Look Again

Prof. Richard Dawkins, scourge of all known believers, was back on his hobbyhorse last night. He made a TV programme which argued for the end of the link between religion and education in many of the schools in the UK.

I have – simultaneously – a respect for some of his views, and a loathing for the style with which he presents them. This is the man who campaigned for the right of atheists to present a ‘Thought for the Day’ in ‘God Slot’ of the Radio 4 Today programme, and when he got it, delivered a ‘thought’ of such epic bad grace that I was tempted to join a Greek Orthodox monastery immediately. (A transcript is here: top quote:  ’Humanity can leave the crybaby phase, and finally come of age.’)

But I digress.

The argument for and against faith schools is complex. I won’t try to deal with all of it. I won’t even make the argument that he underestimates children if he thinks they believe what their teachers tell them. I just wanted to add one small part of the argument that I think is often missed.

That is: that the Bible, as a piece of literature, is at the core of western culture. It is impossible to begin to understand renaissance art without having read the gospels. It is impossible to read Milton without having read the New Testament, at the very least. And what about Dante? J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion?

How many more footnotes would be required to understand James Joyce, without a grounding in Catholicism?

People are drawn to religion for many complex reasons. A big one is tradition and culture. I was drawn to read the Bible because I wanted to understand the world I was living in. That does not mean that I don’t want to understand science: I do, very much. But I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that Homer was a ‘crybaby’ because he attributes things to gods. In fact, I want them to grow up knowing that a belief in gods does not preclude an understanding of humanity: sometimes the opposite.

So, the Labour party lost the election, and so far we have two people running for the leadership, who happen to be brothers.

They both have websites, with links to twitter and facebook accounts. They both pay handsome tribute to the idea that we, the people, should let them know our thoughts, ideas and suggestions.

Except:

• Ed Miliband’s website has no email address on it.

• David Miliband’s ‘blog’ has comments switched off.

They both seem to want us to enter our details – phone number and everything – but when it comes down to it, don’t seem awfully keen on us telling them anything. The sites are focused on the more urgent task of how they can efficiently talk to us.

If they were serious about taking on board people’s ideas, and really wanted to help people collaborate on the future of the country, then the internet has some tried and tested tools that help people work together.

Perhaps they could install MediaWiki? Wikipedia is based on it, and it’s free. Imagine dozens of people reviewing and discussing a manifesto, line by line. Maybe a forum of some kind? Some pretty small groups manage to maintain a forum.

Administering such sites would be time consuming, of course. But that is like arguing that surgery is too time consuming for doctors to waste their time with.

Listening to the people is a politician’s job. We want to talk to them. Do they really want to listen?

I was introduced to a great site the other day, called framerater, (I am christof on there) which asks you to tick off movies you have seen, from various ‘best’ lists from IMDB and elsewhere. I was quite surprised with how many I had seen.

One of the lists was a 1001 movies you must see, which is ordered chronologically with the oldest films at the start.

The two oldest were filmed in 1902 and 1903, and are well worth watching. Many of the oldest on the list are out of copyright and available on either archive.org and YouTube.

Here is one: The Great Train Robbery, by Edison’s studio.

A couple of things stood out for me, a couple of cinematic conventions, one of which has been retained, and one amended.

Firstly, the convention that if you hit someone on the back of the head with a pistol, they will instantly lose consciousness until someone splashes water in their face. I have no personal experience of being clubbed, but I imagine it is rather difficult to judge a blow so perfectly that you do more than leave a nasty bruise, render someone unconscious,  but still stop short of permanent brain damage.

Secondly, how people react to being shot. People seem to die instantly when shot in movies (expect for important characters, who linger quietly, without vomiting or convulsing, until they have said their piece), and indicate that they have been hit by hunching and falling, and remaining still. But in one of these movies, they do not hunch: they all throw their hands vertically into the air as they fall.

Perhaps that is more realistic: heck, in 1903 you might have a people around who could draw upon personal experience of western gunfights. But it looks odd to modern eyes.

I can’t get the logic of this. There is an installed base of millions of iPhone and iPod Touch users: why not release the iBook app for those devices? I can buy books from Amazon’s Kindle app on my iPhone, who seem to be Apple’s chief competitor in this arena.

Surely it would help in negotiations with publishers (who are being pulled between Amazon and Apple) if they could point to sales from iPhone/iPod Touch users, and possibly even Mac users as well?

There are two possible explanations that I can think of. One, Apple are trying to use the iBook app as bait, so that existing iPhone users will buy the iPad as well. I don’t believe this: Apple always seem to play the long game. Which feeds into my second theory: That Mr Jobs just doesn’t think that reading a book on your iPhone is a compelling enough experience, and he doesn’t want to give people the opportunity to dismiss ebooks as a result.

I have no idea, of course. But I can’t imagine any other company that would deny themselves the sales: with one free download they could sell a lot of ebooks.