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Misogyny, Naked Theology and Misandry

Friday, 17 May, 2024 by Free to think, free to believe...

When I was younger I used to quote Paul… and as I took an academic interest in The Bible, I found out that everyone has their own bias – a famous and still published author of New Testament Commentaries (William Barclay) opened up in an Introduction that we should keep an open mind when reading Luke (that was the book in particular this commentary was on) – Jesus may have been God, might still be, never mind how mind-blowing that might be, it could be true… and then he went on to say that we know, of course, that The Laws of Physics are true and therefore all miracle stories have to be read as some strange way of telling parables, illuminating a story or perhaps they were just later additions put in by folk who were either credulous or for the credulous… and of course, William Barclay was not credulous…

So, I thought, how do you hold that Jesus may (have been) be God but miracles are not on the table?

I must admit it put me on the flyer to ‘naked theology’ – just read the bible, I’d say, and whilst I think it better to read the bible than not – ‘naked’ or otherwise, for me, Naked Theology has left the building, allow me to explain…

Now I’ve read Mark’s Gospel before, and this time around I was reading it alongside Nick Baines book of reflections, the somewhat nattily entitled author gave the rather natty title ‘Marking Time‘ to his book and in there is a description of how the passage where Jesus says we put new wine in new wineskins, doesn’t quite read that way – apparently, back in the day, they’d soak an old wine skin so that it could be ‘refreshed’ (thanks to Nick Baines) and then used once more for new wine – I was struck by the idea of Baptism (which means dunking, submersion and is a word that is more transliterated, rather than translated – ie we are told that the use of the word as we know it corresponds to the meaning in the passage – meaning the physical term is now a symbolic term) and how we can be re-used spiritually – perhaps, whilst we may only have ‘one baptism for the remmission of sins’ we could have a few more to help us wash out some of life’s stickier points along the way? But I digress… (get used to it)

So we cannot get to fully grip the Bible without help and therein lies trouble…

Earlier this year, I was reading John and towards the end, there is the crowd of women at the foot of the cross and there springing forth was Mary Magdalene – now I had felt that Michael Marshall was a bit on the authoritarian side of things (he is a bishop after all) but in his section on this, he just said that tradition held that Mary Magdalene is held to be the prostitute found in a passage in another gospel. I just thought this was a bit of a bundle of straw on the ol’ camel’s back… to be clear, I was already so dissatisfied with reading John in the light of ‘Lent with the Beloved Disciple‘ that I had decided to reread John with another book of reflections… Jean Vanier’s ‘The Gospel of John, The Gospel of Relationship‘,and that has a different emphasis and goes through John looking at how Jesus wants to relate to us and how that should form how we relate to others, which is all good and I did engage with this positively… However, again we come to the foot of the cross and Vanier, avoiding a tradition that isn’t as long as it could be (or should be if true), delves into Mary’s name – Magdala, or the Magdalene. Where this refers to, says Vanier, is a place where there was a roman military camp and where there are military camps, there is prostitution – so a strange guilty by association argument is left hanging…

And so, I thought I’d try a third – none of the gospels are that long and these books are reflections rather than mighty books or so small minded that they are like reading a book of footnotes, so, bare with me, doing all this isn’t some terribly burdensome task – indeed, I read John more than anyone else, which is perhaps a good rule of thumb – and this time by a woman! I got my hands on ‘A Journal of LOVE‘ by Pamela Smith, SS.C.M. … Well! When we get to the same spot, Pamela neither mentions the tradition or gets clever about Mary’s name, but, just but… we get that she ‘had been burned and bedeviled by life… she was ready to recognise not only an uncommonly nice man but also a messiah…’

And so what?

In the other gospels the entire totality of what is directly said about Mary Magdalene’s back story is that Jesus had cast seven devils out of her and that she was part of a group of women who helped fund the Jesus gig – she may have had money, it could just be she was part of that group… So, to figure out what I should say, and not make any more mistakes than I’d already read, I decided to read a couple of books regarding Mary Magdalene’s story alongside how other women were also treated and whether their treatment was fair in the light of what we could know (I could go and try to learn New Testament Greek and get access to the manuscripts etc etc, but I do have other things to do… )

Both of the books I read give space to say how valuable reading the texts with a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ ie if the language uses a male sense for mixed groups when a man was present, should we not be suspicious of a tradition that says no women were there as well? I think it’s a good point – it both shows how traditions can get out of hand, how ‘naked theology’ really isn’t the answer and that we need a contemporary hand to help us get to the text properly…. These two books are, firstly, ‘Women Remembered‘ by Joan Taylor and Helen Bond and secondly, but by no means lesser, ‘Mary Magdalene‘ by Adriana Valerio, translated by Wendy Wheatley… (if you want to peak then on page 67 of Women Remembered there is a definition of ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’, whereas p. 28 of ‘Mary Magdalene’ has a good description not only of it, but also a stab at where the phrase comes from…)

Again, both books tackle the tradition of whether Mary Magdalene should be accepted as the anonymous prostitute, and (for a very rare stance) I am willing to put forth the established Eastern Church’s tradition of Mary Magdalene which has no such positing of her as a prostitute – the tradition is just lousy misogynistic argument against a particular woman who was (being named so often) obviously part of the inner circle as part of the roman campaign to bulster a patriarchal church… but which apparently can still be accepted (and taught) now by a bishop in the Church of England – Michael Marshall. Vanier’s take on the name seems to be slightly better, except that it too fails – as a place name, ‘magdala’ indicates tower – but which one, and does it matter – towers, military camps, who cares? Well, if we say we know where it means, then I think it does, firstly because military camps aren’t everywhere, and unless you know whether the one refered to by her name was also ‘host’ to a colonising military force or not, why cast aspersions? What does it say when we say these things?

But more than that, it is also possible, for the usage of the ‘Magdalene’ part, it could have been a nickname – perhaps she towered over the disciples, or perhaps her force of character was a wonder to behold – so on the name we should not assume an actual place, and therefore Vanier’s innuendo is rather crass, rather than thoughtful. I am remined of a quote from The Mandolorian… ‘One does not speak unless one knows‘ The opposite should also be true, especially if we are casting stones at folk….

And then there is Pamela Smith’s, rather more reserved and encoded acceptance of the tradition – she knew what a truly nice man was like, she had been burned by life… well, all the followers had been through the ringer in the week that saw Jesus crucified but that’s not what these comments are about, and yes, Pamela is the most sympathetic of the three, but… but… I just find her leaning in toward the tradition unworthy of her (otherwise insightful reflections) – it invites us, who know the tradition to nod our heads, and for those who do not, this could just seem like a homely sort of thing to say… I find that uncomfortable – say it, or don’t say it and be responsible for what you say.

That is not to say that both of the books on women and Mary Magdalene should be let off, though!

As I said earlier, we all have a bias (or two!)…

Women Remembered, is a good book with strong descriptions of how life was like back in Judea around 30-33 AD (of course, they use CE, and so they can) and how critics influenced the tradition against women. Mary Magdalene, looks at what we know of her from the gospels, other documents and how she’s been portrayed up until now, with the Da Vinci Code (book and film) and all… out of the two, I go with Adriana Valerio’s work – she doesn’t fall into their own trap, take for example The Woman with the Blood Flow, for twelve years and despite spending all money on finding a cure, a woman has no respite from bleeding – which is a terrible thing and she believes if she can just touch Jesus’ clothes, she will be cured – and so she is, Joan Taylor and Helen Bond then make a few comments which show some of their underlying assumptions – firstly, as Jesus asks who touched Him, He doesn’t know… we don’t know that, Jesus may have wanted the woman to come forward of her own volition – it would make a change from just dragging out the unfortunate one – and secondly, they also say that it makes Jesus late to cure Jairus’ daughter (Mk 5vs21-43) – the gospel narrative carries no such comment – apparently, in the life of Jesus, these things were always happenning, and my guess is that the Jairus’ servants who get to him after the Healing of the Woman, must have left before her encounter with Jesus. So, the question is why do Taylor and Bond make this comment – could it be that they are just looking for critiques for the sake of them, rather than in handling the text to see what it says?

I’ll leave this bit with the first sentences of the last reflection of Nick Baines, “Women have come out of this gospel [Mark] very well. They get on and ‘do’ while the men are somewhere else ‘being’. The women who watched Jesus die on the cross also followed Joseph of Arithea and noted the location of the tomb….” perhaps we should also note Jesus’ reaction to the men scorning Mary Magdalene and the other women’s news of His resurrection – ‘He rebuked their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they did not believe those who had seen him…’ (Mk 16 v 14, The New King James Version)…

prejudice leads us by the nose if we are lucky – we can do our best to combat prejudice by being as wise as a serpent (and reading more than one point of view), but let us not forget that we should also be as harmless as a dove…

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On Armistice Day…

Saturday, 11 November, 2023 by Free to think, free to believe...

I would like to share the entry for this day in ‘The Monastic Way‘ –

“Father Daniel, at the age of ninety, was on his way to the front door for a walk one Sunday afternoon. Passing through the lobby, he came upon a young man and his mother. No one was attending to them, and Father Dan exclaimed, ‘Oh hell! Now I’ve got to do hospitality.’ Despite his initial reaction and response, he did the right thing. He took them downstairs and gave them cookies and coffee.”

We are all ‘Father Daniel’ – we all have stuff we prefer to do, we all find reasons/excuses to avoid stuff we do not like, especially at times we could be doing the stuff we really want to do…

The question is whether we can see beyond our own biases, our own likes and reach out for what The Other needs. For example, I get a White Poppy around this time to commemorate and support civilians caught up in war, killed by war and I find the over eager way we show our appreciation for the armed forces, the focus on red poppies, and political figures convincing us of how sacred a day this is, rather unnerving. For me, I have to breach my bias and know that almost all who commemorate Armistice Day, and Remembrance Sunday, do so for the sake of their own grief or to uphold a state that saw so many die for Good Causes, and after reading/learning about both World Wars, I do think that both of them were Good Causes. I am more ambivelent of later conflicts, however that doesn’t matter here.

What matters is that folk want to march in sympathy with the sacrifice of the dead, and that others want to march in sympathy with those yet living in a particular conflict zone… I find it hard to think the first should be in conflict with the second, but some are… but still – what should we do?

Father Daniel, from the excerpt, knew what he wanted to do, and at ninety, who are we to say he doesn’t know what’s good for him. The thing for us to do, if we knew and loved Father Daniel would be to let him go for his walk. There are thousands, if not millions, (if not billions) who remember Armistice Day, who are told what it means and how important it is, but if a few thousand also want to draw attention to present suffering, uncomfortable as it is, should we not support them?

I’ve been watching Survivor, and one of the things that struck me on the last episode I’ve seen is that, not only is one person thrown out of their ‘tribe’ they are then thrown into the ‘other’ tribe (there are only two competing tribes…) and the excerpts for the next (exciting) episode have the recieving tribe grilling the unfortunate, the rejected – and I could only think that the best way of gaining their loyalty for and wanting to identifying with the new host tribe was to welcome them in; be the home the other tribe was not…

Are we in danger of becoming so short sighted that we can no longer host difference? That if folk do not agree with our proposed view of the world, no matter how painful their reflection makes us, should we not, as Father Daniel did, give them sustenance – and by that I mean, on this day, on this year, the freedom to protest that thousands of innocent civillians have recently died, and many more may follow?

Should we not search our hearts and minds and think through these issues thoroughly – not giving to knee-jerk, politician fed answers and see that The Other is like us in War – that civillians are dying and we are, or should be, moved enough by that to simply say – Let them march for peace…

and for those, like Giles Fraser, who think I may be terribly niave, I invite you to reflect on the fact that I have lived for some time in NI…

the Father Daniel reflection, imbedded in The Monastic Way, is from Benet Tvedten’s book, How to Be a Monastic and not Leave your Day Job: An Invitation to Oblate Life obviously the views of this post are mine…

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How did it get to be so Boring!?!

Friday, 11 June, 2010 by Free to think, free to believe...

Where has the radical freshness of christianity gone? How come the symbol of a martyr who was tortured so much he was resucitated three times before, literally, losing his head for his faith become the flag for a national football team…

Perhaps we in the West, and especially in England of whom the symbol is the national flag just wanted to know George was a soldier and a saint and lets not talk about how he peacefully made his protest of faith and was then tortured and killed for it – Let’s talk about dragons instead… And whilst we are here – here’s a question: Would we return George to his state so they could kill him? Nowadays we do send, or propose to send, folk back to countries which kill folk for their views on the grounds that we get a ‘guarantee’ from the state in question re looking after the asylum seeker – we have courts defending their rights not to be packaged out to be killed as there are protests in the press about the money they cost us… Is this the behaviour of a country St. George would want to be symbolic of?

Would he rather his flag would be waved around for a sporting event where, if not caught, a cheat is seen as herioc – the dives, the ‘ruff and tumble’, the penalties gained.. the list of the behaviour goes on… but if the team wins then the sins are washed clean and the flag can be waved in glory…

Victory was never George’s aim in his conduct and that’s a problem for the church and for society – he went and did what? St. George’s story is not boring so why do we not tell it?

Here’s quote from Vivian Stanshaw from 1983 –

Aparthied and prejudice,come before a fall,

but patronage is even worse, you’re walking towards that wall…

from his rare work of genius ‘Sir Henry at Ndidi’s Kraal’

I’ve had this thought for a while and have tried to figure out exactly how it works but I think going to history may help…

A while ago I managed to trundle through this work Constantine’s Bible which debunks the idea of the selection of the books of the New Testament as forced by the Emperor Constantine except by the power of patronage… True, there is the Council of Nicea and all that but what we do not talk about and thus do not see is the habitus of power that Constantine gave to the church… Thus clergy when given a nice big house, virtually, all said ‘Thankyou’ and with all those comments about trusting power from St Paul – hands were shaken and the church went to bat for the state – a boring conclusion.

Well it is now but way back Then when it seemed that the levers of power were influenced by the church – and indeed when the church managed some tight manouvring to have actual physical, legal and state granted [no matter how grudgingly]  power the the church was exciting but not for the reasons it should have been and as we make progress of the church moving away from the state’s machina for governance [note the sermons of the First World War and those before that for fighting for ‘King and Country’ – just like St. George?] we are left with the stain of granted patronage – we had the patronage of lords or the great and the good [whoever they are] and then the priests could trickle down the patronage of sanctity from God… I’m sure the fines for not going to church managed to keep some bums on the pews, right up into the 1900’s… and now when we see patronage for the skeletal effect it is when not given freely or only on demand the story of christians looks boring because we’ve lived the wrong story for far too long… and have been unable to come to grips with the fact that the history of christianity shows how we remember and honour those who stand against the powers that be whilst we find ways of twisting the story so that we no longer need to feel guilt for our normality…

no wonder we’ve grown dull.

Posted in Britain Today, Church of England, dogma, faith, history, outlook, philosophy, politics, religion | 1 Comment »

Spoiling for a real vote…

Thursday, 6 May, 2010 by Free to think, free to believe...

As I left the dog on her own to go off to the polling station I explained what I was off to do, it went something like this –

“I’m going to do something strange, human and pointless.”

As a clip from a former election campaign was played it prayed on my mind – it was a brief quote from James Callaghan who famously lost to Margaret Thatcher in 1979 where he declared that we had to decide what kind of society we wanted. Now I was too young to vote then but I have been thinking about that idea over the last weeks.

Every party is happy with policies that hound and harass 20% of the population – alright they may be smokers but is that enough to drive them away from where they would mix with wider society and make up 40% of the population. So what kind of society is it that we are voting for?

The idea of another five years of Gordon Brown scares me, the idea of being sold down the swanny to the Superstate of Europe gives me the heeby-jeebies thank you Clegg but I still did not vote for Cameron. Or anyone else for that matter…

When the political consensus agrees that 300 odd folk can choose to persecute one fifth of the population and then stick to it – What kind of society can we vote for?

Posted in Britain Today, dogma, General Election, Local Elections, outlook, philosophy, Pipe & cigars, politics | 3 Comments »

The Election Thing – An old note or two…

Friday, 23 April, 2010 by Free to think, free to believe...

I’ve found on the good old UTube a video of an old song by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band…

No Matter Who You Vote For the Government Always Gets In!

This is not the only version but it does have a good way of getting modern pictures and clips for this song… including clips of the would be leaders…

Posted in Britain Today, dogma, history, outlook, politics | 6 Comments »

1984 has been superseded by Reality

Saturday, 12 September, 2009 by Free to think, free to believe...

I wrote about how the novel 1984 was Orwell’s view of how the UK was functioning in 1948 here and argued that he may have been right…

I recently read Anna Minton‘s Ground Control and found that all the debates and protests about whether we are living with ‘Big Brother’ are now redundant. Most folk agree that living in a ‘Big Brother Society’ would be a bad thing but then argue about how we are getting there and worries about how far society could/would go…

Well, the situation is worse than we thought.

In 1984 Orwell argued that the ‘proles’ were mostly left to their own devices and they could get on with their own lives. The problem within 1984 was born by those in government or part of the governing class. This is no longer the case. It might have been one of Orwell’s aims that anybody could read his book and be shaken out of complacency to react to the way we were governed by those who were left to rot by the ruling class.

One of the repeated pictures of ordinary life that Orwell gives is a ‘prole’ who continually hangs her washing out on her line – a classic image of life in Britain but now in 2009 there are areas were this – hanging washing out – is banned. Minton goes through the dreadful reality of ‘gated’ communities and some, as part of their conditions for living within their bounds, ban washing lines…

This is a petty point, to be sure, but it indicates the amount of fine toothed infractions on what is still considered everyday life but won’t be for much longer if we’re not careful. To show how bad things have become I wondered over various titles for this post and just as throwaway pictures I’ll give a couple here…

Why be proud of our armed forces when the government is destroying our way of life?

Government destroy our way society – what can terrorists do to us?

Now, they were not particularly thought through and in the end I plumped for the reference to Goerge Orwell. Make no mistake though – I still think they are right. Take our valued and precious ‘Rights of Way’ – these are being destroyed by government policy to allow private corporations to buy up city centres and privatise the streets. To give an example – I was walking down to meet the wife in High Wycombe through the Eden shopping centre which mixes open streets with ones with a high ceiling with my elderly and friendly dog [not the new arrival] and was told by a reasonable ‘guardian’ that dogs were not allowed. I was following a route that was a cut through that previously had no by laws regarding the four legged friends… The ‘right of way’ had been stopped and now it is a ‘conditional way’… True, the reasonable and private security individual allowed me on my way but he did not need to.

If you don’t like strange four legged life forms you may be sympathetic to the Eden centre but think about this stark fact – there are over a thousand ‘designated dispersal zones’ where groups of two or more can be  moved off. How many times have we not merely ‘hung around’ and waited for some friends. We did no harm but then again, we did not buy much then either and the thing we have to understand is that dispersal zones are in both shopping centres and working class areas who don’t, effectively, want the local kids to be able to grow up with friends they used to ‘kick around with’…

Shopping centres are being designed with CCTV of various calibres and one even uses drones that can fly around and watch folk as they meander around.

There is just too much to be stuffed into one post and so I’ll come back to other issues within Minton’s work at another time but for now I’ll leave you with this question – If we are really fighting the war on terror to preserve our way of life, then why does government policy itself tear our way of life apart?

Posted in Britain Today, outlook, philosophy, politics, Provoked by Pulp | 1 Comment »

Stalking the Unicorn

Sunday, 6 September, 2009 by Free to think, free to believe...

Not only is this the title for a rather entertaining yarn by Mike Resnick it is a direct reference to one of the CampQuest‘s activities, well at least as part of the UK’s camp experience…

The idea is that the leaders talk about unicorns that live in the nearby forest and there’s a prize to be won for being able to prove that the unicorns do exist. There are various ideas behind this whole thing – the one that is given is that it is to show how the onus is on the propegator of a positive idea to prove their point to the sceptic.

The idea that the unicorns stand in for God at the atheist camp is neglected to be mentioned by those little atheists; the children are merely trained in critical thinking whilst having a fun time in a secular camp…

Part of the idea is from how did we ever get ourselves to the folly of belief  in supernatural things/spooks? Note that this activity is dreamed up by atheists for atheists and their children… amongst other fun and frolics…

So why single this one out as the activity to be blogged about?

Because, dear reader, this is the one with quite a few assumptions behind it. Even perhaps dogmatic assumptions -the ones that are accepted but still open to be contested, if only philosophically. Take Occam’s Razor – the rule here is that between two explanations for the same phenomena the simplest should be accepted because that is a. easier to test and b. more elegant. However more complicated explanations could have a firmer grasp of the various factors that are played out… Occam’s Razor or, as it’s also known The Rule of Parsimony is undoubtedly useful and has its place but I doubt that it is infallible…

The simplest explanation for the unicorns is that they don’t exist – and they don’t. No-one is arguing that the unicorns drawn out of the atheists hat are real. The issue I have is that they are obviously meant to stand in for God. According to atheists there is the same level of chance of existence for God as their precious unicorns…

This is obviously contentious.

Take a historical view. If anybody looks back through time to the documents prepared for the camp they would find that the whole activity was a sceptical study – we have historical documents [ie manuscripts that go back through centuries] that speak about historical events and who some call and called God. The role of this ‘Super Being’ is supposed to have done various things – one of which is to have created us and the world and universe around us…

Kant managed to disprove that Creation was Proof of a Creator back when he wrote Critique of Pure Reason but did not then say that disproved the presence of a creator… which is what some would have argued. The problem is that we are losing the ability to balance evidence – only being able to take a ‘proof’ rather than think things through. There are what we theists sometimes call ‘footprints’ of our Creator. Whilst a contentious being some beings have been completely assumed and recreated from one impression in the ground from millenia ago… and accepted by the scientific community.

If you follow the link at the CampQuest site to the clip from this  radio 4 programme then you’ll hear camp followers argue that we have a universal moral code and that we do not need any divine laws to make us ‘behave’… This is sloppy thinking – at the moment I’m reading a terribly engaging book on hunger – Hunger: An Unnatural History by Sharman Apt Russell and the ninth chapter is ‘The anthropology of hunger’ where diferent cultures who suffer from near starvation, notably two of interest here are the Ik who lived near the northern border of Uganda and Kenya and the ‘People of the Alto’ in Brazil. Both of these populations are or were, used to a near starvation diet and if the humanists are correct we should be able to see similar values and cultural norms between the two peoples. This is not the case.

Both societies are also a great deal diferent to the modern western norms. These norms come from a history of a common faith. They are not universal norms that all humans share but becuase there is a great deal that we like about ‘our’ norms we assume that these are universal and correct.

I can argue for my values and norms but I find it interesting when I challenge atheists and humanists about why they think something is ‘right’ about how we should behave; we move onto the shifting sands of debate. There is nothing wrong with debate – I like a good debate as much as the next person and quite possibly moreso… but it shows that there is not this ‘universal’ view of right and wrong.

Perhaps rather than sending kids off to stalk a fictional unicorn they should think things through more and go in search of what is the universal code of behaviour…. Maybe that would be more ellusive than they assume.

Could it be a worthy quest to be undertaken and at the end of the search they might discover something as valuable and as precious as a unicorn would be.

Posted in atheism, dogma, faith, outlook, philosophy, Provoked by Pulp | Leave a Comment »

And the new arrival is….

Monday, 31 August, 2009 by Free to think, free to believe...

Peggy!

Hope you take the time to enjoy this slice of four legged life…

Posted in Canine Matters | Leave a Comment »

1984 or should that be 1948?

Thursday, 20 August, 2009 by Free to think, free to believe...

yes it’s that book by George Orwell…

My rather plush copy came with a forward by Robert Harris although that had nothing to with my purchase – I simply mention it here because he claims in the forward that George originally thought that he had produced a gem of a book but by the time he had typed it up he despised it, not that Harris offers any explanation of that change himself…

I think it is simple – originally he wanted to call it 1948 and in changing the title to 1984 it was robbed of the intended impact Orwell intended it to have.

Awhile ago I read George’s book of Essays and found them such a profound read I blogged about them [please note that there are more essays in this collection than the recently released Shooting an Elephant with an introduction by Jeremy Paxman who does have a grand mind so if you want a smaller slice of Orwell and a word from Paxman this volume might be more to your liking – as a note just to be clear, every story in ‘Shooting…’ is in the collection of Essays…] and to make my case that 1984 is 1948 I’ll have to go back to those essays…

Part of the book has comments that Orwell made as observations in his essays. The prolonged rationing of the post war years gives credence to the idea of perpetual war and the ‘why’ of it. There were still identity cards…

Alright the extensive camera and listening devices were not around in 1948 – but all else in the book would have been possible then.  Indeed the ideas of doublethink and thoughtcrime were lifted from his pointed criticism of the intellectual left.  The idea of having a political class always in power subject to various tests – ability and hunger for power could well be the critique of someone who has seen anarchy and collectivism work – this is what has become quite clear in the british model of democracy, indeed this has grown and become even clearer since Thatcher and Blair… And when was the last president of the USA to be elected with a smaller campaigning budget than the other guy?

The most mentioned departments are called [and no spoilers here, thank you] Ministry of Peace, Love, and Truth – at one point the War Department became the Ministry of Defense… The judicial arm of the government is called the ‘Home Office’ where we can all feel a warm glow of being looked after… Ministry of Truth is harder but if you read Orwell’s Essays you find that he thought that the owners of the press, part of what was [and is] called ‘The Establishment’ and because they wish to continue the status quo ie staying in an influential place where there situation is protected – it is in the media’s interest to sell the story that they think will create the right reaction from within us… Either things don’t get reported and therefore never ‘happen’ in any way we would know or they are told in ways that will provoke the right reaction – note how folk accept each paper has an ‘editorial view’…

The other piece in this jigsaw is the civil service who can be vetted and made sure that their views and work comply to their orders and of course the higher up the ladder they climb and the fewer they become the more closely they can be watched.

And this is were the Thought Police come in… with the job of maintaining the work so ordered by the political class in the Post War Consensus… And the rest of us are left to sink in a way that blurred the lines between the middle and lower classes – partly by raising some up and making it possible only for so many to rise higher… Leaving the grand rump of society to a different set of rules that seek to govern their behaviour and to hide the insidious truth of the thoughtpolice and the hopeless plight they were in under the political rulers .

The question to some extent runs about why Orwell wrote this book. I think he wanted to have a much wider audience for his political observations than his essays received and in so changing the dates to coincide with the publishers demand that it not be ‘1948’ he felt it was robbed of it’s power and force – which would answer the question of why he thought it a terrible copy once he had typed it up…

Ironically one can see the sense that in the publisher being part of the establishment makes the case, in a small way, for the de facto Ministry of Truth…

Posted in Britain Today, dogma, history, media, outlook, philosophy, politics, Provoked by Pulp | 3 Comments »

From Frankenstein to Barbarella

Friday, 10 July, 2009 by Free to think, free to believe...

Just by a strange coincidence at the same time I was mostly through that tedious but famous read Frankenstein – the news broke that Newcastle and Durham’s collective University project has worked out how to manufacture sperm… As I mused on the wild silliness of that old feminist idea that men [as in the male half of the species] are not really needed and this can only add to that strange and destructive argument…

Of course one thing is that as they’ve worked out how to make a sperm from a skin cell – How long before they can make an egg? And then who will be needed? Alright – so that’s science fiction at the moment but last week making a sperm was as well. I’ll stick my neck out and say How Long Before Pregnancy Is A Luxury For The Rich Or Something The Poor Cannot Avoid?

In the late eightees I remember there was some interest in a ‘wet incubator’ that was having some success and how much more interest in developping a wet incubator will there be when sperm and egg can be manufactured, vetted and then wed… why not let them develop slightly longer in the lab… and if possible would the rich spend money on not being pregnant, would folk investigate a full term ‘artificial womb’ or incubator as it would relieve the poor from having to work hard and carry their child?

Frankenstein in his pride wanted to make a creature better than he – We in our pride are content to manufacture ourselves… and make ourselves redundant?

Will we abandon sex completely for the sake of  descandants? Will we automatically turn to contraceptives so that we need never worry about what could occur outside the Lab? Could this be the road to Barbarella where only the eccentric or the rich [possible only the rich eccentric] carry their babes?

Barbarella is a vision of a future without sex – could we turn towards sex as nothing more than fun and then for prudes to allow us to worry about diseases and dirt to say that we should refrain?

I don’t think the future is sexless or genderless, even though that might become possible by design… but I do wonder how wise we’d become in a world where hardship is having to go to the shops… How could we relate to another’s pain when all pain is striven to be discarded?

Now I’m sure there are some who have problems with the old ‘plumbing’ and that given that I’m not against an incubator that could help – I’m against what the widespread use of such could mean… Ordered children? Frozen embryoes to be thawed out at a given notice? Just come along at the appropiate appointment and take your child away and here’s some drugs to get you to lactate [if you so desire]… Male or female there could be a drug for either… [Men can lactate given real hardships… for more ask or be bewildered.]

Don’t want a screaming infant? Well, we could use a new and not quite tested method for allowing them to develop a bit more… yes, nutritional supplements and programmes for languages…

Why don’t you just say how old you want them and perhaps take one off the shelf?

If this were to pass over the years [at least two decades I think but I could be wrong…] would we notice any diference in how we related to each other, would we just say that we had come into some Golden Age? and what would we lose?

Posted in Britain Today, Economics, outlook, philosophy, Provoked by Pulp, relationships, science | 1 Comment »

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