Sunny Banana
YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/@sanibonani-y2g?si=09LymOLYjP7sE3cY
I am a school chaplain and the content is intended to encourage curiosity about Faith and it's impact on day to day life
The Sunny Banana, is a play upon the Zulu greeting, Sanibonani, meaning I see you.
As tech wrenches us from real life, we are not seeing each other. The Greek word 'idea' means to see. It is as if we have lost the idea of what it means to be human; social, communal, relational. The same word, to see, in Old English is 'seon' which has connotations of understanding.
Let's start seeing each other again, listening, respecting, and understanding each other and ourselves. After all, we are people through other people.
Sunny Banana
Sam Bickersteth | God is not a Cosmic Autocrat - How reading and thinking convicted me of God
Check out Sam's great YouTube channel and Substack
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@admoni.
Substack: https://substack.com/@admoni
What happens when inherited faith meets philosophical inquiry? In this thought-provoking conversation, Sam Bickersteth, a Cambridge philosophy student and former football player, shares his transformative journey from defending religious beliefs he didn't genuinely hold to discovering authentic spiritual conviction through literature, questioning, and intellectual exploration.
Sam recalls how reading Tolstoy's War and Peace during the pandemic revolutionised his understanding of God, moving beyond the simplistic "cosmic autocrat" conception to something far more profound and meaningful. This literary encounter sparked a philosophical adventure that led him to break from biblical literalism, question inherited Anglican traditions, and rebuild his faith on firmer foundations. "I was defending something that I had inherited but in which I had no conviction myself," Sam explains, articulating a struggle familiar to many raised in religious households.
The discussion weaves through fascinating territory: the historical decline of Western Christianity (which Sam attributes partly to Christianity's own "decadence" and departure from early Church understandings), the surprising religious revival among young adults today, and the contributions of cultural figures like Jordan Peterson in making religious exploration intellectually respectable again. Particularly compelling is Sam's nuanced take on religious pluralism, where he distinguishes between superficial "liberal pluralism" and a deeper recognition that capital-T Truth transcends propositional statements. "When you draw nearer to the fire of God, you have to start dancing around the heat," he observes poetically.
Perhaps most valuable are Sam's reflections on happiness and mental wellbeing, drawn from both his personal experience and philosophical studies. The pursuit of finite goals—whether academic success, relationships, or material possessions—inevitably leads to disappointment. True fulfillment comes through accepting life's transience and recognizing that all our desires point toward a deeper wholeness. This wisdom from religious traditions offers a powerful alternative to the endless striving that characterizes modern existence. What might your life look like if you stopped chasing phantoms and embraced the mystery at the heart of being?
Sam, a biggest death. Welcome to the Sunny Banana podcast. Thank you for your time today, sunny Bunani. As I say to all my guests, sunny Bunani means I see you. That's a beautiful greeting from my native South Africa. It's a Zulu greeting, a little different to the how are you. It's more I see you. And I hope today our conversation allows people to see more clearly or get more understanding of what it means in their lives to be human. And that's literally what my sunny banana podcast is about. It's about seeing people with the idea of understanding, you know. So when we see people, we actually start to understand them. Um, and so I know we're on a podcast and obviously this would be much better in person.
Speaker 1:Seeing is better in person, but here we are At least we can see each other through this wonderful technology and to hear about your journey of faith, spirituality and religion, spirituality and religion. So for our listeners out there and viewers, I think it would be great to hear about your leaving the school. I might just let me just add I was your chaplain. Yeah, wasn't I? You were. I was a chaplain at school and I'm incredibly proud and fascinated and intrigued about what you have to say today as being your former chaplain. So, for our viewers out there, after leaving school and your journey going to America, and how you have ended up at Cambridge and what you have been doing, Well, first of all, thank you for having me and yeah, I had a bit of a sinuous route.
Speaker 2:Can you hear me clearly first?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I had a bit of a sinuous route to get to where I am now, which is University of Cambridge.
Speaker 2:I was at Beads for two years just for sixth form.
Speaker 2:I'd moved initially because I was football mad and was hoping to play at a better level, and then played for two years and eventually went over to the US which is not uncommon actually for Beads footballers because the US have a fantastic sort of student athlete program all over the country. I got scouted, went over to the US but I found at the time which was just when the pandemic was starting actually that even as I was moving over, I think, my priorities were shifting. I'd been dedicated to football quite intensely for almost a decade, I think, at that point, and it brought me a lot of joy but a lot of pain as well and I thought that maybe I was reaching a natural end. And at the same time, with all the free time to read during the pandemic, I was starting to read more philosophy and more theology and religion and literature, and probably the most significant book that I read was Tolstoy's War and Peace, which is only the kind of book that you can read during a pandemic, given how enormously large it is.
Speaker 1:But I set myself the task of doing it.
Speaker 2:And what it introduced to me there, I think, was both a sense of the possibility of conceiving God in a different way to the presentation I'd had previously and I think a lot of people have, which is, generally speaking, a man in the sky, a sort of cosmic autocrat who delivers rules and gets rather grumpy when you don't follow them.
Speaker 2:Tolstoy had a completely different to my mind, a radical vision of what God was and what that meant, and then also just a rather panoramic view of life that sort of drew you in and said that life is not comprised of particular ends or aims that you strive for.
Speaker 2:But there's a hole here and some ineffable mystery that resides behind it all that you need to pursue in a particular form of your life, mystery that resides behind it, all that you need to pursue in a particular form of your life. So I suppose ever since then I think I read that when I was about 18 I've been following in Tolstoy's footsteps as best as I can and um, and that happened to be in the form of taking up philosophy and religion, uh and fostered that interest throughout my time at Lake Forest, which is my university in America, and then ultimately applied to Cambridge and Oxford when I came back, decided I wanted to do a master's, made that application and was fortunate enough to win a scholarship to Cambridge and I'm now approaching the end of that, that master's program, that one year I'm filled and I'm on the threshold, hopefully, of doing a PhD again. I have offers from Oxford and Cambridge and I'm just hopefully going to hear about funding soon from one of them to help me make my decision brilliant, amazing, amazing um.
Speaker 1:So you're in america and you're reading worn pieces. That was it that was in america and pandemic yeah, that was just before america.
Speaker 2:I'd say it was okay, the probably the last year I was at beads, I think ah well, that might explain a few things.
Speaker 1:Your, your attendance at the faith matters groups or the groups that we put on, was, was there, and you're always keen on discussing these big questions. I read a book called Anamkara when I was 18, anamkara by John O'Donoghue, may His Memory Be Eternal. He is Irish, not necessarily Christian, but this was Celtic sort of wisdom. And at 18, if your book was war and peace, this was mine, and it was just to open up a whole possibility of something else further than our sort of faculties and our understanding of the world, as beautifully as you put it in an ineffable mystery. Um, and when you said, when you were talking about sky, daddy, you know the guy, the, the guy in the sky.
Speaker 1:Um, I think, as a chaplain, that you know 80 of people on the street, as it were. The street knowledge think that, and I think, um, it's a not holy, but a product of, of the new atheist movement that came out when they put a big banner on the bus saying there's probably no God. Now, enjoy your life. And they put this massive push against religion and saying our religion is stupid to believe in such a thing. And it's sadly so. But this is my endeavor through this podcast to get that message out, that there's so much more depth to religion. So this leads me into my next question is what has so since that journey at 18, you're now 24? 23. 23. 23. What has it added to your life? Is there a case for religion in your life? Yeah, basically just expand on that. What has it added to your life?
Speaker 2:Goodness. Well, for context, I was raised in a religious family, um, I was raised in in a real, real anglican family, uh, with a lot of uh sort of church history, and my family, various people, had gone into the church, um, and we were sort of all the way up and down the candle, liturgically as it were, so sort of high and low churches. And it was around at that time when the pandemic was just starting and I was reading more about philosophy and religion, where I thought I think I'd reached a breaking point, not just with my football but I think with my faith as well, with feeling as though, for the preponderance of my life, I had been defending something that I had inherited but in which I had no conviction myself, and I wanted to know why I believe what I believe. And so whether I believe what I believe, and I think there's sort of a whole almost economy of apologetics that goes on within Christian communities, that sort of skims the surface, that provides you with a facile reason whenever you have a query about doctrine or scripture or anything else.
Speaker 2:Doctrine or scripture or anything else, that sort of, is attempting to assuage your worries whenever it can, but ultimately is no more than than a superficial healing and doesn't really provide anything that that is truly satisfying. So so there came a point not long after I read tolstoy where I sort of said you know, I've reached breaking point, I think I'm going to declare myself an agnostic and, from that perspective, return to Christianity and slowly build things back up and throw out the dry rot, throw out what I'm not interested in. And a lot of that happened to be biblical literalism and biblical fundamentalism the conviction that I inherited from a lot of Christians that certain stories in the Bible had to be historically valuable in order to have spiritual meaning which I think is absurd, but it was just one of those things that lingered from my education.
Speaker 2:Since then I've really not looked back, because my interest in philosophy and religion, in thinking critically about these things, have become so intertwined that there's no real competition between the two?
Speaker 2:It's not as though I'm inquiring after truth in one respect and then also trying to hide away my dogma or doctrine and the other. The two are mutually edifying and reveal one another, um, and the result, I think is, is genuinely life-changing. Uh, because it's, you know, put simply, it has made me happy. Basically, it's made me happy to have a conception of life that is fulfilling and is meaningful, and become acquainted with various wisdom traditions certainly christian traditions, but also from other faiths as well that provide you with the means by which to to be a human being, essentially, to to deal with emotions and hardship on a daily basis, to navigate the world through various, various insecurities. All these things that have that will last me in my life lifelong, essentially, will be valuable for as long as I'm alive, because it's timeless wisdom that I'm encountering.
Speaker 1:Yes, beautiful, you remind me of later. So we'll talk about your question to Ayaan Hirsi Ali soon about Sufism, because you mentioned other wisdom, traditions and truth and stuff. So we'll get to that. So, a big objection to being religious. I find some people, oh, you're just born into that religion, you were just raised an Anglican and so forth, you became a Christian. So that argument falls on its head when you find out that, oh, your parents were atheists, you were born into that atheist family. Guess what? You're an atheist now.
Speaker 1:And so what I'm thinking when you told me that, about the conviction that you were raised in, that and you were trying to defend something that you didn't have much conviction about, you just accepted have to come to a point of saying what I believe in, do I have a, do I have a conviction? And? And have I asked the right questions? And do I have I come to a point where this is what I believe in? Um, I don't know what you think about relativity and and oh, um, there's many parts to the one truth and so on and so forth, but as a chaplain, I I would say that I believe that Christianity is true, for example, however, if you are a Muslim. If you are an atheist, be convicted of it, know your reasons why you are that and be the best one you can be. You know? Yeah, so that's what I'll say about that. So I want to get your insight.
Speaker 1:You are 23 now and the question to ian oceali at cambridge, the q a. I came across this. You were giving a, you gave a question, you asked a question. I was listening to this great podcast by justin briley about the surprising rebirth of faith in god and then I hear sam bickersteth's in the crowd and he's asking this question. So our our paths have crossed because I guess we are concerned or intrigued by the same things. But I want to get your your feel. You're a student now. I'm almost 14. You're 23. There's this resurgence, apparent resurgence, or more curiosity or openness to religious faith between, specifically, 25 and 39-year-olds. And does that say men? It shows that more men are arriving at church now or asking the question. It shows that more men are arriving at church now or asking the question. What is your take on that, sam, as a 23-year-old? And you're in a with your peer group, and so on and so forth. How have you experienced that?
Speaker 2:Is there a resurgence? I would say I definitely have seen a resurgence. I think it is a lot easier. Again, I probably would have to be a bit older to say something more concretely, but I do remember being younger and being Christian was basically odd. It was not. It was not a normal thing at all. You were definitely in the minority, one in however many in your student group or in your classroom and you get a lot of questions from people either critical or curious, but never enough to represent a really sustained interest, apart from maybe one or two rare cases.
Speaker 2:But in the past few years I think culture has shifted somewhat to become tangibly more hospitable to religion in general and, in the West, christianity in particular.
Speaker 2:I think you can feel that Again, there's obviously been this recent research done to see that it was recorded, an uptake in Pew numbers in the Church of England, as you say, again, quite male dominated and male driven. That represents something that I will say I think was latent, that I found was latent in a lot of people when speaking to them about religion of people, when speaking to them about religion, I suppose. I think I trace it to the difference between aggression or expectation and invitation, because I think the impression that a lot of people have had through various revival movements american inspired revival movements is that people will, uh, basically thrust their christianity on other people and say jesus is your savior. If not burn in hell, right and inevitably that's going to alienate people because it doesn't speak to their experience, doesn't speak to life as they know it. But once you sort of clear that space out and once you actually just allow people to gravitate to faith in their own time suddenly the conviction is there.
Speaker 2:That's really the whole difference between, as it were, pre and post Tolstoy in my case is that pre it was something that I'd inherited, something that I couldn't have had my own conviction in because I couldn't understand it at a young age. And then afterwards, once I really came to have my own beliefs, my own sense of inner conviction, everything changed because the passion was actually there and, most importantly of all, it was continuous. Now with the rest of my life, I was no longer and this is something that's developed as I've thought more about it it's no longer as though here's my life, when I go to school and listen to the music I love and talk to my friends and have all these joyous experiences that I don't need to be persuaded and told are good or desirable. And then here's church and the bible and jesus, which sometimes you know when I'm seven year old, in the pew it's kind of boring and you know, and you have adults telling me you have to like this and you have to go to church.
Speaker 2:The disparity between these two can very often just lead you to break off the religious part and leave it be. But if you can come to a point and I think perhaps culturally, this is happening where now the religion is not something you are adamantly told you have to believe, but something that you're just invited to come and experience and, in the Psalms, taste and see that the Lord is good. Suddenly it means something, suddenly you see why it makes the grand, sweeping, universal claims that it does, because it's simply trying to get to the heart of the life that every human being knows, not as some sort of separate entity or bubble that someone, the privileged elite, might enter, but as the truth of life itself. And so I think that momentum can only continue if the communication and the messaging to non-religious people remains strong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so much there to think about. What do you think it was that drove people away, that set the decline in? Because there was a decline at a certain point. And some people say the sexual revolution around the 60s and 70s was a big, big moment and then it was quite a steady decline since then. Or some people go further back and yeah, I wonder if you could. You said something about being a way of life and a truth, you know, not separating it from your school and then church. So two questions, I suppose. What drove people away? Why the decline? And now you sort of said about why the uptake is people are seeing religion as something that's not just a bolt-on, it's something that's true perhaps, and edifying. So why the decline? And the second one is Christianity a philosophy? Because now you're a student of something good for our students here at the school Is Christianity a philosophy or is it more than that? What is Christianity according to Sam Vickersteth?
Speaker 2:as a student of philosophy of religion. Well, to decline, it's a very good question. If you want to reach back philosophically, the common narrative you'll hear I think this is pretty true would be generally what's called the death of God narrative. This reaches its pinnacle in the philosophy of the 19th century. German Friedrich Nietzsche. Yeah, probably his most famous proclamation is God is dead. Is god is dead, uh?
Speaker 2:Which is essentially the claim that, in light of the of the rationalist turn of the enlightenment, whereby human reason uh assumed the centrality where it had not before, people started questioning religious authority and questioning religious dogma in such a way that for nietzsche, just before the 20th century, he believed it had become untenable and that even if people still continued to believe, they didn't believe in the way they did and really religion was now just a husk, something of a carcass that would fester away. And he predicted with some acuity actually, the rather revolting forms that that carcass would mould into, namely the totalitarian states that we see in the early 20th century, which are, as it were, statist replacements for God, where you treat the state or a particular figure as though they were God and obviously disastrous consequences followed. So that trajectory, I suppose, flowing from the Enlightenment all the way through the 19th century. You might think of Matthew Arnold, as well as a famous poem called Dover Beach, sort of lamenting the loss of faith. That's sort of quite a well-established trajectory.
Speaker 1:I think, it's.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think personally, it follows from a kind of decadence, which is again a phrase that Nietzsche would use in Christianity itself, which is again a phrase that Nietzsche would use in Christianity itself. I think when we get to the 18th century, or just before, in fact, christian philosophy, christian theology, christian doctrine, the way we read the Bible, the way we do church in general, have become, to my mind, so alienated from the original vision of, let's say, the first 500 years of Christianity, or at least the first thousand even, that it is almost an inevitability that it would slip into atheism, because the picture that we have is frankly just not tenable. And and I think uh, in that case, I think basically we came up with that picture that richard dawkins then criticizes this sort of, as you say, this guy, daddy, who is supposedly revered as some omnipotent agent who is just just does what he wants, basically, and that to be religious is essentially to whip yourself into shape in order to kiss the feet and do what you can to avoid the merciless punishment. And the problem with that, on one level, was, of course, that we turned God into a tyrant and, as we saw with the most significant event of the Enlightenment, which was the French Revolution. That couldn't last for human beings we're not good with tyrants and so it was inevitable we were going to kill him.
Speaker 2:But then, perhaps more pressingly, on a spiritual level, we had created an utter dualism between God and world, which was absolutely foreign to the first few centuries of Christianity. Because the language there and this is borrowing mainly from Plato and from Neoplatonism the language that the church fathers, like Gregory of Nyssa or Gregory Nazianzus or Origen of Alexandria would use, was language of participation in god. It wasn't as though there were just two things side by side god and world, creator and creation, but the the two had some sort of inevitable union, even whilst maintaining their difference. And I think post-reformation, post some of the more sterner Reformation philosophies, that was lost, and it was thought that God is just a transcendent principle and the earth is all full of lowly sinners, and so I think that has led to the decline. And what was your second question? It was about the uptake.
Speaker 1:Is Christianity a philosophy?
Speaker 2:uh, good question. Christianity has philosophy, I in the modern sense, if, if we believe and this isn't necessarily the case I don't think this was the case for the greeks but but if by philosophy we mean, uh, essentially a manner or system of cognition, of ascertaining abstract truths and putting them all in a neat, nice, systematic, then definitely not, definitely not. Uh again, nietzsche noted just how miserable some of the greatest philosophers can be and, frankly, if you read someone like schopenhauer, you read um, I don't know, I need to talk about spinoza as well, even though spinoza is probably a bad example. But but in the modern day, we'd simply say that these are people who intellectualize their emotions rather than actually just feeling them. Right, if you're incapable of feeling your feelings, because every response to every problem in your life is to think it through, then you will become alienated from yourself inevitably.
Speaker 2:And what you need to have real healing and the good life eudaimonia in aristotle's terms is a really cohesive picture of how to be a human being, and that cannot just be an attenuated, limited vision of oh, I'm just going to think correct things, and that will be enough for me.
Speaker 2:It has to be something that encompasses everything that you are, every realm and domain of human being, from, uh, from the intellectual life definitely that's part of it but also down to the fact that you're embodied and how you relate to people, to the food you eat, to everything in between.
Speaker 2:So Christianity is definitely more than that. As I say, it basically offers a way of life and it shows you that the centre in Christianity's claims, the centre of the cosmos, is not a particular idea or an abstraction, but it's an actual human life that was at a certain point in history and that in that human life, in that particular person of Jesus of Nazareth, we saw God with a startling clarity. And we are called, as we see in the language of the New Testament and then in the Church Fathers too, to a union with that life, to oneness with God in Jesus, others too, to a union with that life, to oneness with god in in jesus, which is a enormously sort of significant claim that I think again is watered down by post-reformation theologies, which like to keep god and world absolutely distinct yeah, I just need to pause there for a bit, because it's come to this point and, naturally, these.
Speaker 1:when I speak to people on this podcast, it naturally seems to come to this point of being a human being, being a human being and the ineffable mystery of Christianity is that God became man. And I've been inquiring into orthodoxy and, as you know, orthodoxy has the icon of Christ always at a church and icons of saints. But it resonated with me what you said You've got to how to be a human being. Literally come and see how to be a human being, literally come and see. Yeah, and this, this how to be a human being was, was manifest as what was incarnated in history. There's a, there's a wonderful guy I'm following, martin shaw is a storyteller. I don't know if you've heard about him.
Speaker 2:I saw him live and I spoke to him in cambridge you've spoken to ironhurstielly.
Speaker 1:Now you've spoken to mark and straw.
Speaker 2:Okay, I've met a lot of these people. I've spoken as well to to rowan williams.
Speaker 1:I've spoken to jordan peterson uh yeah well, okay, rowan williams, I've spoken to, so where?
Speaker 2:So I spoke to him at a conference just before Christmas on Thomas Halleck, who's a very good theologian. Yes, yeah, just in Cambridge.
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, well, I met him in Cambridge as well. Yeah, he was quite a role model for me as a young Anglican growing up, and he was Archbishop of Canterbury, obviously, and meeting him was great. But you've now mentioned Jordan Peterson and Martin Shaw. What I'll say about Martin Shaw is he was saying how God has a dog in the race.
Speaker 1:That's what he says about Jesus Christ. You know, he's not just this, as you were saying. There's this being that pulls the strings and the strings and good luck, you know fate, destiny, but he's involved, he's, he's invested, okay, through jesus christ. And um, the other thing he says is christianity comes with a postcode which struck me. I was like what does he? What does he mean by that? But you can go visit these places and where jesus healed, you know the, the sumerian women and the lazarus's cave, and you can go visit these places and they so that like, and I've been a christian for as long as I can remember, but in my late 30s, and hearing these things and hearing these, these questions, uh, it just doesn't stop. There's no point where you think you know everything or you've come to um, fantastic, beautiful.
Speaker 1:You mentioned jordan peterson, so that's before we go into iron hersey alley in your question at the q a um, jordan peterson is an interesting phenomenon because he doesn't claim to be a christian. He hasn't said okay, I am, I believe in him as christ and I believe in god. I think he says he lives as though there is a god. Um, but he brought the psychological, the psychological gifts of the human psyche into the bible. So he came into um. He attracted me through his talks on genesis and exodus. I said here's this guy psychologist, not really a christian, but he's talking about how important and how deep and how true these stories are. And I wondered what you had to say about Jordan Peterson and his contribution to the conversation that we're having now and the conversation that more people are having about the efficacy and the truth of religion.
Speaker 2:I think it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that he's been the most significant single figure in this revival of religious interest in the West, which, as you say, is interesting because he's not a validly Christian himself. Yeah, I think a lot of it is down to perhaps just what we were saying earlier about the fact that he takes the Bible which some people might otherwise think is full of stuffy old stories that they're not interested in hearing some sermon about from the pulpit, and then starts to imbue them with a new life in his case viewing them through a Jungian lens and therefore shows how they speak to life, rather than just being some sort of moralizing document to bash you over the head with. Yeah, I think for me personally, I was watching those genesis videos at much the same time that I was just getting interested in in philosophy and theology, and that was again also a big inspiration for me. Um, yeah, to to really just see the bible reinvigorated, to see it as something that you could actually approach with a certain degree of interest and creativity, without the sort of fear of the rather inhibiting fear of transgressing some sort of dogma if you don't say the right thing or you don't glean the right doctrine from the
Speaker 2:text as any particular authority dictates you must. So, yes, he he's. He's enormously significant in that respect. I've since sort of become more critical of him, I think a lot of people have done, especially in his political takes, but that doesn't undermine the fact that I think he's done very good work for just re-presenting Christianity, basically representing Christianity, basically representing religion in general, emphasising the value of meaning in human life. You know, whatever gripes you may have with him, inevitably you have thousands upon thousands of testimonies from often young men stating how much they've helped him or he's helped them. I should say so, yes, I think he's a very interesting phenomenon, um, and yeah, yeah, he probably has been been the single biggest factor in, in reinvigorating this interest yeah brilliant.
Speaker 1:So to your question, as I said and you said earlier about the other ancient wisdoms and other faith traditions that you can accept and you can resonate with you. So just to get context, I was listening to this podcast Justin Briley's Surprising Rebirth of Faith in God and I'm listening and the host says he has Sam Bickersteth for the question. And I was driving in my car and I was like, is that Sam Bickersteth? From school? I was his chaplain. He's going to ask this question now and it was just such a lovely experience to hear the question you asked. So can I sort of reframe the question that you asked and you can correct us and then we'll go from there. So the context of the talk was ayaan hosiali. She used to be a muslim in somalia. She converted to atheism and I say that because I think it's a belief system. So you convert to atheism, you change and she becomes sort of like the fifth, with the four horsemen of atheism the Dawkins, sam Harris, dennett and the fourth one.
Speaker 2:I can't recall now Harris Hitchens.
Speaker 1:Hitchens and she joined them in the sort of new atheist movement of like religion is for silly people and it's bad for society and we should just move on. She converts to Christianity and, a bit like Jordan Peterson, has become quite famous through why, the reasons and so on and so forth. I'm not going to get into too much of the political stuff that comes from that, but what your question is is fantastic for me as your chaplain and for people out there to hear this question. So the room was. Quite obviously you wanted to try and bring back balance to the room because the room was very, very opposed to Islam and really sort of attacking in a way. And you asked this question. You said how much of the future of Islam will take the form of Sufism? How much space will Sufism take in the future of Islam If this reform because I think I'm talking about reform and change in in the islamic world um, if reform and change would would be likely to take place enough.
Speaker 1:Sufism, as you said in your question, emphasizes this overwhelming sense of of love, and I myself, roomie and affairs and these kind of writers have enriched my own life and my own spiritual life, their attraction to beauty and their life. So where can we go with this? What are your views? When we are looking at other beliefs from other systems, when we're speaking about truth, so are there many, many parts to truths and do we need to be critical about where the where those come from? Or if it's truth, it's truth, and it could be Muslim truth or Jewish truth or atheist. It's like that. The philosophers will love this in at school here the, the elephant with the blindfolded people, and they're touching the elephant and each of them, from where they're standing, feel something different. The elephant they think this is the trunk or they don't know what it is, but they feel something different. But they're all holding or reaching out and touching the same thing. What are your comments on, on that philosophy and outlook in life? Is that, does that have truth, or what is your view on that?
Speaker 2:well, generally speaking, yes, I do believe that. Um, I think there are two types of if we can use the word pluralism that I think is appropriate in this case. There are two types of if we can use the word pluralism that I think is appropriate in this case. There are two types of pluralism, one which I definitely disagree with and one which I do agree with.
Speaker 2:One that I disagree with is generally a sort of liberal pluralism, which functions on account of some terms in postmodern philosophy, reflecting on rhetoric and debate and argument as such, insisting that the attempt to put Christianity, for instance, over and against any other faith is implicitly a colonial endeavour, that it has various political valences that make the very attempt to state that my religion is better than yours is problematic.
Speaker 2:And so this liberalism tends to sort of cultivate an open, even plane whereby everyone can have their own particular belief system, with minimal attempts for one to sort of stand over the fray and dominate the others. It might be quite a nice picture momentarily, but I think it actually does more indignity to those religions in those face it attempts to protect, because it treats them with kid gloves, as though it's not capable they're not capable of having disagreements, which is which is silly, because every religious tradition uh has pretty fierce disagreements, uh as foundational to its history. Basically, uh, wherever you go um, and and then also, I just don't think that's true. It's not, it doesn't represent a very uh serious concern for truth itself.
Speaker 2:To just say, everyone should have their own opinion so I reject that kind of pluralism, but the kind that you mention, that the sort of famous indian image of various hands on on various parts of the elephant. I do think that's true and I think it follows from simply clarifying what capital t truth is, because any attempt I'll put it this way any attempt to assert one particular truth involves a determination. So if to articulate any truth in language, to say that the sky is blue, is to articulate concepts that require the preclusion of other concepts, to say the sky is blue means you're not talking about the ground, you're talking about the sky. It means you're not talking about red, you're talking about blue. The exclusion of all other concepts is what allows the logical coherence of any given statement. So it sort of carves things up in order to make particular claims. But the problem is, if we believe, as you find it to be the case in practically all the classical theistic traditions and really beyond them too, that when we talk about god or ultimate reality or uh or anything analogous, we are not talking about one particular being amongst beings or one particular lowercase t truth amongst truths, but we are talking about being capital b or t capital or capital T truth itself, then we recognise that we can't speak in those terms about the absolute truth In order to be able to assert that one religion is categorically true at the expense of others. I think it's to categorically misunderstand what truth is. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't going to be propositions in religion, dogmas, that are subject to the law of the excluded, that aren't subject to the law of the excluded middle right. A particular claim, like Jesus died on the cross is something that Christians will affirm and Muslims will deny, and in that case you have to adjudicate, look at the evidence and make your mind up. You can't have it both ways.
Speaker 2:But the point is that religion is not reducible to those kinds of statements that actually, when you draw nearer to, as it were, the fire of God, you have to start dancing around the fire, dancing around the heat. Dancing around the heat because he will sort of dissolve those solid propositions into the kind of more poetic, more sacramental, um, more communal ritual forms of being and doing and thinking that we're already familiar with in religion. Right, it's very easy to say that I think proposition x is correct and proposition y is wrong. It's not so easy to say that I think proposition X is correct and proposition Y is wrong. It's not so easy to say, I think, that this way of praying is right and this one's wrong, unless you chain it to some whole system and then treat them as abstract propositions.
Speaker 2:So I think that there's also a lot of the history behind how this era came to be. I think, actually, ironically, a lot of it is colonial, because when particularly the British and the French would go abroad you might think of the British arriving in India when they encountered other religions and other faiths, they didn't really know how to deal with them because they didn't line up perfectly with their conception of what Christianity was. And so words like Hinduism or Buddhism are British words. We came up with them. They didn't exist before. There wasn't any big ism that brought together what Hinduism was.
Speaker 2:Subsequently, I think we, firstly by colonial means and then later by means of capitalism, have sort of made a picture of religions that treats them as though they're products on a shelf, as though getting into heaven and finding God is really a matter of just stroking your chin in the aisle and thinking which one of these is the correct thing to choose. Is the correct thing to choose, um? And yet, as I say, that kind of exclusion is is necessary for a human life because we have limits and we should have particular traditions and cultures and everything else. But it can't be the truth itself, only a means to it, because the truth is not one thing that can be cut off from anything else. So the beauty is you don't have to give up either way.
Speaker 2:You can have your cake and eat it too, you can say that God is all in all as he is, and that God is infinite, but that precisely for that reason, he validates and legitimises your particular form of living towards him. It's just a matter of whether or not your tradition allows you to draw near to that ineffable unity that is God, and there can be greater or lesser degrees or extents to which that's possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when you spoke I love that analogy of the fire and don't have to answer a fire I immediately thought of Thomas Aquinas who allegedly at the end of all his works and he's like tons of, tons of work he says just straw. It's just straw. Now that, because he's apparently had a vision of god and he said all that I've written is just straw and you can might as well, you might as well, burn it, um, because I've seen, seen the truth. It comes back to the point there, sam, where we're talking about the atheist and the agnostic. And the Christian have to come to a point and be convicted about what they believe. They can't just accept like it's something on the shelf that I've chosen now for the time being and I'll choose something else later, or just because I've been raised in this tradition. This is my tradition Be convicted, and, as I was saying earlier, I was being a Christian for quite a while.
Speaker 1:Only this year did someone point out to me in the Orthodox faith, thomas the doubter, doubting Thomas, who, when I grew up we always thought oh silly doubt. Why do you doubt? Why do you doubt? You shouldn't doubt. Bad. The Orthodox call it holy doubt Because Jesus doesn't go. Thomas, go away. You know you've asked a silly question and you've doubted, go away. He goes here, touch and see, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:To boil it down, it's about the questioning and the seeking when it comes to religion, because it's a way of life. It's not just something you can learn in a book although books are important, as we've heard today, and they've changed lives but it is a way of life, it's a participation, as you said. The church fathers wrote about. What term came to mind was the ground of being. Was that Tillich? Tillich is ground, yeah, ground of being. I'm a theologian so I should know that. Yes, but philosophy is not my background actually. So it's theology and becoming a grounded being, I think. Just to sign off. Just to sign off again. Um, slightly same same question, but slightly different. So you said a beautiful line earlier. It's made me happy, like in. Basically, it's made me happy. It's mental health awareness week here at school. Um, what is your message to the teenagers out there? Um, about what? What constitutes good, good, mental health and and happiness? Could you say in a? Sorry?
Speaker 2:not one, we'll cut it there. I think I could say it negatively in the sense of what causes unhappiness and unfulfillment is a sense of, as it were, going halfway as a human being, of attempting to find that sense of fulfillment in something that just won't cut it because it's not the full picture. In chasing those things, basically, religious traditions everywhere will tell you every material thing, everything that really exists in this world is finite, and so believing that you will find a sense of happiness or fulfillment from the attainment of any particular goal is bound to make you miserable. Either you don't attain that goal and you're upset because you think that's what's going to make you happy. Or you do attain that goal and then you're upset because it doesn't make you happy. And it can take a number of sufferings and a number of grievances and disappointments for you to realise that.
Speaker 2:But that's also part of life, and that's well attested in different traditions, is that it's only once you lose everything that you realise that you didn't need all those things that you were chasing. It's only in the belly of the whale that you suddenly know how to cry out for God. Truly, it's only in the belly of the whale that you suddenly know how to cry out for god truly. And what I think religion has done for me and what it does for most people, is it provides you with an index of meaning such that everything that you do is not just chasing phantasms and chasing ghosts, you're not just following whatever you see because you hope it might fill you up. It recognizes that you, however you may feel about it, are always already pursuing fulfillment in in the smallest desires you have, and the desire for a cup of tea to a desire to achieve, uh, you know, get the best job in the world or whatever you'd like, some lifelong goal.
Speaker 2:All of this is an attempt at wholeness, and if you can recognize that you're pursuing this already, then you manage to cultivate a sense of, of detachment from those things. That means they really appear to you much more like like play, like it's. It's as though you're doing something because you enjoy it, not because you feel like you have to, because you feel the pressure and the necessity I have to get good grades, I have to get a girlfriend before this age, I have to do this and that and that sense of pressure is is unbearable and it makes you unhappy. A real fulfillment, real happiness, comes from acceptance, accepting things as they are and accepting things as they come and go.
Speaker 2:And that really is the wisdom of so many different traditions, is one of acceptance, of a calm, equanimity and relationship to life, is recognizing that whatever you may find or encounter, you can find good things, but they shouldn't be your ultimate goal. The ultimate goal in theistic traditions, we'd say, is God. In, for example, buddhism, you'd say, is realization of the emptiness of things. In other traditions you might say it's yourself. In any case, not chasing ghosts is what I'd say, is recognizing that when you suffer that maybe that's something being communicated to you and that there's a profounder and deeper truth, a more cohesive and more desirable truth waiting within you, already just hoping to be realised.
Speaker 1:Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you, seb. Well, beautiful, thank you, sam. Well, thanks so much. Thank you for being on the sunny banana and your time. I've found that very edifying. Um and wonderful food. To speak to a student that I once worked with, worked with as a chaplain um, we wish you all the best. Um are you going gonna choose? You have to know the side between oxford and cambridge.
Speaker 1:You're waiting on funding yes, I, I mean I'm I'm leaning very strongly toward cambridge and I love it here and I'd love to stay yeah, but yeah, my only claim to cambridge is not academic, but I played for the town in rugby, so I would also go for cam Cambridge because I love it there. Well, there you go. That's my decision, mate. There we go. Great. And as I say to my guests, I say Sani Bunani, I see you.