Without a prayer
Today's utterly fascinating news is that Pope Jean-Paul II has added five new prayers to the Roman Catholic Rosary, a kind of institutionalised symptom of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The comparison is not meant to be facetious. Religion is a good thing to bond a community, and shared rituals enact that. Unfortunately, in a metaphysical sense, it is unconvincing, even repugnantly so. Scepticism, you know, is a curse as much as anything.
However, Secular Humanism is a website full of relief for the acursed. It defines itself as, in part, "a conviction that dogmas, ideologies and traditions, whether religious, political or social, must be weighed and tested by each individual and not simply accepted on faith." Even if I called him a fop the other day, Christopher Hitchens does talk sense about religion, as if he's weighed and tested things by himself. Mind you, he's wrongheaded about the War on Terror. This interview about his book on Mother Theresa (The Missionary Position) is a fine example of investigative journalism debunking one of the most profoundly misrepresented figures of the modern era. You won?t be able to hear someone use her name as byword for saintliness again without wincing. The latest update of the website also has a short essay introduction to Proust, which is a nice coincidence (see my current reading).
