A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
Steve Vanden-Eykel in the Vancouver Sun: “[That] Christians are more offended at being wished a Happy Holiday than Muslims and Jews are at being wished a Merry Christmas does not reflect positively on Christianity. It speaks rather to the old rule of parenting: Sometimes you have to give the biggest cookie to the biggest baby.”
Yes, I know. It is interesting though that quite a lot of the speculation about the Suffolk Strangler is linking him to P.D. James novels.
If only it were a media format consumed mostly by those under 30 - like a video game - and then all the usual suspects would be screaming for it to be banned.
But it’s a book. No moral panic here. Nothing to see. We don’t need no stinking rating system for book. They’re in a different class of thing altogether. The difference between Metal Gear Solid and John Le Carré is that old people read the former and young people play the former.
Tags: hypocrisy, moral panic
Londonist: “Gah! Why are financial folk ALWAYS leveraging things?” (Because they talk bullshit!)
As a representative of the forces of secular evil that Archbishops so easily brush off - a life of professional ignorance spreading tends to help that.
So, apparently, we are in a War on Christmas. Yes, us secularists. We are battling for the right to slice up newly-born infants and drink their blood to satsify our Satanic desires.
Or so say the newspapers who like to underline certain words in their headlines for their slightly less bright readers.
And the reason we are trying to destroy religion and strangle kittens is simple - it offends us, apparently.
Sorry, but when have I ever said that I find Christmas offensive? I find it silly, and I think the best you can say about it is that it’s basically plagiarism.
You see what is going on here is you’ve got religious people who deal in the word “offensive” (Behtzi offended a lot of religious people, so they worked very hard to shut it down). It’s not us seculars who believe in offensiveness. I don’t find anybody’s religion offensive. I find a few of the things people do as a result of their religion stupid, insane or thoroughly ignorant. I am no more offended by Christians or Muslims or Hindus than I am by people who believe in pixies.
Religious people think in terms of offense, and so when we say “we don’t want Christmas”, it’s because they think we are offended. Which is bollocks of course. I’m against all religious festivals equally, since they all basically celebrate man’s ignorance.
What I do think is that governments shouldn’t be subsidising Christmas decorations. This isn’t based on whether people might find them offensive. It’s based on the fact that people who don’t support religion x shouldn’t have to pay for it through taxation. You see what I’m doing here is actually affirming your religious belief - I’m saying that Christmas is about Christianity, and because I reject Christianity I reject Christmas. I don’t play the Hegelian carnival stunt of taking something that is reasonably well-defined, change it’s definition beyond recognition and then say that it is now precisely compatible with it’s antithesis.
The whole “take offence” thing is the biggest straw man ever. It’s been surprisingly effective since every silly red top in the country has been promulgating it. But it isn’t actually true - which is probably why it’s coming out of the mouths of Archbishops and being parrotted in the papers.
I quite like the fact that the Archbishop of York - in between talking to his Super Deluxe version of an invisible friend - has been called “courageous” for saying that Christianity ought to be part of public life. Oh yeah! Dead courageous that is. Telling politicians that they shouldn’t change anything and that the Church of England gravy train should keep rolling on. I mean, how courageous it is - to fight back against a position that all of three people in some crazy borough council somewhere believe while mainstream secularist opinion thinks is illogical and ill-considered.
Still, you’ve got to feel sorry for them religious folks. They live their lives under the threat of all sorts of dangerous persecution for holding to their faith. I mean, while Falun Gong practitioners get their organs ripped out in the death wagons which rattle round Beijing, modern English Christians have to suffer through something far worse than Chinese government organ harvesting - the Anglican liturgy! I mean, the drone of Cecil Alexander’s All things bright and beautiful. The fact that the Church of England website compares prayer to weeding (I mean - sorry, but when I think of an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent being breaking the currently understood laws of nature in order to help Granny win the bingo next week, the analogy to weeding doesn’t quite hold up for me).
When I think of the sort of Christianity practiced in the Church of England every week, the only reaction it can rouse in me is a long and slightly bemused giggle.
The idea that the Archbishop of York is being courageous by saying that Christianity needs a more prominent place within public life should inspire the same reaction as Kierkegaard would have us to the solemn Sunday declaration of Professor Martnesen that Bishop Mynster was a “witness to the truth, [one of] the genuine witnesses to the truth… into the holy chain of witnesses to the truth which stretches through the ages from the days of the Apostles”. An archbishop saying Christianity is vital to the nation’s health is courageous in the same way that someone saying “rape is horrid” in a roomful of feminists is courageous (albeit not nearly so true).
Just as Kierkegaard pointed up the disconnect between Martensen’s declaration of Mynster as “witness to the truth” and the fact that Mynster did not suffer for his doctrine, did not “die from the world” - “a man whose life from first to last is unacquainted with everything which is called enjoyment… in poverty, in lowliness, in abasement, and so is unappreciated, hated, abhorred, and then derided, insulted, mocked”.
What the critics of us “rampant secularists” and “immoral atheists” want is not true Christianity, the utter self-abasement and life centered on God - but the sort of Christianity of Kierkegaard’s Denmark - a “play Christianity” replete with wordly goods, power and a dose of earnestness and dramatic liturgy. They want Christmas trees and a return to Middle England’s value system. I mean, having to feign an interest in postmodernist painting is hard work and we really don’t approve of all these Romanians (except the one who cuts the lawn).
The Christianity of the Daily Mail (and even the Spectator) exists solely to bash uppity lefties over the head with, to whinge about illegal immigrants and to use as a moral mallet in order to avoid the pesky demands of reason. Can there be any better indication for this thesis than the fact that 70% of the public call themselves Christian and yet barely 7.5% of them attend a weekly service? Again, I am faced with a world that is ridiculous because it takes the idea that there is a “War on Christmas” seriously while shit like this happens.
Wriggle wriggle! Loïc Le Meur has posted on his blog about Sam Sethi. Which is missing the point. Yes, it sucks that Sam has lost his job. But it also sucks that a lot of people have spent a lot of money attending a conference that sucked and that nobody really wants to have a conversation about this, despite this being a *cough* conversational media *cough*, right? I’ve made my thoughts clear in Loïc’s comments, although the likelihood of a reaction from Loïc “Blogs start conversations” Le Meur looks pretty low right now. If nothing happens, I am sending a formal complaint to whomever it concerns on Monday asking for some form of refund. If you attended Le Web 3 and enjoyed it in the same way I enjoyed it (heh), then you ought to as well.
