For context, I just went to church. Not ‘properly’ - it’s Friday - but to join my son and his school. It’s the school in the village and it’s a Church of England school. It’s harder than I’d like to admit to get me in there. Did I want a coffee? I’ve been drinking a lot of coffee recently. I took one and went to sit on the old seats, not the red squishy ones. My frazzled mind scanned the arches and made bad company for God. The children came in in their red jumpers and I caught Rowan’s eye, got a corkscrew wave and a sunshine smile; wondered vaguely about what it would mean for every child to be equally precious. They have been doing the Lord’s Prayer, line by line, and today it was “lead us not into temptation.” There was a little drama with a box of Quality Street: “now put up your hand…” most of the hands go up before the sentence is over… laughter; “put up your hand if you think she should take one.” Most of the hands stay up, rather to my surprise actually; but I’m pleased to see Rowan’s does not; that he gets the point of the story.
For context, last night he wanted two of his ‘5 minute Bible stories’, especially ‘the one about the snake.’ So we read the first two: Creation and Fall. He chose the book from the school library. It’s got a huge picture of Goliath on the front, rolling on the round and clutching his face. I keep being surprised Goliath has two eyes in the picture, then remember what story this isn’t. At the snake’s sibilant insinuations (the book actually adds strings of esses), Rowan draws in his breath at the appropriate moment: No she shouldn’t do it! Though he knows that she does. I am pleased: he gets the story. And anyway, it’s not like he’s not going to hear other ones: he’ll hear them from me.
For context
just said that he is ‘not not a Christian’ - which is how I’ve felt about myself for a while. Recently, though, this has been challenged.For context, a couple of weekends ago, I dropped in on Charlotte DuCann, editor of Dark Mountain who, coincidentally, was just starting her own Substack,
which she said was about sharing actual practices. I had taken myself birdwatching at Minsmere; a place that it’s deeply uncool for a birder to like, but whose sandy soil never fails to release stored happiness into my bones. I have good memories there and this time I watched lingering hobbies wheeling into the woods. Charlotte lives nearby and we had tea and cake in the garden with her partner Mark and talked about plants and dreams and writing with an arm of mugwort tapping companionably at my shoulder where I sat. Charlotte had some surprising things to say about mugwort.For context, I have got to the end of the period I set for myself to write a draft for a book, which I planned to achieve though weekly posts here. And, for context, this post was supposed to be a little review of how that had gone. I had got to the point where I was describing the dream about Penelope and it was Charlotte who asked me the third important question I’d had about that dream. But instead, in Charlotte’s garden I told her that I was feeling quite bothered by the sudden turn to Christianity of
and and that ‘becoming Christian,’ or returning to a childhood Christianity, seems to be a Thing right now. And Charlotte asked me why I cared, and I tried to answer in the garden, and I tried to answer by email and I just couldn’t seem to stop myself writing and thinking about this - wondering the whole time if I was giving in to temptation in doing so, or if it was something I needed to do. Or both.For context, part way through writing this, I read St Augustine’s “Literal Meaning of Genesis” (in translation of course), and I may not have done enough work to let what I learned from that permeate what I wrote. I didn’t expect, for example, to find the Literal Meaning of Genesis to contain a description of the water cycle with experimental data to back it up. In general, I found myself warming myself to Augustine; a thinker I’m inclined to be very wary of. The general attitude of “I don’t know what this means but it could mean this, or perhaps that. There’s no reason to expect I’d understand it;” - it’s got to appeal to a scientist.
For context, I’m a scientist. Not in that that’s my job; it isn’t any more. Rather, that’s my religion. I am a scientist in that I’m a devotee of the religion of scientism. I think that religion exists but I don’t think it is necessarily what people who talk about it think that it is. I am realising at the moment, that there is a sense in which I will always belong to this religion, whether I like it or not. So, on the one hand, I can feel some sympathy for people returning to Christianity. Martin, who is obviously far more in the public eye than I am, and in far more conversations, said something like “people will forgive anything, except Christianity.” I don’t believe he’s one to moan, so I suspect that he’s had to experience some quite nasty stuff which would probably take me out of commission if it happened to me. I don’t like saying that I’m a scientist, partly because I don’t think I’m a good scientist and partly because I don’t want to face the unspoken or direct assessment of whether I’m the right kind of scientist. That is, not the kind of scientist who sticks by the bad stories that got us into this mess. These bad stories are probably something like ‘materialism’, i.e. not recognising the fundamental difference between living things and machines. In this view, if there’s any way out of this mess, or on from the ruins of this mess, then we will need to know what we want to take from this culture and what we will want to leave behind. For scientism, as for Christianity, these keepsakes are likely to be limited to technical achievements. It is important to reject the changes these religions have made to the story about the world and return to the old stories instead. That’s the viewpoint my vague inquisitors hold when I imagine them.
But the questions that I think my religion pushes me to ask are different ones. Of course, I don’t think my religion’s followers have necessarily been particularly exemplary. I think they might have done better if they - we - had admitted it was a religion, not just a profession. I think there are good and bad ways to be like a religion, of course.
For context, though - context that everybody knows - I’m talking about two religions here: scientism and Christianity, which have serious beef. Stephen Jay Gould’s proposed solution to the conflict was ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ (NOMA), the idea that the proper domains of science and religion in society were separate. It is, perhaps, the main strategy to achieve peace, even when less formally defined. In fact, I suspect that the ‘materialism’ of science is the legacy of a previous attempt at the same thing. I think it would be wonderful if wars could be resolved that way.
For context, at the first meeting of the Saola Working Group, we were discussing whether local people’s statements about saola could be trusted and it became clear to me, seeing B—’s reaction to R—’s eyebrows, that he hoped to resolve this conflict in the same manner: “they know stuff about animals and they believe in the spirits. They’re two different things. I mean, some people in this room probably believed in Jesus Christ in their lives. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to believe what they say about animals.” This was an argument in favour of my approach so I welcomed it, but I had a nagging doubt: wasn’t this distinction between the natural and the spiritual world, precisely what anthropologists claimed we had to abandon if we were to understand these people?
For context, a Katu person had told me and Đức that rhinoceroses were 200 metres long and lived underground.
And, for context, I was saying that decision analysis seemed to provide a framework for holding all the uncertainty about a problem, except uncertainty about the ultimate goal. For context, Augustine says “Insensibly and little by little, I was led on to such follies as to believe that it was a ludicrous folly of the Manichaeans to think that a fig wept when it was plucked and that worrying about such things meant you were showing more mercy to the fruits of the earth than to men for whom they were created1.” The Buddha told his monks that, when eating edible food, they should regard it as if it were the flesh of their only child, whom they had been forced to eat while crossing a desert2.
OK that’s plenty of context.