| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"" |
| Date: |
14 Jan 2005 09:16:42 PM |
| Object: |
In Praise of "Jesusland" |
In praise of 'Jesusland'
New Hampshire
As in previous years, Planned Parenthood has been selling greetings
cards for abortion proponents filled with seasonal cheer to send to
each other: 'Choice On Earth', they proclaim. I can just about
understand being a proponent of abortion; I find it harder to fathom
someone whose obsession with the subject extends to sending out holiday
cards on the theme. Especially as, insofar as the Christmas story is
relevant to this question, it's a season to reflect on the potential
of every new life.
Two thousand years ago, if a betrothed woman such as Mary became
pregnant by a man other than her intended, she was guilty of adultery
and liable to stoning. But Joseph, St Matthew tells us, 'being a just
man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put
her away privily' - i.e., a quiet divorce. Given the prevailing
social climate back then, had they had 'Choice On Earth' -
abortion on demand - Jesus would have been first in line for it.
There would have been no Christ, no Christmas, no New Testament, no
lines about 'peace on earth' for abortion fetishists to riff off
for their holiday slogan.
Scripturally derivative even in its repudiation thereof, 'Choice On
Earth' seems an apt summation of the muddled state of Christendom at
the dawn of its third millennium. These days we don't say
'Christendom', of course, except in an ironic way. We say 'the
Muslim world' all the time, without thinking - 'The Iraq invasion
enraged the entire Muslim world,' declares the Democrats' website.
The notion of a 'Muslim world' is acceptable to the progressive
mind. 'The Christian world' is a more problematic concept.
But it's still out there, just about, and 2004 was a good year for
Jesus. He had the big box-office smash of the past 12 months with The
Passion of The Christ, scorned by Hollywood but popularised by word of
mouth, or word of tongues. And, a couple of days after His man won the
US election, a couple of Democrat wags, in a widely disseminated
Internet cartoon, renamed a big swath of the North American continent
after Him - 'Jesusland', stretching across the vast southern
interior and pushing up along the Rockies to the 49th parallel. The
godless coastal fringes, meanwhile, were joined with Her Majesty's
Northern Dominion and rechristened (if you'll pardon the expression)
the United States of Canada, a fate I wouldn't wish even on
Democrats. And, while the thought of joining their own shrivelled
redoubts in a grand union with the biggest 'blue state' of all
evidently cheers them up, they may be overestimating the blueness of
the Great White North: large chunks of Alberta and the British Columbia
hinterland would be happy to sign up with the Bible-thumpers, if only
for the non-confiscatory tax rates. So Jesusland could well be even
larger than its disparagers suggest.
Jesusland isn't exactly Christendom: the latter evokes Rome, bishops,
cathedrals, bells, incense, oratorios; the former is evangelicals,
pastors, church suppers, 'WWJD' buttons ('What Would Jesus
Do?'), 'Christian rock'. Some Democrats in the beleaguered
fleshpots advocate accommodation with the God-fearing rednecks: for a
week or so after the election, Nancy Pelosi, the Dems' leader in the
House of Representatives, was quoting Scripture in every soundbite,
albeit the wimpy social-workerish bits. But most of her party has no
desire to go down the straight-and-narrow, even as a rhetorical feint:
the other day I found myself motoring along behind some Vermont
feminist whose faded 'I'm Pro-Choice and I Vote' bumper sticker
was now accompanied by another one demanding grumpily, 'Instead Of
Being Born Again, Why Not Grow Up?'
The Jesusland meme is so discombobulating to the secular elites of the
western world that within a week it had become the prism through which
they view every event in the great republic - even lousy movies. For
as the Independent's headline put it, 'Alexander the (Not So) Great
Fails To Conquer America's Homophobes'. I don't think you have to
be a homophobe to find Alexander a stinker; its stinker status does not
primarily derive from its mild gayness, so much as from Oliver
Stone's incoherent storytelling and a dull central performance by
some Irish bloke whose efforts at characterisation start and end with
bellowing every line. But, if the world's media want to conjure
visions of stump-toothed backwoods knuckle-draggers stomping out of the
Jesusland multiplex firing off verses from Leviticus as they demand a
full refund, why get in the way of their illusions? The Guardian's
Timothy Garton Ash, just back from a tour of America's blue states,
says that they're crying out for Europe's help: 'Hands need to be
joined across the sea in an old cause: the defence of the
Enlightenment,' he writes, and adopts as his rallying cry a subtle
modification of Le Monde's famous 12 September headline, 'We are
all blue Americans now'. Europeans need to ally with blue staters and
Canadians and so forth and draw a cordon bleu, as John Kerry would say,
around George W. Bush's Jesusland, throttling it in its manger.
Well, good luck with that. I doubt whether a Euro-blue-state alliance
is in any position to defend the Enlightenment. Even if one accepts
that the modern Euro-Canadian secular state is the rightful heir to the
Enlightenment, it would seem obvious that it's got a lot less
enlightened, at least in the sense of 'freeing from superstition'.
The ludicrous over-reaction by the elites to the US election results is
at least as superstitious and irrational as anything the Bible Belt
believes. And there's nothing very rational or scientific about
refusing to engage with your opponents' arguments and instead
dismissing them as mere 'phobias' - homophobia, Islamophobia,
Chiracophobia.... Whatever else may be said about the evangelicals,
they don't sneer 'theophobia' whenever they're criticised, even
though in that case the lame trope may be almost plausible - when it
comes to abnormal psychological fear of the unknown, blue staters'
theophobia is more pervasive than red staters' homophobia.
A year or two back, I attended a lunch for a minister from California
who was applying for a pastor's gig at a New Hampshire Congregational
church. My friend, the aptly named Faith, cut to the chase and asked
the minister whether she believed the Bible was the literal truth.
'Well,' she said, somewhat condescendingly, 'I believe these are
useful narratives that we tell each other.' Even if that's so, is
it helpful to give the game away? As it turned out, the minister was a
lesbian who'd been joined in what she called 'Holy Union' with
her partner back at their church in Berkeley, since when she'd become
an enthusiastic marrier of gay couples across the Bay area. Proclaiming
the Bible a series of 'useful narratives' is invariably a first
step towards proclaiming many of them useless - the relevant portions
of Romans, etc.
But if the Bible is merely a 'useful narrative', it's an
immaculately conceived one, beginning with the decision to root the
divinity of Christ in the miracle of His birth. The promise of new life
on earth prefigures the promise of new life in heaven. Once you cease
believing in the latter, the former soon follows. Steve Sailer pointed
out in the American Conservative the other week that George W. Bush won
25 of the 26 states with the highest fertility rate. On the other hand,
John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest. If I were a Democrat
looking 20 years down the road, I'd be very alarmed by this trend.
But then not many Democrats do look 20 years down the road: radical
secular individualism is a present-tense culture, in America as in
Europe. 'In the long run we are all dead,' as Keynes said. There
speaks a childless homosexual. Those Old Testament big begetters knew
better: a celestial afterlife is something we have to take on faith,
but our afterlife on earth is the children we beget and the children
they in turn beget. 'How many divisions has the Pope?' scoffed
Stalin. Demographically speaking, Jesusland has more divisions than
Eutopia. Pace Timothy Garton Ash, you can't defend the Enlightenment
if you're too enlightened to breed. Americans remain mystified about
one of the landmark events of this year: the terrorist bloodbath in
Madrid that changed the result of the country's election. Why, they
wonder on this side of the Atlantic, wouldn't the Spaniards stand
firm? But what's to stand firm for? To fight for king and country is
to fight for the future, and a nation with Spain's fertility rate -
1.1 children per couple or about half 'replacement rate' - has no
future.
In that sense, the Bible, beginning with God's injunction to go forth
and multiply, is a lot more rational than the allegedly rational types
at Planned Parenthood. I'm not an absolutist in these matters. I'm
a red stater when it comes to God and guns, but I like European
art-house movies where Juliette Binoche or Isabelle Huppert take their
kit off. It's a question of balance. And comparing Jesusland with
present-tense Eutopia, it seems obvious which is more out of whack.
What Timothy Garton Ash calls 'the Enlightenment' has degenerated
under its present trustees into a doomsday cult with all the
coerciveness of the old state religion and none of the eternal truths.
For example, for as long as I can remember, the pre-eminent
eco-doom-monger on Canadian TV has been a chap called David Suzuki,
who, in a poignant comment on the state of my country, recently made
the 'Top Ten Greatest Canadians Of All Time' list. A while back,
Suzuki wrote a column called 'We Are All Animals Here', beginning
as follows:
'The sign in the shopping mall said, "No animals allowed." As I
read it, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It reflected a
failure to admit or unwillingness to acknowledge our biological nature.
We are animals and have a taxonomic classification: Kingdom: Animalia;
Phylum: Chordata; Class: Mammalia; Order: Primates; Family: Hominidae;
Genus: Homo; Species: sapiens.
'Our reluctance to acknowledge our animal nature is indicated in our
attitude to other animals. If we call someone a worm, snake, pig,
chicken, mule or ape, it is an insult. Indeed, to accuse someone of
being a "wild animal" at a party is a terrible insult.'
But apparently not at his pad; Suzuki, even at a sober wine-and-cheese
do, is literally a party animal. This kind of standard ecoblather
certainly has animal qualities if only in the sense that it's
barking. Everyone knows what the sign in the mall means. It may be
distressing to Suzuki, but the world we live in is defined not by what
we have in common with worms, snakes and pigs, but by what separates
us. For the purposes of comparison, consider the Eighth Psalm:
'What is man, that thou art mindful of him...? For thou hast made him
a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and
honour. Thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of thy
hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen,
yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of
the sea.'
Now you can say that's a lot of Judaeo-Christian hooey. But the
Psalmist, regardless of whether he got it from God or winged it off the
top of his head, has characterised the reality of our existence better
than the environmentalists and scientists. The Eighth Psalm describes
the central fact of our world - our dominion over the sheep and oxen,
yea, and all the party animals. It was a lot less plausible when it was
written, when man's domain stretched barely to the horizon, when
ravenous beasts lurked in the undergrowth, when the oceans were
uncharted and the maps dribbled away with the words 'Here be
dragons...'. But, over the millennia, the Eighth Psalm has held up,
which is more than you can say for the average 1970s bestseller
predicting the oil would run out by 1998 and the Maldives would be
obliterated by global warming.
It's easy, in an otherwise wholly secular West, to mock the
religiosity of Jesusland. But if eternal salvation remains unproved,
the suspension of disbelief required of Eutopian secularists grows
daily. If you were one of those 'redneck Christian fundamentalists'
the world's media are always warning about, you might think the
Continent's in for what looks awfully like the Four Horsemen of the
Euro-Apocalypse: Famine - the end of the lavishly funded statist good
times; Death - the self-extinction of European races too selfish to
breed; War - the decline into bloody civil unrest that these economic
and demographic factors will bring; and Conquest - the recolonisation
of Europe by Islam.
But it goes without saying that Europeans are far too rational and
enlightened to believe in such outmoded notions as apocalyptic
equestrians. If there is 'choice on earth', I'll bet on
Jesusland. Happy holidays.
-----------------
BM
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| User: "Enkidu" |
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| Title: Re: In Praise of "Jesusland" |
14 Jan 2005 11:05:19 PM |
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wrote in news:1105737402.475168.189600
@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
In praise of 'Jesusland'
New Hampshire
As in previous years, Planned Parenthood has been selling greetings
cards for abortion proponents filled with seasonal cheer to send to
each other: 'Choice On Earth', they proclaim. I can just about
understand being a proponent of abortion; I find it harder to fathom
someone whose obsession with the subject extends to sending out holiday
cards on the theme.
I find it hard to fathom the sending of cards celebrating your favorite
myth. Should UFO nuts send out "Area 51" and "Roswell" cards like
Christians send out Christmas cards? How about "Loch Ness" cards?
--
Enkidu AA# 2165
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then where does evil come from?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
Epicurus 341-270 B.C.E.
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| User: "sanguinevikings" |
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| Title: Re: In Praise of "Jesusland" |
14 Jan 2005 09:53:35 PM |
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wrote:
In praise of 'Jesusland'
Two thousand years ago, if a betrothed woman such as Mary became
pregnant by a man other than her intended, she was guilty of adultery
and liable to stoning. But Joseph, St Matthew tells us, 'being a just
man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put
her away privily' - i.e., a quiet divorce. Given the prevailing
social climate back then, had they had 'Choice On Earth' -
abortion on demand - Jesus would have been first in line for it.
There would have been no Christ, no Christmas, no New Testament, no
lines about 'peace on earth' for abortion fetishists to riff off
for their holiday slogan.
<snip>
Get me a time machine and 4 Ogestrel. NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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| User: "Al Klein" |
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| Title: Re: In Praise of "Jesusland" |
15 Jan 2005 02:21:08 AM |
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On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 21:53:35 +0000, sanguinevikings <spam@spam.not>
said in alt.atheism:
[piggybacking]
cherniymonakh@hotmail.com wrote:
In praise of 'Jesusland'
her away privily' - i.e., a quiet divorce. Given the prevailing
social climate back then, had they had 'Choice On Earth' -
abortion on demand
Abortion was available from at least 30,000 years ago until fairly
recent times. There were many techniques known 2,000 years ago.
--
"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he
unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."
-- Bertrand Russell.
(random sig, produced by SigChanger)
rukbat at verizon dot net
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