It's a bear!

With my little boy three months shy of his second birthday, my reading habits have changed a bit recently. The current favourite bedtime story is We're Going on a Bear Hunt (the pop-up version). It's becoming engraved on my heart, like Calais. One more time....

We're going on a bear hunt.
We're going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We're not scared....

From Teddy Roosvelt's original "Teddy" bear, through Pooh, Paddington, Rupert and Bungle, most bears intended for small children's consumption over the last century tend to be cuddly, nonthreatening creatures, so the bear in Bear Hunt is a bit of an exception, being big and scary. It reminded me a little of another children's bear classic, The Teddy Bear's Picnic, a song which presumably wasn't intended to be frightening but always seems to me to have slightly threatening and sinister undertones. Especially in this version by Henry Hall and his orchestra. See what you think - vaguely unsettling, or just the product of some suppressed childhood trauma I must have had with a stuffed toy?

Tidying up

No post today - I've been too busy watching tennis and giving the old blog a face lift, on top of the usual stuff. I may tweak things a bit more still - I'm trying to make the blog a bit easier on the eye.

"Harming mental security in society"

I think this rather proves my point in yesterday's post. 'Nuff said.

Help! It's the rough, secular beast!

It's a funny old world. Apparently some people find this controversial. I can't see why - if anybody would care to point out which part of Pat Condell's piece is unreasonable, I'd be interested to hear why they think so.

Speaking as a convinced secularist myself, I don't mind what people choose to believe in or not to believe in (so long as causing harm to others isn't a core element of their belief system*). I don't even mind if they try to persuade me to believe the same things, so long as they make the effort to explain and defend their beliefs with something approaching a rational argument and don't try to threaten or coerce me into agreement.

If their arguments are compelling, convincing, well-thought out ones, I'll probably listen with something like respectful attention. If someone's argument seems to be bizarre, unsupported by any convincing evidence or reasoning I might laugh or I might call that person silly, or even repellent if I consider their world-view to be particularly unpleasant. But that's all, and compared to the way some members of "faith communities" respond to opposing beliefs, I think it's quite mild and unthreatening - I won't call for them to be ostracised, killed or condemned to an eternity of unspeakable suffering in the name of the hypothetical creator of everything which exists.

If somebody wants to mock or question some deeply held belief which I hold, well, I've got a few options without going nuclear; I could choose to ignore the slight, or I could sharpen up my arguments and prepare a spirited defence, or even admit that I've been wrong and reconsider what I think in the light of what's been said. What I won't do is to demand that what I believe is so much more important than anybody else's opinion that it must never, ever be questioned.

You see, compared to some of the more militantly religious people I hear banging on from their pulpits, I think that secular humanists like me are harmless pussycats, open to doubt, reason, persuasion and argument. And, personally, I think that's better than closed-minded zealotry, based on little or no evidence. I don't often like to blow my own trumpet, but I'm quite happy, proud and comfortable to be a secular humanist in a world where the worst are full of passionate intensity. That's what I believe, anyway.

*of course, very few people actually think that their own system of beliefs is harmful but, to borrow a phrase from the faithful, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions....

A pea and nine tiny seeds, grains of sand and specks of dust

Before the sort of YouTube illustrations linked to in my last post, people had to resort to rather more homely ways to illustrate the vastness of the Universe. But some of them were still highly effective - I still love this, from Sir James Jeans' book The Stars in Their Courses (1931) - he's talking about the planets in our solar system:

They move around the sun in almost circular paths, rather like circus horses trotting or galloping round the ring-master ... the solar system has only one-way traffic - like Piccadilly Circus. The traffic nearest the centre moves fastest; that further out more slowly, while that at the extreme edge merely crawls....It is true that even the furthest and slowest of the planets ts covers nearly three miles every second, which is about 200 times the speed of an express train, but this is a mere crawl in astronomy....

Before we leave Piccadilly Circus, it should be understood that we cannot represent the solar system by putting up a statue of Eros in the middle to represent the sun, and letting nine taxicabs gyrate round it to represent the nine planets. The statue is far too big to represent the sun and the taxicabs are enormously too big to represent planets. If we want to make a model to scale, we must take a very tiny object such as a pea, to represent the sun. On the same scale the nine planets will be small seeds, grains of sand and specks of dust. Even so, Piccadilly Circus is only just big enough to contain the orbit of Pluto, the outermost planet of all. Think of a pea and nine tiny seeds, grains of sand and specks of dust in Piccadilly Circus, and we see that the solar system consists mainly of empty space. It is easy to understand why the planets look such tiny objects in the sky.

Yet the solar system is crowded compared with most of space. If a pea and nine smaller objects in Piccadilly Circus represent the sun and planets, the nearest of the stars will be represented by a small seed somewhere near Birmingham-all in between is empty space.

More perspective

Take a few minutes to explore space and time with YouTube. On this scale, everything human civilization has created is an invisible dot, all of human history less than the blink of an eye. Just think about that for a few seconds. It really is awesome, in the true sense of the word.

An inhuman outrage

Weather forecasters, from Michael Fish, way back to Robert Fitzroy may get a bit of a hard time when they're thought to be getting it wrong, but they get off lightly compared to FitzRoy's uncle, Viscount Castlereagh. If he's remembered at all, it's mainly for the broadsides loosed at him by two of the big guns of Romantic Poetry. Shelley thundered:

I met Murder on the way –
He had a face like Castlereagh –
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew

On hearing of his death, Byron dismissed his memory with the unflattering lines:

Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss

Castlereagh attracted such hostility because, as Leader of the House of Commons, he defended the repressive policies of the then Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth whose tenure saw the ruthless suppression of campaigns for greater democratic representation and smearing of reformers with the accusations of treason and sedition. Sidmouth's repressive measures ultimately included the suspension of habeas corpus and requiring the permission of a magistrate before any public meeting of more than 50 people pertaining to "matters of Church and state" could be held (the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 isn't as shiny, new and paradigm-shifty as the Home Office apparatchiks would have you think). Although Castlereagh was, by some accounts an accomplished diplomat, his reputation couldn't survive association with such bullies and sleazeballs as Lord Sidmouth's crew.

Little wonder that radicals such as Shelley and Byron despised Castlereagh; it's entertaining to imagine what they might made of the defenders of some more recent Home Secretaries, popping up to defend the indefensible, whether in the guise of extended detention without charge, restrictions on the right to peacefully protest, or ID cards. Mincemeat, hopefully.

Perhaps the most flagrant outrage committed on Sidmouth's watch, certainly the most visible was what later became known as the "Peterloo Massacre". At St Peter's Fields, Manchester, on August 16th, 1819, a crowd of over 60,000 gathered to attend a demonstration for Parliamentary reform, and especially for an end to such corrupt institutions as Rotten Boroughs. The local magistrates, fearing the size of the gathering, panicked and called in the military, in the form of the Manchester Yeomanry, who charged into the crowd, hacking away at peaceful protesters with their sabres. It is thought that eleven people were killed and some four hundred wounded.

A millowner, Thomas Chadwick, who was there, described the massacre as: "An inhuman outrage committed on an unarmed, peaceful assembly."

The deaths were only the beginning - the Government's response to the threat of radical unrest, which is how they saw such lawful demonstrations, was to crack down on the civil liberties of the population with the draconian "Six Acts" which introduced such innovations as "speeding up" the legal process by reducing opportunities for bail, cracked down on free speech, extended powers to search private property for arms.

The Peterloo Massacre has been compared to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in China. Although the numbers differ - the People's Liberation Army and their tanks may have killed anywhere from from several hundred to seven thousand people, as opposed to the eleven or so fatalities chalked up by the Manchester Yeomanry - there are compelling similarities; two groups of peaceful protesters, demonstrating for democratic reforms, crushed by military force because of the authorities' fear of subversion, followed by an aftermath of suppression and reprisal. History repeating itself? You decide.