Religion and me

In my series of posts of interest to members of the Australian Skeptics, I intend to include some issues pertaining to religion. To pave the way for whatever I decide to post on that subject, I think I should summarise the role that religion has played in my own life. This is not a biography; it’s just enough of a summary to give readers an idea of where I’m coming from.

I was raised in a Christian family and a Christian community. Mainstream ones, not at all fundamentalist. However, as a child I converted to atheism. My parents insisted that I still had to go to church, and I remember that sometimes during a sermon I would read the Bible critically, looking for the flaws.

Scepticism in reverse

Not long ago I posted about the results of playing Rocky Frisco’s music backwards, and suggested there could be a sequel. More recently I promised over the next few months to occasionally post articles of interest to the Australian Skeptics and likeminded people. This post fulfils both prophecies promises.

Whenever intelligible phrases are discernable in speech or music that’s played backwards, we know that those phrases must have been put there by the Devil and have supernatural significance. We also know that the Australian Skeptics are indisputably a Satanic bunch if ever there was one. Reflecting upon these facts, I wondered what we might find if we took audio material published by the Australian Skeptics and played it backwards.

Rocky’s demon

One way to get ideas for things to blog about is to clean out old emails and newsgroup posts. I’ve recently cleaned out some stuff from about a year ago, including my contributions to a discussion on alt.fan.pratchett about Rocky Frisco’s music.

Pythonised computer

The sound effects allocated for system events on my Windows XP computer are Monty Python quotations, sourced from the .wav files included in Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time. Here are a few examples.

Start Windows. “Are you nervous?” (Spoken by John Cleese on a quizshow sketch from How To Irritate People.)

Exit Windows. “That was really horrible! / Oh, you’re always complaining.” (Spoken by Idle/Jones in Episode 29.)

System notification. “We interrupt this program to annoy you and make things generally irritating.” (Spoken by Eric Idle in Episode 30.)

Empty recycle bin. “Well, that’s quite enough of that!” (Spoken by Terry Jones in Episode 13.)

Personal limerick

Back in 2002, on alt.fan.pratchett, Diane L. composed limericks dedicated to various denizens of the newsgroup. I’ve reproduced mine below (with slight modifications for reasons of personal taste):

A dragon who’s partial to flesh
Will eat pedants as long as they’re fresh.
But if he’s well-fed
He can just keep his head
And be trusted in charge of a creche.

Rather good, don’t you think? I don’t care about the fact that “creche” doesn’t rhyme with “flesh”. It’s way too funny to lose.

Actually, people tell me that I’m quite good at interacting with children, and I’ve never eaten any of them. (Yet.)

Quoting from Nouwen

I have mentioned that Reaching Out by Henri Nouwen is one of my favourite books about spiritual things. Below is an assortment of quotations from it, however the essence of the book cannot be captured in a few short clips.

“I wanted to write this book because it is my growing conviction that my life belongs to others just as much as it belongs to myself and that what is experienced as most unique often proves to be most solidly embedded in the common condition of being human.“

“Does not all creativity ask for a certain encounter with our loneliness, and does not the fear of this encounter severely limit our possible self expression?“

Assorted quotations

These are just some assorted quotations which I happen to like, in most cases because of the point that they so succinctly make. (I got them all from the same book, but never mind that; it’s well out of print by now.)

“Marriage: A community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all two.“

– Ambrose Bierce

“I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish: God Almighty made ‘em to match the men.“

– Character of female novelist George Eliot

“The British have never been spiritually minded people, so they invented cricket to give them some notion of eternity.“

– Lord Mancroft

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”

– Winston Churchill (Attrib)

“A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses hours.“

– Milton Berle, US comedian

Kepler quotes

Here are a collection of quotations from Johannes Kepler, the founder of modern astronomy (people often say that Copernicus founded modern astronomy, but that’s wrong. Copernicus only changed a detail, whereas Kepler changed a whole paradigm. He was the first to say that the motions of planets are governed by principles we would recognise as physical forces, bound by physical, mathematical laws).

Kepler wrote in seventeenth century German; these English translations are all from The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler.

• “Having percieved the first glimmer of dawn eighteen months ago, the light of day three months ago, but only a few days ago the plain sun of a most wonderful vision - nothing shall now hold me back. Yes, I give myself up to holy raving. I mockingly defy all mortals with this open confession : I have robbed the golden vessels of the Egyptians to make out of them a tabernacle for my God, far from the frontiers of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice. If you are angry, I shall bear it. Behold, I have cast the dice, and I am writing a book either for my contemporaries, or for posterity. It is all the same to me. It may wait a hundred years for a reader, since God has also waited six thousand years for a witness.”

Quotations regarding Alfred

The topic of dead kings came up in afp recently, and I mentioned that my personal favourite king of Britain or any part thereof is Alfred the Great. This is largely on the strength of a couple of quotations from The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger (or rather, the cassette tape edition read by Derek Jacobi. I have not read the original printed book).

Alfred’s attitude to knowledge:

“His greatest inspiration had been to understand how knowledge liberates - that knowledge is power. ‘The saddest thing about any man is that he be ignorant’, he once said. ‘And the most exciting thing is that he knows.’“

Alfred’s laws against sexual harrassment:

“A man who fondled the breast of a free woman, uninvited, incurred a fine of five shillings, while throwing the woman down, though not actually violating her, cost ten shillings. Rape was six times more serious. The violation of a free woman demanded compensation of sixty shillings . . . payable, like all the other fines, directly to her.“

I am certainly not the first to post such things to a blog, but I decided to do so because it gives me a good excuse to begin a small series of posts on the theme of quotations. Another installment can be expected in under a week.