Britain tries to limit pro-choice policy

Nobody would wish an abortion upon their closest enemy. Not only for the psychological trauma and misery inflicted upon the mother and father, but also for the death of a foetus that could grow up to live a full adult life. But we also know what damage an unwanted pregnancy can wreak, and, again, not just on the parents but on the baby too. A lapse of judgement, a faulty contraceptive, a rape - and a whole life time of repercussions, some good, perhaps, but many not.

Indeed the decision to have, or not to have, an abortion seems to me to be of such magnitude that the process by which an answer is found must be critical to making the right one. And that process is, obviously, almost overwhelmingly challenging, upsetting and difficult. Who to get advice from? Who to make the decision? How long to decide it? Etc. Tory politician Nadine Dorries wants abortion providers, such as the universally lauded Marie Stopes, to be barred from giving advice in favour of 'independent' counsellors - including religious groups and for the decision making period to be lengthened. Her argument that MS et al have a vested interest in persuading women to have abortions is so implausible as to be almost offensive but perhaps her point is a good one. Isn't more time and greater independence desirable?

But is there any such thing as 'independent' advice? If we believe this decision is important then surely the first consequence we can affirm is that women must make this decision for themselves and not have legislators do it for them? Who could believe an MP has a better chance of making the right decision than the mother concerned? It would follow, surely, that women must be allowed to choose their advisers too and even the period of time that decision should take. For some it will be obvious, for others days if not weeks of agonising may be necessary. We can accept this and still allow a degree of protection - limiting advisers to those with a minimum level of qualification and setting some upper limit on decision making period. Although Dorries claims otherwise, this appears to be part of a gradual chipping away at the right to choose at every stage of having, and not having, an abortion, which the Conservative government have, until now, appeared willing to promote.

A final thought: even those who believe no abortion is acceptable do not need to affirm that it ought to be illegal. The Christian must love, forgive, help, aid and care but not condemn, ostracise or punish; loving your neighbour means allowing them to make decisions for themselves too.

Evangelical Teen Camps & 'Faith Healing'

I've been watching the half-hour long 'best of' clips compiled by Soul Survivor, an evangelical Christian festival aimed at teens. One of the most striking features, between clips of rock music that's pretty far off my taste, was an extended sermon by an attractive, young woman in friendly clothes with a nice, confident voice. I'm sure it wasn't sold as a 'sermon', come to thing of it. It was a loose collection of anecdotes about experiences she had had or heard about when people had been remarkably healed by prayer.

To take two examples:

1. John Wimber had visited an African village where a young boy had been cursed by the local 'witch doctor' after his parents had converted to Christianity. He was mute and shrunken but after Wimber's group prayed for a bit and the boy began to grow and speak. Soon he was fully developed for his age.

2. The woman reported an exchange with her nail technician, one of whom's arms was 1.5cm shorter than the other. After prayer again her arm miraculously grew to full length.

I'm not interested here to assess whether these events took place, although it is hard not to be a little sceptical, but rather what it would mean if they were true, which is what this woman evidently believed and what she was encouraging the enormous crowd of teens listening avidly to her talk.

First, what would it mean for the boy's parents in example 1? Had they not prayed for their son? Had they not prayed hard enough? Were their prayers not good enough? Were they not good enough Christians?

Secondly, what would it mean for other sufferers who don't get better? Her prayers were able to extend the arms of a person she had only just met but why do some good Christians, from loving churches, die from cancer? Were they not really that good? Did they pray wrongly?

Thirdly, did she change God's mind? Had God intended that the little boy should remain cursed unless a prayer group from the USA turned up to help? What about other little boys who are cursed but weren't on Wimber's itinerary, does God give up on them?

In other words does God only act when someone, typically an evangelical Christian, prays to him and why does he act sometimes but, apparantly, not others? My biggest fear about this kind of understanding of 'the power of prayer' is what it means for the practice overall. Prayer, it seems, is like a shopping list of physical ailments for God to fix. If you do it right, he fixes them. For some reason, unknown, He sometimes doesn't. In this sense He's like a capricious car mechanic and we're trying to buy an MOT. Anyone with some knowledge of the history of prayer knows that this is selling prayer far too short and that it simply doesn't reflect our experience of how God works. I don't intend to give a definition but prayer involves, at the very least, a listening exercise not a speaking one. It is about opening ourselves up as a channel or conduit, the traffic is two way. We are in dialogue not monologue.

Perfect Haiku

Writing a haiku as a westerner demands you give up so many intuitive assumptions about the kind of language and expectations poetry fulfills. Gone is metre, metaphor and theorising. No more lengthy wonderings about the internal life of the mind, instead just a crystal clear moment captured in language that perfectly reflects something observed. How hard it is to abandon the likening of one moment to another, or the deliberate shoe-horning in of a thought not an observation, and how perfect it is when a haiku does work and an observation speaks volumes.

Some of my favourite haiku:

Thirty pence each:
a cup of tea,
and a singing bird
(Issa)

Snail – baring
shoulders
to the moon
(Issa)

In the moonlight a worm
silently
drills through a chestnut
(Basho)

The skylark:
Its voice alone fell,
leaving nothing behind
(Ampu)

Each morning in spring
the birds and the toaster
doing their stuff
(Koji)

lend me your arms,
fast as thunderbolts,
for a pillow on my journey.

(Hendrik Doeff)

 

lily: 

out of the water 

out of itself

bass 

picking bugs 

off the moon 

(Nick Virgilio)

   

Some of my own: 

a chapel at night
above the towers –
stars

pigeon breast
puffed out and pulsates;
full of desire

by the tower –
below the window –
a man


a boat leaves behind
quiet quivers
on quiet waters

against the bank –
little lappers
from a paddle
  
unripe grape
between my fingers;
resting on a bruise

Evangelical Teen Camps

Writing in the Guardian, Tom Prosser criticises Christian teen festivals, calling them 'wicked', 'emotionally manipulative' and exploitative. His damning claim is based on two points: first, that the 'tactics' of those who run the camp are manipulative, tricking children into committing to Christianity; and secondly, that the theology of their organisers is suspect. These points do not seem sufficient, to me, to merit his condemnation.

Steve Clifford, general director of the Evangelical Alliance and adviser to Soul Survivor, wrote back, but missed all the key points, although he did do a good job of defending the playing of rock music and so on at Christian festivals from the sneering of Prosser.

Each of the points Prosser made are important, to the first I think he is right that the use of music, dance and spectacle is intended to create an ethereal atmosphere, charged with religious significance and likely to stimulate a reaction that can be quickly identified as the 'Holy Spirit' by the organisers. A substantial part of the appeal of these events is the sense of transformation that be accessed so easily with the right conditions. Prosser goes to far, however, when he characterises this as a ploy to get teenagers to sign on the dotted line like the practices of door-to-door hucksters. The commitment is not odious, without financial demands, and which people keep only as long as they wish to. The signing of a 'contract' to "to include Jesus in their thoughts, words, and actions" is rather more dubious, but not, I think, a widespread practice and obviously more of an initiation ceremony than an out and out legal commitment.

To the second point, I agree again that the theology can be extraordinarily conservative in youth churches but if Prosser really believes, as he claims to, that "young people have a right to choose their religious beliefs", and he ought, then this kind of theology must be available to them. He claims: "Youngsters are threatened with divine judgment, and they are initiated into the world of charismatic Christian practices. At Soul Survivor, the largest Christian youth festival in the UK, teens have been told that witch doctors can maim children by cursing them. They have also been informed that God judges us on death for our deeds and thoughts, and they have been encouraged to practise physical healings."

I suspect not all these claims are true, and if they are, they are not widespread. Taken as a whole, they do not look deeply pernicious, indeed the idea of 'divine judgement' is surely to be expected at a religious festival? The reality is that evangelical teen festivals at their worst are ghastly rock concerts, but as long as the children who attend have fun the core message is overwhelmingly positive.

Evicting rioters must stop

The news that councils in England, with the backing of the Prime Minister, will start removing benefits and council homes from the families of those arrested for rioting - even before they are convicted of their offence - is loathsome, immoral and unjust. Off the top of my head, here are just some of the problems with this: it punishes families for the crimes of their children, it exceeds the punishments given in court for the crime committed, it uses the provision of shelter and welfare as a tool of punishment, it risks extending poverty and homelessness, it is likely to increase antagonism with the police and councils, it will break up communities, and, ultimately, it will increase the liklihood of crime in the future.

These changes are probably best seen as just one further step an a series of antagonistic and thoughtless acts of community vandalism by councils run with both eyes on wealthy, right-wing voters and a complete willingness to sacrifice the needs of council tenants to pursue those votes. Wandsworth, Westminster, Greenwich, Hammersmith and Fulham - the list of councils proposing to start evicting the families of rioters reads like a roster of far-right Tory-run model councils who have spend much of last few decades doing their best to make those in vulnerable positions feel ever less secure.

The 'TRUTH' about the riots

How quickly 'truths' become accepted and established. A glance through Facebook and Twitter informs me that two beliefs are becoming universally adopted: first, that what's needed is a merciless police battle with the rioters stopping short only of bullets; secondly, that the rioters are violent idiotic 'chavs' who riot because they were born that way, viz. working class. Few seem willing to wonder if these actions could be borne from their social or economic context - this is not to excuse horrible acts of violence and vandalism but to acknowledge that people carry them out not because rioting is their DNA but because they are in such a miserable situation that rioting becomes a desirable option. To greet these despicable actions with classist condemnations, to group being working class with being violent as if the two are simply different labels for the same phenomenon, is grossly wrong.

Nor is it patronising, bleeding-heart liberalism to contextualise these actions. No one should seek to deprive the rioters of their agency. What they are doing is wrong, but it is also not surprising, it is part and parcel of the changes to British society and politics that we are currently witnessing. As Martin Luther King said:

"When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty and shoot people dead whilst refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up and express their anger and frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard."

Nations, like individuals, show their true colours in testing times. There are always two options - to go in with all guns blazing rubber bullets and tear gas; or to learn what wrong, to clean up the streets and to make sure that no one is so ever again so desperate, angry and dispossessed that this campaign of violence, vandalism and self defeat looks like a good idea. The choice is between revenge and compassion.

Riots are a sign of the times

What do the riots in Tottenham, Enfield and Brixton tell us about contemporary Britain? It seems to me there are two options: either there is a violent streak in all young men which simmers beneath the surface waiting for an excuse to be unleashed with little threat of criminal charges and rejoices at the chance to nick some electrical hardware; or else the social and economic context are important and riots are an indicator of wider changes in society.

The first is surely impossible to credit - albeit the rioters do seem to consist of young men unconnected to any protest or legitimate concern and are hell bent on causing mayhem, destruction and looting, but these traits are not endemic, genetic traits shared by all young men. To say so is to ignore the relative rarity of such violence and their correlation to poverty, unrest and inequality, whether in Toxteth, Tolpuddle, Brixton or Tottenham.

If the second is the case then I suggest three important factors to look at first: 1. the break down in community policing in London in the last few years after the enlightened policy making of the first Labour government; 2. rising inequality and the failure of living standards to advance significantly for the poorest members of society; 3. the effect of the cuts on poverty, misery and community. To treat these riots as a self contained example of the evil of certain segments of the population or to link them with recent protests by students or public sector workers is as disingenuous as it is contrary to the evidence and to common sense. Why is it now, in poor areas of the most unequal city in the country, that these events are taking place? Vandalism is the most perfect act of self defeat, of blind rage expressing itself in short term, selfish idiocy, of pointless hurt and pain, of dispossession by people with little or nothing holding them to normal society. The police, with all credibility and public trust shattered, have no ability to hold a fragile peace amongst fractured communities. There will be more where this came from over the next few years.