Today, 6th January, is the day when we celebrate Epiphany: the visit of the Magi to Jesus. It's also traditionally the day when we take down Christmas decorations. It's the end of Christmastide, and the beginning (depending on your tradition - if you're a Christian) either of Ordinary Time or of the season of Epiphany. It tends, however, to feel much more like an end than a beginning. The Christmas lights are turned off; the baubles put away; the tree goes either back in the attic or to be chopped up for composting. The house feels feels bigger and emptier and somehow much more bare than it did before Christmas. And Ordinary Time (which comes from the same Latin root as "ordinal" - the numbers like first, second, third) feels like just counting off the weeks and, well, ordinary. In some traditions the Christmas crib is left for a while longer, and figures of three kings with gold, frankincense and myrrh are placed next to the infant Jesus. But that's the end of the Christmas story - bar the slaughter of the innocents (which is another story that never seems to make it into children's Bibles).
Why does this feel so much like an ending? In the early years of Christianity, as it spread, it made good sense to co-opt existing festivals. As people who celebrated a mid-winter festival became Christians, it was helpful to be able to say "You already know that in the middle of winter, something amazing happens: the days begin to get longer again. You talk about this using the language of birth, of newness. The Good News is that you're right! What you've been grasping at is the truth, that Jesus was born, and that the midwinter of your sin and shame is melting away." But this was part of a cycle (you just wait until the Spring of Resurrection), whereas now I think that we tend to see our festivals as discrete parcels of time. Never mind that in consumer culture the bulk of the festival happens before the event, rather than after; too many centuries of clocks have made us not very good at thinking of continuous time. We forget that the events we celebrate: births and birthdays, achievements, victories and memorials, are milestones, not destinations. They mark where we are on a journey; they're not an end in themselves, which we then reluctantly abandon to move on to the next distant target.
So I hope that Epiphany, for you and for me, is not the start of something, but the continuation of something. The Magi brought gifts which referred to Jesus' adult roles as king, priest and sacrifice. They were, in fact, for life, not just for Christmas. I hope your Christmas has been good. But I also hope that it is the kind which leads to many days of Ordinary goodness.
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Consumerist Christmas
I know that retailers make a lot of money from Christmas (though I have my own opinions about that) and I understand that they want to start selling Christmas-themed goods as early as possible to maximise profits, but it just seems bizarre to sell things in Christmas packaging that won't even make it into November.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Monday, October 05, 2009
Education for atheists
One of the atheist arguments against bringing up your children in any kind of faith is that it's abusive, forcing children to accept fairy stories (like the Bible) as fact, before their minds can learn to think critically. I've always had a couple of reservations about this, not least that I think it's better for the parent-child relationship if parents are truthful, as far as possible, and congruent: that what they think, do, say and believe should all fit together. It's bad for children if parents say "I really love you" and then punch them: obviously punching them is bad for them, but longer-lasting harm is done by the lack of congruence: how does that child learn to trust someone else who says "I love you"? So no matter whether or not you think that telling children about God is a terrible thing to do, I'm sure that believing in God but not telling your children about him will cause harm to a child. What will a child make of an adult who lives their life by certain rules but doesn't talk about them - or talks about them as if they are matters of little consequence? Besides which, if we shouldn't talk to children about religion before they have learned to think critically, should we talk to them about rational humanism? Do we teach them to think before we give them anything to think about?
As an aside, I'm always a little perturbed by the use of words like "brainwashing" and "indoctrination" which get applied to how believers bring up their children. I have to say that if we were seriously carrying out the kind of mind-control techniques that the caricature Christian is supposed to do, we'd be a bit better at it. Thousands and thousands of young people leave the church every year. Either our brainwashing is, frankly, a bit rubbish, or (shock!) they haven't been brainwashed at all, just brought up by their parents and chosen (like millions of other young people) to seek out alternatives. Of course, as a Christian, I strongly believe that one of the things the church should do with teenagers is to teach them to think for themselves, to ask hard questions and to be dissatisfied with facile answers. That way there is a chance that they won't get to 18 and suddenly discover that a simple Sunday-school faith doesn't really help to make sense of a complex adult world.
Anyway, this post was sparked by a piece on the Theos site, with research that suggests that converts to atheism appear to be less well-educated than converts to theism. If true, this would seem to run counter to the New Atheist proposition that if only everyone learned to think for themselves, religion would die out. In fact, it seems that if you come out of school with few or no qualifications, you may stop believing in God, but if you go to university and can write a dissertation, you may start believing in God, even if you weren'tindoctrinated brought up that way.
As an aside, I'm always a little perturbed by the use of words like "brainwashing" and "indoctrination" which get applied to how believers bring up their children. I have to say that if we were seriously carrying out the kind of mind-control techniques that the caricature Christian is supposed to do, we'd be a bit better at it. Thousands and thousands of young people leave the church every year. Either our brainwashing is, frankly, a bit rubbish, or (shock!) they haven't been brainwashed at all, just brought up by their parents and chosen (like millions of other young people) to seek out alternatives. Of course, as a Christian, I strongly believe that one of the things the church should do with teenagers is to teach them to think for themselves, to ask hard questions and to be dissatisfied with facile answers. That way there is a chance that they won't get to 18 and suddenly discover that a simple Sunday-school faith doesn't really help to make sense of a complex adult world.
Anyway, this post was sparked by a piece on the Theos site, with research that suggests that converts to atheism appear to be less well-educated than converts to theism. If true, this would seem to run counter to the New Atheist proposition that if only everyone learned to think for themselves, religion would die out. In fact, it seems that if you come out of school with few or no qualifications, you may stop believing in God, but if you go to university and can write a dissertation, you may start believing in God, even if you weren't
Friday, October 02, 2009
Armageddon, popularity of
Don't ask me why, but I was looking on Google Trends and I did a search for "Armageddon". I'd love to know the reason for this: there's a spike in searches for Armageddon just before the end of every year. It's not right at the end of the year, when people might change the calendar and be reminded of the eventual end of time, and it doesn't seem to bear much relation to related news stories.
The sermon for Advent Sunday usually looks forward not only to the coming of Christ at Christmas, but also to his coming again. Either the eschaton is being preached so widely during Advent that lots of people are going home and using Google to find out what to expect (it is, after all, easier to understand than Revelation), or the Church's traditional seasonal liturgy fits with the zeitgeist rather better than I might have expected.
The sermon for Advent Sunday usually looks forward not only to the coming of Christ at Christmas, but also to his coming again. Either the eschaton is being preached so widely during Advent that lots of people are going home and using Google to find out what to expect (it is, after all, easier to understand than Revelation), or the Church's traditional seasonal liturgy fits with the zeitgeist rather better than I might have expected.
Engaging with "new atheism"
I'm interested in how we as Christians can engage with the kind of anti-Christian, pro-rationalism outlook that gets referred to as "new atheism". I think that the study of apologetics should be a top priority for Christians, so that we can explain our beliefs as we should. Today I found a superb example of this. In Australia there is a campaign called Jesus - All About Life. The campaign didn't buy the .com version of their website, only the .com.au one, and now there is an atheist rebuttal site on jesusallaboutlife.com. However, it's there, on this post, that there's a wonderful discussion in the comments. The Christian commenter, John Bartik, whose strangely-named website is here, is patient, tenacious and knowledgable. I think he does a great job of ignoring all the bits of the other commenter's argument that are repetitive or recycled Dawkinisms, which would make me throw up my hands in dismay or chew my own arm off in frustration, and focuses on areas for taking the conversation forward. This is what being a Christian should look like!
Monday, July 06, 2009
Giving up Twitter
I have decided to give up Twitter. Having adopted it when it was just emerging into general public awareness, I'm now abandoning it just as it seems to be really taking off. There are several reasons for this, which I'll go into in a minute, but first a couple of caveats. This is not in itself a criticism of Twitter: of course it has its faults and shortcomings, but they are not the reason for me to abandon it. Nor is it a criticism of other social networks, the way they are used, or the people who use them. I know several people who are enthusiastic and prolific users of Twitter and Facebook: this is not in any way intended to be a commentary on them or the way they use social networks. This is an entirely subjective point of view and a completely personal decision.
OK, so why give up Twitter?
I have recently had extended periods of not using it, first as a discipline during Lent, and lately I have deliberately not posted (though have read tweets from other people), because I was ambivalent about whether I wanted to post some things. I decided not to post anything and see how that went. The result was that I became more convinced that I could easily manage without Twitter. Of course, millions of people manage without all sorts of things that we take for granted, so I needed some reason why not using Twitter would actually benefit me. At the very least, I wanted to be sure that using Twitter wasn't adding any positive benefits to my life, in which case giving it up would save time that could be used on something more productive.
I'd been ambivalent about tweeting some things (and therefore posting them on Facebook, since that was set up to happen automatically) because ideas, impressions and feelings that were important to me at the time were not necessarily things that I would want to share with a wide group of acquaintances. This meant that I was tending to self-censor things that were genuinely important to me, and was left with my daily trivia and minutiae: what I was eating, where I was going, whether or not I had lost any weight. This is a caricature of Twitter: frequent and regular updates about nothing at all. Did I really want to be broadcasting this stuff? I know there are a few people who like to know what's going on with me, but I'm pretty sure that they don't need every detail - and I have a Facebook account to which I can post as easily as I can tweet, so I wouldn't be cutting off anyone who genuinely wanted to find out what I was doing. As for everyone else, I have to be honest and say that I'm not that fascinating.
Similarly, although I am interested in what my friends are doing, I found that looking at a Twitter stream was becoming more an exercise in skipping through tweets than actually finding anything; Twitter had become a way of using up time, or a distraction when I was putting off dull tasks. I regularly found that I would check Twitter on my phone and feel that I had neither gained anything nor added anything useful. It was not, to use a marketspeak phrase, "adding value". If the time I spent reading tweets could be spent doing something that does add value, or that at least doesn't leave me feeling like I had just wasted time, then wouldn't it make sense to give it up?
Most of the people that I follow I do not know and am unlikely to meet in real life. It's always fascinating to get an insight into someone else's life (which is why so much TV is essentially "look at what these other people are doing") but if I didn't know about what these people are doing it wouldn't actually change my life. Similarly, the organisations I follow have so rarely told me anything that has made a difference to me that losing their tweets would have a negligible impact. If someone starts following me on Twitter, I check their Twitter page, and if it looks like they say things I'd be interested in then I'll follow them. Almost nobody who has started to follow me (and why would you want to, if you don't know me?) has got a follow back from me. I'm sure there's an argument that following someone back is the kind of reciprocal behaviour that makes the digital world go round a little more smoothly, but I simply don't want to know dull details about strangers. Sorry.
Online social networking is an adjunct to real life social networking, not a replacement for it. Having 50, or 500, or 5000 followers on Twitter doesn't make up for having few real friends. Having a few good friends with whom you can talk and share confidences, and a wider circle of friends that you can socialise and have fun with, plus 500 Twitter followers is significantly different from feeling isolated from people and using online networks as a way of masking loneliness. For me, it makes more sense to try and develop closer relationships with people I care about than to have a long list of people who tell me things that don't have any emotional impact at all.
I actively dislike the competitive element of numbers of followers, or indeed the value that is put on having many followers. You don't need to be Ashton Kutcher to be seduced into thinking that 10,000 followers is better than 10 followers, and never stop to question the assumption that "many, more, most" is synonymous with "good, better, best". You don't need to have any self-esteem issues to start feeling like the number of people following you must somehow be related to your interestingness, your fame, your value as a contributor to the global conversation. My most recent tweet, "Steve has nothing to say", was a couple of weeks ago. Two people have started following me in the last three days.
The wider question, whether I do have anything to say, and if so what, how and to whom, will continue to occupy my thinking. I'll use Twitter to send a couple of direct messages to people I know in real life, so that they know they won't be able to contact me that way, and then I'll tweet a link to this blog post. Then, I think, that will be it. If I miss the Twitterverse terribly I can always come back; I don't think I will.
OK, so why give up Twitter?
I have recently had extended periods of not using it, first as a discipline during Lent, and lately I have deliberately not posted (though have read tweets from other people), because I was ambivalent about whether I wanted to post some things. I decided not to post anything and see how that went. The result was that I became more convinced that I could easily manage without Twitter. Of course, millions of people manage without all sorts of things that we take for granted, so I needed some reason why not using Twitter would actually benefit me. At the very least, I wanted to be sure that using Twitter wasn't adding any positive benefits to my life, in which case giving it up would save time that could be used on something more productive.
I'd been ambivalent about tweeting some things (and therefore posting them on Facebook, since that was set up to happen automatically) because ideas, impressions and feelings that were important to me at the time were not necessarily things that I would want to share with a wide group of acquaintances. This meant that I was tending to self-censor things that were genuinely important to me, and was left with my daily trivia and minutiae: what I was eating, where I was going, whether or not I had lost any weight. This is a caricature of Twitter: frequent and regular updates about nothing at all. Did I really want to be broadcasting this stuff? I know there are a few people who like to know what's going on with me, but I'm pretty sure that they don't need every detail - and I have a Facebook account to which I can post as easily as I can tweet, so I wouldn't be cutting off anyone who genuinely wanted to find out what I was doing. As for everyone else, I have to be honest and say that I'm not that fascinating.
Similarly, although I am interested in what my friends are doing, I found that looking at a Twitter stream was becoming more an exercise in skipping through tweets than actually finding anything; Twitter had become a way of using up time, or a distraction when I was putting off dull tasks. I regularly found that I would check Twitter on my phone and feel that I had neither gained anything nor added anything useful. It was not, to use a marketspeak phrase, "adding value". If the time I spent reading tweets could be spent doing something that does add value, or that at least doesn't leave me feeling like I had just wasted time, then wouldn't it make sense to give it up?
Most of the people that I follow I do not know and am unlikely to meet in real life. It's always fascinating to get an insight into someone else's life (which is why so much TV is essentially "look at what these other people are doing") but if I didn't know about what these people are doing it wouldn't actually change my life. Similarly, the organisations I follow have so rarely told me anything that has made a difference to me that losing their tweets would have a negligible impact. If someone starts following me on Twitter, I check their Twitter page, and if it looks like they say things I'd be interested in then I'll follow them. Almost nobody who has started to follow me (and why would you want to, if you don't know me?) has got a follow back from me. I'm sure there's an argument that following someone back is the kind of reciprocal behaviour that makes the digital world go round a little more smoothly, but I simply don't want to know dull details about strangers. Sorry.
Online social networking is an adjunct to real life social networking, not a replacement for it. Having 50, or 500, or 5000 followers on Twitter doesn't make up for having few real friends. Having a few good friends with whom you can talk and share confidences, and a wider circle of friends that you can socialise and have fun with, plus 500 Twitter followers is significantly different from feeling isolated from people and using online networks as a way of masking loneliness. For me, it makes more sense to try and develop closer relationships with people I care about than to have a long list of people who tell me things that don't have any emotional impact at all.
I actively dislike the competitive element of numbers of followers, or indeed the value that is put on having many followers. You don't need to be Ashton Kutcher to be seduced into thinking that 10,000 followers is better than 10 followers, and never stop to question the assumption that "many, more, most" is synonymous with "good, better, best". You don't need to have any self-esteem issues to start feeling like the number of people following you must somehow be related to your interestingness, your fame, your value as a contributor to the global conversation. My most recent tweet, "Steve has nothing to say", was a couple of weeks ago. Two people have started following me in the last three days.
The wider question, whether I do have anything to say, and if so what, how and to whom, will continue to occupy my thinking. I'll use Twitter to send a couple of direct messages to people I know in real life, so that they know they won't be able to contact me that way, and then I'll tweet a link to this blog post. Then, I think, that will be it. If I miss the Twitterverse terribly I can always come back; I don't think I will.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Theodore Roosevelt
Another pointed Roosevelt quotation: “If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.”
I've been reading a couple of Art of Manliness articles (here and here) about Roosevelt, and I have to say I do like his style. I'd heard the story before of him being shot in the chest, reassuring himself that it wasn't going to be fatal and going on to give a 90 minute speech, but although I agree with the commenter on one of the articles that it "makes me tired just reading about him", he's a pretty darn inspirational guy.
I've been reading a couple of Art of Manliness articles (here and here) about Roosevelt, and I have to say I do like his style. I'd heard the story before of him being shot in the chest, reassuring himself that it wasn't going to be fatal and going on to give a 90 minute speech, but although I agree with the commenter on one of the articles that it "makes me tired just reading about him", he's a pretty darn inspirational guy.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
You can't give away what you haven't got
I've been doing a lot of thinking recently but not a lot of writing, so this is me wanting to get at least a couple of thoughts down before I lose them.
I've been thinking about who owns my life; that is, who is in charge of it. Now I know that there are a lot of Christians (myself included) who would say, with a variable ratio of truth and hopefulness, "God is." Part of the problem is that it's often quite hard to put God in control of my life, even when I want to. I know that there's always a temptation to believe that I can make a better job of running my life than the omnipotent Creator Of The Universe could, but that's just pride and foolishness; I know that I resist letting God be truly in charge of some aspects of my life, like looking at the spreadsheet for the monthly finances and tweaking our giving so that the graph for the balance doesn't go south quite so fast, but that's just fear that God won't look after us (and some selfishness - shall I order pizza or give more to church?) What I've been thinking about are the areas that I really do want to give over to God, the things that well-meaning Christian friends tell me to "lay at the foot of the Cross." (As an aside, I've never yet asked "Erm... how do I do that, exactly", which may be the reason that nobody has ever told me exactly what laying something at the foot of the cross entails.) Anyway, there's a load of stuff that I would love to hand over to God, to give up, to put under his control, etc, but I don't seem to be able to do it, and I think that part of the reason that I can't give it to God is that it's not mine to give.
This is stuff that I'm still trying to think through, so this might not make a lot of sense, but it's based on ides about the areas of our life where we (through habit or upbringing or apathy) hand over control of ourselves to other people. As an example, consider a (completely fictional!) person who has low self-esteem. He doesn't think much of himself, and depends on what other people think of him - or, more accurately, what he thinks other people think of him. He puts a lot of time and effort into trying to create the right impression, and trying to work out what impression other people have received. If he goes to a Christian friend and talks about his chronic low self-esteem, that friend might advise him to give this issue over to God. And here's where I think the problem happens: my guess is that our fictional miserable man might come back to his Christian friend a week or a month later and say he's still finding life just as hard, and doesn't feel any better about himself. And my next guess is that this is because he has handed responsibility for his feelings to other people. How can he give something to God unless he owns it first? On the surface this is pretty basic: you can't give away something that doesn't belong to you, but the more I think about this, the more it seems applicable across a range of issues. How can you give your finances over to God if the bank/the balliffs/the people who decide prices at Tesco have more control over your finances than you do? How can you hand over your relationships if you still think that everything that happens in them is the other person's fault? Remember, making it all his/her fault is giving him/her all the power and responsibility; how can you hand over something you've already given away to someone else?
Now I'm sure that there are many people who genuinely have no control over the terrible things that happen to them, and I'm certain that God really is on the side of the oppressed, but I'm sure that for many of us middle-class, relatively wealthy and healthy Christians, there are a whole load of places where God has given us abilities and responsibilities that we have handed over to others and to the World, and then wonder why it's so hard to give them back to God.
Umm... I'm not sure how this goes from here. I know there's something about God giving us things so that we can give them back to him. Maybe the best example is the parable of the talents. The guy who hides his talent in the ground does so because he is "afraid"; he feels he has no control and so just buries his talent in the ground. I've heard this explained as a parable of how we must all use what God has given us, but perhaps there's also something about taking responsibility for what God has given us; being afraid and not taking responsibility means that we have nothing much to give back, and we lose what little we have. There's also something about the whole prosperity gospel thing, about the fact that God gives us stuff purely so that we can give them back to him, not so that we can hand ourselves over to the World's standards of wealth and comfort, but I think that that's enough for this post!
I've been thinking about who owns my life; that is, who is in charge of it. Now I know that there are a lot of Christians (myself included) who would say, with a variable ratio of truth and hopefulness, "God is." Part of the problem is that it's often quite hard to put God in control of my life, even when I want to. I know that there's always a temptation to believe that I can make a better job of running my life than the omnipotent Creator Of The Universe could, but that's just pride and foolishness; I know that I resist letting God be truly in charge of some aspects of my life, like looking at the spreadsheet for the monthly finances and tweaking our giving so that the graph for the balance doesn't go south quite so fast, but that's just fear that God won't look after us (and some selfishness - shall I order pizza or give more to church?) What I've been thinking about are the areas that I really do want to give over to God, the things that well-meaning Christian friends tell me to "lay at the foot of the Cross." (As an aside, I've never yet asked "Erm... how do I do that, exactly", which may be the reason that nobody has ever told me exactly what laying something at the foot of the cross entails.) Anyway, there's a load of stuff that I would love to hand over to God, to give up, to put under his control, etc, but I don't seem to be able to do it, and I think that part of the reason that I can't give it to God is that it's not mine to give.
This is stuff that I'm still trying to think through, so this might not make a lot of sense, but it's based on ides about the areas of our life where we (through habit or upbringing or apathy) hand over control of ourselves to other people. As an example, consider a (completely fictional!) person who has low self-esteem. He doesn't think much of himself, and depends on what other people think of him - or, more accurately, what he thinks other people think of him. He puts a lot of time and effort into trying to create the right impression, and trying to work out what impression other people have received. If he goes to a Christian friend and talks about his chronic low self-esteem, that friend might advise him to give this issue over to God. And here's where I think the problem happens: my guess is that our fictional miserable man might come back to his Christian friend a week or a month later and say he's still finding life just as hard, and doesn't feel any better about himself. And my next guess is that this is because he has handed responsibility for his feelings to other people. How can he give something to God unless he owns it first? On the surface this is pretty basic: you can't give away something that doesn't belong to you, but the more I think about this, the more it seems applicable across a range of issues. How can you give your finances over to God if the bank/the balliffs/the people who decide prices at Tesco have more control over your finances than you do? How can you hand over your relationships if you still think that everything that happens in them is the other person's fault? Remember, making it all his/her fault is giving him/her all the power and responsibility; how can you hand over something you've already given away to someone else?
Now I'm sure that there are many people who genuinely have no control over the terrible things that happen to them, and I'm certain that God really is on the side of the oppressed, but I'm sure that for many of us middle-class, relatively wealthy and healthy Christians, there are a whole load of places where God has given us abilities and responsibilities that we have handed over to others and to the World, and then wonder why it's so hard to give them back to God.
Umm... I'm not sure how this goes from here. I know there's something about God giving us things so that we can give them back to him. Maybe the best example is the parable of the talents. The guy who hides his talent in the ground does so because he is "afraid"; he feels he has no control and so just buries his talent in the ground. I've heard this explained as a parable of how we must all use what God has given us, but perhaps there's also something about taking responsibility for what God has given us; being afraid and not taking responsibility means that we have nothing much to give back, and we lose what little we have. There's also something about the whole prosperity gospel thing, about the fact that God gives us stuff purely so that we can give them back to him, not so that we can hand ourselves over to the World's standards of wealth and comfort, but I think that that's enough for this post!
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
The non-attractiveness of ownership
As I was walking through town today a woman with a clipboard resolutely ignored my lack of eye contact with her and asked me if I could answer three questions. I thought that actually three questions would be OK, so I agreed. She asked me "If I could do any job, what would I do?" (she sneaked in a supplementary question by then asking "Is that what you do now?"), "What would you most like to change about yourself?" and "If you could own anything in the world, what would you like?". Now call me weird, but this last one really stumped me. There I lots of things that I see in shops that I think I'd like to own, like books or DVDs or some clothes, and sometimes I see a sports car and think "I want one of those", but when it comes down to it there's nothing that I really desperately want, certainly not in a "more than anything else in the world" sense. The way she phrased the question kind of excluded metaphysical answers like "What I want most is world peace" or "God's Kingdom to come", and I ended up walking away feeling slightly odd about my lack of participation in the consumerist ethos.
Mind you, I'm having an introspective and unsettled day anyway. Maybe if she'd caught me at a different time I wouldn't have given it a second thought.
Mind you, I'm having an introspective and unsettled day anyway. Maybe if she'd caught me at a different time I wouldn't have given it a second thought.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)