A Sunday meditation inside the Adam and Eve echo chamber ...

It's been quite a while since the pond dropped in on the angry Sydney Anglicans for a meditative Sunday, a treat that's rarely disappointing ...

Now admittedly there's only so often that a front digital page like this turns up ... a kind of triple serve visual icecream ...

But this one wasn't so bad ...

It was a pointer to, and a reminder of, just how much the angry Sydney Anglicans have got in common with rabid Islamic fundamentalists and evangelical bigots of the deep south, and let's be general and generous and fair, the assorted bile and prejudice that accompanies many conservative practitioners of religion, with a skew to hypocrisy, guilt and deep seated prejudice.

The pond often wonders where this propensity comes from, and thoughtfully, in the very same digital issue, Dr Peter Orr provided a most salutary and excellent example of the thinking required:

You can read the full piece here, wherein you will be pleased to learn that Dr Billy verified some of the trickiest stories in the bible, including that wonderful act of genocide involving Noah and the flood, and the story of Jonah, and no doubt, though they're not mentioned by name, Adam and Eve and the apple and the snake (more of these anon), and turning out the world in six days and resting on the seventh, and the young earth, so young, and the creation of the dinosaurs and so on and so forth ...

It's all jolly good stuff, but the pond was most moved by the notion that fundamentally doubts about the Bible are best resolved by reading the Bible.

The pond commends this logic to fundamentalists everywhere. There is no doubt that any doubts about Jim Jones would have been best resolved by listening only to Jim Jones - how easy then it would have been to avoid Jonestown.

And any doubts about L. Ron Hubbard and Xenu and volcanoes and cheap gadgets at high prices could easily be resolved ... just by reading L. Ron Hubbard.

In exactly the same way, any doubts about Mao can simply be sorted by reading Mao. Worried about the war on flies, grasshoppers, sparrows and mice?

Read Mao and your fears will be sorted.

Name any religious text ... the Book of Mormon, the Qu'ran, assorted Hindu texts, perhaps Confucius, and the answer is always the same ... resolve your doubts by sticking strictly to the text at hand.

The very best thing about this kind of hermeneutics is that it can be practised in a vacuum, or a bubble, or a glass fish tank, or any other kind of echo chamber:

But enough of post-modernist wannabe Magrittes and Ceci n'est pas un bowler hat, and on with the promised echo chamber:

The trouble with this definition lies in some of the wording, especially for a church founded on the notion that a king must be able to get an heir, and if the job requires it, a divorce.

It rather makes a nonsense of "voluntarily entered into for life", with "for life" a particularly tricky part of the life sentence.

The notion of divorce has always vexed the church. The Catholics are arguing over it at the moment, but back in 2002, the Anglicans decided to let a little light inside the pedantic door - Anglican church doors open for divorcees to remarry reported Fairfax...

It seems fundamentalist definitions can be tweaked at the edges when it comes in handy ... so it's a tad disturbing to read the venerable Canon insist that that its God who joins people in marriage and who presumably defines marriage and while society can redefine marriage as much as it wants, the the angry Sydney Anglicans must hold to the ultimate deep reality of marriage ... except for that shallow redefinition of reality in 2002.

It makes the venerable Canon's urging of the Federal Parliament to uphold the deep reality definition definition of marriage a tad problematic. Just what flexible definition are we talking about? ... unless of course the aim is to present a meaningless, idealistic definition which will automatically fail at the first test and the first divorcee who comes knocking on the door ...

Could there be a modifying clause, along the lines "voluntarily entered into for life, provided that, in certain circumstances, a man may accumulate as many wives as possible and feasible in the time allowed, and divorce same when necessary and expedient, with beheadings permissible in rare and exceptional circumstances, and said divorcee may report at the church door earnestly requesting the right to re-marry, and the Anglican church may, in its infinite wisdom, decline or support said request, depending the priest feels on the day ..."

But there you go, the pond's been distracted again, when there's much more to follow:

Indeed, most excellent stuff, and the pond particularly commends Dr Michael Stead for producing that wondrous concept, "a creation ordinance", which brings us back in a time-honoured way to the notion that the bible is true in every which way, perhaps even loose.

Thus, it is always right and proper to consider Adam and Eve and the apple and the snake and the wanton, wilful work of that deplorable hussy Eve and how she ruined everything for men true and inerrant in every way... the devious, deplorable hussy's descendants might still wreak havoc, if the opportunity were to offered, and ruin things for angry Sydney Anglican males ...

Now it's to the great credit of these angry Sydney Anglican males that they do their best to forgive their women, provided the women know their place and keep their silence, with their wagging, gossiping tongues and foolish ways ...

It goes without saying that there are a number of other useful creation ordinances, like forcing the earth to submit, and gouging it as much as you can, and killing and eating any creature you fancy (you might care to name them first). So many creation ordinances and so little time, and so many requiring a tweak or an adjustment according to the times and the circumstances ...

For those with far too much time on their hands, it is possible to find a thesis about creation ordinances in pdf form here, which speaks to the hearts of all angry Sydney Anglican males:

God pronounced His curse, addressing Eve as follows, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (Gen. 3:16). Eve’s “desire” as well as Adam’s “rule” was to be a perversion of the original ordinance. 
C. F. Kiel’s comments on this verse are instructive: The woman had also broken through her divinely appointed subordination to the man; she had not only emancipated herself from the man to listen to the serpent, but had led the man into sin. For that, she was punished with a desire bordering upon disease . . . and with subjection to the man. “And he shall rule over thee.” Created for the man, the woman was made subordinate to him from the very first ...

Oh the diseased hussy, and remember it's very important to ignore any outside chatter about echo chambers or perhaps the notion that the fable of Adam and Eve isn't the most satisfactory guide to relationships ...

Remember, if you only stick to reading the bible, why on earth would you think it a fable, as opposed to a neo-realist documentary about the beginnings of life on the planet? And soon enough the Ussher chronology will be bouncing around in your Calvinist head, with nary a thought as to scientific nonsense. (Yes, the sweet Ussher was a devoted Calvinist, and where's the harm in that?)

If you stay true and solid, silly science and talk of dinosaurs will bounce off the chamber in the same way that whining women and gays should be bounced:

Sorry, not really, there will be no venturing outside the echo chamber here, and so to the final motion for the day, and what a fine one it was, containing yet another hint of Monty Python and that immortal sketch about the splitters ...

Indeed, indeed, how much more satisfactory it is to share a modern outlook with the Taliban and Daesh and other forward thinking religious minds ...

Sadly, the pond must now dob in another source of grievance and regrets and departures and breaches. 

This tall poppy spends all his time sending out messages designed to outrage the collegial fellowship of the angry Sydney Anglicans ...

Shocking stuff ... the fellow has made the dangerous step of moving from gay marriage to Nauru and climate science and the republic - oh no, not sweet Queen Liz, chair of church and state .... and so no better example can be found of what happens when an Anglican steps outside the echo chamber.

Why this dangerous sort of thinking might well drag the angry Sydney Anglicans somewhere into the middle 1950s, and what good would that do?

Let this be a warning to all ... bloody anti-collegial splitter ...