The Word Cloud

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Tihs r a gamy taht evrywunz can playing! U do teh furstest bit ov a kwote or a cachfrase or a provurb or sumfink and teh neckst playa r finsh it an do anuvva wun. I startz u of:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though . . .

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The Lost Gospels

Amarantha and others have been debating early church history on the ‘Science and Religion’ thread which made me think maybe I should resuscitate a blog I’d intended posting some time ago. The situation is that back in September I recorded a ninety minute documentary by (Rev) Peter Owen Jones in which he looked at the things he was never taught in Theological College. He arranged these under various headings, beginning with an overview of what was lost.

Apparently, it was Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria who compiled the ‘canonical’ list of 27 New Testament ‘books’ in the fourth century. A corollary of this was that over fifteen Gospels, about fifty other texts referring to Jesus, and fifty or so Apocalypses became disapproved and, hence, banned. And so they disappeared – until recent times.

Gnostic Texts

In December 1945 a cache of papyrus texts was discovered (and nearly destroyed) by goat herds at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Amongst these was the Gospel of Thomas, not a biographical text like the canonical gospels but a collection of the sayings of Jesus. These have a Zen-like elusiveness which demands insight (or ‘gnosis’) from the reader and hence makes them inaccessible to some outlooks. For example: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ This elusiveness did not fit with the salvation-for-all message of the early church fathers, so the Gospel of Thomas became lost. (Indeed in A.D. 447 Pope Leo ordered all gnostic texts to be ‘burnt with fire’.)

Mary Magdalene

Another Nag Hammadi text is the Gospel of Philip which gives prominence to Mary Magdalene. For instance; ‘The Saviour loved her more than the other disciples’ – and – ‘He kissed her many times on the...’ The missing word, alas, was eaten by ants during the centuries when the gospel lay hidden in its cave, but the best guess based on analysis of Coptic grammar would be ‘mouth’. Whatever the word, though, we have something pretty explosive here. It would appear that Mary Magdalene was more important to Jesus than was Peter, on whom the whole edifice of male-dominated Christianity became built. This impression is strengthened by looking at another missing gospel. After 1897 British archaeologists, excavating ancient rubbish dumps around the Egyptian town of Oxyrinthus, found portions of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. In this Mary conveys her understanding of Jesus’s teachings – before and after his death – to the other disciples, which once again emphasises her greater importance. These two gospels suggest a strong role for women in the early church, an impression that Peter Owen Jones bolstered by taking us into the Catacomb of Priscilla beneath Rome, where frescoes in the ‘Greek Chapel’ show women taking prominent parts in Christian rituals.

The Nature of Jesus

Owen Jones then moved on to other Lost Gospels, for instance the Gospel of Peter, found in Egypt in 1886 by French archaeologists. In this Jesus does not actually die on the cross because he is entirely divine and therefore incapable of death – or even of suffering. Hence his passion is an illusion. This outlook contrasts with that found in the Gospel of the Ebionites where Jesus is entirely human and plays host to the divine Christ spirit only after his baptism in the Jordan. This gospel is completely lost and we only know about it because of the vigorous written opposition it aroused.

The Nature of God

The Ebionites emphasised the Jewishness of their faith, whereas Marcion entirely rejected it. In The Antitheses Marcion contrasts Old Testament texts with Jesus texts and decides they are so radically different they must involve different gods. For instance, where Leviticus forbids the touching of lepers, Jesus touches a leper to heal him. Because of examples like this, Marcion decides the god of Jesus was previously unknown to us – ‘a Stranger God’ – who gives love and forgiveness and saves us from the vengeful god of the Old Testament. Following the line of his logic, Marcion drew up a list of texts, entirely excluding the Old Testament and including only the Gospel of Luke and ten letters by Paul. However, the response from his fellow churchmen was to excommunicate him.

Choosing the Canon

Nonetheless, Marcion’s list set a precedent, and eventually we ended up with the canonical list of 27 approved texts. How were they decided upon? Largely in response to Roman policy, is the answer. First of all, the Romans martyred so many Christians that it became logical for Christians to favour those gospels which emphasised Christ’s passion and death. (After all, Gnostic riddles would not give much consolation to the bereaved and the persecuted – which may be why the less persecuted Egyptian Christians retained more loyalty to those texts, burying them when ordered to burn them). Secondly, when Constantine converted in 312 A.D. he wanted a unified Christianity to help unify his fragmented empire. Therefore he and his successors supported those leaders who, like Athanasius, wanted to exclude such controversial texts as the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

Final thought from Gerry

Early Christianity sounds to me very much like a New Age religion – lots of interesting and exciting ideas, some weird, some fascinating, some challenging, some uplifting. In this respect it sounds a little bit like the present New Age buffet. We don’t have the disadvantage of Romans messing things up nowadays, but give us time. Soon we’ll have some power hungry dictators telling us which ideas we are allowed to accept and practise. And if we go for anything different, well, get ready to be burnt!

 

We're always being told about the importance of that first sentence. So, I thought it might be interesting to challenge you guys to come up with a intriguing first sentence (for a as yet nonexistent novel) that would make people want to read on. Here's a example:

I should have stayed indoors that night, when the Sick Rain terrorised the world; now, I stare down at the Thing in the toilet and wonder how I survived its agonal birth.

You Know You’re A Writer When...

1. You’ve run out of file colours to keep all the hand-written pages of different works

2. Your default template setting in Word is double-spaced Times Roman 12pt.

3. Whilst reading another writer’s work, you find yourself thinking, ‘Too much tell, not enough show’

4. Credit card companies reject you purely on the grounds that you don’t have a fixed annual salary

5. You’ve found yourself using the word procrastination more and more

6. You have over 40 different versions of a document with the same title-beginning: .docs, .txts, edit(7), synopses, opening chapters...

7. Whilst editing, you’ve suddenly thought, ‘Ooh, those socks need pairing’

8. You have a drawer that just contains pens.  Some of them stolen

9. Battling with your MS for the past two years isn’t such a conversation stopper

10. Your computer’s Writing directory actually contains more files than your Funnies directory

11. You think you’ve invented a new genre of fiction

12. You find yourself circling words that end –ly in your kids’ homework

13. You’ve stared at a computer screen for more than an hour without actually adding anything

14. Publishing houses have somehow transformed from those great places that print books into fortresses that must be stormed

15. Introduced to an arrogant journalist, a little voice in the back of your mind can’t help piping up, ‘Pfft, not a real writer, then...’

16. A rejection doesn’t make you utterly depressed for a week anymore

17. You cut a lot of slack to a rubbish film because the central character is a writer

18. You’re the only person you know who uses the word conducive in everyday speech

19. Just for a moment there, you thought one of your characters was a real person

20. You know what an unsolicited submission is

21. Quoting someone in an email to a friend, you pause to consider whether to use double speech marks or single

22. You found yourself nodding and smiling at most of these


Please add more of your own...

Let me tell you about Harry. Not our Harry Bingham. Another Harry entirely. And let me assure you this is true to the best of my knowledge. Harry is a chap I met in Bedfordshire one afternoon at a show who describes himself on his business card as a writer and entrepreneur. Harry is a great chap but entrepreneur he ain’t. Well not a successful one in any event.

Or is he? I bumped into Harry again a month or so back and got an update.

At the Getting Published Day last Saturday one common theme across all of the speakers was that the book business is just that. A business. An industry. It is necessary to make a profit, necessary to achieve sales at a meaningful level. It was mentioned that a new book by a debutant author might get around £20,000 spent on launch and promotion. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a decent sum and I think we would all miss it if it vanished from our savings, but I’m equally sure that a new book by, let’s say Salman Rushdie, would receive rather more up front investment. But I also expect that we would all acknowledge that anything with that name on the front cover, regardless of it’s being crap, if it were so (not that I express such an opinion here or ever have) if well placed on the tables and shelves in shops, advertised in public pages and reviewed – positively - on all the right programmes would sell well. All it takes is money.

Let’s get back to Harry. Harry wrote a book. I know he’ll forgive me for saying this, but it wasn’t that good. Certainly well written for the material, but not a best seller proposition. He wrote a small book of tales about horses that had been circulating in his family and his neighbourhood for years. Harry isn’t really an entrepreneur, he is a farmer.

Now, straight away you can see that no agent or publisher is going to do anything with this except at best send a politely worded rejection. Which is what Harry found happened when he tried.

But farmers are made of stern stuff in Bedfordshire. Harry spent a few bob and printed it himself. He got himself a couple of rural flavoured endorsements, one from an actor off The Archers and another rural ish literary type. He got features on the local radio and national radio (if we may so describe Farming Today). He set up his web site and he does book signings at various events.

In a blog the other day linked from this site a certain Crabbit Old Bat confirmed that an author who is doing well may receive 10% of the face price from their book when it sells. I imagine the margin may drop for debutants, but hold that number.

Harry has sold around 1,200 copies of his 2,000 print run at full price and is now discounting the rest.

I reckon the publishing business would rather look down on these figures with disdain. But let’s look at this from a different angle. C.O.B confirms that 10% return to author is normal for the writer. I conservatively estimate that after various costs Harry is getting 80% return. So pro rata adjustment to his sales of 1,200 makes that an equivalent of 9,600. Not earth shattering, but I’m sure they’ve had worse. Also he is discounting to move his remainders after sales of 60% at full price. Again, not a disaster. Not wonderful either, of course. But we are talking about a cheaply printed collection of quaint stories about rural folk and their horses here.

Now, from a business standpoint I call that, if not a success (and I am tempted to call it one) then it certainly isn’t a failure. Harry has shown a decent profit. But it hasn’t made a penny for the publishers or agents, has it?

Now consider Jason. I mentioned Jason a few weeks ago in another of my errant blogs. Jason writes graphic novels. These aren’t comics. They are dark and dangerous stories in the form of graphic novels. Jason is very very good indeed. He does all his own artwork by hand, he’s a talented artist and wants to work that way. He employs a printer to his own standards and specification, which is high and runs the whole show with a bit of help from his girlfriend, whilst holding down a day job.

Jason has won awards and has genuinely made it to being reviewed on national television. Unlike Harry with his horse tales, Jason is a real player (no disrespect Harry) and sells in respectable quantity. I don’t know for sure why he chose to go it by himself although having chatted with him at length I think it has much to do with production quality. Jason is a star in my eyes.

Neither of them has to carry the overhead that comes from agents and publishers. Obviously agents and publishers have the right to run their businesses how they wish and also to be paid for what they do. But when what they do is take on what they confirm to be under 0.1% of submissions, whilst continuing to pour money into work product they haven’t yet seen from names they know will sell regardless, then they surely can’t blame that other 99.9% of hopefuls if they choose another way. A way which technology is making increasingly practical.

I don’t believe that the 99.9% of aspiring writers that submit proposals and that don’t make it simply aren’t ready, or aren’t good enough. Not all of them, not by a long way. Too much complete crap gets put on the shelf for me to believe that. Too much work I’ve seen just around here isn’t considered when it can be so much better than that tells me otherwise.

It’s a business and the business is about making money, not producing literature. The safe route of another by “X” will sell sufficiently to keep us in business is best for business. This may be massively against the personal preference of so many individuals in these organisations, but companies are like that, as I will argue in another little essay, probably later this week if I get time.

It has been said that self publishers will find out how many friends they have by how many books they sell. Well, Harry is a great fellow, but he doesn’t have 1,200 friends and that level of sales makes business sense the way he did it. And Jason? Watch out for him.

I think that the mainstream publishing industry should stop looking down at self publishing and perhaps consider its position with a bit more care. I think some areas are less dismissive than others, but overall it remains disdainful. There are too many good writers out there who can’t smash through the ceiling that might go that route.  And there are enough of them in that potential group that are genuinely good enough that if they do that they might just capsize the ship. Just as so many musicians have done by going their own way.

I’m not suggesting that I have said anything unique here. Probably there are many that have already formed such views, maybe even expressed them. I just wanted to write it down for myself. If I have bored you, I apologise. I may bore you with another instalment later.

 

For a very long time, it was assumed that the Universe had always existed, and always would (Steady State Theory). Then along came the Big Bang Theory, with the rather depressing implication that the Universe will one day end, either in a Big Crunch, or in Heat Death. Which kind of Universe would you rather live in?

SST is simpler than BBT, so it has Occam's Razor on its side. The only real problem with a Steady State Universe is that it has to be infinite, otherwise it would collapse. That would mean that wherever you looked in the sky, you'd be looking at a star, however distant, so the entire sky would be as bright as the sun (even interstellar dust clouds would heat up to incandescence). But there could be an answer to this problem.

The direct evidence for the BBT is:
1) The red-shift of light from distant stars (Doppler effect caused by the expansion of the Universe), and
2) The cosmic microwave background (supposedly leftover energy from the Bang).

But what if these effects were caused by something else?

Take the red-shift of distant stars. Could that be caused by something other than the Doppler effect? Consider this analogy:

You have a long, narrow lake. The surface is perfectly flat and calm. You push a canoe out from the shore. It glides for a long way before friction brings it to a stop.
Now there's a thunderstorm happening at the far end of the lake. The air at our end of the lake is still calm, but the water's surface is choppy with waves caused by the storm at the far end. Again we push the canoe out. What happens? You'd find it would go only a short distance before coming to a stop.

You'll have heard of the 'rubber sheet' analogy used to explain gravity, representing 3-dimensional space by removing one dimension to make a 2-dimensional surface. Let's do the same, only this time the analogous surface is that of our lake, rather than a rubber sheet. Space isn't empty. There's a thing called the vacuum (or zero-point energy) field. Space seethes with quantum fluctuations which occasionally throw up virtual particles (particle-antiparticle pairs). In our analogy, this would be like two waves crashing together hard enough to throw up a drop of water, and also to gloop down a bubble of air. If we can measure the rate of virtual particle emissions, we should be able to determine exactly how 'choppy' space is.
Now consider our canoe as representing a photon travelling through space. Would the choppiness of the vacuum field produce a drag effect analogous to the drag of the waves which slows the canoe? It must be possible to model this, but I don't have the math skills! If the vacuum field does exert a drag on the photon, it couldn't lose kinetic energy by slowing down - it has to travel at the speed of light - but it could lose KE by red-shifting ( a photon's KE is determined by its wavelength). If, when modelled, the vacuum field drag produced the right amount of red-shift, this would imply that the Universe is not really expanding. Moreover, it would take care of the problem with the SST because the light from distant stars would be red-shifted, producing the cosmic microwave background.

If some boffin with awesome math skills were to model the effect of vacuum field turbulence on photons, and found that it did indeed produce the right amount of red-shift, there would be no need for a Big Bang, and we would be living in a Steady State Universe. Wouldn't that be nice?

But, anyway, never mind the technical details. What I'm really interested in is the psychological implications of the two theories.
With Big bang, we live in a Universe which is ultimately doomed, and therefore pointless. Our heads may know that the end won't come for many billions of years, but our hearts still say "What's the point if it's all gonna come to nothing in the end?"
With Steady State, we know we have eternity ahead of us, which gives our actions significance (even if it's illusory). The things we do could have consequences that would go on forever, even though we ourselves won't.
Sure, the Sun will die one day, but we could colonise the galaxy. And by the time the galaxy dies, we could have the technology to travel to others. But if the Universe is gonna die, is it ultimately worth making the effort?
In common-sense terms, it may not really make any difference, but spiritually? Isn't the Big bang Universe kinda like a dark cloud hanging over everything?

Has the BBT affected us collectively on some pre-conscious level?

Apologies if this short post on a critically important subject is in any way inappropriate. 

Hopefully, you are all following the NotW exposé. (Ok, the connection to here is tenuous but journalists are writers too.)

I worked at NI in Wapping for three years in the early 90s. Bungs and corruption were rife in that organisation then, probably always have been and clearly are to this day. This is not at all in the 'public interest'. 

We will, hopefully, see the Murdoch minions forced to air their dirty washing in public over the next few days or weeks - it should be a breeze for them, they've had plenty of practice airing other people's dirty washing.

Murdoch is currently attempting a take-over of BSkyB. This will extend his wide influence over our newspapers into TV broadcasting. The government were to decide on this takeover tomorrow, though I suspect that decision will be delayed under the circumstances.

We have an opportunity to prevent that take-over now. At least until a proper enquiry has been conducted over these recent claims. In any fair society the results should prevent the take-over indefinitely. But in this case you never know. Murdoch has powerful allies, from the PM down. He's got away with some outrageous stuff in the past and could possibly swing even this.

Please take a moment to add your name to the petition at 38 Degrees https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/murdoch-deal-petition and lend your weight to the public gound-swell of disgust and mistrust. There is a potential tipping point here. Take your opportunity to contribute.

Passionate rant over.

Science and Religion

Martin Rees – President of the Royal Society, Astronomer Royal, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge – has been doing the Reith Lectures on Radio 4. Here’s part of what he said this Tuesday:

“Imagine ants crawling around on a large sheet of paper (their two-dimensional ‘universe’). They would be unaware of a similar sheet that’s parallel to it. Likewise there could be another universe (with 3-dimensional space, like ours) less than a millimetre away, but we would be oblivious to it if that millimetre were measured in a fourth spatial dimension, while we are imprisoned in just three.”

Later on, when asked “Can science aim to understand religion”, he replied “I take the view that science and religion can and should coexist.” He went on to comment that although Richard Dawkins on his website calls him “a compliant Quisling” he remains “entirely unapologetic at being a compliant Quisling.”

This seems to me entirely proper. If there can be another universe a millimetre away, that leaves plenty of room for angels to dance on the heads of pins if they really wish.

There again we don’t need another universe. There’s plenty of dark matter in this one. Statistically, the room you are in right now should be packed from floor to ceiling with dark matter (it should outnumber baryonic matter – our sort – by about 7 or 8 to one [the estimates vary]). It may consist of dark matter sideboards, computer tables, filing cabinets and the like – but I doubt it. More excitingly, there might be platoons of goodies (a.k.a. angels/devas etc) fighting squads of baddies (a.k.a. demons/asuras etc). Or, sadly but more credibly, we just can’t imagine what’s going on.

And, of course, don’t forget about dark energy (making up about 70% of our universe [26% or so being dark matter and only 4% or so being baryonic matter – our sort]). What does dark mean? Hidden, undetected, occult – all genuine synonyms. So if you want to be controversial you have some reason for calling our universe 96% occult. Martin Rees’s extra universes must, of course, be entirely occult.

So, in conclusion, it seems crackers to use science to attack religion - it is no position to know. On the other hand, it cannot support religion either – only leave room for it, which is what Martin Rees does.

Fair comment?