(Untitled)

[duke_aldhein]

Some time ago, in a discussion on here, someone called JJ asked me a question: 'If you do dismiss literal interpretations of religious stories, how do you deal with the language of "belief" and "faith" that so pervades religious discourse?' I have been slow to reply, because the series of posts that led to the question were riddled with assumptions

Comments

[duke_aldhein]

Christian orthodoxy has more room for Bill Hicks than for the fundamentalists he took such joy in attacking...

I'm serious. I mean, I don't generally see eye to eye with Giles Fraser (he embodies the intelligent-enough-to-know-better liberal Christianity I take potshots at - and his attempt at a riposte to my column on the Church House Bookshop website was both condescending and feeble), but he did a good piece for the Guardian a few Christmases ago. Inspired by Kundera's definition of kitsch as 'the absolute denial of shit', he wrote about the 'caganer' - 'a traditional Catalan figurine who is placed squatting in the corner of the Christmas crib, trousers around his ankles.'Kitsch excludes shit in order to paint a picture of perfection, a world of purity and moral decency

[duke_aldhein]

Yeah, he basically implied (by his selection of books and his comments) that I was a naive young Marxist who would doubtless mature to see the error of his ways, as he had - and also had a go at Radical Orthodox theology for being "fashionable", which is rather ad hominem for an Oxford philosopher. His whole column was pretty slapdash.

I could give a more nuanced critique of the militant liberalism he regularly promotes in the Grauniad, but I'll save that for another day.

[duke_aldhein]

What is difficult is the medium through which the non-literal is presented - ritual, or word - wihtout being so vague as to mean nothing to anyone.Agreed! There are all sorts of difficulty around this

[aurorra]

OOH, IOU one propper comment on all this.... I'll come back later.

x