Stephen Roney's Blog, page 99

Deligion in the Schools

 

Due to the Canadian government’s current inability to perform such simple tasks as issuing citizenship certificates and passports, I have been forced for years to homeschool my kids by distance.

I have considered this an extreme hardship; and have been horrified at the thought of how much they are missing in their education. 

But perhaps not. 

After all, if government cannot manage simple paperwork, how well are they going to do education?

It recently occurred to me that I ought to be teaching my two geography and science. 

I went online to look for a geography and a science text.

I could find nothing suitable. All available texts seem not to be about geography or science at all. They are about global warming, environmentalism, and the depletion of natural resources. With a lot of pointless make-work projects assigned. They are teaching nothing, and in the most inefficient way imaginable. 

Or rather, worse than nothing. In the first place, students will have a misconception of what science and geography are about. In the second, they will have been indoctrinated into a bizarre cult with no scientific or empirical basis, nor philosophical foundation. They will think these dubious assertions are established truth. In the third, this nature cult seems tailored to replace religion and conventional morality. It is paganism.

I am not claiming that the teaching of science was any good when I went to high school.

But this is much worse. And at least geography used to make sense.

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

Down that Rabbit Hole

 

The point of the “green world” that Northrop Frye repeatedly discovers in Shakespeare’s comedies and romances is that it is the world of imagination, where the stories come from. In it the impossible happens, with magic and fairies and music from some unseen orchestra. 

As this is the place where stories come from, and where every reader goes to, the challenge, faced by every writer, is to propose some way to get there from the workaday world we know. This is the “willing suspension of disbelief” Coleridge identifies. We must believe in the world of the book or story.

It has to be some place people do not commonly go; because it is radically apart from our common world. In it magic happens. It is not sufficient to say it is a dream. Baum, in “The Wizard of Oz,” used a tornado spinning Dorothy over the rainbow. The film version transformed this into a fever dream; which is the one thing one must not as a writer do. Partly because that is too easy, even if true; partly because it harms the willing suspension of disbelief. We are too inclined to dismiss our dreams, rightly or wrongly, as unimportant. They fade and we forget them with the dawn.

Shakespeare frequently makes it a dark forest; hence Frye’s “green world.” Which he mistakenly imagines is some fertility ritual. Forest merely represents some place not commonly visited, away from the madding crowd. The forest is often a portal to fairyland in the fairy tales as well: Sleeping Beauty’s castle is beyond an impenetrable forest. Hansel and Gretel are lost in the woods and find the witch and her gingerbread house.

In “The Tempest,” Shakespeare also uses a voyage that loses its bearings and lands on a remote and uncharted island. This is an especially popular conception in British literature, England being a seafaring nation. Gulliver’s Travels, Lord of the Flies, Robinson Crusoe, More’s Utopia, Irish legends of Tir na n’Og and Hy-Brasil. 

Americans, influenced by their own geography, prefer to locate it on the frontier, past the next mountain barrier, somewhere in the West. 

Perhaps the best portal concept found in literature, to my mind, is the mirror in “Through the Looking Glass.” This is satisfying on several symbolic levels.

Science fiction has it easy: the world of imagination is out in space, on another planet.

Another common location is above the clouds; as in the child’s conception of heaven, or the land of giants in Jack and the Beanstalk.

Another is under the earth, perhaps entered through a cave. We see this as the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, but it is also familiar in the classical conception of the Underworld. Any cave in the area of Greece has a legend making it the entrance to the underworld.

In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, the portal to the magical land is through the back of a wardrobe. 

In Norse mythology, or some Irish legend, it is across the rainbow, perhaps using the rainbow as a bridge.

In Greek mythology, it is also at times on top of some inaccessible mountain: Olympus. Or it can be over the impenetrable mountains, in a mountain valley: Shangri-la; the Tibet of popular imagination. 

Or, in Greek mythology, reached by voyaging to the end of the supposedly flat earth, and crossing over into the metaphysical realm. There is a beautiful old print, that I have loved for year, and now feature as the background for my Facebook page, showing a shepherd on a hilltop poking his head through the veil of sky, and seeing the celestial gears beyond the physical.

Of course, all these are metaphors. Nobody should seriously think you can sail beyond the end of the Earth, or find some new world above the clouds. Nevertheless, the power of the concept of there being another world is so strong that many over the centuries have really set sail, or headed west, only, perhaps, in the end, to throw themselves in final despair off the Golden Gate Bridge. 

The next and obvious question: is this world of the imagination real? This is a separate question, after all, from whether you can get there by climbing the Andes, or leaning through a mirror. And a more fundamental one.

“The Matrix,” for one example, proposes the idea that this physical and shared social world is the illusion, and the other world, Wonderland, the green world, is the real one. 

Philosophically, this is just as tenable as the reverse. As Chuang Tzu famously asked, “Am I a man who dreamt last night I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly now dreaming I am a man?”

That question has remained unanswered for all the centuries.

Plato, in his analogy of the cave, proposes the latter. We are all butterflies dreaming we are men. To him, the portal is philosophy; meditation; prayer, if you like. 

The world’s religions say the same. 

Perhaps more accurately, prayer and meditation or art is the mirror, the looking glass, through which we see the real world. 

But it is as through a glass darkly, or through a crystal ball.

It is death that is the actual portal we pass though, and see it all at last face to face.

One thing is clear: we all have a definite sense that there is this other world; and we all have an inner yearning, stronger in some, weaker in others, for it. This is why we love listening to stories, reading novels, watching movies, playing video games. We are imagining ourselves into this other world. It is seemingly the source of almost everything we call joy or fun. From earliest years, for fun, we pretend to be cowboys, or pirates, or superheroes. We imagine the doll to be alive, and the truck to be full-scale.

One might almost suppose we were programmed for this, for this other place, by our maker.

Not that it is a paradise: it is clearly a place both of extreme good and evil. Dragons live there, and gorgons, and the wicked dead, in their own terrible zone of punishments; as well as the blessed, the saints and angels, the houris, in theirs. 

While the laws of nature no longer apply there, the moral law there is strict, evident, and absolute. In a way it is not in the present world. There is no longer any ambiguity or deceit surrounding good and evil. There is no chaos. There is nothing random about the imagination, although some of us may wish there were.

If Plato and the world’s religions are wrong about this other world, what is this inner sense of it always being just beyond the next bend, and this eternal yearning for it, evident in us all, at least as children? At least before the din of life drowns it out. Where is that coming from?

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

Evil Is Not the Problem; Good Is

 

Here's a clear example of how, to the zombies or goats, the sin is not the sin, but anyone pointing out the sin and insisting on moral behaviour.

This is where our society is headed, and it is the low road to civilizational decline and general poverty, among other worse things.

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

Dawn of the Dead

 

I feel as though Jacinda Ardern was the canary. Along with Damar Hamlin. I feel as though we are at a Stalingrad and Al Alamein moment. While not entirely visible yet, while the bad guys are actually at their furthest extent, they are overextended and desperate. I feel the tide is turning against the woke.

Reputedly Pope Benedict has a book coming out, held back to be published posthumously, in which he cuts loose. Now he may speak frankly about the corruption in the church. His secretary has just released a similar book. Cardinal Pell has been revealed posthumously as the author of a letter harshly criticizing Pope Francis and the wokening of the church. Their recent death actually gives Benedict and Pell added authority; a though they are martyrs, speaking from heaven. 

Pope Francis is losing the moral high ground. The moral high ground matters; it is the whole battle.

Something similar is happening in US politics; with the admission that Hunter Biden’s laptop was authentic, and now the discovery of classified documents scattered around Biden’s offices and residences. It is more than a bit mysterious; since the documents are being uncovered in slow motion, in the presence of Biden’s lawyers, why is this happening? And how much of the truth are we really being allowed to see?

Most likely, this is a palace coup. Because, as with Ardern, the dark forces who control the Democratic Party see worse scandals coming down the pike, and need Biden as the pre-emptive scapegoat. He’s old, he’s had his time at the trough; time for him to take it for the team.

 Everyone surely now realizes that Biden is, at a minimum, a habitual liar. Also probably deeply corrupt, and possibly working against the nation’s interest.

But it I not hard to guess what the coming scandal is that is requiring the defenestration of Ardern and Biden. It has to do with the Covid pandemic and the vaccine.

The collapse on the field of Damar Hamlin has similarly lifted the veil on the risks of the Covid vaccine. No more just a rumour some of us had heard; people are waking up as if from a dream. Suddenly everyone realized something was wrong. Scott Adams has now publicly admitted he was wrong to scoff at the anti-vaxx movement. 

Worse, the virus itself came from a government lab, involving US government funding.

The ruling elite worldwide are revealed as responsible for the deaths of millions. 

It is hard to see how any government that demanded vaccine mandates can now remain in power in any democratic country. Notably, in Canada, the truckers are vindicated, and Trudeau is revealed as a monster.

And he knew what he was doing. His hysterical reaction to the convoy shows that.

He, and the other leaders, no doubt did not intend the virus to escape, but they did exploit the crisis to try to seize more power and control over their people.

We now know, thanks to Elon Musk, that “big tech” and government were colluding to suppress dissent and control the political process. “Big pharma” was suppressing possible cures.

On the one hand, it is disorienting and frightening to discover that your government, and “the science,” and the media, and your electronic gadgets, and the church, cannot be trusted, and you might drop dead at any moment from a heart attack because your trusted them and got triple-vaccinated or more. The atmosphere feels almost surreal, apocalyptic.

On the other hand, although there is a terrible death toll, and it has not come to an end, this is the sensation brought on by sudden change, or sudden revelatory knowledge. There is an earthquake in our collective worldview. 

I thought as of a couple of years ago that the Covid epidemic was working like a sudden flash of lightning in the dark, revealing where all the zombies are.

Now the aftermath feels almost like a new day dawning.

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

Zebedee

 

The calling of James and John

One of my favourite comedic bits from the Bible was in today’s mass reading. 

 As he was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea; they were fishermen.

He said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

At once they left their nets and followed him.

He walked along from there and saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. They were in a boat, with their father Zebedee, mending their nets. He called them, and immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him.

Nobody ever seems to notice old Zebedee.

He’s left stranded there in the boat.

No permission, no explanation, no farewells. No help with unloading the catch, stowing the craft, mending the nets. James and John leave immediately.

I can imagine the old greybeard muttering to himself about ingratitude, or shouting and cursing after them.

People do not notice it, because it defies their expectations and probably their desires.

It’s not nice, is it? It’s not respectful.

Yet it is an illustration of what Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel:

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” – Luke 14:26

“Another disciple said to him, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’

But Jesus told him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.’” – Matthew 8: 21-22

The Bible is not about family values. Family is an idolatry, and the Gospel makes this point here rather emphatically.

You have one Father. Accept no substitutes.

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

Fire and Ice

 

Current and recent events make it clear that there really are two kinds of people in the world. It’s not just some cliché. And they are living in two different realities. Their views are so incompatible that it seems they must come to blows.

The first group believes in good and evil, and understands the point of life to be, largely, to do good and avoid evil.

The second group believes in no good but to do and get what they want. Evil is interfering with them in the pursuit of their desires, or criticizing them.

Understand this distinction, and much that is happening now in the news becomes clear. We are in a great battle of good and evil, and what one side calls good, the other calls evil.

It immediately strikes me that this dichotomy is expressed well by the Gospel’s division of mankind into sheep and goats. If you have ever had acquaintance with both sheep and goats, you will see it. Sheep automatically follow “the rules”—keep in mind that the shepherd referred to in the analogy is God, not some political or social movement, and not government. What is meant by the allegory is not social conformity. In dramatic contrast to sheep, although they look similar, goats do and eat whatever they want. You cannot tell a goat what to do.

The difference is also so distinct that it is remarkably easy to classify people as one or the other. This justifies the gospel’s firm division: sheep go to heaven, and goats go to hell, with no parole and no appeal.

Consider Erin O’Toole’s recent editorial concerned with the tone of politics. He objected to all the flags reading “F*** Trudeau.” 

He made no reference to any possible acts of Trudeau that might have prompted such strong emotions.

In other words, O’Toole did not care about acts that might have done harm to others; only being called out for them. The only sin is admitting sin exists. The only sin is judgement.

Pope Francis is also a goat. This is revealed by his recent profanity-filled demand to seminarians that they always give absolution. The problem is not the sin; it is acknowledging sin as something real and important. The only sin is judgement.

The recent "defund the police" drive was of a piece. Insane as it must appear to sheep, the premise was that the problem was not crime, but prosecuting it.

Although, ironically, the goats accuse the sheep of intolerance, the reverse is true. Sheep are constitutionally mild creatures. The sheep will go a long way in tolerating or ignoring the actions of others. But the goats cannot tolerate even a word wrong, or even silence. Ask St. Thomas More. They are therefore especially concerned with “hate speech.”

For example, abortion is free and legal. Protesting abortion, within a certain distance of an abortion clinic, is illegal. 

Apparently even praying silently in the vicinity of an abortion clinic is now illegal; if they can infer what you are praying about.

For example, Benedict or John Paul II, sheep, were reasonably content allowing either the Latin or the Novus Ordo mass to be said. Both were apparently softies when it came to dealing with Vatican corruption. Francis, by contrast, a goat, is eager to crack heads—the heads of those who complain about Vatican corruption. And he is adamant, for no visible reason but promoting disrespect for something holy, that the Latin mass must not be said. 

While the sheep are happy enough to say that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, and to tolerate homosexual sex or sex outside marriage for others, for the sake of social peace and Christian charity, the goats insist that one must publicly agree that homosexual sex or transsexualism is morally good, and wear an advertisement for homosexual pride in public, or be fined, boycotted, or lose your livelihood. 

The sheep are prepared to forgive any sin with repentance. The goats will hunt down old private tweets from years before, or ancient testimony of drunken sophomore parties, to prove supposed “hypocrisy” in anyone who dares profess the unalterable nature of right and wrong.

This is why, in times when the goats gain dominance, it seems that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Sheep are more tolerant and easygoing.

A recent column by regrettably goatish pal Xerxes opines that political positions ought to be judged on what emotions they appeal to: do they appeal to hate or anger? If so, they must be rejected.

So it is okay to do what you want to others, so long as you say the right things. The important thing is that the victims must never be angry about it, or accuse anyone of anything. 

A respondent to Xerxes sharpened the point: political speech must above all not appeal to guilt. 

“[T]hey attempt to make you feel guilty. The sad faces, woeful looks, desperate conditions depicted help us to feel guilty of not caring, not being willing to help, not participating… and can become powerful influencers/manipulators to open our wallets.”

“Making me feel guilty elicits a deletion in my world.”

For the goats, guilt is, in the end, the only evil. That is, their actual enemy is their conscience. And the worse their conscience troubles them, the more extreme their intolerance will become. They will begin smashing icons. They will begin burning churches. And there is nothing the sheep can do, by their own behaviour, to prevent or to moderate this. It is perhaps best for the sheep to realize this. You might as well speak out.

Officially, the Nazi genocide against the Jews was on racial grounds. However, the Nazis were largely influenced by Nietzsche. It seems likely that much of their real, if unstated, motive was that they blamed the Jews for spreading “slave morality” in German and world culture: in other words, the demand to “do unto others” and the Ten Commandments. Morality, in short. How dare they?

To Nazis, the great enemy, according to Himmler, was “pity.” Pity was weakness in the evolutionary struggle. For “pity,” one might as well read the prime Christian virtue of charity, caritas.

In ancient times, this battle of sheep and goats corresponded pretty well with the distinction between polytheists and ethical monotheists. This is why paganism has generally been able to be tolerant of other paganisms, and monotheisms of other monotheisms, but neither has been historically tolerant of the other tendency. They are like fire and ice.

We are in a time of global struggle today, it is a struggle between good and evil, and the battle lines are remarkably clear.

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

The Politics of Poetry

 

Pauline Johnson in recital

Scouting publishers to whom to submit a poetry manuscript, I note that almost all, in their submission guidelines, include a phrase similar to the following:

“[we] also encourage poets from the LGBT community, Indigenous and racialized poets, as well as poets with disabilities.”

This almost looks like boilerplate.

Properly, this is against the law. And it is immoral. This is discrimination on prohibited grounds of unalterable characteristics. Unfortunately, as Jordan Peterson has said recently, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has become a bitter joke. Governments and courts in Canada treat it with contempt.

The official justification for this discrimination is that these groups are “historically underrepresented communities,” to quote from one other example of boilerplate.

If these groups are historically underrepresented, they are obviously being overrepresented now. Everyone wants their manuscripts. 

Producing a rather boring sameness for readers. So much for diversity.

Is it even true that they have been “historically” underrepresented? 

As to “racialized” poets, that is, poets with skin colours other than pink, until the expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, and indeed until some years after that, there would have been rather few “racialized” folk who spoke English fluently. Were they really underrepresented in the English literature and publishing of the 19th and 20th centuries in proportion to their actual numbers? That is not obvious. That case must be made. Rabindranath Tagore, writing in English, took the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. The US had the Harlem Renaissance. 

There is an automatic reader interest in the exotic. Contrary to what leftists insist, people do not want to read about their own boring lives, but about lives different from their own. Witness Star Wars, or Gulliver’s Travels. As a result, anything purportedly written by someone from another culture has always had an advantage in getting published. In the 19th century, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam made quite a splash even in translation.

As to indigenous poets, again, there has always been an advantage, that of exoticism. There is reason to believe they have been historically overrepresented, not underrepresented, in proportion to their population. Pauline Johnson made a splash in her day by reciting in supposedly Indian costume, and claiming to be an Indian princess. I have found imitators, less well remembered, on Internet Archive. Archie Belaney called himself “Grey Owl” and pretended to be aboriginal in order to have a literary career.

And were the LGBT community ever underrepresented? We cannot really know, because few would have been out of the closet back when sodomy was a crime; but gays themselves regularly claim that almost every prominent author of the past was actually gay. That’s impressive, given that they were only 1-3% of the population.

Perhaps the issue is that specifically gay concerns were not aired. That may be so; but necessarily, specifically gay concerns are only of much interest to about 1-3% of the population. So there’s that. 

Were those with disabilities underrepresented until recently?

Like, say, Milton, who was blind? Cervantes, who had lost the use of one arm? 

Does depression count? Almost every decent poet suffers from depression, according to surveys done at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At a minimum, those suffering from mental illness are certainly overrepresented among successful poets; and always have been. After all, Aristotle comments on this over two thousand years ago.

Another group that used to be favoured in the same way in publishers’ calls for submissions, but from whom favour has recently been withdrawn, is white women. It certainly used to be claimed that they were historically underrepresented. 

This too was probably wrong. Female poets were common in the 19th century. Like homosexuals, women had the advantage over men, in the old days, of not having to support a family. As a result, they were more often able to turn their attention to less lucrative pursuits, like poetry.

So what’s behind this fiction that these groups are underrepresented? Indeed, that historically overrepresented groups are underrepresented?

Is it ignorance, or conscious prejudice? Does everyone else hate straight white men just as everyone used to hate the Jews? Indeed, used to hate the Jews as “overrepresented.” 

The one group that actually is historically underrepresented in poetry is Canadians. That is, in the sense that Canada, as a young country, has not had enough of its geography and culture consecrated by poetry. As a result, we all live drabber and uglier lives than we should.

If we publish poets who focus only on LGBT issues, or black issues, or Asian issues, or issues faced by aboriginals, or the disabled, we are, at the same time, withholding poetry from the majority of Canadians.

It is a philistine move.

It also explains why poetry is far less popular than it used to be in Canada. It has deliberately stopped speaking to Canadians.

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

Pope Francis Uses Gutter Language in Demanding All Sins Be Forgiven in Confessional

 

I think this has to be exaggerated and it is based on witness accounts rather than written sources.

But then, why does the pope so often speak extemporaneously like this? Quite possibly, so he can promote what he truly believes, and retain deniability should the orthodox object. The ambiguity that remains gives license to ignore the orthodox teaching.

In brief, Pope Francis seems to have cursed out any priest who withholds absolution in the confessional. Evil is not evil: only judgement is evil.

According to one seminarian, the Pope is reported to have invited them "not to be clerical, to forgive everything". More precisely, he is alleged to have added that "if we see that there is no intention to repent, we must forgive all. We can never deny absolution, because we become a vehicle for an evil, unjust, and moralistic judgement.”

This conforms to the postmodern doctrine that there really is no right and wrong. The important thing is to avoid feeling guilt. 

Given, however, that there is a right and a wrong, a priest is doing a penitent no favours in assuring them they are forgiven when they do not meet the criteria for forgiveness. This is a license to sin with abandon, in confidence that they can avoid spiritual consequences by regularly going to confession. And this, in turn, is a one-way ticket to that hot place. No refunds.

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

David Crosby

 

David Crosby has died, reputedly of Covid. I never thought he had much talent. As a songwriter, his lyrics seemed self-indulgent, to listless melodies:

Almost cut my hair

It happened just the other day

It's gettin' kinda long

I coulda said it wasn't in my way

But I didn't and I wonder why

I feel like letting my freak flag fly

This is someone who has nothing important to say.

He was nothing special on guitar, just chording and strumming. When he first became famous, as a member of the Byrds, he did not yet know how to play it. They had to use studio musicians. He first tried the bass, but found it too difficult. 

He fancied himself a producer, but did a famously bad job producing Joni Mitchell’s and Leonard Cohen’s first albums. Cohen had to re-record it all.

He was great at singing harmony. That’s what everyone credits him with. And I love vocal harmony; but even so, his harmonies do not do anything for me. Although he was fine at hitting the notes, and perhaps working out a counterpoint, there was no special quality to his voice. He seemed to me to have only a simple strategy: go high.

So why did he go so much farther than so many starving musicians with more to say?

To be fair, other musicians I respect do praise him. Brian Wilson. Steve Stills. Neil Young was prepared to perform with him. So was Roger McGuinn, for a few years. 

I hear he was always a source of really good dope. That might explain it.

Being a rich kid might have helped there.

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

Listing of Churches Arttacked in Canada Since the "Unmarked Mass Graves" Hoax

 

From True North.

Heartbreaking.

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