Remembrance Sunday came out of the First World War, the war that indeed, should have ended all wars. It was the first large-scale war with recogniseably modern weaponry, like heavy artillery and tanks, yet still fought in an old-fashioned way, in which two armies line up and attack each other. It became apparent early on that the two things really don’t mix very well. The basis of face-to-face warfare is honour between warriors, and when you are firing at an enemy you cannot see– and being killed likewise– that honour is removed. All that honourless slaughter had a hugely detrimental effect on the men in the trenches. The Christmas game of football during the 1914 Christmas truce was simply unthinkable later on in the War. Too much blood had been spilled, and the men were stripped of their honour by the very nature of the war they were fighting. The Great War was the first in which post-traumatic stress disorder became a noticeable phenomena; in those days they called it shell-shock, and only the lucky ones were sent home to rest: many were shot for cowardice or forced back to the trenches.

The Remembrance Day ceremonies are an effort to give honour to those who died for their country, first in the trenches then on the many battlefields since then. It’s probably the nearest we get to erecting mounds to our fallen warriors these days. We remember them; we inject the short lives of the fallen with the fragile immortality of remembrance. We honour our dead… even as we send more fighters to take their place and maybe die in their turn.

Since the Great War there have been many wars; the war to end all wars was actually just the warm-up act (and root cause) of a 20th Century full of conflict, which gave birth to the “War on Terror” we’re fighting these days. Clearing up the loose ends of the 20th Century, however, has proven to be far more difficult than the politicians let on; conspiracy theorists are simply the extreme end of the scepticism about politics and war that many people are feeling.

I think a major problem is that our politicians have, like those in the Great War, not allowed for the rise of new technologies that will change the face of war. In those days, it was tanks and heavy artillery; these days, it’s information technology. We are more aware than ever of the consequences of war, and what’s more, we have access to a huge range of facts and opinions that often seem to contradict the official line. It is no longer unpatriotic to be sceptical. The families of those killed in war can see precisely what their loved one died for. And many aren’t seeing a good enough reason for their loss. It is because people are patriotic that they are challenging the righteousness of the conflicts we are getting involved in. It is indeed righteous to fight for one’s nation when it is fighting the good fight; when the fight seems bad, sending “our boys and girls” to die becomes a vile affront. When we know how corrupt politicians are, when we know that they sent us into war on a tissue of lies, then we fear for the country.

I still feel the same way.

(I’m not convinced this guy did it, btw)

But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream! (5:24)

To Amos, justice and righteousness flow together, like a stream and a river. Streams feed rivers, so the stream of righteousness feeds the river of justice. We need both. Without righteousness, the river of justice would not flow with its full strength and could even dry up. Without the river of justice to flow into, righteousness just becomes a stagnant pool of wrong.

Rather unsurprisingly, I support the release of all elderly, dying prisoners, as an act of mercy.

In Ronnie’s case, it was just to imprison the criminal. But it is also righteous for us to show mercy to prisoners. (Visiting prisoners is one of the things we’re charged to do elsewhere, I remembered as I wrote this).

It’s not just a case of mercy to the prisoner. It’s also an act of mercy on the family of the prisoner who wish to be with the prisoner when he dies. Ronnie Biggs and his son, who seems to love his father dearly, now have some quality time before he dies. Ronnie’s friends and other family can now come and say goodbye. They also, on a purely mercenary level, can get some money out of the story– Ronnie will no longer be a burden on the state.

Ronnie, however, has become the poster child for one of the major threads of conflict in our society. There’s a section of people baying for his blood. And a section of people saying he should have been released. They are split along political lines: Conservative/right wing types favour prison. Liberal/left wing types favour mercy.

I think the thing about moral absolutes like the need for “justice” and “mercy”  is that people equate a specific issue with the moral, and this error is encouraged by our society because it keeps us at odds and playing politics/religion rather than just rubbing along together.

Like, we all agree that “justice must be served”. So each side will try and claim that their stance on a particular issue is the very definition of justice and denigrate the views of the “opposition” as being anti justice. If one can pull a shocking murderer out of the hat, or an innocent man who was executed out of another hat, so much the better. “The other side want THIS to be the norm!” and so liberals are being treated as if they want murderers walking the street and the conservatives are being treated as if they are all gun-crazy vigilantes who are bloodthirsty for revenge.

Whereas I think a sensible justice system would have both voices, enabling it to flow: there must be a price to pay for harming society but there must also be acknowledgement that to err is human. We need to see the difference between an excuse and a genuine extenuating circumstance. Too much “justice” and you end up with a system where petty crooks and junkies are learning to be hardened criminals because we lock em all up together and make their lives as miserable as possible. You end up with overflowing death rows while the real causes of most crime– poverty and inequality– go unchallenged. Innocent people get executed and people don’t care. Go too far the other way– too much “mercy”– and you end up with a society where people choose crime as a lifestyle because a life cycle of crime and a relatively comfy prison is better than being on the dole in some sink estate. You end up with people who see nothing wrong with committing crime and know if they get caught they can just pretend it’s not really their fault.

Ultimately we need to face up to why people become criminals. It’s utter nonsense to dismiss everyone who commits a crime as an evil criminal and treat them as such. But it’s equally nonsensical to assume everyone’s just a victim of circumstance. Ronnie Biggs’s crimes cannot be equated with Ian Brady or Myra Hindley’s– yet by letting him die in prison that’s precisely what we would have been saying, because that’s the punishment we reserve for people like Brady who need to be removed from society permanently. Biggs became a criminal for many reasons, and I’m sure a disregard for the law was one, but that’s not inherently evil. I don’t know anyone that observes every jot and tittle of the laws.

I’ll start with the New Testament Gateway. This academic site was an immensely useful resource back in my days at Crapston Polytechnic, and I’m please to advise that it’s still brilliant, only now it looks slick, all monochrome with a little picture of the boffin behind such epic usefulness. And it’s bigger. It inspired the creation of an Old Testament Gateway, which sadly didn’t exist when I was coughing my way through dusty old Old Testament studies at the Poly. But it looks like it might have been well useful. And of course in those days, plagiarism off the internet was a lot easier. But I digress… The Resource Pages for Biblical Studies didn’t jump on the Gateway bandwagon, but are immensely useful nonetheless.

Because I’m a bit of a pervert, and more than a bit of a masochist, I’m a fan of both Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins. McGrath got me through the aforementioned Poly (along with a young Internet) with his excellently written Christian Theology: An Introduction and its companion Reader. I love anyone trying to do natural theology in these apathetic days; which is probably why I also like Dawkins, even though I suppose what he’s doing is natural anti-theology. The God Delusion is an excellent read.

Speaking of Dawkins reminds me that I hold the opinion that his style of writing is like a modern C.S. Lewis, in that both are lucid and accessible even when discussing complex matters, and write in a way that manages to assume the reader isn’t an academic but is also not at all stupid and talks to them accordingly. Both make you feel like you’re being read to by the author… and you’re enjoying it.

A good resource for theistic evolution, or evolutionary creationism if you like, is Perspectives. The real book that started me thinking about science was the epic Rebuilding the Matrix by Denis Alexander. READ IT.

More to come, the next time I need to distract myself.

It would be remiss of me to let the funeral of Michael Jackson pass without some acknowledgement and farewell to the man-child who managed to provide much of the soundtrack of my childhood, despite me never actually voluntarily listening to any of his tunes until I was an adult. He was just… there.

But apart from that, I’m going to do what the man said and let him rest in peace.

I’m in quarantine with suspected swine flu, so it seemed like a good excuse to start the blog at last!

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Last Monday was St. Peter’s day. I find myself reflecting on Jesus’s words to Peter, “Upon this Rock I will build my Church”, as I read the news of the latest split within the ranks of the Church of England. The Bishop of Rochester is the leading cleric in this split, which is entirely over the church’s attitude towards homosexuality.

As some of you will know, the church’s attitude towards gay clergy and gay Christians in general was one of the reasons why I left the Church of England some years ago. As this came at around the time I started seriously pondering my vocation, it wasn’t a decision I took lightly. At root, I am simply certain that it is un-Christian not to extend the same rights and priviledges to any individual, regardless of their sexuality. I realised I just didn’t want to be in Communion with a church that did not have a clear policy on making the same demands from homosexuals as they do heterosexuals in every aspect of church life.

What I want to do is try and get to the fundamentals of the issue, and how it’s really not about homosexuals, who have become the scapegoat for a dispute that’s really about the Bible and how we interpret and use it.

The Bible is the root of our Christian faith, all of us, no matter where we stand on this or any other argument. We may believe in God for any number of reasons, but the reason why we are Christian theists is because of the Gospel, and the only external source for that we have is the Bible. The Gospel words in red are the indisputable basis for our faith. The disagreement starts to creep in when we start to consider the words outside of the Gospels.

The Bible is an amazing book. Calling it a “book” is misleading, because it’s actually a collection of books, and those books cover a vast expanse of time and thought. The insight it gives us into the evolution of monotheism and how our society came to think the way it does is priceless. Precisely because it is so priceless I have no qualms at all in agreeing with Paul’s statement that it was “God-breathed”; what’s more I have no qualms about applying his words to the New Testament he contributed to, either, even though it didn’t exist when Paul made his claim.

No matter how important the Bible is, though, it is not the “Rock”. It was not the thing upon which Jesus intended his Church to be built. The very fact that the Gospels are equivocal as to what exactly the Rock is tells us that it aint the written word we should be basing everything on! Christians have always, in practice, tempered what they read in the Bible with their own conscience and understanding of God and humanity. The words about homosexuals are no different from any other words in that respect.

I have often noticed, when discussing the matter with anti-gay Christians on the internet, that actually it boils down to their revulsion at the thought of gay sex. One lady, who presumed I was a gay Christian because of my stance on the matter, ended up just saying, “but she has the same part you do!!!” over and over again. But it’s only natural, if you’re a definitely heterosexual person, to find gay sex an odd thing. You might wonder why someone would feel attracted to do that since you yourself have no natural attraction to do it. Where the Bible speaks against homosexual acts, many people accept this without question because it fits with their feeling that being gay is un-natural. But we know, these days, that homosexuality is an entirely natural phenomena. It’s just one of those things, like being blonde or short or being funny, that is true of some people but not others. It origins are in genetics and how the brain is naturally wired. It’s as odd to expect everyone to be heterosexual as it is to expect everyone to be blonde.

Where we all find agreement again is when we say that it is still true that people should abide by the standards of sexual behaviour demanded by Jesus. And I think therein lies another thing that contributes to anti-gay Christian sentiment. Gays are perceived as being more promiscuous than straight people, more depraved, more likely to be perverts. A close look at the gay texts in the Bible supports this, too; the kind of homosexual behaviour best known to the Hebrews would have been the orgiastic behaviour of pagan temples, often linked to ritual prostitution. For Paul, a lot of the homosexual behaviour he saw would have been the somewhat predatory pederasty practised by the Greeks. But that behaviour is an expression of perversion not sexuality. These days, now that truly gay people are able, legally and freely,  just to be gay, the kind of behaviour they are fighting for is traditional, Christian behaviour: they want to be able to get married, raise families (often by adopting the children unwanted by their parents) and in the case of gay Christians, to be able to not “forsake assembling”, and to participate in Christian life as equals.

I think Christianity in general needs to be more honest with itself about how it uses the Bible. We need to be vocal that those churches who claim to take every word of the Bible literally are making a claim both impossible and non-Christian. The Rock upon which this Church is built is not the Bible. It’s Jesus, and he never thought to even mention gays. But he did talk at some length about sexual responsibility and about being decent and fair to your fellow human beings. Where we see the fruit of a life led by Jesus we should embrace the person bearing the fruit as our sibling in Christ, no matter who they are.

We need to accept that sexuality is really no more controversial than any other topic in the Bible that isn’t specifically covered by Jesus, be it something minor like the covering of heads for women or something seemingly more important like the ordination of women. At the end of the day all Christians should interpret the texts based on their own conscience and should make sure they are as informed as possible as to the background and possible meanings of the text. I fear, though, that the people doing the most shouting on this matter are being influenced not by their faith but by other factors and are merely using the Bible as a weapon. We have seen many “fallen” anti-gay preachers who were really in deep denial about their own natural urges, and we’ve seen much paedophilia. Those denominations who produce these abominations need to be the most prepared to be honest about their policies. How much harm is being caused by denial of the facts of nature?

What did Jesus do? He didn’t even mention it. He just got on with spreading the Good News and made sure everyone knew the sexual standards demanded of his followers. Perhaps Christendom should start doing the same.