Outside the System?

I recently came across this post on the BBC website, discussing the influence of human hunting activity on evolution. The basic point of the article is that humans have evolved/developed predatory abilities which are far beyond those of any other organism on the planet, and that as such we represent a major threat to the rest of the system.

Normally - so the theory goes - organisms develop, in part at least, as a consequence of an evolutionary arms race between prey and predator. So carnivores for example, become faster runners or develop sharper teeth and claws, while the herbivores they prey on become faster or larger or develop tougher skin or other defences.

The problem is that humans have an incredible ability to out-think their prey, and to develop tools or technology that can get round any or all of their defences, and they have been able to do this so quickly that evolution no longer has any chance of keeping up. The consequences of this are obvious - we have already wiped out many species and seem to be well on our way to wiping out an awful lot more!

All of this raises the question though: If evolution has been such a wonderful system up until now, then what has gone wrong? This system has worked effectively for billions of years, allegedly producing living organisms from non-organic matter and then producing the mind-blowing quantities and variety of flora and fauna that we see today. Has this system finally broken in the last couple of hundred thousand years? Has it finally unbalanced itself by producing this strange new species of super-predator which somehow seems to have the capacity to destroy the whole thing?

There is another way to read this story. It's not a scientifically precise or complete way of looking at it, but in many ways it's a lot more useful. This version of the story has been around a lot longer than modern science or evolutionary theory and can be found - yes alright, you've guessed it! - in the pages of the Bible.

This version of the story says that human beings were made, "in God's image". In ancient times, long before the advent of modern communication, if a king ruled over a large empire it was common for him to put statues of himself in the places he ruled over, to remind the inhabitants of who was in charge. In the same way, according to the Bible, God has left a living statue of himself on this planet - that is, you and me! According to the Bible then, it isn't an accident that human beings have intellectual and other capacities which are far beyond those of any other creature - we've been given these capacities by God because we are here with a job to do. We've been given control of this planet and He expects us to look after it for Him, and to show the world what He is like by our wise and careful stewardship of it.

Of course it doesn't take a genius to notice that this arrangement also seems to have gone rather wrong! But the problem is with us. We know that we have the capacity to be wise and careful stewards, but we often choose to be selfish and short-sighted instead. This again, is either a sign that evolution has gone very wrong (if you believe that version of the story), or that there are other forces beyond mere evolution which are at play.

So then, are we independent creatures with the capacity for moral choice who are meant to reflect the good God who made us, but often don't and - it seems - have become estranged from Him in some way? Or are we simply evolved beings whose existence represents the fact that the impersonal system that created us has now finally over-reached itself? Or could there - possibly - be elements of truth in both versions of this story...? What do you think...?

No Answers?

A few days ago, me and some friends at work had an interesting discussion about the state of the world economy, global injustice and all that kind of stuff. We were all kind of agreed that capitalism has gone a a bit wrong but none of us really seemed to have any good solutions. One person astutely pointed out that it isn't capitalism per se that's the problem, it's human nature, and capitalism in its present form is just one manifestation of that. People are selfish, people are greedy and whatever systems or regulations you set up, people will always try to find a way round them. Of course, that isn't to say that you shouldn't have systems, or that you shouldn't try to regulate!

A few minutes later, as I was mulling over the conversation, I mentioned that I'd read a book when I was a teenager called, "Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger", and that it had messed me up for about 10 years afterwards! The book actually affected me for a lot longer than that and it probably still does, in spite of the fact that I can no longer remember any of the contents! What I do remember though, is that it made me feel incredibly guilty about the enormous disparity between rich and poor in the world and about how much wealth I horde, when so many others are doing well even to survive. One of my friends commented - respectfully I thought! - that I obviously think a lot about these sort of things. My response was that, yes, I do think about them, but that doesn't necessarily mean I have very much in the way of answers!

I often feel that as a Christian I ought to have answers. After all, I'm promoting a message which I believe is the ultimate answer - and yet I often feel that there are so many situations that I don't really know how to apply it to, and that this answer is such a long way from being fully worked out or reflected in my own life.

Much later on the same day, I was trying to think about why I didn't know the answers, or at least still don't seem to be able to apply them to my own satisfaction, and it occurred to me again - as it often has before - that in the end I only really have one answer. It isn't another system though, or another set of rules to be followed, it's a person and his name is Jesus. The heart of my faith isn't about rules or systems, it's about an encounter and a relationship with God-who-became-flesh: God who came and lived among us and gave up his life in sacrificial death because that was the extent of his love; who has ridiculously high standards of love and justice and yet lives up to all of them; who understands and has compassion on us in all our weaknesses and failings; who loves us and wants us to change and has the grace and the patience and the ability to make that possible.

This is my answer: That when I look at my life and see the difference between the man I am and the man I'd like to be, I have only to look at the smiling face of my father in heaven to know that I will get there one day and that in the meantime I can be patient as He is with me, knowing that I am loved and accepted and that I will be forever. And the more I appreciate the depth of His love and compassion for me, the more I am able to show the same compassion towards others and to strive for love, mercy, faithfulness and justice, knowing that I am doing the work of the one who loves me and who laid down His life for me and for all those I want to reach out to.

Gamblers & Settlers

Last weekend I played the board game, "Settlers of Catan", with some friends for the first time.

The game board consists of a representation of an island divided into hexagons, each of which represent different types of landscape - forest, mountain, hills, fields and pasture. The first thing that struck me about the game was that each type of landscape also represents a "resource" - lumber, ore, brick, grain and wool respectively. There is also a 6th type of landscape - desert - which contains no resources and is hence treated as useless. The object of the game is to position your pieces in such a way as to maximally exploit these resources for the purpose of developing roads, settlements and cities. This development earns you "victory points" and the first person to acquire 10 points wins the game.

I'm a competitive person with a good mind for problem solving and strategy and I loved this game! These traits combined with a good dose of beginner's luck, meant that I also won on this occasion which of course enhanced my enjoyment considerably! I couldn't help noticing some uncomfortable comparisons with real life though:

As I've already described, the board reduces a large island - which in the real world is a thing of awesome natural beauty and splendour - to nothing more than a set of resources, which are to be exploited as aggressively as possible if you intend to win the game. Of course, within the context of the game no real islands are involved and so no damage is done, but ... what if people were to treat the real world in the same way ... ? You can probably guess where I might be going with this!

The game is necessarily one dimensional as games usually are - they are not intended to reflect or replace the fully-orbed and multi-dimensional nature of life in the real world. They can sometimes reflect the values that are prevalent in that world though, and some people do actually seem to treat life in a similar way.

This article on the BBC News website describes a workshop called, "Investment Heatmap", which took place this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos.  In this workshop - which was run for the benefit of some of the world's top financial "big-hitters" - each team of participants were given the task of setting up an imaginary investment fund in a particular part of the world. They had to think about what kinds of people to employ to manage the fund, local regulatory frameworks, the state of the market, etc. They also had to consider things like corruption, politics and environmental activism - but only in so far as they might help or hinder their monetary objectives.

This exercise was only a game, but it was a game with a purpose - to help people think about how to approach such situations in real life. It seems to me that the "real life" in which many of these people live though, is actually just the same as the exercise - where the ultimate consideration is the bottom line and all other interests become subservient. To underline this point though, just in case it wasn't clear enough, the room in which the workshop was held was carefully and deliberately laid out like a casino! If this is the view which the world's top financial big hitters have of our world and all of our economies, then it seems small wonder that both have ended up in such a state!

Worshipping What Our Hands Have Made

I will pronounce my judgments on my people because of their wickedness in forsaking me, in burning incense to other gods and in worshipping what their hands have made.

- Jeremiah chapter 1, verse 16

Idol worship is a common theme in the Old Testament part of the Bible. It was a common practice among the nations who surrounded Israel, and it seems the Jews just couldn't resist joining in! The inevitable consequence of worshipping something though, is that you begin to become like the thing you worship, and so the Jews quickly took on other, associated practices, and forgot God's good laws of justice and compassion. In the words of the writer of the book of Kings:

They followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless. They imitated the nations around them although the LORD had ordered them, “Do not do as they do,” ... They bowed down to all the starry hosts, and they worshiped Baal. They sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire. They ... sold themselves to do evil in the eyes of the LORD ... 

- 2 Kings 17, verses 15-17

Most people in the Western world no longer worship idols in the literal sense of that word, but we can still be just as guilty of "worshipping what [our] hands have made". Money is a primary example:

Money is a man-made invention, and it is a strange and curious thing. In and of itself, it has no value - it is valuable only because of what it represents.

If you consider that there are a finite amount of goods and services currently available in the world, then money is like a permission slip that gives you access to a certain quantity of those resources. These "permission slips" can be physical, e.g. bank notes or coins, or electronic, e.g. the money in your bank account. Most of the money in the world today is electronic.

Much of the world is currently in the grip of an economic crisis, but this crisis isn't a crisis of resources. There are a similar amount of resources available now as there were before the crisis began^*. This is a crisis of "permission slips"!  It's about how many permission slips there are in the world and who should be allowed to have them.

We often talk about the "financial crisis" as if it's something unavoidable that we are now caught in the grip of and can do little to change, but it's a crisis in the system that we created! If the system isn't working then it seems to me that we ought to be doing something to change the system. This is what people like Occupy London have been campaigning for.

There currently seem to be two main competing and also partially complementing approaches which are being followed in an attempt to "solve" the financial crisis:

1. Borrow more money:
   This is what the UK and other governments have done to bail out the banks. This is what the UK central bank has effectively done through the process of "quantitive easing". This is what the  European central bank has done in order to increase the size of it's "bailout fund".
   
   This approach involves playing the system by its own rules, and stores up more problems for the future. It doesn't make us masters of the system, rather it deepens our indebtedness to it.


2. Austerity measures:
   This is about saving money by reducing government spending, so that the government can afford to pay off its debts. While it sounds like a prudent approach it is damaging in 2 ways:


1. In the process of cutting spending, it is often the poor and the disadvantaged who suffer the most. But why is this necessary when the amount of resources in the world hasn't changed? It is only the distribution of permission slips that has become a problem!


2. If the government doesn't spend money to stimulate its economy, economic output will fall, tax revenues will go down and the government will have even less money to pay off its debts!

Either way we are caught in a trap of slavery to this system that we have created and which now constitutes our view of reality.

This system has worked well for us in many respects but it is not a system rooted in justice or fairness. It is a system exploited by the rich and powerful and designed - in many respects - for their benefit. It is a system that tends to funnel "permission slips" upwards to those who already have them and increases the gap between the haves and the have nots. It is a system which has enabled those with the right kind of knowledge and opportunity to exploit those who do the hard work of creating useful things, and to get rich at their expense.

It is a system that we created, and that we worship, because of the riches it has bestowed on us in the past. And it is a system we are now enslaved to because it has reformed us in its image, and we can no longer imagine a different world.

Finally, this system that we have created and exploited, and which now exploits us, has massive consequences for our children. Here in the UK their economic prospects are already far bleaker than ours ever were:

• Those who want a higher education will start their working lives with enormous debts, having had little or no financial support for their studies.
• Due to rising property prices, the average age for first time house buyers could hit 40 by the end of the decade!
• Then of course there is the enormous national debt, which all of our children will inherit.

We may not be literally "sacrific[ing our] sons and daughters in the fire", like the Israelites used to do, but are the consequences really all that different...?

* New goods have been manufactured and/or dug out of the ground, some consumables have been used up - e.g. food, oil, coal etc. - but the differences are not that significant for this discussion.

Nothing is Mine / Everything is Mine

I have written elsewhere of the mixed blessings of an evangelical Christian upbringing. On balance it's something I am grateful for, but it's also left me with some hang-ups, some of which I am still trying to resolve.

One of the many good things I feel I have gained though, is a positive attitude towards money and possessions. My parents have always believed - and this was passed on to me - that everything we have belongs to God. Not only was a proportion of the family income given away - to the church or to various charities - but the attitude I grew up with was that the rest of it didn't really belong to us either. God allowed us to have the use of it, but it really belonged to Him and He was entitled to do something else with it if He wanted.

I have been thinking quite a bit recently about property. Karl Marx is sometimes credited with the phrase, "Property is Theft", although I have just discovered that the phrase actually originates with French anarchist, politician and philosopher, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. For another - seemingly contradictory - take on property though, see this vision of future justice from the Biblical prophet Micah, written in about the 7th century B.C.:

In the last days ... Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid ...

Proudhon though - as it turns out - did not condemn all forms of property and is similarly credited with the phrase, "Property is Liberty", which he did not consider to be a contradiction. Proudhon's point was  that, for a peasant or farmer, property meant freedom from the control of a landlord - much like Micah's vision above - but for the landlord, property meant "owning" something which was used and needed by someone else, thus making it possible for the tenant to be exploited.

Property - and the prevention of its exploitation - was an important part of the law given by God to the Israelites in the Old Testament part of the Bible. This law said that every 50 years there was to be a year of "Jubilee", where all land was to be returned to its original owners. In chapter 25 of the book of Leviticus, God speaks these words to the people of Israel:

The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.

So the land "that you hold as a possession" actually belongs to God - i.e., the same attitude that my parents have towards property and that I was brought up with. In the words of the Psalmist in Psalm 24:

The earth is the Lord's and everything in it, the world and all who live in it ...

This makes for a radically different attitude towards property.

The New Testament part of the Bible goes beyond this though. In his first letter to the church in Corinth (see here - I've abridged it slightly because the original is in the context of a different discusion), the Apostle Paul says this:

All things are yours, whether ... the world or life or death or the present or the future - all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.

So if you are a follower of Jesus, then you are "of Christ", Christ is "of God" and thus everything belongs to you! But what does that really mean?

In "Drops Like Stars", Rob Bell points out that there is a difference between "ownership" and "possession" (at least in his particular use of those terms). He cites the example of a Rickenbacker 330 6-string guitar which he "owns". His friend Joey though, who is a much better guitar player, is able to appreciate that guitar, enjoy it and get far more out of it than Bell can. In Bell's words, although he is the legal "owner", Joey "possesses" that guitar in a way that he is simply not able to.

If ownership/possession is viewed more in this kind of a way, it becomes a lot easier to believe the words of Jesus, who famously pronounced that the meek would, "inherit the earth". It is the proud who want to own and control everything, and by doing so often fail to appreciate its true worth. It is the meek on the other hand, who can maintain a sense of grateful awe and appreciation. The proud may end up "owning" everything and yet "possessing" nothing, where the meek may "own" nothing but "possess" the world.

Buy Nothing Sunday

I'm currently nearly half way through reading "Colossians Remixed" by Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmat.

The book centres around the first century letter from the Apostle Paul to the church in Colossae, which now appears as the book, "Colossians", in the New Testament part of the Christian Bible. Walsh and Keesmat's central premise is that Paul's letter - and the Christian ideology - was deeply subversive to the Roman Empire at the time when it was written, and in the same way it also subverts the Empires of our own time - in particular the "Empire" of consumerist economics.

I often find when I read books like this that it's little throwaway comments that catch me unawares and really make me stop and think. Like this one from Colossians Remixed, which contrasts the life of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament part of the Bible, with that of the empires around it (and of Empire in general):

While the empire is frantically caught up in the management of production and consumption, Israel is called to a sabbath keeping that acknowledges the gift character of its life in the land.

Production and consumption are the mantras of the Free Market - the "Empire" which currently dominates the western world and is fast expanding to take over the rest of it. Walsh and Keesmat have carefully chosen these words in order to emphasise this comparison, but I have to say that I think they have a very important point!

When I was a teenager, most shops didn't open on Sundays and I have vague memories of the "Keep Sunday Special" campaign, which fought tooth and nail to keep it that way. Personally, at the time, I couldn't really see the point and when Sunday trading finally did become "fully" legal (there are still some restrictions) I was as happy to take advantage of it as most other people. Now though, looking back, I wonder if some of those campaigners did actually have a very good point...

I've recently come across "Buy Nothing Day", which is a campaign to persuade everyone, on one day of each year, to buy absolutely nothing. The promoters define this as a "global stand off from consumerism" which is intended to "make people stop and think about what and how much they buy effects the environment and developing countries" (that sentence doesn't quite make sense, but I think you get the idea!). Participants are promised that they will, "feel detoxed from shopping and realise how much it uses up [their] free time" and that "For 24 hours [they] will get [their] life back".

This is a great idea if it really does make people stop and think about what they are buying, why they are buying it and what effect that has on the rest of the world, and in the interests of subverting our global consumerist ideology I have to say that I approve, but it also made me think:  this is only one day a year, but we used to have one of these days every week and it was called "Sunday"!

Nowadays, to not shop or be able to shop for 1 day in every 7 seems unthinkable! What about the inconvenience and - even more importantly perhaps - what would this do to our economic output!? But Sunday was there precisely to remind us that there are more important things in life than this. We don't exist simply as cogs in an economic machine. Life is there for living and not just for producing stuff! The original Sabbath - as celebrated by the Jews - reminded them of this, and of their ultimate dependence on God, rather than their own enterprise and ingenuity, to provide them with what they needed. The Christian celebration of Sunday as "Lord's Day" should remind us of the same things. As a nation which no longer has a "Lord" to celebrate though, we have instead caved in to the "lordship" of the Free Market, which would rather not allow us any rest in our endeavours in its service...

Faith and Fairy Stories

Christmas is a time for fairy tales.

There's that one about the jolly old fat man in a red suit, who travels around the world at the dead of night in a flying reindeer-pulled sleigh and climbs down chimneys undetected to leave us with free stuff.

Then there's that other one ... the one about a very unusual baby, born 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem, to a couple who had never slept together and yet - so the story goes - had not been unfaithful either. This birth was accompanied by strange signs in the heavens and the baby had strange visitors who would otherwise not even have known he was there. The God of the Universe had decided to visit His creation, and this was how He chose to make His entrance...

Nowadays, both stories are generally treated with considerable scepticism. Most people over the age of about 3 or 4 know the fat man story is just a fantasy - told by parents, purely for the purpose of injecting some extra magic into the festive season. As far as Jesus is concerned though, no serious historian would doubt that he existed, but whether some of the stories we have about the details of his life should be trusted or taken at all seriously, seems a lot more debatable.

The Bible contains 4 different accounts, by 4 different authors, which tell the story of a man who was more than just a man. This man performed incredible miracles - he healed lepers and blind people, he walked on water, he even raised people from the dead. And then - the greatest miracle of all - after being tortured and killed by the Roman oppressors, he rose from the grave on the third day and appeared to more than 500 of his disciples, before ascending bodily into heaven!

For a good chunk of the last 2,000 years, the truth of this story has been more-or-less taken for granted by the majority of people in the western world, but nowadays we are more sceptical. Miracles like that don't really happen. People don't walk on water and they certainly don't come back from the dead, so how can any account like that be taken seriously? The alternative? - his followers must have fabricated, or at least significantly exaggerated these stories after his death.

But if this is the case, his followers must have known that the stories they were spreading were a lie. They saw Jesus crucified (this event is recorded elsewhere, not just in the Bible), and knew that he was dead and buried. At the time at least, their hopes and dreams must have died with him on that cross. They really had believed - as had many other people - that Jesus was the Messiah - the prophesied deliverer that most Jews had been pinning their hopes on for hundreds of years. To see him naked and dead on a Roman cross must have shattered everything they had lived for. Where did they get the energy and resolve to carry on? And not just to carry on, but to found a worldwide movement that spread and flourished in the face of intense persecution, including severe torture and loss of life for those who had started the story in the first place.

Did the disciples really make it all up? The driving force which enabled the new movement to survive in the face of such incredible opposition was its adherents' belief that one day they too would rise from the dead, just as Jesus had done. Either that happened or it didn't - either the disciples' hopes died with Jesus, or something incredible happened to turn everything around - you can't just "exaggerate" a story like that!

I wonder which "fairy story" you believe...?