Answer: In my opinion there is no such thing as complementary medicine or conventional medicine. There is only good medicine and bad medicine. However I would not necessarily say that I would like to see complementary medicine treatments subjected to the same requirements for efficacy and safety as regular 'drugs'. Many complementary medicine treatments are practises, not drugs, and should be evaluated as such. To test acupuncture according to the same principles as a pharmaceutical agent is illogical. To test it using the principles applied to other practise-based therapies such as physiotherapy makes much more sense. You'll find no disagreement from me - or many of the therapists (the ones interested in the patient rather than their own interests) - that complementary medicines need to have more stringent evaluation and regulation. but this is a two way street.

I think that proper evaluation of complementary medicines will reduce misinformed overreactions to adverse events when they do occur. Adverse events are present in all medicines. A good medicine is one where the positive benefits very clearly outweigh the negative aspects. Lack of understanding of these medicines has meant that some potentially valuable and effective medicines are unnecessarily demonised.

Look at the case of Kava. Kava is a plant that has been widely used traditionally by peoples of the South Pacific with low levels of adverse incident. However many jurisdictions now ban the therapeutic use of Kava based on studies suggesting the potential for liver toxicity. Studies suggest that it is not the traditional forms of kava that proffer the potential for liver toxicity but rather the acetone extracts or products made from the stems and leaves that are favoured by manufacturers. On other occasions dubious evidence has been used to implicate Kava in various health scares. In 2006 A Melbourne women died tragically due to liver failure which was blamed on her use of a Kava-containing supplement. Subsequent investigation of the product found that one of the listed ingredients – Scutellaria lateriflora – was absent and that an unidentifiable ingredient was in its place though Kava was still deemed to be the causative agent. This is not rational evaluation but rather dangerously misinformed fumbling in the dark. On other occasions complementary medicine may be misrepresented by an unnecessarily alarmist media. The Annals of Internal Medicine published a case study "Coma from the health food store: interaction between kava and alprazolam"  – which upon closer report was actually a case of lethargy whilst the patient was also concurrently taking cimitidine, which has known interactions with alprazolam. No-one could ostensibly deny that there is a risk of hepatotoxicity with Kava. But a when a Cochrane review suggests promise for its potential for use as a valid alternative to current anxiety treatments and when it compares favourably to the risk and side effect profile of other commonly used conventional medicines for anxiety such as benzodiazepines the continued ban seems irrational and denies patients a valid relatively  safer therapeutic option. Even the hepatotoxicity of paracetamol poses more risk than Kava yet it remains widely sold at supermarkets.

Unfortunately lack of understanding does not cease at Kava. In Omaha a woman was allowed to sue a supplement manufacturer for causing her liver failure despite being a heavy drinker and concomitantly taking several prescription drugs highly implicated in liver failure. The Pan fiasco was in part due to the fact that the Therapeutic Goods Administration simply did not know how to respond when a problem did arise.

In answer to the second part of the question I would reject the notion that complementary therapists do not want further research. What they do want is further appropriate research and they want to be involved in it. Locking these therapists and therapies out of the university sector only serves to ensure those best qualified and most interested in performing this research are denied the opportunity to do so. Most research in complementary medicine is currently performed by people with vast experience in other fields but very little knowledge of complementary medicines themselves. And the research reflects this – vast amounts of money, for example, have been spent studying the effects of Echinacea on acute symptoms of cold and flu. And the results have been predictably negative. Why predictably negative? Because if the scientists had actually bothered to consult with a herbalist they would have found that Echinacea is not traditionally used this way as it has a significant lead-in period of around seven to ten days. Through lack of consultation with those with intimate clinical, theoretical and practical knowledge of CAM much of the research to date has been of little to no clinical relevance. This has essentially wasted what little time, money and resources that are spent on CAM research on research of little consequence to anybody. Is this really the best use of limited (and often public) research funds? Of course there have been suggestions that those seeking to promote complementary medicines (and would would assume that therapists fall in here) should not be allowed access to complementary medicine funding. This is as absurd an argument as saying that those that have practised medicine should not be allowed to research it. And it only serves to ensure even more time and money is going to be wasted.

The research needs to be built upon traditional forms of evidence. There is some merit to traditional evidence. For example Southern Cross University has very recently compared the traditional uses of medicinal plants native to both countries by Chinese and Indigenous Australian cultures. One of the as yet unpublished findings was that these two unrelated cultures with no history of contact shared medicinal uses of these plants in over 80% of instances. The strength of traditional medicine is further supported by the relatively recent 'discovery' and promotion of traditionally used Artemisia for use in malaria treatment. Traditional evidence is not enough, but it cannot be ignored and needs to form the base upon which further research is done. A colleague and I are currently in the process of developing a textbook on Clinical Naturopathy for Elsevier. In it we are attempting to document theoretic or scientific rationales behind current naturopathic approaches to treatment. We do not contend that this automatically implies good evidence but rather we hope that it can guide researchers to study complementary medicine as it is used in practice. I personally anticipate much criticism of the book due to purely to misperception of our intentions on this front.

The major problem seems to be that researchers and other health professionals fail to understand the complexity of complementary medicine In fact most. Most people assuming that graduating from medicine, pharmacy or nursing automatically qualifies them as an expert in complementary medicine (the graph above from my report shows where pharmacists get most of their complementary medicine training from - doctors receive much of theirs from their patients). But it is an area of enormous complexity and requires specialised training. In fact Australian studies suggest that medical practitioners are three times more likely to have adverse events associated with acupuncture than . Experience suggests that complementary therapists also receive better results when using complementary therapies than medical practitioners do. This is not surprising considering the intimate knowledge these therapists have of them. In comparison a study of Melbourne doctors found that they scored a dismal average 18% on a test of basic (as in first year naturopathy) drug-herb interaction and complementary therapy actions. We cannot blame these therapists for not having intimate knowledge of therapies outside their normal scope of practice but we can blame researchers for not enlisting the specialist knowledge of practitioners before they embark on their research. 

This complexity has very real ramifications or research. The table below, also from my report, shows the various factors that can affect the quality and therefore efficacy of many complementary medicines. Like other natural products many complementary medicines can vary according to how, where and when they are grown and harvested and a vast array of differences in processing and manufacturing. Wine at the end of the day is simply fermented grape juice - but these external factors can make the difference between a Grange Hermitage and a $4 cleanskin. This makes it difficult to evaluate complementary medicines superficially. The generic interchangability observed in pharmaceutical medicines simply does not apply to complementary medicines. Glucosamine cannot be simply compared with glucosamine but rather needs to be considered for quality issues in manufacturing. Whilst the CONSORT criteria have attaempted to address this issue a lot remains to be done. Other upstream factors also have to be addressed.

Let me end by asking just what is Evidence Based Medicine? The dogmatic approach that is often employed by its adherents is sometimes frightening and may actually hamper innovation and evolution of healthcare. A study by Le Lorier published some time ago in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that dogmatically adhering to these principles would result would lead to the adoption of ineffective treatment in 32% of cases and the rejection of an effective treatment in 33% of cases. These results may occur from misperceptions of what Evidence Based Medicine means. These misperception "arise from a failure to appreciate that the practice of EBM requires integration of the best available evidence (weak or strong) with clinical expertise and the individual patient's values and preferences"  rather than dogmatic adherence to the literature. There have been all sorts of problems suggested with uncritical adherence to randomised controlled trials and "Evidence Based Medicine (TM)" being held up unquestioningly as the one and only 'gold standard' and these don't necessarily relate only to complementary medicine.

My personal belief is that complementary medicine simply attracts enough scrutiny and critical evaluation to act as a sort of canary for much deeper problems in medical research in general. Problems that are often missed in other areas are picked up in complementary medicine because of this extra attention and general paucity of scientific data - negative or otherwise. But complementary medicine isn't the only area that needs urgent research attention. The practise of many complementary medicines is complex. It think it is wrong to ask any health practitioner to change the way they practise to fit in better with models of evaluation. Rather, we need to develop models of evaluation which are more clinically relevant but maintain scientific rigour. The only way I can see to achieve this is to ensure collaboration between researchers and clinicians. My suggestion would be to develop a symposium to discuss these issues - but sadly I feel as though we remain a long way off from this point.

I wouldn't necessarily suggest that complementary therapists are against developing an evidence base. There are clearly some interests who are doing extremely well out the status quo and are doing all they can to stop the advent of scientific evaluation of their industry. It should also be remembered that some parts of the scientific community are doing as much as they can to exclude complementary therapists from being able to become involved in this endeavour. But these groups do not necessarily represent the bulk of opinion in either complementary medicine or research. If we continue with this ridiculous 'he said, she said' approach we will find ourselves no further along in ten or fifty years as we do now. Both sides are maintaining the divide. And until they begin collaborating it will always be there.

(2) It seemed to me that the recent book by Singh & Ernst, Trick or Treatment, made a serious and fair attempt to summarise the evidence as it exists at the moment. A lot of CAM people said it was unfair. Do you agree with them? If so, could you point to particular judgements made by Singh & Ernst that you believe to be wrong? If, on the other hand, you think that the assessment was fair, what is your reaction to the fact that rather few parts of CAM came out of their assessment with any worthwhile evidence for their efficacy?

Answer: I believe the book was fair based on the information and analysis available to the authors. However, I believe that they were in many ways misinformed in many of their findings. This is no slight on the authors themselves, but rather I feel it illustrates rather vividly the point I made in the previous post. Collaboration is very much required between complementary therapists and the research community if valid clinical research in complementary medicine is ever to become a reality.

The simple fact is that Ernst and Singh have little intimate knowledge of complementary therapies. Ernst of course has been researching them for a long time and even professes to have practised them enthusiastically in the past but he practised them very much under a conventional medical model. This can be a touchy area so I choose my words very carefully. Complementary medicines are defined much more by the way they are practised rather than purely by their therapeutic tools. Qualifying as a medical doctor - or any other conventional health professional - does not automatically qualify you as an expert in complementary medicine any more than qualifying as a complementary therapist qualifies you as a medical doctor. This is no slight on these professions but rather reflective of the depth and scope of that troublesome term 'complementary medicine'.

Complementary medicine is a specialty area of health and it requires appropriate levels of specific training. In fact - even complementary therapists differ substantially amongst modalities. Naturopaths can differ in their approach to naturopathic treatment as much as orthopaedic surgeons and psychiatrists differ in their approach to medicine. Compare a naturopath to an acupuncturist, homoeopath or chiropractor and the differences compound even further. Ernst and Singh do not have the intimate knowledge of these practises that practitioners do and I believe that this is where much of the misinterpretation has come from.

I also think that the results of Ernst and Singh were woefully misinterpreted. Ernst and Singh, for example, quite clearly state that chiropractic may be quite useful in conditions such as lower back pain. They save their criticism instead for the unbridled promotion of chiropractic as a panacea. Chiropractic very obviously has therapeutic benefit in some areas. But there are other areas - asthma is a cited example - where more effective treatment can be found elsewhere. I agree that chiropractic has limitations - but this does not change the fact that it has very valuable clinical applications in certain areas. Ernst and Singh make similar cliams about modalities throughout the book. Sometimes they were justified, sometimes they were not.

I also express concern that Ernst in particular is quite dogmatic in his application of Evidence Based Medicine principles. Applying these to complementary medicine is a good thing. Applying them uncritically is not. I have already expressed the issue of meta-analyses and systematic reviews (rightfully) excluding clinically relevant trials performed by complementary therapists because of poor methodological quality. However, this often leaves only those trials performed by researchers with little clinical or intimate knowledge of the therapies they are testing - and therefore by default what they should be testing for.

The meta-analysis performed by Shang et al and published in the Lancet so often cited by Ernst and Singh is a perfect example of this. Of 110 trials found that were eligible they based their judgement on only 8. Even worse they neglected to state which trials were included or excluded for their analysis. The quality of the paper and the negligence of the Lancet in publishing it as is was rightfully criticised but it neglects an even bigger issue. Why are such low proportions of trials included in these reviews? My guess is that those performed by complementary medicine practitioners do not have access to the expertise to ensure proper methodological quality. This does not proffer an excuse but rather suggests that a valuable clinical insight is missing from the complementary medicine research picture. Again I would suggest collaboration seems the obvious solution.   

I do agree wholeheartedly with Ernst and Singh's suggestion that complementary medicines and complementary medicine practitioners are dangerously under- or un-regulated. One thing I actually have in common with Simon Singh is that I too have attracted litigious consequences due to my outspoken views on regulation. As it exists in Australia - as I am aware it also does in the UK - anyone can call themselves a naturopath, an acupuncturist, a herbalist, a homoeopath or any variety of complementary medicine practitioners. Considering that most of the risk comes from injudicious use of the medicines rather than the medicines themselves and the various actions of unscrupulous rogue practitioners (even I will use the term quacks) who thrive under an unregulated environment I personally see regulation of complementary medicine as a very serious public health issue. However, the actions of these individuals do not in general fairly represent the actions of the majority of complementary medicine practitioners. Regulation can ensure that complementary therapists are bound by the same rules on making ludicrous and false therapeutic claims, medical negligence and patient exploitation as medical doctors. Patients can only benefit from such moves. I must respectfully but very strongly disagree with Professor Colquhoun (and thereby agree with Professors Ernst and Pittilo) that regulation is an issue of legitimation and instead suggest it is an urgent issue of public safety - particularly when you consider that approximately half of total consultations in Australia are with complementary therapists and that nearly one third of patients rely on these practitioners as their primary care providers. From a public health perspective an unregulated healthcare environment of this magnitude is quite simply unforgivable and inexcusable. 

One of the areas I personally took most issue with was the focus of the book on the more fringe and drastic therapies being focused on as representative of the entire industry. I am quite frustrated that complementary medicine in research quite literally includes everything from prayer to well-established and well-researched therapeutic agents such as Hypericum. There is undeniably a lot of crap out there but it is unfortunate that many valid therapeutic options are dismissed based on imagined relationships they share with obscure and unrelated rituals and practises. It is the focus of many sceptics and zealots (on both sides) on black and white arguments in relation to complementary medicine that I find particularly frustrating. Why does it have to be all or nothing? Complementary medicine is like conventional medicine an area dominated by grey. Ernst and Singh's book, whilst a valiant attempt at instilling a scientific approach - unfortunately did so in a such a black and white fashion that it failed to add anything new to the field that had not already been done.

(1) Are there any of the near-infinite number of branches of CAM that you’d rule out as a whole. What, for example, about homeopathy, or reflexology, or crystal healing, or dowsing? Do you really believe that any of them have any effect greater than placebo?

Answer: I like to think that I keep an open mind on these issues. this can raise some interesting issues. I can certainly understand your opposition to many of these therapies, particularly coming from the UK where the wank factor is ever present. I too am naturally cautious about 'the woo' but have seen some of these therapies used successfully in action. However common sense needs to prevail and I think that whilst we would probably agree that it is ludicrous to suggest that reflexology would be of use as an alternative to cancer treatment it probably would be of use as an adjuvant treatment to reduce anxietyin oncology patients. I have no idea and don't profess to suggest how homoeopathy actually works - but I've seen remarkable results in clinical practise. But I would never recommend it for everything. The comic above offers a glimpse here. Just because acupuncture may not fix mechanical issues in a rusted automobile I don't think we should denounce the therapy as a whole. Like every other medical therapies complementary medicines are subject to various limitations. they work remarkably well in some conditions, and remarkably badly in others. I find that it is not the products or the therapies themselves that cause most problems but rather overzealous adherents and practitioners and the many dubious claims they often make.

Homoeopaths - classical homoeopaths at the very least - are a very good example here. Their teachings do much to enforce the dogma that homoeopathy is "the one true medicine". The real danger of homoeopathy is the dogmatic approach adherents take to their founder Samuel Hahnemann. The refusal of many homoeopaths to evolve their modality or integrate with other professions is quite disturbing - and ironically the very approach they often accuse others of using against them. One of the problems I see posed by homoeopathy is that whilst when results are achieved they can be fantastic, sometimes it can simply take too long to find someones 'constitutional remedy'. To deny them other treatments whilst this search continues - often for months or years - is utterly irresponsible. Though this represents a problem of practise, not treatment.

However, this does not mean I find homoeopathy ineffective. For example their seems to be some evidence of homoeopathic treatments working quite well in a variety of conditions. A Cochrane Review even suggests that whilst the homoeopathic remedy Oscillococcinum may not be effective in preventing flu it does show promise in reducing the duration. Ironically, the 'modern' forms of these homoeopathic products are often rejected by homoeopaths themselves as they do not follow the principles of Hahnemann.

 Whilst I do not believe in prescribing homoeopathy for everything I would be at pains to not discount it either. There are some uses in which however I do reject it outright - homoeopathic vaccination being one of the larger, more controversial areas. Also, if there are over 30 different homeopathic remedies for the common cold, how can just one be applied to everyone with an expectation of success? Surely the failure of a remedy in a specific situation implies just that - the failure of a specific remedy to treat a specific condition. It does not and should not reflect the failure of homoeopathy as a whole. This continues across modalities. I believe that chiropractic can be of much use in musculoskeletal problems (as does Ernst and Singh) - but would not recommend it for asthma or psoriasis as there are many other more effective remedies (again in agreeance with Ernst and Singh).

"Did you hear about the man that forgot to take his homoeopathic medicine? He died of an overdose"

I understand it is difficult to reason how I may have clinical faith in remedies without an evidence base. Homoeopathy clearly makes no sense scientifically. Yet people seem to benefit from it. It is often forgotten that clinical experience and traditional evidence do form valid components of evidence based practice. Clearly they're not ideal and better forms of evaluation are still required though I think it is folly to dismiss them out of hand. I do not profess to even pretend that homoeopathy would make sense. Though people do seem to benefit from it somehow. Instead of dismissing it perhaps we should work out what is making it work? If it placebo then why is there such high patient satisfaction? If it is not homoeopathy itself at work perhaps homoeopaths could teach us something about the therapeutic consultation and we can use it to promote better health in our patients? But the crux of the issue is we still need to look at it objectively and we still need to work out how we can best do this.

Let me try a very bad analogy. I have no idea how an aeroplane manges to thrust itself off the ground an deliver me safely to my destination (Before I invite a wave of aeronautic theory response comments let me state that I actually do have some idea but for the purposes of this very bad analogy let's pretend that I don't). However, I know that the team of engineers and designers do and they have the expertise to ensure that the job is done as well as it can be. I also understand that the aircraft needs to be tested before being put into service by a team of experts well trained in picking up various faults. Whilst I appreciate the valuable services of those who evaluate the aeroplane's function, I do not want them designing or building it. Likewise I do not want those who are invested in building or designing the aircraft to be solely in charge of picking out the faults in their labour. They are two very different forms of expertise.

It is the same with research and complementary medicine. The problem to me seems that much of the research is either performed by those with either specific clinical complementary medicine expertise or research methodology (or sometimes conventional medicine) expertise - but rarely both. This is counter-productive in a number of ways. it usually means in the first instance that clinically useful research that actually represents the way these therapies are used in practice is often of insufficient quality and get rightfully discounted from systematic reviews, meta-analyses and the like. However, the research which is of good methodological quality is often researching inappropriate areas which have no real clinical relevance. I will offer specific examples in one of further questions relating to Ernst and Singh's book 'Trick or Treatment'. The solution seems obvious - encourage the scientific and complementary medicine communities to collaborate and determine what should and should not be investigated and how.

I can, however, certainly tell you that as a complementary medicine practitioner I find it extraordinarily difficult to find a Cochrane Review on anything that is even remotely close to what I use clinically or clinically useful. How can we judge an entire industry on its evidence when researchers seem only to be looking at areas of little relation to the way complementary medicine is actually practised? It reminds me very much of a situation involving rheumatoid arthritis patients participating in a qualitative study in Bristol. When asked about their treatment priority the patients overwhelmingly suggested the crippling fatigue associated with their condition was what bothered them most. However until then fatigue in this condition had never appeared on the research radar. Research was instead being driven by well-intentioned researchers following their own passions and ignorant of what was actually clinically relevant. Consultation can be a powerful tool and i think it is one that could really change the approach to complementary medicine research and redirect it to something approaching clinical relevance and scientific rigour.

Placebo effect may be commonly touted as the real reasoning behind complementary medicines effects – however, lack of understanding of how they work does not preclude the possibility that they may work – nor do unknown mechanisms of action imply placebo at work. No one would doubt the effectiveness of pharmaceutical interventions against placebo, though a cursory glance at any Pharmacology text will indicate that many commonly drugs also work via unknown mechanisms. Placebo is a valid and valuable tool in research - though I fear that sometimes it is very often misunderstood. The placebo often used in acupuncture research (sham acupuncture) has been found to have higher placebo activity when tested against other placebos such as an inert pill. Does this significant difference really make it a placebo or does it render it an inappropriate – and therapeutically active – tool by which to measure the effectiveness of “real” acupuncture? I should mention here that what may be termed 'sham' acupuncture by western researchers is actually listed as a valid therapeutic tool in certain conditions in various forms of acupuncture. A meta-analysis of acupuncture for osteoarthritis of the knee published in the Annals of Internal Medicine discussed just a few of the issues with sham acupuncture use as a placebo in acupuncture studies:

"Although these sham controls were designed to be inert by involving needles placed superficially and away from acupuncture points, in reality, the avoidance of all 400 estimated acupuncture points in the body may be impossible. In fact, the shams used in these 2 RCTs were judged to be probably physiologically active and inappropriate as controls in another recent systematic review. Weak physiologic activity of superficial or sham needle penetration is suggested by several lines of research, including RCTs showing larger effects of a superficial needle penetrating acupuncture than those of a nonpenetrating sham control, positron emission tomography research indicating that sham acupuncture can stimulate regions of the brain associated with natural opiate production, and animal studies showing that sham needle insertion can have nonspecific analgesic effects through a postulated mechanism of “diffuse noxious inhibitory control”. Indeed, superficial needle penetration is a common technique in many authentic traditional Japanese acupuncture styles."

Of course there have also been suggestions that the healing rituals associated with complementary medicine are responsible for the placebo effects of complementary medicine. If crystal healing does turn out to be no more than a pile of old bollocks does the fact that those seeking its services gain some benefit really a problem? The ritual itself may still be of benefit. As Ernst himself points out - if people are aware that the therapy is possibly due to no more than placebo no ethical issue exists. True adherents will still fail to be persuaded and the faith in these therapies exhibited by these 'true converts' may still render them clinically useful. Using this faith judiciously and in non-exploitative ways may be clinically effective. After all, those who have strong faith in a spiritual being - regardless of which one - do tend to have better survival outcomes. Faith is a powerful tool. In this instance is it psychology by another name? Is it the art of manipulating placebo why complementary therapists often remark "our placebo is bigger than your placebo?" Does that still make it placebo?

If it works clinically, the patients are made aware of limitations and are not denied access to other treatments than what is the real problem? My major concern is that seeking this form of treatment does not exclude them from seeking other known effective treatments and that they aren't exposed to predatory or negligent behaviour (such as therapists offering unsubstantiated miracle cures) or aren't financially exploited. This interest of public safety is why I suggest that regulation is very different from legitimation.

There still of course remains the possibility that some therapies work in ways currently unknown or misunderstood by science? When Ignaz Sammelweissdeigned to suggest that washing hands between dissecting cadavers and delivering babies he was ridiculed by the medical and scientific community despite dramatically reducing mortality in the Vienna hospital in which he plied his trade. He was ostracised by the community and eventually committed - dying an ungracious death in a Budapest insane asylum. His results wouldn't be taken seriously until germ theory offered a theoretical model for them some fifty years later. Accepting findings that fall only within convenient existing scientific theory is the height of scientific laziness. Lavoisier, Einstein, Copernicus, Snow and so many others enriched science by failing to be constrained by its established theories. We can not rely on scientists alone to find the answers on complementary medicine  as they know only part of the story.

We cannot rely on the complementary therapists either as they too know only part of the story. Only through a collaborative effort can a truly objective appraisal be carried out. Vitalistic theory for example has not been objectively studied since Avicenna. I think that if we can cut through the woo, wank factor or whatever you like to call it there may be some rational explanation for the positive effects that many complementary therapies seem to offer. However, rejecting something without subjecting it to truly objective appraisal serves only to make a mockery of scientific endeavour.

But in the Middle Ages, Abelard reversed this by saying: non credendum, nisi prius intellectum (Intro, ii. 3). Which we might translate, 'I don't believe anything unless I have previously understood it'. This opened the door to rationalism which subjects faith to itself. Faith believes what God has said and seeks to know what is believed. Hence Augustine spoke of faith seeking understanding.

As an BASIL W. MILLER puts it:

…Abelard thought that first the truth of Christianity appealed to the reason, and then was a matter of credence. With him intellectual comprehension was necessary for belief. His dictum was "Non credendum, nisi prius intellectum," or in plain language, "Do not believe unless you first know." While with Anselm it was "credo ut intelligame," or "Believe that you may know." In his Introduction to Theology, from which the above quotation is taken (ii, 3), he tried to solve anew the doctrine of the Trinity but the Council of Soissons in 1121 ordered his work burned. Though not an infidel, still many of his doctrines were unsound. He is the medieval father of present day liberalism and new theology.

http://truthinheart.com/EarlyOberlinCD/CD/4/ChristDogma_BWMiller.htm

This Friday I'll be talking about "Don't Get Fooled Again" with Neil Denny, Padraig Reidy and Anthony Burn on Resonance FM's "Little Atoms" discussion programme:

"If the show has a dominant and recurring theme, then it coalesces around the ideas of the Enlightenment, by which we mean freedom of expression, free inquiry, empirical rationalism, scepticism, the scientific method, secular humanism and liberal democracy. These ideas find their antithesis in superstition, religious fundamentalism, fanaticism, medievalism, totalitarianism, censorship and conspiracy theory."

I've listened online to a couple of previous editions and I'm very much looking forward to being on Friday's show.

When you look at the above pie chart it causes a little concern. The first thought that pops into your head may be "I knew CAM was just a bunch of hogswollop". There is no denying that there is a lot of catching up to do with developing a complementary medicine evidence base. But the chart above has nothing to do with complementary medicine. This is the evidence that exists for conventional medicines. This exists on the BMJ Clinical Evidence website if you'd like to explore it a little further. However, it does change those thoughts a little doesn't it? Perhaps those sometimes self-righteous souls who condemn the lack of evidence in complementary medicine as an anomaly should take a look in their own garden. Complementary medicine may be a convenient scapegoat for the dogmatic adherents of "Evidence Based Medicine" (which is not without criticisms either I might add)  but it is only one representation of a problem that is rife across all health modalities - including conventional medicine. Those in glass houses should stop throwing stones and simply let us get on with our research. It's time we stopped this ridiculous Dubya-like approach of being either completely "for or agin' us" and injected a little scientific rationality into complementary medicine.

First Incident

The first deleted comment was posted at a post on prayer. The author said, in part,

"...In prayer, we enjoy the presence of God and the awareness that He is involved with our world and our lives. A prominent church minister... has declared publicly that God is not an interventionist God. The minister is very wrong...."

The first two commenters disagreed with the blogger's position and said the following:

#1: Have you possibly misunderstood that "prominent...minister"? ...why not take a different approach - an approach of dialogue with the alledgely "very wrong" minister.

#2: One of the things that I have accepted and tried hard not to fall in that trap...is never to deride another persons belief system and theological understanding without knowing where she or he is coming from. To say that the understanding of a 'liberal' United Church minister is faulty and wrong because it does not agree with your understanding is rather a 'closed mind' simplistic approach....

The original blogger answered:

Thank you for your comments. They are both well intentioned. The point of the blog is that God interacts with His creation, unquestionably. This is not simply an opinion. It is the declaration of the Word of God, authenticated through the ages.

Another commenter (I'll call her #3) said:

An article in The Age newspaper gave a brief outline of this minister's thinking and future direction. Whilst I do not know this gentleman personally, I do have concerns regarding his beliefs...There were a number of other alarming false teachings in this article...What this very prominent...minister is saying does not measure to the truth of the Bible.

This was the point where I decided to play:

@ #3: With regard to "the truth of the Bible" have you ever read, Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman? If you haven't, you may want to do so.  You may want to follow along in your Bible as you read Ehrman's discussion. Have you ever thought about the possibility that what many take to be "the truth of the Bible" may really just be teachings about the Biblical text that have been handed down through the centuries?"

My comment was deleted in less than 24 hours.  Looking back at it now, I can take a couple of guesses as to why this happened. For one thing, the author of this blog is unlikely to want any of his readers to follow a reference from his blog to any of Bart Ehrman's writings. For another thing, evangelical beliefs of what constitutes biblical truth are grounded in the supposition that Christians are dealing directly with inspired, God-breathed text. Yes, they know they're dealing with translations, but they believe that those have been divinely preserved and protected through the ages. Accordingly, even though evangelicals rely on the teachings of church leaders, they believe that they can always check those teachings against the Bible itself. My question strikes at the heart of that belief. If the Bible cannot be relied upon as the untainted Word of God, then evangelical Protestant Christianity has a serious problem. This is not the sort of issue that this author wants his readers to consider from more than one point of view.

Second Incident

The second post was about using new approaches to reach goals. These are the comments that appeared before I offered my two cents worth:

#1: Can you clarify what happens to people who don't believe that God exists? It's my favorite part.

#2: People have the choice to believe in God or not to believe in God. But every decision we make in life has consequences, and this is no different. Eternal life with God is available to all people...

#1: Why do you equate disbelief with rejection?

#3: I was hiking...the other day...And it occurred to me in an astounding way, that if we don't believe in the absolutes of God, we have to believe in the absolutes of ourselves...Doesn't it make more sense to know we don't know all there is to know? ... God is real. There are a lot of really smart heady people that have discovered this....

This is where I jumped in:

#3 said, "Doesn't it make more sense to know we don't know all there is to know?"

This is precisely the attitude that scientists and rationalists take when they examine the universe. I'm glad to see that you have a similarly humble attitude.  Unfortunately, there are some Christians who are not quite so humble, and who are certain that their way of viewing the world and interpreting the Bible is the only way.

#3 also said, "God is real. There are a lot of really smart heady people that have discovered this." Appeals to authority (I should have included appeals to popularity) don't strengthen arguments, they undermine them. People can be smart about a lot of stuff, yet still be wrong about a few particular things. For example, lots of very intelligent people bought into phrenology and eugenics in the early 20th century.  Both of those ideas have been discredited since then.  The fact that these people held these ideas didn't mean they were stupid. It simply means that they were wrong about those particular ideas.

Now, at first glance, comment #1 appears (to me, at least) to be more "in-your-face" than mine.  It's such a common query, however, that Christians have a canned response for it.  Therefore, by letting it stand, the blogger also gets to let #2's boilerplate statement stand.

So, looking at my comment (which also lasted less than 24 hours), what was so bad about it?  One answer may be that the blogger thought I had insulted #3 by pointing out his faulty reasoning. This blogger tolerates very little disputation on his blog. Nevertheless, everyone, atheists included, needs to recognize that neither popularity nor intelligence renders any belief true. It's pointless to talk about how many people believe in God or Russell's Teapot or Bigfoot, or to talk about the IQs of people who believe in those things. The only thing that matters is what is actually demonstrably and observably true.

It also may be the case that my attribution of oh-so-Christian humility to scientists and rationalists, and my statement that some Christians are not at all humble, were offensive. After all, I defied two memes that are common among fundogelicals: a) scientists and rationalists are arrogant and elitist, and b) Christians are, by definition, humble people. Do these Christians honestly think that they're the only humble people on the face of the earth? Moreover, would any thoughtful Christian assert that there are no arrogant jerks among them?

If my statements of what are, to me, obvious facts were offensive, then it is clear that my friend's blog will never be a site where serious, critical discussions of a wide range of issues will ever occur. In fairness to him, I'll note that he has allowed some serious discussions of denominational and structural issues. Those are okay, though, because they are basically matters of housekeeping within an accepted evangelical framework. What will never be allowed are discussions that probe the framework itself.

Overall, I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed that my Christian friend was not willing to allow a small bit of dialog from a nonbeliever's perspective. Is he afraid that exposure to non-Christian ideas will contaminate his readers? I'm sure he is. It's ironic, since these people are supposed to be secure in both their faith and their knowledge. After all, they don't just believe in God, they know Him. They even have relationships with him. Good Lord! If the relationships are so vibrant, why do so many Christians behave like they are fragile, delicate things that are easily shattered? Dare I suggest that it's because, deep in their hearts, they're not nearly as confident as they pretend to be about either their relationships or their beliefs? If Christians were really as confident in their faith as they say they are, they wouldn't have to delete from their blogs comments that they either don't agree with or don't like. Christians routinely come to atheist blogs and gripe about how close-minded we are. Yet, in spite of our alleged close-mindedness, very few atheist bloggers refuse to engage Christians in dialog or delete their comments from our blogs. In contrast to this openness, my experience of censorship at my friend's Christian blog is just one example among many that atheist bloggers have encountered. I wish Christians could be more open-minded, but I understand why they can't be: open-mindedness is the first step toward non-belief.

As for my friend, he is a high profile leader (within Salvation Army circles) who can't take the risk of his blog becoming the site of controversial doctrinal discussion. Even worse, he can't take the risk of his blog being the place where Christians come to have their faith undermined. Knowing that, I won't be commenting there anymore. Besides, I have no more business going to Christian blogs and asking them to look at things my way than Christians have coming here and preaching their gospels to me. Christians have the right to have spaces where they can reinforce each other in their beliefs without being molested by people like me. Therefore, I'll be staying on my side of the theological fence from now on. Still, there is a chance that whatever I don't say over there will appear here instead. If it does, just remember, you read it here first.

-- the chaplain

"You can't be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you're drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god."

And I'm going to be controversial and agree with him. To an extent, anyway. Orthodox Christian doctrine on a number of subjects contain some paradoxical elements. We shouldn't kid ourselves that there aren't. There are some dimensions to our faith which are indefensible to rationality.

It's a symptom of our modern times that people find it difficult to accept paradox as our forefathers in the early church did. Many beliefs branded heretical - or at least unorthodox - exist because of this inability to cope with paradox. Some examples are docetism, a belief that Jesus was not human, or Psilanthropism, a belief that Jesus was only human and not divine.

Now I'm not saying this is only a recent problem - these heresies date from the early church - but I think since the enlightenment there has been a popular trend to the belief that everything is quantifiable, and, unfortunately, when it comes to the divine, it just isn't. I believe that one day we will understand with perfect clarity (1 Corinthians 13:12), but as I said, right now the paradox is just that, a paradox, and we shouldn't kid ourselves that our beliefs are defensible to a rationalist standpoint.

That's not how we should try to defend ourselves. The way the Gospel shows us bye example to speak to the rational is to say to them, 'Come and see for yourselves' (John 1:44-50). I've written at length on this before (see Christ in the Mundane), but in short, we have to not only drink the blood of the space god, but live a life that brings the life of that space god into startling reality for all those who see it. We have to live like Christ lived, so that when someone calls us absurd, we can say, "Yes, I know, but come and see. Jesus is here."

- Chalmer

Citations
Lawhead, F. The Philosophical Journey: An Interactive Approach, Third Edition, McGraw Hill: New York, NY, 2006, pp 197-240

I would argue that doubting, or any other form of thinking, is dependent up experience. When I think of what defines an experience, the first things that come to mind are the physical characteristics of the world that inspire my biological senses. Our biological sensations are of real, tangible qualities such as taste and smell. However, to experience such things is dependent on the passage of time. Just as active sensory perception is dependent upon time, so to is thinking. Try to imagine what it would feel like if time stopped completely. I doubt you would even notice because the beginning of a thought is not instantaneous with its end. Denying my claim would require that a thought both exist and does not exist simultaneously, thereby violating the law of non-contradiction. In fact, by that same reasoning, no beginning can occur simultaneously with and end.

The rationalist would assert that the knowledge of ones own existence can be reached by reason alone and is independent of our empirical experience. However, as I have attempted to show, it is required that we experience time if we are to apply reason at all.

So, like the empiricist and unlike the rationalist, I believe that knowledge requires us to experience our reality, even if our existence is the sum of all things logically knowable. Unlike the skeptic, though, I do not believe this dependency on experience casts doubt on certain absolutes. While my perception itself may be flawed, that I perceive at all can not be logically denied.

- Chalmer

I remember laughing at my mother when she stated that she thought of studying naturopathy after a naturopath had cured her of the hand dermatitisthat had plagued her for decades. This was no mean feat. This dermatitis so severe that she would often scald her red raw hands in hot water just to relieve the maddening itch and pain for those glorious few seconds before the burning set in. But what was my arrogant teenage riposte to her revelation? "Why don't you go study real medicine?". Thankfully I grew out of my malapert adolescence but it wasn't until an acupuncturist prevented me from requiring a spinal fusion due to a work injury that I finally came around.

Skepticism comes naturally to me. I am after all a bona fide hick and don't have time for much of what I like to call the wank factor that abounds in complementary medicine. My grandmother and grandfather were buffalo hunters, of all things, and my mother grew up just outside what is now Kakadu National Park. I still remember going to high school every morning smelling like smoke from the fire we used to heat the water for our outdoor shower. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the pragmatism of rural Australia has rubbed off on me more than a little. This was further compounded when I trundled off to do a Science degree at Griffith University (though I must admit I was a much better teenager than I was a student during this time and embarked on several tangents in the course of these studies). I later went on to work in an operating theatre as an assistant nurse for six years whilst I was studying naturopathy. I like to think I am well-versed in scientific skepticism. However, the reason I am passionate about naturopathy is because it works. And really that's all that matters. Just ask any rural person.

An interesting tidbit of information surrounding CAM use is that people in rural areas use complementary medicines more than people in urban areas. Don't get me wrong, if you start talking about Qi, Prana or centering your core you are going to alienate yourself from them. But people in rural areas will gravitate to whatever works - usually on the advice of someone they trust - no matter how flipped out it sounds. This permeates through all aspects of rural life. I remember when the creek behind our house stopped flowing for the first time in living memory (it incidentally didn't start again for another five years and hasn't been flowing regulalry since - there's one for the climate change skeptics). The decision was made that drawing our water out of the stagnant pools that remained was not viable and that we would need to sink a bore. As everyone in the area did we employed the services of the local water dowser- Ted - to find our water for us. For the princely sum of $50 and a couple of tallies of beer he found us three good sites and furnished us with some pumpkins from his garden. though not one reference to earth mother, ley lines or Patchouli to be found. The engineers that come to dig the bore laughed and sunk sites of their own. They stopped laughing when they had to fill them in and go to Ted's sites instead.

I personally think that sometimes we can over-intellectualise complementary medicine. But the truth is that it is many things to many people. Rural people may not appreciate the esoteric side of therapies but they will use them nontheless. They will embrace the principles holism if for god sakes you just don't call it that. Sometimes it's the added wank factor that can get everyone off side. My aim is to cut through the wank factor and get through to the guts of what makes complementary medicine tick. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the esoteric side of these therapies too, I just want to make complementary medicine more accessible for those who don't.

The aim of this site is to try and restore some of this common sense to discussion surrounding complementary medicine. Irrational responses fly thick and fast on both sides of the fence. Those maintaining they are defending scientific credibility in their arguments against complementary medicine often do little to suggest credibility and are very rarely scientific in their approach. Likewise some of the complementary medicines pushed down our throats are simply snake oil manufactured by those with interests other than the health of their customers.

Zealots can and do exist on both side. Hopefully I will not sound like one of them. The aim of this little blog is to finally add what I hope is a rational voice to this debate. No bollocks, no wank factor just a rational and scientific approach to what can be a valuable healthcare option.

Please feel free to drop me a line via my website if you'd like to suggest a topic or get in touch. I hope you enjoy the blog.

   The first Protestant preterist was Hugo Grotius (1538-1645), a Dutch Arminian who also originated the heretical governmental view of the atonement, while Henry Hammond (1605-1660), who followed Grotius approach, introduced to British soil. However, both of these men were more historicist than preterist, and their views were largely ignored by their contemporaries, although post-Reformation groups such as the Huguenots denounced their views, with one of their leaders Pierre Jurieu (1637-1713) stating that preterism “dishonors its authors” and constitutes “a shame and disgrace not only to the Reformation, but also to the name Christian.” Even so, the form of preterism that appeared to this point was mild.

   While the English Protestant scholar John Lightfoot (1602-1675) also adopted a mild preterism, the preterist interpretation was not seen in Protestant scholarship until the 1800’s when it emerged as a product of German rationalism. This liberal school, which rejected supernatural revelation and originated biblical higher criticism, adopted the preterism as a means to avoid predictive prophecy and give a naturalistic interpretation to the Book of Revelation through a comparison with the apocalyptic literature of the Aprocypha and Pseudepigraphra.  With the spread of German rationalism from Europe, the preterist interpretation became established in Protestantism in the British Isles and the United States and influenced later evangelical academics such as J. Stuart Russell (1816-1895) and Moses Stuart (1780-1852) whose works represented the modern forms of preterism. The popular rise of partial preterism among American Protestants of the Reformed tradition can be traced to the 1970’s and the Christian Reconstruction movement through the influence of the late Greg Bahnsen and its popular promotion by his students David Chilton, Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., and Gary DeMar, as well as R.C. Sproul (who became a preterist in the 1990’s). The rise of full preterism can be credited to the Churches of Christ and specifically to one of their pastors, Max R. King,
whose disciples include present full preterists Don K. Preston, John L. Bray, and John Noe.

View original article at: http://www.raptureready.com/featured/price/15rp.pdf

Mollie Hemingway has an excellent column on this phenomenon. Take some time this weekend and read it over.

here is a tease:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us.

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

and here is the conclusion:

Anti-religionists such as Mr. Maher bring to mind the assertion of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown character that all atheists, secularists, humanists and rationalists are susceptible to superstition: "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can't see things as they are."

go read all the good stuff in between.

hat tip to Mollie's husband, Mark Hemingway.

But first, some illuminating background facts about the Bible:

-The English word for "hell" comes from the (Hebrew?) word "Ghenna," which was the name of a trash dump outside of Jerusalem.  Similarly the concept of hell was a foreign and vague concept in the early centuries of the Bible's existence, developed later only in relation to the power schemes that seized on the idea as a implement of social control and subordination.  However, in other ways the concept of hell as something local and real carries existential notions of its own; I'm just saying.

-The unstable, incomplete canon.  The current form of say, the King James or Oxford Bible was not at all spontaneous or somehow complete.  Their form owes itself to arbitrary political and historical events in the early centuries of the Bible's development.  Irenaeus' actions really determined the course Christianity was to take in its brutal ascent to power.  Geographically, in the early days Christianity was composed of dramatically different sects and was only one of many competing cults and religions, and a relatively powerless and modest one; their form of "Christianity" (the word itself implying something stable and unchanging) would hardly resemble that of today.  Much of it focused on the legal codes of a tribal and premodern society, involving the redistribution of wives (labor wealth, cha-ching!) and the suppression (but allowance) of fornication with goats (see "The Red Tent").  The Gnostic gospels (see "the codices"), as well as other hypothetical gospels were omitted or destroyed; similarly, texts of the Apocrypha were denounced, or they came to share only a contentious relationship with the other Gospels.

-And for more see the "the two creation stories," "the synoptic problem," "redactor," "J, E, D, P," and "the documentary hypothesis," and I'm sure you'll find other useful information in the process.

Lastly, the purpose of the paper is not to deny Christian beliefs, but to look at how structures of power seize on and reinterpret incoherent and contradictory religious texts, which gives one a whole different view of our inherited history and its relationship with the present state of national affairs.

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The Insight of the 'Word' of God as Word

A Postmodern Reading of the Bible and its Implications

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"What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein its writ.  How could it?  It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all."

'The Judge' of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

"Through your precepts I get understanding;

therefore I hate every false away."

Psalm 104

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If we accept that the Bible is the accumulation of various works by various authors and redactors, organized by a specific set or sets of canonical values determined by external political schemes, then we may examine its internal content from a perspective external to its causes and their political ambitions.  Similarly, the politics of the inclusion or omission of various texts implies an underlying narrative which the Bible is attempting to compass between its first and last page.  Texts that reinforced, advanced, or appealed to this narrative succeeded at inclusion because of contemporary politics in the Judeo-Christian world.  Other texts did not succeed at inclusion, somewhat arbitrarily but also significantly because they did not follow the underlying narrative line that unified and empowered early Christian authority against opposition.  In such a way, the history of the Bible foregrounds the pragmatically non-terminating process of secondary re-interpretation of what amounts to a mostly fixed text, thereby emphasizing the interpretive process over the explicit meaning of the text itself.  This process complies with the definition of "metanarrative" as offered by Cameron Lee as, "...the broader understandings embraced by a culture that form an inherited context of meaning for the more particular stories that individuals and families within the culture may tell about themselves." (222)   According to Lee's definition, we can interpret the historical significance of the Bible as the non-continuous project by various discourse communities to make the Bible "speak" their own political or moral values via a fixed document.  The sum of all these factors, and the situational relativity of "essential" meaning they imply, is that the Bible obtains the definition of the project of "metanarrative" in nearly every respect.

Paul Lakeland defines the metanarrative of the Bible as the erasure of "the other" and preservation of linguistic demarcations of a non-linguistic world:

The other, as we know, is erased by metanarrative.  The one who possesses the metanarrative, be it one of white supremacy, patriarchy, or Christian imperialism encounters others only through their inevitably subjugated place in the metanarrative.  Thus, they are not met as other, only as comprehended.  They may not speak on their own terms, because the metanarrative has spoken for them.  They are present in the world of the metanarrative, but voiceless, situated, put in 'their' place, which is of course anything but their place. (Lakeland, 57).

In this way we see metanarrative in both a universal context and a Biblical one in particular, where "metanarrative" is seen as the process of imposing an all-encompassing, self-contained narrative (or set of narratives) on a non-linguistic world where any essential connection between sign and signified is arbitrary and ultimately subjective.  It coincides with Lakeland's statement to acknowledge the social and political functioning of the metanarrative as a source of power over others, and the teleological categorization of such "others" as inferior by some cosmological or metaphysical design.  The origin of the metanarrative, as he describes, is both universal and particular, re-occurring at those points of crisis in history where rationalism is the only means toward justifying unjustifiable ends, be it the Biblical justification of slavery, Nazi justifications of the Holocaust, or contemporary justifications of the denial of rights to homosexuals.  In these instances we see both particular applications of the metanarrative within different cultures and historical moments, but also we see its universal application by a majority power in subjugating a minority for economic, political, and social advantage, and for using the suffering of their bodies as an artifice of justification for the metanarrative.

Generically, analytic philosophy studies the dynamics by which humans use language and the construction of myth as a means to creating their existence.  As existence is temporal and entropic, it follows that time, rather than figurative space, is the realm within which we contend with the "other" of existence through language.  In this way, we may derive language as the means by which we attend to the task of overcoming the passage of time, and thereby we may also identify the inherent products of language as performing a similar task.  Narratives, metanarratives, metacultural analyses, universal myths-all these derive from the process of creating "being" and bringing "metanarrative" to its imagined, ultimate temporal scale in erasing "the other" as well as erasing the situational relativity within which such anthropocentric structures artificially place themselves as being "beyond one's knowing."  In these ways, the politics of metanarrative are performative in that they seek a kind of self-containment (canonization) of some absolute, totalized logical system to which one may eternally subscribe to derive "truth" of a prior-as opposed to posterior-sense.  Contrary to this view, Cameron Lee reduces a critical position of a "postmodern, narrative, and social constructivist worldview" to four premises: "1) realities are socially constructed  2) realities are constituted through language  3) realities are organized and maintained through narrative  4) there are no essential truths" (Lee 222).  This position forms the foundational basis upon which the Bible may be analyzed as an artifact of metanarrative.

In the collaboratively-written book The Postmodern Bible, under a section titled "Deconstruction and Reading," the authors examine how the Bible, like any text, is not a stable or fixed piece of literature, but rather that its meaning is informed wholly by its relation with external cultural structures (Aichele 130).  In this way, the meaning, or multitude of meanings, within the Bible are a product of what the individual self imposes on a fixed, but indeterminately contradictory text.  The authors refer to Jacques Derrida's analysis of the story of the Tower of Babel, in which Derrida claims that the themes and narrative conventions of the story provide an allegorical model for the process of writing by Biblical authors.  This model provides a teleological design by which a story can be used to ultimately justify itself in a circular fashion, while using this circularity to allow the audience to impose meanings of social and political convenience upon a fixed story.  In this way such narratives are simultaneously fixed and indeterminate in greater respect.  As Derrida argues, "The 'Tower of Babel' does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, or saturating, or completing something on the order of edification" (Aichele 128).  In such a way, the history of the Bible, and its innumerable interpretations, represents the non-terminating process of reinterpretation of what has been (at least to a significant degree) a fixed text organized by a canonical set or sets of values.  On a historical continuum, this culturally-relative process has yielded interpretations both "good" and "bad," although the definition of such terms is ultimately up to the subjectivity of the reader and his or her relative position within a specific moment of political or social beliefs, in such a way that the net personal gain is what qualifies something as "essentially good."  This process necessarily coincides with the view that the Bible contains an infinite plurality of meaning relative to the observer, without any essential connection between sign and signified, in that "meaning" is preceded by the creative, conatus process of "making" thereof.  In relation to Derrida's analysis of the Babel story, this process reflects an internal attempt of the Bible to come to terms with the multiplicity of meaning in a text that inherently denies such multiplicity, an attempt to internally justify its situational relativity.

The overarching importance of the Babel story stretches beyond a single narrative, sharing its boundaries with the Bible as a whole, with which it shares an inseparable function.  If the Babel story contains an etiological myth explaining multi-lingualism, and if it is a product of syncretism with an identical Sumerian story, then externally it is evidence of its own synthetic, constructed origins.  Additionally, examined internally, the explanation of multi-lingualism may be interpreted as a metaphor for the multiplicity of conscious experience wherein the meaning of the Bible can never obtain universality, yet seeks to justify it by authorizing the lack of universal perception (through language) through myth, thus reconciling narrative multiplicity.  This foregrounds the epistemological crisis of the Bible as a whole, that of imposing universal understanding in a world where universal perception is rendered impossible by the plurality of collective experience.  Similarly, if we expand our definition of a "text" via Derrida's conceptions, we may include within the Bible much of the seconday canon of literature that has contributed to its historical development, its meaning, and its stabilization in relation to changes in culture.  As this is the case, we may examine the Bible not simply as a fixed document, but as the process itself of developing a metanarrative to support a destabilizing worldview.  In this way, the Bible's attempt to establish a self-contained set of meanings for the world through linguistic constructs not only informs a metanarrative, but rather it is metanarrative.

But what is meant by a "self-contained" text?  Something self-contained is something complete, absolute, totalized, self-sufficient; and yet also something that is at first and last hermetically anthropocentric.  Jesus in the gospel of Mark seals the process of Biblical narrative as metanarrative by necessarily dichotomizing those inside and outside the text: "'To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that 'they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so they may not turn again and be forgiven.'" (Mk 4:11-12).  In Mark, Jesus metaphorically separates faithful, internal subscribers of the text from those who read the text externally but do not appeal to the text as absolute in its dimensions of truth.  In this way, Jesus frames the roles of reader's, saying that those who believe whatever he says may understand his words, but those who do not will inevitably be unforgiven and are assigned the negative narrative role of "other."  As Ed Madden states, "Christ's parable of the sower, found in three of the gospels (Mt 13, Mk 4, and Lk 8; KJV), is a parable about reception, and it self-reflexively indicts or blesses its hearers.  It is a parable about parables, a gospel about gospels, a metaparable...once the parable is explained to them, the apostles enter the hermeneutic circle of parabolic discourse...They are able to 'hear' the other parables, once they are instructed how to hear." (130-131)  In this way, the sower parable frames the authoritative interpretive structure of the Bible as a whole, such that the sower parable is an attempt to internally assign the reader's interpretive framework.  Universal understanding is imposed by using and quickly erasing one's liberty to choose one's interpretive construct, erasing and disguising the prior freedom of choice, a degree of freewill threatening toward God's power, as articulated by the Babel story.  For those without this understanding, the role of the evil "other" is assigned, as "Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them." (Mk. 4:15)

Yet, the metanarrative of the Bible must not assume that the Bible, due to its self-containing structure, was a final product which arose instantaneously.  Rather, it was a product of syncretism, revision, canonization, and similar organizing structures which honed its form.  For these reasons it is significant that the Bible originated from a plurality of different gospels, lost documents, interpretations, and re-interpretations.  Terry Tiessen's article, "Gnosticism as Heresy: The Response of Irenaeus," examines how the Gnostic gospels recovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 reflect the plurality of ideas circulating during and in the century following Jesus' life.  As Tiessen articulates, Irenaeus, an early church leader, vehemently sought to denounce Gnostic versions of Christianity as heresy for the purposes of consolidating the church and organizing it under a single set of political values (31-33).  Irenaeus' actions-in spite of their vitriol-reflect the pathology of small differences, such that it was not the differences between early sects which was at dispute, but rather it was the shared territory of two competitors in which the conflict resided.  It is stated that Irenaeus attacked Gnostics much more harshly than sects that were smaller in political influence, but which forwarded far more contrary interpretations of Christianity (33).  The issue for early church leaders was political more than anything else, involving the creation and maintenance of bureaucracies through which meaning would be determined, controlled, and made distinct through legal mandates and compulsion; it was the process of drawing the lines of orthodoxy as demarcations of inclusion and exclusion, Christian and merely a flexible artifice for "other."  Thus, the politics of early Christianity reflect the somewhat arbitrary "final" document we have today, whose "finality" owes itself to a situational political conflict.  For this very reason, we may apply the priorities of "orthodoxy" and canonization to secondary literature and re-canonizations occurring as late as the 1800's with incidents such as John Smith's new-New Testament, other modern cults, as well as similar apocalyptic movements.  But much more explicit examples may be modeled in the discourses which Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus held over matters of free will, or even John Calvin's oppressive "othering" dichotomy of the reprobate and the elect.  It is arguable that these crises, as well as the discourses they forced to occur, influenced contemporary literature of the Rennaisance, and created international religious tensions that existed well into the twentieth century.  All these provide examples of the secondary support structure which the metanarrative of the Bible needed in order to rationalize its case, providing it the retroactive demarcations of "truth" which are to be little found in the original document whose cultural references are derived from a primitive goat-herding culture that believed the world was flat and whose legal codes were refined on the stable redistribution of wives after the death of a husband.

In these ways, the Bible is simultaneously an artifact of metanarrative and metanarrative itself.  It reflects the accumulation of a narrative which can never overcome its own multiplicity, but re-interprets itself with every attempt to do so.  Its narratives dispersed northward and became themselves syncretized with Anglo-Saxon culture and their national myths of white supremacy and modern Christian antinomianism.  It is thereby the accumulation of Western history, and an attempt to triangulate a final essentialist doctrine of truth which can never overcome its situational relativity and much less likely will it overcome its violent politics of alterity and their adaptive yet all-or-nothing calculations of "otherness."  At end, it is an attempt to make a non-linguistic world coincide with the anthropocentric totality of language, which, as my writing may act as evidence, can only be argued against contradictorily by a subscription to its viral terms and the structures of power accumulated by its two-thousand year political development.

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(As you can see, in spite of the momentum built up earlier, the last paragraph is where I just decided to call it a quits for the sake of other papers.  But most of the ideas are more or less there.)

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Works Cited

Aichele, George et al.  The Postmodern Bible: The Bible and Cultural Collective.  Yale

University Press: London, 1995.

Chevalier, Jacques.  A Postmodern Revelation: Signs of Astrology and the Apocalypse.

University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1997.

Lakeland, Paul.  "Is the Holy Wholly Other, and Is the Wholly Other Really Holy?

Reflections on the Postmodern Doctrine of God."  Divine Aporia.  Ed. John C. Hawley.  Bucknell University Press: Lewisburg, 2000.

Lee, Cameron.  "Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern

Rejection of the Metanarrative."  Journal of Psychology and Theology.  Fall 2004, Volume 32 Issue 3, 221-231.

Moore, Stephen D.  Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge.  Yale

University Press: London, 1989.

Slaatte, Howard A.  The Paradox of Existentialist Theology: The Dialectics of a Faith-

Subsumed Reason-In-Existence.  Humanities Press: New York, 1971.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible.  Ed. Michael Coogan, et al.  Oxford U.P.: New York,

1989.

I have written elsewhere of Robert Priddy's and my cherished mutual friendship with (the late) V.K. Narasimhan (although Priddy's spanned several years). He died March 9, 2000, aged 87. See:

Great Editor V.K. Narasimhan Blind In Only One Eye

Renowned Indian Editor VKN. Diary and Letter Scans Reveal

V.K.N. as this most courageous and respected Indian newspaper editor was known, succeeded Professor N. Kasturi as editor of Sanathana Sarathi, the official magazine of the Sathya Sai movement, which is distributed worldwide. He was a rare case of someone who would stand up to Sai Baba. This situation may be understood in the light that it a) served Sathya Sai Baba as a sort of reality check, b) gave some impression of freedom of speech at certain times, and c) brought many men and women of key influence to Sai Baba.

Robert Priddy kept an extensive diary, and has gone to considerable work to scan the entries. His diary entry for 5/10/95 is particularly interesting, because it shows both his and Narasimhan's struggle to reconcile what, in retrospect, are surely irreconcilables. In short, the psychological state of denial:

Found Narasimhan at Sai Towers with Padmanabhan. Long talk. Met Devendra, Mr. Agarwal, Chris Parnell (editor of Spiritual Impressions) & Padmanaban with Narasimhan.
One the June 1993 incident N. said that what Baba told him "privately about it was not convincing". It remains a mystery to N., who quoted Baba's 'Why fear when I am here' as the reason for his bereavement over Baba allowing his elder brother to command the killing of the intruders. N. compared this to Krishna's also Rama's various similar exploits.

Source: NOTES MADE ON HEARING V. K. NARASIMHAN'S SHOCKING REVELATIONS. Recorded talk with V. K. Narasimhan on Sai Baba, colleges, blackmail and Vijay Prabhu. With digital text transcript below the handwritten notes.  Date of conversation and notebook record: 1st January 1996. (continuation of long notes from marathon session with VKN at Prashanthi Nilayam)

Barry Pittard notes: Correct spelling of the name of the owner-publisher of Spiritual Impressions is - Padmanaban, referring to R. Padmanaban of Sai Towers publishing company, Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh, India. Chris Parnell is a prominent leader in the Sathya Sai Organization in Australia, alongside whom I myself worked at Spiritual Impressions

.......................................

Robert Priddy's notebooks from Sai Baba ashrams 1984-1998

Robert Priddy's long friendship with V.K. Narasimhan - scanned letters

V.K.N. lost an eye despite Sai Baba's vibuti application etc.

V.K.N. on printing problems, a suicide, and Sai's boyhood visits to famous 'saints'

Robert Priddy recorded notes and diary 1984-98 - scans and comments

V.K. Narasimhan and Robert Priddy's close association

V.K. Narasimhan on Robert Priddy's book 'Source of the Dream'

V.K. Narasimhan's comments on the murders reported

V.K. Narasimhan on Sai colleges, the 'sect' and Sai's ignorance

V.K. Narasimhan's inability to get Sai Baba to tell him the truth

V.K. Narasimhan's doubts of Sai Baba's powers, avatar claims etc.

V.K. Narasimhan's comments on the Sathya Sai Organization

V.K.N. recorded about pointing out to Sai Baba his inconsistent teaching

V.K.N. contradicts Sai on Advaita - and on ashram security etc.

V.K.N. on 70th birthday crowd size and more

New Year 1996 - disillusioning reflections and VKN

Main locations of Robert Priddy’s writings on Sathya Sai Baba and his worldwide cult

• Sathya Sai Baba Deceptions Exposed (blogsite)

• Sathya Sai Baba In Word And Action (extensive, highly organized, searchable website)

glimpses of a reality that contrasts sharply or even conflicts with what we already believe and/or want to be true

I also see it fully present in so-called liberal rationalists.  We are least as guilty as the radical right-wing nut-jobs we criticize and fear, albeit on a more fundamental level:  We don't want to believe that so many people work sooo hard to suppress legitimate pieces of Truth and Reality.  But people do.  Some do it to preserve their own worldview.  Some work to control other people's worldviews.  And in our disbelief, we -- ironically enough -- suppress a vital piece of Truth and Reality along with them.  So we don't want to believe that we do it either.

I'll go as far to argue that cognitive dissonance is something we as a species are as of yet incapable o