I would like to declare my commitment to extreme moderation.

Times are tough for moderates – we are being assailed from all sides

On the one hand we have secularists, with whom I have always harboured some sympathy, enforcing the will of atheist fundamentalists and over-turning centuries of tradition. For example in Italy, where I live, a Finnish-born mother recently won a ruling through the European Court of Human Rights to have crucifixes removed from all classes.

Soile Lautsi took her cause to court after failing to get crucifixes removed from the school at which her two children were being taught at a town in north-east Italy.

What a monumental example of egotism, if I may be so immoderate to opine.

Meanwhile, as I wrote last week, 125 Christian leaders have recently put their name to the pompously christened Declaration of Manhattan that calls on signatories to break laws that offend their moral sensibility.

God save us from those who know what is best. 

Fundamentalism is the opposite of God – it is a human thing, born of existential fear. It applies equally to religion and atheism, embodying a need for definitive answers where, in fact, there are none. The fundamentalist’s inherent sense of powerlessness is symbolized by their need to impose their personal power, or righteousness, over others. In their insistent certainty they expose how uncertain they really are. They doth protest altogether too much.

Quantum Mechanics illustrates how particles – the grains of life – appear and disappear with utter unpredictability.

The very fabric of existence is actually woven with uncertainty. In fact, Heisenberg coined the Uncertainty Principle to describe this process.

This, not Latin, Aramaic, English or Arabic, is the actual language of God (or Nogod, if you prefer); the lesson it teaches us is that only uncertainty is the rule.

Ani di Franco sums this up beautifully in her song Paradigm.

I was just a girl in a room full of women
Licking stamps and laughing
I remember the feeling of community brewing
Of democracy happening

But I suppose like anybody

I had to teach myself to see

All that stuff that got lost

On its way to church

All that stuff that got lost

On its way to school

All that stuff that got lost

On its way to the house of my family
All that stuff that was not lost on me
Teach myself to see each of us
Through the lens of forgiveness
Like we're stuck with each other (god forbid!)
Teach myself to smile and stop and talk
To a whole other color kid
Teach myself to be new in an instant
Like the truth is accessible at any time
Teach myself it's never really one or the other
There's a paradox in every paradigm

No one would accuse Ani of being a fuzzy relativist, a knock-kneed apologist. She is in fact a well-known radical. Actually, Ani strikes me as a militant moderate – a healthy skeptic with a keen grasp upon reality. As an artist, perhaps, she exists outside groupthink and perceives the complexities inherent in any absolute, that paradox in every paradigm. But this does not make her indecisive – on the contrary. Understanding, even of uncertainty, clarifies. The truth always illuminates.

Ani was married in a Unitarian Universalist church by the way.

First time around, at any rate. 

Merry Christmas.

Conservative Anglican blogger Cranmer has highlighted a new initiative – the Manhattan Declaration, of which he remarks, possibly somewhat tongue-in-cheek…

Perhaps, just perhaps, this declaration might one day be ranked with the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, or at least raise Manhattan to the equivalent historic significance to that of Boston.

We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right—and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation—to speak and act in defense of these truths. We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.

We will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriage or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.

We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral.

And there’s the rub, what makes this declaration by 125 Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox leaders, which Cranmer describes as quite possibly the most formidable ecumenical gathering in US history, consisting, as it does, of eminences, graces, archbishops, bishops, reverends (most and right), professors, doctors, pastors, presidents, CEOs, deans, directors, founders, editors, not to mention a 'TV Host' and the 'National Facilitator of Spiritual Unity so depressing.

Step back, if you will for a moment, spiritually-liberal reader. Although it sometimes feels like a lifetime, it is not nearly a decade since 9/11, yet how the psyche of society seems to have changed. Religion – organised, orthodox religion – rose phoenix-like from the ashes of the Twin Towers, and not just militant Islam. The totalitarians of all faiths were given a fillip by that ultimate act of impotence and rage.

Writing in the Jerusalem Post Neo-Conservative Daniel Pipes recently referred to the rise of what he termed “Islamism 1.5”, which he defined as an unholy alliance of hard-line preachers acting within the law abetted by terrorists, who they would be of course careful to distance themselves from.

We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral.

The Declaration provides a green light to the abortion-clinic shooter.

It eggs on the homophobic killer; the gunman who recently murdered two at Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church and said he acted because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement… he would then target those that had voted them into office.

I don’t want to get in to the pros and cons of Sharia Finance, which are discussed at length in the original post. What interests me is how faith can cross the boundary between private and public.

Persephone scrupulously, and wisely, sticks to the subject despite the comments of those who mischievously attempt to move the conversation on to other aspects of Sharia, although there is perhaps a certain sense of mischief on Persephone’s part too – her argument that Islamic Finance, “based on Sharia Law”, is long-established in the UK and basically bailing the country out of the current rough waters is somewhat tendentious.

Increasingly religion is moving in to the public realm. Yes we debate Sharia Law, but so too do registrars refuse to marry Gays, and so too do Unitarians campaign for everyone to have equal rights. All of it is about the private stepping in to the public.

Kierkegaard contended that because each of us has a different, and absolutely unique, experience of being alive, then the spiritual will mean something different for us all. This is why, although I’m not against my idea of God crossing in to the public realm, I want to be absolutely confident about its provenance.

Sharia Finance appears a perfectly good idea for example, but that does not mean all other aspects of Sharia Law are. The fundamentalist Christianity of the type practiced by the refusenik registrars can also sometimes do good, providing assistance and a sense of belonging for the vulnerable and dispossessed. We should not forget that baby in the bathwater.

The divine may be beyond comprehension yet we nonetheless try to comprehend it, fit it in to our human-shaped box, and being humans – just clever animals really, with tremendous limitations – it soon comes to reflect not the brilliance we sense but our own short-comings. I have little doubt for example, that much of Sharia Law was progressive for its time, yet time moves on; is it really necessary for today’s Christians to act out prejudices formed by tribal conditions 5000 years ago?

Even today, well last year to be precise, the President of the American Unitarians, William Sinkford, met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and contrasted him favourably to the then President Bush, who certainly had his faults but did not preside over a totalitarian regime of violent homophobia, religious and political repression, and anti-Semitism. Sinkford too was guilty of allowing his prejudices – a certain Liberal American (fast-becoming British) mind-set trapped within a cognitive cage every bit as rigid as that of a fundamentalist Baptist – to ignore the objective truth.

Our prejudices imprison us, yet the cage can be cosy too – its bars may keep us in, but they also protect us from what is outside. They create the comforting illusion of control – of systems, design, intent – when in fact they insulate us from the only inescapable certainty, death.

In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus insists the truth is inside and outside of us. I interpret this to mean self-knowledge includes understanding where the self ends; that the light of truth is without as well as within, and only by stepping tremulously in to the open will we see ourselves, and the world, in full.

And only then should we consider ourselves ready to decide what is right for others.