The Hippocratic Oath

In-ter-est-ing. Apparently, the full, original and unexpurgated version of the Hippocratic Oath included the paragraph

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy…

which stands in stark contrast to the modern view of medicine. Abortion? Completely consistent. Euthanasia? Absolutely acceptable. To hear some of the extremists on the de-regulation side of the debate, one would think that the Oath was to do whatever a patient wants, rather than to keep them from harm.

Obviously, not all doctors are required to sign the Hippocratic Oath, but there is a cultural memory here which is hard to destroy, and patients actually expect their doctors to keep them from harm and do good. Plainly, abortion and euthanasia were not considered consistent with that aim by the Greeks: funny how we only learn from the Ancients when we've already made up our minds, isn't it?

Afghan on trial for being a Christian

Source: BBC NEWS.

So we kicked the Taliban out of Afghanistan, right? Let us recall, this was the group who blew up ancient Buddha statues in the name of Islam. And so we blew them up in the name of peace, democracy and human rights. I knew this would all end horribly when we decided that it was all right, after all, to let Afghanistan declare itself, throughout its constitution, an Islamic Republic¹, establishing Islam as the state religion², all but demanding adherence to Islam³, and making the national anthem unsingable for any but Muslims⁴.

We invaded Afghanistan—a good thing to do as the Taliban had to be dealt with—but in its place, we have allowed the worst of the Islamic hard-line elements to have their way. Our foreign policy on Afghanistan is beginning to look like an object lesson in bad house-keeping. Our government really should start thinking about whether we should continue some of our non-essential operations in the country. And for we who are Christians, we can pray for our Government, for the Afghan Government, and for our brother facing persecution, thanking God for the strength of his witness in the face of family rejection and the threat of death.

¹ Article 1: Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic

² Article 2: The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam

³ Preamble: We the people of Afghanistan … believing in the sacred religion of Islam

⁴ Article 20: The National Anthem of Afghanistan shall … mention “Allahu Akbar”

Who's the Unitarian god?

About a month ago, The Times reported that Chester cathedral rescinded an invitation to the Unitarians to hold their annual thingummajig in the building. Apparently, Unitarians are insufficiently Trinitarian to qualify for use. Well, you certainly can't accuse Anglicans of acting with undue haste, can you? I present below a decent enough reason why Unitarians can't be Christians; they don't worship the same god.

Discussion at Ruth Gledhill's blog (she who writes Religious Affairs articles for The Times) brought a few statements to my attention which made me realise that, for all their protestations to the contrary, the Unitarians have actually defined who their god is. I present the following neat little syllogism.

1. God is "what a person or faith-community feels to be the ultimate in their own belief system". (Source)
2. "The final authority for your faith lies within your own conscience." (Source)
3. By good and necessary inference, the Unitarian's god is his conscience.

Of course, this raises the hairy question of who god is for the Unitarians as a whole. Everyone's conscience? A sort of meta-conscience?

Anyway, I present this deduction in stark contrast to the Christian, whose God is actually a bona fide answers-to-the-name-of-Jehovah type of god; and also to demonstrate how when people cease believing in the true God, it isn't that they'll believe in anything (as I think it was Chesterton said); rather, they believe in themselves. The hubris of mankind never ceases to amaze me.

Vox populi non est vox Dei

Please read 1 Sam. 8 and John 18:28-19:16.

I was re-reading the account of Israel's demand for a king today, and it rang a bell for me with the Jews before Pilate. For sure there are big differences, but on other ways, it sounds all too familiar. The people of God are facing the question "who is your king?" and they reject God as their king. It begins with a simple replacement, but it ends with an attempt at regicide. The King of love is killed upon a cruel cross by men of hatred.

And isn't this the story of humanity, in microcosm? "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof", and yet we rejected his kingship in Eden. The rest of human history is little more than a sorry litany of different ways in which each generation lives out that original rejection.

Praise God, then, that the second rejection of the King was, in one sense, the last. One of the themes of Matthew's Gospel is Jesus' taking upon himself of Israel's story (vide Leithart), "doing it right this time round". On the cross, he takes Israel's mistakes, Israel's failings, Israel's sorrows, and rising from the tomb, he turns them into a triumph over death, and display of divine strength and a day of rejoicing! And we can be sure that our own sorry stories, fraught with personal failure and sadness can also be changed, as Jesus takes them upon himself, clothes us in his story of perfection and joy and gives us a new story, of walking in the path he first trod and following him wherever he takes us.

Exact Audio Copy

A plug post. I've been taking copies of CDs, so that I can listen to my collection without having chop and change discs all the time. I was having serious problems with a couple of discs, finding that my usual rippers (Real and FreeRIP) couldn't hack the end of the CD. For some reason, I couldn't, for love nor money, manage to get the least few tracks without a veritable menagerie of clicks, pops and scratches ruining the track. I could tell that the CD was fine, and indeed, played perfectly on any of the standard players; I just couldn't get the flipping thing ripped properly.

I am presently listening to a perfectly ripped version of Verdi's Requiem, courtesy of Exact Audio Copy, linked in the title. You also need a copy of LAME, an open source .mp3 encoder. The software is actually fairly painless to set up, although doubtless I've not really done it to the standards of serious audiophiles. It uses a higher bit-rate than I normally do, and takes a bit longer than the stuff I've used before, but that's because it takes two passes of each track and compares the results. LAME also take a little time over each track.

So, there we are. If you're having problems with a few CDs which just won't rip properly, perhaps EAC is what you need, too. I'll be spending the next few days re-ripping the areas of my library which are in need of a bit of attention, just as soon as I can remember which tracks they are…