The Artificial Winter

Posted on April 11, 2020 by JC

“Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it. For them, there is no winter food problem. They have fires and warm clothes. The winter cannot hurt them and therefore increases their sense of cleverness and security. Ford birds and animals, as for poor men, winter is another matter.”

Richard Adams, Watership Down

I have lived most of my life in a warm climate where winters are relatively mild but I do have fond memories of living in Japan where it is not. Where I lived the temperature was regularly subzero at night but I enjoyed it. I was also quite used to living without central heating in this weather though the dwellings I inhabited were usually well-shielded for such weather. As Adams observes in the quotation above though; my fondness for winter was based on the comfortable living arrangements I had and the complete lack of scarcity. While I could go out and experience the cold, I didn’t have to stay that way and I had clothing enough to keep me well shielded as well.

This is something I’ve sometimes been prompted to think about and usually when I am most comfortable. Whether it be safely inside during a storm or when I wake up on a Saturday morning without needing to go to the bathroom. Comfortable times make me thankful for not being uncomfortable.

Continue reading →

Posted in Australia, Politics, Ramblings, Society | Tagged , | Comments Off on The Artificial Winter

What’s Worse for Marriage?

Posted on April 4, 2020 by JC

The contradiction in terms known as “same-sex marriage” was brought into law in Australia on the 9th of December, 2017. This came into law after close to two decades of  activism and after multiple parliaments having already rejected it. There is much to say on this but something that should always be remembered is that for the political left, the issue isn’t finished until they’ve got what they wanted. For conservatives, something is a universal principle until it just isn’t anymore. I predict that the issue of whether or not the absurdity that is “same-sex marriage” should have been recognised by the state will not be up for debate again as long current political arrangements last.

The purpose of this post is not to take issue with the misguided perverts and their allies who desired such a change but to consider where marriage was prior to the change. The moral cowards representing mainstream “conservatism” in Australia tackled the issue much like their cousins on both sides of the Atlantic. Having already long abandoned the belief that not only sodomy but pre-marital sexual relations were wrong; they instead weakly rested their arguments on the nature of marriage itself. The true but rhetorically empty position that recognising same-sex marriage would weaken the institution’s importance or even destroy it altogether.

Where this was ever seriously addressed by activists on the other side, it was quite reasonably mocked by simply pointing out how poorly marriage was doing among those who were already practicing it. This is probably no better shown today then by the continued success of the television show called Married at First Sight.

Continue reading →

Posted in Australia, Politics, Society | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on What’s Worse for Marriage?

Reverence for Me but not for thee…

Posted on March 28, 2020 by JC

“The Church does not want to lose her clients, she wants to acquire new members. This produces a kind of secularisation which is truly deplorable”. “The world is going astray, the Church is going astray in the world, priests are stupid and mediocre, happy to be only mediocre people like the rest, to be little proletarians of the left. I heard a parish priest in one church saying: ‘Let’s all be happy together, let’s shake hands all round. . . Jesus jovially wishes you a lovely day; have a good day!’ Before long there will be a bar with bread wine for Communion; and sandwiches and Beaujolais will be handed round. It seems to me incredible stupidity, a total absence of spirit. Fraternity is neither mediocrity nor fraternisation. We need the eternal; because . . . what is religion? what is the Holy? We are left with nothing, with no stability; everything is fluid. And yet what we need is a rock”.

Eugene Jonesco, quoted from Antidotes, 1977 in Journey Towards Easter, 1986, pg.158

by Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger)

I was born after most of the destruction that was wreaked on the Church in the 1960s and 1970s. I went to Catholic schools where this had already taken place and where either “modern” churches had been built or old ones had been redecorated with gaudy banners and where CD players and overhead projectors had already replaced the choirs. The confession booths had been removed, boarded up or opened out into a meeting room. The liturgy had already been simplified but the words now in the vernacular weren’t any more accessible simply because we weren’t properly taught what any of it meant. The closest thing you’d get to real Catholicism would be the old photographs of the religious orders who had founded the school and the few remaining crucifixes and statues that weren’t perceived to be in the way.

I would say it was ironic that moves to make the church more open and accessible to the modern world did the exact opposite but that wasn’t really what the vandals intended. The churches I attended were seas of grey and the same churches today are now just puddles of grey. I was sad on revisiting my first school to see how dilapidated the church had become and can only imagine how few now attended Mass and what little zeal remains to at least preserve the building.

I was not conscious of the problems when I was young and in fact, I was not even myself a Catholic until about five years ago. But I can say that I had an inkling that something was not right. Try as modernists might, you can’t ever fully escape the past and people get visions of it and “that’s how it used to be”, isn’t enough to satisfy a genuinely curious mind.

It is important to remember that appearances are just a symptom of the bigger problem which is a lack of spiritual reverence in the priesthood and the laity. It is easy for the traditionally minded to fall into thinking that simply changing the aesthetic will change people’s hearts. It certainly wouldn’t hurt but without a true spiritual conversion there will be no change. I have been Catholic long enough to personally witness the disdain that many church-going Catholics actually have for their tradition. Who are not honest enough to leave what they no longer believe and instead try to fashion it into something that suits them.

This post might seem to be a typical anti-modern rant but this is not my intention, it is just how I want to get started. What I want to consider here is the quest to reduce the formality and reverence of the Mass in order (it is claimed), to make it more palatable and bring more people in.

Continue reading →

Posted in Ramblings, Religion, Society | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Reverence for Me but not for thee…

Hopeful & Hopeless

Posted on March 21, 2020 by JC

hope

I have been meaning to come back to this post for well over a year and the current scare going on (as of writing), has put me in mind to finally finish it. Unfortunately the time between reading these two books and now writing this post proper has elapsed and I don’t remember the details of these two novels as well as I did when I began writing. 

In mid-to-late 2018 read two science fiction books which were both written around the same time and both center around a Nuclear holocaust. My reading them so close together was something of a coincidence but at the time they were written the subject matter was far from uncommon. On The Beach (1957) by Nevil Shute and A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) by Walter M. Miller Jr were both written well into the Atomic Age and the Cold War. These two realities meant there was a potentially grim future and therefore inspired plenty of equally grim fiction.

Apocalyptic fiction has seen a resurgence in recent history mostly in the form of the “zombie apocalypse” which in its various forms is often caused by a bio-weapon or some other sudden pandemic. The nuclear holocaust science-fiction also inspired the popular Fallout video game series which has since the beginning had a 1950s aesthetic in tribute to the works that inspired these games.

These two works both deal more with the human element than does much similar literature today. They don’t focus on the spectacle of the annihilation of civilisation, as this has already befallen the world before either story begins. However, the outlook for humanity in both is radically different as should be indicated by the title I’ve chosen for this post.

Continue reading →

Posted in Australia, Book Reviews, Literature, Religion, Science, Society | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hopeful & Hopeless

Raging Harpies

Posted on March 14, 2020 by JC

Untitled

Not softlier pillowed is my head
That rests by thine, unloving bride,
Than were those jagged stones my bed
Through which the falls of Nuki stride.

The Flower Feast, The Tale of Genji, Part 1

Although I am intimately connected with Japan and Japanese culture, I have never had a great interest in a lot of Japan’s famous exports. The major exception is of course their video games which is a much covered topic on this blog. I have read quite a few novels and watched enough anime to be familiar with it in general; some of which I watched thinking it would improve my knowledge of the language. This includes watching the original Dragon Ball series and some of the follow-up Dragon Ball Z.

There was a lot that fascinated me about the original series which (it is easily forgotten), begins as a retelling of Journey to the West. That is the portrayal of women. This post isn’t just going to be about Dragon Ball or anime though, it is just a good place to start.

Continue reading →

Posted in Japan, Ramblings, Society | Tagged , | Comments Off on Raging Harpies

The Honest Atheist

Posted on March 7, 2020 by JC

In the 2000s there was a sudden rise atheism due in part to the events of September 11th, 2001 as well as what is no doubt a myriad of other reasons. At this time, the names of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens in particular became well known to more of the general public. Two at least were already public figures but their outspoken atheism is what really brought them their fame. Coupled with this on the Internet at the same time there seemed to be legions of their acolytes populating every part of the Internet. Whether your message board was about My Little Pony, stamp collecting, video games or taxidermy, chances are there was at least one resident atheist ready to leap into any topic related to religion to share his opinion.

This is not to say everybody was either an atheist or believer. It also didn’t mean that there weren’t religious people with a similar monomania; it was just that these people tended to stand out and they became quite annoying. They became so annoying in fact that in the following decade there was something of a revolt against them. This was partially prompted by mockery of things they said and things they wore but also what seemed to be mental exhaustion with people like this in general. This didn’t go much in favour of organised religion though as by then, people were for the most part apathetic and didn’t care either way.

We are now entering what seems to be the early stages of a revival. This might be hard for believers and non-believers alike to recognise but there is some evidence of it. As this happens it might be tempting for religious and newly religious to continue to mock atheists as they have (often accurately), been caricatured. This could be a mistake depending on the atheist you are mocking though. Let me explain why.

Continue reading →

Posted in Religion, Society | Tagged , | Comments Off on The Honest Atheist

He Chose Mary

Posted on February 29, 2020 by JC

I just finished reading Rome Sweet Rome by Scott and Kimberly Hahn earlier this week. I didn’t particularly enjoy the book purely as a book. There are a few reasons for this and a major one is it is somewhat a book of its time. These days both the author and his wife are so well-known in Catholic circles that it might surprise younger Catholics that they were ever Protestant. Another is that it was written for a particular audience and probably more intended to be passed around the general laity and pushed into the hands of Protestant friends and family. I’m not saying I’m above the general laity, just that I do read serious Catholic works as a hobby and not just when it strikes my fancy or when someone passes one my way.

Whatever the books merits, I did still find some parts interesting and it has prompted me to come back and flesh-out the limited notes I had for the topic of this post.

Continue reading →

Posted in Ramblings, Religion | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on He Chose Mary

Real-World Observable Arguments for Catholicism

Posted on February 21, 2020 by JC

Normally when discussing the truth of Catholicism, people employ theological, philosophical or historical arguments because these are probably the strongest. There are however other more down-to-earth things that are worth considering, especially for everyday people. What I’m going to attempt to do here is make arguments from the real-world experience. I will freely admit that it is possible to argue against most of these but collectively they have to at least make you think.

Continue reading →

Posted in Religion, Society | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Real-World Observable Arguments for Catholicism

New Thinking and Old Thinking

Posted on February 9, 2020 by JC

I was reading Edward Feser’s post from his irregular series “Adventures in Old Atheism” the other day as well as re-reading A Song for Nagasaki by Fr. Paul Glynn. Both of these readings together got me thinking about exploitation of workers and lower-classes in general. One of the unappreciated problems with Marxism is the reaction it provokes against it. That is because its history and many of its tenets are so distasteful, there is a tendency to revile everything including the few areas where it has a point.

I should add here, that I’m just using Marxism as an umbrella for people who generally subscribe or are at least strongly influenced by Marxism. I know there are differences and that their are many other thinkers besides Marx and nuances to all of this.

Continue reading →

Posted in Politics, Ramblings, Society | Tagged , , | Comments Off on New Thinking and Old Thinking

Anticipation (Short Story)

Posted on February 2, 2020 by JC

This is a short story I wrote last year for a competition that I didn’t win. I wrote it fairly fast and just before the deadline. I do am not making an excuse for its quality, just stating how it was written. I don’t quite know what I had in mind but I was thinking of a time before mobile phones when you had to actually plan to meet up and stay in one place.

Anyway, since I put my writing here (good and bad), I am adding this too. 

Continue reading →

Posted in Literature, Personal, Writing | Tagged | Comments Off on Anticipation (Short Story)