Apocalypse now?

When the history of the twenty-first century comes to be written (if there is anybody left to write it) will it be presented as a narrative of religious intolerance or as a celebration of the triumph of reason over medieval brutality? Personally I hope neither - not because I don’t find reason a good basis for sensible discussion, but because in the present situation cool heads are needed in order to preserve kindness and mercy - equally necessary core human values but lying in an area beyond pure reason. Rationality is not enough. I am of course talking in the shadow of the recent tourist killings in Tunisia, along with the ten years’ remembrance of the 7/7 bombings in London, and any number of other news headlines which almost daily bring us face to face with the crudities of modern life in a stressed and overcrowded planet. Incidents like these really do make one hesitate to apply the instruction of Jesus to love one’s enemies and turn the other cheek. Mindless fanaticism tends to generate mindless responses, and the impulse to put on armour and pick up a gun for a new Crusade lies not far beneath the surface, as events in Iraq and Afghanistan arguably demonstrated. But even if we have reluctantly put aside these crude reactions in favour of limited air strikes by unmanned drones, it still remains the case that our capacity to respond to the challenge is far from adequate. All very well calling for the eradication of radicalisation, but like the ineptly named war on terror, the terms of the battle are so vaguely stated that pretty well nobody seems to know what is really going on, and spectacular violence ends, not in shock and awe, but in misery, mass displacement of whole populations, and the rueful discovery that there is no exit plan for making things work after the explosion. Part of the problem is that nearly all religions have a crude medieval element which has never been outgrown; while another part of the problem is that society in general believes that it has outgrown religion altogether. Anybody can do what they like, within reason; sin and blasphemy no longer exist: it’s enough to be polite to the neighbours and draw the curtains when appropriate. This absence of a universally accepted ethos founded in an agreed ideology presents difficulties for both politicians and religious leaders. The politically correct answer is that national security demands measures to keep dangerous ideologies from spreading: if that requires surveillance of targeted individuals, so be it: public safety justifies the intrusion into individual personal life space, bugging of phones, interception of messages. But the development and presentation of an alternative ideology, one which addresses the concerns of the fundamentalists while educating them out of their blinkered view of the world around – where is it? Do we even understand the nature of the problem? Maybe they have a point anyway about tourists lolling on deckchairs, flaunting their flesh. Sometimes we don’t have the courage to say so, hiding behind the excuse of political correctness. If the politicians are short of arguments, can the church present an alternative, a credo which inspires not just committed believers but the undecided, the don’t-knows who today form the vast majority of the population? If so, it has to recognize that society really has grown out of some of the ideas which once gave the churches their weighty influence. It’s frustrating to find even in this day and age, that quite liberal thinkers within the church hierarchy pay scant attention to the impact of modern science on religious theory. But science has advanced, while religious theory has been sitting on its hands. Science advances through speculation, relying on the testing of predictive capacity of a model as the only sound means of increasing understanding. If nature proves to confirm the prediction of a theoretical model, the theory is strengthened. When the test fails, the search begins for a better theorem. But speculation does not simply mean the replacement of one opinion by another. There has to be consistency and there has to be coherence. The best theorem is the one which explains others and shows that they all fall into place as part of a bigger picture. But despite the demonstration by Charles Darwin that man is not a special creation but one of thousands of elegant solutions to the ever-changing problem of reproductive success, the idea that man has evolved with purposive extra help from on high still permeates the thought processes of too many priests and preachers. And, despite the insight of Sigmund Freud and his colleagues that many of our conscious actions mask hidden unconscious processes pulling us in an opposite - and different, sometimes embarrassing, direction - despite the observation that many of our supposed moral certainties are in fact the projections of hidden unconscious imaginings, nevertheless believers accept without question the irreconcilable oppositions which lurk beneath the surface of our outwardly well-ordered religious and social behaviour. A broader view of man - for instance the self-understanding developed so fruitfully by Freud’s contemporary Carl Jung - is only gradually entering the conscious mind of the Church, and it will surely take further time to be absorbed enough to become one of its integral unconscious assumptions. These are only two fairly obvious examples of areas where scientific understanding has left the churches behind, no longer competitive as the voice of authority. There are other areas where the situation is equally problematic. But without addressing these deficiencies the Church (any church) will not be able to maintain its credibility. The problem is not in the message, but in its formulation. God is still the fount of mercy, the source of inspiration to artists and craftsmen, the loving father of the whole creation. Jesus is still our master, our model, our Saviour. It is still our duty to love God with all our heart and all our mind and all our soul, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. Prayerfulness and respect for nature are still essential to the peace of the soul. The greatest words in human history are still “forgive them, Father, they don’t know what they are doing”. But the theoretical underpinning of these observations has to be restated in ways acceptable to those who have outgrown the special pleadings of the medieval mindset. Otherwise we shall never be able to overcome the radical fundamentalism which is poisoning our society. And in the meantime churches will become extinct. It’s an urgent problem. "Alec" July 2017