Dem Bones Dem Bones Dem .... Dry Bones

If you’re still a rabid Daily Mail reader and don’t believe that our existing drug laws promote crime, then have a read of this pilot conducted in 3 English cities which had excellent results.

Bones from the thigh and foot of St Therese of Lisieux have arrived in the UK for a tour. This quaint Catholic rite of exhibiting the remains of saints seems rather macabre to me and I can see little point in people wanting to view them. It’s not exactly as if she was an Egyptian Pharaoh from the Old Kingdom. Perhaps it’s more to do with the Catholics’ belief that uttering a few words over her bones will facilitate a temporal reversal of the universal laws of nature.

I say ‘laws’, but it’s not as if matter reads a book of rules and then consciously obeys these rules; we merely use the word ‘laws’ to describe matter’s observed patterns of behaviour, patterns from which they never deviate. Catholics (among others of a religious bent) are firmly, yet without firm evidence, of the opinion that the laws of nature can be violated by incantation through the intercession of supernatural forces, for which again there is no evidence other than heresay. No prayer has ever achieved anything more than can be achieved by a competent therapeutic hypnotist.