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!

Papal samba

Talented journalists [of the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein caliber] work like successful detectives. They acquire piles of fragmentary data, of all kinds, and then they attempt to fit it all together like the elements of a jigsaw puzzle. And finally, if they're lucky, a Big Picture emerges from their synthesis.

Great scientists too, in the Richard Dawkins and Brian Greene category, work at times like journalists and detectives. I thought of that comparison last night when I was watching an excellent BBC special on the Adelaide-born fellow named Howard Walter Florey who played a major role in the invention of the pharmaceutical technology behind the production of penicillin, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (along with Alexander Fleming and Florey's Oxford colleague Ernst Chain) in 1945.

Unfortunately, devout catholics in general, and popes in particular, don't operate that way. They concentrate all their attention on a tiny number of not-very-convincing speculations, often of a fanciful nature (akin to what ordinary folk would call magic), and they elevate these sundry things to dogma.

Take sex, for example. What the bloody hell (to talk like an Aussie creator of tourism publicity) gives this silly old guy the right to drop in on Brazil and tell the local folk that they must respect fidelity between spouses and chastity "both within and outside marriage"? Benedict XVI surely knows shit all about sex, marriage, fidelity, chastity, contraception, abortion, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, HIV, etc... just as I know nothing about the concepts of the so-called "Immaculate Conception" of Mary, the alleged virgin birth of Jesus and the incredibly mysterious notion of the Holy Trinity. Benedict, my boy, it's time to pull your finger out and admit that you should stick to your personal specialties, and not start to talk about things you ignore.

Or maybe, on the other hand, the pope should get stuck into studies of all kinds about sex, both theoretical and experimental, so that he could fit all the fragments together and provide us with an expert description of the Big Fucking Picture, in the style of a great journalist, detective or scientific researcher. Who knows? Maybe the Vatican laboratories could invent a powerful pharmaceutical product like penicillin (to be known by a short name such as "penis-kill") which would cause unchaste pricks to wither up and drop off.

But I must refrain from venting my irritation. Let me remain in the domain of facts. In the same Google news that tells us about Benedict XVI in Brazil, there's a serious medical article about possible links between oral sex and throat cancer. [Click here to see how Time magazine handles this subject.] I reckon that the Pope should look into this deep question and tell us how he feels about it.

Gnostic discoveries

Recently, I started to talk about an Egyptian Christian named Pachomius [292-348], who is thought of as the inventor of the concept of monastic communities described as cenobitic, which means that the monks lived together, sharing their possessions, under the guidance of an abbot. Some twenty years after the death of their first abbot, a strange event took place. The Pachomian monks assembled many of the papyrus books in their monastic library and carefully buried them at the foot of the cliffs of Jabal al-Tarif, near the city of Nag Hammadi. Curiously, the monks conducted this book burying, not to destroy them, but as if they wanted their books to be preserved.

In 1945, the buried books of the Pachomian monks were unearthed. Today, an observer might say: "Show me the books they used to read, and I'll tell you who they were." In any case, the books of the so-called Nag Hammadi Library are totally different to what we now think of as "ordinary" Christian reading, and it can be said that the Proto-Christianity of Pachomius and his monks was indeed a very strange affair.

Researchers believe that the monks buried their books as a reaction to a ruling laid down in a festal letter by Athanasius in 367. The archbishop of Alexandria had made a basically unilateral decision concerning his choice of the canonical books of the Christian scriptures, including above all the 27 books of what would later be named the New Testament. As for all the rest, it was declared by Athanasius to be heretical, and this adjective designates most of the books buried by the Pachomian monks.

Today, for us 21st-century citizens who can buy all kinds of books through the Internet, it's a fabulous privilege to be able to read the authentic Proto-Christian books, designated by the mysterious term Gnostic, that were surely part of the everyday "bible" of Pachomius and his monks. In any case, it's an amazing shock for us, since the brand of Christianity revealed by these books of Nag Hammadi appears, at times, to have little to do with our ordinary concepts of the Christian religion.

Sharing life together

During my recent excursion to Provence, my friends Natacha and Alain took me (and my dog) to the ancient Cistercian abbey of Sénanque, which functions today as a priory whose monks earn their living by growing lavender in a magnificent site near the splendid Provençal village of Gordes. In their excellent store, I bought a book about the crusades (a subject that has always interested me), a big book about lavender (containing recipes that I intend to try out, using lavender that grows at Gamone) and a guidebook on Sénanque. I was also attracted by a small monograph with a striking red cover on the subject of Athanasius [293-373], but I'm already sufficiently informed concerning this Alexandrian figure [to whom I shall return].

The Cistercians have always been engaged in worldly affairs. In the UK, the organizational prowess of the monks of this 11th-century order can be admired in the ruins of the great Yorkshire abbeys of Rievaulx and Fountains. The so-called "white monks" are perfect examples of a style of monasticism known as cenobitic, which means literally in Greek that monks "share life" together. In other words, Cistercian monks work and dine together, as opposed to the eremitic style of Carthusian monks, for example, who spend most of their time confined to their cells.

In the Sénanque guidebook, the Cistercians trace their history to a fourth-century Egyptian desert hermit named Pachomius, who can be truly considered as the inventor of cenobitic monasticism. Initially, Pachomius was a pagan (who surely didn't look anything like the saintly personage depicted in this modern stylized Greek icon), and he had a hard job trying to persuade his initial Christian companions to behave correctly like a brotherhood of monks. One day, for example, when members of his community were working out in the fields, Pachomius loaded a donkey with food and cooking equipment, and set out to nourish his brethren. These allegedly Christian fellows, having eaten, decided to abandon their "abbot", steal his donkey and set out in search of greener pastures. Pachomius, disabused, had to carry his cooking equipment back to his home base of Faw Qibli, located in the Nag Hammadi region in Upper Egypt, 600 kilometers south of Cairo and 125 kilometers north of Luxor. This was the precise sun-drenched spot, near the frontier between Egypt's fertile Nile land and the desert, at the foot of a rocky mountain, Jabal al-Tarif, at which our great European traditions of Benedictine-inspired monasteries came into being.

That was the source of Sénanque. In later posts, I intend to return to the all-important domain of Nag Hammadi (ancient documents found in 1945), Pachomius, Athanasius and modern Christianity as proclaimed at Sénanque and elsewhere.

Benedict XVI on the historicity of Easter events

We know with relative certainty the day of the week on which Jesus was brought before Caiaphas, then Pilate, and fixed to the cross. It was the day before the Jewish sabbath: that is, a Friday. This information is provided by two of the four evangelists:

— Mark 15, 42
By this time evening had come; and as it was the day of preparation (that is, the day before the sabbath), [...]

— John 19, 31
Because it was the eve of the sabbath, the Jews were anxious that the bodies should not remain on the crosses [...]

We also know with relative certainty the day of the month (but not the year) on which Jesus was crucified. It was the day of preparation for the Pesach (Passover) festival: that is, the Hebrew date of 14 Nisan. This information is provided twice by one of the four evangelists:

— John 18, 28
From Caiaphas Jesus was led into the governor’s headquarters. It was now early morning, and the Jews themselves stayed outside the headquarters to avoid defilement, so that they could eat the Passover meal.

— John 19, 14
It was the day of preparation for the Passover, about noon. Pilate said to the Jews, ‘Here is your king.’

It is also provided by a purely Jewish document:

— Babylonian Talmud, Nezikin ("Damages") order,
Sanhedrin tractate, V, 2, 43a
The day before Pesach, they executed Jesus of Nazareth [...]

Using the fact that Jesus was crucified on a Friday, 14 Nisan, historians have been able to conclude that this event probably took place on Friday, 7 April 30, when Jesus was about 36 years old.

At some time prior to this fateful Friday on the eve of Passover, Jesus had a final meal with his apostles.

Concerning this celebrated Last Supper, which inspired the Christian ceremony of the Eucharist, there is a dating problem that has not yet been solved in a way that satisfies everybody. Most people consider that it took place on the evening of Thursday, 6 April 30, but this convenient date raises problems, for reasons that I shall now summarize.

There has always been a ceremonial Jewish dinner on the eve or the first evening of Pesach that is known as the Passover Seder, or simply Seder. Christians often refer to this Jewish ritual as the paschal supper. Clearly, since Jesus was tried and executed on the eve of Pesach, then the Last Supper could not have possibly been an ordinary Jewish Seder. Besides, at the start of Jesus's final meal, John describes a curious event that is not part of a traditional Seder: Jesus washed the feet of his companions. Furthermore, as described by the evangelists, essential ingredients of the Seder appear to have been absent in the Last Supper. The gospels make no mention of the presence on the table of lamb, matzot (unleavened bread) and various symbolic foodstuffs.

In spite of these negative factors, the Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) persist in speaking of the Last Supper as if it took place at the start of Pesach and constituted a traditional Seder. For example:

— Mark 14, 12-16
Now on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered, his disciples said to him, ‘Where would you like us to go and prepare the Passover for you?’ So he sent off two of his disciples with these instructions: ‘Go into the city, and a man will meet you carrying a jar of water. Follow him, and when he enters a house, give this message to the householder: “The Teacher says, ‘Where is the room in which I am to eat the Passover with my disciples?’” He will show you a large upstairs room, set out in readiness. Make the preparations for us there.’ Then the disciples went off, and when they came into the city they found everything just as he had told them. So they prepared the Passover.

The Catholic Church has always recognized, of course, that there are contradictions in the Gospels concerning this central theme of the Last Supper. Last Thursday, in his homily during the Holy Thursday mass in the basilica of Saint John Lateran, Benedict XVI made an allusion to these contradictions. Then he went on to make an astonishing reference to Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Here are the words of the pope:

In the narrations of the Evangelists, there is an apparent contradiction between the Gospel of John, on one hand, and what, on the other hand, Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us. According to John, Jesus died on the cross precisely at the moment in which, in the temple, the Passover lambs were being sacrificed. His death and the sacrifice of the lambs coincided.

This means that he died on the eve of Passover, and that, therefore, he could not have personally celebrated the paschal supper; at least this is what it would seem.

On the contrary, according to the three Synoptic Evangelists, the last supper of Jesus was a paschal supper, in its traditional form. He introduced the innovation of the gift of his body and blood. This contradiction, until a few years ago, seemed impossible to resolve.

The majority of the exegetes thought that John did not want to communicate to us the true historical date of the death of Jesus, but had opted for a symbolic date to make the deeper truth more evident: Jesus is the new and true lamb that spilled his blood for us all.

The discovery of the manuscripts of Qumran has led us to a convincing possible solution that, while not accepted by all, is highly probable. We can now say that what John referred to is historically correct. Jesus truly spilled his blood on the eve of Passover at the hour of the sacrifice of the lambs.

However, he celebrated Passover with his disciples probably according to the calendar of Qumran, that is to say, at least one day earlier -- he celebrated without a lamb, like the Qumran community who did not recognize the Temple of Herod and was waiting for a new temple.

Now, the explanations of Benedict XVI are really weird, for two reasons that I shall outline briefly before concluding this lengthy article:

— In suggesting that Jesus was an Essene, the pope has decided, as it were, to rewrite New Testament history on the basis of archaeological findings at Qumran made in the middle of the 20th century.

— Among the great Qumran scholars, nobody has ever imagined for an instant that the historical Jesus might have been an Essene.

My own explanation of the contradictions (for what it's worth) has the merit of being simpler and more orthodox than the pope's. I would imagine that the instructions about going into the city and meeting up with a man carrying a jar of water were in fact given by Jesus on the morning of Thursday, 6 April 30. After all, since the troublemaker from Nazareth and his followers were being spied upon by the authorities, it is feasible that Jesus thought it wise that his followers should be assembled in the "large upstairs room" well in advance of the eve of Passover. One can imagine that this room might have assumed the role, in the mind of Jesus, of a temporary shelter from his pursuers. But, by the end of Thursday afternoon, when everybody was present in the upper room, Jesus foresaw already that he would never live to see the eve of Pesach, twenty-four hours later. So, he transformed Thursday's assembly into an advanced and abridged ceremony: a sort of symbolic Seder. Since it was too early to envisage their evening get-together as a real Seder, there would be no lamb or special Jewish foodstuffs on the table, and the bread would be ordinary, not unleavened. But Jesus, knowing now that his time on Earth was about to end and that he would never be able to participate in a real Seder with his companions, improvised a virtual Passover supper... whose powerful spontaneous symbols (Jesus was equated to a sacrificed lamb, with Thursday's ordinary bread and wine of the upper room symbolizing his flesh and blood) gave rise to the Christian ritual of the Eucharist as we have known it ever since. To my mind, there is no need whatsoever to drag the Essenes into the picture.

In any case, the words of Benedict XVI, the day before yesterday, were astonishing and his reasoning is hard to fathom.

Ashes to ashes

It's ages since the late John Lennon shocked people by comparing the popularity of the Beatles with that of Jesus Christ. As for the Rolling Stones, who are still alive and kicking, most observers would have imagined that these old-timers had moved beyond the stage at which they might shock anybody. But Keith Richards claimed, this week, that he had once snorted the ashes of his dead father. And shock waves circled the Earth up until the Rolling Stones guitarist, who has battled heroin addiction, explained that his statement was a joke... which failed to amuse everybody.

In a different domain, many French people were surprised, if not shocked, to learn this week that alleged relics of Joan of Arc, burned at the stake by the English at Rouen in 1431, were in fact crumbled fragments of an Egyptian mummy. This discovery was made by a young medical doctor named Philippe Charlier who has become a renowned specialist in the research field known as paleopathology, which consists of analyzing pathological elements in ancient human and animal remains. The fraudulent nature of these relics, belonging to the archbishopric of Tours, was revealed by spectrometry and carbon 14 tests. But Dr Charlier also called upon two professional sniffers who carried out much the same kind of act that Keith Richards had joked about: nasal contact with human remains. When these two expert noses from the French perfume industry detected an aroma of vanilla, Dr Charlier was able to conclude with certainty that the remains came from a decomposed, rather than a cremated, body.

The Catholic Church, which looks upon Joan of Arc as a saint, used to be prepared to consider the Egyptian elements (including a fragment of a mummified cat) as authentic remains of the French heroine. It's understandable that the Church could have made such a huge error of judgment in the 19th century, when this stuff was unearthed. Today, it's harder to understand why the Church persists in making an infinitely greater error of judgment by asserting absurdly that natural events determined by the principles of science (many of which are known perfectly, whereas others remain less well-known) can be upset by allegedly magic happenings called miracles, brought about by prayer culminating in the "intercession" of the late pope.

Miracles happen

It would appear that a miracle was brought about on 2 June 2005 through the intercession of the late head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope John-Paul II. The Frenchwoman who benefited from that miracle happens to be a member of this same Church: Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, a 46-year-old nun. That's the Catholic way of keeping things in the family.


The story, which spans over two months, is straightforward. By the time John-Paul II died on 2 April 2005, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre was already gravely affected by Parkinson's disease on the left side of her body. Being left-handed, she could no longer write, and her trembling left arm dangled at her side when she walked. A month and a half later, on 13 May 2005, the new pope, Benedict XVI, wiped away the traditional delay of five years in the canonization process concerning his predecessor. The next morning, like a team of footballers preparing themselves for a forthcoming match, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre and her fellow nuns got stuck into a heavy-duty program of praying aimed at persuading the heavenly soul of the departed pope to do something about the nun's affliction. In spite of all their prayers, on 2 June 2005, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre was in such a state of suffering that she asked her mother superior for permission to abandon her physical duties. This request was refused. Instead, the mother superior demanded curiously that Sister Marie Simon-Pierre should use her pain-racked left hand to write the name of the deceased pope. As might be expected, the result was unreadable. But later in the evening, alone in her cell, the nun felt a sudden urge to perform the same writing exercise, and she discovered with amazement that, this time, the result was... miraculous. The following morning, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre informed her mother superior and the members of the community that her Parkinson's disease had indeed disappeared. A miracle... which the Church is now examining scrupulously.

Talking about miracles, I've often imagined a fabulous thought experiment: the resurrection of my father King Mepham Skyvington [1917-1978]. Now, that would be an authentic miracle, which would convert me instantly into a Believer. But that's not the point of my scenario. Let's imagine that my resuscitated father, out in his native Australia, were to be placed in front of a webcam, and that his friends were to tell him that he could now communicate in real time with his son over here in France. I would imagine that Dad would see this as magic... or, in ecclesiastic terms, as a miracle.

If we were to quiz enlightened Church people about the notion of miracles, many would admit that universal Science cannot be opposed concerning almost everything that has happened, is happening or will happen in the Cosmos. But they would then mention an addendum à la Leonard Cohen:

There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

They would claim that there are exceptions to Science, and that some of these exceptions can be described as Miracles.

Exceptions? I don't like exceptions of any kind. Imagine a murderer who defends himself as follows: "In general, I've always believed that killing was an unpardonable crime. But, in the case of my victim, I made an exception." Or a child rapist: "Sure, I believe in general that children should be protected from people like me. But this kid was exceptionally appealing."

In democratic societies, laws prevent citizens from saying certain things. I know little about legal systems, and I certainly don't have the vocation of a lawmaker, but I often feel that there should be some kind of a French law concerning people who would blab out publicly, at the start of the 21st century, their ridiculous beliefs about allegedly magic events. To call a spade a spade, I'm shocked by the fact that a French nun should be seeking the spotlight because her Parkinson's disease disappeared "miraculously" (in inverted commas). Medical researchers should be given time to advance suggestions (if they can) about why this astounding event might have occurred. Meanwhile, talk of magic and Christian miracles is stupidly outrageous, and should be outlawed.

Normally, this might be a big deal, except that [once again, an exception] few people today in France or elsewhere really give a folkloric fuck about what this nun or the Roman church might be claiming. Maybe it was Jesus himself who descended miraculously from his cross and gave this mindless nun the power to write the name of the pope. Who knows? Who cares? Let's have done with clownish popery. Meanwhile, Science moves on...

Sharing power in Northern Ireland

Normally, these two allegedly Christian leaders wouldn't share a piece of bread if they were hungry, let alone power. Like many of their fellow countrymen, they haven't evolved much at a religious level over the last four and a half centuries, since the days when England's Henry VIII decided to break from papal allegiance, and found a new church, so that he could get rid of his wife Catherine of Aragon. Be that as it may, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein made a promise today that they will share power in Northern Ireland starting on 8 May. The world will be watching them, warily.

The meaning of life

My title is misleading. A reader might imagine that I'm using the expression in the same style, say, as a distraught individual who cries out to a friend (or a priest or a psychiatrist): “Life has no meaning for me; I’ve decided to commit suicide.” There, it’s a question of “to be or not to be”: that's to say, meaning (or rather lack of meaning) à la Hamlet, à la Albert Camus:

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”

I first read those opening words of The Myth of Sisyphus when I was eighteen, out in Australia, and I was so impressed by the French Algerian-born author that I purchased several of his translated works, and even carried these books with me in my suitcases when I came to France in 1962... which was truly a case of bringing coals to Newcastle. Since then, I've totally revised my appreciation of the existentialist Nobel laureate. Like the US physicist Brian Greene [see The Fabric of the Cosmos], I’m no longer on the same wavelength—if ever this were the case—as Albert Camus. I don't, for a moment, consider that the pursuits of scientific research are mere "games" that should be put aside while an individual is deciding artistically (or otherwise) whether or not to blow his brains out. That suggestion, to my mind, is stupid, indeed grotesque. Besides, I'm not—and have never been—in the least bit suicidal. Human life on Earth—like all life in the Cosmos—is such a precious and fragile essence that one should not spill a drop of it.

The meaning of life is a clearcut affair for those who believe in Jesus... or any other divine entity, for that matter. Nonetheless, if a skull is ominously present, holding up the open Bible in this splendid depiction of Bruno in prayer (a curious visual reflection of the monk's own bald skull), this suggests that believers are constantly pursued by the gentle all-pervading presence of death, of human mortality. And this is normal. In extreme cases such as that of the Chartreux monks, whose earthly existence is characterized by a good dose of mortification, it might even be said that the global meaning of a monk’s life is to be found in the expected aftermath of his death.

But I said at the beginning that my title is misleading, since I was not referring to meaning of either the Hamlet/Camus or the Bruno kind. So, we might ask: What’s the meaning of “meaning” in my title? It’s a word whose archaic etymology is linked to the notion of mind. To look for the meaning of X is equivalent to asking: What do we have in mind when we refer to X? More precisely: What do we have in mind when we evoke the notion of living creatures such as plants, animals and Homo Sapiens?

That question found answers of a revolutionary kind in 1859, when Charles Darwin brought out a book with a long-winded title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Living creatures of a successful kind share a dominant feature. [That last sentence contains a hint of a pleonasm. If a creature is living vigorously—thriving, one might say—it is necessarily “of a successful kind”. Creatures that are not successful in life simply die out. Somebody once said that commuters only complain about trains that run late, whereas nobody ever talks about all the trains that run normally on time. On the great railway of life, it’s the opposite. We only meet up with creatures that have managed to get aboard the right train. All the rest disappear during the trip, and never reach their destination.]

As I was about to say, before getting led astray into talking about trains, thriving creatures share a dominant feature: that of being highly successful in the art of procreation. Years ago, when I was working in French TV, I found myself visiting the research laboratory of a French specialist in a bizarre discipline, linked to embryology, known as teratology: the study of monsters. He showed me his vast collection of malformed fetuses and babies, displayed in big jars of formaldehyde lined up on shelves along the walls of his laboratory. A teratologist uses a vocabulary of weird terms to designate the various kinds of monsters. If I remember correctly, “acephalous” indicates that the creature has no brain, and “cyclopean” means that there’s a single eye in the center of the forehead. I was impressed by a curious remark made by the teratologist: “Nature generally ensures that the most extreme kinds of malformations give rise to a creature that cannot survive. Consequently, we don’t normally encounter many striking teratological specimens in the everyday world around us.” Hearing these words, my mind flashed back to a lovely old Anglican hymn that we used to sing in the cathedral at Grafton:

All things bright and beautiful,
all creatures great and small,
all things wise and wonderful,
the Lord God made them all.

[See a quaint presentation of the words and music at http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/a/l/allthing.htm]

I wondered whether the hymn would sound so nice if we changed a line:

all things weird and terrible...

Procreation is essentially a matter of copying genes, which is a process that may or may not be carried out in a two-parent sexual situation. The replicator device at the basis of all life—plants, animals and Homo Sapiens—is the DNA molecule, whose structure was explained by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953.

Shortly before then, a mathematician named John von Neumann, working in the USA, produced operational computer-type models of the replication process, summed up in a famous book that was published posthumously: Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. For those of us who were meeting up with the phenomenon of computers at that time [I first came in contact with IBM in 1957: the year of von Neumann’s death], the great Hungarian-born mathematician was something of a hero, because it was he who actually invented the fundamental concept of a stored computer program. And he also played a pioneering role in the theory of games... which may or may not have concerned the activities that Camus was designating in the quotation at the start of this post. We all felt that, in programming electronic machines to perform all kinds of tasks, we were exploiting an extraordinary art devised by von Neumann.

Today, if you were to ask me about the meaning of life, I would not hesitate in replying that one thing I have in mind (more than suicide or God or any other boring stuff), when I reflect upon the magic of all living things bright and beautiful (and otherwise), is John von Neumann’s work on self-reproducing automata.

Why? How?

My filmmaker friend Eric M Nilsson contacted me a couple of months ago, asking me to participate in a documentary of a philosophical nature for Swedish television on the sense of the two questions: Why? How? This is the distinction evoked by Richard Dawkins on page 56 of The God Delusion:

It is a tedious cliché (and, unlike many clichés, it isn’t even true) that science concerns itself with how questions, but only theology is equipped to answer why questions.

Eric arrived at Gamone yesterday, and we talked about the project during dinner last night. I suggested that he might like to shoot the interview in the fields alongside the splendid monastery of the Grande-Chartreuse, an hour away from my home. I felt that the background image of the great monastery would create a nice harmony. The thirty monks who spend their existence in that glorified prison, allegedly praying night and day for all of us on the outside, are convinced that the why question is valid, and their unique answer is Jesus. As for me, I explained on camera (like Dawkins) that the why question, applied to our human existence, is no more than a nonsensical alignment of words, not a valid question, and that science is obliged to carry on answering how questions exclusively.

Here I am in the snow-covered fields, answering Eric’s questions:

It was a delightful sunny outing. The only thing I regretted was that I hadn’t brought my dog along with us to participate in the discussion. Sophia could have clarified certain issues. After all, “dog” is “god” spelt backwards.

God bashing

In the UK, religion and the religious are being treated pretty roughly these days. A few weeks ago, Elton John was outspoken on this subject, saying: "From my point of view, I would ban religion completely. Organized religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into really hateful lemmings, and it's not really compassionate." Today, Prime Minister Tony Blair made a thinly disguised criticism of Muslim immigrants, saying: "Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain Britain. So, conform to it, or don't come here. We don't want the hate mongers, whatever their race, religion or creed." Blair’s explanations included a catchy slogan: "The right to be different, the duty to integrate.” Earlier this year, the Oxford professor Richard Dawkins (author of scientific best sellers such as The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker) made a brilliant attack upon all kinds of religions in The God Delusion.

In Iraq, a suicide bomber sees himself as a martyr who will be rewarded in paradise by being introduced to seventy-two virgins. This sounds like a ridiculous incentive. But is it more absurd than the religious motivations of a George W Bush who was led to invade Iraq because God apparently encouraged him to do so?

In France, the Catholic Church recently criticized medical research using embryonic stem cells, and this criticism was expressed shortly before the Téléthon: France’s gigantic annual call for donations. Most French people were angered by the attitude of the Church, and the president himself stepped into the arena in order to tell the Church politely to shut up.

The French philosopher André Comte-Sponville recently brought out a book whose title could be translated as The Spirit of Atheism, in which he advocates a new kind of “spirituality without God”.

There’s no doubt about it: In the Old World (particularly in the laic republic of France), religion is more and more often an unwelcome visitor. The graffiti is on the wall: God, go home!