Reviews for Environmental Law: A Practical Handbook

The average rating for Environmental Law: A Practical Handbook based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-01-07 00:00:00 Pip Dirk Paul Johnson’s big dense history of all of Christianity from Day One up to 17th May 1975 when he finished it is mostly excellent although it would help if you’re really interested in the history of Christianity because this book is not about anything else. 1500 YEARS OF HERETICS A-BLAZING, EMPIRES A-TUMBLING, POPES A-POPING, MONKS A-MONKING AND CRUSADERS A-MOK CONDENSED INTO 20 BULLET POINTS FOR THE TIME-CONSCIOUS 1) After Jesus, there was a lot of confusion but everyone was expecting the End of the World and the return of Jesus in a year or so, so that was understandable. PJ writes alarmingly : When we turn to the earliest Christian sources, we enter a terrifying jungle of scholarly contradictions ... Analysing this mass of evidence in the search for the perfect text is probably self-defeating. Beyond a certain point, scholarship tends to raise as many problems as it solves. Mr Johnson’s prose is like a galleon in full sail, which occasionally opens the hatches and lets fly with a cannonball zinger. Of course I am talking here about zingers in the context of the historicity of early Christianity. I don't suggest you open your conversation with the attractive brunette at the next Christmas party by saying "You know, the way I see it, scholarship tends to raise as many problems as it solves". That will go down like a rat in the rum punch. However, it did crystallise a Christian conundrum for me. Was Christianity what Christ said and what Christ was, or was Christianity what that loose aggregation of people who formed the Jesus cult after his death said it was, or imagined it was? Indeed, was it this group, centering on but not limited to the disciples, who created the entire religion? I don’t think this is a question we can ever resolve and I deduce that Mr Johnson would agree with me. I think it’s a matter of faith that the words you read attributed to Christ in, say, the Sermon on the Mount, were actually spoken, in one context or another, by Jesus. People from the ancient world did not confuse truth with veracity – if they thought “this is what he meant” they would cheerfully invent the words and put them in his mouth. That is called writing from a position of faith and that is what all of the Bible is. Another Zinger If we reduce our knowledge of Jesus to points where there is unanimity, plausibility and an absence of objections, we are left with a phenomenon almost devoid of significance. I love it! Hmm, but is that statement itself devoid of significance. I shall test it by substituting something else for the word Jesus. How about Elvis? Or.... Trump? No, it's impossible to even imagine Trump being devoid of significance. 2) Paul (as in Saint Paul, not me) tried to whip the early Christians into shape. He convinced them that this Jesus thing was for gentiles and not just for Jews. 3) The Romans didn’t like them but the Christians were just one annoying shrill dubious cult among ten million. 4) But then they got strangely popular and some Romans started getting tough. I can’t say lions were involved all that often, but the idea of lions was certainly in the air. Lions were mooted. 5) They finally decided on a canon of scripture but really there was no such thing as orthodoxy for a couple of centuries, which is like two hundred years of uncertainty. Christianity was at this point like a religious pick ‘n’ mix. Some Christians worshipped the Sun. It says Son of God, you idiots, not Sun of God! D’oh! Then there was docetism, pelagianism, this ism, that ism, ism ism ism. All we are saying is give Jeez a chance. 6) Constantine the Emperor was a weird creep but decided that the Christians were probably on balance theologically correct. So it became the state religion. For a religion, that was like winning the X Factor. Megabucks! 7) So Christianity moved into the driving seat. it spread out. It felt pretty comfortable. It was pleased with itself. Hey, fourth century baby – this is living! Tell you what – let’s lash a dozen slaves to a chariot and ride that rig down to Caesarea and hit the altars! Yeah baby! 8) The western Roman Empire disintegrated. There wasn’t a great big war. The unlettered and probably unwashed Gauls, Vandals, Vizigoths (yes, even then) and Liverpudlians moved into imperial territory and couldn’t be got rid of. In the end the Romans couldn’t be bothered. The Empire was so tatty and flaking by the end of the fifth century that they just thought aw, sod it – let’s just sell up and move to Crete. They got those unspoiled beaches there. Yeah, baby! 9) The Christian church by that time had vast tracts of land. And they did really well with the tomatoes and lettuces and herbaceous borders, and they kept a few sheep. Any vandals that came near, the gardeners just shooed them away – Oi! You can’t walk there! That’s me marrows! Plus, the vandals and gauls and Liverpudlians basically knew nothing – nothing! So if you had half a brain, the Jesus gang was the only show in town. So the Dark Ages were pretty cool for all the bishops, monks, prebendaries, popes and their plumpacious minions. 10) Dig the size of some of these monasteries! In 1150 the monastery of Goldenkron in Bohemia owned an area of 1000 square miles, containing about 70 villages. The monks were making money hand over fist with their agricultural surpluses. They were rich, baby! But they couldn’t spend it! Except on cathedrals. And writing materials. And relics. (That's like old toes and fingers. Gruesome. See below. ) 11) The monks didn’t create, they preserved. They copied and copied and copied. They were the printing before books. It was mostly Church fathers and Bibles, but some secular Greek literature crept in too. Absolutely no Stephanie Meyer. In the middle of their vast estates they had a feeling of doom. The text they were working on today might be the only one which survives! In some cases, they were dead right. Spooky or what? 12). Today we have the drug trade, in those Dark Ages they had relics. The singed eyebrow of St Agnes of Skegness was more than you could afford. But listen, I can get you a toenail from Joseph of Arimathea’s brother’s wife’s stepson. What? Course it’s genuine! What do you take me for? 13) During the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages the church became the western world’s admin department AND legal department. They were the go-to guys. So, there was this ongoing tussle about where authority came from – from God to God’s Vicar and THEN to the emperors and kings, or directly from God to the emperors and kings. Anyhow, the Church “began to settle vast areas of ordinary life in great and expensive detail… the rights, duties, payments and obligations of the humblest parish priest and his congregation; the dress, education, status, education, crimes and punishments of clerics; charity, alms, usury, wills, graveyards, churches, prayers, masses for the dead, burials, marriage, inheritance, legitimacy, sex and morals.” Whew! 14) This led to some resistance amongst the laity, and, sad to say, some punch-ups. This is what you should yell out next time you barge into a church whose vicar you particularly dislike : “Where is that usurer, that simoniac, robber of revenues and insatiate of money who, perverting our king and subverting our kingdom, plunders us to fill the coffers of strangers?” (p 220). 15) By the 11th century, in England, the clergy, with one per cent of the population, disposed of about 25% of the gross national product. In Germany and France the Church owned between one third and one half of all land. I mean, that's bigger than Google. 16) The size of cathedrals was a measure of the vaingloriousness of their founders and builders, in exactly the same way that nowadays capital cities compete with each other for World’s Tallest Skyscraper. 17) After the Dark Ages Christianity became in PJ’s word “mechanized”. There was an obsession with the afterlife. The point of religion was thought to be how it can assure the safe propulsion of your immortal soul into the basket-hoop of eternal bliss. This wasn’t taken lightly. After you died, unless you were a spotless lambkin, your soul was still in contention between bliss and torment. So those with money laid down in their wills that there should be masses conducted for their souls after death, and these masses should be performed on a daily basis. Many hundreds of monks and others were employed in just praying for dead rich people. People thought it worked like that – X amount of prayer will get you Y amount of bliss. Another example of mechanical Christianity is infant baptism – many examples litter mediaeval literature of the horror felt at the child dying before being baptised. But if you ticked the box, you were okay. Completely mechanical. And a final third example – the Church laid down punishments called penances for certain sinners, and often this was in the form of fasting. So, for, say, the sin of adultery, you were sentenced to fast on Mondays and Fridays of every week for twelve years. Something like that. In the 7th century there grew up the practise of paying people to perform your penance, and as long as the penance was done by somebody, the sin was forgiven – as you see, a completely mechanical way of thinking. In one ridiculous example one lord got through a seven year fasting penance by paying 840 followers to fast one day each. The job was accomplished in three days. Sin forgiven! Ka-ching! 18) People wanted religion to mean something, though, and not be a series of ridiculous chores. The church had a wild time trying to tame those religious enthusiasts like the flagellants or the millenarian sects who would erupt out of nowhere and take over a town or go on a random crusade. Interestingly, the millennial cults of the middle ages descended into exactly the same kind of fascism as the cults of our time (Branch Davidians, People’s Temple, the Order of St Charbel, many others). The leaders are always men and they just want lots of women, then after they get all the women they want Rolls Royces, which, as they were not available in the 13th century, must have led to some frustration. 19) Speaking of nuns, Paul J says: “Celibate upper-class women, living communally, and with very little to occupy themselves, tended to become eccentric and very difficult to control.” Not sure what to make of that, but I like the use of the word very. 20) Fear of heresy became so great that by the 15th century in Europe possession of the scriptures in any language was forbidden. Imagine that! But we must remember that the Church, almost co-terminous with society in general, was permanently embroiled in a ceaselessly up-bubbling brew of false-messiah crazy-cult lunacy. It was a struggle to hold things together. Well, after reading up to the 16th century in this book I got Diarmaid MacCulloch's vast history of Christianity. And I thought PJ's book would now be obsolete. But you know what? Diarmid McCulloch may have a way cooler name than Paul Johnson but his book is so much more boring. Boring! So I'm ditching that one and will return to this one. At some point. No rush. And now, the usual setion which can be SKIPPED as it is nothing to do with this book. I call it A FEW VAPID REMARKS ON RELIGION IN GENERAL Sometimes a thing will quack and waddle and not be a duck. Religion is the human shape which has grown up around a few crucial questions, in the middle of which are “where did all this come from?” and “what’s going to happen to meeee-eee-eee?” (you have to be clutching a pillow or cushion when wailing that question to the darkening void), the twin poles of life (we’re here) and death (....and now we’re not!). Along the way religion has accreted to itself morality and ritual, rules for getting by. Atheists think that because we now know certain things (as opposed to vaguely guessing), religion will – should have already, God damn it – wither and fade and they are cross when the opposite appears to happen. But the two major questions remain. Life is so very unlikely, and death is so very unseemly. The eventual scientific explanation for the creation of the universe will be so technical that only theoretical physicists like Manny Rayner will understand it. A physicist friend of mine the other day was ranting on about how the universe was just before the big bang an infinitely small thing which contained everything. It was Borge’s Zahir (a story I strongly recommend to those who don’t know it.) My eyes widened and mentally, if not physically I was backing away. And this is me, veteran of a thousand wacky SF concepts. But my friend wasn’t a wacky SF writer, he was saying that’s how everything really began. So, laymen will not be able to believe the scientific explanation. It will be as fiercely bizarre and illogical as, say, this : 1 In the beginning the singularity created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep.. 3 And the singularity said, Let there be light: and there was light. And the singularity expanded at the speed of light and then everything that is now came to be including you and the rather attractive house you live in. Christianity, and Judaism before it, humbly acknowledged the blank mystery, the no-clue-at-all-ness of the pre-scientific world. Here’s as far as God will go according to Exodus: 13 And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? 14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. It’s not helpful. The Big Bang theory was originated by Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest. Religion isn’t going away any time soon.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-29 00:00:00 Penny Applegate Paul Johnson’s “A History of Christianity” is a sincere and fascinating (and I do mean fascinating*) effort to tell the multifaceted and incredibly complex story of the development of the followers of Jesus Christ. Such competitors as he has—at least those with which I am familiar—tend to veer to either of the two opposite sides of evangelization or vilification. Whether their purposes for writing are conversion, abrogation, shock or tedium aren’t always clear; they could in truth be unaware of their own motives and/or just poor writers. But the fact remains: there are few (if any) good Church histories. There are innumerable controversies and obstacles. Much of this Mr. Johnson himself addresses in his book and attributes to: the mystery of the person of Jesus and his methods; the personalities and lack of education of his followers; the controversial belief system of the Jewish people into which Jesus was born; their almost constant condition of occupation; the confusing nature of the message Jesus preached; the time gap from when it was initially heard to the first extant writings; the lack of understanding of or acceptance for anything remotely like ‘the historical-critical method’ during the early years of the church—not to mention since; the inability to preserve, store, duplicate or transport written materials for any duration of time; never mind any of the human-on-human persecutions, and the list could continue. My thoughts as I listened to the problems besetting the accurate recording of early Christianity, enumerated and then described by Mr. Johnson, was not one of skepticism but just the opposite—the fact that we have anything, much less all that that we do—almost 2000 years later—and that there is still so much interest, devotion and controversy, despite all those who have fought and died believing they were doing so in the Name of Jesus—that there are still millions at least attempting to live by his tenants as well die for what he preached, did and who he says he was, would seem to be the Church’s own Testament. Okay, so the story of the Woman caught in Adultery was a late addition to the Gospel. We do not know why the men of the time thought it right to add in the story at this time. Was it a late discovery? From some unexpected find of that era? Nevertheless, it was included. Are we going to miss the amazing fact that the 4th century Church—a supposedly male dominated organization—chose to include a story in the sacred canon which shows its Divine leader shaming the all-male leadership of his age by mercy towards the most despised of all creatures, a fallen woman, while we quibble because we aren’t privy to its origin and veracity? If we do, we miss the deeper truth, which is what the Holy Spirit has been using the human institution of ‘the Church’ for these past two millennia. Truth uses stories and even sometimes facts for a higher purpose. Factual reporting is not at liberty to manipulate Truth—something our own modern age has forgotten and would do well to remember. Even so, the Gospels are not strictly speaking historical documents and all but the most fundamentalist Christian sects today acknowledge the underlying Truth (the name Jesus applies to Himself) inherent in the Gospels while accepting we cannot verify the factual accuracy of most of what it claims. And yet I return to what I said above: what has been the outcome? Or as Jesus said himself, a tree will be known by its fruits. (cf. Matthew 7:16 and Luke 6:44) A case in point—my rendering of Christ’s words may be argued all day and yet who doesn’t understand the point? Or as grandma would say, the proof is in the pudding. Truth undergirds, supports and gives meaning to factual information—not the other way round. But this review isn’t meant to be polemical. I’m not interested in convincing readers of said review of my beliefs—and yet how can I write from any other perspective—as much as the consistency, erudition and broadmindedness of the author of this book. Mr. Johnson knows his subject and presents it fairly, ironically, even humorously at points—an extremely dangerous thing where religion is concerned. To counter, the greatest drawback/criticism I can attribute is the datedness of Mr. Johnson’s tome. Originally written in 1976, many will ignore this history given the amount of water which has flowed under the bridge since then. This is indeed unfortunate, for in spite of the numerous modern debates/controversies which have sprung up (many falling as quickly into obscurity as they arose) Mr. Johnson’s presentation of the story has a timeless quality about it. I would like to see him undertake an update before it’s too late. As he was born November 2, 1928, I may be wishing on a star, but barring that, I would like to have one of his closest and most trusted colleagues/students undertake the task. So without going into more detail, let me just say I thoroughly enjoyed this quick trip through Christian history. Although not a small book or ‘a quick read’ it felt like one of those guided tours through a house you’ve long wanted to visit where you are rushed from room to room and leave feeling short-changed. I wanted more. I want to go back ... but I want the same tour guide. Thank you Mr. Johnson. Having said that, I would have to note that I did observe periods where he glossed over – or broad-brushed – huge areas of history and I took issue with some of his points, usually in areas where I have done some study. However, I prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt, to let things go. I like to think he was standing back from the overall picture and not describing the detail in these instances, so I will do the same and save the detail for other books. In his own Epilogue he says: “Christianity has not made man secure or happy or even dignified. But it supplies a hope. It is a civilizing agent. It helps to cage the beast. It offers glimpses of real freedom, intimations of a calm and reasonable existence. Even as we see it, distorted by the ravages of humanity, it is not without beauty. In the last generation, with public Christianity in headlong retreat, we have caught our first, distant view of a de-Christianized world, and it is not encouraging. We know that Christian insistence on man’s potentiality for good is often disappointed; but we are also learning that man’s capacity for evil is almost limitless – is limited, indeed, only by his own expanding reach. Man is imperfect with God. Without God, what is he? As Francis Bacon put it: ‘They that deny God destroy man’s nobility: for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.’ We are less base and ignoble by virtue of divine example and by the desire for the form of apotheosis which Christianity offers. In the dual personality of Christ we are offered a perfected image of ourselves, an eternal pace-setter for our striving. By such means our history over the last two millennia has reflected the effort to rise above our human frailties. And to that extent, the chronicle of Christianity is an edifying one.’ *The things I have learned—right down to the little details such as passion of the Church Father Origen in pursuing a life of scriptural understanding and how it has irritated and been remarked on by his successors such as St. Jerome—were worth the reading alone. ===================================== PRELIMINARY/EARLIER THOUGHTS: Johnson focuses on the areas of the Church which the Church herself tends not write/talk about and yet as a believer/member himself he still presents the 'sins' of the family without discounting the good which is still inherent therein. There has never been a time in the Church's history when there haven't been problems and sinners, when evil hasn't tried to undermine the good, and yet the Church slogs on... And so do I reading this history which can be depressing at times. One wants to read/think/hear only good about one's family and yet one needs to know the truth. >><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> On Oct 27, 2008 I wrote this, 'Thought it was interesting when I listened to it years ago. Not sure how accurate it was, but it gave me a lot to think about and many points of departure for further studies. What I liked best about it was its seeming honesty: 'here is our Christian story, the good, the bad and the ugly'. Some histories like to dress things up; others only seek to tear apart. This seemed to skirt both extremes. But I was reading this to learn my Christian history at the time so I was in no position to determine the book's accuracy. For that, I would need to re-read the book again now and do some comparative analysis. However, as a non-expert, I liked it.' Since then I've read quite a bit more church history and taken a few courses. While still far from an expert, I'm curious to see if I'm still impressed by Mr. Johnson.