The Sunset Limited

Some spoilers in the post. 

Two men in a room. A long conversation between the two, lasting nearly 90 minutes of screen time. One is a black man (Samuel L Jackson), a poor railway worker, with a major criminal conviction behind him. The other is a white man, a Professor, (Tommy Lee Jones) worn out and world-weary, who's just attempted to commit suicide on the tracks in front of the Sunset Limited train. Somehow, and most unexpectedly, the black man has saved him and brought him back to his two-room apartment.  The door is locked with four or five different locks; outside the sounds of a major railway station go on intermittently: someone playing a trumpet badly, a sudden fight, shouting, trains stopping and starting. Our focus, however, is on the discussion these two men are having: life and death, belief and unbelief, God or not God.

This movie is based solidly on Cormac McCarthy's play - which isn't officially a play, but a 'novel in dramatic form (the playscript has minimal stage directions - the focus is on the dialogue). However, it's been presented frequently on stage, and works very well there, in spite of almost no 'action' (a coffee is made, some soup is cooked). The version I've just seen is the HBO version, directed by Tommy Lee Jones.

Both the stars revel in their parts, though Jackson's is much more the flamboyant one. Jones plays his very close to the bone: already looking like death warmed up in most of his movies, here he virtually has a mask of a face, with two dreadfully tired eyes peering out. I sometimes felt you could have done with more passion from Jones, but he saves it till the end, when he produces a tirade that shows he isn't going to change his position, no matter what. If anything he's more entrenched than ever. The much more 'fussy' Austin Pendleton played the same part on the stage - he may have been better cast, in fact, than Jones, since the latter doesn't come across as an academic in most of his films, but rather a man educated on the streets. I didn't quite feel that Jones had that self-preening that the part requires to be there in some measure. Nevertheless, he plays it in his own way, reinterpreting it so that what he does with it is effective. 

Jackson has never looked more at home on the screen. He's played some very oddball roles over the years (one of the Jedi in the second Star Wars trilogy, and that strange breakable character in Unbreakable) but here he's suited to the part completely. For much of the film his character seems to have the upper hand - the Christian apologist-cum-evangelist he might be seen as - but towards the end he realises that nothing he says will stop the other man attempting suicide again. He's knocked down, but not knocked out; he's done his level best, and that's all he could have done. God doesn't force his way into a person's life; if that person (White) doesn't want him, he'll let him be. And White doesn't want God
, come what may. Much of White's problem is a self-loathing, but he also gradually reveals that he loathes everyone else too (though he manages to tolerate Black long enough to stay and have a meal with him), and this hatred of his 'brother' (as Black calls other people) is perhaps his downfall.

But the film can be read in more than one way. As a Christian I can hear the old apologetic arguments skilfully framed by White. For some of the movie, Black's counter-arguments seem weak, and lacking in conviction. It's only at the end that he shows passion for his own belief. But an agnostic or atheist coming to the movie may well see it from the other side, and find White's Christian arguments the weaker ones. McCarthy leaves it open for both to chew over their viewpoints. McCarthy is quoted as not being a fan of writers who do not 'deal with issues of life and death,' and there's no doubt what this film is about.

Musicians, poets, scientists and atheists

I wrote about Evernote in my last post.  And I'm going to mention it here again: it's a great place to go looking for something to connect up with an idea or phrase that you're using in a post, a phrase such as the following: affordable Behringer mixers at Musician's Friend.

To many readers that will read a bit like a statement in a foreign language, or a dense poem. By the way, talking of poems, I'm reading an anthology called Poems of Devotion at the moment.  It's edited by the poet, Luke Hankins, who's served as Associate Editor of Asheville Poetry Review since 2006.  It's a collection of wonderful poems by modern poets, some more accessible than others, but all worth reading.  The focus in the book is on devotion to God, but there are some poems that have snuck under the radar a little too. 

But that's a side path. Back to the original phrase.  I did a search on a couple of the words in it: Behringer produced no results, mixers only a couple of not very interesting ones. Musicians - without the apostrophe - produced plenty, and the first was one from a book I read recently called God's Undertaker, by the scientist, John Lennox.  It's a book in which he tries to bring some sanity to the science/atheist vs Christian/creationist debate.  The following quote has only a small amount to do with musicians, but it's worth reading all the same.

"...the fact that there are scientists who appear to be at war with God is not quite the same thing as science itself being at war with God. For example, some musicians are militant atheists. But does that mean music itself is at war with God? Hardly. The point here may be expressed as follows: Statements by scientists are not necessarily statements of science. Nor, we might add, are such statements necessarily true; although the prestige of science is such that they are often taken to be so. For example, the assertions by [Peter] Atkins and Dawkins, with which we began, fall into that category. They are not statements of science but rather expressions of personal belief, indeed, of faith – fundamentally no different from (though noticeably less tolerant than) much expression of the kind of faith Dawkins expressly wishes to eradicate. Of course, the fact that Dawkins’ and Atkins’ cited pronouncements are statements of faith does not of itself mean that those statements are false; but it does mean that they must not be treated as if they were authoritative science. What needs to be investigated is the category into which they fit, and, most important of all, whether or not they are true."

This kind of straightforward thinking does wonder for the brain, especially if it's been assailed by Dawkins-type thinking. 

Chesterton on education

I'm reading G K Chesterton's The Common Man at the moment.  It's a book of essays that were collected together quite some time after his death.  As always there is an abundance of wit, and sound thinking, of paradoxes and satire.  And dozens of sentences and paragraphs that could be quoted here.

For today, however, just one quote, from an essay called The New Case for Catholic Schools, in which Chesterton shows how foolish it is to think that well-rounded people are produced by schools who choose to cut religion out of their curricula.  

You can have an education that teaches atheism because atheism is true, and it can be, from its own point of view, a complete education.  But you cannot have an education claiming to teach all truth, and then refusing to discuss whether atheism is true. 

We're still having this argument put to us today almost a century after this was written.  We're asked to be tolerant of people's whose views aren't Christian, or aren't religious, but then we're asked to be intolerant of people who do have a religion.

Halik, Harrington and Patience

Patience is what I consider to be the main difference between faith and atheism. What atheism, religious fundamentalism, and the enthusiasm of a too-facile faith have in common is how quickly they can ride roughshod over the mystery we call God – and that is why I find all three approaches equally unacceptable. One must never consider mystery “over and done with.” Mystery, unlike a mere dilemma, cannot be overcome; one must wait patiently at its threshold and persevere in it – must carry it in one’s heart – just as Jesus’s mother did according to the Gospel, and allow it to mature there and lead one in turn to maturity.

From Patience with God: the story of Zaccheus continuing in us, by Tomáš Halik

I began to read Halik's book this morning, after coming across a positive reference to it in a blog post. I'd heard it recommended previously from a different source, and been intrigued by it, but this was the first time I pursued the interest further. Amazingly, there's a Kindle version of it, (there isn't often a Kindle version of books I want to read) so I downloaded it.

What is interesting about the extract above is that it relates quite strongly to the character I've been playing in Shadowlands: Rev Harry Harrington. I've described his faith elsewhere as shallow, by which I mean that he hasn't really thought through the bigger issues that arise in faith, and has tended to ride roughshod (as Halik suggests) over the mystery of God. For Harrington, God is set and sealed in a certain framework, and 'experience' of God outside this box is too much for his mind. Which is why it's interesting that in the middle of their short argument towards the end of the play, Lewis apologetically says that he's 'come up against a bit of experience lately,' meaning that his love for Joy and her early death have hit him deeply and caused him to think deeper into his faith.

art, theology, marxism, atheism, the mix!

I've published this post elsewhere, in relation to the theology aspect. Here it appears more in relation to the cinematic/art aspects...!

One of the blogs I read regularly is entitled 'Never mind the bricolage' and is written by someone who calls himself 'Superflat'. There was a point when I had an actual name, but I can't just track it down on the blog at present. He works with students doing courses in which he discusses art and theology, (at least these topics come up regularly in his blog), and in his latest post, Criticism of Heaven he begins by writing the following...

In the Art, Cinema and Theology class we have been exploring the role of women in the arts and particularly women painters and their general absence from Western Art History. We found our way to a discussion about Frida Kahlo, inspired by the movie about her starring Selma Hayek and directed by Julie Taymor.

I think that there are rich conversations to be had around her life and work, but a question came up during class about how to 'do theology with someone who is a communist and an atheist'--points that I actually think are favourable for a conversation, but somehow seemed to be a stumbling block to at least one person. I guess it all depends on how one understands what theological discourse might be--for me it encompasses at least some aspect of bringing things (anything) into dialogue and conversation. While I part company with the conclusions of the Radical Orthodoxy mob, I do like Graham Ward's idea that doing theology somehow means 'reclaiming the world'--bringing all the things once ceded to the wider culture back into contact and conversation with sacred communities and with theology. So for me Frida Kahlo offers up some major theological potentials: sexuality and gender; socialism/Marxism, theism/a-theism, pain and brokenness just to name a few.

I like that idea of 'reclaiming the world' in relation to art/theology -it resonates with a number of different writers on art and theology I've read.

Superflat has a little more to say....here.

[Bricolage is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process. The term is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler, the core meaning in French being, "fiddle, tinker" and, by extension, "to make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)". In contemporary French the word is the equivalent of the English do it yourself, and is seen on large shed retail outlets throughout France. A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur. Thanks, Wikipedia!]

Missing the point

“I think atheists miss the point. I don’t grant atheism and agnosticism the same moral quality that I give to people who pursue the religious or spiritual way of life… . If you are still an atheist when you get to my age, you don’t know shit. I hope you change.”

— New Statesman - The NS Interview: James Ellroy, author

found courtesy of Alan Jacobs.

A song for atheists

Steve Martin provides atheists with a 'song' - well, sort of. Whether they'll appreciate it or not is another question.



It may not become top of the pops (although the close harmony is great) but at least it provides something humorous about what is often a deadly serious subject.

(Incidentally, Martin's movie, Leap of Faith, from 1992, still stands as a surprisingly good 'discussion' about faith, real and fake.)

Blasphemy is a tribute to God

Michael Gerson reminds us that : British author G.K. Chesterton argued that every act of blasphemy is a kind of tribute to God, because it is based on belief. "If anyone doubts this," he wrote, "let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor."

If all else fails, quote Chesterton. He'll back you up every time. Gerson's article is called, What Atheists Can't Answer, and was published in the pages of the Washington Post. This is what he's discussing:

Proving God's existence in 750 words or fewer would daunt even Thomas Aquinas. And I suspect that a certain kind of skeptic would remain skeptical even after a squadron of angels landed on his front lawn. So I merely want to pose a question: If the atheists are right, what would be the effect on human morality?

So who's Michael Gerson? Well, I didn't know either, but here's the bio the Post helpfully provides:

Michael Gerson writes about politics, global health and development, religion and foreign policy. His column appears on Wednesdays and Fridays. He also contributes to PostPartisan.

Gerson is senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement's Center on Faith & International Affairs. He served as a policy adviser and chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush from 2000 to 2006. Before that, he was a senior editor covering politics at U.S. News & World Report. His book "Heroic Conservatism" was published by HarperOne in 2007.

Reductio ad absurdum

David Hart, in First Things is surprised - or perhaps not surprised - at the lack of thinking in a book, 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Here's a couple of paragraphs in which he describes some of the contributions:

To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed. Some of the writers exhibit a measure of wholesome tentativeness in making their cases, and as a rule the quality of the essays is inversely proportionate to the air of authority their authors affect. For this reason, the philosophers—who are no better than their fellow contributors at reasoning, but who have better training in giving even specious arguments some appearance of systematic form—tend to come off as the most insufferable contributors. Nicholas Everitt and Stephen Law recycle the old (and incorrigibly impressionistic) argument that claims of God’s omnipotence seem incompatible with claims of his goodness. Michael Tooley does not like the picture of Jesus that emerges from the gospels, at least as he reads them. Christine Overall notes that her prayers as a child were never answered; ergo, there is no God. A.C. Grayling flings a few of his favorite papier-mâché caricatures around. Laura Purdy mistakes hysterical fear of the religious right for a rational argument. Graham Oppy simply provides a précis of his personal creed, which I assume is supposed to be compelling because its paragraphs are numbered. J.J.C. Smart finds miracles scientifically implausible (gosh, who could have seen that coming?). And so on. Adèle Mercier comes closest to making an interesting argument—that believers do not really believe what they think they believe—but it soon collapses under the weight of its own baseless presuppositions.

The scientists fare almost as poorly. Among these, Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The contributors drawn from other fields offer nothing better. The Amazing Randi, being a magician, knows that there is quite a lot of credulity out there. The historian of science Michael Shermer notes that there are many, many different and even contradictory systems of belief. The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.

Well meaning, but....

I don't know what Richard Dawkins will make of this, but one of the leading scientists and atheists in the UK has come out saying that perhaps religion - God, even - will save us from ourselves in the coming catastrophe of Global Warming, or Climate Change, or whatever we should increase our home insurance on this week.

Lord May, who was brought up a Scottish Presbyterian but went through an "inverse epiphany" at the age of 11, (which strikes me as fairly mature for an eleven-year-old) says, “A supernatural punisher maybe part of the solution.”

Plainly Lord May hasn't discovered that God is Love, rather than being some nasty big daddy in the sky who beats people up when they don't behave. (Yes, he does have a bit of that too, but it isn't his major characteristic.)

A typical evolutionist, he adds that in the past a belief in a god, or gods, that punish the unrighteous may have been part of the mechanism of evolution that maintains co-operation in a dog-eat-dog world. Evolutionists can't ever say anything without bringing evolution in as some kind of pseudo-explanation, however absurd and unfounded the argument might be. (When you think about it, isn't the usual idea that evolution is survival of the fittest? Where would co-operation come into that?)

He goes on, "Given that punishment is a useful mechanism, how much more effective it would be if you invested that power not in an individual you don't like, but an all-seeing, all powerful deity that controls the world." Okay, now let's try and connect this to something ordinary: Does that means that when I put my grandchild to bed I should threaten him with a nasty deity who will thump him if he doesn't go straight to sleep? (In the light of the anti-smacking law we could then say to the judge, when we've been arrested for smacking our children, that God did it. Okay, I'm just joking....)

To listen to the esteemed Lord May a little more: while religion maybe one possible answer, it remained, at the moment, very much part of the problem as it had teetered ever more towards fundamentalism.

So religion is both the solution and the not-solution. Hmmm.

In less troubled times religions had become softer and less dogmatic, and embraced a more humane set of values, he said.

Um, Lord May doesn't seem to sure about his religious history. In the early days of the church, for instance, at times of often intense persecution, and when Rome had a plague (both fairly troublesome times, one would think) Christians were known for being softer than the normal Roman, and far more humane. It was the Romans, after all, who committed infanticide with great frequency, and the Christians who stayed with those who were dying and suffering when the Romans fled the cities.

But that pattern was now reversing with the rise of fundamental Islamic and Christian beliefs.

The rise of fundamental Christian beliefs? Umm, Lord May, fundamental Christian beliefs have never gone away, so they've no need to 'rise.' The basic Christian beliefs are the same today as they were in the beginning.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself: do atheists actually listen to what they're saying?

A N Wilson 'returns' - albeit slowly

In an honest, first-person article in the New Statesman, A N Wilson, the novelist and biographer, admits that his 'conversion' to atheism was an aberration, which he has spent the last several years leaving behind. I remember reading Wilson's biography of C S Lewis perhaps twenty years ago, and being quite disappointed in his obvious belief that Lewis wasn't really the man everyone thought him to be. Wilson explains why in the article, along with his slow decision to believe in God again, and his realisation that the atheists have got it wrong. A paragraph from the article:

Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

The people you meet at barbecues

I went to a barbecue the other night - men from our church were getting together for the last night of a series of evenings they'd had in which the Book of James was discussed. I haven't been to this group, as it happens, but I thought I'd put in an appearance for the last night, as I've had an interest in men's groups for many years - and in fact, was involved in two or three earlier versions of men's groups in our church back in the 90s and early noughties.
Someone remarked that I only appeared when there was food - I then remembered that I'd also been to the original breakfast meeting of this latest group. Hmm, that could be the case!
Anyway, I mostly knew all the guys there, and pricked my ears up at one point when I heard one of them say he has a blog. We then discussed what we both wrote about - quite different subject matter for the most part.
Anyway, let me recommend True Paradigm to you. It covers more than one field: I note on the page that's current there are posts on NZ Politics, Calvinist views of predestination, atheists, physics, and various other topics that require you to use your brain more than you'll need to on this site (!)

So much for 'Bright'

In the March 2008 Investigate magazine, Ian Wishart reviews a book called, The Irrational Atheist, by Vox Day, a Mensa member and columnist for WorldNetDaily (not a site I'm familiar with, and one that seems to have its fair share of ranters).

Anyway, Vox Day (a bloke, for those who didn't guess) has written a searing indictment of the New Atheists, particularly Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris. Perhaps the most interesting comment quoted in the review is this:

There is even evidence to suggest that in some cases...atheism may be little more than a mental disorder taking the form of a literal autism. On one of the more popular atheist internet sites, the average self-reported result on an Asperger Quotient test was 27.9. The threshold for this syndrome, described as 'autistic psychopathy' by its discoverer, Dr Hans Asperger, is 32, whereas the average normal individual scores 16.5.

Wishart comments that: Sam Harris doesn't make it out of the book alive, Dawkins is touch and go and Hitchens is left reeling by the end.

And in case you think Wishart is a bit of a ranter himself (as he can be), check out the New Oxford Review on the book: ...columnist Vox Day uses logic and facts (not theology) to refute the "unholy trinity" of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.
and
Perhaps the most engaging chapters in this book are those about war. The high-church atheists assert that religion causes war, but Day proves otherwise. He shows that over the past 232 years, 671,070 American soldiers have died in 17 wars, of which only one-half of one percent can reasonably be attributed to religion. This amounts to the deaths of 14 soldiers per year. Turning next to the Encyclopedia of Wars compiled by C. Phillips and A. Axelrod, Day examines 1,763 wars fought from 2325 B.C. to modern times. Of these wars, only 123 can reasonably be attributed to religion -- 6.92 percent of those recorded. Since half of these religious wars were waged by Muslims, this means that, apart from Islam, the world's religions are responsible for only 3.35 percent of all wars. "The historical evidence is conclusive," Day concludes. "Religion is not a primary cause of war."

There's a good deal more, but it's better to read the lengthy review for yourself. It's by
Anne Barbeau Gardiner, Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York.

Is Dawkins sliding down the pit to self-destruction?

Some quotes from an article by Melanie Phillips, in The Spectator, 23rd Oct, 2008. The article concerns a second debate between Dawkins and John Lennox, author of God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

At the very beginning [of the debate, Dawkins] made a most startling admission. He said: A serious case could be made for a deistic God.

This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator. True, he was not saying he was now a deist; on the contrary, he still didn't believe in such a purposeful founding intelligence, and he was certainly still saying that belief in the personal God of the Bible was just like believing in fairies. Nevertheless, to acknowledge that ‘a serious case could be made for a deistic god’ is to undermine his previous categorical assertion that

...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

In Oxford on Tuesday night, however, virtually the first thing he said was that a serious case could be made for believing that it could.

Read the rest of the article, in which Dawkins digs himself deeper and deeper into a confused mire, and seems more inclined to believe in some alien force creating life than God. As the King of Siam says, 'Tis a puzzlement.

John Gray and humanity

I’ve been reading John Gray’s Heresies, a book published in 2004. Some of the essays go back to the late 90s, but they are, for the most part, still very relevant. I don’t think Gray is particularly optimistic about the future of the human race (he certainly doesn’t see science as our great salvation and he sees our history as being littered with war and strife) but at least he’s more honest about it than the secular humanists, who somehow think we’re going to overcome all our difficulties by putting faith (yes, faith) in the willingness of scientists to work together. Here’s one typical example of his thinking, from Sex, Atheism and Piano Legs.

The need for religion appears to be hard-wired in the human animal. Certainly the behaviour of secular humanists supports this hypothesis. Atheists are usually just as ardently engaged as believers. Quite commonly, they are more intellectually rigid. One cannot engage in dialogue with religious thinkers in Britain today without quickly discovering that they are, on the who, more intelligent, better educated and strikingly more freethinking than unbelievers (as evangelical atheists still incongruously describe themselves). No doubt there are many reasons for this state of affairs, but I suspect it is the repression of the religious impulse that explains the obsessive rigidity of secular thought.

God and the New Atheism

After reading Antony Flew’s There is a God, a few weeks ago, I found John Haught’s book, God and the New Atheism, a bit of a fizzer. He has some good things to say in his arguments against Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, but he’s repetitious in his writing, and the book looks as though it’s been produced in rather a hurry, in order to cash in on the current interest in the Christian/Atheist debates. Maybe I just don’t like Haught’s style, and that’s put me off. However, I finished reading it this morning, so whatever he has to say, I’ve now read (!)
Flew’s book was inspiring, by contrast. Here’s a man who has the integrity to say he was wrong about the way he thought previously. This seems to me to be the mark of a true philosopher: as Flew says, he follows arguments to their logical conclusion, even if it means given up long-held beliefs.
Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris remind me more of fundamentalists in various religions: people who are so set on a few basic points that they can’t see any other arguments. (The original Christian fundamentalists had far more breadth to their beliefs; unfortunately their name has been adopted for a group who are narrow and backed into corners.) Philosophically they're much more like teenagers in need of acne treatment than people who've grown up and really argued through all the issues. You find plenty of their adherents on the Net: people who have no willingness to listen to anything beyond their own narrow views.

Richard Dawkins in a swimsuit

I've been coming across a bunch of references to Richard Dawkins on the Net lately, including several videos on You Tube. In some of them he makes an ass of himself; in others he certainly shows his intelligence, but still seems to miss the point of much of what other people are trying to say. In one he makes a surprisingly crude joke, which has some bloke standing off to the side of the conference table rocking with laughter. This bloke seems to be wandering around in a rather ad hoc manner, so don't ask me what he's actually doing there.
In another video he's apparently stumped by a question asked by a girl off-screen. Seems that it may be a hoax, but it certainly makes Dawkins behave really oddly!
In fact, there are so many Dawkins videos around just now, that you rather wonder if he isn't the man of the hour; some are from tv interviews, some from discussion panels, one from a documentary in which he interviews a very aggressive white Muslim and is then puzzled by the bloke's reaction (!), one is a very odd thing that ends up with Dawkins blowing himself and the lecture room up after 'proving' that he won't. I don't quite get the point of this, as it seems to shoot itself in the foot somehow!
All we need now is Dawkins in a swimsuit, I guess, and we'll just about have run the gamut.

He's such a nice man; yes, he really is - he really, really is! Just look at that smile....

Here Lies Eric Ambler

Finished reading Eric Ambler’s autobiography last night - it’s called Here Lies Eric Ambler. I suspect there may be a bit of a play on the word, lies, in the sense of: is he telling us the whole truth, or has he made his own life into something of a novel?
Be that as it may, it ends rather abruptly just after the second World War, though the introductory chapter is set much later, when he has an accident caused by being overcome by fumes in his car. Perhaps he intended (or even did) write a second volume.
I bought it at a secondhand bookshop somewhere along the road from Cromer to Blakeney; they were having a half-price sale. I thought it might be interesting in terms of what it said about Ambler’s way of writing, but he talks a lot more about his (quite adventurous) life, and the books almost seem to come together by themselves. He mentions some incidents that found their way into the books, and how he tended to change things as he went along and then rewrote and rewrote after he’d finished, but beyond that there isn’t much.
One thing that he makes an emphasis on is his refusal to believe in any sort of God, or to have any sort of faith. That would be fine if he didn’t then set out to make it seem that anyone who does have faith is some sort of fool. Right towards the end, when he’s in the midst of some World War II battle and thinks he’s a goner, he finds himself repeating some words learnt from the past: Into thy hands I commit my spirit. He’s immediately ashamed of himself, and goes on about the foolishness of chaplains in wartime who claim that no man is an atheist in a foxhole. He doesn’t consider that he may be the one who’s wrong, but like so many secularists he can’t see that his point of view isn’t necessarily the correct one.
Coincidentally, in a recent Books and Culture ezine, it mentions Eric Ambler as being a writer of note and one to re-read. I’d like to track down some of them and see what they’re like, and to see if the worldview in them is different to the one he portrays in his autobiography. The editor, John Wilson, writes: Eric Ambler's novel The Intercom Conspiracy (1969), [is] currently out of print, alas, but used copies are readily findable, and there's always the library. Bonus for journalists: an editor is one of the key figures; the newsletter he edits is based in Geneva. It's a brilliant, chilly tale, best read alongside an Ambler novel from thirty years earlier, A Coffin for Dimitrios (UK title: A Mask for Dimitrios), his best-known book. Both feature the character Charles Latimer, a novelist. It's fascinating to see how Ambler's view of espionage and power-politics evolved in the intervening years.

Lewis: quiet - and atheism

C S Lewis writes that the way not to hear from God goes along these lines:

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you’d be safer to stick to the papers. You’ll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.

From Christian Reflections, pages 168-9 (Eerdmans edition).

You’ll note that television isn’t mentioned here, but it’s possibly because it didn’t feature large on Lewis’ horizon. Nevertheless, it deserves a place – even a place of honour – in this list of great distractions.

I recently came across the Atheists/Atheism section on About.com by accident. The rather arrogant-looking guide to this site, Austin Cline, (I would regard him as arrogant-looking even if he wasn’t running this part of About.com), has an article – one of several – on C S Lewis, in which he asks if Lewis’ theological arguments are any good. At the end of his article, which is designed to show that Lewis wasn’t all he’s cracked up to be, and that he’s only popular with believers, not with anyone else, he says:

Even one of Lewis’ most sympathetic biographers, A.N. Wilson, writes that Lewis "has become in the quarter-century since he died something very like a saint in the minds of conservative-minded believers." At the same time, though, you won’t find professional theologians and sophisticated apologists citing C.S. Lewis or relying on his arguments in their own efforts.
Theology builds upon the insights and accomplishments of those who have come before, but Lewis doesn’t even appear to function as a minor plank in anyone’s platform. This combination of general popularity and professional dismissal is very curious — either the average believer knows something which the professionals have missed, or Lewis isn’t the apologist he is popularly believed to be.

That Cline could regard Wilson as a ‘sympathetic’ biographer is peculiar, since Wilson does all he can in his book to cut away the so-called hagiography, and to make Lewis ‘just’ a man.

Equally, Cline’s point that professional theologians and apologists don’t cite Lewis means nothing. Lewis never claimed to be a theologian; he wrote for the man in the street, trying to clarify theology and bring it into ordinary language. His task was never to produce theology, something he would have regarded as absurd, I suspect. Anyway, apologists don’t invent theology either. They aim to explain the theology that already exists.

It's interesting that all the articles I noted on Cline's section of About.com are defensive: arguments against what Christians say about atheists ('brights,' remember?). There's no atheism on its own, per se. Isn't this just a little curious?