Heretic!

HERETIC

I come to this from various positions, which have changed over my lifetime. I began at a very young age believing in a Christian God, inculcated as I was in Catholicism. I progressed to being agnostic, then to atheism and now to, what I would simply call a realistic, almost scientific approach to life and death.  There are gaps in my thinking and there is thinking in between the fissures that break out here and there every time I contemplate this subject. Even so, I call this Heretic and place it alongside a photograph I took of these artificial humanoid entities that we inject with spirit through self projection.

No matter how much we attempt to envisage our own demise as an event that we will experience, we are able only to imagine the void (if it be that) from the point of view of our own selves as a conscious entity, whilst thinking about a death state in which we essentially have no consciousness. And, we imagine that at the point of our death - between that last flicker or spark of life and that other terrible, unimaginable state, that we will somehow know in that instant that death is imminent and that we will be simultaneously saddened by the fact that we will be losing consciousness as we know it and flung headlong into this otherness, which really is unnamable, in which we just simply do not know and cannot know, and this is what we find disconcerting because we will not know that we are dead, we will not know in that death that we had ever lived. Perhaps this might be considered (to some) as consolation, for some (or many) there will be peace beyond anything that we can imagine (and some may call this heaven or nirvana), for this state of non-being must remain a secret, a mystery, and yet here, the secret is revealed as a state that may be speculated upon, for nothing that I say here will amount to any conclusions about death, for as I previously said, I (we) can only imagine (and probably not very well) what it might be to have no consciousness, since consciousness of self and other is all that I (we) have known and all that I can remember. Even though I have considered that I was not concerned ever that there was a great deal of time - think of the history of the world and all the events in the world prior to my birth – my first breath and consciousness that followed, whenever that was, and there is no memory of sadness that my awareness was not in that space. Might death, as prior birth, be a matter of forgetting? Surely not. However, and this is not an argument for previous lives, but what if we had lived before, had experienced another conscious state and we just didn’t, could never remember because when we die those perceptions leave us and of it we have no remembrance. If death is the other that lives within us as a constant reminder of all the time of the universe that is really our state of being (un-being), then this state of knowledge – our life and our awareness of it, is an aberration. This world that I spoke of, a world that existed prior to my perception of it, constructed because human kind has had knowledge of its surroundings and wished to mold it, will be, in death, no more accessible by me. The portal (strange unseen door that it is) to this world of conscious being will be forever closed and this is what we lament, or do we? Would we really want to witness the impact of our death on our friends and loved ones (assuming that at least one person is affected by our departure from this worldly plane), would we wish to know who did or didn’t really care, would the pain be unbearable? Some who have had near death experiences say that they float above the scene of their own death and see the events unfolding below, but since they did not die, but only had what is called a near death experience they cannot be said to have experienced death and total disconnection of their conscious self from a mindful world. What is it then that we lament in regards to losing life and consciousness of life? Is it that we will have no pleasure? But we would also have no pain. Is it that we will have no volition, that we can no longer affect the world, that we will no longer make a difference? Spent forever - life, like so much else that has been exhausted. Those who have experienced a good life want it to continue because they experience pleasurable things. Those who have not experienced those good things also want life to continue because they hope to finally receive their share of all things considered desirable. Some want life because they feel that they must experience all that their life has to offer. The night is also the sun, pain also a joy. Such a waste (you hear them say) that we live our whole lives and in death our accumulated experiences disappear; as though our life was lived purely so that it could be shared with others, rather than just being for us and us alone. In death, apparently, self and other is robbed; death that steals this life and all that it has lived and been conscious of. But we can’t ever substitute the word unconscious with death because even though we can be unconscious without being dead, there is no way of re-entering a conscious state once we are dead. Entering consciousness is only possible through a body already imbued with a spark of life. OK, so after writing nearly one thousand words, I really don’t know where I am with this except to say that I wonder what people think heaven is like. Even when I was a child, I imagined heaven in a similar way, described by David Byrne (from Talking Heads), as a place where nothing really happens. Rather boring I would think and so I am left here with the question: Is it heaven that believers desire after death or is it just that they wish to avoid hell at all cost? I do wonder as I read over what I have written whether it is my lack of imagination that brings me to this conclusion about life and death, perhaps, after all the portal between life and death and what follows is something other than what I have said and that in death there are potentials or possibilities worth considering.

DAWKINS AND PELL + Q&A + ABC TV

At no point in the Q &A (ABC TV) session last night between evolutionary biologist, author and militant atheist Richard Dawkins and Cardinal George Pell did I hear the word faith and yet it seemed to me that an individual either has faith in God or one doesn't. Faith is the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen and it appeared to me that in one way or another both Dawkins in his attempt to come to terms with the notion of the Big Bang theory and anti-matter - in other words matter arising from unseen negative matter to explain the creation of the world, and Pell's perhaps inarticulate explanation of an unseen God as the clockmaker of a mechanistic universe, that they were both grappling with this notion of faith or trust, both trying to use reason to explain their belief in a system of thought that guides their lives. Minor points perhaps, but Pell dumbed down whilst discussing the concept of Holy Communion and the fact that Catholics believe that when they ingest the Eucharist,  it is transubstantiation - a process in which the host changes into Christ's body and blood (not physically) but substantively that occurs when they receive and swallow a small round of bread at Mass. Why does the Archbishop of Sydney seem incapable of effectively articulating doctrine? It seems to me that the primary differences between Dawkins and Pell is that the former is an empiricist and the latter not - one only believes in what can be witnessed and proved, the other happy to be involved in speculation, faith and hope.  However, it also occurred to me that Dawkins, unlike Pell, was keeping an open mind when it came to his investigation of things unseen and as yet unknown, such as the particle physics theory of anti-matter, whereas Pell was fixed and rather dogmatic in his viewpoint. No one in the audience asked why we had two men discussing the issue of God and why God is always referred to as masculine. Yes, yes, I know that it is because God the Father and his son Jesus Christ were male (as told in the Bible), but what of the Holy Ghost - a non-gendered spirit? I'd like to see two female members of our community discuss God - one who emanates from the sciences and one from religion and not necessarily from the Catholic persuasion, maybe then we would have a different outcome and a more interesting discussion?

Nietzsche, the Cardinal, and a leap of faith

It was interesting to read a Thomist argument in a daily paper this week. The Australian published an address to the Global Warming Policy Foundation by leading Australian Catholic, Cardinal George Pell. Cardinal Pell invoked the spirit of Thomas Aquinas in a vigorous prosecution of the case against global warming. I don't care one way or another about the polemic but I'm always intrigued by Thomism. The speech is here (pdf)

Thomas Aquinas was a thirteenth century friar whose life's work was the partial reconciliation of fragments of Platonic and Aristolian thought. In the (somewhat unkind) words of contemporaries, Aquinas and his followers laboured mightily to reconcile in death those who never agreed in life. Drawing from Platonic and Socratic traditions, Thomist philosophy in part underpins modern, secular ideas about universal freedoms and rights. Following Aristotle, Thomist doctrine asserts the necessity for accurate observation that underpins the scientific method.

Thomism teaches that a thing is not necessarily so just because a majority says it is. It is up to individuals to see for themselves, and to work out what is true and what is not. And Thomism teaches that not everything is knowable. Where things are not knowable through observation, Thomism teaches an intellect is sustained by faith, because faith does not end in a true or false proposition, but rather in a reality beyond knowing.

Thomism offers a model of mind as a continuum of knowing and believing, a model rejected by both modern positivism and its postmodern adversary, post structuralism. The modern positivist model of mind is a discontinuum of knowledge and ignorance in which believing depends upon knowing, and ignorance is a kind of poverty of mind, to be pitied and where possible cured. The postmodern, post structuralist position abolishes both objectivity and belief, substituting a continuum of subjective uncertainty, a phenomenological shell game of deceived and deceiving minds. Thomist thought is a handy antidote to both.

I don't care one way or another about the dispute over weather forecasts that preoccupied the Cardinal . The intrigue in the Thomist world view is, for me, the model of the individual human mind as a continuum of knowledge and belief. Classical skepticism, after Pyrrho of Elis (c360-270BCE) tried to develop methods of continually testing knowledge and belief. Old school skeptics were comfortable with what they comprehended as the limits of their knowledge, although those boundaries continuously changed, and promoted methods of suspending, rather than passing, judgement. An age later, Descartes introduced the idea of absolute certainty only after declaring he believed that God would not allow his eyes to be deceived, a leap of faith any Thomist might have taken.

The model of human mind as a continuum of knowing and believing is evident in the self-belief of Nietchze's ubermensch, in Thomist metaphysics, in the origins of the scientific method itself. There is always some tension between knowledge and belief. I believe in freedom. I believe in free speech. I can't objectively prove those exist, somewhere, as universal archetypes. But neither could Plato. Or Descartes, for whom the leap of faith - that God would not give him eyes only to cruelly deceive them - preceded rather than followed any evidential trail.

In Thomism I can see an answer to Nietzsche's call to grow long legs, to see further and to leap from peak to peak. Before I know anything else I need faith in at least myself. Faith I can survive the ordeal, belief I won't fall into the chasm between what is spoken and what is done.

God forced into schools + Golding cartoon

Golding cartoon. http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/backlash-as-god-forced-into-schools-20110326-1cb7c.html

Anyone brought up in Catholicism with a sense of humor must be amused by Golding's cartoon in the Age newspaper (on-line) this morning, complementing Michael Bachelard's article Backlash as God Forced into Schools.  The cartoon - an ironic play on the pleasures and perils of non-conformity, depicts Tim (sounds like Jim - James was the name of Christ's brother) with a bewildered look on his face and arms outstretched on the cross, like Christ crucified, comments on the fact that if children (via their parents) opt out of Christian education classes taught in primary schools they are not allowed to do other school work.
Regular instruction may not be timetabled while students from the class are attending SRI (Education Department letter), basically means that the Department doesn't want children attending the half hour SRI class to miss out on vital schoolwork, however, those not attending SRI's do miss out on schoolwork and are actively engaged in pencil sharpening or playing computer games.
Excuse me for using a Hansonism but Please Explain!
Golding reveals a sense of the 'sacrificial' for those children not attending special religious education, since not only are they missing out on regular schoolwork, but are made to feel like outsiders, outcasts amongst those who have been included in the fold. The fact that this moment of sacrifice is approved by the Education Department reveals that it obviously doesn't take religious education seriously, since its equivalence is play. As far as I am concerned both religion and play involve imagination and maybe Tim on the see-saw above is  simply perusing the playground in an attempt to find the elusive God particle! (See: Steve's post yesterday).

Christian anxiety

Understandably, security concerns post 9/11, the media's instance on linking terrorism with Islam and the predominance of primarily Muslim boat people arriving in our country of late appears to have added to existing anxieties many of us have about people from other nations and their possible threat to our existence and livelihood. Extreme reactions, such as vilification, overt prejudice, stereotyping and acts of violence upon Muslims, especially Muslim women caused many to recoil from Australian culture and become isolated and fearful, adding to the notion that they were somehow separate from the rest of multicultural Australia. Petitions, such as the one lodged in the House of Representatives by the Hon Paul Murphy, Labor Member for Reid (NSW)  on Monday 21 February this year certainly don't do anything to smooth the waters between Christians and Muslims. The petition asked that the Parliament of Australia:

1. Review our Commonwealth Immigration Policy to ensure the priority for Christians from all races and colours, especially from persecuted nations, as both immigrants and refugees.

2. Adopt a ten year moratorium on Muslim immigration, so an assessment can be made on the social and political disharmony currently occurring in the Netherlands, France and the UK, so as to ensure we avoid making the same mistakes; and allow a decade for the Muslim leadership and community in Australia to reassess their situation so as to reject any attempt to establish a Muslim nation within our Australian nation.

The preamble to the petition drew upon the very foundation of the Australian parliament and I quote:

That we re-affirm our support for the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia which states “Whereas the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth” (Constitution Act 9th July 1900) and the affirmation of 69% of our Australian population that they are Christians, and the statement of one of our founders that “this Commonwealth of Australia from its first stage will be a Christian Commonwealth” (Sir John Downer 1898), and the Opening Prayer of the Parliaments “Almighty God we humbly beseech Thee to vouchsafe Thy blessing upon this Parliament. Direct and prosper our deliberations to the advancement of Thy glory” and recognizes the importance of these beliefs in ensuring the ongoing stability and unity of our Christian nation.

Murphy also lodged on the same day a petition, which expressed concern about the Islamisation of Australian schools.The book in question is: Learning From One Another: Bringing Muslim Perspectives into Australian Schools, contracted by the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies at The University of Melbourne (previously called the Melbourne Institute for Asian Languages and Society).The Centre brings together established expertise in teaching and research at the participating universities, and plays an important leadership role in public debates on contemporary Islam, particularly in the Australian context.

From my memory Jesus Christ (Jesus of Nazareth c. 5 BC/BCE – c. 30 AD/CE), said Love One Another, As I Have Loved You - Lesson 23 – Luke 22:1-38; John 13.So, would it be too much to expect those who say they are Christians to actually follow the teachings of the personage they purport to follow and begin to accept other peoples' differences?


I find it extremely interesting that the people of Melbourne actually applaud the fact that we have little enclaves of different cultures, which we love to frequent. Vietnamese restaurants line Victoria Street, Richmond.China town in Little Bourke Street actually dates back to gold rush days and is a tourist destination. Lonsdale Street is known for the array of Greek coffee, cakes and food shops.  Lebanese food and culture abounds in Brunswick and Lygon Street, Carlton is well known for its Italian culture and cuisine. I'm sure that they are many more and within each suburb there are prayer groups, churches and community centres that cater for the diversity of different peoples, their culture and religion and non-one is complaining that these people are not like us!

What we preach

When One Nation's Ian Nelson told ABC-Television's Q&A program on Monday night "Muslims have their own religion, they have their own mosques, they have their own Sharia law, they have their own bible, the Qur’an. Which is, uh, really different than what we do", the studio audience laughed.

They weren't laughing with him, they were laughing at him. When Nelson repeated somewhat indignantly that "Muslims have their own bible", the audience laughed louder. Perhaps they remembered we are a secular society, where common law and parliamentary legislation has explicitly overruled religious law for the past five centuries.

Around sixty percent of Australians, including myself, identify themselves as Christians. According to islamicweb.com around 2% of the Australian population identify with the Muslim faith, roughly only six times more than Australians who who identify themselves as Jedi Knights (0.37%).

Before Vatican II Catholic women wore head scarfs, commonly called veils, to church in a tradition as old as Catholicism itself.

"...any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled dishonours her head—it is the same as if her head were shaven. For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her wear a veil" (King James Bible, Corinthians 11:4-16)

Recently there was an outpouring of national pride as a veiled, robed, childless, female Australian historical figure, Mary McKillop, was elevated to sainthood. Many described McKillop as a role model for modern women. Perhaps that's why the studio audience laughed at Ian Nelson's funny ideas about Muslims. I know it is why I did.

Serial misogynist and English King Henry (VIII) Tudor saw off Christianity's version of Sharia, the Canon Law, in what we call the English Reformation. But it was an Ecclesiastical court, applying Canon Law, that made Mary McKillop a Saint. The reality is that Catholic Christians have had their own version of Sharia for two thousand years, and clearly that has failed to affect the status of women in modern times.

But perhaps websites like catholicplanet.com should go on the firewall blacklist, just to make sure.

Whatever the uncertainties, differences or perceptions of threat, we ought not to attack a small minority of Australians who want to practice what we have preached for the past two millennia.

Affinities

I am constantly fascinated by the people who visit this blog. Yesterday someone from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia spent 22 minutes reading posts from May 2010. I couldn't remember what my posts were back then, so I checked. I'd written several articles about the wearing of the Burqa, Muslim women politics, film and images, so that may have been the attraction, since Jeddah is, according to Wiki the principal gateway to Mecca, Islam's holiest city, which able-bodied Muslims are required to visit at least once in their lifetime. It is also a gateway to Medina, the second holiest place in Islam. Apparently Jeddah means 'ancestor of women' and is attributable to the tomb in the city which is believed to belong to Eve, which is fascinating because doesn't this show some kind of Christian influence? And on this point, there is an informative website that shows the affinities and differences between Islam and Christianity that readers may want to check out. The belief of both that I like because it appears less religious is: Faith without works is useless (it is not enough to simply say "I believe"), which I translate as: Believing in something is just not good enough, you also have to put in the hard yards.

The Power of Now

In June 2008 I read a book called The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I read it on the advice of a new doctor who told me I 'thought too much'! In a way, I was lucky I was sick, because this allowed me quiet, contemplative time to read and absorb the book in two days. The first chapter ~ 'You are not your mind' almost put me off reading at all, for I had, for many years believed in the contrary ~ of course I was my mind, what else ~ a body, yes, that was obvious, but I'd put so much store in my thoughts and I had many of them, always racing ahead of what I was doing, very rarely slowing down ~ thoughts, thoughts, too many of them that caused me great anxiety. Most of my thoughts were about dissecting every bit of information, every conversation or interaction. I very rarely fell asleep quickly at night when I went to bed ~ my thoughts kept me awake. I believed that if I didn't think constantly, quickly then I would have no intellect, and I'd invested so much in my intellectual life and study. After reading the book, which was stimulating, rewarding and enlightening in many ways I began to slow down my racing thoughts and become consciously aware of 'the now', because after all, that's all we really have. So, what is the power of now? Simply, it means that if we live in the now rather than the past, we're not always thinking about what we might have done differently, what mistakes we've made, who has wronged us, what enjoyments we've missed out on. In other words, we stop making ourselves miserable by going over and over what cannot be changed or undone. There is only now and opportunities to make the now significant. What I enjoyed about Tolle's teaching is that he drew upon ideas from Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and other religions and philosophies, but reminded the reader not to fixate on any of the names (Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad) ~ just to move through them. After reading the book I began to meditate every day. I'd resisted for so long. Actually, the idea of meditation and anything spiritual irked me, but after reading the book I decided to just give myself over to listening to my breathing and getting in touch with the feelings inside my body. This was not always pleasant. Yes ~ mind doesn't really figure here. It's about not thinking, just breathing and feeling and eventually just breathing. And, with your eyes closed you feel the immensity of the space within you, which is simultaneously absolutely nothing ~ a void, and yet filled with that expansive and overwhelming nothing. It's what Tolle calls 'pure consciousness'. It's hard to explain if you haven't experienced it, and I'm sure that others experience meditation in their own particular way. I can't say that my anxiety has been totally overcome by reading this book, no book could do that because anxiety is produced in the body by complex interactions between the internal self and the exterior world. However, I do often return to the book and meditate from time to time. I'm not sure what prompted this morning's post, perhaps being in the 'now' almost always draws us back into the past, and there's nothing wrong with that ~I think that's the way our brain functions. If we didn't have memory (where-ever it's located - brain/body, or just floating around) we would not learn from our mistakes. I think the aspect detrimental to our psyche is in living too much in the past and not embracing the immediacy of our existence. In some ways this blog is a form of being in the now, the screen ever present, my gaze fixated on the words I type as they form across the page ~ consciousness of my finger tapping ~ and the sound, so clear and distinct in the otherwise quiet of the morning.