Culture Club

What do you mean "we" kemo sabe? 

Can you like Christian art without being a Christian?

It depends what you mean by "Christian Art".

You might like stories. You might think that the Christian stories are good stories even though they aren't true. You might think that Christian art is good art because of the way it tells those stories.

On the other hand, you might believe in art for arts sake. You might admire the formal beauty and technical skill in a painting, and not really care whether it depicts the Crucifixion of Jesus or a bowl of bananas.

So the question is "Can you enjoy the Christianity in Christian art without being a Christian?" Or, put another way, "Did you enjoy that painting of the Crucifixion because of the subject matter or in spite of it?"

I think that a Merchant of Venice is quite a good play and Siegfried is a very good opera. There is no doubt whatsoever that Shylock and Mime are appalling caricatures of Jewish people. [Note 1] But I don't think that liking them makes me a Cultural Anti-Semite. I like Talons of Weng-Chiang, but I am definitely not a Cultural Racist. [Note 2]

Some people think it is okay to like works which contain bad ideas. Others not so much. They say that if you like the work you are colluding with the ideas in it. Or else they say that the bad idea poisons whatever good qualities the work might have had. Or that any painting of a bad thing is a bad painting by definition.

Can you like Christian ethics and not be a Christian?

It depends what you mean by Christian ethics.

Do you mean specifically Christian ethics -- things which Christians approve of but which the rest of the world doesn't?

Or do you just mean ethics, the things which pretty much everyone in the human race would sign up to? Love and kindness and sunshine and fluffy animals?

Is there even such a thing as a specifically Christian virtue? I suppose you could say "forgiveness". Someone like, say, Lord Longford, who visited prisoners and made friends with even the very worst serial killers because he thought God loves everybody was practicing a very specifically Christian form of goodness. Not everyone thought it was admirable.  A lot of people thought that if he visited murderers in prison he must be in favour of murder. 

I don't think only Christians can forgive. I don't think only hippies can be peaceful and only punks can be anarchists and only Romans think that suicide can be honourable. But I'd get what you were saying if you said that someone had "hippy morals" or "punk politics". If I said that Richard Moore -- the Irish guy who reached out to the British soldier who blinded him with a rubber bullet -- was following "Christian principles" you'd know what I meant. (I have no idea if Moore is a Christian.)

Last Easter, the caretaker Prime Minister -- a practicing Hindu -- said that Jesus embodied "compassion, charity and selflessness" and that these values "are at the heart of British values" and that they inspire us to "build a society based on respect, tolerance and dignity for all."

Jesus was definitely compassionate and one definition of "charity" is "love in the Christian sense" -- "love for the unlovable".  Another definition of charity is "giving money to good causes" and not everyone in Sunak's party is in favour of that, particularly if the good cause involves, say, life-boats. In the past, Sunak's party has been less about selflessness and more about how greed is good. And some of his supporters might say that compassion was weak, soft, and indeed woke.

I personally don't have any objection to tolerance and dignity. Respect I'm a bit vaguer on: it depends on who you are respecting. But I don't think that they are particularly British values. I don't think that if you asked a French person or a Chinese person what they thought of when they thought of English people they would say "Well, they are very tolerant of gypsies and drag-queens and they are especially concerned about the dignity of refugees and homeless people, even smelly ones." They would be more likely to say that the English are particularly keen on good manners, apologising, queueing, and not cheating at cricket.

It could be that we British wait our turn and don't argue with umpires because King Charles is head of state and also head of the Church and because in the olden days most people went to Church on Sundays. I don't know if that's actually true, but it sounds like the sort of thing that might be.

Can you be a Christian and not believe in Christianity?

It depends what you mean by Christianity.

It also depends a good deal on what you mean by "believe". I think even that little word, "be" may give us some trouble.

Does Christianity mean "the kind of thing we find in the Gospels" -- the stories about Jesus being born in a stable and feeding the five thousand and walking on the water?

Or does Christianity mean "all of the many and various and very complicated doctrines and dogmas that the various Churches have wanted you to sign up to?"

Does saying "Yeah, that story, I like it, and I think some of it is true, probably" make you a Christian?

Does saying "I reject the idea that Jesus is coequal with the Father and assert that he is a subordinate divine being begotten in time?" make you not a Christian?

What do you call someone who thinks that Christianity is a lot of ethical platitudes but doesn't particularly think about miracles and theology and scripture? 

"A member of the Church of England".

What do you call someone who thinks about miracles and theology and scripture literally all the time, but doesn't believe in any of them? 

"A Church of England Bishop".

Okay, that's quite cynical. But the truth is that churches have always admitted people with quite a wide range and degree of beliefs. The Church of England is intensely relaxed about people who assert their belief in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of the Body in church on Sunday morning but say that it's a bit more complicated than that in a television studio on Monday afternoon.

There was a moment in the 1990s when all the evangelicals were going on and on about meta-narratives. It was just about the same moment when all the university English departments were giving up on structuralism. (I don't know if this is true but it sounds as if it ought to be.) The argument runs roughly like this:

"The Bible tells the story of the history of the world: Creation, Fall, Flood, Exodus, foundation of Israel, deportation to Babylon, building of the temple, coming of Jesus, foundation of the Church, destruction of the temple, large blank space, Second Coming. But the majority of people in the West -- including some who were Christian enough to put themselves in physical danger in order to tell other people about Jesus -- never truly thought of themselves as part of that story.  The story they thought they were a part of was the one that was told at English public schools: Cavemen, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Ancient Britons, Normans, Tudors, Reformation, Spanish Armada, Christopher Columbus, Glorious Revolution, Industrial Revolution, Queen Victoria, British Empire, Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill, VE Day, Winston Churchill, BBC. Christians ought to believe that the story of the West is a minor sub-plot in the story that runs from Eden to Armageddon; where in practice they believe that Christianity is a fairly significant sub-plot in the story of the British Empire and the United States."

Is there some way of saying "I think of myself as part of the Christian meta-narrative, but I don't think it's literally true?" Liberal Jews have a lot of practice in this kind of thing.

Can you be an atheist and a Christian? 

Should we be surprised that the World's Most Famous atheist is a Cultural Christian?

It depends what you mean by "culture".

I suppose that most of us would take "culture" to mean either "books and arts and literature" or else "the customs and traditions and manners that a particular group of people have in common". New plays are reviewed in the culture section of the newspaper. English culture expects you to use knives and forks rather than chopsticks, and says that black ties are appropriate at funerals. So being a Cultural Christian probably just means watching Carols From Kings and picking Bach's St Matthew Passion when you're on Desert Island Discs. Or else it means eating turkey on 25th December and giving the grandkids chocolate eggs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. "I'm not a Christian myself, but of course, my background and traditions are Christian" is an astonishingly uncontroversial thing to say.

Rachel Johnson (who has a brother called Boris) is a very much better interviewer than James O'Brien. O'Brien's technique is to repeatedly harangue his subjects, asking them the same question over and over again regardless of whether or not they've answered it, and to pretend to be cross regardless of what answer they try and give. Rachel Johnson's technique is to fein naivety (or possibly to be really genuinely naive) and ask the interrogatee politely to please explain what he means. Had O'Brien been set on Dawkins, YouTube would today be full of thirty second clips saying DAWKINS TOTALLY OWNED BY GENIUS DISC JOCKEY and WOKE CREEP CANCELS HEROIC SCIENTIST.  Which would have been more entertaining, I admit. As it was, we sat in on two people having a polite conversation. I don't think it will ever catch on.

And in fairness, real life Richard Dawkins seems a lot more pleasant, urbane, and willing to have a conversation than the Richard Dawkins who wrote the God Delusion or the Richard Dawkins who dog-whistles on Twitter.

So, what does this new, more pleasant Richard Dawkins mean when he says he is a Cultural Christian?

He means a cultural Christian as opposed to a believing Christian, or simply a 'believer'.

When Rachel Johnson says that her own non-belief sometimes wavers, Dawkins asks her directly if she believes that Jesus' mother was a virgin and if he rose from the dead, adding "I don't think you do". She says that the former is a biological impossibility but that she would like to believe in the latter. She thinks Jesus was real, felt The Force very strongly when she visited the holy sites in Jerusalem, and has heard, but misunderstood, the theory that the "Virgin birth"  was a mistranslation. Dawkins thinks that both the resurrection and the virgin birth are simply nonsense.

So: the thing which distinguishes Cultural Christians from Believing Christians is the miracles. But aren't some actual Christians also skeptical about those points? Didn't David Jenkins famously think that the virgin birth and the resurrection were not literally true? Was he a Cultural Christian? Does that mean the New Atheists and the Sea of Faith group are going to get together and split the difference? If I wanted to be very cynical indeed, could I say "There you are: Catholic Modernism and Liberal Anglicanism and the German Demythologisers were always just basically Atheists: Richard Dawkins says so"?

So: how do these Cultural Christians differ from common-or-garden atheists?

1: They like hymns

They also like Christmas Carols, parish churches and cathedrals. Dawkins says that he would be sad if we lost the old churches. It isn't exactly clear if he means "lost them as living places of worship" or "lost them as preserved relics of a by-gone age". I myself think it would be a shame if we bulldozed Stonehenge, but that doesn't make me a Cultural Druid.

Tim Minchin, in his very good song White Wine In the Sun says "I get freaked out by churches; some of the hymns they sing have nice chords, but the lyrics are dodgy". He also says that he has "all the usual objections" to Christian education but that he "quite likes the songs". 

I think that the Younger Richard Dawkins would have said that there were really no such thing as Christian songs. I think he would have said that Olden Days writers and musicians just happened to have been Christians -- or just happened to have had Christian patrons -- and just happened to put Christian words to their tunes. If atheists had been paying their wages they might equally have just happened to write atheist songs. I joked at the time that he seemed to think that you could take "Oh Sacred Head Sore Wounded, With Grief and Pain Weighed Down" and replace it with "Nucleotides Only Vary Slightly And Only In The Nitrogenous Base" and it wouldn't make that much difference. But the Older, Mellower Richard Dawkins seems to acknowledge that Christianity is a component of Christian culture. At any rate, he doesn't get freaked out by churches.

2: They feel comfortable with the Christian ethos.

"Ethos" is a bit of a slippery word. It is etymologically related to "ethics". When I Googled it I found a private school saying that it wanted all the kids to flourish and fulfil their potential; and a software company saying that it liked to solve clients' problems and allow employees to explore innovative approaches. Liking the Christian "ethos" might mean feeling at home with stained glass windows, crib-scenes and robed choirs, and feeling less at home with shrines to Ganesh or statues of the Buddha. Or it might mean that you are used to living in the kind of country where most people are, or used to be, Christians. A country where we still say "god bless you!" and "goodness gracious!" and have silly traditions connected with Patrick and Valentine. That's not the same as being a Christian, but it's quite a long distance from finding Christians creepy and dodgy (like Tim Minchin) or saying that they are poisonous, violent, irrational, ignorant and hostile to free enquiry (like Christopher Hitchens).

3: They see a sharp distinction between English Christianity and American Christianity.

I don't think that the Younger Richard Dawkins ever thought that the average Anglican Vicar, conscientiously dispensing moral guidance and spiritual comfort to his flock, was poisonous or violent or ignorant. But I think he would have said that this made it worse: the nice moderate Christians provide cover and credibility for the gun-touting child-beating abortion-banning evolution-denying Trump-voting hellfire-and-brimstone American preachers. But the Older Richard Dawkins sees them as two quite separate things. Sure, he thinks the Virgin Birth is a silly idea. But he thinks Creationism is pernicious nonsense. And he thinks that Creationism is a specifically American problem. 

It's almost like English Christianity doesn't quite count as a religion. It's almost as if what he wants is the Church of England, but without the God part.

"We are actually a Christian country", says the World's Leading Atheist.

"We are a Christian country in that sense...."

"It would matter if we lost our beautiful cathedrals or parish churches"

We. We. We.

"Cultural Christian" means Cultural Christian as opposed to Believing Christian.

"Cultural Christian" means Cultural Christian as opposed to American Fundamentalist Christian.

"Cultural Christian" means Cultural Christian as opposed to someone who is creeped out by Christianity and thinks religion fucks everything up.

But mostly, "Cultural Christian" means Cultural Christian as opposed to Muslim.

And that, of course, is the point.

Asked if he thinks that it is a bad thing that fewer and fewer people are going to church at Easter, Dawkins says that he is "horrified that Ramadan is being promoted instead."

"Being promoted." He's not horrified that Muslims celebrate Islamic festivals. He's not horrified that Christians are becoming less and less observant but Muslims are still showing up to Friday prayers. He's not even horrified that some Muslim Billy Graham is trying to persuade Christians to get up out of their seats and give their lives to Allah.

Do Muslims proselytise? I've been approached by Christians who think that the world is going to end almost immediately, Christians who think it's important to go to Church on a Saturday instead of a Sunday, smiley American Christians who think that Jesus was a Red Indian, but never by someone trying to persuade me that there is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger.

By whom is Ramadan being promoted so horrifyingly? 

Last month, on the date of Islamic Eid, someone put a quote from the Hadith on the departure board at Kings Cross Station. Not instead of the train times, you understand: in that little space where news headlines or messages of support for the King or the England Women's Football Team are sometimes displayed. This got conflated with Lee Anderson's nasty rhetoric about London's mayor being secretly controlled by sinister Islamist forces, and with wilder conspiracy theories about London being a no-go zone operating under sharia law.

Richard Dawkins doesn't say anything like that. But he does say that he prefers Christianity to Islam. 

And it's not just a mild cultural preference, like preferring mince pies and Easter eggs to chumchums and globjamons because that's what he grew up with. Christianity, Christianity itself, is a Good Thing because it provides a "bulwark against Islam". Christianity is a "fundamentally decent" religion while Islam is not.

What's the difference? Islam, he says, is "fundamentally hostile to women and gays". But he has to go back and qualify this. Christians have also had problems with women ("female vicars and bishops"). But the misogyny and homophobia of Islam is written into its holy books. He has to go back and qualify this again: he's talking about the religion -- the Koran and the Hadith. He isn't talking about individual Muslims.

My understanding is that the Koran specifically states that the Sin of Sodom was homosexuality; where the Bible doesn't say what it was. On the other hand the Koran doesn't specify any punishment for homosexuals, but the Bible mandates the death penalty. True, the unequivocal Christian prohibitions form part of (what Christians call) the Old Testament. The Younger Richard Dawkins would not have thought this made much difference. The Younger Richard Dawkins used to cite nasty passages of Scripture -- a verse in Deuteronomy about executing insolent children -- as evidence that Christians in particular and religion in general, was horrid. 

Both sides of the argument are prone to cheat on this point. You don't have to be Christopher Hitchens to see a problem with Christians who assert that the Bible is the absolute and infallible word of God, and in the next breath saying that none of the problem passages apply any more. But it's not very helpful for a smart atheist to pull an obscure passage out of Deuteronomy and say "if you are a Christian, you must, by definition, agree with this verse, and if you don't agree with this verse you obviously aren't a Christian". A certain kind of annoying atheist likes to quote that scene in West Wing when the President challenges a Christian who hates gays "because the Bible tells him so". If you follow the Bible so closely, he asks, can you tell me what would be a good price for my daughter when I sell her as a slave? And should I personally execute the intern who came into work on a Sunday or merely report him to the religious police? It's quite funny, but it doesn't really prove very much. 

If you pointed out to the Younger Richard Dawkins that both Christians and Jews have a fairly complex and critical relationship with the text of their respective scriptures he would probably have accused you of obfuscation or blamed you for committing theology. It has even been suggested that his quip about not needing to know how St Paul interpreted the Old Testament to be certain that God doesn't exist implies that he read my book, although unlike Dave Sim, he never sent me a postcard.

But here is the older Richard Dawkins, looking at actual Christians and declaring them to be mostly harmless, despite what their holy books say; but looking at the holy books of Islam and declaring Islam to be malignant, despite the fact that most actual Muslims are perfectly innocuous. If we are allowed to draw a distinction between English Christianity (benign) and American Christianity (malevolent) why aren't we also allowed to distinguish between the good Muslims in this country and the bad ones in, say, Saudi Arabia?

There is a case to be made that Christianity has proved culturally more adaptable than Islam. Most Christians regard their texts as foundational documents, whereas many Muslims regard theirs as the irreducible truth. There is a case to be made that the literalist interpretations of Islam happen to be the ones currently making the biggest noise on the world stage. Not even the most conservative Christians advocate the imposition of Mosaic law in a modern judicial setting. (Nor, indeed, do the most conservative Jews.) But there definitely are powerful Muslim nations which operate a sharia code based directly on the Koran. Ergo, right here, right now, Islam is more scary than Christianity.

But if that's your case, you could have expressed it more straightforwardly: "Religion is harmless, although in my opinion silly. Fundamentalism is very dangerous." You could even say "Muslims are more inclined than Christians to be fundamentalists" or "Islam is prone to fundentalism because it believes it's scriptures were directly dictated by God." It's not that hard. 

Clever sixth formers, and, in fairness, stupid R.E teachers, used to say that Religion is bad because Religion causes wars. One of the wars they used to say that religion caused was the civil war in Northern Ireland.

The Younger Richard Dawkins made a very fair point about sectarianism. No, he said, the thugs in the IRA and the thugs in the UDA were not actually fighting about faith. No-one has ever put a bomb under a police car because of a difference of opinion about the immaculate conception or the ontological status of the Eucharist. The Irish were killing each other over nationhood and traditions and community and very possibly because Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. But (the Younger Dawkins said) religion was the vector along which that hatred was transmitted: it ensured that people went to different schools and different churches and had different holidays and ate different food and supported different football teams. There is a very old joke about an atheist Jew who visits Belfast, and is asked if he is a Catholic Jewish atheist or a Protestant Jewish atheist. [Note 3] I think the Younger Dawkins made a very valid point. But the Older Dawkins seems to think that it makes a big difference whether you are a Church of England Atheist or a Muslim Atheist.

The person who says that Christian values are values that "we" all share sounds more liberal than the one who says that his God is the best God and anyone with a different God is going to hell. But in fact, the English have generally been quite cool with religious pluralism. I am church and you are chapel and she is synagogue and they are something really quite peculiar -- but we're all British and can play in the park together.  Yes, the guy who thinks he's found the only true God, or the only true God has found him, may spend his spare time knocking on people's doors and standing on street corners and putting tracts through strangers' letterboxes, but he's still British, even if he is a bit annoying.

But once you start to talk about "our" Christian values, you imply that "they" have different, non-Christian values.  And it's only a hop, skip and jump from saying that Christian values are British values to talking about "true Britons" and "real Americans" and saying that the Other Lot don't count.

There was some enjoyable comedy on the Interwebs the other week because a right wing lunatic had asked an AI bot to sum up Britishness, and the AI bot had come up with a picture of Jesus in a nightshirt leading a cohort of crusader knights through a landscape with St Pauls Cathedral and the London Eye clearly visible, along with (for some reason) some muppets and some pterodactyls. For the headbanging right, Christianity is not so much a faith as an identity card. 

I wish Rishi Sunak had had the courage to say "I'm a Hindu and I don't have any idea what your lot are doing with the eggs and the bunnies and the dead guy and the cross -- but you probably don't have much idea what my lot do at Diwali.  And that's what's so great about this country! We're all perfectly free to do our own thing, or nothing at all. Happy whatever!"

"My religion" can be a very good thing. "Our religion" is very dangerous indeed. Cultural Christianity can easily become a badge which says "One of us: not one of them".

We love the merry organ and the bells across the snow

We love the Church of England, although we never go

And we love the dear old Bible, with "Jehovah" and "begat

It's not that we believe in it or anything like that.
          Sydney Carter

[1] I have recently learned that it is NOT anti-semitic to write stories featuring hook nosed goblins who love gold and control the banks, because in real life Jewish people are not in fact goblins and don't control the banks.

[2] "As a matter of fact, Andrew, the fact that you like Talons of Weng-Chiang means that you quite definitely are a cultural racist. And the fact that you have read Those Shitty Wizard books makes you a cultural TERF:"

[3] I am also fond of the one about the Englishman who, threatened by a paramilitary of uncertain denomination, decides it is safest to claim to be Jewish. "Gosh" says the man in the balaclava "I must be the luckiest Arab in Belfast."

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Rambling Think-Piece in Precisely Sixteen Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty Six Characters

I have just ordered a t-shirt designed by friend-of-this-blog Mike Taylor.

It depicts a lightsaber and the slogan “Kylo stabbed first”.

Although it contains only three words, someone unfamiliar with the past 40 years of Star Wars culture — let’s call her “Mum” — would not have the faintest idea why the slogan is funny.

To get the joke, you have to know:

1: The original 1977 movie “Star Wars” featured an amoral gunfighter who shot an enemy’s henchmen in cold blood.

2: In 1997, the scene was re-edited so that the gunfighter shot the henchmen in self-defense

3: Fans, who on the whole preferred the original version, expressed their displeasure by making badges and t-shirts with the slogan “Han shot first.”

4: In the new movie, a Very Bad Thing happens to the same character, at the hands of the villain Kylo Ren.

I find this kind of thing funny; but I must admit that I overuse it, to the extent that some people find my writing impenetrable.

I blame the post-modern condition. In the Olden Days everybody shared more or less the same cultural reference points: I could allude to Baby Roo, Moses, James T Kirk, Iago, John Nokes, Fagin, and Tommy Cooper and everyone would know exactly who I was talking about. What with public schools having turned everyone into zombies and everyone having decided that two TV channels just weren't enough, we all have less stuff in common. Oblique signifiers are a nice way of establishing community but they can also be a nasty of excluding people.

Suppose I describe Prof Richard Dawkins as a “whey-faced coxcomb”. Everyone gets that I mean “fool”; nearly everyone gets that I’m using an old-fashioned term for “fool”; and quite a lot of people spot that it’s a quasi-Shakespearian reference. (The bard was good at insults: “Thou base player of football!”) But only a minority — only one of our particular in-group — would spot that I am quoting five times Hugo award loser J.C Wright quoting Shakespeare.

Richard Dawkins is a whey faced coxcomb translates as “Richard Dawkins is a fool, and by the way J.C Wright is a pompous, in the British sense, ass.”

I sometimes wear a “WWTDD” badge because I want people who don’t get it to feel rotten and inferior.

*

Earlier this year I posted the follow squib/aphorism in response to something I had read on the popular social networking site known as Twitter:

Is there some particular reason why believing in Adam and Eve is incompatible with hosting a TV breakfast show which I may be missing?

This has (to slightly misquote Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide) “made a lot of people very angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move”.

The problem with Twitter is that each tweet is necessarily short. You have to sacrifice all nuances in the name of brevity and condensation.

This is also what makes it fun. There is a haiku-like joy in telling a joke or expressing a political viewpoint in precisely 140 characters

One often finds oneself sacrificing grammar, punctuation and elegance to make what you wanted to say fit exactly into the character limit…

OTOH, the very brevity sometimes creates a kind of poetry of its own, and some people actually think and speak in twitter ideolect hashtag gimmick

I feel sometimes I’m in a double-bind. People treat silly little twitter squibs as if they were my final word on great matters of state… (1)

…But when I direct them to my more substantive essays they throw up their hands and say “Oh I couldn’t possibly read anything that long” (2)

To be fair, the same thing is probably true of the twitter output of Prof Richard Dawkins though probably not the Rev’d Giles Fraser LOL (3)

*

The very select group of human beings who have traveled in space all tell us how awesome it is to look down on the Earth. I don’t suppose I shall ever travel in space — I am scared of heights — but am happy to take their word for it. I imagine that looking at the earth from space must be very awesome indeed. (We probably take this too much for granted. Before 1959, every illustration of The World or The Planet Earth was an artist’s impression of what it would look like. In retrospect they usually looked too much like geography teachers’ globes.) Indeed, when English astronaut Helen Sharman appeared on The Museum of Curiosity — a rather odd Radio 4 talk show in which people with nothing in common are invited to talk about whatever they feel like — “seeing the world from space” seemed to be one of the main reasons why Space Travel was a good thing.

Once you’ve seen the Earth from orbit, you realize how insignificant you are, and in particular that the borders and differences between countries and nations that we make so much of aren’t really real.

Woo-oh-oh-oh-oh, you may say I’m a dreamer.

Travel broadens the mind. Traveling into space presumably broadens the mind exponentially. Seeing the earth from space changes your outlook. But then, being wrongly accused of a serious crime probably changes your outlook, as does having heart bypass surgery and taking too much Lysergic acid. The question is whether the new outlook is better or worse than the old one. How could we tell? Yes, I fully accept that you “spoke in tongues” at a revival meeting. So what? Did the experience make you a more pious Christian or a nicer human being, or did you just feel excited during some gospel music? Not that there is anything wrong with feeling excited during some gospel music. There is absolutely nothing wrong with looking out of porthole and saying “Wow!” either. I am just not quite sure what it proves.

Bristol is very big. The world is even bigger. I am very small relative to Bristol. I am very small indeed relative to the world. I am very big relative to my friend Richard. But the idea that I am insignificant compared with the world only works if you think that big things are in general more significant than small things. In which case I am presumably twelve inches more significant than my friend Richard.

I am currently cutting out snacks and taking more exercise in the hope that it will make me less significant.

Up in space, you can’t see any borders or any countries. Well, no, of course you can’t. No-one ever supposed you could. People used to say that you could see the Great Wall of China from space, but apparently you can’t. I don’t think I ever believed that there was a cosmological distinction between England and Scotland that was obvious from the Moon and would have been even if no-one had invented highland clearances, whisky or irn-bru. I always understood that the difference was mostly cultural — language and history and politics. And climate. You can’t see climate from space; not very easily, but I am still taking a coat if I ever go back to Dundee.

We are only entitled to say “in space, you can see that countries aren’t really real” if we have first agreed that “real things are thing you can see from a long way away”. According to which criteria, history and language and politics, and whether the shops open on a Sunday and what time the pubs close are not real. But they make a real difference to the real lives or real people most of whom have no real chance of really going up in a space rocket, whatever Richard Branson says.

A grown up may say to a child “Stop quarrelling about that toy. It only cost sixpence and a few years from now you won’t even remember it, and a century from now you will both be dead” Yes. But to that child at that moment, the teddy bear or the ball or the small ray-gun that came with the second Cyborg and Muton accessory pack is simply the most important thing in the world. The people of Palestine don’t want to hear that from a sufficiently elevated perspective their struggle isn’t very important and from space you can’t even see the wall. What they want is justice. Which is another of the things you can’t see from space.

*

It transpires that there is a journalist named Dan Walker. He used to talk about football for the BBC, and now he is going to appear on a breakfast time talk show. (One of the things I find it hardest to get my head around, from a terrestrial or extraterrestrial perspective is that a man may make a living talking about football.) It transpires that Mr Walker is a Christian; and it further transpires that he is a Christian of a fairly conservative flavour. For example, he believes that Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden were really really real.

This is pretty much all I know about him. Whether he believes that the Red Sea was actually the Sea of Reeds; whether he thinks that John Mark is the same Mark who wrote the Gospel and how he deals with the prophecy of Daniel being written in Aramaic I couldn’t say. The first I heard of him was a post on the aforementioned Twitter by the aforementioned Prof Richard Dawkins.

“Why in the world is BBC hiring a young earth creationist to host BBC Breakfast? Why not someone who accepts reality.” said the very great man.

“Is there some particular reason why believing in Adam and Eve is incompatible with hosting a TV show which I’m missing?” said I.

“Or does the New Atheist movement think that only people who believe like they do should have jobs and everyone else should be blacklisted?” continued I.

“It’s not like they’d be the first” I concluded.

I don’t think my first bit contained any hidden meanings or obscure cultural references. By “believing in Adam and Eve” I meant “believing that Adam and Eve were historical individuals in the same way that George Washington arguably was”. By “incompatible with hosting a TV show” I meant “incompatible with hosting a TV show.” My question was “Why does believing that Adam and Eve were real people — even granted that you and me and Richard Dawkins agrees that they were not — prevent you from asking Brie Larson penetrating questions about her dress or asking Jeremy Corbyn equally penetrating questions about his tie?

I admit that the question was rhetorical and I already knew the answer

*

"But” asked my Aunt Sally “You would surely agree that at the very least a journalist who believed in Adam and Eve should not be allowed to work on a science programme?”

“You’ve asked me a question” I replied “So let me ask you a question. Would a journalist who didn’t believe in the Christian God be allowed to work on Songs of Praise”

Songs of Praise is a long running British soft-religious TV show. In the olden days they simply put a camera in a church and recorded half an hour of community hymn singing — Anglican, Wesleyan or Salvation Army as the mood took them. They now go to town and chat to local people and ask them to pick hymns that they like.

“I suppose” said Sally “It would depend on what kind of atheist. If he was the kind who shouted ‘oh no there isn’t’ every time the choir started to sing ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away…’ then probably not. If he was the kind who thought that even though he didn’t go in for all this God stuff himself, it was his job to line up a shot of the stained glass window and the vicar so it looked as pretty as possible, then of course he could.”

“Well, quite” I retorted. “And you couldn’t have someone who was supposed to be interviewing the local Catholic clergymen and was somehow under the impression that he was Free Presbyterian. Particularly not if he thought it didn’t make any difference because it was all equally a pile of rubbish.”

“The question” said Sally, "Wouldn't be 'Is the journalist an atheist.' It’s much more ‘Is the journalist a dick?’”

“But that” said I “Is, in a very real sense, always the question.”

*

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who literally believes in Adam and Eve. It's a fringe belief, in this country at least. Is the literal belief in Adam and Eve, alone among the vast range of spiritual and fringe beliefs in the world — meditation and speaking in tongues and yogic flying and tea leaf reading and Gaia and the journey of the hero and homeopathy — the one which rules you out of presenting TV breakfast shows? And if so, why?  I can see that if the BBC are going to make a prestige 26 part series on dinosaurs and I want to be chief researcher and it turns out that not only do I not believe that any such creatures as dinosaurs ever existed, I actually think that the whole idea of dinosaurs is a myth put about by the Frankfurt Group to make it easier for the communists to take over… Well I probably wouldn’t get the job. I have, how would you say, preconceptions which would make it impossible for me to do it properly. But what's the connection between Breakfast TV and creationism? 

I try to imagine how my interview for the Breakfast time job would pan out in Richard Dawkins' universe: 

“Well: you are obviously a very good TV presenter with lots of excellent contacts. You would fit onto this show very well indeed. But as a matter of pure formality, I have to ask you some questions about your personal beliefs. Do you believe in Adam and Eve?”

“Well, I suppose it depends what you mean by ‘believe’. If you mean ‘were they historical people’ then no, I most certainly don’t believe that they were. But if you mean ‘do they represent important religious truths’ then yes I suppose I do. I think that the story is presented as something which happened a long time ago, but it is really a picture of what’s happening now, inside every human being, all the time. I think that each of us exiles ourself…”

What happens then? Does my interviewer say “Oh, your personal spiritual beliefs are none of my business or anybody else’s. I myself believe in the I-Ching, but naturally I wouldn’t tell you that. I just have to check that you don’t believe that the Garden of Eden was a real place or that God made the world in six days. Anything else is your own problem.”

Or does he say “Oh. So you DO believe in Adam and Eve, or else in something almost as stupid, or else you are using theology to pull the wool over our eyes. We obviously can’t have you, or anyone who believes in anything with the slightest hint of the supernatural working for us. Goodbye.”

Richard Dawkins has form in this area. Back in 2013 he was insinuating that Muslims couldn’t work on financial papers “because they believed in flying horses”. Earlier this year, he was rattling off little squibs asking how it was that people who believed that Jesus turned water into wine could possibly hold down jobs in the modern world. This makes me at least suspect that behind the proposition “Young earth creationists shouldn’t present breakfast TV shows” lurks the parenthesis “…and neither should anyone else who believes in miracles, angels prophecies or any other supernatural aspect of religion” which is only a hop, skip and jump from “you shouldn’t employ Christians or Muslims: you should only employ atheists, like me.”

It would have been better if I hadn’t used the politically loaded term “blacklist”.

*

I don’t think that you can deduce things about Scottish independence, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict or the Brexit referendum by looking at the Earth from space. I don’t think that the book of Genesis is very helpful as an explanation of why the male Kakapo parrot has a mating cry which positively repels the female. I don’t think Darwinism is much use as a religious myth. A friend of mind wrote on Facebook that the black-holes and gravity waves thing meant “Science has proved that God doesn’t exist.” I think he probably said it mainly to annoy me, but I still think it’s nonsense. I don’t think you can draw spiritual and ethical conclusions from material and scientific observations.

If people continue to say “I have seen the earth from space; and this proves borders and nations don’t exist and Tibet should damn well shut up about it” then a certain number of people are going to be very tempted to say “Well, if that’s what it proves, then I don’t believe you saw it. Probably your trip into space was another trick, like that time O.J went to Mars.” If people continue to say “all living things shared a common ancestor, and therefore culture and morality are not really real” then some people will continue to say “well, if that’s what it proves, then I don’t believe all living things shared a common ancestor.” If people try to bring science round to reductive, misanthropic conclusions, some people are bound to reject science. It’s the only rational thing to do.

*

So anyway: all those thoughts were kind of bound up in the little tweet I posted from the coffee shop; just like the whole history of Star Wars is bound up in Mike’s little t-shirt. Kylo Slashed First. Is it just believing in Adam and Eve that disqualifies you from breakfast TV, or religious faith in general. That’s the joy of Twitter, although, of course, that’s the trouble with it too.

And the punch line is this: the people who were annoyed by the 140 character tweet will probably never know, because they will probably find a 3,000 word article much too long and dull to bother with. 

*

On no possible view is it literally true that a kangeroo is my cousin.

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On Monday, I placed two apples in the fruit bowl on my desk. 

On Tuesday, I placed two more apples in the same fruit bowl on my desk.

When I went back on Wednesday, I found that there were three apples there. 

“What ho!” I cried “Someone has been eating my apples!”

“Poor Andrew” said my Rational friend. “He thinks that two plus two equals three. And yet he still manages to hold down a job.” 

*

If I announce that no-one wearing a turban is allowed to join my club; and if the only people who wear turbans are Sikhs and the overwhelming majority of Sikhs are Punjabi and Punjabis have brown skin, then my “no turbans” rule amounts to a “no brown people” rule even though turbans are not a race. 

If the “no turbans” policy met with the widespread and enthusiastic support of people who don't think that foreigners ought to be allowed in the country to start with, and who aren't quite sure whether brown people should be allowed anywhere, my theory that the no-turbans policy is racist would be confirmed.

*

There is a catastrophically unfunny movie called "Life With Bells On” about an Englishman who travels to America to teach the locals to Morris Dance. The Californian dancers (rather offensively represented as gay) have replaced the wooden sticks used in English country dancing with special carbon fiber rods.

There is very good English folk-song called “My Son John” about a soldier who goes off to fight in the Napoleonic wars and comes back on crutches. (It’s known elsewhere as Mrs McGrath.) Martin Carthy updated the lyrics so that they refer to the Gulf War. The line about the crutches is changed to “up comes John, he’s got no legs, got carbon fiber blades instead.” 

The joke would have been different if the gay American Morris Dancers had been using plastic sticks; the song would have been different if the crippled soldier had had an aluminum prosthesis. A wooden leg would have made him sound like a pirate. Everyone knows that Abu Hamza had a hook, but no-one cares what kind of metal it was made of. So what's the deal about carbon fiber sticks and carbon fiber legs? That’s at least a bit interesting, isn’t it?

*

We’ve covered this before, but: 

Men, on the whole, care a good deal more about swords, guns, motorbikes and cars than women do; and often (in movies, say, or advertising posters) swords, guns, motorbikes and cars have symbolic value. A big shiny sports car shows that you are a Real Man. It shows other things as well: that you have got good taste, and that you are rich enough and important enough to be able to afford a big red car. But other things show that you are rich and important. A big house is a symbol of wealth, power and status (as well as being somewhere nice to live). So why aren't TV property shows fronted by loud, posturing, macho blokes?

If I remark, in this context, that a big red sports car is a “phallic symbol” or even a “phallus” some wiseguy will invariably say “ha-ha I hope yours isn’t shaped like that ha-ha”. Ten thousand spam e-mails testify that many men do in fact care about the size of their penis; and this seems mostly to be part of a competition with other men. Women don’t care all that much. So to say "the car is phallic" isn't to say "the car is shaped like a penis" so much as "cars and penises are both symbols of particular kind of aggressive, competitive masculinity. 

One of the most common euphemisms for “penis” is of course “manhood”. 

A lightsaber is not simply an old fashioned weapon; it’s a symbol, bound up with fathers and sons and the process of going from boy to man. If I say “when Darth Vader cuts Luke’s lightsaber hand off, it’s symbolic castration” I don’t mean that Lucas really wanted to to write a graphic scene of torture in which Vader physically cut off Luke’s genitalia. I mean that Star Wars is a growing up story and that Empire Strikes Back ends with Vader depriving Luke of the very thing that made him a man.

(There are at least two scenes where James Bond, the ultimate macho man, surrounded by guns, cars, planes and pretty women, is directly and literally threatened with having his penis and testicles destroyed.)

If I were to say that in Space Balls, Mel Brooks makes lightsabers “literally phallic” I think that you would understand what I meant: Dark Helmet and Lonestar position their swords at crotch level and then activate them; getting a childish, crude laugh from the audience when they "grow". I suppose I could have said “explicitly” or “directly” or “unambiguously.” But anyone who is that worried about small points of grammar English usage is literally a dickhead.

*

In 1963 the music critic of the Times famously described the Beatles song “This Boy” as being “harmonically intriguing, with its chains of pandiatonic clusters”. Paul McCartney, a self taught musician, claimed not to know what this meant. This has often been taken as a terribly funny joke at the critics' expense. The poor booby honestly imagined John and Paul sitting down and saying “Let’s put some pandiatonic clusters into this one, wack.” But it turned out they couldn’t have done so, so they aren’t there, so the critic was wrong, so the whole idea of music criticism and music theory is silly, ha-ha.

It is understandable that some writers and musicians should be cynical about critics: why should someone who can’t play an instrument himself get a say about whether my record is any good or not. (Actually, the question can be answered perfectly well on it’s own level: if I want to find the best fish restaurant in town, better ask Cecil, who can’t cook but eats out every night, than Brad, who spends every evening making perfect pastries in the back room of the Tart and Toad.) But the widespread suspicion of the humanities in general -- the doubts about whether literary criticism is a proper subject, the endless press sneering about Media Studies and Sociology are a little harder to account for. Nearly all of us listen to music and read books; and most of us can say which ones we think are good and which ones we think are bad. So it can look as if critics are using big words to tell us stuff we already know; or, worse, are spoiling our enjoyment of much loved classics. I don't know much about art, as the fellow said, but I know what I like. Sometimes, this may be perfectly true -- I have certainly come away from essays and said "you seem to have spent a very long time telling us that Tolkien's view of good and evil is basically the Catholic Church's view of good and evil, which was perfectly to obvious to anyone who has read the book." But very often, the man who says "I don't need an expert to tell me about books, I just want to read them" means "I don't want my preconceptions altered; I'd rather read Faust through 21st century eyes than hear someone telling me the kinds of things that could have been going through Marlowe's mind when he wrote it." 

Oliver Postgate says that when he was animator in residence at an Australian film school, he attended a lecture on the semiotics of film-making. The lecturer argued that film makers deliberately compose their shots in order to create particular atmospheres “impending danger, sexuality and other less definable moods, and infiltrate them subliminally into the unconscious of the viewer.” Postgate says that if any director really thought like that, they could never make anything worthwhile, because “it attempts to use the intellect to do something which is the business of the heart.” 

“I know how I choose the shot I take. I know how all the directors I have worked with choose their shots. They chose them because they looked right.”

He was, of course, absolutely right. He was an autodidact who worked out how to make cartoons from first principles and then discovered that what he was doing had been standard in the industry for decades. Of course he put shots into his cartoon because they looked right. And Paul McCartney, the most brilliant and intuitive song-writer of the last hundred years put notes into his music because they sounded right. The film studies lecturer and the music critic don’t claim to be able to make films or compose songs themselves: they don’t have that gift or that intuition. But they do claim, having looked at thousands of movies and heard tens of thousands of songs, to be able to explain why certain things “look right” and “sound right” and others don't. 

People who are skeptical about criticism never seem to say “Aha — that argument doesn’t work. You claim that in Episode 4 of Ivor the Engine, Oliver Postgate does this and it has that effect. Actually, he does that and the effect it has is more like this.” They always say “what business is it of yours to try to say what he was doing in the first place. What business is it of anyone’s to think seriously about cartoons, or pop songs, or the representation of sports personalities in the media”  

We have seen that Common Sense is the opposite of Political Correctness. Common Sense is whatever I think; the bundle of assumptions that I carry about in my head. Political Correctness is anything which challenges those assumptions. If Political Correctness can be defined as nonsensical then I need never question whatever happens to be going on in my head at the present moment. A sneering dismissal of all writing about the arts and culture has an equally useful effect.

(In fairness, Oliver Postgate was making quite a sophisticated point, much more interesting than Harold Wilson's reflex sneer about pandiatonic clusters. He felt that critical theory is a poor guide to the practice of film making; that film schools show students detailed critical analysis of great shots from classic movies and expect them to retrofit their own films to those ideas, and this doesn’t work. On the other hand, his claim that a director puts a shot into a film because it looks right and this can’t be further analyzed sounds a little bit like someone putting up a wall around his art: you’ve either got it, like me, or you haven’t got it, and if you haven’t got it, it can’t be taught.) 

*

Lots of women enjoy sport, participate in sport, watch sport. But it would be fair to say that many of the most popular sports — football, rugby, cricket and motor-racing — have a strong macho element to them. They are not merely about people competing to see who is the best at, say, tennis; they are about men competing with other men to see who is the biggest, strongest, gutsiest —  who is, in fact, the most male. The most successful sportsmen are represented as being more male than other males, whether we are talking about huge posters on the sides of buildings of David Beckham in his knickers, or George Best surrounded by beer and beautiful women wondering where it all went wrong. One of the "justifications" for the still prevalent hostility to homosexual footballers and homosexual basketball players is that it is an intrinsic part of the game for sportsmen to all get naked together after the match, and a gay man in the showers would alter the macho dynamic. In that kind of a culture, being unsuccessful or weak or merely studious makes you less male or, put another way, more female. It follows that a sportsman who, through injury or some other reason, stops being able to play his sport might be seen as feminized (in the sense we talked about above) castrated. The way in which people talked about Oscar Pistorius was therefore very interesting, because he was a sportsman who had been physically maimed, but who as a result of his prosthetic limbs, was able to compete at the very highest level. His disability made him less male, which is kind of like being castrated; his prosthetic limbs made him a man again, which is kind of like saying they are an artificial penis. In fact, because he became a world-beating athlete, it could be said that his false legs made him even more of a man than he would have been without them. It is therefore interesting that descriptions of his prosthesis always concentrated on what it was made of: they weren’t just false legs or prosthetic legs or metal legs, but always “carbon fiber legs”. One reason for this may be that “carbon fiber” is used to make racing cars, guns, bicycles — the classic “phallic” symbols of male power. 

It is interesting that one of the boys toys classically made of carbon fiber are racing cycles. You sit inside a plane or a car and hold a gun in your hand; but a cycle goes between your legs, making the phallic imagery explicit and unavoidable. Girl's bicycles used to be different from boy's bicycles for just that reason. It would probably be careless of me to say "bikes are literally phallic"; but you would know what I meant. 

*

I do not know if the culture of “safe spaces” in universities has gone too far. Maybe it has. I haven't been a student for years. Certainly, part of being a college student is, or ought to be, robust debate. Having your paper torn apart by your tutor or other students ought to be part of the process of learning, just as being thrown on the mat is part of the process of learning Judo. On the other hand, there is no excuse for personal or ad hominem attacks, in any debate, ever; and the border line between a strident and forceful argument and browbeating can be a fuzzy one. This is a particular problem when it's a man browbeating a woman. The distinction between "winning the argument by having a louder voice" and "bullying" may also be a bit woolly at times. 

If you are the kind of person who thinks that it is perfectly normal to accuse a fellow academic, completely outside your field, in a public forum, of being an intellectual fraud, and to follow it up with language like "pretentious bilge" and "pretentious bullshit" you are probably not the best person in the world to be advising colleges on their policies about acceptable behavior. 

*

Christians who believe in the literal truth of Christ's miracles —  not all do —  do not believe that this is how the universe works as a general rule. A person who believes that Jesus literally turned water into wine at Cana does not believe that this is, in general, how wine is made. Even if they did, it is hard to see why this would be a serious handicap in the overwhelming majority of vocations. I think that you could function very well as a plumber, a filing clerk, a computer programmer, a road sweeper, a window cleaner or Chancellor of the Exchequer while still believing that Threshers employs a Jewish man to lay his hands on bottles of water. It would, I grant you, be a drawback if you wanted to work as a vintner. 

I wouldn’t be particularly perturbed by having a doctor who believed that God healed sick people indirectly through the actions of the medical profession. Lots of doctors do believe precisely that. Nor would I be perturbed by one who believed that occasionally, patients who had no chance of getting better scientifically speaking nevertheless recovered miraculously; and that those "miraculous" events were literally acts of God. I certainly wouldn’t be worried about one who believed that two thousand years ago the Son of God cured people of diseases which were, so far as anyone could see, incurable. The only doctor I would be bothered by is the one who thinks that people are only healed through the miraculous actions of God, that prayer for a patient should come before any natural intervention, that medicine and surgery are blasphemous. Vanishingly few people — not even Christian Scientists, I understand — believe that. 

The idea that Christians told the story of the Virgin Birth because they didn’t understand where babies come from is obviously silly. They told the story because they did know exactly where babies came from. That’s what the word “miracle” means. 

*

The question is not whether or not you agree with me. I have written this very quickly and I may have made some remarks that I will not be able to defend tomorrow morning. 

The question is not even whether you are going to have a look at Hickey-Moody's essay and decide that I am being too generous about that; that it in fact post-modernism really is a load of tosh and I ought not to be coming up with defenses of obscurantism. The question is whether you think it is the kind of thing which is capable of being talked about. 

There is, in the end, very little difference between labeling anyone who disagrees with your as a Social Justice Warrior who Always Lies; and labeling anything outside your field as "theology", "philosophy" and "the humanities" and declaring that that is "not a subject", "not really knowledge", "pretentious bilge" "bullshit" and above all "nonsense". In both cases, you are building a wall around your own beliefs and making discussin of them impossible. You know in advance that anything the other side says is nonsense before they start speaking; you may actually find yourself saying thing like "I don't have to know anything about post-modernism to know that it is nonsense". We can't even discuss whether you are right that cultural studies is nonsense and Social Justice Warriors are liars, because anyone who defends them is lying and talking nonsense by definition... and so on through as many iterations as you please.

Turbans are not a race. Theology is not a subject. There is not possible value in studying culture or the media. My way of looking at things is the right way of looking at things. Your way of looking at things is pretentious bullshit. 



It is increasingly clear that what the New Atheists disbelieve in is not the God of church and religion. It's also feelings and cultural meanings and subjectivity and the humanities and just about anything which isn't cold A = B logic.
                   Me





If you find this kind of thing interesting then please consider promising to pay me 69p each time I write something. If you'd rather I just shut the hell up, don't bother. I was planning to write up the Star Wars Holiday Special but got distracted.

In civilized life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face. To keep this game up you and Glubose must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: ‘I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper.’ Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offence is taken. -- The Screwtape Letters