I went to my third or maybe even fourth Robyn Hitchcock concert last week - this is more due to my husband's devotion to 'Sir' Robyn than mine. RH was looking older, more hunched, than we expected, but the eccentric English melodic melancholy was still going strong. He sings of "heading for paradise, or Basingstoke or Reading" on "I Often Dream of Trains" - the concert is apparently "the director's cut" of this album.
His commentary between songs is as much part of the performance as the songs. At one point, he rather ruined my admiration of his surreal and unpredictable meanderings by launching into a tirade about how he couldn't believe he once voted for Blair and how as a person who doesn't believe in anything, he views with suspicion anyone who does, as they cause so much harm in the world. Well I'm an atheist too, but I really disagree with this "they're all as bad as each other" Bin Laden=Blair assertion.
Not only are Blair's Christian beliefs absolutely preferable to the Taliban's or Al Qaeda's, but the means, above all the means are so different. Blair sought to liberate, and not deliberately to kill massed civilians through terrorist acts.
In England we have battered the Christian church into something we can live with, even positively love aspects of (I would rather like to have Faure's Requiem and maybe "My Song is Love Unknown" at my atheist funeral, I'm afraid). I agree with Daniel Finkelstein's gentle, mild article on this.
Which brings us unavoidably to the Archbish (I really don't understand why Mrs Archbish doesn't sneak up and attack those eyebrows with nail scissors when he's unawares), blogged to death already. I thought "better read the whole speech, before commenting" but thankfully Tom at Freemania already has and it turns out the Archbish has probably been reading Amartya Sen too (“our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging") and seems to have come to some rather odd conclusions, namely that secular governments should not monopolise definitions of political and public identity, so therefore plural jurisdictions should be allowed. As Tom says, he has slid from social identities to public and political identities and then on to citizenship. And of course that is precisely the problem with Sharia law, particularly as presently promoted by Islamists,(from my reading of Terrorism and Liberalism), which is that it too says there can be no distinction between private and public identities - good Muslims must express their faith in every aspect of their life. Once you say Sharia law is accepted, there is no way certain Muslims will accept an "alongside with" English Common Law. Muslims who don't agree will be bullied into accepting the judgement of Sharia courts, more than they are already being bullied.
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