Holy Hookers and Historical Myths...

I first  heard about Sacred Prostutution a few months before I started university, in an episode of Neil Gaiman and Jill Thompson's 'Brief Lives' storyline in Sandman. The episode, touching on themes that Gaiman would later explore far more fully in American Gods, was at least in part about happens to gods when people stop believing in them. In this case, the Babylonian goddess Astarte, or Ishtar, has been reduced to working in an American strip club, soaking up the 'worship' offered her by her drooling clients.

Temple Prostitution is first attested in the pages of Herodotus, and at the time I first heard of it, I didn't know quite how delightfully unreliable Herodotus is. I happen to like him a lot, and work with him constantly, but one needs to sample him with the saltshaker at the ready. Herodotus talks about sacred prostitution as part of a discursus on Babylon in the first book of his Histories, where he says:

'There is one custom among these people which is wholly shameful: every woman who is a native of the country must once her life go and sit in the temple of Aphrodite and there give himself to a strange man.* Many of the rich women, who are too proud to mix the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages with a whole host of servants following behind, and there wait; most, however, sit in the precinct of the temple with a band of plaited string round their heads -- and a great crowd they are, what with some sitting there, others arriving, others going away -- and through them all gangways are marked off running in every direction for the men to pass along and make their choice. Once a woman has taken her seat she is not allowed to go home until a man has thrown a silver coin into her lap and taken her outside to lie with her. As he throws the coin, the man has to say, 'In the name of the goddess Mylitta' -- that being the Assyrian name for Aphrodite. The value of the coin is of no consequence; once thrown it becomes sacred, and the law forbids that it should ever be refused. The woman has no privilege of choice -- she must go with the first man who throws her the money. When she has lain with him, her duty to the goddess is discharged and she may go home, after which it will be impossible to seduce her by any offer, however large. Tall, handsome women soon manage to get home again, but the ugly ones stay a long time before they can fulfil the condition which the law demands, some of them, indeed, as much as three or four years.'

I was thinking about this recently when I yet again came across someone on the Internet warbling about temple prostitution in ancient Corinth. This is, I'm afraid, a common trope in lazy Christian preaching, and someday I'll get round to tracking down why it's so popular. The guts of the issue is this: Saint Paul, in chapters five to seven of his First Letter to the Corinthians, has a lot to say about sexual immorality in Corinth, and so all too often when people talk about this they wheel out cliches about how Corinth was particularly notorious in the ancient world as a centre of sexual vice, and how the huge temple of Aphrodite had thousands of sacred prostitutes and was the corrupt heart of Corinth's decadence. Sometimes you'll even hear rubbish about how Paul's comments at I Corinthians 11 about women covering their hair were driven by his desire that long-haired Christian women not be confused with long-haired prostitutes from the Temple. 

This, frankly, is poppycock, and one of those things that set my teeth on edge. Sure, there's a lot of argument about what means what in ancient history, but you don't need to dig into the real research to find out how ridiculous it is that anyone should be holding that first-century Corinth was a bastion of cult prostitution. The whole idea is a modern myth, based on a spectacularly stupid and lazy reading of the following passage from Strabo's Geography, in which Strabo talks of how fabulously wealthy and powerful Corinth used to be, and after talking of Corinth's famously rich eighth- and seventh-century rulers, says:

'Again, Demaratus, one of the men who had been in power at Corinth, fleeing from the seditions there, carried with him so much wealth from his home to Tyrrhenia that not only he himself became the ruler of the city that admitted him, but his son was made king of the Romans. And the temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, courtesans, whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance, the ship captains freely squandered their money, and hence the proverb, "Not for every man is the voyage to Corinth."'

The son in question, for what it's worth, was Tarquinius Priscus, reputedly Rome's king between 616 and 579 BC, so what Strabo should be understood as saying here is that Corinth had been incredibly wealthy six hundred years before he wrote, and that back then the temple of Aphrodite was so rich it had a thousand temple prostitutes. That things were rather different in Strabo's own day are immediately apparent to anyone who bothers to read the next paragraph, in which Strabo comments at some length on how the former grandeur of the city is apparent when one looks at its ruined defensive walls and the remains of a building so badly ruined that he cannot tell whether it was a great palace or temple. He specifically says that the city of his own day is a new city, rebuilt by the Romans.

This, of course, would hardly be surprising to anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of ancient history or archaeology. Corinth had been destroyed by the Romans under Lucius Mummius in 146 BC, and was only reestablished as a city in 44 BC when Julius Caesar, shortly before his assassination, ordered it be rebuilt as a Roman colony. Over the following century, during which it became the capital of the new Roman province of Achaea, Corinth grew in size and once again became a thriving port city, albeit a Roman one, very different from the Greek one of centuries earlier. Like any other port, prostitution was common there, but we've no evidence whatsoever that suggests it was vastly more common in Corinth than in Massilia, Ostia, Alexandria, Brundisium, Piraeus, or any other first-century Mediterranean port.

Given how easy it is to find this out, I've got to a point where I have no patience with people who trot out this kind of rubbish. It's one thing for people in the pews to believe it; it's another for preachers in the pulpits to propound it. All teachers, of whatever sort, have an obligation to honesty and lazily repeating this kind of claptrap shows at best a cavalier attitude to historical reality. Temple Prostitution didn't exist in the Corinth of Saint Paul. It's as simple as that.

To be honest, whatever about the arguments that sacred prostitution never existed in the Mediterranean world, I'm very sceptical that Corinth at any rate was ever a centre for such a practice. A trip to the site should start one wondering, to begin with, not least because the ruins of the temple of Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth don't look like they could have been associated with a hundred temple prostitutes, let alone a thousand. Herodotus, talking about how disgraceful Babylonian temple prostitution is, and saying that a similar practice prevails in Cyprus, doesn't make any mention of Corinth; indeed, if cult prostitution was common in any major Greek city,  Herodotus would hardly have thought Babylonian temple prostitution so remarkable. It seems that the absolute most that could be said about Corinthian prostitution, even in the city's heyday, was that as a city with two ports, Corinth was a city with no shortage of prostitutes, and that all of Corinth's prostitutes were protected by the goddess Aphrodite, to whom they paid honour, but that in no way were their sexual relations associated with -- let alone performed in -- the temple.

* That's an unfamiliar man, not one who was notably strange, whether in appearance, manner, or way of life. Just, you know, in case you wondering.

Eolai's Cycling Tour of Ireland - And He's Off!

So, the Brother's finally set off on his jaunt -- a 32-County Painting Tour of Ireland. It was nodded to in a couple of pieces in yesterday's Irish Independent. 

He posted a thoughtful and witty and oddly poignant little recording on Audioboo in the early hours, before he'd packed and set out. It's worth a listen. I'm not sure where he is right now, but a few hours back he was painting in the hills south of Dublin somewhere.

The bike's impressively loaded, as you'll see, thanks to the Brother's Xtracycle, which he happily refers to on a regular basis as the best thing he ever bought. As far as I can tell he's carting around paints, brushes, canvas, a seat, tools, and all the other stuff you'd expect if you were cycling round a whole country, covering two or three thousand miles over a couple of months. Which, of course, you would do, wouldn't you?

Anyway, you should follow his adventures on his website, and on Twitter. I expect there'll be no shortage of pictures. It's about Irish social networking and the internet as much as it's about cycling and painting, after all.

Painful Lives

I had to go to Waterstone's in the Arndale Centre the other day as a birthday present needed buying. While there, present in hand, I got thoroughly baffled at why Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, Clive James's fascinating collection of biographical meditations, had been shelved alongside dictionaries and books on the history of English. It's basically a biographic compendium, or a collection of autobiographical thoughts, or a survey of the cultural history of the twentieth century. Take a look at what James has to say about Sophie Scholl, that being a fair sample of the hundred essays that comprise this wonder, and then ask yourself whether that's the kind of book that belongs with style guides and lexicons.

Mind, the science of shelving clearly eludes me. I mean, take a look at this, the 'Painful Lives' part of the Biography section. Make you you scroll right down to the bottom. 

 Or, at least, the Bottom's sister. Painful lives indeed. And the Queen Mum? Seriously?

The Myth of Constantine

Today being the Solemnity of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, celebrated throughout the Catholic and Orthodox world, and in theory in the Anglican one too, it seems as good a day as any to start into my Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church.

Most of these myths, as I've said, are straightforward misrepresentations of doctrine and practice, but three are myths that simply fly in the face of all historical evidence.

The first myth, then, is the claim that the Catholic Church was created by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.

The basic thrust of the myth is that before Constantine Christianity was a simple, pure faith, and that the semi-pagan Constantine spoiled it by adding all manner of pagan elements to it, thereby creating the corrupt institution that is the Catholic Church. If you're drawn to New Age stuff, you'll follow the variant of this you'll read and see in the likes of The Da Vinci Code, arguing that before Constantine came along Jesus wasn't even seen as divine. If you're a Protestant, you'll basically claim that Jesus had always been seen as divine -- which is true -- but that before Constantine came along the Church was just like your church, whatever that may be, with Constantine having added pretty much everything you disagree with in historical Christianity.

This is all nonsense, I'm afraid, and played no small part in why Blessed John Henry Newman conceded, following an extensive and thorough investigation of early Christian history, that 'To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.' It wasn't long, of course, before he felt that to do other than to assent to the authority of the Catholic Church would have been hypocritical.

Arian and Pagan Emperors
The first clues to the absurdity of this broad hypothesis, in whatever form, lie in what we know of the major characters of the era, with particular reference to dates. During the fourth century, there was rarely just one emperor at any given time, but nonetheless, certain figures were dominant, and it's worth thinking about them for a minute. Constantine I was on the scene between 306 and 337, and while nobody really understands Constantine's religious views, it's clear that by the end of his reign he tended more towards Arianism than Catholicism, and the fact of his moving the seat of imperial power to a Constantinople is a rather broad hint that he thought of Rome as an obsolete backwater. His son Constantius II who was around between 337 and 361 was at the very least semi-Arian. Constantine's nephew Julian ruled between 361 and 363, and persecuted the Church as part of a campaign to restore the Empire's pagan identity. His successor Jovian was an orthodox Christian but ruled for just one year, and Jovian's successors Valens and Valentinian were divided in their views, one being Arian and the other being Catholic. It was only with the accession of Theodosius I to the imperial throne in 379 that the whole empire was ruled by a Catholic.

A good barometer for judging the Catholicity, for want of a better word, of Rome's emperors during the period is to look at the life of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria. Athanasius was the Church's greatest champion of the orthodox view of the Incarnation, and was the first person who we know of to have identified the 27 books of the New Testament that Christians regard as canonical, listing them in his Easter Letter of 367. Over the course of his life Athanasius was exiled from his see in Alexandria by Constantine, by Constantius (twice), by Julian, and by Valens. Think about it: if the Catholic Church was really the quasi-pagan creation of the Roman emperors, would four emperors have gone to so much trouble to silence its greatest spokesman?

A Dog that Doesn't Bark
That's the first point. The second is this: we have no evidence whatsoever of a rupture in mainstream Christian belief and practice during the period, other than that Christian worship ceased to be a furtive activity; it became possible to build large churches for large congregations that could now worship in the open. Neither Ambrose nor Augustine, for instance, give any indication that the essential teachings and practices of Christianity had changed in any way under Valentinian and Theodosius.

What of under Constantine? Even despite his late Arian tendencies and his sidelining of Rome as a seat of imperial power -- in truth, it hadn't even been the nominal capital of the west since 286 -- might he not have corrupted Christian beliefs and practices in other ways, introducing Pagan Roman customs and ideas and thus in some sense creating the Catholic Church? Well, in principle this might have happened, of course, but good luck finding evidence of it: there isn't any. Now, sure, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but given that this was an era where people would riot over disputed points of dogma, Catholics and Arians falling to blows with depressing regularity, you'd at least expect to find some traces of dissent or approval about new teachings and new forms of worship.

Same Beliefs, Same Practices, Same Faith
Perhaps most importantly, we have quite a bit of evidence for what the Church was like well before Constantine, and, putting it bluntly, it is essentially and recognisably the Church today. Think of what most people regard as the most distinctive features of Catholic Christianity:

• Sunday as a day specially set aside for worship, with the Mass as the central act of worship, the Mass being understood as a sacrifice, and Christ being believed present in the Mass under the appearances of bread and wine.
• An ordained priesthood, with priests serving under local bishops, each one of these bishops serving as a point of local unity and as a conduit to the universal Church, claiming a pedigree of orthodox episcopal succession going back to the Apostles.
• The Church in Rome as having a unique primacy and authority in the Church, with the bishop of Rome claiming an episcopal succession back to St Peter, and acting as a visible point of unity for the whole Church.
• Honour being paid to the saints, veneration of the physical remains of saints, the belief that the saints in heaven can hear our prayers and pray for us, and the usefulness of prayers for the dead.

Every single one of these practices and beliefs is attested in Christian writings from more than a century before Constantine legalised Christianity. Clement of Rome, the author of the Didache, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, the author of the Martydom of Polycarp, the author of the Shepherd of Hermas, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Tertullian among others collectively attest to the Church of the second century -- indeed, the Church of the late first century too -- as being in its essentials recognisably the same Church that still exists today.

That's not to say that the Church is right about what it teaches and does -- though I think it is -- just that it has neither invented what it teaches now nor abandoned what it taught in Antiquity. This is something that can be tested quite easily. Sure, the Didache and Clement's Letter to the Corinthians, almost certainly the two earliest extra-Biblical Christian texts, were only rediscovered in the nineteenth century, but I don't think this is an excuse for people pretending or acting as if Christians wrote the Bible in the first century and never wrote another word afterwards,  ignoring the Bible and doing their own thing for the next 1400 years.

Indeed, leaving aside the fact that it flies in the face of all historical evidence, the whole notion that the Church as a whole went off the rails in Antiquity or the Middle Ages is profoundly unbiblical. The Bible features Jesus saying he will be with the Church always, assuring the Apostles that who hears them hears him, and guaranteeing the Apostles that the Spirit will guide them; it shows the Apostles and the elders of the Church in Jerusalem claiming to speak with the authority of the Spirit, and it identifyies the Church with Christ himself; indeed, Paul calls the Church the pillar and bulwark of truth. 

If anyone's determined to argue -- honestly -- that the Catholic Church, which even now includes roughly half the world's Christians, was founded by Constantine and not by Christ, they need to be able to justify this both historically and theologically. Where do they think the Church described in the Bible was to be found in the centuries between John and Luther, if it was not that Church that Ignatius and Augustine called Catholic?

______________________________________________________________

And if you don't believe me, go and take a look at the relevant sections in J.N.D. Kelly's Early Christian Doctrines, Henry Chadwick's The Early Church, and perhaps most especially the ancient Christian texts themselves in H.S. Bettenson's Documents of the Christian Church, James Stevenson's A New Eusebius: Documents Illustrating the History of the Church to AD 337, or the Penguin collection called Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers.

More than eight weeks of Summer gone already...

This is ridiculous. Seemingly Met Éireann, the Irish meteorological agency, has taken to running with all the other eejits that think that Summer is the three months of June, July, and August. It takes the view that Summer is defined as the three warmest months of the year, based on data over a thirty-year period; so Summer is, as far as they're concerned, June, July, and August in a typical year. It has, rightly, no time for the nonsensical claim that the seasons begin on the Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumn Equinox, and Winter Solstice, ascribing the use of these astronomical dates as markers for when seasons begin purely to the needs of diary manufacturers and the like, but this doesn't change the fact that their basic thesis is clearly absurd.

Think about it. It was the Summer Solstice just a few days back. What else do we call the Summer Solstice? Yes, it's Midsummer's Day. Midsummer. That's the clue. It falls in the middle of Summer. It's not just a quarter of the way in, much less the day that launches the season. It's pretty much bang in the middle of the season. Go and read Shakespeare, if this doesn't ring any bells.

To have the Solstice fall in the middle of Summer, Summer needs to take up May, June, and July. It's common sense. Likewise with the Winter Solstice -- if it's Midwinter's Day, as it is, then Winter must be November, December, and January.

Despite the meteorological agencies' claims, the traditional European seasons have never been defined by weather. They're not about climate. They're not about fluctuating temperatures, not least because that leads to honest people such as Swedish meteorologists admitting that seasons begin at different times in different years and in different places. They're about light and darkness as experienced in the Northern Hemisphere -- obviously, the months are differnt in the Southern Hemisphere, but the principle's the same. Summer is the quarter of the year when we have the most hours of daylight, and Winter's the quarter when we have the fewest. 

For what it's worth, this means that Autumn is defined as August, September, and October, something the Irish calendar makes very clear, as the Irish names for September (Meán Fómhair) and October (Deireadh Fómhair) literally mean "middle of autumn" and "end of autumn".

And yes, I know it often rains a lot in May. So what? Do you remember June, July, and August of 2007 and 2008? Sodden, they were. Absolutely miserable. Dividing the seasons astronomically, so that the quarter of the year with the most daylight is called Summer and the one with the least is called Winter is meaningful, stable, objective, relevant through the hemisphere, and it's how this was traditionally worked out throughout history.

The Tale of One Bad Rat, or, thoughts on teaching adults to read comics

 I was talking to my housemate last night about Watchmen, raving about it as I tend to do, and following Pádraig Ó Méalóid in scorning the Zach Snyder film based on the book. I'd not say the film is a travesty, but I think Pádraig was almost exactly right to have said:

'It looks a lot like the original Watchmen book, but has none of its grace, or beauty, or subtlety, or sinuously beautiful timing. Watchmen is the most perfect graphic novel there is, and a huge amount of work went into making it that way, and attempting to streamline that for the big screen was never going to work. Alan Moore said it was unfilmable, and I have seen that he was completely right.'

Anyway, I wittered away about why I felt the film didn't work -- how it had fundamentally missed the point of the book, misunderstood the nature of the book's characters as created by Moore, seemed oblivious in all but the most cosmetic of ways to the how the fabric of the world of Watchmen differs from that of our own world, and been unable to play to the book's strength. It has strengths, to be fair -- the credit sequence was funny and clever, the casting was excellent, and every so often the sets were spot-on, but in the main I thought it missed the point and substituted brashness, gore, and gratuitous violence and nudity where Moore and Gibbons had been elegant, subtle, and often just matter-of-fact. 

At this my housemate pulled me up, as someone who had liked the film and never read the book, saying that he'd liked it and didn't agree with me, so I went and got the book and tried as best I could in a hasty way to point out how the book works, panel by panel. I wished I'd Gibbons and Kidd's Watching the Watchmen to hand, but I did my best.

My housemate's intrigued now, and is tempted to buy the book for himself, but I'm a bit wary of him reading it just yet. Watchmen, to be frank, isn't a book to start a new comic-reader on. It's too complex, too sophisticated, to dependent on familiarity with the form and its grammar. 

Years ago I went to a talk by Bryan Talbot, back when he'd just written The Tale of One Bad Rat, where he talked of how he'd been amazed in the aftermath of his avant-garde The Adventures of Luther Arkwright to learn that there were people who couldn't read comics, who found them complex and hard to follow. How does one read a page? How does one read a panel? What do you read first -- the picture or the speech balloons or the captions or the thought bubbles or a combination of them all? It was with this in mind that he wrote and drew The Tale of One Bad Rat the way he did.

The Tale of One Bad Rat is about as legible, and sad, as beautiful, and as hopeful a comic as one could ever hope to read, and it's become one of a handful of comics I like to show people who don't read comics if I want to show them how good work can be done in the medium, work as valid as anything in film or prose. Originally intending the book as a story of a girl obsessed with Beatrix Potter who runs away to the Lake District, Talbot needed to explain why she ran away, came up with the idea that she'd been abused, and then decided that if he was going to involve child abuse in the story then he'd better do it properly.

He did the work, and the result is a masterpiece, utterly nailing the distrust, the difficulty in forming relationships, the hatred of being touched, and the obsessional imagery that can so often haunt abuse survivors, while nonetheless showing paths to healing and being a beautiful and gentle ode to Beatrix Potter, the Lake District, art, and rats.

As a primer in what comics can be and what comics can do, it has very few rivals. I rather wish I had my copy here. It's something I'd like to show people so they can understand.

On Shaving the Roman Way

One of my occasional online haunts is the blog of Paul Gogarty, an old friend and until recently one of my home constituency's deputies to the Dáil, the lower house of the Irish parliament. About a month back he wrote a long and rather detailed post about the Eurovision and shaving. Now, the Eurovision I can take or leave, though I agree with the Brother that it's a better way of learning about geography than having a world war. Shaving, on the other hand, matters to me, and as Paul was clearly having ethical and practical issues with his blades, I wrote to give him my own thoughts on the subject.

I said something like the following...

As you'll know, I've been broke for years. What you'll not know is that I have sensitive skin, and that I like a close shave. These three factors pose a bit of a challenge, but over the last two years I have solved this problem.

The Blade

For the blade, I use the classic Wilkinson Sword double-edged razor, using the kind of blades teenage girls use to cut themselves. You know the ones.

Its very simple, very sharp, and very cheap. It takes a tiny bit of getting used to, as with a Mach 3, say, one uses pressure from the hand to effectively rip out one's bristles, whereas with this it's merely the weight of the head, combined with the angle at which one holds the blade, that slices away the hairs. I started using this as I found that shaving oil, which I used to use when I was travelling, as I so often was, tended to clog multi-blade razors. No matter how much I rinsed them, they'd get blocked up with a mass of oily bristles. Single blades can't clog.

For a while I experimented with a traditional straight razor, but the learning curve on it proved too demanding. I liked the idea of only ever having one blade, which I'd sharpen and re-sharpen, as it struck me as both cool and good for the environment, and so resolved to learn with a straight razor loaded with disposable blades, but found that I couldn't get it right. It wasn't the nicks that bothered me -- I'd expected them -- it was that after shaving my face would alternate between glassily-smooth patches and patches of horrible scurfy stuff, the latter having a tendency to appear overnight. I decided I couldn't be arsed with going through weeks of that, so turned to a more conventional handle and head arrangement.

(I've been shaved with a straight-razor, for what it's worth, one balmy night in Cappadocia last summer, with a young teenage boy drawing the blade over my face as his boss watched approving. Oddly, it wasn't as unnerving an experience as I'd feared beforehand.)

Oil

Secondly, I've stopped using foams, gels, soaps, and even creams when shaving, though I like the Palmolive shaving cream a lot, especially when applied with a brush which raises the hairs to make them easier to slice away. Instead, inspired by poverty and having run out of shaving oil one Christmas at home in Dublin, I've changed to Olive Oil.

Other oils are quite thin, and can clog one's pores, but Olive Oil, especially extra virgin oil, is viscous enough to form a layer that won't harm the skin and will actually enrich it, while providing lubrication and protection as you slice away the hairs.

I usually keep about an inch of oil in a mug, with a few drops of clove oil mixed in*, and leave my razor -- head down -- in that, as keeping the blade in the oil prolongs its life. The oil will get a bit dirty, in that some bristles will invariably find their way in, but I think that's a price worth paying.

So, when shaving in my neo-Roman way, I start by showering and then pressing a hot, wet flannel against my face; I then dab my fingers in the oil and smear it all over my face, rubbing it in especially where I intend to shave; I then set to work, shaving with the growth to begin with and against where necessary, judging by feel as I pull the skin and relubricating whenever I need to; once smooth, I use the hot wet flannel again to remove all oil and freshen the skin, and then use cold water to close up the pores. Mission accomplished.

(Then you must clean your sink, as you don't want oily rings and bristles around it, and your other half or your housemates certainly won't want that.)

People keep saying I have freakishly-young looking skin for someone my age. I don't know if this is true, or they're just being nice, but if they're right I reckon it's due to the olive oil.

Don't use oil with chilli in. That would be bad.

G.

* Clove oil acts as a very mild anaesthetic, which can be handy if you nick yourself while shaving.

Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church: A Taster

I wondered the other day whether somewhere out there in the world there's a Giant Bumper Book of Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church, annoyed as I was to see such respected Protestant preachers as John Stott and Don Carson perpetuating complete falsehoods about the Church, and someone soon told informed me that, in a sense, such a book exists. Roman Catholicism by Loraine Boettner, an American Presbyterian who worked for the Internal Revenue, was first published in 1962 and certainly looks like it fits the bill; while I doubt anyone I know has personally waded through Boettner's ranting, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if his ahistorical, unscriptural, and flat-out illogical claims have had indirect effects. Maybe people I know have read stuff or heard stuff by people who've heard what Boettner said, for instance, and who have passed on his gibberish on trust...

If you have a long spoon and fancy supping with the Devil, it seems you can read the whole thing here; I've had a glance, but am too busy to wallow in vitriol, bile, and hogwash. Still, if you want to waste your money you can squander it on Amazon.

With this in mind, I have a yen to write a series of short posts over the next couple of months -- an intermittent series, broken up by other things, as is my nature -- on Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church I've come across or been actively confronted with in the last few years. Offhand, I can think of about fifteen things I've stared or sighed upon hearing and then had to laboriously refute in conversations since moving to England. I'm sure if I thought harder I'd think of more, but just off the top of my head...

1. The Catholic Church was not created by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.
2. Catholics do not worship Mary, and the Church doesn't say that they should.
3. Catholics do not worship Saints and Relics, and the Church doesn't say that they should.
4. Catholics do not worship Statues and Pictures, and the Church doesn't say that they should.
5. Catholics do not only ever think of Jesus as being in the arms of Mary
6. Catholics do not only ever think of Jesus as being on the cross, and the Church does not teach that Jesus is sacrificed every single time the Mass is said.
7. Catholics do not believe the Pope is always right, and do not have to do whatever the Pope says.
8. Catholics do not believe the Pope can overrule the Bible, and the Church does not teach that he can do so.
9. Catholics do not believe we're saved by doing good works, and the Church doesn't teach that we are.
10. Catholics do not believe they can be forgiven their sins if they put money into a box by a statue of St Peter in Rome, and the Church doesn't ever offer forgiveness for money.
11. Catholics were not forbidden from reading the Bible in the Middle Ages, and translations of the Bible were not banned by the Church.
12. The sixteenth-century Catholic Church did not add books to the Bible at the Council of Trent.
13. The Catholic Church does not teach that only Christians can be married, or that Christians whose marriages weren't presided over by priests are living in sin.
14. The Catholic Church does not teach that all non-Catholics will go to Hell.
15. The Catholic Church does not teach that everybody will go to Heaven.

Three of these are historical points, but those aside, almost all of these, as far as I can see, come down to misunderstandings about terminology. A major part of the problem is that Catholics and Protestants use language differently, and so Protestants and Catholics can often agree completely on a subject while sounding as though they differ absolutely, purely due to how both groups use words. Protestants see Catholic practices or read things by Catholic writers, and often do so in a spirit of sincere curiosity, but misunderstand what they're looking at or reading, and make assumptions which are fundamentally wrong.This is why one of the first requirements of any honest debate is that terms should be defined; without properly defined terms, things get confused and the most well-meaning people wind up at loggerheads over things about which they essentially agree.

I'm not saying there aren't real differences between Catholics and Protestants. There are. They're just not the ones above.

Roger Olson had a good piece about a similar matter the other day, saying, in connection with debates between Arminian and Calvinist Protestants, but stressing that this applies to any honest discussions of any theology:

'We need to distinguish carefully between criticism and misrepresentation.  Fair criticism is valid; misrepresentation in order to criticize (straw man treatment) is invalid and should itself be criticized by everyone.'

So anyway, I reckon I'll give this a shot soon. Fifteen or so short* posts, spread out over a month or two, interspersed with witterings about work, life, drawing, cycling, books, films, and whatever. None of them will be apologetic, in the sense that they'll not be about proving 'why Catholics are right' or 'why Catholicism is Biblical' or anything like that. They'll just be about what Catholicism is, and what Catholicism most certainly isn't. Not just yet, though. I've something to finish first.

* No, really. That's the plan.

Joycean Turtles

Improbable though it may seem, oodles of episodes of the late 1980s and early 1990s cartoon Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles were made it Dublin, at Murakami Wolf which eventually became Fred Wolf Films; back then Dublin was a bit of a hotbed of animation talent, what with Sullivan Bluth making An American Tale and The Land Before Time there, and a brilliant animation school being set up at Ballyfermot Senior College.

Yes, I know, it's really Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, for so the original comic was called and so the cartoon was distributed in America. Still, my little brother watched it in Ireland, and for him it was called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles -- this was basically due to Ireland being lumped in with the UK for distribution purposes, and the Brits having an issue with ninjas. Back then, ninjas were seen as nasty. Now they're cool, from what I hear.

Anyway, I was a bit surprised the other day to learn that there was an episode of the series where the Turtles went to Dublin; I've managed to track it down, and found watching it an odd, and not unpleasant experience.

'The Irish Jig is Up', for so episode seven of series seven of the cartoon is entitled begins with a nice shot of Dublin, looking along the Liffey from the east, with the Four Courts easily recognisable, and what I think is a stylised version of the Liffey Bridge -- that's the Ha'Penny Bridge to most of us -- in the foreground. It's a nicely stylised take on the Quays too, for what it's worth, even if they can look more cartoonish in reality.

Anyway, the camera pans across the Liffey to where we can see the lads' van making its way along the south Quays, driving on the right, but, to be fair, given the eerie absence of any other vehicles on the Quays, they can probably get away with it. It's never made clear why things are so quiet -- I can only presume the Queen was visiting or something. Still, unperturbed by the Mary Celeste atmosphere afflicting Dublin, the lads decide they should pull over and walk around, so they take a corner at speed, hurtling past what appears to be an inexplicably-misplaced O'Connell Monument. 

In a convenient backstreet, the boys change into unobtrusive clothes so nobody will recognise them, clearly reckoning that Hawaiian shirts, shorts, sunglasses, and big hats are just the thing to help them blend in in sunny Dublin. April, sensibly, sticks with her yellow jumpsuit, and Splinter puts on a dirty mac and a false beard, presumably thinking that if he dresses as a random alco, nobody will notice that he's a rat. Frankly, I don't know why he's worried. It's not as if town is kicking. Off they stroll towards Stephen's Green, where just below a remarkably well-rendered Fusiliers' Arch Splinter says he'll tell them about Dublin's history.

It's good, isn't it? They even have Dublin's name right, as 'Eblana'. I've known people to fall at that hurdle in table quizzes back in the day. Anyway, they have a wander in the Green, strolling past a few stylised statues until they get to St Patrick, of whom there's no statue in the Green. No, really, there's not. I'm not sure if there's a public statue of him anywhere in Dublin, actually.

If there were, though, it'd probably not look like this.

Yes, that's Patrick, the Romano-Briton who spent years in slavery here, before escaping to Britain and training as a priest and then returning as a missionary to the Irish, here depicted on horseback, wielding two swords. Who needs a shamrock or a crozier when you can brandish two swords when astride a rearing stallion?

'Ireland,' explains Splinter, 'is a land of magical legends. One of the most famous is that of Saint Patrick. It is said he drove all the snakes and reptiles out of Ireland.'

'Bummer,' says Michelangelo, 'maybe I shoulda gotten us mammal disguises.'

'This is all very interesting, guys,' says April, who presumably has read her guidebook and doesn't believe a word Splinter says, not least because she may have noticed the bit about there being lizards in Ireland even now, 'but I'm supposed to do a report on the famous leprechauns of Ireland.'

'April, leprechauns are just mythical creatures,' retorts Donatello, scornfully adding, 'I can assure you that there are no such things as little green men.'

And with that the lads start throwing their hats around, clearly thinking that the complete absence of people in Stephen's Green gives them a golden opportunity to ditch their disguises and play frisbee, before heading off to their lodgings in the improbably well-preserved McGillicuddy's Castle, which looks rather more like Bodiam Castle in East Sussex than any castle in Ireland, and which is mysteriously dated by the gang to the sixteenth century*

I probably should have mentioned that this episode has a plot, shouldn't I? Basically, Shredder, or Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, has come up with a couple of gizmos, one of which enables him to lift up castles (yes, I know), and another of which can turn vicious animals into cuddly dwarfs and cuddly ones into savage monsters. Seemingly, Ireland has lots of cuddly animals, especially in Dublin Zoo, and so Shredder reckons that he can turn all the inhabitants of the Zoo's petting zoo into an army of monsters that will destroy Dublin. No, really.

I reckon from this shot that Shredder's up near the Magazine Fort operating his device -- it's certainly somewhere high, to judge by the topography, which gives us a view over Dublin and with the mountains in the background. He'd almost certainly need to be in the Phoenix Park to zap the Zoo with his machine, so I think the guys who did this should get marks for effort. Perhaps, given that they may well have been Irish they should have done better, but still. And no, I have no idea why Dublin has so many tall buildings in that shot, but, well, maybe the artists were feeling optimistic about the then embryonic Celtic Tiger.

Anyway, you can see the ray hitting the Zoo, and though this may seem unlikely, that's not a completely inaccurate stylisation of the old entrance to the Zoo. Sure, it's not thatched, and it is has a funny roof, and it says 'Dublin Zoo' rather than 'Zoological Gardens', but, well, it has a wide entrance in the middle and two small windows on each side of it.

The Zoo's interestingly rendered in the show. It has, at the very least, a rabbit, a chicken, a bull, and a lion -- which is a nice touch, as Dublin Zoo is famous for breeding lions, which it's done since 1857, with one of the MGM lions having been a Dublin lion. Perhaps most impressively, though, there's also a handful of people at the Zoo, which is a relief, as by this point, almost twelve minutes into the show, I was kind of expecting Cillian Murphy to show up in a nightgown.

Anyway, I won't spoil it for you. You should watch it for yourselves. Gripping stuff, I tell you. There is, however, one detail I want to draw your attention to, with the day that's in it. Remember how I'd told you about the lads putting on their incognito outfits just after they'd arrived? Well, it's worth looking just beyond Raphael.

Do you see the van? Do you see what's written on it? I'm not sure of the top word on the sign, but the other two, quite clearly, are 'James' and 'Joyce'.

Because it's Bloomsday.


* Note for potential tourists: McGillicuddy's Castle is made up. There are castles in Dublin, but they don't look like that. And if they did, they'd probably not be places you could just drive into in your van, there to kip in overnight while wondering at how the moat and drawbridge are so well-maintained in a place so otherwise neglected.

Tomorrow being Bloomsday...

Whilst strolling by Larry O'Rourke's pub on the corner of Eccles Street and Dorset Street on the morning of 16 June 1904, as detailed in the fourth chapter of Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom pondered how poor barmen could become wealthy proprietors in a city so festooned with pubs as Dublin.

'Where do they get the money? Coming up redheaded curates from the county Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in the cellar. Then, lo and behold, they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or Dan Tallons. Then think of the competition. General thirst. Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.'

It's would be a good puzzle, and if you think of crossing Dublin as taking you north-south over the Liffey and west-east across the city too, then it's not easy to do.

Anyway, this fella thinks he's got it all figured out.

It's not a bad attempt, and his thinking's pretty good, not least in his decision to use the canals as the city perimeters and to exclude hotel bars and restaurants that serve drinks. They're not pubs, and that should be the end of it.

Other than the fact that I think he should probably start his amble on Eccles Street, as Bloom would have had to do, the only concern I have is that Dublin now isn't the Dublin of 1904. Joyce, of course, famously boasted that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it'd be possible to rebuild the whole of it from his works -- his attention to topgraphic detail is astonishing, so surely to do this properly we'd want to be crossing Joyce's Dublin, not our own. We'd need a map of Dublin with only the pubs of 107 years ago on it. And, for that matter, you'd probably need to be crossing the river on one of the nine city bridges that existed 107 years ago, rather than one of the eight that've been built since.

Especially not on one built just eight years ago. Even if it is named after James Joyce.