The Faerie Queene

I was reading David Frum's Blog on NRO today about his attempt to listen to an audio book reading of James Joyce's Ulysses. Aha, famous writer, I have read Ulysses, the whole thing. Once. The trick is to read it really fast and resist the urge to nod off. When you do that you get the whole picture, which is this: it's just one big Irish joke. And the joke is on the solemn denizens of University English faculties and newspaper culture pages who don't want anybody to know they don't understand a word of it. James Joyce wasn't the only Irish writer to pull the literary world's collective leg.
His secretary, confidante and successor, took the cue and played the same game...only better. Who could be more hilarious than Samuel Beckett? "...There's this man who comes every week. ...He gives me money and takes away the pages.,' is how he begins his trilogy, apparently. "Yet I don't work for money. For what then? I don't know. The truth is I don't know much. For example my mother's death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury." There's an Irish way of joking about things that can't be joked about, apparently. The Greeks saw paradoxes and made philosophies, or wrote plays about human fate and brutality. James Joyce saw bathroom humour: "When I makes tea I make tea and when I makes water I make water. But I don't use the same pot." Apparently.
Flann O'Brien aka Myles na Gopaleen wrote a send-up of Ulysses called "The Dalkey Archive," but I like "The Third Policeman" much better, maybe because I have always been concerned about stolen bicycles. Throw in the strangest haunted house ever imagined and that illogical Irish logic and you have a book unlike any other.
"What is your attitude to the high saddle?" inquired Gilhaney.
"Questions are like the knocks of beggermen, and should not be minded," replied the Sergeant, but I do not mind telling you that the high saddle is alright if you have a brass fork."
"A high saddle is a power for the hills," said Gilhaney."
I see that audio books have been made of both Molloy and The Third Policeman and I think either of them would be great to listen to on a long car trip.
I haven't heard these editions, but I do have Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene" on a Naxos audio book which I heartily recommend to David Frum. Couched in what was probably archaic English even when it was written this is a poem meant to be absorbed through the aural apparatus. Somehow a poem takes different pathways into consciousness when it is heard. I have it on my iPod and am always delighted when a verse wedges itself between Helen Humes and David Oistrakh. Spenser fits right in. Yes, I know he was anti Catholic and an oppressor of ireland but it's still one of the greatest poems ever composed. What amazes me about this work is that while Spenser was contemporary with Shakespeare he couldn't be more different. While Shakespeare looks ahead to the psychology of the inner man, Spenser is looking backward at the great literary tradition of Chaucer and Dante, of mythic lore and the problem of knowing good from evil. At first I wasn't especially impressed with the adenoidal voice of reader John Moffatt, but the more I hear this recording the more I like it. I have always loved this poem, the last of the great medieval allegories. It's Homeric in scale with lines as pungent as any found in the Iliad. I've memorized a few verses and I like to read it out loud so I had my own preconceptions of how it should sound. But reciting a few lines is a vastly different enterprise than telling the whole thing. The beauty of a poem of this stature is that you can focus on a verse or two from anywhere in the poem and then gradually build up an understanding of the whole. Poetry isn't linear. Hearing Moffatt's magesterial sonorities I realize why poetry doesn't really flourish in a print oriented culture. Without the sound of the language ringing down the depths of one's soul there is no poetry. Spenser was the last great master of the ancient Saxon device of alliteration.
I have some more recent poets loaded onto the iPod: eecummings, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, T.S.Eliot read by the poets themselves. Actually, I quickly tired of cummings and dumped him, and I more often than not hit the skip arrow when Robert Frost comes on. The most interesting of them is T.S. Eliot and comparisons can be made between Spenser's poetry and his. Eliot knew about music and yearned for the epic scale, medieval allegory, but he had to struggle with the train wreck of 20th Century art. So he wrote "...in my beginning is my end..," "...like a patient etherized upon a table...oh, do not ask what is it, let us go and pay our visit." One can admire the sunset poetry of expiring western poetry but enjoyment isn't part of the equation. Perhaps Spenser was right to look to the myth of chivalry for poetic material. Maybe he knew already that Shakespeares's inner man was doomed.

He who shouts the loudest.

I've read that the ancient Spartans decided issues in their councils according to who shouted the loudest. When I first heard that I thought it was quite a ridiculous way to run things. Our way was so obviously better, what with our ideas of free speech and open debate. Honest and intelligent people can differ in there understandings. Humans aren't endowed with perfect knowledge. We only have very dim inklings of how our plans will work out. But plan we must. We must ry to foresee eventualities, we must try to calculate the effects of our actions. Even at the most personal level of who to marry, what livelihood to pursue, where to build a home we are faced with choices we must weigh and try to do what's good for ourselves and our families. How much more important and difficult it is to plan for the welfare of communities, nations, and now that our power is so much greater than in the past, the entire planet. And so we talk among ourselves. We often disagree. And our Western culture from the earliest times has been to submit ideas to the whole people and when a decision is made by them it is the job of the leader to carry out the program as well as he can. Of course the implementation of this ideal has been fitful, but even the most tyrannical of despots has had to consult and compromise his will to power and bend to the opinions of others. Otherwise, like Louis XVI he could lose his head. Even the Spartan system was a type of consultation. But in my naive youth I thought we had risen above that.
Some voices always carry more weight than others, and deservedly so. When I want my car fixed I go to a mechanic. But when different mechanics give me varying opinions on why the damn thing won't start I am still the one who has to make the call. Often enough I have rued my choice, but I always do my best to learn from my mistakes.
This is the problem with paying attention to the loudest voice: the most stridently opinionated people are also usually extremely ignorant. They don't seem able to learn from their mistakes, or even admit they've made any. It doesn't matter how often they are wrong. Nothing shakes their high opinion of themselves. But they are the ones the politicians listen to...becayuse they make the most noise. The rest of us go quietly about our lives, but the loudmouths seem to have nothing better to do than hector the people we vote into office. This is how it works out that certain groups have more influence on policies than we poor sucks who vote and work to pay for everything.
Their main technique is to make it seem like everyone who is anyone thinks the way they do. That's why they like celebrities. Celebrities like being the centre of attention and as a rule they are not deep thinkers. They like to play a part and they are good at learning their lines but that is a skill set that may or may not be coupled with a capacity for critical thinking.
Who are these People? Al Gore. Jimmy Carter. Rosie O'Donnell. David Suzuki. Jane Fonda. All of them blithely unaware of the damage to humanity their ideas can cause. Idon't know if they are intentionally vicious, like Stalin, but they might as well be. I've just been reading about Rachel Carson and all the damage her book has done. And none of her followers in the environmental movement has yet acknowledged that the banning of DDT has led to millions of deaths, mostly of children in poor countries.
These loudmouths don't have any actual arguments, they just have mantras. In connection with the epidemic of drug use that has exploded in the past few decades, the mantra is harm reduction. Not content with going to the public, via the established rules for making important public decisions, they take it upon themselves to do whatever they want. Case in point: Nanaimo city councilors recently discovered that nurses at the regional hospital have been distributing crack pipes. This is a program instituted by a bureaucracy known as the Vancouver Island Health Authority which has decided it is a law unto itself.
These are the same kinds of people who brought us needle exchanges, telling us that if addicts had clean needles they would be less likely to get all the diseases that go with drug use. Now we have a situation where you have to watch where you step there are so many discarded needles littering the streets. Has nobody noticed that the number of drug addicts on the streets has increased exponentially since this program began? It was a mistake. Most of us average Jills and Joes know it, but the so-called experts don't. Now they say we need safe injection sites. Hasn't it occured to the proponents of this plan that they are making it easier to become an addict? Hasn't it occured to them that such policies legitimize drug use? As far as I am concerned they are no better than drug pushers. Thankfully, this is one issue where the Federal Conservative government is showing some gumption. Let's hope they don't cave in at the predictably deafening Greek chorus they will have to endure. Go around them, boys. My vote counts just as much as David Suzuki's or Margaret Atwood's or whatever minor celebrity you can think of.
And think of the poor Indians. What a disaster for them the Indian Act has been, and how much worse the lawyers and the activists have made things. Since Canada has to slavishly follow every dumb policy that comes along in the USA all our lefties claim to hate, we have affermative action, race-based laws here, too. Since the lawyers cashed in on all the residential schools they are moving on to land claims. You see the activist Indian leaders believe they have a prior right to the Canadian land mass, it having escaped their attention that many of us honkies were born here, too. Well, it's time for a change of direction, that's for sure. It's time that Indians have the right to work and make enough money to buy a piece of property the same as me...and sell it if he wants to. The Indians can't do that now...on their own lands. And they want to expand that system? Where is the evidence that the communal system works for them? There isn't any. All the communally owned native reserves are disasters. Yards full of rusting cars, rotting boats, broken appliances, toys, starving dogs, dirty, uncared for children, the houses with broken windows, leaking roofs, no doors. On waterfront property that would bring millions of dollars if they could sell it. Gordie Campbell said he was going to do his best to fix this idiotic system if he was elected, but that was a few elections ago. I guess he just forgot. He's too busy having photo ops with Arnie to worry about Indian children, I guess.
The imams have been paying attention to this state of affairs. What do you know, they have concluded. Western politicians have no balls. If they can't stand up to screaming headlines, or econazis chaining themselves to trees, why think what will happen when they are threatened with decapitation. And just to make things easier, a little oil money will lubricate a lot of palms and soothe their feelings.
You know, I'm beginning to understand why the French suddenly decided to massacre its elite. Hopefully, it won't come to that. But I think a big purge has to come. For instance, I think whoever was responsible for distributing those crack pipes should be fired immediately without compensation.

Politicians in drag

The headline in today's birdcage lining is that the MLAs (Members of the legislative assembly) gave themselves large pay hikes just before adjourning for the summer holidays. I notice a little undercurrent of resentment among the denizens of the government office where I work, taking the form of, "I wish I were getting a 30% raise," and this is pretty normal. Naturally, the opposition raised a little hell, just as they always do, and I'm sure they'll take the money and run, just as they always do. Promises to roll back pay hikes seldom survive entry into office. The problem as I see it is how do we judge a politician's worth? In any other job you get paid according to how good you are, but how do you tell how good a politician is at his job. If you think of a political unit such as BC as an economic entity valued according to its productive capacity then how does the premiere's salary compare to the head of a comparably sized corporation? The answer is that the premiere gets peanuts, even with his raise. This province has a territory of 355,000 square miles, a long seacoast, forests, farms, schools, and a diverse population. The government in power is responsible for making and enforcing the laws and administering large programs. Good plumbers make more than our premiere does.
What bothers me more than anything else in politicians is their lack of balls. Now you would think the governator would have a set of balls, especially as he claims not to have used steroids in his body building days. But when someone becomes a greenhouse gasbag he's either stupid, lying, or pandering. Pandering is that special type of lie used to pacify a noisy idiot we don't want to argue with. And I see in the same paper images of Arnie and Gordie (Campbell, our premiere, whose name means 'twisted mouth' in Gaelic) all dressed up in Indian duds, presumably with ominous drumming pounding a beat in the background. Because if you're not willing to make an ass out of yourself how can you be a real politician. As eecummings put it, "An ass is something everyone has sat upon except a man." Perhaps they were doing a weather dance. Except in the modern style we throw money down the toilet as part of the ritual.
It makes me despair of democracy sometimes. Why don't we have politicians who are leaders? Why don't they have the balls to tell the truth? Why can't they just tell all the noisy SIGs to shut their traps? Why can't they explain in plain words to the people the plain facts? I do have some hopes that Fred Thompson is the kind of a guy who both knows what's going on and has the balls to tell people the plain facts. For instance that the new kind of lightbulbs that are supposed to be so good for the environment have mercury in them, an extremely poisonous substance. Too many numbskull ideas to list. Let's hear it for Fred. Tell it like it is, baby. I can't vote for you, but you know I was rooting for Sarkozy, too.

Reading list

I've been unable to get Blogger to upload my photos this week so l jettisoned my little piece on James Bay, Victoria's original 'village.' I didn't feel like writing anyway, but I like taking pictures of Victoria. She's quite an attractive old gal. Our weather suddenly warmed up and when that happens my appetite for writing always cools down- but I can never stop reading. The St. Augustine book is one of those that sends me off in all directions. I'm reading Plato again and maybe trying harder to understand the nuancess of his thinking than I have before. And then there is Plotinus, the fountainhead of Neoplatonism. Although I've never read any of the Neoplatonists I've learned to recognize their influence in just about every aspect of Western thought. That whole era of the Late Roman Empire was a seething ferment of religious and philosophical ideas that affects us still.
And I'm reading the Koran, although I'd rather not, with the intent of comparing
I so enjoyed the "Out of the Past" DVD with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Rhonda Fleming that I exceeded my budget and bought Volume Three of a Film Noire series. Arghh. It's not very good. Particularly disappointing was "Lady in the Lake," an adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel. MGM massacred it. One of the attractions of these thrillers, as I prefer to call them, is that many of them had Southern Cal location scenes. Small towns, old cars when they were new, and a general feeling of how the world felt in those days. It's something hard to convey in words but there was a wholesomeness to people then, along with a mental toughness that is instantly recognizable in these scenes. One of the best examples for that is "Suddenly," a movie where Frank Sinatra plays a psychotic hoodlum with a plan to assassinate the president. Frank Sinatra played a great hoodlum, but even he seemed almost wholesome compared to the kinds of psychopaths we hear about now. And everybody was presumed to be patriotic. Anyway, MGM had not a single location shot in this film, a real shame since so much of the novel takes place in sites in and around LA in the '40's. Yikes, no freeways! It was pretty obvious the script writers and producers didn't think much of the book.
Another one with Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell and Vincent Price was better but nowhere near as good as "Past". Vincent Price made it worth the admission and Jane Russell looked pretty hot. Raymond Burr played an Orson Wells-like villain. I still have a few more to watch in this series.
PS Got a couple snaps uploaded, of Fisherman's Wharf and Heather St. in James Bay.

Film Noire

On one of my regular web reads a writer enthused something about American Idol. Apparently I was on Mars or some such place as that's where he thinks someone would have to be to be unaware of the Idol show. I dumped my TV years ago and I have never regretted it, and so I have never seen an episode of American Idol. Perfectly content in my innocence, I was blissfully ignorant that some sort of climactic event was due that night. From what I've heard about the program it should be called "American Idiot."
No, I wasn't on Mars. I was in 1947 in rapt wonderment at how good a movie could be. That was the year RKO released "Out of the Past," with a cast of stars who were in the early stages of their careers and last night I had the pleasure of viewing it for the first time. What a treat. This film has been consigned to the 'film noire' by the artsy fartsy intellectual class but at the time of its making it was just a low budget thriller intended to make money for the studio. All these films have lurid titles to draw in the rubes. That doesn't mean it was tossed off in a slovenly manner. Far from it. This is a work of art. It makes even the best movies of today look sick. Kirk Douglas played the crooked big shot who lived in a palatial residence overlooking Lake Tahoe and Robert Mitchum played Jeff Markham/Bailey, the private detective who had crossed him years ago and was now leading a quiet life as a gas station operator in a small town on the edge of the Sierras. In the opening scene his bucolic existence is disrupted when one of Douglas' thugs informs him that the boss wants to see him.
It's not necessary to adumbrate the typically byzantine plot complexities, which are delicious. I would simply like to rave over the quality and intelligence of the production. First of all, what wonderful acting. This film was made before Stanislawski ruined the American acting fraternity. Then acting was still a craft but how did they learn it? The characters in this film are not passive sufferers of life's iniquities. They are struggling and striving, they have complexities that are revealed under the pressure of the struggle. This is what drama is about. There are five death scenes in the movie but nowhere are we regaled with the gory details. It's not about blood, it's about right and wrong. and the sometimes fine line between the two. There are no sex scenes except one that was implied but sex played a central role in the subtext of the film, more particularly the relationship between sex, love, and power...in a word, passion. Sex is about the genitals, and sometimes I think nature has played a cruel joke on us by locating the organs of reproduction in the same place as the organs of elimination. Passion is not identical with sex but is concerned with it. In this film, the passion Kirk Douglas has for Jane Greer is more closely akin to the desire to own things. He himself seems rather sexless. But between her and Mitchum passion triggers sex, not the other way around. What moves her never becomes clear. Does she love Mitchum or is she just using him for some purpose that not even she knows? In many ways the film illustrates my dictum: women use sex to get power and men use power to get sex.
How is it possible to for a mere 97 minutes of film to evoke so many levels of meaning? I don't know but it's a trick that can only be accomplished by a team of pros at the top of its game, and I know that the product is what we mean by a work of art.
The other day I ran into a friend of mine who writes poetry for children. We stopped to talk in the entry of the Bay Centre and in the window of one of those hip fashion shops hung a poster of a young couple barely dressed. They were both dark and thin in the tired old James Dean manner. They looked feral, as if they were contemplating some gruesome crime they had just committed. Another poster showed a young blond girl dressed a little like Barbarella staring up into the sky. She was pretty but also had that feral look. They weren't at all sexy to my way of thinking but were obviously meant to be. My friend pointed to them and said to me, "It doesn't look like any of them has ever read a book, does it?" And I had to agree. As much as possible I try to avoid any contact with the celebrity culture all young people seem to admire but it's impossible to go through a checkout line without one's eyes lighting on the latest escapade of whoever it might be. Is there even the slightest hint of any intelligence at all behind all the slathered on make up? None that I can detect. And how can an unintelligent woman be attractive? Not to me. I will admit that Paris Hilton is pretty. She has a lost little girl look about her that no amount of degradation can seem to erase. But there is also a blankness in the eyes, a deadness, as if some essential human ingredient was left out when she was made, as if all the time spent in a vain alcohol- and drug-fueled search for self gratification left her with no time to really taste the wonder of life.
What a contrast with the beauties of 1947. Jane Greer, who I had never previously heard of, was the female star, the femme fatale. It was her Kirk Douglas sent Robert Mitchum to find. The trail led to Acapulco and a seedy bar where Robert Mitchum sat drinking a beer. Then one day she "walked in out of the sun," and immediately we see why Kirk Douglas wanted her back. My jaw goes slack, she is so beautiful. It's not her physical appearance that draws this response. It is a presence. There is the intensity of her eyes, the expressiveness of her mouth, which seem to endow her with some sort of ageless wisdom combined with innocence. She has a noticeable feral quality, too, but no. Feral means a domestic creature gone wild. She is just the opposite, a wild thing who hasn't been fully tamed. And every single scene reinforces those initial impressions. She has complexities. She has thought deeply about things. She knows herself, not in that phony self regarding way of modern celebrities, but because she looksat the world and herself with unblinking honesty. Rhonda Fleming is another beauty whose small part later on in the film shows an entirely different kind of beauty. Hers is more buxom and fecund, more fully sexual. And somehow she is able to convey the essence of her character to perfection.
None of this would work, of course, without a first class script, and I'm afraid writing like this is a lost art. Too bad.

Victoria Day Parade

It was cold and rainy all day Sunday and I wasn't at all optimistic at the chances for good weather on Monday's Victoria Day parade. However, I got very angry at god and gve him a piece of my mind, and what do you know.He Smiled and the weather turned out to be almost perfect. I know god loves us and all, but I kind of think he likes a guy who stands up for himself more than the weepy type. I pointed out that I have never ever blamed him for any problems I brought on myself, but that this was different. I reminded him of all the eager and innocent high school bands up from the States and how it would be so unfair to them to get rained on. Well, we had our nice day on Monday and today it's raining again- not exactly raining but getting ready to rain.
I was lucky enough to have had one of the better seats in the house. Starting at 9am the first tendrils of the parade reached my vantage point about 9:40 and the last band went by at about 1:10. Well, I enjoyed it, but not as much as I had hoped. Why does nobody ever play the great band music by Sousa and so many others? Let's face it, band music is march music originally military in nature. But I suppose that answers my question. The military is not very popular in educational circles, and to make matters worse most of that music was composed by the dreaded and reviled dead white males. Even worse, it's so much better than what is most played now that it would be embarrassing. Better not to play it at all. Instead we have all this 'jump up' music (as I think of it) which would be fine as a kind of spice added to the dish. But a whole meal of it is tiresome in the extreme. By the end of it I was getting a headache.
Wouldn't it be nice if a conspiracy took place in band music departments of influential American High Schools (the ones our American hating teachers copy) to start teaching again the elements of harmony, texture, rhythm, tonal beauty and melody as illustrated in the works of the great band composers and arrangers? Another little prayer for you, God.
But absolutely nothing can spoil the delight of watching leggy young high school girls high stepping and twirling batons. Thanks a lot to all those who participated and gave us such a wonderful show. I only wish I had the foresight to make up a banner saying, "Thank you America, for standing up for our freedoms."

Evolution and ethical thinking

Over the years I've been quite interested in how ideas of morality and ethics undermine the utilitarian notion of natural selection. The doctrine of natural selection is a cornerstone of Darwinian thinking. According to this model the various species evolved their differences largely through a process where advantageous attributes are preserved which improve chances of survival and reproduction. An ecological niche is found and the species evolves a strategy for exploiting it. Leaving for later the problem this raises of irreducible complexity (of what use is half a wing?) or exactly how the chemistry of a cell translates into physical structure, let's go to the question of behavior. At a deeper level than utilitarianism is the logical positivist view that "mind is an attribute of matter." By mind they mean behaviour. Living things have behaviours unlike inanimate matter. They have preferences, even at the most rudimentary level. Darwinians think this behaviour is determined by genetics. On the other hand I have thought for years that they had it backwards. Somehow, I don't claim to know how, I think that behaviour influences genetics. In other words, I think birds sing because they like to sing and that only as a side effect has that behaviour also become useful. Because for a small animal like a sparrow is it really so utilitarian to advertise its location to every predator within earshot? When Darwinians try to explain such things they become contortionists.
A sense of beauty and aesthetics in birds is rather hard to swallow for a logical positivist. They go through similar contortions trying to cram altruistic behaviour into the Darwinian box. We aren't the only species to practice altruistic behaviour but I'll only talk about human morality here.
As one of humanity's oldest documents, the Biblical narrative provides us with a record of an evolution in ethical thinking that spans 2000 years. You don't have to believe in god or Adam and Eve to be impressed by it. Critics point to various places in the bible that justify violence, such as Jehovah's injunction to kill every man, woman and child of the Canaanites but they miss the point. It is normal in all tribal societies to regard outsiders as non human. That's why the ten commandments given to Moses didn't apply to Canaanites. They didn't count. They weren't people in exactly the same way that Jews don't count to Muslims. Jews aren't human beings. They are children of apes and pigs. A Jew (or a Christian) can be beaten in the street with impunity by any Muslim. Greeks of ancient times thought that people who spoke other languages only made rude noises and could not be considered civilized. It's a well known fact that hunting and gathering societies only consider their own tribesmen to be human beings. I'm not very familiar with east or south Asian thinking on ethics and morality, but in the west a vast leap forward was made with the transition to Christianity. I don't mean to say that people instantly stopped murdering and torturing each other, but if they did it was contrary to the teaching of the Church. The early Christian thinkers spent a lot of time thinking about whether war could ever be justified when Jesus expressly stated that we were to love our enemies and turn the other cheek when injured instead of retaliating. There was nothing like this in Greek thought. The poet Archilochus (a soldier) probably formulated the standard Greek attitude when one of his poems told how if there was one thing he knew how to do it was to avenge a wrong done to him.
It's hard for modern westerners to imagine how callous we human beings can be to the suffering of others even in our own culture and not too far in the past. As recently as the beginning of the 19th Century people still gathered at Newgate in London to watch public executions. The method was hanging, but not using the technique of breaking the neck to assure a quick death. Instead the miscreant was hoisted into the air by his neck. Death came by slow strangulation. People from every level of society showed a strange fascination with the spectacle of life departing a living body. American cavalrymen on the western frontier got good and plastered before a fight because they dreaded what would happen if they were injured in battle and left to the Indians. It was usually the Indian women who prowled the battlefield and they liked to cut off certain parts of any soldier left alive. Any soldier brought back to camp by them knew that the Indians had developed a fine art out of inflicting a maximum amount of pain while keeping the victim hanging on to life by a thread.
These sorts of behaviours conform fairly well to the utilitarian model. Life is competitive. Fear and intimidation have 'survival value.' Of what use is turning the other cheek? If I were a Darwinist I would suggest that such behaviour, while of no advantage to the individual, is of benefit to the group. It would reduce internicine conflict and allow cooperation for the common good.
But the trajectory of ethical thinking, especially in the Christian tradition, is to confer equal humanhood on everybody regardless of race, language, social status or even species. It's a well known fact that people nowadays seem more shocked by cruelty to puppies than to humans. This kind of thinking has led to ideas of social equality, abolition of slavery, idealistic notions of the "noble savage," and now concern with the survival of frogs and toads. What makes all this possible is the human capacity for imagination, which I believe is also a prerequisite for religious faith. Imagination is the faculty humans have of picturing things that don't exist yet in the real world. It's not only necessary for religious faith but for invention of all sorts. Humans have been imagining for thousands of years what it would be like to fly like birds, to swim under the sea, to travel to the moon.
Similarly, when we humans imagine what it would be like to be that person on the cross, what it would be like to go hungry, what it would be like to be a fish on a hook, we put ourselves in that place and actually feel pain. resumably we have had this capacity ever since we became fully modern humans. But in the struggle for survival in a hunting and gathering technology it was not possible to accumulate sufficient surplus to assure life for any length of time. Agriculture improved things and provided enough surplus to sustain a small class of aristocrats. That was when record keeping, priesthoods, writen history, cities and a vastly more sophisticated organizational capacity developed. And it was precisely then and in the Middle East, Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, now called Iraq where this seemingly spontaneous combustion took place. And it is to this time that our bible traces its pedigree, and it is through that bible that we obtained a divine commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." By the time that the Romans put Christ to death on the cross the emphasis changed from being a law of god, to "Imagine what it would be like to die on a cross. Feel his pain. And he died for us out of love all the while forgiving his executioners."
I was thinking of this in connection with Islam. The god who spoke to Mohammed had nothing to say about forgiveness. And ever since Mohammeds followers took over the ancient source of our civilization it has ceased to be a factor in human progress. To mohammed there was only force and conformity. There was only the outsider who must convert or be killed. Sympathy for the foreigner and his ways was extirpated. Jews are only pigs and apes. In spite of what many writers try to tell us, wherever Islam went it inaugurated a dark age.