Is Anything Really Worth Fighting For?

"I know that for me, the war is wrong. 

I know that, if the [Russians] wanted my little house, 

I would rather give it them than fight for it: 

because my little house is not important enough to me." [1]

 

I. 

 

I said in a recent post with reference to the current situation in Ukraine, that it might have been a wiser diplomatic move on Zelenskyy's part to have attempted to appease Putin - making whatever concessions were needed in order to avoid war - rather than have flirted with the West and indicated his desire to not only join the EU, but NATO.  

Still, it's a bit late for such a policy now that Russia has invaded and major Ukranian cities, including the captal, are being bombarded even as I write. And I'm aware also that appeasement is a dirty word in the political lexicon these days - not least here in the UK, following our experiences in the 1930s with Hitler (give him an inch ...)

 

However, there's really no need for the Ukranians to martyr themselves and I would advise that they capitulate and seek terms with Russia as soon as possible. For there's no shame in surrendering to a massively superior force and, again as I said in the post prior to this one, discretion is the greater part of valour.

 

I don't think this makes me a coward; for it often takes much greater courage to live and refuse to die. 

 

And neither does it make me a pacifist in the conventional sense: I don't have a moral objection to war and certainly don't subscribe to an ideal of peace, love, and the brotherhood of man. I am simply of the view that, in this case, non-violent resistance and civil disobedience makes better strategic sense than armed conflict and self-sacrifice.  

 

 

II. 

 

My thinking in this matter has not, then, been shaped by the likes of white worms such as Bertrand Russell and Mahatma Gandhi. 

 

Rather, it's been influenced by D. H. Lawrence, who, whilst writing in favour of combat in the old sense - "fierce, unrelenting, honorable contest" [2] - abhors the thought of war in the modern machine age; "a ghastly and blasphemous translation of ideas into engines, and men into cannon fodder" [3]. 

It's a beautiful thing, says Lawrence, for a man to die "in a flame of passionate conflict [...] for death is to him a passional consummation" [4] and his soul can rest in peace. But to be blown to smithereens while you are eating a kanapki is something obscene and monstrous. 

 

Thus, the Ukranians should refuse to die in such a manner and refuse to fight an abstract invisible enemy whom they will never meet face-to-face on the battlefield. If the Russians are that desperate to occupy territories in the East of Ukraine, then let them ...   

 

Ultimately, it might be the case that the only thing really worth fighting for, tooth and nail, is not your spouse, your children, your country, your fellow citizens, your money, your property, or even your life, but that bit of inward peace, that allows you to reflect with a certain insouciance ... [5] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Catherine Carswell (9 July 1916), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp.625-628. Lines quoted are on p. 626. 

      I have slightly modified what Lawrence writes, replacing the word 'Germans' with 'Russians'. In this crucial statement of Lawrence's views on what is and is not worth fighting for, he continues:

 

"If another man must fight for his house, the more's the pity. But it is his affair. To fight for possessions, goods, is what my soul will not do. Therefore it will not fight for the neighbour who fights for his own goods.

      All this war, this talk of nationality, to me is false. I feel no nationality, not fundamentally. I feel no passion for my own land, nor my own house, nor my own furniture, nor my own money. Therefore I won't pretend any. Neither will I take part in the scrimmage, to help my neighbour. It is his affair to go in or stay out, as he wishes." [626]

 

      See note 5 below for a reference to a later poem in which Lawrence returns to this theme. 

      And cf. with what Birkin says in chapter two of Women in Love when asked whether he would fight for his hat should someone wish to steal it off his head; "'it is open to me to decide, which is a greater loss to me, my hat, or my liberty as a free and indifferent man'". See the Cambridge edition (1987), ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, p. 29.         

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 158-59. 

 

[3] Ibid., p. 159.

 

[4] Ibid.

 

[5] I am paraphrasing here from Lawrence's verse 'What would you fight for?' in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 431.

D. H. Lawrence and the Myth of Maternal Impression

Der det er kvinne er det svane

 

 

I. 

 

Perhaps my favourite sequence of poems by D. H. Lawrence is inspired by the Leda myth and playfully imagines the queer idea of a modern woman giving birth to a baby that is part-human, part-bird:

Won't it be strange, when the nurse brings the new-born infant 

to the proud father, and shows its little, webbed greenish feet

made to smite the waters behind it? [1]

 

That certainly would be strange: one might even think it ludicrous and quite impossible. 

 

The poet insists, however, that, far-off, at the core of space and the quick of time, swims a wild swan upon the waters of chaos. A great white bird who will one day return amongst men with a hiss of wings and a sea-touch tip of a beak in order to frighten featherless women and stamp his black marsh-feet on their white and marshy flesh [2]:

 

And in the dark unscientific I feel the drum-winds of his wings

and the drip of his cold, webbed-feet, mud-black

brush over my face as he goes

to seek the women in the dark, our women, our weird women whom he treads

with dreams and thrusts that make them cry in their sleep. [3]  

 

 

II.

 

Normally one would regard this purely as poetic fantasy. But I strongly suspect that Lawrence intends us to take his vision seriously and that he passionately believes in an occult theory of maternal impression - i.e., the belief that a powerful psycho-physiological force exerted on a pregnant woman may influence the development of the unborn baby.  

 

As a medical theory of inheritance seeking to explain the existence of birth defects and congenital disorders, maternal impression has long been discredited and should not be confused with the empirically validated genetic phenomenon of maternal effect. 

 

To be absolutely clear: the mother of Joseph Merrick was not frightened by an elephant during her pregnancy! Or, if she was, this did not leave a monstrous imprint on the gestating foetus. And just because a mother-to-be is feeling blue, this will not result in her child being marked with depressive tendencies.   

 

The fact that Lawrence believed in this sort of thing is made clear in a letter written to Bertrand Russell, in December 1915, whilst engaged in reading Sir James Frazer whom, he reported, confirmed his already established belief in blood-consciousness as something not only independent of mental consciousness, but superior to it. 

 

Via sexual intercourse, says Lawrence, he can establish a blood contact with a woman: "There is a transmission, I don't know of what, between her blood and mine, in the act of connection." And then he adds the following paragraph which is crucial to our discussion here: 

 

"Similarly in the transmission from the blood of the mother to the embryo in the womb, there goes the whole blood consciousness. And when they say a mental image is sometimes transmitted from the mother to the embryo, this is not the mental image, but the blood-image. All living things, even plants, have a blood-being. If a lizard falls on the breast of a pregnant woman, then the blood-being of the lizard passes with a shock into the blood-being of the woman, and is transferred to the foetus, probably without intervention either of nerve or brain consciousness." 

 

"And this", concludes Lawrence, "is the origin of totem: and for this reason some tribes no doubt really were kangaroos: they contained the blood-knowledge of the kangaroo" [4].

 

As one commentator notes:

 

"It is difficult of course to take such ideas any more seriously than Lawrence’s solemn pronouncements upon the importance of the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion to the health of human blood-knowledge, or his earnest belief that tuberculosis is caused by love. Yet we must at least pay attention when Lawrence himself indicates that an idea or principle is of vital significance to him." [5]

 

That's a true and fair thing to say. It's also important: for by paying attention to what Lawrence says about maternal impression we find a new way of reading numerous scenes in his work; one wonders, for example, if Ursula might have given birth to a centaur if she hadn't miscarried ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Won't it be strange -?', Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 380.  

[2] I'm paraphrasing here from several of the poems in the Leda sequence found in Pansies, including 'Swan', 'Leda', and 'Give us gods'. See Poems, ibid., pp. 378-80. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Give us gods', Poems, ibid., p. 380. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Bertrand Russell (8 December 1915), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 469-71. I wish there was someway of knowing Russell's reaction when he first read this letter, or how he replied to it (if he ever did). 

[5] Chris Baldick, 'D. H. Lawrence as Noah: Redemptions of the Inhuman and «Non-Human»,' essay in L'inhumain, ed. André Topia, Carle Bonafous-Murat, and Marie-Christine Lemardeley (Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004), pp. 47-55. Click here to read online.  

 

For a sequel to this post, on swan maidens, click here.

 

 

Don't Go to the Baker's with D. H. Lawrence

What food is this for the darkly flying 

Fowls of the Afterwards!

In a recent post [click here], I compared the pleasure that Bertrand Russell took from eating an apricot with that experienced by D. H. Lawrence when eating an apple.

For the former, knowledge shapes and intensifies sensory experience of the world, enhancing our pleasure and, in this case, literally making a piece of fruit taste all the sweeter. But for the latter, there is a danger that decadent intellectualism barters away the physical delight of eating an actual piece of fruit in exchange for mental satisfaction.

Russell, we might say, has his apricot in his head; his secret horror for the soft flesh of the fruit itself compels him into historico-linguistic abstraction, transfusing the juicy body of the apricot with fascinating facts and false etymologies. It's what Lawrence terms cerebral conceit - the tyranny of the mind and the arrogance of the spirit triumphing over the instinctive-intuitive consciousness.

However, as James Walker reminds us in a post on Instagram [click here], Lawrence himself - hypocrite that he was - couldn't even enjoy a sandwich without lecturing poor Frieda on how the word bread has both a mob-meaning and an individual meaning:

"The mob-meaning is merely: stuff made with white flour into loaves, that you eat. But take the individual meaning [...] and the word bread will take you to the ends of time and space, and far-off down avenues of memory. [...] The word bread will take the individual off on his own journey, and its meaning will be his own meaning, based on his own genuine imaginative reactions. And when a word comes to us in its individual character, and starts in us the individual responses, it is a great pleasure to us." [237]

To be honest, I'm having a hard time seeing any great difference between what Lawrence does here with a slice of bread and what Russell does with his apricot. If the latter is guilty of cerebral conceit and intellectual posturing, then so too is the former. For rather than just butter his bread, Lawrence has to spread it with his knowledge of the wide variety of breads that exist in the world.

Worse, he can't resist insulting those readers who are "almost all mob-self, incapable of imaginative individual responses" [238]; people, he says, who usually make up the professional classes (including lawyers, academics, and clergymen).

Not that less educated members of the public get off any easier; for being feeble-minded they do not possess the wit to preserve their own individual feelings; which is why they are so easy to manipulate and always open to exploitation.     

Again, one struggles to find anything particularly imaginative or original in Lawrence's disdain for the mob and contempt for the general public; such elitism (and snobbery) was widespread amongst modernists writers and intellectuals at the time. Disappointing, though, when Lawrence joins in.

Ultimately, my advice would be simple: don't go to the baker's with D. H. Lawrence - you'll never get home on time and will probably be insulted. 

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Page numbers in the text refer to this edition.

On Apples and Apricots, Poets and Philosophers

I've come to give you fruit from out of my garden ...

I.

It's interesting to compare the pleasure that Bertrand Russell took from eating a piece of fruit with that experienced by D. H. Lawrence ...

In an essay first published in 1935, the former writes: 

"I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of Han Dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kaniska introduced them to India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word 'apricot' is derived from the same Latin source as the word 'precocious', because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter." [1]

It's pretty clear what Russell is attempting to demonstrate here; namely, how knowledge shapes and intensifies our sensory experience of the world, enhancing our pleasure and, as in this case, literally making life taste sweeter. 

But Lawrence, who, at one time, imagined that he and Russell might team up and put the world to rights, would doubtless reject this and accuse Russell of bartering away the physical delight of eating an actual piece of fruit in exchange for mental satisfaction.

Compare and contrast Russell's overripe intellectualism with Lawrence's more elemental joy in eating an apple expressed in one of his last poems:   

"They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.
All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.

Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.

If I say I taste these things in an apple, I am called mystic, which means a liar.
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.

But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses." [2]

II.

Now, to be fair, no one could accuse Russell of simply hogging down his fruit. But he too doesn't seem to eat his peaches and apricots with all his physical senses awake, even if his big brain is still mechanically whirring like clockwork. 

It's as if Russell has a secret horror for the soft flesh of the fruit and so seeks an escape route into historico-linguistic abstraction, transfusing the juicy body of the apricot with facts and false etymologies. It's what Lawrence terms cerebral conceit - the tyranny of the mind and the arrogance of the spirit triumphing over the instinctive-intuitive consciousness.

Having said that - and despite his obvious irritation at the charge - it could be that Lawrence is being just a wee bit mystical when he says he can taste in his apple the elements and seasons and wild chaos of creation, etc.

But of course, Lawrence is not the only poet to insist on this. One might recall, for example, Louise Bogan's verse 'The Crossed Apple', which was published in the same year as Lawence wrote his poem (1929) and which contains the following lines:

"Eat it, and you will taste more than the fruit: / The blossom, too, / The sun, the air, the darkness at the root, / The rain, the dew ..." [3]

I suppose we might conclude that whilst philosophers love to parade their learning, poets have to make a big deal about their sensitivity and insist that they can feel more than the rest of us.

(A friend, who happens to be a chemist, would say that what you can actually taste in an apple is a combination of sugars, acids, and tannins; that these things determine the flavour in terms of sweetness, sourness and bitterness. But then he might also insist that water is H2O and that's not quite the whole truth, is it?)

Notes

[1] Bertrand Russell, '"Useless" Knowledge', In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays, (George Allen and Unwin Ltd.,1935).

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Mystic', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

[3] Louise Bogan, 'The Crossed Apple', Dark Summer, (Scribner's, 1929).

Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting the poem by Louise Bogan.

Reflections on Wittgenstein's Rhino

Albrecht Dürer: The Rhinoceros (1515)

Even many non-philosophers know two stories concerning Wittgenstein's time at Cambridge: the first, an amusing confrontation with Karl Popper in October 1946 involving a poker, was the subject of a best-selling book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow; the second, an encounter between Bertrand Russell and his young Austrian student thirty-five years earlier, involving a discussion that centred on the question of whether or not there was a rhinoceros in the room ...

In brief, Russell wanted Wittgenstein to concede that we can have empirical knowledge of the world by admitting that there was, in fact, no rhino present. But the latter refused to do so - even after Russell amusingly began looking for the beast under the desk to no avail. Whilst Wittgenstein may have had a point, one can't help thinking he was, in this instance (as in others), being a bit of a dick.

Indeed, I'm not sure I understand the point he's trying to make or why he can't simply accept the factual non-presence of the rhino, given that in his early work he maintains that only such propositions can legitimately be asserted. But then, my understanding of Wittgenstein's thinking is limited (and probably inaccurate) due to its having been shaped primarily by drunken discussions in the Barley Mow pub many years ago.        

At this very early stage in their relationship, Russell worried that Wittgenstein was a crank, rather than a philosophical genius. I can imagine how he felt, for I experience the same concern whenever I correspond with a friend of mine, let's call him Mr X, who also likes to deny - or at least contest - the propositions of natural science and refuse to accept that there is a mind-independent reality about which we can speak with confidence.

For Mr X, the world consists neither of facts nor of things, but only of interpretations and all descriptions are essentially metaphorical. He thus posits a daemonic ontology that is mytho-poetic rather than material-scientific in character. Rather than agree there was no rhino in the room, Mr X would sooner insist on its invisibility, or point out that imaginary objects are also real even if physically not present as actual entities; thus his (psycho) logical belief also in supernatural beings.

For Mr X, as for Wittgenstein (though for different reasons), Russell's seemingly commonsensical proposition is questionable on the grounds that it doesn't meaningfully assert anything about the world - certainly nothing upon which we can ever be completely certain - and is, therefore, what Wittgenstein terms in the Tractatus a 'nonsensical pseudo-proposition' [4.1272] (i.e. one that refers us only to the logic of language by which we talk about the world and not to things in themselves). 

And so, perhaps Wittgenstein wasn't being a dick after all ... Perhaps, as J. F. Macdonald argues, it was Russell who profoundly misunderstood matters and who, by attempting to ridicule the younger man, was the one acting like a dick. Wittgenstein, says MacDonald, wasn't rejecting empirical propositions; rather, he was rejecting propositions that posed as such, but were not, and discreetly "making a point about what can be meaningfully said, not about what we don't know".

And perhaps I too should learn to listen more carefully to what it is Mr X is saying and not be so quick to dismiss it as absurd, or him as foolish ... For I fear this reveals merely my own philosophical arrogance and limitations. 


Notes

Details of the conversation between Russell and Wittgenstein on the rhinoceros can be found in Russell's letters from the period to Lady Ottoline Morell (reprinted in Ray Monk's biography, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, (Vintage, 1990), pp. 38-40), and in Russell's article in Mind Vol. 60, issue 239 (July 1951), pp. 297-98, which served as an obituary notice for Wittgenstein who died in April of that year.

Click here to read the above article online, noting how Russell misremembers the conversation concerning a hippo, not a rhino.

The essay by J. F. MacDonald from which I quote, 'Russell, Wittgenstein and the problem of the rhinoceros', is in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 31 (4), (1993), pp. 409-24, but can also be found in full online at the Rhino Resource Center (the world's largest rhino information website): click here.   

The book by Edmonds and Eidinow that I mention at the beginning of the post - Wittgenstein's Poker: the story of a 10-minute argument between two great philosophers - was published by Faber in 2001.

Finally, readers interested in directly engaging with the early Wittgenstein should either get hold of a copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), or click here to read the original 1922 edition as an ebook trans. C. K. Ogden, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

This post is for Mr X and Andy G.

Cut the Crap: In Praise of Occam's Razor

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem

Occam's razor is a convenient problem-solving principle attributed to a 14th-century English monk, scholastic philosopher and theologian, William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347), which states that among competing theories, the simplest (i.e., the one with fewest underlying assumptions) is, more often that not, likely to be correct and that complexity should not be valued for its own sake or unnecessarily fetishised.

Obviously, all events are open to interpretation and for any accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there will be a large number of alternative (often ad hoc) hypotheses. Thus we need something that helps us cut the crap and cut to the chase and Occam's razor does the job - although it should be noted that it functions more as a heuristic guide, rather than an irrefutable method for determining what's right.

It does, however, encourage and enable us to choose between competing truth-claims by opening them up to falsification and for that I'm grateful; just as I'm also grateful that it serves as a weapon in the fight against occultists, conspiracy theorists, and crackpots of every description for whom nothing is ever easy or as it appears and there's always a darker, deeper, more diabolical level of meaning to be uncovered. 

When hearing the sound of hooves on cobblestone outside your window, it's reasonable to assume it's someone on horseback and not that there's a unicorn passing by, or that a member of a sinister cult or secret government agency must have released a zebra from the local zoo in order to spread panic and confusion amongst members of the general public.

The law of parsimony helps us understand and appreciate this by taming the wildness of our imagination and curbing our enthusiasm for the elaborate and fanciful. As Bertrand Russell put it in his own reworking of Occam's razor: "Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities."         

Having said that, I realise that Occam's razor is itself a metaphysical assumption; that there's little empirical evidence that the world is actually straightforward and transparent, or that simple accounts are more inherently true than weirdly complex ones. 

I also concede that Occam's razor is an inherently conservative device that tends to reinforce the general consensus of opinion and cut out opportunities to speculate, fantasise, and poetically re-imagine events. Artists, and those who like to daydream and listen to the (irrational) murmurs of their unconscious, as well as pataphysicists for whom knowledge is not only complex, but ambiguous, paradoxical and radically inconsistent, will naturally have an instinctive dislike for it.    

But, nevertheless, I think the scientific method and the axioms upon which it's based - there's an objective reality that is subject to natural laws which we can understand - is something worth defending, particularly in this present time of resurgent religiosity. And Occam's razor generally lends support to these axioms (although, of course, it doesn't prove them).

Afternote

An article by Chris Chatham that shows the limitations (or bluntness) of Occam's razor - particularly within a scientific context - has been brought to my attention by Simon Solomon: click here. It seems that Whitehead offers us the best perspective on this topic: "The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.'" 

Stupid Is As Stupid Does (Notes on the Dunning-Kruger Effect)

I noticed long ago that one of the classic hallmarks or tell-tale signs of stupidity is the failure of a subject to recognise or own up to their own intellectual limitations and to arrogantly believe that they are in fact well-informed and of above average intelligence.  

But what I didn't know, until recently, is that this mix of cognitive misconception and conceit has been closely studied by psychologists and described in detail: the Dunning-Kruger effect refers precisely to the phenomenon wherein idiots cannot accurately evaluate their own capacities or knowledge and suffer from illusions of superiority due to their inability to see what is patently obvious to everyone else; i.e., that they're dimwits.   

Interestingly, the corollary to the D-K effect indicates that gifted people of high ability tend to underestimate or downplay their own competence and mistakenly presume that others can do what they do just as well and just as easily. In other words, intelligent people are often self-effacing and overly generous in their expectations.   

Of course, the fact that fools are often smug and superior in their foolishness had been observed long before Dunning and Kruger formulated their theory in 1999. Poets, philosophers, playwrights and even naturalists such as Darwin have commented on the fact that ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.  

But it's Bertrand Russell's remark that has particular resonance today for secularism in the face of religious fundamentalism: "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."

See: Kruger, Justin and Dunning, David; 'Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments', in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 77, No. 6, (Dec 1999), pp. 1121-1134. Click here to read.

See also Bertrand Russell; 'The Triumph of Stupidity', in the second volume of Mortals and Others: American Essays, 1931-1935 (Routledge, 1998), where he argues that the essential cause of trouble in the modern world is that "the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Click here to read. 

This post was suggested by Dr Andy Greenfield to whom I am grateful.

Moloch

18thC German depiction of Moloch

During a memorial Mass for the murdered French priest, 85-year-old Father Jacques Hamel, the Archbishop of Paris accused the young men responsible of crying Allahu Akbar in order to disguise the fact that they actually worship at the altar of Moloch - the ancient pagan deity who gloried in human sacrifice.

Essentially an Old Testament take on the official line that acts of Islamic terrorism have nothing to do with Islam, Cardinal Vingt-Trois told the faithful not to be fooled by these self-proclaimed jihadists, whilst warning the latter that those who wish to serve and promulgate a god of death - one who demands bloodshed and promises paradise to those who slay the innocent - cannot expect all of humanity to surrender to their madness. In the face of evil, he concluded, Christians must do what they've always done; spread the Gospel of Jesus and find their strength, their courage, and their salvation in Almighty God, the God of Love.

   

Of course, this is as mendacious as everything else that comes out of the mouth of a religiously motivated speaker. For acts of Islamic terrorism have everything to do with Islam and, more widely, with Abrahamic monotheism in general; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are apocalyptic spiritual traditions with a common origin and they share many beliefs, traditions, and moral teachings.

And so, just as there is very little difference between Yahweh and Allah - both are judgemental and jealous gods who demand submission and sacrifice from their followers - there is genuine theological kinship and continuity between the God of Love worshipped by the Archbishop of Paris and the Canaanite idol known as Moloch.

Indeed, reviving a medieval rabbinical tradition, both Georg Friedrich Daumer and Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany published influential works in 1841 arguing that Moloch and Yahweh were actually one and the same figure and that the cult of the latter developed out of that of the former. 

It's probably best, therefore, that Cardinal Vingt-Trois doesn't say anything else along this line in future; 'cos he's on a very slippery slope. Modern followers of the major religions are essentially no different from ancient pagans with their savage superstitions. Muslims and Christians, for example, are often just as willing to martyr themselves for their gods (and to kill others) without ever asking - or even caring - whether their gods are worthy of such fanatic devotion.

Bertrand Russell - not a philosopher I would normally turn to for support - sums this up nicely in the following paragraph:

"Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods ... The religion of Moloch - as such creeds may be generically called - is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain."

- Bertrand Russell, 'A Free Man's Worship' (1903)

The Omphalos Hypothesis

The Omphalos hypothesis - named after the title of a mid-19th century work written by Philip Henry Gosse which proposed, in keeping with a biblical time scale of events, that God created the earth at some point within the last 10,000 years - is one that some creationists in our own time still bizarrely cling to.

Indeed, not only have they accepted Gosse's argument that natural indicators of a significantly more ancient world history, such as fossils, were faked by God, but they have also extended the argument to cover cosmic phenomenon - such as light originating from far-off stars and galaxies - that suggest the universe to be many millions of years old.

Despite the desperately insane aspect to Gosse's notion - which, as Stephen Jay Gould points out, is a classic example of an utterly untestable theory - I have to say I like the idea that the world is fundamentally false and based on appearance; that God, the father of all Truth, is also a great deceiver.

 

So too do I like Bertrand Russell's sceptical attempt to push the Omphalos hypothesis to its logical extreme, by proposing a five-minute hypothesis which argues that the universe could, in fact, have  just come into existence, with all human memory, all signs of history and all ancestral evidence included.

Oh those young earthers! In attempting to untie the geological knot, they have entangled themselves in all kinds of foolishness. It's cruel to mock them, but almost impossible not to: Forgive them Father, for they know not what they say ...