"I have never seen the righteous forsaken..."

I got really irritated today. I suddenly exploded, 'I really think the Bible is a most irresponsible document. I don't approve of it putting about the idea that if you do everything right, then your life will go right too.' You know the stuff - the idea that 'you reap what you sow'. It crops us every now and again all over the place, in Proverbs, Psalms, and the notorious Deuteronomistic history, and I wouldn't know about the New Testament. Not that they don't have other ideas too, such as that the poor sometimes get a raw deal and we ought to be nice to them. But this 'I-have-been young-and-I-have-been-old-and-I-have-never-seen-the-children-of-the-righteous-begging-for-bread' stuff in Psalm 37. Awful. Even Augustine in his commentary on those psalms had to do some exegetical gymnastics and make it somehow refer to the eucharist, so he wasn't exactly comfortable with the plain sense.

Whitby keeps the fun in funerals.

I used to tell students that the book of Proverbs was suitable for children, as it might encourage them to work hard with its promise of reward for righteous living and hard work. The book of Job was like a night out at the theatre for adults where this view of the universe was challenged out of the hearing of children. At the end of the play, all is restored to hunkydory-ness, the ornaments are back on the mantlepiece not moving (I'm thinking of Bagpuss here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lol3fjAyoJw ) and we can get on with the business of bamboozling the children as usual. And then Ecclesiastes is a journal by a slightly depressive character looking back on his life, musing on these things.

But today it seemed to me that life would be a lot better if nobody ever got hold of such a preposterous idea in the first place; never teach something you have to un-teach. Why tell children something that is patently a lie? Are we afraid that if we don't dangle this notion before them, of hard work getting its reward in personal prosperity (job, house, holidays etc) they will just give up and find no reason for getting out of bed?

I think we ought to experiment for at least a generation and tell them the truth, then they won't be disappointed if life or nature or whatever has nor come up with the complete set of goods that we deem essential equipment for a happy, healthy and prosperous life. They'd be able to get used at an early stage to the idea of life having a large element of randomness, luck of the draw stuff; and they'd be given lessons at school in shrugging shoulders, as part of a new combined subject of philosophy, religion and PE.

Say this carefully.

But t'owd man heard me sounding off, and said 'But there is a further thought', and suggested that there is a use for the idea of people getting a just reward for their deeds; it often doesn't work for individuals, but it does work for societies. As a society, we get what we deserve. If our collective values find expression in celebrity culture and all that you find me harrumphing at on this blog, then society will go the way it does, and what a mess it can seem. If on the other hand our values were different, and we planted orchards and valued the making of things of good quality, looked after the old and the young properly, invested as much as we could in health care and wholesome living and good food for all, and... well you know what I think.... if we did those things, then society would reap what it sowed, and there would be better support and safety nets for individuals who experienced misfortune. So Proverbs, Psalm 37 etc does work across a whole society, but doesn't work so well in a highly individualistic culture.

Well done, old man! Barring natural disasters, I think he's really onto something.

But I included the pics here as I thought the blog might look a bit too earnest if I didn't bring in 'the holiday photographs' somewhere. And it is getting chilly so I invested in some warm things in M & S yesterday, as these were so useful in Spain's very cold spring last year too. I'm gradually buying things towards my proposed 'next camino', such as the 'heat generating leggings', which I think is the new term for long johns. T'owd man says that in 2013 I can either stick to my plan to do the camino, OR I can have a motorbike. I decided that the purchase of the long johns at least keeps my options open.