Sea of Faith Christchurch Group

Our next meeting, on Friday 11 July, will be a midwinter celebration. Bring some finger food and (optionally) some kind of contribution: a story, poem, prayer, song, or something else I haven’t thought of.

Why a midwinter celebration? The German theologian Eberhard Jungel says, “It’s high time that from time to time time is different.” This elegant play with the word “time” proposes that we have some times that are different from other times. For the cosmos, one day is pretty much the same as another. Cosmologically, there was nothing special at all about January 1 2001. It was just our human conventions that made it different. So let’s take this Friday and make it a day of celebration.

I believe that we need to vary the style of our meetings. We tend to have a speaker talking or to have a discussion, where the rational analysis of ideas tends to predominate. I’d like this celebration to be more “right-brain” than our usual diet of left-brain activity, more creative, poetic, meditative, more aligned to mythos than logos.

What is there to celebrate?  In the Northern hemisphere, Christians celebrate Christmas at the Winter solstice, the saviour coming into the darkness and cold to bring light into the world. Their celebrations are a Christian overlay on ancient pre-Christian rituals, often centred on the sun.

Maori celebrate Matariki, the beginning of the new year.

Juliet Batten argues that we need to have celebrations that help to align us with nature. The transplantation of European culture to our southern colony broke the link between the celebrations of the Church year and the rhythms of nature.

Bill Wallace has material for a midwinter celebration that mediates on darkness, breaking with the negative associations that it has in most religious traditions.

I’m planning to bring a Bill Wallace hymn, a delightful Christmas story, and a Bill Wallace mediation on darkness.  Others will I trust bring other contributions that will help to make this a creative and many-sided celebration!

Ian didn’t manage to get to our second meeting on The New Atheism. Instead, he wrote a review for the national newsletter on the book “God and the New Atheism” by John Haught.

“His main thesis is that the three authors, drawing their concept of God and religion from fundamentalist and literalist religion, produce a similar kind of atheism: superficial, literal, and lacking engagement with the long-standing intellectual traditions of the Western religions.”

Continue Reading »

At our 27 June meeting, Brian presented the following critique of John Gray’s article in the Guardian, that Laurie referred to in announcing the meeting.

I don’t question Professor John Gray’s moderate social conservatism. I believe it is sincere, as would be his view that religion is one of its bulwarks. But so far it seems to me that his defence of religion against Dawkins and the so-called New Atheists is too shallow and popularist. This leaves a question in my mind as to why Gray has become so prominent in ‘liberal’ and media circles.

There has been a steady revival in religious as well as political conservatism. People crave a more traditionalist, settled world, and the New Atheist attacks on the ‘God-concept’ have been unsettling. Whenever that kind of disturbance happens, well-financed conservative forces go for a ‘backlash’ through their think-tanks, their consultative agencies that influence and serve the ‘establishment’, and their almost complete control of the media. I leave you with the question: Am I being paranoid, or is my suspicion about Gray’s sudden rise to appear to be an authoritative demolisher of the New Atheists, justified? Continue Reading »

Our next meeting, on 27 June, will continue the theme of the new atheism. Here is a little excerpt from Richard Dawkins, which crystallises his attitude to religion. It comes from an interview for Salon magazine, some years before he published “The God Delusion.”

I follow it with a quotation from Fritjof Capra, a physicist who aims to integrate physics and Eastern religion. While Dawkins thinks that science excludes religion, Capra thinks we need both.

Q. Still, so many people resist believing in evolution. Where does the resistance come from?

A. It comes, I’m sorry to say, from religion. And from bad religion. You won’t find any opposition to the idea of evolution among sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the United States.

My American friends tell me that you are slipping towards a theocratic Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for the very large number of educated, intelligent and right-thinking people in America. Unfortunately, at present, it’s slightly outnumbered by the ignorant, uneducated people who voted Bush in.

But the broad direction of history is toward enlightenment, and so I think that what America is going through at the moment will prove to be a temporary reverse. I think there is great hope for the future. My advice would be, Don’t despair, these things pass.

Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both. Fritjof Capra.

Our next meeting, on 13 June, will look at the new atheism. Recent years have seen the publication of a number of best-selling books that frontally attack God and religion. They include:

• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

• God is not Great by Christopher Hitchins

• God the Failed Hypothesis, by Victor Stenger

• Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris

Our meeting will examine this new phenomenon and ask questions like the following:

1. Will the advance of science inevitably bring about the end of religion?
2. How can Christians deal with the violence that the bible ascribes to God, for example the holy wars, where God commands that everything and everyone must be destroyed?
3. How satisfactory are modern theologians’ attempts to talk about God in new ways?
4. What are the unspoken convictions and assumptions that lie behind these attacks?

There is no lack of voices that have responded critically to these new books.

Madeleine Bunting: “Richard Dawkins’s attack on religion is an intellectually lazy polemic not worthy of a great scientist.” Link here.

John Gray: “The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy, or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today’s secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.” Link here.

I’m looking forward to lively discussion!