The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

Soul Synaesthesia

This month’s Believer documents a strange case from Hungary of audio-kinetic synaesthesia. The subject, whenever he hears certain words, ‘sees’ them as discrete and definite actions or gestures.

Colour synaesthesia is more common: sounds or numbers are seen as distinct colours, and some estimates reckon that around 1 in 23 experience it.

And I just wonder if some of us suffer some kind of soul-synaesthesia. All these sounds, words and senses kick off an involuntary response in the spirit that wonders why and how, and wanders, in wonder…

Technorati Tags: Synaesthesia,Believer

Life after Life ¦ Christianity and Euthanasia ¦ Reverend Death

I finally got round to watching 'Reverend Death', Jon Ronson's documentary about George Exoo, a Unitarian minister who has performed around 100 'assisted suicides', mainly for those who have been turned down by other organisations practising legally in places/states where it is carefully controlled because they do not have terminal illnesses.

Most of the people he seemed to help were suffering depression, or from ME. The film followed him 'helping' one woman who had chronic fatigue and 'couldn't go on', though half way through the first attempt she started buttering a bagel, and announced her house-mate was due back any minute. This sent the guy packing quick-sharp: what he is doing is clearly illegal, and this was taken up in the film as the FBI chased him for extradition to Ireland to face charges of assisting a woman in Dublin to commit suicide.

It is possible to see Exoo as a very prolific serial killer akin to Harold Shipman - a British doctor who ended the lives of perhaps 215 people, most of whom were nearing the end of their lives too. Certainly, it seemed he got some sort of thrill out of 'fulfilling his calling' - which is precisely how Exoo saw things.

One thing he would do for all his clients ('because', as he said many times in almost Pythonesque comic style, 'you've not done this before') is give them a copy of 'Life After Life' - a video detailing the near-death experiences of a bunch of characters (some of whose stories didn't quite seem to hold up).

Exoo's reasoning is that 'death is a great adventure to a wonderful place'. And this is where things get interesting. Because if, as Christians or otherwise, we really believe in some after-life, then should we be critical of Exoo, or of euthenasia at all? (He claims that Jesus practised some sort of suicide, which Stanley Hauerwas refuted, before being able to come up with any proof text to show God didn't approve of suicide.)

I was watching the programme with someone I am close to, who trained as a nurse. She mentioned that in practice, in hospices and elsewhere, euthanasia is pretty common.

She then revealed that as she had watched her father lie dying of cancer in the 60's, his GP had passed her a suitable amount of morphine and told her to 'stop his pain.' She thought about it for a very long time, and then did gradually increase his dose to relieve his pain, knowing that this would kill him.

I personally think this was an incredibly brave and humane thing to do. I don't think it excuses Exoo, or his associate who does the same for a $7000 fee (Exoo takes no money) but I do think if we are to state that we believe in an after life, we need to do so in an active sense, by which I mean making sure that we fully value this life, and don't simply cheapen it as a blip before the 'real' version begins, while permitting people the option to humanely end life at an appropriate moment in a dignified manner.

Saviour Sibling?

A bill regarding the use of human embryos is currently passing through parliament at the moment, and, naturally, causing a huge amount of debate. One piece on the BBC caught my ear the other morning - a Bishop was asked what he thought about the creation of so-called 'saviour siblings': human beings created for the sole purpose of saving another. And I thought, this is going to be interesting, how is a Christian going to respond to that?

He didn't go there of course, but it remains a difficult area of theology: is Jesus just a 'saviour sibling'?

Technorati: Embryo | Saviour Sibling

The World Can't Wait For You, USA

[Update: following extraordinary scenes where the US contingent were booed by the rest of the delegates when it was announced they would reject the compromised plan, they performed a dramatic U-turn and have agreed to adopt the 'road-map' (wouldn't 'path way' be greener?!). A huge relief. Now we just need some non-automobile metaphors :-]

Gore has given a truly stirring speech as he accepted his Nobel peace prize, offering a clarion call to the US to get on and start taking climate seriously. Good on him. Quoting Churchill - and if the world had to rise against fascism, it surely must rise in equal force to battle climate change - who said in '38 of those vascillating about action,

"They go on in strange paradox, decided only be undecided, resolved only to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent"

He goes on to urge the world to forget about the US and press ahead, leaving a blank place for them to sign once the muppet Bush is out of the way in a year or so...

Eels | Quantum Physics | Many Worlds | Meaning

A quite brilliant piece of TV on BBC 4 tonight. Worth the license fee on its own, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives traced the journey of Eels front-man Mark Everett uncovering the life of his father, the eminent physicist Hugh Everett III. Everett Snr, in a radical challenge to the Quantum Mechanical orthodoxy of the day, proposed his 'Many Worlds Interpretation', in which parallel universes split off at each moment of decision. Derided at the time, he became depressed and withdrawn. He died young, and Mark's mother and sister followed soon after, his sister taking her own life, writing in her suicide note that she was 'going to find her father in one of his parallel universes.' He was a hidden man, who rarely spoke at home. It was only a few years before his death that his theory was finally accepted; it is only through this documentary that Mark discovers just how important a figure in science his father was.

And, strangely, I wrote a poem about Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation a few weeks ago. Which it seems timely to put here, and add to the probably already huge canon of poetic works on the subject ;-)

Perhaps I Prefer The Inefficiencies of This Universe
To The Cold Efficiency of Your Myriad Others

Relativity,
Two clocks moving apart
At light speed never separate
And, in time, are forever together.

Yes, Albert,
As soon as you Equalled the product of m and c-squared,
You locked us in:
No information shall travel faster than light,
Yes, our infinity, given a limit:
46.5 billion light years
To the edge
Of us.

But you are there, and I here,
And strangely, from each centre elsewhere,
A new spacetime arcs out,
Socking the eye with an infinite number of
Observable universes.

And thus, inevitably, an infinite number of you.

Some mother said I was unique, but now
A father’s physics wants me to believe in
Another me,
Beginning 10 to the 10
to the 29 metres far away.
Too far, and yet too close,
For my comfort.

Quantum physicist,
Hugh Everett III, what have you done?
“The existence of other universes
is inevitable”
Said your Many Worlds Interpretation,
Which denied too the objective reality
Of wavefunction collapse.

And I’m like, WTF?

You go on:
“Between 0 and 1:
A single random number
With all its infinite decimals,
Is expressed, computationally,
Longer
Than
The computational expression
Of the whole set of numbers
That exist there.”

Meaning?

Apparently this:
A universe of infinite parallels
May be more economic
Than a straight, linear,
Singular
One.

Meaning?

Somewhere you and I are together,
Though, in this universe, we are apart,
And somewhere else there are more in betweens
Than we could ever fathom.
And that may be more efficient
Than this.

And now my gourd is swirling,
Thinking,
What is love, and life and us,
Other than to trust in this membrane-thin world,
And chose to forego
In the infinite possibility
Of the efficient multiverse,
And dig long
And deep
For life,
And love,
In this
One?

Technorati: Eels | Parallel Universe | Everett

In Praise of Eccentricity

Just back from a wonderful weekend in the depths of Wales. I didn't find RS Thomas, or any great rural epiphany, but, in keeping with the joys of weekends in other people's houses, had a great time dipping into some books.

The most enjoyable was Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics*. It's an eccentric volume itself, but delicious for that difference. The Folio edition I was perusing began with a quote from John Stuart Mill:

"In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time."

The quote comes from his 1859 book 'On Liberty', where he regularly rages against 'custom', believing it leads to conformity, and thus lack of freedom:

"Even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes."

Eccentricity simply means 'having a different centre'. For this reason alone, and with no thought for wanting to be 'quirky' or 'different', I'd like to sing in praise of being eccentric. Within this definition it is only the eccentric who can speak prophetic criticism. It is only the eccentric who can, by the gravity of their thought, draw close and change the orbit of the masses. Bauman writes in Liquid Life of "the mind-boggling quandary of having to mark oneself out as an individual, while also remaining obviously an acceptable part of the group" and it is this pressure that draws us into predictable, one-dimensional orbits. Being such a satellite around such a large mass is safe, yes, but cold and life-less.

The force to break away from this comes in two forms. The greater force, perhaps, is the gravity of the a-centrics, the vacuous cult of celebrity that tempts us with ideas of total freedom: responsibility-free sex, rootless trans-atlantic existence and the exultation of form over content. But nothing can have no centre, save nothing itself.

So it is down to the eccentric, the differently centred, the 'dirty trickster' as my book would have it, to provide some alter-orbit. The physics is clear on this: the closer this eccentric orbit swings to the other mass, the greater its changing effect. Eccentricity is not an excuse for seclusion or flight, but an invitation to challenge the prose-flattened, cathode-ray world with some vital poetry.

[* The book. Not the online fashion store. Urgghhhh.]

Technorati: Eccentricity | Eccentrics | Mill | Sitwell

In The Shadow of The Moon

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a magnificent movie. No voice-over. No animation. No mock-ups. Just archive footage, and interviews with the Apollo astronauts. It's stunning as a film, stunning to be reminded of perhaps the single greatest technological feat of mankind, and stunning to be reminded - in a way Gore never quite achieves in AIT - that the earth really is immensely precious. Armstrong's continued absence from any documentary - literary or on film - only serves to add mystery to an already ethereal and epiphanic event. He was the first to step out onto another world; what God whispered to him before leaving for someplace else he will continue to keep to himself.

If, you're in London, you'll have to catch it soon, as it's been on a scandalously limited release. If you miss it, buy the DVD, with the largest screen you can lay your hands on. Or, better still, read Andrew Smith's 'Moondust' - which very likely inspired the film.

Technorati: Al Gore | Andrew Smith | In The Shadow of The Moon | Moondust | Neil Armstrong

'Does Your Soul Have a Cold?' | Wholphin | IFC Monday 9pm EDT

Out of the same stable as The Believer, Wholphin is a short-story mag for short films. They mailed me today about a great-looking film, showing on IFC this Monday at 9pm EDT. (I'd love someone to record it for me ;-) The spiel goes:

Back in 2000, western pharmaceutical companies began a massive marketing campaign to introduce a new product to the good people of Japan: depression. Before 2000, the good people of Japan apparently did not even have a word to describe sadness as a debilitating biological illness. So the companies had to coin a new word, "utsu," and create an appropriately catchy ad slogan to help explain the concept. They chose the phrase, "Does Your Soul Have A Cold?" antidepressant sales have since quintupled.

Mike Mills (pictured), director of Thumbsucker, has made an incredibly intimate film documenting the human effects of America's latest cultural export to Japan.

Catch the trailer here.

Technorati: Believer | Depression | Japan | Wholphin

Your Digital Carbon Footprint

It's obviously rich of me talking about this, flying as I am to LA on Monday, but it's an often over-looked fact that the net runs on servers, and servers draw power. Nic mentioned the other day that a simple calculation of the server power-draw for Second Life, divided by the average number of users online at any one time, gives the incredible fact that Second Life avatars use more CO2 than an average Brazilian (or should I say, person in Brazil ;-). Another great reason for never going back there.

So when do Typepad release a 'Green Tariff', which allows you to ensure your power-draw is coming from renewables?

Technorati: Environment | Green | Second Life | Typepad

No More Our Father? | IVF, Sexuality and the Father Figure Clause

I'm not one for 'natural order' arguments, but part of me is drawn that way over the news that the 'father figure' clause currently in British IVF legislation is potentially going to be dropped.

A government joint committee report "took issue with the proposal to remove the current requirement for IVF clinics to take into account the need for a father. They said it was right that lesbian couples should be considered for IVF, but said removing the father clause could encourage clinics to downgrade the importance of a two parent family."

Absolutely. In my experience as a teacher I am absolutely convinced that it is the absence of proper father figures that is leaving children flailing around for meaning when they reach around 12 years old. It is then that, for boys, the move away from the maternal accelerates, and the move towards manhood begins. In the absence of secure father figures, boys struggle to form secure masculine identities. Many begin to violently reject the maternal, and their behavior becomes very poor. Others, unable to find security in the paternal, instead define them through the fraternal, and these immature groups of boys struggling toward manhood become gangs.

I seriously hope that the committee's concerns are listened to. In our virtuous march towards a just and liberal society we must also make sure that freedom for one group does not impact on the lives of another. In this case I am worried that freedom for any woman to bear children is going to very seriously impact society in a few years time as the 'crisis in masculinity' gets worse.

Am I being too conservative here, or is it common sense that a child needs a mother and a father for a balanced upbringing?

Technorati: Family | IVF | Lesbian | Masculinity | Parents

Religion: Ignore God, It's About The Sacred

This month's Prospect carries an excellent short essay outlining some arguments against Hitchens, Dawkins et al: 'the evangelical atheists, shouting from their pulpits'.

The author, Roger Scruton, is surprised by 'the extent to which religion is caricatured by its current opponents, who see it as nothing more than a system of unfounded beliefs about the cosmos - beliefs, that, to the extent that they conflict with the scientific worldview, are heading straight for refutation.'

Refuted they might be, but going away, they ain't. And this is what really riles Dawkins and Hitchens. They get very wound up at having exposed the whole thing as a fiction, only for people to nod and go on believing it. Scruton, as others have, points to work that has shown how the sacred ('moments that stand outside time, in which the loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is confronted and overcome, through immersion in the group') is actually a hugely important part of what it is to be human.

He goes on to look in particular at the writings of René Girard, who works with a kind of inversion of Nietzche: religion is not the cause of violence, but the solution to it. The arguments are too involved to set out briefly here, and I would strongly encourage you to read it fully, (PDF here) but a Scruton summarizes his position:

"The experience of the sacred is not an irrational residue of primitive fears, nor is it a form of superstition that will one day be chased away by science. It is a solution to the accumulated aggression which lies in the heart of human communities."

The question this leaves me with is: once we have returned to the sacred, where is God, and what of the Christ event? Girard does touch on this, but what I am really looking forward to at Greenbelt this summer is hearing Peter Rollins talk on this very subject.

Connected post: Gift Exchange and Terror. Violence occurs when 'the gift' - an act of openness between the self and an-other - breaks down.

Technorati: Dawkins | Girard | Greenbelt | Prospect | Jesus | Rollins | Scruton

Gravity and Grace (1) ¦ Wild Blue Yonder ¦ Living Between Two Oceans

Last night I went with my good friend and doctor of film Gareth Higgins to see Werner Herzog's latest film 'The Wild Blue Yonder'.

It's a deeply comic, deeply environmental parable about space travel, aliens, shopping malls, complex math and hyperspace. And quite wonderful for it.

Speaking to Gareth afterwards, I mentioned that the path of the film reminded me very much of the wonderful children's book 'Penguin Dreams' in which Chongo Chingi flies into the air, and goes so high through space that he pops out back through the surface of his pool. Herzog uses the same trick in this movie: footage from a Space Shuttle mission is cut with mathematicians describing the theory of 'chaotic travel' to other galaxies... the 'astronauts' are then seen diving into this new world as the footage switches to incredible shots of divers exploring waters beneath an ice cap.

The metaphor is, I think, a beautiful one. As humans we live at the interface between two oceans: the seas below, and the 'ocean of the air' above. The tallest human construction is only a few hundred metres tall. Relative to the size of the planet, even Everest is only a minor imperfection; scaled down, Earth is smoother than a billiard ball.

We are, in many ways, but a minor irritant on the surface of the planet. And it will scratch us off with no thought unless we learn to live in peace. The dream of zooming off to another planet is satirized by Herzog very well here. It ain't going to happen. If it could have, aliens would have taken our fine earth by now. They tried. But no one came to shop for their trinkets.

It's a great film with some incredible footage and wonderful music, and reminded me very much of another environmental meditation, Baraka. What is particularly striking are the disorientating shots of zero-gravity living, and the parallels between floating in space, and floating under the ocean. But more of that in the next post.

 

Technorati: Wild Blue Yonder | Herzog | Penguin Dreams | Environment | Ocean | NASA | Space

Rain | Technology Anoraks

After about 6 weeks of solid sunshine, it's finally started raining this week. We needed it. Ironically, the downpours seemed to have caught the water supplies off-guard, and we had 3 water mains burst around our street, closing schools and leaving us without any.

The allotment certainly needed the water. I was down there the other day just doing some weeding and tidying up, and I got caught in a cloud burst. No coat. No umbrella. I had the option to run for the shed, but in the end I decided not to bother.

Then I thought: when was the last time I had really experienced the environment like this? When was the last time you did? We wrap ourselves in Gore-Tex and fleeces, we pop up umbrellas, shelter in shops, step only on hard pavements or retreat to hermetically sealed, climate controlled cars. We never have to feel the raw heat of the sun, or the bite of real cold; our feet don't have to get muddy, we don't ever get soaked.

People talk about techie anoraks, but really, for all of us, technology has become an anorak, protecting us from the environment. Technology has lifted us slightly off the earth. To a plane unaffected by the seasons. It is this disconnect that has left us unmoved by the extinction of around an entire species every 30 minutes, and unwilling to step off the tarmac into the mud to save the planet.

Our separation has moved us from integrated participants in a balanced eco-system to surface irritants. Mother Earth is catching a fever. She'll heat up to rid herself of this infection we've become unless we act soon.

One small thing you could do to begin to be part of the environment again is take the anorak off and step out in the rain.

Technorati: Allotment | Environment | Gore Tex

Asymmetry | Creativity | The Other

'In Our Time' - the BBC's flagship science, mathematics and arts discussion programme - was on symmetry this week. It was, as ever, a fascinating mix of physics, philosophy and history, full of interesting moments, but one comment that jumped out at me was part of a section on symmetry in quantum / particle physics:

"The amount of matter and anti-matter were very slightly asymmetrical at the dawn of creation. If they had not been the 'big bang' would have cancelled itself out"

It reminded me of a quote from Chesterton I used in the book:

Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were able to reckon up the human body: he would at once see that it was duplicate. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes on the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he felt he was right, he would be wrong. […] Life is not an illogicality, yet it is a trap for logicians; its inexactitude lies hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

There is an essential symmetry to life, to beauty, to science. But hidden beneath there also lurks a vital asymmetry. All things are not equal. The universe is not quite in balance.

It was in this asymmetric place that the universe was created. And it remains in these asymmetric places that true creativity occurs. It has to: in balance there is no newness, in equilibrium there is no disturbance. The artist does not create from balance. The artist reflects on and is immersed in context and history, but the newness comes from elsewhere, the creativity from a disturbance of these forces.

Creation and redemption are asymmetric. Their imbalance come from mystery, from elsewhere, and , being from outside the boundary, are dirty.

The balanced, symmetrical self will never genuinely create. The 'other' is needed to unsettle us.

Technorati: BBC | Chesterton | In Our Time | Asymmetry | Symmetry

The Trap

Last Sunday saw the start of a 3 part documentary series called 'The Trap'. It is by Adam Curtis, the guy who brought us the award-winning 'The Power of Nightmares - The Rise of the Politics of Fear.'

The Trap is very much in the same style - wonderful archive footage and superbly scripted voiceover. This time his thesis is that the 'freedom' that Western democracy has brought us is actually a much narrower thing than we are led to believe. Rather, as a result of Game Theory that arose during the Cold War, we are encouraged to see that being highly suspicious of one another is our best strategy.

The first part was one of the best pieces of television I've ever seen. Dumbing down this isn't. Catch it on repeat if you can, and book in Sunday night at 9pm on BBC2 to get the next installment.

Technorati: Adam Curtis | BBC | Television | The Trap

Damien Hirst | New Religion

A unique chance to catch Hirst's 'New Religion' works for free, and in the amazing setting of the church of All Hallows on the Wall.

"There are four important things in life: religion, love, art and science. People tend to think of religion and science as two very separate things, one cold and clinical, the other emotional and warm and loving. I wanted to leap over those boundaries and give you something that looks clinical and cold but has all the religious, metaphysical connotations too. "

Technorati: Hirst | All Hallows

Finally Teleportation is Possible ¦ So That's How Philip Did it

I've always gawped in wonder at the bit in Acts 8 where "the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing. Philip, however, appeared at Azotus".

The only teleportation reference in the Bible?

Anyway, seems like they've finally worked out how to do it. A brilliant paper by a top US defense scientist on practical teleportation can be found here

Best quote from it:

A traveler stepping through the throat will simply be teleported into the other remote spacetime region or another universe (note: the Einstein equation does not fix the spacetime topology, so it is possible that wormholes are inter-universe as well as intra-universe tunnels)

In other words, we can teleport you. But we've no idea where you'll end up. Could be somewhere in this universe, could be somewhere in a parallel one.

Volunteers? If Apple release iTeleporter, who'll use it in a service first, Grace or Moot? My money would be on iKon turning up at Greenbelt and causing havoc with it ;-)

Global Re-boot | Deep Ecology

The Norwegian government today released the final plans today for the 'doomsday vault' that will eventually hold seeds from all known varieties of crops in safe storage in case of 'nuclear war, asteroid strike or environmental catastrophe'. They're building it on a remote island near the North Pole. In the event of a burn up or freeze, it's going to be the recovery disk for a global re-boot.

So called 'Deep Ecologists' would have it different. They see a catastrophic event such as this seed bank is trying to survive as nature's way of getting rid of us, and carrying on. We're a virus; the planet will get a 'flu, heat up and knock us out.

It's a question of scale. If we look at the highest mountain (just under 9000m) in relation to the radius of the earth (around 6,500,000m) then scaled down, the earth would be as smooth as a billiard ball. All our grand projects: 'skyscrapers' and vast cities are no more than a surface irritant. We exist at the fragile membrane between the ocean of the atmosphere above and the seas below. We climbed out of the water many millions of years ago. And now, having become an annoyance to both oceans, the sea is rising to take us back.

I have many sympathies for this view. I'm not optimistic about humanity's chances of averting global warming. A 90% reduction in global CO2 emissions in 30 years? I doubt it, even with the $25 million carrot Branson is now dangling.

But I just don't think the deep ecology takes seriously the deeper fact of our evolution into conscience. Somewhere, at some time, when the Spirit moved over the surface of the deep, the spark of conscience moved us from ape to something more. And that intervention changes everything. The earth is not a simple closed system.

So will God intervene and protect us from disaster? No. But we will be held responsible for screwing up the greatest gift we were given. And if nothing else works, not the doom-mongering or the cash incentives, it's this theological imperative that might just swing the US Christian right to force the government to do something wildly significant.

Trouble is, when the shit hits the fan, we can be sure of one thing: it won't be the poor, the hungry, the vulnerable who'll be holed up in special bunkers. The rich will survive. And with some sick irony they'll thank God for it.

Technorati: Branson | Deep Ecology | Environment | Seed Bank

Wake up, sleepy heads!

Sleep has always fascinated me. Something about absence making the heart grow fonder, perhaps. Via Wired today there's a great article about science's renewed interest in sleep: why do we do it? Fish die quicker without sleep than food... It is essential to all mammals.

One interesting perspective it raises: the more sensible question is perhaps "why do we wake up?"

[When we are awake], the body's metabolic system shifts into the catabolic phase. The body's cells are tearing themselves down in support of the body's need for energy to be mobile, to obtain food and to procreate. It's something that the body can only tolerate for a matter of several hours. Then the body must revert to it's 'default' mode of sleep, the anabolic phase when damage is repaired, growth can take place and the body's heightened immuned defenses intensify their battle against the foreign organisms and viruses that have invaded the animal.

I had a hunch in an article I wrote for EmergingChurch.info that sleep is the time when the brain properly 'networks' memories and experiences. Without sleep time, our minds have no time to reflect, to make connections, to learn. Without sleep, we're just default impusle/response machines. The point? The church needs sleep time. Without times when the body rests, it can never reflect and learn, it's thinking can never evolve.

I think this is still vitally true. Without sleep, churches, like fish will die. But the question about why we bother to wake up at all is relevant. If we just remained asleep we could never reproduce.

For some of us, we need to heed the call to 'wake up'. Others need to be sent to their rooms. All of us need a balance, of waking and sleeping, of reflecting and acting. It's a pattern we see Jesus modelling in the gospels. Time away, time doing stuff. And in the target-driven data-mad world of industrial church it's important to realize the significance of doing that. But, in the sometimes horizontal world of the sleepy emerging church, it's also important we realize we've got to get out of bed and get one with the work.

We Like (Gay) Sheep Have Gone Astray?

In today's Independent there is an interesting piece about gay sheep:

For the past five years, a team of researchers at Orgeon State
University has been investigating the sexuality of sheep. Early on,
they proved what every sheep farmer knows: some 8 per cent of rams are
gay. When it comes to sex, these woolly homosexuals shun ewes and
engage exclusively in ram-on-ram action.

It turns out that the hypothalamus in these sheep's brains is significantly smaller, and these differences exist even in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy. It seems a further 8% or so of sheep are entirely asexual. The reason for the research? The lack of reproduction of this minority is costing farmers dear... And they've worked out a way to make them straight, too.

I wonder how this biological evidence will be treated by the various camps? Hari, himself gay and a forceful critic of the church's attitude, admits he "fears the consequences of moves to abort or "cure" gay people - but I
cannot fear greater knowledge of the biology of human sexuality."

Personally, I think the whole issue is a huge distraction. While serious injustice remains, with famine, wars and global warming, the huge and divisive focus on attitudes to homosexuality as some benchmark for faithful belief is a travesty.

In my own tradition of the Church of England we have in Rowan Williams one of the wisest, clearest, politicially active and deeply spiritual leaders for many years. And yet he has been blunted by this one minor issue. The church has gone astray on this. We have been distracted.

Technorati: Anglicanism |  Church |  Discrimination |  Homosexuality |  Independent |  Religion |  Religion