I've not been updating much lately, as my time has been taken up almost entirely with producing the latest issue of Secular Future, which is the quarterly magazine of the AHS
It's quite a large undertaking, and one I've got to balance with my day-job of making scientists happy and angry in equal measure (oh the joys of science publishing). I'll be glad to get this one out of the way and back to blogging!
It should be done and dusted in the next couple of weeks or so, at which point I've got an article about heresy ready to go. If you're interested, you can read the back-issues of Sec-Fu at: http://www.ahsstudents.org.uk/secular-future
Showing posts with label AHS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AHS. Show all posts
Monday, 7 September 2009
Thursday, 20 August 2009
A Rationalist Reviews: The Holy Bible
It’s one you have to tackle eventually. It’s not so rare in this age of screaming superlative taglines to see a story labelled as “the best ever told”, but on the basis of sales alone The Holy Bible is head and shoulders above its competitors.
It’s not strictly speaking a book, but rather a clumsy stitch-job of two completely different stories. We all remember the runaway success of The Old Testament and quite rightly thought the series was over when the original authors died centuries ago. Now though, a bunch of amateur script-doctors have leapt upon the opportunity to tack their own novella onto the original, calling it The New Testament in a shameless attempt to curry favour with longtime fans. The whole package is called The Holy Bible, after that Manic Street Preachers album.
Regular readers will recall that at the time I lambasted The Old Testament for its po-faced take on the epic family saga, calling it "Twin Peaks without the laughs". Come back Moses, all is forgiven! This latest addition to the canon manages to retain the dry genealogies and lists of rules and regulations that made the OT so hard to read, and ditch the parts that made it interesting. They take the best character from the OT – the vindictive and deliciously fickle ‘God’ – and utterly change his character. This time round, you half expect to see Him hugging a tree, rather than setting it on fire and shouting from inside it. Replacing such a popular, in-your-face fan favourite with a proverb-spouting liberal deadbeat might be the kind of thing that goes down a storm in the literary world, but you can’t see die-hard fans in Dead Squaw, Alabama taking it quite so well.
This ‘Jesus’ is somehow both the ‘God’ we remember and an entirely new character altogether, in a lazy move that is never fully explained. He spends his time dithering around the Holy Land, throwing out glib speeches about equality and justice, all the while followed by a dozen irritating literary props collectively called the ‘disciples’. I cannot begin to express my frustration at this gaggle of faceless drones, whose sole purpose seems to be asking asinine questions so that Jesus has yet another opportunity to sermonise and patronise his audience. Considering this guy is supposed to be recruiting for some radical breakaway sect, the fact that his right-hand men seem unable to tie their own sandal-thongs without his supervision stretches the credibility of the plot somewhat.
At times it seems as though the authors haven’t even read each other’s contributions. Luke and Matthew are the only authors who can be bothered to describe Jesus’s supernatural birth, John completely omits the exorcisms that in other accounts make Jesus look like the fifth Ghostbuster, and Paul doesn’t even seem sure that the character he’s writing about actually exists in the book's setting. I know that authors are often under a lot of pressure, but I don’t think a weekly meet up over coffee to swap notes would have been too much to ask.
Overall, there are some good scenes, and some engaging characters, but the NT suffers from the same flaws as its predecessor. Promising dramatic scenes are utterly squandered almost without exception. The authors are adept at creating perfect set-ups for action scenes that would make Michael Bay weep tears of pure adrenaline, but consistently fail to deliver anything but bitter disappointment. One minute Jesus is kicking ass in the temple and the next he’s wandering around in the desert doing nothing, or healing the sick. It brings to mind the depressingly anticlimactic battle for Jericho in the OT and I’d hoped we’d seen the last of it.
Although not strictly relevant to the quality of the book, you have to wonder who authorised such loose brand control. The dizzying array of spin-offs, continuations and reinterpretations are enough to give any new reader a headache. It’s bad enough having a single story told from four often wildly different perspectives, but poorly thought-out fan fiction like the Book of Mormon and the dozens of near-contemporary Gnostic gospels hardly improve matters. It’s as though the publishers let any idiot with a pen have a stab at writing a gospel in the race to make money off the franchise. People really love these books. I mean, really love them. Harry Potter fanatics have nothing on some of these ‘Christians’. Letting so many people dash off their own non-canon spin-offs is at best irresponsible, but at worst pretty damn dangerous.
Overall score: 2/5
Verdict: if you somehow find yourself trapped in a literary vacuum then reach for The Holy Bible with a happy heart, but there are so many superior fantasy novels out there it’s hard to see why you’d bother with this lacklustre effort.
Originally published in the first issue of Secular Future, the quarterly magazine of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies
It’s not strictly speaking a book, but rather a clumsy stitch-job of two completely different stories. We all remember the runaway success of The Old Testament and quite rightly thought the series was over when the original authors died centuries ago. Now though, a bunch of amateur script-doctors have leapt upon the opportunity to tack their own novella onto the original, calling it The New Testament in a shameless attempt to curry favour with longtime fans. The whole package is called The Holy Bible, after that Manic Street Preachers album.
The deluxe version of The Holy Bible, exclusively on sale in Starbucks
Regular readers will recall that at the time I lambasted The Old Testament for its po-faced take on the epic family saga, calling it "Twin Peaks without the laughs". Come back Moses, all is forgiven! This latest addition to the canon manages to retain the dry genealogies and lists of rules and regulations that made the OT so hard to read, and ditch the parts that made it interesting. They take the best character from the OT – the vindictive and deliciously fickle ‘God’ – and utterly change his character. This time round, you half expect to see Him hugging a tree, rather than setting it on fire and shouting from inside it. Replacing such a popular, in-your-face fan favourite with a proverb-spouting liberal deadbeat might be the kind of thing that goes down a storm in the literary world, but you can’t see die-hard fans in Dead Squaw, Alabama taking it quite so well.
This ‘Jesus’ is somehow both the ‘God’ we remember and an entirely new character altogether, in a lazy move that is never fully explained. He spends his time dithering around the Holy Land, throwing out glib speeches about equality and justice, all the while followed by a dozen irritating literary props collectively called the ‘disciples’. I cannot begin to express my frustration at this gaggle of faceless drones, whose sole purpose seems to be asking asinine questions so that Jesus has yet another opportunity to sermonise and patronise his audience. Considering this guy is supposed to be recruiting for some radical breakaway sect, the fact that his right-hand men seem unable to tie their own sandal-thongs without his supervision stretches the credibility of the plot somewhat.
At times it seems as though the authors haven’t even read each other’s contributions. Luke and Matthew are the only authors who can be bothered to describe Jesus’s supernatural birth, John completely omits the exorcisms that in other accounts make Jesus look like the fifth Ghostbuster, and Paul doesn’t even seem sure that the character he’s writing about actually exists in the book's setting. I know that authors are often under a lot of pressure, but I don’t think a weekly meet up over coffee to swap notes would have been too much to ask.
Overall, there are some good scenes, and some engaging characters, but the NT suffers from the same flaws as its predecessor. Promising dramatic scenes are utterly squandered almost without exception. The authors are adept at creating perfect set-ups for action scenes that would make Michael Bay weep tears of pure adrenaline, but consistently fail to deliver anything but bitter disappointment. One minute Jesus is kicking ass in the temple and the next he’s wandering around in the desert doing nothing, or healing the sick. It brings to mind the depressingly anticlimactic battle for Jericho in the OT and I’d hoped we’d seen the last of it.
Although not strictly relevant to the quality of the book, you have to wonder who authorised such loose brand control. The dizzying array of spin-offs, continuations and reinterpretations are enough to give any new reader a headache. It’s bad enough having a single story told from four often wildly different perspectives, but poorly thought-out fan fiction like the Book of Mormon and the dozens of near-contemporary Gnostic gospels hardly improve matters. It’s as though the publishers let any idiot with a pen have a stab at writing a gospel in the race to make money off the franchise. People really love these books. I mean, really love them. Harry Potter fanatics have nothing on some of these ‘Christians’. Letting so many people dash off their own non-canon spin-offs is at best irresponsible, but at worst pretty damn dangerous.
Overall score: 2/5
Verdict: if you somehow find yourself trapped in a literary vacuum then reach for The Holy Bible with a happy heart, but there are so many superior fantasy novels out there it’s hard to see why you’d bother with this lacklustre effort.
Originally published in the first issue of Secular Future, the quarterly magazine of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies
Saturday, 8 August 2009
Thank God for extremists!
Three cheers for fundamentalists! Every non-believer has seen over the last few years, the growing sense of frustration within the fundamentalist community. Atheists, Humanists and a myriad of other sub-human monsters have been crawling out of the walls and demanding that religionists pack up their special privileges and go home. The push for a secular society has not been as strong in decades and non-believers have never been as vocal. Although they invariably make us angry, these fundamentalists don’t really do us any harm and are, I propose, probably one of our greatest assets.
The problem with being loud and irrational is that people start to notice. You see this time and time again, not least in the case of the UK’s blasphemy law. Christian Voice, a self-proclaimed “prophetic ministry” led by go-to-guy-for-crazy Stephen Green, objected to the BBC showing Jerry Springer: The Opera and consequently tried to prosecute the broadcaster for blasphemy. The result of a religious fundamentalist bringing an anachronistic religious privilege to court? It brought people’s attention to the fact blasphemy was still a crime, and soon the wheels were in motion that would scrap the law completely. The court costs almost crippled Christian Voice - something they definitely didn’t prophesise - and I don’t know about you but I get a warm, fuzzy feeling just thinking about it. Were I inclined to theism I would hypothesise that indeed there is a God, and he has a wicked sense of irony.
The idea of a blasphemy law in a country that – while admittedly not a democracy – praises and encourages freedom of expression was utterly ludicrous. It was a relic from times when religion was a vital and powerful force in England, when religion was woven intrinsically into the fabric of society. It fell into the same category as the succession law that bars non-Protestants from becoming monarch, the tradition that means bishop sit in the House of Lords and the endless dirge of Songs of Praise on our taxpayer-funded broadcasting service. You know I really wouldn’t mind the requirement for the BBC to show religious programming half as much if it were actually entertaining or interesting.
The problem with all of these things is that most people see them as harmless tradition. Certainly most people seemed to recognise the abolition of the blasphemy law as a good thing, but even with bishops the general consensus seems to be that their presence in Parliament is harmless: just a lovely part of British history. Kindly bishops in their funny robes, drinking tea and providing the House with wise and sagely counsel. It doesn’t really matter how many reports you show them that demonstrate how the bishops vote en bloc in a House increasingly filled with independent lords, or that they consistently stand in the way of social progress: reasoned argument just lacks that spark of excitement that gets people motivated. That’s why we need the fundamentalists.
They’ll lambast atheists, Humanists and secularists as being just as dogmatic as they are, they’ll cry offence at the slightest perceived insult to their religious beliefs and they refuse to give ground even when what they want is clearly only in the interests of a tiny minority. Religious zealots unquestionably have a talent for making a scene, for drawing attention to themselves and consequently the issues in question. In short: they bring the drama. The best part is that not only do they bring these issues to mainstream news with a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth, they simultaneously sow the seeds of their own destruction. Ultimately, their views represent hardly anyone, and rarely have logic on their side. They can never widen their popularity because their arguments are just not as inclusive as those of secularists, and all it takes to shatter their credibility for good is a verbal kicking by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight.
There’s no doubt in my mind that secularism will ultimately win out over fundamentalists, because it reaches out to people regardless of their beliefs and demands equality without seeking to advantage atheists, Humanists or any other non-believers. The more extremists scream, shout and throw their toys out of the pram, the more attractive secularism seems.
That isn’t to say we should just let them get away with keeping abortion illegal in Northern Ireland, pushing to give the Church of England the right to select the bishops who enter the Lords or any other number of flagrant abuses of religious privilege. On the contrary, they must be fought at every turn and their agendas must be brought to public attention as often as possible. Once they’ve got the spotlight, they can only make bigger fools of themselves.
The suggestion to scrap the blasphemy law at the turn of the century was met with a plaintive response from the Bishop of Oxford: “is there nothing left that is sacred?” Well actually, no, there isn’t. Not in a society that wants to be seen as free and fair to all in any case. So let’s applaud Christian Voice, Nadine Dorries and other religious fundamentalists who would seek to exercise their archaic rights over non-believers; the more they try to enforce them, the more people will move to have them abolished. Imposing their narrow, divisive views on a multicultural society is like kicking a hornet’s nest, and they get badly stung every time. Their special pleading draws in thousands of people who wouldn’t usually care and almost always brings them in on our side, not theirs. Let’s just hope they don’t figure that out.
Originally published in issue two of Secular Future, the quarterly magazine of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies
The problem with being loud and irrational is that people start to notice. You see this time and time again, not least in the case of the UK’s blasphemy law. Christian Voice, a self-proclaimed “prophetic ministry” led by go-to-guy-for-crazy Stephen Green, objected to the BBC showing Jerry Springer: The Opera and consequently tried to prosecute the broadcaster for blasphemy. The result of a religious fundamentalist bringing an anachronistic religious privilege to court? It brought people’s attention to the fact blasphemy was still a crime, and soon the wheels were in motion that would scrap the law completely. The court costs almost crippled Christian Voice - something they definitely didn’t prophesise - and I don’t know about you but I get a warm, fuzzy feeling just thinking about it. Were I inclined to theism I would hypothesise that indeed there is a God, and he has a wicked sense of irony.
The idea of a blasphemy law in a country that – while admittedly not a democracy – praises and encourages freedom of expression was utterly ludicrous. It was a relic from times when religion was a vital and powerful force in England, when religion was woven intrinsically into the fabric of society. It fell into the same category as the succession law that bars non-Protestants from becoming monarch, the tradition that means bishop sit in the House of Lords and the endless dirge of Songs of Praise on our taxpayer-funded broadcasting service. You know I really wouldn’t mind the requirement for the BBC to show religious programming half as much if it were actually entertaining or interesting.
The problem with all of these things is that most people see them as harmless tradition. Certainly most people seemed to recognise the abolition of the blasphemy law as a good thing, but even with bishops the general consensus seems to be that their presence in Parliament is harmless: just a lovely part of British history. Kindly bishops in their funny robes, drinking tea and providing the House with wise and sagely counsel. It doesn’t really matter how many reports you show them that demonstrate how the bishops vote en bloc in a House increasingly filled with independent lords, or that they consistently stand in the way of social progress: reasoned argument just lacks that spark of excitement that gets people motivated. That’s why we need the fundamentalists.
They’ll lambast atheists, Humanists and secularists as being just as dogmatic as they are, they’ll cry offence at the slightest perceived insult to their religious beliefs and they refuse to give ground even when what they want is clearly only in the interests of a tiny minority. Religious zealots unquestionably have a talent for making a scene, for drawing attention to themselves and consequently the issues in question. In short: they bring the drama. The best part is that not only do they bring these issues to mainstream news with a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth, they simultaneously sow the seeds of their own destruction. Ultimately, their views represent hardly anyone, and rarely have logic on their side. They can never widen their popularity because their arguments are just not as inclusive as those of secularists, and all it takes to shatter their credibility for good is a verbal kicking by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight.
There’s no doubt in my mind that secularism will ultimately win out over fundamentalists, because it reaches out to people regardless of their beliefs and demands equality without seeking to advantage atheists, Humanists or any other non-believers. The more extremists scream, shout and throw their toys out of the pram, the more attractive secularism seems.
That isn’t to say we should just let them get away with keeping abortion illegal in Northern Ireland, pushing to give the Church of England the right to select the bishops who enter the Lords or any other number of flagrant abuses of religious privilege. On the contrary, they must be fought at every turn and their agendas must be brought to public attention as often as possible. Once they’ve got the spotlight, they can only make bigger fools of themselves.
The suggestion to scrap the blasphemy law at the turn of the century was met with a plaintive response from the Bishop of Oxford: “is there nothing left that is sacred?” Well actually, no, there isn’t. Not in a society that wants to be seen as free and fair to all in any case. So let’s applaud Christian Voice, Nadine Dorries and other religious fundamentalists who would seek to exercise their archaic rights over non-believers; the more they try to enforce them, the more people will move to have them abolished. Imposing their narrow, divisive views on a multicultural society is like kicking a hornet’s nest, and they get badly stung every time. Their special pleading draws in thousands of people who wouldn’t usually care and almost always brings them in on our side, not theirs. Let’s just hope they don’t figure that out.
Originally published in issue two of Secular Future, the quarterly magazine of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies
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