A Fishy Story 

Believe it or not, but I do have a real, live, actual friend - his name is David.  Well, sometimes he is not my best friend; sometimes he is an enemy and a bit of an utter swine.  At these moments,  he takes especial joy in telling me how dull San Francisco is compared to London - he visited for about ten minutes a couple of decades ago - or how ugly it is compared to his  newish home town, the fantastically beautiful, Bath.

Well, I do my best to defend my adopted city and my newish home town, El Granada.  Bath is stunning, but it is not Florence, Bangkok or Bruges.  Bath does have nice galleries but we have the Legion of Honor, which has drawings by Sandro Botticelli and paintings by the weirdly delightful Bernardo Daddi (the Master of the Sneaky Eyes). 

Then there are things that never ever happen in Bath.  For example, driving along Highway One last night we noticed the sky darken ominously and looking up we saw that this was caused by thousands upon thousands of utterly demented pelicans.  Looking down as we passed Miramar, we saw a corresponding sinister darkness rising up from the depths of the sea.

Reaching for the rosary I always keep in the glove box along with a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and an antique Tibetan prayer wheel, I told Laura that this was almost certainly the apocalypse - the pelican is an ancient Christian symbol - and we had better start setting our messy affairs in order and get down to some serious praying.  She gave me one of her odd looks and told me that it was just an anchovy surge and that I should stop being hysterical.

Armageddon or fishy surge, we decided it best to watch possibly cosmic events unfold from the comfort of a comfortable chair in the most excellent Miramar Beach Restaurant.  Even if - as I strongly suspected - the dies irae was at hand, a couple of gins and tonic would make things feel a bit better.  I sent a text to David telling him that we had a grandstand view of the end of history and that you don’t get that in bloody Bath.

Well, it was just an anchovy surge.  Ever so slightly embarrassed, I decided to take massive revenge by eating each and every one of the little fishy sods.  We agreed that they were pretty tasty - especially served on well buttered toast with a spicy tomato sauce.   I sent yet another text to David telling him that we may not be witnessing the apocalypse as such, but Half Moon Bay had incomparably  better  anchovies than Bath.

Early on Saturday morning, we  set off on our anchovy hunt, but we were too late.  A bunch of Buddhist Monks had bought the entire catch for $1,000 and liberated the lot of them.  Now, you don’t get that in Bath or even London.

The Junk Shop of the Soul: Spirituality in Silicon Valley

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.

The body beautiful figures highly in this part of California. When the locals are not munching their 'organic' fruit and vegetables bought from vast supermarkets specialising in the bloody stuff, incessantly playing with their smart phones or writing line after line of computer code, they are biking, hiking, trekking, climbing, skiing, running and otherwise torturing themselves as a way of  fending off age and the only end of age, that last exit in a fire chariot of pain.  Given that we are in the heart of the Silicon Valley and Stanford University is just up the road, not to mention the close proximity of Google, Apple and Oracle - actual places rather than ontologically less-than-points in cyberspace - one would suppose that the minds round here are pretty robust too. There must be more sheer intellectual horsepower in Los Altos and its environs than practically anywhere else in the world and it might be imagined it would be a centre of down-to-earth rationality. But there are certain anomalies coupled with a feeling of desperate yearning and rootlessness.  This is, after all, a world whose economy is built on what is essentially modified sand.

The people I have met and the conversations I have held since arriving here gave me my first indications that the Bay Area is not quite as I expected. First, there was a charming and apparently sane computer engineer who revealed that he had recently visited England to investigate crop circles and South America to get to grips with ancient tribal wisdom: then there are my morning chats with a fellow smoker, something of a rarity in these dreadfully health conscious parts. He is a delightful and seemingly level-headed material scientist but tells me he has just found God (I hadn't realised he was missing) and that his life has been changed through the Church of the Living River or Vivacious Puddle or something along those lines. Then there are the Meetup groups. Aside from the expected clubs who gather to 'network' and enthuse annoyingly about IT related topics, Internet marketing or startup strategies, there are a host of others devoted to shamanism, the divine female, out-of-body experiences, the occult, mysticism and the like.

Some of the shops are pretty strange too.  While the streets are not exactly lined with them, palmists and tarot readers are to be found at practically every corner.  In the heart of Los Altos and nearby Mountain View there are stores where one can attempt to give meaning to one's life by buying dream catchers, prayer beads, statues of Hindu gods or books of eternal wisdom by somewhat obscure but, according to the blurb, massively enlightened gurus. The one thing missing is a spiritual cocktail shaker.  The Mountain View store boasts a shrine complete with a miniature waterfall and features a box for posting notes so that the staff can pray for you.  There is no charge for this service.

It sometimes seems that I have travelled some five thousand miles from my old home in Wessex only to find that I have arrived in Glastonbury, the epicentre of New Age spirituality in SW England.   This impression is undermined by the chatter in coffee shops.  In Dorset these are frequented by ladies of a certain age talking about their knees; here they are haunted by geeks discussing aggregated indexes.  It is all extremely curious.  

The Church of Self-Actualization

On the way to Palo Alto along El Camino Real, one encounters The Church of Self-Actualization. It seems to be a bizarre amalgam of Hinduism & Christianity - much of the iconography & rites being derived from the more picturesque bits of Roman Catholicism; However, it is almost as though the body of one has been crudely eviscerated and the innards of the other shoved inside.  For example the Stations of the Cross are replaced by universal religious symbols - the Cross, the Star of David, sacred words in Arabic (well, one assumes this, but they might as well be trademarks for motorcycle companies).  In place of Holy Communion, the congregation stand in line to have pretty tea-lights waved over them as they kneel by the altar rail.  The somewhat chipper 'hymn' in the background adds to the general incongruity:

Aum Christ Aum
Aum Christ Aum

Just as in a normal church, a collection is held.  The other congregants fill the plate with high denomination notes and large cheques - it is surprising that they don't seem to have a credit card reader - and I surreptitiously chuck in a couple of coins as it strikes me that in the realm of Maya, or the unreal, there is surely little difference between 50 Cents and 5,000 Dollars. I receive a somewhat disapproving look from my neighbour.

The service is run by a carefully constructed charming couple clad in robes of an overwhelmingly tasteful matching egg-shell blue. She stands in front of a cross composed of saccharine sweet sentimentalised depictions of Christ and various gurus while delivering homely anecdotes involving camper vans, peanut butter sandwiches and her husband's lousy driving. The congregation laughs affectionately and is rewarded with a sheepish grin and a flash of the husband's improbably white teeth. The peanut butter incident then segues into a sermon on the importance of not passing on misery to one's fellows.  There is some common sense in what is said, but this is undercut by the context. Oddly juxtaposed readings follow from the New Testament and the Bhagavad Gita.

The service over, I buttonhole the pastor and ask about his church's blend of syncretism.  After death will we merge into one universal whole or will we find ourselves standing before our maker? Less than disposed to discuss such matters, he cites his wife's peanut butter story and refers me to the church's philosopher in residence who glibly fobs me off with a Buddhist anecdote about not enquiring into the nature of the arrow but simply addressing one's mind to the urgent  task of extracting it. This seems somewhat unsatisfactory, but perhaps I am being too demanding.

We socialise with the congregants over organic brownies and mugs of herbal tea.  None of them seem especially barmy; indeed, they all appear well educated and most are programmers. When we ask what on earth they are doing there, the response is invariably that it is a good place to meet people and the other parishioners are 'awesome'.

The next installment: out of body/mind experiences

Lourdes: A Den of Thieves

Everybody's faking it in Lourdes - everybody, that is, except for the thousands of sick pilgrims who converge on the famous town of some 18,000 inhabitants by the coachload.

They arrive desperately seeking a cure and depart clutching Virgin Mary-shaped plastic flasks filled with samples of the foul-tasting if putatively miraculous waters and with bags stuffed with other `made-in-Taiwan' relics. Amongst the hundreds of trinkets that the contemporary pilgrim can acquire in the crowded, tout-infested streets are glow-in-the-dark crucifixes, St. Bernadette ashtrays and drinks-mats, plastic snow-scenes and 3D viewers showing the miracle. There are even what look suspiciously like beer mugs and brandy balloons adorned with transfer-images of the ubiquitous saint.

What's more, it is not just commercialism aping piety; there is also religion passing itself off as modern consumerism. Take, for instance, the Pax Cinema offering as its current blockbuster "The Passion of Bernadette", not a film recently exhibited at Cannes (it has been off the circuits for quite a long time). One wonders if there is a free rosary given away with every bag of popcorn. It would, I think, demand a truly sincere faith or an equally profound lack of taste to find anything particularly moving in this place other than the pilgrims.

You approach the town with a sense of mounting expectation and the snow-capped Pyrenees that rise to greet you as you drive towards Lourdes enhance this feeling. It is only in hindsight that their majestic purity seems a mute reproach to the vulgar chicanery going on at their feet. However, as you drive into town passing the Rosary and Passion Hotels and forcing your way through narrow streets lined with bars and seemingly innumerable gift shops, this feeling of awe diminishes. Indeed, coming from Bangkok, one is almost reminded of Patpong, the only apparent difference being that here touts pimp for the Virgin and Bernadette. Reverence is rapidly replaced by macabre curiosity, and its difficult not to succumb to the temptation of playing `Spot the Terminal Case.'

The extent of the tide of human misery in Lourdes is almost overwhelming. Streets are crowded with processions of the aged, the crippled and the infirm all making their way down to the Grotto. You follow as what else is there to do? Even if one could afford the horrendous price of a drink in one of the cafés, it would be virtually impossible to get a seat, and it would take remarkable determination to fight one's way into the unspeakable shops. In any case, there remains a hard to acknowledge longing to find ones cynicism disproved, a vague hope of discovering some kind of spiritual reality behind the crass commercialism. Of course, one is to be disappointed.

On entering the grounds of the Grotto, tourists are warned against smoking, picnicking, littering and unseemly behavior, such as holding hands. The sign warning against the latter offence brings to mind depictions of Adam and Eve leaving Eden, the slash across the figures bearing a not too indistinct resemblance to the angel's sword. Passing the rather somber complex of 19th Century chapels, one is confronted by row upon row of candles, the price of lighting one being from 10 francs up. At the approach to the Grotte de Massabielle itself, there are more signs, this time requesting silence. A long queue of people stands behind a line of railings. There is a feeling of selfish intentness, with each pilgrim regarding the others as obstacles to his progress towards the cave. Shuffling along with the others, I found myself unconsciously reciting some lines from Eliot's Waste Land:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

This fragmentary recollection was more than a little unfortunate as the lines are generally taken as an allusion to the Inferno.

During the walk through the town, it is sometimes hard not to regret the fact that Disney does not have the rights to the Bernadette legend; at least there would then not have been quite such a promiscuous proliferation of unauthorized images of her. However, on eventually reaching the Grotto, you feel that old Walt must have a hand in it all somewhere. How else can one explain the insipid, doe-eyed statue of the Virgin that stands in pride of place? Surely, this rather vulgar statue cannot be the product of genuine piety. Surely, whatever vision the fourteen-year-old miller's daughter may have seen back in 1858 could have borne no resemblance to this overgrown cake decoration. One thing, however, seems distinctly `un-Disneyish': the collection of a couple of dozen rusting crutches suspended on a line above the Grotto. Given their obvious age and the lack of more modern devices, like pacemakers, they can hardly inspire the pilgrims with much feeling of hope.

You stand beneath the statue at the Grotto, a little uncertain about what to do next, there being, I believe, no standard ritual laid down for such situations. Some pilgrims touch the moist wall and cross themselves; others stoop down and kiss it. Their faces express sentiments ranging from grim determination to piety. Few appear ecstatic, but then as far as I can see no one in the queue has been granted a miraculous cure. A non-believer but sensing that something is expected of me, I gingerly pat the wall and quickly make my way to the line of brass taps to taste the waters, feeling a little out of place. A sense of anticlimax descends. So, that's that then. After all the buildup, after all the pious stories of ones childhood, after all the expectations raised by a Roman Catholic education, to find a small, damp, empty cave at the heart of it all is a trifle disappointing.

Lourdes is a place saturated with signs. Billboards, directions, advertisements, warnings, interdictions and so on confront the visitor at every turn. Then, of course, there are the signs that so many of the pilgrims bring with them: the all too visible symptoms and ravages of their various terrible illnesses. Still, there is one sign that is conspicuously absent for most people: a unequivocal sign of some divine purpose; a sign that behind all the misery there is an omnipotent and beneficent will. This, perhaps, is the point of it all. Miracles not taking place everyday, Lourdes demands immense faith; without it, all you have is a garish statue and an empty grotto.

Copyright ©1995, 2010 Mark C. Squire

The Death of Illusions: Posturing Atheism & Faith

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

Alexander Pope "Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot"

Quiet Atheism – A Personal Preamble

Despite an absurdly devout Anglo Catholic childhood, leaving the Faith was neither particularly difficult, especially dramatic nor in the least agonizing. If memory serves the moment of decision was made just after Mass on or around my 12th birthday. I recall that during the service there had been some stuff about weeping for Zion and this had struck me as more than a bit odd given that we were in Torquay and the congregation of Our Lady of the Assumption consisted largely of middle class shopkeepers.

“It’s all nonsense, isn’t it?” I asked as we left the church. After a moment’s thought, my father replied that it probably was and that I needn’t go along any more if I didn’t want to. That was more or less it. Downside was off, much to my relief, and I had to have a chat with a delightful old and strangely boisterous priest, the late and much lamented Canon O’Reilly. This exceedingly holy father confessor made a mild effort to convince me by using the design argument, but when I pointed out to the rose he was using as an illustration had black spot and thus didn’t say much for the Almighty’s gardening skills, he desisted and we parted amicably.

I look back on my early Catholic years and education with considerable affection. Being hauled off to confession most Saturday evenings was a bit of pain mainly because it got in the way of Dr. Who but otherwise I’ve no real complaints. The nuns in my first school were sweet and kind; I learnt a lot about art – true it was mainly bad, highly sentimental art – from the devotional cards they used to foist on us; and I picked up a lot of interesting stuff about saints, especially my favourite, Thomas Aquinas. As for the priests, there was one incident in which a priest expressed a fervent desire to brain me for causing an incense burner to explode over my fellow altar boys (see Pious Pirates and Swinging Thuribles); however, most priests were as kind as the nuns and, unless I have remarkable powers of suppression, I can’t recall being sexually assaulted or savagely beaten by either.

Doubtless had I been brought up in the reign of Bloody Mary, or in Spain during the Inquisition or even in Ireland under the Jesuits or Christian Brothers, my feelings might be different. As it is, I tend to regard my erstwhile fellow believers and members of the Christian clergy as slightly simple minded. Religion provides them with the same sort of comfort that a mother gives a weeping child when she tells him that everything is going to be alright. One doesn’t insist on revealing to the child that things are going to be very far from alright and mummy, daddy & he are sooner or later going to turn into insentient compost. Similarly, one doesn’t mock the dying believer by telling her that when she says her desperate prayers she is simply talking to an imaginary friend; or at least one doesn’t unless one’s name is Sam Harris (see the utterly fatuous and unspeakably vile Letter to a Christian Nation) .

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” wrote Eliot in Four Quartets. This, I think, is largely true. The bleak reality that we are merely a rather tatty bunch of apes clinging to a rock in space or that our mothers give birth to us astride open graves is rather too much for most people. The death of a child or partner is beyond agonizing and would render most of us somewhat simple minded. Even at the best of times, religious faith is an emollient for the great mass of not especially bright men against the meaninglessness of existence and the certainty of extinction. Unless there is a good reason, it would be an act of great cruelty to remove this comfort.

Noisy Posturing Atheism – Dawkins & Co

Richard Dawkins always strikes one as a somewhat quaint or even faintly comical ersatz 19th Century figure. He has suddenly discovered there is no God and is so endearingly anxious to tell us all about it all. It is easy to imagine him gleefully chip-chip-chipping away at the bedrock with his dear little geological hammer or skipping manfully across some fossil-rich Dorset beach, oversized top hat in one hand, ammonite in the other and a maniacal, almost messianic glint in the eye. To complete the picture, there would have to be a beard (we'd give the little chap a clip-on one). They all wore them, those hideously relentless and dangerously naïve Victorian proselytizers. Charles Darwin had one, and so did Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Psalmist’s fool was there first. He was there well before Hume, he was there before Marx & Engels, and he was most certainly there before latecomers like Dawkins & Co. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God”. Actually, the fool is right on two counts: first, there is almost certainly no God, or at least not in the naïve bearded, ‘something up there’ sense (pace people like Don Cupitt there may well be no other). Second, the fool is dead right in keeping this dangerous truth to himself. It is a truth to be spoken very, very softly in one’s heart; it is not something to be yelled from rooftop, pulpit or television studio. To be fair to Dawkins’s hero, Charles Darwin had some reservations about publishing his findings; not so the others. “God is dead” cries Zarathustra at the top of his voice “I teach the superman”. “Hear! Hear!” bleats little Dawkins from the platform of his utterly daft atheist bus.

The folly of these 19th Century proselytizers is and was to replace one blind faith or superstition with another. Liberate the masses from their illusions, smash the mind-forged manacles, take away the opium of the proletariat and all shall be well (one is tempted to add "and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well"). Having knocked off God, the bearded ones hoped to locate omnibenevolence or, at least, perfectibility in Man. They blithely assumed that with the removal of Original Sin, man’s natural goodness would ineluctably rise to the surface like some sort of richly nutritious cream.

With the 20th Century we moved from theoretical to applied scientific atheism; from the study to the test bench. There was little cream and the Übermensch was considerably less than super. Indeed, the only instance in which man proved himself in any way divine was in the creation of circles of hell. The liberated ‘blond beast’ did this on an unprecedented scale in places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, the Soviet Gulags, My Lai, or – stretching blond a little – in Nanjing and in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. In the face of such evil one can only echo the words of Conrad's Kurtz:

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—"The horror! The horror!"

If the 19th Century saw the death of God, the 20th witnessed the demise of the apotheosis of Man.

Preserving the Noble Lie

Richard Dawkins notoriously described atheists as ‘brights’. Well, the tediously vocal atheist is slightly brighter than the average Christian but not by any appreciable margin. Part of the trouble is that his battle was won centuries ago; the blunt truth is that no one of any intellectual account is an old-fashioned theist. Given this and given that a moderately intelligent 12-year old can see through the teleological argument why does a pint-sized Zarathustra feel the need to waste so much ink refuting it? It is as though a pub bore were constantly wittering on about he had disproved the existence of Santa.

Christianity acts as a prop for the feeble minded (the vast majority of any population); it is a needless cruelty to attempt to kick it away. It comforts the majority by giving some sense of meaning to their otherwise empty lives and by assuaging the horrors of death and agony of bereavement. The claim that the unconsidered life was not worth living only holds true for those capable of sustained reflection on life; for others, a flat-pack cosmology supplied by Rome or Canterbury will more than suffice.

Mindless hectoring atheism is also exceedingly dangerous in that religious belief acts an instrument of social control – a kind of Noble Lie. Looking back at the unprecedented horrors of the last century and at the near total breakdown of order in our modern urban wastelands, it would seem that depriving the masses of their opiates was profoundly unwise.

Moral rules are obviously not grounded in the authority of a divine being. This is a point made over & over by the born again atheists and is entirely valid (such a shame it was first made over two and a half thousand years ago by Plato). However, there is a snag: the alternatives are somewhat intellectually demanding. A frenzied mob is unlikely to be particularly influenced by consequentialist calculations. Nor is it going to be especially easy to persuade it to embrace deontological ethics; Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is pretty heavy going.

Science cannot step into the breach as it is morally neutral. A scientist might be engaged in the quest for a cure for AIDS or developing higher yielding crops; he might equally well be weaponising anthrax or vivisecting Jews. On the other hand, religion can provide moral guidance even though this is imposed though irrational or false doctrines and a reward/punishment mechanism that is ultimately specious. The thug’s boot is poised over the pensioner’s head – does it really matter if he is restrained from kicking through a fear of hell fire or an internalised albeit artificial belief in the sanctity of human life?

The Rapier & the Blunderbuss

There is no doubting that Christianity has had a pretty chequered past. However, Savonarola and Tomás de Torquemada are long dead and, much as one might sometimes regret it, it is exceedingly unlikely that Richard Dawkins will be charcoal grilled à la Jeanne d'Arc . True there are things about the Church that raise politically correct hackles and it is doubtless deeply unfair that we are unlikely to see a lesbian Archbishop of Canterbury or a single mother holding the Keys of St. Peter for a good few years. Who gives a damn?

There are lies & there are damned lies. As I see it the born again atheist would be far better advised to forgo the blunderbuss and take up the rapier. Religious extremism and bigotry rather than religion should be the targets. Here there can be no quarter and no pusillanimous attempts at appeasements like the Incitement to Religious Hatred Act.

Notes on the Romanesque

Pining for Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture in a country dominated by the ghastly and barbarous Northern Gothic, I recently made the lamentable mistake of visiting the Italianate Church of St Mary and St Nicholas at Wilton. This was foolish as although the façade is acceptable from a distance, the 19th Century church’s detailing & interior should be avoided like the plague.

Having recently re-visited the utterly perfect San Miniato al Monte, I found the gross vulgarity of Victorian ersatz architecture almost too much to bear. With its lovingly hewn stone & marble, the Italian basilica is a testament to a profound faith – albeit one grounded in humanity – and is the product of generations of skilled artisans; Thomas Henry Wyatt’s concrete neo-Romanesque construction is the product of engineering and Victorian acquisitiveness. It seems that the crass yet somehow aptly named Hon. Sidney Herbert couldn’t bring back an actual church as a souvenir of his grand tour so instead had one knocked up on his estate. Were he alive today, he would doubtless be the proud possessor of a plastic tourist reproduction of Michelangelo’s David or even an oh-so-droll kitchen apron featuring the statue’s penis.

Having said all this, Wilton Church serves a purpose but only if firmly kept in one’s peripheral vision as though it were an afterimage of the real thing. The purpose is, of course, to act as a mute reproach to the horrors of Northern gothic and to the vulgar excesses of Northern nature itself.

To make a proper comparison between the commendable restraint of Italian Gothic and the ill-bred exuberance, or gushiness, of Northern counterpart, take nearby Salisbury Cathedral, a building created by skilled stone masons and other craftsmen rather than by penny-pinching architectural purveyors of holiday souvenirs.

Much lauded by upwardly-gazing dribbling rustics and tourists, Salisbury veers towards an unthinking celebration of the thrust of nature pointing ever upwards. Calling to mind a cabbage run to seed or – more obviously and crudely – a rampant rampaging phallus, the thing is out of all proportion both aesthetically and spiritually. A lapidary ode to vascular congestion, Salisbury is at one with the perfectly foul club-wielding Cerne Abbas Giant and is, incidentally, the subject of Golding’s novel, The Spire (the title is revealing in its use of a synecdoche). Its one redeeming feature is that, being an example of Early English Gothic, it is less infested by the writhing stone tendrils of, say, York Minster or Gloucester Cathedral.

Northern Gothic in whatever form involves a craven submission to both the supernatural and to nature; and by nature I don’t just mean the grossly all-pervasiveness green stuff we find all around us, but also the baser urges so celebrated by writers such as D.H. Lawrence. In the case of Salisbury one might go so far as to see it as at one with the kind of reductionist thought exemplified by the likes of Richard Dawkins. One might speculate that the early Church was so anxious to dominate primitive beliefs and cults through assimilation that it became infected.

A clue to the Romanesque’s superiority to the Northern Gothic is in the name (coined by later art historians). Yes, it possesses Gothic elements but these are subject to severe classical restraint.

Take, for example, the exquisite San Miniato. The building sits full square on the earth; there is no turgid thrust for the skies. The undemonstrative polychrome patterns on the façade are elegantly geometrical; there are no wildly twisting and thrashing organic tendrils. The five arches on the lower register and the decorative ones above are Roman and suggest calm stability (were they Gothic there would be a rippling tension). The building is comfortable as its own focus; it is not pointing elsewhere to some false transcendence. Above all, it is a building that does not seek to brow beat the viewer into submission to some entirely other divinity; rather, it respectfully invites calm contemplation. For its builders the divine and the human were one and the same and both transcended brute nature.

You Looking at Me?

Glancing at the front cover of The Times the other day, it struck me that there is a fantastic and potentially highly lucrative business opportunity for companies like Cabbage Patch Kids® in places such as Tehran and Islamabad. Forget ‘Preemies’ and ‘Newborns’; they should be making cute little Bushes, Blairs and Rushdies. I don’t think that being flame retardant would be an especially strong selling point, though.

More seriously, just why does the Western media do it? Do we need to see yet another pack of clearly demented bigots waving their idiotic banners and burning really, really badly made rag dolls? Do we honestly need to waste good column inches reporting the mindless rantings of such luminaries as the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman or the Pakistan's religious affairs minister?

So, Pakistan has passed a resolution saying the honour was an attempt to "hurt the feelings of Muslims" and Iran says the award was intended to provoke the Islamic world. I am afraid that Messrs. Ebrahim Rahimpour & Ejaz ul-Haq are flattering themselves. Consideration for their feelings never entered the equation, and nor should it. Salmon Rushdie’s knighthood was based purely on literary merit. It may be an archaic honour but it is a matter for the British Government.

For some reason, the whole episode reminds me of a marvellous exchange in Casablanca:

Ugarte:   You despise me, don't you?
Rick:       If I gave you any thought I probably would.

PS: just as an afterthought, one wonders what will happen when Salmon Rushdie is nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

PPS: My good friend and school chum Gideon Mitchell was strangely enthusiastic about my posting this blog.

Modern Witch Trials and Tribulations

It must be hard, soul-destroying work being a modern witch. Not only do you have to do all those tedious magical things, like collecting newts’ eyes, harvesting mandrake and sacrificing the odd virgin, but you also have to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging around popular tourist spots in Glastonbury looking really, really sinister. It’s a tough job, but I guess that someone has to do it.

A particularly sturdy young witch was on duty in the Abbey Gift Shop a couple of weeks ago. Clad in a curiously fetching albeit distinctly unseasonal heap of purple and black taffeta, she was wearing really interesting Goth-style makeup and absolutely loads of ironmongery. She was also clutching a slightly bedraggled funeral wreath in one hand and a black coffin-shaped PVC handbag adorned with a pentacle in the other (a bit of a give away, I thought).

The poor dear was making a huge effort to look mysterious and evil and it was a crying shame that none of the other tourists seemed to so much as notice her. They might at least have pretended to be a little bit nervous. It was such a hot day and she looked so uncomfortable and under appreciated that I was sorely tempted to buy her a rum and raisin ice cream.

Death by a Thousand Qualifications or Daddy, You Bastard

The game is well & truly up, Archbishop Rowan Williams. You found the recent horrors in the Far East a somewhat trying test of your faith … yet - incredibly nay miraculously - somehow your faith survived. How touching … how unspeakably nauseating! What was ultimately on test was your reason and humanity, and both failed abysmally.

A young girl dies in excruciating agony from cancer of the throat, yet God loves her as a father loves his child? Ah, but not quite that sort of love … something mysteriously divine. In Aberfan, 116 little children die, some holding hands for comfort, smothered by thousands of tonnes of slag. More mysterious love from on high?

The years pass with more horrors: Vietnam, the Munich Olympics, the Killing Fields, Tiananmen Square, more recently earthquakes in Turkey. Who can keep track of it all? And exactly how much is the sacred affection diluted by ‘not quite that kind of love’.

Now, tens of thousands of the poorest of the poor die in Asia … yet God still loved them as some sort of cosmic daddy? The poor woman driven utterly insane by the death of her three children and who now is wandering the devastated streets hoping that whoever is looking after her drowned baby is feeding him well … is she another recipient of this wonderful, holy love? Just how much more ineffable affection can we take?

Was this simply a test, Archbishop Rowan Williams, and all this just for you? All this anguish, death and bereavement simply to provide you and your diminishing congregation with a bit of a puzzle, something to think about while warming yourself on a Winter’s evening by a cosy hearth at the Palace? How much God must truly love you.

Perhaps you remember Anthony Flew’s parable about two explorers who chance upon a clearing in the jungle. There they saw many flowers and many weeds growing side by side, and one of the explorers said, 'Some gardener must tend this plot!' So they pitched their tents and set a watch.

"But though they waited several days no gardener was seen. 'Perhaps he is an invisible gardener!' they thought. So they set up a barbed-wire fence and connected it to electricity. They even patrolled the garden with bloodhounds….But they heard no sounds, and saw no movements of the barbed wire. The bloodhounds never alerted them to the presence of any other in the garden than themselves. Yet, still the believer was convinced that there was indeed a gardener: 'There must be a gardener, invisible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound…who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.'

But the skeptical explorer asked, "Just how does…an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?"

Rend your purple robes in shame, Archbishop Rowan Williams. They are in tatters anyway. Go to the beaches of Phuket, to Banda Aceh or to Sri Lanka. Spurn a face mask & breathe deeply, really deeply; it is God’s breath. Then with your head cleared by the invigorating stench, recite after me:

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Religious Tolerance - A Plea

Dear Sir,

While my fellow congregants and I are delighted by the Government’s plan to introduce a law dealing with incitements to religious hatred and outlawing discrimination on religious grounds, we do feel that a prima facie instance of such discrimination is to be found in its own policy documents.

Take for example, Tackling religious discrimination: practical implications for policy-makers and legislators. Not only is Satanism not explicitly mentioned, but there seems to be no attempt to redress the insults that Devil worshippers experience every day in this country. These range from Christian television and radio programs where one can actually hear such phrases as “abjuring Satan and all his works” to such vile works of anti-Satanist propaganda as The Exorcist.

Although the document does cite Article 9 of the Human Rights act (“the freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or in private, to manifest one’s religion or belief”), no mention is made of changing the laws of this country to accommodate our practices. It would not, I suggest, be all that difficult to modify the homicide laws to allow for the occasional human sacrifice providing this be performed in a civilized, life-affirming manner at an official Satanist ceremony.

Doubtless Mr. Blunkett will take active steps to redress these failings. Doubtless too he will look at the institutional anti-Satanism that permeates so much of British life and that gives so much offence to our members. A good start would be with modifying the Union Jack itself. While we are prepared to show magnanimity by tolerating the continued existence of the Christian crosses, we feel that a balance should be struck by including a prominent image of Lucifer at, say, the top-left corner.

Yours faithfully,
Mark C. Squire