Mother Teresa never told us she specialized in neurology

Talented people shouldn't keep quiet about their extraordinary medical skills, which could save lives. Why didn't Mother Teresa, glorified for taking care of sufferers in Calcutta, ever tell us she could intervene successfully in the case of a man with cancerous tumors in his brain ?

The lady was beatified (?) in 2003. And she will be canonized (?) in Rome on September 4 next year. Meanwhile, countless innocent folk have succumbed to brain tumors in spite of the alleged knowledge of the humble lady named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, who's only starting to be applauded as a great cancer specialist (?) now that she's dead.

Why do otherwise intelligent human beings persist in inventing impossible legends, and then disseminating them as if they were true?

Riverside mud

From time to time in my blog, I've mentioned Noah and his celebrated ark: for example, in posts entitled Childhood myths [display] and Beware of flooding [display]. As we all know, God used the great deluge as a weapon of destruction to wipe out millions of undesirable creatures... whom he himself had created.

Now, if that's not downright schizophrenia, it's certainly sick behavior, even coming from a divinity. Besides, in the countless colorful depictions of the landscape after the flood, why don't we see piles of drowned sinners, their bodies bloated by days spent swirling around in the salty floodwaters?

In 1858, many centuries after the fortunate encounter between Noah and his homicidal god, young Bernadette Soubirous met up with the Virgin Mary in the south-western French town of Lourdes. Talking of corpses, the mummified form of Bernadette, her face hidden behind a wax imprint, has become a kitsch tourist attraction in a convent in the town of Nevers, in central France, where Bernadette spent the final years of her short life.

Click here for morbid details about the series of exhumations that culminated in the decision to display the corpse in a gold and crystal coffin. Meanwhile, a disastrous deluge has just hit the town of Lourdes.

                           — photo Sud Ouest, Thierry Suire

The swollen river Gave inundated the celebrated grotto where the peasant girl had once talked to the vision of a visitor, giving rise to an incredible bubble of heavenly hot air.

An observer might well wonder if God is really on Bernadette's side. More precisely: On whose side is the river? In the case of Noah, we were left with an implausible but attractive legend, which still obsesses countless individuals throughout the world. In the case of the sickly child Bernadette (afflicted with psychiatric disorders), alas, all we seem to be left with is mud. We are reminded of the mud that the crazy child rubbed over her face and attempted to eat at the height of her trance.

In my blog post of 20 August 2012 entitled A little knowledge [display], I applied the famous criterion of David Hume (for the analysis of strange happenings) to the case of Bernadette. Today, in any case, it's frightening to see what the Church was capable of doing—and is still capable of doing—with the phantasies of a poor simple-minded 14-year-old child. To call a spade a spade, it's clear that certain ecclesiastical authorities have always been infatuated—in one way or another, but often with far-reaching consequences—by the enticing mysteries of children.

FRENCH MEDIA REACTIONS: The front page of the Charlie Hebdo weekly evoked a fabulously "foamy evening" for horny ecclesiastics at Lourdes.

A little knowledge

The original statement by Alexander Pope [1688-1744] spoke of learning: A little learning is a dangerous thing. Since then, we've usually heard people telling us that it's a little knowledge that can be considered dangerous. This warning is trivially true in cases where you can choose (at least theoretically, if not in practice) between the two extremes: a little knowledge, or a lot of knowledge. A child might have just discovered that striking a match produces a pretty flame. And that knowledge is indeed dangerous as long as the child is unaware that such a flame can give rise to a catastrophe. When humanity first discovered fire (probably after a lightning strike), maybe a doomsayer in the tribe warned: "My brothers and sisters, this discovery is surely a malediction. We must forget about it forever."

The primeval case of "a little knowledge" was, of course, the legend of a tree in Eden—no doubt a fig tree, but presented in translation as an apple tree—whose fruit were forbidden.

It is ridiculous, however, to condemn systematically "a little knowledge" as a dangerous possession. In domains in which we know next to nothing, the concept of "a little knowledge" can often be thought of as speculation, and this is the basis of scientific discovery and research. We content ourselves with speculative theories on reality up until such time as they are shown to be false, when we replace them by alternative theories. That, after all, was the spirit of the quest for the Higgs boson.

Satyendra Nath Bose, after whom the particle was named,
and Peter Higgs, who imagined a very peculiar boson

For decades, physicists had so little knowledge concerning this particle that they weren't even sure it existed!

In my personal family-history research, I've run into a kind of "Higgs boson". I'm referring to the first male in England (presumably a colonist from Normandy) whose descendants would be the future Skeffington family (which would give rise to folk named Skevington, Skivington, Skyvington, etc). My knowledge of this individual is almost non-existent. But he surely existed, at some time and in some place, probably Leicestershire. So, I find myself making speculations about his identity. Inevitably, I run into fellow-researchers who say: "You have no firm proofs for what you're suggesting." That's to say, these rigid observers (accustomed to requesting an individual's birth certificate before accepting his existence) are trying to persuade me that I don't have the right to speculate. Their criticism is not only counterproductive; it's unscientific. So, I ignore it.

Finally, there's a ubiquitous domain in which we have very little knowledge, to say the least. I'm referring to religion, and the belief in God. Here again, I don't consider that there's any "danger" in talking about God, even though we possess so little direct knowledge concerning His alleged existence. But the same rules of the game must be applied in the case of those who say that God does not exist. In that respect, the best example of all concerns the marvelous subject of miracles. In The Magic of Reality, Richard Dawkins devotes his entire final chapter to this question. In particular, in a section entitled A good way to think about miracles, he presents the clever method proposed by the Scottish philosopher David Hume [1711-1776].

Hume said:

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless that testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.

Consider, for example, the case of 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous who, on 11 February 1858 in Lourdes (south-west France), experienced the first of a series of alleged visions of the Virgin Mary.

Applying Hume's criterion, we reason as follows:

— Clearly, the appearance of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes was a miracle.

— We are told by her adulators that it would have been unthinkable for Bernadette Soubirous to have invented a false story about her encounters with a vision of the Virgin Mary. Let us nevertheless imagine, for a moment, the totally shocking hypothesis that the saintly child might have lied.

— Now, which of the two above-mentioned extraordinary happenings would be the more astounding: the Virgin Mary's presence at Lourdes, or Bernadette's hypothetical lies?

— Clearly, there is nothing particularly "miraculous" in the idea that a simple-minded peasant girl might resort to inventing false stories. Consequently, Hume's criterion suggests that we should not accept the miracle of Lourdes.

Notice, in particular, that our use of Hume's criterion to cast doubt upon the veracity of the miracle of Lourdes does not call upon us to actually prove that Bernadette was a liar. It suffices to notice that the hypothesis of Bernadette's lying, no matter how unlikely such an idea might appear to those who knew the girl well, was less extraordinary than the utterly miraculous idea of the Virgin Mary making a personal appearance at Lourdes. So, if an adulator of the Virgin Mary and Bernadette Soubirous were to complain that we've rejected the idea of a miracle without even attempting to prove that the peasant girl had indeed invented her stories, that would simply mean that the detractor has not understood, yet alone accepted, Hume's reasoning. In the context of the life and death of Jesus, too, alleged miracles can be debunked by means of Hume's metaphorical "razor" without the necessity of our having to prove anything whatsoever.

Miracle of Cana

Rowan Atkinson is good in the role of an Anglican parson.



This sketch is quite brilliant in that it highlights the role of Jesus (if indeed he existed) as a showman performing demonstrations of magic.

BREAKING NEWS: An article in today's The Australian, entitled Catholics reach back to church tradition, indicates that a new English-language version of the Roman Missal corrects the revolutionary colloquial style introduced after Vatican II. The article contains a delightful misprint: "… the new translation was in accord with the Church's 1963 text Constitution on the Scared Liturgy." I imagine liturgy that's frightened to hell because it's so audacious. Seriously, this is yet another case of Ratzinger's desire to move backwards. In any case, I prefer the liturgical style of the Reverend Rowan Atkinson.

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.

Miraculous babies

There's a lot of stuff on the Internet about the mind-boggling American baby named Brooke Greenberg, 16 years old, who's not growing up:



Not to be outdone in the domain of miraculous babies, Russia has something even more amazing. In Dagestan, a nine-months-old miracle baby has a divine affliction... which is not so much an affliction as a revelation of the grace of God. Every now and again, mysterious dark forms start to appear on the child's leg. It soon becomes clear that they are in fact verses from the Koran. Here's an objective video résumé of this miraculous phenomenon:



We've known for a long time that babies play a central role in religion. Why not? Faced with these tiny creatures made by God, we must be humble. After all, many of our most illustrious men and women, including several great geniuses, were once babies. Indeed, as Jesus pointed out in Luke 18:17, the more you act and think like a baby, the greater your chances of attaining Heaven: Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.

I wonder if somebody could build an interface to branch the kid's leg directly to the Internet, so that concerned believers throughout the world could read the messages regularly... maybe with simultaneous Google translations for those, like me, who can't read the holy text in its original language. And I wonder too what my intellectual hero Richard Dawkins, impassioned by the wonders of life in the Cosmos, will have to say about this Koranic kid.