Eternity in a span (of four days) -JFK flame went out

I found this (You're fired! Ireland's eternal flame for JFK goes out after four days | World news | guardian.co.uk got my slightly amused interest.

An Irish eternal flame honouring John F Kennedy petered out four days after the assassinated US president's closest relatives and Ireland's prime minister lit it near the Kennedys' ancestral home.

 I found it interesting because of what happened after. To put some context, the flame had been brought over from the USA to light the flame in Ireland. Now I kind of think that if you've gone to the trouble to treat the flame as, in some way, a continuance of the USAmerican one ("An Irish honour guard ferried the flame in an Olympics-style lantern across the Atlantic by aircraft, then by Irish naval vessel to the riverside town of New Ross for last Saturday's ceremony.") then if it goes out at the new location, you have to repeat the whole process of bringing it over again. But apparently not: "New Ross council said it went out Wednesday night, but was relit within minutes."
So, by having it lit there in the USA and, without being unlit, transferred to light a new fuel source which sustains the flame brought over from then on, they have made a big thing of the continuity which seems to me to be undermined by simply relighting it when it goes out (unless they kept the 'olympic style' lamp lit for just such contigency).

Of course this is all dependent on a fiction that somehow a flame is the same flame through all these transformations. However, what is it that constitutes the identity of a flame in the USA with one in Ireland? The constituents have all changed, the context has, no molecules are in common, no photons are the same. The only continuity is the combustion flashpoint for the 'daughter' flame is the parent flame and the maintainance of combustion from that flashpoint.

Why would I make such a big thing of this? Simply because there is something of a reflection on identity here that has some analogues to human beings. I don't have any molecules in common with my babyhood. There is a basic structure that's the same -like the flame itself- but really about the only thing that gives continuity is a history linking through a chain of events so that this body-mind complex traces back to that one and no other.

The Buddhist saying that you never enter the same river twice is apposite to precisely this issue. The point is that we are not stable entities, we are constantly changing. Our identity lies in our genetic and phenotypical patterning, our history, memory, social nexus and relationships. Who we are is formed out of all of this stuff, but all of this stuff is not constant when you examine it minutely. We are a statistical probability constantly arising/emerging and sustained by all of this stuff. But, there is something else to say.

In New Ross, we might just argue that there is a continuity beyond the flame not having gone out since flashpoint even though the fuel sources and housing have varied. The continuity is one of human intention, meaning and function. Because the point is to honour JFK by use of a flame which was originally lit from one in the USA, it could be argued that there is continuity even if it goes out because the human context wills it and since most of it is about a human artefact with human meanins and communicative intent, then those things constitute the main thing of which the actual flame is an emblem but that its emblematic quality is primary not any other kind of continuity which are merely temporary and contingent.

And humans? Are we not in an analogous position in God's remembrance, purposes and 'meaning'? Not to mention that God is able to reconstitute the essential structuring and remembering that makes us indentifiably 'us'. This is resurrection.

For the flame eternity is in a span and resurrection was emblemised before us.

Christians tweeters happier than atheists but less analytical?

This piece of research Christians tweet more happily, less analytically than atheists is in line with a broader body of data emerging around the issue of happiness, the guts of it is:

A computer analysis of nearly 2 million text messages (tweets) on the online social network Twitter found that Christians use more positive words, fewer negative words and engage in less analytical thinking than atheists. Christians also were more likely than atheists to tweet about their social relationships, the researchers found.

 So the corpus is reasonably big. The weak spot would be whether the words chosen are sufficiently contextualised to give a fairly stable indicator of what is being looked for -irony, sarcasm and unusual grammar could all have an effect, and this article doesn't let us peek at that fine-grained analysis. That said, the fact that this lines up with wider findings probably means that its a fairly safe bet. It lines up in that 'religious' people tend to have better social connections and more positive attitudes towards life than those who didn't score highly as 'religious'.

Of course, the 'less analytical' thing is intriguing and deserve more investigation. I suspect that there are fairly culturally-relative drivers in this case in that my hypothesis that this might actually be different in societies where atheism is more mainstream (China?) because felt-minorities need to make more intellectual effort to justify their dissenting position. Also I think that the religious cultures of Christianity in the west tends to be somewhat anti-intellectual and semi-consciously emotive (actually a contrast to the Evangelicalism of my youth which may well have shown up more evaluative and analytical language had there been tweeting then). So, as the article points out, 'the authors caution that the results are correlational and "this does not mean atheists are unhappy overall or doomed to be miserable. If religion improves happiness indirectly through other factors, those benefits could also be found outside religious groups." '
of course, the obverse needs to be noted that analytical thinking could also be found outside of atheist groups, it may for various reasons simply not show up in tweets. I'm proposing that there are cultural reasons for this, including that the use of tweets for pro-sociality would prime, in an affective sub-culture, less use of analytical language. I also suspect that Christian intellectuals are less likely to be using twitter.

So, while these are intriguing results, more contextual analysis may be needed of an anthropological and socio-linguistic sort.

Incarnation in a backwater of history -why?

It's a common  question or observation, as seen here:

 why would ... God ... pick a poor, fugitive Palestinian Jew, misunderstood by his own family, persecuted and harassed by those of his own religious tradition and living in, and ultimately executed by the most oppressive, secular empire of his time?... why would God pick a largely powerless individual, in a weakened culture in an occupied state to make his point about who the Messiah was and what he would bring?

But reading it I found myself returning to a thought that has been growing in my mind over the last few years but I think I have only expressed verbally a couple of times. First my reaction was that actually, I don't think God did 'choose' those things, at least not first off: I think that God chose Christ (very Barthian of me). God's choice is that God-in-Christ should be incarnate in human history. That choice creates the history. It's as if Christ is the centre point of creation and the whole of space and time (both preceeding and anteceeding) emenates from Christ (and most especially the Resurrection). This would mean that it's not that God chose Roman occupied Palestine etc, rather that God's choice of the Christ implies -indeed creates- a history and geography which we identify as first century Judea etc to cradle and enact the choice of the Christ.

I'm hoping to refine that a bit more and it relates to my posts about the Cross as Eikon of forgiveness, so hopefully I can do the join-up at some point, conceptually.

So I'm not taking issue with this post Morf Morford: New Testament Anti-smackdown - Red Letter Christians so much as the common trope which Morf uses, actually, to good effect.

'viral vicar' wedding dance flash-mob

First off, declaration of interest: this woman was a student at the college I was a tutor at during my time there. She also came from the parish I served my curacy at -though our paths did not cross at that time.
If you need filling in as to what the fuss is about, well....


Of all the comments in the media, probably this (Vicky Beeching in the Independent) is among the best:

why aren't these twenty one thousand spiritual seekers beating down the doors of their local parish church instead of driving to Stonehenge for their spiritual kicks?
My hunch is that it has a lot to do with the style of church gatherings. In this digital age, participation has become our natural way of life; the internet has moved from "1.0" to "2.0" and the formerly passive experiences of reading a static webpage of text has exploded into a multi-directional, fluid exchange of views and user-generated content. We don't just consume or passively receive information any more; we comment back, we contribute, we change things. We aren't just receivers; we are shapers of the digital environments we inhabit.

Of course the problem is that she probably doesn't realise that there's far more of this interactivity going on than the image of church allows for. Things like Messy Church, Alternative Worship, Cafe Church ... and even more 'ordinary' services where there are more interactive elements at various points.

But the problem beyond that is that such things tend to get shot at from two directions. One is the press condemning 'trendy' religion. It is refreshing to see Ms Beeching's article actually being positive about it. The other side that it gets negative press from is those who think it's not proper church, or it's unbecoming.

Personally, I've done things that would go at the more 'interactive' end of the spectrum (and even involving dance -I helped create a short-run series of dance services in a nightclub in the 90's) But it should be said that people have to be up for it and I note that Kate and the couple actually planted quite a few people in the congregation to join in. Had they not done that, I suspect that it would have fizzled damp-squid-wise as the clash of expectations between 'church wedding' and 'celebratory moment' would have kept most people in their seats for fear of embarrassment and a sense of cultural dissonance.

Part of the problem for the churches is that we can't uninvent a thousand years of history and culture. Whereas neo-Pagans and others have the chance to make it up afresh. That said, I would suspect that a closer examination of the usages of Stonehenge would show much of it to be just as constrained as a CofE traditional service and that many of those accessing it being far less 'free' to interact than it may look like. Let's be honest, for many people on the web, their interactivity and user-generated-ness is mostly at the level of comments and cat-photos. I'm an advocate of web 2.0 etc but I'm conscious that the practice of usage doesn't live up to the hype in many cases because the social and cultural factors don't (yet?) favour it. And people are still sensitive to the possible perceptions of their digital footprint.

One of my occasional projects is 'unholy praying' or 'praying in plain sight' where the idea is to pray conversationally together in such a way as not to alert people around us in a cafe (say) that we are praying. It quickly reveals how culturally constrained are our prayer habits and expectations.

So, I agree that the churches should return to their interactive roots (yes, read the epistles; they imply communities of interaction, gift-sharing, discussion, taking action together etc etc), but let's not kid ourselves that this will bring spiritual seekers flooding through the doors. We still have to become trusted to be wise and compassionate guardians of the stories entrusted to us. We still have to be people of emotional maturity and evident spiritual nous. An interactive environment will help.
Occasionally dancing will help ...

 The 'viral vicar' who led wedding dance flash-mob is a great example of how to make religion interactive - Comment - Voices - The Independent:

Cultural products' evolutionary roots

It's no surprise that evolutionary psychologist should give attention to what essentially is the idea of seven stories. And I don't gainsay the idea that our cultural narratives should have evolutionary reflexes. But I'm not sure really that this is saying very much reall:

"Romance novels, pop songs and movie plotlines always come back to the Darwinian themes of survival (injuries and deaths), reproduction (courtships, sexual assaults, reputational damage), kin selection (the treatment of one's progeny), and altruistic acts (heroic attempts to save a stranger's life). Movies, television shows, song lyrics, romance novels, collective wisdoms, and countless other cultural products are a direct window to our biologically based human nature," says Saad.

 I'm not sure that anyone would be surprised, really, that we would tell stories about things that concern us and find interest and drama in the interplay of the themes arising from them. What is intriguing is smuggling in 'altruistic acts' as if they are Darwinian themes. I tend to think that altruistic acts are rather a challenge or puzzle to Darwinian selection and our fascination with it seems rather to be astray of so-called evolutionary concerns.

It's not just cultural products that demonstrate the evolutionary roots of what Saad terms "Homo consumericus." From the food we eat to the clothing we buy, we're always under the influence of evolution.

 In my previous sentence, I wrote 'so-called evolutionary concerns' because I question whether we can be under the influence of evolution. 'Evolution' doesn't exist in the way that this sentence seems to say. 'It' is not something that influences: evolution is the collective name we give to a bunch of things that tend to generate phenotypical changes over time via genetic changes. So we may be under the influence of sexual attraction, fear or jealousy but that isn't evolution. Such things may generate evolution, eventually, but they aren't evolution. So we aren't really under the influence of evolution, merely forces and events that may produce changes in time. Meanwhile, we are still going to tell stories about things that concern us: attraction, dislike, fear, loathing, bravery, joy, campanionship and, yes, concern for others as well as for ourselves. These things have convoluted relationships with what may result in survival or reproducible traits. Our cultural values may or may not align with genetic traits' 'interests' and so while our story-telling may reflect things that may have effects in evolutionary terms, these effects may not be straight-forwardly so. Sometimes 'evolution' is now under our influence.
 Big movies and other cultural products have evolutionary roots: