Decomposition

I recently buried Shadow, the last of our gerbils. He has joined the rest of the pets who have died in the last ten years or so, in his own spot in the garden. Digging a grave, even a gerbil-sized one, is a strange activity. Physically attacking the soil with the spade feels therapeutic when you're sad, but at the back of your mind is the knowledge that soon you'll be filling it in over a little body.
I can't help wondering at what point in prehistory people first formulated the idea that we are made of the same stuff as the ground. There must have been some point when the sum of human knowledge first contained the idea that if you leave a dead body long enough it turns into something that looks less like a body and more like the ground. I'm sure that there are paleoanthropologists who have theories about how this happened - did someone bury excess meat for safekeeping, like a dog with a bone, only to discover that it had changed when they went back to it? Or did dead members of the tribe get put in the same special place, so that there was an opportunity to see how the older bodies were different from the more recent ones?
It's frustrating that there is so much I know nothing about!

Finding faults

I had my first lesson yesterday for my Part 2 exam, the second stage in becoming a driving instructor. I'm hopefully going to be taking my Part 1 (Theory) in the next couple of weeks, but I have to have 18 hours instruction before my Part 2, so the lessons need to start now. I'd been thinking about how I drive over the last couple of months, trying to spot and eliminate bad habits, but it turned out yesterday that my main driving fault is one I wasn't even aware I had. I change gear too soon, even changing up as I steer round corners. Not necessarily life-threatening, but enough to fail my test.
It did make me think, though, about my other faults, in other areas of my life. I can list lots of things about me that need working on - some urgently - but there must be some faults of which I an completely unaware. Which is why I need genuine friends, who will point out the problems I hadn't noticed - and why I'm not being much of a friend if I won't do the same for them.

Today is the second day of the rest of your life

It's so easy to make a new start. All you have to do is wake up in the morning and say "Today is going to be different"; meet someone inspiring and think "I want to be just like them"; read a book that changes your life and resolve "I will take the first step"; wake up in the gutter and decide "Never again." Starting a new life is easy. Continuing a new life, now that's hard.

How long does the energy last? How long will shame or ambition motivate you? How do you make that change stick? How long before the gutter calls you back? It could be days or weeks or months or hours, but there has to be a second step after the first, and that can be really tough.

It's inspiring, deciding to change. There's a buzz about it. Fresh from that book or conversation or personal moment of clarity, life seems new, everything is possible. But on the second day, in second week, month, hour, it's not so new any more. Doing the new thing is... getting kind of the same.

If this was a different kind of blog, there'd be a list to follow of the top five points to get through the second day. There'd be helpful links to my ebook "Making Change Stick" (order now and get 25% discount). There'd at least be an inspiring personal story. This is not that kind of blog - sorry about that - so you just get the questions, without the easy resolution. Maybe another day. Or not.

Epiphany

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.

A baby in a stable

Last Sunday Peter gave a talk based on John the Baptist's preaching in Matthew. He asked how we can preach the gospel, using an example of some 19th century ideas about hell and damnation - rescuing people who are "hanging over the edge of the pit". We were asked to think about whether or not that kind of language (or those kind of ideas) are right today - what would John the Baptist be saying now?

I've been thinking about this, and though I don't claim to have any well-worked out answers (and certainly not final or authoritative ones!) I can't help coming back to my previous thoughts about who church is for. Is it for people who don't necessarily feel they need to be there, but like the company or think they should show their face once in a while? Or is it for people who know they need something, but don't necessarily think that they'll find it in church? I know there are lots of other kinds of people between these two extremes, but my feeling is that the church in general has quite a lot of the former and not enough of the latter.

I'd really like to see the church being a first resort for anyone who is lonely, desperate, unhappy, friendless, addicted, ashamed or bewildered. But I don't believe that those people will seek out Jesus (especially not in the church) as long as they are lectured or talked down to by people inside the church. I don't think that they will come - even if they are invited - if the church is seen as a group of people who think they know best, telling the rest of the world just how wrong they are.

I think that the church has something of an image problem. Strangely, I believe that the wider culture is actually helping with this. Church is increasingly being seen as a refuge for the intellectually incompetent, the social misfits, the bizarre fringes of the human race. And that's a good thing. I think that we as a worshipping community should identify strongly with that. We are not the people who have got it all together. We are not the best of the best, or even the middle of the average. We are the people who are beginning to grasp just how massively we've messed up. But we come together on a Sunday morning (or a weekday evening) because we have found a hope, an answer, a love that will never give up on us - and we'd love everyone else to find it too.

Of course, as a church we don't have to do that. Nobody says we have to admit our failings in public. We can stand proud, knowing that not only are we children of God (true) but that he has revealed himself to us (also true). We can let everyone know that they need to be saved (this, I think, is referred to as "speaking the truth in love"), and then we can shut the doors of the church and sing our groovy up-to-date worship songs, with a request that the last member left will please turn out the lights. We can, in short, give the world the church it expects.

Should we? I can't say for sure, but in a couple of weeks time I'm going to be celebrating the birth of the Son of God, and he wasn't born anywhere that people expected. The King of Kings and Lord of Lords was born in a stable. We could do worse than think about what that means for us.

Lies

I hate lies. They make me angry and unhappy.

Maybe I should stop telling them.

The politics of snow clearance

I've just moved our car out of the estate and round to Tesco's car park, from where I will hopefully be able to move it later when Peter needs a lift down to Hamble. It took some initial work with the shovel to get it out of our road (and then again going up the hill), but as I drove along there were small groups of people (mostly men) who were clearing sections of the road. People were getting together - not just clearing their own driveways, but getting the public road clear. And when cars got stuck, two or three people would give them a push.

So is this a failure of local government? Although a lot of people live on our estate, the council don't grit the only road around it that everyone uses. Should we expect our local council to repay us for our taxes by getting the roads clearer, faster, in winter? Or is this The Big Society? People getting together, untrammelled by prescriptive regulation, to really sort out what needs to be done?

I suspect it's not really either of these alternatives. Local and national government are repeatedly unable to deal with extreme events like a couple of inches of snow, and perhaps should be better prepared and respond faster. On the other hand, they can't be everywhere and do everything. And I don't think that people get together because they are feeling empowered by Dave's big idea. I think that generally people tend to look out for each other, and they don't think it's an unusual thing to clear a bit of road - particularly if that means another driver is less likely to slide into your parked car.

I guess we get the the government that we pay for (and nobody wants to pay any more tax); but please don't politicise human goodwill and pretend you've brought about social change.

When the Internet is great (and when it isn't)

Yesterday I exercised my prerogative as a citizen who needed advice and went to the Citizens' Advice Bureau. (I note, by the way, that I've been a grammar pedant and put an apostrophe in their name, whereas they don't.) I'd been on their site to find the location of the nearest branch, but I hadn't clicked on any of the links there, because I wanted to talk to someone face to face and get an informed opinion. I'm a great believer in the internet as a source of useful information, and in education to help people sort out the information from the misinformation and the opinion dressed up as fact, but I actually wanted someone else to give me advice.

So off I went. I'd remembered the location from the website, and it was a straightforward walk - until I got to where I thought the CAB should be, and discovered it wasn't there. No worries. Thanks to the wonders of GPS, Google Maps on my phone showed me where I was - which turned out to be exactly where Google said the CAB should be. I wandered up and down a couple of side streets and eventually asked a couple who were getting into their car. They told me I needed to walk another 100 metres down the road - and when I did, going way past where Google said I should go, there was the CAB.

After a wait, I was seen by a pleasant and enthusiastic member of their team, who listened to me, and then gave me a few leaflets but told me that my main source of information would be their online advice guide. He couldn't really give me advice, he explained, because there were too many variables. What I really needed to do was get information online, so that I could make up my own mind, and then go back to talk to them again if I needed further help.

So there you are. The advice bureau advised that I should go to the internet for information. The internet is great for telling me that there's a CAB within walking distance, but not so good for finding it exactly. I suspect that the Advice Guide will give me a similar level of macro information, but I'll still need individual guidance on how to apply it to me.

There's a point at which information available to everyone becomes information that is of decreasing use to any one individual. Current iterations of the internet are moving towards personally useful information for everyone, pushing ever further away the point at which "widely available" becomes "personally inapplicable", but my feeling is that there's still some distance to go.

On being adored

There's a lot to be said for being adored. In Moulin Rouge Ewan McGregor sings, "The greatest thing you'll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return", but there's a very special feeling that comes from knowing that someone, somewhere, thinks the world of you. Someone has a photo of you placed so that you are always in the corner of their eye. Someone checks your Facebook page several times a day, and when there's nothing new to see, looks through all the pictures that they've already seen a thousand times. Someone wonders what you think, imagines what you might say, constructs variations on variations on an imaginary conversation with you about the nothing-very-much most important things in the world.

Of course it won't last. It's not love. But it is, right now, just wonderful.

I get by with a little help...

I have been having a bit of an emotionally up and down time recently, and there are some habits and personal issues in particular that I think that it would be helpful for me to write about. I don't want to keep a journal, but I have thought several times about starting a blog. "But," I hear you cry, "you already have a blog - you're writing it now!" Yes indeed, but here's the thing: I know that only a few people read this blog, and most of them are accidental visitors via search engines, but I think that a couple of people who know me read this occasionally, and I wouldn't want to tell them any of the stuff that's on my mind. In other words, if I genuinely feel that I have some emotional stuff to talk about, friends and family would be the last people I would want to share it with. I'm sure this isn't uncommon: there would be fewer therapists if everyone talked to their friends and family. Nevertheless, it struck me that the people that I think of as closer than strangers friends would be the people to whom I would be most wary of telling the truth about myself.

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't indoctrinated brought up that way.

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!

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.

Post-Lent reflection

It's rather more than six and a half weeks since my last blog post, though my Twitter feed has been busy, and I've even ventured into the confusion of another revamp to Facebook. Apart from being glad that Digsby plus Twitter integration means that I don't really need to go on the actual Facebook site, what have I learned?

• Giving up telling people about me was easier than I thought it would be
  
• Not knowing what was going on with other people was harder than I expected. I have got used to knowing what's happening with people since I joined Facebook, but because I never maintained friendships before that, I had no fallback methods (calling round to see someone, phoning them) of finding out what was going on for people.
• Using Twitter and Facebook is self-reinforcing. Having "I'm not using Facebook for Lent" as a status is OK, but in most cases I don't want the last thing I said to be the last thing I say, so I keep wanting to make sure my status is up to date. One tweet leads to another.
• Living online is pervasive; it encroaches steadily on real-world life, so that it's possible to spend increasing amounts of time reporting and reflecting on real-world life online, and then spending even more time reporting and reflecting on online life.
• In a consumer society, there's a strong drive to be interesting or appear important, because that turns me into more of a saleable commodity. If you don't think this is true, consider Facebook not telling you (and everyone else) how many friends you have, or Twitter without the number of your followers in the sidebar.

All this ties into my ongoing thinking on humility and self-worth, and some emrging ideas about how to prioritise stuff in life, which I may or may not blog about sometime soon.

Legalism

For a while now I’ve been working through “Celebration of Discipline” with a friend, and I have to say that it’s extremely challenging as well as helpful. The premise of the book is that, for all our efforts to change ourselves, there are some things that we just can’t do by our own efforts, and that living a Christian life (in the fullest sense of being like Jesus) is one of those things. So instead we need to ask God to change us, and we engage with this through the practice of the Disciplines. There’s a lot more than that, including ideas like Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace”, but basically the idea is that the disciplines help to put us in a place where God can work in and through us.

One of the other themes of the book is the temptation to legalism, and it's that I've been thinking about recently. Richard Foster describes a narrow path with a precipice each side. On one side of the path is the temptation to believe that there's nothing we can do to change ourselves, and just have to sit back and wait for God to do things to us. On the other is the belief that we can earn salvation by keeping lots of rules. It's this legalism to which I am tempted to stray at the moment: I'm discovering what a delicate balance it is between wanting to do more of something positive and using my failure to do those things as a stick with which to beat myself.

I wonder how many things there are that change from "should" to "ought". I should lose some weight - I'd be healthier and likely to live longer if I did - but the guilt after eating pizza and ice cream definitely comes from the (slightly, but vitally) different "I ought to lose weight". I think there's something here about our willingness to do what's right: if the things we should do are in fact going to be good for us, whether that's getting enough sleep, being honest or recycling plastic bottles, then surely we should want to do them. Of course, we don't; we do things that are bad for us and those around us. So we surround ourselves with rules and laws to keep us in line, which we then break. I remember reading about Foucault's use of the panopticon as part of an argument of how we internalise control and keep ourselves under surveillance, and I think that there's some truth in that, but more than that I think that there's a human tendency to keep moving between two ideas: that I am rational and given freedom to make choices I will make the right choices for me and society, or that I am flawed and likely to make poor choices, and therefore need guidance, correction and discipline from others. Oversimplifying massively, I think the first leads to free market economics, laissez-faire, humanism, religion that emphasises grace, equality and education-as-improvement; the second leads to education-as-instruction, protectionism, an increased role for the State and religion that emphasises guilt.

So here's my question for myself today: what am I doing that is a choice based on knowing what will be best, that I can feel satisfied with after doing it, or can freely choose not to do if I so wish, and what am I doing that is based on feeling that I really ought to be doing it whether I want to or not, that I might feel miserable about having to do or will feel guilty about not doing?

Greed

I really must rid myself of the belief that if one of something is good, then two will be better. I went over to Tesco for something to eat mid-afternoon, and they were reducing the price of some sandwiches. I picked up a Healthy Choices prawn mayonnaise sandwich for 49p, and then thought "That's less than half price - I could get two and still spend less." So I ended up with two packs of sandwiches, when one would have been fine; 250 extra calories when I really need to lose weight; 49p less in my pocket than I would have had.

Sometimes, more than enough is too much.

Reuben's Confirmation

I'm really looking forward to Reuben being confirmed tonight, partly because it's a good thing in itself, partly because it's a (biological and church) family celebration - I don't have enough parties - and partly because it's a parenting thing.

A while ago when I was looking at the atheist bus stuff I browsed to the justgiving page for Alpha Course bus ads. Someone there had written "£2 to encourage you to target your indoctrination at consenting adults instead of undiscriminating children. It's good to talk." Having grown up with a faith that worked really well until I started asking questions in my late teens, then given up on faith entirely and gone away from God, and having had to think hard about what I believe and why, and needing a faith of which I can ask searching questions, I sincerely hope that we've been able to bring up our children to know about God, but also to have a faith that is flexible enough to grow with them. I think that the fact that Daniel has rejected Christianity altogether is at least encouraging that we've not just "indoctrinated" our children. Unless, of course, we're really not very good at indoctrination.

I probably feel just as frustrated with non-Christians who reject Christianity because it's "organized religion" or "just a myth" as I do with Christians who have a "simple faith", by which they mean they never ask questions. I know that I'm guilty of deciding that I'm not going to be a Muslim or a Buddhist without fully investigating the claims that Islam or Buddhism make, but at least I make that decision because I've made a thought-through decision for Christ, and it would be hypocritical to then consider other religions. (This doesn't mean that I shouldn't try to learn about other religions and belief systems, so that I can understand and respect those who practice them.) I also know that there are a lot of Christians who put people off Christianity through bigotry and intolerance or answering every honest question with a quotation from the (King James) Bible. But I remain convinced that Jesus is who he says he is and that an adult Christian faith, which Reuben will be confirming he has tonight, should be both flexible and robust enough to stand up to whatever questions and doubts and objections are thrown at it.

So I'll be very proud of Reuben tonight, not only because he has chosen to confirm publicly that he is a Christian, but also because he is a young man who knows how to think, and and has made an individual and thoughtful choice.

Which is pretty much all you could ask in a son.

Atheist bus advert

I shared this the other day, and I was going to write something about it at the time, but you know how it is, busy, busy, busy, lazy, etc; anyway I've still been thinking about it and wondering what it is about this that particularly made me pause. I suspect that it's because although I'm a Christian, I absolutely sympathize with Ariane Sherine: I think that bus adverts that threaten eternal damnation are bad news, not Good News. I was initially all for starting a campaign to have bus adverts saying "There is a God: he wants you to stop worrying and enjoy your life (Luke 12:22, John 16:24) - actually I still think that this might be a good idea - but more importantly I think that we Christians need to think carefully about the way that we present Jesus to the world. Despite Richard Dawkins - whose work I used to quite like - saying idiotic things like "thinking is anathema to religion" (ah yes, Professor Dawkins, the complete lack of Christian and other religious writers and academics for the last 1000 years is convincing evidence for this statement), I'm sure that there is a good case for engaging people with the Good News that Jesus makes a positive difference, here and now in this life, rather than suggesting that he's waiting around until the end of time to get you back for every little thing you ever did wrong. The British Humanist Association wants people to ask questions, to think for themselves and to enjoy life. If the Church doesn't want the same things, we're all in trouble.

Conversation

I have kind of mixed feelings about last night's Conversation. On the one hand, having Celia provide a focus for it - and giving notices about this - meant we had a lot more people come than have attended recently. On the other hand, those who attended were also quite a bit older than our usual demographic, which meant that we had to lose the background music, which I guess I always saw as part of the "cafe-style" atmosphere we were trying for.

But... people were very willing to move around, there was a lot of very animated conversation going on, including (from what I observed) some really thoughtful stuff about how we as a church may appear to others who are different in some way from us. I suppose we'll have to see what kind of feedback we get over the next week or so. I can't even really pin down what I imagined Conversation would look like if it really took off, but I know last night was different from whatever that mental picture might be.

The other interesting thing, from my point of view, was that I invited in a couple of lads who were playing football outside when I arrived. They didn't last long in the main room with everyone else - though it did make me wonder if that might have been different with the usual smaller and younger crowd - but did stay and chat for a bit with me and James in the Welcome Area. It made me realise that I've missed that kind of conversation, where you can be talking about the Atonement and someone else just talks over you with some violent/gross anecdote, so you stop and then backtrack again. It also reminded me that actually I'm quite happy to talk to people about Jesus/Christianity/the Bible (why doesn't it have a blurb on the back, wondered one of the girls who came in), and I feel quite happy talking about that and answering questions like "Are you a Jew? You been circumcised?", "Why do good things happen to bad people?" or "When God wanted to kill everyone, why didn't he just snap his fingers and kill them straightaway instead of sending a flood so that they died slowly and horribly?" Hmmm. Slightly sad that I can't do talking to young people about Jesus for a job, but glad that I had a chance to do it last night.

Slogan

Today: better than yesterday, not as good as tomorrow