Thomas and Friends

<rant>

I was listening to a patient (RIP 7 June) this morning talking about how useless she feels just lying in bed all day without anything to do, feeling guilty that everyone is looking after her, being so kind, and that she can't help anyone in return.

I was reminded of the stories of Thomas the Tank Engine originally by the Revd W Audry that my children like so much both in books and on the TV. The greatest (in fact, only) praise that the Fat Controller can give, and which makes an engine so happy, is "Very Useful Engine". Engines that are not useful are scrapped or sent away or, in one distressing story, bricked up in a tunnel.

This is a pernicious doctrine and it pains me as much to read the stories to my children as it does hearing it come out of the mouth of a dear, sick woman. There is nothing wrong with being useful, but it is not what human (or any other) beings are for. What all great spirituality teaches is that we are for love, and this is a trick that the Fat Controller, along with all whose highest good is Economic Growth and those who wish to provide our children schooling that will fit them for work, just do not get.

I barely get it myself

</rant>

Fat

<rant>

In another statement that demonstrates how we, as a society, fail to join up the dots, Alan Johnson is concerned about the level of obesity in this country. Well done: very up with the Zeitgeist, Al.

Well, if we spend so much time and money and space encouraging and manipulating ourselves into being nothing more than consumers ("consumero ergo sum") [please, someone, correct my Latin], what do you expect? “My name is Julian. I am an addict: TV, CDs, that lovely soya yoghurt from [in]Saino's, the Internet, my new mobile phone, now sadly lost or stolen or strayed, books on spirituality, etc. (the list is endless, so I won't go on at length as if I were Clement Freud in Just a Minute); thank you so much for giving me ample opportunity to feed my addiction.”

We live in a terribly split society: we want to have it all; and we don't want to be fat.

Tricky.

</rant>

God is dead: thank God

I feel the need to have a rant (not a feeling I am unaccustomed to). This may be the first of many.

<rant>

Today on Start the Week on Radio 4, Grayson Perry and Jonathon Green were banging on about being ("fundamentalist" in Perry's words) atheists. Their images of God are so outmoded and childish: a god who is a judgemental and a 'grumpy old fellow' 'who wants to make us suffer': it is a projection of the negative father complex.

They do not see that one has to disentangle God from the repressions of particular religious cultures and anthropologies. They cannot entertain a god who is not a person, who is not a thing. I have never yet met a person who said they didn't believe in God who, when I've heard them to talk about the god in which they do not believe, I didn't agree with: I also do not believe in that, so-called, god. Thank God.

Perry read out a piece of doggerel verse he'd penned:

you will die

you are alone

there is no God

upon his throne

impose thy will

upon us, mess

or else your life

is meaningless

no hell below

no heaven above

live life now

and act with love

It is a hymn to love - a definition of God than which there is none better.

Most atheists are simply ignorant of 2000+ years of thinking on the matter and unreflective of their experience. A few are failed apophatic mystics. You so-called atheists, you need to get your act together and update your arguments. Then we might have something worth talking about. In the meantime, it's just not worth any more hot air.

</rant>