A Post from Eleven Years Ago: Ten Reasons I Believe in God

1) Because I am alive. I've never been able to get over the surprise of this. It seems completely unlooked-for and gratuitous. It fits with the idea of a God who didn't have to create anything, but did so out of pure love.

2) Because the world is so dramatic. Nothing had to exist at all. But, given that something does exist, why wasn't it a static, lifeless, unchanging mass of some kind? Or, on the other hand, why wasn't it a chaotic flux with no pattern, no form, no breathing space? As it is, we have a playground for the human intellect, a theatre for the human soul. (I am partly indebted to Carl Sagan for this point. He was merely pointing out how the universe we inhabit allows the emergence of science. He might have been horrified if he realised he was planting a seed of theistic belief in an innocent teenager's mind.)

3) Because things are fundamentally good. We hear a lot about the "problem of evil", but not about the "problem of good". Most of us can expect to live out this day, and the one after that, and the one after that. We can expect that the person sitting next to us on the bus would sooner help us than hurt us. Most of the things we do every single day bring us joy, from the first scoop of breakfast cereal to the caress of a soft pillow on a tired head. Even the things we don't want to do, like working or exercising or waiting in a queue, often end up bringing us an unexpected satisfaction. Whose fault is it that we become blasé about such abounding joy?

4) Because of my thoughts. I am unable to conceive how my memories of a Christmas morning twenty-five years ago are basically made of the same stuff as a pebble, a screwdriver or a tub of lard. I am not sophisticated enough to understand eliminative materialism, just as I would gape at someone who told me that, from the viewpoint of advanced mathematics, two and two actually equalled a pear tree. And the fact that my thoughts seem somehow outside the realm of the physical makes me unable to believe that only the physical realm exists. It also makes me think that there must be an intelligence behind the universe, on the grounds that the greater cannot come from the lesser.

5) Because I have an idea of good and bad. Though I am often successful-- spectacularly successful-- at rigging those notions of good and bad to line up with what I want to do, now and again I find they become stubborn and won't cooperate. Besides, why should I even want to rig them? Why not just ignore them? And I find that other people not only have these notions, but have them to a degree far in advance of myself. It seems as though my notions of right and wrong have a source outside the physical world, too.

6) Because of Jesus Christ. Talk about a magnetic personality! Even the enemies of Christianity seem unable to find anything to say against him. Bertrand Russell accused him of petulance for withering the fig tree that would yield no fruit. It wasn't one of Bertie's better moments; this is plainly a kind of concrete parable for the benefit of his disciples.

I don't know of any character, real or invented, who combines an air of absolute authority with utter humility, as does Christ. He is not some stoic, otherworldly, blissed-out sage, as one might expect of a visitor from the heavens. And yet, how banal that would be! But no; Christ weeps, becomes irritated, has a flair for the dramatic, and dreads his final suffering. And yet every word he spoke seems to glow with irresistible truth.

7) Because of the saints. The saints have the paradoxical quality of being fanatical and yet not fanatics. They were men and women addicted to doing good in the way a teenager is addicted to video games. But, though they seemed to have a kind of craving to feed the poor and comfort the afflicted, none of them seemed to find that these practical acts of charity clashed with spending long hours in prayer and devotion. It even seems as though the two things are-- contrary to appearances and the "social gospel" critics of the Church-- actually one thing!

When you have a group of witnesses who stick to their guns through every persecution, who are even willing to give up their lives for the truth of their claims, and whose stories "check out" with one another to an extraordinary degree, you begin to think there is something to what they are saying.

8) Because of the Catholic Church. Whatever else you may say about the Catholic Church (and everything else has been said, at one time or another), it is undoubtedly the greatest show on Earth. It has run and run and run-- through the rise and fall of empires, the birth of nations, the passing of whole civilizations. I don't know how to account for its survival through persecution, schism, wicked Popes, ideological opposition and the utter changing of the world. What keeps the show on the road? I believe it is the Holy Spirit.

9) Because of the banality of secularism. I cannot believe that the goal of mankind is that we should all have more leisure time to visit museums and art galleries whose masterpieces no longer mean anything to us. "Well, maybe the universe is banal!". But if it is, where did we get this overpowering thirst for the sublime and the transcendental?

10) Because of G.K. Chesterton. I think every open-minded agnostic and atheist should read Chesterton's Orthodoxy. They could read it in a day, and it might change their whole view of the universe. It changed mine.

The Growth of Love (I)

I know my title sounds like it might belong to a marriage guidance manual from the seventies, but that's not what this blog post is about. It's not about romantic love or even interpersonal love. It's about "love" in the sense of enthusiasms, interests, pursuits, and so on. And it's unabashedly personal. I hope it's of interest to someone out there, but even if it's not, I want to write it for myself.

I was watching a horror film earlier today (the one I mentioned in a previous post), and it occurred to me: horror is probably my oldest love in this sense.

I can't remember when I started to love the horror genre. More than anything, it's horror films that I love. I was allowed to any number of horror films as a child, perhaps because my father also liked horror. At least, he liked ghost stories. He often mentioned staying up late as a boy, after everyone else had gone to bed, and reading a collection of ghost stories.

I once asked him why he was so tolerant of ghost stories, when he only had mockery for science fiction and fantasy, which he generally regarded as childish trash. "Because ghosts are real", he said.

How many horror films did I watch in my childhood? I have no idea, and I find it hard to even remember particular horror films. They all blend together in my mind, but they were mostly English: Hammer, Amicus, and other films of that kind.

Horror has always felt like home to me. I feel about horror-- the horror atmosphere, which has to be somehow cosy or appealing as well as scary-- the same way English people feel about the white cliffs of Dover, or Americans feel about Mom's apple pie. 

But speaking of the white cliffs of Dover...my anglophilia, my love of Englishness, was also a very early acquisition, though not as old as my love of horror. Somehow, when I think of it, I think of the image of Big Ben in the cartoon Dangermouse, even though Dangermouse was not a big part of my childhood. I think it was mostly to do with English comics (such as The Eagle) and English TV programmes, though none of the latter suggest themselves to me right now. I do remember that the first "grown-up" book I ever read-- that is, the first book that was mostly text-- was Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

What about my love of poetry? This was a rather late arrival. It wasn't until my early teens that I discovered poetry, and the discovery was sudden. It's hard to write this without sounding obnoxious, but I was astonished-- even then-- at the realization that I had a mature taste for great poetry. As soon as I read W.B. Yeats, I loved him, in the same way that I love him today. I expected poetry to be over my head, but it wasn't. I have no idea how this happened, other than my father reciting poetry to me. (I can still remember the first time I heard the "Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow" speech from Mabbeth-- when my father recited it to me-- and the frisson I felt at the words "a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing").

My love of the cinema was even later. I'd gone to the cinema exactly seven times in my childhood, each of them memorable occasions. But it hadn't sparked a particular love of the cinema per se.

My passion for cinema-going actually began in 2001, when I was already in my early twenties. It sounds ridiculous (and it is ridiculous) but for many years I was reluctant to go to the cinema on my own, being unsure what exactly you did when you walked up to a box-office. I thought there was some kind of mystique to it, like ordering from the menu in a French restaurant.

Perhaps this nervousness was Providential, because when I finally overcame my cinema hesitation, I became an avid cinema-goer, and I experience a profound sense of revelation. I went every week, several times a week, for several years. I read the movie magazines. When people saw me, they asked me what films I'd seen recently-- which irritated me.

The cinema I attended was the Santry Omniplex, which was part of the Omni shopping centre in Santry, not far from Dublin Airport. Importantly, though it was part of the shopping centre, it was semi-detached, as it were-- which meant that, when I left a screening (and I always preferred morning screenings), I would walk from the darkness back out into the cold light of day.

The Santry Omniplex was the sort of suburban cineplex which is called "soulless", but it was exactly what I needed-- although it would take too long to explain this.

The more this great era of my cinema-going recedes into my past, the more important it seems to me. It was like an imaginative rebirth, even a spiritual rebirth. It reminds me of this great line from John Denver: "He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year, coming home to a place he'd never been before..."

But that's all I can write for now...

Favourite Album Covers: Technical Ecstasy by Black Sabbath

 

This has been my absolute favourite album cover for decades now. I've never even listened to the album.

It's hard to explain why. I just really like the atmosphere, and the colours-- the colours and textures create the atmosphere. 

I suppose you could say it evokes a kind of technological dystopia, from a human point of view, but that's not what I think of when I look at it. It actually has something of a retro-futurist feel, and the title colours my view of the picture. It's a moment of ecstasy, not of horror. Maybe my reaction, deep down, is: "Perhaps the future won't be too different from the past, in some way." Also, I've always loved escalators.

It was painted (?) by the same guy who designed the cover for Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. I've only discovered that right now. You could hardly get a more recognizable album cover than that one.

A Positive Cultural Development?

Last night I started watching a 2022 anthology horror film called Tales from the Other Side. It was, to be frank, pretty ropey: cheap, corny, and often ridiculous. But I fell asleep watching it and I'll finish watching it today. I love horror anthologiy films so much that I will (fairly) happily watch even the worst ones. I would rather watch a fifth-rate anthology horror anthology film than a second-rate gangster film, war film, or melodrama. Beside, it had some nice moments.

I came across it on Amazon Prime. This service seems to have a bottomless cauldron of cheap horror films-- most of them made within the last few years. The sort of films that don't have a Wikipedia page or any other kind of online footprint, aside from an occasional capsule review, and that will certainly never become widelly known.

I say "cheap" rather than "bad", because not all of them are bad. For instance, The Curse of Crom: The Legend of Halloween was pretty good, and there have been others.

Presumably this avalanche of horror films-- and, I assume, other genres (Christmas movies, for instance)- only exists because of streaming. Is that really such a bad thing? The people who make all these flms are getting paid, and they are also getting to do creative work. That seems like an admirable thing to me. They only exist because they meet a demand, so somebody is getting something out of watching them. (Me, for one.)

Even if you subscribe to an elitist outlook that only creative works of permanent value matter-- well, you need a mountain of mediocrity to achieve a pinaccle of excellence. The bigger the mountain...

Meanwhile, cinemas still exist, and still exhibit all their usual fare: big budget movies, not-so-big budget movies, and obscure little movies that still get a theatrical release.

I'm not often enthusiastic about cultural developments, but this seems like a good one.

There's UFO's over New York...

 ...and I ain't too surprised.

I happened to be listening to John Lennon's song "Nobody Told Me" just now, and I couldn't help being struck by the topicality of this line, given recent headlines.

(I'm surprised to be writing a second Beatles-related post in a row.)

I've long harboured a dislike of John Lennon, based on a few different factors: the lyrics of "Imagine", the way he treated his first son, and his general cynicism. I think of Paul McCartney as the good Beatle and the John as the bad one.

But of course, that's completely daft. John Lennon was a young guy with a troubled background who experienced unprecedented, unimaginable success. It's impossible to guess how that would affect any one of us.

In more recent years, I've come to really like some of his solo tracks that I didn't know about before. Most especially, "Watching the Wheels", but also "Gimme Some Truth" and "Working-Class Hero."

And "Nobody Told Me", which is a wonderfully bouncy and upbeat anthem to life's quirkiness.

More than that, though: it evokes a mood or aesthetic that I particularly relish, one best captured by Louis MacNeice in his immortal phrase "the drunkenness of things being various".

Other things that awaken this mood, or aesthetic:

The Trivial Pursuit board.

Books of quotations.

Reading old diaries, bound periodicals, or even the newspaper.

Compilation TV shows such as the Irish "Reeling in the Years" series.

I also like the "collage" style of the lyrics. It reminds me of other songs such as "Cool for Cats" by Squeeze or "The Mero" by the Dubliners.

There's something miraculous about music (and every other form of art) that awakens in us a particular mood or view of the world. It's almost the opposite of the Matthew Arnold line I posted a view days ago: "Who saw life steadily and saw it whole." That's a wonderful line, and a wonderful gift. But not to see life steadily, or see it whole, also seems important: the ability to see the world as now comic, now tragic, now mysterious, now exciting, now sentimental, etc. etc. And the fact that life can correctly be described in all these different ways!

Life is a shimmering thing.

Favourite Album Covers: Back to the Egg

This is a new regular feature which I will probably forget about immediately.

Anyway, I've long been of this album cover, Back to the Egg by Wings (1979) which is an example of what I call "everyday surrealism". And so seventies!

Favourite Poems: "To a Friend" by Matthew Arnold.

This sonnet is about Sophocles, of whom I know little. Well, it's about Homer, Epictetus, and Sophocles. The opening is a bit shaky and awkward, although that also gives it a sort of halting dignity. But the sestet, the last six lines, are the kicker. "Who saw life steadily and saw it whole" is, in my view, one of the greatest lines in English poetry. "Business could not make dull, nor passion wild" is another wonderful line; the sort of classical antithesis native to the age of Samuel Johnson, here lit by the afterglow of Romanticism. "Mellow glory" is also a wonderful paradox, or at least, a surprising combination of ideas.

It's the sort of poem that makes me regret being so little of a classicist!

To a Friend by Matthew Arnold

Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?—
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.

Much he, whose friendship I not long since won,
That halting slave, who in Nicopolis
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him. But be his

My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole;
The mellow glory of the Attic stage,
Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child.