Cruci-fiction

See here a handy little device carried in the vanguard of the processions in Antigua for ensuring that the Holy COD remains crucifiction and not strangulation or indeed electrocution.

There's possibly nothing quite like Semana Santa in Antigua for prompting the unbeliever to reflect on the sources of his or her unbelief.

V's notion of God is broadly similar to the one that is often referred to as Einsteinian. God is Nature, the big picture, the whole shebang. Occasionally I've witnessed the looks of confusion and dismay she is capable of eliciting on the faces of her fellow Antigueños when she breezily asserts that "we are God."

By this she essentially means that human sentience is a very significant part of that Nature which encompasses her notion of the Divine. For her God is not something that can be referred to as He or She, not something with beliefs and desires, and rather more pertinently, not something that can be nailed to a cross.

It strikes me that the essential piece of misinformation that the faithful receive by way of religious instruction is the notion that categories like Truth, Beauty, Good and Evil can meaningfully exist in perfect, uncontested form. Perfection and wholeness are not in fact synonymous. The most intense good or evil will often shine through the cracks in everyday reality, still in a sense transcendental, but not I suspect as markers for some uniform, non-dimensional aggregate that is permently resident in a wooly beyond.

A valuable lesson that can be learned from reading Plato's Symposium (as opposed to the Koran for instance) is that many different competing explanations can all contribute to our understanding of life. Each can be partly right and partly wrong to greater or lesser extent, but none can ever be perfectly right for the very nature of knowledge − and indeed of all explanation − is surely incompleteness.

People still take sides today as if it were reasonable to assume that Marxism for example is either a flawless descriptive/predictive system or otherwise unadulterated bunk. If only we could all be taught at a young age to properly grasp the partial nature of all rational descriptions of reality. (It would certainly reduce much of the common misunderstandings surrounding the appropriate demarcation of the explanative spheres of Science and Religion.)

Atheism has certainly been given a bad name over the past hundred years or so, first by the communists and more recently by the likes of Richard Dawkins and the self-styled brights; a name which leaves little doubt about their opinion of people that cherish a contrasting, more spiritual view of the cosmos.

For both of these groups, the root of their rejection of faith has been a zealous form of materialism, which as far as I am concerned is an alternative belief system. The blinkered nature of Dawkins' world-view is often quite staggering. He seems to genuinely believe he can shut down the 'God Delusion' once and for all simply by asserting that any divinity would have to be subject to the same laws of probability that apply to large-scale material objects − at the classical level of explanation familiar to everyday human experience, yet apparently meaningless at the scale of particle physics.

For most of the chapines I know atheist is synonymous with immoralist. It's no use pointing out that there is usually a greater proportion of individuals holding religious beliefs in the prison population than there is in the general population outside.

Personally I have a hard time understanding how anyone that has received their understanding of right and wrong by way of religious instruction can ever really be characterised as truly moral. Time and again one sees how un-reflected ethical impulses are inclined to degrade relatively quickly once exposed to extraordinary situations.