” ARE YOU AFRAID TO DIE ? “

The question was that of one of the two young terrorists who assassinated an elderly French priest by slitting his throat as he celebrated Mass in a small town in Normandy four days ago.  Three nuns were present at the Mass.  One fled to alert the police.  The two others, both, like the priest, in their eighties, stayed in the church.  One of the jihadists asked Sister Hélène whether she was afraid to die.  She said no.  Then he said “Why ?”

” ‘I believe in God, and I know I will be happy’, Sister Hélène said, as she quietly prayed to herself ”  (we know what the journalist meant by “praying to herself”, but we also know that, as in all prayer, she was in fact talking to herself).

“Then they started talking about God.  ‘Jesus cannot be God and a man.  It is you who are wrong’, one of the men said.

” ‘Maybe, but too bad’, Sister Huguette replied.”

The dialogue, reported in today’s “The Guardian” (July 30, 2016) is worth recording here.  Extraordinary courage on the part of the admirable nuns, calm conviction on that of the fanatic jihadist, recognition by both that while their separate, contradictory faiths allowed them both to face death without fear, on neither side were they ready to abandon their faith, or even to argue the point pointlessly about it.  None of them was a Believer on the Brink.

DELENDA   RELIGIO

 

I WENT TO MASS !

Tags

"Somme Mud", Battle of Pozières, Credulity, Eucharist, Persevering in Prayer, Pozières Project, Prayer, Will Davies

The Church was full.  I was sitting in the back seat, waiting for the Mass to begin.  You may well ask what on Earth I was doing there – after all those years since I abandoned the priesthood and later the faith, and naturally stopped going to Mass.  It was one of those occasions when for reasons that have nothing to do with faith, you had to be there.  As a matter of fact, in this regard, I was far from alone.  You see, it was a Memorial Mass for the victims of the Battle of Pozières, in the Somme, where in July-August 1916, the Australian army suffered, in the six-week battle, 23,000 casualities, including 7000 dead.  The Mass, and the civil ceremonies that followed, marked the centenary of our most costly victory in the most ferocious and absurd war in human history.

Parishioners were in the minority, but the choir was in full voice.  The priest was a senior citizen, still able to sing on key.  People paid polite attention to what he was saying and singing, but it seemed to leave even the believers cold.  This was especially true of the sermon he preached.  Even politicians and government officials would find it difficult to say anything terribly original on such an occasion.  But this was a sermon, so the priest could not be content with a call to remember the sacrifice of fallen heroes; he had to say something about God and use the occasion to foster faith.  So he spoke about prayer.  As he clearly was not a reader of this Blog, he trotted out all the predictable nonsense about praying for the Faithful Departed.  Then, in an attempt to break new ground, he started insisting on “persevering in prayer”.  I may not have been, and hope I was not, the only one who wondered why one would have to repeat requests for God’s mercy.  “Ask and you shall receive.”  Period !  Surely once would be enough for a loving Father, who could not possibly have a reason to refuse such a prayer.  When I said “no” to my kids for something they wanted, I sometimes (too often !) gave in when they insisted.  But surely God does not need to have us pester Him to be merciful to the young men who lost their lives in the Somme mud.  (“Somme Mud” is the title of a remarkable book by Australian historian Will Davies, which I highly recommend.  Will is the patriot behind the “Pozières Project” : a state-of-the-art  French-Australian school which will replace the antiquated, inadequate public school on the ground floor of the Town Hall, built in 1925, as a living monument of the saddest chapter in the history of Australia and of the unbreakable bonds between Australia and France.)

After the sermon the Mass continued with the celebration of the Eucharist, a rite incomprehensible for most of the motley congregation.  I am not sure that even the non-atheists present really believed that the white wafer held up by the priest really had become the Body of Christ.  But the point of the Mass was to have us end up feeling we had all done our duty by commemorating the sacrifice of young Aussie soldiers, and nobody really thought of the supposed sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, reenacted  by the symbolic separation of His body and blood, the bread and the wine.  I was perhaps the only one who made the connection, and marvelled at the credulity I once had when I believed it was true.

RIDENDA   RELIGIO

 

DEPROGRAMING TERRORISTS : Good News , Bad News

Tags

"L'Express" July 20 "Raccrocher le Jeune Radicalisé à Sa Vie Avant", Amélie Boukhobsa, Believers on the Brink, DAECH, Deprograming Terrorists

I have just read an article in this week’s “L’Express” (July 20) about the first centers of “deradicalization” which the French government will open in Autumn.  It is an interview, in French of course, with a psychologist-psychoanalyst, Amélie Boukhobsa, who explains the methods that will be employed in these programs.  The post you are reading is therefore at once an invitation to French readers to consult the article, and a scoop for non-French readers who otherwise would probably never hear of the approach to be used to convert present and potential terrorists.  That’s the Good News.  I’ll summarize Ms Boukhobsa’s explanations before sharing with you the Bad News.

1.  Radicalized individuals, aged between 15 and 40 years of age, number 12,000 in France.  They belong to all social classes and economic levels.  Contrary to the public’s illusory self-reassurance, they are not mentally ill.  (Even in this Blog we sometimes call them “maniacs”, as we say hyperbolically that someone is “out of his mind”.)
2. The specialist distinguishes three levels of radicalization :   a)  Political idealists not yet radicalized, tempted to join Daech in Syria for “humanitarian” reasons, or to combat globalization and “American imperialism”.  Some young women in this category are hoping to find their “Prince Charming” at the front ! ;  b) “Prejihadists”, people who feel that life has dealt them a bad hand, people with a chip on their shoulder because of some real or imagined injustice they have suffered.  They display little religious motivation but are willing candidates for Daech which offers them an opportunity for vengeance ;   c)  True jihadists, characterized by a quadruple motivation :  (i)  To become a martyr and enjoy eternal pleasure in Paradise, with the additional right to choose 70 people to share their heavenly reward;  (ii)  To honor the Prophet;  (iii)  To express their rejection of reason and rationality by an unquestioning acceptance of dogma;  (iv)  To sacralize violence and death.
3. The challenge for deprogramers is their targets’ absolute faith, in the salafist tradition, in their literal understanding of their sacred texts.  For them the symbolic dimension of religion does not exist.  But some have moments of doubt (they seem to be equivalent to those we call in this Blog BOTBs, Believers on the Brink).  Getting them to speak of their families and of their personal experiences can trigger an emotional response and lead them to question their faith in dogma.  This demands the establishment of an interpersonal bond with them, and, as in classic psychoanalysis, the proposal of a framework which offers an alternative to their dogmatic position (which sounds very much to me like the “good cop” approach).
4. The centers will handle two different categories of their 30 to 60 inmates.  The first will be people, condemned by the courts, who have returned from Syria, or have committed crimes or are in danger of doing so.  The second will be for volunteers who will spend ten months in a different center, in a program dedicated to getting them to understand themselves, as well as the concepts of secularism and citizenship, and to equip them for social reintegration.  The aim is to reestablish links with their life “before”.  They can continue to practise their religion, but … alone, not in groups (a reminder of the recognized influence of a group praying together).

Now for the Bad News.  The specialist feels confident about converting those tempted to radicalize, but is “not sure” that it is possible to dejihadize a convinced individual (longtime readers of this Blog can think of Jim, our “Lumen de lumine” gung-ho traditionalist Catholic !).  If she is right, the State’s efforts to deradicalize are destined to have no effect on the already radicalized !  Our own suggestion, often repeated in this Blog,  for a media blitzkrieg to expose the absurdity of Radical Terrorism, is likewise not guaranteed of success (see my post “The Final Solution to Fanaticism ?”,February 8, 2015).  But we cannot resign ourselves, in advance, to defeat.  We shall overcome – or we shall be overcome.

DELENDA   RELIGIO

O M G ! T H E Y ‘ R E T A K I N G THE N A M E O F T H E L O R D O U R GOD I N V A I N !

Tags

"Bon Sang !", "Deo Volente", "Mon Dieu !", "OMG !"

“God” is not really a name, like “Yahweh” or “Allah” or “Jesus”.  Of these three, the only one you would ever hear as an expletive in impolite society is “Jesus Christ !” – with a slow, emphatic detonation of the two words separately.  Originally it was meant as an oath.  Today, used indifferently by atheists and non-atheists, it is a knee-jerk expression of surprise or frustration, with no offence or lèse-majesté intended.  “OMG” is used to assert that one is “cool” or “with it” – or, as dinosaurs like me used to say – “in the groove”.

Most abbreviations for expressions like “O my God !”, which fill tweets and textos, are already incomprehensible to old fogies and visiting Martians.  But before long they will replace prose entirely.  One day you will get a mail or a tweet which reads : “GYM.  WTF !  DGAR.  LOL”.  (“Got your mail.  What the f- – – !  Don’t give a ratz.  Laughing out loud” (or “Look out, love  !” or  “Little old ladies”, or whatever).

But I find it fascinating that relics of religion continue to pepper our prose.  In France, eldest daughter of the Church, home of the brave (iconoclast) and land of the free (thinker), “Jésus, Marie, Joseph !” is still commonly heard, as are “Bon Sang !” (a genuine oath evoking Jesus’ blood either on Calvary or in the chalice at Mass) and the omnipresent “Mon Dieu !” – the original OMG !  Such expressions are in fact devoid of any intended religious connotation.  People who use them might be surprised and/or amused if you had the gall to suggest they express disrespect for religion.  Apart from traditionalist  Catholics, practising Jews or devout Muslims, few people give a ratz about religion and its linguistic relics.

Having grown up in a ferociously Catholic environment where kids actually confessed in the Sacrament of Penance the sin of “swearing”, “using bad language” and “taking the name of the Lord in vain”, it is refreshing to realize that for many, in France at least, while religion is not (yet) extinct, it might just as well be, and one day, D.V. (“Deo Volente”), will be.

RIDENDA,   DELENDA   RELIGIO

THE LONGEST QUEUE IN THE WORLD

Tags

"Be Prepared", Boy-Scouts, Death

None of us likes being in queues.  We put up with them because we consider the sacrifice of our time and comfort worth the trouble (not to mention the savings during Sales !).  But we are all in a queue, which we did not choose to join.  There are 7,000,000,000 people in it, everyone of us on the planet, since the day we were born, with more joining it every day down there at the other end of the line.  It’s a fast-moving queue : 151,600 people at the top end die every day (that’s 105 every minute, nearly two every second).  Trouble is we have never known where we are in the queue.  We may have to wait years before we reach the top of the line, or maybe we are among the couple of hundred thousand who will die . . . in a day or two.

The fact is brought home to us as we read the daily obits : another friend gone, another we knew as kids and whose name we thought we had forgotten.  And then there are our loved ones, whose death comes after a long “battle”, or as a total surprise to them and to us.  All these deaths remind us that our own is inevitable (you can’t change your mind and quit the queue) and could happen at any time.  Luckily, more often than not, we know not the place nor the hour.

“Be prepared” makes sense to boy-scouts and to believers, but also to atheists who recognize the wisdom, not of getting on God’s right side before it’s too late, but of putting our material and financial affairs in order, so as to make the inevitable a little less of a pain in the neck for our entourage.  (We might decide even to make it a little less painful for ourselves, should it come to that.)  But to me it makes sense to accept the fact that we’re getting closer to the front end of the queue, and to make sure that we enjoy as much as possible the unknown length of time we have left.  I’m one of the lucky ones whose life has been more pleasant and more satisfying, and even longer, than that experienced by many.  I thank the people, living and dead, who made that possible.  I would thank God too, but given the fact that He never existed, it seems pretty pointless.

RIDENDA   RELIGIO

N I C E , JULY 14 : I SAID IT WOULD HAPPEN !

Tags

Barach Obama, DAECH, Islamist Radicalism, Memorial Service in Dallas

“Praise His name !  Aziz, you have chosen the path of perfection.  If you could arrange to perform this sacred act on July 14, it would be something that France and the whole world will never forget.”

I wrote that  in this Blog on November 16, 2015, just seven months ago.  Yesterday, during the national celebration of Bastille Day, July 14, a French-Tunisian terrorist drove his massive 19-tonne truck into the crowd gathered on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice to enjoy the fireworks display.  84 were killed and over 400 seriously injured, both including children, while thousands of others at the site, and millions throughout the country and around the world, were sent into a state of shock.

Before you call the Ministry of the Interior to have my door demolished and me dragged off for questioning (“et plus, si affinités” . . . ;  “and more, if we hit it off” ), check out the post “A Short Story about a Short-Cut to Heaven” and you’ll discover the parable I invented.  And before you marvel at my fictional, cautionary tale and praise my prodigious prophetical prescience, remember that the whole country  was on red alert yesterday.  No terrorist needed me to suggest the ideal date.  In fact, the target in my “Short Story” was the Eiffel Tower, and the perpetrator a 19-year old “sleeper”, who never succeeded in implementing his Imam’s suggestion, because he was himself victim of another – successful – terrorist attack, when some of his confreres, in the story, blew up the Pantheon.

This personal anecdote aside, we have witnessed yet another predictable, politico-religiously motivated mass-murder,  and will be treated to an identical re-edition of the aftermath of its predecessors.  For the next week, and more, we will hear the same expressions of outrage, of grief, of helplessness, of bravado, of patriotism, of politically correct sentiments, of hate, of racism, of empty promises, of a tightening of security, of optimism and pessimism, of frustration and of fear, and I hope, of hope . . . knowing that the next attack has already been planned (no, I won’t be making any more “predictions”).

We can foresee the predictable reactions, and while hoping that the military destruction of Daech will become a reality in the near future, know that there are countless “lone wolves” out there, and that none of us will ever be safe again.  We will try to avoid crowds, perhaps limit our use of public transport on the ground and in the air, and hope for the best when we must take the inevitable risks.  We will accept tightened security measures and sacrifice some of the freedoms to which we were accustomed.  And hope that this time, finally, the powers that be, in every country, hear the message we continue to flog in this Blog : marshal the best minds worldwide to conceive and conduct a massive public campaign of deintoxication  by anti-fanatic propaganda against Islamist Radicalism.

I can’t resist linking what happened in Nice yesterday with what happened two days earlier at the Memorial Service in Dallas.  After the assassination of five police officers, Barach Obama expressed, with exceptional eloquence, his sincere condolences, his honest frustration and his courageous, contagious hope, on behalf of his country at the . . . eleventh such Memorial during his watch !  The challenge of centuries of racism in the so-called United States is different in nature and origin from the challenge facing the planet in Islamist Radicalism.  But they share a clear, common choice :  “We shall overcome” – or be overcome.  Or, to employ another cliché :  “United we stand – or divided we fall”.

Those red-robed Princes of the Church in Rome in 1965 got it right when they said : “The future belongs to those who can provide coming generations with reasons for living and hoping.”  And, for once, they were talking not about the “afterlife” but life here and now, in this valley of tears.  Nonetheless, because Islamist terrorism is born of religious belief, our mantra remains :

DELENDA   RELIGIO

 

 

 

INDULGING IN INDULGENCES

Tags

"Le Nombre de Dieu", "Sobald das Geld", Compostella, Indulgences, José Juis Corral, Keys of the Kingdom, Luther, Mass Stipends, Plenary Indulgences, Purgatory, Relics, Rights of Burial, Vatican

Between spells churning out these rapid-fire posts as though I were trying to get it all off my chest before my ticker’s expiration date, I am reading an historical novel, “El Nùmero de Dios”, by Spanish author José Luis Corral, in French translation (“Le Nombre de Dieu”, Editions Hervé Chopin, Pari, 2015) about the building of a 13th century cathedral.  The Burgos basilica would take thirty years to build – it took a stonemason a full day to chisel at very most just two stones – but also buckets of ducats.  Financing ?  No worries !  Indulgences and Rights of Burial : those plaques you see in the floor of cathedrals.  It cost a fortune for the right to wait for the Last Judgement resting in peace in God’s house.  But this revenue was peanuts compared with the cash to be made from the Church’s greatest exploitation of Christian credulity, summed up in the 16th century Lutheran jingle :

“Sobald das Geld im Kasten klingt, eine Seele aus dem Fegfeuer springt.”  (“As soon as the gold in the coffer clinks, a soul out of Purgatory springs.”)

We’ve talked about this before, but this novel has got me thinking a little more about what had become established practice in Church finances already in the time of St Francis of Assisi.  It has to be the cleverest scam the Church ever came up with.   But if people bought as fact the biblical fables portrayed in the stained glass of their cathedrals, never challenged the supposed power of relics, ranging from a Saint’s pinkie to a phial of his blood to a piece of his underpants to bottles of Mary’s milk to Jesus’ Crown of Thorns (the wags add a feather from the dove that is the Holy Ghost) and the “miracles” they worked, and believed they could be cured by the healing waters of a “miraculous” mountain stream or a pilgrimage to Compostella, they could also be conned  about reducing the time of suffering for their loved ones in Purgatory.

What struck me recently is the power the Church claimed to have received from God not only to forgive sins in His name, but to act as “administrator” (the word is in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on Indulgences) of the time to be spent in Purgatory “paying off the debt” – from partial indulgences of a certain number of days or years up to Plenary Indulgences, wiping the slate clean.  If Jesus had given the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven to Peter, what could stop the Church from awarding indulgences for pious acts like murdering Muslims in the Middle East or hanging heretics at home, or “good works” and acts of piety like making donations to the building and restoring of churches ?   Luther would protest against the sale of indulgences for the construction of the Vatican basilica.  But for centuries before, the gems of Gothic architecture – the cathedrals of Paris, Bourges, Chartres, Amiens and countless others throughout Christendom – would never have been built without exploiting the belief that the Church really could shorten the suffering of the Faithful Departed.

This is not fiction.  The monuments to faith which we admire throughout Europe bear testimony to a credulity that alone should suffice for Believers on the Brink to see through the brainwashing of centuries of Catholic belief.  If people can believe in Indulgences, they can believe anything the Church tells them they must believe.  Even if we don’t hear a lot about Indulgences today, they remain part of Catholic doctrine.  I can’t imagine anyone following my example today, but let me remind you that as a kid I spent my time at daily Mass accumulating indulgences for the Poor Souls in Purgatory, by reciting the prayers and “ejaculations” (!) in my precious little pamphlet, “The Golden Book of Indulgences”.  I must have saved one hell of a lot of people from Purgatory.

Priests get paid to perform funeral rites and to recite the prayers for the dead.  But the Church also claims that it can improve the fate of the deceased and accelerate their entry into Heaven by having priests celebrate Masses paid for by stipends.  Blessed are the gullible !

RIDENDA   RELIGIO

REFERENDUM REVISITED

On the day the British P.M. who launched the disastrous referendum which resulted in BREXIT, is submitting his resignation to Her Majesty, I feel it appropriate – exceptionally  -to publish here an addendum to my post of June 25, “Counting Noses”.  Scroll back to it and you’ll find, between two other posts touching the same subject, this post in which I criticize severely the wisdom of ever conducting a referendum, subject to the knee-jerk reaction of a populist vote.  The reason is this : today, “L’Express” published an interview with Robert BADINTER, former French “Guardian of the Seals”, the State’s top legal authority, famous for his introduction in 1981, in Mitterrand’s Socialist government, of the bill abolishing Capital Punishment which put the guillotine into mothballs, who answered the question : “What is the best way to use a Referendum ?”  His answer confirms my own :

“Abstain from it . . . A national referendum should remain the exception and be admitted only when it concerns international institutions or treaties.  But we should beware of a national referendum of popular initiative.  It opens the way to demagogues and populists.”

Readers will remember that I spoke of this political subject in the context of a reflection of running a referendum about Catholic doctrine among members of the Church.  Not a good idea for either Church or State.

DELENDA   RELIGIO

” I WAS THERE – 2000 years ago “

Tags

Afterlife, George C. Scott, Immortality, Reincarnation, Resurrection, The movie "PATTON"

Reincarnation is a fascinating variation on the belief in an afterlife.  We have no credible evidence for either, but reincarnation makes a certain amount of sense.  Immortality – the dream of so many – I personally fear I would find deathly boring.  But if, especially if I were conscious of it, I had lived multiple lives already and could look forward to many more, I would consider such a condition not only confirmation that death has no sting (Jesus’ “Resurrection” confirms nothing, except the credulity of generations of believers), but a much more interesting way of spending eternity than sunbathing and playing beach-ball in a celestial Club Med with my seventy-two virgins (did you know that the word “virgins” is a mistranslation of “raisins” ?).

“Patton” was not just, according to me, one of the greatest movies ever made, but the story of an unusually erudite soldier who in real life was an exceptional military leader of men, although recognized as half mad and, in the words of General Pershing, “so bold that he was dangerous”.  Reincarnation was for George S. Patton (played superbly by George C. Scott) a defining reality in his own life.  The famous dialogue of the film is a gem :

(Three men – including two generals – are traveling down a North African road in a jeep) :

Patton   :   “Hold it !  Turn right here !”

Driver   :   “But sir, the battlefield is straight ahead.”

Patton   :   “Please don’t argue with me, Sergeant.  I can smell a battlefield.”

General Omar Bradley (Karl Malden)   :   “He was out here yesterday, George.”

Patton (points with his riding crop)   :   “It’s over there; turn right, damn it !”

Patton   :   “It was here.  The battlefield was here.  The Carthaginians defending the city were proud and brave but they couldn’t hold.  They were massacred.  Arab women stripped them of their tunics and their swords and lances.  The soldiers lay naked in the sun.  2000 years ago.  And I was here.”

Patton   :   “You don’t believe me, do you Brad ?  You know what the poet said :

“Through the travail of ages,

Midst the pomp and toils of war,

Have I fought and strove and perished,

Countless times among the stars,

As if through a glass darkly,

The age-old strife I see,

When I fought in many guises and many names,

But always me.”

Patton   :   Do you know who the poet was ?

Bradley   :   No.

Patton   :  Me !     (It’s been edited, but Patton actually did write it !)

At a cocktail party with British generals, Patton expounded on military history.  One expressed his admiration :

Sir Harold   :   “You know, George, you’d have made a great Marshal for Napoleon, if you had lived in the 18th century.”

Patton   :   “But I did, Sir Harold.  I did !”

Many people buy reincarnation.  Impossible – like the existence of God – to prove or disprove.  Take it or leave it.  Makes for interesting cocktail talk, if you can stand it.  No way you can contradict the speaker, revelling as the center of attention until everyone feels they need to get more fuel from the bar – and forget to come back.

But it’s fun to imagine what we might have been, and might be destined to become.  I am convinced I was a Borgia Pope and later, having repented my sins, Chateaubriand.  My present incarnation sometimes seems like not one but several lives, as you can read here and in my “From Illusions to Illumination.  The Itinerary of a Franciscan Priest from Catholicism to Atheism”.  It is particularly intriguing to wonder what will become of me when I croak in a year or three.  Apparently in reincarnation we have no choice, but if I did I think I’d like to try my hand at something entirely different.  How about a scientist who comes up with the answer to cancer ?  Or a musician who makes Mozart look like an amateur ?  Or . . . a woman who champions L.G.B.T., until she discovers that she really is a man, who goes on to tell his/her story and wins the Booker Prize ?

It is rather a pity that these are all pipe-dreams.  The reality is I have already had the privilege of living multiple lives, of being able to tell people about them and why I will be happy to die without hope or fear of reincarnation or any other form of “afterlife”.

RIDENDA   RELIGIO

 

 

 

AT LEAST ONE ADVERB IS INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT

Whenever I hear politicians or other public speakers wind up a point by saying that it is “important”, I dismiss it as padding, a filler, a chance to catch one’s breath, a hollow anticlimax to all that they have just said.  Without explanation, it is at best a vacuous value judgement.  Unless they tell me WHY it is important, I consider the phrase as completely devoid of . . . importance.

But more . . . important is the adverb some TV journalists in particular use to modify the abused adjective : “incredibly”.  If they said “immensely” it would remain an empty phrase but at least it would not emasculate the powerful word “incredible”.  Something is incredible if it is unbelievable.  The phrase “incredibly important” suggests that something is SO important that we would not believe just how important it is.  But what it says is  worse than that : it says it is IMPOSSIBLE to believe the degree of importance possessed by whatever the speaker is talking about.

Before you explode and tell me I am splitting hairs or do not recognize perfectly acceptable rhetorical hyperbole when I see it, let me tell you why I am losing my cool about a stupid adverb.  This Blog’s subject is religion, belief, faith, credulity.  Religions preach as facts things we atheists consider literally impossible to be true and impossible for us to believe – in a word, incredible.  The word should be reserved for this purpose, along with all other claims that have no basis in reality.  Some people expect us to give credence to the most outrageous propositions just as they do.  But I will not take their word for it, just because they say it is a fact, anymore than I will accept incredible “events” recounted in their “sacred” writings and the groundless beliefs and promises with which they are filled.

I felt it very important, but not incredibly important – for the reasons I have given – to clarify all this.  I would find it surprising and truly regrettable, but not incredible, that anyone could disagree with me – on this point at least . . .

RIDENDA   RELIGIO