Zeus Be With Us

Contrary to myth - another normal Christmas

I live in a medium sized town in the north of England. One much depressed by a succession of recessions which have seen the heart slowly sucked out of the town until, in the local government ward I live in, two areas register in the most poverty stricken categories possible by EU standard measures.  It is also a town that has a large population of Asian Muslims living in particular parts, with strongly white communities elsewhere - a fact that has been seized upon by the BNP who briefly flourished in the town before collapsing amid internecine bickering. Now one of the local papers publishes a weekly column that dwells on highlighting the faith divisions in the town.

The basic rhetoric draws week after week on the same story over and over along the lines of "I'm not allowed to criticise Muslims - crikey, I just have, now I'll be in trouble". 

This is no isolated instance- much of the media, local and national, take a similar line. Newspapers regularly lament how in Britain we are no longer apparently allowed to say all sorts of things because of the Political Correctness Police. This is stated at the same time as saying the things they claim are not allowed to be said. Sadly, of course, some people buy into this bizarre nonsense because they still trust what they see in newspapers as conforming to some standard of accuracy.

Yet this week has seen a quietly buried but very significant admission from the doyen of rumour as fact, the national Daily Mail, that it has spent much of the last decade blatantly lying about one of the most infamous cases of supposed political-correctness-gone-mad.

WINTERVAL, a briefly used marketing slogan to promote shopping throughout the winter season in Birmingham in 1997 and 1998, was, according to a slew of articles in the Daily Mail, introduced by left wing councils all over Britain to replace Christmas so as not to offend Muslims. This false theme was taken up by more allegedly serious rightwing papers until what is in essence a complete lie passed into the popular imagination as fact. And more than that, the rumour mill has got us to the point where, supposedly, Christmas trees have been taken down to assuage the fury of wild eyed Islamic mullahs and Nativity Plays in schools have been halted after threats from Muslim parents.

Except schools continue to put on nativity plays, as they always have - though I have a colleague who still thinks that her grandson's school was breaking some non-existent law when it put one on.  And likewise, there are no instances of Christmas trees removed at the behest of Muslim complainants - granted, there have been a truly small handful of times where oversensitive non-Muslims have stopped Christmas decorations for such reasons but they are few and far between and actually betray a dreadful ignorance of Islam and its historic relationship with Christianity - and Judaism.

These three Semitic faiths are of course deeply linked to each other - Judaism, originally a polytheistic faith, coalesced around the idea of  a single god, exclusive to the Chosen People of Israel, the Jews, as short a time ago as 300 BC; Christianity claimed to be the fulfilment of the Judaistic belief in a messiah, a Saviour, and initially was a sect within Judaism, exploring beyond that racial faith almost three decades after the death of Jesus when Paul of Tarsus, a non-Jew, became its leading proponent and was responsible for formalising much Christian thinking. Ultimately, Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, the superpower of Europe and the Near East of its day and from this, its beliefs were carried through the trade routes into Arabia, where some Arabs adopted it as their faith.

In the sixth century after Jesus, however, Mohamed, an Arabian trader, began to formulate new beliefs with which he forged both a political and faith union in the Arabian peninsula - Islam - which held him to be the last Prophet of God (Allah is simply the Arabic word for God), in direct succession from the Christians Jesus (Isau in Islam), and the Jews Moses (Musa) and Abraham (Ibrahim). Given this pedigree, Islam from the outset had to identify its view in relation to its predecessor faiths and in its holy book, the Koran, Mohamed set out the need to both respect and protect the Jews and Christians as People of the (holy) Book.

Consequently, through much of its history, Islam has not only tolerated Christianity and Judaism, but for centuries Islamic states provided havens of refuge for Christians and Jews persecuted by the totalitarianism of the Catholic Church in western Europe. When the Jews were told to leave Spain or die, it was the Muslim Ottomans who sent ships to rescue them and carry them to new lives in the Middle East and the Maghreb. And even today, millions of Christians live and worship freely and generally peacefully in Muslim states which, in the West, are portrayed as brutal theocracies.

You can find more about Middle Eastern Christians in a previous blog here, but suffice to say that whether you look at Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Syria or Lebanon, or Iraq in Saddam's days or Libya under Gadaffi, you will find Christian people and Christian churches, established for centuries and respected by their Muslim neighbours. In many instances, people of all faiths mark each others festivals - even Ayatollah Khomeini issued Christmas messages to Christians and just last week the head of the Iranian Church met the Pope - notably and discreditably to the surprise of Benedict, who amazingly confessed his ignorance of its existence, although it numbers over 100,000 people and has been in existence for nearly two millenia..

And so we return to Britain, with the bizarre and surreal situations that arise among a white community that is both socially divided between rich and poor and also effectively no longer Christian in terms of any genuine religious beliefs - indeed, there are many times more Christians at church on a Sunday morning in Pakistan than in Britain. And perhaps it is this combination that creates the divisions we face.

Because, coming back to my town, the two poverty stricken areas I mentioned at the start are split - one is predominantly white, one predominantly Asian. Their socio-economic problems are very similar and in effect both are badly let down by the system and feel isolated and neglected, with high unemployment and bad housing and all the attendant problems. In this sense, as the white community for want of a better word like people in any community don't all share the same values to begin with, then the next best thing for those seeking to foment division is to create a shared threat - hence the invention of Winterval and the attendant mythology of the subversion of a "native" culture that has never existed in any unified form in any case.

At their core though, monotheistic religions, even ones linked as intimately as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, by their exclusive theologies carry within them the seeds of conflict. If there is only One God and that god is an interventionist god with a set of revealed beliefs, it is not a big step to find believers in all of these faiths who take such thinking to its logical conclusion, which is if my God is right, then yours must be wrong. And so you can find small minorities of people in each of these faith communities who do hold destructive and even violent viewpoints towards each other and, yes, only a fantasist would suggest there is never problems or violence - but in truth most of the time most people of all faiths have actually lived in peace if not always harmony.

And so faiths are both more intertwined than popular belief  and the mass media would have it; though non-faith issues and the manipulation of half-truths or the exaggeration of threat mean that there is plenty of potential for real conflict. The obvious strategy for those who wish to keep any potential socio-economic change in check, is of course to stigmatise and scapegoat one particular minority to explain away the failures and poverty of others, deflecting challenges from the real problem - the obscenely unjust distribution of wealth and resources.

This was precisely Hitler's tack in his rise to power - stigmatising the Jews and claiming that there was secret plot to subvert German society and turn it into Israel. The Winterval Myth may be small beer by comparison, but the intent of stigmatising and scapegoating a section of society with false ill-intent is just as dangerous now as it was all those decades ago and so the need to challenge and spike the falsehoods has rarely been as important as it is now.

Tomorrow, Christians will celebrate Christmas. It won't be Winterval anywhere - nor has it ever been.

For me, as a follower of the Hellenic Dodekatheon, yesterday was the end of Saturnalia, the Roman winter festival of what was originally the Hellenic Cronia (held in summer) which marked the Golden Age when humans were equal and shared the bounty of the world in harmony with nature. Many religions have a winter festival and aspects of Saturnalia were assimilated into Christmas by Christianity sixteen centuries ago.

But even there, there is a tenuous unity of sorts. For, just as the Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem, now cut off by the "security wall" erected around them by the Israeli army, will tomorrow praise God the Father by singing to Allah, I will thank the gods for my own life and the wonders of the universe by praying in thanks (not in making requests) to Zeus Pater, Father God. Unrevealed natural religions like the Hellenic religion hold that there are many paths to the divine and we each find our route in our own way; so we accept all who will accept each other; we deny and feel threatened by none. And the gods are not individuals hanging around the top of Mount Olympus plucking harps and farting thunderbolts - rather they are metaphorical aspects of the divinity of creation, the wonder of existence, that we can all find within each of us. We only have to look.

So, whatever your belief, your philosophy, your doubts or non-belief, may you have a peaceful weekend and let us hope for a year of peace, justice and progress ahead rather than the one of division and bloodshed that is drawing to a close.

And may Zeus be with us.



O Fortuna, I think I am becoming a god: the hubris of Humanity

The head of the allegedly "greenest government in (British) history", David Cameron, announced yesterday his intention to repeal a raft of environmental legislation, including laws protecting wild bird's nests and eggs, as well as, crucially, the Climate Change Act. This latter law currently requires the Government to take steps to ensure that the carbon emissions of the UK are 80% below their 1990 level by 2050 - this is the minimum reduction many climate change scientists argue will be necessary across the world to prevent runaway climate change and the destruction of human civilisation.

Why has Cameron, aided and abetted by his supine Liberal Democrat Orcs, decided on this?

Well, apparently such rules are "red tape" which hinder the onward march of British industry. They crush creativity and damage our competitiveness with overseas trade rivals. Much better to set our resource-gobbling entrepreneurs free to sate their lust for profit on the altar of profligacy and excess.

Cameron and his free marketeer allies like David Laws and Nick Clegg claim of course that this is the genus of capitalism unbound - free to develop, to cater for every human demand and whim, somehow, by magic, it will find the answers to our environmental problems, invent amazing new technologies that will defy the laws of physics and breach resource limits. Hence the move towards freeing up GM food and the view of Climate Change regulations as a hindrance to the mystical Invisible Hand of the Mighty Market that will mysteriously provide for us all. In doing so, it might ravage the planet of its natural beauty, destroy its ecosystems and rape it of its resources, but that won't matter - somehow, as long as we work hard enough and don't think of some free ride on the state benefits express, Capitalism will provide.

And so we have a government informed by neo-liberal economics and the freak theories of people like the Campaign to Repeal the Climate Change Act. See a video interview with one of their leaders here (click here to link)...a man so breathtakingly arrogant in his ignorance that he defies belief outside of the realms of bad science fiction movies. This man feels that any suggestion that we might limit our use of resources or seek to limit or even just slow the exponential growth rate of humanity is a slight to his warped version of reality. By his arguments, the more the merrier - more humans will not bust the planet, but rather somehow create the ingenuity that will allow us somehow to cram more and more people onto our tired piece of space rock, forever gobbling resources, flying everywhere, driving everywhere, living like Americans everywhere...

Of course, he is in a fantasy world: one where anything that might rain on his parade is in fact a socialist plot. Peak Oil? Nonsense, he scoffs, if we begin to run out of oil, having another three billion people on the Earth will not massively increase demand for the dwindling black stuff and make its price rocket, but rather provide the creative brainpower required to invent new ways of miraculously creating and consuming more and more outputs for fewer and fewer inputs. Anyone who disagrees is just a havering hippie.

But then this denial of reality also invents any kind of excuses or explanations for our current realities - of rising energy prices, of rising global temperatures, of billions living on the edge of existence shorn of the ownership of anything of value. Doubtless, all these will be down to the failure of a state somewhere to implement full-on market capitalism. All they need is to let business and industry find a way.

This is the hubris of humanity, exemplified as never before by our strange advocate and the men he stands proxy for. Somehow, we will always find a way out, create something that will make it right, even if it is just on time and millions may suffer in the meantime. Somehow, we have reached a stage in our history where government policy and the cultural zeigeist do truly hold that creativity is spawned far more effectively by seeding it with the prospect of dollars cash rather than by the prospect of public service or even simple satisfaction.

The transient Triumph of Vespasian

In ancient Rome, Emperors were declared gods when they died. When Vespasian heard the Shades whispering to him in AD79, he wryly observed, "O Fortune, I think I am becoming a god" before passing away.

Our modern Masters may sadly no longer worship Zeus and give thanks for the planet the gods bequeathed them, but they clearly see themselves and their favoured sons and daughters as capable of godly deeds as the Earth spins towards catastrophe. To rein them in as they wipe out our rainforests, jet the world over day after day and continue with conspicuous consumption, would by their argument amount to heresy. To suggest that industry might serve people and planet rather than the other way round can be to invite the full Inquisition, castigation as a utopian dreamer or schemer. Rather, it is time to unite around the consensus that somehow Capital will find a way, no matter how pyrrhic its inevitable Triumph.

But Rome is long gone, and the halls of Olympus lie empty. And our modern would-be gods, just as they claim to hold the very key to knowledge, in truth stand empty, nothing more than false gods and hollow men.

We make our obeisances and sacrifices to them at our peril.