Thursday, January 27, 2011

ii

I don't, personally, believe in magic. On the other hand, I am not 100% confident in my disbelief in magic. I could be quite tolerant of a devout wizard who tried to sell me a magic potion. I don't think such things work, but I don't know that they don't. The reason that homoeopaths are scumbags is that they are selling their magic potions on the basis of scientific claims which are just. not. true. Eye of newt and gall of bat might summons up the ghosts of all the kings of Scotland, for all I know. But atoms do not remember things which used to be dissolved in them. They just don't. 

If I'd spent longer planning this essay, there'd  have been a clever pun on "homophobic" and "homoeopathic" in there somewhere.

It is one thing for a Muslim to say "I don't drink wine because it's against my religion to drink wine". It's another thing to say "You shouldn't drink wine because it's against my religion for you to drink wine." But it's different again to say "No-one should drink wine because everybody knows that the infidel introduces special cancer inducing chemicals into the grapes." The first two claims are matters of opinion and conscience; the third is just.not.true. Same for the Pope saying that the magic HIV worms can swim in between the atoms in the condom as -- opposed to "Using birth control is a mortal sin worth a century in purgatory or two hundred hail Marys."

Yes, I know the indulgence system was largely abolished after Vatican II.

So: is Mel claiming that homosexuality is wicked because it hurts people and causes pain, like getting drunk and telling lies about weapons of mass destruction? Or is she claiming that it is immoral because it makes little baby Jesus cry, like playing with your thing and eating flesh on Friday.? (Yes, I know the compulsory weekly fast was largely abolished after Vatican II. The Guardian has recently developed a thing about playing with your thing but so far as I can tell it's only wanking over pictures you found on the Internet which makes C.P Scott cry.)

So far as I can say, she says neither. She says instead that homosexuality is not "normal". Or, at any rate, she says that if children are bombarded with homosexual propaganda they will be brainwashed and lose their idea of "normal" sexuality. That sounds to me like a scientific claim, not a religious one.

But what does "normal" mean? If it means "natural" then homosexuality is perfectly natural, in that is occurs in nature: human beings, and indeed penguins, do it, and have always done it. If it means "consistent with social norms" then again, it is pretty normal, because lots of people do it it and most people don't mind other people doing it.

But that usage gets you into horrible circular arguments. I could say that public nudity is not "normal" because most people don't do it, and most people are freaked out when somebody else does it. But if I was advocating that we should get over ourselves and leave our pants off on hot days, there wouldn't be much point in appealing to the present "norms". It doesn't mean very much to say "We mustn't change our norms because that would involve changing our norms." Norms change all the time. I am reliably informed that in olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. 

I suppose a traditional conservative says "We developed our norms gradually, over a series of centuries, and if you change them suddenly, the whole mechanism might come crashing down." That comes into Mel's thinking. She has a theory that Western rationality is based on the Bible (sort of possibly maybe true, debatably) and that it follows that if we depart from Biblical principles we will descend into irrationality and chaos. But this doesn't seem to involve reading the Bible and saying "How does Deuteronomy 23 apply to issue of detention without trial?" It seems to involve using the Bible as a fetish-object which makes the ways we do things right now the only ways that things can be done. And that the state of Israel is always right about everything. How she gets round the fact that, until very recently indeed, letting women vote in elections and work on newspapers was not considered "normal" I am not quite sure.

If you are going to sell me a magic potion, sell me a magic potion. If you are going to preach traditional morality then preach traditional morality. Don't wrap it up in weirdo language about what is and isn't normal. 


continues

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

i

Sorry: I decided I really needed to write down why Melanie Phillips is so uniquely hateful. There is probably no need for you to read it, though. Go away for a few days, and I really promise to write something about children's books when I'm done. Or comics, maybe. Going to hear the miserable one from Show of Hands on Saturday, and everything, so I'm bound to write about that. Even got some follow up notes on Baby Jesus, but I'm thinking maybe hold them over til next Christmas?





When little Nicky Griffin sees two grown men holding hands, he finds it "creepy". This is on the same level as not wanting girls in your tree-house because they're smelly.

When America's favourite comedy bigot Fred Phelps says that God hates homosexuals he is pretty much just projecting his own gut-feelings onto the universe. He also thinks that God hates Hollywood, television, America in general, the media in general, soldiers, children who have been killed by gunmen, and Methodists. (Especially Methodists. Methodists are even worse than homosexuals.) Doubtless very distressing if it's your funeral he decides to yell at, but not really something you could describe as a point of view.

Someone like Anne Atkins thinks that homosexuality is taboo and would rather the priests of her religion didn't openly engage in taboo practices. (Priests who say "I know, tobacco is my besetting sin, I'm trying really hard to quit, and I would urge everyone else not to start" would be another matter.) One can quarrel with her exegesis, of course,  but I'm guessing that most gay theists wouldn't want to go to that kind of church in the first place, although Anne says they'd be made perfectly welcome if they did. 

Melanie Phillips is in a completely different class. The common or garden bigot makes a lot of noise, but is completely ignored by everyone who doesn't already share their prejudices. You can't argue someone into having a gut feeling. Or out of it. They don't matter. The Daily Mail is systematically using sleight of hand to trick people into believing in things which don't make sense. And people pay attention to it. Including powerful people. It matters.
 
Your average white, middle class Brit is not particularly homophobic. He doesn't mind what people get up to behind closed doors, although he'd probably just as soon the doors stayed closed. Phillips is not trying to infect these readers with a Fred Phelps style revulsion against homosexuals. She's too clever for that. She's not even presenting an argument that homosexuality is immoral or contrary to holy scripture or fattening. (Your average white middle class Brit thinks that religion is another thing that you should really only do behind closed doors.) She's trying to smuggle into their mind a theory that "gay" is out to get them.

And she's doing this, I submit, not because she is herself homophobic, but as a tactic in a wider political game. 


The article was published on January 24th. On January 23rd, the Daily Mail had run two substantially fictitious anti-gay stories: Governments £30 million to find out if hovercrafts discriminate against gays and Gay messages built into maths lessons for children as young as FOUR  Both of these stories have been substantially debunked elsewhere on the web. There was no big investigation into homosexual hovercrafts: there was a footnote about gay equality in the section on sea transport in a general report on the implementation of the governments equality laws. (It said there were no particular issues to worry about.) There is no secret plot to insert homosexuals into maths books: a gay/lesbian group has put some free lesson plans on the web which teachers could download and use during gay/lesbian awareness week, if they want to.

It's quite common for junior schools to use thematic integrated study programmes. The class might spend two weeks learning about Ships, which would include learning about the Spanish Armada in history, reading sea adventures in English, and making model boats in art.  Obviously if you look at  it objectively, this is a bad way to teach children. The only objectively good way to educate children is "Like what it was when I was at school". (Apart from gym teachers. First thing we do is hang all the gym teachers.) But what we're talking about here is clearly "ways in which you might incorporate maths lessons into  your Gay People In History week". That's not the same as smuggling sex education into general maths books.

This is how the Daily Mail works. It makes shit up and puts it on the cover as if it was news. The next day, its columnists write opinion pieces, which repeat the same points made in the original, fictitious, articles. Members of the public then write outraged "Won't someone think of the children" letters based on the columns. With any luck, one of the qualities takes the story up. And before long, you have a huge pseudo-fact and anyone who says "But no-one has banned Christmas" sounds like a whinging pedant or a denialist.

All newspapers print opinion as well as news. All newspapers print chit chat about actresses and footballers alongside the important bit about how this years manglewurzle crop is up 1% on last years manglewurzle crop due to a new type of fertilizer devised by local man Mr Smith, 45, pictured left. Polly Toynbee and Germain Greer are not always notably less unhinged than Melanie Phillips. But "comment is free but the facts are sacred" remains a pretty good rule. In the Guardian, despite its many sins, you can usually still tell one from the other.


continues
No.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Though for the Day

"In a priggish or self-righteous society Cleon [a tabloid journalist] would occupy the same social status as a prostitute. His social contacts would extend only to clients, fellow professionals, moral welfare-workers, and the police. Indeed, in a society which was rational as well as priggish (if such a combination could occur) his status would be a good deal lower than hers. The intellectual virginity which he has sold is a dearer treasure than her physical virginity. He gives his patrons a baser pleasure than she. He infects them with the more dangerous diseases. Yet not one of us hesitates to eat with him, drink with him, joke with him, shake his hand, and, what is much worse, the very few of us refrain from reading what he writes....

"....Even when the rewards of dishonesty are strictly alternative to those of honesty some men will choose them. But Cleon finds he can have both. He can enjoy the sense of secret power and all the sweets of a perpetually gratified inferiority complex while at the same time having the
entrée to honest society. From such conditions what can we expect but an increasing number of Cleons? And that must be our ruin. If we remain a democracy they render impossible the formation of any healthy public opinion. If -- absit omen -- the totalitarian threat is realised, they will be the cruellest and dirtiest tools of government."
 
                                                                                                                       C.S Lewis

Monday, January 24, 2011

P.P.S

Is publishing this shit even legal?
 
...this is but the latest attempt to brainwash children with propaganda under the ­camouflage of ­education....abuse of childhood.... all part of the ruthless campaign by the gay rights lobby to destroy the very ­concept of normal sexual behaviour....just about everything in Britain is now run according to the gay agenda...anyone who goes against the politically-correct grain on homosexuality....must be considered a bigot and thus have no place in public life...seemingly all-­powerful gay rights lobby carries all before it... risks turning gay people from being the victims of prejudice into Britain’s new McCarthyites....

Don't click on this link. It will make you feel dirty.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

P.S

The reason that it's unfair to harp on about Lord Rothermere's relationship with the Furher is that the present day paper's attitude to minorities -- Moslems, gypsies, gays etc -- is so entirely different from that of "Adolf the geat" to the Jews.
 
Unfunny cartoon by Mac

(Note particularly the Swastika.)



Okay, experiment in blogging about politics didn't work out. Back to looking for the Oedipus complex in Winnie the Pooh, I think.  

Monday, January 17, 2011

Spent literally seconds trying to think of a witty reaction to this locally themed piece from The Paper That Supported Hitler. But since this blog is already blocked in my place of work (for "profanity") I decided to go with my first instinct:

You utter shit. 

Unbelievable. Literally unbelievable.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Public Service Announcement

But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus.

The governor answered and said unto them, "Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you?"

They said, "Barabbas".

Pilate saith unto them, "What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ?"

They all say unto him, "Let him be crucified."

And the governor said, "Why, what evil hath he done?"

But they cried out the more, saying, "Let him be crucified."

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, "I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it."

Then answered all the people, and said, "His blood be on us, and on our children."

Matthew 27 15-25

When St Matthew says that "all the people" cired out "Let (Jesus) blood be on us and on our children" he presumably means "all the people who were gathered outside Pilate's residence" -- "the multitude" who the Priests have persuaded to vote for Barabas and against Jesus. 

He doesn't, so far as I can see mean "all the people in the middle- east" or "all the people in the whole wide world."

If we read this dispassionately, we would infer that Matthew thought that the responsibility for Jesus death lay with the mob who actually called for his death, not with the magistrate who sentenced him to death or the soldiers who executed him. We would take him to be saying that the consequences of this guilt would fall either on them (the people who actually called for Jesus to be killed) or on the next generation (their children).

We would also note that in the preceeding chapter, Jesus warned of an earth-shaking apocalypse which would occur within the lifetimes of those who had actually heard him preach. We would conclude  that Matthew thought that Jesus thought that something very terrible was going to happen in Jerusalem within thirty or forty years of the death of Jesus. Say, around AD 70 or so.

Sunday, January 09, 2011

Homosexual Frogs / Little Baby Jesus

   Then up spoke baby Jesus,
from in Mary's womb:
"Bow down thou tallest cherry tree,
that my mother might have some!"


Every year Rowan Williams spends lots of money that he hasn't got putting up posters to persuade people to go to Church at Christmas. Quite what the point of this is, I couldn't say. Christmas is the one time of year when people would go to church regardless of whether or not there'd been posters telling them to. Christmas is the one time of year when churches lay on extra services, when the cathedrals and the more picturesque parish churches have to turn people away at the door.

These adverts are universally embarrassing. There was Jesus drawn in the style of Che Guevara, and the Angels running a call center, and Mary having a bad hair day. I really, really want to punch the person who came up with the "Christmas Begins With Christ" slogan. And Thursday begins with Thor and July begins with Julius bloody Caesar.

I assume someone already thought of "Church is for life, not just for Christmas."

This year, they've got one of those ultra-sound pictures of a human foetus that you get in ante-natal clinics, with a halo over its head, and the slogan "He's on His way."

I can see how the focus group came up with that one. It's even quite clever, in a "not particularly clever" sort of way. Advent is the time when Christians look forward to the birth of Jesus, yes? So, what does the focus group associate with "looking forward" to the birth of a baby? Nowadays most familys' first sight of their ickle bubbie is one of those grainy ultrasound pictures. People even put them in family albums, before the picture of the wrinkly thing a few minutes after it has been born. Rather charmingly, it means that the question "What are you hoping for?" is largely redundant. (I'm told that in the olden days baby's first clothes  had to be yellow or green, because until it popped out you didn't know if it was going to be a blue one or pink one.)

So the poster is saying "If Jesus were born in England today, Mary would have had a free ultrasound scan, so we should all be jolly glad that we live in a country where poor ladies with donkeys get that kind of thing on the National Health, and not America, where if you get pregnant and you're poor, Barak Obama kills you with a panel." [Check this: Ed] It's like one of those modern nativity plays which says that if Jesus were born today, he'd be born in a garage, not a stable; he'd be laid in a shoe box, not a manger; he'd be visited by college lecturers, not kings, and he'd be a Muslim, not a Christian.


 Well, no. I think it's probably saying something more like: "Ultrasound pictures the kind of thing we modern people associate with waiting for babies. But Jesus is a special, holy baby. And painters used to use halos to show when someone was special and holy. So a modern ultrasound image of an unborn baby with an old fashioned halo over its head is a clever ideogram for waiting for the arrival of a very special baby."

However, this image has proven terribly offensive to the kinds of people who get terribly offended by images of this kind.

Some people say that Christians spend a lot of time deliberately getting offended by things which are quite harmless, largely because they do. (Wallace and Grommit stamps aren't an attack on our traditional Christian heritage. They just aren't. And did I mention that no-one has banned Christmas?) But just lately, atheists, secularists and biologists have adopted the tactic of pretending that they can get just as frequently and just as pointlessly annoyed as their opponents can.

There's a pointless column in the Guardian in which pointless celebrities are asked to fill out a pointless questionnaire. Last year, one of them was pointlessly asked what historical period he would most like to visit. "The Garden of Eden", he replied. A pointless atheist sent a pointless letter to the next issue's pointless letter page pointlessly  pointing out that the Garden of Eden wasn't a real place so har-har aren't Christians silly? There was an apparently serious article on the Dawk's website pretending to be very cross indeed that guests on Desert Island Discs are still asked the question "Which one book would you choose to take to a desert island -- assuming that the works of Shakespeare and the Bible are already there?" This proves that atheists are worse off in modern England than homosexuals were in 1950s America. 

I guess this is how all political discourse works. If one side does something stupid, the other side's first reaction is to try to do something even stupider.

Now, if Polly Toynbee or someone had objected to the Archdruid's poster because it was quite clever and might encourage people to go to church, and that this was a bad thing because if people went to church they might come out thinking that God exists, and that would be a bad thing because he doesn't, that might have been a good point, in a "not a particularly good point" kind of way. I don't blame foaming non-theists for objecting to the Narnia books any more than I blame foaming theists for objecting to the Dark Materials books. I even sort of saw the point of the non-theistic bus campaign: if the worst kind of Christian can stick risible posters on the sides of buses saying that God exists, then obviously the worst kind of atheist is entitled to stick equally risible posters on other buses saying that he doesn't, or at any rate, probably doesn't. (The question about how, whether, and what kind of religious advertising ought to be allowed in a secular society is more interesting. But not much more interesting.)

But this isn't what the storm in a mulled wine glass is about. Oh no. No, some secularist bods came up with the wheeze of pretending that they thought that the ultrasound Jesus is part of a sinister pro-life campaign by the Church of England.

Ultrasound pictures of foetuses look like babies. And people who don't agree with abortion want people who do agree with abortion to think that abortion involves killing babies. People who do agree with abortion are more inclined to say that a foetus is not a baby, but a thing which happens to look like a baby. So people who don't agree with abortion sometimes show people who do agree with abortion ultrasound pictures of foetuses to make the point that foetuses look so much like babies that they probably actually are babies. So ultrasound images of foetuses are now so much associated with people who don't agree with abortion that publishing one of those images in any context leaves you open to the charge of not agreeing with abortion, and although quite a lot of people don't agree with abortion, saying you don't agree with abortion is very offensive to people who do.

I trust this is perfectly clear.

Hard to work out what terms to use in these sorts of discussion, isn't it? In the first paragraph, I very naturally typed "ultra-sound photo of an unborn baby" because that's the normal English way of talking about such things, but changed it to "human foetus" for fear of offending my feminist friends, of whom I will very shortly not have any left. But that's biased the other way. A person I otherwise respect and admire (he is related by marriage to an author for whom I have occasionally expressed admiration) once remarked in an Internet forum that "foetus" is an offensive term, like "nigger" or "gook", used to dehumanize people who you want to kill. And I just typed "pro-life", which is a completely meaningless term, like "pro-air". Stick around long enough, and I'll probably be saying that someone or something is "pro-choice".

See? Words do affect how you think.

Now, my usual line on such things is the same as that of Mr C.S Lewis, to wit, that since I am neither a woman, nor a married man, nor a priest, the best approach would be to keep my mouth very firmly shut about birth control, abortion, and all the other complicated messy icky stuff that happens in the months before the Christening Party.

Assuming that you are allowed to go to Christening parties . Christening a child is worse than sexually interfering with him, isn't it? I lose track.

Someone once made out a very convincing case for renaissance religious art having had a consistent, theologically significant iconography around illustrations of the infant Christ's penis. At least, I assume it was a convincing case. I didn't read the book. I'm not actually sure why I even mentioned it.

Last month I heard the folk group Kerfuffle doing a very good concert of traditional English carols. One of the songs told the story of how some older lads took the mickey out of the boy Jesus, because he was poor and his mother was no better than she ought to be. So Jesus drowned them. The boys' parents are bit put out by this, and complain to Mary. So Mary puts Jesus across her knee and gives hm a good whacking. Christian children all must be, mild, obedient, good as he.

I'm not sure why I mentioned that either, to be perfectly honest. I do like the way in which the long instrumental break wobbles between "John Barleycorn" and "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen".

If we saw the image of a halo placed over a picture of the adult Jesus, the boy Jesus in the temple, the baby Jesus being suckled by the Virgin, or the new-born Jesus in the manger, we would take that halo to indicate that Jesus was a very special person. And one might have supposed that it was pretty uncontroversial to say that Christians do, in fact, think that Jesus was a very special person indeed.

Pelagians like Charles Dickens and Geraldine Granger believe that "Son of God" is a descriptive phrase -- it refers to all the special things that the grown-up Jesus did. His followers were so impressed with his innovative suggestion that you should be nice to people that they invented the title "Son of God" to emphasise what a good and original idea being nice to people was. And then they pretended that Jesus had applied it to himself.  (Fortunately, the bits where they say he said that we should be nice to people are completely historically reliable, even though the bits where they say that he said that he was the Son of God aren't.)

But that's not what Christians think: and its a safe bet that at least some of the people paying for the Christmas Begins With Christ campaign are Christians. Christians think that some intrinsic Jesusness of Jesus was already there when he was a child and a baby -- before he'd had a chance to say or do anything at all. And that was what the person who photoshopped the halo onto the foetus was presumably trying to convey.




If you are a Christian, this is all terribly uncontroversial. "Come and behold him, born the King of Angels", we sing. "The little lord Jesus asleep on the hay", we sing. "Veiled in flesh, the godhead see" ,we sing, hardly stopping to wonder if we are  unconsciously slipping into the docetist heresy. "Our God contracted to a span incomprehensibly made man". That's Christianity. If you don't believe it, you don't believe it, but there isn't much point in whining because some Christians still do.

(I suppose I have to allow the possibility that "Christians think that Jesus was special" is a completely novel idea to children and Guardian readers. Only a couple of years ago, we had a supermarket straightfacedly telling us that Easter commemorated the birth of Jesus. And before that, a surprising number of perfectly intelligent people seemed to be genuinely surprised that Mel Gibson regarded the Crucifixion as a central and iconic element in his faith. Perhaps the idea that Jesus, Mohammad and Bob Geldof are three roughly equivalent examples of People Who Have Helped The World is so entrenched in school R.E lessons that Rowan Williams really does need to take out an advertising campaign to counteract it.)

In Max Ernst's surrealist take on the Bitter Withy, the boy Jesus halo falls off while the Virgin punishes him. (Or maybe she punishes him because his halo has fallen off?)  No idea whatsoever why I mentioned that.




If we are say that Jesus Was Special, does it follow that Baby Jesus Was Special, and therefore that Baby Jesus Was Special Even Before He Was Born. If Baby Jesus Was Special Before He Was Born, does it follow that babies in general can b e special even before they are born? If Unborn Jesus had an intrinsic Jesusness, does it follow that Unborn Andrew and an intrinsic Andrewness? Does the mere attribution of qualities to a human shaped figure in an ultrasound photograph come dangerously close to saying the foetuses are human beings? And does that represent a tick in the box against abortion being a morally neutral act? Did, in short, the people who thought that the C of E Christmas poster was presenting a subtle pro-life argument actually have a point. Not so much because the pro-life brigade own all images of unborn children, but because there's something "pro-life" in the whole idea of the Incarnation?

A belief in the personhood of the foetus does not, so far as I can see, logically imply that abortion is morally wrong under all circumstances, much less that it should be prohibited by law. Nearly all of us accept that persons can legitimately be sacrificed to the common good. We all regard dead miners as a price well worth paying for coal-powered electricity stations. We all regard dead pedestrians as acceptable collateral damage in the cause of getting from point A to point B very fast. We may say that we don't, but we do. But if we could convince our self that the children being knocked over at pedestrian crossings weren't humans, but only human shaped objects, we'd feel less guilty about ignoring red lights when the road was quiet and we were in a hurry. Stupid people frequently claim that torture and executions don't violate anyone's human rights because the sorts of people who get tortured and executed don't really count as human. The noxious expression "feral child" is worth rolling around your tongue for a few minutes, too.

I'm sorry: I said I wasn't going to talk about this.

And of course, the extreme anti-abortion position is a mirror image of this: people who would like to see abortion prohibited under all circumstances fear that once you allow abortion to be a morally neutral act -- once you concede that a foetus is not a person, but  only a person-shaped object -- you may end up saying that babies are only person-shaped objects; children are only person shaped object; in fact, people in general are only people shaped objects. And that this will be terribly convenient the next time you want to start killing them.

I think  that this is what they must have in mind when they talk about life being "sacred" because people (even unborn people) have "souls". I don't think that they think that the "soul" is a funny little ethereal butterfly that lives in the pineal gland and needs protection. (Has anyone ever really believed that?  Did St Paul? Did Descartes? Plato did, I suppose.) They mean that they want us to think of "human beings" as whole, finished, things -- not lumps of meat, collections of atoms, bags of organs, but, well, people. They mean that "everyone is 'I' ". They mean that everyone has their own subjective experience, that you can and should and must imagine what it would be like to be a murderer, or a torture victim, or an infant, or a foetus -- or, in some versions, a fox or a whale  or a sperm -- and that you can never do to one of those little "I"s what you would not want done to you. And then they rather sacrifice the moral high ground by setting fire to clinics and assassinating doctors.

Some of them, I mean. One wouldn't want to blame a whole group for the behaviour of its most extreme members. Oh no.

There are times when its quite useful to think of humans as human shaped lumps of meat. Say, when you performing an autopsy, or when you  are dropping bombs on a school. (To preserve freedom of course; and we all agree that my freedom, by which we mean my right to read the newspaper of my choice and have a choice of which church to attend, is far more important than the lives of foreign children. We may say that we don't, but we do.) There are other times when it is very difficult to think of humans in that way: when the lump of meat is your own child, for example, or the person you want to marry, or the composer of Hey, Mr Tambourine Man.

Who was it who said "God isn't a thing you could find in the Universe: he's a way of thinking about the Universe"? The soul isn't something you could find by dissecting a brain or weighing a dying patient: it's a way of thinking about brains and dying people. Most people happily shift between the two ways of thinking. Extremists on both sides think that there's only one perspective and that the other one can be abolished. Along, very probably, with the people who agree with it. 

Do the people who believe that everyone is special believe that because they believe that God really and truly historically became a baby, whatever "became" means? With the corollary that, if you could prove that the story of the Incarnation was completely unhistorical, they'd all suddenly say "Oh, well in that case, we're fine with euthanasia, assisted suicide, and capital punishment after all." Or have they embraced the story of the Incarnation because they already believe in the specialness of the human race? Or was the story only ever a way of saying a thing about the specialness of human beings that won't quite fit into ordinary language?

Well, it's no terribly big discovery that Christians think that Jesus' specialness conveyed specialness on everybody else? What was that hymn that Miss Walker taught us: "....and that a higher gift than Grace should flesh and blood refine: God's presence and his very self and essence all sublime." Not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but the taking up of that manhood into God, as the fellow said.



Mr Richard Dawkins thinks that the  "soul" way of thinking about human beings is so wrong -- and so obviously the result of the "god" way of thinking about the universe -- that he wastes spends a whole section of his book-shaped -object on something he calls "The Great Beethoven Fallacy." (In biology, "great" has the specialised meaning of "a thing I read on the Internet and found irritating". A similar usage occurs in the Daily Mail, so that "Several people have complained about new arrangements for refuse collection" becomes "The Great Bin-Bag Revolt.")

The "great" fallacy is that Beethoven's mum was unmarried, poor, had lots of other kids, some of whom were sick, and that his Dad had multiple sexually transmitted diseases. Any proponent of legal abortion would have allowed her to have a termination and thus killed the second greatest composer who ever lived. Any fool can see the problem with this argument: you might just as well say that Mrs Beethoven had prevented the Fifth Symphony from being written if she'd told a horny Mr Beethoven that she was feeling quite tired and would just as soon curl up with a cup of cocoa and watch Vienna's Got Talent tonight, if that okay with him.

Dawkins thinks that one of the advantages of curing us all of the belief in God is that we'll also be cured of the belief that every unborn baby is a potential little Beethoven. We will stop regarding human life as sacred, and start permitting stems cell research, euthanasia, abortion, assisted suicide, infanticide, the death penalty for people who go to the Noah's Ark  Farm Zoo etc [Check this. Ed.]

The Beethoven paradox is, in fact, a joke: on the level of the one about the two fish in the tank. ("Do you know how to drive this thing?") It forcibly drags you from one way of looking at the world (humans are lumps of organic matter, tanks are a kind of small aquarium) to another (everyone is special  and some people are so astonishingly special that they write symphonies; tanks are a sort of military vehicle.) If you only believe in one perspective, then, of course, you won't "get" the joke. I doubt if someone raised in a nudist colony would understand why people laugh at nob jokes.

Images of foetuses wearing halos; legends in which Jesus is both the Messiah and a very naughty boy: poems about "the Word within the word unable to speak a word" are holy paradoxes  -- jokes even -- in very much the same spirit. So, come to that, are Renaissance paintings which draw attention to Christs'...er...manhood. Not "half god and half human" as the Guardian theatre critic thinks, but completely God and completely God and completely human. Try and get your head round the idea that Jesus was an eight year old and also God. Bet you can't! But try and get your head round the idea that the mind that wrote the choral symphony was embedded in a lump of meat -- bet you can't do that either!
 
Most of us do in fact believe in the sacredness of human life. We may say we don't, but we do. We think of unborn children as "he" or "she"; we say "she is carrying my son" or "my baby kicked". We expend huge amounts of love and energy on differently abled people who are never going to have a very high quality of life. We say "This is where Granny is buried", not "This is where the lump of matter that used to be my granny is buried" or  even "My granny stopped existing and so we chucked the remains in the dustbin." We get very cross indeed when doctors cut up dead people without asking permission.

And maybe we shouldn't. Maybe no baby can ever have a halo. Maybe no person can. Maybe there is no cosmic joke. Maybe here is only one way of looking at things. Maybe we should think of the thing in Mummy's Tummy as a very complex lump of matter that is in the process of becoming a person; but feel no sadder when it dies than if we had (say) had our tonsils removed. Or damaged a complex plasticine model of the Albert Hall that we'd taken a good deal of trouble over. That's a perfectly viable position. Some societies, have, I guess, been more callous or less sentimental about babies than we are. About children. About people.

It's a complicated philosophical question and there are good arguments on both sides. But the idea that Church of England is being a bit naughty by possibly alluding to one side of the complicated argument in public is a little bit worrying.  It's like, we're taking it for granted than one way of looking at things is always right and the other way of looking at things is always wrong.

Assuming a consensus where no consensus exists. "You can't sing the Cherry Tree Carol: it expresses an idea about un-born children which doesn't agree with my philosophical position. It is a pretty story but it is, how you say, politically incorrect." 



Dear Andrew

It is quite clear from the above that you are a [misogynist] [baby murderer] and wish to [perpetrate a silent holocaust] [reduce all women to the status of Gorean breeding machines]. At the very least, in trying to be even handed, you have pretended that the [deluded pro-life lobby] [deluded pro-choice lobby] have a valid point of view. Right thinking folks simply do not engage with [baby murderers] [misogynists]. But that is what I would expect from a [liberal] [fundamentalist] [Romanc Catholic] like yourself. If you were not surrounded by people like [Nick Eden] [Sam Dodsworth] [Phil Masters] who think you are a genius and agree with everything you say regardless, you would think more carefully before dashing off this sort of rubbish.

I agree, however, that Kerfuffle are excellent.

Anonymous [via Blackberry.]

Saturday, January 08, 2011

It is, I suppose, just barely possible that someone reading this blog hasn't seen this yet.