Month: March 2012

Saudi mufti calls for all churches to be destroyed — UK media suppresses story

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I wouldn’t bother with this story, except that the UK media seem to have received a 3-line whip, directing silence about it.  ArabianBusiness.com reports (four days ago!):

Destroy all churches in Gulf, says Saudi Grand Mufti

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has said it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region,” following Kuwait’s moves to ban their construction.

Speaking to a delegation in Kuwait, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, stressed that since the tiny Gulf state was a part of the Arabian Peninsula, it was necessary to destroy all of the churches in the country, Arabic media have reported.

Fox News reported the story from the Washington Times, and commented:

If the pope called for the destruction of all the mosques in Europe, the uproar would be cataclysmic. Pundits would lambaste the church, the White House would rush out a statement of deep concern, and rioters in the Middle East would kill each other in their grief. But when the most influential leader in the Muslim world issues a fatwa to destroy Christian churches, the silence is deafening.

On March 12, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, declared that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.” The ruling came in response to a query from a Kuwaiti delegation over proposed legislation to prevent construction of churches in the emirate.

The mufti based his decision on a story that on his deathbed, Muhammad declared, “There are not to be two religions in the [Arabian] Peninsula.” This passage has long been used to justify intolerance in the kingdom. Churches have always been banned in Saudi Arabia, and until recently Jews were not even allowed in the country. Those wishing to worship in the manner of their choosing must do so hidden away in private, and even then the morality police have been known to show up unexpectedly and halt proceedings. 

This is not a small-time radical imam trying to stir up his followers with fiery hate speech. This was a considered, deliberate and specific ruling from one of the most important leaders in the Muslim world. It does not just create a religious obligation for those over whom the mufti has direct authority; it is also a signal to others in the Muslim world that destroying churches is not only permitted but mandatory.

There’s nothing novel in the demand, in truth.  This is how Islam is, as a look at the dismal stories in the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria reveals.  Usually the method is to forbid repairs, which, over time, amounts to the same thing; but direct demolition or theft of the premises is also fairly common.  How else, indeed, did Hagia Sophia come to be a mosque?  How much longer we may be allowed to say this, however, I do not know.

But the real issue for me is the media silence.  Fox News make precisely the right point.  For instance, I can see no sign that the BBC have reported this.  This happened a week ago.  And I didn’t know until, by accident, I saw the story on Facebook.

We cannot trust the mass media.  Incidents like this, where a story with all sorts of important implications go unreported, should act as a wake-up call.  Our mass media are in the hands of a tiny minority of people whose values are not our own. 

It isn’t that the stories they run are untrue — although the framing of the story is often dishonest or polemical.  It is the selection and the editing that ensures that only stories that reflect one particular political agenda and narrative can even be reported.  Dr Goebbels did it first (and isn’t it curious that, in all my 40 years of watching TV, I have yet to see a documentary on the media methods of the good doctor?)

And that should worry us all.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m in Chester at the moment, on personal business. 

Chester, I know, is a Roman city.  The street plan shows as much — it is, indeed, extraordinarily Roman, considering that nearly 2,000 years have passed.  Sadly I have been unable to devote any time to seeing antiquities, despite staying in the Crowne Plaza hotel pretty much in the city centre.  I did get to walk on the medieval circuit of the walls this afternoon, going down to the River Dee.

I’ve seen a few Roman column bases scattered around.  All of this material is of a reddish stone, which also appears in the medieval cathedral.  I presume, therefore, that this is local stone, and that in turn means that the Roman columns were manufactured by local artisans.

Chester is quite an attractive city, although quite small.  If you’re in the area, do visit it!

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Why copyright does NOT mean money for those who create original material

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Quite by accident, I came across an interesting article which throws new light on why copyright is not quite what it is generally supposed to be.

Copyright is not a moral axiom.  There is no teaching in the bible that states it, nor is it self-evident.

The idea behind it is that people should be able to profit from their intellectual or artistic labours.  An example of the problem caused by the lack of copyright is the edition of Chrysostom researched and published by Sir Henry Saville in the 17th century.  It’s an excellent text, but Saville lost quite a bit of money on it because someone bought copies of the volumes as they appeared, shipped them to Holland, copied them, added a Latin translation, and sold the result for his own profit.  This was perfectly legal, and, had Sir Henry not been a rich man, might have prevented the rest of the edition appearing.  A copyright law would have given Sir Henry redress to stop the rival publication.

When the “creative industries” (as they like to call themselves) are lobbying for yet more extensions to copyright, they invariably hold up the right of the artist, the creative person, to be protected.  Yet we all know that the copyright is always sold to someone else, and that, in reality, it is the rights of the middleman, the publisher, the record company, that are at stake.

At the moment, out of the sales of CD’s, only 13% “belongs” to the band.  63% is kept by the record company, and the remaining 24% goes to the distributor.  But the band has yet more costs to pay from “its” 13%; some 28% goes on managers and lawyers and so on.  The remainder is divided among the musicians.

Now that doesn’t sound too bad.  But … when does that 13% start getting paid?  Does the copyright provision actually mean that the artist gets his share?  Well, no it doesn’t.  Because the record company demands that the band repay advances and the like out of that 13%.

So, back to our original example of the average musician only earning $23.40 for every $1,000 sold. That money has to go back towards “recouping” the advance, even though the label is still straight up cashing 63% of every sale, which does not go towards making up the advance.

The math here gets ridiculous pretty quickly when you start to think about it. These record label deals are basically out and out scams. In a traditional loan, you invest the money and pay back out of your proceeds.

But a record label deal is nothing like that at all. They make you a “loan” and then take the first 63% of any dollar you make, get to automatically increase the size of the “loan” by simply adding in all sorts of crazy expenses (did the exec bring in pizza at the recording session? that gets added on), and then tries to get the loan repaid out of what meager pittance they’ve left for you.

Oh, and after all of that, the record label still owns the copyrights. That’s one of the most lopsided business deals ever.

So think of that the next time the RIAA or some major record label exec (or politician) suggests that protecting the record labels is somehow in the musicians’ best interests.

The situation in publishing is no better.  No normal author gets paid very much for the content.

So … could someone explain again, honestly, just why copyright is in the public interest? 

OK … I still do believe that Sir Henry Saville should have some redress.  But I suggest that we’re quite a long way away from that common sense problem, and getting further away with each tweak to the law.

If only our politicians didn’t take bribes from industries so readily!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My days have been busy with personal business, but I did manage to get back to OCR’ing Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans. 

It’s rather anaemic, tho.  I reached the portion where Paul advises submission to worldly authorities this evening.  Now the pressure on Christians to conform to whatever anti-Christian demand gay lobbyists dream up is reaching fever pitch here, so it would be very interesting to hear an early Christian exegesis of this passage.  But Theodoret simply ignores the issue of what it  means to submit to an anti-Christian power.  Is there an extant patristic exegesis worth reading on this passage, I wonder?

A couple of kind people have purchased CDROM’s of the Additional Fathers collection, which helps replenish the translation fund.  It’s quite flat now, after the Origen purchases.  But I can top it up once I go back to work.

And back to work I jolly must go; a week on Monday, no less.  I’d appreciate prayer for this, as I know not the person for whom I shall be working, nor what the role involves, nor what sort of conditions. 

I’m considering rather seriously whether the Lord is asking me to look at a change of direction, and indeed possibly a change of town.  But I’ll post on this separately, if I consider it right, and interesting to others.  I’ve worked in more or less the same way for the last 15 years, and it’s been very isolating, I now realise.  The Lord has been busy in my life — with a baseball bat — and I have a sense that I am at a cross-roads, in several senses. 

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So, farewell, O dead tree Encyclopedia Britannica

Posted on by Roger Pearse

News today that Encyclopedia Britannica has decided not to print any more editions of its encyclopedia.  Sales of the paper version have been “negligible” for years, and 85% of the income comes from the online version.  I would imagine these sales are licenses to libraries and the like.  There is, apparently, some gloating from some anonymous erk in Wikipedia — the ‘encyclopedia’ that any teenager can edit (and especially Randy in Boise).

It’s a key moment, isn’t it?  The paper encyclopedia is now definitely dead.  That is, the major reference source until 1995 is now history. 

Any reference source in paper form is now obsolete.  Any source that is not read from end to end, but instead is accessed in bits and pieces, is now on borrowed time.  There are any number of such handbooks — we might think of the Clavis Patrum Graecorum.  They’re all dead meat, and just waiting to be collected.  They cannot, commercially, exist on paper any more.

It’s a brave new world.

Mind you, I do wish someone would sue the hell out of Wikipedia and force it to institute some proper controls and regulation of trolls.  It can’t grow much beyond its current status as “collection of hearsay”, until this is addressed.

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Eusebius of Emesa, Commentary on Genesis, reviewed at Bryn Mawr

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent writes to tell me about a new publication, the Commentary on Genesis by Eusebius of Emesa.  It’s reviewed by Mark DelCogliano at Bryn Mawr here.

The present volume reassembles the four branches of the tradition, providing new editions of each that are accompanied by annotated French translations on facing pages, in this order: the whole commentary in its ancient Armenian translation, the Greek fragments from the catena and Procopius, and the Syriac fragments from Isho’dad. Thus this volume enables for the first time a comprehensive view of Eusebius’s commentary on Genesis. … It is a model of what an edition of a fragmentary text preserved in multiple languages can and should be.

My own experience with Eusebius’ Gospel Problems and Solutions made this last an interesting comment indeed!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve had a cold for the last few days, and so I have been lying on the sofa reading a rather low-grade Christian novel.  Nothing much is happening here.

One interesting thing is that I popped into the Premier Christian Radio forums.  Sadly the administrators have allowed them to be hijacked by atheist trolls.  It was bedlam in there.  Until the owners take charge, posting is futile.  It’s telling that unmoderated fora are now, to all intents and purposes, impossible.  That wasn’t so, once upon a time.

Long ago I read a post in a usenet newsgroup describing how a group of trolls could deliberately take over a news group and make it their own.  I wish I had it now; for the techniques, far from becoming marginal, have become mainstream.

I’m looking forward to getting back to scanning Theodoret’s commentary on Romans. It’s going much better than it might have done, in the second half.  Can’t do much today, but maybe on Thursday!

I have an event in Oxford on Saturday, and I was contemplating booking into the Randolph Hotel for two nights, rather than drive up on Saturday morning.  This is the grandest hotel in Oxford, in a great location, and it is where important people always used to stay.  However it’s ridiculously expensive — around 400 GBP –, and I simply don’t propose to throw money away like that.  A look at Tripadvisor reveals that it is about as good a standard as one might expect — swanky public rooms, but poorly maintained bedrooms and bathrooms.  It is the great, traditional, horrible British hotel experience, in other words, avoiding which made Premier Inn into a massively successful business.

All the Oxford town centre hotels are pricey, and indeed I have never stayed in any of them.  Who does, one wonders?  The Oxford Spires wants 300 GBP for two nights. 

The Holiday Inn Express looks better value — 150 GBP for  two nights — but is far away.  Maybe that would do.  But of course then one has to factor in car parking.  Oxford is really a mess, at least as far as visitors are concerned.

Maybe I will just drive up that morning.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been working on OCR’ing Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans, from the 1839 issue of the Christian Remembrancer.  I’m most of the way through this, although no clue as yet to the translator.  Notes are by a certain “E.B.”

A kind correspondent has sent me PDF’s of the rest of the commentary, which appeared in the 1840 issue.  These, unfortunately, were digitised at a very low resolution and do not OCR very well.  I can’t say that I am looking forward to dealing with those very much.

One comment by Theodoret has struck me so far:

For they who live in idle ease, and will not undergo the labours of virtue, cry out even against God Himself, for imposing this commandment.

In our day, that is a very familiar sight, isn’t it?

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