British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
The debate in Christianity goes back at least as far as the 8th century Eastern Empire (and has always existed in Islam). Are art, architecture, music, literature the allies of religion, or its most insidious enemies.
More news on Mike Johnson: 'One month ago, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., voted with 93 Republicans to cut off Ukraine aid. Now, as speaker, Johnson said he's asked White House staff to “bifurcate” aid to Israel and Ukraine. But he emphasized that the U.S. must stop Russia’s advances.
“We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to prevail in Ukraine because I don’t believe it would stop there,” Johnson said in an interview on Fox News the day after he was sworn in. “And it would probably encourage and empower China to perhaps make a move on Taiwan. We have these concerns. We’re not going to abandon them.”'
Several possible compromises are mentioned in the article.
The Loser's friend, "Czar" Putin, won't be happy about this announcement.
Doesn't sound massively optimistic - they were talking about holding a separate vote for Ukraine aid back when McCarthy was there, to pass with some level of bipartisan support, but the rebels seemed outraged all the same. I can see Gaetz has not condemned the idea, but I cannot see what is different in the idea which was proposed before.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
I felt that, a few months ago, as I wandered through the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, and I've felt it at Fountains, too, and the London Charterhouse. Especially, reading about the cruel fates of many of the monks who dared to defy a tyrant, knowing what awaited them.
It was Councillor Peter Golds, a Jewish Conservative, who once spoke to me of his sadness at reading of the disapperance of the "Land of the Bells" that was pre-Reformation England.
Rievaulx Abbey had that effect on me. It felt unutterably sad and moving to see the remains of what was once there, sacked by greedy barbarians.
Barbarians?!
The monasteries were sinks of corruption, stagnation and avarice, and sucked the blood out of rural England. Henry VIII dissolved them for purely selfish reasons, but what he did almost certainly benefited England as a whole. The Catholic Church in the 16th century was the equivalent of the Woke Blob today. A toad squatting fatly and squarely on the nation. There was a Reformation for a damn good reason
We were and are well rid
And of course today there are some Anglican monasteries and convents, albeit rather less wealthy than their Roman Catholic predecessors 500 years ago
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
Why?
It seems to be a minor channel, the viewership no more than than the attendance at a Man Utd soccer game, yet it seems to cause otherwise rational people to lose their sense of perspective online (not you I hasten to add). I’ve no interest in it so I don’t watch it. I doubt it has any real influence.
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
No it is the biggest clearly rightwing TV channel in the UK, longer term that is a key tool for making the case for rightwing policies
The Americans have Fox News yet it didn't stop Obama winning twice and Biden beating Trump. Having a platform for a particular set of policies is fine only as long as enough people are willing to listen otherwise it's a niche.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
I felt that, a few months ago, as I wandered through the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, and I've felt it at Fountains, too, and the London Charterhouse. Especially, reading about the cruel fates of many of the monks who dared to defy a tyrant, knowing what awaited them.
It was Councillor Peter Golds, a Jewish Conservative, who once spoke to me of his sadness at reading of the disapperance of the "Land of the Bells" that was pre-Reformation England.
Rievaulx Abbey had that effect on me. It felt unutterably sad and moving to see the remains of what was once there, sacked by greedy barbarians.
Barbarians?!
The monasteries were sinks of corruption, stagnation and avarice, and sucked the blood out of rural England. Henry VIII dissolved them for purely selfish reasons, but what he did almost certainly benefited England as a whole. The Catholic Church in the 16th century was the equivalent of the Woke Blob today. A toad squatting fatly and squarely on the nation. There was a Reformation for a damn good reason
We were and are well rid
But...but...the nice buildings!
In all honesty I love a good historical building myself and so any loss is regrettable in one sense, but greedy old git that Henry was it's hard to escape the idea the medieval church was a greedy, hypocritical, power hungry group of political power players. You probably had the good folks at the bottom doing the good work, but the organisation? So many abbeys and monasteries and who paid for it all?
Kings nearly always squabbled with the church about power and money. Henry just won his confrontation more strongly than most.
The main thing is we saved the cathedrals and churches. That’s what matters, architecturally, they are the most important. They weren’t burned down. Some got a bit whitewashed, so be it
And as for the abbeys, we have kept a fair few, and those that were ruined are now picturesque ruins. Tintern Abbey is WAY more interesting as a ruin than yet another abbey with creepy pervy hairy kneed monks trying to sodomise every boy in Abergavenny
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
No it is the biggest clearly rightwing TV channel in the UK, longer term that is a key tool for making the case for rightwing policies
But is anyone else outside of "right wing" people actually watching? Isn't it just a talking shop for people who agree with other to... well... agree with each other.
But where do floating voters - the people who actually decide elections - fit it? They are just looking on in bemusement watching this array of right wing oddballs, attention seekers and conspiracy theorists agreeing with one another?
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
I felt that, a few months ago, as I wandered through the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, and I've felt it at Fountains, too, and the London Charterhouse. Especially, reading about the cruel fates of many of the monks who dared to defy a tyrant, knowing what awaited them.
It was Councillor Peter Golds, a Jewish Conservative, who once spoke to me of his sadness at reading of the disapperance of the "Land of the Bells" that was pre-Reformation England.
Rievaulx Abbey had that effect on me. It felt unutterably sad and moving to see the remains of what was once there, sacked by greedy barbarians.
Barbarians?!
The monasteries were sinks of corruption, stagnation and avarice, and sucked the blood out of rural England. Henry VIII dissolved them for purely selfish reasons, but what he did almost certainly benefited England as a whole. The Catholic Church in the 16th century was the equivalent of the Woke Blob today. A toad squatting fatly and squarely on the nation. There was a Reformation for a damn good reason
We were and are well rid
The Papacy was a corrupt toad. But, that was not in general, true of the English monasteries. They were the welfare state of the day. When they went, so did most charity. Tudor legislation against beggars was ever more vicious, until the famines of the 1590’s persuaded the government to bring in the Poor Law of 1601.
A hopefully non-controversial question for the evening.
My son is obsessed with the Romans. Teaching-himself-Latin levels of obsessed. Creating-frescoes levels of obsessed. Recreating-Pompeii-in-Minecraft levels of obsessed.
The son of an acquaintance is also obsessed with the Romans. Why do the Romans loom so heavily over our history and psyche; perhaps more so than (say) the Vikings or Normans?
Without going all Monty Python, the Romans ran England (and much of Europe) for several centuries and so did the Normans. Both had huge effects on our language, culture and even geography. The Vikings were brutal raiders who inflicted Beowulf on generations of English undergraduates.
ETA do a search for the video of the C4 programme When Boris Met Dave. In it, iirc, Rachel Johnson explains that Classics is an easy way of getting into Oxford. Your acquaintance might bear this in mind.
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
Why?
It seems to be a minor channel, the viewership no more than than the attendance at a Man Utd soccer game, yet it seems to cause otherwise rational people to lose their sense of perspective online (not you I hasten to add). I’ve no interest in it so I don’t watch it. I doubt it has any real influence.
It’s not the channel, but the viral clips you can get from the channel. Like you I don’t watch it, and I also don’t follow political stuff on social media or even have Twitter, but as I understand it these clips get shared in those places and also in WhatsApp groups (why anyone would stay in a WhatsApp group sharing endless political videos is beyond me) which is where, for example, a lot of where the anti-vax stuff lives.
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
At the moment I would say that GB News has more effect on the debate inside the Conservative Party than on the debate across Britain. Imagine if the Corbynists had their own TV channel to ensure there was no backsliding from Corbynism in the Labour Party?
It will possibly have blown over by then but there are few issues in British and European politics as visceral as apartheid. And since South Africa this is seen (certainly on the left) as the next great injustice.
I'm sure Starmer will water down his intemperate comments but if he doesn't there will be a backlash. A lot will depend what happens in the next few months. Blair was able to lose his support in a short time with a wrong decision on Iraq and so could Starmer over Palestine
I'm always fascinated by the way the british Left decides it can willy nilly tell other people how to run their countries . Its just imperialism by other means.
But as imperialisms go I'd say campaigning against apartheid beats invading Iraq.
In South Africa, there was an obvious good guy, and an obvious bad guy.
Despite what Roger and the Corbynistas think, Israel doesn't fill the role of obvious bad guy, nor do the Palestinians fill the role of obvious good guy.
No, but it's as close to objective truth as you can get that the clashing agendas of various powers and the searches for solutions to a difficult problem down the years since 1948 have left the Palestinian people wronged and stuffed.
The Palestinians are not passive spectators in all this. They have on repeated occasions made many stupid choices which has made their position very much worse than it might otherwise have been. Pretending that it has all been done to them and not also by them is ahistorical nonsense and treats them like children.
Sure. And eg the Israelis keep voting for Netanyahu. So ditto. But anyway I'm not making out this is a clear good v bad affair. I'll leave that to the antisemites and their opposite numbers in the 'Palestinians don't count' camp.
This is a good v bad affair.
That's not because "Palestinians don't count".
Its because Hamas being fascist anti-democrats who refuse elections, murder babies, rape women, execute gays and want to kill every Jew, is unmitigatedly evil.
While Israel as a democratic nation that has sought peace for decades, offered peace to the Palestinians, and has in recent years made peace agreements even with undemocratic nations like the UAE and who were in peace talks with the Saudis are on the side of good.
Democracy and human rights count. That's why Israel is good, and Hamas is not.
You really are a simplistic clown. Have you ever been outside of Mostyn?
The one being simplistic and naive is you.
Have you ever read Benevolence and Betrayal by Alexander Stille? You should. It's about 5 Italian Jewish families under fascism. One of them is led by a man who supports Mussolini, thinks fascism a good thing, ingratiates himself with the regime and thinks he will be safe. He is one of the good pro-Italy-under-Mussolini Jews. When I read your comments I think of that man. Too late he realises that all his sucking up and ingratiation and support for the regime is of no consequence. The only thing that matters about him is that he is a Jew - nothing else - not his support or his money or his opinions. Too late he tries to escape. He does not and is murdered.
That, Roger, is how Hamas view you. They don't care about your dislike of Netanyahu or that you call Israel a one-eyed country or that you support the Palestinian cause. They didn't care about the elderly journalist who wrote about the Sabra and Chatila massacres and Israel's shameful role in them. They still took him hostage. They didn't care about the woman who had been helping Palestinians in Gaza get medical treatment. They took her hostage too. They didn't care about the Israeli IT CEO who was building businesses inside Gaza to give good jobs to Gazans. They still killed his 15 year old daughter. They kill Jews because they are Jews - because of who they are not because of their opinions or what they have done or who they vote for. That is what their Charter says and it is what they have done and will continue doing until they are stopped. You are profoundly naive if you think otherwise.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
I felt that, a few months ago, as I wandered through the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, and I've felt it at Fountains, too, and the London Charterhouse. Especially, reading about the cruel fates of many of the monks who dared to defy a tyrant, knowing what awaited them.
It was Councillor Peter Golds, a Jewish Conservative, who once spoke to me of his sadness at reading of the disapperance of the "Land of the Bells" that was pre-Reformation England.
Rievaulx Abbey had that effect on me. It felt unutterably sad and moving to see the remains of what was once there, sacked by greedy barbarians.
Barbarians?!
The monasteries were sinks of corruption, stagnation and avarice, and sucked the blood out of rural England. Henry VIII dissolved them for purely selfish reasons, but what he did almost certainly benefited England as a whole. The Catholic Church in the 16th century was the equivalent of the Woke Blob today. A toad squatting fatly and squarely on the nation. There was a Reformation for a damn good reason
We were and are well rid
The Papacy was a corrupt toad. But, that was not in general, true of the English monasteries. They were the welfare state of the day. When they went, so did most charity. Tudor legislation against beggars was ever more vicious, until the famines of the 1590’s persuaded the government to bring in the Poor Law of 1601.
No, the Catholic Church was the EU of its time, only worse
A vast bureaucracy slowly bleeding away independent life and thought. Kthxbye and fuck off
More news on Mike Johnson: 'One month ago, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., voted with 93 Republicans to cut off Ukraine aid. Now, as speaker, Johnson said he's asked White House staff to “bifurcate” aid to Israel and Ukraine. But he emphasized that the U.S. must stop Russia’s advances.
“We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to prevail in Ukraine because I don’t believe it would stop there,” Johnson said in an interview on Fox News the day after he was sworn in. “And it would probably encourage and empower China to perhaps make a move on Taiwan. We have these concerns. We’re not going to abandon them.”'
While I'm convinced People Polling is a clear outlier, YouGov, Techne and We Think all have Labour leads of twenty points. Labour are back to the mid 40's while the Conservatives are in the mid 20s.
We're due an Opinium on Sunday which last time had Labour 16 points in front (44-28).
As for Techne, the 46-25 reported today is exactly the same as in the first poll of the year back in January. Nearly 10 months later, the surprise continues to be not how much has changed, but how little.
A hopefully non-controversial question for the evening.
My son is obsessed with the Romans. Teaching-himself-Latin levels of obsessed. Creating-frescoes levels of obsessed. Recreating-Pompeii-in-Minecraft levels of obsessed.
The son of an acquaintance is also obsessed with the Romans. Why do the Romans loom so heavily over our history and psyche; perhaps more so than (say) the Vikings or Normans?
Without going all Monty Python, the Romans ran England (and much of Europe) for several centuries and so did the Normans. Both had huge effects on our language, culture and even geography. The Vikings were brutal raiders who inflicted Beowulf on generations of English undergraduates.
Also, going out forging empires is cool so long as you have the 2000 year separation to stop you worrying about the slaughtering and the slaves. 2000 years from now the British empire will get the same fascination I suspect.
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
No it is the biggest clearly rightwing TV channel in the UK, longer term that is a key tool for making the case for rightwing policies
The Americans have Fox News yet it didn't stop Obama winning twice and Biden beating Trump. Having a platform for a particular set of policies is fine only as long as enough people are willing to listen otherwise it's a niche.
FOX news has been bad news for the GOP as without it, I think it's doubtful Trump and MAGA would ever have been able to take over the Republicans.
Fortunately for the Conservatives GB News doesn't have the reach of FOX. Yet.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
The debate in Christianity goes back at least as far as the 8th century Eastern Empire (and has always existed in Islam). Are art, architecture, music, literature the allies of religion, or its most insidious enemies.
I incline to the former, not the latter.
Yes, Puritanism isn't unique to Protestantism, and does have a lot of parallels with the iconoclasts, the early Muslims and even the Bolsheveiks. When people get fed up with corruption, oppression and the yoke of the ruling class they find a lot of interest in a philosophy of empowerment, collective self help and equality.
There is a revolutionary spirit in these that the ruling classes really fear, and which they tend to corrupt themselves into a tolerable form for them. Hence Anglicanism, Stalinism and Sheikhs. Until next time...
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
I did once find it in Cologne, but that was after 48 sleepless hours hitch-hiking from Copenhagen and arriving at the height of evensong. The soaring choral voices echoing around the ancient rafters (rebuilt after WW2) almost reduced me to tears, but once outside and back on the road sanity prevailed.
Missa Solemnis remains to this day my favourite genre of entertainment.
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
At the moment I would say that GB News has more effect on the debate inside the Conservative Party than on the debate across Britain. Imagine if the Corbynists had their own TV channel to ensure there was no backsliding from Corbynism in the Labour Party?
They do, Russia Today and C4 news is effectively the Starmer Labour channel now with BBC news not far off
I’d say another reason for the popularity of Romans and vikings is the widespread belief that pagans didn’t really believe their own religions, which makes them rather like us.
Again, a popular belief that no qualified academic would entertain, and really, pretty insulting to both Romans and Danes.
I don't mind stories set in ancient times where the main character is not really very devout, there must have been people like that, but sometimes it does feel like a cheap way of having someone with near modern values in an older setting, when they are in a period where it was likely they were and not at least appearing so would be questionable.
One of the worst sins for a historian is presentism - the belief that people who lived in past societies shared our own outlook and beliefs.
Some behaviours are almost universal - almost everyone loves their own children for example; fart jokes are always popular.
But, especially in matters of sex and religion, the past is often a different country.
And, presentism is a sin for the historical novelist, too.
Verisimilitude. It doesn't need to be true, just seem like it could be. We might not put our finger on something seeming wrong, but we can often tell.
Ancient Romans did not speak like upper class British people, but because it is not everyday California dialogue it sounds more real than if a film has them all talk like surfer dudes. 9th century viking raiders probably held less than salubrious opinions on treatment of monasteries, that sort of thing.
The other one is avoiding the ugly truth by talk about complexity.
One that struck me was the description of how two cultures “merged” after a conquest. According to DNA, after the conquest there was lots of “inter-marriage” with only the female side of the original group.
Yeah. “Inter-marriage”….
Granted he's only a novellist, but I did like a pointed comment from Bernard Cornwell in one of his Last Kingdom books.
The northmen are usually called Vikings and some historians suggest that, far from being the feared predators of myth, they were peace-loving folk who mostly lived amicably with their Saxon neighbours. This ignores much contemporary evidence, let alone the skeletons that are doubtless still buried beneath the railway at Benfleet. Alfred organised Wessex for war and built hugely expensive defences and he would have done none of that if the Vikings were as peaceably inclined as some revisionists want us to believe.
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
At the moment I would say that GB News has more effect on the debate inside the Conservative Party than on the debate across Britain. Imagine if the Corbynists had their own TV channel to ensure there was no backsliding from Corbynism in the Labour Party?
Yeah, that's another reason it's bad news for Con as they might decide to go down the rabbit hole of an extreme right wing leader rather than a center right candidate.
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
No it is the biggest clearly rightwing TV channel in the UK, longer term that is a key tool for making the case for rightwing policies
But is anyone else outside of "right wing" people actually watching? Isn't it just a talking shop for people who agree with other to... well... agree with each other.
But where do floating voters - the people who actually decide elections - fit it? They are just looking on in bemusement watching this array of right wing oddballs, attention seekers and conspiracy theorists agreeing with one another?
If it fires up the right and gets them out to vote that only helps the Tories, unfortunately for them Sunak isn't firing up either the right or floating voters now as Boris did in 2019
This image has been doing the rounds on TwiX today by all the usual people. Zoom in and have a count of the number of fingers and toes. Plus look at the arms round the neck - how is that possible?
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
At the moment I would say that GB News has more effect on the debate inside the Conservative Party than on the debate across Britain. Imagine if the Corbynists had their own TV channel to ensure there was no backsliding from Corbynism in the Labour Party?
A hopefully non-controversial question for the evening.
My son is obsessed with the Romans. Teaching-himself-Latin levels of obsessed. Creating-frescoes levels of obsessed. Recreating-Pompeii-in-Minecraft levels of obsessed.
The son of an acquaintance is also obsessed with the Romans. Why do the Romans loom so heavily over our history and psyche; perhaps more so than (say) the Vikings or Normans?
Without going all Monty Python, the Romans ran England (and much of Europe) for several centuries and so did the Normans. Both had huge effects on our language, culture and even geography. The Vikings were brutal raiders who inflicted Beowulf on generations of English undergraduates.
ETA do a search for the video of the C4 programme When Boris Met Dave. In it, iirc, Rachel Johnson explains that Classics is an easy way of getting into Oxford. Your acquaintance might bear this in mind.
The Vikings occupied a lot of Northern Britain, and Ireland so were also key influences on the development of these Isles. And of course the Norman's were Vikings, albeit French speaking ones.
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
No it is the biggest clearly rightwing TV channel in the UK, longer term that is a key tool for making the case for rightwing policies
The Americans have Fox News yet it didn't stop Obama winning twice and Biden beating Trump. Having a platform for a particular set of policies is fine only as long as enough people are willing to listen otherwise it's a niche.
FOX news has been bad news for the GOP as without it, I think it's doubtful Trump and MAGA would ever have been able to take over the Republicans.
Fortunately for the Conservatives GB News doesn't have the reach of FOX. Yet.
I think it will find a decent audience, but I can't see it getting the reach of a Fox - that's too exuberant and intense, there are many more Tories and Tory sympathising people who would get put off by that approach.
This image has been doing the rounds on TwiX today by all the usual people. Zoom in and have a count of the number of fingers and toes. Plus look at the arms round the neck - how is that possible?
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
At the moment I would say that GB News has more effect on the debate inside the Conservative Party than on the debate across Britain. Imagine if the Corbynists had their own TV channel to ensure there was no backsliding from Corbynism in the Labour Party?
Yeah, that's another reason it's bad news for Con as they might decide to go down the rabbit hole of an extreme right wing leader rather than a center right candidate.
The Tories have a centre right leader at the moment who is leading them to their lowest voteshare since 1832 on current polls.
At least an ultra right leader would win back voters lost to RefUK, if floating voters are gone anyway for now
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
No it is the biggest clearly rightwing TV channel in the UK, longer term that is a key tool for making the case for rightwing policies
The Americans have Fox News yet it didn't stop Obama winning twice and Biden beating Trump. Having a platform for a particular set of policies is fine only as long as enough people are willing to listen otherwise it's a niche.
FOX news has been bad news for the GOP as without it, I think it's doubtful Trump and MAGA would ever have been able to take over the Republicans.
Fortunately for the Conservatives GB News doesn't have the reach of FOX. Yet.
Fox undoubtedly got voters out for Bush in 2004 and Trump in 2016 when both won
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
Why?
It seems to be a minor channel, the viewership no more than than the attendance at a Man Utd soccer game, yet it seems to cause otherwise rational people to lose their sense of perspective online (not you I hasten to add). I’ve no interest in it so I don’t watch it. I doubt it has any real influence.
It’s not the channel, but the viral clips you can get from the channel. Like you I don’t watch it, and I also don’t follow political stuff on social media or even have Twitter, but as I understand it these clips get shared in those places and also in WhatsApp groups (why anyone would stay in a WhatsApp group sharing endless political videos is beyond me) which is where, for example, a lot of where the anti-vax stuff lives.
But a lot of that, rather like the centrist Dad podcasts News Agents and The Rest is Politics, is just people with the same views talking to each other.
They’re effectively disappearing up an social media cul de sac.
I just think people raging against it simply draws attention to it. It’s an irrelevance
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
On the subject of GB News, it's clearly doing OK. Since it moved to being on-line first, it has dramatically increased its reach, and is clearly well ahead of other right of center UK channels on-line.
With that said... it's not doing *that* well either.
In total it has 1.07 million YouTube subscribers. That's... a lot less than Piers Morgan (1.92 million).
And if you look at it's current live stream:
It has - errrr - 222 people watching.
It's most popular video yesterday was Jacob Rees-Mogg (71k views), followed by Nigel Farage with just 20k views.
Those aren't amazing numbers. Some of my videos got 200+k views. And that was just me and a green screen. It is, presumably, absolutely hemorrhaging money.
A hopefully non-controversial question for the evening.
My son is obsessed with the Romans. Teaching-himself-Latin levels of obsessed. Creating-frescoes levels of obsessed. Recreating-Pompeii-in-Minecraft levels of obsessed.
The son of an acquaintance is also obsessed with the Romans. Why do the Romans loom so heavily over our history and psyche; perhaps more so than (say) the Vikings or Normans?
Without going all Monty Python, the Romans ran England (and much of Europe) for several centuries and so did the Normans. Both had huge effects on our language, culture and even geography. The Vikings were brutal raiders who inflicted Beowulf on generations of English undergraduates.
Also, going out forging empires is cool so long as you have the 2000 year separation to stop you worrying about the slaughtering and the slaves. 2000 years from now the British empire will get the same fascination I suspect.
Er, plenty on PB haven't waited a hundred years ...
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
Why?
It seems to be a minor channel, the viewership no more than than the attendance at a Man Utd soccer game, yet it seems to cause otherwise rational people to lose their sense of perspective online (not you I hasten to add). I’ve no interest in it so I don’t watch it. I doubt it has any real influence.
It’s not the channel, but the viral clips you can get from the channel. Like you I don’t watch it, and I also don’t follow political stuff on social media or even have Twitter, but as I understand it these clips get shared in those places and also in WhatsApp groups (why anyone would stay in a WhatsApp group sharing endless political videos is beyond me) which is where, for example, a lot of where the anti-vax stuff lives.
But a lot of that, rather like the centrist Dad podcasts News Agents and The Rest is Politics, is just people with the same views talking to each other.
They’re effectively disappearing up an social media cul de sac.
I just think people raging against it simply draws attention to it. It’s an irrelevance
The problem is that it feeds the silo thinking of groups of people (just like social media does) and it'll drag the tories to the right.
A hopefully non-controversial question for the evening.
My son is obsessed with the Romans. Teaching-himself-Latin levels of obsessed. Creating-frescoes levels of obsessed. Recreating-Pompeii-in-Minecraft levels of obsessed.
The son of an acquaintance is also obsessed with the Romans. Why do the Romans loom so heavily over our history and psyche; perhaps more so than (say) the Vikings or Normans?
Without going all Monty Python, the Romans ran England (and much of Europe) for several centuries and so did the Normans. Both had huge effects on our language, culture and even geography. The Vikings were brutal raiders who inflicted Beowulf on generations of English undergraduates.
ETA do a search for the video of the C4 programme When Boris Met Dave. In it, iirc, Rachel Johnson explains that Classics is an easy way of getting into Oxford. Your acquaintance might bear this in mind.
TBF I'd check the current situation. But doing Greats did cut down on what would have been seen as the oik competition from state schools. Whether this is still the case ...
This image has been doing the rounds on TwiX today by all the usual people. Zoom in and have a count of the number of fingers and toes. Plus look at the arms round the neck - how is that possible?
Hard to believe in the 21st century we are watching the effective starvation of 2 million people under siege . I appreciate some in here could care less under the “ Israel has a right to defend itself “ .
I didn’t realize that right extended to killing over 2,000 children .
Scratch some of the more exuberant pro-Israeli pundits and you'll find the feeling that Palestinians don't count as fully fledged human beings. They fling the 'antisemitism' charge around like drunken sailors but are guilty of the same sort of thing, deciding a particular group of people are undeserving of any empathy or respect.
Given what we have seen levelled at Jews in this country here by fellow Britons, that charge could - and should - just as easily be made against those people who seem to think that being pro-Palestinian entitles them to be pretty bloody horrible to British Jews and to talk about 1400 murdered people in Israel who, for the record, did not just include Jews but Arabs and others like the Filippino carers of old people who stayed as if they do not count as human beings because they are "colonialists" or "settlers" or whatever.
Why is it that so many people on here find it so hard to notice or admit or care about what British Jews here - our fellow citizens - are feeling right now?
Interesting you mention the Filipino carers.
There is a story I want to confirm, about someone who was told to leave but refused to leave her charges. Is that the one you are taking off? If so, do you have more info?
I would have to look for it. Her name was given. She refused to leave and was murdered along with the elderly woman in her care.
A hopefully non-controversial question for the evening.
My son is obsessed with the Romans. Teaching-himself-Latin levels of obsessed. Creating-frescoes levels of obsessed. Recreating-Pompeii-in-Minecraft levels of obsessed.
The son of an acquaintance is also obsessed with the Romans. Why do the Romans loom so heavily over our history and psyche; perhaps more so than (say) the Vikings or Normans?
They built things that lasted and we use the latin alphabet are two reasons.
A large list of reasons. Extent. Longevity, especially if you run it to 1453, it more or less overlaps with the early modern period. Quality of sources, and quality of literature and other things to study. First century BC Roman history is one of the great narrative stories full of big characters. The rise of Christianity. Its place in British history. Proximity and distance. I live close to Hadrian's Wall, but there is also this, which beggars the imagination, from the middle of nowhere in Algeria.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not not to destroy.
Woman, know thy place
I have tolerated your insolent disagreements for long enough, in the spirit of gender equity. But there is a limit, even in the free thinking west. Now, it is time for you to be quiet, and return to the kitchen, and make some kind of complicated soup
This image has been doing the rounds on TwiX today by all the usual people. Zoom in and have a count of the number of fingers and toes. Plus look at the arms round the neck - how is that possible?
We are now seeing AI images being used for propaganda.
Are we?! Golly, who knew?
The Right seemed to be doing all right with non-AI images. One need think only of Tory attacks on Labour and the SNP. Not a robot in sight, unless one thinks of the android-like contempt for ethics and search for power, whether a 13A socket or a No 10 key.
On the subject of GB News, it's clearly doing OK. Since it moved to being on-line first, it has dramatically increased its reach, and is clearly well ahead of other right of center UK channels on-line.
With that said... it's not doing *that* well either.
In total it has 1.07 million YouTube subscribers. That's... a lot less than Piers Morgan (1.92 million).
And if you look at it's current live stream:
It has - errrr - 222 people watching.
It's most popular video yesterday was Jacob Rees-Mogg (71k views), followed by Nigel Farage with just 20k views.
Those aren't amazing numbers. Some of my videos got 200+k views. And that was just me and a green screen. It is, presumably, absolutely hemorrhaging money.
I’d say another reason for the popularity of Romans and vikings is the widespread belief that pagans didn’t really believe their own religions, which makes them rather like us.
Again, a popular belief that no qualified academic would entertain, and really, pretty insulting to both Romans and Danes.
I don't mind stories set in ancient times where the main character is not really very devout, there must have been people like that, but sometimes it does feel like a cheap way of having someone with near modern values in an older setting, when they are in a period where it was likely they were and not at least appearing so would be questionable.
One of the worst sins for a historian is presentism - the belief that people who lived in past societies shared our own outlook and beliefs.
Some behaviours are almost universal - almost everyone loves their own children for example; fart jokes are always popular.
But, especially in matters of sex and religion, the past is often a different country.
And, presentism is a sin for the historical novelist, too.
Verisimilitude. It doesn't need to be true, just seem like it could be. We might not put our finger on something seeming wrong, but we can often tell.
Ancient Romans did not speak like upper class British people, but because it is not everyday California dialogue it sounds more real than if a film has them all talk like surfer dudes. 9th century viking raiders probably held less than salubrious opinions on treatment of monasteries, that sort of thing.
The other one is avoiding the ugly truth by talk about complexity.
One that struck me was the description of how two cultures “merged” after a conquest. According to DNA, after the conquest there was lots of “inter-marriage” with only the female side of the original group.
Yeah. “Inter-marriage”….
Granted he's only a novellist, but I did like a pointed comment from Bernard Cornwell in one of his Last Kingdom books.
The northmen are usually called Vikings and some historians suggest that, far from being the feared predators of myth, they were peace-loving folk who mostly lived amicably with their Saxon neighbours. This ignores much contemporary evidence, let alone the skeletons that are doubtless still buried beneath the railway at Benfleet. Alfred organised Wessex for war and built hugely expensive defences and he would have done none of that if the Vikings were as peaceably inclined as some revisionists want us to believe.
They were probably quite peaceable if you allowed them to take anything they felt like. Including female members of the family.
It will possibly have blown over by then but there are few issues in British and European politics as visceral as apartheid. And since South Africa this is seen (certainly on the left) as the next great injustice.
I'm sure Starmer will water down his intemperate comments but if he doesn't there will be a backlash. A lot will depend what happens in the next few months. Blair was able to lose his support in a short time with a wrong decision on Iraq and so could Starmer over Palestine
I'm always fascinated by the way the british Left decides it can willy nilly tell other people how to run their countries . Its just imperialism by other means.
But as imperialisms go I'd say campaigning against apartheid beats invading Iraq.
In South Africa, there was an obvious good guy, and an obvious bad guy.
Despite what Roger and the Corbynistas think, Israel doesn't fill the role of obvious bad guy, nor do the Palestinians fill the role of obvious good guy.
Yup. The talk of a “ceasefire” is a good example. In most conflicts when we say “ceasefire” we mean both sides. In this case, people seem to mean unilateral from Israel, and for Israel to just sit there and take continued rocket strikes during it, because it is the baddie and it deserves it.
What makes you say most people want a unilateral ceasefire?
Because I assume no one is silly enough to entertain the thought that Hamas would respect one.
If Hamas won't respect a ceasefire then Israel surely have nothing to lose by calling a ceasefire knowing Hamas will break it anyway. An easy propaganda victory. But Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
What a perverted logic. Hamas started the fight, and Israel haven't got in their retaliation yet.
So your logic is that Israel should just have a ceasefire giving Hamas an opportunity to strike them with no recourse? How does that make any sense whatsoever?
Israel should have a ceasefire once Hamas have been destroyed.
Umm, you seem to 100% agree with me that Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not not to destroy.
Woman, know thy place
I have tolerated your insolent disagreements for long enough, in the spirit of gender equity. But there is a limit, even in the free thinking west. Now, it is time for you to be quiet, and return to the kitchen, and make some kind of complicated soup
Aren’t most soups just boiling up some veg with a stock cube then puréing it ?
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The lack of sympathy being displayed towards British Jews right now worries me a lot.
Agreed. It's not just the lack of sympathy. It's the callous cruelty - tearing down posters, defacing them, threatening schools etc.,.
I think some people enjoy being able to justify cruelty to a group they classify as "wrong" by claiming that they are just concerned with being kind to their favoured "in" group. In some cases, people only side with the "in" group precisely because it allows them to be horrible to Jews - while wrapped up in self-proclaimed virtue.
It bodes very ill for our society. We can do nothing about what happens in the Middle East. But we can do something about how we treat a small, vulnerable and now fearful minority here - instead of grandstanding about abroad. That's what Starmer, what all our politicians should be judged on.
You deserved more than 8 likes for this one.
I've often thought there were relatively few liberals on pb - stodge, kle4, ydeouthr, rcs - but I'm more convinced of that now than ever.
Lots of people who seem to talk a good game and claim to be fairly liberal but it seems as though they are mainly just Tory haters for whom issues like migration are just a weapon to beat the Tories with.
This image has been doing the rounds on TwiX today by all the usual people. Zoom in and have a count of the number of fingers and toes. Plus look at the arms round the neck - how is that possible?
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
At the moment I would say that GB News has more effect on the debate inside the Conservative Party than on the debate across Britain. Imagine if the Corbynists had their own TV channel to ensure there was no backsliding from Corbynism in the Labour Party?
They do, Russia Today and C4 news is effectively the Starmer Labour channel now with BBC news not far off
RT is no longer shown in the UK (at least not on Freeview).
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not not to destroy.
Woman, know thy place
I have tolerated your insolent disagreements for long enough, in the spirit of gender equity. But there is a limit, even in the free thinking west. Now, it is time for you to be quiet, and return to the kitchen, and make some kind of complicated soup
On the subject of GB News, it's clearly doing OK. Since it moved to being on-line first, it has dramatically increased its reach, and is clearly well ahead of other right of center UK channels on-line.
With that said... it's not doing *that* well either.
In total it has 1.07 million YouTube subscribers. That's... a lot less than Piers Morgan (1.92 million).
And if you look at it's current live stream:
It has - errrr - 222 people watching.
It's most popular video yesterday was Jacob Rees-Mogg (71k views), followed by Nigel Farage with just 20k views.
Those aren't amazing numbers. Some of my videos got 200+k views. And that was just me and a green screen. It is, presumably, absolutely hemorrhaging money.
Should claim it was really about Palestine, not only will the charges be dropped, but z-list celebs will be saying well you see, his chant could have multiple means, it could be all about personal struggle.
This image has been doing the rounds on TwiX today by all the usual people. Zoom in and have a count of the number of fingers and toes. Plus look at the arms round the neck - how is that possible?
On the subject of GB News, it's clearly doing OK. Since it moved to being on-line first, it has dramatically increased its reach, and is clearly well ahead of other right of center UK channels on-line.
With that said... it's not doing *that* well either.
In total it has 1.07 million YouTube subscribers. That's... a lot less than Piers Morgan (1.92 million).
And if you look at it's current live stream:
It has - errrr - 222 people watching.
It's most popular video yesterday was Jacob Rees-Mogg (71k views), followed by Nigel Farage with just 20k views.
Those aren't amazing numbers. Some of my videos got 200+k views. And that was just me and a green screen. It is, presumably, absolutely hemorrhaging money.
They have had a total of ~1 billion views of their videos, which is actually quite impressive.
The problem is the strategy they are employing has been massively down ranked by YouTube, because people a few years ago were doing very well out of the idea of reading news articles, splitting it into 10-20 videos a day and getting ad revenue for each one.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The lack of sympathy being displayed towards British Jews right now worries me a lot.
Agreed. It's not just the lack of sympathy. It's the callous cruelty - tearing down posters, defacing them, threatening schools etc.,.
I think some people enjoy being able to justify cruelty to a group they classify as "wrong" by claiming that they are just concerned with being kind to their favoured "in" group. In some cases, people only side with the "in" group precisely because it allows them to be horrible to Jews - while wrapped up in self-proclaimed virtue.
It bodes very ill for our society. We can do nothing about what happens in the Middle East. But we can do something about how we treat a small, vulnerable and now fearful minority here - instead of grandstanding about abroad. That's what Starmer, what all our politicians should be judged on.
You deserved more than 8 likes for this one.
I've often thought there were relatively few liberals on pb - stodge, kle4, ydeouthr, rcs - but I'm more convinced of that now than ever.
Lots of people who seem to talk a good game and claim to be fairly liberal but it seems as though they are mainly just Tory haters for whom issues like migration are just a weapon to beat the Tories with.
{Pulls up a chair}
Let’s define Liberal.
For example, I really like Gladstone. The old Liberal Party is the one I like the … style of the most. Earnest men in search off solutions that worked.
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
At the moment I would say that GB News has more effect on the debate inside the Conservative Party than on the debate across Britain. Imagine if the Corbynists had their own TV channel to ensure there was no backsliding from Corbynism in the Labour Party?
They do, Russia Today and C4 news is effectively the Starmer Labour channel now with BBC news not far off
RT is no longer shown in the UK (at least not on Freeview).
Yeah, but don't spoil it for those of us who love to go on about it.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Too much bells and smells?
Whitewash??!!!!
Luuuuuuuxry!
God should be worshiped on a hillside. In winter. In a snow storm. No pain, no gain.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Edit: whitewash to keep the existing kirk neat and tidy - not to paint over old sculptures etc.!
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Too much bells and smells?
Whitewash??!!!!
Luuuuuuuxry!
God should be worshiped on a hillside. In winter. In a snow storm. No pain, no gain.
Well Jesus did give his best sermon on a hillside...
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
Seems like an appropriate time to post this, The Interior of the Cunerakerk in Rhenen by Pieter Saenredam.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The lack of sympathy being displayed towards British Jews right now worries me a lot.
Agreed. It's not just the lack of sympathy. It's the callous cruelty - tearing down posters, defacing them, threatening schools etc.,.
I think some people enjoy being able to justify cruelty to a group they classify as "wrong" by claiming that they are just concerned with being kind to their favoured "in" group. In some cases, people only side with the "in" group precisely because it allows them to be horrible to Jews - while wrapped up in self-proclaimed virtue.
It bodes very ill for our society. We can do nothing about what happens in the Middle East. But we can do something about how we treat a small, vulnerable and now fearful minority here - instead of grandstanding about abroad. That's what Starmer, what all our politicians should be judged on.
You deserved more than 8 likes for this one.
I've often thought there were relatively few liberals on pb - stodge, kle4, ydeouthr, rcs - but I'm more convinced of that now than ever.
Lots of people who seem to talk a good game and claim to be fairly liberal but it seems as though they are mainly just Tory haters for whom issues like migration are just a weapon to beat the Tories with.
{Pulls up a chair}
Let’s define Liberal.
For example, I really like Gladstone. The old Liberal Party is the one I like the … style of the most. Earnest men in search off solutions that worked.
I’m in. But only before any of the “social liberalism”, home rule for Ireland, and internationalism crept in.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Too much bells and smells?
Whitewash??!!!!
Luuuuuuuxry!
God should be worshiped on a hillside. In winter. In a snow storm. No pain, no gain.
Oh, they still do that here. Only two Presbyterian sacraments: baptism, which needs a font; and burial, which used to be out in the kirkyard and still is for non-cremations. Hellish in winter on a hilltop cemetery; I rememmber my mother coming home and repeating the old Scots saying, the kind of funeral which will see several more in a few weeks.
As for the open-air conventicles: the Cameronian Regiment still did them until its recent disbandment, complete wirth armed sentries.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Non Anglican Presbyterians like you, Kate Forbes and Gordon Brown
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
The debate in Christianity goes back at least as far as the 8th century Eastern Empire (and has always existed in Islam). Are art, architecture, music, literature the allies of religion, or its most insidious ene
I’d say another reason for the popularity of Romans and vikings is the widespread belief that pagans didn’t really believe their own religions, which makes them rather like us.
Again, a popular belief that no qualified academic would entertain, and really, pretty insulting to both Romans and Danes.
I don't mind stories set in ancient times where the main character is not really very devout, there must have been people like that, but sometimes it does feel like a cheap way of having someone with near modern values in an older setting, when they are in a period where it was likely they were and not at least appearing so would be questionable.
One of the worst sins for a historian is presentism - the belief that people who lived in past societies shared our own outlook and beliefs.
Some behaviours are almost universal - almost everyone loves their own children for example; fart jokes are always popular.
But, especially in matters of sex and religion, the past is often a different country.
And, presentism is a sin for the historical novelist, too.
Verisimilitude. It doesn't need to be true, just seem like it could be. We might not put our finger on something seeming wrong, but we can often tell.
Ancient Romans did not speak like upper class British people, but because it is not everyday California dialogue it sounds more real than if a film has them all talk like surfer dudes. 9th century viking raiders probably held less than salubrious opinions on treatment of monasteries, that sort of thing.
The other one is avoiding the ugly truth by talk about complexity.
One that struck me was the description of how two cultures “merged” after a conquest. According to DNA, after the conquest there was lots of “inter-marriage” with only the female side of the original group.
Yeah. “Inter-marriage”….
Granted he's only a novellist, but I did like a pointed comment from Bernard Cornwell in one of his Last Kingdom books.
The northmen are usually called Vikings and some historians suggest that, far from being the feared predators of myth, they were peace-loving folk who mostly lived amicably with their Saxon neighbours. This ignores much contemporary evidence, let alone the skeletons that are doubtless still buried beneath the railway at Benfleet. Alfred organised Wessex for war and built hugely expensive defences and he would have done none of that if the Vikings were as peaceably inclined as some revisionists want us to believe.
@Richard Tyndall says archaeology (it’s fairly easy to identify burnt settlements) shows that the Great Heathen Army was every bit as brutal as claimed.
You can be both a peace-loving farmer, and a ruthless conqueror, at different points in your life. European settlers in the Americas, and Australia, showed that.
On the subject of GB News, it's clearly doing OK. Since it moved to being on-line first, it has dramatically increased its reach, and is clearly well ahead of other right of center UK channels on-line.
With that said... it's not doing *that* well either.
In total it has 1.07 million YouTube subscribers. That's... a lot less than Piers Morgan (1.92 million).
And if you look at it's current live stream:
It has - errrr - 222 people watching.
It's most popular video yesterday was Jacob Rees-Mogg (71k views), followed by Nigel Farage with just 20k views.
Those aren't amazing numbers. Some of my videos got 200+k views. And that was just me and a green screen. It is, presumably, absolutely hemorrhaging money.
They have had a total of ~1 billion views of their videos, which is actually quite impressive.
The problem is the strategy they are employing has been massively down ranked by YouTube, because people a few years ago were doing very well out of the idea of reading news articles, splitting it into 10-20 videos a day and getting ad revenue for each one.
Hmmm: I was at about a cent a view, so that's... errr... $10m in total.
If we posit that it's doing that annually, then it's £650,000/month.
Now that's not a disaster. And they will get other revenue - from Sky for carriage and from advertisers on the channel - and their viewership is moving in the right direction.
But it's not that great either. They probably have 40 or 50 employees, offices and the like. So no one is going to be earning megabucks.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Edit: whitewash to keep the existing kirk neat and tidy - not to paint over old sculptures etc.!
I'm an atheist, so it's noneof my business - but I findthe austere asceticism of Presbyterianism rather more satisfying to the soul than any other religious aesthetic.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not not to destroy.
Woman, know thy place
I have tolerated your insolent disagreements for long enough, in the spirit of gender equity. But there is a limit, even in the free thinking west. Now, it is time for you to be quiet, and return to the kitchen, and make some kind of complicated soup
Aren’t most soups just boiling up some veg with a stock cube then puréing it ?
Well don’t tell everybody! There’s careers to be made selling books about soup…
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Non Anglican Presbyterians like you, Kate Forbes and Gordon Brown
Non Anglican Presbyterians? *struck by the notion that there is [edit] by inverse implication a kind of Presbyterianism which embraces Episcopalian hierarchies and enslaves itself to King and State as masters of the church*
On the subject of GB News, it's clearly doing OK. Since it moved to being on-line first, it has dramatically increased its reach, and is clearly well ahead of other right of center UK channels on-line.
With that said... it's not doing *that* well either.
In total it has 1.07 million YouTube subscribers. That's... a lot less than Piers Morgan (1.92 million).
And if you look at it's current live stream:
It has - errrr - 222 people watching.
It's most popular video yesterday was Jacob Rees-Mogg (71k views), followed by Nigel Farage with just 20k views.
Those aren't amazing numbers. Some of my videos got 200+k views. And that was just me and a green screen. It is, presumably, absolutely hemorrhaging money.
I'm glad you had such a Youtube success. I don't think GBNews is primarily a Youtube Channel.
Their major issue is that advertisers (through politicised advisory panels within the industry) avoid right wing channels. Guido has also been affected by this. The Spectator does really well but it has a different model - subscriptions, magazine sales etc. They have an audience, the audience has money, they just need to work out a creative way of getting some of it.
My general take that GB News is overall bad news for the Tories and the sooner it's an ex-news channel the better it'll be for Con, continues...
No it is the biggest clearly rightwing TV channel in the UK, longer term that is a key tool for making the case for rightwing policies
The Americans have Fox News yet it didn't stop Obama winning twice and Biden beating Trump. Having a platform for a particular set of policies is fine only as long as enough people are willing to listen otherwise it's a niche.
FOX news has been bad news for the GOP as without it, I think it's doubtful Trump and MAGA would ever have been able to take over the Republicans.
Fortunately for the Conservatives GB News doesn't have the reach of FOX. Yet.
FOX would love to dump Trump, but know if they do their viewers would abandon it. Trump owns Murdoch.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not not to destroy.
Woman, know thy place
I have tolerated your insolent disagreements for long enough, in the spirit of gender equity. But there is a limit, even in the free thinking west. Now, it is time for you to be quiet, and return to the kitchen, and make some kind of complicated soup
Aren’t most soups just boiling up some veg with a stock cube then puréing it ?
If we're going to move on to soup we need a new thread: Pistou versus Ribollita, Gazpacho versus Salmorejo?
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
An absence of austere beauty characterised Puritanism. Selfish delusionism replaced such good things. At its heart was the abomination of Calvin's doctrine of double predestination. This is that the one God created two sorts of human, the ones who would necessarily be saved and those who would necessarily be damned. And there was nothing you could do to change it.
'I am God's child and you are not' - which arises from Puritan doctrine, lies behind a lot of wickedness in this world.
On the subject of GB News, it's clearly doing OK. Since it moved to being on-line first, it has dramatically increased its reach, and is clearly well ahead of other right of center UK channels on-line.
With that said... it's not doing *that* well either.
In total it has 1.07 million YouTube subscribers. That's... a lot less than Piers Morgan (1.92 million).
And if you look at it's current live stream:
It has - errrr - 222 people watching.
It's most popular video yesterday was Jacob Rees-Mogg (71k views), followed by Nigel Farage with just 20k views.
Those aren't amazing numbers. Some of my videos got 200+k views. And that was just me and a green screen. It is, presumably, absolutely hemorrhaging money.
They have had a total of ~1 billion views of their videos, which is actually quite impressive.
The problem is the strategy they are employing has been massively down ranked by YouTube, because people a few years ago were doing very well out of the idea of reading news articles, splitting it into 10-20 videos a day and getting ad revenue for each one.
Of course, across all of GB News videos and presenters, across several years, it has reached 1/13th the number of views as this:
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Edit: whitewash to keep the existing kirk neat and tidy - not to paint over old sculptures etc.!
I'm an atheist, so it's noneof my business - but I findthe austere asceticism of Presbyterianism rather more satisfying to the soul than any other religious aesthetic.
Yes, my Dad is a Presbyterian Athiest. He is very clear of what God he doesn't believe in, and with a fervent certainty.
On the subject of GB News, it's clearly doing OK. Since it moved to being on-line first, it has dramatically increased its reach, and is clearly well ahead of other right of center UK channels on-line.
With that said... it's not doing *that* well either.
In total it has 1.07 million YouTube subscribers. That's... a lot less than Piers Morgan (1.92 million).
And if you look at it's current live stream:
It has - errrr - 222 people watching.
It's most popular video yesterday was Jacob Rees-Mogg (71k views), followed by Nigel Farage with just 20k views.
Those aren't amazing numbers. Some of my videos got 200+k views. And that was just me and a green screen. It is, presumably, absolutely hemorrhaging money.
GB news often gets more viewers than Sky now and is well ahead of TalkTV. It also has plenty of paid for adverts
Several weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Sycamore Gap tragedy, we were discussing which treesintge UK might be considered iconic. Yesterday, I was at Scone Palace, where there is a massive Douglas Fir, which, the plaque states, is one of the top 50 trees of Britain. The source appears to be this, which provides some answer to our question: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Great_British_Trees
On the subject of GB News, it's clearly doing OK. Since it moved to being on-line first, it has dramatically increased its reach, and is clearly well ahead of other right of center UK channels on-line.
With that said... it's not doing *that* well either.
In total it has 1.07 million YouTube subscribers. That's... a lot less than Piers Morgan (1.92 million).
And if you look at it's current live stream:
It has - errrr - 222 people watching.
It's most popular video yesterday was Jacob Rees-Mogg (71k views), followed by Nigel Farage with just 20k views.
Those aren't amazing numbers. Some of my videos got 200+k views. And that was just me and a green screen. It is, presumably, absolutely hemorrhaging money.
They have had a total of ~1 billion views of their videos, which is actually quite impressive.
The problem is the strategy they are employing has been massively down ranked by YouTube, because people a few years ago were doing very well out of the idea of reading news articles, splitting it into 10-20 videos a day and getting ad revenue for each one.
Hmmm: I was at about a cent a view, so that's... errr... $10m in total.
If we posit that it's doing that annually, then it's £650,000/month.
Now that's not a disaster. And they will get other revenue - from Sky for carriage and from advertisers on the channel - and their viewership is moving in the right direction.
But it's not that great either. They probably have 40 or 50 employees, offices and the like. So no one is going to be earning megabucks.
How much will that bother the people behind GBN?
If the aim isn't to make money but to get the message out, the losses presumably are a relatively cheap way to do that. Especially if you're a shadowy squillionaire.
And whilst even the viral clips have the sort of audience that would be considered a bit poor by "Look East West In Your Region Tonight", if the aim is to influence the direction of the right, that might not matter much.
In societies that I admire, women (and children) are put in their proper place -- ahead of men. That is, to say the least, not a new idea, but one that requires restating from time to time.
On the subject of GB News, it's clearly doing OK. Since it moved to being on-line first, it has dramatically increased its reach, and is clearly well ahead of other right of center UK channels on-line.
With that said... it's not doing *that* well either.
In total it has 1.07 million YouTube subscribers. That's... a lot less than Piers Morgan (1.92 million).
And if you look at it's current live stream:
It has - errrr - 222 people watching.
It's most popular video yesterday was Jacob Rees-Mogg (71k views), followed by Nigel Farage with just 20k views.
Those aren't amazing numbers. Some of my videos got 200+k views. And that was just me and a green screen. It is, presumably, absolutely hemorrhaging money.
They have had a total of ~1 billion views of their videos, which is actually quite impressive.
The problem is the strategy they are employing has been massively down ranked by YouTube, because people a few years ago were doing very well out of the idea of reading news articles, splitting it into 10-20 videos a day and getting ad revenue for each one.
Hmmm: I was at about a cent a view, so that's... errr... $10m in total.
If we posit that it's doing that annually, then it's £650,000/month.
Now that's not a disaster. And they will get other revenue - from Sky for carriage and from advertisers on the channel - and their viewership is moving in the right direction.
But it's not that great either. They probably have 40 or 50 employees, offices and the like. So no one is going to be earning megabucks.
They probably not even getting that. Shorts get miniscule amounts and these kind of current affairs videos got nerfed by YouTube as people were exploiting this by just making loads of 10 mins videos that just read an article, made a few comments, rinse and repeat.
We have talked discussed this before (even before they launched), and the business model doesn't work.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Too much bells and smells?
Whitewash??!!!!
Luuuuuuuxry!
God should be worshiped on a hillside. In winter. In a snow storm. No pain, no gain.
Oh, they still do that here. Only two Presbyterian sacraments: baptism, which needs a font; and burial, which used to be out in the kirkyard and still is for non-cremations. Hellish in winter on a hilltop cemetery; I rememmber my mother coming home and repeating the old Scots saying, the kind of funeral which will see several more in a few weeks.
As for the open-air conventicles: the Cameronian Regiment still did them until its recent disbandment, complete wirth armed sentries.
Edit: modern take is, the kind of funeral where some young relative comes sniffling to the crem and gives everyone covid. Happened to a friend recently. The fresh air kind of funeral as per my mum's saying, he observed, was definitely preferable!
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Edit: whitewash to keep the existing kirk neat and tidy - not to paint over old sculptures etc.!
I'm an atheist, so it's noneof my business - but I findthe austere asceticism of Presbyterianism rather more satisfying to the soul than any other religious aesthetic.
Yes, my Dad is a Presbyterian Athiest. He is very clear of what God he doesn't believe in, and with a fervent certainty.
Aye, that's me. The God I don't believe in doesn't want a lot of ornamentation. And He thinks bishops are all dicks.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Non Anglican Presbyterians like you, Kate Forbes and Gordon Brown
Non Anglican Presbyterians? *struck by the notion that there is [edit] by inverse implication a kind of Presbyterianism which embraces Episcopalian hierarchies and enslaves itself to King and State as masters of the church*
The Savoy conference of 1661 was an attempt to square that circle in England, and ultimately failed.
#BREAKING The US aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower will cross the Strait of Hormuz to be stationed in the Persian Gulf in southern Iran, a senior Pentagon official told Al Jazeera, amid escalation of conflict between Tehran and Washington.
A hopefully non-controversial question for the evening.
My son is obsessed with the Romans. Teaching-himself-Latin levels of obsessed. Creating-frescoes levels of obsessed. Recreating-Pompeii-in-Minecraft levels of obsessed.
The son of an acquaintance is also obsessed with the Romans. Why do the Romans loom so heavily over our history and psyche; perhaps more so than (say) the Vikings or Normans?
Without going all Monty Python, the Romans ran England (and much of Europe) for several centuries and so did the Normans. Both had huge effects on our language, culture and even geography. The Vikings were brutal raiders who inflicted Beowulf on generations of English undergraduates.
ETA do a search for the video of the C4 programme When Boris Met Dave. In it, iirc, Rachel Johnson explains that Classics is an easy way of getting into Oxford. Your acquaintance might bear this in mind.
Beowulf: I feel your pain by proxy, I had a neighbour and friend in halls who spent a full term bewailing learning Anglo-Saxon as a bona fide foreign language for that text.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not not to destroy.
Woman, know thy place
I have tolerated your insolent disagreements for long enough, in the spirit of gender equity. But there is a limit, even in the free thinking west. Now, it is time for you to be quiet, and return to the kitchen, and make some kind of complicated soup
#BREAKING The US aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower will cross the Strait of Hormuz to be stationed in the Persian Gulf in southern Iran, a senior Pentagon official told Al Jazeera, amid escalation of conflict between Tehran and Washington.
On the subject of GB News, it's clearly doing OK. Since it moved to being on-line first, it has dramatically increased its reach, and is clearly well ahead of other right of center UK channels on-line.
With that said... it's not doing *that* well either.
In total it has 1.07 million YouTube subscribers. That's... a lot less than Piers Morgan (1.92 million).
And if you look at it's current live stream:
It has - errrr - 222 people watching.
It's most popular video yesterday was Jacob Rees-Mogg (71k views), followed by Nigel Farage with just 20k views.
Those aren't amazing numbers. Some of my videos got 200+k views. And that was just me and a green screen. It is, presumably, absolutely hemorrhaging money.
I'm glad you had such a Youtube success. I don't think GBNews is primarily a Youtube Channel.
Their major issue is that advertisers (through politicised advisory panels within the industry) avoid right wing channels. Guido has also been affected by this. The Spectator does really well but it has a different model - subscriptions, magazine sales etc. They have an audience, the audience has money, they just need to work out a creative way of getting some of it.
GB News started off as a regular TV channel on Sky, etc., but as I understand it have pivoted to on-line first.
They do OK on BARB viewing figures from a relative perspective, but pretty poorly from an absolute one. (Bear in mind that total live news viewing in the UK has fallen about 80% in the last six years, and is continuing to fall.)
So, they've gained share this year, but at the same time monthly reach has dropped from 3.4m in May to 2.8m in September.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Non Anglican Presbyterians like you, Kate Forbes and Gordon Brown
Non Anglican Presbyterians? *struck by the notion that there is [edit] by inverse implication a kind of Presbyterianism which embraces Episcopalian hierarchies and enslaves itself to King and State as masters of the church*
Which is why I said Presbyterians are NON Anglican.
The more evangelical you are generally the more hard-line you are against homosexual marriage etc. An austere evangelical free Presbyterian like Kate Forbes is certainly more likely to oppose homosexual marriages or blessings than liberal Catholics within the Church of England happy with the King as their Supreme Governor or the members of the high church Episcopal church of Scotland which actually performs homosexual marriages.
Even the Pope has now floated the idea of blessing homosexual couples which would be anathema to most evangelicals
A hopefully non-controversial question for the evening.
My son is obsessed with the Romans. Teaching-himself-Latin levels of obsessed. Creating-frescoes levels of obsessed. Recreating-Pompeii-in-Minecraft levels of obsessed.
The son of an acquaintance is also obsessed with the Romans. Why do the Romans loom so heavily over our history and psyche; perhaps more so than (say) the Vikings or Normans?
Without going all Monty Python, the Romans ran England (and much of Europe) for several centuries and so did the Normans. Both had huge effects on our language, culture and even geography. The Vikings were brutal raiders who inflicted Beowulf on generations of English undergraduates.
ETA do a search for the video of the C4 programme When Boris Met Dave. In it, iirc, Rachel Johnson explains that Classics is an easy way of getting into Oxford. Your acquaintance might bear this in mind.
Beowulf: I feel your pain by proxy, I had a neighbour and friend in halls who spent a full term bewailing learning Anglo-Saxon as a bona fide foreign language for that text.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
And the weird thing is, as @TimS implies below, that very English compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism means that ancient English cathedrals and churches have managed to maintain the best of both traditions - avoiding the overt garishness and luridity of Catholicism (all those saints’ foreskins and bleeding Christs) while also sidestepping the total blank austerity of the puritanical tradition, where beauty itself seems a sin. And all history is expunged
It may have been sheer luck, of course. Or the happenstance of modern aesthetic sensibilities meeting ancient coincidence. But the fact is, if today you walk into a great English medieval cathedral, you get a spiritual rush - the instant sense of the mysterious and the numinous - that is hard to find anywhere else in the world
Leon: how can I put this? Your opinion is not an unchallengeable fact. It is an opinion. Others are available. I have a different one. I find CoE cathedrals and churches to be rather barren affairs with about as much sense of spirituality as supermarkets.
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
Hmm! Some of us were baptised and brought up in a tradition which would regard many Anglican churches, certainly the over-restorations of the likes of Gilbert Scott and Pugin, as uncomfortably elaborate. Look at Berwick, a perfectly good Cromwellian preaching hall ruined by a High Church makeover in the Victorian era.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
Too much bells and smells?
Whitewash??!!!!
Luuuuuuuxry!
God should be worshiped on a hillside. In winter. In a snow storm. No pain, no gain.
Oh, they still do that here. Only two Presbyterian sacraments: baptism, which needs a font; and burial, which used to be out in the kirkyard and still is for non-cremations. Hellish in winter on a hilltop cemetery; I rememmber my mother coming home and repeating the old Scots saying, the kind of funeral which will see several more in a few weeks.
As for the open-air conventicles: the Cameronian Regiment still did them until its recent disbandment, complete wirth armed sentries.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The lack of sympathy being displayed towards British Jews right now worries me a lot.
Agreed. It's not just the lack of sympathy. It's the callous cruelty - tearing down posters, defacing them, threatening schools etc.,.
I think some people enjoy being able to justify cruelty to a group they classify as "wrong" by claiming that they are just concerned with being kind to their favoured "in" group. In some cases, people only side with the "in" group precisely because it allows them to be horrible to Jews - while wrapped up in self-proclaimed virtue.
It bodes very ill for our society. We can do nothing about what happens in the Middle East. But we can do something about how we treat a small, vulnerable and now fearful minority here - instead of grandstanding about abroad. That's what Starmer, what all our politicians should be judged on.
You deserved more than 8 likes for this one.
I've often thought there were relatively few liberals on pb - stodge, kle4, ydeouthr, rcs - but I'm more convinced of that now than ever.
Lots of people who seem to talk a good game and claim to be fairly liberal but it seems as though they are mainly just Tory haters for whom issues like migration are just a weapon to beat the Tories with.
Thank you for the ultimate accolade.
There's no monopoly of illiberal thought on the right, left or even among liberals if I'm being honest. In a way, how we treat each other speaks volumes. From recent personal experience, kindness is everywhere when it's needed.
It's not a mindset I find easy to get into but I suspect the constant low-level harrassment, insults, pointed words are cumulatively as bad as outright violence. Yet we know muslims too have been subject to the same at times in the recent past. It's all too easy to scapegoat a group, a creed, a nationality and blame everything on them and even in the most democratic and liberal (that word again) societies it happens, has happened and no doubt will continue to happen.
Breaking the cycle of intolerance isn't easy because you start with the notion people have the freedom to be intolerant - you can't be intolerant on intolerance because that undermines the notion of freedom of thought. It's about education and information - telling people the truth though there are other "truths" out there. You also bump up the truth people like people like themselves.
In societies that I admire, women (and children) are put in their proper place -- ahead of men. That is, to say the least, not a new idea, but one that requires restating from time to time.
Ahead of men is usually where there are lots of landmines.
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
The debate in Christianity goes back at least as far as the 8th century Eastern Empire (and has always existed in Islam). Are art, architecture, music, literature the allies of religion, or its most insidious ene
British churches and cathedrals - if old enough - are generally the most numinous, mystical and spiritual inside
I have no idea why this is. But if you go in a great British cathedral (generally gothic - but there are exceptions like Durham) you get an oooooh spine tingling quality that is all too often absent elsewhere
Eg I’ve just been in Siracusa’s cathedral - which is half built out of a Doric Greek temple ffs - yet it didn’t particularly move me. I find the same in Spanish French German cathedrals. Most but not all Italian cathedrals
And this is despite the fact Britain is a much less religious culture
Maybe it is the northern light? The accretion of time without revolutions? The patina?
You DO get the same buzz in some Eastern European and Russian cathedrals - they can be intense
Relative lack of Catholic Tat? Seville always gave me a degree of spiritual indigestion.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Controversial take: Catholicism ruins a lot of great Catholic cathedrals
In France it is often the revolution that is to blame. It swept away so much - it scraped away the patina of smoke and time and worship which makes a great moving cathedral
Weirdly, Hagia Sophia DOES have that buzz despite being a museum for a century and now a mosque
Ditto the orthodox churches of Greece. Some of them are seriously intense. Esp the monasteries of Mount athos. Omg
Ironic that most of the cathedrals you mention were built as Catholic cathedrals.
I feel the opposite to you. Having been brought up in Naples amidst fantastic baroque architecture and going to such churches every week for years, I find the spareness of Protestant churches weird - as if they are unfinished. Minimalism seems to me to be inhuman.There was something inhuman about the destruction of religious art during the Reformation; it damaged Britain's visual sense in a very profound way - from which it has never truly recovered.
No, there is an austere beauty in Puritanism, which is why there was a massive popular demand for it. The focus though is not on architecture and idolatry, but rather the message and the collective of believers.
Anglicanism is a British compromise to suppress the revolutionary doctrines and reimpose an aristocratic control of believers not very different to Catholicism.
So yes of course there is less ornament, statuary, smells and spells in Protestant Churches. All that is seen as idolatry that is a misrepresentation of God.
The debate in Christianity goes back at least as far as the 8th century Eastern Empire (and has always existed in Islam). Are art, architecture, music, literature the allies of religion, or its most insidious enemies.
I incline to the former, not the latter.
Yes, Puritanism isn't unique to Protestantism, and does have a lot of parallels with the iconoclasts, the early Muslims and even the Bolsheveiks. When people get fed up with corruption, oppression and the yoke of the ruling class they find a lot of interest in a philosophy of empowerment, collective self help and equality.
There is a revolutionary spirit in these that the ruling classes really fear, and which they tend to corrupt themselves into a tolerable form for them. Hence Anglicanism, Stalinism and Sheikhs. Until next time...
Iconoclasm was born out of military defeat, not social protest.
Why had God abandoned His people, and permitted heretics (at that point, Muslims were viewed more as heretics than a separate religion) to conquer Syria, Egypt, and North Africa?
So, the iconoclasts concluded, it was due to their idolatry. And, they had a point. Many pagan Gods had been repackaged as Christian saints, but the painted statues and images were the same. To the average peasant, venerating a saint and worshiping a God were one and the same.
Then the iconoclasts took power, and their first two emperors, Leo and Constantine, were outstanding generals, who stopped the run of defeats. Proof positive of God’s favour.
Comments
I incline to the former, not the latter.
some Anglican monasteries and convents, albeit rather less wealthy than their Roman Catholic predecessors 500 years ago
It seems to be a minor channel, the viewership no more than than the attendance at a Man Utd soccer game, yet it seems to cause otherwise rational people to lose their sense of perspective online (not you I hasten to add). I’ve no interest in it so I don’t watch it. I doubt it has any real influence.
And as for the abbeys, we have kept a fair few, and those that were ruined are now picturesque ruins. Tintern Abbey is WAY more interesting as a ruin than yet another abbey with creepy pervy hairy kneed monks trying to sodomise every boy in Abergavenny
But where do floating voters - the people who actually decide elections - fit it? They are just looking on in bemusement watching this array of right wing oddballs, attention seekers and conspiracy theorists agreeing with one another?
ETA do a search for the video of the C4 programme When Boris Met Dave. In it, iirc, Rachel Johnson explains that Classics is an easy way of getting into Oxford. Your acquaintance might bear this in mind.
Have you ever read Benevolence and Betrayal by Alexander Stille? You should. It's about 5 Italian Jewish families under fascism. One of them is led by a man who supports Mussolini, thinks fascism a good thing, ingratiates himself with the regime and thinks he will be safe. He is one of the good pro-Italy-under-Mussolini Jews. When I read your comments I think of that man. Too late he realises that all his sucking up and ingratiation and support for the regime is of no consequence. The only thing that matters about him is that he is a Jew - nothing else - not his support or his money or his opinions. Too late he tries to escape. He does not and is murdered.
That, Roger, is how Hamas view you. They don't care about your dislike of Netanyahu or that you call Israel a one-eyed country or that you support the Palestinian cause. They didn't care about the elderly journalist who wrote about the Sabra and Chatila massacres and Israel's shameful role in them. They still took him hostage. They didn't care about the woman who had been helping Palestinians in Gaza get medical treatment. They took her hostage too. They didn't care about the Israeli IT CEO who was building businesses inside Gaza to give good jobs to Gazans. They still killed his 15 year old daughter. They kill Jews because they are Jews - because of who they are not because of their opinions or what they have done or who they vote for. That is what their Charter says and it is what they have done and will continue doing until they are stopped. You are profoundly naive if you think otherwise.
A vast bureaucracy slowly bleeding away independent life and thought. Kthxbye and fuck off
We're due an Opinium on Sunday which last time had Labour 16 points in front (44-28).
As for Techne, the 46-25 reported today is exactly the same as in the first poll of the year back in January. Nearly 10 months later, the surprise continues to be not how much has changed, but how little.
Fortunately for the Conservatives GB News doesn't have the reach of FOX. Yet.
There is a revolutionary spirit in these that the ruling classes really fear, and which they tend to corrupt themselves into a tolerable form for them. Hence Anglicanism, Stalinism and Sheikhs. Until next time...
Missa Solemnis remains to this day my favourite genre of entertainment.
The northmen are usually called Vikings and some historians suggest that, far from being the feared predators of myth, they were peace-loving folk who mostly lived amicably with their Saxon neighbours. This ignores much contemporary evidence, let alone the skeletons that are doubtless still buried beneath the railway at Benfleet. Alfred organised Wessex for war and built hugely expensive defences and he would have done none of that if the Vikings were as peaceably inclined as some revisionists want us to believe.
https://twitter.com/GerryAdamsSF/status/1717836851325612133
We are now seeing AI images being used for propaganda.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ai-will-destroy-tv-news/
At least an ultra right leader would win back voters lost to RefUK, if floating voters are gone anyway for now
They’re effectively disappearing up an social media cul de sac.
I just think people raging against it simply draws attention to it. It’s an irrelevance
The buildings as buildings are superb - though Chartres beats them all IMO. But they are evidence of man's need to create beauty as part of the reach for God or some sense of spirituality and grandeur. To create, nota bene. Not to destroy.
With that said... it's not doing *that* well either.
In total it has 1.07 million YouTube subscribers. That's... a lot less than Piers Morgan (1.92 million).
And if you look at it's current live stream:
It has - errrr - 222 people watching.
It's most popular video yesterday was Jacob Rees-Mogg (71k views), followed by Nigel Farage with just 20k views.
Those aren't amazing numbers. Some of my videos got 200+k views. And that was just me and a green screen. It is, presumably, absolutely hemorrhaging money.
Golly, who knew?
“Hold until relieved” pretty much.
https://www.openculture.com/2020/08/explore-the-ruins-of-timgad-the-african-pompeii-excavated-from-the-sands-of-algeria.html
I have tolerated your insolent disagreements for long enough, in the spirit of gender equity. But there is a limit, even in the free thinking west. Now, it is time for you to be quiet, and return to the kitchen, and make some kind of complicated soup
https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1717995400303456696?s=61&t=s0ae0IFncdLS1Dc7J0P_TQ
Saves on all that re-sharpening axes and swords.
Who needs anything more than whitewash and a table for the communion every few months?
I've often thought there were relatively few liberals on pb - stodge, kle4, ydeouthr, rcs - but I'm more convinced of that now than ever.
Lots of people who seem to talk a good game and claim to be fairly liberal but it seems as though they are mainly just Tory haters for whom issues like migration are just a weapon to beat the Tories with.
Labour: 532
Tories: 33
LDs: 30
SNP:32
So actually not that bad for the Tories, they’d still be the Opposition
W**kers of the world, Unite!
https://twitter.com/CorbynSnap/status/1717966852595253626
I'm sure their Jewish members will feel reassured they stand with them whilst also saying "From the River to the Sea".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-67245144
Should claim it was really about Palestine, not only will the charges be dropped, but z-list celebs will be saying well you see, his chant could have multiple means, it could be all about personal struggle.
The problem is the strategy they are employing has been massively down ranked by YouTube, because people a few years ago were doing very well out of the idea of reading news articles, splitting it into 10-20 videos a day and getting ad revenue for each one.
Let’s define Liberal.
For example, I really like Gladstone. The old Liberal Party is the one I like the … style of the most. Earnest men in search off solutions that worked.
Whitewash??!!!!
Luuuuuuuxry!
God should be worshiped on a hillside. In winter. In a snow storm. No pain, no gain.
LAB: 49% (+7)
CON: 21% (-3)
LDM: 9% (=)
RFM: 9% (+1)
GRN: 7% (=)
Via @PeoplePolling, 23 Oct.
Changes w/ 29 Mar.
Any other leader would be 20 points ahead...
Oh yes, it's in the Mauritshuis.
⚡️⚡️ UN General Assembly adopts resolution on "protection of civilians and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations" on the ongoing Gaza crisis.
FOR: 120
AGAINST: 14
ABSTAIN: 45
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1717995336327647660
As for the open-air conventicles: the Cameronian Regiment still did them until its recent disbandment, complete wirth armed sentries.
Eg see pp. 90, 92 herein
http://www.cameronians.org/_covenanter_editions/Covenanter 2008.pdf
You can be both a peace-loving farmer, and a ruthless conqueror, at different points in your life. European settlers in the Americas, and Australia, showed that.
If we posit that it's doing that annually, then it's £650,000/month.
Now that's not a disaster. And they will get other revenue - from Sky for carriage and from advertisers on the channel - and their viewership is moving in the right direction.
But it's not that great either. They probably have 40 or 50 employees, offices and the like. So no one is going to be earning megabucks.
Their major issue is that advertisers (through politicised advisory panels within the industry) avoid right wing channels. Guido has also been affected by this. The Spectator does really well but it has a different model - subscriptions, magazine sales etc. They have an audience, the audience has money, they just need to work out a creative way of getting some of it.
(Answer: the latter in each case, obvs.)
'I am God's child and you are not' - which arises from Puritan doctrine, lies behind a lot of wickedness in this world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w&t=1s&ab_channel=PinkfongBabyShark-Kids'Songs&Stories
It also has plenty of paid for adverts
Yesterday, I was at Scone Palace, where there is a massive Douglas Fir, which, the plaque states, is one of the top 50 trees of Britain. The source appears to be this, which provides some answer to our question:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Great_British_Trees
If the aim isn't to make money but to get the message out, the losses presumably are a relatively cheap way to do that. Especially if you're a shadowy squillionaire.
And whilst even the viral clips have the sort of audience that would be considered a bit poor by "Look East West In Your Region Tonight", if the aim is to influence the direction of the right, that might not matter much.
We have talked discussed this before (even before they launched), and the business model doesn't work.
#BREAKING The US aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower will cross the Strait of Hormuz to be stationed in the Persian Gulf in southern Iran, a senior Pentagon official told Al Jazeera, amid escalation of conflict between Tehran and Washington.
They do OK on BARB viewing figures from a relative perspective, but pretty poorly from an absolute one. (Bear in mind that total live news viewing in the UK has fallen about 80% in the last six years, and is continuing to fall.)
So, they've gained share this year, but at the same time monthly reach has dropped from 3.4m in May to 2.8m in September.
(See: https://www.barb.co.uk/monthly-viewing/)
Presbyterians are NON
Anglican.
The more evangelical you are
generally the more hard-line
you are against homosexual
marriage etc. An austere
evangelical free Presbyterian
like Kate Forbes is certainly
more likely to oppose
homosexual marriages or
blessings than liberal
Catholics within the Church
of England happy with the
King as their Supreme
Governor or the members of
the high church Episcopal church of Scotland which
actually performs
homosexual marriages.
Even the Pope has now floated the idea of blessing homosexual couples which would be anathema to most evangelicals
Night all.
There's no monopoly of illiberal thought on the right, left or even among liberals if I'm being honest. In a way, how we treat each other speaks volumes. From recent personal experience, kindness is everywhere when it's needed.
It's not a mindset I find easy to get into but I suspect the constant low-level harrassment, insults, pointed words are cumulatively as bad as outright violence. Yet we know muslims too have been subject to the same at times in the recent past. It's all too easy to scapegoat a group, a creed, a nationality and blame everything on them and even in the most democratic and liberal (that word again) societies it happens, has happened and no doubt will continue to happen.
Breaking the cycle of intolerance isn't easy because you start with the notion people have the freedom to be intolerant - you can't be intolerant on intolerance because that undermines the notion of freedom of thought. It's about education and information - telling people the truth though there are other "truths" out there. You also bump up the truth people like people like themselves.
Why had God abandoned His people, and permitted heretics (at that point, Muslims were viewed more as heretics than a separate religion) to conquer Syria, Egypt, and North Africa?
So, the iconoclasts concluded, it was due to their idolatry. And, they had a point. Many pagan Gods had been repackaged as Christian saints, but the painted statues and images were the same. To the average peasant, venerating a saint and worshiping a God were one and the same.
Then the iconoclasts took power, and their first two emperors, Leo and Constantine, were outstanding generals, who stopped the run of defeats. Proof positive of God’s favour.