OUR FATHER ....

One of the oddest features of ordinary Christian discourse is the use of 'turn-off' or 'own goal' images - or so they are to people outside the faith. The most glaringly counter-productive example is the symbolism of 'sheep', 'flock' and 'shepherd'. The sheep is one of the silliest of animals, easily driven, does what the others do and, of course, is ruled by the shepherd who keeps them all for his own benefit and looks after them only in so far as they are valuable properties to be fleeced, sold or simply eaten. Apart from the orphaned 'pet lamb', it is hard to discern any great love or loyalty between sheep and shepherd. Surely Christians do not think of themselves as faintly ridiculous followers of a self-interested controller - even if some ambitious and worldly prelates have been inclined to view their followers in that light.

But it is the 'father' image that is the most at variance with dignified humanity. There is, after all, not a lot you can do to relate on terms of proper respect with a sheep but, surely, the father/child relationship is more promising. For one thing, this relationship develops from one of kindly dominance and great dependence (as in childhood) to discreet leadership and tentative independence (in later minority) to equality when the child has ceased to be a child and to dependence and care the other way round when father is old. (I am working on it in cautious hope!) Actual human fathers and children will cringe at this idealised account of the way child raising is. My own experiences and, I must infer, those of my son and my daughter too, lead me to permit myself a little hollow mirth at the words I have just written. But they do describe an ideal which most normal people would wish to realise if only at a first approximation. In any event, who wishes to be a god to his children? Not I!

If 'God is our Father' and if ordinary words have ordinary meanings and not some special mystical religious meaning (which is the routine cop out when believers are cornered in debate) then we did need god in the infancy of the race, we mature away from dependence on him - and that with his discreet approval and encouragement for that is, properly speaking, what fatherhood is aimed at - until eventually we think of him as a memory, as an example, as a warning perhaps and possibly as an exacting dependent relative when he is old and we are getting on a bit.

Perhaps that represents humanism making the maturing plural society sustainable - keeping the old 'fatherhood' religions from bashing one another with their Zimmers because their hearing aids have failed and they get angry shouting mindlessly at one another all the time?

Is heaven the place where we care eternally for the poor old god, enduring his short range amnesia and long range reminiscences and wheeling him around the cosmos in a celestial bath chair on the eternal fine spring day?.

Free range imagery is a tricky thing. I envy the battery-believers, the literalists; at least they think they know where they think they are. But I suppose there is an undiscovered tablet of stone somewhere whereon are the words "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's certainties."

I suggest that the habitual Christian imagery of 'sheep' and 'father' is nonsensical. There are, essentially, two possible reflections upon this conclusion. One is that the nonsense imagery is a telling representation of a nonsensical belief. This is the atheist view, the view that 'god' is an illusion which it is high time we shed. The other conclusion, that is equally possible from the recognition that the imagery is nonsense, is that the imagery misrepresents the truth that god does indeed exist and that he cares for us and expects us to respond positively to that care. Intelligent believers take this sort of view - but mostly among consenting adults in private.

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