Religion

Christmas 2015

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Newgrange  is  an ancient structure in Ireland so constructed that the sun, at the exact time of the winter solstice, shines directly down a long corridor and illuminates the inner chamber. More about Newgrange  here  and  here.

Grim  has an Arthurian passage about the Solstice.

Don Sensing has thoughts astronomical, historical, and theological about  the Star of Bethlehem.

Vienna Boys Choir, from Maggie’s Farm

Lappland in pictures…link came from the great and much-mourned  Neptunus Lex

Snowflakes and snow crystals, from Cal Tech. Lots of great photos

A Romanian Christmas carol, from The Assistant Village Idiot

In the bleak midwinter, from King’s College Cambridge

Rick Darby  has some thoughts on the season. More  here.

A Christmas reading from  Thomas Pynchon.

The  first radio broadcast of voice and music  took place on Christmas Eve, 1906.  (although there is debate about the historical veracity of this story)

An air traffic control version of  The Night Before Christmas.

Ice sculptures  from the St Paul winter carnival

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, sung by  Enya

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Jeff Sypeck  on a winter garden

Mona Charen, who is Jewish, wonders  what’s going on with the Christians?

Is Islam a Religion ?

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As usual, Richard Fernandez gets to the heart of the matter with the least number of detours.

The important thing to remember about rebellions, even small ones, is that everyone who thinks they can control the forces unleashed — can’t. That goes for Obama and that goes for Trump. A friend who was a veteran of the Anbar Surge wrote that democracy was scary and to calm himself down he repeated to himself Winston Churchill’s soothing words: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

Yes, I think we are on the threshold of a revolution. Whether it is a Revolution, with a capital R, is yet to be seen.

Fernandez begins with the incident of Gessler’s Hat.

in 1307 Gessler raised a pole in the market square of Altdorf, placed his hat atop it, and ordered all the townsfolk to bow before it. Tell, whose marksmanship and pride were legendary, publicly refused. Gessler’s cruel wrath was tempered by his curiosity to test Tell’s skill, so he gave Tell the option of either being executed or shooting an apple off his son’s head in one try. Tell succeeded in splitting the apple with his arrow, saving his own life. When Gessler asked why he had readied two arrows, he lied and replied that it was out of habit. After being assured that he wouldn’t be killed, Tell finally admitted that the second was intended for the tyrant if his son was harmed.

Yes, it is best not to put all your cards on the table until they are needed.

Gessler, enraged, had Tell arrested and taken by boat across Lake Lucerne to Küssnacht to spend the life he had saved in a dungeon. A sudden fierce storm made the crew terrified, and since William Tell was a better sailor, they handed the wheel to him. But instead of heading towards the dungeon, he escaped to shore. There he ambushed and killed Gessler with an arrow, launching the young Confederacy’s rebellion against Austrian rule.

The result was freedom that still endures. What does this tell us ? Not much but Andrew McCarthy has some ideas.

Donald Trump’s rhetorical excesses aside, he has a way of pushing us into important debates, particularly on immigration. He has done it again with his bracing proposal to force “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” I have no idea what Mr. Trump knows about either immigration law or Islam. But it should be obvious to any objective person that Muslim immigration to the West is a vexing challenge. Some Muslims come to the United States to practice their religion peacefully, and assimilate into the Western tradition of tolerance of other people’s liberties, including religious liberty — a tradition alien to the theocratic societies in which they grew up. Others come here to champion sharia, Islam’s authoritarian societal framework and legal code, resisting assimilation into our pluralistic society.

Now what ?

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Trump’s Dumb Muslim Plan

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To do a valid Christian baptism requires some water, a Christian to administer it, and about 15 seconds. Licitness so that all the proper paperwork is done and the newly baptized Christian is properly educated could take a year but if you don’t give a hoot for the niceties or it’s an emergency, 15 seconds will do. That’s all that is required to get around Trump’s Muslim ban. This makes his plan a stupid plan. It is worse than useless. It is an anti-screen. Honest Muslims who want medical treatment or just to go shopping will be stopped. For a terrorist, it’s hardly a speed bump.

That isn’t to say that there is no room to change our immigration system to improve things. It’s just not this one. Trump has the money to hire the best help in formulating a real plan and he came out with a stupid stinker instead.

The better solution, and one that would be perfectly understood by Trump’s base would be a straightforward declaration that private courts including religious courts that issue judgments that call for the injury or death of americans are enemies of America. To aid them as a U.S. citizen is treason, and any of their agents or bailiffs are in an immigration-excludable category that gets put on the DS-156 right next to the item asking are you a Nazi.

We don’t need anything complicated. Nobody reasonable is going to get bent out of shape over the declaration of our enemy being people who seek to kill or hurt us. The ones who do protest it will be doing us all a service. Hardly any administrative procedures have to be changed, only one form.

Trump wouldn’t have had to break a sweat selling this. But he didn’t. Why did he push his dumb plan instead?

Is Trump Right?

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Should the USA stop immigration of muslims into the country? I think yes. I would go further, and declare – through legislation – islam a seditious ideology and outlaw its practice. I would even close mosques.

Let me be clear. This is not my being opposed to a strange religious practice, or a group of people because of their ethnicity, this is about recognizing islam as a violent, totalitarian ideology. In the same way we would not invite members of a violent cult to live in our homes with our family and children, we should not invite islam to live in our larger civilization. And recognizing its violent and totalitarian nature, we should outlaw its practice.

I do not see this as a violation of religious freedom. If I declare an intent to kill everyone who does not join my cult, and propagate that idea through my offices, then declare my beliefs a religion, am I then free to go about carrying out my agenda and proselytizing others to kill and subdue as well? And is a society that wants to protect its citizens, its freedoms, and its way of life within its rights – within its responsibilities – to prohibit that cult from practicing?
If not, why not?

And if that violent cult wishes to bring more of its members from overseas to join them, are we morally obligated to admit them?
If so, why?

Lewis vs Haldane (rerun)

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(I cross-posted my 2014 review of C S Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength  over at  Richochet, where a good comment thread has developed. Some of the comments reminded me of the extremely negative review of the book written by JBS Haldane in 1946, and Lewis’s response thereto.)

Haldane was an eminent British scientist (population genetics) and a Marxist. C S Lewis was…well, you probably already know who C S Lewis was.

Haldane’s critique was directed at the series of novels by Lewis known as the Ransom Trilogy, and particularly the last book of the series,  That Hideous Strength  . Lewis responded in a letter which remained unpublished for many of years. All this may sound ancient and esoteric, but I believe the Lewis/Haldane controversy is very relevant to our current political and philosophical landscape.

To briefly summarize That Hideous Strength: Mark, a young sociologist, is hired by a government agency called NICE–the National Institute for Coordinated Experimentation–having as its stated mission the application of science to social problems. (Unbelievably, today the real-life British agency which establishes rationing policies for healthcare is also called NICE.) In the novel, NICE turns out to be a conspiracy devoted to very diabolical purposes, as Mark gradually discovers. It also turns out that the main reason NICE wanted to hire Mark is to get control of his wife, Jane (maiden name: Tudor) who has clairvoyant powers. The NICE officials want to use Jane’s abilities to get in touch with the magician Merlin and to effect a junction between modern scientific power and the ancient powers of magic, thereby bringing about the enslavement of mankind and worse. Jane, though, becomes involved with a group which represents the polar opposite of NICE, led by a philology professor named Ransom, who is clearly intended as a Christ-figure. The conflict between NICE and the Ransom group will determine the future of humanity.

A brilliantly written and thought-provoking book, which I highly recommend, even if, like me, you’re not generally a fan of fantasy novels.

With context established, here are some of the highlights of the Lewis/Haldane controversy:

1) Money and Power.

In his article, Haldane attacks Lewis for the latter’s refusal to absolutely condemn usury, and celebrates the fact that “Mammon has been cleared off a sixth of our planet’s surface”…clearly referring to the Soviet Union. Here’s part of Lewis’s response:

The difference between us is that the Professor sees the ‘World’ purely in terms of those threats and those allurements which depend on money. I do not. The most ‘worldly’ society I have ever lived in is that of schoolboys: most worldly in the cruelty and arrogance of the strong, the toadyism and mutual treachery of the weak, and the unqualified snobbery of both. Nothing was so base that most members of the school proletariat would not do it, or suffer it, to win the favour of the school aristocracy: hardly any injustice too  bad for the aristocracy to practise. But the class system did not in the least depend on the amount of pocket money. Who needs to care about money if most of the things he wants will be offered by cringing servility and the remainder can be taken by force? This lesson has remained with me all my life. That is one of the reasons why I cannot share Professor Haldanes exaltation at the banishment of Mammon from ‘a sixth of our planet’s surface’. I have already lived in a world from which Mammon was banished: it was the most wicked and miserable I have yet known. If Mammon were the only devil, it would be another matter. But where Mammon vacates the throne, how if Moloch takes his
place? As Aristotle said, ‘Men do not become tyrants in order to keep warm’. All men, of course, desire pleasure and safety. But all men also desire power and all men desire the mere sense of being ‘in the know’ or the ‘inner ring’, of not being ‘outsiders’: a passion insufficiently studied and the chief theme of my story. When the state of society is such that money is the passport to all these prizes, then of course money will be the prime temptation. But when the passport changes, the desires will remain.

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