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Pataki vs Religion

Against Religion

Tamas Pataki

Scribe (2007)

Tamas Pataki could be accused of misleading advertising. His title should have been Against Christianity or Against Monotheism. And his cover image, with its implicit hard-science associations, is misleading too, because he argues against religion primarily on the basis of Freudian theory.

To be fair, Pataki does warn the reader in his introduction that he is going to focus on the monotheistic religions. Christianity (the religion of about 33% of the world’s population) is his main target, while Islam (20%) and Judaism (a mere 0.2%) are often caught in his field of fire but less often singled out. He barely mentions Hinduism (13%) or Buddhism (6%), and in fact his prime argument applies to them poorly or not at all. Continue reading “Pataki vs Religion”

Journey towards a path

I wrote this in 2007-2008 primarily for my own benefit but then decided to put it on my website in case anyone else might find it useful. Nearly fifteen years later (2022) I find that I still agree with most of it so I’m moving it across to my new site rather than simply deleting it as I close down my old site.

I seem to have set out on a journey, and to have surprised my family and friends more than myself by doing so.

It is actually more accurate to say I have found time to recommence a journey that began when I was teenager but has mostly been on hold for the last twenty years. (That alone is probably enough to explain why my family and friends were more surprised than I was.) My journey re-started when it did (2006-07), rather than years earlier or later, for a mixture of personal reasons: events just combined to urge me to redefine my relationship with the world.

The journey is a quest for answers to the big questions that most of us ask from time to time and usually set aside. ‘What is the purpose of life?’ and ‘How should I live?’ are the biggest, but they lead to questions about society’s relationship with our increasingly fragile environment.

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Terry Lane: God – the interview

God: the interview

Terry Lane

ABC Books, second edition, 2004

Terry Lane prefaces his book with a warning and a plea, and it is only fair to repeat them here: the contents of his book, and therefore of my review, may disturb those who are content with their deeply held Christianity. That was not his wish, nor is it mine, and we would ask such people not to continue.

Lane is widely known in Australia as a radio interviewer for the ABC. When asked casually whom he would most like to interview, he said, ‘God.’ The idea took root and this book grew from it.

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The Art of Funerary Violin

An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin

Rohan Kriwaczek

Scribe, $29.95, 2007

This curious volume delineates (in considerable detail, despite its self-deprecating title) the lost art of Funerary Violin, a recondite tradition with its long-forgotten heroes and martyrs, and rather more than its share of eccentrics.

The Funerary Violinist, according to Kriwaczek, performed sombre improvised solos at gravesides of the well-to-do over a span of some two centuries. Beginning in Elizabethan England, the practice spread to France and Germany before being crushed by the Vatican in the Great Funerary Purges of the late 1830s.

Afterwards, its Guild eked out a furtive existence in London until Kriwaczek chanced upon it, spent thirty years recovering its records and idiosyncratic repertoire, and brought it to public notice with this semi-scholarly monograph. His work is replete with reproductions of contemporary portraits and concludes with some forty pages of music laboriously transcribed from such fragments of the tradition as survive in mouldering chests in the Guild’s headquarters.

Anyone who has read thus far without baulking at my poor imitation of his florid language may enjoy the Incomplete History. The only caveat is that it is either a wonderfully elaborate flight of fancy or a very clever but rather silly hoax, depending on the reader’s predisposition. Funerary violinists, Guild, persecution, portraits and music are all the creation of one brilliant, versatile musician, Rohan Kriwaczek.

Afterword

This review was first published in the Townsville Bulletin in 2007 and added to this blog in 2022. Here we can add that Mr Kriwaczek has created a website which further documents the Guild and its repertoire, and offers for sale his recordings of some of those (ahem!) unique compositions.

The ingenious gentleman is also responsible (we use the word reluctantly) for several more projects exhibiting the same lunatic energy, so his website may entertain visitors longer than anticipated.

Sara Gruen: Water for Elephants

If you ever wanted to run away with the circus, if you have ever been passionately in love with the wrong person, if you are scared by the idea of a lonely old age in a nursing home, if you know some animals are cleverer and nicer than most people, if you love larger-than-life characters, lost worlds, high adventure and fairytale endings, then this book is for you.

Set in the USA in 1931, a period defined by Prohibition and the Depression, Water for Elephants follows Jacob Jankowski as he drops out of veterinary school and accidentally joins Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show On Earth, travelling by train across the country.

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