Enough already

When I was a kid my sisters and I spent years being chucked out of Religious Instruction in primary school because my father had firm views on the subject and had instructed the school, probably in colourful language, that his children were not to be exposed to such a thing. I can't remember when this eventually let up; my mother probably intervened, not because she was any more Christian than he was (except in her values; he's more your rugged individualist), but because she didn't want to expose us to the humiliations of being thus singled out, especially in such a small town.

Not that I cared; it meant I got to sit under the pepper-tree, reading my book of choice, rather than listening to the tedious dronings-on of the RI teacher. If we'd had a good teacher who concentrated on the music and the stories, it might have been a different matter.

It is to this singular childhood that I attribute a paradoxical respect for other people's religious practices and beliefs, though not for the organisations to which they belong. And when I say other people I mean all other people, all over the world. Growing up secular means growing up with no barrow to push and no bone to pick about any religion over any other. Some of my best friends really are Christians, not to mention the Buddhists. And, unlike various other friends I've discussed this with, I have no problem with the concepts of the numinous, the spiritual and the sacred. It's organised religion I have a problem with, and even then I can tolerate it as long as it leaves me alone under my pepper-tree.

If the Assemblies of God, for example, want to turn up the lights and turn on the giant closed-circuit screens when they pass around the money buckets (one for each row) so that everyone including the pastors on the stage can see exactly how much money you're putting in the bucket, then it is the devotees' choice and the devotees' right to be thus manipulated, surveilled and conned. And if parents want to send their kids off to be sexually abused by priests, then nobody can say these days that they haven't had fair warning and it's no business of mine.

But in the spirit of 'Your right to swing your arm ends where it meets my eye', I draw the line where religion starts to influence politics. And as far as Australia is concerned, it's not too much of a stretch to say that John Howard's term as Prime Minister -- not his own colourless, constipated Methodism, but his vote-grabbing open collusion with religious loonies and his barely-concealed hatred of other cultures -- opened up a space in which Kevin Rudd's own much-publicised Christianity became far more acceptable to Australian voters than it might otherwise have been. We're living in a country where the doctrine of the separation of church and state is no longer, even in theory, a given. Naturally the cultural domination of the US has had a lot to do with this, although those who remember anything about the history of the DLP in Australia will know it's not new here.

Now, I've been unduly preoccupied over the last few days with Sarah Palin because the silly woman has invaded my darkest nightmares. I think she is more terrifying than anything the Americans have so far come up with, and that is saying a great deal. If they don't dump her, and the Republicans win the election, and then McCain drops dead of a heart attack that night from the strain, the most powerful person in the world will be someone who is not only dumb enough to believe that the war in Eye-rack is 'God's plan' and that fighting in it is 'a task that is from God', but is also dumb enough to say so in public. Not even Dubya, to my knowledge, has ever gone quite so far.

Yesterday I was mulling these things over in the supermarket carpark, as you do, when I heard a loud female voice behind me. 'PRAISE THE LORDJESUSCHRIST, THE SUNNAGOD!'

Turning to see where this exhortation might be coming from, I saw a large blonde woman in a strange and exotic assortment of clothing. She seemed quite mad, and was glaring straight at me. Why, no thank you, ma'am, I don't believe I will, I muttered -- well below the audibility line, for engaging with the mad in a public place is even more foolish than engaging with them online. But it shook me up a bit. Maybe she wasn't mad at all. Maybe this kind of stuff has just made its way across the Pacific and is infesting the suburban car parks of small Australian cities, and in five years we'll all be doing it.

If we're still here in five years.

The fundies made him do it

According to this report on the ABC's website, Sarah Palin was a last-minute second choice after McCain's first pick as running mate, Senator Joe Lieberman, was rejected by the fundie lobby. The evangelical Christians threatened a revolt at this week's Republican Convention, saying they would overturn the decision on the floor, as the saying goes. Picture the scene. Oh never mind.

Without the support of 'the conservative Christian base of the party', McCain was told, he would certainly lose the election.

Lieberman is an Independent Senator and a former Democrat. He is Jewish. And he is pro-choice.

I particularly like the punch line of the ABC's report:

[Palin's] selection by Senator McCain immediately excited the evangelical base and his campaign received around $US10 million in donations over the weekend.

Catholic Big Kahuna calls for more bonking, but not for everyone

Archbishop George Pell, today:

"There is a crisis in the Western world. No Western country is producing enough babies to keep the population stable, no Western country," he said.

23 words, and three of them are 'Western'-- that subtext should be clear enough for even the masses to get the message. Wimminz, on your backs: you owe it to your country. And you non-Western folk, stop reproducing and get back to the jungle at once.

Saturday Bookblogging: Sacred Food

People seemed to like the animals-in-art book I posted about a little while back so I thought I might blog a few other books from my 'what an arresting and unusual idea for a book and isn't it gorgeous' collection.

Elisabeth Luard's best-known book is probably European Peasant Cookery, which I have the early edition of and which contains my default recipes for osso bucco and rosti among other things, so when I saw this book in Imprints (think a smaller and scaled-down but equally classy Adelaide version of Readings or Gleebooks), the combination of a familiar and trusted authorial name with a beautiful idea for a book was irresistible.

Like most of my favourite books, it's a mongrel: cultural history, recipes and truly sumptuous illustrations. There are four chapters, each holding forth on the food of particular events that happen everywhere in human life; one of the lovely things about this book is that it rises effortlessly above the notion of the sacred as contained by a single belief system and goes straight to the heart of the events and seasons that humanity has built its religious rituals around. So a lot of thought has gone into the way the table of contents is arranged, to signal that; it looks like this.

1fertilitycultivationharvest

2birthbaptisminitiation

3courtshipbetrothalmarriage

4deathremembranceresurrection

Chapter 2, for instance, goes from a description of the eastern European custom of 'birth baskets' -- 'a kind of edible baby shower ... ritual gifts presented by well-wishers to ensure the baby never goes hungry' -- to one of the classic Dickens illustrations of a huge Christmas pudding being carved up by a chubby mumsy type at a table crowded with rioting ratbag children. There's also a beautiful full-page photograph of a young Ghanaian girl contemplating the gifts of fruit, vegetables and cloth that she's been brought as part of the puberty ritual in which she is presented to the community, various members of which are standing around behind her, looking on. There's a recipe for German Christmas roast goose (lots of apple, cabbage and sage), an explanation of Hanukkah, and a description of the sacred food of the Iranian midwinter festival, its pagan elements similar to the Christmas ones:

The sacred food, ajeel, is a mixture of seven varieties of roasted nuts and dried fruit -- pistachios, almonds, chickpeas, melon or pumpkin seeds, apricots, raisins, dried figs. The vigil of watching through the night is known, appropriately, as shab-chera, night grazing.

Berber wedding pancakes, with chopped pistachios, preserved cherries and cream, plus the dish of honey in the middle and, apparently, a cup of 'tooth-achingly sweet' mint tea on the side.

The disquisition on Spanish 'pilgrimage food' gets shoehorned into Chapter 3 under 'opportunities for courtship' which I'm sure was just an excuse for Luard to wax eloquent about paella, one of her favourite things and an excellent illustration of the fact that food is so much more than fuel:

Among the most remarkable of the Whitsun pilgrimages is the long trek across the delta of the Guadalquivir, southwest Spain, to the sanctuary of the Virgin of the Dew, hidden deep in the sage brush and cistus scrub of a watery wilderness. These week-long picnics -- requiring eating and sleeping under the stars -- are a happy compromise between pagan and Christian preoccupations ... open to all who care to take the new road from Seville. The pilgrimage is a merry one ... guitars strum and drums beat day and night to accompany the dancing and singing ...

... in the old days -- twenty years ago, when I made the pilgrimage across the dunes with my children on a mule-cart -- people took nothing with them but rice and oil (well, maybe saffron and salt) in the confident expectation that the Lord would provide the rest. Indeed He did. Anyone with a gun could be sure to pick up a rabbit, or a brace of duck. [Anyone with a gun and decent aim, surely -- ed.] ... The children would be able to gather the exquisitely patterned snails, no bigger than a thumbnail ... or search out the spindly but delicious shoots of wild asparagus. You could always count on a variety of herbs ... fennel, thyme and rosemary.'

On the previous pages there's a full two-page colour reproduction of Goya's The Pilgrimage to the Miraculous Fountain of San Isidro, which like most Goyas appears to depict an assortment of bodies and souls in anguish, writhing in a half-dark hell and a very long way from singing, dancing or catching rabbits for the pot; on the following page there's a recipe for paella complete with instructions like 'the true paella must be prepared over and open fire, and only by a man' (pffft) and 'the only essentials are rice, saffron and olive oil ... The rest is whatever comes to hand in the countryside and will serve to flavour the rice -- wild asparagus, wild garlic, crayfish from the stream, snails, pigeon, partridge, rabbit, frogs from the marshes, fresh water from the spring.'

This combination of image, recipe and cultural history is typical and the pictures are beautiful: a nineteenth-century Chinese painting of a wedding banquet; a sixteenth-century German engraving depicting the moment of transubstantiation; a moving black-and-white photograph of a 1940s French provincial Nativity play complete with a raggedy, sad-looking sheep; a photo from southern India of a sacred cow with painted and decorated horns in fetching shades of gold, red and neon pink, with little bells; and several obligatory Breughel feast scenes that provide evidence for Barry Humphries' assertion that with Brueghel you can always find someone in the background having a quiet chunder out of a window.

It's probably safe to say I'll never make the Epiphany Cookies, the Afghan Betrothal Ravioli, or the Bacalao de los Muertos (All Souls' Day salt-fish). But if the day ever comes when I have to choose five books out of my food-and-cookbooks collection to take with me to my little room in the End of the Road Aged Care Facility, this'll be one of them.


Mexican sugar skulls, for taking with you to the cemetery on the Day of the Dead, though why you would take skulls to the cemetery is a question that remains unanswered.

Friday mogblogging: religious instruction

Here endeth the lesson

Not to be confused with the Rosary Expo in Tasmania or the Yarmulke Market in FNQ

My head is currently full of sand and fog for reasons best known to the mind gods, so it was with less surprise than you might expect that I heard someone on ABC radio today mentioning 'the Burke affair in Western Australia' and was absolutely sure she'd said 'the burqa fair'.

Surely a heightened awareness of the Other, to the point where one's subconscious is affecting one's auditory function, can only be a good thing, right?

Hardly worth the bother

"Registering your telephone number on the Do Not Call Register will not stop all telemarketing calls to your number. There are some exemptions which enable certain public interest organisations to make telemarketing calls. Exempt organisations include charities, religious organisations and registered political parties. You can also still receive calls from market researchers."

Que ...?

The thusness of it

I'd trust this quiz more if they'd spelled 'Buddha' correctly, but being him is kewl all the same.

Via Tigtog.

Which God or Goddess are you like? Your Result: Budha   You are Budha. You are a very peaceful person, you love all who love you. You are a cheerful personality, and you have a great sense of humor. Congratulations!! You are Budha!!
Jesus
The Christian God
Goddess Bast
God Zeus
Goddess Sekhemet
You are your own God or Goddess
Satan
Which God or Goddess are you like? Make Your Own Quiz

Santoro's "charity" of choice: 'to counter feminism, defend the unborn and the traditional family'

As investigated and reported by Radio National's The World Today this afternoon, Senator Santo Santoro's idea of what constitutes a 'charity' is a bit looser than the one most of us have.

Sprung owning shares that put him squarely in the centre of a conflict of interest, given his portfolio as Minister for Ageing, Santoro claimed that he had donated the profits to 'charity' after selling shares that he should have been sacked for holding at all. But, as (unlike Senator Ian Campbell) he wasn't getting in the way of any Prime Ministerial attempts to smear the Leader of the Opposition, it hasn't been deemed necessary to remove him.

The 'charity' in question turns out to be something called the Family Council of Queensland, which, far from being a registered charity, is actually a conservative lobby group: a loose affiliation of mainly Christian groups with policies their president describes as 'pro-family' -- a term recognised by people on both sides of the debate as a dog-whistle/euphemism for 'anti-progressive in general and anti-women's rights in particular'.

While the above ABC link quotes the president's examples of 'pro-family' policies as being anti-child abuse and anti-pornography, a look at their website and those of the different organisations that belong shows that other policies include anti-abortion, anti-stem cell research, anti-contraception, and open, hostile anti-feminism. (Though you have to wonder what they think 'feminism' is.)

They have no interest in actually helping people in need; they seem 'pro-family' chiefly in the literal sense of wanting to produce more and bigger families, via the enforced compliance of traditional baby-making machines, also known as "women".

At least one of the bodies that form this Family Council is somewhere on the nutso side of truly barking. The Festival of Light is a member, but the Festival of Light looks sober and rational next to this mob here.

One wonders just how much money Senator Santoro got for his shares, and what the Family Council of Queensland plans to do with it. In the meantime, this sequence of events is being held up as an example of the Ministerial Code of Conduct at work.

Doesn't think much of his fellow Australians, does he?

Tony Abbott, the Minister for Forcing Everybody Else to Fall Into Line with His Own Personal Belief System, appears to believe that many of his fellow Australians are potential murderers:

'"If euthanasia were legalised there's a whole range of old people who would suddenly be at risk of being bumped off," Mr Abbott told The Age.'

Has anyone noticed him applying that sort of bogeyman-on-the-slippery-slope argument to, say, nuclear power? No, I thought not. He's also wilfully ignoring the fact that voluntary euthanasia is the only kind that anyone is advocating -- that is, he's assuming he can control the populace by playing on their ignorance and fear.

As long as voluntary euthanasia isn't legalised, Minister, there's a whole range of old people who are not just 'at risk' of acute physical and mental suffering, but are experiencing it 24/7, sometimes for years and years on end.

But you, no doubt, would just say that suffering was good for their souls.

And as the hearts of moderate, reasonable Australian Muslims sink even lower ...

Radical sheikh (yeah yeah, I know) Feiz Mohammad -- who only looks about seventeen himself -- in Sydney, addressing Muslim parents, via a surreptitiously circulating DVD, on the human sacrifice of their children:

"Teach them this: that there is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a Muhajid."

O RLY?

Why doesn't he, then? Think of all the young Muslim lives it might save.

God and all his angels and saints

Wow, cop the hubris of that title. Never let it be said that Pavlov's Cat concerns herself only with trivia.

And I suppose it needs to be said at the outset that while not a Christian I am open to suggestion about all sorts of more or less batty phenomena that are usually lumped (to my mind often quite wrongly) under the omnibus banner of 'spiritual', and that I have great respect for other people's religious beliefs and practices right up to the point where they begin to impinge on me but not, however, a nanometre further. If other people wish to be Christians then I am not going to lift a finger to stop them and I am happy to admire newborns in mangers and sing any carol you put the sheet music for under my nose. Just don't ask me to kneel down.

The religious hatreds currently circulating the globe, as they have of course always done, are utterly foreign to my own experience of personal feeling. I have no idea where this intensity and density of religious fervour comes from, although a year's blog-reading has given me some sad-making notions about how it too often manifests itself: a desperate, unvoiced, driven desire to signal one's allegiance to a tribe, and to give one a conduit for the venting of unformed, unacknowledged hatred and rage.

Anyway, there I was in the car last week, driving around as I usually do an awful lot this time of year and listening to the radio, which is something I almost never do unless I'm in the car, and there was Robyn Williams interviewing Richard Dawkins about his recent book The God Delusion.

Williams is a sublime interviewer of his peers, and his peers are relatively few. Unlike interviewers who have no particular store of knowledge and experience other than that of journalism itself, Williams is not a shark; he is not a thinker-up of headlines; he is not someone who gets a bunch of lowly, unsung slaves research assistants to do the hard yards for him and write his questions. What this means is that his interviews are genuine conversations, in which his questions and prompts are designed not for self-display but for the eliciting of the very best thinking and speaking that his interviewees are capable of.

Like, I think, most other people, I have a couple of friends in whose company you somehow find yourself rising above your usual conversational standard: saying more interesting things, and saying them better, than you thought you were capable of. Which of course makes you very enthusiastic about the conversation. This seemed to be happening in the Williams/Dawkins conversation. Dawkins kept saying in a surprised sort of way 'Oh, that's a very good question, isn't it, I'll have to think some more about that.'

But even more than this lovely dynamic, which is what makes any live interview really take off no matter what the situation -- I speak as a veteran of many writers' festivals -- what surprised me about the interview was something I hadn't really realised until I heard Dawkins speak.

For radio is a medium through which great intimacy is possible. The only thing available to you about the person speaking is her or his voice, and the voice thereby takes on great importance. As one knows from phone calls, you can often identify and conjure up the entire physical presence of a person the minute s/he speaks, even if it's just some kind of pre-verbal vocalisation, an indrawn breath or an 'um' or 'ah'. Voices are as potent as perfume in this regard.

Voice is also the thing that always alerts me, in the absence of any other obvious sign, to someone's mental state. When a voice sounds odd to me -- a buzz, a drone, a monotone -- then what one beloved ex-boss of mine used to call the 'maddie antenna' quivers like that retriever's tail in the Bugs Bunny cartoon. And as soon as Dawkins began to speak I thought Oh my God, he sounds like a Dalek. I mentally plotted him somewhere along the Asperger's spectrum. The phrase 'lack of affect' came to mind.

His voice has a sort of metallic, sawing, plangent edge, its effect reminiscent of paper cuts and fingernails on blackboards. Yet is not in itself an ugly voice, that isn't what I mean; its timbre, in fact, is rather unusually pure and clear. It's the voice of a brilliantly played brass instrument. A trumpet, say. A trumpet of an evangelical, military and/or annunciatory kind, of the kind that summons souls on the Day of Judgement, orders Adam and Eve out of Paradise, or announces sternly to the Virgin Mary that she's pregnant with the son of God and there's not a damn thing she can do about it.

And it was deeply ironic, I thought, that a man so loudly, insistently and unreservedly determined to pour scorn on any manner of theist, on spirituality of any kind, should adopt so successfully the Biblical modes of denunciation and command: the mode of evangelists and angels, or vengeful gods of any stamp. The mode of a bossy, overbearing, single-minded bully.