May we all get the justice we deserve

I'm impatient to see how my Anglican compatriots in Australia, not to mention their Catholic mates, are going to react to the suggestion of Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, that certain elements of the Islamic sharia system should be introduced into everyday British law, enabling Muslims to choose between having certain cases resolved either in normal courts or before Islamic authorities. Similarly, I would consider that Catholics should be free to bring their legal conflicts before a traditional papal tribunal of the kind that once dealt with Galileo.

As for atheists, I believe it would be fitting if judicial affairs concerning humble beings of my kind were to be submitted to a charming court on the other side of the looking-glass in which I would be seated between Alice and the White Rabbit, and defended by the Mad Hatter.

Talking about weird English notions of personal freedom [which we weren't, really], I watched an amazing TV documentary last night on the Mitford sisters. Wow, what a crazy family! Unity Mitford [1914-1948] was a devout groupie of Adolf Hitler up until she botched up an attempt to blow her brains out with a revolver that the Führer had given her. Diana Mitford [1910-2003] was the enchanted wife of the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley [1896-1980]. Jessica Mitford [1917-1996], who had married a leftist nephew of Winston Churchill who fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, ended up as a member of the Communist Party in the USA. Individuals of that kind make me feel so terribly dull and undistinguished.

I realize that, from time to time, I get so carried away with my Francophile sentiments that I no longer think of myself as an ordinary Australian. On such occasions, to return abruptly to reality, and convince myself that I can't escape my cultural roots as a genuine 6th-generation small-town Australian, far removed from England and certain kinds of British behavior, there's no better personal antidote than to sit in on a few words from exotic folk such as the Mitford family, the archbishop of Canterbury, etc.

Pope unwelcome in academia

Normally, today, Benedict XV should have gone along to the Sapienza University of Rome as a guest of the rector. But he decided, two days ago, to stay at home, since a group of 67 teachers and researchers of the physics department had made it known that the pope was a persona non grata in their ivory tower of science. Why didn't the academics wish to welcome the head of the Catholic church? A spokesman explained: "Ever since the condemnation of Galileo by the Inquisition in 1633, physicists are particularly touchy about the Catholic church meddling in scientific matters." For staff members of La Sapienza, Galileo's trial is looked upon as a relatively recent happening, since their prestigious university was founded (by a pope) in 1303.

Now, scientists have had ample opportunities to express their opposition to religion in general, and Christianity in particular. So, why today's sudden surge of aggressiveness, in the Italian capital, concerning the latest pope? It gets back to Galileo. Delving into the declarations of the theologian Joseph Ratzinger long before he became pope, the physicists of La Sapienza have unearthed an oration in which he attempts to justify the trial of Galileo by a fuzzy reference to some kind of "greater rationality" than that of science.

Let us hope that the decision of Benedict XV to refrain from visiting La Sapienza will set a precedent. Popes, cardinals and tutti quanti would do well, from now on, to remain on their time-honored terrain: that of the Church, with all its wishy-washy thinking and bloody history. Today, in the citadels of science, there is no longer any room for those who persist in believing in antiquated falsehoods and childish magic.

For sale: horses, carpets, souls...

Referring to current discussions in Bali on the conception of a post-Kyoto agreement on greenhouse emissions, Australia's new prime minister Kevin Rudd used a quaint Aussie metaphor: "It will be a negotiation, and negotiations involve horse-trading. People here know a bit about what horse-trading means."

Here in France, when negotiators get around to trading advantages and disadvantages in a laborious fashion, a common metaphor evokes Middle Eastern merchants selling carpets.

At the Vatican, the pope is selling neither Australian horses nor Persian carpets. As we all know, he deals in souls. And, in his soul-trading, the pope uses neither dollars nor euros. The papal currency bears an antiquated name: indulgences. The basic idea is that the sins of pious people can be pardoned, at least partly, by the pope. In the 16th century, you could even obtain an official papal receipt (hot off the newly-invented printing presses) stating the precise terms according to which a part of your debt due to sin has been canceled.


Pope Leo X [1475-1521] got around to selling indulgences to acquire finance to rebuild the basilica of St Peter. There was even a brilliant marketing slogan: "As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs."





A strait-laced German monk named Martin Luther [1483-1546] was quite exasperated about this procedure, and the final outcome of his fury was the foundation of Protestantism... which seems to confirm that God moves in mysterious ways.



For the third time since he became pope, Benedict XV has just bestowed a so-called plenary (full) indulgence upon the faithful. This latest papal offer will benefit pilgrims visiting Lourdes during the next 12 months. Opening date = Dec 8, 2007. Closing date = Dec 8, 2008.

Always interested in the possibility of using the Internet to make money [which, sadly, has never been the case for me up until now], I seize this opportunity of announcing to pilgrims to Lourdes that, for the duration of this exceptional and highly attractive Vatican offer, I'm prepared to advertise and market their indulgences through my blog... or maybe, if the volume of trade were to become excessive, through a dedicated website [what a lovely adjective!] whose coordinates will be announced at a later date. My fees are amazingly low: a mere 15% of the sales value of the indulgence. And I promise to send each purchaser, for a small extra fee, a computer printout that illustrates—more eloquently than graphs or pie charts—the soundness of his/her investment: an ancient engraving revealing the horrors of eternal damnation in Hell.

Faith fun

I believe it would be good for god-fearing humanity [including Mormons, above all], good for half the US population and good for fun-loving aficionados of religious clowns everywhere if would-be presidential candidate Mitt Romney were to be accepted officially and wholeheartedly by the Republicans as their miracle man for 2008.

Now, I must be careful when I speak about Mormons, because the folk in Salt Lake City have provided me, free of charge, with fabulous online genealogical resources enabling me to indulge in one of my favorite and most meaningful pastimes: family history research. Coming from Americans, this assistance is yet another demonstration of pure US altruism, with no obvious strings attached, like D-Day in Normandy and the Marshall Plan... not to mention their generous attempts to remove Communists from Vietnam and Islamic terrorists from Iraq.

Already, Bush is less and less in the limelight. And life is going to be duller for everybody when his star finally fades and goes down over the political horizon. Mitt Romney would be capable of brightening up our long winter evenings, particularly if he were to be coaxed into telling us more about the purported 4th-century prophet named Mormon, the alleged angel named Moroni, and the weird visionary, all too real, named Joseph Smith [1805-1844], shot to death at the age of 38 by his fellow citizens, while in jail, in the purest American style.

There are all kinds of ways of gaining an awareness of the planetary phenomenon of America, and an insight into what might be termed American thinking. I guess the ideal way is to visit the USA or even decide to settle down there. Short of that extreme solution, you might view lots of US movies and TV series, watch CNN and Fox News, and dine constantly at McDonald's. If that kind of punishment sounds excessively harsh, here's a painless and entertaining approach to enlightenment: Take a look at Mormonism. Personally, I've tested this approach [albeit briefly and superficially, because I didn't want to take the risk of picking up any kind of mental virus], and I can assure you that it works. Like me, you'll be vaccinated against America forever.

Red can be wrong

Everybody recalls the simple reassuring words of the 23rd Psalm of David, which I prefer in the old-fashioned language of the King James version:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths
of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

We have here a striking case of the celebrated ovine metaphor, which was later enhanced by the evangelist John.

The fundamentally awkward nature of the assimilation of Christians to lambs struck me dramatically when I settled down here in Gamone with a small flock of sheep, and started to participate regularly in the slaughter of lambs. Since then, whenever I run up against the Biblical shepherd metaphor, I'm reminded immediately of bloody and smelly sheep operations at Gamone. I think, for example, of the day I used my self-defense revolver to send a rubber marble through the skull of a young animal, which was an alternative to seeing it stunned mortally by the usual technique of a hammer blow delivered by the butcher. I think of all the plastic bags full of dirty fleeces, hoofs and guts that I've dragged down the slopes to burn. I think too of stacking dozens of packs of prime lamb in my freezer, followed by memories of countless excellent dinners at Gamone. Needless to say, these recollections have altered considerably, for me, the poetic charm of the ancient texts.

The words of the 23rd Psalm have even given rise to a popular song, which I heard hundreds of times on the radio during my childhood. Since then, I've often wondered why most people—at least in the English-speaking world—retain the number 23 associated with this poetic text. This number 23 reappeared later in my life, in Paris. For many years, I lived in a flat at 23 rue Rambuteau.

The surname of this 65-year-old ecclesiastic, André Vingt-Trois, means 23 in French. Apparently the identity of one of his paternal ancestors was unknown, so the authorities referred to him by a number, like a soldier or a prisoner. And that number became a surname. As a youth, André studied at the Henri IV lycée: the same school where I taught English for three years, back at the time I met up with Christine. In 1968, when Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his comrades were mounting the barricades in the Latin Quarter, André Vingt-Trois was studying for the priesthood at the seminary down in Issy-les-Moulineaux: the south-western suburb of Paris where I would be working, a few years later, as a scientific consultant for the research division of French Telecom. After his ordination in 1969, Vingt-Trois remained in Paris for three decades, before a stint as archbishop of the city of Tours, on the banks of the Loire. Today he's back in Paris as the archbishop of Paris. And last weekend, the pope made him a cardinal: that's to say, one of the major princes of the Roman Catholic church.

Unfortunately, this man has decided to intervene in a domain in which he knows no more, a priori, than the local grocer... if only there were still grocers in the parish of Notre-Dame de Paris: the use of human stem cells for medical research. Parading as a specialist in the fuzzy field referred to as bioethics, "Monsignor 23" has dared to denigrate France's great annual fund-raising event, coming up shortly: the Téléthon.

Now, if there's one thing I hate, it's narrow-minded religious fanatics who step outside their intellectual prison called Beliefs and Faith with the aim of attacking Reason and Science. The cardinal's obstruction of future medical research might well have been a tragedy. In fact, it's likely to be seen rather as a tragicomedy, for the silly man doesn't seem to have done his homework.

Two days before Vingt-Trois was awarded his red hat, international media announced that Dr Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University had taken less than a month to coax a banal cell from a woman's cheek into behaving as if it were an authentic embryonic stem cell. That's to say, this "doctored" cell was henceforth capable of developing into any of the 200 or so basic types of human cell. Consequently, medical researchers will be able to exploit such cells with no risk of being accused—by Vingt-Trois and his kind—of destroying human embryos. Cells of this kind [seen in the blue photo, above, from Kyoto] can be described as reprogrammed. To indicate that they can be made to evolve into any type of human cell, they are designated as pluripotent.

At practically the same moment that the Japanese researcher announced this extraordinary and exciting news, an American biologist named James Thomson, at the University of Wisconsin, revealed that his team had obtained similar results.

In the revolutionary fervor of May 1968, it's a pity that "Danny the Red" didn't think of trying to get the seminary at Issy-les-Moulineaux transformed into a scientific research institute...

Bone box excursion

In my recent article entitled Bloody beliefs [display], I described a place of pilgrimage, not far from where I live, named Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier. Well, I went back there last Sunday to witness a curious event, of an anachronistic unworldly nature: the arrival in the church, for a few hours, of a bodily relic of a relatively recent Christian saint, Thérèse de Lisieux.

She became a nun at the age of 15, and her life was uneventful. Afflicted with tuberculosis, she died unknown at the age of 24, leaving behind a simple autobiography entitled Story of a soul, which made her posthumously famous throughout Christendom. It was said that the corpse of Thérèse Martin produced a strong scent of roses for several days. Now that is literally what the Church has often referred to, ever since the Middle Ages, as an "odour of sanctity". As weird as this phenomenon might appear to us today, this allegedly pleasant odour of such-and-such a dead body has often played a role in transforming the deceased individual into a candidate for sainthood!

Inside the Basilica of Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier last Sunday, I was surprised by the size of the crowd of reactionary Catholics who had gathered to welcome a relic of Thérèse de Lisieux.

Up until recently, I had imagined it as unthinkable that Catholics in France, in the year 2007, would still allow themselves to be mystified by a fragment of bone from the body of a young woman who had died of tuberculosis 110 years ago. I thought that the primitive adoration of relics had disappeared with the Middle Ages. Not at all! The people I saw in the church at Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier a week ago looked like the ordinary parishioners you might see of a Sunday morning in front of innumerable French churches. Inside their brains, though, they must nurture very weird beliefs... of corpses that smell like roses, and of bone fragments, capable of bringing them nearer to God, which are worthy of being carted ceremoniously around the countryside in a glass and gold box. In fact, I went off to Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier with my new movie camera, thinking that it might be an interesting subject for a short reportage. But the vision of all those crazy people parading in front of the reliquary nauseated me to such an extent that I lost whatever desire I might have had to communicate with them and make a video.

Bloody beliefs

Last week, I drove to the village of Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier, not far beyond Saint-Marcellin. In the local church, this stained-glass window tells a curious bloody story. On Assumption Day 1649, a local Huguenot named Pierre Port-Combet was trimming a willow tree in front of his house, to obtain twigs of the kind used to make wicker baskets. Devout Catholics—such as Pierre's wife Jeanne Pélion—knew, of course, that it was a sin to work on such a feast day. Suddenly, Pierre was astonished to see that his curved pruning sickle and his clothes were covered in blood. Thinking he had cut himself, Pierre went into his house, to clean himself up, but neither he nor his wife found any trace of the imagined wound. When they returned to the willow tree, blood was flowing from slashed branches. Pierre was henceforth notorious throughout France, which led to his being condemned by the religious authorities for working on 15 August.

The sequel of this story is illustrated by a second stained-glass window. In 1657, eight years after the amazing phenomenon of the bleeding willow tree, Pierre was plowing his field when a lovely female stranger [the Virgin Mary] appeared and informed the Huguenot that she knew him, that she disapproved of his Protestant beliefs, and that he would soon die if he didn't convert to Catholicism. True enough, soon after the apparition of the Virgin, Pierre Port-Combet fell ill and died. And the legend of Our Lady of the Willow Twigs [osier in French] was born.

The Virgin's personal concern for the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism amuses us today. One would imagine that the lady's apparition upon the planet Earth might have been directed towards more universal and profound issues, instead of making the long journey from Heaven simply to reprimand a humble Dauphiné farmer because he was a Protestant. But, as we all know, the ways of God remain mysterious. Meanwhile, a lovely little chapel has been erected at the spot where the Huguenot's bloody willow tree once stood:

A flower-bedecked altar evokes the Virgin's warning words to the unrepentant Huguenot:

Devout believers take these past events seriously, as proven by the quantity of thanksgiving plaques:

In the middle, to accord an allure of credibility to this affair, there's a photocopy of a declaration made in 1686 by the Catholic widow, Jeanne Pélion, 30 years after the death of her Huguenot husband. That was the time it took for the message of the mother of God to sink in. Recent marble plaques inform us that such-and-such a believer got through a baccalauréat exam thanks to the Virgin, whereas another was even awarded a superior university-level certificate with the help of Our Lady of the Willow Twigs. Conclusion: As every true believer knows perfectly well, religion works!

Prayer

Before arriving in Cartusia in 1084 and starting his legendary existence as a hermit in the Alpine wilderness, 54-year-old Bruno had held for many years a comfortable ecclesiastical job at the cathedral in the French city of Reims. Before settling down in France, the future founder of what would become (after his death) the Chartreux monastic order had received his basic education in his German birthplace, Cologne.

A week or so ago, in that same city of Cologne, the current cardinal, Joachim Meisner, evoked the concept of "degenerate art": an expression that rings an ugly-sounding Nazi bell. Media articles on this affair showed a photo of the cardinal in prayer, like Bruno.

The juxtaposition of Meisner's declaration and the photo of him in prayer gives the impression that the reasons for the German prelate's unexpected judgment on art can only be found in the private dialogue of prayer between the cardinal and God. Now, this suggestion infuriates me. When scientists and technologists—not to mention other intellectual leaders of society, including art experts—are called upon to back up their beliefs and allegations by hard facts, they obtain these precious elements of justification by many subtle and often complex means. Legal folk would speak of evidence. In any case, private dialogues with God are totally unacceptable as a justification for incendiary declarations concerning things in our everyday world... particularly when the declarations in question come from a German churchman, and they sound shockingly close to Nazi talk.

Fool on the hill

On 14 December 2006, in my article entitled Why? How? [display], I explained that my Swedish filmmaker friend Eric M Nilsson had asked me to participate in a philosophical project inspired by these two basic questions. I've just browsed through Eric's film, which will be broadcast on Sweden's channel 2 at 10 pm on 21 October 2007. Since the one-hour documentary is in Swedish, I'm incapable of appreciating the exact ways in which Eric has amalgamated my words with those of the other main participant: a Swedish pastor. But Eric assures me that it's good TV, and I trust his artistry and his judgment. Click on the following stylized rendering [by Eric] of the Cournouze mountain seen from Gamone to hear an introductory statement [which may or may not be honest] from the scientific Fool on the hill:

Ignorance in God's Own Country

Stephen Prothero, of the religion department at Boston University, has just published a book entitled Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn't. Here are several gems from a recent poll:

— Two Americans out of three don't know the name of the man who delivered the Sermon on the Mount.

— Only 50% of Americans can name one of the four Gospels.

— Less than 50% know the name of the first book of the Bible.

In a broader historical domain, Americans were asked to identify Joan of Arc. Some 10% replied along the following lines: "Did you say Arc? That rings a bell. She must have been Noah's wife."

Citizens of that pragmatic nation, where everybody is out to make a buck, were confronted with the following quotation: "God helps those who help themselves." Over 75% were convinced that this is a statement from the Bible.

In fact, it was the illustrious American statesman Benjamin Franklin—"a true champion of generic religion", as somebody said—who put forward this point of view. But everybody knows that what was good enough for Benjamin Franklin is, of course, good enough for latter-day insertion into the Bible.

Cloudy shroud

Last Saturday, while visiting the Grande Chartreuse with Natacha and her husband, I was momentarily alarmed when I saw Alain disappearing into an unlit alcove at the monastic gateway. I recall tales in which a guy goes out to buy a box of matches, while waving goodbye to his wife and family... and reappears half a century later on the other side of the globe. I imagined my having to soothe his lovely wife with banal words: "Natacha, I'm sure Alain's not lost for Eternity. Besides, he left with your car keys." In fact, Natacha's husband reappeared almost instantly, with no apparent help from the Holy Ghost. Alain had merely discovered a charming little subterranean chapel for visitors. It was foolish of me to have imagined that he might have decided on the spur of the moment to abandon us and become a monk.

Inside the chapel, somebody [no doubt a creative artist from the nearby Carthusian museum] had installed a splendid cloth replica of the famous Shroud of Turin:

Most people agree today that this piece of medieval cloth is a fabulous hoax, but it keeps a lot of serious people busy in arguing for or against its alleged authenticity. [Click here to see a website on this affair.] Personally, I believe it's a forgery manufactured in the secret Roman laboratories of Leonardo de Vinci based upon on-the-spot forensic data concerning the crucifixion of Jesus supplied by a descendant of Mary Magdalene. I see no other explanation capable of accounting for the perfection of this inspiring artifact.

Incidentally, in a neighboring domain, all those Polish pilgrims who died a few days ago in a terrible coach accident near Grenoble were returning from a nearby place called Our Lady of Salette, where the Virgin apparently appeared and spoke to a couple of local children, named Maximin and Mélanie, about a century and a half ago.

We all know that peasant kids don't necessarily have the expert reactions of professional journalists such as my daughter, for example, but I find it a pity that nobody has thought it worthwhile, on one of these frequent apparitions of the Virgin, to pop the question directly to the divine First Lady: "Is the Shroud of Turin genuine?" Theoretically, she should know... but, then again, she might still be in the dark [which is normal, you might say, in the case of a shroud]. A direct question of this kind might be like having asked Hillary Clinton, not so long ago, for her evaluation of the authenticity of tales about Bill's big cigar. The trouble with shrouds is that they're meant to hide things.

Catholics v. Protestants

In the part of south-east France where I'm settled, people are still aware of, and indeed sensitive to, bloody conflicts that took place here over four centuries ago. I'm referring to the so-called Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants [often referred to as Huguenots].

They lasted on and off for 36 years, from 1562 up until the salutary Edict of Nantes in 1598. Records indicate that the vineyards at Choranche, run by Catholic monks, were totally devastated by Protestant vandals in 1593. Besides, that date enables me to infer that the splendid stone cellar in my house dates from the beginning of the 17th century, when all the monastic installations in the region had to be rebuilt. It is said that, towards the end of the Wars of Religion, the Catholic lord of Pont-en-Royans, Antoine de Sassenage, slaughtered all the Calvinist troops in the village, and that the Bourne (so the story goes) "ran red with their blood".

I'm amazed to learn that Pope Benedict XVI has just approved a document that is likely to revive conflicts between Catholics and Protestants by reasserting naively the universal primacy of the church of Rome. The document affirms that Jesus established only one church on earth. This is total rubbish. Everybody knows today that Jesus, during his brief life, never established anything whatsoever that might be referred to as a church. After the crucifixion of their master, and up until the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, some 40 years later, the followers of Jesus remained Jews [referred to, these days, as Judeo-Christians], and played no part in the foundation of anything that might be thought of as a primitive Christian church. That did not start to happen until Gentiles led by Paul got into action. As far as early links with Rome are concerned, there is no proof whatsoever that the apostle Simon Peter went to Italy, and is buried at the Vatican. It's far more likely that he died in Jerusalem and was buried beneath the chapel of Dominus Flevit on the Mount of Olives, at the place where Jesus wept while contemplating the temple and its future destruction.

As a relatively unconcerned observer, I have the impression that some of the reactionary decisions and declarations of the headstrong former cardinal Joseph Ratzinger will end up annihilating little by little the failing credibility of christianity, and hastening its doom.

The man who called God by his right name

A great Franco-Israeli intellectual has just died in the Holy City: 89-year-old André Chouraqui, counselor of David Ben-Gurion, friend of Moshe Dayan, author, translator of the Bible and the Koran, former vice-mayor of Jerusalem.



Born in Algeria and educated at the law school in Paris, Chouraqui was a profound Jew with an ecumenical regard for all the great religious faiths of the planet, including Buddhism. Intrigued, if not irritated, by the countless names that have been invented to designate the divine entity with whom Abraham, Moses and Jesus communicated, Chouraqui proposed a novel typographical solution designed to replace the term "God". In fact, Chouraqui decided to use the two names provided literally in the Pentateuch: on the one hand, the so-called Tetragrammaton composed of four Hebrew letters, often written in English as YHVH (or similar variants), whose pronunciation remains a mystery; on the other hand, the strange plural word Elohim. Chouraqui suggested that, instead of the letters "God", it would be better to use the following formula:

Finally, he has inserted the term adonaï, in small letters, above the Tetragrammaton. This is not a proper name, but merely an easily-pronounceable Hebrew term (which might be translated into English as "master"), used as a substitute for the unpronounceable term YHVH. Simple, no?

In Hebrew today, there is in fact an easy way out of this naming problem. Instead of trying vainly to pronounce or even write the name of God, it's perfectly correct to refer to it simply as HaShem: literally, the Name. In computer programming, naming things is a fundamental task. Maybe my longtime preoccupations in this field have made me sensitive—in a superficial way—to the Jewish question of naming the entity that others call God.

Magic date

I don't know whether or not the world in general has been behaving similarly, but many people here in France are somewhat bewitched by today's date: July 7, 2007. They see 7-7-07 as a magic date. Apparently hordes of couples have planned their marriages for today. Others have simply bought lottery tickets.

Not to be outdone, Pope Benedict XVI chose today to announce the restoration of an ancient and magic ritual referred to as the Latin mass, which is the epitome of ecclesiastic obscurantism, because ordinary parishioners simply don't understand this language any more (if ever they did). In other words, a priest could say anything he liked in Latin, even to the extent of reciting Ovid's Art of Love, and the congregation would still carry on believing that the reverend gentleman was praising God. Moreover, the Latin ritual is performed by a priest who turns his back to the congregation, which means that they wouldn't even see if he happened to be yawning or grinning. Maybe it's preferable that people don't understand the words of the Latin mass, because certain folk might not appreciate the presence of the prayer that implores God to convert Jews to Christianity.

Many Christians in France still have the habit of referring to their nation—without necessarily knowing why—as "the eldest daughter of the Church". [As was often the case in ecclesiastic matters, it was a story, not of peace and love, but of bloodshed. An 8th-century French king fought a battle and gave the spoil to the pope, who promptly thanked the king by inventing the daughter tribute.] Well, the most that can be said today is that the eldest daughter doesn't appear to be particularly concerned by the Holy Father's encouragement of a return to Latin. It wasn't mentioned in the French Google news, whereas US media seemed to handle the subject as a major story. This lack of attention to the papal decision is all the more unusual in that the French Church was even brought to the brink of schism not so long ago because of a renegade ultra-traditionalist archbishop in Paris.

The Pope's decision might be a tempest in a chalice, because the truth of the matter is that few priests today know enough Latin to conjugate the verb amo, amare, amavi, amatum... let alone speak it for an hour.

I must ask my neighbor Madeleine what she thinks of this decision. Not long ago, I happened to tell her that I was unable to find a Latin specialist who was capable of deciphering the 14th-century parchment in medieval Latin that describes the agricultural properties at Choranche. Madeleine advised me to see a priest. I replied laughingly: "Madeleine, village priests don't know medieval Latin." She didn't agree: "Of course they do, William. Everybody knows that every priest speaks Latin." Maybe, on this magic seventh day of the seventh month of the year 2007, Benedict XVI will urge the Holy Spirit to descend upon the heads of village priests, bestowing upon them the magic gift of tongues, so that Madeleine's presumption becomes a reality.

Case against religion

There are several major religions, and different kinds of charges can be brought against each of them. So, maybe I should have put my title in the plural: Cases against religions. But I prefer to generalize by affirming that something is basically wrong with religion, globally.

No intelligent person would designate the destruction of the Twin Towers as a religious act. On the other hand, an upsurge in anti-religious expression of all kinds has been taking place throughout the Western World since 9/11 and the subsequent God-driven decision of George W Bush and his Anglo-Saxon allies to wreak havoc upon Iraq. I first evoked this anti-religious sentiment in my message of 9 December 2006 entitled God bashing [display].

Concerning Christianity, it often seems to be coming apart at the seams. Many will say, of course, that Christianity has been like that for centuries, and it's still surviving. However I don't go along with the argument that, since a building is still standing, it will stand forever. Behind all the superficialities of the papacy, the Catholic church appears to me today as an empty chrysalis, and the butterfly is likely to soon disappear forever. In my blog, I've alluded to fascinating findings such as the Nag Hammadi Scriptures and the tomb at Talpiot, which often appear like Joshua blowing his horn alongside the walls of Jericho. How long will it be before the walls of Christianity fall down? I don't know. I'm not a prophet. But I'm convinced that the phenomenon we call Christianity today has been reduced to a largely ceremonial thing, which exerts little or no effect upon the course of worldly events... except in notorious cases such as that of the current US president. And, in talking like that, I feel that I'm throwing my weight against a door that is already open.

Often, throughout my life, I've felt that the fabulous stories and lessons of the Old Testament retain all their ancient nobility, and that this dimension of Judeo-Christian reality remains, as it were, intact.


Today, alas, we know that this is no longer the case. The extraordinary research and scholarship of Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, brilliantly exposed recently in both a book and a DVD set entitled The Bible Unearthed, shatter every illusion we might have retained in this domain. In a nutshell, all the stories of the Torah and the Prophets are neither more nor less than that: enthralling but perfectly fabricated stories. For years to come, Israelis and Palestinians will still be capable of killing one another in their respective determination to administer the tombs of the alleged patriarchs, in the cave of Machpelah at Hebron. But we know now that there were no patriarchs. Neither an Abraham, nor an Isaac nor a Jacob. They were literary constructions: personages invented by scribes in Jerusalem writing in the 7th century BCE [before the start of the so-called Common Era: that's to say, the year zero, which Christians used to associate approximately with the birth of Jesus].

It goes without saying that you don't need to become familiar with archaeological findings in the Holy Land [I remain fond of that expression] or the land of the Pharaohs [and that one, too] to form an opinion concerning the case against religion. As Richard Dawkins makes it perfectly clear, not only in The God Delusion but in his celebrated books about genes and evolution, science has truly advanced to a point at which there is simply no longer any tiny place whatsoever for any kind of divinity. This is a conclusion that imposes itself naturally upon any serious inquirer equipped with a minimum of scientific culture. Indeed, this atheistic awareness has become an essential cornerstone of contemporary culture in general. So, the case against religion might be summed up, not surprisingly, in a single word: Science.

Blasphemy in Europe

From a geographical viewpoint, Europe is a vaguely-defined entity, but the political body called the European Union is perfectly clear. It is composed at present of 27 member nations whose union is concretized by various institutions: above all, the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the European Parliament.

Many people are confused by the fact that another organization, called the Council of Europe, has nothing to do with any of the above-mentioned entities. The CE [Council of Europe], whose seat is in Strasbourg (France), is much older than the EU [European Union], since it was founded in 1949 by the Treaty of London. Today, the CE has far more members (47, including Turkey, Russia and many former Communist states) than the EU.

An important institution of the CE is its Parliamentary Assembly, referred to as the PACE. Today, the summer session of the PACE made two interesting recommendations concerning religion, which I summarize roughly as follows:

— When they conflict, human rights must ultimately take precedence over religious principles. States should welcome and respect religions, in all their plurality, as a form of ethical, moral, ideological and spiritual expression by citizens, and should protect individuals’ freedom to worship. But there should also be a clear separation of church and state.

— Religious groups must tolerate criticism and debate about their activities, provided it does not amount to gratuitous insult. On the other hand, hate speech—inciting discrimination or violence against people of a particular religion—should be penalized. Meanwhile, blasphemy laws—which often result from the dominant position of one particular religion—should be reviewed. In particular, blasphemy should not be considered as a penal infraction.

The explicit use of the term "blasphemy" in the second recommendation is particularly interesting. This recommendation has probably been inspired by recent conflicts concerning allegedly blasphemous references to the prophet Muhammad in political cartoons.

Medieval Australia

I'm shocked by the fact that certain elected politicians in Australia are described in the local press as "Catholic MPs", as if their religious beliefs might impinge upon their political convictions and choices. Are so-called catholic MPs expected to cater for voters who might be Protestants, or Jews, or Moslems, or atheists? Or does the Catholic tag attached to such a politician mean that he/she is morally justified in ignoring non-Catholic citizens, and leaving them to rot in hell? To my mind, the expression "Catholic MP" cannot logically exist, and should not be tolerated in serious journalism. When an elected member enters the sanctuaries of the State, he/she should leave his religious beliefs in the cloakroom.

Today, no nation can claim to be adult, and no political constitution is sound from a purely human viewpoint, unless a strict separation is established, once and for all, between the supreme concept of the State (that is, in the case that concerns me, the nation of Australia), on the one hand, and the multifarious religious organizations that the land might shelter. Ideas of the latter folk should not be allowed to ooze, like medieval sewage, into the sacred domain of the Nation and the People.

Now, as if it weren't enough to have the Church—like an antiquated harlot in parrot-colored robes—trying to allure hesitant politicians in the context of the ongoing debate (not only in Australia) about research using human stem cells, there's a greater cause for concern in this domain. Apparently, a new social phenomenon is arising, described colorfully by Australia's national media organization as stem-cell tourism. What's it all about? Well, in the backwoods of Australia's great Asian neighbors, private charlatans have started to jump onto the bandwagon of stem-cell treatments by offering miraculous cures of a highly suspect nature. Their potential patients (customers) include Australians with a terminal illness or spinal injury.

Funnily, in speaking out against this quackery (a tiny voice in the wilderness), I would seem to be on the same side as the Sydney cardinal. This is an illusion. In French, there's a terse old saying: Robes don't make a monk. In Sydney parlance: Clothes don't make a drag queen. My simple advice to the cardinal (borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick): Watch out for life. The same advice might be given to travelers of all kinds, including sexual tourists and stem-cell tourists.

Required reading

Many people like to believe antiquated nonsense such as the notion that the crucified Jesus once ascended bodily into the sky. In a different domain, other misinformed folk persist in believing today that donkeys are stupid beasts. Once upon a time, in French schools, teachers punished the dunce of the class by forcing him/her to wear a so-called bonnet d'âne [donkey bonnet] adorned with a pair of big cloth ears.

The French term ânerie [donkey stuff] is still used as a synonym for ignorance and stupidity, as in the English metaphor that consists of designating a silly fellow as an ass. Well, in a recent issue of a serious French TV weekly, two otherwise respectable French intellectuals dared to apply this derogatory term to the famous film by Simcha Jacobovici about a tomb to the south of Jerusalem that contained several ossuaries [human bone boxes], one of which was marked "Jesus son of Joseph". [Click here to see my earlier article, entitled Thomas time, on this fascinating subject.] These Parisian intellectuals, who should know better, referred rudely to Jacobovici's work as an ânerie mercantile [roughly, commercial donkey shit]. I would like to offer a symbolic donkey hat to each of these gentlemen, while hoping—as we say in English—that they'll end up being obliged to eat it.

Simcha Jacobovici's film was finally aired on French TV late last Wednesday evening, and it was followed by a well-mannered debate in French between Simcha himself and 65-year-old Monsignor Jean-Michel di Falco, bishop of Gap, who has long been looked upon as an elegant and well-informed spokesman of the hierarchy of the Catholic church in France.

I hardly need to say that Jacobovici's astounding film is clear and convincing. Quite the opposite of commercial donkey shit. On the other hand, di Falco's observations were neither pertinent nor particularly relevant, and certainly not persuasive. He even wasted everybody's time by evoking two extraneous subjects: Dan Brown's popular novel [The Da Vinci Code] and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Curiously, Monsignor di Falco did not utter a single word concerning the relatively recent discovery (1945) of the most fabulous Christian documents since the Bible: the Nag Hammadi library. [I've already written two articles on this theme. Click here to see the first post, entitled Sharing life together. Click here to see the second post, entitled Gnostic discoveries.]

This juxtaposition shows the covers of two books. The current situation can be summarized simply. If you're concerned by Christianity today, either as an interested observer (like me) or as a believer (like Monsignor di Falco), you need both these books. The one on the left provides a complex but partial introduction to the subject. The one on the right [hot off the press] offers an even more complex but necessary and complementary view of Christian things. Henceforth, for aficionados of Jesus, both books are required reading. The second book reveals all that was stupidly banned, in year 367, in the days of Athanasius. Today, we're adult enough to read such stuff. In any case, to my mind, Simcha Jacobovici's research and film go hand in hand with the Nag Hammadi scriptures. And together, they'll end up turning Christianity upside-down...

Childhood myths

I'm using the word "childhood" to designate, not only my own early years in Australia, but the wider concept of the infancy of Humanity. The great myth of Noah's ark belongs to these two domains.

As a boy in Grafton, I had witnessed two major floods, in 1950 and 1954. In our dull existence in a small country town, floods were exciting happenings, tinged with anguish, because nobody knew to what height the waters might rise. On the other hand, people rarely feared for their lives, because few of us were in the vicinity of swirling currents and treacherous depths. Besides, there were boats and dinghies everywhere, even amphibian military vehicles nicknamed "ducks". During the tense countdown to an impending flood, many local men saw themselves faced with long hours of harsh effort, in the chilly dampness, to protect their families and belongings from the rising waters. Some of these flood fighters were convinced that an ideal way of sustaining their bodies during these combats consisted of a regular intake of warming alcohol, often rum or whisky. An outcome of this belief was that a few rare accidents during a flood involved drunken men who slipped in the water and drowned.

I've always looked upon the biblical tale of Noah's Ark as an archaic precursor of themes I'd witnessed as a ten-year-old child in South Grafton. As soon as weather reports made it clear that there would soon be a flood, farmers started to move their animals to higher grounds. As the waters slowly rose, families in isolated places were offered a choice between moving by boat to safer places, or staying stoically in their inundated houses. In my juvenile vision of a Clarence River flood, the waters seemed to cover the entire flat world. I had no reason to imagine that there might be places on Earth that remained high and dry.

The ancient people who left us legends of the Deluge probably saw things in a similar way to me, at the age of ten, on a farm in South Grafton. If the rain were exceptionally heavy, the resulting flood would be universal (or global, as we would say today, knowing that the Earth is round), and the only way of surviving would be to scramble aboard a gigantic biblical boat. If there were room on the vessel, a farmer might ask the captain to save some of his dearest animals.

Normally, there's a time for infantile tales: childhood. As we grow up, most of us set aside such legends, replacing them by adult explanations. Sadly, some folk remain immature kids throughout their entire lives. In the USA, a recent poll revealed that half the population believes that a supernatural being named God created the universe, in much the same form as we see it today, at some time during the last ten millennia. In other words, for these folk, who have the superficial appearance of adults, it's as if scientific research in general, and Darwin's theory of evolution in particular, simply never existed. The extremists, who call themselves creationists, believe that Genesis is a literal description of the way in which the cosmos came into being. A milder form of this anti-scientific affliction consists in believing in the concept of intelligent design, which alleges that "all things bright and beautiful" were conceived and produced by a superior being intent upon creating a satisfactory abode for humans.

[NOTE: In my personal profile attached to the Antipodes blog, I speak of spending my time at Gamone "admiring the beauties of Creation". I have hoped that readers would understand that my use of the term "Creation", with a capital C, is a trivial case of poetic license, which is not meant to suggest that I see the cosmos as the outcome of a biblical Genesis-type creator. In fact, I often use the term "Creator", with a capital C, to designate Big Bang principles, evolutionary events, and their on-going consequences.]

Some Australians might be pleased to know that America's star creationist is a Queensland expatriate named Ken Ham, who has set up a so-called Creation Museum in Kentucky featuring a reconstruction of Noah's Ark carrying robotic dinosaurs. First, Crocodile Dundee, then Steve Irwin, and now Ken Ham. There would seem to be big openings in America for Aussie clowns. I don't wish to waste any more time describing the US operations of this nitwit whose success story appalls but does not surprise me. Whether we like it or not, America is America. Use Google to learn more about the Ham scam.

Sepulcher cult

Respect of the dead is one of the most ancient human principles that exists. In the splendid trilogy of films by Jacques Malaterre on the origins of humanity, there are reconstructions of the primeval impact of death at a personal level, that of the family and companions of the deceased. The notion of a sepulcher probably occurred in the beginning as a simple pile of rocks concealing the putrefying corpse. Much later, the concept of individual life after death was concocted, and the sepulcher cult reached an apogee in ancient Egypt. Along with the processes of embalming and mummification, and the erection of elaborate stone sepulchers, the Egyptians codified alleged happenings in their Underworld.

In this New Empire papyrus, the dog-headed god Anubis (whose head has often been described erroneously as that of a jackal) guides the deceased person to his judgment, which uses a balance.

Christians have taken over this Ancient Egyptian concept of a guide in their Saint Christopher, who is actually depicted in this image with a dog's head. Not so long ago, devout Catholic drivers used to attach a St Christopher medal above the dashboard of their vehicle, without realizing that the main role of the prototype personage consisted of guiding individuals into the afterlife! [What a pity that there don't seem to be any statistics revealing the proportion of accident deaths in which the driver was "protected" by a St Christopher medal.]

Getting back to the theme of elaborate sepulchers, I must admit, as a genealogy enthusiast, that I'm always happy to discover ancestral tombs, which are often a primary source of data. Sometimes, on the contrary, tombstones display less reliable information than what you can find in church and government records.

The raison d'être of my musings on sepulchers is to ask a rhetorical question: Should we, today, continue to employ traditional funerary rites that have come down to us from past epochs? Or should they be modernized? And the reason why this subject has arisen in my mind is the news item about a lot of folk having paid money to have a few grams of the ashes of some 200 loved ones sent into space aboard a telephone-sized rocket. The exact price: $495 dollars a gram. [Click here to see this story.] The capsule orbited Earth for two weeks, as planned, before floating back down to the surface of our planet by means of a parachute. But the hilarious aftermath of this afterlife business is that the parachute apparently touched down at a remote and rugged site in New Mexico, which means that the "ashstronauts" have not yet been found. Did the space vehicle and its dead occupants get damaged during their re-entry into the atmosphere? How long will they be able to survive in the harsh desert conditions if rescuers don't reach them soon? Will, in fact, they ever be found? These are terrible questions, which cannot yet be answered.

Personally, I'm convinced that it's high time to ditch all archaic concern for the material remains of the dead. We should realize that corpses are corpses, and ashes are ashes. No more, no less. I believe that much of the ugliness of death can be attenuated by facing up to the fact that a corpse contains no traces of the consciousness and personality of the individual we once knew. So, it's silly to think that the deceased person might, somehow or other, get a kick out of his/her posthumous ride through space.

I can imagine a far more logical spatial trip towards posterity, which could even be organized while the individual is still alive. This would consist simply of using modern technology to obtain a digital copy of his/her genome and then beaming this into outer space by means of a high-energy transmitter, which might be called a Life Ray (as opposed to the death rays of a Star Trek kind). To keep it company on its never-ending journey through space, the genome could be associated with a digitized account of the genealogy and earthly achievements of the deceased. And why not even encapsulate in the Life Ray's message a digitized illustration of Anubis or Saint Christopher? The more the merrier on this excursion throughout Eternity!