All Publicity, Good Publicity?

All Publicity, Good Publicity?

I went through period when I felt there was nothing I could or should comment upon. Suddenly it seems to have changed! The latest piece of info-speak that I have come across that seems intellectually incredible comes from the Humanist Society’s website where there is comment upon their ‘billboard campaign’ against labelling children, complete with comment from Richard Dawkins. Expounding on some of the bad rationale from the God Delusion this dogma declares:

We also believe that labelling children is coercive because it:

• places an expectation on the child to conform to her parents beliefs
• removes choice and decreases autonomy by limiting the options available; by constraining the child to think that their religion is “a given”.
• can act as a threat, either because there is an implied risk of parental disassociation if the child rejects the religious beliefs, or because inherent in the religion itself are explicit metaphysical dangers (judgment, Hellfire etc) associated with disbelief or apostasy.

Now I have some well-founded objections to this as follows:

1. Intellectual Dishonesty playing with half-truths

I come from the Christian part of the world that is neither Anglican nor Catholic and I have so say that in my reasonably wide experience, children from our families are not labelled, and we do not label other children. Yes, I understand that where there are ‘faith schools’ there is often a bias in favour families from a clear faith, but that is more linked with the work and ethics ethos that goes with Christian faith and “The faith” is not the big issue at many such schools. In Catholic schools there appears to be a stronger leaning towards identifying children as coming from Catholic families but, I would suggest from local knowledge, the emphasis is on the family and not the child. I suspect the same is true of the Muslim families.

The vagueness of the dogma is thus all-embracing and does not cover the majority of the Christian population (I’ll say more on this below). It is only a vague truth therefore and there would be a sense of integrity in this dogma if they specifically aimed it at faith schools (which they do in other posters) and at specific religious groupings. Aiming at the whole audience is careless and sloppy, and intellectually indefensible.

2. Utterly Inaccurate

In the Christian world at least, links to faith schools are minimal – most of our children don’t go to such schools, simply because there aren’t enough of those schools. Put those schools aside, therefore, and my experience tells me that these three ‘reasons’ above are unrealistic and verging on the absurd.

My wife and I are both practising Christians. We have three children who are now in their late twenties or early thirties. They are all bright kids who think for themselves. Where there are religions or religious expression that is authoritarian then it may be that there could be a shred of truth in these things – but the vast majority of Christendom does not fit in the category of authoritarian. My own children came to church with us, made their own decisions to be Christians without pressure put on them. They have had plenty of opportunity to reject those beliefs whenever they wanted but have not done so, seeing their faith as the best alternative in a world of mixed values and being very happy with their choices, being aware of all the others!

I have also known a number of other children who grew up in a Christian environment but rejected the life and beliefs of their parents and went their own way. They have also turned out to be those who have struggled with life and have not got a happy outcome – but that has nothing to do with their supposed feelings of ‘guilt’ of leaving the Christian fold (which is absent), but simply because of the life choices they have made, similar to so many of their peer group in the world, who similarly are struggling with the wonders of a humanistic lifestyle and its outcomes.

3. He who lives in glass houses….

Possibly the greatest hypocrisy and deception in this dogma is the implied claim that while Christians impose values on their children, atheistic humanists don’t! You must be joking! Richard Dawkins is crusading for the hearts and minds of the children of this nation on a platform that many of his scientific peers think is abhorrent. From my own observation, I would suggest that crusading humanists may well be those who impose their views far more than their Christian counterparts.

My wife is an RE teacher and her curriculum requires the students to analyse the historical evidence for Jesus Christ and the resurrection. What she increasingly finds is that many of her students who come from atheistic families (i.e. mother and father deny belief) are literally incapable of objectively analysing the factual evidence that is there in history. They have been so indoctrinated by their parents that they are intellectually incapable of being objective when presented with accredited historical data. They are UNABLE to be unbiased. Now that is far more worrying, I suggest.

I recently came across the following quote which starts with a supposition and goes on to recount an experience. It is worth bearing in mind:

“people who have been given a faith-based education are generally more tolerant when dealing with people of other religious and non-religious faith traditions than those who have been nurtured in an intentionally anti-religious or ‘secular-humanistic’ environment. The way in which Muslim parents actively seek out Christian ethos schools is testimony to the fact that they believe those schools are more likely to encourage a tolerant and warm attitude to their own religious beliefs, than a school which may deliberately exclude the idea of the divine. Lord Sacks was educated at St Mary’s Primary School. Comments the Chief Rabbi, ‘I got more tolerance in that Christian school than I suspect I might have had if I had gone to a secular school where no faith was taken seriously at all. That was when I discovered religiously based tolerance – the religious roots, the foundations of tolerance.’

Intolerance is clearly alive and well in the humanist camp, but here is my closing thought. I am aware that there are many unthinking people who mindlessly subscribe to the thoughts of the Humanists, but it strikes me that anyone who knows anything about the reality  of the individual child’s ability to make up their own mind, will know that this language from the humanist website is empty posturing and must simply be a means of gaining publicity – except it does not show them up in a good light, and one wonders if, in fact, this publicity is good publicity, or rather it shows them as bigoted zealots with an intellectually empty cause?  Sad!

Unproven?

This blog, by its name, is obviously a blog about faith and specifically about the Christian faith, but it’s also about all aspects of human life and behaviour that has ethical dimensions to it. Now I say this because I have often commented that I believe sin can also be equated with stupidity. We’re all guilty of that because we’re all sinners, redeemed or not. Yesterday the news was shouting about Gordon Brown’s possible intention to use the Queen’s Speech to kick off the Labour manifesto with a quote that seemed the height of stupidity.

Let me quote: “In a podcast on the Downing Street website, Mr. Brown said that Britons wanted world-class public services underpinned by “guarantees not gambles” Now, forgive me if this sounds a bit harsh and this is a completely non-political observation, but it seems that such a comment from a leader of a party that has been in power for over a dozen years, comes over as crass stupidity to us the watching public. In fact any pontificating by Mr. Brown about improving services seems to have a hollow ring about it. Excuse me, what have you been doing for the last however many years since Labour have been in power? This is the craziness of politics. If you had an ounce of integrity you would put your hands up and say, “Sorry chaps, we haven’t been able to achieve these things, it was beyond us, so we’ll move over and let someone else have a go.” But of course politics, it increasingly seems, isn’t about integrity any longer.

But that wasn’t the thing that pushed me into print again today. When things come up in threes I find it interesting. There were three things in the papers of the last two days which had similar rings about them. The first was the ongoing comment about the public’s disbelief about Global Warming. Quote: “in a recent poll for the Times, only 41 per cent of U.K. voters thought the case for man-made global warming had been proved.” That means that most of us have big queries about it. The pro-brigade speak about the FACT of global warming but the sceptics challenge ‘the fact’. It seems that ‘the facts’ need interpreting. One sceptic even recently suggested that an increase in carbon dioxide was helpful. An apparently unproven case!  Time may change that because it is an ongoing science.

The second thing was an article, following a science conference in Alexandria, that declared that “Muslim scholars and students have turned against Darwin”.  The bulk of the article referred to a Professor of Physics and Astronomy from a university in the United Arab Emirates who referred to a survey of 100 academics and 100 scholars at his own university, that showed that 62 per cent of Muslim professors and students believed evolution to be an “unproven theory” compared with 10 per cent of non-Muslim professors.  The professor obviously was an evolutionist and said it didn’t contradict Islamic beliefs, yet clearly for a number of people it was unproven. I have no problem with micro-evolution but macro evolution, according to what I hear a number of people say, is still ‘unproven’. Remember for something to be ‘proven fact’ in scientific terms means there are no doubts or assumptions, or questions or gaps! Start asking evolutionists about the evolution of sex and there seems to be a large silence. Some will feel negative about me daring to suggest this – but it is, despite claims of ‘fact’ from some, more real to come to an ‘unproven’ verdict. Perhaps one day that may change but for the moment the questions, doubts, assumptions and gaps deny the verdict of ‘proven’ partly, it seems, because of lack of evidence.

The third thing came up in a report from Italy that “Colonel Muammar Gaddafi invited hundreds of attractive Italian “hostesses” to a villa in Rome last night for an evening at which he urged them to convert to Islam and told them Christianity was based on a fraud.” According to the report, “He then observed — to “general incredulity” — that Christ had not died on the Cross and been resurrected, as Christians believe, because the person crucified had been “a look-alike” who was substituted for the real Jesus.” Again, according to such Islamists, the case for Christ’s resurrection is ‘unproven’. But this one is a much more simple debate than the environmental and evolutionary debates. This argument, which is often put forward by Islamic representatives as part of their teaching, fails to take into account the wealth of evidence which makes the resurrection logically most probable, but of course you have to read and examine the evidence with an open mind to come to that conclusion. ‘Unproven’ here means “Unproven in my mind because I refuse to examine the evidence.”

Each of these three debates involve history and history so often requires assumptions. The first two revolve around long-term history which is uncertain and which require various assumptions because the evidence is not always there, and that is where it becomes unclear and debatable. The last one is about the simple, straight forward evidence of a simple historical event which has world-changing consequences and which is easily resolved by careful examination of that clear evidence. The evidence, at least in Colonel Gaddafi’s case seems unpalatable because it raises questions about an alternative belief system and that is not easy to take.  Unproven? It depends on where you start from!

Hypocrisy or Naivety?

Hypocrisy or Naivety?

Those who might occasionally stumble across this blog site will know a) that I have become loath to join the world that pontificates on issues too complex for meaningful comment and b) I have often commented about hypocrisy in the modern world. I write, therefore, only when I have reached boiling point and when I wish, for my own benefit, to record in journal form, my thoughts at this time in my life.

The subject that has been building up in the back of my mind is of death and Afghanistan. I have sat, as a media watcher, for many months pondering the futility of war in Afghanistan. History suggests that no one from outside wins in that country. We have been there before, the Americans have been there before, and the Russians have been there before, and none of us came out with flying colours. The current reason for being there is purported to be to thwart Islamic fundamentalist terrorists yet I suspect that if we managed to occupy the entire land mass of that country such terrorist activities will simply carry on somewhere else. It seems to many of us that it is like chasing symptoms but not dealing with the disease. That is hypocritical and, for the many of us who feel jaundiced and betrayed having watched and worried over Iraq, there is a subtle undermining worry that honesty does not prevail here either.

In today’s Times, Paddy Ashdown rather uncertainly makes a defence for being in Afghanistan on the grounds of what might happen if we pulled out. He is, in many eyes at least, someone with credibility yet even he appears uncertain. Possibly the only reason he gives that seems to have some certainty behind it (and I take his word for the truth of what he says) is that, “an overwhelming majority … despite all, still want us to be there and only 5 per cent of whom want to see the Taleban back.”

A second view was expressed earlier in the week in the Times by Nick Horne who had just resigned from being a political affairs officer at the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, who concluded, “I now believe that strategic failure is the most likely outcome of our engagement in Afghanistan.” He gave his reasoning as follows: “Among the greatest mistakes of the international community has been its laissez-faire approach to the corruption, cronyism and venality of the Afghan Government. The insurgency is winning not so much because the Taleban’s ideology and platform have popular appeal, but because the Afghan Government is seen as corrupt, unrepresentative and ineffective.”

There we have it! Put in Biblical terms there is an unrighteous administration which the West is supporting. How many times in the past sixty years has the West supported such regimes, simply because the alternative is worse?  If there are two evil regimes, the answer is not to choose the lesser of the two evils but to get wisdom to choose an alternative course of action. It appears that as the West has largely rejected God, that wisdom has not been forthcoming. Whereas there was once at least a Christian consensus with absolutes in the West, which helped foster a ‘reasonable’ democracy, with the abandonment of that the West seems to have lost any viable alternative to put to regimes who have never had the same Christian-philosophical underpinning. All we are left with is political pressure of a very shallow kind which subsequently seems almost powerless. The helicopter gunship, drones and missiles become the currency of persuasion and the end is highly questionable, as Paddy Ashdown is suggesting today.

Put aside the hypocritical aspects inherent in what we’ve considered so far, there was a further article in the past week that made me ponder on whether hypocrisy or naivety were the right words that apply. The article was headed, “Celebrities get more respect than dead soldiers, says George Cross holder.” It was the complaint of a young man who at 18 had won the George Cross in Iraq but who, now out of the army and “disillusioned by army life and angry at the Government” was upset that Government ministers didn’t turn up at Wootten Bassett to welcome home the dead bodies. It was left to a services spokesman to point out that they specifically restricted such times to close families and military personnel, but it left me wondering about the reality of public responses to deaths of army personnel in Afghanistan. Is it hypocritical or merely naïve?

Check this out. If you join the army you know you will be trained to fire weapons to kill enemies. Yes? Those enemies are going to fire back and inevitably, as much as we may dislike the thought, people are going to get killed. Yes? Yes, it is right and natural for families to grieve at the loss of a loved one, but why the surprise? If we are comfortable with this government taking us into Iraq (on false grounds it now turns out) and now into Afghanistan (on questionable grounds at least), why are we surprised and upset at soldiers being killed. Surely that is either hypocritical or naïve – or perhaps something else?

At this time of year as we are coming up to Remembrance Sunday we again pull down the shutters on logical and non-emotive thinking. The First World War was surely all about bad treaties that fell like dominoes dragging everyone into one of the worst blood baths of history. Governments and fickle and deceived public opinion dragged millions to their deaths. There was nothing glorious about it. The best thing we could say to such survivors as are left would be, “We are really sorry you were dragged into that mess and had to go through what you went through.”  When it comes to the Second World War, that was a bit of a different ball game and there appeared a much stronger case for calling men to go to defend their country against a horrific ideology which still has echoes today. But now we add in the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan and, I would suggest, there needs to be a similar apology from the present government as I have suggested need to be given to World War I veterans: “We are really sorry you were dragged into this mess and had to go through what you went through.”

There is an immense difference between being called to defend your country and going to another country to wage a philosophically questionable war. Is it hypocritical of the government to send troops to a questionable conflict? Is it naïve of young men joining up at a time when they know they will be called to fight and possibly be killed, to think it’s a safe and honourable profession?

With all the clever think-tanks that the modern world uses, is it beyond our abilities to come up with bigger, better, real solutions that genuinely face the problems, face the false ideologies, and come up with viable alternatives? Ah, but there we have the problem: we believe in anything and everything and are not very good at critically examining ideologies and pointing out their faults and failings – perhaps because we have too many of our own. Hypocritical or naïve?  Possibly both!

Whether these, in such a situation, are bad things is another question. Perhaps the word ’sincere’ should temper the discussion for undoubtedly our soldiers, at least, appear sincere. They may be naive but sincerity does a lot to cover that. Nevertheless we may still have to apologise to them and their families for not having come up with something better to solve the terrorist problem – those who live to tell the tale that is. For the rest we’ll appease our consciences by putting little crosses in a public place. We must do better!

My Generation?

I’ve often contemplated the subject of hypocrisy on this blog but I want to veer off to something that is not quite hypocrisy but something not far from it.

I’ve recently been browsing an article on TimesOnline where the writer was considering the angry younger generation. He quoted a young man who wrote into the Guardian last week (sorry about quoting a quote that quoted…..) and who asked, “How is it that your generation feels it can continue to shaft my generation? …. I am 23  and have many friends who are unemployed due to the economic crisis caused by your generation.” Three times he spoke of “your generation.”

Now I realise that this is an ‘angry young man’ but this generalising through careless language and even more careless thinking does him “and his generation” no favours! Where does this crazy idea that a ‘generation’ is responsible for the woes of our society come from? I am not a banker and I am not a politician. I am a minor social commentator and over the past few years warned on blogs that if ’society’ continued as it was, we would be in serious trouble.  No, I am not up to my neck in debt and no I am not a rampant materialist who purposefully seeks to use up the resources of the earth.

Now there is no doubt that I do use up the earth’s resources – as does the young writer – because the retail industry is pouring out goods using up resources regardless of whether I buy them or not. Moreover I have not been part of this present government or previous ones that have ploughed this country into the morass that it is in. We do seem to be suffering from deja-vu as this government takes a pounding in ways similar to the Conservative governments before them.  I have no say over the way our government leads us and leads the economy – don’t tell me I can vote them out, I will if everyone else does as well. My one vote does very little on its own. Most of us feel powerless. Democracy may be better than the alternatives, but it isn’t always all it is cracked up to be!

But where did this collective ‘generational guilt’ come from? It’s the generation below mine, if not two below mine, that caused the havoc of last year, a generation a lot nearer the 23 year old than me. But even so, the actual causes of the financial meltdown of last year was caused by people who probably numbered a few thousand, not the millions of us who now feel the brunt of it. It wasn’t any ‘generation’, it was greedy and negligent representatives of several generations.

Stop sounding so hard done-by please and stop blaming the many of us who feel adversely affected by what happened, in some cases far more than this young man who has still got years to redeem his situation. The older generations are stuck with it, if you really want to think about generational justice.

But now this is a faith blog so what does faith and the Bible have to say about this?  We’re all hypocrites, play-actors, and this angry young man is no different from the rest of us. His mask is just anger that he tries to pretend  is righteous. Sorry it is not.

Dawkins’ Faith

Richard Dawkins is about to launch his latest shot in his crusade against God – The Greatest Show on Earth – not, he says, intended as an anti-religious book, yet still part of his anti-religious campaign. Today The Times Supplement printed an extract from this new book which comes out soon.

It appears to be a book founded on science and inference: “Given that, in most cases, we don’t live long enough to watch evolution happening before our eyes, we shall revisit the metaphor of the detective coming upon the scene of a crime after the event and making inferences. The aids to inference that lead scientists to the fact of evolution are far more numerous, more convincing, more incontrovertible, than any eyewitness reports that have ever been used, in any court of law, in any century, to establish guilt in any crime. Proof beyond reasonable doubt? Reasonable doubt? That is the understatement of all time.”

Now that language I find most interesting because it is exactly the same language that I would use to describe why we can be confident in our acceptance of the Bible and its veracity as a revealer of God. The only difference, I suspect, is that when I look back on the evidence for the Bible and use ‘inference’, I look at all possibilities before I arrive at a conclusion and Richard Dawkins considers only one possibility and ignores all others – well actually he doesn’t ignore, he denigrates!

Whatever he may try to convince us about evolution – and I am not anti-evolution (but wait before you rush to comment) – he comes at the subject, it appears from his past writings,  loaded with emotional, historical prejudices that are tantamount to a form of blind faith.  He believes on the basis of partial facts viewed, it seems, through the skewed eyes of atheistic emotional prejudice – and is utterly convinced he is right – just like the flat-earth extremist is.

Now if you think that is an unkind, unjust and unfair comparison, I can only say that that is how it appears to some of us watching from a slightly less emotionally charged position. In fact what I have just done is the same as he does when he denigrates those who wish to have open minds to other alternatives to atheistic, mechanical evolution, by equating them with holocaust deniers, which is what he does in the book.

Rather like some of Job’s comforters, he appeals now to questionable traditional figures such as some Church of England Bishops, who aren’t always known for their traditional beliefs. But let’s start from the opposite end of the scale, from the Biblical perspective, about which neither Dawkins nor his followers appear to have much knowledge. The Biblical picture of God is that He is both Creator and Sustainer of the world and interacts with it as He deems fit – both with people, animals and what we might call inanimate creation. (This is a tremendous subject, but it will have to wait for another time).

If we accept for a moment the general concept of evolution – and I have to say that although I am quite open to the concept of evolution, there appear to be a considerable number of question marks which throw doubt on the idea of ‘fact’ that Dawkins espouses – what is impossible to determine is WHY things happened (if they did) as the evolutionary scientist maintains.

If there is no God, then anything that happens is chance and given sufficiently long periods of time, anything can happen. Whether it is behavioural or genetic change it has to be purposeless. To speak of survival ‘instincts’ makes a major leap of faith, a questionable leap, I suggest. It prejudges. Why should ‘life’ want to ‘survive’? Chemicals don’t have that instinct.

Now if there is a God as revealed in the Bible then there is nothing to say that changes that have been observed have not been God-directed changes, i.e. it is simply the way He worked to bring about the present end result – IF those changes did happen.  Whichever way it is, it is a faith issue, and the starting point is whether you believe from the outset in God or that there is no God. Your end result follows from there. Thus I would suggest that Dawkins’ latest trend of trumpeting how wonderful this world is, is simply what the Bible has done for centuries before him – except it declares that it is not a mechanical accident, but the purpose of a benign and loving God.

Our applause, or otherwise, of Dawkins’ latest “controversial book” will depend entirely, I suggest, on our starting point, but it will be left to others commenting upon it to add light for those who want light.

Awful Acts of Mankind

There is no doubt about it, but we live in good times – at least there is a lot of good. Our society may be crumbling from the inside out, but there are a lot of things that are good about living in the early part of the twenty first century.

I was particularly made mindful of this when, on holiday recently, we went down an old disused coal mine and then went round the above ground museum later. There are some terrible things in this world, things done by mankind, that most of the time most of us are not aware of.  Coal mining, I concluded was one of those things.

Miners will tell you that it is considerably different today to what it used to be down mines. I can only go on what we were told by our guide, an ex-miner, but life as the family of a coal miner in the early part of the nineteenth century was nothing less than slavery! Miners at the face worked in a two foot high gallery hacking out the coal for their twleve hour shift, taking their food and drink down with them, working an living in virtual darkness.  Shifts were twelve hours. Accidents were common. Women and young children also worked down the mine.   Young girls were used to open and shut the draught doors in the the galleries and if their family couldn’t afford a candle, she would work in pitch darkness, often tied to the door to make sure she didn’t run away. The only light she saw in her shift was when men or women passing through came by with their own candles.  Yes, the mine owner provided housing but the workers didn’t receive money, only tokens to be spent in the mine owner’s shop for goods that were priced a third more than in the open market. There was no escape.

When the mines started to be closed down there were interesting conflicting views. On one side were miners saying these mines should have been shut years ago. On the other side were miners bewailing the closing of the pits because it was the end of the community. Because of the hardness of the life (the coal mining industry is the most dangerous industry) it brought a resilience and closeness in the community, seldom found elsewhere. It might have been a great community but I’m glad I never had to work there and have lived in a world of staggering ease by comparison.

There are countless of other ‘hard situations’ that could be cited both now and in history. We the human race haven’t done very well sometimes. Often we’ve justified it on a variety of dubious grounds.  Today we live in a (largely) different world, that is (mostly) considerably better yet we don’t have to look far to see lifestyles that are dubious at best.

In the major cities of  the world we have white collar workers who work long, tense hours for staggering amounts of money, workers who have forsaken family life, and permanent relationships. It’s a staggeringly different world to that of the miner: it lacks the physical hardship and danger – and it is clean! Both work, or worked,  long hours but the hardship of the miner seemed to create a strong community whereas the long hours of the money-driven lawyers, bankers and money makers of the city, seem to destroy community, and certainly family life.

In a completely different category we could perhaps include teachers in the world of wrongs, teachers whose hours don’t end when school ends, but who work on long into the evenings, teachers who often work under incredible stress at the coal-face of the breakdown of society. How many teachers simply live with almost permanent exhaustion and take it work granted?

Yes, these modern examples that I’ve cited would be scorned by the miner. These people have good salaries and expensive lifestyles. These people want for little, little that is except peace, quietness, family relationships and a stress-free life. Like the famous frog being slowly boiled to death, we tolerate these things and accept them as normal. May there come a time of civilisation when we look back and see these times as ‘the bad old days’. Is this how God made it to be?  No, it’s how we’ve chosen it to be – but we could choose otherwise.

God’s other book

I came across an interesting quotation recently – one I’d seen before, but it came afresh: “There is a long-standing tradition in Christianity that God wrote a Book of Works (Creation) as well as a Book of Words (the Bible).”

For the last two weeks my wife and I have been out in the midst of God’s “Book of Works”  The Psalmist wrote “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.” (Psa 19:1,2) and “The heavens proclaim his righteousness, and all the peoples see his glory.” (Psa 97:6). The apostle Paul wrote, “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Rom 1:20)

The clear declaration of those verses is that God’s greatness is obvious and should be obvious in what we might call ‘nature’ or ‘creati0n’.  I have lost count over these past two weeks of the number of times my wifre and I just stood and looked at the wonder of the country before us and just went, “Wow! That is incredible!”

Many years ago when I was having to write an essay with a strong philosophical base for part of my Teacher-Training Course, I chose to write about the existence of rainbows.  I’m reminded of that when I pick up Richard Dawkins’ book Unweaving the Rainbow. It is a book to show how wonderful creation is – without any God, it is wonderful. That is the message of it, I believe. it is a defensive book because in the preface he quotes from his colleague, Peter Atkins: “We are children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.”

I like that quote for it reveals all that is left when you take away God from the equation. Solomon, in his latter years, when he had drifted away from faith and lost sight of God, declared similarly, “Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher. Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless.” (Eccles 1:2). What is fascinating is that Dawkins agrees with that quote YET feels he has to revel in the glory of the wonder of this incredible world.  He too recognises the wonder of the world in which we live. You can’t avoid it – only try and ignore it.

But I noted some interesting reactions within myself as we gazed over tremendous vistas or stood in awe in an arboretum of nearly three thousand specimens of trees, shrubs & bamboos from around the world. The variety of size, colour and shape was incredible. We marvelled at such beauty.

But hold on! Why should it be that if I am simply the product of random time and chance molecular activity that I should have such feelings and such concepts. Surely ‘beauty’ is a mere illusion, a chemical reaction? Why should I feel refreshed and restored  after spending time in these environments where my eyes and (sometimes) ears were made accutely aware of the amazing beauty around us? We can rationalise it, categorise it and try and explain it, but it is something that still has the capacity to make all such intellectual exercise seem rather pointless. I was reminded of the poem:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

(William Henry Davies)

As I have stood and stared, I have found a response rising within me, “Lord, that is wonderful. Thank you so much.”  I feel sorry for those who have no one to thank.

Reiterating the Old

We live, we are told by some, in a postmodern world, where experience counts more than truth.  We live, the media tell us, in a corrupt world where politicians and bankers feather their own nests at the expense of the rest of us. We live in a world, it seems to many of us, that is falling apart at the seams.

Yet in all this nothing changes!   Many years ago when opportunities opened up for me to travel the globe and teach, in my weakness I cried, “Lord, what can I possibly say to people on the other side of the world, who have cultures so utterly different from my own?”  His reply was that their needs were exactly the same as those of the people around me in my own church and my own community.  And so it proved to be. As I travelled and spoke I found people with exactly the same needs, and it didn’t matter what colour skin they had or what sort of culture they came from.  They all needed to know that their sin was forgiven and that God loved them!

Nothing changes. The corrupt or self-serving politicians merely tell us what the Gospel has declared for two thousand years: we are all sinners and  when God lifts off His hand of restraint from our society, we are free to do outwardly what inwardly we have been thinking all along – and it’s not good!

I feel sorry for humanists and atheists who so often proclaim their optimism in man’s goodness, for life must be a real trial for them as every time they open their paper they see man’s badness being proclaimed. More money, more education, more technology, more of this or that, they proclaim – then man’s goodness will be revealed. The facts deny that.

How the Gospel of God is justified, day in, day out. Yes, we have great potential for goodness, but we squander it on self-centredness and self-serving.  We grab for ourselves and make the most of the moment – and then justify it, in our own minds at least, and we remain deceived.

Yet again and again, I see sinful men and women come to the end of themsevles and encounter the living God through His Son, Jesus Christ, and I see lives transformed for good. That is the Gospel at work, and it never changes, it is always the same – forgiveness and restoration and new life are always there for the taking. It is the only hope we have for the future. If we let the blind optimists lead us, we’ll continue to go down and down into a world of darkness and despair. Nothing changes! When we tuirn to God through His Son, Jesus Christ, then suddenly light and life pour forth and hope becomes real. Nothing changes – except when we come to God.

Easter Sunday

She followed the crowd. Why are they shouting like this? He hasn’t done anything! Well, no, that’s not true. He’s done so much. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.

The doctors had been no help; they hadn’t known what was wrong. I knew behind their whispers that people said I must have done something wrong, but it wasn’t like that. I didn’t know if I had done anything. All I knew was that I was ill and that they said I was dying. Then he came to my town.

My mother had helped me out to see what all the noise was about. We’d heard rumours. Then there he was with a big crowd around him, walking down the street. The crowd was noisy. We held back in the doorway and watched, but as they came level with our home, he stopped and turned towards us. He obviously said something to those with him, for they stood aside as he came across to us.

There was nothing special in what he did, and yet everything. He just smiled at us and said, “Hullo.” I found myself just gaping at him with tears running down my face; I don’t know why. Somehow… somehow, it was as if he knew, knew all about me, and still loved me…. He reached out and gently placed his hand on my head and almost whispered, “Be healed.” And then he was gone and we both stood there weeping and I was well. Yes, I know it sounds too simple, but I was. I was completely well. I can’t explain it, but I’m alive and well – because of him. So why are they treating him like this?

The soldiers are so brutal. They’re making him carry a large wooden cross. Why? Surely they can’t be……. They push at him and snarl at him. He falls. Oh why? They drag a man unwillingly from the crowd to carry the cross. They pick Jesus up and I see his face. There is blood all over it. There’s a crown made with long thorns that’s been pushed on his head, now askew, but the wounds from the thorns mean the blood runs down over his face. He can hardly stand, and then I see his back, or rather what is left of it. I am sick in the street. The crowd moves on and I stand there in shock. Why are they doing this to him? What has he done to deserve this? I remember the look as he stood before me. Here was utter goodness; it was that which broke my heart then – and now.

The crowd has gone. I am alone in the street. I must go. I must follow him. I must see where they are taking him. I follow the sounds down the street. Where is this all going, on this Friday?

I took a wrong turning. I found myself alone in the back streets of Jerusalem. Here there was silence. But then across the city came two stretched-out screams, just two. I eventually found my way to one of the gates of the city and there across the valley I saw three crosses being erected, three horrible symbols of man’s inhumanity to man. Even from this distance I could see he was one of the men being crucified. Why? What had he done except be good! I slumped down against the city wall and watched. The hours passed and eventually I saw them take the bodies away. It is over. I am past weeping. I am angry, no I am furious! Why? Why did they have to do this to him?

Two days later, when I woke on Sunday morning, something was different. No one else in the place where I was staying was awake yet, and so I quietly made my way outside. Something had happened! What was it? I still had that awful ache inside, but something was different.

I wandered down the street. There was hardly anyone else around. A woman scuttled by laughing and crying, but I hardly noticed. I came to one of the city gates and looked out over the graveyard area. I heard a sound of panting and two men dashed past me. Now it was my turn to be hardly noticed. I watched as they ran down through the olive groves to the grave areas. What a terrible place this is. Death hangs over it condemning all of us.

“I’m not there,” a gentle voice came from behind me. I started and turned and gasped. Again I found myself just gaping at him with tears running down my face. It was him. No, it can’t be. “It is,” he said reading my thoughts. “But why,” I sobbed, “why did it happen… and how are you alive?” Words were meaningless. I just sobbed.

“It’s all right,” he gently replied, “it will all become clear. The most important thing is that I’m here, so you can go home now and live and tell your family and friends what you have seen.”

“But they won’t believe me,” I sobbed.

“Not at first, but many will eventually. You’ll never be the same again now you know I’m alive. Go now.”

“But when will I see you again?” I managed.

He smiled, “When you come home.” Then he was gone, and I was never alone again.

Saturday

Today has been a day of silence. It is as if the city has sunk in its shame. It is the Sabbath, the day of rest, but we aren’t resting. We are in anguish and turmoil. I sat listening to some of the others earlier, silent for most of the time but every now and then breaking out in self-justification, all that is except Peter and Judas.  Judas, of course, is dead. There were one or two, “How could he?” comments but mostly we all feel so bad about ourselves that none of us feels like pointing a finger. Peter has just disappeared. I think the guilt of his actually denying the Master has almost destroyed him, but I want to say to him that we’re all the same. In one way or another, we all denied the Master.

It may be that it’s because it is the Sabbath, but the city seems strangely quiet. When we’ve looked out, there seem few people around even though there are hundreds of thousand here for the Feast. I think the events of the past week have been so contrasting that there is a feeling of anticlimax. A week ago Jesus was being welcomed into the city like a conquering king. A week later the king is dead. A week ago our hopes and dreams of freedom from the Romans carried us away. Today those hopes and dreams are dead.

Our women sit around red-eyed and every now and then further sounds of sobs are heard. The men are mostly silent, just sitting there, too afraid to go out, but too fearful to look at each other. A week ago anything was possible; now nothing is possible. There is no future. What will we all do? Who cares!

We sit there and unsuccessfully try not to let the images of the past two days run again and again through our minds. I keep hearing the baying of the crowd madly egged on by the fanatical hatred of the so-called religious authorities. I hear the screams of the thieves as they are nailed to wood. I see the silence of my Master as they set his body in the most terrible of execution processes that mankind has ever devised. His silence was awful. From his lips had come such wonderful words of wisdom and of life over these past three years, but now they are silent. He was like a lamb being led to the slaughter. I hear the jeering of the crowds that had turned against him, and I remember my own silence, and I weep.

Somewhere out there in the grave area outside Jerusalem, in a new tomb is a cold, lifeless body of one who had been so warm and so full of life that it overflowed to all those who came to him. But now the life has gone. Now there is no hope. We are a condemned human race! What awful things will God do to us for this two day’s work? Yes, I know, most of the world hasn’t a clue what has happened but if they had been here, they’d have been the same; we’re all the same. We may like to kid ourselves that we are better than the next person, but these two days have laid that lie to rest. Instead of receiving this light and rejoicing in the wonder of the days that we were privileged to be part of, we snuffed out the light. We prefer darkness to light for the light shows us up for who we really are. On this awful Saturday we sit in silence and try not to think – but we do.