Changing the Rules of Engagement

Have just come away from a church service on the eve of the Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast, where I heard a remarkable sermon by Labib Madanat of the Palestinian Bible Society. Preaching from 2 Kings 5: 1- 19, the story of Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram. Aram had persecuted and plundered Israel, and Naaman had a captured Israelite girl as a slave. She encouraged Naaman to go to Israel to seek healing from his leprosy.

Now most takes I have heard on this story focus on Naaman and Elisha the prophet by whom God healed him, but Labib focussed on the slave girl – taken by force, her family probably slaughtered before her eyes (or worse), and now held a captive far from her home land, speaking a foreign tongue, she had no cause to love or care for her Aramite master. Indeed, she could have said his leprosy was God's righteous judgement on him – but instead she had compassion on him. The rules of engagement required that she should be his enemy – she changed the rules of engagement and showed compassion.

Labib recounted his own experience after losing a close friend and colleague to Hamas gunmen, and while initially feeling this hatred he found himself some time later meeting with a Hamas leader, and mourning with him the loss of his son to Israeli forces some two weeks earlier – this after spending time with his colleague's still grieving family, including his young children. He changed the rule of engagement, and showed compassion.

When I look at Jesus, that is what he did all the time. He never met the scribes and Pharisees on their turf, or fought according to their rules. He did not distance himself from prostitutes and tax collectors and occupying Roman soldiers as the religious rules of engagement dictated, rather he went out of his way to engage with them. He changed the rules of engagement between God and humanity.

At the moment I see my own church's global family ripping itself apart over the issue of gay priests. And while I have sympathy with both sides, especially the conservatives, I fear that neither are changing the rules of engagement. At a time when we are finding that gay men in the UK are engaging in risk taking behaviour like never before, and that HIV rates are climbing within the gay community as a result, should we not be changing the rules of engagement and looking at what we as Christians have to offer to help tackle this? Not in judgement and harsh messages, but out of grace, love and compassion to those who are choosing knowingly to put themselves at risk. A radical suggestion, bound to be disliked by gay activists, religious conservatives and liberals alike – so all the more reason to put it forward. I suspect Jesus would have been with the gay communities, and those affected by AIDS as he was with lepers and prostitutes and tax collectors in his day. Those marginalised by society - is the church doing anything to reduce that marginalisation? I fear the answer is a qualified "no".

While some commentators suggest this growing Anglican rift is primarily a conflict based on a clinging to a Christendom model of the Christian faith, and others that it is just plain intolerance of difference, there is no doubt that both sides in the debate have been lobbing missiles at one another, and as things currently stand a growing number of bishops will not be at the Lambeth Conference in July – heralding the real possibility of schism within worldwide Anglicanism.

But in keeping to the traditional rules of engagement between the theologically conservative and liberal, the Anglican Communion may also be missing the mark in other ways – the media and commentators will be obsessing over the gay priests issue, while the other issues under debate, including global poverty will not get an airing. The National Prayer Breakfast (on the eve of which the service last night was held) is focussing around the Micah Challenge – the global church movement to hold our governments to account for the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals to halve global poverty and tackle the other scourges facing the world's poor. This will also be a focus of the Lambeth Conference, with a planned prayer walk to 10 Downing Street of Bishops committing their churches to the campaign. With so many conservative bishops boycotting the Lambeth Conference, the message of commitment to the Micah Challenge vision of a mobilised global church addressing the issue of poverty will be weaker than it should be.

The rules of engagement between liberal and conservative Anglicans need to change – on both sides; there is too much at stake for the world as a whole for there not to be.

Consistent Ethic of Life

So, once again we have US "pro-life" senators trying to pull funding on work that saves lives (just not the unborn). At the same time I am a UN meeting representing some of the smaller UK based Christian HIV & AIDS ministries (and spending some time talking to the larger ones), and find there is an air of intolerance towards Christians in general, and evangelicals in particular. Some of that antipathy is inevitable and not to be avoided - speaking unpalatable truths (as we should if we are faithful the gospel of Jesus) that set people free is one of our callings as believers. But seldom is it the expression of the truth that causes the problem - it is rather this inconsistency from some of the evangelical community (not just in the USA, but most frequently).

Argh! Here at the UN, the US is seen simultaneously as the bad guy (for an example of why, see above) and as a cash cow (ditto!). I am frustrated that we are not getting back to core issue in the AIDS pandemic - how do we stop in spreading, and then how do we treat and care for those already infected and affected. As I see it, the plan to wreck the new PEPFAR funding bill in the US Congress is based on a misapprehension that only drug therapies have the answer, or that prevention should be along narrow (and largely unproven) sexual abstinence only initiatives. Prevention and care need to be tackled in lots of different ways, but at its most effective it is less dependant on the top down approaches of PEPFAR and more on the mobilisation of local communities (churches and other faith communities in particular) to respond in a locally appropriate way.

A consistent ethic of life seeks to care for all - the born and the unborn, the dying and the living, and accord all with equal human dignity. It is about justice above all else. And it is about equipping people to respond to their own needs rather than rely on paternalism from the rich - a Biblical principle found throughout the Pentatuch, and especially in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Sadly, a lot of the "pro-lifers" of the US religious right do not know their Bibles half as well as they think they do, or else they might not be barking up the the wrong tree yet again.

No Imminent Cures from Stem Cells

Well, here we have it at last, an admission that all this hoo-haa about human animal hybrids is not leading to imminent cures for degenerative diseases. It is both sad and suspicious that only after the vote had been taken by Parliament did the scientific commentators and proponents of this line of research come out and admit the truth.

Vulnerable people have been exploited to make the case for a line of research which, at the very best, offers only a long-term hope for treatments in a few decades. The cynicism and sheer chutzpah of some proponents of hybrid embryonic stem cell research is astounding.

Once again, one has to ask why the government forced this bit of legislation through with such hype about the potential to cure everything under the sun? Are we seeing once again, as with the dodgy dossier and the case for war in Iraq, a peddling of half truths to win over the public and parliament? And with what motivation?

Hmm... I have no more to say on this matter, time will judge.

The Social Care Agenda

So, it seems that Gordon Brown et al are suddenly concerned that our old people (i.e. almost all of us in a few years time) are not being well enough looked after, and that the cost of care is disadvantaging all. Well, I can't argue with that, having worked in nursing and care of the elderly back in the nineties, all I can say is that if things have got worse since that time then we are in a truly sorry State.

The thing that worries me is that throwing money, insurance schemes, and other reviews is not really addressing the issue. The way have chosen to live our lives, atomized, families scattered, children too busy to see isolated parents regularly, neighbours too scared, suspicious or ignorant of one another to watch out for the vulnerable ones, and a general abdication of responsibility to the "powers that be" (i.e. social and health services), means that care has been reduced to a mechanistic process rather than one of genuine compassion and engagement by the wider community.

In fact I would go so far as to say that no government can ever resolve this. While a bill goes through Parliament that allows for IVF with no father being named, and as we increasingly rely on self-definition of "family" and "community" – it is no wonder that our care services are in a sorry state. Because at the end of the day it will be down to us, not Labour, the Tories or anyone else coming along making manifesto promises.

We will all (should we live that long) grow old, become frail and need care. Will we leave it till it's too late to wake up and realize that we need to start looking out for one another and not abdicating that responsibility to the State? I am much heartened by new models of church community that are exploring how to care for one another, especially the most vulnerable. But these examples are still the exception, not the norm, and even if every church in the land rose to the challenge that would still run the risk of the wider community abdicating its responsibility to the churches instead of the State, thus creating a new form of institutionalism.

If how we care for the vulnerable is a mark of how civilised we are then I guess we are living in a barbarian society – the old, the young, the dying and the unborn – none are universally well cared for in modern Britain, and more and more legislation to remove protections and allow the killing of those whose lives are deemed "not worth living" are threatening to appear on our statute books.

The only way that changes is going to happen is with each one of us choosing for it be otherwise – and not to rely on someone else to care for our family, our friends and our neighbours. Instead we should look to do it ourselves, together as a community.

Studying Belief

This is a fascinating article from the Economist, that saves it’s sucker punch for the last paragraph, but raises some interesting problems. And my initial reaction was to laugh (it still is to be honest), but on reflection one has to admit it does raise some serious questions about the assumptions in some branches of the scientific community. I say some, as my own schooling in medical anthropology has taught me, the first thing you have to question is every assumption, and reconstruct your understanding from the most basic level.

So the epistemological problem here is quite an intriguing one – can religious belief be analysed and deconstructed, and the basis for it be found in evolutionary biology? The first question I have to ask is, “why are you asking this question?” – is it a valid question to ask if an area of human behaviour and knowledge that deals in the metaphysical, the ritual and the moral/ethical dimensions can be analysed in terms of reductionist methodologies coming from a totally different epistemological starting point. Or to put it another way, can the questions asked by evolutionary biology answer the questions and the search for spiritual meaning and truth? There would seem to be an assumption by the evolutionary biologists that religion has an evolutionary purpose.

And it is a valid question to ask – after all some sociological and psychological studies have indicated that those with a religious belief, and especially those belonging to a religious community of some sort (from a church to a monastery, mosque, synagogue, temple, ashram, etc, etc.) seem to live longer, and have healthier lives, and often contribute more to society (although almost of all of these findings are open to question and interpretation). However, it begs the question – if religious belief has an evolutionary purpose, does non-belief serve a purpose? Is there an evolutionary purpose to scientific research, atheism, secularism, etc, etc? In other words, physician health thyself – it is the old error of earlier generations of anthropologists that their science was purely about the observation of the other rather than the observation of self – the researcher researches him or herself and questions the values, assumptions and mindsets that underpins his or her own field of study and activity. Medical Anthropology soon turned from studying only the patient to also studying the doctor and the nurse, and then to studying the researcher him or herself.

Because the next problem then arises – if those undertaking this research come from an essentially secular and at least agnostic world view then is there not an anomalous problem that the world view they represent may in itself also be the result of an evolutionary process, or, worse still, an evolutionary dead end (after all, the secular, educated middle classes have far lower birth rates than their religious counterparts, so by Darwinian logic are slowly being bred out of existence). So it seems illogical to ask the one question without also asking the other.

The problem is one of blind spots in epistemology, and the ready assumptions that consequently arise. The early question used in the article, about how people may be programmed to see God observing their every move, misses an understanding of what it is that believers actually believe. It is based on the assumptions of what it is that we believe by those who do not necessarily share our beliefs (and of course, there are many scientists who do have a religious belief – the two domains are far from mutually exclusive).

So the whole enterprise of finding a scientific reason for belief ultimately flawed from several angles. However, that does not mean it will not throw up interesting results – but possibly the most interesting results will be what it tells us about the assumptions and beliefs of the scientists undertaking the research.

Best Reading & Listening over the Last Twelve Months

Normally, I'm not in to lists and after the initial appeal of all those nostalgia shows on TV, I have got bored to death of shows with titles like "Top 100 Greatest Celebrity TV Dog Moments Ever of the Nineties" or whatever.

But, unapologetically, and with no real reference to wider culture, here are a couple my favourite reads and listens recently - if for no other reason that to give myself something to come back and laugh at in ten years.

1. The Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell - admirable for its structure (six nested novella length stories , each in a different literary style, each set in different eras form the 19th Century through to a bleak, post apocalyptic far future by way of a detective novella, a farce, a disjointed set of letters from a venal composer between the wars and an Orwellian dystopia), its readability (you can't put it down - seriously!), and the elegant and beautiful way it brings all six narratives together in an exploration of the human capacity to transform ourselves and our world for good and ill, and the journey of one soul through time. A sort of bildungsroman for the 21st Century. It is also a brave literary author who ventures in to Science Fiction - and pulls it off (the two SF stories have echoes respectively of Huxley's "Brave New World" and Le Guin's "Always Coming Home", along with several very Atwood-esque unreliable narrators).
   
   Above all, it is about how humans can really foul up the world - and how we have the potential to put it right again.
   
   
2. In Rainbows - Radiohead. Well, just when I though their avant had disappeared up it's garde and the bleeding edge had exsanguinated itself, Radiohead come out with something immensely listenable, but still way out there (at least in terms of commercial pop and rock). It is also dark and ironic.
   
   One of the great iconic moments of "The Royle Family" is the two leads singing to "Baby David" Radiohead's "No Alarms & No Surprises" as a lullaby. This was Caroline Aherne making an ironic statement about how little most people really listen to music - the song has a beautiful, almost childlike melody, whose lyrics are about suicide(hardly fitting stuff for a lullaby).
   
   This juxtaposition of lyric and melody is a bit of Radiohead trademark ("Fake Plastic Flowers", "High & Dry", etc.). In this album we have one such moment at least in "House of Cards", a beautifully transcendent piece of music that should be a tender and passionate love song, but turns out to be about wife swapping and lust. "You are All I Need" compares the singer to "an animal trapped in your hot car" - a dark reflection on co-dependency. There are glimmers of hope, but you do get the feeling that Tom Yorke feels humans are a bit of a mess, and not very nice - there is no redemption here. He has a point, but it could do with some leavening with hope and a bit less post-modern irony - but maybe you need faith to do that, and that does seem to be the biggest absence.
   
   But it's really the music that grabs you - energetic and almost hypnotic - with some almost unbearable melodic tensions stretched out to the limit before being gloriously resolved. It is quite the most beautiful thing they have done since OK Computer, and one of the very best albums of the last year.

The list will be added to as I get through more books and albums (and the odd film or two).

The tyranny of science

The tyranny of science spiked
Dear old Frank Furedi. He does get it right sometimes - although not completely.

His attack on the deification of science as a new de facto source of "scriptural authority" hits a nail on the head. His targeting is a bit lazy in places, but it does bring up an issue - are we creating a new "Scientific Orthodoxy". Are we allowed to hold dissenting views to that Orthodoxy? hmmm.....

Recently the Science & Technology Committee of the House of Commons presented a report that they said was based purely on scientific evidence to do with altering the lower limit for abortions. But the science was already clouded in politics, as both pro and anti lobbies presented evidence that backed their cases. Despite some excellent research on foetal pain from the States, and on surivial of infants at or below the current lower limit of abortion, the Committee produced a report that backed the view that the abortion lower limit should be maintained, and abortion regulations liberalised. The science that contradicted these findings was left out of the report to such a degree that two members of the committee submitted a Minority Report highlighting it.

The Government has now come out clearly in support of the Majority Report, so quickly that one wonders if it had all been written in advance of the official publication? The science was politicised even before this of course, and only a token number of expert opinions were taken from those who believed a lowering of the upper limit was necessary because of increased survival of pre-term infants. And those who did offer expert testimony were then "outed" as being "pro-life" (even if at least one committee member and a number of those giving evidence to the contrary were members of known "pro-Choice" groups). It seems in British public life at the moment only certain orthodoxies, of a scientific and political persuasion, are tolerated.

And now we are seeing a gradual erosion of protection for families and reproductive rights of fathers, the legalisation of human/animal hybrid embryos (for somewhat dubious reasons) and other reproductive rights and protections on a nod and a wink as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill goes through without any of its assumptions (scientific, social and moral) being challenged in the public arena (the media have kept the latter stages out of the headlines altogether). Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill Peers vote to sideline role of fathers for IVF children

This is only one issue of course, but it does seem that there is an unthinking orthodoxy emerging in British Society, and that anyone who steps up and says "hang on a mo', is that really right?" is liable to be at best ignored, and at worst vilified and discredited for daring to speak against the prevailing belief system.

Ring any bells - Spanish Inquisition, Taliban, revolutionary Iran anyone? Now it is the "scientific & secular" West that is jumping on dissenters - maybe we don't get imprisoned for questioning the orthodoxy - not yet anyway, but differences of opinion are certainly not being encouraged.

Whither democracy and freedom of thought now?