Zoomtard

42% of weddings in Dublin take place inside civic registry offices now. That means that more and more people who do not believe in Christianity are refraining from using churches to instill their marriage ceremonies with a bit of traditional chic.

Am I the only person who thinks this is brilliant?

Your Correspondent, Finished his working day

… to everyone who is not me.

Your Correspondent, Immune to brain hemorrhoids

Zizek said:

During the Seventh Crusade, led by St. Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he once encountered an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked why she carried the two bowls, she answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them: “Because I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God.” Today, this properly Christian ethical stance survives mostly in atheism.

At the heart of the good news of Jesus lies Grace. This abundant love of God that pours out on the undeserving, on anyone who will receive it. When Christians talk about being saved by faith alone, it is not some kind of buy now-pay later marketing trick. Only the person who stands before God for reasons that have nothing to do with their own merit can love Him.

By Grace means not by human endeavour. Whether you succeed or fail at life, you can still enjoy reconciliation with your Maker. That means that Grace frees us to respond to God in love in a way that no other system could even dare to provide. You are not honouring God so as to get something from Him. You already have it. The Christian who lives in the light of Grace loves God because God is lovely.

But Zizek is maybe right. Faced with a church intent on calcifying Grace into a doctrine or rationalising it into a lifestyle choice, Atheists arguably embody this core of the Gospel better - it is no good following God to get something, life to the full would be lived if we could love God because he is lovely.

Your Correspondent, Prefers atheist writers to Christians

I am going to write a little bit about Christian Zionism (which is the [unwavering] support for theological reasons of the modern state of Israel) over the next few weeks. The Israeli budget was announced recently with another quarter billion for illegal settlements in Palestinian territory. The idea that Christians back this kind of thing up is like something from the Twilight Zone. If I could travel back in time, I’d advise Lenin to rename the USSR the Promised Land. American Christians would have swallowed communism whole if only the socialists had marketed right.

Students of religion talk about the innovation at the heart of the Jewish idea. Wander round the world or the anthropology section of your nearest library and you will find that the concepts of god that most societies have come up with falls under what we might call numen locale. They are local gods.

Kind of like I am here in Maynooth. Pregnant women stop me to ask me to kiss their bellies for luck. Children think they receive a blessing if they poke my hairy neck. It gets tedious, I tell ya.

Now a local god exists as a result of a religious experience, either individual or communal, that then becomes mythic. So a spring or a tree or a stone is invested with significance because of the remarkable thing that happened there. Wisdom sits in places and all that. Ratzinger acknowledges that this kind of thing happens in mariolatry. He writes:

A faint echo of these tendencies can be noted even now in Christianity: to less enlightened believers the Madonnas of Lourdes, Fatima or Altotting sometimes seem to be absolutely different beings and by no means simply the same person.

It is from this idea of numen locale that we have in all societies the idea of sacred space and holy ground. If we follow the theology implicit in it to its logical conclusion, then the soil itself at a space of sanctity is invested with meaning.

Surely then, if we had some appropriate means of transport, we could just dig out the soil and move it to some uncontested spot somewhere else. We’ll move the Dome of the Rock to Roscommon, where no one will really mind. And we’ll move L. Ron Hubbards house to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

With the El of Judaism, we find an entirely new idea, the numen personale, the Personal God. The “God of our Fathers” that is revealed through Moses is not the god of a particular place, but the god of men. Ratzinger says of this idea that, “God is seen on the plane of the I and You, not on the plane of the spatial”.

This God that Moses encounters is personal to all men, is the source of all power and is bound by the promises he has made to Abraham. In other words, his character goes beyond the qualities of God that we mostly assume. He is not simply a “prime mover” or a “first source”. He is not the essence behind the changing tides of time and the callous hands of fate. He has an intention and a project and a people he intends to involve in it. Therefore, there are a whole host of things he is not about.

This is drawn out for us in the enigmatic name he gives Moses, YHWH. “I AM”. Or “I am what I will be”. Or “I am what I am”. Moses asks for his name, and this God says, “Name? You can’t label this. Not even “Label-less” is a good enough label for me”. Before that he is known as Elohim. A single plurality. He is more than One but totally unified. He defies the flatness of monotheism but subverts the incoherence of polytheism. (He is what makes atheism possible.)

So what has this got to do with Christian Zionism? If YHWH was numen locale, then the idea of claiming the historical Israel and making it a the land of the nation for Jews would make sense. If YHWH was the spirit who invested Mount Horeb, where he first revealed himself to Moses with some divine spark, then we should maybe have the descendants of Moses take control of that territory. Or we could move all the soil of the Holy Land and spread it out in the Argentinian plains and settle everyone happily there to continue their tribal religion.

To describe Judaism however as a tribal religion would be to commit a particularly heinous intellectual and historical sin.

But YHWH is not just LORD of Arabia. He is the God of our Fathers, the God of men who can be known personally by all men. He is the God of promise, a promise made to one man, Abraham, that extends to all people, everywhere. As such, we can see how the message of Jesus and the community he formed fulfills the Old Testament hopes of the Hebrews. The numen personale cannot be kept captive inside a temple or inside a nation or the plaything of just one people. His whole purpose was to break down the dividing walls between people and use the people of his covenant to complete it. To disagree with this and to insist that the land of Palestine ought somehow to be controlled by the secular state of modern Israel seems to be stretching way outside the bounds of orthodoxy, as well as justice and wisdom.

Your Correspondent, Cries, “Donuts! Is there anything they can’t do?”

So usually when I write a Zoomtard everyone is like, “Oh Kevin you are so smart and so wise and your rapidly greying hair makes you so attractive.” Or, “Kevin, you are the closest a theologian has ever come to reminding me of Shakira”. Last time me and the Pope had coffee he insisted I take mine with a shot of Smirnoff Ice (he claimed that was a Bavarian tradition) and he told me that Zoomtard posts are “Einfach Klasse!”

So I was surprised when no one liked my most excellent MP3s-as-underwear analogy a while back. But I thought a little bit about it.

And I still think the Pope is right. I rock.

My basic contention is that music is a vocation. It is not an industry in the sense that we have seen it for the last fifty years. Many livelihoods can be supported by vocational activities. But not many episodes of Cribs.

If we are going to live in western democracies then we have to accept the most basic ground rule that the market is king. Technology has outstripped the market in a way that cannot be legislated or regulated back into place. So either the market for music licences purchased by the consumer has to change (shrink) or insist on staying as it is and die.

I have access to every great painting created in the last 800 years. It’s here at the tap of my keyboard. I can embed Da Vinci into my powerpoint presentations and I can stick a perfectly copied Mark Wallinger sculpture on the front of a mix cd for a friend I make of legitimately purchased albums (which is illegal).

Has art stopped? Simply because I can access the finest Irish contemporary landscapes in seconds and take them all home for free to print at my desk doesn’t mean that artists have stopped painting.

It does mean that when your daughter says she wants to become an artist, you know she will probably always be a bit poor.

But that was always the likelihood with art.

And with music.

People still have a hunger for painting and sculpture in an age when we can digitally mimic the great masters in our home. And I predict that in decades to come, when all your music is not produced by the same five companies, your kids and grandkids will have as diverse and explorational a musical palette as you have. But they probably will mostly be musicians living and working in your city, gigging in your coffeeshops and venues and maybe even working fulltime for the government.

By the way, apropos of nothing at all, here’s a link to Mumblin’ Deaf Ro, my favourite Irish songwriter. He works for the government. He takes many years to make an album. His two albums are masterpieces. And we sent him an email one day and asked him to come play at our wedding and he came. He only lived on the other side of the city.

You probably still don’t agree with me. So at least go read the moderate side of my position over at Marginal Revolution.

Your Correspondent, Has a special harddrive to back up the Zig And Zag albums

Jon Ronson is a deeply trustworthy journalist and documentary maker. His Secret Rulers Of The World is still one of the finest short series Guider and I have ever seen.

At the start of a new Channel 4 series on faith in the contemporary world, called Revelations, he looks at how the Alpha course plays out in an evangelical church in Oxford in a film called How To Find God.

Ronson starts out with a lovely gentle introduction, drawing out the way in which in a very relaxed setting, there is a a deep and evolved and structured process that Alpha invites people into. This is almost a service to the missional church because Ronson draws the two strands together: the live participation of the candidates over ten weeks and the way in which Alpha runs.

Then half way in there is a diversion, the diversion that prompts me to not use Alpha in my church. Ronson shows the footage of the so called “Toronto blessing“. Alpha puts a heavy emphasis on the spiritual gift of tongues that we’ve always felt was a bit over the top. Placing the spiritual gifts front and central in a presentation of Christianity runs against the grain of St. Paul’s own teaching. Such extraordinary manifestations of God do happen. But making them central or a necessity is upside down.

You can imagine how uncomfortable I was watching the scene where non-Christians were being asked to call for the gift of tongues. Ronson’s gentle touch as a film-maker is beautifully balanced; respecting these charismatic Christians but keeping the critical distance. A Ford GT40 sports car revs up just when the atmosphere in the room is getting too charged.

Ronson is much more fair minded than I am. He says he appreciates the gamble that the Alpha folk have made in placing tongues so centrally in the midst of their presentation. In his summation he editorialises of Alpha that it is a lovely thing that “these nice people share their lives and only put the pressure on once and even then its engagingly flaky” is about as balanced a conclusion as I have ever seen in a television documentary about Christianity.

Your Correspondent, Not mathematically nice

Regina Spektor’s album returns to the very cool heights of Soviet Kitsch. She actually pronounces the lyrics and puts the little girl voice that Feist made so cool away. And this song seems bound to be the theme tune inside my head for the next month.

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one´s laughing at God when they´re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one´s laughing at God
We´re all laughing with God

Your Correspondent, Human of the year

Lest I become like Anna and just have a blog consisting of C.H. Spurgeon (a great preacher in London in the 1800s) quotes, I promise I’ll only do this once a year or so. But in an age when certain kinds of Christians make certain declarations about the imminent apocalypse, this quote is pertinent. Especially since so many of those crazies love Spurgeon.

Your guess at the number of the beast, your Napoleonic speculations, your conjectures concerning a personal Antichrist–forgive me, I count them but mere bones for dogs; while men are dying, and hell is filling…

Your Correspondent, Found Spurgeon naked in somebody else’s room

Previous to this entry, over the last week I have published about chick-flicks as emotional porn, topless waitresses (and implicitly the need for renewed feminism), the sense in which sexuality is a part of how we are human and on how crucial it is that our theology on sex would be sharp and accurate to avoid the kind of tragedies Irish society seems to ceaselessly be uncovering.

Equally innocuously I then quoted Owen Meany’s most famous line about John’s mother “HAVING THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE MOTHERS” and comedically applied it to me; a man without cleavage.

Needless to say you guys emailed me to say, “Oooh Freudian this” and “sex obsessed that”.

In comments the same point was made.

Seriously, you guys reveal more about yourselves by suggesting I am subconsciously obsessed with sexuality.

Your Correspondent, Acrostically yours.

Last week I was in Greystones teaching a bunch of students the book of Galatians.

I told them the story of Exodus. It is the story that shapes the Jewish mind. But it is also the story that echoes in the minds of the first Christians. The Jews were constituted as the slaves who were set free from Egypt. Dozens of times we read the Old Testament talk about YHWH as He who brought the Israelites out of Egypt.

Christians saw themselves, Jews and Gentiles as the people who were set free from the real slavery; the slavery of sin. The Exodus of Moses out of Egypt was just the shadow of this real Exodus of Jesus out of sin. It was the pointer to the great liberation all humanity was looking for.

In the pub that night, they wanted me to back this waffling up.

So earlier this week I was reading the book of Exodus and noticed something that I always knew, just never spoke before. In Exodus 19 we read of how this new nation, the people who were set free from slaves are to be for God a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” These are the words YHWH gives to Moses to constitute the nation at Sinai.

Now fast forward to 1 Peter. Peter writing to persecuted urban Christians in the Roman empire tells them to hold fast to their identity against the strength and might and fury of the emperor. How does he do it? He writes, “you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”

Early Christians saw themselves as the people of Exodus. They saw themselves as people who were living in exile, in slavery, in captivity and their new life found in the church was a kind of liberation into a new identity. They were no longer Greeks or Turks or Jews but a people called out of darkness into a wonderful light and called to be a royal priesthood, a holy nation and the special possession of God.

The Christians who live in your town live in the light of these words. But how well are Western Christians doing at embodying this idea of being a “holy nation” in the midst of an empire, a people constituted not to enslave but as slaves set free?

Your Correspondent, Slow of speech and of a slow tongue