Malcolm Guite makes an excellent argument in the Church Times for the appropriateness of awarding Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature, including the following:
'... it is the Bible, more even than the work of previous poets, that has inspired and informed Dylan’s best work; and this biblical strand in his poetry is not confined to the more obvious and dramatic quotations in the intense period of his Christian conversion (1979-82).
Throughout his work, from his earliest days to the present, he has been in an imaginative conversation with scripture. In his best songs, it is not only direct quotation, but subtle allusion, that informs and deepens the poetry. Dylan often allows a Bible passage to work quietly behind his song. We can hear and appreciate the song without at first hearing the biblical echoes, but, once we do hear them, the whole meaning of the song is enhanced.'
For more reflection on Dylan and faith, read my co-authored book 'The Secret Chord'.
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Bob Dylan - Blowing In The Wind.
Showing posts with label nobel prize. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nobel prize. Show all posts
Saturday, 22 October 2016
Saturday, 5 September 2015
God is Red
'Liao Yiwu, 57, has lived in exile in Berlin since 2011. He was a leading Chinese literary figure until 1989 when he wrote a long poem titled Massacre addressed to the authors of the Tiananmen massacre (4 June 1989). Sentenced to four years in jail, he experienced life behind bars and social exclusion.
Although his books have been banned, they are widely circulated underground. Among the most famous are The Corpse Walker (English translation by Pantheon, 2008) and Dans l'empire des ténèbres ('In the empire of darkness,' in French, by François Bourin Editeur, 2013), in which he describes his experiences in prison.
In God is Red, published in 2011 in English and in French last month, he talks about his encounters with Christians from Yunnan, Hebei, Beijing and other parts of China. Before that, Liwu had never been interested in Christianity ...
In prison, Liao met with Christian prisoners. In doing so, he discovered another group of fellow Chinese. In God is Red, he relates the stories of some 20 people, Catholics and Protestants. Like many Chinese who do not know the history of the Church, he cannot see much difference between the two.
At the book launch on 12 February, he noted that converting to Christianity is "fashionable" in China. "During the 2000s, there was a strong sense of insecurity, of threat, in China," he said in the interview. "Not everyone had Liu Xiaobo's inner strength to resist those in power". A friend of Liao Yiwu, Liu won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2009, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for some of his online writings.
"Conversion is a way to find spiritual assistance. Yu Jie, a writer who became famous in the 90s, converted after feeling overwhelmed by the regime's threats. My friend Wang Yi did the same, as did their wives. For them it is a way to stop fear. Moreover, when we would meet, my recently converted friends would urge me to convert as well."
Even though Liao Yiwu is not a Christian, he is impressed by the courage Christians showed. Persecuted by the Communist government, they have remained steadfast in their faith.
"They all impressed me. Their fierce resistance for the freedom to believe inspired me a lot," he said. "The one who impressed me the most was a lady who was more than 100 years old, who was filled with holy anger. It is this holy anger that made her live. She wanted to fight until the complete victory of freedom for her religion."'
Friday's Guardian included a report about the current situation:
'A Chinese human rights lawyer who disappeared into police custody last month after joining the fight against a government drive to take down church crosses could face spying charges.
Zhang Kai, a Beijing-based attorney, was seized by security officials on 25 August in Wenzhou, a city in the eastern province of Zhejiang sometimes referred to as China’s Jerusalem because of its large Christian population.
Zhang had been in Wenzhou offering legal support to churches battling a controversial Communist party demolition drive that has targeted Christian places of worship since late 2013.
Writing on Weibo, China’s Twitter, two weeks before his detention, Zhang said: “I have thought it through: at worst they can put me in jail. But if I keep silent, I will regret it for the rest of my life.”'
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Monday, 31 August 2015
Czeslaw Milosz, Oscar Milosz and Simone Weil
Czeslaw Milosz was a Polish poet, 'who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts.' He was influenced particularly by his distant cousin Oscar Milosz and also by the writings of Simone Weil. In his Nobel Prize speech he spoke about his relationship with Oscar Milosz:
'... Like all my contemporaries I have felt the pull of despair, of impending doom, and reproached myself for succumbing to a nihilistic temptation. Yet on a deeper level, I believe, my poetry remained sane and, in a dark age, expressed a longing for the Kingdom of Peace and Justice. The name of a man who taught me not to despair should be invoked here. We receive gifts not only from our native land, its lakes and rivers, its traditions, but also from people, especially if we meet a powerful personality in our early youth. It was my good fortune to be treated nearly as a son by my relative Oscar Milosz, a Parisian recluse and a visionary. Why he was a French poet, could be elucidated by the intricate story of a family as well as of a country once called the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Be that as it may, it was possible to read recently in the Parisian press words of regret that the highest international distinction had not been awarded half a century earlier to a poet bearing the same family name as my own.
I learned much from him. He gave me a deeper insight into the religion of the Old and New Testament and inculcated a need for a strict, ascetic hierarchy in all matters of mind, including everything that pertains to art, where as a major sin he considered putting the second-rate on the same level with the first-rate. Primarily, though, I listened to him as a prophet who loved people, as he says, "with old love worn out by pity, loneliness and anger" and for that reason tried to address a warning to a crazy world rushing towards a catastrophe. That a catastrophe was imminent, I heard from him, but also I heard from him that the great conflagration he predicted would be merely a part of a larger drama to be played to the end.
He saw deeper causes in an erroneous direction taken by science in the Eighteenth Century, a direction which provoked landslide effects. Not unlike William Blake before him, he announced a New Age, a second renaissance of imagination now polluted by a certain type of scientific knowledge, but, as he believed, not by all scientific knowledge, least of all by science that would be discovered by men of the future. And it does not matter to what extent I took his predictions literally: a general orientation was enough.
Oscar Milosz, like William Blake, drew inspirations from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, a scientist who, earlier than anyone else, foresaw the defeat of man, hidden in the Newtonian model of the Universe. When, thanks to my relative, I became an attentive reader of Swedenborg, interpreting him not, it is true, as was common in the Romantic era, I did not imagine I would visit his country for the first time on such an occasion as the present one.
Our century draws to its close, and largely thanks to those influences I would not dare to curse it, for it has also been a century of faith and hope. A profound transformation, of which we are hardly aware, because we are a part of it, has been taking place, coming to the surface from time to time in phenomena that provoke general astonishment. That transformation has to do, and I use here words of Oscar Milosz, with "the deepest secret of toiling masses, more than ever alive, vibrant and tormented". Their secret, an unavowed need of true values, finds no language to express itself and here not only the mass media but also intellectuals bear a heavy responsibility. But transformation has been going on, defying short term predictions, and it is probable that in spite of all horrors and perils, our time will be judged as a necessary phase of travail before mankind ascends to a new awareness. Then a new hierarchy of merits will emerge, and I am convinced that Simone Weil and Oscar Milosz, writers in whose school I obediently studied, will receive their due.'
Simon Leys has written about Milosz and Weil:
I learned much from him. He gave me a deeper insight into the religion of the Old and New Testament and inculcated a need for a strict, ascetic hierarchy in all matters of mind, including everything that pertains to art, where as a major sin he considered putting the second-rate on the same level with the first-rate. Primarily, though, I listened to him as a prophet who loved people, as he says, "with old love worn out by pity, loneliness and anger" and for that reason tried to address a warning to a crazy world rushing towards a catastrophe. That a catastrophe was imminent, I heard from him, but also I heard from him that the great conflagration he predicted would be merely a part of a larger drama to be played to the end.
He saw deeper causes in an erroneous direction taken by science in the Eighteenth Century, a direction which provoked landslide effects. Not unlike William Blake before him, he announced a New Age, a second renaissance of imagination now polluted by a certain type of scientific knowledge, but, as he believed, not by all scientific knowledge, least of all by science that would be discovered by men of the future. And it does not matter to what extent I took his predictions literally: a general orientation was enough.
Oscar Milosz, like William Blake, drew inspirations from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, a scientist who, earlier than anyone else, foresaw the defeat of man, hidden in the Newtonian model of the Universe. When, thanks to my relative, I became an attentive reader of Swedenborg, interpreting him not, it is true, as was common in the Romantic era, I did not imagine I would visit his country for the first time on such an occasion as the present one.
Our century draws to its close, and largely thanks to those influences I would not dare to curse it, for it has also been a century of faith and hope. A profound transformation, of which we are hardly aware, because we are a part of it, has been taking place, coming to the surface from time to time in phenomena that provoke general astonishment. That transformation has to do, and I use here words of Oscar Milosz, with "the deepest secret of toiling masses, more than ever alive, vibrant and tormented". Their secret, an unavowed need of true values, finds no language to express itself and here not only the mass media but also intellectuals bear a heavy responsibility. But transformation has been going on, defying short term predictions, and it is probable that in spite of all horrors and perils, our time will be judged as a necessary phase of travail before mankind ascends to a new awareness. Then a new hierarchy of merits will emerge, and I am convinced that Simone Weil and Oscar Milosz, writers in whose school I obediently studied, will receive their due.'
Simon Leys has written about Milosz and Weil:
'For Milosz, the discovery of Simone Weil's writings, as it had for Camus, gave new direction to his inner life. The traces of this revelation are found throughout his essays, his correspondence, and even his teaching (he gave a course on Manichaeism, directly inspired by Simone Weil's thought; and furthermore he edited, and had published in Polish, a thick volume of her selected works).
Milosz's religious posture seems to be both symmetrical with, and the inverse of, Simone Weil's. The latter's reflection on naturally Christian pagans, and on naturally pagan Christians, could be taken to sum up their respective positions quite well. Simone Well, though inhabited by a great desire to enter the Church to be able to partake of the sacraments, nevertheless denied herself that happiness, and deliberately stayed on the threshold, sharing in the destitution of the neo-pagans. Milosz, by contrast, born and educated in the Church, often wished to leave it; he wanted to escape the chauvinist and political Polish Church of his childhood, just as much as he wished to escape the depressing caricature of Protestantism into which he saw Western post-Council Catholicism sinking.
Milosz defined himself as an "ecstatic pessimist," and perhaps it is in this that he is closest to Simone Well. In the face of the mystery of evil, there is little room in their faith for Providence (which would alleviate suffering) or for the communion of saints (which would give it meaning). Is a consoling religion a baser form of religion? "Love is not consolation, it is light"--this phrase of Simone Well's is admirable; but why would light not bring some consolation? In any case, that is what simple souls naturally perceive when they piously go to light a votive candle before an image of the Virgin or some saint.'
Milosz's religious posture seems to be both symmetrical with, and the inverse of, Simone Weil's. The latter's reflection on naturally Christian pagans, and on naturally pagan Christians, could be taken to sum up their respective positions quite well. Simone Well, though inhabited by a great desire to enter the Church to be able to partake of the sacraments, nevertheless denied herself that happiness, and deliberately stayed on the threshold, sharing in the destitution of the neo-pagans. Milosz, by contrast, born and educated in the Church, often wished to leave it; he wanted to escape the chauvinist and political Polish Church of his childhood, just as much as he wished to escape the depressing caricature of Protestantism into which he saw Western post-Council Catholicism sinking.
Milosz defined himself as an "ecstatic pessimist," and perhaps it is in this that he is closest to Simone Well. In the face of the mystery of evil, there is little room in their faith for Providence (which would alleviate suffering) or for the communion of saints (which would give it meaning). Is a consoling religion a baser form of religion? "Love is not consolation, it is light"--this phrase of Simone Well's is admirable; but why would light not bring some consolation? In any case, that is what simple souls naturally perceive when they piously go to light a votive candle before an image of the Virgin or some saint.'
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Bruce Cockburn - The Light Goes On Forever.
Saturday, 12 October 2013
The strong meat of short stories
In the light of Alice Munro's Nobel Prize for Literature there has not only been analysis of her skill as a writer of short stories but also much reflection on the nature of short stories themselves.
Colm Tóibín writes of Alice Munro that her "genius is in the construction of the story. She has a way of suggesting, both in the cadences and the circumstances, that nothing much is going to happen, that her world is ordinary and her scope is small. And then in a story such as "Runaway", she manages to suggest a fierce loneliness, and begins to dramatise the most unusual motives and actions. Slowly, there is nothing ordinary at all. I would love to see her drafts, or the inside of her mind as she works, because my feeling is that this takes a great deal of erasing, adding, taking risks, pulling back, taking time."
Sarah Hall, who won a £15,000 prize for a short story in the same week Alice Munro won the Nobel, writes that "They are excruciatingly difficult to produce and make effective. The best provoke potent sensations in the reader – discomfort, arousal, exhilaration, fear. They are as powerful and memorable, in some cases more so, than novels."
She continues by saying that "Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required. Often the experience is exquisitely unsettling; one might feel like a voyeur suddenly looming at the window of an intimate scene. At first glance normal-seeming events are taking place, but mundanity gives way to the peculiar, the perilous, the capricious. Short stories are manifestations, their own literary phenomena. Mostly there is no explanatory narrative ramp or roof, there are no stabilisers giving support over scary subject matter – sex and death, classically – and there are no solvent, tonic or consoling endings. The reader is left to decide what everything might mean, and in this way the form is inordinately respectful. Some might want such a reading experience infrequently, some every day, many never."
flavorwire has links to ten short stories which can be read online, starting with the "pitch-perfect short stories and razor-sharp wit" of my favourite short story writer, Flannery O'Connor. They state, "This is not meant to be a definitive list of the best short stories in the world, but merely a celebration of the form and a collection of ten of our many favorites, limited to those that we could track down online." Nikolai Gogol is another of my favourite short story writers; here is his entry in The Guardian's Brief Survey of the Short Story.
I have posted several of my own short stories on this blog. They can be found at:
The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.
Colm Tóibín writes of Alice Munro that her "genius is in the construction of the story. She has a way of suggesting, both in the cadences and the circumstances, that nothing much is going to happen, that her world is ordinary and her scope is small. And then in a story such as "Runaway", she manages to suggest a fierce loneliness, and begins to dramatise the most unusual motives and actions. Slowly, there is nothing ordinary at all. I would love to see her drafts, or the inside of her mind as she works, because my feeling is that this takes a great deal of erasing, adding, taking risks, pulling back, taking time."
Sarah Hall, who won a £15,000 prize for a short story in the same week Alice Munro won the Nobel, writes that "They are excruciatingly difficult to produce and make effective. The best provoke potent sensations in the reader – discomfort, arousal, exhilaration, fear. They are as powerful and memorable, in some cases more so, than novels."
She continues by saying that "Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required. Often the experience is exquisitely unsettling; one might feel like a voyeur suddenly looming at the window of an intimate scene. At first glance normal-seeming events are taking place, but mundanity gives way to the peculiar, the perilous, the capricious. Short stories are manifestations, their own literary phenomena. Mostly there is no explanatory narrative ramp or roof, there are no stabilisers giving support over scary subject matter – sex and death, classically – and there are no solvent, tonic or consoling endings. The reader is left to decide what everything might mean, and in this way the form is inordinately respectful. Some might want such a reading experience infrequently, some every day, many never."
flavorwire has links to ten short stories which can be read online, starting with the "pitch-perfect short stories and razor-sharp wit" of my favourite short story writer, Flannery O'Connor. They state, "This is not meant to be a definitive list of the best short stories in the world, but merely a celebration of the form and a collection of ten of our many favorites, limited to those that we could track down online." Nikolai Gogol is another of my favourite short story writers; here is his entry in The Guardian's Brief Survey of the Short Story.
I have posted several of my own short stories on this blog. They can be found at:
- A Disappearance - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4;
- Interrogation;
- The Black Rain (see also here, here, here and here);
- The Clean-up King - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6;
- The Curious Glasses; and
- The New Dark Ages - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.
Sunday, 18 March 2012
The Dreams of William Golding
Last night's Arena documentary on William Golding was a fascinating study of a fascinating writer:
'In 1954, William Golding's Lord Of The Flies, a terrifying vision of the latent savagery of society and the struggle between good and evil, burst upon the polite world of English fiction. It was originally turned down by more than 20 publishers, but has since sold 20 million copies worldwide.
Golding, an unknown schoolmaster and D-Day veteran, went on to win both the Booker and Nobel Prizes. His dozen novels, awesome in their scope, range from the dawn of humanity to medieval man and maritime epics, and reveal an imagination which is dark and powerfully compelling. Arena has been given unique access to Golding's family and to his extensive personal archive for the first film to be made since his death in 1993. Rooted in the mysterious West Country landscape that Golding made his home, and with testimony from his neighbours including John Le Carré, James Lovelock and Pete Townshend, and his admirers Stephen King and Ian McEwan, it embraces the bewildering range of Golding's genius, and the continuing importance of his vision.'
The Presentation Speech for his Nobel Prize gives a helpful summary of some of his core themes and approaches as a writer:
'Golding has a very keen sight and sharp pen when it comes to the power of evil and baseness in human beings. He often chooses his themes and the framework for his stories from the world of the sea or from other challenging situations in which odd people are tempted to reach beyond their limits, thereby being bared to the very marrow. His stories usually have a fairly schematic drama, almost an anecdote, as skeleton. He then covers this with a richly varied and spicy flesh of colourful characters and surprising events.
It is the pattern of myth that we find in his manner of writing ...
Golding inveighs against those who think that it is the political or other systems that create evil. Evil springs from the depths of man himself - it is the wickedness in human beings that creates the evil systems or that changes what from the beginning is, or could be, good into something iniquitous and destructive.
There is a mighty religious dimension in William Golding's conception of the world, though hardly Christian in the ordinary sense. He seems to believe in a kind of Fall. Perhaps rather one should say that he works with the myth of a Fall. In some of his stories, chiefly the novel The Inheritors, 1955, we find a dream of an original state of innocence in the history of mankind. The Fall came with the motive power of a new species. The aggressive intelligence, the power-hungry self-assertion and the overweening individualism are the source of evil and violence - individual as well as social violence. But these qualities and incentives are also innate in man as a created being. They are therefore inseparably a part of his character and make themselves felt when he gives full expression to himself and forms his societies and his private destiny.'
In his Nobel Lecture Golding said that:
'Under some critical interrogation I named myself a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist ... I meant, of course, that when I consider a universe which the scientist constructs by a set of rules which stipulate that this construct must be repeatable and identical, then I am a pessimist and bow down before the great god Entropy. I am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension which the scientist's discipline forces him to ignore ... Twenty years ago I tried to put the difference between the two kinds of experience in the mind of one of my characters, and made a mess of it. He was in prison.
"All day long the trains run on rails. Eclipses are predictable. Penicillin cures pneumonia and the atom splits to order. All day long year in year out the daylight explanation drives back the mystery and reveals a reality usable, understandable and detached. The scalpel and the microscope fail. The oscilloscope moves closer to behaviour.
"But then, all day long action is weighed in the balance and found not opportune nor fortunate nor ill-advised but good or evil. For this mode which we call the spirit breathes through the universe and does not touch it: touches only the dark things held prisoner, incommunicado, touches, judges, sentences and passes on. Both worlds are real. There is no bridge."
What amuses me is the thought that of course there is a bridge and that if anything it has been thrust out from the side which least expected it, and thrust out since those words were written. For we know now, that the universe had a beginning. (Indeed, as an aside I might say we always did know. I offer you a simple proof and forbid you to examine it. If there was no beginning then infinite time has already passed and we could never have got to the moment where we are.) We also know or it is at least scientifically respectable to postulate that at the centre of a black hole the laws of nature no longer apply. Since most scientists are just a bit religious and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole while his religious intellect believes in them outside it. Both, in fact, now believe in miracles, credimus quia absurdum est. Glory be to God in the highest. You will get no reductive pessimism from me.'
Watch the documentary on i-player by clicking here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lou Reed - Waves Of Fear.
'In 1954, William Golding's Lord Of The Flies, a terrifying vision of the latent savagery of society and the struggle between good and evil, burst upon the polite world of English fiction. It was originally turned down by more than 20 publishers, but has since sold 20 million copies worldwide.
Golding, an unknown schoolmaster and D-Day veteran, went on to win both the Booker and Nobel Prizes. His dozen novels, awesome in their scope, range from the dawn of humanity to medieval man and maritime epics, and reveal an imagination which is dark and powerfully compelling. Arena has been given unique access to Golding's family and to his extensive personal archive for the first film to be made since his death in 1993. Rooted in the mysterious West Country landscape that Golding made his home, and with testimony from his neighbours including John Le Carré, James Lovelock and Pete Townshend, and his admirers Stephen King and Ian McEwan, it embraces the bewildering range of Golding's genius, and the continuing importance of his vision.'
The Presentation Speech for his Nobel Prize gives a helpful summary of some of his core themes and approaches as a writer:
'Golding has a very keen sight and sharp pen when it comes to the power of evil and baseness in human beings. He often chooses his themes and the framework for his stories from the world of the sea or from other challenging situations in which odd people are tempted to reach beyond their limits, thereby being bared to the very marrow. His stories usually have a fairly schematic drama, almost an anecdote, as skeleton. He then covers this with a richly varied and spicy flesh of colourful characters and surprising events.
It is the pattern of myth that we find in his manner of writing ...
Golding inveighs against those who think that it is the political or other systems that create evil. Evil springs from the depths of man himself - it is the wickedness in human beings that creates the evil systems or that changes what from the beginning is, or could be, good into something iniquitous and destructive.
There is a mighty religious dimension in William Golding's conception of the world, though hardly Christian in the ordinary sense. He seems to believe in a kind of Fall. Perhaps rather one should say that he works with the myth of a Fall. In some of his stories, chiefly the novel The Inheritors, 1955, we find a dream of an original state of innocence in the history of mankind. The Fall came with the motive power of a new species. The aggressive intelligence, the power-hungry self-assertion and the overweening individualism are the source of evil and violence - individual as well as social violence. But these qualities and incentives are also innate in man as a created being. They are therefore inseparably a part of his character and make themselves felt when he gives full expression to himself and forms his societies and his private destiny.'
In his Nobel Lecture Golding said that:
'Under some critical interrogation I named myself a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist ... I meant, of course, that when I consider a universe which the scientist constructs by a set of rules which stipulate that this construct must be repeatable and identical, then I am a pessimist and bow down before the great god Entropy. I am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension which the scientist's discipline forces him to ignore ... Twenty years ago I tried to put the difference between the two kinds of experience in the mind of one of my characters, and made a mess of it. He was in prison.
"All day long the trains run on rails. Eclipses are predictable. Penicillin cures pneumonia and the atom splits to order. All day long year in year out the daylight explanation drives back the mystery and reveals a reality usable, understandable and detached. The scalpel and the microscope fail. The oscilloscope moves closer to behaviour.
"But then, all day long action is weighed in the balance and found not opportune nor fortunate nor ill-advised but good or evil. For this mode which we call the spirit breathes through the universe and does not touch it: touches only the dark things held prisoner, incommunicado, touches, judges, sentences and passes on. Both worlds are real. There is no bridge."
What amuses me is the thought that of course there is a bridge and that if anything it has been thrust out from the side which least expected it, and thrust out since those words were written. For we know now, that the universe had a beginning. (Indeed, as an aside I might say we always did know. I offer you a simple proof and forbid you to examine it. If there was no beginning then infinite time has already passed and we could never have got to the moment where we are.) We also know or it is at least scientifically respectable to postulate that at the centre of a black hole the laws of nature no longer apply. Since most scientists are just a bit religious and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole while his religious intellect believes in them outside it. Both, in fact, now believe in miracles, credimus quia absurdum est. Glory be to God in the highest. You will get no reductive pessimism from me.'
Watch the documentary on i-player by clicking here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lou Reed - Waves Of Fear.
Thursday, 7 April 2011
Responses to the Templeton Prize award
Here are two responses from today's Times to the decision to award this year's Templeton Prize to Lord Rees:
"Martin Rees is a brilliant astrophysicist and a personal friend, but I believe he has made a mistake in accepting £1 million from the Templeton Foundation. In doing so, he supports its primary aim, which is to undermine the most precious tenet of science: that it is the only philosophical construct we have to determine truth with any reliability. The Templeton Prize has been set deliberately at a higher value than the Nobel Prize in a pathetic attempt, using enormous amounts of money as their lure, to bask in the reflected lustre of the most prestigious of science awards." Sir Harry Kroto
"Lewis Wolpert, Emeritus Professor of Biology at University College London and vice-president of the British Humanist Association, said that Lord Rees was justified in accepting the prize. "I think religion helps a lot of people, and as long as it doesn't interfere with science I don't mind. My son became religious and it did him some deal of good. Martin works so hard and does so much for science that any prize is well deserved."
I leave it to you to judge which response is the more reasoned and reasonable.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Radiohead - Everything In Its Right Place.
"Martin Rees is a brilliant astrophysicist and a personal friend, but I believe he has made a mistake in accepting £1 million from the Templeton Foundation. In doing so, he supports its primary aim, which is to undermine the most precious tenet of science: that it is the only philosophical construct we have to determine truth with any reliability. The Templeton Prize has been set deliberately at a higher value than the Nobel Prize in a pathetic attempt, using enormous amounts of money as their lure, to bask in the reflected lustre of the most prestigious of science awards." Sir Harry Kroto
"Lewis Wolpert, Emeritus Professor of Biology at University College London and vice-president of the British Humanist Association, said that Lord Rees was justified in accepting the prize. "I think religion helps a lot of people, and as long as it doesn't interfere with science I don't mind. My son became religious and it did him some deal of good. Martin works so hard and does so much for science that any prize is well deserved."
I leave it to you to judge which response is the more reasoned and reasonable.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Radiohead - Everything In Its Right Place.
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