We have adorned the lowest heaven with lamps, missiles for pelting devils. We have prepared a scourge of flames for these, and the scourge of hell for unbelievers:  an evil fate!

The Koran 67:6

The Cross is on a mission to explore the terrain of a moral framework without god as its central reference and that recognises the immorality of the mega-machine.

Organised religion, like corporations, and state bureaucracies are evil to the extent that they negate humanity and they are at the extreme edge of negative territory in this regard, right now. The sexual abuse scandal in the church, the corporate trafficking in slave labour the willingness of political rulers to sacrifice millions of lives to abstract ends are all examples of this.

Havec Pavel put it this way in an interview forming the first chapter of Disturbing the Peace.

A genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in “systems” cannot happen without a significant shift in human consciousness. … It’s hard to imagine the sort of systems I’ve tried to describe here, coming about unless man, as I’ve said, “comes to his senses”. This is something that no revolutionary or reformer can bring about, it can only be the natural expression of a more general state of mind, the state of mind in which man can see beyond the tip of his nose a d prove capable of taking on – under the aspect of eternity – responsibility even for the things that don’t immediately concern him, and relinquish something of his private interest in favour of the interest of the community, the general interest. Without such a mentality, even the most carefully considered projects aimed at altering systems are bound to fail.

Pavel proposes a moral framework without mentioning spirituality. He proposes that it is central that we take responsibility for the world beyond the immediate material environment and the consequences that we can detect in it. That additional awareness needs to be nurtured. Its development will be a significant evolutionary process. We must do more than simply damn religion and faith for the blind alleys down which they have led us.

We can damn religious institutions for the fact that their character as mega-machines consumes and depcreciates humanity. We can damn gods for the fact that we have used their elevated status to create meaning and justify our own purpose. Simply leaving behind the tribal competition as to whose god is more powerful, however, gets us no closer to describing or developing the state of mind we must enter to live harmoniously. Of course we need to leave blind faith behind to create the space in which greater awareness can evolve, but that alone is not enough. It is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.

Our task is to transcend the selfish grasping that has provided the evolutionary impetus that has created the Anthropocene. That means recognising values other than accumulation and consumption. Those higher values, then, are not simply material. Transcendence requires the recognition of the non-material character of those values.

This is vastly different than the second step of the twelve step program. That step directs its adherents to recognise that there is a larger force than themselves, it is cast as an acceptance of our own limitations. The opposite is true. We must remain responsible for our own actions. We must take responsibility for the fact that we are imperfect, but our actions impact on it. We must accept that the world is imperfect, and strive to take the real, flawed substance of reality and improve on it.

The second law of thermodynamics describes the nature of the life force as it applies to the material world. Structure is potential energy. As structures collapse, energy is released. The compost pile becomes hot as the complex plant matter breaks down, releasing the energy captured from sunlight as it energised the synthesis of that plant matter. Entropy is the lowering of energy, the “natural” end point of the universe. Life is the gathering and harnessing of energy to organise matter, to add structure. Plants provide the bulk of the energy for the ecosystem, converting carbon dioxide and water into complex carbohydrates using the energy of the sun.

Life then accumulates energy to create order. Civilized societies are more complex, involve more infrastructure, than primitive ones. When empires collapse civilisation decays. The ants nest is weakened and retreats to one corner of its physical space.

Our task, then, is not to reject structure and order, as they are the natural legacy of life. Our task is to direct our lives to enhance rather than destroy the environment that nourishes us: to determine principles that inform the design and implementation of our structures. Our task is the application of the principles of deep ecology to the ancient idea of husbandry.

The relevance of religion to this discussion and the raison d’etre for The Cross is that we currently do not have a cohesive value system beyond the material and commercial one that has usurped traditional systems.

Most importantly, the institutions with the most to lose are using the fear generated by the crises engendered by our self-centred materialism to generate a nostalgia in traditional faith-based moral frameworks. This is a backward step that can only accelerate the existential crisis that faces us in the Anthropocene.

It is imperative, then, that we clarify the discussion by separating morality, spirituality and belief. Further, we must underpin the mechanistic view of science with a moral framework that guides the application of its evidence-based research. This has economic, political and spiritual implications that all need to be explored.

https://www.facebook.com/Crossycrosscross/posts/1666201490285639

And the anger of the Lord was against Israel, and he delivered them into the hands of the spoilers that spoiled them and he sold them into the hands of the enemies round about.

Judges, 3:14

The events at the 2015 hearings Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child abuse almost exclusively occupied The Cross last year. As a result you could be excused, Dear Reader, for thinking that might be this project’s raison d’etre.

Not so! Justifiable on past performance, perhaps, but incorrect.

The Cross exists to challenge the dominant assumptions of the Christian West and its hegemonic view of the geopolitical landscape. This ranges from the institutional rumblings of the established churches and the governments that protect them, the hysterical self-satisfaction of the Christian right as it carves a swathe through the falling middle-class, the arrogant rantings of the anti-theists and the empty posturing of the agnostic left.

In short, current discourse completely fails to apprehend the many and varied influences of religion, its role in society and therefore the damage it continues to do and the good that it should.

Worse, the dialectic of attacking or defending religion further fails to offer any evolution away from the tribal defensive ”My god is better than your god” and the disastrous consequences of that position in a time where weapons of mass destruction abound.

As a consequence, there is a complete misunderstanding of the role of secular government and so almost no healthy policy development to deal with the population’s need for narrative frameworks to meet the challenges of overpopulation, peak energy and climate chaos.

Some starting points.

There is no external god, driving the universe. There is no intelligent design.

We know this because we continually recreate God in our own image. All metaphysical frameworks mirror the structures of our apprehension of reality. Just as the aliens that visit earth and molest its citizens have evolved over the last century with the technology those citizens use in their day to day life and experience in their collective imagination through the shared fiction of cinema, television and radio, so has god evolved with human society.

Religion is an important cultural glue.

There is always common, agreed narrative that provides the shorthand that allows us to assume the meaning of things so we can get on with the rest of our lives. This cultural agreement allows us to meet with a common agenda and engage peacefully in quite complex dialogues and sophisticated activities. Culture need not be faith based, but there are always belief systems and it serves no purpose to deny the historical role of religion in providing that cultural glue.

Religion is an apparatus of the state.

Agriculture was developed at sword point to feed a standing army: There was no initial benefit for the farmer in stocking the king’s granary.

Since the emergence of the city, made possible by agriculture, the state has required more complex disciplinary and revenue raising structures to support its internal complexity. The marriage of religion and state was perfected by the Roman Church starting with Julius Caesar’s assumption of the roles of both Flamen Dialis and Pontifex Maximus and culminating in Constantine’s Nicene Conference which agreed on a Creed that served both the Christian priesthood and the imperial apparatus.

Ironically, JC (of the coin) was appointed Flamen Dialis by a jealous uncle precisely because it was the ancient religion that was deliberately powerless in state affairs. The high priest could not touch iron and all his trappings of office dated from an earlier Bronze age. By merging the Flamen Dialis, the Pontifex Maximus and the role of Consul, Caesar made himself a divine ruler, transcending the democratic apparatus of the Republic.

Constantine specifically recognised that religion was more effective (and cost effective) than brute force and it was easier to work with the priests than use a standing army to oppose them. He was opposed by the religious philosophers who understood that harnessing religion to the state was about power not spirituality.

We stand roughly 1700 years down the track, with a couple of centuries of Inquisition, brutal Crusades and three centuries of christian-justified colonialism under our belts.

Money is the new religion

Money provides the abstract value system by which we measure good.

In the last century we have shifted our focus of worship from the cross to the dollar. We believe in money because the institutional apparatus tells us this is the glue that holds society together.

Economic rationalism identifies the monetary cost of services as the yardstick by whether we know something is working. Social services are funded on the basis of outcomes that are accounted for to determine if funding should continue.

This befits a material world understood by the abstraction of numbers. The centrality of commerce to governance was perfected by the Venetians when they invented that great tool of economic rationalism, double entry book keeping. We now know, as Oscar Wilde so eloquently put it, the price of everything and the value of nothing.

It is notable that the Venetians accepted large wads of cash from the French Pope to transport French troops to the holy lands and fight for control of the religious relics of Jerusalem. Instead of heading to the Levant, the Venetians took the troops to Constantinople to gain control of the centre of commerce.

Thus began the process of supplanting religious values with commercial ones.

God is evil

This demonstrably illogical statement provides a dramatic starting point that is consistent with the full article published on The Generator. On one level it is not consistent with atheism in that god cannot be evil if god does not exist. In the context that god was only ever a human construct to provide meaning and has always been abused by those with the power to do so, it is as close to the truth as we are going to get. My final point is a perfect illustration of this illogical truth.

Commerce uses God to justify its wars.

Given this past, our furious refusal to acknowledge it, the fact that we still use it to justify increasingly complex and nasty wars over the geopolitical end-game for the planet’s last cheap energy, it is more critical than ever that these layers of belief, assumption and deliberate falsification are exposed examined and questioned. We have an “amoral” network of global corporations using Gods they do not believe in to exploit the passions of populations obstructing access to the resources they wish to control.

Even more challenging, we confront the existential crisis that we have the power to destroy our own species or, at least, civilisation and, without some moral framework underpinning radical change, this appears to be an almost inevitable outcome. As a result, there is a real and urgent imperative to create a new metaphysical framework that is not materialistic and self-centred but is rights and evidence based.

That is the mission The Cross sets itself at the beginning of the 2016^th year of our lord, as they say in the Christian establishment of the European dominated globe in which I write.

Church is about God isn’t’ it?

Or so I thought until a few weeks ago when I first attended the Brisbane Sunday Assembly.

I’d read a little of Alain De Botton’s 2013 book “Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion”, but still wondered what a god-free ‘church’ would be like, and why you would want one in the first place.

I put these questions to Anne Reid, who I had met when she was the Secular Party candidate in Griffith in the 2013 election. Anne invited me along to the Brisbane Sunday Assembly to see for myself.

Anyone stumbling into a meeting of the Sunday Assembly for the first time could be forgiven for thinking they were in a church. The group meets in a school hall but so do a lot of religious groups these days.

The meeting commenced with music provided by a live band (clapping and singing along), followed by a reading, a key speaker, a word of testimony, more singing, and some silent contemplation.

This structure was familiar to me from my past life in a Protestant community church. The similarities stop however with these outwards trappings.

The songs were not hymns: on the day I attended, songs included Cat Stevens’ ‘Peace Train’ and John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. The reading was not from the Bible: it was a poem titled, “A Square Deal” by iconic Australian, CJ Dennis. The key speaker was not a minister or priest, but a professor of quantum physics (and the custodian of the world famous Pitch Drop Experiment) at the University of Queensland. Professor Andrew White did not present us with a sermon or a homily; instead, he gave an amusing and accessible overview of an aspect of his work.

This is certainly not church as I had known it.

In the final segment of the meeting, Chrissy Dunaway, one of the founders of Brisbane’s Sunday Assembly, explained why, as an atheist, the concept and practice of Sunday Assembly are important to her. Brought up in the Mormon Church in the United States she came to a point where she could no longer accept the religious dogma and she left. Her mother, she said, characterised her life after Mormonism is a being like “a ship without a rudder” and that, she said, was a fair description of how she had felt. Ms Dunaway said that what she had been looking for was a philosophy and a supportive community; the very things that she had lost when she had left the church.

The concept for Sunday Assembly began just one year ago with UK comedians, Sanderson Jones, and Pippa Evans. They say on their website that, “they wanted to do something that had all the best bits of church, but without the religion, and awesome pop songs.” In the short time that has followed, Sunday Assembly groups have been established in a number of UK and US cities, as well as in all mainland Australian capital cities. The Brisbane Assembly attracted over 200 people to its first meeting and around 100 people routinely attend its monthly meetings.

Grant Richards, well known in Brisbane as “Grant, the polite guy,” told me that he first encountered Sunday Assembly as an invited speaker. Once homeless himself, Grant is the founder of Signal Flare which runs barbecues and raises funds for the homeless. Sunday Assembly and Signal Flare have since developed an ongoing relationship, with Sunday Assembly helping at barbecues and providing clothes and toiletries and other essentials for homeless people living in and around Brisbane and Ipswich.

Asked if he is happy with the non-theist basis of Sunday Assembly, Grant said, “I love the community spirit here, and the three point philosophy: ‘live better, help often, and wonder more.’” Adding, “It is awesome, it’s the community coming together to celebrate life.”

Commenting on the Assembly’s work with Signal Flare, Ms Reid said that some people think that charity is the province of the churches, “but I have been openly atheist for some time, and I have been involved in a lot of charity work.” “In that [charity] scene,” she said, “the question is always about what church you belong to. The assumption being that only the religious do charity work. I would very much like to change that perception”.

Ms Reid considers that in the future Sunday Assembly could provide a base for the many overseas students she meets. Such students, she said, are often in need of a community in Australia, and they are frequently drawn to the churches for support. She thinks that it could be important to have non-religious organisations available to these students to help them navigate the basics of living in a foreign country without the associated belief system.

Both Ms Reid and Brisbane Sunday Assembly President Cameron Reilly said that criticism of Sunday Assembly has mostly come from other atheist organisations which consider it is too similar to a church. Ms Reid said this was a pity because, “atheists come in all ‘makes and models’ and all outlets of atheist expression should be encouraged.”

Mr Reilly said, “We really do like people, and we like community, and we want to help other people. This criticism that atheists should not get together as a community just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me”. He added that the structure of the meetings is intentionally similar to a church service, “we deliberately take what we think are the best parts of religion, because it works. What a lot of people are looking for is a community and that sense of knowing your neighbours, and having a group of people you care about, that care about you…that you share some common interests with”. “The thing with Atheism,”.” he said, “is that it tends to be a solitary thing. You may be part of a music group, or a sports group, but nothing that really talks about how you live your life, about how you support one another in times of need; what your philosophy is. I think there are a lot of us that are yearning for something like that.”

De Botton says much the same thing in ‘Religion for Atheists’: “For too long non-believers have faced a stark choice between either swallowing lots of peculiar doctrines or doing away with a range of consoling and beautiful rituals and ideas.”

I asked Mr Reilly whether Sunday Assembly will create its own rituals to mark life events, such as births, marriages, and deaths. He said that he and his partner have a baby due in 3-4 weeks, and they have been talking about how Sunday Assembly will welcome this new life. “Those sorts of rituals are an important part of the human experience and an important part of being a community: celebrating and supporting people through major life events.”

Sunday Assembly meets each month. For more information on their meeting times and events, see the Sunday Assembly website or look them up on Facebook.

For Signal Flare’s next event see their Facebook site.

I’d like to thank Jo Stevens for providing the images that accompanying this story.