Two in the eye in the fundamentalists
After the discovery of the "missing link" fish/amphibian yesterday, today it is the unveiling of the Gospel of Judas:
The Gospel of Judas, a fragile clutch of a leather-bound papyrus thought to have been inscribed in about AD300...
According to this version of events, not only was Judas obeying orders when he handed Jesus to his persecutors, he was Christ's most trusted disciple, singled out to receive mystical knowledge.
According to the 26-page gospel, copied in the ancient Coptic language apparently from a Greek original more than a hundred years older, Jesus told Judas: "Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal."
Scholars are saying it doesn't reveal anything fundamental that wasn't already known about the gnostics (about whom I've written here and here), but it is a nice reminder that the whole idea of the Bible as a single, unchanging document, set in stone, is utterly ridiculous - a bit of a problem for the fundamentalists.
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Simon Jenkins in the Guardian today is getting stuck into modernist architect. That left me looking out my Sixties tower block window (and a very nice, practical, well laid-out, light and airy flat) it is too, wondering if the fault on "failed estates" really is with the architecture, or with the lack of investment in maintenance, services etc? I tend towards the latter view.
Perhaps some of the huge estates, with their linked walkways, as seen for example in east London, do by their nature create problems, but to sweep up all modernist architecture in that seems a bit harsh.
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The Tories have decided that prison doesn't work and the solution lies in rehabilitation not punishment. Meanwhile Labour keeps locking more and more people up without making any provision for their rehabilitation. It is getting to be a funny old political world.
One figure of note from that article: 2 per cent of the prison budget is spent on education - TWO PER CENT! No wonder the recidivism rate is awful.
posted by Natalie Bennett at 4/07/2006 10:49:00 am
2 Comments:
But the lift is broken down because the maintenance is bad; and is urine-sodden probably because there are several alcoholics in the building who've not been given the opportunity to access services that might stop them being alcoholics.
Yes, we do have that problem in these flats, and did in the previous one where I lived, where the offender was an inoffensive old Irishman on my floor. (Terribly stereotypically...)
Being an ag science graduate (cows are much, much worse) it doesn't much worry me...
If I won the lottery with the ticket I haven't got, I'd choose to buy a modern (if not necessarily precisely modernist) home, designed for life today, rather than some Victorian pile awkwardly adjusted for it.
Some council flats are very good on noise - the eighties ones I used to live in were superb, you really didn't hear anything at all, and even this sixties one is OK. Someone in my vicinity likes very bad country music played loud, but they only do it for half an hour or so, and I can live with that.
But some of the privately built stuff is a worry - there is a block just down the road that has been constructed in concrete block (one layer, quite thin), with PLASTIC fake wood cladding around the outside. And the prices start in the high £200Ks. As a builder's daughter I wouldn't be buying one, even assuming I wanted to spend that much money.
But that's a construction problem, not a style one. And I do wonder what they'll think in a few hundred years when they realise we were mostly building today domestic buildings designed - usually very badly - to look more or less like Victoria or Edwardian ones, instead of actually having our own aesthetic.
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