I am becoming quite fond of my little corner of Schiphol airport. I have put up my Christmas cards and a few bits of tinsel. I now have a boarding card for the 0800 to Manchester. This is the sixth boarding card I have had. It is very hard to understand why, time after time, they don’t know a flight is cancelled until some time after it was due to leave and all the passengers have queued at the gate for hours.
Of course, Manchester is a lot further from Ramsgate than Schiphol is, so even if the flight atually goes, this represents rather dubious progress.
Happy New Year everybody.
Remarkably, KLM delivered my lost luggage, including my laptop, at 9.30 pm on New Year’s Eve. At that time a pretty lively party was already in full swing,much improved by the presence of a great many beautiful young women, mostly from Latvia. I am not sure why; my life as ever consists of a bewildering succession of chance encounters with really nice people. I am in the fortunate position of being able to say that Nadira was the most lovely of all, without indulging in dutiful hyperbole.
It was an extremely happy Christmas. Having my mum, both my brothers and all my three chidren together was as great as it was rare.
We have been through the laptop in lost luggage discussion before. The problem is that my shoulders dislocate at the drop of a hat, and I travel without hand luggage to avoid an accident.
2011 is going to be a very important year for me. particularly the first quarter. A number of crucial events are going either to set me up financially for the rest of my life, or result in real distress and failure. At present I have reason to be very optimistic. I am also very absorbed in my life of Alexander Burnes, which I hope will help establish a serious academic reputation.
The Portuguese edition of Murder in Samarkand has sold unexpectedly well in Brazil. The translation of the Turkish edition has just been finished.
I hope to do a Wikileaks retrospective in the next couple of days. Just a quick thought on the case of the poor young gardener in Bristol. Of the Jill Dando case, long before Barry Bulsara’s succesful appeal I blogged that this appeared to be a miscarriage of justice in which the police had fitted up the local weirdo.
Despite not being enamoured of landlords in general, I fear the same dynamic is at work in Bristol, albeit Chris Jefferies is much more intellectually capable than Bulsara. My instinct is that the police have picked up on Jefferies for being camper than a boy scout jamboree and archer than Trajan.
Jefferies’ release on bail has me worried that there was nothing against him other than the “He’s a weird one, guv” instinct of some not very bright cop. The case needs to be closely watched as history shows that the powers of the police to make the evidence fit the suspect are considerable.
some of those “moral codes” from the Bible (and don’t let me get started on the Koran):
Don’t let cattle graze with other kinds of Cattle (Leviticus 19:19)
Don’t have a variety of crops on the same field. (Leviticus 19:19)
Don’t wear clothes made of more than one fabric (Leviticus 19:19)
Don’t cut your hair nor shave. (Leviticus 19:27)
Any person who curseth his mother or father, must be killed. (Leviticus 20:9)
If a man cheats on his wife, or vise versa, both the man and the woman must die. (Leviticus 20:10).
If a man sleeps with his father’s wife… both him and his father’s wife is to be put to death. (Leviticus 20:11)
If a man sleeps with his wife and her mother they are all to be burnt to death. (Leviticus 20:14)
If a man or woman has sex with an animal, both human and animal must be killed. (Leviticus 20:15-16).
If a man has sex with a woman on her period, they are both to be “cut off from their people” (Leviticus 20:18)
Psychics, wizards, and so on are to be stoned to death. (Leviticus 20:27)
If a priest’s daughter is a whore, she is to be burnt at the stake. (Leviticus 21:9)
People who have flat noses, or is blind or lame, cannot go to an altar of God (Leviticus 21:17-18)
Anyone who curses or blasphemes God, should be stoned to death by the community. (Leviticus 24:14-16
Anyone who dreams or prophesizes anything that is against God, or anyone who tries to turn you from God, is to be put to death. (Deuteronomy 13:5)
If anyone, even your own family suggests worshipping another God, kill them. (Deuteronomy 13:6-10)
If you find out a city worships a different god, destroy the city and kill all of it’s inhabitants… even the animals. (Deuteronomy 13:12-15)
Kill anyone with a different religion. (Deuteronomy 17:2-7)
Alan, you’ve got to remember something like thermodynamics. For every one way there is to build something, there are umpteen billion ways to break it, so getting things wrong is far more likely than getting them right. Yes, in amongst the moral codes are ones that are useless or worse. But enough of them make a positive contribution for the *system* to be better than none. What is remarkable is that any of the rules are useful at all; whatever is at work here does a much better job than chance.
Nice to have an interesting discussion for a change!
Clark, you asserted, “Religion has been Humanity’s most important organising force for thousands of years.” I disagree. I’d say it’s been the most divisive force for at least as long. Religious bigotry has been behind a great deal of wrong (not all of it, granted). I don’t recall that many occasions upon which religion came along and saved the day, and united a people, or stopped a war.
You further asserted, “Any religion is vastly bigger and more complicated than any fairy story.” I agree – absolutely! When there’s that much money and power to be made, it’s a hell of a lot more important, for a start. It’s got to be complicated and pretty much self-contradictory, or you would not find a great deal of wriggle-room to justify pretty much anything you want. You wouldn’t have the Great Explainers, the High Priests, on anything straightforward, so what would they do for a living then? You go on to mention, “ritual, authority, organisation, hierarchy, records keeping” – well, the first three are what it’s all about. Four, actually – comply very well, and you’ll rise in the ranks. Record keeping – particularly financial – not so good. The religious records about historical events don’t really bear much scrutiny either.
You continue, “employment, trade, celebration, conditioning, centralisation, calendars…” – well of course. I’m not denying the significant effect that religion has on a society, but I would like to point out that it’s a terribly harmful thing, overall. Up to and including the taking over of calendar events, celebrations, of previous religions, when they are pushed out of the way by those more brutal and forceful.
Subjugation of women, and installing passiveness or hatred in the masses as required, is why religion is so popular among the ruling classes. The idea that the self-declared religious are more decent, charitable, truthful or law abiding that the rest is ridiculous. You’ll find the deeply religious more than well represented in jails and in positions of high corruption. The highest, I’ll wager, is the Catholic hierarchy, which is as corrupt and damaging as any single institution in history.
Anyway, what is the alternative? I don’t think you can get straight from a hunter-gather tribe to a secular soceity (has Humanity achieved one of those yet?). You need some kind of developmental process, or else you need some god or alien to come and show you how it’s done.
Personally, I reject religion. What I don’t do is slag off religion. As an atheist, I recognise that I’m the newcomer with a set of beliefs that are virtually untested as regards the development of my species. I know that I would never have had the chance to be an atheist without the vast developmental process of religion to enable it.
“From the mythos comes the logos” (or something).
Clark at 01:37…. no they don’t, not at all. We pick and choose the (very few) sane edicts out of a candid religion, and don’t bother with the rest because they make no sense. We know it’s not right to lie, cheat and steal, or kill. We don’t need a religion to tell us we should rescue a drowning stranger, or lay our own lives on the line for a random child we might encounter than needs our help.
So that a few sane laws are incorporated into a religion is hardly a proof that it’s good, and that we need the religion!
Think of all the more insane laws – kill your children if they disrespect you. Abandon your family, and follow Jesus. Put all manner of people to death, and multiply like cockroaches, as if you were a tiny tribe trying to survive the dark ages. We conveniently ignore that aspect of religion, because it doesn’t make sense.
The racist Anglophobe, SS, has just found another six million corpses for which to blame the white man. Hence his support for Craig Murray’s campaign to break up the UK, disrupt the indigenous culture and political constitution, and promote the ethnic cleansing of the national capital and other cities by mass immigration both legal and illegal.
But the problem for Dr. Saadi is this: if Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11, and if on 9/11 Al Qaeda was run by Osama bin Laden, and if Osama bin Laden was then a guest of the Afghanistan Government, and if as was the case, the Afghanistan Government refused to hand Osama bin Laden over to American justice, on what possible grounds can the US and its allies, including Britain, be condemned for their war against the Afghanistan Taliban?
The United States is not a wounded beast to be pecked to death by terrorists from some fourth rate tyranny: it is a great power that will reacts to assault as would any great power, red, white, yellow or brown.
So which is it Dr. Saadi? Did Al Qaeda, directed from Afghanistan, attack the US on 9/11 as Craig Murray asserts, or was 9/11 a false flag attack connived at or instigated by the US itself?
And here’s another problem for Dr. Saadi: According to information supplied by the sainted Julian Assange, Osama bin Laden is alive and well living in Pakistan and directing the war against the US in Afghanistan.
So which is it here? Is the information provided by Wikileaks about Osama bin Laden’s present whereabouts and activities correct, in which case US military operations, however tragic the consequences, are justifiable, or is Julian Assange a witting dupe or conscious agent of US disinformation?
But that Craig Murray and his acolytes get real is no doubt too much to ask.
Glenn, yes, religion is also a divisive force. That’s typical of an evolved system – it’s not the least bit single-minded. My point is, it must have been doing more ‘good’ than ‘harm’, or evolution would have eliminated either it, or it’s practitioners (99.9% of humans)
Your criticisms are all valid, but I would point out that you’re criticising the *result* of a long process. When rulers see the power of religion, don’t you think they want some? You can’t really blame religion (the result of human instincts) for the powerful’s deliberate use of it.
I’ve said before, I’m happy to leave religion alone, as long as it (and its followers) leaves me alone and doesn’t try to impose any of its regulations upon me. But it always does, doesn’t it? Whether its the Pope telling me not to wear a condom or the religious police in Iran throwing acid in a woman’s face for wearing make-up.
Glenn at 1:59 – that’s how silly religion looks *now*, in *hindsight*. Morals aren’t given, they had to be learned. The rules that were passed down *were* the rules of tiny tribes trying to survive their dark ages. The fact that those rules helped them is why those rules got passed on.
Alan: I’m pretty much with you on this. But have you thought about how the fundamentalist Kristians in America might give you grief, were you to have your legal choice of abortion, or your constitutional right of not having religion put upon you by the state?
And even if religion were not directly acting against you, you still have to pay for it. Churches, Mosques, all sorts of religious crankery where officially recognised, does not have to pay tax, or rates. So they get prime real-estate tax free. All of their expenses can have money claimed back. The building does not have to pay rates, but we get to pay for its protection against fire, theft etc. just as if it were an honest business. You can’t find a city or town anywhere where one of these parasitic organisations is not in the prime spot, living without contribution, entirely at the expense of the rest of us.
So we all pay for this religious delusion. Even those of us who’ve seen through the sorry scam.
Alan, you’ll just have to be patient, I’m afraid. The religious crash was inevitable. You were just unlucky in being born either too early or too late.
Yeah, “Live and Let Live” is a fine rule, and one that politicians could do with learning, as well as the religionists. These days, the politicians are more dangerous. The religionists sound scarier, but the politicians have the bigger guns. Hell, al-Qaeda even had to use US planes!
Clark at 2:17 – You’ve got it backwards. Components of religion are just basic elements of humanity, not what taught us what to do. We don’t need religion to be moral. We’ve abandoned the more crazy parts of religion on the whole (admittedly through ignorance – most “religious” people have no idea what’s in their Holy Book!), it’s now time for the enlightened minority to work on having society abandon the rest.
Anyway, the power of religion is declining, though obviously not fast enough for Alan and Glenn. It seems a bit off to hurl insults at it when its demise looks inevitable anyway.
I dunno, Clark… look at the rise of the teabaggers. They’re all about religion, which they’ve combined with racism and fascism, and they’re pretty strong right now. It needs rational intervention more strongly than ever.
Glenn, I said religion was an emergent phenomenon. It’s what assembles itself from various bits of human nature. Morals are in there, so is mistrust of outsiders, awe at the universe, etc, etc. No, we don’t need religion to be moral, but throw a bunch of linguistic, morally developing creatures together that don’t yet have science, and you’ll get some of the aspects of religion. Humans are alive and social, so the components don’t just remain components, they self-assemble into systems.
Another thing religion does is provide a moral argument to use against others. I don’t need religion to be moral myself, but it’s damn useful to call upon when I’m claiming that my neighbour’s behaviour is immoral; it makes it more than just my self-interested opinion.
Clark: Agreed, religion is _damned_ useful in denouncing another. You don’t even have to have a different religion to the one you’re denouncing, just declare that the other person is not adhering to your shared religious doctrine to the extent required. That’s enough to have her or him considered a Bad Person, and Bad People must be punished. Dark ages stuff, but it still goes on, on a daily basis – even around here – as a divisive force. Just look at the crap Anno has posted recently.
The teabaggers will chill out when they get what they want, by which I mean what they *really* want, not what they think (or have been persuaded to think) they want, and shout so loudly about. It’s a glitch; religion is on the way down.
I think this could be where some of the Muslim trouble stems from. There’s relatively little stress on a young Muslim maturing in a Muslim society. There is far more temptation in a society such as the UK. Many young Muslims must feel shackled by their religion and wish to escape, but their religious conditioning makes them fearful. Can you imagine the tension that can accumulate around such an internal conflict? I’ve been through something like this myself, and I can tell you it was NOT trivial. Some escape, some (like many “Christians”) go all fuzzy-headed and sort of believe and disbelieve simultaneously. And a few become zealots, completely repressing their non-religious side, and end up carrying a lot of anger.
Glenn, denouncing someone of your own religion is the default scenario. Religions developed in much greater isolation than we see today. They met in battle, of course, but that was exceptional. Having lots of people of different religions all mingled together is mostly a modern scenario. But yes, to provide a basis for publicly criticising a neighbour’s morals – this is one of the functions religion performed, which the law is now making increasingly redundant.
This is why religion is doomed. Bit by bit, its functions are being replaced by superior systems. The law replaces moral pressure. The state replaces education. Science replaces mythology and explanation of the natural world. Etc. Pretty soon, religion won’t be needed.
By “pretty soon” I mean in maybe 500 years or so.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/god-angrily-clarifies-dont-kill-rule,222/
Well, Clark, we are much in agreement. Religion isn’t needed now, though, except by those that want to rule through it. But consider that a significant proportion of America – enough to sway elections – thinks that Obama is a Muslim, and that alone is enough to shriek in horror at his presidency. Also, that America was founded by Bible-thumping fundamentalists, whereas the opposite is true. And that it’s right to have a new Holy War in the middle-east, because forces for satan are being waged against us. That – in total seriousness – is what the last President (Dubbya) believed, and was given PDB (Presidential Daily Briefings) that were prefaced with Biblical texts reinforcing this dangerous delusion.
Religion is to subjugate, to delude, to make people abandon all reason, and accept any outrageous acts. Religion is the root of evil even more than money – capitalism/religion … maybe _they_ are the same sides of that figurative coin.
Hmm. Religion and telly may have been a particularly bad mixture.
“Whoever we are and wherever we’re from
We should have noticed by now our behavior is dumb…”
Zappa:
http://www.metrolyrics.com/dumb-all-over-lyrics-frank-zappa.html
Glenn, remember that all over the world there are billions of people who voluntarily do kind or helpful things. For most of these people, these acts of generosity are in some way entwined with their religious beliefs, and this is how things have been for thousands of years. Religion as practiced on the street is not proportionally represented in the media, which of course focuses on the spectacular, which is often the worst.
If people want to think in religious ways I think they should be free to do so, without undue criticism, because it is the default human state. But children’s exposure to religion should be limited and balanced by law.
Oops, me at 4:24.
@AB at December 31, 2010 2:02 AM:
“and if as was the case, the Afghanistan Government refused to hand Osama bin Laden over to American justice…”
Not true.
See link below –
Alfred (2:02am), hello.
You’ve not answered my very simple question yet. Here it is again, lest you have forgotten:
If today you lived in the UK, would you vote for the BNP?
Posted by: Clark at December 31, 2010 12:07 AM:
“Most religions also institutionalise marriage, which is probably one of the greatest achievements of collective female power.”
Surely, it was more to do with men seeking sexual exclusivity, so that they could be sure they weren’t bringing up another male’s offspring.
sue hayle
You still here?
Thought you’d have bored yourself and everybody else to death by now with your tediously inept attempts at humour and witless off-topic banter re-pop music.
One gets a sense from the level to which this comment-board has sunk over the festive season just what it would look like should independent thinkers like Apostate and Steelback be moderated out.
Those guys absolutely laid waste to airheads like you, Glenn, techniwombat, jon, angritwat, the wexford banshee, cheap-cow et al day after day.
Better pray for Craig to start moderating for 2011. You guys have been utterly exposed over the last 12 months for the intellectually feckless numpties you are.
CENSORSHIP:THE LAST REFUGE OF THE INTELLECTUALLY CHALLENGED!
tongue-stem
Thank God you turned up.
Here’s a good link re-WikiLeaks from a blog the ADL doesn’t like:
http://www.opinion-maker.org/2010/12/the-enemy-within/
Yes, following numpty-logic that means it’s “anti-semitic” n’est pas?
(LMAO)