The Brothers Hitchens

A fascinating and moving article by Peter Hitchens about the parallel lives of him and his brother, Christopher.

porn 80-20 rule

an interesting article in today's paper about the government proposal to filter hard core porn on the internet:
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/opposition-grows-to-internet-filter-20100224-p3ma.html
Quote from the newspaper article: "Despite the vocal opposition, McNair Ingenuity research released a fortnight ago found support for the filter running at 80 per cent."

From all the rants on the internet, it sounds like most people oppose internet filtering or hard core porn, but it turns out to be only a small minority. Maybe it shows that 20% of the population either make money out of, or consume hard core porn. Depressing thought, huh?

On the other hand, Apple is removing explicit material from its iPhone/iTouch app store:

http://www.businessinsider.com/apples-war-on-porn-is-just-getting-started-2010-2
the obvious conclusion is that Apple want to make sure that when they release the new iPad next month, it doesn't get publicity for being a porn device. They clearly also believe that 80% of the population don't want the porn, so commercial reality makes them clean it up.

Its a pity some of the media who oppose internet filtering and therefore support internet porn aren't exposed to the same commercial (let alone moral) realities.

Still Waiting

I just saw some video of Venice and its canals and gondolas.
It occurred to me that for my whole adult life, I have been told:

• the Great Barrier Reef is being destroyed by either starfish, mining or acidic water
• the global financial system is collapsing, and
• Venice is sinking into the Adriatic Sea.

As far as I know, none of these have happened yet. Do I have to keep waiting, or is it over now?

Moral Panic

We are often told that wowsers are deluded in thinking that the moral behaviour of society is decaying at an accelerating rate these days. That is just uninformed moral panic, and really, nothing has changed much. We just read about bad things happening more because of increased media coverage, so there is nothing to worry about.
I hope all that is true.
But think of a few things that have happened lately:

• repeated examples of 12 year old children being threatened with knives by other 12 year olds.
• news reports of stabbings almost every day.
• half the sports reports seem to be about footballers being charged with rape, drug trafficking, glassing their girlfriends etc. Good old "drunk and disorderly" seems pretty tame these days.
• a campaign to introduce an MA15+ rating for video games, in order to allow violent video games to be imported and sold legally.
• 18,000 tickets have been sold for the first bout of the "Ultimate Fighting Championships" this Sunday at the ACER arena in Homebush. (http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/more-sports/ufc-fighters-building-up-to-showdown/story-e6frey6i-1225831970755). I once had the misfortune of seeing a few seconds of this on TV, and it is nothing like wrestling. I remember one man flat on his back with his head against the cage and covered with blood. The other fighter was sitting on him and pummeling his face. It looks like a regression to the barbarism of ancient Rome.
• Operation "Titstorm" has started, which involves hackers attacking the computers in the Australian Parliament. They are objecting to internet filtering, which is aimed at stopping content on the internet which is "refused classification" and would not be allowed in any newspaper or video screen, like child porn and extreme violence.
• binge drinking and attacks on police are in the news regularly.
• children and women are degraded in order to sell clothes. One of the few people campaigning against this is Melinda Tankard-Reist (http://www.collectiveshout.org/ )
• a study in the UK indicates children are feeling increasingly unhappy with life (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7197888/Children-feeling-unhappier-with-life.html ). The solution from the government there is to introduce "happiness lessons".

Is all this just a lot of nonsense and nothing to be worried about? I really, really hope so. I think the worry is that in all these cases, there are a lot of powerful forces driving society in the wrong direction, but not so much pushing in a healthier direction.

Itty-bitty dresses

There was one letter in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday which pointed out that there were actually some women at the Alan Border Medal ceremony on Wednesday because they could play cricket. But there was no other comment.  The TV news only wanted to know about the women with pretty (but very small dresses), to the accompanying sounds of drooling TV commentators (both men and women commentators). I'm outraged at this and I'm not a feminist, so where are the feminists? They seem to have rationalised themselves into an opinion that dressing like this empowers women. With respect, I think that is rubbish, and is only perpetuating stereotypes of women as dumb clotheshorses. Is feminism dead?

Tale of two Schools

In todays, we read of two schools who have been successful in the NAPLAN tests.

One, a non-denominational school called the John Colet school learns their times tables by rote, use Sanskrit to learn good handwriting and put on a Shakespeare play each year.

The other, the St Francis of Assisi school in Paddington was also successful in the NAPLAN tests. One parent is quoted as saying there was pressure in the classrooms and in tests.

The conclusion drawn by the journalist who wrote the article is that the John Colet school was not teaching to the test, but St Francis of Assisi was.

I'm sorry, but I can't see any difference between the schools, on the basis of the information, except that John Colet is represented by the headmaster and St Francis by one apparently dissatisfied parent.

A biased report, if you ask me.

Tale of two Tales

There are two news stories today about preventative killings. In the US, a man who shot a doctor who regularly and famously performed late-term abortions has been convicted of premeditated murder. The man, Scott Roeder, argued that the killing was justified to prevent further abortions. “Those children were in immediate danger if someone did not stop George Tiller,” he told jurors. “They were going to continue to die. The babies were going to continue to die."

At the same time in London, Tony Blair is defending himself in front of the Chilcot inquiry, claiming that waging a war to oust Saddam Hussein was justified because it made the world safer.

"But if I am asked whether I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better but our own security is better, with Saddam and his two sons out of power and out of office, then I believe, indeed, that we are."

Of course, it was not only Saddam who died, 4,000 US soldiers and more than 100,000 Iraqies, many of them innocent civilians. And they are still dying.

Two people, defending themselves on the basis of the end justifying the means. What is the difference between the two?

Decline and Fall

Don't tell me Caligula and Nero are making a comeback. weird obsessions

Save the Glaciers

Did you read about the phoney claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 that was included in the "scientific" ICCC report?
glacier blunder
The person who discovered this hoax (which is now being called an "error" by the people who did it) says that most of the conclusions of the report are correct, but she wanted to get rid of this unsubstantiated claim.
I think this is probably true (although the "probably" will become less probable each time they uncover hoaxes like this), but this is a perfect example of the greenies getting carried away with their own nonsense. The fact is that they want, no, are passionately addicted to the idea that the environment is being destroyed. That is the whole justification of their position that evil humankind, especially Genesis-believing Christians, are destroying the world, and the only solution is for us all to go back to the way the Mother Earth Spirit intended, namely cave-dwelling pagans who have a limit of 1.5 children to each mixed or same sex couple.
I am as guilty as anyone in choosing examples of events that agree with my ideas, but the greenies claim to be "scientific" and base their ideas on facts and nothing but facts.
Well, as this example shows, they can be barefaced liars when they think they can get away with it, and when they think the lie will bully people into agreeing with the ideas the greenies have already decided are true, based on the green dogmas.

Putting things in Perspective

The other day I had the crazy idea of showing a year 7 or 8 Scripture class some of the writings of St Thomas Aquinas to show them the level of detailed thinking that was done 800 years ago. I don't know much about Aquinas myself, but I do know that he puts most of today's "thinkers" to shame with his intellectual honesty.
As a fairly simple example, I thought of showing the article TA wrote on flattery:
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3115.htm
but I think they might find it a little confusing because of the language he uses, even if the ideas are simple enough.
A more basic article by TA is on the existence of God..
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm#article3
It is interesting to see his arguments against the existence of God as much as his arguments for. Thomas always starts with arguments against the proposition he is putting, and then, after stating his case, he replies to each of these objections. Normally, he tries to think of at least 3 or 4 objections, but in the case of the existence of God, he can only think of 2, namely
- the existence of evil and
- "Occam's razor", or why believe in God if you can explain nature without believing in God.
These are exactly the arguments used today by the "new" atheists, although St Thomas puts the argument for atheism more neatly and logically than most atheists. Really, there is nothing new under the sun.
In March this year, there will be an Atheist Convention in Melbourne (http://www.atheistconvention.org.au/) and I assume we will hear these arguments, once they stop saying that believing is God is like believing in Santa Claus (which is an embarrassingly irrational comparison), that religious people do evil things (which has already been said by every religious person) or that all Christians believe the world was created 6,000 years ago (which is of course not true)
(By the way, I will be interested to check the personalities involved in the Atheists Convention. The stars of these shows are usually white Anglo-Saxon males in their 60's, like Richard Dawkins, plus a few professional comedians, like Catherine Deveney. We shall see who turns up.)
No doubt, a claim of the Atheist Convention will be that religion is withering and dying, so it is interesting that last year a book called "God is Back" was published, written by 2 journalists for the Economist magazine, at least one of whom is an agnostic. An extract from this book is at
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nations-prosper-with-god-on-their-side/story-0-1225737842159
The writers have looked at countries around the world and the history of atheism and concluded that religion is rising, not withering. Some of the examples of religion are not too inspiring, but overall it shows why atheists feel the need to put on a convention in Melbourne. They are afraid their cause is being lost. To quote from the article above:

"Another indication of religion's reappearance in the public sphere has been the outcry among secular intellectuals, many of whom hold that the real "clash of civilisations" is not between different religions but between superstition and modernity. A hit parade of recent books has torn into religion: Sam Harris's The End of Faith, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

The authors have crisscrossed the US, debating religious leaders, even in the Bible Belt, in front of megachurch-sized audiences. Dawkins has set up an organisation to empower atheists. Part of that secular fury, especially in Europe, comes from exasperation. What if a central tenet of the French Enlightenment - that modernity would kill religion - is proving to be an ancien canard? Statistics about religious observance are notoriously untrustworthy, but most of them seem to indicate that the global drift towards secularism has been halted and quite a few show religion to be on the increase. One estimate suggests that the proportion of people attached to the world's four biggest religions - Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism - rose from 67 per cent in 1900 to 73 per cent in 2005 and may reach 80 per cent by 2050. Even if this number is padded by people moving from tribal religions to bigger ones, we are hardly seeing decline; and in terms of intensity - a harder to measure phenomenon - there seems to have been a considerable increase in most places outside Europe during the past half century."

We live in interesting times.

Occult-old and new

Movies these days are full of goblins, wizards and vampires, which looks like a throwback to medieval times. But is it? How about this for a few more modern ghouls....

In the 1870's, Alfred Russel Wallace was a naturalist who proposed a theory of natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin. An example of 19th Century rationalism? But Wallace was also interested in spiritualism.

What about Carl Jung in the 1920's? He was not exactly a materialist, but was a colleague of Freud, as well as a devotee of alchemy. 

In more modern times Jonathan Marshall and Mike Hulme are discussing our attitudes towards climate change. But its not a question of science, but of psychological and cultural forces.

What to make of all this? Perhaps not many people are really prepared to accept that materialism and physical science is able to explain all our lives and interests.

Frederic Mitterrand

There is some talk in Sydney of volunteers providing "ethics" courses in public schools as an alternative to Scripture classes given by the local churches.

I have never seen any syllabus or any description of what would be in these courses, other than the title "ethics", so I find it very hard to comment on this idea, it being so vague.

But now I see the case of Frederic Mitterrand, the French Minister of Culture and Communication. He wrote 5 years ago in his autobiography that he visited Thailand and was fascinated by the trade in boys and ....... well frankly, I don't care, or really want to know what happened after that.

Despite what he wrote in his autobiography, he now says:

"that the book was not a strict autobiography. He admitted to "errors" in paying for sex in the past, but said he had relations only with consenting men his age." (as reported in the London Telegraph newspaper )

An English translation of what he said is:

"A mistake certainly, a crime no, nor a fault because each time I was with people of my age, [or] who were five years older than me. There was never the slightest ambiguity - and they were consenting."

Err, what was that again? A "mistake", yes, not a "crime" or a "fault". He claims that the other parties were adults and consenting, but it was a mistake, but not a fault. Why? Is it bad because it is good but embarrassing?

Now I think we need that ethics course, after all...

If you are interested in the French words used in the translated quote above, they were: "erreur", "crime" and "faute"

This quote came from an interview last week on French TV station TF1:

http://www.wat.tv/video/defense-frederic-mitterrand-1uewu_1k5lc_.html

Where are the young atheist evangelists?

I see that an atheist conference is planned for Melbourne in March 2010.

It puzzles me why occasions like this are dominated by male 60 - year olds. The list for this conference (with year of birth) is:

• Richard Dawkins 1941
• Dan Barker 1949
• A C Grayling 1949
• Robyn Williams 1944
• Peter Singer 1946
• Philip Adams 1939
• P Z Mayo 1957

There is one youngster, who happens to be female:

• Catherine Deveny 1968

Why is this so?

Trends in unbelief

I like trying to spot fads and trends in our media and best-seller saturated society, and I think I can see one developing in the public discussion of religion. I think two recent trends are

1. Militant atheism.
2. Acceptance of the fact of religious belief and its impact on society.

The Militant atheism is more than just a lack of faith or skepticism, it is an active attack, and almost hatred and fear of religion and religious belief, demonstrated by the series of best selling books, such as Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion",  aimed and destroying religious belief, using any argument that will serve the cause.

I think there are couple of problems with this approach. As any steak-knife salesperson knows, the best way to convince people is gentle persuasion with some humour, not by shouting abuse at them. People like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens write angry books, and when I have seen them being interviewed on TV, they often get a little hot under the collar.

Having experienced the 60's and 70's myself, I think I have an explanation for this anger. When I was at university in the early 70's, it was almost universally accepted that religion was nonsense and would soon wither and expire. We were on the threshold of a space-age, nuclear-powered, free-loving, gender-changing, flower-powered future of happiness freed from the medieval constraints of all religions.

But here we are 40 years later and it didn't happen. Religious belief is growing amongst poorer nations and although it is withering in the wealthy West, I don't see the predicted universal contentment in society. My theory is that the most militant atheists are about my age, and their anger is not the anger of confident belief, but the anger of frustration that the hopes of their youth have failed.

As a little bit of quantitative justification for my theory, here are the years of birth of some of the New Atheists:

• Richard Dawkins 1941
• Christopher Hitchens 1949
• Daniel Dennett 1942
• Michel Onfray 1959
• Andre Comte-Sponville 1952

with the exception being youngster Sam Harris (1967), who missed out on the swinging sixties and seventies, unlike the others above.

Now for the newest trend. I heard of a book called "God is Back" by Economist magazine editors John Mickethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. I haven't read it, but I believe the argument is that religion is increasingly accepted by politicians and to understand the behaviour of people in society, it has to be studied. (I have heard that one of the authors is an atheist and the other a Christian.)

For a bit of local Australian content, there was a report on religious talk in politics, where "university research shows" that

"Melbourne University politics researcher Anna Crabb analysed 2422 speeches by 60 prominent federal politicians — the leaders and senior frontbenchers of the three main parties — between 2000 and 2006. She tallied the number of these speeches that included the words Christ, church, faith, pray, Jesus, Bible and God and found the use of religious language by politicians had increased.

In 2000, 9 per cent of the speeches in Ms Crabb's sample used religious terms. The proportion increased in each of the following five years, reaching 24 per cent in 2005, before easing to 22 per cent in 2006."

Sounds like a fun piece of research.

Then I heard a programme on the ABC radio programme about political theology. It referred to books edited by Scott and Cavanaugh and written by Hent de Vries, among others. I haven't read either of these books (hey, time is short), but the argument seems to be that the effect of religion is one factor contributing to politics, and postmodernists, unlike aging children of the sixties, are eager to examine all ways of looking at society.

Finally, the enterprising Tony Blair has set up his Faith Foundation, so he can see the need to study religious faith.

In my opinion, both the militant atheists and the postmodern political theorists are only looking superficially at what they say are the results of religious belief, and are not really examining faith and its relationship with reason. To do that, you would be better off reading St Augustine, the early Church Fathers, or, closer to home, Pope John Paul II, or the book A Comprehensible Universe by Fr Michal Heller.

In any case, I find it interesting that the militant atheists are only interested in attacking religion, despite the fact that it seems to be outlasting them, whereas the postmodernists are happy to accept the fact of religion and talk about it. When atheists manage to produce a society that is a little better than the cruel, oppressive, atheist dictatorships of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, they can then talk about their alternative to religion.

Caritas in Veritate

I'm working my way through Pope Benedict's just released encyclical letter Caritas in Veritate, but there are a couple of useful comments on it in

the NY Times and MercatorNet .

The first thing that strikes me is the practical nature of the issues that Pope Benedict is talking about. He risks criticism from all directions by bringing up real, day to day issues, but he wants to give real guidance.

Perhaps related to this encyclical, I heard one talk in the BBC Reith Lectures on Genetics and Morality. These are scary issues, like gender selection, designing successful sports champions and deaf parents wanting to have a deaf child. The really frightening part of the programme was the discussion at the end when some people enthusiastically looked forward to our "designer" future. Is there any doubt we need some guidance from the Magisterium?

Antwerp Sound of Music

A bit of nostalgia for me (in this case the city and the railway station, not the movie).

A Belgian TV Ad to find someone to play Maria in Sound of Music shows the crowd in the Antwerp Central Station dancing to Do a deer etc. Good fun

The East is in the black, not red

I see that Malcolm Turbull says that  "the Liberals would be better economic managers.
“The Labor Government's policies have made a difficult situation worse and the economy would be strong and therefore employment would be high if we were in government.”"

The truth of course, is "who knows?" However, what is Mr Turnbull's logic here? So far he has suggested:

• don't spend a "cash splash"
• don't introduce more regulation into the Industrial Relations laws.

Now, I don't see how the "cash splash" can actually destroy jobs in the short term. It might cause problems in the long term, but we haven't got there yet.

We could compare our IR laws with the land of deregulated labour markets, the USA, but they have even higher unemployment, so what does that prove?

Of course, if you want an example of relatively strong growth in these troubled economic times, we need only look to centrally controlled China. Today, Premier Wen Jiabao said 

"We have loaned a huge amount of money to the United States," Wen said at a news conference in Beijing. "Of course, we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I'm a little bit worried. I would like for you [a Western reporter] to call on the United States to honor its word and stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets."

So maybe we would be even better with the Communist party in charge instead of the Liberals?

types of guilt

In the last week we have seen two examples of madness that have caused people to kill young children or infants. In Belgium, a 20 year old man, whose parents allegedly were trying to get him admitted to a psychiatric hospital, stabbed and killed several infants. In Melbourne, a man involved in a custody battle threw his daughter from a high bridge and then drove to a law office in the city, asked people to look after the other children and then collapsed in distress.

These acts have caused public shock and anger and some calls for revenge on the two men involved.

These were two acts of madness, and no-one yet knows what caused them. On the other hand, the Victorian parliament has last year coolly and calmly passed legislation to allow decriminalised late term abortions, up to 24 weeks without approval, and after 24 weeks with the approval of 2 doctors.

A couple of other recent events have been the delivery in the USA of a multiple birth of 8 children at 31 weeks, and the visit to Australia of 31 year old Gianna Jessen, whose mother attempted, unsuccessfully,  to have her aborted at about 31 weeks.

Only God knows who has the greater guilt.

Parallel liturgy

Compared to 30 years ago, the attendances at Anzac Day ceremonies have become huge in recent years. The sacrifices of the soldiers in noble causes are remembered, which is a fine thing. The only thing I find regrettable is that the interest and gratitude in remembering the soldiers' sacrifice has not been matched by praise and thanksgiving for the sacrifice Jesus made for us on Calvary. The biggest day of the Easter Show is Good Friday, but woe betide any store that dares to open on Anzac Day during the march.

Enthusiasm for Australia Day has also increased, and the birth of the nation is celebrated, with some regrets by and for aboriginal people.

It just occurred to me that we are creating a secular liturgical year as a parallel (and I would say poor parallel) to the real liturgical year, but delayed by about a month.

The feast of Christmas is followed about a month later by Australia Day. The Advent season precedes Christmas, and the celebrations of the Festival of Sydney precede Australia Day.

Then, usually in April, the Church remembers Christ's sacrifice on Good Friday, and in the secular liturgical universe, we remember the soldiers' sacrifice on Anzac Day on April 25th.

It is a pity if the secular liturgy only succeeds at the expense of the real, and much more fruitful liturgy of the Church.

I don't know what isn't art, but I know it when I see it.

We were all shocked by the sudden death of Heath Ledger one year ago, and we all pray that his soul rests in peace.

The role of the "Joker" he played in the Batman movie has been universally praised as a masterpiece of the art of film.

Now, hang on a minute!!!!

Batman, and the villian called the Joker are comic book characters invented to appeal to young children. They have recently been turned into violent and sadistic movie characters, apparently intended to appeal to adolescent boys. In what way is that art? Apart from the obvious and simply evil violence in the movie, it is claimed that Batman and the Joker are complex characters because they recognise their opposite in each other and in some way need each other. That sounds evil, scary and a little bit psychological and is said to constitute art. But what is art?

Leo  Tolstoy was an eccentric thinker, but he turned his mind to this subject in an essay called "What is Art?"

If you like, you can read an excerpt and outline of this essay on the web. In the opinion of Tolstoy, the social elite class has decided what is art, regardless of its moral function, and whether it satisfies the function of real art.

On the other hand, his criteria for real art include:

• It is a means of communication. "To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling -- this is the activity of art.
       Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."
• Good art always pleases everyone. It employs pictures, sounds, or formal design understood by "everyone" or, in the case of prose and poetry, is comprehended by any language speaker of a language into which it's translated. Corollary: It is accessible without the aid of interpretation by art critics
• Good art unites us. Tolstoy describes two kinds of feelings that unite men, those imparted by religious art and universal art. Religious art does not express the doctrines of any organized religion or "cult." It expresses "an understanding of the meaning of life which represents the highest level to which men of that society have attained". In our time, this feeling is connected to message of "love of God and of one’s neighbor."

Universal art expresses simple and accessible positive feeling. Found in all arts, but "most of all" in music.

Now, does the comic book character the Joker satisfy Tolstoy's criteria for art? Is it communicating a feeling experienced by the actors? I certainly hope not. Does it please everyone? I can't really say, but it doesn't please me, for one. Does it unite us and express positive feelings? Certainly not.

As I said in the heading, I find it hard to define exactly what isn't art, but I think movies about evil comic book characters are not art.