Excellent article. The same applies to our monarchy and historical traditions, most of which are irrational but which enrich and beautify our lives no end.

Indeed, the concept of benign irrationality is central to conservatism, as articulated by Edmund Burke who thought that each man’s ‘private stock of reason’ is small compared to the collective wisdom of society handed down through the ages.

It would be a good article if only religion was indeed a “benign irrationality”. When it is entrenched in power by law, as is the COE, it allows for irrational beliefs to be forced on the populace.
That has had a corrosive effect on human rights throughout history – witch-burning, inquisitions. One does not have to look far to see this in action today, particularly in areas governed by sharia. The irrational pope continues to condemn african catholics to death by the insistence that the condom is an evil device.

Love is irrational. The central theme of the Easter story is irrational love. You can take it or leave it for all sorts of reasons, but I haven’t met many people who have turned down love in their lives on the grounds that it was irrational.

Love is rational.

Monarchy, religion, your dopey comments – irrational and very expensive waste of time. If you want the monarchy and religion then pay for them. £40 million a year wasted on hospital chaplains?

“Misogynist, racist, homophobic and xenophobic comments will be deleted.”

I guess no sincere advocates of that “benign irrationality” called Islam will be welcome here then. And I love this cute new term “new atheists”: “I got nothin’ against de atheists, I only ‘ate de new atheists”. An argument analogous to “I got nothin’ against de Jewz, I only ‘ate de Zionists”. What a load of bollocks. If leftists feel like supporting the Islamization of Europe by scapegoating atheists then could at least be as honest as American anti-atheist bigots (Google Dinesh D’Souza).

All rationality is bounded. I dislike the notion that organised irrationality should be encouraged as long as it promotes ‘nice’ things. Also, like Dawkins, I do not think that efforts to view the world through a rational, scientific approach are incompatible with an appreciation of beauty, emotion, culture, etc. Infact I would argue that the atheist p-o-v makes the world seem more wonderful and intriguing than the childish nonsense propagated by religious traditions.

Of course, that well-known fire-breathing, evangelical christian tub-thumper, David Hume [:-)))], pointed out nearly 250 years ago that however rational and empirical we try to be, (Chris almost quoted, “the wise man…proportions his belief according to the evidence”, from Hume), “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions”…although he was referring more to the choices of what we apply our rational minds to, it must be said..

BUT Bunting is trying to justify a ’species of irrationalism’ that regularly seeks to impose its will on others, claims to explain the physical universe, and demands special privileges and protections for these claims and impositions. In this instance “belief without proof” is indeed a weakness, given religions’ assertions of “truth”, which should be held to the same standards as everyone else’s.

Also:
“You learn to cook, or play a musical instrument, or strip an engine, not by the application of abstract rationality but by practice.”

Or you could argue – following a recipe is closely akin to a scientific formula (get all ‘irrational’ and ‘creative’ with the oven temperature and see where that leaves you), acquiring the technical facility for playing a musical instrument is likewise in no way “irrational” (smashing a perfectly nice guitar on the floor like Pete Townsend, now *that*…!), and an engine is simply a complex piece of mechanical construction – which can be systematised rationally, and you learn to strip by, oh, let’s see, following a rational set of instructions…or you could use ‘intuition’, but I’ll lay odds it’ll take a darn sight longer…

Now, these might be more akin to “applied rationality”, ok, but “practice” is a disciplined repetition of a practical skill towards a future goal – a highly rational activity, in other words.

I usually admire your posts, Chris, (and am slightly in awe of some of them, sad to admit), but this one, oddly, doesn’t stand up.

Hume 1, Bunting 0 – but ’twas ever going to be thus. )

[10] I don’t actually think there’s any conflict between Hume and Bunting.

As far as music is concerned, I don’t think you can reduce it to rationality in the way you want. Yes, anyone can learn to play (say) the piano in the same way as anyone can (at least in theory, most of us don’t have the patience) to solve quadratic equations. However… the other day I was listening to a CD I was recently given and I thought “that backing pianist sounds just like X” and on checking the sleeve notes sure enough it was X. You may think an account of how X can do this (and how I can recognise him doing it) in terms of brain electrical discharges, sound waves or even more basic physical units may be of use and add to the gaiety of nations, but if so, we’ll have to differ.

This I take to be Hume’s point – that any attempt to give a rational acount of why I prefer to listen to Keith Jarrett rather to Oscar Peterson is simply a category mistake. (This is not to say, of course, that sociological explanations of why, say, different styles of jazz have waxed and waned in popularity, are pointless.)

By focussing on the issue of rationalism, Chris has passed by one very important point in the Bunting article. She was groping towards – although she didn’t quite get there – a way of distinguishing benign and malign religious practices. (I will take it for granted that most people here think that both are possible human behaviours.) Since our culture, as much of the original article was taken up with discussing, comprehends religion in creedal terms I will offer the distinction in those terms: apophatic ideas of God good, anthropomorphic bad.

An apophatic God is the ultimate Mystery which by definition human beings cannot comprehend. It (and it is an It, not a He) is not so much believed in as accepted as a given. Apophatics encompass pantheists, and (just about) those who identify God with Love. More interestingly, they also include not only Buddhists, Taoists and Confucians, but also mystics of all religious traditions and mainstream Christian theologians from Augustine onwards. All Muslims are theoretically apophatics, but in both the Christian and Muslim traditions the doctrine has been found too difficult for mass consumption. Hence the idea of “veneration” (in Islam) and “intercession” (in Christianity). These are perversions of religion caused by infantilism – the desire for a protector. Protection from what? A hostile environment, perhaps – but really protection from ourselves, from our own disproportionate desires and irrational fears themselves caused by alienation from the Source. Hence the regression to anthropomorphic religion (from which the sages of the Axial age, and, later, Mohammed were trying to free us) and such practices as petitionary prayer* which has become so widespread that hardly anyone has noticed that it’s a perversion – and those who have, like Neale Donald Walsch, are ignored almost completely.

Of course you can live well without religion. Armstrong herself demonstrates this in her autobiographal volume “The Spiral Staircase” where she describes the Hart family – a moving depiction of spiritual atheists. And for many people philosophy and art will provide all that religion has to offer – indeed, Carl Jung argued that in our society no psychologically healthy person would turn to religion until they reached middle age when they would do well to do so – my caveat would be that they should be able to find an apophatic group to join, which the mainstream churches certainly aren’t. Even my own denomination, the Unitarians, who are closer to apophatics than most still contain many who hanker, hopefully slightly guiltily, for anthropomorphic religion.

Most religious practice is institutional – a desire to fit in, to be part of a crowd, even to sustain a link with dead parents. Most of the rest is pious, and when people here and elsewhere attack various religious practices (usually concerned with sex and the role of women) what they are attacking is piety. The pious wants to be better than other people – the religious knows we’re all human and that we can only live in the present while any good deeds we might have done in the past are just that – in the past. To personalise it: Obama is (I think) religious, Sarah Palin is pious.

***

*Petitionary prayer says “please”, true prayer says “thankyou”. Not being very spiritual myself I still think that some forms of petitionary prayer – those for abstract qualities like patience and tolerance are also OK. At the very least, they don’t seem to do any harm.

‘Irrationality’ is only part of the case against religion, the most important being that it is religion is pure bullshit.

Your arguments could be used to support other forms of irrationality, for instance

‘Racism is irrational – but so is love! Therefore racism is good!’

‘Homophobia is irrational – but so is the appreciation of art and music – therefore homophobia is good!’

The difference is that love and art make a valuable contribution to society, superstition does not.

It’s the 21st Century, grow the fuck up.

I don’t see Chris advocating religion as a legitimate source of political power in this piece so I am not sure what people are complaining about. Just like any other irrational belief system that still contains some knowledge, as soon as it touches the state, it becomes a source of power, domination and suffering (just like Marxism, socialism, Conservatism, and even most kinds of “liberalism”).

Even in ’secular’ societies we still have legal prohibitions rooted in the concept of ’sin’.

At the heart of our laws against ‘vices’ such as drugs or prostitution is the irrational belief that a wrathfull sky pixie won’t like it if we enjoy ourselves without paying our dues to his earthly representatives.

Sure there is a genealogical connection, but there is a whole range of “medical” authorities that are used to justify prohibitions on modern vices these days. They don’t rely on religious authority for their claims.

Incidentally, there’s an obvious difference between irrational BEHAVIOUR and irrational BELIEF.

The human brain evolved (yes, EVOLVED) in order to ensure our survival and so makes stereotypical assumptions on the basis that those who thought ‘I wonder if this sabre-tooth is a friendly one?’ did not leave decendents; furthermore the brain is modular and some functions conflict with others. This means that we do not necessarily behave like Vulcans and might therefore act irrationally.

(These irrational behaviours are the subject of a great deal of accessible pop-psychology books which are worth checking out.)

That’s an entirely different matter from irrational BELIEFS which are handed down culturally and not open to challenge by their very nature.

Nick (15): medical and legal practitioners won’t use the word ’sin’ but their post-hoc scientific and legal discourse is rooted in it.

Well, I dunno I’ve been reading some Michel Foucault recently and he seems to attribute much of these discourses to the modern use of reason. For example, why would avowedly atheist regimes like Cuba or the Soviet Union (I am not saying they are paradigms of atheism, just that they avow themselves to be) take such a hardline on things like homosexuality and drug use. They had a whole separate “scientific” discourse to explain it. Ok, it is more than a coincidence that they often targeted the same sort of “deviants”, but then one should ask why religion can be used to target minorities as well.

Yes even if all faiths are irrational let us not for get the faith of Dawkins and Humanism. Both irrationally hold to beliefs that are impossible to prove while giving an appearance of omniscience based on theoretical extrapolation

Belief in ‘humanism’ and belief in ‘god’ are entirely different matters: ‘humanism’ is a set of values, religion is a set of beliefs about supernatural entities.

It’s like comparing the belief that ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is a great novel with the belief ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is true.

If Christianity was simply a set of values such as ‘Love thy Neighbour as Thyself’ then you could compare it with Humanism, but as it stands it also involves a lot of twaddle about all-powerful deities, angels, virgin births, resurrection, etc. which conflicts with science and history.

Certainly, one should move away from the bad habit of judging things by their origins. But does that mean judging on the basis of their consequences?

The same applies to our monarchy and historical traditions, most of which are irrational but which enrich and beautify our lives no end..

No problems, apart from the fact that the taxpayer has to support them, and that they’re delaying the inevitable day we have a proper constitution… so citizens can have better rights.

If Christianity was simply a set of values such as ‘Love thy Neighbour as Thyself’ then you could compare it with Humanism, but as it stands it also involves a lot of twaddle about all-powerful deities, angels, virgin births, resurrection, etc. which conflicts with science and history.

shatterface – not all religions do. Eastern religions like Sikhism and Buddhism don’t (though they do feature re-incarnation, which you may put in the same category).

My feeling from growing up in a religious household is that there is a tremendous amount of good philosophy and debates about morality and ethics in religions that atheists dismiss far too easily. Plus, the fact that religions provide a deep sense of personal security to many people.

I’m not a fan of institutionalised religion – and so I think there is a space for non-institutionalised and non-sectarian religion to grow, while secularists (like myself) can criticise the institutional bits that people try and impose on society.

I think it depends on the humanism, but they often have fairly tendentious ideas of what humans are, for example. Rational, autonomous and reasonable? That is sort of thing you might here a humanist claiming about humans. They might believe in “Rights” (as if they were actually attached to people), or they might believe in the primacy of pleasure and pain responses and their utility. Every positive system of belief seems to be founded on some fairly doubtful premises.

I doubt you’ll find many current Humanists who regard human beings as inherantly ‘rational, autonomous and reasonable’ for the reasons I stated in comment 14, which is that science has shown us how deceitful our perceptions can be.

Rationality is something you strive for in understanding and it is through rational enquiry that we have proven how irrational we are. That’s the difference between science and religion: it’s open to challenge.

And I agree with you Sunny, that some faiths depend more on values and practices than fairy stories. I think we can all respect positive VALUES, but we don’t have to regard the stories through which those values are transmitted as anything more literally TRUE than, say, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, which has a much more complex and relevant moral universe than any of the Abrahamic religions.

“The same applies to our monarchy and historical traditions, most of which are irrational but which enrich and beautify our lives no end.”

The monarchy may enrich and beautify your life, but they don’t enrich or beautify mine.

It’s interesting that a lot of religious people just now – both Bunting’s original article and this article are examples – seem to be actively moving the debate away from whether religion is in any way TRUE, and towards whether it’s USEFUL. I’m inclined to see this as a win. As people have mentioned above, positive values are lovely, but most religions (at least in the West) have based their claims to power on the truth of their supernatural claims, not on the objective superiority of their morals. If they’re now willing to compete on the same level as the rest of us, where they have to make arguments for their values other than “you should do it because God says so”, that can only be a good thing.

I think we can all respect positive VALUES, but we don’t have to regard the stories through which those values are transmitted as anything more literally TRUE than, say, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, which has a much more complex and relevant moral universe than any of the Abrahamic religions.

Possibly. there is constant debate and tension amongst Hindus as to whether the Mahabharata and Ramayana actually took place. Both are interesting stories, which are meant to convey different facets to ordinary Hindus. they grew out of a time when most people were illiterate and hence stories were told in order to spread the values of the religion. Many of the stories in Christianity and Islam served the same purpose I reckon.

I get the feeling that many Anglicans are moving in the direction of treating the Bible purely as metaphor and that they regard the question of truth a bit of an embarassment.

“What a load of bollocks. If leftists feel like supporting the Islamization of Europe by scapegoating atheists then could at least be as honest as American anti-atheist bigots (Google Dinesh D’Souza).” – George Miller

I think you may have mistaken this site for the Brussels Journal or some such hell hole.

These new atheists of Bunting’s – do they deny irrationality is an important part of human life? Christopher Hitchens, for instance, writes very well and sensitively about poetry. He writes movingly abut his affection for his wife. I don’t think he is envisaging a kind of Houyhnhnm land, a rational society where there is no love of family or spouse.

“All I’m saying here is that the statement “religion is irrational” is unhelpful. It’s true, but irrelevant. “
“
Well, no. There have been religious intellectuals at least in Christianity have said that “religion is rational”. There’s Pascal’s wager isn’t there? If you believe in hell for unbelievers, it was rational to save yourself from it. A lot of religion has been based on fear of definite and concrete and painful circumstances for the unbeliever and the sinner. Fear of hell made a great part of the Christian religion. Read the sermon in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for instance.

So fear of hell is part of one religion at least. Let’s recast that sentence.

“All I’m saying here is that the statement “fear of hell is irrational” is unhelpful. It’s true but irrelevant.”

I would say that the truth of that statement was of overwhelming importance and relevance. For nineteenth century free thinkers reading Strauss’s Life of Jesus the idea that the scriptures could be re-examined as part truth and part fable came as a revelation and a liberating one at that.

I’ve heard Bunting in action before, with her slippery use of definitions. Her finest moment for me was when she was explaining about faith and how we need it. After all, we have faith that a taxi we call will turn up, don’t we? We have faith in our spouses and friends? So why shouldn’t we have faith in God?

Many of these comments well illustrate the point that Bunting was making, particularly in her quoting Karen Armstrong.

Arguments against traditional Christian doctrine (e.g. concerning the existence and nature of life after death) are just that – arguments against traditional Christian doctrine. They are not arguments against (or even about) religion as such. Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was much surprised when he encountered a Buddhist monk who told him that he (the monk) didn’t believe in god. Wilson, a son of the manse, had a view of religious matters that was so exclusively Christian that he had great difficulty in accepting that anyone could both be a monk and say they didn’t believe in God. To equate religious with Christian practice is culturally particularist, to put it no more strongly.

Spiritual and/or religious practice (there is an interesting debate to be had as to the relationship between the two, but we’ll leave that for next Easter!) is necessarily culturally specific. The world’s great religions were all started (except Islam) as a response to the development of Iron Age technology, when for the first time the offence had the upper hand over the defence. This also meant a considerable increase in the amount of trade, such that the previous hegemonic form of religion (worship of localised gods) collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, and spirituality as we have had it for the last two millenia was invented. (Note, by the way, that many cultures which did not develop iron working such as those indigenous to Australia retained magical practices – because at that level of technological development they are effective.)

The utilitarian defence of religion is at least as old as the Enlightenment and is the only one that makes any sense. And the Enlightenment itself – in whose terms we are all debating this matter – itself represents a bouleversement as great as that of the Iron Age. Mainstream religion, like the majority of humankind, operates in pre-Enlightenment terms. To children of the Enlightenment, it presents an easy target. (And this itself makes it more precious to those who see the Enlightenment as a form of cultural imperialism, which arguably the majority of human beings actually do.)

One final thought. Atheism is not as simple a concept as it may appear. Consider the “deep green” who claims to be an atheist but who nonetheless goes to a great deal of risk and trouble to oppose developments and other actions which she holds harmful to the planet. Hasn’t her atheism in practice slid into pantheism, a worshipful attitude towards Planet Earth? And if the next woman on the protest line is an avowed worshipper of an Earth Goddess (Gaia, perhaps), wouldn’t we say that – at least in terms of how beliefs influence actions – any theological debate between them would indeed be two bald women arguing over a comb?

You are confusing two kinds of ‘worship’: the ‘deep green’ you speak of may devote herself to the Earth but that doesn’t mean she worships the Earth spirit as a supernatural entity anymore than me saying I ‘worship’ my girlfriend means I regard her as the Creator. It’s more likely I am either pissed or horny. Or both.

Most of these confusions rest on the polysemy of certain words: ‘faith’, ‘belief’, etc. mean very different things here and the comparisons rest on little more than puns.

“Consider the “deep green” who claims to be an atheist but who nonetheless goes to a great deal of risk and trouble to oppose developments and other actions which she holds harmful to the planet. Hasn’t her atheism in practice slid into pantheism, a worshipful attitude towards Planet Earth?”

No, you don’t have to consider the planet as a deity to want to protect it. Maybe she’s wrong about how harmful these things will be, but that means nothing on a metaphysical level.

[30][31] Further examples of supposing that religion can necessarily be defined intellectually by credentialism and in practice by the kinds of rituals etc embedded in monotheistic practice. You can define religion that way, but really doing so obscures more than it reveals.

Mike (32): I never defined religion as monotheistic but I did define it in terms of a belief in the supernatural.

If you extend the term ‘religion’ to encompass beliefs with no supernatural elements it loses all meaning.

Mike – “However… the other day I was listening to a CD I was recently given and I thought “that backing pianist sounds just like X” and on checking the sleeve notes sure enough it was X. You may think an account of how X can do this (and how I can recognise him doing it) in terms of brain electrical discharges, sound waves or even more basic physical units may be of use and add to the gaiety of nations, but if so, we’ll have to differ.”

So, what you seem to be saying is that you have no interest in a greater understanding of the functioning of the human brain in relation to music? And that such an understanding is not “of use” ? (nations being gay or otherwise is entirely their own affair – I’m very socially libertarian)

That’s a pity, because it’s an extremely fascinating topic – some nonsense (I should know, I wrote it) on music & brain-related topics can be found here, for anyone interested (or insomnia-ridden).

If you don’t see the conflict between a cherry-picking theist such as Bunting, and an (at the very least) empiricist agnostic such as (the mighty) Hume, then the only explanations I can come up with at this late hour are either a) your critical faculties are deficient, b) you haven’t read Hume’s ‘dialogues concerning natural religion’ or c) you’re being wilfully irrational in support of your own, personal belief system.
If there’s a rational, evidence-based reason, then please, I’m all ears…

Oh, and some of your history is mightily suspect, too. This for instance –
“Note, by the way, that many cultures which did not develop iron working such as those indigenous to Australia retained magical practices – because at that level of technological development they are effective”

So, how come “magical practices” (’effective’ – good luck in proving that one – or otherwise) as part of everyday life persevered in places like, oh, I don’t know, all of ‘christian’ Europe well into the middle-Middle Ages (and, arguably, beyond)?

For example, quite apart from all the “Green Men” and suchlike you can find carved all over cathedrals, etc, here’s just one little illustration of the Icelandic church & magic in action:

“In 1554 a priest in Eyjafjörður was charged with raping his sister-in-law, a minor, with the aid of grimoires found in his possession. He was outlawed from the region and sentenced to lose one arm and both ears, and to pay his father-in-law vast sums in compensation. The authorities later allowed him to keep his arm and ears, and he then became a parish priest in the Strandir region. ” (from http://www.vestfirdir.is/galdrasyning/early-court.php)

Now I’m not going to go on to claim that the abundance of C17th witch trials proved anything, but then I’m not the one making the sweeping generalisations to prop up his personal fairy stories…

“An apophatic God is the ultimate Mystery which by definition human beings cannot comprehend. It (and it is an It, not a He) is not so much believed in as accepted as a given.”

Oh, come on, that’s an appallingly weak justification for the existence of a “god” – oh, we poor, weak little mortals can’t possibly measure/test/understand the invisible deity, and *never* will have that capability, so somehow, therefore it must be taken to exist…?

Mmm. I think I begin to understand why you like Bunting…

[33] What is supernatural? Why don’t cosmology and superstring theory count? They have led quite a number of physicists away from materialism by virtue of their very weirdness…

[34] Ignoring the polemic (we all cherry-pick, for one thing) you make a very good point in relation to pre-Christian survivals. (Indeed, I gave an address on the very subject once…) What they show, of course, is that people practice religion pragmatically – as William James noticed, the “true is the useful”. And I have little doubt that they practice atheism for the same reason…

So what if religion is irrational?

So what if cyanide is poisonous?

Don’t ever laugh, George – it’s irrational, you know…

From C S Lewis, who was a believer, as historical fact, in things like the resurrection.

In lecturing to popular audiences I have repeatedly found it almost impossible to make them understand that I recommended Christianity because I thought its affirmations objectively true. They are simply not interested in the question of truth or falsehood. They only want to know if it will be comforting, or “inspiring”, or socially useful (In English we have a peculiar difficulty here because in popular speech “believe in” has two meanings, (a) To accept as true, (b) To approve of – e.g. “I believe in free trade.” Hence when an Englishman says he “believes in” or “does not believe in” Christianity, he may not be thinking about truth at all. Very often he is only telling us whether he approves or disapproves of the Church as a social institution.)

You can respect someone who propagates something because it’s true even if you don’t believe it’s true yourself. But what respect should you give someone to “follow these practices it will do you good” as if a religion was like going to the gym? It reminds me of an interview that I saw with some young trainee suicide bombers, and they really did believe as a fact they would get the 72 virgins after blasting themselves to pieces. Rather than pointing out the social uselessness of such a belief it seemed better to say, no, that won’t happen. It’s against all sense and observation.

Most of these confusions rest on the polysemy of certain words: ‘faith’, ‘belief’, etc. mean very different things here and the comparisons rest on little more than puns.

True, and the same goes for “rational”. I think arguing with Bunting is a waste of time, since she is slippery, or ignorant, about what such terms mean. Agreeing with her or finding anything of merit in what she says is an even greater waste of time.

Comment 35:- Being an atheist is useful? I think most atheists would be insulted by that. Atheists are atheists because they don’t believe there are such things as supernatural beings. They see no evidence for it.

The second paragraph of the above should have been in quotes.

[38] I don’t know who’s defending Lewis’s position – certainly I’m not. And surely you don’t follow your doctor’s recommendations because you have a high opinion of their truth value, but because they do you good (or you believe they will).

I have no time at all for Madeleine Bunting, nor her apologists like Oliver Kamm. Nor, come to that Chis Dillow.

Is that a large enough target?

I am an old atheist. I am generally quite about it, unlike the new atheists that Bunting et al seem to detest. They detest it is because it contests their reason. Which in their happy clappy post modernist world is an insult to their sense of self.

They think they can think whatever nonsense they like – and more worryingly propogate it – without it being challenged.

Bunting made an idiot of herself a long time ago, when she asked what the Enlightenment ever did for us. Kamm is just a spooky guy that thinks Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justifiable, or more to the point, excuses for the present use of nuclear weapons. Might is right or somesuch drivel. Why either of them should be considered worth listening to is beyond me.

I have never encountered Chris Dillow before now. Personally I think he is playing a game with us, where he writes the rules.

“No, no! It is down the ladders and up the snakes”

“Honest Injun!”

Quiet rather that quite, right enough.

Some of the posts on this thread seem to be confusing religion with theism.
Some even seem to be confusing religion with the monotheistic abrahamic faiths.

While the majority (most?) of religious people can be considered theists in some form, the terms are not equivalent. There are non-theist religions and even in religions which appear exclusively theistic like Christianity, non-theistic traditions can be found. This I believe is what Mike Killingworth is talking about in the second paragraph of post #29 and some of the bits of his post #9.