Interview with Me by Steve Anderson

Reproduction of an interview originally published here.

Interview: Daniel Hoffmann-Gill

The Nottingham-born actor talks about slumming it as a teen and the tragedy that made him turn his life around.

Across the foyer of London’s Royal Festival Hall Daniel Hoffmann-Gill cuts an imposing figure. At 6ft 6in and thick cut, the actor, playwright and director is almost a giant. However, as he says goodbye to Rich, the designer for his upcoming play Our Style is Legendary, and scans the open-plan hall for his next appointment, I can’t help but think he looks like a lost little boy.

I approach Hoffmann-Gill, who is dressed in a scruffy wax jacket and ripped baggy jeans, and am greeted with a gentle handshake and a warm smile from behind a heavy moustache. It seems the lost boy analogy isn’t too far off as he tells me about his struggle growing up in Nottingham in the 1980s.

The only child of middle-class, entrepreneurial parents, Hoffmann-Gill was significantly better off than those living around him in the notorious St Ann’s area of the city, where racial tension and violence were prevalent. “It was interesting for me because it meant that I could experience a different way of life by making friends and hanging out in that community,” he says. “It was an important education for me.”
Hoffmann-Gill, now 34, describes his teenage years as a sad time, full of anger and violence, spawning from his relationship with an authoritarian father shaped by military discipline. “My dad had a lot of anger towards me and I had a lot of anger towards him. I think it’s a classic Oedipul thing, you want to kill your dad and have sex with your mum,” he tells me, not quite making clear whether he is joking or not.

His rough East Midlands accent comes alive when he spits expletives, passionately breaking his relaxed and soft-spoken demeanor: “I think it’s important when a son’s growing up and he knows he could smack the fuck out of his dad.”

His adolescent violence soon turned inwards as he started using drugs as a coping mechanism to deal with severe self-loathing, and was perfectly comfortable destroying a person he did not care about.
His life was to change very suddenly when he was 16, however, when his best friend Michael died of a heroin overdose.

Hoffmann-Gill reels off the date like it is eternally etched into his brain – “1992, 8th of December” – and for the first time, his easy, sprawling conversation becomes slower and more contemplative. It is less emotional than it is reflective; he has obviously come to terms with his friend’s death. Indeed, their relationship forms the backdrop to the autobiographical Our Style Is Legendary.

When Michael died, Hoffmann-Gill knew it was time to make a fresh start. “That part of my life literally died. That’s the way I believe things should be, if something goes wrong you have to chop the whole arm off otherwise it will kill you.”

A keen performer since an early age and nursed by “inspirational” school drama teachers, he decided to pursue a career in acting, as well as working with problem children in St Ann’s that were wandering down the same dark path he had.

Now working regularly as an actor, making a living from commercials and theatre, the self-loathing of Hoffmann-Gill’s teens has completely disappeared, as he boldly claims he now loves himself a great deal. “It’s not arrogance, but if you make your life reliant on other people giving you love to make yourself feel good, that means they can take it away and reduce you to fucking nothing.”

He says he still believes in a shared existence, however, and proudly tells me he is due to marry his fiancée Eva-Jane in December. The couple met four years ago when Hoffmann-Gill took over directorial duties on a play she was starring in. On a prompt sheet to remember the actors’ names he wrote ‘I love you’ next to hers. “It didn’t mean I loved her, she just looked great. I was like ‘fuck, she’s amazing’.”
Don’t count on the wedding being a big church ceremony though; as an avid science and philosophy reader, Hoffmann-Gill claims him and religion don’t mix. Counting Sartre and Nietzsche among his favourite writers, he calls the Bible and Koran “wonderful bits of writing, but nowhere how you want to live your life”.

“It doesn’t make any sense. Faith is just an excuse for bad ideas.”

Our Style is Legendary runs at the Tristan Bates Theatre, Covent Garden from March 14th until April 2nd. Tickets can be bought here.

Live Like Untamed Lightning

I blame my brother-in-law, he gave me a book on the work of Mayakovsky for Christmas and I've been devouring it at a hefty pace. It is a most stimulating read, empowering, inspirational; a tool to drive you on, into the nothingness with no sense of dread but of wonder.

He provides a good guide on how to live your life and what to aspire to and what to discard.

To be precocious, honest, self-confident and to obliterate the past.

A welcome read as we approach the end of my most successful year, a stimulant to re-focus the mind, an addition to my personal manifesto as I re-embark on the challenges of a new year.

The actors life is an existential one. You faced by nothing, no work, or at the best hints of work or fragments of work. You look out into the abyss and can be crushed by the blackness, the endless nothingness.

Not me.

Nothingness is life. We are always staring into the pitch black. The difference is, I charge into the dark to see what it contains, or rather what I forge in the vacuum from force of will.

Exhilarating.

Have a happy new year folks, with much success and joy.

I know I will.


Words are


the commanders


of mankind's forces.


March!


and behind us


time


explodes like a landmine. 


To the past


we offer


only the streaming tresses


of our hair


tangled


by the wind.

ONE FROM NONE

The top of my right arm now bears the inscription: ONE FROM NONE.

This being my second tattoo, I was not as wracked with nerves as my previous outing to Prick and all went to plan, this being the first part of a three piece tattoo on my right arm.

Of course, you always have to explain what it means when you get summat done and it ended up sounding a bit lame and pretentious, perhaps it is...who knows...All I know is I've wanted this text on my arm since I was 18, so fuck all you haters!

The idea for me is that humanity, life, existence is all something from nothing. No God, no creator, no before and no after, just the present. Life is about the force of will to make it something from nothing, of being one from none.

It also has a heavy personal resonance in that, my dad's sperm and my mum's eggs and womb aside, I made me. Of course, I inherited DNA and other elements that influence me but I made me and only I have the power to destroy me. The feeling that your life is in your hands and that you can make it or break it and that no excuses should be made, or blamed laid for failures and foibles. The same goes for life's successes, they do not belong to anyone but you, they can be shared but you did them.

It's an important part of my philosophy that only the individual has ownership over their life and if you hand that ownership over, so that others can build you up and make you feel good, you are equally as vulnerable to people knocking you down. That to me is a life lived on quicksand, with no core of love and self-belief, rooted in the self.

Hence, ONE FROM NONE.

What's God got to do, got to so with it? Who needs a God when a God can be Broken?

My dear brother-in-law got me great book some time ago, that turned me on to the genius of Robert G. Ingersoll. A man truly ahead of his time with his musings upon the place of religion in American society and more crucially, government. With the awful rise of the Tea Party in America, this acute and powerful voice of atheism is as relevant now as he was during the 19th century.

Ingersoll made the crucial distinction that there is no God in the constitution, the founding fathers of America retired him from politics because human's can govern themselves without the assistance of a supernatural power. And if God is ever allowed into the constitution, humankind must abdicate as there is no room for both. Government is and should be of, by and for the people.

Ingersoll was rightly proud that the United States was the first secular government in the world, all men were created equal, not just Christians...

Ingersoll argued that if a government is united by religion, it is a pointless one, as any religion that has to be supported by law is without value, a fraud and a curse. A religious argument that is supported with a gun isn't one worth making and a prayer that must be supported with a cannon is best never uttered; forgiveness has no partnership with shot and shell.

One of his greatest points is the hypocrisy of a constitution with no God, paired with the need to swear on a Bible and to take oaths. The fact you have to swear on a bible re-inserts God into the equation and, if you're atheist, forces you to lie. Also, an evil man can take solace in the oath and has God as a partner and the jury have the brand of God to cover the man but anyone who refuses to swear, because he does not believe, is deemed to be something lesser.

I'll leave you with some grand quotes from the legend that is Robert G. Ingersoll:

"If humans actions can displease or please an omnipotent being, then the being is not at all omnipotent, he is a slave and victim of man."

"Why should a God get angry over a little piece of bacon?"

"The more a man knows the more willing he is to learn, the less a man knows, the more positive he is that he knows everything."

"No man of humour ever founded a religion, ever."

Happy 'The Day a Jew Was Tortured and Killed' Day

State by State. Part 2: Missives on Montana to Wyoming

MONTANA
The home of the boob, 90% of all little people here are fed on the tit, not formula. Must make good warriors, no state contributes more soldiers per capita than Montana. Gave us Evel Knievel and the 17th Amendment. God Bless the Treasure State!

NEBRASKA
A state to travel through, going east or west, a half-way house, it just goes on and on and on...Practical, polite, respectful, conservative and plain; Republicans to an extreme but never extreme Republicans.

NEVADA
72% of Nevada was born outside of Nevada. My question is: why the fuck come to Nevada? Since 1950 no state has seen its population increase quicker or by such a huge margin. There can only be one answer: Las Vegas. I've been there and it is not my kind of town.

NEW HAMPSHIRE
The roller coaster capital of America! The state that gave us the best fictional President of all time. It is the wilderness next door to Massachusetts, where conservations go something like this:

(A New Hampshire graveyard has to be moved, one of the occupants had been buried there for seventy years, the grand-nephew was present at the exhumation)

"Did they?"
"Yep."
"Were you thar?"
"Yep."
"How was the box?"
"Purty nigh gone."
"Coffin?"
"Sorta mouldy."
"D'ja look in?"
"Yep."
"How was Uncle John?"
"Kinda poorly."

NEW JERSEY
What is it with the New thing? Big lover of roller coasters but warring with arch rival New York to spend more on education than they do, NY is winning, as it does with most things as it looms over NJ like an annoying and better looking younger brother. Has no state song, famous New Jerseyite Bruce Springsteen's epic "Born to Run" was suggested but then it was pointed out that song is about getting the fuck out of New Jersey. New Jersey is a punchline to more jokes than any other state and I've been there so can vouch for that.

NEW MEXICO
I've been there. Named after Mexico. Not a big fan of health insurance here. They test nuclear weapons, aliens and military technology in this state because they can.

NEW YORK
Where to begin? Thinks it is the best, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. A mythical land. Obviously, I have been here but all over, not just some New York City whore. The least suicidal state of all. Can you believe it? No state spends more on education but New Yorkers spend more time commuting to work than any other, on average 40 minutes. If you're born in New York, you stay there, unbelievably, other Americans do not seem to want to go live there but if you're not American, it is a Mecca and nearly as foreign as California but not quite. Unbelievable.

NORTH CAROLINA
I've been there and why you may ask? I was passing and it was pretty. The pig capital of America, or hogs as they like to call them. There are more pigs in North Carolina than humans and it is the state that lays claim to inventing barbecue. As Winston Churchill said: "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."

NORTH DAKOTA
Smile. Be Polite. Say Thanks. Be Nice.
They like to drink round these parts but not lock folks up, safest state apart from Maine, also the most religious, with a tiny 2% claiming atheism as their own. America's shortest commute, 15 mins, give or take. The most Native American of all the states.

OHIO
Mythically flat. Actually more bumpy. Not technically Mid-Western, more Mid-North-Central or West-of-Eastern/East-of-Western/North-of-Southern/Mid-Rustbelt-ish. Has contributed more Presidents than any other state, all of them were pretty crap.

OKLAHOMA
People cannot stay married here, more divorces than any other state. Maybe something to do with the sheer variety and ferocity of weather here, a place where meteorologists are Gods in a land of extreme heat, cold, floods, droughts and of course...twisters.

OREGON
As with other liberal states, Oregon loves the boob but unfortunately, no one has any idea what Oregon actually means. Rains a lot.

PENNSYLVANIA
I've been to the keystone state, heart of old America perhaps, the greedy old colony that it is; a nursery ground that makes good people that go elsewhere. Fear of the South which is on its doorstep hangs heavily around still, black communities combusting in its inner-cities, a state of ancient immigration becoming something else all together.

RHODE ISLAND
I've been there and can vouch that no one has more drive-ins or Dunkin' Donuts than these chaps. Named after the Greek island of Rhodes, as you did in those days I suppose but actually not very Greek at all. The 13th of the original 13 states and first to renounce allegiance to the King, back in 1776. A home to religious tolerance but not the bottle bill.

SOUTH CAROLINA
I have been there. It is the most violent of all the 50 states, yes, even more violent than Tennessee. South Carolina is too small to be a sovereign nation and large to be an insane asylum. A place of easy rage, recklessness and eccentricity; halfway between freedom and insanity. Charleston SC is one of the finest cities I have ever had the honour of visiting in my life.

SOUTH DAKOTA
Lowest unemployment of any state, nudging a percent. Arch rivals ND just pip them for shortest commute to work, the bastards! Good for trout fishing and Mount Rushmore.

TENNESSEE
Tee-total state? Oddly enough, not big drinkers here but love their violent crime and not voting. More bankrupts reside here than in any other state. A lot of country here and it pushes back hard against the city sprawl, a powerful root system that goes very deep. Apt, considering the state is a tranche of rich, deep soil sitting beneath hot, humid weather...things grow well and deep here.

TEXAS
Honk if you hate Texas? I've been there. It is big. Health insurance? What health insurance? Only freakishly young Utah is younger than Texas, where they are also very big fans of sex and having babies. Never mind Texas seceding from the Union, Austin might secede from Texas. Car ownership compulsory. Don't mess with Texas.

UTAH
Winning war of non-smokers versus California, just, spends the smallest amount on education than any other state but who needs books when you've got the Latter Day Saint scam...sorry...religion? Youngest state, median age of 28, some 4 years younger than the nearest: Texas. Loves sexual intercourse and babies are everywhere here, as are wives.

VERMONT
Who is this Jesus fella? 23% of Vermont is atheist. Babies are also off the agenda, only 10 born per 1,000 people, state has a French name which must have been difficult during the Bush-idiot years. Lots of hills.

VIRGINIA
I've been there, to the old core of America, the Old Dominion. Like New Jersey it has no state song, for what tune could encompass the long history and epic narrative that is Virginia? Steeped in gore and tobacco, plenty dead are under your feet here, even after the state has had so many chunks taken out of it to make other states up.

WASHINGTON
Atheism is God here, if you know what I mean. A liberal state where people come to disappear and get away from the rest of America. Grunge was formulated under the trees, wilderness and rain, hence the practical work wear in adverse weather conditions.

WEST VIRGINIA
I've been there. They like a smoke. Fattest state in all of Americadom (what an honour!) with 63% obesity, also the worst teeth, the poor bastards. Actually West Virginians are also nearly the poorest too. But how come they live so fucking long? "You're not from round here are you?" was coined in WV, where only 1% of the population is foreign born. Only state in the last 60 years to see its population go down by a huge 10%. May soon be empty.

WISCONSIN
America's top drinkers with 22% of population taking part in serious booze sessions, this also goes hand in hand with huge voter turn out. Worried? You should be.

WYOMING
Consumes more petrol than any other state, it is after all a big place where hardly anyone lives, humans just outnumber antelope in the least populated state by a royal mile and very square, in every sense of the word.

A good place to end actually because years ago, back in 2006, I did an Internet experiment about Wyoming, something called the Wyoming Project, inspired by Dick Cheney and how empty the state was. 

The findings of the Wyoming Project are here and here, it was great fun, a nice little blog mission that I undertook some time ago that has kinda come full circle.

Bible Study: Modernity Doesn't get it

I know it has been a rather sporadic series of posts but today marks the final Bible Study post, the others can be found, in order of tracking the history of the Bible, at these places: And in the Beginning..., NewTestament, Humans Are Too Stupid and A Very Confusing Book Indeed.

The current modern Biblical malaise stems from a desire for certainty, as if to combat scientific certainty (which in itself is not totally certain) and to a degree, this has bred the modern, defensive Christian, who feels under siege from science and indeed modernity and has entrenched themselves in the warm comfort of Biblical dogma and apocalyptic visions. No longer is the Bible an act of faith in itself but an act of intellectual submission to a set of beliefs ruled errorless and binding.

This desperation had led to a disgusting distortion of the scriptural tradition, as witnessed in the idea of the Rapture and whereas in the past, the less than humane parts of the Bible were passed over or treated with exegesis, modern faith has actively sought these portions out and has invoked them ahistorically and literally.

Quite simply, the Bible is not there to back up political policy, doctrines or beliefs; it is an activity unto itself and not one to be abused as a mere block quote, to justify some insane position or another. The fundamentalist emphasis on the literal, which is ever restricting and limiting, is a breach with the long tradition of the figurative and the innovative.

It has not all been one way traffic though, modernity, with all of its advancements, has brought about unprecedented violence and tools of destruction, these have coloured interpretations of the Bible, apocalypse became a reality and the violence of modernity has in turn made the Bible more violently interpreted.

Modernity's assumptions about the Bible are, for the most part, horribly incorrect. The slavish conformity and dogma that is much of its current incarnation have little to do with Biblical tradition, the Bible is anti-orthodoxy and was always supposed to be contradictory and conflicting but more importantly it was supposed to be interactive and ever changing.

We have a long way to go to get back to that kind of subtle interpretation...

Bible Study: A Very Confusing Book Indeed

Bible studies finished last week with humanity prostrating itself before the Bible in awe at how ruddy bloody amazing it all was. This subservience to the text meant that any queries about an odd passage of writing, or laws that were already out of date, could be dismissed with the idea that puny human language had splintered under the divine impact of God’s power. Reading the Bible literally was like looking at just the face but not the heart, seeing a flat land but ignoring the majestic mountains that surround it.

And if that didn’t work, a quick clip round the ear with the command to stop bloody thinking so much and get prostrating yourself before it.

All this interpretation and prostration led to, naturally, some odd interpretations to please God, such as Europe’s first act of communal cooperation as it crawled out of the primordial Dark Age sludge: the First Crusade. Quoting Jesus as literally as you possible could: “anyone who does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple” the crusaders, in a bizarre act of love for their God, hacked a few thousand Jews and Muslims to pieces.

Jews in the meantime, when not being attacked by eager to please Christians, were struggling with the two concepts of a God: one who walked, talked, sat on a throne, got jealous, angry and changed his mind…often and without much warning; with a god that was timeless, impassable, didn’t care about mundane events (such as prayers and other tedious business), didn’t create the cosmos because the cosmos and God were eternal.

A struggle that anyone who has contemplated the Abrahamic God will be more than familiar with.

Then came Martin Luther and the noble if not controversial idea that has shaped much of our religious landscape: sola scriptura, the idea that scripture alone is the guide to God’s will and in turn that the Bible can be digested alone, without guidance by anyone else. This gave everyone the right to interpret the ancient and complex documents how they saw fit, which in turn led to the vast raft of Christian sects we now have (there are some 20+ main branches of the faith but each of these has many offshoots), this religious liberty is indeed problematic

Sola scriptura is about the reader making annotations in the margins, erasing the traditional divine gloss and making it a living, breathing, personal document. At first, this method spearheaded by Martin Luther was Jesus-centric to an absurd length, famously leading to his ninety-five theses nailed to church doors and the rift with Rome, the word of the Bible versus sacramental tradition: “a simple layman armed with scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it”. Humanity no longer is looks up to the Bible but stands side by side with it, a comrade in life’s battles and a fundamental switch in how the Bible is perceived and used; it is now the tool of the many.

The came John Calvin, who sought a middle ground less fundamental than Martin Luther, one based on the concept that the large swathes of the Bible that didn’t mention Jesus were just as important, a re-connection with the Old Testament. Less edifying stories were seen as steps on a long path and did not have to be explained away with allegory and exegesis. Calvin also pushed the idea that the ever-burgeoning field of study called science was not contrary to religion but an extension of it. And if you seek scientific knowledge, you do not turn to the Bible but to scientific thought.

The world’s galloping modernisation was progressive and empowering but with it came an inbuilt intolerance towards religious extremism, so in 1620 a party of English settlers travelled across the Atlantic. The English puritans, radical Calvinists, were following the exodus mythology in the Bible, finding a mandate in the bible to repress the Native Americans, all the while seeing their exodus as a precursor to the last days…which so far haven’t come of course but more on that in the final edition of Bible Study.

What was established, in what became the United States of America, sums up many of the contradictions of the Bible. A single text that can be interpreted to serve diametrically opposed interests, from African slaves embracing the same exodus narrative of liberation against their Christian owners, who in turn claimed the Bible’s lax attitude towards slaves as justification for their actions. And from this Biblically justified rising up of the slaves against their owners came one of the most distorted Christian cults, the Klu Klux Klan who used the Bible to justify lynching.

EPIC LEVITICUS FAIL

I was going to continue with my series of Bible Study posts but then I stumbled upon this blog post and as it is connected in theme to my current musings, I thought I'd share it, especially in the current climate in the UK of casual gay bashing that we have seen with the sad loss of Stephen Gately.

You may or may not be familar with the book in the Bible called Leviticus, it is a pretty hardcore collection of laws and rulings that Jews and Chrisitians should abide by, of course most of them are pretty hard to abide by but as is the trend nowadays, some selective reading has enabled people to pick and choose the laws they like. An oft-quoted section is Leviticus 18:22...

"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination."

And it goes on to add in Leviticus 20:13...

"If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."

Lovely bigoted stuff but then some American idiot went and got  it tattooed on his arm...

Forgetting of course that at Leviticus 19:28 it says:

"Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD."

Looks like someone will be joining all the gays burning in hell...

Bible Study: Humans are too Stupid to Understand the Bible

Augustine of Hippo’s (354-430) Biblical insights brought about a lovely phase in how the good book was treated. Conceit and self-importance were to be thrown off and replaced with an understanding that the whole truth of the Bible and indeed life itself, could never be fully known; that language was inherently defective and it was impossible to express the divine mystery in scripture.

Thus, disputes over the meaning of the Bible were pointless, ridiculous even, as the Bible expressed a truth that was infinite and beyond comprehension of every single person, therefore humanity is drawn together in a humble recognition of its shared ignorance.

For Augustine, the Bible was about love and any quarrelling over the Bible or a set interpretation was like arguing with God’s love, calling God a liar and was seated in pride, not service to God.

Augustine was almost Jewish in his approach to the Bible, seeking exegesis and outing those that used the Bible to spread hate and dissention as illegitimate Christians. All good stuff which eventually led to the lectio divina concept I’ll be turning to next week…

Sounds great right?

Augustine also sowed the seeds of humans as one big humble ignoramus, unable to comprehend the often bizarre and cruel workings of God and deemed best not to trouble their simple minds with such complexities and just prostrate themselves before the jumbled collection of stories and marvel at its wonder.

Any atheist reading this blog post will be familiar with this, as it is often the religious person’s last and desperate attack in any heated debate: “HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY CHALLENGE AND UNDERSTAND GOD’S WORK?!?!”

This attitude to the scriptures, of reverence to the text itself and the idea that any difficult passages can be negated with a meek shrug, was a new phase in the Bible’s development that stemmed from Augustine’s desire to end the arguments over scripture but instead it just enabled those that wished to misuse the text for their own purposes to have a great line to silence any dissenting voice.

Bible Study: The New Testament Has a Really Shit Ending

Much of what we call the New Testament is actually a bunch of letters written by Paul of Tarsus in an effort to answer questions put to him about the proto-Jewish cult he was the leader of and an effort to spread the word of the man he believed to be the Messiah. He had no idea, or indeed intention, that such missives would become scripture.

Paul also began the process of Christians treating the Torah and its accompanying texts as merely a prelude to the main event that is the coming of Jesus, an unfettering of the Jewish cult from its Jewish roots and its slipping into a new sphere, the world of the gentile, a massive captive audience looking for something outside of the exclusive covenant of Judaism.

And by the middle of the second century much of what would become the New Testament was written, Paul’s letters were joined by the Jesus biographies of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John but others, such as Thomas and the books of Ebionites and the Nazarenes are lost, along with what historians refer to as Q, the text that covered the teachings of Jesus and a far more detailed account of his trail, torture and death that was the source document used by Matthew and Luke for their writings. Books for the canon came and went, with only a few constants, which makes the current fad for the verbatim and infinitely wish nature of the terribly flawed document that is the Bible seem even more delusional.

Indeed the New Testament canon was not fixed until around the fourth century, quite simply because it took that long for Christianity to fully take shape into a coherent belief system. But by the time it was in place, it was already heavily edited so that many of the prophecies in the Old Testament rang true in the New, an early insight into the complex relationship that Christians would share with the faith that spawned them. A desire to be separate from the mother faith, to disown it but a desire to also have it anoint Jesus as the Messiah; remember that at this time Christianity was a cult that needed verification as a legitimate religion, something it actually got when Constantine converted in 312.

But that doesn’t stop the New Testament coming across as anti-Semitic, which it isn’t really as it was written by Jews, self-loathing Jews but Jews never the less but it does reflect a real disenchantment with Jewish religion and the aforementioned anxiety to reach out to the gentile world meant that much blame was placed on the authors own people, famously of course with Matthew’s words to the Jewish crowd at the death of Jesus:

“His blood be upon us and our children.”

A phrase that has pretty much been the one steady inspiration behind centuries and centuries of pogroms and raging anti-Semitism.

A special mention has to go out to the worst ending to a book that I’ve read in a long time: the Book of Revelation, which is a vile, toxic, bitter and fearful little snuff movie fantasy by John of Patmos, that very nearly never made it into the canon because it is so bad and ill-fitting. Indeed, many people still consider its entry a moot point, while for many it is all the Bible is. It doesn’t surprise me that it was stuck onto the end, like some embarrassing relative you don’t want in the family photo but its position has fooled many modern Christians into thinking it is the final word.

It is most definately not...

Bible Study: And in The Beginning There Was Exegesis...

For no reason other than I can, I've started re-reading certain bits of the Bible with Karen Armstrong's excellent "The Bible: The Biography" as my companion, as I delve back into the belly of the beast.

It confuses me as to why a literal interpretation of the Bible, such as we are now seeing influence much policy making and public discourse in the USA, is a relatively modern invention, only really dating from the late 19th century. Up until that point, the idea that Genesis, for example, was a de facto guide to the start of life was something only spouted by mentalists. For most of its history the Bible has been understood with the tools of allegory, exegesis, myth making and skilful interpretation. It is the modern age, with all of its reason and science, that has seemingly placed a massive pressure on the text and its readers have turned to dogma and fundamentalism in order to defend it. But more on that in a later blog post…

Let us begin with the Torah, because this is where the Bible began. It is clear to me that this document was supposed to be fluid, supposed to be and indeed still is, a work in progress; an every changing testimony constantly under exegesis. The early Jews always feared that the commuting of their faith to the written word and page would limit it, make it unmovable and dogmatic; the idea of being written in stone held no sway here; such confines were seen as restrictive, the oral tradition held sway with its organic approach that enables it to move and change with the times.

But slowly the Jewish faith took form in the written word and I for one never realised that what we call the Old Testament wasn’t even finished by the time the New Testament was being constructed; their development ran side by side.

And then the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70CE and along with it, the majority of the varying Jewish cults but one of the few cults to survive and then prosper were of course the followers of Jesus and their musings are full of the horror of that destruction.

It’s odd that many of the things ascribed to Jesus are either not in the Bible or are never explicitly mentioned in it, such as Jesus claiming he is the Messiah, which he does not, it is his followers that do much to build the mythology around Jesus. It's also odd that many of the things that Jesus does say are selectively ignored, such as the personal example he and his followers set.

Let us recall the manifesto of Jesus that comes to us from the Bible: to live as devout orthodox Jews (revere the Torah, keep the Sabbath and observe the dietary laws) with no private property but to share goods equally, to endure voluntary poverty with a special remit for care of the poor and a loyalty to the cult over and above family ties. Finally, evil should always be met with non-violence and love.

Where has this religion gone? It is in the Bible but does not seem to be present on this Earth? Indeed the description of the Jesus cult reads like that of some kind of socialist, hippy squat manifesto. It is also fascinating how the Jewish roots of Christ have been subsumed and hidden.

In my next Bible Study blog I’ll be turning my attention to how a bunch of missives by a collection of cultists, who never ever dreamed that their words would become scripture, as they fully expected their Jesus to come back to them in their lifetime, ended up becoming the New Testament.

"Those Folds in the Trousers..."

I have just finished reading Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell", a book I have been meaning to get around to for some time, after all, it gave The Doors their name and as someone with plenty of experience of hallucinations and mind altering experiences, I wanted to investigate what is considered a key tome in the genre.

I was not disappointed, for it gives the reader so much, including the seminal idea of Istigkeit, or is-ness, the idea that 'it just is' and that through this is-ness one can gain a sense of being in the object or thing that just is.

To be clear, "The Doors of Perception" details the author's experiences of taking mescaline and offers a crucial insight into mind-altering experiences. It famously charts Huxley's reaction to the legs of a chair, where he muses:

"I spent several minutes, or was it several centuries, not merely gazing at those bamboo legs but actually being them, or rather being myself in them; or to be still more accurate (for 'I' was not involved in the case, nor in the certain sense were 'they') being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair."

But it is the section where he become entranced by the folds of his own trousers that I truly shared a eureka moment with Huxley, a re-remembering of the positives from my own experiments with an alternate way of viewing things, to invest those things with new values and to discover, as described in relation to the chair leg, being myself in them.

From here Huxley departs on a fascinating tangent that is further developed in the following book "Heaven and Hell", which is that it is in humankind's representations of fabrics that the true vision of art is to be found, in that, arts love for drapery for its own sake, or rather for their own sake. Humanity's transcendence is to be found in these non-representational and unconditional forms that enable true expression. It is those things which are charged with is-ness.

The accompanying slim volume "Heaven and Hell" further distills the thoughts in it's experiential predecessor, which divests transcendental powers to humanity's obsession with jewels as means by which alternate states can be reached; alongside more prosaic methods as fasting, solitary confinement, fireworks and throwing oneself about in order to reach otherness and thus is-ness.

Huxley also leaves us with two fascinating ideas in "Heaven and Hell", the first is that heaven only exists in the minds of many as a vantage point to look down on those below, so in doing so the relationship between heaven and hell is symbiotic and self-referential, one can only exist without the other and that heaven would not be heaven if it did not have hell and also some sort of middle ground for it to be heavenly in relation to, the same of course goes for any concept of hell.

Secondly, Huxley touches on his understanding of schizophrenia, which is all about perception of what is, in that the illumination of is-ness is infernal in it's intensity and that added to this is the horror of infinity; a revelation of the universal system, the cosmic mechanism which exists to grind out guilt, punishment, solitude and unreality. This seems to be a very close friend of Sartre's nausea.

And just as Sartre teaches us how to engage and channel this nausea, Huxley makes the valid point that:

"Sanity is a matter of degree and there are plenty of visionaries who see the world of the schizophrenic but contrive none the less to live outside of the asylum."

My Struggle

This week I completed my epic journey through Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, which is perhaps the hardest book I've ever had to read.

Not for the reasons you'd think, indeed it is not a grim read and you get strangely used to everything being the Jew's fault and if it's not the Jews it's the Marxists (who are all Jews anyway) and if it's not either of those two's faults then it might possible be a German's fault but not a real German, a German who is a Jew loving Marxist.

This will all sound oddly familiar do anyone who has had to "debate" daft racists on the Internet.

Anywho, the reason the book is difficult to read is that it is, as Winston Churchill said: "a turgid, verbose and shapeless affair" that runs to some 600+ pages and aside from the opening chapters that are an autobiography of sorts (and are actually quite humorous in parts, although I'm not sure if Hitler was trying to funny...probably not knowing him), the rest is a bombastic call to arms for anti-Semites across the globe.

The level of puffed-up self-importance is staggering and although it is clearly justified, the man built up a new political party from eight people (himself included) to over a million strong force of Germans through sheer force of will, I don't think we need five pages of flowery, earnest verbiage as to the thought process behind designing the Nazi flag and how long it took him to get the white circle that surrounds the swastika the right bloody size.

What was most interesting for me was reading about how Christian he was, I knew Hitler was a Catholic but religious types always bring up Hitler and Stalin as examples of atheism going terrible wrong. Which makes me laugh, as if Hitler or Stalin are epitomes of atheism when they invest so much in building up a God head via the cult of personality...I digress...

Hitler was a Catholic and a big fan of Christianity, he saw Jesus as an Aryan slaying the Jews, forgetting that Jesus was a Jew (many Christians seem to do this) in the process; in fact much of Hitler's religious views are selective and self-serving but let it not be said the man was an atheist.

Anyway, what caught my eye in Mein Kampf regarding religion was that Christianity was a template for Hitler's beliefs, in the way that it crushed all opposition to it with ruthless force and power and that intolerance is a good thing in order to create stability. Hitler's reference point was paganism and witch hunts but it made me think that organised Christian faith provided Hitler with his final solution ideology.

Also, Hitler talks about how the Catholic churches' then blind faith and utter adherence to its teaching and principles, meant a total denial of any and all scientific and rational evidence that contradicted it (please see the United States and for it's current incarnation). Thus, in such dogma and immovable attitude Hitler sees, rightly so, that all strength is bound and that as soon as you tolerate or compromise by fitting in other's ideas, in the churches' case science and the advancement of human knowledge, you weaken and fall away.

I'll leave you with this comedy video of Hitler.

Worship Supplies

I was at an audition last week in a church and whilst I was waiting to be seen I saw a large cupboard which had the following sign on the front...

Worship supplies?

This made me very curious, what was inside this metallic haven I wondered? Perhaps some mini-Christs, or the communion flesh and blood, a cupboard full of crucifixes or even God himself, waiting to be brought out, dusted off and to strut his stuff for the awe stuck minions?

Curiosity got the better of me and I jemmied the cupboard open, committing a minor felony in the process and all was revealed to me...

Tea, bottled water, NESCAFÉ, white sugar sachets and some urns. Ho Hum.

So, that's all you need to worship?

That and a bit of faith I suppose...

Watch with DHG

Via the legend that is Dave, a great educational video.

Yes, it is long but well worth the full watch, especially if you are, like me, exasperated at having to argue the toss with idiots all the time...

"It's a Very Long and Complicated Story..."

Yesterday, my doorbell rang and I went to answer it.

It was two elderly chaps who were trying to sell God to me, I kindly refused, saying that I wasn't religious at all and bid them good day.

One of them looked confused and pointed at my t-shirt, the penny dropped, I had forgotten I was wearing my "Jews For Jesus" tee, that I bought as a joke because I found the idea of Jews being for Jesus very funny indeed.

I looked down at the t-shirt and then back at the gentlemen and said:

"It's a very long and complicated story."

Hard Week, Hard Volume, Hard Newbury

Hard week last week.

We spanned the country in our efforts to perform Poles Apart, from North Devon all the way to Glasgow (via Manchester=475 miles but worth it as Glasgow audiences are cracking), a brief stop off at my new most hated place in the UK: Newbury (via Manchester=390 miles and why Newbury has 4 fucking theatres when no fucker ever comes to see 'owt...) and then a home match (of sorts) at Newark, Nottinghamshire (128 miles).

Hard graft was worth it as, aside from the typical Newbury bullshit, we had a great time, seriously, Newbury is the new Shropshire but the rest of the gigs were not only busy but stormers. I'm going miss being in front of a live audience when this tour is over...

I also got some great news this morning, it turns out that British people are cleverer than I thought they were, as four out of five Britons repudiate creationism. I always knew that us Brits had an edge over Americans with our belief system but it turns out we are more Godless than I thought, which is good news indeed. I thought that our slide towards the worst elements of Americanism meant we would all start becoming Bronze Age, backwards thinkers but thankfully not.

Now all we need to do is convince those people across the river that God needs be kept as far away from politics, education and science as possible...

"Science is Just One Gene Away From Defeating Religion"

Here's hoping...

Read the article here.

Peace.

You Go Tell 'Em Jean-Luc!

A quick one as I just need to share the following great news with ya'll.

First up, the disgusting Ronald Reagan invention: the global gag rule, has been repealed by Obama in yet another masterstroke of decent governance and basically doing the right thing.

And yet more bad news for the Christian Right mentalists, came in the form of the green light for stem cell research in the US, another bit of science previously blocked by backward thinking religious asshats.

OWNED!