“Who is Jesus?” Alpha Course - Week 2

Expecting not to feel like eating in close proximity to other people again, I bought a banana from a greengrocers on London Road as I walked down to St Peter’s church for my second Alpha Course session.

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I approached the building quickly and entered with a smile on my face. This was not deliberate, I was genuinely excited by tonight’s subject. At the first session, we were each given an Alpha Course “manual”, so I knew this week’s question would be “Who is Jesus?”. Note the present tense. I do feel like I already know him fairly well, having spent my entire school life in the Catholic system. My mental images of Jesus, Mary and God were all formed when I was about 4 years old. I still have to stop myself from revering the very idea of Mary.

I said hello to the 4 others from my circle who, like me, had showed up early. They all remembered my name and I had forgotten all of theirs. They were happily talking amongst themselves and seeing as there were so few here I decided I would eat some of the food. There was a choice of either pasta carbonara, or a sort of mushroom and leek vegetarian pasta option. I went for the latter and it was very good. As I ate, another 4 or 5 of my circle arrived. In total we were 3 down on the previous week. Nobody sat in the same place as last week and I positioned myself at the point farthest from the altar so I could look at it without twisting.

Once all the plates had been cleared away, The Vicar took to the stage and welcomed us warmly. He thanked those of us who had returned and he thanked those who were there for the first time. It looked like the numbers had thinned slightly but not much. If there were 100 last week then there were perhaps 90 this week. After reminding us of our complete freedom, he went a little more into what the Alpha Course offered. Part of the package he described was “...a taster of the experience of Christianity..” and this is where the singing comes in. He told us that the singing we do there is an example of the sort of benefits that come with being a practising Christian

The Singing

At the end of this short introduction, he invited the guitar-playing singer up on to the stage. We were invited to stand and sing and this time I saw only one other person that had chosen to remain seated. There may have been more but I couldn’t see from my vantage point, surrounded as I was by standing human bodies. The other non-stander was behind me and I chose not to make eye contact.

Surprisingly, they started singing exactly the same hymn as last week. I could speculate about why that might be, but I’ll let you ponder that for yourselves. At the end of “How great Thou Art” they went without a pause into another hymn which contained the repeated lyric “Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord”.

This hymn is apparently called “Everlasting God”. I don’t like it one bit. “How Great Thou Art” has a certain grandeur to it but “Everlasting God” has one of those non-melodies so favoured by weak bedroom-based singer songwriters. Uninspiring.

As they sang, I looked around at my enthusiastically singing, swaying comrades. Although I couldn’t remember their names, I could remember the questions they’d asked during last week’s group session. I’ll give you a summary of that while they’re singing this damned hymn.

The Previous Week’s Group Discussion

After The Vicar finished his first sermon last week, it was time for the circles of Alpha students to discuss the topics amongst ourselves. Our circle stayed where it was, in the centre of the room but most of the other ones got up and went to the various corners of the huge building and its annexes.

As we hadn’t talked as a group yet, our circle’s lead-helper started with a non-religious question to get things going: “If you were sent to live on a desert island, what one item would you take with you?” A short conversation ensued about whether we should go around the circle in a clockwise or anticlockwise direction. Clockwise was decided upon. The answers included a television, a computer, a cooker, cosmetics and a musical instrument. I wanted to take the works of Shakespeare and after acknowledging my own pretentiousness we laughed and moved on.

Next question: “If you could ask God one question, what would it be?” Now this was the sort of thing I was here for so I started trying to think of a good question as I waited for my turn. The questions that this group of people would ask if they had an opportunity to speak to the omnipotent creator of the universe included:

“When will the world end?”
“Why does evil exist?”
“Why are there wars?”
“How did you create the world?”

There were a few others which I can’t recall, but one I can vividly remember is “When you created the world, why did you make it so there are 24 hours in the day, and not like 26”. After we’d finished a good-natured chuckle, I couldn’t help but announce to the group that in actual fact, the rate at which the Earth is spinning is slowing down and a some point in the distant future a day will indeed be 26 hours long. I also pointed out that this meant that in the past, the planet spun more quickly, so during the time of the dinosaurs, the day would have been shorter. This was listened to with interest by most of the circle, though a couple of them wanted me to go over it again.

It then came to my turn to ask God a question. I asked “Imagine a human that was so rich and powerful that he could afford to rid the world of poverty. This person chooses not to, however. Does God see this person as a sinner for choosing not to end poverty?”

The main helper said “good question” and some agreed with him while a few others looked bemused. Then it was the next person’s turn. “But what about the answer?” I thought.
This was the first time I realised that the Alpha Course does not provide immediate answers to specific questions. I was hoping that one of the helpers would point out the theological basis whereby it would be wrong for a human not to end poverty, but OK for their God. Nobody in the group offered an answer.

The next question was “Is religion a force for good or bad?” The consensus of the circle was that it is “about 50/50” because religion has caused a lot of strife but it has also led to a lot of good works being undertaken. Religion inspires good deeds such as charity work. I tried to stay quiet on this question as I didn’t want it to become "The Simon Course". I failed, and told them that I don’t believe that you need a religious belief to do good deeds; people are capable of doing good for its own sake. I gave an approximation of the idea (with which I wholly agree) that a good person will do good things anyway whereas religion can give otherwise good people a reason to treat other people badly, sometimes very badly.

This brought us on to the Old Testament. One of the students asked how it can have been God’s will to order the deaths of certain people in the Old Testament. The story she referred to was one where God told a man to “kill this man by burying his sword in his body or something”. Someone else recognised the story and a few other people nodded in agreement that this didn’t seem like a good thing for a good God to command. A moment’s silence followed, and I expected someone to bring up other instances of God’s counterintuitive notion of what is right. Nobody did, so I told them that the killing of individual people is nothing when you compare it to God’s command that the returning Israelites wipe out the Canaanites (Deuteronomy 7:1-2), with no mercy for women and children. I went as far as to say I don’t know what the Canaanite children could have been guilty of that could justify their slaughter - or even their symbolic slaughter - and that this didn’t sound like the kind of deity I would choose to worship even if I thought it did exist. I saw a few faces frown for the first time at this point.

One of the helpers said she would dig up one of her books to find the Christian answer to this problem as she couldn’t get her head around it. This technique for dealing with difficulties is the standard response to the tricky questions. When faced with something that could only be justified by reference to the mystery of God’s ways, it was accepted that there would be an explanation somewhere, even if it was hard to think of one yourself. For me, if there is no justification to be seen, it suggests that there is no justification. When I see people assume that genocidal acts can be justified by defering to the writings of theologians, it makes me despair for a moment or two.

At the end of the group session, one of the girls suggested that God was “too far above us” to be questioned in such a way and that we couldn’t possibly understand it. In response, I asked why this God should be exempt from the same level of interrogation and scrutiny as the rest of us. The silent nods and frowns ended that week’s discussion. Afterwards I went for a pint with the lead-helper and had a very good conversation about atheism and faith.

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The Vicar’s Sermon - The Historical Evidence

Back to the present week, where we left the congregation singing a rather flaccid hymn. When it finished, The Vicar took to the stage and began his sermon. Although entitled “Who is Jesus?” this talk concentrated mostly on reasons for believing that what we know about Jesus is true.

His first point was that the “historical evidence” for Jesus’ existence is very strong. The historical evidence referred to is the New Testament. The reason that this evidence is so strong is because the oldest copies of the gospels are from a time quite close to the life of Christ when compared to other historical documents and the events they describe.

For instance, the oldest copy of the works of Tacitus dates from about  1100 AD, which was 1,300 years after it was first written. These documents are deemed trustworthy enough for us to use their contents to inform our views of Claudius and Nero. We have copies of the gospels dating from 350 AD with partial manuscripts dating from 130 AD. This means that our earliest copies of the gospels date from only 30-310 years from the time when they were written, so they must therefore be at least as reliable as Tacitus.

As always when the reliability of the New Testament is referred to, there is a show of inquisitiveness, but its content is always absolutely trusted in the end. The Vicar did not even mention the possibility that the gospels may have been embellished. The content of the New Testament, and the gospels in particular are viewed as if they are a description of events as they occurred. The Vicar again referred to the supposedly exhaustive choice of Jesus being either “Mad, bad or God” and we discussed this point in the group afterwards.

The lead-helper asked what we thought about the idea that Jesus must be one of those three options. I allowed a few seconds of silence to pass before saying that there is another choice. It is possible that the stories described in the gospels did not happen that way, so the choice should be between Jesus being either mad, a liar, the son of god or a fictional character. I immediately clarified that I don’t personally doubt the existence of a man called Jesus, I just doubt that he was God, that he worked miracles and that he necessarily said the things that are attributed to him. To back myself up, I mentioned that I have read a book called “Jesus Never Existed” and that it failed to convince me that Jesus didn’t exist. They liked this, but nobody responded to my point about the New Testament perhaps not being wholly accurate.

Returning to The Vicar’s talk, after the historical aspect of the life of Jesus, he went on to speak of the things Jesus said about himself. Jesus said that “I am the way and the truth and the life” and “To have seen me is to have seen God”. He claimed to be the Messiah, the son of God and also God the Son. The Vicar’s point was that Jesus must have been so much more than just the great teacher that many say he was. The reason he believes this seems to be that Jesus said it. This circular reasoning is not an over-simplification of the argument.

To show us what he meant, The Vicar asked us to imagine we were at the house party of a friend of a friend. While at this party, the host approaches you and says “I am the truth”. You say OK and shuffle away. A little later, the host speaks to you again and says “I am the Son of GOD”. Such claims, according to The Vicar, cannot be anything other than the claims of somebody who is telling the truth. He didn’t mention the thousands of other people over the centuries that have claimed to be God, however.

He compared the lofty claims of Jesus to the claims of the Buddha who said “I die seeking the truth”, or Mohammed, who said he was “a prophet”. Jesus claimed to be “The Truth”, and indeed God himself. The look on The Vicar’s face as he said all this told me that he really does follow this line of reasoning. His trust in the character of Christ as portrayed in the gospels is so absolute that he believes every claim that the Jesus character makes at face value. Jesus was Jesus so what Jesus said about himself must be true.

Jesus the Original Thinker

The Vicar then spoke of the “new thinking” that Jesus came up with. The examples of such hitherto unheard of concepts included the sermon on the mount; “Blessed are the meek” etc. The other example was the words said to have been spoken by Jesus to the mob that wanted to stone the adulteress to death. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”. The Vicar lingered on this story for a while in a kind of amazement at how wise Jesus must have been. This was a subtle attempt to claim a Christian ownership on the concepts of justice and fairness and it was rather disappointing for me; I expected more than that from The Vicar. It still surprises me when Christians think that humans do not have a natural sense of justice that grows from our instinctive empathy for one another. It seems obvious to me.

We then digressed for another attack on the “mechanistic” views of science. The Vicar said that we all agree that the human experience requires more than a mechanistic explanation. There are many things that we cannot quantify, such as justice and love, but this does not mean they don’t exist. “We can’t buy 2 litres of love, but we wouldn’t deny its existence”. In the same way, you can’t deny God just because you can’t quantify him.

Lives without faith are apparently “of limited ambition and purpose”. There is a gap in all of us that only Jesus can fill.

The rest of the talk continued in the vein of using the bible as evidence of what was said in the bible. “How could someone have stolen Jesus’ body from the tomb when there were two guards posted?” How indeed. He can only have risen from the dead. Jesus also fulfilled too many prophecies of the Old Testament to to be dismissed as an impostor.

Finally The Vicar spoke of his feeling that the behaviour of the apostles (you guessed it, as described in the bible) can only have been the behaviour of people that had witnessed the resurrected Christ. Would they have gone to their eventual terrible deaths in the name of somebody they knew not to be the Messiah? Would the church have blossomed into life so quickly if it wasn’t based on real events, witnessed by real people?

The Group Discussion

In our circle, we drank tea and discussed the talk. The conversation flowed a little more easily than the previous week. The main subject was the believability of the Jesus story. I said that for me, discussion of the historical evidence for Jesus’ life and miracles was surely missing the point. If Christians’ main aim is to follow what he said, then what does it matter whether he performed miracles or not, or rose from the dead? Why do we need to attribute supernatural features to him if we are trying to follow his teachings? For that matter, does it even matter whether or not he existed if it’s his teachings that we’re interested in? Why would it make a difference to Christians if it turned out that the New Testament was just a novel? The teachings would still be the same. Nods. Frowns.

The group then starting talking about all the times that Jesus was seen after he rose from the dead; on the road to Emmaus, at the scene of Doubting Thomas’ humiliation, in the garden of Gethsemene etc. I had already made my point to them about all of their evidence coming from this one book with a murky provenance, so I chose to limit the depth of my unpopularity by forcing my mouth closed for a bit.

By the end of the discussion, I felt the first inkling that some of the others were tired of hearing from me. All the questions being discussed seem to stop after I’ve had my say. Nobody argued with me. I do think that a few of them are taking my comments on board, which I’m pleased about, but there are some that are only there to bolster their faith rather than to truly question it. I asked the group to forgive me for speaking so much and they assured me that they were pleased I was doing so.

I spoke briefly with The Vicar afterwards to ask him for the source of the Charlie Brooker quote from last week. I told him I was the token atheist in the group and he congratulated me “Oh well done! Make sure you speak up!”. So with this invitation ringing in my ears, I left the church wearing the same smile I arrived with.
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Next Week: The Vicar is away for a week, so the talk is given by a stand-in who treats us to a surprisingly full-on, traditional Christian view of the cross and of sin itself.

“Explore the Meaning of Life” The Alpha Course

I arrived at the gothic monolith of St Peter’s Church, next to the Level in Brighton. It’s a grand old building and I’d always wanted to look inside. At the age of 33 I finally got my chance. I signed up for the Alpha Course.

My main motivation was curiosity. I’m pretty secure in my atheism and I‘m satisfied that one lifetime of consciousness is plenty for me. I find the idea of death terrifying but I don’t think this means that there must be some kind of afterlife. I imagine that my experience after death will be exactly the same as the one I had before I was born. I acknowledge that there’s a theoretical chance that I’m wrong about this and that’s OK.  

I’ve had several conversations with believers during which the Alpha course has been recommended. We will have arrived at this point in the conversation because my interlocutor has run out of answers to my various questions about their faith. The obvious big questions about how God can allow suffering seem only to be resolved by reference to His Mysterious Ways. I can’t accept that as an answer, so when I ask for more, I am told “Well I can’t explain this to you but someone else can” and the Alpha course is mentioned. I’d like to bypass this part of future conversations by saying that I have indeed completed the Alpha course, then we can get back to where I want to the conversation to be, at the bit where the believer must tell me their reasons for accepting why the God they say loves them also chooses not to heal the sick, why they are OK with that.

My thoughts about religion can be summed primarily as seeing no reason to think there is some kind of personal creator or all-seeing eye out there. Secondarily, even if it turned out that the Christian God exists, I would not choose to worship such a petty, cruel and self-obsessed being. Aside from this, the obvious mutual incompatibility of the various religions tells its own tale.

Enough background. I arrived in the dark outside St Peter’s Church at 7pm and entered from the eastern side. The lighting was a mixture of suspended red heat-lamps and various coloured bulbs. My overall sense was one of a purple-blue glow. I felt like a teenager entering a disco full of people I didn’t know. I was surprised to see that about 10 circles of 10 chairs were arranged near the altar and halfway down the cavernous nave were tables set up with some sort of rice and casserole meal. Everybody was eating very well, except me, as I just can’t bear stuffing my face in close proximity to other people like that.

As I entered, I was greeted by three separate twenty-somethings who ushered me firstly to a table where I wrote down my name and contact details, and then onwards to my designated circle of chairs. My circle was right in the middle, a position which afforded me the pleasure of gazing up at the high, ornate ceiling for a bit. These roofs just astound me, they are wonderful. The word “glorious” pops into my head.

There were about 100 people there and the average age looked to be about 22-28. At first glance there seemed to be a few more women than men. My circle of 11 people was made up of 9 women and 2 men, of which I was one of the men. The other male was the sort of main ‘helper’ or ‘facilitator’ for our circle. There were 2 other helpers included in this ring, one of whom was sat directly to my left. We all introduced ourselves to each other and exchanged chit-chat. Some of them had done the course before 2 or 3 times. It felt like all of us wanted this to go well.

From where I sat I had a good view of the elevated screen that was on the stage/altar next to the rather stylised crucifix that was on the wall behind it. It was one of those crucifixions with no blood. Jesus was fully robed, caucasian, symmetrical and serene in his torture.

The Vicar stood up and introduced himself. I will refer to him as The Vicar. He looked about 35, bouncy blond curls, checked shirt, no dog-collar. He frequently burst into those fabulous grins that are granted only to the devout. (Actually he looked very much like Ben Goldacre in full flow.)

After making us feel welcome, The Vicar started to explain a little about what the Alpha Course is. (I didn’t keep notes, so this is not a verbatim account, though I did remember more of the talk than I expected to.) The main thing about the way the course is set up is that there appear to be no rules whatsoever. There is no restriction on what you can ask. None at all. Also, you don’t have to do or say anything. Every single thing you do there is done out of your own free will. He was keen to stress this aspect of the Alpha Course, and rightly so - I think it’s incredibly empowering to be told that you are free to do what you want. It immediately instilled me with a sense of wanting to repay their trust.

The Vicar’s introduction was all very light-hearted and even genuinely funny sometimes. He said a lot of people turn up to Alpha wondering if they’ll be the only normal person there, which made me laugh. After this, he got on to the subject of singing. Apparently one of the things people dislike most about the course is the singing, but it also happens to be one of the things that people say they like the most about the course too. More laughter.

Another chap was invited on to the stage. He held a guitar and I felt myself start to blush.
“I’m your worst nightmare,” he announced as he checked the tuning of the guitar,
“A Christian who really believes”.

Here we go, I thought. As I feared, we were invited to stand up and sing along. To my horror, everybody stood up. I had a short conversation with myself where I weighed up the awkwardness of remaining seated against the self-loathing I would feel if I stood. I hate this kind of light, harmless social pressure so I remained in my seat. Looking around, I think there were maybe 5 of us in total doing this. Nobody else in my circle was seated. I felt very much like this little exercise had identified all the people who may prove tricky.

He started singing “How Great Thou Art” and almost everybody joined in immediately.

It’s one of those hymns that I quite like the sound of, apart from the lyrics. As my gaze switched from the glorious ceiling to the floor and back again, I couldn’t help but feel some pangs of envy. I wished that I too felt like just singing out. They sung all of the verses and choruses and by the end I was comfortable in my non-participation and pleased with myself for resisting the first wave of group pressure. Well done, Simon.

As well as identifying me as potential trouble, the singing also demonstrated that 95% of the attendees were actually rather faithful Christians. I had expected around half of them to be recognisable as doubters, especially in Brighton, but no. The overwhelming majority of this group were believers. It was a congregation.

After the singing, The Vicar got back up on stage and started his main talk, or sermon if you like. We had a bit more about the course itself. He reminded us again of how free we all were to say whatever we wanted to, and that the course did not require us to leave our brains at the door but to bring our best questions. Many people on the course were there because they have doubts or difficulties with their faith and it’s through sharing them that we could start to address such issues. From what I saw, a lot of people are there for a general refresher in the basics of Christianity, and some people were there just as a bit of extra-curricular churchgoing.

I think he said this was the 6th course that had been run from this church. He said he had learned a great deal from each of the previous courses. For him, the new questions had made him see his faith from new viewpoints, all of which, as it happened, ended up reinforcing his Christian faith.

He told us that each of us can have a personal relationship with God, where he knows you and you know him. This isn’t just a figure of speech but a description of a real relationship. It’s a relationship that The Vicar feels and it’s a relationship he wants us all to feel. He went on to mention how some people never do get it. Some well-meaning people have said to him that they could see how the christian faith was really good for him and that he seemed to benefit greatly from it, but that it wasn’t for them. Although they meant this as a compliment, he didn’t feel like it was a compliment.

This brought him on to the “New Atheism” as he called it. Name-checking Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, and their respective anti-religious books, The Vicar spoke of their effect on society by offering only a materialistic view of the world, with no appreciation of the human experiences of faith or a desire for meaning etc. He outlined their view that religion has a wholly negative influence on the world. After giving a brief but fair summary of each of the writers, he concluded by referring their approach to religion as an “intellectual” one. Apparently religion can’t be understood by purely “intellectual” means. Finally, he appealed to the ubiquitous sense that there must be more to life than this.

From the language he used, I suspect that he has indeed read the work of the authors he mentioned. Although he neglected to mention the awe and wonder expressed for instance by Dawkins in relation to the natural world, he managed to avoid lapsing straight into the caricatures that are so often referred to instead of their written words.

After reading a quote from a Charlie Brooker* Guardian article in which Brooker characteristically describes the sense of emptiness and hopelessness felt by, well, him, The Vicar started to talk about how Christianity fills the gap. Christianity provides him and other believers with a sense of MEANING and PURPOSE. After outlining these a little (good works, etc), he surprised me by saying that these are “Subjective Benefits” in that they are something that can be defined and experienced differently by everyone, and that these benefits alone are not any sort of proof that Christianity is the way to go.

For the Vicar, the clincher is not the meaning or the purpose that Christianity brings, but the fact (as he sees it) that Jesus is the son of God. This was a bit of a leap of logic for me. Having so honourably acknowledged the subjective nature of meaning and purpose, I was expecting something based on a similarly analytical approach. The Vicar told us that Jesus said “I am the truth” and for him this is such a fundamental and extraordinary statement of intent from Jesus, that he is compelled to believe in him. He touched on C.S. Lewis’ analysis that Christ was either mad, a liar or the son of God. Out of the three, The Vicar chose the Son of God option. He doesn’t believe that someone (especially Jesus!) would make such claims dishonestly. Along with other circumstantial reinforcements of this idea, he is very secure in this faith.

From here, the vicar explained his idea of “reasonable faith”. He wouldn’t believe in Jesus’ message if it wasn’t reasonable to do so. He touched on the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus and hinted that we’d learn more about that over the coming weeks. Aside from the non-biblical evidence of his existence, The Vicar told us that the descriptions of the behaviour and fates of the apostles just rang true with him. Underlying all of this reasoning was the assumption that the gospels are a true account of Jesus’ life. This assumption was utilised a lot through the night, with no real critical thought about the possibility that it is at the very least an enhanced version of events.

With all the “evidence” and “reasoning” available, the Vicar concludes that Christianity is either completely meaningless, or is the most important truth that there is.

He ended his talk by going through the top 10 list of questions typed into the Ask Jeeves search engine. After the predictably frivolous ones, we got down to number 2 which was “Does god exist?”. At number 1 in the list was: “What is the Meaning of Life?”. The point was rather poignant. People all across the planet, sitting alone at their computers, all want to know the answer to that big question. They want to know it so much that they ask the hive mind, in case the answer is out there somewhere. This Christianity says it has the answer; it knows the truth. It says the truth is Jesus Christ.

For me, this is not an answer at all. It’s a non-answer to a non-question. I don’t see any need for there to be a “meaning” of life in the first place. To my mind, anyone that says they know the answer is indeed simply a liar, or deluded. Saying you have the answer, is not the same as having an answer and nor does it make you a god.

After the sermon, we discussed the subjects raised by the Vicar within our group. This was the most enjoyable part for me, but I will write more about the group element of the course next week, as I’ve written too much already. After the discussion, the session was over and I went for a pint with the main ‘helper’.

I hope you can stick with me on my little journey through the Alpha Course. I am determined to complete the whole thing. My inability to keep my mouth shut when presented with poor answers is the biggest threat to my achieving this. I must walk a line between being true to myself and avoiding expulsion.

Next week I will look more closely at the group discussions as this is where you get to the guts of why people are there and why they believe what they do. We also see how they respond to the decidedly awkward questions I have.

*The Vicar is going to dig up the Charlie Brooker quote for me.

I WAS WRONG - IT IS REMARKABLY WARM AFTER ALL

So it has been warm lately hasn’t it? The only reason I know this is that twitter and facebook have been full of people mentioning it. As usual this year, whenever there is good weather I am stuck in an office where even the concept of Summer is hard to grasp. Sunshine outside might as well be sunshine on Mars for all the satisfaction I get from it while I toil.

My usual reaction, on hearing how much people are enjoying something that is denied to me, is one of dismissive envy. In this instance this manifested itself in a belief that actually this warm spell is not at all remarkable anyway - that people are disorientated by the piss-poor Summer just passed and are just blindly seizing on the opportunity to moan about how hot it is for the first time this year. I hypothesised that people were relying on flawed memories for their perception of what the weather was meant to be like at this time of year. You know, like in all that research that shows how fallible eye-witness statements are? That’s exactly what’s going on, I thought.

Having nothing better to do, I thought it would be fun to get all the data for maximum temperatures in September over the last decade and compare them in a graph. Then I could show people that while it is indeed warm it is not remarkably so. I’d show them that actually it’s often like this and they would concede that there was no point banging on about it as they had been doing all week.

So I went to the excellent http://www.wunderground.com/ and copied all the data for the Septembers over the last 10 years at Gatwick airport (nearest data to where I live in Hove), right up until yesterday. Using my rudimentary I.T. skills, I put all this stuff on a graph and here it is:

[Hmm, it's a bit small but the X axis is the day of the month of September (1-30), the Y axis is the maximum daily temperature in degrees centigrade (10-30). On the right is the key showing the colours allocated to each year. The RED line is the one for THIS September - the red line ends yesterday]

As you can see, the bright red line, which shows maximum daily temperature for each day in September 2011 (that’s the September we’re in now), is actually significantly higher right now than it has been on the same day over the last ten years. My hypothesis is therefore wrong. The people were right, after all. They were right to say that it is warmer than usual and I was wrong to dismiss this as some kind of mass delusion - wrong to assume that they had forgotten similar temperatures on this day in previous Septembers.

When this result emerged on my graph, I was disappointed and initially I thought “oh well, I won’t write that blog entry after all, my hypothesis was wrong” but then, of course, I would have failed humanity! I must share the result of my investigation whether it proves me right or not!

In this instance, my efforts have proven my reaction to be wrong but that is not a bad thing. I have now learned to put a bit less faith in my grumpy knee-jerk reactions. Next time I respond to such a situation with grumpy dismissal, I am more likely to remember the time I proved this reaction to be unreliable. This will result in me getting over grumpiness more quickly, armed with a new tool to dispatch it with. Thank you skepticism!

[I suspect that this conclusion would be less clear if I went back 50 or 100 years, as weather really does fluctuate. However, my knee-jerk reaction against the “ooh it’s remarkably warm” comment was based on my lack of faith in people’s memories of the September weather over the last few years. Also, when I say that this one is “Significantly” warmer than Septembers over the previous decade I mean this in a purely intuitive sense - I don’t know enough maths to say that it is actually significant in a truly mathematical sense. Maybe it is.

You can see that 2003 and 2006 also had unusually high maximum temperatures, but these were earlier in September when the average temperature is slightly higher than it is at the end of September. These periods would also have been “remarkable” by my definition, but less remarkable than this warm spell we’re in right now.]

I Dismiss Your Biased Speculation

To the glib people who say “it’s possible to condemn the riots AND to understand the background you know” I say fine, of course that’s true, but I hope such sophisticated thinking extends to allowing me not to accept every “understandable” or "logical" reason as if it’s an actual observation of reality.

Riots exist. Possible reasons for riots exist too. The existence of a riot does not itself prove why it started (this sounds blatantly obvious). Surprise surprise, the reasons people “reckon” on seem to follow what their political biases already were. Just because you can think of a logical reason that stems from your politics, it does not mean that you have therefore identified the motivation of the rioters.

There are all sorts of potential logical reasons behind a riot. Some of them you will like, some of them you will be appalled by (BNP). So please allow me to dismiss any unsubstantiated ideas without presuming that I am therefore unwilling to understand the actual reasons for the riots.

Let's Be Clear

Mass public protests have once again driven me to make a short, sarcastic and possibly glib statement on my Facebook profile. I try not to do this, I really do, but every now and then I feel compelled to spit something out.

In this instance I said this:

“When democracy doesn't give you what you want; When your best arguments just won't change enough minds, SHOUTING SLOGANS is bound to do the trick”

Now I knew that on the face of it, this statement seems to go against the opinion of many people that I know i.e. that protests and demonstrations are an important - even crucial - part of a free society and that they can make a difference. Well I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, of course. Public protests are a necessary part of a free society - a society that decided to ban protest would of course have become totalitarian and nobody wants that do they? Well I certainly don’t anyway. I’d like to think that people who know me at all, or even not very well would not think I was a totalitarian at heart. If anyone who says they know me were to accuse me of having totalitarian sympathies, I would wonder what exactly had brought them to such a conclusion - oh and I would be interested in the answer too.

Going back to my statement on Facebook, I wrote it - perhaps naively - with the intention of compressing a general query I had into a short, sarcastic and hopefully thought-provoking string of words. Foolishly, I assumed that the parts of my philosophy that I had left unsaid would be assumed by my friends to be limited only to the obvious things that aren’t worth saying, such as that: I am a fan of democracy - I think the right to protest is important - I believe that our representatives should be made aware of the plurality of theories that exist so that their policies can be shaped in full knowledge of all the options - that engagement in politics is important - that ignorance of political issues is bad - that different people have different opinions - you know the sort of stuff I mean. The obvious stuff.

As it happens, my statement was not actually about the current issues that were being protested. My intention was simply to question the motives of those who were taking part. Now, for me, the questioning of motives simply means to ask what the motives were and then listen out for an answer. I want real answers so that I don't end up relying on my preconceived notions when speculating about such things.

There is, for me, a gap between the rights and wrongs of the issues being protested and the actual reason for people attending the marches. In discussions on the subject, these separate items are mixed up and blurred, so I can’t question the motives of protesters without seeming to be making a statement about the political issue itself. With regard to the political issue, throughout the various protests, I have been looking for answers on both sides of the arguments that would help me to come to my own conclusion. So far, none of them have delivered a line of reasoning that would actually change my mind from the agnostic position in which it currently resides to having a belief in their arguments. It’s all speculative at best and idealistic wishful thinking at worst. Oh I find my agnostic position on the economic policies of the government and opposition as infuriating as anyone else - I want to know the answer! That’s why I ask such questions out loud.

Yet time and again, such a standpoint, yearning for solid facts, is met by tirades from people who accuse me of smugness, arrogance and “being a closet Tory”. I maintain that I am not an expert in economics, therefore my opinions on it are worthless. I am however capable of using logic to weigh up evidence that I hear on either side and of building up an idea of what is true and what isn’t. The problem is that the vast majority of the “facts” I hear about economic policy are not facts at all, but the opinions of people with as much grasp of the chaos of economics as I have. These economic experts - amateur and professional - all shout very earnestly and they all say slightly different things, insisting that they are right. This seems to me to be similar to the situation with religions: they can’t all be right, but they can all be wrong. Or as Plato describes it: between ignorance and scientific truth lies opinion.

To me, this means that until I hear something that isn’t based on subjective, opinionated sloganeering, until I hear evidence I can really believe in, the only sound standpoint is one of objective agnosticism. This of course leaves me open to accusations of smugness and arrogance but luckily for me I don’t get these accusations mixed up with reasoned arguments, and after a few hours of anguish I shake them off and brush them into the bin marked “irrelevant”. I am perfectly happy to be seen as arrogant if my position is based on sound logic and if my own opinion of myself is that I am not being arrogant.

Aside from my agnosticism on the subject of the policies themselves, we come back to what my Facebook statement was actually about. I was asking a particular question about human behaviour but holding it up against the backdrop of current events, like what topical commentators do. The backdrop in this instance was the protests. The subject I was holding up against it was this: that humans, when they believe something to be right, will tend to maintain that position even in the face of good evidence that proves they are wrong. (I know for a fact that this happens in at least one living human ( Oh I’d better clarify that I’m referring to myself here - mustn’t leave things unsaid!)).

The only thing that can actually change someone’s mind is evidence - either empirical or anecdotal. The evidence is seen or heard by the eyes or ears, then the brain weighs it up and decides on its reliability and tries to fit this evidence into its existing world view. If it doesn’t fit into the brain’s model of the world, then either the model is changed, or the evidence is rejected due to its incompatibility with the model. This is the difference between open-mindedness and bigotry.

I wondered then, if all the evidence and logic that the protesters had at their command had failed to convince people that the government’s economic policy was wrong, what chance did the bellowing of slogans have? I can not recall a single instance where somebody shouting rhyming slogans at me had ever succeeded in changing my mind about anything - let alone about economic policy. Whereas there are a great many times when reading about a subject has resulted in my mind being changed. I love it when this happens! Each time I realise I was wrong in some belief or other, I am another step closer to a truthful worldview. When people have shouted at me in order to make me do their bidding or believe what they say, it has the effect of making me very resistant indeed to what they are saying. Shouting is just brute force in vocal form and I resent its use. (I have to be honest here and say that my profound disappointment at the sloganeering of the left has indeed made me more resistant to their view.)

Perhaps someone might have answered my Facebook comment, saying “Actually we’re not trying to change people’s minds anyway. It’s an opportunity for like-minded people to show their solidarity and to be reassured that they are not alone in their beliefs, whilst also ensuring that the government cannot at any point say that they were unaware of so many people feeling this way - a demonstration in the true sense of the word. You’re being overly simplistic if you think we’re here expecting tol make the government come round to our way of thinking - we’re not stupid!” They might also have said that the protests were a result of the frustration of feeling that they weren’t being listened to, although that would have raised from me the question of why they thought their views were more worthy of being listened to than those of the people who agree with what the government is doing. (See quote and link below).

If the stakes were higher, protesters could have legitimately told me that the purpose of their gathering was to overthrow the government, as we’ve seen to such inspirational effect in Egypt. But the stakes aren’t quite that high in this instance. If they were, if it was a matter of overthrowing a dictatorship, I’d like to think I’d be right there with them. I’m not opposed to protest, you see.

But no, those who sympathise with the London protesters choose instantly to resort to lobbing straw men and questioning my non-totalitarian credentials. Well since they asked the question, you’ve just read my answer. I’m still waiting for a decent answer as to how and why the shouting of slogans should outweigh democracy and reason.

Guardian 25th March 2011
[Despite Saturday's protest march in London, public tolerance of cuts seems to be sustained. Only 35% think the plans go too far – a 10-point drop since ICM asked the question in November. Meanwhile 28% think the government has found the right balance and 29% say the cuts are not severe enough. That amounts to 57% support for current cuts or more.]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/mar/25/voters-cuts-coalition-poll