Barney Zwartz, and in a post election mood as the nation goes loony, solemn talk of music, beauty, chickens and militant atheists ...

In what can only be construed as a major election victory for the pond, the country has seized the moment and swung solidly every which way to ensure the triumph of loonish principles.

A hung parliament, Wilkie maybe up in Tasmania, PM killer McKew down, the youngest ever politician voted into parliament, an indigenous candidate up in the west, a sprinkling of independents of a wild cat kind, a Green in Melbourne, the Greens with the balance of power in the Senate, once the detritus is cleaned out, and Tamworth as always at the centre of the universe.

Any one who wants to run the country with that balance of power, well good luck with that. Will the NSW Labor party learn anything, and discover the need for principle and discipline and policy and leadership? Is there any irony in Bob Carr's promise of a railway line, which turned into an Olympics and no railway line, derailing a government? No satirical comments please, but when you can't bribe the punters with promises of fairy floss and billions of dollars in railway lines, things have come to a pretty pass.

Will Abbott maintain the discipline he discovered in the campaign and keep things on an even keel as the going gets tough? How soon to the next election, and the next sausage sizzle at the local primary school?

Will all the experts who talked endlessly about the female factor, and the way women would vote for Gillard simply because she's a woman, and because women are empty headed bubble headed boobies, and so stick together through thick and thin, bother to retract one word of their simple minded scribblings?

The good news is that with the Greens getting their watermelon paws on the levers of power, Miranda the Devine is likely to go into such a funk meltdown that the level of hysteria in Murdoch land could reach Faux Noise proportions. And so might Cardinal Pell. Naturally the Devine is so deluded that she can't see ahead more than 24 hours in the news cycle, and penned these immortal words here:

As West Australian results started trickling in, and the prospect of the Coalition governing with Greens and independents sank in, the mood grew more joyous.

Allow me to re-phrase that. As the prospect of the Coalition governing with the secular atheistic dangerous, should be hung from lamp post pinko homosexual pervert watermelon Greens sank in, the Devine grew more deludedly joyous.

Well there's more commentary than fleas throughout the land this quiet, reflective Sunday, and so it seems as good a time as any to revisit Sir Marcus Loane, some time Archbishop of Sydney's wise words:

As God is the Head
of Christ, so Christ is
the Head of Man and
as Christ is the Head
of Man, so Man is the
Head of Woman.

Well at least that's the way he was quoted in an old Oz flick, Going Down, and as politics for the moment are in a lull before the next storm, it seemed as good a time as any to drop in on our old mate Barney Zwartz, brooding and mulling over The boot changes feet - but still crushes.

What with all the political squawking, we sometimes forget to check his scribbles, but it seems good old Barners is terribly worried about militant atheists, though he doesn't come out with it like a man.

Instead he pretends he's only channeling the views of a ratbag American commentator:

US academic and commentator Mark Helprin argues that militant atheists* and secularists are working to impose a rigid non-religious orthodoxy on wider society that, if not opposed, will end religious freedom. The ugliness of former religious marginalisation of unbelievers threatens to become “an equally repulsive mirror image”.

Poor old Barners doesn't seem to understand that starting off a debate about faith by invoking militant atheists is a bit like an atheist evoking fuckwitted Christians. Oh well at least militant Christians. Or Islamics. Or whatever.

It seems that, compared to people who blow people up, kill, maim or annihilate them in their quest to convert them so they can spend their next life in paradise amidst virgins, the militant atheist chappie is totally unreasonable:

The anti-religious employ reason unreasonably, apply moral pressure immorally, deny the shortcomings of their own ideology, misunderstand separation of church and state, offer no satisfactory replacement for religion, and are simply blind and deaf to the most transcendent longings. “Belief has been attacked of late with a fervour that suggests the desire not merely to disprove but to annihilate it,” Helprin writes.

Barners re-tells a Helprin anecdote about a fist fight, suggesting that a fist fight - as a kind of metaphorical example of the futility of t smartarse college debating points - is the kind of tactic Richard Dawkins employs. At least I think that's what he's saying, though whether he thinks being a physical bully boy or a college smartarse is Dawkins' game, I couldn't quite determine.

But what I did love was when Barners got on to the matter of faith:

Since time immemorial, insistence on a sole path to truth has been essential to intolerance. Long the preserve of religion, in the 20th century it went atheistic totalitarian, and has now reached the free West, Helprin says. “The intolerant will tell you in the same breath both that they are not and that they have every right to be; that historically and by nature religion is intolerant and therefore should not be tolerated.” And the enemy can be summarised as faith.

This so resolutely loopy as to be quite charming. The enemy is faith? By golly, it's time to have a word in the ear of all those Christians and Muslims dedicated to their faith.

The enemy is faith? I began to think I was in a bizarro world where Christians attack faith as a problem while pronouncing their faith and decrying their faith all in the same two in one holy duopoly breath ...

It seems what really gets the Christian juices flowing is a bit of advertising:

Helprin attacks the atheist bus campaign that began in Britain and has reached Australia. “Signs on buses tell you it’s OK not to believe in God. Admitted, but what of signs that said, “it’s OK not to be gay”, “it’s OK not to be black”, “it’s OK not to be a Jew”? While true, these statements are more than the simple expression of a point of view. Accurately perceived, they are an ugly form of pressure that while necessarily legal is nonetheless indecent.”

Indeed, though I prefer a sign that says "it's OK not to be a Nazi" because then we'd be more clearly in breach of Godwin's law, especially since there are any number of Christians and Islamics, especially of the racist or sexist kind, who will tell still tell you even unto this day that it's not OK to be gay, it's not OK to be a Jew (come on down Mel and tell us what they did to Jesus), and it's not OK to be black, especially if they happen to be Islamic, born in Kenya and lack a birth certificate.

When you want ugly forms of pressure that might be legal but nonetheless decent, where do we put Cardinal Pell calling Greens pinko pervert secular poofter loving watermelon commies? Sure he used more subtle language, but we got the message ...

Well I guess we can just hang around waiting for Barners to unfurl that sign saying it's okay to be gay and get married in a gay way in a Christian church ...

But back to the subterfuge of quoting a ratbag American as a way of making his points yours:

He says the case against religion rests on three accusations - that historically it has been destructive; that it is incompatible with democracy; and that belief in God is unsupportable – and addresses them in turn. These arguments are familiar to regular posters, except perhaps the democracy one.

This is the idea that Christians want to introduce a repressive theocracy, though the US has never come remotely close and the powerful opposition includes most clergy.

Lordy was it only the other day I was reading Ken Silverstein's Tea party in the Sonora in Harpers, about the total collapse of Arizona at the hands of Republican crazies (behind the paywall, no link):

Soon the committee (the Senate appropriations committee) began to debate whether to post the Ten Commandments at the entrance to the old state capitol. A six-foot granite version located a few hundred feet away did not, it seemed, sufficiently convey the state's piety. "George Washington, our first recognized president of this republic, said you cannot properly govern without the Bible and God, and I couldn't agree more. And John Adams once made the statement that this republic is designed wholly for a moral and religious people and will survive under none other," Pearce, the measure's sponsor, told his colleagues. After a few minutes' more debate, the measure passed, and the committee, having done the people's business, adjourned for the day.

Yep, those poor hapless Christians tormented on all sides by the notion that the constitution, drawn up by more than a few atheists, separated church and state.

On the other hand, I guess we could try setting up a rival brand of religion, housed in say a mosque, in say New York, or say wherever else you might think you can because you own the land, in the currently fevered United States, and see how we might go ... never mind the constitutional rights, just watch the repressive hysterical Christian theocracy go about its business of making damn sure no NIMBY mosque is built anywhere NIMBY to me

Talk about motes and eyes. But Helprin, courtesy of Barners, is just getting warmed up:

On separation of church and state, Helprin says atheists who insist church beliefs must be excluded from the law miss the difference between exclusively religious doctrines, such as the divinity of Jesus, and social ones such as the prohibition of murder. “Primitives” on the religious side think if something is religious doctrine it should be law, but they are far fewer than primitives on the secular side who think if it agrees with religious doctrine it must not be law.

There are so many stupidities involved in this particular line of reasoning that I simply don't know where to begin. Put it down to my primitive nature and my instinctive notion that the Romans actually had a few laws about murder and theft and such like (except when it came to Carthage and Christians in the good old early days) , and surely it agreed with their religious doctrines, but frankly, since I'm not keen on murder, I don't mind if they evoke a couple of dozen deities as the reason for the ban.

But quickly let's move on to the ineffable, because the ineffable is always so ... well, dammit, ineffable:

His next argument is that art and theology are particularly powerful because they dare admit the ineffable to which, because it is beyond reason or measurement, science must be blind. “The ineffable makes itself known in flashes too transient to contain and without the confines of reason. Art exists, however, to fix imprecisely the quickly fading after-images.” To the extent that beauty is immobilised by being defined, it, like God, will vanish from sight.

Ah whenever someone gets to the simplistic mindless notion that beauty = art = truth or whatever, we know that a remedial course in aesthetics 101 is required, though when it comes to music a little mathematics would also help. Usually these quaint folk never head off to talk about Shostakovich or Bartok or other modernists of an even more ungainly kind, but get stuck somewhere in a time warp with Bach or Mozart.

Of course we wouldn't dream of mentioning that S and B and quite a few others, in all kinds of aesthetic fields, be it literature or the plastic arts, busy working away at the arts, are or were in their day atheists.

It gets even more tricky and poignant if we break Godwin's Law and mention the role of music in Nazi concentration camps, or Hitler's love of Beethoven, not to mention Wagner. It's a truism, but it's also compelling, that after a hard day's work killing people, more refined Nazis would retreat to a quiet domestic life to enjoy their love of classical music.

So let's talk of chickens:

A chicken that listens to Mozart hears exactly what you do, but you hear more. Science can identify the difference between you and the chicken, but cannot isolate what you hear and the chicken doesn’t, which nonetheless clearly exists. The chicken (the atheist) “might challenge you to explain your higher apprehensions. Except in the language of beauty, to which he is deaf, you could not. Thus believing he had won the argument, he would crow.”

Actually there's not even the beginnings of an aesthetic argument here, since the point made about chickens and/or atheists is of such mind warping naivete, there's no point beginning. But let's just remember for starters that the language of art is not exclusively or only the language of beauty, it is the language of humanity, and so atheists have as much access to this language as others (or else how do atheists manage to create works of a sublime kind?)

Let's make a few notes. How about atheist Janacek and surely one of the most sublime bits of religious music ever written, the Glagolitic Mass? What about Delius, Debussy, Bizet (atheists), Holst (eastern mystic), Mahler (converting to Christiantiy was like putting on a new suit), Mozart (Freemason), Nielsen (agnostic veering to Platonic deist), Schubert (atheist) and so on and etc.

There are more things dreamed of in the philosophies and thinking of composers than are dreamed of by chickens, and usually this sort of argument is mounted by people who neither love nor understand music, or the other arts, and what they can be used to express, and how the arts can be deployed by diverse folk ranging from fundamentalist Christians to fundamentalist Communists ...

And golly we haven't even got on to the ecstatic mysticism produced by drugs or a good fuck.

Helprin doesn’t think this analogy will persuade an atheist about God, but might “counter the arrogant notion that the faith and astonishment of billions across cultures and time is an absurdity to be addressed with exasperated contempt”.

Actually the absurdity to be addressed with exasperated contempt is the attempt to ignore the history of religions and the activities of true believers determined to convert, or to keep people converted to their faiths. Sorry, but the Inquisition and the worst excesses of religion continue to be an absurdity to be addressed with exasperated contempt, and too many to list here.

He concludes: “What is at stake is more than a matter of civil liberties. One of the greatest gifts to man and among the most beautiful and comforting things in life is the occasional glimpse of an insubstantial light beyond the dark clouds of mortality. To catch sight of it demands apprehension beyond reason, and a facility exercised in the appreciation of beauty and what we imprecisely call the education of the spirit. An aggressive minority of some who cannot replicate this in themselves has come forward to attack what for others is the most luminous and self-evident of all truths, even as it is expressed in a variety of ways. They deny that this light can exist and demand agreement by force of negative reasoning. But no matter what their success in appropriating politics and governance to their purposes, belief that is self-evident to heart and mind cannot be extinguished any more readily than the sun.”

Which is about as nonsensical a set of non-sequiturs as any troll looking for a reaction in a forum of atheists might produce in a desire to stir the pot, get the juices flowing, and watch all the ants get agitated, especially those who can't quite glimpse a bearded dad up in the sky promising glimpses of of insubstantial light ... let alone substantial light. Damn these modern long life light bulbs ...

Barners loves to troll, and sure enough, as a result, he regularly scores high sets of comments. This little flurry of faith floozies produced a handsome 186 at time of writing.

It also produced The clown shoe still capers, an entertaining read by P Z Myers at Pharyngula, who gets agitated about the straw men and the chicken atheists set up for the fall by Barners and his free way with quotations:

These would be the atheists who claim that because the Bible says murder is a crime, murder can't possibly also be a secular law, and therefore atheists are free to kill people.

Of course, there are no such atheists that I know of, and that would be an utterly ridiculous and irrational position to take, which means that if that's what Helprin is arguing against, he's got to be stark chittering freakbar nuts. Which implies that he's arguing that the imposition of purely religious rules on secular society is reasonable — which makes him merely right-wing teabagging American nuts, which isn't really much better.

The other thing that amazes me is how dim you can be and still be a widely published defender of religion. Standards are pretty low, I guess, or desperation for anyone willing to praise vapor and lies is pretty high.

Barners of course, being cunning, presents this as just being about teaching the controversy, a handy technique for when you want to lead with creationists, intelligent design, tea baggers, Sarah Palin, truth, beauty and chickens. Here's how to do it:

Over to you. Do any of these arguments resonate? Is Helprin over-reacting? Is he right about the limits to reason, the profundity the “chicken” cannot hear, the extra dimension beauty brings? Is he right about the aggressive dogmatism of the new atheism? Where does he err?

Yes that's class trolling, trawling for feedback. And Barners attaches a consoling footnote:

* NOTE 1: By militant atheists I do not mean every atheist, only that small minority that insists their view is the only valid one.

So naturally I'll add my own:

* NOTE 1: By fuckwitted Christians I do not mean every Christian, only that small minority that insists their view is the only valid one. After all, Christians who embrace secularism atheism and watermelon Greens might get to run the country ...

And so bounteous thanks unto Barners for helping me recover from the election night party ...

Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution. (Eugene Delacroix)