BBC4 Beyond Belief: Truth

On Good Friday, next week, the story of Jesus' arrest, trial and crucifixion will be read in Churches across the country. In the Passion according to St John, Pontius Pilate famously asks: what is truth? An intriguing moment which resonates with modern times. We might well ask the same question today: an era of 'alternative facts' and 'fake news'; or so we are told.

Religions claim they hold the 'truth', but religious belief cannot be proved like the sort of truth which is based on empirical evidence. What are some of the religious understandings of truth? And what role does religion have to play in a so-called 'post-truth' world?

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BBC4 Profile: Rex Tillerson

On Profile this week, we look at the life and career of new US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson.

He flew to Moscow this week to urge Russia to abandon its support for Syria's President Assad following the chemical weapons on a town in northern Syria earlier this month.

It seems he came away empty handed, with Donald Trump warning that relations between Russia and the US were now at "an all-time low".

So who is Rex Tillerson ?

Mark Coles gets to grips with Tillerson's past : his formative years in the Scouts, his time as a drummer at university, the four decades spent at oil and gas giant ExxonMobil where he ended up as CEO and his controversial business ties with Russia which now hang over his new role as America's top diplomat.

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SciShow: Why can't you tickle yourself?

Vox: Why knights fought snails in medieval art

Medieval snails and knights — who knew? It turns out that medieval illuminated manuscripts featured a lot of bizarre imagery in the margins, but this pocket of art history might be one of the most intriguing.

Scholar Lilian Randall provides the best theory for the unusual motif: these medieval knights fought snails in the margins because snails represented the Lombards, who had become widely despised lenders throughout Europe. Snail was an insult and, over time, it became a type of meme detached from its original meaning.

Of course, like much of art history, this theory is just a theory. But it gives us an insight into the rich culture of marginal art and all the complexity, confusion, and amusement that sits on the side of the page.

Haaretz: Le Pen's Real Sin? Roping in the Jews With the Muslims as a Threat to France

Jacques Chirac deserves credit for being the first French president to puncture the myth of Vichy being an aberration of history, when at the time of the deportation of Jews it enjoyed overwhelming popular support. The same Chirac, however, helped forge France's special relationship with Saddam Hussein at a time that the Iraqi dictator called for Israel's fiery destruction. 

What prompted Le Pen to issue the statement was her essentially correct instinct that a successful fight-back against an Islamic takeover of France required France to shed a sense of guilt and shame. As Andrew Michta has recently written in the American Interest the narratives fostered in academia and the media equating the West's colonialist past to original sin have sapped Western self-confidence. This all-pervading sense of guilt (according to Michta) has been appeased by the embrace of multiculturalism, whereby immigrants were no longer expected to embrace the values of the host country and Islamophobia was viewed as a greater problem than the establishment of no-go zones ruled by sharia law. Another tactic in seeking absolution, which Michta does not mention, is to transfer the guilt to others, for example the United States or Israel. [...]

Macron, who will probably get most of the Jewish vote, and was himself targeted with anti-Semitic slurs due to the years he worked in the Rothschild bank, also fell into this pattern. He decried the fact that an increasing number of pupils are studying in religious schools that inculcate hatred for the republic, be they Muslim schools where studies are essentially in Arabic "or elsewhere where they teach the Torah more than the basic skills." As measured by success in matriculation exams, Jewish schools that study Torah surpass the national average by a healthy percentage – but facts cannot get in the way of evenhandedness. The fourth major contender, far leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon, is exempted from this list because he believes that the Muslims are sweetness and light and the Jewish umbrella organization CRIF is "acrimonious".

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Haaretz: The Loneliness of the Long-distance Liberal Zionist

We may soon become an endangered species. Liberal Zionists are besieged on all sides by powerful forces that actively seek their demise, aided and abetted by everyone else's indifference. And they are fighting for survival at a time when they are leaderless, rudderless and spiritless, wracked by self-doubt and despondent about their chances of survival.

The election of Donald Trump was a tipping point. For the past eight years, liberal Zionists always had Barack Obama to fall back on. When they were dismayed by the right-wing shift in Israel, liberal Zionists could always console themselves with the knowledge that Obama was sitting in the White House. When it came to Israeli democracy and peace with the Palestinians, Obama’s heart was always in the right place, even if his achievements left a lot to be desired. The new U.S. president may yet confound his many skeptics and initiate a vigorous peace process, but until that time comes the world of liberal Zionists has turned dark, and cold. It’s open season and they are the prey.

Although the term liberal is certainly not synonymous with leftist, for the sake of convenience let’s assume that, in this context, it is. Liberal Zionists believe the occupation is unsustainable and immoral. They reject annexation and a one-state solution. They believe that Israel has veered off course and is now in danger of moving in a direction that will force them to confront an impossible choice between the two parts of their identity. They may not all acknowledge or talk about it yet, but many liberal Zionists dread the day, as I do, when they will have to concede that one can either be a liberal or a Zionist, but can no longer be both. 

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Political Critique: No Hope in Turkey

Those who followed Turkey’s tense constitutional referendum are looking high and low to find the silver lining. Unfortunately, there is none. Yes, President Erdoğan would have loved to carry the day with a much wider margin than 51.35 percent. The victory of the “No” vote in 17 out of 30 big urban centers, including Ankara and Istanbul where his own political career took off when he won the mayoral elections in 1994, must have hurt. But win he did and frankly, there is nothing to stop him now. Turkey has formalized the one-man political system that has been in the making for a good part of the 2010s. [...]

One should be aware that this referendum is not the end of the journey. The constitutional changes transferring all executive power into the hands of the president, abolishing the prime minister’s office and subduing parliament to the national leader, will come into force only after the next elections for the head of state, which will take place in the middle of 2019. Erdoğan will have to be returned to office by the voters. The likelihood of such an outcome is quite high. The 50 percent who oppose the current president are not a homogenous group and it would be a surprise if a candidate emerges who is capable of mounting a credible challenge. [...]

Worse still, there is a low-intensity war still going on in the southeast provinces. Erdoğan cannot win it, neither can the PKK. As things stand, it is bound to drag on for at least another generation and it is now fought in the big cities of western Turkey too. Across the border, Syria remains a mess and there is no end in sight. The “Euphrates Shield” operation is now officially over, but the Turkish military will be invading again in the future, to “mow the grass” and keep the Kurds at bay. Jihadis will continue to wreak havoc in Turkey. The strong president is meant to do away with the bad memories of the 1990s when the country was run by fractious coalition cabinets. Ironically, the PKK insurgency and Turkey’s exposure to the Middle East mark a sort of return to the turbulent 1990s.

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Motherboard: The Taliban Want to Go Green

The announcement proved strange not only because of its message but also because, though the Taliban might issue many such statements, Akhundzada rarely signs them. So I contacted Qari Muhammad Yousuf Ahmadi and Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesmen for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban's self-styled government in exile, to talk about the insurgents' counterintuitive plans to go green.

"The US invasion destroyed many sectors of Afghanistan, including the environment, in a very bad way and for the long term," Mujahid told me via WhatsApp. "The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has the perfect plan for environmental protection through planting trees. Every citizen of the country should plant at least one tree a year. Also, we support all actions taken for the support of the environment, including the state's efforts to invest in this sector. In fact, we support any action to this end." [...]

The Taliban would prove far from the first terrorist organization to embrace environmentalism. Osama bin Laden, the insurgents' onetime ally, also lent his support to environmentalists by slamming climate change denial in the Western world.

Of course, the Taliban's actions contradict its statements: the insurgents have involved themselves in illegal logging, illegal mining, and—the linchpin of the Taliban's war economy—the illegal drug trade. Short term at least, the insurgents have only contributed to climate change. Deforestation hastens global warming, and mining can lead to environmental degradation. Growing opium, on which the Taliban has a near monopoly, results in habitat destruction and soil erosion while processing it often requires hazardous materials.

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Geoawesomeness: The history of space exploration on a single space map

Humans have always dreamed about spaceflights but only in the second half of the 20th century we developed rockets that were powerful enough to overcome the force of gravity to reach orbital velocities that could open space to human exploration.

Everything started in 1957 when the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into space. The first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, went into orbit one year later in 1958. In 1961 the next milestone is space exploration has been achieved – Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth. His flight lasted 108 minutes, and Gagarin reached an altitude of about 202 miles (327 kilometers). We had to wait 8 years to 1969 for Astronaut Neil Armstrong to take “one giant leap for mankind” as he stepped onto the moon… The road to space exploration has been long and often bumpy but we have managed to achieve a lot.

The awesome poster called Chart of Cosmic Exploration documents every major space mission starting from the Luna 2 in 1959 to the DSCOVR in 2015. The map traces the trajectories of every orbiter, lander, rover, flyby, and impactor which ever left the Earth’s orbit and successfully completed its mission. Additionally each poster features an array of over 100 exploratory instruments with hand-illustrated renderings of each spacecraft. It’s awesome and beautiful!

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