Cats, Compassion and Comprehension

Last week, we were staying with my parents-in-law up in Scotland, which was mostly extremely pleasant.  However, they have a new cat, a very handsome ginger kitten by the name of Rory, who, halfway through dinner one evening came through the cat flap carrying a bird.  The bird did not approve of this situation because, you see, the bird was still very much alive.  Not that it would have approved of the situation any more if it were dead of course, in fact it might have thought it even worse, but nonetheless this was not a position in which the bird wished to find itself.

Dinner was therefore briefly abandoned while were attempted to corner Rory, and persuade him to release his innocent victim, which he was greatly enjoying letting go before instantly recapturing it, batting it around and generally going about the kind of things that the CIA and MI6 get into trouble for doing abroad.  Eventually we succeeded, via the expedient of wrapping him in a towel and dangling him upside down, a situation that he appreciated even less than the bird, and he made his disapprobation known via the medium of his claws.

We then caught the bird, which was fluttering around on the floor, and released it out into the garden, where it promptly hid behind a plant.  Rory sulked, and wouldn’t talk to us for several hours for spoiling his fun.  Good deed deeded.

However, later that day, I was pondering this, and I wondered whether either animal had any idea of what we were doing or why.  After all, cats hunt birds.  If Rory were wild, or even feral, that’s how he would survive.  Birds gets hunted.  If Rory were wild, or even feral, that’s how many of them would go, not to mention sparrow hawks, other cats, peregrines etc.

Did Rory understand that we were rescuing the bird because we wanted to preserve a life that didn’t need to be taken?  Did the bird feel any sort of gratitude, or did it think that it had merely escaped from a second predator that had seized it from the first?  If the bird had no conception that it had been deliberately rescued, and I see no reason to believe that it did, then why would it feel gratitude at all?  Such a thing as compassionate altruism towards a random member of another species is totally beyond the idea of a cat or bird (or, I suspect, the vast majority of animals) to comprehend.  They might form an emotional attachment to another creature (although only really in artificial circumstances such as pethood), but to rescue a strange bird from a cat would be totally outside their experience or understanding.

So here comes the inevitable theological comparison; a lot of people seem to believe that humans are capable of understanding their universe in totum, and that we should want to.  The latter I leave to the philosophers, but I’ll try and deal with the former.  Obviously there are things that we don’t know, and we know we don’t know them, but hold out hopes of understanding them given sufficient study.  But then there are the things that we don’t know that we don’t know.  (I actually tried to think of an example of this, before realising that I was being very stupid).

Some of these we will gradually become aware of, and they will come into the category of things that we merely don’t know yet, but others are completely beyond our ability to comprehend, things for which we have no point of reference, that we are not mentally or physically capable of experiencing or processing, and, of course, the greatest of these is God.

It has often been said that it is impossible to speak of God without instantly committing heresy, because there is no way to do so without reducing God into something that humans are capable of understanding, even if we don’t actually claim to understand Him.   There was a news story recently regarding using gendered language to refer to God as He and Him, but even referring to God as a ‘being’ is to make of God something less than He is.  Indeed, the only true thing that can be said about God is what He said to Moses.  “I am that which is”.  God is incomprehensible, and a great many (if not all) questions that we ask can only be met with an honest “we don’t know”, or the “God works in mysterious ways” which so many atheists find so frustrating, because they think that we ought to be able to know.  (And, to be fair, far too often it is used as an intellectually lazy cop-out.)

It might be asked then, why we bother with theology at all, but I believe that God wishes us to understand Him as much as it is possible for us to do so, and this was surely in part what the Incarnation was about.  “He became like us, that we might become like Him”.  I said in a previous post that I would consider any theology simple enough for me to understand (without wishing to do down my own intelligence; I’ll let others do that) far too simplistic to be anywhere near the truth, and I hold to that.  I do not support wilful ignorance, and I will not stop my own pondering on the nature of God, but I will never assume that because so many things are now unclear, that therefore they are false.  To adapt an archaeological maxim, an absence of understanding does not equate to an understanding of absence.



I leave a great many avenues of thought here unblogged, not least is the fact that although I saved the bird from Rory out of compassion and a desire not to see a creature die needlessly, I quite happily eat meat that I don't technically need to in order to survive.  Thoughts for another day perhaps...

Road to Joy

One of my favourite hymns (of which I have a great many), is Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee.  You know the one, the one sung to the tune of Ode to Joy.  This seems like the way forward.  I’m horribly un-musical, but not too bad at writing lyrics.  I’ve always fancied being a famous hymnist (are famous hymnists well paid?) so maybe I should just start plagia- um, adapting other people’s tunes. 

Wherever it came from, with that tune, it’s hard not to like it (although I appear to suffer some sort of mental short circuit due to which, sometimes, if I try and hum it, I find myself humming ‘Angels in the Realms of Glory’ instead, and can’t actually bring the tune itself to mind.  I blame encroaching age…).

It was written by a bloke called Van Dyke (but neither the painter (who also invented a new type of beard) or the actor), who said of it that, “These verses are simple expressions of common Christian feelings and desires in this present time—hymns of today that may be sung together by people who know the thought of the age, and are not afraid that any truth of science will destroy religion, or any revolution on earth overthrow the kingdom of heaven. Therefore this is a hymn of trust and joy and hope.”

It should be pointed out that when he says ’this present time’, the hymn was written in 1907 and published in 1911.  However, what he says in the above quote about ’the thought of the age’ and ’not afraid that any truth of science will destroy religion’ still have a certain something to them.  The BBC ran a story on the new government’s proposals to continue their crack down on ’extremism’.  I’ve discussed this before, and have nothing further to add, except to say that the quotations from David Cameron, if accurate, are truly terrifying.  Obviously this is large being aimed at religious extremism, and there were several rather insulting things said about religion and the religious in the comments section.  On another story, on antibiotics, someone capitalised the word ’science’, and described it as a ’force for good’.

In many ways, ’this present time’ is exactly the same as this present time, and the same old arguments are being had, and the same stale, false dichotomy of Science vs Religion continues to be thrashed out.  However, continue to be unafraid ’ that any truth of science will destroy religion’.  And this is the thing, it is truth.  There’s no point anyone denying the evidence of their God-given senses, as a small but noisy number of fundamentalists try and do.  Scientific truths must be taken as they are, compared to religious traditions and beliefs and we must decide how the latter fit with the former.  That doesn’t mean instantly capitulating on every single point, and we can continue to boldly assert that the absence of (scientific) evidence is not at all the same as an evidence of absence.

I strongly believe that not only the two branches of thought compatible, they are complementary, and it is a source of constant frustration that there are so many people, all fundamentalists in their own ways, that insist that only their path to truth can possibly be the right one, and that all who claim otherwise are morons or villains, or more likely both.

In the face of close-minded disdain and hatred, we must continue to be positive, patient, and forgiving.  We must show that our beliefs are a source of goodness and unity, even with those who disagree with us, not a source of division or an excuse for hatred. 

Until that distant future time when everyone comes to their senses and agrees with me on all subjects, we must continue to sing a ’hymn of trust and joy and hope.’

Of Silk Purses and Sow's Ears

I suspect that I may be unique in that I do not hold a strong opinion one way or another on the subject of Margaret Thatcher.  We are told that she was raised as a Methodist, and this is either proclaimed proudly or admitted sheepishly by Methodists depending on their political outlook.  Possibly I’m just too young to have formed a strong opinion.  At the time I was far too busy with important things like Lego castles and Transformers to pay much heed to what boring-looking people on the news were up to, what with their disappointing ability to turn themselves into cars or fire lasers at anything at all.

All this is really just preamble to a story I read in the paper last week about a speech that Margaret Thatcher wrote.  It was a blistering attack on the Labour party for their support of the mining unions and refusal to condemn picket line violence, accusing them of having been infiltrated by extremists and riven with factions.

This speech was to be delivered at the Conservative Party Conference in 1984.  It was never made.  An IRA bomb was detonated at the hotel hosting the conference, killing 5 people.  In the wake of the bombing, Mrs Thatcher received hundreds of letters of support, sympathy and condolence, many of which came from Labour politicians, and this moved her deeply.

She tore up her aggressive, antagonistic speech and wrote something rather gentler.  That handwritten first draft was later taped back together and kept.  The newspaper story quotes someone from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation as saying “It is ironic the speech is softened by an act of great violence.”

I suggest that that person is very wrong.  It wasn’t the act of violence that softened the speech; it was the acts of kindness, sympathy and compassion from people who were her political enemies that made her rethink her angry words.  It is a good example of what I have written about before about the existence of evil.  After all, without hurt, without hate, without these acts of violence and evil, how could we forgive, how could we love, how could we show compassion and courage and solidarity?

I’m not trying to claim that the perpetrators of that attack are in some way noble or good for having created the conditions in which such virtues are necessary, but when people ask why a good God would permit such things to happen, I will point to the wonderful and unexpected outcomes that can be the result of the evils in our world.