(Image courtesy of atheistmemebase)
Not even the church in L’Aquila could be saved after a devastating earthquake struck in 2009.
It’s only human nature that when there is damage, destruction and death we look for someone to blame and vainly seek assurances that such a thing will never happen again.
So when there’s a natural disaster, what insurance companies call an ‘act of God’, we should all point skywards accusingly exclaiming ‘why has thou forsaken us?’ or words to that effect.
The buck should stop with the deity but we know by now that s/he moves in mysterious ways and remains a hidden and, I would argue, non-existent presence. Continue reading
Philip Pullman hopes that his brief retelling of the life of Jesus Christ will encourage people to read, or re-read, the bible. It is not that he is interested in persuading sceptics to believe; more that he wants people to recognise the story’s power while also noting the inconsistencies and implausibility of many of the events documented.
How, for example could the scribes have known what happened in the wilderness. since the supposed son of God was alone at the time and as Pullman observes in the afterword: “Jesus does not tell stories about himself”.
In this short book, part of the Canongate ‘Myths’ series, Pullman imagines Jesus and Christ as two separate beings – “the man Jesus whom the Gospels talked about , and ……Christ, the Messiah, who featured more prominently in the Epistles”.
His point here is not to satirize or attack the biblical story but to speculate on how the original story came to be recorded. He shows how the ‘miracles’ were more likely to be the result of creative embellishment on the part of the writers than accurate accounts of the actual events.
Continue reading
There is no God and no cure for cancer. Further proof of these truisms comes with news of the death of Ari Up (Ariane Daniele Forster) aged just 48. When she began singing with The Slits she was only 13 and this all female band came to epitomise the revolutionary DIY ethic of Punk and helped show that women need not be content to slavishly follow stereotypical roles as passive, pretty adornments. They were not, nor had any desire to be, typical girls.
Plenty of other bands pretended not to able to play their instruments but The Slits were genuinely inept. They more than made up for this with attitude and an instinctive recognition of how you could incorporate dub rhythms and banal words to create a sound that was both radical and fun.
Unfortunately, I never got to see them live but well remember being entranced by their sessions for John Peel. The current crimson wave of girl bands from the US owe a great debt to their innovative and fearless example.
This recording from the Peel session of Love Und Romance is nothing less than a classic which includes the following great lyrics (when Ari could remember them):
Oh oh oh sweet love and romance / I’m so glad we met by chance
Call you everyday on the telephone / Break your neck if you ain’t home
I can’t resist small books about big issues so was pleased to chance upon Julian Baggini’s ‘Atheism’ – number 99 in the Oxford University Press ‘a very short introduction’ series. You can find a Blog interview with Baggini on the OUP site devoted to these books.
Issues don’t come much bigger than the question ‘Is there a God?’ or I suppose a logical follow up question : ‘If there is no God what is the meaning of life?’
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