Nurses, not cretins

We need help from the Dawk on this one. The Holocaust-denying bishop isn't a problem. That's obviously typical of what religion does to you. But what about the kind of person who would want to suspend a nurse for offering to pray for a patient? How do you get that smallminded without any assistance from theism, for Almostcertainlydoesntexist's sake, Professor?

I for one am in need of all the prayer that's going and should the occasion arise would be delighted to be prayed for by any nurse, be he/she Muslim, Seventh Day Adventist or Zoroastrian. Is there some kind of card I can carry to make my wishes known? Would that appropriately promote diversity and equality?

A final and very serious question for anyone who's after my vote: who will give me a National Health Service where I pay for nurses and not cretins?

The agony of liberal Europe

When is gross child abuse approximately as serious as a spot of burglary? When it's a cultural thing, of course.

Whilst the defence that she was doing the right thing by her own lights evidently sufficed to relieve the abuser of most of the responsibility for her crimes, if that prompts the thought that they must be pretty dim lights you'd do well to keep your thoughts to yourself. Thoughts like that can get you into real trouble.

Beyond belief

RIP Richard Neuhaus

Sometimes I think the papers should give us previews of some of their obituaries, to alert us to people we should make the most of while they're still with us. I wish I'd been more than dimly aware of Father Richard Neuhaus, the American Lutheran-turned-Catholic theologian and activist, before reading his obit.

Neuhaus was a 'progressive' when he marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam war. He became a 'conservative' when he challenged the human rights record of Vietnam's victorious Stalinists, and still more so when he upheld the rights of the unborn child. So much for political tribalism as a moral guide.

Requiescat in pace.

In the beginning was the stuff: a creation myth for today's bourgeoisie

The lesson is found in the first chapter of the Book of Spectators, beginning to read at the first verse.

In the beginning there was nobody around to create anything, just stuff.
And the stuff was without form and void,
Only not quite, because there were some eddies in the stream of entropy.
Though obviously not because of anybody thinking they were a good idea.
And by a happy chance the eddies brought forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life etc. etc.
A day or two later the eddies created market economies, and every banker that jetteth over the earth after his kind, and the market economies brought forth bonuses abundantly,
And the bankers saw every thing that they had made, and, behold, it was very good.
On the next day things weren't looking quite so hot.
And the bankers said, this bottom-up business is all very well, but let's not get fanatical about it, so let the taxpayer bring forth bail-out packages.
And the bankers trousered the bail-outs, and behold, it was still reasonably satisfactory.

Here endeth the lesson.

[Footnote: dialectical materialism, the Leninist state religion, claimed that class struggle and revolution were inscribed in the natural order of things. Awarding the same status to market economies is probably less dangerous but certainly just as silly. Either way science is being misappropriated to provide an ideology with a mythology.]

A seasonal post

'To make sense of a conflict in which both sides claim to be victims requires more than an emotional response to gory pictures. I support the Palestinian right to self-determination. But I am disturbed by the rise of anti-Israeli sentiments in Britain and the West, as when my old friends on the Left declared: “We are all Hezbollah now.”

'There is a tendency to reduce the Middle East to a simplistic morality play where Good battles Evil, projecting our own victim politics on to other people's complex conflicts.

'The Israelis I met bear no comparison with the caricature of expansionist “Zio-Nazis”. [...]'

- Mick Hume reports on a visit to Israel, and puts the concerns actuating this blog into a nutshell. The tendencies he describes continue to find an echo in the churches.

Simplistic morality plays have an enduring appeal for Christians of a certain sort, and the traditional view that the festive season is incomplete without some Jewish baddies is enjoying quite a comeback - as I noted in my post on Christian Aid's 2004 Christmas Appeal. This year we've had priests saying it with carols - either by banning them or, worse, rewriting them.


There's not much to be added to this post from a couple of years ago. It's been a year in which innocent civilians in Israel have been blessedly secure from the attentions of suicide bombers. It's also been a year in which innocent civilians in Bethlehem have continued to suffer misery resulting from the Israeli security barrier. These facts are not unrelated (that the will to butcher Jews is alive and well has been gruesomely confirmed in Mumbai). The world is complicated, and surely nowhere more so in the Middle East.


To left-leaning Christians whose emotional response to the conflict has been reinforced by a pre-Advent pilgrimage: I don't want you to be silent about what the people in Bethlehem are going through (though I would like you to revise the silent assumption that Darfur, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe are of lesser concern simply because you don't choose to take your holidays there). I do want you to give it a basic level of context, to hear and tell the Israeli story too, to acknowledge that it takes two to make peace. When you fail to do that, whatever blend of naivete, political dogmatism and - just possibly - prejudice it is that actuates you, you hand the terrorists a propaganda victory to compensate them for their lost opportunities for slaughter.


One or two further messages. To Mr Stephen Hugh-Jones: thank you for your comments; be assured that I'm not ignoring you, and will have my say in due course. To the little band of regulars who have appreciated my posts, apologies that you've been having a thin time lately. It's been something of an annus horribilis for Mrs Cyrus and myself, and I've often felt blogging is the last thing I want to do after a day in front of the computer. I hope for rather better things in the New Year.


To all readers, peace and joy over the remainder of the Christmas season and in the New Year, and (I need hardly add) please continue to pray for peace in the Holy Land.

Mumbai: the blame game

Have I mentioned Caroline Lucas MEP, or was that one of the ones that I didn't quite finish? As I have extensive Christmas shopping commitments today, I'll allow Howard Jacobson to do it for me. Let's face it, nobody, least of all me, does it like Howard.

We're still very much in the same territory as Grumpy's post on Astrid Proll (not that Dr Lucas has ever been a terrorist herself, I hasten to add). A Green Party ought to be a very good thing indeed. This one won't be getting my vote as long as we carry on hearing this kind of thing from its leader.

The romance of the murderer

'I hate the fact that we are all under pressure to repent. I have long dissociated myself from the RAF, as early as when when I was in England. However, we are stigmatised for our lives. For many people it is just black or white - there is nothing in between. Those who died in Stammheim were people who committed inhuman acts not because they were criminals, evil or monstrous, but because they could not endure the unfairness and oppression of this world.'

You kill because you are fascists, we kill because we care. The definitive voice of romantic leftism: Astrid Proll, 61, still doesn't get it.

The RAF aka Baader-Meinhof made this unfair and oppressive world a little more unfair and oppressive. That's all. There's still time for Ms Proll to read Albert Camus' The Rebel.

Pedants' Corner

A red-faced Torygraph has made a swift correction, but if my eyes weren't deceiving me, when I first read their report on the Subway sandwich bar chain it contained this:-

'One industry expert says: "In a lot of city centres it has replaced the donor kebab shop as a place where people go to get food and hang out after the pub."'

I always did wonder what went into those kebabs.

Stop the Bomb

A German friend has sent me a link to Stop the Bomb, a site which hosts a petition calling on the German government to impose trade sanctions as a means of exerting real pressure on the Iranian regime to drop its nuclear weapons programme.


The initiative has the support of politicians across the spectrum from Christian Democrats to Left Party members, plus sundry academics. Names with a resonance outside Germany include Matthias Küntzel (see my links section), Benny Morris and Nobel Literature Prize winner Elfrida Jelinek (something of a surprise to me - I evidently need to revise my perceptions of her politics).


You don't have to be German to sign! Germany is Iran's leading European trade partner, and that should concern everyone.


Oh, and by the way. Yes, of course Israel has the Bomb. What it doesn't have is leaders who talk openly about wiping nearby countries off the map (and, no, that wasn't a 'mistranslation'). Or who host conferences for genocide-denying racists. I haven't been celebrating Obama's triumph, but I'll start partying retrospectively if and when he convinces me that he has the measure of the seriousness of the Iranian threat.