Dialogue with Humanists?

For Evangelical Christians, as for the Roman Catholics in this article, it is a live issue as to why one would want to be involved in interfaith dialogue. Now a word before you read the quote following and think "hang on; that's not about interfaith dialogue; humanists aren't a faith". Well, I'd point out that the issues are the same and that we sholudn't get hung up on labels. However, there is a case to group together humanists with people who follow Christ, Mohammed/Qur'an, Buddha etc. One of those figures was, apparently, agnostic on the God question which would cohere with the humanist position -at least some versions of it. And if a faith is a belief system that provides perspectives and values for living, then humanism certainly fits with that. In addition consider that the European legislation on religious discrimination etc; usually gets worked out in terms of religions and 'life philosophies'. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that humanism should, in a number of public fora, be grouped with religious and spiritual bodies and movements.

This quote starts from the difficulty that often people who engage in dialogical events can't 'bind' their constituencies to anything they may themselves agree or change their minds about. To do so would be tantamount to saying that a conversion of one agent in such and event would be a conversion of all. Clearly that cannot be: individual conscience still is paramount. So ...

‘If you are not representing anybody, you already know what the other side is going to say, and you’re probably not going to change their minds, why bother?’ He then answered that question by appealing to the importance of ‘civility’. Civility ‘is not about agreement, or even negotiation,’ says Sims. ‘It is about how we can disagree in such a way that we retain the respect of those we disagree with, and build the possibility of common cause on issues beyond our disagreements.’

 What I like about that is the recognition that there is a value in 'civility' based on conviviality, if you like. In a society where there are a number of different views on all sorts of things progress can only be made by agreement, common-cause and/or 'co-belligerancy'. We need to be in the business of creating the conditions for alliances to be made and for disagreements to be worked out with respect and charity. These are matters, in Christian terms, it seems to me, of straightforwardly working out loving ones neighbour. In addition, if we believe that God's mission involves justice, peace and peacemaking, then we cannot avoid effort towards creating the conditions for those things and that means dialogue with others who do not see things as we do.

And in actual fact, if we are broadly right about certain important facets of reality as we think we are, then we are only going to help others to wrestle with that claim and those realities if we prepared to dialogue genuinely. This will mean that we will be changed. But I would argue that this is analogous to the 'change' involved in Incarnation and seen in Jesus' response to the Syro-Phoenician woman. Change doesn't mean necessarily 'apostasy' but could mean a fuller entry into the world of another so that our perspective becomes clearer in other terms than those we started with. This, theologically, in term, may be related to some of the debate about God's impassibility ... but perhaps that would be a longer post than I have time to compose right now. Suffice to say for now Thomas Weinandy and Does God Suffer?

Praying 'vertically' and 'laterally'

I've been meaning to flag this up and mention a few things about it for a couple of weeks now. The interest for me is in the fact that it is dealing with something I've been writing on and off for a handful of years now. The working title is 'Unholy Praying' and the aim is to write up, give rationale for and reflect a bit on a series of group prayer experiments in prayerful conversation which doesn't go all holy on us. It comes out of noting that we talk the talk of taking our 'religion' into the secular, but actually just end up creating mini bits of 'sacred' within the secular rather than truly bringing the two together; and our praying together -'just talking to God'- is no exception: we have a whole set of unwritten rules (which may vary from group to group) -a set of conversational pragmatics, if you will- which have to be learnt and which would mark out a bunch of prayists in a secular setting as doing something a bit wierd.

So I'm right with Kester in asking further questions about what is actually going on, beyond our theo-ideological justifications for 'group prayer' and its typical formats and conventions. One thing he notes: "praying aloud in a group functions to give permission to words that would otherwise be too difficult or awkward to say directly." The thing is that it is talking to God that is deliberately overheard. This actually drives some of the conversational pragmatics (like not interrupting) - actually this is analogous to what I and fellow dog owners do when we talk to our dogs while walking them in the vicinity of others: we say stuff to our dogs that acts as interpretive comment for overhearing dog-walkers and passers-by. (Dog - God; not a deliberate palindrome thing going on there, but, well, perhaps the old subconcious is up to tricks there). But it's okay; we do it all over the place, we are skilled at taking note of our 'audience' actual and ostensibly-addressed and talking to both. Perhaps it's not surprising we do this with God stuff too.

If you want to follow this angle up check out the sub-discipline of linguistics known as pragmatics. It's one of the things I've been brushing up on in odd moments as part of thinking about this UnHoly Praying thing.

What I want to ask, though, is how we can just involve God in conversation and what the obvious physical difficulties with that (God's lack of somatic presence and accompanying vocal tract being the most notable) actually mean for potential practice of a truly 'unreligious' way of prayer. Some of the issue lies with the 'fictive' attribution of presence and how we handle that. By "fictive attribution of presence", I mean the way that we sometimes treat God as if They was* a finite presence: so we suddenly 'agree' God is there and listening and so repeat to Them everything we've just discussed as if They wasn't in the room until just then. (Of course, we're also doing things, quite often, like affirming the concerns of the others and strengthening social bonds). Or we 'locate' God in the sanctuary and bow ... Can we manage to pray together without indulging in these fictive strategies? Should we? Or should we recognise more readily that God is also beyond personhood and learn to do more 'mystical' prayer together?

Referring to: Kester Brewin � “Lord I just…” | Do you believe in Prayer? | Speaking into the unknown
*Just experimenting with pronouns for God. Taking a leaf out of the Hebrew Bible where the word for God -Elohim- is plural in form but singular in the verb forms it takes. I reckoned that a triune God might be worth mixing the forms for, especially as English for about 5 centuries has used 'they' to refer to unspecified or unknown antecedents ("That person ... whoever they are ...") so I'm just experimenting to see if extending the range a bit could begin to sound sort of alright once we got used to it.

The books everyone must read

More based on what people actually read rather than what they are told they should read. Interestingly, I'd say I'd read more of these than the 'canonical' works...

Information is Beautiful on the books everyone must read | Books | guardian.co.uk

Pain, guilt, punishment -some research

The research seems to show that people who feel guilty are likely to both subject themselves to pain more readily and also to feel that pain helps with the guilt. It's the interpretation then that becomes interesting. How far is this cultural and how far somatic. Of course the two are inextricable, but where does the balance lie of factors? Well,

"According to the scientists, although we think of pain as purely physical in nature, in fact we imbue the unpleasant sensation with meaning. Humans have been socialized over ages to think of pain in terms of justice. We equate it with punishment, and as the experimental results suggest, the experience has the psychological effect of rebalancing the scales of justice -- and therefore resolving guilt" Cleansing the soul by hurting the flesh: The guilt-reducing effect of pain

I'm not entirely sure on this hypothesis: I'm willing to believe it but I can't help a niggly feeling that it's offering too much to culture. To be sure we are inveterately meaning-making creatures and therein lies our inescapable culture-making. But I'm wondering whether the pain-punishment-guilt linkage may not be more deeply rooted that this hypothesis seems to give credit for. I'm thinking that the impetus for punishment seems to be more connected to a more instinctual anger/frustration which when turned on to others is often expressed with 'violence'. When turned on the subject results in guilt (ira incurvata in se?), but since this is a form of anger>violence, the pain in the study serves as a release. So this would be a more somatic genesis.

Interested to hear further thoughts. Clearly this has potential implications for issues of forgiveness and atonement (which is actually where my interest comes from at the moment).