History subverts religious nonsense

I can't understand  parents who bemoan their kids growing up. One of the biggest joys of being a parent is watching them figuring out the world for themselves. We had one of those impromptu family discussions in our house yesterday prompted by one of those delightfully innocent questions that cuts through all the bullshit of the polite grown up world - just why do religious people believe such obvious nonsense ?

I should explain that our kids have grown up in a thoroughly free-thinking household - but at their school they seem to be  largely  surrounded by friends who are either practicing Muslims of varying degrees of orthodoxy, or Evangelical Christians.  Either way - happily my kids genuinely struggle to comprehend the barminess of their friends' beliefs - both in  theory and practice - whether it's the concept of an imminent apocolypse and the bodily resurrection of our ancestors, or having at all costs  to cover your hair and not consume shellfish. 

We can try  to explain it to them in terms of psychology - religion gives people comfort, or in terms of sociology - it affirms people's cultural identity.  But on  a purely abstract level, having encouraged the application of reason in  every other aspect of their education, it's very difficult to explain religious belief in terms of anything else other than  wanton stupidity and simple superstition.

However I've found help  in the unlikeliest of places -  the BBC's 'History Of The World in 100 Objects' -  this week they have been looking at the rise of the major world religions. They do so in terms of power - both political and economic. The 15 minutes a day programmes chart why the big four religions we are stuck with today triumphed over other local 'pagan' religions. And clearly slow that was not because they were any more intellectually vigorous or morally superior, but because they won by  military conquest (Islam), or by providing the fabric of empire (Christianity and Hinduism) or by trade networks (Buddhism). Maybe the disciples of the Flying Spaghetti Monster were just less fortunate in their historical breaks.

What is it about female hair ?

A French parliamentary commission has recommend a state ban of the Islamic burqua or full veil. It's a debate that will continue to rumble through the governments of western europe.

At a  pragmatic level even the better-informed Islamophobes see that state bans will produce the  opposite to the intended effect and strengthen funda-mentalism in minority communities.

Western liberals on the other hand are in danger of disappearing up their own relativist backsides in refusing  to address disturbing issues that they would never accept in their own culture.

Here's a thought though;  each of the images  here tells a story - and  these stories are not equally valid, they are equally fucked up. I could speculate at length on the cultural, historical and socio-economic origins of the customs portrayed, and the world-views they imply.

I think it is sufficient to simply say that they each reveal some profoundly twisted shit: About property relations, about the status of women, about suppressed sexuality ... and most of all about the unique and extraordinary power of religion to get people to connive in their own subordination.

William Blake, Jesus and the druids

I have a soft spot for William Blake. His art is visionary and timeless. His politics were radical. And he started life as a copper-plate engraver and so would have been a member of my old union the NGA (SLADE). I'm not so sure about his poetry though. And although I have to concede that 'Jerusalem' would be a preferable national anthem to 'god-save-the sodding-queen'- it is of course complete nonsense.

Whilst I can appreciate the radical intention behind the lyrics - a vision of building an earthly paradise in 'England's green and pleasant land'; the only possible answer to 'Did those feet in Ancient Times?' is ... NO!!! However this view is not accepted by Dr Gordon Strachan, a Church Of Scotland Minister who has made a film to re-assert the old legend that Jesus did visit Britain.

The myth is an old chestnut that has been around for generations, and does  have some flimsy connection to recent archaeolgy. We now know that Britain at the time of Jesus , particularly in the South West,  was not some desolate outpost but a vibrant trading economy with trade routes that connected across the Mediterranean to the Levant. But that's about it. Mixed up with this is the legend of Joseph of Arimathea having deposited the chalice from the last supper (AKA The Holy Grail) at Glastonbury. From there on of course it is only a few short steps to the whole Arthurian circus - and Dan Brown.

But more mundanely. Joseph may have been a merchant and  he may have been Jesus's uncle - and so this leads to the speculation that he may have taken  his nephew with him on his trading  trips. All a bit thin but there is at least some semblance of tenuous logic to it. However apparently Dr Strachan is not content with the idea that Jesus may have tagged along with his uncle to pick up some Cornish tin or lead: He argues that Jesus visited the druids of Britain to swap philosophical concepts !

Ignore for a moment the improbability of an almost certainly illiterate carpenter from a small town in Palestine who probably only spoke Aramaic discoursing with celtic-speaking elders who themselves had no written language.

Not too much is known about the druids, but we can be pretty sure that their pagan belief system was simply not the kind of religion given to the calm ecumenical debate of metaphysical concepts. Travellers would  not have visited them for enlightenment like gap-year students going to see ghurus in Goa to find themselves. They would have been rather more likely to find themselves sacrificed and their heads stuck on display on the door of the chief druid's hut. Still, no matter what the implausibility, there is no end to the wishful thinking of religious believers.

I'm just waiting for someone to sign up Dr Strachan's theory for Hollywood - it can't be any worse than the fucking Da Vinci code.

Martial arts & religion

Chewing the fat the other night at one of those all-important having-a-beer-after-training sessions, the conversation turned to why a couple of students had recently left – in both cases it was a question of religion.

The first was one of our very few female students – a hippy / New Age type. She left because she thought we weren’t spiritual enough: She had asked why we didn’t have anything to say about chi. We said that we just don’t go there – it’s not necessary to explain how Wing Chun works. We only talk about perfecting body mechanics not releasing inner energy.

It’s not that we have anything against chi – we still know so little about how the nervous system works that it is quite conceivable that the concept of chi is just an ancient expression for some sort of energy impulse that medicine is yet to articulate.  It’s just that we don’t need to promote it in the teaching of what we do. As for the student who left because of this omission - we have heard since that she has converted to Islam, so presumably she is not too keen on chi herself now.

The other student was a senior with many years of mileage on him – and experience working as a doorman. Then he became a born-again Christian. His pastor told him that he was practicing a ‘pagan art’. The evidence cited for this was a couple of things found on the internet about techniques known as ‘the half prayer to Buddha’ or ‘the five prayers to Buddha’. These are not the technical names of the techniques – they are effectively Chinese slang that maybe made sense in a society with a Buddhist culture. We don’t even use them in our kwoon – and we don’t use the traditional Chinese yin-yang salute either, believing that a handshake or a bear-hug are more meaningful Western-equivalent gestures of respect and brotherhood.

It’s sad to lose  students for such stupid reasons. It’s also kind of amusing to see how religious belief systems are so mutually-repellent. (Although I should add that we do have some students who are devout Muslims or Christians and manage to reconcile this with their training). Personally as an atheist/Humanist/freethinker/whatever I find martial arts not only compatible but absolutely complementary with my own worldview:

Martial arts training is so essentially ‘promethean’ with much of the training counter-intuitive and aimed to condition new reflexes. It takes short, tall, skinny, fat, timid, aggressive, uncoordinated people, or more rarely natural athletes and scientifically allows them to make themselves into something else. It is about rational enquiry – looking behind the seemingly amazing feats of strength, speed or endurance and breaking them down into perfected physical techniques. And in the long run, more than the physical it provides psychological benefits like stress management and the cultivation of calm. You can call that spirituality if you must but I think that’s just shorthand for mental well-being.

Happy Eostra

Everybody's making noises about Easter coming early this year. Few seem to be aware why this is so: It's because, in simple terms, the date of Easter is calculated around the lunar calendar and the first full moon of Spring. It is not you'll notice an anniversary based on Roman records of the date of the crucifixion of a certain Jesus of Nazareth.

Hmmm. Maybe there's a clue there to its origins ?

(Just to spell it out for the hard of thinking: Eostra was a pagan Germanic fertility goddess. Her name provides the derivation of Oestrogen. Hence the whole Easter egg thing).

Which reminds me of I read a nice story about a child being asked to describe the Easter story: Apparently it's when the Easter bunny hatches out of a chocolate egg and then goes to heaven.

Makes as much sense as some stuff I've heard. Whatever. Enjoy the break ...

Samhain

Tonight’s the night we teach kids the valuable lesson of the power of extortion or as it’s now known ‘trick or treating’. With this in mind it’s easy to appreciate that Halloween is a quintessentially American festival.

And it is indeed an American import – twenty years ago Halloween was pretty much confined to Scotland and Ireland – but the numerous retail opportunities for selling cheap and tacky scary shit were too irresistible.

And so another ‘tradition’ was invented much like Father’s Day (a totally synthetic event manufactured by the greetings card industry). In fact Halloween does have a bit more of a solid origin than that. It came to the USA from Scotland – the first written reference to it is in Robbie Burns – and it derives from All Hallows or All Saints Day – a festival in the Christian calendar.

But that’s not the whole story.

The Christians, as so often is the case, nicked the idea from a Celtic pagan festival – Samhain. There was an original Christian festival of the dead in May but somewhere in the Eighth Century, when the Christians were recruiting amongst the pagans, they swapped over the date to November so that they could capitalize on the existing celebrations.

For the pagans Samhain marked the end of the ‘light’ half of the year and the start of the ‘dark’ – it was marked with what was essentially a piss up around a camp fire. A time of celebration after the harvest and before the cold of winter set in.There’s no evidence that I’m aware of that confectionary was given to kids in exchange for not getting your windows egged - presumably that’s a later development.

So ironically all those Christian-mentalists who get hot under the collar about kids celebrating Halloween might actually have a point.

Still, bollocks to ‘em – lets celebrate the dark side tonight.

Catholics and human rights.

Some time ago the Vatican stopped its donations to Amnesty International. And now bishops in Northern Ireland have ordered Catholic schools there to ban Amnesty groups.

The reason ? Amnesty's definition of human rights includes a woman's right to choose. This was adopted not after some abstract ethical debate but as a specific policy in particular response to the widespread use of rape as a weapon of terror in the Balkans, Congo and Darfur.

Amnesty International debated this issue long and hard as it always bends over backwards to avoid adopting any position that can be seen as 'political'. I respect this and the pragmatic need to maximize their effectiveness by not compromising their 'impartial' stance. But of course ultimately it is nonsense - human rights are always going to be a political issue, and you can't help but offend someone by adopting a stance. Particularly bigots.

The kind of bigots whose message to refugees who are driven from their homes and subjected to systematic mass rape both as a means of repression and ethnic cleansing by 'breeding', is basically that they should put up and shut up. (Possibly 'offer up their suffering to God' - I never did understand that particular piece of sado-masochistic bollocks).

I shouldn't really be surprised though; this is the organisation that brought us the Holy Inquistion and the prescribed list. The real surprise is that there are any religious Amnesty groups at all.

Every religion will throw human rights out the window when it comes into contradiction with some 'sacred' belief, be it how we choose to dress, what we choose to eat, what we teach our children or our sexuality.

'Protect the human' is Amnesty's slogan these days - I would suggest that this can only genuinely be done by humanists.

Tom Paine

The anniversary today of the death of Thomas Paine in 1809.

Which takes us (strangely enough) to that seventies cult classic Death Race 2000. Wonderfully cheap and tacky production values, but like much Sci-Fi, a serious message underlies it.

In the wake of global economic collapse the USA is run by a fascist government. In order to keep the citizenry happy and distracted, and to cull society of its weaker members, the government televises a Death Race across the country. The objective is not just speed but to accumulate points for running over the public – with maximum points for a kill on the elderly or children. (If this all seemed far fetched in the seventies it now seems like a possible new project for Endemol).

Significantly the leader of the resistance movement which plans to disrupt the race, assassinate the Fascist president and restore freedom to the USA, is Thomasina Paine. And hence the connection to today’s anniversary.

Tom Paine, a true working class hero. Originally apprenticed as a corset maker, he failed in pretty much every job he tried his hand at, and this forced him to emigrate to the American colonies. Largely self-educated, he was an inventor and scientist but above all a political philosopher who provided in three short works a democratic and radical ideology that inspired revolutionaries in America (Common Sense) and France (The Rights Of Man) and rational opposition to religion (The Age Of Reason). He was imprisoned in France during the Jacobin Terror but never wavered in his support for the revolution and returned to the US only when Napoleon replaced the republic with the empire.

In our own age when the US stands as a reactionary superpower he is a reminder of where it all came from. The Republicans and Democrats today would do well to re-acquaint themselves with somebody who was truly both these things.

Cardinal's opinion not welcome.

If some ‘Mad Mullah’ called on his flock not to vote for any candidate who supported the war and occupation in Iraq, the Little Englanders would be up in arms. And smug that they don’t live in a theocracy.

Meanwhile, Cardinal O’Brien, primate of Scotland has called on Catholic voters not to support ‘pro-abortion’ candidates. He’s also going to deny communion to those Catholic politicians who don’t come out against abortion. (By the way, I’ve yet to meet anyone who is ‘pro-abortion’; though quite a few believe that there should be a right to abortion).

And this from a bloke who has taken a vow of celibacy, has no family and absolutely fuck-all experience of relationships or bringing up children. He has absolutely no business expressing an opinion on women’s reproductive rights. Or using the 'authority' of the church to intervene in how people vote.

Mind you this is the same guy who a few years ago denounced sex education as "state-sponsored sexual abuse" of children. Hold up there Your Eminence – I think your church might be on rather dodgy ground on that particular subject !

Personally I’m as tolerant of religion as the next guy: Just so long as it’s kept between consenting adults and behind closed doors.

ie: Don’t take it as your right to indoctrinate your children in faith schools, and stay out of the political process.