BlackPhi Webitorial Ramblings

News & Comment From A Christian's Perspective

Hell Is A Place On Earth - Posted 25th May, 2007

In English Bibles you often read Jesus talking about 'Hell'. What is not so obvious is that, in the original, he is actually talking about a real, physical place: Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom. This was a valley just south of Jerusalem, which was used as the municipal rubbish dump.

In Gehenna, waste organic material would rot and be eaten by maggots ('worms') and flammable material would be burnt - apparently often with the addition of sulphur ('brimstone'), to help to disinfect the place. Rubbish dumps are, of course, vital to keeping a town clean and disease-free.

Jesus once told his followers that they were the salt of the earth, but if salt loses its saltiness it is good for nothing except to be thrown out. Similarly he talked about good and bad trees, and the tree that doesn't bear good fruit being only good for throwing on the bonfire. So for Jesus to talk in hyperbole about cutting off your hand or putting out your eye being better than being thrown out on the rubbish tip, is consistent with his other teaching.

Note: The picture of Gehenna above is taken from the GospelThemes website, so is presumably their copyright. If anyone objects to me using it here, please let me know and I'll replace it. Although I don't agree with much that is written on that page, particularly the idea that 'Hell' is a Roman Catholic invention (see my previous post), it does usefully collect together the passages where Jesus talks about Gehenna (albeit using the archaic King James translation).

I came across another example of hell recently, in Rob Bell's new book, Sex God. He got it from Banksy's website (mispelling Gonin's first name, which made checking up on it rather trickier); Banksy got it from the Imperial War Museum. It is an extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO, who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945:-

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.

Some 70,000 people died in the hell of Belsen; ironically it was not even intended to be a death camp: they were further east. Gonin goes on:-

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Rob Bell puts it this way: "sometimes, the difference between heaven and hell may be a bit of lipstick." His chapter on heaven & hell, humanity and anti-humanity, is on the web as a pdf here; I very strongly recommend it.

Is someone in your neighbourhood living in hell? The odds are the answer is 'yes', so is there anything you can do to take a little bit of heaven into the gates of hell?

As the song says:-

Sing me a song, you're a singer
Do me a wrong, you're a bringer of evil
The devil is never a maker
The less that you give, you're a taker
So it's on and on and on, it's Heaven and Hell

The lover of life's not a sinner ...

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The Black Parade - Posted 22nd May, 2007

I'm officially very old today, as my son delights in telling me. To commiserate he bought me an album: The Black Parade, by My Chemical Romance - an album all about dying. Thanks, son!

This is a concept album: the central character, 'The Patient', dies from cancer and looks back over his life, what there was of it. In style it is a combination of Queen's A Night At The Opera and Green Day's American Idiot. Theatrical, well over-the-top, creative, up-beat music to down-beat lyrics, rhythms that inject straight into my foot-tapping nerve, heavy passages, melodic passages, it's even got Liza Minelli in a Cabaret pastiche! You can see why people either love or hate this album.

Like nearly every other concept album (the only exception I can immediately think of is Dark Side Of The Moon), The Black Parade is deeply flawed. Doom and gloom, and existential angst are all very fine, but after 13 tracks of it, you have to say 'enough'. Without a glimmer of light - hope, redemption, meaning, whatever - you are left with an incomplete picture. It's like Mona Lisa without the smile, or Easter without the cross; something is missing. Now maybe MCR don't believe in such things, maybe the album accurately reflects their worldview; nevertheless The Black Parade remains artistically flawed by the absence.

In spite of its flaws, on first listen I really enjoyed this album. Over the weeks and months it will be interesting to see whether this will end up as a 'classic' or whether the appeal will fade, but for now I am really enjoying the creativity and the fantastic music.

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Fairtrade, Child Labour & Slavery - Posted 21st May, 2007

One irritating feature of the responses I got back from chocolate companies, after my pre-Easter post about the use of slavery on their suppliers' plantations, was the way they confused simple issues with complex ones.

Nestlé, for example, responded to my email about their use of slave-grown chocolate by talking about child labour. I am well aware that child labour is a difficult issue - it ranges from children helping their parents after school in the family business (my kids have been known to do that), to child sex slaves in Thailand. But I wasn't asking about child labour, I was asking about slavery - kids being bought in Mali, trafficked to Ivory Coast, and being forced to work on the cocoa plantations so that the big confectionary companies can provide us with our fix of chocolate at minimal cost.

When Nestlé, and others, talk about the "worst forms of child labour" it is a crude euphemism for child-slavery. Cleaning up child labour in their suppliers is a big job, especially when Ivory Coast has an ongoing civil war, so there is some excuse for taking time to do so. Refusing to buy slave-grown cocoa is a much simpler issue: Nestlé, Herschey and Mars (called Masterfoods in Europe now) should just stop procrastinating and do it.

Cadbury initially responded by talking about Fairtrade. Actually, I am aware that just because something doesn't have a Fairtrade mark it is not necessarily unfairly traded. But slavery is different. Chocolate is either made from slave-grown cocoa - which is unambiguously wrong - or it is not. That's all there is to it.

To be fair to Cadbury, though, when I got back to them they were prepared to say that, as far as they could tell, none of the cocoa beans they bought were grown using slave labour. At last, someone being definite about not using slavery. Well ... definite-ish. I am fairly sure that mass-market chocolate uses both cocoa beans and cocoa butter as raw materials (cocoa butter is the fat from cocoa beans, without the brown tastey stuff, and, I think, is purchased separately by chocolate manufacturers). So I asked Cadbury for clarification on this; they told me that Cadbury in the UK buys all its cocoa beans from Ghana, and "we have no evidence that any of the cocoa we buy has been produced using slave labour".

Mars (aka Masterfoods) put an email address on the relevant section of their website which didn't actually accept emails; when I finally found an address that did work then I got no reply. I really wasn't impressed with Mars on this. I also sent an email to Thorntons, but got no reply from them either.

So, how do I eat chocolate without supporting slavery? I have started buying just fairtrade chocolate for 'normal' chocolate eating - fortunately Waitrose and Oxfam, both in Caversham, have a decent choice. If I feel that I have to buy something more exotic - such as filled chocolate bars - then I will buy Cadbury. Nestlé's responsiveness was good, and improved their image for me, but ultimately they are not seriously addressing the slavery issue. Mars/Masterfoods were simply very disappointing.

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Website Not Available - Posted 21st May, 2007

I'm sorry if you tried to look at this website over the weekend. We lost our broadband connection Friday night, through much of Saturday. Virgin were okay, actually: although they originally thought it would be fixed by midnight, they were easy to contact, and they admitted straight away that there was a major problem and that it would be a while before it was fixed. Then, in the early hours of Saturday morning Caversham had a massive power cut, which scrambled the registry on my webserver. Hopefully everything is back to normal now (well, logically, if you are reading this then I guess it must be).

Heaven & Hell I - Posted 8th May, 2007

Contrary to what Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and others would have you believe, the content of the Bible was not decided by the Emperor Constantine - most of it was agreed well before his time. The Old Testament is basically the canon of Jewish scripture (the Tanakh), and the Gospels and most of the New Testament epistles were recognised as scripture soon after they were written. The only issue was with the small number of 'disputed' documents, where there was no such agreement. Key among these was how to finish the Bible. There were two candidates for the final book, both apocalypses: the Revelation to John and the Revelation of Peter.

These two books were very different in style. The Revelation to John is an epic weaving together of Old Testament prophecies and New Testament themes concerning the end of the present age, the coming Day of The Lord, and the transformation and renewal of all things:-

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."

The Revelation of Peter, by contrast, is altogether cruder and more populist:-

... other men and women were burning up to the middle and were cast into a dark place and were beaten by evil spirits, and their inwards were eaten by restless worms: and these were they who persecuted the righteous and delivered them up. And near those there were again women and men gnawing their own lips, and being punished and receiving a red-hot iron in their eyes: and these were they who blasphemed and slandered the way of righteousness. And over against these again other men and women gnawing their tongues and having flaming fire in their mouths: and these were the false witnesses. And in a certain other place there were pebbles sharper than swords or any spit, red-hot, and women and men in tattered and filthy raiment rolled about on them in punishment: and these were the rich who trusted in their riches and had no pity for orphans and widows, and despised the commandment of God. And in another great lake, full of pitch and blood and mire bubbling up, there stood men and women up to their knees: and these were the usurers and those who take interest on interest ...

The Revelation of John was eventually accepted, and that of Peter rejected, as part of the official New Testament canon. But the pictures of Hell in the rejected document, with their Let the punishment fit the crime imagery, remained popular and found their way into mainstream Christian traditions anyway. Dante's Inferno is a classic example of this.

John's Revelation is much terser about the fate of those who reject God to the end:

I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, the book of life. And the dead were judged according to their works, as recorded in the books. And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and all were judged according to what they had done.  Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire; and anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.

They are thrown into the 'lake of fire', which is their second death. Terminal, and you may or may not like the theology which assumes that some people won't be saved, but it's very different from the traditional doctrine of Hell as a place of torment. So, next time some 'Bible-believing Christian' starts telling you about people ending up in a hell of eternal suffering, ask them why they prefer a non-Biblical tradition over the word of Scripture. And whether they believe that fear is stronger than love, or that "perfect love casts out fear"

(Many English Bibles translate Gehenna - the Jerusalem rubbish dump - as 'Hell', which is confusing. This post is quite long enough already, so I'll put that off to Part II).

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World Press Freedom Day - Posted 3rd May, 2007

Today is World Press Freedom Day. Across the world, reporters are being murdered, imprisoned and tortured as they seek to keep us informed about the activities of governments, armies, businesses and powerful individuals. Actually, in some countries it's not just professional reporters being targeted: in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia and China bloggers are also liable to be imprisoned if they post about subversive subjects, like democracy, freedom, or (in China) Tiananmen Square.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, there have been 9 confirmed cases of murdered journalists in 2007, and 10 unconfirmed cases. Reporters Without Borders give higher figures of: 24 journalists killed, 5 media assistants killed, 125 journalists imprisoned, 4 media assistants imprisoned, and 65 cyberdissidents imprisoned. A significant proportion of deaths are in war zones, although UNESCO's Safety of Journalists page gives a breakdown of 580 such deaths, showing that the vast majority were deliberate murders, rather than a direct result of the fighting.

The reason that journalists are targeted, and the reason why I believe it should matter to us, is that a free press is a vital part of the functioning of a free, democratic state. Freedom and democracy can only work where there is genuine accountability, and accountability only works if people know what is going on.

Countries like China, Cuba and Russia don't want people to be free, so they imprison or murder those who would keep their people informed. Western democracies don't do such things, of course - well, apart from the kidnap and torture of Sami Al-Hajj, an Aljazeera cameraman - but that doesn't mean freedom of speech is anything like safe in the West either. Many Western European countries, including the UK, have restrictive security laws, which are used to intimidate journalists and to gag newspapers. In the US commercial pressures bring press ownership monopolies and lead to news companies closing foreign press bureaux and cutting overseas news staff, whilst feeding their customers a diet of meaningless pap and slanted reporting. The International News Safety Institute report, Killing the Messenger, has this to say in its preface:-

Every time a reporter anywhere slants the facts, writes a story to fit his preconception, allows the unclouded face of truth to suffer wrong, he betrays Kurt Schork, Veronica Guerin, Norbert Zongo, Orlando Sierra Hernandez, as surely as they were betrayed by their society. Every time a journalist anywhere foments sectional hatred, he shames the memory of Abdi Ipecki. Every time a news organization puts excessive profit before excellence — is 20 percent not enough? — it betrays all the names on the memorial [the Freedom Forum memorial in Arlington, Virginia, which has 1,700 names of murdered journalists inscribed on it]. Every time a photographer grossly exploits private grief, he betrays the families of all the victims. Every time a journalist in America abuses the First Amendment, he betrays all those around the world who have to struggle for half the freedom. Every time a news organization closes its eyes to the world — and I think of the television networks shutting so many bureaus — it betrays those who gave their lives in the course of letting us see.

In many countries, reporters risk their lives to tell others the truth; too often in western countries the truth has already been sold out.

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This Is Not Helpful! - Posted 3rd May, 2007

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Amazing Grace, Amazing Film - Posted 23rd April, 2007

Last Monday, we finally got to go as a family see the film Amazing Grace, at our local Showcase cinema. Generally, I find myself disappointed by films that are hyped by the evangelical religious establishment - such as The Passion and The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe - but Amazing Grace was different. I found it told a deeply moving and powerful story.

The film covers the long campaign by William Wilberforce to get the British parliament to ban the Transatlantic slave trade - almost eighteen years of striving. The focus is very tightly on this political campaign - the other work going on, in the UK and overseas, is brought in but only as background to the main story.

The film starts half-way through, in 1797, with Wilberforce (played by Ioan Gruffudd), almost broken in health and spirit by the failure of his campaign, travelling to stay with his cousin to recuperate. From there it goes back to tell the story of his conversion to a committed evangelical brand of Christianity, which led to him almost deciding to give up politics and to serve God instead - presumably in the ordained ministry. He was a gifted orator, so this led him to pose the question: "Should I use my voice to praise God, or to change the world?". The answer follows shortly after:

"We understand that you're having problems choosing whether to do the work of God or the work of a political activist. We humbly suggest you can do both. ... Surely the principles of Christianity lend to action as well as meditation."

Wilberforce gathers the evidence that campaigners have collected about the horrors and inhumanity of the slave trade, and presents it to parliament. A huge majority of MPs have been 'bought' by the slavers (I'm not sure whether this parallel is deliberate) and ignore the evidence, and their own humanity, to vote overwhelmongly against abolition. Over several years Wilberforce continues to present ever more evidence, and parliament continues to do nothing, until the French Revolution and the war with France destroy support for his cause. One of the good features of the film is that it often shows things rather than telling them: in this case there is a scene of a preacher talking about the slave trade and his congregation simply walking out - he was seen as unpatriotic in a time of very real fear.

Which brings us back to where the film starts, "... we haven't changed anything". His cousin introduces him to a zealous young woman, Barbara Spooner (played by Romola Garai), who persuades him to go back into the fray (and marries him, "Barbara and I have discovered that we're both impatient and prone to rash decisions").

This time the abolitionists get sneaky and introduce a bill which will help to cripple the economics of slave trading, in the guise of promoting the war effort. Once the financial muscle of the trade is broken, Wilberforce's bill for the abolition of the slave trade is finally passed, in 1807, by an overwhelming majority.

As I said at the beginning, I found this a deeply moving film. It was far from flawless, though. It starts off with a seriously naff scene of Wilberforce stopping a (white) man from beating a (black) horse to death, and finishes with a standing ovation in the House of Commons which looked just like Gryffindor winning the house cup at the end of the first Harry Potter film. Michael Gambon, as Charles Fox, was great fun, but essentially pointless, and Romola Garai was trying too hard to sparkle to be plausible as the feisty Barbara.

The standout role in this film, by a mile, was Albert Finney as John Newton, the author of the hymn Amazing Grace. Newton had been captain of a slave ship, who was converted to Christianity and came, in time, to realise the horror of what he had been doing. Finney plays in relatively few scenes in the film, but those are the scenes which give it power and emotional depth. It is hard to convey this in a quote, or even two, but I will try to give a flavour, from near the end of the film where Newton has lost his sight and is dictating his memoirs, or his confession: "Although my memory's fading, I remember two things very clearly. I'm a great sinner and Christ is a great Saviour." and "'I once was blind, and now I see.' Did I write that? ... And now it’s finally true."

This is a fantastic film and I really recommend that you go and see it, if you haven't already. At the time of writing, it's still on at the Showcase here in Reading, but I guess it may have finished its run in most places - in which case I recommend that you preorder the DVD.

One final thought: several reviews of the film have complained that it is a morally simplistic story, with no ambiguity of right and wrong. This is indeed the case, I doubt if anyone reading this would view the slave trade, indeed slavery itself, as anything other than abhorrent. So why did it take Wilberforce 17 years? Why did it take so many more years before slavery itself was banned thoughout the British Empire (and it took a civil war to ban it in the USA)? And why is slavery still going on today?

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Democracy In West Africa - Posted 22nd April, 2007

Last week was a fairly flakey week, healthwise, but a busy week in terms of things to blog about, so I'm running a backlog. Probably the best place to start is West Africa, as Nigeria goes to the polls this weekend. As the BBC puts it:

If the election is successful, it would be the first transfer of power from one civilian regime to another in a country that has seen about three decades of military rule in its 46-year history.

At the moment things are looking very chaotic there, but there still remains some hope that this time power will transfer fairly peacefully.

A few months ago I wrote about the probably even more historic poll in the Democratic Republic of Congo . Against the odds, that election passed off relatively peacefully: the loser, Jean-Pierre Bemba, apparently accepting the result and leading a democratic opposition. It looked like this was going pear-shaped last month when government troops tried to forcibly disarm fighters loyal to Bemba, leading to armed clashes on the streets of Kinshasa. That tension eased last week with the news that Bemba was travelling to Portugal 'for medical treatment'.

Meanwhile, in Ivory Coast, there has been civil war for several years between north and south, leading to an effective partition of the country. This is one of the reasons that the rule of law has been patchy there, hindering attempts to curb trafficking of slaves for cocoa plantations, for example. Last year's attempt by the UN to bring peace seems to have failed dismally, but there have been signs these past few weeks of some sort of agreement being patched up, which actually seems to be making a difference. The buffer zone between the two areas is being dismantled, a new government has been formed, there is agreement on a joint military command, including both rebel and loyalist officers, and there is even a chance of presidential elections. Less chance of them being particularly free and fair, though.

Stability, or instablility, is no respecter of borders. If these three countries can become stable democracies it would make an enormous difference, politically and economically, not just in West Africa but also throughout the whole of that remarkable continent. Given the worldwide instabilities which are building at present, a peaceful and prosperous Africa would be a major blessing for the future of all of us.

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