Bubblehammerblog

Watching Christian broadcasting from the US on satellite makes me glad to have been born in a country that was never fully christianised. Christianity was always a minority concern in England, now more than ever - there are more Muslims here than practising Christians. In the neighbourhood where I grew up, in an industrial city in the North of England, there was only one family that went to church. Significantly, they were also the only family that owned a car. We used to watch them on Sunday mornings, getting into their gleaming Morris Traveller in their Sunday best, the two kids looking utterly miserable. It was assumed that, as the owners of a grocery shop, they went to church to distinguish themselves from the steelworkers, bus drivers & skivvies they lived amongst.

Even among English churchgoers the sort of religious enthusiasm you see in the huge congregations in American megachurches has been viewed with suspicion, probably because of the religious & political turmoil we experienced in the Civil War. The Church of England has never really been concerned with religious belief, being an instrument of class politics, ignored or despised by the bulk of the population. For much of it's existence it was 'the Tory Party at prayer'. In the later 20th Century, as a survival tactic, it developed the charming trait of becoming tolerant to the point of self-extinction, welcoming avowed atheists into the clergy, & turing a blind eye to vicars who delivered Buddhist sermons while bollock naked.

This explains why I've always found Christian observance slightly shocking & disturbing. I once found myself in Dublin early one bright Sunday morning, having spent the night showing some Irish mates how to drink pints of Guiness. While wondering why there were so many people about at that time of day, & discounting a football fixture, I realised that they were all herding into these great ugly church buildings. I'd never seen anything like this before, & the experience left me feeling so queasy that I had to find some open green space, & a park bench to sit on while I waited for the pubs to open.

American Christian broadcasts, though, bear no resemblence to any kind of religious practice I've ever experienced. Coming from a land of many beautiful but deserted & hushed churches, that smell of furniture wax & Brasso, it's startling to see these vast crowded astrodomes, where men in immaculate business suits & expensively coiffeured women strut & fret before the audience, microphone in hand, harranguing in bizzare intonations. It takes a while to work out they're speaking English.

It seems they worship an entity called Guard. Clearly, Guard & Jesus are the same entity. Both of them speak directly to these men in suits, in the manner of a robust & commonsensical bank manager, instructing them in the conduct of various activities, often involving grandiose construction projects for which cash must be raised. Obviously, Guard/Jesus is a bloke, & the Supreme Being at the same time. This is a religion without mystery.

My friend who is a Muslim scholar tells me this crude theology is blasphemous, & an example of what Muslims call shirk, or associating Allah with something created. As the Catholic theologian Paul Tillich has written:

"The concept of a 'Personal God' interfering with natural events, or being 'an independant cause of natural events', makes God a natural object beside others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless a being. This indeed is not only the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God."

As an atheist I have to agree.

These people would be just depressing or laughable were it not for the grotesque politics they've dreamed up, using the authority of the Bible to justify belligerence & destruction to the credulous. I watched one 'minister' telling his flock that climate change was a 'hoax', quoting scripture to justify the continued rape of the planet on the grounds that 'Guard wants you to be rich beyond your wildest dreams'. Another, calling himself 'Pastor' Somethingorother, stood before a map of the world, behind which were draped many imperial star-spangled-banners, expounding a biblical 'prophesy' that predicted the destruction of Russia, the expansion of Israel up to the Euphrates, the routing of the Satanist Muslims, the second coming of Jesus in Jerusalem, resulting in the conversion of the Jews, & the establishment of the Kingdom of Guard.

What's just as saddening is that some people claiming to be Muslims espouse similar nonsense. Some 'Neo-Taliban' are talking about a "Battle of the End of Time", also centred ultimately on Palestine, which will herald the coming of the Mahdi. See, http://www.counterpunch.org/shahzad10122008.htm

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(Placard held up last week on Wall Street)

Not much to read in the newspapers at the moment. So far as I'm concerned the swathes of print devoted the the supposed 'financial meltdown' might as well be written in Armenian. Three days into the 'crisis' I gave up buying papers. It's not that I'm ignorant or dismissive of economics, far from it, as a fierce young marxist I devoured whole shelves of books on political economy. No, I sensed as soon as the story began to unfold that nothing would come of all this blather. The superlatives that were being tossed from one news bulletin to the next failed to impress - worst figures for six years, British economy technically in recession, ten percent knocked off value of shares. All of which may be tough bananas for the banksters & their like, but what's happening here is just a periodic market adjustment, & is about as interesting as the office computer breaking down. A real crisis looms when the prices of necessities begin to rise quickly, & when the price of oil rockets. Oil has recently dropped from a high of $150 a barrel to just $80, & continues to fall.

Of course I don't have any shares, & I don't own any of the kind of property that might decrease in value. I don't use banks either. All the money I have, & there's a fair amount of it, is in cash, &
it's stuffed into the tubes of a big brass bed, where it's safe. If anyone attempts to take any of it
I'll kill or severely injure them, for which purpose a heavy wooden knout hangs from the bedframe, finely inscribed in kufic script with the 99 names of God.

The only sound reason to put money in a bank is if you want to borrow larger sums from them. I did this once to finance the purchase of a number of technically advanced television sets, & found them far too insistent, not to say pushy, when it came to getting their money back. In the end their impertinence became so intrusive I decided to permanently suspend repayment. A couple of times they even had the cheek to send people to knock on my door & ask for money. I had one of my employees provide them with an address in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia where I could be contacted, & I've heard nothing further from them. 'It is only by not paying our bills', said my friend Oscar Wilde, 'that we can hope to be remembered among the commercial classes.'

Taking refuge from the boring financial news in the serious papers, I turned to the gutter press for entertainment. I have to confess to what's probably some sort of intellectual perversion. I often enjoy, if that's the right word for it, experiencing the sensation of being appalled. Picking up a copy of the Daily Mail, The Mirror, or The Sun, I head straight for the full-page columnists - the shreiking Melanie Phillips, the odious Littlejohn, the gallows enchanted Peter Hitchens, or the pipsqueak-next-door Tony Parsons.

My deviant fix on Saturday came from Parsons. 'So many suffer for the grimy greed of a few', his piece was headed. He lays into the gluttonous, bonus-hungry spivs, who got the beleaguered British taxpayer into this mess. They are worse than criminals, he bleats. When do decent men & women, like himself, who actually work for a living, get to the point where they have given all they have to give? It was that Thatcher, who proclaimed that getting your hands dirty at work was a thing of the past, & the future was in financial speculation & writing columns for newspapers, who started it all. Casino capitalism & the culture of unfettered greed has brought us to this wretched point.

And just as you're thinking, 'hang on a bit, this fucker sounds like one of them outmoded socialists', he hits the button. An Asian immigrant, who lives in a £1 million seven bedroom Edwardian mansion, is claiming £4,000 a week in benefits from the British taxpayer. Outrageous, yes, but Tony honestly can't tell the difference between this leech & the city spivs who abuse decent, hardworking capitalism. Oh, Tony, appal me some more.

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A seemingly small point, but an important one. The first letter of the Arabic name for the nation of Iraq is an 'ayn'. It is not like an English 'i', as in lip, but since the Arabic letter is a voiced pharangeal fricative, a sound that is not heard in native English, the short 'i' is the nearest aproximation. Iraq.

Sarah Palin repeatedly said 'eye rack'. There is no such place. Nor is there anywhere called 'eye ran'.

Biden pronounced Pakistan the way most English many people do, so that it sounds like it's describing an Asian called Stan who runs a corner shop. It's a mark of respect to at least attempt to prounce the names of places where people live correctly.

Robert Fisk on Aljazeera this morning made the most important point. The debate was supposed to be about foreign policy, yet Palestine was barely mentioned. He said it looked like an agreement had be made by the paries beforehand not to bring up Palestine/Israel. Biden mentioned Hizbollah, but only to make the ridiculous claim that Hizbollah had been cleared out of Southern Lebanon by the Israeli invasion.

Why did Sarah keep winking at me? Margaret Thatcher did that & I find it disturbing.

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