petermullen – Page 26 – All Things Considered

18 Nov

Another first for the Church of England

It’s just one triumph after another for the General Synod these days. Yesterday they passed regulations to allow women to be consecrated as bishops by the end of the year. Today, another showstopper: they have invited Fuad Nahdi, a man with connections to Muslim terrorist organisations to be the first non-Christian to address the Synod. Nahdi has been associated with The Muslim Brotherhood which is classified as a terrorist group by security services and by many nation states. It is banned in Egypt. Nahdi has also been involved with Jamaal-E-Islam and he set up the Muslim pressure group Radical Middle Way following the 7/7 London bombings. RMW was part of the Labour government’s PREVENT strategy which was designed to promote discussions with “moderate Muslims” and the organisation received £1.2millions of public money. PREVENT was widely regarded as a catastrophic venture when it was discovered to be funding traditional Muslim antipathy towards homosexuals , the subjugation of women and rampant anti-Semitism.

RMW has hosted as speakers men such as Kemal-El-Halbawy, a supporter of Osama bin Laden who also has described Jews as “satanic” and praised that other terrorist outfit Hamas as being guided by a “divine programme.”

Other speakers listed on the RMW’s website include preachers such as Jamal Badawi, Muslim Belal and Suhaib Webb.

Badawi, a Muslim Brotherhood cleric, has described suicide bombers and Hamas terrorists as “freedom fighters” and “martyrs,” and advocates for the right of men to beat their wives

Muslim Belal is a “performance poet” who composes nasheeds (Islamic songs without instruments) that promote fundamentalist Islam. One of his nasheeds expresses support for the Al Qaeda operative and convicted murderer, Aafia Siddiqui.

Suhaib Webb is an Islamic preacher who, according to FBI surveillance documents, spoke at a dinner in 2001 alongside Al Qaeda operative, Anwar Al-Awlaki, in order to raise £100,000 for the legal defense of Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (aka H. Rap Brown), an Islamic fundamentalist who murdered two American police officers.

Even without RMW, Nahdi’s connections are troubling. In 1992, he founded Q News, an Islamist youth magazine that promoted Jamaat-e-Islami ideology. Nahdi’s colleagues at Q News included Fareena Alam, who would later also be involved with RMW while simultaneously working for Press TV, the Iranian regime’s propaganda outlet.

In 1997, Nahdi wrote an obituary for The Guardian of an Islamic scholar who was once a contributor to Nahdi’s Q News publication, Sayed Mutawalli ad-Darsh. Nahdi described ad-Darsh as “respectable, approachable and sensitive — he was the peoples’ Imam.” The “people’s Imam,” however, called for the killing of homosexuals and adulterers, and expressed justification for suicide bombings. He also denied that there was such a thing as rape within marriage.

I wonder if the Synod will invite Nahdi to say what he thinks on the issue of women bishops?

17 Nov

Making it worse

Appalling car crash in Yorkshire. Five killed, including four sixth formers from the same school.

Then the head teacher comes on The Today Programme to be interviews by John Humphrys and all the now obligatory rigmarole starts: “Counselling…support…flowers…candles lit…books of condolence…no words to express our feelings etc”

Yes, there are words and I’ll come to what they are in a minute.

Post-Christian society cannot cope with the fact of death and so its only recourse is to sentimentalise it. And that does no one any good, because it is really an avoiding of the issue.

I have some experience in the deaths of schoolchildren. When I was eight, I walked into the school yard one morning and there was the dead body of one of my mates who had been climbing on the back of the milk lorry for the fun of the ride. He’d fallen under the wheels and was crushed. A teacher stood by the body over which he had thrown a blanket. He ushered us all through briskly. We were all disturbed and scared. In a very silent assembly the headmaster told us what had happened, said some prayers and cautioned us all not to climb on to the back of the milk lorry in future. The death of our friend had been a shocking lesson and none of us went near the milk lorry again.

Thirty years on from that event, I was myself a teacher, head of RE and chaplain in a downtown state secondary school in Bolton, Lancashire. There were two incidents of untimely deaths in the four years I was there. A brother and sister killed crossing the road on their way home from school. Then two boys drowned in a mill pond.

Naturally, on both occasions the whole school was upset. But no words? Yes there are:

“There has been a terrible accident. Two pupils have been killed. They were our friends and we shall miss them. We send our sympathy to their parents and brothers and sisters. And we pray for the repose of their souls, these our friends who are now in the nearer presence of God. Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord: and let light perpetual shine upon them.”

The headmaster followed me on to the rostrum and repeated his warning about the dangers of running into the road without looking and of playing in the mill ponds.

The whole school walked out in silence and we got on with our lessons.

12 Nov

Lily Allen and the bishop’s balls

A bishop has praised the pop star Lily Allen for her feminist songs and claimed that misogyny is “still very evident” in the Church of England. The Rt Rev’d Martyn Snow, our youngest bishop, said Allen’s lyrics on the single Hard Out Here “poignantly” capture society’s sexist double standards. He commends the song to his thirteen-year-old daughter.

The edifying ditty goes like this:

“If I told you ‘bout my sex life you’d call me a slut / When boys be talkin’ ‘bout their bitches no-one’s making a fuss… Forget your balls and grow a pair of tits / It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard out here for a bitch.”

Just the thing for the bishop’s pubescent offspring to sing along to.

Bishop Snow refers to Allen’s lyrics in what he calls an “essay” reflecting on his daughter, Roxanne’s thirteenth birthday. This “essay” is worth quoting at length, not least for its literary merits:

“The passing of this particular landmark has caused me to reflect a little on the world my daughter is entering and in particular the effects of the so-called feminist revolution. In 2010, Lily Allen won an award for her song The Fear which brilliantly captured the manipulation, insecurity and fear which is at the heart of consumerism. Four years and two babies later, Allen has returned with a song which angrily and poignantly captures how far the feminist revolution has not brought us. Allen highlights the double standards in private sexuality and public work. It’s fine for men to boast about their sexual conquests while women are blamed for being loose and free.”

He concludes: “None of this is new, of course. Indeed, it is depressingly familiar. But it is worth stopping to think about the way the feminist revolution, while bringing huge gains in some areas, has had almost no impact in others. Far more women may go out to work now than they did fifty years ago, yet a woman is paid £82 for the work a man will be paid £100 for. By now, you may be asking how a bishop in the Church of England would dare to write about feminism. After all, it has taken us twenty years to accept that women can not only be vicars but can also hold senior leadership positions in the church. We are hardly the model of equality. And my female colleagues are very clear that even as the first woman is appointed as a bishop – expected in the next few months – misogyny is still very evident in the pews of our churches. So the church is no better than the rest of society but at least we are moving in the right direction.”

Can I play at teachers and pupils for a minute and mark the lad’s “essay”?

First, it has not taken the church twenty years to get around to ordaining women. It took 2000 years and many wonder why it was ever attempted.

Secondly, the phrase “We are moving in the right direction” is a meretricious slogan where reasoned argument would be more meritorious: who says we’re moving in the right direction?

Thirdly, “It’s fine for men to boast about their sexual conquests, while women are blamed for being loose and free.” Hasn’t the lad noticed that scores of women journalists fill the papers with reminiscences of their sexual exploits, and get well paid for it? There’s a word somewhere for that profession.

Fourthly, has he considered the spectacular success of Lily Allen by which she becomes the living refutation of the feminist manifesto?

But the most amusing aspect of the lad’s “essay” is the remark about the church’s alleged misogyny. Hasn’t the lad also noticed that actually the church has become terrifically feminised? Or did I only imagine that I have had to sit through all those services – ululations, more like – conducted by women and featuring night lights, mawkish prancing about the chancel and God addressed as “She”?

What more can I say? Beta minus, Snowy lad.

And end by adapting a line from the great Lily Allen’s song: Forget this balls and grow… Grow what?

How about Up?

10 Nov

Horatio’s back

I suspect some malign power has slipped something into our drinking water to turn us all stupid. Just cast your eyes over the following report:

Swiss researchers carried out an experiment to make artificial ‘ghosts’ They were investigating why some people feel a ‘creepy presence’ And in the research they found it was just a trick of the brain The sensation was re-created by researchers using a robot to interfere with the sensory signals in the brains of blindfolded volunteers. The illusion came from a programmed delay between the brain’s processing of the body’s movements

“This confirms that it is caused by an altered perception of their own bodies in the brain,” said Professor Olaf Blanke.

No it doesn’t, Professor Blanke.

The fact that scientists can replicate artificially the experience of those reporting to have seen a ghost no more disproves the reality of ghosts than the artificial creation of the sensation of eating pork pie and mushy peas disproves the existence of real pies and peas.

The mistake is the confusion of ontology with neurology.

All our experiences take place in our brains, from the view of Mont Blanc to our acute dislike of Strictly Come Dancing. The relation between what takes place in the brain and what is out there – if there is anything out there, or even if there is an out there – is one of the most abiding problems of philosophy. And Professor Blanke and his mates have not solved it.

Please don’t compound the mistake by assuming that I’m arguing for the existence of ghosts. I’m not. I’m merely stating what ought to be obvious, even to neuroscientists and all materialists: that my (and your) neural activity neither explains nor explains away what actually is or might be.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Probably

09 Nov

The cloud of witnesses

I have never been much of a one for praying to the saints. Not that anyone should pray to the saints anyhow, but instead ask for their intercession. I do say the Marian prayers, such as the Ave Maria gratia plena. And I take much encouragement from the verse in the Epistle to the Hebrews which says, Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.

And when I seek help from this cloud of witnesses, I don’t confine my search to the saints who occupy the Red Letter days. I talk to a great variety of dead people and I believe they talk to me and that:

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

I have talked to Mozart since I first heard one of his piano sonatas when I was thirteen. And the music answers. I feel certain that Mozart is always close by and that he has been very close on many occasions in my life, for example at my Ordination in 1970. This took place in my own parish church of St Bartholomew, Armley, Leeds with 800 people in the congregation including many of my family and friends, people I had grown up with. It was, to say the least, an affecting occasion. All the more so then when I was handed a chalice brimful and told to administer it to a section of that vast congregation. I had to walk from the altar, down through the chancel and into the nave. I was doing pretty well until the choir began Mozart’s Ave Verum K.618 – the motet he composed in Baden, where his wife was taking the waters, in the afternoon of 5th July 1791. Fear and trembling. I managed somehow not to spill the sacramental wine.

I talk to St Augustine and he answers in the words of his Civitas Dei which are as pertinent to our age as they were in his for, as C.H.Sisson wrote, Augustine attracts us because he lived through times which were very much like our times – and rejected them.

Dr Johnson tells me about the fear and love of God. R.G. Collingwood taught me metaphysics. Coleridge reassures me regularly that I am not alone in feeling frail. Schopenhauer comes along now and then and shows me how to make philosophical jokes. Shakespeare for terror and pity. Giotto for making visible what otherwise would have remained invisible: Christ on the cross. Eliot for holy dread in the rhythms of the English language: Come with me under the shadow of this red rock…

Eliot for pretty much everything actually.

By the way, the original Greek word translated as witnesses in that Epistle to the Hebrews is marturwn – martyrs.

And not one of them a suicide bomber.

08 Nov

Wimmins’ Hour

I try to listen to Woman’s Hour whenever I can for, beyond the political chit-chat of everyday, this programme keeps me in touch with the things that really matter, things that are dear to a woman’s heart. The other week, for instance, the programme fearlessly exposed the failure of so many of our local councils to provide adequate lavatory facilities for the transgendered. There’s a lot about rape and the rumours of rape. Intense debate about the 5:2 diet, or the stone-age diet or whatever Manichean foodie obsession happens to be in vogue. Wall-to-wall celebs, it goes without saying. Inanities and banalities by the bucket load: the soap operas of course, by the side of which real life is a mere shadow. Historical novelists whose own linguistic register is out of synch with the period they write about: Hilary Mantel, that disgorger and forger of the 16th century, is ever popular.

But the programme’s fondest obsession is pop music. Today, for example, Jane Garvey confessed she had been “weak at the knees” during her interviewing an aging punkster called Blondie and her side-kick, Chris. They play you blasts of the “music” unfortunately, but that’s not the worst part. The most sickening part is the way the Woman’s Hour wimmin go all gooey over this trash. Rock music has its place. It is for teenagers, to allow them to imagine they’re being cool and anti-establishment during that most uncomfortable part of growing up. Most do grow up, but many alas live on to stretch the folly of their youth to be the shame of age – as G.K. Chesterton put it. For goodness sake, gooey Garvey is fifty years old! Shouldn’t she have got past going weak at the knees at the sights and sounds of the past it perpetrators of audible filth and learnt to go weak at the knees at such as the Beethoven late string quartets?

I will keep listening though. What cheaper or easier way is there of keeping up with the sub-theatrical absurdities of the meedja world. Oh hell, if we really do get the media we deserve, then God help us!

I can’t help thinking that things would be better if the wimmin – all with impeccable leftie CVs – reverted to being women, or even ladies, and told us the secrets of jam-making and demonstrated the creation of net curtains by the forgotten art of croquet.

Those were the days, alongside Mrs Dale’s Diary, Top of the Form, Journey into Space and, new every morning, Housewives’ Choice. It was a far, far better thing they did than now they ever do.

06 Nov

Atheism by stealth

I get to read some very perverted literature these days. For example, I’ve been looking at the purpose and content of RE teaching in state schools as outlined by the Department of Education. As you would expect of all such documents devised by a bureaucracy, it is voluminous, so here’s an extract to give you the flavour:

Aims of GCSE Religious Studies Specifications

This unit will provide students with the opportunity to:

develop their knowledge, skills and understanding of religion by exploring the significance and impact of beliefs, teachings, sources, practices, ways of life and forms of expressing meaning;
express their personal responses and informed insights on fundamental questions and issues about identity, belonging, meaning, purpose, truth, values and commitments.

Questions will be focussed on concepts and framed in an open-ended way that will allow candidates to answer with reference to the religion(s) they have studied. The Specification allows for the study solely of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism or Sikhism, or for a combination of any of these specified religions. This unit may be studied as a Short Course GCSE or may form part of a Full Course GCSE in Religious Studies when taken with another unit from this Specification.

Pic ‘n’ mix, in other words.

The guidelines for the teaching of RE, and indeed the whole syllabus, make it clear that the perspective entirely ignores the question of truth. So, for instance, to take one of the options generously allowed by the prescribing bureaucracy, the pupils are not taught how to be a Christian – or how to be a Buddhist if that’s your consumer-led choice in the supermarket of “faiths,” so admired by Prince Charles that he wants to defend them all. There is to be no attempt at inculcation or, to use that formerly benign word which is now only ever used pejoratively, indoctrination. Inevitably, this descriptive perspective must be secular. Pupils are not taught religion, but they are taught about religion. This approach is, of course, inimical to the character of religion itself.

As if we should teach maths without believing in numbers.

It was always bound to be like this since our lapse into relativism. Everybody has a right to their (sic) own opinion, however uninformed or plain stupid. And everybody’s opinion is declared to be as valid as everybody else’s. I repeat, this can only be done from the secular perspective which sets itself above all the various religions and presumes to evaluate them objectively.

So we see what follows from this: the contradictory ideology which declares that everything is relative, except the secular perspective which is held absolutely. If I may put this epigrammatically as a slogan: ABSOLUTE RELATIVISM RULES OK.

Thus there is dogma and there is indoctrination after all. The dogma is secularism and this dogma, by implication and method, is indoctrinated into the pupils. The secularists who devised this programme are convinced that only their perspective – the secular perspective – possesses objectivity.

But why believe that? I should like to see the same astringent scepticism directed towards the secular perspective as that which the secularists direct towards the claims of faith.

Only of course in a state where secularism is the religion, such scepticism is not permitted. The word for this is totalitarianism.

The proponents of this secular fundamentalism are not convincing. J.H. Newman in his The Idea of a University explains why this supposed objectivity is a sham. And what Newman says of the university applies to the school curriculum as well:

“A university is a place of teaching universal knowledge. It cannot fulfil its object duly without the church’s assistance; or, to use the theological term, the church is necessary for its integrity. A university by its name professes to teach universal knowledge: theology is surely a branch of knowledge: how then is it possible to profess all branches of knowledge, and yet to exclude not the meanest or the narrowest of the number?”

Of course, some argued in Newman’s time, as many more argue today, that theology is not a form of knowledge but only a matter of opinion. As we learnt from Newman, it is liberalism itself which has created this view. But Newman stoutly defends university theology:

“Are we to limit our idea of university knowledge by the evidence of our senses? Then we exclude history. By testimony? Then we exclude metaphysics. By abstract reasoning? Then we exclude physics. Is not the being of a God reported to us by testimony, handed down by history, inferred by an inductive process, brought home to us by metaphysical necessity, urged on us by the suggestions of our conscience?”

Moreover,

“In a state of society such as ours in which authority, prescription, tradition, habit, moral instinct and the divine influence go for nothing, in which patience of thought and depth and consistency of view are scorned as subtle and scholastic, in which free discussion and fallible judgement are prized as the birthright of each individual…all this I own it gentlemen frightens me.”

He was right to be frightened – as we are who inhabit the age in which this nightmare vision has come to be our daily reality.

But it is sometimes argued that pluralism and diversity of views are signs of a society’s health. This point was asked of Newman himself:

“A question was put to me by a philosopher of the day: Why cannot you go your way and let us go ours? I answer in the name of theology, When Newton can dispense with the metaphysician, then you may dispense with us.”

05 Nov

Credo quia absurdum

Every newspaper and magazine should follow the example of the Spectator and appoint its own in-house surreal comedian.

Although Matthew Parris begins a recent article by misquoting Lewis Carroll – the White Queen said she could believe six impossible things before breakfast – he proceeds to outdo Carroll in the production of things bizarre and fantastic. His article is titled Why I intend to become an addict. That Spectator piece should be made compulsory reading in all our state secondary schools. You’ll see why in a minute. But enough preamble, let the great man speak for himself…

“Heroin, by all accounts, is the big one and for decades I’ve wanted to experience addiction to that drug…

“I did have one wholly abortive attempt at getting hooked on nicotine patches. My mistake was to attempt a shortcut and apply patches that were classified as the equivalent of 30 cigarettes a day. I put one of these patches onto (sic) my lower back, forgot all about it, went out to dinner – and ended up literally crawling to my host’s sofa, unable to stand, lying there with my heart thumping, ripping off the patch, passing out, and not waking until dawn…

“A friend tells me he knows a non-smoker who…tried e-cigarettes and has become seriously addicted to them. Sounds promising…”

“And how often would I need to vape in order to let myself effectively but gently into a possible addiction?

“People who are not addicts should try it and report. Sooner or later, and one way or another, I intend to.”

Parris’ virtuosic feel for narcissistic farce is beyond all comment or criticism. Give him the Spike Milligan Award for Surpassing Daftness.

04 Nov

Le Nozze di Figaro

It’s easy to feel up to one’s ears in politics, so well described by Eliot as “endless palaver.”

Better to think about Mozart and particularly the miracle that is Figaro. It nearly didn’t get composed at all, for Beaumarchais’ play on which it is based was banned. Mozart told Lorenzo da Ponte that he had no hope of getting the ban lifted, whereupon Da Ponte said, “Leave it to me.” As court poet, he had access to the emperor, a civilised man, a music-lover and a devotee of Mozart. The emperor reminded Da Ponte that the play was banned, but the poet replied, “It won’t be seditious in our hands.”

And so it came to be written and at great speed – Da Ponte recording that often the verses he delivered to Mozart were returned fully composed the same day!

Mozart was overjoyed by Da Ponte’s words, for Da Ponte was no mere rhymer but a genuine poet with the poet’s facility in assonance, dissonance and above all rhythm. Any hack composer could have made something out of Da Ponte’s marvellous productions. In Mozart’s hands they became an indissoluble masterpiece.

In my view there is nothing in opera – not even Don Giovanni or Cosi and certainly not the vulgar, strangulated hernia operas of the 19th century – that even comes near the greatness of Figaro which is a torrent of wit, melody and human sympathy. On the face of it, Figaro is a popular tale of a servant getting the better of his bumptious, bullying master – below stairs characters outwitting the toffs. No wonder the emperor was nervous about its appearance, a mere two years before the French Revolution and all the European gentry running scared that the whole continent would go the same way as France. No wonder also that aristocrats’ subscriptions to Mozart’s hugely popular piano concerts in Vienna fell away dramatically at this time.

Figaro is packed with glorious solo arias, but it is the ensemble singing which is truly remarkable: six or more players all interlocking their themes with the most astonishing verve, clarity and sureness of touch. The counterpoint of the various moods and motives are the currents of life itself. In these parts, Figaro hints at the same transcendence we find in St Matthew Passion. At this level of musical understanding – coupled with Mozart’s unmatched acquaintance with and sympathy for the ways of the human heart – there is no distinction to be made between religious and secular music.

All great music is religious.

Non piu andrai was Mozart’s favourite tune. He repeats it in the second act of Don Giovanni and he would often, as a party piece, improvise sublime variations on it at the piano. The English soprano Nancy Storace was the first Susanna. By this time she had damaged her voice by attempting strenuous coloratura exercises as a young girl and Mozart chose her as much for her vivacious acting as for her singing. None of the characters is idealised; there is no caricature. All are flawed, often mischievous and occasionally malevolent. But there is not one who is unlovable.

So we have to conclude that Figaro is politics after all: but politics in the same sense that The Divine Comedy is politics.

Like St Matthew Passion, Da Ponte’s and Mozart’s Figaro is about forgiveness.

There are times when this sublime confluence of love and beauty is too much to take.

02 Nov

The jihadi chapelgoers

An old man was arrested at the airport last week. His crime? He had been asked by security to remove his shoes and he replied, “Why? I’m not a Muslim.” The security guard called the police who turned up in force and plonked down heavily upon the non-Muslim. After several hours questioning, taking mouth swabs and general disdain, they offered him a caution which the man refused, electing for trial. His defence will no doubt be that, since nearly all recent terrorist attacks featuring aeroplanes were perpetrated by Muslims, it was highly unlikely that this non-Muslim posed any threat.

Indeed the police were doing their job properly. It would be quite wrong and, my goodness! “racist” to arrest only Muslims on suspicion of conspiracy to mount a terrorist attack. I have been doing some intensive undercover research of my own and I have come up with some alarming discoveries…

There is a sect in every town in Britain known as “Methodists.” Its members, while trying to pass themselves off innocently enough as a “church,” are potentially more dangerous than any Muslim fanatic. Like the devotees of Islam, they are teetotal – always a sure sign that something is wrong. Also, as with Muslims, they have a strange attitude towards their womenfolk. The so called “chapel deacons” make the women put on funny hats and sit at the front of the “chapel” on a balcony where they are formed into something called a “choir” which lets out fearful noises throughout the strange rituals performed morning and evening every Sunday. At each of these supposed “services” the same deacons go round the “chapel” collecting money to finance the Methodist jihadists.

The women also meet during the week – it might be a Tuesday afternoon or a Wednesday evening – in a place known as the “schoolroom,” which is clearly some form of terrorist training camp. This secret military planning session is code-named “The Women’s Bright Hour.” Dastardly terrorist plots are being hatched even as we speak under cover of tea and biscuits, or perhaps even a piece of cake. And deadly poisons are manufactured and packed into jars labelled “marmalade” and “jam.”

Camouflage clothing for the Methodist mujahadeen is collected and allocated at a secret gathering known as the “jumble sale.”

On Saturday nights there is an event for the hard core jihadists known as a “Social.” This is a sensual, quasi-orgiastic occasion featuring a lewd performance known as “musical chairs.” While the pianist plays, men and women cavort and scramble to sit on one another’s knees. Shrill, almost demonic, laughter is frequently heard.

Don’t be misled by the innocuous appearances. Some of these Methodists are so extreme in their fanaticism that they even refer to themselves as “Primitive.”

The Methodist children are indoctrinated and radicalised at events such as “the outing” and “the summer trip.”

And every year in the autumn, there is a terrifying primitive ceremony called “the harvest festival” when there is wild, banshee-like wailing of “hymns.” Ritual foods are presented and, following weird incantations by the “Minister” – who wears a white collar in the forlorn hope of passing himself off as a clergyman – these foods are distributed to injured jihadists in the hospitals.

That old man arrested at the airport was no Muslim – but did the police check him for Methodism?

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

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