Temperama

Get Behind Me!

All was sweetness on the home front at 7.50 a.m. as infants gathered round the wireless to hear on the Today programme of terrapins in Hackney's Clissold Park.

And then?

Lo, the Ghastly One did once more invade Thought For The Day with her condescending manner, excruciating egomania and Christian Right message thinly disguised as a religious reflection. And we were sore afraid. For it doth seems that the programme's editors hath failed to grasp that the supposed neutrality of this God Spot is despoiled every time the Ghastly One doth, er, spake in it.

Moreover, and verily - OK, I'm losing the lingo here but I've got to run out for some cat food in a bit - these same editors have failed to accept that Thought For The Day should cease to be a space for neutrality at all or for religious voices alone, and should be transformed into a platform for open partisanship from all parts of the cultural and political kaleidoscope, including that practised with such un-Christian immodesty by the unbearable Anne Atkins, for that be the Ghastly One's name.

And so it was written. Amen.

Christian Right TFTD (5)

No Nanny Neocon on Thought For The Day today! Suddenly, my Wednesday has become a spiritual void.

Christian Right TFTD (4)

Clearly, it's now a regular Wednesday feature on the Today programme: a political polemic barely masquerading as a theological meditation delivered by the Hard Right Reverend Anne Atkins. Here's last week's extraordinarily not "balanced" effort with added heckles

"As Jim's always saying..."

Oh stop name-dropping, you creep!

"...you get everything on this programme."

(I'm Anne Atkins! I'm virtually a member of the team!)

"Yesterday, Evil was abolished - as an unhelpful idea that stops us analysing why we behave badly."

I don't know what she's referring to here. Probably a lot of Today's listeners didn't either. But Atkins's style is to assume that everyone listening to her is exactly on her wavelength. How else can she go through life so disturbingly certain of herself? And, of course, the theme of her sermon is already apparent: the usual one about trendy PC wet liberal moral relativism making it impossible to condemn bad behaviour blah-de-blah: pure Daily Mail editorial.

"So Dickens, portraying sheer wickedness in a Quilp or Sykes, is misleading; and Shakespeare's art declined, from his early realistic villain Aaron, a doting father with ethnic tension to extenuate his behaviour, to the unspeakable Iago, with no redeeming features or famously even any motive to explain his malignity."

OK, OK, you've read the literature and we're all impressed. Shame you didn't understand any of it.

"Instead of this condemnation of evil, we should try to understand the factors that make us act as we do. Indeed, one of the most powerful articles I've ever read consisted of inter-views with four 'lifers', explaining step by step how each had committed his crime, so I could see how easily I would have done the same. Evil murderers, yes - one had battered his baby son - but no more evil than I am."

Oooh, sarcasm! Not very Christian is it?

"As we heard yesterday, Hilter's crimes were carried out not by an inhuman monster, but by someone profoundly ordinary... like us."

So come on! What did "we" hear yesterday? Who was saying it? Why? Don't let those of us who didn't hear yesterday's programme in on the secret or anything, will you?

"But the fact that we should analyse the wickedness within ourselves doesn't mean there isn't greater wickedness elsewhere - any more than studying the unselfish mechanics of our selfish genes logically implies that there isn't an infinitely good Creator God."

Hidden Christian Right Message: Creationism isn't trumped by evolution. (Just in case you missed it).

"Nor is there just the moral evil in mankind, but also the unthinking evil within nature. I've lived with mental illness, and seen external evil first hand: how it attacks not just sanity and sense but identity and personality, leaving a victim stripped of himself. If I doubted evil once, I never will again."

Hidden Christain Right Message 2: Satan exists.

"And it didn't help to deny it: therapists who tried to find reasons for this devilish destruction delayed its cure and increased distress; whereas doctors who identified it as a wicked disease and fought to destroy it were the ones who restored health and happiness. We heard yesterday of the myth of evil, as if myths tell a lie: on the contrary, we tell stories of faerie changelings and describe demon possession because evil sometimes truly does come and steal away our loved ones. If we didn't know this we'd surely go mad ourselves, with grief. But in fact this is not the point..."

How funny! I was thinking exactly the same thing!

"As Sarah Montague said..."

(Me and Sarah, we're nearly friends you know!)

"...the question is not whether an idea is helpful, but whether it's true. How often do we say, we don't like the 'idea' of God, as if our preference could erase the power behind the universe!"

Hidden Christian Right Message 3: If you don't believe that God created everything you are spreading lies and, therefore, a thoroughly bad thing.

"Some of us don't find cancer diagnosis, or the arrival of our bank statements, helpful; sadly, that doesn't make the truth go away. Of course evil may not be 'helpful', but that doesn't mean it isn't real, intelligent, and predatory as a prowling beast."

This is just taking the Mick. Atkins doesn't like the word "helpful" used for judging the efficacy or lack of it of the concept of "evil" in comprehending and therefore eradicting bad things in the world. As it happens, I don't like this patronising kind of use of the word "helpful" either. But Atkins is deliberately misrepresenting those who use it in that way to suggest that they are irresponsibly "soft" on genocidal totalitarianism. This simply doesn't follow - unless you hold hard right political views, that is.

"I once had the terrifying experience of hearing a lion roar in the night close by. It would have been much less frightening if he'd crept up on us quietly. And far more dangerous."

Hidden Christian Right Message 4: These trendy, PC liberal moral relativist types make the world a more dangerous place because they won't condemn bad behaviour.

Next week, for "balance": a hard Left secularist offers a "thought" about why hard Right Christian moral pieties are nothing but a bunch of self-serving slogans that make the sloganeer feel very virtuous and do no one else the slightest good. Or maybe not.

Fisking In Harmony

Seems I may have kindred spirits over at Fisking Central. Why, we even use the same Typepad design! Contributor Tom Hamilton of Let's Be Sensible is as annoyed and astonished by Anne Atkins's Today programme sermons as I am. And he knows her dirty little secrets too. Be afraid, and so on...

Christian Right TFTD (3)

Anne Atkins did Thought for The Day again last Wednesday, only a week after her last barely-concealed Hard Right polemic. Why so soon? Did someone else drop out at the last moment? Interestingly, the unequivocal Christian Right message was a bit more muted this time. Would it be too much to hope that she or someone at the Today programme has been reading this blog and made adjustments accordingly? Probably. So let’s keep at it and see if they do.

And so, from our Oxford Studio...

“Good morning, John.”

(Me and John Humphreys, we’re friends you know)

“One character got a reprieve, JK Rowling says of her next and final book. But two die that I hadn’t intended to die. It’s nonsense of course, the author has absolute power over her characters: bringing them into being, naming them, shaping their lives and even ending them. Just like Pirandello’s six characters in search of an author...”

(Ah yes, Pirandello. Marvellous fellow, as we all don't know).

“...trapped in the writer’s imagination, unable to think, speak or act without his writing or directing them until one independent soul breaks free and runs out of the drama. It was a play that inspired other illustrations of humanity’s helplessness, from the maddening waiting around for a Godot who never appears to the frustration of Rosenkranz and Gildenstern dying as bit parts in someone else’s story.

"If Miss Rowling always knew...”

(Not Ms Rowling, please note: none of that trendy, left-wing PC nonsense here)

“...as she says she did, that this is how her microcosmic story would end, how can she claim not to have been in control? And if the macrocosmic author knows our end from our beginning, how can we suppose we have choice or free will?”

(The “macrocosmic author”? That would be the guy upstairs.)

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport,’ which can be random, cruel, even scandalous.”

(Yes, yes, yes. Now kindly leave the stage...)

“The end of King Lear is such a moral and philosophical outrage, the innocent Cordelia dying for the sins of her father, yet without saving him or the play’s outcome. But for over a hundred years it was performed with a happy ending written by someone else, Cordelia and Edgar marrying, quite out of character. Happily, after this Shakespeare turned to writing about resurrection and redemption and the finding of the lost. But was Cordelia’s death his choice? And if so what kind of monster was he to kill his own creation?”

(Er, where’s this going, exactly?)

“Writers often talk of their characters having a life of their own. Sadly it’s only happened to me once when my first novel seemed to write itself....”

(This self-gratifying plug delivered as a laughing aside: I’m not just a know-all showing off her classical education: I’m a novelist too!)

“But even though they only exist in the imagination, characters must behave consistently with themselves. The writer cannot violate their nature. How much more true of us, figments of an imagination so powerful that when He thinks of us we spring into being. We say glibly, God can do as he likes. But He can’t contradict himself. Having made mathematics, he can’t make two and two five. Being a God of sense, He can’t perpetuate nonsense. And having created autonomous beings, He can’t overrule our autonomy and still be who He is. He gave us choice. But not forever.”

(Now we’re getting too it...)

“As another bestselling writer of magical children’s stories observed, ‘When the author walks onto the stage the play is over.’ None of us will have any choice then. It will be, CS Lewis continued, ‘God without disguise’; and the time when we discover which side we really have chosen. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose. It will not last forever.”

Shame about the repetition of “forever,” but let’s let her off: we've all done it and this piece does seem like it was done in a hurry. And so to those main points;

One: I don’t like JK Rowling.

Two: I know a lot about posh literature.

Three: If authors are in charge of their creations and God is humankind’s author, how come we are able to make choices?

Three: Because God has given them to us; that’s why.

Four: When we die God will decide if we got to Heaven or Hell. If He sends us to Hell we will only have ourselves to blame. That’s because if we are bad it is no one’s fault but our own.

Conclusion: God doesn’t believe in all that trendy, relativist, left-wing PC nonsense that gives bad people excuses for being bad. Trust me, they’ll be sorry when they’re dead!

To repeat: I don’t believe the BBC is in thrall to the values of the Right or the Left and I don’t mind Anne Atkins expressing her moral arguments about the world and the cosmos on Thought For The Day or any other BBC programme. But let’s not pretend that even this piece, whose message is fairly subtle by Atkins’s standards, is anything other than a right wing polemic. Let’s open up TFTD to secular speakers too, and let them express their opinions openly. There will, of course, be endless squabbles about “balance” but you get those anyhow and such quarrels can be productive.

Here endeth the lesson.

Christian Right TFTD (2)

Last time the right-wing Christian polemicist Anne Atkins delivered the Today programme's Thought For The Day she provided a barely-concealed critique of 'relativism'. On Monday she again used the cover of theological musing to criticise what she see as a drift from moral absolutes. Her address began like this:

'Good morning.

Hate crime is as hateful as the name suggests. Jody Dobrowski was murdered not for his wallet, nor because he happened across the wrong place at the wrong time but because he was gay. A crime of chance or greed is undiscriminating and anyone might have died in his place. But Mr Dobrowski’s death was personal, attacked for his identity, assaulted for who he was, murdered for his very nature. Shockingly, if he’d been different he’d still be alive.

So under the Criminal Justice Act (2003) those guilt have been jailed for 28 years and not a day too many. Though twice as long as they would have received if their reasons had been different. Crimes prompted by race, religion, disability or sexuality now attract much heavier sentences – an understandable reaction I realised when I heard of a man in America being dragged behind his car for a mile because he was black.'

So far, so straightforward: Anne Atkins hates hate crimes. Yet I've a feeling that a 'but' is on its way. Ah-ha! Here it is!

Suppose, though, his torturers had objected to his hair colour or name or make of car. Would his death have been any less dreadful? Does motive make a murder so much more wicked?

Ooh, I wonder! Let's find out:

'Hitler killed for reasons of race, religion, disability and sexuality and his crimes still, and rightly, revolt us. But he also hated those who helped his targeted victims. Was it worse to kill a Jew than someone who voluntarily and bravely, helped a Jew escape?

A lawyer in Mr Dubrowski’s case is quoted as saying that “We are moving towards a saner society in which everyone’s human dignity and personality, whatever his lifestyle, is fully recognised: a surprising observation when, as one commentator has pointed out, if Mr Dubrowski had been heterosexual, his life would have seemed to have been only half as precious. So we no longer have a set punishment for a certain crime but a system that seems subjective in response to circumstances.'

She's moving towards her target now. But first she has to secure her rear.

'It was recently the twentieth anniversary of a case that caused outcry for similar reasons when the perpetrators of the violent and terrifying Ealing vicarage rape were given lenient sentences because, the judge said, “The victim’s trauma had not been so great.” This was retribution based on a reaction rather than reason. Now we have a penalty prompted apparently by political correctness.'

Yee-ess-ah! So that's what she's leading up to: an attack on 'political correctness'. Why am I not surprised? And now to veil this blatant hard Right polemic with the mitigating cloak of religion.

'It’s a far cry from the statue of justice on top of the Old Bailey blindfolded because she shows no partiality towards persons. Very different, too, from the origin of justice itself, the judgement of God, whose ruling is so objective that it’s the same for sinner and saint equally, who despite his particular love for some yet treats all alike, and who is so scrupulously fair that good and bad of any race, religion, disability or sexuality will face the same judgement and are offered the same escape from it.’

And here endeth the lesson. In summary: because the PC brigade have given extra rights to vulnerable minorities everyone else's lives are valued less (and God agrees with me so it must be true).

I won't challenge Atkins's argument point by point, because that is not my purpose here. And I'm not disputing her right to express the view she holds: indeed, there is a perfectly respectable case against hate crime legislation sometimes made from a different part of the political spectrum. The problem is that when she does Thought For The Day Atkins delivers a Daily Mail editorial in disguise.

Is this consistent with the 'neutral' remit of the slot in question? It is so obviously not that I'm amazed the Today editors let her get away with it. Biased BBC! Tee-hee!

Christian Right TFTD

Let's give Anne Atkins some credit for this morning's Thought For The Day. (Scroll down to 7.45). Her style may grate but that's just my opinion. Her offering had ambition, showed learning, explored an idea. It was also a speech espousing the viewpoint of the Christian Right.

'We nowadays think there's no such thing as absolute beauty. But maybe we just don't know what it is. Perhaps the Platonic ideal really exists: the perfect table, to use Plato's mundane example, of which all our tables are only imperfect reproductions. In Heaven we'll recognise the original. Now, we can only attempt derivative approximations.'

Yep, to Hell with all this trendy Lefty PC relativism. There is Good and there is Bad, these are factual absolutes, and when we die God will show us which is which. I don't mind Today giving a platform to hardline religious conservatives. But would they allow a secular progressive one to proselytise so freely? Or even a Christian progressive one? Don't think so, actually.