Happy Saturnalia, brought to you by the bromancer ...

 

The pond would like to take the chance to wish a happy Saturnalia, and good cheer for whatever season they've signed up for, to its highly esteemed correspondents.

Saturnalia tends to be controversial in rarefied circles, though it simply acknowledges Roman days and the seasonal solstice - any excuse to bung on a do and a feast - has been accepted into academic circles.

It seems it still attracts the ire of fundie Xians, with this sign recently featured in a YouTube site:

You only have to prod them a little, and Xian intolerance will always bubble to the surface:

Perhaps Saturnalia got tangled up in the war on Xmas, a war now somewhat in remission. 

There was a good history of that war in Media Matters. It's by Parker Molloy and is headed A War on Christmas Story: How Fox News built the dumbest part of America's culture war.

What's disappointing is that it only takes the war up to 2019:

2019: The season began early with the Fox News invention of a new seasonal war, this time on Thanksgiving. But it's not as though there weren't Christmas grievances to air. Fox Business host Trish Regan became irate over the fact that Starbucks' annual holiday cups say “Merry Coffee” instead of “Merry Christmas,” a move she was convinced had been driven by political correctness. In an interview with Jeanine Pirro, Lara Trump celebrated the ability to “say 'Merry Christmas' again.”

Indirectly this confirms a trend which the pond has suspected has been developing for some years ...Is the ‘War on Christmas’ over? Polling suggests fewer Americans think it exists.

Bloomberg has done its best to keep the fuss alive, There Is No War on Christmas. There Are Many.

But Bloomberg itself failed the test with The ‘War on Christmas’ Is the Wrong Fight for Christians

Really? Even worse were there were signs that some wanted to abandon their orange Jesus, their tangerine tyrant, for their original saviour:

...The work of rescuing Christianity from partisan warriors is captured in an inspiring new book, Your Jesus Is Too American. Its author, Steve Bezner, is the pastor of a large evangelical church in Houston, Texas, which I visited recently on a cross-country RV trip.
“It’s not unusual,” he writes, “to see signs featuring a cross draped in an American flag or even Jesus wearing an American flag as a sash.” Those images lead to “people being convinced that being an American citizen is synonymous with being a Christian” — and often, that being a Christian is synonymous with being a Republican.
“You’re not a Christian if you vote for a Democrat,” a megachurch pastor in Dallas said earlier in the year. He was hardly the only person to make that claim, which has led many Christians to believe, Bezner writes, “that our salvation is found not in Jesus but in who occupies the White House.”
His book aims “to remind us of the backward and upside-down values of Jesus and to hold them in tension with our American values.” He’s deeply patriotic, but doesn’t confuse love of country with love of God, or loyalty to party with fidelity to scripture.

This is a worrying trend, someone who actually read the bible:

“Jesus’ final act of teaching before sharing a meal with his disciples and then journeying to the cross,” Bezner writes, “was an act of joyful service” — washing his disciples’ feet, demonstrating that the lowliest forms of service are God’s highest calling.
“Too many of our pastors sound like pundits,” he writes. “Too few of us wash feet.”

That's spoilsport behaviour. Does this Bezner chappie see King Donald I arranging a feet-washing ceremony at the White House to show his common touch and his deep spirituality, deeper than orange toner?

It takes all the fun out of wishing pond readers happy Saturnalia or happy holydays, or offer season's greetings, or merry Xmas if you insist ...

The reptiles have badly let down the side. The war on Xmas should be revived and rage for decades.

To hell with it, in honour of a happy Saturnalia and during the holyday season, the pond is going to indulge in a variation on the hunger games. 

Only one reptile will make the cut each day. Others might be noted, but only in passing; there will be much blood in the Surry Hills Colosseum sand. 

Some will be slighted, some offered just a little finger, a cutting Becky Sharp note that they're the loser in a bunch of losers. 

Somehow they couldn't contrive on any given day to be the worst of the worst ... and so must endure the punishment of exile (putting them in Cicero's class is perhaps too fine an honour).

This will involve some great sacrifices. For example, the pond can only note in passing the leaking of the Gaetz report prior to its official launch.

The pond can merely note the reports of others on the sale of Foxtel, at the Graudian and in the Nine rags.

The news of a sports streamer taking over the Murdochian vision led some to hope the dream was dead, though the ABC's report did attempt to offer a small consolation:

All the Fox Sports operations will move across to DAZN as part of the deal, but Sky News Australia will continue to be owned by News Corp and will be broadcast by Foxtel.

But how much love will a sports streamer devote to a bunch of ratbags with abysmal ratings?

The gathering of the filthy rich swamp dwellers in January, Why Trump Is Going to Have the Swampiest Inauguration Ever (outside the paywall), is a future treat, with splendid trinkets on offer for those who can't afford a ticket to the real thing:

For the moment, the pond must pass on such rich temptations, pleasures and treats ...

A hunger games variant will be tough on the reptiles, but they love tough love. 

This day many headlines of the greenie and Jewish activist and billionaire kind shrieked for attention ...

But the pond refused to be tempted ...while over on the extreme far right an array of reptile pundits pleaded for attention to be paid ...

But only one reptile could make the cut ... and it certainly wouldn't be ancient Troy,  offering tall tales of future reads, or Marita scribbling a fable about the fate of Pesutto, as if the pond cared.

Nor could Dame Groan pass muster. A standard bout of union bashing couldn't hold a candle to the winner this day, the valiant returning bromancer, celebrating the true spirit of the season ...

Come on down bromancer ... Art of god: the rite stuff, A conversation with Marilynne Robinson confirms a belief she is ‘the greatest Christian novelist of the 21st century’.

Of course you can't do a book blurb without a snap of the author, Novelist Marilynne Robinson.

Then it was on with the hagiography, the bromancer in finest full flowering of simpering excess. Dame Groan, with her talk of following the money (Murdochian money excepted) was no match:

Marilynne Robinson is the greatest Christian novelist of the 21st century. In 2024 she branched out and produced a scintillating meditation on the Book of Genesis, which, with the exception of the Christian gospels, is the most consequential book in human history. I think Robinson’s Reading Genesis is the book of the year (it includes a complete copy of Genesis itself, read that first).
Robinson demonstrates the continuity between the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament. In one sense, Robinson is telling us what we already know. God doesn’t change. We need look no further than Jesus for an evaluation of the Hebrew scriptures. They are always on his lips throughout the New Testament.
Let me tell you a little about Robinson. She’s an American essayist and academic who has taught literature, the OT, and much else. She’s also, in my view, the greatest Christian novelist of the 21st century. It’s impossible, though, to contain her in any category. In 2004 Robinson published Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize, an astonishing outcome, given its subject. Gilead, perhaps the best novel I’ve read, defies summary or description. It’s a fictional letter a 76-year-old Congregationalist pastor in Iowa, John Ames, writes to his seven-year-old son, in 1956. Ames expects to die soon. He offers his son an account of his life, a substitute for the memories the boy won’t have, and also advice, on God, life, how to see the world.

The best novel he's read? Is that a boast by the bromancer that he doesn't bother reading many novels?

It bemused the pond that the book didn't make the cut in Google's AI compiled list, which perhaps simultaneously says something about the intelligence of AI and the bromancer's intelligence.

No doubt you can get the same result by googling "best novel of all time", but the pond must ignore all that lot and press on ...

I had a priceless chance to talk with Robinson via Zoom, and found her as effortlessly charming, thoughtful and clever as she seems in print. Why choose a minister as hero? “I’ve had a lifelong interest in clergy – what they take home with them after church. I think that they’re a wonderful presence in the world. I’m sorry they’re so often ridiculed in all literature, so often undercut. It wasn’t consistent with my experience, that I should not treat him (Ames) with respect. Out of all that comes the character, and out of the character comes the novel.
“I hadn’t written fiction in a long time. I became aware I had a certain voice in my head and a certain vision in my mind. And I thought it (Gilead) felt like something that would allow me to deal with questions like parental love, things that are extremely complex and profound.”
After Gilead, Robinson wrote three connected novels, Lila, Home and Jack. Did she plan a series? “No. I simply felt as if I knew the characters in a much fuller way than one novel had let me explore and they lived in my mind the way a character I was writing about would, so I gave them their books.”

It's also wise, when blurbing, to feature a purchase opportunity, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, in the spirit of an Amazon Xmas:

Carry on bromancing:

Robinson has created an entire fictional universe for us, shot through with Ames’s beguiling ruminations on God, natural beauty, life and meaning. Now she takes us to Genesis. You get a sense of how integrated her understanding of God’s long dialogue with humanity is. The three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, substantially derive from Genesis (it doesn’t figure as a separate book in Islam, but significant parts of it appear in the Koran). The OT appeals as art: “I have no doubt that whatever else you say about the Bible, it’s great ancient literature, that stands up against Homer or any other comparison.”

Ah, a category error. 

Is the Bible itself great ancient literature? Has Robinson read the original texts in their original languages? Or is she referring to the King James translation, notoriously flawed as a translation (does that bring out the weirdos, or what?) Was she moved by the work of a committee, standing on the backs of others? (Poor Tyndale, burned at the stake for his pains).

Or is she referring to some other translation? Has she ever wondered why all the great writing in the apocrypha never made the cut?

Nah, no saucy doubts here, here no saucy doubts:

Robinson thinks the whole Bible a meditation on theodicy, the problem of evil: how do we reconcile a loving, good God with the existence of so much evil and suffering? Because the culture has moved against metaphysics – reasoning from first principles – we’ve stopped making any serious effort to read and interpret scripture, especially Genesis. This is a spectacular impoverishment. For, Robinson argues, Genesis is completely unique in the literature of the ancient world.

Oh dear, of all the things on which to hang your hat, though to be fair, Genesis does show that the long absent lord loved Herself a good genocide ...

...And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:
All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

What a genocidal bitch She was, though it perhaps explains why genocide remains a popular sport.

Speaking of genocide,  sadly the pond's strict rule means that it can't mention Nesrine Malik's A consensus is emerging: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Where is the action?

Shush, Nesrine, the bromancer is having a rapture. 

How can he take action on a current genocide when he's rapturously celebrating past genocides?

Babylon was a huge and powerful culture, its myths and legends widely and well known. Yet it could hardly be possible for Genesis to be more different from the Babylonian epics. In the Enuma Elish, the gods are many, horrible and warring. They suffer hunger, fear, etc. Tiamat, the gods’ mother, a ferocious serpent, decides to kill all her offspring. Marduk, with his four ears, four eyes and fire-breathing mouth, ultimately defeats her and uses her body parts to make the Earth and sky. Robinson observes: this could hardly be less like the majestic, rational, serene creation in Genesis: “God said let there be light, and there was light.” Genesis radically asserts that creation is good.
Is the Genesis claim that humanity is made in the image of God also unique? Robinson: “Yes, that’s true. It is unique, dazzlingly so, I would say.” Robinson argues the episode where God instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, but then stops him at the last, supports: “A reading that sees in the dramatising of child sacrifice something shocking and transgressive, rejected by God …” Child sacrifice was practised in numerous ancient cultures, including Carthage: “I think it’s fascinating that Carthage is never mentioned by name in the Bible. Carthage would have been a very large, very influential culture, and a Semitic language culture.” When it came to certain pagan customs and personalities they regarded as beyond the pale, the OT writers: “ … would not speak the actual names of pagan gods. They had names like Beelzebub instead. It seems to me the exclusion of them (Carthage) altogether is probably an extension of that same impulse.”

Ah, so it's a banning and a shunning, up there with the Romans, who showed what should be done to the Carthaginians. Now there's a precedent:

Sorry, the pond keeps on getting distracted by genocides:

Genesis is crucial in human history: “It’s the self-definition of God. That makes it unique, distinctive in itself. The fact that God cares to make himself known to human beings and cares what they think about him – that’s all very remarkable. I think it’s probably had more impact on thought and literature than we can really quite understand. It creates a very powerful impetus towards thinking, and thinking very seriously. A lot of Christian writers assume that by attending, by praying, by meditating, they are capable of the most profound sort of insight human beings can have, that human beings can be in a relationship with God.”

Himself? Another category error. Is it any wonder the pond celebrates, along with those Pompeiians enjoying a family feast?

Oh look, they loved a bit of foot tending too ... pity about Her ordering up a volcano to help with the feast.

Then comes a form of undiluted wankery, abusing humanism as a notion while at the same time celebrating one of the great misogynists.

Robinson is describing what could be called scriptural humanism, when she writes: “ … these divine likenesses (ie, human beings, images of God) among whom we live are of the highest interest to God.” She tells me: “The Old Testament prepares the idea that what happens in human history is central, cosmic, absolutely meaningful. This is the context in which the figure of Jesus can arise.” Her insights into religion are inherently literary, which puts them on the highest plane, for the proper subject of literature is the truths of the human heart. Naturally, in excavating the human heart, the artist encounters God. She believes it a great mistake that a knowledge of Genesis or, say, the writings of Paul, is absent in the experience of students in Western education: “The always more rigorous exclusion of religion from education that’s gone on in recent decades has been simultaneous with a kind of stepping away from scripture and theology in a lot of mainstream churches. There’s a tendency to make them good people societies. They’re losing the literary roots of their own denominations, not only the Bible but a lot of beautiful things written by people inspired by the Bible.”

The writings of Paul?

Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.
And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.

Pray be silent, wretched woman writer, or if you must, blather gibberish in tongues.

This reflects trends across the academy: “I’m no philosophy specialist but to the extent that I read modern philosophy it seems a very depleted thing.” Some of the greatest philosophers of the past, she argues, would find no purchase today, the language of big concepts is no longer accepted: “I think the walls close in at the period where people become cynical about religion. They don’t accept the meaningfulness of thought that claims that scale for itself. There’s a cosmic scale from the very first words of the Bible.”
In Gilead, Ames speculates about heaven. Does Robinson look forward to heaven? “Something I have in common with Ames, I like this world very well. I’m very grateful to be a part of it. I don’t know what to expect (about heaven). I think it probably would be naive to try to know what to expect. If you’re persuaded of God’s ultimate benevolence, you could look forward to heaven on those terms.”

Spoken with a genuine ambivalence. Luckily the benevolence has been revealed to all as the treat that will follow the salmon mousse course:

 

Time then for the sign off:

Reading Robinson helps persuade me of God’s benevolence. Happy Christmas to all.

Reading the bromancer going full Xian helps remind the pond of Her complete indifference. 

Happy Saturnalia to all and as William Blake once wrote ...

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

Put it another way ...

Yep, soon we can look forward to another year of the reptiles building a Hell in Heaven's despite ...