Scroll down for the photos if my ramblings are of no interest to you ... and if you are sensitive to the sharp sectionings of a pugnacious atheist at the depradations of religion and its conceits, you should definitely consider scrolling down and looking at the pretty pictures of cathedrals rather than reading my screed. I have thought a long time before mounting this ... I am always afraid of offending those I love or like or with whom I associate. But this is a time in history where never before has humanity more needed rationality and science to solve the potentially planet destroying problems we face, and yet we are drowning in a flood of idolatry and irrationality. Religion bears enormous responsibility for the sad pass at which our species finds itself, and yet it blames everyone, anyone else. So, again, if you prefer to look at pictures of cathedrals, skip the screed and scroll down.

 

With a smirk, and a nod to Mr. Chavez, the tinpot populist tyrant roiling the waters, I have named this collection of photos of ancient religious monuments “Sulphur.” Perhaps I will call religion “sulphur” from here on, just as I decided a while back to call god by that more ancient appellation “zeus” ... surely if god were more than a fevered imagining, the name would be inessential. But, as we know ... o, too well ... measureless mounds of cadavers have met their end over the name of a zeus.

 

So ...

 

Nothing more illustrates the sulphurous majesty of religious conceits than christian architecture in Paris. The notion proffered even by liberals that without religion we would not have had these vast cathedrals, is no more than a teleology. Yet every cathedral, no matter how stirring, evokes the misery and blood, the poverty and suffering, that is both font and effluent of religion.

 

My chosen reading in Paris concerned the Crusades. I did not do a lot of reading in my five short days, and did not get past the third Crusade, but such reading is a tonic to the instinctual reverence one feels in the majesty of these medieval stone monuments. The Crusades, not coincidentally, arose at the same time as the church turned against gay love, rejecting Jesus’ reported interpretation of the Sodom myth to justify the bilious homophobic loathing whose stench we still endure today. (See John Boswell, the magnificent scholar of early and medieval christian homophobia, on this.) It was in the next century that they got started on Notre Dame. But the point is that the 11th century, in the late part of which the Crusades arose, saw the beginning of the reform that led to the particular and fully explicated yet ever naked claims of the universal church that still haunt Europe today. Theology does not interest me, but the history of illusion is fascinating.

 

Notre Dame, magnificent, was a little disappointing by comparison to Westminster Abbey with the latter’s labyrinth of tombs and national history. But it was inspiring to be in this medieval monument with the hordes of self-absorbed tourists evidently less impressed by any religiosity than by their toys and giddiness. Periodically the loudspeaker issued a loud, long “shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” to remind the unwashed that they were, by jove, in a house of worship. Cranky bugger that I am (bugger in the double-entendre sense, of course), I stonily agreed and, puckered, scorned the slovenly middle classes as they flashed bad photos of loved ones whose corpulence obscured the art.

 

The structure and the felt unlikelihood of creating something so vast and stony with simple tools and human muscle nevertheless renders the observant reverent, if to nothing more than to the efforts of the poor sods who made it so. I never restrain myself from long imaginings at famous gargoyles, or the sprendiferous stained glass, or the queer stonework. How much agony has been accumulated here. Why do human beings make their lives so gruesome when the bounty and beauty of planet tempts and entices. How could I help but speculate, gazing on the beauty of Notre Dame at night and the sacrifice in lives that its edifice represents, on the suporating religiously-inspired greed that is the defining characteric of this ‘publican era in American democracy ... unlike those medieval days when surety of place enforced religious position, nowadays every self-reverent sod holds out to himself the sanctimonious promise that he might score the unjust bounty while his neighbors rot, and so again is our failure to take full benefit of the gifts some zeus has given us.

 

Saint Chappelle’s renowned windows did not disappoint ... and the rather more enthralled and refined and quiet crowd made for better contemplation. Well worth the excessive security consequent upon the monument’s latter-day encasement within a national police center.

 

Saint Paul was near my hotel ... I never went in. One night, I wandered around Saint Sulpice which, by report, plays a role in the silly Da Vinci Code (why should anyone care about the veracity of one unsupported myth which may have lost some battles against that other utterly ludicrous myth that has dominated and killed and still litters our lives with its foolishness and bigotries ... although I would hardly deny that I enjoy a soupçon of schadenfreude at the sanctimonious fulminating priests getting a little popularized comuppance) but I took no photos as it was shrounded in scaffolding and the black mesh that painters prefer. Saint Germain des Près was magnificent from outside, but its beauty was sullied by a bunch of silly banners inviting the decidedly secular French populace to return to the catechism ... give your children something “solid” indeed ... when will these bloody medievalists just give up and let the Enlightenment that defeated them have its just rewards.

 

Oh, religion, curse and foil. I would say “a pox upon religion” ... except that religion, the pox itself, infects and pretends to its own inevitability.

 

Click on any photo to to start the slide show ... and I warned you not to read this if you are one of those religionists whose sensibility gets all bothered when you encounter the scowling skeptic. Don’t bother writing if you do not accept the notion that “H”e is not there.

 

© 2007, Stephen Arod Shirreffs. Take any photos you like. If you want to use them for fun, give me credit (Stephen Arod Shirreffs). Permission is pointedly not granted for any religious, commercial, or political purpose. If you want to use any photos for commercial or political purposes, send me email to foto at gunung dot com.