Amsterdam's Red Light District: Freedom or Bondage?

My wife and I were in Amsterdam this week and one evening we made our way to what we were told was the best Tibetan restaurant in the city.  En route, we passed through part of ‘De Wallen’, the famed/infamous Red Light District.

I understand that the majority of sex workers are coerced into ‘the industry’; something that is entirely reprehensible.  In this blog, however, I want to reflect on those sex workers in Amsterdam’s Red Light district who state that their involvement is a genuinely free, commercial choice.  For the purposes of this article, I will not dispute their claim.

I am not remotely prudish, I respect individuals’ freedom to engage in the consensual sexual activities of their choice, I acknowledge that some people might choose to become sex workers, that there are many reasons why people choose to engage their services and, in general, I prefer regulation to prohibition in the arena of ‘public morality’.  I was, nonetheless, disturbed by my fleeting experience of De Wallen.  

In truth, I was initially a little slow on the uptake; we entered the area in daylight so red lights were at a minimum.  I mistook the first young woman I saw for a lingerie manikin until she waved; in my defence her window was beside a clothes shop.

There might well be racier windows in the area, but in the ones we passed on our way to the restaurant, greater ‘exposure’ could be encountered on hundreds of Mediterranean beaches.  The poses were not provocative; indeed listlessness pervaded.  What I found disturbing was the fact that it was happening at all.

I felt a kind of hollow sadness and despair that anyone, male or female, might choose to put themselves on display so that others could ‘rent’ their bodies for a few minutes of non-relational sex.  That anyone should consider ‘renting’, I found chilling.  The whole thing smacked of those disgraceful accounts of slave auctions from the past.  For bodies to be reduced to commodities and for sex to be reduced to manipulating bits and pieces of anatomy, I found profoundly dehumanising.  Perhaps in pornography, some half-hearted pretence might be made that desire, passion or mutual lust is involved; in DeWallen no pretence at all was evident.

There was no respect to be discerned anywhere.  I gained no impression that the women were being treated with respect by anyone and I could see absolutely no reason why, at most, the women ought to treat their clients with anything other than disdain.  It was an untrammeled exercise in personal liberty, devoid of personal relationship.  To quote one of the great commentators on human nature, Leonard Cohen, ‘It looks like freedom, but it feels like death’

Easter: Does it Add Up?

I recently saw the following post on facebook:

‘Add the Numbers:

Nineteen minus five + 4 – 3 x 2 + 7

Solve this….’

Most people make the mistake of ignoring the initial instruction to ADD the numbers; instead they perform the calculation.  The host website states that the right answer is 16 (adding together 4, 3, 2 and 7). This, however, is open to challenge: have the hosts confused the word ‘numbers’ with the words ‘figures’ or ‘digits?  ‘Nineteen’ and ‘five’ are still numbers even if they are written as words rather than expressed as figures.  The correct answer might, therefore, be 40 (or forty).

What has this to do with Easter?  I have spent a lot of time recently discussing with individuals and groups whether the resurrection of Jesus ought to be understood ’physically’, ‘spiritually’ or ‘symbolically’.  The answer to this depends largely on how we read the source material of the New Testament.  For example, ought we to read the Gospels as history understood in essentially modern terms, as history understood primarily in ancient terms, as examples of ancient writings known as ‘lives’ (a type of ‘dramatised’ biography or docudrama) or as documents that primarily contain material designed to portray the significance of Jesus even though some biographical details might also be present?

Enough books to fill a good-sized library have been written in attempts to ‘prove’ each of the above positions (and others).  Such arguments are important; seeking the truth is always to be commended especially when the truth is hotly disputed. 

What is missing, however, in much of what is written about the resurrection is attention being given to the equivalent of the initial instruction in the teaser above.  The point of the resurrection narratives, according to John’s Gospel, is to encourage people to believe in Jesus so that their own lives might also be transformed.  In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter so much how the resurrection happened; what matters is that Jesus continues to live in a transformed manner.  The nature of that transformation is a matter of debate and long may the debate continue; the point of the transformation is that we might find someone worthy of following, someone ‘we can believe in’.

The form of that belief and the ways in which we might follow Jesus will also vary from person to person.  My conviction is that once we get to the point of believing that Jesus is truly worth following we are in for a life-time of exploration, development and challenge.  At a personal level, Easter is not so much about theories and doctrines as it is about a particularly striking person and the continuing impact he can have in my life.  If the resurrection doesn’t make a difference in me what does it really matter to me?

Blood Moons and the End of the World

The night of April 14/15th sees the first of four ‘blood moons’ (a ‘tetrad’ of total full-moon eclipses) to occur over the next eighteen months.  Two of these will fall on the feast of Passover and two on the feast of Tabernacles: cue televangelists with predictions of ‘significant events’.  One such, John Hagee, has written a best-selling book on the topic, citing Joel 2: 31 ‘The sun will be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood before the great and dreadful day of the LORD comes’, glibly ignoring the fact that even if this is to be understood in astronomical terms, it speaks primarily of a solar eclipse.

Hagee’s thesis is that every time a series of blood moons coincides with either Passover or Tabernacles, it is God’s way of letting the world know that something momentous is going to happen with regard to the Jewish people/Israel.  In evidence he quotes 1492 when Jews were expelled from Spain, 1948 when the State of Israel came into existence and 1967 when Israel won the six-day war against its Arab neighbours. Impressive stuff, some might think, but sadly for those who like to think that God habitually uses the solar system to send coded messages to those ‘in the know’, a little examination brings the entire thesis crashing down.

The first two events outlined above happened before their associated blood moon sequences occurred, rendering them pretty ineffectual as prophetic warnings; the ‘coincidence’ was out by a year or so; not the sort of accuracy one might expect from God.  There have also been blood moon sequences falling on Jewish festivals (which conveniently occur only on full moons) that coincided with…absolutely nothing.  It is also a little ironic that, at most, only the final ‘blood moon’ will be observable from Israel, the land of the original prophecy; all four, of course, will be visible from the USA.

What all of this underlines is that there is a willingness, even a desperation, among many people to find proof of some sort of divine control over human affairs.  The world is going to hell on a hand-cart, they believe, so God needs to show up somehow to reassure believers that all is not lost.

I don’t disagree with their analysis of the state of the world; war, poverty, hunger, abuse, discrimination, slavery and downright badness are rampant.  Thus it has always been.  God’s presence, however, is not to be looked for in the stars (seriously, one star of Bethlehem story and we’re fixated), but in the words and actions of people who are determined to swim against the tide of evil that threatens to over-run societies; people who (whether they realise it or not) are sufficiently infused by the spirit of God to stand up and make a difference.  We don’t need to look to the heavens; just at ourselves.     

Genocide and Kate's Skirt

This week marks the 20^th anniversary of the beginning of one hundred days of insanity that resulted in more than 800,000 people being killed in the Rwandan genocide. 

The details of the murders are horrific: shootings, mutilations and mass burnings were common place; often victims were specifically sought out and ‘executed’ by those known personally to them.  Age, sex or infirmity offered no protection from the bloody carnage.

The atrocities were made all the more horrific in that many murders took place in or near churches, where terrified people huddled together seeking protection.  Not only did hate-fuelled groups ignore any suggestion that they were ‘on holy ground’, incredibly in many cases the murderers were regular worshippers in church, sometimes even clergy.

Of course, not all Christians acted in this way; there are many accounts of clergy and others hiding potential victims, sometimes risking their lives to do so.  I have to ask, however, was that anything more than ought to have been expected of anyone who made a claim to be a follower of Jesus?

One story that has emerged over the past few days has stood out particularly for me.  It is of a woman whose baby was killed by a machete-wielding church choir member who then slashed her in the head, severed her right hand and left her for dead.  Some years later, the man met with her, knelt before her and asked for forgiveness.  Almost unbelievably, she forgave him and they now both work together for a charity that seeks to provide ongoing help to victims of the genocide.

His account of how easy it was for him to turn from his Christian principles, to be seduced by ethnic hatred, is chilling to the core.  After the first few murders, he explained, he just stopped thinking about it, choosing to believe that he was ridding his country of vermin.  It all sounds so familiar.  The depth of humanity, spirituality and love that enabled his victim to forgive him is beyond my ability to comment on.  He now feels intensely for his victims and experiences ongoing remorse for his actions; something that might well not have happened had his victim not forgiven him. 

Of course, we all know that for the tabloid media, the death of one white British child is more newsworthy than the death of a hundred or more black Africans.  A plane crash in ‘the developed world’ will blot our genocide in Africa.  There was something particularly crass, however, in one of the UK tabloid’s coverage yesterday.  Its commentary on the Rwandan genocide was placed alongside snickering comment about the Duchess of Cambridge’s skirt billowing in the wind.  Hundreds of thousands of Africans killed, injured or traumatised; oh well, at least they didn’t suffer a wardrobe malfunction….

It's April Fools Day all Year Round

Yesterday, my older daughter and I exchanged April Fools texts.  She informed me that she was going to miss her flight home at the same time as I texted her saying that her flight had been cancelled; the annual ritual had been duly observed. While some may be dismissive of such puerile pursuits, I think that it’s a good thing to be reminded not to take ourselves too seriously or to believe that we are immune from gullibility.

A famous April Fools hoax was conducted in 1976, by the BBC presenter and astronomer Patrick Moore.  He informed people, on air, that at 9.47 am precisely the ‘Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect’ would cause a momentary negation of the Earth’s gravity.  If people jumped at precisely the right moment, they would experience a strange floating sensation before returning to the ground.  Subsequently, the BBC’s switchboard was flooded with callers eager to attest that they had experienced the effect.

It was, of course, nonsense, but many people still believed that they had experienced it.  Moore, however, had more than an April Fools trick on his mind.  He had devised the hoax to draw attention to a book called ‘the Jupiter Effect’.  The authors argued that a certain type of planetary alignment, due to take place in 1982, would cause all manner of terrible natural disasters to take place.   In spite of the fact that this alignment occurs every 179 years and no discernible pattern of natural disasters could be found to correlate with it, the book became a best-seller, questions were asked in government and even NASA became involved.  Moore and others protested in vain that the book was nonsense from start to finish; even when 1982 came and went without anything unusual to report, the authors stuck to their guns, revised their theories and published a follow-up.  Only in 1999 did one of the authors admit that it was all rubbish, writing ‘I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.’  It has not been reported whether or not he donated his royalties to charity.

From ‘the Jupiter Effect’ through ‘the Millennium bug’, to countless conspiracy theories, religious beliefs, health fads, political and social theories and our individual quirks and superstitions, time and again we believe what we want to believe simply because we want to believe it.  Some of our beliefs might be true, some of them might be false, but seldom do we adhere to beliefs because we have rigorously pursued the truth.  More often than not we have simply looked for ‘evidence’ to support our existing presuppositions and preferences.  Rarely, are these presuppositions and preferences put to the test…..foolish or what