Australia's future fighter planes

Two-and-a-half years ago, on 1 March 2010, my blog post entitled Australia's choice of fighter planes [display] suggested that my native country would do well to compare the French Rafale with the aircraft on order, the US Joint Strike Fighter.

Towards the end of last year, doubts concerning the evolution of the US project provoked a statement by the Australian Minister of Defence.

His words were reproduced in The Sydney Morning Herald dated 7 December 2011 [display].

Australia has set aside up to $16 billion to buy 100 of the planes, but the Minister for Defence, Stephen Smith, has already warned that any cuts to the program could force Australia to reconsider its orders for the fighter beyond the first 14, which are to be delivered by 2014 at a cost of $3.2 billion.

Today, in the French press, there's an interesting article [display] entitled Et si Dassault convainquait les Américains d'acheter le Rafale? That tongue-in-cheekish title asks a rhetorical question: And what if Dassault convinced the US to purchase the Rafale?

In the Breton city of Brest this morning, at a colloquium on European defense, the director of Dassault, Charles Edelstenne, took to the floor for a totally unexpected little speech, which included the following statement concerning the US project, whose total costs have skyrocketed by 50 percent in the space of a few years:

The present difficulties are just a beginning. As soon as the systems attain their age of maturity, things will become far more complex. The unit cost has already overtaken that of the Rafale, in spite of the fact that the volume of orders for the F-35 is ten times superior [to that of the Rafale].

He added jokingly:

The Americans call the program TINA, meaning "There is no alternative". On the contrary, an alternative exists: the Rafale, an aircraft that has been proven both technically and financially.

These remarks should be interpreted within the context of the so-called "Smart Defense" approach that might be adopted in Europe, involving the large-scale mutualization of defense resources, and a "Buy European" attitude. But Edelstenne's remarks might be little more than wishful thinking.

Biggest threats to Christianity

As you might imagine, I'm not particularly worried personally by emerging signs of the decline of the Christian religion. On the other hand, this inevitable shift in significance is a subject that interests me from a social and historical viewpoint. What have been its main causes up until now, and what are the biggest threats to Christianity from now on? Those are interesting questions, which I would be incapable of tackling seriously, in depth, in this humble blog.

Over the last few years, many observers have suggested that the church might decay from within, as a consequence of the countless affairs of pedophilia throughout the world. I don't think that's likely, because the clergy have had centuries to get their defensive act together in that domain, and they can be pretty cunning. Look at the case of that silly old priest in New York, Benedict Groeschel.

He dared to evoke the possibility of teenagers transforming themselves into evil "seducers" then "coming after" poor defenseless priests, and leading them into iniquity. What a despicable arsehole!

Other people imagine that the widespread acceptance of the atheistic theses of scientists such as Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins will inevitably turn vast numbers of people away from religion. There again, I don't really see things in that light. A godless movement such as that of Dawkins will inevitably remain elitist—like my recently-proposed awestruckism [access]—for the simple reason that it takes a lot of intellectual preparation to understand and appreciate the various branches of scientific thinking upon which it is based. It's most unlikely that devout Christians might read, say, A Universe from Nothing (Krauss) or The Selfish Gene (Dawkins), only to be swept immediately off their feet by a sudden urge to become atheists.

Things don't work like that. Even a formerly religious reader who has been deeply influenced, say, by God is not Great (Hitchens) or The God Delusion (Dawkins) was most likely a favorable candidate for conversion to atheism. Besides, we must never forget that, all the way down from the pope to schoolteachers in faith-based establishments, their are hordes of Christians who claim that they have no trouble in accepting science while pursuing their belief in God.

No, let me tell you the nature of the greatest threat to Christianity. The danger, in a word, is bones : that's to say, the possibility (however remote it might or might not appear to be today) that the fragments of bones unearthed by archeologists will end up "speaking" through an analysis of their DNA. Up until now, the alleged Greatest Tomb on Earth—in the Crusader church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem—has remained resolutely empty. This is hardly surprising, because there was surely never anything interesting to be seen in that ornate structure. But certain researchers have been starting to look in the right places in the hope of finding and examining the bodily remains of Biblical individuals, including members of the family of Jesus. And these investigations could well upset the apple cart in the near future.

When I speak of researchers, I'm thinking primarily of James Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici, mentioned in my recent post entitled Jesus [display].

Ideally, one might imagine that the idea that Jesus was a splendid but perfectly normal male should shock nobody. But, because of the teachings of the apostle Paul, that simple idea is literally anathema within the established church. And if ever the examination of bones led us to conclude that Jesus had been married, that he had been the father of children, and that the so-called Virgin Mary had been the mother of five boys (of whom Jesus was the eldest) and two girls, then this would surely be disastrous news for most Christians, who prefer to envisage the Holy Family as unearthly supernatural creatures.

Sadly, we see already the initial signs of the hatred expressed publicly by certain eminent academics towards Simcha, who has the misfortune of being a humble Jewish-educated filmmaker, rather than a university professor. Click here to see, for example, Simcha's six-part response to nasty criticism of his interpretation of the presence of a pair of nails found inside a Jerusalem tomb.

You might say that the forensic analysis of stuff such a bones and nails strikes certain academics—not only Christians, but certain Jews, too—where it hurts most: that's to say, at the level where Jesus is no longer looked upon as a magical being.

François Skyvington's moped road movie #6

Episode #6 of the road movie was presented yesterday afternoon.

François and his moped left the sunny south of France for another exotic corner of Europe: the German Bight, on the edge of the North Sea.

His excursions started at the North Frisian port of Husum, where François boarded a vessel for a bit of prawn fishing.

Funnily enough, the crew members were intrigued to find that their French visitor was accustomed to crunching into small cooked prawns without removing their shells.

Next, François abandoned temporarily his moped and took a plane out to the remote archipelago of Heligoland, some 50 km off the German coastline, where he had a rendezvous with Rolf Hagel, in charge of the local seal population.

They started out immediately, on foot, to inspect seals on the nearby beaches.

They soon came upon a pair of baby seals that had been abandoned by their mother.

They would have to be captured rapidly and transported to the local seal nursery for feeding and care.

Next, François boarded a ferry for the bleak windswept island of Pellworm, which seemed to lie in the middle of nowhere.

Here, men were constantly building and repairing sea walls made of wooden stakes and bundles of branches.

Taking advantage of the least strip of earth emerging from the waters in this steel-gray setting, these warriors of the sea strive ceaselessly to prevent the island from disappearing into the North Sea.

François was guided by a local resident, Knud, who, besides his work as a seawall supervisor, has a job as a barefooted postman, walking across the beaches to deliver mail brought across on the ferry. On this particular day, the island's postman got a helping hand from François and his moped.

François' final encounter in this lonely but lovely universe was with a lady named Ruth.

After meeting up with François in a mainland food-supplies store and piling his moped into her van for the trip towards her island home, Ruth parked her vehicle and took control of her personal train for the journey along a narrow causeway with the sea on both sides.

She explained that she only owns the train, whereas the railway line belongs to the German Republic.

As for her home, it's built on a mound of earth that rises magically out of the flat sandbanks and the sea.

Whenever the sea surrounds the house, they simply close the doors and windows.

François saw amazing photos of what the house looked like whenever there was a tempest, several times a year.

Apparently, at the top of the house, an emergency attic has been built on four hefty concrete pillars. So, even if the rest of the house were to be swept into the sea, Ruth and her children could wait in safety for the waters to subside.

For the second time in his road movie, François was surrounded by a big flock of sturdy sheep, which enable Ruth to earn her living in this exotic setting.

When François asked Ruth naively if it might not be better to reside on the mainland and only step across to the island to take care of the sheep, she replied with a smile that her ancestors had been settled in this remote paradise for the last two and a half centuries, and that she felt fine there.

Finally, François trudged back along the causeway beside his trusty steed.

A big fat ewe watched him leaving.

The animal seemed to be saying to itself: "Why would anyone decide to leave this marvelous island?" In one of Ruth's amazing photos, we saw that, in times of tempest, the sheep gather on the lawns of her house as if it were Noah's Ark.

It's easy to understand that—for Ruth, her children and her sheep—abandoning this kind of existence for a mainland house at the other terminus of her railway line would be unthinkable.

Half a century ago

In September 1962, I was spending my final fortnight with IBM in Paris. After seven months working as a computer programmer in the IBM Europe headquarters in the Cité du Retiro—a few hundred meters away from the Elysées Palace of the Général de Gaulle—I had the frustrating impression (which later turned out to be false) that I hadn't learned much French.

For the next three months, I would hitchhike around France and Spain before moving across to London for another IBM job, in the UK company's Wigmore Street headquarters. For the moment, in Paris, I must admit retrospectively that I had not yet heard the new sound that was emerging on the other side of the English Channel.

However I had vaguely sensed that lots of things were happening in London at that time. It seemed to be the place where the action was.

Jesus

Having just announced the creation of a new religion—in my previous blog post [display]—I'm aware that it's somewhat risky to submit this new blog post about Jesus, who could well upstage me. What I have to say is so important, however, that I don't think I'm behaving foolishly. Indeed, if it were to come to pass that the two great religions of our Third Millennium were Christianity and Awestruckism (as I firmly believe), I'm completely fairplay. I want to give Jesus a chance.

I've just finished reading (rereading in the case of the first title) a pair of extraordinary books:

If ever there were required reading in the Vatican (and elsewhere), this is it! But the arguments of the distinguished authors—James Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici—are often so complex (while remaining perfectly lucid) that I'm more and more convinced that Christianity, in spite of all its obvious merits, is likely to be soon engulfed, for the better or for the worse, by the limpidity of my Awestruckism. The change will evoke the way in which the terribly complicated "nested spheres" theories of Ptolemy were surpassed by the splendid simplicity of Kepler. For the moment, it's a little too early to say whether Awestruckism is likely to demolish Christianity (and Judaism and Islam, just to name a few old religions) in the same revolutionary style. But today, if Jesus were a corporation on the Chicago stock exchange, I wouldn't buy shares...

It's a tale of two tombs, which I shall refer to (jumping ahead, for simplicity) as the Jesus Tomb and the Arimathea Tomb. Basically, book #1 talks of the first tomb, whereas the existence of the second tomb, almost alongside the other one, is only revealed in book #2. But the themes of the two books and the two tombs are so intricately interwoven that you need to delve into both.

First, I should make it quite clear that we're not talking about the literary effusions of crackpots. I'll let you look up the credentials of the North Carolina professor James Tabor and the filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici. They're smart guys, not necessarily in the Judeo-Christian religious mainstream, but terribly convincing. Their competence extends from deciphering ancient Biblical texts down to the analysis of DNA. And they write in a beautifully convincing style, which leaves little doubt about the likely truth.

So, the great news is that we now know, most probably, where Jesus, his family and his companions were buried. It is becoming clearer that Jesus was indeed the sexual partner of Mary Magdalene.

Retrospectively, it's amazing that the bones of Jesus were probably accessible (able to be examined genetically) not so long ago, before being whisked away into eternal obscurity by the Ultra-Orthodox morons of the Holy City. The stupidity of the latter guys has given unwittingly an enormous boost to my new religion of Awestruckism...

New religion

I've been trying to define the principles of a new religion: its creed, you might say. It's not often that I do this kind of thing, so I'm a bit of a newcomer to such a challenge. But creating a new religion is a pleasant and fulfilling task. For the moment, I'm the only clearly-identified adept of this new religion, but that could change overnight once my system of beliefs becomes more widely known.

In spite of all that talk about a rose being a rose by any other name, I consider that names (and symbols, too) are quite important when you're creating a new religion. For the moment, I'm forced to admit that the name I've been using for my new religion is a little clumsy: not exactly the sort of word that rolls off your tongue, harmoniously, like most good names of religions. But it's the best thing I can find. I'm calling it Awestruckism, from the well-known adjective "awestruck". And I'm using a nice big purple-hued letter A as our symbol.

It's not a particularly complicated religion, in that it has no dogma whatsoever, no sacred rituals and—last but not least—no clergy. In fact, I don't think my new religion can even be associated with something that might be referred to as a theology. Individuals who adhere to Awestruckism won't be expected to pray, or take part in any kinds of official ceremonies. Indeed, the sole religious duty of those who decide to accept this new faith can be summed up in a single sentence:

Adepts of Awestruckism are expected to remain constantly awestruck by the nature of the Cosmos.

That's all. Being awestruck is our sole profound goal in existence. But we must understand the multiple meanings of this adjective... which have been conveniently grouped together in my online Macintosh dictionary:

awestruck: awed, filled with wonder, filled with awe, wonderstruck, amazed, filled with amazement, astonished, filled with astonishment, lost for words, open-mouthed.

The dictionary concludes with four more, of a slightly different kind:

reverential; terrified, afraid, fearful.

Without going into details, I believe (here, it's my faith that is talking) that the practice of awestruckism can be associated with any and all of the above-mentioned senses. Indeed, I consider that one of the great early intellectual pioneers in Awestruckism was the French philosopher Blaise Pascal when he said:

The eternal silence of these
infinite spaces terrifies me.

Unfortunately, he was waylaid by conventional religion and science, and never had an opportunity of developing his Awestruckist beliefs.

Within the context of the new religion that I am promoting, there will be no arbitrary rules concerning the nature of the phenomena capable of striking such-and-such a believer with awe. For example, if I were approached by a young male baptismal candidate who told me that he was utterly awestruck, first and foremost, by the insanely sexy allure of a certain young female (or male, for that matter) whom he had recently encountered, I would not hesitate in looking upon him as a potentially serious member of our congregation.

Admittedly, no self-respecting religion can survive without a certain number of forbidden themes. For example, if somebody informed me that he was totally awestruck by the recent phenomenal gains of Ajax shares, say, on the Chicago stock exchange, I would hesitate a little before looking upon him as a potentially-rich adept of our faith. Potentially rich, maybe, but not necessarily the kind of spiritual profile we're seeking.

To call a spade a spade, many (but not all) of our sources of awe are likely to come from the various domains of contemporary science: genetics, cosmology, etc. But an Awestruckist might just as surely discover his revelations of awe in art, literature or, simply, in everyday life. Our religion is largely open-ended.

Already, I can hear folk of other faiths claiming that I only chose this name because I'm "Awe-stralian". But I assure such heretics that my having been born Down Under has little, if anything, to do with my religious beliefs. Even if I had been born in France, for example, I'm sure that I might have evolved into a pious Awestruckist.

Other infidels are going to draw attention to the proximity, from a pronunciation viewpoint, of the term ostracism, designating exclusion and banishment from an established group. This criticism worries me less, because it's undeniable that Awestruckism will be tinged inevitably by a mild and inoffensive form of elitism. What I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't like to see hordes of people flocking to our new religion simply for superficial pretexts such as baptisms, marriages and burials. Besides, I've decreed (pardon my absolutism) that it's out of the question for Awestruckists—at least for the moment—to build religious edifices or organize regular ceremonies of any kind whatsoever.

Talking about religious edifices (churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, etc), I feel it's not too early—even before I get around to exploring the tenets of Awestruckism (in later posts)—to refute categorically certain suggestions of a complicated and indirect kind that are sure to arise. Let me explain. The French philosopher Auguste Comte [1798-1857] created a vaguely science-oriented belief system known as Positivism.

Friends know that I lived for many years in the Rue Rambuteau, Paris, on the outskirts of a celebrated neighborhood: the Marais. Not far from where my children went to school, there's a mysterious temple, in the Rue Payenne, inspired by the beliefs of Comte.

You can read about this place (in French) here. Surprisingly, the creation and upkeep of this so-called Temple of Humanity (which I've visited on countless occasions, simply because it's so weird) has been financed by anonymous Brazilians. And, if you're still under the silly impression that the Brazilian flag displays a soccer ball, let me show you in closeup what it says:

The national motto of Brazil—Ordem e Progresso (order and progress)—has been taken indirectly from the work of Auguste Comte. In other words, the creation of the modern nation of Brazil was in fact inspired by the Positivist faith of its founders.

Although I was once greatly intrigued by Auguste Comte, I hardly need to point out that there are no direct links between his Positivism and my Awestruckism. On the other hand, I must admit that I'm highly interested in the possibility that, somewhere on the surface of our awesome planet, an emerging nation might decide to use a quote from one of my Awestruckist texts. Let me propose immediately the following five-word motto, which would look good on a flag:

All things bright and digital.

François Skyvington's moped road movie #5

Episode #5 of the road movie was presented yesterday afternoon.

Still in the Cévennes, François met up with a friendly pipe-smoking shepherd.

The traditional grazing method involves seasonal operations known as transhumance. The shepherd walks his flocks up to highlands for the summer season, then back down to the plains for winter.

During the brief sequence, no less than three new lambs were born, with no problems.

François and the shepherd looked on, amused (there was no cause for alarm), as one of the ewes continued to follow the flock with the head of her half-born lamb sticking out behind her.

A few minute later on, the baby was sitting on the ground.

The shepherd collected the lambs by their front legs and carried them over to where the main flock was located.

Next, François met up with a man who organizes walking excursions in the company of Provençal donkeys.

 

The conversation moved inevitably to the story of the writer Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-1894], author of Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. As a Scottish Presbyterian, Stevenson had been fascinated by tales of the Protestant insurgents in the Cévennes, back in the time of Louis XIV, who became known as Camisards. At that time (1879), Stevenson was troubled by his romantic attachment to a married woman, Fanny Osbourne, ten years his senior and the mother of three children, who had abandoned him temporarily. (A year later, she would later become his wife.)

What better way to meditate about religious history and romance than while walking across the Cévenol mountains in the company of a faithful donkey...

François then followed an itinerant butcher on an excursion to isolated villages and houses.

In this sparsely-populated corner of France, Didier's meat van has remained a vital service.

François then met up with a rural puppeteer.

Here we see the most famous puppet of all time: Polichinelle, from the Italian Commedia dell'arte.

The puppets' heads have been created by talented sculptors.

Then the puppeteer paints them and dresses them up.

In former times, puppeteers would operate at rural fairs, in order to attract customers to the merchants' stands.

François was thrilled to discover that he had his own puppet.

They all set off on the orange moped—François, his puppet and the puppeteer—to reach the place where the puppeteer's mobile theater was parked.

François and Polichinelle were the stars of the show...

At the end of the day, François stopped for a moment in the village of Ganges to pay homage to Charles Benoit, inventor of the moped. He left an orange scarf attached to the commemorative plaque.

Finally, the episode terminated with a short trip in a hot-air balloon: an 18th-century French invention of the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier.

The orange moped surely enjoyed the excursion into the skies of the Cévennes.

François certainly did.