Opera and atheism

[sawyl]

More stuff culled from today's Guardian. Philip Hensher's article on the new Kirov touring production of The Ring is interesting — apparently, when it was initially staged in 2003, it was the first Russian production for 90 years and the first every German language version. I guess that means that the previous versions must have been in Russian. Wagner in Russian? The mind boggles.

Also worth reading is Madeleine Bunting's take on Dawkins and Dennett. Maybe Dawkins should take a leaf out of the Archbishop of Canterbury's book. When asked why he didn't speak out to condemn more things, the Primate of All England replied:

What I mean I think is that why doesn't the Archbishop condemn X, Y, Z? Because that's what Archbishops do, you know, they condemn things, they - they make statements usually negative or condemnatory statements. And I - I just wonder a bit whether, you know, when an Archbishop condemns something, suddenly in, I don't know, the bedsits of north London, somebody may say oh, I shouldn't be having pre-marital sex, or in the cells of Al-Qaida, somebody says, goodness, terrorism's wrong, the Archbishop says so. I never thought of that. I'm not sure that's, you know, that's how it is.

Maybe the various proponents of the whole Darwin-requires-atheism thing should think on that for a while before sitting down to write their next unhelpful polemic...