Much of today’s society is run by the ideology of Avarice. That is things are primarily judged by do they make money. If they do not then they are considered worthless. A human is valuable only in so much as they have the ability to make, spend or control the spending of money. This is not the only ideology but at present in my opinion in the West it is the dominant one. This has been even more the case since the last American elections where as far as I can tell a group of people were elected for whom Avarice is their dominant virtue. The rest of it, which is nasty indeed, is just ways to make sure money comes to them and not to others.
Upto their election, after Elon Musk bought out Twitter and destroyed it, Facebook and Meta were seen as more responsible social media empires. Not good but better than an awful lot of others. They did have fact checking and did have sanctions against trolling and such bullying behaviours. These of course implied limits to free speech but early days in the internet had shown that for true free speech to exist a strong policing of respectful language was necessary. Some people inevitably fall foul of this. The present President of the USA is one of these. Please realise if strong moderation in the early days of Bulletin Boards had not become the norm, Facebook, Twitter(X), Instagram, TikTok and such would not have come about. The evolution of social media would have died with Bulletin Boards as the trolls drove everyone else off and nobody but people like that would touch them. All that would exist is email discussions and probably things like Whatsapp where only people you know are added. We would still have the bullying albeit on a smaller scaler but we would not have the social influencers.
When the Nazi party came to power in Germany, business has the choices of adapting to their policies or facing the sanctions for not doing so. The Nazi party regulation meant 20% of small businesses went under. If there is a bigger company you can see, how pressure can be brought to bear so it will self regulate.
Zuckerberg wants to keep Facebook in the American Market which is Facebook’s biggest revenue earner. Europe is big enough to be a worry but if he has to choose between North America and Europe, North America will win every time. Zuckerberg is smart, he would have seen at least six months in advance which way the election was going. Donal Trump also did not like the fact that Zuckerberg donated money in 2001 to “donated roughly $400 million to nonprofits in 2020 to help state and local governments conduct a presidential election during an unprecedented pandemic” and had threatened him over that. So he decided he needed to make a rapprochment with Donald Trump. You can read about that rapprochment in the Business Insider.
So Zuckerberg and therefore Meta chose to side with Trump, may be I am wrong about the financial reasons. Zuckerberg gives another narrative, but one that I find too convenient. It makes me feel nervous on Facebook, it will make lots of other people feel nervous on FACEBOOK. Maybe I am wrong about greed, the need to make money to stay afloat there.
I am not providing answers here I am raising a question.
I am going to be honest, there have/are times when I end up scrolling through Facebook. This particularly happens when I am down and finding it difficult to focus. I find the scrolling provides a relief. Part of what I hope with this break from Facebook is that I can find better ways of coping with those times such as making the habit of picking up a book or doing one or so of the zillion jobs I am procrastinating on. At the moment the top two are doing a puzzle on my phone (Mathdoku) and going for a short walk but I hope to widen the options and up my ability to cope with boredom. I still find myself wanting to reach for Facebook. I have it tied down pretty well on both my phone and computers so I have not done so yet.
Following an nasty bout of flu December I ended up more down than I have been for several years and thus the scrolling got worse. It is no good saying just pick up a book, I do not have the concentration to do that in that state and the two minutes of focus just suit my brain in that state. I am not doom scrolling, far more likely to watch Irish Dance, gymnasticss, travel blogs, social interest or renovation blogs than doom laden scenarios. Basically the stuff I would read about in lifestyle magazines in 1980s and 90s. Throw in some spirituality blogs and you basically get what I looked at. It sounds pretty harmless.
Except Facebook would start trying to take me onto new creators who I had not been on before. Sometimes I found someone I enjoyed but some were mildly weird but rarely very weird and I just moved on. Then things began to change. Firstly the videos became shorter. I would no longer get a full episode but only the highlights of a video or the first part and no ability to follow on. I also began to feel that these were being posted by other channels than the original videos.
Then in January this year I got tonnes and tonnes of really weird videos. Videos that used videos with unrelated audio. I did not like this. I felt as if I was being manipulated. The videos’ audio was a male narrated voice that sounded artificial to me. It did not have the cadences of a natural speaker and it was the same voice on every single video regardless of the content. Initially there was some matching of the audio to the actual content of the video but eventually it felt as if they were two separate things.
I responded to this by doing a very tight policy on what I watched and what I liked and cutting my time watching. It pulled things back but I had to be hyper-vigilant or they started coming back into watching.
The only thing I could think of for producing this sort of video was that they were trying to produce an AI version of a successful video. It had gone around the internet looking for what were viral videos, looked for what was the transcript of audio for the videos that went viral and then found what was a popular narrators voice. Then combined the three in what was decidedly spooky.
I could control it on Facebook but it took constant vigilance and with struggling to focus it was only a matter of time before that vigilance lapsed.
This is to make clear why I am taking a break (indeed already have been taking a break) from Facebook this Lent. I have decided for my mental and spiritual well being this Lent to give up Facebook. I have for the last month or so not been on Facebook very much at all and I intend to cut out the remaining bit for the entirety of Lent. No I am not going to be looking for othe Social Media at this time. I am on a old fashioned BB Forum and will remain there but otherwise I will be absent
My main reason for this is self care. In the wake of the coming of the Trump administration I started listening to the friends on Facebook in America and I became overwhelmed with the news that they were posting. I did not get care fatigue, I just could not cope. I was like a sponge soaking up the pain and outrage they were going through. I was not helping them, and I was making myself ill. I needed to limit my contact with news. I am doing so and part of that is not being on Facebook
At the same time, I am asking myself hard questions about the nature of the World we live in and how I live in that world. I am needing space to think and to discern. This is very Lenten, I know. The way Facebook aims to grab ones attention and hold it is not conducive to this. I need time out of the shallow cluttered streams that are social media. I am taking Lent to do this. My hope is that during Lent I will be able to post a series of thoughts on this blog as I make progress a long the way. This is only part of a much bigger discernment process.
I am therefore planning on not being on Facebook at all during Lent. At Easter I will decide whether I am coming back to Facebook or whether I am leaving altogether and therefore will be deleting my account.
This is not about the meaning of word belief in the English language, or Western Christendom either. Nor is it about the relationship between belief and belonging that has characterised so much of sociology of religion since Grace Davy’s book in 1996. What I am going to do is simpler and that is try to pull out for me three elements that twisted together form my understanding of what it means to believe as a Christian today. They do not stay tidily in neat strands but branch out and they are not totally separate from belonging but they do not encompass the full scale of it. So what are they: Content, Piety and Obedience but each will need spelling out in much more detail because each take their meaning within the context of the Christian faith.
Content is perhaps the easy one. To proclaim Jesus is Lord, the accept as true the Historic Creeds of the Church, to hold that God is Love. However, it is more than that, it is the claim to “believe the Bible”, to accept quite secondary doctrine whether that is speaking in tongues as evidence of Baptism of the Holy Spirit, praying the sinners prayer is necessary to be saved or the Assumption of Mary into Heaven. This secondary layer is not normally seen as central but if forms the context within which the central core is held.
Then there is Piety, at its simplest to Love God and to Love your neighbour. However it too has a whole range of behaviour around it, from keeping the ten commandments, participating in worship and the sacraments, prayer, almsgiving, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, the teaching of Christ in the beatitudes. Add onto it all the moral and spiritual teaching of various branches of the church and you will see that there is plethora of secondary practices that also come under piety whether it is tea-totalism, walking the camino or snake handling.
Then I have put obedience except I do not mean normal obedience. Rather I am taking it from its latin root “ob+audire” which means “in the direction of” + “to listen”. So the question is “Who do you listen to?” and to recall James 1:22 “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only” it is easy to see how this links to more modern ideas of obedience. However who do you listen to when it comes to making sense of Christian faith? God? well yes but he tends not to speak directly. The Bible? but any reading of a two thousand year old text requires us to read through a lens and if we claim we have no lens then that usually means our lense is our own prejudices and blindspots. However, there is at least your priest, minister, pastor, elder or other leader of your fellowship who gives the teaching, preaching, word, sermon, or homily during your time of worship. You listen to her or him, maybe no very carefully and if it is the same person quite often you will feel that you have heard it all before but you do listen. Then there are places where that person changes every week, and even in churches where there is a single leader so often someone else will will be invited to give a Word or testimony. Then there are others who hold influence. In hierarchical churches these may be people with institutional authority such as Popes or Bishops. In other churches these may have celebrities because of their learning, because of the congregation they founded, because of the media presence or their ability to heal. Then there are the books and other resources we read about Christianity, the friends we talk with who share our faith. We are all the time making choices about which voices we listen to and about which voices we ignore. This community of voices creates the context in which we make our faith decisions even down to our understanding of what we understand ourselves as doing when we say “I believe”
Like many Christians who are still loyal to the institutional church, I am tired and fed up with the number of scandals that are coming out into public knowledge. This Webpage on scandals across denominations is out of date but at least covers several denominations in the UK. That is just safeguarding, it does not deal with financial fraud, bullying (but clergy can bully laity as well) or false advertising. Do not even get me started on discrimination. Let me be honest the dark side of church is very dark and I know it.
I will say what will not fix it. A new institutional structure will not sort it. This is often what is proposed by people who have been caught up in these scandals. If it is a structured denomination then they go onto set up an independent church that freed from the damages of the institutional church can go back to ‘Biblical’ basics. If they have been damaged by an independent church then they say the Church should have more accountability and structure to avoid this happening and tend to seek out the more formal structured forms.
The only real difference structure makes is whether you want a lot of small scandals or a few large ones. A small independent chapel that has acted with impropriety is not news. It is simply an everyday occurrence. The rest of the independent churches are unaffected and go on living their lives as normal. The lack of accountability means that it only takes one or two bad people in the congregation to be not on the straight and narrow and the whole chapel is in scandal.
Now compare with a big denomination such as the Roman Catholic Church or the CofE and there you have the accountability. The problem is that when the accountability system becomes on the side of the corrupt then the evil uses the accountability structure to spread itself through the institution. Harder to get started but when it does catch it spreads. Each member of the covering for others who are implicated in the scandal and thus becoming participants themselves. To talk in terms of disease, evil in these churches is not endemic, the accountability keeps it in check. However, when it manages to infect the accountability system then the accountability system actually becomes a means of spreading the infection and then you get a pandemic.
To continue with the viruse metaphor then you go from endemic version in independent churches rather than the pandemics of the more structured churches. That is you will find if you listen closely an almost continual stream of allegations about what is happening in specific independent churches. Some of these churches may be large with thousands of members but the evil is to a certain extent contained within the church. There is no accountability system to spread it to other churches. It is also easy for other independent churches to think because it is happening in another congregation it has nothing to do with them
Neither form is good. Those with in-between structures such as small denominations or ones with looser forms of connections between churches seem to follow something like flu with ‘seasonal’ spates of scandals happening every few years. Basically, there is a negative correlation between frequency of outbreak and severity. I am indebted to St Thomas Aquinas for this observation for without his theory of governance I would have struggled to it but I am also grateful to Mark Buchanan book Ubiquity for making me aware the that many social aspect seem to organise on a power law and the more structure the stronger the bigger the power is.
So if it is not structure, what is it that the Church has wrong? My answer is that it is actually its belief in its Ecclesiology. The church is very good at promoting itself as a heavenly ordained, the people of God and the bride of Christ. It forgets to mention that it is also a human institution, a company of sinners and the great whore of Babylon. The best you get is an admittance that there is both a heavenly church and an earthly church. What I want to suggest is for us on earth a better Ecclesiology that looks at both elements is important.
There are however some important provisos about what I am saying. I am not saying that the Church is mediocre, it isn’t. Mediocracy is something the church rarely is. It is like the little girl in the nursery rhyme who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When it is good it is very very good and when it is bad it is horrid. To look at it another way, the Church’s capacity for evil is created by its capacity for good. I am also not saying that there are good and bad churches. There undoubtedly are better and worse churches but the close dance between good and evil is intrinsic to the nature of the Earthly church. The church can be so thoroughly nasty precisely because she has the capacity to be some beatifically good.
What I am saying is the Earthly church as humans experience her is actually a battleground with hand to hand combat between the forces of Good and Evil. We all love the illusion that we have joined up on the good side and the other is bad. The illusion is to misunderstand the analogy. We are not the foot soldiers fighting the battle; we are the ground on which they are treading. What is more, the two sides have not fought themselves to a standstill but there are real victories and real defeats happening all around us. Sometimes we are going to be on the good side and sometimes we are going to be on the bad, and we are going to have to choose over and over again.
This is why stories that enable us to ask questions of why there are those who are so opposed to the church out there are important. We, the Church, including me, need to learn a humility, for the Church has betrayed and been betrayed a thousand times in this battle and we so often by our assuming that we are on the right side only add to the problem for so often in that assuming we are party to the betrayal. Too often we are the elder son, not really sure why the father wants to welcome back the younger son, maybe unaware how our bullying contributed to his leaving in the first place.
Thus cultivation of humility by all within the church, this willingness to listen to those who are hurting, yes, but also a willingness to admit we did not have it right in the past and we do not have it right now but are working at it. A willingness to admit that abuse happens, that we sometimes overlook abuse and we know that is wrong, but we are working on it. That we fail to act on the command to love, we fail to protect the weak and the vulnerable and often we ignore the violence in the use of power within our structures but we are working on it. We will not get it perfectly right this side of the parousia, we strive to live up to being the Bride of Christ but being human too often succumb to being the Whore of Babylon. Until Christ restores everything we will unfortunately not be one without the other and though we will work at defeating the Whore of Babylon within us, the final victory is Christ’s and Christ’s alone.
Wider View of Grenfell Tower Burning courtesy of Wikipedia
That is Grenfell Tower burning courtesy of Wikipedia. What is important is the pannelling that was so disasterous was Aluminium coated with a polyethylene core (i.e. plastic core). The image therefore includes plastic burning. Plastic that burns is no longer in existence. We burn plastic regularly! Yes this is a cause of green house gases and I would never trumpet it as a solution but we need to note that we do destroy plastic as well as create it.
When you are going to make claims about plastic please make genuine ones, not ones that are so easy to disprove.
“As humans, we have to see the ways of God through others. We can’t really comprehend virtues like forgiveness or love or compassion in the abstract; we have to have experienced them through other human beings.”
from “St. Benedict’s Rule: An Inclusive Translation and Daily Commentary” by Judith Sutera
The quote above may well remind you of
Christ has no body but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
St Theresa Avila (Attributed)
But I want to make a different couple of points, the second following from the first.
Firstly the fact is that at its core language has analogy. When we say that something is a dog we mean that in some sense it is like other being that we know to be dogs. So the meaning comes to language from the use we put it too and that we learn it from the use other people put it to. It also means with abstract ideas such as virtues we understand them as we see them performed. If someone says “they love you” then the way they treat you alters your understanding of love. It is one of the big problems of talking about God in language at all. The analogies are far more tenuous than when applied to other creatures either human or animals. God in this sense does not exist within human parameters and to talk of God is to mislead as much as it is to make clear. However, we need some manner of talking about God, so we use human words. As Christians we are therefore faced with a duty that when we want people to know about God’s attributes that we should share, e.g. loving, forgiving, wise then we need to try to bring our human attribute in line with God’s. To seek to be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect, is not to get everything right but to seek to reflect out to the world the characteristics of God. That is to make them flesh.
The second is that we need to take seriously the fact that the Bible is a material book. There is no language that is not human language. We thus see in the Bible is not a pure output of the divine brain but the struggle of the divine to communicate through human experience. It is not that through reading the Bible we can get a perfect transplant of the knowledge God intend to leave to humans. There is if you like a treble embodiement of the Word in the Bible. The first is the embodiement that comes through the experience of the divine. There is the the second embodiement which is that of those who are inspired by the divine to record the priors engagement. They are not necessarily the same people. The third is the fact that the person reading the Bible is a body and part of human society. In all situation we have to take seriously the humanity of all three groups of people engaged. Divine inspiration is therefore not simply a matter of divine dictation but a matter of living in contact with the divine. We therefore need to struggle with those texts where others have found the divine until they yield their light. That light will take time and effort.
This is basic, comes from my understanding and is really here to help people who have never considered that Anxiety can be a mental health diagnosis. This is a UK based attempt to just pull some information together. It is not comprehensive and I am a sufferer, not a doctor. Therefore, there are two questions I am not going to try and answer:
What are the diagnostic criteria for specific anxiety disorders?
What treatments are there available for anxiety disorders?
What is an Anxiety Disorder?
Anxiety is perfectly natural part of life which often occurs when faced with a stressful situation. There is nothing wrong with being anxious before an exam. Anxiety disorders occur when the anxiety is out of proportion to the stressful situation or does not dissipate normally after the event. Anxiety disorders are likely to be diagnosed when the anxiety is interfering with everyday life.
What are the symptoms of anxiety disorders?
symptoms include:
Excessive worrying
Rapid heartbeat
Sweating
Shivering or shaking
Dry mouth
Restlessness
Fatigue
Difficulty concentrating
Muscle tension
Insomnia
Panic Attacks
An overarching sense of doom
Avoiding Social Situation
Irrational Fears
gastrointestinal (GI) problems
nausea and vomiting
heightened alertness
disassociation
wanting to escape
overthinking
headaches and pain
seeking reassurance
pins and needles
grinding teeth particularly at night
This is not a comprehensive list. I could add forgetfulness, which is actually an inability to lay down memory due to being anxious. Equally, it should be said that nobody suffers from all symptoms. I should also stress that I have not listed some symptoms associated with very specific anxiety disorders such as flashbacks.
What types of Anxiety disorder are there?
There are a huge variety of disorders that are classed as Anxiety disorders including:
Generalised Anxiety Disorder
Panic Disorder
Phobias
Social Anxiety Disorder
Separation Anxiety Disorder
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Health Anxiety Disorder
Perinatal Anxiety Disorder or Perinatal OCD
Unspecified Anxiety Disorder (a catch-all terms for forms that do not fit elsewhere)
Again this is not a complete list, there is a longer and fuller list on the Anxiety UK Website.
How Common are Anxiety Disorders?
There are not figures overall for the UK although there is some data on individual specific disorders. In the US it is calculated as 30% of the population sometime in their lives suffers from an anxiety disorder (See America Psychiatric Association article “What are anxiety disorders?“). If this held in the UK then this would make them more prevalent that Depressive disorders, with approximately lifetime prevalence of 25%. Oddly enough statistics for children are available in the UK. Comparing depression with Anxiety in children gives the following table:
There seems to be a case that even without the pandemic the splitting of anxiety disorders has led to the overlooking of what an impact they are having on society.
What causes an Anxiety Disorder?
First off there is usually not a single cause that alone produces an Anxiety Disorder. According to NICE risk factors include:
Female sex.
Family history of psychiatric disorders.
Childhood adversity such as:
Maltreatment (for example, sexual or physical abuse).
Parental problems with intimate partner violence, alcoholism, drug use, and/or mental illness.
Exposure to an overprotective or overly harsh parenting style.
Bullying or peer victimization among youths.
Environmental stressors such as:
Physical or emotional trauma.
Domestic violence.
Unemployment.
Low socioeconomic status.
Substance dependence or exposure to organic solvents — these can exacerbate the development of anxiety disorders [Morrow et al, 2000].
Chronic and/or painful illness such as arthritis
One thing that is important to say is that there is an absence of personal experience of depression. Depression is definitely connected with anxiety but it is not clear what the relationship is. In my case, my anxiety disorder contributed hugely to my experience of depression. However, depression shares many risk factors with anxiety disorders and it also is sometimes listed as a risk factor itself.
Do people get better from an Anxiety Disorder?
The answer is that some do and some don’t. GAD seems to have between a 40% and 60% cure rate with CBT and PTSD seems to be somewhere similar. So really not something that is clear cut. What I think can be said is treatment helps people cope.
Where can I find out more?
This is UK based. There are many good US websites out there but I needed to restrict my listing. This also focuses on those that deal with the big umbrella term of Anxiety Disorder and do not go into the specific diagnoses. This is simply because I do not have the time to check all the websites.
The Royal College of Psychiatrist has a webpage on Anxiety, Panic and Phobias with general information for everyone
This is a reflection comes from a discussion on a URC Facebook page about what amounts to the Fellowship necessary for worship. I am not answering that question directly here but looking at the forms of fellowship that happen during Christian worship. This is a personal piece reflecting on my experience.
Firstly in the two years before Covid I was regularly going over to Manchester monthly and quite often in an emergency at short notice to. I had just changed from a URC to the local parish Anglican Church that was very definitely Anglo-Catholic. Its prayer meeting was a rosary group and I got drawn into that. The group often met on the day I was visiting Manchester and I started saying the rosary while I travelled (by train). It became natural for me to pray the rosary on emergency visits as well despite the fact the group were not praying then. One thing it did was give me a strong sense of being connected to a spiritual fellowship of prayers. I was with others in prayer.
Secondly, I want to juxtapose that with my experience of watching the mass during the lockdowns. I did this with the parish church as it was streaming daily through the first and second lockdown. I did it daily usually as well. When I was able I did it at the time of the streaming and would then use an act of Spiritual Communion at the distribution of the elements. If I was not able to do it at the exact time due to work commitment or other (I have worked from home since just before the first lockdown) I would watch later but I would not then make an act of Spiritual Communion. I was blessed during the second to be able to receive communion weekly because I helped with the broadcast of the service on a Saturday. This highlighted for me how much was missing even from a Spiritual Communion online.
Right I think there are at least seven ways of keeping fellowship with others in the act of worship:
Fellowship of the Church – All worship from a hermit in isolation to that of community living together in the same building is an act of fellowship. We are always surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses of which we are members as part of the church.
Fellowship of place – where we use the same space where others have or are worshiping. This is one of the reasons why places of pilgrimage are so special
Fellowship of time – where we are aware of worshiping at the same time as other people whether or not they are present.
Fellowship of form – when we use the same form of worship as others. So following a recorded online service does this but so does my praying the rosary on the train.
Fellowship of the table – when we share the same meal during worship with others. The fifth came late but I think it is important to acknowledge the sociological insight that humans, as are all animals, are careful who they share food with and there is an assumed bond between those who share a table that goes beyond the table.
Fellowship of touch – The fellowship of touching and being touched by fellow human beings. Think of its use in sharing the Peace or greeting someone with a hug. I am going to admit that when I originally posted this did not occur to me. It did not occur to me simply because for me it is fractured and what I experience when used is no longer fellowship.
Fellowship of silence – I talk of the place where I meet internally with God as a silence. Like many people who use contemplative prayer I have found it a place where I am profoundly met. It also seems to echo through many of the other silences in my life. When I am with someone in silence the echoes from my silence create a harmony with the echoes of their silence and this deepens the worship that is happening around it.
