Pope Benedict XVI - A man in a modern-day pyramid

As man is storied

Pope Benedict XVI was a man that represented the frailty of our humanity, for all flesh shall perish. That is nature as it has been from long before we recorded history I note that Roman Catholic Church is the longest continuously running political and religious organisation, what she documents in her archives, some unsearchable of the mysteries of our human race would intrigue those who eventually have liberal access to those libraries.

When Pope Benedict XVI took the papacy at the end of the long reign of Pope John Paul II, much as he was highly influential as the Dean of the College of Cardinal and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he was also an old man of 78 and for almost 8 years he bore the burden of his ministry with the strength he could muster and the weaknesses that plagued him in the many domains where he wielded influence from within himself to the broader church and global political organisation he led.

As man is frail

When he decided he could no do more, he resigned from the papacy and took on the title of Pope Emeritus sequestering himself at the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican Gardens as Pope Francis succeeded him at the age of 76 and he presided over the solemn funeral mass of his predecessor, also now a frail man of 86 years of age.

Of men of advanced years, there was every possibility that the current pope could predecease the man he succeeded, my cultural heritage of the Yoruba celebrates the lives of people who live to a great old age at death, even as congratulations are offered to those who survived them. Our mortality is ever present in the course of our existence.

The concerns that a pope in retirement would inadvertently interfere with the organisation of his successor were not borne out. Pope Benedict XVI devoted himself to writing, studying, and prayer with the occasional snippets of news about him, what he was up to and his health condition.

As man is mortal

In his death, at the age of 95 on New Year’s Eve into 2023, there became how to celebrate a cardinal and a pope, as he was not the Sovereign of the Vatican City, apart from officials attending from Italy where the Vatican is situated and Germany, where he was from, any other country representatives would have attended in a personal capacity.

For the wealth and influence of the man and his standing, along with the offices he held, “As per tradition, the Pope Emeritus' pallium, coins and medals minted during his pontificate, as well as a "Rogito" or Deed summarizing the highlights of his papacy, were also placed inside the casket. He was buried in a triple coffin of caskets of cypress wood, zinc, and oak. [Vatican News: Deed of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI placed in casket]

As man is mummified

The zinc casket is welded shut with seals and a plaque, but for the man who ruled over men, they see no corruption for they neither return to dust nor are given to ashes, they become mummies of posterity, an eternal reliquary of bones with hair and leathered skin.

It makes one wonder if the crypts of royalty or the papacy very much like the pyramids of the Pharaohs might be discovered millennia from the present time will reveal to that civilisation once again the treasures of antiquity exemplified in the lives of significant persons of our times only for them to be plundered in the name of archaeology for the new museums that as human beings we visit to gawp at artefacts with intrigue.

As I watch a replay of the funeral Mass, the solemnity with the obscurity of Latin clouds the ceremony with mystery and awe. Pope Francis was wheeled in on the chair, and we all at another funeral find that moment to reflect that the times of man are just for a season. The celebration of our lives is informed by how we lived and for all that we might have done, our stories are buried in a summary and our graves have the briefest of inscriptions; our names, the year of our coming and the year of our passing.

Blog - Academic theologians creating Islamic disquiet

As for man, his days are like grass; As a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, And its place remembers it no more. Psalm 103:15-16 (NKJV)

Opinion: We are up against a menacing kind of religious puritanism

“This is the terrifying paradox of zealotry: no one hates humanity more than those who believe they know what's best for it." Howard Jacobson

Before us

Reading this in the Wit & Wisdom column of The Week magazine simply crystallised my thoughts about activities of religious extremists around the world.

In terms, we can all agree that the Islamic State has eclipsed both the Taliban and Al Qaeda in their utterly hubristic quest to somewhat purify their world and rid it of any person, view, thought, opinion or act that dares question their premise.

They have arrogated to themselves an omnipotent and untrammelled control of everything, having the power over life and death, killing off people like cattle with impunity and sadly, it seems without any consequence.

Religious puritanism

For how much longer we can continue to tolerate this rotten menace in our 21^st Century world, I cannot tell, but the more we allow it to fester, the more this cancer will metastasise into an incurable blight on our humanity.

What we are up against is a brand of religious puritanism that imposes itself relentlessly on our humanity, grabbing headlines with more daringly desperate and reprehensible acts that threatens to condemn our civilisation to a mediaeval existence.

Like someone offered in a tweet to me a few weeks ago, he defined puritanism as the fear that someone somewhere appears to be having fun or enjoying themselves.

Human expression curtailed

You them ask why life is not here to be enjoyed? Why should we not be happy? Why should we not appreciate beauty in nature and in things, in art, in music, in sport, in theatre, in dancing, or in every form of human expression?

Why should anyone think they can impose their beliefs and their extreme interpretations of religion on others where it is clear we are neither uniform in our devotion or allegiances?

These are people, flesh and blood like you and I, yet they act like there has never been any like their kind that walked the face of this earth. Tombstones all around the world mark the graves of those who thought they will live forever, some never even had a sign for posterity where they returned to dust. History stands as a forever indicting judge over those whose heinous acts against our human coexistence brought pain, death, suffering, war and worse to their fellow human-beings.

Where is the outrage?

The height of this hubris was first demonstrated when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, a treasure of human antiquity about 15 centuries old that some misguided religionists suddenly thought did not fit with their religious world-view.

Since then, there religious puritans and megalomaniacs have ravaged and vandalised, treasures, cities, records and histories, convinced that they serve a cause too great for any other to comprehend. They terrorise with violence and atrocity, purveying their absurdities with more alarming rhetoric, this needs to be stopped once and for all.

What we can lose

As we watch these people and let them thrive, with satellites in Africa, Asia and beyond; just imagine if this plague sweeps into Egypt and razes The Great Pyramid of Giza to the ground, because the Pharaohs were not of a particular religious persuasion, or see how Damascus reputed to be one of the longest inhabited cities in human history being torn down in our time.

It is unacceptable and the longer these people are allowed to exist our very existence is not only threatened, we become lulled into a form of acquiescence that history will never ever forgive our generation for.

If there is no leadership to arrest this nonsense like Nazism was arrested and defeated just 70 years ago, then what a pitiable existence our once resilient humanity has come to.

Panda diplomacy comes to Stockholm in terracotta splendour

Stockholm this winter

Despite the cold weather and other complaints about Stockholm there is at least one reason to visit this winter if China is not on your itinerary.

Before leaving for Stockholm I searched for tourist things to do just to ensure I got a feel of the city and there is quite a lot to see in Stockholm on a good day with the strength and will.

However, I came upon a once in a lifetime opportunity present in Stockholm and running until the 16^th of January 2011, exhibits from the Chinese Qin and Han dynasties including part of the terracotta army and recently excavated findings.

Unfortunately for everything else Swedish, they all had to take second-place for this unique event – at least my thinking was that everything about Stockholm will still be here but this was too transient to miss.

Secret tunnels of unveiled statues

The exhibition [1] was in a cavern of tunnels under the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities; the cavern was built by the navy in the 1940s and had heretofore been secret and not accessible to the public until these exhibits presented a unique opportunity for opening up the place and setting for displaying the exhibits.

After breakfast, well brunch, we got to the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities and there was a long queue in place that seemed immobile for a while and then people were let in in batches, we thankfully fell in the last batch before we got frozen in the cold.

As we walked in we caught a glimpse of the first statues of the full-size army and we just taken by the human likeness, the size and the intricate work that had gone into the creation of the heads, the tunics, the hands, the stances and the sheer numbers back in China.

A feat almost beyond belief

One could only imagine the project management that went into the mass production of this army in buried along with the 1^st Qin Emperor and then probably the understanding of scale and cost that informed the miniature army created for the tomb of the 4^th emperor of the Han dynasty that succeeded the Qin dynasty and empire.

Along with all the exhibits that included weapons, farm animals, weights and measures this was quite well curated and gave a sense of Chinese history with the persuasion to visit China itself.

Until then, this the foretaste that gives China the historical footing literally at par with the wonders of Egyptian pyramids not to talk of the lucrative returns of panda diplomacy [2] offered as cultural exchange – it would be well attended and the catalogue does not come cheap either.

I took a few pictures of the exhibition – see the slideshow here.

Sources

[1] Östasiatiska museet - Exhibitions » Future Exhibitions

[2] Panda diplomacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Innocent red blood spun as roses in their bloom

A swarm of new destruction

Operation Swarmer represents the biggest offensive on Iraqi soil since the invasion in search of Wielders of Mass Deception in 2003.

As they conquered Baghdad and the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down with the help of a liberator tank, oil installations were protected but buildings of antiquity their treasures were left to looters and brigands to plunder.

No greater treasure than oil

We haughtily sniffed at the Philistines of our Modern Age who having a long history that stretches back a long 250 years as a nation forgot to secure treasures that date more than ten times 250 years into the past.

Nevertheless, one can conceitedly surmise that they were protecting treasures of the deep that date back even billions of years – Oil!

Somehow, if oil is a fossil fuel, I can only wonder how much would have had to go to waste in decay, sedimentation and precipitation to offer so much oil – sometimes I cannot muster enough faith to believe to Darwinism.

The whole thing blows my mind, I would rather be a simpleton of the creation story, and the miraculous can more believable.

However, I would contend that there was an eternity of time between the beginning and when the earth was found null and void. Eternity past could very well be billions of years of passage of time – the earth is as old as you want it to be.

From Baghdad to Berlin

Having suffered the plunder of the Museums in Baghdad, I thought to myself, the only other place top see Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian and Mesopotamian culture would now have to be the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

Then on Larry King Live early this morning a number of commentators had a few things to say, but I did wonder how history had been twisted when a Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair vain-gloriously misrepresented some facts.

• That Iraq was under a greater danger of a civil war under Saddam Hussein as his regime was already imploding.
• That Iraq is no more occupied since it has an Iraqi head of state.
• That military might would handle the insurgency just as the Sadr Army was succumbed in 2004.
• That the Al Qaeda operatives working in Iraq arrived long before the coalition forces invaded.

The red blood of roses

I think it is time we fully document and journal the events in Iraq before other people blinkered by some unconscionable partisan loyalty rewrite the events before our eyes – misrepresenting the red blood of the innocent lives lost as the colour of roses in their bloom.

Yesterday also, a whole programme on Newsnight documented in some detail the mismanagement of moneys meant for the reconstruction of Iraq to the tune of $50 billion.

This is looking like an American “Oil for Food” type of scandal that enthusiastic senator-persecutors of the UN have not taken note of.

In what can be cynical viewed as a poll-boosting exercise reminiscent of when Clinton bombed Yugoslavia whilst the Monica Lewinsky scandal captured the imagination of the American People, Operation Swarmer is riding on comparatives and superlatives with the hope the those rock bottom ratings of the President get a nudge upwards.

History lost to the present

It is however with interest that this exercise is taking place in Samarra where the force of occupation and incumbency failed to prevent the destruction of one of the holiest Islamic shrines.

It also shows that heritage and history plays more significance in the matter for preventing internecine violence leading to a possible civil war.

It is probable that flushing insurgents out of Samarra would snuff out the purveyors of violence, but it would not rebuild the shrine.

That shrine would also not get rebuilt is moneys are corruptly disbursed to political personnel who are allegedly lining their pockets better than an African chieftain his hands in the bank vault.

Such great ruin we behold

The fact is helicopter gunships and all that artillery do not daintily miss out infrastructure and innocent people as the culprits are being searched out.

After the operation is over such great ruin would we behold as the quest to prevent a civil war that has unravelled as a result of our pre-emptive war.

The division of a united people

The parallel with Yugoslavia is stark from the fact that Marshall Tito kept six constituent nations together as one and it all broke apart as Slobodan Milosevic stoked the embers of nationalism.

Iraqis who were Iraqi nationals under Saddam Hussein are now Kurds, Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims.

The bizarre case of a branch of religion in schism for 1,400 years being synonymous with a tribe and a location and exacerbated by Western equality in representation democracy simply accentuates the divides and does nothing for unity.

Iraq is one big and opened Pandora’s Box and God help us if we ever find the lid and get the strength to shut it up tight.