The devil and the deep blue sea

We were discussing religion over a curry, as one does. The one I discuss religion with (and have curries with, for that matter) expressed the view that religion is incompatible with science. He is reading Dawkins at the moment. NLPer that I am, I started challenging the generalisations: “All religions?” “Entirely incompatible in every way?”

What bugs me about evangelical atheists, and I’ve drunk wine and broken bread with a few in my time (secularly of course) is that they assume that all religions are based on The Book and slag them off accordingly. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all monotheisms and in that direction – if you ask me – madness lies. The problem with monotheisms is the dualities they set up: Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Heaven and Hell, Sheep and Goats, God and the Devil. Someone once said to Abraham Lincoln “I am so glad that God is on our side” to which he replied “I don’t set my sights that high, Ma’am. All I hope is that we are on God’s side”. Bush and Blair and Bin Laden all know god is on their side, and so they have far more in common than they have differences. I’ll stop wandering off in that direction now, before get so enraged I forget to breathe.

I know very little about Hinduism which seems polytheistic (though the one I was having curry with knows a bit about it). I know barely more about Buddhism and Taoism, which are atheistic. Isn’t that a thought to conjure with? An atheistic religion. A religion without a god. Roll it around your mind’s tongue. Taste it, savour it, find out what you think.

If you strip god out of religion you are left with a whole load of other stuff which (because it is my post and I can do what I like with it) I am going to put broadly into four categories:

Societal

Ceremonial / Rites of Passage / Social glue / Social contribution / Ritual

Explanations

Creation myth / Higher purpose / Why bad things happen / Why are we here

The supernatural

Spiritual practice / The shamanic / Good luck charms

Social control

Ethical precepts / Moral guidance / Greater cause

The one that interested me the most, as we were discussing it over our curry, was the Shamanic. This is all mixed up with ritual, energy, altered states of being, sexual power and the power of the personality. In the 60s and 70s Rock stars were our shamans; in the 80s there was even a band which took the name. I’m not sure who our shamans are now, but I am pretty sure that the popularity of fantasy films appeals to our need for the shamanic. Looking at that list of nouns again – ritual / energy / altered states / power – maybe terrorists view themselves as shamans. I dunno. Which reminds me. The obvious thing that that is missing off that list is Sacrifice, which is common to so many religions. I’m not sure where it fits though.

It is interesting to see what is happening now to those areas of human life.

The societal stuff (ceremony, rights of passage, social contribution) is pretty hollow without religion. Don’t get me wrong, it is all much better done with integrity by atheists than with hypocrisy by those who claim to be religious, but I am not sure how well atheists do it. I’d rate the ceremonial of a Russian Orthodox Eucharist over the Oscars any day of the week. Mind you, I prefer my schools, hospitals, orphanages and childrens’ homes to be run by the state, so maybe I am arguing myself out of that one after all.

Structures and explanations. This is the scary one. This is the one that gets Dawkins’ blood boiling. “Where is the evidence?” the atheists cry. And they are right of course. There is no evidence that the world is the result of Egyptian gods masturbating or of great cows licking the ice, and plenty that it isn’t. Sane Christians yield this ground gracefully admitting that the world is not flat and does in fact go round the sun. Insane ones promote something which is neither intelligent nor design and call it science. (Breathe, Aphra, remember to breathe). Unfortunately these follies lead evangelical atheists to throw the baby of spiritual practice out with the bathwater of creationism. Or something like that.

The supernatural. This one is trickier than it looks. It’s a mixture of stuff which has quite clearly demonstrable effects such as meditation, and other stuff which is just wishful thinking. Add in the human need to seek patterns, mix it with the human inability to estimate odds, and sprinkle with the human responsiveness to spontaneous hypnotic suggestion, and you end up with all sorts of nonsense like numerology, astrology, Bach flower remedies and (goddess help us all) spiritual channelling. Scientists can now see the parts of the brain which fire off when someone is having a spiritual experience. The question is, of course, whether the brain is responding to an external stimulus analogous to its response to sounds, or whether the sparks are flying at random or for some electro-magnetic or chemical reason. The fact that stuff like meditation works doesn’t make it spiritual any more than the fact that the world exists proves that it was hatched out of a giant egg.

Social control. This is the one where religion leaves the biggest gap behind it. Ethical precepts just aren’t the same if they aren’t backed up with violent weather, rugged mountain scenery, Charlton Heston and the threat of everlasting damnation. (This is the place where I point out that I rather like the idea of terrorists achieving martyrdom and waking in Paradise to find that their sherbet will be delivered by 70 Ann Widdicombes). We’ve lost our moral compass and don’t appear to be able to adopt irreligious ethics in the way the Greeks did. They took pantheistic shamanism to blood-thirsty extremes, but came over all rational and philosophical when considering ethics. The Norse gods couldn’t be bothered with all that Good and Evil stuff either so far as I can make out. Monotheism makes me spit.

I rather like the idea of a Schroedinger Deity; a god comprising the sum of an increasingly complex and sophisticated life force, evolving in power and sophistication in the way that the chemical richness of our world is based on elements which evolved from hydrogen and that all living things have evolved from random amino-acids losing their randomness and forming RNA. This would be a god who may or may not exist, whose existence will only become apparent at the end of the universe at which point in time (and space) it will turn out has existed all along. Or not, as the case may be.

Sorry to whitter on for so long. It was a good curry. Thank you for asking.

No place for sissies

I’ve been thinking about growing older recently. No particular reason except that I’ll be jumping the half-way point between a couple of big ones soon.

Words associated with being old that I like:

• Wisdom
• Experience
• Perspective
• The long view

Words associated with being old that I don’t like:

• Set in her ways
• Grumpy
• Miserable
• Conservative
• Narrow minded
• Infirm
• Out of touch
• Losing one’s nerve
• Oh, and “twinkling”

The problem is that habits are comfy. I know who and what I am, what I like and don’t like. I’m at ease with myself. I’m comfy.

I’ve lived long enough to know that I can’t bake cakes, and that – no – I won’t enjoy a night-club where I can’t hear what people say and everyone is drunk anyway. But if I avoid baking cakes and clubbing, will other horizons gradually narrow until I become not just set in my ways, but cemented in them?

A girl at work wore a t-shirt the other day saying “Mary is my Homegirl”. I have no idea what a homegirl is, so I asked. I didn’t understand any of the first three synonyms. This unnerved me far more than when I was handed a postcard in a Glasgow street in 1999 which advertised a band or a club. The only words I recognised were “of” “at” and the date. I found it funny, that time. “Losing my nerve” is on my list of things I don’t like about growing older and it seems I am losing my nerve. The list of things I don’t want to do is getting longer, and that worries me, too.

Maybe it’s because my Ma and my Grandma did not provide positive role models for growing older. My Grandma, by the time I knew her, was slipping from grief to senility. My Ma – well I hesitate to call her a sissy, but she didn’t flower in late middle age and old age.

Chasing youth is pointless. (They can run faster, for a start). Why deny the good things about the age one has reached? What I am afraid of is a gradual narrowing of the outlook, a gradual disengaging from the world. That I will get to the point where new things either don’t interest me or I haven’t heard of them.

Here are the top 10 from Google Zeitgeist this week, and my view of them.

1. valentine’s day – yeah, ok
2. Michelle Manhart – never heard of her
3. grammys – not interested
4. peanut butter recall – presume it’s local to the US – not interested
5. dixie chicks – not interested
6. obama – not interested
7. westminster dog show – never heard of it – not interested
8. the police – not particularly interested
9. PS3 – really not interested
10. wii – so not interested you would not believe it

You see, it is partly that the world is so big and scary and accessible that the nasty stuff stares you down and waits for you to blink, if you let it. It is completely bloody terrifying, what with Iran and Bush and Afghanistan and Terrorism and Climate Change and all that.

On t’other hand, it is partly that we are, in the words of Neil Postman, amusing ourselves to death and, sorry, but I really couldn’t care about Ms Spears’ bad hair days, or Wii, (whatever that is), or celeb-trash or the popular beat combos de nos jours.

So at one end, we have things which are too trivial to bother with, and at the other we have things that are too scary to face up to, and the most comforting option is to hide your head under a blankie and say “wibble”.

But how many steps from “wibble” to dribble?

If you withdraw too far into a comfort-zone, you’ll end up like the wizard in the Pratchett book who is so afraid of dying that he locks himself into his room, sealing himself into a box which is so impregnable that nothing can get in or out, including Death. Or, as it turns out, air.

So there are two challenges. One is to avoid being a narrow-minded, apathetic lump who isn’t interested in anything but where the next cup of tea is coming from. The other is to stay sufficiently engaged with the world and the devil to know what a homegirl is without allowing the sheer freaking terror of the c**ts in the White House and Downing Street sending one into gibbering rage.

… but then again, too few to mention …

When you get a text message at a quarter to midnight saying “Are you still awake?”, what are you going to do? That’s right. I rang back.

My friend has a complicated life. I’m used to being the soap opera around here, and it is rather odd to find myself the stable one while my friend ricochets from situation to situation like the ball in a pinball machine.

He has some choices to make and, for once in my life, I didn’t have advice to give.

I am great at giving advice.

No, really I am.

Sometimes it’s advice, sometimes it’s an opinion, sometimes it’s a suggestion, and one of the things that makes me a good person to ask for help is that I am always really clear on which it is. I’ll even give people advice that I really don’t want them to take, if what is good for them is painful for me. For some reason that’s the one set of advice I have a 10/10 take-up on. Oh well.

So I told him about a couple of ways that I make sure I end up with as few regrets as possible. Coward that I am, I don’t like the idea of regrets.

The first is to kick start some hindsight. Imagine yourself five, ten, fifteen, twenty years in the future, or at the far end of your career, or the far end of your life, and look back on the situation you are in. What would you wish you had done? What would you regret the least? A powerful question that. (Ha!) Use it wisely.

It’s an odd thing to do the first time you do it, but it is so powerful and so useful that it can end up becoming habitual. It helps you get some perspective on the thing and sort out the short-term gain or pain from the lasting consequences of your decision.

The second is to take time to notice that the decision you are making is the right one, given the circumstances you are in right now. This is something that good abortion and adoption counsellors do. They take the time to make sure that, whatever happens in the future, the woman knows now that the decision she has made (to terminate the pregnancy, to give the baby away or to go through with the whole thing) is the right one given the situation she is in and the information she has available.

This one makes it easier for you to forgive yourself for your own mistakes because you know you did the best you could at the time.

The third thing is to be aware when a decision really is not your call, and you are just a factor in someone else’s decision-making. Deluded fools that they are, they think the world revolves around them. Don’t they realise? You see, you can have all sorts of reactions to the consequences of another person’s decisions but unless you caused them to take that decision, regret cannot be one of them.

So there you are. Aphra’s guide to regret-free decision-making. Mind you, you may still make completely lousy choices. You may still lie awake staring at the ceiling and aching with pain. But at least you’ll have got there really really carefully.

Grandmama, Grandmama, here’s this lovely egg. Listen up while I teach you how to suck it.

Bedtime stories

Charlotte’s delightful podcast made me think about bedtime reading.

When I was in my 20s and my sister in her 30s someone once asked us what was the best thing about the way our Ma brought us up as children.

We both separately said “reading to us”, and they looked at us a little oddly. How could something that obviously stopped when we were six or seven be the best possible thing?

But she didn’t stop.   She read us Beatrix Potter and Pooh and Wind in the Willows when we were smidgeons. She read us Kipling and Elizabeth Gouge when we were older. Then she read us Trollope and Austin and Dickens and Gaskell when we were teenagers. We caught the habit. My big sister read me Daddy Long-legs and T.Tembarom when my Ma had to pause draw breath and both my sisters took turns reading me The Lord of the Rings, or the first few chapters, at least.

My Ma read to me regularly until I was eighteen or so and left home. I have clear memories of sewing a seam and listening to the sarcasm of Mr Collins, to Emma Wodehouse’s silly mistakes, to Lydia Bennet’s folly, and to the smooth machinations of the Reverend Snape and Mrs Proudie.

I’ve been trying to work out what this gave me; evening upon evening of listening to second-order 19th and early 20th century fiction. Well, the Jane Austin isn’t second order fiction, but Angela Thirkle certainly is. Now that I list it I can see how neurotically small-c conservative my Ma’s taste in fiction actually was. Mind you, I am not sure that mine is any better, merely more modern. So little of it was Capital-L Literature that I still tend to slush around with low-brow and middling stuff and avoid the pure oxygen of the high-brow. I am still slightly nervous about Literatature. Am I Grown Up enough for it?

However, the true gift given was self-confidence. I was worth spending time with. Whole novels-worth of time. I don’t remember that we discussed the books very much. I think I provided monosylables in reply to “are you enjoying it?” and occasionally commanded her to “go on!”. But we spent a lot of time together, my Ma and I.

I also learned to listen, to be in an audience. I learned to hear the words that are spoken, and this has made it easier to hear what isn’t said, to hear the silences between the words. Mind you, if somone had told my Ma this when I was a teenager she’d have laughed out loud. I listened to other people no more than any teenager ever does, so the gift was subtle and long-lasting.

It gave me an ear for a well-turned phrase and an understanding that the test of a good sentence is how well it reads out loud. I can write with a troubling fluency, and I suspect that came from listening to educated English being read.

However, I think the most powerful thing that these evenings gave me was a sense of my family. Imagine, if you will, three girls swooning simultaneously over Strider in the inn in Bree. I had a moment of shivering self-awareness at the time, that this solid, firm, loving, shared, sisterly security was precious and rare and to be remembered. Then, many years later when my Ma was old and infirm and frail, I would visit her and occasionally I’d read to her. One day, when I was reading one of the old familiar stories, I realised that I was echoing the rhythms and cadences of her own voice from more than thirty years before, and in another moment of shivering awareness, I realised that these were the rhythms of my grandfather’s voice, reading to her as a tiny girl some forty years earlier again. So one of the gifts she gave me was to hear an echo of my grandfather, who died before my memories began.

Reading out loud while someone sews or draws or paints is such a simple way to share time and space with them. It combats the encroachment of television and games and the internet into all our minds. It gives a space where love and silence and sharing may grow. And enjoying the jokes and joys of a story with someone is a quietly intimate pleasure.

Personality clash – am I alone with this problem?

One of these fine days I know I’ll sign an email at work

“Aphra”.

Radio Treats

A day of unexpected musical treats:

Sunday Worship
“… Choral Matins according to the Book of Common Prayer, in a new jazz setting composed by Roderick Williams, sung by Schola Cantorum of Oxford and accompanied by the Chris Hill Trio.” Listen again (for the next 7 days) here:

I lack the words to write about music, and the knowledge to understand what I hear, but I did find myself responding to this quite powerfully. I was raised on the Book of Common Prayer, and to hear Cranmer’s words from the church where Cranmer was tried in such a different and frankly joyous setting was enthralling.

And:

Drama on 3 – Hooligan Nights
“The brutal world of London gangland in the 1890s is brought vividly to life in an innovative new musical created by writer Mike Walker and composer Mike Woolmans. Loosely based on the book by Clarence Rook, it recounts the criminal career of Alf, a self-styled Lambeth hooligan.” Listen again to this for the next 7 days.

At first I thought I was listening to a version of Brighton Rock from John Entwistle. I have no idea if John Entwistle would write a version of Brighton Rock, but if he did some of it would sound like some of this. There are shades of Moll Flanders here too. Much of it is excellent and most of it is clever. The trio when Alf and Allie are passing off forged banknotes to a curtain draper is – well, I’ve already said I can’t write about music, so let’s just say I thought it worth listening to.

Oh, and a half hour programme from Radio 4:

Who wrote Bach’s Toccata?
(Here for 7 days from the 13th)

I didn’t hear the original, but the snippet I got on Pick of the Week included a version on the violin and a rock version on electric guitar (which I really should recognize) and made me want to listen again.

Whither do you wander?

The police: How do you want your call directed?

Aphra: I’d like to speak to someone about road traffic, please

The police: How can I help you?

Aphra: I’d like to report a goose in the road – it’s a live goose, just wandering around

The police: Thank you very much. It has already been reported. Is it on Long Hill?

Aphra: That’s the one. It’s fine. Admiring itself in a car. But it might be a danger to traffic.

The police: It’s all right. We are sending our finest goose-catchers to catch it.

I wouldn’t have been so amused, but it was an urban street.

Word Clouds

Hey – how cool is this? These are the words I use here. If you like, it’s a snapshot of my mind. I got it from a site that makes t-shirts. I skipped on the t-shirt, but I really like my word cloud. I’d love it on a mug.

Someone has written a plugin for using with WordPress, but I think it only works if you use WordPress as a stand-alone content editor instead of doing your blogging here on site.

I thought this was cool so I have suggested it in the features forums. I have started a conversation suggesting the Word Cloud plugin and added the suggestion to a separate conversation about tag clouds. Be wary of spamming though, but the two conversations are about different features, though they look very similar. Apparently the thing to so is use the Feedback button at the top right of your Dashboard to put the suggestion to the WordPress Peeps.

Freedom of speech – only there to defend those we agree with

I’ve just had a very odd thing happen. I have had comments which I made and which have already been replied to deleted off a political blog for no better reason than I can see than that I disagreed with the person whose blog it is, and could cite sources.

It’s his blog. He can do what he likes with it and with the comments made on it.

Even so, I find it deeply ironic that his tagline is “Winning friends and influencing people for better or for worse”. I cut my cyber-teeth on a site where nothing was ever deleted unless it was illegal, racist or homophobic. Having my words removed is an odd feeling.

So, if you don’t want comments deleted from a political blog which purports to invite civilised debate, then don’t do any of the following:

Don’t point out an uncomfortable interpretation of the bible and say “I have not verified it” – to do so suggests that you don’t have access to the Bible which means you must be – spit the word out – an atheist.

Don’t say “what I meant was that I did not check it out with a Greek scholar” when you are abused for failing to verify it. Don’t cite your mother who did study New Testament Greek as the otherwise unverified source of your comments. Presumably to do so implies you don’t trust your mother, which undermines Americans’ faith in motherhood and apple pie and breaks the commandment to honour your parents. More atheism. Evil evil Aphra.

Don’t challenge an unsubstantiated and frankly incredible statistic posted by your host by looking up relevant statistics in the National Statistics Office of the UK, the CIA, the French Embassy in Washington and British Census data and quoting them with links. To do so undermines an otherwise perfectly good argument which manages to vilify both the French and the Muslims living in France. I’m an enemy of Freedom. Obviously.

Don’t answer a post containing a series of loaded political questions simply and honestly, and above all don’t put in a slightly flippant reference to the 45 minute warning and WMD in the last reply. I am not sure what it means if you do those things, but I do know you won’t be granted the freedom of speech to do so.

Don’t suggest that you find the social darwinianism of the US unpleasant, and that you prefer the shared responsibility of loving your neighbour, paying your taxes and having health-care free at the point of delivery. To do so suggests that you are European, addicted to welfare and therefore plainly a socialist, and – as we all know – there is no evil greater than socialism. Unless it’s to be French. Or a Muslim. Or to oppose the war in Iraq.

Don’t say that America is going to be in the 2nd league in 50 years time. To do so shows you are an obvious enemy of freedom and are casual about the end of American hegemony. (That is one of those words which I can never quite remember what it means, so I guess I must be casual about it).

Don’t blog pseudononymously. To do so indicates that you …. wait for it …. have no sense of pride. Presumably only people who are ASHAMED of something would use a pseudonym.

Oh, incidentally, as well as all the above, I have high-school debating skills, (which may well be true). In case you didn’t know already I had better warn you that he can tell that I am an atheist, a socialist, an international pacifist. Oh, and most of what I say is plainly gobbledygook.

You have been warned.

In some respects it’s impressive that I got so far under his skin, and it does mean that I won’t be wasting my time bothering him any more, which will be good for his temper and for mine.

I am however shocked that someone who claims to invite active debate on their blog will simply delete the posts of those he disagrees with. My few original comments which have been replied to by other commentators are “awaiting moderation”. I am not sure if that means that anyone other than me can see them.

If that is what American Freedom of Speech is, then the good goddess help us all.

What genre are you?

Tolstoy it was who said that all happy families are happy in the same way while unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way. Whether he’s right about that I don’t know, but I do know that some families are unusual in peculiarly literary ways.

I once came across a family from a Greek Tragedy.  Actually, it was more of a Restoration Drama complete with dazzling wordplay, hints of incest, and suicides – both attempted and successful. Once the first child had been conceived everyone involved was trapped in a cresta run of melodrama, dysfunctionalism and real, true, nasty violent tragedy. I thank the goddess daily that my part was sufficiently minor not to merit an actual name, just a number and a description. There is a lot to be said for being the third spear carrier.

Then there’s the friend who sprang from the loins of an Iris Murdoch novel. Slightly whacky religious community – check. Agonised artists – check. Intricate polyamorous relationships – check. Intense political convictions – check. Complex characters who are both magnificent and deeply flawed – check. The whole shebang was topped off with more brain-power than is entirely fair. Even the first names of the protagonists manage to be Murdochian.

I have a friend whose childhood amongst hippies leading a simple life in wolf-laden valleys within the Appenines in Italy is clearly straight from another genre, though I am not entirely sure what genre it is. The same genre as Hideous Kinky perhaps.

Eric Berne postulates that we are all script-driven, though for some of us the scripts are “get married, have children, have grand-children, be happy” and for others they are grand guignol.

I lack the distance and the perspective to know what genre my life falls into. I’d love to think of myself as a Grande Horizontale, but I lack the figure and the stamina for it. I quite fancy ending up as one of Mary Wesley’s experienced and sexy old women with a complex and mildly kinky past and a complex and mildy kinky present.

Whatever I am, I am glad that I’ve managed to escape the Restoration Drama and that I’ve moved on from Mills and Boon and Bridget Jones.