All the beauties I love most are transient

Don Cupitt has just published a new book: "The Fountain: A Secular Theology". I'll buy a copy, but in the meantime there's a review of it in the latest Sea of Faith magazine, which includes the following quote from the book:

We cannot conceive personal life except as temporal, and if I reflect I find that all the beauties I love most are transient, and that it is precisely for their transience that I love them. I cannot coherently wish them anything but transient and the same goes for myself

I remember someone once telling me about "The Sacrament of the Present Moment". Something about the fact that we only ever exist in the present, so our relationship to God is only ever 'now'.

I find these sorts of ideas - combined with a feeling that we have no idea what 'time' is - much more satisfactory than any idea of eternal life, though I have to admit if still feels that I need faith to believe them. They feel right, but there's still part of me that's not quite convinced.

Bible quotes in gun sights

U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret 'Jesus' Bible Codes

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found. [...]

The company's vision is described on its Web site: "Guided by our values, we endeavor to have our products used wherever precision aiming solutions are required to protect individual freedom."

"We believe that America is great when its people are good," says the Web site. "This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals."

Old Testament "Thou shalt not kill" would seem the more obvious choice.

Suffering, and Darwin's loss of faith

Alerted by a tweet from Richard Dawkins, I read this is the Guardian:

Darwin's complex loss of faith

It wasn't evolution that led Darwin away from religion, but nor was it simply the loss of his beloved daughter

[...]

In reality, Darwin's loss of faith was, as he recognised, gradual and complex. The reasons were not new – suffering always has been and always will be most serious challenge to Christianity – but they were newly focused. Plenty of Darwin's scientific contemporaries, men like John Stevens Henslow, Charles Lyell, Asa Gray, George Wright, Alexander Winchell, and James Dana, could accommodate their Christian beliefs with the new theory. Indeed, as historian James Moore has remarked "with but few exceptions the leading Christian thinkers in Great Britain and America came to terms quite readily with Darwinism and evolution."

But Darwin, brought up on William Paley's harmonious, self-satisfied vision of creation, could not.

(My emphasis.) I'd go along with that, but also note that suffering is at the heart of Christianity in Christ's suffering on the cross. Sort of obvious, and yet somehow it gets forgotten.

God has to justify his (her) existence?

(One of what might be a series of half-formed, half-baked, thoughts that need developing.)

I read things that talk as though God is a 'given' and we can work-down from God to understand the world. I'm thinking that God has to justify his existence.

Susan Boyle and the resurrection

The story of Susan Boyle was used in a sermon a couple of weeks back. The preacher spoke of the sacrifice that Susan had made. Earlier in her life she had chosen not to pursue her singing ambitions, instead looking after her mother and doing voluntary work, visiting the elderly members of her church congregation. A parallel was drawn with the resurrection: from 'nobody' to global fame in the space of a few days. Her sacrifices were rewarded.

Yes, but.

Susan was not a nobody before her fame. She was the same person before and after. She could sing beautifully, whether or not anyone could hear. Her value does not reside in the recognition that the world gives to her. Her glory was not in her discovery, it was there all along. (Her glory doesn't even reside in her ability to sing so well - though that is a wonderful thing. God values each and every one of us because we are human beings. Full stop. That's the point of God. Human life would be intolerable otherwise. But that's a different story. Let's run with her singing for the moment.)

This is one of the problems I have with the resurrection - or with the way the resurrection is sometimes portrayed. If the resurrection is a happy ending, then how do we cope with events that don't have a happy ending? Because we can't pretend things do always have a happy ending. Unless of course it is 'pie in the sky when you die'. But that doesn't work for me.

No, the glory of Susan's triumph was the way it revealed to us what she had always been and would have been whether or not she'd been discovered. So too the resurrection has to be about life before death, whether or not Jesus was raised from the dead.

But again.

You start writing and the words flow. 'Resurrection has to be about life before death'. Maybe it has to be, and those are the right words for Christian Aid Week, but that's hard, isn't it.

Easter at the Cornerstone, reflections on Mary Magdalene

David Tatem's Easter sermon at The Cornerstone, was on the theme of 'The God of Surprises', and included a comment that the resurrection narratives contained a 'time bomb' that has only being going off in the last few decades: that the first apostle was a woman, Mary Magdalene.

Meanwhile, in the foyer of the Church is David Moore's latest sculpture, on the theme of Mary Magdalene and how she has been mis-represented by the Church over the centuries. He (David Moore) introduced his sculpture and carried the same theme into the prayers.

'A' commented on the fact that the two Davids (especially Moore) were so outspoken about the treatment of women by the Church, wondering if it was potentially confrontational with the Roman Catholics (and maybe inappropriate for an Ecumenical Church). Of course the Catholics hardly have a monopoly on the oppression of women within the Church... Anyway, it seems to me that David Moore has never flinched from saying things that some people might find uncomfortable, without ever being needlessly confrontational. But then I don't recall disagreeing with anything he has said from the pulpit, so I'm not really in a position to judge whether anyone else would be offended.

For myself, the role of women in the Church is not an issue that I feel the need to grapple with. I don't see the issue: there is no justification for discrimination. That might seen dismissive, but we can't all take on all issues equally. This does not feel like my battle.

Madelaine Bunting on the New Atheists

Real debates about faith are drowned by the New Atheists' foghorn voices. Guardian 7 April 2009.

They [philosopher John Gray and historian of religion Karen Armstrong] see the New Atheists mirroring a particular strain of fundamentalist Christianity with no knowledge of the vast variety of other forms of religious faith. In common with their Christian opponents, they share "the inner glow of complete certainty" [...]

Armstrong and Gray converge again on where they pinpoint the key mistake. Belief came to be understood in western Christianity as a proposition at which you arrive intellectually, but Armstrong argues that this has been a profound misunderstanding that, in recent decades, has also infected other faiths. What "belief" used to mean, and still does in some traditions, is the idea of "love", "commitment", "loyalty": saying you believe in Jesus or God or Allah is a statement of commitment. Faith is not supposed to be about signing up to a set of propositions but practising a set of principles. Faith is something you do, and you learn by practice not by studying a manual, argues Armstrong.[...]

The author Mark Vernon [...] argues that the most interesting conversations about faith are among those just outside religious traditions and those just inside - along the borders of belief, if you like.

I've long felt that those on both extremes can't abide those of us on the boundaries. Our lack of dogmatism is seen as not legitimate.

Palm Sunday and G20 New World Order

Mary Cotes sermon at the Cornerstone on Palm Sunday made an interesting link between the adulation of the crowds as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and the claims of a 'New World Order' emerging from the G20 summit.

My interpretation of her starting point was a parallel:

G20 "New world order",
What it ought to be:
A new world with justice for the poorer nations
What crowds want it to be:
Recovery of a comfortable lifestyle in the rich countries

Jesus riding into Jerusalem:
What Jesus means:
A new world based on justice and love
What crowds want it to be:
The end of the Roman occupation and Israel back on top

The Kingdom of Heaven

What were the Churches and Christian charities doing among the socialists, the unions and the anarchists at the G20 rally ... marching through central London, surrounded by the police and standing alongside people calling for the death of neo-liberal capitalism?

1) Well, to get started, how can we tolerate such injustice in the world? How can we go on leaving people to starve to death, when there's so much wealth? How can we consume, consume, consume, when we know what climate change is doing? (If you believe the scientists, of course... but we do, you know, most of us Christians, whatever Richard Dawkins would like to think)

The world has enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed.

We've all heard it before, so we can move on and think about something else? But that doesn't make it OK. The world is NOT OK. It's in a bad way. And its our fault (us human beings).

2) I expect most of us, Christians or not, know about that (what a bloody mess we've made of the world), and know that it's wrong. But maybe Christians are more inclined to think it is worth trying to do something about it? Because of our limitations, we will always get it wrong, but we believe in 'forgiveness', and that frees us up to have a go. And of course there's just the fact that if we go to Church we keep hearing people talking about these things - those 2000 verses (see snippet no 3) in the bible about poverty and justice.

3) For me, I guess, it is sort of what remains of my faith. You might say I don't believe in God*, but whatever I do believe in leaves me thinking that we can't just accept the way the world is. Quite often I'm embarrassed to 'be a Christian' - when I see and hear what is done and said in the name of Christianity - but in London last Saturday it seemed right.

*One day I'll explain a bit more about what God I don't believe in