Knew there was something else

That old duffer in the long white frock has been at it again, publishing a short (76 page) whinge about 'modern atheism' Perhaps something was lost in translation. What's right with out-dated, out-moded, old-fashioned atheism?

He is a199 years old so one must make allowances but timing is everything and his assertion that atheism had led to some of the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice ever known" looked odd coming as it did in the same week the Sudanese Islamic Tyranny banged up a benighted English teacher for allowing her pupils to give a teddy bear the same name as most of the boys in the country.

I know, I know

As a MAHList I should be above these things. I can't help myself. This morning I am frankly revelling in the discomfiture of Peter Jensen and his ilk who've been outmanoeuvred in the struggle for the right to ordain female bishops in the Aussie anglican church. Never mind the religion feel the emancipation.

Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen, whose diocese led the case against women bishops, said he was disappointed by the decision.

"While I respect the judicial procedures which have led to this result I am disappointed that the matter has now been resolved in this way," Dr Jensen said.

"Those who are opposed to this development base their objection on conscientious grounds as a matter of biblical principle. "

The innovation will inevitably create ongoing difficulties around the church for decades to come."

So that's decades of fun for on-lookers; in the history of slow train wrecks this could be one of the slowest on record.

I don't want to be a MAHList any more

I've rather boxed myself into a corner with this one. An athiest being someone who "doesn't believe in god" at least in the common parlance must accept the existence of the thing he or she 'doesn't believe in' or that is roughly the line of country I've been dragging myself across over the course of the past 48 hours. A more accurate description of my position would be that I'm a person who believes in the non-existence of a supernatural entity, requires not such a concept to explain the world about me however immense and complex it might be. This rational state has been termed nontheism.

The problem is that I can't be a MNHList: I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to pronounce that. Shit

Stop it!

Fully 80% of page FOUR (4) of today's Times is given over to coverage of a row that has broken out at Oxford University. Of that material about two thirds is a straight reporting piece written jointly by Ruth Guildhall and John O'Leary, while the remaining third is a commentary piece by Ruth Gledhill alone.

The story is not one of politicking in the customary Oxford sense, or any one of the usual fillers always on standby for deployment during slow news weeks: admissions (over-representation of posh kids from Public School among student intake), sexual misadventure, substance abuse, admissions (under-representation of un-posh kids with the same grades as posh kids but emerging from a comprehensive located in one or other inner city slum district), undergraduate hi-jinx, falling academic standards, admissions (the scandal of bias in the interview process which either plays to the advantages of posh kids or results in over compensation for impoverished backgrounds), plagiarism, under-funding, commercialisation, Americanisation and, er, admissions (over reliance on the ability to spell, construct grammatically correct sentences and count as indicators of make the most of a tax payer subsidised stint at university) .

What we get, instead, is column inch after column inch given over a review into the Seven Pillars of Ignorance at Oxford which are its seven christian private halls. Rather puzzlingly the article describes them thus: "two Anglican, one Baptist and three Roman Catholic", though by my calculation St Benet's (benedictine/premonstratensian*), Blackfriars (dominican), Campion Hall (essentially jesuitical) and Greyfriars (capuchin) makes, um, FOUR. What have I missed? Have the Jjesuits given up entirely on God?

The fact that the piece is an opportunity for Gledhill ( who should more accurately be described as the Times Religious Correspondent) to take an arch swipe at those who are concerned by the state of play in these Halls and particularly what is going on at Wycliffe (those who've written a letter of concern about developments have indulged in "an unprecedented breach of normal academic protocol") constitutes aggravating circumstances; the real problem is the grotesque prominence given to hocum, superstition and the intellectualising of fairy tales in the first place.

The piece by Gledhill actually contains the following sentence: "It is an indication that the atheistic creed, preached by dons such as Richard Dawkins, is in the ascendancy." That O'Leary might have been the author of that outrageously sly dig is irrelevant, since Gledhill puts her name to the entire article.

The Nigerians and the Jenson Brothers must be rubbing their hands in glee, given the ability of their type to see advantage in every set back. Now, if they'd only indulge themselves in the privacy of their own homes. The clarion call by Carol Sarler to rid the pages of our print media and the airways of an excessive attention to matters 'religious' was met with a furious response and it seems the Times has taken the views of one side in that debate to heart - 80% of page 4.

Mind your language

Under a MAHLism based oligarchy expressions such as Where Angels Fear to Tread might result in a translation to Butlins-style re-education camp.

Also, it is probably true that the early history of MAHLism can be told, as adherents split into Dawkinsians and Hitchinsians. The outcome is all too predictable, with split after split resulting in a tawdry and diverse range of factions squabbling amongst themselves and becoming enmeshed in a web of arguments over the evidence for the non-existence of God, the number of angels being able to dance on a pin head being zilch, whether early leadership of the Dawkinsian movement had any legitimacy, which scholarly tomes are canonical and which are to be filed in the fiction section or even proscibed (and so forth and so on).

How sad.

Where angels fear to tread

That's usually where you'll find me blundering about like a baby elephant.

So rather late in the day I've decided to investigate those who went before me in adopting the acronym MAHL, and the word if it exists. Those I've unearthed, in Google-Order, include:

• mahl magazine, which I must confess I spent no time whatsoever looking into. On that basis my impression is that the people behind it are likely to very skinny girls in smock tops and boys with exotic-shaped bits of beard about the jaw line, plus a couple of older men in artistic spectacles;
  
• there are, of course, the mahl stick and the mahl bridge - available at all good suppliers of artists' requisites. ;
  
• there's also the Mid-Atlantic Hockey League, which if it sounds more interesting than this can be reached here;
  
• it is a surname*
  
• a language spoken by the half-dozen or so inhabitants of Minicoy Island, India. It is a variant of the official language of the Maldives (and it is actually spoken by about 15-20,ooo people). It is also sometimes refered to as Mahal.
  
• a place in Texas, USA**, Latitude 31.7336, Longitude -94.6761, Altitude (feet) 449
  
• it stands for Maastricht Aachen Hasselt Liège (major cities of the Meuse-Rhine)
  
• and Master of Arts in Hebrew Literature/Letters
  
• and Midland Amateur Hockey League (Midland, Michigan)
  
• it is also the stock code on the Stockholm (that's Sweden, ok?) bourse for a company called AB MÄHLER & SÖNER, producers of "snow clearance equipments for truck, wheel loader, and road grader." It was founded in 1895 and is based in Rosson, Sweden. (This is not investment advice, ok.)
  
• there is the MAHL method, which is something brain-achingly science-ish
  
• it is the ID for a weather station at Horseshoe Lake in Arizona, USA** at LATITUDE: 33.98, LONGITUDE: -111.71, ELEVATION: 2001 ft
  
• it is the name or partial name of sundry sole practices and partnerships (an inevitable consequence of it being a surname and some people of that name becoming doctors*
  
• Milton Adult Hockey league: "of Miltonians, by Miltonians, for Miltonians" or something very like that

Finally, the search produced the web pages for the Mercian Order of St.George about which I could unearth little besides the self-descriptory phrase "an Eclectic Unitarian Fraternity". You can read a little more here.

* Doctors are on the whole a pretty dedicated bunch of self-publicists who never knowingly under sell themselves and have taken to the internet as a marketing tool like a very large flock of particularly agressive ducks.

** Does this grate? Redundancy always does.

Now scanning that lot I have to concluded that I got off lightly. Even the Mercians might be god botherers but they're hardly offensive in their belief-set or approach. The rest are largely either hockey nuts or derived from a surname.

So I think that's that. It is safe to describe myself as a Militant Atheist Humanist Libertarian.

I'm a WHAT?

Hate was, of course, the wrong word. What most English in my experience feel towards the Welsh is something less inaccurately labelled contempt. I used the word Hate, possibly with the fat that the Slug is a Taff Slug in mind. And of course he is the exception that proves the rule (that is to say the rule about it being contempt rather than hatred).

While I'm underlining my credentials as a non-racialist let me say this on a not entirely unrelated matter.

Three million cheers and equally many congratulations must go the Japanese for their showing in today's Rugby match. This will of course be interpreted as a typically obnoxious piece of bullying arrogance from a bullying arrogant Aussie - but notwithstanding the brutal final score line, the Nips apparently acquitted themselves quite magnificently particularly during the first half. I didn't see the match or listen to it; my impression is based only on the BBC on-line coverage of the match which presumably is based on a report of the match filed by someone who was in touch with some one who was somewhere in Europe when the match was taking place. So that's authoritative, right?

Anyway, well done, Tojo.

And the plucky kiwis also had a quite solid win over whoever they were playing. So well done to them too.

The English, on the other hand, can celebrate not one but THREE victories at international level, today. What a tremendous hat trick that is chaps. Well done! Romping to victory in the match and the Best Of series against solid opposition in the form of India is splendid. To have ground the Red Sea Pedestrians (as the Slug described them) into the turf despite Michael Owen's best efforts to keep them in the tie is a Grand effort! A veil had best be drawn over the rather patchy performance against the USA in the World Cup. A Win's A Win, as they say. Never mind the quality feel the, er, remaining in contention.

Today's piece on hate came courtesy of the deeply peculiar 'Englishman' Graeme Le Saux, a man never knowingly found to have forked out on a copy of The Sun, and once rumoured (by pretty much all and sundry) to have no interest whatsoever in that august journal's Page Three Stunna du Jour.

For that sarong and frilly pantie wearing pal of the Sir Elton John's to casually diss a fellow player in the most pejorative terms at his disposal is one thing; that he does not have the balls - be they of gold or base metal, to say "All is fair in love and war, and I routinely call anyone who can string a coherent sentence together a faggot" is quite another matter. I suspect strongly that Golden Balls views on those few footballers who don't read at the Sun/Mirror end of the journalistic market are pretty commonplace, not excluding among those who actually work in the mass media.

After that, and one or two other things that have happened to cross my path today I have decided to become a Militant Atheist Humanist Libertarian. I've tried (a bit) to come up with some alternative combination or alternative words that would provide me with a snappy acronym and failed. Perhaps if I hadn't had a couple of bottles of Hobgoblin already.... Anyway

So now I'm a MAHL, a strangulated creature stranded somewhere mid-Atlantic (between the British and American pronunciations of that dangerous little tyke of a word - m.a.l.l.).

To the two female members of staff who've announced that they've progressed in their "faith" to the point where they must wear some garment, the name for which they have I've forgotten but which seems to approximate to what you or I would call a Head Scarf, because "only their husbands should see their hair"... I say this:

You go right ahead girls. You've been going up to London and immersing yourselves ever deeper in your "faith" and if wearing a head scarf is where this has led you so be it, though I challenge you to show me where in the Koran or the Hadith the particular garment is stipulated, and if not, what is actually required of you beyond dressing modestly - an imprecation surely open to the widest imaginable interpretation and as manifested anywhere and everywhere largely reflecting a cultural imperative.

But let me also say this. The minute you stray beyond what is strictly demanded of you by your "faith" and lapse into an expression of what would more honestly be described as the culture your parents brought to this country with them when they migrated, I will absolutely assert my right to express my culture, in whatever way I interpret that.

OK?

Probably not, but I've been imbibing, and that probably goes a long way to proving your point and, as it happens, mine also.

Good night.