Aniseed Balls

Many years ago, someone told me a sociology story. A researcher approaches three workers and asks what they are doing. The first is a Tory and answers "a fair day’s work for a fair day's pay". The second is a Socialist and answers "I'm having my labour exploited for profit by the capitalists". The third is a Christian and answers "I'm building a cathedral". I can't remember who told me this, but I woke up this morning thinking about how it reminds me of a famous witticism of Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, often quoted as "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse". He almost certainly never said it in that form. If he did say something like it, then the order would have been to emphasize Spanish, which he called the divine language: "... and Spanish to God". The translated order says more about the teller than it does about Charles, betraying an anti-Germanic prejudice by im

A friend of mine recently shared the following on Facebook: "Priests are like airplanes: one falls and it’s all over the news, but no one remembers those who are still flying". This is in danger of being read as a disgraceful and callous downplaying of the scale of abuse by Catholic priests. If we limit ourselves just to rape and sexual violence, and just to cases where people have managed to overcome the mental scars and been brave enough as adults and go through the trauma of describing what happened to them as children, and if we limit ourselves just to the cases that ended up being investigated, and just to the investigations that uncovered multiple abuse over a prolonged period, then the scale of the crimes is still too appalling for most to contemplate. Major abuse scandals have been uncovered in at least 200 towns and cities all over the world. Most of the abuse is of children between 11 and 14 years old, but with some as young as 3. To many, the most shockin

I have a problem with how the mirror self-recognition test is popularly portrayed as a test for self-awareness. I’ll leave aside the thorny issue of how exactly we might define self-awareness and tentatively assume that we could agree on enough for my present purpose. I’m talking about conscious introspective knowledge of self. Suppose an animal notices a foreign body on its skin and reacts to it. That doesn’t demonstrate self-awareness: even plants do that. Being able to interpret a surface reflection certainly shows a degree of sophistication, but it’s not evidence of self-awareness: the observer may not even be in the reflection! Some fish can interpret images refracted at the air-water interface well enough to hunt flying insects, and there is no obvious reason why reflection might not also be used, though I don’t know an example. So, reacting to a real object rather than its reflection doesn’t demonstrate self-awareness, and neither does reacting to an object on one’s ow

In the early 1990s I had an experience that I haven’t told many people about. I woke alone in the middle of the night and immediately felt a presence in the room. My heart was racing, my stomach churning, and I had those uncontrollable waves of goosebumps surging down my body that you only get with something awe inspiring. I expected it to subside but instead it worsened, and I became intimately aware that the presence was God and he was speaking to me. It wasn’t talking, but direct communication, and he was giving me a chance to accept his existence or die there and then. I was terrified, and my heart started racing more and more and I realized I might die of a heart attack. I was completely overwhelmed with the idea that this was a stark challenge to professed reason that I could only pass at the expense of my life, and my heart was bursting, and I seemed to be struggling for ages to regain rational control with no success, and … Well eventually I calmed down and lived to tell

We often hear Muslims of both sexes parroting that Muslim women are treated equally, and I have commented before about how this is at odds with much of what we see. It really does appear to be a veneer of disingenuous obfuscation. But sometimes the façade slips, and we see the true prejudices unmasked and undiluted. Last month the Hudson Islamic Centre in upstate New York had a high-profile ground breaking ceremony for a new mosque after years of praying in a basement. Local dignitaries were invited, speeches made, and the project unveiled. The entire community of mostly first-generation Bangladeshis had been invited. Unless you were female. One of the local Muslim women, Jabin Ahmed Ruhii, was frustrated enough to expose the farcical situation on social media, and a storm blew up. The president of the Islamic Centre, Abdul Hannan, said that no discrimination is allowed in their mosque or religious ceremonies. Are you ready for what he said next? He explained with no hint of em