When all else fails, remember to wear a good frock ...

(Above: kourambiethes to the left, tsourekia to the right, chow down)


The good news is that the pond is finally enjoying Easter. And by golly the Greeks do good lamb and tsourekia.

What's that you say? It all sounds a little relativist and arbitrary, the long absent god seeming to have chosen a couple of different dates for the resurrection? Couldn't She have worked out a decent calendar and a settled date?

Never mind, there was good listening this week, suitable for a Sunday meditation, when A. C. Grayling took down Rachael Kohn, as you can still hear here, by streaming or downloading.

The pond has often meditated on why Rachael Kohn and her program should exist, dedicated as it is to superstitions (from primal screams to primal speaking in tongues) - but couldn't come up with a single reason, until A.C. Grayling stepped up to the plate, or the mike, and took her down.

Kohn was so befuddled, her only chance to strike back was to make interstitial remarks where Grayling had no chance to respond. The program copped 74 comments, more than the fairies you can usually find at the bottom of Kohn's garden, with the usual sprinkling for and against, and the odd loon (the voice of god seeking more work).

You can guess Kohn's manner and style - by golly did she try to put in the fix - by the way the program is titled A Secular Inquisition.

Grayling sounded as much like Tomás de Torquemada as Kohn manages to sound like a rocket scientist, but that's the way a casual, unthinking smear works.

Now if she'd said disquisition ... but no, the program had to be headed Secular Inquisition, and so a conversation which sounded like it was conducted over tea and scones, and with Grayling infuriatingly in support of taking pleasure in the banality of life, is headed up with a piece of verbal abuse and a reference to the worst of Catholic excesses.

What next? Kohn interviews Dawkins and titles it My Life as a Secular Struggle, kraft durch freude?

It's a pity there's no transcript, so the gazumping of Kohn could be quoted at length, but as it is, Grayling's insights aren't worth a second listen, interrupted as they are frequently by the inane twittering of Kohn. So you're on your own ...

Meanwhile, over at the Sydney Anglicans, it turns out that the site is down this morning. Perhaps Anonymous, realising that the SAs posed a greater threat to the world than scientology, launched a DOS attack. Or perhaps it's just that the wretched make-over of the site continues to be buggered  (because She's eternally unhappy with the SAs and stuck a gremlin in the code?).

Hopefully when it does return you can join pond in rolling Jaffas down the aisle at Graham Stanton, who generated a laugh fest with A Youth parable, a mangled version of Luke which sees Jesus in Sydney and getting the parents to send off the kids for the weekend to be indoctrinated in the faith, in the way Mao liked to indoctrinate the masses.

As a result, the bloody parents enjoy a weekend at home, the lazy ne'er do well bludgers, possibly drinking coffee and exchanging chaste kisses, while the youth ministers suffer and toil without reward, except for one family:

Then one of them, when they saw that their children returned home strengthened in their faith and spurred on to live more boldly for Jesus, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. And they fell on their face in the presence of the youth minister and youth leaders, giving Jesus thanks for the kindness and love these leaders had shown them and their family.

Moral? Well yes inflated righteous expectations showing both paranoia and delusions of grandeur.

Next time you meet a Sydney Anglican, it seems you must remember to fall on your face and thank Jesus, and love the Ministers and fall all over them, and if you can only do it by imagining that they look a little like George Clooney or Justin Bieber or Carey Mulligan, why do it.

Now they were a family who were not regular members of the church. Then Jesus answered, “were not ten families served by these leaders? Where are the other nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except these outsiders?” And he said to them, “Rise and go on your way; your faith has saved you and your family”.

Talk about needy and demanding. Are all Sydney Anglicans, especially youth leaders, this needy and emotionally demanding, and so insecure that they feel they must be lavished with heaps of praise, such that they propose people should fall on their faces in the presence of said youth ministers and youth leaders, and give Jesus thanks for their unrelenting indoctrination of their children into backward, wayward superstitions, which will in due course cause suffering, most notably for women and gays?

Seems so ...

Meanwhile, the Catholic church seems to have run a tight fiscal ship. It managed to contain any cost blow out in relation to child abuse by paying out a tidy $30 million to some 600 victims of child abuse in Victoria, or so the ABC reports here in Catholic Church paid $30m to child abuse victims.

By the pond's wretched maths, that's an average 50k a victim, a tidy sum when you think about lives ruined and nightmares endured .... and it turns out that the police were totally wrong and the Catholic church totally right.

Seems it's not only the SAs that wants people to fall on their faces, or swallow any old load of tripe.

It's a funny old world, and what to make of a Catholic woman who'd want to be a Catholic priest? (San Ramon woman to be ordained priest, angering Catholic church). It's enough for the pond to resort to the Marxist thought that any club that would have the pond as a member ...

All up, it might be enough to make people rush off to read Julian Baggini's Atheists, please read my heathen manifesto.

But apart from a preference for paganism, the pond has absolutely no need of any kind of manifesto. The traditional churches have that sort of nonsense, and routinely void the terms and conditions and warranties, and trash the brand ...

Monty Python said it without Baggini's length or verbosity:

Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, try to be generous to people in your care whom you've abused, especially if you're a cold-hearted, bloody minded aggregator of enormous wealth and treasures in Rome, try not to sound like a pompous git demanding people fall on their faces in front of you in gratitude and supplication, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations. 

Easier said than done it seems, so what else is there?

And finally, here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises to annoy the censors and to hopefully spark some sort of controversy which it seems is the only way these days to get the jaded video-sated public off their fucking arses and back in the sodding cinema. Family entertainment bollocks! What they want is filth, people doing things to each other with chainsaws during tupperware parties, babysitters being stabbed with knitting needles by gay presidential candidates, vigilante groups strangling chickens, armed bands of theatre critics exterminating mutant goats - where's the fun in pictures? Oh well, there we are - here's the theme music. Goodnight.

Oh and do a little cross-dressing - nothing wrong with that:

And remember to wear a good frock: