Bach, God and Mark Hollis (Talk Talk)

Talking of Beethoven (and his liver) recently got me thinking. And no I'm not going to turn this into a 'great composers I adore' blog but.........Johann Sebastian (Bach) is often derided for being mathematical, formulaic, just a little bit soulless. Now I love Bach and it occurs to me that there may be lots of people out there who don't know one salient fact, Bach had twenty, yes that's right, twenty children! Seven with his first wife (who died) and thirteen with his second. It isn't too difficult to guess what Bach was doing when he wasn't composing, now, is it? If you don't get that from the music, go listen again! Perhaps if he'd called the 'art of fugue', the 'art of sex', he'd have a better profile!

Enough of music. I suppose it's time to come clean and confess that I made bits of March and April up, mostly! It wasn't a deliberate attempt to mislead, it was only that I thought you'd be be a bit more sympathetic to an egg brooding penguin. It's just that bit more cutesy, isn't it? It being the males that do the brooding. The truth is, the blog would have largely consisted of "shagged the fragrant Fricka 5 times, 6 times, 7 times, 14 times today" and I thought starting out like that would have been a little off-putting. Especially if things weren't too hot on the 'how's your father' front at your end. So, sorry!

"So, you see, there is more than one way to play the god-game."

Oh yes indeed! If by the 'God Game' one means "If I were God, what would I have done/would I do?" There are many ways to play but all must suffer the same constraint. Whatever it is that you would have done however many years ago and now do must produce the current universe, no? Now it seems to me that however you play, they reduce down to essentially two different kinds of god. (I think you can apply this to polytheistic religions too)

First there is what we'll call 'the watchmaker god'. He starts off with a bundle of things, particles, energy stuff like that. He writes a few rules that apply to the things he's created and winds up the clock. He then sits back and watches what happens when all this stuff interacts in ever more myriad and complex ways. (If you've never played the Game of Life, play it! Find a few good starting points on the internet and see just how complexity can be generated from a few simple atoms and a few very simple rules). He may take time out to repeat the performance elsewhere just to observe the differences. This is a god with really grand plans! This is a universe creating god not a world making god.

It seems to me that this is the kind of god that 'religiously minded' scientists, especially physical scientists, use to reconcile their god with their scientific theories and pursuits. However I don't see that this is awfully more fulfilling than in just believing that the big bang happened. It seems to me to be just a slightly more human-centric way of explaining what appears to be 'something' from 'nothing'. However you're still left with where god comes from and HIS ability to create something from nothing. It is also extremely deist and in my view doesn't sit comfortably with religion, which I'll come to later.

The second kind of god, we'll call 'the interventionist god'. Now this god does all that the first god does but he's not content with just watching, no, he can't stop fiddling about. So forever after he 'interferes' and usually does things things that affect the ways in which the universe develops. Now it seems to me that this is the kind of god that religions are made of.

Now as a paid up member of the Atheists' League I don't subscribe to any religion's particular credo. (I'm also in the Anarchists' League, by the way, but I'm thinking of leaving. It's getting far too organised for my liking. I mean they want to hold a conference?) But like all sentient beings must, I have an interest in what makes people or penguins (or dolphins, even orcas) think the way they do. So I know a little about some of the major religions. I must confess a preference for the Norse and Greek pantheons, so much more oomph, Zeus shagging everything in sight, Wotan carving notches on his staff, Ragnarok! However I suppose the one I know the best is christianity.

Now, the christian god is an interventionist god. The question is: how interventionist? At the very least once. He intervened 2,000 odd years ago when he decided to offer all of you lot a life jacket. Funny how it didn't extend to everyone else, ay?. The question is, did he intervene before (the old testament says he did, lots of times) and does he intervene now? The catholic church says he does, otherwise why pray? Where do miracles ascribed to saints come from?

The trouble is that even christianity can't agree who or what god is! Every christian believes in the 'divinity' of christ. Trouble is they can't agree the identity of the father! Catholicism preaches, as I understand it, a fairly uniform view of god, the 'authorised version'. But....the 'heresies' had started by the 11th/12th centuries, 'big time'! By the time of the Lutheran schism, you have a real problem. God starts to become personal! Until in the end, you're left with an 'individual god'. All things to all men or women! Which does kind of equate to nothing to nobody.

If god is only the total of what every individual perceives him/her to be where does that leave god? Out on a limb, subject to the vagaries of human perception. I can't buy into one, what's the point? I can't buy into two, it's too fluid, it's even more fuzzy than quantum mechanics.

We'd all like to be god (I could get rid of you lot for a start and maybe WE'd have a future) but in the end all there is life and in the words of Talk Talk, life is what you make it!

As a postscript, a not very well known fact. The English word cretin (that's idiot for the educationally challenged) comes from the French, chretien, which means..........................christian!

I'd be derogatory about the muslims too but unfortunately they (still) have a habit of resorting to violence if they get offended and I don't have much of a defense against a loaded Kalashnikov or a suicide bomber on the underground/metro. It's a very sad world you (and God) have made for yourselves.........and (unfortunately) us.

In the words of Ian Anderson, "In the beginning, man created God. And in his image did he create him". Or in the words of a more notable thinker, François-Marie Arouet, "Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer"

I'll leave it with Voltaire.