Today I am resuming this blog after a three week break for a family holiday in France.

In today’s news I’ve been reading a remarkable account of the creativity of capitalism, affecting, in this case, the food industry.

The Two Sisters Food Group, owned by Mr. And Mrs. Boparan, has swallowed up such well-known brands as Bernard Matthews and Harry Ramsden, so that it can provide a significant proportion of the chicken market in this country. A recent undercover investigation at one of its production units has shown employees faking the kill-dates of chicken corpses and restoring to the production line some that had been dropped on the floor. All more or less in accordance with the best traditions of the British chicken industry, you may say. But there was one particular matter which caught my attention: some chicken bits pacakaged for Lidl, which had been returned as surplus, were repacked as Tesco’s Willow Farm Chicken, which claims that its chickens are reared “exclusively for Tesco.” A lawyer for the Two Sisters explained the apparent contradiction thus: “The Willow Farms brand is exclusive to Tesco, but the raw material is not.”

I had never before seen it stated quite so clearly that a brand is a name without material content. Willow Farm Chicken exists independently of all actual dead chickens, while its immaterial content refers elegantly to supposedly idyllic English farms of the past. When I buy A pack of Willow Farm chicken I should be content that although the material content may have been bred anywhere in the world for any supermarket, the brand has been bred exclusively for Tesco. Alleluia.

Surely this invention of the immaterial brand – like The Volkswagen which is utterly removed from the filthy air- polluting vehicle people actually drive, or the Conservative Party which has nothing at all to do with the public school anarchism which is destroying our traditional way of life, or the  Sports Drink which cannot be identified with the liquid that gives you a week’s sugar in one suck – is a triumph of economic imagination. The materials may be guilty but the brands are pure and innocent. This invention is reminiscent of Allah the merciful, the compassionate, who is not responsible for the history of the  violent califates, or of the God of Love who has no part in the crusades, the Inquisition, the wars of religion, the ethnic cleansing of the Americas, or the persecution of Jews. The brand separates itself from from its (very) raw materials.

Philosophically I guess this kind of branding is similar to the Platonic notion of the forms of things. Every actual dog in the world, whether prize-winning at Crufts or stinking of the excrement it’s rolled in, derives from the pure form of dog, the innocent archetype in the world of truth. No disgraceful behaviour by any material dog can spoil the eternal form of dogness.

In his simplicity, Jesus of Nazareth found it impossible to make this kind of separation. While others were impressed by the Pharisaic or High- Priestly brands of religion, he said that the brands would be known by their fruits, that is, by the material lives amd actions of their adherents. He explained that a sound tree could not produce bad fruits, nor an unsound tree good fruits. He could see no merit in a religion whose brand was beautiful but whose material content was ugly, comparing it to a whitewashed grave or a cup washed clean on the outside only.  Not content with this unsophisticated down-to-earthness, he went so far as to call the sophisticated supporters of high-end religion, “hypocrites” meaning “play actors” whose words had nothing to do with their own material lives.

Play actors of many times and places, including popes and imams  and ministers as well as successful capitalists, have regretted the awkward simplicity of Jesus, but I find it a helpful antidote to all kinds of smart branding.

 

 

 

The story of the bear bile trade is not likely to increase admiration for the human race. Traditional healers in China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan and other Asian countries think that bear bile has beneficial effects on human health; and popular culture promotes the utterly mistaken notion that it increases male sexual performance.  As a consequence the Moon Bear especially is bred, trapped, kept in cages, cathetered and deprived of its bile, for up to thirty years in some instances. In spite of some government intervention the trade remains legal in many countries, which means that an estimated 10,000 moon bears remain captive in China.

Captive bears suffer from being confined in tiny cages, with inadequate care if any, often living in their own excrement, and from a variety of painful invasions of their bodies to obtain their bile. Because they never walk their pads rot, their bones warp; because they never see the sun, their eyesight is poor, their fur is mangy, their resistance to infection is low; because they are ill-treated, they are terrified, depressed and angry. Their condition is a measure of the corruption of those who farm them. In my own country the condition of battery animals provides a similar measure.

As human beings will enslave, maim and kill other human beings for profit, it is unsurprising that they will do the same to animals.

The surprising thing is that some human beings oppose this kind of atrocity, and take action to have it stopped, while tending to as many of its victims as they can.

“Founded in 1998, Animals Asia promotes compassion and respect for all animals and works to bring about long-term change. We work to end the barbaric bear bile trade, which sees over 10,000 bears kept on bile farms in China, and, according to official figures, about 1,200 suffering the same fate in Vietnam. Animals Asia has rescued over 500 bears, caring for them at its award-winning bear sanctuaries in China and Vietnam.”

“Animals Asia also works to end the trade in dogs and cats for food in China and Vietnam, and lobbies to improve the welfare of companion animals, promote humane population management and prevent the cross border export of “meat dogs” in Asia.”
“In addition, Animals Asia campaigns for an end to abusive animal practices in zoos and safari parks in Asia, and works closely with governing authorities to improve animal management and increase awareness of the welfare needs of captive animals.”

The founder of this charity is Jill Robinson, who was moved by an encounter with a captive moon bear to campaign in the conviction that animal welfare is human welfare and vice versa. She is passionate and rational, personal and political, in her advocacy for animals. This has led to her establishment of a humane, intelligent and inclusive movement for animal welfare in Asia, which can operate even within authoritarian regimes that are averse to criticism.

The bible has provided animal lovers with a vision of comprehensive justice:

Isaiah 11English Standard Version (ESV)

11 There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
2 And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and might,
the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
3 And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide disputes by what his ears hear,
4 but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
5 Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist,
and faithfulness the belt of his loins.

6 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;
and a little child shall lead them.
7 The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra,
and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.
9 They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

The wise rule which provides equal justice for human beings, creates at the same time peace amongst domestic and wild animals, amongst whom a human child will be safe. This vision which goes beyond what seems historically possible is nevertheless anchored in the history of Israel and its rulers. It has inspired other visionaries, notably the American Quaker painter Edward Hicks.

Animals Asia shows a number of practices common to movements for justice that work in the spirit of this vision:

1. It is founded in truth and respects facts.

2. It has clear aims.

3. It believes that other human beings will respond to its vision and therefore communicates with people in all parts of the world.

4. It believes that governments can be influenced by programmes which are for the benefit of their peoples and lands.

5. It knows that although legislation “cannot make my neighbour a good man, at least it can stop him lynching me” (Martin Luther King). The law can be a powerful force for change.

6. It is more concerned to talk quietly where it matters than to gain publicity through confrontation.

7. While it attempts to outlaw an atrocity, it seeks out present victims and provides them with loving care.

8. Inasmuch as there are genuine benefits derived from the cruelty it wants to abolish, it has worked to provide scientific alternatives.

9. Although it abhors injustice it has goodwill towards those who cause injustice.

10. It is realistic, but its hopefulness goes beyond what is real at the present time.

This kind of rebellion against injustices which are taken for granted was typical of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth – think of his attiitude to lepers amd possessed people-  and is one of the reasons he can be rightly be called a saviour.

I am just coming to the end of a part-time ministry in two linked congregations in the Angus countryside near Dundee. Over the five or six years of this association I have learned a great deal about rural life and its institutions, and about farms and farmers. Having spent all of my previous working life in cities, I had a great ignorance and considerable prejudices about the countryside, both of which have been reduced by my recent experience. When I add that the countryside in question is the lovely green strath on the southern side of the Sidlaw hills, readers will understand when I state that I feel blessed to have been given this opportunity, in my relatively advanced years.

The true blessing has been the new friendships made and sustained. Because rural living often puts people at a greater distance from each other than urban living does,  many rural dwellers put a great value on the friendships which prevent loneliness and build up community. Hospitality which fosters friendship is still recognised as a virtue in such communities. Readiness to share food, conversation, concerns and individual experience enables friendship, and although in many cases for me these friendships remained tentative rather than fully established, they involved a genuine sharing of goodwill. To know that another person with a different experience of life, likes you and values your liking of them, enhances your life and your ability to live well. Some of the pleasures of friendship – the times of mutual discovery, the fact of mutual trust, for example – are similar to those of being in love, but without the dynamics of sexual passion. There is an easiness about friendship which we do not find in sexual love. Many couples say however that in a long relationship, friendship between them has developed alongside sexual love and become as important.

Some of the friendships I have made will survive the end of my ministry, but many will not, which is why it can seem like an event of mulitiple bereavement, with losses which seriously diminish the wealth of my daily experience. I do not find this topic much addressed in the literature about retirement or changing jobs. Perhaps most people assume that friendships established through work will survive outside it. If so I consider they will be wrong as least as often as they are right. Nor is friendship itself a great topic of discussion in say, the popular press, unlike sex, while the endlessly discussed so-called friendships on Facebook are nothing of the sort.

Are there great works of art about friendship? Ancient literature abounds with friendships between warriors, Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, Roland and Oliver. Shakespeare of course recognised it in Hamlet and Horatio, Brutus and Cassius, although these are not the main matter of the plays in which they appear. Boswell’s biography of Dr. Johnson is at one level a celebration of his hero’s friendships. Mark Twain beautifully delineates friendship between Huck and Jim. Sherlock and Watson  are friends. Friendships abound in great modern masterpieces by Proust and Joyce, but in none are they the ruling subject. Perhaps the only great work of art in which a friendship is the true subject is Tennyson’s In Memoriam, where the friend has died. The poem eventually establishes the experience of friendship as constitutive of the poet’s intellectual, emotional and spiritual identity. Faced with his friend’s death and the absence of any coherent comfort, the poet says, “The heart stood up and answered, ‘I have felt.'” The experience of friendship allows Tennyson to hold to the worth of human existence even when everything else seems to reduce it to insignificance.

Perhaps in theology this sustaining human relationship has been underused as a model for understanding God. Set against the absolute use of the word love, friendship may look more ordinary. In Paul’s classic summary of the experience of God, “the GRACE of the Lord Jesus Christ, the LOVE of God and the FELLOWSHIP of the Holy Spirit” maybe we should look again at the last component, in Greek KOINONIA, often used of commercial collaboration, meaning shared enterprise,

shared life. We might define it as friendship within a common project, which for Paul means the down-to-earth shared friendship amongst members of the believing communities enabled by the shared friendship of God, extended to the newcomer and the stranger, and even to the persecutor. In this way we could give friendship its true place in the story of God: acknowledging the creative and sustaining parental love, marvelling at the passionate longing of the divine lover, we can enjoy the companionship of the divine friend, who shares our journey, and gives us other dear companions on the way. Maybe after all, the Bible is the great work of art about friendship.

 

 

Today the religions of Barcelona held their own event of opposition to last week’s atrocity. All Christian denominations, including Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, came together with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Taoists and Bahais to asssert their common allegiance to the community of Barcelona, described as a unity of diverse people with diverse beliefs. They affirmed each other’s separate identity as a vital contribution to the richness of civic experience in Barcelona. Because the attackers had been young, the event included young women and men, encouraging them to believe that a robust personal identity was not contrary to a shared communal identity but rather a constituent of it; and to resist any attempts to found personal or group identity on hatred of others.

Civic and national leaders were present but were given no special prominence and there were no allusions to the Catalan independence issue. Religious people were saying that their very different traditions of faith and practice were directing them on the one hand to the welfare of their neighbours, and on the other to humility in holding their own versions of ultimate truth. Not that they doubted these truths, but rather that as they expressed them most clearly, they realised they pointed beyond themselves towards what cannot be expressed, but can be worshipped and lived. The great Taoist teaching is relevant: “The Way that can be (fully) told is not the Eternal Way.”

These people were not saying that their different faiths could be mingled in some super-religion that would take over from them; they were saying that their traditions had nurtured them and enabled them to keep moving into what T S Eliot called “another union, a deeper communion.” But maybe that phrase suggests a mysticism which was foreign to this gathering, whose focus was upon friendship, solidarity, wisdom and justice.

I only have a Spanish news report of this event which perhaps will not be picked up by worldwide media; but it struck me as both admirable and unusual. In a confusing world of myriad available points of view the temptation of some form of fundamentalism is strong. People, perhaps especially young people who are unsure of their identity, along with those whose identity has been shamed or abused, grasp eagerly at any certainty that promises them dignity. Many religious, as well as political leaders, understand this opportunity and gain power by offering their own form of certainty. Such brute certainty is not only a contribution to sectarian hatreds, it is also a denial of the sublety of all the great religions, who know that their good truths are not the whole truth.

A freindly act of witness to an inclusive civic culture which nurtures vibrant individual identities, gives religion a much-needed good name.

Yesterday, in every continent of the earth, some human beings showed their care for the planet, by treating its creatures with respect and its soils and waters with wisdom.

Yesterday, in every nation of the earth, some political leaders did their duty according to their best knowledge, putting the good of their people above concerns of personal advantage or reward.

Yesterday, in every farmland of the earth, some farmers put long-term fruitfulness above short-term profit.

Yesterday in every industry of the earth, some workers united to secure their common good rather than individual safety.

Yesterday in every science in the earth, some scientists cooperated in testing and re-testing their discovery rather than rushing to announce sucesss.

Yesterday in every university of the earth, some scholars found happiness in handling the material of their discipline, rather than worrying about research ratings.

Yesterday, in every city of the earth, some strangers met and laughed together rather than being suspicious of one another.

Yesterday in every school in the earth, some pupils learned something new and were delighted, rather than aiming at test results.

Yesterday in every church, mosque, synagogue, temple, ashram, and sanga of the earth, some people looked for truth rather than religious dogma.

Yesterday, in every village of the earth, some residents reached out in compassion to a brother or sister in need, rather than giving them the body swerve.

Yesterday, in every street in the earth, some families lived together with love and commonsense, rather than tearing themselves apart.

Yesterday throughout the earth, some prejudiced people began to find difference a source of interest rather than threat.

Yesterday, over every land on earth, the rain fell and the sun shone on the just and the unjust without discrimination.

On the whole, it wasn’t a bad day, with many happenings that would please the heart of Jesus.

But all our mass media have focused only on the terrorist attacks in Spain, because they use them for self- aggrandisement, for adding to their sense of importance as they obsessively chew over the minutiae of disaster even before the facts have been established. All media outlets are to some extent guilty, but the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme is especially offensive as its teams of clever boys and girls ask their smart questions and interrupt with their egregious theories the foreign officials who are good enough to speak to them in English.

All of which leads many of us to imagine we live in an evil and frightening world.

We should remind ourselves how selective our news is.

Our mass media don’t want to know about Jesus (or Mohammed or the Buddha or Moses) but choose, as Jesus’ opponents did, Barabbas, the violent jihadi. They ignore almost all the surprising good of the earth in favour of its repetitive evils. I’ve always prided myself on being well-informed and up to date with the news. Now I know that to preserve a truthful impression of the world, I must ignore much news presentation, try to feed on facts only, and dig hard to find the stories of human goodness that are buried beneath the rubbish of 24/7 coverage.

A week of reading the mutual threats of Donald Trump and Kim Jung-un have convinced me that a song excluded by Randy Newman from his recent album “Dark Matters” should be dusted down and released as a single, which would surely rise immediately to the top of the world charts:

My dick’s bigger than your dick / It ain’t braggin’ if it’s true / My dick’s bigger than your dick / I can prove it too / There it is! There’s my dick / Isn’t that a wonderful sight? / Run to the village, to town, to the countryside / Tell the people what you’ve seen here tonight. CHORUS: What a dick! What a dick! What a dick! 

Newman excluded it on grounds of its vulgarity, but it remains a beacon of discretion when compared with the traded insults of the two great leaders. The North Korean people at least have an excuse for being ruled by a nutter in that he is a ruthless dictator who’s not about to ask their permission, whereas the USA actually chose its nutter. This suggests that the nuttiness coefficient of the US population is higher than that of the North Korean.

The tendency of the North Korean leadership to magnify any of their pathetic achievements – they have never succeeded in feeding their population for example- would be comic if they weren’t messing about with stuff that could make Hiroshima look like a smack on the wrist. As it is millions of North Koreans bow down before the splendour of their huge shiny penile weapon. The USA is more sophisticated of course, merely promising to unveil fire and fury of a size never before witnessed in the world. The sooner the white vans arrive to remove these leaders to institutions where they will be well looked after, the better. Because if they are in charge too long there may be no vans, no institutions, no people, no life.

Well not quite no life, as I’ve learned from the public discussions about who or what might survive a nuclear war. Here it’s also clear that size matters: only the smallest of creatures have much chance of eating breakast the day after a nuclear attack. Connoisseurs of this topic know that the common cockroach is often said to be ideally suited to survival due to its tolerance of radiation, but recent thinking favours the Tardigrade or Water Bear, a minute creature 2mm in length that can survive all extreme events – flatten it, eat it, freeze it, boil it, irradiate it, it always comes back smiling. Then again, animals however small are nothing like as perfect survivors as bacteria, which due to the speed with which they can share their genes, are able to adapt with astonsihing speed to almost any environment. Such humble creatures with their ability to absorb punishment and gift of communal adaptation are much more likely to survive disaster than complicated macro-organisms like homo sapiens.

Amongst human beings of course, presidents and prime ministers however stupid and culpable are much more likely to survive nuclear conflict than the most intelligent and moral citizen, hidden as they will be in protective bunkers. It seems to me an elementary requirement of living with nuclear weapons, that those who can decide to use them should be sure that they will have no special protection at all. That might concentrate their minds.

Jesus advised his followers to become small, like children, if they wanted the best life. He taught them that although in the way of the world, leaders lorded it over their subjects, they must have very different communities in which the true leaders were servants to the rest.  This strand of Jesus’ teaching is not unimportant, as it was his readness to identify with the small people of his society that so aroused the enmity of the big battalions who got rid of him. He would have known the critical words of the prophet Zechariah about the rebuilding of the ruined temple: “not by might or power but by my spirit,” says the Lord, along with the prophet’s question about the tentative beginnings of restoration, “who can despise the day of small things?”

The day of small things may be the day of the tardigrade and the microbes who survive the nuclear war unleashed by leaders who wanted to prove theirs was bigger than his.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is a GLENCOE product named after the glacial trough in the west highlands of Scotland, which is itself the product of evolution, which is in turn, as far as I believe, the product of God. In fact, I would also quite like to advertise my thinking as GLENCOE theology, a branch of GLENCOE Christianity, as practiced by the International Church of GLENCOE Jesus.

Sane readers may be wondering why I should indulge in this repetitive naming of a west of Scotland glen with a sad history, and the answer is, because I can. Because the glen in question is part of my native land, a known and named location on planet earth, I feel justified in using it as the name of this intellectual product, if I want. I recognise that others may do the same, but if I don’t complain about them , why should they complain about me? Yes, there might be arguments if I use the mountain names Fuji or Everest, but unless my product is competing with products marketed under those names, surely I cannot be stopped selling my theology as Fujiism or my paintings as Fuji images?

That would not be the view of the National Trust Of Scotland, which has threatened a small Scottish manufacturer of outdoor clothing with legal action for calling one of its jackets, “Glencoe” because as the legal owners of Glencoe, the NTS has registered its name as a trade mark. Over the years the NTS has done some strange things, but this is one of the strangest yet. As part of its mission of keeping this historic glen for the people of Scotland and the world, it has turned the very name of the place into a trade mark which can only be used to market NTS trash in its visitor centres. Of course I recognise that it has done so because it can. The registration of a commercial product under a name taken from nature can, it thinks, stop other people from doing the same. If this is the law, which I doubt, the law is an ass, and requires sorting out.

How could the act of registering a name which belongs to all the world somehow restrict that ownership to a body which happens to own a large number of stately homes, gardens and land, on behalf of the nation? I have a love/hate relationship,with the  NTS, of which I have been a member for many years. I support its preservation of historic buildings and landscapes, while cringing in embarrassment at the biased narratives it has often peddled as history. Its care of the precious hills of Glencoe has been exemplary, but that does not entitle it to sole possession of its name.

Social critics have used the unlovely word, “commodification” to describe the process whereby elements of nature or of human invention from birds and bees to Winston Churchill and the Ode to Joy are capitalised as objects to be traded. Many people will see this as a crime against nature and humanity, but I see it also as an insult to the Creator.

The poetic theology of the book of Genesis, one of the subtlest of all theologies, insists that the earth belongs to humanity only as a gift from the Creator, and that with the gift comes the responsibility of looking after all its creatures. Great kings and Pharaohs are seen as laughable when they imagine themselves as outright owners of what belongs to God and God’s creatures. The NTS does care for land and creatures and should not be sidelined by a naff commercialism into commodifying the land it owns.

Public interest has already led to it adopting a more reasonable tone over the Glencoe jacket, but it should be aware of the number of Glencoe bandits who are ready to swamp their markets with Glencoe toothpicks, cookies, craft beers, umbrellas, sex toys, bicycles, triple glazing, pop ballads and ….. blogs.

PS

I hope that the manufacturers of the Glencoe Jacket will not take me to court when I market my superannuated oilskins, the thing with holes, as a Glencoe Special Issue.

 

My alien pal Marty is normally a stand -out, what with his green skin, lizard-like hands and chinless head, but suitably dressed he merges seamlessly into any gathering of the European aristocracy, of which there were many representatives at the Passchendaele remembrance ceremony earlier this week. I had urged him not to go, but he was anxious to understand one of the great tragedies of earthling history, which he had come here to study.

I accompanied him at a discreet distance, not wishing to participate, if truth be told, but concerned about his safety, knowing that if he was outed, he might well be dispatched as a Bosche come back from the dead. The solemn remembrance of half a million dead young men was of course moving, and I was in a sombre mood when later I asked Marty what he’d thought of it . He snorted – something that Martians are good at with their long noses – and told me he is still puzzled. When I pushed him further, he said,”Your Prince Charles was insisting on the courage of the soldiers who fought here, but I am more impressed by their stupidity.”

I asked him what on earth he meant.

“Well, even a Martian can tell that there was no good reason for this war, if there can  ever be a good reason for war. In this  case there were just a lot European empires jostling for the best chances to dominate the world. Most of those who assisted the slide to war had no idea of new technologies or the carnage they could cause. Most young men had no quarrel with the young men on the other side, yet they let themselves be ordered to kill them by a amall class of patriotic cretins. And you wonder why I call them stupid!”

I sighed at this, and made some important points:

1. The young men had no source of information independent of government propaganda.

2. Although some volunteered, most were conscripted, amd would have gone to prison for refusing to fight.

3. The popular press, the mass of citizens and the churches, were enthusiastic supporters of the war, and of the young men who fought it. Anyone with other opinions was very unpopular.

4. For these reasons it was unfair to label that generation of young men as stupid.

“Tell me things I don’t know, baby,” he said in that irritating Martian drawl. “All you’re saying is that they belonged to a stupid society. A society too stupid to have a press that thinks and writes independently; too cowed to oppose the crime of conscription; too conventional to have churches that might stand up for the views of Jesus. No, it’s true the young men were failed by their culture and their religion, but still, they knew what they were being asked to do: to go and kill other young men who were in the same position as themselves. By the time of Passchendaele, many of them had heard some facts from older men about the nature of the conflict, yet still they went like lambs to the slaughter, because they hadn’t learned to think for themselves or to organise together against the establishment. I am not saying these men were thick and unable to think, but that they were stupid because they did not use the brains they had. Those who have youth and strength and vitality and courage will always be used by older people who lack these qualities but possess cunning, unless they have a humane ethos and learn to question any departure from it.”

I said that Plato believed that justice in the soul and in society were mutually dependent and mutually reinforcing, but never succceeded in explaining how either could grow from the corrupt souls and societies which exist now.

“Surely I don’t have to tell a minister of Jesus that the transformation of individuals and societies grows from those who act now as if true justice has arrived, making its goodness available to them. They do not wait for the perfect society to arrive but create communities of justice in the midst of the world as it is. And they educate their children to think and act in the same conviction. If your church had been doing its job in 1914, in Germany and in Britain, many lives might have been saved.”

I observed sourly that whenever the church had acted in the way he was describing it had been savagely persecuted and the lives of many of its members had been lost.

“Not lost,” he said, “but given as a sign that people can do justice even in the worst circumstances. This is something I did not know until I came to your troubled planet.”

I thanked him for recognising some value in our civilisation, but wondered why he had not learned these things at home.

“You think I’m here on a kind of gap year,” he replied. “That is not the case. I’m here because our civilisation has been much like yours, and our violence to each other and our planet has left no more that a hundred of us alive today: we are a threatened species. I am here, as numbers of my colleagues are amongst other intelligent species, to learn what wisdom we can for a new start. Your Jesus had extraordinary wisdom. I don’t understand why he is not more valued, especially by his church. I will take his wisdom back to Mars, but maybe you could use it to prevent more Passchendaeles, and more memorials that praise the dead rather than damning the causes of their deaths.”

I wondered aloud if there might be room for homo sapiens on Mars if things went badly on this earth.

“It’s impossible now to survive on Mars without peaceful cooperation,” he told me. “Maybe you’re not quite ready?”

My spanish language science feed, which I use to improve my Spanish rather than my science, gave me this week the intriguing headline, “DNA Sequencing contradicts God.” When I investigated, I found that archeologists who had managed to sequence the full genome of Canaanite bodies from Sidon around 1500 BCE, showed that they were the direct ancestors of the present day population of Lebanon. Which makes good sense, except the bible tells us that Joshua, acting on the explicit instructions of God, exterminated the “Canaanites” completely around maybe 1400BCE.

Now good Biblical scholars had already noted their suspicion that the Joshua story is a load of unhistorical mince provided by much later writers for propaganda reasons. On the other hand Richard Dawkins -whom God preserve- had quite correctly seen the story as evidence that the God of this part of the bible, was a prejudiced thug and ethnic cleanser, no better than Hitler or Ratco Mladic.

The reaction of church authorities to the new discovery is instructive. Catholic commentators have noted that it confirms the suspicions of their scholars, proving that the holy scriptures are best left in the hands of experts. Orthodox commentators have said nothing since their support of Orthodox Serbians makes ethnic cleansing a tricky topic; while fundamentalist sources in the USA have hailed the discovery as proof that atheist accusations from such as Dawkins are now disproved and the reputation of God restored. Of course, they don’t deny that God issued the instruction to smite the evil Canaanites, but he was using the language of vivid exaggeration characteristic of the semitic people, which Joshua naturally understood, so he was pretty relaxed about leaving the odd pregant woman or child alive, as he brought shock and awe to Canaan.

It’s hard not to feel that the scientific community comes out of this a lot better than the defenders of the faith. They have come up with useful evidence, while church representatives have responded with flapdoodle and bunkum, which only adds to the prevailing conviction in many countries that faith rots your brains and is harmful to your children even if they escape some of the nastier predilections of the clergy.

The issue is not trivial: the books of Joshua and Deuteronomy announce a divine sentence of death on a whole population. Can anyone who supports the doctrine that this same bible is the word of God, be accepted as a decent citizen of any modern society? Should anyone who believes such things ever be employed in positions of responsibility for others? Or should they rather, be offered to the kind of aversion therapy which they have in the past offered to LGBTTrans persons?

The issue of the accepting the Hebrew Bible as Holy Scripture goes back to the early church, which naturally enough wanted to maintain continuity with its Jewish origins, more particularly with its origin in Jesus of Nazareth, whose life, death and resurrection they saw prophesied in these same scriptures. In the third century, one Marcion described the God of the Hebrew Bible as an inferior deity to the God of Jesus and recommended getting rid of it and any other writings that didn’t match his view of true spirituality. The church, spotting Marcion’s dislike for all things material, rejected his teaching, but as time went on emphasised to the faithful the doctrines of the church rather than the contents of the Bible.

When Martin Luther, however wanted to challenge the certainty of the church’s teaching, he did so in the name of a superior certainty, the written word of the scripture, which could now, with translations into vernacular languages and the new invention of printing, be made available to all believers. The believer’s assuarnce of salvation, formerly offered by the authority of the church could now be found in the preaching of the true gospel authenticated by scripture.

Except of course that in a short time it became evident that different preachers offered a different gospel because they interpreted the scriptures in different ways. That dilemma has remained for mainstream reformed churches ever since, who have tended to say, “Scripture is completely authoritative, but the church tells you how to interpret it.”  This also, in effect, the modern position of the Roman Catholic Church. On the one hand fundamentalists have objected to this by holding every word of scripture ( in English!) to be spoken by God, and on the other, radicals and Quakers have rejected the whole idea of scripture as fettering the free movement of the divine spirit.

For myself, I treat the Bible as a unique source for understanding the life, ministry, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus, subordinating the Old Testament to the New, so that the former is only interpreted in the light of the latter. It is a human book with human authors and human all too human faults and errors, but when it is read in the community of believers with the inspiration of God’s spirit, it can provide genuine illumination. So with regard to the ethnic cleansing in Joshua and Deuteronomy I am happy to say, in Christ, “This is mince; it is wrong and evil.”

But if the scriptures contain evil, and are often defended by flapdoodle and bunkum, would it not be better to follow then Quakers and reject Scripture altogether. For if the Scripture does not give certainty, what use is it? My answer is that we have to abandon the demand for certainty: no certainty is available to human beings, only greater of lesser degrees of probability, established by looking at all the evidence. My own daily encounters with Scripture, many of which are recorded in my blog http://emmock.com express my sense of how I can understand and be true to the Christian tradition of divine love, revealed by Jesus, but I know that my understanding and practice are both provisional. They await challenge and correction. Nevertheless, I have benefitted hugely from my reading of Scripture; my life would be the poorer without it. The nourishment I have received from them is better than certainty.

By banishing these two imposters, Messrs Flapdoodle and Bunkum and all their disabling certainties, I can welcome the DNA analysis of the Canaanite genome as a contribution to the understanding of Scripture.

* mince, noun, Scottish vernacular; nonsense, possibly related to the insult, “thick as mince,” = lacking in intellectual acuity

 

I have been reading a very remarkable book “Fall down seven times and get up eight,” by Naoki Higashida translated by David Mitchell and his wife K. A. Yoshida. Naoki is what we have called “autistic” or what he calls “neuro-atypical.” In this book, which was serialised last week on  BBC Radio 4, he gives glimpses of what this difference means. For example, here is his outline of his thought process when his mother hears rain and rushes out to save her washing which is on the line:

1) A million pitter-patter-pitter-patter sounds. 2) I wonder, What could that noise be? 3) Mum cries, ‘It’s raining!’ Then the noise must be rain. 4) So I look out of the window … 5) … and watch the rain, mesmerised; yet as I watch now, I hear nothing; it’s like a close-up scene of rain in a silent movie. 6) Only now does the sound of the rain start to register. 7) I seek to connect the concept ‘rain’ to its sound; I search for common aspects between all the downpours in my memory and the rain now hammering down outside. 8) Upon finding common aspects, I feel relief and reassurance. 9) I wonder, How come it’s raining now? It was clear earlier. 10) Up to this point, my mother hadn’t crossed my mind. Now she comes downstairs, saying, ‘That shower was on us all of a sudden, wasn’t it?’ 11) I recall Mum running to the balcony to save the laundry. 12) How could she realise so quickly that it was raining?”

Naoki has no wired -up way of connecting the sound with the rain that produces it or of connecting rain with clothes getting wet. But he is not stupid. He can write a beautifully expressed sentence describing his dilemma.

If he experiences disconnection between sound and concept, he also finds huge gaps between his inner desires, wishes, recognitions, feelinsgs and any words he might us to express these. He describes how much he wants to thank someone for being good to him, and after great effort he says, “Have a nice day,” because that’s the last utterance he associates with gratitude.

I find his account of neuro -atypical life both terrifying and strangely familiar, for I have felt the perceptual gaps he exposes, although I have learned acceptable ways of bridgeing them. Sometimes I have loitered near the quicksands of naked experience before scuttling back to the safe shores of communal thinking. He is the foreigner who reminds me what is fundamentally human in my way of living.

I can barely imagine the terror of being neuro-atypical, the loneliness, the bewilderment, the powerlessness, yet I can relate to this young man’s story especially when it speaks about those moments when personal experience is at odds with what society expects. How much of myself have I surrendered in accomodating my thinking to the expectations of others?

The drawbacks of being neuro-atypical are clearly set out in this book without anger or blame. Neuro-typical readers are also introduced to everything positive in a life that initially seems alien. Naoki’s moments of pleasure, his recognition of relevant support, his delight in his own discovered gifts, are offered as gifts to the reader. How on earth has Naoki managed in the midst of so much pain, to be a grateful person? His explanation is revelatory:

“Try imagining you’re resident in a foreign country where you’re wholly ignorant of the language, but a person there is taking excellent care of you. Then, one day, along comes an interpreter who offers you a strictly limited period of time in which he or she will translate anything you wish to say. How would you use that opportunity? Would you really want to spend it mouthing off about the miseries you endure thanks to your feeble grasp of the language? Maybe many topics would spring to mind, but if you’re with someone you respect, I think the chances are high that, first and foremost, you’d want to express your appreciation.”

In response to this, I am Naoki, I am the neuro-atypical person, I am the one moving in worlds not fully realised, yet experiencing the blessed goodness and care of others. I am the one who lacks all knowledge of appropriate speech yet deeply desires to say, thank you. To whom? To the good people who have affirmed me and sustained me, yes; but beyond them to the One who put me here with all my inadequacies, to learn to be proud of what I am and can become.

I am very grateful to my brother, Naoki, for a painstaking account of his own life that helps me make sense of my own.

* Fall down seven times and get up eight” by  Naoki Higashida, Amazon Kindle.