Truth and Prejudice, and Steven Runciman

I've read a lot of historians who have the best reputations, who've written over the course of the past 2,500 years, in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, French, German, English and some other languages, and the one who has impressed me the most, by far, is Steven Runciman, born 1903, died 2001. (The historians wrote in those languages. In the case of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and some other languages, I've read them in translation.) At the beginning of Chapter I of his first book, The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus & His Reign, published in 1929, Runciman lays out a lot of what his career is going to be about. He begins:

"In the battles between truth and prejudice, waged on the field of history books, it must be confessed that the latter usually wins."

So right away, he admits that he's fighting an uphill battle which he doesn't expect to win.

 

Also right at the beginning of his first book, he lays out the field of battle where he's going to struggle to put the facts across and defeat prejudice. It's a field my brother and I have often discussed recently: the image, in the West, of the Eastern Roman Empire (usually referred to in the West as Byzantium), after the Western Empire fell. Runciman describes how crude, warlike Westerners, the Crusaders, came into contact with Byzantium and found

 

"[...]a society where everyone read and wrote, ate food with forks and preferred diplomacy to war."

  

Runciman states flatly, here at the beginning of his first book, that up until shortly before his own time, prejudice had trounced truth even in the best history written in the West when it came to Byzantium. And then he spent a very long and brilliant career backing up this flat statement. Rather than admit that Byzantine society was more advanced in many ways than their own, Western historians made "byzantine" an adjective meaning decadent, flabby, lazy, cowardly, cunning, etc, etc. Runciman's mentor JB Bury (1861-1927), a pioneer in bucking this pervasive trend, went so far as to refuse to even use the term "Byzantium" to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire after the Western Empire had fallen. 

 

Bury, Runciman and some like-minded Western historians have made some headway in changing the attitudes of historians, and somewhat less, so far, in the consciousness of the general public. It's still quite common to encounter very well-educated Westerners who talk of the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476, who refer to the Catholic Church before the Reformation, and Catholicism plus Protestantism since then, as "the whole of Christendom," completely ignoring Greek Orthodoxy, not to mention the Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian and Nestorian churches who never acknowledged Catholic or orthodox supremacy.

It seems to me, now, simple enough to recognize that, for example, the Romans who were represented at Jerusalem by Pontius Pilate and a garrison of soldiers in the time of Christ did not go anywhere in AD 476, and to grasp why Christians who already had their own written languages were not inclined to accept either a Latin or a Greek spiritual overlordship. 

But did I see any of this before people like Runciman and Bury pointed it out to me? No, of course I didn't, any more than I saw how obviously Gothic cathedral towers, all built after the Crusades began, mimic Muslim minarets, before that was pointed out to me.

You have to see a truth first. Then it can become obvious. Not the other way around. Which usually means that someone else has to point it out to you. 

Prague and Germany

The nation of the Czechs reaches farthest to the West of any of the Slavs. Their capital, Prague, is quite close to several major German cities: 91.2 miles from Dresden according to Google Maps, a drive of 1 hour and 55 minutes. Leipzig is a 158 mile drive, Munich is 238 miles away, Berlin 217 miles, Vienna -- the usual capital of the Holy roman Empire since the 15th century -- 207 miles. Other major Slavic cities are considerably farther: Prague to Warsaw is 396 miles, Dubrovnik 794 miles, 556 miles, Kiev 881 miles. 

The Slavic regions between Western Europe and Russia have been ruled by foreign powers for much of their history. Prague has the distinction of having been the capital of a foreign empire, in the 14th century under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, and then again from 1576 to 1612 under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.

 

The Czechs were, and are, situated between Protestant and Catholic Germany: most of Germany north of Prague was, and is, majority Ptotestant. Most to the south was, and is, majority Catholic. From the time of Jan Hus onward -- he was burned at the stake for heresy in 1415 -- Protestantism among the Czechs tended to go with anegative view of the German Empire, and those Czechs who worked for the Empire tended to convert to Cathollicism. 

When the Prague defenestration is mentioned, most people think of the incident in 1618, but there have actually been three defenestrations in Prague, in 1419, 1483 and 1618. In German, the 1618 defenestration is called the Fensterstuerz, with the result that people actually know what is meant. Defenestration means being thrown out of a window. In all three Prague defenstrations, Protestants, followers of Hus, threw representatives of the Catholic Imperial occupation out of high windows, killing all of them in 1419 and 1483.

In 1618, surprisingly, the Emperor's representatives survived the 70-foot fall from a window in the Hradcany, the Prague Castle. However, the incident marked the beginning of the Thirty Year's War, in which millions died all over central Europe.

Prominent authors who lived in the Czech region and wrote in German range chronologically from Johannes von Tepl, who published der ackerman aus boehmen around 1400, to a remarkable amount of the very best German literature which was written in Prague in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by authors such as Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Rudolph Fuchs, Egon Erwin Kusch and many others.

The Nazis led up to their invasion of Poland and the beginning of WWII with a series of smaller-scales crimes including the occupation of Czechia in 1938 and 1939.

In 1989, Czechoslovakia opened its borders, and ten of thousands of East Germans per day went through Czechoslovakia into West Germany, one of the major factors which forced the end of East Germany and German reunification.

Dream Log: Lost on Sunday

I dreamed that I and some friends were in a car together, and we pulled into the parking lot of a Catholic church in an area somewhere on the border between suburban and rural. Mass was about to begin. The others went inside, and I decided to take a walk until Mass was over. 

There was a tall, steep hill near the church, and I climbed it. The hilltop was very broad and flat. Even though I was in church clothes, I felt like running. After I had been jogging along for a while, a man zoomed past me, wearing the Chariots of Fire running outfit: white T-shirt tucked into white shorts, white socks, black shoes. 

I took the difference between his speed and mine as a challenge, and sped up. He soon disappeared around a bend and I never saw him again, but I enjoyed running fast. For a while I was self-conscious because I was running in a dark red shirt under a dark red sweater, dark red corduroy pants, white socks and black shoes, but then I told myself to worry less about what people thought and enjoy myself.

I ran so far that when I stopped I didn't know where I was, and couldn't find my way back to the church where my friends were. The area had become much more urban. 

I walked through a plaza lined with Renaissance-style apartment buildings which, I felt sure, many connoisseurs would disparage as absurdly gaudy and over-the-top. But then I told myself that I didn't have to let some hypothetical snobs stop me from enjoying the view. 

And the dream went on like that for quite a while: I walked through many different architectural styles which I liked although, somehow, I was sure that there were many experts who would laugh at them, and over and over, I was able to overcome my self-consciousness and like what I like. None of it was Sylvester Stallone's sort of thing. I don't like architecture that's THAT gaudy. (And there's no reason that Sylvester Stallone should be upset about that.) One of the buildings was a mall which included a shop whose wares included some of those old books which are as tall and wide as a man, which often appear in my dreams, or, more likely, new replicas of those old books.

Dream Log: Among Irish Catholics

I have never yet, in waking life, been to Ireland. When I lived in Manhattan in the 1990's I knew many, many Irish-Americans. I felt very comfortable in and around some of Catholic church buildings on the island. Perhaps most of the others in and around those buildings were of Irish heritage, or perhaps I gravitated to the Irish for some reason.

How Irish is Manhattan? Well, in addition to Irish immigrants, people who had moved there from Ireland, I met some people, adults, who had been born in New York City and lived in the city all their lives, who still spoke with Irish accents.

Or maybe they only sounded that way to me. There is an upper class in the United States, most of whose members kindly shun the public eye so as not to shatter the illusions of those who believe that America has no upper class, some of whom speak in accents which sound English to Americans and American to English people.

Last night I dreamed I was in a large city which was almost all Irish Catholic. Dublin, perhaps. The city wasn't specified. It seemed to be the 1950's. But for all I know, some regions of Dublin might look, sound, smell and feel like the 1950's. On the other hand, it was just a dream.

I had pleasant, non-meaningful conversations with strangers on the crowded sidewalks. I like that part of Louis Armstrong's hit record "What a Wonderful World" where he sings, "I see friends shaking hands, saying 'how do you do?' They're really saying, 'I love you.'" That's pretty deep, I think.

In the dream there was no sign of COVID.

Some of the Irish Catholics surrounding me were self-righteous, rigid, dogmatic, judgmental and just thoroughly unpleasant. Others were wide-eyed, wild, alert, gentle, good humoured, generous, sensuous and loving. Most of us in the dream were somewhere in between. 

A storm was coming, and many of us moved into an enormous church building. Lightning lit up the stained-glass windows. Strong wind rattled them. Rain was coming down in torrents outside. I stood in a portico watching it, until there was no staying out there without getting wet. 

It was getting to be too crowded in the nave, so most of us moved down to the less formal basement. 

 

Some went into the kitchen and began to cook for the huge crowd. Some basement windows were crushed by the rain and water began to pour in. I joined some people who attempted to bail all of the water out, but it was quickly getting deeper. 

We managed at least to keep the kitchen relatively dry. I was drawn there by the smell of bread fresh from the oven. I picked up a loaf as big as a suitcase, with a golden-brown crust. I tore off a corner. Inside it was white, and fluffy, and tasted as good as bread rarely tastes. 

I walked around the basement handing out pieces of bread to wet people. One girl who looked and acted angelic complained, although with a sweet smile and utterly without malice, that I had only given her a little, so I tore off an enormous piece for her. 

The bailers had become channelers and had managed to dry out parts of the basement. People who looked most vulnerable were bundled up in blankets and sent upstairs.

Then suddenly the storm was over, and I was in a restaurant, still in the same city, just a few minutes' walk from that large church building, where a young woman was directing a scene from a movie. Now the movie equipment and people's clothes and other things made it clear that it was the present day. I was one of the actors. In the scene, a young couple, a fair-skinned blue-eyed blonde-haired woman and a dark-skinned black man, were being harassed by racist thugs, until the other people in the restaurant banded together to protect the couple. I was playing one of the restaurant patrons who stopped the thugs. My character had several lines, and was supposed to be Irish. I was very unsure of my character's accent. The director said my accent was just fine, nothing to worry about. I was unconvinced, but she was the director, which meant that it was her call, and that if she said something was okay, it was part of my job description to stop bothering her about it. I thought to myself, maybe they'll just edit my voice out of it. 

After the scene was finished, the fair-skinned blue-eyed blonde-haired woman burst into tears, and said -- in an American accent which caught me by surprise, because her character was Irish and her accent had fooled me into assuming she was Irish as well -- that the scene stirred up a lot of emotions for her because she had experienced similar harassment in real life. Several of us shared frightening experiences we had had while in interracial relationships. We expressed the hope that the movie we were making might help in some way. I thought again about that Louis Armstrong song, and it felt to me that what everyone was saying to everybody else was, "I love you and I want to protect you." I thought to myself, as I often have in waking life, that show business people can be pretty awesome sometimes. That it's not always all just crap. Then I woke up.

The Battle Of Lepanto And The Sinking Of The Spanish Armada

I wonder how many of you have heard of one of the events mentioned in this post's title and not the other. In 1571 the combined naval forces of Spain, the Pope and Venice scored a great and unexpected victory over the navy of the Ottoman Empire in the Gulf of Patras in the Ionian Sea. 17 years later, in 1588, the same Spanish navy, the dreaded Spanish Armada, suffered a great and unexpected defeat at the hands of the English navy when they attempted to invade England.

Both events have been written about at great length, but what strikes me is that, to the best of my recollection, I have never heard them mentioned in the same breath, as I am doing now. Garrett Mattingly's The Armada, an above-average book about the 1588 battle,



has 3 entries in its index under "Lepanto, battle of," but 2 of those references merely mention that Don Juan of Austria and the Marquis of Santa Cruz had been at Lepanto, and that Sultan Selim II had spoken disparagingly of the battle's significance. Mattingly actually says nothing at all himself about the battle.

The I Tatti Renaissance Library recently published an entire volume of poems in Latin written shortly after the battle of Lepanto and celebrating the Christian victory,



and nowhere in the poems, the index or introduction or well over 100 pages of notes about the battle and its background and significance is any English man or woman mentioned, let alone Elizabeth I, let alone the sinking of the Armada.

I thought that surely HG Wells, in his great 1-volume history of Earth, The Outline of History,



would prove an exception and discuss both battles. But no. And more surprisingly still, the battle he mentions is Lepanto. Maybe he was deliberately thumbing his nose at those of his countrymen who in his estimation went on and on at entirely too much length about the supposed significance for world history of the sinking of the Armada.

Which brings me meandering roundabout to my point: some historians have written at great length about either Lepanto or the sinking of the Armada, either because they felt that it was of great significance in world history, or that its significance had been greatly exaggerated by historians. Either one battle or the other -- and the other was barely worth a mention.

Surely many Spanish sailors and soldiers must have been in both battles, just 17 years apart. Surely they, if no-one else, often thought of both battles at the same time, and considered them to have some connection to each other. Such sailors and soldiers were themselves an obvious connection.

But individual historians have rarely -- if ever -- felt that both battles were worth writing about. Which is my point: the great subjectivity of decisions about what is "historically significant." Surely the treatment by historians of these 2 battles shines a very great light on the fact that objectivity is an illusion. Historians write about what is significant from the point of view of the entire world? No, they cultivate myths of significance. If they are especially sympathetic to Catholicism and/or Spain, they nurture the myth of the significance of Lepanto, they talk up the glorious nature of the Catholic, or Spanish (or Venetian, or Papal) victory, and don't mention the Spanish defeat in 1588. But if they happen to think that England is particularly glorious, they support that preconception by dwelling on the sinking of the Armada, and by making it seem as glorious as they can.

Objectivity, schmobjetivity. There is no such thing. Research these 2 battles and you will be shown objectivity's nonexistence in a particularly striking way.

Adult Atheists Converting To Theism

I don't know how widespread such conversions are. Because of my literary interests, I happen to know about one small group of conversions, those of prominent Weimar-era authors writing in German, who were atheists and ethnically Jewish, who converted to Catholicism. Karl Kraus, Alfred Doeblin, Joseph Roth and Franz Werfel. I don't approve of their conversions. I don't present these authors as role models. But all four are great writers. Doeblin is -- Doeblin, although greatly admired, is still greatly underrated, he's the greatest writer ever to have written in German, there I said it. Doeblin is the balls. And I'll repeat what I've said on other occasions: being religious is not as disastrous to artists, including writers of fiction, as it is to persons in other professions, because being an artist and being religious both involve constantly making things up.

Doeblin and Roth were Leftists who opposed religion for political reasons. Doeblin was that way for a long time. His one big commercial success as an author was his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929, he had been active in the Left wing of the SPD since 1920, fled from Germany to France in 1933, then in 1940 from France to the US, settling in the Los Angeles area, where like some other German authors he found some work writing for the movies. In 1941 he and his wife and son were baptized in a Catholic church in Hollywood. He said that he had been very moved when looking at a crucifix in the cathedral of Mende, France, and that he had had a similar experience when looking at a crucifix in a church in Krakow: both times, he said, he had become overcome with emotion when looking at what he called "the rebel executed on a cross." Whatever happened to him when he saw those two crucifixes, it seemed to have played a big role in his conversion. It seems that after his conversion he was in the Left wing of the Church, particularly concerned with coming to the aid of the poor.

Doeblin announced his conversion in front of 200 guests on his 65th birthday in 1943. Most of his friends were Leftists and had remained atheists, and their general reaction was dismay. They felt Doeblin had joined the enemy. Bertolt Brecht had been a close colleague of Doeblin's in both political and literary projects; he wrote a bitterly sarcastic poem about Doeblin's conversion: "Peinlicher Vorfall" ("An Embarrassing Incident").



Joseph Roth's time as an atheist Leftist was briefer than Doeblin's. He was born in Galicia in 1894, when the region was still part of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a university student in Vienna, the Empire capital, and just a few years after the Empire ceased to be 1918, Roth became disillusioned with the Soviet Union, and began to say and write the most remarkably euphoric things about how the Catholic Church unified all mankind, and how the very Catholic Habsburg Empire had united the many nationalities under its rule. (Very few members of the non-German nationalities under the Habsburgs ever seemed to find the Empire particularly benevolent.)



Karl Kraus was born in 1874 in what today is the Czech Republic; three years later he family moved to Vienna, and he lived there the rest of his life, until 1936. In 1899 he withdrew from the Jewish religion; in 1911 he converted to Catholicism, and in 1923 he left the Catholic Church. Unlike Doeblin and Roth he wasn't a Leftist. But he also was never a conservative or Right-wing reactionary either. He preferred to ridicule any and all parties whenever he felt they deserved it, and he seems to have similar problems first with his family's Jewish faith and then with Catholicism.



Franz Werfel was born in 1890 in Prague, which -- let's all sing it in unison -- at that time was part of the Habsburg Empire. He settled in Vienna after WWI, converted to Catholicism in 1929, was rescued and hidden from the Nazis by the nuns at Lourdes in 1940, promised those nuns to write a novel about their cloister, and did: Das Lied von Bernadette, published in 1941.



That's only just about about all of the most prominent Jewish authors of their time writing in German. Whether this is all just a coincidence -- four people; that's a rather small sampling for statistical purposes -- or whether there were many other German-Jewish authors of the same era, less prominent, unknown to me, who also converted to Catholicism; and/or many other German Jews from other professions who converted -- I don't know. There is one prominent German-Jewish author of the same generation, Lion Feuchtwanger, who, as far as I know, never became Catholic. Feuchtwanger collaborated on a few pieces of writing with Brecht (who was not Jewish), was pals with Doeblin, joined the Los Angeles-area colony of German expat writers in 1940. No conversion on Feuchtwanger's part, but the title character of his novel Jud Suess, based on the historical figure of an 19th-century Jewish financier, does have bad dreams in which Catholic Germans and Jews are locked together in a grotesque dance which they cannot stop, in which they are thoroughly and inescapably a part of one another. So maybe there's more than a coincidence here.

"Everything's A Situation"

-- that's my favorite line from "NYPD Blue," which, more than 2 decades after it premiered, is still the gold standard for American broadcast-TV partial nudity.



Gail O'Grady, Amy Thankyoujesus Brenneman, are you kidding me??? Guh...

Where was I?

Ah yes: "Everything's a situation." Scott Allan Campbell (IAB Sgt Jerry Martens) said that to Jimmy Smits (Det Simone) in some situation which also involved Dennis Franz (Det Sipowicz). I have no idea what the situation was, I'm sure I forgot everything about the situation pretty quickly except that line and what it meant. To Dennis Franz, everybody from Internal Affairs was a rat, you never told them anything, you didn't have anything to do with any of them and that was that. To Jimmy Smits, Scott Allan Campbell was a human being standing in front of him telling him that everything was a situation, and the two of them found a way to work together and get something done.

I recently quit a Facebook group because I was unable to resolve an argument with a group member, and the group member was an admin, so I couldn't block him. He insisted that a religion is a set of beliefs, and that you can criticize the beliefs without criticizing the believers. I don't think you can. I think a religion is a group of people, and that this stuff about a religion being a set of beliefs is a convenient excuse for bad behavior on the part of some atheists, who heap scorn and abuse on a religion, and then add, "Now, don't get mad, because I wasn't criticizing any people, I was only criticizing their beliefs."

Of course, anybody who knows me at all well knows that I occasionally insult people. But I freely admit that that's what I'm doing. Watch, I'm going to do it some more right now:

Earlier today I watched a nauseating video of some yahoo who's a rather well-known professional religion-baiter and winner of at least one Atheist of the Year award, spewing abuse on Catholics. It occurred to me that parts of his tirade could have come word-for-word from an anti-Catholic rant by a leader of the KKK; it ended up with something like "[...]the Catholic Church hasn't done good in the world, and fuck you for saying it has!" Huh. 1500-some-odd years, over 1 billion people currently, and they haven't accomplished a thing, eh, Perfessor? And fuck anybody who dares to say something different? As someone who's been homeless and given food and shelter from Catholic churches and clergy, I would be remiss not to point out that I have experienced things personally which seem to indicate that this particular atheist leader is full of shit. He's the epitome of the kind of atheist I don't want to be associated with, the kind of New Atheist who I hope will make New Atheism fail, when atheist leaders emerge who understand how everything's a situation. Atheist leaders who, for example, can appreciate some of the things which Pope Francis is doing.

When you ask a group of atheists what they think of Pope Francis, some will go into the standard Catholic-bashing rant, including, of course, a mention of pedophile priests and the standard charge that the Vatican isn't doing anything against sexual abuse. Some, on the other hand, might have noticed that Francis introduced laws specifically mentioning such abuse as criminal offenses in Vatican City. A year and a half ago. In his first action as Pope to do with the laws of the state he governs.

Some atheists view Catholics the way Sipowicz views Internal Affairs: they're all evil, they're the enemy, period, done, there's no discussing it with them. Some look at Francis the way Simone looked at Sgt Martens: they see an actual human being who wants to change a few things and help. I look at Francis and I see someone more likely to change things in the Catholic Church for the better than all the New Atheists put together. Yeah, I don't believe in God, and yeah, there are a lot of other things besides that I disagree with Francis about: gay marriage and priestly celibacy come immediately to mind. If I ever meet someone I don't disagree with about something, I'll be sure and let you know. I can't recall having met such a person yet. My world isn't black-and-white, it's all grey.

Everything's a situation. These groups that haters hate, they're all people. Most Catholics hate the child abuse and want it dealt with. Most Muslims hate terrorism. Most Germans aren't Nazis. Most Southerners aren't racists -- the yahoo I mentioned above, the one who sounds like a Klansman when he rants against Catholics, he's a white Southerner, and might well become indignant if someone assumed, because he's from the South, that he's a racist -- as well he should. Might mention some of the many white Southerners who've fought and continue to fight for civil rights -- as well he should. I don't assume that he's a racist because he's a Southerner. I don't even assume it just because he's batshit-crazy on the subject of Catholicism.

And I'm also not going to claim that I didn't just insult him, but only his beliefs. Yeah, I insulted him. I felt he deserved it. I stand by my verbal abuse.

PS, 14. January 2017: Apparently I'm not the only one who ever thought that "everything's a situation" is pretty deep for being just 8 syllables long: "NYPD Blue" itself quoted the line. These days the show is on TV about 70 or 80 times a week, and now and then I watch an episode, and recently I was watching an episode which must have aired a couple of years after the one described above, and once again, there was tension between the squad's detectives and IAB, and Simone said something like this to Martens (reconstructed from memory, not an exact quote) : "I try to learn something each and every day if I can. A while ago you said something to me that stuck: 'everything's a situation.' 'Everything's a situation.' That was my lesson for that day." And I don't remember what that particular situation was, but apparently, Simon and Martens were once again able to work things out.

Sometimes It's Hard To See The Forest For The Trees

A striking example of this occurred recently during debates I've had with apologists who point out that Charles Darwin's books were never put onto the Index, and claim that this is one of many things which proves that the Catholic Church is the greatest supporter of science of all time. The obvious, forest-for-the-trees answer to that is that THERE WAS SUCH A THING AS THE INDEX, from the 16th century to the 20th. Here's a webpage listing every author who was ever on the Index. That webpage is a little misleading: it claims to be the Index in 1949. Actually, many authors were put on the Index and then later taken off. I happen to have a copy of the official Index as it stood in 1854. Charles Darwin was never on the Index, but in 1854, when Charles turned 45 years old, his father, the eminent, world-famous biologist Erasmus Darwin, was on the Index. (Yes, Charles' very own Dad. No one can speak for Charles now, but is it really very far-fetched to imagine that Charles might have gotten just a little bit annoyed if someone tried to tell him that an organization which had banned his father's books was the greatest promoter of science of all time?) So were Bruno (opera omnia, of course: the complete works), Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and, oh yes, also... Wait for it... Francis Bacon! ("We're the greatest supporters of science of all time! Don't read Francis Bacon, generally credited with the formulation of the scientific method, often called the 'father of modern science,' or you'll go to Hell!") And of course also Pascal and Diderot and Voltaire and Luther and Hume (opera omnia) and Bentham and Locke and Heine, and so many other illustrious writers that it is no exaggeration to say that it was a bit of an insult to an illustrious modern European writer if he or she were not put onto the Index. It is a Who's Who of the intellectual community of Europe. (Why not Charles Darwin? Why not Goethe or Feuerbach or Schopenhauer or Marx or Nietzsche? Didn't each of them deserve that distinction as much as Zola [opera omnia.]? Maybe because the people composing the Index rightly suspected that such authors would only be overjoyed and encouraged by being Indexed. Maybe because there's not much rhyme or reason here.) Over 400 pages long, the Index in 1854. Several thousand entries.

People who actually promote science don't ban books they dislike. It would never occur to them to do such a thing. They say: this book is terrible. Go ahead, read it for yourself and you'll see what I mean.

Just What Could You Build With All The Fragments Of The True Cross?

Archaeologists excavating a 7th-century church in Turkey have found a reliquary with a piece of the True Cross in it.

John Calvin, the loveable, cuddly 16th-century founder of Calvinism, is quoted as saying that the pieces of the True Cross added up to a large ship-load of wood, while Charles Rohault de Fleury, a 19th century archaeologist, said that they added up to about 1/3 of a cross the size of one Jesus might have been crucified on. Was Calvin really in a position to judge how much wood was in all the fragments of the True Cross? I really doubt it. Was he fervently opposed to Catholic practices such as the veneration of relics? Oh yes. (To this day Calvinist churches are notable for Minimalist decor.) Was Charles Rohault de Fleury an expert archaeologist who wouldn't make a statement like that about True Cross fragments without basing it on reliable data? I don't know. Was he a fervent defender of the Catholic Church? I don't know that either.

Was Fleury counting differently than Calvin, excluding many pieces of True Cross which Calvin included? Again, I don't know. Do many people today repeat Calvin's line, or something similar ("If you put all the pieces of the True Cross together you could build an Ark," for example), not based on any clear idea at all about the number and size of Cross relics, but because they are grinding an anti-Catholic ax? (Or an anti-Orthodox ax. Let's not forget that although in the 7th century the split between Catholic and Orthodox still far from complete, "Orthodox" is a far more accurate term to describe a 7th-century church in Turkey than "Catholic.") I have absolutely no doubt about that, nor do I doubt that many Catholic apologists would gladly quote Fleury's remark without having any more idea about Fleury's competence and possible bias than I do -- that is to say, no idea whatsoever.

Once again, I feel I am on the sidelines, on neither of the two sides bickering over the theological significance of some archaeological find. The theological debate doesn't particularly interest me, and the historical significance of the find, which interests me, doesn't seem to interest very many others.

Do I think that any of the relics venerated as pieces of the True Cross really once were pieces of the cross on which Jesus was crucified? Well, I'm not convinced that Jesus existed. If He did, and if He was crucified, wearing a crown of thorns, and stabbed in the side with a lance by a Roman soldier while He was on the Cross, then it seems to me that it is possible that the wood and thorns and iron venerated by some Christians as pieces of the True Cross and of the Crown of Thorn and of the Holy Lance are actually objects which touched Jesus -- possible, but extremely unlikely, because I know of no reports of anyone preserving relics thought to have been associated with Jesus earlier than Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great. And also because it would have been unusual for the Romans to have allowed Jesus' followers to have preserved the Cross or a part of it. (But it would have been unusual for them to have allowed Jesus' followers to remove his body from the Cross. Leaving the body there to rot away was a significant part of the horror and insult of that form of punishment. "Golgotha" means "place of skulls" because the remains of the victims of crucifixion were left there. And that is one of the many reasons why I have trouble believing the New Testament stories of Jesus.)

Nevertheless, a 7th-century artifact is interesting to me purely by virtue of its being as old as the 7th century. In this case, I would most likely find the reliquary much more interesting than the piece of wood within. Unless, that is, they date the piece of wood and it actually turns out to have come from a tree felled in the 1st century or earlier. (Did the Romans reuse one cross over and over?)

If they do actually date the wood, then as far as I know, that in itself would be newsworthy. As far as I know, Orthodox and Catholic authorities have allowed very few relics to be scientifically tested. The most famous exception has been the Shroud of Turin. That was subjected to carbon-14 dating and found to have been made in the 13th or 14th century. And ever since, the Catholic Church along with various crackpots and huckster authors and makers of silly documentaries and the so-called "History Channel" have being doing all they can to distract people from those carbon-14 test results and to discredit the scientists who performed those tests.

If traces of human blood are found on this wood, this 7th-century-or-older artifact found in Turkey, that in itself would not be significant in the search for the historical Jesus, because, sadly, crucifixions were still quite common in the 7th century.

They Should Elect ME Pope

If they're serious about sending the world a bold statement about change, that is. Electing a non-Catholic openly avowed atheist would be bold.

I'm not saying there's much chance that the Cardinals are actually going to elect me Pope. But it would be pretty cool. And I know some Latin, I can legere and dicere me a bit of lingua latina. I must say, there is exactly one thing I can think of which I really like about Benedict XVI, and that is his enthusiasm for the Latin language. When he gets going on that topic, you can pretty much safely assume that I agree with what he's saying. And I know some other languages as well. The Church seems to like its Popes to be multiligual, to be able to speak to folks in their own languages when they tour the world and whatnot.

Clearly, I would be a controversial choice. Even more controversial than, say, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi. Do I really want to live amid strong controversy?

...Well, maybe I do. Intense worldwide controversy would drive more traffic to my blog, for one thing. And there wouldn't be anything wrong with that.

And the thing is, the Vatican is... just really nice. So much beautiful art and architecture. I mean that. Zero sarcasm right now. I deeply appreciate that art and architecture. And the location is great too. And since my elderly cat passed away recently, travel has become less complicated for me.

So. If any of my readers has any pull with the College of Cardinals, let 'em know. Throw my hat into that ring. Thank you.

Criticism of Religion (and Spirituality, po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to) is Good. But Not Every Negative Remark Rises to the Level of Criticism, or Even Common Sense

People I'm often on the same side with on religious issues sometimes turn me right back off when they start to grind some personal, irrational, bigoted ax. They might, for example, speak as if all Muslims were pro-terrorism.

Often they start going on in an unproductive manner about the Catholic Church. As an extreme, some people flatly say that the Church is responsible for all of the evil in the world. I don't know how scapegoating prejudice can get a lot more extreme than that. Moving from the cosmically, insanely paranoid down to the petty, boring and silly, there are those who go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about the "dresses" and "jewelry" and "purses" and so forth worn by male Catholic clergy, and how "fabulous" it all is, and well you get the idea. As an atheist trying to lessen the influence of religion, I am so tired of these people, and so aggravated at the impression they give that atheists are -- well, idiots.

First of all, they're not dresses, they're robes. If these sneering, sniggering fools look at Raphael's School of Athens, do they get similarly giggly, and point and say Oh look, Plato and Aristotle are wearing dresses, nya, nya-nya nyaaaaa-nya?

And if they were right about the robes of Catholic clergy and ancient Greek being dresses -- they're not -- but if they were, do these same people giggle and point and mock whenever they see trannies?

Can someone say "issues"? Thank you, I knew that you could.

I saw one particularly obnoxious anti-Catholic for the first time I could remember about a month ago. Using CAPS in a VERY ANNOYING manner, mentioning things like RATZI's NAZI past -- Hey it rhymes! that must make it even more appealing to idiots -- and so forth. I don't like Ratzinger. Apart from the enthusiasm we share for the Latin language, I honestly can't think of one thing I like about him. I was very disappointed when he was elected Pope. But he was a teenager in 1945, which means that all this talk about his "Nazi past" is plain stupid. The Hitler Youth was not an organization which a German boy either joined or spurned with no pressure.

(Some time ago I asked another person who was calling Ratzinger a Nazi just how young he would have to have been in 1945 in order to be off the hook. They didn't get back to me.)

There's a critique of religion, and then there's bigotry -- and unfortunately the former often acts as camouflage for the latter. It turns out that that IDIOT I MENTIONED ABOVE who OVER-USES CAPS and called RATZI a NAZI left the Church about a year ago. (There are many churches, but only one referred to simply as the Church by friend and foe alike.) Who knows what horrors he or some child he knows may have suffered at the hands of priests or nuns, or what repressive political policies he sees tied to the Church. I don't know, because so far he's just been spewing silly stuff. Maybe eventually he'll calm down, become more coherent and actually contribute in a positive way to public discourse. Who knows. I hope so.

And as for all the men who sniggeringly refer to the dresses of Catholic clergy, I'll just continue to assume that they're all self-loathing closet wannabe transvestites, until I see some reason to assume otherwise. People need to come out, come clean, get down to the real stuff.