The Age wrote it up in Soul Pattinson pharmacy chain dumps devout Catholic chemist in furore over pill, and then the cock crowed at least once, perhaps heading to thrice, when Neil Mitchell asked Tony Abbott his views, here:
"That would certainly strike me as highly unusual behaviour," Mr Abbott told 3AW Mornings.
"I think chemists should act professionally," the Prime Minister said.
Say what, Big Tony? Et tu? No defence of a chemist pursuing the very same faith you espouse?
Of course it was all the fault of a frenzied social media backlash:
A disgruntled customer posted a photo of the note on Facebook, receiving about 1500 shares at the time of press.
People also took to Twitter to vent their anger at the chemist’s stance on birth control.
1500 shares! Why it's like an out of control Western Australian great white or a runaway train.
It's a social media facebooking and twittering frenzy, and it had absolutely nothing to do with News Ltd. hopping on the bandwagon with a salivating Soul Pattinson drops Catholic chemist owner discourages customers from buying contraceptives.
It did give the pond the idea for a splendid business model. Here, open this envelope. Now read the note. See what it says: if your primary reason for reading this blog is to get ranting and raving left and right wing views, the pond would appreciate it if you got your prescription filled elsewhere. News Ltd, for example, provides an excellent service of the ratbag right wing kind ...
If you don't like the confused, confusing lumpish middle brow middle of the road centrist nonsense on offer, hit the road, and don't you come back.
Now watch the hits roll in ...
Actually the pond was most excited because today is usually Cardinal Pell day at the Sunday Terror, and surely the good Cardinal would support his church's humble followers, swing the full weight of the mighty holy empire behind their cause.
Say what? He's gone missing? There's no offering to be found in the opinion pages?
Well not at time of writing, so naturally the pond turned, for comfort and the local angle and a picture of the chemist and his shop, to the always reliable mighty Border Mail, itself in an uproar with Thurgoona pharmacist: Soul Pattinson's stance was no bitter pill to swallow.
Never mind, while it might be passing strange that the official Catholic church didn't rally around a chemist espousing the official church line, the pond found an excellent guide to Pellist thinking amongst the reptiles at the lizard Oz with Relationships market after 50 years of the pill. (may be behind the counter and not free and if it is, please don't ask the dispensing editor to make it available).
Yes, it's another guide to married life and breeding by a deliberately chaste, single and barren man who decided to get hitched to Jesus and the Church.
Citing a profoundly stupid economic thesis by Timothy Reichert, scribbling Bitter Pill, (how quaint two of his degrees should come from the Catholic University of America and the Franciscan University and so clearly he has no axe, or even an ax to grind), Pell remarkably says something that is true:
Only the official teaching of the Catholic Church remains opposed to the pill and indeed all artificial contraception, but this is not even a majority position among Catholic churchgoers of child-bearing age. Indeed, this particular Catholic teaching is often cited as diminishing the church's authority to teach on morality among Catholics themselves, as well as provoking disbelief and even astonishment among other Christians and non-believers.
Yes indeed. In spades. Astonishment is the least of it. Befuddled bemusement as well ...
And then as usual Pell has to ruin it, which is passing strange considering he's one of the world's leading climate scientists:
The ancient Christian consensus, which lasted for 1900 years, linking sexual activity to the lovemaking of a husband and wife to create new life, was first broken by the Anglican Church's Lambeth Conference approval of contraception in 1930.
In this new contraceptive era, where no Western country produces enough children to maintain population levels, the Catholic stance is isolated, rejected and often despised.
But the use of the contraceptive pill not only changes the dynamics within a family between husband and wife, it is also changing our broader society in ways we understand imperfectly.
But 50 years is not a long time; it is still early in the story.
1900 years? 1930? Surely this suggests Pell is an Onanist:
Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to raise up offspring for your brother.” But Onan knew that the child would not be his; so whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death also.
By golly, they knew what to do with Onanists in the old days - or at least a psychopathic homicidal long absent lord did ... and strangely contraceptive activity has been around as long as the earliest yarns in the bible.
And so when it came to the crunch, the Pellists knew what to do. Kill all the witches!
On December 5, 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued the Summis desiderantes affectibus, a papal bull in which he recognized the existence of witches and gave full papal approval for the Inquisition to proceed "correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising" witches "according to their deserts." In the bull, which is sometimes referred to as the "Witch-Bull of 1484", the witches were explicitly accused of having "slain infants yet in the mother's womb" (abortion) and of "hindering men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving" (contraception).
Famous texts that served to guide the witch hunt and instruct magistrates on how to find and convict so-called "witches" include the Malleus Maleficarum, and Jean Bodin's De la demonomanie des sorciers. The Malleus Maleficarum was written by the priest J. Sprenger (born in Rheinfelden, today Switzerland), who was appointed by Pope Innocent VIII as the General Inquisitor for Germany around 1475, and H. Institoris, who at the time was inquisitor for Tyrol, Salzburg, Bohemia and Moravia. The authors accused witches, among other things, of infanticide and having the power to steal men's penises.
Steal penises!
Sheesh, one minute you're in the outer suburbs of Albury and the next thing you know you're keeping company with penis stealers!
Go on, do a Greg Hunt and wiki up History of birth control for the footnotes and to discover how many ways Pell was scribbling like an Onanist.
Meanwhile, over at the angry Sydney Anglicans, devotees and cultists will find themselves torn by the richness of the Jensenist opportunities.
Do they first feast on Michael Jensen's Why contemporary Christianity still needs to speak of hell, or do they go up to date, as modern as now, with Phillip Jensen's A Sat-Nav with nowhere to go.
Oh she's going to hell and so is he. And so, quite possibly, are the schismatic, heretical Sydney Anglican splitters:
The Bible’s reticence to describe in detail the actual geography of hell seems to have been forgotten. And this leads to a second, more difficult problem with hell: how can it be true to the character of the God revealed in Scripture to have a place of eternal ongoing cruelty and torment from which there is no escape? Why would we send people there who are guilty only of making a theological error - namely, worshipping the wrong or no god?
Yes, yes, you're all doomed, you splitters, you're all going to hell. No good works are going to get you out of this one. Chances are, Sydney Anglicans might even use contraception ...
There's nothing much else, just waffle and a healthy dose of most unseemly masochism:
We have no business in making the judgement of the holy God more palatable, as if cushioning the blow will somehow convince others that it is all ok. Our God is a consuming fire; it is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. The wrath of God has been revealed against all human outrages – and why would we want it otherwise, even as we come to the realisation that we are included in the verdict?
It still works with ten year olds, but as Elmer himself noted as he walked away from the fundamentalist mess he was in - his natural home was as a kind of Willy Loman seller of women's underwear:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish, Jensenist, hellish things.
Even worse, Jensen forsakes all the fiery stuff, settling for weeping and gnashing of teeth (and possibly wailing and the renting of garments).
In the end, it seems he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, settling for "whatever hell is".
Actually hell is probably what gays in Africa are going through as they're persecuted by Christian churches, the Anglicans and Catholics showing the way ...
And so it was off to the modernist Jensenist with the bigger digital splash.
It turns out that it's one of those quaint, old-fashioned sermons that have been doing the rounds since Henry VIII decided he needed to start a new religion so he could get a divorce.
You may choose welfare over criminality but that is your personal preference with no greater claim to rationality or morality than the opposite choice.
They are like electrical engineers inventing a sat-nav but having no destination to put into the program. An engineer may be able to explain the component parts and the interaction that will allow it to give directions – but there is more to a sat-nav than its component parts. There is even more meaning than the sum of its component parts. And the meaning comes from outside the components – from the maker of the sat-nav and the language of the society in which and for which it was made and the destination that the owner programs into it.
An invention, or a creation, has the purpose and meaning of its inventor or creator and owner. Accidents have no meaning; they may have causes, they often have consequences, but they have no meaning – which is why they’re called accidents. The world was made, it is no accident.
Indeed. And the way the long absent lord built accidents into the world suggests that She was quite fond of accidents.
So when was the world made? When it evolved out of the galactic dust? Or when the galaxy itself took shape?
In the end, you're left with a tidy choice. Between a luddite still willing to spout gibberish of an anti-engineering, anti-science kind, and which can only offer Adam and Eve and Genesis and the whole damn fairy tale. Or punching a destination into the sat-hav and getting to where you want to go ... at least until the petrol runs out ...
Do the angry Sydney Anglicans go around like a bunch of Amish? Forsaking the meaningless Sat-Nav? Giving up on power points and running everything on batteries (talk about fine theological distinctions)?
Of course not, and that's the hypocrisy they live with on a daily basis.
Oh yes, they're going to hell, the lot of them ... it's just a pity they have to punish gays and subordinate complementary women while they're on their way to getting there ... unless the Sat-Nav is broken and they merely end up in the grave ...
DP - to continue our discussion on hateful ideology and brilliant skill, an interesting character is Hanna Reitsch, Hitler's favourite test pilot. She pioneered women's role in aviation in Germany before and during WW2 and set many world records and worked hard against the entrenched chauvinism of the time.
ReplyDeleteShe was also a loyal Nazi and willing tool for Goebbels' propaganda and was in the bunker when Hitler killed himself, saying later she wished she could have died with him.
After the war she become something of a heroine for her pioneering aviation feats.She was invited to the white house to meet JFK, and set up gliding schools in India and Ghana.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vxxHyl46co
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanna_Reitsch
Great links Anon, and that YouTube link leads to two more segments - the pond had never seen that glider or rocket footage. And yet she really never recanted, but was welcomed into the White House. Strange days ... Ta ...
ReplyDelete