When in Rome... again

Ruth Gledhill's post yesterday, though written with tongue firmly in cheek, is nonetheless most amusing. It's nice to see Oxford Circus so prominently emblazoned with a Celtic Cross.

Of course, it's just a pedestrian crossing, but there's a cross there too, for those who choose the see it. That's the way of these things, as in the story from Chesterton's The Ball and the Cross that Pope John Paul I drew on in Illustrissimi, relating how the monk Michael addressed Professor Lucifer, who had shrieked on seeing the cross above St Paul's. Michael told Lucifer he had once known a man like him:

'As I was observing,' continued Michael, 'this man also took the view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and all unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect allegory of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began, of course, by refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round his wife's neck, or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that it was an arbitrary and fantastic shape, that it was a monstrosity, loved because it was paradoxical. Then he began to grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would batter the crosses by the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic country. Finally in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of the Parish Church and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and uttering wild soliloquies up there under the stars. Then one still summer evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and transfiguration which changes the world. He was standing smoking, for a moment, in the front of an interminable line of palings, when his eyes were opened. Not a light shifted, not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change in the eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses linked together over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick and went at it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path he broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every paling is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was a literal madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it for the cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image. He flung himself upon a bed only to remember that this, too, like all workmanlike things, was constructed on the accursed plan. He broke his furniture because it was made of crosses. He burnt his house because it was made of crosses. He was found in the river.'

Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.

'Is that story really true?' he asked.

'Oh, no,' said Michael, airily. 'It is a parable. It is a parable of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you end by breaking up the habitable world.'

Human Rites?
I couldn't help but think of this earlier, when I heard of today's decision from the European Court of Human Rights. The decision is deeply bizarre, and it's hardly surprising that people in Italy are reportedly up in arms about it.

It seems that Mrs Soile Lautsi, a Finnish lady who is also an Italian citizen, has been embroiled for eight years in a quarrel with the Italian authorities over the fact that her children had to attend school in a school where every classroom had a crucifix on its walls. Wanting her children to be educated in line with her beliefs, which would have required the crucifixes' removal, she approached the school and subsequently challenged the school's refusal in the Italian courts. Getting nowhere there, she eventually took the case to Strasbourg, where the seven judges who dealt with the case today ruled unanimously in her favour.

Drawing on article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights, and on article 2 of the Convention's first protocol, the Court found that 'The compulsory display of a symbol of a given confession in premises used by the public authorities... restricted the right of parents to educate their children in conformity with their convictions,' and likewise restricted the 'right of children to believe or not to believe'.

Mrs Lautsi was awarded €5000 as compensation for 'moral prejudice', but the Court refrained from directing the school to remove the crucifixes, and from advising the Italian State that the 1920s law, requiring the display of the crucifix, is incompatible with the Convention.

I have no idea whether she was awarded costs. It seems as though she wasn't.


The ECHR is NOT an instrument of the EU
There's a lot to chew on here, but it's worth starting by pointing out that the European Court of Human Rights, which implements and interprets the European Convention on Human Rights, is an instrument of the Council of Europe, and not the EU. It was established in 1950, so predates the EU by some time, and its remit governs 47 countries, whereas remit of the European Court of Justice, the EU's supreme court, extends only to the Union's 27 members. The UK's Human Rights Act, is based on the Convention, which makes it rather ironic that so many of the UK's 'Conservatives' want to repeal it, given the Convention's Conservative roots.

That the Convention has conservative roots seems far from insignificant in the current situation. I have difficulty believing that its signatories back in the day would have been keen to sign up to it -- or to decide that doing so should be a prerequisite for admission to the EU -- had they believed that their own laws, as they then stood, should be deemed in breach of the Convention.


The Basis for the Decision
It's worth taking a look at the Convention itself, to see the bits the Court has based its decision on. Article 9 has two parts and is as follows:

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
2. Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Article 2 of the Convention's first protocol throws important light on Article 9:

No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religions and philosophical convictions.

I think it's easy enough to see how the Court reached its decision. The Court clearly recognised that, given how the Italian state exercises certain functions regarding education and teaching, in that it has a national school system, the State should have respected the right of Mrs Lautsi to ensure that her children could be educated in line with her religious and philosophical convictions.


Well, yes.... but...
It seems to me that the first and most obvious problem with this is that Mrs Lautsi's children were hardly being taught in isolation. They were taught in classes, along with, say, twenty or more other children. Might it not have been the case that the parents of the other twenty or so children wanted their children educated in line with their convictions? Ought their convictions to have been dismissed in favour of Mrs Lautsi's?

It's probably worth bearing in mind that homeschooling is legal in Italy. Granted, it's very rare, but it is an option. That's not to say that Mrs Lautsi should have taken her children out of school, but she could have done so if she really wanted to. I know, that sounds drastic, but it happens in other countries when people aren't happy with the ethos in the local schooling system.

I also can't help but thinking St Ambrose of Milan's very old injunction that one should do as the Romans when one is in Rome. Mrs Lautsi is Finnish by birth and clearly at least partly by ancestry; she is hardly obliged to remain in Italy, and it seems a tad unreasonable that she should expect the Italian state to accommodate itself to her, rather than accommodating herself to it.

I'll have more on this issue, but not today.

Randall Munroe is a Genius

In the mountain range of comic brilliance, XKCD regularly leaps from pinnacle to pinnacle, but I think today's a particularly dazzling summit. The Lord of the Rings diagram is particularly clever, with up and down loosely corresponding to northwest and southeast, and there are a couple of nice touches with the Star Wars one, with the dotted line to represent the Special Edition, and with Luke's time with Yoda rightly summed up as 'Luke's Entire Jedi Training'. I mentioned this to my housemates the other day, saying Yoda's presumably spent the last twenty years in his swamp figuring out how to concentrate a couple of decades of Jedi training into just a couple of days.*

Anyway, I think Edward Tufte would approve of this, and wonder how Randall would cope trying to map out Bleak House or The Count of Monte Cristo.
_____________________________________________________
* Or a month. Or a few weeks. Or half an hour. It's basically impossible to tell how long Luke spent with Yoda, and attempts to correlate it in a terrifyingly nerdy way with how long it'd have taken Han and Leia to reach Bespin from Hoth without the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive are surely not the way to go. Star Wars is a fairy tale, after all.

Adventures in Advertising

There's a terrifying ad on the telly at the minute, that says something like 'Wake up to Laser Eye Surgery from just £395.'

Wake up to laser eye surgery?

On the Eve of All Saints

Oh dear. There was an article by Marina Hyde in yesterday's Guardian -- I know, I'm not quick with this, but I am busy elsewhere -- emblazoned with the heading 'The internet has done for Scientology. Could it rumble the Christians, too?'

The headings's probably the work of a sub-editor of course, as I gather Guardian journalists rarely write their own headings. Ms Hyde's not really talking about Christians in general here, or even using Christianity as catch-all to criticise all religions, though some of the commenters on the article believe this is so; all three of the critical references to other religions in the text are to Catholics in particular. She compares the Pope's response to certain Anglicans as an attempt to lure them into a cultish communion; she cites the rantings of Mel Gibson, who espouses a rather peculiar strain of Catholicism, about the apparently inevitable damnation of Anglican wife; and she imagines a senior cardinal being asked whether he accepts -- albeit in caricatured form -- the most basic teachings of the Catholic faith. Frankly, it looks as though she has an axe to grind against Catholicism in particular, in that peculiarly English way. But I digress.

Predictably, Ms Hyde is picking up on the story of how the French have found the Church of Scientology guilty of serious fraud, and indeed on other recent developments:

'In France, Scientology was found guilty of defrauding its followers after a judge effectively debunked the idea of the church's trusty e-meter, a crude polygraph whose readings are used to encourage Scientologists to purchase everything from books to extreme sauna courses. In Los Angeles, the Oscar-winning (even if it was only for the abysmal Crash) director Paul Haggis cut his ties with Scientology in protest at what he branded their tolerance of homophobia, adding for good measure that the church's claim that they do not tell people to "disconnect" from unsupportive family members was untrue – his own wife had been ordered to do so. Meanwhile, Scientology's chief spokesman Tommy Davis stormed out of a television interview with Martin Bashir, after the latter pressed him on what we might delicately term "certain articles of faith". The alien stuff, basically.'

Hyde's general argument is that all this has happened because of the internet, that the internet has proven a threat to Scientology that L. Ron Hubbard never imagined facing. Structurally, Scientology is a mystery religion -- like the Greeks had at Eleusis, say, or the Gnostics who played with the Christian template in the centuries when the early Church was fighting to survive. It claims secret knowledge, and for a price you can be initiated into that knowledge, being purified in the process; the more you pay, the more you learn, and the purer you get. The thing is, thanks to the internet, huge amounts of the Scientologists' secret knowledge is in the public domain, and -- as South Park caricatured it in 'Trapped in the Closet'- it's not really very likely. Alien warlords? Spaceships like DC-8 airliners? Intergalatic genocide? Hydrogen bombs? Volcanoes? In fact, it's just the kind of scenario that a hohum pulp sci-fi writer from the middle of the last century might have been inclined to make up.

That's bad enough, but then there's all the whistleblower stuff, and most recently the thing with Paul Haggis, and then the rampant loopiness of what Tom Cruise said about Scientology last year, when I particularly loved how he was introduced:

'There is a worldwide arena where the game is played for the fate of whole populations . . . where one side schedules entire generations for psychiatric drugging, and marks five million more for lethal toxic exposure . . . Also on the board, scores of nations where no workable technology will even be permitted . . . and plans in play to keep people so restimulated they can barely envision a future, much less consider the eternal scope of Scientology.But there's someone on the other side of that global arena . . . Someone advancing Scientology on a fully epic scale to a very different future . . . And he is Class 4 OT7 Platinum Meritorious and IAS Freedom Medal of Valor Winner . . . Tom Cruise!'

And, then for me there's the jewel in the crown, which is that it's very easy to find solidly researched biographies of L. Ron Hubbard online, which depict him, frankly, as a fraudster, as someone who made this all up with the aim of making money.

That's the key point, really, and that, I think, is where Ms Hyde's article falls down. She goes on:

'Yet there is the rub. In France, Scientology is deemed a sect as opposed to a religion, which is why they are required to produce evidence for their claims, where recognised religious leaders are not. For those of us who believe that all religions are full of tall tales, this might seem slightly unfair [...] Clearly, Scientologists should be forced to justify their doctrinal lunacies – the only sadness is that other religions are apparently exempt from having to do the same. Imagine for a moment a Bashir-type interviewing some senior cardinal. "So," he might inquire, "you're saying that by some magic the communion wafer actually becomes the flesh of a man who died 2,000 years ago, a man who – and I don't want to put words into your mouth here – we might categorise as an imaginary friend who can hear the things you're thinking in your head? And when you've done that, do you mind going over the birth control stuff?"'

I know, this is silly: the Scientologists are being asked about their beliefs because they 're a mystery religion that in return for payment will reveal secret knowledge; Christians wouldn't need to be grilled in quite this way, as Christian teaching is freely accessible to everyone. In a way, though, she does have a point. Extraordinary claims can hardly be taken on face value; these things need to be justified, and Christians, for example, shouldn't expect to be treated with kid gloves. Indeed, 1 Peter 3.15 pretty much says we should expect to have to justify our beliefs: and should always be ready to do so: 'always be prepared to make a defence to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.'

The thing is, though, if you're going to ask someone to justify their beliefs, you have to be prepared to listen to what they say. And I don't mean to smile and nod politely, I mean to listen. Given that we all too often find each other's beliefs to be, to a greater or lesser degree, ridiculous, the big questions here are surely not so much based around 'what?' as they are variants on 'why?'

Some of these questions are philosophical and scientific, such as 'why do you believe there is more to the universe than meets the eye?', or 'why do you think, in an exclusively material universe, one pack of neurons is more valuable than another?' or 'why do you think, in an exclusively material universe, you have any control over how the atoms bounce in your head?', but others are historical...

Is there any basis for Scientology's fundamental beliefs other than the claims of L. Ron Hubbard, who made huge amounts of money from his claims? Is there any basis for Mormonism's fundamental beliefs other than the claims of Joseph Smith, who was widely regarded as a fraudster in his own time and who gained influence and several dozen wives from the religion he founded? Is there any basis of Islam's fundamental beliefs other than the claims of Muhammad, who used his claims to rally an army and conquer Arabia? Is there any basis for Christianity's fundamental beliefs other than the claims of -- as Paul says at 1 Corinthians 15 -- witnesses such as St Peter, St James, St Paul, and hundreds of Christ's other followers, none of whom had anything to gain from the claims they made, and many of whom faced persecution and death for making these claims?

These are the kind of questions that should be asked. I don't mind justifying what I believe, but if someone's going to demand an explanation, they ought to be willing to listen to it.

Whether you consider it a religion or not, Scientology's a new phenomenon, not yet 60 years old, and it's one that's had a very ease ride so far; this is something Ms Hyde seems to be skating over. It's a shame, she says, that other religions are exempt from having to justify their beliefs. I can't speak for Buddhism, Hinduism, and so forth, but I'll say this: Christians have been justifying their beliefs for two millennia. For the first three hundred years of the Faith they regularly did so at the point of a Roman sword, and even now, throughout the world, this is still all too often the case. It'd be worth thinking of the martyrs tomorrow, especially given how there may well have been more of them in twentieth century than in all the previous Christian centuries combined.

It's one thing to attack religions; it's another to attack them because you can't be bothered finding out about them. It's not close-minded to disbelieve religious claims, but it is close-minded to dismiss them without considering the evidence fairly and thoroughly. This stuff has been justified, and continues to be justified every day. I'm not saying that Ms Hyde would accept these arguments, but it seems remarkable that she's unaware that they're out there. They don't just hide that information in books, you know, nor do they only proclaim it in churches that are open to all. It's on the internet too.

You know, the thing that's rumbled the Scientologists.

A Bruton rather than a Briton?

I was more than a little startled to read yesterday morning that John Bruton has decided to put his name forward for the Presidency of the European Council, should the Lisbon Treaty be signed into Czech law by Mr Klaus. I just hadn't seen it coming at all. The debate about the Presidency has been annoying me for ages, mainly because people keep referring to it as the European Presidency, when it's nothing of the sort, and because people in England have been getting their knickers in a twist over the prospect of Tony Blair getting the job.

Frankly, I don't know what David Miliband was on about the other day, when he said that Blair would be perfect for this job, as he believed that 'we need somebody who can do more than simply run through the agenda. We need someone who, when he or she lands in Beijing or Washington or Moscow, the traffic does need to stop and talks do need to begin at a very, very high level.'

The Council President's main job is to chair a handful of meetings -- or summits, I suppose -- every year. That's it. I can't really see him being called upon to go and conduct talks at the highest level -- that's surely a job for the President of the Commission, or, more probably, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. But if the President has to be sent in to negotiate, well, does anyone really think someone making a common case for 500 million people who generate more than 30 per cent of the World's GDP is really going to be ignored?

Surprised though I was, I, like Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber, think Bruton must have a serious chance of being selected for this role. I think Jan-Peter Balkenende, from the Netherlands, is probably the most likely contender, but I reckon Bruton's got a fair chance.


Let's look at the main names in the frame: Blair, Bruton, and Balkenende, as noted; Jean-Claude Juncker from Luxembourg; Belgium's Guy Verhofstadt; Vaira Vike-Freiberga from Latvia; Austria's Wolfgang Schuessel; Spain's Felipe Gonzalez; and Finland's Martti Ahtisaari.

It seems the Spanish have said that the Socialists are interested in the High Representative role, so it looks as though the symbolically more important Presidency is being ceded to the centre-right; this is hardly surprising given that almost every country in the EU currently has a centre-right government. Now, Blair is hardly on the left in real terms, but he is technically there, so he's surely out of the running for the top job. So too are the more genuinely left wing Gonzalez and Ahtisaari.

That leaves Juncker, Balkenende, Verhofstadt, Schuessel, Vike-Freiberga, and Bruton. They're all from small countries, so won't get anyone's back up, and are all from the centre-right.

Verhofstad will get nixed by the British, because Belgium and the UK can get arsey with each other in European matters, so unless there's a trade-off with Miliband to be High Commissioner, that probably reduces the list to five.

Likewise, Juncker would probably be seen by Britain and the Poles as 'too European' -- he's basically what you'd draw if you were asked to draw a caricature of a Eurocrat -- and will likewise almost certainly be ruled out. It's a shame, as given his years and years of EU experience, and his ability to get things done quietly, he'd be very good, but I think his obvious expertise, experience, and enthusiasm for the European project shall almost certainly hurt him. Four left, so.

Angela Merkel likes Austria's Shuessel, but I think this might be seen as German patronage, and more importantly others will see him as too right wing -- he'd had Haider's party as his junior coalition partners, after all. I have a feeling the socialist Spaniards will have doubts, for starters, and can't see this one flying. I hear he can't speak French either, and if true, that alone could irk Sarkozy; the French can be funny about these things. That leaves three.

Latvia's Vike-Freiberga could be a dark horse, and I'd half like her to get the job, because she'd probably be a reasonable choice and then I could namedrop by telling people that I met her in London a few years back. I doubt she has a real chance, though, as I suspect Germany would block her candidacy, given how pally Germany is with Russia nowadays: the Russians don't like the Baltic states. She was proposed as UN Secretary General a few years ago, and withdrew her candidacy after the Russians made it clear they would oppose any Eastern European Candidate.

Balkenende and Bruton then.


I reckon Balkenende has to be the favourite, not least because he's currently in his fourth stint as Dutch Prime Minister and knows everyone at the table who'll be making this decision. On the other hand, I can't help wondering whether it'd be wise for him to jump ship from the Netherlands at the minute, given the possibility of Geert Wilders and his crowd making further inroads into Dutch politics. What's more, I can't help thinking that the fact that he couldn't persuade the Dutch to vote for the EU Constitution back in 2005 might be held against him. After all, if it's possible -- wrongly -- to argue that Blair denied the British a referendum on the Constitution, imagine what could be said against Balkenende: the Dutch voted against the Constitution and then Balkenende went ahead and ratified a similar treaty anyway. He could look like a personification of the democratic deficit, and that wouldn't do the Union any good.


So what of Bruton? Well, frankly, I think he could be a brilliant compromise candidate that wouldn't pose any difficulties for anyone. To start with, he meets the basic criteria by being a Christian Democrat from a small country that's a member of the Eurozone. Although he's a conservative, his track record of working productively with left-wingers is impressive: his cabinet consisted of him, eight further TDs from Fine Gael, seven Labour TDs, and one TD from the Democratic Left. Despite him being a conservative Catholic it was his government that introduced divorce into Ireland, so he's not too conservative; on the other hand, his largely left-wing government introduced the low corporation tax that played such a huge role in creating the Celtic Tiger, so economic liberals should like him. In short, he's a right winger that doesn't throw his weight around and plays well with others.

What's more, he's deeply pro-European, but I don't think is so much so as to scare the likes of the British and the Poles, in the way that a Benelux candidate might; indeed, having worked closely with Conservative and Labour governments over Northern Ireland, I think he could be someone that British would be very comfortable with. His European credentials are impeccable, though. He was the effective head of the successful campaign to have the Maastricht Treaty ratified in Ireland, despite being in opposition at the time, and as Taoiseach he chaired the European Council and helped lay the foundations of the Euro. After leaving office he served as one of the delegates that drafted the proposed European Constitution -- which was ditched in the end, but which was substantially salvaged via Lisbon -- and has been the EU's ambassador to the United States for the past five years.

That's important too. Being Brussels's man in Washington has given him serious familiarity with America already, and it's worth noting that he addressed Congress back in 1996. Indeed, if the Council President is ever called upon to negotiate with the Americans -- and again, that's not really the President's envisaged role -- then I think he'd do okay. While no Blair, his last few years will have given him useful connections, and being an English speaker he'd come across as less exotic than Juncker, Balkenende, or any of the others. I think an ability to speak the Americans' language could prove a serious advantage, as could the fact that he embodies the responsible phase of the Celtic Tiger rather than the crazy excesses of the Fianna Fáil years.

What puzzles me most about this, though, is that Bruton came forward and nominated himself. writing to the 27 governments to ask to be considered for the job. Cowen has had to shuffle out to support the nomination. This is pretty irregular. It'd be more normal for someone to ask him in an interview -- and an interview would easily be contrived -- whether he would like the Council Presidency, and he'd say that he'd be honoured to be considered, and that he'd relish the challenge of the job blah blah blah, and then the Irish government or another would bring his name up when the heads of government meet in conclave. As it were.

But he came right out with this? Why? He's never come across as an arrogant or a reckless man. Does he know something we don't?

I reckon Balkenende's still the favourite, but it's probably only 60:40.

Give us your misogynists and bigots...

There's a remarkable piece by Richard Dawkins over at the Washington Post's site, which is drawing a lot of fire from Catholics, largely because if he'd spoken this way of Judaism he'd have been quite rightly identified as a vicious anti-semite, and because if he'd written anything like this about Islam -- well, he'd probably feel he'd have to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.

The premise of the article is rather strange, given that it's a response to the following question:

'The Vatican is making it easier for Anglicans -- priests, members and parishes -- to convert to Catholicism. Some say this is further recognition of the substantial overlap in faith, doctrine and spirituality between the Catholic and Anglican traditions; others see it as poaching that could further divide the Anglican Communion. What do you think?'

Professor Dawkins seems an odd person to direct such a question to, given that he's neither an expert in theology or the history of ecumenism, and and thinks all varieties of Christianity to be utter hogwash. Faced with such a question, you'd have thought he would have responded by saying that he didn't care, and that as far as he can it's just a classic case of two bald men fighting over an imaginary comb.

Sadly, while Professor Dawkins is an atheist, I think it's fair to say that he's a very conventional Anglican atheist, in that he's a product of England's semi-Protestant culture, and as such he's weighed down by the mass of anti-Catholic baggage that sadly burdens all too many English minds. Given an opportunity to shrug off recent developments as a complete irrelevance, he instead let loose a torrent of anti-Catholic bile.


By 'Evil' do you just mean 'Counter-Productive'?
His opening is dramatic, of course, rhetorically asking 'What major institution most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world?', and decreeing that 'In a field of stiff competition, the Roman Catholic Church is surely up there among the leaders.'

I'd like to see the other contenders on Professor Dawkins' shortlist, not least because I wonder what he ranks as major institutions and I wonder whether any of the other contenders on the shortlist are things other than institutions -- things such as greed, envy, fear, and human nature in general.

I'd hope so, though if so, I'd wonder why human nature didn't win hands down. Leaving that aside, though, it seems perverse to see the world's foremost private provider of healthcare and of education as being uniquely wicked. In fact, it seems especially strange given the emphasis on caring for the poorest of the poor especially in Africa.

Much of what Professor Dawkins says is simply too vague or too subjective to counter, but some things are worth addressing. Try this heap of hooey:

'The Anglican church does not cleave to the dotty idea that a priest, by blessing bread and wine, can transform it literally into a cannibal feast; nor to the nastier idea that possession of testicles is an essential qualification to perform the rite. It does not send its missionaries out to tell deliberate lies to AIDS-weakened Africans, about the alleged ineffectiveness of condoms in protecting against HIV.'

Granted, he doesn't actually say that the Catholic Church does the things he here specifically says the Anglican Communion doesn't do, but I think it's implied. It's worth considering for a minute whether these charges are fair.


Priesthood and the Eucharist
To begin with, Catholics don't believe that the Eucharist is a form of cannibalism, although non-Christians have misunderstood this from the start. This was a charge Christians faced from at least the second century, when they were persecuted and regularly accused of engaging in 'Thyestean banquets'. Rather, Catholics hold that at Communion they partake in the glorified body of Christ, under the appearance of bread and wine.

Secondly, it's true that the Anglican Communion doesn't accept transubstantiation as a matter of doctrine, and indeed that the 28th Article of the Church of England explicitly rejects transubstantiation as a concept, but High Church Anglicans have long believed in transubstantiation, and in 1971 the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission issued an Agreed Statement on Eucharistic Doctrine which stated that they had 'reached substantial agreement on the doctrine of the Eucharist'.

I'm not sure why Professor Dawkins seems to regard sexism as nastier than cannibalism, but in any case it's of course nonsense to say that Catholics believe that the rite of Eucharistic consecration can't be performed by anyone without testicles. I'm not sure whether Professor Dawkins is being ignorant or simply crude here, because I'm fairly sure there are a few priests out there now who've received drastic treatment for testicular cancer, and who are still saying mass.

What Professor Dawkins is trying to get at, I presume, is that Catholics believe that only priests can celebrate the Eucharist, and only men can be priests. Now, you might think that's nonsense or unfair or outright misogynistic, but that's a debate for another day; what's significant here is that a significant minority of Anglicans share this belief. It seems that at least a part of the Anglican Communion cleaves to exactly the same 'dotty ideas' as the Catholic Church.


African Condoms
As for the idea that the Catholic Church sends missionaries to Africa to tell deliberate lies to AIDS-weakened Africans, well, I'm afraid this is bosh. Yes, it's true that incredibly stupid things have been said by at least one cardinal, at least one archbishop, and a host of priests and nuns, but it seems to be tad on the defamatory side to be claiming, firstly, that these were deliberate lies rather than sincerely believed falsehoods, and also I'd wonder why Professor Dawkins seems to think this is a policy. Does the Church send missionaries to Africa to tell people about the ineffectiveness of condoms in combatting HIV and AIDS? Or does it send them there to tell them about, well, Jesus? If it's the former I'm sure there must be a directive to this effect somewhere. No? Oh, well, fancy that.

One might interpret the Pope's comments on this matter as a policy statement, of course, because you may remember how back in March the Pope said that AIDS could not be overcome by the distribution of condoms. You'll probably remember quite a few people throwing a fit over this, not least President Sarkozy, but you may not recall the reaction of Edward C. Greene, who heads the AIDS Prevention Center at the Harvard Center for Population and Developmental Studies, who said 'the best evidence we have supports the Pope's comments'.

Needless to say, people got huffy about this too, citing instances where people have multiple partners, but I think it's pretty obvious that in a situation where AIDS is rife, the nhaving more than one sexual partner, whether or not you use a condom, isn't exactly a good idea. After all, they sometimes break, for starters. It seems, as it happens, that in areas with the biggest AIDS problems, people often use condoms

For what it's worth, more than half of all projects in Africa that combat AIDS are run by the Catholic Church, and more than a quarter of all HIV care in Africa is provided by Catholic agencies -- yes, agencies of that same Catholic Church that Professor Dawkins sees as a contender for the the title of 'the greatest force for evil in the world'. In terms of educating people in order to limit and prevent the spread of AIDS, sure, they teach abstinence and faithfulness, which seems to work, if the Ugandan figures mean anything, which they might not.

Where do condoms fit into this? We all know the Church is opposed to them, of course, but doesn't it seem somewhat paradoxical that someone merrily disregarding the Church's precepts on sex outside marriage should feel obliged to abide by its teaching on contraception? Besides, contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church doesn't teach anything at all about the use of condoms outside of marriage. No really, it doesn't. Sex outside of marriage is simply forbidden, and as a rule, the Church generally doesn't advise its flock on how best to sin.


Do we 'belong' to a Church or do we 'have' a Religion?
On Professor Dawkins goes, then, spluttering 'Poaching? Of course it is poaching. What else could you call it?' Let's see. A hefty minority of Anglican clergy, many of whom regard themselves as Catholic, have been unhappy in the Anglican Communion for some time. Many of these have been seeking some kind of reunion with the See of Peter for a long time, and had hoped to do so while retaining their Anglican identity. They've been knocking at Rome's door for ages, and the Pope having finally opened it, has said that if they want to come in, they're more than welcome, and indeed, they can keep their coats on if they insist.

They don't have to become Catholics if they don't want to. It's up to them. They can think for themselves, after all. I'm not sure Professor Dawkins realises this.


The Argument from Personal Incredulity
Why would they want to do this? Well, here Professor Dawkins can envisage only two possible explanations, being misogyny and homophobia. I'm not sure why he sees these as the only possible explanations -- it may be that he's not looked at any evidence, whether statistical or anecdotal, or it may be that he just can't imagine any other possibilities, and so assumes that his prejudices must explain everything.

I'm afraid his explanations are a bit subtle for me anyway. He seems to be saying that some of the Anglicans who'll swim the Tiber are homophobes who are joining a homophobic institution that's a refuge for homosexuals, while others believe the forgiveness of sins and the consecration of bread and wine so that it becomes the glorified body and blood of Christ are humble and unexacting duties. Paradoxes again, eh?


Statistically Informed Science?
On he goes, with a smirk, declaring,

'Turning to the motives of the poachers, here we find cause for real encouragement. The Roman Catholic Church is fast running out of priests. In Ireland in 2007, 160 Catholic priests died, while only nine new recruits were ordained. To say the least, those figures don't point towards sustainability. No wonder that disgusting institution, the Roman Catholic Church, is dragging its flowing skirts in the dirt and touting for business like a common pimp.'

Leaving aside how I'm not sure if Professor Dawkins understands what a pimp is -- they don't wear skirts, to my knowledge, though maybe he's more familiar with them than I am -- it's simply not true to say that the Church is running out of priests.

Sure, in Ireland the number of priests is indeed dropping, but so too are the numbers in the pews, unfortunately, and there were probably far too many priests anyway, even leaving aside the bad ones. Professor Dawkins's figures seem a bit out of date, anyway, given that it looks as though vocations may be on the rise in Ireland, where 38 seminarians started studying for the priesthood last month. As for England, two friends of mine have entered seminaries in the last year or so, so I think things may be healthier here than meets the eye too. Of course, the claim that the Roman Catholic Church is fast running out of priests is hopelessly Eurocentric anyway. Far from being in decline, the number of priests around the world is -- just about -- on the rise, as it has been for the last decade.

I know. You can prove anything with facts, can't you?

How to Draw Comics the Liefeld Way

There was a time when I used to want to be a comic artist, and among my inspirations was one Rob Liefeld. Don't get me wrong: I didn't think he was good. No, I was astonished even then by how bad his drawing was -- and I could tell this by just flicking through his 'work' before buying something a bit more credible in the Forbidden Planet -- and was convinced that if he could make a fortune from something so egregiously bad, well, surely I could make at least a living.

Obviously, things haven't worked out that way, and as the years have passed my scorn for Mr Liefeld has faded along with my ambitions towards being a comic artist. You forget, after all.

Until tonight.

There's a lovely post on Crooked Timber today entitled 'The Dark Depths of Comics History', pointing to the odd 1990s phenomenon of Marvel Comics swimsuit issues. Yeah, I know. Look, don't blame me. I'm an ardent admirer of Sturgeon's Law. It highlights a detail of a drawing in which lush inking and subtle colouring are cleverly deployed to disguise the fact that the actual drawing is terrible:

'Where exactly is either his left shoulder or the left side of his chest? Did his shoulder just sort of give up on becoming an arm and then the arm tried again, launching itself out, a bit below, where the intercostals should be? I could stare for hours. It’s like a cross between a Japanese sand garden and a fancy butcher shop.'

It's quite special, really, but the post itself is utterly trumped by the comment thread which leads, by some comic book variant of Godwin's law, to the pit of excrement that is Rob Liefeld's artwork.

Here, for instance, is Rob's take on Captain America -- and I hope both Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were dead by the time this was drawn, as this sort of thing just shouldn't be allowed. One of the commenters, Gareth Rees, sizes it up and drily remarks that 'Liefeld’s Captain America is the result of merging two different perspectives into one picture: his shoulder is seen side-on, and his chest at an oblique angle. It’s the same kind of distortion used to get the buttocks and breasts of female characters visible at the same time. It’s a technique that goes back at least to the cubists.'

This drew the response that 'It’s not just that, but part of his back is visible as part of the side-on angle, and his other shoulder is missing from where it should be given the chest angle. You’d have to tear his torso in half to force it into that pose.'

Good, eh? It gets better, though, as Gareth Rees has linked to a marvellous site dedicated to 'The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings'. Now, I'd say they're not so much the worst Liefeld drawings as a representative sample, but what the hell, they need to be studied. I've hardly been able to breathe for laughing since seeing them, and given how my life has been the last couple of months, that's quite an achievement.

It's still beyond me why anybody bought this stuff, let alone why they bought it in such massive quantities. Baffling.

Take this beauty, for instance, number 16 on the list, of which it is entirely fair to say:

'How many teeth are in a mouth? Like a billion, right? I’ll just draw a billion, all the same size and shape.

All of the characters on this page are in the same room. Not that you’d know that, given the way Liefeld draws the majority of his backgrounds. Where most artists would include, say, details of the room or an actual background, Rob uses groundbreaking techniques like, DAGWOOD’S HAIR! HORIZONTAL LINES! CURVES! And CROSSHATCHING!

Seriously, if that establishing shot weren’t there you’d think these people were all just kind of abstract concepts. What are they, in a wind tunnel? Who gives a shit, get back to people holding swords.'

I know, astonishing, eh? And this isn't even close to being the worst piece of Liefeld art there. No, you need to see his reluctance to draw feet, his inability to draw hands, his obsession with really big guns that rest on clenched fists, his tendency to draw women standing en pointe if their feet must be shown at all, his fetish for pouches, his perplexing theory of shadows, his prediliction for drawing freakishly endowed men, and his utter ignorance of female anatomy. The last point, apparently, is easily explained:

'The most important thing you need to know before reading about all the terrible things Rob Liefeld has drawn is that he has never seen or talked to a woman in his life and has no idea what they look like or how their bodies operate. If you asked Rob Liefeld to draw a diagram of the uterus he'd put on a pair of gauntlets and punch the shit out of your chalkboard. This is how the man operates, and though I know it sounds like a lot, you have to believe me. I don't want you looking at the stuff he's drawing and think he's a conscious adult male with a creative job who can and has influenced the minds of young artists. The man is a pair of blue jeans with a face. He has on a backwards cap, and when he turns it around, it's still backwards.'

Seriously, it's priceless. And that's just his drawing. Because he wrote too...

Premier League 2010-11: Survival of the Fittest?

It's been a pretty grim week to be an Everton supporter, what with losing 5-0 to Benfica last Thursday in a match we didn't need to win, succumbing 3-2 to Bolton in one we surely did, and then being knocked out of the Carling Cup by Spurs this evening, going down 2-0.

The reaction over on Toffeeweb is understandably grim, but strangely, most of anti-Moyes crowd are being unusually quiet at the minute. Relatively so, anyway. I'm not sure if it's because they think this is just because the results speak for themselves, or because they reckon this is all down to injuries.

Is that a cop out? I don't think so. If you go over to this remarkable site, you'll see that at the moment Everton is clearly the most battered side in the Premier League, with ten people out injured, eight of the ten being regular starters, and two being regular subs. To put that into context, all bar three sides currently have five or fewer men injured; indeed, Everton has more men out than Villa, Hull, Stoke, Sunderland, and Wigan combined. Add this to the fact that we have one of the Premier League's smallest squads, and fielding a team is proving increasingly tricky; Moyes seems to have little option but to play regulars out of position along with youngsters and lads that aren't fully match-fit. The subs benches have tended to be almost for show, given the inexperience of the players sitting on them; tactical substitution seems scarcely to be an option. It's not really surprising that we've been getting tonked.

The thing is, though, I can't help but wonder how next season's going to pan out. After all, the plan is that next season no Premier League side should have more than 25 players in its squad. Obviously, this is intended to stop absurdities like last year when Liverpool had 62 players on the books, while the average club had 41.

I think it's safe to say that if you reduced Everton's squad to 25 players, that 25 would include the injured 10. That'd leave us with 15 functioning players, those presumably being the eleven starters from tonight and four of the six subs.

The point being: next season could be very interesting, given that every side will have a squad smaller than Everton's current one. I'm not even sure it'll be possible for teams to compete meaningfully in four competitions, and I suspect utility players rather than positional specialists may become the norm. There's a serious chance that the League could well wind up being a simple campaign of attrition, with health rather than wealth being the deciding factor in who wins, in which case it may not be Manchester City's money that breaks the top four cartel -- it may all come down to who has the fewest injuries.

In terms of turning the Premier League into an actual competition, this can only be good, but I suspect it's not going to be pretty. Evolution is anything but elegant, after all.

Holy Crap! Look at these Guys!

It's kind of strange that after this week's Question Time, there are those in the BNP who are none too happy with their leader, feeling that he's not obnoxious enough. Something like that, anyway. According to the Guardian, the BNP's legal officer, Lee Barnes, has been far from discreet in his disapproval:

Barnes complained on his personal website that Griffin "should have stood up to these whining, middle-class hypocrites that use the race card for self-enrichment – and thrown the truth right back into their fat, sanctimonious, hypocritical, self-serving faces". He accused his party's leader of "failing to press the attack" on the "ethnic middle class" for "taking up the best jobs while still playing the bogus race card for every opportunity". And in a move that is likely to reinforce concerns that Griffin's appearance will spark violence, Barnes used his personal website to suggest that "perhaps there needs to be a few 'white riots' around the country a la the Brixton riots of the 1980s before the idiot white liberal middle class and their ethnic middle-class fellow travellers wake up".

Charming, eh? Of course, there are worse folk out there than the BNP... have you heard of the BPP? Yes, the British People's Party, who despise the BNP for its opposition to racism. No, really, they do.

These guys manage the curious feat of making the BNP look reasonable. Their spiritual leader seems to have been responsible for drawing up their 'eternal principles' that 'still hold good today'. It's nice to learn that eternal principles don't get outdated within a few decades, but I'm not sure on these, though. Adolf Hitler as a gift from god? As NMRBoy said to me last night, it probably gives these guys an instant advantage in internet flame wars. You can't really accuse them of falling victim to Godwin's Law, after all...

They fight, and fight, and fight and fight and fight

After a seminar the other day, I read the most extraordinary article from the new Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. I think the general thrust of it is generally right, but at times it crosses the line into -- well -- into rather unacademic language, which is particularly odd given that its occasionally deployed against a colleague.

I'm baffled by what's intended a complement to one academic, who is described as having 'took up his shillelagh for the soundness of the tradition.' A shillelagh? In the hands of one of the most English people imaginable? Frankly, it was difficult getting past that, but I'm glad I did because it brought me to this, and I'm changing names for the sake of discretion:

'Jeff and Geoff, as proper classicists, were acutely alert to anachronism: they called for one ancient genre, history, to be colonized by other ancient genres, rhetoric and drama. So the adoption of their theories by this cynical crew must inspire in Jeff and Geoff the same strange mixture of horror and pride that a father might feel upon learning that his fourteen-year old son has got a classmate with child.'

Good, eh? It gets better. Its finale is as follows:

'Finally, when history is cast out of the Latin historians, discarded also are the robust intellectual habits of the modern historian, to be replaced, if the restraint of stern philology fails, with the weak and whimsical instruments of the contemporary literary critic. A sense of argument, of proof, of scale, of proportion -- even of logic and coherent language -- all depart. Scholarship becomes indistinguishable from its parody, and the subject of inquiry shifts from the geysering fascination of antiquity to the dull, trend-obsessed, and self-obsessed mind of the critic. The result is like the diary of a fat teenager: riveting only to its creator, repellent to others, and illuminating to none.'

That's telling them.