Book review of Micheal Ots' What Kind of God? by Tulpesh Patel

What Kind of God is a collection of 10 short answers to common questions, or ‘accusations’ made by atheists, of religion, such as: What kind of god doesn't prevent suffering? What kind of god sends sincere people to hell? What kind of god would limit my sexuality? It’s written by a Minister of Evangelism at Landsdowne Baptist Burch in Bournemouth, but by happenstance grew up just down the road from where I did.

I wanted to review this book not on the arguments presented, but on the writing and book itself, but realised that would be a impossible and not entirely useful. I won't spend time dissecting the answers given to these questions, save to say that, as is par for the course with these kind of books, they are just one long non sequitur. 

Paraphrased answers to the questions posed above are: ‘God, in his justice, is perfectly fair in punishing our sin, but, in his love, he is patient with us, and thus every day the world continues is a sign of his patience’, ‘just like ourselves God does not tolerate the evil that is inherent in us and demands justice – it would be evil of God not to judge and punish us for our sins’ and ‘when it comes to sex, it is because it is good and precious that God places restrictions on it’ (and what I found most laughable as a ‘Christianity isn’t a homophobic religion, honest’ defence: ‘there is a difference between the orientation and the act’). 

The book is written in an affable, blokey style and is peppered with little snippets of the author’s life, which I suppose is meant to appeal to the Christian Union students it is aimed at and demonstrate that ‘Christians are people too’. It’s not the worst kind of book in defense of Christianity, but don’t read it expecting a serious theological discussion – it’s well short of any solid argument or philosophical discussion, and as I’ve already said, is just a series of illlogical appeals to emotion built around a scaffold of biblical quotes.

It’s a quick enough read, and it’s always good know what the religious feel is something resembling the antidote to amassing and incisive anti-religious literature.

Book Review: Why Does E=mc2? (And why should we care?) by James Ellor

Ask a person on the street about the famous E=mc² equation and you might get a vague response about it having something to do with Einstein. A person with some degree of scientific training (like myself) could tell you it has something to do with energy, mass and the speed of light squared, but how and why we know this and more importantly, why it is so, would stretch even those with a physics degree.

With Why Does E=mc²? Professors Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, come into their own by explaining the most complex, incomprehensible and downright weird niceties of quantum physics in a simple, accessible manner. That they do this with only the one mild instance of blinding the reader with maths speaks volumes about their skills. The apparently mundane revelation that, as a direct consequence of E=mc², a sprung mousetrap weighs ever so slightly less than a set one, sends as much a tingle down one’s spine as contemplating the size of the universe.

The last chapter on Einstein’s general relativity, and the resulting warping of space and time due to gravity, adds a final dose of weirdness, just in case special relativity wasn’t enough for you.

Book review: The Bible According to Mark Twain by Tulpesh Patel

The Bible According to Mark Twain is collection of his writings on Eden,  God’s flooding of the Earth and Heaven, written over a period of nearly 40 years. I must confess, for my sins, that this is the first Mark Twain I have ever read, save for his countless quotations and aphorisms which litter books and websites of an atheistic bent.

The book is composed of two main sections, the first is Twain’s understanding and re-working of the Christian creation myth through fictionalised diary accounts from Adam and Eve, the second concerns Heaven and the afterlife. Each piece begins with a short introduction by the editors, who place it in historical context, referring to either Mark Twain as the writer, or (his real name) Sam Clemens, when referring to events in his personal life.

The background reading provides an interesting account of how the pieces were composed. Some of them evolved over decades and we get an insight into Mark Twain’s battle with both the literature and the numerous re-writes and edits, but also how he wove personal tragedy such as the loss of his young daughter into this his musings on heaven and how he wrestled with the effects his writings would have on the religious establishment.

Mark Twain knits issues of the time from biology, technology and sociology into Adam and Eve’s account of their time in Eden and the ideas still have remarkable resonance today. The Extracts from Eve’s Diary capture some of the real wonder and curiosity that many of us feel when observing the world around us. Adam’s grapple with ‘science’ the description of Eve’s love for nature and Adam are genuinely funny and affecting. A recurring theme in all the pieces is the objection to God’s punishing Adam for eating an apple from the Tree of Knowledge with death, even though they would have had no concept of it as the Moral Sense, death and evil had not yet entered the garden. Twain also repeatedly emphasises the sheer vastness of the universe and the inconsequence of man in a miniscule corner of it.

A shorter third section, ‘Letters from Earth’, is a collection of letters written Satan recounting his visit to Earth and his wonder at the illogical nature of man and the God they create(d) to worship. This is Twain’s most devastating appraisal of Christianity, and religion in general, as some of the wonderful allegory and story-telling of the previous works is stripped back to really hammer home some astutely observed and eloquently constructed arguments for the fallacy of man’s belief in God, particularly a personal one that cares for humans.

With these various writings, Mark Twain achieved the incredible feat of weaving together an extraordinary deconstruction of religion, with funny, touching fables that far exceed the morality and humanity of the source material.  

Book review: Princess by Jean Sasson, and the inculcation of fear in young Muslim girls - am I making a mountain out of a mole-hill? by Tulpesh Patel

I started writing a review of Princess, a biography of a Saudi princess written by Jean Sasson,  but, as the Lord does indeed move in mysterious ways, something happened at work very shortly after that prompted me to also turn this into a blog post.

First the book. Princess recounts the life of Saudi Princess, Sultana, from childhood in the 60s to her own motherhood in the 90s. It was lent to my wife by a friend, I casually started reading the blurb and found it so engrossing I was a couple of hundred pages in before I realised the time. This book is one of the most brutal things I’ve ever read and I can say with complete sincerity, unputdownable.

Sultana tells of ritual and absolute oppression by the men of the household and wider society. The men hold untold wealth and absolute power, able to deny or cover up their own offence or justify any/all behaviour as that sanctioned or encouraged by their faith or tradition. The women are denied education (save for reciting the Koran); forced to wear an abaaya (not unlike a burkha, but even more covering) from their first menstruation, which incidentally makes them eligible for marriage to whomever the father chooses usually for simple financial gain;  routinely mentally, physically and sexually abused and killed.

The treatment of women is so vile that it is actually difficult to grasp the reality of a woman’s life in this period. Most of this book reads like science fiction set in a whole other world; that it does so, makes the story’s impact all the greater. For someone raised in Britain without really a religious upbringing and only having ‘moderately’ religious friends, I did not know anything like it. Seeing women in a full burkha complete with a metal mask on the streets of Dubai is the closest I’ve ever come to such closeting of women.  To quote the book: “those who are free cannot fathom the small victories of those who live on a tether”, and this is simply the princesses response to the unprecedented decision of allowing her to see her fiancé before she married him.

The second strand of the story, on the near limitless wealth of the Saudi royalty, is one less emotional and nearly as interesting. The princess astutely observes how the such wealth, and lack of drive that usually entails, is stagnating progress in oil-rich states; princes live on huge monthly stipends, and women are placated with more jewels, homes and finery than they know what to do with.

This book is a remarkable insight into the role of women in Saudi cultures, but what is also striking is how women hold their oppression and faith in tandem. Sultana praises Mohamed and turns to God and the Koran, which gave us Shariah and yet denounces her faith’s sanctioning of the maltreatment of women . The book begins with the caveat that it does not intend to offend Islam, but routinely demonstrates how, in actuality, what morals can be gleaned from the Koran are routinely ignored by men who’s urges and wallets are beyond control, and it is more truthfully used a manual for the oppression of women.

Princess is set in a period 40 to 20 years ago in Saudi Arabia. Since that time the world has become smaller and the ability of the followers of Sharia law to stifle human rights violations have become tougher than ever.  There are still, however, despairingly regular, prominent cases of female oppression, the most recent being the impending execution of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani  by Iranian authorities for alleged adultery.  The fact that these cases exists, and the international legal wrangling surrounding her proper defence, shows how tenaciously the (male) enforcers of the law have clung to old, repressive traditions and resisted fair, secular values. Daughters of Arabia, Sasson’s follow-up to Princess, concentrates on Sultana’s daughters and as an heart-wrenching and depressing as I know it’s going to be, I can’t wait to read it. 

Now on to what made me want to write more than just a review of the book. As part of my PhD I routinely perform cognitive assessments on children aged from 4 to 18.  On one particular occasion, just a week or so ago, I introduced myself to the patient’s mother, who was a head-scarfed Muslim, and immediately found that she was anxious about the assessments and asked if I was just me administering them. It isn’t unusual for parents or the children to be anxious about being left with strangers to do ‘tests’ in an unfamiliar environment, and we often let parents or guardians sit in the corner in order to help the child relax (as long as they don’t start to sign language answers, which has happened before). In this case, however, the patients were fine but it was anxiety solely on the mother’s part about my being male and left unsupervised with her daughter. Leaving your young daughter in the company of strangers is perhaps a legitimate fear, but this was a research facility in a hospital and was beyond the Stranger Danger stuff you usually teach to kids.

We are normally on a tight schedule on assessment days and run tests in parallel so the mother had to accompany the sibling for the physio tests in another department. She insisted that there be another woman in the room with me during the cognitive assessment and didn’t otherwise feel comfortable with it taking place. Despite the hassle, we acquiesced and managed to get a research assistant to sit in for the duration of each if the 90 minute assessments. It was a frustrating waste of resources to have the nurse just sitting there, but we needed to do our upmost to appease the mother because clinical research participants, particularly from ethnic minorities, are few and far between (an issue for a whole other article).

Having just finished reading Princess only a couple of days beforehand I suppose I was more sensitive of the situation than normal and although I know it has nothing to with me personally, and only a matter of my being male, it is still hard not to take exception to the insinuation.  My offence, however, is really a non-issue. What shocked me at the time was that , hard-line Muslim or not, this practice of not leaving a female with a man unaccompanied was still being practiced in the Britain in 2010.

I’m not sure of the root reason for this behaviour. I’ve heard and read different versions from as many sources, but it is categorically unhealthy: it treats men as unrestrained sex-obsessed fiends to be constantly feared, and women as weak, and constantly vulnerable; the girls were barely pubescent and yet they were made acutely aware of their sexuality and that I, men, should not be trusted.

I’m still wrestling with just how big a deal the whole situation was. It falls well outside the remit of my PhD but what I would really like to do is sit down with that woman and ask her why she really feels the need to shield her daughters from male company; what exactly she expects to happen and what might happen in situations where it is not possible to provide a chaperone. What might be even more interesting would be to probe the thoughts of the daughters and how they feel about men, perhaps, being children, they don’t really notice or care as yet.

Mostly I worry about the kind of message she is sending her daughters who are growing up in a liberal and permissive society. These girls are second generation immigrants subjected to an insidious way of making them fear men from childhood. Whilst it’s not quite full on Sharia law, it’s one of these traditions subsumed by it that are easily practiced behind closed doors and I imagine very rarely surfaces as a problem in the wider community, or comes to the attention of people like me who are acutely aware of it.