God or Not

I tend to avoid talking (or even blogging!) about religion, because if I would prefer people to keep their personal beliefs to themselves and not try and foist them onto me, then I feel I should practice the same restraint. However, I am making this one exception to my general rule, and hope I will be forgiven. Having decided to write something on the subject, though, I am of course prepared and ready for whatever comments anyone who reads this may wish to make!

Last night I watched the third part of Channel 4's excellent "The Bible: A History", this episode being presented by the intensely irritating Anne Widdecombe. However, I forebore my annoyance because I was interested to see what she and others had to say. The topic, for anyone who didn't see it, was the 10 Mosaic Commandments, how they form not only the basis of religious morality, but also of English Common Law, and how they should still underpin our behaviour today.

I could feel my annoyance growing--as it tends to do these days very quickly when I hear people defending the literal truth of the Bible--and found myself wondering why such basic, obvious tenets as "don't kill" should necessarily have a religious origin. Surely these ideas--don't kill, treat other people the way you would like to be treated, don't steal, etc.--are essential axioms for human society? Must they have been handed down by God? And are we to believe that before God's chat with Moses, such things were commonplace and acceptable?

I was brought up a Christian. My parents were both active in our local church, my father being both choirmaster and lay preacher up until his cruelly premature death at the age of 32. Since then my faith has been on a generally downward slope, and today I find it virtually impossible to hold on to a belief in any kind of omnipotent, omniscient, essentially benevolent God, when simply turning on the TV brings so much evidence to the contrary. Today it is from Haiti. Before that it was New Orleans. Before that, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. All of these places lost tens, hundreds of thousands of good, law-abiding and--in the majority of cases--religious people. I know it's an old and hackneyed argument against the existence of God, but it doesn't make it any less potent, and if an argument is good enough for Richard Dawkins, its certainly good enough for me.

What do such disasters tell us about God, and a belief in Him? We are presented with three equally unsatisfactory options, it seems to me, if we wish to maintain a belief in God:

1) God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, and cannot prevent natural disasters

2) God could prevent such tragedies but chooses not to

3) "God works in mysterious ways."

Which of those would I most like to have as my own creed? Frankly, none! Do I find infinitely more palatable the idea that in fact there is no God, at least in the sense that the major religions cast him, and that such events just happen? Yes, hugely so. There are geological and meteorological reasons why, and that's all. On a human scale such disasters are immense, beyond comprehension, but I actually start to feel a certain comfort in knowing that these events were neither a punishment from God, something that He chose to allow to happen even though He had the power to prevent it, or that He couldn't have stopped it even if He'd wanted. The Universe may not care about us one iota, but I actually find that more acceptable than a punitive or powerless God.

So why do I still have even the slightest lingering doubt, the last remains of a reluctance to call myself an atheist? That one is easy to answer: because in that simple and--apparently--obvious act, I would be killing my father. Since the age of nine I have held on to the belief that I would one day see him again, in Heaven. By finally losing totally my faith in God, I would be forced to accept that my father left my life for good when he died thirty years ago, and his spirit died with him. 

I have two hundred thousand Haitian deaths telling me there can be no God, and a single one telling me I must hang on to the possibility that there is. And as illogical as it may seem, the scales aren't entirely tipped towards Haiti.

Sleepers Awake

In the news today is the most remarkable story about UK and Belgian researchers who have found a way to communicate with patients in PVS (Persistent Vegetative State). They have been able to elicit Yes/No answers to their questions by asking patients to imagine themselves playing tennis if the answer is yes, and by then recording activity in the parts of the brain responsible for movement.

This, as I'm sure goes without saying, is an extraordinary discovery and, if further research and wider trials continue to back up their findings, opens up a huge potential for treating and possibly even curing many PVS patients. It will bring hope to hundreds of thousands of friends and family members of people in PVS that they may once again be able to reach their loved ones. It also provokes thoughts about current treatment of people in this condition, and surely must affect decisions about termination of life support or withholding of medical treatment should they become ill.

I don't think I really have anything controversial, profound or insightful to say on this, it just struck as by far the most amazing and potentially far-reaching piece of news I've seen for a very long time. Considering the pace of modern developments in our ability to read, map and interpret brain activity, it surely cannot be beyond our realistic imagination that within a relatively small number if years doctors will be able to go much further than simple "yes/no" responses, and actually read the complex thoughts of people in PVS. And what a revelation those thoughts will be. 

Windmill Dreams

Do the wind turbines atop our hills and mountains sing of hope for the future, or intone our past failures? When they watch us, ant-like from their Olympean heights, do they look down on us in pity, anger or compassion?

Wind turbines polarize views. Champions point out the free, clean, infinite energy source waiting to be tapped, which will free our air of fossil-fuel fumes, and allow our atmosphere to repair itself. They talk of the critical need to reduce carbon emissions, to mitigate as far as possible the potentially devastating effects of climate change, to which we as an island may be particularly vulnerable. They point out that the landscape we cherish is under threat, and if the alternative to its total loss or transformation is the erection of these white leviathans, then that is a price worth paying.

Opponents decry the loss of unspoiled vistas, landscapes virtually unchanged since Turner, Constable and Gainsborough captured them on canvas; the impact on bird populations who have little chance against the giant blades travelling at over 100mph; they claim that they are inefficient, expensive white elephants which cannot solve the problem of replacing fossil fuels.

And as the arguments rage around them, the turbines keep turning, and as they turn, they watch. They are both markers of our failure to grasp earlier the changes happening in our climate, and to act more quickly and decisively, and at the same time sentinels of a future hope that the worst impacts of those changes may be avoided. They may not provide the entire solution but over and above their individual contribution to our energy needs, they represent the results of what we can achieve when we steer our scientific and technological abilities in the right direction.

So when I look at that distant hill, crowned with grey-white turning statues, I do see hope. Tinged with regret that such major changes are becoming increasingly urgent and that it is already too late to entirely prevent the effects of climate change, but hope nevertheless, that we do have the ability to generate the energy we require to sate our greed from clean, renewable resources. 

And I also happen to think that if Messrs Constable, Turner and Gainsborough were around today, they would be reaching for their Titanium White with a certain relish.

Down The Lane

Over Christmas, I spent a few days at my mother's house, the house I grew up in, the house in which I spent the entirety of my generally happy childhood.


After the usual over-eating of Christmas lunch, I decided to take a walk. My mother lives on the edge of a smallish, rather anonymous village, and running down the side of her small house and garden is a narrow lane which winds between a mile or two of fields to the next village. This was the route I decided to take so, wrapped up against the unusually icy weather of this winter, I set off.


The road has a name, but to us it has always been known simply as "the lane." As I walked down between the high hedgerows, the road itself sunken into the landscape by several hundred years of footsteps, horses hooves, cart-wheels and car tyres, my mind drifted away from the present moment, to countless occasions during my childhood when I had walked this same path.


To us, "going down the lane" was always an adventure. There was an air of the mysterious about it. As it meanders its way left and right, climbing hills then running down to the base on the other side to cross over streams, all the time half-hidden between the banks and hedges flanking it, it keeps itself half-hidden, so to young, forming minds, it seemed to hold something new and different with every new stretch which became visible as we walked.


I remembered, too, how much further it seemed. To an adult, a walk to the next village would take no more than forty minutes. To a six-year-old, however, it was a trek that had no ending, a journey into the wilds of the unknown country. There were strange and exotic things to be found as one followed it, and once sight of our house had been lost behind the hedge and the hill we had just crested, we were truly in a foreign land.


After barely ten minutes, I came to "the brook." I remembered how, in early childhood, common features such as brooks, hills, fields and lanes were thought of not simply as one specific instance out of a thousand, but as a singular, unique item, to be denoted by use of the definite article. Our world consisted almost entirely of what could be seen from our window and, since within that proscribed view there was only one such run of water visible, this became "the brook," in exactly the same way that the one road was "the lane," and the one un-metalled track that ran off it was "the dirt-track." The field at the bottom of the garden was "the field," and the playing field at the end of the road was "the rec." No need to be more specific; our world consisted of just one of each feature. Such simple times.


The lane crosses over the brook without fuss; no quaint hump-backed bridge, no dramatic ford, just a utilitarian flat bridge running over a concrete tunnel beneath. I stopped here for a moment, recalling the sense of slightly guilty excitement of the times when, as a seven- or eight-year old boy, I would play under the bridge with my friend. We would have followed the brook from close to his house some half a mile away--a lengthy journey in our world--to arrive at this point. The sense of danger was palpable as we entered the dark tunnel, and if a car were to pass over the bridge as we were underneath it, this excitement would be heightened to almost unbearable levels. Surely the whole thing would choose precisely the moment when two small boys had chosen to clamber through it to crash down, entombing us beneath concrete, masonry and twisted metal?


Beyond the bridge, the road climbs again, towards the destination for many of our childhood walks: "Wooden Hut." Not within my memory has there been an actual wooden hut anywhere in the vicinity, but one supposes that once there was, and this gave rise to its name.


It is very hard to describe this place in a way that would convey the sense of mystery, excitement and joy with which we reached it. In essence, it consists of a stand of trees, bisected by the road. The actions of rain over decades have eroded out the roots of the trees on each side of the road, so that they now form a knotted wooden jumble on the red-earth banks. Climbing up these, one can reach the top of the bank and stand amongst the trees. As I reached this place so indelibly burned into my early memories, so powerful were my recollections I could almost hear those delighted yelps as we ran down one bank, across the road and up the other side, using the exposed roots as make-shift ladders.


On one side of the road here, a small stream had cut a deep channel in the red earth, and this had subsequently become overgrown with tangled hawthorns. The combined effect was of a dark, secret place that promised great adventure and excitement to anyone brave enough to dare its shadows. We never did. Some things are just too scary for six-year-olds to attempt. Looking at it now, thirty years on, I could see that all it led to was a rusty barbed-wire fence delimiting one field from its neighbour. The dried water-course had simply been used as a convenient marker, and an untidy hawthorn hedge planted alongside it.


And in that moment, I felt a profound sadness for times lost. For those times when the prospect of walking a mile from home was one of such wild excitement that it was barely containable. The times when even such mundane, ordinary places as this slowly decaying group of sycamores could hold such mystery, such novelty and adventure. We had almost nothing when we were young, my parents struggled financially more than I will ever truly appreciate. And yet not once did we consider ourselves poor or deprived. Wearing scruffy jeans, wellington boots and knitted sweaters, as we played and explored our tiny part of the world, we counted ourselves rich beyond imagining.


And we were.