Why did Satan get such a bad reputation? Or reflections on the war in heaven.

Why did Satan get such a bad reputation? I'm not suggesting he doesn't deserve it, but I am suggesting it's an important question. The reason is not just that 'it's obvious because he's the chief bad guy'. The reason, in my opinion is because the new testament's attitude towards the cosmic bad guy is rather unexpected, and is most clearly revealed in the war in heaven. (Rev. 12 7-13)

In order to appreciate this, it's necessary to think hard about what's new and unusual in the story in Revelation.

...there was no longer any place for them in heaven

That phrase in verse 8 got me interested in this passage. It really seems to remind me of Girard's ideas about myths. Verses 7 and 8 look like a classic example of (part of ) a myth in Girard's system. The dragon committed some crime (or at least was accused of committing the crime) but after the defeat of the dragon and his angels, all the angels are driven from heaven due to some collective association with the dragon's crime. Girard would say that this story started in a real event, where someone committed the crime (or was accused), and his clan was driven from the community as a result.
But what was the crime? Looking only at verses 7 and 8 (I'll explain why in a minute), there's only 1 clue, in Michael's name. It means 'Who is like God?' So the dragon is (accused of) claiming to be God's equal, but no-one can be God's equal. This idea that the dragon's crime was to claim equality with God seems to have entered our conciousness, but I've been struggling to find any references (beyond Michael's name) as to where it comes from; I've certainly heard it before but can't remember precisely where. Anyway, it sounds all too plausible a real event for a myth to be based on; one of a king's senior advisers is accused of trying to usurp the king, so must be removed. But society needs a broader scapegoat than that so the entire clan is expelled. The event has such a cohesive power that it becomes a myth. But a few odd phrases tend to remain, clues to the scapegoating, such as 'there was no longer any place for them in heaven'.

The name of the dragon.

Fans of Girard would be slightly horrified to find any girardian myth in the new testement, but it's all OK. What John of Patmos has done is to take an old familiar story about how the dragon was defeated and twisted it round into a parody of the original that gives a completely different message. Verses 7 and 8 are there to remind the listeners of the original story, but verse 9 is the punchline, the verse that takes this story in a completely new direction. It continues to lull you into a false sense of security talking about the great dragon being thrown down, but then throws in the surprise; the dragon is Satan.

In the Old Testament, Satan isn't the cosmic bad guy. The most famous appearance where he's actually named is in the book of Job, where he seems to be God's gambling partner. I'm told that in the talmud, the jewish tradition is that Satan (the accuser) is essentially considered an aspect of God. So what's going on here is that a benign being, an essential aspect of God's justice, the accuser of those who transgress the law, is being elevated to the cosmic bad guy. I'm reminded a bit of Scooby Doo here; in every episode of Scooby Doo, at the end some monster's head is pulled off and the monster is revealed to be a kindly old man in a costume. Here the dragon is revealed as God's gambling partner and (what was thought of as) an important aspect of divine justice.

I see Satan fall like lightning

I keep using this phrase 'cosmic bad guy'. Why such a clunky expression? The reason is because the normal words like 'devil' are totally linked to Satan; Satan is Hebrew for 'the accuser', and Devil is a corruption of Diabolos, the Greek word for Accuser. To say 'Satan is the devil' is a tautology; the accuser is the accuser. This gives me a linguistic problem - I reckon that by saying Satan is the cosmic bad guy, you're asking people to see the world very differently. And unless you see this as a novel innovation, you're going to miss something important in the New Testament.

We all like to divide the world into the good guys and the bad guys. Us lot are in league with the cosmic good guy, so we accuse those different people over there of being in league with the bad guy. So they're fair game for persecution. How can this new religion of radical peace undermine this impulse? By throwing a spanner in the works of the myth of the cosmic good guy and the cosmic bad guy, warping the myth so it becomes a condemnation of persecution, not a justification for it. The spanner is to make Satan be the dragon.

You are accused of the crime of...accusation

So, Satan, the accuser, is the ultimate bad guy. Doesn't that make Accusation the ultimate crime? This could be looked at in 2 ways. One is that the story is now an attack on any form of scapegoating or persecution. The other is that it's setting up a deliberately unworkable (and hence profoundly and deliberately self-defeating) structure of persecution. If we want to persecute people, we need to accuse them of the ultimate crime. But that is impossible without committing the ultimate crime so the whole thing should fall apart. Indeed, the only way people have found to keep persecuting is to forget about this whole thing and treat Satan's name as a synonym for the cosmic bad guy.

And all is certainly not sweetness and light in this new world. Unlike in Scooby Doo, pulling the dragon's mask off makes things more unsettling and scary. We know what to do about dragons - you send in a hero to fight them. If the great evil is something we all do from time to time, that's more unsettling.

Tidying up - who is like God, and how much space there is in heaven.

A few odd phrases need further comment. One is Michael's name. What's its significance. It could just be left over from the original story; Michael also features in the version of the story in Enoch. The possible, more exciting, option is that John of Patmos is giving a different answer to the question. Who is like God? The original story says 'no-one'. This version says 'the one who does not accuse'.

Good disagreement

Justin welby has suggested that 'good disagreement' is the answer to a particular issue in the church of England. My immediate response was that this was a very Anglican idea. If we are a broad church then good disagreement should be our first instinctive response to any controversy.

Thinking more about it, I think good disagreement is a rather better ides than that. Any church should search for an issue to have good disagreement on because if they do they'll be a better church.

The idea of a church is a rather strange element of Christianity. Why can't you just be a Christian on your own is an often-asked question. The epistles in particular seem clear that you can't but maybe aren't clear enough on what the problem is.

I want to suggest that this requirement to be in a church is linked to the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself. Of course 'our neighbour' includes difficult people with opinions we dont like. To get good at this would take practice, and the ideal place to practice would be with a bunch of people also committed to this practice but who do disàgree about important things. Fortunately churches are good at finding things to disagree about, so a church is the perfect place for this practice. Of course, while charity dose begin at home it doesn't end there; the practice must lead to love of neighbours outside the church.

So church becomes a reflection 'in a glass dimly' of the heavenly kingdom, in that it is a place where everyone is trying to love one another. Of course, in the kingdom of God, the love, and hence the disagreement, won't be good but rather perfect.

How significant an aspect of church is this? Well it seems to me that the new testament says more about good disagreement than about any other aspect of being church.

So maybe the most important thing to look for in a church is good disagreement. What should you disagree about? Well that's up to you but the most passionate disagreement I've ever heard about at a PCC was about replacing a worn carpet. Of course, disagreement is very painful, especially if people hold views that seem to utterly miss the point of Christianity (as you see it). But maybe a positive way of looking at things is that they're still going to hold those views if you aren't in the same church as them, and it's best if the holy spirit is there to guide any good disagreement which might happen with you.

The pursuit of happiness

The day before 'Action for Happiness' launched this week, I happened to be thinking a lot about happiness. I haven't studied what Action for Happiness are saying in detail yet, but the Big Idea that occurred to me seems a bit different, and more fundamental, than what they're talking about.

My Big Idea about happiness is this: It is non-obvious that the pursuit of happiness is difficult. And this matters A Lot.

The reason why Action for Happiness will fail is that everyone has in fact spent their entire lives trying to maximise their happiness. What is the point, people will think, in a campaign to persuade me to do something I've been doing continually from the moment I first cried as a baby. The point should be that, despite the fact that we have been doing this our entire lives, we've been doing it in an instinctive and blundering way and we still aren't any good at it. And as with brain surgery and anything else that we aren't any good at, skills can be learnt.

Take materialism. Action for happiness seem to criticise materialism a bit. I'm not sure they should, as people will assume that they're trying to take away all their nice material possessions. The problem is that we're bad at working out which material possessions will actually make us happier. If we were better at doing that, we could either buy more of the ones that do make us happier, or save the money (and time taken to earn it) we currently waste on ones we don't 'need'. This will probably reduce materialism, but materialism is only the symptom.

The perfect political system

There's a bit of a perceived swings-and-roundabouts thing with first past the post elections versus proportional representation. I think by changing a few things that other people don't seem to have considered changing, we can create a system that's the best of both worlds.

The advantages of first-past-the-post are:

• Everyone has a representative that's for 'their area'
• Representatives can be held to account by their constituents
• Increased odds of stable governments (I'll assume this is a good thing, but see below)

The advantages of PR are:

• Everyone's vote matters equally
• People in safe seats don't feel enfranchised
  
• Minority parties are given a voice
• There's no need for complex 'tactical voting'; you simply vote for who you want.

My marvelous voting system combines the benefits of the 2 by the simple method of abandoning the principle of 1 member 1 vote actually in the commons. Here's how it works. (Initially, we'll consider a system that's equivalent to 50% PR, so produces moderately stable governments, but gives minorities a bigger say than they have now in the UK. But not as much as a say as in a classic 50% PR system. We'll consider other variants later)

• Everyone elects an MP, just as they do now. In addition, everyone votes for a party in a national vote.
• MPs are elected, just as they are now. Each MP is initially given 100 votes in the commons. (Let's assume there are 650 MPs, like there are now. That gives 65,000 commons votes in total from this stage)
  
• The party votes are then counted up. The votes for any party that got no MPs in the constituency election are ignored. 65,000 votes are then allocated to the remaining parties according to their share of the vote.
• These votes are then shared evenly among all MPs in that party.
• Obviously, we need some sort of electronic voting system in the commons; I would suggest oyster-style readers by the lobby doors, so MPs still get the exercise of walking into the lobbies to vote.

The effect of all that is that the LibDems and other minority parties will have more votes per MP, to reflect their support in other parts of the country, but all MPs are answerable to a constituency that elected them, and you'll have the same set of parties in the commons, so minority parties that don't have any regional strongholds (such as the greens) are still out. The minority parties are much more powerful per-MP than the majors, but they're still under-represented compared to their true popularity in the country.
As I say, this is 50% PR, but could be tweaked by altering the number of votes issued in the 2 phases. I'll come back to that point in a second.

There obviously needs to be some rules about how to get onto the national party ballot paper. This is arguably a detail, but it might be best to say that a party has to stand for at least so many seats to appear. You could also allow a party to pay a (fairly large) deposit in order to appear. This is returned if they get any MPs elected. Allowing this deposit would mean that independents who stand a good chance of being elected (people like Martin Bell) could end up being enormously significant people in the commons. I'm not quite sure if that's a good thing or not.

A possible tweak to allow a small party list. The justification for this is to let parties like the greens in, and because senior ministers arguably do a useless job of representing their constituency. This would work as follows:

• Votes are cast, MPs elected and the 65,000 party votes are divided as before.
• Each party supplies an odered list of 10 names.
• The party votes are initially allocated 100-at-a-time to people on the list, and then the remainder are shared out among all the MPs (list and constituency). e.g. if a party had 250 party votes, the first 2 people on the list would become Ms then 50 votes (the ones left over after giving 100 to each of the 2 list MPs) would be allocated among all the party's list and constituency MPs. If a party had 2,000 votes, 1,000 would be used electing all 10 list names, and the other 1,000 shared amongst all the party's MPs.

As well as letting the greens in, this would probably let the BNP in. As far as I can see, for many people the goal here would be to invent a system to let the greens in and keep the BNP out. I'm not playing that game since the BNP always sound utterly stupid when they talk about any subject except the fact that everyone persecutes them (which is mostly what they talk about when non-nutters are likely to be listening). Therefore the solution to the BNP is to stop persecuting them, and let them be revealed for the stupid people they are.

If people want a more anti-BNP system, we just add a floor percentage of votes below which party votes are ignore. (Any party that gets under the floor of say 3% is ignored, just as parties that got no MPs were in the original system were ignored)

We probably want to shrink the number of constituencies to allow space for all these list MPs, but that's a detail. (We also might want to shrink the number of constituencies because there are far too many MP but that's another story)

To make life slightly more interesting, we could allow factions to appear on the party list. A faction is like a sub-party. To prevent things getting too interesting, I would allow each candidate to be a member of only 1 faction as well as a party. A faction appears on the party ballot paper if it satisfies the requirements for a party above (more than so many candidates, or pay a deposit). I can't quite decide if list candidates are allowed to be members of factions; I'm minded to say no. Faction votes are counted and allocated exactly like party votes, apart from the fact that factions certainly don't have their own lists. An MP who's a member of a faction gets 'party votes' from his party and from his faction. This has no impact on the overall electoral sums; the number of votes given to a party if some people vote for factions is the same as if they voted just for the party. However, they are biased towards the end of the party that has more popular support.

Cross-party factions should probably be banned.

As a final tweak, this has the interesting property that it's possible to change the effective PR-ness after the election. This property could be used to try and move towards fixed term parliaments while basically keeping the british constitutional system. To do this, we remove the prime minister's right to ask for an election. Usually, elections happen some fixed time (4 years) after the last one, and initially happen with a bigger bias towards PR (say 32,500 constituency votes in the commons and 65,000 party votes, although it could even be 0 constituency votes). If a confidence vote fails, the monarch should firstly attempt to find another prime ministerial candidate capable of winning a confidence vote, but to do that they are allowed to change the number of constituency and party votes. This effectively creates a 'new commons' which may have a different balance of power, but which was still arguably democratically elected by the same election. A minor detail is how to prevent governments from deliberately failing confidence votes in order to get a more first-past-the-post system (and hence a stronger real majority), but I'm sure that would be possible.

Failure, or Interpreting my tent-packing instructions as a parable

In my tent-folding instructions (last post), people are likely to be drawn to step 4. That's where all the action seems to be. That's where all the pseudo-mystical ideas are introduced that clearly lead on to the miracle in step 5.

That's wrong.

The most important is step 3 After step 3, all you need to do is gain the understanding and fold the tent. Before step 3, that is impossible.

Step 3 involve failure, but without failing in exactly that way, you can't succeed. The fact that failure is sometimes vital is what many people fail to understand when they're too concerned with success.

How to pack up an easy-to-unpack tent

You can get these tents where the poles are a single long loop that gets wrapped up a bit more when you fold them up. They're in the shape of a large disc when folded, and are marketed as being easy to erect. This is true. You just take them out of the bag and they spring into shape before you can do anything about it.

However, arguably they should be marketed as tents whose packing up will be a character-building experience. Certainly it takes much longer to pack them up than to unpack and pack up a normal tent, so they don't save any time at all in the long term. I've watched and helped with packing one up twice now, and so I offer these instructions on how to pack one up. As far as I can make out, this is the only way of folding these tents. There is no possibility of taking any short-cuts; you need to follow these instructions to the letter.

1. Make sure you have a large audience. You won't see the funny side of what's about to happen but I assure you it's hilarious. It would be a pity for all that hilarity to be wasted.
2. Start by trying to follow the instructions that came with the tent. Do this a few times. Each time you will get three-quarters of the way through before reaching an instruction that makes no sense. At that point, you will pause to think, and the tent will spring back to its fully-unpacked state. By now, the audience will be declaring this the most fun they've had on the entire camping trip.
   
3. Abandon the instructions. Try to do your own thing. Fold it in your own unique style. Try numerous variants. Each time, you'll fold it into a nice neat circle that's between 2 and 3 times too big for the bag, with no way of making it smaller.
4. Having no-where else to turn, and increasingly losing face in front of your rapidly-growing audience, return to the instructions. Meditate on the instruction that makes no sense. Try to imagine it from all possible directions. In desperation, consider it more of a zen koan than an instruction.
   
5. Having done this, fold the tent to the point before the instruction that makes no sense. Holding the tent in this position, meditate once more on the instruction that makes no sense. Become at one with the instruction that makes no sense. Don't understand it, since that is impossible. Just be it. Now jump on the tent.
6. Observe that you've now got the tent into the shape needed for the next instruction, and the rest is pretty trivial really. Put the tent in the bag rapidly. Accept the adulation of the crowd. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED IN STEP 5.
   

I am that I am

At fEAST last week, I said a few things about the name of God which seemed to strike a lot of chords. Since only a few people were there, I thought I'd repeat them.

When God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, Moses asked God's name, and was told given the reply 'I am that I am. If they ask you who sent you, say that I am sent you'

So why is God called 'I am'? It's a bit of an unusual name.

My first answer was that God encompasses everything and is beyond comparison to anything. As such, 'I am' is the only possible name. Any other name exists to help distinguish the named thing from other things. God cannot be distinguished, and so can only be called 'I am'.

But I then gave a second answer, which people seemed to like. The name 'I am' in hebrew is spelt YHWH, and was probably pronounced Yahweh. 'Yah' is one of the very few sylables that can be pronounced on an in-breath, and it sounds like an in breath anyway. Weh sounds like an out breath. The name of God is nothing more than the sound of the breath.

So God's name can be looked at in 2 ways; as utterly all-encompassing and transcendant, or as close to us as our breath. In fact, it seems even more intertwined than that; it's impossible to think of the name 'I am' without thinking of yourself; no-one ever says anything including the words 'I am' that isn't about them. And the breath of God is constantly talked about.

And of course, the name of God is constantly on your lips. Every breath is a prayer. Recently I've been using 'yahweh' as my mantra during meditation. For some time I've preferred very simple mantras which mean there's no hard and fast line between meditating on the breath and using a mantra. Yahweh is literally perfect in this respect. It is also, of course, the name of God, which seems like a good thing to meditate on. And finally, it seems to fit well into Ramana Maharishi's practice of 'Self enquiry'; of constantly asking who you are. Who is it who thinks these thoughts? Who is it who says this mantra?

I can't help thinking that the jewish tradition of never using the name of God is missing out on something. But that might make an interesting post on its own.