Sunday Sermon: Logos 3

Every, good morning. Thank you for all things: your world, your music, your people, your word. To play our parts in your great, unique journey is a privilege and for our opportunity we are truly grateful. Help us help you, body of all things. Amen.

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Every is unnameable, unknowable, indescribable, but Logos is not. That symbolic, arbitrary cultural residue that we all take for granted, that language which we speak and read... that is our shared religion. Logos is civilisation's symbolic engagement with truth and meaning, with the divine.

Most readers will, I expect, know the joy of discovering someone who is reading or has read the same book, and hence of being able to build excellent conversation around reflections on its characters and themes, the virtues or otherwise of the author, implications for contemporary issues etcetera. The shared narrative facilitates and accelerates our engagement, and is fruitful. In the bed of the story our own ideas, hundreds of miles or years from the story, might make love and have babies. If you're bothered by the schmaltzy metaphor: shared story is software for a larger computation device. Anyway, that's just a preliminary thought.

To speak of Logos in history we are obliged to see it in many language groups and traditions, indeed as many logoi. Though it was always somewhat connected, at least if we leave out the New World of the Americas, it is only recently with the internet, translation software and mass accessibility to translations of millions of international works that Logos has truly become a single whole (though still with its rich organicism of parts, each language operating as a separate mnemonic and contemplative organ). This is indeed a new age for Logos, and The House of Every is a religion designed specifically for this new age, of the living, universal Word of God, in all its vastness and mystery, and equally accessible to all.

But I'm going to talk a bit about the Greek language. Please don't accuse me of Eurocentrism or something. It is a wonderful ancient tradition which has had an enormous impact on successive world history, and it is one that it is my own practice to engage with closely, but it is not the only tradition.

At approximately the same time as the outbreak of Greek literature and learning I'm speaking of (latter half of the first millenium BC) was the Spring and Autumn Period in China. This gave us the seminal literature of the Chinese people which continues to unite and inform the Chinese language and culture today. Its well known figures even in the West include Lao Tsu, Sung Tsu (Art of War), Confucius and Mencius and there were many others. The I Ching was completed in this period. It was a full, true renaissance, also called the 'Hundred Schools of Thought'.

Meanwhile, about half way between these two great unleashings of Logos was a major period of Vedic literature in North-West India. Both the Han and the Vedic traditions, not to mention innumerable smaller language traditions of learning, story and literature, are not merely more relevant than the Greek tradition to billions of people, but are currently expanding influence in the ever-globalising Logos.

But all of this is merely to say that I am going to focus more on the Greeks which, I admit, are the root of my own inherited legacy of religion, language and meaning (by the way I am not Greek, just to prevent any misunderstanding).

Logos has an archaeology with distinctive strata, as I've indicated. I could go back before Greek to find stories in an earlier layer of literature (first half of the second millenium BC), though those left to us are few and far between. Once upon a time we must assume a story like the Epic of Gilgamesh had a literary and social context. It was alive and meant varying things to different people, shifting across generations and permeating collective ideography. We can see traces of it in the Hebrew texts which certainly belongs to the strata we're talking about (especially after they were translated into Greek which is how most read it), and in Homer itself. But the fact is we have very little to examine, the measure of ongoing influence is meagre, and my last two sermons have had wild speculation enough. The Greeks provide us with our first (in the West) living, broadly evidenced and examinable world of story, literature and learning.

Arguably there was a decisive development with the Greek alphabet. The first writing systems were a bit like the first computers, not designed to be 'open source', but tools of the elite. There is some argument that Egyptian scribes actually attempted to make their script more difficult in order to maintain their elite access to it. Certainly early written script wasn't widely known and was very difficult to learn, for a long time.

The first real alphabet was apparently invented by the Phoenicians, a maritime trading people (the first glyphs are often associated with trade) and the Greek alphabet was one of a number of versions of it that washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean. The specific innovation in Greek was vowels, and hence some call Greek the first true alphabet. I'm not going to go into it, but vowels helped make Greek that bit more accessible and transferable, especially for transliterating previously unheard language.

It is easy to get the impression that pretty much the entire legacy of knowledge in the West comes from the Greeks, and some seem to have that impression. Aside from historical reasons since, one reason for this impression is because the Greeks wrote stuff down.

Thales, generally listed as the first of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and hence at the very beginning of the Greek philosophical and scientific journey, was the first of many to use the Greek alphabet to write down the knowledge of far more ancient cultures. He was from Miletus in what is now Western Turkey and what was then the Western edge of the Persian Empire. He also made visits to Egypt and when his students wanted to study deeply he basically sent them to Egypt. He was largely just writing the stuff he learned from the Persians and Egyptians down in Greek.

As much as an engine of invention, the Greek alphabet and language was a sponge. In the same sense that the King James Version of the Bible is a seminal part of the English language, Greeks made all the knowledge of the known world their own literature. Or, at least, a larger, more mature and universal Logos emerged in Greek. I'm not sure any person or people could be said to be conscious agents in the matter.

I suppose I'm daring to suggest that the first fullsome Logos - literary, accessible, relatively immortal and beyond anybody's individual or collective control - came about in the Greek alphabet. Today we call this world of literature, along with Latin literature, 'the Classics'. But it includes the world from Thales and the pre-Socratics through the 'first historian' Herodotus, the first playwrights, Socrates, the scientific tradition begun by Aristotle, the translation of all sorts of texts into Greek including the Hebrew texts (without which they would have probably remained obscure), more historians like Plutarch and Josephus, and all the way to the writing of the New Testament and its voluminous associated literature.

It's quite a creature and quite a journey. It didn't end there of course, but the Classics became a fixed strata impacting upon history thenceforth. In the English world people were learning it until only a couple of generations ago. Personally I think we lost something profound when we discarded it from the education system, but I'm also confident that there will always be people learning and engaging with this ancient Greek world. Meanwhile it inhabits our language, ideas and institutions, and is with us to stay, whether we engage with it or not.

But Thales was not the first major figure in this development. This entire period of Greek writing was prefaced by the stories that united the Greek language and indeed the Greek people, stories that were, before they met the Phoenician alphabet some centuries earlier, transferred orally. I'm referring to the stories of Homer and Hesiod, but especially Homer. I think it's fair to say that everywhere in the world that might be said to be 'westernised', has been touched by Homer.

My point is not to talk up the virtues of Homer, who I am not even going to review really. My point is to highlight the role of shared story in the first great intellectual explosion leading to the modern world. For us perhaps, the stories of that time - of the time of the polis, of Hellenism and then, of course, of Jesus and co, are a deep unifying narrative of all Western civilisation. But at that time they already had a deep, unifying narrative strata in Homer, already somewhat lost in their own antiquity.

For even earlier on the Greeks were not unified politically, but by their language and the stories it embodied. Later on Greek became the language of learning throughout the Hellenistic then the Roman world, even as Greek power radically declined. At this point this particular language of Logos had actually outgrown and outlived its people but very early on, I'd say, its people lost control of it. Logos had become its own life form, and the people merely hosts.

What I'm proposing here is that Logos required a story in a popularisable written form in order to really find its feet in the world, to really 'incarnate' in any sense. But I'll get to that theme next week.

Our great people are heard to proclaim humbly that it is the shoulders of other people they stand upon. But weren't they also standing on others' shoulders? What are the muses? What gave Leonardo or Einstein (or Isaiah) their revelations? What is the nature of genius? If two or more people invent a thing simultaneously, as has often occurred, can there be said to be a common source? For that matter, why is it that whenever I think I have a new idea I just have to google it to assure myself that it has been had by hundreds of others in the recent past?

The answer to all of these questions, in my view, is the creature called Logos, of which we are merely temporal hosts in our turn. There is a real sense in which Charles Darwin can not be said to have written The Origin of Species. Logos wrote it.

Before I go to yet another Leonard Cohen song, here is how that man put it in his acceptance speech for the Spanish Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, 2011, reflecting on the ambivalence he feels taking credit for word craft: "Poetry comes from a place that no one commands and no one conquers... If I knew where the good songs came from I'd go there more often."

Every, bless my readers wherever they be on their own respective pilgrimages. Give them the capacity and the responsibility to critically organise the wheat of my words from the chaff. And help all of us do thy will. So be it.

Sunday Sermon: Logos 2

Every, good morning. Thank you for this week. Help us to help ourselves. Bless all the earth. Amen.

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Last week I attempted to describe in sketch, as a kind of dialectic, the origins of logos. I'm aware that I am way outside of anything close to an expertise and will not be doing the subject of the origins of language any real scientific justice. I did have to try though, and there was a point to it.

When we use the word 'mind' we are generally referring to the modern human mind, even though, as we should meanwhile understand, the brain and cerebral cortex has a very long evolution and exists in thousands of creature types. It was important for me to illustrate that although I am generally referring to the world of literature when I use the term 'logos', it also has a long evolution and sort of means its entire evolution as well as its most modern and developed forms.

Theologically it is also important that logos is not something that came to earth by chance in about 3000BC (say), but is something rooted in and a part of the greater process of the unfolding of the complexity of the life and consciousness of Every. In the beginnings of the universe, with barely anything more complex than a neutrino in existence, the potentiality of complex, conscious life already existed as surely as it exists today. Life was in the universe, implicitly, from the beginning, as surely as a chicken may be in a freshly laid egg, and that's a compelling thought. The universe as a natural system wants (tends naturally) to live.

And even more astounding, I am suggesting, logos itself - the universe's capacity to seek knowledge of its own identity and purpose, was implicit from before the foundations of the world. Now I'm not trying to assert that the universe has any organised 'will' in the matter, but in the same way that it can be said, metaphorically, that gravity wants things to fall, it can be said that the universe wants to know itself.

And we're it. That's the central idea here.

The origin of spoken language is one of those wonderful questions which scientific enquiry has virtually dismissed as folly due to lack of any evidence which might substantiate or contradict any theory. Hence, in my view, it is precisely the sort of question where enlightened theologians should be able to freely swap notes with secularists. (It's neat in my view that for an Everyite 'enlightenment' actually refers to the Enlightenment.)

Look, I suspect that a range of nouns - animals and places, followed by proper nouns based on these used in courtship, and intonated by the range of grunt-meaning available to many creatures, was the first proto-language, but there are many theories and we can not really know. The point is that even the simple hypothetical sentence, "Bear!", with an intonation of fear, only communicates everything intended with 'us' (not 'them'), with a shared community.

But regardless of the nature of the first proto-languages or how they first began to develop into the elaborate recursive grammar we now have available to us, there is, it seems to me, a step in development between the first proto-language and written language that, however little we can know about it, can at least be broadly identified. That is the development of story, as in extended, repeatable and regularly repeated narrative, which occurred way before written language, and existed for millennia in oral form, but must have occurred way after the first major developments of vocabulary and grammar.

It's an odd thing. We cannot know anything about the details of this development, which isn't generally discussed scientifically because it is smack bang in the middle of the unknown, but in recognising that it must have happened we open up the possibility that it might be very important. Could it - the development of communally shared story - be the developmental basis of the outbreak of modern humans that happened about 80,000 years ago in Africa? Neanderthals and other Homos had apparently been using some form of language for many millennia, after all, so it wasn't language as such.

Story. That is my candidate anyway, but let's be clear that we shall probably never really know.

The thing is, we can talk about 'language' as an anthropological development, but language, beyond the universal grunt expressions of fear, opportunity, happiness and the like, only has any usefulness as an operation among a specific community which shares the language and hence necessarily shares a history. And because the survival of given language is embedded in this living community - it does not exist if it is not shared - and at the same time language is plastic and arbitrary, the range of the language might start as very limited. Archaically I guess, the first shared word-meaning begins between two people, and is then shared among a kin group, but only survives as long as they survive and stay in touch.

I suppose I'm suggesting that the Tower of Babel bit of Genesis (Ch.11) got it pretty damn wrong, even as a metaphor. With very early language - first shared word-meanings between individuals and small groups, coming and going probably over hundreds of millennia - there was not a single language that broke into many but thousands of languages that overlapped, coalesced and variegated once again and could only slowly become fewer languages of larger groupings. Once again, even if language had a single origin (possible), the thousands of millennia, the massive geographic scale and the apparent plasticity of language would have ensured that language across the late palaeolithic earth was very diverse indeed, constantly reinforcing the everyday 'us and them' conflict between religions, between adopted shared meaning; crucial to survival yet different from the others'; bound to for life however arbitrary; names yet not eternal or universal names.

Tribalism based on shared narrative, along with its concomitant 'other', still firmly exists in our genes and in our society, as far as I can observe. The time I'm attempting to discuss is the time when these tendencies in human nature evolved.

One of those analogy operations that we know will sometimes bear fruits of illumination but scientists strictly can't use (but may be inspired by) is that between the development of written language, for which we have a wonderful paper trail, so to speak, of evidence, and the incremental development of spoken language, for which we have no evidence at all and almost by definition can not have any evidence. There is a sequential trace of our long biological evolution in our foetal development, for example, so perhaps there is a sequential trace of the development of spoken language in the well documented development of written language.

If so, I'm not going to discuss it much. I'm just going to leap way ahead of the story to 14th century England. At that time there were many 'Englishes', many of which would not be able to understand one another, as well as various versions of Latin and French. Outside the aristocracy, for what it was, local dialect ruled. That is when Chaucer invented the first widely recognised English language which became the basis of a much bigger world of shared meaning. English speakers would barely recognise this, but it is historically arguable that before Chaucer there was not a standard English. With him, English as we now know it was born. They may be more likely to recognise the next layer of deep, long-term standardisation of English two centuries later. For in a very real sense the English that so much of the world broadly shares exists as a unity upon Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Shared story alright. Pretty good stuff too. We're privileged.

And maybe there is an insight into developing spoken language from Chaucer. As more elaborate narratives could be shared with the use of mnemonic devices like rhythm and repetition, and as stories were able to recurse upon older stories, as much later on in writing Aeschylus was to recurse Homer and Shakespeare was going to retell Plutarch, it became possible for larger groups to share the story, hence the language. At its very origins, language is a story, and in a strong sense a religion. It is very difficult to separate the three phenomena in the late palaeolithic, in my view.

My apologies for being a bit discursive, a bit rambling perhaps. I admit these ideas continue to emerge and I am obliged to flesh them out exploratorily. As always, your feedback, dear reader, is most welcome.

Next week I promise I will talk about the development of written literature which is, in practice, mostly what is meant in the House of Every by 'logos'.

This guy reckons that if everyone played a ukulele the world would be at peace. Who knows? His gift is stunning.

Every, bless my readers. Thank you. So be it.

Sunday Sermon: Logos I

Every, good morning. Thank you for this new week within which we can know you and serve you. Thank you for the gift of logos. It is also our gift to you, in text, speech and song. Amen.

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I feel sometimes all I really want to write sermons about is logos, but apart from Read a Book and The Great Commission, I haven't really begun to discuss it. Part of the reason is that I know for a fact that I simply can not do it justice. But I'll have a go, as I think it is the real theological contribution the House has to offer all world religion, and a powerful and helpful personal idea as well. I'm sure it won't be the last time I try.

In short logos is language, and in particular written language, but all the writers, editors, linguists, grammarians, translators, philologists and literary critics together would, I'd wager, struggle to do that subject justice.

For logos is a singularity of rather awesome scale. It is the distinctive human attribute. It has a direction. That is, it is doing something over time. As well as growing it is striving to know everything, striving for the truth. In a sense it is an evolving incarnation of God. And we collectively, along with our literary and technological artefacts, are its temporal hosts for our time.

But, philosophically and in time, I want to go back a bit.

None of us, not one living creature, gets a fresh, unaffected environment. All of us are obliged to live amongst the increasingly various detritus of previous generations and, as we live life, the detritus of ourselves. We are obliged to account for it, engage with it, 'read' it, learn from it, make decisions thereby and hence to add to it. This is the two-way engagement with Every which every creature must endure.

It hasn't always worked out well. Cyanobacteria, a rather distant ancestor of pretty much all life on Earth, found that out the hard way when it oxygenated the atmosphere and wiped itself out about 2.4 billion years ago. But that opened the world up for our slightly less distant ancestors, who were quite happy with the oxygen, and on the whole they were much more interesting anyway, so things worked out there.

This inevitable cumulative process - life living in its own shit impact - may be one reason why evolution continued and was never able to find a happy stasis between disastrous mutation and costly adaptation. It's not that nature did not have a strong conservative streak. Finding balance is what it does if it's given enough time. But even if there was no other major impact so an ecosystem could have millennia to adapt into a perfect equilibrium, the environment slowly changes with the impact of the biology - leaving detritus, reorganising nutrients, carving minerals from the rock to build soil, clogging and altering waterways - so new niches come about and old ones are threatened. Biology must always retain its capacity to adapt, no matter how cozy things get, for ultimately it is obliged to adapt to itself.

One of the adaptations life made early on was to start impacting the world strategically or, in other words, reorganising their environment for their own needs. Easy examples are birds building nests or spiders weaving webs which don't merely provide for the respective creatures' needs but leave an organised detritus. Indeed they organise components in the environment into forms another creature might recognise as detritus of their particular species.

Webs, nests and mushroom rings don't last long though, and it is hard to argue that any design of, say, a spider web, was ever influenced by a spider looking at the other webs in the area. The very location of these existing features of the environment might though, existing spider webs hence becoming active agents in the placement of the next spider's web. Could birds' design be influenced, however subtly, by the design of existing bird nests? More so than spiders we might guess, but apart from changing materials as they become available, we would not expect the nests or the locations to change much. There is little ongoing, developmental, living culture of nest building, as far as we can see, but a portion of nest-building in some species may be learned, and part of any such learning must be the example of other nests being built. This detritus is already becoming creative, and a part of the world of meaning and knowledge.

Tool using primates were the ones to really open up the creative possibilities of not merely arranging the environment strategically, but being able to 'read' the impacts of other tool using primates in order to learn from them. Tool using cultures can be identified fairly distinctively by their tools and artefacts from very early on, due to the resources in the environment and the particular needs of the environment but also, increasingly, due to an accumulative culture of knowing through watching, 'reading' and learning.

To get a little bit less abstract I'm going to talk about a man (a preliterate but somewhat lingual man, say a neanderthal, we'll call him Neo) who is building a wall around a garden area to protect it from animals. Presumably this guy learned how to build walls from his parents and relatives. The particular culture builds lots of garden walls, so he grew up building the odd wall, usually in the winter time.

But that experience and those relatives are not all Neo brings to the task. To the extent that he engages life more meaningfully than survival, perhaps, there is another factor which might well influence him. He has a text. And that text is every wall he can see and has ever seen, some of them ones he helped build and some of them that have been there hundreds of years. He might spend some time studying his available text. He may see a flaw developing in a particular type of wall, he may want of a popular material and need inspiration to adapt, he may through seeking status wish to build the best wall ever, but the existing state-of-the-walls is Neo's unique text and it may impact his wall.

Pre-literate society is not renowned for its rapid development. It did develop though, however slowly, and in increasing active dialogue with its own increasing detritus. The huge enabling factor for this capacity for generational, cumulative learning was of course spoken language which, believe it or not, is the topic of this sermon. With spoken language humans adapted much faster than biological evolution ever allowed, even if it appears to us to begin ponderously.

Aside from being born, which we might call a creature's first initiation into the religion of Every (if we are being very loose and broad), the first religious initiation available to humans is learning their first language, learning how to speak and listen in aural symbolic patterns. The content of these sounds are arbitrary, abstract and cultural. That is, the words and grammars are learned by listening to others babble them even if a brain-language which needs to upload the going software for speech is in fact innate. (There is ongoing and fascinating research continuing on these topics). That's why people born in Japan will speak Japanese, regardless of where their parents are from, but they'll be able to communicate, more or less, the same sorts of things as children in England.

We like to call this learned part of language 'cultural' but it is, in a very real sense, religious in itself. I've often thought the bit of the Genesis story where Adam gets to name the creatures is about right. They only have names because we named them (but that name we use will not be the eternal name). And the only way our name will 'work' as a communicative bit of detritus is if other people 'believe' the same symbolic utterance represents the said thing (I'm thinking of a dog). There is good reason for language (evolutionarily, say), to have a word that means 'dog', but no good reason for a particular language, a particular word. They're all capable of being very good. We get our particular language from the ongoing aural detritus of our society. It's our religion and once bought into no other is conceivable, more or less.

Which is why I include language itself in my admittedly very broad definition of religion. In itself language may not constitute shared story, but that is its tendency, and in the earliest times of language the very narratives, not just the words, must have been shared very closely among a language group. Words don't really exist outside narratives. And all of the narratives surrounding Neo, say, are mythopoeic.

I am not the first to suggest that the origins of religion and language might be coterminous, just incidentally.

A major difference between an existing wall, which may have been built 200 years ago, and a word, 'wall', is that if no speaker says the word for a generation the word is lost forever. The existence of the word is dependent on a host of living memory, a living, procreating community. The word isn't 'just in Neo's head' though, because if it is not spoken in reference to its understood meaning repeatedly it is lost. It needs heads to be in but can only continue to exist if it is actually breathed between them, is actually made a part of the observable environment, however fleetingly.

And meanwhile without language Neo and his community probably would not even be surviving. They have become dependent on it like spiders are dependent on their webs. And they are not merely dependent upon it in order to survive in their current ecosystem, they are dependent upon it for their capacity to adapt (to an increasing detritus of increasing types, even if nothing else). Language - language in narrative - had become society's meta-memory and meta-computer.

I have gone on long enough for one morning, and I have not really talked about logos. Already, with life's interaction with its own cumulative detritus, I have discussed a possible philosophical and archaeological starting point for the idea of logos, as well as a possible engine for change and a pathway to more elaborate, semi-communicative change. Then I have talked about language which, though half a cultural artefact, with cumulative knowledge and increasingly interesting stories has started to look like logos.

But I still don't think what I have described deserves the term logos. That will have to wait to next week, when I sketch from here the origins of written language and written, popularly accessible and transmittable, stories. That's where logos goes off, as does religion and most everything else.

And if I might draw attention to the lyrics of a verse not in this version:

You say I took the name in vain
Well I don't really know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to ya
There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The broken or the holy
Hallelujah.

Everything, thank you for this opportunity to teach what I have to teach. I pray that I bore few and deceive none. Bless all my readers, those that think well of my words and those that don't. So be it.

Sunday Sermon: Lao Tsu and Moses

Every, good morning! Thank you for all things. Thank you for your endless ocean of logos. I can not do it any justice, but I make my humble contribution sincerely, with as pure a heart as I can manage, and I hope that it is helpful or useful to people who read it. Amen.

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I'm going to tell the story of Lao Tsu's writing the Tao Te Ching. The story probably isn't true, and I won't get all the details right anyway, but it's a traditional story and it is sort of within its own tradition to retell the story freshly.

For those not familiar with the Tao Te Ching, it is the most important text of the Taoists. It is very short and is made up of beautiful, meditative, always paradoxical poems. It is one of my most dearly favoured ancient texts and I heartily commend it.

But Lao Tsu, already a noted philosopher in his lifetime, had not written anything down. In this he was like his near-contemporary Socrates, and like Jesus. As far as Lao Tsu was concerned, when he came to the conclusion that he was dying, that was the way it was going to be. Apparently he could write, so he didn't have the excuse Jesus has of probable illiteracy. He was either too lazy to write - unlikely, since he held down a job as Keeper of the Archives, read a lot of classical texts and maintained a school of philosophy - or he had his reasons.

When he discovered he was dying Lao Tsu travelled toward the western borders of China in order to go into the Himalayas to die in his own chosen, peaceful way, in nature. The Emperor found out about this plan and sent to the borders to stop Lao Tsu. He was taken hostage in a sense, a hostage from his own peaceful end, until he wrote down his teaching. According to this story we would not have the Tao Te Ching if this political intervention and unjust internment had not occurred, which leaves us wondering whether we should thank the fates or hold the Tao Te Ching itself somewhat skeptically, or both.

Anyway this is how it came to be that Lao Tsu wrote. By far the most important and most remembered lines are the first two, which appear to tell us why he didn't wish to write, and why we should treat all religious writings as implicitly suspect or, at least, non-canonical.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name

What he then went on to write is a pantheistic collection of paeans to paradox, which frankly is hard to make any clear sense out of (I may be stupid but I have read it many times, and made a sincere attempt to learn the language in order to understand it and other literature from the Chinese Spring-Autumn period, but that was 25 or so years ago). Also it is beautiful, evocative, challenging and has been the basis of the meditations of millions for two and a half thousand years. But in my mind, it is these two first lines that are the most important ones, Lao Tsu's own 'first layer' of teaching, of which all the rest, and indeed almost all religion and literature if it's right, is subordinate.

Because if you paint a picture of a parrot, regardless of how detailed; indeed even if you took high resolution video of a parrot, it is not the eternal parrot. It is not a parrot at all.

The repetition of the pattern (the first line actually kind-of says, "The Tao that can be tao-ed is not the eternal Tao"; dào ke dào fei cháng dào) invites us to repeat the pattern, so let's play:

The religion that can be lived is not the eternal religion.
The life that can be lived is not eternal life.
The god that can be represented is not God.
A name of God is not the name of God.
A future that can be predicted is not the future.
A past that can be storied is not the past.
The present that can be comprehended is not the present.
The chord that can be played is not the perfect chord.
The strategy that can be conducted is not the ideal strategy.
The map is not the territory.
The you now is not you.

My apologies for getting carried away there but I really like the formulation.

It might seem a strange place for me to find illumination on the second and third of the Ten Commandments, penned some centuries earlier very far to the West. So far to the West was it penned in fact, and so relatively recently (along with secular scholarship, I place the Mosaic writings much later than does tradition) that it is virtually impossible that the respective traditions had any contact on the matter. And they do have a very different... um, voice. In short (Exodus 20):

2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing. (verse 4)
3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. (verse 7)

These are shortened versions of the King James Version. I render them quite differently in Ten Responsibilities in order to make my own meaning as clear as possible to begin with. But in a way they are saying the same thing as the first verses of the Taoist text, and personally I really like what the Taoist version does to the Mosaic version's meaning.

I am yet to really rationalise my inclusion of a version of the Ten Commandments at all into the House of Every's initial presentation. I am aware I need to, but this isn't it. Here I am talking about the standard version of the Mosaic edicts to make no images and speak no names (or not 'vainly' anyway, whatever that means). The Taoist version seems to provide the Mosaic version with a 'why'.

Why shouldn't we make images of God, of being? Because we can't. It's not possible, for any image or articulation we make will be infinitely finite compared to the real thing, and hence would be an insult and a mockery. Regardless of how careful we are our attempts to depict God will have our snotty cultural residue all over it. That's the pious reason anyway.

More pragmatically, imaging The God is divisive. So long as you believe in bunches of gods and maybe your main sacerdotal squeeze is, say, Athena, there really isn't a problem. But when you start talking about a transcendent-over-all 'God', a "God of gods," no less, your image of God is dangerous. That name you use is just a word in your language, that story you have is just the story of one people, that book you read is just one of thousands of books. Idolatry of a transcendent God will kill people, for four generations according to the curse appended to the second commandment (v.5). I don't believe in curses, but presumably the writer believed in this one, and it is the only curse in the Ten Commandments.

And looking back across the thousands of miles and the couple of centuries, we get a hint that early Taoism had a version of the edict against idolatry, though never named as such. It was, expressed much more passively, a, "Not." It is much more polite though. Rather than "Thou shalt not engrave an image" it says, "That image you engraved; it's not really God and doesn't look like God; just saying." Rather than saying, "Do not name God" it says, "That name of God that you use; it ain't really the name of God." It's the same principle, with a far different degree of tolerance. The Taoist Tao is not "a jealous God" (v.5), apparently, but more of a realist.

The book that can be written is not the eternal book.
The logos that can be incarnated is not the eternal logos.

Tao (more or less 'way', 'path' or at a stretch, 'being-in-change') is not a synonym of Yaweh ('being'), and it seems to be referring to a different idea than 'God'. The Tao Te Ching is pantheist throughout however, and Taoism is often considered, at these philosophical roots, to be pantheist. In a sense Tao is Yaweh, though with more of a process-edge to the meaning, 'Way of God' perhaps, or 'Way of Being'. They are both profound, universalist and transcendental terms, in any case.

Meanwhile, as is our existential lot, we will have a way, and a word, a song and a story, we will have a life, and we will have ten thousand images, just as Lao Tsu refers to the "ten thousand things." Even 'Everything' is a name, in a particular language with a particular story, however much it tries not to be, and even 'all world literature' is a finite text, and is incomplete, imperfect and, well... frankly not entirely clear on a few points. Meanwhile we will live our lives, as differently as any other lives that have been lived before and different to any lives which will ever again be lived.

Speaking of the ten thousand things, I would be amiss if I didn't provide the rest of the first Chapter of the Tao Te Ching. Here is all of it, for you to scratch your head over for as long as you like:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
 this appears as darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

Every, thank you for this strange but compelling calling as a modern preacher. Thank you for this very modern opportunity to blog. I pray that my preachings will be taken in, at the very worst, good humour and, at best, that they will bear good fruit. Bless my readers, and bless life on earth. Help us to do thy will. So be it.

Sunday Sermon: Recap of some Essentials

Everything, good morning. Thank you for dancing us through another week, and thank you for this new day and new week. Help us to do thy will. Amen.

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To my estimated 30 or so regular readers and the other 60 or so that I expect to happen past, this is just a bit of a recap of what I'm trying to do here.

Religion is important for many of us and for society as a whole. Many disagree, and with very good reasons, but they are confusing content with form. Instead of rejecting the very form of religion the proposal here is that religion needs major and ongoing reform, beginning with rejecting the supernatural and rejecting the canonisation of holy texts.

Religion is not just personal. 'Spirituality' might be a useful term if we are just referring to a person's private beliefs. Religion implies a shared system and (ultimately) an institution and an institutional layer in society. It has a uniquely placed voice in society - one independent from political and commercial interests and heartfully committed to the truth as it revealed to us through the living logos - including the sciences (-o-logies).

For shared narrative we have not only all the ancient texts of the world, but the unfolding work of writers, historians, researchers and scientists. For so many questions, the quest for truth is a shared one, in theory and practice.

God=Everything, is not only an ancient and historically prevalent equation, but is the basis of the unity of the whole religious world, and of all humans. Theologically, it is the first law. It unites science with religion. Even atheists believe in Everything and can swap notes intelligibly with pantheists as to their insights about the same.

There is no holy text, for text itself - Logos - is a sacred thing, in all its many forms, and is in a singular sense seeking truth. It is an imperative to teach all to be able to read and write and it is a sacred act to engage with logos - ie read and write.

I use these terms - 'Everything', 'Logos'. They don't matter at all. They are meanings that need names and I have attempted to find good names for them. They have many other possible names, but it is the meaning that I hope is interesting. (Just to be sure, none of these are new ideas.)

The basic value is that Everything matters, that life matters, that it matters that there is still a good world for our grandchildren, that there is high biodiversity and a healthy ecology, that people are nice to each other. Together we express our wonder for it all, our gratitude and our willingness to attempt to serve it for the best. We do this in song and we do this in verbal engagement, but we do it together, regularly. We want to do the Sunday morning thing. That's the idea anyway.

This is a consciously engineered system. For that reason it is highly vulnerable to critique and any element of it should be discarded if it proves indefensible. The objective is to serve the needs of people and of civilisation.

For individuals, the religion is designed to be empowering, respectable and defensible. In terms of individual practice it is designed with a minimum essential theology that it may be a viable personal basis for any number of spiritual practices, stories and rituals. It is meant to unite without stifling creative religious expression of all flavours.

The sermons up until now are sort of the 'first series' in my mind and are now the first draft of a small book outlining the basic system used here. While I'm working on this book, which will be mostly expanded and edited versions of the previous sermons, I'll see where future sermons go.

I don't  really have a song, but I do love this one:

Everything, thank you for this opportunity to... um... blog. As usual I pray that my readers are blessed with keen critical discernment, that they may divide well words that are vain from those that might be fruitful, whether those words be mine or another's. So be it.

Sunday Sermon: Atheism or Pantheism?

Everything, good morning! Thank you for the privilege, the wealth and the technology by which I can write here and be read by people from around the world. It truly is an extraordinary thing. In this communication, help me. Help me to help you. Amen.

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There is no questioning the explanatory power of science. Though to be sure we didn't learn everything we know all at once. And we keep learning more. What we have learned has come one step at a time. Meanwhile, no good scientist will claim that we know everything, or even close to everything, especially about something as complex as human society. The best science has a humility of sorts toward knowledge and is very careful about distinguishing things that are well-evidenced from things which are still very vague.

Perhaps a general statement that we can make about the progress of our learning is that we have managed to examine the particular much faster than we have learned about system processes. Biology came before ecology for example, and systems theories are relatively new in science. We know about termites in great detail but we still struggle to explain how they collectively construct their nests. We know a lot about birds but still struggle to explain how they fly in formation.

With this in mind it strikes me as somewhat smug and disingenuous for (some) modern rationalists to reject religion, a feature of not just all civilisation but all human existence, entirely and out of hand. Ironically, in my view, this shows a lapse of reason and a lack of rigour.

Human societies are societies bound together by meaning and song. We are social, beyond the most rudimentary family group, by means of religion. Up until quite recently in human history there are no exceptions to this and neither is there any ambiguity about it. Now modern science rightly dismisses a lot of superstitious nonsense, but to dismiss the community of meaning and song as such is a leap of faith, oddly, and may not merely be wrong. It may be social sabotage.

Reform! Like the political institutions of the past as well as the knowledge systems of the past, reform is surely required. No question there. But to say we should abolish the very idea of communities of meaning and song - religion - is a big leap. It's quite literally like saying that because feudalism or tribalism is wrong then all government and society should be abolished.

Like reason vis-à-vis knowledge and democracy vis-à-vis politics, there is a very ancient version of the divine - of God - that should not be ignored. That is pantheism - the conception of God as nature itself, as being, as Everything.

Pantheism is a conception of God which creatures from other planets will recognise (the only such conception, in fact). It does not depend on any cultural residue, and is utterly compatible with reason and science. Everything is the answer to all the standard religious riddles; the first cause, the highest conceivable concept, the ground of all being. Everything is omnipotent and omnipresent. Everything creates all, ordains all and destroys all. Everything most definitely exists, and there's only one of them. As an object of worship and prayer Everything is insurmountable, universal and transcends all culture.

Here is a fairly concise, fresh statement of what pantheism is but let's be clear that it is ancient and far more prevalent in history than the puerile Judeo-Christian god that our modern atheists spend so much time smugly refuting.

According to the famous atheist Richard Dawkins, in fact, there is no difference between atheism and pantheism except that atheism is impotent and useless to human needs. "Pantheism is sexed-up atheism," he candidly argues. Another way to say that of course is that atheism is de-sexed pantheism. He's not wrong. (The God Delusion, p.18).

Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking are just some of the scientists who, despite their rationalism, resort to the term 'God' to describe the nature which they perceive. For Dawkins they are committing some sort of political crime, an act of "intellectual high treason," no less. (ibid. p.19)

For Einstein, who also spoke highly of the nature-worshiper Spinoza, "Religiousness" is, "to sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection..." High treason, according to our modern atheist priest.

In the words of Leonard Cohen, "Come healing of the altar, come healing of the name":

Everything, I struggle to communicate the importance of collective reverence and worship of you - Being, Nature, the totality of existence - to the health of society. In the midst of the modern condition, even whilst so much is falling apart and ways forward are so unclear, this seems all but impossible to articulate. If my insights, which burn me, have merit, please help people see what I am seeing. If I am merely mad, and what I consider to be crucial insights are merely vain delusions, then please give any readers the critical capacity to see this. So be it.

Sunday Sermon: Doing Religion

Everything, good morning. Thank you for the blessings we so easily take for granted in this moment. Thank you for our lives, our education, our meals and our medicine. Help us to take none of it for granted, and further help us use the opportunity to help you make the lives of others, now and in the future, even more blessed than our own. Amen.

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There are so many people, from so many points of view, who would agree that our modern society is not healthy. Just to be clear, and to keep this message relatively simple and to a point, I am speaking of my own world. I am speaking to my city, Brisbane in Australia.

It's a frustrating thing because we have so much going for us. We have so much wealth, such high levels of education and so many techniques for good life. We have plenty to eat - all manner of meats, more varieties of fruit and vegetables than anyone in history, as well as delicacies, cheeses, nuts, spices and herbs.

We have medicines. The women among us rarely die in childbirth and as a rule we live to a very ripe age. There is not much disease. We have tablets for pain. We have dental care - not free to be sure, but very accessible and beyond anything humans even conceived of until very recently. When we do complain that dental care, say, is not free, we are not comparing the lack to the human experience. We are comparing it to a reality which has never been.

We can communicate with anyone in the world, by face, and we can travel anywhere in the city and even beyond, pretty damn quickly. Our homes are full of extraordinary equipment for comfort and entertainment, our wardrobes have warm clothes, our beds have blankets and pillows.

We have access to good information about pretty much everything.

Clearly I am not speaking for everyone in the world, and it may be that I'm being insensitive here toward some readers. To those I apologise, but from where I stand I am talking to many, many people - not merely a tiny elite as I may have been at pretty much any other time in history. I confess I am speaking for myself, though strangely I do not consider myself wealthy, and I am speaking for virtually everyone I know - even, to a large extent, those who are unemployed, aged or disabled.

Also unlike virtually any other time in history we are fairly equal under the law. There is no public torture in my city, no executions. There is no military conflict for thousands of miles in any direction. Extraordinarily most people are not even armed and feel no need to be. We actually get to vote for our leaders and, despite continuing inequalities, no one is completely above the law.

There is plenty to criticise about our leaders, our institutions and our media, to be sure, and my point is not to stop us from making such criticism. But even in these areas we have greater influence and access to information and power than virtually anyone in history.

Amazing, really.

It seems a great pity that our society is not very happy and very optimistic indeed. It seems odd when we lay out our extraordinary privilege like this that we are not able to face the real problems we do have robustly and with confidence of strong outcomes. Surely we should also be able to reach out and help less privileged societies in a huge and powerful way, but we don't really.

There is something else that makes my society fairly unique in history. We're alienated from one another, even within our neighbourhoods. We're so bloody privileged but each of us is alone. It's not how humans have ever worked.

We evolved to work in societies, with communal narratives and values - societies who share songs, celebrations, calendars and sacred spaces. And while we scrap about for new political parties or new government policies or a new social program, what we need is the regular deep massage of social tissue that only worship has ever provided.

Religion? Frankly I don't care what you call it, and no I certainly don't think we need to believe a whole lot of supernatural bullshit or discredited narrative myths. But we do need to sing together and to find our story and our values together. That I am 100% convinced of.

And when we do, when we learn to once again do religion, but this time without illusions, our society will become something we now barely dare to dream about.

Everything - universe, being, existence, totality of all things, that which is - here I am burning, straining, weeping, bleeding with this burden to say these things, and hopelessly inadequate to the task. I believe I am doing your will by preaching these things and I can only pray that, if I am merely a madman, that you give readers the critical faculties to tell it, that I deceive no one. There is enough stupidity and deception in the world without me adding to it, after all. So be it.