Helicopter hovering overhead.

I'm in my back garden and there's a helicopter hovering overhead. I admire the technology, but find myself trying to imagine what it must be like to be in Gaza knowing that technology overhead could mean death at any moment. I try to imagine that, but, tbh, I can't, because for me it *doesn't* mean that. Limits to human empathy. That's why we need God. We need (even if we have to make him/her/it up) a God who is there with them. Christ in the rubble.

Wetting yourself

This post describes three events in which someone wets themself: pees in their pants. It was motivated by the third event described below which took place in Gaza in February 2024. The first event, about an incident from my own life, is me clearing my throat before I speak. It has no significance to anything. The second is something I read a few years back and, IMHO, is significant. But the third is huge. That people will do this to a five year old child, and that we, my society, my government, the whole charade of Western 'civilisation' is complicit. It changes everything. As El Akkad goes on to say: "How does one live, hearing the screams, bearing witness to the bodies? How does anything else matter"?

Fleetwood, October 1969

At 11 years old I went to boarding school. It was not a nice experience. I was a very timid and home-loving child who, prior to this, had never been away from home - even finding staying at school for school dinners too frightening - but my parents were living in Germany and so I was sent to boarding school in England. One day in the first week I wet myself. This is on the only time in my life that I recall it happening. I was on my own in the music practice rooms, didn't know where the toilets were and couldn't hold on. In 55 years I've never told anyone about this, though some people knew I had wet myself because they saw my stained y-fronts. 

Hillsborough. April 1989

On April 15, 1989, catastrophic failings of crowd management at the FA cup match at Hillsborough statium led to the deaths of ninety-six Liverpool football fans. Four days after the disaster, The Sun newspaper infamously published lies, blaming Liverpool fans for the deaths - something which was eventually, 27 years later, completely rejected by the official inquiry. One of the lies was that Liverpool fans urinated on police who were trying to help victims. In a later interview, one the survivors said that he had a full bladder after having been drinking before the match and that when trying to escape the crush, terrified, he had wet himself. So, yes, maybe he had urinated over people. Just think about that: the terror of that man among his dying friends and set it alongside the editor of The Sun, Kelvin Mackenzie, using the tragedy to further his career. 

Gaza. February 2024

"On the second weekend of February 2024, the decomposing body of five-year-old Hind Rajab, whom the Israeli military murdered, is found in a car with her family, next to a burned-out ambulance that was dispatched to rescue her. Later, and independent investigation will find 355 bullet holes in the car Hind was in. But early on, the story is reported in multiple media outlets as though it were a missing-pesons's case, as though this child simply walked out of sight and then walked straight out of this life.

She had called for help. She had picked up a phone and begged for help. She cried, said she'd wet herself. She was five years old.

What is the word for what she felt? Because on the other side of the planet countless people are cheering on this liquidation will wake up and say they too are afraid. But if these are equal and offsetting fears then the word means nothing. As does any system, any was of living, that abides it."

Omar El Akkad "One day everyone will have always been against this" Canongate 2025 p147

 

The Fall of Jericho: biblical genocide?

The guest preacher, Terry Boyle, at the Church I attend this morning (Sunday 17/11/2024) preached on this reading:

Joshua 5: 13–15  The Fall of Jericho

Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”

‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.’ Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, ‘What message does my Lord have for his servant?” 

The commander of the LORD’s army replied, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ And Joshua did so.

Boyle's key message from the reading was that Joshua achieved success because he was obedient to God. And, he said: 'We all know what happened next'. 

Indeed we do, and I remember as a child joyfully singing "and the walls came tumbling down". 

It was a great triumph for Joshua because he followed the will of God, and Boyle took it for granted that we would all rejoice at this story of victory in the history of the Israelites. That is indeed always how I remember the story in my Christian upbringing.

But here's what the bible tells us happened after the walls came tumbling down:

"They devoted* the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys." Joshua 6:21

*A footnote to the NIV translation on Bible Gateway explains that the Hebrew term translated as 'devoted' refers to "the irrevocable giving over of things or persons to the Lord, often by totally destroying them".

And:

"Then they burned the whole city and everything in it...." Joshua 6:24

Sound familiar? 

How did we deal with these passages when I read the story in the past? When singing the song you go no further in the narrative beyond the walls coming tumbling down, and you don't need to think about what happened next. From bible classes I have vague memories of worrying about killing so many people, but I think we read it as a story and which was no more real than, say, the Lord of the Rings. If it is 'just' a story it is an exciting tale! (The business with Rahab the prostitute sheltering Joshua's spies, Joshua 2, and Joshua in turn saving her and her household from the killing, Joshua 6:22, is weird but a memorable story.)

But now Israel is acting-out a modern-day slaughter of Palestinians and it is very, very real. Israel is destroying "men and women, young and old' and 'burn[ing] the whole city and everything in it' - but not just Gaza City, the whole of the Gaza strip. And people in Israel, and even more so Zionist Christians in America, are justifying it based on the authority of the bible.

As I said about Psalm 124, it is not good enough that churches use these stories without joining the dots. We can no longer stop at 'the walls came tumbling down'. We've got to ask about the slaughter.

What to do about Psalm 124?

Yesterday (29th September 2024) I was on the rota for reading at Church, and found myself reading Psalm 124, one of the lectionary readings for the day:

1 If the Lord had not been on our side –
  let Israel say –
2 if the Lord had not been on our side
  when people attacked us,
3 they would have swallowed us alive
  when their anger flared against us;
4 the flood would have engulfed us,
  the torrent would have swept over us,
5 the raging waters
  would have swept us away.
6 Praise be to the Lord,
  who has not let us be torn by their teeth.
7 We have escaped like a bird
  from the fowler’s snare;
the snare has been broken,
  and we have escaped.
8 Our help is in the name of the Lord,
  the Maker of heaven and earth.

I don't need to spell out the problems with this, in the light of the activities of the state of Israel over the past year, do I? 

In the past I wouldn't have worried. or not much anyway. The psalms are notorious for 'difficult' content ("happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks", psalm 137 v. 9) and need lots of interpretation. For example, I heard someone suggest that the infants being dashed against the rocks should be thought of as evil thoughts starting to grow in your mind: smash them before they become too big. For myself, I see the bible as a human creation and, like any book, open to criticism. We can contexualise all we like, we can interpret it in the light of modern understanding, but at some point we just have to say: no, I think that is wrong.

At the end of the reading, as is the custom, I said 'this is the word of the Lord', and the congregation responded 'thanks be to God'. I toyed with instead saying 'this is what it says in the bible' or something like that, but in the end I didn't have the courage to break with what we are 'supposed' to say.

But if this psalm is being read in churches across the world, at the very least we have talk about it surely? To put it crudely, is it saying that God is on the side of modern-day Israel? That the slaughter of 40,000 people in Gaza, and the bombing of Lebanon and the Yemen will succeed (is succeeding) because the Lord is with them?  

And, before you shout 'anti-semitism', I'm talking about the state of Israel, and about Christian churches. And, let's be clear, the most ardent Zionists, the most dangerous Zionists, are right-wing Christians in the USA. I don't know what goes on in most Synagogues, but I do know that large numbers of Jews would have no sympathy whatsoever with Zionism, certainly not Zionism which leads to the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians.

In my church, the minister's sermon was based on the New Testament reading* and made no mention of the psalm. I suggest that's not really good enough: we can't just have a reading which some people might read as giving religious cover to genocide, without at least saying something about it.

*Mark 9: 38–41. "Whoever is not against us is for us", and he spoke of the need for diversity and a range of perspectives in the church. This was fine, but could have been preached at any time. And, TBH, I've heard it plenty of times before.

Why create God? Thoughts at a funeral

I recently attended a funeral at the local crematorium with about 17 mourners. I didn't really know the deceased, though he was someone known to my wife, and I had developed an indirect liking for the man.

Two months ago a friend only had a couple of people at his cremation, but invited friends to think about him on the day, which my wife and I did.

Earlier this year I attended a funeral at my church of a member of the congregation. The church was packed with family and friends.

When Queen Elizabeth died two years ago, millions of people across the world mourned her death and watch the funeral on television.

Meanwhile, people all across the world die with no-one to mourn them. 

Are some of these people of more 'value' than others? Is the life of one more meaningful than that of another? Humanly, it is difficult not to draw that conclusion. We may say 'all human life is worth the same', but it is difficult, really, to believe it. 

So, we invent a God for whom it is true.

The Sea of Faith Network: Religion as a human creation

From 2025 I shall be editing Sofia magazine: the magazine of the Sea of Faith Network. 

Or, more precisely, I shall be editing the magazine of the Sea of Faith Network which is currently called Sofia, because it is not a forgone conclusion that it will retain the name Sofia. Personally I think Sofia is a great name: 'Wisdom' and a clever play on 'SOF'. But some network members have suggested that with the change of editor it might be appropriate return to just calling it "Sea of Faith" as it was before the present editor, Dinah Livingstone, took over in 2006.

Knowing that I am taking this on has spurred me into thinking about my faith, and especially exploring just how well I fit to the Sea of Faith Network. At the moment I would say: surprisingly well! 

My plan is to use this blog chart the exploration.

A sentence on the front page of the Nework website declares:

SOF is about exploring and promoting religious faith as a valuable human creation for this life

I've been working on the consequences of religion as a human creation, and that's what I hope to discuss in the next few blog posts. 

Here's a start.

One of the ministers at the church I attend likes to engage with the congregation as follows:

Minister: God is good
Congregation: all the time!
Minister: And all the time
Congregation: God is good!

I, along with some of the other old reactionaries in the membership have been reluctant to join in. I think that if I am honest it is because I feel manipulated that I don't like it, but someone else said they just couldn't go along with the simplistic notion: God doesn't always appear to be good!

Well now here's what I'm now thinking from a "religion as a human creation perspective". This mantra that God is good all the time is not descriptive: it is normative. We are creating/defining God, and we require that (s)he is good all the time. This makes a whole lot of sense to me. A God that is not good all the time is no use to us, so we define God as such.

 That's enough for today.

The rifle brought about the birth of these United States

 From Geoff Mann "Give your mom a gun" (LRB Vol. 46 No. 5 · 7 March 2024)

Guns are central to America’s mythology. In the patriotic version of its history, from an imaginary ‘revolution’ to westward conquest to cops keeping the streets safe, guns are the tools of America’s self-creation. ‘This country was born with a rifle in its hand,’ Philip Sharpe wrote in The Rifle in America (1938). ‘As a matter of fact, the rifle brought about the birth of these United States. The United States and the rifle are inseparable.’ 

"This country was born with a rifle in its hand" which is how the white colonialists established the Racial Contract in America.