Saturday, January 29, 2005

Twenty Questions

I think that, before we stand any chance of working out answers to tough questions, we need to work out what the questions are. Which we very rarely do. So, as a service to the general public, here are the relevant questions about last months Big Controversy.

1: Did the images, which portrayed St Jerry in the role of a tawdry chat-show host, considered by themselves and regardless of context, constitute blasphemy against the Springerist faith?

2: Were those images, considered in that way, likely to offend Springerists?

3: What do you mean by “offense”? Do you mean “actually painful to watch” or merely “slightly annoying”?

4: What do we mean by “blasphemy”? Is a religion free to decide for itself what is blasphemous? (In other words does “blasphemy against my religion” mean “anything my religion says is blasphemous?”) If not, who else gets to decide?

5: Are “blasphemy” and “offense” synonymous? Can something be blasphemous but not offensive? Can something be offensive but not blasphemous?

6: If I don’t belong to your church, should I care about what your church considers to be blasphemous? But if it is immoral (or at least bad mannered) of me to insult your mother, why is it quite all right for me to insult your God?

7: Can “blasphemy” or “offense” ever be legitimately used for artistic effect? Can a writer or painter ever say “I know it was offensive: it was meant to be.”?

8: If we say “This image is offensive” and “I was offended by this image”, are we saying the same thing? (Can I think that something was offensive if I personally wasn’t “offended” by it?)

9: Does the use of “blasphemous” or “offensive” images in, say, a play automatically make that play blasphemous or offensive? If an actor playing a Roman soldier spits on the image of Christ in a Passion Play, is he guilty of sacrilege? Granted that the phrase “fucking nigger” is highly offensive, does a play become offensive the moment a racist character uses the expression “fucking nigger”? (If so, who has committed the offense: the actor who said the words? The playwright who wrote them? The manager who staged the play? The audience? Everybody in the whole wide world?) If the phrase “Granted that the phrase ‘fucking nigger’ is highly offensive...” occurs in an article, does that article become offensive?

10: Does it make any difference if you print it as f*ck*ng n*gg*r?

11: Is an image less offensive if you find it in a work which has artistic merit than it would have been if you found it in a work which had none? Does the degree of artistic merit make a difference? If we discovered a lost painting by Leonardo that happened to depict the rape of a child by an adult, would the image’s offensiveness be reduced by the brilliance of the brushwork?

12: Contrawise, is the artistic merit of a work reduced if its subject matter is offensive? Could you say of the Leonardo “It can’t be a good painting, because it depicts a child being abused.”? Can we conceive of “good Nazi art”? If not, are we becoming confused about two possible uses of the word “good”?

13: If a work has sufficiently high artistic merit, does it matter who it offends? Can we says “It doesn’t matter that lots of people will be upset by the subject batter, because it is such a very pretty picture?” Is Ode to Grecian Urn really worth any number of old ladies?

14: Is it ever reasonable for someone to say “That work is offends me, so I won’t look at it”? Or is there some kind of moral duty to look at potentially offensive things? Or is it purely a matter of individual choice? Should I get around to seeing Life of Brian one of these days? Should Dastardly Dick Dawkins see The Passion of the Christ? Should anyone read Cerebus the Aardvark under any circumstances whatsoever?

15: Is it ever reasonable for me to say “That work offends me, so YOU shouldn’t look at it?” Can I be offended by a work I haven’t seen? Can’t the fact that other people are gathering to look at it be offensive in itself? Does my shock at the racist play or the pedophile picture go away simply because I don’t happen to be looking at them? Is it possible that under their cloths everyone is, in fact, naked?

16: Is your answer to question 15 affected by the number of people who find the work offensive? Do I have the same right to display a painting which is highly offensive to the 15 members of the UK’s frog-worshiping community than one which is equally offensive to the UK’s 500,000 Jews?

17: Is your answer to question 15 affected by the media in which the work is going to be displayed? Are there things which we can show to an all-ticket cinema audience which we can’t show on TV? Are there things which we can show on TV which we can’t put on a poster-hoarding near a busy road?

18: That Prince Harry, eh, what a twit.

19: What degree of “offense” and or “blasphemy” did Jerry Springer: The Opera in fact contain?

20: What degree of artistic merit does Jerry Springer: The Opera in fact possess? (Ignore this question if your answers to questions 11, 12 and 13 make it irrelevant.)

There. Now I’ve done the hard part, sorting out the answers is left as an exercise for the reader.

I didn’t see it, myself: and neither did any of the people who made such a fuss. I did get right through The Satanic Verses, though. It wasn’t very good.

Friday, January 28, 2005

My other webpage

If you want to read more of this drivel, there is about a decade's worth of it here

http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk

If this carries on, I will have to re-consider my decision to stop reading the Grauniad.

Guardian Unlimited Guardian daily comment History is blue. Discuss

"3. The abolition of the slave trade was:
a) "political correctness gone mad"; b) the only way to set quotas for immigrants coming into the empire; c) forced through parliament by the Islington liberal elite, who had no understanding of rural life in the colonies"

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

I posted it four times

I know I posted it four times. I don't know how I posted it four times. Twice, given that I tried to cancel the one with everyone's name in cc instead of in bcc, I could have understood. But not four times.

I am very sorry that I posted it four times.

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

How many members do they have? "We're bigger than David's band, but not as big as Biblical armies," says Green, gnomically. He will not be more specific, but according to 1 Samuel 29:6, David, the future king of Israel, had a 600-strong band of followers, though their leader was not, as the Christian Voice is, based in Surbiton. What's more, 2 Chronicles 14:9 records that one of the largest Biblical armies was led by Zerah the Ethiopian, who brought brought one million men and 300 chariots against King Asa of Judah. So Christian Voice, we can say with confidence, has somewhere between 600 and one million members, though no chariots.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1387321,00.html