Bond Thwarts the Bad Guy's plans for Global Domination...

So it seems that Devil May Care, the new James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks, was officially launched yesterday at the expense of the British taxpayer, much to the frustration of the Daily Mail.

Tuuli Shipster, the model whose shapely form adorns the book's cover, brought seven copies of the book from the printers in a samsonite case, carrying the case down the Thames in a Pacific 24, a Rigid Inflatable-hulled speedboat, escorted by a couple of Lynx helicopters. Rendezvousing with the HMS Exeter at the Pool of London, she carried on down the Thames aboard the Exeter, still escorted by the Lynx helicopters, finally brought ashore, and then escorted to Waterstone's Piccadilly by a cavalcade of Bentleys.

Bond supposedly served as an intelligence officer on some incarnation of the HMS Exeter, so I suppose it must have seemed fitting to someone that such a crucial role in this publicity stunt should have been played by the current HMS Exeter, a Type 42 destroyer that served in the Falklands War and which must surely be due for decommissioning any day now, considering that most British ships have a service span of twenty-five years or so.

The Mail is up in arms because, of course, they say that this was at taxpayers' expense, though I'm sure the publishers must have coughed up something. Still, though, you have to wonder whether the Royal Navy might have better things to be doing with its time. Mind, it is recruiting season, isn't it . . .

My favourite part of this whole charade, though, is the bit where the Mail reports that 'The book, which coincides with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Bond creator Ian Fleming, is published today and the details of the plot have been kept secret. All that has been revealed is that the story is set in 1967 during the Cold War and sees 007 travelling to London, Paris and the Middle East.'

The plot has been kept secret? A 007 plot has been kept secret? Why? In case people might guess what it's about, and have their fun spoiled? They're all the same!

Years ago, in UCD, I was amused to see how Filmsoc had advertised their 'Bond Week'. Beneath every film's title was a summary of the plot, and all the plots were identical: 'Bond thwarts the bad guy's plans for global domination and shags loads of chicks.' Well, almost all. Goldeneye tried to present a more sensitive take on Her Majesty's pet thug, and so was described with the rather disappointing 'Bond thwarts the bad guy's plans for global domination, and shags just one chick.'

Mind, it was Izabella Scorupco . . .

Separated by a Common Language

Are you going to vote 'no'?' asked an English friend of mine yesterday, seemingly out of the blue. 'Please vote 'no'. If you don't vote 'no' then we might never get a chance.'
'What are you talking about?' I asked, and then ventured a weary 'Lisbon?'
'The European Constitreaty.'
'Why do you call it that?'
'Because it's the Constitution, with a few of the words changed, and the mandatory flag -- though they still fly the flag and sing the anthem anyway!'
'It was never a Constitution,' I retorted, 'and should never have been called one. Doing so was a pretentious and absurd attempt to glorify it. It was only ever another treaty, and a far less dramatic one than the Treaty on European Union.'

'Well, the point is that every UK party promised we'd get a vote on it, and only one of them made any attempt to deliver on that promise.'
'They didn't, actually. Blair was forced into a corner by Rupert Murdoch, who said that he'd withdraw support for Labour if Labour didn't promise a vote on the version of the Treaty that had all the Constitutional stuff in. That version failed, following the French and Dutch votes. A new treaty based on that had to be renegotiated. No promises were made about this one.'
'Technicality.'
'That's not a technicality! It's a different thing!'
'It is different, but it's 95 per cent identical, according to virtually every European leader who signed it.'
'So what? You're 98 per cent identical with a chimp, but you're not one.'
'Me being 98 per cent similar to a chimp wasn't due to some overpaid bureaucrat signing a piece of paper.'
'You mean your Prime Minister?'
'In a darkened room. On his own.'

'I'm actually far happier with this than I was with the previous version. I'd been unhappy with the old preamble, and am glad it's been ditched. But why do you think you should have a vote on this?'
'Why do you have one?'
'Because I come from a modern country with a written constitution that demands that any possible adjustment to our constitution must be put to the people.'
'So it is a constitutional treaty.'
'In the sense that it might perhaps effect Ireland's own constitution, yes, maybe,' I conceded, 'but no more than Rome, the Single European Act, Maastricht, Amsterdam, or Nice. Rather less than Rome and Maastricht, in fact. Much, much less. But since the Supreme Court's Crotty Judgment in 1987, all European treaties have to go to a referendum in Ireland. It's a singularly bad way of ratifying treaties, in fact, since the vast majority of people won't read the things and wouldn't understand if they did!'
'Probably. But the fact is there was a cross-party pledge and two out of three have broken it.'
'Well, no, again, because it's a different treaty!'
'Ours is more identical because of the red lines.'
'What do you mean "more identical"? Everybody signs the same treaty.'
'The red lines. Exceptions. . . I think.'
'Those exceptions are part of the treaty. They have to be approved by other people. We have to approve your 'red lines' just as you have to approve ours.'

'For what it's worth, and this may interest you,' I continued, 'the Irish system of default ratification by referendum is in fact quite questionable. The Crotty judgment said that it'd be fine to ratify treaties by statute rather than by referendum provided that 'such amendments do not alter the essential scope or objectives' of the EU, and it's certainly arguable that the Lisbon changes don't alter what the EU is about. In fact, really all they do is hopefully clear up some of the clutter that makes it hard to do its job. However, the people have grown fiercely attached to their right to have their say on these treaties they haven't read, and any party that attempted to reverse the default position would be wiped out. In other words, the only real political rationale for us having a referendum on this matter is to prevent a backlash against the government. Curiously, though, the government parties are not allowed to enlist the resources of the state to campaign for the treaty.'
'Well, obviously. Or are your parties state-funded?'
'Not obviously at all. Until about ten years ago they could do so, and indeed doing so was really just a matter of political leadership. As things stand, the parties cannot enlist the resources of the state in any referendums.'
'It is political campaigning, though.'

'Do you have any idea of the sort of things we've had referendums on?'
'Probably really trivial matters that need resolution.'
'Ratification of European Treaties and of Irish acquiesence to the International Criminal Court, removing the constitutional ban on divorce, defining the status of the right to life of an unborn child relative to that of its mother, the right to Irish citizenship, the voting age, and the possibility of replacing our PR-STV system of voting with a 'first past the post' system, just as examples.'
'Those arent constitutional. Except the first two . . . and the last two . . . and the other three.'
'Now are you really saying that it should be impossible for a government minister to be interviewed by the national broadcaster about one of these things, backed fully by the government and the majority of members of our parliament as voted for by the people, without the national broadcaster having to go and find somebody to interview to put an opposing view?'

'Well the national broadcaster is another thing . . .'
'It's an arm of the state. It can't take sides, and can't be used to put forward the case of the government, without a counterbalancing view being put forward too.'
'It should be representative of the full spectrum of opinion.'
'Why?'
'Because otherwise it would be Pravda, the propaganda arm of the state. In many ways the BBC already is . . .'
'Too obvious an answer. And wrong too. Look, you say a full spectrum of opinion --'
'I said "representative".'
'So -- what -- someone from the extreme left, someone from the extreme right, someone in the middle?'
'No. Representing the views of the people, respecting people's understanding.'
'And how do you establish what the views of the people are?'
'Well it's not exactly numerical analysis. Use rules of thumb and opinion polls.'
'So if a referendum looks set to be passed by 95% of voters, with the remaining 5% being, shall we say, BNP types, do you go, well, they're the opposition on this issue, and give them a platform on the national broadcaster?'
'5% of the time. You don't choose your opponents in matters like that. All it does is encourage them, drives them underground.'
'Even so, do you give them a platform?'
'Depends how they conduct themselves on it doesnt it? Richard Barnbrook was given virtually no platform and he still made his way onto the London Assembly, yet now he has a platform he has shown himself for the rude, obnoxious lout he really is. Ultimately it is an argument against state broadcasting altogether, which as an argument I would fully endorse.'
'Well, oddly, I'm sure the European Commission would too, though I'd disagree.'

'Look, do you have any idea who the campaigners against European treaties are in Ireland?' I asked, 'For what it's worth, they always about 20% of the vote. Our opposition to EU treaties always comes from the same people, who reel off the same nonsense every single time. The few remaining socialists and communists in the land oppose them, Sinn Fein and other hardline nationalists oppose them, holier-than-thou Catholics oppose them, and a chunk of the Green Party -- the chunk that overlaps with the socialists and communists -- does so. Together they can yell and shout and roar emotive nonsense that while incorrect and usually contradictory nonetheless serves to get people to vote against the treaties, convinced that we'll lose our supposed neutrality, or our tax laws, or be forced to start butchering babies tomorrow.'
'So that's an argument against political debate then.'
'No, it's not, actually. And those people don't know the meaning of debate. Lying isn't debating. I'm just trying to see why you'd want this, that's all. It's a pain in the hole here, trying to make yourself heard over that hysterical shower of gobshites.'
'If they lie then it's the presenter's responsibility to challenge them on it. Of course not every presenter is as talented as Andrew Neil, sadly.'
'Posters. Leaflets. Newspaper articles. TV adverts. No presenters there. Look, let's put this simply: despite your claims about promises and such, at bottom you want a referendum on this so you can vote against it. That's certainly what you intend to do, yes? So why? Why would you vote against it?'
'Largely because I want this country to have the opportunity to make a de facto rejection of what the European Union has become: an expensive burden on the legal framework of the United Kingdom, and an affront to its sovereignty, instead of the trade bloc it was meant to be.'

'It was never meant to be a trade bloc -- why do you say that?'
'Well, that's what we entered into. The notion of a European President and Foreign Secretary is also horrifying -- particularly if Blair gets it.'
'No you didn't -- let's stay with the first point for a minute -- you signed the Treaty of Rome, same as the rest of us. I realise that the term 'perfidious Albion' is proverbial around the world, but why are you so keen to pretend you signed up to less than what the Treaty established?'
'The Treaty of Rome was a blank document encapsulated between a frontsheet and a signature page.'
'Rubbish. Not by the time Britain signed it. What does the first line of it say? The very first line? "Determined to establish the foundations of an ever closer union"! That's what you guys signed up to, same as us. Ever closer!
'In 1953. Mainly by people who aren't alive any more.'
'Signed up to by the British and the Irish in the early seventies, which is the relevant date from your viewpoint. And you've still got the same head of state! You signed up for ever closer union. The Common Market was only ever meant to be the first part of that. Everyone knew that.'
'Well, that's about the only function it's served remotely well as, and I'm not particularly sure it's serving the UK well any more.'
'Would you rather withdraw, then? That'd be okay, you know. It's not as if you're particularly constructive members of it. You're basically a fat kid sitting on the sidelines, saying you want to be on the team, but only if the team plays your way.'
'I dunno. But that's something I'd rather see decided at the parliamentary level, rather than at the EEC level.'
'So you'd trust your parliament with the decision to withdraw, but not with the decision to make things more efficient? A it happens, the Treaty provides you with a mechanism to withdraw.'

'It's not just about efficiency though is it? There's more in that treaty than efficiency measures.'
'It basically is, actually. There's not much more, really. It's ultimately a streamlining exercise. The current structures aren't designed for 27 countries and 450 million people.'
'It's not reasonable to use one policy to let a load of other ones through.'
'It tidies the commission, it makes the council more accountable, it makes the parliament more democratic, it gives the national parliaments an opportunity to vet proposed legislation in advance rather than being faced with facts on the ground. As for the Presidency and the Foreign Minsitry position, the second one really does little more than to merge two positions, while the Presidency effectively exists already and has done for years. All it does is replace the current six-monthly rotation system with a more stable two-and-a-half year system, which should obviate the need for things to stall with a new learning curve every few months . . . so what's bad about it?'
'I can't remember. I've mainly given up hope on it. I've just generally been very much anti-Europe since I learnt how much money they take away from us and waste, and how much of that "waste" is actually politicians taking it for themselves. And the loss of our sovereignty in general.'
'I'm pretty sure you gain far more from the EU than you lose. Besides, it's not as if you have a huge amount of faith in your own government's fiscal prudence, is it?'
'I seem to recall seeing a chart that had us second from bottom in terms of EU value for money. Oddly enough, Ireland was at the top.'
'Probably because we play the game, really. The Euro is a big factor too.'

'The thing about my government's fiscal prudence is that in two years I will be able to completely get rid of them, whereas getting rid of the EU government would involve a huge political coalition across the whole of Europe at the same time, and given that it's made up of coalitions of dozens of smaller parties. . . there's no real way to do it.'
'I'm not sure you can be so certain. They were elected with a huge majority last time despite getting just a third of the vote last time. They might get beaten by another party that will have only a third of the vote. Your system is a travesty of democracy, I'm afraid.'
'Tories are currently hovering above 40 per cent. They took Crewe and Nantwich four days ago, the 126th safest Labour seat.'
'Great, so you'll get a landslide despite being opposed by almost six out of every ten voters. Wonderful.'
'That's not exactly how the system works. We have the constituency link so everybody is in some way represented, even if it doesn't reflect 100 per cent on their viewpoints.'
'Meaning what?'
'Meaning that if the government wanted to turn Coventry into a reservoir, there's someone in the House of Commons who will fight to prevent that from happening.'
'Er, we have constituencies too, so I don't see why this is special.'
'The alternative is minority governments and coalitions which spent half their time in government in deadlock, meaning that no decisions get made, which can be seen across half of eastern Europe, or PR which means that you get wholly unaccountable politicians.'
'We haven't had a majority government since 1985 or so, and we certainly don't have deadlock. And who says they're unaccountable? In what sense? Well? I'm curious . . . I'm just saying, I've lived under and voted in two systems, and I think the British one is a joke. Complaints about Brussels being undemocratic always strike me as hilariously hollow when they come from a country where most voters are effectively disenfranchised.'
'I don't think it's perfect. It's far from perfect. But it's the best system there is.'

'No government has had a popular majority since 1931.'
'But there have been several changes in government -- popular by what definition anyway?'
'In the sense of you count the votes and see if anyone got more than half. In terms of votes, they've all been minority governments, with more people having voted for 'losers' than 'winners'. 64 per cent of voters didn't vote for Labour in 2005, 59 per cent didn't vote for them in 2001, and 56 per cent didn't in 1997. 58 per cent of voters didn't vote for the Tories in 1992, just as 57 per cent didn't in 1987 and in 1983, and 56 per cent didn't in 1979. It goes on . . .'

Exploring 'Christianity Explored'

Over the past year I've heard good things about Christianity Explored, an evangelical course that supposedly 'complements' the Alpha Course, but looks rather to have been designed back in 2001 as a corrective to it, having rather more to say about sin that Alpha and markedly less to say about the Holy Spirit. If it were to be pigeonholed, it'd probably be best described as a mainstream Evangelical course, unlike Alpha, which is rather more charismatic.

A couple of friends of mine in Manchester were thinking of doing 'Christianity Explored' a while back, but were unsure, having tried and been decidedly unimpressed by the Alpha Course not long before, finding it fluffy and lightweight. I spoke to another friend, who'd done both courses a while earlier, and she said that just speaking for herself, she had found 'Christianity Explored' more worthwhile and more substantial than Alpha, grounded as it was in Mark's Gospel. Another friend, currently training for the Anglican ministry, said something similar to me when I stayed with him a few months ago.

In Manchester last month I came across a copy of 'Christianity Explored' by Rico Tice and Barry Cooper, the founders of the course, going for 50p in a secondhand shop. Curious, I picked it up, but only got round to reading it last night; I've been insanely busy over the last while.

It's interesting. I don't think the book's intended to integrate into the course, though it seems to follow the same structure and presumably rests on the same points. Rather it appears to be intended for people who can't do the course, for whatever reason, but might be interested in exploring this anyway.


Augustus Caesar, Divi genus . . .
So yes, it's interesting, and it's very strong in some areas. It's exceptionally clear, for starters, both in how it's written and how it's structured, and is particularly good on explaining sin and Grace, though its emphasis on the atonement doesn't make a lot of sense without some discussion of the relationship between Father and Son in the Trinity. Without discussing how the Father and the Son are One, it's hard to present the atonement as anything other than a form of cosmic child abuse. This isn't helped by statements such as 'Jesus was willing to be adandoned. He has taken God's anger on our behalf so that we can be accepted.'

Part of the problem -- and perhaps the course deals with this by being, of its nature, rather more interactive than a book which must be followed -- is that the real issue of Jesus' identity is skimmed over. The first chapter, entitled 'Who Was Jesus?', considers his authority in all sorts of remarkable ways, but in terms of what this means it largely dismisses it in a paragraph.

Was he a great moral teacher? A compassionate miracle-worker? A misunderstood revolutionary? Mark's verdict goes far beyond any of these, as you can see from the very first sentence in his book:

'The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.'

Noel Coward was once asked, 'What do you think about God?', to which he replied, 'We've never been properly introduced.' Well, that's exactly what Mark wants to do for us here. And he is determined that we see Jesus as a figure with divine authority: 'the Son of God'. Or, to put it another way, God in human form.

It's a bit of a leap, isn't it? I mean, leaving aside the fact that one of the earliest manuscripts we have -- the Codex Sinaiticus, if you're interested -- doesn't include this phrase, it's certainly not a self-evident interpretation. The term 'son of God' pops up pretty often in the Jewish scriptures, and certainly never implies any identification with God himself. And of course the early Christians lived in the Roman Empire, in a world replete with gods and demi-gods and sons of gods. The Emperor Augustus is styled 'son of a god' in the Aeneid, but it wasn't until after he had died that he was officially deified. In other words, we shouldn't automatically assume that Mark believed Jesus was God purely because he describes him as 'the Son of God'.

The funny thing, though, is that having announced that Jesus' divine sonship implied a divine identification, Tice and Cooper go on to treat of the atonement as though God and Jesus are absolutely distinct. There's no trace here of any attempt to discuss the mysteries of the Trinity or the Incarnation, no hint of the Nicene formula of the Son being of one substance with the Father of the Chalcedonian formula of Jesus having both a human and a divine nature.

I suppose it could be argued - rightly, in a sense -- that these mysteries are highly complex things, and a bit advanced for people just starting to explore Christianity, but without them you're left with Jesus being born solely so he can be abandoned by God and killed by men in order to satisfy God's anger against the sins of men. I know that's a caricature, but that's kind of how this comes across.


If a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key
What's more, if the reason for avoiding this issue is because to do otherwise would complicate things - if this is, in short, a tool for basic evangelisation - then I think other questions need to be asked.

The preface to the book is based round a straightforward problem. 'Is it really possible,' it asks, 'for a sane person to reach the conclusion that the Bible is indeed God's way of speaking directly to human beings? On what grounds?'

Well, in the first place the authors assert that 'any book that makes all the claims that the Bible makes about itself deserves some examination at least. . . even if there is only the tiniest, tiniest possibility that these claims might be true, the Bible deserves our attention.' It's a fair point, though I'm pretty sure the same thing should likewise be said of the sacred books of other religions too. What's more, the authors claim, the Bible looks like God's word, which rather presupposes that God exists -- something that isn't a given for any curious but convinced atheists -- and that we'd know what His word looks like! But how do we know it looks like His word? Well . . .

Approximately forty authors wrote in three different languages over a period of one thousand five hundred years. Some of the authors were young, some were old, some were soldiers, others were fishermen, farmers, civil servants or kings. They wrote during different periods of history, in different geographic locations, to different groups of people. It wasn't like a relay race, with one author handing on the baton to another. Often, they were writing centuries apart. But despite this amazing variation - which alone makes it a unique book - the Bible has one theme running through it like rings in the trunk of a tree. There is one striking message, one striking person at its centre. That person is the subject of Christianity Explored. Given the diversity of its origin, the long period of time over which the Bible was written, and the even longer period of history that it deals with, this single-minded purpose is quite staggering.

This bothers me tremendously. Firstly, the reason the Bible is so diverse is that it's not -- strictly speaking -- a book. It's a library! But perhaps more importantly, it doesn't really work to say that it has one theme running through it, that being the person of Christ. I believe this is the case, of course, but it's not prima facie true; certainly no Jew would ever accept that their scriptures are really about Jesus, and many early Christians had difficulty in seeing Jesus in those Jewish scriptures!

Tice and Cooper go on then to say that the Bible contains hundred of fulfilled predictions, which may well be true, but then declare that the Bible's authority was not seriously questioned for fifteen hundred years. What does this mean? It wasn't questioned until fifteen centuries had passed since Moses took up his pen - assuming you accept the Jewish tradition that he was the author of the Pentateuch -- or until fifteen centuries had passed since John had put down his? Or fifteen centuries since the Synod of Hippo approved as canonical the twenty-seven books of the New Testament and fourty-six books of the Septuagint? Or fifteen centuries since Martin Luther had seven of those Septuagint books excised from the Bible? That'd give us dates of roughly 100AD, 1600AD, 1893AD, and, um, sometime about a millennium from now.

I'm not even sure by what it means by 'seriously questioned'. Certainly, the Jews that met at Jamnia towards the end of the first century AD questioned and denied the authority of several books of the Septuagint and all the Christian scriptures. Some Christians, notably those led by Marcion, disputed the authority of all the Jewish scriptures, and other Christians wondered about the authority of such New Testament writings as Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation. And of course, the pagans of the Roman empire simply didn't accept the authority of any of the Bible's books!

And then there's the claim that as we'd expect from a book so grounded in historical realities, 'archaeological evidence has repeatedly confirmed the unwavering accuracy of Biblical history . . . the Bible gives us real historical facts -- such as the amazing deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt -- that demonstrate the fact that God is powerful . . . if you want to know whether or not there is any substance to the Bible, one way of doing it is to see if there is any substance to its historical claims.'

Fair enough, but the thing is that the jury's definitely out on this very example. Archaeologists simply haven't found any evidence whatsoever that confirms a Jewish presence and exodus from Egypt at any stage. They just don't know.

A mistake? Sure, and a well-meaning one, surely, but a worrying one for all that. It's not the only one either. Only a few pages later, for example, the authors quote Morpheus from The Matrix and Thom Yorke from Radiohead, and then go on to say:

What Morpheus and Thom Yorke describe is nothing new. Augustine, writing in the sixth century, suggested a reason for this sense of 'wrongness' in our lives: 'O God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.'

All very well, and indeed profound, except that this wasn't written in the sixth century. Rather, you'll find this line at the very start of St Augustine's Confessions, written in 397AD. Yes, that'd be the fourth century rather than the sixth. Just a casual mistake, a slip of the pen? Maybe, but I doubt it. See, while this line comes from St Augustine of Hippo, who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries, there was another Augustine, St Augustine of Canterbury, who was sent as a missionary to the English and who lived in the sixth and seventh centuries. It rather looks as though the authors just grabbed at the quote and assumed it came from the apostle to the English, without even making the most cursory attempt to find out its context!

That might seem to be quibbling, but I don't think it is. Rather, there seems to be a tendency here to simply accept easy answers, and not to question things. After all, if this course is intended for curious atheists just as much as for Christians looking to deepen their faith, why doesn't it raise the obvious questions of how the Bible came about, and indeed who Mark was? That last point seems crucial to me, in fact, given that the course is focused on his Gospel. The Gospel was actually written anonymously, after all, though it was certainly ascribed to Mark - who had served as Peter's interpreter -- at least by the second century.


When you are old, you will stretch out your hands . . .
The Petrine connection is important, especially given how in a chapter entitled 'What is a Christian?' the authors don't shirk when it comes into making Peter out to be some kind of buffoon.

They zoom in on the bit where Jesus asks his disciples who do they say he is, and rightly highlight Peter's response that Jesus is the Christ. 'But it's not enough simply to know Jesus' true identity,' they say. 'You see, Peter gets the question of Jesus' identity absolutely right here. But when it comes to the question of what Jesus came to do, Peter gets it horribly wrong.'

Impressive, eh? And on they go, telling the story of how Jesus explained his mission -- notably how he had to be executed but would rise again -- and how Peter rebukes him. And they elaborate at some length about what Peter supposedly said, although Mark says nothing of the nature of his rebuke and Matthew merely records an impetuous outburst that this must not happen!

Jesus, we're told, rebukes Peter in turn, telling that he does not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men. And the author -- it's not clear which one -- says that 'in a way' he doesn't blame Peter for having misunderstood. In a way? Presumably, then, in a way he does. Presumably, unlike any of the apostles, he'd have known better . . .

There's something quite sinister and underhand going on here, if you're paying attention, as the authors then shift to say that Jesus responds to those who have in mind 'the things of men' by describing the scene from Matthew's gospel that details how in Gethsemane one of the disciples -- John's gospel identifies him as Peter -- lashed out with a sword, cutting the ear from one of the temple guards. The authors then relate how Jesus again rebuked Peter for not understanding how the Scriptures must be fulfilled. 'Even here,' they say, 'as he pulls a sword to keep Jesus from being arrested, Peter has in mind "the things of men." He is still looking at the situation from a human perspective.'

So what? Well, a few pages earlier the authors had described the story of Thomas' disbelief after the Resurrection, and his response when faced with the living Christ in the flesh.

Thomas then makes one of the greatest statements of belief in the Bible: 'My Lord and my God!' Thirty years later, this stubborn, rational, incredulous man was to die a martyr's death testifying to what he had seen.

You'd never know from this that the evidence of Thomas' martyrdom is decidedly shaky, would you? If it happened, nobody is even remotely sure of where it happened, when it happened, or how it happened. It's a damn sight flimsier than the evidence of Peter's martyrdom, which is pretty much universally accepted as having happened during the Neronian Persecution, roughly thirty years after the Resurrection.

In fact, the authors give no sign of Peter ever having learned to keep in mind the things of God, rather than the things of man. They ignore his clear preeminence among the apostles, they gloss over his eventual martyrdom, and astoundingly -- considering that the core text for their course is Mark's Gospel -- they make no mention of how Mark had apparently been Peter's interpreter!

What's going on here? Well, it rather looks as though the authors are succumbing to that unfortunate tendency among some Protestants to hold that Catholics aren't really Christians.


Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you?
It's obviously wrongheaded nonsense to set one apostle up against another, but I think it's fair to say that ever since Luther's day the Protestant churches have seen themselves as largely Pauline in inspiration, whereas Catholics have always stressed their Petrine connection. Some Protestants have scorned Catholics as latter-day Pharisees, giving primacy to man-made laws rather than true worship. Painting Peter as someone who stresses the 'things of man' rather than the 'things of God' is a rather clear way of suggesting that this tendency has been in Catholicism from the start.

This isn't the only subtle dig at Catholicism -- or liturgical Christianity in general -- in the book. I don't know if references to 'slightly spooky people in strange garments hanging about in dank halls' is intended as a jab at Catholicism or High Church Anglicanism, but take, for example, the casual description at the end of James and Jude as 'Jesus' own brothers'. Sure, the Bible uses that term for them, but it may well not have meant 'brothers' in the strict sense of siblings -- Aramaic was a flexible language, and the term rendered in Greek as 'brothers' may just as easily have meant half-brothers, cousins, or pretty much any male relation. Still, by ignoring the fact that this is a contentious point, the authors are casually able to imply that there was no way that Jesus's mother remained a virgin after his death, putting paid to any temptations to honour her. Or look at this:

There were a couple of blokes in my rugby team who lived their lives without reference to God, but who nevertheless used to 'cross' themselves as they ran on to the field. It was a little self-help formula they used: a quick, superstitious prayer to get them in the right frame of mind. But that's not what Christian prayer is about.

Again, the author might be right, but leaving aside how it's hardly for us to judge anyone else's relationship with God, study that tone of contempt towards making the sign of the cross. Why the inverted commas, for starters? It's worth bearing in mind that making the sign of the cross like this, although a custom in most Christian churches from at least the second century, is almost wholly alien to Evangelical Protestants. It's seen as a 'Catholic' thing, an extra-biblical charm of no spiritual value.

It's striking too that the entire section which asks what it is to be a Christian juxtaposes Peter's supposed failure to understand what Jesus was about with a section which describes how Jesus, having rebuked Peter, summons the crowd and tells them what it really means to follow him. It's curious, really, that it doesn't consider the account of the episode in Matthew's gospel -- and since occasionally the authors skip away from Mark, as they do when describing the Gethsemane incident for instance, they'd surely do so if they wished. Matthew's gospel has Jesus responding to Peter's confession of faith in words that Catholics tend to reel off perhaps too readily while Protestants tend to pretend aren't in the Bible:

Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Look, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with an Evangelical book taking an Evangelical line; it'd be ridiculous for it to do otherwise. But I get uncomfortable when books and courses are marketed to people saying that they represent the essence or the central truths of Christianity when in truth they just reflect one small variant of Christianity, a variant that seems to be at odds in some important ways with the faith held by the majority of Christians over the eras, gong back to the disciples of the disciples.

But then, as the authors of Christianity Explored seem to imply when they say that 'in a way' they don't blame Peter for his failure, they clearly think they know better.

Taught half as much! Taught twice as well?

I despair of universities. Today I went to get a staff card, my old one having expired, and was told that I couldn't be given one because my old one had expired. Yes, you read that correctly: because I need a card, I can't be given one.

Try not to sprain your brain wrestling with this. I shall need to discuss this with Personnel, I think.


In fact, I don't just despair of universities; I despair for them. Student Direct is running a fascinating story about how little teaching Manchester students tend to receive, and how unfavourably it compares with the situation in the University twenty years ago. It's worrying stuff, both in terms of what it revals about Manchester and about what it suggests about higher education in Britain as a whole.

It seems that Student Direct complained to the University's president last year, saying that teaching hours in the University had plummeted; Alan Gilbert apparently challenged the paper to prove this, and using that marvellously liberating tool that is the Freedom of Information Act they were able to do so, leaving the president 'stunned' and 'momentarily lost for words'.

Student Direct describes students having just four or five hours of teaching a week, clocking up just 120 or even 86 teaching hours over the course of a year, whereas twenty years ago they'd have had roughly double that amount of teaching, on balance.

I think the article would gain from a hefty chart showing how the emphasis has shifted away from teaching over the past twenty years, with figures for each subject clearly laid out, and maybe with case studies and such, but even as it stands, sans the help of Excel, this is potentially huge.

Granted, the article doesn't say anything of how Manchester compares with other universities in Britain and abroad in this respect, which I think needs consideration. Despite this, though, that teaching at Manchester suffers in contrast to research seems clear if you study the university guides published by The Guardian and The Times; the former ranks Manchester as the sixteenth-best university in Britain, whereas the latter ranks it as only twenty-ninth in Britain! These rankings may seem absurd when contrasted with the University's far more credible showings in the QS World University Rankings -- seventh in Britain and thirtieth in the world -- and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Ranking which places it fifth in Britain and forty-eighth in the world, but the latter league tables emphasise research rather than teaching. It seems clear that in the surveys that rank universities in terms of what they offer students, Manchester doesn't do as well as it should.

That's part of where the 2015 Agenda, laudable though it is in so many ways, falls down. There is only so much money to go round, after all, and the University clearly thinks the best way to spend it is on high-profile figures who will in turn attract other eminent individuals -- the aim being to make Manchester one of the world's top twenty-five research-led universities by 2015. All very well, but if that's where the money's going then it's hardly going on teaching, is it?

And while people might argue that this'll mean better teaching -- and better students -- in the future, should the students of today really be asked to pay for the students of tomorrow? Is it the role of the University to teach the students it's got or to pick the students it wants?


Martin Stevens, who taught poetry in Manchester a few years ago and is now the High Master of St Pauls School in London, gave no quarter a couple of months back when damning the paucity of the University's teaching:

The university is so locked into getting in big name researchers and doing as much research as possible that students come far, far down the food chain. Students are so far down the food chain they are in danger of starving to death. . .

This is the philosophy of unintended consequences. By focusing the funding of universities on research, it has forced universities to take their eye off young people even more.

To make that a little bit more tangible, remember Martin Amis? Martin earns £80,000 a year in the University of Manchester, and teaches for just twenty-eight hours during that year; in short, by the only yardstick we can use, he's paid £2857.14 for every hour he teaches, a rather more impressive sum than the £20 to £50 an hour that most visiting lecturers reportedly earn. Well, applying a similarly crude yardstick, there are second year history students who pay £3,070 a year in fees and yet are taught for just four hours a week, which works out at £28.43 per hour.

Granted, you can prove anything with facts, but it does rather appear that on an hour-by-hour basis it takes a hundred students to pay for Martin Amis, whereas it takes only a couple to pay for, say, Terry Eagleton.


Granted, Manchester prides itself on encouraging independent learning among its students, but I've heard plenty of people grumbling over the years that this tends to work out as simply an attempt to provide education on the cheap; I've heard medics in particular complaining that the much-vaunted 'problem-based learning', so central to the Manchester medic experience, is a joke, and the figures might bear this out.

It's all very well to say that higher level teaching is about quality rather than quantity, but that rather loses its potency as an argument when you crunch through the workload figures for British universities and then place those figures side by side with the university league tables that focus on what students get out of their university education.

Try it. If you torture the data long enough it'll tell you anything.

Are the Simpsons more realistic than the Flintstones?

I still reckon the jury's out, but I reckon this may have convinced a lot of people, whether they've seen it via BoingBoing or whatever.

I know, it's terrifying, isn't it? And after Friday's post I probably shouldn't be trying quite so hard to make your stomachs churn. Sorry.

For what it's worth, there's a slightly less alarming rendition of Mario over at Pixeloo too. Strangely, Jessica Rabbit is leading the poll for the next person to be detooned. I can't see that working. We'll see though, I guess.

Fifty Years of Moyler Men

Well, last night was interesting.

This academic year has seen the fiftieth anniversary of my old school, and so there was a shindig in Citywest hotel to mark the occasion; there were a handful of us there from my year, along with an army of lads older than us, and smattering younger, and maybe a score of teachers.

I can't remember the last time I was a gathering so absurdly male -- it was probably when I was in school, to be fair, as having paid my dues through thirteen years of all-male education, I've tended towards female friends over the last few years!

It was a good evening, what with drinks, dinner, and entertainment, though that was a bit hit and miss. Comedians are always risky, since everyone's got their own sense of humour, and while the band was very good, it was rather neglected; by the time they came onstage everyone was outside chatting at the bar.

The chatting was definitely the soul of the evening, and so I buzzed about chatting to almost everyone I wanted to, during which I discovered to my astonishment that teachers I'd been terrified of when I was twelve were surely no older then themselves than I am now!

I couldn't help but grin ruefully as I nattered with a couple of them and pointed out a detail or two from the Jubilee Yearbooks, piled on the tables in front of us. Look at the history of the school magazine, I said, embarrassed. The first few all have cartoons by a fella called Robert Bohan, cartoons that are described as 'benign'.

My cartoons take up where his stop, and there's no 'benign' attached to mine. Were mine 'malign'?

To be fair, in retrospect, they probably were. And the last of the magazines was the one that got banned, pulled off the racks after being sold for just one day, all due to me. There must have been a ferocious row about that in the staffroom. Maybe more than once. Dearie me, and talking last night -- for the first time since leaving school -- to the person I surely bothered most, left me feeling decidedly ashamed.

There's a lesson there somewhere, though I'm not sure what it is.

Sadly, there were more than a few teachers and old friends missing who I'd have loved to caught up with, but there'll be more nights like this, please God. And next time, with luck, there'll be more of us from my year, and perhaps a bit less of the entertainment.

What Lies Beneath

I was highly amused earlier on by this fine attempt at casting the principal characters from Peanuts in Watchmen. In gratitude to the person who sent me that I pointed him over to this sinister rendering of Charlie Brown's skeletal structure.

You could do worse than work your way through the whole of Michael Paulus's disturbing attempt at revealing the skeletons of the rest of the Peanuts gang, Betty Boop, Fred Flintstone, the Powerpuff girls, and others:

Animation was the format of choice for children's television in the 1960s, a decade in which children's programming became almost entirely animated. Growing up in that period, I tended to take for granted the distortions and strange bodies of these entities.

These Icons are usually grotesquely distorted from the human form from which they derive. Being that they are so commonplace and accepted as existing I thought I would dissect them like science does to all living objects - trying to come to an understanding as to their origins and true physiological make up. Possibly to better understand them and see them in a new light for what they are in the most basic of terms.

I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.

Disturbing, eh? The one of the Shmoo troubles me perhaps more than any other, because I'm pretty sure the Shmoo shouldn't have a skeleton. And of course, if those were too grotesque for you, then you probably don't even want to think about what balloon animals must look like on the inside.

Sorry about that. If you can stomach it, there's more where that came from, thanks to Jason Freeny.

Between Two Stools You fall to the Ground

Just following up from the Naomi Sugai affair I mentioned the other day, I was interested to see a short but telling piece on the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education in today's Independent.

Student complaints about their treatment by universities rocketed in the year after the introduction of top-up fees, according to a watchdog.

They rose by 25 per cent during 2007 to 734, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA) disclosed yesterday. Figures also show the number of complaints upheld also rose significantly from 19 per cent to 26 per cent. The biggest rise was among mature students.

Most of the complaints for 2007 were made in the first half of the year when students having to pay top-up fees of up to £3,000 a year were in their first full year at university.

However, many of the complaints were about examination results with students realising that a 2.2 degree was not enough to find a good job.

"The rise in complaints is due to many more students challenging their degree and exam results," said Baroness Deech of the OIA. "This is probably because there are so many graduates emerging onto the job market now that graduating with, say, a lower second, is insufficient for success."

Students are increasingly aware of the complaints procedures, she added. Years of rising debt levels among students culminating in the introduction of top-up fees have also made them demand more value for money, according to academics and student leavers. In all, 64 per cent of the complaints were related to degree or exam results – while 11 per cent were over disciplinary proceedings and accusations of plagiarism. The OIA recommended that universities pay £173,000 in compensation as a result.

The OIA is recommending that universities set up their own "campus ombudsmen" so that complaints could be dealt with more swiftly and simply.

It's interesting that so many of those complaining are postgraduates and mature students; I'm sure their willingness to complain isn't simply due to them having more at stake than undergrads. Rather, I suspect, it's simply the fact that their age and experience makes them less susceptible to bullying or being messed around; that's not to say that it makes them invulnerable, just that they're perhaps more likely to try to speak up when things are going wrong.

That's not to say that the issue of value for money isn't an important one. Universities constantly justify their actions nowadays by saying that the modern world demands that they be run like businesses -- think of University vice-chancellors and presidents claiming as a matter of course that they should be paid in line with the salaries that CEOs. That's fine, though it rather demands that the universities be run like well-run businesses, and that the students are treated either as valued customers or as stakeholders in the business. Unfortunately, it seems that these truths elude far too many universities.

The OIA's recommendation about campus ombudsmen seems almost too obvious, really, and indeed it's a point that Baroness Deech sensibly made a week or so back, describing a campus ombudsman as 'someone who sits on campus behind an open door and is ready to sort out students' grievances at an early stage... we believe it's a very good idea'.

Of course, like all these things, the office will only be as good as the person holding it. The real problem with the universities is often not so much that they've not got mechanisms to deal with problems, it's that the mechanisms aren't properly applied, and then their misapplication is condoned and approved of by people higher up the chain, effectively institutionalising what might charitably be deemed bad practice.

Baroness Deech is retiring this month; I'm pleased to see that her successor Rob Behrens will be a full-time appointment. He looks promising.

Of course, I've made the mistake of assuming that about people in the past.

Leaders by Acclamation

And so Brian Cowen is leader-designate of Fianna Fáil, and will be only the seventh leader in the party's 82-year history. And this being the way of things, in about a month's time he'll become our eleventh Taoiseach.

I was talking about this to an old friend last night, and couldn't help but grin at how it seemed only the other week -- in reality it was half a lifetime ago -- that he was bubbling over in school at the thought that Brian Cowen, his old family friend, someone his Mum had babysat in her day, had been appointed to the cabinet.

'Mam was talking to him last night,' he said, 'He's really excited.'
'I bet he is. How's your Mam taking it?'
'Oh, she's thrilled!'

It's far too strange, really. There shouldn't only be just one genuine link between me and the head of our government. I live in a village.

I passed the Dáil today when the Soldiers of Destiny were gathering outside for their family photograph. The last couple of weeks have been peculiar. Bertie's resignation was odd enough -- not that he didn't have reason to resign, just that he's brassed so much out already I'd assumed he'd keep going. But watching the Fianna Fáil leadership so calmly floating over to Cowan's head has been bizarre. It just seems freakish that the position shouldn't be contested. I appreciate how popular he is within the party, and how his loyalty is admired by all his colleagues, but even so, he's hardly the only person among the Fianna Fáil front ranks who'd have the ability and the appetite for the top job.


Speaking of uncontested elections, our society -- the second-oldest in the college -- appointed its new auditor today, joining an illustrious line that includes, um, me. Oddly, browsing through the auditorial list today, I realised just how rare elections have been in the society, and spoke to a couple of others who'd likewise taken the helm about this.

'I think I'm the only person in about fifteen years, maybe more, who was actually elected in a contested election,' I frowned.
'What? Someone ran against you?'
'Heh. No, it was the other way round. I ran against someone. There was already somebody who looked set to slide into the position without any objections. It's a long story.'
'What was the vote like?'
'Horribly close. I won by one vote. 41 for me, 40 against. Imagine if I hadn't voted for myself!'
'Hmmm. And it hasn't happened since. A short-lived experiment with democracy interrupting a long-line of automatic succession...'

University in Using Sledgehammer to Crack Nut Shocker!

There was a very peculiar story in the Times Higher the other day, picked up by the Telegraph yesterday, of how Anglia Ruskin University has reacted to the grievances expressed by one of its students.

It seems that one Naomi Sugai, a master's student doing some sort of business course and the student representative for that course, having grown frustrated with attempts to complain formally about how her course was being handled, decided to air her concerns publicly.

Basically, she filmed a short clip of herself claiming that she was was gathering evidence to complain to Trading Standards about the university; she specifically complained in the clip about timetables being issued late and inaccurately, and alleging that the University had said that its students could choose modules tailored to their needs, but that this hadn't happened on her course where all modules were compulsory.

She posted the clip on YouTube back on 25 February, and eventually it drew the attention of the University authorities, who in turn clearly felt a need to alert everyone else to their shortcomings. Claiming that comments posted on YouTube in response to the video were defamatory, the University suspended Naomi indefinitely, and barred her from the campus, with Steve Bennet, the Secretary and Clerk writing to inform her:

Should you attend the campus during your suspension, security staff have been instructed to remove you and, if necessary, to seek assistance from the police. Given the seriously defamatory nature of your comments, this matter has also been referred to our solicitors.

The supposedly defamatory comments have since been taken down, but the video itself is still online, and if you watch it you'll probably wonder why the University has made such a fuss. It's pretty inoffensive, really, just a girl sitting at a computer in her bedroom, talking to her webcam and grumbling vaguely about her course. If the University had stayed calm it's safe to say that this wouldn't have caught the attention of the national media, and wouldn't have inspired internet comment.

Do they not understand that creating martyrs is a bad idea?

Leaving aside the merits or otherwise of Naomi's case, and the fact that things are only defamatory if they are false, what intrigues me most about this is the notion that she could be prosecuted for comments made in connection with the video. The comments have since been removed, so it's not clear whether she made the comments herself or whether the comments were responses by others to the video. Common sense might suggest the former, but this comment of hers from yesterday suggests otherwise:

Belfast confetti I'm afraid I had to delete your comment as it could have been construed as "defamatory" and I have been told to regulate this site. I do not like to censorship but unfortunately I have no choice.

Isn't that interesting? It seems -- and it's important to say that the whole story may not be in play just yet -- that the University has threatened to prosecute her for something someone else has said! Are they just bluffing? After all, it would seem that she was neither the author nor the publisher of the offending comments -- YouTube is the publisher. How then could she be held responsible for them? Granted, she has to power to delete comments, but I think the University would be on shaky ground if it tried to argue that people ought to police all responses to things they've posted on the internet.

It's kind of funny reading the comments, though, both in response to the video and in connection with blogs commenting on it; quite a few people are remarking that they'd never even heard of Anglia Ruskin before this happened, while others simply ask why Naomi went there!