I’ve not yet read the full book that Alain de Botton has been promoting recently, but I’ve read a number of interviews and heard him speak, and browsed his website: religionforatheists.com and I wanted to post a couple of first-thoughts about his thesis.

Firstly, he’s being unashamed to say that he is ‘picking and mixing’ from different religions. As he puts here, ‘even if religion isn’t true, can’t we enjoy the best bits?’

It seems that there is a twin move here. Atheists like de Botton are moving towards religion, to try to colonise the secular space which still values ritual, and many religious people are moving towards an atheist reading of their faith… both agree that ‘God is dead’… but what to do with the carcass?

It seems to me that de Botton and others want to pick over the beautiful, to grab rituals and art and the ‘awe-some.’ One of de Botton’s earlier books, which I like a lot, is The Consolations of Philosophy, and I wonder now if this is simply an upgrade: religion as no more than consolation. We feel lonely, we suffer, we don’t earn enough…so here’s a smash and grab on some religious ideas that seem to have helped console people in the past.

I don’t think this is enough. I think religion as consolation is little more than religion as emotional crutch. It’s low challenge, middle-class angst with stained glass windows, and intellectually and psychologically impoverished.

The religious who are turning to an atheist reading of their faith are doing something different. God is dead, but that means that we have to take up the challenges of that absence… and that’s perhaps a more demanding road. I can’t speak from anything more than a Christian perspective on this, but it seems to me that this is not so much gaining ‘ahhh’ moments from beautiful buildings, but taking a long hard look at the scorched earth once those buildings have been torched, and wondering what is left.

Because an atheist reading of Christianity is not about polite rituals and ‘big society’ moments of collective goo. It is not about human beings rejecting God and becoming atheists. It is about God rejecting God and becoming an atheist himself. The core of Christianity is as radical as that. Jesus beat de Botton to ‘religion for atheists’ by about 2000 years; the problem is, the path he set out was so challenging that it has been almost totally rejected. Why? Because the move from religion to an atheist reading of religion is not about experiencing the sacred in the remains of religious beauty, but about experiencing the abandonment and desolation, the responsibility to the rest of humanity, when we realise the sacred is not found in the stain glass, but in the slum outside the church.

God’s life created fissures within society between the believers and unbelievers. It seems God’s death will be no less divisive… but this time I wonder if the polite ‘crutch’ accusation will be made the other way.

Apologies (really, I’m saying sorry? For what?!) for not posting much recently. It’s not that I’ve had nothing to say…just not much to say in public right now. Lots of writing getting done, so watch this space (if you like watching space.)

Anyways, something I’ve been pondering the last couple of days: the importance of transgression in ‘salvation’ narratives. By these, I mean stories that have a basic arc of saving something or some group from some evil or monster.

For various reasons I’ve been spending a fair bit of time thinking through the Harry Potter books recently – a series which I’ll defend against anyone in terms of their thematic seriousness and literary merit – and what is interesting is that this pattern is very much on show here. As I expressed in a recent tweet:

One thing we can be sure of: if there is a ‘forbidden forest,’ our hero will be bidden to enter it.

If you know the stories at all (yes, I know the films are crap) you’ll know that in every book Harry ends up breaking either school rules or ‘Wizarding Law’  - but does so not as a rebel, but as a ‘saviour.’ He is ‘the orthodox heretic.’

As the series continues we see that ‘the law’ turns more and more heavily against him and, by labelling him a serial transgressor, the community ostracise him to a pretty horrific extent. He is cast out of the school, a price is put on his head, and is turned into a figure of hatred by those in charge.

We can see how this turns out: our hero’s transgressions turn out to be the very thing that redeems the law and those who make it. Sometimes the law needs to be broken, in order that it may be remade properly.

The parallels with Christian theology should be fairly easily worked through; my current interest is more with how this plays out with the work on historic piracy that I’m writing, and how this impacts the current ‘Occupy’ movements.

I picked up an old copy of a 1970 ‘Ladybird’ book on piracy recently, which has this brilliant introduction:

In those days a man might legally be seized in the street by a ‘press-gang’ and compelled to serve for years as a sailor in a ship of the King’s Navy, often without his wife or family knowing what had happened to him. Sailors were badly fed and brutally punished, and sometimes they mutinied, murdered their hated officers and became pirates in well-armed ships. Pirates […] were mainly scoundrels and a menace to all honest folk.

This is the classic tension: the law has been broken, so these people must be branded a menace, and yet we can see why the law needs breaking and reforming.

The problem comes with the line at which orthodox heresy becomes violent transgression. Were the murders of their brutal Captains by pirates excusable? How much leeway should we give them for their historical context?

These are all questions I’ll be working through in the book… and looking at how this arc of redemptive transgression works out… Hope you’re still looking forward to it.

Something Pete Rollins tweeted this morning got me thinking a bit:

“Often the problem we face is not a lack of enjoyment, but an inability to enjoy our enjoyment.”

I think this is a particular concern in a world where so much of our lives is now mediated. Rather than attend a party, we attend and tweet about it, and update our Facebook, and take photos of ourselves enjoying ourselves… It’s not a uniquely digital problem: we all know that the moment is punctured as soon as someone makes everyone aware of it by saying something like ‘this is the best fun I’ve had in ages!’ It was…until everyone thought about it. But with social media the problem is so much worse.

I think we are spending too much time concerned about convincing ourselves – and the invisible ‘others’ that we have in mind – that we are having a good time. So what becomes important is not having a good time, but recording the fact that we had a good time, in order for others to be sure that we did.

In a way, the urge to record something, to commit it to digital memory, suggests a fear that we will forget. But the recording is it’s own forgetting: because we are not ‘in’ the moment when we are mediating it to others, but thinking about recording it, we loose the memory and truth of it.

Without wanting to be too base, it’s analogous to having a mirrored ceiling in the bedroom, or feeling the need to record the act. It’s not enough to be there in the moment, to lose oneself with another person – there has to be some evidence, some external observation – even if that is yourself looking at yourself as in the mirror.

One might say that true pleasure has no reflection. To ramp this up and use a quantum parallel, true pleasure is mysterious and rich… as soon as it is observed, photographed, or reflected on ‘wow, we are having fun aren’t we!’ it is collapsed into something more narrow; more physically real, perhaps, but actually lessened by its reduction to three dimensions.

Unreported pleasure is perhaps a dying art. To simply enjoy, and not have to tell anyone… to be happy enough that it happened, and that memories will form and fail…

You go to a shop to buy a bat, and a ball. In total they cost £1.10. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much does the bat cost?

Listened to a very interesting episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast on ‘the enigma of reason’ yesterday. The interviewee – Dan Sperber – was outlining how he feels the pride we humans take in our ability to reason is misplaced. We see ourselves as ‘above the animals’ because we can reason things through… and yet reason has not brought us to peace, nor to agreements about what is true.

What interested me most was his outlining the phenomenon of  ‘confirmation bias.’ Once we gain a belief, we tend to use reason to confirm and reinforce it – not to correct it, challenge it or critique it. Why is this? Surely we want to access the best truth that we can? We want to think ourselves reasonable and rational people, but in fact we are not.

What we tend to do is run mostly on intuition, though we think we are being rational. Take the problem above: most people will initially come to the answer that the bat costs £1 and the ball 10p. But this is wrong as the bat in this case does not cost £1 more. We need to think more carefully, more rationally than we may be think we need to.

Sperber’s own view is that reason evolved in order to help us deal with other people. The masses of people we meet deliver large amounts of information, and we need to be able to interrogate this information in order not to be ‘taken in.’ As he puts it, reason helps us to ‘get beyond the bottleneck of trust in communication’ – you can just trust everything anyone says, so reason evolves to help us winnow out the crap.

Getting finally to a point: this is why I think Pete Rollins’ new book is important. If reason is what separates us from the animals, then doubt is what elevates us above unthinking belief.

To put it more bluntly: there is a massive dose of confirmation bias in almost all forms of Christianity. People come to belief, and then refuse to allow doubts to form and shape that belief in a way that points it further into truth. What I love about what Pete does in Insurrection is that he takes a wrecking ball to this confirmation bias, and insists that people really let doubt come into play as a way of moving towards better understanding.

It’s something I wish we saw more of – in politics, in religion and in life in general. We shelter in the comfortable gardens of ideas that suit us spoken to us by people we respect. Comfortable it may be, but true it isn’t.

It’s been good getting to know Pete over the past few years. Our first books came out at pretty similar times, when we were both involved in similar projects in Ikon and Vaux, and since then I’ve come to count him as a good friend, and companion on a journey. The very nature of conversation means that threads are picked up and then left for a while, so it’s always good to get some of the thoughts and discussions I’ve had and overheard distilled into a crafted argument.

I suppose it was nearly two years ago when I headed over to New York to see Pete that I found him reading The Coming Insurrection – a revolutionary tract put out by The Invisible Committee. The back cover goes like this:

It is useless to wait – for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilisation. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.

It’s an influential and persuasive read, and I thought that Insurrection might draw far more directly from it, be a far more obviously inflammatory work. But while the content of Pete’s new book contains a very revolutionary kernel, he has, wisely I believe, chosen to take a more careful approach to presenting it in that his book is actually quite pastoral.

In the introduction (just to prove I at least got that far ) Pete writes:

In Insurrection, I endeavor to outline what this radical expression of a faith beyond religion might look like and how it has the power to give birth to a radically new form of Church… The following will not be an easy read; many will find it disturbing, for some of the things we hold precious will be attacked from the very outset. But it is written with a firm conviction that we must not be afraid to burn our sacred temples in order to discover what, if anything, remains.

And that is precisely what he does. Using a mixture of parables and stories, and weaving in thoughts from theologians and philosophers from a wide variety of backgrounds, Insurrection (not to be confused with the fantasy trilogy of the same name!) takes us on a journey that is, like all of the best journeys, engaging, sometimes frightening, beautiful and enriching.

Ermmm... no, not this one.

But it is also a journey that refuses to return home. This is not a book that takes you to the boundaries of orthodoxy, stretches you and then returns you to your home comforts. This is a journey that – like the people behind The Coming Insurrection – opens the doors and takes you into a reality that demands some tough choices.

You could very easily read this book and be warmed by the cute, twisty stories and the interesting inversions… but that would be to be blind to the fierce message behind the text. For what Pete is asking you to do is nothing less than give up your Christianity. To give up the identities that you have built around it, the comforts you have brought into your pews and the affirmations you have wrought into your songs that mean that doubt is eliminated.

I know there will be those who say that the radical deconstruction that Pete is working in his writing leaves us with nothing positive – no way of serving the poor or reaching out to people. I think that’s a mis-reading. For me, Insurrection refuses to deliver simple messages that everything is ok because the poor and the needy matter too much. Christianity has gone so badly wrong structurally that it needs a radical overhaul if it is ever to serve people better in the long term, rather than serve its own needs in the short.

As Pete puts it in the conclusion (yep, I skipped to the last page)

[Denying the resurrection] means holding too tightly to what we have and identifying too closely with our idealized image. It means avoiding doubt, turning from our weakness, and refusing to face up to our finitude. In short, it means saying “no” to life.

But then there are times when we may affirm it: Times whenever we embrace life, face up to our pain, allow ourselves to mourn. Times when we meet our neighbour, look at ourselves without fear, take responsibility for our actions, listen to our fears, find joy in the simplest of things, and gain pleasure through embracing the broken world. In times like these, we say “yes” to life and, in doing so, we say “yes” to Christ. For it is only when we are the site where Resurrection takes place that we truly affirm it. To believe in the Crucifixion and Resurrection means nothing less than enacting them.

Insurrection, then, is both revolutionary and pastoral, because it is a call to integrity. To be – as Mother Theresa was – the change we need to see, even in the midst of enormous doubt. Here is the most clear link to The Coming Insurrection: for Pete, the central message of the a/theistic reading of Christianity is this: the resurrection is here, right now, so get on and live it.

I’d say this was essential reading… yet I’d also say that Pete is not finished, and it’s wise to read this book as part of an evolving theological move, the final act of which we are yet to see. Where he’s going with that will, I think, really force people to make some very tough choices. But with Insurrection we get the build up and background to exactly why those choices are going to need to be made.

I’m not going to pretend that I have an answer, but I’ve been wondering if there is any mileage in thinking about it in terms of the possibility of newness.

Perhaps a radical is someone who does believe that newness, genuine newness, is possible. Whereas a conservative is perhaps someone who believes that new expressions are possible, but these are only reformulations of old things – and thus the old is preserved, even if it is reformed.

It’s also clear that these terms are relative. To those on either side of the spectrum to the person in question, they are either radical (not conservative enough) or conservative (not radical enough.) This is both a pastoral and a political issue, as some have committed themselves to working to change the centre, while others have committed to pushing the edge. Both may actually have the same goal in mind.

Richard Passmore has written a very interesting post on the idea of newness, which is very well worth a close read and draws on the theory of ‘transitology’… want to post a more full response to this shortly, as it links to some of the work I did in The Complex Christ / Signs of Emergence.

Running around like crazy trying to get things sorted for a new academic year (I’m teaching full time now, by the way, so writing going to be even more stretched) – but wanted to flag up a piece in Prospect that caught my eye.

It’s a review of From Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon by Martin Kemp, an art historian and world expert on the Mona Lisa.

The key question is this: what actually is an icon? There are ‘iconic’ brands and images, but are these genuine icons? As for images in general, Scruton writes:

Images lodge in the mind and remain there, influencing our thoughts and actions, governing our tastes and purchasing habits, and drawing on deep and hidden emotions for their power.

He goes through some of the many examples Kemp has in his book going-  as the title suggests – from the image of Christ through to the design of the Coke bottle, via various famous photographic images and works of art. But Scruton is critical of Kemp’s conclusion, which is that nothing really connects these images at all.

Instead, he offers this analysis:

Only what is consecrated can be desecrated, and although the Mona Lisa is not a liturgical object she is consecrated in our feelings. Her image resides in a higher realm, where our aspirations find their fulfilment. Even if the painting were destroyed, the image would remain in that realm, alongside the Venus of Botticelli and the David of Michelangelo, as a “point of intersection of the timeless with time.” Nothing like that is true, or could be true, of the Coke bottle.

In other words, an icon is something that is can be desecrated. Other things may be revered or much loved, and then smashed or abused, but desecration is a higher category of offence.

It’s something I’ll be mulling over for a while. Can a Coke bottle become an object that could be desecrated? If so, it would suggest something about our spiritual state. Indeed, one would have to think the deeper question: is consumer capitalism even capable of generating icons? And if it is, what does that say about the sorts of things we are venerating?

With Other now out in the US and having been at Wild Goose and met a bunch of new people, I’ve been asked a fair bit ‘what are you working on now?’ Life is fairly complex to be honest, but here’s some of the things I’m working on at the moment:

Firstly, I’m working fairly intensively on a new novel. It’s set in Jaywick, a tiny sea-side resort on the coast of Essex which was recently rated the most deprived area in the UK. This has some personal connection as my great-grandfather bought the land in the 1920′s and created the village, initially as a bunch of beach-huts for holidays for people from the East End of London. It was wildly successful, but with the 2nd world war and other factors, it has fallen on very hard times. So the novel is, if you’ve read it, a bit of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, set in Essex, and will draw in issues of contemporary poverty and dislocation, as well as a good dose of the British sea-side frontier spirit. My first novel – which tracks the breakdown and recovery of an English teacher in a tough London comprehensive – is currently with a big UK publisher, who I know like it… but that’s a long way from ‘yes!’ Fingers crossed.

In terms of my work in education, I’m consulting with the BBC at the moment on a new programme involving Mathematics in nature and culture which will be out in the Autumn. Can’t say much more about that right now, but looks great. I’m also exploring a lot to do with ‘mindfulness’ in the classroom, thinking about how to help kids to concentrate better in a fractured and distracting digital world. Lots of neuroscience, bit of meditation techniques etc.

And in my other writing, I’m researching a new book which will concentrate on ‘the commons.’ I’m convinced that we have something to learn from the twin failures of Communism and Christianity. The church has never properly taken on board people’s alienation from their labour, which Marx got so right, and Marx never understood alienation from ‘the Other’. What is common to both is, ironically, a core idea of a ‘commons’, which we need to reinvigorate – linking this to Zizek’s work on the radical early church community, and the terrible erosion of the commons that capitalism/protestantism has brought.

Linking with this, I’m also working hard on expanding the piracy thesis, and linking this with a dark inversion of the prodigal son story, which draws in some thoughts about why we so often see ‘big’ ministries fail so spectacularly. I’m not sure what to do with this yet, as it’s something I want to get out there, but it feels too long for a blog post… and what magazines are truly interested in something that draws in psychoanalysis, theology, philosophy, films, pirates and everything else? May be I need to start a magazine

So… busy times, complex times. Need about 50 more hours each day, or a very rich patron. But hopefully will all come good. Thanks for messages of support of the field I’m ploughing… Encouragement is so welcome!

Fear is a foolish counselor, and it is also an addictive one. As the work of Rene Girard and others makes clear, our national anxieties love to vent themselves on some monster, real or imaginary. We can unite our party, if not our nation, around common aggression against shared fear – even if we can’t unite them around a common vision around shared values.

It’s a very good point. One – rather extreme – etymology of the word community is ‘co-munis’ – people we build walls and fight with. We gather together in common resistance to some greater evil, and when this is vanquished – witchcraft, communism, Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism – we move on to the next thing.

We need something to fear, because without this external fear, we would have no choice but to face the real monster: the monster within.

Christopher Booker’s work on why we tell stories outlines this progression well. The Three Billy-Goats Gruff is a children’s story about facing an external orge… but as we move into more serious stories, the orge turns out to be the ‘self’ that we need to face.

This is one of the key questions I’ve tried to address in ‘Other’ – a book I’m pleased the Brian is a big fan of. We need to address the other within the self before we can properly address the problems of engaging the ‘other others’ who exist externally.

That ‘the West’ and ‘Islamic extremism’ have risen in opposition to one another suggests that they are both experiencing some kind of existential crisis. The west is really not convinced by the spiritual vacuousness of consumer capitalism, and Islamic extremists are not convinced that the Arab / Middle East construct is anything like what Mohammed envisaged. Both need to look within themselves, and somehow try to resolve their problems without conflict with each other.

Very good episode of In Our Time this week, which looked at free will. 50 mins or so – and very well worthwhile listening to, especially in the context of the debate on heaven and hell which is still rumbling around the publication of Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins.

There are serious problems on both side of the free will / determinism argument. If the universe is truly deterministic then we really have no way of holding people responsible for their actions – they are simply responding to a set of initial universal conditions of which they had no control. But if we assume we have free will, then we need to work out where that comes from, and what that might mean in a quantum universe too.

This philosophical debate gets right to the heart of some of the problems of heaven and hell. If the bible is to be believed, then we have free will – or God would simply not be right to judge, because our fate would have been pre-determined. But the bible also wants us to accept that God has predestined a certain (small) number of people to be saved – and that there’s nothing we can do to change his [sic] mind.

These arguments can be nuanced in lots of ways,but what was refreshing about the In Our Time piece was the reference to Peter Strawson’s work Freedom and Resentment (appended below). As Strawson’s son (also a philsopher) explained, F&R turned the debate about free will on its head somewhat:

Attitudes like ‘gratitude’ and ‘resentment’ are impossible without free will. In a fully deterministic world, there would be no point thanking someone for a generous act, because they would have done it anyway. Similarly, there would be no point being resentful towards someone, because the bad that they have done to you was not in their control.

Strawson defines things like gratitude and resentment as ‘personal reactive attitudes’ – primitive instincts.

If we turn things round, if gratitude and resentment require a universe with free will, then given that we live in a universe within which we want to be grateful, and we find we need people to blame because these are primitive and at the heart of our humanity, we instinctively live as if we had free will whether or not we actually do.

Thus, the debate over free will may as well be closed: we need to live as if we have it.

This could be boiled down in the negative form to the aphorism ‘we are forced to live as if we are free’ – which I think applies beautifully to both over-arching consumer capitalism and evangelical Christianity.

But perhaps we can push this further. If our humanity pushes us to live as if there were free will – even if there might not be (which is, as the programme explains, proveably unproveable) – then perhaps we project the consequences of these free actions into places of judgement.

In other words: we cannot prove if heaven and hell exist, but it’s a natural response to want the world to be fair, to be sorted out and judged at some point so that justice is done. A deterministic universe it might be – just chemicals and electrons – but this is not a world that we find ‘human’ precisely because it makes a nonsense of ideas of love – and hate too.