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.

I received a present the other day – a book through the post from an ex-colleague: ‘Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition.’ It’s a fascinating read.

Admittedly, I was a little wary: there’s a long history of ‘actually, they were gay’ books which would have us believe that Jesus, St Paul, Shakespeare and even George Michael (ok, fair enough) were all gay… but this book is not that at all.

As the author points out, it would be tempting to think ‘yes, there was probably homosexual activity on ships, because, like prisoners, they didn’t have any other outlet.’ But this is to entirely miss the point. Pirates had escaped the prison conditions of the naval ships. They were free men. And some of them – not all – but some of them formed intentionally all-male communities.

Why is this important? Firstly, for reasons that are non-purient. I’m just not interested in an ‘exotic’ twist to the piracy thesis. I think it’s important because it shows, again, how pirates emerged to create TAZ spaces in which taboos could be broken. The emergence of these ‘transgressive’ communities began the process of the deadened orthodoxy being challenged and changed. This is the archetype I’ve been working on in the book from an economic, religious and social perspective… but I’m really glad to be able to expand that into sexual politics too.

Challenging material for some, I’m sure. But that’s what this is all about. As the author writes in the introduction:

‘the major portion of the literature has been concerned with piratical deeds than with pirates. Its appeal, one would surmise from the content, is to an audience of small boys, retired naval officers, and other primarily concerned with cannon, cutlass, gore and decks awash with blood… the opportunity to investigate one of the unique groups in human history has been ignored.’

So, yes, if you thought all this pirate stuff was just about eye-patches and children’s parties, think again. What these challenging and marginal communities of (mostly) men did at the turn of the 18th century has an enormous amount to offer us as we seek to challenge the hegemony of white, Christian capitalist, hierarchical and misogynistic power structures that fanned out in Empire building and did damage that we still suffer today.

I’m hoping to have the 1st draft finished in the next couple of months… just taking time.

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.

“We fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that’s the end.” Hamlet, Act IV, Scene III

In the previous post I tried to set out a distinction between death (which can remain beautiful – a frozen moment just beyond life) and decay (which is always grotesque – all beauty drain and consumed by maggots) and then examine how, in ecological terms, decay is healthy, while unrotting death fails to complete the cycle of life. It is only once decay sets in that a body can become useful again.

All ecosystems require the evolution of appropriate agents of decay to remain healthy. I finished by expressing a hunch that ritual can be seen as an agent of decay in our culture, and that currently it is lacking. There is plenty of death – plenty of redundancy and refuse – but little decay. The end result of this is a lot of dead material to trip us up, but fewer and fewer resources released back into the ground to fund newness.

I’ve been re-reading Hamlet recently, and re-reading Will in the World – How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare alongside it too. The section that deals with Hamlet describes the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet (occasionally corrupted as Hamlet in various public records). Reading into the events of the time, the funeral of the boy must have had added strain: Shakespeare’s family had definite Catholic leanings, and yet the ceremony in 1596 would have had to have been a strictly Protestant affair. As such, families such as Shakespeare’s may well have grieved the loss of the more colourful and rich Catholic ritual that expressed a far more open relationship with the dead.

“It is possible that he found the service, with its deliberate refusal to address the dead child as ‘thou’, its reduction of ritual, its narrowing of ceremony, its denial of any possibility of communication, painfully inadequate.”

The theatre of funeral was removed; the agent of decay reduced. Bodies were lowered, cold, into the ground, like coal. Unfit for transition. At the same time, the theatres in London were regularly shut by the Protestant moralisers. Early 17th century London was a society unsure of how to decompose the dead material that surrounded, and use it to regenerate.

It feels as if we are at a similar place today. With the economic crisis and accompanying political crises, as well as the crumbling of trust in the press with phone-hacking scandals and the Leveson inquiry, it seems as though there is a lot of ‘dead’ material around. What we can now see is that the problem is whether we can evolve appropriate agents of decay to help process this dead material and reformulate it.

The Occupy protest movement is perhaps part of this process. Right-wing observers like to portray those involved as dirty maggots and bottom-feeders anyway, but this should perhaps be taken as a compliment. They are crawling over the dead matter, trying to work out what can yet be reused, and how these rich resources can fund new directions.

It strikes me that this is precisely where the church ought to be basing itself. As a faith based on death and resurrection, Christianity’s natural habitat is decaying matter. This is what others fled from in disgust – the lepers, the sick – but what Jesus went straight towards, mixing mud and spit.

Locating oneself in this place of decay is going to be profoundly uncomfortable. There is something heroic about those who can preach death of faith: it is cold and hard, steel sharp and cutting. But the reason why the communities that Pete Rollins is talking about in Insurrection offer such a shocking vision is that they are not based around the death of faith, but around the putrid decay of faith – the decomposition of it into something more base, more akin to shit, to soil, to raw earth… where, as compost, it can feed newness.

This is perhaps the best description of Ikon: a putrid community. One that embraces not just death, but decay and decomposition.

There is a theological problem here though. The orthodox idea of Jesus’ physical resurrection is very keen to affirm that Jesus’ body did not see any decay. To evangelical belief the idea of Jesus’ bruised and broken dead body carries with it a mystique of martyrdom and heroism… but the idea of it entering a state of decay is totally taboo. And yet, there is a sense in which it was only by the decaying of this body that its riches could be released.

In 2 Corinthians 4:16, Paul says that

“though outwardly we are decaying, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day…”

Perhaps we need to see this not as a negative-positive construction, but as a positive-positive one. The outward decay is to be welcomed…is the very thing that funds the inner renewal.

Either way, what we must certainly do is ensure that the theatre of ritual remains… that agents of decay are encouraged and given space, and that we do not hold on to our dead too tightly. The old, embalmed Lenins we all keep must be allowed to warm and rot.

Micah Redding has an interesting post bouncing off some of the thoughts I’ve posted here, which reflects on baptism, and whether this represents a ‘ritual to signify the end of rituals.’

My immediate thought was of the lines from the Bhagavad-Gita, made famous by J Robert Oppenheimer in an interview in which he recorded his thoughts in the aftermath of the first atomic bomb test:

‘We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.’

Funny how these things go, but I then caught a few minutes of a BBC4 programme yesterday – ‘After Life – The Strange Science of Decay.’ (around on iPlayer for 6 days from today) and that threw up some interesting connections.

So, here we go… some quick thoughts on death, rituals and a theology of decay…

Firstly, I think it’s interesting to highlight the difference between death and decay. We might even say that it is not death itself that we are afraid of, but the process of decay that comes after. The just-dead body appears still to be of this world, or at least functionable for use in another world, whatever or wherever that might be. The embalmed or preserved body is frozen in time, still holding the tension between this life and the next.

But once decay sets in, things turn nasty. The decaying body is a thing of horror: beauty takes quick leave, and the ‘frozen’ nature of the corpse thaws into warm rot. Zombies are dead bodies in decay. The fear of the decaying body is this: it is no longer fit for transport or use elsewhere. The decaying body is returning to this earth; breaking down into its elemental substances, ready for re-use. The decaying body thus tells us something about our place in the material cycle of things: we are not elevated, we are atoms, chemical bond… we were dust, and will be dust again.

This fear of decay leads us to desire, if not eternal life, then at least some preserving medium which will keep our material bodies from disintegration. But in terms of ecology, this is a disaster: decay is a vital process, without which life on earth would cease to exist.

Without organic decomposers (bacteria and fungi) decaying dead organic matter, vital nutrients would be trapped and never be released back into the soil. Plants would therefore be unable to grow and every ecosystem would collapse, as plants are at the base of every food chain: the cycle of life would grind to a halt. Not only that: if nothing decayed, the dead bodies of all living creatures and plants would litter the globe. We would literally be climbing over undecayed bodies.

Actually, there have been periods in history where this has (partially) been the case. In the carboniferous period, large quantities of wood were buried and not broken down because the bacteria and insects that could effectively digest them had not yet evolved. These fallen trees were laid down as coal deposits, dark and cold and undying.

In other words, death will come to us. But decay – the transition from death into the new cycle of life – requires ‘agents of decay.’ Without these agents there is nothing can be broken down and reused.

So what the hell has this got to do with baptism? Well here’s my hunch: rituals are agents of decay. And at the moment they are seriously lacking.

I want to expand on this in the next post, as this is getting far too long for the average digital attention span [joking!], but, in brief, I want to propose that not only are we living in a culture – theologically and otherwise – where death is taboo, but, more seriously, we have  a paucity of communal ritual which moves in post mortem to bring about healthy decay. And the result of this: dark, undying deposits which are unavailable to be broken down and re-used.

Now here’s the thing: what I think Pete Rollins is doing with Insurrection is offering not only a path by which people can experience death (of poorly-thought-out beliefs) but also a way of participating in decay: the breaking down of these beliefs that can open them up for re-use.

But via Hamlet, Catholic persecution and the Occupy movement, I’ll get to that in the next post.

I’ve been wondering about writing something on this for a while, but haven’t been sure how much to say, or what might be wise. But I thought it might be helpful to others to open the door just a crack and see if there’s some light that could get in on what’s a terrifically difficult and often very dark and complex place.

Perhaps I don’t need to say very much, so I’ll start with just this: I’ve long been aware of the creative relationship I have with depression. Which is to say – it’s a bastard thing to suffer, but I’m not sure I’d want to be without it. Why? Because the time spent walking the black dog – as Churchill put it – appears somehow to bring something to the page.

I’m not going to go into any details – I don’t think there’s much point as I’m pretty sure people who know know anyway, and it’s no badge of honour either (which I know can happen). Plus it’s not something I suffer from very badly, and I’d be happy just to shut up and get on with it, but the reason I wanted to write something is that I see it in other writers, other speakers and public figures, and wonder if it would help to get it out in the open a bit, because, to be honest, there’s still a stigma around the issue, which is surprising, given the prevalence of it. Surveys show that writers (and teachers – great, double whammy) do tend to suffer depression more than others… but feelings are mixed about whether they would would want to be without it.

Anyway, may be I’m dumb to own up, and may be people just don’t want to talk about it… but if you did want to  – anonymously if need be – then feel free to add comments/links etc. I don’t really have any answers, but I think it’s possibly even worse in the ‘Christian’ world because there’s such a pressure to be shiny-happy people who’ve got Jesus to sort it all out. Well…that didn’t work out so well for me, so you’re not the only one /-)

It’s been interesting watching the argument over whether the England football team should be allowed to wear poppies for their international matches this weekend. The international governing body of the sport, FIFA, ruled that they could not have poppies on their shirts as this contravened their guidelines.

The FA, the British body, cried foul and argued that it would be offensive to the memory of those who fought in the wars if the poppies were banned.

As it turned out, a proposal by a Tory MP that they should be allowed to wear them as an emblem stitched onto a black armband.

What’s interesting is that there’s some kind of altercation over poppy-wearing every year. A figure appears on TV not wearing one. A newsreader says they won’t be forced to and calls it ‘poppy fascism.’

Thinking it about it today, it struck me that in some ways these transgressions are actually required for the act of remembrance to be performed properly.

Poppy-wearing has become meaningful only in its disruption. It is only in arguments about the violence of its absence that its meaning is renewed. If everyone wore a poppy, and nobody forgot to, no one would remember why they were really being worn in the first place. What this means is that the day we remember the end of the two great wars requires a person or body to be demonised. The energy from this opposition is then channelled into the revitalisation of the memory of the event.

We can think about this in relation to other symbols too. There have been a number of cases about the rights of employees to wear crucifixes, for example. What we can see from this is that these battles are, in fact, welcome to those who put great meaning by the symbol, because it’s only in the context over a fight about its absence that its presence is re-invigorated. Without the battle, the symbol dissolves into easy familiarity.

Ironically then, those who really want poppy-wearing to be remembered are actively looking for, and excited to find, people each year who forget. They need these transgressors as a sort of sacrifice in order to breathe life back into the memory of the event.

The question this poses then is whether symbols of remembrance are to be encouraged at all. If it’s only by transgression and the demonisation of a transgressor that they work to draw the act of remembrance back to life we need to ask if that is appropriate.

What we tend to find is the media going not for ‘poppy fascism’ but ‘offence addiction.’ They talk up how offended people will be if poppies are not worn. But again, I wonder if this it is more offensive for to the memory of those who died if they felt that people were only wearing them so as not to be caught out and cause the stir.

It is very possible to remember properly without physical symbols of remembrance. So while I think remembering is hugely important, let’s stop haranguing people who choose not to show they may be doing so with an external symbol.

One of the key questions that has been often asked about the ‘Occupy’ protests is ‘what are your proposed alternatives?’ This, I think, is often asked with a background attitude of ‘I really don’t think you have any alternatives, do you?’ The implication being, before you moan about how bad things are, make sure you have a fully worked solution to how you can undertake improvements.

One comment on a previous posted ended with this:

What alternative ways of living are the occupiers proposing? and what alternative are you proposing? If you’re really suggesting the occupiers mutiny, as opposed to just complain, then surely that entails appropriating St Paul’s as rebel territory and mugging any banker that comes within range? If that’s not the plan, what are the new ways of living that will transform our society?

Couple of points on this.

Firstly, it is part of the corruption of power to insist that any protest or critique against the dominant system comes fully formed. When you’re being beaten down, it is entirely valid to simply scream in frustration, without any idea what changes need to be made.

Secondly, that said, I do want to reflect on the sorts of changes that I think we need to see. Importantly, they do not involve mugging bankers. In fact, in some ways it would be inappropriate to blame the bankers at all. Why? Because bankers are not ‘bad guys in an essentially good system.’ They simply lucky guys in an essentially unfair and unjust system.

Zizek makes this point in his typical style in the video above, when he comments that Hitler was never violent enough. Why? Because, however radical, he worked only to make the system work for him. Counter this, Gandhi was far more violent – why? Because he wanted to dismantle the system entirely. He wanted the whole thing to stop and change.

So the point is not to mug the bankers as some attempt to redistribute the wealth that they have pooled into their possession. The only ethic behind this is jealousy – you’ve got more than me, so give me some. The fundamental point is that we need a different system – or, more poignantly, a different ethic.

In other words, the changes that need to be made need first to come at the inner, personal level. We need to deal with our own desires to be rich and wealthy, to use more than our fair share of resources. Without that, all we are wanting is to swap places with those who have done better than ourselves out of the current system.

Interestingly, the debabcle at St Pauls fits nicely into this. Why? Because at the centre of the debate is the ethical question of what constitutes ‘Christian’ economics. What Would Jesus Do? is the right question here, but, it seems, the Anglican church has come a very long way from that original radical ethic. Compare this:

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.

(Acts 4, 32 – 35)

to this:

The Riches and Goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast.

(38th Article of the Church of England)

There are nuances and interpretations, I’m well aware. But the grandeur and opulence of St Pauls does seem to sit rather too comfortably in the Corporation of London…and does seem a very very long way away from the spirit of radical equality that the gospels and new testament talk so much about.

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.

Interesting video here showing Slavoj Zizek at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York. His speech can be read in full here, but what I love about the video is that, for some technological reason no doubt, he cannot himself speak. The crowd around him who can hear directly have to shout out what he’s saying so that others further away can hear. In a strangely symbolic way, his message is internalised, and is only heard when the crowd themselves amplify it.

I like that, partly because Zizek has been in danger for a while of becoming a caricature of himself – and thus able to be ridiculed and dismissed without his message being heard. And his message is good.

In particular I like these lines, which I think fit well with my post on the protests:

Carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after when we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like, ‘Oh, we were young, it was beautiful…’ Remember that our basic message is, ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives.’ A taboo is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want, but what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want? Remember: The problem is not corruption or greed; the problem is the system which pushes you to be corrupt.

He goes on to ask what exactly Christianity is… and outlines briefly that this is Christianity: people gathered in empathy, in solidarity with the poor, concerned to get a grip on a corrupt system and change it together. That’s not happening in church on Sundays people. Just admit it.