Barrel Strength

Whingeing Seventies rock star Sir Elton John announces to the world that Jesus Christ was a “super-intelligent gay man“.

And the increasingly awful Church of England does little to refute this fabulous theologian:

A spokesman for the Church of England said: “Sir Elton’s reflection that Jesus calls us all to love and forgive is one shared by all Christians.”

“But insights into aspects of the historic person of Jesus are perhaps best left to the academics,” he added.

Fittingly, at one point in the interview with that bastion of religious reflection, Parade Magazine, Sir Elton claims that “fame attracts lunatics”.

No argument here.

Conducted by Bruce Bawer, author of “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within“:

http://www.rights.no/publisher/publisher.asp?id=59&tekstid=3259

No actually I don’t. I hate his doctrines. David Warren is a tower of intellectual strength and and integrity. On many issues, he represents a voice of long-term sanity, though as a Holy Fool he aggravates many.

My problem with David Warren is that he is not of our species, and does not know it. Consequently on the subject of sex he preaches to some other class of being not commonly found among humans – those who feel no lust. He may share human DNA; but I can scarcely believe it from the way he talks.

In this week’s sermon, he writes:

“A woman, who is not the victim of a rape, has always had that right; and even my Catholic Church recognizes a method of contraception that is quite infallible. Gentle reader may guess what that is. And while it is only a rule of thumb, “no sex without babies, and no babies without sex” does in fact provide adequate guidance for any conceivable life issue.”

How else can you account for his advice in a major newspaper, that the best course was “no babies without sex, no sex without babies”. Wilful perversity? Possibly, but not on this issue.

This is not Roman Catholicism, David. It is just the voice of a man in whose veins no testosterone runs. I am not saying that you lack courage, for clearly you have profound moral convictions and have suffered greatly for them. I am saying that you have critical absence of the vital juices that make humans the most sexual of all species.

A man who explained his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism on the basis that the Anglican Church was getting too gay-friendly has some serious thinking to do about the nature of the priesthood of the Roman Church, the largest gay-owned and -operated institution in the world.

Warren continues:

“This moral injunction (no babies without sex, no sex without babies) is dismissed as “too simple.” Yet merely by trying to draw some alternative line, say between contraception and abortion, we have already found the means to become irretrievably lost. All moral injunctions are simple, and the sinful heart has always cried out for a little complexity.”

Warren continues in the long line of Catholics from Saint Paul and Saint Augustine forward, to find something inherently sinful about the human desire for sex, whether with oneself, or others, whether with the opposite sex, or one’s own.  One of the 39 articles of the Anglican religion, written in the 1540s,  expresses it thus.

 IX:…..”the lust of the flesh, called in Greek, phronea sarkos, (which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh), is not subject to the Law of God. And although there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized; yet the Apostle doth confess, that concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature of sin.

If lust be something not subject to the law of God, one asks how it is different from the production of bile or hemoglobin, or the production of neurotransmitters or snot, or any other bodily function. And if lust is subject to the will of God in the same way as other bodily functions and processes, one asks how or why it has the nature of sin.

Sex is how we got here. I mean more by sex than by how we were given birth. I mean sexual selection, how you chose your mate and how you were chosen, is the only means of evolution directed enough, intelligent enough, discriminating enough, to take us from furry-faced bipeds under the plains of Africa to listening to Mozart under northern stars, dining on food with cutlery and table cloths, in the space of 30,000 years. Read Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind for a more complete exposition of this argument. To place in sexual selection the burden of sin is a portion of traditional Christian doctrine that we have all walked away from, for many profound reasons.

All but David Warren and his lonely band of traditional Catholics. May God bless them and preserve them, for they have been made crazy. Our revenge shall be to outbreed them.

All the conceits of enviro-’watermelons’ and the simply awful United Church of Canada come together in one package:

Mardi Tindal, the newly elected moderator of the United Church of Canada, returned from last month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen with a deep malaise. Not a true clinical depression, but an anxious despair that reduced her to weeping.

[...]

“And I said, ‘Doug, I’m weeping for the millions of lives that have been lost as a result of what did and did not happen in Copenhagen,” Ms. Tindal said. “My experience was that I had a place to go with my tears and my lament … It’s an expression of pain for the world’s suffering.”

Climb down, madam, that cross isn’t a two-seater model!

I admit that I have lived a long time, and yet it seems like nothing until I talk to younger people, who do not remember a time before the Internet.

Recently I saw a photograph I took of my two eldest children, as teenagers, beside my then living parents. The season was March, the day sunny, everyone in sweaters but no coats or hats, and the field behind them still covered in snow, which might have lasted another week. It was 1995. My father, still black-haired at 83, was to live until 2000, five years later. He would be healthy for another two years, until a gentle decline. My mother is still alive, somewhat frailer than in the picture, but mentally still sharp at 91.

It struck me that that photo was 15 years old! I would have been 45 years old when I took it. Forty five is full middle age.  Wait! The realization how old I am only gets  worse.

I recently spoke to a group of 22 year-olds in fourth year university. It means the average person in that class was born in the last year of Reagan. Their infancy was in the regime of George Herbert Walker Bush, their childhood under Bill Clinton, their teen-age under George W. Bush the Younger.

These young people do not remember the Cuban Missile Crisis or the fall of Communism any more than we remember the coronation of George VI, which my mother remembers well, she then in her 18th year, passing down sandwiches to the equally young Bud Drury, later Pierre Trudeau’s minister for everything,  from her hotel window in London before the parade was to pass by.

I suppose if we had the privilege of asking our forebears, some would have remembered Armistice Day in 1918, and others would have remembered bells ringing to mark Trafalgar in 1805, and Waterloo ten years later.  Or the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, which solidified the claim of Protestants to the throne of England.  Or how Bach the elder used to forget his frustrations with the Lepizig town council by going into the organ loft at Thomaskirche to improvize for hours on the organ, and communicate as directlyas a man can with God. Or what Akhnaton said to his priests when he established worship of the one true Sun-God against the polytheism of Egypt. Or how one of our forefathers worked out the bow and arrow, or one of our foremothers who first brewed beer. God bless you, madam!

The next miracle, if you will forgive the word, is how my contemporaries are so much younger than 60-year-olds in my parents’ day. Sure, there were healthy looking parents at sixty and well-preserved people at seventy forty years ago in the year 1970, but they were exceptional. 

If it were not for the face in the mirror, I would not know I was getting older, and even now I suspect some Dorian Gray portrait may exist somewhere, doing the ageing for me, because I feel great!

As in the Academy awards, my thanks to the following list of people and forces:

• my parents, or giving birth to me
• the healthsystem, for dealing with my ailments, few though they be
• for the victors of World War II, for making the world safe for liberal democracy
• for the Cold Warriors, for keeping Communism contained
• for my guardian angel, for looking out for me
• for my children, for confirming me in my life’s choices
• for those who have loved me, for upholding me
• to the Creator of this Universe, for giving us all a place to live
• to my Saviour, for keeping me in mind.

Thanks to you all! I could not have done it without you! Thank you!

I am not a climate warning alarmist. As readers will know, I am an Islamic jihad alarmist. Our very occasional correspondent Oban and I dined last night.  The outline of the conversation goes as follows. I will leave it to Oban to correct the record.

It all started with listening to Iris Dement singing confessional protestant hymns. Her religion is a deeply personal encounter with Jesus. She sings in an accent so hillbilly it seems unchanged from when her ancestors left the lowlands of Scotland in the 1730s. She is an artist of surpassing power, and ranks with the best female artists we listen to, not excepting opera stars. This led us to a discussion of religion,and the difference between this highly personal encounter with Jesus religion and what Oban calls “state atheism”, namely, the Anglican Church.

Oban – Whenever you go into a real church, you see plaques listing the war dead on the wall. I don’t look at the cross. I look at the plaques commemorating the war dead. That is my religion. Real religion teaches you that you may be called upon to die in the defence of your country, for the maintenance of civilization.

Dalwhinnie – (accompanied by table pounding) – Oban, that is the most Tory thing I have heard in my life! Bravo! But clearly that is what religion is for those of us raised in institutional and establishment religion. But how are we going to deal with the Islamic thing, in that case, because according to them, any ten guys who haven’t been laid in six months have a right to wage war against the surrounding society? Not just go out and get drunk and puke in the streets, but to plant bombs on buses and kill lots of people.

Oban – I agree that this war-making tendency is a fact of Islamic life. But if they make war without the authority of the state, the result will be so disorganized that it is a recipe for societal failure. And indeed, their propensity to wage ceaseless war on all concerned is why they are so backward.

Dalwhinnie – Agreed. But, what if societal failure were a self-reinforcing state? What if a society could function at the Islamic dysfunctional level forever? I see no sign that Islamic societies are reforming out of their dysfunctionality after a thousand years of Islam. In fact the dysfunctionality seems to be intensifying.

Oban – The overwhelming attraction of Western society is that it gives vastly greater pleasure to its participants. At the basic level of sex, western men have more orgasms with better partners. Islam cannot offer this. All it can offer is repression.

Dalwhinnie – The attraction seems to be highly resistible. Children of Islamic immigrants tend to wall themselves off from the outer society more than their parents.

Oban – I think you are underestimating the huge and overwhelming attractiveness of Western society for all people. It is so much better than anything Islamic societies have developed for themselves. And if the young jihadists do become a problem, I think we can roll over and crush them.

Dalwhinnie – Nothing I have read about the invasion of Europe by Muslims, the increasing presence of no-go zones for police and firemen, the use of human rights law to prevent any free expression of distaste for Muslim social practices, the supine passivity of European political leadership, the use of welfare to support a stagnant population of slackers, the sexual self-isolation, the attacks upon European Christian women, suggest that there has been any change in Islamic behaviour. Any tens guys who feel pissed off have the right and duty to wage war against the surrounding infidels, and they do.

Oban – I think you underestimate the assimilating powers of western civilization. It is a much better offer.

____________________________

And that, folks, was what I can recall to tell you. Debate continued until it was time to go home. An excellent exchange was had.

Klavan: “Shame and guilt and self-hatred are universal.  Whether you chalk it up to original sin or to Oedipus or call it Jewish guilt or Catholic guilt or white guilt or black guilt, every single one of us knows he is not the person he was made to be.  There are honest ways to confront that.  You can kneel before God and pray for forgiveness and live in the joy of his love.  Or you can drink heavily and make sardonic remarks until you destroy everyone you care about and then keel over dead – that’s honest too. 

“But what a lot of people do is try to escape their sense of shame dishonestly by constructing elaborate moral frameworks that allow them to parade their virtue and their lavish repentance without any real inconvenience to themselves while simultaneously indulging in self-righteousness by condemning others for their impenitent evil. 

“That’s the bad version of religion – the sort of religion Jesus came to dismantle.  And that’s exactly the sort of religion leftism is:  an elaborate system for hiding shame behind a cheap mask of virtue. 

“That’s why they demonize any opposition.  To them, we’re not just disagreeing with them, we’re threatening to tear off the mask of their virtue and reveal them to themselves.  Which, without God or sufficient whiskey, would be unbearable.

Andrew Klavan is a screenwriter, crime novelist, and former atheist.

The article, published in today’s Globe and Mail, and derived from the Guardian, has to be read in the complete inverse of its intentions:

-the result looks likely to sully the country’s image abroad

-the vote represented a triumph for the far right Swiss People’s Party

-the vote also reflected an act of mass defiance of the national establishment

Well, what else would they say? That it was a triumph of the ordinary white Christian Swiss who says he wants to live in a white Christian country? And moreover, have a say on the direction of his own country’s basic nature? No, the Guardian could never say that. That would be….. wait a minute…. uh, racist!!

From an AP report:

“The nationalist Swiss People’s party (SPP) described minarets, the distinctive spires used in most countries for calls to prayer, as symbols of rising Muslim political and religious power that could eventually turn Switzerland into an Islamic nation.

“Muslims make up about 6% of Switzerland’s 7.5 million people, many of them refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Fewer than 13% practice their religion, the government says, and Swiss mosques do not broadcast the call to prayer outside their buildings.”

I seem to recall a Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, who  had publicly read an Islamic poem including the lines: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…”

  Maybe someone listened to him.

PS: It should be noted that Switzerland is a republic, not a disguised monarchy, and that voter initiatives are allowed.  That would explain the difference between Switzerland, say, and Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and so forth.

I have been reading high-minded rebuttals of the latest trendy atheists. In particular, Michael Novak’s “No One Sees God” is a fine engagement with the squadron of atheists who currently occupy mindshare.

But, tiring of my non-fiction diet of history, science, and religion, I found Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” in an attracive edition, and have been devouring it to the exclusion of the weightier tomes.

You may be of an age to recall the wonderful Brideshead Revisited television series of 1981 with Jeremy Irons, with the gorgeous settings and the great music by Geoffrey Burgon. There is also a new movie covering the same, which I have not yet seen. Like Dune, Brideshead will engender a fresh edition each generation. It is one of the great stories.

In the chapter, “Brideshead Deserted”, the hero Charles Ryder encounters Cordelia Flyte, younger sister of his alcoholic former friend Sebastian, while on his first commission as an architectural painter, painting the Brideshead London palace before it is torn down to make way for a block of flats. This is several years after Charles had his falling out with Lady Teresa Flyte over Sebastian’s hopeless drinking. Cordelia asks Charles to take her out to dinner. She is fifteen, quite ugly and very perceptive.

They are at the restaurant talking of the late Lady Flyte, who was disliked by members of her family in varying degrees. Who can fail to recall Lady Flyte’s [Clare Bloom's] cool and withering denunciation of Charles Ryder for having assisted Sebastian’s drunkenness be lending him a couple of pounds? “Callous wickedness”, she called it, in her cool, quiet voice.

So here they are years later as Cordelia scarfs down her first meal in a public restaurant, speaking of her late mother.

Read the rest…

I always thought we were, in Catholic eyes. A Jesuit tells his fellow conservative believing Catholics that we are not. Sheesh! What does it take?

Hats off and best wishes to the unpronouncable Deborah Gyapong (Japong?, Gyapong?) for this one).

The Reverend Father Oakes says:

“I do hereby conclude: When the Western Church fissiparated in the sixteen century, the Reformers took a portion of the essential patrimony of the Church with them, and they thereby left both the Roman Church and themselves the poorer for it.”

And further:
“All I can say is this: We live in strange times when I find greater doctrinal fellowship among many Protestants than I do among far too many Catholic theologians!”

To which I can add, welcome to the club, dude.

Rev. Oakes’ article is far more interesting than these teaser excerpts.