A Conversation with Vlatko Vedral | Big Questions Online

A Conversation with Vlatko Vedral | Big Questions Online

Civic Service

I don't always feel 100% behind the Church I attend, the Church of Christ the Cornerstone. But then there are times I think they've got it right.

Today the 'Civic Service' was held there. This is the annual service - sometimes held at the Cornerstone, sometimes elsewhere - when all the dignitaries of the Milton Keynes Council turn up.  I don't know the ins and outs of this, why there's an 'official' Church Service for the Council at all, and I expect there are many that wouldn't approve.  But given that there is and did happen, I thought it was OK.

For one thing there was contributions from several different communities. (Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Greek Orthodox - there should have been someone from the Sikh community too, but they weren't there. I don't know why.)

Also, though, among the prayers were these words:

Praise God, whose will is justice and love,
who marks out no-one for privilege
and whose favour cannot be bought. 

Praise God, who redresses the balance
in favour of the defenceless and the poor,
and calls us to do the same. 

Praise God, who loves the foreigner
and finds a home for the stranger
and reminds us that we have all been outsiders.

Those seem to be the right sentiments for a Church to express before the great and the good of Milton Keynes. 

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.

Bike lanes.

As well as death, faith and football, another thing I have strong views on is cycling.

As I once texted to a discussion on Radio 5 Live :-) I think we cyclists are the saints of the transport world and are badly done to.

Here's some evidence:

More on death and faith (some clarifications on my previous post)

The trouble with writing anything is that the moment I've written it I invariable think it misrepresents what I really think. Fortunately you can edit posts, so that's what I've done with the previous post in this blog. And why not? This is my private blog and it comes with no claims of academic credibility!

Also a couple of clarifications/further developments:

1) I'm not saying that it is OK deliberately to lie to make make people feel better. Just that you should be sensitive. Dawkins and some of the New Atheists come across as insensitive to a degree that amounts to being cruel.  I don't like people being cruel.

2) My own faith is not an easy solution to my fear of death. When I experienced le reveil mortel (the first realisation of eventual extinction - see Julian Barnes "Nothing to be frightened of") I was 13 or 14 years old, and, like John Betjeman recounts in 'Before the Anaesthetic' I was immediately aware that my Christianity - as I then formulated it - was no match for death.  Basically I believed the science before the Christianity, and I couldn't, however much I wanted to, 'choose' to believe in that way.  Forty years on, and the way I see it now is that in faith - faith, not belief - there is way forward.  For me, faith in the resurrection of Jesus contains within it - among other things - faith that we are not defeated by death.  It is not saying that extinction does not happen, but that whatever it is in extinction that I fear is not what I think it is.  That love is greater than death.

Yes, I am afraid of death (but I'm not afraid of the dark)

I've been wanting to say something like this for a while, and I saw an opportunity as a comment on this article in the Guardian.

Here's what I said (later edited - you can always follow the link above if you want to check what I wrote at the time -  and then see also the following post):

Hawking:

I'm not afraid of death, ....There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Wenham:

the idea of extinction holds no more fear than sleep. It really is insulting to accuse me of believing there might be life after death because I'm afraid of the dark.

Well you two are different from me then. I'm bl**dy terrified of extinction. You people who don't have this fear, should read, for example, Julian Barnes "Nothing to be frightened of", Larkin's "Aubade" or Betjeman's 'Before the Anaesthetic". If you people really don't have this fear you don't know how lucky you are. (And actually I think it displays a lack of imagination.)

I can only assume that the likes of Hawking and Dawkins who love to mock 'afraid of the dark*' really don't understand this fear. If they did, and they continued to disabuse people of their only escape from the terror, they are no better than the 'hell fire' preachers who at least offered an escape.

*The dark? The dark? Is that really what you think I'm afraid of? I love the dark, but extinction is NOT the dark and if you think there is any parallel then it just proves that you don't understand the problem.

Why my MP is saying no to AV (and why I'm saying yes!)

My MP, Mark Lancaster, has a blog he's using to campaign against AV: http://marklancastermp.wordpress.com/

In theory he allows comments (that's to say he hasn't turned off the comment facility on his WordPress blog) but there aren't any visible yet. Here's what I tried to say. It is awaiting moderation, but somehow I suspect it could be waiting for some time!

Why don’t you come clean. There’s one very big reason you want to say no to AV: you wouldn’t be elected under AV! You were elected with 43.5% of the vote last year, so 56.5% of those who voted in your constituency did NOT want you*. It is a pretty safe bet that the vast majority of Green, Labour and Liberal Democrat voters would NOT have put you as one of the alternatives so almost certainly Labour would have been elected.

* How is THAT fair?

It seems it would be such a small change, yet it would mean I could vote for who I really want - I wouldn't be forced into chosing between voting tactically (which is what I've always done) and wasting my vote. Under AV I would almost certainly vote Green first, then Lib Dem followed by Labour or vice versa (depending on the individual candidate).