Lev Lafayette's journal

On Sunday I visited St Michael's Uniting Church in the city for a special commemoration service for Dr Francis McNab, who had died a few weeks earlier. As a very irregular attendee of the congregation, I nevertheless had been given the opportunity to meet Rev McNab on several occasions in the past and had a number of opportunities to discuss his attempt to combine theology with psychotherapy, a keystone of his "New Faith" which dispensed with the dogmatic notions of traditional Christianity. A liberal and caring intellectual McNab's lasting legacy - as founder and executive director for over forty years - will probably be the Cairnmillar Institute, now one of Australia's largest training centres for counsellors, psychologists etc. It was, as one could expect, very well-attended and with a stream of high-profile speakers from the legal, religious, and therapeutic communities (as well as family, of course).

With McNab's departure from the earthly plane, he joins two notable Catholic priests of Australian origin who died this year; Cardinal George Pell and, more recently, Father Bob Maguire. You possibly couldn't find two more different figures within that intrinsically hierarchical organisation, nor two very different pathways. Pell was a man of the establishment who worked his way up the hierarchy to become the person in charge of the Vatican's finances as the third most important person in the Church. A traditionalist in so many areas, antisecular (i.e., he believed Church doctrine should be law), he nevertheless became most famous for the establishment of "the Melbourne Response" protocols to authorise payments and covering up accusations of child sexual assault, and his own convictions which would quashed on appeal.

At the other end of the spectrum was Bob Maguire of South Melbourne, an utterly tireless advocate for social justice and welfare for not just the poorest but the most difficult members of society. People would go to Father Bob's charities when they had absolutely nowhere else to go and, it was with great honour and pleasure, I helped organise a fundraiser for his foundation at the Melbourne Unitarian Church July 2012. As he was being forcibly retired from his parish at that point, I recall making a pointed remark that he was a priest without a church and we were a church without a priest. Alas, the subtle hint was not taken up by the committee of management, although I'm pretty sure he knew what I was getting at. He was a person who deeply understood the principles of secularism and was quite prepared to conduct same-sex civil unions and advocated within the church for women's ordination.

I honestly don't think any of the aforementioned figures believed in the traditional, personal, interventionist God. All were intelligent enough to know that the idea is untenable. As the former Reverend of Knox Church in Dunedin (yes, I'm a member of that congregation, too), Sarah Mitchell once said about atheists "Tell me about the God you don’t believe in - I doubt that I believe in 'him' either". For Pell theology was mainly about loyalty to the institution, traditionalism, and hierarchy, to Maguire it was the ability to see the intrinsic worth in all human beings, to have forgiveness of their failings, and sympathy for their circumstances. For McNab a cerebral and empathic quest to understand the motivations of the human mind and our interpersonal space. I think one can easily see the correlations between these people and the traditional trinity; Pell the Father, Maguire the Son, and McNab the Spirit.

This Saturday I am giving an online presentation to SoFiA (Sea of Faith in Australia) entitled, "Pantheism: Beyond Atheism and Theism" and will provide the Zoom link and passcode to those were want to hear me talk about the subject. As a backgrounder, I have previously presented to the Melbourne Atheist Society n on the subject, several years ago now. By preparing for the presentation has given me the opportunity to consider my own searches along this path. Whilst I was initially raised in a fairly orthodox welfare-working class Catholic environment, and would soon find myself under the direct care of the Sisters of Mercy. During my childhood, I was a voracious reader of the Christian bible but had also been sufficiently exposed to Hellenic mythology, which I adored. In my adolescence, it must be said, participation in fantasy RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons and especially RuneQuest gave me a wider knowledge of the polytheistic cultures of the world in the former, and how mythology is its own Weltanschauung in the latter. Later in my teen-aged years, as I became more influenced by Marxism, I would become an atheist and carried a degree of antitheist anger at the deception carried out by religious institutions, yet also sympathetic to the healing properties expressed as "the opium of the people" and the fascinating union in "liberation theology". I have fond memories of organising a meeting at Murdoch University on the latter subject where I designed a logo based on the cross and the sickle which caused a bit of a stir.

After moving to Melbourne I initially became interested in Buddhism (and much later, Engaged Buddhism in particular) and journeyed with my housemate, Glenn K., to Woolongong's temple for the Year of the Rat, a fascinating combination of an Australian hitch-hiker story and pilgramage which I covered in an address to the Melbourne Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship. It was during that journey, becoming close to the natural environs and mixing it with an interest in the European enlightenment that I found myself attracted to paganism in general and Celtic paganism in particular for a while, and my time in Timor-Leste reignited an anthropological interest in animism, along with encounters with Hinduism in Bali and syncretic Islam in Java. Soon afterward I would join the Melbourne Unitarian Church where I was an active member for more than a decade and, for my sins, even spent time in the turgid environment of their committee of management. For a short period, I was even enrolled at the New Seminary for Interfaith Studies in New York, until it became clear that they carried no academic standing. Whilst I do not attend often, I am also a member of the Christian Uniting Church through the very liberal St Michael's Church and when I can, attend the equally liberal Knox Presbyterian Church in Dunedin. Over these many years, however, all of these journeys and reflections have narrowed down to naturalistic pantheism as a metaphysic. It suits my idea of the universe being both prosaic and also magical at the same time, expressed in Ludwig Wittgenstein's comment in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): "Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist" ("Not how the world is, is mystical, but that it is"), which certainly accords with my lived experience.

Every year a common image meme appears declaring that Easter is somehow related to Ishtar. This is demonstrably untrue. Easter is named after the month and the Germanic pagan goddess Ēostre, Easter eggs (a particularly Christian symbol) date from at least the 17th century, and the rabbit the carrier of the eggs. So whilst I grimaced somewhet when the speaker at the Unitarian service started the address by mentioning the Ishtar myth, I was pleased that the reading included a selection from an excellent humanist interpretation of the Christian Easter myth: Good Friday is for every good-hearted person who has ever been tortured or murdered or beaten down by the relentless forces of human oppression.

Saturday night's Isocracy meeting at Trades Hall could have had a better turnout, punished by both the Comedy Festival and tramworks leading to a parking disaster. Nevertheless Nick Langdon gave one of the most scholarly and nuanced accounts of human rights and international relations in North Korea, noting in particular how the regime exists on a cult-like propaganda machine (which is why sanctions and economic punishment is ineffectual and indeed, counter-productive). Importantly, Nick pointed out that the North Korean system is incapable of reform, only collapse. Which does raise, of course, the question of what comes afterwards. In all probability it would be a South Korean takeover of some sort which would lead to the uncomfortable situation of US troops on the Chinese border. In my opinion any sort of reunification in order to be successful would also require a substantial demilitarisation of the penisula, and, especially in a transition to social and liberal democratic governance, an expansion in the South Korean welfare system - which is difficult given the GDP etc differences between the two countries.

In other activities ran a session of Pendragon on Thursday night which concluded with contacting the Ten Saints of Britain who are now reciting a common prayer for a year to end the Waste Land. Sunday afternoon played Hacker with the usual suspects which, despite its age and some changes in contemporary technology, is actually a surprisingly good simulation of computer hacking. Perhaps a new edition is in order? On Friday afternoon attended a social gathering hosted by Anthony L., with excellent political, cultural, and technical discussions and some great food. Saturday afternoon convened the LUV Beginners Workshop which had Terry Kemp speaking on GNOME3 and particularly the GNOME Tweak Tool (slides available). Yes, that does mean for the entire Easter long-weekend, this is the first day I've had free.