Anyone out there good at the Bible?

I have a couple of questions you might be able to help with.

Is there any indication, (genealogies, etc) how long Adam and Eve were in the Garden before the fall? Are there any reliable scholars (ie. saints) who have written about the state of man before the fall? Thomas, I think, right?

Apart from the Protestant fundies and creationists, are there any Catholic scholars who have thought about the time frame for the existence of the world? When it all happened?

I ask because I was discussing with someone on email the theories being put forward by some rather interesting, and rather odd, Egyptologists who say that the pyramids and the sphinx and temples built in the time of the Old Kingdom were in fact a great deal older than the academic consensus would have us believe. Someone has said, for example, that there is irrefutable evidence of water erosion on the base of the Sphinx, the sort that could only be made by many hundreds of years of heavy rain. Well, the Sphinx is in a desert... no rain. At least not for a very long time. Much longer than academia thinks is possible. But there it is.

There were lots of other things this person told me that I didn't read the details of much, but sounded damned interesting. Things about astronomy, the placement of temples to look at star patterns that are no longer in the right place. Meaning, the temples have been there so long that the star patterns they were built to map have shifted in the sky (or the world shifted under them, I guess is more accurate). Meaning the temples were built a hell of a lot longer ago than, again, academia wants us to think.

Another thing was the incredible tale, which is the academic consensus, that the pyramids were built with no tools more complex than rocks, copper tools and plumblines. Like they made millions of huge stone blocks, hauled them up the side of a man-made mountain, all within 20 years. According to modern engineers, we would have a hard time doing it in that time now, with our modern stone-cutting techniques and heavy cranes. But we're supposed to believe they did it with stone mallets and hemp ropes?

I went through my Egypt phase at about eight, the usual time, and never heard anything about this. I vaguely knew that the temples lined up with the sun rise at the equinoxes, and that some of them had something to do with astronomy. But these guys are saying that they are complex pieces of, essentially, stone machinery, technology, and that the Egyptians were way past stone tools by the time they were built, which was way before anyone thinks. Someone said just after the last ice age.

The trouble is that the people making these claims then go off all wild and wiggy about mystical energies and stuff, and totally lose all credibility (to me, anyway), but it's incredibly interesting nonetheless. And even if we don't think that the planet was once ruled by a race of super-smart space hippies, or giant-headed warring Nephilim from Planet Nibiru, some of the things they said about the age and mathematical complexity of the temples and pyramids, certainly sound plausible to this unschooled ear.

Now, I'm not up much on paleoanthropology other than the stuff I read as kid in National Geographic, but I have had the impression, from other things, that the current academic consensus actually kind of blows. I know that it does on a variety of other scientific things (pregnancy starts at implantation because we damn well say it does!) and the arrogance of the materialist Darwinians does not match the rigor of their arguments. We're just supposed to believe it because they say.

Not being a fundamentalist protestant, or still less a young earth creationist, or a biblical literalist, I don't have a pressing need to prove that the world is only 4000 years old, according to the genealogies in the old testament. So I wanted to consult the more reliable sources. What do Catholic biblical scholars, especially the ones, as Philip said, whose names start with an S, say about the time scale?

And the millions of years the world is supposed to have been capable of sustaining life is a really, really long time. If civilisation has only existed since the times of Çatalhöyük and the neolithic and chalcolithic, how do we explain a thing like Gobekli Tepe? a large stone temple complex built during what is supposed to be the paleolithic, predating pottery, metallurgy, writing, the wheel, agriculture and animal husbandry?

I've read a few books recently, not by gnostic Egyptologists, but by perfectly respectable archeologists and geologists, that suggest human civilisation is not only far older than we thought, but is actually cyclical, that is, that not just individual civilisations like the Egyptians, but the whole human endeavour of civilisation itself, everywhere, comes and goes. That we go through periods of civilisation and primitive tribal societies, every few tens of thousands of years.

So, anyone have any idea how this idea could be reconciled with the biblical accounts of the creation? (I mean anyone sensible, that is, neither a Protestant fundamentalist, a young earth creationist or a dedicated materialist Darwinian).

I don't know what relevance it has for us now, what it has to do with any of our pressing problems, but wouldn't it be cool to think that there were ancient civilisations running around building flying pyramids before the ice age?

And isn't it just a bit of a modern conceit the idea that history is a natural progression from primitive to sophisticated societies? That we're doing nothing but get better, taller, smarter and more sophisticated? That it could never ever go the other way? Or be in any way cyclical? The modern historical theory of uninterrupted progress is bollocks on the face of it. We've seen societies decay, morally, economically, even technologically. They go up; they go down. Peoples learn things and forget things collectively. Technology waxes and wanes.

Ours certainly is. It's an observable fact that a large portion of the manufactured goods available today are less useful, less enduring and less functional than the same things as they were produced 50 years ago. Right now, for example, I would not buy a new domestic sewing machine. They're crap. I'll regret to my dying day that I didn't manage to retain my mother's sewing machine, made of metal, with beautifully machined parts, weighing about a half a ton, that was never, ever going to break down. We might have fancier technologies, cell phones, but can you drop one and have it still work? Is it going to last 70 years? Or will it die if you splash your latte on it? The 1937 bakelite rotary dial phone in my room still works just fine, thanks.

I have no doubt whatever that the accounts in Genesis are true. That God made the universe out of nothing, made the earth for the animals, plants and man to live on, that we had two genetic parents who transgressed and undid their original state of primal grace, were taught to fend for themselves in a transformed creation after the Fall. I've got no problem at all with any of that. But I would like some thoughts of scholars on the exact when. How long ago are we talking about.



~

What do you do when you're sick?

Watch nature shows on TV.

Durrrr...

Or in this case on YouTube.


Cool BBC documentary on recent discoveries about Archimedes.

Was suddenly violently ill last night. Started vomiting at ten pm and was up all night. I think it was something I et. After my stomach had finished panicking, I commented on FB that having survived C, one tends to think of one's self as indestructible and impervious to all lesser illness or injury. It was cancer after all, and was going to kill you, and instead, you killed it. You feel ready after that to take up grizzly wrestling as a hobby, and you tend to forget that things like flu and food poisoning can still happen to you.

Fortunately, being up all night has lately become something of a habit/strategy to deal with the horrific late Italian summer heat, so I'm not as badly off as I would have been otherwise. Tummy still pretty delicate though, and not exactly bubbling over with energy. So it's a good day to lie around, sketch Winnie, mess about with my new set of watercolour pencils and watch nature shows.

It reminds me of when I was a kid and would start spontaneously vomiting the night before school out of sheer panic at the thought of the next day. I hated school in the 2nd grade more violently and psychotically than I did at any other time. It was probably due to the shock of being back in Canada, among the North American child-savages and teacher-sadists that were such a contrast to the relatively civilised English variants I'd known up to then.

I will never forget the name of my 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Lakowski, who was one of that wretched breed of creature that gets into teaching specifically to have a room full of helpless test subjects on whom to act out her most treasured vengeance fantasies. Her favourite teaching technique was a gentle combination of screaming insanely and humiliation and her cruelty was matched only by her smarmy, treacly sweetness in the presence of parents.

I had been rather sheltered up to that point, (it was still decades before the English school system had rocketed to the bottom of that ol' slippery slope) and the kids I'd known up to then, while not exactly friendly towards me, were at least not encouraged to be bullies. It was something I'd never experienced before. Eventually, my rather hapless mother, not knowing what to do with this kid who was getting more and more terrorised by school, decided that a less structured, more "free and open" environment was the answer. Unfortunately, the structure they threw out at the hippie "free school" was things like classrooms and instruction.

Anyway, suffice to say, I spent a lot of time at home sipping chicken broth and watching PBS.



~

Mysterium Iniquitatis

Why do we sin?

Some years ago, I went with a friend to the now-annual St. Michael's college booksale at the University of Toronto. There was a small fee to get in for non-students, and one passed a table set up to collect these at the door. The lady manning the table asked me, "Student?" I rather glibly responded, "I'm a student of human evil, will that do?" She thought I was joking.

I had, by that time, been working in various capacities in the pro-life movement for about six years (it's just coming up to ten now), and I had realised some time before that a great deal of the appeal of this sort of work was my personal fascination with the mystery of human evil. Why do people do what they know is wrong? Why do they persist in holding opinions that are contrary, not only to the moral law, but observable reality? I could not accept the idea that they do so because of the reward of iniquity. The passing pleasure of the moment.

Obviously the most common sins, and the most interesting to us postmoderns, are sexual sins, the 'pelvic issues'. A brief perusal of the history of films will give an idea of just how sex-obsessed we have become in the last 40 years or so. We are inundated with sexual imagery of an explicitness unimaginable to our immediate predecessors, that invade even the most innocent pastimes, just by riding a bus or opening a cooking magazine.

Our public institutions are increasingly dedicated to the pursuit of what is now being called "pansexualism", in which it is regarded as the highest good to ensure the license to insert our parts into whatever orifice in whatever object we happen to fancy. We have whole ranges of products to help us pass the blessings of this new philosophy on to our children at the earliest possible age.

It certainly seems that sexual sins, ever-popular though they may be, are taking up more of our attention than they ever have. Even given that these sins are connected to the strongest biological drive, it seems implausible to me that we would continue to pursue them, even at the possible cost of catching a decidedly nasty, incurable and fatal disease.

C.S. Lewis once compared the sexual obsession of our times, (and he was writing in the '50s) with a similar obsession over food. What if, he postulated, there were commercial establishments where people could pay a fee to watch a full turkey dinner, with all possible fixings, slowly unveiled on a stage? Wouldn't that seem a little odd? Why then doesn't this other thing strike us as similarly odd?

The moral law, biology and common sense teach us that sex is for making babies, and that this activity, for the good of everyone involved, is best carried out within the confines of a stable marriage. It used to go without saying that we all knew what "marriage" meant. What it is for, etc. The fact that sex, and by extension marriage, are designed to create a situation ideal for making and teaching other people is precisely what elevates the sex drive above the need for food. The opposite of marriage and family life, is not singleness, it is not the sexual license to which our entire civilisation has become addicted. The opposite of marriage, childrearing and stable family life is murder. In our case, the wholesale destruction of family life has required, and been replaced by the institution of systematic, government-assisted mass-murder on a simply indescribable scale. If we don't have one, we must have the other.

The first builds up human life. When a man and a woman are joined in marriage, they become "one flesh". One person. I remember Peter Kreeft once pointed out that divorce is a form of suicide because by divorce you kill this two-made-one. The legalisation of divorce has been the first legalisation of assisted suicide. I have long held that the disaster that no sane person can any longer deny we have made of our society started not, as many Catholic believe, with the dissemination of artificial contraceptives, but with the legalisation of divorce.

So much is obvious. But we are in the odd situation where we have to say it out loud. It is not something that anyone seems to remember. The natural is not 'natural' to us any more.

But even the slowest among us, even the most brainwashed and most morally damaged, can, in a moment of reflection, tell at least that the threat of a deadly disease should constitute some kind of check on behaviour. Even if it is only to wear a bit of rubber.

Why then persist?

Why do we sin? And sin to the point of death?

Why, when the Pope, for example, suggests in the mildest possible terms, that it is better to refrain, does he meet with howls of rage that would make a demon blush?

When I started this little reflection, I had a bar of chocolate on my desk. It is now entirely gone. I et it.

I was not feeling terribly well, not having had much in the way of dinner, nor lunch. And it was not the first bar of chocolate I had eaten. I bought two of them, for some reason, and had carried the second one around in my pocket. When I got back to the office, the second bar of chocolate remained in my coat pocket. (The first one disappeared in the first ten minutes after purchase.)

But, as I was writing this, even though I didn't really want it, even though I knew it would make my tummy feel nothing but worse, even though the pleasure on the tongue of dark chocolate and toasted hazelnuts was soon to be as if it had never been, with a deliberate will, I pulled it out of my pocket, opened it and ate the whole thing.

And it hasn't made me feel any better. It did precisely what I knew it was going to do. It has made me feel slightly ill and wishing I had eaten nearly anything else. Or nothing.

Why did I eat it?

Mysterium Iniquitatis.

What do you think of when you see this photo?

I went to Chester today for my monthly run around the used book shops. One of the things I like about Chester (apart from leaving it) is the little old ladies. They are of a breed that I had thought extinct. The kind I used to see a lot of when growing up in Victoria. None of them wear white gloves and flowered hats (that breed has definitely moved on, but I remember them very fondly), but they are still wearing their pleated tweed and plaid skirts, cardies, white blouses buttoned up to the neck, sensible brown shoes. In winter they've got their headscarves.

I like to listen to them chatting with each other while we wait for the bus. It makes me sad to think that some day soon, they're going to be gone, that breed who were born before the war. The ones who raised me and taught me which fork to use. They're going to be replaced soon with the people who will possibly make the worst generation of little old ladies in human history.

Next time, when I've had a moment to think about it, I'll take my camera and take some photos. You'll know exactly the kind I mean. I find I'm mourning for them already, even though they are still here.

I look at them, and I find that more than anything I want their world back.

I don't know much about American politics,

so correct me if I've got it wrong.

A while ago, I joined a facebook group (I still don't understand what facebook is for, still less facebook groups, still...) called something like "One Million Against Hillary" (Clinton, that is. I'm not getting self-destructive.) Then I joined another one called "We don't like Obama". Ok, I thought. They're both dangerous leftists, so, whatever.

But then I thought, hang on. What if everybody just doesn't vote for either of them? What if the duelling facebook camps just cancel each other out and they both lose? Does that mean the third guy gets to run for president for the Dems? Or is it that the whole president election just gets canceled and it automatically goes to the Republican guy (whoever he is) in the absence of anyone running against him?

Honestly, with all the expense they all go to for their years and tedious long years of campaigning through all this Byzantine "primaries" business, you'd think they'd get fed up and just go back to the sensible British Parliamentary system. I think I have sussed out why the voter turnout is so bad in the US. By the time you get to the voting part, everyone has been bored into a coma by the ten or fifteen years worth of lead-up.

O Fishy Fishy

Is fish on Friday, or in my case, fish pie with added shrimps, still pentitential if you really like fish?

Never really got how fish could be somehow "worse" than meat. I like both with equal enthusiasm...in the case of shellfish, slightly more, in fact.

I suppose I could try an outright fast on Fridays instead, but it's just that...well...I get really hungry, and then my brain goes all wobbly and I can't write and my editors get mad at me because my copy is also wobbly and then I come back here and (in the absence of children) have to take it out on you guys...

and nobody wins.

Zombies

Just sent the following note to Steve.

Last night was a big zombie night around here.

I dreamed that I was back in some big city (which I must say is far fetched; I came to Tattenhall specifically to avoid the zombies) with a few friends after The End and we were holed up...like Chuck, in a fortified house, but, naturally, zombies being fairly clever for the undead, they got in and we fled. We took a train "south" and ended up in California somewhere where we found you organising the survivors into an army of sorts. I thought it was odd that you were in California and that I'd recognized you since I remembered that we'd never met (but not, apparently, that I no longer live in North America). I wanted to join your army but you said I had to be in charge of the girly stuff and wouldn't give me a gun.

Well, you were sorry about it later when the zombies staged an ambush...heh. so there. There was some kind of argument, in the midst of this, about the proper way to iron chasubles and I recall that we were somewhat miffed that, although we had a priest with us who would say Mass, there were nothing but ugly N.O. vestments around. The zombies didn't care for the Traditional Mass, I suppose.

When I woke up, I remarked to the cat that zombies can be fun but I would rather fight them in Britain. They can have California, as far as I'm concerned, since they more or less already have it now.

...and no, I don't normally dream about other bloggers, but I do dream quite often about zombies. As does everyone, I guess.

What's Cool?

Quite a while ago now, we were having a discussion on this blog (or one of its earlier incarnations, I can't remember) about the notion of "cool" and whether it was related in any way to any of the virtues.

Well, since the Big Important Issues of God, Man and the Meaning of Life no longer really hold my attention, I'm not all that keen to reopen the debate on virtue and cool, but I was just "rickrolled" by a friend of mine. I didn't get the joke, of course, and having been enlightened, responded that I have an excuse, being that I am famously unhip. I'm not cool. I'm too old to be cool.

But it made me think for a moment again about "cool" as a concept. Rick Astley was not cool among my friends in the 80's. We knew that the synth-pop genre was insipid. Things that are insipid cannot be cool. (Except for Flock of Seagulls, who, being insipid synth-pop, weren't cool, but I loved them anyway.)

I think there may be a clew here as to why the whole burlap-banner/guitar n'bongo/dancing nun liturgical movement never caught on and is (tbtg) dying out with the Boomers. It was insipid, for one thing. But it also had that other Kill o' Zap anti-cool landmine effect: it had been started in the 50's by then-middle-aged people who wanted to be seen by younger people (our parents) as "cool and withit". Well, now those middle aged people who started it all have died off, and the "young people" they preached to are now the greying hipsters still trying to sell peacelovegroovy to the crowd and wondering why the kids are so uncool.

What they don't seem to realise is that the wrinkly grey haired people they look at every morning in the mirror, are themselves and they are the ones who now look ridiculous dressed up in tie-dyed chasubles. They've become the one thing all cool hip teenagers most fear and despise: old people dancing to rock and roll.

What did I think was cool?



That'll show you how old I am.

Mood: worried

The pollen count must be up or something but in the last day or so, I've been plagued with a vague sense of free-floating anxiety about nothing in particular.

If I focus, I find I'm worried about:

the bees;

Peak Oil;

being thrown in jail for being a wildly politically incorrect Christian;

rising food prices;

the possibility of the village post office being closed by the government;

my council tax bill (which is odd, because I just paid up in full);

the fact that there was nowhere to go for Triduum that wouldn't send me into a blinding fury and make me want to raze the church to the ground with my bare hands (I realize now, I should have taken a day trip to Birmingham...next year);

the fact that Gordon Brown is going to be Prime Minister without-a-mandate for at least another year;

the fact that, despite his good looks and charm, moderate intelligence and vague good will, I really don't think David Cameron is up to the job;

the fact that despite all the evidence that it was a Really Bad Idea, women still have the vote;

the fact that the ancient system of English Common Law is being systematically replaced with a European/French/Napoleonic concept of law in which citizens only have the rights specifically detailed in legislation...all other activities and thoughts are outlawed by default;

the state of the trains;

the fact that every time I read a passage from Hansard, it becomes more obvious that the Honourable Members and Peers are totally barking mad;

the fact that Britain seems to have fallen under some kind of mass enchantment that seems to be equal parts pathological indifference to civic life, cultural amnesia, and rabid addiction to pleasures of appetite.

and the general nightmare horribleness of everything in the modern world.

Today I did a bit of shopping and the person I went with bought a little flannel for her grandson who likes Winnie the Pooh. But he doesn't like the Winnie of A.A. Milne and E. H. Shepard. He doesn't know about that Bear. He only knows Disney's nasty greedy Americanised cartoon. That's all you can get in shops if you look for Winnie stuff.

Is the real England in hiding? Is it living in caves in the hills waiting for rescue?

"Narnia was a sad country. Taxes were high, laws were harsh and Miraz was a tyrant."

I've always wondered

Does anyone know the answer to this one? Has it been discussed or addressed in the primary sources?

How does Superman shave?

The Embarrassing Soul

So, I've got to do a little chore, related to something that really has nothing to do with anything else, neither blogging, nor work, nor friends nor family. I've got to do it, and I won't say why, but I'm finding it surprisingly difficult.

I have to make a list of two categories of things: things I like, and things I don't like. It's quite broad, there are no subcategories and no limits. They can include anything that can be described using a noun. The only stipulation is that the list has to be truthful. It has to be a list of things I actually like and dislike, not of things I think I ought to like and dislike.

That was the tricky part, the part I didn't quite understand when I agreed to do it.

Maybe part of the problem is that I find, now that I think about it, that I seem to like quite a few things that I think I ought not to like and I'm embarrassed slightly. Smoking, for example. And cheesy sci-fi TV. Admittedly, these aren't exactly soul-killing vices, but they seem to be things that I think I should not like someone I liked to like, if you see what I mean. But at the same time, I find that in actual practice, most of the people I know who like, for example, smoking and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are the people I actually like the best. Of course, there are plenty of things that fall into the category of perfectly respectable preferences; I actually do happen to like sacred polyphony, for example. Quite a lot. But at the same time, I am very fond of Grunge.

One likes to think of oneself as a noble soul, with lots of high-minded things going on between the ears. Sadly, I find I'm not only a member of the human species, but a child of my time and place. Yes, I was raised on classical music on the CBC, but was also very fond of a Saturday morning spent in front of the TV with a bowl of Fruit Loops and Speed Racer. Sure, I read Betjeman, and know the names of the other Metaphysical poets, but I also know all the words to the Gilligan's Island theme song and that knowledge will probably be the last to go.

ooo...

I've just had a thought, maybe this makes me "complex". (Sure, keep telling yourself that; it worked so well for Sartre.)

I have read over and over some variation on the line, "God knows you better than you know yourself". Of course, we all would like to think it is not true, that we are full up to the nostrils with self-knowledge and insight into our own character, but this little task that looked so simple, seems to prove the truth of that rather irritating spiritual axiom.

I read somewhere, Peter Kreeft's book on the afterlife I think, that a great deal of the pain of purgatory is going to be the experience of finally knowing ourselves completely, in the way that God knows us and knowing exactly how we had failed in life to reach what we ought to have been. It will be the perfectly clear mirror from which we won't be allowed to flinch.

I can see how that might be uncomfortable.

Discord

What if we lived in a world that did not quite work properly? Where human thought was dulled and effort subtly thwarted by clumsiness, carelessness and inattention?

What if we lived in a world in which no music was true, in which every singer was tone deaf and sang slightly off key, every instrument in every orchestra was out of tune with all the others and played slightly out of time, every bird sang a slightly different note from all the other members of its species?

Can you imagine a world in which we spoke but only understood one word in five that was spoken to us? What if we could only communicate one concept in five that comes into our heads?

What if all the buildings in the world were built slightly out of true plumb? If walls of houses did not quite meet each other at the corners?

Life as fallen man is like this and we cannot know since we've only ever known this.

What must it have been like for unfallen man?

French Nuns

These glorious Benedictine nuns have recently had a bad fire that destroyed their chapel.

People frequently, and rather annoyingly, refuse to believe that I know no French. For some reason, when I say, "I don't speak or understand French" they somehow think I have said, "My French isn't all that good." or "I'd have trouble following a lecture in metaphysics or macroeconomics in French." People usually respond to my assertion with weird non-sequiturs like, "Yeah, I know what you mean. The last time I was in Bordeaux, I had a terrible time keeping up with the evening news."

No, what I said was what I mean. I don't understand why it is so hard to accept. My editor keeps sending me things to do in French. And when I send them back asking for the English version he says the same thing, "But do you mean you don't know any French?!" as if it is the first time he has ever heard the idea. Every time!

I had a very nice, very distinguished French diplomat once tell me that I ought to go to Europe and do work with the EU. I told him I didn't know any French, and he said, "Why do you keep saying you don't know French?" Well, because it's true?

I have never understood a word of Canadian French television. I can't make sense of the instructions on a soup can label.

When I lived in a Quebecois French-speaking community for three months, I was in a constant haze of misery, being totally shut out of every recreation, conversation, conference, instruction, written notice and the entire liturgy. It was the most isolating experience of my life. Horrible. And in the entire time, I never picked up a word.

What's so hard to get about "I don't know any French"?! Sheesh, it's perfectly plain English. What's so hard to understand? Why doesn't anyone ever believe me? Is it because I was raised in Canada? In the part of Canada I was raised in, there is more Cantonese spoken than French.

I recall my first French class in school, in the fifth grade. All the other kids had been through the whole system and had had French for four years. The French teacher asked me to conjugate a verb. I was horrified. She might as well have asked me to explain the General Theory of Relativity. I sat there in terror. She asked me again, and I managed to croak out "What does conjugate mean?" After the other monsters kids had finished laughing, she just shook her head in disgust and went on the the next kid. I spent the rest of my mandatory French instruction throughout my brief and interesting school career looking out the window and not handing in assignments.

(And no, I didn't learn what "conjugate" meant until I started studying Japanese in University and it seemed a perfectly straightforward concept. I never understood why that woman didn't just explain it to me and try to teach me something. This childhood trauma may be the reason I have generally disliked French people as long as I can remember...or it could have something to do with them being intolerably rude, don't know.)

When I hear French spoken, that early sense of panic starts to grip me by the throat and my heart starts pounding out my primitive flight response. But I fight it and my policy now is to try very hard to listen. I concentrate terribly hard and try to pick out individual words I might recognise. They are few. While I am concentrating on this mental word search, the entire lecture/homily/conversation is rushing past me like a box train full of chattering seagulls.

Anyway, this is why, when someone suggests to me that I might like to entertain the possibility of religious life in a French speaking community, I usually just give them a withering look and try not to cry.

They're pretty nice looking nuns though, don't you think?

I wonder what they are saying.

The Great Hunger

I just had a thought.

I wrote a while ago:

* That there has been so much manufacturing in the last 250 years, that there is virtually no need to buy new things. If everyone in this country were to give to a needy neigbour or a church charity all the bits and pieces of furniture, household goods and clothes and other permanent things they are not using, every man woman and child in this country would be amply provided for.

The above suggestion would ruin the economy.

but of course, it wouldn't.

People already have everything they need. They don't buy things they need, they buy things they covet. Or have been taught to covet.

Need is finite. It can be satisfied and the man who needed, freed from his needs is free to pursue the things in life proper to his state.

But we never get there now. What we have now is endless, and endlessly stoked desire and, therefore, endless emptiness. We are a perpetually hungry people, never filled, no matter how bloated we become.

We're the tribbles in the quatro-triticale. Starving to death in a compartment full of poisoned grain.

(hmmm...maybe SciFi is good for something after all...)

"This boy is ignorance and this girl is want..." they are the doom of man.

Anyone else ever do this?

when you're watching a film or a television programme, and someone is swimming under water without any breathing equipment, do you hold your breath to see if it could be done?

I always do.

I think someone should tell movie directors to keep this in mind.

An oldie but a goodie from...well, from an undisclosed location

(hey, don't whine! Recycling is all the rage, haven't you heard?)

Things I Don't Really Care About


Jeff has tagged me, (admittedly, only after I whined about never getting tagged) in his Thirty Things that Don't Bother Me meme.

I like memes. It's like Sharing, only less socially awkward. A few months ago, I was having a chat with Paul Tuns, the edior of the Interim, the "last conservative paper in Canada" (according to Conrad Black), and he (Paul, not Conrad) was telling me that he and Kathy Shaidle were doing a Ten Things I Don't Care About meme. I thought it was a cute idea and started a list of my own.

Strangely, I fizzled on it.

It's because, well... it's hard to think of stuff you don't really care about, because you don't really think much about things you don't think about...if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I told Jeff that thirty's a lot, especially for someone like me who's known to be a bit highly charged about quite a few things, but I'll have a go. (Some of these are a bit Canadian, so bear with, if you don't live above the 49th.)

Things that don't really bother me:

1. The Vocations Crisis - there isn't one.

2. Canada - see note above re: vocations crisis.

3. Global Warming - warmer winters? longer summers? sounds pretty good to a Canuckistani.

4. Women's Rights - actually I do care about this, it's just that I think we should have fewer of them.

5. Canadian Politics - tough to care about the politics of something that doesn't really exist.

6. The Canadian Catholic Church - as note one above.

7. Liturgical Abuses in the Novus Ordo - Can't corrupt something that is itself a corruption.

8. Genetically Modified Foods - humans have been genetically modifying the food they grow for ten thousand years. Too late to worry about it now.

9. The Sex Abuse Scandal - Why is anyone surprised by this? Fags (that's poofs, not cigarettes)(1) do what fags do; if you put a bunch of yippity-skip nancy-boys into the priesthood, that's what they will do.

10. The Environment - nature is stronger than us. Oxford says: "Environment, n. Surrounding; surrounding objects, region, or circumstances." sounds like the sort of thing that will be there no matter what.

11. Islam - it's a false religion. Truth always wins...in the end.

12. Racism - it's been with us a long time; not going away soon.

13. the Role of the Laity - pay, pray and obey gives us plenty to do.

14. the Modern Dissolution of the Religious Orders - no point saving a house that's already riddled with termites. The sooner it goes down, the less threat it poses to the neighbourhood. With the anti-nuns: the sooner they die off, the sooner we get their stuff.

15. the Motu Proprio - if it comes before the Parousia, we're ahead, I figure. (Hey! It came! But you wouldn't know it in Ynglonde.)

16. University Dropouts - a sign of mental health if you ask me.

17. Catholics who don't want to move and shake - also disparagingly called 'pew-sitters.' We need more non-activist Catholics. People got enough to think about without obsessing over encyclicals.

18. Ladies who don't want to work/go into politics - Kittens and embroidery, as well as gardening, homeschooling, sewing, pie-making, and watercolour landscape painting are all under-represented in the unpaid labour market.

19. Modern "Art" - the only people who pay for it are corporations and it is only seen in art galleries that only stupid people go to. What's the loss? Beauty is like truth and nature; they're stronger than our stupidity and tend to make comebacks.

20. Gay Rights/Feminism/Demographic Implosion - a problem that is naturally taking care of itself without me having to lift a finger.

21. The Pandas - (or cute endangered species of your choice)- people don't want to save the pandas; they want to keep feeling the Cuteness Thrill and worry they will lose it when the cute animals go away. Plenty of cute furry animals around to trigger the response. Besides, any animal that refuses to reproduce and only eats one kind of food deserves to get voted off the genetic island.

22. The Coming Persecution of the Last of the Faithful Catholics - can't think of an easier way to go to heaven than at the point of a commie rifle. cf. Miguel Pro.

23. Anglicanism - I write a lot about the 'coming Anglican schism'. The phrase almost always makes me giggle.

(1) So hard to write in two sets of colloquialisms.