My web provider has screwed up and caused all emails since last Friday to be deleted without my seeing them. Most were spam but if you sent an email to bede@bede.org.uk between Friday and Monday, then please resend it as I will not have received the original. Sorry about this. I am finding it very hard to locate a web provider that works.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Monday, June 20, 2005
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
An apology. My post on the top ten anti-Christian myths also linked to an article by Kyle Gerkin. My post implied that Kyle was peddling all these myths himself which is not the case. However, I have written a specific rebuttal to his article which will hopefully appear some time soon.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Monday, June 13, 2005
In an increasingly crowded field, we have a new entry into the all time most stupid conspiracy theory competition. The Lost Middle Ages theory asserts that around three hundred years from 700AD to 1000AD is mssing due to a conspiracy by the pope, Holy Roman Emperor and the Byzantines. Presumably they had to get the Chinese and Caliphate on board as well... I am quite in awe of the guys who made this up.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Here is an amusing parlour game played by a bunch of right wing American intellectuals.
They decided to vote for the most dangerous books. The results were sent round my departmental mailing list as a joke but I think they are quite interesting. Perhaps we could do a similar survey here. Name your top three most dangerous books (in order) and either post to the yahoo group or email me. I'll tot up the scores once replies dry up and see what we get. My answers soon, but here is the top ten by those US conservatives.
Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries
1. The Communist Manifesto Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels Publication date: 1848 Score: 74 Summary: Marx and Engels, born in Germany in 1818 and 1820, respectively, were the intellectual godfathers of communism. Engels was the original limousine leftist: A wealthy textile heir, he financed Marx for much of his life. In 1848, the two co-authored The Communist Manifesto as a platform for a group they belonged to called the Communist League. The Manifesto envisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and oppressive owners, calling for a workers’
revolution so property, family and nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established. The Evil Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. Mein Kampf Author: Adolf Hitler Publication date: 1925-26 Score: 41
Summary: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was initially published in two parts in
1925 and 1926 after Hitler was imprisoned for leading Nazi Brown Shirts in the so-called "Beer Hall Putsch" that tried to overthrow the Bavarian government. Here Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany, laying out a Nazi program pointing directly to World War II and the Holocaust. He envisioned the mass murder of Jews, and a war against France to precede a war against Russia to carve out "lebensraum" ("living
room") for Germans in Eastern Europe. The book was originally ignored. But not after Hitler rose to power. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there were 10 million copies in circulation by 1945.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao Author: Mao Zedong Publication date: 1966
Score: 38 Summary: Mao, who died in 1976, was the leader of the Red Army in the fight for control of China against the anti-Communist forces of Chiang Kai-shek before, during and after World War II. Victorious, in 1949, he founded the People’s Republic of China, enslaving the world’s most populous nation in communism. In 1966, he published Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book, as a tool in the "Cultural Revolution" he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction. Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. "It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism," wrote Mao.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
4. The Kinsey Report Author: Alfred Kinsey Publication date: 1948 Score: 37
Summary: Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University who, in 1948, published a study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as The Kinsey Report. Five years later, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy. "Kinsey’s initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws," the Washington Times reported last year when a movie on Kinsey was released. "The report included reports of sexual activity by boys--even babies--and said that 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience. . . . The 1953 book also included reports of sexual activity involving girls younger than age 4, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
5. Democracy and Education Author: John Dewey Publication date: 1916 Score:
36 Summary: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a "progressive"
philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking "skills" instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
6. Das Kapital Author: Karl Marx Publication date: 1867-1894 Score: 31
Summary: Marx died after publishing a first volume of this massive book, after which his benefactor Engels edited and published two additional volumes that Marx had drafted. Das Kapital forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of Marx’s materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits. Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian revolution. He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
7. The Feminine Mystique Author: Betty Friedan Publication date: 1963
Score: 30 Summary: In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in "a comfortable concentration camp"--a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that "Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy Author: Auguste Comte Publication
date: 1830-1842 Score: 28 Summary: Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, "I have naturally ceased to believe in God." Later, in the six volumes of The Course of Positive Philosophy, he coined the term "sociology." He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond "theology" (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through "metaphysics"
(in this case defined as the French revolutionaries’ reliance on abstract assertions of "rights" without a God), to "positivism," in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
9. Beyond Good and Evil Author: Freidrich Nietzsche Publication date: 1886
Score: 28 Summary: An oft-scribbled bit of college-campus graffiti says:
"‘God is dead’--Nietzsche" followed by "‘Nietzsche is dead’--God."
Nietzsche’s profession that "God is dead" appeared in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, but under-girded the basic theme of Beyond Good and Evil, which was published four years later. Here Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral "Will to Power," and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them. "Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation," he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money Author: John Maynard Keynes Publication date: 1936 Score: 23 Summary: Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
They decided to vote for the most dangerous books. The results were sent round my departmental mailing list as a joke but I think they are quite interesting. Perhaps we could do a similar survey here. Name your top three most dangerous books (in order) and either post to the yahoo group or email me. I'll tot up the scores once replies dry up and see what we get. My answers soon, but here is the top ten by those US conservatives.
Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries
1. The Communist Manifesto Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels Publication date: 1848 Score: 74 Summary: Marx and Engels, born in Germany in 1818 and 1820, respectively, were the intellectual godfathers of communism. Engels was the original limousine leftist: A wealthy textile heir, he financed Marx for much of his life. In 1848, the two co-authored The Communist Manifesto as a platform for a group they belonged to called the Communist League. The Manifesto envisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and oppressive owners, calling for a workers’
revolution so property, family and nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established. The Evil Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. Mein Kampf Author: Adolf Hitler Publication date: 1925-26 Score: 41
Summary: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was initially published in two parts in
1925 and 1926 after Hitler was imprisoned for leading Nazi Brown Shirts in the so-called "Beer Hall Putsch" that tried to overthrow the Bavarian government. Here Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany, laying out a Nazi program pointing directly to World War II and the Holocaust. He envisioned the mass murder of Jews, and a war against France to precede a war against Russia to carve out "lebensraum" ("living
room") for Germans in Eastern Europe. The book was originally ignored. But not after Hitler rose to power. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there were 10 million copies in circulation by 1945.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao Author: Mao Zedong Publication date: 1966
Score: 38 Summary: Mao, who died in 1976, was the leader of the Red Army in the fight for control of China against the anti-Communist forces of Chiang Kai-shek before, during and after World War II. Victorious, in 1949, he founded the People’s Republic of China, enslaving the world’s most populous nation in communism. In 1966, he published Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book, as a tool in the "Cultural Revolution" he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction. Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. "It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism," wrote Mao.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
4. The Kinsey Report Author: Alfred Kinsey Publication date: 1948 Score: 37
Summary: Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University who, in 1948, published a study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as The Kinsey Report. Five years later, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy. "Kinsey’s initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws," the Washington Times reported last year when a movie on Kinsey was released. "The report included reports of sexual activity by boys--even babies--and said that 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience. . . . The 1953 book also included reports of sexual activity involving girls younger than age 4, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
5. Democracy and Education Author: John Dewey Publication date: 1916 Score:
36 Summary: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a "progressive"
philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking "skills" instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
6. Das Kapital Author: Karl Marx Publication date: 1867-1894 Score: 31
Summary: Marx died after publishing a first volume of this massive book, after which his benefactor Engels edited and published two additional volumes that Marx had drafted. Das Kapital forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of Marx’s materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits. Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian revolution. He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
7. The Feminine Mystique Author: Betty Friedan Publication date: 1963
Score: 30 Summary: In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in "a comfortable concentration camp"--a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that "Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy Author: Auguste Comte Publication
date: 1830-1842 Score: 28 Summary: Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, "I have naturally ceased to believe in God." Later, in the six volumes of The Course of Positive Philosophy, he coined the term "sociology." He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond "theology" (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through "metaphysics"
(in this case defined as the French revolutionaries’ reliance on abstract assertions of "rights" without a God), to "positivism," in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
9. Beyond Good and Evil Author: Freidrich Nietzsche Publication date: 1886
Score: 28 Summary: An oft-scribbled bit of college-campus graffiti says:
"‘God is dead’--Nietzsche" followed by "‘Nietzsche is dead’--God."
Nietzsche’s profession that "God is dead" appeared in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, but under-girded the basic theme of Beyond Good and Evil, which was published four years later. Here Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral "Will to Power," and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them. "Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation," he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money Author: John Maynard Keynes Publication date: 1936 Score: 23 Summary: Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
It's been over two weeks since my last entry. Part of the reason for this is that it has been a very busy time, and partly because I've been arguing on the Sec Web about the history of science. The later used up my self imposed internet quota while it was happening.
The Da Vinci Code marches on. Today, even the Times Literary Supplement had an article by Professor Bernard Hamilton about it (basically saying it is historically rubbish and decidedly anti-Catholic) which was quite entertaining. I loved the dry and measured tone of the article which made it far more effective than a rant and also quite funny with its studied understatement. I could learn something from that technique myself when arguing.
Rather less pleasing is an interview in Christianity Today with a Jesus myther who is making a movie about his delusions. I have no objections to Jesus mythers being allowed to say their piece but I do think Christianity Today could have provided rather more commentary on the false claims being made here. Doherty certainly does not remain "unrefuted" today. He's been refuted so often that most of us have despaired of the true believers who cling to it.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
The Da Vinci Code marches on. Today, even the Times Literary Supplement had an article by Professor Bernard Hamilton about it (basically saying it is historically rubbish and decidedly anti-Catholic) which was quite entertaining. I loved the dry and measured tone of the article which made it far more effective than a rant and also quite funny with its studied understatement. I could learn something from that technique myself when arguing.
Rather less pleasing is an interview in Christianity Today with a Jesus myther who is making a movie about his delusions. I have no objections to Jesus mythers being allowed to say their piece but I do think Christianity Today could have provided rather more commentary on the false claims being made here. Doherty certainly does not remain "unrefuted" today. He's been refuted so often that most of us have despaired of the true believers who cling to it.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Friday, May 20, 2005
The feedback form should work now. Do let me know if there are problems with the web site and I'll try and correct them. Even pointing out typos is much appreciated!
I have finished Alister McGrath's Dawkin's God. It is a good book and much more recommended than Roger Steer's Letter to an Influential Atheist, reviewed earlier on. McGrath chooses his ground carefully and attacks Dawkins where he is vulnerable rather than holding any hostages to fortune. For instance, the meme concept is torn to pieces (Dawkins himself has now wisely retreated from it)and various anti-religious rants are analysed and found to be, well, rants. What this books does not do is argue for anything. It is wholly negative and defensive although very effectively so. Steven Carr has objected that McGrath doesn't deal with the problem of evil, which is almost certainly the grounding of Dawkins' atheism. This is true and I expect McGrath deliberately avoided it simply because he knows he can't deal with such a complex problem in such a short book. Perhaps it would make a good follow up work as I would be interested in what he thinks.
McGrath concedes that Dawkins is a great explainer of science. I can vouch for this having enjoyed two of his books despite the wholly explicit atheist agenda. McGrath also reveals Dawkins as an absolutely dreadful philosopher and historian of science who makes so many errors it can reduce his whole argument to an amorphous blob. I don't know if Dawkins will be taking these criticisms on board although it is notable that his latest book, The Ancestor's Tale, is much shorter on the usual anti-religious editorialising. So perhaps he is getting the message after all.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
I have finished Alister McGrath's Dawkin's God. It is a good book and much more recommended than Roger Steer's Letter to an Influential Atheist, reviewed earlier on. McGrath chooses his ground carefully and attacks Dawkins where he is vulnerable rather than holding any hostages to fortune. For instance, the meme concept is torn to pieces (Dawkins himself has now wisely retreated from it)and various anti-religious rants are analysed and found to be, well, rants. What this books does not do is argue for anything. It is wholly negative and defensive although very effectively so. Steven Carr has objected that McGrath doesn't deal with the problem of evil, which is almost certainly the grounding of Dawkins' atheism. This is true and I expect McGrath deliberately avoided it simply because he knows he can't deal with such a complex problem in such a short book. Perhaps it would make a good follow up work as I would be interested in what he thinks.
McGrath concedes that Dawkins is a great explainer of science. I can vouch for this having enjoyed two of his books despite the wholly explicit atheist agenda. McGrath also reveals Dawkins as an absolutely dreadful philosopher and historian of science who makes so many errors it can reduce his whole argument to an amorphous blob. I don't know if Dawkins will be taking these criticisms on board although it is notable that his latest book, The Ancestor's Tale, is much shorter on the usual anti-religious editorialising. So perhaps he is getting the message after all.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Apologies for the time Bede's Library was down today. I have changed my web host (again!) and the move necessitated some reorganisation. The feedback form doesn't work for the moment, although the search facility does (possibly for the first time).
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
I had a nice email about this article today which explains how the genetic code must be part of the fabric of the universe rather than something that can have evolved. I am also reading Alister McGrath's Dawkin's God, which is a critique of Richard Dawkin's non-scientific thoughts. You may remember I discussed a talk McGrath gave at Cambridge a few months ago. I'll have some more on the book when I've finished it but it looks good for now.
Another thing to consider is the question of mutations. These are random changes to DNA that are then passed on to the next generation. It is the effect these changes have on an organism that provide grist for the mill of natural selection. But are the mutations actually random? They are certainly usually assumed to be although in fact, they have causes such as radiation or chemical reactions. Also, some genes are more prone to change than others which is why some genetic illnesses are quite common and some very rare indeed. A mutation is essentially a chemical reaction and how easily these happen depends on the stability of the molecules involved. Some mutations happen more easily than others because some DNA arrangements are inherently less stable than others.
This raises an interesting point. In the long run, all mutations should tend towards the most stable arrangement of DNA. Even if that arrangement is not genetically viable (and it probably isn't), there will still be a tendency to move in that direction. This might be part of what junk DNA, that has no direct genetic effect, is doing. On the other hand, it might be that the 'higher' animals have more stable DNA than lower ones simply because theirs has mutated further towards the theoretical arrangement of maximum stability. If that is the case, then it would mean that there was a built in tendency in nature towards the higher animals. It would also leave us asking where that tendency might have come from.
I do think it would be worth measuring the relative chemical energies of different types of DNA, or perhaps it has already been done in which case I'd love to see the results.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Another thing to consider is the question of mutations. These are random changes to DNA that are then passed on to the next generation. It is the effect these changes have on an organism that provide grist for the mill of natural selection. But are the mutations actually random? They are certainly usually assumed to be although in fact, they have causes such as radiation or chemical reactions. Also, some genes are more prone to change than others which is why some genetic illnesses are quite common and some very rare indeed. A mutation is essentially a chemical reaction and how easily these happen depends on the stability of the molecules involved. Some mutations happen more easily than others because some DNA arrangements are inherently less stable than others.
This raises an interesting point. In the long run, all mutations should tend towards the most stable arrangement of DNA. Even if that arrangement is not genetically viable (and it probably isn't), there will still be a tendency to move in that direction. This might be part of what junk DNA, that has no direct genetic effect, is doing. On the other hand, it might be that the 'higher' animals have more stable DNA than lower ones simply because theirs has mutated further towards the theoretical arrangement of maximum stability. If that is the case, then it would mean that there was a built in tendency in nature towards the higher animals. It would also leave us asking where that tendency might have come from.
I do think it would be worth measuring the relative chemical energies of different types of DNA, or perhaps it has already been done in which case I'd love to see the results.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Monday, May 16, 2005
With the release of Kingdom of Heaven, there have been complaints about Hollywood's anti-Christian bias. I haven't seen this movie, but last night we saw King Arthur with Clive Owen and I was staggered by its blatant anti-Christian and specifically anti-Catholic stance. It was actually quite grotesque at times even if the film's battle scenes were a redeeming feature.
In King Arthur, set around 420AD, we learn that Arthur is a friend and follower of one Pelagius, a heretic who we later hear was executed by the Pope. It is the Pope and not the Emperor who is running the show in Rome and all the Christians in the film (except Arthur, who is a heretic as well) are evil beyond belief. We see monks deliberately walling pagans into caves to starve to death, a bishop who is a double crossing scumbag and a Christian aristocrat trying to murder a child. No good Catholic features in the movie at all.
Of course, historically this is codswallop. The Emperor and not the Pope was not in charge at Rome even if the former enjoyed a good deal of influence. Pelagius was a religious fundamentalist who said only the most pious ascetics could get to heaven. He had no time for the grace that the rest of us sinners need to know God, because he thought he was so perfect so as not to need it. Nor was he executed, although he left Rome after his teachings were condemned.
I have to wonder how a movie that portrayed Moslems as entirely made up of unreconstructed psychos would fair in the media. King Arthur proves that anti-Catholicism is still the acceptable bigotry of some of the liberal elite (witness the rantings in the Guardian from the likes of Polly Toynbee). Frankly, it is becoming rather tiresome.
One other thing about King Arthur is that the Saxons (that is, the English) are also portrayed as racist barbarians. But a negative portrayal of the English is something else that Hollywood has long been guilty of.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
In King Arthur, set around 420AD, we learn that Arthur is a friend and follower of one Pelagius, a heretic who we later hear was executed by the Pope. It is the Pope and not the Emperor who is running the show in Rome and all the Christians in the film (except Arthur, who is a heretic as well) are evil beyond belief. We see monks deliberately walling pagans into caves to starve to death, a bishop who is a double crossing scumbag and a Christian aristocrat trying to murder a child. No good Catholic features in the movie at all.
Of course, historically this is codswallop. The Emperor and not the Pope was not in charge at Rome even if the former enjoyed a good deal of influence. Pelagius was a religious fundamentalist who said only the most pious ascetics could get to heaven. He had no time for the grace that the rest of us sinners need to know God, because he thought he was so perfect so as not to need it. Nor was he executed, although he left Rome after his teachings were condemned.
I have to wonder how a movie that portrayed Moslems as entirely made up of unreconstructed psychos would fair in the media. King Arthur proves that anti-Catholicism is still the acceptable bigotry of some of the liberal elite (witness the rantings in the Guardian from the likes of Polly Toynbee). Frankly, it is becoming rather tiresome.
One other thing about King Arthur is that the Saxons (that is, the English) are also portrayed as racist barbarians. But a negative portrayal of the English is something else that Hollywood has long been guilty of.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
As we're staying at my parents this weekend, I popped down to a church near them for mass this morning. Like most English Catholic Churches it was quite modern, but still an attractive brick building. It was also full which was lovely to see and filled with as fine a mix of people of all races and ages as you could ever expect to find, certainly in South West London.
But I do have one major gripe. Why is it that Catholic Churches do not hand out an order of service to the congregation? I'm away from home and don't have my missal on me, so could have done with a primer. And what if someone who was not a Catholic at all wandered in. How would they have a clue what was going on? Worse, the service was quite a freewheeling version of the mass with songs and chants substituted for many of the prayers. A good deal of audience participation was expected. I, a convert, was lost. If you attend a Church of England service, you will always be given an order of service but not at a Catholic Church. This is a mistake. If a church wants newcomers to feel welcome then it should not make them have to advertise themselves by asking for an order of service. Not handing them out makes the mass seem to a private club instead of a ritual open for all, even if not all can take communion.
So, if your Church doesn't hand out an order of service, perhaps you should find out why and suggest that it would be a cheap and effective way of reaching out.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
But I do have one major gripe. Why is it that Catholic Churches do not hand out an order of service to the congregation? I'm away from home and don't have my missal on me, so could have done with a primer. And what if someone who was not a Catholic at all wandered in. How would they have a clue what was going on? Worse, the service was quite a freewheeling version of the mass with songs and chants substituted for many of the prayers. A good deal of audience participation was expected. I, a convert, was lost. If you attend a Church of England service, you will always be given an order of service but not at a Catholic Church. This is a mistake. If a church wants newcomers to feel welcome then it should not make them have to advertise themselves by asking for an order of service. Not handing them out makes the mass seem to a private club instead of a ritual open for all, even if not all can take communion.
So, if your Church doesn't hand out an order of service, perhaps you should find out why and suggest that it would be a cheap and effective way of reaching out.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
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