“The Crucifix Creates Discrimination”

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that displaying crucifixes in Italian public schools violates religious and educational freedoms. It has ordered the Italian government to pay a $7390 fine to an Italian mother, Soile Lautsi, who has struggled for eight years to compel her children’s schools in northern Italy to remove crucifixes from the classrooms.

The Court rejected the government’s disingenuous argument that the crucifix is not a religious totem at all, but instead “a national symbol of culture, history, identity, tolerance, and”—get this—”secularism.”

Sanely, the Court concluded that secular, state-run schools, where attendance is compulsory, must “observe confessional neutrality in the context of public education,” and that crucifix-clogged classrooms “could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign and they would feel that they were being educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion.”

Crucifixes have been compulsory in Italian classrooms since the enactment in the 1920s of two laws under the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, a personage aided and enabled by the Catholic Church, which for millennia has been the premier peddler of crucifixes.

Lautsi’s husband, Massimo Albertin, said the family was satisfied with the court’s ruling. “We believe the ruling is a positive signal from Europe to Italy, which seems to increasingly lose its secularism,” he said from their home in Albano Terme. “The crucifix creates discrimination.”

Dueling Bardos

After death comes nothing hoped for or imagined.

—Heraclitus

With life tough enough to figure, you’d think people would leave off trying to suss out what happens after it, too. But they don’t. Some science types claim that’s actually what differentiates humans from other animals, brooding on the afterlife, but they’re probably wrong about that, as ravens attend funerals, and elephants weep for their dead.

In a certain sense it’s understandable, this obsession with events after the expiration of breath, since life is so short, and death is so long. Matt Groening, in a Love Is Hell strip, once put things in perspective for one of his rabbits, who was considering adultery, confronting him with a line across the entire page that represented time. The line was labeled “time you are dead.” Near the very beginning of the line lay a tiny dot: “time you are alive.”

“If We Were In His Place, Should We Hesitate A Moment?”

Maurice Maeterlinck was an interesting person. A Belgian born in 1862 into a wealthy French family, he initially snored into law, before waking to write first Symbolist, and then fairy-dust plays, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911.

By that time Maeterlinck had pretty much abandoned the theater, having become intensely interested in ants and bees, and inscribing several eccentric works about each.

In the end, he wandered off onto his own peculiar path of mysticism, peridocially producing, until the end of his life in 1949, volumes with titles like Wisdom and Destiny, The Buried Temple, Our Eternity, The Great Secret, and The Life of Space.

In this last, Maeterlinck included the essay “The Isolation of Man.” It seems to have been intended as an argument against the existence of extraterrestrial life. But to me it reads as one of the most poignant refutations extant of the notion that some deity once planted, and today watches over, those of us suffering here on terra nullius.

Variations In B-Flat: The Sakkudai

(The ancients spoke of the Music of the Spheres; modern scientists have discovered that the universe continuously sings in B-flat. In the past couple of years I’ve developed the whimsical notion that all human spiritual belief systems are attempts to interpret, explain, understand, this universal sound.

Colonialism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, globalism, and the like have not only disrupted and diminished native cultures and languages, they have also encroached on thousands of unique spiritual belief systems. Given that determined devotees of the two dominant proselytizing religions, Christianity and Islam, have between them penetrated into every square inch of this globe, minority manners of hearing B-flat are today as much under threat as minority cultures, languages, and ecosystems.

I thought it might be worthwhile to explore here from time to time some of these more “minor” variations in B-flat. Not only those still struggling to survive, though largely unknown, but also those extinct, and those minority strains that have (or have not) succeeded in remaining within the “big five”–Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.)

First, and in many ways my favorite, B-flat according to the 3000 people of the Sakkudai, who live in the center of a modest island off the west coast of Sumatra, today part of Indonesia.

I discovered the Sakkudai while editing the sixth edition of Bill Dalton’s Indonesia Handbook. That was more than ten years ago, and I was somewhat surprised to find that Dalton provides in his book more information on the Sakkudai than may be found today anywhere on the tubes. There also do not seem to be any reliable photos of the Sakkudai on the tubes, and few of Pulau Siberut, the island whereupon the Sakkudai dwell.

The Sakkudai’s spiritual belief system, it should be noted, does not officially exist. Animism is against the law in Indonesia—which is absurd, because the majority of Indonesians are in truth animist. Nonetheless, the first principle of Indonesian state ideology is “belief in the one and only God.” Thus, the government sloppily, bizarrely, disingenuously slots various animist peoples as “Christians,” “Muslims,” or even “Hindus,” though the latter is not exactly perceived by most people who know anything about it as a monotheistic faith.