Oh, the Devil will make work for idle hands to do…

Allow me to introduce you to Theo Hobson, an occasional contributor to the pigsty that is Comment Is Free. Theo announced in a post a couple of days ago, without a trace of irony, that he “believes in Satan”. How quaint.

I’ve never really understood the whole Satan thing. I suppose if you must believe in the existence of fictional characters then he’s as worthwhile as any other (up there with Zeus, Thor and, I don’t know, Champion The Wonder Horse). But how do Christians reconcile the existence of Satan with their belief in an omniscient, omnipotent God? The very existence of Satan contradicts the concept of an ‘almighty’ doesn’t it?

The medieval philosopher St .Anselm set out to prove the existence of God with his ontological argument. It’s rubbish: a question of semantics rather than anything demonstrative. Basically speaking, he posited that if you can conceive of (i.e. agree to the theoretical existence, but not the actual) some being “than which nothing greater can be conceived” and accept that such a being would be ‘God’, then nothing can be imagined that is greater than God. But if God does not exist, then you can imagine something that is greater than God – namely, a God that does exist. Ergo, God exists. Like I said: a rubbish argument. Couldn’t we perform the same mental exercise with anything? Sausage rolls, teapots, leopards, rocking chairs…

I wonder if Mr Hobson followed this reductio ad absurdum to come to the same conclusion about Satan? “I am capable of conceiving a being (or a beast!) so vile, so vicious, so dripping in pure undiluted evil. What could possibly be worse than that? Why, such a thing that exhibits all the same qualities but really does exist. Therefore, Satan is real! Eeek! Lock up your chickens! Hide the Black Sabbath albums!”

To quote from the article:

Christian faith, in my experience, is all about engaging with Satan, arguing with him, and, above all, trusting that God has defeated him, crushed him. Faith is knowing that, thanks to Jesus Christ, Satan is finished. He might be strong in the short term, but in reality, he is a spent force. Through faith, one can defy him. 

Erm. So Christian faith is about engaging with somebody that has already been destroyed by the power of your faith? That can’t be easy. If Satan has been defeated and crushed, what is there to engage with? If, thanks to Jesus, Satan is finished, who are you arguing with? And if your faith is so very powerful, why did Satan ever exist in the first place? For Hobson, belief in evil is intrinsically linked to a belief in Satan – the personification of evil. Again, an argument without legs. I believe in the existence of ‘sleep’ – that crusty build up that forms in your eyes overnight. Am I therefore compelled to believe that the Sandman put it there? What a truckload of gibberish.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

Hot Jiminy! Two weeks without a post! Empires have risen and fallen in less time. Some have even fallen then risen again. While others still have risen, fallen, risen a bit then fallen again before finally rising back to their former glory. It’s a long time. Fourteen days. A fortnight. Half a lunar month (give or take). A goddamm eternity in blogging terms.

It used to be customary on this blog to fill the vacuum created by a lengthy absence with a catch-up post, consisting of bullet points on various events that have occurred in the interim. Here then, in recognition of said custom, are some of the news nuggets of late, plus whatever else happens to be on my mind today.

• Firstly, happy new year to you all. As you may be aware, I do not recognise January and February as components of the calendar. Instead, after December 31st, we descend into a two month period of ghastliness known as ‘Helluary’. This period has finally passed. We are now in March, the days are getting longer and the year can finally begin. Rejoice.
• The official population of London is approximately seven and a half million people. Am I the only one convinced that it must have risen to ten million in the last year with an extra 2.5 million brought in to try and thrust free newspapers into my hand? You can’t walk more than about two metres in this city without someone shouting “London Lite!” or “London Paper!” into your ear. Here’s an experiment: walk out onto any street in central London with a brick in your hand. Close your eyes, spin around for thirty seconds to lose all sense of direction, then chuck the brick anywhere you choose. I guarantee it will hit somebody handing out a free paper. They’re everywhere! I often find myself taking one of the damn things just to roll it up and use it as a baton to keep the others at bay. Walking to Cannon Street station after work is like doing a news vendor slalom. Fuck off!
• In breaking news today, Mohammed Al Fayed has been successful in his efforts to have the inquest into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed be presented to a jury. If this is what it takes to put this whole tedious saga to bed once and for all, then let’s have it. But what a waste of taxpayer’s money and court time. And why, when the man is convinced that it was all a conspiracy by the ‘Establishment’, does he think that putting the case through one of the machines of said ‘Establishment’ is going to produce an outcome more to his satisfaction? Surely the jury would be handpicked by Prince Phillip and made up of agents from MI5, MI6, Mossad, CIA, The Elders of Zion, CI5, ITV, MTV plus perhaps Agent Smith from The Matrix? Deluded fantasist.
• Speaking of deluded fantasists, did anyone else read these pieces by George Monbiot on Comment is Free taking on the pea brained, conspiracy peddling fuckwits who refuse to accept the actual version of events concerning 9/11? I don’t usually much care for Monbiot’s opinion pieces, but on this subject he is so obviously correct it’s barely worth listing the arguments. If you want to depress yourself, read through some of the comments. Whilst there are plenty of sane people amongst them, the number of commenters who actually believe all, some or even any of the ludicrous accusations is genuinely alarming. I’d put 9/11 conspiracy theorists in the same category as creationists who deny evolutionary theory: daydreamers who think that wheeling out a couple of contrarian ‘experts’ lends some validity to their specious and deluded fantasies. My favourites are the ones who list dozens and dozens of ‘sources’, as if the sheer volume of their reference points makes their case more convincing. Kind of like living in a palace made of poo, then adding a new poo tower and thinking that it makes the place more habitable when, in fact, it’s just adding to the sheer amount of poo that you’ve constructed.
• Speaking of poo and Comment Is Free, our old friend George Galloway is currently generating the most comments with this piece about how everyone’s being so nasty to his good friend Hugo Chávez, the ‘president’ of Venezuela. The biggest section in Galloway’s address book must be under the heading of ‘Despots, Tyrants and Ideologues’. Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Bashar al-Assad, Chávez: do you think the day will ever come when George prostrates himself before a national leader who was, I don’t know, actually democratically elected? Neither do I. A plague on his house.

That is all.

A boycott worth boycotting

(Most of this post originally appeared as a comment at PP’s blog, but I liked it too much to just let it linger in comments limbo, so I’ve stretched it out as a post in its own right. I am not treating the subject very seriously at all, instead taking it off on a surreal tangent. If you want to see an intelligent response to the issue, read the whole of PP’s piece.)

John Berger (a writer of some repute, apparently – at least, that’s what it says on his profile), has written an article on Comment Is Free, calling for a global cultural boycott of the Israeli state due to the ‘illegal occupation of the Palestine territories of the West Bank and Gaza’. So far, so Comment Is Free. It’s the sort of thing you’d be surprised not to see written on the site.

Anyway, he rambles on and on about who should be joining the boycott, and why, and how. But the most bizarre passage has to be this:

How to apply a boycott? For academics it’s perhaps a little clearer – a question of declining invitations from state institutions and explaining why. For invited actors, musicians, jugglers or poets it can be more complicated. I’m convinced, in any case, that its application should not be systematised; it has to come from a personal choice based on a personal assessment. 

Yeah, sounds great John. But, err, sorry, can we back up there for just a minute? Jugglers???? Is there a cultural exchange programme for jugglers going on that I wasn’t aware of? I’m trying to understand why there would be much demand for jugglers being invited to Israel at all. But the idea of jugglers being invited, but declining for political reasons has flipped my Surreal-O-Meter into hyper mode. I can just picture it…

We proudly present JAZ: Jugglers Against Zionism. A two hour juggling extravaganza highlighting the plight of the Palestinians crushed under the military and ideological weight of Israeli occupation. From the people that brought you Sword Swallowers Against Israeli Aggression and the award winning Fire Breathers For Palestinian Freedom. 

“Unquestionably the finest political juggling act I have ever seen.” – John Pilger

“The way these jugglers captured the plight of the Palestinian people by throwing three squishy balls up in the air brought a tear to my eye.” – Robert Fisk

“Bush and Blair should be forced to watch this brave juggling performance. At gun point.” – George Galloway

COMING IN 2007: Midget Pyramids on Motorcycles will push Israel back to its pre-1967 borders. Book your tickets now!

If at first you don’t succeed, Trident again

I agree with the decision to renew Britain’s nuclear deterrent. I don’t know enough about nuclear warheads to make a convincing case for Trident itself - there seems to be a school of thought that the programme is out of date, expensive to maintain and unsuited to post-Cold War military strategy, and that land or ship-based cruise missiles would be better than a roving submarine fleet – but it seems particularly reckless to make the decision here and now that, come 2024, it will suit us to not be a nuclear power. I agree that it is an expensive decision (£20,000,000,000 isn’t exactly loose change), but it’s an insurance policy, plain and simple. Insurance policies are by nature expensive, but not in comparison to the cost of a worst case scenario becoming reality. Reducing the number of warheads by 20% and dropping from four to three submarines strikes me as being eminently sensible, and does not appear to be a breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (for those that care about such things).

“Oh, but it makes the world a more dangerous place!” shriek some. Bollocks. Nuclear weapons have kept the world free from major wars for sixty years. Live with it. What does makes the world a more dangerous place is unhinged totalitarian or theocratic states with access to a nuclear stockpile of their own (North Korea and, perhaps inevitably, Iran, whose deranged ‘president’ has expressed the desire to ‘wipe Israel from the map’ on a number of occasions). This is also, by default, the most convincing argument for us remaining a nuclear power ourselves. As somebody sensible wrote on a post on Comment Is Free yesterday (a rarity indeed, although I cannot find the link to it now): “Let me get this straight: you’re quite happy to live in a world where North Korea and Iran have nuclear weapons, but we don’t?” Exactly.

In fact, it was reading some of the ramblings on that very site that further entrenched my position on this subject – I instinctively needed to be on the opposite side of the argument to these people.

Here are two examples, so typical of the vast majority of comments one reads here every day (from this post):

 

Imagine if, instead of being motivated by fear, Blair was motivated by hope, and led Britian (sic) to become the first power ever to voluntarily give up nuclear weapons, thus setting an example for the world.

Imagine the boost that would give to non-proliferation. Imagine the energy and the hope from that example and the spread of the realisation that the abandonment of nuclear weapons IS possible.

 

Yes. And imagine if we lived in a world made of marshmallows where nobody ever got hurt and all our dreams came true the moment we thought of them and everyone had a lovely fwuffy bunny wabbit to play with all day. I mean, just imagine.

 

When analysing Tony Blair’s motivations for an action it is always helpful to ask “How does this help the United States?” since Blair’s primary desire in international politics is to strengthen US military and economic power (and concordantly weaken its rivals) whether because he simply has a messianic belief in US manifest destiny or because he is a US intelligence asset.

“A messianic belief in US manifest destiny”? Oh, for fuck’s sake. And heaven forbid that any action the UK decides upon should be in any way beneficial to or convenient for the United States! That marauding, imperialist, despotic nation! I mean, why would we want to be partnered with them, when there are so many other like-minded countries we can work with?

It’s official. Reading the thoughts of Guardian readers made me a committed advocate of nuclear weapons. If the majority of people there are against them, then it must be a good idea.

Comment Is Free – über blog

I don’t think this is even officially live yet (I picked it up via Andrew Sullivan), but The Guardian have launched Comment Is Free, a new blog-based comment and analysis section of their website. It’s being described as a British Huffington Post and will eventually feature up to 200 different writers. Looks quite interesting, but I hope the range of contributors and content are a bit more varied than they are in the paper itself. Still, it’s good to see a major mainstream media outlet taking blogging seriously rather than contemptuously dismissing the phenomenon, as is so often the case.

UPDATE 1.19pm Then again, look who’s listed as a contributor. Jesus wept.