Stephen Roney's Blog, page 105
December 23, 2022
Mary Had a Little Baby
One of my favourites.
Christianity and Hypocrisy
In my book Playing the Indian Card, I point out that Christian missionaries coming to Canada had every reason to try to preserve Canadian First Nations cultures, and they did. This is the opposite of the usual claim. They are commonly scapegoated as supposed cultural imperialists. In fact, most of what we know today about Canadian First Nations culture comes from their work and writings. For the natives had no writing system.
This makes sense purely in terms of self-interest. Keeping the natives separate from the civil culture magnified the authority of the missionaries as intermediaries. But more nobly, the Jesuits and Recollets were concerned with the depravity of the general culture. Far better for the souls of their charges that they not venture into the cities with their alcohol, prostitution, and sharp trading.
My editor objected. Surely they were imposing on them their culture, their Christian religion?
Only the irreligious see religion as culture. To the religious, religion is counter-cultural.
Andrew Breitbart famously said “politics is downstream from culture.” Similarly, culture is downstream from religion. True, adopt Christianity, and you are liable to come up over time with things like empirical science, liberal democracy, and the Enlightenment. But Christianity, or Catholicism, is highly culturally diverse.
For people who are not religious, it is true, religion is their culture. These are the people who have never thought about it, or read the texts. They just do it because those around them do it. They celebrate Christmas, because it is a party, and everybody does. They get married in a church, because that is the way it is done. They attend mass because their grandmother did, and their father.
But this attitude is the very opposite of true religion, which is above all a search for the truth: for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
And it produces something social that is the opposite of true religion. It produces a dull uncreative social conformity. It produces “happy happy joy joy” Hallmark-card-sentimental self-satisfied “be nice and get along” attitudes and behaviour.
Christianity is profoundly counter-cultural. If that is not obvious to you, consider that its founder figure was crucified by his culture as the worst of criminals.
So are the other great religions, but for Islam.
A recent example of how different the cultural facsimile is from the real article: one of Xerxes’s readers, a United Church minister, recently opined that she saw no distinction between secular and sacred Christmas songs for her services. “After all,” she remarked, “We are called to be a people of this world.”
This is the opposite of what the Bible says.
1 John 2: 15-17:
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.
John 17: 14-17:
I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.
John 15: 18-9:
If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.
The cultural Christianity almost systematically asserts the opposite of the actual Christian message. It generally asserts what is most comfortable, especially for the rich and powerful.
It is, in itself, proof of the existence of the Devil.
We are warned of this, of course, in the Bible. This is the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees.
This is why everyone should actually read the Bible for themselves; and Catholics should read the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 22, 2022
Arthur McBride
An unconventional Christmas song.
The Holly and the Ivy
One of my all-time faves.
Beauty Is Not Skin-Deep
Traditional Middle Eastern talisman against the evil eye.
We are often warned not to judge by appearances. We must not judge a book by its cover. We must not assume, because a woman is beautiful, that she is either especially intelligent or moral. This, we are told, is an unjust prejudice. Beauty is only skin deep.
On the other hand, fairy tales always show the beautiful heroine as also highly intelligent and, in the end, moral. And fairy tales are, in effect, the distilled wisdom of our ancestors, advice on life meant to be passed on to the younger generation.
The same is true of the hero legends: Sir Galahad is always handsome, brave, intelligent and highly moral.
So who is right?
We have one automatic reason to assume the fairy tales and hero legends have it right. Not just because they are the wisdom of the ages; because we naturally do not want to believe that beauty, intelligence, and morality go together. It is a harsh thing for the majority of us, who are not exceptionally beautiful, to accept. It means we lose on all counts. We have an ulterior motive to believe the contrary, against all evidence.
In fact, unfair as it might sound, there is good reason to assume that an attractive man or woman will most often also be intelligent.
Here’s why: beauty is most highly valued by men in a mate. A beautiful woman has the best evolutionary chance to get married young to a good husband and have lots of children. This makes evolutionary sense: beauty equates to good physical health. Of course, men also value intelligence, but less so.
Intelligence, in turn, is most highly valued by women in men. This too makes evolutionary sense. While good physical health is less important in the father, the ability to provide financially is vital. An intelligent man will probably be able to support more children.
So a highly intelligent man usually marries an unusually attractive woman: like Hephaestos and Aphrodite in Greek myth.
What is then likely to be true of their progeny? Combining the two characteristics, refined and amplified over generations, their progeny is likely to be both highly intelligent and physically attractive.
Fairy tales and hero legends are less likely to equate beauty with moral goodness. In Snow White, the wicked queen is also beautiful, almost as beautiful as Snow White, according to her magic mirror; but she is pure evil. In Cinderella—the original, not the Disney version—Cinderella is prettiest, and good, but her sisters too are beauties. In Beauty and the Beast, Belle is both a paragon of beauty and of morality; but her sisters too are notably attractive, and are selfish and abusive.
So here there seem to be two opposite possibilities.
A beautiful or intelligent child is liable to be spoiled by proud parents or eager suitors; leading to a lack of concern for others. This is so in the original legend of Narcissus.
But a beautiful or intelligent child is also at least equally likely, like Snow White, to be subject to the envy of others. The less beautiful or intelligent, especially those who have invested their self-esteem in being beautiful or intelligent, are liable to hate and wish to destroy the exceptionally beautiful. This is almost the prime lesson of the fairy tales. Even the opposite sex: the reaction may be a desire to possess rather than concern for the well-being of the beautiful. It is the unusually beautiful who have most to fear from rape or sexual harassment; or, for intelligent men, entrapment into marriage.
Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood love goddess and co-inventor of wifi.If being forever flattered and favoured leads to a lack of care for others—and it does—being forever attacked and criticized, as or more often the case, leads to identifying with the downtrodden and a sense of empathy for others.
So it can go either way, and is liable to be extreme in one direction or the other: either the Wicked Queen, or the exemplary, dutiful Cinderella.
The more extreme the beauty or intelligence, the more likely to have been subjected to envy or harassment rather than favour and support. This too is the lesson of the fairy tales.
Perhaps we have to say it in fairy tales because it is too controversial to say out loud. Envy is powerful.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 21, 2022
A Song for Midwinter Night
Important News of the Cosmos
Alternate History
Recent intimations that the Kennedy assassination was indeed a conspiracy, by the Deep State make me start to wonder what they destroyed. What would the world look like today had Kennedy completed his term, and been re-elected?
Things went pretty crazy in the USA within a few years of his death. The culture got knocked into a cocked hat later in the Sixties, and has not recovered. Perhaps this was a reaction to the loss of Kennedy and what he represented: the idea of a brave and better postwar world. People stopped having kids at about the same time: a sure sign of pessimism about the future. And weren’t the Sixties the classic “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die” reaction to a loss of hope? “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”
We can be sure the Civil Rights movement would have continued: it was Kennedy’s initiative, and Johnson continued with it on the strength of his imprimatur. Perhaps the folk boom with its sincerity, concern for social causes, and ultimate respect for culture would not have been supplanted by the Beatles and more raucous rock and roll. Which was less about improving the world and more about getting drunk and getting laid.
Imagine all that energy being better channelled.
I think it is a fair assumption that the Republicans would still have nominated Goldwater. Kennedy would have won a second term. His brother RFK insisted that he would have pulled out of Vietnam had he survived. I suspect this is true; he did not have Johnson’s macho insecurities, and showed his ability to admit and learn from mistakes during the Cuban missile crisis. We might have avoided all that. We would have avoided LBJ’s vast expansion of government and his Great Society, which so devastated the black family.
I assume the Republicans would still go with Nixon in ‘68. Johnson would not run, due to health. The most likely Democratic standardbearer would have been RFK. Let’s assume Kennedy would still be popular enough that RFK would beat Nixon on his brother’s coattails. It was a close run thing for Nixon even against Humphrey, with the latter fighting the headwinds of Vietnam, a dubious nomination, a bitterly divided party, no charisma, and a raucous convention.
Would RFK have been very radical? I think he was at base an opportunist. He would play it by the polls. He would probably, in these altered circumstances, be a relative centrist. And he would not have been assassinated; nor would Martin Luther King have been. These were copycat crimes. We would have been spared those two traumas, and have had King’s input in the years to follow. It could have been a glamourous time, with RFK in Washington, Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa, Expo ’67 still recent, and civil rights passed.
Nixon would presumably not be back for another round in 1972; that would be one too many resurrections even for him. Whomever the Republicans ran that election, we would have missed the trauma of Watergate and the aura of “Tricky Dickie” in charge of the globe. They might well have run Ronald Reagan, who was by then well established as the standard-bearer of the party’s right wing, and was serving as governor of California. Imagine him winning this election—after three terms, the electorate is usually hungry for a change—and being able to govern in his prime.
Would Reagan have made the same deal with China that Nixon did? Perhaps. But without Vietnam, he would have had less need or incentive to do so. And subsequent events suggest we might have been better off had Nixon not made that deal. The Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union would probably have collapsed anyway, for economic reasons, and China would not have been built up to replace them.
Give Reagan a second term, and he would have been in power during the Iranian Revolution. We can imagine him giving the Shah the backing that Carter did not; we can imagine the Ayatollah and the Iranian theocrats not coming to power. That might have saved much strife and anguish in the Middle East.
Although we’ll never know, it seems to me it could have been a happier century. As one left-wing British commentator remarked, before the Kennedy assassination, everyone admired America. After it, everyone fell out of love with America.
Imagine that had not happened.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 20, 2022
Now Banned on the BBC
... for a few forbidden words. See if you can spot them.
The Passion of Joan of Arc
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Watching Dreyer’s 1928 silent movie “The Passion of Joan of Arc” with my kids. It is a harrowing experience, that must be had and cannot be undone. It is unfathomable the spiritual suffering this uneducated girl of nineteen must have gone through.
She was in the hands of her enemies, of course. She was threatened with a painful death, as painful as they could conceive. She was abandoned by Charles VII, who might have ransomed her—although he owed his throne to her. Put not your faith in princes.
But worst of all, those who actually tormented her at her trial were not just fellow Frenchmen, but religious authorities. They put her in the unspeakable position of having to deny either her direct relationship with God, or the authority of the church. She was all alone and could trust no one. And, if she chose wrongly, she risked eternal damnation.
If anyone ever earned heaven, she did. As Leonard Cohen wrote of her case,
“Me, I yearn for love and light;
But must it some so cruel, and oh, so bright?”
Yet her dilemma also expresses the experience of every abused child. The authority of the abusive parent keeps pulling against one’s own conscience; their plausible lies against one’s perception of reality.
It is probably this resonance in so many souls that makes the movie immortal.
The actress, Renee Falconetti, gives an incredibly compelling performance as Joan. One believes she is experiencing everything Joan experienced. One feels she must have been drawing on her own personal experiences.
May all abused children receive their reward in heaven.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
