cloudsoup

I support the January 18th Wikipedia blackout to protest SOPA and PIPA. Show your support here http://tinyurl.com/7vq4o8g

Everyone witter on about fundamentalist Christians in the US and how weird Santorum is, or how terribly much we liked Tim Minchin and let's all post on Facebook how awful it was that the BBC didn't broadcast that song.

Meanwhile in the real world…

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My favourite Onion story:

Archaeological Dig Uncovers Ancient Race Of Skeleton People

AL JIZAH, EGYPT—A team of British and Egyptian archaeologists made a stunning discovery Monday, unearthing several intact specimens of "skeleton people"—skinless, organless humans who popula…

Nothing sums up the demented nature of the modern left better than a soi-disant socialist party that supports taxing janitors in Leeds to give money to millionaire luvvies in London, so they can make films about how folk in Yorkshire are ignorant bigots

- House Of Dumb (http://goo.gl/7dtWF)

Car park

Yorkshire lane

Spent yesterday afternoon rooting an Android phone belonging to a friend. Now I know more than I wanted to about phones.

Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion is selling http://goo.gl/21LyL and (atheist) philosopher Julian Baggini tries praying. I sense a disturbance in the force…

Perhaps we can begin to move away from the bizarre spectacle of otherwise perfectly sensible journalists (Hitchens) or Zoologists (Dawkins) spending valuable time either talking at the brick walls of fundamentalism or smugly accepting applause from a crowd of acolytes. Perhaps we can stop treating religion as if its empirical claims had to be endlessly debated; and see instead if there's anything of use left in them.

Baggini writes:

…practices that are created ex nihilo can fail to have the same purchase as those which have a long history and are validated by tradition and doctrine. I once spoke about this and after the talk a woman came up to me and explained how she had tried to instigate a secular grace before her family meals. This is a kind of prayer I feel is particularly valuable. In a world of waste and taken-for-granted western plenty, to remind ourselves of our good fortune before a meal seems to me morally right. The trouble was that as an invented ritual, it seemed artificial, whimsical. In the end, she gave up

The social reality of faith and its manifestations provided, for so long, a means of transmitting and reinforcing ethical norms. It's simply not sufficient for atheists and humanists to pretend that the only argument to have is one about a conjuring trick with bones. There is a something that needs replacing.

Larkin ponders the question in his poem, Church Going, imagining a future when nobody knows or remembers the purpose of churches and wondering if they'll still retain some sense of being special.

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

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http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/church-going/

You don't have to be religious to pray … but it helps

Julian Baggini: Heathen's progress: Religious rituals can provide real benefits, but try to separate them from the beliefs and they lose their potency and grip

Μηνιν αϜειδε Θεά Πηληϊαδεω Αχιλῆος

Thinking of the recent fuss about US soldiers abusing corpses I was reminded of the (admittedly dishonourable) conduct of Achilles, vengefully dragging Hector's corpse behind his chariot in the dust of the plain of Scamander. Such things have been with us for a long time.

Then, happier thought, I was reminded of the lecture, Heroes of Homer's Illiad and the Warror Code, by the superlative Marsh McCall (available as a free podcast, highly recommended). His explanation of the very first line of The Illiad is wonderful:

Μηνιν αϜειδε Θεά Πηληϊαδεω Αχιλῆος

transliterated,

Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achileos

literally,

Wrath sing oh goddess of the son of Peleus Achilles

but that word order, the word order in Ancient Greek, can't be rendered and make sense in English – you have to begin with the imperative, 'Sing'. In Latimer's translation, for instance

Sing, goddes, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus

In the highly inflected Ancient Greek the poem's very first word could be the theme of the entire poem:

Wrath

So even the best translation doesn't begin to do justice to the poetic brilliance of Homer, using as the first word the the word that will thrust through the whole epic.

As Marsh says: "Isn't that great".

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