When it was reported last month that Hollywood actor Tom Cruise intended to eat his wife's placenta raw, I thought it was one of the stranger stories going round at the time. Another, according to some newspapers, was that Cruise had bought his wife, actress Katie Holmes, an adult-sized pacifier to ensure that she didn't make any noise as she gave birth.
Scientologists -- Cruise is a follower of the "religion" set up by pulp science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1952 -- believe the delivery room should be a quiet place, and that apparently means the mother should be quiet, too. Hubbard said she should be given as little anesthetic as possible. "It's basically just respecting the mother, you know," Cruise reportedly said at the time. Holmes was raised as a Roman Catholic before succumbing to Scientology after meeting Cruise.
His words, and the belief systems of both Scientology and Roman Catholicism, came back to me this week when a London philosopher published a provocative paper.