Cheese Crumbs

From the infamous Kinsey Report:

Cheese crumbs spread before a pair of copulating rats will distract the female but not the male.

Daniel

This is Daniel.

Hilary and I have the joy and privilege of looking after him. His main home is with his mum and dad, two disabled brothers and three able sisters. As respite for his main family Daniel spends part of every week, and most or all of some weeks with us. The arrangement is supervised, monitored and supported by our local Children's Services department. It's called Shared Care.

Daniel has lissencephaly (lissencephaly, we say, we shall say this only once.) His brain is smooth when it shouldn't be. A smooth brain can lead to a jerky life. In Daniel's case jerky episodes can turn into prolonged epileptic fits. Daniel can neither walk nor talk, though he can get about and make very meaningful sounds and gestures.

We think of Daniel as ours - but not ours.

We didn't choose him. He was given to us. We were vetted and selected - but we didn't select him.

We don't know how long we've got him for - or how long he's got - or how long we've got.

He'll never be able to repay us - or disappoint us. Our pleasure and rewards are of the simplest kind.

Every moment matters - is all there is.

Wherever Daniel goes he takes a very big cushion (bigger than him) and a Sky TV remote control - and that's when he's travelling light.

His rule for life is: If you want the full attention of someone, sit on his head.

The Pianist

Went to a performance last night of The Pianist, based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman.

Part of it was the story of a man who kept an orphanage for Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto. When they were transported to their deaths in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, he insisted on going with them to protect them as much as he could, even though this meant he would have to die too.

I thought of Daniel and the others we care for. I felt, as if praying, that unless I am that man in relation to them, my life has no meaning.

You-just-did-ness

Does anyone know if there's a word for this?

Like when someone says, 'Words can't express how grateful I am.' They just did.

or

When someone says, 'I'm no good at expressing myself.' And again they just have expressed themselves - perfectly.

Gentleman Bob

This from Norm:

He is commonly regarded as one of Africa's most ruthless tyrants, unleashing persecution and violence on anyone who dares challenge his iron rule.

So it came as a surprise to Zimbabwe's main opposition when they discovered that President Robert Mugabe has the manners of a Victorian English gentleman.

Why it should be regarded as a matter of surprise, let alone comment, is beyond me. We already know this, OK - people can be charming and also brutal, cultured and cruel. We know it, big time. After a day in the death camps presiding over the most revolting cruelties, men crossed the wire to be with their families - 'decent' men at home, who loved their children, refined men who listened to Bach and Beethoven.

The thing with Mugabe was never, like, 'Oh, how uncouth he is, what a boor; he swears in company, he belches at the table'. Politically, he's a criminal, that's all.

Shared Faith

Late-term Abortion

This painful matter is back in the news. Kira Cochrane reminds us what it is really about.

Many of those who have late-term abortions are the most vulnerable: teenagers who didn't realise that they were pregnant until five months' gestation; women with learning disabilities; those using methadone in drug rehabilitation programmes, which puts a halt to your periods. Women like the one I read of recently, whose partner started beating her up when she became pregnant, and who feared she would never be able to escape him if she had his baby. (In more than 30% of domestic violence cases, the abuse started during pregnancy.) Women who have suffered a severely traumatic episode - the death of a partner, or a child, for instance - who fear that the stress might affect foetal development. The BPAS has just published a 28-day audit of late-term abortion requests, to be distributed to MPs. The stories include that of a woman with two small daughters from a previous marriage, who had an unplanned pregnancy with her current partner, which he urged her to continue. She then found out that he was abusing her daughters. As Ann Furedi of BPAS says, the stories "provide a really stark contrast to the abstract, philosophical and rather sterile discussion about viability and not viability. What this does is to take it woman by woman. The challenge that we're putting to MPs is to look at this and think about it - what makes you think that the lives of these women would have been better if they'd had to continue their pregnancy? We're talking about women who, by their own admission, are saying, 'I cannot cope with having this child'."

Child abuse report

Speechless and in tears - after watching this.

http://www.gavinsblog.com/2009/05/26/child-abuse-report/

More Double Standards?

Melanie Phillips draws our attention to the suffering of civilians under Sri Lankan bombardment. "Hospitals have been repeatedly shelled. Thousands of civilians have been trapped and unknown numbers have died. The BBC says more than 70,000 people have been killed in this conflict, while the United Nations says it thinks 265,000 people have been displaced."

"Sure, there are some protests. But where are the calls by academics or trade unions to boycott Sri Lanka? Where are the denunciations of Sri Lankan ‘atrocities’ by the bishops and archbishops of the Church of England? Where are the passionate and emotive TV documentaries about the plight of the Tamils, the one-sided grillings of the Sri Lankans on the Today programme, the front page splashes and multi-part newspaper features on the Sri Lankans’ supposed breaches of international law, the NGOs’ appeals for humanitarian aid for the besieged Tamils, the attempts by human rights lawyers to prosecute Sri Lanka’s military for ‘war crimes’? No, all these things are reserved instead for Israel, which has demonstrably gone out of its way to avoid civilian casualties as far as humanly possible and yet upon whose imagined crimes against humanity the western intelligentsia – which has barely bestirred itself over the Tamils -- obsessively dwells."

At Further Expense

The British people have been scapegoating Parliament because of members on the fiddle. Now MPs are piling all the blame on their Speaker.

As Oscar Wilde opined, 'Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.' We don't like MPs. We don't understand or appreciate what they do, or benefit from it ourselves in any immediate or obvious way.

We have a problem here but it's not about lying and cheating, because we all do that, especially when we can get away with it.

A letter in yesterday's Times proposed a moral audit of the whole nation. Must have been a Rabbi.

At Enormous Expense

I seem to be one of the few people who sees the current outcry against Members of Parliament as just another case of what Thomas Macauley termed the ridiculous sight of 'the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality'.

The proposition that these particular culprits are untypical of the rest of our society at work and play is the most nauseating nonsense. How many of us, for instance, would turn down an offer of workmanship done well, efficiently, cheaply, quickly, paid for cash-in-hand, no questions asked, at known expense to the public purse through non-declaration and thus non-payment of Income Tax and, probably, VAT? This is cheating - just as much as wrongly claiming state benefits. But I do not know anyone who hasn't done it and wouldn't do it - even my friend who happens to be a retired police officer.

Who wouldn't, in claiming expenses from an employer or estimating expenses to set against their earnings for tax purposes, give themselves the benefit of the doubt, generously if permitted?

Church spokesmen, unable to resist, have of course jumped on the bandwagon of moral condemnation. Like most others they have forgotten how easily and unhealthily we project our shortcomings onto others and make scapegoats of easily definable groups. Worst of all they have forgotten their own scriptures which warn against human greed, against casting stones at other sinners, against moral sadism in all its forms.

Let's hope that there are not individuals and groups with malicious intent waiting in the wings to exploit for their own nefarious ends our collective, sanctimonious indignation.

From Harry's Place

Surely the BNP hopes to gain votes from people who are very keen to “support our troops”.

Well, I support the troops. People like Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry, for example.

Grenada-born L/Cpl Beharry was honoured in 2005 after twice saving lives under enemy fire. He became the Army’s most high-profile war hero when he received the VC for “repeated extreme gallantry and unquestioned valour” for the two rescues in May and June 2004 “despite a harrowing weight of incoming fire”.

He was at the head of a five-vehicle convoy when it came under attack in the town of al-Amarah on 1 May 2004. He guided the column through a mile of enemy ground to drop off wounded comrades at great risk to his own safety, his citation said.

Weeks later, his vehicle was hit by an rocket-propelled grenade round. Despite receiving horrific head injuries, he drove out of the ambush and again saved his crew.

The BNP is unimpressed.

The BNP, led by Nick Griffin, called Johnson Beharry “an immigrant” and claimed his heroics, which saved the lives of 30 fellow soldiers, were simply “routine”.

On its website the far-right political party states that Lance Corporal Beharry only received Britain’s top military honour because of “positive discrimination by the PC-mad government”.

It comes just days after the party held an Armed Forces Awareness Day to try to portray themselves as “the only party that supports our troops”.

Whatever their views on wars and politics, in March many people were horrified by the hateful Islamist protest against soldiers in Luton.

This racist belittling of bravery by BNP scum is no better than that.

Anyone who really does support British troops should never vote for the BNP.

Blog or Twitter?

Not sure which way to go.

Quite like short, not necessarily grammatical, notes with hyperlinks.

Went to a lecture Thursday night at Manchester Cathedral. Michael Schmidt, Professor of Poetry. Not the best lecture so far. I was left feeling not very clever, certainly not as clever as the speaker, and afterwards not much wiser. Especially horrified by the way he praised Rowan Williams' initiative on Sharia Law, one of the few things I think he has, as Abp of C, got catastrophically wrong.

Disturbing account in the Church Times of how serious religious violence in Nigeria is being ignored. Might cause the Abp to have second thoughts.

Carol Ann Duffy's appointment as Poet Laureate has been widely welcomed. In the past her lesbian stance might have prevented it, but, as she says, “I think we’ve all grown up a lot over the past ten years. Sexuality is now celebrated. It is a lovely, ordinary, normal thing.”

There's probably a philosophical label for this but I'm struck by how much trouble we make for ourselves by using nouns rather than verbs. Two have just occurred to me - depressive and failure. To be either a depressive or a failure is to be stuck in or with something, something you have to be cured of or delivered from. To be depressed sometimes, or to fail, is part of being human and of itself no big deal. I think, for example, the political left have wrongly judged that failing makes you a failure, and diminishes your worth as an individual, something you must be protected from, by state intervention if necessary. Is this the "all must have prizes" philosophy?

War by any other name

Joe Queenan lampoons some recent examples of newspeak.

The Obama administration has come under intense criticism for replacing the term "war on terror" with the emaciated euphemism "overseas contingency operations," and for referring to individual acts of terror as "man-caused disasters."

This semi-official attempt to disassociate the administration from the fierce rhetoric favored by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney has enraged Americans on both the right and left. Many feel that such vaporous bureaucratese is a self-emasculating action that plunges us into an Orwellian world where words have no emotional connection with the horrors they purport to describe.

Yet, if the intention of the Obama administration is to tone down the confrontational rhetoric being used by our enemies, the effort is already reaping results. This week, in a pronounced shift from its usual theatrical style, the Taliban announced that it will no longer refer to its favorite method of murder as "beheadings," but will henceforth employ the expression "cephalic attrition." "Flayings" -- a barbarously exotic style of execution that has been popular in this part of the world since before the time of Alexander -- will now be described as "unsolicited epidermal reconfigurations." In a similar vein, lopping off captives' arms will now be referred to as "appendage furloughing," while public floggings of teenaged girls will from here on out be spoken of as "metajudicial interfacing."

There's more.

On the Telly

I've just heard Ben Miller on ITV's Moving Wallpaper refer to someone as a 'misanthropic sociopath with entitlement issues'. Whatever this is, it isn't 'dumbing down'.

Not at peace

Sometimes I think I'm an introvert. But, if so, why are there so many people I want to shout at and shake at the same time?

Shoe thrower's sentence reduced

Gene brings news of justice tempered by mercy.

The journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush in Baghdad in the presence of Prime Minister al-Maliki last December has had his sentence cut from three years to one.

This is in contrast to what would have happened to him if he had thrown his shoes in the presence of Saddam Hussein while he was in power. In that case, the only things cut would have been his head and possibly other body parts.

I'm no expert on what is appropriate punishment but, as Gene says, it's a far more lenient sentence than he would have got in any other Arab country.

Solitude

“Solitude greeting solitude, that's what community is all about. Community is not the place where we are no longer alone but the place where we respect, protect, and reverently greet one another's aloneness. When we allow our aloneness to lead us into solitude, our solitude will enable us to rejoice in the solitude of others. Our solitude roots us in our own hearts. Instead of making us yearn for company that will offer us immediate satisfaction, solitude makes us claim our centre and empowers us to call others to claim theirs. Our various solitudes are like strong, straight pillars that hold up the roof of our communal house. Thus, solitude always strengthens community.”
Henri Nouwen

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman

timesonline reports from a region of Pakistan where the brutal Taleban have taken control:

In return for peace the Taleban can administer the region, run Sharia courts, ban women from marketplaces, outlaw music shops and stop girls older than 13 going to school.

Israel's crime

If you are beginning to feel "that Jews who are worried about anti-Jewish discrimination are really mendacious liars seeking to pull the wool over honest Gentile eyes" then please pay attention to this appeal by Eve Garrard.

Religion, theo-politics and race

Paul Sikander at Butterflies & Wheels has cautionary things to say about a phobia that is sweeping the world.

‘Islamophobia’ is a constructed model designed to protect Islam and Islamic politics from criticism. It has little or nothing to do with protecting individual Muslims from discrimination.

Until the late 1990’s, ethnic minorities in this country were conceived of as being susceptible to discrimination on the basis of immutable human factors. That you are black or Asian is a fact that cannot be altered, and you could face discrimination in British society because of it, prejudice sometimes subtle, sometimes violent and visceral. And so, civil and political society sought to counter this by privileging the dignity of the individual in the face of racism. If a Muslim, a Hindu, or a Sikh was to be called a ‘Paki’ it was not because of the religion they actively or nominally belonged to. If a West Indian was called a ‘nigger’ it was not because of any cultural or religious formulation or criticism they were facing. Anti-Semitism when it was expressed, the earlier racism of Europe, that had been present before the post war migration of black and Asian people to the UK, was simultaneously a similar and different mode of prejudice. But crucially, anti-Semitism when expressed and countered was not about defending the theology of Judaism.

The construction of the concept of ‘Islamophobia’ began in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair. The impetus for it was to stigmatise an entire range of individuals and opinions, from those who took issue with religious precepts of Islam, to those who questioned certain values of the religion, certain cultural practices recurrent inside the sub-culture of some British Muslim groups, all the way through to those who critically analysed Islamist politics.

For the first time, ‘racism’ was not considered to be the active discrimination against individuals because of their ethnic background. Now, ‘racism’ was asserted to be anything that remotely offended the sensibilities of religious Muslims, including those from within the Muslim community who dissented from a certain line on any range of issues.

What a victory. To weld together the protection of religion and theo-politics with the whole idea of racism. To no longer privilege the dignity of the individual against racial prejudice, but to privilege the ‘dignity’ of the religion of Islam, and the politics of Islamism, and providing them with an immunity — the righteous immunity of protection from ‘victimisation’.

Save the children from whom?

Norm sums up why people like me have stopped supporting what once were our favourite charities, and Comic Relief to boot.

Save the Children opposed the Iraq war, so doing what too many humanitarian NGOs have been doing lately, namely, adopting partisan positions on difficult and divisive political issues, thereby going beyond their stated and legitimate purposes, and turning away some of their longtime supporters. Save the Children favoured leaving the children of Iraq to the continued attentions of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The first and biggest lie

Brett at HP on a major casualty in the "war on terror".

According to a StWC press release: “Anti-war groups from across the world will meet to oppose any further expasion (sic) of NATO and demand an end to the occupation of Afghanistan.” Another rally will feature “leading speakers from the peace movement.”

That these are “anti-war” groups and that these speakers are from “the peace movement” is the first and biggest lie in what I know will be a flood of many more.

These are NOT “anti-war” campaigners. They are not pacifists. They are not conscientious objectors. They are certainly not against all wars. They are not against the use of armed force. And, perhaps most importantly, they are not even against all sides in current conflicts.

. . . the people invited to speak for the “Stop the War Coalition” are only against the use of military force if it is Western military force.

. . . this same sorry lot have no idea what do do about the theocratic fascists, the Taliban. As their malignant influence spreads into neighbouring Pakistan, as more women are forced into burkas, as more teachers are murdered and schools burned down because they educate girls, as the flirtatious are stoned to death and secularists murdered in their wake, what does the StWC recommend? Of course - western forces pull out of Afghanistan and leave them to it.

It is a position so ludicrous, so reckless and senseless, that the only way to make sense of it is to accept that it is in the interests of the enemies of democracy. Or peace.

There's no best species on earth award

That's what Pam Mason says in today's Guardian, and in so doing she grasps a beautiful truth:

Human achievements only matter to, and improve the lives of, other humans. There's no Best Species On Earth award which we win every year, like the US winning the World Series.

Who, apart from us, says we're so special? God? Darwin? A select committee of chimpanzees and dolphins? Yes, we have more abstract knowledge than we had 1000, 100, even five years ago, but it means absolutely nothing to anyone but us. Our achievements please us alone, and when we become extinct (most likely by our own hands) our vanishing will actually improve life for other species, provided we haven't wiped them out too.

Edward O Wilson was making a similar point:
“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

It's a fabrication that Britain doesn't make things any more

The truth that dares not speak its name. From timesonline:

Manufacturing output accounts for a larger share of GDP in the UK (13 per cent) than it does in France (12 per cent) or the United States (12 per cent).

More equal than others

This, from Harry's Place, is more none-too-subtle evidence of a double standard.

. . . have a read of these extracts from a Socialist Worker article from 2005, and see if you can guess which stateless and oppressed nation it describes:

This is a country occupied by a murderous foreign power for decades. A country split apart by a 1,600 mile series of fortified walls backed by soldiers, heavy weaponry and millions of landmines.

A country with 160,000 people living in refugee camps and yearning to return to their homeland.

It is a country where young and old have declared an intifada against their rulers — and where hundreds of UN resolutions which call for justice have been contemptuously ignored.

Still not guessed yet? The language may be familiar but the target might surprise you.

Look here for the answer.

The conclusion: Jews behaving in a certain way, bad: Arabs doing the same, erm well, you don’t understand, you’ve got to see it in context…ah, can I phone a friend? etc etc

An ancient prejudice

An article by Howard Jacobson on anti-Semitism is always worth reading, especially when it includes lines like this:

A life spent singing anti-Zionist carols in the company of Ken Livingstone and George Galloway is its own punishment.

Amazing Grace

Can't resist posting this passage from Kathleen Norris' book Amazing Grace. It reminds me of warmer feelings I once had for religious practices.

Not long ago I heard a novice speak of a nun with Alzheimer's in her community, who every day insists on being placed in her wheelchair at the entrance to the monastery's nursing home wing so that she can greet everyone who comes. "She is no longer certain what she is welcoming people to," the younger woman explained, "but hospitality is so deeply ingrained in her that it has become her whole life." Better an old fool welcoming people at the door with her whole heart and soul, Benedict might agree, than a distracted, cold, or officious monk or nun with faculties intact.

UNfreedom

Thanks to MadPriest for this:

The right to criticise religion is being slowly doused in acid. Across the world, the small, incremental gains made by secularism ~ giving us the space to doubt and question and make up our own minds ~ are being beaten back by belligerent demands that we “respect” religion. A historic marker has just been passed, showing how far we have been shoved. The UN rapporteur who is supposed to be the global guardian of free speech has had his job rewritten: to put him on the side of the religious censors.

Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants, led by Saudi Arabia, demanded the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to be able to think and speak freely failed to “respect” the “unique sensitivities” of the religious, they decided, so they issued an alternative Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. It insisted that you can only speak within “the limits set by the shariah (law). It is not permitted to spread falsehood or disseminate that which involves encouraging abomination or forsaking the Islamic community”.

In other words, you can say anything you like, as long as it precisely what the reactionary mullahs tell you to say. The declaration makes it clear there is no equality for women, gays, non-Muslims, or apostates. It has been backed by the Vatican and a bevy of Christian fundamentalists.

Incredibly, they are succeeding. The UN’s Rapporteur on Human Rights has always been tasked with exposing and shaming those who prevent free speech ~ including the religious. But the Pakistani delegate recently demanded that his job description be changed so he can seek out and condemn “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets”. The council agreed, so the job has been turned on its head. Instead of condemning the people who wanted to murder Salman Rushdie, they will be condemning Salman Rushdie himself.

Anything which can be deemed “religious” is no longer allowed to be a subject of discussion at the UN ~ and almost everything is deemed religious. Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union has tried to raise topics like the stoning of women accused of adultery or child marriage. The Egyptian delegate stood up to announce discussion of shariah “will not happen” and “Islam will not be crucified in this council” ~ and Brown was ordered to be silent. Of course, the first victims of locking down free speech about Islam with the imprimatur of the UN are ordinary Muslims.

Johann Hari
(THE STATESMAN)

Democratic dawn in Iraq

William Shawcross writing in The Guardian gives credit where he thinks it's due.

The weekend's elections in Iraq were a huge success for the Iraqi people. The remarkably peaceful day of voting on Saturday - and the interim results - give good reason to hope Iraq really is on the way to building a decent society.

There will be further setbacks. But who knows, Iraq may yet even become a model for democratic change in other Arab countries. If so, who deserves some credit? The much maligned President Bush. And Tony Blair.

But some of my best friends are Lions

This from the Hamas Covenant:

The Zionist invasion is a cruel invasion, which has no scruples whatsoever; it uses every vicious and vile method to achieve its goals. In its infiltration and espionage operations, it greatly relies on secret organizations which grew out of it, such as the Freemasons, the Rotary Clubs, the Lions and other such espionage groups. All these organizations, covert or overt, work for the interests of Zionism and under its direction, and their aim is to break societies, undermine values, destroy people's honor, create moral degeneration and annihilate Islam. [Zionism] is behind all types of trafficking in drugs and alcohol, so as to make it easier for it to take control and expand.

The charming Cherie Blair

Louise Bagshawe at CentreRight pays this most unexpected compliment.

I had the honour, and yes I do mean honour, of interviewing Cherie Blair. As a tribal Tory, like the rest of us, I've read the caricatures published about this woman over the years. She was the PM's wife our press loved to loathe. Grasping, bolshie, chippy, you name it. There was none of that anywhere in the person I met.

What I'm about to say will not surprise anybody who has read her book. Mrs. Blair is a naturally good writer, so much so that I think in becoming a lawyer she may have missed her true calling. Speaking for Myself is a cracking good read. The author is self-deprecating, witty, perspective, laugh out loud funny at times. You must get it if you haven't done yet. No wonder why it was a massive bestseller when so many bland, sanitised political memoirs fail.

I interviewed her at Southwark Crown Court where she is still working as a Recorder. Not the height of glamour, and obviously Mrs. Blair has no need to work. She does it from a sense of duty and self-satisfaction. When I said I thought it was great she was still working she looked puzzled that I'd even imagine she would stop. She was kind, she was polite, she asked about the date of the election, she said we needed more women in parliament, asked me about standing in Corby. We discussed the hell of the PPC selection process, something she went through herself as well as watching her husband suffer through it.

I was there to interview her, but she's one of those rare people who seems more interested in others than herself. She was elegant, she smiles and laughs all the time. She is (red rag to a bull on ConHome, this, but I admire it) a true feminist. She said she sees her book not as political but written for other women. Men will love it too.

You can see the interview during the show, but in passing in one of her answers, Mrs. Blair said of the press that she didn't even recognise the woman they described. Nor do I. I don't think I've ever been more struck by the disparity between somebody's manufactured image and the person they turned out to be. In the future, I will put even less stock in the tabloids' portrayal of anybody's character. As Conservatives, we can be thankful that such a bright and charismatic woman never made it into Parliament.

A war not quite over

"The message that we are sending the world is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism... in a manner that is consistent with our values and ideals," Mr Obama said.

It's that struggle formerly known as the 'war on terror'.

Heaven defined

What animal would you most like to be?

One of a pair of well-loved cats in a house with a cat flap. Love, companionship and independence. Bliss.

Punditry

I hear that Suggs is marching against racism and homophobia.
I mean, it's just Madness gone politically correct.

Just suppose

Suppose there had been an increase over recent years in the incidence of a particularly cruel and criminal act. Suppose it amounted to an attempt to sabotage the National Blood Service and thus prevent urgent transfusions of blood taking place. Suppose that, apart from a few representatives of oddball organisations and a handful of individual nutters, most of the known culprits were Jehovah's Witnesses and sought to justify their criminal behaviour by reference to the teachings of that religious group, even though many leading Jehovah's Witnesses had publicly condemned their actions.

Suppose a book had been written and a charitable helpline set up to advise and support victims of this horrific interference with a life-saving service. Suppose that the writer of the book and director of the charity was invited to answer questions about the problem in a Guardian column, and she did so without once mentioning Jehovah's Witnesses. Wouldn't it make you think?

Jasvinder Sanghera appeals for support in her efforts to eradicate forced marriage and honour-based crime, without once mentioning Islam.

Becoming western culture

Interesting to see Don Cupitt's typically shrewd observation that Christianity has gradually evolved beyond its 'church' form, to become modern western culture.

He sees this in "the way that the modern world expects Christian standards of the West. People in the poor countries expect the West to feel rather guilty about being so rich, and to acknowledge a duty to 'redistribute' its surplus wealth. They expect the West to acknowledge the sinfulness of colonialism and the slave trade, . . to go on about individual human rights, about democracy and the rule of law. In short, the rest of the world has a great range of moral expectations of the West and tries hard to exploit them. But the poor countries don't have the same expectations of other religions or culture-areas. Nobody expects the Turks to apologize to the Armenians, or the Egyptian Arabs to the Copts, the Indians to dwell on the evils of the Maghul Empire, or the Zanzibaris to demand repentance and reparations for centuries of slave-trading in dhows down the East African coast."

"The world assumes (rightly, it seems) that Christian values do still greatly influence Western behaviour. Many commentators assume that Christianity is a dying faith whereas Islam is very much alive. Because other faiths and cultures show absolutely no inclination to be self-critical in public, they can confidently assert their own moral superiority and the West's relative decadence. But are rich oil sheiks apologizing to black East Africa for slavery, and offering aid without strings? Seemingly not, despite the fact that Almsgiving (Zakat) is one of the Five Pillars of Islam."

His conclusion? That "Christianity is doing better in its afterlife as 'Western culture' than ever it did as a religion."

A virtue of losers

According to Dr Alan White in the Guardian Review, this is how Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, a man who had lost all sympathetic feeling for his fellows, saw kindness - as a virtue of losers. Scrooge was of course redeemed and reabsorbed into life and its networks of reciprocity by the hand of a sort of God, a sort of God (be it God or Marx) that, says Dr White, we are lacking today.

But surely all human virtues are truly virtues of losers. We all eventually lose everything - forever. Isn't it this that makes them virtues in the first place? Isn't it only because we are born losers that any kind of morality is possible? If we depend on God or Marx to compensate our losses, can we ever be said to act virtuously at all?

Atheist Bus

Posters have appeared on 800 buses in England, Scotland and Wales, as well as on the London Underground, with the slogan, There's Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying And Enjoy Your Life.

The trouble with this slogan is the word 'probably'. I think the probability of God's existence is a profoundly irreligious idea. I would rather argue that God is Nothing, following the line of Gareth Moore in Believing in God. It is the extension of another plea I have made here, that we cannot understand belief in God without understanding what it means to become nothing before him.

Good Politics

'For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.' (Nelson Mandela)

When antisemitism needs a spell check.

In Defence of Israel

The scenes from Gaza are heartbreaking. But the whole conflict could be avoided if the Palestinians said one small thing.

Daniel Finkelstein's words are moving and wise. Please read them.

Just imagine

Norm reports . .

. . a 'helpful' warning that has just been delivered to Gordon Brown. Jewish representatives are saying to him that it might be hard to restrain angry young Jews from bombing mosques and the London Underground if the rockets on Sderot and other Israeli towns don't cease. Not that the Jewish representatives support this, of course; they're pleading for restraint. Cancel that paragraph - just kidding.

My Coolest Grand

About two years into my term of articles, aged 19, I asked Walter Eccles, my boss, for a £1000 loan. The family business, a corner shop, was going bust. It was my dad's business and comprised our home. My request was graciously and regretfully turned down.

How cool was that? £1000 was a lot of money in the early sixties. My starting salary was two pounds ten shillings a week. To me it was a simple matter. My dad was in need. My employer was in the money. Perhaps surprisingly, neither my importunate request, nor Mr Eccles' gentle letdown, made my later relationship with him the least bit uncomfortable. What a gent!

In Senegal

This is what happened:

Nine gay men in Senegal have been sent to jail for “indecent conduct and unnatural acts”.

Homosexual acts are illegal in Senegal but lawyers for the men said the sentence was the harshest ever handed down to gay men in the country.

The judge added three years to the maximum five-year sentence after ruling that the men were also members of a criminal organisation.

Most of them belonged to an association set up to fight HIV and Aids.

“This is the first time that the Senegalese legal system has handed down such a harsh sentence against gays,” said Issa Diop, one of the men’s four defence lawyers.

…

The head of a gay rights organisation in Senegal told AFP news agency that the situation for gay people in the country was getting worse.

“Many gays are already fleeing to neighbouring countries because of our living conditions,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Senegal is a predominantly Muslim country and gay men and women remain socially marginalised.

Spring Gardens, Manchester

I passed here today. It took me back to my interview with Walter Eccles, partner in the form of Chartered Accountants, Litton, Pownall, Blakey and Higson. I was leaving school at sixteen and looking for employment as an articled clerk. My dad came with me to the interview. He was trying hard to impress in the way of proud working class fathers. He asked what renumeration I might expect. Having been to a Grammar School I knew that he should have said 'remuneration'. I was mildly embarrassed, but even more I was glad to have a father who cared.

Thanks dad.

Moral Inversion

Melanie Phillips offers a judgement on those who took part in the anti-Israel demonstration in London:

Such people have made no protest at the bombardment of Israeli towns by more than 6000 rockets in the past six years, deliberately targeting innocent civilians. They have made no protest at the way Hamas has used Gazan civilians as human shields, situating its murderous arsenals beneath apartment blocks, in schools and hospitals and mosques in order to maximise the numbers of civilians killed (in order to manipulate all-too pliable western opinion). No, their protest only starts when Israel finally takes the military action aimed at stopping this genocidal barrage.

A better tomorrow

Two things that taken together would, I think, change the world for the better:

First, that each person should wear two badges, one showing their total annual income, and the other their total capital wealth.

Second, that all police officers should be dressed in pink.

Pope attacks blurring of gender

This (as David T reminds us)
from a man who WEARS A FUCKING DRESS!!

Memo to Catholics

Your leader is a hate-mongering lunatic.

Killing gay people is not funny

Many people were recently amused by the shoe throwing antics of journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi. According to his brother, al-Zaidi’s actions were ’spontaneous’ and meant to ‘humiliate the tyrant’ George Bush. The New York Times reports that al-Zaidi has become a ‘hero’ in the Arab world.

But once again, has Azarmehr of the excellent ‘For a democratic secular Iran’ blog hit the nail on the head:

What would have happened if the Arab so called journalist who threw his shoe at President Bush, as he claimed ‘for all the mothers and orphans of Iraq?’, had thrown his shoe at Saddam Hussein? For Saddam certainly made thousands of mothers mourn for their sons and thousands of Iraqis had become orphans as a result of Saddam’s massacres.

If Muntazer al-Zaidi was critical of Bush’s policies, as he had a legitimate right to, he could have posed them as questions during the press conference in a civilised manner, something he would have never dared under Saddam.Al-Zaidi is apparently a supporter of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Islamist extremist.

Al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, is a disgusting clerical fascist outfit with a particular love for killing gay people, as Peter Tatchell reported in 2007:

The Madhi Army has been involved in the torture and execution of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Iraqis – and many other Iraqis, especially women, who do not conform to its harsh, perverse interpretation of Islam … Muqtada al-Sadr’s men have adopted a new tactic, borrowed from the Iranian secret police. They are posing as gays in online chatrooms, in order to lure gay men, arrange dates and kill them.

This could smart a bit

You may remember how a few weeks ago Mrs goodfornowt announced that she didn't mind me having a little prick. Well how that woman has changed! She now wants me to have a second prick.

So it's back to the doctor today. Wish me luck!

Sweet relief

The guest of our soul knows our misery; He comes to find an empty tent within us - that is all He asks.

St Therese of Lisieux

The power of story

Went to a debate last week at Manchester University. Martin Amis was in the chair. Also taking part were John Gray and Adam Phillips. Deep stuff.

John Gray was mourning the passing of reading books. He quoted research which suggests that the very act of reading alters the brain, presumably in a good way. It seems that digital technology is likely to lead to other, less welcome, cerebral developments. The feeling was that we are in danger of losing a great literary tradition upon which our whole civilization had been securely founded.

It occurred to me though that literacy has itself only lately been added to our cultural landscape and has until recently been the preserve of a privileged few. Oral tradition and the art of story-telling have been more formative of our enlightenment.

Andrew Spurr reminds us of the need to offer counter-stories to the Playstation generation.

There is an old saying that God invented humanity because God loves stories. In the tradition of the Hebrew people, there was a prohibition against rendering their God in the plastic arts and so they went to town on narrative and thoroughly delighted in it. The Hebrew sacred texts are story and counter-story describing worlds and the God who is active in those worlds. If you are familiar with the world painted by the Deuteronomist, that you get what you deserve, and God rewards the righteous, then the Book of Job comes alive as a counter-story, protesting that ill-fortune falls on the righteous too, and the reasons are hidden in the depths of God.

The Christmas stories are counter-stories. They are stories which are holding out for a God and a world which will work differently to the one in which the storytellers live. Matthew uses the Moses story, and Luke the call of Samuel, to tell their listeners that the God who was present in these classical tales is present in Jesus of Nazareth. We know that the Christmas stories are counter-stories because they use words for Jesus of Nazareth which the early audience will have associated with Augustus Caesar. Caesar was Son of God, Prince of Peace, and our Christmas birth story writers are say that Jesus is these things, in other words, Jesus is, Caesar is not. Caesar’s Roman Peace is fine if you are Roman, and so long as Caesar has the biggest army. The peace of Jesus of Nazareth is about seeking out those who do not benefit from Roman peace, and including them at life’s table. Our Christmas stories are asking us whether our God is more likely to be found in a Roman palace, or a cow’s feeding trough.

All of this is commonplace for first year students in Biblical studies, I’m saying nothing new. But over the last several years my worry has been that we have lost our grip on the power of story. When you clear our public spaces of religious stories (particularly those pressed into
the service of worldly interest) you are not left with a pristine post-Enlightenment space. The power of stories is that they are ways of inviting us to consider who we might be, they invite us to make lives in the worlds they describe, and they invite our loyalty and our resources. This is too much power to be left unfulfilled.

Into this space come the storytellers we know, news organisations, spin doctors and advertisements, each seeking to frame the world and our place in it. With the technological gap between generations, the worry is that our children are being formed by stories told by Nintendo, Sony and the like. After school our children step into virtual worlds which are laid out before them. They can progress through these worlds with the purchase of each upgrade, and they are being encouraged to acquire skills which will help them be promoted through the moral universes the games companies have described.

All of this goes by stealth because this happens unsupervised. Work-weary parents may even be grateful for the diversion. Narratives are being quietly assimilated, and these are shared in the schoolyard, and young friends measure each other by their skill and knowledge in worlds barely guessed at by those who have the care of developing the next generation.

We need to dispense with the tinsel-and-teatowel Christmas and recover its visceral power in the world where the story was first told, a world which was about brute force and malnutrition. We need to rediscover the power of telling stories of a God which runs counter to the prevailing
values of the day.

If we can recover Christmas as a counter-story in its own day under Rome, we might want to start telling new counter-stories about the God we believe in, in our own day, to the Playstation generation.

God in ordinary

God

doesn’t have to knock

use the front door key

doesn’t check how clean the house is

knows how to use the kettle

and where the spoons go

washes up

is content to sit

and chat about issues

of no importance

or just be quiet

Andrew Rudd

We, the ordinary people of the streets

I have Sue at Discombobula and Barbara at Barefoot Toward the Light to thank for this. It's a quote from Madeleine Delbrel. I have spent most of my life and a great deal of effort trying to escape ordinariness of one kind or another, but chiefly in myself. Religion and spirituality have often been my means of escape. But these words remind me of something that first drew me to Christ a long time ago.

"We, the ordinary people of the streets, have the distinct impression that solitude is not the absence of the world, but the presence of God.

"Our solitude is the encounter with God everywhere. For us, being alone in a crowd is participating in the solitude of God.

"God is so great that there is no place for anything else., everything is within God.

"For us, the whole world is the meeting place with the One whom we cannot avoid. We encounter God's living plan right there on the busy street corners. We encounter God's splendor in the laws of nature and science. We encounter God's imprint on the earth. We encounter Christ in all these `little ones' who are his own, the ones who suffer in their bodies, the ones who are bored, the ones who are troubled, the ones who are in need of something. We encounter Christ rejected in countless acts of selfishness.

"How could we possibly have the heart to mock these people or to hate them, this multitude of sinners of whom we are a part?

"Godly solitude is the love of people, it is Christ serving Christ, Christ in the one who is serving and Christ in the one being served. How could such activity be for us a distraction from God or mere busyness and noise?

"We, the ordinary people of the streets, are certain we can love God as much as he might want to be loved by us.

"We do not think love will he something extraordinary, but something all-consuming. We believe that doing the little thing in union with God is as loving as our greatest activities. Besides, we are unaware of the size of the measurements of our own activities. We know that everything we do can only be small and everything that God does in us is always great. And so we go about our activities with a sense of great peace.

"We know that all our work consists of being at peace, one with God, while not avoiding the very things that need to be done. Basically it is letting God act through us. ...

"It matters little what we have to do, pushing a broom or a pen, speaking or listening, sewing a dress or teaching a class, taking care of a sic person or tapping away at a computer.

"All this is the meeting place of God, minute by minute, the very place where God's love is revealed."

Happy crappy Christians

Norm has been visiting his mum. But he can't stop blogging.

Notes from the Holy Land

While I've been in Israel I haven't had time to do much blogging. Tomorrow I'm travelling back to England, so radio silence is about to set in at normblog. I hope to resume on Thursday. Meanwhile, leaving Israel, I give you a couple of Israel-related links.

1. Here's an item about some happy clappy Christians, evidently unfamiliar with some of the less salubrious aspects of the history of Christianity, teaming up with a group of Jews, evidently unfamiliar with some of the less salubrious aspects of the history of Christianity, to rewrite a few Christmas carols as attacks on Israel.

2. Then, here's a detail from Mumbai:

Asked specifically if he was talking of torture marks, he said: "It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood," one doctor said.

The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: "Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again," he said.

Put together a Christmas carol about that, why don't you? (Also here, here and here.)

Dying is a bugger

NHS Blog Doctor has this to say:

Dying is a bugger.

It is unpleasant. It often involves discomfort. It is the loneliest experience you will ever go through. It is heart-breaking for you and your family.

It is a real bugger.

But let us not sweep it under the carpet and rush you off to the hospice where death can be processed and packaged. Out of sight. Out of mind.

Hospices remove death from life. They sanitise it. We have already removed birth from life in the UK. Obstetric medical services are currently set up so that no one in their right mind has a home delivery. It does not have to be like that. Now the same is happening to death.

Be realistic about dying. It is not pleasurable. It is not fun. There may be some physically painful times, though these can nearly always be controlled medically. There will be some emotionally painful times. These can not be controlled so easily. You will be sad. You will be lonely. Ideally, you will be at home, surrounded by your family, supported by the family doctor, the district nurses, the Marie Curie nurses and the local vicar or priest. If that is not possible, you will be in the hospice.

There will be some bad times. Times of deep sadness and despair. There will also be some good times, some quality times. Not in any transcendental and philosophical way, but in terms of precious time spent with family and friends.

Whatever else is going on, that is too good to miss. Do not throw it away. And do not ask me to help you throw it away.

Go-Cartland

Alert as I am to every opportunity to redefine negative stereotypes and champion the culturally despised, I was yet surprised to find that Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland can be icons of liberal society.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalia born feminist writer was interviewed by Johann Hari.

Somali culture began to demand that Ayaan too become a submissive woman who scrubbed away her own personality and sexuality. When she was five years old, she was made "pure" by having her genitals hacked out with a knife. It was a simple process. Her grandmother and two of her friends pinned her down, pulled her legs apart, and knifed away her clitoris and labia. She remembers the sound even now - "like a butcher, snipping the fat off a piece of meat." The bleeding wound was sewn up, leaving a thick tissue of scarred flesh to form as her fleshy chastity belt. She could not walk for two weeks.

Ayaan soon realised that in a culture so patriarchal it could not tolerate the existence of an unmaimed vagina, "I could never become an adult. I would always be a minor, my decisions made for me. But I wanted to become an individual, with a life of my own." She heard whispers of a world where this was possible by reading novels. For her, even poring through Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland seemed transgressive, because they depicted a world where boys and girls played together on the basis of equality, and where women chose their own husbands, rather than having them forced on them by their fathers. Imagine a world so patriarchal that Barbara Cartland seems like a gender revolutionary.

Is Richard Dawkins missing the point?

S O Muffin thinks so.

Religion doesn’t make you moral, and doesn’t make you immoral either. Religion (or, for that matter, any “sacred text” – Das Kapital will do) gives you an excuse to be what you anyway intend to be. If you want to be a complete bastard, kill the infidels, take away their land, fly airplanes into their buildings, stone 13-year old girls, hang gays off cranes at the market place, bomb abortion clinics – with little effort you’ll discover all the right sacred quotes to salve your conscience and persuade you that what you are doing is the will of god. However, if you want to spread peace and understanding, comfort the sick, help the powerless, build bridges, reach to your enemies, be a mentsch – well, also then you’ll discover, with equally little effort, all the right sacred quotes to “justify” your actions – if there was any need to justify them.

The true dividing lines are not between religious and atheists. They are between bastards and the mentsch, of all creeds and none.

No brocade

We were talking with friends the other day about how some people of faith are able to face death with a kind of serenity, and how this somehow validates the claims of those who believe. Later I came to see how my take on religion is different from most others.

For me religion doesn't work - has never worked. Religion in my understanding is not effective; doesn't produce, let alone guarantee, benefits; it's not therapeutic, does not solve problems; makes life harder, not easier; it's not the bandage but the wound.

Religion, like love, hurts. It really hurts. It hurts me. How could it be otherwise?

Ruminate

Hero of the Year

Bishop Gene Robinson in Pink News:

. . . the thing that I would say to the people in the pews of the Church of England is: 'When are you going to stand up for your gay priest?

'Whom you know and love, you know his partner, you adore his partner, when are you going to demand of your church leaders who also know the sexual orientation of their priests and who will go to dinner at his house with his partner.'

'When are you going to demand that they support publicly what they support privately?'

One of the frustrating things about pronouncements from the Church of England for us in the States, is you would think from those statements that there are no gay priests or gay-partnered priests in the Church of England.

And that's a kind of living death for those priests.

It must be very difficult to feel any sort of worth if the church will let you work for them but not acknowledge you.

And let's remember that priests are called to get into the pulpit every Sunday and call people to a life of integrity. To not allow the priests themselves to live such a life of integrity is tragic.

What I most admire about Gene Robinson is his costly commitment to openness and honesty, and his refusal to hide.

Hiddenness is the divine prerogative, not a prerogative for divines.

(S)layers of meaning

One of the most useful conceptual tools when interpreting a biblical text is contained in the question, 'What must the truth have been and be, that someone who thought in the way this person did should express it like that?'

Actually it can be applied to almost any form of human communication.

As in:

There are always two sides to every divorce. There's yours. And there's shithead's.

Fool, Philosopher, Sage

From Maverick Philosopher:

The fool is never satisfied with what he has, but is quite satisfied with what he is. The philosopher is never satisfied with what he is, but is satisfied with what he has. The sage is satisfied with both, with what he is and what he has. Unfortunately, there are no sages, few philosophers, and a world full of fools.

You can run

I have met people who, when you ask them how they account for the unexplainedness of life, the puzzle of it, the point of it, smile and say: “When someone raises questions like that, I turn away, sit down, and enjoy a good lunch.” Afterward, they think of it no more.

. . .the one contemporary whose life I most carefully tracked, from the beginning to at least The Fall, was Albert Camus. “A single sentence will suffice for modern man”, he wrote in 1956: “They fornicated, and they read the papers.” Well, that’s a way to avoid the nothingness.

Michael Novak, No One See’s God, ix-xx.

What's left?

I used to see myself as on the left, the old left, old Labour. I'm still Labour. It's in me. Call it tribal, though it's not a tribe I was born into. More like the Church of England, it's one I joined.

But am I still left? Can I claim to be when I find myself, as I increasingly do, nodding in agreement with those, like a recent correspondent to the Church Times, who inveigh against "a culture in which honest and thrifty people subsidise . . the mindless random procreation of life by very young people who have no time for each other, let alone for their pitiable and blameless offspring"?

"Only laziness, down-levelling, and a perverted political correctness could allow that the lack of a high income or a high IQ or a stable background preclude recognition by the perpetrator that such behaviour is wrong."

"It is greatly to the credit of Jeremy Kyle and his team that they bring the culprits face to face with the enormity of their actions, and then bend over backwards to offer practical, professional, and costly help, and a sense of meaning to people disastrously ensnared, with the state's tacit assent, by their own selfishness and decadence."

Jeremy Kyle? Now after what I said in my last posting about unpopular minorities, can you think of anyone more unpopular, and more of a minority than Jeremy Kyle? And yes, I do feel sympathy for him.

Descent into smugness

I was kind of brought up with this idea that siding with the underdog is as much a Christian as an English character trait. An unpopular minority is an underdog, so I can't seem to help siding with unpopular minorities, even the ones I don't really approve of or agree with.

It's for this reason that I can't enjoy BBC Radio comedy, much of which, as Martin Kelner points out, is aimed at easy targets, from dubious politicians to self-obsessed celebs, but always the same ones over and over again, wheeled out for a cheap clubbable laugh.

There is no denying a tendency towards smugness. As Kelner says:

Jeremy Hardy on Radio 4's The News Quiz, for instance, is a funny man but there is something about his tone - maybe it is the approbation of the audience - that occasionally seems so self-satisfied that, even while you are laughing, you want to give him a smack round the neck with a sock filled with horse manure.

Most things happen by chance

. . . the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Ecclesiastes 9.11

Anyone there?

God decided to hide himself so that we might have an idea what he's like.

Simone Weil

It's too easy to stuff Bush

As you may know by now, I can't help having a soft spot for any beleaguered minority, and not just ones that are Muslim or gay (lesbian, bisexual . . .).

Well here's another - and thanks to Norm for putting in a good word for him. He's talking about Oliver Stone's new movie about George W Bush, W, and the critical responses to it.

What Stone presents is a political downfall and his protagonist's consciousness of that fact. But this is evidently not enough for many critics caught up in a cultural moment in which Bush has come to stand as either pure incarnation of evil or a laughing stock, or both. There is no kind of wrongdoer today, or tyrant, or criminal, or enemy, who doesn't have someone to remind us of their humanity: of the fact that they came to whatever it is they did by way of impulses, temptations and weaknesses which they share with ordinary people living decent lives. The very architects and perpetrators of genocide are not denied this consideration. But a movie that shows George W. Bush in the figure of a man, though it shows him in the end in abject defeat - this doesn't fit with a certain dominant liberal consensus. It tells you some interesting things about that consensus that there is now no more hated figure than a democratically elected politician whose incumbency is about to end.

Bush does indeed have plenty to answer for: principally that he allowed a wholly necessary conflict - the much-maligned war on terror - to be morally tarnished and politically weakened by Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, by the practice of extraordinary rendition and forms of interrogation that are torture. But these facts, referred to in Oliver Stone's movie, do not explain the perception of some of the critics that W. is kind to George Bush. It isn't.

There's one born again every minute

The trouble with most religious believers I know is that they are content to go through life on little more than a whinge and a prayer.

BBC denies 'homophobia'

The BBC denied it had been "homophobic" after a complaint was made to police about Have I Got News For You.

After discussing Iran's failure to make the world's biggest ostrich sandwich, guest host Alexander Armstrong said: "On the plus side they do still hold the record for hanging homosexuals."

A BBC spokeswoman said: "The presenter never intended for this comment to be homophobic - quite the opposite."

Another aggrieved minority so determined to be offended that they can't tell the difference between an attack on them and one on their, and our, enemies. Very worrying.

First Impressions

You really had to get to know Mr Hillman in order to dislike him.

Straw Dogs

I've been looking again at John Gray's book.

Essentially the message is:

Humans are not central. Progress is a myth; freedom is a fantasy; the individual self a delusion; morality a kind of sickness; justice a matter of custom; illusion our natural condition; technology beyond our control; humans helpless; political tyrannies inevitable.


Or as someone has said, 'Not the best motivation for getting out of bed in the morning.'


It seems fair also to say, with another critic, that Gray mixes vital truths with half-truths, plain falsehoods, lurid hyperbole, dyspeptic middle-aged grousing, and recklessly one-sided rhetoric.


There are also glaring inconsistencies in the case that Gray makes.


He claims that morality is a fiction yet goes about morally denouncing everything from Socrates to science. And I've yet to meet a giraffe that gets anywhere near so worked up about genocide as Gray does.


But though he does manage to blur important differences between humans and other animals in this way, I'm not altogether dismissive of the case he makes in saying that humans are neither central to nor special in the scheme of things. The notion that human beings are superior to other life forms seems often to me to be circular in that humans are superior precisely at being human, and doing the things that humans do and value doing. We're good at what we're good at, and when compared with bacteria, we humans are better at writing poetry but not as good at surviving for millions of years in conditions of extreme heat or cold.


More later.

The impossible takes a little longer

I've asked before and I'll ask again. Why do people insist on doing things they can't do? It's the whole paralympics thing. Can't understand it. To me it's simple. If you're blind, you can't play cricket. Blind people are properly ruled out by cricket team selectors in the same way, and for a similar reason, that hydrophobics are not likely to make it as swimmers, or agrophobics to excel in the event of cross-country running, or legless people in any event or sport that involves any kind of running at all.

To accommodate these games to the individual needs and disabilities of all who should like to take part entails the same kind of flight from reality as that of a vegetarian who insists on eating only wafer-thin slices of ham.

This guy was sacked from Relate because he wasn't content to go on being a first class relationship counsellor but wanted instead to tell people with sexual difficulties how and with whom they they should and shouldn't have sex. He is of course taking his case to an employment tribunal, alleging unfair dismissal on the grounds of religious discrimination. But all they said in effect was, 'If you want to do that kind of thing, get yourself a soapbox or pulpit. If you want to stay with Relate, accept the limitations of your office.'

The After-Pill Morning

Since I stopped taking my anti-depressant medication,
my words have turned to tears.
Should I translate them into words again?
Should I even try?
Tears can be more honest
and thinking doesn't come into it.
To parody Wittgenstein, the greatest living philosopher now dead,
Don't think: Choke.

What they never told us at theological college.

From now on I will be haunted by this image of The Second Coming.

I've just heard Jonathan Ross's account of why we eat turkey at Christmas.

It's because Jesus came into Jerusalem, riding on a turkey.

As he said, for God's sake READ YOUR BIBLE!

Softening the blow

I couldn't resist sharing a joke with my GP as he lurked needle-brandishingly by my left shoulder.

Man goes to the doctor with a cough.


Doctor diagnoses Upper Respiratory Tract Infection. Tells patient it's commonly called High Chest Cold.


Ah! says patient. "As in, High Chest Cold To Say I Love You?"

Moving on

My prick is now behind me.

Correspondence closed.

Being 65

My wife says that she doesn't mind me having a little prick.

So on Saturday I'm off for my first flu jab.

RC Bishops in Philippines oppose family-planning Bill.

Archbishop Oscar Cruz likened the 'contraceptive mentality' to excessive feasting in ancient Rome, when people would vomit after they were full, and then continue feasting: "Artificial contraception is like that: couples have sex, put it in, spit it out, have sex again," he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

What the Archbishop lacks in connubial experience he more than makes up for in unflagging imagination.

Scouts to be prepared about sex

It's 1955. I'm twelve years. In the local library. Wanting to know if masturbation is going to do me any harm, or whether I'd found the prototype of 'safe sex'. I'm a boy, at a boy's school, formerly a Cub Scout, trusting that a book published by the Scouting Association would offer the best advice.

I can still remember the repeated references to 'self-abuse' and the inevitable hideous consequences that would follow, each one a nail in the coffin of an innocent and carefree exploration of my sexuality.

The Scouting Association really does have a lot to answer for.

UK economy 'already in recession'

Has there ever been a time when so many of today's news headlines consist mainly of what certain people think will probably happen tomorrow?

Deal or No Deal

I'm still puzzling about what to do with this blog, and where, short of oblivion, to go with it. To be honest I haven't got much of a readership, numerically, to please. But I have this notion, which may turn out to be a delusion, that some worthwhile purpose may be served by it.

One of my fondest attachments is to the belief that evidence persuades people. What I mean by this is that I myself have always liked a good argument, have always tried to listen to different sides, and have been known in conclusion to change my mind and opinion about this and that.

One of the things that people like me are up against is the mentality of those who have no intention of ever having a change of mind or opinion about anything at all important. Such people are to be found presently in the BBC and the Iranian parliament. At the BBC the Director General has claimed that his programme-makers tackle Islam differently from Christianity, not because of fear of provoking radical elements, but because Islam in this country is a minority religion and we must therefore be particularly sensitive to the feelings of its followers.

Comedian Ben Elton is having none of it:

'There's no doubt about it, the BBC will let vicar gags pass but they would not let imam gags pass. They might pretend that it's, you know, something to do with their moral sensibilities, but it isn't. It's because they're scared. I know these people.'

Meanwhile, back in Iran, Christian Solidarity Worldwide is urging parliament to drop a draft Bill that would codify the death penalty for apostasy. It is estimated that more than 40 Christian converts are in prison for whom rather more than their moral sensibilities are at stake. To change your mind about Islam in Iran can land you in jail and, if the law is changed in accordance with a recent parliamentary vote of 196 to 7, to the gallows, or other equally unpleasant means of execution supported by holy scripture.

Down the road in Iraq the Christian minority are receiving similarly sensitive treatment at the hands of their Muslim majority hosts. In the northern city of Mosul over the past two weeks at least 14 Christians have been killed, and more than 1300 families have fled, many of whose homes have been blown up.

Now in the interest of balance I think a little joined-up thinking is called for. I don't think the deal the BBC has struck is good enough. 'Please stop killing our folks and we won't tell jokes about yours', doesn't quite do justice to the seriousness of the hour.

Because it is serious, of that I feel sure.

It could be worse.

There's one born again every minute!

The Islamic Republic of Iran is hosting a conference in Tehran, entitled “Religion in the Modern World“.

The conference is being attended by the great and the good:

Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, former Norwegian prime minister Bondevick, former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, former French prime minister Lionel Jospin, former Swiss president Joseph Deiss, former Portuguese president Jorge Sampaio, former Irish president Mary Robinson, former Sri Lankan president Chandrika Kumaratunga and former UNESCO director general Federico Mayor as well as several other scholars are ALSO attending the two-day conference.

The host of the conference is the former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami

Azarmehr says:

Khatami has managed to gather major useful idiots, ex-world leaders and religious figures included, to attend a conference on ‘Religion in the Modern World’. During the conference Khatami has called for ‘religious leaders of the world to try ways to create a peaceful co-existence and invite the world to establish peace and security’.

Where are these fancy phrases said? In the capital of a state where dissident Shiite Ayatollahs like Ayatollah Boroujerdi are tortured and imprisoned, the likes of Ayatollah Montazeri are under house arrest, many Shiite clerics were ‘disrobed’ during Khatami’s term in the office purely because of political dissent, Sunni Muslims can not even have their own mosque in Tehran, Christian converts from Islam like Ramtin Soudmand are facing imminent execution right now and fact after fact which slaps the sheer hypocrisy of this spin conference and the useful idiots attending it, in the face.

Imagine if in South Africa during the apartheid years, a former apartheid president set up a conference calling for ‘ways to create a peaceful co-existence between races of different colours’, and speakers of international standing spoke about racial harmony in front of celebrated pictures of D.F. Malan, would you not have a belly ache from uncontrolled laughter?

I wonder if any of them pleaded for the life of Rashin Soodmand?

Eucharist

Thou hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more, - a grateful heart;
Not thankful when it pleaseth me,
As if Thy blessings had spare days,
But such a heart whose pulse may be Thy praise.
~George Herbert

Noblesse oblige

As Brownie says:

On a great day for the traditions of democracy and liberty in Britain, an upper-chamber of the privileged few subverted the will of the democratically elected parliament.

According to Liberty:

Common sense and common decency prevailed as the Government dropped plans to detain terror suspects for 42 days without charge.

Of all the adjectives one could use to describe the grandees filling the padded benches of the Lords and a vote which, according to almost all polling, ignores the will of British public, “common” must surely be the most inapposite.

Terms of trade

This was a key passage from the Chief Rabbi's recent Thought for the Day:

"The fault is not markets but morals. Markets remain the best way we know of harnessing human creativity for the benefit of all. Economic liberalization has taken 500 million people out of poverty in China, and 130 million in India. They're also the best antidote to war. As Montesquieu pointed out in the eighteenth century, when two nations come into contact with one another, they can either fight or trade. If they fight, both lose; if they trade, both gain."

Aren't women human beings?

Asks Tahira Abdullah, a Pakistani feminist. Apparently not.

Burned with acid for crimes of honour.

More reporting from Frédéric Bobin here, where he describes how three young women aged 16 to 18 were buried alive with a JCB for the crime of wishing to marry someone they had chosen.

I wonder if someone will write a play about them one day? says Neil D at Harry's Place.

And me a descendant of master hairdressers!

Not very intelligent design

A C Grayling explains why ID theory would be hilarious if it were not such a threat to world peace. Actually I think he exaggerates the threat to world peace.

" . . . your average engineer, tasked with building a human being, would not separate the entrances to the trachea and oesophagus with a movable flap tagged with an instruction not to breathe while you eat, or the organs of generation not just next to but partially carrying the organs of excretion, or redundant bits of anatomy than can become infected and kill their owners, or permanent vulnerability to large numbers of invasive life-threatening organisms, or cells that constantly mutate in potentially life-threatening ways, or the origin of the optic nerve slap in the middle of the retina, or... and so endlessly on. Next time Fuller (an ID theorist) crosses a bridge or a railway line, let him note the way it allows for expansion and contraction of the materials from which it is made in response to circumambient temperature; and ask him why the soft tissue constituting the brain, apt to swell if bruised, is encased in a rigid box of bone. I take it, on the evidence of his book, he has never had wisdom teeth: had he done so, he might have contemplated the evidence they constitute, in connection with orthognathy, of evolution's blind gropings. Intelligent design? Look in a mirror for the horse-laugh answer to that one. Look at nature - in all its beauty, ugliness, sweetness, brutality, charm, indifference and immense variety - and the idea that it manifests conscious design or purpose, still less intelligent design, is seen for what it is: a little driblet of childish ignorance; a mark of mankind's infancy."

Sexism

Neil D has this on Sarah Palin:

"There are some things about Palin that are worth examining, there are some that we might enjoy examining because it might engender righteousness, and there are things best left unexamined if you want to win the election. There’s a certain level of patronising arrogance [technically correct, snobby and mean: certainly] in Democrat-leaning blogs. You might find that a pathetic criticism, but your views don’t matter. What matters are the voters, and characterizing Palin as a simpleton George Bush in a dress is not going to win the election."

Painfully honest

Miranda Richardson (when asked to describe her most unappealing habit):

"I am a truth-seeking missile. A lot of people find that unappealing."

Spiritual Viagra

The only time I ever prayed, it was for an erection.
Christopher Hitchens

A happy event?

Church Inside Out

As a student I read a book with this title. It has something to offer the debate about inclusivity.

In a nutshell, for me, the Church of England has always been problematic; the Church as England - now that I can work with!

Larkin about

Mark Lawson in The Guardian writes of P D James's latest novel, "Christian religious faith, a recurrent touchstone for James's characters, seems in The Private Patient no more than a comforting ritual: a suicide takes place on holy ground, and James's sentiments throughout feel closer to the atheistic philosophy of Philip Larkin - 'what will survive of us is love' - than any sense that the many corpses in her story are happy in paradise."

'What will survive of us is love.' Atheistic? What can this mean?

For the time being

We only have, know, and are anything or anyone for the time being. Religion can so easily be a way of denying this, of escaping into eternity or the present moment. But the passage of time is the necessary context of all our human experience, a necessary part of its uniqueness. Our history and biography is who we are. Can we not learn to love it, to love life, this changing, ambiguous, ephemeral mixed bag?

Letting go of Jesus

I wonder whether this is what I have to do.

It's nearly thirty years ago that Don Cupitt started to teach us that we should be 'Taking Leave of God'. Sheldon Kopp had already written his 'If you meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!' But letting go of Jesus, for a Christian, seems like spiritual suicide. Need it be?