Strange Gods and Concert Tickets “I am the Lord thy God thou shalt not put strange gods before Me.”…Rule No. 1 Last year my wife and I decided, late in the day, to attend the Paul Simon concert at the Point in Dublin. We logged on to Ticketmaster and requested two of the ‘best available’. To our dismay we were offered what seemed to be two of the worst seats in the house. We deliberated briefly and decided to settle for what must have been some of the last seats available; second last row of the stage-facing balcony at the far right corner. As I was just a little embarrassed at having purchased such poor quality merchandise I told no one about the unfortunate location of our seats. However…… When the day came and we took our seats some twenty minutes before the show commenced the first thing we did was to look at one another and remark “hey, these seats are great”. They were! Recently I obliged a friend who doesn’t have internet access by obtaining a pair of tickets for the Ozzy Osborne concert at the same venue. I was pleased to report back to him that I had obtained a pair of “very good seats”: stage-facing balcony, dead centre and near the front. I began to tell him the story of my Paul Simon tickets. It took him a while to realise that the difference between his ‘very good’ seats and my ‘very bad’ seats was more one of appearance than of reality. Our seats were really only slightly further back and at a very slight angle. When U2 last played Croke Park in Dublin myself and a friend queued all night to get tickets. Between the jigs and the reels I ended up with a spare pair of ‘extremely good’ tickets which I sold at a modest, twice face value, price on eBay. When I met my client at the concert he expressed his delight, “couldn’t get better”, at the location of his seats: side stands, close enough to be close but not so close as to be at a bad angle. I remarked that, on eBay, seats similar to ours went for much the same price while a small number of seats, so close to the stage as to be at an almost impossible angle, went for between four and six times their face value. What am I getting at here? One last example. The Cork Opera House, in my home town, is a relatively small venue. Whenever I purchase tickets for a show I would, perhaps most would, favour a fourth or fifth row seat, down stairs and dead centre ….. ideally. However if one were offered tickets for the ‘hottest show in town’ and discovered that these were in the balcony, very last row and at a far corner it would make very little difference in practice to ones experience of what was on stage. The Opera House is a small venue and there are no restricted view seats. What is at issue here is not making the best of a bad situation but that the difference between a ‘good’ seat and a ‘bad’ seat in all the above instances involves more how the seats in question might appear on a seating diagram rather than how their location actually affects ones enjoyment of the events on stage. Of course in some theatres there can be genuinely poor seats, but this is not really what is pertinent in any of the above examples. And to say that one might have knowledge of a seating diagram and not of the actual structure of a particular theatre would be to point to a defect in the analogy and not to a defect in the actual argument. A recurring theme in the philosophy of the ancient Western world involves the question of the difference between appearance and reality. And in the Eastern world the essence of the religious quest is to escape from the cycle of birth and death, of reincarnation, by obtaining enlightenment, the state of being genuinely in touch with reality, which state has the side-effect of entering the state of Nirvana, of being in heaven here on Earth as well as forever in the afterlife. Now, while I claim no special expertise in Eastern philosophy, Western philosophy recognises that there is a significant element of the ‘socially constructed’ to the reality we inhabit. The 20th century philosopher Edmond Husserl asserted that in order to experience true reality we should ‘bracket’ all theoretically created constructs which we superimpose on an experienced object thereby ‘reducing’ the experience to that of the pure consciousness of the object. Husserl felt that this process would enable one to experience the eternal, something akin to a Platonic Form, as opposed to the culturally relative. He asserted that the application of this methodology would induce a form of religious conversion. The enlightened one of the East is, by definition, enormously wise. Therefore I would assert that when such an individual would encounter another human being he would not simply ‘bracket’ all this individuals socially constructed attributes and, in the manner of the naive Christian, gaze at the humanity of the other as being just like his own. Such behaviour quickly tends towards narcissism, the act of replacing ones perceptions with ones preconceptions. One deludes oneself that what one would prefer to experience is what one actually experiences. Or truth is dispensed with in preference to lies that are more to ones liking. The enlightened one, and here I again surmise, would be keenly aware of both the eternal and the socially constructed and be able to distinguish between the two. Unitarians often state their rejection of dogma, that is, doctrines based on authority alone and on no other evidence. Official statements made by the Pope, or any other bishop of whatever persuasion, are considered to have authority based on the traditional respect of the faithful for those in such positions. The idea that the Bible is an infallible source of authority is a similar form of dogmatism. The vast majority of Christians will approach the study of scripture through the lens of, at least, some form of tradition. Those who claim to approach the Bible, as it is, alone, as the centre of their faith fail to recognise that scripture is always encountered through the lens of some cultural context or some cultural pre-suppositions. All language, whether written or spoken, functions in this manner. The alternative to religious dogma as a source of authority is data of an empirical nature, data that is undeniably traceable to direct human experience. This, of course, would curtail the amount of information one can believe and makes the world a far more uncertain place. While recourse to dogma can be repugnant to the empiricist, the shedding of all dogma can involve the discarding of one’s culture with little to replace it other than shared fashionable delusions. The Unitarian who, quite rightly, discards dogmatism must be aware of the inherent dangers. He must be able to see the proverbial ‘wood for the trees’. The gap left by traditional ‘shared delusions about reality’ that may be an element in dogmatic beliefs is often replaced by an attitude that reality is entirely socially constructed. It is not uncommon for people to firmly, dogmatically, believe that beliefs require no justification other than that they are convenient. The purpose, the function, of consciousness in any animal is to enable it to successfully negotiate its surroundings. The blissful existence enjoyed by the ‘holy one’ of the East is a by-product of the profound accuracy of his perception of the world around him and of the depth of his understanding of this perception. One who is unenlightened projects a fantasy, to a greater or lesser extent, of his own creation over the actual, objectively existing world around him, causing frustration and misery. In Eastern philosophical thought Reality and God are one and the same. The enlightened one is aware of this; of his own Godhead and the Godhead of everyone and everything else as well. And those who are unenlightened, which is just about everyone else, continually project a fantasy in front of this Truth and this, it seems, is the root cause of all misery. Brendan Burke MA (Phil) 3rd July 2007 Cork, Ireland Cover