Below Piccadilly Circus
In May 2007 a small group of religious leaders met, in the EU headquarters in Brussels, with the three most significant leaders of Europe: Angela Merkel, German Chancellor and at the time president of the European Council, Jose-Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, and Hans-Gert Pöttering, President of the European Parliament.The meeting was one of those semiformal occasions at which little is said, and a great deal of time taken in saying it. Concerned at the return of antisemitism to Europe within living memory of the Holocaust, I decided that the time had come to break protocol and speak plainly, even bluntly.
I gave the shortest speech of my life. Sitting directly opposite the three leaders I said this. “Jews and Europe go back a long way. The experience of Jews in Europe has added several words to the human vocabulary – words like expulsion, public disputation, forced conversion, inquisition, auto-da-fe, blood libel, ghetto and pogrom, without even mentioning the word Holocaust. That is the past. My concern is with the future. Today the Jews of Europe are asking whether there is a future for Jews in Europe, and that should concern you, the leaders of Europe.”
It took less than a minute, and after it there was a shocked silence. We adjourned for lunch, and over it Angela Merkel asked, “What would you like me to do, Chief Rabbi?” I did not have an easy answer for her then. I do now. It is: reverse immediately the decision of the Cologne court that renders Jewish parents who give their son a brit milah, even if performed in hospital by a qualified doctor, liable to prosecution.
There’s an asteroid the size of Montana heading toward Earth and if it hits us, the planet is over. But we’ve got one last-ditch plan. We need a team to land on the surface of the asteroid, drill a nuclear warhead one mile into its core, and get out before it explodes. And you’re just the liberal arts major we need to lead that team.
Finally, a bridge you can trust
In what is perhaps a sign of the growing Islamic extremism in the country, Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate, who helped develop the theoretical framework that led to the apparent discovery of the subatomic “God particle” last week, is being largely scorned in his homeland because of his religious affiliation.Adbus Salam, who died in 1996, was once hailed as a national hero for his pioneering work in physics and his contribution to Pakistan’s nuclear programme. Now his name is stricken from school textbooks because he was a member of the Ahmadi sect that has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants, who view them as heretics.
Photo by James Charlick of the library in an abandoned house, via BoingBoing
There is another wild card to take into account in history: the way that something which once seemed so important to everyone can suddenly seem of no significance at all – and then all the worries are rapidly forgotten, as if they had never been. Let me point you to one of the most long-lasting examples: the Christian ban on menstruating women from participation in the sacraments or even from approaching the altar.This prohibition, which seems so bizarre now, is first to be encountered in the writings of Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria at the beginning of the third century. An honourable exception – one of very few – to this unexamined consensus was Pope Gregory the Great, writing soon after launching his mission to England under the monk Augustine in 597. Alas, the pope’s open-mindedness was probably conditioned by his evident irritation with the Christians already in Britain before Augustine arrived; they not only predated but resisted Augustine’s authority. These native Christians were rigorous about menstruating women and it was their independent-mindedness that provoked the pope’s liberal ruling. The consensus began to fade in the 16th-century Reformation, at least among those Protestant churches whose worship was less centred on the sacraments than was the case in the Catholic church, but the prejudice survived half-expressed in the more ceremonially minded parts of Lutheranism and Anglicanism until the 1950s and it could still be encountered in 1970 in a regulation of the Catholic church excluding women lectors from the sanctuary during their menstrual periods. Now western Christendom at least has forgotten an issue on which church leaders were near-unanimously agreed, almost without discussion, for 1,700 years. Any lessons to be drawn from that?
Smart developers will not just conclude that Twitter is unsafe to build on, but also any company that is operating in the Twitter model. If they are running a website, and trying to attract a lot of users, and are going in the direction of advertising, you’d be a fool to think they won’t do the same as Twitter has. They just may not be as far along. I had an interesting conversation in Amsterdam last year with the founder of SoundCloud, who asked me to use his platform for podcasting. That’s like asking a guy with a gambling addiction to put down a bet. I said no. At some point they will screw their users and developers as Twitter was already doing. I’ll pay for my own hosting and use software I can run myself.
Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Penn Jillette, Richard Dawkins, etc, specialize—not in philosophical thought—but in ridicule. And that means the new atheists excel on the only evangelistically-effective playing field that matters—that of human emotion and desire. Most Christian apologists conversely seem content to surrender that ground in their preference for mere rationality. This is a tragic mistake and it’s the primary reason Christian belief is diminishing, marginalized and an easy target for nighttime comedians.Blaise Pascal said, “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is” (Pensees 12).
All too often (especially online) those of us who like arguing for Christian Theism jump to the end of Pascal’s list. We think we have wiz-bang arguments to offer. Unfortunately, we don’t have a worthy foundation for showcasing such arguments. We have not established that Christianity should be revered, nor that it is attractive, nor that it is worthy of affection. We prefer to pull out our five proofs for its “truth” and argue our misguided interlocutors into the Kingdom cold. This is a mistake, for most of our audience see such arguments as power plays, as manipulation, as simply another advertisement out there trying to entice them to buy something.
It was a Wal-Mart, now it’s a public library