Sami, whose parents are at the helm of the controversy, told the Italian daily that at one point during the proceedings (which began in 2002 – seven years ago!) he was surrounded by his classmates and beaten up to the tune of “Atheist piece of s*%t!” Mighty Christian of them, eh?
So much for those “universal values” of Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone. The crucifix, even at the scholasic level, encourages irrepressible division between Catholic students and those who don’t wish to see a crucified Jesus every time they turn their heads in class. Archbishop Bertone made a hilarious comment that the EU was going to take away Italy’s dearest symbols (crucifix) and replace them with Halloween pumpkins. To appreciate Bertone’s sense of humor, it’s worth noting that Halloween is not a recognized holiday by the Catholic church. It’s even considered spooky.
If they refuse to take down the crosses, I think we should begin a campaign to put up mezuzahs on every doorpost in every public structure in Italy. It’s only fair, after all, as the Jewish people have been here since before Jesus was, well…circumcised.
Today the European court made an important ruling against the display of crucifixes in Italian public schools, saying that “the display of crucifixes in Italian public schools violates religious and education freedoms.” Right. But the Vatican doesn’t see it that way. In fact, they (and most Italian politicians who either believe this hooey or don’t have the balls to stick up for their country against the bishops) are even trying to twist the crucifix into a universal, non-denominational “cultural” symbol. As Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini puts it:
”In our country nobody wants to impose the Catholic religion, let alone with a crucifix, but it is not by eliminating the traditions of individual countries that a united Europe is built.”
The Bishops’ Conference added:
”The multiple significance of the crucifix, which is not just a religious symbol but a cultural sign, has been either ignored or overlooked.”
Don’t be fooled. Europe is no more united by the crucifix than the United States are by the Ten Commandments. In fact, if anything unites the countries of the Euopean Union, it is a collective desire to get beyond the stifling, warring factionalism of inter-Christian warfare. The Catholic church imposed itself on Europe (and much of the rest of the Christianized world) largely through religious war and political domination, extirpating all other religious denominations except for Judaism, which was left to suffer beneath the heel of the Church as a “living witness” to Christ. Ghettoized, expelled, forced to convert, stripped of their rights and property, they were prepared for the slaughter of crusades, pogroms and – given enough time – the unprecedented carnage of the Shoah. This is the legacy of the Christianization of Europe and the universal values of the Catholic church.
It’s time Europe left them behind for good, making Christianity just another one of the many competing religious and non-religious identities on the continent. Everyone has the right to choose a religion and practice it, believe in it and love it. But no one has the right to impose that religion (yes, Christianity is a religion) on anyone else. Italy is a secular country, born in strict opposition to the totalitarian dogma of the late 19th century church (infallibility, et al). Under Mussolini, the church was given new life as a de facto state religion. The Italian constitution has upheld these agreements to this day.
The time has come for them to be abrogated in the name of humanism and a pluralistic, secular Italian state with freedom of religion for all and privilege for none.
If you really want to get a feel for the Italian language in all of its richness and diversity, watch this brilliant routine by Enrico Brignano. He’s one of Italy’s best “showmen”, as they’re called here, meaning he can do just about anything on stage short of smashing watermelons with an oversized hammer.
Pharyngula pointed me to this video. Apparently, Amazon is unable to distinguish between Darwin’s Origin of Species and a creationist rewrite of it. Because the book is in the public domain, what Ray Comfort has done is legal. Meyers points out that one can fiddle with the King James Bible legally, too. But, before you purchase Darwin’s book (or any book for that matter), check which edition you’re buying!
There is a new book out by Rev. Ed Dobson, who tried to live like Jesus for a year. Apparently the question WWJD was unanswerable, so he decided to take the matter into his own hands. Of course the good Rev. is following in the wake of A.J. Jacobs’s Year of Living Biblically and Benyamin Cohen’s My Jesus Year, both wholehearted attempts (well, not exactly) to come to grips with the “reality” of the Bible and/or its most famous son in the twenty-first century. I read Jacobs’s book, which was at times funny, insightful and gratifying – enough so that I feel I can skip the other two and any others that might crop up in their wake.
Anyway, this book has some pretty poorly researched marketing. Read on: “Live one year as Jesus lived. Eat as Jesus ate. Pray as Jesus prayed. Observe the sabbath as Jesus observed. Attend the Jewish festivals as Jesus attended. Read the Gospels every week.”
Read the Gospels? Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t the whole point of the Gospels that, by the time they were written, Jesus was already dead? Or does Jesus read them in heaven? If so, I hope he’s learned Greek by now.
Well, I’m saving up my energy for my first book, My Year of Impersonating Muhammad. I hope nobody’s thought of that one yet. It should be a wild romp!
Another carabiniere is being questioned in the Marrazzo blackmail case. His name is Donato D’Autilia, 42 years old, and in 2006 he was arrested in connection with a pedophilia investigation. He is suspected – together with about thirty others, among them businessmen, priests, and military – of having forced numnerous Roma children into sexual encounters.
As we expected, the crime ring is widening. Just scratch the surface in this country and criminal behavior comes oozing out of the wound.
Lately I’ve been fascinated by the debaptism phenomenon in Italy, called “sbattezzo.” The numbers of debaptisms aren’t high yet (a few thousand are presumed), and it’s difficult to gauge exactly how many people debaptise themselves (I prefer the reflexive form) because the only records are kept by the Catholic church itself. Being a strictly individual act, there is no association of debaptized persons. The option is, however, promoted by the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics (UAAR) as coherent with religious freedom and freedom from religion.
Below are three videos about debaptism. They’re in Italian, so get a dictionary out if you have trouble understanding. This is one of the most interesting new developments in Italy in recent years, challenging the widely held belief that “all Italians are Catholics” and, far more importantly, the self-granted authority of the Catholic church over the lives of unwilling subjects.
It’s important, in my view, that people know that debaptism is an option. I’ve never been baptised, so this is not my personal war against the Catholic church (in case you were worried). But it is consonant with human rights and individual freedom to be able to undo a symbolic gesture like baptism. There are also legal aspects related to Canon Law, but that’s Adele Orioli’s job (the woman in the videos) to explain. I’d bet most people don’t even know they have this right, which is why they’ve launched this campaign.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
They’re not. And they’re not kosher, either, which is odd because we find them among other non-kosher birds: storks, cormorants, owls, herons, the hoopoe (Israel’s democratically elected national bird) and the ever-abominable falcon in Leviticus 11:13-20 (JPS Version, for you citers out there). Of course, I crosschecked other versions of the Bible and they all say the same thing. This is no mistranslation. The authors of the Bible really thought bats were birds. Of course, we know they’re mammals–like us.
Thanks to Richard Dawkins for pointing this out in his recent book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.
I’m a sucker for memes. This might sound odd to anyone unfamiliar with meme theory, called memetics, but anyone who has been around me in the last few months has certainly received an earful on this tantalizing topic.
What is a meme, you ask? Susan Blackmore, the author of “The Meme Machine,” explains: “When you imitate someone else, something is passed on. This ‘something’ can then be passed on again, and again and again, and so take on a life of its own. We might call this thing an idea, an instruction, a behavior, a piece of information…but if we are going to study it we need to give it a name. Fortunately, there is a name. It is the ‘meme.'”
The word was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene.” Memes are superficially related to genes in that they are self-replicators. Essentially, memes are like cultural genes. Large groups of them are referred to as memeplexes. Memetics is still a fairly embryonic theory by scientific standards. But, like I said, it’s a tantalizing one that anyone can grasp by simply paying attention to daily life.
Here are a few examples of well-known memes: baseball caps worn backwards; the word “meme”; apparitions of the Virgin Mary; shoe-throwing as political dissent; little green men; Obama-as-Hitler; Obama-as-Spock; designer keffiahs (emblematic scarves popularized by Yasser Arafat); circumcision; cakes with cherries on top.
I remember noticing, in the mid-1990s, memetics in action (though I didn’t think of it in those terms). I was living in New York, which is a great meme-factory. I had been listening to Lenny Bruce’s performances from the ’50s and I was hooked on them. One of the sketches, “Father Flotski’s Triumph,” parodies popular prison-revolt movies of the day. “Dutch” is the gun-crazy criminal who has taken a hostage, and it’s Father Flotski’s job to talk him down. Dutch speaks Neanderthal; his only phrases are amusical variations on the non-word yada: “Yada yada. Yada yada yada, Father!” Mindlessly, I began aping this non-word in company and making friends listen to the Bruce performance. It caught on, at least among those in my circle.
Around the same time, the Seinfeld episode “The Yada Yada” was broadcast. Suddenly everyone was saying “yada yada” at the end of every sentence. “Sharon and I fooled around on her parents’ bed. One thing led to another, and yada yada yada…” That is, you know and I know so why bother with the details?
Yada-yada died out at some point. Today nobody uses it, but there are discussions on Wikipedia over the etymological origins of the term. Did it come from Hebrew via Yiddish? Did it hop the Atlantic from London to New York? Was the term ever recorded before Bruce’s performances?
A more recent meme-word is “truthiness,” thought to have been coined in 2005 by comedian Stephen Colbert, but later traced to prior inclusion in the OED. No matter, however, because Colbert gave the word new life through television. Within a year, “truthiness” had been used in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Newsweek, The Washington Post, USA Today… yada yada yada. You get the picture.
I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that at the time of the “yada yada” craze, I felt that I had actually had a role in the popularizing of this meme (though of course I didn’t think of it as such). It was a coincidence, of course. I had happened on the term thanks to recent reissues on CD of Bruce’s old comedy albums. Is it really so unlikely that a writer for Seinfeld was listening to the same CDs around the same time, and brought one of the gags back to life on America’s most popular television show?
The man behind "yada yada?"
The memes are all around us. We tweet and Facebook ourselves into self-referential tantrums of narcissism. The other night I was having dinner with some friends on Rome’s Via Cavour. “Did you see that article I posted on my Facebook page?” “What about the photos of my trip to Greece?” “Did you read my witty status update?” We soon realized that nobody — not even one’s close friends — reads much of anything anyone posts. Yet we keep posting day in and day out. Blackmore would say we are being manipulated by our memes.
Yesterday, in fact, I was struck by what seemed to me to be a perfect meme just waiting to be coined. Memes, neither good nor bad, just “want” to replicate. Those that replicate and lodge themselves in as many brains as possible are successful memes, and there are probably as many extinct memes as species on this earth. The word I wish to coin is a verb, to quotate. As a working definition, let’s say it means “to make air-quotes with one’s fingers.” In my experience, Italians are always struck by the American tendency to air-quote. I’ve been asked what this is called (in Italian they say “tra virgolette”) but no satisfactory verb exists as far as I know. An example of possible usage:
Larry (making air-quotes): “Our new band is ‘alternative.'”
Marc: “Would you stop quotating, for chrissakes? That went out ten years ago.”
Air-quotes themselves are a rather successful meme, an observation which should require no explanation.
And what about “commenter?” The first time I read this, on Ron Rosenbaum’s blog, I wrote it off as just another ‘knotch’ on his bad spelling belt. Commenter sounds like a deliberate corruption of commentator, coined for purposes of cultural taxonomy. The word probably existed in its own right (though it’s not listed in my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate) before blogging made it viral. It has now found a comfortable home, signifying anyone who comments on an online forum.
I plan to push “to quotate” in the following months, and monitor the results. If it ever pops up in a Google search (it doesn’t yet), if ever there is a Wikipedia discussion on the origins of “to quotate,” remember you read it here first. I’ll let you know when I get a call from The Colbert Report.
Sergio Romano concludes – in his advice column – that Italians have essentially two choices regarding the teaching of Islam in public schools:
1. Get used to it. Muslims are second only to Catholics in number, and growing. In Italy we must teach religion in school. It’s in the Constitution – duh! So it’s only fair that majority religions get a bigger slice of pie. Screw the Jews, Buddhists, atheists and Lutherans. They’re ballbreakers anyway.
2. Abolish religious teaching in public schools. Be fair to everyone by giving priviledges to no one. The only obstacle to this benign and wise solution is the Constitution, which recognizes the Lateran Pacts signed with Mussolini’s government, giving the Catholic church the priviledge of teaching its dogma in Italian schools.
So the answer to this conundrum is the same as it was before we tuned in: the Lateran Pacts must be abolished.
Let the church teach its Catechism in Catholic schools. Let the Qur’an be taught in Muslim schools. Let public schools be a place where children are taught to think for themselves, reason, and learn universal knowledge like scienc and mathematics, history and languages. We will have a better society for it in the end.
Marc Di Martino 