Book Review: A.C. Grayling's Hail-Mary pass at lasting relevance.

The Good Book: A Humanist Bible, the new ‘secular alternative to the Bible’ by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, is exactly what one might expect a book explicitly conceived of and written as a ‘secular alternative to the Bible’ to be like: Inoffensive, generic, and completely uninspired.

            There is a lot to dislike about Grayling, a professor at the University of London and fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, both for religious people and for irreligious people who have cultural or artistic interest in religion. With somebody like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens it is relatively easy to point to their relative (though not as extreme as sometimes made out) bitterness and rancour as reasons to, if nothing else, critique their motivations for behaving as they do while advancing their beliefs. This goes doubly for Sam ‘If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion’ Harris. Grayling, on the other hand, is a lot harder to pin down. He is maddeningly vague about his opinions at some times and unexpectedly and inexcusably nasty at others, and when he is nasty he adopts a condescending attitude that makes one long for Dawkins and his ability to act as if he thinks that religious people are basically intelligent and normal people whether or not he actually does. I do not know why he decided to write The Good Book. I want to believe that he was acting in some form of good faith, however defined, but the contents of the book make this a little more problematic than one would like.

            The first problem with The Good Book, and one of the worse ones, is its style.

My church's Easter sermon this year (sourced from anglicansonline.org)

re there any who are devout lovers of God?
Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival!

Are there any who are grateful servants?
Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary with fasting?
Let them now receive their wages!

If any have toiled from the first hour,
let them receive their due reward;
If any have come after the third hour,
let him with gratitude join in the Feast!
And he that arrived after the sixth hour,
let him not doubt; for he too shall sustain no loss.
And if any delayed until the ninth hour,
let him not hesitate; but let him come too.
And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour,
let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.
For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first.
He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour,
as well as to him that toiled from the first.

To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows.
He accepts the works as He greets the endeavor.
The deed He honors and the intention He commends.
Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord!

First and last alike receive your reward;
rich and poor, rejoice together!
Sober and slothful, celebrate the day!
You that have kept the fast, and you that have not,
rejoice today for the Table is richly laden!

Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one.
Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty,
for the universal kingdom has been revealed.

Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again;
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free.
He has destroyed it by enduring it.
He destroyed Hell when He descended into it.
He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh.

Isaiah foretold this when he said,
"You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below."
Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.

Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.

O death, where is thy sting?
O Hell, where is thy victory?

Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!
Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is Risen, and life is liberated!

Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;
for Christ having risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen!


The Easter sermon of John Chrysostom (circa 400 AD)

---

A poem for Lent: Last 25 parts (LXXVI-C)

LXXVI.

Hadley bulges into Connecticut,

Blowing bubbles into the river

Beneath the bridge under the same sky.

The café, the bus stops, the mall

And the old farms and farm stores

The Agway, the passing artery

Of the throbbing Interstate, rejoicing.

A better person stands on the bales of hay

In Hadley’s fields in the late summer, but here

At the beginning of spring, snow still crusted

Dirtily under bushes and in the shady spots

Of buildings, there is not yet goodness here.

Yet no evil, rather a pre-Adamite furry sense

Of being in a honey-coloured world, the glasses

The colour of jade, colour of ancient Emperors’

Desire for an eternal life in an unchanging world

Without point or postulate, not yet affixed to the face

And so there can be no evil at such a time in any case.

The cows flick their tails in this unimagined springtime

Their fuzzy minds, identifiable as psychology but too far

In the state of innocentia veritas to genuinely interpret

Falling to thoughts—or thought-like objects—of dimly

Remembered warmth from a forgotten summertime.

Lordly, shining in that crevasse of worldliest existence

Town and country inseparable stand strung out along the road

Something true and proper and eternal, protected and fought for

Greater than business, greater than trade or anything, just here.

The words of this world are short as they spread across the sky

Ideal words, a simpler kotoba mot lexe wort woord parola slovo

Polyglot of the air, polyglot of the river, polyglot of the whole earth.

LXXVII.

Lord God of Hosts of Montague

Steered us good and right and true

Through lands of paper and lands of pen

Until we reached true Home again.

The words upon a yellowed page

Do not fear the tyrant’s rage.

A binding, though without fresh paste

Leads not our minds to foolish haste.

Covers of leather roughened and worn

Cannot mistake when they were born.

Pulp stretched out in its drying-frame

Will never throw calumnious blame.

Confessions of a religious-leftist

I don't ENJOY identifying as progressive/liberal. I really don't. I have very serious and basic disagreements with the fundamental view/views of existence (secular, rationalistic, et cetera) on which most people who share my policy positions seem to base them. I'm lonely.

'People may not believe it but I advise you all to check your Bibles more closely. God mandates this [radical redistribution of wealth] in Amos and most of the minor Prophets, as well as by implication in Jeremiah, in the Synoptic Gospels, and even in Leviticus 25. It was good for Paul and Silas and it is good enough for me. It is good enough for America, too.'

This is how I debate with radical libertarians.

'God is Love and Love is Justice. Justice entails dealing fairly in human affairs, not denying people the rights that you would not have them deny you. Love is so fundamental that the right to civil recognition of romantic commitment regardless of sex (as civil recognition of familial and professional commitment pays no regard to sex) can be counted a basic human right. And ‘to turn aside human rights before the face of the Most High, to subvert a man in his cause, the Lord approveth not’ (Lamentations 3.35-6). God is Love, God is the source of love, God is concurrent to love, and any love that does not destroy the lovers flows from God and is with Divine blessings. If it is love, and if it is beautiful, is all that matters. In love the moral becomes the aesthetic, the aesthetic the moral. God did not institute the fact of love for some brute material teleology like sex and reproduction. God instituted the fact of love because He is Love. In the end nobody is free from experience; all our experiences are the same, so please don't be cruel.'

This is how I explain my support for gay marriage.

It's not always easy to hold what is fundamentally an un-Enlightenment (not anti-Enlightenment, simply un-) view of the world in a political culture that still thinks that John Locke was a pretty swell guy (and not one of the founding fathers of the Atlantic Slave Trade and an all-around bastard who got off on the thought of genocide in the name of white people's so-called 'private property' rights). In fact it's typically extremely difficult whenever discussion turns from policy issues to the underlying philosophy. I don't know what to do. I'm starting to think that because I'm in a minority therefore I must be wrong.

A poem for Lent: parts LI-LXXV of probably around a hundred and ten or so, more or less

LI.

Just being here

Just under the same

            sky, sleeping

here, our existence

            flourishing, gives us

A second point to move on.

Love itself

Taking the form of a

            reading from the books

of fate, is lifeblood

            pulsing, in an eternal rush

Within vividly carnelian veins.

The whole world

Amorous and ambiguous

            squeals, its voice

resounding over rock and

            flood, taking a point

Drawing it out for a hundred years.

LII.

In elation, the lights go out

The colours come out after

            the fall, before the spring

            that yet begins, its light

            greenness blinking.

Over the parks and pales

Light greens and delicate

            reds, making worlds

            out of dull understanding

            bring it all on by.

In a desirous sort of culture

Wanting is the nature of feeling

            really here, wanting

            all manner of things

            and loves in the breast.

The fir tree shakes in the spring rain.

A poem for Lent: Parts XXXIV-L of I-known-not-what

XXXIV.

Diesel’s scent, warm, billowing

wrapped up in its own thing like an identity

wafts over a tangled country

like a chessboard

The water, the swamp, the trees

the housing blocks, the baseball

diamonds, the post-industrial lots

and haze, crash together

mingled crazily and without form, without

            lot or consequence

Something unearthly, something

            less than everyday yet

            in this world, totally so

            totally there.

Electrical supercharged on

towards Connecticut, the train

charges along the twisted scope

of the sound-shore.

The sky is blue, too blue

            as if smiling

it looks to scorn the shade and cool

of the sombre trails of illusory

half-substantial draperies

—As the damasked robes

            of a wandering ghost.

XXXV.

Returning to the town

of the green-on-the-whitesward

            O bells clanging

            for compline!

The sun crashes down

            whitely, whitely

—Over an edge

            serrated, separated

A human work of

common spaces and block-jagged

                        lines.

A poem for Lent: Parts XVII-XXXIII of NANI DESU KA?!

XVII.

Now it’s sunset

it’s springtime

almost, and in sunset-beams

the cat’s curled up

on the mattress asleep.

From the cold

insulated

without penitence

or need to repent

his pre-Adamite depth.

Still chilly but

with snow now gone

paving crazy in

thawing streets

the wind is a blessing.

In the wind’s

benediction

the record of the spring

wind is the record

of the autumn wind.

Spring and autumn

the seasons for norms

the months with neither

beach-holidays nor

ski-resort-holidays.

Winter and summer

the seasons for Norns

one gone one not

realised but wanting

to be frozen.

Stamp up and down

now it’s cold rock-hard

now it’s soft soil

waiting for the

gardener’s hand.

XVIII.

There is an unveiling of svelte loveliness throughout the town.

Without asking, simply look and watch as the spring air lights up.

There are no fireflies yet, not for several months in these parts.

But even so the sudden lightness into the evening bravely blazes.

A poem for Lent: Parts I through XVI of I-know-not-how-many.

Yes, this is indeed what I am doing for Lent. I'm going to add to it every day between now and Easter. This is what I have so far.

Lencten Tide

By Nathan Turowsky

I.

Reluctant eyes watched

            Through the skies’ frames and the snowmelt

                        on the Holyoke Range

            come

            Parnassus.

Turbulence of reality unveils its greyness

Under putative silence of spanning stone.

Eye of God to eye of man

Off the waves two worlds connect.

Something’s secret behind the nerves

There—Deep, deeply.

The ground is yet white

It is an underskirt layer

That is green.

Red banded wings

            set out over still water

Not the deep river and not

            the cold Quabbin

Under a quivering cast of stratus

As they would in the golden world.

In Kendrick Park

The nudity of the trees stands suddenly

Over earth’s similar nudity

In front of the pitched roofed Capes.

From remaining ecstasy of snow

Brush buds carmine-purple

Standing along the highway

                                    tin soldiers.

Light come down

            as love is

            wont

So that on

            the high-flung

            mont

With the joy

            of dancing

            colts

We may catch

            its florid

            bolts.

II.

Once my heart made a sound

Like a little starling nested

            in the wall, not reaching

            down into the hollow…

Not here not there here everywhere

Kindness, space of the eye.

In defence of Christmas.

For all the talk about Santa/Father Christmas as a harbinger of a total commercialisation of Christmas, I'd like to actually take some time to talk about what I think this figure means. I think that Santa fills an important role in the Feast of the Nativity in that he is in effect the tutelary deity or prime spirit involved in what amounts to a sacramentalisation of childhood, the same childhood that is seen and worshipped in the infant Christ.

When a parent reads a letter that a child has written to Santa and answers it with gifts, that parent is, in that moment, Santa Claus, in the sense that Santa becomes a role that the parent plays in a mystery play of the child's devising and for the child's benefit. In this role the parent absorbs the mythos of a benefactor and a comforter, whose operation in the enjoyment of the holiday is in effect a translation into material terms of the operation of the Holy Ghost in the enjoyment of spiritual graces. To a large extent the scruples and dedication of the parent are measured, by the child, in a subconscious examination of how this role is filled. The parent in effect becomes a household god, balancing this role with his or her role in the quotidian family unit and thus attaining a sort of priesthood, a position between Earth and Heaven in other times of the year reserved for more formalised religious functionalities.

It's only later that the child's evolving understanding of the spirit of giving and of the nature of parenthood allows for the roles that the parent plays to be collapsed into a more earthly understanding of generosity and the giving of gifts as operations that occur within and lend beauty to the everyday world. In this part of the system the role of Santa goes into abeyance as the child and the parent (and other gift-givers) enter into a more one-on-one relationship of exchange.

Later on, if the child becomes a parent or even just has children in his or her life as an adult, he or she likewise will come into the Santa role, having prepared the child or children for the nature of the mythos as an inheritance from the generation before.

This is not to say the system is not commercialised or filled with shit, because it is, by advertisers among others. But at its heart, the role of Santa in Christmas is a very strong and very real signifier of the transmission of the ideas and experiences of childhood, and as such is certainly relevant to the celebration of the Nativity and God-as-Child.

Shadows of Yearning

Shadows of Yearning

An Oratorio

Chorus

Jesus

Priest

Lawyer

Farmer

Kings of the Earth

Weaver-Women

Bodhisattva

CHORUS:      Hear the word of the Lord Incarnate

                        Made a man in Palestine;

                        Read in letters of gold and silver

                        Across the land from hill to brine

                        The Gospel of the distant saudade

                        Eternal on the lily-shore

                        Hear the words that shook the Temple

                        And its veil asunder tore:

CHRISTMAS BOOKS, MOSTLY THEOLOGICAL

More books I might want for Christmas:

A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez
Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? With a Short Discourse on Hell by Hans Urs von Balthasar
God in the World: A Guide to Karl Rahner's Theology by Thomas F. O'Meara

Books that I'll be reading in the next semester of college:

Five Women Who Loved Love by Saikaku
The Narrow Road to Oku by Basho
Quicksand by Tanizaki
Kokoro by Soseki
Wild Geese by Mori
Something by Akutagawa whose title I can't remember.

WISH ME LUCK!!

For God's sake, Mr Fry, no no no.

I mean it's perfectly obvious that if there were ever a God he has lost all possible taste. You've only got to look - forget the aggression and unpleasantness of the radical right or the Islamic hordes to the East - the sheer lack of intelligence and insight and ability to express themselves and to enthuse others of the priesthood and the clerisy here, in this country, and indeed in Europe, you know God once had Bach and Michelangelo on his side, he had Mozart, and now who does he have? People with ginger whiskers and tinted spectacles who reduce the glories of theology to a kind of sharing, you know? That's what religion has become, a feeble and anaemic nonsense, because we understood that the fire was within us, it was not in some idol on an altar, whether it was a gold cross or whether it was a Buddha or anything else, that we have it.

--Stephen Fry, acting like a prick.

The idea that 'religious people aren't creative any more' has absolutely no possible justification or basis in reality outside of the heads of Stephen Fry and people who already agree with him. It's deliberately small-minded ostrich-thinking. Kajiura Yuki is Shintoist and rather devout about serving the gods. Mashimo Kouichi, her frequent collaborator, is Catholic and in a position for the title of 'modern Dante' as far as I am concerned. If he wants to talk about music, and visual art? Philip Glass. Religious omnivore. Olivier Messiaen. Catholic. John Cage. MOTHERFUCKING GAY BUDDHIST ANARCHIST, HELL YEAH. And...honestly, I think most modern painting is bankrupt anyway, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if anybody can point me in the direction of some good stuff.

Let's extend this to the relatively recently deceased in the world of writing. Philip K. Dick and Marion Zimmer Bradley, perhaps a bit surprisingly, were both churchgoing Episcopalians (although both were a little crazy also). Christopher Fry, the greatest modern playwright, was a Quaker who deliberately let it influence his writing. Very surprisingly, Jorge Luis Borges was also a Quaker, at least for some of his writing period. Getting back to the living, we have Catholics Les Murray and Seamus Heaney in the world of poetry and Umberto Eco, who is lapsed but far more disdainful of people like Stephen Fry than he is of the Church, in prose.

For God's sake. I could go on and on.

It's just.

This really pisses me off.

When Mashimo Kouichi gets his hands on lesbians with guns, religion happens.

Church and State

In light of recent legal developments in the United States, a question in law called ‘rational basis’ has seen a lot of discussion both by legal scholars and in the general public. Rational basis is the least stringent test for determining whether or not a law restricting people’s behaviour meets the due-process requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. The stricter level of scrutiny revolves around something called ‘compelling state interest’, but it can be generally held that if a law does not stand up to a rational basis test it will not stand up to a compelling state interest test either, simply because rational basis is the lowest and loosest level of scrutiny in such cases[*].

            In the case of the recent developments in case law, which have occurred mainly in the US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco but also in the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, the rational basis and compelling state interest tests have been much discussed as regards the institution of civil marriage. The immediate question at hand is ‘Is there a rational basis for or compelling state interest in restricting civil marriage to couples of the opposite sex?’; the broader question that has to be answered first is ‘What is the state’s interest in registering marriages anyway?’

            Marriage was for most of human history a distinctly ad-hoc and theocratically organised institution—as, indeed, were most institutions, including government itself (the nation-state emerged as a concept in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was only substantially divorced from the religious authorities of the country in question from the eighteenth century onwards). Religious organisations performed nuptials, which were then granted a certain legal cachet by relevant authorities, chief among which were property exchange and heritability and, in the next generation down, the right to not have to inquire too deeply into who exactly one’s parents were. This system, since it was administered by religious law, was (and in many jurisdictions still is) defined solely in religious terms. Common church interests in marriage (in Europe) included legitimising sexual behaviour, keeping track of family units for the purpose of parish registers, and advancing what was seen as a series of divine mandates related to reproduction and biological parenthood. Obviously, these interests were at the time and to a large extent even to-day only served through the marriage of opposite-sex partners.

Buddhism in Contemporary Japanese Society

The second of three reposts of papers from my first year of college that I remain proud of even now.

Buddhism in contemporary Japanese society

Nathan Turowsky

            Buddhism, especially forms of Buddhism imported from China and adapted to the Japanese cultural and spiritual consciousness, has played an important role in the history of the nation and people of Japan. From its nascence in Japan in the fifth century, through its legitimisation under the Suiko Empress, all the way up to its militaristic state lip service in the Taisho and early Showa periods, Buddhism has been the Boswell to Japanese history’s Johnson.

Plato's Soul and the Concept of Guf

This is the first of three reposts of academic papers from my first year of college that I'm particularly proud of now, a month from going into my second (after a false start last year).

Plato’s Soul and the Concept of Guf 
Nathan Turowsky

            Plato’s dialogue Phaedo is notorious in some circles for apparently putting Plato’s thoughts in Socrates’ mouth, unlike earlier dialogues that are generally thought to serve as more accurate representations of Socrates’ own thinking. Phaedo’s Socrates talks about the ideal forms, argues explicitly for the immortality of the soul and the existence of an afterlife rather than making the best of either eventuality like he does in the Apology, and generally uses the infamously circuitous logic of the student rather than the clear, linear thinking of the master.

            Unlike Socrates, Plato feels comfortable in positing highly complicated metaphysical realities if he feels that there is a good reason to do so. One of his major arguments is that all learning is done by recollection—remembering and forming patterns from things previously seen. He demonstrates this by having Socrates talk to a slave who has never studied mathematics and coax out of the slave a correct understanding of how squares and square roots work. Since the slave could not possibly have learned this in this life, and since Plato does not admit of the possibility of new synthetic truths being formulated, he concludes that before bodily birth the slave (and, thus, everybody capable of learning anything) must have existed in the world of ideal forms, Plato’s Heaven, where you can see moral, mathematical, and semantic truths face-to-face.

Aliens, Academics, and Gender

For the past few weeks I've been re-reading C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) for the first time in quite a while. The last time I read these books I was eleven years old and on a plane from Dublin to Newark so I don't remember much. I got through the first two books double-quick but like many people I'm finding That Hideous Strength a bit of a slog. I LIKE it, but it's much slower reading.

One thing that I've been noting this time around is how these books deal with gender. I don't generally go to C.S. Lewis expecting great things with regards to gender issues or female characters, for three reasons: first, the whole Susan Pevensie debacle; second, how Dorothy L. Sayers once said that when the topic was sex and gender Lewis's mind just kind of went to static until somebody changed the subject; third, 'Ministering Angels' was truly awful. So when, late in Perelandra, Lewis suddenly started talking about gender and sexuality, and didn't stop in That Hideous Strength, I was kind of expecting to be angry at him.

And I am. But, weirdly, not as much as I thought I would be.

The bad things about the way the Space Trilogy handles gender are both really bad and obvious, so I'll list them first: gender is presented as real, the feminine gender is presented as 'lower' (though Lewis tries really hard to avoid equating this with 'worse', this was doomed to fail from the start and Lewis and all of his loved ones knew it) in some kind of spiritual hierarchy than the masculine, God is explicitly masculine, there is a character who is a gratuitously vicious butch lesbian stereotype, and the anti-contraception arguments in That Hideous Strength are completely insane and revolve around a deliberately absurd warning about eugenics and Merlin chopping people's heads off.

The good things are more subtle but also arguably more interesting, as the bad things are pretty much just what you'd expect of a conservative single male academic writing in the 1940s. In the realm of good things: gender and sex are different things and don't always go together in the allegedly 'normal' way (the main character, Elwin Ransom, is male in sex but actually feminine in gender as Lewis presents it), going 'against gender' isn't presented as sinful so much as something that just confuses the narrator and thus the author (the narration is first-person ancillary with Lewis appearing briefly in Perelandra), God isn't gendered in the same 'way' that humans and angels are (whatever that means), there are apparently five genders other than male and female that only exist in the Outer Planets, husbands who abuse their wives are roundly condemned, That Hideous Strength has a sympathetic coded-lesbian character in addition to its more explicitly lesbian evil character, and we're clearly not supposed to agree with everything Merlin says since he also recommends killing George VI for being a Saxon and insists on referring to Iraq as Babylon.

I think what this shows is that Lewis was interested in discussing gender within a small-l liberal Christian perspective but was hamstrung by his environment, which was filled with people who with the arguable exception of Williams were a lot more conservative than he was about these things, and by the fact that at the time that he wrote the Space Trilogy he had essentially no clue what a woman who wasn't Dorothy L. Sayers or G.E.M. Anscombe even looked like. Most of what he writes about sex is very questionable and I've spent a lot of That Hideous Strength with face firmly in palm.

It's interesting to think that with the exception of Til We Have Faces and maybe Surprised by Joy this is about as non-failing about gender as Lewis gets, and that most of my favourite authors tend either to have had 'of their time' views on gender (Lewis and all those premodern writers I love), to not really discuss it at all (Umberto Eco and his ilk), or to win at gender but fail in some other ways (Angela Carter, in my most humble opinion). I'm not sure if this means that I simply prefer older literature, that what I consider good portrayal of gender (as opposed to just awesome female characters, which is a broader category) simply isn't that common in general, that my interest in literature with religious themes or discussion ropes in questionable (though rarely if ever outright Godawful) dealings with gender as a sort of sacrificial lamb, or what.

Which of these would you rather worship?

(Click images to embiggen.)

These are all images of the same person. Inari Okami, Japanse god/goddess/deity-thing of foxes, rice, agriculture, and wealth, and a chthonic and in some traditions afterlife deity. He/she/it can be a guy, a girl, an anthropomorphic fox (no word yet on George Clooney's involvement), a non-anthropomorphic fox, or, apparently, in the second image from the bottom, David Bowie from the film Labyrinth. Inari is associated with summer so I thought it'd be nice to post some of him/her/it for the beginning of the dog days.

Also, Google Image Search for "male inari" turns up mostly Inari-brand tennis shoes. THANKS A BUNCH, CAPITALISM.

Disclaim for sarcasm

I note, with some consternation, that a recent online attempt of mine to explain—not even to argue for or against, simply to explain—St Anselm’s Ontological Argument was somehow disseminated to the point where it reached Richard Dawkins’s website, at which point it, along with other online assays of such kind, was mercilessly excoriated by Dawkins’s brood.

            Obviously being criticised by the followers of Professor Dawkins is a major setback for anybody interested in the philosophy of religion. As we all know, Professor Dawkins is a very well-regarded pillar of said branch of knowledge and to get on his bad side (or that of his fans) is to get on the bad side of the greatest philosopher of religion since, perhaps, Erasmus. In fact, to antagonise Professor Dawkins, wilfully or not, directly or not, is to be certain one of the greatest mistakes that a modern thinker of any sort can make.

            This has all been very trying for me. My beliefs have been shaken to their core. Due to the overwhelming insight engendered in Dawkins’s thought and that of his cohort, I am more than willing to re-examine and if need be abandon some of my most well-thought-out and clearly-articulated opinions. I am truly sorry for contributing to the vast religious conspiracy seeking to suppress Professor Dawkins and his thought, for as we all know he is as oppressed in the public at large as he is respected by serious philosophers.

            And it’s not just him! Poor Hitchens, poor Harris! For are not these pitiable Rudy Ruetiggers of modern thought the most oppressed of all? Surely they are as downtrodden as the great Christian and Jewish thinkers of former days! Surely no Buber, no St Cecilia or Tertullian, can match how they have suffered for their work, nor how great the work in question is. I wish them all speed in their work: may Hitchens succeed in his truly great endeavours! May Harris’s voice ring loud and clear in American life! May Dawkins’s next project truly do what it is meant to—for is not children’s ability to enjoy fantasy truly as pernicious and evil as paedophiliac rape? And may the great paladins, PZ Myers and Ian McEwan and Philip Pullman and their ilk, come to the constant aid and defence of these great, great, truly great and deep thinkers into the realities of the religious experience. May Myers’s reasonable approach, McEwan’s unique insights, and Pullman’s good grace triumph against the obscurantist drivel of the world’s Francis Collinses, Doris Lessings, and Leonard Cohens. May those who encourage unreason be mocked! May those who encourage fanaticism be killed!

May those who are against scientific supremacy be crushed beneath the wheels of the great Professor, who as we all know had so many better things to do over the past decade than teach his students about science. May he no more do useless things like studying his actual fields of expertise and expressing his outrage at various universities’ decisions to award honorary degrees to Ben Stein; of course these are less useful than promoting open contempt for one’s enemies in western Asia and trying to destroy the concept of fiction. May he entirely abandon his attempts at promoting evolution against intelligent design and focus entirely on religious philosophy, his true area of expertise!

            MEA CULPA.

            SALVA NOS, RICARDUS.

Why the hell am I even posting this? It's embarrassing that I spent so much time on something that can be very easily researched.

Although Christianity is the largest religion in the world, only about one out of three humans describes him- or herself as Christian. It thus follows that potentially two out of three or more are confused as to what it’s all about.

Key concepts

The Bible. The Christian holy text is called the Holy Bible. It is divided into the Old and New Testaments, which are further divided into between sixty-six and eighty Books, depending upon what branch of Christianity one is looking at. The Old Testament, also called the Hebrew Bible, is also a holy text of Judaism; the New Testament, also called the Christian or Grecian Bible, is unique to Christianity. For the first few centuries of Christian history the content of the Bible was in flux; since the fourth century, when Christianity became an official religion of the Roman Empire, the content of the New Testament has been a constant of twenty-nine Books and the content of the Old Testament has only varied slightly between denominations, with thirty-seven Books accepted by all as canonical. The Holy Bible was written from approximately 700 BCE to approximately 100 CE.

Theism. Theism, the belief in the existence of God, should need no explanation. It is the fundamental concept of Christianity, most strains of which subscribe to a form of pluriform monotheism. The doctrine of the Trinity states that God is three persons—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit-who-used-to-be-a-Ghost (subsequently I'll use the term 'Holy Ghost' because I like it better)—but one being. The expression of the doctrine used the Athanasian Creed (a Creed in use by the Catholic Church and widely accepted among liturgical Protestants) is:

Why Paradise Lost is so beautiful (one and a half of many reasons)

The reasons why Paradise Lost is such a beautiful piece of literature are many but, to be quite frank, have in my view been grossly misrepresented and twisted over the centuries. Blake famously said that Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it', because Blake was one of those people who assumed that any depiction of the Devil as anything more complex than an unremittingly disgusting psycho killer (like the genuinely terrifying Un-Man in Lewis's Perelandra) automatically meant that the author intended the reader's sympathies to be drawn.

The beauty of Milton's Devil is that he is a hateful and horrifying figure without being the sort of over-the-top mad evil idiot so common in mediaeval art and mystery plays--the tradition where St Dunstan or St Dominic can trick him into doing household chores or pinch his nose with a pair of pliers like the Three Stooges. Real-life sociopaths and borderlines are not immediately or easily identifiable as such. The beauty of Adam and Eve is that they aren't idiots and their actions are understandable and even, yes, sympathetic--but still not portrayed as right. John Milton, unlike many great poets, actually understood how people work. The man was Oliver Cromwell's private secretary and involved in many of the great upheavals of seventeenth-century England, on at least two different sides (the parliamentarians early on and the moderate restorationists later).

The beauty of the writing has to do with Milton's mastery of English blank verse--a mastery which, speaking purely mathematically, surpasses Shakespeare's. Milton's style in Paradise Lost is a lot more formal than Shakespeare's usually is. But such formality may go unnoticed, may even put some people off. There is (or, at least, should be) nothing controversial about writing characters in an interesting way that actually makes sense.