Blog

I don’t mind atheists – we all have a right to moral and intellectual aberrations. Such as eschewing revealed religion for a silly superstition based on neither revelation nor scientific evidence.

What’s less acceptable is people spouting hostile, militant nonsense at the top of their lungs, especially if they try to pass harangues for a serious argument.

This brings me to Philip Collins’s article Ignore the Slippery Critics of Assisted Dying. Obviously to Collins and other haters of religion, anyone unwilling to knock out every cornerstone of our civilisation only deserves pejorative designations, of which ‘slippery’ is one. Hence the title is par for the course.

As is the half-witted ‘philosophy’ Collins uses to justify his support for the cull of the crumblies. “Life is the capacity to realise certain capacities,” he writes, and it’s good to see that his style is in harmony with his crepuscular thinking.

Any sentence that starts with the words ‘life is…’ is suspect. Whatever follows is almost guaranteed to be gibberish. For example, one could say that life is a cucumber: today’s it’s in your hands, tomorrow up your rectum. Or else life is a hotel: we arrive, stay for a while and then check out.

However, these and a million other silly possibilities one could think of would still be preferable to what passes for the meat of Collins’s argument:

When a person no longer has the capacity to mobilise his capacities in realising the full range of certain capacities he would otherwise have the capacity of realising, doctors should kill him with his consent.

The rest is Collins’s attempt to couch his visceral hatred of religion in quasi-intellectual terms, and he lets his febrile emotions overrun his already modest intellectual ‘capacities’.

Thus he takes issue with Archbishop Welby’s objections to assisted suicide being merely “pastoral”, as opposed to “religious”. In the next sentence the confused reader realises that by pastoral Collins means secular, but then one doesn’t expect terminological precision from the likes of him.

One is almost led to believe that, had His Grace expressed his objections in more theological terms, Collins would jump up and salute. Yet considering that he lists God among “some implausible things”, it’s rather unlikely that a theological argument would sway Collins’s ideological hatred of the founding tenets of our civilisation.

One also gets the impression that Collins sees the line of demarcation between philosophy and theology as being sharper than it actually is. The bill to legalise assisted dying, he says, “should attract the support of philosophers just as it is drawing the opposition of theologians.”

Knowing something about the subject on which one pontificates is clearly no longer a professional requirement at The Times. If it were, his editors would have pointed out to Collins that an atheist philosopher is very close to being an oxymoron.

A real philosopher, whatever his immediate interests, can’t avoid asking himself ontological questions about the nature and origin of being, as distinct from existence. Such philosophical questions can only have two types of answers: theological or unsound.

For the theologian the existence of God is the beginning of the argument; for the philosopher, the end. But sooner or later they’ll always converge, at least partly.

The theologian will maintain that, outside of God, questions of being can be neither answered nor indeed asked. The philosopher will try to do both and will only agree with the theologian after many a futile attempt. But agree he will, out of professional integrity if nothing else.

A philosopher, even if he himself doesn’t espouse the Judaeo-Christian understanding of life and the attendant ethics, will know that in the West the only alternative to Judaeo-Christian morality isn’t some other morality. It’s none.

That’s why a philosopher will begrudgingly agree with the theologian that, when society sees a man as the sole sovereign of his life, such a society will start by endorsing suicide and will end up countenancing murder.

The eternal barrier to murder is the same as to suicide: the realisation that human life is sacred. Remove the barrier, and assisted suicide will become first advisable, then legal and then compulsory. The already tenuous difference between assisted suicide and murder will disappear.

Collins mocks “some mysteriously redemptive purpose for which suffering is a surrogate”. This purpose is only mysterious to ignoramuses like him. Even educated atheists know that redemptive suffering was the starting point of our civilisation – and treat it with the same reverential respect they feel for the civilisation.

Collins feels no such respect, partly because he knows little about our civilisation and its heritage, including rhetoric. Hence instead of a coherent argument he treats us to a soppy story about his father, whose suffering at the end of his life could have been prevented by a lethal injection.

“Unlike religion,” clamours Collins, pressing his atheist credentials, “[assisted suicide] will actually ease suffering.” Quite. So will murder. And the similarity between the two dwarfs the trivial differences.

 

“Only an idle fool would convict Jane Austen of bad grammar”, runs the Times headline of yet another panegyric to illiteracy produced by Oliver Kamm.

By contrast, a clever, busy chap like Ollie has no time for fine distinctions among ‘convict of’ and ‘accuse of’ or ‘charge with’, either of which would have fit his sentence better.

What Ollie has plenty of time for is a systematic campaign based on a linguistic philosophy he summarises thus: “[Grammar] has many rules and the way to find out what they are is to examine how native speakers use their own language.”

Exactly which native speakers are we talking about, Ollie? Tattooed Millwall fans? Smug Times columnists? The average of the two? Since, on this evidence, there’s little intellectual difference, the grammatical extremes must also be converging.

Real grammar, Ollie, is not only descriptive but also normative. Anyone who asserts that whatever native speakers say is correct because they say it is effectively declaring all norms to be invalid.

I’ve heard this view expressed before, though never by someone with pretensions to expertise. “Language,” they’d say, “is just a means of communication.” To which my usual retort is that linguistic norms are precisely what makes communication precise or indeed possible.

If native speakers say ‘masterful’ instead of ‘masterly’, or ‘appraise’ instead of ‘apprise’, no communication occurs because what the listener understands is different from what the speaker thinks he’s saying.

Ollie is scathing about those who criticise William Hague “for the supposed error of discussing whether he or Tony Blair held ‘the best job’. The sticklers insist that the comparative must be ‘the better job’. What hogwash.”

The sticklers are right and Ollie is illiterate, or at least ignorant of the difference between a comparative and a superlative. In the cited sentence, ‘the better job’ would mean the better of the two jobs, one held by Mr Hague and the other by Mr Blair. ‘The best job’ would mean one better than all other jobs. Either option is possible, so how is the listener to know which one is meant?

Quoting great writers’, in this case Jane Austen’s, solecisms as support for Ollie’s cherished grammatical populism is disingenuous. Jane Austen et al create their own language universes in which they are the deities establishing all the rules.

Sometimes they use bad grammar on purpose, to achieve a stylistic effect. Sometimes they do so out of carelessness, caused, say, by that second sherry before dinner, time pressure or the late hour of the day. Either way, simple mortals haven’t earned the right to the same latitude that great writers enjoy and silly mortals demand.

Encouraging such latitude is guaranteed to produce generations of tongue-tied, monosyllabic functional mutes – exactly the type churned out by our oxymoronic comprehensive education.

But hold on, Ollie takes exception to that assessment. He extols “the generally high standard of English language teaching in schools”. A less permissive grammarian would be tempted to say ‘…of English taught in schools’, which would make the sentence more mellifluous of sound if no less wrong of thought.

Here we leave the domain of grammar to enter that of ethics. Ollie, I’m like, where was you brung up, mate? Wasn’t you teached not to lie? Or is you deaf as well as dumb? Djahmean? Wha’ever.

A short walk through the streets of any British city, and not necessarily its bad part, will disabuse anyone of the notion that in our schools English is taught well, or indeed at all. One would get the impression that we’ve reverted to the primordial era, well before man received the gift of coherent speech.

Never mind the streets: listen to our newscasters who, if unprompted and unscripted, have trouble talking in correct sentences. What regularly comes out of their mouths is “people who were sat at the table”, an ugly usage of recent provenance, doubtless inspired by Ollie-style laissez-parler.

I’m sure he’ll spring to the defence of that usage with the same energy he showed a few months ago when supporting the reply “I’m good” to the question “How are you?”.

To display the power of his convictions, he’d now probably answer this question with that liberally egalitarian Americanism. Glad to hear you’re good, Ollie. But you’re clearly not well.

The waves of refugees threatening to engulf Britain amount to a crisis. Like all crises, this one begets debates, debates beget rhetoric and rhetoric begets oversimplification.

As any veteran of verbal jousts will tell you, a debate is no place for rational, nuanced arguments. It’s a place for fiery slogans and endlessly repeated mantras.

Both sides to the present debate give ample proof of this observation. One side, reduced to the absurd by Yvette Cooper, issues a blank invitation in the shape of the poster ‘Refugees welcome’. The other side screams NIMBY, citing the fiscal and demographic ramifications of accepting thousands of migrants.

The first position is as meaningless as befits Yvette Cooper. For, if left unqualified, ‘Refugees welcome’ may be tantamount to national suicide.

How many and what kind of refugees are welcome? In a pre-election interview Ed Miliband put no limit on either, which partly explains why Yvette now sits on the back benches. Does she share Ed’s view?

Since most refugees in question are Muslim, are we prepared to increase our Islamic population even further – in the knowledge that most Muslims are hostile to our civilisation and all are alien to it?

Our population is already five per cent Muslim, and some sources cite numbers closer to 10 per cent. The aforementioned waves of migrants approach 400,000, and before long they’ll reach the typhoon power of millions. Does Yvette feel we should welcome, say, a million or so?

If she does, she remains loyal to the political memory of her guru Blair. Now safe in his coupon-clipping retirement, Tony cynically admits that he imported millions of Muslims on purpose, to smash the traditional voting base of the Tories.

In other words, he was prepared to destroy Britain, debauch her whole history and rip the traditional social and cultural fabric to tatters to improve Labour’s electoral chances. If achieving that worthy goal meant turning a great, formerly Christian country into a giant kasbah, then so be it.

It’s good to see that Yvette is willing to continue her mentor’s fine tradition of demographic sabotage. Those of us who detest Blair and reject his legacy ought to transfer some of the rancour to his politically surviving acolytes.

But does that mean we should amend Yvette’s slogan to ‘No refugees are welcome’? Our answer to this question should be leavened with mercy and some sense of guilt.

There’s no doubt that many of the refugees aren’t really refugees but economic migrants. There’s even little doubt that some of them are ISIS infiltrators. But equally clear is that many of them were made homeless, stateless and hopeless by – well, us.

This is another part of Blair’s subversive legacy that ought to make us withhold snap decisions. Because, but for the criminal stupidity of Anglo-American ‘nation building’ in the Middle East, we’d have a trickle of Muslim immigrants, not a tidal wave.

It was American and British bombs followed by ‘boots on the ground’ that turned the region into a murderous chaos unfit for human habitation. Since we made that blood-filled bed, to what moral extent can we refuse to lie in it?

The dictators that our democracy-obsessed nation-builders deposed kept some sort of lid on the bubbling Islamic passions. The passions have now splashed out, scorching the region and sending a human spray over to Europe.

Hence the slogan ‘No refugees welcome’ is as bad as its opposite. We can’t just say ‘let them drown in the Mediterranean or starve to death, see if we care’.

This kind of obtuse, merciless resolve would in the long run compromise Britishness more than a generous but limited welcome would, for Christian mercy has always softened the British proclivity for rational, actuarial calculations.

Such is the principle, and it’s so easy to establish that one is amazed so few parties to the debate have managed to do so. The logistics are much harder.

To invite people to our home we must have a home left to invite them to. So how generous and how limited a welcome should we extend? How do we separate the refugee wheat from the economic (or terrorist) chaff? Let’s be absolutely clear about this: without such vetting we’re back to Yvetting, an accelerated national suicide.

The answer is, I don’t know. However, it’s obvious that some order and patience must be brought into the proceedings. There has to be one centre for all refugees to wait their turn, and no traditional DP camp would be big enough.

My earlier suggestion of using a Greek island for this purpose still holds, and this project must be financed either wholly or at least greatly by the rich Muslim states. It’s clearly within the capacity of the EU to exert pressure both on them and on the Greek government – in fact extortion is about the only thing the EU is good at.

Then each case must be considered individually, which will take months if not years. In the end we’ll accept a few thousand people in genuine need – and reject many more. And, to make sure that no further waves reach our shores, we must do all we can to repair the damage we caused to the region.

This is the price of our geopolitical folly, and we have to pay it out of decency. But we mustn’t kill ourselves out of decency – or to please wicked dunces like Yvette Cooper.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk and devout Christian, refused to issue licences for homosexual marriages because they “conflict with God’s definition of marriage”.

There are only two objections to her statement possible even in theory. One: there is no such conflict. Two: either way, God’s definitions don’t matter.

The first objection would be clearly nonsensical: both Testaments treat homosexuality as an abomination, which a priori invalidates homomarriage. This leaves only one objection on the table, one that Kentucky authorities indeed invoked.

The objection was so strong that it had to be delivered in the form of a custodial sentence – nothing less would have driven the point home with sufficient force. Since the US Supreme Court had ruled on 26 June that homomarriage is a constitutional right, Mrs Davis was sent to prison.

She took her punishment meekly but with dignity, as Christians have been doing for 2,000 years. “It is not a light issue for me,” she said. “It is a heaven or hell decision.”

That draconian measure looks particularly brutal against the backdrop of our time, when burglars are routinely spared jail. Clearly, their crimes are innocuous compared to the felony committed by Mrs Davis.

So they are, for burglars only hurt individuals. Mrs Davis, however, attacked the very foundation on which every modern state rests, emphatically including the USA.

What to her is a matter of heaven or hell is to the state a matter of life or death, and it’ll defend itself with every means at its disposal.

The modern state, pioneered by America, came into being when a jolt of anti-Christian energy was injected into Western civilisation. All resulting states may have evolved slightly different positive desiderata, but they all converge at the negative end: the urgent need to wipe out every vestige of Christendom.

Leave any of them intact, and no modern state, whatever its manifest politics, would be able to function. The Founders and the Framers understood this with prescient clarity, which is why the very first constitutional amendment, ostensibly providing for freedom of religious worship, in fact “erected a wall between religion and state”, to cite Thomas Jefferson’s gloating boast.

With a few minor exceptions, all those distinguished gentlemen were non-Christians, or rather anti-Christians – regardless of whether they called themselves atheists, agnostics or deists.

Yes, they were prepared to let their citizens worship God in private. But under no circumstances would they allow Christian tenets to exert one iota of influence on public affairs.

In due course the modern state bifurcated into its philistine and nihilist variants (championed in their purest forms by the USA and the USSR), but, in terms of their treatment of Christians, they differ only in methods, not principle.

Some, like the Bolsheviks, will massacre priests and their parishes en masse; some, like the Founding Fathers, will allow Christian worship provided it doesn’t lead believers to defying the state.

Christians may be allowed to live – as long as Christianity stays dead as a moral, social and especially political force. On this condition no modern state run by the motley crew of our today’s Baracks, Daves and Françoises will ever compromise.

However, even as Christians are imprisoned for refusing to sacrifice their faith at the idolatrous altar of state worship, many still regard America as a Christian country. This misapprehension is widespread not only in the country itself but also among the outlanders.

They base their judgement mainly on the frequency with which the plastic figurines called American politicians scream “God bless America!”, the Pledge of Allegiance to ‘one nation under God’, the slogan ‘In God we Trust’ appearing on dollar bills (which medium leaves little doubt of the deity in the message) and the statistics of church attendance. Of these only the last one merits any consideration, the others being simply risible.

Gallup polls suggest that 37 per cent of Americans are church-goers. Whether we accept this finding or rely instead on the self-reporting online surveys indicating a lower figure of 22 per cent, the number is still impressive.

My point is that, even if church attendance were 100 per cent, it wouldn’t have the slightest effect on government policy. The state would remain aggressively atheist even if its every citizen were devoutly Christian.

However, even those statistics are meaningless unless we understand clearly what kind of people go to what kind of churches.

About 23 per cent of the US population describe themselves as evangelical Christians, and one suspects that most of them are the happy-clappy folk who express their piety by speaking in tongues, jumping over pews, and dancing shamanistic jigs in the aisles.

I find it hard to see them as bona fide Christians, though my priest friends will probably say such cynicism will make me burn in hell.

Mrs Davis’s religion is described as apostolic, which could mean Catholic, Anglican (or Episcopalian, which is in communion with Anglican) or Orthodox. Whatever it is, the state’s hostility to specifically apostolic Christianity has from the time of the Founders been even stronger than to any other confession.

Hence the brutal treatment of Mrs Davis. She hasn’t quite been thrown to the lions or crucified upside down, but prison is a good modern equivalent, conveying the same message: the state, not Christ, is God. 

 

 

 

    

 

     

 

 

 

 

‘Judge a man by the company he keeps’. My friend Vlad ought to have familiarised himself with this Euripidean maxim before attending yesterday’s festivities in China.

Communist China used the anniversary of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War to parade its muscle. Over 12,000 soldiers marched through Tiananmen Square, where the same army massacred a peaceful demonstration in 1989.

According to China’s sources, 80 per cent of the military technology on show was brand-new, including missile systems operating from space against groups of aircraft carriers. Reading about it, I heaved a sigh of relief.

Mercifully Britain is safe from this cosmic threat for we have no such groups. After all, a group made up of our solitary carrier would sound shamefully tautological. How Americans feel about this technological breakthrough may be a different matter altogether.

Anyway, it was appropriate that China’s armed forces celebrate in style their triumph of 70 years ago. Defeating imperial Japan is something Chinese communists can take pr…

Ouch! An ice-cold shower has poured down to douse my enthusiasm. For Chinese communists, whose descendants rule the country now, were in effect Japan’s allies, not her conquerors.

It was Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomingtang that fought a guerrilla war against Japan. Mao’s communists were fighting a guerrilla war against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomingtang, thus helping Japan no end.

It wasn’t China – and certainly not communist China – that defeated Japan, but the combined might of the USA, Britain and, in the last week, the Soviet Union. Therefore for China to hail that victory as her own is downright mendacious.

That’s why Vlad was the only major foreign leader to accept Xi Jinping’s invitation to attend the parade. The Soviet Union doesn’t exist any longer, and the other real victors gave the extravaganza a wide berth.

That, however, didn’t make the government stands empty. Posing next to the grinning Vlad and inscrutable Xi were the leaders of those other countries that made such a decisive contribution to the glorious victory: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Burma, the Congo, Venezuela, Pakistan, Mongolia, Vietnam and Laos.

That should tell Vlad exactly where Russia falls in the pecking order of nations. And it should tip the West to the strategy Vlad is pursuing.

Emulating his role model Stalin, who in 1939 struck an alliance with the other evil power of Europe, Vlad is now hoping to get into bed with the other evil power of Asia.

Having found the hard way that the West, for all its obvious weakness, is unlikely to succumb to Russia’s nuclear blackmail, Putin is hoping to recruit China to his cause.

Hence his recent pronouncements on the essentially Eastern nature of the Russian people and Russia’s historic mission to unite Eurasia under her banners.

Vlad’s retired colleague Gorbachev used to bang on the same theme, when he defied geography by talking about ‘our common European home from the Atlantic to Vladivostok’. But at least Gorby speaking ad orbi didn’t threaten to enforce such a geographic solecism by nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, our social networks are singing hosannas to Putin. One picture catching my eye was of Cameron and Putin together, with the caption asking rhetorically which one of them “cares about his people”.

My answer would be ‘neither’, but the implication was that one of them does, and it isn’t Dave. I have to agree: Putin does care about his people. Except that he defines that group more narrowly than his Western champions think.

Putin’s people are the ruling junta of the KGB/FSB fused with the criminal underworld. That’s why the top one per cent of Russia’s population own 71 per cent of the country’s wealth, as opposed to an average of 32 per cent in Europe.

The ruling elite operates according to the unwritten laws of mafia gangs, with the godfather aware that losing face will be quickly followed by losing his life. And Putin is in danger of losing face over his aggression against the Ukraine.

His idea was to launch a staggered offensive, testing the West’s reaction every step of the way. In Step 1 the West reacted to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 with roughly the same insouciance as it displayed towards Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938.

Thus emboldened, Vlad’s ragtag army of psychotic criminals and regular Russian troops without insignia moved into the eastern Ukraine. Had the West again shrugged its indifference, all of the Ukraine would have been occupied, probably followed by the Baltics.

However, though the West didn’t respond with appropriate resolve, it did respond –  by introducing sanctions and pledging its support for the Ukraine and the three Baltic Nato members.

Vlad stopped and looked around. What he saw was many a KGB caporegime looking at him askance to check if il padrino’s face was still where it should be.

Vlad knew he wouldn’t survive a humiliation. Not only would he lose power but he may not even be allowed to enjoy his ill-gotten billions in quiet retirement, Gorby-style.

This explains the crescendo in his overtures to China, which he hopes will end in the rousing finale of a military alliance. Vlad is reluctant t to take on the West by himself – the military odds don’t look promising even despite the West’s demob-happy lassitude.

I doubt that alliance will ever materialise: China’s interests probably lie elsewhere. Even so, there’s every sign that Putin is gearing up for war. In the good tradition of Soviet leaders, he cares about his people so much that he’s prepared to lose millions of them in pursuit of his own criminal ambitions.

 

   

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Pope Benedict XVI once wrote that the Catholic Church is about to be wiped out – only then to start from the beginning and gradually rise again.

Though His Holiness hasn’t uttered a public word about his Vatican successor, one is in little doubt that he sees him as having more to do with the first part of this prophecy than the second – a view Pope Francis seems eager to justify.

Even his admirers will admit that His Holiness is a man of the Left, a movement whose founding raison d’être was, and its current one remains, waging war on every religious, cultural, social and political vestige of Christendom.

Hence a ‘left-wing Christian’ is to me an oxymoron, a ‘left-wing priest’ even more so, and a ‘left-wing Pope’ more still. That, however, is an inner contradiction for every man to resolve privately.

A pontiff’s personal politics ought to have no more effect on his public mission than his taste in food. He’s there to be the Vicar of Christ, not a political agitator.

The trouble starts when a Pope uses St Peter’s throne to promote a secular political agenda, especially one that’s at odds with the very Christian message he’s supposed to preach. This, I’m afraid, is exactly what Pope Francis has done ever since he first occupied the aforementioned throne.

His actions this summer did nothing to dispel this impression. First, the Pope combined political folly with bad Christianity by recognising a nonexistent ‘State of Palestine’.

By doing so he showed how deep the Church has sunk since 1095, when Pope Urban II blessed the First Crusade. Pope Urban understood something Pope Francis doesn’t: Islam is a mortal enemy not only of Jews but also of Christians.

But even if we narrow our perspective to today and tomorrow, what kind of state will ‘Palestine’ be if it gains statehood? Since the past and present are the most reliable indicators of the future, there’s only one possible answer to that question.

It’ll be a jihadist state so anti-Semitic and anti-Christian that it’ll be committed to the genocide of both Jews and Christians. This state will also be an implacable enemy of the West, and it’ll joyously act as a global terrorist base. As a short-term objective, it’ll do all it can to act on its current promise to ‘drive Israel into the sea’, presumably along with all its inhabitants.

Does His Holiness believe that this kind of state deserves pre-natal recognition? Evidently yes, because his next act this summer was to approve of the Iran nuclear deal.

Unlike the ‘State of Palestine’, the state of Iran already exists, and it already is what ‘Palestine’ will be: virulently anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-Western.

Empowering this state to develop nuclear weapons in 10-15 years may well lead not only to a regional holocaust but indeed to a global one, with mushroom clouds popping up all over the world like toadstools after an autumn rain.

What part of this scenario does the Pope like? None, would be my hope. It’s more likely that he simply doesn’t understand the full implications of this agreement. Then why approve it?

As in his recognition of the ‘State of Palestine’, His Holiness didn’t act in a holy or even rational way. He allowed his visceral political views to add poison to his Eucharistic water, thus betraying the mission to which he supposedly dedicated his life.

Not content to encourage diabolical political regimes without, Pope Francis is busily working to compromise the Church from within as well.

The Church, alone among the world’s secular and religious bodies, has always adopted an intransigent, which is to say Judaeo-Christian, position on sexual morality. That’s another thing Pope Francis has set out to destroy by advocating a more ‘liberal’ stance on homosexuality, abortion and divorce.

He tried to push his ‘reforms’ through last October’s Synod Part 1, but was defeated by the real Catholics among the bishops. Now he has announced that he’ll allow priests to forgive women who’ve had abortions.

As my friend the Rev. Peter Mullen has explained so thoroughly, this is doctrinal nonsense. Courtesy of Jesus himself, speaking through the evangelists, priests have always had the capacity to absolve any sins, including this one.

Surely the Pope is familiar with John 20:23 and Mark 3:29, not to mention the subsequent two millennia of Christian tradition? Of course he is. His generous permission for priests to do what they’ve been doing for 2,000 years anyway has nothing to do with dogma or doctrine.

It’s both an emotional cry of a leftie soul and a calculated attempt to soften up Part 2 of the Synod when it reconvenes next month. I do hope that the real Catholic bishops will again stand fast. We don’t want the first part of Pope Benedict’s prophecy to come true too fast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The carbon dating of the Koran fragments found in a Birmingham library shows that they almost definitely predate Mohammed. And there I was, thinking that Birmingham’s sole contribution to civilisation is Balti cuisine.

Turns out it may well be the birthplace of Islam, invalidating the prior claims of Mecca and Medina. As indirect proof, Birmingham certainly has a greater Muslim population than those two put together, although, unlike them, it also has a smattering of infidels.

Actually, I must admit I had my suspicions before. I used to go to Birmingham quite often, on business (nobody goes there for pleasure), and my impression was that the city was predominantly Muslim. There must be some hidden magnetic force, I thought, attracting Muslims to that part of the Midlands, and it can’t be just the free-spending social.

The impression that Birmingham was mostly Muslim was purely that, an impression, for demographic surveys show that only a quarter of the city’s population espouse Islam. Still, you can understand my error: Muslims somehow stand out in Britain, and seeing so many in one place may easily lead one to infer that they predominate.

Also, now that we know that Islam started in Birmingham and not, as was previously thought, in the Arabian peninsula… oops, sorry. My wife has just looked over my shoulder and pointed out that Birmingham was only founded in 1871, which makes it an unlikely birthplace of Islam, seeing that it has been around for 1,400 years.

Fine, I’m man enough to admit I’ve made yet another error. If it’s an error, that is. Allah, after all, is just the Arabic for God – the same deity that’s accepted as such in both parts of the Bible. I may find Allah an odd name for God, but it’s infinitely preferable to its Russian equivalent, which is Bog. Don’t know about you, but I’d rather pray to God, or even at a pinch to Allah, than to Bog.

But God, whatever you call Him, is outside time. Hence, looking at it from His perspective, it’s possible that a city we think only appeared in the late Victorian era was already up and running circa 568 AD, when the Birmingham Koran was produced.

Hold on, I’ve just spotted a theological flaw in this argument. Yes, God is outside time – but we aren’t. Since we’re strictly temporal, at least in this life, it’s utterly presumptuous even to suggest that we can look at the world through the eyes of Allah, otherwise known as God.

Hence both Birmingham and its Koran exist on a human timescale and can’t possibly overlap. One must grudgingly admit that the distinctly Muslim character of the city must come from a different source – quite possibly from the free-spending social.

Yet the dating of the Birmingham Koran, if it’s reliable, tears a hole in the patchwork quilt of a religion otherwise known as Islam. Its founding tenet is that Allah spoke directly to Mohammed, who then initiated the game of Arab whispers by passing the message on to Abu Bakr, one of his fathers-in-law (since Mohammed had several wives, he must have had several sets of in-laws, and his ability to cope with that arrangement must be seen as divine by anyone who has ever struggled with even one set).

Abu Bakr then passed the good news on to assorted other caliphs and so forth, all the way to Osama bin Laden. This admittedly schematic history of Islam begins to wobble somewhat if it turns out that Mohammed had his epiphany second-hand, and that he more or less cribbed it from a pre-existing document.

That may create a conundrum for Muslims, as the existence of such a document casts a shadow on Mohammed’s claim to be the prophetic primus inter pares. But I don’t doubt for a second that Islamic scholars will handle the problem.

They could, for example, claim not unreasonably that carbon dating isn’t all that precise, and in this case an error of a few years here or there would be enough to reinstate Mohammed’s patent rights.

Or else they may decide to adopt the so-is-your-aunt-Tilly tactic of pointing out that the carbon dating of the Turin Shroud may also be at odds with the claims Christians make for that garment.

Yet such savants will find it difficult, not to say impossible, to deny the synthetic nature of Islam. In fact, they ought to take their cue from Marx and own up to Mohammed’s tendency to borrow from other religions.

Marx honestly identified three ingredients he shook together to produce the heady cocktail of Marxism: German philosophy, mainly Hegel and Feuerbach; British economics, mainly Smith and Ricardo; and French socialism, mainly Saint-Simon and Fourier.

Even if we discard the Birmingham Koran, Mohammed also used three principle sources: Judaism, Nestorian Christianity and Zoroastrianism. Thus he could proudly claim to be a heretic to three major religions, and we aren’t even talking about the minor ones.

But who’s to say that mixing multiple ingredients can’t produce an original concoction? No one, especially not those bar-hoppers who enjoy the unique taste of the odd Mojito, Daiquiri or Long Island Tea.

A note to those intemperate infidels: if you enjoy your cocktails, steer clear of Muslim countries. The Koran, Birmingham or otherwise, says that indulging that taste will get you flogged within an inch of your life.

I’m not proposing this drastic measure as a punishment. On the contrary, stand-up comedy is the only popular entertainment I like.

It’s just that comedians will have to make a living somehow after their profession becomes obsolete, as it surely will soon.

Comedy depends for its survival on two preconditions. First, there must be enough people out there whose sense of humour outmuscles their self-righteousness. Second, comedy can only thrive if reality doesn’t overstep the limit beyond anyone’s ability to poke fun at it.

Since neither of these preconditions is met these days, comedians will have to retrain as diversity consultants, sensitivity advisors, social workers, community organisers or anything else seen as indispensable these days.

Not to starve while the training is under way, they may indeed have to support themselves by working down the mines. If they mutter that life is the pits, no one will laugh at the pun.

As an illustration of the first precondition rapidly disappearing, Mike Kusneraitis, a Tory councillor in the Runnymede Borough, is being investigated for the terrible transgression he has committed.

I’m not sure whether the investigation is merely professional or also criminal, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were both. So what’s Mike’s crime?

He shared on the net a spoof of the advertising campaign for Carlsberg beer. For the outlanders among you, the actual campaign shows some impossibly wonderful event, with the tagline saying “If Carlsberg did [X], it would probably be the best [X] in the world.

The spoof that got Mike into trouble features the tagline “If Carlsberg did illegal immigrants…” under the picture of a boat densely packed with 14 pretty, stark-naked girls.

Now some will find this joke funny and laugh; some may find it tasteless and wince. Both will have to agree, however, that this is just a joke, and a topical one at that.

Runnymede is after all a borough where Magna Carta codified the rights of Englishmen exactly 800 years ago. Surely one of those rights must have been to be able to laugh with impunity at anything this side of the Holy Spirit.

This right was first established by a source predating Magna Carta: “Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.” Obviously, modernity is less forgiving than Christ.

Some jokes may be in poor taste, some may be funny. Some may be both, as will be confirmed by anyone who has heard that the last thing to go through Diana’s mind was the steering wheel. None, however, would be seen as grounds for prosecution in a world that didn’t think that humour is tasteless or criminal by definition.

As to reality outpacing any humour or satire, this point was put beyond any doubt by the Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

The very fact that an institution of higher learning has such a job description on its staff would already place it outside the reach of satire, even if the gentleman in question did absolutely nothing.

But hey, everyone must earn his keep, and the good Vice Chancellor is no exception. Hence he proposed the ‘inclusive practice’ of introducing ‘gender-neutral’ pronouns as a way of “exposing our students to an increasingly diverse and global world.”

Actually a world where no sex distinctions were allowed to survive would be rather the opposite of diverse, but one can’t expect intellectual rigour from a chap in charge of diversity and inclusion.

What one can expect is exactly what one got: the proposal to do away with such offensive words as ‘he’ and ‘she’, along with their derivatives, and replace them with the new ‘gender-neutral’ pronouns ze, hir, zir, xem and xyr.

Donna Braquet, Director of the university’s Pride Centre, whatever that is, agrees wholeheartedly: “It is important to participate in making our campus welcoming and inclusive for all. One way to do that is to use a student’s chosen name and their correct pronouns.”

The wording of her drivel proves that the job is already half-done: in a sane world the antecedent ‘a student’s’ would be followed by the possessive pronoun ‘his’, not the ideologically illiterate ‘their’. But, since we’ve allowed PC fascists to impose that harebrained diktat on the world’s greatest language, we must be prepared for ‘ze’ revolution.

There we have the double whammy: PC fascists mangling English in a way that no satire could possibly fathom, and students being brainwashed to be offended by such ‘gender-specific’ fossils as ‘he’ and ‘she’. Comedians have no place in such a world.

There’s nothing we can do about it, other than refusing to use PC pseudolanguage and mocking those who do. The other day I did just that by refusing to use the PC term ‘African American’, as demanded by my interlocutor of the US neocon persuasion.

“Would you call a dog a canine American?” I asked. No smile crossed his self-righteous face. Life is no longer a laughing matter.

“I’ve never been able to picture my wife in my mind – and now I know why,” writes Dominic Lawson in today’s Mail. I hope Mrs Lawson will be satisfied with the ensuing explanation. I am not.

Mr Lawson and I have a few mutual friends, but we’ve never met. Hence I don’t know what his religion is, though by the general tenor of his writing one suspects that his answer to this question would be ‘none’.

That explains why, in common with most modern men (a designation I never use as a term of praise), he feels the urge to look for a physical, in this case medical, explanation for a phenomenon with a strong spiritual dimension.

This explanation goes by the term ‘aphantasia’, invented by the professor of cognitive neurology Adam Zeman, who happens to be Mr Lawson’s school friend. Those afflicted with this condition, about 2.5 per cent of the population according to Prof. Zeman, are incapable of generating visual images in their minds – they have no mind’s eye.

I’m not qualified to judge Prof. Zeman’s findings or indeed to understand some of the recondite terminology he uses. Neither, I suspect, is Mr Lawson. But being by nature a rather incredulous sort, I may venture a guess that there may be more to it than merely a medical condition.

Mr Lawson, who in general tends to vouchsafe more personal details than we care to know, claims he has no visual memory at all. That must be most unpleasant, and one hopes he still manages to recognise people he hasn’t seen for a few days. The inability to do so may upset some editors, those who don’t like their employees asking “And who might you be, my dear chap?”

Now, if you don’t mind my offering a personal detail of my own, my visual memory is rather good. I can’t claim I never forget a face, but I do so rarely. Most of the time I can easily recognise a casual acquaintance of 40 years ago, and even, to the best of my rather poor ability, sketch his face from memory.

Yet I too have trouble visualising my wife’s face after a day or two apart, this with no aphantasia affecting my encephalo-optical function. The explanation for this must lie in a sphere considerably more complex than one describable by professors of cognitive neurology.

We see those we love differently from the way we see others, and the greater the love, the greater the difference. When a man looks at someone close to him, especially his wife with whom he is, according to St Paul, “one flesh”, he employs a vision other than purely optical.

He doesn’t just see a combination of geometrical shapes, sizes and colours. His eye acquires the X-ray ability to see beyond the physical surface and deep into something infinitely more important: the metaphysical essence. Depending on the kind of vocabulary one is comfortable with, this may be described as the spirit, the heart or the soul.

Because it’s infinitely more important, this essence overshadows the purely physical image or even completely obscures it, as powerful pictures can do. Many who have seen Mont Blanc, even those suffering from aphantasia, will remember its snow-capped summit, but few will be able to describe the trees at the mountain’s foot.

This brings us to the question in the title: What did Jesus look like? The iconic images we all know are not, nor are claimed to be, accurate physical representations. The painters, after all, never saw Jesus in the flesh.

However the evangelists did, and they preserved many of the words Jesus uttered during the months they spent together. Even more important, they memorised, and decades later conveyed, the deep meaning behind those words, the divine significance of the message.

Yet none of them left even a sketchy description of Jesus’s appearance. We can surmise some physical generalities, such as the obvious fact that Jesus didn’t look very different from the ambient Jewish population. If he had, Judas wouldn’t have had to identify him to the arresting detail of Roman soldiers in the garden of Gethsemane.

But the evangelists’ memory didn’t retain any individual physical details, which must have made Jesus look as different from other people as Mr Lawson looks different from me. Why?

Because their visual memory was subjugated to their spiritual vision and the all-conquering love they felt for Jesus. They remembered so little because they loved so much.

Then again, all four of them may have fallen into the 2.5 per cent of the population suffering from aphantasia. I’m sure Prof. Zeman and Mr Lawson would be satisfied with this explanation. Are you?

 

   

  

 

 

 

 

 Correct me if I’m wrong, but to me fiscal austerity means making sure one always spends less than one earns. I bet your definition is similar to mine, but I’ll go double or nothing that George Osborne’s isn’t.

That’s because you and I live in the real world, the place where we earn some income and figure out how to pay our way and make ends meet.

Sometimes we have to borrow, but we know that, should our liabilities exceed our assets, and our income is insufficient to cover the deficit, we won’t be able to keep the bailiffs at bay.

However, George, along with other finance ministers all over the West, lives in a virtual world where nothing is real: words, thoughts, morals – and certainly money.

George lives by virtual adages uttered by virtual economists, such as Samuel Brittan, the Financial Times guru, who once pontificated that “Since my undergraduate days, I have been pointing out that a government budget is not the same as that of an individual…”.

Back in the old days, when the world was real, and so were the economists, Adam Smith uttered some real, as opposed to virtual, truth: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

The two statements represented not just two different approaches to macroeconomics but two different worlds. George, along with his past, present and future Western colleagues, lives in Brittan’s world, while pretending to live in Smith’s.

His much-vaunted budget is being hailed by some, and damned by others, as an exemplar of austerity. So it is, except that in George’s virtual world ‘austerity’ is actually another word for ‘profligacy’.

Hence he took one look at the 2008 crisis and knew exactly what caused it: Labour Chancellor Gordon ‘The Moron’ Brown practised profligacy without ever referring to it as austerity.

That, according to George, was his fatal mistake, one that George vowed never to repeat. He too would practise profligacy, ideally on a larger scale than Brown but, unlike his hapless predecessor, he’d refer to it as austerity.

It has worked like a dream (in fact, it could only have worked like a dream, not actual reality). Under George’s austere tutelage, our national deficit stands at £70 billion, far outstripping Brown’s achievement and confidently moving towards the £100 billion mark.

Austerity George has also more than doubled the national debt, to an utterly suicidal £1.5 trillion, which is quite impressive even if lagging behind America’s $18 trillion-plus. At least Obama’s ministers don’t hold up this catastrophic statistic as proof of their fiscal responsibility.

To be fair, Austerity George doesn’t monopolise his virtual economics. He also lets banks play fast and loose with finances, lending trillions with the same reckless abandon as they did in the run-up to 2008.

As with any pyramid scheme, which is the dominant model of today’s economic activity, things look fabulous for a while. As the pyramid totters in the wind, borrowed and freshly printed banknotes fly out of it, settling on the ground.

This creates virtual prosperity that will persist until reality makes a comeback. The pyramid will then collapse – just as it did in 2008. Next time, however, when banks go to the wall, the government won’t be able to help: servicing the galloping debt will leave no money in the kitty.

Meanwhile George is clipping the coupons of his phoney prosperity, helped in this task by grossly inflated property prices. But for Russian, Arab and Chinese money-launderers parking their ill-gotten cash in British townhouses and mansions, George would find it harder to boast of the impressive performance of his austerity.

Yet there are protests all over the country, with Jeremy Corbyn’s candidature for the Labour leadership injecting some Trotskyist energy into his comrades’ indignation. ‘Down with austerity’ seems to be the battle cry, which is the negative to George’s positive.

However, the protesters also live in the virtual world, which is why they don’t bother to look at the figures. Figures have no place in virtual reality.

Brown was running the country into the ground, but he never mentioned austerity, which was fine with our loony fringe, rapidly gaining the status of the mainstream. George is running the country even deeper into the ground, but he calls it austerity, and those are fighting words.

If George were to state openly that Britain is heading for the knacker’s yard, but that’s fine because nothing in the world will stop him spending money on the [poor, needy, minorities, underdeveloped countries, free health and education, foreign adventures – take your pick], everyone would be happy.

As it is, the God of Party Politics speaks to George out of the burning economy, and his commandment is to talk austerity while doing profligacy.

All we can do is pray that the aforementioned pyramid doesn’t collapse before the next general election. Britain could survive another 2008, one hopes, but she won’t survive Corbyn at 10 Downing Street.

I wonder if George is secretly working on the Elect Jeremy campaign. Who knows, Prime Minister Corbyn might even keep him as Chancellor. Do as you’ve always done, George, he’d say. But for Trotsky’s sake don’t mention austerity.