Easter is not all about going to heaven. Still less some nasty evangelical death cult where a blood sacrifice must be paid to appease an angry God.

Giles Fraser, 22 March, 2008 

 The idea of an omnipotent God who can calm the sea and defeat our enemies turns out to be a part of that great fantasy of power that has corrupted the Christian imagination for centuries. 

Giles Fraser 8 Jan 2005  

Jesus set out to destroy the imprisoning obligations of debt, speaking instead of forgiveness and the redistribution of wealth. 

Giles Fraser 24 Dec 2005 

 Nicene Christianity is the religion of Christmas and Easter, the celebration of a Jesus who is either too young or too much in agony to shock us with his revolutionary rhetoric....And from Constantine onwards, the radical Christ worshipped by the early church would be pushed to the margins of Christian history to be replaced with the infinitely more accommodating religion of the baby and the cross. 

Giles Fraser, 24 Dec 2005 

 Evangelical Christianity, with all its emphasis on Jesus as friend, risks domesticating the divine, pulling God too much within the dimensions of the human perspective. With this sort of Jesus at hand, God becomes just too easy. 

Giles Fraser 11 Dec 2011 

 For too long, Christians have put up with a theory of salvation that has at its core the idea that God requires the sacrifice of his own son so that human sin can be cancelled. "There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin," we will all sing. The fact this is a disgusting idea, and morally degenerate, is obvious to all but those indoctrinated into a very narrow reading of the cross. 

Giles Fraser 11 Dec 2009 

 (On evangelicals who support corporal punishment): Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise. For, as evangelicals, the Pearls believe that salvation only comes through punishment and pain. God punishes his Son with crucifixion so that humanity might not have to face the Father's anger. This image of God the father, for whom violence is an expression of tough love, is lodged deep in the evangelical imagination. And it twists a religion of forgiveness and compassion into something dark and cruel. 

Giles Fraser 8 June 2006

I'll know my song well before I start singing

Bob Dylan

Cardiff Arena

Oct 13 2011

Everything you've heard is wrong. Literally, everything. Any rulebooks you have lying around. Tear them up.

A lot of people (including me) have, over the years, talked a lot of rot about The Almighty Bob's current performance style. (And by "current" we mean "what he's been doing for the last 20 years".) You know the jokes. Sits with back to audience. Growls though the songs. Can't hear the words. Third verse of Blowin' in the Wind before we worked out what he was singing

None of its true. None of it. Not. One. Word.

I can't think of the last time I saw a performer who was so obviously having fun on the stage. This is a man of 70 who has performed on five out of the last seven nights. He doesn't need the money: the only possible reason for being on stage is that he likes it. That's why you are never going to hear a greatest hits set: he keeps himself fresh by playing a different selection of songs each night and – as explained at some length in Chronicles – by deconstructing the songs, using a system of rhythmic improvisation which allows him to re-invent them in each performance.

Reviews of Dylan gigs tend to bifurcate; a smattering saying that this is the best they've ever heard Bob sing; a thundering consensus that he's an old has-been and should hang up his guitar; a hint of anger that he's 70 rather than 17.

Well there's an explanation for that, isn't there?

The Cardiff arena was a standing venue; we arrived at 5.30 and made straight for the front when the doors opened; a mere 2 hours investment of time resulted in a position not more than 20 feet from a the stage. We could see ever detail of Bob's performance.

And its an astonishingly nuanced, detailed, joyous performance. I hadn't realised what a small man he is. What incredibly spindly legs he has. The band are in sharp grey suits with hats. The guitarist almost seems to be emulating the clothes of his Bobness, like a hassidic Jew. Bob is in a crumpled suit; with a white mafiosi hat. Before long sweat is pouring off the rim. It's like he's saying that he's just some hobo who seems to have wandered up onto the stage and is going to sing us some songs. He does Leopardskin Pillbox Hat standing at the keyboard, but after only one number, he comes to the front and does the mighty Shooting Star in front of the mic and stays there for the next half-dozen songs. He even dances a little; a sort of delicate mincing wiggle. The audience applauds him when he stand up; when he starts playing the harmonica. They applaud him when he gets his cable tangled in the mic stand.

He still pulls the words of the songs apart and puts them back together again in an off putting way. (Remembers how, on Theme Time, he could sometimes lose himself in the pronunciation of very long words, particularly place names. His whole acts is like that.) He still does that thing where whole lines and stanzas vanish into staccato rhythm: "Some! Bod! Y! Said! From! The! By! Bul! He'd! Quote!.....there was dussssssssst on the maaaaaaann in the loonnnnnnng black cloak?" With a tentative, questioning rise on the last word, as he grins at the audience, big wide eyes flashing from underneath the hat brim, as if he'd just delivered the punch line of a good joke. It's in those elongated vowels that he sounds most like Dylan. The dark goth-noir atmosphere of Man in the Long Black Cloak gets lost in the performance, but the poetry (it really is poetry) still speaks.

And yeah, maybe it's jarring if you haven't heard it before. Hard Rain (official greatest song ever written by a human being, from a short list of half a dozen) is initially unrecognisable, not because you can't hear the words – I swear I heard every word, even of the songs I frankly didn't know like High Water – but because the Dalek-style delivery is so weird that I found myself thinking "hmm.....don't know this one...is there a Dylan song which involves asking questions to a blue-eyed boy?" But it forces you to attend to every word, to follow him through the labyrinth of imagery as if you've never heard it before. There's a sense of release and climax when we finally get to "and-I'll-KNOW-my-song-WELL-before-I-start-singingggggg".

I'll know my song well.... There is applause. He does. We do.

It would have been too absurd for him to talk in between the songs. I really can't conceive of him saying "Hello Cardiff. Thank you for turning out tonight. Here's a song from my latest album." But it's just such a plain lie to say that he doesn't connect with the audience. Every smile, wink, grin, tip of the hat – every time he taps he left hand on his thigh in rhythm with his harp, every time he continues to beat out a rhythm on the keyboard with one hand while half dancing with his spare leg – makes a connection. There's an elation here that makes me feel he's happier than he's ever been; that the addled gravelly bluesman dancing his way through old numbers is the person he's always wanted to be. There's a deliberately rough edged tin pan alley feel to the band; as if he wants us to feel that we're sitting in on a jam session or knocking back the Jack Daniels at an informal hootenanny. He's more comfortable with the newer songs, certainly: there's detail and nuance in Trying To Get To Heaven Before They Close the Door and Things Have Changed which rather slips away when he gets back to the keyboard for the Highway 61 Revisited. 

Bristol's foremost citizen folk journalist wondered if there was an irony in that wink – a sense that he's been told we want to hear those old songs, so he's humouring us, putting them in quotation marks? I wondered if  the whole slightly mannered body language saying "You want me to be a performing monkey, and I tell you what – I'm happy being a performing monkey." Is this a legend who simply refuses to be an icon?

Did we catch him on an exceptionally good day? Bob did a full length set – he noticed that the young lady had a brand new leopard skin pill box hat at 9PM and didn't finish wondering how it felt to be on your own with no direction home until well after 10.30. Which makes me wonder where the idea of the Mark Knopfler support set came from? I wonder if His Bobness doubts his ability to do a full set every night, and is doing a double-handed tour so that the audience aren't short changed if he has an off day? Has he got some system of resting his voice between gigs so that he's been cured of the  "How mmmm mmm mmmm man mmmm down" syndrome? Or was the sound mix simply better in Cardiff than it was when I heard him in Sheffield a couple of years back? There were a couple of numbers (Summer Nights, in particular) where the band went into a completely over the top freak out mode but Bob's voice never seemed to disappear into that improvised back yard racket?

Or has it actually always been like this? Have those of us lucky enough to get somewhere near the front always felt that we've made a connection with a vibrant, fun and instantly likable rock and roll personality – but anyone further back felt they'd heard some quite interesting reworkings of mostly obscure Dylan songs? (Anyone who doesn't know his catalogue inside out is going to be lost, of course.) Which makes his insistence that there can't be any screens seems all the more perverse. Assuming that the never ending tour is never going to end, one almost wishes he could give up on stadia and limit himself to smaller venues, however much harder it might become to get tickets.

Is this tour, or some tour, being filmed as a documentary? I overwhelming feel that this Dylan, the live Dylan, the showman Dylan who uses his voice as a musical instrument, one component in what is a actually a consummate piece of musical theater is the real Dylan, the one Robert Zimmerman has always wanted to be, and it needs to be preserved for posterity.

Noble prize for literature, indeed.

Clever Man Says Interesting Thing, Shock

Earlier this year the New Statesman (a magazine) asked a group of famous people who believed in God why they believed in God. Later on they asked a group of famous people who didn't believe in God why they didn't believe in God. It turned out that the people who believed in God believed in God for all the usual reasons, and the people who didn't believe in God didn't believe in God for all the usual reasons. I give Ben Goodacre points for saying that he thought there should be a word for people who weren't interested one way or the other. The atheists were on the whole shriller than the theists. Richard Dawkins started off sounding calm and reasonable, explaining that he didn't believe in God because he didn't see any reason to believe in God, but ended up saying that "theology" was "the exact equivalent" of reading tea-leaves.

I was a lot more interested in the comments of one Steven Hawking. He was the fella, you remember, who said that when we'd filled in the last bit of physics we would "know the mind of God".

The Dawk is probably right to say that when Hawking says "God" he doesn't actually mean "God": it's just a flowery way of saying "we will know everything." I do wonder if Hawking was deliberately playing up to his own mythology. A very clever man who happens to be severely disabled fits in nicely with Gnostic ideas about Bodies being things that Minds have annoyingly got trapped in, and that we should let those bodies shrivel away so that minds can expand and ascend and get back in touch with the mind of God. That's why the most brilliant fictional scientists (Prof. X, Davros, the Mekon) are always represented as wheelchair users.

Biologists are often accused of "playing God" by people who don't understand biology, or for that matter, God. It's hard to see why "fixing the plumbing" so childless couples can make babies is necessarily more hubristic than, say, giving aspirins to people who God has decided ought to have headaches. But Physicists seem to positively like using the G-word. They pretend that Mr Higgs-Boson is the God Particle or that a grand unified theory is the Mind of God or that Quantum Physics reveals that the Creator is a big fan of Yahtzee. 

Christians have a bad habit of pretending that this means that the scientists in question believed in God even when they obviously didn't. Christians have a bad habit of pretending that all sorts of famous people believed in God when they obviously didn't. Atheists have got an equally bad habit of claiming that famous people didn't believe in God when they obviously did. ("Oh, they may have said that they did, but that was the kind of thing you had to say in the olden days. If they lived today, they would have agreed with me.") Einstein, who was a scientist, didn't believe in God, and said so, although he also said that the didn't think much of atheists and was a big fan of Jesus.

I think that the tendency of some physicists to talk about their science in theological language does imply that they think that their science is the sort of thing which it is worth using theological language to talk about. I think that they use words like "God" because they like to think of themselves as discoverers of some ultimate, or indeed, Ultimate, truth, or indeed Truth. Unlike those poor benighted chemists who just mix things up in their test tubes. I think that they use the G-word because they believe in some kind of Platonic reality – that there are things that are true and would have been true even if there had been no minds to observe them being true. Unlike those people on the other side of the quad who think that everything is contingent, cultural determined, subjective, post-modern, deconstructable.

More recently, Mr Hawking has claimed that the gaps which he perceived when he wrote a Brief History of Time have indeed been filled in: "the scientific account is complete and theology is unnecessary". This works very well if God is primarily an explanation for the bits of the Universe we don't quite understand. When we knew hardly anything, there was lots of stuff for God to do; now we know everything, we can retire him. (I've always felt that this can't be quite right. So little of the Bible and the Koran and the Book of Mormon seem to be involved in saying "Why do elephants have long noses? Because God said so, that's why." So much of it seems to be about temples and taboos and morals and miracles and stuff.)

But the bombshell that Hawking drops on the New Statesman goes like this:

"I am not claiming that there is no God. The scientific account is complete but it does not predict human behaviour because there are too many equations to solve. One therefore uses a different model which can include free will and God." 

Go back and read that again.

Now go back and read it again.

Now, we know well enough how the rest of this argument pans out. Like a high level chess game, the moves are planned out in advance. Some Christians are, right now, typing that God exists because the most famous scientist of his generation says that God exists, or at any rate, that God doesn't definitely not exist. Some atheists are, right now, typing "Oh, I suppose just because humans are complicated I have to start circumcising lambs on bronze alters, do I?" All the cute little Dawkinistas are typing that by "God", Hawking doesn't mean "God" and even if he does, he's got a diseased mind and can be ignored. Five comments in someone will use the phrase "sky fairy" and the discussion will come to an end.

But it is still very interesting.

Clearly, Hawking hasn't suddenly converted to anything, and isn't even necessarily talking about the "God" of religion. He may not be saying anything more than that "God" can be a useful tool of thought. That was the line taken by Phillip Pullman before he became boring: God doesn't "exist" but she's still worth thinking about, because she allows us to think of things we couldn't think of without her. (There is no such number as the square root of minus one, but calculations involving the square root of minus one have useful real world applications.) It was also the line taken by Terry Pratchett: maybe it is good to teach children to believe in things that don't exist, like the tooth fairy, because they are going to need to believe in other things that don't exist, like "love" and "freedom".

It isn't quite clear what Hawking means by "model". He may mean "It could sometimes be useful to pretend that there is a God in the same way that it is sometimes useful (when you are trying to find your way home without a compass, say) to pretend that the earth is the center of the universe and the sun moves round it." Or he may mean: "When we are talking about the human mind, and how it interacts with the universe, and whether it makes real choices, it is perfectly valid to construct hypothesis which includes God. At some point in the future, we may think of a way of testing those hypotheses." 

He seems, very interestingly, to grok the idea that "God" is not, and never way, primarily a very inefficient way of explaining why elephants have trunks; but is, and always was, a way of thinking about how us minds go about existing and interacting with other minds which also seem to be embodied in this physical universe thing. 

Since he has (so far as I know) no particular religious axe to grind it will not be possible for the atheists to reply "Oh, look at the contortions which these Christians will go to to salvage some part of their nasty barbaric bronze age did I mention Fred Phelps stoning apostates sky fairy sky fairy sky fairy." This doesn't mean that they won't say it. And if he is serious (about not claiming that God does not exist) it will suddenly become awfully hard to maintain the imaginary line between science (which is always atheistic) and faith (which is always anti-scientific.) Which doesn't mean that people won't carry on saying it.

Science has explained everything; but human minds and their apparent ability to make choices are not really part of the "everything" which science has explained. We may need to think of them in some other way. Some way that may include "God". 

Excuse me: but wasn't that exactly the territory over which C.S Lewis and G.E.M Anscombe had their celebrated theological spat in 1948?

These Ones Are Pretty Awesome As Well