As an atheist I am a huge believer in Christianity.

The scenes we have recently witnessed on the streets of our major cities has proved to me that there has been a breakdown in the moral fabric of our society and I think It would not be a huge leap draw a direct correlation between outrages of this kind and the decline in church congregations.

Allow me to justify my seemingly non-sensical first statement then. Rewind one hundred years or so and you would find in most communities, the majority attending a church of some sort or other. In these services they would be taught a code of moral ethics expounding laudable principles such as do unto others as thou should do to yourself and though shalt not steal. Sound principles in any society and based in many ways on the logic of group dynamics dictating working together gains you more.

However, where I deviate from my Christian friends is that whilst this sound group moral philosophy makes sense for a harmonious society there is the introduction of the god myth. I understand the need for the god myth, put crudely, we all need an incentive to do and be good and if some devine power has deemed it necessary we behave in a certain manner, then one hundred years ago that would have been enough to convince that we ought to, particularly if the majority were of that opinion, however ludicrous it seems today. I understand that for many the chaos and randomness of our life’s need to be put into some sort of higher context.

Christianity needs to be reinvented in a modern world.

Let’s for the sake of this argument say that Jesus was not the son of god, that he did not perform miracles and was not resurrected from the dead. Let’s strip all that away. Let’s also say that he was not born from a virgin and he did not turn water into wine and feed the five thousand.

Let’s say he was just a regular guy, from a regular family, 2000 years ago.

Isn’t that interesting? Here I am, an atheist, talking about some bloke, 2000 years ago. What a man, that we are talking about him two thousand years later. But just a man I would say, an amazing man and an inspiration to billions but just that. Would he not have wanted that legacy, rather than to be deified in churches.

Martin Luther king famously said: “you should judge a man not by the colour of his skin, rather the content of his character”.

Rather than the colour of the wine I doubt very much he produced we should look at the content of Jesus’ teaching and what he was saying. Turn the other cheek, be accepting of others not like you, be kind and Turn the other cheek, be accepting of others not like you, be kind and generous, forgive others.

I wonder how much was lost in translation over the past millennia. When he talked about God, was not good interchangeable? A common good, an abstract concept that good in it’s purest form becomes almost an collective entity in it’s own right.

So that is why I can be an atheist and believe in Christianity at the same time. Jesus was an inspiration, who through his teaching showed us how we could live our lives. A regular guy, but a regular guy we are discussing two thousand years after his death. Not many people you could say that about, isn’t that enough?

Universality (philosophy), meaning present in all places and all times

par·tic·u·lar·i·ty/pə(r)ˌtikyəˈlaritē/
1. The quality of being individual.

all you need to do is sit there. don’t get up. don’t change the channel. leave it right there. let each one pass you by. the smiles. the words that drip with treason after each utterance. let the product consume you. why? because the product was made just for you. sure, everyone else might be watching the same commercial (at least that is what THEY want you to think). but nonetheless, the product under the promise of false-status making will change your existence. it will give you significance.

notice that even in a simple commercial two divergent premises erupt. that of universality (the knowledge that you are aware that everyone else is watching this commercial and might even purchase this item; and the notion or feeling of interpellation (that the commercial was made directly FOR you – particularity).

evil acts have been materializing here in london, more specifically, the riots. in years to come i am sure they will simply be referred to (or dismissed) as the ‘london riots’. as if to implicate all of the blame on the city itself. as if to assume the city itself is a being capable of defending itself against such destructive atrocity. but what if it was?

the irony in the act of terrorism here in london demonstrates both universality and particularity. the desire for the terrorists to perform their act(s) in a communal fashion (the groups were in the hundreds) show us their hope that reality will transform itself through violent revolution. although their heart might have been in the right place (in that they sought change) the mode in which they performed their acts was directly not.

but their desire for universality (for revolution to be true of the whole of london and by implication england, and the world)is thwarted by the blaringly obscure actions of particularity. it started from a paradigm inspired by individual(s) and their circumstance. it was the peculiar events prior to the terrorism that affected such heinous acts.

this leads me to another important point. the promise of the christian message being universal yet hinged on the fact that it relies upon the particular. now, as a hybrid theorist it pains me to separate one because of the other, but this severing is what must happen if christianity is to fulfill the space of universal receptivity.

if it is to be something that is true of humanity then it must strip itself of the promise of particularity. now can something be both here (a la particularity) and then there (a la universality) simultaneously? sure, most would assume ‘time’ is one such example. but this is under the presumption that time is and has always been linear. which the notion of time following a lined path is quite a new concept, the ancient world interpreted as circular. the ancient hebrew culture interpreted time not as some sort of quantity, but rather rather an event by event moment; when no events occurred, time did not materialize.

the assumption that god somehow chose a particular group in a particular time does not leave much room for the universal. if we employ this notion as the foundation by which we define ourselves, christianity can and never will be universal. it might have the appearance, but it will be an nuanced one. jesus in his message seems to use the word ‘world’ quite a bit. in some churches there is tendency to personalize one of the most over-quoted verses in the bible (jn. 3:16) and by doing so not only decontextualizes the theme, but also decontextualizes humanity. let’s change some of the rhetoric here.

lets use the word christian to mean ‘particular’ and let’s utilize the word humanity for ‘universality’. if christ came for christians then wouldn’t christ use that word over the world (in this case, humanity). but it seems he insists that the message is for the world not an express few. so, in essence, those who claim to be upholding a christian message inspired by the notion of particularity are upholding something other than the christ-message of universality. if christ is for humanity, and christians are for christians, then there can never be a change toward a more universalized message to which it seems christianity sprung up from.

Click Here to Watch Clip:

“If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength, I hate to tell you this, but that’s another weakness” – Jack Handy, Saturday Night Live

if you do this ONE act you will then be perceived as a saint. if you care for the poor then society will be better, if you feed a man a meal he will be fed for a day, but if you teach him a skill, he will be fed for a lifetime. i think there is something deeply wrong with good deeds and the perverse assumptions that follow after the wake of philanthropy.

but lets start somewhere before an act takes place. let’s start with the idea itself: good deeds.

the good in good deeds assumes also that bad deeds can exist, not just that, to have good deeds there must be bad deeds. but what is good? who gets to define for us ‘what is good?’
is it something benevolent? does it speak of the state of the person or the event occurring? for good to be true of itself something bad must have had to occur prior to the eruption of good. good isn’t something that just happens. it relies upon something former. a catastrophe. essentially, the good disrupts THAT catastrophe. by being what though? by being the opposite of bad? i think that premise does not account for the violence of good acts.

in fact it stereotypes the world into dualistic categories that promotes the shelves and compartments by which we interpret reality and relationships. it is not that good acts are bad in and of themselves but the way in which we interpret them and they in turn interpret us will determine the direction of our society.

this is not some childish overstated case, once we figure out good deeds maybe we can actually participate in the better world that the intention of good deeds might have initially wished for. but if the world is categorically cut into pieces (you are a girl, you live over there, she is a farmer, god is up there, satan is down there, brothers, sisters, black, white and etc.) then all we do is continue the distance in the name of philanthropy. we do nothing more than attempt to embrace the other all the while pushing them further into their self-fulfilled prophecies.

we are all familiar with the story of the pastor who takes some of his congregation on a mission trip out the african bush to do some philanthropic work with some tribes. by the time they leave they have built an outhouse for the tribe to use. when the team returns the following year they are stunned to find that there beloved outhouse has been turned into a storage facility. although, this story represents good intentions, what is good about it? it has taught a tribe to generalize that westerners will do whatever the hell they want just as long as it gives them a chemical high and some pictures to show their local congregation. it also demonstrates that as westerners we think happiness comes in the form of commodities, in the perverse form of having things. it also paints a violent picture that what is useful to me must be useful to you. it obscenely universalises hegemony but hides these acts within a title that seems to convey itself as spirit of well-being.

and then acts, what of acts? what are they?

an action is a form of movement or response. it is the exploitation of time in a moment of nothingness. it is the undertaking of a performance based response. it is the demand that something must be done. something must be ACTed upon.

in the move clip above steve martin’s character attempts to inspire michael caine’s character into a form of what most would deem as a bad act, which in this case, is the exploitatiion of the opposite sex. his act emerges out of a defense that women’s money should be taken. his argument, albeit flimsy is enough to encourage michael caine’s character into a career as a con artist. but do you see what happens.

the act itself has to be inspired by something, it can’t emerge on its own, so the whole claim that someone has pure motives cannot be true. and this is not a bad thing, for purpose can be used for great aims. but we must be willing to push the boundaries further on the violence of good deeds if we are to take seriously the horizon of philanthropy.

good deeds do not equal contextual awareness
this is the same for good acts, for a bad event must occur before the perceived good act to arrive on the scene. sometimes good deeds provides this idealistic notion that once the act is performed all will be well, this also happens with the christian ideology behind prayer, that somehow once the prayer (‘a good deed’?) is enacted then only goodness can emerge, and we all know this just isn’t true.

the predominant narrative behind good acts throughout history also has a thread running through it, it is the thread of the bourgeois. although some of us might not think of ourselves in this way, i am using this term in the purist marxist sense possible. more specifically, in terms of trying to globalize everything in our path, trying to make everything so overtly accessible and similar that in the end no distinction is even alive.
no, this might not be the intention of globalization, but it sure is the aftermath. it relies upon some context where globalization must emerge from. and good deeds rely upon the same.

the good act exploits a need and attempt to convince the receiver it must have this object (sound familiar? watch a commercial) and after receiving it their need will be met. i think one response is also sustainability, which i think something like micro-financing promises, which is a step in the right direction because the receiver has to work for the object of desire and then create enough revenue to assist another. for me this is a sacred notion. good is however is not, it is a violent notion fueled by the ultimate question: how does this act help me?

again, i am not speaking of intentions here, as they old overused maxim says: actions speak louder than words. as good and noble as intentions might be (a la christian mission trips, international development agencies that thrive on the philanthropic model and etc.) they do not account for the context, in fact, they eradicate the context and the people in it. it is not that they simple sustain the status of the ‘other’, they imply that the ‘other’ is so much the ‘other’ that their opinions do not matter, nor does their voice, history, culture and context. for they are nothing more than a fiction that must be disregarded…

Click link to watch clip: the russia house

we tend to speak of innocence as something that we either have lost or gained or can quite possibly re-gain. in the movie ‘the russia house’ there is a moment where michelle pfiefer’s character begins a conversation with ‘do you remember 1968?’ – right in this moment, the movie begins a jilted sequence of flash-backs with her narrating what to her might have been a time of innocence.

to her, innocence is an idea trapped by/in time. and it cannot be gained again. only in memory or repetition can innocence be regained. for memory itself is form of repressed repetition. we repeat the sequence of events, and in that moment we re-experience the feelings, be they good or bad, we might even remember the tastes, smells and words that were said as if we were there all over again.

let’s think of memory as an absence of the present. for memories tend to refer to some sort of past event. nostalgia fits in this category. when we sit and remember our first kiss, or when we remember our first bicycle, or our first broken heart – its as if we live that exact moment over and over again. we desire nothing more to attempt to perfect moments, and crystallize them into a form of encased reality, but the tragedy of those moments is that we will never get them back. for the most part rememberance is a form of mourning. either through wishing that the moment would re-appear or either through the catharsis of letting it all go.

the truth is innocence in its traditional context does not exist. no one is innocent in that sense. let me explain. we sometimes equate innocence to naivete (some sort of lack of knowledge of either evil or something not beneficial to a person’s development), the reality is, once someone enters the world a knowing of some sort occurs, either through the eyes, ears or nose. this kind of innocence is born out of something that does not exist. which in short, is a delusion.

this also begs the question of ethical secret-keeping. is there such a thing?

do we not tell someone something because it might preserve their ‘innocence’? (much like in the movie ‘the truman show’ where everyone but jim carrey’s character is aware that reality as he knows it is simulated. but isnt that a perverse sense of pseudo-innocence when we preserve naivete? this isn’t to say that we should expose children to obscene pictures of the holocaust, of course, discretion must be employed, but at what or who’s cost must it be employed? the longer we preserve this kind of ‘disneyland innocence’ (meaning that happiness can be obtained through consumerism (i.e., you are buying a ticket to ‘the happiest place on earth’) when in reality happiness is an attitude not a narcotic.

memories of the innocence type play on an absence in that the event that has past is no longer present. it relies on the memory to partake in the illusion of presence when in reality the memory itself is absent. and if innocence is a memory then it can be nothing more than an illusion we repeat.

our culture preserves itself through nostalgia. if you turn on your television and notice the majority of commercials center around age and the prevention of getting old. we want to preserve that which is impossible -immortality. we seek after the fountain of youth all the while knowing this object does not exist. but we need the object to exist to give our life meaning. we need innocence so we can forget how perverse the world has become. but, in reality, the best way to preserve innocence is to work together to remove those objects, systems, beliefs and so on in place that keep us from who we once were. this is not some naive communist notion of altruistic perfect community, but more akin to the jewish tikkun olam where we work together to repair the world of the divine that already inhabits it.