(Above: Janus, found here).
Things have reached a truly dire nadir at The Punch.
Clearly those willing to scribble for free over the holiday break can only be found at the bottom of the barrel, and so we're offered up Steve Kryger's What do you think happens when we die?, which reminded me of the days when Christian Union cadres used to stalk the campus looking for converts and a bible reading. (And what do you know, it seems CUs still haunt the hallowed halls).
You could invariably pick them by dress and hair and speech, and a fondness for C. S. Lewis, and the books of Narnia, and a rather droobish devotion to the bible (in contrast to the Catholics, who had a pagan devotion to drink and sex).
Invariably when a CU got around to the pitch, they always had a revelatory anecdote to hand which could be tied back to the need to repent, convert or suffer eternal damnation.
So it is with Kryger. He takes a ride with a Muslim cab driver, and asks him where he'll be after he's taken his last breath, and is pleased when the cabbie answers it'll probably be heaven.
Well there's a wrong note for starters. Kryger should have admonished him straight away - seeing he's a Muslim, it's the duty of any Christian to advise the man that he's off to eternal hellfire for worshipping the right god in totally the wrong way, using a perfidious false messenger, and failing to understand that there's only one way to eternal bliss, and that via Christ.
Perhaps the taxi driver gets off lightly all the same because it seems Kryger persecutes everyone he meets by asking them how ready they are to meet their maker, as if studying for a bit part in the first season of Deadwood. Naturally he makes use of the simple-minded metaphors beloved of CU types, this time driving and doughnuts:
Sure, you can use your imagination and hope that there’s a Krispy Kreme store selling delicious jam-filled, dentist-delighting donuts, but that store won’t be there just because you want it to be. It’s either there, or it’s not. And so surely, before you come around the corner, you want to be sure of what will be there - so you can prepare yourself appropriately.
Sure, spend your life preparing for death. Now there's a handy routine for wasting a life, and getting to the end in a state of paranoid, jumbled fear.
If it’s a donut store, you want to prepare yourself by not having lunch. If it’s a flooded roadway, you want to start slowing down. If it’s a cliff, you want to slam on the brakes. So the next question is - is it possible to know what is around that corner before we get there?
Actually it's death, and it's got bugger all to do with driving or doughnuts - yes the Australian spelling thank you very much - or other simple minded metaphors.
I believe a course in Monty Python films is the best preparation, but to each their own. Naturally, after the inducement - an eternity eating krappy Kristian Krispy Kremes - comes the pitch:
As a Christian, I believe it is possible. The Bible is both the authority and road-sign that I place my hope and confidence in. In the Bible we read that all people who have ever lived will experience a day of judgement. For some people, the result of this judgement will be to continue to experience relationship with God in heaven, for eternity.
Dear sweet absent lord, is this the best The Punch, allegedly Australia's best conversation, can offer in the holiday season? It's like opening the door and finding a couple of Mormons on the verandah, looking solemn and earnest and totally wet behind and between the ears. All you can do is take the broom to them, and shoo them away ...
But of course the pitch usually comes with an implicit threat. No point holding out the Kristian Krispy Kremes if you don't have a kudgel hidden in the other hand. Watch out, here it comes:
However, the Bible is also very clear in explaining that there is an alternative - a place called hell - where all who desire to continue to live separate to God and his rule will be permitted to do just that. Their destiny will be a place where God, the source of all goodness, will be absent. There are two alternatives, the Bible explains, and everyone makes the choice.
Hell is just a place where god is absent? So that explains why there's sundry forms of hell on earth ...
Well after the requisite quote from C. S. Lewsi reminding us of the dangers of hell, we get a final desperate warning:
Don’t go round that last corner blind-folded. The consequences are simply too great to just cross your fingers and hope for the best.
Yep, it's god as the big bad boogeyman, holding a big stick, and reminding the sheep they'd better hang around to be tithed, lest they end up in the other place.
Ah well, it made for a more nostalgic read - oh the pleasure of student days ravaging the flock of the faithful - than David Daintree's plaintive pitiful scribble about how the Christians were being done down in the national curriculum, in Christianity has role in learning.
This, surely, is an oblique mention of Christianity and a judgment upon it at the same time.
Yes, your point?
Well naturally Daintree has a tedious point, which he expounds on at length, though this time shifting the emphasis from Kristian Krispy Kremes to Roger Scruton's revisionist use of the word oikophobia, now fashionable amongst right wing American ratbags as another way to lambast liberals (cf James Taranto's Oikophobia,Why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting, in the WSJ naturally, who has much fun with the concept of oiks).
Daintree's point is that history should be taught as ideology, or more to the point, as an introduction to theology, and the role of Christianity weighed in the balance, and naturally found to come out triumphant.
Sure there are a few downsides for the Christians - like the Crusades and the Inquisition and the Albigensians and the treatment of Jews and the Thirty Years war and Northern Island and thousands of other wretched excesses he doesn't name - but then there are the upsides, like the self-sacrificing saintliness of many clergy, the prohibition of slavery, and the improvement of the lot of women. Yes even now the Catholics are planning a female Pope ...
Of course the same claim could be made for the Greeks and the Romans:
Yet the draft curriculum in history avoids all of this. It is almost completely silent on the whole matter of the Greeks and the Romans. It chooses to ignore a worldwide religious movement shaped by the gods that has marched with civilisation for 2000 years, infusing it with a calendar celebrating Janus, Februus, Mars, Maiesta and Juno, a legal system and system of governance that has shaped the thinking of the whole of society, including the minds of those who lost the faith in the gods but clung to their moral view, a bit like Caligula.
But that's the problem with special pleading, and with viewing the acquisition of historical method as a way of copping an indoctrination about the splendours and joys and contributions of Christianity to civilisation ... given that history is a vast field, those who romp through it above all need a sense of historical method, a historiography that will guide them through the prejudices and preferences of the various narrators they'll encounter in their wanders ...
By golly, do they need that in spades when it comes to Daintree. Here's his classic whinge and his classic solution:
This omission is not just careless, it is staggeringly inept and profoundly dishonest.
What would an honest and inclusive curriculum look like?
It would recognise the enormous influence of religion in the world since late antiquity.
What would an honest and inclusive curriculum look like?
It would recognise the enormous influence of religion in the world since late antiquity.
Uh huh, but why since late antiquity? Well of course that's when Christianity turns from a remote middle eastern cult into a powerhouse within the Roman empire. But surely an honest and inclusive curriculum would start much earlier, and place religions of all kinds within their social and cultural context.
No, no, no, and here comes the special pleading bit:
Moreover, being an Australian curriculum, intended for students in Australian schools, it would not pretend to the possibly laudable but utterly impossible task of giving all the world's cultures and religions equal coverage, but will acknowledge that, like it or loathe it, Christianity has been the dominant faith and moral mentor for our nation since white settlement began, that many indigenous people have embraced it too, and that the more recent waves of settlers - including Muslims and Hindus - have scarcely been unaffected by it.
Uh huh, so forget about a study of the histories of various cultures and sundry religions, no time for any of that, might is right.
It's on with the blinkers and back to a world where Christianity is all the go ... oh and did we forget to mention, bugger off the dreaming, we all know that Australia was terra nullius theologica ...
It would be good to see our society honestly facing up to the implications of its own heritage, and mature enough to recognise the good alongside the bad, and wise enough to see that amid the imperfections of any human organisation there is much to take pride in.
Which is of course utterly to mistake the purpose of history, in Daintree's peculiar mind a weighing of the good and the bad, and then just like the Krispy Kreme Kryger resulting in the same epic payoff:
For believers, though, the reality is that the incarnation of Christ was and is the greatest event in human history, and that this greatness is not simply a matter of degree, but it is a kind of an absolute and ultimate truth by which alone the significance of all other events must be judged.
For believers, though, the reality is that the incarnation of Christ was and is the greatest event in human history, and that this greatness is not simply a matter of degree, but it is a kind of an absolute and ultimate truth by which alone the significance of all other events must be judged.
Yes, but history is not the path to redemption, nor should it be blind sided by peculiar prejudices and one sided perspectives, not even by those who want to return to the safety and certainty of a nineteen fifties world view.
Many unbelievers cannot but be angered by such assurance, and we should not be surprised or disappointed by a savage response to such claims.
Many unbelievers cannot but be angered by such assurance, and we should not be surprised or disappointed by a savage response to such claims.
Actually, there's no need for a savage response. The notion that history is a kind of outreach of bible studies is such a blithely stupid one that laughter is by far the best medicine, especially when the advocate produces a hearty dose of paranoia and rage:
Many of those most bitterly opposed to Christianity have perhaps sensed that we are on the ropes, utterly nonplussed by this apathy, and are determined to continue to wage that kind of war of attrition in the hope that we shall simply and finally melt away. My suspicion is that some of the framers of the curriculum are driven by such a plan, perhaps consciously, perhaps by instinct.
Lordy, it's a conspiracy, wouldn't you know, consciously and instinctively.
Or perhaps the framers are determined to provide students with analytical skills that allow them to dissect Daintree's blather, amongst the blather to be found everywhere in the world when it comes to viewing history through the wrong end of whatever prejudicial telescope they bring to the task, be they Christians or hippies.
Many other people of goodwill, non or anti-Christian in their orientation, are willing enough to face us on the field of debate and controversy. Such people may indeed admire and respect aspects of Christianity, while rejecting all or most of its metaphysical tenets.
In many such men and women I think I can see - excuse the presumption - the characteristics of the unconverted St Augustine: all too often they bark against a faith they have not troubled (or have not been able, through the scandal of our failings and our own poor example) to understand.
Yep, it's the usual claptrap, and once more we revert to the recent survey that suggested atheists and agnostics know more about religion than the religious (here). Why do people like Daintree always assume ignorance in the other, and not the self, and bugger the excuse of excusing the presumptuous, since that's just another way for a buffoon to be presumptuous and try to get away with it ...
Sure he goes on the dress the notion up in the usual piety - somehow it's the scandal of failings or poor example and we're all a bunch of unconverted St Augustine's waiting to be converted, but what, you might ask, has all this to do with the study of history in all its forms and many guises?
Sweet fuck all, it turns out, because instead history must become a new front in the culture wars, a new killing field where Christians can boldly slaughter disbelief:
Clearly it is the best interest of the Christian religion boldly and confidently to face the challenge of those who would with equal confidence contest the veracity and integrity of our claims.
To take the battle vigorously to the critic's gates, to emerge thus from the slough of indifference that now threatens to swallow us, is our best hope.
Clearly it is the best interest of the Christian religion boldly and confidently to face the challenge of those who would with equal confidence contest the veracity and integrity of our claims.
To take the battle vigorously to the critic's gates, to emerge thus from the slough of indifference that now threatens to swallow us, is our best hope.
It turns out that Daintree is president of Campion College, a Catholic institution offering a bachelor of arts in the liberal arts, offering students a variety of perspectives in the same period so that the realities of life can be viewed through different lenses. Provided it's a standard 55mm Catholic lens ...
And his piece is appearing in a critique published by the Institute of Public Affairs and a mob called the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation ... which as well as peddling books, peddles a lot of pro mining free market alarmist guff.
What curious company to keep.
Why in that bag of broken eggs alone there's rich turf for a student of history interested in exposing the curious connections between rampant Christianity, Catholicism, the IPA and Mannkal ... not to mention The Australian, and its links to Murdochism ...
Not to worry, we're only a couple of days away from the arrival of Janus, god of gates, doors and beginnings, with one face looking forward and the other looking backward, and it's time to get together branches from sacred trees, perhaps a gold-covered nut or a coin bearing the image of Janus, as presents for like minded devotees of the gods.
Of course when the Catholic church got going it vigorously denounced the Roman new year as a pagan celebration, before deciding since they couldn't get rid of it, they might as well go with the flow and make it the feast of Christ's circumcision. It wasn't until the late fifteen hundreds that the church gave up the ghost and the first day of the new year became a public holiday in many places ...
How do I know about these things? Well I looked them up, thanks to having a series of excellent history teachers who managed to introduce me to ways of looking at the world without the specious claptrap of Daintree and chums ...
Long may it continue, and to hell with special pleading ... and while Daintree's at it, he can take the tortured treatment of school students during religious studies classes and shove that too where it belongs ... somewhere in the basement with dusty Krispy Kreme metaphors ... because there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in his narrow world view ...
(Below: time for a course in Roman sexual history at Campion college?)
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