A beautiful morning in Ashgabat

Dishes, dishes everywhere...

And this is how the Ashgabaters get their television programs - satellite dishes. Everyone seems to have at least one. Some have two or more of these monsters. One of the pics captured the moment of a dish being either removed or stolen - who knows? It is a very easy target for the homeless and the drug addicts - the dish capsule can fetch about 2 dollars on the street.

Ashgabat

Ashgabat in a very dense fog. The memorial area dedicated to Saparmurat Turkmenbashi (the Father/Leader of all the Turkmens) and the book Ruhnama (now in two volumes) he wrote to spur the spiritual development of the nation. It is now a mandatory subject in every school and college, as well as a must-have item in every company or household. It has been translated into all major world languages by the companies who wanted to win construction or trade deals from Saparmurat.
As you can see, the monument to Saparmurat has a Nestle ice-cream vending booth, and the inscription on the memorial stone at the Ruhnama park claims that the construction was "complited in february 2003" (sic!)



Photos by Valera Meylis

A view from my mom's apartment

The other side of these mountains out there would be Iran (about 20 miles south). The building below (surprise, surprise) is the Iranian Embassy, which used to be the Regional Communist Party Committee. Times they are a-changing.

An Istanbul Cafe

A glimpse through the window...

Topkapı

Topkapı (stress on the last syllable which is more of a long "pit" sound than a Pee one - notice the dotless i at the end of the name) - a place where one can see a bucket of emeralds each bigger than a chicken egg, the personal remains (hair, nail, sword, letter etc.) of the Prophet of Allah, dresses and thrones, jewels and teapots of the Ottoman Empire.

Photos by Valera Meylis

Blue Mosque (Sultan Ahmed)

A (supposedly) rival building constructed by Sultan Ahmed I.

for more information see this Wikipedia article

Hagia Sophia

Inside the marvel of architecture Hagia Sophia (pronounced Ahya sOfiya). The most surprising things is that most of the building, some of the icons and the mosaics have survived, proving in a way that re-branding is all we need, tolerance or not. Jerusalem is another example of such successful re-branding, the city that everyone claims to be their own... New York, the old New Amsterdam, may become such New Jerusalem...

for more information see this Wikipedia article

Istanbul

On my way to Istanbul

Somewhere in Europe...

An Image by Bertoux

Photo by Quentin Bertoux

A new Caravaggio painting

British royal family announced it has discovered a Caravaggio painting it possessed for the last 400 years.

Sauternes: Sweet Rot

Take a closer look at the sweet rot from which Sauternes is made - that is where the sweetness comes from.

TLS: Freelance

by Michael Greenberg

Lately I've become self-conscious about the books crammed into my apartment.
Many are simply ones I didn't like enough to give away. I have Celine's novel North, for instance, but not Death on the Instalment Plan or Journey to the End of the Night. Other books I've hung on to because I haven't read them yet, but do I really intend to crack Iris Murdoch's A Message to the Planet? If one's personal library is a self-portrait, then mine is distinguished by what isn't there, like the neighbourhood library of my childhood whose shelves, due to censorship and theft, were half empty. Filled with down-at-heel types trying to cop a nap, the message coming from the Rockaway branch of the New York Public Library was that reading is a waste of time, an occupation for the powerless and unemployed.
Part of the librarian's job was to shake them awake. "If you don't read, I'm afraid you'll have to leave." At which the poor slacker would open some enormous encyclopedia and stare miserably at the page. Encyclopedias captured my attention as well, because they encouraged one to ingest information like a tourist. In his recent book The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel points out that, taken to an extreme, they present an impossible notion of order. China's Great Illustrated Imperial Encyclopedia of Past and Present Times, published in 1726, is divided into more than 10,000 sections. "The section on Human Relations lists the biographies of people according to their position in society, including slaves, sages, playboys, tyrants, supernatural beings, great drinkers, notable archers and widows who did not marry again."
Intrigued by the story of Manguel's library, I telephoned him at his house in the small town of Mondion, western France. He speaks a careful, soothing, mysteriously accented English, learned, he tells me, from a governess in Tel Aviv where the family lived while his father was Argentina's ambassador to Israel. "When I was seven, we returned to Buenos Aires, and I picked up Spanish at school." I imagined him, aged sixteen, reading Kipling to Jorge Luis Borges in Borges's modest sitting room "behind a curtained doorway" in his apartment.
Borges had plucked Manguel from a bookstore he frequented where Manguel worked as a clerk. "He asked me if I was busy in the evenings because he needed -he said this very apologetically -someone to read to him, since his mother now tired easily." Manguel soon realized he was one of many who fulfilled this service. "Borges used people as his notepads, which was fine with me. He wasn't one to encourage intimacy. Do you remember the story in which he describes 'one of those English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and end with no need for conversation'?"
Borges's interactive life as a reader, his vision of "paradise in the shape of a library", and of the universe itself as a single infinite text, chimed with Manguel's earliest sensations with his books. "Experience came to me first through books", he writes in A History of Reading. "When later in life, I came across a circumstance similar to one I had read about, it usually had the slightly disappointing feeling of deja vu." He couldn't bear to throw away any of his books, "not even the bad ones", and after fifty years his library swelled to more than 30,000 volumes. To house them, he rebuilt the crumbling fifteenth-century barn on his property in Mondion. But how to impose order on this reflection of himself? "Organizing my books was like writing an autobiography", he says, an anxiety compensated, perhaps, by the satisfaction of putting things in their proper place. This too comes with a dose of ambivalence: unpacking his books, Walter Benjamin regretted "the mild boredom of order" that would be forced on them once they were on their shelves.
For Manguel, order begets its own chaos; no category is final or self enclosed.
"Among the subject headings in the Library of Congress are banana research, boots and shoes in art, chickens in folklore . . . . It's as if the contents of the books have taken a back seat to the library's invention of thematic anthologies."
Ultimately, he decided to organize his books by language, then immediately set out to "restore chaos", filing them according to his private understanding of the world. "Why stash the works of Saint Augustine in the Christianity section rather than under Literature in Latin or Early Medieval Civilizations? Why place Carlyle's French Revolution in Literature in English rather than in European History, and not Simon Schama's Citizens?"
A few days after our telephone conversation, I met Manguel in the Trustees room at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, with its Beaux-Arts fireplace, golden Flemish tapestries and blooming chandelier. Paul Holdengraber, who presides over what has become the most engrossing series of literary events in New York, "Live at the NYPL", had invited him to take part in one of his conversations. "We come into the world as readers", Manguel said, "with the impulse to decipher, to find narratives.
Stupidity is something that has to be learned." He is perfectly groomed, bespectacled and bearded, with a faintly nostalgic air. Comparing the Library of Alexandria to the World Wide Web, he says, "one aspired to include everything, the other will include anything, without context, a constant present, which for Medieval scholars was a definition of hell". For readers, he pointed out, the computer is a technological step backwards, since it replaces the codex with the scroll. "The time has come to refuse to buy from book chains or giant online outlets." Later, Holdengraber tells me that to have copies of Manguel's book on hand for signing, he had to shop at Amazon Canada, since The Library at Night has not yet found a US publisher.
Afterwards, Manguel and I exchanged memories of Borges, whom I met briefly while living in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. "His personal library was quite small", Manguel said. "He kept none of his own books. My passion for collecting amused him." Manguel invited me to come to France to see his magnificent barn library for myself. "Come when the weather's mild. We'll sit outside in the garden. The books have a way of making visitors go silent."

Mental Floss

So you think you know GEOGRAPHY pretty well? Then take the Challenge!

Glorious Pittsburgh

Here are some of the pictures I took while in Pittsburgh, PA.

Paul Mauriat is dead

the saddest ironic part of this Russian announcement is that it confuses Paul Mauriat with Nino Rota :)

МОСКВА, 4 ноя - РИА Новости. Всемирно известный французский композитор и аранжировщик Поль Мориа, автор бессмертной музыки к фильму "Крестный отец" и других музыкальных шедевров, скончался в пятницу во Франции в возрасте 81 года, сообщают французские СМИ.
Поль Мориа родился 4 марта 1925 году в Марселе в семье музыкантов. Уже в возрасте четырех лет он начал играть на пианино. В 17 лет юный талант создал свой собственный джаз-оркестр, у которого сразу же проявился характерный для Мориа стиль. Вскоре от джаза композитор перешел к эстрадной музыке, аранжирует популярные мелодии, пишет собственные композиции.
В 1967 году Поль Мориа впервые приезжает в СССР как аккомпаниатор Мирей Матье. Именно с этой певицей он записал лучшие свои пластинки. 1968 год стал поворотным годом в судьбе композитора. Записанная им пластинка "L'amour est bleu" расходится по всему миру тиражом более шести миллионов экземпляров. Она становится "золотой" в США, Австрии, Канаде, Аргентине, Мексике, Японии, Бразилии. Во Франции за эту запись композитор получает Большую премию диска.

Putin

A modern Diet

Ne pas avaler = Do Not Swallow = Не глотать(from Le Monde)

Polyamory

by Michael Greenberg

An acquaintance called Barbara Foster phones to invite me to the monthly meeting of her "polyamory group" in Greenwich Village. "We believe in multiple love relationships", she explains. "An extended family where everything's above board - you're fully aware of your partner's lovers, and he knows all about yours. No cheating, no broken trust, which, as you know, is what causes love to crumble."
I pull The Kreutzer Sonata from my shelf, Tolstoy's diatribe against sex, to read on the subway ride downtown. The narrator Pozdnyshev mocks the notion that "spiritual affinity" is the basis of marriage. "Is it because of unity of ideals that people go to bed together?", he asks sarcastically. He can't bear the fact that, duped by sexual attraction, he convinced himself he had fallen in love. When attraction ends, contempt takes over, lasting until the couple's last miserable breath. Yet we "go to the grave believing we have lived perfectly normal and happy lives!", cries Pozdnyshev. To protect the "purity" of ideal love, Pozdnyshev proposes chastity in marriage.
The meeting is to take place at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, a former elementary school on West 13th Street, filled with concealed staircases and unexpected wings. "We're just renting space here", a polyamorist hastens to inform me. "For the most part, they're completely confused about who we are." About forty people have gathered in a room tucked away in a remote corner of the third floor. An air-conditioner rattles loudly.
Strips of black duct tape keep the carpet from coming apart. Our chairs are arranged in a circle, like in nursery school.
I find Barbara, who hands me a book she co-wrote, entitled Three in Love:
Menages a trois from ancient to modern times. The other authors are her husband and the third member of their menage. "I lived it", she says with disarming intensity.
Among the threesomes she profiles are Joseph and Magda Goebbels and Lida Baarova; Charles Parnell and Kitty and Willy O'Shea; Jack Kerouac and Neal and Carolyn Cassady; and Superman, Clark Kent and Lois Lane.
It occurs to me that the characters in The Kreutzer Sonata also make up a menage a trois.When Pozdnyshev beholds his wife playing duets with his rival, he is captivated by "her fascinating, abhorrent face . . . her perfectly melting mood, her tenderly pathetic and blissful smile". Pozdnyshev is excited by the music as well. "In consequence of my jealousy, there passed between them a kind of electric current." To deny his rival the satisfaction of knowing how threatened he feels, Pozdnyshev invites him to come and play again with his wife. "I was aware that I could not control that body of hers." Out of his mind with jealousy, he murders her with a curved Damascus dagger.
At 8 o'clock sharp, the featured speaker bursts into the room. She is Nan Wise, Certified Relationship and Alternative Lovestyles Specialist, and Happiness Coach.
Tall, voluptuous, with long coppery hair, she looks as if she has stepped out of the pages of a Robert Crumb cartoon. To complete the picture, she has brought along her lover, or her "secondary relationship", as the polyamorists would call him. Her husband couldn't make it but, she assures us, "he's poly, too".
"Languaging is of critical importance", Nan says. We are immediately bombarded with made-up words, apparently meant to lend a sociological aura to the movement. A heavy-set man wants to know how to present his poly- amorous desire to his monogamous girlfriend. "The dreaded poly/mono dilemma!", Nan cries. "To lead this life successfully, you need advanced skill-sets. They can be learned.
But they require commitment. Sacrifice, in some cases. Maturity. Work."
The couple sitting next to me clutch each other's hands, like nervous passengers on a plane.
The polyamorist's ultimate goal is to reach the state of "compersion", where jealousy is transcended and "one finds pleasure in the pleasure of his lover with another" -a variation, perhaps, of Pozdnyshev's ideal love. The ability to negotiate is paramount.
"Advance-skill polys can cut a relationship deal in three to five minutes", Nan says. The guidelines are simple: "win/win or no deal".
Someone complains about the word "compromise", with its "negative connotations of giving something up". All agree that "collaborate" should replace it as the favoured term. A man reports that, after they went poly, his wife of twenty years left him. He seems morose and stung, but sympathy for his plight is measured. He has failed to reach compersion. However, more bruised feelings from members of the audience come to light. A young woman worries about maintaining primary status with her main lover. "I don't want to be demoted to number two or three." Another complains of being stuck at a low rung on the ladder. "I feel like a mistress. I mean, what the hell am I doing this for?" Maybe a change of language would ease her discomfort. "'Primary' could be 'principal', and the rest could be called 'satellites'", suggests a man. "It's less hierarchal."
Wise's secondary pipes up with advice of his own: "Life is fluid and love even more so. Today's secondary may move to the top, while the primary may be struck off the list entirely". He glances at Nan, who ignores him. As the meeting breaks up, a "cuddle party" is announced for next week -"for people who want more touch in their lives without it leading to sex or rejection".
An outspoken member of the group, Birgitte, invites a few friends to her apartment across the street, and she allows me to tag along. As she unlocks the door, two eager identical miniature dogs greet her, and Birgitte, large-bodied and with a queenly demeanour, scoops them up in her arms.
The apartment is stacked with her Michel Basquiat-inspired paintings. Each canvas has its title scrawled across the top. "She was his flavor of the month", reads one. "He fucked her brains out", goes another. In her day job, Birgitte works as a make-up artist. "I did Condoleezza Rice for a television appearance", she tells me. Propped against the wall I spot a large canvas, called "He's her twin". A woman and a man are holding hands. Each has a real dagger sticking out of his large, papier mache heart.

More on God and Dawkins

Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching
Terry Eagleton
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins · Bantam, 406 pp, £20.00

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.
Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature. There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle to the grossest prejudice. For a lot of academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the writings of Marx; for militant rationalists it is religion.
What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.
A molehill of instances out of a mountain of them will have to suffice. Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins’s own critique of science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?) Reason, to be sure, doesn’t go all the way down for believers, but it doesn’t for most sensitive, civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself.
Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.
Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.
Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of human beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.
Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins’s God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge. Dawkins’s Supreme Being is the God of those who seek to avert divine wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in their diet and being impeccably well behaved. They cannot accept the scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. This is one reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed. Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and obnoxious. It’s a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered Jesus.
Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don’t look eagerly forward to death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human life deeply, which is why the martyr differs from the suicide. The suicide abandons life because it has become worthless; the martyr surrenders his or her most precious possession for the ultimate well-being of others. This act of self-giving is generally known as sacrifice, a word that has unjustly accrued all sorts of politically incorrect implications. Jesus, Dawkins speculates, might have desired his own betrayal and death, a case the New Testament writers deliberately seek to rebuff by including the Gethsemane scene, in which Jesus is clearly panicking at the prospect of his impending execution. They also put words into his mouth when he is on the cross to make much the same point. Jesus did not die because he was mad or masochistic, but because the Roman state and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation. Several of Jesus’ close comrades were probably Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground movement. Judas’ surname suggests that he may have been one of them, which makes his treachery rather more intelligible: perhaps he sold out his leader in bitter disenchantment, recognising that he was not, after all, the Messiah. Messiahs are not born in poverty; they do not spurn weapons of destruction; and they tend to ride into the national capital in bullet-proof limousines with police outriders, not on a donkey.
Jesus, who pace Dawkins did indeed ‘derive his ethics from the Scriptures’ (he was a devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new set-up), was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ‘religious’ affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic prohibition on meat on Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)
Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.
The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough.
The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people. It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’, was rather more judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.
Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism.
Some currents of the liberalism that Dawkins espouses have nowadays degenerated into a rather nasty brand of neo-liberalism, but in my view this is no reason not to champion liberalism. In some obscure way, Dawkins manages to imply that the Bishop of Oxford is responsible for Osama bin Laden. His polemic would come rather more convincingly from a man who was a little less arrogantly triumphalistic about science (there are a mere one or two gestures in the book to its fallibility), and who could refrain from writing sentences like ‘this objection [to a particular scientific view] can be answered by the suggestion . . . that there are many universes,’ as though a suggestion constituted a scientific rebuttal. On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.
Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the time, betrays just how little he knows about it. He also thinks rather strangely that the terms Loyalist and Nationalist are ‘euphemisms’ for Protestant and Catholic, and clearly doesn’t know the difference between a Loyalist and a Unionist or a Nationalist and a Republican. He also holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics.
These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford. (I should point out that I use the term North Oxford in an ideological rather than geographical sense. Dawkins may be relieved to know that I don’t actually know where he lives.)
There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it’s all down to religion.
It thus comes as no surprise that Dawkins turns out to be an old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to global politics, believing in a zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever increasing progress, with just the occasional ‘reversal’. ‘The whole wave,’ he rhapsodises in the finest Whiggish manner, ‘keeps moving.’ There are, he generously concedes, ‘local and temporary setbacks’ like the present US government – as though that regime were an electoral aberration, rather than the harbinger of a drastic transformation of the world order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we can foresee. Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish way, that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue.’ So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up.
Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals. As far as such outrages go, however, The God Delusion does a very fine job indeed. The two most deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld’s emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.

Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester University. His latest book is How to Read a Poem.

Poem of the Day

Reticent Sonnet
by Anne Carson

A pronoun is a kind of withdrawal from naming.
Because naming is heavy, naming may be slightly shaming.
We live much more lightly than this,
we address ourselves allusively in our minds -
as "..." or "we" or "one" -part of a system
that argues with shadow, like Venetian blinds.
Speaking of Venice, called "the Shakespeare of cities" by a friend of mine,
reminds me how often the Sonnets misprint "their" for "thine":
beware the fog in Venice.

Beware those footsteps that stop in a hush.
I used to think I would grow up to be a person whose reasoning was deep,
instead I became a kind of brush.
I brush words against words. So do we follow ourselves out of youth.
brushing, brushing, brushing wild grapes onto truth.

Lion from Lyons. No, Really...

One day I will eat you all. Slowly.

An Image by Bertoux

Les Deux Mondes vu par Quentin Bertoux