenants. As such, our life is a gift handed on through the profligacy of nature, and it is only from this perspective that we can make sense of it; not through consuming but through giving – not primarily of materials but of our self, our time, talents, skills, knowledge and affections; not for any purpose or merit but as its own mode of satisfaction.
All this has been said better by Don Cupitt and others, which itself illustrates why we need a Sea of Faith spirituality. This need is not just as a novel response to environmental challenges, though this gives added urgency, but because of how we now can best understand reality and the inadequacy of traditional religious theodicies.
— Dominic Kirkham, Manchester
Dear Editor Most members of Sea of Faith would probably pride themselves on disdaining other people’s shibboleths, but maybe they tend not to notice their own. This seemed very evident to me in the September issue of Sofia.
Jonathan Porritt writes of ‘bringing the sacred back into our understanding of what we owe the living planet and all life forms with which we share it.’ I do not think that we owe anything to the smallpox virus, and hope that we have in fact caused its extinction. If viruses are too small to count as a life form in this sense, there are plenty of larger pathogenic parasites that I would be equally pleased to see extinct. And I would have considerable sympathy with an Indian villager with a gun whose village is menaced by a man-eating tiger. So Cardinal Martino cannot be entirely wrong in according priority to mankind. The use of a picture of two giraffes caressing each other has a big ‘aaagh factor’, and although one letters would not want to see giraffes become extinct, nevertheless they are part of an ecological system that on a geological time scale can only be temporary.
Doubtless it would have been equally possible to drool about two dinosaurs caressing one another. To worry unduly about species extinctions could even lead to doubts about St Patrick’s green credentials for freeing the Emerald Isle from snakes!
The over-riding problem is our attitude to time.
Stephanie Dowrick refers to a saying of Epictetus: ‘human beings are not disturbed by events (or things), but by the view we take of them’. People seem to have a horror of the idea of anything coming to an end. Jonathan Porritt is horrified by the idea of Jim Lovelock that it is already too late to do anything about global warming. But maybe it has always been impracticable to avert it since the start of the industrial revolution! And even if there is still time to do anything about global warming, there must be some other geo-catastrophe that will bring to an end the present phase of the biosphere, as it must end some-time. Ever since my conception it has been too late to prevent my death. What matters is not that things come to an end, but what is their quality during their lifetime. Eternal life does not consist of living for an infinite number of years (a horrid idea really); it is a quality of life here and now. ‘This is life eternal that they should know thee the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent’.
— Eric Whittaker, Kidlington
Dear Editor, The Humanist David Warden wonders what is meant by ‘religion’. I wondered what is meant by ‘human’ and I think (at least, at this time of writing) that though we share a great deal with other animals there are some characteristics which make us distinctly human. Firstly, we humans like to see structures and patterns in things and events. In fact we do not seem to be comfortable with experiencing one event after another as purely random events. We like to see expected reactions to our actions. In the family home if a child does something which they have been told not to do, they like to have the expected punishment and if there is no consistent reaction to the misdeed a child becomes very confused. If an adult breaks the tribal or national rules, taboos, norms, legislation, they know they have done so and unpleasant consequences will (or should) follow.
Logical reasoning is then applied to our apparent need to see that unpleasant effects should be consequent upon misbehaviour, so if an unpleasant occurrence happens randomly our pattern is spoiled and somehow needs to be mentally corrected – hence we have developed notions of karma or divine powers who will get us in the end (or get our offspring). What human justice cannot effect is then replaced by supra-human forms of justice. This is done by a god or gods, by the fates or the world’s design or the very laws of nature under which we all live. So here is, I think, one strand of what is meant by the term religion.
We humans have other strings to our bows: firstly, we have empathy as part of our natures. Empathy is, I think, a very basic instinct. It is the one which makes a parent respond to the cry of their young. In fact, some mothers will experience pain if they try to resist the cry of their baby. Empathy is the instinct which makes one person cry or smile if another is hurt or happy. Without this instinct survival would be precarious. At this very basic level I am sure animals possess empathy too. But we humans learn to control and harness many of our instincts for logical and cultural reasons and we certainly control our empathetic responses to some people or some situations – sometimes not always for their good. I suspect that an animal never seeks to control its instinctive empathy.
We humans and other animals have instinctive empathy not only with other people or animals, but with the environment around us so that we find pleasure or fear in it. This of course is developed in a variety of ways, according to our cultures, our time in history, etc – hence the variations in the arts across the globe. But unlike other animals we make connections in our logical, patternmaking minds between our empathy and our notions of justice, rewards, punishment and divine or supra-human forces. And it is this human combination of instincts and logical reasoning which produces part of what is called religion. I suspect that no animal has a notion of religion, whereas humans the world over have a sense of the logical need for an extra dimension to their worlds.
Religion is a human-only way of approaching the world and understanding our lives within it. We have other important parts to our nature, such as sympathy and language which both clearly exist among other animals but are far less developed in them than they are in us.
Children are born with the latent ability to sympathise, just as they have latent within them an ability to speak.
But these abilities need time and support to develop. One of the tests of childhood development is to see whether or not they are able to stand in another person’s shoes and see things from a different perspective. That is, sympathy needs encouragement to develop fully. To a large extent sympathy has variations which are culturally based. I guess that a child brought up five hundred years ago in Britain would have been encouraged to help his fellow Britons but probably taught to regard other races as nonhuman. Sympathy for them would be seen as a lack of proper patriotism at least, and probably worse. I surmise, most animals lack sympathy for those different from themselves but it is a skill which they cannot acquire however hard any human tried to encourage it. 17 sofia 86 November 2007 The connection of sympathy with the notion of justice then produces versions of morality – and for many people the next logical connection has to be with their religious ideas. Hence full-blown religion as a force in the lives of many humans. My conclusion is that although we humans are clearly animals it is the connections inside our brains which produce some really interesting differences between us and all the rest of the animal kingdom, and the biggest difference is actually religion – I cannot see any evidence that any animal has any made any connection between their instinctive response to the world around them and a sense of the necessity for morality and ultimate justice to exist.
— Joanna Clark, Sherborne
Yours faithfully Joanna Clark 2 Coopers Court, Sherborne, Dorset DT9 4HU A Second and Final Letter From God Dear Humans, God here again (and again, as always, via one of you). In my first letter, I asked you to stop trying to contact me and instead, to contact one another. The result was encouraging and it increased my faith in your ability to change. Thank you for your understanding and effort. If you would like to have a far better ‘prop’ than I could ever be, then look to the best thoughts, your own and others’, which you may be able to use to do some good. As this will be my final letter to you, I thought I would ask you to try to make some more changes.
You all know that you are but one of the many thousands of different animals living on the earth, but what many of you may not have realised is that, of all the animals, you have been (and are), the most destructive.
Ever since you evolved into humans, much of your behaviour has saddened me. If some of you are saying, ‘Yes, we have behaved badly at times but what about the synagogues, cathedrals, mosques, temples, churches and meeting houses we have built in which to worship you, and what about the wonderful music and hymns we have composed in order to glorify you?’ my reply would be, ‘You have done all of those things for the benefit of yourselves. My cathedral (mosque, temple or whatever) is the whole of the universe and my music comes from the earth’s thrushes, cicadas, frogs, donkeys, etc. and should I want more volume, I can always listen to thunder, monsoon rain, a volcanic eruption or a hurricane.’ I know that many of you have done some wonderful things, both as individuals and in cooperation with others. However, you need to spend much more of your time working to bring to an end your appalling history of torturing, maiming and killing one another and the destruction of one another’s lands and buildings. Add to that, the increasing human population and the polluting of the earth’s air, water and soil, and you have some idea of the range of your problems; problems which can be dealt with by you alone. I say ‘you alone’ because I have never helped you in the past and nor will I in the future; a decision I wisely made for your own good. You must surely have noticed that all the other animals have learnt to rely entirely on themselves and on one another; they have never sought help from me and so their world is entirely within them and all around them.
— Peter Mavromatis
As I don’t believe in miracles (and I hope you don’t), I will wait patiently for any sign of a lasting change. Do not forget that I have an infinite amount of time but you do not. Once again, yours sincerely and I hope, helpfully, God via Peter Mavromatis Are we the Universe taking a peek at itself?
Dear Editor, In previous editions of the magazine Anthony Freeman has written much about consciousness and mystical experience. Sometimes the impression is given that he would secretly rather like to be able to rediscover that some aspects of this experience could actually be given the name ‘God’, suitably demythologised.
The discussion about what people’s consciousness actually is and what it reveals reminds me of a phrase from a book by Alan Watts, called, I think, ‘This Is It’, which I read as a theological student back in the 1970’s.
He describes various aspects of religious experience, especially from the point of view of the then emerging interest in Zen Buddhism.
At one point Watts refers to the awareness or insights gained in contemplative meditation as something along the lines of ‘the Universe taking a peek at itself’.
Maybe we humans are in the very early stages of, at least potentially, developing a supra personal consciousness analogous to what Buddhism calls Enlightenment.
— Nicholas Smith, Maussane Les Alpilles