daylight savings 2024

the last Sunday in September is the day when we go through the amusing ritual of putting our clocks back and to revert what some people might call God's Own time I say amusing because the practice of altering our clocks for saving daylight has always jiggled My Funny Bone just a little it seems a kind of way of fooling ourselves into getting up an hour earlier why don't we just get up an hour earlier and let it go at that well I suppose in practice the idea of putting the clocks back has something to be said for it in the way of saving a reprinting of all the airline and railroad Tim taes but it's very illustrative of ways in which human beings fool themselves and it offers what I feel to be a very instructive parallel to a lot of argument that is going on these days about going back to the oldtime religion I've speculated did a good deal about this and I'm not at all sure why in certain circles there is so much talk going on about God and there is a kind of flavor in this revival of the idea of God which I don't like it's sort of sinister people want to write into all sorts of documents that this country is under God and in this idea of God of course there speaks the projection upon the cosmos of the benevolent desperate the great patriarch because of course it's very convenient for people who want to play the part of benevolent desps and authoritative Patriarchs to feel that they have some backing as it is I suppose uh you feel a greater sense of of uh authorization uh if you get up an hour earlier by doing so at the usual time through altering the clock but the practice of changing the clock is illustrative of another phase of this whole recrudescence of the idea of God the patriarchal God because because in going through all the various reasons which in the past 25 or 30 years theologians have been advancing for reasons why God should be believed in this kind of God should be believed in I come across only one really dominant argument that is to say I've never found anybody yet in writing in modern times who has advanced what seem to be any new simply logical reasons or uh metaphysical reasons for the belief in God most of these are simply repetitions of things that have been said hundreds of years ago most of the reasons that are now Advanced have to do with what an advantage it would be to human life and Human Society to believe in God in other words we have problems with juvenile delinquency what a Pity if outside the Roman Catholic church we cannot scare these children into good behavior by frightening them with ideas of hell and judgment or appeal to their sentiment by saying for example look what your sins have cost Jesus Christ you've put another nail in the cross but it's a strange thing isn't it that sin has been running around in the world for an awful long time and people did Desperate depraved and horrible things when the oldtime religion was in full swing and one of the reasons why nowadays we think the world is going to the dogs is that everything happens not only on a much larger scale but everything happens within the sight of everybody that is to say there's so much news there's so much communication and uh you just slug someone in a back alley in uh San Francisco one night and it's all over the headlines in the morning and therefore the presence of evil is perhaps drawn to our attention more than it ever was before but people very frequently say that the belief in God is necessary for preserving the Dignity of man man in other words if man say in the conception of the of nature which is held by people we might call mechanists if man is simply uh a piece of Machinery are very complicated Machinery which emerged as a result of the blind changes and processes of nature then he is qualitatively no more than a cow or any other domestic animal he's just more complicated that's all and therefore the argument goes if human beings are only a mechanical cattle uh and cattle are only um very complicated chemical mechanisms just as we exploit cattle breed them impersonally kill them when we want to eat them and generally push them around so also if man is just this kind of thing there's no reason why we shouldn't just push him around there's no reason why we shouldn't gas millions of Jews if we find them inconvenient and so on on in other words uh the basis of of the argument is if man does not have some sort of guarantee Beyond himself for his dignity for the rights of his personality then all chaos can break loose and the human being can be simply degraded as indeed he has been degraded in modern times but it seems to me a very very false and perhaps dangerous argument to say that the foundation for this dignity must be belief in God because the believer in God will say no you must not uh humiliate human beings in this way you must not despise human dignity because man is a child of God every individual human being is the object of the love of God has a special Destiny planned for him by God and uh therefore for this reason and on this Authority you must not uh treat human beings as if they were just machines or just animals this is similar to the argument frequently produced by Roman Catholics in commending the superiority of their form of Christianity to the various forms of protestantism they always say well what you believe is a Protestant is simply a matter of opinion and it's your own private judgment whereas a Catholic suspends his private judgment and believes because he also believes that he is bound to believe it is an act of obedience and this is an equally silly argument because it simply conceals the fact that to believe that you are bound to believe is something that you believe it's a matter of personal opinion and private judgment it's an act of private judgment to accept the authority of the church and in the same way if we say the guarantee for the Dignity of human personality is the existence of God I'm going to ask then uh what is the guarantee for the existence of God I suppose this is an old a sort of sophisticated form of the child's question if God made the world who made God but it really is rather a good question because you can answer nobody made God dear God isn't made and then the child can come back if he's smart enough well why couldn't you say the same thing about about the world and uh so in the same way when we uh say only God can be the guarantee only belief in God can be the guarantee for the proper treatment of human beings then uh we must ask again what is the guarantee for belief in God and uh it's simply in other words a way in which we can kid ourselves into certain forms of conduct by laying down a premise just as we kid ourselves into getting up earlier by changing the clocks and while as I said um changing the clocks may be actually a practical idea because of the timetables and all the reprinting of stuff uh it's very important to know what you're doing when you're doing it it's very important to know that you're just changing a standard of measurement and that you made the standard of measurement that the clock is your invention and so in the same way it should important to realize that when uh people start talking about the need for belief in God again this is just a Gambit in the art of ruling a Gambit in the art of preserving Law and Order only uh it seems to me in this case to be not so ex useful and in many ways to confuse the issue profoundly because it gets us into this strange state of mind which you find so often in discussing the problems of human conduct and thought that people want to base their actions and their ideas upon some sort of authority and it's strange this for a Christian because it's said of Jesus that he spoke as one having Authority and not as the scribes and to have authority is a very different thing from uh following Authority the scribes you know were the sort of people who never said anything unless they could quote somebody else as having said it before some great and Rabbi of the past uh to whom time had given the kind of distance of divinity and uh in the same way when we nowadays in academic world get what is called an authoritative text you may be sure that the authoritative text is absolutely jammed with footnotes nobody dare say anything without documenting it but in a deeper sense than that people want to feel that certain forms of conduct certain ways of life are not things upon which they can safely Embark unless they are in some way authorized that is to say unless they feel that this is in accord with the will of God or if they don't believe in God in that sense they want to feel that it's in accordance with what is natural with what is in accordance with the laws of nature or else it's perhaps with um what is in accord with the opinions of a very celebrated person or with some other forceful and successful group of people there's always this curious desire to found what one does and thinks on authority to get as it were some basis outside one's own judgment and one's own will for doing what you're going to do and then of course when what you do is challenged either by other people or by life itself you can say well I uh I I really I wasn't responsible I acted on Authority but without Authority and so we can see how in this sense we kid ourselves by invoking and inventing reasons for what perhaps deeply we are going to what we want to do and we're going to do anyhow reasons which somehow seem to pass the buck to shove the responsibility on a higher Shelf at the same time you might think that an argument of this kind would come and naturally from a person who was simply an atheist who believes that the universe is a drifting process that is absolutely without any sort of authority behind it and that uh man finds himself in this process and has to make the best of it that he can make and this is the difficulty which I think today very very many thoughtful people find themselves in the notion of God as presented by tradition whether Hebrew or Christian is utterly distasteful but mechanistic atheism uh is equally distasteful because as a matter of fact both of them rest upon the same premises the atheists mechanistic Universe of course not all atheists would be mechanists but very often they are but that universe is based on the same premises as the universe of the theist atheist and theist seem so often to be heads and tals of the same coin acknowledging the same premises because both of them naturally look upon the universe as an artifact a machine is an artifact only in the case of the atheist or what we might call the monistic naturalist the architect has disappeared and there is just left the machine it's all part of this thing which I've mentioned occasionally um our attitude of regarding the world as a collection of objects and we of course uh have justification for this in so far as looking at the world as objects has been such a successful way of dealing with it I mean we don't pray to the wind anymore we don't uh speak to the rain or to the Sun as if they were people we look upon them as objects that is to say just is not people and of course as time goes on we know more and more objectively and scientifically about ourselves in our own minds we can regard ourselves as objects and so indeed we do get the depersonalization of man which uh the people who call for a return to belief in God or at least some of them are afraid of and we get this feeling of the universe being uh Hollow empty a rattling shell uh an altogether impoverished affair with no more any life in it it's all just hurrying atoms as Whitehead said now it's always seemed to me that the difficulty one of the main difficulties with the Hebrew Christian idea of God is that it's much too specific in fact it's strange isn't it that uh many apologists for Orthodox Judaism or Catholicism or some sort of Neo Orthodox protestantism rather Pride themselves on the specific character of their God and make fun of uh say Christian Scientists or new thought followers or liberal Protestants who have a very vague idea of God and they say oh these people are so wooly and so vague and so sort of the implication is they're timid and haven't gotten any guts whereas we have a good strong definite belief and they laugh about it and make jokes and have a great time not realizing that it's precisely this specific idea of God uh as something not just um unimaginable but having a nature which has been revealed say through the character of Christ or through the scriptures or through the church a nature which is intelligible to man even if man can't know everything about it but the difficulty you see with all these specific accounts of God is that on the very terms of a Jewish or a Christian attitude to life they're idolatrous they pretend to knowledge which nobody has the right to pretend to they form a specific image in the mind of what God is and that specific image in the mind is far more idolatrous than a specific image sitting on an altar because it is more persuasive and therefore it seems to me at the same time that while we cannot at least while I cannot utterly reject every meaning that the word God has ever had I at the same time feel still that I want to be able to have at least a symbol which will embrace the concept of the totality of all Worlds by that I don't mean simply an additive concept World Plus World Plus World just the total collection because I don't think this world is a collection it's only a collection of things if in the first instance you have split it up into things in order to think about it but if you think of the what a physicist might call the total field of phenomena there's something that we can't think about because we can't get our minds round it we can analyze it and measure it and so on and so forth but all we have is various projected systems of measures which we use in just the same way that we use the measure of time to chart the movements of life but time isn't out there there isn't a kind of cosmic clock with calibrations on it we invented it but at the same time the I think in almost anybody of any sensitivity at all finds it hard to regard the total realm of physical nature as something which he can sort of shrug off and say well radioactive gas and Machinery because it always makes us Wonder there are various ways of wondering one way of wondering is to ask well what explains it all and that creates that kind of question in the mind which we call Wonder but that's not the only ground for wonder supposing I say well perhaps to ask for an explanation of it all is the wrong question that's only after all translating the history of what has happened into words this is what we mean by an explanation and explanations never fully explain because there's always more explanation that can be done more words that can be said more uh events behind the events of history and so on and on forever and ever and ever what is also at the root of Wonder is something perhaps more aesthetic is simply the admiration the astonishment that a world exists at all and the realization that a great deal of it in fact almost all of it is something which influences us rather than something which we influence now of course if there is then something of which the world is an expression which we will just call X or if we say energy like a physicist might say energy is a kind of devitalized word strangely enough it means something mechanical like electricity but we don't know what it is and part of our difficulty is that wherever we look with our eyes with our instruments we find only the surfaces of things and the surfaces within surfaces so that there's only one place where we as it were have very intimate acquaintance with what existence is and that is in us but it's a strange thing that at the very point where we have the most intimate acquaintance with existence it is the least susceptible to objective study because it's too close it's the very middle of us and it is there in in the unknown and ultimately unfathomable Springs of our life our action and our thought that we are linked with whatever this x is of which all uh the world is a manifestation I don't want to say man manifestation is a curious word because it sometimes suggests that what is manifested is very different from that which is manifested in other words that uh while on the outside in the manifestation we see all the multiple and glorious variety of this world what's on the inside must be somehow one instead of many and therefore sort of uninterestingly um shapeless uh something like wasn't it CS Lewis said tapioca pudding or Jello or something like that no I only say manifested uh in the sense that there is uh a way and we experience this way when we experience our own existence in which the world is not accessible to our examination and our control in a very intimate deep way and I would say it's it's there you see that our Ingenuity stops not it doesn't stop at a dead halt it slows down gradually as it penetrates deeper and deeper and it's at this point that we could exclaim God more perhaps as an exclamation of Wonder than an affirmation of a theological proposition and I feel that it's profoundly important not just to put out of mind the illimitable mystery from which we spring and from which we act as something that just can be neglected because then indeed we do become what the theologians rightly fear we become inebriated with pride we become cocky we become people who think that they can push the whole universe around and range everything just so and then we get into these enormous difficulties uh like The Sorcerer's Apprentice uh who got hold of the magic and didn't know how to keep it under control because he didn't have respect he didn't proceed with a certain caution and so if anything it seems to me that the future of the idea of God will involve less definition and much more vagueness and in this weakness of clear delineation will lie its strength and the difficulty to exploit it by people who just want to rule human beings