Homophobia and the Church

On Tuesday, the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill passed its second reading in the House of Commons. While it's by no means guaranteed that it will become law, this seems likely.

The Bill received significant opposition from many members of the House of Commons, and from a number of religious groups, including the Church of England. That has led — as always happens in discussions of this kind — to accusations that the Church (both "of England" and in a wider sense) is bigoted, homophobic, irrelevant, out of touch and so on.

One way of reacting to this is to do the rhetorical equivalent of crawling under a rock and waiting for it all to blow over. And believe me, that's an attractive idea. But it's also a very bad idea, because the more the Church stays silent on matters that affect it and everyone, the more it cedes the ground for discussion. The Church believes — as do I — that it is bearing witness to the hope of the whole world, and talking about this kind of thing is therefore not only important, it is vital.

With that in mind, I wanted to put down a few thoughts about homophobia, and in particular what the Church's relationship is with it. First I'd better define my terms. When I refer to what "the Church" says, I will be talking about the churches that I know well; that is, the Church of England (or rather its official policies) and the opinions generally held by the kind of evangelical free churches that I know (I'm a member of a Newfrontiers church, if that gives you any reference point).

Homophobia is a little harder to define in this context, because it's a much more vague term than you might think. At its broadest, it can refer to any action or attitude that specifically disadvantages or disapproves of gay people or homosexuality. The definition I'll be using is slightly more specific, and reflects the common thread in most of the definitions I've found: "discriminatory acts or attitudes, born of a hatred or intense dislike for gay people or homosexual orientation".

OK then. So, now that our definitions are in place, the first thing I want to say is that the Church's position on gay marriage is not inherently homophobic.

Don't believe me? I really can't blame you.

To explain why I think this is true, let's look at how the Church has reached this position. First off, it comes from the concept that sex outside the context of heterosexual marriage (henceforth abbreviated SOTCOHM, because I'll be talking about it a lot) is incompatible with what the Bible teaches. The Biblical justification for this covers quite a lot of ground, starting in Genesis ("That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.", Gen 2:24) and getting mentions in the New Testament as well (see this fairly long passage from 1 Timothy). Other people have covered this far better than I can (here's a good and very positive article on the subject), so I'll simply say that the key point here is that if you're going to take the Bible seriously, you are probably going to find it pretty hard to square allowing SOTCOHM with that¹.

Disregarding the arguments put forward that basically amounted to "blah blah tradition grumble grumble redefining blah", the Church's position regarding same sex marriage was therefore this:

Biblically, SOTCOHM is not something I can support.
Marriage is, essentially, defined by sex².
Gay marriage would therefore be creating a context for sex that falls under the definition of SOTCOHM.
That's not something I can support³.
Therefore, I cannot support gay marriage.

Whether or not you think that reasoning is correct, please understand the absolutely key point here: it does not come from a position of hatred towards either gay people or their identity as gay. As such, it is not, in itself, homophobic.

This brings us on to the next problem, which is, of course, why do people see the Church as being homophobic? I think the answer lies with the cultural context in which we live, and specifically with the shifts in attitude towards homosexuality that have occurred over the years. These have been absolutely massive. It's not even 60 years since the British government hounded Alan Turing to suicide over his sexual orientation, despite his vast contributions to victory in World War II. It's less than 45 years since the Stonewall Riots, 40 years since homosexuality officially stopped being treated as a mental illness, less than 30 years since the UK had its first openly gay MP, only 13 years since the repeal of Section 28, and less than ten years since Civil Partnerships were introduced to this country. While the "ambient homophobia" of Western society is a long way from disappearing completely, it is receding at an immense rate, and particularly among the young it is near-unthinkable that anyone should be hated just because of who they happen to be attracted to. And to be absolutely crystal clear, these shifts are a fantastic thing, and should be applauded not only by Christians but by everyone in society.

The Church's problem, then, is that when it was surrounded by this ambient homophobia, opposition to gay marriage wasn't at all unusual. Let's contrast the above reasoning — which, again, regardless of whether it's correct, is not inherently homophobic — with the below, which definitely is.

Eww! Gays are icky!
Therefore I don't like them.
Therefore I don't want them to have the things they want.
Therefore, I cannot support gay marriage.

Or how about this one?

Gay people are scary and I don't understand them.
Allowing them to marry would also be weird and scary.
I don't like weird or scary things.
Therefore, I cannot support gay marriage.

The problem should be obvious — opinions which started out from very different places have produced the same result. As the tide of homophobia has receded around the church, suddenly its opposition to gay marriage stands out as unusual, and all that people can see is this opposition — which, because it has been associated for so long with homophobia, and because we have done so very, very little to correct this impression, now itself looks homophobic.

So we can blame it all on an image problem, which other people have to learn about? No. If you take nothing else away from what I'm saying here, at least pay attention to this: If the Church has placed itself into a position where it looks homophobic to all who see it, it has utterly failed to adequately witness to Christ's love. We can argue after the fact in blog posts like this one all we like, but when people look at the Church's opinions and actions, they are going to apply what is sometimes called the "duck test": If it looks like homophobia, and it walks like homophobia, and it quacks like homophobia, then of course everyone's going to think it's a duck homophobia.

So what can we, as a church, do about this? The answer should be simple. We need to never shut up about how much Jesus loves people — gay, straight, whatever. We need to be the most loving and welcoming people in our communities. We need to make it absolutely clear that everyone is welcome in our churches, that Jesus is for everyone, that there is Good News here for all people. When people think "where can I go in this community that will welcome me just as I am, will support and befriend me, and will treat me as a human being", if they think "the pub" before "my local church" then we have done something very wrong. And if this means focusing a bit less on how SOTCOHM is a sin, then I think we can live with that — everyone's already heard that message many, many times!

Finally, given that we as a Church have dropped the ball so badly on this one, we need to avoid complacency, and seriously think about what else we might be saying that can easily be confused with hatred. What are we doing that makes people feel unwelcome or unloved, which we haven't spoken about because everyone else is doing it too? And how can we learn to stop doing it, in order to truly witness to who Jesus is to the people around us?

Footnotes

1. This conclusion is, of course, disputed by some Christians! One argument I've heard is that there was no concept in Bible times of a loving homosexual relationship, and that all the warnings about it are therefore actually regarding abusive homosexual relationships. It's an appealing theory, certainly, but I'm not personally convinced that the text supports it — the Greek culture in which the early Church grew up was very familiar with homosexual behaviour of all kinds, and if this was really the intent of the Biblical authors I'd have thought they would have mentioned it in contexts other than what basically looks like a blanket ban on anything other than celibacy or heterosexual marriage.
2. Yes it is. Sure, "lifelong devotion" and "expression of commitment" come into it as well, and are very fine things, but Biblically speaking, the only thing that needed to be present for a marriage to exist was sex.
3. It's worth mentioning that this is also a leap of logic that not everyone's going to agree with — it's an open question to what extent one's personal or Biblical views on gay marriage should affect national policy, particularly in what is essentially a secular nation. I'm not certain myself how I would have voted on Tuesday if had been an MP, and I'm certainly happy to accept that the Christians who unequivocally support this Bill can be doing so from a position of loving both God and his Word.

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Earthquakes, Evangelists and Evil

What would be a proper Christian response to the recent events in Haiti?

That's not just idle speculation, it's actually pretty important. After a US General has suggested that the death toll may top 200,000 (that's considerably higher than the population of Newcastle, in case you were wondering), the world is in shock at what seems like a completely senseless tragedy. At emotionally fraught times like this, the church has traditionally been one of those places that tries to bring "meaning" (in so far as that's possible) to those situations which seems meaningless, in the hopes that people will be comforted.

That's not always a good thing, of course — it's entirely possible that what people really want from the church is an assurance that this kind of thing won't happen to them, that there was something different about those "others". Sadly, some people are all too eager to give such false assurances; Pat Robertson, an American televangelist, has blamed the earthquake on a pact with the devil that Haitians allegedly made in order to gain their independence.

I don't mind admitting that when I first read Robertson's words, my immediate reaction to them was decidedly un-Christian, and I'm certainly not going to repeat it here. (Not without a long disclaimer and a video of a kitten, anyway.) How someone so influential, who commands a large audience of Christians, and who is apparently well thought of by his audience, could spit out such poisonous rubbish is beyond me. Needless to say, that is not the right way to approach the topic.

So what can we say? Well, it makes sense to start with what we know and have always known — that God loves the world and the people in it. This is a theme that runs right through the Bible, from the world's creation (when God looks at all he has made, and sees that it is very good), through to its salvation, in which we find that God loves the world so much that he will send his Son to save it. This is a love so great that literally nothing can separate us from it. So whatever happens, we can be sure that God hasn't left us, and that he cares for us.

But if God loves the world, why do things like earthquakes happen? Although I'm going to have a stab at this, it's really far too large a topic to cover in a single blog post, even if I thought that I had a handle on it (and I really don't). People far more intelligent and wise than I am have spent years trying to solve this. Some people have even used the problem of evil as an argument against God's existence, often phrased in the form of The Riddle of Epicurus:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Personally, the point where I would take issue with this is at the second line, in which it is claimed that not consistently preventing evil is logically equivalent to malice. This doesn't logically follow, to my mind at least. There are situations in which permitting evil to happen is not necessarily an evil act in itself, if it allows a greater good. Take imprisonment, for example. Is it evil to deprive someone of their liberty? In a vacuum, you'd have to say yes. (Particularly if by that you meant imprisoning people inside a huge vacuum. That's definitely evil.) But if, by imprisoning someone, you prevent him from killing someone else, then you've done more good than evil.

"But wait!" I hear you cry. "That doesn't work, quite apart from the whole 'ends justify the means' thing which you appear to have completely ignored, even if it was for the purposes of avoiding long digressions like this one. If you're carrying out little evil acts to prevent big evil acts, you're presupposing the existence of big evil acts! That doesn't explain evil at all!"

And you'd be right, annoyingly perceptive voice in my head. What it does let me do, though, is lead up to what Wikipedia tells me is Plantinga's Free Will Defence (the whole Wikipedia article on the problem of evil is well worth a read, by the way). Plantinga argues, in a nutshell, that if God wishes us to have free will, we can choose either good or evil. Now, the fact that free will pops up in the Bible so very early (Adam and Eve chose to eat from the tree) indicates that it's part of the original plan, the one that God calls "very good". So, if evil can occur, this is only because a much, much greater good — the ability to choose to serve God, or not to — is its result.

Right, so we've reached the stage at which we can say that God who is both all-powerful and completely loving isn't necessarily incompatible with a world where terrible things happen. That doesn't go far enough as an explanation, though. Sure, we can say that murders and violence may happen, but that's because people exercise their free will and do bad things. It doesn't cover earthquakes, landslides, typhoons, or any of the other million and one horrible things that the Earth periodically does. How does this square with the image of a world that God made, and with which he was very pleased?

I think the key to understanding this is that we always like to remember the first half of the verse I linked to above ("God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.") and we forget the second half ("And there was evening, and there was morning — the sixth day.") Each part of the story of Genesis is linked to a particular and very specific time; just because the world was perfect then doesn't necessarily mean that it's still perfect now.

(I'm going to take a moment here to digress, and say that I'm not going to put forward any opinion, one way or another, on the extent to which I consider Genesis to be a literal, historical account of creation. That's a topic just as large as the problem of evil, and far too much ink and vitriol has been spent on it for me to try to wade in here. What I will say is that even if one takes the most metaphorical view possible — and I'm not saying that I necessarily do — there are still many, many important themes and valid bits of theology that we can draw from the book. In other words, Six Day Creationism isn't the only game in town, and it's possible to take just as active a part of the conversation if you're on one end of the spectrum as if you're on the other. Right now, I'd prefer to focus on the stuff on which we stand the slightest chance of reaching some kind of agreement. Sound good?)

What Genesis makes very clear is that although the world was perfect, there was a Fall. After Adam takes the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, God says the following to him:

Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.

From that point on, everything goes wrong. Adam and Eve get clothed in animal skins rather than the leaves they were wearing before, highlighting the fact that death is now a part of their lives. Adam has to work the ground before it will give him any food, which implies that before this it was working with him. Again and again the point is hammered home that just as humanity is no longer living in the type of relationship with God that he originally planned, so their relationship with the Earth itself has gone sour.

For the record, I should note that Pat Robertson (and those of his ilk) probably wouldn't disagree with any of this. Where we part company is the assumption that because the Earth's brokenness is because of sin, therefore any manifestation of that brokenness — for example, an earthquake — is in response to a very specific sin, such as the one Robertson attributes to the inhabitants of Haiti. I think this seems like a very odd idea. Should we assume that if we get weather we want, for example, that God is particularly pleased with us? No, of course not. After all, Jesus makes it very plain that the rain falls both on the righteous and the unrighteous. Although the Bible reports that God has used natural disasters as a form of judgement (the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah comes to mind), it doesn't remotely follow that any natural disaster is therefore part of such a judgement.

What's more, it's daft to assume that any particular sin you see is going to receive a visible punishment. Take the Roman Empire, for example. This was a society that far outstripped our own in terms of capacity for evil (bad though Big Brother may be, we haven't yet reached the stage of having people raped and murdered in public for our entertainment), and yet it never received so much as an errant asteroid.

Of course, all this ignores the number one reason not to blame particularly sinful Haitians for the earthquake: Jesus tells us not to. You can't get much plainer, really — Jesus is told about specific tragedies, and states in no uncertain terms that these were not due to their victims being unusually bad. He does add the very ominous warning "But unless you repent, you too will all perish", but he's not backtracking on his own words. He's not suggesting, for example, that even though people who have towers fall on them aren't necessarily sinful, if we don't repent we will also have a bunch of towers fall on us. No, he's pointing out that sin is a big deal to God. What we might think of as something inconsequential is something that has completely broken our world. It didn't cause a tower to fall, it caused our relationship with God to be completely twisted out of alignment, and that matters a lot more.

I've clearly gone on at some length here (hello, all two of you who made it down this far!) so let's draw things to a close. What is our response to the earthquake?

Well, first, don't blame the victims. I'm looking at you, Robertson. What the victims of this need to hear from us is not that God is not chuckling away at the carnage that he has caused, but that he loves them and cares for them.

Secondly, we need to back up that expression of love by actually helping them. If you possibly can, donate to the aid effort. If you're in the UK, I'd recommend donating to the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella organisation of several charities working together to get help out there. The Red Cross, or Médecins Sans Frontières, would be good choices too. Anything you can do to help is a good thing.

Thirdly, and most importantly, pray. We're living in a broken world, one which periodically does terrible things to its inhabitants, just as they do terrible things to each other. And we can't fix that, but we believe in a God who can. When we've done all we can on our own terms, the only thing left to do is to ask God to do all he can on his.

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So you'll be an Austrian nobleman, commissioning a symphony in C

One of the reasons I like having easy access to central London is that in a city this size, you'll always find a whole bunch of shops that would have real difficulty surviving elsewhere. What's more, the modular way London has developed (it's really just a collection of villages and small towns smooshed together into one gigantic whole) means that you're very likely to find entire streets that are heavily weighted towards one type of shop.

For example, Rupert Street and Berwick Street in Soho (they're end to end, so are effectively the same road) are packed to the gills with little record shops. I've spent a happy few hours in Cheapo Cheapo Records, poking through shelves full of CDs where I recognised maybe one in ten of the bands, and choosing music based entirely on whether I liked the name of the album. (Current front-runner: Hellogoodbye's Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!)

Go into any of these shops and you'll find a mind-numbing array of musical genres. Find a specialist shop for one of these, and it gets even more complicated; Wikipedia lists thirty different varieties of metal, twenty-eight of punk, twenty of country, the list goes on. Mix in all the types of music that isn't sold in these shops at all (the various flavours of classical, music-hall, opera etc.) and it just gets ridiculous.

However, I reckon that these splits boil down, in the end, to just one major difference, and it's not necessarily one that you'd expect. Rather than splitting the genres based on the types of instrument that are played, or by the age of the music, I think the best way to look at it is the underlying philosophy of the song's composer, and what they thought of the relationship between musician and audience.

Let's go back as early as we can to look into this more. In the Bible's Old Testament (which is pretty darned early), music is found in two places — people's homes and workplaces, and in worship. Even then, worship music is an extension of that found in the home — people wanted to express their love for God in many ways, so they took the things that meant the most towards them and deeply moved them, and turned them towards praising Him. In that way, music comes up from the people as a whole. Even when there are specific Temple musicians leading the people, everyone's joining in, in a many-to-many interaction. Let's call this the bottom-up model of music.

Even in the Old Testament, though, we see parts of the other model. In 1 Samuel 16, King Saul is being tormented by an evil spirit (from the Lord, apparently – there's an entire theological debate to be had in that verse alone, but it's one that we are emphatically not having here), and he gets David to come and play the harp for him, to soothe his mind. Here we have a one-to-one interaction: Saul isn't taking any part in the music, he's just listening to David. David is, essentially, the first court musician, someone employed by the rich and powerful to play music for a select group who do not themselves participate. This is the top-down model.

OK, getting both of those out of the first few books of the bible is maybe a bit of a stretch, but both models have definitely been in place throughout history. By the time we reach mediaeval times, there's a definite split. People in their communities create their own music for participation, and the composers and musicians are a part of the community. In the houses of the rich and powerful, however, musicians tend to be employed. As such, they are explicitly not part of the community. What's more, because the music they play is also bought (or commissioned), it tends to be created by a single person, then propagated out by the musicians to a non-participatory audience — one-to-many. Once again, it's coming from the top down.

Fast forward to the present day, and we can still divide musical genres into these two models. In a classical concert, the music has been created by a single person. It's played by a large (and therefore anonymous) group of musicians, who are controlled by a single, powerful figure (the conductor) and have little opportunity to put something of themselves into the performance besides competence. And the audience is generally not going to do much more than sit there. I'm not saying that it's going to be bad music — the audience may well be enjoying it tremendously – but they are definitely in a passive position of receiving the music rather than joining in.

In a rock gig, on the other hand, the composer is often one of the musicians, all of the musicians will have defined, unique and visible roles, they'll be facing the audience rather than a conductor, and the audience itself will be jumping around a lot more. One more thing — rock musicians very rarely play from music at a gig, whereas classical musicians generally do. The implied message is that the rockers are actively encouraged to improvise bits, to put their own spin on the song, and to just rock out, dude. This often results in a much messier performance, but that's the whole idea.

If you start looking at music with these models in mind, you end up splitting the genres in unexpected ways. For example, folk music may look and sound completely different to speed metal, but both are bottom-up. And a comedy-oriented post-punk band like They Might Be Giants might share certain similarities with Tom Lehrer's comic songs, but Lehrer is firmly in the music-hall tradition, which is top-down.

Although the two models are very different, there's not usually any conflict between them because they tend to be found in very different venues. However, there's one place where the two clash on a regular basis, and it's one that brings us full circle: the church. The heated (not to say vitriolic) disputes between those who want traditional organ music to accompany church services, and those who want contemporary guitar-based tunes, has very little to do with the choice of instrument and everything to do with the model of worship that people want.

A church organ is pretty much the only instrument that can't cross the divide between top-down and bottom-up. "Classical" instruments do it all the time (the trumpet is just as comfortable in a marching band as it is in a jazz quartet), but playing an organ is necessarily an isolating activity, and hence they don't work well with other instruments, making them necessarily top-down. And that makes them the perfect choice for those who see worship as something that is led from the front, handed down from on high. Making up a band from the congregation, on the other hand, where people bring along their own instruments and lead from the floor, is the natural extension of the idea that worship comes up from the people and is expressed in their way.

I'm not going to suggest that either model is in any way better (although you can probably guess which way my preferences go, given that I was reading the Guardian at lunchtime today and I'm currently listening to The Who). But it is an interesting way of looking at something that's not only been of immense importance to humanity ever since humanity was first...well, human, but is also an integral part of the world around us. Music's a powerful thing, a shortcut to our memories and emotions — it's worth thinking about to see how much of our society is tied up in it.

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Let's not even mention "The Little Drummer Boy"...

It's almost Christmas, so I have now left London for two weeks back at home, which are likely to involve more cups of tea and mince pies than anyone can reasonably be expected to consume, a bit of rampant commercialism, a few moments of old-timey feeling as the Queen makes her annual TV performance, and of course, Christmas music.

It will surprise absolutely nobody to learn that I get more than a little Grinchy around Christmas, and nothing brings that to the fore more than the appalling musical rubbish that gets wheeled out every year. (Well, except for Christmas movies and Christmas specials of TV shows, all of which aim for "heartwarming" and usually hit "vomit-inducing".) Record producers are consumed by a kind of madness, which causes them to add sleighbells to everything and inexplicably extend Noddy Holder's career. And lyricists, never the most stable bunch, decide that no-one's really listening to the words anyway, so they stick in a few references to love, peace and family and leave it at that.

One of the worst offenders in this regard is Johnny Mathis's 1976 #1 hit, "When A Child Is Born". This song was the only time Mathis reached the top of the UK charts, and frankly I'm amazed that it got there in the first place. It's not all bad, of course. Indeed, it starts out so promisingly with the portentous line "A ray of hope flickers in the sky". Despite the fact that scientists are yet to discover the precise form of radiation that transmits hope, it's still a great way to open a song.

The problem is that this line does rather set the rest of the song up for failure. If we're already staring hopefully up into the dark sky, our hearts filled with anticipation, there's not really anywhere else to go. And, as the rest of the verse unfolds, we begin our slow and inevitable descent.

The second line is "A tiny star lights up way up high" – OK, fine, but if it's so tiny, what distinguishes it from all of the other stars that are in this particular night sky, and why should we particularly care? Even more confusingly, the very next line is "all across the land dawns a brand new morn". Now, my physics knowledge is admittedly pretty shaky, but don't stars tend to appear just after dark? If Mathis has just spotted this tiny star lighting up immediately before dawn, this suggests that he has in fact either witnessed a far-off and rather short-lived supernova, or a satellite has just exploded.

The last line of the verse – and of every verse – is "this comes to pass when a child is born", which just puts several layers of incomprehensible icing on the proverbial cake. This being a Christmas song, the immediate conclusion to jump to is that Mathis is referring to Jesus. That said, nothing in that first verse has had even the slightest connection to anything Christian, which sends us off to the other conclusion, that it's just about children in general and how wonderful they are. However, this conclusion doesn't have a lot of support either, given that if it was referring to events that happen every single time a child is born, then (according to the global birth rate) approximately two tiny stars would be lighting up way up high every second, and there would be so many brand new morns dawning all across the land that there wouldn't be time for any other part of the day.

The next two verses continue in the same "hope in some non-specific child-related event" theme, mixing metaphors as fast as humanly possible as silent wishes sail the seven seas, walls of doubt crumble, rosy hues settle all around (understandably, given the brand new morns that seem to be constantly dawning) and no-one feels forlorn. By the end of them, listeners are going to be pretty convinced that Mathis is not, in fact, suggesting that this huge litany of events occurs at every single birth world-wide. And if he's actually talking about just one birth, then we start to swing back towards him talking about Jesus again, despite the complete lack of any explicitly Christian references.

And then we get the spoken-word section.

And all of this happens because the world is waiting
Waiting for one child
Black, white, yellow, no-one knows
But a child that will grow up and turn tears to laughter
Hate to love, war to peace and everyone to everyone's neighbour
And misery and suffering will be words to be forgotten, forever

Now, even if we ignore the fact that it has been horrendously insensitive to refer to Asian people as "yellow" for the past fifty years or so (did I mention that this was a hit in 1976? I did? Good), this just makes no sense whatsoever. It's pretty Messianic stuff, but suggests that the Messiah figure in question has not yet appeared, and in fact could come from anywhere. The last verse then gives us exactly the same thing ("It's all a dream, an illusion now / It must come true, sometime soon somehow").

The overall impression you get out of the song is that Mathis got about halfway through writing it with a Christian message in mind before suddenly getting cold feet and bailing out into "vaguely hopeful about nothing in particular" territory. In the end, what could have been a fairly powerful (if schmaltzy) song about the Saviour coming at Christmas fizzles out into a completely meaningless jumble of good intentions that doesn't actually go anywhere.

If you're after some good meaty Christmas music that not only sounds good but packs a bit of a dark punch, may I suggest either the Coventry Carol, which combines a frankly haunting tune with lyrics about the massacre of the children in Bethlehem, or What Child Is This?, which goes to the tune of Greensleeves and has the most graphically Crucifixion-related words of pretty much any carol ever? Perfect for a cold night, as you huddle round a fire and shut out the darkness.

Oh, and by the way – merry Christmas!

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Cat, meet pigeons.

We're just hours away now from the end of the incredible circus of the American elections. (And if you're American, and eligible to vote, and it's currently November 4th, what on earth are you doing reading a blog instead of voting?) It's been quite a ride, and hopefully soon we'll know, one way or another, who's going to become the most powerful man in the world.

The Presidential vote isn't the only thing decided by the polls tomorrow. There are Senate seats, House seats, Governorships and all manner of other things up for grabs across the country. And, in some states at least, there have been initiatives to use the fact that people are voting anyway to do state-wide referendums (referenda?) on various issues.

The most publicised – and most controversial – of these issues is in California, where Proposition 8 seeks to make it unconstitutional for gay people to get married in the State, or for their out-of-state marriages to be recognised. Literally millions of dollars have poured into this issue, on both sides, as emotions (quite understandably) run very high. It's the kind of thing you might want to stay out of, really.

Unfortunately, that's not an option. Like it or not, gay people are here to stay, and the question of what we do about their wish to marry is pretty nearly central in the issue of how our society treats them. Because of that, it's an issue that is not going to go away. More importantly, it's something that you can't avoid having an opinion about, because sooner or later someone will ask you what you think, and when they do a shrug and a "meh" just will not pass muster.

Why? Because gay marriage is an issue that cuts deeply, on both sides of the argument. To those who oppose it, it's part of their core beliefs, part of the morality that defines them. For those who support it, nothing less than a key civil right is at stake here, something worth marching for, something worth protesting about, something worth sacrificing time and money and even personal safety to support. That means that indifference, honestly felt though it may be, will be seen as horribly offensive by both sides. We're too far in for anyone to be able to opt out.

For Christians, the problem is even harder, because two conflicting principles are at stake. How do we show to everyone that we love them in the same way that Christ loves them, while also getting across that Christ is also in charge of the way we live our lives? Is there a way of truly accepting everyone, just as Jesus did, while at the same time holding firm to his more difficult teachings? And, cheesy quotation it may be, but what would Jesus do in this situation?

I'm once again going to have to wheel out my disclaimer at this point. For the most part, I don't bother saying "I think" or "I believe" on this blog, because if I'm writing it then obviously I think it or believe it, and there's no point in qualifying it like that. In this case, though, the issue is so complex that I cannot possibly claim to have the last word, and though I stand behind everything that I say here, your mileage will almost certainly vary. Oh, and I can tell this is going to be an incredibly long post, even by my standards. OK? Good, on we go.

One of the main problems when discussing this issue is that everyone uses the same words, while actually meaning a number of different things. In an attempt to avoid this, let's go through some of the key principles and concepts in the debate.

First, what do we mean by "marriage"? By that, I don't mean "is it one man and one woman", I mean "what does each side actually mean when they use the word?" Let's start where we have to if we're going to do the Christian side of the argument properly – let's go to the Bible.

The Bible talks about marriage quite a lot – the word (or close variants) appears 200 times in the NIV – but very rarely does it actually define the concept. It doesn't often happen in a church or temple, marriage vows are hardly ever mentioned, wives are sometimes bought, sometimes kidnapped and sometimes simply given away, men can decide to divorce their wives at any time (in the Old Testament, at least), polygamy is common (Old Testament again), and frankly it's a bit of a mess all round. Things start to get clearer in the New Testament, where we're told that leaders of the Church are to have no more than one wife, and that they are to stay faithful to her alone, but even there we see no sign of a ritual or ceremony.

In fact, the only principles that are always spelt out is that God really does not like it when marriages end. Very rarely does the Bible ever say that God hates anything (this is a notable exception), but Malachi breaks with this in an extremely blunt way:

"I hate divorce," says the LORD God of Israel, "and I hate a man's covering himself with violence as well as with his garment," says the LORD Almighty. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith. Malachi 2:16

It's pretty clear, then, that whatever form marriage takes, it's important to God and it shouldn't be taken lightly. I find it interesting that the kind of person who will write to the newspapers, green ink flying and frothing at the mouth, whenever a gay couple kiss on screen, will not bat an eyelid when adultery is routinely and casually portrayed. Which one has an entire commandment to itself?

So, from the Biblical perspective, marriages are a good thing, to be taken seriously, and otherwise not very well defined. What about from the world's perspective? Well, leaving out the "financial gain" and "spur of the moment" motivations, marriage means two things: a public declaration of faithful devotion, and a way of legally recognising a partnership that already existed in all but name.

Now, is it just me, or does it actually matter whether or not these are served by the same mechanism? After all, a Biblical marriage (whatever it is) is one whether or not the government says it is; likewise, signing the papers does not produce a Biblical marriage if the participants have no intention of seeing it as being forever.

This means that my answer to "do you support gay marriage" would, in an ideal world, be the following: legal marriage and religious marriage should be entirely separate concepts. The legal aspects (allowing people to hold property jointly, inheritance, visiting rights in hospitals, joint bank accounts, the whole shebang) should be available to any two people who want to use it. We already have a name for such a concept – "civil partnership". Currently this concept is practically synonymous with "gay marriage" in the UK, but all it would take would be expansion of its availability. Once a couple were legally "civil partnered", they could arrange whatever kind of ceremony they liked to recognise it in their faith, or among their friends, or whatever they liked. Immediately, Christian marriages would no longer be devalued by association with the marriages of convenience we see nowadays, because only people who actually cared about them would go in for one; likewise, supporters of gay marriage would have all the benefits, and could call it whatever they liked.

There are two problems with this idea. The first is that it'll never happen. The idea of a "church wedding" has become so deeply ingrained into society that it's seen as the "right thing to do", regardless of the fact that a lot of the people who have one have absolutely no intention of following Christ, and they will see it as being unfairly shut out. The second problem is that answering "do you support gay marriage" with "I want to split up the concept of marriage entirely" doesn't actually answer the question.

So let's answer it, in a very carefully-defined way. Question one – should churches bless gay unions and call them marriages?

There is no point in saying that you believe the Bible to be the word of God unless you're prepared to accept the whole thing. Doesn't mean you have to accept it all as literal truth, doesn't mean you have to understand it all, but it does mean that you can't ignore bits you don't like. And it is very clear that God does not approve of active sexual unions outside the context of marriage. Even accepting that marriage is very sparsely defined in the Bible, multiple verses – Hebrews 13:4, 1 Corinthians 7: 1-3, and Matthew 5: 27-28, to give a few examples – state very clearly that sex outside it is, to put it mildly, a seriously bad idea, and that includes homosexual sex. It doesn't mean that people who are attracted to those of their own sex are inherently evil, any more than it would for those who are attracted to a certain accent or skin colour, but it does warn against acting on that attraction. For this reason, I don't think a church should bless the union of any couple – heterosexual or homosexual – who are sexually active outside marriage. Welcome them as God's people, yes; love them as Christ would, yes; ask God to look favourably on their actions when you know full well he does not approve of such actions, no.

On to question two, then: should the state recognise legal unions between gay couples and call them "marriages"?

Although it's not an explicitly Christian question, as a Christian I'll have to answer it from that perspective. We've already seen that Christian marriages have very little to do with the world's view of marriages, hetero- or homosexual. Now let's add in the fact that you can't achieve salvation by what you do.

For any of you who are not familiar with this concept, it basically goes like this: humans are sinful. We all do bad things, not a single one of us is perfect, and because God is perfect, none of us is worthy to join him. Because Jesus was perfect, we can use his perfection and his sacrifice (when he died on the cross) to allow us to meet with God. This cuts two ways – nothing bad that you have done can disqualify you from becoming a Christian (because no-one was good enough anyway), but on the other hand no matter how good you try to be you can't reach God by yourself. Anything "good" that Christians do, therefore, is not an attempt to make God save them – it's a response to the fact that they have been saved.

This means that the kind of person who marches around saying that "gay people are SINFUL!" (I'm looking at you, Westboro Baptist Church – don't Google them, you'll just get depressed) is massively missing the point. Expecting non-Christians to abide by the rules that Christians follow is daft, because they haven't been saved. If they can't reach God by their actions, then "stopping being gay" (if such a thing is even possible) isn't going to help a lot. A Christian's focus should be on reaching out to the world and loving it, telling people that there is a way to God – let their lifestyles change after that point. Trying to make people sit up straight and smarten themselves up before you get on to the "God is amazing and he loves you" bit is not going to get you anywhere, and is completely antithetical to the way Jesus worked.

All of which is a pretty convoluted way of saying that because telling non-Christians to follow Christian rules is ridiculous, trying to change any kind of non-Christian marriage to look like a Christian one is also doomed to failure because even at best it will be a sham. As such, we can't try to use Biblical arguments to control a marriage that was always going to be non-Biblical. And this means that the question before us should really be answered in terms that don't directly use Biblical arguments. Let's look at the issues that fall under this remit.

Does calling a gay union "marriage" devalue heterosexual marriages? No more so than heterosexual couples have already managed. We already have marriages of convenience, marriages that last mere days, people getting married in Vegas because they were really drunk and it seemed like a good idea at the time; frankly, letting in some people who are going to take it seriously can only improve the situation.

Will gay marriages cause society to crumble? They haven't so far. The UK is yet to implode, as is California (yes, Proposition 8 aims to take away a right that gay couples already have).

Doesn't this open the door to people marrying animals/trees/robots/fourteen other people? No, because those people are generally known as "completely insane" and there's hardly any of them. Let me know when the first "man-dog love association march" happens in San Francisco and then I'll start to worry.

Does allowing gay marriage lead to a better quality of life for gay people? Undoubtedly yes. Allowing gay couples to marry grants them all the same legal rights as heterosexual couples, which is really quite a lot. Anything that raises quality of life without causing society to implode (see above) and which does not cause Christians to disobey God's laws (see further above) is a good thing.

So, really, allowing gay couples to marry (in a non-Biblical sense) has positive effects, and no negative effects other than people saying "calling it marriage makes me feel icky". To which the only response is, grow up. And does the measure on the Californian ballot force churches to bless these unions? No. Does it make Christians give their support to such unions? No. Does it help people? Yes.

Let's summarise. Christian marriages and non-Christian marriages aren't the same thing anyway. Non-Christians can't be expected to act in the same way as Christians, because they haven't experienced the same things. And gay marriages are explicitly in the non-Christian marriage category, which is what the ballot initiative is talking about anyway.

Let's summarise even further. Hi. My name's Phil. I'm a fairly conservative evangelical Christian, and I support gay marriage.

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Critical commentary on this blog post is very welcome. So long as it doesn't disagree with me.

When I was doing English Literature A-level, one of my teachers told the class about the school of criticism that states that the author is completely separate from their work. In other words, you can't speculate on what the author was thinking when they were writing; equally, you can point out themes and ideas that the author didn't deliberately insert. Personally, I'm not convinced. Although it can be really interesting to draw completely unintended parallels (for example, Jan Needle's book Wild Wood re-tells The Wind in the Willows from the point of view of the stoats and weasels, turning it into a Marxist allegory, which in turn points out the unthinking aristocratic assumptions of the original), I think it's a waste to just throw away everything you know about the author.

To give you an example of what I mean, I've just finished reading Things the Grandchildren Should Know, the autobiography of Mark Everett, better known as E. E is the frontman and driving force behind the band Eels (in fact, he's frequently the band's only member), and has lived one of the strangest and most tragedy-filled lives I've ever heard about. He grew up with a father who barely ever spoke to him, and who he found dead when he was just 19; strange characters have followed him around all his life, to the extent that an entire chapter of his autobiography is entitled "I Love Crazy Girls"; and his sister and mother died within months of each other, his sister by her own hand.

I bring this up because I'm a great fan of Eels, and especially of the strange and obviously deeply meaningful lyrics that E writes, but I really didn't understand the deeper meanings behind those lyrics until I found out what he was thinking when he wrote them. The song "I Like Birds" is a prime example: it's a very simple three-chord ditty, always coming back to the refrain "'Cos I like...birds." When I played that song to some of my friends, they couldn't believe it was actually about birds, as in, feathery little creatures; they assumed, because it was a rock song, that it was about girls. The song is mentioned in Things the Grandchildren Should Know, and when you find out that E wrote it after watching little birds eating from his mother's best birdfeeder in the weeks after she died, it suddenly gains a vast amount more meaning.

It's possible, then, for an artist or author's work to be improved enormously by knowing about them as a person. Obviously, though, the reverse is also true. The comic book Cerebus began in 1977, and continued for over 6,000 pages; it's notable within the comics world as an incredible success for Dave Sim, its writer and main illustrator. (I wouldn't know, by the way, never having read it - don't expect any critical commentary here.) It also enjoyed critical and commercial success; however, things started to go downhill when Sim began to include essays with his work that were...well, let's call a spade a spade here, and say that they were disgustingly misogynistic. Again, I haven't seen all of Sim's writing by any means, but the parts that I have seen contain ideas that go right through "uncomfortable" or "plain-spoken" and go right into "complete nutjob" territory.

Is it possible to read Sim's work and not be influenced by this? Maybe it is. I do know, though, that I would find it very hard to divorce the writer from his work in that case; indeed, I'd find it difficult to buy anything that he produced, knowing that I'd in effect be offering implicit support to work that espoused ideas that I found utterly repulsive.

(Brief aside here — I think it's far too easy to dismiss repellent ideas as "crazy", when a better description would be "dangerous" or even "evil". Crazy ideas are those that are incoherent or meaningless; evil ideas are those that are terrifying because of their coherence and planning. For instance, Idi Amin managed to stay in control of Uganda for so long by carefully cultivating the appearance of being a clownish and over-important buffoon; this distracted the international community from the fact that he managed to systematically murder up to half a million of his own people.)

Now and again, it is possible to come across a piece of work where the right balance is struck — where the author's ideas are in direct contrast to your own, and that leads to a better result all round. In my case, Terry Pratchett fulfils this superbly in his book Carpe Jugulum. Pratchett is an outspoken atheist and a member of the British Humanist Association, and several of his books make gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) digs at organised religion. I suspect that he used Carpe Jugulum as something of a soapbox, mostly through the mouthpiece of his character Granny Weatherwax. Here's what Granny says to the Omnian priest Mightily Oats, towards the end of the book.

"Now if I'd seen him, really there, really alive, it'd be in me like a fever. If I thought there was some god who really did care two hoots about people, who watched 'em like a father and cared for 'em like a mother...well, you would'nt catch me sayin' things like 'There are two sides to every question' and 'We must respect other people's beliefs.' You wouldn't find me just being gen'rally nice in the hope that it'd all turn out right in the end, not if that flame was burning in me like an unforgivin' sword. And I did say burnin', Mister Oats, 'cos that's what it'd be. You say that you people don't burn folk and sacrifice people any more, but that's what true faith would mean, y'see? Sacrificin' your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin' the truth of it, workin' for it, breathin' the soul of it. That's religion. Anything else is just ... is just bein' nice. And a way of keeping in touch with the neighbours."

Despite being almost the polar opposite to Pratchett in terms of religion, I wholeheartedly agree with this speech, and knowing that he is an atheist makes this even more important; the standard that Granny speaks about would, presumably, make her re-think her position if she ever actually encountered it. Far from simply trashing faith, it's a call to true faith, and gains great value.

There's no one "best" way of approaching a piece of writing, or music, or any other form of art — indeed, when one form of criticism dominates, criticism as a whole suffers. I do think, though, that it's something of a waste to completely ignore the author. After all, they do know more about their work than almost anyone else.

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This year's conference is straight outta Pwllheli. Word.

Several of my friends are shortly going to be attending the New Word Alive conference. For those of you who have no idea what this is, it's a week-long Christian event full of Bible teaching, worship and so on. Several fairly high-profile evangelicals are going to be speaking there (the "headliners" are Don Carson, John Piper and Terry Virgo), so as Christian conferences go it's a biggie.

Although I do respect the work that the conference is doing, there's a couple of things that make me laugh every time I hear it mentioned. The first is that it's called "New" Word Alive to distinguish it from plain old Word Alive, the conference that was a part of the much larger Spring Harvest conference up until last year. The split is mentioned on the Spring Harvest website, but you'll note that the site announcement makes no mention whatsoever of the reason for the split. That's because the organisers of Word Alive disagreed with Spring Harvest's practice of inviting speakers whose theological viewpoints differed from their own.

Actually, that's a rather simplified way of looking at it; it's probably fairer to say that the Word Alive people considered the theological difference so great that the Spring Harvest speakers were preaching things that were just plain wrong. Whatever the motivations, I can't help but feel that the new setup is pretty nearly the worst possible outcome. By sticking with almost exactly the same title, the New Word Alive organisers have ended up looking like kids who are taking their ball and going home because the other kids weren't playing nicely; equally, the Spring Harvest organisers look like heretics or like idiots who can't control their own conference, depending on which side of the theological argument you tend to come down.

Both impressions are wrong. The New Word Alive people made their split because they couldn't, in good conscience, be part of an organisation which disagreed with them on, as they saw it, an utterly fundamental point of belief. That's about as far from petty as you can get. Likewise, the Spring Harvest people seem to believe so strongly in allowing different shades of belief a voice that they're willing to sacrifice convenience for unity. Whichever side is "right" (and I think the situation's much more confusing than right-or-wrong), both have acted in the interests of the people they serve, and yet both have come out of it looking daft. It's the sheer absurdity of this situation that makes me laugh, although it's more from desperation than from any inherent humour in the situation.

On a lighter note, the other reason to find New Word Alive amusing is that they use the abbreviation NWA. I can only assume that most of the attendees have never heard of...errr...the other NWA...

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For some reason, marketing companies have had difficulty putting "the real meaning of Easter" on a card. Funny, that.

Christians are a gloomy lot. Sure, they have some very lively churches (ever seen a proper big Pentecostal service? Walks a fine line between "amazing" and "terrifying"), but they are all obsessed with death and pain. That's not a new thing. It goes right back to the early church - the Romans thought the early Christians were cannibals because of the focus on Jesus' body and blood in the Eucharist - and even earlier, to Jesus' words in Matthew 5:

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

Jesus made it abundantly obvious that pain and difficulties were part and parcel of being a Christian. That became most obvious on the day we're currently remembering, Good Friday, when he was executed by the Romans. In case you've forgotten, that execution was in the most humiliating and painful way the Romans could dream up, and given that we're talking about a culture which spiced up its theatres by killing people on stage, that's no small statement. Jesus showed in the clearest possible way precisely what his followers were letting themselves in for.

Paul picked up the theme in his letters, as did Peter. (References to some examples are here, here, here, here and here, if you're interested.) If that wasn't enough, Revelation is almost entirely about the horrible things that are going to happen to Christians in the end times. Unfortunately, it's so full of metaphor and imagery that quite what those horrible things are going to be is anyone's guess. Fortunately, that wasn't the point of the book, which was much more about the fact that the suffering does eventually end. Taken with the notoriously blood-drenched Old Testament, you might think that Christians are so focused on the bad things that might happen to them that they don't pay any attention to what is actually happening.

That, however, is not the case. Yes, the Bible does tell us about terrible things, but that's because terrible things happen. It gives us an explanation for them, tells us what to do to cope with them, and exhorts us to prevent them from happening to other people. There are literally hundreds of Bible verses covering justice for the poor, social responsibility, care for the disadvantaged, and an overwhelmingly pervasive sense that God cares about the problems and wants to help us.

When Jesus told people that if they followed him, they were opening themselves up to a world of pain, it really wasn't one of the greatest advertising pitches in history. "Roll up, roll up! Get executed in a number of pointy and painful ways!" He didn't promise riches, or fame, or power, or authority. Neither, it's important to note, did he promise comfort, tranquillity or fellowship, although they are often present too. That's why I get annoyed with people who say "you should become a Christian/Muslim/Buddhist/Pastafarian because you will feel better" or "because you will have peace". None of the things that a religion can give you are worth anything unless the claims of that religion are actually true. That was the one reason to follow Christ back in the first century, and it's the only reason now.

He certainly believed that what he said was true. That's why, 2000-odd years ago, he was nailed to a piece of wood, and that's why we still remember it on Good Friday.

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Best if he tells it in his own words.

⁶⁸Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people.
⁶⁹ He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David
⁷⁰ (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago),
⁷¹ salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us—
⁷² to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant,
⁷³ the oath he swore to our father Abraham:
⁷⁴ to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear
⁷⁵ in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.

⁷⁶And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High; for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him,
⁷⁷ to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins,
⁷⁸ because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven
⁷⁹ to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace.

Luke 1:68-79 (NIV-UK)

Merry Christmas.

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Picture of the Week: #37

[taken during week running from 10/09 to 16/09]

The weather's turned, and we're heading straight into autumn. Although I took this picture during the Indian summer a couple of weeks back (and it was a nice reminder of what summer could have been like, had the weather been up to it), the fields show that it was already coming up to Harvest Festival time.

Harvest, although it's a beautiful festival to witness, does seem like it's rather less applicable nowadays than it used to be. For a start, a much lower proportion of the population are farmers than in pretty much any time before the present, so that "bringing in the harvest" means that much less to most people. Then there's the fact that there's generally something being harvested at all times of the year. And let's not forget that the world is so small nowadays - transport and preservation being what it is - that we get all sorts of produce from all around the world at all times of the year.

Given the fact that Harvest Festivals as we know them have been going on in this country for barely 150 years - a blink of an eye in British historical terms - it would appear that there's a good case for dropping them entirely. There are, though, a few reasons why Harvest maybe should stay. First, it gets people into church. Whether or not they believe what they're being told, they get exposed to Christian teaching - and more people deciding whether to accept that can only be a good thing. Secondly, as with so many traditions, there have been changes - now, there's a major element of charitable giving included in most Harvest festivals, and it would be unfortunate to lose this.

And thirdly, it's a very healthy idea to have a specific time set aside for thankfulness. The Americans have the right idea about this - their Harvest has turned into Thanksgiving, which, despite it being something of a gluttony-fest, promotes thankfulness about all aspects of life. When you think about the emphasis on profit prevalent in today's society, and the concentration on getting all you can, then surely it's an excellent idea to remind ourselves to turn around, stop and remember how we ended up where we are.

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When it comes to faith healing in the Peter Popoff mould, though...go Dawkins!

When it comes to the public face of atheism, there's no-one quite like Richard Dawkins. Although he's yet to achieve Robert Winston's ubiquity on TV biology programmes, he has done a couple of shows, the most recent of which was the Channel 4 documentary Enemies of Reason. This was his attempt to go to various mystics, alternative therapists and other less than scientific people, and show that what they were peddling basically didn't work. This follows on from his earlier show, The Root Of All Evil?, in which he argued that all religion is useless and harmful.

Although the two shows have generally similar premises, it's interesting that the focus has changed. Whereas Root Of All Evil attacked religions on the basis that they can't be tested, Enemies of Reason concentrated much more heavily on things which certainly could be tested and shown to be false. This new emphasis, which is inherently much more scientific than the first, sounds to me like a good direction in which to go. After all, Dawkins's position at the University of Oxford is the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science, not the Grand High Railer Against All Things Religious - if he can demonstrate how the scientific method works and how things should be tested with it, that can only be a good thing.

It seems like Dawkins himself should be happy to have changed his emphasis in this way - at least, this is the suggestion that one gets from reading an interview with him in a recent edition of BBC Focus magazine. Dawkins states in this interview that he'd much prefer to be remembered as a biologist, rather than for his religious opinions, which made me warm to him considerably. The problem that I do have with him, though, is that his actions up until this apparent cooling-off seem to be completely out of proportion to his major thesis, which seems to boil down to one statement: Believing anything without any evidence is harmful.

Not surprisingly, I have very little trouble agreeing with Dawkins on this point, as do most of the Christians I know. If you believe something just because anyone tells you to, then you'll believe anything at all. The mistake that Dawkins makes, along with a lot of other people, is in thinking that this is what the concept of "faith" refers to. Faith is a complicated idea, and can result in widely differing actions (note the major differences of opinion among the various denominations of almost any religion or sect), so it deserves careful study rather than out-of-hand dismissal.

The Christian concept of faith (and I won't be looking at any other concept, due to my ignorance of how they're defined!) is most succinctly summarised in Hebrews 11:1: "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." This statement gives us a few important things to think about, so let's break them down bit by bit.

1. Faith does not necessarily either include or preclude evidence.

Neither of the phrases "what we hope for" and "what we do not see" entirely precludes evidence being present - all they specify is that the evidence is not obvious. If I can see, say, a table in front of me, then I don't need faith to believe that it's there, because its existence is obvious. If I'm facing away from the table, though, it's no longer obvious that it's there - I can't see, hear or feel it. I have to use other, indirect evidence, such as some dude saying "hey, there's a table behind you", or seeing someone who was carrying a plate 5 seconds ago and is no longer doing so. This is still definitely evidence, and if I trust the aforementioned dude then I have no reason not to believe that there is indeed a table behind me. But it will be a matter of faith.

That said, using the Biblical definition, faith can also be present with no evidence, either direct or indirect. There's nothing stopping me from believing that there's a purple giraffe called Bilbo standing behind me if I want to. The difference between this kind of faith and the first kind, though, is that this kind is very weak, and will fall over as soon as any evidence is produced. Given the existence of verses like 1 Thessalonians 5:21 ("Test everything. Hold on to the good."), I'm pretty certain that this is not the kind of faith we're called to have.

2. Faith looks forward not back.

If faith applies to what we "hope for" and what we "do not see", it is surely applicable (for the most part) to the present and the future rather than the past. This means that people who denigrate faith on the basis of things like the creation story in Genesis are missing the point somewhat. Faith is, of course, based on the things that happened in the past, but when the Bible refers to people having great faith it is not complimenting them on their intellectual acceptance of statements. Rather, it commends them for what they were looking forward to. Take a look at Jesus' comments in Matthew 8 - the emphasis is on the centurion's trust in what Jesus will do, not what he's done.

3. Faith is about actions more than beliefs.

OK, this one's not quite so obvious from Hebrews 11:1. If you read on from it, though, it becomes obvious that the "Heroes of the Faith" throughout the chapter are overwhelmingly being commended for their actions. Beliefs are mentioned, but they take a back seat to the things that people used their beliefs for. This fits in well with the analogy of the fruit showing the tree's nature, as seen in Matthew 7; incidentally, this passage reflects back on the role of evidence, as Jesus' followers are instructed not to follow false teachers, who are identified by their actions. Faith, therefore, is not academic - it is active.

In keeping with the bit of 1 Thessalonians I quoted above, I hope that anyone who reads this will heartily ignore it if it's obviously rubbish. Hopefully, though, it will show that faith is not the simple, credulous concept seen in the opinions of people like Dawkins. There's a lot more to it - and if your thesis is that everything should be scientifically supported, then perhaps rejecting anything out of hand is not a consistent strategy.

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Can it actually be a utopia without hover-bikes, though?

One of the things I've been doing on holiday is catching up on my classic science fiction reading. (Incidentally, that's science fiction or SF, not sci-fi. Apparently they are very different. I have no wish to rouse the wrath of the world's collected nerds, so I will follow this nomenclature despite having no idea why it should be in place. Isn't social convention wonderful?) This has consisted mainly of reading a huge and chunky compilation of H.G. Wells's novels, Wells being one of those authors who I've always meant to read but have never quite got round to.

The compilation was very entertaining to read - I had no idea that Wells was capable of writing stories that are not only scientifically consistent (for example, if the story calls for time travel to be possible, a suitably hand-wavey explanation for it is concocted, but then every other element of the story remains consistent with the results of this explanation), they're also really well-written and very witty. The Invisible Man, for instance, concentrates very little on the title character, and far more on the people who have to deal with him on a day-to-day basis, giving Wells an excellent opportunity to focus on the absurdity of the events that they perceive. What's more, the stories are frequently applicable beyond themselves - Wells went so far as to explicitly say (in the introduction to the compilation) that he's been "talking in playful parables to a world engaged in destroying itself". Elements of this appear throughout the stories, whether it's in the form of the giant children in The Food of the Gods noting how strange it is that those with money just tend to sneer at those without, rather than helping them, or whether it's the startlingly lucid and cynical passage about the tendency of people to turn on their fellow man if it will help them that appears near the end of The War of the Worlds.

The most obvious place in which this preaching to the audience occurs is In the Days of the Comet, which is little more than a simple presentation of the world as it was when Wells was writing, followed by a presentation of the world as he thought it should be, tied together by a slightly laboured love story. In some places, Wells makes excellent points - his description of the crippling poverty and blatant social injustices suffered by the have-nots of the world is eye-opening, and suddenly makes it rather more obvious why Communism took hold in the popular imagination quite so firmly in the first half of the 20th century. Other aspects are, if not all that believable, at least interesting because of the time at which they were written - his vision of "the swift, smooth train" that he clearly thought would be the result of widespread access to electricity is a very similar concept to the flying car that I thought I'd be driving "in the future" for much of my childhood.

One of the most striking things that Wells does, though, is to change religion as well, in much the same way as it's being changed nowadays by popular opinion. Have a read of this passage, describing the narrator's mother in the new, changed world.

She kept to her queer old eighteenth-century version of religion, too, without a change. She had worn this particular amulet so long it was a part of her. Yet the Change was evident even in that persistence. I said to her one day, 'But do you still believe in that hell of flame, dear mother? You - with your tender heart?'

She vowed she did.

Some theological intricacy made it necessary to her, but still -

She looked thoughtfully at a bank of primulas before her for a time, and then laid her tremulous hand impressively on my arm. 'You know, Willie dear,' she said, as though she was clearing up a childish misunderstanding of mine, 'I don't think anyone will go there. I never did think that...'

Now, although I'd be the first to say that I really hope that Willie's mother is right in this regard, I would never go so far as to label the concept of hell as a "childish misunderstanding". It's far more serious than can be simply brushed away like that, and doing so betrays an underlying attitude that "religion is just what we make it" - an attitude that makes it worse than useless, as it suggests we're all deliberately fooling ourselves. Frank Herbert does something very similar in his classic Dune. From the appendix at the back of the book comes this little gem, placed in the mouths of the "Commission of Ecumenical Translators":

'We are here to remove a primary weapon from the hands of disputant religions. That weapon - the claim to possession of the one and only revelation.'

Not only is this a pretty blatant reworking of the "blind men describing the elephant" metaphor (and it's just as arrogant and internally inconsistent a concept as is that one - claiming that no-one has the single correct revelation is itself a claim to have that kind of revelation), it also instantly writes off religion as being human-created. Just in case Herbert's audience hadn't got the concept, he hammers it home a few paragraphs later by reporting that the Commission's work was said to be "filled with a seductive interest in logic" and that it shouldn't have tried to "stir up curiosity about God". The obvious implication is that the whole edifice of religion is based on irrationality and shouldn't be inspected too closely, lest it come tumbling down.

This is a theme that I'm planning to return to shortly, so I won't keep on at it now. I just think it's worth noting that utopias and "advanced" societies aren't always all they're cracked up to be, and that they seem to have a tendency to insist on humans being the only force that can influence their own destinies. It would be nice to see a little humility in this kind of fiction - if we're going to look at how humans could develop in the future or after a major event, why can't we sometimes accept that we're rather less in control of our own fate than we might like to think?

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Pick a church, any church...

Another very quick one-link post for you today, this time from the Seattle newspaper The Stranger. The paper, noticing that Seattle is not renowned for its religiosity, sent 31 reporters off to various places of worship on a single Sunday (and a Saturday in the case of the lone Jewish service) to describe what they found.

The article largely speaks for itself, so I'm not going to analyse it at all, but I will reproduce here a couple of points that I thought were particularly relevant or striking.

When attending Christian Faith Center, a megachurch preaching prosperity gospel:

"If you're thinking of attending a church, I beg you not to attend the CFC—find one that understands humility and grace and charity. I'm an atheist, but the CFC brings Bible imagery to my mind. Standing in all the gaudy sound and tacky fury, all I can think of is the perverted temple that Jesus Christ ripped to pieces with his bare f***ing hands."

Church on the Hill:

"I've heard this is a conservative, Fundamentalist church, but in the hour and a half I spent there, it didn't show. The members just seemed really into Jesus."

Beacon United Methodist:

"The music was typical of 'praise' music: formulaic pop-style love songs with 'girl' and 'baby' replaced by 'Jesus' and 'Lord.'"

Saint Joseph Catholic Church:

"On this Sunday, the Eucharist is, fittingly, the topic; the service is marked by humility, with discussion of feeding those in need, of spiritual hunger. The priest quotes Andre Dubus's Broken Vessels. The fundamental, communal acts of eating and drinking—body, blood—are consecrated. More than one person remains behind, watchful, possibly reverent, as the feast of Corpus Christi is enacted. If one feels like a trespasser, there is the sense that one's trespass is forgiven."

St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral:

"In an era when Christianity is marketed as a sort of rock concert meets Gatorade commercial—with TV-screen preachers beamed into makeshift houses of worship in high-school gyms—St. Mark's splendor is awesome. I understand the populist impulse of the evangelicals, but God deserves some gentle beauty."

Quest Church:

"In today's emerging churches, you lift both hands up toward heaven, arms out, in what looks like a sort of double-armed fascist salute. It's a posture that screams, "Look at me, God! I'm praying! To you!" The more enthusiastic worshippers looked like toddlers reaching up for Daddy, anxious to be picked up and hugged past their comfort levels."

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But rock music must be evil! He proved it! With a flowchart!

As you may well have heard, Jerry Falwell died the other day. This isn't going to be a post about him, though, because I knew very little about him. The only things that I am going to say are addressed towards those who:

1. Seem to be idolising him; the man said some extremely stupid things and gave the impression of being rather unpleasant in certain ways.
   
2. Appear to be crowing over his death. Guys, he just died, that's more or less the definition of bad taste. Cory Doctorow, one of the posters to Boing Boing, has managed to fall several places in my Personal Estimation Scale (all the way from "pretty cool guy overall" to "bit of a jerk") with a single, staggeringly insensitive post like this, and he's not alone in his views by any means. Whatever else Falwell was, he was also a person, and should get respect for that reason if nothing else.
   

What I did do after hearing this news, though, was have a browse around various topics associated with the slightly nuttier end of Christianity. I always regret doing this, really, as it takes up a lot of time (you'd think I had exams coming up or somethi...oh) and tends to leave something of a bad taste in the mouth. It is a valuable practice, though, as it lets you work out where you stand on controversial topics, forces you to take a position one way or another, and provokes you to look up the Biblical support for each side so you can see whether their interestingly kooky views are actually valid.

And, of course, it can be pretty entertaining. It was as part of these wanderings that I came across possibly the epitome of slightly nutty Christian literature - Chick tracts. Named after (and produced by) Jack Chick, who Wikipedia tells me is a reclusive 83-year-old Independent Baptist, these little tracts are apparently fairly well-embedded into American popular culture. There's certainly a lot of them. Each one generally consists of a few pages telling the story of someone either a) struggling against the forces of this world, and especially against one particular person or organisation, in an attempt to convert others, or b) doing precisely the opposite. The tracts unfortunately share some of the same failings as the (previously-mentioned) Josh and Jimbo, in that the story is usually very simplistic, and is resolved by the end, either one way or another; as such, although they're interesting as a cultural phenomenon, they're not going to win any literary awards.

Aside from aesthetics, the problems with Chick tracts come in two main forms: their theology and their fact checking. As far as the theology goes, I don't think there's too much being said that's actually wrong - it's much more that Chick is dealing with topics that are so big, there's very little chance of fitting everything into a short tract, so you end up with an extremely restricted and simplistic view of some very important topics. Look at Scream, a tract specifically talking about Hell, for an idea of what I mean - Chick selectively uses the parable of Dives and Lazarus, and extrapolates it entirely literally, using only a couple of passages from Revelation (yes, Revelation, the book that is packed solid with metaphorical and semi-metaphorical symbols, and which requires a whole lot of context to make any sense of it) as supporting text. What you end up with is a tract that presents an intensely complicated issue as one that is very simple, and gets rid of careful Biblical study in favour of getting a big emotional response. (And let's not forget some of the distasteful themes going on here - the rather unsubtly Hispanic stereotype arsonist dies very early on and gets no mention, because we're concentrating on the square-jawed Caucasian fireman. Oh, and Bob Williams's moustache is simply not right.)

The fact-checking is the more worrying aspect of these tracts, as it doesn't seem to actually exist. You won't have to look too hard to find some...err...interesting assertions made, but let's flag up a few particularly flagrant ones. The tract Are Roman Catholics Christians? (take a wild guess what Chick thinks), for example, claims that the Catholic Church teaches that anyone denying transubstantiation should be burned as a heretic. The word actually used in the relevant decree, though, (and the one quoted in the tract) is "anathema", which simply meant an extreme form of excommunication, still leaving open the possibility of returning to the church. More entertainingly, the same tract claims that the "IHS" letters seen in several places in Catholic churches are a direct reference to pagan religions, claiming that "In Egypt, the IHS stood for their gods...Isis, Horus and Seb". Even if Chick doesn't know that IHS is actually an abbreviation for Jesus' name, you'd have thought he'd have noticed that the Ancient Egyptians didn't write in English. But apparently not. Chick's historical knowledge is also shown to be slightly suspect in The Attack, in which he claims that (a rather poorly drawn) Henry VIII broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in a highly principled stand against the ungodly power of the Pope, as opposed to because they wouldn't let him divorce Catherine of Aragon (which seems rather more likely). He also manages to conveniently forget that the Protestant Elizabeth I burnt considerably more "heretics" than "Bloody" Mary I ever managed.

If the small details are cringe-worthy in their inaccuracy, the wider topics covered are absolutely hilarious. Dark Dungeons shows, in true fundamentalist style, that Chick doesn't actually know the first thing about Dungeons & Dragons (nor do I, I hasten to add, but at least I can do research into people who do). Even better, though, is Angels?, in which we learn of all the evils of rock music, which are orchestrated by a Vulcan in a sharp suit. Sorry, I mean Satan. Anyway, he's apparently "turned millions into rock-a-holics" via "the church of Rome" (I would love to see Pope Benedict rockin' out at Glastonbury, but somehow I don't think it's going to happen), and the only way to get out of this self-destructive cycle is to burn everything associated with it and dress in a suit. (Not a sharp Satanic suit though.) I don't think I should have to point out how weird this whole concept is - yes, there have been many musicians that went in for sex, drugs and rock n' roll in a big way, just like in most branches of popular entertainment down the years. That's what having everyone idolising you will do. It doesn't mean that the music itself is evil; Chick has jumped so far to his conclusion that he'll probably be competing in the next Olympics.

As with Josh and Jimbo, there's clearly good intentions behind these efforts (even if they come across as rather unpleasant). Indeed, Chick's tracts aimed at those who are already Christians have some good stuff in them, even if it is mixed in with some of the fruitcakitude mentioned above. What's more, I don't doubt that some people have come to faith in Christ through them. But, until Christians can communicate better, and until this communication can enter the public consciousness in the same way, the only image of Christianity that people are going to see is the fire and brimstone, the offensive Falwellisms, and the people engaging in endless moral panic without ever actually living for Christ.

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Why yes! My entire world view is wrong! Thank you!

The genre of "Christian literature" is pretty successful at the moment. You've got books dealing with proper heavy theology, books dealing with specific aspects of faith, books about other faiths and how they relate to Christianity, and loads of different versions of the Bible. The Bible, actually, is doing incredibly well - most people know that it's the best-selling book of all time, but I was surprised to find out recently that it is also the best-selling book every single year.

It's not surprising, and in fact quite gratifying, that other forms of entertainment have their own Christian branches. Some of them aren't really very exciting (Christian popular music, when presented just as music rather than as a form of worship, still has some way to go, the first step of which should be "attempting not to sound like yet another U2/Coldplay clone"), while others - the Christian children's novel, for instance - have been wildly successful outside their original genre. Which brings us to the webcomic "Josh and Jimbo: Long Street".

I found this site from a Google advert on Questionable Content, of all places (I wonder whether either party would be particularly happy about that fact - QC rarely lives up to its name, but its ethos is very distinctly different to Long Street's). I've only read the first episode, and already I'm despairing.

First, the artwork. It's not bad by any means, it's just that it could be done so much better. If you're going to go for a 3D modelling approach, then make sure you don't leave the job half done. Read a couple of pages of Crimson Dark if you want to see how this style of artwork should be done. Second, the entire storytelling style of the comic is pretty much doomed to failure. It presents itself as two guys "living normal lives", whereas what we actually see is a few conversations, with no setup and no context (we have no idea who these guys are or why they're capable of driving around for no specific purpose discussing philosophical ideologies). The purpose of the comic is clearly to present dialogues about particular issues. To put it another way, it's trying to present a debate - something that is, almost by definition, completely verbal - in an overwhelmingly visual genre. You have to be really, really good at writing to keep a reader's interest through pure wordiness.

So how good is this writer? Sadly, the writing seems to be the weakest part. Within the first episode, the topic of debate is brought up with one of the worst analogies I've ever seen, the participants immediately take views at polar opposites of the possible spectrum, there's no possibility of either being remotely unsure of themselves, and then within about three minutes of story time it is completely resolved. There are no apparent subtexts and no subplots. Worst of all, in what I think is probably an attempt to be "inclusive" or "non-threatening", there is no explicit mention of God, Jesus, the Bible, or anything remotely Christian, despite the site being called "The Book" and there being a link on the sidebar to find out more about Christianity. What you're left with is a bizarre, contrived and shallow philosophical argument, which is, just to put the icing on the cake, almost solved with violence.

I'm sure there are webcomics out there that deal with explicitly Christian issues in a sensitive, well-written and probably even effectively evangelistic way. I just wish that they were the ones that advertised on other major webcomics, instead of fatally flawed ideas like this.

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In Which I Lecture My Readers Endlessly While Using Lots Of Capital Letters

I'm fully aware that one of the most pretentious things one can do when publishing one's thoughts online (apart from using the word "one" as a pronoun) is to mistake the personal for the universally resonant. Specifically, it's a very bad idea to take your own experiences and present them as if everyone goes through exactly the same thing.

Well, in this post I'm going to avoid that in a very clever way - I'm going to use experiences that aren't even mine and present them as universally resonant while addressing my readers in a patronising tone. Clever, eh?

To be fair, it is probably true that everyone will, at some point, have to face a challenge to their beliefs. These beliefs may be of any kind, religious, political, more generally ideological, even beliefs about the best way to run a business. There are several strategies that can be used when faced with these challenges, and I'm going to go through a few of them here.

La La La I'm Not Listening
The simplest way of dealing with a challenge is to dismiss it outright. I hardly need to say that this is not a very good method. Even if you don't have to think about the challenge for a while, it will come back eventually, and it will probably bring a few friends. If you've used it more than once on a single issue, it's time to move on to a new strategy. Even worse is to use this method in a debate - unless you're debating a complete moron, and if you are then for goodness' sake get a hobby, you will be demolished and your opinion will hold no weight whatsoever. Beware the variants of this method, Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad (repetition of the basis of your original belief even if this repetition has absolutely nothing to do with the challenge) and Let Me Get Back To You On That One (getting rid of the challenge with no intention of ever addressing it), as they are surprisingly easy to use without realising you're doing it.

Corollary: The "That's Not Even Worth My Time" Approach
If a challenge is so obviously wrong that it would be a waste of your time to even consider it, then it is probably OK to dismiss it outright. The problem with this approach is that an argument that sounds like complete rubbish might turn out to be valid after all - you can bet that a lot of scientists said "Continents? Drifting around? Yeah, right," or words to that effect. In general, only use this approach if the challenge is not even coherent (along the lines of "turkey cabbage gizzards ate my brain").

Yeah, Well, Yo Momma's Fat
I really hope that will be the first and last time I ever type those words in this blog. Anyway, this method of dealing with a challenge is more formally called an Ad Hominem attack. It involves rejecting a challenge on the grounds that the source of the challenge is unreliable. This is another poor method to use, as it again doesn't address the underlying challenge, although it may be suitable in the extremely short term because it will at least make you feel better. (Possibly.) This method is much more commonly used than you might think, and is particularly insidious in that even if your reason for thinking the source of the challenge unreliable is entirely accurate, you still haven't adequately defended your belief. For example, suppose you read something by Richard Dawkins claiming that Christianity is a Bad Thing because of the Crusades. You can dismiss this by saying that Richard Dawkins is an utterly useless theologian and should go back to biology where he can, you know, actually make a contribution. And you'd be absolutely right to say so. However, you need to address the claim itself, for example by pointing out that the Crusades were an example of the misuse of religion in the name of force in the same way that the forced sterilisation of over 64,000 people in the United States between 1907 and 1963 was a misuse of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, not a direct outgrowing of the beliefs themselves.

Hah! They Didn't Close This Parenthetical Statement And This Invalidates The Argument!
If your gut feeling is that the challenge made to your beliefs is wrong, a more useful approach is to go through the challenge until you find an aspect of it that's wrong. Given that arguments with wrong elements in one place are likely to have wrong elements in other places, it's very possible that the first mistake you find will invalidate the whole challenge. Be wary, though, of dismissing arguments too quickly. To use the previous example, although it's true that the Crusades can't be used as proof that Christianity has been a force for evil throughout history, the Crusades themselves must be faced as evidence that Christianity can be dangerously misused, and steps must be taken to ensure that that kind of thing doesn't happen again.

Yes, I Do Require This Library Desk Until October, Thank You
By far the best approach to take when faced with a challenge is to exhaustively study it. Take it to pieces, look at every element, and compare it to your current beliefs honestly. Although this process will be pretty quick for some beliefs ("playing tennis is more fun than playing badminton", for instance, can be verified or knocked down in a couple of hours), for big and complicated beliefs (political philosophies and religious beliefs, especially) you're probably looking at a much longer process. Researching the background of each element, or talking to people who have researched it, is always a very good strategy. It's also worth noting that you don't need to come to a decision on all elements simultaneously - putting off decisions until later is fine, provided you're willing to face them eventually.

I Don't Agree With This So I'm Going To Invade Iraq Hit Someone To Create A Diversion
No, this is not a good strategy.

Maybe You've Got A Point
If, after going through the above options, you find that the challenge to your beliefs was valid, change them. It is not a sign of weakness to change your mind. Make sure that it's the right thing to do, though - what's more, it is not a bad idea to leave off making wholesale changes in attitudes or beliefs until you're sure on all elements, rather than switching beliefs as soon as you reach a tipping point one way or another. The reason for this is that long-held beliefs are often comforting, and it can be painful leaving them. (For me, realising that I should not be supporting the Conservative Party's goals was not especially painful. For you, maybe.) That said, if you realise that your current beliefs are so wrong that they're actively damaging you or someone else, that's probably a good opportunity to change them sharpish.

Hold On A Moment
Yes, changing back again is also fine, but if you're doing that without any new information coming to light it's probably a sign that you didn't go through the research stage properly. Try it again.

If all of this sounds too much like hard work, then OK, try to forget about the challenge to your beliefs and get on with your life. It is worth remembering, though, that even though a ship might be huge and beautiful and comforting, recommended by thousands, if it's got a huge hole in it then running from end to end will not help you. The only safe place to stand is what we technical sailor people call "not on the ship".

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