"Their hearts are far from me" - A Very Tory Christmas

"Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen" - John 1, 4.20


As usual, our political leaders have seen fit to bless us all with a Christmas message. Why they think we want to hear from them at this time of year, who knows?

There's Lib Dem Vince Cable, wandering about in a long black coat and a fedora, like some vampiric George Galloway, bothering homeless people with his sudden shock that they are sleeping on the streets. Meantime, Jeremy Corbyn is hailed as the Second Coming by some of his more fervent followers, but in spite of his shared initials with a certain other JC, his elevation is more akin to a slightly baffled Life of Brian than a would-be King of Kings, and his message is suitably personal, asking people to look after their neighbours and not let anyone be lonely this Christmas. He may not be the Messiah, but he is ready to stand up to Elvis.

But the one who takes the biscuit, and the whole Christmas pud, is of course our dearly beloved Prime Minister, Theresa May. Not only does she issue her sermon sitting in regal pose, she invokes Britain's "Christian heritage" and talks of love, service and compassion lived out every day in Britain. Darkly, she warns of Christians persecuted in the Middle East.

Yet perhaps Saint Theresa should stop and think why, in Alistair Campbell's infamous words, Prime Ministers shouldn't "do God"...

Because when she talks of compassion, hers is the Government that has plunged four million children below the poverty line. It is the government that has presided over the exponential rise of foodbanks in this, the 5th or 6th richest nation on the planet. It is the government that, when May was Home Secretary, locked up an Indian couple who came on holiday to the UK because the wife had her degree certificate with her, leading to suspicion she might be looking for a job; then kept her detained even after her husband died in custody and she begged to be allowed to take him home for his funeral...

And as for Christians persecuted in the Middle East? While contrary to the common portrayal, around 15 million Christians in Middle East countries live and worship - the church in Iran is small but actually growing in numbers - there clearly is persecution in several Arab states. By far the worst is Saudi Arabia, where the practice of any faith other than Islam is illegal. Yet it was the Saudis to whom Mrs May personally flew to promote arms contracts worth billions of pounds.

So when Mrs May talks of Christian values, she may want to reflect on the deeds and acts attributed to the founder of Christianity. For Jesus Christ's teachings don't seem to bode too well for a Government that puts profit before people and stigmatises the weak and vulnerable.

Tories rail against "health tourists"; Jesus taught the need to give medical help to foreigners without asking for payment (The Good Samaritan).

Tories test disabled people to check if they are lying; Jesus healed them without questioning them.

Tories have set up all sorts of tax dodges for the rich; Jesus told people to pay their taxes (render unto Caesar).

Tories praise the accumulation of wealth; Jesus flogged financial speculators. (The cleansing of the temple.)

Theresa May quite possibly prays for God's aid every day for all we know - given the mess she is in, who could blame her? Her own faith is clearly lifelong and there is no intention here to question the sincerity of her personal belief. But it is manipulative beyond belief for her to try to associate herself with values she then attributes both to to the nation as a whole, and to God.

Of course, May wouldn't be the first leader in the world to try to use religion for political ends - but those who have done so have rarely found a happy ending.So no, she's not the Messiah either...

 (Jesus) replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “ ‘These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.' " - Mark 7.6



Happy Christmas!  (n.b. this salutation does not represent or claim to represent any endorsement by any Divine Being. All wording contained herein, however penetratingly insightful, is of purely temporal origin.)

On the Right Side of History? - Christianity and Homosexuality

The debate on rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people has not been so prominent as it is now for several years. The breakthroughs of a few years ago, with civil partnerships and gay marriage being legalised by more and more places around the world, at least appeared to put to rest much of the old bigoted arguments that in so many respects made LGBT people at best second class citizens - perhaps no longer outlawed for their sexuality, but by no means enjoying the same rights as heterosexuals.

But in the last couple of years, something of a backlash has emerged - parts of the Christian church have become ever more shrilly vociferous in their condemnation of gay people; and in Uganda, driven on by the urgings of evangelical zealots, the Government has even been debating whether or not to make homosexuality a capital crime. In the USA, the rightwing of the Republican Party has been complicit with this agenda, seeking to drive back President Obama's support for greater equality - one of the few areas where he has worked hard to deliver on his original promise of genuine change.

That 2,000 year old Scripture is invoked in determining the laws and rights of 21st Century people in so many parts of the world is a depressing commentary on how narrow and pernicious supposedly democratic politics have become - and how diversionary: the rightwing especially is happy to indulge in debates about sexuality, welfare and migration, portraying all three as threats to civilised society, as it shifts the focus of public debate away from the real issues of social inequality, poverty and unsustainable economics. It also shows how, in so many ways, old arguments are rehashed to provide supposedly eternal principles - old wine in new bottles, to use a biblical analogy - and to coat with a fake respectability arguments against one progressive agenda that were previously used against another, but would be deemed out of order now.

In this video, we see a powerful speech by a Christian pastor calling for legislators in the US city of Springfield to stand on the right side of history when it comes to laws on gay and lesbian people - but which side is the right one? Please watch to the end to see.

(With thanks to Michael Emperor of New York Green Party for highlighting this video.)

Dreams of Apocalypse

Post-apocalypse London* 

Since time immemorial, humans have been asking the same key questions: who are we? Why are we here? And where are we going?

For millennia, religion was used to offer the response: whether we were created from, then absorbed and re-shaped and endlessly recreated anew from the matter of the Universe, as the Hellenic and Buddhist faiths proclaimed. Or alternatively we are shaped in the image or purpose of a Divine Creator, who set rules for us to follow and will in the End come to render Judgement, as the Abrahamic faiths believe.

The Big Bang Theory of scientific creation and evolution similarly holds to a beginning and end of sorts – though like the Hellenic and Buddhist schools, each end heralds a new cycle. A new beginning, whereas the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic themes see the End of Life and in turn of the Universe as points of departure to a different plain, to Heaven – or by some reckonings, to Hell.

Although both Jews and Muslims believe in an Ultimate Judgement by God on all humanity, it is the Christian Book of Revelations, purportedly written by the Evangelist John towards the end of the First Century, that most explicitly (though in many respects also in the most obscure fashion possible) sets out the End and the Judgement. The Four Horsemen - sometimes identified as War, Famine, Pestilence and Death - will be sent out near the End Times to proclaim the coming Judgement of Souls (notably a concept derived from the Egyptian God Anubis, who weighed the souls of the dead). 

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - harbingers of the Last Judgement

While many of all faiths have argued that humans are stewards of God’s Creation for the future, US fundamentalists, who comprise over 20% of the population, hold that, if the world is due to end anyway, it exists for our exploitation rather than needless conservation. 

Indeed, one such believer, James Wyatt, dreadfully appointed by President Reagan as US Interior Secretary in 1981, chillingly told a bewildered Congressional Committee that “When the very last tree is felled, then Jesus Christ shall return.” He was, unbelievably, responsible for the environment policy of the most powerful nation on Earth – and the ruin of our planet was a divinely-ordained inevitability he was actually looking forward to. (He has in recent years denied meaning and, sometimes, even saying this - alternately claiming he was taken out of context. What is beyond doubt was his implying that environmentalists should be gunned down because of the "trouble" they cause.)

Yet he was (and is) far from alone: both US churches and, unsurprisingly, the internet are awash with fundamentalists eagerly awaiting the destruction of our world and the return of Christ. If through war and resource destruction they can help that day along, they will willingly do so. Apocalypse Soon website depicts global warming as the culmination of God's Plan, not the result of human greed and folly - there is nothing we can do to prevent it and, indeed, as seeking to do so runs counter to God's Will, those who argue for clean energy and resource conservation are in effect blasphemers. There an ironic consensus between the prophetic fatalism of some religious thinking and the believe of many secular progressives that if the planet continues on its current trajectory, the dreams of apocalypse revealed by Saint John all these centuries ago may well come true.

Science has shown us that there have been Mass Extinctions before on the Earth – five in all, and many now talk openly of a Sixth Extinction: this is opening up rapidly with the destruction of a record number of animal and plantspecies every year, a trend that is escalating almost daily. Sitting atop the thin membrane that is the Terran biosphere, human society is increasingly under pressure as our current economic system of unalloyed global capitalism fosters growing consumption and an obsession with short-term profits rather than any form of restraint or long-term planning. Taking its cue from the Abrahamic Genesis myth that sets Man’s Divinely-granted Dominion over Creation (including over women), Capitalism holds that anything and everything may be commodified and bought and sold as long as there is a demand for it and some degree of scarcity (i.e., it is not freely available to all – such as air, for now at any rate).

In consequence, the economic system blindly drives forward the prospect of oblivion: and while there may be elites who even now enjoy obscene levels of wealth, their control over the course of events is as illusory as ever. Whether the Bilderbeg Group actually means anything or not, nothing and no one is ultimately in control of capitalism. Our species is riding an increasingly ravenous tiger and no one is going to come riding to the rescue. There is no Free Market White Knight – because had such a mythical figure ever actually existed, he would have rented out his armour and sold the horse.

And it is this prospect of our world of today gone totally out of control that, more recently, has spawned an alternative cannon of literature, counter-posed to the stories of Revelations which culminate in the arrival of Divine Judgement. For over a century, science fiction writers have asked the three key questions over and over again, and some of the most compelling visions they have created have been in response to the third enquiry of where we are headed. Whilst tapping into both our natural curiosity about what could be, as well as our morbid mix of fear and fascination with what might go wrong, few of the greatest texts offer an optimistic vision.

Meal-time for Morlocks...

H.G Wells blazed a trail with his short novella, “The Time Machine”, which sees the protagonist hurled forward to a time when civilisation has collapsed and humanity is divided into two newly evolved branches - the cattle-like Eloi who are farmed and eaten by the ferocious, troglodyte Morlocks – each a response to a world gone awry. This  inspired Russian Yevgenny Zamyatin's 1921 novel "We", which projected the man-machine theories of the early 20th century nearly a thousand years forward to imagine a de-personalised totalitarian nightmare. This was to be evoked further in films like Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and novels like Huxley's "Brave New World" and, of course, Orwell's "1984" - all of which projected then-current schools of thought about social and bio-engineering to extreme but logical conclusions. Zamyatin's efforts in particular attracted the wrath of the nascent Bolshevik regime as it began to clamp down on the torrent of free thought briefly unleashed by the collapse of Imperial Russia and propagated by the herculean efforts of Maxim Gorky.

In subsequent decades, writers conjured up many versions of how the world as we know it might end, each responding to some of the threats of the writers’ times: in the years following the war, with atomic deadlock between the West and the Soviet Bloc, both literature and cinema focused on the potential for nuclear holocaust.

Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” movie posits a world of extremes where the the justification of nuclear arsenals lead to a suitably Freudian Love of The Bomb. Obsession with nuclear weaponry, which led to many in the American military positing the concept of “limited” nuclear war (helpfully “confined” to Europe), was to be parodied at its most extreme a few years later in “Beneath the Planet of the Apes”, where a mutant human community worship a planet-killing plutonium missile and sing hymns in its praise.

More meal-time...

Over-population was one of the first big environmental themes to be raised by the mass media in the 1960s, spawning films like “Soylent Green” depicting  a world of massive social injustice, authoritarian politics and the total devaluing of human beings. Less successfully, “Logan’s Run” depicted a future society which controlled over-population via a mythological re-birth which permitted the elaborate ritualised execution of everyone reaching their 30^th birthday. In tandem, the threat from man-made viruses accidentally unleashing a species threatening plague provided the foil for films such as “The Omega Man” (later remade as “I Am Legend”) and books such as “Earth Abides”.

 (NB It should be noted here that the frequent appearance of arch-Republican and avowed capitalist Charlton Heston in several of these films was almost certainly contingent with the size of his cheques as opposed to any endorsement of the movies’ premises – indeed, Serling commented that Heston was so bigoted that his narrow worldview meant he just didn’t notice the range of progressive political messages in the first two Apes films, even when later on they were explained to him!)

Technology has also both fascinated and terrified humans since the first loom was invented: and again, science fiction has offered up dystopian visions of a future run by robots, whether the prophetic Thatcheresque android of “Metropolis” or the indistinguishable-from-human replicants of Ridley Scott’s “Bladerunner”, which was based on Philip K Dick’s story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”  1970’s “Colossus: The Forbin Project” combined several themes – nuclear war, overwhelming technology and scientific hubris- to create a nightmare scenario of artificial intelligence deposing its human creators that was far more convincing than the later series of Terminator films, which again portrays profit-seeking companies developing robotic weaponry endowed with independent thought seeking to destroy humanity.

With many artificial life form programmes now underway and within striking distance of recreating human-levels of intelligence, and last month the Disney Corporation perfecting the ability to graft human-like faces onto robots “for entertainment purposes”, this theme remains as pertinent today as 80 years ago in Lang’s Berlin studios.

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as father and son

However, perhaps the bleakest tale of all is one of the most understated. Published in 2006 and made into a strikingly beautiful but harrowing film, “The Road”, by Cormac McCarthy, tells the story of a man and his son walking an endless road in a dead world, hopelessly seeking some solace among the debris. It is hauntingly written and evokes so powerfully the relationship between the father, who has known a world of abundance, and his boy, who has known nothing but grey skies, ash-covered landscapes, scavenging for the last few tins of food and hiding from the dangers of cannibalistic strangers. All the hopes and dreams a father might have for his child are gone – all he can do is try to keep his offspring alive, hoping against all logic that somehow they might find something to offer just the faintest chance of a future. The cause of the apocalypse is unstated, but the skin deep nature of civilisation is revealed as the survivors scramble to secure what resources remain. Appropriately, much of the film version was made in the deserted and devastated streets of post-flood New Orleans.

This is one scenario, a sudden collapse. Other novels tell of more gradual endings – “A Secret History of Time to Come”, by Robie Macauley, is set three or four centuries on from a race conflict that destroyed the USA and presaged global conflict and the collapse of society. In this tale, a wanderer, Kincaid, follows an old ESSO road map around the Great Lakes of the Mid-west, encountering remnants of the old societies – while most live in wooden huts and barter for goods, occasionally some half-remembered title or post comes up such as a “Shirrf” in charge of one community. But in this world, no one travels far and strangers are seen as a threat and so Kincaid frequently encounters hostility. Underpinning his Odyssey is a concept of embedded biological memory – he keeps seeing an image of something which drives him ever on towards a destination he does not understand. This haunting book, while not as desperate as “The Road”, nevertheless shows how the human society we cling to now has shallow roots and how, left untended through a combination of greed and complacency, can wither and die faster than we dare contemplate. All that remains are the empty shells of once great buildings and the overgrown highways traversed by the solitary figure of Kincaid on his journey to nowhere.

Perhaps, though, the most assertive rebuttal of humanity’s claim to Dominion over the planet and the other species on it is to be found in Paul Dehn and Rod Serling’s film adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s “Monkey Planet” – 1968’s “Planet of the Apes”. In this, two thousand years from now, humanity’s remnants have lost all power of speech and reason, roaming the Savannah in search of crops to sequester from the farmlands of the now dominant Simians. The Apes have an evidently deep hatred and fear of these seemingly docile if destructive creatures. Their conservative society is unable to come to terms with the true reasons for this antipathy, but in their religious writings and the repressive actions of their Government in the form of Minister Doctor Zaius, humanity’s destructive potential is clear: “Beware the beast man, for he shall make a desert of his home and yours.”  A desert area known as the Forbidden Zone is described as having been a paradise, ruined by mankind. The facts are long lost, but the folk memory of the Simian culture that has emerged stretch far enough back to recall however vaguely the inherent folly of our degraded species.

It is perhaps the most apposite illustration of the potential outcome of our current complacency as we face both deep resource scarcities and environmental degradation of catastrophic proportions – too often, we are told by both greens and the media that we must “save the planet”. Yet the truth of the matter, which much apocalyptic science fiction tells us, is that it is not the planet that is in danger – it is us; it is humanity, as well as many of our companion species.

It is said that good science fiction tells you more about the world in which it is written than it has to say about any alternate realm. And in this respect, the nightmares of tomorrow, forged in the minds of the authors of the last century or so, are a far more powerful warning and road map than any of the fantastical and whimsical dreams of apocalypse conjured up by Saint John. And science fiction is decidedly not prophetic – as often as not, it is a warning, a call to arms against folly and injustice. Unlike the writings of Saint John, where our species is so damned it has no means of redemption or escape other than by Divine Fire, the visions of tomorrow created by contemporary writers draw both on our very human fascination of our potential destinies and on our potential for action.

By depicting the very worst of outcomes, whether the big bang of Strangelove, the subversion of our own creations in Bladerunner or the poisonous legacy of the Apes films, science fiction offers choices. On a range of threats to our species survival, it portrays the possible – but not the inevitable. Where are we going? is a question that we can answer for ourselves; it is not pre-ordained by a spiteful deity intent on revenge against his own creation – we have no right to absolve ourselves of the responsibility of the stewardship of our planet so easily. In all the scenarios painted above – nuclear holocaust, environmental destruction, artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation and so on, the protagonist is not God, or Nature, or aliens. It is us, people. And just as we are the threat, so we can be the solution. Our behaviour, our choice of economic system and the social norms we adopt, our exploitation of the natural habitat and our damaging of our biosphere – all of it is our choice, our Free Will.

Unfortunately, with born again Christians mobilised to powerful effect in the US elections, and increasingly making their political presence felt in other countries too, it is the chilling Visions of Divine Inevitability that are more likely to inform public policy in the near future. As the Believers rapturously eye up the final trees and sharpen their apocalyptic axes, we need more than ever the authors of alternative futures to sharpen their pens and help to save us from leaving behind the most dystopian of legacies.

We deserve better. 

*Post-apocalypse London picture - credit to Hellgate London pc game

God of Love?

It was almost certainly a deliberate and very telling editorial decision, but one page of the print Guardian should have caught the attention of any reader today.

Emblazoned across the top of the page was the headline:

Pakistani girl accused of Qur'an burning could face death penalty

In an outskirt of Islamabad, an eleven year old Christian girl has been accused of blasphemy, a capital crime in Pakistan, for allegedly burning some pages of the Qu'ran - her family dispute this, claiming she was tricked by a Muslim neighbour into throwing ash into a pot with pages from the Muslim holy book already in it. Whatever happened, this child has now been arrested and nine hundred Christians expelled from the area.

Although he is a priest for a faith whose founder called on its followers to extend special protections to Christians and Jews as "Peoples of the Book", the local mullah is quoted as approving of the expulsions, not only because of the alleged book burning, but because of the infernal singing of hymns in the local churches (now closed).

"They have done this to provoke the Muslims, like they have with their noisy banging and singing from their churches," said a local mullah, who would not give his name. "We are not upset the Christians have left and we will be pleased if they don't come back."

On the same page, the next article similarly told the tragic tale of religious intolerance and the hypocritical taking of lives in the name of faiths that all outlaw killing.

Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians listed as 'terrorist incidents' by US

The US Government has finally declared as terroristic a longstanding pattern of hate crimes by Jewish settlers in Palestinian lands against Arabs - and even the Israeli Government has condemned in similar terms a series of attacks by settlers over the last few weeks which have included the random beating of a young Arab by a mob and the firebombing of a taxi carrying Arab children. The "Hilltop Youth", a group of Zionist extremists, has been linked to attacks that have killed three Palestinians and injured 183 over recent months. 10,000 olive trees, vital for Arab farmers' livelihoods, have been destroyed and in 90% of cases, the Israeli police have closed the case without charge.

During the same time, Palestinians have murdered a Jewish settler family in their home and bombed a bus terminal in Jerusalem, killing one and injuring fifty. Some may argue that the continuing and desperate siege of Gaza, where hundreds of thousands live in ghetto conditions surrounded by the Israeli army, somehow justifies such assaults, yet how can it? Such attacks are not war, but simple murders with civilians as their targets - as such, they detract from the real injustices and murder committed against Gazans by the Israeli state and invite the enemies of Palestine to create some moral equivalence between oppressor and oppressed.

And the three faiths involved - the Judaism of Israel and the Islam and minority Christianity of the Palestinians all talk of the sanctity of life. Yet here we see blood shed in the name of these same faiths.

The final article is less directly focussed on interfaith disputes, but shows how bigotry, in this case Christian-led against Muslims, can lead to laws with supposedly unintended consequences for all.

Pussy Riot protesters arrested in Marseille

Arrested because...?

Because in a fit of Islamophobia, France has banned the niqab, the face covering worn by some Muslim women as a mark of their faith. It is a policy advocated by many rightwingers in Europe - curiously adopting the same policy adopted by President Assad in Syria, who enacted a similar ban on such garments in universities, while until recently Turkey imposed a similar ban on Islamic dress in public buildings. Why so many are so obsessed with what others wear has always been a puzzle to me - it also ignores the possibility that, while some people may ban face-coverings now, this is setting a precedent for other people to ban other forms of dress they don't like. For example, what if the fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths club together to ban women wearing trousers? Or to insist that men must stop shaving (a sinful activity in all three faiths writings)?

In France, the law has been used to arrest people who wore balaclavas over their faces to show solidarity with the similarly-clad Russian punks, Pussy Riot, three of whom were jailed for two years at the weekend. Supposedly, the French arrests prove that the niqab law is not about niqabs at all - but about face coverings and so not aimed in particular at Muslims. It seems an ingenuous argument and a patent lie - the law was inspired and argued for by pro-Christian rightists supposedly to defend alleged and undefined "French republican values". The last time I looked, the values of the Republic included liberte; but in modern France, it seems noticeable by its absence, especially for liberal protesters and for Muslim women of a certain outlook.

And the point behind all these sad stories of intolerance, violence and bigotry?

JUDAISM: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself"      (Leviticus 19:18)

CHRISTIANITY: "Love your neighbor as yourself.'           (Matthew 22:36-40, NIV)

ISLAM: "Do good to parents, kinsfolk, orphans, the poor, the neighbour who is near of kin, the neighbour who is a stranger..."                                             (Qu'ran Ch4, v 36)

"We believe in God, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Ishmai'l, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that given to (all) Prophets form their Lord: We make no difference between one and another of them: And we submit to God."  Qur'an (2:136)

Each faith stems from the same beginnings, shares a number of Prophets and holds, on paper at least, the many of the same or similar teachings, mostly based on respect and love. Yet, as we know, so often the reality is warped beyond recognition by the fundamentalists and bigots of each. It may be a trait within monotheism - if there is One God with One Way which has to be revealed to His followers, then the corollary is that those who don't agree with you must not only be wrong, but sinfully against God too. And so what is the duty of a believer? The majority of each faith see it as little more than proselytising, if even that - for the truth is that most people of faith live in at least passive tolerance of each other the overwhelming majority of the time; many learn to respect and share each other. 

But where belief morphs into blind faith with its attendant dogmatic superiority and is manipulated by those with a political agenda to boot - racial supremacy, land grabs or simply scapegoating for some sort of gain, then we see the headlines of today. A sad, bad and foreboding taste of how the 21st Century presents itself as far from the enlightened "modern" society it would like to think it is; but rather, the echoes of the Dark Ages and the dark hearts of the zealots of monotheism grow louder and louder with every day. It is a harbinger of a dystopian future of neo-Inquisitorial theocracy. Torquemada would approve.

We let the headlines pass at our own risk.

Jews, Christians and Muslims - one God, three faiths.

Baroness Warsi - Minister without a Clue

The Conservative Party Co-Chairman and Minister without Portfolio (Clue - her titles hint at the real situation), Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, has tripped off to the Vatican to praise the well-known misogynist, Pope Benedict, and call for Europe to be more confident about Christianity. In a craven paean to The Holy Father, Britain's only Muslim Minister praises the Catholic Church for its apparent role in supporting human rights and laments the absence of any mention of Christianity in the European Union's constitution. Echoing her earlier comments that the British Government now does religion (a pointed rebuttal of officials' advice that we don't do God when Tony Blair wanted to end his declaration of war on Iraq with a Christian prayer), Warsi expresses the hope that the crucifix can be displayed in public buildings in Britain in the future.

Warsi lauds the Catholic Church as an exemplar of European culture - claiming its influence shines through our way of life and "for centuries, Christianity in Europe has been inspiring, motivating, strengthening and improving our societies."

Presumably these centuries of shining include the Catholic Church's inspiration and motivation behind
- the Crusaders' sacking Jerusalem and butchering of almost its entire population in 1099;
- the FIVE MILLION women burnt at the stake as witches by the Church, a Holocaust in itself;
- the hundreds of thousands of people exiled, tortured and killed for heresy by the Inquisition (an institution which has never been abolished by the Church);
- the Pope's ambivalence towards the Nazis in deporting Italy's Jews during the war and refusal to condemn antisemitic laws prior to the war;
- the Vatican's decades of involvement with countless bloodthirsty and corrupt Latin American military regimes through to the 1990s, as well as its cosying up to Spanish dictator Franco as he murdered thousands of socialists and communists, a tendency that continues today with Vatican approval of Belarussian dictator Lukashenko.
- the rank corruption of the Vatican Bank, including its laundering of millions of dollars of Nazi and Croat Ustashe money at the end of the war and its links to the murdered "God's banker", Roberto Calvi in 1982.
- its continuing cover up of the abuse of children in its care;
- its continuing persecution of gay and lesbian people;

Benedict himself created a storm a few years back when he deliberately misquoted a medieval Byzantine Emperor to declare the Islamic faith the Baroness professes as evil and inhuman. Presumably she won't forget to thank him for that little contribution to interfaith harmony and understanding too?

There are plenty of decent, peaceful Catholics and other Christians, but I don't want the Government of my country praising any institution with a pedigree like that headed by the Pope, especially when its leaders continue to be in total denial of much of their history and eschew their responsibilities towards their victims. Nor do I want Christianity - or any other religion - sponsored by the public buildings, officials or services that I pay taxes towards and which are meant to serve citizens of all faiths and none.

The latest census apparently shows a huge decline in the proportion of British people calling themselves Christian - and most of those who do are in fact not practising Christians as they don't attend church, read the bible or pray regularly. But, sounding like a would-be British Tea Party-goer, Warsi spits out her usual ragbag of ignorance with her customary shrill pomposity and uninformed would-be populist rhetoric.

Let's get this right - she wants to impose a religion on British citizens which she does not actually believe in or follow herself? How hypocritical, or just plain stupid, is that?

The Baroness and some episodes from the centuries of inspiration offered by the Catholic Church

Apocalypse Not Now: Nothing to be Rapturous About

It is all too appealing to have a laugh at the expense of the followers of Harold Camping, head of the Family Stations Christian radio network, who has predicted that the "Rapture", the first stage of the biblical Apocalypse set out in the Book of Revelations, will take place today. Revelations, traditionally written by St John, but more likely by a number of different authors, is a confusing, dream like book packed with allusions and illusions, mostly relevant to early Christians who were themeselves expecting the world to end imminently over nineteen centuries ago.

According to the Gospels, Jesus spoke of a Day of Judgment , predicting it would happen in the lifetimes of his followers, and couching it in suitably fiery language subsequently used to justify all sorts of atrocities:
"The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." (Matthew 13, 40-43)  and "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!" (Luke 12, 49)

By the Rapture theory, created by a Church of Scotland Minister Edward Irving around 1830, all true believers will be taken up to Heaven just before all this nastiness begins. The rest of us who are "left behind" will then be subjected to great tribulations and violence as the so-called End Times gather pace up to Judgement Day, when Jesus Christ will return and judge those who can go to Heaven (after first living with Jesus on a restored Earth - the New Jerusalem) and those due to suffer the eternal torments of Hell.

It is tempting to dismiss these as wacky ideas on the fringe of religion, easily rebutted by a range of sarcastic activities such as the Post-Rapture party organised on Facebook, or music concerts across the States peppered with "subject to change" notices for events on Sunday. Likewise, some people are ready to make a point - such as non-believers advertising "Gone with the Rapture on Saturday? Can I have your stuff please?" while, more exploitatively, some are making a tidy sum out of offering to look after cats and dogs that are "Left Behind" when their owners ascend.

But this sort of phenomenon can not be set aside so easily. Not only is it tragic that some clearly vulnerable people are taken in by this - the pregnant woman grieving that her unborn child may not be saved; the man who cashed in his life savings to warn others of the impending apocalypse; the terrified mother who slit her children's throats and wrists - it is also the case that, according to one Newsweek poll, as many as 55% of Americans believe in the Rapture at some point soon. Most of these believers also firmly think we are now in the End Times and the consequences, given the well-organised machinery of the wealthy and profoundly conservative American evangelical movement, are deeply political and deeply damaging to the struggle against the very real threats to our species and planet.

As the world faces genuine resource depletion and environmental degradation, many evangelical Christians warmly embrace the destruction, seeing it all as proof of their prophecies and the culmination of their hopes. And these beliefs are transmitted into policy through many in the US Government - as far back as the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, testified to the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant as, given that Judgement Day was imminent, they would not be required anyway. To the incredulity of listening Congressmen, he declared that, 'After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.' 

This is a far from isolated example, with evangelicals deriding many attempts to conserve the environment or seek international peace and disarmament. Ever since the Moral Majority of the late 1970s promoted Ronald Reagan as a "born again" Christian candidate, it has been almost impossible for a non-evangelical to get anywhere in Presidential politics. Some, like Clinton, have exaggerated their beliefs, but Bush Jr held close to evangelism throughout his Presidency, by his own account believing that he received the instruction to attack Iraq directly from God. Barak Obama's more relaxed approach to his faith was infamously used by his evangelical opponents to make a range of assertions from his being a secret Muslim to being the anti-Christ. And these have had an impact - with 18% of Americans believing he is a Muslim according to one poll last August, a figure that rose to one in every three Republican voters. 

And as for the Anti-Christ rumour? It may seem bizarre, but it has been covered and analysed by national news networks, used by the Republicans to whip up Christian votes and, of course, been plastered all over the internet.  Take a look at the video at the end of this blog - Americans live in truly superstitious times. Exchange even the briefest messages with US Evangelicals, as I have done through this blog, and you will soon be told Obama's policies on healthcare, tax and the environment are the work of Satan and yet more signs of the truth of apocalyptic prophecy.

Not all dogs go to heaven after all....Evil puppy!

Especially in the Middle East, the evangelicals are at work, desperately undermining any attempts at a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Believing the Al-Aqsa Mosque should be demolished and the ancient Jewish temple of Jerusalem rebuilt on its site as part of the Apocalypse prophecy, the Christian Zionist movement within American evangelism has advocated and even contributed to funding the appalling wall that has been constructed around the Palestinians on the West Bank.
Many additionally believe a range of supposed prophecies which identify the restoration of Israel to its Biblical age borders and a great conflagration with its neighbours as important steps on the path to Rapture and Judgement, things to be helped along rather than guarded against. Consequently, they lobby hard and generally successfully for American political and military aid to Tel Aviv.

So this extreme mode of religion closely informs the politics of the most powerful and destructive nation on the Earth. With one in twenty of the world population but gobbling up almost a third of the Earth's resources, the USA is absolutely critical to the survival of our planet as a place habitable by humans and other species of life. It needs to take the lead in environmental action, on cutting pollution, recycling, reducing consumption and distributing fairly.

What those who oppose them struggle to get our heads round is that, in the Evangelicals' Universe, environmental collapse, wars, terrorism and disease are not to be eschewed or regretted. Rather, they are to be embraced, full-on as we race towards what they see as the glorious destiny of all true Christians. Nearly 40% of Americans in a recent survey believe the Japanese earthquake and tsunami were visited on Kobe because Japan, to them, is a godless nation. With nearly 50% of Americans believing they are a special people in God's eyes, Evangelical America is a real threat to all of us, particularly as the USA's inevitable economic and military decline in the coming decades will clearly challenge this deeply held belief.

So, as those of us who deride the nonsense of Mr Camping smugly sip a glass of wine or two this evening, we would nevertheless do well to keep a relatively sober view of the power of the belief in the Apocalypse, and both the ardent desire and all too real ability of many Americans to make one happen, whether God is ready or not.

"People of the Book" - a review of Zachary Karabell's history of Islam and the West

It is always a treat to read something that is tightly written, fresh, and a bit different. This relatively short book (291 pages) is just that - American writer Zachary Karabell captures a broad sweep of history with an exciting gusto that brings periods and places normally obscure to western historians alive and with an immediacy that is explained by his central premise - that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have existed far more in mutual tolerance and respect, and sometimes even harmony, with each other than they have in conflict - whether the conflict of the Crusades or of the contemporary jihadists and neocons.

He takes us through the founding of Islam right up to the 1980s Middle east, yet somehow you do not get the sense of any period being overlooked or short-changed. Whether scholars, soldiers, merchants, priests or philosophers, he brings different ages to life by focusing on individuals of note at various points, though also slips down to take in anecdotes of every day life - how Moses Maimonides, a Jew, felt about working as a doctor at the court of Saladin, the Muslim prince, during the day to go home at night and work on his great treatise of rational Judaism; or how the Muslim caliph, Harun al-Rashid, turned Bagdhad into a centre of multi-faith discourse and learning, where his son held debates with Christian scholars; or how, more recently, men like Abduh argued for a new interpretation of Islam to mirror the Enlightenment process in Europe.

Yet there are dark tales here too - the slaughter of Muslims, Jews and heretic Christians by the Crusaders at the fall of Jerusalem in 1099. The suppression of much of the learning of Islamic centres such as Cordoba and Bagdhad by a more conservative strain of thinking around 700 years ago, one which has persisted in some respects and some societies ever since. And more recently the expulsion of the Palestinians and the creation of an essentially religious based state in Israel in 1948 and subsequently, flying full in the face of history while simultaneoulsy recasting history to justify the present.

Karabell's premise is that, as the third of the three faiths to emerge, Islam has always had to define itself in relation to Christians and Jews, acknowledging them all to have a shared history and a shared God, yet viewing both as incomplete. Mohammed invoked special protection over both Jews and Christians and this is central to the not always easy tolerance shown to both these faiths through history by often politically and militarily superior Muslims.

Contrary to the popular myths in the West of bloodthirsty Arabs forcing Islam on cowed conquered peoples, the book shows how in truth many eastern Christians welcomed the Muslims as they were far more tolerant of their beliefs than their previous rulers, the Orthodox Romans, had been. While in Europe, Jews and Christians who did not hold quite the right beliefs for the official church were persecuted and burned, for centuries, Muslims provided sanctuary to these people, demanding nothing in return other than a poll tax (which excused them from military service, not a bad deal at all). When the Jews were expelled from Christian Spain in the early 16th century, it was the Muslim Ottoman lands that sent ships to carry them to safety - and prosperity under the Sultan and Caliph.

By the same token, Karabell shows that the Crusader states, after their initial belligerence, settled down to a century of tolerance and even interfaith marriage and mixing which worked well for the people in the near east, but caught the inevitable displeasure of the Pope.

So where did this all go wrong?

In one sense of course, it didn't. There are still many societies where people of all three faiths live alongside each other, sometimes integrated, sometimes leading separate lives, in peace. In fact, most of the time, in most places, that is still precisely the case - whether in Egypt with its 10% Coptic Christian populace rearing pigs and drinking wine in a predominantly Muslim society; or in the Lebanon with its multi-religious coalitions, Christian President and Muslim Prime Minister; or in Dewsbury where I live, home to the London bombers but also to the country's first woman Muslim Cabinet Minister.

For most people, their religion is just one aspect of their lives to varying degrees of importance or unimportance. For example, Turkey is portrayed by some in Europe as a fundamentalist Muslim society ill-suited to joining the EU. Yet any visit to Istanbul would show you a city (outside the tourist area) indistinguishable from London, Berlin or Paris, and where a lower per centage of people attend Friday prayer at mosque than turn up at the near empty Churches of England on Sundays. Why then all this talk of a clash of civilisations? And why a desire to rediscover a false history of conflict and despair when in truth the times of togetherness have been far more of the story - and will need to be again for any hope of a future for us all?

There is no neat answer - except that perhaps where there has been conflict, it has been where religion is one of many elements, the central ones being, as ever, social justice and freedom, yet religion has been used sometimes by religious zealots, and often sometimes by populist (or just desperate) political leaders to justify the most dreadful deeds.

If Karabell shows anything, it is that each of these faiths can be and are interpreted in many many ways by their followers. And perhaps there is the one issue he does not tackle - Monotheistic faiths which each claim to be the revealed word and the sole, true, exclusive path to God and Truth, contain within them the seeds of conflict. However hard they may try, either scripturally or as individual believers, to respect, tolerate or even associate with those of other faiths, can faiths which proclaim one God and one way, ultimately live in real peace with each other?

The violence of Bin Laden's jihad and Bush's crusade may sit ill with faiths which proclaim love and peace, but as they each also proclaim themselves as the sole Truth, everything else by default stands ultimately as a lie. And woe unto those who worship a lie when a Believer of a certain ilk, fired up with the zeal of the One True God, steps forward to spread the Word.

Very much worth reading; this book has made and will keep making me think for a very long time.



"People of the Book" by Zachary Karabell is published in the UK by John Murray, isbn 978-0-7195-6755-1