The atrocities in Oslo and Utøya shock everybody. I have only contempt for the perpetrator, but I am sceptical to the Holy Taboo inspired by the Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg. Far from reducing his impact upon us, we are actually giving Anders Behring Brevik an almost mystical power over our lives.

The new Taboo has not arisen spontaneously from this horrid tragedy. Had the media not informed the public that the Prime Minister was avoiding mentioning the murderer by name, it is doubtful that anybody would have noticed. However, not only did the media do so, informing us thereby what those in power now want us to do, but the Prime Minister’s Taboo was the subject of a language discussion on NRK radio  – just in case anyone needed the message spelling out.

So we find ourselves in a strange situation where something more suited to a more superstitious age has gotten coinage in our society. One of the major food stores has jumped on the bandwagon, and is encouraging a boycott of the papers that keep showing the picture of Anders Behring Brevik. While the KIWI shop in Romsås justifies this boycott by saying the man should be “forgotten” and not glorified (with which I don’t have a problem), they do so by referring to him as “Whom We Do Not Name”. That is where I have the problem.

By this special use of the language, we are not forgetting Anders Behring Brevik. On the contrary, we have elevated him in our superstition. One only has to think of religion. Where mention of the name of the deity is prohibited, or where it is forbidden to show pictures of a prophet, it is by not doing something that we give something more status. If we now begin to refer to Anders Behring Brevik as “Whom We Do Not Name”, then instead of fading into anonymous insignificance – by far the better punishment for someone with such an over-dimensioned sense of his own importance – he will become a kind of myth.

No, I say call a spade a spade, and bring this man to justice. Let us try him, however, under his full name. Once convicted, he is welcome to keep it because nobody will have need of it anyway – apart perhaps for the warders of the prison from which he hopefully will never be released. That is, lastly, why I fully agree with the Justice Minister that we do need a serious discussion now about the length of sentences that can be imposed in this country.

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The common theme in the televising of the Norwegian Coastal Cruise has been that nobody ever thought  there would be so much interest. I cannot help wondering what that firstly says about those who make their living entertaining us.

I have about twenty or so television channels on my TV. I watch them so rarely that, since I still have to pay my license and will still get the NRK stately broadcasts whatever I do, I seriously am considering ending my subscription to Riks TV. Some people wonder why I don’t rather install a satellite dish instead of my old fashioned antenna that I inherited from the previous house owner, and the days of analogue TV. My answer is that if I am utterly bored by a choice of twenty channels, why should I fork out for a hundred or so more that frankly don’t interest me?

On a typical evening I shall go through the TV channels one by one, and find – no thank you and turn the TV off altogether. I think the banality offered is one of the reasons the Internet has begun to take over. On a so-called educational channel there will be – for the many gods know even how many more times – a program about “hard time” in prisons abroad, there will be for just as many times repeated “Count down to Catastrophe”, there will be boring music videos on the one channel, boring American talk shows on the other, and you get the drift. I’m just not interested.

Now that we are entering the Summer holiday season, I can’t help but wonder whether the programmers thought that putting cameras aboard a ship would be some “in between” solution – the bane of the time slot between the late night and early morning that I quite forgot to mention above. If ever you are unfortunate enough to get indigestion in the night, and decide to get yourself a cup of tea to settle your poor tummy down, don’t think of turning on the TV then. There will be some youth sitting in some make do studio who “chats” SMS with you, preferably with some (in my opinion, understood) idiotic banter while even more idiotic people actually pay the TV company NOT to be doing anything at all – in a constant stream of very expensive SMS messages.

However, the Norwegian Cruise has surprised everybody. It is, without question, a form of “reality TV” – and yet this particular Norwegian brand is very different. It is addictive, it cultivates something quintessentially Norwegian, and it has got an entire nation glued to the TV on a channel that normally is the “little brother” of the bigger players. Everywhere the ship has come in land, it has been greeted by enthusiastic crowds, and followed in its journey on the shorelines by young and old waving flags.

Perhaps all this has something to say about those “bigger players”, and what people are really interested in? Perhaps we are NOT interested in the “culture” constantly dished out at us.

The Norwegian Cruise Minute for Minute may still be reality TV, but at least it’s not a rehashed template like “X’s got talent”, where “X” is the country you are pushing your product! Do the programmers really have contempt for the world’s public, that they are able to serve basically the same thing from country to country, just in order to build their big media empires? I think this is why the “choice” we have is so terribly limited!

Thank you NRK for giving us something completely different… even if it wasn’t what you planned!

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Nå er ikke bare sola tilbake. Vi har like mye dagslys som alle andre.

Etter jeg søkte norsk statsborgerskap i fjor valgte jeg å ta en pause med denne bloggen. Nå starter jeg opp igjen… på norsk!

Watch this space!

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Today I listened to the church service broadcast on national radio. It struck me that the doctrines of anthropological climate change are beginning to acquire the characteristics of religion.

Given that the service focused on our responsibility for the climate, it was evidently a given to the Church that we actually have such a responsibility. However, that nevertheless remains a theory. I object to the Church preaching it as though it were fact, and to the composition of prayers on this subject.

I for my part do not recognize anthropological climate change. I view it as a lie constructed for political reasons. Yet in this Church service, I am expected to say “Amen” to what I do not agree with. One cannot put one’s hand up in a church service, and say that one does not agree with what is being prayed for!

Moreover this new manmade religion is replacing what the Church is supposed to be. It is indeed a matter of religion and faith, because even now at the time of my writing it has been acknowledged that the basis for this belief (that humans are changing the climate) is fraudulent. That is now admitted! However, clergymen and environmental activists clearly have not registered that what they believe in is compromised. Thanks to the constant climate coverage in our media, if you keep saying it long enough people think it must be true!

Therefore there really is no point in pointing out that there is no consensus on the theory of anthropological climate change. There is no point in discussing the science. Neither is there anything to be gained by pointing out that, in fact, the earth has been cooling and there has been no warming at all since 1998 – a fact that even the normally climate change biased BBC has admitted. Given that there are political conferences coming up in Copenhagen, the inconvenient truth is being positively suppressed.

Facts do not matter because the Church now proclaims that anthropological climate change is true. That is the religious dogma; nobody is really interested in the truth. It will one day be seen that the Church hopped on a political bandwagon – and as people come to see that for the political scam it is, the Church will be seen as an accomplice to the higher taxation and costs that politicians really wanted all along.

Let us be clear, the whole question of anthropological climate change is already compromised; most people just have not registered this. Furthermore, the belief is arrogant and idolatrous.

One day church people will hopefully see how incredibly arrogant it is, that human beings should have the power to change the climate and even to “fix” it after breaking the natural system. These are things that only God Himself can do. If you do not believe in God, then at least see how insignificant we are in comparison to the power of the sun and nature!

The manmade religion of climate change has subtly replaced much of Divine Worship, and is as such idolatry. The ingenuity of this is that we are made to feel guilty. Yet this is the mask for the conceit that makes anthropological climate change such a popular belief. In order to feel guilty in the first place we must also have grandiose ideas about our own importance in creation.

I am compelled to confess that not only is the sky not falling, but that the we would be better doing according to the closing words of the Norwegian confession – grant that we may fear and love but You alone.

Anything else is idolatry. We do not go to church in order to join various causes, however just we may think these are. We go there to be in fellowship with Jesus Christ. When we begin to project our guilt on to things that are not real, like the absurd notion that we have or are about to ruin earth’s climate, we have less focus on the areas in our personal lives that we know come short of what God wants.

Jesus died for what is very, very real. That is the purpose of our fellowship: to meet Him, and remember His sacrifice made once and for all. Manmade climate change is a belief, and I submit not real at all.

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As those of you patient enough to read my ramblings already know, I have begun the long bureaucratic process of naturalisation. A part of this is that I must document my competency in the Norwegian language. Today I therefore sat my Norwegian Exam!

The odd deja vu feeling of walking from my house down to Finnsnes’s Institute of Higher Education (=Voksenopplæring), rather than going to work, began as soon as I left my door. Memories of my time as a student, living at my parents’ home, came rushing back to me. Then as I joined the swelling number of fellow candidates, most of whom were relatively new in this country, those memories were supplemented by a flood of memories from my own advent here.

All this, and not to mention the weird feeling of entering an examination rooom, and sitting down at a school desk! My brain was overwhelmed with impressions both from my present and the past. All this too as I went into super concentration mode, as we were given our instructions on answering the questions before us.

For those who might be interested, the examination – before which might begin everybody had to surrender their mobile phones – consisted of a listening and reading test, a written paper with three choices (of which one had to choose two), and an aural examination. The written examination, which includes the listening and reading tests,  took 3 hours 45 minutes, and the aural was about 20 minutes.

However, quite unlike anything I remember in England, one is provided with a break here in Norway. Nothing can be taken out of the examination room, naturally, but after the listening test was over at about half past midday, I took advantage of this and bought myself something to eat at the local cafe. I needed strength for the main written paper I kept telling myself!

It is now getting distinctively “dark” here in the North. We are not quite in the Polar Night yet, but not far from it. Consequently, to a brain already on memory overload, the winter colours and sky hues brought memories back from my four years in Lødingen.

Anyhow, I am cautiously optimistic now that I have taken my first official examination here in Norway. Yet all these memories and impressions! I am tired out! Even so, tomorrow the bishop comes to inspect our parish…. ah well, no rest for the wicked!

The results of these examinations are not expected until December 4th. I’ll keep you posted.

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I find life is inherently ironic. The relationship I had with my father was at times “strained”. Yet now I find myself more and more like him every passing day! My father’s mannerisms are now mirrored in me – the very ones that used to vex me most!

When I think of my teenage years, indeed, there was a certain priest – whom since he yet lives I shall refrain from naming – who really got my goat. Today (and now I am almost cringing with the admission) I sound just like the man! Behind what I now see were superficial matters of disagreement, what troubled me most about that priest was that he raised one essential question. That was a sore point.

I was brought up in a tradition of boys’ choirs, and fine church music. We used to culture this, as indeed the language in which our rituals were written. Ironically (yet another irony!) we had a fast prayer that ought to have reminded us of the reason for our tradition, but this was just another ritual in the life of a chorister. That prayer, like the priest, raised the question of why one was in church in the first place.

Bless O Lord, us Thy servants who minister in Thy temple. Grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our daily lives; through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Now in those days there were many church choirs. As many of you here in Norway know, Britain had a tradition for them. The problem was that that same tradition had itself become our god: the music, the special language, the rituals and the culture were the most important thing to us if we had asked ourselves why we went to church.

I shall balance what I say by adding that in getting rid of choirs, and the tradition that used to exist, many “threw the baby out with the bathwater“. I personally regret that the boys’ choir (boys singing with men) is now almost an endangered species. Even so, at the heart of the processes of change, which unfortunately did see the loss of many a choral institution, was the desire to explore what being church is all about.

If our churchgoing was “vanity of vanities“, because we never asked ourselves truthful questions about why we were doing what we did, then it is perhaps the irony of ironies – life is so ironical – that the “worship groups” sometimes ended up doing exactly what the robed choirs and traditions they replaced had done before them. That is to say that now you had people enjoying the modern pop songs instead, but they still would not ask themselves why they otherwise went to church…

The beautiful song “When the Music Fades” by Matt Redman speaks of just this matter. The story of this song’s conception is well worth reading, because it very much sums up what has been written so far. As a church musician I am moved by the touching honesty of the words “I’m sorry for the thing I made it”. That “thing” of course is what we do in church, the music, the rituals, and this applies just as much to the modern choruses and songs as it did when I was a boy to the older hymns. “It’s all about You Jesus”, ought to be cry that compels itself out from our innermost being if we really are worshipping.

We ought all to reflect upon this worship song’s profound message. I have sometimes despaired that so-called “church choirs” do not sing in church, save for concerts and an occasional church service. Likewise it has saddened me to see that many church musicians seem to treat their work as a simple job. They plan out a series of events in the year, that mainly follows the school year, and those are the things they and their choirs/music groups then work towards. That is not “what it’s all about”!

A comment on my facebook wall set me off on this article. What, I was asked, did I think about Ris Church in Oslo that had replaced all its hymns for the music of U2? Well, if you have read my article, you will already know. I find it very sad that when people talk about making church less boring and instead wish to appeal to the masses (who not usually going to church certainly have not asked why they want to be there), and have not rather asked themselves “what it’s all about”. We are not talking about entertainment, but as Matt Redman so eloquently puts it “The Heart of Worship”.

I need say no more about Ris Church’s sorry experiment. In the long run it will fail, because even if the place is full to bursting point, the most they have achieved is an alternative venue for entertainment – a par with a concert hall or theatre. You do not bring growth to the Church by anything other than the Word of Jesus Himself.

This goes to the heart of what it means to be His follower. We who call ourselves Christians are expected to be doers, not merely hearers of what Jesus says. Going to church, or rather being church – it is we in fact who are the Church – is about meeting Jesus. It is about letting Him become the most important “be all and end all” in our life.

It is about a fellowship where – exactly as He Himself commanded His followers to do – we constantly remember how Jesus, the Lord we love, once had to die for us. Likewise in the Communion, we also are reminded that His death is what allows us to have a relationship with God Himself. We believe that through the mystery that is the Holy Communion, Jesus Himself does indeed come into us.

As for me, the prayer that once was a mere ritual is now very central to my work, “Bless O Lord us Thy Servants who minister in Thy temple: grant that what we sing with our lips, we may believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts, we may show forth in our daily lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen”. That prayer brings me therefore full circle: life as said is ironic!

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As some of you already know, I have been off on a tiring jaunt to Bergen. As a result of this, I have not been able to put my virtual pen to this virtual paper. With apologies to those who have missed me doing so, I shall therefore update the blog…

There are quite a few things that I could write about, but if I take the subject of Norwegian or English I can catch two birds with one stone. Firstly, this could be about nationality. I am in the process of changing mine. However, it seems that in order to become Norwegian, I must first apply for a new British passport just so that my old one does not run out in the 12 months or so that my application to become Norwegian is being processed! The Norwegian Department of Immigration (UDI) advised me today that I therefore have to apply for a new British passport – so I shall have a valid one to lose by the time I hopefully become Norwegian sometime at the beginning of 2011 (which is how long this process is going to take)!

So to the second musing on this theme. As I have already mentioned, the wonders of Facebook have put me in contact with people I have not met since my youth. Now when you become a “friend” on Facebook, by default your status message (a simple statement you make telling the world what you are doing or how you are feeling) gets shown on the Facebook page, or wall, of your friends.

Now I have never complained that my English friends do not write Norwegian, nor have I ever complained to my one German friend that I see German that I cannot understand popping up. However, last week one of my new found Facebook friends wrote to me saying “I do not “like” this, as I don’t understand what you are saying”.

It then occurred to me that we English – I shall have to use that inclusive pronoun at least as long as I remain a British Citizen – have an incredibly arrogant, insular, and conceited attitude. Since English is the de facto universal language, we do not take the task of speaking other languages terribly seriously. Yet so, we expect others to speak ours!

As for my blog, I have chosen to use English precisely because I wish it to be readable to the world; with Facebook, on the other hand, my status message is – as it is with the very person who made the comment – a part of my day to day life, and that just happens to be here in Norway and (while I do use English) most of the time is expressed in the normal language people use here. Needless to say that that is not English.

Now I realise that the person concerned just had not found out that you can “turn off” status messages from those friends you do not wish to see – a very simple procedure – but even so, turn this on its head, how is it acceptable for the one person to criticize my Norwegian status messages… and yet unthinkable for me to criticize the other for not writing in Norwegian. Ok, I understand English, it being mother tongue, so let me ask the question in another way, I don’t criticize my German friend for speaking in German (which I do not understand) so what makes English so holier than thou special?

I rarely agreed with anything Mrs Thatcher did or said. However, in her final week of power, when everybody ganged against her to stab her in the back, I remember her saying “It’s a funny old world”. With my two examples on the theme of Norwegian or English, I would have to agree. And it’s not “funny” “haha”…

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Today, with only a few breaks, it has done nothing but rain. The wind whipped the raindrops on to my windows, and drenched the fjord, mountains, and land outside from a very dreary grey sky. 

Today was the first day that there was less daylight here than further south. The equinox was yesterday. Now it gets darker.

Notwithstanding I love the North of Norway! Not one day is the same. Even if tomorrow is another day of rain; it will have its own character. Some people are bemused that I look forward to the darkest time of the year. Here is a clue: every day is special.

I remember when I last lived above the Polar Circle. That was when I was the organist of Lødingen between 1994 and 1998. In the Polar Night – which for those who have never experienced it is not completely dark – you could see the most fantastic colours in the sky in the middle of the day. Often a hue of some red, orange, pink, blue or purple reflected on everything on the ground. One day, however, I was on a school bus travelling out to Vestbygd, and it was a day pretty much like today. I looked at the waves crashing into the shore, as if they were in a frantic competition to get there before the wind driven rain. There was nothing boring about that wild day! Each day then is special, and never the same as the one before or after.

The Midnight Sun from May to the end of July is less interesting – in my opinion. Time seems to stop. It is just light all the time. So I am looking forward to my first Polar Night since 1997. If I am lucky, I might get to see the Northern lights too!

The North of Norway is fabulous!

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Welcome To My Muse. I am blogging again after a rest of two years.

CQD, my last blog, was primarily concerned with Peak Oil. Before this closed, it briefly split to form the separate 11th September blog, CQD 911. Both were closed at the end of July 2007.

With respect to Peak Oil, this week’s announcement by the French oil firm Total proves that I and everybody else who vainly tried to wake people up, were right all along. The world is now heading into the energy crisis that we were warning about. As for the 11th September, it is clear that the official version of events – that most people including myself accepted without question after those horrendous events in 2001 - is completely discredited. More and more people are coming to the same conclusion that the ever growing number of building professionals, now nearly nine hundred, have reached. It is a matter of time before that will become the biggest news story in this century.

However, for several reasons, I shall not now be writing a blog that is directly political; I shall however try to make you think. So without further ado, let me try to do just that…

One of the amazing things about Facebook is that you can come into contact with people you haven’t seen for years. Indeed, this week, I was contacted via Facebook by a person I have not met since Þe olde days of my childhood. Having then posted a picture from that time, she went and “tagged” someone else in that picture, and suddenly I was back in contact with that person - and through that person with some other people, and so on.

Anyhow, and back to lady that started all this off, I was chatting. Suddenly she commented that I had not changed. Well, I wanted to know what she meant….

In many ways our discussion could be likened to Pilate’s question. You’ll remember from your bibles that he had asked what truth was. Well inasmuch as until recent times (11th September understood) the idea that our governments could work against their own people would have been unthinkable, those of us who are not convinced of this might well ask this same question.

Furthermore, something very disorientating occurs with your identity, when you grow up believing – as “we” did (we of course being we in the West) – that you were on the “good” side, and then you find out that your side wanted to crush those who tore down the Berlin wall. The hypocrisy of course is all the more disturbing: we grew up in the cold war believing that that was a bad thing, and that the communists were the bad guys. Then the BBC goes and reports that Mrs Thatcher and the French wanted, not only to stop the opening up of the wall (so as to stop German reunification) – but that “we” were wanting the Russians to use the military to stop the wall from falling! Had “our” wishes been granted of course, “we” could then continue saying bad things about the communists for the very thing “we” (behind closed walls) had persuaded them to do!

So to the remark that I hadn’t changed..  I was informed that that was because I could argue strongly for this or that, but that this did not change anything. That I had to give her. Nevertheless, in this my musing, let me continue with some rhetorical questioning.

Nothing is changed, or gets changed by knowing what we now know, or by pointing it out. Yet perhaps that is not quite true. You will notice that I put the pronoun “we” in quotation marks. Certainly, for my part, something very fundamental has changed, and that is that whatever it is that makes you think of yourself – from birth through your formative years – as being part of something, has most certainly been changed. The very premises, if you like, of who I am (I cannot speak for anyone else) have been shown to be false, and therefore everything else that has been built upon those premises has – at the very least – to be reappraised.

Another way of looking at this is by thinking of your average school class. Is not something going on here, that is to say, are ”we” not building a society in the hearts and minds of the young. Of course, indeed the whole point of schooling is to impart “our” values and so on. It is a building project: flesh and blood are the building materials. That is why we feel the concept of shame if we break the conventions and rules that get laid down during this time. I suppose that, if you want to analyse it, that is where the stigma comes from about going to prison. The connection is, in other words, to the first authority in one’s life, when one was a part of that building project that is “our” society, that is “us”.

Now – please note that I am NOT discussing here whether the US Government were behind the attacks of the 11th September, nor “our” desire  that the Russians should crush the reunification of Germany by military force - I ask what this does for us EXISTENTIALLY, in terms of who we are, IF (rhetorically and hypothetically speaking) such monstrous things BE admitted to be the truth. 

It does not change anything at all to point out things that actually have been declassified – as in the case of Mrs Thatcher and the reunification of Germany. Yet what if your upbringing were Christian. How do you, for example, continue to go to church professing righteousness and truth when you – being a part of that “we” in speech marks - are consequently part of anything but? It is no good saying that you personally have nothing to do with this  (well yes you can, but then you have to change some of the premises of what you stand for), because your faith is not a private matter. If yours is, well sorry, but mine is the expression of something “we” believed in as the body of Christ.

I suppose I am grappling with existential things hard to explain.  Nevertheless, in the simplest terms possible, where it is demonstrated that what “we” stood for – “we” who thought we were on the good side – was evil and plain wrong, at the very least that concept of “we”, “us”, “our”, and “ours” fall apart. The trouble is that undermines the legitimacy of every authority that rests upon “our” values, since “we” as such can no longer exist…

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