(Above: following on the movie, the magazine).
The prosaic facts remain: The right to reject a religion, to leave it, to lampoon it, to question its assertions, to ignore its prescriptions and proscriptions, is a basic post-Enlightenment human right which is under attack when a cult which denies the right of dissent establishes itself in a free country. Does Islam respect the right of dissent (even where it has temporal authority)? If it calls for punishment of dissent, away with mincing apologetics. It has to be resisted, while fully respecting the rights of consenting adults to apply its dicta to themselves. (originally posted here, though it might be behind the Crikey paywall for some).
The answer, when people promote monetary rewards to kill heretics and dissidents, is obvious. (Pakistani bounty placed on anti-Islam filmmaker). So it's away with mincing apologetics and poodles (and Christopher Pyne if you insist) on the pond, we'll have none of it this Sunday.
The best news this week came with another angle on Jesus Christ being married, based on a fourth century Coptic papyrus fragment (Did Jesus Christ really have a wife?)
It's a pretty long bow, but at least it stirred the possums in the traditional churches, and reminded everyone again how women and alternative religious notions (anyone for a dash of Gnosticism?) had been written out of the Christian tradition as much as possible, such that by the turn of the first millennium traces were hard to find.
There's nothing more guaranteed to send traditional Christians into a frenzy than to suggest that Jesus Christ might have got hitched and enjoyed a fuck or three, because guilt, chastity and denial are the real holy trinity for many. (You know how it goes, wank, feel guilty, deny, repeat endlessly, until driven mad or to the molestation of children).
It's peculiar and surprising and quite perverse really to deny Jesus a healthy sex drive, which is how we've ended up with him looking utterly wet and weedy, like Willem Dafoe or Robert Powell or Max von Sydow, or ready for a good flogging, like Jim Caviezel, or perhaps most epically blue eyed and silly, like Jeffrey Hunter doing his thing in de Mille's King of Kings.
It's surprising because when you think about it, his adulterous Father didn't think twice about knocking up the betrothed of another man, and then after getting her pregnant, letting the hapless dude get married to bring up the cuckoo in the nest as if the spawn was his own, while spinning a yarn about the way he should think himself lucky for letting god into the bedroom. Why it's behaviour worse than Zeus and the nymphs.
Yes Islamic protestors, that's the sort of good-humoured ribald banter Christians have to wear now that we've got rid of the Inquisition, and the Tower of London no longer houses heretics courtesy Henry the VIII.\.
It's the age of the angry atheist, so when you see a set of cartoons in a French magazine, taunting and teasing, just shrug your shoulders and walk on by. Hum along to Dionne Warwick if you like.
Walk on by, don't stop,
Walk on by, don't stop,
Walk on by.
Get used to it, or at least conduct your feuds with other religions off the street and in the privacy of the internet.
An alternative strategy, seeing as how the French cartoons are so dismally bad, in the Danish way? Where incitement and controversy and attention seeking is more the point than wit and humour?
Why not hire a cartoonist - please get a professional - and have him draw a monkey eating cheese and attempting to draw a cat, before throwing his hands up in surrender?
There's no doubt that attention-seeking Islamics have stolen the thunder of the mainstream churches, but how pleasing to see that Phillip Jensen is still firing on all fifty shades of angry Anglicanism with Love and Subjugation.
Oh dear, with this ring, I bind thee and get the right to indulge in domestic torture for eternity, or at least until we get to the divorce court. Anglican graphic artist strikes again!
Jensen spends an inordinate amount of time explaining all over again how his paean of praise to women submitting to their husbands doesn't mean subjugation. It seems he's been misunderstood, oh please don't let him be misunderstood.
It's a pity Jensen didn't spend some quality time on the bleeding obvious, the dictionary definition of submit and submission - to yield or surrender oneself to the will or authority of another, to subject to a condition or process, to give in to the power, authority or desires of another and so on (here).
In Jensen's world, the husband and wife are one, and submit to each other except of course it's terribly hard for both parties to be submissive. At one point or another a dom emerges, and in the Anglican way, it's rarely the domme. If it were mutual, why do Sydney Anglicans have such a hard time listening to the thoughts of women or accepting a woman could be elevated to Archbishop. As Orwell proposed, all submissives are equal but some submissives are more equal than others.
Any reader with even a cursory knowledge of the role of women in Victorian English society will know that the Church of England conspired to help produce a patriarchy of the first water using the same Biblical passages as a guide. Women were chattels, subject to the control of men:
Sexual relations within Victorian marriage were unilaterally based on men and male needs. Neither a woman’s desire, nor her consent was at issue. The ideal Victorian woman was pious, pure, and above all submissive. The question of her consent was rarely a matter for concern. A Philadelphia physician reinforced this distorted view of women. He asserted that their emotions and character were more “interior” than men, saying: “The house, chamber, the closet, are the centers of her social life and power” (Woloch 128). (The Degradation of Married Women in the Victorian Era).
Jensen pleads for understanding and mutual submission, but he's just the new boss sounding like the old boss, and sensible women won't get fooled again.
Even worse, he indulges in his own forms of misrepresentation:
The secularist worldview, based in individualism, power and rights, analyses the cause of this abuse in terms of giving power and authority to the husband and therefore rejects the whole notion of submission. The Christian worldview analyses this abuse in terms of the profound sinfulness of the human heart and therefore rejects the behaviour of such husbands as expressions of a wicked and evil nature in need of repentance and regeneration.
Secularism is based on individualism? Well there goes those bloody collectivist secularist socialists.
As for the rest, it's the usual tortured nonsense about wickedness and evil and sinning and guilt and yadda yadda, with all the relevance to current times as could be found in diatribes about Satan (who strangely doesn't get a guernsey, when it's well known that the Satan in women is the cause of all the world's woes. Thanks Eve).
Lastly, please indulge the pond in a piece of petulance.
It seems while out of country Michael Jensen, of the angry Anglicans, decided to slip in his seventh sin of Sydney in 7 Sins of Sydney 7: Work addiction.
The irony? The seventh sin is workaholism! And Jensen opens by complaining that writing the seven sins have been a hard slog because he's been on long service leave!
And the pond has been out of town on a junket!
Does Jensen have a single ironist bone in his body?
Ah well, he's got off lightly but his treatise would have been more convincing if he'd bothered to tackle Richard Tawney's convincing explanation of how the rise of capitalism can be attributed to those bloody Protestants (these days you can find Tawney's Religon and the Rise of Capitalism online in pdf form all over the place).
Untrammelled by the silken chains which bound the Establishment, and with a great tradition of discipline behind them, the Noncomformist Churches might seem to have possessed opportunities of reasserting the social obligations of religion with a vigour denied to the Church of England. What impeded their utterance was less a weakness than the most essential and distinctive of their virtues. Founded on the repudiation of the idea that human effort could avail to win salvation, or human aid to assist the pilgrim in his lonely quest, they saw the world of business and society as a battlefield, across which character could mark triumphant to its goal, not as crude materials waiting the architect's hand to set them in their place as the foundations of the Kingdom of Heaven. It did not occur to them that character is social and society, since it is the expression of character, spiritual. Thus the eye is sometimes blinded by light itself (page 139 in the Mentor edition).
Yes, if anyone's going to take the blame for the rise of workaholism, it's the bloody Calvinists. All sorts of people have had a go at it (you can look at Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism here) but this sort of scribbling is water off a duck's back to Jensen.
He only gets close in this line:
Certainly, the Protestant preachers of the early days preached against laziness and indolence, and their congregations modeled the lifestyle of hardwork and its benefits. 'Hard-working' is clearly a deeply embedded virtue for most of us.
The early days? So why is the Mittster getting agitated about the mooching, bludging 47%? Why do evangelicals in the States love to build crystal cathedrals? Why does Hillsong celebrate getting filthy rich as the natural desire of the lord? There's a lot of churches and evangelicals invested right here, right now, in hard work and making money and the capitalist system.
Religion in the United States continues to assert workaholism as a way of life, with the bonus that the workaholic can sign away his rewards to the needy 1%.
It remains to note that in Sydney some workaholics struggle night and day to pay the Sydney Anglicans rent for their properties - yes, there are rent seekers everywhere - and perhaps an even deeper spiritual vice is relentlessly playing the stock market in the hopes of scoring a big hit (which is perhaps why the long absent lord was entirely indifferent to the Sydney Anglicans dropping a bucket load on the stock exchange).
Finally Mr. Jensen commits the sin of confusing generality and specificity. There's nothing intrinsically "Sydney" about the "sin" of workaholism. It's available all over Australia and around the world, and the same can be said about the other six sins Jensen brooded about.
Using an easy rhetorical trick - "unique, same as everywhere else" and quoting Jimmy Barnes isn't enough to get Jensen out of jail, especially when he comes up with this kind of nonsense:
Sydney's uniqueness in its sins is only then in its particular stories. You cannot say that Melbourne is less sinful or more. But only Sydney has its particular rap sheet. The character of its crimes is only to be found in the history and sometimes mythology of its sinners.
And so Sydney gets tagged with workaholism, when not even Manning Clark could manage to find workaholism as a natural outcome of Sydney's convict beginnings!
Mr. Jensen would do well to read Tawney and repent his sins.
The pond's Freudian interpretation? Has Mr. Jensen considered the possibility that he's unhappy in his work, and his place amongst the Sydney Anglicans? Time for more leave, and a European junket? Just do it ...
And now since quoting poets is all the go, let's have a dose of William Blake's Songs of Experience, and in particular The Chimney-Sweeper:
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying! 'weep! weep!' in notes of woe!
'Where are thy father and mother? Say!' -
'They are both gone up to the church to pray.
'Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
'And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and His priest and king,
Who made up a heaven of our misery.'
Let's talk no more of sin and sinning, at least until next Sunday when angry Sydney Anglicans and Islamics turn up again like unfortunate lands whirring into sight at the top of the magic faraway tree ...
(Below: the illustrated version, click to enlarge).
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