Prayer v trolling, and waspish wit

I found out yesterday that a few days after my last post, Richard Dawkins had a stroke and this news caused the Church of England to post a tweet requesting prayer for him, which in turn caused a hoohaa in the Twittersphere, as if such a call to prayer were somehow the equivalent of trolling the dear Prof - as if asking people to call Godly blessing on this man was the same as grotesquely revelling in his plight and wishing him harm. Really? Is that where religious illiteracy has led us at last, to rank ignorance of what Christian prayer is for? Ironically, the people misinterpreting the C of E's request would probably defend to the death the right of Islamic calls to prayer, maybe even of having them broadcast across English cities.And would those prayers include a fervent wish for good to come to unbelievers, let alone those who vocally hate God and His Word? Doubtful, isn't it. Praying for 'enemies' of the faith and of the faithful is a Christian thing, people, and a good one. The allegation of trolling was still almost fresh when poor Stephen Fry apparently got lambasted on Twitter for his joke about the top costume designer who collected a Bafta award dressed, as he quipped at the time, like a bag lady. Except when this was reported, Fry was the victim of bone-headed users who failed to see the joke, and his impatience with such ignorance something to be commiserated with. In contrast, where the C of E was concerned, it was the bone-headed 'trolling' charge that was affirmed and the Church put on the back foot, having to somehow prove it was no such thing. See the difference? For the secularly-sainted ('national treasure') Fry, the knee-jerk, unthinking reactions are seen as precisely that; for the beleaguered National Church, the ignorant reactions are seen as potentially genuine.In a further irony, Fry's off-the-cuff, bitchy wit - and it was funny, I was watching - is exactly the kind of thing he was hired to deliver. That his target in this instance was an unprepossing older woman (even if a friend of his), was entirely in keeping with the gay-influenced culture that rates women primarily on glam and grooming. Anyone paying him to MC their gig will know this. Job done.

Richard Dawkins, Entertainer

Richard Dawkins ought to be on the stage as a solo comedy act. Seriously, I am so grateful to him for his entertainment value. Take a recent two-page interview in The Times, for example (Saturday January 30 2016). It was headlined with what was no doubt deemed to be his most provocative statement ('It's time feeble feminists started to condemn the misogyny in Islam') but contained some pure Dawkins gems.The best of these, in my opinion, was the summation of his brief disussion on how everything, including evolution, is a 'continuum': "If you go back, take your great great great grandfather and add a couple of hundred greats you've got a fish." Did his two interviewers keep a straight face? I laughed out loud as I was reading this in a public place. Earlier in the piece, the dear Professor trashed Adam and Eve as one of the 'idiotic non-facts' allegedly taught to children in faith schools. Well, the story of Adam and Eve makes complete sense in terms of understanding the fissures of the human predicament, whereas a seemless line to a fish ancestry really, you know, does not. What makes the story of the Fish more probable that the story of the Fall? It does have the advantage of not requiring us to grapple with the awkward question of why we human beings are beautiful and complex yet so false and vile, I suppose. Another Dawkins gem is his lament for the decline of Christianity and Christian education in Britain - very proper, well done - almost in the same breath as his fierce denunciation of Christian education as something 'wicked'. His dogmatic insistence on the completeness of science is also comic. Why does no one call him up on this when he spends so much energy denouncing dogmatism elsewhere? Why does no one also point out that, by the way, he's wrong? Science cannot explain everything. Even where it does a good job at addressing 'how' it cannot explain 'why'. This Dawkins is blind to: "It's staggering that we can understand why life exists, why we have plants and animals, carnivores and herbivores", he says. It would be staggering indeed if it were true, but it isn't. Dawkins fudges this issue so he can express his sense of wonder at the marvel of Creation without having to refer to a Creator, let alone bow to Him. Moreover he complains that children - those alleged victims of faith schools - are denied this wonder by not being taught the absoluteness of evolution. Leaving aside that Dawkins's view of what gets taught in schools seems more supposition than reality, Christianity (and Judaism) are precisely the go-to educations to foster wonder at the world, and therefore poetry, music etc, which he himself ackowledges as influences for good in his life. Yet another Dawkins gem is his assumption that children should learn things dispassionately, scientifically, multi-laterally, and then make up their own minds about what they want to believe. On the one hand, that is simply not how children learn. Their minds feed on values. They will have values of one sort or another, they must have them, they ascribe value to everything that goes on around them, whether they're consciously aware of it or not at the time. That is the rationale for teaching them those values we think are good, and proven by long usage to be good (like Christian ones). Later on, of course they can choose for themselves, and indeed they will - as Dawkins himself did. To think they are not taught how to think, while they are being encouraged as to what to think, is nonsense. After all, did religious education blight Dawkins's mind? He is still praising it , even though he wants to deprive others of the same advantage. On the other hand, is the dear Professor himself dispassionate and scientific? Not a bit of it! Especiallly not when engaged in his war against religion. Altogether, I'd say that Dawkins's sloppiness in language and intent makes him the most unscientific of prominent scientists. But he is funny.

St Paul and the sword

St Paul is traditionally represented in art carrying a book and a sword. When I learned this today - in a lecture where Paul was described as 'the guy with the sword', accompanied by a big sword-waving gesture - I thought there was surely some mistake. The Paul I know from the Bible is just about the least likely person to wield a sword ever. Of course he wrote about "the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God" (Ephesians 6: 17), but a real sword? The kind of sword, perhaps, that we know only too well at the moment as an instrument of beheadings by jihadis? Er, I don't think so. Paul wrote of himself as very unimpressive, both physically and oratorially, so we can assume he was not the warrior type. If anything he was a geek, a very learned and clever person, who through a most powerful conversion experience went from from ordering the violent persecution of Christians to devoting the rest of life to preaching Christ crucified. One of the disciples did briefly wield a sword, cutting off the ear of a 'servant of the high priest' in an ill-judged attempt to defend his Lord at the time of his arrest, but Jesus swiftly told him off for it, and the damage was just as swiftly reversed when "Jesus touched the man's ear and healed him." (Luke 22: 51). The clue to the sword iconography in depictions of St Paul is in the way he himself was martyred by beheading - the more civilised way of doing things at the time, since Paul was a Roman citizen (as opposed to the drawn-out agony of crucifixion). Paul does not wield the sword, in traditional representations, he holds it, as saints also hold or are represented by the instruments of their deaths. Unfortunately, though, in these troubled times, the image of the sword is apt to be misinterpreted as an instrument of physical warfare. It's worth pointing out that, in a Christian context, this kind of assumption would be the opposite of the truth. Christianity is not a religion of the sword, it is a religion of the Holy Spirit, who is a sword of an entirely different kind: for healing rather than for death.

A Ban on God

http://www.christian.org.uk/news/downton-abbey-banned-god-for-fear-of-alienating-viewers/
 So now we know why God does not feature in Downton Abbey: He was banned from it. For all those years! All those hours of filming! All those times when we didn't quite notice that we never saw the beginning of a meal, only its middle or end, so as to avoid the potentially offensive matter of saying Grace. The actors knew it, inevitably; did not one of them object to such a systematic distortion of history? This Downton development is not as silly as one might think. One could say it's a sign of our times, and ties in grimly with recent events in this sense: that the glaring absence, in the reaction to the Paris massacre, has been the absence of any clerical figure either commenting or praying or advising. Not a single one. A desert of Christianity has descended on Western Europe. It's as if these outrageous, terroristic attacks have outed the West as a full-on secular society. And to see the rest of the world projecting the Tricolore blue, white and red as a mark of solidarity, or singing La Marseillaise, is almost surreally ironic. For of course France did declare itself a secular state in the late 18th century - not with peace and love, but with the streets of Paris awash with blood - in that instance, the blood of royals, nobles and priests. This secular West is also very sad. Confronted with young men who are all too eager to die in the cause of their version of Allah, all we can muster are small public gestures (flowers, candles), improvised symbols (Eiffel peace sign) and hashtag declarations. I doubt the ones who hate the West with a passion are trembling at this. They know that not one cafe patron is going to give up his life for the ideology of having a cup of coffee, or of eating dinner on a rickety outdoor table - which is what these 'values' everyone is talking about seem to amount to. 

Trendy religious pluralism

G.K. Chesterton, writing 90 years ago about the add-on gods of Classical paganism or, as it could be, religious equality and diversity today.

"It is regarded as a liberal and enlightened thing to say that the god of the stranger may be as good as our own; and doubtless the pagans thought themselves very liberal and enlightened when they agreed to add to the gods of the city or the hearth some wild and fantastic Dionysus coming down from the mountains or some shaggy and rustic Pan creeping out of the woods. But exactly what is lost by these larger ideas is the largest idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the whole world one. And the converse is also true. Doubtless those more antiquated men of antiquity who clung to their solitary statues and their single sacred names were regarded as superstitious savages benighted and left behind. But these superstitious savages were preserving something that is much more like the cosmic power as conceived by philosophy, or even as conceived by science."
(The Everlasting Man, 1925, Chapter IV, 'God and Comparative Religion'.My emphasis.)

Downton and God

Dear Downton Abbey, in its final series, is figuratively speaking clobbering us at every turn with feminist dialogue. Well and good, its characters have to be portrayed as vastly enlightened on the subject of pretty much everything, lest we withdraw our 21st century sympathies from them. Lady Violet is the exception, the dinosaur, and always good for a laugh although she is sometimes allowed to utter sensible lines, notably in the latest episode when she held up Family as the bulwark against State - though she was immediately shot down by her own daughter who was already surrendering the Family as dead despite being happy to continue availing herself of Family wealth, connections and practical advantages. Of course. But the place where Downton rings especially wrong is on the subject of God. I mean, where is He? Religious observance would have held a prominent place in a Big House, even if only in terms of going-through-the-motions rather than with spiritually integrity. This anachronistic absence gives rise to great infelicities in the dialogue, because this artifcial absence cannot be maintained in character conversation. God will out. So, in the latest episode, we had the following catastrophes of tone and taste. Lady Mary jibing than even a monkey, given enough time, would type out the Bible: meant as one of her usual taunts of her sister, in reality a shocking statement of pervasive ignorance. Lord Grantham and his sister (I think) exclaiming  'Halleluia' and 'there really is a God' with much feeling, over the mere fact that Mrs Carson will continue to be know as Mrs Hughes: no comment needed. And Mr Bates uttering 'My God' when his wife hints that she is pregnant even though she has previously said in a bald-faced lie that she was not hiding anything from him: one half-assumed it was uttered in choked-up rage and half-expected him to strangle her for her duplicity (am I the only who finds him sinister?), seeing as both the 'my' and the 'God' were meaningless in terms of his character so far. These examples are not nothing. They are especially not neutral. Their tone and values get absorbed in general Downton-ness without our realising it, all the while doing their insidious work of contributing to the rubbishing of the Triune, Christian God, as if that too were a mark of enlightenment.

Bake-Off and Motherhood

As the dust has settled a bit on the 2015 Great British Bake-off victory of Nadiya Hussein, let's highlight something else than her headscarf, to wit: that Bake-Off is that rarest of environments in contemporary Britain, one where it's ok to be a full-time mother. Hussein's pivotal role in her family passed largely without comment. Everyone, understandably, was excited about her throrough-going Britishness, as it was reflected in her general demeanour as well as in her bakes. Presumably though, religious observance had something to do with her decision to be at home, and all power to her. Assuming that is the case, I can't help wondering how viewers would have reacted if a contestant with Nadiya's winsom appeal had been equally obviously seen to be a Christian rather than a Muslim. (And I don't mean just by a cross worn around the neck, as that's often a mere fashion statement - except where it does it mean something and therefore must be visited with wrath by Health and Safety or Equality commissars.) Would there have been as much jubilation over a Christian Nadiya's win? Or would people have taken to social media to criticise her choice of work as privileged or elitist or, on the other hand - because one can't win at this - to denounce her oppressed status of wifey-at-home? Just a thought.