Crowl or Crawl

Courtesy Pixabay

Trawling through Evernote, I came across a piece I wrote in 2007. It was published on an internet site that faded away through not being able to pay its writers on time...Since it's a piece poking fun at blogs and their writers, I thought it could do with another airing:

Crowl or Crawl

In one of those idle moments when the brain is parked in a lay-by, I typed my surname into the search engine on Blogger.com. I shouldn’t have been surprised that a number of people had typed ‘crowl’ instead of ‘crawl’ and had never noticed (who apart from me proof-reads their blog scribblings?), but seeing my name leap out from some of the most random writing on the planet was disconcerting.

It even turns up in foreign language texts. Is it a slang word that crosses borders? Many blog writers don’t have too cosy a relationship with grammar and spelling. We can excuse those for whom English is a second language: “I want to know does search engines crowl websites without submission. Should website important to submit to Search engines. I have some website for promotion so I want to know that Search engine will not crowl without submission.”  

At least I hope this is a writer for whom English is a second language.   

The next writer, however, has style: “I'm detached. I don't want to do anything with this ugly politics anymore. If I'm lucky I'll find a hole in some quiet corner of the world and crowl there and continue my research on Machine Translation and live my own life and don't care a bit about anything that happens anywhere. If I see a needy, I'll help. But I'll forget dying African kids, and greedy thiefs of higher society... Let them do anything they want.”

Perhaps the next writer was too troubled by his angst to notice where his fingers were flying: “I woke up and I looked into the mirror and standing there was someone else...Not me. I have to say that I really didn't like what I saw. What happened with the VERY confident guy that used to stare back at me and say: "Today will be a great day!!"???  I really don't know...What I saw there, in the mirror, was a fraction of what I used to see...My walk has fallen into a crowl...I didn’t want to fall straight into a halt... If that happens I might as well just curl and die...I have never been so close to His will and then everything just piled up trying to tumble me to my knees and admit defeat... But I think I've got some news for ya...I won't give up and I will be at the centre of His will! God...I know things won't be easy... Help me...I think I might be losing my mind...”

Of course, losing your mind, let alone feeling you’ve fallen out with God, may well be the result of falling into a crowl.

And more on the religious life of the teenager: “Today—Monday, July 10, 2006—was a day of relaxation. We slept in and had pancakes for breakfast and then had morning worship and Pray the Bible. After lunch we had Salvationism class (which was really eye-opening to what we need to change in the world). The girls got into an in-depth discussion on today’s RevoDevos of Exodus 19 and 20 and the Ten Commandments and the Articles of War. After dinner we had a Salvationist Missionary/Teacher visit us and talk to us about her 10 month adventure in China. It was extremely inspiring to get out there and do missions. Last night the girls decided to go to Starbucks and then have a “discussion” and because of that the boys decided they wanted a “boy’s night out” as well. As soon as the boys left campus we girls went to Cozy’s for our second dinner. Side note: Thai food is good.”

I began to wonder if many people pronounce ‘crawl’ as ‘crowl’ and have a mistaken view of its spelling. “It seems like my blog has been forgotten again. But in the past 2.5 weeks I was glad if I had the energy to crowl into bed when I got home.”  

Or: “I don't dispute her assessment. It's pretty evident that the forces that brought Summers down were not monolithic and many people found themselves in a firm opposition to him due to a variety of reasons. But still, it doesn't dispel the gloom that comes from the realization that if even such a powerful man as Larry Summers had to crowl acquiescently, rather than stood by his remarks, and was still brought down, the perspectives of simple mortals are that bleak.” 

You have to wonder how a person who uses words like ‘monolithic’ and ‘acquiescently’ appears to have no idea about tense. 

Someone who may be teaching dressmaking writes the following: “At the top that blob like thing would be a pinned on flower of some sort. At the bottom, the sides would be runched up and have ties. The effect given is kind of like a crowl neck, only at the bottom.   More of that crowl neck effect, but just a little tighter, so it wouldn’t be overly exaggerated.   Split sleeves. A sheer see-through material overtop the bottom material, adding a bit of extra length.”  I’ve always had a ‘crowl neck’ of course, but it’s usually at the top, rather than the bottom.  

Here’s someone on the history of swimming: “The first literatures about swimming are dated since the 2000 B.C. However it wasn't since the 1800 the first competitions started taking place in Europe. Back then the most popular style was the breaststroke. The most popular and fast style, the front crowl, was first introduced in the so called civilized world, by John Arthur Trudgen, in 1878 who saw it from the natives Americans.”  

Oh, communication, wherefore art thou?

And finally a person who hasn’t yet discovered the shift key: “what an amazing moment.  i tripped and fell today. i ripped my jeans, skinned my knees and killed my toe...it hurts real bad.  everyone looked at me, good thing kate was with me, its always more sad when someone is alone and they fall. but i owned it and it was pretty much amazing. it almost made me late to crowl the warrior king's final. that wouldnt have been good. he was wearing jeans today and it was pretty awkward. but you dont know him so you probably dont really care. well sara knows him. im sure she will agree that its awkward.”

I’m sure she will….and not just the falling over.

Footnote: 

All these are unedited extracts from blogs. My thanks to the people who unwittingly offered their writings...

Darwin's Secret Sex Problem

Darwin’s Secret Sex Problem: Exposing Evolution’s Fatal Flaw—The Origin of Sex, by F LaGard Smith. 

For many years the thing that seemed to me most unanswered in the evolution 'history' - even more than how the eye could have evolved in such complexity by chance - was how a male and female could suddenly appear together at the same time, out of the blue, within the same part of the world, and thus set humanity on its course. There seemed no possibility that all the complex requirements of both male and female could come together at the right time. This was the same for all male/female species, of course. 

And then I came across this book, and found someone else who saw the absurdity of believing that a male and a female had suddenly appeared on the evolution horizon at the same time. Thanks, Mr Smith, for this alone you deserve five stars.

The book, truth to be told, is too long, and certainly in the earlier chapters, seems rather repetitive. But there is so much evidence for Mr Smith's point of view that the more of the book I read, the more I enjoyed it and appreciated his arguments. 

It's been obvious to me for many years that evolution was more of a religion than a science, though there are some science factors to it. There are many religious aspects to it as well, though evolutionists won't admit to this. 

I think the saddest part of this book is the discussion of well-known Christians who somehow manage to keep a Biblical worldview in tandem with an evolutionary one. Mr Smith doesn't see this as possible, and I don't either. You have to make a choice in the end. To my surprise, there was a time when C S Lewis, who for the most appears to have one of the soundest Christian minds of the 21st century, could have for so long contemplated the possibility that evolution was true. 

I wrote on Twitter the other day: "I long for the day in the future when Evolution is remembered as a fairytale our ancestors used to tell us, claiming it held the truth for everything, when in fact it explained almost nothing..." Of course that immediately aroused the sarcasm of evolution believers, as you'd expect, though surprisingly, very little of it. 

Mr Smith makes the point that we no longer regard the earth as being at the centre of the solar system, but that this took centuries to change. And those who were most opposed to the idea were scientists more than Christians. So that gives me hope that one day evolution will go the way of the dodo. It certainly deserves to do so.

Human rights in the abortion debate

Today is the 16th October, here in NZ, and it's Blog Action Day again...or BAD, which always strikes me as a kind of ironic acronym to be using. Anyway, the focus this year is on Human Rights, a subject that covers an extraordinary number of areas.

One that concerns me greatly is that of abortion. Yes, I know all the old arguments as to why women should have abortion on demand and so on, and that men shouldn't have any say on the matter because they don't have to carry babies in their wombs (even though the babies wouldn't have got there in the first place if it hadn't been for the men), and that it's a woman's right to choose and all the rest of it. The arguments for abortion on demand have been running around like headless chickens for decades now, and are sound very tired and very hollow.

Too often those arguing for abortion on demand come up with straw men arguments. One such is claiming that those who are pro-life are all religious people, people who want to impose their religious views on everyone else. This isn't the case at all. Yes, there are plenty of people of faith involved in the abortion debate, but the reason they're there is because it's a matter of ethics, and ethics are very close to the hearts of people of faith.

Pro-life arguments are also about human rights, and the rights of the little human beings who are being carried in the wombs of their mothers are never given any credence by those in favour of abortion. Somewhere along the line, these evolving babies were turned into 'foetuses', blobs of jelly, or growths. Anything but what they actually are: potential human beings.  If we were to take a new-born baby and kill it, we would be charged with infanticide; this has been the case for many centuries. But somehow a baby - a human being - inside the womb is regarded by the pro-abortion movement as not a human being, and certainly not one with any human rights. According to the long-held myth - "it's a woman's right to choose" - the potential human being has no rights. (Many women who argue "it's a woman's right to choose" don't realise that this myth was propagated by a man originally, not by a woman.)

I know most of this will be pooh-poohed by women (and men) who favour abortion.  However, I'd like to suggest you read further on these straw-men arguments.  Even more I'd like you to stop and think about the human rights implications of abortion.  Where else in the world do we allow thousands of people to be killed day after day, hour after hour, without a major outcry?  Nowhere. If a tribe or a nation kills hundreds of members of another tribe or nation there is an international tribunal set up to investigate, even if it takes a decade or more to do so.  But because the abortion movement has so successfully redefined human rights when it comes to humans inside the womb, there is no outcry, except from those who fight against this evil year in and year out.

It's truly time for the ethical, human rights issues in the abortion debate to be honestly defined.  For several decades people have believed lies about the benefits of abortion, or the rights of women and so on. Lies eventually lead to nations being destroyed from the inside out. Don't let that happen to your nation.

Wild Strawberries

It's very many years since I last saw Ingmar Bergman's 1957 movie, Wild Strawberries, so when I came across a DVD copy in the Library, I grabbed it.  I'd gone off Bergman after a while, because his later films were so bleak, but Wild Strawberries is unusual in having something of a positive ending, and in seeing growth rather than decay in a character.

The performance by Victor Sjöström is wonderful; apparently he found it quite exhausting (he was 78 when he made the movie) and struggled to remember lines.  For all that he brings a marvellous depth to his character.  He's surrounded by a wonderful cast, with many Bergman regulars in it.  Bibi Anderson plays two characters in it, both named Sara, their lives separated by some fifty years.  The one from the past is a self-centred, pouting child, who can't make up her mind which cousin to marry (she marries the wastrel, in the end).  The other is a contemporary girl, full of shocking sayings (for their time), and equally unable to make up her mind which boy she loves (she's trailed after by an atheist and a young man who's going into the church ministry). However, she's a woman who knows her own mind a good deal more, and is far more spontaneous, than the other girl.

The story is probably well-known: Sjöström plays a man, Dr Isak Borg, who is about to be decorated after a successful life in medicine.  But circumstances, including the unfaithfulness of his long deceased wife, have caused him to become remote from people, and careless about their emotions.  After a frightening dream, in which death plays a prominent part, he decides to drive to the ceremony (in another town, some 12-14 hours away) instead of flying there.  His daughter-in-law, who has been staying with him, decides on the spur of the moment, to join him in the drive.  

The doctor makes a detour to visit the old family holiday home, and finds himself seeing scenes from his past - a past where everything is always in sunshine, and the large family and their cousins are thoroughly enjoying their time. After this, he picks up the three youngsters, and then, after narrowly avoiding a car crash, adds the bickering and hurtful couple whose car has been damaged to the passengers.  These two are eventually thrown out of the car again when they can't stop picking away at each other.  

He stops off in the village where his aged mother lives (the actress was actually 13 years younger than
Sjöström); she continually snipes about her family and their children, and is cold and remote, like her son.  There are some scenes between Borg and his daughter-in-law, and we discover that Borg's own son is also a cold man, who doesn't want children, and who is at odds with his father. 

In spite of all this creeping coldness (a sign of the kind of films Bergman would make later) the film ends in a sunshine mood - the daughter-in-law and her husband seem to be picking their cautiously back together again; the three youngsters continue their joi de vivre, Borg himself discovers something about his nature and how he can change it, and at the end, sees himself back at the holiday home, where light and joy abound, in spite of all the contrasting personalities. 

There are several dreams or hallucinatory scenes in the movie, some much darker than others.  Each one gradually forces the doctor to uncover the things that have held him back from being more connected with other people.  We never find out what everything in these scenes mean - some have a kind of Dali-esque quality about them - but we sense their importance to the doctor.  

The film is beautifully shot (though not always concerned about continuity from shot to shot) and the performances are wonderful.  I finished up seeing it one and a half times, and enjoyed it just as much on the second time round as the first.

Life of Pi - the novel

Why is it so many modern novels - especially those that seem to get categorised in the literary genre - don't grab you sufficiently from the beginning to make you want to keep on reading?   These books are often very well written, as far as the style is concerned, but when it comes to an actual story (and I don't just mean a 'plot' - although many of them could do with something that could be called a plot) they fall down.  I began to read a book last night called How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić - the excellent translation is by Anthea Bell.  It's full of interesting detail, and considerable warmth, and the characters have life.  And yet...something's missing.  There's nothing grabbing you (at least in the first thirty pages or so that I read), nothing that says: keep on reading me; I'm going to take you somewhere.  I suspect that if I persevered, I'd find that it did go somewhere (if the blurb is anything to go by) but why do I have to wait thirty pages or more to find out?

I began to read Felix Holt by George Eliot the other night (I've had it on my shelves for as long as I can remember).  Now, in her time, it was okay to start slowly and gradually draw the reader in.  But Eliot spends several pages of small print giving us nothing but background, and absolutely no characters, and I just couldn't be bothered taking the journey any further.  Sometimes it seems like modern writers (again, I emphasize it's the 'literary' school that's most inclined to do this) don't really care whether their reader keeps reading.  They've written their beautiful book and that's all that matters.  

I read The Life of Pi while on holiday.  Yann Martel manages to keep you reading from early on, though it would be possible to toss this book into the unfinished pile too.  I think the difference is that there's a sense that the book is going somewhere (Stanišić's book somehow misses this, in spite of all the detail), even though again there's no particular 'story' and certainly no plot.  The first third of the book has the narrator telling us mostly about the zoo his father runs, on one hand, and his spiritual journey on the other. The zoo is there for a good reason, but the spiritual journey?  I'm not sure how that relates to the rest of the book.  It almost seems like a sidetrack that Martel enjoyed writing about but which perhaps should never have got into the finished book.  It's interesting, and intriguing and amusing, but is it part of the story?

The first third is all pretty much a prelude to the incredible journey that Pi ultimately finds himself involved in: the ship on which he and his family are travelling to Canada on sinks mid-ocean; the ship also contains some of the animals from the now closed zoo.  Pi is the only human to escape - he winds up on a lifeboat with a tiger, an orang-utan, a hyena and a zebra.  There's some very nasty sorting out of the pecking order amongst these creatures, and finally only Pi and the tiger remain.  They survive an extraordinary trip across the ocean, wind up for a short period on a floating island full of meerkats, escape from its initially unrealised perils and finally drift to the coast of Mexico, where both survive in their own way.  Recovering in hospital he's visited by two Japanese agents from the ship's owners who try to understand what caused the ship to sink.  Pi tells them his story, which they don't believe, so he tells them a totally different (and even more unpleasant) version - and then they don't know which to believe.  And the book ends.  There's also a kind of framing of the whole story supposedly written by Martel, who meets up with Pi at a later stage.  This section also seemed a bit irrelevant, like a kind of framing device that should have been ditched at some point in the various draftings of the story.  

Anyway, for better or worse, Martel kept all these diverse elements in.  The story is full of humour, and is enjoyable for that reason (the last section with the translated Japanese comments is often delightful).  It's full of detail about surviving at sea, and that's extremely interesting, if difficult to come to terms with at times.  It's also extremely grim: if the sinking of the ship seems like an unpleasant experience, it's nothing like the unpleasantness that's described when the four animals gradually dispose of each other, or the horrors of trying to survive for months and months in a lifeboat.  The fantastic section set on the meerkat island begins as a tranquil interlude and then becomes a nightmare. 

Martel keeps us guessing throughout as to what is really going on: who is the real narrator?  Is it Pi or Martel (or Martel's novelist 'character')?  Do we hear Pi's story as he told it, or as the novelist has rewritten it?  How much of it is 'true' and how much a fantasy?  Where does the religious element that's so prominent in the first part come into the rest?  According to some reviewers the book's underpinning is religious, and there are hints scattered throughout that this may be so.  Yet the religious element seems to me to be the weakest.  I don't know what Pi is thinking about spiritually in his long journey, and at the end that aspect of his life seems to be put in the background.  Perhaps I need to re-read it discover what Martel is getting at here, as I seem to have missed what other reviewers have 'discovered' in this regard.  Early in the book a character tells the 'author' that this story will make you believe in God.  I'm not sure how that is supposed to happen.  Pi doesn't necessarily credit his ultimate salvation with being saved by God (and which God, anyway, since he believes in three very different versions simultaneously) and there's no sense of an epiphany - at least not that I recall.  

Anyway, the main point about the book is that somehow Martel keeps you reading.  I'm not sure how he does it - whether it's the sheer inventiveness of the book and its wealth of detail or the perseverance of the main character - but he does it in such a way that it would annoy you to put the book down.  Certainly better than being annoyed because you can't be bothered to read any further!

Chesterton on education

I'm reading G K Chesterton's The Common Man at the moment.  It's a book of essays that were collected together quite some time after his death.  As always there is an abundance of wit, and sound thinking, of paradoxes and satire.  And dozens of sentences and paragraphs that could be quoted here.

For today, however, just one quote, from an essay called The New Case for Catholic Schools, in which Chesterton shows how foolish it is to think that well-rounded people are produced by schools who choose to cut religion out of their curricula.  

You can have an education that teaches atheism because atheism is true, and it can be, from its own point of view, a complete education.  But you cannot have an education claiming to teach all truth, and then refusing to discuss whether atheism is true. 

We're still having this argument put to us today almost a century after this was written.  We're asked to be tolerant of people's whose views aren't Christian, or aren't religious, but then we're asked to be intolerant of people who do have a religion.

Whyte, Murray, Words, Poetry

David Whyte is a poet I'm unfamiliar with (it's not hard to be unfamiliar with poets - there are so many of them!), but he was quoted as saying the following in a blog post I read today: “A poet’s work is all about creating a language that is big enough to represent both the world you inhabit and the next, larger world that awaits you."

I'm currently revising the poem, Poetry and Religion, by Les Murray. Revising as in re-committing it to memory, something I have to do every so often in order to remind my brain that I've once learnt something and expect it still to be there somewhere. (I'm using a little digital dictaphone I bought for another purpose recently to re-learn the poems and Scripture I've memorised previously: it's a different kind of challenge to learning from a page of words.)

Murray's poem discusses a similar idea to Whyte's statement, though perhaps from a more theological perspective. Like many of Murray's poems, it takes a bit of unpacking to get to the gist of things, especially as he can make use of ordinary words and give them additional meanings: 'concert', 'attracted', for instance. And the section where he uses the 'mirror' imagery is quite dense until you work over it a number of times....for me, anyway.

Here it is in full.

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror;
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

I love those two lines:
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

It seems like a simple couple of statements, yet it has a hidden depth like a pool that you think is shallow - you step into it, lose your footing and suddenly find yourself floundering.

Accurate reporting

Two posts from GetReligion.org today show the difficulties of reporting the news accurately - and why it's always worth asking questions about reported pieces. Furthermore both of these pieces involve the difficulties inherent in clearly understanding religious issues as opposed to sectarian ones.

The first discusses various clashes between Muslims and Christians in Egypt since the removal of Mubarak. The second looks at a particularly horrific attack on an Israeli family, allegedly by the Al Aqsa Martyrs (who at first took credit, then later claimed they hadn't done it).

In both cases, the writers attempt to clarify who is who and who did what to whom. In neither case are these things as clear as they should be in the original news reports, and the reports often leave out vital facts.

Sometimes the problem is publication policy; sometimes it's inept reporting; sometimes it's a biased use of language. Whatever the problem, it shows that in a world where we can actually compare reports, it's worth doing so before we make up our mind about what we've been told.

Catching up on Tunisia

Like many other New Zealanders, no doubt - and probably many other Westerners around the world - the recent unrest in Tunisia has come out of the blue. Where is Tunisia, for starters, and who are the people involved in the situation?

On my Google Reader I get a daily roundup of a lot of blog sites, but one that's been most helpful in getting some small grip on the Tunisian situation has been GetReligion.org, which not only sums a lot of things up very well, and quotes other sources more than adequately, but also gives helpful links for further reading, if you're of a mind. (GetReligion aims to clarify the religious aspects of journalism, but alongside that it's a very readable site in terms of the news.)

Their piece, Tunisia's Islamist-free revolution, is the article in question, and one of the most interesting things to come out of it is the way in which successive rulers in Tunisia have kept the Islamic opposition in its place; rather brutally, at times, but certainly they've avoided many of the problems that plague other Arab countries.

Wesley and a paradox

John Wesley enunciating the inherent paradox of Christianity (and of Judaism as well, I suspect). Note that by 'religion' Wesley means Christianity, not religion in general, necessarily.

I fear, whenever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revivial of religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger and love of the world in all its branches.

Quoted in Philip Yancey's 'What Good is God?' - pg 177

Blasphemy is a tribute to God

Michael Gerson reminds us that : British author G.K. Chesterton argued that every act of blasphemy is a kind of tribute to God, because it is based on belief. "If anyone doubts this," he wrote, "let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor."

If all else fails, quote Chesterton. He'll back you up every time. Gerson's article is called, What Atheists Can't Answer, and was published in the pages of the Washington Post. This is what he's discussing:

Proving God's existence in 750 words or fewer would daunt even Thomas Aquinas. And I suspect that a certain kind of skeptic would remain skeptical even after a squadron of angels landed on his front lawn. So I merely want to pose a question: If the atheists are right, what would be the effect on human morality?

So who's Michael Gerson? Well, I didn't know either, but here's the bio the Post helpfully provides:

Michael Gerson writes about politics, global health and development, religion and foreign policy. His column appears on Wednesdays and Fridays. He also contributes to PostPartisan.

Gerson is senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement's Center on Faith & International Affairs. He served as a policy adviser and chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush from 2000 to 2006. Before that, he was a senior editor covering politics at U.S. News & World Report. His book "Heroic Conservatism" was published by HarperOne in 2007.

Two extracts from Finding Sanctuary

Finding Sanctuary is by Abbot Christopher Jamison.

In February 2004 BBC Television broadcast a programme entitled 'What the World Thinks of God.' As part of their research they commissioned Bradford University's Peace Studies Department to carry out an audit of wars over the last hundred years, with specific reference to the role of religion in causing those wars. Looking back at history, they analysed the actual mechanisms by which religion might case war and found several possible ways in which this occurs. These mechanisms might be the promise of salvation to those who fought the infidel, or the intention of religious leaders to seize holy places - both key factors in the medieval crusades. Or they might be the desire ot convert the enemy, as in the wars of the Reformation.

The researchers then analysed the thirty-two wars of the twentieth century. Their conclusions were that only three had a significant religious element. They considered the Israeli-Arab wars, for example, to be wars of nationalism and liberation of territory (and I would ad that the same is true of the Irish wars and conflicts). They noted that the current campaign being waged by Arab terror groups is largely about political order in the Arab countries, especially the presence of foreigners there. These groups use the language of religion, but the use of religious language to justify terrorism is disowned by mainstream religious leaders.

Political leaders use differences in confessional faith as a way of mobilising support for political wars, and it is mainly in this way that religion becomes a factor in war. Furthermore, the main wars of the century (the two world wars, the Russian civil war leading to Stalin's regime, the Chinese civil war leading to Mao's regime) claimed seventy-five percent of all casualties of war in the twentieth century: they killed 150 million people. None of them is attributable to religion. The recent conflicts in which religion has played a significant role have killed only one per cent of the number of victims of secular wars.

This study provides evidence that religion is not a major reason for war in modern times. But the two great moments of violent religious conflict in Europe, the Crusades and the Reformation, have cast a long shadow over the popular mind, so that even though there have been no truly religious wars for many centuries, even intelligent commentators still insists that religion causes wars. The reality, however, is that in the modern world it is governments, and not religions, that cause wars. (pp 165-6 Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition 2006)

And on another tack entirely:

I offer a final story from the desert fathers and mothers. A young monk once went to see his superior: 'Father, ' he said, 'I must leave the monastery because I clearly do not have a vocation to be a monk.' When the older monk asked why, the younger monk replied: 'In spite of daily resolutions to be good-tempered, chaste and sober, I keep on sinning. So I feel I am not suited to the monastic life.' The older monk looked at him with love and said: 'Brother, the monastic life is this: I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down.' The young monk stayed and persevered. (pg 172 ibid)

And in spite of the title of this post, one more:

You may be wondering whether such an approach to scripture is only for monks, so I offer you this thought from St John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople. "'I am not,' you will say, 'one of the monks, but I have both a wife and children, and the care of a household.' This is what has ruined everything, your thinking that the reading of scripture is for monks only, when you need it more than they do. Those who are placed in the world, and who received wounds every day, have the most need of medicine." (pg 66 ibid)

Well meaning, but....

I don't know what Richard Dawkins will make of this, but one of the leading scientists and atheists in the UK has come out saying that perhaps religion - God, even - will save us from ourselves in the coming catastrophe of Global Warming, or Climate Change, or whatever we should increase our home insurance on this week.

Lord May, who was brought up a Scottish Presbyterian but went through an "inverse epiphany" at the age of 11, (which strikes me as fairly mature for an eleven-year-old) says, “A supernatural punisher maybe part of the solution.”

Plainly Lord May hasn't discovered that God is Love, rather than being some nasty big daddy in the sky who beats people up when they don't behave. (Yes, he does have a bit of that too, but it isn't his major characteristic.)

A typical evolutionist, he adds that in the past a belief in a god, or gods, that punish the unrighteous may have been part of the mechanism of evolution that maintains co-operation in a dog-eat-dog world. Evolutionists can't ever say anything without bringing evolution in as some kind of pseudo-explanation, however absurd and unfounded the argument might be. (When you think about it, isn't the usual idea that evolution is survival of the fittest? Where would co-operation come into that?)

He goes on, "Given that punishment is a useful mechanism, how much more effective it would be if you invested that power not in an individual you don't like, but an all-seeing, all powerful deity that controls the world." Okay, now let's try and connect this to something ordinary: Does that means that when I put my grandchild to bed I should threaten him with a nasty deity who will thump him if he doesn't go straight to sleep? (In the light of the anti-smacking law we could then say to the judge, when we've been arrested for smacking our children, that God did it. Okay, I'm just joking....)

To listen to the esteemed Lord May a little more: while religion maybe one possible answer, it remained, at the moment, very much part of the problem as it had teetered ever more towards fundamentalism.

So religion is both the solution and the not-solution. Hmmm.

In less troubled times religions had become softer and less dogmatic, and embraced a more humane set of values, he said.

Um, Lord May doesn't seem to sure about his religious history. In the early days of the church, for instance, at times of often intense persecution, and when Rome had a plague (both fairly troublesome times, one would think) Christians were known for being softer than the normal Roman, and far more humane. It was the Romans, after all, who committed infanticide with great frequency, and the Christians who stayed with those who were dying and suffering when the Romans fled the cities.

But that pattern was now reversing with the rise of fundamental Islamic and Christian beliefs.

The rise of fundamental Christian beliefs? Umm, Lord May, fundamental Christian beliefs have never gone away, so they've no need to 'rise.' The basic Christian beliefs are the same today as they were in the beginning.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself: do atheists actually listen to what they're saying?

So much for 'Bright'

In the March 2008 Investigate magazine, Ian Wishart reviews a book called, The Irrational Atheist, by Vox Day, a Mensa member and columnist for WorldNetDaily (not a site I'm familiar with, and one that seems to have its fair share of ranters).

Anyway, Vox Day (a bloke, for those who didn't guess) has written a searing indictment of the New Atheists, particularly Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris. Perhaps the most interesting comment quoted in the review is this:

There is even evidence to suggest that in some cases...atheism may be little more than a mental disorder taking the form of a literal autism. On one of the more popular atheist internet sites, the average self-reported result on an Asperger Quotient test was 27.9. The threshold for this syndrome, described as 'autistic psychopathy' by its discoverer, Dr Hans Asperger, is 32, whereas the average normal individual scores 16.5.

Wishart comments that: Sam Harris doesn't make it out of the book alive, Dawkins is touch and go and Hitchens is left reeling by the end.

And in case you think Wishart is a bit of a ranter himself (as he can be), check out the New Oxford Review on the book: ...columnist Vox Day uses logic and facts (not theology) to refute the "unholy trinity" of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.
and
Perhaps the most engaging chapters in this book are those about war. The high-church atheists assert that religion causes war, but Day proves otherwise. He shows that over the past 232 years, 671,070 American soldiers have died in 17 wars, of which only one-half of one percent can reasonably be attributed to religion. This amounts to the deaths of 14 soldiers per year. Turning next to the Encyclopedia of Wars compiled by C. Phillips and A. Axelrod, Day examines 1,763 wars fought from 2325 B.C. to modern times. Of these wars, only 123 can reasonably be attributed to religion -- 6.92 percent of those recorded. Since half of these religious wars were waged by Muslims, this means that, apart from Islam, the world's religions are responsible for only 3.35 percent of all wars. "The historical evidence is conclusive," Day concludes. "Religion is not a primary cause of war."

There's a good deal more, but it's better to read the lengthy review for yourself. It's by
Anne Barbeau Gardiner, Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York.

John Gray and humanity

I’ve been reading John Gray’s Heresies, a book published in 2004. Some of the essays go back to the late 90s, but they are, for the most part, still very relevant. I don’t think Gray is particularly optimistic about the future of the human race (he certainly doesn’t see science as our great salvation and he sees our history as being littered with war and strife) but at least he’s more honest about it than the secular humanists, who somehow think we’re going to overcome all our difficulties by putting faith (yes, faith) in the willingness of scientists to work together. Here’s one typical example of his thinking, from Sex, Atheism and Piano Legs.

The need for religion appears to be hard-wired in the human animal. Certainly the behaviour of secular humanists supports this hypothesis. Atheists are usually just as ardently engaged as believers. Quite commonly, they are more intellectually rigid. One cannot engage in dialogue with religious thinkers in Britain today without quickly discovering that they are, on the who, more intelligent, better educated and strikingly more freethinking than unbelievers (as evangelical atheists still incongruously describe themselves). No doubt there are many reasons for this state of affairs, but I suspect it is the repression of the religious impulse that explains the obsessive rigidity of secular thought.

Heresies?

I wrote about the philosopher John Gray a while back without knowing much of him or his work at that point. I’d been reading an article in the NZ Listener in which he was quoted at length relating to his most recent book.
Since Gray keeps turning up on my HitTail search results I thought I’d follow one of them through, and in doing so came across a review on an earlier book by Grey called Heresies: against progress and other illusions. The review is by John Banville and appeared in The Guardian back in Sept, 2004.
Banville quotes Gray several times as well. Here are some examples:
"The danger of American foreign policy is not that it is obsessed with evil but that it is based on the belief that evil can be abolished."
He says that the direct heirs of the Enlightenment are "missionaries of a new gospel more fantastical than anything in the creed they imagined they had abandoned." (Banville comments: One of the heresies promulgated by Gray is that many of those who today continue to hold to religious faith are far more profound in their thinking, and certainly better educated, than most of their liberal-humanist opponents. )
And something that would no doubt irk dear old Richard Dawkins: "in intellectual terms atheism is a Victorian fossil."

Linkless in some things

I’ve mentioned linkandblogchallenge.com before on this blog, and still find it an interesting way to increase links to my blogs, and to add links to other people’s.

There are two ways of using the site: you can either challenge another member to use a particular word or phrase in a post, and then you link to their post and they link to yours.

Or (if you weren’t confused by the above) you can set up a topic, and other people can link to that via posts on the same topic, on their blogs.

Yeah, I know I’m not explaining it well.

Suffice to say, I go back to this site often to check what’s happening, and run down the list of topics that are up for linking to. It’s surprising what’s there: lots of celebrity stuff, but virtually nothing in the religion area; a good deal on health, but not much on books and writing. Plenty on blogging (which is probably not surprising) but not much on automobiles trains and planes.

I guess I’m expecting the range of topics to be more widespread. Perhaps it depends on who writes on the site, and who doesn’t. I’ll have to add something else to the religion section, because it’s sad to see just one little post listed in there – especially since it’s mine!

Religious Jeans?

Skipping around the Net I was taken with the phrase true religion jeans which I naturally thought had some religious connection, and was intrigued to find out what it was. But no, true religion jeans are jeans with about as much connection to religion as you could find. It gets more complex. There are True Religion Destroyed jeans, which take fashion to a ‘ripped new level,’ and Bobby Vintage wash jeans that are apparently ‘comfortably mythical jeans’. Comfortably mythical? What the heck does that mean?
Talking about fashion like this reminds that I’ve meant to comment for some time on the curious thing about women’s fashion magazines, or any magazines that feature fashion as part of the package. Doesn’t it seem odd that these magazines often display women in alluring, even sexual poses, yet the magazines are for women? Feminists used to complain that men’s magazines featured women in near nakedness, but women’s mags are often just the same. How does that figure? Are women who read these mags only focused on what women wear and how they look in those clothes? I guess they must be. Certainly these mags aren’t in any way intended for men, though no doubt some men glance through them. Are the mags intending to say that You, the Reader, will look as alluring as this model looks? I don’t think so, somehow. I think they’re saying that other women will be envious of how you look if you wear this gear. I suspect men don’t even come into the equation.
But I could be wrong. Let me know what you think.

Not everything appears on Quazen

Not all of the recent little articles I've written appear on Quazen. There's something called Socyberty - which I presume is pronounced So- sigh-bertie rather than Sockie-bertie, which is how it looks to me at a glance. Or there's Relijournal. Neither Socyberty or Relijournal have as many readers as Quazen, if I read the stats are correctly. Certainly I don't make as much money off those two as off the others. Though even with Quazen it depends which area your article gets included in. One piece on the Transit of Mercury is in Quazen Astronomy. It's made very little money, but it's interesting that when you pass the mouse over 'Mercury' it comes up with a little ad for Mercury Dealer Bargains! Rather like those Google Ads, every once in a while the connections are a bit obscure!