Stephen Roney's Blog, page 91

Naked and Afraid

 

Illustration for Song of Songs: Jesus and the individual soul.

My gauche chum Xerxes has decided there is not enough sex in the culture. Why don’t we speak more of sex in church? 

“Is this a taboo from Victorian times, when even piano legs had to be covered lest they excite irrepressible lust?”

Victorian times ended in 1901.

“Face it – we are both sensual and sexual beings. Four of our five senses are in our heads. When we reject sexuality/sensuality, we deny the largest sense organ of our bodies -- our skins.”

The comment suggests we are already giving too much importance to sex. It implies that our sense of touch, and our physical body from the neck down, is entirely concerned with sex.

I wrote back:

“I disagree with you that our society needs to be more concerned with sex. We are already more concerned with sex than any other culture in history.

When I taught in China, students listed to me their traditional five necessities of life, and pointed out that sex was not one of them. It was meant as an implicit criticism of the West and its obsessions. We foreign experts were required to sign a declaration that we would respect the purity of Chinese womanhood.

My Pakistani acquaintances used to refer to “the wicked West.” Which I was then supposed to justify to them. They were thinking of sexual libertinage.

Cambodians and Filipinas have complained to me about how “casual” Westerners are about sex.

I think we got this way initially because of the strong tradition of Medieval romance, which, like the Song of Songs, used sexual love as a metaphor for our relationship with God. These passages are stunningly beautiful, but many people took and take them literally, and decide that sex is love and even somehow sacred. More recently, the whole thing has been exacerbated by Freud and psychology, which proposed a century and more ago that all mental illness was caused by frustrated sexual urges. It began in Victorian times with the pervasive theory that mental illness was caused by masturbation, and Freud and the rest ran with it from there.

Is sex central to life? No; reproduction is. Interestingly, the more interested we become in sex, the less interested we become in reproduction.”

It is perhaps significant that he then declared he would never again print any of my responses to his columns. 

The reader responses he did print all agreed with him.

“Xerxes, you need to get laid!”

“Why such beauty, of the most potent & lively drive, would be denigrated to the shadows is beyond me. I wish it weren’t so. I feel impoverished as a result.”

“It is our White Anglo Saxon heritage that evolved and came to this country and this continent.”

This one flies in the face of reality. Has she never heard of the hijab? Of honour killings? But it might explain the current hatred towards anything “white” or “Anglo-Saxon.” It is seen as killing a fun evening.

“Creation is a wonderful act and expression of our love and sexuality.  It needs to be celebrated.”

If sex is so wonderful, why the euphemism? Why does he say “creation,” instead of coitus?

We all know this is a load of cattle manure. 

It is a fine example of deliberate delusion, of the sort narcissists are always guilty of. It is telling each other alibis, as one sees in a dysfunctional culture or a dysfunctional family. Like most delusions, it allows us to think we can get away with something we know is wrong. 

And like any delusion, it is inevitably going to demand to be celebrated in church. The sense of guilt demands it. Just as children must be forced to affirm drag queens.

There is nothing wrong with sex. It is nature’s way to encourage propagation, and God’s little reward for passing on the human project to a new generation. It is a natural instinct, like hunger or thirst. When used for other purposes, it is lust. Compare food and gluttony, or thirst and alcoholism.

All is created for good. All evil comes from placing too much value on a thing.

“The sins which cause most souls to go to hell are the sins of the flesh.” – Jacinta of Fatima.

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

The Promise of Poilievre

 

Last fall, when Pierre Poilievre won the Tory leadership, all the talking heads were saying his stewardship of the party was doomed. He had, after all, ru to the right in the leadership contest. Now how could he move to the centre to win an election?

I found this assumption that deceit was simply the way to do business disgusting. The first time I heard this idea, that you ran as an ideologue to win the nomination, then moved to the centre, was from Richard Nixon. I realized then that he was a crook. It is the reason I can no longer bear to look at a picture of Erin O’Toole without a sense of physical revulsion.

Besides the gross immorality, it is bad practical advice. If you make your programme indistinguishable from that of the party in power, why vote for you instead of the party in power? If they like what the other guys are doing, they will vote for them. If they don’t like it, why vote for you and just get more of the same? And then there is the inevitable suspicion, and accusation, that you have a “hidden agenda.” You are asking the people to buy a pig in a poke. For the leadership, you did not govern on the platform you ran on. Why would it be different if you came to power? How can anyone trust you?

Leadership is not about finding a parade, and rushing to the head of it. It is not about parsing the polls.  If it were, one leader would be just as good as another; anyone can do that. Only a narcissist would think that way: all that matters to him is that he is in power.

Leadership is about communicating, and convincing people. This Poilievre seems exceptionally good at. And he has already, according to several polls, opened up an eight-point lead over the present government. Proving my point: but for a bad stumble over Christine Anderson, he has not yet betrayed his principles doing it.

If Poilievre comes to power, the same rhetorical skill, the ability to bring people along with him, could make him an exceptionally good prime minister as well. This ability to communicate and inspire was the core skill possessed by Reagan, by Churchill, by Zelensky, by Thatcher; by Ralph Klein in Alberta. Although few seem to realize it, by Donald Trump, a brilliant comic performer. By Martin Luther King; by Lincoln.

It seems less common on the left. JFK had it. Pierre Trudeau did. On the left, it is called “charisma.”

To be fair, Diefenbaker too had the knack, and Bill Clinton, and Boris Johnson. None of whom I would consider exceptional leaders. Which demonstrates that it is not enough. There are other elements to a great leader; empty rhetoric is still just empty rhetoric.

Canada may be exceptionally lucky, as if protected by God, to have Poilievre emerge at this moment, when our society and perhaps our civilization seems to be falling into chaos and despair. If it can be pulled back together at all, that is a job for a master rhetorician.

No guarantees; but there is cause for hope. There is cause for hope if, two years from now, Poilievre is in charge in Canada, and Trump in the USA. That might be enough to turn things around.

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

The CBC Indulges in Anti-Catholic Hate Speech

 

This CBC report is breathtakingly dishonest. 

The Vatican recently formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery.” I hope they knew they were wasting their breath. Inevitably, the headline is not this, but that “the Catholic Church has not gone far enough.” Nothing will ever go far enough; there will never be either truth or reconciliation. There is a vast grievance industry and special interests to be fed.

The CBC’s premise for saying this is not enough is that the Vatican should have “rescinded” instead of “repudiated” the doctrine. As if this makes any material difference to any Indian. Indeed, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission asked for “repudiation”. But the goalposts move with every step towards reconciliation by the other side.

As the Vatican document explains, the Church cannot rescind the doctrine. It is not a Catholic doctrine. It is a legal theory, in international law, and in the US. 

“The legal concept of ‘discovery’ was debated by colonial powers from the sixteenth century onward and found particular expression in the nineteenth century jurisprudence of courts in several countries, according to which the discovery of lands by settlers granted an exclusive right to extinguish, either by purchase or conquest, the title to or possession of those lands by indigenous peoples.”

The Vatican has no control over courts or common law in the US or other countries.

But the “Doctrine of Discovery” had no place in Catholic teaching. To the contrary, as the Vatican document notes, 

“In the 1537 Bull Sublimis Deus, Pope Paul III wrote, ‘We define and declare [ ... ] that [, .. ] the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the Christian faith; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.’”

Which the CBC report does not explain. It does not quote from the document; it ignores it. And it does not, as journalistic ethics require, include a spokesman for both sides, if there is some controvery over the Vatican’s statement.

This is rather like asking a politician “When did you stop beating your wife?” Then, if he answer that he never beat her, condemning him for refusing to answer.

It is anti-Catholic hate speech. Our tax dollars at work.

Sadly, the statement has given Pope Francis another opportunity to say something idiotic: “Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.”

Of course one culture can be superior to another; why would one suppose otherwise? What is his argument? And if it is never legitimate to coerce others, police forces and parenting are immoral. 

How helpful is that?

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

This Way Madness Lies

 

People these days hold to psychological theories with a desperate fervour, a fervour one would never see associated with religion. This was thrown into stark relief for me when a longtime friend, a friend who had stuck with me since back in college days, suddenly refused to speak with me after I said Freud had been disproven. He objected that I had no right to say that, since he had never criticized my Catholic faith. Wait, isn’t Freud supposed to be science? And I realized then that he had, in fact, criticized my Catholic faith now and then. It had not troubled me nor affected our relationship. Although I rarely spoke of it, never tried to evangelize, while he was often talking about his psychoanalysis. The religious are usually eager to engage in philosophical debate, while others refuse. For the religious, everything is subject to question and justification. Not for the psychologized.

Another time, I was organizing a group of writers for a book on personal experiences with depression. And one insisted she would not participate, and objected to the book itself, unless we all pointed out that depression was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. 

Another longtime friend abruptly unfriended me and stopped answering emails when I criticized humanistic psychology for saying that mental illness was caused by a lack of meaning, yet then asserting that there was no meaning in the universe—you had to invent meaning. Given that they were right on the first point, they had no cure, and probably left patients in despair. I had no idea at the time that he was an adherent. But as a result, he suddenly accused me of being immoral and cut me off.

Consider too the current adherents to the doctrine that one can be “misgendered” at birth, and this is the cause of one’s suicidal depression. If, like Michael Knowles, you reject this theory, they accuse you of wanting to kill them, even of “genocide.” And they become violent.

What is going on here? 

This illustrates the truth that humanistic psychology has stumbled upon: all mental illness is a loss of meaning. Aboriginal people call it “loss of soul.” The sufferer can make no sense of their experiences, and there seems to be no point to their life. This may come from being consistently “gaslit” in various ways growing up; it can come from a delusional or materialistic culture lacking plausible answers and explanations. It can come from being too intelligent to buy honestly the usual facile answers, which might be good enough to bamboozle most everyone else. 

Those who end up with a psychiatrist are healed, if and to the extent that they are healed, which is to say, almost never, by placebo effect. All psychiatric healing is faith healing. They are given some reasonably plausible explanation for their experience, some patchup to preserve the shared narrative, allowing them to limp on accepting that world view.

Precisely because the explanations psychiatry offers are limited and flimsy, just makeshift patches, alibis, people cling to them, and cannot stand questioning. They are hanging on desperately to their life raft. 

By contrast, any of the great world religions have developed, over the centuries, a comprehensive and persuasive account of the psyche and the cosmos. People who can accept one of them can be definitively cured of “mental illness.” And as world views, they are robust enough to easily stand questioning.

Why don’t people turn to religion in the first place? Not because the great religions are not plausible. That is an alibi. Unlike the new psychologies, they have satisfied the greatest minds of mankind for centuries, millennia: the Dantes, the Shakespeares, the Ngarjunas, the Hui Nengs. Religion is rejected by individuals for the same reason religion is on the decline generally in our society—leading to a rising tsunami of mental illness.

People fear religion because it requires an admission of divine justice, personal responsibility and possible guilt. Not even their own guilt, necessarily. Some are mentally ill to avoid admitting the guilt of a parent, or the government, or the society as a whole. The alternative may seem too personally threatening.

Psychiatry and psychology’s great selling point is that it promises healing without any reference to morality, responsibility, or guilt. It’s all just chemicals in the brain, say. Or misgendering. Or mere Oedipal fantasy. No fault no foul. 

The problem is, it does not work. This is why “mental illness” is rapidly becoming more common, more severe, and is now generally considered incurable.

The longer you deny guilt, in yourself or others, the crazier you get, and the stronger the fear of divine retribution gets. You start cutting off entire areas of thought, of conversation; you start unfriending and deplatforming even your closest and oldest friends, or closest relatives.

And that is where we are going as a society.

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

Punching Judy

 

Vancouver’s “Billboard Chris” is getting Canada international attention by being assaulted by a trans in front of police. 

This is an illustration of how most people do not act morally. The police stand by, then blame him for the assault. Why? Because it is easier and personally safer than challenging the power of the trans crowd.

We have governments is to protect the weak against the strong. But in practice, the police, like everyone else, are inclined to take the path of least resistance, to get back to their own concerns. Meaning they, and society as a whole, will generally back a bully. Until and unless the bullies become so demanding they feel they will be allowed, personally, no peace.

Women have been able to make demands for over a century, and governments will quickly comply. Beginning with issues like prohibition. They have the power. Not because they have the votes—although they do have a majority of the votes; this is relatively trivial. They were just as powerful before they were generally enfranchised. Because women have more disposable income than men, about four times as much, and more free time to organize and volunteer for political causes. 

If you doubt this, that women have more spending money and more free time than men traditionally, check a magazine rack. How many magazines are targeted towards women’s interests and how many towards men’s? Check book sales. Check a TV schedule. How many shows are targeted towards women, to sell things to women; how many are clearly men’s interest? How many shops cater to women, and how many to men? And so on.

With feminism and women entering the workforce, however, they have reduced their political power significantly over the years. They retain greater purchasing power, but have less free time to organize. So that they are now sometimes seeing their concerns lose out to other interest groups. Like trans athletes.

Gays have always had something of the same advantage. Because they do not procreate, they have, singly or as couples, usually had more disposable income and more free time to organize and volunteer for their political interests. And so this demographic tail has been wagging the dog; increasingly as the power of women has subsided.

Transgenders have the same advantages as gays: they do not procreate, and so they have the free time and disposable income to organize and fund their candidates and demands.

Seniors have always also had a powerful lobby: disposable income, free time. No politician dares mess with social security or medicare.

Wait. What about blacks and aboriginal people? They too, surely, have been getting their issues before government. What is their advantage? They may well have more free time for organizing, if only due to unemployment, But surely not more disposable income. 

But it is not really their issues, and it is not really them organizing and lobbying. Irt is powerful bureaucrats and bureaucracies claiming to act in their interests. They have by and large been kept dependent, wheeled out for sympathy as basket cases, to get more cash and power for these bureaucrats. Who themselves have lots of free time to organize, and all the money of the government itself to lobby the government itself for more power and money. They generally act heedless of the real interests of Indians or blacks—it is against the interests of the average Indian to maintain the system of reserves. It is against the interests of the average black to encourage open immigration or deny school choice. It is a con, suckering their charges, who have been taught to be helpless, in order to exploit the public sympathy for blacks and Indians. 

How do we escape this cycle? I suppose by seeing through it. As I suspect we are beginning to. Thanks to the Internet and the explosion of information it offers. And thanks to the demands of the privileged escalating to a point at which it at last becomes more obviously in the interests of the passive majority to confront the bullies than to appease and abet them.

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

Purgatory: The Evidence

 

There are reasons to be suspicious of Near Death Experiences. There may be secrets that those who are ultimately going to return to life must not take back with them. Other secrets, shameful things, those returning might not want others to know. I imagine all we hear of is the vestibule of the next life. But such as it is, I learn from more than one researcher that people near death most commonly report a “life review,” in which they experience all the pain or pleasure they have caused others.

It has always seemed to me that, given a just God and a just universe, this must be so. This is what purgatory is about. One cannot enter heaven until the slate is clean. 

It also follows that anyone who has undergone great suffering in this life must be compensated in the next. This is promised, indeed, in the gospel of Luke, and in the story of Dives and Lazarus. 

“Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.”

“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh…. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.”

Not at this point, in purgatory—it would delay entry into heaven, and so would be no compensation. Nor would it seem proper to elide any harms caused to others to compensate for this suffering. That would be an imperfect life review. 

Therefore, we must assume a hierarchy; some are greater than others in the kingdom of heaven, beyond purgatory. As, indeed, the gospels tell us. 

“he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

“anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

It all seems to fit, on the initial premise that there is a God.

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

The Darkest Hour

 

Current events are unrelentingly depressing. Militant transvestitesand their supporters, more or less including the governments of the US and Canada,have declared open war on Christians, and begun shooting. Governmentseverywhere seem to be seizing totalitarian powers. Inflation is out of control,and recession likely to follow. The health system is broken. People are homeless.The pope is an apostate.

In the early days of the Second World War, some woman wasreassured that the good would surely triumph. She countered, “Why would you thinkso? Why isn’t it as likely to be evil?”

In the early days of the Second World War, as Hitler seemedto win every battle, it was hard to have such faith. Yet he did eventually lose—noconsolation to the six million—and in retrospect, his loss was not a close run thing. Economically, he was runninga Ponzi scheme. Only continual conquest and pillage could keep the machinerunning. The British blockade was sure to starve him of food and fuel over thelong run. And he was soon fighting not just the British Empire, one quarter ofthe world, but also the Soviet Union and the United States.

I do think the great arc of history bends toward justice,and that, if we look back at history, the bad guys do lose. The present timeslook a lot too like the Cultural Revolution in China. But the Gang of Four endedup in the dock, Lin Piao was shot down over Mongolia, and Deng Xiaoping tookover. Robespierre’s Reign of Terror ended with him its last victim. The KhmerRouge madly invaded Vietnam, and got themselves crushed. Radical revolutionarymovements can rarely help themselves; they go too far, and march off a cliff. Theworse things seem to look, the closer we probably are to the end.

Evil is a Ponzi scheme. Its ultimate defeat is built intothe structure of the universe. Lying only works so long as most people usuallytell the truth. Theft only works so long as property rights are generally respected.The mass of people will not resist evil until they feel personally threatened,but eventually, they do feel threatened.

The crazy left, the forces of chaos, are now attacking women and children.

How much farther can they go?

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

The Right to Choose

 

In her Internet explorations, my fifteen-year-old daughter has come up with another existential question. She was talking to a chat bot and pointed out to it that, unlike her, it had no free will. It simply followed its programming.

And the chat bot responded that she, too, simply followed her programming, her natural urges.

So, daughter wanted to know: do humans have free will, or not?

It is an open question, philosophically. Many Calvinists would say the latter: we merely follow our programming. Many behaviourist psychologists and philosophers would say the same.

I believe this is immediately untenable in our daily experience. If we really thought this, we would be unable to function. You wake up in the morning. There are Rice Crispies on the shelf. There is a toaster on the counter. Do you decide which you want for breakfast, or do you stand there and wait to see what you do?

You make a choice. You are aware of making a choice. You are aware that you could have chosen differently. You can also conclude that you made the wrong choice.

The “lower” animals, reptiles, insects, fish and so forth, seem to operate only on instinct, which is like programming. We too have instincts, natural urges, but are able to choose not to follow them. We can look at that beautiful woman, yet conclude that we have no right to have sex with her. We can refuse that piece of cake because we are on a diet. We exercise free will.

You could say that we have several levels of programming, which are often in conflict. One is our natural urges, our selfishness; another is our conscience, our innate sense of right and wrong. We can also have aesthetic concerns, social pressures, loyalties, obsessions. We choose among them as an exercise of will.

And our will grows stronger with this exercise.

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

Pierre Poilievre Defines "Woke"

 

It is a joy to have Poilievre around, if like me you enjoy fine rhetoric. He rarely fails.

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

The Stigma Attached to Narcissistic Personality Disorder

 

My bright fifteen-year-old asks “Is it right that there is a stigma around narcissistic personality disorder”?

I don’t know what she has been reading or listening to on the Internet. In these times, the world is an open book. 

Short answer: yes.

“Narcissism” is the modern term, distorted by the history of psychiatry, which began by seeing everything based on sex. 

What is narcissism really? Morbid self-love. 

What is the old term for excessive self-love? Pride. 

What was Lucifer’s original sin? Pride. He thought he could be God.

What was Eve’s or Adam’s original sin? Pride. They thought they could “become as gods.” 

Pride, narcissism, is the first and greatest deadly sin, from which all other vices emerge. If there is no stigma attached to narcissism, there is no stigma attached to sin.

What is the old term to refer to someone in the grip of a vice? “Vicious.” That is the appropriate stigma.

But, narcissists will complain, they are “mentally ill.” They can’t really control it. 

A perfect alibi, from their point of view. Gets them off the moral hook.

And there is some truth to it. Once you give in to vice, it is hard to turn back. That is why these sins are called “deadly.” They lead to spiritual death. You have made a pact with the Devil, as Eve did, and surrendered your will to his. 

The vice most people have the easiest time understanding is alcoholism. The confirmed alcoholic seems unable to control himself. “First the man takes a drink; then the drink takes a drink; then the drink takes the man.” And people like to speak of alcoholism as a “disease” as a result. But ultimately, the alcoholic is responsible. If he cannot now control himself, this is based on a conscious moral choice he made in the past. For comparison, if I murder someone, my guilt does not simply go away with the passage of time. Especially if I keep murdering.

This is why there is no redemption for the Devil. He has made this irrevocable moral choice, to set himself up as God. This is why he is condemned to hell. This is why anyone who is condemned to hell is condemned to hell: because, once you surrender yourself to a vice, once you sin against the Holy Spirit by setting yourself up as your god, you cannot escape. You have sold your soul to the Devil.

That is how Adam and Eve committed the original sin, which passed down through the generations: that is how hard it is to escape a settled vice. It requires a dramatic divine intervention to escape.

But, in sum, there should be no stigma more permanent and complete than the stigma around narcissistic personality disorder.

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