agnostic bus

I donated five pounds to the Atheist Bus campaign on the grounds that I am irritated by all the evangelical Christian propaganda on public transport. A Christian friend of mine also donated on the grounds that the advert would promote discussion. Well, it certainly has, but perhaps not quite the sort of thing he had in mind.

Here's my suggestion: "There may or may not be a Divine Being or Beings, and they're probably just the anthropomorphic interfaces of vast cosmic processes, but anyway, they're on their own spiritual journey and their goals may or may not coincide with yours. They certainly can't be bothered to arrange for you to fry for all eternity on a hot griddle, so you can stop all that worrying."

But perhaps the above is not as snappy as the Atheist Bus.

Liz Williams suggests:

GOD: SHE'S NOT JUST AN OLD BLOKE WITH A BEARD, YOU KNOW!

Another suggestion from KH:

"Zeus is going to kick your pussy God's ass and then shag your women!"

Maybe we could just have a poster on the side of buses that reads: "Paganism: the religion where enjoying yourself is SACRED." Except that we don't believe in evangelising.

(Also available in Judaism, where it's a sin to refuse a pleasure, apparently, and it's requirement to make love on the Sabbath eve; and Unitarianism, which celebrates being alive.)

All this talk of buses reminds me of the short story by E M Forster, The Celestial Omnibus, which you can hear read aloud at the Library of Babel.

The title-story is a whimsical piece of fantasy which again uses a child as the means to unmask unimaginative adult pragmatism. “The Celestial Omnibus” starts with a young boy who is perplexed by the sign-post in his Surbiton street that says “To Heaven” and points to a cul-de-sac. Running up the blank alley one evening he encounters an omnibus which takes him up to a paradise where he meets all the characters from fiction and mythology that his parents and their friends talk about but do not really believe in.

~ Literary Encyclopedia

Criteria for theology

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

~ John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

I think any explanation of the nature of the universe should be elegant and the simplest possible solution to the problem (so it could actually be quite complex, whilst still being the simplest possible explanation). Physicists often talk about elegance and simplicity as criteria for their theories about how the world works. Also I think we should distinguish between theories (large bodies of complex reasoning backed by copious amounts of evidence) and hypotheses (propositions about how the world works that have yet to be proven).

Theological explanations should also be internally consistent and logical (even if the logic is different from conventional forms of logic), as well as consistent with the fact that there are millions of people with a different explanation. Pagan theological formulations usually take into account the plurality of religious beliefs; Christian theological formulations signally fail in this regard.  For example, most Pagans say that other people are following their own unique spiritual path in their own cultures; there's no drive to convert others to Paganism (Jews and Sikhs also believe this).  Most Christians believe that Christ is the only means of accessing the Divine, and many believe that non-Christians won't be "saved" (this fails to explain why other faiths are so satisfying for their adherents).  Theologians should also practice triangulation, comparing their explanations with those of other religions and philosophies, and with science, to see if they still make sense.

Many theologians claim that theology is resistant to logic because the Divine is paradoxical: but   paradoxes can often be resolved by looking at the thing from a different perspective - like the old chestnut about "God is no where and God is now here".

a little light reading

Four interesting projects....

• Badger's Bible Project, in which an atheist reads and comments on the Bible
• Peter on Genesis, in which a Quaker Pagan reads Genesis and Exodus
  
• Blogging the Bible, in which David Plotz, who is Jewish, finds out what's really in there
• Bill Darlison, a Unitarian minister, also reads the Bible (for the 14th time)
  

Badger says:

So the Lord said, “I will destroy Man whom I have created from the face of the Earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry I have made them.” - Genesis 6:7

So, God gets pissed at Man and decides not only to kill every single person on the planet (even the newborn babies who are, one would think, blameless), but he also decides to off all the animals. Well, except fish, I would guess. They were probably quite pleased!

Anyhow, flood happens. God has a grand ole time going along undoing everything he did. Is it just me, or does he strike you as a frustrated gamer, always reloading Sims from a save point, after having done horrible things to his Sims?

Actually the Flood was caused by Ishtar when she was suffering from PMT. See Tablet 11 of The Epic of Gilgamesh. I am also mystified as to why anyone would worship a being who is described as sending plagues and floods on innocent people. Anyway, it’s all a metaphor…

Peter says:

The Bible was written by writers, and I’ve long felt that much of what those writers wanted to say has been lost, crushed, twisted, and sometimes outright perverted by later so-called “Bible based” traditions. All religious sentiments aside, as a fellow writer I feel it is my calling and my sacred duty to read through the text, not for comfort or for inspiration or for edification, but simply to hear what it is they were trying to say.

David says:

This is not a story they taught me at Temple Sinai's Hebrew School in 1980: The founding fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel lie, breach a contract, encourage pagans to convert to Judaism only in order to incapacitate them for slaughter, murder some innocents and enslave others, pillage and profiteer, and then justify it all with an appeal to their sister's defiled honor.

Bill says:

I am not against the Bible. I am just against the idea that this book – or any other book, including the Koran or the Book of Mormon or whatever – is a special revelation from God. It is probably the most irrational, dangerous and divisive idea that currently infects the human psyche. And, as Art Lester said to me last month, ‘The book-believers are the ones who will destroy the world.’ Sadly, Art might just be right. And it is our duty to challenge the book-believers, by fostering a new kind of religious consciousness with the contrary message that knowledge and wisdom are the result of human thought, human experience, reflection, reason, scientific endeavour. They do not drop down from heaven fully formed, nor are they are not the preserve of one nation or one religion or one period in history. And they are certainly not to be found in one book. To suggest that they are is to turn works of literature into loaded guns.

Bill is the author of The Gospel and the Zodiac, which puts forward the idea that the Jesus mythos was originally an initiatory mystery based on the symbolism of the Zodiac. Neat idea.

If I was going to do a Bible-blogging project, I'd start with something as near to the original as I could get: the Hebrew Tanakh in English. Alternatively, I would blog about a book that I might enjoy reading, like the Tao Te Ching or the T’ai Hsüan Ching.

Merry....

Ornamental Yule Goats made of straws, used for Yule decoration in Scandinavia.

Happy Winter Solstice (yes Virginia, axial tilt is the reason for the season)

Io Saturnalia!

Bona Dies Natalis Solis Invicti

Merry Yule

Happy Modranecht

Happy Kwanzaa

Happy Hannukkah

Happy HumanLight

Merry Christmas

Season's Greetings

Happy Sanghamitta

Happy Hanukwanzmas

Joyeux Noël

Fröhliche Weihnacht

and a huge variety of other fascinating festivals!

theoretical models of Paganism

I was wondering if Heelas and Woodhead's four categories of congregational religion were useful for thinking about Pagan and related traditions too.

Some voudouisants stress the all-powerfulness of the loa and the relative powerlessness of humans — could this be an example of a religion of difference?  And when it really focusses on experience of the loa in possession, could that be an example of a religion of experiential difference? Many Pagans speak of being chosen by a deity (and having little choice about which deity picked them) — this also seems to stress the relative powerlessness of humans in the face of divine prerogatives.

Some reconstructionists stress the similarity of deities to humanity, do not practice magic, and stress the importance of tradition — could this be an example of a religion of humanity?

Many other Pagans stress the importance of inner experience and cultivate individuality — could this be an example of a religion of experiential humanity?

No to bigotry, yes to life

I've written before about the difference between interfaith dialogue, evangelism and proselytising.

Now a particularly sickening and insidious example of "evangelism" (or is it proselytising?) has been highlighted by my fellow Wiccan blogger over at Witches and Scientists.

So, a message to Christians of an evangelical and/or proselytising persuasion:

People of other religions than your own are not "lost". They didn't get "sucked into" the other religion because they somehow failed to notice the existence of Christianity. If they looked at Christianity, they probably rejected the disgusting doctrines espoused by some Christians, but not all, of exclusivity (the idea that only Christians can get to heaven), penal substitution, and the idea that the divine isn't immanent in the world, and is only masculine. They probably rejected the utterly sick idea of "dying to the world and living in Christ". They probably saw the humanity and spirituality of a gay friend and rejected the sick and perverse doctrines that seek to prevent that gay friend living and loving to the full.

Instead, we embraced the idea that all religions are paths to the Divine (with the possible exception of those espousing the above-mentioned doctrines); that the Divine is immanent in the world - that each rock and tree and living being is filled with the Divine - and that the messages of compassion, love and spirituality shine forth everywhere, in all times and places. And that all forms of love and pleasure are sacred, rituals of the Goddess of life and love (including same-sex love).

So, no thanks, we don't need the narrow, warped, cramped, life-denying, exclusivist, dreary creed of the sort of Christians who write utter drivel like "Generation Hex".

We are very happy to embrace as kindred spirits the kind of Christians who are prepared to acknowledge that other religions and lifestyles are valid paths to the Divine (and there are many more of them every day, thank the gods) but we will never, never compromise with the evil bigots who promote homophobia, bigotry, and hatred of other religions.

the privatisation of religion

Hell In Little Axe: An Oklahoma Mom’s Chilling Battle With Religious Bigotry (Americans United for Separation of Church and State)

The thing that interests me about this story is that the two mothers who didn't want their children indoctrinated were themselves Christians, but still got labelled as "atheists" by the bigots who ran the school.

The picture here seems a lot more complicated than atheism vs religion -- it's about the privatisation of religion and individual liberty vs state-sponsored religion.

Sociologists of religion (Heelas & Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution, 2005) have identified four main categories of religious group, which "new" atheists would do well to take note of, since it seems counter-productive to lump all religionists in the same category - many people who practice a religion agree with atheists that secularism is a good thing.


Source: Spirituality in Counselling and Psychotherapy
By Dennis Lines
Published by SAGE, 2006
ISBN 1412919576, 9781412919579

Heelas and Woodhead also identify two main ways of engaging with spirituality: "subjective-life" in which the individual spiritual life is paramount; and "life-as" in which individuality becomes subsumed to the collective identity. These attract different types of people and have very different results. In the past, adherents of subjective-life spirituality were generally regarded as heretics and often killed or persecuted.

gender bending

According to the Gender Analyzer, there is an 84% chance that Stroppy Rabbit is written by a man. Well, a friend did once tell me that I am a gay man trapped in the body of a woman...

deep, so deep

The Stroppy Rabbit is an INTP, according to Typealyzer, a website that works out the Myers-Briggs personality-type of your writing (spotted by Chas, whose blog is an ISTP):

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

religions as software

Christianity is like Microsoft:

• It's a large corporate venture, bent on world domination
• Once you've installed it on your hard drive, it's really difficult to get rid of it
• Nearly everyone's got it (and they use it in schools), so it has become the default option
  
• It is incompatible with other software
• It takes up a lot of space on your hard drive
  
• It fails to conform to international standards
• But the user interface is attractive and the support is 24/7

Paganism is like Linux:

• It's dead set against Microsoft
• It's small and developed by a dedicated community of geeks
• It comes from Northern Europe
• The support arrangements are a bit patchy
• It's eclectic and has lots of shareware

Reconstructionism is like programming via the command line:

• It's bloody hard work and you can only do one thing at a time
  
• Heathenry - "the religion with homework" - 'nuff said.
  

Satanism is like a computer virus:

• It's parasitic upon Microsoft and exploits its vulnerabilities
• People blame it on the Linux geeks but it's actually done by spotty teenagers with no social life
• Naive Microsoft users are always claiming there's more of it about than there actually is (there are only about 100 actual Satanists in the UK)

Google is like an insidious cult:

• It appeared from nowhere and everyone thought it was peace-loving and non-corporate and cool
  
• Now it is trying to take over the world by stealth
• It started with the motto "Don't be evil" but then got into bed with a totalitarian regime
  

The New Age is like Facebook:

• Light, bright and has lots of shiny gizmos
• Uses social networking to connect people

Quakers (Friends) and Unitarians are like Apple Mac:

• Generally owned by intellectuals and arty types; not corporate
• Adheres to international standards
  
• Great user interface; universally agreed to be cool
  
• But hardly anyone actually owns one

Wicca is like Firefox:

• Wicca discovered the Divine Feminine way before Christianity, and now they're stealing our clothes (so everyone will think they discovered Her) - Firefox invented tabbed browsing way before Microsoft, and now Microsoft have finally adopted it, and everyone will think they invented it
• Both Wicca and Firefox have a great logo
• Both adopted by a small community of dedicated users

New Atheists are like teenage computer hackers - they have no clue about what they're trying to hack into or how it works, but they like to create a virus or two (sorry, meme...)

(By Yewtree. If you pass this on to anyone else, please link back here).

See also: Religions as ex-girlfriends by Al Billings

sexual ethics

Just spotted this interesting chart of different religions' attitudes to sexual ethics in 1994. Well, if it was a choice between those seven, I'd rather be a Buddhist. Since they omitted Paganism, here's a summary:

Pagan attitudes to....
Sex between consenting teenagers	OK as long as they use contraception
Sex between an adult and a teenager	Unacceptable (difference of power)
Premarital sex	Blessed ("All acts of love and pleasure are My rituals")
Extramarital sex	Only if both parties to the marriage agree to it
Divorce	It's a fact of life (and is provided for in the wording of the handfasting ceremony)
Masturbation	Fine
Abortion	Most Pagans are pro-choice
Contraceptives	Encouraged
Married clergy	Married, single, we're not fussy
Female clergy	Yay! Priestesses are everywhere
Homosexual orientation	Blessed (fabulous actually)
Homosexual sex acts	Blessed ("All acts of love and pleasure are My rituals")
Same-sex weddings	Marvellous
Ordination of homosexuals	Lovely (you just try and stop 'em)

It would be interesting to know if there was any difference between different Pagan traditions on any of these issues.

"Witchcraft" in Africa

African "witchcraft" has been in the news again recently.

Here is my view of this issue:

• There are African traditional religions which include magical practitioners. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these practitioners were mislabelled as "witches" by Christian missionaries and colonialists. At that time the word "witch" still had almost entirely negative connotations. When these people's roles are being translated into English by Africans, they don't use the term "witch".
  
  
• African traditional religions have two categories of "witchcraft":
  
  1. involuntary "witchcraft" which is a disease that the "witch" often doesn't know that they have. This is a complete misuse of the word "witch". (See Witchcraft among the Azande by W Evans-Pritchard for an anthropological study of this type of witchcraft belief.)
  2. sorcery or malevolent "witchcraft" - again, this has its own set of African words which probably don't map precisely onto the European concepts.
  Please note I don't believe that either (a) or (b) above actually exist, certainly not as an organised practice. Unfortunately evangelical Christians in Africa do believe in (a) above (and probably (b) as well), and are using it to get converts and money by stirring up a witch panic and torturing children (many of whom are rescued by the excellent charity Stepping Stones Nigeria).
  
  
• During the late 19th and early 20th century, various European writers began to see witches as just traditional healers who were misunderstood, and so the word "witch" came to have positive connotations in some quarters; Gerald Gardner picked up on these writings and created Wicca (or the people who initiated him did so).
  
  
• This new positive understanding still hasn't reached many evangelical or fundamentalist Christians, who regard all magic as being of the devil. The more enlightened Christians understand the difference between contemporary Pagan Witchcraft, the negative stereotypes of the 19th century, and the magical practices of African traditional religions.
  
  
• In some circumstances, it may help to label traditional healers & magicians as being like Wiccans (where Wiccans are held in positive regard); in other cases, it may not (where Wicca is regarded as just another decadent Western practice, for instance).
  
  
• Labelling all magical practitioners as "witches" is a bit too much like saying that anyone who does anything that looks like shamanism is a shaman, when they may have their own indigenous term and understanding of the practice which is different from that of the original shamans of the Tungus in Siberia. People's practices should be understood on their own terms, and not in terms imported from another context. It is quite correct to say that understanding it in terms of "black magic" versus "white magic" is very unhelpful. I'm just going one step further and saying we should be extremely careful in applying European terms, metaphors, or concepts to the situation; if we do so, we need to understand it in terms of the historical factors which might be causing the situation, and to be aware of the differences as much as the similarities.