Andrew Brown

Paganism is alive and well – but you won’t find it at a Goddess Temple

The first pagan temple to be built in Iceland for a thousand years has just been granted planning permission, a wonderful bureaucratic detail that shows up just how much this revival is polite make-believe. Ragnar Hairybreeks or Harald Bluetooth would not seek planning permission before building a place of sacrifice. At Gamla Uppsala, the Viking temple site in Sweden, horses were hanged to please the gods in groups of nine from trees, along with cattle, sheep, and human beings. In Reykjavik today’s pagans still eat sacred horsemeat at their feasts, but they buy it in from caterers. Respectable modern paganism is not only made up, as its leading ideologues cheerfully admit, but made up within a very limited compass of the modern Anglo-American imagination.

The theological illiteracy of Eric Pickles

It is worrying that Eric Pickles is in charge of religion for this government. I first came across his footprints in Bradford, where in the Eighties he was as much responsible as any other politician for the introduction of 'multicultural' policies into English cities. He understood that there were Pakistani Muslim votes at stake, and introduced policies to gratify their sensibilities, something conveniently forgotten once he moved down to Essex. The central flaw in this policy was not that it encouraged Islam but that it locked Pakistani machine politics into the indigenous machine politics of local government. Labour turned out to be the main beneficiary of the process, though you can't fault Pickles's political astuteness in trying to make his own party benefit instead.

The bizarre – and costly – cult of Richard Dawkins

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_14_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Andrew Brown and Daniel Trilling discuss the cult of Richard Dawkins" startat=788] Listen [/audioplayer]The other day I wrote something to upset the followers of Richard Dawkins and one of them tracked me down to a pub. I had been asked to give a talk to a group of ‘Skeptics in the Pub’ about whether there are any atheist babies — clearly not, in any interesting sense — and at the end a bearded bloke, bulging in a white T-shirt, asked very angrily where Dawkins had said there were any. I quoted a couple of his recent tweets on the subject: When you say X is the fastest growing religion, all you mean is that X people have babies at the fastest rate.

Andrew Brown

Home boys

Meet the Dalis: men who are dependent – and loving itIt sounds like a cushy life for a man. On weekdays he potters about at home, running a duster over the surfaces, tinkering with a short story he’s struggling to compose, painting, daydreaming, listening to a bit of Jeremy Vine; his wife, meanwhile, gets up in the dark, takes the 5.47 to Liverpool Street and toils away in a glass tower all day to bring home the bacon. He is dependent, and loving it: we could call him a Dali. There are a plenty of Dalis around these days. You probably know one or two. And the statistics show it clearly. More and more couples, especially if they have children, are choosing to swap the traditional roles. This change, like so many other trends, is driven by economics: it is often cheaper for one half of the couple to stay at home while the other works than to pay for childcare so that both parents can climb the career ladder.

Thursday

Paganism is alive and well – but you won’t find it at a Goddess Temple

Paganism is alive and well – but you won’t find it at a Goddess Temple

Saturday

The theological illiteracy of Eric Pickles

The theological illiteracy of Eric Pickles

Thursday

The bizarre – and costly – cult of Richard Dawkins

The bizarre – and costly – cult of Richard Dawkins

Saturday

Home boys

Home boys