[This needs work. Too many jumps. But clumsy though it is, I'm going to leave it up here.]
I watched David Attenborough the other night on TV. From him I learnt that there is an organisation with the above name. I am deeply suspicious. Suspicious? Read on.
For a start, you wouldn’t create such an organisation with such a name unless you had a policy agenda. You can check the details; but from what I could bear to read, these people think that we should reduce the world population (6,000,000,000) to about half in the next half-century! AH’s Final Solution x 500.
Malthus was Wrong
In fact only one person in the history of the world has been wronger than Malthus – Paul Ehrlich, The Wrongest Person Ever!
Bjorn Lomborg demonstrates from UN figures that we are better fed (as a planet) than ever before. That the planet is cleaner than ever and that natural resources are more plentiful than ever. That species are disappearing at a negligible rate.
And yet... Prince Phillip of WWF wants to be reincarnated as a deadly virus with a view to depopulating the planet.
I am a loyal subject of Her Majesty but...
I am committing myself here to a posting on Malthus/Ehrlich and The Deadly Duke.
No doubt “The Science is Settled”... but what do they propose (OPT)? Apparently, the wickedest deed in History. Evil has been in its infancy till now! Damien's still peddling his trike. Pol Pot was an amateur! Well, as far as his aspirations went - in practical terms, quite a guy. He killed about 1/3 of the population of his country (for wearing specs and similar crimes). So, proportionally, he was the baddest of all time.
Influential though they may be: Attenborough, Ehrlich and the D of E, they probably won’t achieve their foul goal.
No doubt they applaud the achievements of the "One Child Policy" of the Chinese People's Socialist Republic and would cheerfully cough up a Carbon Footprint payment for every aborted Chinese baby. The Chinese are ready to issue you with an invoice!
We can pause here to ruminate on every Chinese woman forcibly aborted under the above policy, of every enforcer obliged to murder a twin (whose only crime was to be a twin), on every Chinese lad for whom there is no corresponding lass (the Chinese choosing male foetuses over females, for the most part).
As you may have guessed, I have serious problems with many aspects of Islamic culture. I have lived in Saudi Arabia, which I found dreary and intolerant. Islam has spawned Islamicism, which is an abomination. Islam has not yet found an accommodation with Democracy. I hope and believe that Islam will have its Renaissance and its Reformation. I know that in many respects I have more in common with Muslims than with mainstream Western culture.
In spite of my problems with Islam, I have, for as long as I can remember, been ravished by examples of Islamic Art and Architecture. What is it about Islamic Art that gives it its strength and grace? Discipline, I think. Discipline (Strength) and Piety (Grace).
The Koran, I believe, forbids representations of humans and animals, a prohibition which if applied to western art would pretty well wipe it out. The prohibition exists to remove the temptation to idolatry. All very worthy but it leaves me with a few questions. Q1: Are Christians tempted to worship The Boy David by Michelangelo? A: Not this Catholic. Q2: How comes it that portraits of humans are ubiquitous in (most) Islamic countries? Saddam Hussein was on every wall in Iraq. This ought to have been anathema to every Sunni and every Shia in the country. More puzzlingly, witness the photos of Ayatollah Khomeini all over Iran. You would have expected the man himself to rend his clothes and pour dust upon his head at the sight of them.
Perhaps photographs do not qualify as art. All the same, paintings of people are not unknown in Islamic art. There are in fact portraits of The Prophet Himself. Nevertheless, the glories of Isfahan and of the Alhambra and of the Taj Mahal make do without portraiture. They are self-denying. They are thrown back on geometry and calligraphy. And they make the most of them!
Obeying rules is fundamental to art. Free verse is like playing tennis with no net. Who said that? Tracey Emin says that what she does is art because she is an artist. I think that Tracey Emin has a fine pair of tits. Sorry, Trace, but that is the best I can do.
The sonnet is one of the sublime forms of English verse. [Actually, there are several set of rules to which a sonneteer can subject him/herself]. Obedience is the trick!
Here's a link to some beautiful stuff. There's loads more.http://www.patterninislamicart.com/
There are movies about which you find yourself thinking the next day. There are movies which you can watch a dozen times, a hundred times, and notice something new each time.
Here are a few movies I have watched a few times. I have enjoyed introducing others to them. Some of them are movies which I have bought and lent without caring whether I got them back (I could always buy another copy). Some of these movies develop ideas which are a million miles from my own mindset.
In no particular order, then, some of my favourites:
[It would be nice to have comments featuring your favourites. If you have watched a movie over and over, then there’s a good chance that I’ll find it worthwhile.]
Duellists:
Pulp Fiction: There are those who think that this is the greatest movie ever made. Well, it is a great movie. I’ve probably watched it more often than any other.
Secretary: A very very strange movie but compulsive.
Groundhog Day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MoOvPIuKAY
Green Mile: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slsMqC0_6pk&NR=1
Inglourious Basterds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmTvMUvaBcg
Reservoir Dogs:
Shawshank Redemption: This seems to be the whole movie in 14 parts, in 10 minute chunks. I assume this is legal? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spR3u9UJfJc
Team America:
High Fidelity:
True Romance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT-yylPUtx4
Fugitive: Tommy Lee Jones is stunning. Harrison Ford is very good.
Favourite Movie Makers
Cohen Brothers:
Quentin Tarantino:
Favourite Actors
A lot of the above favourites are favourites because they star actors who would be watchable if they were presenting detergent commercials. Acting talent is a difficult thing to analyse, even, I suspect, if you are a top director.
Harvey Keitel: The rest of this list is in no particular order but HK is at the top for a reason.
Tommy Lee Jones:
Christopher Walken: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqccyUpnZwA This is such a great scene that it seems churlish not to include...
Dennis Hopper:
Dustin Hoffman:
John Cusack:
Joan Cusack:
Harrison Ford:
Jamie Lee Curtis:
Kevin Bacon:
Sigourney Weaver:
Darryl Hannah:
Brad Pitt:
Meryl Streep:
Mia Farrow:
Uma Thurman:
John Travolta:
Samuel L Jackson:
Morgan Freeman:
Angelica Houston:
Faye Dunaway:
Robert Duvall:
Robert de Niro:
Bill Murray:
Maggie Gyllenhaal:
Notice that I do not say Science & Religion. Nor do I say Science and Catholicism but that would suit my purpose nearly as well.
Listening to The Infinite Monkey Cage on Radio 4 this afternoon, I was appalled by the dismal quality of the ‘debate’. The Dean of Guildford, I think, was the ‘Christian’. He led the laughter at the unctuousness of his voice ‘the way a dean should sound’, as though an Anglican clergyman had an obligation to live up to the popular stereotype as well as to be utterly bland and vacuous. He was both. He probably likes being called ‘Rev’.
Anyway, The Vacuous Dean volunteered that ‘religious people’ have a tendency to claim that they have the whole truth, than which nothing could be further from the truth if by ‘religious’ he meant Christian. If anything, this is the claim of the atheistic materialists, who declare that Nature is all there is and that Science is the only means of understanding the World. They know that the Darwinian mechanism (random mutation and natural selection) is how earthworms came to be earthworms and nuns came to be nuns (not just women, but nuns).
Darwinism explains, they tell us, ‘Everything’: earthworms, nuns, fascists, emperors, slavery, tenderness, abortion, Mathematics, rape, heroism, sadism, Democracy, atheism, Music. Everything! Everything and its opposite.
I digress. The atheists on the programme would have it that there was a ‘tension’ between Science and Religion, their way of saying that the former negated the latter. Our clergyman, on the other hand, told a little story about some American students at a service in St Paul’s. He had pointed out to them that Darwin was buried beneath their feet – so they could go back to Arkansas and tell the rednecks that at least Anglicans believed in Science and not creationism. I am paraphrasing; but I swear that he mentioned Arkansas.
My animus against the Unctuous Dean is that he didn’t point out to the unwashed atheists that Science is the Daughter of Christianity, that the Glories of Copernican Astronomy, of Kepler’s planetary Geometry, of Galileo’s observations, of Newton’s magnificent laws and the mindset that underpinned them, were outgrowths of Christianity. The assumptions that gave rise to the Scientific Method were deeply theological. The theology was Judeo-Christian.
Christianity holds that everything emanates from the Mind of God, that humans, made in the image of God, have minds which are fitted for understanding Nature, that the Laws of Nature, products of God’s Mind are, astonishingly accessible to our minds. We Christians expect to be able to make sense of Nature because (as we increasingly discover) Nature makes sublime sense. It is not capricious as an animist would believe. Our minds are capable of getting ever closer to understanding the products of God’s Mind. We wouldn’t have started doing Science if we had not believed that Reason was built into the World’s substance and that Reason is inherent in human thought.
It is anti-scientific to suppose that our ability to detect order in the Universe is the result of random mutations in our brains. Doing science only makes sense if we know what sense is. And we do know; our understanding of things depends upon logic and mathematics being ‘given’ and not random. Coherent thought seems to me impossible if Reason is the product of randomness.
Reason and Faith are absurdly placed in contradiction to each other. We can’t do Science, we can’t think coherently unless we have Faith in the transcendence of Reason.
I can think of no area in which I believe good Science is in opposition to Faith – not one. What we do see is bad Science in opposition to good Science or (more often) honest ignorance in opposition to bad Science, arrogant conjecture or bullying consensus.
I believe that Science is no threat to Christianity and that it never has been. I believe that thoughtful observation of Nature has always been on the side of Faith (see Psalm 19) – more so than ever before. The Big Bang Theory (now, I think, universally accepted) is profoundly theological in its implications. But we still have much to learn about it. What I also believe is that the potential (even the inevitability) of minds existing in Time and Space came into being with the Big Bang, that there are Laws of Nature, which Science may discover, which guide and have guided not only the formation of the galaxies, but the formation of thinking animals with minds and the ability to reason and by Reason and Faith dimly to know the Ultimate Mind.
This is one of the finest lyric poems in English. Once upon a time a good proportion of Englishmen would have had some or all of it by heart. Do you recognize any phrases in it, used by other authors? It is a total justification of Gray's existence.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share,
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault
If Memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood.
Th' applause of list'ning senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation's eyes,
Their lot forbad: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,
The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.
Yet e'en these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply:
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.
For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?
On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires.
For thee, who, mindful of th' unhonour'd dead,
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, --
Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn;
'There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high.
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove;
Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
Or crazed with care, or cross'd in hopeless love.
One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill,
Along the heath, and near his favourite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;
The next with dirges due in sad array
Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne,-
Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay
Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.'
The Epitaph
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melacholy marked him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
(There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God.
Some atheists reckon they have a cast-iron refutation for the Christian belief in an all powerful and all loving God. How come, they demand, if God is all powerful and all loving, that he allows bad things to happen to innocent people?
This, of course, is a question asked not only by atheists, but by Christian and Jewish teachers for much more than two thousand years. It is the theme of the Book of Job. It is a question asked by every child brought up in the Christian faith. If I were God and could do anything, would I allow bad stuff to happen? ’Course I wouldn’t.
It is a very hard question. Funnily enough, it doesn’t seem to do the trick as often as an atheist would expect – that of causing people to abandon faith in a God who is simultaneously omnipotent, good and apparently tolerant of evil. Christians believe that God hates evil. But we still don’t disbelieve – just because he doesn’t wrap a force field around us which repels every evil thing (and he doesn’t program us to behave always in our own best interest). Are Christians just stupid, then? Are they incapable of following a simple syllogism? A good, omnipotent God would not allow evil to exist. Evil exists. Therefore God is not good or not omnipotent or not existent.
Like all thinking Christians, I think about this. It worries me, as it has worried all Christians forever. But it worries me a little less than it did.
Christians believe that God is our Father. Clearly, this is a metaphor. All human parents inhabit Time and Space. God does not. God is the originator of Time, Space, Energy and Matter. When we say, “Our Father...” we are not pretending to be in literally the same relationship with The Creator as we are with our human parents. Nevertheless, we do say it and we do mean it. Christ taught his disciples to say it. Christians who are parents believe that they share, if only to an infinitesimal degree, in the nature of God.
God is omniscient. We are not. However, we are not omni-ignorant. We do know things. We know for certain that when we procreate, our offspring will have to endure suffering. We hate the evil that we know will befall them. We practise varying degrees of self-sacrifice to mitigate their inevitable suffering. But, all the same, we choose to procreate. Knowing what is inevitable, we do not think it would be more loving (of our still un-conceived progeny) not to beget and bear them.
To an infinitesimal degree we are like God. We would not, even if we could, withhold freewill from our children, by genetic modification or brainwashing. Any attempt by others to do so would meet with our fiercest resistance. We abominate the idea of government thought and behaviour control, even when we meet it in fiction, such as in Brave New World.
Having mused on this for a few days, I was surprised to hear Lord Harries of Pentregarth (sometime Bishop of Oxford) developing a similar theme in the Thought for the Day slot on the Today programme last week. It is very seldom that I hear anything in this slot that sticks in my memory. Well done, Richard! Of course, I didn’t expect Humphrys and Naughtie to improve on it; so I switched to Wogan. Terry, don’t leave us!
A growing list
Melanie Phillips: Right about nearly everything. But not drugs policy. Proud to have her topping my list. http://www.melaniephillips.com
Phillip Johnson: Hard to summarise but a great man!
Christopher Booker: Right about the EU. Right about AGW.
David Berlinski: The polemicist's polemicist - erudite and witty. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec8lpcA5hls
Daniel Hannan: One of my two favourite parliamenarians. The other is Frank Field. Here Dan's his famous speech in the European Parliament: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs
Thomas Gold: Twice vindicated in different branches of science. Probably to be vinicated in a third.
Peter Duesberg: A brave scientist who will be vindicated. Listen to him and you will wonder how the nonsense which is the HIV theory of AIDS ever got a hearing. Charles Geshekter is exceptionally good on African AIDS, as is Rian Malan.
Jonah Goldberg: If you haven't read 'Liberal Fascism', you are probably labouring under the same misconception that I was before reading this momentous book. I took Left and Right to be opposite ends of the political spectrum. Communism was extreme Leftism and Fascism was the extreme manifestation of Right wing ideas. Until I read Goldberg. He makes it clear that Communism and Fascism/Nazism were twins. Not only does he quote Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini expressing admiration for each other but he reminds us that Hitler called his movement National Socialism and that Mussolini declared himself to be a lifelong socialist. The antecedents of both were nineteenth century materialism, atheism and anticlericalism. Both forms of totalitarianism owed much to the Darwinian theory of evolution. These dictators were much admired by early twentieth century 'progressives'. It was HG Wells (all purpose progressive thinker and eugenicist) who called for Liberal Fascism. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsFoiVZDSRs
Stephen C Meyer: Author of 'Signature in the Cell', articulate, lucid and convincing. Watch him in debate with Eugenie Scott. Hear her claim that black is white. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFhMxAsMDvk The interviewer is a moron.
Michael Behe: Author of 'Darwin's Black Box' He invented the phrase, 'irreducible complexity'.
Bob Carter: Demolisher of the hypothesis that human CO2 emmissions are causing catastrophic global warming aka climate change. On YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI
Michael Denton: 'Nature's Destiny' is magisterial. His earlier 'Evolution a Theory in Crisis' will one day be seen to have been highly significant.
Vaclav Klaus: My favourite head of state. On Glenn Beck: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VttfdKhQDrQ
Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels): An essayist of brilliance and humanity. See his essay on Ray Honeyford, another great man. http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_2_oh_to_be.html Two unmissable collections: 'Life at the Bottom' and 'Our Culture, What's Left of it'.
James Delingpole: A blogger's blogger and much more.
Christine Maggiore: Here is a link to Alive and Well - http://www.aliveandwell.org/
Celia Farber:
Terry Wogan: On Monday Chris Evans takes over the Radio 2 Breakfast Show and I wish him well. Don't Forget Your Toothbrush was a great show and he is a fine broadcaster. But Terry Wogan is the broadcaster sans pareil (and the Greatest Living Irishman).
Couldn't find the PW fart show. But this is good. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgwD6SR-CXs&feature=PlayList&p=D91F2C7EDFFDF997&index=11
