Park life and death

Last week I was in St James Park and saw a murder and was almost witness to a killing. I was walking along a path that skirted the lake before heading towards Horseguards and The Mall. It was a day puncutated by showers and the park was enjoying a rare moment of sun and shine.

Ahead on the path, in the lee of a large tree, a crow stood on the asphalt cawing for all it was worth. Again and again, without pausing for breath, it called out the same ratcheting cry. In the tree other crows looked on. They fidgeted on the branches sending showers of rain drops thudding to the grass. On the lawns to either side other crows hopped about. Crows are usually very confident creatures, but these looked uneasy, fluffing feathers and hopping quickly from place to place.

At first I thought the crow was a fledgling and was calling so much because it was hungry. Perhaps it was just one of those crows that calls a lot and the others were keen for it to shut up. I got much closer and the calling crow did not stop sounding its caw nor did it move, its gaze did not flinch from the tree's base. I looked where it stared and saw the body of a crow cradled on the roots of the tree.

Eventually I got too close to the crow for comfort and it hopped once, twice and flew away. Its silence rang in the rain. The dead crow was whole, there was no obvious damage, no blood about the beak that would suggest it had collided with one of the park vehicles trundling about. Its body was intact, nothing crushed or maimed to give a hint to what killed it. Clothed in velvet feathers and dusted with rain drops it was quite beautiful. More so, given how strenuously the other crow tolled its passing and called the others to pay their respects. I have no idea how it died, if it was killed or how its life ended but my respect for crows has grown. I know that they are among the smartest of the birds and now I know they can mourn.

Call it

I'm always a sucker for sites that give me help finding names for characters no matter where they find themselves. So, this site looks like it will be very useful. It's not quite as easy to get around as it appears but there are gems in the rubble.

Fussy soup

Image via WikipediaIn my youth I was very careful to avoid being fussy in my actions and gestures. Fussy, in my mental schema, was the opposite of cool. Those who were cool got things done with a minimum of effort and a swoosh of style. Those who fuss take time and are painstaking about what they do. They never take off the training wheels nor trust their feet enough to try the high wire.

There have been times when the difference between cool and fussy have struck me a weltering blow, particularly while an undergraduate. There were people who knew how to sit in the bar, drink a pint and smoke a cigarette and were cool doing it. Many others, me included, were not so sophisticated but I watched, envious, and learned.

In my first year at Uni I lived in on-campus flats and shared a corridor with about 12 other freshers. During the first week we were all asked to make the place more friendly by writing our names on a card and sticking it on our door.

I fretted over the best way to do that and the over-analysis, fussiness, robbed me of any chance of looking spontaneous or cool. In the end I just used an index card with my name written in black marker. In the dim corridor it looked a bit shrill.

A guy down the hall demonstrated the cool way. His card was a torn off corner off a notebook with his name scrawled across it and thumbed to the door with a blob of blue-tac. The paper wasn't even white. It looked like he had gone "Oh, yeah. That." Then done it and moved on. Too cool for school.

For some reason that memory occurred to me this week while I was eating soup. God knows why. With this soup I had a hunk of bread and I wondered, in a very idle moment, what would be the coolest way to butter the bread. Was there a way to hold the knife, to scoop up the butter on the knife and apply it to the bread that was better than any other? I tried a few different ways but most left me wearing the butter rather than eating it. Should I dab the bread in the butter and do away with the knife? Should I use a flick knife?

And then I realised how pointless that debate was. Why? Because cool people do not eat soup. That's why.

Worship that

Image via WikipediaThe idea of a world without Christianity has really got to me (gladiators in Elizabethan London!) and I've been thinking about alternatives that are equally long-lasting religions.

Shinto is a good candidate because it has persisted, has no scripture and is not based around any messianic figure. It is about man's essential goodness, emphasises ritual and is about appeasing spirits. It strikes me as a good model for those pagan religions that might be prevalent in a world without Christ. It's pretty local too so doesn't need a Vatican equivalent handing down bulls.

Then there is Hinduism, it too lacks scripture, has no single founder and no common teachings. It's a way of life rather than a didactic religion. It also has multiple deities at its head. Again a good model for what might have been. I can also consider Taoism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. And those are just the ones that have survived until today.

The more I read about Christianity the more I realise that the reason it succeeded way back when was not just because of the hope it gave the down-trodden but because it co-opted so many existing practices. Being a Christian meant doing a lot of what you always did but it got a new name and you did it in a different place.

A case could be made for Christianity having a civilising influence in that it tempted people to stop going to war. But there were lots of other similar influences around then too. The example of Rome helped in that life got better for a lot of people under its rule. And a lot of people were dead because of it but that does go with the territory. And it has to be said bloodshed did not end when Christianity was being widely practiced.

It was a force for disruption too, all those messianic warlords with the light of heaven blinding them and slaughtering those who refused to cleave to what they see as a loving God. Without those holy wars, what would Europe have looked like?

A fresh start

Image via WikipediaSo, why did Christianity become so popular? It wasn't particularly quick - I've read suggestions that it became the dominant religiion within the Roman empire within 400 years. I was going to say that change happens fast when you consider that it had to over-turn other religions but the point about it is that it didn't. A lot of Christian liturgy, holidays and so on were nicked from earlier faiths.

However, that leaves open the question of why it did prosper. This seems a good explanation and suggests the success was down to the hard work of Paul of Tarsus who changed it to make it more appealing. It also says that it proved popular psychologically because it coupled

a coherent and attractive picture of how the world worked with a commonsensical moral code.

The Christian idea of the afterlife was much more attractive than that of other religions and, for that reason, appealed to those who had a crappy time in this life. Their reward, so palpably absent from their day to day existence, would become apparent once they were dead. Plus it also gave people a place in the Universe and the illusion of control over their lives.

The Christian God was also a nicer guy than those old pagan deities. The older faiths were all about anger and punishment, plus they were very parochial whereas God was about forgiveness and was universal. And, in Christ, there was an explicit connection to humanity.

Christians were also heavily persecuted during the early days. The Roman games were all about punishing Christians as well as lots of other enemies of Rome. Some Emperors tried to stamp it out by burning books, destroying churches and killing worshippers.

There were alternatives to that early Christianity too. Notably Mithra and the Sol Invictus cult of Rome. Plus there were a lot of mystery cults that disappeared without a trace. Around Europe there were a lot of Pagan religions that were steam-rollered by Rome and then Christianity came along to fill the void in their wake. More so when Christianity became the dominant religion of the Empire.

By Toutatis

Image by xploitme via FlickrThis discussion on Reddit (I know, I know) got me thinking. I'm aware that many parts of the early church steal and edit earlier beliefs and that the editorial conference for the Bible was quite fraught, but that question about about older gods really made me wonder.

How different would beliefs be if Christianity had not emerged at all? What did Romans believe? It looks like the established achievement metric of belief = favours was well established but beyond that there is huge divergence.

The most exciting part of the discussion, and the reason Reddit continues to delight, was the note that part of the reason Christianity was seen as a threat was because it clashed with many aspects of Roman life. For Romans, as with many other cultures, beliefs define what is permissible. The moral teachings of Christ means that some Roman staples (gladiators, astrology, slavery) were incompatible with a Christian way of life. Given that worship of Roman gods was rigorously enforced you can see how that might be seen as troubling.

It'd be interesting to wonder what kind of society we would have now if Christianity had been snuffed out and the Roman way of life stayed dominant. There would be clashes with indigent cultures around Europe but I'd bet that the various tribes wouldn't be preaching tolerance and understanding.

The rot seems to have set in when Constantine the Great became Emperor. As the first explicitly Christian emperor he preached religious tolerance which literally forced people to live a different way. A vision led to Constantine's conversion, but he was such a canny politician that there may be something else pointing him that way.

I guess the big question is how did Christianity come to pose such a threat? Then there are subsidiary questions about how history would be different if Christianity was missing. The Holy Roman Empire might be a bit different for a start.

Human overhaul

This is a fabulous discussion of what needs to change in the human body to make it better. It also makes me love the net all over again as I've been wondering about what would need doing and here are all the answers in a handy format for me to work with.