Stephen Roney's Blog, page 182

White Male Murderer Syndrome

The story of Brian Laundrie and Gabby Petito has been dominating the news for a couple of weeks. Commentators often suggest that it is an example of “missing white woman syndrome”: when a white woman goes missing, it is big news. When a non-white woman goes missing, it isn’t.
In fact, the Petito case tends to disprove the thesis. Gaby Petito is not missing. Her body was found on September 19. Based on the “missing white woman” thesis, public interest should have waned at that point. Instead, it has grown since. It is not Petito people are interested in. It is Laundrie.
What we are dealing with, here and in most other cases of “missing white woman syndrome,’ is actually “white male murderer syndrome.” It is the white killer, not the white victim, that makes the matter newsworthy. For whatever reason—the initial premise would imply this is because of anti-white racism. People want to think bad things of whites. It is politically incorrect to report bad behavior by blacks or aboriginals.
Of course, one does not necessarily know the perpetrator. But if a black woman turns up missing or dead, the perpetrator is probably a black man. Therefore, not newsworthy. If an aboriginal woman turns up missing or dead, the perpetrator is probably an aboriginal man. Therefore, not newsworthy. This would change if the prime suspect turns out to be, or can be implied to be, white. This, for example, is why “missing aboriginal women” is recently a big deal in Canada—because it has new been insinuated that white people, not aboriginals, are somehow directly or indirectly at fault. 
If a white woman turns up missing or dead—this is newsworthy, because the perpetrator is probably a white man. This is especially so in the Petito-Laundrie case, since a white man is the obvious suspect. If, on the other hand, the obvious suspect is or turns out to be non-white, the story disappears.
A similar example of “white murderer syndrome” is the common misperception that mass killers are always white men. In fact, the proportion of mass killers who are white reflects their proportion of the overall population—about 65%. It is blacks who are overrepresented—approaching twice their population share. But if a black man starts shooting up a mall, it is less likely to be featured as major news. Or his ethnicity will not be mentioned, or will be downplayed.


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Winsor McKay - Breaking News of 1917

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Sky Father

 

Urizen, Blake's conception of a false god.

"whoever believes in nature, disbelieves in God – for Nature is the work of the devil" - William Blake

As noted previously in this space, atheists—and perhaps some nominal Christians—have the bizarre belief that Christians think God is an invisible old man on a cloud, a “sky father.”

This concept is not in the Bible. Jesus does address God as “Father”; but the Christian God is a Trinity, Father. Son, and Holy Spirit, and the most correct way to represent him is as the Son, because this is how he chose to reveal himself to us.

And he is not in the sky. “The Kingdom of Heaven” or “The Kingdom of God” is among us, not in the sky. Here’s how perverse that notion is: Ephesians actually refers to the Devil as “the ruler of the kingdom of the air.” (Ephesians 2:2) Demons are “the spirits of the air.” The sky and clouds are the realm of Satan.

Pondering where this notion of a “sky father” comes from, I think it is a confusion in the popular mind of God with the classical polytheistic god Zeus or Jupiter. “Jupiter” comes etymologically from the IndoEuropean “sky father.” As he is the god of thunder, he is naturally imagined as seated in the clouds. He is sometimes referred to as “father of the gods.” 

In Christian terms, he is a demon.

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Apologizing to the Pagans

 

Miss Persephone, can you identify the rapist from this lineup?

A recent HuffPo article calls for a Catholic apology for “the destruction and desecration of Greco-Roman polytheistic culture.”

Here are a few reasons why this is absurd:

1. Catholicism did not destroy Greco-Roman culture. Catholicism is Greco-Roman culture as it has evolved. The only thing missing is the polytheism.

2. Accepting the premise that polytheism should have been left alone, none of the polytheists who might have been harmed are still alive.

3. There are not even any remaining Greco-Roman pagans. Who then does one apologize to? Should the Israeli government apologize to the Canaanites and the Philistines? The Italian government to the Etruscans? The Irish government to the Firbolgs? How would this be meaningful?

4. Any actual suppression of paganism was an act by the civil, not the religious, authorities. It may have been done by them on grounds other than religious ones. Constantine and his successors believed in the value of consensus on values, to promote imperial unity, and saw Christianity as most likely to achieve it. All Catholicism did was win an intellectual argument.

5. Worshipping the pagan gods was not a matter of devotion or conscience. The pagan gods were rapists and murderers. They had no love for mankind. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” Ancient Greeks and Romans sacrificed to their gods out of fear. Conversion to Christianity would not have been a hard sell. It was like being released from bondage.

Accordingly, the modern Catholic Church apologizing for ending Greco-Roman polytheism would be like Britain apologizing for ending the slave trade. Apologizing, that is, to the slaves.

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Be Reasonable

Xerxes, with enthusiastic agreement from much of his readership, has determined the original sin to have been reason: "I wonder if humanity’s original sin might be our obsession with labelling and categorizing our experiences.” One respondent characterizes this as a flaw of Western civilization. Another chimes in, “Judgement dams up the works! No sooner do I make a judgement, i.e., apply a label, then I stop considering alternatives and limit all the possibilities that might be realized by continuing consideration. Acceptance, on the other hand, permits flow, movement, discovery!”

This is a non-starter for Christians. One might point to Biblical verses like “judge not, lest ye be judged,” or the woman taken in adultery. But, importantly, these are about judging other people, not making judgments as such. And they themselves call for judgement—it is not that we must not judge others, but that we must judge ourselves first: ‘first, take the beam out of your own eye.’ ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’”

John 9:39: And Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind.”

As for naming things, God himself brings the universe into being, in Genesis, by his words—by calling it into being. Then, as if in echo of this divine act, he has Adam give names to all the animals. The implication seems to be that it is precisely in naming and clearly defining things that we are acting in the image of God, and in accord with the divine will.

Jesus is the Logos. He is judgement incarnate.

In sum, nothing could be less Christian—or more diabolical—than this postmodern doctrine of unreason.

Acceptance of everything requires acceptance of the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, and Charles Manson. This was precisely the philosophy Mason preached to his followers.

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Wonderfulland

 

"ERECTED BY THE CITIZENS OF GANANOQUE
IN HONOURED MEMORY OF THE MEN OF THE TOWN AND DISTRICT WHO FOUGHT AND FELL IN THE GREAT WAR 1914-1918"

 Often for sport the crewmen will ensnare

Some albatrosses: vast seabirds that sweep

In lax accompaniment through the air

Behind the ship that skims the bitter deep.

No sooner than they dump them on the floors

These skyborn kings, graceless and mortified,

Feel great white wings go down like useless oars

And drag pathetically at either side.

That sky-rider: how gawky now, how meek!

How droll and ugly he who shone on high!

The sailors poke a pipestem in his beak,

Then limp to mock this cripple born to fly.

The poet is so like this prince of clouds

Who haunted storms and sneered at earthly slings;

Now, banished to the ground, to cackling crowds,

He cannot walk beneath the weight of wings.

―Baudelaire

When I was a child, my brother and I used to swap stories about “Wonderfulland,” a place where everything was wonderful. The fact that this was a fascinating topic for us reveals that we were only too aware that, counter to a common myth about childhood, the real word we experienced daily was not so wonderful.

I remember my father describing Belmont Park in Montreal as “the real Wonderfulland,” when he planned to take us there. But I knew in advance this could not be true, and the amusement park, although enjoyable, was nothing like it. Wonderfulland was not a place of thrill rides or cotton candy or custard cones.  It was a land of stories where imaginary things were real. One area, as I remember it, was the Old West, one was islands of the Caribbean, one had castles and forests, and so on.

The one detail I remember best is that part of it was Statueland―a garden full of statues. 

Why the statues? What did I know of statues? There was, as I recall, only one statue in the small town where I was growing up, of a World War I soldier, commemorating the war dead. It did leave a deep impression on me. We might have seen more statues on a trip to Ottawa; but if so, I cannot remember. 

Gananoque, my home town, was also famous for its pink granite. There was a stonemason’s yard on the main street with a display of tombstones. 

This, along with the war memorial, seems to me the most likely origin of statueland. It was the land of the dead. Perhaps this is why I have always felt a particular fondness for Remembrance Day.

I rather think that Wonderfulland emerged from our—perhaps only my—intimation that there was a heaven. This might have been instinctive, or rather instilled by God. Or it might have been the result of an early Catholic education.

I thought of Wonderfulland the other night while listening to Bruce Springsteen. I had not thought of it, I imagine, for years. Yet the thought came to my mind, out of nowhere, that this was someone who had visited Wonderfulland. There were hints of it in his music and his voice—not anything explicit, but a mood. It was a mood I knew well, I realized, from other art.

The mark of great art is that it has this sense of Wonderfulland about it. Michelangelo has it; it is all over the Sistine ceiling. Shakespeare often openly refers to it; it is his “green world.” Hans Christian Andersen knows it intimately, and his stories describe it in detail. It is where all fairy tales are set. Romanesque art is the art of Wonderfulland. Chagall paints it. Kurelek paints it. Sendak paints it. Blake paints it, and writes about it. Other writers who clearly know it well include Cervantes; Don Quixote is all about the difference between Wonderfulland and the imperfect diurnal world. Yeats, Stevenson, Coleridge, Hesse, Carroll, Dostoyevsky, H.G. Wells, all write about it. It is where the Krishna Gopala cycle takes place. Arthur Koestler chronicles it in non-fiction. 

It is perhaps most present in music. I hear it in Cohen, Dylan, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Diana Krall, Whitney Houston, Prince, Sinead O’Connor, Ian Tyson, Mark Knopfler, Willie Nelson, Norah Jones, Buffy Sainte-Marie. It is everywhere in classical music. They say all art aspires to the condition of music; they speak of the music of the spheres, and of angels playing harps and blowing trumpets. Perhaps this is why: music among the arts is able most accurately to express the nature of heaven.

 “Realistic” art is an absurd and a philistine idea. The purpose of true art is not to show the world, not to “hold the mirror up to nature,” other than to shame it. It is to open a window to a vista of Wonderfulland.

Another insight: those who most experience Wonderfulland are inevitably going to be the most dissatisfied with life here below. The contrast is too intense. At the same time, God seems to give the clearest vision of Wonderfulland to those who are suffering, like Andersen’s Little Match Girl, in this life.

“Socrates: And now, I responded, consider this: If this person who had gotten out of the cave were to go back down again and sit in the same place as before, would he not find in that case, coming suddenly out of the sunlight, that his eyes were filled with darkness?"

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Who Is Mad?

 

To be insane is to be out of touch with reality. But what is reality?

It is not just the majority opinion. That is the ad populum fallacy. The majority of men once thought the sun moved around the earth. A plurality of Germans voted for Hitler. 

Plato’s cave analogy suggests reality is experienced by only a few; most of us may live a delusion. Buddhism asserts the same. As, arguably, does Christianity. “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.” (1 Corinthians, 3:19) A more familiar concept to many may be that of the Matrix films.

And postmodernists, of course, assert that there is no reality. Everyone just makes things up.

So what is real is not self-evident. We therefore cannot use it as a standard for sanity, or else one man’s sanity becomes another’s madness. The person who experienced the world as it is might be declared insane by the deluded majority. “Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending.” (The Republic, Book 7, Jowett trans.)

Rather, then, than saying that sanity is knowing what is real and what is not, we might say that Sanity is the quest for what is true. Insanity is no longer caring or trying to find out. We all understand the concept of a lie, a denial of the facts or of the evidence. Insanity is believing a lie, while being at least partly aware that it is a lie.

This means that sanity is always at least in part a moral issue. 

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Lauren Southern on the Canadian "Mass Graves"

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Laueren Southern on the Canadian "Mass Graves"

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Advice on Writing

 

“There is no other way: read more and write more, and you naturally write well. Nobody who writes little, who is too lazy to read, and who expects to be good at everything he writes, can write anything good.”

-- Ouyang Xiu, Song Dynasty.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.