Honesty

I was going to tell you about something that happened this afternoon, but unfortunately although this was this afternoon two weeks ago I haven’t got round to doing anything about it until now.

So.

I was going to pretend that it had happened on the day I wrote it. No one would be any the wiser (especially as it relates to rain, which in 2012 seems to be happening most of the time).

But then it occurred to me that another principle that needs to run through this blog is one of honesty. Honesty with regard to what I believe, what I think, and how I behave, but also with regard to simple facts.

Actually, I think it’s impossible to be completely honest. Any human attempt at communication cannot avoid some distortion of the truth: it’s impossible to avoid putting some spin on what is said/written/expressed.

If you don’t believe me, try it (and be honest with yourself (insofar as that is possible…). Review the last thing you said. Even the most trivial.

‘The bathroom’s free’. OK, the core factual statement is true (unless you’re particularly perverse). But how do you say it? Do you put an explanation mark at the end, to try and show a friendly demeanour? Fair enough. But note the words ‘try’ and ‘show’. In a tiny way, you’re playing a part, attempting to project a facsimile of how you feel towards them. And it may be a very tiny way indeed. But it’s still there. Even the most spontaneous communication must involve some element of choice, of consideration. Without that it’s just a response, a reflex.

I said ‘human’ communication before: is that one reason why some of us like dogs? That their communications with us (appear) unconsidered? Is this true for all animals? Is part of what makes us human the inability to be completely truthful (‘I lie, therefore I am human’)? Or, to put it another way, is it inherent in language that truth cannot be communicated without some untruth as well?

There is here, perhaps, a parallel with the Sufi understanding of ‘veils’*. Put simply, this considers that all created things are veils that hide the Divine, but that, because all things are from the Divine, they also show what it is like: they simultaneously obscure and reveal. Maybe, for us, our language consists of the veils we wrap around ourselves, both revealing and obscuring our identity: crucially, even the way our communications distort the message tells the hearer a lot about us.

Of course, the kind of dishonesty I’m talking about here isn’t blameworthy. It’s unavoidable. For us (presumably not God) there is a spectrum, with necessary distortion at one end and blatant lies at the other.

Anyway…

I need to aim to remove unnecessary dishonesty from what I say, leaving behind only that which tells you more about me than what I’m actually trying to say does.

I’ll talk about what I meant to talk about when I started in my next post…

*See, for example, ‘Sufism: A Short Introduction’, W C Chittick, Oneworld, ISBN 1-85168-211-2

On (Un)Certainty

Are there two kinds of people in the world: those who are sure of things and those who aren’t? Or is it more complicated?

I have friends – good friends – who are atheists, to whom it is obvious that there is nothing beyond what can be explained by science, to whom thinking otherwise is ludicrous, or even perverse. They appear to find the fact that I believe a conundrum: I seem outwardly intelligent, logical, and down to earth, and yet I purport to believe such tosh. Fortunately, because we are friends they come to accept it as (I think) a charming eccentricity, part of the weirdness that makes me me.

I have other friends – good friends – who are, well, ah, I think I’ll call them Assured Believers for the moment. To them the existence of the Divine is self-evident, as is a clear and definite relationship between the divine and themselves. Prayers are made in the expectation of their being answered, and seeking day-to-day guidance from God is de rigueur. I am not so sure how they regard me: are they disappointed at my liberal tendencies and lack of assurance, sad that my early flush of evangelical zeal seems to have withered away, or just accepting that I am different? (Maybe I should ask them.)

The odd thing is that both types of friend seem to me to be incredibly similar. When in the presence of each their arguments, their beliefs, seem powerful, natural, compelling. Their confidence that they know the way the world is constructed* are impossible to distinguish in kind. Sometimes I envy them: both of them.

For I cannot be like them. I cannot even imagine being like them (except in the sense that when with them I tend to pick up the pattern of my surroundings, like some flat fish (but not chameleons!)). What is it like to be sure?

One of the purposes of this blog is to try to effect a reconciliation between the two world views characterized (caricatured?) here, at least inside my head if nowhere else. But I think it also has to explore reconciliation across the other axis: between being certain and being doubtful. Otherwise I risk living my life on an island between two landmasses rather than being a bridge between them.

*I initially mistyped this as ‘constricted’…

Principles

This post isn't really a proper post at all: instead it will serve as a page to store all the principles that crop up as I continue...

I am not an expert

Honesty

I am not an expert

Dear me…

In my first post I made, and recorded, a commitment to write every post at one sitting. What I forgot to mention was that I had also made a commitment to post at least once every week.

Hey ho…

However, one of the great things about being a Christian, in theory, is that you can always start again. Although the past cannot be changed, everything can be made new. Hurray!

So, here I am again.

All I want to do hear is to make one thing clear: I am not an expert – at least, not in the things I plan to think about in this blog. The only thing I’m really an expert in is British social security law, and I don’t intend this to be a major area of thought here. I am not a theologian, or a philosopher, or (except by training) a scientist. I therefore apologise for any of the above who read this stuff; for my presumption in trespassing in your garden. Having said that, I hope that you’d like to feel it's open to the public.

Shifting the metaphor slightly, I think of myself rather as a cheeky magpie, hopping from garden to garden picking up nice shiny things and bringing them back to my nest…

Just in case you think this is false modesty, I’ve recently been reading that Rowan Williams’ philosophical position is generally opposed to the French post-modernism of Derrida et al, when to me they seem to be mutually compatible [Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams, by Benjamin Myers, Continuum].

Why the title? II (the first bit)

 It’s considered appropriate to tell someone to ‘Get Real’ when you think a proposed course of action is certain to end in disaster, or, alternatively, when you think what someone believes is preposterous. I suppose it is shorthand for ‘You’d better adjust your plans/beliefs to reflect the world as it is, not as you’d like it to be’. It’s normally said quite aggressively, as part of a campaign of treading heavily and proprietarily all over the garden of someone else’s dreams.

I, however, would like to convert into something a little humbler but, perhaps, a little deeper. In writing a blog in which I am encouraging myself (and hopefully, others) to Get Real I think I mean:

Firstly, through how I think, how I behave, and what I do, to become closer to the person I ‘ought’ to be to become, and be, as truly Me as possible. I realize this statement is fraught with questions. Is there a sort of ‘platonic me’ of which I am an imperfect copy? Where does the ‘ought’ come from? And how, and by what yardsticks, do I measure my progress in this ambition? I might try and tackle these questions a bit more in later posts. At the moment, though, all I can say are there times when I feel more genuine, more three dimensional as it were, and times when I feel more as though I am playing a part, being less me; diminishing myself into two dimensions, as it were. I imagine that other people sometimes feel the same.

Secondly, by trying to comprehend, to understand, to grasp, or, more realistically, to simply persist in wrestling with the fundamental mysteries that hover forever on the boundaries of the banal little worlds that we construct around ourselves. Sufi Islam frequently refers to the Divine as simply ‘The Real’, and for good reason. I do not discount the possibility that believers in the supernatural are mistaken: possibly the outcome of this journey will see me leaving belief for atheism or agnosticism, although I think this unlikely. However, it is crucial to note that a purely secular naturalistic worldview does not enable one to dispense with these questions of horrifying profundity: in some ways it makes them more acute. That I inhabit a universe which appeared (or has always existed) for no particular reason, other than that it simply is, and in which a tiny, momentary, flicker of conscious life briefly exists is, to me, an abyss as terrifying as that of a necessarily existent God.

It is pretty obvious that these two aspirations are linked: it might even be argued that the interplay of the two is what religion is all about (although this hadn’t occurred to me before writing this post!). 

Why the title?

Good question. I’ll deal with the second bit first.


There are so many ways I could define myself (many of which will, I hope, emerge during the lifetime of this blog): so why highlight being Christian, and being gay?  Here, in no particular order, are some reasons that come to mind…

• They are, I think, the two main points of friction between me and the world around me (although rarely at the same time, thank goodness). In a broadly secular world my Christian-ness is something that sets me apart. Christians, and religious believers generally, are increasingly seen as a little odd, in the UK at least. The prevailing culture amongst the intelligentsia is that belief in the supernatural is something that we have (or at any rate ought to have) outgrown. On the other hand, being gay also separates one, even now, and of course especially in the church. I think there are gay people who have never experienced any angst because of their sexuality, but my impression is that they are still rare.
• Not many of us live in that Venn-diagram overlap of being both gay and Christian. This is not surprising. Gay living growing up within the church frequently either run away from the church, or run away from their own sexuality. I have experience of doing both.
• Christianity seems to be a part of me that my culture seems to believe harks back to the past, whereas being gay is often thought of as one of the new things (the reality is, of course, more complicated). As a result each stands for rather more than itself in a sort of internal battle between tradition and post-modernity.

I don’t really like the word ‘post-modern’. Apart from anything else I’m not 100% sure I know what it means. At the moment I am, I suppose, using it as a short-hand to describe the world I find myself in. This is a world where claiming to have the monopoly on Truth is getting more and more difficult to sustain (as does the use of the capital T). Science digs increasingly deeply into some very strange ‘hows’ but society struggles with the ‘whys’. A local Muslim butcher (wonderfully!) advertises Halal Christmas turkeys; monks are called in to calm angry spirits before Bangkok’s new state of the art airport can be opened (in 2005); freedom of choice is regarded as a fundamental right, and yet the current scientific world view strongly suggests that free will is an illusion. How do I – how does any of us? – navigate through this web of contradictions?


Now the first bit: Getting Real. 


That will have to wait until the next post…


(I have made myself a rule that each post has to be written at one sitting. Hopefully this will encourage not to procrastinate, and not to wait until each piece is deathless prose before its uploaded. It should also limit each post’s length!)


(Actually I cheated with this one: it took two visits to the keyboard: but it is my first one)