Ultimate dinner parties

First course: snake oil

Jesus sitting at the head of a dinner party table. by AI.

Back in the 1980s, when the creative process that would lead to the mess we’re all going to be getting into over the next half-decade really got going, me and my fellow varsity students would muse over bottles of beer and wine about the subject of dinner parties, which were more popular back then than they seem to be in the present age. Some students would actually host one, bedecked in wing collars and floating chiffon scarves—the 1920s and The Great Gatsby were in revival at the time.

Part of these musings included the ultimate fantasy dinner party: you have twenty places around an elongated dinner table; one of them is for you; you may choose nineteen figures from history to join you for this repast of historical repasts. Whom do you choose?

Some named obscure figures from their own country’s past, or from their own personal past, but the future merchant bankers and attorneys general among us tended to name world-beating figures like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Nelson Mandela (he was still in prison at the time, for the few who knew who he was), Christopher Columbus, Robert the Bruce, Henry VIII, the (now late) Queen, the Dalai Lama and, my favourite, Enver Hoxha. But whoever the remaining eighteen were, there was one place that everyone accorded to the same invitee: Jesus Christ. If such fantasy dinner parties could ever have been realised (other than in people’s fantasies), they would have broken bread with Jesus more often than you’ve had hot dinners, and certainly more often than any of them had ever broken bread around a church altar.

Although what always reaped consensual agreement was the notion of having Jesus Christ at these dinner parties, what never got discussed, not one whit, was what the host would have been minded to say to Him over that dinner. Aside from banalities such as “How do you walk on water?” (to which I have no answer myself) or “What’s the trick to getting water to turn into wine?” (to which I do: you feed it to the roots of a vine, and grapes will grow from which wine can be made), what would they want to know from Jesus Christ that He had not already said? Surely they would not have asked, “Does God really exist?” Pu-leeze.

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Last week, and for the first time to my knowledge, I made the acquaintance of a Quaker. Quakers (and without delving into research in popular encyclopaedias like Wikipedia) enjoy a reverent reputation. As I said to this one, “One feels a little abashed and one mentally prepares to avoid at all costs using Anglo-Saxon expletives, a little like when meeting nuns.” As it is, the party in question is able to drop a few F words without causing affront, and to that extent there is in fact a huge difference between the F word with affront and the F word without.

However, I, as usual, digress. We have since then exchanged views on our outlooks and I should like to share with you my side of our conversation (I do not have express permission to divulge the other person’s side, but perhaps that will follow).

This is edited and I extrapolate in places, and it is always possible that, as offered, you will hold up a gentle hand and demurely decline the offer. Except, I’m not offering anything. What’s here is here for the taking. Take it, or leave it.

I have thumbs-upped two of your statements that particularly struck me:

1) “My parents were somewhat idealistic rationalists”; as were indeed mine.

My mother once hinted that she was a regular churchgoer (and theatre visitor and cinema addict) until she met my father, who had less interest in such things. He was a keen sportsman and loved to watch football and cricket and such like. He avidly supported me and my brothers when we played for the school. I attended Sunday school only sporadically, but attended a secondary school founded as a Wesleyan Academy and which is still advancing the Methodist method to this day.

I sometimes think that my mother went to church because her mother did. My gran hailed from the desolate landscapes of Wigtownshire. I recently re-watched the 1975 BBC dramatisation of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Five Red Herrings, set in that county and the neighbouring Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, and it looked positively crowded with its sparse cast compared to its reality. Gran was the oldest of eleven children total (though one died before the last was born), so it will have been a merry train that wended its way to the kirk of a Sunday, and gran read her Bible on into her final days.

But why do I read my Bible? Not because I believe it. I don’t cast doubt upon all of it but, when you don’t believe all of a story, it’s hard to know what bit of it to believe. Nonetheless, I believe that those who wrote the story believed it. Because it is magnificently understated in places, and has none of the razzmatazz of an evangelical preacher. It is evangelical preachers who make the Evangelists sound evangelical.¹ But they’re not.

However, as a historical record it is so patently unreliable as to cast doubt on those parts one might wish were reliable, and that is where I stop: divine scholarship and interpretation leave me a little cold because I reason that God never intended belief to be that complicated. As I say in one of my essays: “When Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount, it is nowhere recorded that, before starting, He asked the crowd, ‘Is everyone here a theologian, so they know how to interpret my words?’ When He called Simon and Andrew in from their fishing, He didn’t ask them, ‘I see you’re out fishing, but you don’t happen also to know a bit of theology do you?’ He took ordinary men and women, hookers, criminals and those despised by the people, like tax collectors, to His side precisely because it was those sorts of people that He wanted to talk to, and they were the kind of people to whom He addressed the Sermon on the Mount.”

There is much in the scriptures that I cannot explain, like the significance of the miracle of turning water into wine at the wedding in Canaan. I cannot really fathom how the Ten Commandments were handed down twice, on what must have been very heavy tablets of stone. No wonder Moses dropped the first lot and broke them: didn’t God have a biro? And, as I may have mentioned, I don’t understand why, upon his birth, Jesus was gifted gold (he would tell a young prince that the rich will have a hard time getting into the kingdom of God) and a symbol of death (myrrh, which is embalming fluid—like giving a coffin to a baby shower). I’ve tried to rationalise the gold, at least, here. Why shepherds on a hillside? The town was full of people—why not have the angels tell the townsfolk? And, what’s more, if the town was full, how much did the stable end up costing in terms of service charges? To: supplying swaddling bands, cost 5 denarii …

I think that, if my Bible studies had been inspired only by my mother and grandmother’s belief, I probably, like most folk, just wouldn’t have bothered. My belief has not one iota affected what has physically happened to me, after all. Or has it?

No, my belief hasn’t. But what has happened to me has inculcated belief, and that is something no one can deny; because belief, like love, like hatred, like fear, like apprehension, like hope, like fortitude, cannot be learned. It is inspired by the heart. It is visceral, and it can no more be unlearned than it can be learned. They lose faith whose faith was learned by the mind and not felt by the heart. And they have no faith who refuse to feel.

Someone whom I know works at the sewage works and has always been a technician—electrical appliances, lighting, Microsoft, and so on. But water is new to him, although he loves the technical precision of what he is doing and he is attending courses to expand his knowledge. Someone who was hired after him has just left the company after six months. The other guy needed to learn all those technical details by rote, and he hadn’t the heart for it, so he wants to do something else instead. My buddy will not leave. Because his heart is in his work. He loves the technical challenge. When employers tell candidates about the training opportunities that they offer, I sometimes wonder whether they know what they’re talking about.

Anyhow, I digress again: rationalism is a product of the Enlightenment, which gave us science, and philosophy, and … the judicial rules of evidence: the erosion of belief, whereby visceral emotion is negated by rational proof, started in or around 1650. But the problem with that, as I see it, is that divine belief is not faith in some third-party entity, which can be neither seen, nor smelt, nor tasted, not heard, nor felt, but rather (and here I switch paragraphs to your second thumbs-up):

2) “Man makes god in his own image, rather than the converse version found in scripture.”

That sounds clever, and witty, and a truism. I think it’s all of those, but more. It is too clever, too witty, and not true enough. What do I mean?

Because of the Enlightenment (I shan’t enter here into a discussion of the heinous way in which religion has been adopted as a tool of governance throughout history since the Egyptian pharaohs, which does nevertheless need some nuancing), the sense that we now designate our sixth was lost to us. Vets will tell us that cats and dogs can smell four thousand times better than we can, can hear a far wider range of frequencies than we can and perhaps even see parts of the spectrum that we cannot. All of this goes to explain why they can catch mice and criminals. But it doesn’t explain why they shirk at entering places with a reputation for being haunted. We say that animals are wary because of some sixth sense, but some of us vehemently deny that we, too, might have such a thing.

I don’t want to sell you snake oil. But here are the bottom lines: I believe in God. And I believe that God is a projection of my own conscience. In effect I believe in me. I believe that the kingdom of God is not to be found in heaven, but in a part of me that surgeons do not know of, called my soul, or conscience or inner domain, or whatever—the names are unimportant.

Yes, I create God out of my … not imagination, but my heart. I feel compassion and I feel resonance in the messages I receive from my God and I create this idea that they stem not from me but from a divine being, and how that interacts with me and everyone else is precisely something that is beyond the comprehension of man. When Thomas More says “I have no window to look into another man’s conscience,” what he means is that each of us is unable to evaluate anyone else’s individual relationship to God. That’s not because it is privy to God and the subject alone, but because it is internal to the subject. Even though experts can decipher body language and handwriting, and voice patterns and gaits and divine what the subject is thinking or who he or she is, the fact remains that, even with the Elon Musk implant, no one can really know what’s going on in someone else’s conscience. For that is beyond the comprehension of man, which is why I cannot comprehend it. If quantum physics poses conundrums that fox physicists, then imagine what sort of conundrums are conjured up by the ineffable.

I have in the past summarised this as God is not for everyone. He is for every one. Those who join in the battle of the religions seek to establish primacy for theirs over all others: we are right, everyone else is wrong. And you can be as ecumenical as you like, but that fundamentally is the problem with our world: not the battle between right and wrong, but the battle between what each individual sees as being right and what they see as being wrong.

The last book of the Bible, Revelation, speaks of the end of the world, and there are some who opine that the current culture wars, global political developments and the far right, are all a scheme² to edge the world towards that event: it’s end.

Well, maybe that’s what they want, and they may get the end of me and perhaps of you, but I don’t think they’ll get the end of the world. Not because God will resist their machinations, but because what they want to accelerate cannot as such be accelerated (they will in fact decelerate it, by seeking the hegemony of a single organised religion; yes, they are mysterious ways). The reason Revelation is so hard to interpret and understand is that it expresses notions that are hard to express and explain.³

If I’m a Jew and you’re a Muslim, which of us believes in God? Neither? Both? Or just one of us? They say that in the Roman Empire all roads led to Rome. Well, it’s true, they did. The Internet is like the Roman Empire: all connections lead to Rome. Whether we talk of roads or Internet connections, the truth is that they all lead to Rome. The point of dispute is not this truth, it is: What is Rome?

Rome is a city in Italy and, if you go there, you know where you are because there is a sign that says Welcome to Rome. The world convenes to accept that Rome is what it is and where it is because it has physical form and undeniable existence. But the world is unable to convene on what or where God is and I think I know why: because it is in them. It is in us.

We look at the newspapers and we see wars and parliamentary elections and disputes in court and failed companies and whatnot. Our entire existence comprises two forces:

1. the power to bend another to our will, and

2. our judgment of that other, which tends us to apply said power.

That is the sum total of our existence and, when you reflect on it, the only things that don’t fit that paradigm are the visceral things I mentioned before: love, hatred, fear and belief, etc. For the rest, we judge and exercise power, from birth to the grave. And we’re the only ones to do it among the entire animal world. Yet, we apply these two criteria across the board to all those who cross our path, with one exception: ourselves.

We are very lenient with ourselves and we lie to ourselves more convincingly than we could ever lie about a lost mobile phone. So God (or god) is the ability to judge ourselves and exercise power over ourselves. And how that comes about matters not: through Christianity, or self-revelation, or Judaism, or Buddhism or Hinduism … at the heart of every organised religion lies the discovery of the Self. And that is why I asked you about Quakerism, because Quakerism is a wholesome path to self-discovery and I am curious about it, as I was curious about North American First Nations (enough to become a member of one), and I am curious about Roman Catholicism and I am curious about Anabaptism (on the matter of which: why did the organised Roman Catholic church burn Dirk Willems at the stake? Here’s why. And here.) And the reason why I am so curious about everyone’s avowed religions is because, if all roads lead to Rome (provided the map can be counted on), then all self-explorations lead to self-discovery (… provided the map can be counted on).

I don’t know how far off Rome I am. But I keep looking and updating my roadmap as I go. And I write on these matters not really in order to persuade, but to cogitate and give others ground to cogitate, and the writing itself marshals my thoughts and reveals my discrepancies and makes me realise my faults. It’s not a diatribe. Because there is no one God for everyone. Every single one of us will find our own way to the power of what we conveniently (or inconveniently) call God.

And, unlike the rest of our existence on Earth, it does not comprise judgment and duress. It comprises a power far greater than that, one whose edict supplants every law in the world, in every jurisdiction in the world, in every country in the world, from North to South Pole: love.

Because God’s power lies in love, many think Him weak, because, with it, He cannot subjugate us the way we subjugate each other. But all the laws, in all the jurisdictions, in all the countries, over all of time have proved one thing: our conception of power has never once succeeded in its ambitions. Not once, ever. And that is because the exercise of power by one man over another man tips the scales entirely in the first one’s favour, and that is untenable. All things return to equilibrium, to a balance, to a midpoint, whether we want it or not. So, the duress exercised over another, will eventually return to zero, even if it swings to duress by the other over the one before doing so.

Love is the only power that guarantees balance as its first and only precept. Short of its apogee, man’s power has always declined. Like a roller-coaster, our history cranks itself up a huge mount, to then release itself into whoops of joy and tight curves and hair-raising, stomach-churning thrills; and, every time, it simply comes back to where it started from. Because, even though He is powerful, God never forced anyone to do anything. Not even to love. How could He? He comes from your intestines.

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1. Marked by ardent or zealous enthusiasm for a cause. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/evangelical.

2. Note that the referenced article is more than twenty years old (2004).

3. One small part of the problem with Revelation is that it contains no contemporary, referential anchor points. The events narrated in George Monbiot’s article (referred to in footnote 2) were initiated by named institutions and individuals and any comparison to other events would be cross-referenced using familiar names of places, dates and people.

But Revelation is a document for all time. Even assuming the fundamental events it describes are accurate in their effect, their form is highly questionable (horsemen riding across the sky, for instance). People read Revelation and dismiss it as fantastical poppycock. But it is no more poppycock than a piece of poetry is: Shakespeare’s Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day would be a touching, if unconventional form of greeting. But, in a police investigation, it would be a pretty useless witness description of the culprit. If Revelation were anchored to a point of reference, the relevance of that reference would long since have been lost to time. Instead, it resorts to poetry, a reference that is timeless.