Rationalist

2002-07-06T00:34:00.000+10:00

Ye Of Miscellaneous Faith

The Australian Bureau of Statistics classification of religions is a fascinating few pages. No Religion - about 15% of the population, according to last year's census - contains only 4 subgroups: Agnosticism, Atheism, Humanism and Rationalism. No Objectivists or Ayn-Randians in sight.

This is pretty unimaginative when you consider the options available for Other Religions (0.4%). Some public servant has patiently allocated unique codes to everything from Chinese Ancestor Worship to Druidism; although Australian Aboriginal Traditional Religions have all been lumped together.

It's the last chance catch-all at the bottom of the Miscellaneous Religions section that's interesting - the Religious Groups, code 6999. While the Census Bureau officially frowned on people listing 'Jedi' as their religion at the last census (see post from June 22), and threw 'Jedi' into the Religious Groups bucket, just look at some of what it explicitly includes there: The Aetherius Society (Flying Saucer Group), The Builders of the Adytum, The Inner Peace Movement.

The Australian Government recognizes The Flying Saucer Group, and not the Jedi!? May the force be with them, they know not what they do...

2002-07-06T00:22:00.000+10:00

The Judean People's Front

Pedophile Catholics have been thankfully absent from the news lately, but there was a funny postscript to one of the last TV news stories about them, on Sydney Channel 10 as I remember. There was some story about how the Melbourne Catholic establishment had protected child molestors, dismissed victims, the usual stuff. Then the news went on to other stories, and right at the end, the announcer said something like, 'The Australian Catholic Church would like to clarify that the earlier news item about child abuse was referring to the Roman Catholic Church'.

Let us not go into the morass of almost every Christian faith believing that they alone are the true Catholic faith - the most prominent being the Church of England regarding herself as the English Catholic Church, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and nothing to do with those oddballs in Rome.

But spare a thought for the Australian Catholic Church - not only have the Roman Catholics gone and devalues the brand, as it were, but the Australian Catholic Church is very, very obscure. I can't find them anywhere on the net, 'Australian Catholic Church' is synonymous with the 'Roman Catholic Church in Australia'. They must have a massive complex over all this - if are any members are out there, do email me and tell us about yourselves.

I know the Australian Catholic Church exists because it is listed in the Australian Bureau of Statistics list of Christian religions, and I know it is obscure because it is right as the very very bottom with the 'Other Christian' religions, way below the mainstream 'Catholic Church in Australia', right at the runt of the list with the Millenial Dawnists and the Father Divine - Peace Mission Movement.

2002-07-06T00:20:00.000+10:00

Just shove it

Who do you think said this?

"... we want to assist in shutting down the sweatshops where these garments are made by workers who get paid very little and work in atrocious conditions."

I'll save you the suspense because you'll never guess - the speaker is one Richard Stanwix, Nike corporate security manager in Australia, on the occasion of a police raid on a suburban Sydney market that was selling fake Nike tshirts for A$7. Our tax dollars at work.

Some poor worker gets a few cents for sewing a tshirt and some guy selling off a trestle table at the markets makes a few dollars. This subverts the way things are supposed to work, which is that some poor worker gets a few cents for sewing a tshirt and Nike makes heaps of dollars. Nike know all about sweatshops, of course. A Google search for 'Nike' and 'sweatshop' turns up over 12,000 hits, not all of them the famous sweatshop email.

2002-06-29T01:53:00.000+10:00

Gods and Monsters

How many articles do you read about the War on Terror, and how many of them are actually saying something important and saying it well? Salman Rushdie, risking another fatwa, takes Muslims to task for being too obsessed with rote anti-Americanism to meet Western tolerance and support with any morality of their own. It's been said before, but never so well:

Some of us have been listening out for something else: the emergence of a genuine Muslim polemic against the harm the terrorists are doing to their "own people." The war against Islamist terror will only be won when Muslims around the world begin to believe that fanaticism is a greater evil than that which they believe the United States to embody -- an evil, moreover, more damaging to Muslims, more socially, economically and politically destructive, and possessed by the nightmare vision of the Talibanization of the planet. After nine months during which it has been repeatedly stressed that most Muslims are not terrorists, but ordinary, decent human beings, it would be good to point to the birth of an international Muslim movement against terrorism. Unfortunately no such movement has emerged, nor is there the slightest indication that it may yet do so.

2002-06-29T01:41:00.000+10:00

Somebody Bless America

How entertaining! Mass outrage and harrumphing about the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturning a 1954 law adding the words "under God" to the pledge of allegiance.

I Pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

This is recited every morning in public schools in the US (in the US, public are schools are schools for the general public, unlike British public schools) which goes some way to explaining to the rest of us why Americans visibly stiffen their backs and place their hands on their hearts at any whiff of their flag or anthem.

Much religious demagoguery and hyperbolic overreaction has ensued, and one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at the sheer inability of a majority of Americans to even comprehend that some of their fellow citizens simply do not believe in any God at all.

SOME PEOPLE ARE NOT RELIGIOUS. It's hilarious how some other people just don't get this. The WSJ counters that

"God is the generic name for the monotheistic Deity"

while a Salon author offers helpfully:

... nonmonotheistic religions believe in Gods rather than God, but, contrary to the appellate court's interpretation, they are not excluded from the Pledge's formulation, since those who believe in more than one God still believe in at least one. (They could, moreover, add their own personal "s" to the pledge without anyone noticing -– or caring.)

(I am not linking to Salon Premium articles, since unless you are a subscriber, you are not able to read them.)

So, if you are an American Hindu, pick your favourite God. and here is the Pledge of Allegiance in Hindi.

When people can for any reason no longer indulge their own personal prejudices, the standard reaction is to blame 'political correctness', and politicians have obliged by describing this decision as 'political correctness run amok'. One rejoinder:

Nor has it been commented upon that the Republic's keen sense of political correctness apparently extends to everyone except the godless. Even those of the Muslim faith are treated with more compassion than the skeptic. Fortunately for them, the Republic's sanction and promotion of religion is largely harmless. Etching "In God We Trust" on our currency is not quite the same as the Taliban butchering infidels in Afghanistan. Luckily, most atheists are highly civilized people and are able to look on the antics of their Christian brethren with a laughing eye. In fact, watching the boobs in Congress stumble over one another to be first to the podium to decry the court's decision is an amusing spectacle in itself. Obviously these politicians are simply milking this welcome opportunity to show off for their hometown church groups, a tactic that they -- I almost said pray -- that they hope will, at the end of the day, translate into a nice Election Night windfall. How many of the drunken, lascivious boors in Congress do you suppose really bend their knee at night, or mutter a prayer of thanks before dinner? I doubt you would find more than a handful.

... Originally, the Pledge, composed by socialist Baptist minister Francis Bellamy, ran: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." According to Baer, author of "The Pledge of Allegiance, A Centennial History, 1892-1992," the idea of "equality for all" had to be scrapped, presumably because the state superintendents of education were opposed to equality for women and minorities.

Since it was penned in August 1892, Bellamy's oath has been tampered with twice. In 1924, despite the author's protests, the National Flag Conference changed the phrase "my flag," to "the flag of the United States of America," seemingly so that godless communists could not hijack the Pledge and make it their own. And again in 1956, during the height of the Cold War, the Knights of Columbus, a usually harmless Catholic organization of grown men with swords, pressured Congress to include the phrase "under God."
With hypocrisy and bombast for all, Christopher Orlet, Salon Premium

At the moment, the US appears far from indivisible, under God or just freestanding. The matter of who, if anybody, they should be indivisible it in itself somewhat divisive:

...there are many inconvenient facts about the Pledge decision that its legions of detractors are simply ignoring. Here are some of them: Significant numbers of Americans simply do not believe in God. Other Americans may embrace a kind of spirituality that involves more than one god, or some spiritual entity entirely different from the conventional God, who does not answer to that particular name. Even some of those who do believe in God -- whether spelled with an uppercase or lowercase "G" -- may feel strongly that this belief is a matter between themselves and that God, and not something that should have anything at all to do with the U.S. government, the public schools it supports or avowals of allegiance to the Republic, the government and the flag made in those schools. ...

... If there's a political consensus in the U.S. to say, "The majority rules, and the majority believes in God, so the rest of you should just stand by quietly while we haul our God into the daily Pledge of Allegiance," then let's acknowledge that squarely, rather than pretend that no one is excluded by the choice. But anyone listening to the words of the Pledge itself -- "One nation, under God, indivisible ..." -- will sense, as I did every time I recited it in my public elementary school (at a time when you couldn't "opt out"), that in fact they prescribe a unity of belief. If you happen not to believe God exists, then you stand as an implicit violator of that unity: You aren't part of that "one nation"; you have fractured the indivisible.
God stoppers, Scott Rosenberg, Salon Premium

At least its driven the pedophile Catholics off the news pages. Some fun times ahead, I'm sure.

2002-06-22T01:18:00.000+10:00

May the faith be with you (not)

News from the non-believers:

"If we don't start, very soon, to replenish our ranks with young people, our future will be dim."

This is not a Catholic Priest worrying aloud, but a Secular Humanist. I suspect that like minded young people today are just secular humanists, not Secular Humanists, and who can blame them? The above is from an article on the American Atheists web site investigating the thorny debate "over whether the promotion of secular humanism should involve "bashing" religion, or whether we should only focus on presenting humanism in a positive light."
(Conclusion: bash at will.)

If you want to know what atheism would be like if it was an organized non-religion, look no further than American Atheists. This is a movement awash with its own dogma, creeds, manifestos, a charismatic founder - Madalyn Murray O'Hair - and her sacred writings. Like the best corporate religions, it has a National Convention, a governing hierarchy, and even a board of directors.

Perhaps it's a reaction to the ostentatious devoutness of Americans, that American Atheists are so prickly and defensive. As well as the article above - what kind of a belief system needs to depend on bashing other ideologies? - they offer this most peculiar advice on Coming Out of the [Atheist] closet.

Relax, people, just relax. Dogma is its own downfall.

Nonsense like all this obscures the more reasonable AA offerings, such as their objections to a Christian cross being placed at Ground Zero.

American Atheists today charged that plans to include a Christian Cross made out of steel beams from the World Trade Center as a permanent memorial on city property would violate the separation of church and state, be insensitive to those victims who had no religious beliefs and would incredibly pay homage to religion - the prime motivating factor in the faith-based attack of Sept. 11. According to recent news reports, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is being asked to include a "cross" made of debris discovered by a construction worker at the WTC site in the redevelopment plans for the area. The group has received over $2 billion in funds from the government to rebuilt the site of the former WTC.

"This is an inappropriate use of taxpayer money," said Ellen Johnson, President of American Atheists. "You can't take government funds to promote religion, especially sectarian religion in the form of a 'cross' or any other religious symbol."

Johnson added that any memorial to the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks "should bring Americans together, not divide them on the basis or religion or anything else."

"Nearly 14% of Americans reject religion," said Johnson. "Atheists and other people-of-no-faith died in the faith-based twin towers attack. They also worked to clear debris, they donate money, blood, food and other assistance. Thus a sectarian monument is an insult to them, and indeed anyone else who isn't a Christian."
It's generally recognized that Americans are the most publically devout of the Western nations, but if you believe the American Atheists figure, 14% of Americans are not religious at all. This would seem to put them on a par with Australia, where the 2001 census revealed that 15% of Australians explicitly described themselves as having 'No Religion', although another 10% did not even bother to answer the optional 'What religion are you' question.

However, Australians are definitely not uptight about religion. Before the census, an email and online campaign got underway, which
"urged locals who didn't identify with conventional religions to tell census statisticians they were adherents of the Jedi religion, whose knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Star Wars movies."
The hope was that if there were enough takers, Jedi would have to be listed as an official religion in the next census - an urban myth, as it turns out.

Nevertheless, the Australian Census Bureau took the threat seriously enough to publically respond to it.
The official warning:
ABS [Australian Bureau of Statistics] recognises that people have a wide range of belief systems. If your belief system is "Jedi" then answer as such on the census form. But if you would normally answer Anglican or Jewish or Buddhist or something else to the question "what is your religion?" and for the census you answer "Jedi" then this may impact on social services provision if enough people do the same.

If a Jewish or Anglican person is moved to call themselves a Jedi in their census form, then I suggest they are probably not potential clients of Jewish or Anglican social services to start with.

In the end, the Jedi were disrespectfully lumped into the 'not defined' category. Never fear. I'm sure that the Force can triumph; even from the remote planet of none-of-the-above.

2002-06-15T00:16:00.000+10:00

Elephantine

This metaphor of 'The Elephant in the Living Room' was developed by groups involved in drug and alcohol recovery to describe the phenomena of the dysfunctional family. It typically refers to situations where a problem is far too large to not be noticed, but people would rather ignore and tiptoe around it than discuss it. The Elephant can be many things - alcoholism, domestic violence, racism, infidelity, problem gambling - any problem where the comfort and status quo of silence is preferable to the pain of confrontation. In some Alchoholics Anonymous type groups, they teach that the first step to recovery is to acknowledge the elephant.

Now, the Catholic Church has an Elephant in the Sacristy. Not a pink elephant, but certainly a lavender one:

... we must be able to call the elephant by its name. The real problem facing the American Catholic church is that a great many boys have been seduced or forced into homosexual acts by certain priests; that these offenders appear to have been disproportionately represented in certain seminaries; and that their case histories open questions about sexuality that--verboten though they may have become-- demand to be reexamined.

The article charges that the elite media, in a mass exercise of political correctness resulting from fear of homophobia accusations, are driven by the "secular cultural imperative of evading the elephant".

The dominant view in the press right now--what might be called the "anything-but-the-elephant" theory--reads like this. Whatever the scandals may appear to be about--as it happens, man-boy sex--they are actually about something else. "It should be clear by now," as the New York Times put it in a classic formulation, "that this scandal is only incidentally about forcing sex on minors." Similarly, the New Republic: "We all know that the sexual abuse of minors is horrific; but somehow the bishops did not react with horror. That is what truly shocks." And the New Yorker: "The big shocker has been not so much the abuse itself--awful and heartbreaking though it is--as the coldly bureaucratic 'handling' of it by hierarchs like [Boston's Bernard] Law and the current archbishop of New York, Edward Cardinal Egan." And, for good measure, the New York Review of Books: "The current scandal is not a sex scandal."

Some writers do draw attention to the elephant--but only in order to dismiss it. Here is A.W. Richard Sipe, for example, a psychiatrist and former Benedictine monk who is as widely quoted as any other authority on the scandals: "It's not a gay problem; it's a problem of irresponsible sexual behavior and the violation of boundaries" (emphasis added here and below). Here is a Jesuit writing in the English Catholic magazine the Tablet: "The problem is not the abusing priests' homosexuality, but rather their immaturity and their abuse of power." Thereby has developed what might be called the cultural imperative of the scandal commentary--the proposition, as the president of the gay Catholic organization Dignity put it, that "Homosexuality has nothing to do with it."

It's an interesting article, with a very different point of view to the huge volume of more liberal opinion on this awful and sordid issue. If you're sick of Andrew Sullivan, definitely read it. The author analyses and debunks the common so-called 'causes' of the crisis - celibacy, institutional secrecy, sexual immaturity, and the semantic retreat behind 'ephebopilia'.

Social conservatives and traditionalists have embraced this distinction... The attraction of this approach for traditionalists seems to be that it is marginally less damaging to the reputation of the Church if its priests are seen more as preying on teenagers than on pre-adolescents. Meanwhile, Church dissidents and gay activists have seized on it for a related reason--namely, that it is marginally less damaging to the reputation of homosexual priests if it turns out that the renegades in their ranks are having problems with teenage boys, rather than engaging in "true" pedophilia. The fact that this serves as yet another example of defining deviancy down--i.e., that ephebophilia is discussed not as a horror in its own right, but as a less- bad alternative to sex with little children--has been under-discussed, to put it mildly.

2002-06-13T00:21:00.000+10:00

Watching by night

Catholic Bishops carry a crosier, or shepherds's staff - albeit often an elaborate, ornate and expensive-looking one - to symbolize their responsibility as successors of the Apostles, and to remind the like-minded that Jesus said, "I am the good shepherd."

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

"The Church is, accordingly, a sheepfold, the sole and necessary gateway to which is Christ. It is also the flock of which God himself foretold that he would be the shepherd, and whose sheep, even though governed by human shepherds, are unfailingly nourished and led by Christ himself, the Good Shepherd and Prince of Shepherds, who gave his life for his sheep.

Despite the popularity of 'The Shepherd and His Flock' references in the popular media, very few writers take the next step, which is to refer to the individual Catholic faithful themselves as, er, sheep. Collectively, it's a lovely metaphor; a Good Shepherd tending, sheltering, protecting all of you. Singly, it's not generally considered too complimentary to be referred to as a sheep. Walk up to someone in a pub and call them a sheep, and Catholic or not, they'll probably deck you.

According to Monty Python lore, the most dangerous of creatures is a clever sheep, and some Catholic sheep have been getting very clever indeed lately. Angry at the fact that, 'The bishops are God's shepherds, and they've let the wolves among the flock.', some sheep are in open rebellion, talking back to the Shepherds. What next - four legs good, two legs bad?

Still, if the wool fits, wear it. Otherwise endlessly opinionated Catholic Andrew Sullivan, in this week's TIME, bleats that,

When so many church leaders could not treat even the raping of children as a serious offense, how can we trust them to tell us what to believe about the more esoteric questions of contraception, or homosexuality, or divorce?

To me, it is simply beyond comprehension why any intelligent adult in this century would be prepared, let alone want, to be 'told what to believe' about their own private reproductive, sexual, or marital conduct.

(Particularly since on these specific topics, the huge majority of Western Catholics completely ignore the Church's pronouncements anyway!)

...reliance upon yourself is the first step toward freedom of thought. Not that you need think yourself infallible, but that you must learn to think everyone fallible, and to content yourself with such greater or less probability as the evidence may seem to you to warrant. This renunciation of absolute certainty is, to some minds, the most difficult step towards intellectual freedom. ...

Towards facts, submission is the only rational attitude, but in the realm of ideals there is nothing to which to submit. The universe is neither hostile nor friendly; it neither favors our ideals nor refutes them. Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured on an astronomical scale. But that is no reason for not living as seems best to us. The things that seem to us good are none the less good for not being eternal, and we should not ask of the universe an external approval of our own ethical standards.

The free thinker's universe may seem bleak and cold to those who have been accustomed to the comfortable indoor warmth of the Christian cosmology. But to those who have grown accustomed to it, it has its own sublimity, and confers its own joys. In learning to think freely we have learnt to thrust fear out of our thoughts, and this lesson, once learnt, brings a kind of peace which is impossible to the slave of hesitant and uncertain credulity.
Bertrand Russell, The Value of Free Thought, 1944

2002-06-10T01:02:00.000+10:00

Midnight, in the Church of Good and Evil

God moves in mysterious ways. Compare these two cases:

In Milwaukee, the so-called 'victim' of Archbishop Rembert Weakland collects a US$450,000 payout. This 'victim', himself an accomplished predator, had a consensual adult relationship with the Archbishop, before subsequently blackmailing him for the money.
In rural New South Wales, Australia, a disabled women whose first sexual experience at 15 was being raped and impregnated by a Catholic priest, was last month awarded A$15,000 in hush money, almost 20 years after the crime. That is 15,000 Australian dollars - a little over $7,500 US dollars.

God may see every sparrow fall, but He is evidently not watching the bank statements. $15,000 is a bargain for the church, which paid a reported A$100,000 to place full page notices in all major Australian newspapers yesterday. The announcement apologised to victims of priestly sex crimes, and introduced a catchy new corporate branding slogan - 'Towards Healing' - to refer to the process whereby victims can now beg for piddling amounts of hush money from the church.

Such publicly scripted contrition and genteel self-reproach now seem standard practice for all organisations suffering major PR crises - the last crowd to do so was disgraced accountants Arthur Andersen.

"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion."
Professor Steven Weinberg

I know I've repeated this a lot, but when you think about the sex scandals now bedeviling the churches, it rings very, very true. Think, not of the actual pedophile priests, but of the many Bishops and Archbishops and Cardinals who have knowingly protected them, and are now concentrating their efforts on protecting themselves from the wrath of the public.

The defenders of these protectors all say: 'But this is unfair! He is a decent man, a good caring Christian, and he has done this and that for the poor, and blah blah', and it's true that they probably all started out like this. They are not guilty of physical abuse themselves, and child molestation was probably once as abhorrent to them as it is to us. How, why, did things get to this state?

"It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways."
-Buddha

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
-Edmund Burke

"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
-Albert Einstein

"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph."
-Haile Sellassie

Normal people who encounter a distressed child crime victim will comfort and help the child, and call the police. Had they chosen other secular professions, our men of the cloth would no doubt have done the same. Instead, they did worse then nothing - they compounded the crimes. By refusing to remove practising perverts from the priesthood, they caused many more crimes.

Over the past decades these esteemed Bishops, Archbishops and Cardinals have ignored, dismissed, punished, denied, blamed, belittled, bribed, silenced, intimidated and threatened the victims of pedophile priests. They are accessories to crimes, before and after the fact. They are criminally negligent, morally bankrupt, and spiritually disconnected to the people and God they profess to serve.

''What struck me was that the cardinal and the other clergy kept talking about what to do about the priests, not the children. What had been done to the children just didn't enter into their equation. I felt they were there dealing with themselves, that they didn't realize what was happening. They were people who had no connection with children, people who didn't have families. They didn't have a clue.''

These men stand condemned.

What has made so many once good men do such evil? Not their faith, but their Church. As they say, What would Jesus do? Would he tend to and comfort the child, or would he think, 'Whoa! Bad public relations potential here, better keep a lid on this one. Better not be too kind, or the public liability insurers will be on my back.'

2002-06-09T01:40:00.000+10:00

The Sound of Nazis

Perhaps it's the fault of the Sound of Music, but modern culture finds the combination of nuns, priests and Nazis irresistable. Early last month, a NYT article (see post of May 06) accused the Vatican of Stalinist repression of dissent within the Church - "Like the Communist Party circa Leonid Brezhnev, the Vatican exists first and foremost to preserve its own power."

Today, the Vatican hit back. "A leading Latin American cardinal considered a possible successor to Pope John Paul II has attacked the American media for what he called Stalinist and Nazi tactics against the Catholic Church in the coverage of the sexual abuse scandal."

It would appear that, according to Godwin's Law ( "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress."), the Vatican has just lost the argument.

Still, let's be grateful to the good Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga; we needed a good laugh amidst the depressing sex crime articles. Some hilarious exerpts:

He accused Ted Turner, vice chairman of AOL Time Warner Inc. and founder of CNN, of being ''openly anti-Catholic,''

''Not to mention newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, which were protagonists of what I do not hesitate to define as a persecution against the church,'' said the cardinal, a Honduran who is often mentioned as a possible successor to the pope. ...

Recalling vicious Roman emperors and 20th century tyrants, Rodriguez Maradiaga accused the American media of acting with ''a fury which reminds me of the times of Diocletian and Nero and more recently, Stalin and Hitler.''

The cardinal said those priests and bishops who had committed grave errors had to be brought to justice by church tribunals and even civil courts.

''There should be no witch hunts around the church,'' he said. ...

...Cardinal [Bernard Law] had been ''questioned with methods that recall the dark days of Stalinist trials of churchmen of Eastern Europe.''

Rodriguez Maradiaga accused the American media of concentrating on the scandal in part to get back at the Catholic Church for its support for a Palestinian homeland...

Serial rape of children is regarded as, 'a grave error'? And nobody, of course, could ever accuse the Church of persecution or witch hunting. And I don't recall the last time I heard the Catholic establishment touting a Palestinian homeland, either. You can see thoughts of 'Zionist media conspiracies' swirling under the Cardinal's red cap. And you can stop laughing right now, because this guy is odds on to be the next Pope. If I believed, I'd say, God help us.

2002-06-09T00:24:00.000+10:00

A Designer Universe

The debate over whether or not some form of God exists is so last century. Perhaps even the century before that. Those who think he does go and worship, those who think he doesn't go and do other things, and of those who aren't sure - the majority of them don't care either. Been there, and done that.

But at at any time there are always a few people going through their 'Does God exist?' phase, even if they're just first year philosophy students. With the theologians preoccupied with issues like zero tolerance of priestly sex crimes, where do you go these days, for a good old fashioned dose of the 'argument from design' or some 'free will vs evil' angst?

Answer: to the theoretical physicists. In 1999, the American Association for the Advancement of Science instroduced a 'Program of Dialogue between Science and Religion' (your research dollars at work) and as part of it, Nobel Prize winning physicist and religious unenthusiast Steven Weinberg debated Sir John Polkinghorne.

John Polkinghorne worked for many years as a theoretical elementary particle physicist. From 1968 to 1979 he was Professor of Mathematical Physics in the University of Cambridge, before resigning to train for the ministry of the Church of England. We'll come back one day and give Father Polkinghorne equal time, but for now, here's the transcript of Professor Weinberg's talk. It's all here:

The benevolent designer: "You don't have to invoke a benevolent designer to explain why we are in one of the parts of the universe where life is possible: in all the other parts of the universe there is no one to raise the question."
Evil and Free Will - "I have seen ... scores of second and third cousins murdered in the Holocaust. Signs of a benevolent designer are pretty well hidden. ...The prevalence of evil and misery has always bothered those who believe in a benevolent and omnipotent God. Sometimes God is excused by pointing to the need for free will. ...It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans ..."
The moral influence of religion - "It is certainly true that the campaign against slavery and the slave trade was greatly strengthened by devout Christians, including the Evangelical layman William Wilberforce in England and the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing in America. But Christianity, like other great world religions, lived comfortably with slavery for many centuries, and slavery was endorsed in the New Testament.

So what was different for anti-slavery Christians like Wilberforce and Channing? There had been no discovery of new sacred scriptures, and neither Wilberforce nor Channing claimed to have received any supernatural revelations. Rather, the eighteenth century had seen a widespread increase in rationality and humanitarianism that led others—for instance, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan— also to oppose slavery, on grounds having nothing to do with religion. ... As far as I can tell, the moral tone of religion benefited more from the spirit of the times than the spirit of the times benefited from religion."

Read the whole thing. He concludes:

In an e-mail message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science I learned that the aim of this conference is to have a constructive dialogue between science and religion. I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.

2002-06-06T23:19:00.000+10:00

God and the new navel-gazing

In recent times, huge advances in quantum mechanics have been accompanied by much philosophical, mystical and metaphysical navel-gazing. The Tao of God and the New Dancing Wu Li Masters, that kind of thing. If you can wade through even some of it you'll conclude, to cut a long story short, that most physicists end up taking an each-way bet on the God-like issues.

Not Steven Weinberg. Considered by many to be today's foremost theoretical physicist, Steven Weinberg received the Nobel prize in 1979 for his contributions to 'the unification of the electromagnetic and weak interactions of subatomic particles.'

No supernatural claptrap for Professor Weinberg. From his 1994 book, Dreams of a Final Theory:

The insights of thousands of individual physicists have converged to a satisfying (though incomplete) common understanding of physical reality. In contrast, the statements about God or anything else that have been derived from religious revelation point in radically different directions.

An observation about "religious liberals":

At least the conservatives like the scientists tell you that they believe in what they believe because it is true, rather than because it makes them good or happy. Many religious liberals today seem to think that different people can believe in different mutually exclusive things without any of them being wrong, as long as their beliefs "work for them."

Steven Weinberg's best-known comment on religion came not from his books, but from a speech he gave in 1999, later transcribed as an article in the New York Review of Books - more on this next time. Here, he replies to his critics:

One frequent theme in other letters and articles reponding to this essay is anger at one thing I said: "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion."

Several correspondents called my attention to the fact that the worst evils of the twentieth century were caused by regimes that had rejected religion: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. This list leaves out some pretty horrible regimes in this century that enjoyed support from religious leaders - the Czar's Russia, Franco's Spain, Horthy's Hungary, the Ustashe's Croatia, the Taliban's Afghanistan, the Ayatollah's Iran, and so on. Even Hitler had the benefit of the 1933 concordat with the Catholic Church.

But this is all off the point. Who would call Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or their followers good men? In saying that it takes religion for good men to do evil I had in mind someone like Louis IX. By all accounts he was modest, generous, and concerned to an unusual degree with the welfare of the common people of France, but he was led by his religion to launch the war of aggression against Egypt that we know as the Sixth Crusade.

I never claimed that religion causes all the evil in the world, but I have learned that when you say anything controversial, you are likely to be blamed not so much for what you have said as for what people think that someone who has said what you said would also say. Still, it's better than finding that you have made no one angry.
Facing Up - Science and Its Cultural Adversaries Harvard University Press 2001

2002-06-06T21:40:00.000+10:00

Some people can't even win graciously. Sneers the WSJ:

"America woke up Wednesday to one of its greatest soccer wins," the Associated Press reports from Suwon, South Korea. "The U.S. soccer team shocked heavily favored Portugal at the World Cup, earning a 3-2 victory and breaking a five-match Cup losing streak dating back to 1994."

This just goes to show what a lame sport soccer is. A victory over Portugal is a big deal? Portugal--a country that hasn't been a major power since the 16th century?

They really don't get it, do they? Yes, all of us third world countries humbly acknowledge that America is today the one and the only major power; even if it does leave them playing with themselves. But watch that cycle of history, and the rise and fall of empires... five centuries is a long, long time.

2002-06-06T00:02:00.000+10:00

Facists 1, Democracy 0

Yesterday, June 4th, was the thirteenth anniversary of the Tianamen Square massacre.

In April 1989, students had begun a prolonged demonstration and sit-in in Tianamen Square after the unexpected death of progressive party secretary Hu Yaobang. Workers, intellectuals, and civil servants join the students to stage a hunger strike and demand democratic reform and an end to official corruption.

Mao Tse Tung had not been merely theorizing in his famous dictum, that 'all power comes from the barrel of a gun.' On May 19, martial law was proclaimed. On June 4 1989, on the command of Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping, 40,000 members of the 'People's Army' marched into Beijing, and crushed their own people.

What warped and evil 'leaders' were these, to order the murder of the bravest and brightest of their own future? Tanks crushed protestors sleeping in their tents. A BBC report said that, "In Tianamen, one hundred students linked arms and faced the tanks. They were shot down. Then another hundred linked arms, and they were shot down."

Is it prudent, to stand in front of a tank? To us now, perhaps not. China hand Harrison Salisbury, in his 'Tianamen Diary', observed at the time,

"I am amazed by the people. They don't seem to be frightened by the tanks or the firing. Almost as thought they couldn't conceive that the army has chosen them as its target."

The exact casualty count is unknown, but estimates range up to 4,000 dead. Nevertheless the Chinese Government denied the massacre, eventually allowing only that a few counter-revolutionary rebels had been killed when they attacked the loyal People's Liberation Army. The PLA, of course, were just carrying out orders.

The anniversary was entirely ignored by the media and why not, western countries are all making far too much money in and out of China to care. While you're waiting for democracy, why not have a Coke? In a lucky coincidence, June 4th was also the day of China's first FIFA World Cup appearance, thus distracting both China and the world from memory of the unfortunate incident. ABC radio reported that near Tianamen Square itself, large outdoor TVs had been set up and huge hordes of students had gathered to chant patriotically and cheer the People's Soccer Team.

One Beijing student interviewed about the events of 1989 said, 'I have already forgotten them.' He probably never even knew about them. China was beaten 2 - 0 by little Costa Rica, so there's some justice.

* * * * *

Americans en masse have been completely ignorant of the World Cup save for occasional bleatings about how unsophisticated and low tech soccer is (although, so is basketball). They were therefore not watching earlier this evening when the US team really fired and unexpectedly beat highly ranked Portugal, thus depriving themselves of one of life's rare and genuine pleasures.

This is when your national team is the rank underdog, but you watch the whole game anyway, bravely hopeful, and - they win! What do you bet, now they've had a scent of 'Win, Win, Win for America!", that there'll be a lot more American soccer fans tomorrow?

Being the underdog in any team sport, quite natural to us Australasians in all but a very few things, is of course massively culturally alien to Americans. When you think of it, Americans don't seriously play national team sports with anyone. American Football is called American football because nobody else plays it. Only Cuba and Japan play baseball, pale imitators. They probably play Canada at Ice Hockey, but that's about it. Basketball? They send that up-themselves prima donna multi-billionaire sponsor's Wet 'Dream Team' to each Olympics and are really pleased when they win! Duh...

You could argue, like Andrew Sullivan, that America's soccer isolationism is related to her cultural isolationalism. Even Rugby countries that do not play soccer very well, like Australia and New Zealand, watch the World Cup avidly. The actual game can be boring - no arguments there - but the internationalism of the competition is quite neat. Not the big multinational flag-waving, but the endless little things.

The Japanese team includes a naturalized Brazilian. The Polish team includes a naturalized Nigerian. The French team are largely north African. The African team members all play in the European leagues. Western spectators cheer Cameroon and Senegal. All the Asian teams have European coaches, so you hear it said of the Japanese, 'yes, they're playing a typically Dutch game there.' Is all this not honestly more interesting that a bunch of guys from the University of Texas playing gridiron in Texas?

2002-06-03T22:03:00.000+10:00

Black Sheep

Far be it from me to bore everybody - including myself - with an article on the woeful state of Australian Soccer, but this one made a interesting observation about the Nigerian team:

... Nigeria, [Africa's] second-largest Catholic country, a divided nation locked in a violent cultural civil war between the Christian south and the Islamic north, a fact which ripples through the predominantly Christian national team, the Super Eagles, whose names - Celestine, Augustine, Pius, Benedict, Bartholomew, Isaac, Julius, Justice, Joseph, John - sound like a roll call of popes.

I checked the names on their website - they're for real. Unfortunately, the Super Eagles have drawn the difficult Group F, known as the Group of Death, and were beaten 1-0 last night by Argentina (the winning goal scored by a player named Gabriel).

According to the Catholic African World Network, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, has the largest Catholic population in Africa, some 25 million people. Nigeria has over 17 million Catholics, followed by Uganda (13 million), Tanzania (12 million), Kenya (9.5 million), and Mozambique (more than 7 million). In addition, Burundi, Rwanda, Ghana and Cameroon all contain sizable Catholic populations of at least 5 million. ...There are 2.3 million black Roman Catholics in the United States.

Some have even tipped Nigeria's Cardinal Francis Arinze as the next Pope. The Papacy is like the Miss World or Miss Universe contests - organizers have to always make sure that the third world believes it's in with a real chance. According to the article,

"Arinze converted to Catholicism from traditional Animism at the age of nine."

Animism! From Animnism to being the Roman Catholic Pontiff - what a life journey that would be! God indeed moves in mysterious ways...

2002-06-02T23:39:00.000+10:00

Triple trouble

From O Ye of Much Faith! NYT (link requires registration)

The past eight months have not been easy for believers. Roman Catholics learned that some of the princes of their church protected priests who sexually abused children. Muslims have seen their scholars condemned and their scriptures deconstructed for signs that Islam encourages terrorism. Jews in Europe have suffered a wave of anti-Semitic attacks as world opinion hardened toward Israel.

This is a rare moment in history, like a planetary alignment: three world religions simultaneously racked by crisis.

The nature of the trouble for each is different, but adherents of all three feel suddenly embattled and isolated. Atheists say "I told you so" and even some people of faith are asking whether there isn't something in the nature of religion itself that ends in corruption. ...

Distinctive elements of all three religions have become a focus of criticism and a cause for humiliation, shame or defensiveness.

Revelations that Catholic cardinals, archbishops and bishops helped hide the abuses of pedophile priests and even moved them into new parishes have put a harsh spotlight on the faith's hierarchy and its celibate male priesthood — the very attributes that distinguish Catholicism from other Christian denominations.

For Muslims, the crisis is one of doctrine. The 19 Muslims who crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania on Sept. 11 set off the ideological equivalent of a house-to-house search for militants in Islamic schools, mosques and media. ...

For Jews, the anguish is over a central part of their identity: their state and homeland of Israel. ... Their crisis is not one of faith or doctrine, but of the viability of Israel — and this for a people who since the sixth century B.C. have been reciting the psalm, "If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither." ...

...Every year some Catholic bishops meet with Muslim leaders for an interfaith exchange. At this year's gathering, at the Brooklyn archdiocese in April, the Muslims commiserated with their Catholic counterparts, said Mr. Baig.

"We told them, now the whole press is attacking Catholicism. Right now you look at any priest, and the first thing that comes to mind is, is something wrong with him or not. And as Muslims, we feel the same way," Mr. Baig said. "People are staring at me and they are thinking I am some terrorist. We told them, we understand what you are going through."

...This confluence of crises is "highly unusual" but not without precedent, said Karen Armstrong, a scholar of Catholicism, Judaism and Islam, and author of "A History of God." But she had to reach a long way back — from 800 to 200 B.C., a period of tremendous violence and upheaval on many continents, including China, India and the Middle East.

In the midst of that ancient upheaval, she said, great spiritual thinkers forged the basic ideologies of most major religious traditions, from Confucianism and Taoism in China to Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism in India, to monotheism in the Middle East. The German philosopher Karl Jespers named that era the Axial Age because it was the axis of religious development.

"Those times were extremely violent and disturbed, and this made people question everything from scratch," Ms. Armstrong said.

"We've been undergoing our own sort of axial age, economically and technologically," she said. "But we've not begun to meet this challenge in religious terms. We could use this suffering to create wonderful new religious systems, as the Buddha did, or we could retreat into the spiritual barbarism of hatred."

As Professor Marty pointed out, the average person relates to religion not as a source of strife, but as a quiet, healing force, personified by the pastor who reconciles a divorcing couple, or the chaplain who delivers last rites to the dying.

"We're seeing now that religion is not an innocent force in the world," he said, "but it shares the same problems as the rest of the world.

2002-06-02T23:29:00.000+10:00

A tale of two Archbishops

Australia has its own local version of that combined news and freak show, 60 Minutes. Sydney Catholic Archbishop George Pell spent much of last week trying to get an injunction against local TV station Channel 9, in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent tonight's screening.

The story lambasted Archbishop Pell's handling of - what else - child sex abuse cases, alleging re-assignment of guilty priests, refusal to face damning facts, coverups, complicity, and hush money offers. In other words, just the usual everyday Catholic morality in action, and small beer compared to the scandals rocking many US parishes.

Archbishop Pell, long accustomed to sharing the spotlight with gay Catholic publicity-seekers, is media-savvy and has come out fighting with statuary declarations and all those holy weapons. On 60 minutes he kept calm amidst the melodrama, said sympathetic things about the victims, acknowledged the scale of the problem, stonewalled only when strictly necessary, and I'm sure his handlers would have told him that he performed ok. He'll survive.

In the run up to the story last week, a couple of commentators mentioned that Archbishop Pell was at least handling the sexual abuse issues better than did recently one of his Anglican counterparts, former Archbishop Peter Hollingworth. Former, because he is now Australia's Governor General. Australia is still a monarchy, and the GG is the Queen's representative in Australia, a largely ceremonial if hugely prestigious position.

We have had Governors General who have ranged from being atheists to privately extremely devout, but the appointment of Hollingworth, then Archbishop of Brisbane and a card-carrying clergyman, raised some protests about separation of church and state, etc. Such fears were soon realized. When stories emerged earlier this year about the laxity of the Brisbane diocese in acting on numerous child abuse complaints within churches and Catholic schools, Australia was treated to the unedifying spectacle of its Governor General directing the considerable powers of his office to protect the Anglican Church.

And he still botched it. Reportedly a personally decent man, but a man of that older generation that 'just doesn't get it' on gender and sexual matters, Dr Hollingworth commandeered an entire TV program to respond to the accusations. He put his genteel suburban family life on display, trotted out his shining and devoted wife and daughters - an advantage not available to his Catholic counterparts - lamented how difficult all the attention was to his family - and then proceeded to put one foot firmly in his mouth, by blaming a 14 year old victim for her own abuse.

The victim fought back, even releasing a photograph of herself at 14 that showed a plain and dumpy schoolgirl, hardly a Lolita. Victim's groups, women's groups, Republicans, and a lot of ordinary Australians excoriated the Governor General, who subsequently made some mealy-mouthed and unconvincing apology. The Prime Minister was pressured to ask the GG to resign, and children's charities including Barnados embarrassingly dumped the GG as their official patron. The fuss eventually blew over, but with considerable damage to Hollingworth personally. Since then he has laid low and we have heard nothing from him for months. But I bet he was watching Channel 9 with much, much interest tonight.

2002-06-02T01:33:00.000+10:00

Unamerican Football

'David and Goliath' has been trotted out everywhere to describe the Soccer World Cup victory of Senegal over World Champion France, its former colonial master. Senegal is a democratic republic of ten million people, 92% Muslim, on the westernmost country on the African continent. If 'war is God's way of teaching geography to Americans', then soccer is His way of teaching the rest of us.

It's a free extra that such a heartwarming victory of the underdog should be at the expense of France, the most virulent anti-Muslim anti-African-immigrant nation in Europe. While some may point out that,

"The answer to the apparent success of the anti-immigrant National Front in France, for example, is to point to the national fervour for a team many of whose best players are immigrants or the sons of immigrants."

one suspects that this point will be lost on the French ultra-right. Bigotry has the unique ability to adapt itself to the facts, and is quite comfortable with the view that a few ethnic African champion soccer players are OK but the rest of the dirty bastards should go back to where they came from. France was. after all, recently noted by the Independent as being able to 'simultaneously support both large anti-Muslim and large anti-Semitic movements.'

A few commentators have also gone the hackneyed path of describing soccer, and the World Cup fervour, as a religion. Hardly, but it's certainly the opiate of the masses at the moment.

* * * * *

It's probably being New Zealand born that does it, but I find soccer boring to watch. Dreary 0-0 draws and even sillier penalty shootouts - no thanks. Australia, where I am now, can't even make it into the Soccer World Cup at all - despite huge popularity at school level, and the consistent emergence of individual champion soccer players who promptly disappear to play overseas, the failure of Australian soccer administration has left these two phenomena quite unrelated. Australia and New Zealand are among the world's few countries where, when you say 'football', you are not talking about soccer. In New Zealand, football is Rugby Union. In Australia, football is Rugby League, Rugby Union, or AFL/Aussie Rules.

Another such country, of course, is the US. US sports writer Allen Barra has weighed in about soccer, Ugly American style:

Yes, OK, soccer is the most "popular" game in the world. And rice is the most "popular" food in the world. So what? Maybe other countries can't afford football, basketball and baseball leagues: Maybe if they could afford these other sports, they'd enjoy them even more.

It's no mystery why soccer is popular worldwide: It's the only sport where all nations can compete. It's the only sport where, in theory at least, Cameroon has a chance at beating Russia. This is, of course, because, played at a high level at least, soccer talent does not vary widely. It's the reason so many parents want their kids to play it, because they can have a modicum of athletic ability and still look good in a game. What the hell, it's the reason I liked playing soccer so much. I wasn't tall enough for basketball nor strong or fast enough for football and I didn't have the arm or hand-eye coordination for baseball. But I could run around on a soccer field all afternoon and walk off feeling good because my team only lost 2-0. (I would never admit to myself that 2-0 in soccer was like 37-0 in football.)

The truth is I do feel a little guilty about not reading or writing more about World Cup soccer. It's like that edifying but boring article in the New York Review of Books that you feel guilty for not having tackled. To be churlish about soccer is to indicate that you're not a good European or a good world citizen, or something like that. Instead of being self-centered Americans who only care about whether Roger Clemens is going to win his 300th game or whether the New Jersey Nets can possibly beat the L.A. Lakers, we're supposed to show some higher consciousness and root for Kenya against Germany.

All I can say is, that the many Sengalese kids who are going to grab an old ball and rush out to the nearest bit of paddock tomorrow are doing themselves a lot more good than their overprivileged American counterparts. American football, basketball and baseball leagues notwithstanding, some estimates say up to thirty percent of American children are sedentary and obese.

And don't watch soccer if you don't want to - I don't either - but let's not sneer at its egalitarianism or its internationalism.

The simplicity of it explains much of the extent of its appeal - the skills and (lack of) equipment required mean that the world's greatest players are as likely to emerge from a South America favela or an African shanty town as from the suburbs of London E4.

As a result, while success in the Olympic Games reflects the wealth of nations, football is open to the poorest countries on equal terms

No, not every country can afford a pro football league where players, contracted for millions and commercially sponsored for millions more, deck themselves out in helmets and ridiculous shoulder padding Judge Dredd-style to play some over-stylized game that stops every two yards. But these days, the world needs all the cheap and easy nation bonding that it can get, and you can do that just with a cheap ball and a patch of grass. In recent years there've been soccer games between Timorese and Australian soldiers, post-Taliban Afghans and UN peacekeepers, and Afghani asylum seekers and Australian provincial teams

The US, of course, is the country that trumpets 'World Series Baseball' - a competition entirely between US teams, of a game only seriously played in the US! (Actually the Japanese play pro baseball too, but you can bet that doesn't interest the Americans.)

2002-05-31T23:13:00.000+10:00

The Men Who Knew Infinity - Part 2

(All excerpts from Robert Kanigel's fascinating 1991 book, The Man Who Knew Infinity - A Life of the Genius Ramanujan)

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan was raised in Kumbakonam, a provincial town in Southern India. His mathematical talent was evident from childhood. As a member of the privileged Brahmin caste, he had the leisure, as a young man, to devote himself to whatever pure mathematics texts made their way to his isolated hometown.

So engrossed was Ramanujan in number theory that he neglected all other topics, thus failing to qualify for university entrance. He studied on, alone and self-taught. Without access to much mathematical literature, he independently re-discovered many difficult areas of number theory which, unbeknownst to him, had been discovered already.

Ramanujan was a devout Hindu, who grew up praying to stone deities; who for most of his life he took counsel from a family goddess, the goddess Namagiri of Namakkal, declaring it was she to whom his mathematical insights were owed.

After some local recognition and publication in Indian mathematical papers, Ramanujan sent samples of his theorems to four prominent English mathematicians. One failed to understand them. The next two ignored him - who was some obscure Indian clerk, to importune the cream of English academia? His fourth letter, in 1913, was to G H Hardy. Hardy did not ignore him.

Ramanujan was, if nothing else, a living, breathing reproach to the tripos system Hardy despised. Sheer intuitive brilliance coupled to long, hard hours on the slate made up for most of his educational lacking, and he was so devoted to mathematics he couldn't be bothered to study the other subjects he needed to earn a college degree. This 'poor and solitary Hindu pitting his brains against the accumulated wisdom of Eureoris' as Hardy called him, had rediscovered a century of mathematics and made new discoveries that would captivate mathematics for the next century. Is it any wonder Hardy was beguiled?

At the height of his own considerable reputation, Hardy recognized Ramanujan's gifts, brought him to England, schooled him in the mathematics he had missed, and brought him to the attention of an appreciative world.

"Srinivasa Ramanujan was a mathematician so great his name transcends jealousies, the one superlatively great mathematician whom India has produced in the last thousand years."

His leaps of intuition confound mathematicians even today, seven decades after his death. ..the brilliant, self-taught Indian mathematician whose work contains some of the most beautiful ideas in the history of science. His legacy has endured. His twenty-one major mathematical papers are still being plumbed for their secrets, and many of his ideas are used today in cosmology and computer science. His theorems are being applied in areas - polymer chemistry, computers, cancer research - scarcely imaginable during his lifetime.

Two more different mathematicians could scarcely be imagined. To Hardy, cold and clinical proof was the way to knowledge. For Ramanujan, mysticism and intuition ruled his work, and proof of his theorems was left to others - needless to say, they always were proved true. Their collaboration and friendship was nevertheless a "clash of cultures - Kumbakonam in Southern India vs Cambridge - between the pristine proofs of the Western mathematical tradition and the mysterious powers of intuition with which Ramanujan dazzled East and West alike."

In the west, all through the centuries, artists have sought to give expression to religious feeling, creating Bach fugues and Gothic cathedrals in thanks and tribute to their Gods. In South India today, such religious feeling hangs heavy in the air, and to discern a spiritual resonance in Ramanujan's mathematics seems more natural by far than it does in the secular West.

In the west, debate existed as to whether mathematical reality was made by mathematicians or, existing independently, was merely discovered by them. Ramanujan was in the latter group - for him, numbers and their mathematical relationships fairly threw off clues as to how the universe fit together. Each new theorem was one more piece of the Infinite unfathomed.

In how the mystical streak in Ramanujan sat side by side, apparently at perfect ease, with raw mathematical ability may testify to a peculiar flexibility of mind, a special receptivity to loose conceptual linkages and tenuous associations.

It was just Ramanujan's luck, then, to be thrown in with Hardy, whose insistence on rigor had sent him off almost single-handedly to reform English mathematics and to write his classic text on pure mathematics, who had told Bertrand Russell two years before that he would be happy to prove, really prove, anything: 'If I could prove by logic that you were going to die in 5 minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but my sorrow would be very much mitigated by pleasure in the proof."

Ramanujan, Intuition Incarnate, had run smack into Hardy, the Apostle of Proof.

Even among mathematicians not religiously minded, one finds evidence of at least respectful allusion to the dark terrain between faith and reason. G H Hardy, though, did not admit to such ambivalence - for him the whole spiritual world was just so much bunkum. He KNEW - this was HIS faith - that wherever Ramanujan's genus came from, there was something straightforward to explain it. Ramanujan's mathematics, he said, was the product of a reasoned working of a reasoning mind, and nothing more needed to be said.

Someone would later observe that 'Hardy's deep reverence for mathematics and for all things of the mind was precisely of the same kind as compels other people to the worship of God - the only enigma about Hardy was that this never seemed to occur to him.' And at least for public consumption, it never did. Had Ramanujan scoured the British Isles, he could have found no-one less sympathetic to his spiritual side, no one who, in this realm, could appreciate him less.

Faced with a man once described as 'an atheist evangelist', Ramanujan simply never revealed to him the richness and extent of his inner spiritual life.

Ramanujan's study at Cambridge and work with Hardy and other mathematicians resulted in a number of important publications and great honors - in 1918, he was elected to the Royal Society of London, and a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. But his health was always delicate, and exacerbated by the English climate and the strictness of his diet. In 1920, after returning to India, he died of tuberculosis. He was only in his early thirties.

What might have been, had he lived longer?

G H Hardy died in 1947. As an old man, he still spoke glowingly of his time and friendship with Ramanujan. Hardy was a lifelong and public atheist. Yet when he died, one mourner spoke of his,

'profound conviction that the truths of mathematics described a bright and clear universe, exquisite and beautiful in its structure, in comparison with which the physical world was turbid and confused. It was this that made his friends... think that in his attitude to mathematics there was something which, being essentially spiritual, was near to religion."

The same, but more emphatically, goes for Ramanujan, who all his life believed in the Hindu gods and made the landscape of the Infinite, in realms both material and spiritual, his home. "An equation for me has no meaning', he once said, 'unless it expresses a thought of God.'

2002-05-29T23:41:00.000+10:00

The Men Who Knew Infinity - Part 1

Science vs. Religion is hackneyed and done to death - creationism, evolution, God and subatomic physics, blah blah. Far more interesting are relationships between religion and mathematics, (and I don't mean these boggy Randian/Objectivist pseudo-mathematical arguments against the existence of God, either).

Bertrand Russell is probably the best known atheist mathematician. and even the people who email me to tell me that "I can logically disprove 'Why I Am Not A Christian' in my sleep, so there," cannot refute his mathematical ability. Entering the world mecca of mathematics - Trinity College, Cambridge University - in 1893, Russell, in the gruelling Mathematical Tripos (entrance test), qualified as the quaintly titled, 'Seventh Wrangler'.

The Mathematical Tripos was considered the most difficult mathematics test ever known. The ranks into which the successful candidates in the mathematical tripos were divided were called respectively wranglers, (after the ability to wrangle over points of logic), senior and junior optimes. The top student was designated 'Senior Wrangler' - the blue ribbon of Cambridge scholarship. To get among the top ten Wranglers was a noteworthy achievement. The student at the bottom of the examination list received a wooden spoon.

But the most compelling interweaving of mathematical ability and religious orientation involves not Russell, but two other Trinity College mathematicians of a few years later. The first was G.H. Hardy.

G.H. Hardy

Godfrey Harold Hardy entered Trinity College as 'Fourth Wrangler' in 1898. For many years he was England's premier mathematician, inspiring an entire school of mathematics. He gained and retains to this day world fame in the area of pure mathematics known as number theory.

Number theory seeks out the properties of, and patterns among numbers - remember prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, Benoulli numbers? Don't run away scared - Hardy once said, "...most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity."

Hardy was a confirmed atheist (why do we always say confirmed atheists?) since childhood, contemptuous of religion, as was his older sister. This was apparently a reaction to their mother's zealotry. His parents were devout worshippers, and the young Hardy, forced to attend church, would seek the prime factors of the hymn numbers.

He always played an amusing game of trying to fool God (which is also rather strange since he claimed all his life not to believe in God). For example, during a trip to Denmark he sent back a postcard claiming that he had proved the Riemann hypothesis. He reasoned that God would not allow the boat to sink on the return journey and give him the same fame that Fermat had achieved with his "last theorem".

Another example of his trying to fool God was when he went to cricket matches he would take what he called his "anti-God battery". This consisted of thick sweaters, an umbrella, mathematical papers to referee, student examination scripts etc. His theory was that God would think that he expected rain to come so that he could then get on with his work. Since Hardy thought that God would then have the sun shine all day to spite him, he would be able to enjoy the cricket in perfect sunshine.

Hardy thought incisively, wrote and spoke beautifully, and passed judgemental and acerbic opinions on everything. His eccentricity was all the more striking for the intellect behind it, although on a trip to America he impressed mathematician Alan Turing, himself homosexual, as, 'just another English intellectual homosexual atheist'.

Hardy was divinely quotable. From his 1940 book, A Mathematician's Apology:

"There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds."

"A science is said to be useful of its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life."

Like all good English intellectual homosexual atheists, Hardy was left of center. At one time a Trade Union representative, he objected to the lunacy of both world wars.

All his life, has was sympathetic to the underdog. Mary Cartwright ... recalled that, as a woman mathematician, "I was a depressed class' - and so enjoyed Hardy's favour. C P Snow wrote that Hardy prefrerred the downtrodden of all types "to the people whom he called the large bottommed: the desc was more psychological than physical... [They] were the confident, booming, imperialist, bourgeois English. The designation included most bishops, headmasters, judges. and politicians."
The Man Who Knew Infinity - Robert Kanigel

The 'Large Bottomed' - what a divine phrase. Don't some people come immediately to mind!

It might seem obvious, then, to regard the lack of belief in God shown by Bertrand Russell and GH Hardy as an understandable side-effect of the logical analysis skills required by mathematics, a subject founded on formal proofs. No so, and not so simple - mathematics has many faces. And in 1913, Hardy received a letter - from a very different kind of mathematician indeed.

To be continued ...

2002-05-28T11:00:00.000+10:00

Banalities

Not everyone is a Dalai Lama convert.

"Curious, even disturbing, is the way so many non-Buddhist Australians blur the lines between respect, reverence and worship in their attitudes toward the Dalai Lama. Critical reflection on the man and his message hardly seems to figure in their estimation of him. ...

The Dalai Lama seeks to excite the "innate spiritual nature" of people so that they might choose kindness and affection in their relations to others rather than anger, hatred or the temptation to exploit.

Christian church leaders promote the same message, but when they do they tend to be ignored or scorned, whereas the Dalai Lama is regarded as a welcome breath of fresh air.

This is partly because his approach is intuitive rather than discursive, inclusive rather than exclusive, gently encouraging rather than reproachful or overly instructive. With the Dalai Lama one seems to be getting the essence of religious insight without the froth and bubble of dogma and doctrine or the hard and fast rules of moral behaviour.

The trouble is that when religion is leeched in this fashion of too much content, all that is left is platitudes - or worse, banalities. ...

In fact many of the Dalai Lama's comments on international problems and their solutions - the sort of complex issues on which he is prepared to make generalised statements - tend towards the naivety of a primary school pupil at an end-of-year speech night. When children talk about the need for more caring and sharing in the world, adults smile knowingly - which is to say that we, unlike they, appreciate life's complexities. Ironically, when the Dalai Lama says the same thing, we call it wisdom and applaud."

I've said similar things, but I do detect sour grapes in this article. To be the religious affairs columnist for Sydney's major paper you'd need some formal theological background, which in these parts means Christian, and I think the author's preferences are showing.

When did you last hear anything other than banalities from any organised religion? Which faith ever does reflect critically on its leader and his message? (OK, some Catholics are at the moment, but that's due to very extenuating circumstances.)

Inclusive, non-reproachful, free of dogma. How many organized religions does this bring to mind? If that's what the people want, then its a free market.

* * * * *

One advantage of speaking in banalities is that you never put your foot in your mouth. George W. Bush, the most insular of recent Presidents, has just finished a trip to the former infidel land of the former Soviet Union, and is now in Berlin. Here's an excerpt from Maureen Dowd's trip report:

In Berlin, Mr. Bush's first stop on a trip full of fabulous cities he had never visited, he was asked by a snippy local peacenik reporter to "try to explain to the German people what your goals are when it comes to Iraq." The president huffed: "He's a dictator who gassed his own people."

It had to be the most powerful statement in postwar Germany, but the president seemed oblivious to its power. He had used the line before, but never in a country that had actually had a dictator who gassed his own people. Afterward, he told German lawmakers that the terrorists were like those who had "killed in the name of racial purity. . . . We are defending civilization itself."

* * * * *

Before September 11, it was generally accepted by most people outside the US that most ordinary folk within the US, as well as its President, had very little notion that other countries even existed.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography," as the old saying went.

But there's always been one group reaching out to countries and other faiths, and that's the scarily flaky US Christian Right. We know that the hard-line evangelists are supporting Israel, the Holy Land and site of the upcoming rapture and armageddon (see last Friday's post). But another rightest group, the white supremacists - and white supremacists are Christians, thank you, no iffy beliefs here - are aligning themselves with the Islamofacists, in a 'Nazi-Muslim Axis'. Banalities about being nice to each other never looked so good.

"What’s going on here? For decades, American extremists have lumped Arabs in with dark-skinned "mud people." In Europe, neo-Nazis have been implicated in countless xenophobic attacks on Arabs, Turks and other Muslims.

The peculiar bond between white nationalist groups and certain Muslim extremists derives in part from a shared set of enemies: Jews, the United States, race-mixing, ethnic diversity. It is also very much a function of the shared belief that they must shield their own peoples from the corrupting influence of foreign cultures. Both sets of groups also have a penchant for far-flung conspiracy theories that caricature Jewish power. ...

...in the late 1930s The Grand Mufti, the preeminent religious figure among Palestinian Muslims, was the most notable Arab leader to seek an alliance with Nazi Germany.

Although he loathed Arabs (he once described them as "lacquered half- apes who ought to be whipped"), Hitler understood that he and the Mufti shared the same rivals - the British, the Jews and the Communists. They met in Berlin, where the Mufti lived in exile during the war. The Mufti agreed to help organise a special Muslim division of the Waffen SS. Powerful radio transmitters were put at the Mufti’s disposal so that his pro-Axis propaganda could be heard throughout the Arab world."

Read about it here, in the irresistably titled 'The Swastika and the Crescent'.

2002-05-27T21:41:00.000+10:00

Out to pasture

Two old war-horses of the faith both returned home today, after hard campaigns in infidel lands.

The Dalai Lama left Sydney this morning, ending his 10 day tour of Australia. I don't know about Sydney but in Melbourne he reportedly stayed at the 5-star Marriott - it would appear he's no ascetic. The SMH reports:

"The immediate appeal of the Tibetan leader's uncomplicated recipe for happiness and inner peace says much about a Western culture which believes itself to be spiritually starved.

Yet His Holiness's core message - at least when tailored to his mass- market Western audiences - is decidedly secular, with truisms of tolerance, knowledge and compassion as its staple tenets."

Sounds lovely, sunshine, light and lotus blossoms all around. Tolerance, knowledge, and compassion! Am I the only person to see an odd irony in people requiring a major religious figure to point out to them the obvious - and treating it as a profound spiritual insight when he does?

The arrogant and ignorant notion that virtue is the exclusive preserve of the religious is as old as formal religion itself. This attitude seems to be lessening among the severely devout, so it is a pity indeed when the non-devout take it up. People know, themselves, what's needed and what's good to do. They shouldn't be intellectually cowed into requiring it to be validated by a spiritual leader, even one as seemingly benign as the Dalai Lama.

Bertrand Russell, in his 1927 essay, Why I am not A Christian, stated:

"A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage,"

beating the Dalai Lama to that particular insight by seventy-five years.

Russell was a rationalist and an atheist, yet had a fine grasp of morality:

"The first and greatest change that is required is to establish a morality of initiative, not a morality of submission, a morality of hope rather then fear, of things to be done rather than things to be left undone. It is not the whole duty of man to slip through the world so as to escape the wrath of God. The world is our world, and it rests with us to make it a heaven or a hell." 1916

"Moral codes which are irrational, and have no basis except in superstition, cannot long survive the habit of disinterested thinking. But if a moral code seems to promote human well being in this terrestial existance, it has no need of supernatural sanctions. Kindliness and intelligence are the chief sources of useful behaviour, and neither ir promoted by causing people to believe, against all reason, in a capricious and vindictive deity." 1944

"More and more people are becoming unable to accept traditional beliefs. If they think that, apart from these beliefs, there is no reason for kindly behaviour, the results may be needlessly unfortunate. This is why it is important to show no supernatural reasons are needed to make men kind and to prove that only through kindness can the human race achieve happiness." 1947

"Kindliness and tolerance only prevail in proportion as dogmatic belief decays." 1953

* * * * *

Pope John Paul has returned to the Vatican from a trip to several Eastern Orthodox countries. He is so ill it is distressing to see him, immobile and barely animate, like those statues of Fatima that get carted around everywhere.

But, Christ suffered, and the spirit is willing even if the flesh is weak, and the recent journey was motivated entirely by John Paul himself. As the NYT commented, (link requires registration), "These days, the pope is focused on the kinds of special projects embraced by former presidents or honorary chairmen of the board."

The elderly become far-sighted, and, ignoring the stinking mess in his own back yard, the Pope went forth to mend feelings, after the Great Schism in the mid-eleventh century between Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox Churchs.

Unfortunately, this drive was not met by equal enthusiam from the Eastern Orthodox heirarchy. Who can really blame them? If you were a spiritual leader right now, would you want to unite your faith with a bunch of reactionary sexual disfunctionaries?

"Patriarch Maxim, leader of the Orthodox church in Bulgaria, echoing his counterparts in Georgia and Ukraine, did not bend to the pope's overtures. Maxim, 87, stiffly assured the pope that unity would come as soon as Christian truth was accepted by all as "preserved and proclaimed by the Orthodox Church."

Orthodox leaders did not raise the pedophilia scandals with the pope, but they, too, had read the newspapers. "We discussed it in our seminaries," Archimandrite Sioniy, rector of the Orthodox seminary in Sofia, said as he stood in the monastery awaiting the pope. "If Catholic priests could marry and have families, as we do, then perhaps the problem would not be so great.""

* * * * *

One danger of being 'spiritually starved' is that any old faith might rush in to fill the vacuum - even one profoundly at odds with your own self-worth. For example, women in the Sydney Anglican diocese have hit the stained glass ceiling. "Sydney is one of only a handful of Anglican dioceses in the country that ban the ordination of women as priests, following the general synod vote 10 years ago allowing the practice."

The Newcastle Anglican diocese, some mere 100 miles north of Sydney, does allows women priests. Talk about a Great Schism - what changes, when you drive across that cartographical boundary? Surely, ordination of women is either a theological abomination, or it isn't. You'd think that'd be fairly clear cut within the same church. Perhaps the Catholic way is not so bad - you only have one guy making the rules.

2002-05-26T22:10:00.000+10:00

Versions of Hell

    "For centuries, [suicide] would have been considered a mortal sin by Catholics. Early on, many believed suicide was a one-way ticket to Dante's version of hell, a sizzling sulfur pit where those who killed themselves writhed alongside other sinners in never-ending agony. For hundreds of years, funeral Masses and burials on consecrated ground were prohibited because of this.

    "But in 1983, church officials rewrote canon law, opening a door to forgiveness, both from God and the church."

    "...at least 16 Catholic priests, 12 in the United States, have killed themselves since 1986 amid allegations of child sexual abuse."

Perhaps they should have kept the old rules?

The suicide rate for victims of priestly abuse is unknown.

With more Catholic priest sex scandals breaking every week, a story needs an edge to stand out from the pack. Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland had a long-term consensual homosexual relationship with another adult, which would barely raise eyebrows in the church today, O Tempora, O Mores! He then made his big blunder, which was to pay his ex-paramour nearly half a million to keep quiet, out of, presumably, the poor box. The Archbishop singularly failed to get value for the Church's money, since the entire world is now gaping at this sordid episode.

What happened to the good old days, when you paid people hush money and they stayed hushed? The Church has the right to sue the Archbishop's ex-lover for breach of his confidentiality contract, but do they have the stomach for it?

With Archbishops, big money, and gay sex already in the plot, one would think it totally unnecessary and gratuitous to additionally introduce the Nazis into this story, but somebody has. The Cold War is over, but the Nazis live on - the villians we have to have - still popping up in our commentaries nearly 60 years after VE day.

    "Always remember Godwin's Law: In any argument about serious matters in controversy, someone will eventually invoke the name of Hitler or the Nazis. At this point, all useful content has gone out of the discussion and you might as well drop the subject. Godwin's law was invented to describe interactions on the Internet, but I've noticed it also holds true in real life."

More from our first story.
    "How can a priest be both an abuser and a nurturer? Psychologists call these seemingly dual personalities "splitting," according to A.W. Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist and former Benedictine monk who has studied sexuality and priests for decades.

    "Sipe and others say that priests maintain their double lives much as German doctors accused of experimenting on humans during World War II.

    "Researchers discovered that the doctors developed a coping mechanism, flipping their personalities on and off like a light switch. At work, they were mad scientists. At home, they were doting fathers. There was no crossover.

    "Sipe said he often sees the same "splitting" among priests who abuse children. They can be among the most dedicated servants to God, he said. But when they choose to flip the switch, they are predators, manipulating children only to fulfill their sexual desires."

How gloomy all this...imagine being Catholic all the time. Unless there's any irresistable news, I think we need a Catholic-free week. I have some interesting stuff about Religion and Mathematics. Coming soon.

2002-05-26T00:12:00.000+10:00

A Wonderful Life

We learnt yesterday that, "Dispensationalism is a predominant belief among fundamentalists". Creationism, of course, is the predominant belief among Christian fundamentalists, and one person uniquely qualified to comment on Creationism was the late Professor Stephen Jay Gould, reknown palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist. Professor Gould died last week, after battling lung cancer for many years.

    "Although always an adversary of Creationism, in later life he grew tired of the war of intellectual extermination being fought by extremists on both sides of the religion/science divide, and wisely urged forbearance."
From an otherwise rather catty obituary in the right-wing National Review Online.

Here's Professor Gould's political opinion of creationism, taken from an interview in 1996.

    "Creationism is still with us. Do you think it's a permanent feature of the landscape?

    "As long as there are millions of people who believe it and have lots of money. What's permanent, in geological terms? But as long as our society is organized this way, yeah, I think it is. Because it's not an intellectual issue. It's an interesting phenomenon of American socio- cultural history. As long as you have this enormous pluralism within Protestantism, as long as some of our traditional divisions like rich and poor, north and south, and rural and urban persist, you're going to get this hard-line fundamentalism. And it's never going to be majoritarian, though it might be locally, but it's gonna be at least locally potent."

"A Harvard professor since the age of 26, Gould attacked that classic image of the "march of evolution". His version of evolution was messier. It had jerks and spasms, went backward and forward, and sometimes fell over sideways.

In 1972, he and colleague Niles Eldredge offered a modification of traditional Darwinian theory, something they called "punctuated equilibria". The evolution of species wasn't always smooth and steady, they argued, but could occur in bursts shaped by historical chance.

Some people see the world as divinely created, and others perceive it as the result of an orderly natural process. But for Gould, this was a planet of accidents, of lucky breaks, of biological lotteries.

If you started the whole process over from scratch, he argued, you would wind up with something totally different."
Reuters, 25 May 02

In other words, "We [humans] are here because we are here, not because we have to be here."

In his own words:

"Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again."

In addition to butting heads with both Creationalists and traditional Darwinists, Professor Gould was for good measure also a rationalist, a Marxist, and very much an individualist.

    "Stephen Jay Gould, who died on Monday, belonged to no particular scientific sect and founded none. Almost all his battles were fought on his own. But the happy elegance of his style and the bewildering range of his interests allowed him to recruit the sympathies of every benevolent, well-read humanist to his various causes. No wonder he was hated so. He was the scientist for the rest of us.

    He gave as good as he got in his long feud with the "Darwinian fundamentalists," as he called his opponents. This term, an inspired piece of polemical mudslinging, showed that what his own invective lacked in quantity, it made up in quality, since one of the defining characteristics of the sociobiologists he was attacking was their rather Victorian atheism, and their conviction that the worst sort of human being in the world was a fundamentalist Christian.

    It's hard to think of any scientist who has managed to combine Gould's professional excellence -- for you do not get to be a senior professor at Harvard by being an industrious windbag -- with his gifts as a popularizer. ...

    Perhaps the person he most resembled in this was Bertrand Russell, who also spent his professional life on subjects of arcane difficulty, increasingly isolated from the activities of his peers, and who earned his living with high-class journalism and popular histories. Russell, who won an unlikely Nobel prize for literature, was the better stylist (and the bigger fool, as reading his essays on current affairs makes clear today). But both men managed to make hard thought look easy and fun."

Well-informed passion - we need more of it.

2002-05-25T22:39:00.000+10:00

Americana

The Cold War is officially over. Yesterday, at the Kremlin, George Bush and Vladimir Putin signed an arms-reduction agreement. The US is going to buy Russian oil and ignore Russian human rights violations. Now, all we need is for US commentators to learn how to say NUCLEAR, not NUCULAR, and the free world will improve even more.
The notion that the US govt. could have 'connected the dots' and warned the complacent pre-Sept 11 world of the impending attacks really blasted the many US political blogs into a tizzy of partisan denial and accusation. When there was no more to write about whether President Bush could easily or could not possibly have done more, these great sages turned on each other, criticizing what so-and-so had writen about whether... boring, boring, boring.

But they illustrate perfectly a wonderful description from the late Stephen Jay Gould (more about him later).
... "Punditry's fundamental error: the fatuous notion that a head-on rush at the biggest questions will automatically yield the deepest insights."

While we're here, let's have a belated two cents worth. Certainly the major turf wars between the US intelligence agencies that are preventing them from leveraging each other's information have got to be dealt with. But be honest. Be very honest. If someone had gone into print on Sept 10, warning that crazy Arabs were going to attack the world's number one superpower, invade the world's richest city, topple a couple of the world's tallest buildings, then go and hide in a cave... you'd have written them off with the rest of the doomsday nutters.
I have not visited the US for some years now, but it seems to have changed markedly, according to the figures at least.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2002, 62 percent of Americans are either overweight or clinically obese.
According to a Gallup Poll taken in March 2002, "46 percent of Americans describe themselves as 'born-again' or evangelical."
That means that a minimum of 8 percent of Americans are both evangelical and overweight/obese.

In other words: of any and every thirteen Americans, at least one is a fat Evangelical. Is this true? What's happening over there, guys?

2002-05-25T00:44:00.000+10:00

Dispense with sense

Salon, which first alerted us to those peculiar Evangelical travellers, the Dispensationalists (see post of 15 May) has much more about them today in an article called Antichrist Politics, and very interesting it is, too. This is a Premium article, so you have to pay for it. If I tell you all to rush over to Salon and subscribe, I'm sure they won't mind if I print just a bit of it...

"...for elements of the Christian right, pro-Israel fervor has ascended to the realm of the sacred. Christian leaders Ralph Reed and Gary Bauer both say that their support of Israel -- and Israeli expansionism - - is partly rooted in biblical injunction. Bauer says, "There are a variety of Old Testament scriptures in which God is saying to Abraham that the people of Israel will occupy all the land between the sea and the river," which he says means the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. "There's a belief that this is covenant land," he adds.

"Such views have concrete consequences -- as Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times, evangelical internationalism is a "broad new trend that is beginning to reshape American foreign policy." Many Jewish leaders have welcomed evangelical support on Israel. Yet despite feel-good talk of ecumenical alliances, conservative Christians aren't just acting as backup for their Jewish brothers and sisters. They have an agenda of their own. For now, it coincides with mainstream Jewish concerns. It won't always.

... "Yet despite its international influence, most people on America's godless coasts have never heard of dispensationalism. It's one of those words that reveals the yawning ideological gulf between red states and blue. To secular urbanites, it might seem like just another example of fringe American madness, something akin to UFO cults. But it's thoroughly mainstream -- far more so than agnosticism. Darrell Bock, research professor of New Testament studies at the Dallas Theological Seminary, says that the most prevalent view among evangelicals is an unequivocal support for Israel, and that dispensationalism plays a large role in their conviction. And Gorenberg says, "Dispensationalism is a predominant belief among fundamentalists."

... "It matters that a lot of evangelicals are dispensationalists because a lot of Americans are evangelicals. According to a Gallup Poll taken in March, "46 percent of Americans describe themselves as 'born-again' or evangelical."

..."Yet if end-times prophesy can't completely account for the Christian right's embrace of Israel, it also can't be disentangled from it. As Gorenberg says, "There's a package deal going on here. The same people who hold this particular Christian theology are also conservatives in other ways. They tend to see the world as divided between good guys and bad guys and they tend to see force as the proper solution." They may speak in geopolitical terms, he says, "but they're influenced by a mythological view of the state of Israel."

... "Besides, even Republicans of the Christian right who don't believe we're on the cusp of the second coming have to appease the evangelicals in their constituency, and among those evangelicals, dispensationalism is as much a part of the culture as is "Star Wars." ...

..."...Christians certainly aren't the only ones with a messianic view of Israel. While secular or reform Jews -- that is, most Jews -- tend to see the need for a secure Jewish homeland as a political matter and are thus willing to negotiate its borders, Orthodox Jews share the evangelicals' conviction that Israel is covenant land. That's why when it comes to issues like settlements, Rabbi Eckstein says, deeply religious Jews have more in common with Christians than with the Jewish mainstream. Israel, says Eckstein, "is the Holy Land for both the religious Jew and for the evangelical Christian. It is a miracle, the ingathering of the exiles. It is God's redemption."

..."But the two versions of redemption [Evangelical and Orthodox Jewish] are starkly different. In the evangelical one, the Middle East is convulsed by unprecedented violence and most Jews die.

..."The vast majority of Jews desperately want to avoid a full-scale conflagration between Israel and the Arab world. Dispensationalists don't. In the dispensationalist narrative, Christians will be raptured to heaven before all the fighting between Jews and Muslims starts. Everyone left will face mass death and destruction. "Some people see some of the imagery in Revelations being caused by nuclear weapons," says Brodrick. Thus evangelical Christians' support for policies like the permanent takeover the West Bank and Gaza and even, in some cases, the expulsion of Palestinians into Jordan, should be understood in the context of a worldview in which world war is inevitable."

2002-05-25T00:25:00.000+10:00

In the news today:

The Pope has just visited Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan, population 7 million, has an entire 120 Catholics. (120, not 120 thousand or anything.) For the mass, in a sports stadium, they had to ship in rent-a-crowd local Muslims and foreign visitors. Statistically, out of 7 million people, you can almost certainly find 120 who believe in anything.
His Holiness is now in Bulgaria, where there are enough Catholics for someone to have even set up a snazzy site, www.popeinbulgaria.com, to cover the event. I love the Net, how else can an atheist in Sydney watch live video coverage of the Pope at the Sofia Hilton?
I know why he went there, too. Bulgaria must have seemed about as far as you can get from the US, where no less than an Archbishop has just toppled off his perch. The former Archbishop of Milwaukee has resigned, ostensibly because he has reached 75, but hurriedly too, because of the news that he had a long-term relationship with another man 20 years ago, then paid him US$450,000 of church funds to keep silent; which evidently did not work.
In a nice bit of niche marketing, the Bible Society in Australia has today released a Surfer's Bible (for real surfers, not Net surfers).

2002-05-23T22:19:00.000+10:00

If only...

Give control freaks an inch and they'll take a mile. Australian Prime Minister John Howard is currently visitng China grovelling for trade agreements. The timing's great since it allows him to simultaneously snub the Dalai Lama, who is currently visiting Australia (and what a pity we can't make it a permanent swap!).

But this isn't enough for China's Thought Police, who ventured to suggest that Australia should ban the Dalai Lama from visiting altogether:

    "Mr Howard was quick to the Dalai Lama's defence when questioned at the Chinese Communist Party school, about why governments like Australia allowed His Holiness to tout anti-China policies, under the cover of religion. In his most direct and forceful language on the topic so far, Mr Howard told the audience of Communist officials that just as Australia respected China's values and political system, so too should China respect those in Australia.

    "As evidence of the differences between the two countries, Mr Howard cited the 1950s referendum that allowed the Australian Communist Party to stay operational. That was despite the fact, Mr Howard said, that then and now people did not support the Communist party because most believed in a different ideology."

    "He said it was wholly consistent with Australian tradition to allow someone like the Dalai Lama to visit. "He comes as a spiritual leader and he comes as a person who does not offer any offence to the laws of Australia."

"It would not be consistent with the traditions of Australia to ban entry to such a person," he said in reply to a question after a speech to the Communist Party's Central Party school in Beijing. "Australia ... allows the free movement of people in and out irrespective of their political philosophies and their beliefs," he said."

What effrontery from these Communist officials, to presume to tell Australians who we should ban from entering our own country. How dare they? Who do they think they are? What year do they think this is?

China wouldn't dream of trying that on the UK or the US - if Australia wants to be regarded as a grown-up country then we have to make it clear that China can just keep its totalitarian snout out of our affairs, and full marks to Mr Howard for doing this. (As far as I can remember, the only person recently to be denied a visa to Australia on character grounds was professional nutcase and Holocaust-denier David Irving.)

China, of course, has always regarded any international comment on its own activities, such as running down its own citizens with tanks, as unwelcome and unwarranted interference in her domestic affairs. I think it's time the world did interfere big time in Chinese domestic affairs. If we are to be accused regardless of, 'touting anti-China policies, under the cover of religion,' then we might as well do it.

The Chinese persecute those of unapproved faiths and have banned all but the party-approved Christian churches. Try setting up an Our Lady of Fatima sect in Chongqing and see where it gets you. China has Communists, she has Atheists, and we know that Satanists can't be far behind. So, what more do all these evangelist do-gooders need, and where are they when we really need them?

How about - if an apparition of the Virgin Mary appears to some downtrodden plastic flower factory workers in, say, Taipei? Our Lady, as geopolitically astute as ever, commands that we consecrate the People's Republic of China to her Immaculate Heart. The Pope, grateful for any distraction from the gays and pedophiles, goes for it. The faithful and their hard currencies flock to the site. Blessings are beamed across the Taiwan Strait. Take that, party officials! Ah, if only. Come back Blue Army, all is forgiven...

2002-05-23T00:25:00.000+10:00

Stranger than fiction

It's 1947. WWII is over; but Cold War tension is mounting as the West eyes the impending Soviet menace. The McCarthyist communist witch-hunts are almost upon America. Thirty years earlier, in the dying ebb of another world war, an apparition had predicted the spread of communist evil - and prescribed a way out of the danger.

There is yet another secret - revealed by the apparition and placed by its only witness in a sealed envelope, it cannot be revealed to the world until 1960. No time to wait! Now, with the ideological threat of Communism creeping closer by the day, the CIA secretly funds the establishment of a sect devoted to spreading the anti-communist faith. It also funds the construction of their faux-Orthodox faux-Byzantine chapel at the place of the apparition, to taunt and tempt the suppressed Soviet hordes.

But sect members believe that sinister forces are colluding to prevent the rescue of millions of innocents from their godless state. Who is behind this? and what can this third secret possibly be?

Fast forward several decades. The third secret is revealed as... a massive anti-climax. But is it really the real secret?

This is from real life, of course, not a Robert Ludlum novel. The sect is the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, and the Byzantine Chapel was built at Fatima. Blue is the color of the Virgin Mary's mantle, and conveniently color-coded to oppose the Red Army.

Whatever the Red Army may be. If you check out the Blue Army's own latest magazine, it gives this history:

"'We will be the Blue Army of Our Lady.' With those words, at St. Mary’s Church in Plainfield, New Jersey, Monsignor Harold V. Colgan founded the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima in October of 1947. Some say that our Founder declared: 'We will be the Blue Army of Our Lady against the Red Army.' Others recall that the sentence should end 'against the Red Army of Communism' or 'against the Red Army of Atheism' or against some other Red Army (see page 26). Regardless, the leader of the Red Army is known for sure: Satan ... "

Hey - Communists, Atheists, Satanists, we're all one and the same to these devout crusaders.

The CIA involvement is an neat angle. The French 'WHEN THE VIRGIN APPEARS' TV documentary, mentioned yesterday, was quite outright in stating that the CIA financed the startup of the Blue Army. Needless to say, there is no public record or reference to this to be found. It may just be an urban myth, thought it's credible, when you think of the Ostpolitik of those times - we'll never find out.

This was the era when, according to spy novels at least, both the US and the Soviets were secretly constructing exact replicas of Russian and American villages, the better to train undetectable deep cover agents. If you can do this, setting up a new sect from some of the most gullible faithful around would have been a snap. It may end up a bit woolly and out of control, but so do most of these bio-warefare experiments.

Like all Robert Ludlum novels, especially those also including the CIA, conspiracies abound. Almighty schisms have also appeared among the followers of Our Lady. Post Cold War, Gorbachev visited the Vatican, a status of Fatima visited Moscow, the score appears to be,
God: 1 Communist Atheist Satanists: 0
and the Blue Army, their enemy vanquished, are struggling for relevance, and, like Hollywood, to find a new Bad Guy.

But the surviving Fatiman conspiracy theorists leave their secular looney counterparts in the shade. Forget Zionist-World Bank world domination - these people have cover-ups, papal imposters, communist and/or Freemason infiltration of the Vatican, and secret deals between Nikita Kruschev and Pope John XXIII.

Such is their passion, they seem unfortunately incapable of writing clearly and concisely on any one of these grave threats. Still, it's all good fun, and stops them plotting the revolution.

2002-05-22T00:32:00.000+10:00

Something about Mary...

SBS TV - Australia's multi-ethnic and multi-lingual station, amidst the local commercial Americanized clones - just showed an interesting French documentary, WHEN THE VIRGIN APPEARS.

"In 1981, the Virgin Mary 'appeared' to six young Croats in the village of Medjugorje in Bosnia- Herzegovina, part of the former Yugoslavia. Whilst two successive bishops of Mostar denounced the apparitions as a fabrication, the local Franciscan order used them as a means of increasing their influence and combating godless communism. Since then, Medjugorje has become the biggest Marian pilgrimage destination in the world. The visions are not officially recognised by the Vatican, but they have the tacit support of the current Pope because in 1917, the Virgin is said to have appeared to three young shepherds in the Portuguese village of Fatima and to have predicted, among other things, the 1981 attempt on his life."

Apparitions of the Virgin Mary are often an embarassment to the formal Catholic Church, bringing to mind pagan idolatory rather than high-minded canonical theology. It won't do, of course, to remind a religion which worships the bones of saints, and dresses its Cardinals in red caps symbolizing blood, of pagan idolatory. Though you can see their point that the Marians do appear to have slightly lost the plot, forsaking the Holy Trinity to instead worship a Palestinian girl turned Virgin turned Goddess.

Fatima worship groups are huge, surprisingly so - particularly so - in the US, but you won't find much clear sense in their own writings. Instead, if you don't read anything else today, do, do read this article instead, Something About Mary. It's highly amusing, while full of the background and political history of the various Marian apparitions. Some excerpts:

     "This official (and little-remarked) distaste for Mary's devotees may stem from queasiness at being reminded of Catholicism's polytheistic, idol-worshipping undercurrents. More likely it's just snootiness. Mary worship is largely the province of poor people - non-English speakers, the people who put up plaster lawn shrines in the wilds of Long Island. ...

     "Even after it has approved a miracle, the Catholic Church insists on maintaining its primacy in interpreting what that miracle means. To do otherwise would be to leave the direction of the faith in the hands of children, or worse, women. ...

     "More to the point, if the Virgin Mary herself comes down from Heaven to deliver a message, shouldn't that take precedence over the word of any pope or cardinal?

Not according to the "worthy of belief" category the church has worked out for Mary revelations; under this system, Mary messages are classed as optional beliefs that have no effect on one's faith. But ... the Fatima Crusaders speak contemptuously of fellow Catholics - some of them even high Vatican officials! - who "make no secret" of the fact that they doubt the story of Fatima. If there is a heavenly message in all of this, it may be the reminder that Mary, like nuclear power, is a weapon that's easier to unleash than to control. "

2002-05-21T23:42:00.000+10:00

Holier than thou

Never let it be said that I only mention bad things about Catholics, so three cheers for Patrick O'Donoghue, Roman Catholic bishop of Lancaster, who announced recently that, "he plans to sell his £1m official home - with magnificent wine cellar but no wine - and spend much of the proceeds on relieving the problems of the poor. ...

     Bishop O'Donoghue described Bishop's House in Lancaster as a beautiful 16-room Victorian mansion. "But these are symbols of another era," he said. "I want to say to my people, and hopefully other people too, that the church is more than big houses which are status symbols from another era.

Bishop O'Donoghue is described as being a believer in "service not status". This puts him radically at odds with, for instance, his colleagues over the sea in Boston, where they may soon find themselves selling their church properties to fund compensation payments to sexual abuse victims.

Not everyone is 100% impressed. A Guardian writer comments,      "It all sounds a bit Christian for a bishop, you might think. Holders of episcopal office do not generally take quite so literally the injunction to "sell what you have and give to the poor." ... Clerical riches needed no apologia, and if one ever were demanded then you could always talk about reflecting the Glory of God.

    "Secular priests – that is those who are not members of monastic or other religious orders – don't take vows of poverty. Indeed there are those who argue that, given the testing sacrifice of celibacy, they need some compensations in the rest of their day-to-day life."

2002-05-19T22:46:00.000+10:00

Welcome to East Timor

Welcome to East Timor, the world's 192nd and newest country. In a couple of hours from now, history will be made, "when Annan, the UN Secretary-General, hands government to President-elect Xanana Gusmao and declares East Timor independent. Five minutes later the UN flag will be lowered and the red, black, white and yellow flag of East Timor raised on a 20-tonne cement pole. After three centuries of Portuguese colonial neglect, 24 years of Indonesian occupation and 2 years of UN administration, a new nation will be born."

Someone will rain on every parade, and in an old International Herald Tribune article (no longer online), one Philip Bowring complained that, "... Indonesia has been trying harder than most Catholic countries to avoid confessional politics. It is bad news for Christianity in Asia and secularism everywhere if East Timor is deemed to deserve independence because it is predominantly Catholic and Indonesia is mainly Muslim. The brutality of the Indonesian military (not only in East Timor) should not blind us to the benefits of large, multiethnic, multireligious states. Does the West really want to promote the Balkanization of Southeast Asia?"

Still, what's done is done. Thanks to its Portugese influence, 92% of East Timorese are Roman Catholic. "Our Lady of Fatima, or at least a statue of the Virgin Mary, has already arrived from Portugal and drawn thousands while carried in procession through villages and towns across the tiny territory. "From the North Pole to the South Pole, they are coming to see Our Lady of Fatima," one local said."

"Jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 Bishop Carlos Belo is one of East Timor's symbols of peace and justice. ... Belo sees the Church as the conscience of the government in a relationship he describes as 'critical solidarity'."

Where there are real issues of military freedom, national identity and social justice, the church is at its most effective. Good luck and good wishes to Bishop Belo and his flock.

2002-05-19T22:20:00.000+10:00

Gays in church, blah blah

As expected, the Rainbow Sash members in Sydney and Melbourne were denied communion during Penecostal mass today. The protestors did, however, hit it big in the media - TV crews stalked outside St Marys, a discomforted looking Archbishop Pell was mobbed by reporters. and the event made headline news on all the Australian free to air channels.

All in all, it was a good stoush and everyone got to vent a little. Archbishop Pell's sermon included such cliches as, "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve and important consequences follow from this,", and the Rainbow Sash spokesperson got to declaim on national TV about a bunch of celibate old men making rules for everybody else, blah blah.

It seems churlish, to point out to these intrepid people that the entire point of the Catholic Church is precisely to be such a place, where celibate old men can and do make the rules for everybody else. Anyone who believes that the CC should exist for the benefit of the worshippers probably still thinks that the government's job is to do the will of the people and a board of directors' job is to safeguard the shareholders. For all of God's great creations, liberal democracies were not among them.

The TV crews doorstopped the photogenic faithful leaving the church, and most of them said they thought that communion should be given to anyone who wants it, but one old man said something like, "Well, they should have their own church, if they want to do all that." Now, everybody regardless of queer affiliation has the right to worship where their beliefs lie, but it does say something for the doctrinal unity of Catholicism that Catholics of extremely diverse opinions still stay within the one albeit troubled church, whereas some of the other Christian denominations seem to form a different sect for every different thing they put on toast in the morning. I have no idea why - this is for theologians to explain, not me.

Suicide watch. Another US Catholic priest, multiple abuse claims over decades, diocesan officials knew for years, blah blah, the same sad story.

2002-05-19T12:00:00.000+10:00

His Holinesses

I don't know what they're putting in the holy communion wine over in Germany, but according to a magazine poll, German Catholics hold the Dalai Lama (37%) to be wiser than the Pope (19%). This odd fact heralds the Dalai Lama's arrival in Australia this weekend. Australians are expected to flock to his rock-star-like appearances. I daresay if you were in some southern US state a visit from the Dalai Lama might be quite challenging, but Sydney in 2002 is so irreligious that the Dalai Lama is in some ways just another celebrity motivational speaker.

Some have commented unkindly on his "Dalai Lama, Superstar" image, but it's sour grapes - the other faiths would just love someone with the star status and street cred who can pull the crowds like His Holiness can.

Our Australian Prime Minister, whose ability to tailor his actions to meet the lowest moral common denominator is reknown, has refused to meet the Dalai Lama. Not because the voters mind - a lot of people are, rightly, a bit embarassed about it - but because the Chinese Government certainly would mind. Since Australia is currently after a lucrative natural gas contract with China, Mammon wins out over God.

The Chinese assume that since they act like totalitarian thought police in their own country, this mind control should extend to their trading partners, and thanks to Australia's morally bankrupt leaders, it does. If there is anything to this reincarnation and karma business, I trust they will come back as spineless slugs.

People are starting to insist that Pope John Paul II will not resign or stand down, which is a sign of sorts.

And succession murmurs have started - Honduran cardinal and papal hopeful Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga has stepped tactfullly into the limelight, suggesting that "a Latin-American Pope would give a huge impetus to a new evangelism, a new missionary surge for the church". He added that a Latin-American Pope could play an important role in "overcoming the north-south conflict and in the battle against poverty".

Today, just up the road at St Mary's Cathedral, the Rainbow Sash coalition of Lesbian and Gay Catholics will be performing their old party trick with Sydney Catholic Archbishop George Pell, by asking for holy communion.

"It's about our rights as human beings, it's about issues such as sex education in Catholic schools where they refuse to teach the kids about safe sex, the fact that they teach that gays and lesbians are abnormal ... there's the scandals going on in America, there's a whole range of issues,"

He will almost certainly refuse them - as he has the ten previous times they've tried this stunt - whereupon they can take the opportunity to publicly castigate the church for its conservatism.

I don't know what the Australian figures are, but estimates put the percentage of gay clergy in the US at approaching fifty percent. So, in one of the funnier paradoxes regarding communion, a huge number of homosexuals have the right to give holy communion, while a small number of homosexuals are refused the right to be given it. The other funny thing is that you can murder your spouse, confess, receive absolution, and continue to receive communion. However, should you instead divorce your spouse and then remarry, you can no longer receive communion. God moves in mysterious ways, indeed.

2002-05-18T01:03:00.000+10:00

Early adopters

"Religion Finds Technology", in today's NYT, describes how churches are getting into technology, in a toys-for-the-boys kind of way.

    "Houses of worship all over the country are going high-tech in a variety of ways. From digital sound systems to PowerPoint sermon outlines to multiple remote cameras that send out streaming Webcasts, technology has found religion — or maybe it's the other way around. ...

    "Hymn lyrics are superimposed over live shots of the choir, and the pastor is in view on the screens no matter where one sits. ...

    Pastor John Rasz "uses a system of Sony presentation projectors at his service each week to display announcements and hymn lyrics, and shows an occasional clip from a Hollywood film like "Braveheart" to reinforce points in his sermon. "I love movies," he said. "If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video has to be worth a million." ...

    "The Rock, an interdenominational Christian church in Roseville, Calif., ... takes congregational interactivity to a new level. The church has a 330-seat sanctuary with a big-screen television and integrated keypads built into seat armrests. The buttons on the keypads allow members of the congregation to answer multiple-choice questions asked by the pastor during the service. ...

    "The answers, which often touch on delicate issues like emotional abuse or spending habits, are quickly compiled into percentages. (A recent question was "How many of you have ever attempted suicide?") The pastor takes the responses and adjusts his sermon on the spot, recounting stories about life experiences that address the congregation's concerns."

Wow, the Church as Karaoke or Game Show night. I suppose you could play bingo with the hymn numbers. Actually, I don't know why people go to church at all, when you can do it all online, from the comfort of your own browser.

You can get ordained. To become a minister of the Universal Life Church, just click on the 'Ordain me' button, and confirmation will arrive by email.
You can also be ordained as a United Christian Faith Ministries minister, but they're tougher than the ULC - you need a userid and password. Can't have just anyone ordaining, you know.
You can confess. There are no-frills confession sites, where you type in your sin (or just an X, if you'd rather not)
or more elaborate ones, where you select from a whole smorgasbord of sins. The problem with this approach is that while you are looking for your sin, you notice a whole load of other ones you may have committed, such as the General sin of 'excessive consumerism'. And it's sad when confession has to be accompanied by a disclaimer: "We make no claims as to the effectiveness of an online confession, rosary or anything else..." Ye of little faith, indeed.
Online blessings and prayers are everywhere, but online blessings specifically for horses? "Online blessings and prayers are for equestrians and equines needing prayer, positive affirmations, spiritual aid, inspirational quotes, or courage to face a challenging time."
Here's an online rosary, complete with moving beads. And here's Ask the Imam, 'the online fatwa resource'.
Then there's Beliefnet. Beliefnet has something for everyone, letting you sign up for daily emails on everything from Astrology to the Bible to religious jokes. We know some religious jokes, don't we, and they're working in the Boston Archdiocese. For the woman's mag quiz crowd, there are quizzes on What kind of Catholic/Jew/Muslim/Hindu are you? Orthodox Christian Icon Trivia Challenges, and even a Belief-o-matic, in case you don't know what religion you are.

Actually, I didn't know - it told me I was a Unitarian Universalist, which appears to be the 'can"t figure this person out' faith. I was surprised not to be a Nontheist, but this is apparently because I believe in humanity's ability to improve the human condition. If you are 'spiritual but not religious', there's a quiz for you, too, to discover your spiritual type. All this, and from the same page, at least when I was there, you can 'learn how to decrease fat storage and increase lean muscle mass'! Faith and a flat stomach! That's really one-stop shopping...

2002-05-16T23:09:00.000+10:00

Clown Princes

    "In the most regal manner possible, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has skewered United States President George Bush as a man so ignorant about the Middle East - and specifically about the suffering of the Palestinians - that he needed several hours of personal tuition to bring him up to speed.

    When the prince visited the presidential ranch in Texas last month, the two men spent five hours together, far longer than expected. This was an indication - according to the White House spin machine - of how well they got on. But Prince Abdullah presents a different interpretation: the time was spent coaching the President in political realities.

    "He is the type of person who sleeps at 9.30pm after watching the domestic news," the prince told Okaz, a Saudi newspaper.

    "In the morning, he only reads a few lines about what is written on the Middle East and the world due to his huge responsibilities.""

Look, this is a bit rude of the Crown Prince. One can just imagine the highly informed and non-partisan advice that he would have offered the President - along the lines of, "Let's blast Israel off the face of the earth, and both drink oil together, my friend."

I think President Bush is entirely wise to "only read a few lines about what is written on the Middle East," every morning. Every day, new and numerous articles on the Middle East are published. the huge majority of them woefully biased, from the rabid anti-Muslim Israel-can-do-no-wrong stand of the Wall St Journal to the America-can-do-nothing-right rantings that infest many of the UK papers. I frequently wonder if real people are as interested in the Middle East as their newpaper editors appear to think they are. Someone said to me recently, "I'm seventy-five years old and for the last thirty years of my life, whenever I've turned on the news I've heard about Israel and the Palestinians, and I'm bloody sick of it."

There are other peoples in the world fighting intractable turf wars, and we don't hear much about them. There are other peoples in the world who are oppressed and dispossessed, and their representatives don't get five hours to whisper in the US President's ear. Why does the President kowtow to these benighted fools? Oil and money have twisted all logic:

US ally Saudi Arabia is funding, training and organizing the enemy side in the America's global War against Terrorism.
US ally Saudi Arabia is funding terrorist attacks against US ally Israel. Sometimes it's a bummer being the US.
US bases protect Saudi Arabian security but cannot be used for US security missions.
US ally Saudi Arabia produces 15 of the 19 Sept 11 hijackers
The Land of the Free and the Brave is publicly big buddies with the land that refuses Jews the right of residency, non-Muslims the right of worship, and women the right to be seen, and gays any rights at all.

It's more than the oil. Since Sept 11, most Americans are so fervently, patriotically, and genuinely behind their country's fight against evil, that with the right exhortations from the right people they might be willing and even eager to turn down the thermostats, downsize the SUV, walk to the mall occasionally, buy oil from the Russians, and invest a tiny fraction of their military budget into efficient renewable energy sources.

Then, they could tell the Saudis exactly where to put their oil, their depotism, their fundamentalism, their anti-Semitism, their duplicity, their terrorist cells, their hypocritical anti-Western cant, their payments to suicide bombers, and so on. Wouldn't that feel good! and I think individual Americans would feel good being able to personally contribute something more concrete to the battle than just flag-waving.

But Americans won't do it, because nobody will ask them, and nobody will ask them because there are just too many mutual interests in powerful places with too much invested in good relations with the Saudis - who are laughing at the US all the way to the bank, as you do to some rich, dumb kid who keeps throwing money at you while you treat him like shit.

I do wish President Bush had found the time to do just a little reading over the past few months. These articles are all old, but relevant:

Friends like these

    " "If the term 'Islamic fundamentalist' applies to any place in the world, it's Saudi Arabia," says Ali Abunimah, vice president of the Arab American Action Network. "The Taliban is rightly criticized for its horrendous social policies. But the silence on Saudi Arabia is inexcusable. The lack of political freedom there is stifling, yet Saudi Arabia gets a pass from the West."

    "Oil is the likely explanation for that free pass. America needs it, and the Saudis want to sell it.

    "Our way of life is dependent on them, and their way of life is dependent on us. It's a fantastic, symbiotic relationship," adds Bogle. "It subsumes other issues that arise. ... "

    "... Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, author and expert on Islamic extremism in Pakistan, writes that the problem is even more widespread: "If the U.S. wants to do something about radical Islam, it has to deal with Saudi Arabia. ... Saudi Arabia is the single most important cause and supporter of the general fanaticization of Islam."

    "Why hasn't America raised that red flag? Consider that last May Saudi Arabia announced its most lucrative Western investment deal in nearly three decades, a natural gas project by America's ExxonMobil oil company valued at $100 billion.

    Meanwhile, since 1989, Saudis have purchased $40 billion worth of military products from America."
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

"All of this administration's admirable successes to date fall short of addressing the obvious source of fundamentalist terrorism, subversion and hatred: Saudi Arabia.

"This is an oilman's administration, and long affiliation with energy affairs appears to have blinded an otherwise-superb strategic team to the abundant, well-documented evidence. Far from examining Saudi Arabia's deep and extensive complicity in supporting terror and undermining secular regimes throughout the Muslim world and beyond, the administration reflexively defends the Saudis. I do not believe the administration is intentionally dishonest--only that ties to the oil business and a half-century's assumptions prevent it from facing up to Saudi Arabia's support for, and funding of, the cruelest, most benighted and hate-filled version of one of the world's great religions."
An Oily Quagmire

    "For more than half a century, the US has been beholden to the dictatorships of the Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia, which controls more than a quarter of the world's known oil reserves. The Saudi patriarchate financed the Taliban, the madrassas that educated Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and (when convenient) Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

    "This connection was documented and declared long before the Taliban became America's villains of choice. But that link never dissuaded the US from seeking Saudi oil. George Bush I's ample business alliances with Saudi rulers have been remunerative for the Bush family and former Bush I officials James Baker and Frank Carlucci, but not terribly useful for protecting America from attacks by Saudi citizens with passports and box-cutters. ...

    "...Access to oil trumps democratic values and human rights at every turn. For half a century, purported realists in Washington have thought nothing of greasing the palms of Saudi princes in exchange for the favor of permitting us (and, to an even greater extent, the Japanese and the Europeans) to buy their oil."

2002-05-16T07:40:00.000+10:00

Oddments

Mixed news lately, from the world of Catholics:

Violent

In Maryland, an abuse victim has shot the priest who allegedly molested him.

    "A man charged with gunning down a Roman Catholic priest had grown frustrated after being unable to get an apology from the priest, who he claimed fondled him over a three-year period, the man's mother said. Dontee Stokes, 26, shot the Rev. Maurice Blackwell after the priest refused to talk to him, police spokeswoman Ragina Averella said. Stokes was charged with attempted murder, gun violations and assault and was being held without bail.

    "The shooting — the latest development in the sexual abuse scandal that has roiled the Roman Catholic Church — drew pained reactions from church leaders, with Baltimore Cardinal William Keeler saying he was ``appalled'' by the violence. Stokes' mother, Tamara Stokes, accused the archdiocese of mishandling her son's molestation allegations.

    "``All he wanted was an apology due to what had happened,'' she said Tuesday night in front of her home as family and friends stood around her holding candles and praying for Dontee's release."
Sick

Pedophile priest Rev. Paul Shanley, assessed nearly a decade ago as being "so personally damaged that his pathology is beyond repair.", reveals in a letter that he is himself a victim of priestly sexual abuse, from another priest in the Boston archdiocese:
"I, too, had been sexually abused as a teen-ager, and later as a seminarian by a priest, a faculty member, a pastor and ironically by the predecessor of one of the two Cardinals who now debate my fate."
Sicker

Not quite every underage sex partner of every Catholic priest was a victim - this one certainly didn't mind the attention,
(And a warning, if you are a prudish religious person who has come here by mistake from Google, go away to a nice Christian site now and don't read on.)

"The fact of the matter is, Catholic priests have given me some of the best blow jobs of my life....

... He sobbed and he shook and looked, there on his knees, like he was about to split into pieces. He, the priest, was vulnerable and ruined for that moment. And I, the 14- year-old, felt kind of thrilled and kind of like, what do you expect? You worship a naked man on a cross all day? This shit's bound to happen."
Poisonous

    "Vatican Radio's forest of antennas north of Rome could be causing leukaemia with the high levels of electromagnetic radiation they emit, a report conducted for a public prosecutor said on Thursday. The findings, released by the Green party, reopened controversy over the antennas that began 2 years ago, when reports showed an increased incidence of leukaemia in the nearby town of Cesano.

    "The antennas, some of which have a 600,000-watt capacity, caused a bitter diplomatic row in 2001, when former environment minister Willer Bordon threatened to cut off all electricity to the radio transmission centre. But last February an Italian court threw out charges against the Vatican, ruling the Vatican-owned site was outside the court's jurisdiction under a 1929 treaty.

    "[Green Party head] Bonelli announced that his party will begin to collect compensation requests from the inhabitants of Cesano."

Good luck to them, but they'll need to get in line behind the child abuse litigants. If God is everywhere, why do we need Vatican Radio? The SMH, reporting the same story, continues:

    Bets are being taken on how the Pope and his cardinals will deal with this latest crisis. Will they:
1. Deny the problem and sweep leaking electromagnetic radiation under the proverbial carpet?
2. Hold an in-house inquiry, then refuse to release the findings on the grounds the antennas are an internal church matter?
3. Offer several billion dollars in hush money to victims and move the antennas to another parish?
Tragic

A NYT Magazine article sounds like the wildest fiction, but it's true. Two young brothers, growing up, are both abused by the same Catholic Priest. One becomes a passionate, anti-clergy-abuse crusader, determined to bring abusive priests to justice. His brother - you guessed it - becomes a Catholic Priest and child abuser. (Requires registration - do it, the NYT is free and worth registering with)

    "One night in early April, as the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church swept more and more priests into an unforgiving spotlight, David Clohessy stared at the telephone in his St. Louis home, wondering whether to warn one of the next priests in line. His stomach roiled. It would be easier, he reasoned, not to do it, and it would probably be best. But then he envisioned the priest in question rounding a corner the following morning without any knowledge that his name had hit the newspaper and facing a television camera he never saw coming. He imagined the man's humiliation. And he was not sure he could bear the thought of it.

    "For Clohessy, this was an astonishing thing. His sympathies had always gone toward the victims of such men, because he knew their devastation and rage, which were also his own. And he had forged those hard, cold feelings into a determination -- a quest -- to hold the church accountable for the actions of its servants. He stormed the barricades, time and again. He nurtured a national support group, now nearly 4,000 members strong, for those who had been molested by clergy members. He appeared on ''Oprah.'' Always his message was that the church must be treated like any institution that was causing such destruction, and that Catholic priests deserved no special protection, no special consideration.

    "On this night, however, Clohessy decided to ''violate my fundamental bottom line,'' as he puts it, and grant this one favor to this one priest. He left an urgent message for the man, who called back 10 minutes later, just before 11:30 p.m. Clohessy told him that the Diocese of Jefferson City, Mo., had identified him to The Boston Globe as one of a half-dozen priests who had drawn ''credible accusations'' of sexual abuse over the years. The Globe planned to publish the man's name, which was certain to end up in newspapers and on newscasts throughout Missouri.

    "''I know this is going to make your life really hard,'' Clohessy remembers saying, and he felt both awkward and sad, for so many reasons, including his witting and unwitting roles in this chain of events.

    "''Thanks for the heads-up,'' the priest said, flatly. The call ended in less than 10 minutes. It was as long a conversation as the two brothers, David and Kevin Clohessy, had shared in years. ... "

2002-05-15T07:37:00.000+10:00

Special Dispensation

The Jewish peoples have had the misfortune thoughout history... to attract more than their fair share of the world's raving nutcases, and worse. The Holocaust forever entwined the Jews and Nazis together in the public mind and decades later, the Nazis bob and weave throughout Zionist issues large and small.

Nobody has tried this tack for a while, but in his last written message in 1970, Bertrand Russell criticized the Israeli bombing of Egypt and responsibility for the Palestinian plight thus:

    "We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy."
The Washington Post (2nd March 1970)

Things have mutated the 30-odd years since, and now, at US demonstrations against Israel's recent incursions into the West Bank, protestors carry signs saying ISRAEL=NAZI or SHARON=HITLER, to the dismay of the more thoughtful protestors:

    "We also need to rein in our rhetoric. It's not just incendiary to compare Israeli actions to those of Nazi Germany; it's inaccurate and unfair. The Nazis' extermination of millions of Jews and other "undesirables" -- systematic, bureaucratic, scientific -- is in many ways unparalleled in human history. The point is not to say Jews have suffered most, because that's a pointless debate: Many groups have a claim on the world's shame and sympathy. Yet calling Israeli atrocities Nazi-like demonstrates either a weak grasp of history or a calculated misuse of it. Certainly, like many governments, Israel has committed unjustifiable acts: occupation, massacre, torture and more. But calling someone a Nazi implies something further: that they are implementing a comprehensive plan to annihilate an entire class of people. That's why the accusation is so devastating, and untrue.

    "And while more Jews have rallied to the anti-occupation cause over the last month, I believe their numbers are dampened by distaste for banners that use an equal sign to connect the Star of David and the Nazi swastika, or proclaim that "Sharon is Hitler." Those banners, and the superficiality that inspires them, are calculated to offend, not communicate, and they hinder the movement for Palestinian rights."

From The shame of the pro-Palestinian left, Salon (Premium only). This is a calm and excellent article on both the problems with and the justification for the protests against Israeli military agression. It's tougher on the protestors than any of the ranting rightwing columnists, but fair and balanced also. I think that Salon are really doing a public disservice by restricting it - particularly with the predominance of rabid and uncriticial supporters of Israel in the US press.

We're not done with Nazis yet - nor are they done with us. At a rally outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, neo-Nazis and White Supremacists protested against the US support of Israel while waving Palestinian flags, to the horror of the Palestinians present, who were there to support Palestinian independence. Sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is definitely not my friend. But, if neo-Nazis support the Palestinian cause so much, I think it'd be just great if they'd all volunteer to go and be suicide bombers. Perhaps the Palestinians could entice them to suicide-bomber training camp, then accidently blow them all up.

Amidst mounting worldwide anti-Semitism - fuelled in part by Israel's own recent actions, but some people never need an excuse, either - Israel has found wide and unexpected support from an unexpected source - the US Christian Right. From other countries, the Christian Right are seen as a bit of a joke, and you will soon see why. First, we have to understand how pro-Israeli support is increasingly found right-of-center, because anti-semitism has moved left-of-center. (Right-wing! Left-wing! Christian Right! Christian Left! Liberal Catholics! Church Conservatives! Why do Americans need to label everything and everyone? Is it related to why they need to know the number of grams of fat in everything they eat?)

From Jews and the GOP, Salon Premium again:

    "Hardcore Christian conservatives were once the major force distancing Jews from the Republican Party. Suddenly, they're the chosen people's closest friends, on Israel at least. Thus while the political fallout from the Middle East stalemate is still unpredictable, Republicans are tantalized by the idea that right-wing support for Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon's hawkish policies will win Bush the lasting fealty of large number of American Jews. ...

    "... Though by and large Jews, as the quip goes, still earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans, small numbers of them have been drifting to the right for decades.

    "...Not long ago, as the ADL's [Anti-Defamation League] Foxman says, most visible anti-Semitism came from the right. It existed on the left as well, but "fascism and Nazism were the greater threat," he says. "There was a worldview of the right as being anti-Semitic." Now that the right has teamed up with Jews, while Palestinian liberation has become a cause célèbre in universities and in the global justice movement, the left is perceived as the new locus of Western anti-Semitism."

OK, we are getting to the interesting bit:

    " ...Jews, says pollster Mark Mellman, "remain very suspicious of [conservative Christians'] motives. They have nothing to do with support for Israel and everything to do with prophesies about the end of the world."

    "Mellman is referring to dispensationalism, an end-time eschatology that's prevalent on the evangelical right. ...

    "... Dispensationalists believe the return of Jews to Israel is a necessary precondition to the longed-for rapture. "Evangelicals who hold this belief have been very strong in supporting the Israeli expansion into the West Bank, because this is part of the promised land," says Peter Boyer, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Such thinking coincides with the views of the ruling Likud party -- which Sunday voted to oppose the creation of a Palestinian state, making for a convenient alliance. Where these views diverge is over the Jews themselves, who dispensationalists believe must either eventually convert to Christianity or, well, go to hell."

Dispensationalism is just huge. What is it? Like many simple religious questions, it does not have a simple answer; the more to put us unbelievers down as just too dumb to understand.

According to one Dispensationalist site,
'In simple terms, Christians who do not believe the church is "Spiritual Israel" are dispensationalists.'

Duh? Well, how about:

    "Dispensationalists derive their name from their teaching that the entire program of God is divided into seven dispensations. Five of these have passed into history, we are living in the sixth, and the seventh dispensation will be an earthly reign of one thousand years (the millennium) following the rapture of the church."

OK, so this is the 'Christ is literally coming back to earth' crowd, thought they disagree as to when, and the passing of the millenium has left some of them looking a bit silly. Here, he will destroy his enemies, Satan will be bound for 1000 years, Believers who die and Old Testament saints will be raised, unbelievers will be cast onto hell, and the good guys will all live happily in heaven, you know how it goes.
Pentacostals, Baptists and many/most Protestant churches are dispensationalists, either small d or big D - you may be one without knowing it.

Beliefs aside, one of the wackiest things about Dispensationalism is its factionalism.
    ""Among dispensationalists, then, opinions differ widely as to when the church actually began. Consequently, we dispensationalists often distinguish ourselves from other dispensationalists, who hold to a different starting point for the church. The most common method for doing so is to label ourselves according to the chapter of the book of Acts in which we believe the modern church (the body of Christ) began:

Acts 2 Dispensationalists
Mid Acts Dispensationalists
Acts 28 Dispensationalists
Pauline Dispensationalists
Berean Dispensationalists

You won't learn anything coherent about Dispensationalism from their own writings, so try this.
Though one Dispensationalist, more level-headed than most, warns that "Dispensationalists should stay clear of promoting Israel in these times of inflamed passions"

All in all, Dispensationalism is too much for me. I wish I had the Catholics back...

2002-05-12T00:59:00.000+10:00

He who pays, prays

Day in court

A lawyer for Catholic man-boy love practicioner Rev. Paul Shanley, objecting to his $750,000 bail, "said the court should consider fitting Father Shanley with an electronic monitoring bracelet." Unless the bracelet beeps a warning whenever Father Shanley is within groping distance of anything in trousers, I can't see much use in it. Maybe someone can come up with an electronic male chastity belt.

In related news,

"Americans have become depressingly familiar with the sight of great men and women dragged before a judge or grand jury and answering questions with an eye to the finer nuances of law rather than the grand moral questions of social justice. On Wednesday Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston became the latest, and his answers in a court-ordered deposition were more befitting a businessman trying to dodge an insider-trading suit than one of the nation's highest-ranking churchmen."

A lawyer for Cardinal Law even argued, "that forcing the cardinal to answer questions under oath was a violation of the constitutional separation of church and state."

Hilarious! The Boston Archdiocese has depended heavily on the services of public liability insurers, public relations firms, and criminal laywers - evil instruments of the secular state, all of them. It's a bit much now, to argue that this is merely a church matter.

Things move from being church matters to state matters when there is a crime involved, and the crime began with the abuse of the first child decades ago, not with the Pope's statement mere weeks ago. The state's legal presumption of innocence is the only thing saving Cardinal Law's skin.

Were both the state and the Church to butt out of this issue altogether, we would be left with Cardinal Law facing the victims of his negligence before his God, whereupon - God being fair, wise and all-knowing - Cardinal Law would be in even deeper muck than he is now.

Novena Nirvana

Perhaps it was with this in mind that the Cardinal yesterday called for a Novena for reconciliation and healing for the Catholic Church, "acknowledging that the sexual abuse scandal has diminished the church's moral authority, weakened the faith of parishioners, and created mistrust toward church leaders."

Not being a Chrisian I was not entirely sure what a Novena is, apart from it being some kind of prayer. It wasn't that easy to find it explained clearly and concisely, either - Catholic information mostly assumes that you know stuff about Catholicism already, and that if you don't, you're too much of a heathen for them to bother explaining.

Nevertheless, I persevered and found out. A novena is a sequence of nine identical prayers, performed consecutively either privately or collectively, in order to obtain a specific blessing. If you want the history of them, see the Catholic Encylopedia.

So, in other words, a Novena complements the formalized, organized and generalized Catholic worship by providing a flexible, fast track way to focus prayers on just one specific outcome that you want. While some Novenas themselves appear pretty formal themselves and are said as Masses, others are strictly you and a direct line to the Almighty. Who is doubtless so worn down by your tenacity that on the eighth time He says, "OK, OK then, I hear you, you're really fixed on this, I'll get it done next time, promise, just stop bugging me."

You do not need to be a Cardinal to compose your own Novena, and if you give the Church enough money, she will say a Novena for you - much more effective than just doing it yourself! For instance, the Priests of the Sacred Heart offer this service, get in before the end of the month:

"Novena practices have been popular for many centuries and usually are performed to obtain a special grace, for a particular intention, or to honor Christ, His mother, or one of the Saints.
The Priests of the Sacred Heart have adopted this pious practice by offering "novenas" of Masses for our friends and benefactors. We offer a Novena of Masses on the first nine days of each month for the intentions of our benefactors."

If you only have US$10, you can still post your own Novena to this message board, which presumably St Jude himself has bookmarked.

So, can anything be the 'intention' of a Novena? Well, no. Here, some poor women is asking, is there is a Novena she can say for those who practise artificial contraception? The Priest answering her avoids the question, so I daresay there isn't.

Cardinal Law's Novena

Here's just an excerpt:

"By a fresh outpouring of the Spirit's gifts give new life to the Church in Boston this Pentecost.
"We beg that the Spirit will bring healing to the victims of clergy sexual abuse and their families.
"We pray that the Spirit will warm the hearts of those whose faith has been weakened by this scandal.
"We ask that the Spirit will bestow mercy and repentance on the abusers."

I join in hoping that the huge majority of moral and decent believers are helped by the Spirit to strengthen and keep their Catholic faith, because if they lose it they're going to have a mightly hard time finding anything anywhere near as peculiar to replace it.

Virtual Novenas

Like Tibetan Prayer Wheels simplify and symbolise the act of prayer, so Novenas can be similarly automated, and I look forward to some enterprising Catholic nerd producing a 'Pedophile Priest Child Sex Abuse Novena' Web page where you just click on a button and there, the prayer appears written on the page or comes out of your little computer speakers. They could even make it part of the Boston Globe's comprehensive sex abuse site.

Then, all the many tedious and incestuous Catholic bloggers could link to it, and zoom! you'll see the prayers going up with the page count.

Before anyone accuses me again of being irreverent, Virtual Novena sites exist already.

My Own Novena

Novenas get better! How's this:

"Do I have to be Catholic to make the novena? Do I have to be religious?

No! You only have to be someone having a difficult time coping with one (or
more) difficult problems in your life that do not seem resolvable on your own."

Cool, I'll have a go. Here, from a lifelong unbeliever, is My Very First Novena:

'I hope that all clergy abuse victims everywhere get an apology, monetary compensation, sympathetic counselling,
and as much peace of mind as the world can bring them.
'I hope that Cardinal Law learns humility and resigns.'
'I hope the Church from now on takes its moral responsibilities seriously and puts child welfare ahead of public relations.'

Anyone going to say it with me?

2002-05-11T00:04:00.000+10:00

I am not a racist, but...

We don't like to speak ill of the dead, and what better place than among the obituaries and tributes to slip in a little political revisionism? Since the shooting of Dutch right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, many articles have appeared pointing out the reasonableness of his views, indignantly denying descriptions of him as facist or racist, and decrying comparisons between him and Jean-Marie Le Pen, who, nobody bothers to deny, really is facist and racist.

Gay writers have been particularly defensive of Mr Fortuyn's politics, and not only Andrew Sullivan. This Independent Gay Forum article appears to use the logic that since Mr Fortuyn was opposed to Muslims, and since Muslims are facist and racist, therefore, Mr Fortuyn himself could not possibly be facist or racist.

Independent columnist Mark Steel provides a welcome antidote to all this:

    " Only the Dutch could have a gay sociologist fascist...
Almost every news item has insisted that "Professor Pim" couldn't be labelled in the same bracket as the rest of the European far right. Much of the coverage has insisted he was simply flamboyant, popular, breaking the predictable mould and quite liberal really, certainly not a racist. ... The media also seems to have fallen for the modern racists' trick, as the main evidence of those suggesting that his party wasn't racist is that he said it wasn't racist. Maybe this should apply to other areas of reporting.... "

    "But Pim Fortuyn did try to build a movement around the demand to halt immigration, particularly against Muslims, whose religion he regularly described as sick and backward. In some areas, he complained, Dutch people "no longer hear their own language." When did the Dutch start complaining about this? The whole point of being Dutch is to speak 40 languages. Everything in Amsterdam is in English or German, so why didn't he complain about that? It seems there were only certain foreign languages he objected to, connected to the race of the people speaking them. ... "

    "... And one clue as to whether Fortuyn's appeal revolved around racism was the chant of crowds of his supporters after his death - "Pim was our Hitler." Now why would they have yelled that? Was it a) because they were attracted to his racism which, they felt, was as strident as that of Hitler. Or b) because they have been misinformed and believe Hitler to have been a gay sociologist?"

Hitler, we are reminded, didn't campaign on the slogan: 'What Germany needs is concentration camps'
What you hear may not be what you get...

2002-05-09T23:09:00.000+10:00

Environmentally sound

Environmentalism could be joining the non-theistic religions of Bolshevism, Communism, and Nazism. A recent WSJ columnist thinks so, at least. Environmentalism has become a religion, (requires registration) talks of the recent US Senate vote to reject oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

"ANWR has become a test of faith. Drilling in this supposed cathedral of nature would constitute an original sin. And any Democrat who strayed from the one true faith could expect to be punished with the usual fury reserved for apostasy. ANWR, in other words, symbolized the primal myth of environmentalism: that man, particularly industrial man, is an intruder who threatens to disrupt the beauty and harmony of the natural world."

Referring to Marxism, the author remarks, "Currently the environmental movement possesses something of the same grim religious determination to prevail over traditional Western belief systems."

I'm not too sure I agree with that, but in an odd echo, the alleged murderer of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn turns out to be an environmental activist. "Police believe van der Graaf was motivated to commit The Netherlands' first political assassination by Mr Fortuyn's support for fur farming - a policy rather less well known than his anti-Islam stance."

How ironic (and no doubt disappointing for some) that such a prominent anti-Muslim figure escapes Muslim wrath without so much as a fatwa, only to get gunned down by some Aryan wacko angry about fur farming! Animal rights are an excellent and deserving cause, but when did they outweigh a person's right to live?

2002-05-09T22:36:00.000+10:00

A broad church

Catholic schools in Sydney are being overrun by unbelievers.
"Catholic schools are proving so popular they're providing something of a headache for the church - how to keep the numbers of student unbelievers down to an acceptable level. Church authorities want to maintain a Catholic ethos in their sprawling school system, but more than 21 per cent of all students in Catholic secondary schools are now non-Catholic. Two decades ago, the proportion was just 8 per cent. ... Orthodox and other Christian denominations form the majority, but there are now significant numbers of non-Christians in the schools."

Why would a non-Christian send their children to a Catholic school, where religious education lessons are - fair enough, too - compulsory? Money, mainly. In New South Wales, government schools are short of cash and consequently often low on standards. Catholic schools provide an affordable alternative for parents who can't afford private schools.

Catholics, we know, consider Protestants and all other Christians to be misguided pretenders, but you don't often hear what the other side thinks. The Most Rev. Dr Peter Jensen, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, laments that the Church is "frightened of not being relevant and persuasive".

"We have accepted the secular world's verdict that we have nothing of importance to say, and we have adjusted ourselves to this reality. We have become domesticated. It has all the sadness of seeing a great cat of Christian theology turned into a house pet."

There's fire in the Reverend yet, however:

"The Christian gospel is the insertion of the truth into the untrustworthy discourse of the world. Some of us want to be so kind, so loving that we will not speak the truth. The therapeutic model of pastoral care has been perverted into mere affirmations of human behaviour. Our love is no love, for it refuses this great test: will it speak boldly, frankly, truthfully?

Let me apply this very directly. We all know that one of the great failings of the church has been sectarianism, the ugly rivalry and jealousy which have soured relations. And yet we also ought to know that there remain profound differences between us, differences which cannot be overlooked. In my view the differences between Catholic and Anglican remain of enormous significance, and I am duty-bound to point them out and try to convince my Catholic brothers of my truth. The clue is not in ceasing from this responsibility, which doubtless they share with me in reverse, but in fulfilling it in love."

I think it's quite delightful, the idea of Anglican and Catholic Archbishops lovingly pointing out each other's shortcomings. Keeps them from plotting the revolution, as they say.

Which church is this? "Half of its leaders are women and a policy of zero tolerance towards sexual misconduct from its clergy has been in place for years. ... police checks on its clergy and mandatory police reporting is applied across all parishes."

Sounds good? There's a catch. This is the Metropolitan Community Church, founded by the Rev Elder Dr Troy Perry after he was excommunicated by the Pentacostals for being gay. The movement is now "the largest international Christian denomination with a specific outreach to homosexuals, bisexuals and the transgendered."

Dr Perry is here in Sydney to attend MCC Australia's 2002 Queer Sexual Ethics conference. The Catholics, of course, have recently had their own Queer Sexual Ethics conference at the Vatican, but Dr Perry admirably declines to take the high moral ground.

2002-05-08T22:00:00.000+10:00

The mouse that roared

Down here in Australia, we are wonderfully of the world yet not of it. We can watch the latest world news, while still feeling that bad things are happening there and not here.

However, international trends are often mirrored in Australia in miniature. We have the obligatory Catholic sex abuse decades-old cover-ups, and we even anticipated Jean-Marie Le Pen and Pim Fortuyn, with the rapid ascendency, in 1996, of populist right-winger loony Pauline Hanson.

Australians had never seen or heard a politician like Hanson - red-headed, red-suited, a former fish and chip shop owner, a real little Aussie battler.. After declaiming, in her maiden speech to parliament, "I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians."
it was on for young and old in a disturbing period when the familiar, tolerant Australia rang with echoes of its infamous While Australia Policy

Hanson, who naturally strongly denied being a racist, was never accused of being an intellectual and could barely string two sentences together; her party's economic policies such as they were included schemes based on printing more money. No matter: on some occasions in some places her One Nation party got massive proportions of the vote. Her following came from the 'silent majority' of voters who long felt disenfrancised by the two major political parties and threatened by golbalization, who felt that political correctness had stymied constructive discussion of the problems with official multiculturalism, and of course who were just outright racists. The recent analyses of the success of Mssrs. Le Pen and Fortuyn are eerily familiar, and could have been lifted from just about any Australian political commentary on any recent election,

Like France and the Netherlands, Australian politics had long been the preserve of grey men in grey suits, and anyone who broke that monotony was guaranteed an obsessive media following for whatever unpleasantness they chose to share with the nation. Lauded by the Klu Klux Klan as an inspirational Ayran woman, Hanson posed wrapped in the Australian flag (we are not a 'flaggy' country like the US, possibly because a large part of our flag is still taken up by the Union Jack) and, suicide-bomber style, recorded a video to be played on the event of her assassination, which she announced to great national hilarity on one of the tabloid news shows.

Hanson's party eventually imploded under the weight of infighting, funding irregularities and sheer amateurism, but although she was gone, her followers weren't, and the big fear was that one day, another right-winger but this time with some real brains and organizational skills would come along.

What happened was somewhat worse than that, and I hope this does not portend ill for France or the Netherlands. The mainstream parties, wildly impressed at the huge and unexpected electoral success of jingoistic racist nationalism, promptly adopted such policies themselves.

The 2001 Federal election in Australia was far worse than the 1998 one. In '98, you knew Hanson was a buffoon and her followers were at least in the initial throes of genuine delight in discovering that they suddenly had a voice in national affairs. In 2001, the encumbent Australian Prime Minister won by calculatedly and deliberately demonizing a few hundred mainly Afghan and Iraqi asylum seekers, who so conveniently turned up on a sinking boat post-Sept 11 and galvanized fears of hordes of those Muslim terrorists sneaking into the country. They were refused entry into Australian waters - a breach of international maritime law - and falsely (as it later turned out) accused of throwing their children overboard as a form of emotional blackmail.

As everybody knows, Islamic terrorists have wads of pocket money from Saudi Arabia and arrive flying first class with valid visas, accomodation, and flight-school enrolments, not on a sinking ship after which, even if some hero pulls them from the sea, they could spend forever on some remote Pacific island. As not everybody knows, the vast majority of visa overstayers in Australia are UK nationals, who arrived by air. No detention centers for them.

2002-05-07T23:56:00.000+10:00

Tolerance

Realpolitik visits the Netherlands. Hardly more than a fortnight ago, the entire Dutch government resigned in contrition over the failure to prevent the massacre of the Srebrenica Muslims that the Dutch had been charged to protect. Today, in the run up to the consequent election, rising right-winger and electoral hope Pim Fortuyn was assasinated in the street.

Unlike the right-wingers from central casting, Mr Fortuyn was flamboyantly gay and favored all sorts of leftie causes from lax drugs laws to euthanasia to same-sex marriages. Like all good right-wingers he was at least considered a racist, a charge which he vehemently denied. (So do they all. Even the Klu Klux Klan describe themselves merely as 'American Patriots'.)

Mr Fortuyn was strongly anti-Muslim, a religion he described as "a backward culture" a position that saw him "trading insults with one Rotterdam imam who said gays were worse than pigs," but at least allowed him to deny racism, thus:
""Give me a definition of racism. You don't know what a racist [is] because you have negroes who are Muslims, you have white men who are Muslims, you have yellow men who are Muslims, so how can you connect the Muslim religion and culture with a race?"
interview with the BBC's John Simpson

"Pim Fortuyn is gay, openly so and proud of it and this is crucial to understanding his politics. He fears that the influx of Muslim immigration into the Netherlands is undermining the ultra- liberal, permissive values which made his the first country in the world to fully legalise same- sex marriages. "Muslims have a very bad attitude to homosexuality, they're very intolerant," he says. Jabbing his finger aggressively towards me, he goes on: "And women. For them women are second class citizens"."

And the funny bit: according to his own obituary, Mr Fortuyn was born "to a conservative Catholic family", yet here he was, pointing fingers at Muslim homophobia and inequality of women!

Sure, OK, we know the Catholics are only pretending to be intolerant of gays; some estimates put the percentage of gays in the US Catholic priesthood at close to 50 percent. Catholicism=Hypocrisy. Muslims, by contrast, not only proscribe barbaric punishments for homosexuality but actually practise what they preach. A backward culture - sometimes you can't argue.

2002-05-06T23:50:00.000+10:00

Facing facts

Is it unfair, perhaps, to have such a good laugh at Radio Replies?

    "Some men argue that the question whether religious dogmas are true or false is unimportant; the important thing, they say, is that these beliefs are comforting. How could we face life, they ask, if this world were all, and if we had no assurance that its apparent evil serves some great purpose? Will not belief in immortality promote courage in the face of evil? Will not the belief that the course of history is ordained by an all-wise beneficent Providence help us to stand firm in times when evil appears to be triumphant?

    "Why rob ourselves or others of this source of happiness by listening to the dubious arguments of those who refuse to believe in anything that cannot be demonstrated by the cold intellect? Has not the heart its rights? Why should it submit to the head?

    "As the poet Tennyson exclaims in rebutting the contentions of skeptics:

    Like a man in wrath the heart
    Stood up and answered: I have felt.

    "There is to my mind something pusillanimous and sniveling about this point of view, which makes me scarcely able to consider it with patience. To refuse to face facts merely because they are unpleasant is considered the mark of a weak character, except in the sphere of religion. I do not see how it can be ignoble to yield to the tyranny of fear in all ordinary terrestrial matters, but noble and virtuous to do exactly the same thing when God and the future life are concerned."
Bertrand Russell, The Value of Free Thought, 1944.

2002-05-06T00:06:00.000+10:00

Circle of friends

Since its inception, Communism has been regarded by the sceptical observer as a religion:

    "Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and instpired scriptures. When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does so, if possible, by quoting texts from Marx and Engels.

A full-fliedged Communist is not merely a man who believes that land and capital should be held in common, and their produce distributed as nearly equally as possible. He is a man who entertains a number of elaborate and dogmatic beliefs... which may be true, but are not, to a scientific temper, capable of being known to be true with any certainty."
Bertrand Russell, The Practise and Theory of Bolshevism, 1920.

In an odd kind of circle, a fascinating article in todays NYT (link requires registration) accuses the current Pope of having created a climate of Soviet-style repression within the Catholic Church.

    "One paradox of the Polish pope is that while he is rightly revered for helping bring down the godless Communists, he has replicated something very like the old Communist Party in his church. Karol Wojtyla has shaped a hierarchy that is intolerant of dissent, unaccountable to its members, secretive in the extreme and willfully clueless about how people live. The Communists mouthed pieties about "social justice" and the rule of the working class while creating a corrupt dictatorship of bureaucrats. Russians boiled this down to a cynical adage: We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. For American Catholics, the counterpart is: They pretend to lead, and we pretend to follow.

    "Like the Communist Party circa Leonid Brezhnev, the Vatican exists first and foremost to preserve its own power. This is disheartening for the many good Catholics who hope this crisis will provoke a renaissance in their church. Nobody quite says it this way, but one reason many Catholics see the moment as ripe for reform is that this pope is on his last legs. Soon, the hope goes, a vigorous new leader may emerge. ...

    "Maybe so. But like the Communists, John Paul has carefully constructed a Kremlin that will be inhospitable to a reformer."

Unlike the Communists, sexual matters, rank highly among the concerns of the Church. Repression combined with reactionism is extra spooky.

    "Implored by Catholics to consider, at least, the lifesaving power of condoms in the age of AIDS, John Paul II was unyielding. He actually grouped contraception with genocide in a litany of "intrinsically evil" acts that condemn sinners to hell for eternity. "The vast majority of Catholic married couples, that is, stand on the wrong side of the abyss with Hitler and Pol Pot," as Charles R. Morris observed in his splendid history of American Catholicism."

Christos Aneste - Happy Easter to all the Orthodox Christians, celebrating today in the former Sovier Union among other places.

The news keeps getting worse - you, or your children, may be Catholic without knowing it! Check out the following, from the trusty Radio Replies. It mentions Anglicans, but would also apply to those of you belonging to any of the rest of what the Catholics consider to be untrue faiths.

"I was baptised in the Church of England. What is the religion of my baptism?"
"The Catholic religion. Baptism, if valid, makes a Christian. Now Catholicity is the only true form of Christianity. Therefore, everyone validly baptised is radically a Catholic, even though he be aware of it."
Radio Replies Volume 1, Question 817

"Do you deny that Baptism can belong to the Anglican Church?"
"Yes. All the sacrements were instituted by Christ, and belong to Christ. Now Christ founded the Catholic Church and committeed his religion to her keeping only. Therefore the Sacraments, without exception, belong to her. ..."
Radio Replies Volume 1, Question 818

"If that be so , then Anglicans are Catholics after all, a thing which I have heard you repeatedly deny."
"In virtue of their Baptism they are readically Catholics. But despite affiliation with the Catholic Church by valid Baptism, one can exclude himself from the true and visible Church by conscious heresy or schism. If a child is baptised validly inthe Church of England, that child is a Catholic and remains a Catholic until it comes to the age of reason and adopts heretical and schismatical Anglicanism for itself. ..."
Radio Replies Volume 1, Question 819

2002-05-05T00:32:00.000+10:00

Science on Religion

Religions through the ages have had much to say about science, most of it self-serving and illogical. Here, instead, is an eminent scientist commenting on religion.

Franklin M Harold is Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Colorado State University. This comes from the epilogue of his 2001 book, The Way of the Cell.

    "No intelligence, examining the bones and tools of Homo habilis, could have forseen the Sistine Chapel, for it was not in any sense fore-ordained; evolution (cultural as well as physical) performs its wonders without intent, guidance or safety net. For better or for worse, mankind makes itself, and no one who wanders the globe can fail to be impressed by the sheer variety of choices that the human race has made. ...

    ... If a liveable world is to emerge from the race between sanity and catastrophe, we shall have to come to terms with the limits of our small planet; science must play a much larger role in shaping public policy. ... But we must also find secular (or at least tolerant) soil in which to re-root those civilized values that sages have proclaimed time and again, usually in the name of one god or another.

    For those of us who have outworn the ancient covenants between man and his gods, the search for meaning necessarily becomes personal rather than tribal. This, too, is hardly a strange road, for it has been trodden for centuries by Epicureans and Stoics, by Buddhists, Sufis, and all manner of free-thinkers; and many thoughtful moderns, including scientists, travel it today.

    I do not feel diminished by the discovery that we are all part of a vast biotic enterprise that brought forth consciousness, understanding, and morality from mindless chemistry. The great tree of life does not command my worship, but it surely invokes reverence and awe; and I would gladly surrender the illusion of dominion for the responsibilities of stewardship.

    For me, as for most humans past and present, the search for meaning remains unfinished, an aspiration rather than an achievement. And I am proud to walk in the company of Diogenes of Oenoanda who, nearly two thousand years ago, had this inscription engraved upon his tombstone:

    "Nothing to fear in God
    Nothing to feel in death
    Good can be attained
    evil and be endured."

    I have come to think of science as a kind of game, whose object is to make rational sense of the world. Players are bound by strict rules; the imagination must ever be disciplined by reason, observation and experiment, and no cheating, please! It is the most engrossing game ever invented, one to which I and many others have happily dedicated our lives; and it has revealed much that is new, true and important. But we must never forget that the game of science is played on a board, and much of what matters most to human beings lies off the board. Science has little useful to say about good and evil, right and wrong, justice and oppression, and the strange ways of the human heart.

    Science can often explain what is happening, and it can sometimes forecast the future and distinguish wisdom from folly. But it provides no basis for ethical choice, nor the will to act. About what it means to be human, individual scientists often hold strong opinions; but science must be silent."
Franklin M Harold

2002-05-04T01:42:00.000+10:00

Howling at the moon

Bertand Russell once remarked that one of the differences between the religions of Catholicism, Communism and Nazism was that the latter two "are less obsessed by sex." We knew that, but now we learn that some sexual groups are equally obsessed with Catholicism:

"The Catholic Church is and has long been both loudly homophobic and intensely homoerotic. Our public discussions of priestly sexuality won't make any progress until we can begin to talk about the homoeroticism written into Catholic imagination and its institutions. ...

Gay friends who are not Catholic often ask how a gay man can remain in the church, which is, as they see it, one of the most dangerous enemies of gay civil rights in the United States. The puzzle is worse than they think. Some of us don't have the excuse of being born Catholic: Like myself, we converted. We were drawn to the church as much through our sexual orientation as through any other natural disposition. ...

Male-male desire in Catholicism isn't confined to the priesthood or religious life, though it is certainly most intense there. The desire suffuses Catholic imagination. ...

The Roman Catholic Church entices us gay men to fall in love with it much before we ever consider its policies."

If your kids said to you: Mum, I'm going to join this weird gay sex cult, where they worship this guy whose Mother never even had sex, and whose Father goes around with a ghost, and where we celebrate when people suffer and where this bread turns into the guy's flesh, sort of, and we eat it.... tell me honestly, what would you think?

A bit of good Catholic news - the disgusting Rev Paul Shanley has been arrested, and charged with rape. I hope all you other pervert priests out there are watching the news, and shaking in your shoes. You'll get yours.

Epitaphios

It's Orthodox Good Friday.

The Orthodox and Catholic Churches:

both consider themselves to be the one and only true church founded by Christ
both claim to have remained unchanged in doctrine and faith since the early Church of the Apostles
both regard each other as heretics

This being so, it's hard to know how to account for the massive differences between them on little matters like the Papacy, priestly celibacy, purgatory, the immaculate conception, and so on. But the major historical difference was over none of these - the churches fell out over the concept of 'Filioque'. To cut a long story short, according to Catholics, the Holy Spirit proceeds "from the Father and from the Son", whereas the Orthodox Churches believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds "from the Father". No, I don't understand this, and please don't explain it to me either.

2002-05-02T23:41:00.000+10:00

Capitalism, severed heads, Nazis again...

May Day yesterday, and protestors came out all over the world for the traditional anti-capitalist protests, 'anti-capitalist' sounding quite delightfully retro these days.

In London, amazingly, the big symbols of capitalism boarded up their shops in fear: "Past Versace, Rolls- Royce, Mont Blanc, DKNY, Calvin Klein, Boss and Aston Martin. The route read like a roll-call of the ostentatious and the elite. And they were all boarded up. For one day only, as the sales pitch goes, the tills were quiet. Like an anti- capitalist's dream, London's poshest boutiques in Mayfair, its most exclusive quarter, had battened down the hatches."

Across France, over a million people turned out to protest the fact that right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen has made it through to the second round of the French elections - where were they last weekend, when they could have voted against him in the first round? Did someone once say something about Freedom and eternal vigilance?

Here in Sydney, things were much more low key, a few protesters against Australia's treatment of asylum seekers was as far as it went. We don't really have the European tradition of May Day protests, and that's a pity. Our ANZAC Day - see post of 24/4 - draws out all the 'I fought in the war to stop people like you from coming to this country,' brigade, and it would be nice to have an equivalent occasion where, instead, all the old comrades and Catholic unionists would get together on the streets and sing 'Solidarity Forever'.

On the topic of ANZAC day, a day of force-fed military hero-worship which I particularly dislike: "A grisly discovery in northern Victoria has cast a shadow over the gallant images of the friendships forged between Australian soldiers and their Turkish enemies on the battlefields of Gallipoli. The grandson of a digger was sifting through his grandfather's estate a few days ago, when he discovered the severed head of a Turkish soldier packed inside a box. He promptly handed it over to members of Melbourne's Turkish community who are deeply upset by the find."

Back to the old comrades. Communism was regarded by Bertrand Russell as having degenerated into another religion - his criticisms were aimed at the Soviet variety, but were much later also borne out by the Chinese. Nazism also qualified:

"Christian orthodoxy, however, is no longer the chief danger to free thought. The greatest danger in our day comes from new religions, Communism and Nazism. To call these religions may perhaps be objectionable to both their friends and to their enemies, but in fact they have all the characteristics of religions. They advocate a way of life on the basis of irrational dogmas; they have a sacred history, a Messiah, and a priesthood."
The Value of Free Thought, 1944

Nazi watch! OK, I mentioned them, but they're everywhere today:

Australian ABC TV news just now reported that the newly released Yasser Arafat has branded his Israeli captors as "racists and Nazis."
The WSJ Best of the Web, reviewing an article lamenting the Muslim world's capacity for modernization, comments: "After all, the 20th century gave us an example of a regime that was both murderous and efficient: Nazi Germany. Could it be that the only thing saving us from the Arabs' ideology is their inefficiency?"

2002-05-01T22:18:00.000+10:00

Yours infallibly

If you are generally accepted as being personally infallible, it is highly advisable to be bold and unambiguous with it.

Imagine what an impact it would have made, had the Pope tackled the Catholic sex scandal head on. Sacked the most culpable Cardinals, and decreed instant expulsion for all proven sex offenders past present and future. This would not be unprecedented - St Augustine did similar for property owners:

    "Then Augustine issued a warning, saying that any priest found holding property in the future would be instantly expelled: "I will not let him divest himself of it and stay, but I will delete his name from the clerics' register. Though he should appeal from me to a thousand councils, or sail to any other arbiter wherever - anywhere he can - yet, so help me God, he shall not be a cleric so long as I am a bishop. You hear me. They hear me."

Alas, the Catholic Church is infinitely more worldy-wise on matters of property ownership than matters of sex. This, remember, is a faith that cannot even get its story straight about permissible sex within heterosexual marriage, let alone any other kind.

The very notion of Papal Infallibility is intriguing to those of us who, unlike Catholics, do not take this as given. Just imagine - everything you say just hangs there and becomes truth! In fact. infallibility is not all it is cracked up to be, and even the Pope is not expected to be infallible all the time.

Radio Replies is a very, very old publication - it's actually the transcripts of a 1930's radio show on Sydney station 2SM, in which the intrepid Rev. Dr. Rumble, M.S.C., invited questions on Catholicism from nonbelievers, and very irreverent some of them were, too. (2SM is still broadcasting, these days indistinguishable from any secular Greatest Hits and Memories station.) It's an often hilarious read, and I recommend it to Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

Here's the word on infallibility:
    "He is not infallible in everything. He is infallible only when he speaks in virtue of his supreme office as head of the Church on matters of faith and morals. He notifies us when he intends to define in accordance with all the conditions required for infallibility. This restriction to set occasions is as reasonable as the restriction of the jurisdiction of a civil judge to his official decisions in court."
Radio Replies, Volume 1, Question 436

Clear as mud? So, if the Pope's just wandering around and saying, 'Hey, nice weather today,' then there's nothing more to it than that, but when he says, 'Now listen up, I"m going to get infallible here', then you better listen. I don't know whether his anti-sex-abuse statements were made while he was in infallible mode or not.

Sometimes, however, infallibility can be a real pain, not least when you turn out to be wrong and your Church ends up with egg on her collective face. On knottier things, perhaps it's much more prudent to forgo the infallibility and just proclaim as a normal Cardinal-in-the-street. Take this handy piece of revisionism, on that pesky Galileo:

    "Was the Church right or wrong in condemning the theory of Galileo?

The Committee or Congregation appointed to consider his teachings declared that his theory was wrong. In doing so, the members of the Committee were mistaken. But as no infallible decision was given on the subject in the name of the Church, infallibility is not involved in this matter.

Meanwhile Galileo advanced no really satisfactory proofs of his theory, and the prudence of the prohibition forbidding its being taught is more than defensible, in the light of the circumstances of the times. But that is another question."
Radio Replies, Volume 1, Question 419

2002-04-30T23:34:00.000+10:00

Timeline

1854 - Catholic Church defines doctrine of the Immaculate Conception
1870 - Catholic Church defines doctrine of the Infallibility of the Pope
2002 - Catholic Church declares that 'man-boy love', feeling up young girls, and groping 6 yr old boys in the confessional are Bad Things

And that, I'm afraid, appears to be the sum-total of last week's hoopla in Rome. American Cardinals, they of the liability insurance and the PR firms and the tough-cop zero-tolerance rhetoric, are summonsed to the Vatican. There, in another country and another century, they are told by no less an authority than His Holiness that - guess what, will you? - sexual abuse of children is a crime. "Whoa!" don't you hear them saying, slapping their red-capped heads as the truth sinks in, and everyone scurries to pretend that the Emperor has just put on a few clothes.

Let's give His Holiness some points, for at least and at last calling a crime a crime, and stating that there is "no place in the priesthood ... for those who would harm the young." Now, doesn't this seem clear to you? But having announced this new direction, the Pope appears to have left its implementation to the Cardinals; the very people responsible for causing the problem.

Anyone who has ever worked for a large organization during a market downturn has been to the company crisis meeting where some Business Manager honcho declares that hey, things are tough, he's going to give it to us straight, but hey, working together we can all turn this around. Then, a bit of brand tweaking here, a new logo and mission statement there, and off you go, a pat from the CEO and the board, and no need to really dig too deep and find causes you'd rather not know that might take a bit of real fixing. The Catholic Church is just so corporate sometimes about so many things; it's a real pity they don't have that ultimate organizational redress - the shareholders' meeting, when they can vote out the whole pitiful board of directors.

Sort of on that topic, in the torrent of press on last week's Vatican anticlimax are plenty of people, nuns, lay Catholics, and liberal priests among them, expressing surprise and hurt that the hierarchy has neither sought nor heeded their views on the current crisis, and is in fact actively seeking to oppress them.
I wish all these bold reformers well, but... really, duh! The Catholic Church takes pride in being and has never pretended to be anything other than an autocratic patriarchal hierarchy. Where did they think they were?

Bird brained

An American Cardinal always sounded to me like a species of bird. A cardinal is "a crested thick-billed North American finch having bright red plumage in the male." However, although there exist American Robins, American Tree Sparrows, and American Woodcocks, there appear to be no American Cardinals, only Northern Cardinals.

This is fortunate, as it saves bird-lovers from having to demand a name change, like German Shepherd dogs became Alsations during the war.

Sorry, but sex and Catholics just got too boring. A flock of avian cardinals would have more sense than their ecclesiastical counterparts, these days.

One example will suffice to illustrate how less than nothing has been achieved by the American Cardinals. "The American prelates said they would recommend a special process to defrock any priest who has become "notorious and is guilty of the serial, predatory sexual abuse of minors." But they made a legal distinction in cases that are "not notorious" and said they would leave it up to the local bishop to decide whether an accused priest is a threat to children and should be defrocked".

As if we needed more illogic brought to this situation - in a kind of victim's roulette, the more 'notorious' your abuser, the more likely you are to get justice for your abuse. When your local bishop has finished counting angels on the head of a pin, he can adjudicate on exactly how much priestly physical contact constitutes 'notorious' abuse.

But verily, the most notorious of them all is the ghastly Rev. Paul Shanley, pedophile and VD clinic regular. ""One of the first things I do in a new city is to sign up at the local clinics for help with my VD. . . . There is next to no confidentiality - your name is bellowed out for all to hear (I meet a lot of old friends this way)," Shanley wrote."

Surely, this piece of garbage has to be first in line to be defrocked. What a pity we don't consider castration as a punishment.

But yesterday, Cardinal Law responded to a lawsuit brought against Shanley by blaming the then 6 year old victim

"In his first legal response to charges that the Rev. Paul R. Shanley began molesting a Newton boy when he was 6 years old, Cardinal Bernard F. Law has asserted that "negligence" by the boy and his parents contributed to the alleged abuse."

Cardinal Law, of course, would know all about negligence. He disgraces his church, his community and his country.

2002-04-29T10:32:00.000+10:00

One man's fanatic...

While Australian children have gone back to school today, in other parts of the world Israeli troops have run over and mutilated the bodies of 14 year old Palestinians with a tank, and Palestinians disguised in Israeli police uniforms have broken into Jewish homes and killed among others a 6 year old girl, who was hiding under her bed. The TV news here showed her teddy bear sitting sadly on the bloodstained blankets.

It's thirty years since then Israeli PM Golda Meir made her famous and rather disturbing quote of 1972:

    "We will eventually forgive the Arabs for killing our children; but we will never forgive them for making us kill their children."

No-one is holding their breath for much forgiveness for anything, from either side. Erasmus said that, "Folly is perennial" - I don't know if that's a comforting thought or not.

Fanaticism is a term frequently these days employed against the Palestinians, suicide bombers in particular. The problem is, fanaticism on one side on a conflict will always sooner or later provoke fanaticism on the other.

Here's a quote on the topic from Bertrand Russell, very resonant to today's world. As if in proof that Fanaticism is also perennial, irrespective of its cause, this was written in 1920, about the spread of Bolshevism, and what loomed as a war between Capitalism and Communism. Russell supported the social aims of Bolshevism, but disliked its religious overtones, its "elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures." [Marx and Engels]

    "It cannot be denied that, over any short period of time, dogmatic belief is a help in fighting. If all Communists become religious fanatics, while supporters of capitalism retain a sceptical temper, it may be assumed that the Communists would win, while in the contrary case the capitalists would win. It seems evident, from the attitude of the capitalist world.... that there is no depth of cruelty, perfidy or brutality feom which the present holders of power will shrink when they find themselves threatened.

    "If, in order to oust them, nothing short of religious fanaticism will serve, it is they who are the prime sources of the resultant evil. And it is permissible to hope that, when they have been dis-possessed, fanaticism will also fade, as other fanaticisms have faded in the past."
The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, 1920

2002-04-24T23:56:00.000+10:00

Lest we forget

Tomorrow is ANZAC day, a sombre public holiday in both Australia and New Zealand.

ANZAC stands for 'Australian and New Zealand Army Corps', a combined force that made its military debut as Churchill's cannon fodder at the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, where, thanks to some spectacular political and military incompetence, huge numbers of ANZACs were slaughtered for little gain.

Other countries glorify their great military victories, but not the ANZACs. Despite its abject failure, Gallipoli is commemorated for the heroism and resourcefulness of the ANZAC soldiers. ANZAC has come to stand, in the words of the historian, C.E.W. Bean, "for reckless valour in a good cause, for enterprise, recourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship and endurance"

Indeed, it's sometimes said that ANZAC is the true religion of Australia, and to a great extent I find this is true. As far as traditional religion goes, Australians are admirably casual, and people of diverse and no faiths co-exist better than they seem to anywhere else. Making fun of the established churchs won't ruffle too many Australians, but the legend of ANZAC is sacrosanct, from the near deification of the Gallipoli veterans - there is only one left now, at 104 years of age - to the Mass-like sacrament and rites of the ANZAC Dawn Service.

ANZAC day also has its "hymns" including a moving tribute from Turkey's first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who led an Ottoman regiment in defence against the ANZACs.

I agree we certainly should have a day that honours the Australian servicemen and women who have died for their country. The fact that most of them have been needlessly sent to the other side of the world to do someone else's dirty work - I mean really, what on earth was Australia doing in the Boer War, or Vietnam, or the Falklands? - doesn't negate the bravery of the individuals involved.

But what I do object to is the selective view of history by the current Australian government, which wallows in the ANZAC glory - the nobleness and courage of the lads at Gallipoli reflecting on us all, blah blah - while disowning any collective responsibility for more recent and less palatable eras of Australian history, such as the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their own families. But that's another issue.

I'll be away for a couple of days, and when I return, we'll need to check on those Catholics again. The Pope has spoken, and branded child abuse a crime, not merely a sin. I don't know if I'm impressed or underwhelmed - both, I think. Interesting times are ahead.

2002-04-24T01:13:00.000+10:00

Heal thyself...

"No religion is suddenly rejected by any people; it is rather gradually outgrown. None sees a religion die; dead religions are like dead languages and obsolete customs: the decay is long and -- like the glacier march -- is perceptible only to the careful watcher by comparisons extending over long periods."
Charles Bradlaugh, Humanity's Gain From Unbelief, 1929

Charles Bradlaugh (1833 - 1891), founder of the UK National Secular Society, was an atheist and secularist during an era when such public opinions were not always even legal. (Never afraid of an unpopular cause, he also championed republicanism - in the UK of the 1870's!)

When we do watch religions over long periods, some of the language, at least, barely changes:

    "It is not Romanism, but secularism, that is the most dangerous enemy of true religion today."
The Rev. R. J. Campbell, Liverpool, 1929. (By "true religion", the Rev. was, we can assume, referring to the Church of England)

Over the decades, the Roman Catholics have come in from the cold and joined the chorus:

NY Cardinal O'Connor "...said he saw "secularism" as "the most pernicious of all the threats" facing the Church."
interview with Fr James Murray of The Australian (28 October 1997)

A almost identical statement, citing secularism as the greatest threat to the faith. has been made in recent weeks by the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Archbishop George Pell. The Archbishop has been saying this for years: in 1994, he wrote:
    "The religious tensions today in Australia are not Protestant versus Catholic, not Christian versus other religions, but Christian churches/values versus neo-pagan secularism.'

It's obvious to anyone half awake that the greatest threat to the Catholic Church today is not 'neo-pagan secularism', but the conduct of the Church hierarchy itself. As fun as it is to point out the logical flaws in much religious reasoning, religion is an emotional attachment for most people, not the least those who have been indoctrinated since birth, so much so that even someone who can admit,

    "As an American woman in her 30s, I have always felt equal to men in the workplace and at home. Only at church do I feel an injustice and powerlessness that I encounter in no other area of my life. Only at church am I marginalized."

can also go on to say,

    "I remain Catholic, very simply because I believe that beneath the misguided theology, misogyny and paternalism, there is truth."

But many are not remaining, and not because they run across the ideas of Charles Bradlaugh while net surfing, either.

    "THE first question Boston priest Paul Shanley asked the distraught and fragile young man seeking his counsel was this: How big is your penis? Arthur Austin can still hardly believe it all these years of depression and lost opportunity later. ..."

    "... In 1998, he told the church what had happened, and received an apology and the news that he wasn't Shanley's only victim. Austin says he cried with relief. But when the church sought his silence in a legal settlement, he rebelled. He wanted kindness and healing - "I wanted Christ" - but saw it was really about shutting him up.

    ""The Cardinal and his henchman achieved what Shanley could not - they drove me from the church," he says."

2002-04-19T23:56:00.000+10:00

Orthodoxies

I will be away for a few days, and will return mid next week. Out of cyber range for school holidays. perhaps it will indeed prove 'fabulous not to know what was going on in the Middle East,' that 'strange tragedy from parallel universes.'

On today's political and religious orthodoxies, I leave you with this, from Bertrand Russell:

    "Give me an adequate army, with power to provide it with more pay and better food than falls to the lot of the average man, and I will undertake, within thirty years, to make the majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold, or any other nonsense that might seem to serve the interest of the State.

    "Of course, even when these beliefs had been generated, people would not put the kettle in the ice-box when they wanted it to boil. That cold makes water boil would be a Sunday truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life.

    "What would happen would be that any verbal denial of the mystic doctrine would be made illegal, and obstinate heretics would be 'frozen' at the stake. No person who did not enthusiastically accept the official doctrine would be allowed to teach or to have any position of power.

    "Only the very highest officials, in their cups, would whisper to each other what rubbish it all is; then, they would laugh and drink again."
An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish, 1943

2002-04-19T00:49:00.000+10:00

Thou shalt not...

I know, we weren't going to rant about child abuse again until there was new news, but I couldn't resist this look at the Catholic problem from the point of view of God's laws i.e. the Commandments. The Catholic hierarchy has broken quite a few:

"Those letters [from his Cardinal, praising man-boy love advocate Rev. P Shanley] were as untruthful as the testimony of a mobster on the stand. And what went through my mind was I read them was: You shall not bear false witness."
"You shall not commit adultery. If infidelity to one's spouse is a grave sin, how much graver is infidelity to God, to Whom these men took a vow of chastity?"
"You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. God's name is disgraced whenever religious people, and especially clergy, behave immorally."
"You shall not steal. Theft is not only the stealing of money and property. It is also the stealing of innocence."
"You shall not covet your neighbor's wife. Or your neighbor's sons or daughters, either. The crimes of these men didn't begin with improper fondling or risque suggestions. It began when they let their lust for the forbidden dominate their thoughts."

Oh, and remember too, Thou shalt not kill... "The Chief of Staff of the Dutch army resigned yesterday, a day after the entire cabinet quit in atonement for the role of the Netherlands in the worst massacre of the Bosnian war. .. The government of Wim Kok, the Prime Minister, resigned on Tuesday, admitting that it could have done more to prevent the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims by Serb forces."

The Bosnian Serbs were Orthodox Christians, yet this genocide is never described in the major press as a 'massacre of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Christians.'
Supporters of Islam post Sept 11 point out that, "The massacre of 8,000 unarmed Muslims at Srebrenica never led to a stream of pieces about the violence of Christianity".
Supporters of no faith wonder if airbrushing the murderers' Christianity out of the picture was a collective conscious or subconscious decision. While like the Middle East, there are more than just religious conflicts throughout the Balkans, it does seem a bit weak-stomached.

News is never more than a few degrees away from the Middle East. Here's an old but well researched article from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, rightly castigating the Dutch for their sins of ommision and commission in Srebrenica. However, the article has another purpose - to provide verbal ammunition for Israeli officials to rebut criticisms of Israel doing bad things (e.g. Jenin), on the grounds that the UN and modern Western countries like the Netherlands also do bad things (e.g. Srebrenica).

    "So-called moralists both in Israeli society and abroad frequently claim that Israel should only do things which are internationally acceptable, conveniently ignoring the systematic double-talk of the international community. Another claim is that Western countries are governed by enlightened moral principles, to which Israel should measure up. The Netherlands is one of those most often commended as a shining example of such leadership."

    "... The Dutch double standard may also be viewed from a different angle. Nothing sticks to The Netherlands: their colonial misbehavior; the Dutch authorities' widespread assistance to the German occupiers in arresting and deporting over 100,000 Jews to their deaths during World War II; ... The myth of the benign Dutch is false, but their public relations are excellent. For Israelis who are the victims of double standards, this is something that can be learned from the Dutch."

    "In the coming years, Israel and the Jewish people will have to systematically document and expose the double standard applied against them. Fighting this is becoming a key challenge for Israel. Hopefully, this analysis of the Srebrenica case is a small step forward on this road. ... No Israeli diplomat should be sent abroad without a good knowledge of the literature on the Yugoslav war, which contains a practically unlimited amount of useful information for presenting Israel's case.'"

Well. Still, if crimes are sins, then they can be at least partially absolved by repentance, and "never before has there been an era of such public contrition as that for the mistakes and atrocities of the 20th century."

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan "apologized in Bosnia last October [1999] for the opportunities to "achieve peace and justice that were missed." He singled out the massacre of 7,000 Muslims in Srebrenica by Serbs, saying that tragedy "will haunt our history forever.""

"Mr Annan has also been moved to visit Rwanda, to apologize for failing to staunch the 1994 genocide there that left 800,000 dead." Well, it got him a Nobel Peace Prize, pity about all the dead, though...

2002-04-18T00:52:00.000+10:00

Post-theism

I'm a person of the here and now, and you won't find any deep 'ism's here. With so much of human interest happening each day, I get impatient with sites where authors just endlessly examine their own navels, or worse, their inner thoughts. But I'm in the minority - most people have a definite preference for 'looking for what isn't there' over 'looking at what is there.'

In these complex times, enrolments to study theology are booming. However, the numbers are coming from lay people in search of meaning - of more than 1800 students in Melbourne, "nearly all of them have no wish to wear a dog collar. In a twist to tradition, theology, the study of religion, has gone from being a preparation for preaching to a way of wondering how to live."

"Christian faith is not a necessary prerequisite.

"Hamish Duncan, 29, still has doubts well into his course. "I have a deep feeling for what I think of as God, but I don't know whether I'd consider myself a Christian," he said. Like the others, Mr Duncan, a former casino hand, works parttime to finance his exploration of ideas he believes are ignored by popular culture.

"[College Dean] Dr Reid thinks theology offers a more sophisticated view than that offered by the churches. He said the sex abuse scandals had turned students off the clerical life.

""They're studying purely for their own purposes, not a job," he said.

"The lay boom is not reflected among ordinands, but it touches all denominations. Just 70 of the 230 students at East Melbourne's Catholic Theological College are seminarians. A decade ago, according to college master Father Austin Cooper, the figure was about 100. "The emphasis is now on personal enrichment," he said. ...The focus has shifted from young people seeking ordination to older people wanting an academic basis for their faith."

It can only be an improvement that at least some lay people are no longer taking their faith on faith, as it were, and 'studying theology' has a definite gravitas to it, but it seems to me no more than nostalgia for the old undergrad Comparative Religion and Philosophy 101 days, an emotional support group for those fortunate enough in matters of body to be able to devote time to debating matters of spirit.

And what of the non-Christians studying theology? One supposedly typical student: "She likes the idea of applying academic rigour to such questions as: Does God exist? Well does He/She? After four years studying theology, she still cannot say, but that does not seem to worry her. "I haven't got the answers and, in a way, it doesn't matter. The point is to get a more sophisticated idea of what truth is," she said."

Pardon me asking, but if you don't know whether or not God exists, what are you doing at Theological College? If theological study has degenerated into some kind of secular agnostic self-discovery mission, why not just keep your day job, and hang out where they wallow in this kind of profound meaningful meaninglessness - say, Eve Tushnet's 'Questions for Objectivists'

People who study at Theological College only to conclude that God exists but He is something other than one of the Big Four probably think they have reached a profound conclusion, but they're nowhere near the bounds of free thought.

Bertrand Russell applied his considerable academic rigour to this same question - Does God Exist - and came to the conclusion that he did not. Russell used logic to defeat the common arguments for the existence of God, but freely acknowledged that what really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all, but emotional factors including, 'the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you.'

2002-04-17T01:13:00.000+10:00

Life begins at...

Australia is only now having the debates on human embryo research that have been 'resolved' in countries like the UK. The emotiveness of the issue turns chiefly on whether or not you regard the early embryo as a human being.

The Age reports today that, "This disagreement runs through the religious communities. Faiths disagree among themselves on the issue, churches within the same faith disagree with each other, and even the leaders of some churches disagree with their colleagues."

The article also draws on the findings of the British House of Lords select committee that examined the ethics of this issue. (Why a bunch of over privileged superannuated hereditary peers are qualified to examine the ethics of anything is another matter, but somebody's got to do it.)

To summarize the various positions regarding the early embryo:

The Anglican Primate of Sydney, Archbishop Peter Carnley, has drawn a line in the sand, or rather, in the petri dish. Before 14 days, an embryo is "human genetic material" but not, he says, a "newly conceived human being" - that is, a person.
The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, the Most Rev Peter Jensen: "once the embryo has come into existence it is a human embryo and ought to be given the rights and respect as a human person".
Muslims and Hindus: the embryo is a person from the moment of fertilisation (or fertilization if it is an American embryo)
UK Court of the Chief Rabbi: "Personhood, with its attendant rights and responsibilities, begins at birth,"
Church of England: "developmental view of the emergence of personhood"
Catholics, everywhere: the "moment of conception" is, in fact, fertilization

If you get the feeling that this is not going to end rationally, you're right.

The article concludes:
"The Lords committee was canny enough to appreciate that moral principles are not always observed to the letter by those who preach them. Thus, for instance, Catholic authorities have never required burial rites for miscarried or aborted foetuses and they don't busy themselves baptising stored embryos. If, as the Pope insisted earlier this year, the embryo is to be regarded as an "individual human being with its own identity" then the church seems somewhat careless about attending to its spiritual needs. This kind of inconsistency between principle and practice is not conclusive proof of anything except that absolute positions are not always held absolutely. Moreover, even moral absolutes can conflict."

Australian author Germaine Greer, much of whose most biting prose was actually on reproductive matters rather than gender relations, had already made this exact point nearly 20 years before. In her 1984 book, Sex and Destiny. she wrote the following, (and if you're at all prudish, please don't read it; I've warned you, so don't complain):

"There are millions of people who believe that the immortal human soul comes into being at the moment that the sperm fights through to the nucleus of the ovum; what happens in the petri dish is as wonderful as the Transubstantiation... and therefore they argue passionately that such an event ought not to take place at a biologist's whim.

"It would be consistent to learn from the example, to concern themselves with all circumstances in which conception takes place only to be aborted, all unknown to the parents, who would be horrified and contrite if the fact was brought to their attention.

"A Catholic biologist may baptise the contents of his petri dish before he washes them down the drain. A Catholic woman losing her blastocyst at menstruation has never been told of the possibility that a human life has just ended. It may seem very complicated to keep a jug of holy water beside the lavatory bowl to baptise sanitary napkins with, but it is no more elaborate than many of the rituals which believing people all over the world practise several times every day of their lives.

"It would certainly dramatise the fact that Catholics take life before birth very seriously. The fact that they do not carry out rituals of this kind suggests that in fact they do not really believe what they maintain in polemic. There is after all nothing intrinsically improbable in the idea that the soul comes into existence at the moment of fertilization, but if such a view is to be held, it must be held rigorously as a matter of personal conviction and not simply brandished in arguments with unbelievers."

I... don't think I can add anything to that, so I won't try.

2002-04-15T23:42:00.000+10:00

Quote for today:

    "We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world - its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is, and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole concept of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men ..."

    "... We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages."

    "A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead."
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not A Christian, 1927

2002-04-14T23:38:00.000+10:00

Through a prism, darkly

Here's an interesting article on how someone's faith can color their views on an issue. The scary thing is, the someone is the born again President of the US, and the issue is the Middle East. Journalist Michelangelo Signorile:
"...the more plausible explanation for why this administration tragically bungled the Israeli- Palestinian conflict for weeks is simply that the solutions require creative thinking, something contrary to the black-and-white absolutism of "born-again" evangelical Christianity. Some might think it’s a cheap shot, even intolerant, to bring up Bush’s faith in this regard-but it is Bush himself who has made his faith a public and political issue, exploiting it in speeches about the war on terrorism, referring to God and religion and attacking "evil.""

Everyone's an expert, everyone's a critic. Yes, definitely, being unable to see outside the confines of your faith is a major handicap. But it's hard to see how anyone of any faith, or none, could do anything to defuse the Middle East at the moment.

2002-04-14T23:21:00.000+10:00

The blending of Christ and Caesar

Why, a couple of people have asked me, don't I write anything nice about the good things that Catholics do? Answers:
a. Because, gentle readers, you are simply visiting the wrong web site
b. OK, many Catholics have done a lot of good, but this still doesn't mitigate the culpability of much of the current Church leadership - these people have betrayed not only their direct victims, but their own congregations, many of whom are far better Christians than their priests will ever be.

Many bloggers can say cool things like, 'From where I write, I can see the smoke rising from Ground Zero.' The only exciting thing I can see from where I am is the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade, and this year, as well as the usual Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, it really lampooned the Catholics quite viciously - it'd been a bad year, with Rainbow Sash members refused holy communion and so on.

Afterwards, a lot of Catholics were quite indignant, pointing out that the many gay HIV/AIDS patients in St Vincent's Sacred Heart Hospice - on the very parade route - are cared for lovingly and non-judgementally by Catholic nuns. In the first article above, it's said of a local councilor: "Although he understands that the nuns attempt to mock repressive attitudes in traditional Christianity, he feels there are better ways to get this across. Pointing to the heroic work many real nuns have done in such areas as HIV/AIDS care, he suggested that other targets of wrath, such as dressing up as bishops and cardinals, would be more appropriate." I agree. I'll tell you what happens next year.

And now, being neither gay nor Catholic, I will leave that increasingly tedious field to Andrew Sullivan and his imitators. (Until the next irresistible scandal, of course.) I think Bertrand Russell summed up Catholicism, that most oddest of faiths, very well thus:
"The Catholic Church... represented a blending which would have seemed incredible if it had not been actually achieved, the blending of Christ and Caesar, of the morality of humble submissions with the pride of Imperial Rome."

2002-04-14T00:30:00.000+10:00

United they stand

I promise not to turn into someone who just regurgitates and reposts Andrew Sullivan, but today he provides an example of something that puzzles me. Which is, the phenomenon of a normally lucid and logical thinker, (whether you agree with him or not), losing all reason when his personal take on his religion is challenged.

What has raised Mr Sullivan's ire, in an entry from Friday, April 12, 2002, is a Wall St Journal article (link requires registration) by Phillip Lawler, editor of the Catholic World Report. In it Mr Lawler decribes the fall from credibility of Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law, in the wake of new evidence that he protected man-boy love advocate the Rev. Paul Shanley (see previous posts).

    "The scandal in Boston--like similar stories elsewhere--exposes a grave pattern of institutional corruption. Too many bishops have been serving the interests of their office rather than the needs of the faithful.

    "The fact that this crisis for Catholicism revolves around sexual misconduct is not coincidental either. For too long Catholic pastors have given lip service to the more controversial Church teachings on sexual behavior while quietly tolerating the violation of those norms. Most prelates have chosen to ignore the abundant evidence that many Catholic married couples use contraceptives and that many Catholic priests are active homosexuals. The gross inconsistency between public teaching and private practice has given rise to a culture of hypocrisy and secret vice.

    "I am not ashamed of the Gospel," wrote St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans. And I, for one, am not ashamed of the church's teachings on sexual morality. Like many other Catholics, I am looking for leaders who can say the same."

Now, this is one of the most honest evaluations I've read on the situation by anyone, Catholic or not. However, the author gets lambasted thus by Mr Sullivan:

    "One wacky right-wing Catholic suggests the real problem is that straight Catholics haven't been told firmly enough they need to stop using contraception. ... That's a warning to the straight people struggling to make sense of the Church's teachings on sexual morality: you're next, guys. Even if we have to empty the pews completely to make our point."

"Wacky right-wing Catholic" ! Don't you just love Catholic factionalism? I adore it. The entire ideological spectrum plays out within the Catholic Church - wacky right wingers, liberals, moderates, conservatives, establishment figures, dissidents, reformers. Why does the Catholic Church ape the political scene in a way that other denominations don't - why are we never treated to the views of such as dissident Episcopalians, or far right wing Presbyterians?

And what does it mean? To me, it highlights the fact that the Catholic Church is a creation of men, not of God - and the faithful, clergy and laity alike, regularly mistake the serving of the Church for the serving of God.

Back to the article, and I never thought I would come racing to the defense of a right wing Catholic, but he has a point. The Catholic Church, sensibly or not, bans contraception. It has an each-way bet on homosexuality - loves the sinner but hates the sin - but celibacy is the rule for all priests, regardless of orientation. So, thems the rules; no sex for the priests, no birth control for the faithful, every sperm is sacred.

No Catholic can fail to know this, and yet, what do we have? The majority of Catholic congregations and a fair number of the priests are violating these rules and, nudge nudge wink wink, turning a blind eye to everyone else breaking them too. What kind of basis for sincere worship is it:

When you can pick and choose what you like from the rules and then lay the rest of the rules down for everyone else?
When some church teachings are expected to be obeyed, whereas others, well, don't ask and don't tell, we all understand how difficult it is, nudge nudge...

You knew the rules when you joined the church. I do realise that most Catholics didn't have any choice about joining, but you're still turning up every Sunday and this, as they say, indicates your acceptance of the terms and conditions. The rules on sexual conduct may be reactionary and outdated, but your entire organized Church is reactionary and static, and it is therefore entirely consistent that if you love the Church as you say you do, then you accept all its rules, and you had better obey them to the letter.Anything else is pure hypocrisy.

And I'm tired of and amused by in equal parts, Catholics who keep threatening to leave their church because it doesn't make sense. Just do it, find a decent church and get on with life. There are plenty of churches around who aren't obsessed with the sex lives of their clergy or congregation. I have news for these bristling Catholics - your Church isn't going to care if you all do leave. Organizations like the Catholic Church exist for the primary benefit of their own administration, as the last few month's news has made abundantly clear.

2002-04-12T23:21:00.000+10:00

Princes of peace

As if 'Yassar Arafat receives the Nobel Peace Prize' didn't already sound like the outline of a Monty Python skit, George Bush today referred to Ariel Sharon as, 'A Man of Peace.' Honestly, some of these men of peace, like some of these men of God, are a real menace to everyone.

The US press, a few mavericks excepted, is strongly, conservatively anti-Palestinian, from the mainstream papers to the bloggers, some of whom are at least original - see AsparaGirl on Wednesday, April 10, 2002.
    "So when I hear Palestinians screaming in the streets or interviewed on the news saying they want Israel to get the hell out of the West Bank, but who also have no internal system in place, not even a nascent one, for potentially dealing with the resulting power vacuum that would create, much less running a country some day, it's telling. Who do they think is going to run the place once they don't have the Israelis to kick around anymore?"

    "What say we give the Arab world a little rope in the form of an independent Palestine? We remove the Israeli- Palestinian smokescreen they use to hide all of their troubles. We say look, they're on their own, just like they wanted, and they have nothing to show for it but infighting and pointing fingers. We remove ourselves from their world just as they've demanded, and with that, not coincidentally, all traces of democracy or hope for a fair legal and judicial system evaporates too. And who will get blamed then? The Palestinians should be very careful what they wish for; they just might get it."

Americans do seem to bring a lot of baggage to writing about the Middle East. Their country is Israel's ally, its democratic mentor, its benefactor to the tune of billions of dollars a year, its partner in zillions worth of arms deals, the Great Satan, the Great Bully, the lightening rod for fanatical Arab anti-everythingism, taken for a sucker by the duplicitous Saudi anti-Semites. So, you can comprehend their 'ride in with a posse and kick butt,' attitudes - and I happen to agree they should do something very like that - but they do get tedious to read.

For Jewish-American commentators, it must be even more difficult to eye the conflict coolly. Here are two entirely different views of the conflict from two Australian Jewish writers.

    "What is a Jew with a moral conscience meant to do in these dark days of "Arik" Sharon's Palestinian putsch?... Do I keep my mouth shut as we witness the amazingly disproportionate use of force by the Israeli Defence Forces against what are essentially the wrong targets? ... Is it "breaking ranks" to be Jewish and to criticise Israel's terrible government now that Israel has unilaterally declared war on the Palestinian Authority? Or is standing up for what is right still seen as a positive attribute?

    "While Sharon spends much of his nation's resources fighting the Palestinian Authority, the facts are that most of the terrorist suicide bombings have been by Hamas and/or the smaller Islamic Jihad. ... So every time the religious fundamentalists kill a score of Israelis, Israel responds by attacking Hamas's secular rivals. It is, indeed, a bizarre policy ...

    "The revisionist descendants of Ze'ev Jabotinksi have a bottom line of "whatever it takes". They do not see parallels between their behaviour and that of other oppressors, and they scream the loudest when the words genocide and ethnic cleansing are applied to their policies, particularly when it is true."

    "Still no one protests as Jews are killed ... Between 1933 and 1945, six million Jews were murdered in full view of the entire world. Hitler banked on world indifference to the plight of the Jews in his plan to destroy them, and the world did not let him down. ... Why were the Jews of Europe abandoned by the whole world?

    "It is this indifference to Jewish suffering that lies at the heart of both the approach by the Israeli
Government to the wave of terrorism that has seen the slaughter and maiming of countless of its citizens in the past 18 months and the cynicism of world Jewry to the biased and hypocritical responses to Israel's actions.

    "The cry "Never again!" that resonated in the death camps and ghettos of Europe after their liberation at the end of the Second World War can again be heard in the streets, schools and homes of the state of Israel."

2002-04-12T21:54:00.000+10:00

Office romance

The Melbourne Anglican Church is taking a dim view of relationships between clergy and their parishioners.
"The Catholic Church is not the only one going to inordinate lengths to try to prevent clergy sex abuse. Though the charges against their clergy have been many fewer, the Anglican and other Protestant churches have also developed wide-ranging rules to ensure the correct behaviour of their priests and ministers.

"Most of the new requirements are entirely proper, but one protocol is causing concern in the Anglican Church, at least. Single clerics, the rule says, may no longer form romantic attachments with a member of their congregation. If they do, either the lay person must leave the parish or the clergyperson must resign from the position, as the Melbourne Anglican Church's code of good practice for clergy, published last year, makes clear."

The author argues this is a bad thing - where else can a priest find someone so spiritually in sync than among his own congregation? Good priests will respect both their position and their partners, and bad priests will use their pastoral authority to lure people into bed, and if there's one thing we know, there are good and bad priests everywhere.

Speaking of bad priests, another Catholic Priest Sexual Offender Suicide, this time in the US, buried with a full Catholic Mass and a weeping congregation.

How can Catholics treat innocent children so badly and their perpetrators so well? Don't tell me about compassion - there was precious little compassion from the Church for the child victims who dared to complain over the years.

2002-04-11T23:58:00.000+10:00

Let no man put asunder

Tunku Varadajaran, in todays WSJ, deplores 'Another troubling marriage of Muslim backwardness and high technology.' He's not thinking of nomadic tribesmen wielding Stinger anti-aircraft missles, but a Muslim man who divorced his wife by email.

    "There's a dark side to the interface between faith and the Internet, and much of it has to do with the crossover of politics into religion. Religious hatred is much more easily spread in cyberspace, as is intolerance of theological dissent, or of unorthodox variations on religious convention. And there is, sometimes, a wholly disconcerting juxtaposition of the primitive or medieval (religious bigotry) with the modern (swiftness of communication).

    Yesterday, I came across one such creepy incongruity, the example of a Muslim man who e-mailed the words Talaq, talaq, talaq--the Arabic for "I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee"--to his wife, and successfully carried off a divorce that was entirely in accordance with Islamic law. Although the specific case appears to be benign--and involves a highly educated Muslim couple who agreed to the transaction for mutual ease--I fear for the consequences of such quickie "e- divorces," should they catch on, on the generally oppressed women in the Islamic world. Under Islamic law, a man need do no more to divorce his wife than utter Talaq, talaq, talaq in the presence of two witnesses. Alternatively, he can simply convey the three words to his wife in written form, and here no witnesses are required."

After a Muslim women has been served with Talaq. talaq .talaq, however it happens, there is in theory at least no religious bar on remarriage. This is clearer than the situations within some other religions, there being a 'bewildering range of prohibitions, restrictions, customs, laws and rituals' in the area of divorce, remarriage, and religion.

If other people's sex lives are intensely interesting to the religious, their marital lives seem hardly less so. ReligiousTolerance.org, a peculiar site where Christians share space with Wiccans, Pagan, NeoPagans and Scientologists, has data on the comparative divorce rates between faiths. Atheists and Agnostics, according to what sounds like something of a dodgy survey, have a lower divorce rate than both conservative and moderate Christians.

    'Ron Barrier, Spokesperson for American Atheists remarked on these findings with some rather caustic comments against organized religion. He said: "These findings confirm what I have been saying these last five years. Since Atheist ethics are of a higher calibre than religious morals, it stands to reason that our families would be dedicated more to each other than to some invisible monitor in the sky. With Atheism, women and men are equally responsible for a healthy marriage. There is no room in Atheist ethics for the type of 'submissive' nonsense preached by Baptists and other Christian and/or Jewish groups. Atheists reject, and rightly so, the primitive patriarchal attitudes so prevalent in many religions with respect to marriage."'

I worry about these 'American Atheists', just as much as I worry about the Catholics. Avoiding dogma and moral superiority is good advice for everyone.

2002-04-10T23:43:00.000+10:00

Middle.... of nowhere

Just as some commentators had begun to opine that the latest Israeli offensive had stilled the suicide bombings, BOOM, there goes another one - 10 commuters killed in a bus explosion in Haifa.

There are zillions of words printed on the Middle East conflict, yet it's hard to find much agreement on anything, even - especially - on the basics, such as how did all this start, and whose fault is it. The causes surely go back centuries, yet columnists will often point to, as suits their story, one recent happening that started it all.

As for who's right or wrong, although there are only two sides, one or other of them suits almost every major prejudice. If you're uninformed and:

anti-Semitic
anti-Zionist (some argue this is not the same as the above)
anti-Arab
anti-Muslim
anti-American
anti-Imperialist
always on the side of the underdog

then it's no secret whose side you'll be on, and whichever one it is and why, you'll find plenty of commentators to agree with. Since many people exhibit more than one of these biases, their position on the Middle East will depend on which one is stronger.

This also occupies the columnists. How often, really, can you write the same things about revenge, retribution and escalation? Much more interesting to shoot at your ideological opponents, and there is much dogma, religious and otherwise, among commentators on either side of this conflict.

Bertrand Russell regarded 'dogmatic creeds' as the main enemy of free thought, and while religions were the main dogmatic creeds to which he objected, he counted Communism and Nazism as 'religions' also, to which today we might add the many flavors of Middle Eastern nationalism and self-determinism. Russell's last writing, two days before his death at the age of ninety-seven, was a message to the International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo. It condemned Israel for bombing Egypt, and noted that to "invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy."

2002-04-10T23:41:00.000+10:00

Book 'em, Danno

Even in the most provincial corners of far-flung Australasia we get an endless diet of American cop and lawyer shows. but despite this cultural heritage I really can't see how Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law, that great protector of pedophiles, is keeping out of jail, let alone keeping his job. America is the most litigious place on earth - we all know that only in America, you can sue McDonalds because your hot cup of coffee is hot. So, seriously, why is Cardinal Law not facing big time criminal negligence charges?

A NYT article from the weekend, Abuses by Clergy Become New Focus for Prosecutors (link requires registration) reports that the gloves are starting to come off. ""I've watched law enforcement deal with church authorities for decades, and a monumental change has swept the country in the last few months," said A. W. Richard Sipe, a retired psychologist who has appeared as an expert witness in more than 50 sexual abuse trials. "Prosecutors are not acting as timidly in the face of the church as they once did."

Indeed, a few Catholic prosecutors are bringing a missionary zeal to their task. 'In Sonoma County, the district attorney, J. Michael Mullins, has pursued priestly abusers with unusual determination. "God intends me to do my duty under the law," Mr. Mullins, who is Catholic, said.'

Now, more damning evidence has appeared over Cardinal Law's core role in defending another priestly abomination, the Rev. Paul Shanley. The Boston Globe reports that, "Documents from the church itself, released under court order, show definitively that church officials were aware of Shanley's predatory sexual practices with young boys in his charge over a period of decades and did almost nothing about it. Despite repeated warnings of Shanley's depravity, the archdiocese took only evasive action, shifting him to a Newton parish, placing him on sick leave, and finally shunting him off to a California parish with a note from Bishop Robert J. Banks, top deputy to Cardinal Bernard Law, certifying that Shanley was ''a priest in good standing.''"

Today's NY Times give us details of the Rev. Shanley's activities:

Gave public and impassioned defenses of pedophilia, including comments at what was apparently the formative meeting in Boston of the North American Man-Boy Love Association in 1979
Is quoted as saying, about pedophilia, "The adult is not the seducer — the `kid' is the seducer, and further the kid is not traumatized by the act per se, the kid is traumatized when the police and authorities `drag' the kid in for questioning."
Called 6 year old boys out of catechism classes, to molest them in the bathroom, the rectory or the confessional.
'Came on to' a hospital patient by explicitly discussing sadomasochism
According to the Globe, once transferred to the unsuspecting San Bernadino diocese, Shanley and another priest operated a bed-and-breakfast for gay customers 50 miles away in Palm Springs, rented to gay patrons and advertised in gay publications.

I am not making this up; I only wish I was. The Reverend is currently on 'sick leave'. 'Reverend', incidentally, means 'worthy of respect, adoration, and veneration'. Sick, sick indeed.

2002-04-08T22:11:00.000+10:00

Suffer the little children...

Sometimes this seems like a dedicated anti child abuse site, but that's the lot of anyone writing about religion in the news nowadays. On Saturday, the Vatican accepted the resignation of Irish Bishop Brendan Comiskey, of the southeast diocese of Ferns, after he admitted having mishandled years of complaints of sexual abuse by priests, in particular the Rev. Sean Fortune, who faced 66 counts of molesting and raping teen-age boys when he committed suicide in 1999.

In NY Times article Scandal and Social Change Leave Irish Church Adrift (link requires registration) author Dan Barry writes:

    "As American Catholics struggle with revelations of child molestation and cover-ups by the clergy, they might glimpse their future here: where modernization and scandal have cost the Catholic Church in influence and participation; where religious orders are relinquishing convents and property to appease adult victims of childhood abuse; and where some Catholics see a "fire in the forest" opportunity for the seeding of a more inclusive church."

Barry uses the phrase 'post-Catholic Ireland'. I had not heard of 'post-Catholic', but I guess we can expect a wave of post-Catholic weblogs any day now.

Ireland, that most quintessentially Catholic of all countries, has had some sick abuse cases, and not all of the 'misunderstood repressed gay overcome by the power of healthy youth' variety. "In 1992 the country learned that Eamon Casey, the well-known bishop of Galway, had fathered a child 18 years earlier, deserted the mother and child for years, then used diocesan funds to try and buy their silence."

Of Father Fortune himself, the article reports, 'Before washing down barbiturates with whiskey, he dressed in his priest's garb and placed a poem he had written, "A Message From Heaven to My Family," on a dressing table, along with instructions that it be read at his funeral Mass.'

Give a poor atheist a break, but isn't suicide a mortal sin? Shouldn't raping boys be a mortal sin, if in fact it isn't? Aren't sinners supposed to go to Hell, not send us messages from Heaven? Was the Father hoping to enter Heaven on some tide of forgiveness and compassion from his mourners? Say fifty 'Hail Mary's, and also say this fifty times, fifty thousand times, until you and all your co-worshippers get it:

    'Child abuse is a crime to be punished, not a sin to be absolved.'
    'Child abuse is a crime to be punished, not a sin to be absolved.'
    'Child abuse is a crime to be punished, not a sin to be absolved.'

2002-04-08T20:43:00.000+10:00

God Save the Queen, somebody save her Church

Sometimes, modernization just serves to highlight how archaic an institution really is. The death of the Queen Mother, as well as causing a torrent of grief and hagiography, has also reportedly allowed the Queen to move ahead on some pretty radical reforms including, "Daughters of the monarch would gain equal rights to succession and the 300-year-old ban on Catholics sitting on the throne would end."

Gracious me, women and Catholics, they don't make royal families the way they used to. Britain's Mail on Sunday newspaper said that, 'the Queen had waited for her mother's death before moving because the Queen Mother had believed there was no need for change.'

'It is understood that Prince Charles supports lifting the ban on Catholic monarchs, which would break the link whereby the king or queen automatically becomes head of the Church of England.' It will be most interesting, if this happens, to see how the head of the Church of England will be appointed. And females or not, the sucession is still hereditary. A Catholic monarch would have to come about by, say, Prince William falling for a lovely Catholic lass, and agreeing to bring up their firstborn in her religion, as a Catholic. Or, Prince William or one of his children converting to Catholicism. The mind boggles.

'The winds of change are already blowing, with Princess Anne last week breaking with tradition and marching with male members of the royal family behind her grandmother's coffin.' Defying the old fogeys to pay your personal respects to your own grandmother - go girl! Princess Anne, of course, is no stranger to the silliness of things. When she remarried in the early 1990s, she was forced to do so in the Church of Scotland, since the Church of England, of which her own Mum is the boss, officially forbids the remarriage of divorced people.

If Prince Charles, himself enamoured of the divorced adulteress Camilla, somehow became King but not head of the C of E, then its ban on remarriage could be lifted by someone else, without Charles having such an obvious personal conflict of interest. Entertaining times are ahead.

2002-04-07T22:02:00.000+10:00

Out and Proud

Just one more exercise,and we're done with the word processor. Take this article called Coming Out, and change all instances of 'Atheist' to 'Gay'.

Huh, what? American Atheists offer this lengthy, serious and sad advice column on how atheists might cope with 'outing themselves' and coming out to their spouses, families and friends.

"'Coming out of the closet' is a term most associated with gays and lesbians announcing to the world that they are homosexual. Few regret it, having found their way toward a more open and satisfying life. But there is another closet which is hiding a different minority: atheists. Many of us, like many gays of previous decades, hide in the shadows due to fear of hostility and aversion to confrontations."

Well, you could have fooled me, from the huge online presence of self-titled atheists, humanists, rationalists, secularists, agnostics and freethinkers, the last two terms being, in the author's opinion, terms that people use to 'soften the blow' of being an atheist. The article lists in ascending order the degrees of 'outness' for an atheist, ranging from:

"Degree 1:Completely closeted. Not even your spouse knows. You tell everyone you're a believer, and you may even attend church services to convince those around you. You're living a lie, terrified that someone may learn the truth."

all the way to

"Degree 5: Completely open. Every time the subject comes up, you state your disbelief with pride and frankness. Anyone who doesn't like you because of your atheism is a bigot and is not your concern. You've written letters to the editors of newspapers on the topic, and you may have an atheist bumper sticker on your car."

and includes a guide to 'Coming out: How, when, and how soon.' It's totally bizarre, the concept of atheists as oppressed victims terrified into silence. Perhaps in some of the very conservative areas of the US it may be like this, but I suspect atheists everywhere else - and their spouses, families and friends - are totally relaxed about it.

2002-04-07T01:46:00.000+10:00

If the prose fits, wear it

Still, you can take the word processor to much religious criticism. Take this comment from a New Humanist article:

"In one of his early works the traditionalist writer Frithjof Schuon makes an acute observation about the mentality of Muslims: `The intellectual - and thereby the rational - foundation of Islam results in the average Muslim having a curious tendency to believe that non-Muslims either know that Islam is the truth and reject it out of pure obstinacy, or else are simply ignorant of it and can be converted by elementary explanations; that anyone should be able to oppose Islam with a good conscience quite exceeds the Muslim's powers of imagination, precisely because Islam coincides in his mind with the irresistible logic of things'. (Stations of Wisdom). How true this is will strike anyone who has tried to have a rational discussion on religion with a Muslim born of Muslim parents and raised in a Muslim culture."

If I replace Muslim with Christian, does it still strike me as true? Um... yes. I have known some Christians like this, and I have also had many polite and respectful discussions on religion with Christians. But having a 'capital R' Rational discussion with a member of any organized religion is both by definition and by my own experience an impossibility - not because they are raving and ranting, but simply because they are willing to suspend logic and I am not.

Here's someone else who won't suspend logic - Thomas Doubting (sure) of the Secular Web has tables illustrating the popular Christian denominations' divergence on core Christian matters such as salvation, hell, and the Holy Trinity. Muslims, of course, think Christians are polytheistic for having a Holy Trinity at all. Things would certainly be clearer if all the 'people of the book' were reading from the same book.

On salvation, 'not only are Christians in disagreement regarding how one is saved, they can’t seem to reach agreement on what one is saved from or where the faithful go after they are saved. Moreover, every denomination I researched has millions of followers, so no matter how you cut it, many people who think they are Christians are going to a yet-undefined hell.'

2002-04-07T01:39:00.000+10:00

Everyone's a critic

Some topics have been talked to death recently. The sexual deceit of the Catholic church is one of them, and another is the violence perpetrated by adherents of Islam, that religion of peace.

Any Bertrand Russell fan analyzing the shortcomings of Islam will soon learn of Ibn Warraq's book, 'Why I am not a Muslim', its title taken straight from Russell's 1927 classic essay, 'Why I am not a Christian'. When I first heard of this book I thought the idea was hilarious and imagined some guy at a word processor, doing a 'Replace All' of the string 'Christian' with 'Muslim'.

Ibn Warraq didn't actually do this - though some topics aren't too tightly organized, his book is thoroughly researched and includes chapters on issues like the Salman Rushdie fatwa. Some of his criticisms of Islam closely parallel Russell's criticisms of Christianity, but if both Christ and Muhammad had character defects and if both the Bible and the Quran have major authenticity problems, who can help that?

Oddly enough, very few of the book's reviews mention the author's debt to Bertrand Russell, even though Russell's influence is clearly obvious in much of Warraq's writing, including this Guardian article shortly after Sept 11:

"Aldous Huxley once defined an intellectual as someone who had found something in life more important than sex: a witty but inadequate definition, since it would make all impotent men and frigid women intellectuals. A better definition would be a freethinker, not in the narrow sense of someone who does not accept the dogmas of traditional religion, but in the wider sense of someone who has the will to find out, who exhibits rational doubt about prevailing intellectual fashions, and who is unafraid to apply critical thought to any subject. If the intellectual is really committed to the notion of truth and free inquiry, then he or she cannot stop the inquiring mind at the gates of any religion - let alone Islam."

Judging by Amazon, sales of this book have boomed since Sept. 11, but it puzzles me why as far as I remember there was no huge Muslim fuss about its publication in 1995. It is unsparingly, scathingly, heretically critical of Islam, a magnitude more so than the turgid 'Satanic Verses' that caused such a massive international Islamic hissy fit.

So where on earth these same people when Warraq went into print, claiming that, 'that Muhammad never existed, and if he did, he had nothing to do with the Koran. Rather, that holy book was fabricated a century or two later in Palestine, then "projected back onto an invented Arabian point of origin."'

Ibn Warraq is the pseudonym of an Indian-born author living, supposedly, in Ohio, but surely people fanatical enough to march and chant fatwas in the quiet streets of suburban Sydney, Australia, as they did, could have tracked this guy down. He appeared at a book signing just last week, at an American Atheists convention.

2002-04-06T02:21:00.000+10:00

No goat like an old goat

Variety is the spice of life - and of clerical sex abuse cases. Today in Melbourne, Australia,
'Three young women fell pregnant to a Buddhist monk, 82, who abused them while acting as their spiritual adviser, a Melbourne court has heard. Ajarn Manivong used his reputation as a healer and Buddhism teacher to induce five victims, aged 13 to 24, to engage in various sexual acts with him, the County Court was told.

Three of the victims became pregnant as a result of his offences, which took place between 1998 and 2001, the prosecution said. He was originally charged with 45 counts, including rape and sexual penetration of a child. He has instead pleaded guilty to five counts of procuring sex by fraudulent means, which carries a lesser maximum penalty of five years' jail.

Defence barrister John Saunders conceded that his client's conduct was reprehensible and involved a serious breach of trust. However, he argued that Manivong - who had explained his offending as "a moment of weakness" - lived an otherwise exemplary life. He argued 'that Manivong's crimes were at "the lower end of the scale" and in view of his age and previous reputation, urged the judge to consider imposing a sentence that did not involve an immediate jail term. The Crown did not dispute this submission.'

Apart from being disgusting, there are several things wrong here. I know lawyers who accept child rapists as clients are pretty low in the moral order, but since when was a near-80 year old forcing a 13 year old into sex 'the lower end of the scale'? How can someone charged with rape of a child be allowed to plead to a lesser charge? How does this creep's exemplary reputation lessen the impact of his crimes on his victims?

I venture to suggest that if this monk been, instead, a Catholic priest, he'd have been treated much, much tougher. Sex abuse and Catholic priests are linked in the public mind at the moment, whereas Tibet's so groovy and we tend to have a more benign stereotype of Buddhist monks. Also, just perhaps there's some kind of subconscious male admiration - the criminal legal practitioners in Australia are overwhelmingly male - for the virility of this old goat, who at the age of nearly 80 can still get it up, when he should be tucked up in bed early with a cup of tea reading the thoughts of the Dalai Lama. Who knows.

Organization theory

Who knows, also, what an industrial psychologist would make of the various religious org charts. Does it work out better to have one infallible guy at the top, like the Pope? Nobody argues that he's the boss, and he makes the rules, though when he's old and tired, it can look like no-one's minding the store.

That still might be better than modern-day Islam, where militant Mullahs and Imams and Muftis seem to pop up everywhere, echoing distant proclamations of jihads, fatwas and general hate-mongering. Our Islamic Fifth Column is an old article, but a scary one. The Muslim opposition to fanatical Saudi Wahhibism, while genuinely there, is decentralized - there is no single internationally recognized authority to thump the table and declare, for the sake of the whole Islamic family, that some if its members should be thrown out of the compound.

The Buddhists have a novel approach - the positions at the top are few and well-defined, but you have to get reincarnated into them. As you can imagine, this can prove problematic - establishing beyond doubt that a particular child genuinely is the seventeenth Jebtzun Damba or whatever it is is fraught with obstacles, ranging from simple fraud to arcane obfuscation.

And I'm coming back as Nicole Kidman

The problem with not having an exact science is nowhere better illustrated than by the case of the Panchen Lama, or rather, the two Panchen Lamas. One is the 'real' 13 year old Panchen Lama, recognized by the real Dalai Lama, who is reportedly being held as a political prisoner by the Chinese. The Chinese have chosen to recognize an alternate Panchen Lama, who may someday supervise the search for the next Dalai Lama. This Panchen Lama they parade around regularly, and like those toy dolls, he has a button which you press and he spouts Chinese Government orthodoxy. A sort of 'Man in the Iron Mask' tale in the making.

In another old but classic piece, Christopher Hitchens, having skewered Mother Teresa, give his take on the state of Buddhism:

'Steven Seagal, the robotic and moronic "actor" who gave us "Hard to Kill" and "Under Siege," has been proclaimed a reincarnated lama and a sacred vessel or "tulku" of Tibetan Buddhism. This decision, ratified by Penor Rinpoche, supreme head of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism, was initially received with incredulity by Richard Gere, who had hitherto believed himself to be the superstar most favored. "If someone's a tulku, that's great," he was quoted as saying. "But no one knows if that's true." How insightful, if only accidentally.'

''While he denies being a Buddhist "Pope," the Dalai Lama is never happier than when brooding in a celibate manner on the sex lives of people he has never met. "Sexual misconduct for men and women consists of oral and anal sex," he has repeatedly said in promoting his book on these matters. "Using one's hand, that is sexual misconduct." '

That, and sex with 13 year olds.

2002-04-04T23:28:00.000+10:00

An old fight, but a good one

Today, the Australian Prime Minister John Howard announced that he supported using embryos left over from IVF in stem cell research. Or, as they put it on TV, he 'came down on the side of science,' against opposition from, of course, the churches. This surprised many people, Mr Howard himself being a socially conservative Methodist.

Science versus religion, with ethics thrown in - what huge fun! While stem cell research is a serious topic, the recent debate in Australia has been quite entertaining, with all the usual suspects coming out of the woodwork:

    Some Archbishops have proposed that people be allowed to adopt the embryos. Sydney's Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen has compared stem cell research to human cloning experiments by wartime Nazi doctors. (Somehow, an issue just isn't complete until someone's mentioned the Nazis. Those of you who came to weblogs via newsgroups will know of Godwin's Law, which says that whoever first mentions the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.)

    The Catholic Health Australia CEO says, "It's basically that in these circumstances it's OK to destroy human life." (Northern Ireland, anyone?) In fact, the embryos involved are used only with the permission of their donor parents, and if not used for research, would be destroyed anyway.

    Sydney's preeminient Rabbis, Rabbi Raymond Apple, Rabbi Moshe Gutnick, say that, 'Human life, even potential life, is sacred and must be respected.' (West Bank, anyone?)

    The New South Wales State Premier (like a US State Governor) goes boots and all over to the other side, "It is almost time, I think, to recollect what happened to other great scientists pushing the boundaries of research, such as Galileo. History shows we must honour scientific inquiry over unbased fears."

Churches are such an easy target at the moment that it's almost unfair, and their attempts to moralize over this issue have raised a few hackles, with the sexual abuse scandals still very much on the radar. (In Australia recently, the worst fuss over clerical child sex abuse has involved the Anglican Church, and one day soon I will tell you all the cautionary tale of Australia's Governor General, the ex-Archbishop of Brisbane.)

But as one SMH reader says, 'Do church leaders believe that by lobbying to "save" embryos, they will somehow receive absolution for the abuse of children under their care?' Unarguably, the churches have only themselves to blame, for such a fall in their moral authority.

And it's almost funny to watch an organization that finds it impossible to present a consistent moral stance on the most simplest of reproductive technologies (ie. have sex regularly, and babies will keep coming along) grapple with the ethics of reproduction in the age of IVF and genetic engineering. It's too boring to go on about the Vatican's ban to this day on artificial methods of birth control. But you don't see Catholic families of 8 or 9 or more kids these days, and we know that abstinence doesn't work for man or priest, and someone has doubtless done the figures on the failure rates of the Rhythm and Billings Methods and figured out that we should at least see some slightly larger than average Catholic families, but we don't.

Let's leave these things to the professional ethicists, and that does not mean the churches - or the scientists either. Here's a sensible article by the director of the Monash [University] Centre for the Study of Ethics in Medicine and Society, saying 'We should openly acknowledge that these debates raise difficult issues to which there are no definitive solutions. This means we need to find complex, negotiated compromises that respect different views and sensitivities.'

And the last word goes as always to Bertrand Russell:

"The fact is that religion is no longer sufficiently vital to take hold of anything new, it was formed long ago to suit certain needs, and has subsisted by the force of tradition, but is no longer able to assimilate anything that cannot be viewed traditionally.'
Prospects of Industrial Civilization, 1923

"And science, while it diminishes our cosmic pretensions, enormously increases our terrestrial comfort. That is why, in spite of the horror of the theologians, science has on the whole been tolerated."
In Praise of Idleness, 1935

2002-04-04T21:33:00.000+10:00

O little town of Bethlehem

Right now, in the very birthplace of Jesus, a Christian priest is pleading for the lives of the Muslims and Christians who have sought sanctuary in the Church of the Nativity, now under seige by Jewish troops. There is a horrid symbolism in all this, though of what I can't say.

WWJD - What would Jesus do? - is often invoked by Christians in difficult situations. I don't mean to be flippant, but I believe I know what Jesus is doing. He's in a pub somewhere in the hereafter, and he's with Karl Marx, and they're both crying on each other's shoulders about how it all seemed such a good idea at the time, until we all came along and terminally screwed things up.

2002-04-04T21:32:00.000+10:00

Catholics in (cyber) space

Peter Nixon, of one of the few readable Catholic blogs, 'Sursum Corda' mails me of 'a good friend who became an atheist after reading Bertrand Russell.' This is quite cheery news, when you consider that it normally goes the other way - people convert after reading one or other of the holy books.

I knew as a child that I was not a Christian, but it wasn't until my twenties that I discovered Bertrand Russell, and the delight of someobody eloquent beyond my dreams, who was saying everything that I had always thought.

In 1960's New Zealand, where I went to school, there was no division between religion and state education, and nuns would come to our primary school once a week. They lent us little books - blank books containing only four pages, colored black, red, white and gold, and we turned the pages as we droned the following: "My heart was black as sin, I let His blood run in, It washed me white as snow, I walk the streets of gold." In the absence of any other supporting information from the nuns, this did not prove at all enlightening to me as an 8 year old, and it wasn't long before I concluded that whatever it was that these odd people believed, I didn't.

Why are there so many more Catholic blogs than other Christian - (what do you like to be called?) - faiths, sub-faiths, denominations, sects, cults? Perhaps all those Catholic schools are teaching them all to write so well.

2002-04-03T22:35:00.000+10:00

Of little faith

Faith, I'm told, is why people remain loyal to the religious institutions which ignore, exclude and demean them. Gays, women, the divorced, the remarried, the unmarried parents, a huge swathe of the faithful are regarded with profound disrespect by their own churches. Gays are denied communion, women are denied ordination, divorcees are denied acknowledgment. People are treated in a way that they would never tolerate from their employers, their government organizations or even their own families; yet they go back every Sunday for more.

To an atheist, this is worrying behavior. If the Catholic Church was a public company, in its current state and with its current CEO, you'd be shorting your shares, not bringing your newborn children to this institution and asking it to protect them. Faith, whatever it is, evidently provides comfort and compensation all its own, but some of the most logical people are quite dotty on matter of faith, and I can't help thinking that whatever faith gives you, it takes a few of your brain cells to pay for it.

As Bertrand Russell says:
"We may define "faith" as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When there is evidence, no-one speaks of "faith". We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.'
Human society in Ethics and Politics, 1955

'..religious apologists are engaged in blunting the edge of logic, appealing to the heart instead of the head, maintaining that our feelings can demonstrate the falsity of a conclusion to which our reason has been given.'
The Scientific Outlook, 1931

2002-04-02T23:08:00.000+10:00

Don't mention the war

Evil changes face, and Adolf Hitler does not come often to my mind these days, except for last week when two very different articles appeared, one referring to him as a Christian and the other, as a pagan.

In a rave in the weekend Guardian, rebel UK journalist Julie Birchill accuses Adolf Hitler of being a Catholic, and 'accuses' is an apt word here, as Ms Burchill has a very low opinion of Catholicism. On Hitler:

    'And how do Catholics explain the fact that so many of their European co-religionists fell in behind Hitler (himself a Catholic), while the far more racially pure - and Protestant - people of Scandinavia behaved so excellently?'

Earlier in the week, Robert Bartley in the WSJ argues that 'the Nazi leaders and ideologues were not Christians. They were pagan, some quite explicitly.'

Hmmm... explicit paganism and Christianity are far from mutually exclusive, and many of the best-loved rites and symbols of Christianity are of pagan origin. Easter itself is adapted, complete with eggs and bunnies, from a pagan spring ritual.

The WSJ article also describes Nazi plans for '..the National Church. Its altars would have only a copy of "Mein Kampf," with a sword to the left. The Christian Cross would be removed, replaced "by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika."'

OK, so now we are getting pretty pagan. This sounds like nothing so much as a scene in a 70's B movie. It's good, actually, that the mystique of Nazi imagery can debase with time into the realm of corny airport thrillers.

Once on the topic of Nazis and Mein Kampf, one's thoughts turn towards.. the late Queen Mother. Now, while I support an Australian Republic I nevertheless offer my condolences to the British Royal Family, while at the same time wishing all elderly ladies everywhere her comforts and advantages.

Just one last comment on pagan rituals - Prince Charles has chastised the venerable BBC because their newsreader was not wearing a black tie when he made the live announcement of the Queen Mother's death on BBC Television. Duh?

Goodness knows what the Prince would make of some of the current complaints, in Australia at least, about the overly saccharine and grovelling obituaries for a lady about whom the best that can be said is that she did not monumentally screw up her position of privilege.

Many of the tributes credit the Queen Mother and her husband, King George VI, with a major role in encouraging wartime Britain to stand alone against the Nazi onslaught. The truth is far less flattering, as Sydney writer Gerard Henderson points out:

    'These days the Queen Mother and her late husband, George VI, are most often praised for rallying the British during World War II. There was the courageous Winston Churchill (as prime minister) and the King and Queen standing up against the might of Nazi totalitarianism. The task was even more difficult due to the fact that, during the early part of the war, Germany was in an alliance with the Soviet Union and the US was neutral.

The plot is accurate enough. But some of the actors are miscast. The King and Queen are famous today for the role during World War II only because their advice was rejected by a majority of British politicians. The fact is that in the late 1930s George VI and his wife were among the main cheerleaders in favour of Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Hitler. Had the monarchy's advice been accepted, the Nazis would have conquered continental Europe.The full (sorry) tale is spelt out by Andrew Roberts in his book Eminent Churchillians.'

    '...in November 1939 she sent Halifax [who, along with PM Chamberlain, was stongly in favour of appeasing Hitler] a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf. In her accompanying letter, the Queen Mother made reference to Hitler's "obvious sincerity". Really.'

2002-04-01T20:25:00.000+10:00

Advice from the past

News stories this weekend mention the unique difficulties that Catholic clergy worldwide are having with the 2002 Easter message. Normally time for a message of hope, this year the disgrace of the Church's complicity in child abuse stands like the proverbial elephant in the middle of the living room, and to their credit, most Catholic leaders are at least no longer even attempting to ignore it.

In such internal struggles for meaning, an outside view is useful, and who better from than the 20th century's greatest thinker, Bertrand Russell. Russell was a rationalist and an atheist - would that religious leaders today had even half his grasp of morality.

"The first and greatest change that is required is to establish a morality of initiative, not a morality of submission, a morality of hope rather then fear, of things to be done rather than things to be left undone. It is not the whole duty of man to slip through the world so as to escape the wrath of God. The world is our world, and it rests with us to make it a heaven or a hell."
Bertrand Russell, 1916

2002-04-01T00:38:00.000+10:00

Happy Easter, Mr President

George W's speechwriter has evidently heard my complaint. NYT reports that "President Bush reached out today to Christians and Jews celebrating Easter and Passover with some of the most religious language he has ever used in public.. ...Mr. Bush often mentions God and faith in his speeches and public remarks, but rarely as emphatically as he did today. As if mindful of that, Mr. Bush took care to point out in his remarks, however briefly, that "many good people practice no faith at all."

A sincere Thank You, Mr President. Certainly, he has his finger on the pulse of public opinion!

The article goes on 'Mr. Bush once again cast the war against terrorism as a struggle between good and evil, overseen by a god who had long ago taken sides.' Who was it who said that religious wars were just a competition to see whose imaginary friend was the best?

To be scrupulously inclusive, this weekend is only Western Easter. Orthodox Easter this year is not until May 2002. What do Orthodox Christians do all this weekend when people wish them Happy Easter - do they get fed up with explaining? It is probably overly pedantic of me to point out that if Christ died and was ressurected only once, surely Christians can agree on the date. Nevertheless, if it applies to you, Happy Easter and Passover.

2002-03-31T23:25:00.000+10:00

Sex, religion and politics - where else but the Catholic Church?

One of the most... ghoulish religious issues at the moment is the seeming implosion of the American Catholic Church, following the public revelation that it has been effectively running a protected child abuse racket over the past few decades.

Criminal sexual assault of children by clergy is certainly not a problem confined to the US, to Catholics, or even to Christians. But to the rest of the world, America has always seemed somehow larger than life - big country, big cars and big people, and ditto with the scale of this problem. I mean, one single former priest - John J. Geoghan - has been accused of molesting no less than 130 - count them, one hundred and thirty - children. To diffuse the public anger that this disclosure incited, the Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard F. Law, finally agreed to dob in another 90 priests suspected of child sexual abuse to the DA. No matter what the proportion of pervert priests are when compared to the entire population of the Boston Archdiocese, this is a staggering scandal no matter what way you cut it. Since then, pedophile priests have been falling out of the trees all over the US.

This is just huge in the US press - of the dozens of articles, the Boston Globe, NY Times, WSJ and Salon have the most thoughtful coverage. American Catholic commentators have weighed in aplenty, with on the whole a reaffirmation of their own personal faith in God combined with some no holds barred criticism of His local administrators.

The Vatican's response, aside from a lukewarm 'tut tut' from whoever is writing the Pope's speeches these days, (see conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, who desribes his statement as 'necessary but not sufficient' ) has basically been to:

Blame the permissive Americans
Blur the distinction between homosexuality and pedophilia, thus blaming the gay priests

Anything, to avoid taking any responsibility themselves for the fact that the Catholic Church's moral compass has gone severely beserk.

Americans have understandably reacted with indignation at the implication that problems like this are somehow a product of their culture. NYT's Maureen Dowd scoffs that 'The Vatican has shrugged off the international spate of sex abuse cases and acted as if this is another overhyped American tabloid sex scandal.'
She's right, but to a foreign eye there are also a couple of inimitably American aspects to this sorry saga:

The payouts and legal hush money. As you do if you're an image-conscious operation beset with a huge corporate PR problem, the US Catholic Church has already paid out tens of millions of dollars, all including non-disclosure clauses, to Geoghan's victims alone, and has reportedly budgeted for at least a hundred million more. That's a lot of cake raffles. (How must the donors feel, to see their contributions diverted from good works to limiting public liability for the Church's bad works?)
A Minneapolis lawyer is suing a group of Catholic bishops for allegedly violating federal anti-racketeering laws - laws introduced specifically to target mob gangsters in Mafia-run organizations. Only in America...

Conservative Vatican spokemen (is there any other kind?) have firmly blamed the problem on gay=pedophile priests, and let a raging genie out of the bottle in the process, including Maureen Dowd again, and intellectually formidable gay Catholic Andrew Sullivan. Virulent debates are underway over whether celibacy contributes to the abuse, whether the priesthood specifically attracts the sexually confused, whether there would be any priests left at all if all the gays and/or non-celibates were drummed out, and even if, gasp, allowing women into the priesthood might improve things.

We have also all increased our vocabularies and learnt what an 'ephebophile' is. Since anything sounds preferable to 'pedophile' (remember the self titled 'Man Boy Love' associations of a few years ago?), proponents of 'ephebophile' have evidently consulted the cosmic Scales of Awfulness and concluded that sodomizing a 16 year old boy plays better with the readers than sodomizing a 6 year old one.

To a complete church outsider this would all seem like a mildly interesting field study in sociopathic organizational collapse, were it not for the real and ongoing tragedy of the hundreds of young lives blighted by these evil and disgusting men and the structure that protected them.

Do tell me if I'm being naive here, but... even an unbeliever knows that Catholicism, as one of the major Christian faiths, must therefore be at some point based on the teachings of Jesus and Jesus had very little if anything to say about fancy dress or pointy hats or rigid hierarchies, but much to say on treating other people well. Formal Catholicism has gone so far off the rails, is at such odds with its spiritual founder's intentions, that how lay Catholics can possibly reconcile themselves with this is a major mystery to me...

2002-03-31T15:04:00.000+10:00

The point of no return is back that way

The shocked neighbours of murderers and serial killers invariably describe them as '...a quiet guy, polite, always said Hello,', and so on. Horror can strike out of nowhere - even in places where they are used to horror.

A schoolfriend of 18 year old schoolgirl Ayat Akhras, the latest Palestinian suicide bomber at the time of writing, saw her that morning and 'was surprised when I heard that she blew herself up in Jerusalem,'. Well, what else can you say. What else can surprise anyone about this ghastly Israeli-Palestinian conflict? It transcends religious conflict - it's a war of ancient homelands, of ancient histories, of a concentration of all human spiritual and political failings into one blighted place. The mothers of Ayat Akhras and all of the Israeli victims cry alone, but their grief is universal.

2002-03-31T14:23:00.000+10:00

Communism - a political religion (but don't tell them)

Having no great spiritual beliefs myself, I still fully support the rights of those who do. Being free to act according to your faith and being free not to have one at all are part of the same thing. Non-believers should extend to the religious the tolerance that they would like to be shown themselves. While this can work on a personal level, formally institutionalized Atheism can be just as oppressive as formally institutionalized religion, and here I find myself in the somewhat novel situation of defending Christians against Atheist thought police.

Namely, the current Chinese Government. China allows "state-sponsored, state-supervised Christianity, where the government vets the church, the priests, even the prayer books," but any non-approved Christianity is driven underground - see this Australian Broadcasting Corporation report.

Not content with that, a news story today reports that the Prime Minister of Australia has been pressured by the Chinese Government not to meet the Dalai Lama during his forthcoming visit to Australia.

Now, Australia, where I live, is not on the international A-list and we do not get that many visits from that many genuinely important foreign figures, let alone the leader of a major world faith - imagine any national leader snubbing the Pope, for instance.

Sure, this says heaps about the moral fiber of Australia's current leadership, but the Chinese Government is like some Orwellian mind control squad. You'd think they'd have enough to do persecuting their own Falun Dafa movement to worry about who down at the bottom of the world is just going to have a cup of tea and some civil small-talk with the Dalai Lama. I don't know anything about the Falun Dafa, but any group prepared to stand up to China's moral thuggery has my support.

2002-03-30T23:35:00.000+10:00

Welcome to Rationalist

Rationalist aims to be a secular and international look at the role of religion in recent and current political and social justice issues.

September 11 caused a massive tide of online news, opinions and analysis, in which religion has figured prominently. We've been repeatedly reminded, despite some rather damning evidence to the contrary, that Islam is a 'religion of peace'. 'God Bless America,' seemed to be the most common initial cry from a shell-shocked US. It would appear that God is weighing in on both sides in this conflict.

Yet Americans have far more to fear, it seems, than Islamic jihads and holy warriors. An excellent recent TNR article, 'Bad Faith' by Peter Beinart, accuses the Bush administration of:

'implicitly writing atheists and agnostics out of America's moral community. When they describe the country they love, they describe a place where people of different faiths live in harmony and equality, and where people who follow no faith simply do not exist."

and goes on to report on studies that have found:

'66 percent of Americans viewed atheists unfavorably--almost twice the percentage that held a negative view of Muslims. ...
69 percent of Americans would be bothered by a close family member marrying an atheist.'

I do not believe in any religion. I strongly support a tough US military response against those responsible for September 11. I am astounded that so many Americans would nevertheless view me so disapprovingly.

What is it about atheism that scares people? Do they think we're all devil-worshippers or such? Since I don't believe in God I'm hardly likely to believe in the devil either. And when was the last atheist suicide bomber?

2002-03-30T21:49:00.000+10:00

"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom on the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid..."
Bertrand Russell, 1916