The D word

I started to read Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion recently. There are several reasons why I haven't done it sooner, but the main ones are that people I trust have assured me that it doesn't say anything he hasn't said elsewhere, and that he doesn't need my money.

But here I am with a free copy that came my way, and I read the preface. I think the project is going to be a long one. I had to go and lie down in a dark room to recover. Others have already criticised the work in lots of ways, so I probably won't bother here, but the bit that gave me a headache was this:

"Just as feminists wince when they hear 'he' rather than 'he or she', or 'man' rather than 'human', I want everybody to flinch whenever we hear a phrase such as 'Catholic child' or 'Muslim child'. Speak of a 'child of Catholic parents' if you like; but if you hear anybody speak of a 'Catholic child', stop them and politely point out that children are too young to know where they stand on such issues, just as they are too young to know where they stand on economics or politics."

Presumably this latter means that it is impossible to speak of a French or English child. After all, the child has not chosen which nation to be born into, knows nothing of its politics and economics and may grow to prefer speaking Greek. Come to think of it, he or she may never make a conscious decision to be French or English. Perhaps most of us should simply be described as of French or English birth; the only real French or English people are those who have become naturalised citizens.

The problem is that Professor Dawkins must know that belonging to a religion is a cultural as well as intellectual phenomenon. Why does he pretend it's otherwise? Or perhaps he really does purely equate religion with assent to a set of propositions. In which case he is abysmally ignorant.

And I'm not sure which would be worse in an academic. But then, I suppose Dawkins stopped being an academic a long time ago, when he became a science populariser (and a good one at that). Here he seems simply to be venting spleen, which is OK, I suppose, but is seriously disappointing.

Black Death Awareness Week

Well, no, not really. But I was recently chatting with Prof. Lindsey Davies, the National Director of Pandemic Flu Preparedness at the Department of Health (as one does), and a thought occurred to me. She had been saying that public awareness of the fact that a world-wide outbreak of nasty influenza is well overdue seems to swing wildly between panic and complacency. As bird flu strikes in South East Asia, the tabloids run scare headlines, and the internet sale of dodgy antiviral drugs soars. Then there isn't a huge epidemic and everyone forgets about it. Yet the danger remains, and the likelihood of a massive flu outbreak continues to hover over us.

What we ought to be doing is raising people's awareness of several things. Firstly, that eventually (perhaps quite soon) it will happen. Secondly, that if we are prepared for it, the impact will be lessened, and there is no need to panic. And thirdly (there's more, but no one wants more than three points at a time) we need to raise public awareness of basic hygiene. Why is using a handkerchief a lost art amongst younger people? Coughs and sneezes really do spread diseases, (as do unwashed hands) but lots of people seem hardly to realise it, and so on....

The key in responding to the threat, then, is neither to panic nor to ignore it, but to be prepared, to be aware of how to respond, and how to minimise the spread of illness. Many people will fall ill, and quite a few will die. There will be a strain not only on the health service, but on all areas of life. Yet it is survivable, and with preparedness it need not be as bad as it could be.

Being a preacher, I couldn't help drawing a spiritual parallel. Many people believe in God, and will resort to prayer and even churchgoing in a crisis. And often they seem disappointed that it seems to offer less comfort and strength than it promises. Part of the reason is that the necessary preparation is lacking. Of course, God does tend to come through, but he can build much better on a foundation of steady spirituality. Where there is a constant habit of prayer and worship, and a way of thinking that acknowledges God from day to day, there is a firm basis for dealing with the lows and highs of life. Otherwise we tend to swing between panic and complacency, and end up wondering why we never bothered to have any spiritual preparation in place.

Coming back to the worldly, Prof Davies asked me what preparations our diocese has for a flu pandemic. After all, there may well be a lot more funerals, pastoral needs and so on, while quite a few clergy will no doubt be out of action, and the bereaved will still be wanting the same care and consideration for themselves and their nearest and dearest. So I looked it up on the diocesan web site. The good news is that there's an entry for " flu pandemic". The bad news is that there's no actual content linked to the header. No doubt preparations are in train....

Back

What do you mean, "Back"? You never said you were going away!

Which is why this blog will never feature on widely viewed blogs of the world. But we've been to Belgium on holiday. At this point, of course, we are always asked (yes, we've been twice before!), "Why Belgium of all places?" On the face of it, it does seem strange. After all, who knows anything about the place? The most famous Belgian ever was a fictional detective created by an english woman.

One answer, of course, would be beer. The Belgians brew really great beer. Of course, most of them don't appreciate the stuff. The best selling beer in Belgium is a lagerish swill called Jupiler. And of course, they perpetrate Stella Artois. But they also do Westvleteren. This is one of the famous Trappist beers, brewed at an actual Trappist monastery in the eponymous village near to Popperinge in the heart of Belgium's hop growing region. It's produced in small quantities and is very rare. But if you go there, you can drink the stuff in the nearby bar and just possibly buy some to take home. (We failed.)

But there are plenty of other reasons. The people are friendly. (Not to each other; the Walloons and the Flemings hate each other cordially, but both are delighted to discover that you are British.) The art and architecture are great, the countryside is delightful and the food is great (and always comes with chips, which are a proud Belgian invention, even though we English have made them our own).

We stayed in the south, near Malmedy and the Haute Fagne, a (relatively) high altitude fenland with lots of bleak and windy peat bogs and corresponding fauna and flora. One way of seeing it is by railbike, which was fun, in a physical sort of way. Here's a video that Sarah made by accident...

So anyway, home we came, and plunged again into the hectic round of the real world, so that August almost passed without a blog entry and my fans despaired.

A Good Role Model

We went last night to see Die Hard 4. It was quite fun, with Bruce Willis an older, balder, leaner and if possible meaner John McClane. He shot, burnt, slashed, crushed and generally pureed the opposition for a couple of hours in a suitably satisfactory manner. In addition, his character appears to have given up smoking. So he is not going to encourage any impressionable young viewers to do anything dangerous. That's encouraging.

Smoking in church

A few weeks ago the local council sent me a no smoking sign which has to be displayed at the entrance to the church, in accordance with the new law against consenting adults smoking indoors.

I'm hardly the first to notice that people don't actually smoke in church. (I once saw a teenager reach for his cigs, only to be slapped down by his friends.) I'm not sure whether smoking was ever acceptable in churches, though perhaps in the eighteenth century it may have been. I have a totally unresearched mental image of some gouty squire huddling near the brazier in his box pew and sucking on a clay churchwarden (which is a type of pipe). But I suspect the image is fanciful.

Anyway, my first instinct was to bin the offending article, but someone pointed out the huge fines that can be levied for not telling the congregation not to do what they are already not doing. So I checked the official web site and discovered that you are allowed to customise the notice. So I came up with this:

Cafe culture on the Moor

That's Heaton Moor, the former village cum suburb next to Heaton Mersey where I live. It's in north Stockport. Over the past few years, a host of pavement cafe sort of places has opened along its main thoroughfare.

Sarah and I went to one tonight. The food was OK - sort of a reasonable starter disguised as a main course. Hardly any beer, though. Lots of fizzy stuff under pressure, and some of that so-nasty-it-has-to-be-extra-chilled stuff. We did find a bottle of Duvel, priced at £3.50. That's about twice what it is in Belgium, and a pound more than at my local.

So what is it we're paying for here? The beer is mostly bad, and very expensive; much more than pub prices. The food is only OK; my crab and haddock fish cakes may have contained some sort of gadoid fish, but I suspect that decapods were only a distant rumour to them. Nicely presented, on black square plates, though.

I suppose the answer is that we are paying for an idea. Some sort of sophisticated pseudo-european chic. Frankly, I don't think it's worth it. But I probably don't understand these things. I'm old-fashioned and like beer with flavour and food with a bit of volume to it.

Liberal evangelicals and other demons

There's a continuing rumbling about changes at Wycliffe Hall, the Oxford theological college whose new principle, Dr. Richard Turnbull, is accused of making it more conservative and of getting rid of staff who oppose him.

A letter from the previous three principals of Wycliffe to the Bishop of Liverpool, Wycliffe's chair of governors (or whatever the body is precisely called) recently expressed similar concerns. On the other hand, a friend who is close to events there tells me that it's all rather over-blown, and there's not too much to worry about. I hope so, but....

A video of Dr. Turnbull addressing a Reform meeting last year is rather disturbing. Not necessarily directly because of the Wycliffe question, but simply because of the attitudes he seems to espouse. (Reform, by the way, is a conservative evangelical Anglican group characterised by opposition to women's ministry and a deep homophobia. A similar group is called Anglican Mainstream. Somewhere there is an agency which comes up with these odd names. (It is also responsible for those countries called The People's Democratic Republic of....)

Dr. T says it's very important to be sure what an evangelical is. (Why? Where is the term in the Bible? Did Jesus tell us to be evangelicals?) Apparently, true evos believe in the authority of scripture (OK), a personal relationship with God (OK), the need for evangelism (OK) and substitutionary atonement (damn, I nearly made it!)

He says that being a theological college principal is a "strategic" move to counter the "capture" of colleges by liberals, and that the spearhead of liberalism is liberal evangelicalism (perhaps evos who only score 3 out of 4 on the identity scale?) and they need to be rooted out of the theological colleges they are in charge of (or perhaps have "captured"). Hence he speaks of "two plus four" evangelical theological colleges: Oak Hill in London and his own Wycliffe are the two (who presumably score 4 out of 4) and the others are presumably the liberal evangelicals at Trinity Bristol, St. John's Nottingham, Ridley Hall Cambridge and Cranmer Hall in Durham.

This is fighting talk. It's military language. Which is bad enough: he evidently sees an awful lot of his fellow Christians (some separated by only one point of disagreement, perhaps) as enemies. But perhaps it's even worse. My present colleague points out that militaristic language in conservative evangelicalism is usually about "spiritual warfare": opposing the forces of darkness. Perhaps we liberal evangelicals (I only score 3 out of 4, remember) are not just enemies, but also demonic ones. No wonder he thinks that 95% of the British population is facing hell, if half or more Christians are satanic.

There's more I could rant about, but I find all this much too depressing. Wouldn't it be grand if instead of talk of (possibly demonic) enemies we had a call to shared prayer, worship and outreach? Does it really matter what "mechanism" I believe lies behind the events of Good Friday as long as I truly believe it was Good?

However, let's finish on a positive note. I agree with him that residential theological colleges can provide better theological training than regional part-time courses (and I'm a tutor on one). But that sadly bids fair to be outweighed by the threat of their becoming ever more sectarian training grounds.