Origins of life: origins of the Powers

I got quite excited when I read this article: The secret of life won't be cooked up in a chemistry lab | Paul Davies | Comment is free | The Guardian. One of the things that I have said in my recent presentations on corporisations, when I'm connecting up the theological/scriptural notions of the Powers with the emergent properties of much of the natural world and then applying the latter to the former, is that I am, in effect, proposing that there is a "creational trajectory" of emergence which doesn't culminate in humans so much as reaches beyond us and includes us. -We are held together in corporisations by mimetic instincts, shared projects, language and semiosis and these bonds along with the feedback provided by among other things, self-awareness and reflection by human beings provide the conditions for further living entities to emerge: the Powers; corporisations. The trajectory is of each 'layer' of emergent things to form a 'substrate' for the emergence of yet another layer of entities.

Anyway, in the article I'm pointing to, Paul Davis writes that he and Sara Walker are proposing:

... that the significant property of biological information is not its complexity, great though that may be, but the way it is organised hierarchically. In all physical systems there is a flow of information from the bottom upwards, in the sense that the components of a system serve to determine how the system as a whole behaves. ... In living organisms, this pattern of bottom-up information flow mingles with the inverse – top-down information flow – so that what happens at the local level can depend on the global environment, as well as vice versa ... Walker and I propose that the key transition on the road to life occurred when top-down information flow first predominated. Based on simple mathematical models, we think it may have happened suddenly, analogously to a heated gas abruptly bursting into flame.

Applying this in my 'creational trajectory' would suggest that where trans-human entities formed of human agglomerations emerge, then they do so because the 'top-down information flow' reaches a critical point. Given that the 'top-down' thing is about exercising control and is composed, at least in part, of human mentalities interacting, then we have the makings of corporisations: the Powers that Be.

The Bible and homosexual relationships

Interesting: I think; this:

 Was the author intending to enshrine the view that all lifelong sexual unions should be exclusively heterosexual because this is a ‘creation ordinance’? Or, is this simply the normative illustration, whereas the critical truths of the story lie elsewhere? If it is the former, then it is perhaps legitimate to refer to practising homosexual sex, even within a lifelong relationship, as having ‘fallen short of God’s ideal’ and to state that those who are not heterosexually orientated are ‘in need of restoration’. But if it’s the latter, then does the ‘norm’ necessarily infer the ‘ideal’? Or is it like the ‘norm’ of being right-handed, which never implies any failing of those who are born left-handed? If so, then neither of the earlier negative definitions is appropriate, but instead cause a great deal of unnecessary pain and, sometimes, terrible tragedy.

... is Steve Chalke making basically the same argument as I made here, about two-thirds of the way in under the sub-heading "What's wrong with the creational argument?". I think he is. I like the left-handedness illustration. But I think that Steve and I both need to work at sharpening up the expression of the fundamental insight so that the arbitrariness of extending the moral imperative to gendered-difference is seen even more readily.


The Bible and Homosexuality: Part One | Christianity, Sexuality:

A still big voice in the noise

Last week, in the Church Times'; Prayer for the week: There was an interesting prayer for those who don't do quiet well. It is by Martin Wroe.

They say you're available
on certain conditions. Quiet ones.
That if I can find an air of
 tranquillity
It carries that still small voice.
But I don't do quiet, stillness.
I am not tranquil except when
I am asleep
And then I am not available
As far as I know.
So, what's the chance of a still
big voice in the noise,
Of hearing you in the roaring
traffic, ...

Meryl Doney's comments on the prayer are, to my mind, pretty fair enough. However, there was a response in the letters this week from Mrs Viven Moores
Sir, - Meryl Doney chooses a "prayer for those who don't do silence" (Prayer for the Week, 4 January). Of course God can speak to us anywhere, but why should he have to shout?

Now perhaps I missed something about this, but I must admit I felt that it was avoiding the challenge. So I wrote back (though I doubt it'll be published).

I had taken Meryl Doney's "prayer for those who don't do silence" as something quite positive. As a Myers-Briggs (MBTI) extrovert (E), I came to realise that much spirituality teaching has tended to be by introverts for introverts. So I'd like to respond to Viven Moores' comment "God can speak to us anywhere, but why should he have to shout?" It's not a matter of God shouting: it's a matter of how we process information.

For introverts (in the MBTI 'I' sense), being quiet and processing internally is important. And I have, over years of spiritual practice, learnt to appreciate the value of silence and solitude -but it's not my native spiritual language. If Deity is everywhere, God doesn't need to wait for us to be quiet before speaking to us -we might need rather to learn to tune into God's disclosure in the everyday and to be helped in our discernment by being in conversation with others. Not all activity and noise is necessarily distraction.

Given that it is likely that the majority of the national population are MBTI E's, we church people surely need to be able to offer spiritual formation in the native language of E's as well as I's.

The feral rich: tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime

This month's New Internationalist has a good set of articles on the theme of the feral rich. Obviously referencing some politicians' rightist-press rhetoric about the 'feral poor'. There's a great set of cartoons under the title: "The Feral Rich, How Can We Help Them?" and it's a '10-point action plan for policymakers'.
These are witty. Some of them are quite worth considering (I nominate 2, 4, 6, 10).
1. Gang Culture. Break up their vicious, criminal gangs by arresting the ringleaders and locking them up. (The cartoon has the police turning up at the World Economic Forum)
2. Parenting. Provide parenting classes to teach social values and respect for others that they can pass on to their children.
3. Housing. Move them out of overvalued ghettos in the centres of the world's capitals. Turn over the properties that they own but rarely occupy to public use and social housing.
4. Crime and Rehab. Crack down on repeat climate-crime offenders by confiscating their luxury cars and private jets. Rehabilitate persistent offenders by teaching them how to walk and use public transport.
5. Wean the work-shy off the benefits of unearned profit. Break trust-fund dependence. Get undeserving recipients on to work experience schemes.
6. Anti-social behaviour. Use 'tough love' to deal with those who engage in risky behaviour, who gamble, cheat and deceive and then expect the public to bail them out of trouble. Ground them, tag them and ban them from using the internet to vandalize the global economy.
7. Profligacy. Target contraception towards problem families with morbidly obese carbon footprints fuelled by irresponsible lifestyles.
8. Vandalism. Get them to clear up after themselves (the cartoon has a reference to BP chief being made to help clear up an oil spill.)
9. Social Conscience. Teach them to start paying their own way. Lesson no.1 Pay your tax.
10. Restorative Justice.  Get overpaid execs who helped themselves to bonuses from bailed-out banks and businesses to face the victims of their crime and repay the money they owe.

The feral rich -- New Internationalist

Spirituality of the ordinary in these days of miracle and wonder

As a piece of cultural observation, I think that this is worth paying attention to because it seems to me to identify something that could well become a big  issue in the kind of way that 'instantness' has. The basic idea is that the proliferation of cameras and connectedness combined with the human attraction to novelty, spectacle and emotional extremes is likely to produce a stream of the extraordinary ...

 Cameras are becoming ubiquitous, so as our collective recorded life expands, we'll accumulate thousands of videos showing people being struck by lightening. When we all wear tiny cameras all the time, then the most improbable accident, the most superlative achievement, the most extreme actions of anyone alive will be recorded and shared around the world in real time. Soon only the most extraordinary moments of our 6 billion citizens will fill our streams. So henceforth rather than be surrounded by ordinariness we'll float in extraordinariness.

So what will it feel like to be 'us' -ordinary people in humdrum lives when

the improbable dominates the archive to the point that it seems as if the library contains ONLY the impossible, then these improbabilities don't feel as improbable.

So plausibility is affected. The miraculous is more imaginable, the 'laws' of physics perhaps seem more likely to be 'broken' "To the uninformed, the increased prevalence of improbable events will make it easier to believe in impossible things.".

So will that contribute to the growth of all sorts of belief and superstition? And how should we respond as Christians? I'd suggest we might find ourselves in the place of wanting to defend the regular, predictable and scientific -holding the fort in the face of those who may believe anything, as GK Chesterton warned.

Theologically, I would suggest that the Incarnation, notwithstanding its own extraordinariness, paradoxically affirms ordinariness. The extraordinary actually plays into the very ordinary and humdrum. It is precisely a choice to align with the 99% and the unremarkable and to eschew the spectacular. And even later when the miraculous figures it's understated  and woven into the everyday with Jesus on the whole trying to keep it out of the news because hype distorts and misdirects. The extraordinary tends to discriminate against most of real life. -We have an arrabon of that in 'celebrity culture'.

What I think that this may mean is that we need to help people develop an affirmative spirituality of the commonplace and everyday. This would be a mindfulness of the humdrum. More, I think learning to enjoy, take pleasure in and to be thankful about the regular 'stuff' which supports everyday life. In addition we will need to learn the discipline of curtailing envy of the extraordinariness of others, to be content and to forgo invidious comparison.

And we need to begin now to help people to grow in these dimensions of spirituality.

The Technium: The Improbable is the New Normal:

Does 'celibacy' include 'petting'?

I was amused by Sharon Ferguson's (of the LGCM) turn of phrase "The important thing is not what people do with their dangly bits, but whether their relationship is faithful and loving."
This is all part of commenting on the possibility of civilly-partnered gay men being able to be bishops in the C of E. My problem with this is that it is what people do or don't do with their dangly bits that isn't really talked about, and perhaps it should be because I suspect that there is a great deal of duplicity about this.

To put it as plainly as I feel I can given that this blog is 'universally' rated: there are manual acts and other non-penetrative but sexually-related actions that are being implicitly 'outlawed' by this ruling. The problem is that if an unmarried heterosexual couple engage in these things, it's probably considered by those, like Anglican Mainstream, who oppose gay uncelibate partnerships as a Christian option, to be kind of alright. I may be wrong, but 'heavy petting' is what this amounts to, but I bet lots of young Evangelical Christians do these things before marriage and would only consider penetrative sex as sex for the purposes of sexual morality.

So, I reckon the challenge back to the Anglican Mainstream (soi dissant) is what is your policy on heterosexual 'petting'? Because if it's not directly comparable to homosexual possibilities then it probably actually is homophobia and not simply heteronormativity. The follow-up question, if it is agreed that there should be comparability, is whether their members are willing to act on that. And so we do actually need to ask not so much what people do with their dangly bits, but what kinds of dangly-bit action counts as 'within-marriage sex' and what doesn't -and to be consistent about how that applies also to unmarried heterosexuals.

What I mean by contrasting homophobia and heteronormativity is that the former, I take it, is about attitudes of hatred or denial of civil respect and equality while heteronormativity I take to be about offering all civil and personal respect but holding that in regard to sex and marriage, only hetero- is morally sanctioned.

Fresh storm hits C of E after move to allow gay bishops - Home News - UK - The Independent:

Price ebooks less stupidly

This is ridiculous! I fancied this book, but when I saw this:

Kindle Edition 9.69
Paperback -- 8.91 

Something rebellious rose up in me: The ebook should be cheaper -there's insignificant costs for production: no costs for paper, printing. I think a fee for the author and for editing services is fine. But. So come on Westminster John Knox Press: price it properly. I reckon a fiver might be reasonable. The US site has it the right way round (though still on the high side).

A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age eBook: Glen H. Stassen: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store: