A snark de triomphe, Pellists and two Jensenists in a single day ...

Too rude! Bingle in dingle-creating bingle. And George Pell! Howzat?

The pond was determined to give the Pellist heresy and the angry Sydney Anglicans a rest this meditative Sunday, but truth to tell the pleasures are simply too excruciatingly pleasurable.

As you can see above, there was the splendid sight in today's Terror of the Pellists once again frolicking amongst the tabloid pap.

Thank God we won the Ashes?

What, the dinkum down under Aussie god is way better than the filthy vile perverted Pommie bastard god, and so we'd better thank Her for lending a helping hand?

Could it get any better? Of course it could, as Akker Dakker joined in to help explain why Kerry O'Keefe has been brutally silenced by the ABC, despite our Kyles returning home to save him:

Yes, the pond was forced to endure O'Keefe's farewell - at great, inordinate length - while on the road. Marriage can lead to purgatory ...

The cutting of a bloody birthday cake ... on radio!!

But enough of the witless curmudgeon Akker Dakker maintaining his ever-lasting rage about the ABC - he has more repetitions in him than a washing machine and a clothes dryer combined - because real masochists will want to read the Pellist tract Thank God for Test cricket and that we won the Ashes.

In the text, Pell didn't make the mistake of attributing test cricket and winning the Ashes to god,  since it leads to various philosophical tangles, including Epicurus long ago, on the notion of an interventionist god:

“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 whence cometh evil? 
 Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?”

Thanking god was left to the Terror subbie, who clearly didn't care about the finer theological points.

But Pell did come up with this sort of meandering stupidity:

One or two old-timers still claim "it's not cricket", when confronted with injustice. However this imaginary world of innocence has been destroyed, to our loss, by the match-fixing scandals. Such corruption must not be allowed to return. 
The matches are now played in an atmosphere of crude psychological warfare. It is difficult to know whether this is fiercer than in the Bodyline series of the 1930s or 35 years ago with Lillee, Marsh and the Chappells, but public attitudes and on - field microphones encourage the press today to highlight any incidents rather than hide them. 

It's difficult to know?

It is of course sublimely easy. You just need to do a Greg Hunt and read the wiki here, with the affair escalating to the level of a diplomatic incident, talk of boycotts, changes to the laws of cricket, and fierce rhetoric on all sides, as evoked by S. G. Wells' 1932 cartoon:

Oh there's nothing new under the sun, not even Alan Bond.

And then in his usual way Pell came up with a profoundly offensive capper:

When we win, and Australians like winning, we should not forget that cricket is only a game, part of my summers for more than 60 years, a wonderful recreation, but no substitute for real life.

Real life? So professional cricketers, and presumably by extension anyone making a professional living from all sorts of sports are living an unreal life?

Why you might just as well say that hermetically sealed clergy locked into a life of celibacy, but still spouting on about abortion, marriage, sex, contraception and such like, and with some seeking refuge from the folly by fiddling with children, and the hierarchy do their best to cover up the fiddling, are leading unreal lives ...

The pond is profoundly grateful for the Terror now routinely featuring the Pellists on the front page of their Sunday edition, reminding the world this dodderer is allegedly the spiritual mentor of Tony Abbott, especially when Pell seems to be saying that being a MAMIL is simply no substitute for real life ...

Meanwhile, the angry Sydney Anglicans are still stuck somewhere back in the 1950s:

Yep, for whatever reason, the wretched angry Anglican graphic artist decided to lift an image of a Mansfield Holiday II 8 mm Cine Camera, with turret and three fixed lenses ready and waiting with a twist of the wrist, as a way of illustrating Phillip Jensen's rambling, incoherent Moving Pictures and Gospel Motivation.

Well two can play that game. Here's more angles:

Oh the little beauties were all the go in the 1950s, because you see, you could have three lenses of varying focal lengths at your fingertips, and before the age of the zoom, that meant you could do a close up, medium and wide shot with just a tweak ... (or so they said, but it was never that easy)

By golly those bold brave black and white images could bore anyone way better than slides at a slide party.

But where were we?

Is it true that talking about almost anything, even 8mm photography in the 1950s, is better than reading Phillip Jensen?

Well yes, because Jensen's homilies all fit the same stale, tired theme and pattern. Introduce the theme, kick it around the park at inordinate length and then wrap it up with a flurry of quotes from the bible, in this case, being careful to ensure there's no bracket creep:

... the work of the missionary is primarily that of taking the eternal message of the gospel into the world. Any missionary, like any Christian, may attend to the needs of the poor or the sick, the oppressed or the wounded – but that is not the reason to go as a missionary. That is what the United Nations, the Red Cross and other humanitarian organisations are for. The task of the missionary is to take the great news of the Gospel of Christ crucified into the world calling upon people to be reconciled to God through his Son.

Charity work? Red Cross and the UN, and never mind the black helicopters.

But remember as a missionary you do have the pleasure of kicking the crap out of gays, the wicked deviants, handy for missionary work in Uganda, and women, who really should just shut up and sit silently in church, handy for missionary work in Sydney ...

And there was one further insight. We're accustomed to the angry Anglicans and their website graphic artist living in the 1950s:

What you get today as a bonus is Jensen's fear of graven images, television, paintings, heck any image you can think of really:

The value and worth of pictures is deceptive. Most art galleries place titles, descriptions and explanations of the pictures that hang on their walls. Many provide booklets and audio commentary so that the viewer can understand what they are looking at. The paintings are often not self-explanatory but require words for people to appreciate them.

Deception, fear, and guilt, the stock in trade of the angry Anglican preacher, but do pictures need an explanation?

Not all the time, surely. Take a gander at those images above, and you know immediately that the angry Sydney Anglicans are lost in a deep time warp, beyond imagining

 The same is true of the wonderful world of television documentaries. We are shown incredible images – of animals and landscapes, of towns, cities and reconstructed history – that fill our understanding and appreciation of our world. But it is the voice-over narrator who explains what we see. The visuals are only the backdrop for the silky voice that reinterprets the world for the viewer. The pictures persuade us that what we are being told is true. They move us with a sense of wonder and of ‘seeing is believing’, but they are selective impressions designed to ‘prove’ the truth of the commentary’s viewpoint and move the viewer to belief. 

Which is surely paranoia incarnate. The "silky voice", the moving of the viewer to belief ... as if somehow the silky verbal and written gobbets of nonsense delivered up by Jensen are somehow better  and more truthful ... and not designed to move the reader to belief ...

Well the image they rustled up, of a 1950s 8mm camera, gives the lie to that in a very convincing way...

But do go on:

Worst still is the dominance of the picture over the news. If there are good visuals it is newsworthy, but if there is no picture it is less newsworthy. If there are cameramen available the story is news but if it is only words it’s not newsworthy. While the fire burns, the river floods or the volcano spews; the nightly TV news will report it but it is difficult to photograph the hard grind of rebuilding lives and so once the pictures stop the disaster is no longer reported. Photography is powerful in emotively moving the audience, but weak in analysing the truth.

Uh huh, but is it any weaker in analysing the truth than the average Sydney Anglican still fixated on the story of Adam and Eve?

Jensen also takes a swipe at missionary snaps:

Here was the problem of the 20th century missionary photographs. The pictures of preachers preaching or people praying were not worth showing compared to strange deforming medical conditions, impoverished families begging, refugee camps bulging or old donkey carts still being used as basic transport. Photos showed us a world of pain and suffering; of conflict, war and superstition but they couldn’t show us the spiritual battle that is the real work of the missionary. They couldn’t show the lives of sin that took people to hell, or God’s work of regeneration that rescued people and transferred them into the kingdom of his beloved Son.

Snaps of preachers preaching? Truly all is vanity, saith the preacher ...

But even more jolly were the sorts of alternative snaps currently deployed on the angry Anglican site, including one cheek by jowl with Jensen's musings:

By golly, even Eric Blair himself would approve of all the happy, smiling faces.

Shiny happy people holding hands 
Shiny happy people holding hands 
Shiny happy people laughing 
Everyone around, love them, love them 
Put it in your hands, take it, take it 
There's no time to cry, happy, happy 
Put it in your heart where tomorrow shines 
Gold and silver shine 
Shiny happy people holding hands 
Shiny happy people holding hands 
Shiny happy people laughing 
Whoa, here we go

And if you can't get enough Jensenism, as a special bonus, you can also read Michael Jensen's equally garbled and confused Educating for Failure.

The foolish younger Jensen dares to put his toe in the Nazi water:

As the literary critic George Steiner once said: 
We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. 
Nevertheless, it is a rare school indeed that insists that the education of its young people should take place in full view of the cross of the Christ who died for fallen humankind. 

Which of course completely fails to comprehend the complex relationship between religion and the Nazis in Germany, or the way, while some churches resisted, many other established churches became fellow travellers, such that George Steiner might have observed, We know now that a man can read the Bible in the evening, and to to his day's work at any concentration camp you might name in the morning. 

Time for another Greg Hunt:

In his study The Holy Reich, the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall comes to the conclusion that Christianity, "in the final analysis, did not constitute a barrier to Nazism." 
Furthermore, he comments on the reason why Nazism is quite often seen as the opposite of Christianity: 
"What we suppose Nazism must surely have been about usually tells us as much about contemporary societies as about the past purportedly under review. The insistence that Nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the past fifty years.... Exploring the possibility that many Nazis regarded themselves as Christian would have decisively undermined the myths of the Cold War and the regeneration of the German nation ... Nearly all Western societies retain a sense of Christian identity to this day.... That Nazism as the world-historical metaphor for human evil and wickedness should in some way have been related to Christianity can therefore be regarded by many only as unthinkable." (Religion in Nazi Germany)

In the end, the younger Jensen gets exceptionally mawkish, and very very Kevin Donnelly:

Perhaps a new dark ages is upon us. And perhaps, as after the decay of mighty Rome, it was the Christian monasteries that preserved the possibility of a less savage way of life, so now our schools and churches will need to become the protectors of the true, the beautiful and the good. 
This is already in evidence. People with no faith can see that our Anglican schools preserve something precious which has been lost, and that in their devotion to what is true, and right, and beautiful in creation and in human life, they point beyond themselves to the source of all these things.

It's just as well he throws in a few 'perhaps' because perhaps it just happens to be nonsensical stuff.

Why do Christians always try to take over Rome and claim it as their own, when for most of its time, Rome was both profoundly barbaric and pagan? Why do they cling to this notion of a golden age? Why do they blather about precious things lost as if they are the only way and the light amongst a horde of barbarians?

Why is there never a mention of the role of the Arabs in preserving Greek and Roman thought? Why is it always Christian monasteries? Why this profound Anglo-celtic ignorance and bias? (go on, Greg Hunt it here in Transmission of the Classics)

The answer is simple. Because the angry Sydney Anglicans are in the business of guilt, and telling the world that it's sinful and corrupt, and that only they have the answer, just like only Tupperware has the perfect food containers, and so you end up with rhetorical guff like this about the New Atheists which is beyond silly:

Without God, it turns out, everything is permissible – the ugly, the false and the evil. Leading philosophers argue for infanticide. Even the New Atheists have begun to wonder how civilisation might be saved if the God of Jesus Christ is abandoned. 

Oh yes, Richard Dawkins ... take that ...

Now can we get any sillier?

They cannot paint a universe with any colour to it; they cannot appeal with any conviction to a sense of absolute right or wrong, and so any outrage they have looks insincere; and they cannot know that what they see around them is real. There is now a sense among them of tragic loss – an acknowledgement perhaps that their project has destroyed the only things worth having.

Enough of this silliness, which it has to be said, in best Python fashion, has got very silly indeed.

Time for a bonus treat for any long suffering soul who made it through this almost unendurable slog. Pellists and two Jensens in one day? It's almost unimaginable.

So here's a little fun from Harper's current edition. Apply examples how and to whom you will: