Why I Am Ashamed To Have Marched In Newcastle For A Good Cause

It is very hard for me to march and attend rallies. It's hard to explain how hard it is for my head to cope with the noise and crowds and the fact that 56 hours later I have not recovered from being there. For me to attend such an event and stand up for equality, fraternity and liberty and all those nice things is a big sacrifice. 

I would still want to attend. Because there are things I believe in that trump the difficulties of being the owner of my lovely little autistic brain - and the shaking and tears and pain I've had the last couple of evenings as a pretty direct result of putting myself through the event.

But I am not going to attend. My conscience is such that I must in future stay away from them unless things change.

See if you can spot why I can no longer attend these rallies. Clue: It comes about 1 minute into this video:  https://vimeo.com/184366522

Newcastle Unites, "a broad coalition of the left" have shared the video on Facebook.  It's called "The English Defence League v Newcastle Unites."  A great title for a football match.

Answer: The call for people to commit suicide.

I cannot be associated with that. Ever. It's evil.

 

I don't care who the people are.  I don't care what they say.  I don't care what they have done.  It doesn't matter.  Shouting at them to commit suicide is never justified.  Never.

I am rubbish at social initiation. But I did it on this occasion. Telling them just how vile the chant is. The response I got was, "Well they say bad things so we can too." I felt physically sickened by that response.

Others disliked that chant too. But there it is in the video as if this is something that supposedly nice people should be proud of. It isn't. Newcastle Unites should be profoundly ashamed that such things happen on their watch. Not proud. Ashamed.

Other chants distress me too:

Calling people scum. Yeah, they might be wrong, they might be racist. But is anyone scum?

Saying they're "our streets." Er, no. They're everyone's streets. Because we live in a free society. This isn't some gang warfare, Jets versus Sharks. This is a call for unity, for the celebration of the dignity of all human beings.

So yeah, no more marches and rallies for me unless I can be assured that this awfulness can be consigned to the dustbin of shame where it belongs.

 

I strongly dislike the English Defence League and the things they believe and proclaim.  I believe their brand of racism, like any other brand of racism, is cruel, ignorant and inhuman.  Earlier today I watched the video the EDL produced of their rally.  The ignorance is plain.  The hatred is plain.  The fear of other people is plain.

 

Some of their members even proclaim these things while carrying banners claiming to be "Christian" defenders.  I'm not sure they had read the parts of the Bible about how to treat the alien in your land.  Or the parts of the Bible in which Jesus - an interesting middle Eastern guy whose family were forced to seek sanctuary in a foreign land - talked about love and mercy.

Yes.  I'd love to see every member of the EDL give up their ways and wear nice "Refugees Welcome" badges.  It would be wonderful.

 

I am proud that I stand, as much as my head and variable abilities allow, against the hatred and racism that organisations such as the EDL churn out.

But.  I am ashamed to have walked in a parade and stood at a rally where the encouragement was given for those members to commit suicide, to shoot themselves.

I am ashamed.

And I won't be doing it any more.

You'll Be Amazed At This Woman Who Can't Love Someone More Than They Deserve

Recently I attended a meeting of a not-church. I call it a not-church anyway. It's a meeting for people who are “guided by the life and teachings of Jesus” and who meet “in the presence of a God whose love is freedom, whose touch is healing, whose voice is calm.”

The people at the meeting are good people, seeking their God and I find it less difficult than most meetings. It's still hard though because every word in the little bit of the liturgy prepared for each meeting is phrased with theism in mind. It's a language that takes theism as a presupposition of a shared belief in an interventionist deity. I don't believe in that deity. I'm not sure that everyone there believes in the deity either. But the language, like the language of a church, is theistic.

It's not exclusive though and it's not evangelistic so usually I've been able to cope with it and just miss out what I couldn't say at all and translate the rest into my own meaning. That day I couldn't participate at all. Just as the meeting began my brain decided it had had enough of things and I spent the whole time wanting to walk out and sit in the sunshine. Perhaps that's what I should have done. Afterwards I left very quickly and couldn't speak even when grabbed for conversations, including one with a person who offered to buy me a ticket for an event in October.

The subject of the not-church this month was kindness. As always, the liturgy includes some quotations about the subject and after they are read there is an open group discussion – something that I can't participate in at all vocally because I can't deal with group discussions. My head just doesn't know the rules and can't process everything quickly enough. By the time it has something worthwhile to say the topic has moved on and even if I have something to say at what might be the right time I don't know how to break into the group and say it. Never mind. That's just how things are and they're not likely to change. The diagnostic criteria for autism still mention a triad of impairments. My inability in group situations is part of one of those impairments. It truly isn't my favourite part of my autism and it's one in which this so-called very high functioning autistic person is pretty severely impaired.

One of the quotations struck me:

A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.

Joseph Joubert

Joubert was a French moralist who died nearly 200 years ago. His Pensees were published after his death. I haven't read them – I hadn't heard of Joubert at all. Then again I never managed to finish the Pensees of Blaise Pascal either. I guess I will probably never read Joubert. But I guessed I would never read a lot of things that I have since read.

One of the members of the not-church discussion really liked that Joubert quotation. She talked about it. I wasn't able to speak and was rapidly sinking into a state in which it's quite difficult to even get myself home. If I had been able to speak I might have talked about this quotation too. Because I didn't like it. I still don't like it.

Joubert says “loving people more than they deserve.”

I take issue with that and ask a question:

How much love does a person deserve?

I believe that every single person on this planet deserves more love than they give themselves. They deserve more love than other people give them.

Basically, whatever is happening, whatever the situation, whatever a person has or hasn't done, a person deserves more love not less.

However they feel, however they dress. Whatever their gender or sexuality or race or height. Whether they are disabled or not disabled. Whatever their politics. Whatever their religion. They deserve more love not less.

Even if they treat us badly or treat others badly they deserve more love not less.

And for ourselves. We deserve more love not less. Always and at every moment.

My belief is not an original idea. I've inherited from others, most especially from a spiritual teacher who has been known to use “more love not less” as a kind of mantra and as part of a liturgy. It's pretty powerful to look at a person we don't like and tell ourselves that they deserve more love not less. It's even more powerful to look at ourselves when we unfairly criticise ourselves and say “I deserve more love, not less.”

More love, not less. In fact I would say that we deserve total love. All of us. Total love. Constantly.

Joubert said “loving people more than they deserve” and I sit here typing about it two hundred years later. And I type this: Joubert's thought was nonsensical.

You cannot love any person more than they deserve.

You just can't. It's impossible.

What we need to aim to do is to love each person as much as they deserve. Total love. Always. If anyone lived according to that aim it was Jesus, a teacher of the way of love.

Unpacking that is hard. It raises many questions of how to love people as much as they deserve. It raises questions for what to do when we fail to love people that much. It raises questions of how best to love ourselves, and how to keep loving ourselves when we fall short of the aim of a life of total love. I am not even going to begin to attempt grappling with those questions in this post.

I think Joubert is not to blame for getting it wrong. He was living in a society with a Christian based morality. Even those Frenchmen who killed priests in various revolutions were really only removing a Christian establishment and morality and replacing it with what, beyond story, was just another Christian establishment and morality.

The Catholics of Joubert's day believed in original sin. They believed that God loved them but that loving them was in itself an act of mercy because they didn't really deserve the love of God, let alone to have God as a friend. The Church taught that each person deserves to go to Hell and suffer for eternity, separated from God in fire and torment and damnation. That's what humans deserve. Anything about that is mercy. It's true that the mercy story was rich – the loving, merciful God finding a “just” way to rescue the fallen, sinful humans from hell if they followed him and his son. But it's also true that the Church had a very negative view of human beings. Gee, thanks Augustine for developing that doctrine so well.

Every now and again you might have heard that we're all fearfully and wonderfully made or heard about the dignity of human beings. But the Catholic liturgy was based on the idea that we need to repent – and that one sin of the wrong type leads to Hell without that repentance and reliance on mercy. The Protestants of the day weren't much better and sometimes were much worse. Thanks Calvin, for outdoing Augustine – the very first point Calvinism makes is that every single one of us is totally depraved. It's not a good starting point for developing a healthy, loving view of the human race.

I confess that I used to go along with all this. Original sin. The fallen nature of human beings thanks to Adam and Eve eating some fruit. There was a time I even believed in the literal truth of that story, that there really were two people wandering around a pretty garden being tempted by a wily serpent. I believed that we were fully reliant on God for salvation, hope and anything that might be nice. I believed in a literal Hell once. And in literal human souls burning for eternity. I believed that the Bible taught it so it must be true. The preachers in my churches taught it too, straight from Scripture and you wouldn't want to go against what God wrote in his book, would you? Yeah, I believed people were fundamentally sinful. I believed I was fundamentally very sinful. I was a worm – as Scripture puts it. I was a wretch – as John Newton said in the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

I don't believe any of that now. It's been a long journey to get from there to where I am now, which is a much more free place. And I don't like that hymn any more because I am not a wretch. I was not a wretch. I just believed in my own wretchedness and acted accordingly.

Now I believe that humans are fundamentally good. It's a statement of faith. It would be easy to look at newspaper headlines and see the suffering we inflict on each other and to despair, to see the obvious faults – and let's face it, the way humans act is sometimes particularly awful and the way I act falls short of the way of love. But we're fundamentally good. And we're fundamentally deserving of more love not less. Yes, even those of us we see as monsters. To prove Godwin's law because it's fun to prove Godwin's law: Even Hitler!

Human beings deserve total love.

So. A rewrite of Joubert's thought is in order, removing all the nonsensical stuff about deserving or not deserving love.

“A part of kindness consists in loving people.”

But hey, that's not right either.

It's backwards.

I want to rewrite it again:

“A part of loving people is showing kindness.”

Yeah, that's better.

Love people. And in that love, show kindness.

Here endeth the lesson!

Those final words could have come from Jesus who said to “love one another.” He didn't say anything about deserve did he? Just “love one another.”

Sometimes it's good to be like the people at not-church. And as an ex-Christian I can say this too: Sometimes it's good to be “guided by the life and teachings of Jesus.”

[1694 words and a clickbait style title!]

Jim Palmer's Inner Anarchy And The Certainties of A Sikh Preacher

A couple of days ago I travelled on a coach.  A normal kind of activity.  During the journey I began to read a book that I had been wanting to read for over a year but had only just got round to ordering.  It had arrived in the post the day before my journey.

 

The book is Inner Anarchy by Jim Palmer. I keep sharing his Facebook posts because I like him a lot. Even if he does talk about Jesus!  He talks about a lot and even presents a Jesus who I like.  And Jesus who I can get on with and a Jesus path that I could follow in some way.  It's a path that is in many ways far more challenging than that proposed by the various Christian sects, even the most radical ones in terms of discipline.  If you use Facebook I'd urge you to follow Jim Palmer.  But don't follow him as a guru or religious authority or any other kind of authority.  He wouldn't want that.  Read him as a person who can help you teach yourself and trust your heart.  And dismiss whatever doesn't resonate with joy and with compassion and passion.‬

 

A Sikh man had got on the coach at the same time as me and he was sitting on the seat behind me.  I had read enough of the book for the moment and set it aside on the seat next to me.  The Sikh asked if he could take a look at the book because it was obviously about God and Jesus and, being a Sikh, he likes those two subjects.

 

I sat back and relaxed.  I listened to some music and then began another book that had arrived in the same parcel as Inner Anarchy and was also strongly related to God and to spirituality.  That book was book one of The Masnavi by Rumi, translated by Jawid Mojaddedi.  It's poetry of course, and I confess I find reading poetry difficult, but so far I'm enjoying it.  It's a long poem - about 26,000 verses - so will take some getting through but if it's all as beautiful as it has been so far then it'll be worth perseverance.  Rumi believed in some things that I don't.  But his mysticism and teaching is profound and touches me.

The Sikh had read enough and asked me if he could come and sit with me.  He then began to talk with me (or at me). He said the book said exactly the same as the Sikh scriptures. He should have read a little more and would have discovered that while there are similarities there are big differences - like Palmer wanting to do away with the myth of a sky God person in control of everything.  

The Sikh raved about how we should admire God and then God will love us as give us things. [I think it's a shit God if it only loves us if we admire it] He raved about the 90 year old he was on his way to look after and encouraged me to chant in Punjabi several times a day and be like the 90 year old who got up at 2am every morning to do it and had a wonderful life.  He encouraged me to find a big sheet of note paper and write the words Wahe Guru along the top row four times.  Then to fill each row of the paper with the same words.  And then to chant them every day.  With attention and with true adoration of God.  He said that there are forty benefits of admiring God written in his holy book and that chanting or praying in this way every day, several times a day, would mean that these benefits would come to me.  He talked about how in the Gurdwara in Birmingham and in Leicester they were using chant prayers from the Guru Granth Sahib as a meditation form and how that meditation was leading to people being healed of incurable diseases.  The Sikh told me lots of interesting things about his faith and his concept of God.

I tried to tell the Sikh that I don't believe in the sky God myth any more but since he tells everyone he meets about admiring God with every breath [a laudable aim, especially if that god is not the sky God] my non-theism met with a brick wall. A bit like if a non-theist or an atheist would have talked to me about God a few years ago.

He talked about how God has limits. How Hitler and the Nazis failed eventually because God didn't allow him them to take over the whole world. God controlled everything they did and then stopped them. I didn't like to point out that his God was in control of the murder of millions of people by the Nazi regime - and countless millions more people by other regimes he mentioned and that really any God who is all powerful and eventually steps in after watching so much horror is a very crap God indeed.  In my opinion.  The problem of suffering is a toughie for all theists and even in my strongest evangelical days I knew that there was no theistic answer that quite satisfied.  "God works in mysterious ways" and "It'll all be for a greater good" seem like utterly empty platitudes in the face of the cruelty humans sometimes exhibit.  And in the face of natural disasters we can't even give the equally empty platitude of "You can't blame God for the actions of humans.  It is our free will."

The Sikh man was very pleasant though.  I disagree with much of what he said but that's fine.  I am glad that he sat with me and talked and I learned a little more about his faith and the reasons why he counts himself as very blessed to have such a faith.  He was obviously a good man.  One doing his best to walk in the light - and one almost certainly doing a better job of it than I often do.

 

I have to say that I haven't yet met a Sikh I couldn't get on with.  And I know that there is much that the Sikh faith has that is highly commendable.  For example: When he had earlier pulled out a bottle of water to drink he asked the people around him whether they would like it.  He wouldn't drink it until he had offered.  His reasoning, from Sikhism, was that others around may have been more in need of the drink than him, more thirsty.  And since God is in every person, to offer the drink - to offer anything selflessly - is honouring and pleasing to God.  I like that.  But I would like us to be able to move beyond God and just to learn to offer selflessly anyway, just because it's a good way to live rather than to please a supernatural deity.

 

I like the Sikh teachings on selflessness, humility, service, hospitality, community and so on.  I like the way this Sikh said he had learned to not ask God for selfish things but to just admire God.  I don't know the teachings well at all but what I've heard of them I like.  I like the fact that Sikhism isn't exclusivist.  They firmly believe their way leads to God.  But they also believe the other faiths lead to God too.  So there isn't a need to convert the other religions or to save a Christian from Hell in the way an evangelical Christian might want to save a Sikh from that damnation.

 

I have enjoyed the few times that I have visited the local Gurdwara, the Sikh temple.  I've been able to sit in the quiet and it feels good.  And then I've been able to eat - and to help out too and to talk with people in the Gurdwara at that time.  If you want a theistic faith, the Sikh one is pretty good.

Yes, it's a decent religion.  But I can't say I will be getting up at 2am to chant for hours.  And I won't be returning to my old version of the sky God, or to any other sky God.  I have been set free from that myth.

Set free.  Yes.  But maybe, just maybe, Jesus can free me even more.  Without chanting Wahe Guru for hours each day.  And without praying Christian prayers to mythical beings or to their saintly followers for hours as I used to.  I am free from that.  I believed it was life and there was definitely a lot of light within the myths.  But in the end it didn't bring me such life.  How can it bring abundance of life when the central tenet is that we are fundamentally bad, fundamentally fucked up so much that we are completely lost and without hope unless somebody else dies an agonising death?

 

I am glad that I am now finding freedom.  Immensely glad of my decision, made just four and a half months ago, to make a break with church, a finality.  Bye bye liturgy of the sky God.  Bye bye prayers to the sky God.  Sky God, your followers are good people and many of them do wonderful things.  In that loving place I can gladly walk with them.  But I no longer can walk with them in the following of you.

And books like Inner Anarchy and Jim Palmer's previous couple of books, which I now want to read even more, can show me how to become more free.  Inner Anarchy is a Jesus book that anyone can read and be touched by.  It doesn't matter whether they are Christian, of some other faith, or an atheist.  This is a Jesus I am excited about.  Even while looking at Gnostic Jesus versions and finding much light within them, I didn't think I would ever be this excited by a Jesus again.

[1671 words.  Sorry!]