Delighted by the news that 'the world's first death magazine' is staging a resurrection. Eulogy was published last summer but appeared to die after its very first issue. A rumour grew that certain persons behind the title imagined that writers get up in the morning and say to themselves: 'Who can I give something for nothing to today?' I say no more, suffice that I was paid handsomely by the title for my two pieces after only a minimum of energy expenditure post-publication.
Its personable and clever editor Alfred Tong has probably suffered many a long night since the first launch and subsequent travails; but here he is, back again, with a wonderful new website. His editor's letter chronicles a rites of passage that promises a most fascinating auto-biography if he can resist the atheistic allure of Dignitas at the slightest twinge or headache. He strikes me as being a tough and enterprising cookie who learns fast. So good luck to the poppet.
I don't think the magazine will reappear in the shops. The website is its new corporeal casing; sensible in my view. Eulogy sets out to be a forum for bereavement and end-of-life organisations and charities as well as an inspiration, a place for mortal anecdote and perhaps a death market analyst. No more ideas of 'coffin-shaped magazines', plainly.
I am only sorry that the one and only issue of Eulogy, which had my permanent fiancee Molly Parkin on the cover, is consigned to a bin in the opening illustration. It was a good cover; the issue had some fine content: I understand the symbolism but Molly wasn't to blame for a crap management.
Ooh, diddums. I notice that Prof Brian Cox's delightfully outspoken wife, nuclear energy-loving Gia Milinovich, has banned Madame Arcati from joining her following on Twitter. I do hope it wasn't something I said. She describes herself on the site as 'married to that mindless pretty idiot from a pop band @ProfBrianCox.' It enhances my sense of romance that she aids self-definition by reference.
I do like her sense of humour. While tolerating certain fans' foolish suggestions that her husband is gay - I fear he is too unimaginative for that lifestyle option - she is happy to reveal, 'My last tweet was about how my chance to shag David Tennant was foiled by Paul McCartney sleeping on my hotel room floor.' Anyway ....
I can understand Gia's sensitivity to my trenchant criticism of her husband who is now the BBC's licence fee-paid voice of secularism and unelected, self-appointed scourge of all faiths. Criticism can be a painful thing, even for one who engages in pre-emptive self-laceration and larky asides. Oh, the pillow laughs! But is divisive opinion much tolerated chez Cox? I sleep alone.
Certainly Gia and Brian are one on nukes. She writes (see link above): 'Nuclear Power Is Not Nuclear War.' He writes (in the Sun): 'Nuclear reactors ... cannot explode like nuclear bombs.' Aren't they just adorable?
Still, I'm not one to bear grudges. Enjoy Gia's blog; laugh at her post-modernist, astutely framed jokes. And read her heart-rending description of being turned into an Invisible Wife by Brian's fame.
Among the very few spokespersons for global sanity is Francisco J Ayala, recent winner of the Templeton Prize and its £1m (donated to charity).
An evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist, a former scientific adviser to Bill Clinton in the '90s - who has battled with deluded Christian creationists and intelligent designers for years - Ayala argues that spiritual faith and science ought to co-exist. As he says, "[They] are two windows through which we look at the world."
He has no time for Richard Dawkins who has misled a generation into thinking that the issue of God and science is an either/or. By way of example, Ayala refers to Picasso’s Guernica: "While science can assess the painting’s massive dimensions and pigments, only a spiritual view imparts the horror of the subject matter. Together... these two separate analyses reveal the totality of the masterpiece." (To quote the Templeton website)
In an interview Ayala further explains: "Science has to do with the expansion of galaxies and movement of the continents and the origin of organisms and adaptations. Religion has to do with our relationship to our creator and to each other, with the purpose and meaning of life, with moral values that govern our lives. So, they deal with different subjects... there's no need to contradict each other."
Ayala's is a large mind and a refreshing change from the juvenile, materialistic inanities of Dawkins and the Sun's favourite professor, Dr Brian Cox - the smiling rock star host of the Wonders of the Solar System.
You can hear the murmurs already. Where's the research, the evidence, that Europe had to close down its air space all because of some piffling volcano in Iceland? An Italian on Radio 4's Today this morning blustered against the "theoretical models" that caused airports and airlines to shut up shop. Told that a Met Office plane had encountered dangerous levels of ash, he said he knew nothing of it. So let's ignore it?
Any minute now Andrew Neil will be galvanising the idiotic Spectator kids to cast doubt on the existence of the volcanic ash or its destructive effect.
These self-described "contrarians" will also be doubling as the climate change denialists who've gone quiet since the scientists at East Anglia University were cleared of misrepresenting research on global temperatures. It's curious how the Church of Science has bred a new generation of secular flock uninterested in objective evidence. You can see in motion how religions spark to life.
After the secular propaganda and excitement of this morning in our international media. a great silence shall descend upon the $10 billion manger of CERN, Geneva. Years will elapse and the multitude shall wonder, "What was that all about?" New theories of the "god particle" and "sooper-dooper partners" shall be bandied about, mainly by journalists proficient in synopsising press releases, yet no one will be any the wiser about the origins of the universe. But this won't stop ambitious particle physicists from locking horns in academic media about the significance of This and That, and the lay atheists shall take sides as at a football match, waving their flags and other partisan livery. In time Large Hadron Collider churches shall be built in the name of This or That and each of their clergy will bemoan the vicissisitudes of faith while some among them fuck the under-aged.
The latest sexy darling of atheists is particle physicist Dr Brian Cox, former rock star member of the band D:Ream. His current BBC2 show Wonders of the Solar System is wowing the so-called intelligentsia in the UK, for reasons beyond my understanding. It's telling us nothing we haven't heard already: the Sun is awfully hot, Mercury is hot, too, but gets very cold at night, Venus is Earth's carbon alter ego, and there are some helluva storms on Jupiter. True, I hadn't seen some of the pics of Titan's surface, but think of sand and stones and, presto, you have Saturn's Worthing.
What's tickling mental clits and dicks is Cox's ability to smile while talking. This is quite an achievement. Most people who smile while talking are probably planning to kill you; they're loons: but Coxy Babe couldn't drown a kitten. He's a cuddlesome, hard-geeing northerner geek in awe of the universe. His very orgasmic, transferable relish in repeating what his profs taught him at uni alchemises his commonplaces, with that toothy smile. That he sounds like a simpleton while parroting the number of air molecules in a pebble disarms because one knows he's a swot and make no mistake. We need to look down a bit first before we look up.
Cox is a man boy waggling his box of toys at us: he has nothing new to tell us, just a new way - thanks to his talking smile. At public expense he gets to fly at 60,000 ft to admire the dark blue of the sky, to drive over desert sand dunes to show us what Mars is like (air: thin), and he lights Chinese lanterns to demonstrate the effects of hot air. Oh, it rises.
No wonder he's smiling. I'd be laughing in his shoes.
PS: (The Mail on Sunday columnist Suzanne Moore wrote me on Facebook after I said Cox was like a kid with toys: "Told Brian what you said. He said Tell them from me that they should stick to shaking their jowels and drinking Claret and leave science to the big boys and girls ;-) Oooooh x"
Death. The final frontier. Now I hear a new UK magazine plans to boldly go into this uncharted territory. It's called Eulogy and is due for launch sometime this year. I like the title. It sounds better than fucking Dignitas. Its target readership will include those facing the loss of a loved one, the already bereaved and the seriously or terminally ill. I understand it will focus both on the commerce of death - such as inheritance tax and funeral options - and on philosophical or religious perspectives, with an emphasis on celebration of life and death. I once wrote a piece on the Macchiavellian power of the last will and testament. Readers went wild with recognition. Can't see how Eulogy can fail.
I see the fabulous Naim Attallah and his Quartet Books is releasing a "non-fiction novel" in April called Young Hitler. It was the boastful Truman Capote who first brought this category - the non-fiction novel - to my attention, with his bestseller In Cold Blood and then the unfinished, promising Answered Prayers. The author in effect novelises documented or researched fact - actually, I'd have preferred the title Young Hitler - A Novelisation. Sounds less poncy. But anyway ....
The author of Young Hitler, Claus Hant, is being sold as the first non-fiction novelist to focus on Adolf's early years. This maybe true, though let us not forget the late Norman Mailer's attempt to novelise Hitler's childhood in the unfortunate The Castle in the Forest, which I wrote about in 2007 - click here. Mailer's "Young Adi" is given an older brother with a penchant for inserting "his happy blood-filled organ into the yearning lips" of an old male beekeeper's arse whose buttocks "feel like the portals to a bounteously endowed temple." I questioned the temple imagery, wondering whether "sweatshop" might not be a happier substitute in the sodomitic circs. But anyway ...
I don't think Hant will be reliving this revenge fantasy. His fantasy is that Hitler was a man of God and not the atheist most historians accept he was. Hant says, "Hitler did not just believe in God, he believed himself to be someone through whom God was revealing his existence." That would depend on your meaning of God. To Hitler, God, Providence and nature/science were interchangeable terms to suit his purposes of self-glorification, not the same thing as spiritual self-deification. Turn to Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944 - transcripts of Hitler's unguarded chit-chat - and you find him saying: "A movement like ours must ... stick to the spirit of exact science."
He adds: "It would be appalling for me ... if I were to end up in the skin of a Buddha."
There is a line to be drawn between a despot's wish to make a cult of himself and a faith in a metaphysical system of ideas. I shall be interested to see where Hant goes with this in his non-fiction novel. I wonder whether he is yet another atheist propagandist with a fashionable loathing for religious faith. I could Google and find out, but I won't. I'll leave that one in the air for now.
The site for the book is fascinating and worth perusing - there are book extracts. I had no idea that Hitler's family home in Braunau, in Austria, is on the market (for £2m) and that the local council are trying to buy it with EU funding to fend off neo-Nazi interest. At another Hitler family home, Hant comes across a teenage girl lolling about in her bedroom, once young Hitler's, walls adorned with popstar posters. Asked what she thinks of the room's demonic past occupant, she replies: "It's just so super cool."
I hadn't thought of broadcaster Ray Gosling for about 20 years until he confessed on BBC's Inside Out that he had mercy killed his dying young lover. From the jumble of reports, I think Gosling has admitted to honouring a pact with his hospitalised unnamed partner and smothering him with a pillow to end his "terrible, terrible pain" from an Aids-related illness.
Nottinghamshire Police are investigating the matter. But since Gosling has announced he will not cooperate with the inquiry, I am pretty certain he won't be prosecuted. I can well imagine a disinclination to follow the trail that may implicate others in what will be framed in the media as an assisted suicide.
Well, you know my views on the matter. Even my fiancee Molly Parkin is appalled by my hostility to the death camp Dignitas in Switzerland. Gosling wanted to end his lover's pain. In truth he also wanted to end his own. Dignity in Dying is already using this story to push its soap operatic, death camp agenda. I already see the TV show: Live or Die: You Decide. The decider won't be the life in question, but the emoting of loved ones - anxious to end their own misery.
As I write, aiding or abetting another person's death is illegal in England and Wales under the 1961 Suicide Act, and is punishable by up to 14 years in jail. Gosling has freely made his confession. He should be arrested, tried amd jailed for murder or manslaughter. He'll have ample opportunity to emote in the dock and on the TV breakfast shows for a public sympathy reactively honed by the talent shows. And the atheistic libertarians who now write national newspaper editorials will have acres of space to call for the right to exterminate someone whose health condition is a thundering and expensive nuisance.
Prepare for a whole new area of litigation: Assisted Suicide - Or Convenience Killing?
A "gentle tribunal" for death cravers? A scene from Logan's Run
Why on earth would BBC News lead with a report on Discworld author Sir Terry Pratchett's support for assisted suicide? Easy. To promote its Panorama show tonight whose theme is the public's warming to the idea of exterminating people past their economic usefulness, as affirmed by a "poll".
Supporters of this might want first to look into the topic of elder abuse before they get excited about Sir T's naive suggestion of "gentle tribunals" to decide who qualifies to be put out of their misery. One study suggests that 64% of elder abuse takes place in the family home - perpetrated by so-called loved ones unable or unwilling to deal with aged relatives.
I can well imagine a bunch of tearful adult kids, going on about the "loss of dignity" of a sickly aged mum or dad supposedly in their care, queuing up for a judicial release from responsibility. The scarcely researched and resourced problem of elder abuse is part of this debate.
Another atheist author who appears to support corpse tips for the clapped-out is my darling Martin Amis. I fully intend to read his new novel The Pregnant Widow. He created a stir last week with his cry against the "silver tsunami" (he means people, with grey hair, who no longer can fuck or read his books, in effect) and his call for a euthanasia "booth on every street corner where you could get a Martini and a medal."
Now he tells the Guardian he was just being "satirical". I believe him. But the damage is done. As Amis' interviewer Stephen Moss points out, on Google you'll find "137,000 items referencing Amis + euthanasia."
So please correct: Amis + euthanasia + joke. (Nonetheless Amis adds: "I stick to my basic point: you need to have a means to end your life.")
Dr Andrew Newberg: Not quite the know-all atheist the Sunday Times would have us believe
"We are born to believe in God" is the headline of a Sunday Timesstory today. Various quoted research studies suggest that natural evolution requires us to have faith in a deity for the betterment of social bonds. Put another way, and leaving aside any independent paranormal, religious or mystical experience, people end up believing in God because our brains are hard-wired tarts, and a healthy tart will opt for whatever promises a good time. God-belief is a sort of john/client/punter/trick that delivers a benefit after the fantasy-screw. Yum yum.
The faith of Atheism appears to be going the way of all other religions: sinking into the pit of dogmatic fantasising. Having failed to disprove the existence of gods/afterlife/paranormal whatever, the salaried secularists in their uni labs are resorting to a form of academic Lego to construct theories from their experiments which are essentially unprovable (or essentially speculative). The agenda is to ignore countless subjective experiences of the mystical and explain them away in biological terms. Professorial livelihoods boom or bust on the dismissal industry.
Yet a closer inspection of at least one of these supposed apostles of Atheism reveals a more interesting and complex picture. Take Dr Andrew Newberg. for example.
He is quoted in the Sunday Times story. He's an Assistant Professor of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. Author of Why God Won't Go Away and other works, he uses brain-imaging techniques to show how religious and spiritual experiences are the result of "belief networks" operating across different parts of the brain.
You would think from the article that Dr Newberg has reduced all mystical or religious experience down to mechanistic brain function - it's all in the head. That is not the case. In a Q&A on Newberg's website, he states plainly: "Whether or not God exists 'out there' is something that neuroscience cannot answer."
He goes onto explain: "For example, if we take a brain image of a person when she is looking at a picture, we will see various parts of the brain being activated, such as the visual cortex. But the brain image cannot tell us whether or not there actually is a picture 'out there' or whether the person is creating the picture in her own mind. To a certain degree, we all create our own sense of reality. Getting at what is really real is the tricky part."
It didn't suit the Sunday Times and its Atheism agenda to flesh out this subtlety.
After the great success of the Madame Arcati night at the Ghetto Club here I think I'll become a DJ or something. I plainly have a talent for orchestrating a mood, and foreign parts are better suited to my temperament.
Before the frenzy we viewed Molly P's new paintings in the club's upstairs gallery: an experience in bold abstract expressionist erotica swirls. When I return to the UK I'll put up some images for you to scrutinise.
The club itself is a labyrinthine and multi-floored warren of kitschy art and hidden dark places and decorated bars. The owner, Sonia, is a Russian princess, I am told. She wore a folded silk red polka dot kerchief in her back pocket and led the handclapping of things that pleased her: a curious habit which I really like. She is a Queen of Gothic in her deviant leathers and I can't imagine what goes on in the early hours. One of her staff Monika showed me her Adam and Eve homage to Rubens: I think being an artist is a condition of employment there.
I'm not going to waste my time describing Split - just Google the guides for the fucking adjectives. Molly wanted a green handbag so she selected one at a market near the club and I bought it for her. She then asked for a pair of scissors and vandalised the bag by cutting away a strap which left a hole in the side of it. So I bought her another bag, yellow this time, which had caught her eye. Earlier, in the taxi to Ghetto, we had argued about my Dignitas piece. "That was the most disgraceful piece you've ever written," she said as a fan of the place in Switzerland. Eventually I said I would assist her suicide by throwing her out of the car. That seemed to resolve our differences.
Back at the Meridien, I got up to speed on the goss. Steven Spielberg recently stopped by in his yacht for an electricity top-up from the hotel mains. He paid with his platinum. Then there was rapper Little Kim whose management wanted her booked suites repainted all in black. However they settled just for black towels when presented with the estimated costs. I liked the story of the Moroccan princess whose armada descended on the hotel demanding the presidential suite. The occupants were booted out and compensated with a luxury yacht at a cost to the hotel of 35,000 Euros a week. Then there was the Russian oligarch who wanted the presidential suite and wouldn't accept no for an answer. Even when he offered to pay the occupant guests three times the hotel rate he was rebuffed. Tom Cruise is left unmolested though the locals comment on his lack of height. When Molly took a walk on the prom in her robes, the torpid sun sizzlers came to life and clapped.
Today, Croatia's cultural elite are paying court to her with a cruise to the island of Brach (Brač) and then a visit to the Ghetto for a gawp at the paintings followed by a party there. She and her entourage are staying in Croatia till Tuesday but I have to fly back tomorrow. I shall have more to say and will put up photos.
Oh, didn't I tell you? I won't be updating again until I feel there has been a satisfactory response to this posting. No one tells Madame Arcati what to write about. So, go read some boring newspaper atheist blog, penned by an editor-approved dollop, if you want your prejudices echoed.
One of the great priests of modern voguish atheism is Arthur Schopenhauer, the so-called "philosopher of pessimism" who viewed life as meaningless and the universe as godless. When, say, Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens lecture us that religions (and not money, greed, nationalism, etc) cause wars, they are parroting Schopenhauer, and they in turn are parroted by the tots who write for a whole range of serious publications, literary, intellectual, whatever.
One organisation that heartily endorses Schopenhauer's worldview is Dignitas, the assisted suicide death camp based in Switzerland. While I am not religious myself (in the sense I do not belong to any faith) I am struck by how the humanist/atheist agenda invariably veers towards the joy of death and how to make it part of one's orderly schedule.
The problem identified by Dignitas is the human will to live: if only people could be made to feel that there's no earthly reason why they should feel obliged to stay alive when times are hard, they could make it better - by killing themselves. Religious faith just encourages people to stay stubbornly alive against adversity, distressing loved ones in the process and clogging up hospitals. Whether in fact religion is relevant to this debate is neither here nor there: Dignitas has decreed that it is. Dignitas isn't just a death camp. It's also a proponent of the atheist cause.
Back in 2006, Ludwig A Minelli of Dignitas gave a talk at the Liberal Democratic Party congress in Brighton. He painted a pretty picture of a future of assisted suicides which would... "save a lot of money in the public health system." He went on: "We have to avoid the heavy consequences of century-long indoctrination with religious dogmas." He then quoted Schopenhauer favourably: "The power of religious dogma, when inculcated early, is such as to stifle conscience, compassion, and finally every feeling of humanity." The English are jeered at for "their stupid ecclesiastical superstition."
The point to all this is to be aware of how robustly and proactively an organisation like Dignitas advances its cause. It's not just offering a death service. It is out there drumming up business. It is doing so by ventilating a hostile, baseless view of faith - that it is at the root of all evil. Faith stifles compassion or conscience? You have only to open a history book at random to see what else might stifle our humanity.
