nevermind the bricolage

The Great Stink+Pure Filth

I came across a remarkable essay by Stassa Edwards in Cabinet magazine about the 'Great Stink of 1858. It concerned the overflowing of the river Thames into the streets of London and the unleashing of a putrid stench stemming from the long-term practice of dumping waste of all kinds-animal, industrial and human, in the summer of 1858.

The essay explores the modern city and its relation to human waste, to dirt, to shit--there's a great line, "The Great Stink was, perhaps, an unwelcome metaphor for London's paradoxical modernity: it was the epicenter of a world power, its citizens could fundamentally change human knowledge, but all of this could be ended by a plumbing problem. and that is exactly what the great stink was: an epic plumbing catastrophe nearly two thousand years in the making."

Without stretching a metaphor too far, I am fairly convinced that after a couple of thousand years Christianity has a plumbing problem as well--it is over-flowing with shit--the detritus of centuries of dumping crap into the river of faith. Dogma, doctrines, ideas and metaphors that undermine the perception of what religion is, what it's functions are, how it works etc. Towards the end of the essay Edwards writes,

"Perhaps the Great Stink is an urban madeleine of sorts--not the sweet-smelling spongy cake that Proust envisioned, but a foul-smelling, deformed inversion of it. It invades the senses, creating memories of sensory revulsion. It reminds us of how quickly our smart city existences can devolve into primitive conditions."

One could argue that the rise of fundamentalisms in the early 21st century are indicative of the devolution of religion into a primitive, barbaric state.

Anyway, the essay prompted me to begin to address some ideas that I've been kicking around in my head for at least a couple of decades, just some niggling thoughts that I have wrestled with over the years related to what it means to have faith, to live a life impacted by religion, and a notion that the sterile, sanitized version of Christianity that most of us have experienced is an elaborate veneer masking a smell that needs to be addressed.

So I'm giving a series of talks called, Pure Filth, which will explore things like vulgarity, disgust, the unclean, the profane, the dirty and everything we tend to avoid but which are in fact, everyday realities and experiences for all of us in life--and maybe this will tease out another way of thinking about religion, or maybe it will just be a load of crap.

The very provocative image at the top is by Odd Nerdrum, entitled, Ecce Homo.

(Village Church 343 S. Church Lane, LA 90049 at 11:45am Sundays)

clouds illusions

I've been teaching a class on theology and media, focusing primarily on television and digital media, exploring the acceleration of change and the theological implications of living mediated lives. As I come to this class every eighteen months or so I am aware of how quickly things shift and change. We now find ourselves in the era of 'cloud' technology, the digitality of the present/future seems to be this strange notion of the cloud-our information, our lives, disappearing into internet vapour and no longer living on our computers.

Surely one of the more interesting dynamics of digital living is the growing disconnect with materiality when it comes to our stuff--our music library is made up of files rather than tape or vinyl, our photos are digital, our letters and communications are e-mail, text, tweets-seldom tangible, mediated via machines--mobile devices, laptops, ipads etc. And then there is the cloud-we are intensely suspicious of this sudden appearing, because like much of digital technology it appears to us in a finished form and we are caught up in it before we even know what's really go on and our thoughts about it are usually retroactive-it's only when it works against us rather than for us that we realize its dark side--the recent leak of celebrity nude pics, hacked from the cloud basically--you might delete something from your phone, but it's not gone, nothing  is ever 'gone', it's stored in the cloud which surrounds us, consumes, subsumes us in its vaporous nothingness.

Now it seems to me that there is something of a connect here with some forms of theological reflection. There is a history of 'cloud theology,' be it works, like The Cloude of Unknowyng, the anonymous Middle-English book on contemplative prayer, or Nichols Cusa's 'cloud of impossibility' which addresses the concept of learned ignorance (not-knowing to put it in contemporary terms perhaps), a sort of return to Socratic inquiry.

Cloud computing places everything within our reach but removes it from our grasp-we have to access it through a process, it doesn't live on our devices, they become tools of access. 

The interesting thing about cloud technology is that it’s not a place or location, it’s a highway system. Look at the Google data center in the image above-it's all tubes and pipes. The Cloud contains loads of information and files, but that reality only articulates itself when I go to my computer, launch a programme and resume work on something at the point I left it on my ipad earlier. And we are not really supposed to be thinking about this very much, even though every digital outlet from Apple to Google to Amazon is championing its benefits, we’re simply meant to realize that we can have our data where we need it, when we need it.

Socrates declared that "All I know is that I know nothing," which was the inspiration for Cusa's move to learned ignorance, the premise being that what we know is contingent and we cannot know things precisely because what we know of anything is through relations. For Cusa, the cloud is defined by blindness, darkness and ignorance (an apt metaphor it seems to me for our understanding of the digital cloud), and it is this cloud that we must deal with when we consider the sacred--the darkness itself, if you like, is illuminating.

 

The cloud confronts us with contradictions-both the theological cloud of unknowing and the digital cloud---we don't know enough but we are in relation, and we need to reflect on our not-knowing, our ignorance rather than jump to conclusions and simplistic answers.

In his wonderful book, Nudities, Giorgio Agamben writes,

"The ways in which we do not know things are just as important (and perhaps even more important) as the ways in which we know them...it is possible, in fact, that the way in which we are able to be ignorant is precisely what defines the rank of what we are able to know and that the articulation of a zone of non-knowledge is the condition and at the same time the touchstone of all our knowledge...The act of living is, in this sense, the capacity to keep ourselves in harmonious relationship with what escapes us."

It's virtually impossible not to enter the digital cloud these days, unless one opts out of all connectivities related to the Internet, but avoidance and resistance has seldom seemed the right move to me, and when it comes to digitality I think it is not possible, better then to take some time to frame our ignorance. The same would be true for me when it comes to issues of the sacred-a learned ignorance, and informed not-knowing might just be the pathway not only to fresh understandings but also out of old cul-de-sacs.

 

 

maundy thursday

Maundy Thursday's not really about washing feet is it? Funny how an example of a way of being in the world is often reduced to a ritual performance, a rehearsal rather than an embodiment of an alternative consciousness about life and living and being human.Foot-washing in the 21st century has a very different set of associations than the 1st century I imagine, there it was a necessary part of life dealing with the dirt and dust of walking-today it is performed in the sanctified environs of religious enclosure-it still has impact, still carries meaning, but I fear it is viewed as simply part of the easter event-the various regular rituals that are performed during Holy Week.

If  I were in complete charge of a church these days I would essentailly invert Easter--deprive it of the pomp and circumstance and make it all happen 'off-campus' in the real world, rather than in the suspended space of religious performance where so much gets said and so much gets left behind when we depart.

what happened to the soul?

 

One of the topics that I brought up early on in my latest theology and culture class was the issue of the self and the shifting terrain of the soul. The 'erasure of the self,' a term I used from Mark I. Wallace, is an issue of real importance to the realm of the religious in my opinion. Our understanding of what it means to be human, how we think or perceive of the condition of human nature, and particularly, the body and soul dualism that has generally been regarded as given. For most of our history in Western civilization we have operated with a classic view of the self, gifted to us by the Greeks etc., the idea that the 'soul' is subjective and exists outside of matter. There has been a lot of re-thinking of these concepts, and above is yet another from Iain McGilchrist, asking whether or not the use of the term soul has any value or currency in the world today--spoiler--he thinks it does, but redefines it nicely I think.

(There is a blank spot in the video because of music copyright issues but you can listen to the piece yourself via another source)

This lecture is part of an ongoing series created by the RSA to consider spirituality anew in the 21st century.

new orthodoxies

I try to avoid the Christian brouhahas as much as possible, the storm-in-a-teacup attitude and indignation that often springs up around an idea or person or theological perspective, but I happened across a little flare-up this past week that piqued my curiosity mainly because it involved some friends of mine, so I followed the rabbit trail. The whole thing began with an article by someone in Christianity Today and was about the 'wings of wax' passed onto to three evangelical leaders which resulted in their erroneous views on things essentially (I'm not going to go into the whole thing because it is really not worth it, so I'm not trying to be completely accurate), including a potential slide into universalism, abandoning church and the authority of scripture etc--the usual stuff that gets thrown around when people start moving beyond the boundaries and borders that others still find comforting. There was a statement about how in 2003 the future looked so bright, but somehow it all went wrong and ultimately it went wrong because these three leaders broke bounds and the remedy therefore is to 'get back into the fold,' or at least that's my take on it, I also thought it was ridiculously naive overall.

Now these three people were never people I regarded as carving any trail for me, one of them in particular I know very little of, and I didn't jump on his bandwagon at all, in fact, I didn't even understand the fuss (my only real connection was via another friend who took the books title and reconfigured it as a potential for his own memoir--Fucked Up Like Jazz Fusion--seemed much more like a book I would want to read!!), but I understand the liberation they brought to many who were feeling confined or constricted by theological and ecclesiological grids that no longer sufficed, and I have heard many of those same people wondering lately what happened, i.e. "where is the great movement etc?"

This article, along with a few others over the past year or so, seems to have questioned whether or not anything really happened, and whether its all over now, a flash in the pan rather than a long term thing.

A couple of thoughts. Firstly, I think that culturally, and I aways position what happens to the church in terms of its embeddedness in culture, we are in a bit of a holding pattern. Alongside the new moves in 'church-world' there were new moves in culture and technology, the last decade saw two huge things heralded by the digital shift--smart phone technology and the emergence of the social web-I don't think we can over-estimate what a massive shift these things brought about a decade or so ago. they are not new anymore, they are part of the fabric of our lives and we can't imagine life without them, or before them! And yet, like church movements that sparked a a few years back, we seem to be in a bit of a holding pattern with the social changes and shifts promised by new technological opportunities, we still have not fully worked out the monetising aspects (and lets face it, economics is the thing here--maybe with technology and also with church movements)and there is a bit of a tendency for all of this to feel a little just like newer versions of old broadcast technologies as people rely on old ways while working out new ones. But it's early days, an infrastructure has been laid, groundwork has been done, and it seems like we are in a bit of a dead zone. That could be the new reality, or it could be that we are simply pausing as new responses are developed.

A lot of the early digital activity was around the rejecting of the old ways, the old orthodoxies that shaped our lives pre-social media etc. there was energy, spark and fire everywhere, much like those giddy days the author referenced in his reflections on a decade ago. But there weren't too many 'new orthodoxies' and that I think is the task of the next phase--a time not for innovation but inventiveness. I am not sure that there will be any big technological change for a while--we might get Apple TV or whatever, but its seems that, at least for a while, our new horizon has been established and its fueled by mobility and the social-web, so this is our reality, and it is in this reality we must now turn our attention.

The author used the analogy of the Fall of Icarus as a descriptive of what has happened--these men were equipped with wings of wax by the church that birthed them and they have fallen to earth (or into error) and now we should all be chastened by this and return to a more robust embrace of three things the author obviously feels they didn't take seriously enough.

My take is somewhat different. I don't think they flew to close to the sun, I just think there are a lot of people around who are afraid to fly.

writing on the wall?

 

I have to admit that a part of me just cant take the tone of this ad which aired during last week's Superbowl. I didn't watch it on TV, unfortunately American football is completely lost on me, but I did see the ad a number of times online and was aware of the broad responses that pinged around the web, positive and negative, regarding the 'diversity' of America, which was too much for some people apparently. The co-mingling of America the Beautiful with lyrics praising coke was, well, sappy as far as I am concerned, but again, the level of patriotism and nationalism surrounding major sporting events is something that I still marvel at, but I was not surprised that they took this approach with the music. The very simple payoff for the ad was that a diverse America finds unity around coca-cola, probably more likely to find it around that than around other things like religion. Consider this image which came via the Public religion Research Institute, which notes the disparity of attitudes and practices around religion between generations. It's quite a stunning image really, no matter where you might place yourself on the grid, the writing is there on the wall--things need to change, if there is much chance of connecting organized religion with younger demographics. These figures do not reflect the more subtle issues and nuances that are also part of generational theories, because there are always anomalies, but nevertheless, there are some strong signs here that should not be ignored.

The growing trend towards non-affiliation is quite a thing when viewed in comparison. I have a conversation about stuff like this on a nearly daily basis, or at least it feels that way, with people for whom these realities are something they don't choose to face with much semblance of desire to do anything at all about it, and I doubt seriously if this image or these statistics will put much of a dent in the resistance, but you never know, perhaps this time it will.

Revolutionary acts and the Scandal of Normality

Rolling Stone have put Pope Francis on the cover of their latest edition, thereby sealing his cool factor into the pop-culture psyche. It's remarkable how quickly this man has managed to capture the imagination of people who one would not expect to be interested at all. Even someone like TV host of HBO's Real Time, Bill Maher, whose disdain for all things religious seems to run pretty deep has sounded almost bullish about the man.

I continua to have concerns about the lack of substantive shifts on major policies within the church particularly around sexuality and gender, but I am also quite taken by his swift change of gears and the amazing results it has produced in the cultural perception of the office of a Pope and perhaps even of the church itself, at least in the short term.

The RS article is pretty thorough, say what you will about Rolling Stone's demise over the past decades into little more than another gossip/promotional rag driven by a culture of gossip, it still manages to offer really thoughtful articles on wide ranges of topics, and this essay on Pope Francis is no exception.

A fair piece of the article is devoted to his personal style and how it has been the catalyst for a sea-change in both perception outside and perhaps practice inside the church. The article acknowledges that so far Francis has produced little in the way of substantive doctrinal change, but perhaps argues that this is not really the way things will change anyway, an idea I found quite fascinating. There have been accusations even from conservative insiders that francis is more about style than substance, but Thomas Reese, a catholic analyst is quoted, saying that in the Catholic church style is substance, that a church of symbols responds to symbolic gestures better than other methods. It would seem that much of the world outside the catholic church agrees, symbolic gestures would seem to be well received, especially when they are so obviously in tune with the very real issues that many in the world face. It should come as no surprise really that francis has gained resonance because he has principally addressed and critiqued runaway capitalism, greed, disparity and the growing loss of concern for those being left behind in the wake of economic shifts and changes in the economies of the world. When tweets make the rounds over and over concerning last weeks snippet that 85 billionaires have as much wealth as half the rest of the world or something ridiculous like that, it makes sense that a pope who calls this for what it is-complete madness-would find a level of popularity. After all religion is generally presumed to speak for the poor and dispossessed, of course, the fact that people seem genuinely surprised when it does, goes a long way to demonstrating what the central problem people have with religion.

You should buy the magazine and read the article for yourself, but there were a couple of little quotes I would like to address because I think they are pertinent for anyone in the religion game these days.

Speaking of his ascent to the papacy, the author, Mark Binelli, notes that when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis has never been a very good public speaker, but once he became Pope, "his recognizable humanity comes off as positively revolutionary. Against the absurd, impossibly baroque backdrop of the Vatican, a world still run like a medieval court, Francis' election represents...a scandal of normality."

Recognizable humanity and the scandal of normality--two key factors in his ascent to 'people's pope' if you will. If you combine those two ingredients with his ability and experience of genuine human struggle and an understanding of the need for the church to represent something other than the moralizing, sex-obsessed, petty, vindictive, judgmental vehicle it has largely come to be for the most part(and I'm speaking here of the whole church, not just the catholic arm of it), you have the groundwork for, or at least the potential for serious change in the relationship between church and culture.

on tradition

I read a couple of interesting articles on the Guardian digital site lately that deal with very different issues--one on religion, the other on food, but there were so many potential intersections. The religious article was a response to the ridiculous response to an experiment with changing the verbiage in the Baptism Rite--taking out the reference to 'renouncing the devil' and replacing it with more culturally accessible wording. Of course, for some this is tantamount to sacrificing chickens on the altar and naturally heralds the absolute decline of the church. According to one retired bishop (generally the best kind of bishop in my mind), this amounted to a 'dumbing down' of Christianity--blah blah blah. So the article defended the experiment and attempted to argue for a more reasoned response to this kind of thing.

The second article was in the food section, and was about tradition, culinary tradition, and the fuss that happens when things get changed. There is some small comfort in knowing that religion is not alone in being subjected to stupid arguments in the name of the defense of tradition. And I call them stupid, because like many arguments from the upholders of the status quo, there is a naive understanding of the very concept of how tradition is both preserved and honoured. The complete title of the food article, which was drawn from a forthcoming book, The Virtues of the Table, by Julian Baggini is , The changing taste of food and drink traditions. his essay essentially argues that tradition is safest in the hands of adapters, not preservationists.

This stuff appeals to me because I work in an environment where tradition is often sacrosanct and apparently unassailable, where 'we always done it that way' is perceived as a legitimization for continuing to do things that are no longer helpful. I get it, we all hold arcane ideas that get in the way, things become so special to us, so familiar, so comfortable, we cannot conceive of a way forward without them, but when it comes to religion, I think that is death--and that goes for ritual practices and theological ideas--the ideas and the praxis.

Baggini argues that what we view as tradition, usually has a much shorter history than we know--he cites pasta-the definitive Italian dish, declaring that it did not become so until after WW2. This and a few other little tidbits about the development of 'italian cooking' underscore his argument that tradition is movement not stasis,, that adaptation, incorporation, synthesis and innovation are as much a part of tradition as historic practice is.

This reminded me of Anthony Appiah's book, Cosmopolitanism, which exposes the cross-pollination of cultural ideas and exchanges in creating the world we live in--he does a great piece of the development of Kente cloth and the role of outside cultures in the development and creation of what became a defining pattern cloth of a part of Africa.

“Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren't authentic; they're just dead”--I would argue that you could replace the word society with food, or religion and come to the same conclusions.

The church in general, and perhaps mainline Christianity in particular, is feeling a little pressed and threatened at the moment, and for many the answer lies in a sort of circling of the wagons, appealing to tradition as a way to resist change, rather than seeing the moment as an opportunity to authentically honour tradition by adapting. I think it was Picasso who said, "you can honour tradition by wearing your grandfather's hat or by having grandchildren" all too often the church I work in reaches for the hat. Now I am not a traditionalist, or a purist on any level, so it might be easy for me to say, I can be quite utilitarian at times and let things go without too much heartache, I realize that is not true for all, but please let's not pretend we are defending or protecting tradition, let's just be honest and say we like things this way and are uncomfortable with change--aah but that's a bit personal isn't it? That means taking responsibility for ones own choices, preferences and proclivities, something we often find difficult-but that's called maturity, and if religion has any purpose for me grwoing up and taking responsibility for my life is a central part of how I understand Christianity to be of value to me.

Perhaps those who are worried about the dumbing down of all things Christian should read Alan Mann's book, Atonement for a Sinless Society, which, when it was published a few years back, argued that the concept of sin has dramatically changed in our culture and we need new ways to engage concepts of evil, sin etc.,--but that would require adaptation and for some...

They used to think the entrance to hell looked this this as well--maybe we should bring that back, or maybe some still do?

 

where the gods hide: thoughts on skin and microsoft surface

 

“I think of tattooing as scratching off the surface and revealing what’s really under there" Mr. X

A bus went past me this morning with a huge ad plastered all over it for the Microsoft tablet, Surface. I have never used anything but Apple products, so I have no idea of it's quality or functionality, but I do think it's name captures something of the times in which we live in a canny way. I mean let's face it, the whole 'i' this or that feels a little dated to me. Steve jobs had a fascination with skeuomorphic design--bringing unnecessary elements from one iteration of a design into a new version in order to naturalize the experience--so the notepad app on your device looked sort of like a yellow legal notepad, etc. One of the big complaints about the iOS7 upgrade was its 'flatness.' That skeuomorphic tendency continues to be reflected in the names of Apple products--I doubt it can or will change because it has become the brand marker, but again, your iphone isn't really a phone, its a mobile device that has phone capabilities but it's not a phone--nor for that matter is my ipad, a pad--its a surface. So kudos to Microsoft for capturing what's going on in the name of a device.

 I think I probably have a heightened awareness to surfaces at the moment because I have been reading Mark C. Taylor's Hiding, in the theology book group I participate in. Taylor views his work as 'a surface play' rather than a book, and it is a celebration and critique of the surface of things.

"Surface has never been accepted and embraced as such but is always justified in terms of the heavens or the depths. When height and depth collapse, we are left with nothing more and nothing less than the proliferation of fleeting surfaces. To insist that these surfaces obscure more secure depths is to flee the creative-destructive effervescence that is our condition." MCT

My interest in surface goes back a long way, it crystallized during my PhD work, where I explored the  new cultural implication for Christianity. I used this term, rhyzomic sacralization, to mark the way in which ideas move across the surface of the culture, linking, and forming webs of connectivity as we attempt to negotiate the new digital realities. My thinking on this was influenced by things like Kevin Costner's Waterworld, and the work of artist Mark Tansey, and other explorations of things that flat on the surface of culture, often viewed as inconsequential, but in my mind, of import both in terms of reflection and reaction to how the world shapes us even as we shape it.

I'm also fascinated by tattoos and, as part of my field research component, explored tattooing as means by which we could understand the cultural shifts that were literally being inscribed upon the surface of us, upon our skin. I think the broad embrace of tattooing by mainstream society, and the use of dermis as a site for inscribing meaning is very interesting and again, comes back to this shift to surface idea. Of course, it is more than tattooing on the surface of skin, there are other elements that go deeper--body-piercings, modifications etc., but those still remain slightly further on the margins than tattooing. I was inspired to this by the work of shelley Jackson, whose Skin project I came across in Cabinet magazine. She had a story and wanted to write it on skin, so she invited people to volunteer to be tattooed with a single word from the story. Only those who signed on would know the whole story, and they had to be willing to get any word they were given tattooed on the body in a classic book font and in black ink--over 2000 have participated,

I am not dystopian, surprising given my tendency toward depression and melancholy, but I pursue a positive trajectory across the cultural surface--surface is depth--and meaning is made here. That doesn't mean I am optimistic, because optimism is hard for me. But this resistance to dystopian positioning has often put me at odds, or at least on a different trajectory, with many of my peers who approach culture through the lens of religion. There seems to be a tendency to lead with critique, a product of certain religious conditioning I believe, whereas, to echo the other Taylor, I go with celebration. It's not that I won't, or don't critique, it's that I won't hold up the past as a model for something to return to--I see no benefit in reaching back, reflecting back sure, but the times are what they are, and they need to be critiqued and celebrated on their own terms, and critique is easy-the making is the hard part. Celebration has 'respect' as part of it's definition, so perhaps I should say, I respect and critique.

"What I am trying to do is to articulate the conditions of alternative cultural practices. I'm convinced that in the twenty-first century, the domain of social and political contestation will be the symbolic order or the imaginary register. That is where what once was called "reality" will be constituted. I see it as incumbent upon us to understand these structures and processes and to develop strategies and tactics that will enable us to intervene effectively." MCT

This fascination with surface has also affected the way I think about the inner/outer components of religion. The positing of going inward as going deeper versus allowing the surface to be the site of religious interface. What I mean is we tend to what to plumb the depths of our humanity by ignoring the skin, the flesh, the surface, in fact, we don't just ignore, we demonize, negate and repress the surface in the quest for religious depth and authenticity and I am not sure this is either necessary or helpful in the interplay of surfaces which is life in the 21st century. In Waterworld (I know, but it's good:)), Kevin Costner's character has developed a set of gills, which enable him to go below the surface and bringup artifacts that can still have life on the surface. There is a whole world down there, under the water, it used to be the 'real world' now it's the ghost of a past that is no longer viable. He doesn't want to live there, he just brings up what can be used on the surface. This for me is the shift we must make with our religion, we cannot live in the depths, submerged in an old world, we have to find ways to live on the surface in new ways, floating across the seas, building new networks of being and relations. some artifacts from the old world can be utilized, most of them can't--this is particularly true of religion for me.

paramapada sopaanam--the ladder to salvation

Board games are not really my thing, but I had one brought into my mind the other day because someone was talking about their kids loving 'chutes and ladders,' there were three brits in the room and we all raised our eyebrows and looked at each other with that derisive British 'oh those poor Americans' look. Chutes and Ladders is the americanized name for Snakes and Ladders, a long time board game that I was surprised still had currency with kids, but there again, games are games and the simplicity has an appeal I suppose. Snakes and Ladders came from India, and made its way into British culture in the victorian era, around 1892 apparently. The earlier roots of the game were linked to various religious streams in India, the earliest perhaps called, Moksha Patam was concerned with concepts of fate and karma, later versions were linked to other ideas connected to Hindu thought and practices around everyday consciousness. Life as a mixture of skill and good luck, the ladders representing virtues such as faith, generosity and humility, the snakes, lust, anger, theft, with the overall lesson being that a person can attain salvation(moksha) by acts of virtue, and the snakes will slide you down the karmic scale into the lower depths of rebirth. Who knew? And the phrase, "back to square one," apparently came from this game.

So much of our life is coloured by things that emerged from times when religion played a much greater role in the shaping of the fabric of life. of course, snakes and ladders is not presented as a religious exercise, simply a kids game that brings fun and enjoyment. most games seem to trade in the same binary oppositions that S+L trades in, whether it be defeating an enemy, winning positions, gaining points etc. Below is what Salman rushdie wrote about snakes and ladders in his book, Midnight's Children, I appreciated his comment about the lack of ambiguity, this to me, is the great challenge for schemes to portray the world, how does one convey a key element of life and of any religious ideology--ambiguity?

“The moment I was old enough to play board games I fell in love with Snakes and Ladders. A perfect balance of rewards and penalties, seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice. Clambering up ladders slithering down snakes I spent some of the happiest days of my life. When in my time of trial my father challenged me to master the game of shatranji I infuriated him by preferring to invite him instead to chance his fortune among the ladders and nibbling snakes.

All games have morals and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures as no other activity can hope to do the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb a snake is waiting just around the corner and for every snake a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that no mere carrot-and-stick affair because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things the duality of up against down good against evil the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuousities of the serpent. In the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see metaphorically all conceivable opposition: Alpha against Omega, father against mother. Here is the war of Mary and Martha and the polarities of knees and nose... but I found very early in my life that the game lacked one crucial dimension that of ambiguity - because as events are about to show it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake... Keeping things simple for the moment however I recrod that no sooner had my mother discovered the ladder to victory represented by her racecourse luck than she was reminded that the gutters of the country were still teeming with snakes.”