DUFF & NONSENSE!

WARNING: Do not read this on a full stomach!

Whilst wearing surgical mask and gloves I did touch upon this subject a few weeks back and it is only with extreme reluctance that I return to it.  I do so because my e-pal, Dom, sent me link which both turned my stomach and sent me into apoplectic rage.  If you do not wish to suffer similar symptoms, read no more!

It concerns Dr.(?) Kermit Gosnell, a man who has run abortion 'factories' for decades and who has now been found guilty on three murder charges relating to the deliberate killing of babies minutes after they were born.  In my earlier piece I remarked on the fact that none of the American MSM had bothered to use the court seats which had been reserved for them with the result that great swathes of the American public know nothing of this case - although now, thanks to the efforts of a minority of media outlets, the story is spreading.  I also described the technique employed by Gosnell and his assistant butchers to despatch these babies after they had been born as they lay there on the table moving, crying and fighting for life.  Gosnell or his assistants used scissors or a scalpel to snip the spinal cord at the back of the neck, in fact, they called it "snipping"!

Today, Dom sent me a link to a Catholic blog which in turn drew heavily on an article by James Taranto in the WSJ written last month.  Taranto's article is quite long but is a meticulous summary of the current situation and the past history of abortion in the USA and I urge you all to read it.  He ends with this example, rich in irony, of history coming back to bite you in the arse:

One of the strongest practical arguments in favor of the Roe regime is that abortion has been around since time immemorial and outlawing it only drove it underground, leading women to endanger themselves by seeking out the services of back-alley quacks. The Philadelphia grand jurors recounted a powerful example from their own city’s history.

It was called the Mother’s Day Massacre. A young Philadelphia doctor “offered
to perform abortions on 15 poor women who were bused to his clinic from Chicago on Mother’s Day 1972, in their second trimester of pregnancy.” The women didn’t know that the doctor “planned to use an experimental device called a ‘super coil’ developed by a California man named Harvey Karman.”

A colleague of Karman’s Philadelphia collaborator described the contraption
as “basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. . . . They were
coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted
into the woman’s uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, . . . the
gel would melt and these . . . things would spring open, supposedly cutting up
the fetus.”

Nine of the 15 Chicago women suffered serious complications. One of them
needed a hysterectomy. The following year, the Supreme Court decided Roe v.
Wade. It would be 37 more years before the Philadelphia doctor who carried
out the Mother’s Day Massacre would go out of business. His name is Kermit
Gosnell.

Back-alley abortions were indisputably a problem before 1973. That’s no
defense of the Roe regime, which failed to solve it.

How are you feeling?  Yeeeees, quite!  And before you are tempted to shrug and say, "Only in America", ask yourself how our baby killing factories are doing?!

 

A Marxist site censors, er, Karl Marx, actually!

One doesn't usually visit Marxist sites for the laughs but David Osler's example nearly had me falling off my chair with hysterics.  It is a site worth visiting if only to realise that there are actually bigger loonies out there than the ones who run global warming sites.  Ostler's is packed with every sort of mouth-foamer you could imagine and, although they are all Marxists, it is obvious that they hate each other much more than they hate non-Marxists.  Anyway, the other day I was reading a review of a new biography of Karl Marx in The New York Review of Books and it contained this short quote from the man himself:

It is now completely clear to me, that, as proven by the shape of his head and
the growth of his hair, he [Lassalle] stems from the Negroes who joined the
march of Moses out of Egypt (if his mother or grandmother on his father’s side
did not mate with a nigger). Now this combination of Jewry and Germanism with
the negroid basic substance must bring forth a peculiar product. The pushiness
of this lad is also nigger-like.

Well, of course, me being me I couldn't wait to drop that one in their little Marxist laps but, dammit, I couldn't get it accepted by the site.  I tried again this morning but it still wouldn't go through.  Then the penny dropped, of course, it has the dreaded 'n'-word in it and even if it was penned by the great oracle himself there was no way that pathetic, latter-day Lefties could face it without the risk of fainting.  How Marx would have despaired and despised them all!  With disciples like that one almost (but definitely not quite) feels sorry for the evil old sod!

 

The Sunday Rumble: 21.4.13

"Oh, what a beautiful mornin'"!  And, as it happens, it is indeed a beautiful morning here, all the more so given what seems like in retrospect six months of cloud, rain, snow and a non-stop freezing wind from even further 'ooop north' than the usual 'ooop north'.  Even so, I am provoked to the opening quote not by the sunshine but by a filmed version of Oklahoma produced by the Royal National Theatre back in 1999 and which was shown on Sky Arts last night.  I was curious to see it because it starred (a much younger) Hugh Jackman who later played Jean Valjean in the film of Les Misérables.  I remarked at the time that whilst I had heard of him I had never seen him before.  Well now I have seen him twice with a fourteen year gap in his career and I now realise what the rest of the world already knew, that he is tremendously talented.  Unfortunately, Oklahoma suffers a little, as so many of those earlier musicals do, from thudding dialogue whose only advantage is that it gives one time to get up and make a cup of tea before the next brilliant, moving and/or witty song begins.  In retrospect, what an act of genius it was when the producers of Les Mis decided to forego spoken dialogue and just let the songs tell the story.  Even so, Oklahoma from the RNT was a superb piece of theatre and the director, Trever Nunn, is quite simply the very best.

 Sometimes it gets personal:  This morning, quite properly, the news bulletins are full of details concerning the Chinese earthquake with 200+/- killed and God knows how many injured and thousands bereaved and mourning.  And yes, for a moment one is moved to pity and sympathy before moving on to the next story of the day.  To be thus is to be human.  But sometimes, somehow, a tragedy sticks beneath the skin and it will not be moved.  For me, it is the tragedy of the man and his family - wife, two sons and a daughter - who went to the Boston marathon.  The father was taking part in the run and his family were close to the finishing line to cheer him in.  And then - personal apocalypse!  The bomb went off, one son killed outright, a daughter maimed by the loss of a leg and a wife in hospital with brain damage.  It beggars understanding.  At one moment you are this, a happy family tied together with mutual love and affection; and the next moment you are that, a wreckage of hopes and expectations blown apart.  "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport."

Sow and ye shall reap:  Or something like that; but it was Heffer, I think, in The Daily Mail yesterday who reminded us  with sardonic brutality that Boston was the main centre of financial and 'moral' support for the IRA whose atrocities 'over here' far, far exceeded the marathon bomb.  Folly, to which we are all prone, does not deserve the non-linear retribution exacted lat Sunday but it is a salutary lesson all the same.  Think before you drop a dollar in the collecting tin!

 

And talking of terrorist bombers there's always the president's old friends:

 

 

Whilst supping with the Devil (and his wife) it is usually good practice, or so I am told, to use a very long spoon.  The President seems unaware of this as he enjoys a dinner with the convicted terrorist, Bill Ayers, and his equally despicable wife, Bernadine Dorhn.  Both, of course, now major players in the Chicago mafia Democrat party which, as Emmett Tyrell of The American Spectator reminds us, is never totally averse to bombing atrocities.  According to Obama they are "just good friends"!  Yeees, quite!

 

Fitch the Fab!  At last, and long overdue, the credit rating agencies are turning the screw.  On Friday Fitch downgraded the UK to AA+ which is not much in itself but anyone with half a brain would take it as a serious warning of more, much more, to come unless Osborne stops borrowing m0ney!  He can only do that by cutting government spending, not little bits here and there but wholesale slashing and burning whilst at the same time cutting taxation to those likely to produce wealth in the future.  And, no, I'm not holding my breath! 

 

Another great oxymoron - 'settled science':  Well, they told us that global warming was 'settled science' and temperatures have barely budged for 15 years.  Then again, we have been told that the origin of life took place down in the depths of the ocean where heated air from the earth's core erupted through fissures and set off a chemical re-action and, hey presto, suddenly what was inanimate was animate.  So, the swots told us, 'settled science', move along, nothing to see here.  But, you just gotta love those swots because no sooner is science settled when some rascal comes along and unsettles it.  According to The Mail, a couple of computer nerds have used something called Moore's Law which explains the rate at which computers have increased their complexity and efficiency since they were invented.  Using the same equations on life forms but working backwards they estimate that life actually began about 10 billion years ago and as the earth is a mere stripling of 4.5 billion years then it is obvious, innit?, that life began somewhere else in the universe and caught the equivalent of a No.29 bus to this old globe of ours. 'Settled science' - heh!

 

Is God laughing or crying?

I ask, you see, because I have 'got religion'!  No, no, I'm not banging on your door asking if you believe or any of that sort of thing, but ever since I read Jonathan Sachs's superb book The Great Partnership I have become interested in the history of religion, or to be precise, mainly the Christian religion.  What nags away at the back of my mind is the incredible speed with which, in those ancient times, it spread round the Roman empire and was lapped up so quickly by the populations of so many different countries.  Of course, now I think about it, I can see the attraction for ordinary people in a religion in which prince and pauper are equal before the eyes of God.  Even so, the speed of its spread was amazing.

Talking about this with a friend before Christmas prompted her to buy me another book, The History of Christian Thought by Jonathan Hill.  I am only partway through it but already, like God in my title above, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.  If indeed God did despatch his Son to earth to preach a simple but hugely powerful and persuasive message of morality to be easily understood by the great unwashed and ignorant, then surely he must have realised that it would only be a matter of time - a very, very short time - before the intellectuals got at it!  Amongst the first was Justin Martyr, about a hundred years after Christ, and after Justin it was downhill all the way.  Endless 'picking of nits' and 'dancing on the heads of pins' was undertaken by sundry bloody intellectuals so that the simplicity of the original message was buried under a slag-heap of contradictory interpretations, many of which would in time be enforced by axe, sword and fire.

And then yesterday, via the good offices of Arts & Letters Daily, I came across an excellent review of a book called Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg.  The reviewer, R. I. Moore at The Nation, begins with Nirenberg's unique (as far as I know) interpretation of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in which he proposes:

“In sooth, I know not why I am so sad,” Antonio wonders at the outset of The
Merchant of Venice. What could seem more universal, more culturally neutral
than melancholy? Yet if David Nirenberg’s argument in Anti-Judaism is correct, by Shakespeare’s time the negative associations of Judaism were so universal, and so close to the surface of Christian consciousness, that Antonio’s words immediately prompt the suspicion that he might be a Jew. Other characters soon echo the suggestion. His friend Salerio attributes Antonio’s mood to anxiety about the safety of the ships carrying his merchandise overseas, thus taxing him with excessive regard for his money; then, when Antonio repudiates the accusation, another friend, Gratiano, charges him with hypocrisy. Either way, Nirenberg writes, Antonio “appears to be, in the vocabulary of Christianity, a ‘Jew.’”

Well, I have lost count of the number of times when Shakespearean experts have offered up a new way of looking at his plays which have left me open-mouthed and my own pet theories in ruins about me.  This way of looking at Antonio is certainly new to me but . . . but . . . now you mention it  . . . !  Anyway, both the book and the review are concerned with wider matters.  They both draw attention to the way in which the early 'Church Elders' (or bloody intellectuals, if you prefer!) felt the need to differentiate themselves from Judaism despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that they both drew their inspiration from the same early chronicles.  This need to distance themselves from the Jews went hand-in-hand with the necessity of crushing any Christian sects who failed to abide by the totally man-made creed of the early church, and , of course, any pagans still surviving who preferred their old, semi-human and therefore recognisable Gods.  Over the centuries these habits, which might be described as 'getting your retaliation in first' persisted with increasingly bloody results.  But through it all ran the over-riding necessity to mark the differences between Christianity and Judaism with results that live - and die - with us today.

I think He's crying!

 

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What's the good of me being nice to little Georgie Moonbat?

No more 'Mr. Nice Guy', that's my motto from now on!  Just the other day I was nice to little Georgie Moonbat (aka, George Monbiot) and then he goes and writes something monumentally stupid and puts me into a bad temper.  In a blog post entitled Cardinal Sins ('Oh, very witty, Wilde!'), little Georgie takes a swing at the new Pope - and misses by a mile!  He takes him to task for failing to be active in support of so-called 'Liberation Theology', an idea so foreign to the teachings of Jesus Christ that I am amazed any Catholic could ever dream it up, let alone support it.  Matthew 22.21: "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's".  In other words, true Christians should not concern themselves with earthly matters of governance but simply lead their own personal lives according to the teachings of God as expressed by his Son on earth.  So leading people into political action against governments that will prove to be almost certainly futile and probably life-threatening is not what the followers of Jesus Christ should be doing.  It is not life on earth with which Christians should be concerned but the promised 'life' after death.  This life, according to Christian theology, is merely temporary, a testing ground, if you like, upon the record of which you will be judged for what you will receive in the next life.

Now let me make clear, as if you didn't know, that I am no Christian, indeed, I am not even a theist of any sort.  I squat, quite comfortably, thank you, on the fence of agnosticism.  I view Christianity (and Christians) with the same degree of bemusement as I do Muslims, Wotan worshippers, the 'Wee Frees, Mithraists, atheists and all those other people who seem to require more than what is around them to attract their wonder and their awe.  So, I feel no need to protect Pope 'Frannie' from the likes of little pipsqueaks like George Monbiot.  My only reason for grumbling away here and now is that little Georgie should know better.  I mean, he's an intellectual and all that sort of thing; you know, he sits around all day reading books, writing articles for 'The Graun', opining from time to time on my TV and, for God's sake (no pun intended) he's 50 years old and should know better!

Buck up, little Georgie, or I'll set 'DM'* on you!

*For the sake of any newcomers who may have stumbled in here by mistake, 'DM' is the 'headmaster' here and he's a stickler for detail!

 

The Sunday Rumble 03:03:13

I will add further 'rumbles' to this post concerning this, that or the other during the course of the day as and when anything occurs.

News from the Rehab Unit:  The 'Memsahib' gains strength daily - and I'm steadily going downhill!  It's not the weight of work in running a household but its sheer unremitting, relentless, never-ending nature that pisses me off.  I don't want to think about what we are going to eat for lunch next Tuesday, or whether the sheets are due for a change, or whether or not I remembered to leave the money out for the milkman . . .  I mean, it's all so damned domestic!  Nobody seems to realise that a great mind like mine should not be encumbered with such trivia, I have matters of great moment upon me which it is essential be passed on to my faithful blog followers who wait, daily, hourly, for my views and opinions and . . . sorry, did someone say something?  Anyway, 'er upstairs' is now downstairs as well and is leaping about on a single crutch, well, "leaping" is perhaps a slight exaggeration, but anyway, she is now in a position to actually supervise my downstairs activities - so there goes the occasional nap on the settee!

Bye, bye, Benny, baby, but why?  Yes, the question is, why did Pope Benedict resign?  I must instantly confess my almost total ignorance concerning the Catholic church but in doing so, I suspect, it places me amongst a vast majority of people including most catholics.  Only the Vatican insiders plus a tiny handful of informed outsiders know what is going on inside Vatican city, a place that makes Stalin's Kremlin look positively transparent!  Some possibilities are discussed by John Cornwall in The Mail.  His Wiki entry seems to mark him as an outsider with some penetrating knowledge of what may be going on inside the Curia, as the Vatican civil service is called.  Worth a read but my guess is that, given the secretive nature of the Catholic hierarchy, it will be a hundred years before we even get a hint as to the truth behind this resignation - if resignation it was! - and in a hundred years will I care?

When cracks appear in an icon:  I never thought I would live long enough to see the beginning of the collapse and fall of the Nationalised Health Empire in Britain - but it is beginning.  As I mentioned in a previous post, perhaps the only good thing to emerge from the Mid-Staffs Hospital horror story is that the carefully nurtured image of nurses being angels of mercy and light and therefore above and beyond criticism has just crashed and burned.  From now on we will all view them as they are, ordinary people trying to do their best, some good, some not so good and some who should have been prison officers!  There may be one other benefit derived from the Mid Staffs story, that is, having driven all other NHS stories off the front pages it has hidden the sly, surreptitious changes wrought by this government.  Yesterday there was a 'Shlock-Horror' story in 'The Graun' (natch!) reporting howls of complaint from some Doctors' union about the sneaky privatisation of the NHS.  Well, if it results in the sort of service provided by the privately-owned Shepton Mallet Clinic who dealt with the 'Memsahib's hip under a NHS contract, then "give me surfeit of it"!

D' Ancona no can do:  I have long had my doubts concerning the judgment of Matthew d' Ancona notwithstanding the fact that he was once the editor of my favourite mag - The Spectator.  I suppose you can mark him A1 in loyalty to Dave but is that really a virtue as it becomes clearer to everyone, except our Matthew, that Dave is driving the Tory party into oblivion.  As far as I can tell from his article in The Telegraph, 'all is for the best in the best of all worlds' as far as Dave's leadership goes and the only slight fault is that perhaps his presentation isn't very good!  And the idea that somehow Dave is a paid-up member of a metropolitan elite with no understanding of ordinary people's concerns d' Ancona dismisses out of hand saying that such a "cabal" is a figment of imagination.  Well, no one was suggesting the existence of a "cabal", only the very real existence of a certain state of mind prevalent amongst the wealthy upper middle-classes with comfortable homes in both the country and in London neither of which brings them into contact with ordinary people beyond the butcher, baker and candle-stick maker.  D' Ancona is as big a dimwit as his hero!

My two favourite 'biches sont revenus':  Oh, yes, indeed, they're back.  Both the enticingly tough but tender Caroline Proust (Insp. Laure Berthaud); and the deliciously naughty and red-headed Audrey Fleurot (Lawyer Joséphine Karlsson) on my TV courtesy of BBC4 on Saturday nights in the superb French crime and justice(!) series, Spiral.  I'm loving every minute of it but hating trying to choose which of those lovely ladies I prefer.  I know, I will write to both of them in impeccable French, er, with a 'leetle 'elp from mon ami, Google Translate' and see which of them replies soonest.  Waddya mean - neither of 'em!  Of course they will, I shall enclose a photo, perhaps that one with me in my Long Johns, that's always a winner!

Here endeth my Sunday Rumble - see you tomorrow!

 

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Why I shall never walk up the aisle with a gay!

No, no, not just because the 'Memsahib' would cripple me for life, and anyway, I was talking metaphorically.  I cannot support all this agitation - and 'agitation' is exactly what it is - from a miniscule portion of the population bent - no pun intended - on changing 2,000 years of Christian sacrements.  After all, I am a conservative - with the smallest 'c' you have ever seen - Oi! I do the jokes round here! - and on the whole, outside of 'swottery', I am predisposed in favour of things remaining pretty much the way they always have been, and if they have been that way for about 2,000 years then that settles it!  Of course, if the churches take a decision, properly under their own regulations, to change then so be it.  But it is not the business of government to stomp its clumsy way into the minefield between a man and his god.

I was (and still am) for many years a supporter of the idea that homosexuals (God, how I hate that word 'gay'!) should be provided with the means to conduct a civil ceremony in which their personal partnership could be attested to in public and signed and sealed under law.  Marriage is a means of civilising sex and if you wish to experience what life is like when this ancient custom is ignored, feel free to visit any of our large council estates where they rut like feral rats!  Thus, I am in favour of 'marriage' for one and all and irrespective of sexual tastes, but I am equally in favour of Christians conducting their ancient sacrements in the tried and tested ways they themselves have found to be best.

After all, it's their right - innit?!

 

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Back to the beginning

I still remain fixated, well, fixated for five minutes at a time after which my head aches, with this problem of the very first incident of inanimate matter becoming suffused with life.  What's the problem you ask?  Well, after the 'Big Bang' it is surely the Singularity of Singularities.  Absolutely everything that has ever lived, that lives now and that will live in the future depended utterly on that single little chemical burp which resulted in biology.  As Matt Ridley puts it:

The three-letter words of the genetic code are the same in every creature.  GCA means an arginine and GCG means an alanine - in bats, in beetles, in bacteria.  They even mean the same in the misleadingly named archaebacteria living at boiling temperatures insulphorous springs thousands of feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic ocean or in those microscopic capsules of deviousness called viruses.  Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know the same code.  All life is one.  The generic code, bar a few tiny local aberrations, mostly for unexplained reasons in the ciliate protozoa, is the same in every creature.  We all use exactly the same language.  This means - and religious people might find this a useful argument - that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born.

Matt Ridley: Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, 1999, p21.

"One single event"!  Can that be right? It seems like it because we all, from people to plants, bacteria to baboons, share the same genetic 'language' and presumably if some other bits of matter had been kick-started in the same environment at that time then there would have been a plethora of different languages - and one shudders to imagine the chaos that would have been created! As it is, the human genome which was thought likely to contain at least 100,000 genes turned out to consist of only 26,000, and that is a mere 5,000 more than - a blind, millimetre-long roundworm!  So, one single event, in one single place in certain very specific conditions.  What are the chances of that?  Of course, the 'Dawkinistas' will propose, on nil evidence so far, that life probably exists on other planets in the cosmos, hence their desperate hopes that signs of life will be found on Mars.  There may well be signs there but if and when they are found they need to be treated with great caution and scepticism because, like global warming, inference will become fact overnight!

Anyway, we are left ruminating on the great, nay, humungous, singularity of the start of life on our planet and then we have to consider those absolutely critical, six physical constants which, had any of them varied by a hair's width (or the physics equivalent thereof) then the whole bloody universe would not have been possible.  Makes you think, doesn't it?  Well, it might make you think - it gives me a headache!

Incidentally, I'm on an away-day tomorrow, back on Wednesday. 

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The gallant charge of the Nagel Brigade

No, not another military anecdote, although it is concerned with the 'war' between philosophers and scientists.  Not, I hasten to add, that I qualify under either title, my part, as always, is to act as an unreliable cheerleader who supports one side and then the other!

But let me begin with young Brian Cox, 151/2, a super-science swot from the Upper Fifth who somehow has managed to get himself an entire programme on BBC2 teaching us all how life began and why.  Except, of course, that he didn't quite explain how life began and nor did he convince me of his reason why.  Partly, this was due to the retards in the BBC production team who seem to think that we, the plebs, will never understand science unless there are never-ending and totally incomprehensible computer graphics showing abstract shapes expanding and surging to the sort of ghastly 'musak' you hear inside hotel lifts.  Of course, Prof. Cox is not really a schoolboy, he just looks like one, as this photos shows:

 

Now, I was one of his earliest fans because he and a colleague wrote a book promising the irreducibly stupid, er, that's me, in case you're wondering, to explain Einstein's theories of relativity.  Big Fail!  But as I wrote at the time, 'the fault, dear, dim Duff, lies with you, not in your stars'!  Even so, I remain a big fan of Prof. Cox and, as regular readers will know to the cost of their diminishing patience, I remain captivated by some of the many mysteries of existence. Like, how did it all begin?

As far as the beginning of biological life is concerned, I'm afraid to say that young Cox was no more illuminating than his peers.  I concentrated as hard as I could, despite all the BBC visual effects crapulata and the vomit-inducing 'musak', but all he offered was what I more or less knew from others.  That is definitely not a criticism of Prof. Cox who was not on my 'telly' to offer a new theory, he was just there to explain the old one, because the fact is that none of these science swots actually know quite what the spark was that turned inanimate material into living, reproducing organisms.  They seem to have a fair idea on the ingredients and the conditions required, and the likely place in which it probably occurred - way down deep in the ocean amongst the nooks and crannies on the seabed - so it's farewell to the old 'primordial mud' which used to be the favourite as the start point of life years ago - pity, really, I quite like the idea of us all crawling out of mud!  Anyway, that missing 'x' factor continues to plague science and it is interesting that every effort to reproduce the conditions inside a lab have all failed.

So, needless to say, I tottered off to bed with a headache and awoke this morning pondering on the problem as I drove to the swimming pool - have I told you before about . . . right, moving on - and it was still festering in what passes for my brain when I sat down at the computer and virtually one of the first items I came across, courtesy of Arts & Letters, was a review in the New York Review of Books by Prof. H. Allen Orr, a biologist, of a book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel.  The title of his book appears to sum up the content:  Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.  'Luvin' it already,' I thought because I will always offer to hold the coat of anyone taking a swing at 'Archbishop' Dawkins!

In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel continues his attacks on reductionism. Though the book is brief its claims are big. Nagel insists that the mind-body problem “is not just a local problem” but “invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.” If what he calls “materialist naturalism” or just “materialism” can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life. And if it can’t explain life, then it can’t fully account for the chemical and physical universe since life is a feature of that universe. Subjective experience is not, to Nagel, some detail that materialist science can hand-wave away. It’s a deal breaker. Nagel believes that any future science that grapples seriously with the mind-body problem will be one that is radically reconceived.

I could feel my headache returning!  However, it soon became obvious that Prof. Orr's mum and dad had brought him up properly because, unlike the insufferable Dawkins, he admitted some of the doubtful areas in modern biological explanations whilst applying a cool but critical attutude to some of Mr. Nagel's other theories, especially his main one which was to propose a teleological imperative behind the universe whilst simultaneously excluding any sort of God.  And, no, I'm not sure how Nagel pulled that one off but with great courtesy Prof Orr expressed his doubts.

Anyway, it's five to eleven and time for my life-saving caffein injection which I hope will cure my headache.  I recommend Prof. Orr's review, an example of the very best sort of scientific writing for the non-scientist and if it gives you a headache too, well, I like to share my troubles, I'm generous like that!

 

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Christ on a bike . . . !

You know how it is, you stumble and bumble along on your life's journey, mostly smoothly but sometimes hitting the odd bump or three which can cause alarm or despondency, or both, but you keep on pedalling and then suddenly, without warning, you come across someone else's life and for a few minutes your own stops dead!  Thus it was for me when I read this last night:

"Max Ostro was a young Jew living in Poland when the Nazis came.  He and his family were rounded up.  Together with one of his brothers and his father, he was herded into a cattle truck in a train bound for Treblinka.  No one came back from Treblinka.  It was an extermination camp.  There, many of Poland's three million Jews were gassed, burned and turned to ash.

In the train, barely able to breathe, his father held his two sons.  He said to them, 'Mein kinder, if you stay on the train you will die.  It belongs to malch hamoves, the angel of death.  I want you to davven maariv - pray the evening prayer.  Then I want the two of you, when the opportunity presents itself, to jump.  The Nazis will shoot.  But one of you will survive.  This I promise you: one of you will survive.'

The sons prayed.  Both jumped from the train.  The Nazis saw the movement and started firing.  Max's brother was killed instantly.  Max, under cover of darkness, survived.

The family had hidden a sum of money which Max was able to recover, and with it he paid a farmer to hide him in his hay barn.  Max survived this way for some time.  Then came November 1944.  The Nazi effort to round up and exterminate all remaining Jews intensified.  Max later told his son that he had a dream at that time.  In it he saw the Rebbe, the holy teacher his father had admired.  The Rebbe told him, 'It is no longer safe for you in the barn.'

So Max came to an arrangement with the farmer.  He had himself buried in a grave in the ground with only a narrow space open to the sky.  Through it Max was able to breath.  Once a week the farmer would come and bring something for Max to eat and drink.  He survived like that, buried alive, for two months until the war came to an end. 

Max eventually came to Britain, built a business, married and had two children.  He went to the synagogue regularly, prayed every day, lived his life as an Orthodox Jew and gave much of his money to charity.  He never spoke bitterly about the Holocaust, and though sometimes he wept for the family he had lost - he was the only survivor - he and the other survivors in Britain became a kind of extended family to one another.

I did not know Max well - I saw him from time to time at gatherings of Holocaust survivors.  I knew his face, but not his story.  While I was writing this book, he died and I went to comfort his son Maurice, whom I knew.  That was when I heard his story.  A book has been written about it."

        Jonathan Sacks: The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning; ch. 10,         pp182,183

No doubt there are a thousand and one stories like that, not just from the Holocaust but from all the other man-made catastrophes we have inflicted upon each other.  As you come across them, they give you pause and once again you marvel at the human spirit and the strength that lies in the will to live.

 

 

'Les Misérables' made me very happy through my tears!

Les Misérables was simply superb!  At the end of the film, six of us sat in the back row utterly silent, not trusting ourselves to speak, whilst in the row in front a young girl sobbed.  Very slowly the cinema emptied and I haven't seen such a silent, contemplative audience leave an auditoreum since Schindler's List.  Of course, the film is an emotional sledgehammer and you would have to have had your emotional nerve-endings cauterised to resist it, either that, or be absolutely determined to cut a pose as a young, dead hard, post-modernist critic eager to make a name for yourself like the teenage prat who wrote a pathetic review in The Independent.

 

 

Of course, the film, like any other great artistic enterprise, is not perfect.  For example I thought the very opening scene in the shipyards with convicts dragging a ship into dry dock was unconvincing and heavy-handed - in all senses!  I admit that at that point my heart sank and I thought I was in for two hours and forty minutes of the worst sort of melodrama.  However, once past that, the film found its feet and took us all on Victor Hugo's epic journey through sin, mercy and on to final redemption.  I have seen the stage show four times but I had not taken on board the tremendously strong message of Christianity that it contains.  This story really is Christianity in action.  Of course, there is a dollop of soppy socialism in the story - not at all the same thing as Christianity! - because it is set against the backdrop of the mini French revolution of 1835, but predominantly the story is one of personal tragedy laced with the optimism of final redemption.

No doubt there will be no end of 'Clever Dicks', like The Independent's critic, who will complain that the singing is not perfect to which I would reply that if you want perfect singing, go to the opera but if you do, do not expect to see perfect acting!  The point about the performers in this film is that their slight imperfections in singing actually added to the realism of their performances - it persuaded us that these were real people enmeshed in the all-too-real drama of their situation.  (I was reminded of a concert performance of West Side Story I saw on TV once featuring trained opera singers - they drained the emotional blood out of it and left a dessicated corpse on stage!)  I will not describe each and every performance because they were all just excellent.  However, I must just mention Hugh Jackman because, although he is constantly in the press and has, I gather, a string of film performances to his credit, I had never seen him before so at least now I know why people rate him, rightly, as a truly first-rate actor.  (There was a man who could have played Jack Reacher!)

Instead, let me heap my praise on the director, Tom Hooper and the entire cast and crew of this terrific film - most of whom are British - HOORAH!  This joins the other 46-odd films which constitute my Top Ten Favourites.  Thinking about it, I am taken with how many musical films go into my Top Ten.  For a man who does not know the difference between a crotchet and a quaver, that is very odd!

ADDITIONAL:  I have just come across this earlier piece in The Telegraph which provides some interesting background to the way this film was made - worth a quick read.

 

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In which Rabbi Sacks waxes lyrical

I have been banging on for weeks about the book written by Rabbi Sacks called The Great Partnership.  Christmas festivities interrupted my reading but I have now restarted.  I bring the subject up again but instead of me blathering on and probably distorting his words in my paraphrasing I thought I would give a direct quotation thus providing you all with a tasting:

Social cohesion is precisely what religion sustains and much else undermines.  When societies grow affluent, when the burden of law-abidingness falls on the state and its institutions, when people define rights and wrongs in terms of externalities - punishment and rewards - and in terms of what other people do and are seen to get away with, when people focus, as they naturally do, on immediate benefits not long-term sustainability, then society begins to erode from within and there is little anyone can do about it.  The signs are unmistakable:

"People lose a sense of shame.  Rudeness is taken as a sign of sophistication.  People pursue the pleasure of the moment.  They lose respect for elders.  The young no longer defer to the old, and the old behave as if they were young.  The difference between the sexes is blurred.  People get irritated by the least touch of authority and they dislike any rules that inhibit their freedom to do as they like."(*)

A Christian evangelical bemoaning secularism today?  No: Plato speaking about the democracy of Athens.

A law of entropy governs societies.  They rise to power and affluence and then begin to decline as individualism saps the collective spirit that brough them greatness in the first place.  When this happens, only a counter-cultural force can revive flagging energies, renew institutions, defeat cynicism, generate trust and restore altruism.  The Abrahamic monotheisms are the most powerful counter-cultural forces the world has ever known because they speak to something indelible in the human spirit: the dignity of humanity as the image of God.

So Dostoevsky was wrong and Tolstoy was right.  Morality does not suddenly break down when people stop believing.  People do not conclude: God does not exist, therefore everything is permitted.  But they do in the long run, like an orchestra without a conductor, lose the habits that sustain the virtues that create the trust that preserves the institutions that shape and drive a moral order.  That is when you see the first signs of discontent with secularisation.  People, even those who do not practice a faith, start sending their children to faith schools.  Children, even if only a few, start becoming more religious than their parents.  Religious voices begin to be listened to with respect, if only because so many other voices sound cynical or self-seeking.  The moral sense is not a blazing fire but a flickering flame, and it seems to have been the fate of faith to keep it burning even when the winds of individualism are strong.

God and good are connected after all.

Magnificent stuff; quietly passionate, elegantly phrased and mostly, in my opinion, accurate.  I should add that I, personally, still do not believe in God but I do believe in the influence, for good or ill, of what he calls the "Abrahamic monotheisms".  The big question remains: will they survive?

(*) The Republic

 

A moral muse, or, a moral maze?

You will all be relieved to know that I am not offering up a 'Monday funny' today because most of you idle lot are not working and, if truth be told, this being Christmas Eve, my 'funny' today would probably have come from a cracker - and they can only be classified as not so much non-jokes as 'anti-jokes'!  Anyway, I have just finished the ironing - what? - oh, yes, I do the ironing in this house!  Years ago the British army had a slogan on its recruiting posters along the lines of "You Learn A Trade in the Army".  Well, if you call learning to iron your own clothes 'a trade' then I suppose that for once the recruiting sergeants did not lie!  It's about the only thing, or at least, useful thing, I took out into 'civvie street' - and the 'Memsahib' has taken full advantage over the years.  Now, where was I  . . . ?

Oh yes, as I was doing the ironing I was gazing out of the bedroom window across to the Church in exactly the same view as my Christmas card (see below) except that instead of beautiful snow I was peering through what looked like a tropical rainstorm!  As 'I dashed away with the smoothing iron' I began to muse on the subject of morality.  Who decides on moral laws?  And from whence do they originate and upon whose authority?  Are they innate or are they taught?  I would describe myself as 'an immoral moral man', by which I mean, that I possess a moral sense and code but frequently break it.  I only (just) qualify as a moral man because at least I usually know when I have been immoral.  I have been intrigued by these musings recently as I slowly read my way through Jonathan Sacks' superb - and I do mean superb - book, The Great Partnership.  I am reading it slowly because, like a top class claret, it needs to be savoured gently - not gulped!

I have been struck recently - because until recently I had never given it a thought! - at the remarkable speed at which Christianity spread through the ancient world.  When you consider the difficulties of travel and communications it is extraordinary that within two or three generations it had reached the limits of the Roman empire and huge numbers of people had adopted it as their prefered religion.  Part of the explanation seems to lie in the attraction for ordinary people in having a personal God, that is, a God to whom they were responsible on a one-to-one basis and, moreover, a God before whom they would stand side-by-side on equal terms with kings and princes.  According to Sacks, the attraction of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, was unstoppable.

I, of course, was born and raised in a Christian country but I was not in any sense indoctrinated with Christianity.  The family with whom I lived during the war were not practicing Christians and my mother, having 'suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous Scottish Presbyterianism' certainly had no truck with churches of any kind.  Of course, I suppose (because I can barely remember) that I must have had the obligatory one-lesson-a-week on Bible studies in my infant and junior school but they made little impression.  And yet . . . and yet . . . I do possess a moral sense - it's a mystery!  Also there is another mystery because two of the moral precepts which I hold dear - and which I have broken from time to time - do not actually appear in the Ten Commandments.  There is no 'Thou shalt not tell lies' nor is there any 'Thou shall keep promises'!  They are two precepts I hold dear and which I have always assumed was part of the bedrock of Christianity.  On the subject of the Ten Commandments, I am always amused at the unintended irony contained in the fact that the first four are strictly concerned with precepts designed to safeguard the organisation of the church!  They have the smack of religious civil servants rather than the word of God, methinks!  Nor, I confess, am I too impressed by this: "I the LORD your God am a jealous God,visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me".  So much for 'innocent little children come unto me'!

Even so, I am content to accept as the basis of a moral code all that stuff about honouring Mum and Dad, not murdering, or stealing, or committing adultery, or calumnating, or coveting, not so much because I think it is the word of God but because it is commonsense!  All those 'rules' plus the unwritten ones concerning truth-telling and promise-keeping, should be re-inforced by the law of the land, not because that would put an end to sinning, that will never happen, but because a constant moral pressure makes an excellent foundation for a civilised society.  We have seen recently in all areas of our political, business and social life how quickly lying, cheating, coveting and so forth become very attractive, very quickly - with disasterous results.

But all that is the musings of an old man and I am still wondering where I obtained this moral sense of mine?  Also, given the times in which we live, why should I bother?  As Sacks reminds us, there are some intellectually powerful and brilliant men out there telling us, very pursuasively, the exact opposite:

God is dead.  God remains dead.  And we have killed him.  How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all the murderers?  What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?  What water is there to clean ourselves?  What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we invent?  Is it not the greatness of this deed too great for us?  Must we ourselves become gods simply to appear worthy of it? [1]

That bleak assessment is not lightened by the knowledge that Nietzsche eventually went mad and was confined to an asylum for his final eleven years.  The fact is that when a brutal 'truth' hits you like a bucket of icy water it is necessary to face it without flinching.  Nietzsche, himself, found his 'truth' unbearable but followed it grimly to the end, insisting that when a society loses its Christian faith, it will inevitably lose its morality:

If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one's hands. [2]

Grimly, but in a way bravely, logical he trudged on to the fateful conclusion:

The biblical prohibition 'thou shalt not kill' is a piece of naivete compared with the seriousness of the prohibition of life to decadents; 'thou shalt not procreate'. - Life itself recognises no solidarity, no 'equal rights', between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism: one must excise the latter - or the whole will perish. - Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted - that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be anti-nature itself as morality.

And we all know where that led!  But here I sit, or slump, more like, sharing Nietzsche's disbelief in a supreme God, but still clinging to my moral code without very much in the way of justification for it.  I can see and feel the power of the incoming logic from Nietzsche's atheistic passion, just as, a few weeks ago, I felt exactly the same barrage of logic coming from 'Deogolwulf' in the opposite direction.  Like a member of the PBI (the Poor Bloody Infantry) in 1915, I can only dig myself in a little deeper out here in no-man's-land and hope for the best!  How pathetic is that?

1:  The Gay Science: With a prelude in songs and an appendix in rhymes

2:  Twilight of the Idols

3:  The Will to Power

 

What's the point of him, I mean, what's he for?

I refer of course to that chimera, that man of a thousand faces, that smooth reflecting man who, when you look at him, returns the image you wish for - I mean, of course, The Right 'Honourable' David Cameron.  I insert the inverted commas around 'honourable' because not only did the man stand as a Tory but he is actually the leader of the Tory party.  Thus, it is not unreasonable to suppose that he, himself, is a Tory.  Well, if you believe that you will believe anything! 

Apart from driving high speed train-lines through Tory heartlands destroying the property values of local residents, giving our money to windfarm contractors to allow them to ruin our countryside with their hideously ugly and mostly utterly useless contraptions and relaxing all planning rules so that any old get-rich-quick 'Bob the Builder' can knock up half a dozen brick boxes where-ever he can nick a bit of land, what has Dave done for you if you are a Tory?  At least Brown & Balls, the Brokers Men, bent every rule in the book, borrowed money and committed the nation's finances in support of the north of England by massive recruitment campaigns for local authorities and quangos thus ensuring that there was a huge pool of potential voters hanging on their government's teat.  But 'Dim Dave' actually attacks his own natural supporters.

His latest example of metropolitan, progressive, Left-wing policy-making is to force churches to allow same-sex marriages.  Of course, he hurriedly tells us, no-one is forcing the churches, let alone the mosques or the synagogues, to undertake this task because they will have to volunteer by opting-in to the scheme.  You do not need to be 'Mystic Meg' to see the forthcoming appeals to the European Court of (in)Justice aimed at any church or synagogue which declines to opt-in to this cosy arrangement.  Of course, no-one in their right mind would try that on the Muslims because retribution would be swift and deadly!  Only the soppy and soppingly wet, dear old Church of England will be targeted.  I hold no brief for the CofE but I defend the right of anyone to practice their religion provided they do not take actions to inflict damage on other people.  They are, in a sense, a private organisation and they should have the right to conduct their affairs according to their own lights without interference from the State.  If, in order to avoid this monstrous intrusion into its own affairs and practices, it means giving up the right to be the 'official' national church, then so be it.  And 'Dave' can go down in history as the man who helped destroy one of the last pillars of our society. 

And he calls himself a 'conservative'!

(To avoid any misconceptions, let me make it clear that I am in favour of same-sex marriage but as the State already provides that service I fail to see why churches should be forced to do so.)

 

An official 'go slow' here at D&N!

Yes, I'm afraid 'the trains will not be running on time' here at D&N due to a coincidence of events.  First of all, on Wednesday this blog is not so much taking a great leap forward as rather stumbling through the swing-door into the 21st century by up-dating to Microsoft 8.  In addition, as part of my effort to rejuvenate and once again lead a healthy, vigorous sex blog life I am having a new 'drive' fitted - and, no, I have no idea what a 'drive' is in 'computerese' but I am assured it will do me a power of good.  Needless to say, with all the cynicism aquired after 25 years in the second-hand car trade, I am prepared for the whole thing to splutter to a halt the first time I press a button!

However, despite that particular event there is something else causing a slow down at D&N and I blame Waka Waka Waka!  No, no, that is not some new Max Mosley-style party game for Christmas, Waka Waka Waka is the blog of my e-pal Malcolm Pollack who makes occasional appearances here in the 'Comments'.  He has written a post drawing attention to some other contemporary thinkers and writers who share my increasing misgivings concerning the direction and the ends pursued by so-called 'democracy'.  In particular, Malcolm points to a four-part series of essays written by Nick Land (no, me neither) who explores the historical and philosophical routes that have led, inexorably it seems, to where we are today, and the likely (in his view) outcome in a dim but not so distant future.

Nick Land, and the other writers he links to, raise huge questions which I, and I think several other readers of this blog, have sensed without perhaps, in my case, the intellectual or just plain, old-fashioned, educational ability to formulate them.  His essay runs to four fairly long parts and then, of course, there are the other writers he refers to who must also be read.  In the meantime, I am slowly and carefully working my way through Jonathan Sacks's book whilst simultaneously trying to snatch bits and pieces from Hans Zinserr's eccentric master-piece Rats, Lice and History.  I am uneasily aware that some of my recent posts have been, shall we say, cursory and whilst I know that you do not expect polished gems of wit and wisdom I really don't like scribbling too many 'space fillers'.  So, there will be a bit of a 'go slow' for a few days as I try to catch up with my reading and, even more tricky, attempt to assimilate its contents.  Except when I go 'off air' on Wednesday there will be the odd post but nothing too 'heavy'!

Anyway, in the meantime, get over to Malcolm's place and pick up his links to Nick Land and start reading!

 

Make this woman Archbishop of Canterbury now!

Yes, yes, I know she's a 'Left-footer' but that's the whole point of these sophisticated, monotheistic religions, they appear to be rule-bound but when pushed to it they can be exceedingly subtle.  So, on the basis of having written the only intelligent article I have seen on the subject of 'wimmin' priests - and that includes my own very wise words! - I propose that that rather wet-sounding bloke from Durham goes back 'ooop north' where he belongs and Ms. Melanie McDonagh takes over the Church of England.  Apart from her obvious intelligence she's also rather attractive (he wrote whilst idly curling his manly moustachios!)

MDM,which now stands for My Darling Melanie, writes at The Coffee House.  She begins by giving the likes of 'Squeaker' Bercow, Chris 'Y-fronts' Bryant, and Dave 'dim-dumb' Cameron a right good slap! 

They, and others, have been opening their mouths and letting their bellies rumble on the subject of the vote in the House of Laity which stopped all those pushy 'wimmin' vicars from becoming bishops.  The fact that the most vociferous of them were not actually Christians did not miss her attention.  Nor did the rampant 'humbuggery', either:

The Church of England, by comparison [with the Church of Rome], is a democracy, with rather a fine balance between the interest groups within it. The bishops, clergy and laity each have a house or voting bloc and they are given due weight; a vote requires a working majority of two thirds within each of them. It gives due weight to the feelings of parishes as well as the top brass, which is, you might think, a good thing. Yet the entire secular world seems united in condemning the laity for its sheer cheek and impudence in voting the wrong way. There was an explosion of indignation across the press and broadcast media – the BBC didn’t even try for impartiality – notably among those organs which are in general most antipathetic towards Christianity and most indifferent to the CofE.

Well, we all know - do we not? - that anything the BBC supports is 'pants'!  And even bigger 'pants' is the total ignorance of those who misreport for it.  It took that big, black Archbishop of York, a man who resolutely refuses to comply with the Islington photo-fit image, to remind us of the exact and crucial details upon which the motion for 'wimmin' priests foundered:

As the Archbishop of York, John Sentanu, pointed out, the vote was not lost on the basis of the principle of the thing: it was about the provision that was made for those with conscientious objections [my emphasis]. They included Evangelicals, who object to women bishops on scriptural grounds, and Anglo-Catholics, who believe, inter alia, that women bishops would not represent Christ in his gender as well as his humanity – which is the case my own church advances. They are also concerned about the effects of reform on relations with Orthodox and Catholic churches. These are not negligible arguments. But opponents are being treated like heretics against the real contemporary orthodoxy of gender equality.

"Consciencious objections?"  We can't be having those in the Church of England!

The critical issue was not so much the principle of women bishops as the provision that was made for those who can’t in conscience accept it. If opponents are allowed to seek the oversight of a male bishop, then the rest of the Church can go its own way and ordain the Rev Lucy Winkett as soon as it likes. If the CofE is meant to be a broad church, then presumably that includes those who take a line on this issue that isn’t approved by The Independent and The Guardian – whose chief critic of the vote, Andrew Brown, incidentally, isn’t a believer either. The would-be women bishops, in a spectacular display of intolerance, earlier this year opted not to give any such leeway to those who in conscience can’t accept their ministry. [My emphasis]

Thus, through a stench of hypocrisy, these 'wannabe' lady bishops demonstrated the truth of that old saying, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"!  In her honest fashion as a Catholic herself, Ms. McDonough, admits that her church is a dictatorship not a democracy so she suggests that:

If the exercise of democracy in the Anglican Church really is that objectionable, then the more honest approach would be to scrap the three-tiered system in Synod, representing bishops, clergy and laity, and just have it run from the top like the Catholic Church. Anything must be better than having MPs – Catholics, unbelievers, the lot – running the show.

Anything run by the likes of Bercow and Bryant is bound to be a cock-up - and I wish had time to think of a more subtle expression!

 

Three cheers for the dear old C of E!

'Whodathunkit'?  The lay people of the Church of England, you know, the ordinary people, the mostly quiet ones who just go to church every Sunday to commune with their God, the ones without Divinity degrees from Oxbridge, have just told their priests and bishops and most of all their ghastly 'wimmin' vicars to take the contemporary notion of 'wimmin' bishops which has not a shred of support from ancient teachings and stick it up their bell towers!

I should add, hurriedly, that as a well and truly lapsed member of the C of E, I don't really give a stuff whether they have 'wimmin' bishops or not but anything that gives that beardie-weirdie Archbishop of Canterbury a dose of indigestion is fine by me.  Also, how delicious that for one glorious moment the inexorable tide of fashionable feminism is halted in its high heels!  I sometimes wonder if the appeal of Islam lies in the fact that 'wimmin' are not allowed to worship with men so that at least every once in a while the poor chaps can have a bit of peace and quiet, well, they would if they could only shut up that noisy bugger in the minaret!

Anyway, the C of E news has cheered me up immensely, not least because I can imagine 'Harry Harperson' choking on her latte this morning.  She will probably insist on nationalising it now!  Come the spring I shall cut the Churchyard grass with added vigor.

 

Jonathan Sacks reminds me of my ignorance!

The last time I mentioned a book by Jonathan Sacks called “The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning” I had just finished chapter  #1 and already I was jumping up and down with excitement.  Now I have finished chapter  #3, and yes, it is slow going but I am both savouring the words whilst simultaneously trying to ensure that I understand them correctly.  The result of all that effort is that I am even more enthusiastic for both the book and the author - and my brain hurts!

Sacks, who is, as it happens, the Chief Rabbi, puts forward in quiet, elegant and civilized English the notion that: “Science takes things apart to see how they work.  Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”  He then sets out to support this proposition.  He begins by returning to that esoteric specialty, the study of ancient texts.  He reminds the swots amongst you, but actually teaches me because I never knew it, that whilst the Old Testament was written in Hebrew the New Testament was almost certainly written in Greek.  In other words, the teachings of Christ were eventually written and saved for us in a language which Christ himself probably did not speak.  It was at that point that two very different influences were brought to bear on the whole fractured and fractious business of God and His nature and purpose.

Sacks suggests that these two differing ways of thinking about our existence is mirrored in the natural make up of our brains in which the left hemisphere tends to be the basis of rational, analytical thinking whilst the right is more concerned with empathy and relationships and emotion.  Thus, he concludes, the left side of the brain will concern itself with seeing how things work whilst the right will search for meaning.  In early times when written language was just evolving most languages, certainly Hebrew and Aramaic, had no symbols to denote the vowel sounds and the written language went from right to left.  Later, beginning with the Greeks, a written language evolved which included vowel symbols and the writing switched to left to right.  The coincidence, Sacks points out, that this revolutionary change occurred during the period in which Greek philosophy and science also began is more than just a coincidence.

To begin with, Sacks tells us, the two very different approaches to the mystery of existence – the Greek scientific approach and the Jewish/Christian mystical approach – went along hand in hand and with mutual respect.  The Rabbis of the time never questioned Greek analytics, in fact they frequently agreed with them, but they remained steadfastly to the view that whilst it explained the ‘hows’ it failed to explain the ‘whys’.  For ‘meaning’ to become clear it was necessary to look into men’s hearts.  This happy synthesis continued until the 16^th century when the truly amazing explosion of scientific knowledge began which drove a wedge between the two that remains more or less unbridged right up to this day.  In fact many of the scientists in their arrogance are now positively hostile to any idea of a remaining mystery.

But not all of them!  If you need your sense of wonder to be re-ignited turn to the book written by Lord Rees called “Just Six Numbers”.  These are the six ‘prime’ numbers, if you like, that simply had to be met – exactly and independently of each other – before our universe could exist in the form we know it and they are, therefore, the absolute bedrock for our existence.  Rees puts it thus:

These six numbers constitute a ‘recipe’ for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitiveto their values: if any one of them were to be ‘untuned’, there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a coincidence? Or is it the providence of a benign Creator? I take the view that it is neither. An infinity of other universes may well exist where the numbers are different. Most would be stillborn or sterile. We could only have emerged (and therefore we naturally now find ourselves) in a universe with the ‘right’ combination. This realization offers a radically new perspective on our universe, on our place in it, and on the nature of physical laws.

It is astonishing that an expanding universe, whose starting point is so ‘simple’ that it can be specified by just a few numbers, can evolve (if these numbers are suitable ‘tuned’) into our intricately structured cosmos.

“Astonishing” is an astonishing understatement, in my view.  More later as I read further but why wait – get out there and beg, borrow or steal a copy – er, but not mine!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Partnership-Jonathan-Sacks/dp/0340995246

 

Oh God, not God again!

It is with some trepidation that I touch upon this God business again.  The last time, as you will recall, ‘Deogolwulf’ marched in, gave me a sound thrashing and then stalked off haughtily – and no-one does ‘haughty’ better than him, except, perhaps, his hero, Edward Feser!  Anyway, this is not primarily concerned with God – much to His relief, no doubt – but to a book about Him.  The sick friend I visited yesterday loaned me a book and I was about to place it on the wobbling pile of ‘waiting-to-be-read’ when I thought that perhaps I would just read the Introduction. Oh dear, within a few paragraphs I was well and truly hooked!  So, yes, this is another ‘rave review’ for a book of which I have only read the Intro and Chapter #1 but you are used to my extravagant enthusiasms by now.

It is written by a man whose name, Jonathan Sacks, is familiar but about whom I know nothing else except that he is the Chief Rabbi.  The book is entitled The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning.  It is simply superb!  Based on considerable erudition it is written with enormous enthusiasm in clear but eloquent English; I put it up there with Ferdinand Mount’s book Full Circle about which I raved a few weeks ago.  What I would not give for a chance to share a dinner with those two men!  To give you a taste, here are two extracts.  The first, quoted in the book, was written by Bertrand Russell:

That man is the product of the causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast depths of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.  Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s salvation henceforth be safely built.

Then Sacks neatly inverts the argument to illustrate his way of thinking and belief:

That man, despite being the product of seemingly blind causes, is not blind; that being in the image of God he is more than an accidental collocation of atoms; that being free, he can rise above his fears, and, with the help of God, create oases of justice and compassion in the wilderness of space and time; that though his life his is short he can achieve immortality by his fire and heroism, his intensity of thought and feeling; that humanity, too, though it may one day cease to be, can create before night falls a noonday brightness of the human spirit, trusting that, though none of our kind will be here to remember, yet in the mind of God, none of our achievements is forgotten – all these things, if not beyond dispute, have proven themselves time and again in history.  We are made great by our faith, small by our lack of it.  Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding ghope, can the soul’s salvation be safely built.

Sacks sums up his philosophy thus:

Science takes things apart to see how they work.  Religion puts things together to see what they mean.

I am intrigued, I shall follow where he leads and when I have finished it I shall return to the subject but in the meantime, do yourselves a favour and go buy a copy!

 

Your Sunday snigger

Well, like watching a man slip up on a banana skin, you simply can't help an involuntary snigger but we all know, deep down, that in the best of comedy there lies tragedy, either real or potential, which is why clowns are funniest when disaster strikes and we watch laughing as the bucket of cold water cascades down their pants.  Bernard Buffet captured this paradox in his famous clown painting, a copy of which hangs in my living-room.  I never tire of looking at that melancholy face beneath the cheerful make-up.  For me, it sums up much of life.

All of which brings me, courtesy of CBS New York (via Drudge), the 'sweet 'n' sour' tale of Mr. David Jiminez who prayed daily to a crucific affixed to the outside wall of a Catholic church.  The heartfelt plea he offered up to this representation of Christ on the cross was that his wife should make a full recovery from ovarian cancer.  The 'Good News' is that the lady did exactly that.  The 'Bad News' is that Mr. Jiminez , in his gratitude, offered to clean the statue which had not been tended in years.  In doing so, the crucifix fell off the wall and crushed one of his legs which subsequently had to be amputated.

Sorry, sorry, you are probably appalled but, I confess (mea culpa), that I sniggered - and, yes, I know it says so much about me.  Even so, after picking myself up off the carpet and wiping my eyes, I did attempt some more serious thinking on the incident.  At this point I must tread carefully because I am uneasily aware of the lurking presence of Deogolwulf who is more than capable of hurling down a logical thunderbolt upon my head if I draw a wrong conclusion.  (You may see the the sort of wreckage that ensues in the comments, here, here and here.)

The question that arises in my mind is whether this incident, encapsulating as it does so much of life's trials and tribulations, tells us anything about the nature of the 'Thing' that originally hurled all those hydrogen and helium particles into a void?  Some might venture that the 'Thing' at least has a sense of humour, others might complain that if so his humour does not seem to rise above the cruelty of 'The Joker':

 

Yet others, like me, might simply suggest that given the billions of years since those naughty particles first disturbed the peace of the void, the zillions upon zillions of objects that have been formed across the universe and the fact that we, the entire  human race, past, present and future, represent only the equivalent of, say, one grain of sand in the entire Sahara desert, then frankly, my dear, the 'Thing', doesn't give a damn!  I might go further and suggest that, apart from some dilettante dreamers with nothing else to think about and whose tortuous contemplations takes us not an iota further forward in our understanding of the 'Thing', we should just ignore it all and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other and getting through this 'vale of tears' - and laughter - in the best way we can.  And, because I always like to finish my parables with a moral injunction, I would strongly urge you all not to stand under statues of Jesus on the cross! 

 

Timon of Beijing!

This is one of my more meandering posts on an even more than somewhat arcane subject -Shakespeare's Timon of Athens - but stick with me, there is a point to it, honestly!  First of all let me correct an inexactitude, Timon was not wholly written by Shakespeare, a new-ish 'kid on the block', Thomas Middleton, was roped in to help out, the boss being somewhat busy around the 1606/7 period writing some of his very greatest masterpieces.  I learned all this and much more, very much more, from the 2008 Arden edition prepared by two Eng. Lit. swots, Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton.  I stress the duality because normally if you were to place two Shakespearean experts in a locked room eventually only one would emerge with three different opinions - the other having been murdered!  But these two are a 'dream team'.  They meld together effortlessly (or apparently so) and, joy of joys, they write clear, plain English that is easily understood, by which I mean that I only had to reach for my OED once or twice!  It is, in my opinion, the very best Arden Introduction I have ever read.  They are helped, happily, by the fact that Timon was not only never performed in Shakespeare's time, but neither was it published!  This only occurred when Shakespeare's old mates got together long after his death, collated his works and published them as the First Folio.  Timon, being of mixed parentage, so to speak, only squeaked in at the last moment almost due to an accident.  Anyway, the lack of a publishing history means that our two swots do not, unlike their compatriots discussing other scripts, spend page after tedious page telling us of the minor work practices of 'compositor A' as compared to 'compositor B' to say nothing of 'C', 'D', 'E' and so on into a yawn-inducing coma.  Instead, they tell us about the play and its underlying themes.

I vaguely remember skim-reading a cheap edition of the script very many years ago when my AmDram club decided to give it a go.  I was underwhelmed!  My 'whelm' was not increased after seeing our production of it - not that it was a bad production - just that the play, somehow, didn't quite work.  Thanks to Dawson and Minton I now have a clear idea why but, oddly enough, I am now very much more interested in it which is just as well because I am booked into my local cinema on the 1st of November to watch a 'simulcast' of the current production at the Royal National Theatre(*) starring Simon Russell Beale.  I urge you all to give it a go at your local cinema and it's no excuse to tell me that you live 'over there' or 'down under there' because these things go world wide, so your absence will bring down on your recalcitrant heads at least a hundred lines by way of punishment!

The main theme of the play is money.  When Shakespeare/Middleton wrote the play England was, just like today, in a state of flux over money and its uses and abuses.  Usury, that is charging interest on loans, had been forbidden across Christendom and it was only that old 'rebel', Henry VIII, who finally permitted the practice.  'The times they were a-changin' but in those days they changed exceedingly slowly and the mores of the earlier age hung on.  Thus, through Elizabeth's reign the higher levels of society worked on the give and take principle of you scratch my back today and I will be obliged to scratch yours on another day. Now you see the point of my silly title because this is the practice in modern day China where 'obligations' are, so to speak, banked!  As the recent Bo Xilai scandal has illustrated, this system is coming under extreme strain in a new era of international banking.  Back in 1606/7, similar rifts were occurring and, one might ruminate, Shakespeare himself was somewhat at sixes and sevens over this tricky problem of money, interest and obligation.  He, after all, was an artist, a creator, and yet we do know, or can infer, from his scant history that he was personally very keen on aquiring and keeping money.  He even sued to recover a loan that had gone bad!

Of course, mention money and you must instantly mention its bedfellow - sex!  To lend money at interest and thereby beget yet more money has obvious metaphorical connections to sex and procreation.  Shakespeare's approach to sex was ambivalent, being apparently idealistic in his earlier plays (R&J, for example) but even there, beneath the surface of the text there is a more than somewhat realistic, verging on cynical, undercurrent.  In later plays his approach to sex its almost vitriolic (MforM, T&C).  Not, except for a minor interlude, that sex as such enters this particular play, it's just that the references to usury have strong sexual undertones.

Timon lives under what he fondly believes (because he wants to believe it) a code in which gentlemen are always but always generous in gift-giving to each other but his fault-line lies in his insistence that he must forever be the biggest giver!  With all the inevitability of a stock-market crash, he goes broke and then finds out the hard way that his beneficiaries and 'friends' have deserted him.  This sends him from one extreme of lunatic generosity to the other extreme of almost psychopathic misanthopy.  He dies, mysteriously, and there's an end on't!  The play features one of Shakespeare's favourite devices, the apparently detached observer and commentator.  One thinks of Feste and Jaques but Epemantus in this play almost rivals Thersites from T&C in his venomous, vitriolic attacks on Athenian society in general and Timon's individual stupidity in particular.  This is a play of extremes and it lacks the subtleties and depths of his other great tragedies.  It is best described, I think, as 'a work in progress' but unfortunately he and Middleton never quite got around to finishing it off and providing it with a bit of polish.  Even so, I have learned, via this excellent Arden edition, that sometimes Shakespeare's lesser works are tremendously illuminating.  This is a savage, unformed attack on the society of the early 17th century - it can be read as a warning shot aimed at James  the First's notoriously spendthrift court which was causing much alarm at the time.  Anyway, Simon Russell Beale is in it and I would pay to hear him recite his laundry list!  Even if you don't see the 'simulcast' treat yourself to this Arden, the Introduction alone is worth the money:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Timon-Athens-Arden-Shakespeare-Third/dp/1903436974

(*) I try always to give the Royal National Theatre its full title because the left-wing scumbags who run the place are almost ashamed of using their 'Royal' title. Harrrrumph!

 

Thomas - who? Thomas SZASZ!

But first of all let me pause and, metaphorically speaking, cover my e-pal, Louise, with kisses - poor girl!  Until yesterday I had never heard of Thomas Szasz who, incidentally, died on September 8th at the ripe old age of 92.  I cannot find the words to express my gratitude to Louise for bringing this man to my attention, er, hence the metaphorical kisses.

So, who was this Thomas Szasz?  Well, with the usual caveat, you can get a very good idea of his life and achievements from his Wiki entry which I urge you all to read.  He, during the course of his lifetime, has put into words all the nagging doubts and the confused fumbling thoughts I have had for years concerning the nature of psychiatry and psychiatric practice.  Let me just quote a few lines from his Wiki entry which will provide you with the flavour of the man:

His books The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) and The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1970) set out some of the arguments with which he is most associated. [...]

As Szasz said, having become convinced of the fictitious character of mental disorders, the frequent injuriousness of psychiatric treatments, the immorality of psychiatric coercions and excuses, he set himself a task to delegitimize the legitimating agencies and authorities and their vast powers, enforced by psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, mental health laws, mental health courts, and mental health sentences. [...]

"Since theocracy is the rule of God or its priests, and democracy the rule of the people or of the majority, pharmacracy is therefore the rule of medicine or of doctors." [...]

Oh boy, is that ever righter than right!  And this sums it up exactly:

"The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?...[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed."

I know it is quite ridiculous but I am so excited by discovering this man.  My lonely grumblings about the iniquity amounting to an inquisition on the part of the medical hierarchy, in general, and the psychiatric branch of it, in particular, has brought down on my head the ill-tempered abuse of most of my friends at one time or another - usually towards the end of well-oiled dinner parties when they all start swapping their medical histories and going all gooey-eyed over their wonderful, wonderful doctors!

Also, at the risk of being even more boring than usual, I must repeat again my excited and passionate belief that this internet-thingie is the greatest invention in the history of Man.  I have mentioned before the appalling state of my ignorance (and I keep 'Deogolwulf' around like Lear's fool to remind me should I ever forget!) and the fact is that via the internet I have learned more about more things in the last ten years than I have learned in the rest of my life. Anyway, I can see yet another book approaching at speed. 

In the meantime, out of respect, I shall sit quietly for a moment and contemplate the life of a great and original thinker - Thomas Szasz. 

 

Or are philosophers just ill-mannered yobs?

I ask the question as a follow-on from the question I posed earlier, "Are philosophers more like lawyers or car salesmen?"  I am provoked to it (so blame him!) by my old e-pal, 'Norm', who has been reading naughty magazines, in this case, The Journal of Philosophical Psychiatry.  I say "naughty" because how else can you describe a rag that implies that professional ethicists are a bunch of oafs and grunt-snufflers?  I am shocked, I tell you, shocked!

If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (versus remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (versus attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (versus leaving one's seat tidy). By these three measures, audiences in ethics sessions did not appear to behave any more courteously than did audiences in non-ethics sessions.

'Norm', himself a moral philosopher of  impeccable courtesy and considerable intelligence, asks a couple of very acute questions.  First:

What were these ethicists like before they became ethicists? Maybe they were real hooligans - like just totally?

In other words, a good course, or dose, perhaps, of moral philosophy might be a way of de-yobbing yobs!  I remain unconvinced, myself, having just experienced some religious philosophers at first hand.  Their Christian beliefs do not run as far as courtesy and kindness to anyone who disagrees with them, but then again, that is a characteristic that makes constant re-appearances throughout the history of their religion of 'love and charity'!

The second point 'Norm' raises is that their sins of omission and commission do not rate very highly in yobbery terms.  Certainly, they would not be enough to gain you entry into my gang!  He asks:

Second, have the authors tested to see how ethicists and non-ethicists compare when judged on more serious delinquencies, such as: throwing rotten fruit at the speaker; elbowing others aside and knocking them down so as to get to, or out of, the door first; smashing up the furniture?

Ah, now, that's more like it!  Well, I suppose I could try and attend one of Edward Feser's lectures and propose that "classic theism" is a load of old cods - just so long as I was by the door and able to make a quick getaway!

 

Are philosophers more like lawyers or car salesmen?

In the commentary to my post on "This God Business" I was admonished - and how! - by my e-pal, Deogolwulf, and instructed sternly to read the words of wisdom that flow from Mr. Edward Feser, a philosopher much admired by him.  Always an obedient pupil, if not a very bright one, I did as I was told.  How was it for me?  Well, in my heading I ask whether philosophers are more like lawyers or car salesmen but I think I should have added footie fans to the list of possibles!  The first few paragraphs consist mainly of Mr. Feser booting and nutting his philosophical opponents.  Now I know that so-called high-minded swots just love going in with boots and bottles (it must be the unrequited yob in them) and vicious university common-room rows are the stuff of legend, but it is more than somewhat tedious for a reader seeking knowledge.  To give you the flavour these are some of the words that occur in Mr. Feser's first few paragraphs: hacks, mediocrities, intellectual rubbish, this stupid argument, silly argument, utterly contemptible and sleazy, the feeble argument, intellectually dishonest and sleazy, stupid, a slimy debating trick - and needless to say they are aimed at those who disagree with his particular 'opinion'.  (I slightly stress the word 'opinion' because that, at the end of the day (or the last two and half thousand years), is what it amounts to because, as far as I can tell, almost every philosophical thesis put forward suffers with an antithesis that simply will not go away!

Of course, Deogolwulf abjures emotion and warns us all against indulging in it but, alas, we're all human and the fact is that Mr. Feser's tone pisses me off!  Rather like watching a pub fight on Saturday night, one is tempted to put the boot in against this hectoring bully boy.  Mind you, I have a suspicion that his opponents are equally bitchy and it is that sort of constant handbags-at-dawn slapfest that was part of the reason I gave up on philosophy years ago.

I have yet to finish Mr. Feser's blogpost and reached only his first point of contention - after wading through all the nonsense in the first few paragraphs.  His complaint against those who attack him, and his ilk, is for suggesting that what he, Mr. Feser, is proposing is that everything has a cause.  Mr. Feser is outraged, I tell you, outraged!  That is absolutely and definitely not what he is proposing, far from it.  What he is actually putting forward is - now pay attention - what comes into existence has a cause.  Yeeeees, quite!  Well, I have read it, first with one eye and then the other, I have stood on my head and looked at it, I even gave the computer-thingie a slap and took another look, and still I can detect no difference in the essential meaning between the two phrases.  If Mr. Feser is only concerned with things that do not come into existence, well, good luck to him, I say, but it is of no concern to me, I want to know about things that do exist.  But you see what I mean about lawyers and car salesmen.  I do think that all philosophical writings should henceforth come with a government health warning and a reference to the Sale of Goods Act!

I am short of time this morning - it's my 46th wedding anniversary and a posh lunch is called for - but if any of you swots out there can explain the difference I would be most grateful.  However, I should warn you that I may be even less sensible this afternoon than I am this morning.

ADDITIONAL:  For God's sake don't tell  'er indoors' that I said it was my 46th wedding anniversary because, of course, it is actually my 48th but then, time goes so quickly when you are enjoying yourself!

 

Now, about this God business . . .

I have been sorely provoked, but glad to have been so, by my old e-pal, Deogolwulf, to discuss this' God business' which I do so, of course, with all the authority of your average fifth former!  You can follow the opening shots of this campaign here and in the comments section.  Necessarily, given the nature of that particular post we started our conversation somewhere in the middle of the controversy that I call 'the God business'.  Here I want - dread words! - to go back to basics.

To begin with I intend to avoid the use of the word 'God' which has religious overtones that tend to obscure rather than enlighten any discussion.  Instead I prefer to use the term 'Prime Mover'(PM) which is more neutral.  As I understand it, one of the very first reasons for posturing the existence of a PM is the idea that before there was nothing and afterward there was something and a PM is the only answer because something cannot be produced from nothing and so a PM is required.  That is entirely logical but only if you accept the premise for which there is no proof.  For example, it fails to explain who or what created the PM in the first place . . . and then who created the creator of the PM and then, hey-ho, we are off into an infinite regression. 

As I understand it, speaking as man who failed 'O'-level maths, physics and chemistry, it all began with a bang in which two entities, twins really, were 'created', or appeared, matter and energy.  The matter, atoms of hydrogen and helium with virtually no mass, were hurled outwards, but, and this I always think is significant, they did not explode with perfect synchronisation, there were very slight but significant variations which were critical because that helped to bring about collisions and fusions between the particles at which point their increased mass resulted in increased gravitational forces which helped meld more and more of them together.  The question which arises in my mind is, assuming the PM exists, did it intend to have those slight imperfections or was it an accident?  I have a vision of a PM muttering, "Oh, fuck it!  That wasn't perfection, let's sod off to another plane of potential existence and try again" and meanwhile our sad, imperfect, old universe was left to get on with it.  This leads, naturally, to the question of intentionality on the part of the PM.  Did it build-in imperfections and did it know where those imperfections would lead, or was it all one big roll of the dice?

All of that, or even some variations on that, I am prepared to accept as a hypothesis to explain the notion of a PM, but is it exclusive to other hypotheses?  For example, returning to infinity, a notion treated with great caution and some distrust by ancient Christian thinkers, it is a possibility that nothing was created because everything exists, always has existed and will continue to exist - even though the form changes constantly and forever.  Thus, as one scientific theory postulated (although I seem to remember that it has gone slightly out of favour recently) our universe will one day fall back on itself and everything will be collapsed into a black hole before it explodes yet again, and thus does "the wheel of fire" keep turning forever and ever, amen!

Now, I find the idea of an infinity of existence, or perhaps, existences, as cautiously acceptable as the notion of a PM.  As theories they both share some strengths and some weaknesses but neither of them is entirely satisfactory.  In other words, I am not prepared to accept that a PM is necessary to explain existence.   However, as my conversation with Deogolwulf is concerned with religious explanations of existence I will set aside infinity for now and concentrate on the nature of the Prime Mover.  However, the sun is shining and I must take advantage of it to do some gardening so I will continue this dreary monologue this afternoon.

 

As if

Odd how this coincidence business keeps recurring!  I have been pondering, and if that summons up a vision of me retiring to a darkened room in which to engage in deep thinking let me assure you that most of what passes for thinking in my head takes place in those few precious moments between my head hitting the pillow and the sound of snores ascending.  The problem with that mode of intellectual effort(?) is that the next morning I can't remember what the hell it was I was thinking about!  Where was I ... oh yes, pondering.

I have been pondering on what it is that keeps a moral sense alive when all the main religions are either crumbling away inch by inch or in some cases landsliding to oblivion.  In this modern age, God has been well and truly crucified like his Son, and the likes of Nietzsche and Dawkins have played the part of Roman soldiers thrusting spears in His side to make sure He's well and truly dead.  Fair enough, I suppose, because there is no intellectually satisfying argument to support the existence of God and even the most passionate and eloquent of Christian theists are reduced to admitting, albeit proudly, that their belief is founded on emotion.  So in the absence, or non-existence, of the Almighty, where-in lies the authority thought to be necessary for the maintainance of morality?  And almost instantaneously a further question arises, how is that morality continues at all?

That brings me to the coincidence that began this tedious tale.  In his superb book, Full Circle, Ferdinand Mount touches upon all those puzzling questions which have delayed my nightly slumbers by at least half a minute!  He points out that despite the catastrophic fall in religious attendence, there are waiting lists for C of E schools and, in an irony that has me whinnying with pleasure, some parents lie and cheat in order to gain entry for their kiddie-winkies to schools which will teach Christian values.  He goes on to remind us of the sad demise of Jade Goody, a British 'sleb' famous for nothing much except for loud-mouthed, incontinent, sluttish behaviour who died of cancer at the age of 28.  Given her background and upbringing it is no surprise that her behaviour was the way it was, and yet ... and yet ... one sensed that buried in her somewhere, somehow, there was a moral streak.  She apologised for her frequent bouts of bad behaviour - and surely an apology is but another version of confession.  Even more extraordinary, as Ferdinand Mount recalls, was her behaviour shortly before her death:

As she was dying, Jade Goody said, "I know I'm ignorant but I'm going to make sure my boys get the best education.  I'm going to pay for their education for the rest of their lives because that'll give them the best chance in life.'"  By "chance in life", she di not simply mean 'chance to make money'.  After all, she herself had managed to do that, despite suffering the worst start in life you can imagine.  What she meant was something lareger, such as a vision of the right way to lead one's life.  A fortnight before she died, she had herself and her two sons baptized at the chapel of the Royal Marsden Hospital where she was being treated for cancer.

Of course, the more cynical will instantly riposte that no-one repents faster than when they are on their death-bed, and by doing so they will miss the point - this fundamentally non-religious woman was not just pre-occupied with her own state of grace, she wanted her sons to be baptized into Christianity.  She saw, she sensed, she felt, that somehow in the ethos of Christian morality there was a sensible, one might almost say an intelligent, way to lead your life.  I would hesitate to speak for her but somehow, I guess that she did not necessarily believe entirely in the existence of a God even if she could have comprehended and encapsulated (as most of us cannot) the enormous concept of a God.  Even so, she knew there was a moral life that could be lived as an alternative to an immoral life and so she acted as if there was a God.

The notion of conducting one's life as if there was a God is a point Mount emphasises in the final chapter of his book.  He points out that the 'Darwinistas' in their intemperate attacks on theistic religion and their non-stop hallelujahs in favour of their religion of choice, Darwinism, have failed to apply evolutionary studies to the development of beliefs in God.  However, Mount draws attention to:

Robin Wright's new book called "The Evolution of God" made such a stir when it came out in 2008.  Kant would undoubtedly have applauded the enterprise.  He would have seen the evolutionary approach as the best possible way of showing the different ways in which men and women have chosen to live as if God existed. [My emphasis]

I must express my genuine gratitude to Mount for expressing this as if notion of God.  It has cleared out an irritating pebble in my mental shoe.  And perhaps now I shall nod off even faster than usual at nights!

 

I have just been re-educated and I didn't feel a thing!

Actually, that is not quite true because what I did feel was intense pleasure, delight and wonderment mixed with shame at the lazy idleness I have nurtured through the years which has left me as a man filled with opinions but not much in the way of true learning.  So, thank the Gods, for (Sir William Robert, 3rd Baronet) Ferdinand Mount and his jewel of a book, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back To Us.  It is typical of this man that he rarely if ever uses his title, and he carries his staggeringly huge learning with the lightest of ease.  And I do mean 'learning' in the very highest and best sense of the word.  He doesn't just read books on the innumerable, mind-boggling subjects on which he writes with such elegant ease, he goes out and inspects them, digs into their history, compares them with similar artifacts, takes account of the mores of their day, links them to events and artifacts of today, and then with the sort of wit that leaves you smiling and nodding in appreciation he offers some startling conclusions.

Perhaps the most startling is the main thrust of his book which is the proposition that, far from the progressive's dream of Mankind climbing ever higher and higher to new levels of civilisation, in fact we have just spent the last two thousand years going in Full Circle back to the Greeks and the Romans.  He points the finger, not of hostility but more of intellectual wonderment, at the last 2,000 years of Christianity which, whilst it, too, had its virtues, also acted as a big wet blanket on the behaviour of Man.  Now the blanket has dried out and is beginning to disintegrate under the unrelenting forces of "that old common arbitrator, Time" and, lo, we find ourselves returning in a mixture of surprise and delight to the truly ancien regime of the classical world.

Please, please, buy this delightful, witty and immensely learn-ed book.

 

SHLOCK-HORROR - I have actually read 'The Guardian'!

Well, not all of it, naturally, I mean, there's masochism and then there's reading 'The Graun' from beginning to end!  No, I have just read a bit of it, in fact, just one article sent to me as a cutting by a friend and thus, happily, I have now discovered Mr. Francis Spufford and his excellent essay on why he is a Christian believer.  My only irritation with Mr. Spufford is in knowing that if I run this blog for another 50 years (and that's a threat not a promise!) I will never be able to write as well as he does.  I was hooked from his opening paragraph:

My daughter has just turned six. Some time over the next year or so, she will discover that her parents are weird. We're weird because we go to church. This means as she gets older there'll be voices telling her what it means, getting louder and louder until by the time she's a teenager they'll be shouting right in her ear. It means that we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities. That we fetishise pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we're too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy. That we're savagely judgmental. That we'd free murderers to kill again. That we're infantile and can't do without an illusory daddy in the sky. That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children by implanting a sick mythology in young minds. That we teach people to hate their own natural selves. That we want people to be afraid. That we want people to be ashamed. That we have an imaginary friend, that we believe in a sky pixie; that we prostrate ourseves before a god who has the reality-status of Santa Claus. That we prefer scripture to novels, preaching to storytelling, certainty to doubt, faith to reason, censorship to debate, silence to eloquence, death to life.

Right, I thought to myself, that's a nice deep hole you have just dug for yourself, Mr. Spufford, let's see how you get out of it.  He began well enough with a sort of pat on the back to 'Archbishop' Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens but instinctively one felt he might have been holding a dagger as he did it it:

But hey, that's not the bad news. Those are the objections of people who care enough about religion to object to it. Or to rent a set of recreational objections from Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. As accusations, they may be a hodge-podge, but at least they assume there's a thing called religion which looms with enough definition and significance to be detested. In fact there's something truly devoted about the way that Dawkinsites manage to extract a stimulating hobby from the thought of other people's belief. Some of them even contrive to feel oppressed by the Church of England, which is not easy to do. It must take a deft delicacy at operating on a tiny scale, like fitting a whole model railway layout into an attaché case.

How right was that?  Those who virulently attack religion can at least be said to care about the matter and that includes the little minds, usually unable to think for themselves, forced to pick up the trifles deposited by the two great anti-religionists of our age.  But for the Great Unwashed Masses (GUM) the response to arguments over religiosity is neither pro or con, it is simply total indifference mixed with, er, like, you know, sort of, embarrassment:

No: the really painful message our daughter will receive is that we're embarrassing. For most people who aren't New Atheists, or old atheists, and have no passion invested in the subject, either negative or positive, believers aren't weird because we're wicked. We're weird because we're inexplicable; because, when there's no necessity for it that anyone sensible can see, we've committed ourselves to a set of awkward and absurd attitudes that obtrude, that stick out against the background of modern life, and not in some important or respectworthy or principled way, either. Believers are people who try to insert Jee-zus into conversations at parties; who put themselves down, with writhings of unease, for perfectly normal human behaviour; who are constantly trying to create a solemn hush that invites a fart, a hiccup, a bit of subversion. Believers are people who, on the rare occasions when you have to listen to them, like at a funeral or a wedding, seize the opportunity to pour the liquidised content of a primary-school nativity play into your earhole, apparently not noticing that childhood is over. And as well as being childish, and abject, and solemn, and awkward, we voluntarily associate ourselves with an old-fashioned, mildewed orthodoxy, an Authority with all its authority gone. Nothing is so sad – sad from the style point of view – as the mainstream taste of the day before yesterday.

What the GUM make of Islamists getting hot under the collar over perceived insults to Allah from people who now have no need of a collar because their heads have been removed, one can only guess.  But Mr. Spufford is surely right, in our 21st century western world to believe in a god will earn you either a discreet rolling of the eyes, or a pat on the back and the suggestion, old chap, that you have another drink and tell us what you really think about the Man United team these days.  And if, by accident (and it surely would have to be by accident) you bump into 'Archbishop' Dawkins, all you will receive in place of blank incomprehension will be a load of semi-scientific waffle which will miss the crucial point of theism by a mile.  Thus, you will not so much 'meet' as pass each other in a mutual fog of misunderstanding.  Mr. Spufford is absolutely straightforward and honest in telling us that his religious beliefs are founded on emotion - and he makes the case, persuasively, that surprisingly, emotion provides a very sound basis:

That's what I think. But it's all secondary. It all comes limping along behind my emotional assurance that there was mercy, and I felt it. And so the argument about whether the ideas are true or not, which is the argument that people mostly expect to have about religion, is also secondary for me. No, I can't prove it. I don't know that any of it is true. I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.) But then, like every human being, I am not in the habit of entertaining only those emotions I can prove. I'd be an unrecognisable oddity if I did. Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe. We dream, hope, wonder, sorrow, rage, grieve, delight, surmise, joke, detest; we form such unprovable conjectures as novels or clarinet concertos; we imagine. And religion is just a part of that, in one sense. It's just one form of imagining, absolutely functional, absolutely human-normal. It would seem perverse, on the face of it, to propose that this one particular manifestation of imagining should be treated as outrageous, should be excised if (which is doubtful) we can manage it.

Please read his essay, it is a delight whether or not you accept his premises.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/31/trouble-with-athiests-defence-of-faith

 

Will the Israelis wait until after November 6th?

I know, I know, I have cried wolf before but this time I really do believe that Israel is on the brink of an attack on Iran.  Those who think this would be a folly and that the Israelis should learn the 'lesson' from the cold war stand-off between the Soviets and the West, that is, that mutually assured destruction works as a deterrent to both sides, should read 'The Kraut' in The WaPo:

There are few foreign-policy positions more silly than the assertion without context that “deterrence works.” It is like saying air power works. Well, it worked for Kosovo; it didn’t work over North Vietnam.

It’s like saying city-bombing works. It worked in Japan 1945 (Tokyo through Nagasaki). It didn’t in the London blitz.

Charles Krauthammer reminds us of the difference between the Soviet communist ethos based on a material 'here and now', and that of the millenarian ravings of religious zealots who believe that there is an infinitely richer existence beyond this squalid life on earth.  Also, the clerics are shrewd enough to realise that given the tiny size of Israel and the physical concentration of their population the Israelis are, in effect, a one-bomb target.  However, Israel could use all of its arsenal and turn Iran into a wilderness but that would not destroy the vast remaining bulk of Muslims in the Middle-East.  It's a win-win situation for Islam.  Hence the extreme likelihood of an Israeli pre-emptive strike.

There is no doubt in my mind that there is anything other than an enormous doubt in Israeli minds as to the reliability of President Obama as an ally.  Some of his critics accuse him of timidity but that, in my view, is absolutely incorrect.  His world-view is steeped in anti-Americanism and that feeling of domestic antogonism reaches out to encompass America's allies, including us, but especially Israel.  So Netanyahu has some delicate equations to balance and time is not on his side as the Iranians race towards their nuclear goal.  Will Romney, likely to be a more steadfast supporter, win the election?  Can Netanyahu squeeze some useful concessions and/or promises from Obama by assuring him that he will not strike before the election?

In another article, 'The Kraut' quotes an American plan of action which, if Romney wins and impliments it, might just save the day.  In essence (and it's worth reading the article in full), the progenitor of this plan, Anthony Corseman, a military analyst, suggests a three-part approach.  First, make clear to the Iranians that there are only two options left - a deal or a disaster!  Second, let the Iranians know that if they choose not to deal then in addition to surgical strikes against nuclear targets there will also be a massive campaign aimed at the total destruction of the entire infrastructure of their country, in other words, they will bomb Iran back to the stone age.  Third, if they agree a deal then part of it would be an equivalent of the old Marshall Plan in which huge amounts of aid and trade would flow from the West into Iran guaranteeing them a prosperous future.

Of course, it is not a given that Romney would adopt such a hard-nosed policy because no-one knows anything about his foreign policy views, or, whether he has the cojones for such risk-taking.  And needless to say, the Israelis may not wait around to find out!

 

In which I share a bath with Ferdinand Mount

Well, I have known him, off and on, for about 30-years.  Perhaps 'known' is too strong a word but back in the day he used to write for 'The Speccie' and, like all my favourite columnists, I feel I really do 'know' him even if I have never met him.  Anyway, my somewhat laboured joke in the title to this post refers to the opening chapter of his latest book - Full Circle: How the Classical  World Came Back to Haunt Us.  In this chapter, entitled The Bath, he provides us with a history of baths and bathing as a means of proving his central point in the book that far from following progressive notions in which Humankind has steadily advanced to ever greener pastures in an upland of civilisation (always led by Progressives, of course), in fact we have merely executed a complete circle and are now back where we started in Greco-Roman times.

Now, it really doesn't matter whether or not you agree with Mr. Mount who is, after all, a typical 'Speccie' writer in that he is highly intelligent, perceptive and able to cast a cool but good-humoured  eye over all sort of ideas and then distill his conclusions into shrewd but witty words.  However, having only read his opening chapter on the history of bathing I am convinced!  And, what is more important, in the process of being convinced I have also been effortlessly educated and delighted with a seemingly unending wealth of details and personalities ranging from Sir Daniel Gooch who was Isambard Kingdom Brunel's chief engineer and the patron behind the building in Swindon of the huge bath-house provided for the benefit of his workers on the Great Western Railway, to the eras of Diocletian, Caracalla and Hadrian and their baths each covering some 25 acres which puts them amongst the biggest buildings we know of in the ancient world.  I am tempted to quote that old catchphrase of an equally old Brit comedian whose name eludes me - "notta lotta people know that!"

I know I am always banging on about this book or that but really, truly and honestly and cross my heart and wish to die - this is a copper-bottomed, gen-u-ine, absolute CORKER!  I know that one or two of my regular readers are tremendous brain-boxes (which makes me wonder why they slum it over here) but I bet even they will find things in this book which they never knew and which might, just, alter their perception of our world.

 

Crikey, I never knew it could kill you!

This comes - no pun intended - under the heading of 'Only in Nigeria'.  It is also a dire warning to all Muslim men that us 'Christian' chaps actually might have the right idea when it comes - seriously, no pun intended - to the number of wives we might, er, enjoy.  On the face of it, having six wives seems to have some advantages when it comes to, er, Saturday night playtime, so to speak, because you have the chance to pick and choose.  But that scenario also has its dangers, as poor old Uroko Onoja found out the hard way - no, I mean it, that really was no pun! - when, according to The Indian Express, he chose wife No. 6 for a Saturday night frolic.  You see, he had not allowed for female ferocity when they find themselves slighted:

Uroko Onoja, a wealthy businessman, was having sex with his youngest wife when the other five women attacked him with knives and sticks, demanding that he have sex with all of them at once.

Onoja, who resisted their attack, was overpowered by the women who ordered that the sex march begin with the youngest wife and to continue in that order to the top, Nigeria's Daily reported.

Onoja stopped breathing when the fifth woman was making her way to the bed.

One's feelings are mixed.  On the one hand a certain sympathy is called for in the light of his death, but on the other, considerable admiration is aroused by his plucky attempt to favour the other five.  And of course, one can only mutter reverentially, "What a way to go!"  I'm not sure if he will have qualified for the 76 virgins but one suspects that they are the very last thing poor old Uroko will want to see when he goes to heaven.  In the meantime I trust the authorities in Nigeria will erect - look, I'm telling you for the last time  - a suitable statue in his memory for truly he stands - oh, I give up - for the very best of Nigerian Manhood.

 

Well done, the army - er, the Egyptian army, that is!

Those very cool, detached and intelligent observers at 'Nightwatch' have summed up current affairs in Egypt with admirable precision: 

Unofficial results tallied from reports announced by the judges in the various Egyptian governates during the weekend and relayed via Twitter also indicate the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Mursi won the presidential election by a significant margin. The governate results are incontestable that a majority of Egyptian voters voted for an Islamist government leader.

There are two problems with this outcome. The turnout was so low that it bordered on embarrassing. Less than 25% of registered voters thought voting was more important than anything else they had to do on a weekend. This minority decided the immediate political future of Egypt. This must be interpreted as the will of the people, as Cicero wrote, "cum tacent, clamant.' [when they are silent, they cry]

Well, the can 'cry' all they like but for the immediate future Egyptians will have to put up with rule by the army who give every indication of refusing to yield power to a bunch of religious nutters.  From the West's point of view - and what other view is worth wasting time on - we must all hope the army has what it takes to smack the Muslim Brotherhood round the ear and send it home to Allah.  As 'Knightwatch' puts it:

 

One clear lesson of the Egyptian elections is that Egypt was not and is not ready for democracy in any modern or western sense. Egyptians now have voted twice - in the parliamentary and the presidential elections - to use the procedures of democracy to vote out democracy and elect an authoritarian, theocratic government.

This is the paradox of democracy - the electorate can vote away its right and power to vote. The Egyptians have now done this partially twice. This is not the Egypt that the US governing elites are familiar with.

The one thing we in the West must ensure is that the Suez canal is not controlled by Islamists.  And Israel needs to do all it can to ensure that it does not have a militant anti-Jewish state on its southern border. 

 

Yes, she is very definitely "A Good Thing"!

Today we shall witness a very English event as hundreds of boats of a variety of types and makes and spanning a great deal of the 20th century paddle, row, punt (there is a Venetian punt in the parade) steam and chug their way down the Thames to celebrate Queen Elizabeth's Diamond jubilee.  Needless to say, England being England, it will rain, the wind will blow and it will prove to be a highly uncomfortable experience for all concerned - but they will turn out in their hundreds of thousands and thoroughly enjoy themselves.  It was not always like that:

Thursday there had been great heat.  Friday was worse.  The breeze died, the air became moist and heavy.  Flags hung limp and haze spread over the immense fleet anchored in the Solent.  Only when the sun peeked through was it possible to see from the shore that pale outline of what appeared to be an enormous city.  One hundred and sixty five warships of the British navy lay in this protected body of water, three miles across from the sandy shores of the Hampshire plain to the wooded hills of the Isle of White.  Five lines of black-hulled ships, thirty miles of warships, they carried 40,000 men and three thousand naval guns.  It was the most powerful fleet assembled in the history of the world.

And, as Robert Massie reminds us in his superlative book, Dreadnought, all those warships came only from the Home Fleet.  There were other powerful fleets and squadrons in the Mediterranean, the Americas and the Far East and they remained untouched as they went about their business of ensuring the sea lanes remained open for the world's business not just British business.  But that was then - 1897, to be exact - so today we can only ponder on Prospero's words:

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Of course, there were a couple of cataclysmic encores to be played before the curtain finally fell on the British Empire, and thus it was a tired, bashed, albeit unbeaten and unbroken, Britain that limped into the 1950s as Elizabeth II mounted her throne.  Yet more shocks were to be suffered.  The Empire dissolved, not without bloodshed; rampant socialism had its "hour upon the stage", mass immigration changed the face of Britain forever and Christianity, a pillar whose crucial importance to society is only now slowly being realised, crumbled under the onslaught of new, modern, pagan idols, or perhaps, ideologies is a better word.

Given all that upheaval - and the increasing speed with which the changes hit us - it is quite extraordinary that this (as I guess) slightly dull and somewhat unimaginative woman has with seemingly effortless ease held together the very heart and core of constitutional Britain and this despite the worst efforts of twelve different and mostly useless prime ministers.  I, for one, am deeply grateful to her and later today I shall raise a glass and drink "a health unto Her Majesty".

 

Rendition - Elizabethan style!

Of course, I refer to the first Elizabeth not the kind, grandmotherly lady who adorns our throne today.  This from Ian Mortimer's 'must-read' book The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England which will tell you in engrossing detail how life was lived - and lost - in those more robust times:

Consider the case of Dr. John Story, a Catholic lawyer and MP, who is locked up in 1563 after speaking some poorly chosen words against the queen.  Escaping by night and reaching the Spanish ambassador's residence, he manages to slip the country and flee to the Netherlands.   There the duke of Alba appoints him to search all vessels coming from England, and Story assiduously combs every English ship for Protestant letters, books and messages.  The zeal with which he conducts his work leads him to becoming the leader of a group of  émigré Catholic activists, and more than just a minor irritant  to the English merchants trading with the Low Countries.  [Sir William] Cecil therefore decides to take action.  In 1570 he sends agents to Dr. Story who win his trust.  They join him in searching English boats, until one day they lead him onto a boat whose captain has been primed.  Dr Story is seized, taken to England and handed over to the privy council for interrogation and trial.  Found guilty of high treason, he is drawn, hanged and quartered.  'Black operations' such as this, in which government agents seize residents in a foreign country and subject them to rendition, torture and eath, have a long pedigree.

Tut, tut, who'da thunk it?!  Not that 'good Queen Bess' didn't sometimes live up to her image:

On July 1579 a young man named Thomas Appletree is fooling about with some friends in a boat on the Thames near Greenwich.  He has a loaded gun, which to the great amusement of the party he fires three or four times at random.  Unknown to him, the glass-sided royal barge is slowly floating towards them.  The queen is aboard, discussing with the French ambassador the possibility of her marrying the duke of Anjou, when one of Appletree's bullets strikes the helmsman six feet from her and leaves him lying on his back bleeding profusely.  The queen tosses the injured man her scarf and tells him to be of good cheer: the bullet was surely meant for her and the fact that it struck him is good news, for the assassin had failed.  Later, there is a thorough investigation, and Appletree is soon found.  He confesses and is duly condemned to death for endangering the queen's life.  A gallows is set up on the bank of the river so that he may be hanged close to the scene of his crime.  Before his execution, Appletree makes a speech to the assembled crowds.  He is no traitor, he says, but admits that through his carelessness he had endangered the life of the sovereign and therefore deserves to diw.  When he has said goodbye to his friends, the hangman places the noose over his head.  Just then, when he is on the very brink of death, a man in the crowd steps forward with a pardon from the queen.  She knows Appletree is just a silly young man, but he had to be taught a lesson. 

So, not only were the dark arts of the security services in operation 450-odd years ago but so were the ones of the public relations industry, too!

 

'Dear Lord, don't make me good, make me lucky!'

My title seems to be the default prayer today for more and more people, men and women, in all stratas of our society.  You might care to add to my title, 'And, Lord, don't let me be found out!'  I do realise that old men are prone to wailing that things aren't like they used to be and so I should make clear that I don't believe there has been some sort of golden age in which honesty and probity and straight-dealing was the order of the day.  Even so, it seems to me that simple, old-fashioned notions of virtue seem to have almost disappeared.  Ethics, in so far as it exists anywhere, seems to be confined by large organisations to ensuring that no-one indulges in racism!

In the last few years I have spectated the goings-on in the dismal non-science of climatology in which politically (I use the word in its widest sense) committed 'scientists' have bent truth to suit their agenda.  When they were found out, various committees of 'the Great and the Good' were wheeled in to whitewash their behaviour.  Just yesterday, I pointed out the disgraceful fact that 47 out of 53 supposedly 'scientific' papers on possible cancer cures were found to be impossible to replicate.  In our civil service, our local authorities, our schools, our universities, our police, our media industry and, above all, our parliament and government, we find a constant practice, almost amounting to a deliberate policy, of lying and cheating.  I would remind you that, despite appearances, these dishonest activites are not conducted by 'organisations', they are executed by individuals, people - people like me and you!

Whilst I cannot claim with any certainty that such corrupting and corruptible behaviour never occurred in earlier generations, I think I can claim that at least there was a sense of shame involved.  The perpetrators knew they were doing wrong. Today, I rarely sense that in the behaviour of the lying liars who hold positions of influence in our society.  Whether it's a teacher giving her pupils hints on the exam questions to come, or a public employee 'throwing sickies' as often as he or she can get away with, or a managers of large corporations being 'economical with the actualité', or a 'scientist glossing his experimental results, everywhere and all the time people are lying through their teeth.

So why, I wonder, has the notion of ethical behaviour, of honesty, almost totally disappeared?  No doubt part of it is the loss of Christian teaching to the very young.  Whatever one might think of Christianity as a corporate body, so to speak, no-one can gainsay its fundamental teachings on personal virtue.  However, the loss of the ten commandments has been matched by the growth in political ideology in which ends justify means.  Examples of this are too numerous to list and they exist on both sides of the political divide.  Well, as individuals, of course, our power is limited but we do have dominion over ourselves.  So perhaps we should remind ourselves of Shakespeare's words:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves

Or, perhaps the words of many of my old school teachers, "Could do better!"

 

I suggest that we abort Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva with immediate effect!

I am obliged to 'SoD' (Son of Duff) for sending me the link to this Telegraph story which reports that the two brain-damaged (that's my description not theirs) mouth-breathers in my title call themselves 'medical ethicists'.  Before I contemplate an action under the Trades Descriptions Act, I had better tell you what this pair of latter-day moralists have to say.  In essence, they ask, why should babies who have actually been born be disqualified from abortion?  Being a man of generous, not to say, kindly disposition my first thought was that they were using an argument which philosophers describe as reductio ad absurdum. 

In the never-ending dispute over abortion it is an extreme example of an argument I have used myself in the past which goes something like this: at what point, exactly and precisely, does a bundle of self-reproducing cells change from being inhuman to being human?  I ask because, of course, that would decide whether an action to kill the cells was a moral abortion or a murder.  I have yet to hear from anyone, expert or not, who can tell me the precise point at which the change occurs.  Given that uncertainty, I have always maintained that abortion (except in a very small number of specific situations) should not be permitted.

So, in my innocence, I assumed that these two 'medical ethicists' were making my point (in extreme form) that unless you can point to some measurable factor upon which we can all agree that it demonstrates humanity, then the mere fact that a foetus has been expelled from a womb does not necessarily make it human.  Silly naive chap that I am, of course, this pair meant nothing of the sort.  They were being absolutely serious and published their views in a comic calling itself The Journal of Medical Ethics:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

There you go, just drop it on its head, that should do it!

"Oh, brave, new world".  Someone pass me a sick-bag.

 

"Joy shall be in heaven . . .

. . . over one sinner that repenteth" and all that sort of thing.  Well, I know the quote is not a precise fit for the event but it was the one that leapt to mind when I heard the news.  According to The Telegraph a few days ago, 'Archbishop' Richard Dawkins engaged in a long debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury in the course of which he admitted that he was not entirely, absolutely, completely, convinced that there was no God:

There was surprise when Prof Dawkins acknowledged that he was less than 100 per cent certain of his conviction that there is no creator.

Prof Dawkins said that he was “6.9 out of seven” sure of his beliefs, referencing the seven point scale of belief that he sets out in his book The God Delusion.

The philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, who chaired the discussion, interjected: “Why don’t you call yourself an agnostic?” Prof Dawkins answered that he did.

It was not reported at the time but I have it on good authority that Canterbury's beard shot out horizontal to the floor, and that several members of the Humanist Society required first aid!  When challenged as to why, therefore, he did not call himself an agnostic, he replied that he did.  At this point, I am led to believe, the scene resembled a Bateman cartoon with devout atheists rocking back on their heels with eyeballs threatening to burst from their sockets!

You see, that's one the very few advantages of living long - you get to see sundry chumps change their minds.  Even if, in this case, it is only 0.1 of his mind!

 

Is there anybody there? asks 'the Kraut'

But first, a terrific poem which came back to me through the ages from my long-lost school days provoked by the recent words of 'the Kraut':

'IS there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor.
And a bird flew up out of the turret,	5
Above the Traveller's head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill	10
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight	15
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.	20
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even	25
Louder, and lifted his head:—
'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,' he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake	30
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,	35
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

I love that poem - how could I have forgotten it for so long? Anyway, on to 'the Kraut' who had some fascinating ruminations in The WaPo last week.  He asks one of those simple but deadly questions, "Are we alone in the universe?"  He was prompted to this by the, probably undue, excitement in cosmological circles (or should that be 'ellipses?) at the discovery of some planet-like objects circling suns in much the same way as our tired, battered, old planet does.  Instantly this raises the question of whether or not we are alone in the universe.  "Is there anybody there?" we mutter, and answer comes there none!

As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?

The silence, as they say, is deafening!  And perplexing.

It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”

'The Kraut' quotes something called The Drake Equation (1961) which seeks to enumerate how many advanced civilisations there must be in just our galaxy alone.  Apparently if you add in the information gained from modern satellite sources the number should be very great indeed.  And yet ... and yet ... despite all our signals sent out at the speed of light and our monitoring devices which could pick up the sound of an alien's fart from a zillion miles away - there is nothing, just the vast, endless emptiness of nothing.

Personally, I am not too unhappy because I always reckon that people - or beings, if you like - are nearly always trouble in the end and are therefore best avoided!  But 'the Kraut', being 'the Kraut', has an even gloomier explanation:

Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.

In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.

He lists the many man-made possibilities available to those madmen who, seeking a salvation in an after-world, would be happy to pull the trigger and bring about 'apocalypse now'.  But then, in a startling and original piece of thinking, he points to the only thing likely to save us - politics!

Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.

There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.

Good man, 'the Kraut', he makes you think.

 

The swots begin to realise they are dumb and dumber!

Actually, my title is not only unkind but also a tad misleading if it leaves you with the impression that I am somehow anti-science and scientists.  I am frequently anti-technologists, particularly when they manifest themselves in quasi-scientific speculations like global climate and neo-Darwinism; but I have genuine, almost open-mouthed admiration for real scientists, particularly those grappling with the mysteries on the far horizons of our knowledge.  Some of them, like the late Richard Feynman, are almost heroes in my imagination. 

Even so, regular readers will already know of my firm belief in disbelief, otherwise known as agnosticism, and my shivering delight in rich examples of irony.  Reading a recent article in Harper's Magazine by Alan P. Lightman, I was able to hug myself with delight at receiving a double helping of both!  Lightman, a considerable polymath, himself, reminds us of the incredible achievements of physicists during the 20th century.  I suppose it began in 1900 with Max Planck and his almost accidental discovery of the peculiar behaviour of electrons.  From that moment on it was the scientific equivalent of Renaissance travellers discovering America - a huge undiscovered continent filled with delights, riches and dangers.  In they rushed, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Feynman and many, many more.  At last, was the general feeling, we've almost cracked it, soon, very soon, there will be no more mysteries! 

“Back in the 1970s and 1980s,” says Alan Guth, “the feeling was that we were so smart, we almost had everything figured out.” What physicists had figured out were very accurate theories of three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force that binds atomic nuclei together, the weak force that is responsible for some forms of radioactive decay, and the electromagnetic force between electrically charged particles. And there were prospects for merging the theory known as quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of the fourth force, gravity, and thus pulling all of them into the fold of what physicists called the Theory of Everything, or the Final Theory.

It just needed one more shove, but unfortunately, it was like shoving on the end of a piece of string.  Indeed, in their efforts to reach this final Theory of Everything they had to use what they called 'string theory', the implications of which are mind-bending.

In essence (and you need to read Lightman's essay to double-check my errors of omission and/or commission), they discovered that for life to exist at all, as it manifestly does on this planet, several critical criteria at the moment of the 'Big Bang' had to be within very tight and specific limits.  Too much, or too little, of this, or of that, and life would not have been able to develop.  And yet it did!  Looking back at this peculiar, one almost might say, contrived, state of affairs at the very beginning of the universe, there is a severe temptation to suggest that God is a sort of master chef adding a pinch of this, or slightly less of that, in order to ensure the flavour of the stew is just right!  In other words, the sheer exactness of conditions at the very instant of the 'Big Bang' might lead a physicist to mutter, sotto voce, if he has his eye on a Nobel prize, the dread words - Intelligent Design!

Recoiling in horror, the swots have been forced into ever more complex hypotheses to explain away this awkward set of circumstances.  One theory currently in vogue in some quarters is the idea of  a 'multiverse', that is, the notion of an almost infinite number of universes all of which are different.  Thus, we can all relax and forget about the amazing set of circs which has allowed life to exist in this universe because given a 'multiverse' of almost infinite proportions it was bound to happen somewhere, sometime.  I have to say that smacks of desperation, to me.  H0wever, I leave it to you to read Mr. Lightman's fascinating article and make up your own minds.  In the meantime, I will, after shifting my buttocks to obtain what comfort I can, remain sitting firmly on this fence.

 

The red mist that never clears

First of all, yes, I enjoyed a super Christmas with 'SoD' and his 'bouncing Czech', thank you for asking, and, yes, I am now in strict training to ready myself for New Year's Eve which, more and more as I get older, takes on the characteristics of a marathon!  But now to more curious matters.

I have remarked before on the oddity of coincidence.  Just before Christmas I was involved in some knockabout stuff with the mouth-breathing 'Trot-lot' brigade who inhabit the comments box at David Osler's (interesting) site.  The subject was the putative idea of a State funeral for Lady Thatcher when she dies.  It reduced them all to paroxysms of fury.  I could understand it if we were arguing 25 years ago when the shot and shell of battle were still flying about but at this late date how could anyone look back and say that the Thatcher medicine was anything other than absolutely necessary for a desperately sick country and which, on the whole, was beneficial.  Before any Trot brave enough to enter these hallowed columns starts to froth at the mouth, I do not mean that everything was perfect - nothing ever is - however, it is obvious beyond any argument that for the mass of 'the people' (dread words!) prosperity increased and the country was fortified accordingly.

So why, I have been asking myself, do the 'Trot-lot' continue against all available evidence before their eyes to fester in a visceral hatred of 'that woman' which almost amounts to a phobia!  I realise that most of them were in their youth during those turbulent times and generally speaking the young always tend to rebelliousness but they are all middle-aged now and there can be no excuse for failing to acknowledge that is was "A Good Thing" for governments to stop making motor cars, running telephone services and producing iron and steel.  It was an even better thing to sell off council houses and make tenants home-owners.  And it was a truly great thing for a government to recognise and act upon the truth that money supply is the critical ingredient of inflation.  The fact that this tiny rump of political detritus clings so fiercely to their teen-age dreams is surely an indication of the essentially religious nature of their beliefs.  Nobody expects total rationality from the deeply religious who continue to carry their burden of beliefs despite all the contradictory evidence that swells the tide against which they are wading.

Then I came across a piece by Alex Massie at The Coffee House who had picked up (whilst wearing gloves, I hope) some droppings from Simon Winchester not, as one might suppose, from The Guardian but from The Times (which is behind a paywall so I will not link).  Winchester was writing on the subject of Kim Jong-il's long-overdue death and in the course of his essay he wrote this:

The State’s founder, Kim Il Sung, claimed that all he wanted for North Korea was to be socialist, and to be left alone. In that regard, the national philosophy of self-reliance known in North Korea as “Juche” is little different from India’s Gandhian version known as “swadeshi”. Just let us get on with it, they said, and without interference, please. 

India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out — its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.

Sometimes the crass stupidity of well-educated men leaves me open-mouthed with astonishment.  According to Winchester, then, South Korea which is prosperous and free (well, their members of Parliament are free to constantly indulge in fist fights with each other!) is to be despised because - SHLOCK-HORROR - their way of life has been Americanised.  But North Korea is to be provided with a pat on the back by the ineffably superior, British-born Simon Winchester, who chose to become an American citizen, because they have maintained their Korean culture.  I need hardly add that Mr. Winchester chooses to live in the USA!  The totalitarian brutalities of the Kim family's regimes in which millions perished needlessly are simply flicked away by Mr. Winchester's limp wrist under a generalised expression: "North Korea, for all its faults".  Someone pass a sickbag, quick!

Is Winchester, I wonder, in any way related to the late and utterly despicable, Hewlet Johnson - I refuse to give him his clerical title, suffice to say that he was known from before the war as 'the Red Dean'.  I ask, because again in yet another coincidence just before Christmas, Charles Moore in The Telegraph was reviewing a new biography of this old Marxist 'criminal' who spent his entire life as an advocate for Joseph Stalin.  Now, I use the word 'criminal' deliberately and after some thought because, whilst it is possible for some people to be fooled some of the time, to continue in an advocacy of a regime that had been proven to have indulged in mass murder places you on their platform.  When, in addition, you take their money, as Hewlet Johnson did, that should place you in the dock with them.  I see no difference between the high-ranking Church of England prelate and, say, Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's not-so-secret Torturer-in-Chief.  Johnson did not die until 1966 by which time there was more than sufficient proof of the fact that Stalin out-murdered Hitler by a (rough) factor of ten.  Never once did Johnson admit the possibility that Stalin had been other than a 'saint'!

So there you have it.  Three examples of wilful and deliberate avoidance of the facts.  We have all done it from time to time, but eventually, truth will out, and somethat shame-facedly we own up to having been wrong.  But for some people, for some reason, this never happens.  "What a piece of work is a man".

More poetry: George Herbert

Yes, sorry and all that (well, I'm not in the least sorry, really) but you must blame my e-pal 'DM' who sent me a simply stunning link to a 'virtual tour' of King's College Chapel, Cambridge which must rank as one of the most elegant buildings in the world.  As I told 'DM', it is nearly as good as Sherborne Abbey which is just down the road from me!  I would urge you all to take a few minutes and enjoy the 'tour' and do take a look at the tracery ceiling.

Now, as you will have gathered over the years, I am not a believer; I remain firmly astride the fence of agnosticism, uncomfortable though it be at times.  Even so, with or without the presence of God the inherent wisdom of Christianity as a means of conducting one's life is obvious, or should be, to everyone.  Above and beyond all else it is both civilised and civilising.  Even as I write those words I can sense the atheists readying themselves to hurl at me an enormous list of crimes and misdemeanors carried out by Christians.  Thus, would they demonstrate their grunt-snuffling stupidity by failing to recognise that those very actions went against the teachings of Christ, or in other words, the perps were human beings not saints whatever labels they attached to themselves.

To me, there is one man who typifies, in his wisdom and in his humility, the very best of Christian values.  He was, amongst other things a poet, and was thus enabled to bare himself as a weak man, beset with sin, and yet always striving, with help from his God, to try, try and try again to live up to his ideals.  That man was George Herbert (1593-1633):

He was a Cambridge man and would have known King's College Chapel intimately, although I am not suggesting that this poem is based on his recollection.

 

THE CHURCH-FLOORE

 

MARK you the floore? that square & speckled stone,
Which looks so firm and strong,
Is Patience:
And th' other black and grave, wherewith each one
Is checker'd all along,	5
Humilitie:
The gentle rising, which on either hand
Leads to the Quire above,
Is Confidence:
But the sweet cement, which in one sure band	10
Ties the whole frame, is Love
And Charitie.
Hither sometimes Sinne steals, and stains
The marbles neat and curious veins:
But all is cleansed when the marble weeps.	15
Sometimes Death, puffing at the doore,
Blows all the dust about the floore:
But while he thinks to spoil the room, he sweeps.
Blest be the Architect, whose art
Could build so strong in a weak heart.

A public man exposed by a private deed

I have long been convinced that it is the small things that people do which tells you more about their character than anything else - particularly if they are politicians.  Here is a typical example, via Brutally Honest, from a man almost universally traduced from all directions - President George W. Bush. 

During his presidency, one of his White House Special Aids was caught out plagiarising other people's works.  He immediately resigned but returned a day or two later to empty his office.  He was told that the 'Boss' wanted to see him and he made his way, with all due nervousness, I suppose, to the Oval Office.  The following will strike normally tight-lipped Brits as more than a tad OTT (over the top) but remember these are Americans and religious Americans at that:

And I said, "Mr. President, I apologize. Please forgive me." He said, "I'll say it again: Grace and mercy is real. You are forgiven. Now we can talk about all of this, or we can talk about the last eight years." We spent 20 minutes together. We prayed and we embraced. I cried when I was looking around the Oval Office for the last time. And as I prepared to leave he said, "By the way, I want you to bring your wife and sons here so I can tell them what a great husband and father you've been." Sure enough, he invited them to come. He was the leader of the free world, validating me, after I did what I did, before my wife and children.

A commentator to the piece added this:

George W. Bush may not have been a great president, but my sense is that he was a great man. [...] Liberals mocked Bush for having been a drunk, or being a "dry drunk," but it seems that Bush did something that too few do after such an experience; he learned from it and projected his lessons onto other people.  That's is true greatness.

I can only add, for what it's worth, that George W. Bush is man I would be happy to go into a jungle with!

 

'Archbishop' Dawkins trips over his own cassock!

I am obliged to my e-pal, 'Whyaxeye' (which is hereby immediately reduced to 'W' for the simple reason that it takes me three goes to spell his 'name' correctly!), who in a comment thread below drew my attention to 'the mysterious affair of the William Lane Craig debate', or, to be precise with reference to 'Archbishop' Dawkins, the William Lane Craig non-debate.  That exactitude is necessary because no debate between these men ever took place except, I suppose, via the infinite world of Blogdom where-in all hell was let loose!

You see, Mr. Lane Craig is a devout Christian philosopher and scholar - and one need go no further than that to recognise instantly that he stands for everything that Dawkins finds abominable.  But it gets worse, in Dawkins's eyes, because Lane Craig at some stage in his career sought to defend the word of God as recorded in Deuteronomy 20: 13-15 and in which apparently, He commanded that all the men, women and children of Canaan be put to the sword.  Those of you interested enough to read Mr. Lane Craig's defence of ethnic cleansing may do so via Google - me? I can't be bothered at the moment. 

What does interest me is that on the basis of his disgust at Mr. Lane Craig's words, 'Archbishop' Dawkins, standing on a stack of Bibles copies of his book The Selfish Gene, pronounced from on high that he would never, not ever, debate with such a self-evidently evil man.  But why?  Surely Mr. Lane Craig was only describing an act on the part of the Israelites of the time that was absolutely and entirely in compliance with the genetic code which Dawkins maintains over and over again drives men to be selfish, that is, to do anything and everything in their power to ensure the success of their own gene pool.  Massacring an entire tribe of hostile neighbours seems to me to be exactly what, in Dawkins's world, is to be expected, after all, such an act definitely increases the chances of success for your own genes, anything less puts them at risk .  Thus, like every street corner thug who sticks a knife into the guts of a member of an opposition gang, the Israelites can shrug and say, "Wasn't my fault, guv, it was me genes, wannit?"

It is worth quoting Dawkins in order to fully appreciate what a complete bugger's muddle this 'first class brain' gets into when he seeks to explain the all-powerful, er, well, sort of all-powerful-ish, selfish genes that makes us what we are, er, selfish:

The argument of this book [The Selfish Gene] is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. [...]  This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes.  I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. (My emphasis)

OK?  Alright?  Got that, have you? I mean, it's clear enough, pelucid, one might almost call it.  Ah, but hang on, there's all those awkward events in which people risk, and often lose, their own lives trying to save others.  Not very selfish, is it, 'your Grace'?  "No, no", the 'Archbishop' would cry, "it only looks altruistic because the people they are saving are their relatives and thus the carriers of the same, or very similar, genes to the rescuer, so, in  a sense, he or she is still being driven by those rascally, selfish genes."  But what about the people who are saved by rescuers who are not relatives?  Well, mutters Dawkins, as he shuffles uneasily on the spot:

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,because we are born selfish.  Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to. (His emphasis)

Yeeeeeeeees, quite, as Mr. Paxman might sigh!  Given that Dawkins has told us in one paragraph that we are merely machines governed by our genes, where are the genes that order us to "teach generosity and altruism"?  They, obviously, are not "selfish" genes by definition, just the opposite, they are altruistic genes.  Yet in his book Dawkins barely gives them a passing nod, almost, one might think because, like poor relations, he is slightly ashamed of them!  What they are, from whence they came and how they arrived, is neither asked not answered.

I have no opinion on Mr. Lane Craig.  However, I do view with considerable suspicion anyone who takes the words of the Old Testament literally, especially any words alleged by a writer several hundred years after the event to be the words of God. Happily, if that is quite the word, we have 'Archbishop' Dawkins with us here and now and consequently we can apply Duff's Law which states that when faced by a prat on a soap box the only course of action is to shout, "SHOW US YOUR WILLY!"

You can read Dawkins's defence of his refusal to debate, here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/20/richard-dawkins-william-lane-craig

And in a comment thread below 'W' offers this link to a enjoyable example of the 'unspeakable in pursuit of the equally unspeakable', in which Dawkins is beaten up by a gang of feminastis - my dears, simply too, too, delicious but one just doesn't know which side to cheer for!

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/07/richard-dawkins-draws-feminist-wrath-over-sexual-harassment-comments/39637/

NB: All quotes from The Selfish Gene, chapter one.

 

Watch out next April - academic warfare is likely to break out!

I have, and enjoy, the occasional equivalent of a Saturday night punch-up over at the 'Trot-lot' and 'Warmer' sites but they are nothing compared to the unrestricted warfare that breaks out when academics fall out.  And a fall out of almost nuclear proportions can definitely be expected next April when the eminent biologist, E. O. Wilson, publishes his next book. Wilson, as some of you may know, was the 'father of sociobiology' which sought to explain evolution in terms of group behavior - Wilson was an expert on ants and their highly specialised and successful social model - whilst agreeing that the unit of evolution was the gene.

However, as I explained in a post last June, Wilson is no respecter of persons and reputations, particularly if the person and reputation concerned is 'Archbishop' Richard Dawkins!  Thus, in his forthcoming book, which follows a highly technical paper written for Nature in concert with two big-brained maths swots, he intends to press home his view that altruism, such a thorn in the side of Dawkins, is not confined to kin selection but arises from group selection.  Well, I could have told him that but who the hell listens to me?

Anyway, watch out next April for a mammoth, academic hissy-fit and a  barrage of deliciously vicious book reviews in which old scores might be settled but new ones will spring up to take their place.  Such fun!

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/e-o-wilson-rsquo-s-theory-of-everything/8686/?single_page=true

 

Contrarian or crank?

Looking at his photo you would find it hard to choose, he could be either.  However, given that he takes to wearing a red fedora you might think he was a comedian!

Raymond Tallis by Felix Clay, Eyevine

Actually, I think 'contrarian' is his best description given that he is a former clinical neuroscientist by the name of Raymond Tallis and that he spends most of his time at war with his fellow neuroscientists.  I am obliged to The Chronicle of Higher Education - and, no, don't ask what an ignoramus like me is doing in such high-falutin' company - for an interesting article on the man by Mr. Marc Parry in which he suggests that perhaps a better job description for Dr. Tallis is 'dustman' on the grounds that he describes most of the theories put forward by his fellow specialists as "neuro trash" which he is all too eager to deposit on the nearest dump!

Happily, on this occasion, given that I know nothing of the subject I do not have to offer an opinion (wadd'ya mean that never stopped me before?!) I can simply carry their coats whilst they set to.  On the one side we have, according to Mr. Parry, those who support:

[...] a rash of pseudo brain science that purports to explain behavior as varied as believing in God and falling in love.

In the other corner we have the redoubtable, and probably very irritating, Dr. Tallis, who:

In 2006, Tallis gave up hospital-ward rounds for a full-time writing life that unfolds in morning and afternoon rounds of two local pubs. In these "offices," the atheist-humanist nurses his animosity toward thinkers who reduce human beings to animals "acting out a biological script inscribed in our brains by evolutionary forces." He takes aim at their exaggerated claims in a new book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (McGill-Queen's University Press).

I like his working routine, it reminds me of the old three-martini lunches so beloved and missed of yesteryear.  I think I would pay good money to attend one of his lectures:

In a cheerful voice, turned out in a magenta tie and a blue boating blazer with broad white stripes, Tallis informs 60 people gathered in a Kent lecture hall that his talk will demolish two "pillars of unwisdom." The first, "neuromania," is the notion that to understand people you must peer into the "intracranial darkness" of their skulls with brain-scanning technology. The second, "Darwinitis," is the idea that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory can explain not just the origin of the human species—a claim Tallis enthusiastically accepts—but also the nature of human behavior and institutions.

As I confessed above, I have no knowledge of the arcane details of neuroscience but I instinctively side with Dr. Tallis, not, I hasten to add, for religious reasons but simply because I am by nature a 'Bolshie bugger' and I do not care for the notion that anyone tells me what to do - whether it's God or Darwin!

It's a good article well worth reading not least because it makes you wish you knew more.

 

One last chew and then you can spit it out!

(This follows the subject matter of the three previous posts.)

The last bit of trickiness arising from this sad tale of the unexpected earthquake which virtually destroyed L' Aquila in Italy which I would like to dwell upon concerns the all too common disputes between experts and non-experts in the fields of science and technology.  My own very slight personal experience of this sort of thing came years ago as a teenager reading Nevil Shute's No Highway and later seeing the film with the great James Stewart.  This story written in 1949 tells of a lonely scientist's efforts to convinve the authorities that the cause of an aircraft crash is metal fatigue which he worked out using a (fictional) version of quantum mechanics.  He is an awkward cuss with few social skills and his interest in the symbolic meanings of ancient Egyptian pyramids is used against him when he tries to get people to take his ideas seriously.  In the end, of course, he is proved to be correct and the consensus opinion of the scientific hierarchy wrong.

In L' Aquila, a local man with a scientific background but no high degrees or published works to back his opinions, undertook regular measurements of radon gas emissions, this gas being endemic in the area.  I am not quite sure exactly what he was doing but it was based, I think, on his theory that the nature of the gas changed when tremors were imminent.  Consequently he warned that the chances of a big tremor hitting were very much greater than the 'experts'.  He ran his own open blog on which he published his data and his theory and so many people were reading it and becoming panicked that the authorities decided to place him under investigation.  A big-ish shock occurred the same day, and the really big one hit about five days later.

Does that remind you of something?  AGW, for instance, although in that case the concensus science is the one predicting enormous catastrophes whilst the 'maverick' outsiders are denying it.  The 'Warmers'/'Changers' (at the moment they appear not to be certain which climate they are forecasting!) have retreated into their stockade defended by 'peer review' which in practice means reviews conducted by other scientists (and sometimes friends) who agree with them.  Happily, we now have 'internet review' in which everyone and his uncle can join in, although that mass rapidly filters down to a few very expert blogs whose owners are extremely knowledgeable.

So, yet another intractable problem to add to the others I have referred to.  I certainly do not pretend to have solutions.  I only ask for complete openness on all sides so that we, the public, can best decide for ourselves.  However, I would add that a healthy dose of scepticism when it comes to 'experts' is often very good for your, er, health!  Unless, of course, it is your local cardiologist telling you that your indegestion is actually a sign of an impending stroke and the prat selling you homeopathic lichen is having you on!

'What's a body to do?' you may ask.  'Pay yer money and take yer chance', is my fairly useless reply.

 

Doncha' just lurve those 'Amurican' lawyers?

Yes of course you do because you all spend a disgraceful amount of time watching their adventures on the 'telly'.  Every other blasted programme seems to feature American lawyers.  It all started years ago, I suppose, when the strong-jawed, stiff-upper-lipped and tremendously dignified Gregory Peck played the noble Atticus Finch and defended the black kid against a rape charge in To Kill A Mockingbird.  Since then, Hollywood has regularly placed lawyers on heroic pedestals and yet, oddly enough, this has gone hand-in-hand with a mounting detestation of the whole trouble-making bunch of them amongst the American population.  If I had a lawyer's fee for every anti-lawyer joke I have ever seen or heard I would be worth suing!

However, on this occasion I intend to leap to their defence.  Bless their silk socks, they'll do anything for money, including pleading cases on behalf of one of the most despised minorities in America - no, no, not paedophiles or Tea Party activists - I mean those who dare to question Darwinism (the unspeakable swine!), and even worse, those who by doing so upset 'Archbishop' Dawkins of 'The Holy Church of Genes & Memes'.

According to Evolution News, the California Science Center (CSC) has just been forced to cough up $110,000 for cancelling a booked film show called Darwin's Dilemma.  Apparently the film was sympathetic to Intelligent Design (ID), an idea which causes 'Archbishop' Dawkins's eyeballs to swivel in opposite directions simultaneously.  Anyway, the CSC, along with the Smithsonian Institution, and LA County Museum of Natural History, were all hauled in front of 'dee judge' for infringing the First Amendment Rights of the American Freedom Association.

Next in the dock, according to the Times Higher Education, was the magazine Applied Mathematics Letters which had begun by accepting a reviewed paper from Granville Sewell, professor of mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso, which posed criticisms of the awesome 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, but then withdrew it when the author's sympathies to ID were brought to their attention.  Sewell reached for his trusty lawyers and, lo, he won an apology and $10,000.

Finally, and almost unbelievably, I turn to The Guardian of last February which covers the story of:

Dr Martin Gaskell [who] applied for the position of director at the new MacAdam student observatory at the University of Kentucky. He stood "breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience" according to the chairman of the selection panel, but he did not get the job.

Gaskell, an Englishman by birth, is a devout Christian and also expresses doubts concerning Darwinism.  According to 'The Graun', his doubts are more nuanced than your average Bible-thumper which is hardly surprising in a man whose expertise lies in cosmological physics, in general, and massive black holes, in particular.  He was applying for the job of director of the University's observatory but his 'politically incorrect' views on biology were held against him and he was passed over.  After years of delay the university finally caved in and settled out of court for $125,000. 

God Bless America - and American lawyers!

Incidentally, the lawyers concerned were, in order:

William J. Becker Jr., of the Becker Law Firm

Pete Lepiscopo, of Lepiscopo & Morrow

Francis J. Manion, American Center for Law & Justice

So, let's hear it for American lawyers, altogether now - hip-hip-hip . . .  . . . oh come on, you can do better than that  . . .

 

Am I "crass and thoughtless"?

I ask the question because I stand so accused by my e-pal, Dom, in a spirited comment to my post on the Norwegian massacre.  It is worth reprinting his comment here:

When the unabomber published his manifesto, I was appalled but not surprised to find that some on the left read it approvingly. When Breivik published his manifesto, I thought, certainly no conservative will be so crass and thoughtless as to find something worthwhile (or non-insane) in this. Well, there goes that theory.

Why, in the world, would you write, "is it time for armed insurrection?" You live in a country that (a) has banned arms (why, I don't know, but it's your country), (b) has a vote, and (c) allows emigration. The last one is difficult for anyone who loves his country, but put emimgration in one hand, and insurrection in the other -- which is better?

Now Dom is a frequent and intelligent commenter here at D&N and his criticism deserves a full response.

If a man commits an atrocity because, he tells people afterwards, the moon was in the right (or wrong) quarter then it can be inferred that he is 'insane' in the sense that his explanation for mass murder lacks any basis in reason.  It is, so to speak, completely and utterly 'unreasonable' in the literal meaning of that word.  However, men have committed massacres of more or less 'innocent' people throughout the ages, in fact, since history was first recorded.  The particular reaons are several but all of them come under the general heading of 'political'.  Take a recent example - the slaughter of the Jews by the Germans under Hitler.  A truly monstrous act but not one that stands alone.  On the contrary, what Hitler did on the grand scale, other East Europeans, like the Russians, had committed many times before on a smaller scale - but only because they lacked the industrial capabilities of 20th century Germany.  I should add that in medieval times England indulged in the occasional pogrom, too.

So were they all 'insane'?  I think not because they all had reasons for doing what they did.  The reasons might have been mistaken and the acts were certainly immoral but there was a reasoned basis for their actions.  I have forgotten which particular one of my Napoleonic history books describes the advance into Russia and the way in which the Russian population fled but the Jewish money-lenders stayed and , for a price, were prepared to be helpful.  If you were born and bred in Eastern Europe the local Jewish money-lender was your bank manager and no-one loves their bank manager!  If, as most money-lenders do, your 'bank manager' held you in your desperation during a failed harvest to a usurious rate of interest and then turned you off your land to starve if you failed to pay, then a lack of love becomes hatred.  These conditions prevailed for centuries and thus was born a deep and abiding detetestation of Jews.  So one is forced to ask the question, were the regular pogroms carried out by madmen or by maddened men - a subtle difference.  In Germany in the 1930s the localised nature of Jewish moneylending was more or less over - but, as the old song has it, "The memory lingers on".  The massacre of the Jews was, of course, worse than immoral from a political point of view because it was also stupid beyond belief.  The Jews of Germany were the brains of Germany and lack of brainpower is all too apparent when one studies Nazi history and its downfall.  However, from the point of view of the politicians at the top of Nazi Germany, and the prejudices of so many of the general population below handed own through the generations, there was a reasoned case to be made for killing all the Jews!  They were wrong, they were immoral, they were dimwitted, but they were not insane.  And, if you were antogonistic towards the Germany of those days it would have been a folly to shrug their actions off to mere insanity.  Such policies, as and when they arise need to be faced up to and argued, or even fought, against and this is best done on the basis of a full understanding of your enemy's thinking.

So now I return to Anders Breivik and his single-handed atrocity.  I have not read his manifesto in full - my dear, simply too, too, tedious!  However, from the various extracts I have read it is quite clear to me that whatever you think of his actions, he was not insane.  His atrocity was not committed because the moon was in the wrong quarter but because he had studied his country's condition and come to the conclusion, based on the facts that he had accrued, that it was in a dire state of peril.  Now you can argue against that opinion - and there-in lies the proof that he was not insane because it is impossible to debate an argument with a loony.  I know virtually nothing of Norway so I can only take his template and apply it to the UK.  I do not think we are in peril of a Muslim takeover - yet!  In fact, I believe (hope?) that there are several factors operating against Islam in this country which will eventually bring about its downfall.  They are, amongst others, science, technology, culture and pornography.  They will work like acid on the religion of Islam in exactly the same way that they have eroded Christian belief.  The Muslim fanatics, in their hearts, recognise this and fear has turned to fury and provoked them into fighting.  They will not win - although the battle might be bloody - because the science, technology, culture and pornography are all-pervasive.  What they do cannot be undone!  Every Muslim girl who forsakes her veil for the 'freedom' of her western school friends is one more victory for secularism over religion.

However, Breivik came to the opposite but reasoned conclusion and with the facts and figures to support him decided to take violent action in defence of his homeland.  You may apply any epithets you like to him and his actions but I repeat, he was not insane.  I would also add a shrewd insight offered by Richard North today.  He notes the political fury, as opposed to any personal fury from relatives of the dead and injured, which has been engendered:

Another point of interest is how far the Norwegians and the other political establishments go down the line of branding Breivik "mad". For some - particularly the Right (as it is known) - this would be a convenient diagnosis. Then, everything he has done and represents can be dismissed as the frothing of a madman.  The issues raised can be ignored and the discussion shut down. [My emphasis]

He then adds yet another reason why the politicians are so eager to stamp on Breivik:

What offends, therefore, it not the deed itself, but the fact that it was not state sanctioned. The killing of men, women and children is perfectly acceptable, as long as it is ordered by grave men in suits, sitting at tables in the offices of government, and carried out by men in pretty uniforms with lots of badges.

It is even deemed admirable if done at a distance with high-tech toys. The deeds are applauded and the bodies quietly buried. The men (and indeed women) involved even get shiny new medals for their labours, promotions, more badges and pensions.

Thus, Breivik's great "crime" was to breach the state monopoly on killing. You have to get elected before you are allowed to order killing on this scale. And then, only state employees may carry out the orders even to the extent of indulging in mass, indiscriminate killing. But if an individual conducts targeted slaughter, on the basis of his own careful analysis, he must be mad. It is the only acceptable diagnosis.

Exactly so, and in precisely the same manner in which, as several recent cases illustrate, the establishment always comes down heavily on a property-owner who kills a burglar in defence of his own home.  It's OK for the state to take action but heaven help the individual - or you and me, as I like to think of him - who does!

My final comment in response to Dom is this, whenever you see and hear the entire political class all united and singing the same song - lock up your daughters and bury the spoons!

 

A sideways glance at the Norwegian massacre

I have delayed writing anything on this subject until matters became a little clearer.  It is now obvious that Anders Breivik was not a loony in the sense of walking around with his arm in the front of his jacket and insisting that everyone call him l'empereur!  Quite the contrary, he appears to be an intelligent, well-read and studious man who has gone to considerable trouble to analyse current affairs in his country and his continent and came to some reasoned conclusions. 

I am obliged to Mr. Ken Ferguson at Anna Raccoon's site for this:

One of conservatism’s most important insights is that all ideologies are wrong. Ideology takes an intellectual system, a product of one or more philosophers, and says, “This system must be true.” Inevitably, reality ends up contradicting the system, usually on a growing number of points. But the ideology, by its nature, cannot adjust to reality; to do so would be to abandon the system. Therefore, reality must be suppressed.

If the ideology has power, it uses its power to undertake this suppression. It forbids writing or speaking certain facts. Its goal is to prevent not only expression of thoughts that contradict what “must be true,” but thinking such thoughts.

But what happens today to Europeans who suggest that there are differences among ethnic groups, or that the traditional social roles of men and women reflect their different natures, or that homosexuality is morally wrong? If they are public figures, they must grovel in the dirt in endless, canting apologies.

Actually, those were not Mr. Ferguson's words but those of Mr. Breivik and who, outside of the  Brussels autocracy, can disagree with them?  I repeat, whatever else he is, this man is not mad.

Hang on, I hear you cry, this man slaughtered some 70+ Norwegian civilians, his own country men and women.  Quite true, but I would refer you to another Norwegian 'patriot',  Knut Haukelid, who with deadly 'malice' aforethought placed a bomb in a ferry and blew it up killing a considerable number of his fellow Norwegians.   He, like Breivik, had analysed his country's position and come to the conclusion that it was overrun by malevolent foreigners aided and abetted by a 'quisling' government.  Quite right, of course, because the government of his day was indeed run by Vidkin Quisling, a Nazi sympathiser, and Haukelid was fighting in the Resistance.  For this, and other,  acts involving the deliberate killing of his fellow citizens he was showered with medals!

Another factor which has hitherto inhibited any commentary from me is my almost complete ignorance of contemporary Norwegian society.  Again, I am obliged to Mr. Ferguson and will quote him again in the hope that he does know where-0f he speaks:

Norway and Sweden are often held up as models of social democracy. They are countries with highly efficient commercial and industrial systems featuring a well cared for and highly educated work force. In terms of politics, the Social Democratic Workers Party in Sweden and the Labour Party in Norway have been dominant for almost 100 years. But although both countries have constitutional monarchies and left of centre governments, the real authority is invested in a ruling cabal of financiers and industrialists who make the decisions behind the scenes. It is a close knit ruling elite, the members of which tend to build their summer houses round the same lakes.  [My emphasis.]

So whilst there are elements of the Nordic societies that look, from the outside, like a form of socialism, it is actually more like corporate paternalism. This produces a very controlled environment and, whilst there is a general culture of deference to authority within all organisational structures, liberal and egalitarian values are dominant.  [My emphasis.]

Hmmmn!  I know the feeling!

I must add that although I know Scandinavia has a considerable Muslim immigrant population I have never understood why.  They have no history of empire and thus no 'obligation' to former members of it.  However, it must be stated clearly that Norway is not a dictatorship and that the people have had many chances to change the political scenery and consequently, as I frequently remind my British readers, they have the government they deserve!  But dictatorship comes in new forms these days.  As the Germans have discovered the hard way over the last century, there is more than one way to skin a cat!  Bullets and bayonets have their part but their staying power is limited.  Much better to bribe a population into slothful acceptance and, of course, once they have become accustomed to the bribes and the soft living which comes with them, they are hooked.  Thus, today is born the soft Left ascendency, or Blair's 'Third Way', as it used to be called and which continues in contemporary Britain under the 'benign' dictatorship of the "heir to Blair", aided by its principle agitprop organisation, the BBC, and the massed chorus of 'the Great and the Good'.  It is worth noting that Breivik did not attack Muslims.  Instead, he went for the leadership of the ruling socialist party which has more or less run Norway for the last 100 years, and their children.  This was shrewd of him because it indicates that (as seen from his point of view) he knew who constituted his true enemy.  The retards of the BNP here always seek confrontation with the Muslims thus demonstrating their idiocy by attacking the puppet instead of the puppet-master.

So the question arises: is it time for armed insurrection over here?  I simply do not know.  According to Pew Research, as of last year Muslims represented 4.6% of the population.  Via Wiki, Richard Kerbaj of The Sunday Times reckons that Muslims are breeding 10 times faster than all other groups. Also, it is imperative to realise that each and every time the government, any government, assures us that they are cutting down on immigration - they are lying!  Thus, a second question arises: what percentage figure would it take to convince a majority of people in the UK that they were about to be taken over?  Again, I do not know.  Obviously in Norway, one man at least came to the conclusion that a take-over was dangerously close.

Finally, let me leave you with a single and critical question.  If, at some time in the future, you reach the same conclusion that Mr. Breivik arrived at - what will you do?

 

It's that God-thing again!

In a previous post on the subject of Bernard Nathanson, a man I think of as the Dr. Mengele of the abortion butchers' shop, I was sternly rebuked by Gabriel in the comments thread who thundered at me, but perfectly politely, from his own personal Christian pulpit because I had indicated my absolute lack of forgiveness for this wretched man despite the fact that he later repented and became as fervent for pro-life life opinion as he had been whilst keeping himself busy (and rich) yanking bits of babies out of their mothers' wombs.  As you can imagine, a fairly lively conversation ensued but was cut short by bloody TypePad interference which automatically shuts down comments threads after a certain period of time.  Needless to say I haven't a clue how to rectify it so I thought it was quicker to compose a new post in which I would attempt a riposte to Gabriel's last criticism of my 'Old Testament' outlook.

Let me take some of his salient points in order.  He wrote:

That a man may deserve the death penalty has nothing to do with forgiving him if he asks for forgiveness. I am able to forgive you for breaking my window, but it doesn't mean that I will not demand that you pay to repair the damage you have done in order to satisfy justice. I other words, you can forgive someone as they wall to the gallows.

To which I can only ask, what then is 'forgiveness'?  I have puzzled over this word and its meaning without result and can only phrase the dilemma in a series of question;

a: Is it that you 'forgive' a villain his trespasses such that, were you to meet him in a pub later on, you would buy him a drink?  That is not as frivolous as it may sound because surely such a wholehearted stance is required by the word 'forgiveness'.  Anything less is only part-forgiveness.

b: Or does 'forgiveness' just  mean that you will forego all personal revenge and leave matters to the law.  Again, somehow that does not quite express the full meaning of the word.  You still hate the guy but prefer the hangman to do your job for you!

c: But supposing, as a Christian, you forgive the evil-doer completely and utterly.  Does not that infringe on a responsibility which lies entirely with God?  Surely, it is not up to us to forgive, it is up to God.

Then Gabriel reminded me that what Nathanson did was completely legal, a non-sequiter of epic proportions.  What has mere legality to do with this matter, I thought we were discussing morals.  He then suggests that my anger should be directed at the Supreme Court and, by implication, everyone who aided the passing of legislation that permitted Nathanson's activities.  To which I can only reply - it is, and I do!

Then Gabriel moved on to my lack of belief, or faith, in the existence of a God.  Happily, he tells me, I do not require faith despite every priest of every denomination I have ever known constantly calling on their flock to 'have faith'.  No, no, he tells me, the 'proof' can be reasoned out:

1) If nothing existed 500 trillion billion years ago, nothing would exist now, simply because it is impossible for "nothingness" to bring anything into existence. Thus, something always had to exist (because here we are today.)

2) In order for something to have a beginning it must exist in time. Therefore, if something always existed, it is outside of time. Philosophers call this "an eternal state" where there is no past, no future, but just an "eternal now" Scientists today will tell you that before the "Big Bang", "time" and "matter" simply did not exist.

3) The fact that the universe is comprehensible through the language of mathematics is and that man can intellectually grasp the laws which govern the universe is an important key.

Therefore the Cause of the universe is:

1) Outside of time (Eternal)
2) Outside of matter (Spiritual)
3) Rational (A Producer of an intellectually comprehensible universe)

Thus, the universe is timeless, so bang goes the, er, Big Bang theory!  Well, as it happens I gather that some scientists are already having doubts on that one. In his second point he confuses, I think, two entities, matter/energy and time.  I agree that in the very nano-second matter/energy is produced then time begins, because time is measurement and you can only measure something that exists.  But if he is correct that matter/energy have always existed then it follows that time has always existed - the two go together hand in hand, indivisible - until of course, that wretched 2nd Law of Thermodynamics  has its wicked way and all energy ceases, at which point all time ceases because there is nothing to measure.  Gabriel touched a sympathetic nerve with me by the way he stressed the importance of mathematics.  It is indeed the very keystone to our understanding, despite the fact that at the moment it merely serves to underline how much we do not know, rather like a man lighting a match in a cave as big as St. Pauls and trying thus to understand where he is.  He also rather spoils his argument by suggesting that the universe is rational, to which I can only respond with one expression - irrational numbers!  And as for 'harmony', again, without wishing to become bogged down in details, I would simply remind him of the correctly named Chaos Theory.  Yet again, I would remind him that if the Big Bang theory is correct, part of what permitted the eventual cohesion of sub-atomic particles which eventually led to the existence of planets and stars was their very slight dis-harmony as they flew away in the explosion.  None of any of this offers the slightest proof of the existence of a God.

Gabriel then moves on to the sort of arguments I might aim at atheists, that is, the nature of life and how it began - that is what I call, in an attempt at humour, Phase II of creation!  Like the beginnings of matter/energy, I have found no satisfactory explanation as to how life began.  That is not to say that one day there will not be such an explanation but I can only take the world as I find it today.

Gabriel then proposes the notion of 'soul'.  According to him "all living things" possess a soul which, given the selfish, false friendship of my cat who would sit by cleaning its ears as a burglar murdered me, I find hard to accept let alone define.  I mean, what sort of 'soul' does a fir tree own?  Or a frog?  According to Gabriel, Man's soul lies in his ability to reason, but surely that is a product of his brain which in turn is the product of evolution, so if Gabriel is right then the nature of Man's soul has changed over the millennia.

Sorry, Gabriel, but I remain unconvinced.  Mind you, ten minutes listening to that mouth-foamer, Richard Dawkins, might swing me your way!