Blackboard Politics: UKIP and BBCQT

A good, smart, and principled friend of mine posted the below picture on his Facebook feed earlier today. It makes a case I've heard time and again over the last few years, that being that UKIP is disproportionately present on BBC Question Time when compared to, say, the Green Party, which actually won a parliamentary seat in the last election.

Now, without getting into the fact that Nigel Farage is what TV producers would describe as "good value" from a viewing standpoint, or how Caroline Lucas's vote in Brighton was a mere 31.3%, which is hardly a resounding mandate, such that it's fair to say that her victory was an odd quirk of the First Past the Post system which requires candidates not so much to be "first past the post" as to be "just one vote more popular than the next candidate", I think this is a dodgy approach to the issue.

The fact is, as I said to my friend, that I think this chart is misleading for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that MP stands for "Member of Parliament", not "Member of Panel show."

First, the unbalanced nature of the UK's demographics means that if parties aren't seriously active in England, they're basically not playing the national game. I'm not saying that parties shouldn't be regarded as serious ones unless they're present in the rest of the Union too, but the reality is that England, with 85% of the population, is key to the whole thing, and this matters when it comes to presence on a national television programme. 

Second, if the BBC site is right, the Greens (1%), Sinn Fein (0.6%), the DUP (0.6%), and Plaid Cymru (0.6%) combined got 2.8% of the national vote in the 2010 general election, compared to UKIP's 3.1%. If anything, it looks like UKIP is slightly underrepresented compared to them.

Third, given the unrepresentative nature of the British electoral system, where the typical voter is less likely to have voted for his or her MP than otherwise, using the number of MPs as a measure of anything seems unwise. 

Fourth, in the 2009 European elections, UKIP was the second party across the UK, with 16.5% of the vote, and in the 2014 elections they were the leading party, with 27.5%. Aside from beating Labour, the Tories, and the Lib Dems, that's roughly three times what the four parties on this blackboard got combined.

I think UKIP gives wrong answers -- even dangerously and stupidly wrong answers -- to things perceived as serious problems, but I think their answers, and the problems they're addressing, need to be tackled properly.

And I don't think stuff like this helps.

Oh, Sam... Part One

So, idly pondering again Sam Harris’s offer to pay $20,000 to anyone who can change his mind about the thesis of his almost-universally panned The Moral Landscape, I revisited the book the other night only to put it aside in frustration.

Its problems start, it seems to me, with the polarised contrast he sets up between religious people who believe that moral truth exists and non-religious ones who believe that 'good' and 'evil' are merely subjective and non-binding products of evolution and culture; one wonders where Kant would fall in this scenario, let alone the many proponents of virtue ethics from Aristotle on, perhaps most notably in recent decades Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre. Indeed, it’s striking that neither Anscombe’s‘ Modern Moral Philosophy’ nor MacIntyre’s After Virtue even appear in Harris’s bibliography, let alone are engaged with meaningfully in the text.

Anscombe and MacIntyre might be wrong, of course – I don’t think they are, but that’s neither here nor there – but wrong on not, their views are serious ones and have been enormously influential; Harris’s failure to engage with virtue ethics is a glaring failure of the book, and I don’t think it’s good enough to say that the language of philosophy 'directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe'.

Given his background, it’s baffling how weak on philosophy Harris seems to be, and his hand-waving dismissal of Hume’s is/ought distinction – a distinction pointed to by Kant and Kierkegaard too, the former merely nodded to and the latter wholly absent from the book – suggests that, far from Harris having refuted Hume, he simply hasn’t understood him.

Harris’s thesis, ultimately, is a utilitarian one, and I think it’s fair to say that his claim that science can help us discern moral questions is a reasonable one, assuming utilitarianism is true and leaving aside the question of how practical it would be to do this in real-life situations.

However, it is far from a given that utilitarianism offers the best approach to morality, and indeed Harris’ thesis contains all the long-identified problems of utilitarianism; this is one reason why it doesn’t work for Harris to say that he didn’t arrive at his views from reading philosophy, but from 'considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind'. That’s all very well, but regardless of what path he took there, the position he reached is one of utilitarianism, and that’s a position long-established as vulnerable to some very serious criticisms.

Bentham and others had taken a similar approach to Harris long ago, starting from the premise that the only real motives for human action are attraction to pleasure and aversion to pain, and from this argued that moral choices should always ultimately entail taking the action that will produce the most pleasure and the least pain for the largest number of people; Mill added a bit of nuance later by effectively recognising that 'happiness' is not a simple thing, and that there are different sorts of pleasure.

In practice, Harris does exactly the same thing as Bentham, save that he’s replaced the concept of 'pleasure' with that of 'well-being'. Given, however, that despite deploying the term well over a hundred times, Harris refuses to define 'well-being', it’s hard to see how he’s improved one jot upon Bentham and Mill.

'Well-being,' is, it would seem for Harris, something you know when you see; constantly open to redefinition, it’s akin to a sense of fulfilment and happiness, while not, as far as I can gather, being identical with either. That which contributes to well-being is, Harris says, the only intelligible basis for morality and values, saying that it’s clear that 'most of what matters to the average person – like fairness, justice, compassion, and a general awareness of terrestrial reality – will be integral to our creating a thriving global civilization and, therefore, to the general well-being of humanity.'

An obvious problem with this is how one quantifies something that is constantly reopen to definition; if morality is, ultimately, a scientific question, then it’s hard to see how anyone can do the maths when one of the variables in any given moral equation resists a fixed value. How can you measure that which you cannot define? It won't do to say that 'health' is a similarly flexible concept, but that this doesn't stop us from pursuing 'medicine' in a scientific fashion; at its bluntest level, we know that a dead person is not a healthy one, giving us a clear demonstration of what health certainly is not; is there any comparable state for Harris's 'well-being'?

Another serious problem is that this when Harris speaks of 'the average person', it’s not clear who he has in mind. He says that 'a general awareness of terrestrial reality' matters to the average person, but also says that 'a majority of Americans believe that the Bible provides an accurate account of the ancient world'. Does he mean the ancient world in general, or is he in particular speaking of the creation account in Genesis? Certainly, there are large numbers of Americans – not far off half, I gather – who believe in creationism rather than evolution, such that for the average American, an awareness of terrestrial reality would entail a denial of certain scientific discoveries and their implications. Might it, therefore, be morally better, to Harris’s mind, to encourage such denial in order to foster national – even global - harmony?

(There’s a question: does truth matter? Is honesty, for Harris, a virtue, even if it may sometimes be a dangerous one? Or is truth only a morally good thing when it is contributes to well-being, however that may be defined or quantified?)

‘A thriving global civilization’ is something Harris claims to aspire to, and as such one might think he’d seek to engage with cultural differences in the whole field of morality; I don’t mean specific cultural practices which we might find admirable or reprehensible, but rather how cultural differences affect how we approach moral questions. As Jonathan Haidt demonstrates in The Righteous Mind, compared to the vast majority of people around the world, comfortable westerners tend to have a limited moral palate; while Harris might assert that Haidt’s 'ethic of sanctity', for instance, isn’t really a moral issue as it doesn't affect 'conscious minds', this merely shows that he’s defining morality in an idiosyncratic fashion, at odds with most people in the world, just as Bentham did, although Bentham, at least, was open about was what he was doing.

Of course, that’s a big part of the difficulty in engaging with this sort of argument nowadays. The whole language of morality is, at least in the West, inherited from a Classical tradition that we largely abandoned between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-seventeenth century, such that we’ve inherited words without inheriting meanings; MacIntyre demonstrates that our moral language has come so far adrift of our shared historical moorings that we can no longer even disagree with each other in a meaningful sense!

Still, moving from theory to practice for a moment, Harris observes in a footnote that many people assume that a moral emphasis on human 'well-being' would lead us towards the reintroduction of slavery, the harvesting of the organs of the poor, periodic nuclear bombing of the developing world, and other such monstrosities; such expectations, he says, are the result of not thinking about these things seriously, as there are clear reasons not to do such things, relating to the immensity of suffering that they’d entail and the possibilities of future happiness that they would foreclose. 'Does anyone really believe,' he asks, 'that the highest possible state of human flourishing is compatible with slavery, organ theft, and genocide?'

I’m fairly confident plenty of people have believed precisely that, and suspect that there are no shortage of people who’d think it now – in recent years there may well have been Hutus and Serbs, for instance, who thought the world would be a better place bereft of Tutsis or Bosnian Muslims – which returns us to one of the basic problems here.

Harris’s thesis is, when you get down to it, an argument that science can tell us how to be nice, for some value of 'nice', and while I don’t think many people would contest that science certainly can help us to make moral decisions, it doesn’t really say why there's an obligation on us to be nice in the first place. There's no sense in which it's normative, in which it imposes a duty towards niceness upon us; the best Harris manages is to say that it stands to reason that it's good for the species if we do things that are good for the well-being of the species, whatever that may be.

(The fact that there have been and will be plenty of people who’d readily have put the good of a subset of the species above the good of the species as a whole is something that really doesn’t fit into his paradigm; neither does he engage with those thinkers – Machiavelli and Nietzsche spring very obviously to mind – who have argued that we’re most certainly not under any obligation to niceness.)

In any case, when Harris talks both of the immensity of present day suffering and the foreclosure of future happiness, it seems to me that his concept of 'well-being' is so broad as to be, in practical terms, useless; we need to evaluate the suffering of people directly affected by an action, and the happiness denied to potential people whose very existence would be prevented by said action, and weigh this up against the increased happiness of those whose lives might have been improved by, say, having slaves, or replacement organs, or reduced competition for resources. But then, of course, we’d need to factor in how people might be plagued by guilt because of the atrocities they’d committed, or how their children might feel…

Good luck with that, especially given that 'well-being' still awaits a definition.

I was never a fan of Star Trek:Voyager, but even so, I’ve seen quite a few episodes over the years; one episode features a Cardassian scientist who saved thousands of lives by discovering a cure for a virus; unfortunately he’d achieved this medical breakthrough by experimenting on hundreds of prisoners in concentration camps. Obviously, we have real-world analogues for this in recent history, but the episode in question thrashed out the issues in a useful way that’s always stuck in my mind. So here’s the question: how does this kind of scenario play in Harris’s analysis?

Imagine, if you like, that to find the cure to something will entail experimenting on 100 people, each one dying in a horrible and humiliating fashion, their wills, minds, and bodies broken; I think we can probably say that their well-being would have deteriorated 100 pc as a result of this. The experiments therefore would have cost humanity at large 10,000 'well-being points', for want of a better term. But what if, as a result of these experiments, medical progress meant that the lives of 10,001 people were improved by 1pc each, such that the net effect of the experiment would be that the totally of human well-being would have increased of 1 'well-being point'; could we, therefore, say that the experiments had been morally right?

Obviously, we can tweak the numbers in various ways – the ever amusing Bluff your way in Philosophy envisages a situation where three people are suffering from the terminal collapse of a vital organ, asking whether a fourth healthy person ought to agree to give up his life for donation purposes to ensure ‘a net gain of two lives’ – but I think the core questions stand: does the end justify the means, and is it ever acceptable to treat human beings as things?

Lending real interest to that question is how Harris flatly denies that human lives are intrinsically equal in value. Now, 'value' here is a term that needs unpacking, with Harris seeming to think a person’s value measurable based on how much suffering and happiness would be generated or prevented by their death, but given that he juxtaposes his observations on human beings differing in value with the statement that it is 'worse to run experiments on monkeys than on mice,' it's worth asking whether it would – to Harris's mind – be worse to run experiments on intelligent, sensitive, educated, gregarious people than on foolish, insensitive, ignorant, shy ones? Or, putting it another way, would it be better to experiment on less valuable human beings?

I don’t want to misrepresent Harris; he does, after all, say that it’s probably good that laws ignore the fact – as he sees it – that all people are not equally valuable, but he qualifies this by saying he might be wrong on this. In any case, he says, he’s confident that whether or not laws should treat people as though they’re equal is one that has a scientific answer.

As well he would, given that he thinks moral questions always – in principle – have scientific answers. 

How he squares this with his observations on 'utility monsters', I don't know. Saying that it would be entirely 'ethical for our species to be sacrificed for the unimaginably vast happiness of some superbeings', he imagines the distinction between us and these superbeings as analogous to that between bacteria and us, but really, these are differences of degree, not of kind. This raises the question of whether it would be ethical, by Harris's scheme, for the 'less valuable' members of our species to be sacrificed – in, say, the kind of medical experiments considered earlier – for the increased well-being of the 'more valuable' members of the species. 

I'm not sure whether his answer to that would be 'clearly, yes', or whether it would be to say that he doesn't know, but he's sure that the answer, as ever, can be found through science.

-- From the files, October 2013.

Soapy Operatics

The other evening, while digging through recent tweets, I noticed how a fortnight or so back I’d said, “Hmmm. Must make tea before calling home again. Rang during a proposal in Coronation Street, something which is never mentioned on Twitter.”

And that time I paused, because I honestly couldn’t think of a time I’d noticed anybody talking about Coronation Street on Twitter. Or Eastenders, for that matter. Now, granted, I could just have been filtering out tweets on those topics, but it got me thinking about how roughly a quarter of Britain’s population watch soap operas every week, and yet they seem to go unmentioned on Twitter.

It turns out that there are official Twitter accounts for the two main soaps, with Eastenders’ official account having almost 220,000 followers, and Coronation Street’s having almost 180,000. Not Stephen Fry country – indeed, not even in the range of the QI Elves – but still, it’s not too shabby.

But here’s the thing. It seems that of the almost 800 accounts I follow, just two follow the Eastenders account, and two follow the Coronation Street one. And one of those is the NSPCC.

Am I typical in this regard? Or is it simply the case that Twitterati are radically unrepresentative of the British population – and perhaps the Irish and American ones too -- in general? Food for thought there, methinks.

Now there's a condundrum for you...
So, anyway, this got me thinking about the soaps in general. I’m sorry to say that I’ve probably clocked up a few thousand hours of passive soap-watching over the decades. I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately turned one on, but I’ve certainly been in the room innumerable times when others have been watching Eastenders, Neighbours, Glenroe, Home and Away, and most especially Coronation Street. I have a big family, after all. The telly’s hardly mine to hog.

And while the telly’s been on, there have been plenty of occasions when I’ve not averted my eyes, so I’ve picked up a good broad knowledge of soap operas over the years.

Occasionally I’ve pondered a question memorably put by one of my best friends in Dublin: “What do the regulars in the Rovers Return watch on telly at half-seven on Monday nights?”

The dogs that don't bark...
It’s a fair question. One thing that’s conspicuously absent from Coronation Street, as a milieu, is Coronation Street the programme. Indeed, absent too, as far as I can tell, are Eastenders, Neighbours, Emmerdale, the lot. It seems that Weatherfield is almost the only working class or lower middle-class place in England where nobody watches or talks about soap operas.

I saw ‘almost’, because Walford seems to exhibit the same peculiarity. So, I suspect, does Emmerdale.

Another thing that’s strikingly odd in the two shows I’ve seen are football references. I’ve been assured that football gets mentioned now and again in the shows, but I honestly don’t think I’ve ever noticed it happening.

Weatherfield, it would seem, is a suburb of Greater Manchester where nobody talks about Manchester United or Manchester City, and where the pub is singularly devoid of crowds of burly men shouting obscenities at a big screen. And, just as eerily, although Eastenders occasionally features a mention of Walford Town FC, we never see people camping out in front of the Queen Vic’s telly to watch West Ham, that being, I think, the local team.

Spectator sport, it would seem, is unheard of on Coronation Street and Albert Square. I can’t remember whether it was ever mentioned on Brookside Close. Is it tenable that this was the only street in Merseyside where nobody talked of Everton and Liverpool?

Were Merseyside’s two great teams ever mentioned in Grange Hill, for that matter, when the school was inexplicably relocated there from London in 2003, thus rendering nonsensical the teasing Ziggy had received for his Scouse accent back in the 80s?

Sometimes historians have so little to go on...
All of which leads me to think that we’d be in quite the pickle if future historians were left to rely on soap operas and the usual incomplete archaeological remains to figure out what life was like in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Britain.

What would they conclude? That ordinary English people didn’t watch drama programmes on television – so that the shows that had somehow survived must have been elite entertainments. That they didn’t partake in spectator sports, and rarely engaged in any physical activities. That their social lives revolved around drinking establishments called pubs, which were perennially popular and oblivious to outside social factors. That religion played almost no part in their lives, save sometimes at weddings and funerals. That adultery, abuse, rape, and murder were the small change of their miserable lives.

That those lives were short, with Londoners rarely making it past their mid-forties, and Scousers being lucky to reach their mid-twenties, though lifespans in Manchester were seemingly rather longer than those in London.

And then, just to complicate matters...

And, of course, if they were particularly unlucky they might also have a couple of episodes of Doctor Who, to really confuse them. If they had ‘Army of Ghosts’, for instance, they’d see the Doctor and Rose Tyler sitting in Jackie Tyler’s living room, flicking through the channels to see Eastenders’ own Peggy Mitchell confronting a spectral cyberman in the Queen Vic.

“Listen to me, Den Watts! I don’t care if you ‘ave come back from the grave. Get outta my pub! The only spirits I’m serving in this place are gin, whisky, and vodka. So you ‘eard me – get out!”
The Doctor turns off the programme, and turning to Jackie says,“When did it start?”
“Well, first of all, Peggy heard this noise in the cellar, so she goes down - ”
“No,” he says, “I mean worldwide.”

Might the historians of the future think this is metafiction? Well, you’d hope so, not least because of the improbable suggestion in it that ordinary people obsessively watched soap operas, which they would of course know to be false.*

Of course, if they had more than ‘Army of Ghosts’ to rely on, they’d realise that Doctor Who and Eastenders share a fictional continuity**, with the Doctor having visited Walford in 1993’s Dimensions in Time, where the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh incarnations of the Doctor, not to mention a medley of companions, battled the Rani, caught in timeloops that saw them visiting Albert Square as it was in 1973, 1993, and what appears to be an alternative 2013 where Kathy Beale, Pauline Fowler, Frank Butcher and Pat Evans are all mysteriously still alive.***

This might lead them to think that Eastenders is no more realistic than Doctor Who, or it might lead them to think that this is just a straightforward way of making Doctor Who seem more credible, on the Henry James principle that “a good ghost story ... must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life.”

Or it might lead them to think that Doctor Who accurately depicts modern British life too, with Eastenders being a reality TV show within the Doctor Who continuum, which might at least explain why Jackie watches it.

But that’s a whole other topic. Whatever way we look at it, it'd probably lead to some very strange documentaries.

________________________________________________________
* Especially if they had Twitter to go by.
** Subtly different from Red Dwarf, which though set in the same fictional continuum as Coronation Street is explicitly stated as taking place in a different dimension.
*** Don't even think of saying that as a 'Children in Need' special it doesn't count. Nobody says that about 'Time Crash'.

The Shame of Cardinal Brady?

Well, having had a heads-up that it'd be on, and knowing that I'd be called upon to talk about it on the radio this morning, I watched the BBC's This World documentary, The Shame of the Catholic Church, last night. About abuse in Donegal's diocese of Raphoe, perhaps the most remote part of the country, and about how the Brendan Smyth investigation in the diocese of Kilmore was handled in 1975, it was a powerful piece of television.

I watched it with lips pursed, stomach churning, and eyes narrowed and at times tear-clouded; I can't imagine anyone else watching it without feeling upset, furious, even betrayed. I’m still distraught over it.

I know an enormous amount about abuse in Ireland, knowing quite a few abuse survivors extremely well, and having read several books, hundreds of articles, and all the national and a few international reports on the subject, and even so it was agonising to witness the suffering etched on the faces of Brendan Boland and so many others as they told their tales of the horrendous abuse they suffered at the hands of Eugene Greene and Brendan Smyth.

It was, in its weird way, inspirational too. Whenever I hear abuse survivors coming forth to talk of what was done to them, I'm always struck by their courage.

In the aftermath of last year's Cloyne Report, Archbishop Neary of Tuam preached the Reek Sunday homily on Croagh Patrick, in which he said:

'A woman asked me last week when it would all end. The honest answer is that it will not end until every survivor has told their story and until every victim is facilitated in embarking on their journey to real healing, where true dignity is accorded.'

In that sense, I have to say that I'm glad the BBC has made this documentary. It's afforded some people – some terribly, grievously, shamefully wounded people – the opportunity to tell their stories, and to be heard by millions. I only hope that doing so will help them in some measure towards healing, and will help others tell their stories too.

Misleading

That said, I have serious misgivings about the programme itself, which even while watching it and despite by general sense of disgust at what had happened, I thought was deeply misleading. Of course, Cardinal Brady's recently-issued statement  seems to suggest it was rather more than that.

It was, when you get down to it, two wholly separate documentaries – one on Greene and Raphoe, one on Smyth and Cardinal Brady's role in his investigation – bound together by some commentary, notably by Colm Tóibín, whose book The Sign of the Cross, taking him across Catholic Europe and deep into himself, is something well worth the readings.

The commentary gave the wholly false impression that the Catholic Church in Ireland is a monolith, whereas the reality – as I said yesterday – is that it's more like a loose network of 184 separate organisations, all in communion with each other but with nobody in charge and nothing remotely resembling a chain of command. This isn't a trivial point, because it's utterly crucial to understanding how the abuse phenomenon happened

As Ian Elliott, the Protestant Head of the Church's child protection agency said in 2007,

 'The task of organizing and motivating the whole Church to adopt and implement a single approach to any issue should not be underestimated. Authority is structured in such a way as to allow independence. No one person in Ireland can direct and require the various constituent parts of the Church to act or to follow one particular course of action. This simple fact helps to explain why it has been so difficult to implement a single strategy in the past or to apply across the whole Church the valuable lessons learnt from painful experiences.'

You'd not think, to watch the programme, that one of the people responsible in 1996 for having herded those 184 cats in such a way that the Irish Church collectively adopted the most stringent child protection procedures in the land was the then Coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh, Seán Brady. Granted, the groundwork must have been done by others, but I don’t think we can dismiss his contribution.

These are crucial errors of omission, but there were other errors too – clear factual errors. Notably the programme claimed that when it became news in 2010 that the then Father Brady had been involved in 1975 in an internal abuse investigation about the late Father Brendan Smyth, it was argued that Brady had just been an innocent notetaker. This enabled the programme to wheel out Father Tom Doyle O.P. to argue that this is nonsense, and that the transcripts of the investigation show that Brady was an investigator, even though, by Brady's own account, the transcripts explicitly identify him as a notary.

Now, leaving aside how the story originally broke in 1997, being reported on 10 August of that year in the Sunday Mirror, it simply wasn't argued in 2010 that Brady had merely been a passive notary. As my own account of the matter on my 18 March 2010 blogpost shows, it was widely recognised and never disputed that he'd participated in interviews, taken oaths, and presented findings as well as taking notes:

'Over the weekend it turned out that the current Irish cardinal, Sean Brady, had learned of Smyth's actions back in 1975. An ordinary priest at the time, Brady was a schoolteacher who had been trained in canon law. In this capacity in March and April 1975 he interviewed two teenage boys who had reported Smythe's behaviour, taking notes on the interviews and administering oaths that required the boys to confirm the truthfulness of their statements and to guarantee that they would preserve the confidentiality of the interview process.

Father Brady, as he then was, passed on his findings to his bishop, who made his decision – that Smyth's priestly faculties should be withdrawn and that he should receive psychiatric help – which he passed on to the superior of Smyth's order, the Norbertines. The Norbetines, as we know, utterly failed to enforce the order restricting his priestly role, simply moving him from place to place, and we all know what horrors ensued.'

Betrayal

Other than hearing the stories of the victims themselves, which stood as powerful witnesses to their extraordinary courage, the only new thing in the programme was the fact that during the first interview, that of Brendan Boland, the then Father Brady was given the names and addresses of possible victims. Of course, these would have been passed on to his superior, Bishop Francis McKiernan, but neither McKiernan nor Brendan Smyth's order, the Norbertines, acted to protect these people, with the terrible consequences we all know.

I think it's hugely unfair to blame Brady for not having contacted the families of those children directly, and for not having reported the matter to the police. That might sound crazy, but think of this: nobody, I hope, would ever accuse Brendan Boland's parents for having covered up or facilitated Smyth's abuse by not reporting it to the police. The reality is that the Bolands trusted Bishop McKiernan to handle the matter properly, and the then Father Brady did exactly the same thing.

Brady, in short, was as innocent as Brendan Boland’s parents, and I think his own account of what’s happened is well worth reading. He corrects what appears to be some serious errors in the programme.

I think the teenage Brendan Boland acted heroically in coming forward as he did. And I think he was horribly let down – even betrayed – by some in the Church, to some degree by the late Bishop McKiernan but most especially by Brendan Smyth's superiors in the Norbertine order. I don't think, however, that he – or Smyth's other victims – were betrayed by the then Father Brady.

I'd go further, in fact: I think Brady himself was betrayed, as he interviewed the boys, believed them, passed on his findings to his superior, and trusted in good faith that matters would be handled properly. And they weren't. It’s hardly surprising that he says he was horrified when he learned decades later that his findings had ultimately fallen on deaf or uncaring ears.

Leadership

That said, and I hate to say it, but I'm not convinced that Cardinal Brady really can carry on as the nearest thing the Church in Ireland has to a man at the top. Unfair it may be, but he's fatally tainted by his connection with the Smyth affair, such that it persistently undermines him. I'd not say that he should resign – that's for him, of course – but I'm just not convinced he can be the leader we need right now.

He's already effectively asked to be sidelined, of course, having requested that the Pope appoint either an assistant bishop or, depending on who you ask, a Coadjutor Archbishop – a regent, if you like – such that he could slip off the scene, and I'm not surprised. Although he's done a good job in pulling the Church's disparate elements together to implement common guidelines far tougher than those of the State, it's looked to me as though his confidence has been shot ever since this story was revived a couple of years ago.

I'm just not sure he can be the man to lead a renewal of the Irish Church. And that, I think, is yet another tragedy.

Ninjas, Vikings, and Celtic Fancy

Those of you with long memories may recall how last summer I enlightened you both by exploring a remarkable episode of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in which the viridian foursome visited the Emerald Isle, there to stroll inconspicuously through a Dublin as empty as though the Queen were visiting, before shacking up in a castle that had somehow evaded the tender cares of An Taisce and thwarting an assault on my home city by the denizens of Dublin Zoo's pets corner.

No, really. Go and look.

Anyway, early in the lads' adventures Splinter takes them through Fusiliers' Arch -- that's Traitors' Gate to the more unreconstructedly nationalist among you -- into Stephen's Green, there to tell them of Ireland's history, with the aid of the many statues in the park. He homes in straight onto a statue of Ireland's principle patron saint, there to tell the boys that Ireland is a land of magical legends, including that of Saint Patrick, who drove all the snakes and other reptiles out of Ireland.

No, really, that's what Splinter says. 

Now, there are at least four things wrong with this. First, although there's legendary accretion around the character of Patrick, he was a real historical figure, rather than a magical legend. Second, Patrick supposedly drove the snakes -- and only the snakes -- out of Ireland, with the few lizards we have being left to roam freely. Third, there is no statue of Patrick in St Stephen's Green. Fourth, if there were, it probably wouldn't look like this:

So, anyway, I was reminded of this recently after reading a letter in the Irish Times a few weeks back.

I would have loved this when I was in primary school...

Seemingly the American O'Brien Clan Foundation has decided that there ought to be a statue to Brian Boru, the victor of Clontarf, in Dublin; in principle this is a nice idea, and one that I espoused myself in school when I was eleven years old. The letter begins:

'The Victorian ambiance of St Stephen’s Green seems perfect for a classical equestrian statue of Ireland’s greatest High King, Brian Boru, the millennium of whose death is fast approaching. 

We believe Brian Boru deserves the place at the centre of the park, where the statue of King George once stood. Once in place, it would appear to visitors as though the park was designed around the likeness of an Irish leader, rather than a foreign colonial ruler, or bed of flowers. 

In his address to the assembled troops before the Battle of Clontarf, Brian Boru spoke of Irishmen fighting for their country, surely the first ever mention of the notion of Irish nationality? Brian Boru was the first and only High King to unite the warring tribes of Irish into a nation. His was the greatest Irish life ever lived. Were the Office of Public Works to permit a monument to be erected, people would have the chance to pause and reflect about the sublime achievements of Brian Boru, and drawing inspiration from it, enrich their own lives.'

And it concludes:

'Texas Pastor Terrell O’Brien, who is also an accomplished monumental sculptor, famous for his statue of Rev Billy Graham, in front of the university he founded, has been chosen by the O’Briens to carry out the project. 

A photograph of a rough model he is working on is viewable at obrienclan.com/raising-a-monument-to-brian-boru. The scheme is simple: We will pay for the statue, and its erection, and hopefully the Office of Public Works, and the art adviser can help with the proper permits and approvals.'

Now, call me old-fashioned, but remarkably aquiline features aside, isn't this statue of Brian just a bit similar to the fictitious statue of Patrick in the Ninja Turtles cartoon? I'm not suggesting for even one moment that Terrell O'Brien copied his maquette from the cartoon's take on our patron saint, but it seems to me that it might be a bad idea to have a statue so similar to the cartoon Patrick in the very spot where the cartoon Patrick is supposedly located. It could confuse tourists, after all. Especially the sort who like to wear Hawaiian shirts and play frisbee in cities so desolate that Cillian Murphy could show up any minute.

Seriously, look how similar the statues are: you'll note that Brian appears to have inherited Patrick's clothes, and is brandishing two cruciform shapes just as Britain's greatest son is portrayed as doing. The horses are a mirror image of each other, once you correct for the fact that only a miracle could explain how Patrick's horse is balancing so elegantly on its left legs.

What might have inspired this pose, you might ask, other than that mounted Prima Porta rip off we know as the Marcus Aurelius statue on the Capitoline? 

Ah, folklore...

Well, the centrepiece of the Irish Times letter reads as follows, quoting, it says, from the Annals of Innisfallen to describe the 73-year-old High King engaging in a fine piece of battlefield exhortation:

'Their ranks had been formed before daylight, and as the sun rose, Brian rode through the lines of his soldiers with a crucifix in one hand, and a drawn sword in the other; he reminded them of the day selected by the pagan invader to offer battle, and exhorted them to conquer or die. Standing in the centre of his army, and raising his powerful voice, his speech was worthy of so great a king and so good a man:  

"Be not dismayed my soldiers, because my son Donough is avenging our wrongs in Leinster; he will return victorious, and in the glory of his conquests you shall share. 

On your valor rests the hopes of your country today; and what surer grounds can they rest upon? Oppression now attempts to bend you down to servility; will you burst its chains and rise to the independence of Irish freemen? Your cause is one approved by Heaven. You seek not the oppression of others; you fight for your country and sacred altars. It is a cause that claims heavenly protection. In this day’s battle the interposition of that God who can give victory will be singly manifested in your favour. 

Let every heart, then, be the throne of confidence and courage. You know that the Danes are strangers to religion and humanity; they are inflamed with the desire of violating the fairest daughters of this land of beauty, and enriching themselves with the spoils of sacrilege and plunder. The barbarians have impiously fixed, for their struggle, to enslave us, upon the very day on which the Redeemer of the world was crucified. Victory they shall not have! from such brave soldiers as you they can never wrest it; for you fight in defence of honor, liberty and religion – in defence of the sacred temples of the true God, and of your sisters, wives and daughters. 

Such a holy cause must be the cause of God, who will deliver your enemies this day into your hands. Onward, then, for your country and your sacred altars!".'

Stirring stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Still, without wanting to be a party pooper, I think it mightn't be a bad idea to inject some reality into this narrative.

A touch of history...

Firstly, I'm far from convinced this is from the Annals of Innisfallen. It might be from the eighteenth-century farrago of fact, folklore, and full-blown mythologising that's known as the Dublin Annals of Innisfallen, but if you look at the year 1014 in the actual Annals of Innisfallen, you'll find the following passage:

'Great warfare between Brian and the foreigners of Áth Cliath, and Brian then brought a great muster of the men of Ireland to Áth Cliath. After that the foreigners of Áth Cliath gave battle to Brian, son of Cennétig, and he was slain, with his son Murchad, royal heir of Ireland, and Murchad's son, namely, Tairdelbach, as also the princes of Mumu round Conaing, son of Donn Cúán, and round Domnall son of Diarmait, king of Corcu Bascinn, and round Mac Bethad son of Muiredach, king of Ciarraige Luachra, and also Tadc Ua Cellaig, king of Uí Maine, and many others. There were also slain in that battle Mael Mórda son of Murchad, king of Laigin, together with the princes of the Laigin round him, and the foreigners of the western world were slaughtered in the same battle.'

It's a bit dry, isn't it? It's certainly not the Mel Gibson-esque patriotic fantasy that the O'Brien's are quoting.

Here's the thing. Clontarf, contrary to popular belief, wasn't what we think it was, and it didn't really matter all that much.

The Vikings had been a spent force in Ireland for decades before Clontarf. Under Olaf Sigtryggsson, Dublin had ruled over a big chunk of north Leinster in the mid-tenth century, but at the battle of Tara, fought in 980, Máel Sechnaill II, King of Meath, defeated Olaf, forcing the Dubliners to pay tribute to the Irish henceforth; it was Tara, not Clontarf, that had decisively ensured that Vikings would not rule in Ireland.

Clontarf, on the other hand, is best understood as a battle between rival Irish kings. Máel Mórda, king of Leinster, had rebelled against Brian Boru, the High King of the day, and although Vikings made up a large part of his army, the Vikings of Dublin did not take part in the battle on their doorstep; indeed, although Sigtrygg Silkenbeard, king of Dublin, was Máel Mórda's son-in-law, he remained neutral in the conflict between the two Irish kings. And well he might, for Vikings served in Brian's army too, and Brian had been the third husband of Sigtrygg's mother!

The tale of Clontarf grew with the telling. Vikings remembered it as a heroic encounter between champions, while as time went by Dubliners grew embarrassed about their Viking heritage and recast the battle as a clash of nations. The reality is that the Vikings were an important presence in medieval Ireland following their defeat at Tara. Though they remained an important -- if decreasingly distinctive -- element in Irish life right up to the arrival of the Normans in 1169, after Tara they would never again threaten to be an dominant one; the Irish and Norse nobility were deeply intermingled, and it's schoolboy nonsense to think of Clontarf as a heroic Irish victory against sinister foreigners. 

Then again, schoolboy nonsense has its charms. I suspect Chesterton would have said that there's truth buried there, the kind of truth that academics too often forget. 

Praise be to Woody Allen Jesus

The hoohah in today's news about Tim Minchin's 'Woody Allen Jesus' song having been cut from Jonathan Ross's Christmas special is a curious one. There seems to be a certain disingenuity in how Minchin himself has been describing the song, and indeed in how others have followed the story.

On his own blog, Minchin says, 'Being Christmas, I thought it would be fun to do a song about Jesus, but being TV, I knew it would have to be gentle. The idea was to compare him to Woody Allen (short, Jewish, philosophical, a bit hesitant), and expand into redefining his other alleged attributes using modern, popular-culture terminology.'

That all sounds very innocent, really, and on the face of it, one would think Minchin could be excused for being a bit miffed at how his song, the lyrics of which had gone through the lawyers and producers and so forth, had wound up being cut from the show at the last minute; seemingly Peter Fincham, ITV's director of television, got nervous in light of how people might react, and said it had to go.

Well, okay, but it's worth listening to the song, or at the very least reading the lyrics -- as accurately transcribed, in the main, by this fellow -- and then wondering whether they really would have been ideal Christmas television.

Sure, the song starts with a Woody Allen comparison, which, even if wholly contrary to what historical evidence we have -- Jesus doesn't seem to have been admired by his peers or been remotely political, as far as we can tell -- is nonetheless not something that would bother many people, but then it starts to crank things up. Comparing Jesus with Darren Brown doesn't quite work, as it suggests that Minchen doesn't understand what magic supposedly is, and how it differs in rather profound ways from conjuring and from miracles, but it's only with the next verse that things get really tricky.

'Jesus died but then came back to life
So the Holy Bible said
Kinda like in Dawn of the Dead
Like a film by Simon Pegg
Try that these days, you’d be in trouble
Geeks would try to smack you with a shovel

Praise be to Jesus
Praise be to Magic Woody Allen Zombie Jesus
Magic Woody Allen Zombie Jesus!'

Now, given that I'm a huge fan of Stewart Lee, who's gone much further than this in his attempts to lampoon Christianity, being far more offensive, far more original, and far more intelligent than Mr Minchin, I'm hardly going to say that Minchin ought not to be allowed say such things. That'd be absurd. No, I'm just saying that I'm a bit surprised he was naive enough to think this would be the sort of thing that would be likely to be broadcast as bland light entertainment at Christmas.

And, of course, he went on in his puerile way, comparing Jesus with a superhero flying into the sky and Mary with a parthenogenetic lizard or snail, and likening Jesus to Psychic Sally because of his ability to communicate with the deceased -- though I'm not sure when he's meant to have done that, unless that's a really oblique reference to the Transfiguration.

In any case, that's a prelude to saying,

'Jesus lives forever, which is pretty odd
But not as odd as his fetish for drinking blood'

Which, let's face it, was never really going to be broadcast by a thoughtful or pragmatic broadcaster at Christmas time. Saying, 'Hey guys, did it ever cross your minds that Jesus was a bit like a zombie or a vampire?' is, aside from being neither a challenging nor an original idea, something that ITV probably wasn't ever going to run with, especially at Christmas time, and most especially not with a presenter whose career they're relaunching in the aftermath of stupid behaviour on BBC.

There's a sense in which Minchin's point is about free speech, but like it or not, commercial television isn't about free speech. It's about advertising and making money, within the limits of official broadcasting standards. Sorry, but that's how it works. On his blog, Minchin says

'It’s 2011. The appropriate reaction to people who think Jesus is a supernatural being is mild embarrassment, sighing tolerance and patient education. And anger when they’re being bigots. Oh, and satire. There’s always satire.'

Fine. Minchin's fully entitled to his views, childish and ill-informed though they are. But he must surely realise that others are entitled to theirs too, and that lots of people's views might differ from his own, and it's only prudent of ITV to take them into account. He must be extraordinarily naive -- childish, even -- if he can't grasp that. This isn't even about fear of the Daily Mail. It's about being polite, and having basic respect for people, and not insulting people's views just because you don't agree with them.

Especially at Christmas. Because there wouldn't be a Jonathan Ross Christmas special for Mister Minchin to tinkle the keys on were there no Christmas to celebrate, and because there wouldn't be a Christmas if it weren't for Christians, and because there wouldn't be Christians if it weren't for Christ.

After all, despite all the factoids long absorbed by so many who think themselves educated, Christianity predates Paul of Tarsus and Christmas was not a creation of the Emperor Constantine.

I've liked some of Minchin's work. He's a talented musician, and sometimes can pen some genuinely witty songs. This isn't one of them.

Spain's Stolen Babies: Where Angels Fear To Tread

Without spending much time on this -- I'm swamped with work -- I was sent a link to a blogpost this morning that's worth addressing simply because misconceptions should be tackled as quickly as possible.

The blog in question seems to tend toward the obsessive, not to mention lacking in knowledge of what it is it's opposing -- it could learn a lot from Sun Tzu's greatest precept -- but I'd agree with more if it than the author would expect and its author has posted a couple of fairly reasonable comments on other blogs, so it strikes me that it's worth engaging.

You'll know the story, of course, if you've been watching telly this week. There was a programme on BBC the other night called Spain's Stolen Babies, which claimed that under Franco numerous Spanish Catholic doctors and nuns misled the parents of newborn children that their babies had died, whereas in reality they'd been sold on to more 'desirable' couples. What the BBC documentary revealed* was horrific, and what it suggested was far worse.

That said, it was only a TV programme. No serious historical work has been done on this. We need to tread cautiously.

As far as I can figure out, it looks like there have been about a thousand certain cases of this sort of thing; the programme's 300,000 figure was just speculation. That's one of the things Caroline Farrow was getting at on her blog, linking to some useful articles: that we just don't have the data to judge, and until we do it makes no sense to be shrieking about it. It's horrible, but we just don't have enough information to evaluate how historically significant this was, let alone into what was driving this, whether individually or systemically. I have my own suspicions of how this will play out in terms of numbers, time, and geographic prevalence, but they're just speculative too. As long as facts are thin on the ground, the only honest and reasonable think for anyone to say about the situation is that we just don't know. I think a prudent reserve is the best response to this.

William Oddie made some interesting points about the documentary on the Catholic Herald site, and though I think Oddie was slightly wrong in what he said, it wasn't in the way the anonymous author of the Catholic Internet Watch blog seem to think.

Oddie's completely right to say that the same principle was at work in Franco's Spain as in today's United Kingdom, that being that the State knows best and has the right to decide that children would do better when reared by people other than their natural parents. The fact that there are more checks and balances here in England than in Franco's Spain doesn't change the fact that the same principle is in play. That said, he's wrong to omit the issue that those who engaged in this activity in Spain seem, at least sometimes, to have had a financial interest in doing so. That's an important omission.

(Though again, until the facts are in, we shouldn't be rushing to any kind of judgement on this. It was just a TV show, after all.)

On a broad historical point, the fact that Franco's gang had taken power with the support of Hitler and Mussoline doesn't really mean anything; his opponents were backed by Stalin. It doesn't make sense to view the Spanish Civil War with external eyes: it was a profoundly Spanish conflict, and one in which both sides were glad of whatever help they could get, from wherever it came. Certainly, the defeated side was no more pleasant than the victorious one, as is shown by how they raped nuns and mutilated and killed thousands of priests. Orwell, who'd gone to Spain in naive support for the Republican forces, was turned off his natural allies to a massive degree when he realised their willingness to trade atrocities with Franco's people.

The CIW blogger is spectacularly wrong, I'm afraid, to say:

'And those priests and nuns were not just authority figures; they were the face of a religion possessing divine authority to determine whether you go to Hell or not.'

I'm not sure whether he sees this as being reasonable grounds for said priests being murdered or mutilated and said nuns being raped, though that seems to be the case, but that aside, he's completely off the mark when he says the Church possesses -- or claims to possess -- divine authority to determine when people go to Hell or not. In point of fact, the Church never says anybody is destined for Hell, and it does not teach that anybody is there. Indeed, it's theologically impossible to say that anybody in particular is in Hell.

That the blogger thinks that the Church makes such claims really just shows his complete incomprehension of what it is he's attacking. Again: read Sun Tzu.

The rest of the piece is little more than an ad hominem attack on Oddie for having once said he found himself agreeing with Stephen Green's Christian Voice group more often than he disagreed with them. Green seems a fairly unpleasant piece of work, but note that Oddie has never said  he agrees with Green all of the time, or on what issues, merely that on balance he found himself agreeing with him more often than not. I can think of lots of people who I'd agree with more often than not, while nonetheless differing from strongly on some major issues.

It concludes by turning to a couple of forum threads, one of which raised the question of whether the Pope would have known of this. The blog takes the view that these are just instances of Catholics whining and feeling victimised by the media; I'm not sure that's fair. The problem with the bulk of the media, surely, is not so much bias -- not that there's not plenty of that -- as ignorance, with ignorance of both science and religion being particularly prevalent. This ignorance results in all sorts of crazy ideas, such that many people seem convinced that the Pope wields absolute control in the Catholic Church. As John Allen puts it:

'The implied image seems to be that he sits behind a computer terminal deep inside the Apostolic Palace, making all the decisions for the Catholic Church. However entertaining it is to think such thoughts, reality is a good deal more prosaic.'

So, lest Catholics panic or anti-Catholics sneer, let's be clear on this: whatever was happening in Spain, it's almost 100 per cent certain that the Pope didn't know about it, much less command it. There's very likely that hardly any Spanish bishops ever knew about it either. And indeed, in a very important sense, it doesn't make sense to say 'the Church' did this or even that 'the Church' was complicit. People throw out such claims all the time. They should take some time to find out and think about what the Church is.

Hint: it's not a corporation with a pyramidal structure and clear lines of command.

* I say 'revealed'. The story was new to me, but wouldn't have been new to anyone who'd read Time magazine back in March, the New York Times in July, or Business Insider a fortnight back.

The Hand of God and the Will of Allah

One of the standard questions I'm asked by people who are curious about how such an otherwise apparently sane and reasonably intelligent person can be a Catholic is generally along the lines of 'But there are lots of other religions that don't believe in your god -- how can you say they're all wrong?'

The answer, when you get down to it, is that I say no such thing. I don't think the situation is polarised such that Catholics are right and everyone else is wrong. I talk of degrees of truth, and aspects of the transcendent, and intimations of the numinous in the collective imagination of mankind, and in talking of all of this I think in the language of Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council's declaration on the relationship of the Church to non-Christian religions. Deep down, though, I think I'm really just offering a developed, more Scriptural, and more sophisticated version of of a couple of things I read as a child, one penned by C.S. Lewis, and one in a Doctor Who novel.

Yes, I'm still talking about Doctor Who. Three days in now.

The Lewis passage is well known, of course, and comes from the end of The Last Battle, the final Narnia book, when Lewis describes Aslan meeting Emeth, Lewis' good Calormene, and welcoming him into Heaven.

'"Son, thou art welcome." But I said, "Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash." He answered, "Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me." Then by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, "Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one?" The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, "It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites -- I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man does a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child?" I said, "Lord, thou knowest how much I understand." But I said also (for the truth constrained me), "Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days." "Beloved," said the Glorious One, "unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek."'

The other passage comes from a rather less well-known work, Doctor Who and the Crusaders, David Whittaker's novelisation of the 1965 story, 'The Crusade'. The book is rather more substantial than the TV programme, and features a memorable scene -- well, memorable for me, anyway -- where Ian Chesterton, one of the Doctor's companions, meets with Saladin.

'"I give you these passes," he told Ian, "because I admire your bravery and courage, Sir Ian. Secondly, the lady Barbara had believed she was under my protection and I would have that belief honoured. Lastly, El Akir has presumed upon my situation in this war, and his value to me in it, and I would have that rectified. His main army, of four thousand men, it is true, is placed with the body of my fighting men in front of Jerusalem, but he has a personal guard in Lydda of several hundred. One thing and one thing alone can bring success to your enterprise... the Will of Allah." He smiled at Ian wryly."But of course, you are a Christian, and my words mean nothing to you."
"On the contrary, Your Highness, if you will forgive my contradicting you, the names and the phrases differ but the purpose is the same in all races of intellect and culture. You say 'the Will of Allah' where we would say 'the Hand of God'."
"I see you have made some study of the subject, young man," murmured Saladin approvingly, "but surely the conflict still remains? The gulf between our separate faiths is too wide to be bridged by such a simple explanation."

"I have a friend, a very wise, well-travelled man who spoke to me on the  subject of religions once. In the West, three main streams dominate: Mohammedanism, Judaism and Christianity. In the East, the Hindu, the Buddhist and the Moslem rival Janism, Sikhism, Parsee and Shinto. But what is the sum total? That all people, everywhere, believe there is something mightier than themselves. Call it Brahma, Allah or God – only the name changes. The little Negro child will say his prayers and imagine his God to be in his colour. The French child hopes his prayers will be answered – in French. We are all children in this matter still, and will always be – until colours, languages, custom, rule and fashion find a meeting ground."

"Then why do we fight? Throw away Life, mass great continents of men and struggle for opposing beliefs?"
Neither could provide an answer so Ian took his leave as decently as he could, although Saladin was now keen for him to Hay and hear the arguments put forward by the many wise men and philosophers who filled his court. Ian’s only regret was that he had had to speak for the Doctor and knew that his friend would eternally regret not meeting the great Sultan.'

I'm not saying that religious truth doesn't matter; on the contrary, I think it may matter more than anything, not least because what we believe dictates how we live, and I doubt there's a more important question out there than 'how should we live?', itself resting upon the deeper question of 'why are we here?' 

I'm merely saying that we're all in this together, and  the challenge of secularism is to be a meeting place where we can wrestle out this question in our lives. It should be an open space, where those of all faiths and none are free to live their lives in accord with their beliefs. It should be a space where the civil authorities seek neither to serve nor to suppress any religious -- or irreligious -- grouping. It should be about the separation of Church and State, but not about the separation of religion and politics, something which I believe to be neither reasonable nor pratical, neither desirable nor just.

But that's a discussion for another day.


* The others, of course, include, 'but how could a loving God have created a world like this?', 'why do you even think Jesus existed?', 'do you really believe the world was created in six days?', 'you don't really believe the Bible, do you?', 'do you think you can't be moral unless you believe in God?' and 'seriously?'

Watching Doctor Who after the Easter Vigil

I was talking yesterday about how Stephen Moffat's run on Doctor Who hasn't shirked the messianic themes of Russell T. Davies' era, and indeed has enhanced them, openly embracing an idea of 'Doctor as Christ'. Questions of faith -- not defined simply as blind belief, but as fidelity, loyalty, and faith in action -- ran through Moffat's whole first series. The final episode, taking its name from the scientific theory first formulated by perhaps the twentieth century's greatest priest-scientist, Georges Lemaître, featured a fine sequence which played on the idea of faith as 'the conviction of things not seen'.

Little Amelia Pond, in her altered universe, believes there should be stars in the almost empty night sky, and paints and draws them regularly.

'You know this is all just a story, don't you?' says a psychiatrist to her after looking at the sky by her side, 'You know there's no such thing as stars.'

Afterwards, Amy listens in on the conversation downstairs.

'I just don't want her growing up and joining one of those star cults,' says her aunt, 'I don't trust that Richard Dawkins.'

Work that one out if you can. Is this criticism of Richard Dawkins or is it praise? Is it right of his alter-ego to believe in stars, without their being any evidence of them? Does he think that they should be there, even if all the evidence points to the contrary? We don't know. All we know is that in a universe without stars, Richard Dawkins believes they're there. 

An Easter hero, revisited

I talked of Paschal imagery in last year's curtain-raiser; well, watching 'The Impossible Astronaut' on the morning of Easter Sunday in Glasgow, having attended the most beautiful, vibrant, and thoughtful of vigil masses the previous night, I was struck by how Moffat seemed to be developing those ideas. 

The episode begins with a image of men in what looks like late seventeenth-century garb, trying to enter a room where a painting of the Doctor has been in progress. No ordinary painting, though: instead an image of the Doctor as a heavenly king, standing in the clouds and being crowned by an angel...

It's not long before the action skips forward through the centuries to the present day where Amy and Rory receive a message, a summons from the Doctor. Off they set to the Valley of the Gods, with them arriving at their destination by bus -- a local bus, bearing the name of Utah's San Juan County, where the Valley of the Gods can be found. Yes, that's right. San Juan. Saint John. As in the fourth evangelist. Keep that in mind.

Joined by the Doctor and River, they decamp to a nearby diner, where the Doctor and River pore over their diaries, and River asks the Doctor, W'here are we? Have we done Easter Island yet?'
'Yes!' he exclaims after a thoughtful pause, 'I've got Easter Island.'
'They worshipped you there... have you seen the statues?'

And then, after gracing us with the idea of the Doctor as God, at a place defined by the Resurrection, they set off for a picnic by a lake. But it's no ordinary picnic. It is, by any definition, a last supper, as the Doctor has summoned his friends to dine with him one last time before he goes to face his death.

That it should be by a lake seems reminiscent of Jesus' post-Resurrection meal with the Apostles by the Sea of Galilee...

... but far more important, surely, than the location of this meal is what its central element seems to be. Wine. Red wine, presumably poured by the Doctor given that he's got the bottle. The Paschal significance of this hardly needs spelling out.

'Human beings,' smiles the Doctor. 'I thought I'd never get done saving you.'

A mysterious figure appears from the lake and the Doctor approaches it, telling his friends not to follow: 'You all need to stay back. Whatever happens now, you do not interfere. Clear?' Parallels to Jesus' instructions to his followers at Gethsemane should be very obvious at this point.

And then, having told his friends to stay back, the Doctor goes to his death, dropping his head and dying with arms outstretched as though nailed to a cross.

He collapses onto the ground, dead, and his friends gather around him. Here the iconography becomes particularly clear, with River leaning over his body, clad in blue and white, a Marian figure in a Pieta. Amy next to her is a redhead and clad in red too; as the previous year, she is Mary Magdalene. And Rory? He must, I suppose, be the beloved disciple; hardly surprising, really, given how he's basically defined by his steadfast love and loyalty. And then up turns Canton Everett Delaware III to confirm that there's definitely been no fraud and to help them dispose of the body. This old man is clearly standing in for Joseph of Arimathea.

It's important to destroy the body, for what it's worth, because as River says, 'A Timelord's body is a miracle. Even a dead one. There are whole empires out there that'd rip this world apart for just one cell.' And why shouldn't a dead body be as miraculous as a live one? Elisha's bones could raise the dead, if we can believe the Old Testament...

Note that it's River, clad in the colours of Mary, who expresses complete fidelity to the Doctor. 'We're his friends,' she says. 'We do what the Doctor's friends always do. As we're told.' Her faith is absolute. Remember what I said yesterday about early Christians seeing the Incarnation as a recasting of the Fall? Well, just as Eve's role in the Fall was defined by her disobedience, well, so Mary's role in our salvation is defined by her obedience. 'Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word,' she said, and thus the Word became flesh. 

Afterwards they return  to the diner, the same place they'd met before the Doctor's death. It's the Cenacle, in effect, the upper room, but -- unlike earlier -- this time it's not a place of comfort and friendship. It's a place of disbelief, of confusion, of a complete lack of understanding of what has just happened.

And then, all of sudden, he's among them, and they're looking at him in horror, as though they're looking at a ghost. 

He's okay, he assures them, he's the King of Okay, but they're still baffled, and then, in complete confusion, Rory stretches out his finger...

Doubting Thomas. It could hardly be more explicit, could it?