8 out of 10 cats

In last week's Channel 4 programme a member of the panel, a gay man, referred to Jesus as the hottest Jew on a stick. Funny perhaps. And anyway Jews and Christians are fair game.

Also on the show was an item about the paralympics, potentially one of the richest sources of humour imaginable. No poking of fun whatsoever.

Why are we so selective in our squeamishness, so unequal in the distribution of our bad taste? Why is The Vicar of Dibley acceptable to the BBC but The Imam of Dibley no laughing matter to the lawyers of ITV?

No, Jesus! No, Jesus! No!

I have often found myself in a minority of one when exercising the human right of disagreeing with Jesus. That's because I do it as a kind of Christian talking to other Christians. We're not supposed to say that Jesus might have been wrong.

But the only other options are either blind obedience to the literal meaning of the scripture or subtle exegesis/eisegesis to ensure that the Lord's words always accord with our own prejudices.

Jumping off

The trouble with joined-up thinking is that there are so many different ways of joining things (thoughts) up. I find it attractive, as in a really persuasive speech, but increasingly unsatisfactory.

So I'm going to try the way of the desultory. A desultor was an equestrian acrobat who entertained the crowd by leaping from one swiftly moving horse to another. That's what I'm going to do in this blog - to jump randomly from one thing to another. One of the fears I shall have to face down in doing this is the fear of being, or seeming, disconnected or superficial. Still, no more detailed explanation or it rather defeats the object.

It can't be!

Yes it is the same George W Bush that the historian John Lewis Gaddis is talking about here:

"The President has surprised me more than once with comments on my own books soon after they’ve appeared, and I’m hardly the only historian who has had this experience. I’ve found myself improvising excuses to him, in Oval Office seminars, as to why I hadn’t read the latest book on Lincoln, or on—as Bush refers to him—the “first George W.” I’ve even assigned books to Yale students on his recommendation, with excellent results."

Don't you just love it when facts get in the way of popular prejudice?

A step too far

Taking the money from those who would find more oil and gas and giving it to those who will consume more oil and gas is an absurdity. And that's what Tim Worstall thinks a windfall tax on the energy companies would be.

67% of Britons in a YouGov poll strongly disagreed with him, and he fears that the government will be willing to pander to the ignorance of the populace in order to garner votes.

His counterblast though is a bit drastic:

Perhaps it's time to revive a saying from one of the good socialists (ie,
one of the dead ones), Bertold Brecht. Time to elect a new people
possibly.

Imam of Dibley

From Adam Sherwin:

Have you heard the one about the Islamic comedy sketch that ITV ordered its latest star to remove? Katy Brand was the victim of humourless lawyers who instructed her to delete a harmless-sounding spoof called The Imam of Dibley.

“It was not intended to be offensive,” says the comedian, whose Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show returns on ITV2. “A new imam arrives in a sleepy parish and the comedy arrives from the misunderstandings that causes. But the lawyers said it might be culturally insensitive.”

It’s no laughing matter, argues Brand, 29, an Oxford theology graduate. “The vast majority of Muslims are able to have a laugh at themselves just like everyone else.

Why should they be excluded from comedy? It’s funny that ITV had no problem with a new sketch about a pregnant Jesus’s girlfriend who has to deal with dating the Son of God.”

Rowan Atkinson has expressed similar concerns about comedy censorship. But Brand is particularly peeved to lose her imam of Dibley. “I really liked the outfit.”

Not only Rowan Atkinson. Ben Elton too has accused the BBC of being too 'scared' to allow jokes about Islam.

MiJulie

Cath Elliott wishes Julie Burchill well in her quest for enlightenment but insists that 'Christian feminist' is an oxymoron.

In any society where religion dominates it is women who pay the price: we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether or not any particular religion sanctions so-called honour crimes for example, but what's unarguable is that men's interpretation of religion, and the patriarchal values that religion instills, has led to the murders of countless women. Similarly, it's in the name of religion that girls are denied an education; in the name of religion that more than half a million women die every year because they cannot access safe abortions; in the name of religion that Aids continues its unrelenting progress across Africa, and in the name of religion that women throughout the world remain subjugated, impoverished and denied individual agency.

The Prince and the Paupers

Paul Collier defends genetic modification against Prince Charles and in the cause of famine relief.

Europe can afford romanticism, but the African poor cannot. The return to organic peasant agriculture is an appealing fantasy with disturbing consequences. The GM ban has already persisted for 12 years: how much more hunger must be endured before it is faced down?

No sob story

I miss miJulie's regular column in the Guardian, but here she is taking a stick to them atheists - for the love of Christ.

The middle wall

“Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.”

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (Lincoln, nb 1997), 200.

Good news from Baghdad

Given my history as an Anglican pacifist, I was hardly a wholehearted supporter of the Iraq war. What I did notice though was the number of people on the political (anti-American?) left, not otherwise committed to non-violence, who could see no possible good coming from the overthrow of Saddam's evil regime.

For them, and for me, this surely is good news.

Health care costs

Tim Worstall offers this to cheer up those who insist that health care costs are rising and will continue to rise evermore.

"It's worth remembering that in the 1940s penicillin was so expensive, because we didn't know how to purify it very well, that it was recycled from the urine of those receiving it. Today, well, "amoxicillin, 21 capsules, 87p; trimethoprim, 28 tablets, 45p".

Being Dead

Still not sure where I'm going with this here blog, but here's a quote from the latest novel we've been reading in our book club.

It's "Being Dead" by Jim Crace. I'll share my introduction with you later, but here's a taster:

'Whatever philosophical claims we might make for ourselves, human kind is only marginal. We hardly count in the natural orders of zoology. We'll not be missed.' Joseph, in a rare display of scientific passion, had told a student . . when she had been too dismissive of the earth's smaller beings. 'They might not have a sense of self, like us. Or memory. Or hope. Or consciences. Or fear of death. They might not know how strong and wonderful they are. But when every human being in the world has perished, and all our sewerage pipes and gas cookers and diesel engines have fossilized, there will still be insects.'

It has always seemed extraordinary to me that when human beings wish to insist on their superiority to other creatures, they invariably select for comparison those very human characteristics that they are naturally bound to excel in. The capacity for prolonged survival in the most extreme conditions is not one of them.

Thus saith MadPriest

"If you don't believe me, read that Bible thing people keep going on about."

Pure poetry!

An old friend

In the Church Times, Prebendary Neil Richardson writes:

On the subject of homosexuality, the Archbishop of Sudan says that "Our Muslim neighbours view us as completely infidel . . . they think what we are doing in the church is completely evil."
What an opportunity the Archbishop has to witness before his Muslim neighbours to the Christian view of the ultimate worth and dignity of humanity made in the image of God, whether presenting themselves as homosexual or otherwise. I would urge him and the other African bishops to stand up to the sharia-driven punitive attitudes of Islam, and stand alongside those whose human dignity is denied and negated simply because they are not heterosexual.
The Archbishop will need great courage to do this, and support from all of us to face up to the storm. The time has come for Christians to make a stand in the name of the Christ who died on the cross to redeem the world, and embrace and welcome gay and lesbian people everywhere.

Sounds Christian enough for me!

Europhobia?

I used to get panic attacks whenever I saw small coins, but the doctor said I was just afraid of change.

Don't remind me

On the birthday of the late Nobel economist Milton Friedman I have to admit that I find his insights more and more compelling. Here's one:

"The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself."

Like many Christian Socialists I have managed for most of my life to avoid and deny the obvious wisdom here.

Lest we forget

Why do I still take The Guardian? It doesn't even include speedway in its sports coverage.

Further to this post on the one-state solution: just one day after being offered a vision of a democratic and secular state in which the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis 'are equally protected', we learn from the Guardian that the two major organizations now representing Palestinian aspirations, Fatah and Hamas, routinely torture detainees, and hence each other's supporters - this according to Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group, and Human Rights Watch. As the Guardian's reporter presenting this information is the slippery-tongued Jonathan Steele, you might expect - somewhere - an attention-shifting, mitigating note to be struck. Your expectation won't be disappointed:

The alleged abuse by PA forces appears to be aimed at convincing western donor governments, as well as Israel, that the authority is "clamping down on terror".

Just a typical day in the columns of the Guardian newspaper.

I couldn't put it better myself

From an interview with Pat Condell:

I’m a vegetarian and I strongly support animal rights. (I hope that’s OK with Jesus.)
I find it hard not to smile at religion’s conceit that we’re superior to animals on the basis that we have souls and they don’t, when five minutes in a slaughterhouse would convince anyone that, if anything, it’s animals who have the souls and human beings who don’t.

No danger

Mission expert dismisses fears of Islamic take-over in the UK Tuesday, 15th July 2008. 4:13pm By: Nick Mackenzie. The UK is not in danger of an Islamic takeover, according to Steve Bell, the National Director of Christian mission agency Interserve, who is an expert on Muslims issues.

Speaking at this year's Keswick Convention, a meeting of conservative evangelical Christians in the north of England, Steve Bell, the National Director of Interserve, pointed out that 'Muslim fertility rates are dropping noticeably in Europe, and dramatically in the Middle East and North Africa. Fundamentalism thrives in communities with large extended families and poverty and this pattern is diminishing among Europe's Muslim communities. A sub-replacement birthrate was one of the causes of the decline of Christianity in Europe and it looks set to do the same for Islam in Europe.'

Not only is an Islamic takeover in this country unlikely, but he also believes that the UK is providing a safe place in which Islam can change: “Muslims in the West are finding they can practice Islam without pressure from Islamic governments. So here in the UK both dangerous Islamists and freethinking reformers are emerging.

“The West is now the crucible in which Islam is being openly debated and modified for the 21st century. I suggest the outcome of the debate in this country that is going on between Muslims could well affect the outcome for the future of Islam worldwide. A reforming process is already painfully underway within the house of Islam.”

In a mess

Something in me is still moved by words like these, from Prodigal Kiwis:

“…When Thomas Merton was a novice master at the Abbey of Gethsemane…He started off one class by speaking [the following] words to the earnest and pious would-be monks who’d been placed in his care: “Men, before you have a spiritual life, you’ve got to have a life!”

I [Parker Palmer] treasure that line because it sheds the light of humor on one of the big problems of religion and spirituality: the assumption that the spiritual life is a life set apart from the “secular” life – which is to say, from the life one is living.

… Merton’s point, of course, is that we will find our spiritual lives in [the mess of our lives themselves], in [their] earthly realities, unpredictable challenges, surprising resources, [and] creative dynamics…

…If we stand in the middle of the mess assuming that the spiritual life will be orderly and pristine, linear and logical without complexity or contradiction, we will pray… for an extreme makeover, [and] of course, the ultimate extreme makeover is an embalmed and well-accessorized corpse, which is what we become in life when we try to defy [and reduce] the wideness and wildness of God…”

Above board

We've just finished reading Beloved by Toni Morrison. Not an easy book. Not a book to enjoy. Excruciating in parts, but kinda beautiful too. It captures the way that slaves in America were at the mercy of their owners, like checkers on a board.

What she (a mother) called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.

Book Club

We have a Book Club that meets in our home. Once a month we get together with a few friends to discuss a novel we've agreed on in advance. Actually it needn't be a novel. It can be any book. We started with a meeting at which each member of the group was invited to nominate 'a good read'. From this we drew up a list of books and dates, the idea being that each member of the group in turn should introduce the volume of her choice.

Now I can imagine someone suggesting that we read one of the classics of world literature, but one collection I guess we would all steer clear of would be the bible. As far as religious commitment goes we are I suppose a fairly average English mixture, all of us having some, at least childhood, acquaintance with the scriptures. So why is it that people, like us, who love books, don't love the bible, and, in the same way, people who read books, don't read the bible?

A reality check

On the Newsvine:

A recent opinion poll conducted by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government found that 77 percent of Israeli Arabs would rather live in Israel than in any other country in the world.

Getting better

Normblog has news of Afghanistan:

The education system that we take for granted in Britain is still a distant dream here, where the government struggles to find teachers and classrooms. But the girls at the Qala-e-Baig school in Shakar Darra are among 2m attending schools across the country. They are a visible sign of real progress.

When the Taliban fell in 2001 there were only 900,000 children in school, all of them boys. That figure is now 6m and rising.

And . . .

The minister for education told me that another teacher had been beheaded by the Taliban in the past week. Schools are burnt down and the populace terrorised.

Educating children, including girls, versus beheading teachers and burning down schools. Whatever you do, though, don't talk about a noble cause.

Without hope

Most forms of religion I've come across invite us to hope for the 'wrong thing', usually some kind of satisfaction beyond this world, and this life. In Sheldon Kopp I found a religious writer who had no place for such consolation. He described his work as a psychotherapist in "If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!"

The seeker comes in hope of finding something definite, something permanent, something unchanging upon which to depend. He is offered instead the reflection that life is just what it seems to be, a changing, ambiguous, ephemeral mixed bag. It may often be discouraging, but it is ultimately worth it, because that's all there is.

Why do I find this strangely comforting?

Pounds of flesh

I'm back from Merchant of Venice and the British Speedway Grand Prix. Antonio was the clear winner at Stratford, while Jason Crump, of Belle Vue Aces and Australia, had a stunning victory at the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff. Shylock and Nikki Pedersen turned out to be poor losers.

Both performances were excellent in their own way, both dramatic, exciting and entertaining. Very different audiences, apart from me and Big H, but equally well-behaved. Large contingents of children here and there. Quite why the two groups should otherwise be so mutually exclusive I'm not sure.

Nobody died on stage, but Chris Harris (not the actor) is nursing a broken nose.

A hero to some

From normblog:

A prisoner exchange between Israel and Hizbollah has led to the freeing of Samir Kuntar. If you want to know who Samir Kuntar is, you can read about him here and here: a man responsible for 'a murder of unimaginable cruelty', for smashing a child's skull against a rock with a rifle butt after shooting her father in front of her. This man, it would appear, is a hero to some.

A short break

Following my longish break from blogging (I just haven't got round to it) I am now taking a short break (a few days) after which I will resume with renewed vigour this preposterous enterprise of sharing with you, faithful reader, the collection of ambiguities and ambivalences that is my mind.

During my break I shall be visiting Shakespeare's birthplace to see 'Merchant of Venice', and the capital of Wales to shout encouraging words at Jason Crump of Belle Vue Aces in the British Speedway Grand Prix. I can't help wondering how many of you could pass so joyously from one of these spheres to the other. What an upbringing!

Jewish Humour

The President of Iran was wondering who to invade when his
telephone rang.

'This is Mendel in Tel Aviv. We're officially declaring var on
you!'

'How big is your army?' the president asked.

'There's me, my cousin Moishe, and our pinochle team!'

'I have a million in my army,' said the president.

'I'll call back!' said Mendel.

The next day he called. 'The var's still on!' We have now a
bulldozer, Goldblatt's tractor. Plus the canasta team!'

'I have 16,000 tanks, and my army is now two million.'

'Oy gevalt!', said Mendel. 'I'll call back.'

He phoned the next day. 'We're calling off the var'

'Why?'

'Well,' said Mendel, 'we've all had a little chat, and there's
no way we can feed two million prisoners.'

Contra-Mundum

What, do you think, are the chances of this working? Some details:

More than two dozen young people who broke into Robert Frost’s former home for a beer party and trashed the place are being required to take classes in his poetry as part of their punishment.

Using “The Road Not Taken” and another poem as jumping-off points, Frost biographer Jay Parini hopes to show the vandals the error of their ways — and the redemptive power of poetry.

Many people think the arts have the power to make people better. Some think the same of education. The idea is that the more cultured you are, the better you will be. And the more education you have the better you will be.

But this is folly, is it not?

If you educate a thief you only increase his capacity to steal, said a once famous theologian. And I suspect that if you immerse a jerk in the poetry of Frost, you’ll get a jerk who knows the poetry of Frost, not a non-jerk.

Here’s the test. Think of the highly educated and highly cultured. Are they moral people? Are they more moral than the less cultured, and the less educated?

A proposition: the highly educated and the highly cultured have a more difficult time distinguishing good from evil, and decent from indecent. They seek to get beyond good and evil.

Anti-semitism

Rabbi Y Y Rubinstein addressed a recent meeting of university chaplains from all over the country, including some imams, on how to deal with anti-semitism on campus.

Here's an excerpt:

'...The New Anti Semitism is in reality the old anti Semitism. When I walk in the street or Campus and someone shouts "Jew" or "Palestine" at me, they have not asked me whether or not I am an Israeli or a Zionist, I am in fact neither, they simply see a Jew and one Jew is guilty of the crimes or perceived crimes of all the Jews… In medieval Europe I killed Jesus. In the New Anti Semitism I am guilty of every alleged crime of Israel, although I have never oppressed a Palestinian or a Muslim in my life… and that is Anti Semitism.

But let me here be frank. Since the founding of the State in 1948 it has created untold suffering. It has been responsible for a massive transfer of population and a huge refugee problem. It was carved out of an existing State and was set up specifically to be the home of one religious group. It is Nuclear armed and has been the cause of several wars with its neighbours, any one of which could have escalated and dragged the world into a third world war. It’s politicians and government are generally believed to be corrupt… But personally I wish Pakistan and it’s people well.'

Susan Hill again:

Those who take THE TIMES - and it is all online too - will also have read the very sane coverage for Bjorn Lomborg’s latest Copenhagen Consensus. Here is the gist. We need to concentrate our time, energy and resources on feeding the poor of the world not on frivolous pursuit of some GW dream. Our earnest shovelling of every bit of our energy and resources into cutting carbon emissions shows in a different light after you read the following. The attitude of ‘well, even if it does no good, it can‘t do any harm can it ?’ simply will not wash. It can do harm. It diverts our resources and energies from feeding the world. It even, at worst, helps contribute to global poverty. (Use of land for bio-fuels not food.) It certainly helps directly to contribute to the high price of food, let alone of anything else.

What We Really Should Be Doing For People

The top ten most effective economic actions were agreed to be as follows:

1.1.Vitamin A and zinc micronutrient supplements for children. Cost: 60 pence per child. “For just $60m a year, it would be possible to provide capsules of both micronutrients to 80 per cent of undernourished children in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with benefits worth more than $1bn. Each dollar does more than $17 worth of good”;

2.2.The Doha development agenda. “The economists’ second-place priority was removing subsidies and tariffs that exclude developing countries from western markets, as is currently being proposed in the World Trade Organisation’s Doha round of negotiations”;

3.3.Iron and salt lodisation (cost: 5 pence per person);

4.4.Expanded immunisation coverage for children;

5.5.Biofortification of plants. Estimated that every £5 spent will yield £60 of benefit;

6.6.De-worming of children;

7.7.Lowering the cost of education;

8.8.Improving the education of girls and women;

9.9.Community-based work on nutrition;

10. 10. Support for the reproductive role of women.

Plastic Baggage

Dr Eamonn Butler puts in a good word for the much traduced plastic bag:

Plastic bags use 40% less energy and generate 80% less solid waste than paper ones. Plastic bags are a quarter of the thickness they were when we started using them in the mid-1970s. They use hardly any oil, and recycling a kilo of plastic takes just 10% of the energy used to recycle a kilo of paper. Paper bags produce 50 times more water pollution. Recycling paper uses bleaches and other nasty industrial chemicals, remember.

And yet the humble, useful plastic bag is on the way out because politicians, for the best of intentions but the worst of reasons, are intimidating supermarkets into scrapping them. Now: which is the real rubbish?

Even better news is that a sixteen year old scientist has found a way of reducing the time it takes for plastic to decompose from thousands of years to - three months.

Who needs a Bible?

Announcing: The Logic of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of Everything by Tim Harford.

Harford's The Undercover Economist showed how ordinary economics explained everyday curiosities, such as the outrageous price of a cup of coffee and the traffic jam on the way to the supermarket. His new book shows how the new economics of rational choice theory explains much, much more. Drug addicts and teenage muggers are rational. Suburban sprawl and inner city decay are rational. Endless meetings at the office and the injustices of working life? Rational. Economics explains why your boss is overpaid, and whether we should build more prisons, even whether to have sex, take drugs, and be honest. Racy stuff.

The Singer Solution to World Poverty

Peter Singer is a controversial philosopher. An article about him in The New York Times reveals that he gives one-fifth of his income to famine-relief agencies. "From when I first saw pictures in newspapers of people starving, from when people asked you to donate some of your pocket money for collections at school," he mused, "I always thought, 'Why that much — why not more?"'

Is it possible to quantify our charitable burden? In the following essay, Singer offers some unconventional thoughts about the ordinary American's obligations to the world's poor and suggests that even his own one-fifth standard may not be enough. It's a longish piece, but stay with it if you want to be deeply provoked.

In the Brazilian film "Central Station," Dora is a retired schoolteacher who makes ends meet by sitting at the station writing letters for illiterate people. Suddenly she has an opportunity to pocket $1,000. All she has to do is persuade a homeless 9-year-old boy to follow her to an address she has been given. (She is told he will be adopted by wealthy foreigners.) She delivers the boy, gets the money, spends some of it on a television set and settles down to enjoy her new acquisition. Her neighbor spoils the fun, however, by telling her that the boy was too old to be adopted — he will be killed and his organs sold for transplantation. Perhaps Dora knew this all along, but after her neighbor's plain speaking, she spends a troubled night. In the morning Dora resolves to take the boy back.

Suppose Dora had told her neighbor that it is a tough world, other people have nice new TV's too, and if selling the kid is the only way she can get one, well, he was only a street kid. She would then have become, in the eyes of the audience, a monster. She redeems herself only by being prepared to bear considerable risks to save the boy.

At the end of the movie, in cinemas in the affluent nations of the world, people who would have been quick to condemn Dora if she had not rescued the boy go home to places far more comfortable than her apartment. In fact, the average family in the United States spends almost one-third of its income on things that are no more necessary to them than Dora's new TV was to her. Going out to nice restaurants, buying new clothes because the old ones are no longer stylish, vacationing at beach resorts — so much of our income is spent on things not essential to the preservation of our lives and health. Donated to one of a number of charitable agencies, that money could mean the difference between life and death for children in need.

All of which raises a question: In the end, what is the ethical distinction between a Brazilian who sells a homeless child to organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and upgrades to a better one — knowing that the money could be donated to an organization that would use it to save the lives of kids in need?

Of course, there are several differences between the two situations that could support different moral judgments about them. For one thing, to be able to consign a child to death when he is standing right in front of you takes a chilling kind of heartlessness; it is much easier to ignore an appeal for money to help children you will never meet. Yet for a utilitarian philosopher like myself — that is, one who judges whether acts are right or wrong by their consequences — if the upshot of the American's failure to donate the money is that one more kid dies on the streets of a Brazilian city, then it is, in some sense, just as bad as selling the kid to the organ peddlers. But one doesn't need to embrace my utilitarian ethic to see that, at the very least, there is a troubling incongruity in being so quick to condemn Dora for taking the child to the organ peddlers while, at the same time, not regarding the American consumer's behavior as raising a serious moral issue.

In his 1996 book, "Living High and Letting Die," the New York University philosopher Peter Unger presented an ingenious series of imaginary examples designed to probe our intuitions about whether it is wrong to live well without giving substantial amounts of money to help people who are hungry, malnourished or dying from easily treatable illnesses like diarrhea. Here's my paraphrase of one of these examples:

Bob is close to retirement. He has invested most of his savings in a very rare and valuable old car, a Bugatti, which he has not been able to insure. The Bugatti is his pride and joy. In addition to the pleasure he gets from driving and caring for his car, Bob knows that its rising market value means that he will always be able to sell it and live comfortably after retirement. One day when Bob is out for a drive, he parks the Bugatti near the end of a railway siding and goes for a walk up the track. As he does so, he sees that a runaway train, with no one aboard, is running down the railway track. Looking farther down the track, he sees the small figure of a child very likely to be killed by the runaway train. He can't stop the train and the child is too far away to warn of the danger, but he can throw a switch that will divert the train down the siding where his Bugatti is parked. Then nobody will be killed -- but the train will destroy his Bugatti. Thinking of his joy in owning the car and the financial security it represents, Bob decides not to throw the switch. The child is killed. For many years to come, Bob enjoys owning his Bugatti and the financial security it represents.

You shouldn't take that cruise, redecorate the house or get that pricey new suit. After all, a $1,000 suit could save five children's lives.

Bob's conduct, most of us will immediately respond, was gravely wrong. Unger agrees. But then he reminds us that we, too, have opportunities to save the lives of children. We can give to organizations like Unicef or Oxfam America. How much would we have to give one of these organizations to have a high probability of saving the life of a child threatened by easily preventable diseases? (I do not believe that children are more worth saving than adults, but since no one can argue that children have brought their poverty on themselves, focusing on them simplifies the issues.) Unger called up some experts and used the information they provided to offer some plausible estimates that include the cost of raising money, administrative expenses and the cost of delivering aid where it is most needed. By his calculation, $200 in donations would help a sickly 2-year-old transform into a healthy 6-year-old — offering safe passage through childhood's most dangerous years. To show how practical philosophical argument can be, Unger even tells his readers that they can easily donate funds by using their credit card and calling one of these toll-free numbers: (800) 367-5437 for Unicef; (800) 693-2687 for Oxfam America.

Now you, too, have the information you need to save a child's life. How should you judge yourself if you don't do it? Think again about Bob and his Bugatti. Unlike Dora, Bob did not have to look into the eyes of the child he was sacrificing for his own material comfort. The child was a complete stranger to him and too far away to relate to in an intimate, personal way. Unlike Dora, too, he did not mislead the child or initiate the chain of events imperiling him. In all these respects, Bob's situation resembles that of people able but unwilling to donate to overseas aid and differs from Dora's situation.

If you still think that it was very wrong of Bob not to throw the switch that would have diverted the train and saved the child's life, then it is hard to see how you could deny that it is also very wrong not to send money to one of the organizations listed above. Unless, that is, there is some morally important difference between the two situations that I have overlooked.

Is it the practical uncertainties about whether aid will really reach the people who need it? Nobody who knows the world of overseas aid can doubt that such uncertainties exist. But Unger's figure of $200 to save a child's life was reached after he had made conservative assumptions about the proportion of the money donated that will actually reach its target.

One genuine difference between Bob and those who can afford to donate to overseas aid organizations but don't is that only Bob can save the child on the tracks, whereas there are hundreds of millions of people who can give $200 to overseas aid organizations. The problem is that most of them aren't doing it. Does this mean that it is all right for you not to do it?

Suppose that there were more owners of priceless vintage cars — Carol, Dave, Emma, Fred and so on, down to Ziggy — all in exactly the same situation as Bob, with their own siding and their own switch, all sacrificing the child in order to preserve their own cherished car. Would that make it all right for Bob to do the same? To answer this question affirmatively is to endorse follow-the-crowd ethics — the kind of ethics that led many Germans to look away when the Nazi atrocities were being committed. We do not excuse them because others were behaving no better.

We seem to lack a sound basis for drawing a clear moral line between Bob's situation and that of any reader of this article with $200 to spare who does not donate it to an overseas aid agency. These readers seem to be acting at least as badly as Bob was acting when he chose to let the runaway train hurtle toward the unsuspecting child. In the light of this conclusion, I trust that many readers will reach for the phone and donate that $200. Perhaps you should do it before reading further.

Now that you have distinguished yourself morally from people who put their vintage cars ahead of a child's life, how about treating yourself and your partner to dinner at your favorite restaurant? But wait. The money you will spend at the restaurant could also help save the lives of children overseas! True, you weren't planning to blow $200 tonight, but if you were to give up dining out just for one month, you would easily save that amount. And what is one month's dining out, compared to a child's life? There's the rub. Since there are a lot of desperately needy children in the world, there will always be another child whose life you could save for another $200. Are you therefore obliged to keep giving until you have nothing left? At what point can you stop?

Hypothetical examples can easily become farcical. Consider Bob. How far past losing the Bugatti should he go? Imagine that Bob had got his foot stuck in the track of the siding, and if he diverted the train, then before it rammed the car it would also amputate his big toe. Should he still throw the switch? What if it would amputate his foot? His entire leg?

As absurd as the Bugatti scenario gets when pushed to extremes, the point it raises is a serious one: only when the sacrifices become very significant indeed would most people be prepared to say that Bob does nothing wrong when he decides not to throw the switch. Of course, most people could be wrong; we can't decide moral issues by taking opinion polls. But consider for yourself the level of sacrifice that you would demand of Bob, and then think about how much money you would have to give away in order to make a sacrifice that is roughly equal to that. It's almost certainly much, much more than $200. For most middle-class Americans, it could easily be more like $200,000.

Isn't it counterproductive to ask people to do so much? Don't we run the risk that many will shrug their shoulders and say that morality, so conceived, is fine for saints but not for them? I accept that we are unlikely to see, in the near or even medium-term future, a world in which it is normal for wealthy Americans to give the bulk of their wealth to strangers. When it comes to praising or blaming people for what they do, we tend to use a standard that is relative to some conception of normal behavior. Comfortably off Americans who give, say, 10 percent of their income to overseas aid organizations are so far ahead of most of their equally comfortable fellow citizens that I wouldn't go out of my way to chastise them for not doing more. Nevertheless, they should be doing much more, and they are in no position to criticize Bob for failing to make the much greater sacrifice of his Bugatti.

At this point various objections may crop up. Someone may say: "If every citizen living in the affluent nations contributed his or her share I wouldn't have to make such a drastic sacrifice, because long before such levels were reached, the resources would have been there to save the lives of all those children dying from lack of food or medical care. So why should I give more than my fair share?" Another, related, objection is that the Government ought to increase its overseas aid allocations, since that would spread the burden more equitably across all taxpayers.

Yet the question of how much we ought to give is a matter to be decided in the real world — and that, sadly, is a world in which we know that most people do not, and in the immediate future will not, give substantial amounts to overseas aid agencies. We know, too, that at least in the next year, the United States Government is not going to meet even the very modest United Nations-recommended target of 0.7 percent of gross national product; at the moment it lags far below that, at 0.09 percent, not even half of Japan's 0.22 percent or a tenth of Denmark's 0.97 percent. Thus, we know that the money we can give beyond that theoretical "fair share" is still going to save lives that would otherwise be lost. While the idea that no one need do more than his or her fair share is a powerful one, should it prevail if we know that others are not doing their fair share and that children will die preventable deaths unless we do more than our fair share? That would be taking fairness too far.

Thus, this ground for limiting how much we ought to give also fails. In the world as it is now, I can see no escape from the conclusion that each one of us with wealth surplus to his or her essential needs should be giving most of it to help people suffering from poverty so dire as to be life-threatening. That's right: I'm saying that you shouldn't buy that new car, take that cruise, redecorate the house or get that pricey new suit. After all, a $1,000 suit could save five children's lives.

So how does my philosophy break down in dollars and cents? An American household with an income of $50,000 spends around $30,000 annually on necessities, according to the Conference Board, a nonprofit economic research organization. Therefore, for a household bringing in $50,000 a year, donations to help the world's poor should be as close as possible to $20,000. The $30,000 required for necessities holds for higher incomes as well. So a household making $100,000 could cut a yearly check for $70,000. Again, the formula is simple: whatever money you're spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away.

Now, evolutionary psychologists tell us that human nature just isn't sufficiently altruistic to make it plausible that many people will sacrifice so much for strangers. On the facts of human nature, they might be right, but they would be wrong to draw a moral conclusion from those facts. If it is the case that we ought to do things that, predictably, most of us won't do, then let's face that fact head-on. Then, if we value the life of a child more than going to fancy restaurants, the next time we dine out we will know that we could have done something better with our money. If that makes living a morally decent life extremely arduous, well, then that is the way things are. If we don't do it, then we should at least know that we are failing to live a morally decent life — not because it is good to wallow in guilt but because knowing where we should be going is the first step toward heading in that direction.

When Bob first grasped the dilemma that faced him as he stood by that railway switch, he must have thought how extraordinarily unlucky he was to be placed in a situation in which he must choose between the life of an innocent child and the sacrifice of most of his savings. But he was not unlucky at all. We are all in that situation.

Free Trade is Fairer

In spite of his bad press Gordon Brown is right about one thing.

"Coming down strongly against protectionism (at the Google Zeitgeist Conference) he argued once more for free trade:

"The two great protected industries of the moment are the two industries that are causing us the greatest problems today: the oil industry, with a cartel run by Opec; and the food industry, with high levels of subsidy.

"It is well known that one of Brown’s personal concerns is poverty. He is absolutely correct in highlighting the iniquity of protectionism, and that it is holding back the economic development of the world."

Welcome to The Gambia, the smiling coast of Africa

Afrik.com, a news aggregator of the African press has a terrifying headline.

President plans to kill off every single homosexual

The stand-first elucidates:

Gambian President Yahya Jammeh says he will “cut off the head” of any homosexual caught in his country.

The story continues:

He said the Gambia was a country of believers, indicating that no sinful and immoral act as homosexual would be tolerated in the country.

He warned all homosexuals in the country to leave, noting that a legislation “stricter than those in Iran ” concerning the vice would be introduced soon.

According to pan-African LGBT organisation Behind The Mask, Gambia already has fairly draconian antigay laws.

Quoted in Pink News, the President Jammeh, who also claims he can cure AIDS with bananas, said:

“Any hotel, lodge or motel that lodges this kind of individuals will be closed down, because this act is unlawful. We are in a Muslim dominated country and I will not and shall never accept such individuals in this country.”

Saviour siblings

Andrew Brown has a few sharp and witty observations in response to a Telegraph comment by George Pitcher.

If little Leo (Blair) grows up to resent that he was the result of a contraceptive failure, he should get over himself. Isn’t the whole point of Christianity that god has a purpose for you even if it is invisible to the outside world, and to your parents? And, from a non-christian point of view, why should the world acknowledge any legitimacy to the teenager’s complaint “I didn’t ask to be born”? No one asked to be born and it’s absurd to think that your parents wanted you in particular. They took their chances at conception and hoped for the best. They may have got lucky. You and they may have collaborated to produce a decent human being. But no one could have foreseen which decent human being this would be at birth, still less at conception.

. . . How many Telegraph readers have had babies because they didn’t want their other one to be a lonely only child? How many have had babies because they wanted a boy, or a girl, and hadn’t had one yet? Isn’t it the duty of an aristocratic family to produce an heir? In all these cases and throughout human history, babies are born for the purposes of the family or the tribe to which they belong. In other contexts, Telegraph readers understand this very well. If some fifteen-year-old on benefits starts having babies just because she loves them, they see her as a threat to society. But sentimentality and cruelty have always gone hand in hand. Neither gives religion any credit. You would have thought, however, that an ordained priest like Pitcher would be familiar with the story of one baby who was born “for us men and for our salvation” with consequences generally agreed by Christians to have been wholly beneficial.

Nature or nurture

'Research shows' that parents of autistic children are twice as likely to have had psychiatric illness. The finding suggests to Ian Sample that autism and psychiatric problems may sometimes have a common cause and genetic link.

But surely this begs the question of whether psychiatric illness, and indeed autism itself, is an environmental disorder.

Grieving mother of two boys found dead in car says they did not deserve to die

A baffling headline in The Guardian.

The trouble with heroin - it's very moreish

I've blogged before about drug addiction and my own personal and family experience. I have come to agree with those doctors who have judged that addiction to illicit drugs like heroin is not stronger than that to legal drugs like cigarettes.

This message has not yet reached the public and has therefore not prevented the emergence of a huge therapeutic bureaucracy. Theodore Dalrymple, who has worked as a prison psychiatrist, analyses this therapeutic community in his new book Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, which is dedicated to the war against withdrawal symptoms. He thoroughly debunks the disease model of addiction claiming that we should be really talking about a moral and spiritual problem requiring changes in behaviour.

In it he makes the following, extremely telling, points:

• Just as with smokers the vast majority of people who try heroin either never use it again, use it just a few times, or only use it intermittently.
• Even among heroin users, the heroin addict is the exception.
• Experiments have shown that withdrawal symptoms were eliminated with placebo injections of saline solution.
• Histrionic addicts…who complain of horrible discomfort in the presence of doctors…to obtain narcotics but act normally both before the visit and after.
• Patients who repeatedly receive large doses of narcotics for pain... rarely become addicted.

Breaking point

Sigmund Freud has been described as the "prose-poet of the heart's desire to break". I think he was a kind of artist who gave us a language in which to express our deepest griefs. For the most part we are not able to do this in anything like a direct way, by simply naming them. We need a vocabulary which expresses and yet conceals them at the same time. Freud supplied it, or at least one possible version of it.

In the Old Testament there is a teaching that God loves a heart that is broken, indeed that brokenness is the only sure way to approach God.

Freud must have been well acquainted with it.

Thoughts on Travel

Maverick Philosopher has some wisdom from Albert Jay Nock:

Wherever we are, we see the world through the same pair of eyeballs, and filter its deliverances through the same set of conceptions, preconceptions, anxieties, aversions, and what-not. If I travel to Naples, thinking to get away from myself, what I find when I wake up there is “...the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.” (Ibid.) Shift your spatial horizon as you will, you may not effect any change in your mental horizon. If you can’t find enlightenment in Buffalo, where the water is potable and mosquitoes are rare, what makes you think you will find it in Benares where mosquitoes are ubiquitous and the water will give you dysentery?

I once had a conversation with a young Austrian at the train station in Salzburg, Austria. He told me he was headed for Istanbul “to make holiness.” But could he not have made holiness in Salzburg? Could he not have found a Pauline ‘closet’ somewhere in that beautiful city wherein to shut himself away from the world and pray to his Father in secret?

Stay home. Cultivate your garden in peace and quiet. Sink your roots into the soil of solitude. But travel a little so to appreciate the foregoing.

Here for a season

Human life is not to be judged by its longevity alone but by the quality of its brief encounters.

Irene Lancaster

Emily

One of our visiting children who have what are called learning disabilities was getting upset about the weather. It was cloudy and damp. This isn't called Greater Manchester for nothing. Pointing to the sky, she cried, "The clouds! They're working!"

John and Ted

I met John in prison. I was chaplain, he an inmate. I had kept publicly on the right side of the law. He had been caught briefly on the wrong one.

John's sixteen year old daughter had fallen in with a bad lot. Her boyfriend who was a bit older and should have known a bit better, had introduced her to a new circle of friends. One of the things they did together was inject heroin. In a vulnerable state he had 'taken advantage' of her and she was pregnant.

John, a man with no history of or known capacity for personal violence, had reacted like any father might. He hit the boyfriend - hard, with the nearest object to hand - an empty beer bottle. It caused the young man severe though short-term injury. Most people, including the prison officers who came to know John, thought his outburst perfectly excusable. They made life inside for him as easy as possible, even supplying him with an internet connection so that he could continue to manage his successful business of waste-disposal from his prison cell.

John was a Roman Catholic. He spoke to Father David, the RC chaplain. Two things worried him. He feared the incident had exposed a tendency to violence in his nature which contradicted his previous self-awareness. Secondly, he was not able to feel sorry for what he'd done. Father David quoted St Paul writing that our lower nature is often in conflict with our higher or spiritual nature. John found no consolation in this.

When John told me I tried to reassure him. He was plainly not a man given casually to violence. As for feeling sorry, it seemed to me that his concern about this was ample evidence of the kind of moral sense he feared he might have lost. If he couldn't feel sorry for the injury he had visited upon the miscreant, he did at least regret not feeling sorry, and could offer this to God in confession of his sins.

As you will appreciate John was more troubled by matters of moral motivation than the average inmate. He was a decent man, and a good Catholic. But there was one area where his conscience acquired what you might call a little elasticity. In his impending interview with the parole board, which could lead to his early release, his contrition would be as impressive as it was false; anything to get him out of that hell-hole and back to the family he missed so much. Honesty before God in prayer mattered deeply to him; honesty to civil servants less.

Truth-telling in prison can get you into a lot of trouble - and keep you there.

Ask Ted. Ted was a 'lifer'. He had strangled his wife in a drunken rage. That was fifteen years ago, and he too was due to appear before the parole board. If he behaved well and convinced them that he was no longer 'angry with women' he might be moved to another, more open, prison, a prelude to his eventual release. One member of the board was, as he put, right snotty to him - made him feel like a piece of shit. It happened to be a woman. He didn't like being treated like that, and he said so. If he could have held his tongue, shown less spirit, been more humble, seemed more sorry, he might have made it. But he couldn't. So he had to stay inside, for the offence of emotional honesty.

Spreadsheeting bad behaviour - which column?

Sue at Dicombobula is always worth reading.

The Australian Federal government is trying to address teenage binge drinking by proposing a tax hike for premixed alcoholic beverages like vodka and orange and bourbon and coke (two personal favourites in my teenage years, when I had the dosh).

The government believes that making these drinks more expensive will stop teenagers getting together and getting shitfaced. I wonder, do any of them really believe this, even a smidge? I know we are all economically rationalised to death and feel constrained onto spreadsheet columns, but does anyone at all involved with the government, including the toilet cleaners, really think that is anything but some sort of lip service? Surely not. And surely they don't think we're that stupid. And surely this is why listening to the blatherings of the world is so damn tiresome. It's enough to make you want to go and get shitfaced :)

This kind of thing really pisses me off. What a waste of time it all is. It's talking about issues without talking about issues. So much fluff, full of soundbytes and infuriatingly signifying nothing.

Teenagers get drunk because it feels really good to be pissed. Because they are full of angst and don't know who the hell they are and are suffering under the weight of living in a world where nothing gets discussed in ways that really make any kind of goddamned difference at all and because no one would listen if they said that Uncle Harry was doing bad stuff to them when no one was looking, or that they felt like losers because they didn't know what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives and therefore which VCE stream to set themselves onto at 15 years of age. Or that they felt like they would never ever belong and it didn't seem like there was all that much to belong to anyway and hey, how bad does that make you feel when we are the lucky ones and the rest of the world is being flung about by tempestuous weather?

Teenagers get pissed because it is so nice to quell your fears and shame - and that is surely the absolute crux of it, for mine. Or at least, that was always the reason why I got drunk. To get me out of myself. To have a blast. To tell my friends I loved them (love ya mate, I'll luv ya forever, mate. Now excuse me while I go over here and vomit). To give me a bit of Dutch courage to talk to that boy and maybe get a pash (or more). Fear and shame pursue every single person down through the days and to not address that is to not address anything in the end.

But then, what column would that fit into on the spreadsheet? And is that the responsibility of the government anyway?

Taxing alcopops will make teenagers resort to drinking beer, or they will buy wine and mix their own orange juice in it. Or whatever. Or maybe - heaven forbid - they will buy Blackberry Nip or Brandivino and mix it with Coke. However far your dosh spreads. 'Cause it's not about the taste so much as it's about the high and about the quell. And I really just don't know how that one can be regulated. 'Cause you can stuff it down and keep on going, but so far I have really only found one Place where fear and shame have been nailed. And it's got nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with Love.

A scientist speaks out

Roy W. Spencer is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. His book, Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor, will be published this month.

Who to believe?

Surprising to find the (Eddie) Stobart Group so upbeat.

Stobart Group shrugged off fears of a UK recession yesterday and boasted that it was seeing record trading despite rising fuel costs.

. . . confident of strong profit growth over the next year despite the uncertain economic outlook.

Our business last week was the busiest week in the history of Eddie Stobart," he said (Andrew Tinkler, the chief executive). "I haven't seen any signs [of a UK recession] and neither have our customers, who are hitting their targets. Even the building [industry customers] are still hitting their forecasts. The sub-prime market really damaged the banks but [other] businesses are carrying on as normal.

Yet on the same day the Financial Times headlines "Mounting signs of economic slowdown."

Whatever are the humble poor to believe?

Miscarriages and misreporting

This from Harry's Place.

And our sanctimonious media elite wonder why politicians ’spin’?

Susan Hill on Boris

I think he will do well so long as he is true to himself. They had to gag him to get him in but now he is in, I hope the gag comes off, that he continues to be his own man, and that above all he does not become Cameron`s puppet. Because Cameron is a man to be wary of, and a man not to trust if ever I saw one. He is just the sort of smooth, slippery, bland, bend-whichever-way-it-takes politician we should dread. And any man whose wife is boss of a shop that flogs fuchsia pink suede bibles at £150 a pop and handbags named after her daughter for £1,000, should be viewed with the gravest suspicion. The wives say it all and they do count for a lot, like it or not.

Sarah is the best reason I can think of for giving Gordon another chance.

Honestly

I've just heard another discussion on the Today programme about whether politicians will ever stop being devious. I do get sick of this self-righteous moaning. The answer is obvious. Politicians will give up telling lies when the rest of us do. They're only human after all.

A touch of class

Overweight, barely comprehensible, infamous womanizer; it could be John Prescott - or Boris Johnson. One thing's for sure. Boris will never be as unpopular as Prezza who was never forgiven for being plainly working-class.

Gas guzzling

Perhaps it's my lack of appetite for travel, but I can't help noticing how much respect is shown to those who can't find enough to entertain, intrigue and stimulate them in these beautiful British Isles of ours.

Take Tory MP Ann Widdicombe who was asked in a recent broadcast about her visits abroad. Her only regret seemed to be that she hadn't been to more places and in particular 'I'd like to see the penguins in Antarctica'. Miss Widdicombe often promotes herself as a devout Christian woman with self-denial as a major component of her moral and spiritual life. Yet is not her wish to travel the globe to spend time with a flock of flightless birds the most shameless fantasy of self-indulgence? What possible good would accrue to Antarctica, its inhabitants, or the planet as a whole, from such personal extravagance?

Another interview, this time with Michael Palin, in which he shared his experiences in foreign lands, concluded with the question, 'Is there anywhere you'd still like to go?' But why are such people never asked, 'Don't you think you've done enough globetrotting? Do you think it's necessarily a good thing for you, the human race and the environment, that you should continue your international perambulations?

Carbon footprints

If global warming and carbon emissions really do pose such a threat to the planet and its peoples, why does the UEFA Champions League Final which must now be fought out between two British clubs take place in Moscow? Or was Bill Shankly right about soccer being more important than life and death?

It's the Telegraph, so it must be true

The cricket club where no-one can hit a six . . .

Back again

After a break in the English Lake District with no postings for days and days, I'm surprised to find that I have as many readers when I'm not actively blogging as when I am.

One of my dearest friends has written to tell me that in his opinion I'm a 'good egg'. Am I flattered? No way. To reduce my struggle with life and its meanings, my ambiguities and ambivalence, my high ideals and my often abject failure to live up to them, my painful honesty in the face of organized lies and half-truths, to the epithet 'good egg' feels like the worst kind of pat on the back. What makes it worse is that the friend I speak of is one of the kindest people I know. With any luck we'll have many hours to laugh at my sanctimonious pomposity.

Peter Hitchens writes . . .

The Book of Common Prayer, originally published in 1549, has affected me more powerfully than any other book I have ever read. I hope to have it with me when I die. Best known in Britain in its 1662 version, and in the USA as The 1928 Prayer Book, it is the now-forgotten third pillar of written English, alongside the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Excerpts from it occupy more than 15 pages of the Third Edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, yet - since it is now hardly used by the Church of England or its cousin, the Episcopal Church - those who quote from it, or use its phrases and cadences in their language, are mostly unaware of the fact that they are quoting at all. It is, amongst other things, the refutation in practice of the idea that religion is a resort of the stupid and the illiterate. Its marriage service is the constitution of private life, expressed in numinous poetry. Its burial service is a raw, uncompromising confrontation with the majesty of death.

But it is in its regular, ordinary services of Morning and Evening Prayer that, with a sweet persistence, it softly asks the listener - who is also often a participant - to consider, reasonably and carefully, the alternatives to the bare, comfortless tedium of materialism, and to reflect on his place in the universe. The apparently simple phrases quietly slip into the mind and compel thought. No revolutionary manifesto ever equalled the Magnificat's scorn for earthly greatness.

And running through it all is the knowledge that almost all of this, especially its repeated calls for God's help in the struggle to be good, 'forasmuch as without Thee we are not able to please Thee', was written or compiled by a rather bad man, Thomas Cranmer, Henry VIII's highly political Archbishop of Canterbury. This is not the work of some unapproachable, impossible saint but of a married man, wily in worldly affairs and capable both of great cowardice and of astonishing courage.

Just to get me going again

Having sorted out my computer problems for the time being, I've been afflicted by another kind of virus that's left me spiritually and intellectually shrivelled.

Then I read this, and wanted to blog again.

Hope it lasts.

• The only faith that makes sense to many people is one that offers a story to resonate with. Belonging to a community, and any promise of life after death [or even of a god who loves even you, you dirty rotten scoundrel], are no longer draw cards.

Some thoughts on love

From Dennis Prager:

"The love relationship between a man and a woman is unique.. . .it is the only relationship in which it is a good thing to seek to be loved. In other relationships, it is bad to seek to be loved. Parents who seek to be loved by their children will inevitably do a poor job as a parent. They may even damage their child. Leaders who seek to be loved by the public will be ineffective at best and dangerous at worst. One can only lead if he does not yearn to be loved. A teacher who tries to be loved by her students will likewise fail. Parents, leaders, teachers have jobs to do, and seeking to be loved compromises their ability to do those jobs properly. They should seek to do the right thing, and doing the right thing often means being not loved, even hated. If they seek any response from those they lead, it should be respect, not love.

"But in the love of equals — i.e., the love between a man and a woman and the love of friends — it is not only all right to seek to be loved, it is a good thing. Taking the love of a spouse or friend for granted is perhaps the single greatest cause of marital divorce and the breakup of friendships. “What can I do to ensure his/her continuing love?” is a wonderful thing to keep in mind."

What think you?

Are you religious?

Maverick Philosopher has a quote from Simone Weil:

The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it.

This suggests one of several tests you might apply to yourself to see if you have a religious ‘bent’ or sensibility, or orientation toward life, or however you wish to phrase it. If, upon reading the Weilian line, a ‘yes!’ wells up in you, then the chances are excellent that you are religiously inclined. If your response is in the negative, however, or if you are just puzzled, then that indicates that you lack the religious attitude.

Soul food

"The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread [God], but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry."

Simone Weil (1909-1943) French philosopher and mystic; from Waiting for God.

Love and understanding

"Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing help, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it's those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding."

Rev. Norman Maclean, from the movie A River Runs Through It

How true.

Jack

It wasn't easy to walk past his house without stopping to talk. At least chat. Local stuff. Neighbourly stuff. A bit of putting the world to rights. But not much. If you didn't want to stop or talk, it was easier to take a different route, past someone else's front gate.

When I was a lad, my father had a corner shop. People, mainly women, came in for the company. It wasn't the kind of shop where the service was swift and efficient. Hygiene and accountancy were not high among my dad's priorities. You didn't get a receipt. There wasn't a till. Dad was as much a friend, counsellor, entertainer, as a shopkeeper. His customers were his captive audience. To work alongside him was a great laugh, but ours was not the kind of shop I would have visited as a customer.

To pass Jack's gate was to enter into a relationship with him; to know and be known. Like shopping in my dad's shop.

Jack would also have made a great country parson. He would have done supremely well what I could never do. Standing in one place, watching the world go by, passing the time of day with villagers and visitors alike. I wasn't good at it. I was always friendly and affable, and ready to talk about everyday things. To men I could chat about sport, but cars and tractors and DIY left me cold. And always in the back of my mind I would be thinking of what I ought to have been doing that would have been more worthwhile, more like a proper job, more like work. I was paid to be the Vicar after all.

Jack would have taken all this in his stride. At least I think he would. What I don't know is how good he was at keeping confidences, or how much he just liked a good gossip. I've no doubt though he was a mine of personal information about the local populace, and people don't usually talk as freely to those they can't trust. He had his very own drop-in congregation, many of whom I never see now.

It was too cold in winter for Jack to take his stand, and that's why we didn't miss him for weeks after he died. In fact we didn't know he had died. Now we do, and our walk to the post-office will be more direct, but less of an event.

Jack RIP

One crying in the wilderness

From The Times:

Despite the many mistakes that have been made I still do not regret that the war happened. I regret deeply what happened after the war. I take hope from the work of the Multi National Forces in Iraq, not least the US and UK troops; they are doing an outstanding job. I also take hope from the way that the Iraqi Army is developing.

The writer is Canon Andrew White - known as the vicar of Baghdad - the only Anglican vicar still working in the city.

Mary Doyle

Mary was my auntie. Hers was the last funeral I took, months ago, as a family favour. She was quite old - in her eighties. When she was only in her seventies she lost confidence in her GP. There was, she said, something about him she didn't trust. She thought he was out to do her harm. We all thought the same thing: She's going funny: It's her age: Poor Mary.

Her doctor was Harold Shipman.

Starting over

Buddhist spirituality I like. What I can't figure out is how such sensitive and intelligent people as are drawn to that great religion can fall for such a logically incoherent doctrine as reincarnation.

The belief that I was someone else, say Guy Fawkes, in a previous life seems straightforward enough until the next person turns up claiming the exact same identity. What criteria could we possibly apply to distinguish the true claim from the false?

Yours truly

I wish that we took Oscar Wilde more seriously about many things, but one of the most profoundly insightful sayings attributed to him is that prayer should never be answered. Prayer that is answered, he continued, ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.

Honesty

A few random thoughts on honesty:

It was Honest to God by John Robinson that convinced me back in the sixties that religion should be taken seriously by thoughtful people.

Being honest has many times been expensive for me in life and ministry.

I would like to belong to a Church that was more publicly honest. Andrew Shanks on liturgy as an ideal enactment of public honesty is interesting. More on this later.

I wonder what would happen if, like those with Tourette's syndrome, we all acquired a tendency to blurt out the most shockingly immediate and uncensored version of the truth as we saw and felt it without regard for the needs or feelings of others within hearing distance.

Vivienne Westwood's use of the phrase 'organised lying' with reference to the propaganda put out daily for public consumption caused to me to wonder whether all human institutions are based on this practice, and whether the Church could and should be the exception.

Prejudice

From Normblog:

Name the odd one out, and discount gender in doing so.

Neil Harvey, Herbert Hoover, Garfield Sobers, Harry S. Truman, Graeme Pollock, Ronald Reagan, David Gower, Bill Clinton, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama.

If you can't get it on your own, the answer is available here.

Honesty

It's one of the things I mean to blog about, along with the old Death and Immortality questions, in the coming weeks.

Honesty is so difficult, and so neglected, and so easily evaded. Trouble is, we are, by and large, so dishonest about honesty, and so hypocritical in the way that we demand it of others, especially children, not least our own, but manage it cunningly to our advantage as adults.

Let's be honest, nobody wants to live in a world where everybody is honest. Our local headteacher who likes to include in her school prayers petitions for strength to be honest at all times, would be the most horrified if one of her pupils told her, honestly, that she was grossly overweight.

Some things are better left unsaid.

I'm back, honey!

I've been out of touch for a few days; what in the Church of England we call an interregnum.

We used to have AOL Broadband, but now we have Sky. A kind of conversion; just can't get away from God-talk. But between my two ISPs there was a silence, a not-being-connected, a not-belonging. And worse, for me, there was having to acquire and install a new computer to go with my new connection, because the other one was too old and didn't have the right socket for me to plug the router into. And one thing led to another - an easy transfer cable that I bought and whose CD I then inadvertently discarded (PC World kindly replaced the CD, even though they hadn't lost it) - an easy transfer cable (the same one) that turned out to be a 'won't transfer anything at all' cable, again because the old computer didn't have enough disk space to operate it (the saintly staff at PC World replaced this with a Flash Drive which I'm assured will do the job but much more slowly) - constant to-ing and fro-ing - attempts, soon abandoned, to run two computers with only one monitor - . . . . and now at last a kind of normality, and a lesson learned

. . . . . to be humble is to be sane.

Madge

One of the best nights I have spent in the theatre was for An Evening's Intercourse with Dame Edna Everage. Emily Perry, who played Edna's bridesmaid, Madge Allsopp, died last week aged 100. One of the tributes paid to her was that her job was to do nothing, and she did it beautifully.

During the more than twenty years she worked with Barry Humphries she travelled the world, though she admitted, at the age of 99, she couldn't remember a thing.

Doing less, and eventually doing nothing, but beautifully, seems like a good plan for retirement. Between now and when I'm 100 I'd like not so much to see more, do more, and travel further, as to digest, value, appreciate what I have; reflect on what I have seen, read and done.

And then, mercifully, to forget.

Is religion good for you?

Oliver James reckons that people who go to church once a week are more likely to be mentally healthy. He asks whether this counts as evidence for the existence of God.

I hate it when people make religion a kind of health-trip. Getting yourself crucified is far more damaging to your health than smoking.

Hereafter Again

If talk of the survival after death of a non-material body leaves you, like me, in a state of complete incomprehension, or desperately seeking convincing evidence, then it may be that the dualistic view of human beings made up of two parts, the body, and the mind or soul, may help us still to make sense of our Christian belief.

One problem is with that word 'part'. Unless my soul is me, and not just a part of me, as one philosopher put it, the news of the immortality of my soul would be of no more concern to me than the news that my appendix would be preserved eternally in a bottle.

My own view of what human beings are, and what a person is, rules out the notion that I am essentially an inner thinking substance that could conceivably have an existence quite independent of the physical world we share or the other persons we share it with. I can't begin to imagine how life without its public aspect of relationships, shared language, meanings, and experiences, would be a human life, with the capacity for what we call introspection, in the first place. Giving meaning to words is itself a public rather than a private matter.

What then of reincarnation? And, before you reply, 'I don't want to come back as a tin of milk', I will say - more later.

Broadbrush

The ability to identify significant movements in thought, and present them in a way that helps others to grasp their significance without oversimplifying, is a valuable art. I can still recall the excitement that I experienced when the works of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud were first linked in my mind as thinkers who had progressively shifted our perception of human beings, once seen as freely autonomous individuals, the crown of God's creation, set on earth, at the centre of the universe, to the much more modest position we now occupy in the cosmological, evolutionary, and psychological worlds of most people.

Sometimes though this ability can be put to the service of sinister causes. I suppose every petty dictator has a vision of the world and himself which neatly accommodates his own megalomaniac fantasies.

Jacobo Timerman, the Argentine Jewish newspaper editor who was kidnapped and tortured by the death-squad regime in his country in the late 1970s, analyzes the work of the neo-Nazi element that formed such an important part of the military/clerical dictatorship, and quotes one of the “diagnoses” that animated their ferocity:

“Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space.”

Why you no listen?

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
-- George Bernard Shaw

Is brown the new black?

Tidying my underwear drawer the other day, I noticed that my erstwhile black underpants had over time turned a shade of brown. A question occurred to me: Why do men, and women who buy for their men, buy far more pairs of black underpants which eventually turn brown, than brown ones which presumably stay brown? Why not buy brown in the first place?

I am now going to drop my underpants.

What are you hereafter?

I have commented that every belief in survival after death I've come across is either the product of confused thinking, or subverts my understanding of morality, which is about doing something for nothing, and generally gets in the way of appreciating and loving the world we live in as it is.
I want to argue that life after death makes Christianity (the religion I know best) and morality (as I understand it) impossible.

One principle I'd like to explore is that beliefs in an afterlife are unsatisfactory religiously speaking insofar as they are rooted in a desire for more of selfhood rather than more of God. They seek to satisfy an anxiety that my life might be meaningless without its continuance to a fulfilment beyond death; as if life is not worth living, and good not worth doing, unless it can be justified by post-mortem events.

There has never been convincing evidence that 'we' can survive the dissolution of 'our bodies'. There is an important sense in which we are our bodies. Still, the reputation of many psychical researchers have been dashed in the attempt to produce evidence for the existence of non-material bodies. No such 'subtle bodies' have ever forced themselves upon the attention of physical scientists, however sensitive the apparatus they have deployed.

Perhaps though my essential self has nothing to do with bodily existence at all. Perhaps it is to be found elsewhere. Perhaps a dualistic solution should be sought.

In memory

I wrote a letter of condolence to the widow of a priest I worked with many years ago.

"One thing I have valued over the years may surprise you. Denis had what I then found to be an infuriating habit, when discussing things in a meeting, of rehearsing how part of him thought and felt this, whilst another part of him thought and felt that. With the impatience of youth I often wanted to make progress by asking him to come more quickly to the point, but thought better of it. I later came to appreciate that this way of speaking may have come from his counsellor training and I found, and find, it a liberating way of talking especially about more personal things. Through it you can own thoughts and feelings you do not like and would certainly not wish to act upon. A part of me says ‘this’. A part of me says ‘that’. Thanks Denis."

Love is a losing game

The real winners in life, says Oliver James, "are those people who don't worry about winning and losing."

My own view is that sooner or later we are all losers. We are all going to lose everything that we have and we are forever. So better accept it.

Among the groups of people least willing to come to terms with this unavoidable truth are the religious. They are mostly hooked on the idea of some kind of afterlife in which they can go on going on, so that they don't have to lose everything, at least not forever.

But they do. And this craving for something they can't have prevents them developing a real spitituality - a spiritualty with guts.

Or so it seems to me.

Getting off to a good start

On a blog thread the other day I recounted that on my first day in a new parish, a second curacy, one of the churchwardens, very much the senior one, was about to introduce me to his wife after Evensong. I had met the lady earlier that day at the 8am Holy Communion. I therefore interrupted the churchwarden to say 'Oh I've already met your MOTHER.'

What made it more inexcusable was that she wasn't even older than him. Fortunately she was one of those Christians who really did forgive. As far as I know she never held it against me.

In my defence (or is it hers?) I can without effort be twenty years out on either side in guessing any person's age.

Bonkersgate

In the Church Times, Andrew Brown does what he does best; writes about journalists and journalism. Towards the end of a fine piece on Rowan Williams' recent bad press, he says:

"By the time that Dr Williams rose to speak on Monday, the outline of a defence was clear. He had been brutally and unfairly attacked for things he never said. What the press had done was an assault on the very possibility of nuanced discussion - and this is true. But it is much more important and and just as true that he was brutally and fairly attacked for things that he did, in fact, say, and quite probably meant."

Give a mouse a bad name

Douglas Adams, back in 1999, saw how the internet was being demonized.

"Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day."

Bring Back Jehovah

Simon Hoggart illustrates what it is about Christians that gets right up intelligent noses.

"A week ago the TV news included a heartwarming story about an 11-month old baby boy in Tennessee who had been picked up by a tornado and thrown for 150 yards. Rescuers found him lying face down in mud, but alive and only scratched.

"Neighbours and friends lined up to say how kind God had been, how God had looked after him, and so forth. I wanted to yell at the screen: "But his mother died! He's an orphan! What was God thinking of?" You don't have to be Richard Dawkins to realise that belief in a God who is both all-benign and omnipotent is going to lead you into some pretty tricky philosophical tangles.
Americans seem to have come up with the notion of God as the fourth emergency service, stepping in to mitigate misfortunes which for some reason He couldn't prevent: Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 for example.

"I've seen Christian newsletters which argue that God worked hard on 9/11, organising traffic jams in Manhattan so that hundreds of people didn't get to work in the twin towers before the planes hit. A bit rough on those who went by subway.

"Maybe they ought to get back to the Old Testament Jehovah, angry and vengeful, constantly seeking blood, destruction and revenge. It would solve so many problems."

Double Entendre

She showed me hers. I showed her mine.
She found it so exciting that in no time at all she believed we would be related by marriage.
I had another look at mine to see what it was that had impassioned her.
Upon closer inspection I found that her great-great-grandmother is mine as well.
Genealogy is sexy.

_______________

My wife can't get randy.
Is this a psychosexual problem?

No. It's 5 Down in today's Quick Crossword.

Quote of the Day

The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words. A recent federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.

– The Atlanta Journal

Vocation

From Prodigal Kiwis:

“This led me to revisit my own understanding of the vocation … question, and I finally asked it the right way. What I asked myself was this: is there anything in my life that I have always felt called or compelled to do, any drive or impulse that I have ultimately been able to ignore?... I can ignore it, but it does not go away. I am happier when I am following it than when I am not. It is something that gives me a sense of integrity and meaning…” (Gregory Augustine Pierce).

Jewish Heretic

I like this epithet as applied to Jesus.

Jewishness appeals to me because a religion that ends in 'ish' has a suitably modest opinion of itself.

To be out of step, as a heretic must, with something so ill-defined as to end in 'ish' in the first place, makes the man from Nazareth all the more attractive to those of us who have never found it easy to nail our colours to a particular doctrinal mast.

The great Iraqi insurgency

From Harry's Place:

The BBC is carrying a report about two bombs exploding in busy Baghdad animal markets have killed at least 64 people. According to the report the devices were attached to "two mentally disabled women, and were detonated remotely".

Is this some new dispicable low? Is the great Al Qaeda going around and rounding up the mentally ill and strapping bombs to them?

Iraqi security forces spokesman Brig Qassem Ata al-Moussawi told the BBC: "The operation was carried out by two booby-trapped mentally disabled women. [The bombs] were detonated remotely.

"Forensic and bomb squad experts as well as the people and traders of Al-Shorja area of the carpet market have confirmed that the woman who was blown-up there today was often in the area and was mentally disabled...

"In the New Baghdad area the shop owners and customers of the pet market confirmed that the woman who was blown-up there was mentally disabled as well."

Gene adds: This isn't the first time the "resistance" has done such a thing.