Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts

Friday, January 1, 2010

Irish law on blasphemy

On this first day of the new decade, Ireland's medieval law on blasphemy becomes operational.

My article of 26 November 2009 entitled Damnable Irish Catholic behavior [display] evoked a report on disgusting sexual crimes involving children committed by Catholic personnel in Ireland. Today, it's frankly preposterous that this same nation should be intent upon promulgating a law against blasphemy. This ugly law must be repealed as soon as possible!

People might react by claiming that Ireland is an independent nation and that the Irish have the right to outlaw blasphemy if they so desire. In other words, if Ireland wants to remain backward, it's none of my business. Well, I would reply that, since the creation of the entity known as Europe, everything that's decided in Europe in the way of new laws is the business of every European. But there's a stronger reason for worry. This kind of archaic law about blasphemy is wind in the sails of extremist Muslims who've been lobbying at a UN level for the drafting of new international laws designed to protect religion... which means, of course, their religion and religious customs.

Monday, December 28, 2009

In God we don't trust

Theoretically, in the USA, the national legislative body has no power to deal with religion. That's to say, church and state are separated, as stipulated in a clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Nevertheless, the nation's official motto is "In God we trust".

Since 1978, an association of freethinkers named the Freedom From Religion Foundation, based in Wisconsin, has been striving to erode the grip of God's trustees. Among other things, they've got around to designing what look like stained-glass windows of a new kind. Here's their Dawkins model:

[Click the banner to display a humongous version]

The word "trust", with financial connotations, can be found in French dictionaries. The presence of this verb on US banknotes lends weight to the view that the power of the dollar is, in some mysterious way, divine. This money is backed by God, as it were. I used to feel the same way about the basic monetary unit of modern Israel, the shekel.

Here in Europe, we've got a lot of work to do before the euro shines divinely like a piece of silver warmed by the hand of God. The underlying problem, of course, is that the mythological pagan creature Europa was not exactly the kind of female who would be welcomed into the home of a normal God-fearing family. As for the idea of "In Zeus we trust", this just wouldn't sound convincing to a serious banker.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Cute religion

When referring to religious beliefs, people generally use adjectives such as "ancient", "sacred", "profound", etc. To my mind, the fabulous American belief system known as Mormonism is simply cute. There's no better adjective to describe it. Compared to old religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Mormonism is cute in the same way that babies are cute, in the same way that this old Kodak poster is cute:

And here's a terribly cute video presentation of Mormonism that I found on the web:



I ignore the origins of this video. Was it really produced by the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? If so, they're dauntless folk. There's a French proverb: "Ridicule kills." What it means is that, once somebody has acquired a reputation as an object of ridicule, he's basically dead. It's almost impossible to recover his status as a person to be taken seriously. So, from that point of view, it could be said that the Mormons don't seem to fear death.

I've had two kinds of personal contacts with Mormons. Whenever I visited Jerusalem, back in the '80s and '90s, I invariably ran into small groups of cute Mormon girls from Utah, who were exceptionally friendly. Later, in Grenoble, LDS church members helped me enormously in my genealogical research by lending me precious microfilms of English census data. These days, I continue to use constantly their splendid Family Search website:

If ever a miracle were to occur and the voice of God were to boom out from the heavens above Gamone, informing me that it was time for me to choose a religion and pay up my church membership fees, I think I would become a Mormon. To borrow the language of Some Grey Bloke in my earlier article entitled Nasty stuff, should be censured [display], I like their options. I mean, those laid-back Utah spirit-chicks in Jerusalem were really angelic, in a cute way. Besides, at a deeper spiritual level, if you were to ask me to sum up my impressions of the fabulous theology of Mormonism in a single word, I would not hesitate in saying that it's truly... cute.

Clearly, if I'm going to spend Eternity in nice company, while pursuing my favorite hobby of computer-assisted family-history research, then the Mormons sound like the right people to get mixed up with.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Sunday pests

The local Catholic priest has never tried to convert me to his religion. That's understandable, because there's no longer any such individual in the neighborhood. A visiting priest does the rounds of the dozens of churches in the district for masses and marriages... particularly since the latter give rise generally, at the end of the betrothal, to a generous donation in crisp brightly-hued banknotes. This morning, for example, it was the big Sunday for Choranche, and my neighbor Madeleine was thrilled to inform me on the phone that there were at least two dozen aging individuals in the congregation. Just try to imagine that pious flock emerging from the doorway of the village church, seen in this old postcard (expertly tinted by a minute of Photoshop):

Burials, on the other hand, are taken care of by a compassionate middle-aged lady who lives at Pont-en-Royans. That solution might be thought of as a regression by old-timers who remember priests in black soutanes and altar boys in white laced cassocks. But it can be said that nobody buried under the auspices of this kind lady has ever complained of their treatment.

Meanwhile, this morning at Gamone, I received a visit by three young women on foot, members of the Jehovah's Witness organization. Now, if there's anything that drives me momentarily but furiously mad on a sunny Sunday morning, when I'm calmly devoting my time and energy to a subtle blend of gardening and computer-based work, it's a visit from Jehovah's Witnesses. I see them as pests, to be chased away. To be honest, it hasn't happened for ages... and I don't think it will happen again for quite some time. Let's say that I have a method for dealing with such individuals, in a totally spontaneous but well-oiled manner. The underlying rule is to dominate totally the discussion (in fact, a monologue), bringing up various well-chosen topics, and consistently refusing to allow them to get a word in. I do this reasonably well in the sense that I have a fair amount of experience in lecturing and industrial training courses in computing, where you don't really expect listeners to intervene verbally. Little by little, I allow them to start a sentence or two, which I exploit immediately in a harsh demonstration of their stupidity, ignorance, etc. This "dialogue" is conducted politely, almost respectfully, but I am constantly waiting for one of my listeners to pronounce a few words that might be construed as an attack on science. Then I pounce. This morning, one of the poor women started to say: "But, after all, Darwin's ideas are merely a theory, which can be contradicted..." That was largely sufficient for me to explode in an almost dignified style. I told the women to piss off immediately, and to never come back to Gamone to waste my time.

My farewell tactic is always the same, seemingly spontaneous, but in fact well-oiled, like the rest of my diatribe. Calling the three women back, I stammered out something along the following lines: "Excuse me for getting so upset. You must realize that I'm particularly fond of Charles Darwin. Criticism of his brilliant ideas upsets me immensely. I should force myself to remain calm, but it's stronger than me. You know how it is. In a rural setting like this, people tend to get upset by encounters with strangers like you, who drop in unexpectedly and start trying to tell us how to think. Besides, I must warn you that it would be unwise for you to visit local folk such as myself at any old time of the day or evening. You know, in the dark, all the local people have weapons, and one never knows how we might react if we were visited by individuals in the twilight, with the dogs barking, etc."

I don't mind being considered as a little crude and crazy. After all, I look upon Jehovah's Witnesses as immensely mindless creatures, on a cerebral par with medieval theologists. Readers will notice that, in what I've said, there's nothing that might be construed as an explicit threat, merely almost-friendly general advice, to avoid the possibility of nasty happenings. In parting, rapidly, the women wished me a happy Sunday. And I did the same. Needless to say, I've lost three would-be friends. But I believe I'm perfectly within my rights to discourage vigorously, in my own style, such visits from religious proselytizers.

A minute after our separation, as the women were retreating on foot down along Gamone Creek, with Sophia continuing to bark gruffly, spasmodically and dispassionately (in the way she barks when minor events are unfolding before her eyes), there was a totally-unplanned Magic Moment. A series of three loud gunshot bangs rang out across the valley from Châtelus. The three females looked back up over their shoulders, half expecting to see me with a gun in my hands. I waved a farewell. It was only this morning that Madeleine, after describing the mass at Choranche, and knowing that I don't read newspapers, added: "I forgot to warn you, William: the hunting season started yesterday." Yes, Madeleine, I saw three wild birds at Gamone.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Miraculous viruses

An ordinary Christian believes in God. But the thing that characterizes a true Man of God is his belief in miracles.

The bishop of Orléans, André Fort, is such a believer. Defending the theories of His Fallible Holiness Benny XVI, Andy the Strongman (the French adjective fort means "strong") has just announced that AIDS viruses have the miraculous capability of passing through the latex material out of which condoms are made. Now, I don't know where Andy obtained his facts. There must be some kind of an ecclesiastic laboratory in Orléans in which dynamic viruses can be observed bursting through condoms with the same divine energy as Joan of Arc breaking through the walls of the besieged city on 8 May 1492.

In the eyes of the enlightened bishop, condoms are holey... not to be confused with holy. If a man were dying of thirst after spending 40 days and 40 nights in the desert, he couldn't even use a condom to collect morning dew to drink. If you jumped into the ocean from a sinking ship, you couldn't even blow up a condom and use it as an inflated raft, because it would fizzle flat like the tube of a bike that has just run over a nail. A lady caught in foul weather while returning on foot from her hairdresser couldn't even drag a condom down over her perm to protect it from the rain, because the droplets would get through the latex skin like a horde of uncouth viruses breaking through the windows of a jewelry boutique. The Church has known all along that AIDS viruses have the same magical powers as the precious solidified blood that you find in tiny glass vials in Mediterranean churches. The faithful only have to conjure up the divine image in their minds, and the blood liquefies like a gelato in the sun of Naples.

If Benny and Andy were nice guys, prepared to assist uninformed fornicators, they would reveal holy secrets making it possible to waterproof condoms by the use of prayer, or maybe transform sperm into harmless holy water, or a miraculous trick of that kind. Another solution: Condom users in Africa and elsewhere could stock up with the prestige Driza-Bone ® product from Down Under... used by the Drover in the Australia movie. It's high-priced protection, sure, but 100% safe. And, as Nicole puts it, women like the rough outback feel.

BREAKING NEWS: You might recall the hilarious Monty Python sketch of scenes from a Ministry of Silly Walks [display]. These days, I have the impression that Catholic prelates throughout the world have been participating in a Mission of Silly Statements. André Vingt-Trois started the ball rolling. He's the archbishop of Paris whose attitude towards medical research was mentioned in my article of 26 November 2007 entitled Red can be wrong [display].

[An archbishop's colorful head and shoulders can look like a condom.]

A few weeks ago, on Women's Day (March 8), this Andy 23 was awarded the Macho of the year prize for his amazing declaration of 6 November 2008 on Radio Notre-Dame : "The most difficult thing is finding trained women. It's more than just wearing a skirt. It's a matter of having something in their heads." Then, in January of this year, the pope canceled the excommunications affecting a band of antiquated bishops, one of whom immediately aired alarming and unlawful revisionist views of the Shoah. A few days ago, Benny 16 gave us his unforgettable opinion on condoms, and he was backed up, first, by Di Falco then, yesterday, by Andy of Orléans.

Well, during the few hours since I ended the above article, another major ecclesiastic has jumped on the Silly Statements bandwagon, Brazil's Dadeus Grings, who claimed publicly that the major victims of Hitler's death camps were not Jews. Here are the words of our joyous Daddy Gringo: "The Jews talk about six million people killed. But how many Catholics were victims of the Holocaust? They were 22 million in all.''

I believe, seriously, that all these silly statements form the lyrics of a pathetic swan song from men who realize, maybe only subconsciously for the moment, that their old-fashioned system of Christian faith is doomed in the forthcoming future, for it has been overtaken by information, knowledge and scientific wisdom. Their declarations are fragments of a funeral dirge.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Light and darkness

I'm employing this pair of words metaphorically to designate clarity and obscurity. And the theme of my post is a petition that has just been launched in favor of the German theologian Joseph Ratzinger, now known to Christendom as Pope Benedict XVI.

Readers of my Antipodes blog are probably aware that one of the only things in common between Joe/Benny and me (please call me Billy) is the fact that we have both recently acquired dual nationalities. Joe was German, while Benny now has a Vatican passport. Similarly, Billy was Australian, while William now has a French passport. I've looked hard for other links and common features between us, but this domain remains murky. The Holy Ghost has refrained from inspiring me and enlightening my quest. [Notice the subtle way in which I've started to insert the light and darkness metaphors into my discourse.]

You've realized, no doubt, that my profound sense of Christian charity has prompted me to publicize the above-mentioned petition by papal defenders. But there was method in my madness. At the bottom of the petition website, there's a fabulous set of web banners: a colorful collection of links to everything that's Byzantine and medieval in the way of today's distinguished Catholic sheep... or should I say goats, in honor of my genetically-engineered friend Jeanie [display]?

Those interested in holy rocket science could spend an entire afternoon browsing through all those lovely links. With a bit of chance, you might even learn how to make fire by rubbing sacred wafers together... but I advise you to keep a flagon or two of the blood of Jesus on hand to quench the flames if ever they attained Aussie bushfire proportions.

Seriously, what some of these folk would appear to crave for is obscurity. The neat thing about Latin, particularly if you're not a Latinist, is that you have no idea whatsoever about the sense of what's being said. This is a truly great solution for those who consider that the ways of God must necessarily remain mysterious. And lots of fuddled old-timers think that way. Ignorance has always been bliss. And there's no better way of installing a shroud of profound ignorance than to chant about existence in a mysterious language.

Meanwhile, there are those who would like to see the light... for example, concerning the exact way in which the Nazis exterminated Jews. Years ago, a Californian literary agent pleaded with me to sit in on the trials of Robert Faurisson in the law courts of Paris. I did so, for professional reasons (you might say), and soon became most confused, because vain attempts to cast light upon Nazi darkness gave rise rapidly to more murkiness than ever. The Nazi barbarians concluded their exterminations by putting out the lights, as it were, so that no meaningul traces would remain of their unspeakable acts. Blinded by ignorance and confusion, we would-be observers have no other choice than to accept the shroud of obscurity. And society condemns those—like Faurisson and his ecclesiastic adept Richard Williamson—who would dare to lift theoretically a corner of this terrible shroud by vain and painful promises of dubious assertions of facts, and false enlightenment. This is neither more nor less than the law of civilized society, designed justly to attenuate the pain of victims.

Fortunately, in ancient history, the light is falling at last upon scenes and situations that were once obscure. We now know, for example, that Jesus was essentially a Jew, and that Christianity was preceded by a lengthy and rich epoch of Judeo-Christianism, of which the Apocalypse of John is the purest expression. The apostle Paul then stepped into the picture to develop early Christianity as we commonly imagine it, incorporating Gentiles. Retrospectively, it goes without saying that the idea that Jews might have perpetrated deicide, through the Crucifixion, is mindless bullshit. So, many naive Catholic traditionalists whose web banners are displayed in the context of the above-mentioned petition concerning our quaint but curious German pope might take a more serious look at their Christian culture.

Seriously, I've always considered that all Christians who can do so should spend at least a few weeks in Israel, which is truly a land of light, capable of dispelling archaic Christian darkness. Many things, in the Holy Land, become clear. Other things, alas, are doomed to remain forever in darkness. But, since time immemorial, this pilgrimage to where it all happened has been obligatory. It teaches you to open your eyes and see. To discard darkness, and place yourself in the light.

Admittedly, it's not yet, exactly, the light of Science. But the Holy Land is an excellent beginning. Judaism is an ancient system, and we all know that Jews didn't drop down in the last shower of rain. Modern Israel, too, is an exceptionally smart nation, accustomed to facing and solving life-and-death problems. I can't think of a better place to start one's quest (as I once did) for enlightenment.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Divine job

One of the most amusing, if not fulfilling, jobs I can imagine would be speechwriter for the pope. Let me explain. No matter what a run-of-the-mill author writes, his/her words will be appreciated (in the best of cases) by a handful of readers and denigrated by others. Concerning words to be pronounced by a pope, on the other hand, the writer can be certain beforehand that millions of listeners and readers will love the stuff, absolutely, because they consider it, a priori, as inspired and infallible words straight from the mouth of the Creator's personal representative on the planet Earth. His director of communications.

Talking of absolutely divine documents, let me display the latest specimen. It's an English translation of a fragment of the pope's Xmas address to the Roman curia gathered in the Sala Clementina on 22 December 2008:

Because faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian creed, the Church cannot and must not limit itself to transmitting to its faithful the message of salvation alone. It has a responsibility toward creation, and must exercise this responsibility in public as well. And in doing so, it must defend not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation belonging to all. It must also protect man against his own destruction. Something like an ecology of man is needed, understood in the proper sense. It is not an outdated metaphysics if the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this order of creation be respected. In fact, this is a matter of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, disdain toward which would be the self-destruction of man, and therefore the destruction of the very work of God. What is often expressed and understood by the term "gender" is ultimately resolved in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wants to create himself, and to arrange always and exclusively that which concerns him. But this means living contrary to the truth, living contrary to the creator Spirit. Yes, the rainforests deserve our protection, but man deserves it no less, as a creature in whom a message is inscribed that does not mean the contradiction of our freedom, but its precondition.

This is excellent prose, of a journalistic kind, and I can imagine the pride of the holy ghostwriter seeing the pope's face light up when His Holiness discovered the slick but sloppy sentence: Something like an ecology of man is needed... With a tiny bit of rewriting, that sentence might have been elevated to a memorable quotation that would go down in literary history. First, I would have used the term spiritual ecology, which sounds much better, frankly awesome. Second, I would have written Man with a capital letter, in italics, to give it a scientific biological flavor.

Talking about capitals, notice the subtle way in which the rewriter jumps back and forth between the terms creation and Creator. I'll let you guess which noun refers to a familiar day-to-day process described by scientists, and which one designates the pope's special pal. Personally, I've always been so utterly awed by the amazing complexities of the archaic process that I like to spell Creation with a capital... but I now realize that this is a dangerous habit, since there are a lot of crazy folk out there who've succeeded in monopolizing the expressions Creationism and Intelligent Design to designate the accomplishments of the pope's much-celebrated magical Creator: the big old guy with a white beard up in the sky.

It's the latter part of this extract of the pope's Sala Clementina address that has stirred up shit, over the last few days, in the international gay and lesbian worlds. Read it carefully, to see what the anonymous speechwriter of His Holiness is actually saying. Here's the keystone of the literary lobbyist's subtle art:

What is often expressed and understood by the term "gender" is ultimately resolved in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator.

The euphemism "self-emancipation" means, of course, assuming one's true sexuality. So, to call a spade a spade, the pope's Xmas speech turns out to be a blatant diatribe against homosexuality. Meanwhile, I reacted spontaneously: What the bloody hell is this word "gender" doing here? Gender, as we all know, is an ancient linguistic concept concerning nouns, which are often separated into formal groups designated as either masculine, feminine or neuter. Recently, it has become fashionable to apply the term "gender" to cultural differences between creatures of the opposite sex. For example, if a little boy likes to wear his sister's clothes, you might say (if you were incapable of finding a better way of putting it) that his behavior is of a female gender. But it's totally ridiculous to fall back upon the fuzzy gender concept, in human beings, as a criterion for distinguishing between those who have a penis and those who have a vagina. That difference (both the pope and his speechwriter should know by now) is called sex, and it's all a matter of so-called X and Y chromosomes... not to mention precise differences in the form of genital organs, which even the virginal pope, with a little bit of prompting, should be able to recognize.

I wondered whether the silly intrusion of this gender term might be a translator's error. Then I made an amazing discovery. The gender word has been included, in inverted commas, in the original Italian!

Ciò che spesso viene espresso ed inteso con il termine "gender", si risolve in definitiva nella autoemancipazione dell’uomo dal creato e dal Creatore.

The plot thickens! For me, it's clear. The pope's speechwriter is almost certainly an English-speaking priest, of Italian origins, who happens to be an inhibited homosexual. He can't bring himself round to talking of sex, so he prefers to say gender... even in the middle of a papal address in Italian! There's no other way in the world to explain the sudden production of so much pontifical rubbish. There's another clue as to the identity of the pope's speechwriter. He's clearly well-informed about ecological issues in Australia, because he refers both to the pope's recent visit and to the question of saving rain forests. So, maybe he's a homosexual Tasmanian priest of Italian origins.

Now, why am I so motivated by the idea of unveiling the identity of the speechwriter responsible for the pope's spectacular gender stuff? Well, ideally, if he were unmasked, he might get sacked for professional faults... such as throwing the word gender into a pontifical address. In that case, I might then be in a position to apply for this fabulous job. Meanwhile, I love this image of our electric pope, a real man's man:

I imagine Benny's bolts of blue lightning penetrating painfully the sin-stained backsides of gender miscreants...

Friday, December 5, 2008

Man created God in Queensland

I used sarcastic words concerning the Queensland politician and would-be photographer who has detected the wrath of God behind the planet's current financial fuck-up. But don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-Queensland. In fact, some of my best friends have been Queenslanders. Indeed, my father was born there, in Rockhampton, and his own father retired to a place on the Gold Coast, Burleigh Heads, that he thought of as the nearest approximation to Paradise on the surface of our planet. But I've often felt that Queensland thinking—and political thinking in particular—can be rather... well, different, as my mother used to say when she couldn't find an appropriate synonym for "weird".

I've just stumbled upon an enlightened Queenslander named Ronnie Williams: a musician, father of five, who doesn't like the idea that state schools in his native state are dispensing religious instruction in a surreptitious fashion. He blew up, in particular, when his daughter was asked to help make a replica of Noah's Ark at the local state school. Well, Ronnie Williams has set up an imaginative website named Renaissance of Reason. As a teenage adept of romantic pantheism, I was thrilled to discover that Williams invokes this same kind of thinking in the context of his movement called Infinite Deity (where the term "deity" appears to me as in bad taste).

[Click the image to visit the website.]

You know how wide-eyed smiling Evangelical groups have been stuffing God down our ears for ages with their syrupy musical stuff. Well, here's an amusing Ronnie Williams variation on this theme:




Some people might consider that Williams, too, is "different"... when he advocates, for example, "a simple Palaeolithic-inspired diet supplemented by a sensible vitamin and mineral regimen". Critics will say that we're in the same ballpark as James Bidgood, who suggested that we should seek explanations of the current financial mess in the Book of Revelations. I don't really know whether my compatriot is a serious intellectual disciple of great god-veering present-day thinkers such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. I would simply conclude that, like my father, Ronnie Williams appears to me as an inspired and intelligent Queenslander... of the quiet kind I appreciate.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Peace and love... and entertainment

In the Holy City of Jerusalem, there have often been nasty conflicts between various lovable and charitable Christian neighbors who happen to have inherited significant chunks of real estate at the Crusader-built church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Jesus is alleged to have been crucified and buried. The latest popular punch-out involved the major proprietors, Orthodox Greeks, and their Armenian fellow travelers. In the following video coverage of the event [turn up the audio volume], you can see Israeli policemen trying vainly to intercept the blows, which symbolize gloriously the power of the Lord.



It goes without saying that this free-for-all is taking place at the holiest of holy places in Christendom, and that the pious pugilists appear, through their robes, to be ecclesiastics of various kinds.

I can't tell you much I love this great stuff. What a pity it doesn't happen more often. I can imagine a sort of regular world series of all-out brawls between Christian groups of all denominations. Matches would be organized, not only in Jerusalem, but in all the planet's great cities where the religious fighting spirit lives on: Rome, Paris, Belfast, Salt Lake City, etc. Onward Christian soldiers! Later, the international organizing committee might explore the interesting idea of inviting teams from other faiths—such as Judaism and Islam—into the tournaments. The shows might be enhanced by bouts in feminine categories, maybe mud-pit wrestling matches between Western nuns and blue-shrouded Taliban females. To my mind, religion must become a synonym of fun. And why not fighting fun?

I love to invent names. This planetary sporting/entertainment affair could be called the World Crusader Tournament.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Religulous

Ever since his sketch on France, I've admired greatly the US stand-up comedian Bill Maher. It's reassuring that an American could be so frank and lucid.



I'm looking forward to his anti-religious movie, Religulous (like ridiculous), which will be coming out in the near future.

[Click the banner to see the trailer.]

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Amazing American discoveries

Few observers would deny that the most fantastic American discovery of all time was the Book of Mormon.

[Click the photo to access the Wikipedia page on this amazing subject.]

Maybe the word "discovery" is not quite correct, because the golden plates upon which the original document was inscribed were actually handed over to Joseph Smith in 1827 by the angel Moroni. What I'm trying to say is: Can we seriously use the term "discovery" in the case of a holy gift from a heavenly creature? Long ago, there was a good old English word, derived from the Latin noun inventio (the act or faculty of discovery), that served perfectly well for great findings of this kind. For example, after Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, went to Jerusalem in the year 327 and unearthed the true cross of Jesus (along with the crown of thorns and some nails), her amazing exploit was referred to formally as the Invention of the Cross. Since then, this usage of the term "invention" has become obsolete. So, there would be a danger of being misunderstood if one were to speak of the invention of Moroni's document.

A few decades after the Moroni event, reports of another miraculous American discovery started to appear in the press... and they still do. I'm referring to sightings of an extraordinary creature known today as Bigfoot. [Click the photo to access the Wikipedia page on this amazing subject.] Superficially, Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, looks like a large hairy ape, but there are strong arguments for considering this humanoid creature as a cousin of Man: a kind of surviving Neanderthal.

Yesterday, at Palo Alto in California (site of the prestigious Stanford University), there was an extraordinary press conference about the latest Bigfoot sighting.

[Click the photo to access an article about this amazing press conference.]

It's all rather secretive, in the sense that the three men behind this press conference did not actually bring along any biological samples of the Bigfoot corpse they claim to have discovered... which remains stored in a refrigerator at an unidentified location.

Various aspects of this latest Bigfoot affair seem to fall into place once you visit the shopping section of the trio's website [click the lapel pin, which can be purchased for $6.50, or a dozen for forty bucks]. It would appear that the three discoverers are associated with this commercial affair. In any case, two of them turned up wearing Bigfoot caps... priced $24.99 on the website. It goes without saying that this website would become a tremendous money-making affair... if only a real specimen of the legendary beast were to be found.

Incidentally, reading between the lines of his excellent The Ancestor's Tale, I have the impression that Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in Bigfoot. That's hardly surprising. Dawkins doesn't even believe in God.

As for me, I think that we should believe in both of these great American discoveries: the angel Moroni and the ape man Bigfoot. Clearly, if God didn't intend us to believe in these creatures, then why did He put them on Earth and allow them to be discovered? That's the solid line of reasoning I used in my decision, long ago, to wear glasses... along with the fact that they help me to see things better. If God didn't intend us to wear glasses, then why did He provide us with a nose and a pair of ears?

Friday, July 18, 2008

Jesus festival in Sydney

I've already pointed out in my Antipodes blog article of 2 December 2007 entitled Reenactments [display] that historical reenactments tend to bore me. The most nauseating reenactments of all are those that attempt to recreate intense suffering and torture. Fortunately, I wasn't a spectator of the Catholic reenactment of Golgotha in the streets of Sydney last night, for this tasteless drama would have surely made me break out in an itchy red rash followed by fever and vomiting. Well, almost...

That ridiculous photo really makes me sick... like the images in the old movie Mondo Cane of Italians whipping their backs, during a religious procession, until they're bloody pulp. I'm nauseated primarily by the mindlessness of the creators of such a show in the streets of Sydney, who were no doubt reimbursed royally for their artistic efforts. Their production is senseless shit, with no links whatsoever to plausible history or facts. Their patron saint, no doubt, is Mel Gibson. They're playing for the gullible gallery, to suck them in. I'm saddened to realize that there are hordes of simple folk who need to gulp down such sick visual crap in order to be able to claim that their existence has a sense. They're deluded, of course, but they'll never be educated enough to know it. So, they jubilate innocently and eagerly in this reenactment of their poor lord and would-be savior attached to a structure that reminds me of a massive concrete pylon in the expressway at Circular Quay. Back in the pioneering days, Australia donated eucalyptus trees to Israel, to clean up the coastal swamps. It's utterly ludicrous to imagine for an instant that ancient Palestine, at the epoch of Jesus, might have possessed trees capable of providing timber for such a great cross as in Sydney 2008. But who worries about facts?

The thing that disturbs me most is that compatriots in my native land as a whole, rather than just a handful of silly pilgrims, might be appreciating all this superficial papal bullshit. I'm sure there'll be descriptions, in next Monday's Sydney Morning Herald, of hedonistic papal parties in luxurious residences on the foreshores of Sydney.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Dope-inspired miracles

Maybe it was unwise of me, in this morning's article entitled Guinea pig [display], to rave on jokingly about pills and miracles. You never know. French gendarmes might drop in here unexpectedly and carry me off handcuffed and kicking, in front of all my shocked blog readers. Even if I were to scream out in self-defense that my blogging performance is never enhanced by anything more powerful than a few glasses of wine, are people going to believe me? Maybe the Internet authorities should look into the idea of asking bloggers, at the end of particularly grueling and spectacular posts, to upload a urine sample. I'm sure that this must be technologically possible, maybe using webcams in the style of porn artists. As we've been saying for years, unless a draconian approach of this kind is adopted, the whole great blogging system might soon fall into disrepute.

Most people have heard of famous places such as Lourdes where medical miracles are brought about [if I understand correctly, which I don't] through the divine intercession of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, I'm not sure that many Catholics are aware of the existence of explicit patron saints of medicine and pharmacy.

Their names are Cosmas and Damian. They were third-century twin brothers, of Arabic descent, who generally operated together. Cosmas was the physician, while Damian was primarily an apothecary. The ancient archives fail to make it clear whether the Cosmas/Damian tandem intervened in the specialized domain of sporting medicine. To my mind, this is highly unlikely. Cosmas and Damian are celebrated in that they asked for no fees, and that doesn't sound like typical behavior in the world of sport.

One thing, in any case, is certain. In the Roman and Greek directories of patron saints, nobody stands guard over the domain of dope. This is all the more surprising in that one of the fundamental requirements of sainthood, the power to perform miracles, is an everyday phenomenon in the spheres of dope in sport. Just look at the way that Riccardo Ricco has been flying up the mountain slopes over the last week or so. If that's not a miracle, what is?

Now that the young Italian is out of work, probably for the rest of his sporting existence, his manager might look into the idea, with the help of the pope, of recycling this cyclist into a candidate for canonization, maybe while he's still alive... because the fast-track process is becoming faster and faster. The charming Cobra, already as famous as a rock star (like the pope himself), would become the future patron saint of dope, and he could spend his days, attired in a saintly jersey, pedaling around Rome, Italy and even Europe at large distributing free samples of the latest cocktail of the EPO hormone.

Guinea pig

An American couple from Massachusetts, traveling as tourists in the snowy wastes of Alaska, meet up with an Eskimo man and his wife, living in a primitive hut.

Eskimos: We've heard a lot about Massachusetts, because our eldest son has spent the last few years in the post-graduate anthropological research department at Harvard.

Tourists: Really? How marvelous! What exactly is he studying?

Eskimos: No, he's not studying anything. He's being studied.

Me, too, I'm being studied... by the prestigious French medical research organization called Inserm. A few years ago, after a strenuous incident that consisted of my dragging unaided my runaway ram out of the rushing waters of the River Bourne, I was the victim of a minor cerebral accident that manifested itself (and still does) by a slight numbness in the tip of my right thumb. I referred briefly to this affair in my article of 4 January 2007 entitled Best wishes for eternal health [display]. Well, ever since then, in the interests of medical research, I've been consuming a daily dose of two fat pills. They're wrapped in weekly packets, referred to as blisters, as shown here:

I have a huge supply of these packets in a cardboard box that I keep in my refrigerator, and I start a new packet each Monday. Throughout the week, I cannot possibly forget to take the pills, because they function as a kind of primitive calendar... which takes a bit of getting used to. For example, when I see that the two left columns are empty, that means that either it's Tuesday afternoon, or else it's Wednesday morning and I haven't yet consumed my daily dose. OK, it's not rocket science, but it's better than making notches in a stick. And I can always confirm my intuitive awareness of the current date by calling upon my faithful Macintosh. [Some readers are likely to wonder: Why don't you use your computer for this purpose right from the start? All I can reply to people who ask such questions is that they are obviously insensitive to the joy of the daily consumption of pills.]

Now, the hitch in my job as a guinea pig is that I don't really know what I'm consuming. Theoretically, the big yellowish pills could well contain omega-3, and the smaller reddish ones, a mixture of vitamins. But either of them might be placebos. So, I won't normally know the objective truth until the end of the experiment, scheduled to last for several years.

The most interesting aspect of this affair is that I meet up with a representative of the organization every summer, at a local hospital, for a kind of checkup. Whenever they phone me up, two or three times a year, the researcher (generally a female with an African accent) always seems to be surprised, first, that I'm apparently in excellent health and, second, that I haven't yet got fed up with taking their pills. Yesterday, I couldn't resist the temptation to invent reasons to explain to the lady on the phone why I've never missed out a single day of their pills:

"I'm not supposed to know whether there are active ingredients in my particular pills, or simply placebos. But I've been convinced for ages that you're giving me the real stuff, and that it's doing me good. For me, that knowledge is intuitive and mysterious, and I can't explain what's happening. It's as if I were to see a vision, say, of the Virgin Mary. But it's clear and certain in my mind. Sometimes, around midday, I feel slightly sick and drowsy. Then I realize that I haven't yet taken my daily dose. I only have to gulp down the two precious pills and, within twenty minutes, I'm back in perfect form. It's a true miracle."

During my forthcoming checkup, I imagine they might decide to scrutinize me carefully for advanced signs of dementia.

Meanwhile, in Sydney, Benedict XVI has just visited the memorial chapel of a local nun, named Mary MacKillop [1842-1909], who's on the fast track towards canonization. Click the photo to visit a web article about this humble individual, whose claim to fame is that she created a new order for nuns specializing in free Catholic education for country kids.

Apparently, she already has one cancer-oriented miracle in her posthumous curriculum vitae, but she needs a second one to acquire full-blown sainthood. I'm looking into the idea that maybe I could lend Mother Mary a hand through the above-mentioned pills revelation. It's an undeniable fact that the pills started to exert their miraculous effect upon me when I was out in Sydney in August 2006. I think I should start out by sending a friendly email on this question to the pope.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Colorful males

Often, civic authorities in the great harbor-side city of Sydney become agitated, flustered and indeed overwhelmed by the prospect of dealing with a handful of foreign visitors. This was the case for the APEC summit [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] last year, as suggested in my article of 29 August 2007 entitled Sydney skies [display].

Once again, this histrionic behavior has characterized the present papal festival. On such occasions, normal life in the metropolis is shut down temporarily, and the citizens have to bide their time until the visitors leave. I find this weird. Sydney's a big place, and there should be lots of room for everybody. The local population should normally be expected to carry on calmly with their usual activities, instead of being drawn, by their mindless leaders, into a state of temporary trauma.

By comparison, look at Paris. Over the last few days, the city was host to some 43 heads of state, including a certain unwelcome individual, the Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, who could be considered as a huge potential target for assassination.

The City of Light was invaded by contingents of men and their machines for the great Bastille Day parade. But everything went over smoothly in a perfectly friendly atmosphere. And in the evening, beneath the Eiffel Tower, no less than 600,000 people attended a free concert, followed by a gigantic fireworks display.

By comparison, the events planned for Sydney this week will be trifling. There's only a single major foreigner in town, the pope, and everybody is supposed to love him. So, there's no point in disrupting the life of the nation to protect him... even though we cannot of course be certain that, in the midst of all those lovely young people who believe in magic, there might not be a fuckwit with a gun who would be thrilled to consider boring Benedict, for want of imagination, as a bull's-eye.

Compared with last night's excited concert crowd of 600,000 in the middle of Paris, there'll probably be no more than 500,000 calm Catholic attendees at next Thursday's mass... at Randwick, an empty racecourse located six kilometers from the famous harbor-side skyline of Sydney skyscrapers. So, what's all the fuss about?

I hasten to point out that the word "fuss" is no exaggeration. Believe it or not, back in 2006 (when I was last in Sydney), the NSW government actually voted an act of parliament dedicated to this forthcoming Catholic festival, which stipulated that it would be a crime to "annoy" future Catholic pilgrims. It's only today that we hear a lot about this absolutely insane legislation, at a propitious moment when happy hordes of anti-papal Sydney males are contemplating a naked parade through the streets with their pricks shrouded in fluorescent condoms, to protest against Vatican decisions that accentuate the ongoing Aids holocaust in Africa. Happily, a local court has just ruled retrospectively that the "annoy" clause in the Aussie law is bullshit.

Meanwhile, the Aussie papists have donned their brightest robes, and they're awaiting the emergence of the old white-robed German, who's currently biding his time in solitude, apparently playing the piano, in a rural estate on the outskirts of Sydney.

Another male—whom I admire immensely— is attired in a different color, and I'm delighted to learn that one out of three Australians is following this cycling glory, every evening, on local SBS TV.

Faces of great cyclists, who spend their daily existence in a state of physical agony, are often drawn and contracted, as if they haven't slept well. The facial features of Cadel Evans are stark, accentuated, like those of a Biblical shepherd or fisherman, with a mysterious sad smile. A French newspaper said that Cadel looked like an exhausted zombie. Was he really weeping, yesterday, when the yellow jersey was drawn over his injured shoulder? Were his grimaces expressions of intense inner joy? Tears of a wounded giant? In an instant of glory, we witnessed the frail human carcass of a champion who had been crucified momentarily, accidentally, upon the terrible slopes of the Pyrenées. Like a child, after the official ceremony, Cadel Evans hung on to the rag lion, mascot of the French bank that sponsored his yellow jersey. For a moment, the champion cyclist was all alone, with his warm felt animal and his cold solitary glory. But all the world was watching this fabulous hero. All Australia.

Over the next few days, the color of Australia will be neither red nor white, but yellow! Aussie action will be situated, not at Randwick Racecourse, but upon a mythical field of heroes in the south of France. Cycling enthusiasts in Australia will understand what I'm trying to say. Monsieur Evans, the entire nation is behind you, including those who are praying at Randwick. Go for it, Cadel!

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Boring Benedict

Once upon time, the human phenomenon known as religion used to deal with gigantic fundamental interrogations such as the meaning of our existence, the creation and destiny of the Cosmos, the concepts of good and evil, the mysteries of life, love and death, and the power of prayer. Religion was at least a noble human preoccupation, even though it has ended up getting pushed out of the way, first by philosophy, and now by science. As in the case of all entities facing extinction, future fossils are starting to form... and Benedict XVI is a pure still-living specimen. Excluding dyed-in-the-wool Catholics, few intelligent observers give a damn about what the pope thinks about anything whatsoever in the modern world, for the simple reason that this old man in white robes has never really lived in the modern world, and his knowledge of reality is surely akin to that of a backward adolescent, reared in a cocoon from which he has never emerged. So, what can we expect him to talk about during his visit to Australia? Well, of all things, he's expected to ramble on about the sexual mischief committed by priests, as if airing the Church's dirty washing were henceforth a major task for this archaic practitioner of magic. Yawn... When will this boring stupidity end?

Friday, May 30, 2008

Religious insanity in God's own country

In the following video clip, we see a funky guy introducing, in boxing-match style, a white pastor named Michael Pfleger who then made fun of Hillary Clinton while preaching last Sunday in Barack Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ:



When I see such clownish antics, bordering on some kind of clinical emotional problem, words fail me. If I were a Christian, I would pray that the pastor might be forgiven by his brethren and maybe even enlightened by the Lord. If I were a US voter, I would also be inclined to do a bit of praying, no matter whether or not I believed in God. It goes without saying that I wouldn't dare to suggest that the silly preacher should be punished in hell. On the other hand, I do feel that everything in the world would go a little more intelligently if all the religious crackpots in America, including—above all—those in presidential spheres, would quietly go to hell... at least until after the election's over.

Virgins

This is surely the naughtiest image of Mary you could ever imagine. It's the sort of porn stuff that the police in my native Australia will surely be banning and burning during the Pope's July visit to Sydney for Youth Day. The Virgin is fondling a serpent with her left foot, and the rigid reptile seems to be enjoying every moment of the caresses.

Seriously, this image reflects a legend about the Greek goddess Eurynome [whom you can look up on Google: today's cornucopia of facts, if not necessarily of knowledge and wisdom].

It appears that the whole Catholic thing about the mother of Jesus being a virgin is based upon a translation error. The origin of the legend is a statement in Isaiah 7, 14. Here's how it reads in the antiquated King James Version:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

The Revised English Bible introduces an interesting surprise: the word "virgin" has disappeared!

[...] the Lord of his own accord will give you a sign; it is this: A young woman is with child, and she will give birth to a son and call him Immanuel.

The change from "virgin" to "young woman" reflects the true content of the original Hebrew, which speaks of almah ["young woman"], not bethulah ["virgin"]. The error of the King James Version was introduced way back before the birth of Jesus, when scholars translated the Hebrew almah into Greek as parthenos ["virgin"]. Much later, in Matthew 1, 22-23, the evangelist is inspired by this Greek translation error when he declares:

All this happened in order to fulfil what the Lord declared through the prophet: "A virgin will conceive and bear a son, and he shall be called Emmanuel..."

That's to say, Matthew was the ignoramus in elementary biology who set out to mystify everybody by claiming that the conception of Jesus had never been preceded by the sexual penetration of Mary and the introduction of male sperm. Many Catholics persist in considering that Mary's hymen membrane had remained perfectly intact although she was in a state of pregnancy. The least that can be said is that they have a lot of explaining to do! These days, high-tech interventions enable a woman's reproductive cell to be fertilized without an explicit sexual union with a male. Otherwise, failing technology, we remain in the fairy-tale domain of frogs that metamorphose into princesses.

Sadly to say, ever since the Isaiah translation bug and Matthew's failure to do his Hebrew homework, the trivial concept of virginity has become a Big Thing among Christians and Moslems. Amazingly, a French marriage has just been canceled, as if it had never been enacted, because a dissatisfied husband discovered with horror that his legal wife wasn't a virgin. Somehow or other, the court in Lille has contrived the delicate argument that the canceled marriage was a transaction founded upon the presence of "goods" [my word, not theirs] that did not conform to what was imagined by the male "acquirer" [again: my word, not theirs]. In other words, it was as if the guy imagined that he would be obtaining a fresh piece of meat, only to discover that it was tainted.

Most cases of canceled marriages in France are due to the fact that the consent of a partner had not in fact been obtained. The case of a ruptured hymen is something new... and shocking.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Scientists sitting on the religious fence

Many scientists continue to affirm that they believe in God. For example, there's a reunion of such folk every two years in the precincts of my native Anglican cathedral in Grafton, but they've made such a minor impact upon mainstream thinking that I've never received the slightest inkling of what they have to say... which, I feel, is probably so much the better. Let sleeping gods lie.

Richard Dawkins informs us, with a certain dose of his typical humor, that a giant US thing called the Templeton Foundation is using its vast financial resources to waylay scientific personalities by offering them incentives for claiming that there might indeed be a bit of godly stuff in their research conclusions persuading us that "He" (the fabulous Man in the Sky) has not yet said His Final Word. In other words, the Templeton Foundation is tempting prominent scientists to declare publicly that they've forsaken neither God nor, above all, the idea that He might in fact exist. All of this inoffensive stuff is most folkloric, like Druidic get-togethers at Stonehenge.

I try to avoid science books that attempt to shove Old-World magic down my throat. If I'm looking for a book on modern genetics, for example, I don't want to be waylaid into purchasing a document with religious overtones. Pollution zero! No religion!

Monday, April 28, 2008

God is an aircraft

My 700th post.

Two months ago, when I was getting my prostate ablated, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins provided me with ideal reading material. In the context of a hospitalized "survival machine" (an expression that made its first appearance in this book, which I've reread several times), there's nothing better than a dose of Dawkins to encourage you to survive.

Insofar as Dawkins considers that all gods—including one's favorite personal God, with a capital G—are a delusion, certain opponents would claim that the professor's atheistic philosophy might depress a sick person (or even a perfectly fit individual, for that matter) to the point of suicide. On the contrary, I've always found Dawkins elating. I look upon him as the finest scientific author I've ever encountered, and I'm convinced that there are no more noble philosophical questions than those—about evolution, genes and memes—tackled so brilliantly by this great thinker and writer.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins uses an unexpected title for his major argument against the existence of gods and God. He calls it the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit, and it's such a delightful argument, simple yet profound, that I wish to describe it here rapidly... as a way of celebrating my 700th Antipodes post. Apparently, the English astrophysicist Fred Hoyle [1915-2001] once used an aeronautical metaphor to emphasize the extreme unlikelihood that life could have originated by pure chance on our planet... that's to say, without a divine nudge. He likened this probability to that of a hurricane, blowing in a junkyard, which just happened to assemble a Boeing 747. I'm convinced that most people who cling to the notion that Creation necessitated divine intervention justify their beliefs by a variant of this Boeing metaphor. In a nutshell: "It's unthinkable that a phenomenon as rich as Creation could have just come about by chance." Dawkins agrees totally with that last statement. The answer is certainly not chance. The explanation is Darwinian evolution. Getting back to the Boeing metaphor, Dawkins points out simply that the chance arrival on the scene of an "intelligent designer", God, is vastly more improbable than the idea of manufacturing Boeings with the assistance of hurricanes in junkyards. So, in this sense, God can truly be referred to as the Ultimate Boeing 747!

Imagine the following scenario. Suppose that you go out to inspect the damage after a terrible hurricane. In a junkyard alongside your house, you're amazed to discover that the wind has blown together bits and pieces in the form of a makeshift aircraft... a little like a cargo cult artifact. Why not? Intrigued by this extraordinary chance event, you climb up onto the neatly-assembled pile of junk and you peer into the cockpit. There, at the controls of the would-be aircraft, you're utterly astounded to find a well-groomed white-haired middle-aged gentleman wearing a pilot's uniform. Noticing the expression of amazement on your face, he says in a mellow voice: "Don't be surprised, my friend. I'm God. I just happened to get Myself blown together and placed here by that bloody terrible hurricane."