When Ignorance Is Sometimes Best

In a week of mourning over the tragic deaths of the Christian members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, we have also seen the most powerful earthly example of Christian love there is - showing love, grace and forgiveness to someone who deserve condemnation - just as Christ did for each and every one of us.

I think it is in these wonderful acts of Christian faith that we'll find the answers to some of those difficult Bible verses, like the one where St Paul says we are to be like infants when it comes to evil (1 Corinthians 14:20). I think we must place this alongside Jesus saying that we must become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3), as there are clear parallels between the two. Children have many excellent qualities, and it is those child-like qualities that we should emulate in our faith. We should be reliant on God in the same way a child relies on a parent, and we should always be enquiring just as children are always enquiring about the world they live in.

But being told to be like children in our love towards God is in no way to be taken that Christians are to be innocent and unapprised of worldly things. For we all know that Christ also says to be as 'shrewd as snakes' as well as being innocent as doves" (Matthew 10:16). We should search and rely on God as a child searches and relies on a parent, but we should also be shrewd and wise on our Christian journey too.

Perhaps the grace-filled response of forgiveness we are seeing by those who lost loved ones in Charleston is a perfect example of how, and why, it is better for us to be like infants in being innocent and unapprised of evil. This has parallels with St Paul's instruction in Romans 16:19, to be "wise in doing right" and to "stay innocent of any wrong". In remaining innocent of the motivations of the evil mindset, the victims' families are steering well clear of any motivations of their own to respond quid pro quo. In other words, they are allowing the power of Christ's love to subsume their motivations to the extent that evil is always giving way to love and grace.

And it's in those microcosmic demonstrations of Christ's love and grace on earth that we get the hint of what the world would be like if we all behaved that way and had the same motivations - the template for which was laid down by Christ himself on earth, with His teachings, miracles, death and resurrection.

Christianity Used To Be Like Islamic State

Ok, well not all of Christianity used to be that way, of course.  But the title is attention grabbing for a very good reason - that Christianity, despite being (in my view) A) true and B) the best hope humans have of genuinely understanding goodness, turned up some of the most ignoble fiends in history committing some of the most ignoble acts in the name of their faith.

BBC News had an account this week of what life is like in Mosul, Iraq's second city, a year after it was captured by Islamic State. It's sobering to think that Islamic State's ethos - violence, sexual perversion, forced conversion, oppression of women and megalomaniacal aspirations of global dominance - were once not much of a departure from certain factions of the Christian church in the Middle Ages (between about the 11th and the 16th centuries).

Living in Britain in the 21st century it's hard to imagine divisions of the Christian church once doing things comparable to what Islamic State is doing now. Yet they did, and one can't escape the irony that Christ's love and grace came to earth precisely because of the ignoble things we humans would get up to - including, sadly, those who claim to do those ignoble things in His name.

What to do about Islamic State?

It's a particularly perturbing spectre this Islamic State business. They are such an evil, ideologically-driven regime that any of the West's available options are troublesome. What are the options? One option is to have another Iraq situation circa 2003-2008 with thousands of mobilised troops, tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and no real forecasted plan for the future. That sounds like hell all over again. Another option is to deploy ground troops in a more strategic way, picking them off with on the ground combat. That's better than option one, but still futile because Islamic State is growing and spreading more quickly than our ground forces could manage to quell. Further, terrorist groups that spring up all over the place in different regions are particularly hard to subjugate.

Peace talks are obviously hopeless because Islamic State has no peaceful intentions - its intention is dominance and murderous establishment of their cause. This leaves two other equally undesirable options, both centred around a more detached approach - otherwise known as doing very little. Given that Islamic State will be nigh-on impossible to defeat, and that any military mobilisation will come at the cost of servicemen and women, and lots of innocent civilians, not to mention financial cost and cost of political unpopularity (apparently the USA has already spent more on bombing Islamic State than they did Iraq and Afghanistan), it may well turn out that any major involvement we have will turn into a quagmire that will be lamented for years to come.

A detached approach will probably bring about the eventual establishment of some kind of post-Iraq Islamic state region, with its people being utterly oppressed and maltreated - a nightmare state resembling an Islamic version of something between North Korea and Nazi Germany. That cannot be allowed to happen, particularly with the oil and gas in the Middle East, and the issue of the stability of all its other nations.

So resolution of this Islamic State business is an absolute horror to contemplate - it's in a region that is too culturally and politically complex for Western politicians to understand (as Iraq 2003 showed), and against opponents unbound in their scope of wicked and backward ideological aspirations - aspirations we just cannot allow to come to pass.

My gut instinct is that what will happen is a combination of many Islamic State fighters being picked off by Western/Iraqi armed forces, and that there will be enough implosions in the Islamic State camp with individuals and subset groups breaking away or dissolving to the extent that the terrorist group becomes a fractionated adjunct to its former self.

Whatever happens though, Islamic terrorism is here to stay, and in all likelihood we're going to have decades of hell before there are any signs of things getting better.

The Trouble With Humanism Is Humans

We often hear talk in the UK of injecting more humanism into our society in an attempt to rescue us from the archaic social cancer that is religious belief. Humanism is a non-religious ethical life stance that commits to development and human wellbeing on the basis of reason and naturalism.

The upshot is, humanists are a group of people that want to cut the supernatural out of ethics and decision-making. The problem with being a humanist is that it involves the tricky business of trusting human beings - which is ultimately going to leave us in trouble.

There are two ways we can trust humans: one is in what we can achieve, and two is in how we behave. It's quite easy to trust humans in the first sense. Our achievements are phenomenal: we've built big cities, travelled into space, mastered global travel and communication, learned how to treat the sick, lifted millions out of poverty - and with the Internet we have all the world's knowledge at our fingertips.

Alas, it's in the second sense, in our behaviour, that humans are so very hard to trust. However much we advance our scientific achievements and improve our material living standards we are always going to have to face up to the reality that at our worst we humans are pretty selfish, ignoble, inconsiderate and unkind creatures.

That's why even if I wasn't a Christian I could never be a humanist - I think humans are as much of the problem as they are the solution. We are so incorrigibly wretched inside that we can never be the solution to the problems of being human, just as gravity can never be the solution to a skydiver having difficulty opening his parachute. Gravity of course is the reason he needs his parachute just as our human brokenness is the reason we need so much more than humanism. We need Christ, in fact.