Thursday 22 June 2017

On the Tragic Necessity of Other People

A Misanthrope Resocialised

YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE?
Yes. Yes, of course.
Death Nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.
Terry Pratchett. Small Gods.

[After a long night discussing this article’s subject] I’d sell my own mother for a garlic bread – community be damned.
- Me
When I was younger, I remember being in churches fairly often of a Sunday morning. After all, being seen there on another day might imply an unhealthy level of enthusiasm and it’s best to get the troublesome tasks of the day (the mowing, the washing and one’s immortal soul) out of the way before the heat of the day. In one of my last visits to my local church, I remember being surprised to learn about the number of payment options available for the parishioner on the go who had neglected to withdraw cash for the weekly tithes and offerings.

Multiple payment types accepted. Don’t have cash? That’s all right. We accept cash, cheque (with photo ID, naturally), credit card and, of course, direct debit and direct deposit.

Now, much ink has been spilled by authors with much better credentials than myself on the vexed question of the spiritual ethics of plying vulnerable people for money in a creepy circus of guilt, greed and gratuity. So, have no misapprehensions, gentle reader, that what follows will be a mean-spirited tirade about the economics of religious belief by a misanthropic agnostic. Rather I want to talk about what the EFTPOS machine and the direct deposit mean for the Christian community and what they might actually mean for all communities.

Why You All Deserve to be Shot

We’ve all been there. Standing – in my case, hurriedly clothed – at the threshold, held hostage by a neighbour who wants to discuss the vexed question of the placement of the bins. This is, after all, the seventh time you’ve defied community expectations regarding the precise ordering and orientation of the bins. What did you expect? Justice has come to you at last, the Bloody Bin Baron of Bell Close, in the form of a tragically interminable conversation. And as you stand there, transfixed by the pulsing forehead vein of a man with strangely evangelical refuse positioning predilections, you reflect again on what terribly small-minded things human beings are.

People are, for all in intents and purposes, terribly annoying. For one thing, they aren’t me and they haven’t the good taste to be ashamed of it. Other people are petty and childish and want things all their own way, regardless of how much sense it would make to do it the sensible way – you know, the one you laid out for them last week.

Human beings - there can be no living with them.

A Stay of Execution

Except I rather like some of the benefits I gain from living among people. There are conversations, and peccadilloes and jokes and faux pas. After all, what do we live for, except to make sport for our neighbours and laugh at them in our turn. We need – I need – others of my own kind in ways that animals clearly don’t. It is a matter of supreme indifference to a wombat how another wombat arranges its burrow. (I assume. I mean, have you seen one of their wombat hovels? It’s no surprise that they’re on the endangered list. They’re no better than they should be, I’m sure).

Which brings me back, by a meandering route to those EFTPOS machines in that church. For a long time, I wasn’t able to put my finger on precisely what disturbed me about those EFTPOS machines. Was it just a general technophobia? – a retrograde desire to return to an imagined better past?

No, I believe my objection to EFTPOS machines and direct debit tithing is rooted in a recognition of the transactional nature of that method of giving. Transactional giving that is, perhaps, indicative of transactional relationships, where nothing genuine is exchanged and no true connections established.

A Digression Regarding Crockery

I remember giving my mother a present one year at Christmas. It was a terribly ugly, functional, metal mug that I had picked out for her. It was bought with what little pocket money she was able to afford me as a single mother. As a sycophantic 13 year old, very much desirous of praise and adulation, I had chosen a gift of sufficient frugality to ensure my coffers would be able to stretch to a chocolate bar immediately afterwards. I remember the lavish praise that was heaped upon that mug by my mother when she opened the crudely wrapped gift – praise most undeserved by such a utilitarian and ugly thing. I fancied it to be the best present she must have ever received. Her true opinion on the topic hardly crossed my mind. Parenting, I am led to believe, is a pursuit best prosecuted with a sort of kindly deceit.

It was a good gift, for all my present criticism of it. It was a gift given lovingly from what I had to a person with whom I shared a deep bond who received it with enough good grace not to point out its obvious flaws. The gift was personal and implied a deep connection. As the song so nearly goes, you say it best when you say it with metallic crockery.

Gift Giving & Community

A gift received from someone unfamiliar to us is an excruciatingly uncomfortable thing. A gift received from someone with whom we have no connection is close to meaningless. For example, I don’t know anyone who has been moved to tears by the champagne the hotel gave the on check in. In the same way, when giving to community no longer carries connection, it will cease to be meaningful either to the givers or the receivers.

When I hear modern, large churches pleading (cajoling?) with congregations in the most manipulative of terms regarding the need to deliver unto the lord one-tenth of the harvest, what I hear is the funeral dirge for community. The sine qua non for community is connection. Community engagement can’t be reduced to anonymous participation. You can’t transmit genuine human connection through servers or contract for it through solicitors. Community engagement can’t be found through a memorandum of understanding between organisations. Community is a much messier thing than that. It involves human beings, after all.

Community is a word that is spoken about a great deal, usually by people (like me) who are contemptuous of modernity and long for the good old days that never were. To look the matter in the face, community has always been difficult and support for community always hard to generate. It is good to recognise that community will be terribly noisome and that community ties have only ever theoretically implied universal brotherhood and altruism.

For better and for worse, community was never meant to imply anonymity. Community is about neighbours coming together in recognition of the ties that bind them together (voluntarily or otherwise). Community is about personality and frustration and disturbing conversations. If community isn’t annoying, you’re probably doing it wrong.

When I stand in front of you as your neighbour and give you something that you need, I affirm the relationship that stands between us. I acknowledge your need (perhaps smugly) and affirm your value. After all, if I could just ignore you, I would have no need to support you. In your turn, you (resentfully) accept my condescension and, with your pride at last choked down, offer your closest approximation of sincere gratitude.

In the modern multi-payment method congregation, BPay numbers have replaced needy neighbours. EFTPOS machines have replaced recognition of our role and place in the community to which we’re giving. When precisely nothing is confirmed in the tithing and offering process but the account number of the church, something has gone badly wrong in the community of giving.

Learning to Live With – If Not Love – Your Neighbour

Let the reader understand that the author (for all of his obvious affection for the human race) is the leader of no community organisations and the participant of few. I have, however, come to recognise that this is a dysfunction of mine rather than a virtue. Being remote, disaffected and aloof is most of what modern society is about. Speaking to others has become a sort of exertion from which I need several days to recover.

I have come to recognise that the buffeting and bouncing of my ideas off other people is necessary to refine them. I understand that I must set aside my vanity about being the cleverest and smartest and deal with others. I have come to value the roughness and imperfection of community. The often-uncomfortable acknowledgement that I am one of many. Special, certainly, but not in a way that elevates me above the playful, kindly ridicule of my fellow companions on life’s journey.

And in exchange for the humility that must come from having to recognise my place as part of a larger whole, I am in turn recognised as having a place myself. A voice in the chatter around the dinner table. That voice isn’t always the loudest. It’s not always agreed with. Sometimes it’s not even listened to. After all, one’s opinion, however cherished, is never quite so important as the placement of the bins.

Sunday 16 April 2017

An Agnostic Perspective On Christian Persuasion

Image Credit: Toms Baugis, used under CC 2.0 Attribution Generic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

A Question of Volume 

“You know it’s a life!”, she screamed at me across a quiet living room in Landsborough on Christmas morning.

I had been explaining to a close relative of mine that upon fertilisation but before implantation an ovum is referred to as a zygote, not an embryo. Detecting, in my minor technical qualification, intended only for purposes of general edification, an existential threat to all foetuses in the immediate vicinity, my family member leapt valiantly and vociferously to their defence. Passionately held convictions often raise blood pressure and vocal volume. When defending causes we believe in or speaking up for those we feel don’t have a voice, it’s natural to want to ensure our point is getting across – often as loud as possible.

In response to loud noises, the tensor tympani muscle and the Stapedius muscle contact together in what is known as the acoustic reflex. The purpose of this reflex is to protect the sensitive organs of the inner ear from excessive vibration which may damage them. The reflex lowers the amplitude of sound waves entering the inner ear, making loud sounds seem softer as a result. Shouting, then, may literally lower the sensitivity of a person’s ears.

Persuasion, then, is not done at volume.

Assumptions: A Spherical Agnostic in a Vacuum

There’s a joke about a physicist who comes to solve a problem for a farmer whose chickens won’t lay. After thinking for some time on the problem, the physicist goes to the farmer and says, “I’ve found a solution, but it only works for a spherical chicken in a vacuum.”

The point of the joke is that idealised solutions tend to oversimplify the complexity that you will face in the application of that solution to any real world problem. (As an engineer, I can tell you this joke often applies equally well to our own calculations.) Any education necessarily simplifies problems down to their simplest constituent parts to enable students to solve problems. Agnostics will tend to think this way. Muslims tend to adopt these positions. Learning to analyse these positions generally is vital if you’re going to be prepared to not seem ignorant when discussing an opponent’s worldview.
It’s important, though, when beginning to think about how to persuade someone who doesn’t agree with you, that you don’t fall victim to responding to the spherical agnostic in a vacuum.

In this sense one should understand Napoleon's saying: "I have never had a plan of operations." Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.
- Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

There’s a glint that comes into the eye of some Christians I meet when they hear that I’m an agnostic. It’s the sort of look I imagine the victims of Hannibal Lector saw briefly in their final moments. The glint usually means, “I know a brilliant argument that you won’t have heard.” Despite Anselm’s valiant attempts, there are no deductive proofs of Christianity that are universally acknowledged. That argument that is convincing to you won’t necessarily be convincing to me. What’s worse is that in your rush to apply a one size fits all solution you tend to miss the person underneath. The spherical agnostic in a vacuum isn’t the human being sitting across from you at the pub.

He said you know I don't I don't really hate God
I just don't like it when people
You know assume that I don't know anything just because I don't go to church
I said that's fair
He said yeah you know
They assume that I know nothing that I-I believe in nothing
And we talked for a while
And this is pretty much exactly what he said
Well
We sort of made it poetic
And we took out some words
This is what he said

I've no problem receiving from a God who could set me free
I've no problem believing maybe He came and He died for me
But condemnation and judgement I hate
Conversation and endless debates
But sometimes I feel I know more
All these crazy (knocking) people knocking on my door
Paul Colman Trio – No Problem


All assumptions are equally bad, but some are more equally bad than others. In general, you should attempt to enter a conversation with a person on religious matters without a preconceived notion of their position. That’s difficult and I will bear with equanimity a wide range of spurious assumptions about my personal beliefs but there is one class of assumptions that you should try to rid yourselves of immediately (if you haven’t already).

The most offensive assumption with which I am confronted as a post-Christian agnostic who regularly dialogues with Christians is that my opinion is somehow unresearched or ill-informed. The notion that I might be wrong isn’t foreign to me. I’ve been wrong before; I’ll be wrong again. But to begin a discussion with the assumption that I haven’t thought about what I believe because I don’t believe what you believe displays an arrogance and a contempt for my intelligence that I honestly can’t abide. While my opinion may not coincide with yours, that doesn’t mean I don’t hold to it deeply or think about it a great deal. Even if you’re convinced that someone is intellectually bankrupt, acting that way will lose you the argument before you begin. You can’t convince someone you’ve just insulted.

Make room in your minds for the possibility that there will be smart people who disagree with you. There are most definitely smart people who disagree with me. I’m hoping you will be some of them.

One Person – Two Conversations

I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right. That truth was not worth the stake. … On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying).
Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus: An Absurd Reasoning

It’s not enough to be right; Humans just aren’t that sort of creatures. We seldom change our minds without first changing our hearts. All purchase decisions (including those of worldview) are emotional. There are two conversations that you’ve been secretly having with everyone you’ve ever talked with about anything of great import; one is about reason and the other is about emotion.
Behind the intellectual gambits and ideological missiles, lies a very real emotional concern for what it will mean if you are right. The first conversation about rationality is fuelled – sustained by the second secret conversation about the emotional and social consequences of the radical change in worldview agreeing with you would represent.

The second conversation is the one you have to win to win the person. Apology may make faith credible but it will never make it convincing. Being intellectually overmatched has never stopped people from fighting on emotionally. This is why it is vitally important that at all times you remain human and don’t give over to your impulse for pride or self-congratulations at an argument well fought. No one likes giving their heart to someone smug.

Before writing this I looked in vain for a Christian author that dealt with the concept of worldview shift as a sort of trauma. I appreciate that this may be an unpopular analysis, but whatever the feelings of spiritual elation associated with the actual decision to adopt Christianity, prior to that moment of decision, the atheist may be faced with a traumatic choice.

Imagine for a moment if you were in a position of discussing your faith with an atheist. Imagine still further that they convinced you not just intellectually but were on the brink of emotionally convincing you that you should abandon your faith. All your pretensions of being wise and following your faith through thick and thin have been wasted. How do you feel?

Now, think of the faces of your Christian friends when you tell them that you’ve lost your faith. Think of your parents’ reaction. What about your pastor? Your teachers? What would the thought of looking a fool in their eyes cost you?

Worldview changes can be traumatic – at least in their contemplation. A change in worldview may lose an individual their community, friends and possibly even family. I would sooner say that up is down than willingly lose all of that. If you’re honest, so would most of you.

Failure to take the emotional consequences of worldview change seriously may have led to many a convinced atheist or agnostic slipping through the fingers of the apologist or the evangelist.

Dialogue: Winning Friends not Arguments.

The problem is that the second conversation requires something beyond clever arguments and a brilliant mind. It requires emotional vulnerability and intellectual honesty.

Rightly or wrongly, Christians are regarded as a corporate monolith by society at large. Christians – oh yes, backward religious people who don’t understand science. The dialogue you have with a non-Christian may be the only time they get to speak to a real, live Christian rather than the ones in the memes theirs friends share with them.

Become the counter-example. Confound expectations. In the time after I had lost my faith what kept me from hating Christians was the fact that I knew so many of them and I knew they weren’t (all) mad. People (verily, even the Christian and the non-Christian) are mostly just people. Mostly, what we want from others is for them to be people we can talk to who don’t annoy us too much and occasionally share cake with us.

So buy a cake. Be a human being. Admit when you don’t know something. Admit when you’re wrong. Be open to being persuaded by them. Talk about moments when you doubt your own faith. Share struggle and not just triumph. Share a drink and laugh at a joke. Do your best to decompress conversation about religion from moments of tension, fraught with fear about when you reveal your secret Christian third-eye (we know you have one – there’s no point in denying it), to moments where they can explore their own deepest held beliefs.

In a cultural moment obsessed with the ephemera of memes and celebrity, can you imagine a more beautiful thing to give someone than the space and time to speak to what matters most to them? We are starved for human moments at a time when we’ve never been more connected. Be a person that allows them that human moment without judgement. And then don’t take advantage of it in point scoring.

Where you must disagree, offer a competing opinion humbly (even when you know you’re right and especially when they know you’re right). Rid yourself of pretentions that your opinions carry the divine stamp of approval where theirs don’t. Acknowledge that views and ideas shift, even your own. In defeat, be gracious; in victory, doubly so. Don’t win every argument even if you can. Make your point but allow your friend a face-saving retreat. Your friend will love you better for a hard lesson learned easily than for a hard lesson learned difficultly.

Win friends, not arguments.

One of the most beautiful motifs of the Christian is that of the suffering servant; the righteous man sent to serve by suffering for the sins of the world. Surely a conversation with a work colleague isn’t too much to ask?

And yet, before the crucifixion and the resurrection, he began by living with them, walking with them, talking with them. Live with those you wish to convince. It will make you understand them better, enabling you to convince them more easily. It will make them understand you better; allowing them to see why agreeing with you might not be so dangerous.

 - MitchG