The boat of belief and the rocks of reality

I remember my dad telling me that it didn’t really matter if a person was sincere about something, because you could be sincerely wrong. That’s just one of those things that has stuck with me, for more than 30 years.

I think about it every time someone talks about their “beliefs” and how they feel their beliefs should be respected, by which they usually mean not challenged. I also think about it when seeing the sort of things covid-denialists post on social media that subsequently appear on Reddit’s Herman Cain Awards. Confident statements that they are protected by the blood of Jesus, and that they choose to live in faith not in fear. Or propagating misinformation that covid is fake news and part of some planned assault on individual liberties.

The thing is, Sars-Cov2, which causes covid, doesn’t care about a person’s beliefs. What it sees are some nice, warm, unprotected airways that it can take up residence in, and multiply. It’s a virus – and a fascinating virus at that – and it doesn’t go away because people don’t believe in it or because people have rebuked it and invoked a deity’s protection.

One of the cleverest jokes in any Pixar movie is in Inside Out, a movie where the central characters are emotions felt by a girl called Riley. 

When the characters Joy and Sadness are accidentally cut off from the rest of the emotions, they try to make their way back through Riley’s mind to the central control room. They board the ‘train of thought’ accompanied by a character they meet in Riley’s subconscious – Riley’s semi-forgotten imaginary friend Bing-Bong. On the train Joy knocks over crates containing facts and opinions and remarks that they look very similar. Bing-Bong tells her not to bother sorting them out because no-one can tell them apart. (Here's the scene on YouTube)

That’s incredibly astute. It explains covid-denialists, conspiracists, woo-peddlers and religious fundamentalists. They literally cannot tell an objective, demonstrable fact from an unevidenced opinion. Everything has the same weight – a meme off Facebook, through to a talking head on a chat show, through to a peer-reviewed paper published in a reputable journal. And when we factor in confirmation bias, where we are more likely to listen to sources that corroborate our existing beliefs rather than sources that conflict with our beliefs, we can end up adrift in opinions, thinking they are truths.

But the rocks of reality poke through the surface of the sea.

We see this in the multiple posts on the Herman Cain Awards Reddit, where so many people follow the same track. They post covid-denying memes, antivax propaganda, weird claims about conspiracy, then they get ill. Some continue denying the seriousness of their illness right up until they are posting from their ICU bed in hospital, often struggling to spell words correctly because of hypoxia as their oxygen levels plummet and their brains struggle to function. Then their relatives and friends start posting tributes to them.

Their belief boat has been holed by the rocks of reality. And they drown.

What is unusual about the pandemic, is that this is happening on a much larger scale than usual. Most religious people have experienced unanswered prayers, and have girded themselves with all kinds of reasons why people die instead of being healed, but this usually happens occasionally and can be dealt with as one-offs. It isn’t being chronicled the way these covid-deaths are being shown to be oblivious to the effects of prayer.

I come back to what my dad told me. Sincerity is no protection. Being sincerely wrong about covid can mean trusting in an opinion that isn’t going to protect you from reality.

A review of Godless Morality by Richard Holloway

Over a decade ago I was reviewing books for the trade journal of UK Christian bookshops. I was sent a book by Richard Holloway, who had just left the ordained priesthood in the Anglican Church. He had stepped down from the role of Bishop, which is obviously fairly high up in that denomination, and was now embracing life after theism. The book I was reviewing had a write up of Richard that mentioned he was the author of Godless Morality - a title that intrigued me. So when I found a second hand copy recently I bought it to see what he had to say.

It's a short read and I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he wrote. His basic premise is that because theologians and religious leaders can't agree definitively on what constitutes moral or immoral behaviour, this throws the legitimacy of basing morality on religion into question.

He points out that coercing moral behaviour by insisting people behave a certain way is often far less effective than if people consent to certain moral standards. That's a very important point when so many religious people seem to want to make laws for everyone else to follow. You could possibly change the way people behave but you will not make them want to behave that way by forcing them to.

Instead, Richard suggests that authority has to earn respect through the "intrinsic value of what it says", not because it can impose moral parameters on people and make them behave a particular way. The moral philosophy in the book isn't complicated. Richard makes a good case that morality based on preventing harm is pretty much universal and can therefore act as a base for a moral system that does not depend on religious revelations of what is right and wrong.

But harm must be evidenced - and the evidence for harm to the individual and to society is lacking for a number of things that are proscribed by religion. Ultimately, in Richard's view, many religious statements on morality come down to preference because they cannot explain why doing or not doing a particular action will cause harm. He is particularly critical of people ascribing their own preferences to 'God'; with people even sometimes admitting the course of action they claim is divinely mandated, and therefore 'moral', is unfair or defective, and yet because it is labelled as 'God's will' they will not countenance change.

Richard sums this up by saying identifying "transient social attitudes" with 'God's will' has in the past given religions great power, but is now what is frequently rendering religion irrelevant. Enshrining the mores of the past as eternal means that when society changes, religion struggles to keep up. It becomes a living museum of dimly-remembered attitudes that are seen as no longer useable in the world most people navigate daily.

That's all pretty sharp and is still very effective anti-fundamentalist thinking. Unfortunately, in the 17 years since this book was published, there has been a great amount of change in many of the ethical areas Richard looks at in later chapters. The commentary on human fertility has dated badly, while the legislation of gay marriage was not even on the agenda back in 1999 when the book was written.

But over all I felt there were still several important things in the book, particularly that idea of basing morality in a common universal ethic instead of competing truth claims within and between religions, and the idea that moral behaviour people consent to is more binding than behaviour that is coerced.

The book concludes with a 'look ahead' that depicts humanity standing on the cusp of a future that it shapes for itself, through gene technology and other triumphs over the natural barriers that prevent humans from achieving more. It is an interesting vision of the future from a churchman. It isn't the classic eschatalogical hope of Christianity, but it is hope nonetheless. Knowing Richard's trajectory, and how in a few short years he would formally reject the faith he was still ostensibly part of when he wrote Godless Morality makes this final section very interesting. It was also personally quite challenging to find myself agreeing with so much of what he wrote, given the path he was on in his faith.

For the very first time

I had the undoubted pleasure of taking a 13-year old to his very first football match yesterday and it taught me something that I knew was true, but had kind of forgotten. When you look at something quite mundane for the very first time, it can be wonderful.

So, the game ended 0-0, but there was excitement and colour, and (very limited outbursts of) flair, and atmosphere. And I asked him afterwards whether he had enjoyed the game and he said he loved it.

And as the person accompanying him it gave me a vicarious experience of newness too. Because as I pointed out the various aspects of the new stadium and had to describe what the old ground used to be like, it gave me a new appreciation for the niceties of a purpose-built place. When I pointed out the tactics, or lack of them, it made me appreciate again how football is a relatively simple, yet impossibly hard, game. And when I compared the teams we were watching against the bloated corporate behemoths of the Premier and Champions Leagues, I reasserted the belief that we were watching 'real' football, and in that moment reaffirmed my faith.

Of course, I know that seeing it with someone who is seeing it for the first time gives you a new perspective. I'd forgotten how much, though.

It made me think again of the vagaries of affiliation, when I explained that despite living over 16 years in a city that now has a team knocking on the door of the Premier League, my true loyalty lay with the club I supported as a boy.

It made me excited again about the idea of football, and tempts me to try out some new teams, places and experiences. Maybe this is what fuels the phenomenon of ground-hopping - it's the opportunity to experience novelty in a relationship that has long grown stale.

Maybe another solution is to always take someone new with you, and see it the way they do?

I wonder whether a pair of fresh eyes, the innocence and wide-eyed wonder of a total newbie, would make such an impact on my church life too.

By the wayside

Disappointment with other people is sometimes hard to live with.

Almost two years ago the (Christian family) organisation I worked for was rocked when the recently departed director left his wife and moved in with the lover he had apparently been having an affair with for almost a year.

We all had questions about it, but ultimately we will never know why he chose to do that. The aftermath was an alienated family, broken friendships, and a sense of questioning wonder that anyone would do that and claim that God was okay with it.

A couple of months ago a couple I've known for several years split up when the husband moved out. There doesn't seem to be a reason why he left. I remember their children being born and he seemed such a doting Dad. As a couple they appeared to be soul mates.

I admit I hadn't seen much of them the past few years, but I wonder how they could have grown apart. Another couple I knew from the same church recently split for good as well, finally getting a divorce after a long rocky patch in their marriage. I went to their wedding. I remember the groom's dad giving a speech welcoming his new daughter-in-law to the family.

Did all that mean nothing?

I've learned there are two errors I can make when facing disappointment with people. Firstly, I can assume that there was something I could have, or should have, done to prevent it. Maybe if I'd been a better friend or invested more in them as people, then they would have talked to me about their problems and I could have fixed things and prevented this from happening.

It's the delusional superhero response. The likelihood is that I would have been sucked in to the row and been forced to take sides.

The second error is to assume that everything that went before was false. This is the 'John Calvin response' to people who 'fall away' - they were never saved in the first place. It's harsh, and it presumes there is no further chance of redemption, but it does provide an answer for why Christians do stupid, sinful things regardless of the consequences; things they know they shouldn't do that hurt the people they said they loved.

Having said all that, though, I don't find the Calvin response satisfactory. It's too simple.

Maybe it's that after a while people think that the rules don't apply to them? That was possibly the case in the first example I listed. It's easy to get blase about matters of faith and believe that God is your buddy who will wink and look the other way whatever you choose to do. Particularly if you're successful at all this 'Christian' stuff; particularly if you have a ministry and people look up to you.

We can forget that we need to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. We can forget that promises matter to God. The thing that angers God the most, it appears to me, is people who break their covenants. Not just their covenants with God, but their covenants with people made in the image of God.

That's why offences against our neighbours - adultery, lying, stealing, killing - are such a big deal in both testaments. That's why - unpopular though it is to say this in church these days - divorce is regarded as a bad thing in the Bible.

I can believe that people mean the things they say and the vows they make, but then can change. I believe they can get overly familiar, even contemptuous, about their commitments, and about their faith. And I'm not so dumb as to think it could only happen to other people. (I'm fairly dumb, but not that dumb.)

When anyone lets their faith go by the wayside, that's a warning that anyone - including me - shouldn't take things too lightly. If we forget the Kingdom is a Pearl of Great Price we might cast it before swine.

Survivally Challenged

So I made it through the week at Soul Survivor. The weather was great, thanks. We had one night of rain and that was about it.

A few things stood out, mainly from one of the nightly talks by Ants Watts, a New Zealander linked to Soul Survivor in NZ. He said:

I was always told that you don't have to like people as long as you love them, but actually I think you have to love them until you like them.

We are very good at creating ways of loving people - mechanisms for loving people - we can drop food off at the food bank, and we can give items to the thrift store, and we can sponsor a child on the other side of the world. And those are good things to do. But the problem with them if that is all we do, is that we can show that we love people, and people can have their needs met, but neither of us are transformed by it.

Lots of people are trying to be 'somebody'. Lots of Christians are trying to be 'somebodies' - trying to get on the platform, to lead the worship, to do a CD, to get their book out. But do you have what it takes to be a 'nobody' for Christ? To say 'this isn't about me'?

These are how I remember him saying those things. They aren't verbatim quotes. The third one in particular struck me. I had been in a seminar given by a 33 year-old theology graduate who already had three books published and was doing seminars to a packed out room. It made me think 'Where did I go wrong'. And then I thought 'Hang on...'

On the last night I made someone cry because I asked them to just clarify a throwaway remark they'd said earlier in the week that had rested heavy on me. It turned out I identified a real hurt that needed healing. But most importantly, they needed to know that someone understood, that someone cared, that someone loved. I wouldn't have been in that first conversation if I had been a 'somebody', let alone had the opportunity to be in the second.

Faith

I'm reading a (dodgy liberal) theology book at the moment and found this definition of faith, which I quite like:

"Faith is reason turned courageous."

It's rational to believe in a God, but it takes courage to believe the things people say about God (or the things He says about Himself).

Nostalgic twinge

I felt a nostalgic twinge about the church I used to go to today. It's weird to think about the time I spent in Barnabas, at a number of venues across Shrewsbury. There was the old Barnabas centre, above a pub at the back end of Mardol. It had a long main room you could play a decent game of football in on a youth night, except that the carpet would strip the skin off your hands and knees if you ever felt on it at speed.

And for a while we were 'aliens and strangers', pitching up at a variety of venues like the Music Hall in The Square, the careworn main hall of the Wakeman School, Springfield Hall in Sutton Farm (when we had two congregations), and then the current centre in Coleham.

I remember the intensity of some services - where there were 'words' and 'tongues' and all manner of goings on. I saw an exorcism one night, with shrieking and thrashing about until it was over. And I wonder what happened to all those 'words' and 'pictures' which were shared. What was their long-lasting effect? I know at one time people tried to write down all the 'prophetic words'. Does anyone have a record? Does anyone still refer back to them?

And at the time there was a sense of being part of something bigger - this was it, happening now. But actually, today it all seems so long ago, as if it was all seen by a different person in a different life. That's what nostalgia is - a looking back tinged with a regret that those experiences are in the past. Nostalgia is a recognition of distance; distance caused by time (the fourth measurement of distance).

But there's also a sense of sadness. Those words were spoken in the context of a community which, for one reason or another, has changed. People move on. People who were once central to the ongoing prophetic life of the church drift out of being part of church life. People die. Not wishing to sound cruel, but some people stagnate, never moving on from old battles and old arguments as if they cannot bear to let go of the past, even if the past is poisonous to them.

And some of us grow up from wide-eyed kids who believed we knew what was right into wearier souls who have discovered that actually the answers produce more questions and sometimes the only thing you can do is ask the question and wait and see if you get an answer. And I guess such melancholy is another root cause of nostalgia. Life seemed so much simpler back then. Like TV, you knew what you were watching when you watched in black and white. But high definition colour can sometimes feel confusing. It can trick the eye and strain the brain trying to keep up.

It's a complicated emotion, nostalgia. And I'm not convinced it's a particularly good one to indulge. Yes, I need to look back, but I also need to look forward. If I truly believed that such a dynamic life isn't happening now, or couldn't happen in the future, then I may as well give up. Looking back over my personal history, and remembering the things I've heard, and seen, and felt, is not the prime reason for my faith today. It can't be - because those things are long-gone; the evidence of the past can only show me what happened in the past.

Faith is based on what I've known in the past, what I see today and what I hope for tomorrow as a result. Maybe in the future those hoped-for things will become part of my past and I'll feel nostalgic about them then. Who knows? But if I'm only ever looking backwards, it will be challenge to walk forwards. And whether I want to dwell in the past or not, the only way I can move is forwards, and I'll move in that direction no matter how desperately I cling to memories of times past.