Wrecked Wrists and Reckless Religion
I've taken up boxing recently, in a desperate attempt to get fitter and more toned before the seven day binge that is Fresher's Week. My logic is the fitter I am, the higher my metabolism, the more I can eat and drink, without the weight of my taste for ale hanging heavily off me by christmas. I am a slave to my appetites, evidently, and I will therefore ensure I am in a condition to cope with them.
I love the club and the exercise and the feeling that it's ok to be soaked with sweat. Which I never felt in the gym. Because our local gym looks like some terrifying training pod for the crew of the Enterprise, all strip lit and computer controlled and filled with denizens who have evolved not to perspire or mess up their hair.
This morning I woke up almost entirely unable to move my right hand, due to what I assume to be a trapped nerve in my wrist, and what my mother is convinced is the beginnings of the arthritic problems that plague any impact sport. (I'm being unfair, she just warned me about it and said "be careful" , which is her reaction to pretty much everything from motorbikes to going to the pub.)
Anyway. At the moment I'm feeling proud of myself. I've not had a sporting injury since I pulled the muscles in my thumb playing basketball. And sporting injuries make one feel tough. This healthy glow will wear off once I get to fencing tonight and realise I can't hold the epee, never mind stab someone with it.
The other sort of conditioning I'm trying to go through is reading newspapers daily rather than "as and when I feel like it, and usually only the comment section. If David Mitchell's writing." And today's exciting story is about book burning, which like everything it seems, was first recorded in China under the empire of Shi Huang. And it concerns America, a place where natural selection does not operate on the margins of the bell curve of religious inanity.
I say inanity rather than insantiy, because plenty of places tolerate religious nutjobs and implement laws for their protection and advancement. But, recently at least, it is in America that religion has taken on the greatest level of malovelent triviality. Fred Phelps and his "God Hates Fags" (presumably because they cause lung cancer...) is a prime, if rather tired, example. There's nothing which suggests that this is a man devoted to God and the greater understanding of Christianity. There is no analysis of the canon, no careful building of a rational argument as to why his apparently all-loving, all-forgiving God will make an exception in the case of those damn homosexuals, nothing that links the WBC with the body of Christian scholarship.There's just him, his family, their friends and some magic markers on one side and lot of angry bereaved soldiers' and AIDS victims' families on the other.
Florid Floridan Terry Jones and his "Burn a Koran" day is a recent and more interesting one, if only because it's nominally tied to protest about things that are actually topical, rather than just the deranged dribblings of a brood of mid-westerners who needed something to get them out at the weekends. He also leads the church that occasionally provides the warm-up acts for the Westboro Baptist Church's picketing of funerals.
Now freedom of speech is, relatively, sacrosanct, particularly in America. Well. Kinda. Ideologically, anyway. That is right and proper, and any call to actually ban Jones and his jolly literary bonfire would be high inappropriate. And while symbolically it's all terribly offensive, several Islamic publishers and bookshops would theoretically be getting a brief influx of trade as supporters of Jones go out to buy their very first Qu'ran. See, the world doesn't operate on symbolism alone. In the religious sense it's Islam's holy book. In the sense of western capitalism, once the money's exchanged hands, it's your book, to do with as you wish.
The problem with this sort of protest is it's not exercising freedom of speech in a way that can be engaged with. Because there is no argument made, no debate can be held and it all becomes the dreary recycling about freedom of speech (an argument that was won back in pre- revolutionary france) and responsibily and hate acts. However, the press feels the need to make it public, because, no matter how even handed they try to be, there's no way one can support book burning, if only because it is generally accepted in the west, particuarly in Britain, as something only intolerant foreigners with silly facial hair do (Imam Musri's beard is very neat, incidentally, while Jones' moustache looks like it's putting out feelers in an attempt to cling onto anything less embarassing than Jones' face.)
No apologist for Christianity or Islam, what worries me is that this is all we get of religion. When it's not violent extremism or child abuse, it's men in Iran being arrested for having the wrong beard (facial hair again. I should write a thesis) and Bible-Belters building museums showing Adam and Eve playing with Billy the Brontosaurus. None of this does anything to suggest the huge amount us secularists owe to the efforts of Christian and Islamic scholars, artists and architects throughout the ages. It's far more damaging than any polemic Dawkins and friends can come up with. And I need a healthy number of religious people donating to churches and cathedrals and their counterparts so I have enough beautiful architecture to gawk at when I'm retired.
I love the club and the exercise and the feeling that it's ok to be soaked with sweat. Which I never felt in the gym. Because our local gym looks like some terrifying training pod for the crew of the Enterprise, all strip lit and computer controlled and filled with denizens who have evolved not to perspire or mess up their hair.
This morning I woke up almost entirely unable to move my right hand, due to what I assume to be a trapped nerve in my wrist, and what my mother is convinced is the beginnings of the arthritic problems that plague any impact sport. (I'm being unfair, she just warned me about it and said "be careful" , which is her reaction to pretty much everything from motorbikes to going to the pub.)
Anyway. At the moment I'm feeling proud of myself. I've not had a sporting injury since I pulled the muscles in my thumb playing basketball. And sporting injuries make one feel tough. This healthy glow will wear off once I get to fencing tonight and realise I can't hold the epee, never mind stab someone with it.
The other sort of conditioning I'm trying to go through is reading newspapers daily rather than "as and when I feel like it, and usually only the comment section. If David Mitchell's writing." And today's exciting story is about book burning, which like everything it seems, was first recorded in China under the empire of Shi Huang. And it concerns America, a place where natural selection does not operate on the margins of the bell curve of religious inanity.
I say inanity rather than insantiy, because plenty of places tolerate religious nutjobs and implement laws for their protection and advancement. But, recently at least, it is in America that religion has taken on the greatest level of malovelent triviality. Fred Phelps and his "God Hates Fags" (presumably because they cause lung cancer...) is a prime, if rather tired, example. There's nothing which suggests that this is a man devoted to God and the greater understanding of Christianity. There is no analysis of the canon, no careful building of a rational argument as to why his apparently all-loving, all-forgiving God will make an exception in the case of those damn homosexuals, nothing that links the WBC with the body of Christian scholarship.There's just him, his family, their friends and some magic markers on one side and lot of angry bereaved soldiers' and AIDS victims' families on the other.
Florid Floridan Terry Jones and his "Burn a Koran" day is a recent and more interesting one, if only because it's nominally tied to protest about things that are actually topical, rather than just the deranged dribblings of a brood of mid-westerners who needed something to get them out at the weekends. He also leads the church that occasionally provides the warm-up acts for the Westboro Baptist Church's picketing of funerals.
Now freedom of speech is, relatively, sacrosanct, particularly in America. Well. Kinda. Ideologically, anyway. That is right and proper, and any call to actually ban Jones and his jolly literary bonfire would be high inappropriate. And while symbolically it's all terribly offensive, several Islamic publishers and bookshops would theoretically be getting a brief influx of trade as supporters of Jones go out to buy their very first Qu'ran. See, the world doesn't operate on symbolism alone. In the religious sense it's Islam's holy book. In the sense of western capitalism, once the money's exchanged hands, it's your book, to do with as you wish.
The problem with this sort of protest is it's not exercising freedom of speech in a way that can be engaged with. Because there is no argument made, no debate can be held and it all becomes the dreary recycling about freedom of speech (an argument that was won back in pre- revolutionary france) and responsibily and hate acts. However, the press feels the need to make it public, because, no matter how even handed they try to be, there's no way one can support book burning, if only because it is generally accepted in the west, particuarly in Britain, as something only intolerant foreigners with silly facial hair do (Imam Musri's beard is very neat, incidentally, while Jones' moustache looks like it's putting out feelers in an attempt to cling onto anything less embarassing than Jones' face.)
No apologist for Christianity or Islam, what worries me is that this is all we get of religion. When it's not violent extremism or child abuse, it's men in Iran being arrested for having the wrong beard (facial hair again. I should write a thesis) and Bible-Belters building museums showing Adam and Eve playing with Billy the Brontosaurus. None of this does anything to suggest the huge amount us secularists owe to the efforts of Christian and Islamic scholars, artists and architects throughout the ages. It's far more damaging than any polemic Dawkins and friends can come up with. And I need a healthy number of religious people donating to churches and cathedrals and their counterparts so I have enough beautiful architecture to gawk at when I'm retired.