I am not of the mindset that *insert bad news story* is a punishment from God or a message from Her or any other thing. I usually see disasters as disasters and God as God but this time it is different.
I can see the fires as a disaster of our own making, a symptom of impending climate catastrophe. And I do. The enormity of the suffering pains me. The depth of ecological loss angers me. My own helplessness frustrates me. It's a distressing, depressing situation.
Or I can try to find some hope, which I also do. I look for the stories of humanity, of resilience and compassion, generosity, selflessness. There are good news stories and I look for them, enjoy them, share them.
The positives I speak of are nice but they are not enough. Stories of communities pulling together, wildlife carers, millions of dollars in donations and burrow sharing wombats are not enough to shift my despair.
I don't think anything can really shift my despair over climate change but as I see my nation react I have just the tiniest glimmer of hope. My hope is like a dying match, little more than a glowing splinter and wisp of smoke in a vast universe of blackness.
Is it possible that this huge crisis can shift people out of their complacency? Is it possible that our government will start to listen to the people who cry out for action? Will the suffering we see inspire a deeper compassion? Will we repent of our selfishness?
I do believe that the earth can heal if we allow it. And I believe in a God who will honour our attempts to make things right, if we are committed and genuine. I do believe this situation can be turned around
I also believe that it probably won't be. I hope I am wrong but I think we are creating our own armageddon.
The only place I can find hope is in my faith. These times are so very bleak
10 comments:
"The only place I can find hope is in my faith."
John recently pointed out the hopelessness that he projects onto those who lack religious faith. In my view, if faith brings hope without harming anyone, wonderful, but for me, it added up to a net loss, plus I've observed that it gives many people a rationale for ignoring such problems as you have mentioned.
It is not about my projecting hopelessness on people, Snow.
All around me I see lives broken down, families shattered, women abused, children abandoned.
Drugs, alcohol abuse, despair, murder, organised crime, antisocial behaviour.
And at the same time we have a government (in London) which has given up on the poor.
In-work poverty is endemic while benefits are being cut.
Homelessness is a major problem everywhere.
Crony capitalism benefits only the super rich.
Even The Daily Telegraph, a centre-right newspaper, is critical of this capitalism.
London is the centre of the world for money laundering and financial crime.
Faith as a net loss?
What is it you are losing?
I am reading The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede (673-735) which gives a beautiful account of early Christianity in these British isles.
"Faith as a net loss? What is it you are losing?"
Membership in an organization that doesn't welcome me, and the attempt to mold myself to beliefs and standards that I don't accept.
"All around me I see lives broken down, families shattered, women abused, children abandoned. Drugs, alcohol abuse, despair, murder, organised crime, antisocial behaviour."
And you regard religion as the solution? Then America, Central America, and the Middle East must be heaven on earth because they're positively drowning in religion. Perhaps the reason that religion is faring so poorly where you are is that it has failed so miserably--would you really like to go back to the days when Jack London photographed the poor of the then religious UK?
John, unlike the Salvation Army, few churches here do anything for the poor, and even when they do, they make an effort to screen out people of whom they disapprove. For instance, thanks to religious judges and legislators, transgender people can now be legally turned away from homeless shelters--even on nights so cold that their lives are in danger--and people who want to foster or adopt children can be refused solely because they are LGBT. Likewise, civil rights protections, and birth control benefits can be legally denied by religious employers even if their businesses are utterly unrelated to religion--"Hobby Lobby" being a prominent example. Employees of religious organizations are even worse off because they can be fired for any reason whatsoever in the name of "religious freedom." I could give many other examples, but, in short, once you say that you have a "sincerely held religious belief," you can treat people like shit in America and legally get away with it, but if you aren't religious, you're legally held to higher standards. What Trump is, his followers are, and his followers are primarily Christian, and their main concern is for running the show and to hell with the rights of others. All that is backward, callous, mercenary, anti-science, anti-environment, and bigoted, is embodied by Christianity in America. You speak of social problems in your country which you somehow imagine stems from too little religion while overlooking the poverty and crime prevalent in the most religious countries, and the good that prevails in countries with secular welfare states. Even in this country, the highest standards of living prevail in the least religious states of the Northeast and the Northwest while extreme social problems prevail in the religious states of the "Bible Belt." In my extensive experience, religion primarily serves as a rationalization for enshrining the abuses inherent in tribalism, its (commmon) claims to having a monopoly on morality and compassion being seen as hypocrisy to anyone outside of what it likes to call its "fold" due to the fact that religious people (again, commonly) regard themselves as huddled together like sheep in a place that doesn't welcome skeptics and non-conformists.
Only you can speak for (or rather, against) Christian America, Snow.
The well-known evangelist John Piper said he would not be voting for Trump.
I have watched YouTube videos about atheists in the Bible belt who are afraid to be themselves, in some cases fearing they will be sacked as teachers in public schools.
One young mother spoke of her unbelief to other Moms. Immediately they all said they would pray for her. She did not want prayed for. And they were horrified because she was comfortable as an atheist. The Christian Moms felt threatened by this godless newcomer in their midst.
Some years ago a full-time church worker said he would be happier if I did NOT attend a Christianity Explored seminar. My mistake? I told him I did not think that all non Christians would go to hell. Although I pray for the conversion of sinners I will not pre-empt the judgment of Christ.
After the death of Fidel Castro I left a comment on a blog called American Catholic.
All I said was that the Castro dictatorship had worked to eradicate poverty, and that they had sent more doctors to Uganda during the ebola epidemic than any other country.
A blogger who called himself Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus expressed his contempt for me by counting my words and going blah-blah-blah, Haggerty the Marxist etc.
John Henry Newman said the two features which distinguish Christianity are beauty and severity. When one of these gets too predominate the faith suffers.
Tribalism existed before Christianity came on the scene and is still here, at least in Europe, now that Christianity is no longer a force in the lives of most people.
I remember a Nigerian doctor here in Scotland who turned on me angrily because I pointed out that Tom Paine died an atheist, refusing the prayers of a minister. *But he rejected the Lord!* she shouted at me, forgetting what he had done for slave emancipation.
On the other hand I was moved by two YouTube videos this Christmas night:
*Heartbreaking: Wife Sings Amazing Grace to Dying Husband.* 2019.
*Man Sings to 93 year old dying wife. Erin Solati.* September 2015.
Best, John.
P.S. I am a Jack London reader too. Martin Eden I read at high school and now I must read it again. I have his Letters and several biographies. A hard life, like Woodie Guthrie.
YouTube.
*Remembering the nun who died smiling.*
Sister Cecelia Maria Theresa. July 29 2020.
John, I appreciate your response. America under Trump has become a dangerously divided land, and I see in myself an ever-increasing anger toward and isolation from people who disagree with me. You're probably aware that here in Oregon, the city of Portland had over 100 nights of demonstrations--many of them riots--following the killing of George Floyd. Yet, even those demonstrators were divided between violent anarchists who want to bring the government down and peaceful--primarily--Black Lives Matter protesters who only want to take funding away from police. The only thing they were united around was their anger at government officials who thought that, just maybe, society needs police. They broke into--and vandalized--the homes of those officials. Last week, a mob of heavily-armed religious right-wingers descended upon the Oregon state capitol, assaulted police and photographers and broke into and vandalized the building. In my own town, demonstrators have vandalized buildings and destroyed statues. All these things have happened of late within a hundred miles of where I live. It is hard to not feel hopeless, helpless, and outraged by those on the other side. In America, the people who control the government are Christians who show no concern for the fact that, on everyday that passes, more people who formerly took a live-and-let-live view of religion are coming to positively hate it because it is running the show here, and doing it very, very unfairly. America's Christians commonly take the view that God rewards those whom serve him with physical wealth, so this allows them to blame the problems of the poor on the fact they don't love God. Therefore, when you talk about the problems of the poor being due to too little religion, America's Christians would agree, only in their view, it's the poor who are being punished for having too little religion. All my life, all the problems that religion causes--rampant pedophilia within the clergy--have always been blamed on too little religion, but it finally occured to me that the problem with religion is that it exists at all because nearly all of those billions of dollars that it takes in every year is only spent on itself--on bigger "physical plants," bigger organs, ever more land paved over for parking lots. Sure, religion can be used for good, but, in my experience, are most religious people more noble, compassionate, or generous than non-religious people? A resounding no, and while I already suspected the opposite, Christianity's support of Trump--a man lacking in any discernible virtues--confirmed it. If I was looking for a new doctor, roofer, or car mechanic, and all I knew about a given choice was that s/he was or wasn't religious, my negativity toward religion is so strong that I would think it more likely that I would be badly treated by the religious person than by the non-religious person. I feel badly saying this because I would like to view people as individuals, yet I didn't come up with this view automatically but due to living in a very religious country in which I am a daily witness to the fruits of religion.
I do not doubt anything in your comment, Snow.
It takes me back to my last two years at school, and two years at university.
In Britain from 1967-72 we watched the news on television. Nightly.
*What is happening to America?* we asked.
Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. Agent Orange. Napalm, burning children. The American dead.
The Democratic Convention in Chicago. Mayor Daly's police beating peaceful protesters.
The murder of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X.
Our Labour Government refused LBJ's request for military support in Vietnam.
Daniel Ellsberg. Father Daniel Berrigan. Hoover. Black Panthers. Barry Goldwater.
Finally Watergate. Nixon promising, *There will be no whitewash in the White House.*
*What is happening in America?*
Because we shared a common language, we thought we understood more than other Europeans.
But did we?
Everyone I knew looked to America. Music, literature, cinema.
Easy Rider was the movie. Woodstock the counter culture's high point.
Philip Roth said the novelist could not compete with unreal reality.
Mailer was convinced there would be a revolution: and he loved the Sixties.
Jimmy Baldwin told Styron that black people no longer believed anything white people said.
In Scotland we were living in the legends of Blind Lemon Jeffries, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Woodie Guthrie, Kerouac and the Beats, Dylan, Joan Baez, Jim Morrison.
Joan Didion told my brother, *This is a trash society, there's nothing we won't trash.*
In Barcelona in 1970 I befriended two New Yorkers, one who would die in Vietnam.
So the awful truth is that today we are frightened by the collapse of civic tolerance.
Maybe I experienced it in a minor way.
A group of evangelists come to Britain every year and preach in our streets.
When I questioned one of the preachers he turned on me angrily.
An elderly man from Virginia had a poster, *Evolution is a Lie*.
Creationism is accepted by 40 per cent of Americans.
I'm not sure if creationists know that we share 98 per cent of DNA with chimpanzee.
They are ignorant of genetics, comparative anatomy, biogeography, embryology, geology.
America did survive the Sixties. Mailer's revolution did not occur.
My father (a fan of Jack London, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair and Steinbeck) used to say that people have to learn to live together. And that means getting up in the morning for work. Economic necessity solved a lot of things, he thought. He left school at 14 for work.
Do you see a day when you can peacefully co-exist with a Trump supporter and a born again Christian?
John
John, Easy Rider was largely about people from where I grew up, so to recognize the thinking depicted on the big screen as a true representation of my neighbors' thinking was partly what led me to leave Mississippi (not that I actually saw the movie on a big screen because local theaters wouldn't show it). For example, the restaurant scene was filled with locals who really did look with such scorn upon the actors that the actors reported feeling unsafe (Hollywood was commonly referred to in the South as "The Great Babylon." The Civil Rights movement was largely powered by black churches while resistance to it--in the South anyway--was powered by white churches whose members joined the Klan and/or the Citizens' Councils (that sought to institutionalize racism legally--as if it were not already sufficiently institutionalized through Jim Crow laws), and I heard preachers use the Bible to prove that God intended for blacks to be subservient because they were the descendants of Ham, whom God had cursed. Some Christians even argued that blacks weren't human, and therefore didn't have souls (I once owned a book entitled "The Negro, a Beast or in the Image of God" that defended this view), while others claimed that blacks owed a debt to white people for making their lives vastly better--than they had been in "the jungle"--by enslaving them.
Likewise, the Civil War (with 600,000 killed, it remains America's most costly war in terms of mortality) was powered by religious people who used the Bible both to defend slavery and to oppose it. Then there were the Nazi troops with the words "Gott Mit Uns" on their belt-buckles (Nazism was intially popular in racist America and so was defended by the likes of Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford). Such things led me to wonder why an all-knowing God would author a book that he knew would inspire hatred and cause the deaths of millions upon millions of people, a book so self-contradictory that people could use it to justify evil as easily as good. Better yet, why, instead of always speaking through intermediaries, wouldn't God speak to every one of us within our hearts so we would know that he existed and that we would be clear regarding what he expected of us? Was it he didn't want anyone but the elect to know his will, or was he simply so limited (by divine justice that he could only save us through blind faith in Christ's atoning blood. Or was the answer that religion was an invention of men (always men)? Such questions started one Saturday morning in church school at age eleven while studying a divinely ordained Old Testament rapes, theft, and genocide, and, rather than finding answers to them, they instead multiplied. You have said that you were an atheist until your mid-fifties, a statement that greatly surprised me because while the word atheism means little in the absence of God being defined, I daresay that few people go, as you did, from atheism to conservative supernaturalistic Christianity so late in life. Did you simply not think about religion prior to that?
I enjoy hearing your thoughts and images of America. Perhaps, they were in some ways like how I regarded California as a child because it seemed to me that California was the center of the universe and the source of all things good while my state was a forgotten outlier (always a rebel, I arrived at this view despite--if not because of--the way I heard preachers attack Hollywood). Then came the Civil Rights movement, and seemingly overnight was my state--and the adjacent state of Alabama that was on the TV everyday and in Life Magazine every two weeks.
...I doubt the anything is more detrimental to religion than becoming the voice of the status quo.
Mississippi, Old Miss, must be something else, Snow.
When he was at the Glasgow School of Art (which he attended before the National Film School in Beaconsfield England) I remember my elder brother's copy of The Sound and the Fury.
At 14 I had never ready anything like Faulkner, old *Count No Count*.
Your local movie-house refusing to show Easy Rider I can understand. In a way.
Even at the age of 18-19 I could see the counterculture was subversive to what I shall call American work-ethic puritanism. And the wealth of America was built on that ethic.
Recently I watched Barry Goldwater's *Extremism is no vice* speech at the Republican Convention (YouTube) and I studied the faces (all white) of his hard-working admirers.
Could I have cut it in America? I very much doubt it. Like so many in Scotland I was a cultural American. The pace of life in real America Would have exhausted me.
The folk in Haight Ashbury didn't want the hippies, the dope, the drop-outs.
Timothy Leary's phrase *We have America surrounded* seemed threatening.
And it disturbed me that the Black Panthers wanted separate black enclaves.
America seemed to be tearing itself in two (Mailer's coming revolution) but it didn't.
We feared that the black ghettoes were flooded with heroin while Hoover was looking away.
Black radicalism was silent. Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver were no longer a force.
T.S. Eliot said history is full of cunning corridors and strange turnings.
Aren't there examples of radicals who turn Right?
John Dos Passos broke with Communism after hearing that his Spanish translator was shot by the Stalinists in Spain. Thereafter Dos turned toward Jefferson and patriotism.
I read a long biography of Whittaker Chambers and learned he was not the right-wing bigot that his enemies made him out to be.
In Britain we watched America in its post-Vietnam, post-Watergate period.
President Ford, Kissinger's Nobel Peace Prize, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan.
I still have a copies of two books written by CIA chiefs:
William Colby's Honorable Men and Stansfield Turner's memoirs.
Scotland's love of Blues, soul music, bluegrass, bottleneck has been well documented.
An old friend James Campbell wrote the first biography of James Campbell, a book about the Beats and a collection of essays, Syncopations, largely about American writers.
Christianity became the status quo after Constantine and many Christians view that as detrimental. On the other hand it gave us Saint Augustine, Chartres, Notre Dame, Giotto, Saint Thomas the Divine Doctor, Dante, Leonardo, Pascal, Descartes, Bach, Mozart, Karl Barth etc. Two cheers for Western Christianity.
Erratum.
I meant to write that my old friend James Campbell wrote the first biography of James BALDWIN.
Campbell was editing The New Edinburgh Review and wrote to Baldwin, asking for an essay.
Then he went down to the south of France and met Baldwin at his home, the first of several trips.
He interviewed Jimmy's friends, editor, old teacher, and contemporaries for his biography,
A Voice at the Gates, republished a few years ago.
John
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