Must try harder.

This blog is becoming more and more of a commonplace book, a place where I can record my far from original thoughts, and find them again.

The 'real world' has become so insane that it is difficult to grapple with it.

I really must try harder.

Burns's Prayer in the Prospect of Death

Hardly good Catholic theology to blame God for one's sins and weaknesses, but a touching 

poem.

O Thou unknown, Almighty Cause
      Of all my hope and fear,
    In whose dread presence, ere an hour
      Perhaps I must appear!

    If I have wander'd in those paths
      Of life I ought to shun;
    As something, loudly, in my breast,
      Remonstrates I have done;

    Thou know'st that Thou hast formed me,
      With passions wild and strong;
    And list'ning to their witching voice
      Has often led me wrong.

    Where human weakness has come short,
      Or frailty stept aside,
    Do Thou, All-Good! for such thou art,
      In shades of darkness hide.

    Where with intention I have err'd,
      No other plea I have,
    But, Thou art good; and goodness still
      Delighteth to forgive.

Dalai Lama so way-out, he is leaving religion behind

Mundabor has an excellent post -  False Prophets the Dalai Lama .

Well worth reading.

Bigotry! Bigotry! Quackety Quack!

You won’t like this – not at all!

How often, if you speak out against homosexualism (no, not homosexuality) or any other pressure-group, do you hear the duckspeak: Some of my best friends are……….

No! No! No!

I have no friends whom I know to be actively homosexual;.

whom I know to be rich. I am poorish, and do not like the rich;

whom I know to be deep ecologists. They are mad;

whom I know to be in favour of abortion – need I explain why?

I have no friends whom I know to be religious Jews, only because religious Jews choose their friends from among their co-religionists. Does that make them bigots, speaking duckspeakfully? I think not.

I had a friend, who was a Jew and I think privately a Chasidic Jew, though he dressed like an Englishman. We were in business together and every week he would invite me and a couple of other Catholics to a debating society which met weekly in the Bloomsbury Hotel. It sounded very boring, and too much like school, so I always pleaded the need to go home to my family. Later it emerged that the society was Jewish and seeking converts. Had I known I would certainly have gone for the chance to learn, question, and argue. I approve totally of missionary activity.

I guess he was a bigot, too, because he was devoutly religious, a family man, and would never have accepted that the Messiah has already come. His reasons were, for him, rational.

I had a number of Muslim Arab friends when I worked in the End of London. One, the chef at my favourite restaurant, was called Ossama. They were witty (in English, too. I know no Arabic), clever, well educated, and knew far more about European history that the average English person. They also were out, sometimes very subtly, sometimes openly, to bring in converts. Good for them! I did my best to present Catholicism to them, but without success.

One of them told me that Allah would forgive me if I killed my father, mother, brother, or sister, but not if I continued to say that He had a Son. Very bigoted, but for him, rational.

I am choosy about my friends – and enemies, for I, too, am duckspeakingly a bigot.

A bigot is someone who knows or thinks he has the truth. He then acts in accordance with it.

To be Catholic is to believe that only Christ saves, and that he does so through His Church, whether the person to be saved is Catholic or not. That is what I understand to be the truth of “no Salvation outside the Church”.

Unacceptable bigotry!

Quack! Quack!

Justifiable Abortion?

Proposition, of which I am unconvinced: God sees all time, past, present, and future, as now. The future, therefore, already exists. The child in the womb is already guilty of whatever sins and crimes he or she will later commit.

If this were true, and if a method of travelling in time existed, would it be morally justifiable to visit the past in order, with or without risk to one's own safety, to kill or abort in the womb a future evil-doer, tyrant, or murderer, and so save millions of innocent lives, or even one innocent life?

And thus save the soul of the person killed?

And would you do it?

Rambo-footer is contrite

In my last piece, Rambo-footer regrettably neglected to take out the Ottoman empire in 1450. Performing this agreeable duty would have prevented the fall of Constantinople, the consequent advance of that empire into south-eastern Europe, and the Balkan atrocities.

Rambo-footer also forgot to nuke Sweden in the 1640s, in order to prevent that country from invading and ruining Poland and desecrating the Black Madonna.

He also omitted to take out Berlin, Moscow, and Vienna in 1770. Their destruction would have prevented the 123 year long partition of Poland.

I have confiscated his knives, guns, headband, scowl, and false chest. He is very contrite. He says also that he is a bit tired.

I have promised to return his toys, and give him use of my time-machine. He has in turn promised to visit the sick Byron in Missolonghi and give him medication to save his life and ensure further poetry;  to liquidate all British 19th century anti Irish Emancipation and Independence M.P.s; to zap Disraeli and all his governments, (enabling Gladstone to do something about a rapprochement with Holy Russia; to prevent the worst excesses of the French Revolution); and to bump off H.G.Wells, Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, D.H.Lawrence, W.H. Ordure, and a few others.

Bless him!

Rambo-footer on the rampage

Time has always fascinated me, history only more recently. Some time ago I wrote a piece about time, and whether God can know the future which as yet is not. The question for me is like the piece of foolishness about whether He can create a stone so big that He cannot lift it.

Fascinating also is the idea of a time-machine: what uses it could be put to, and what the effects would be on the individual travelling back in time. If I you went back to 1600, for example, would you still be you, or would you on arrival be a bit of every one of your n thousand ancestors and the animals and plants they had eaten?

Interesting.

As to the uses time travel could be put to, I am in no doubt as to what I would do (stepping into fantasy land here, but why not?).

Armed Rambo-like with fearsome knives and firearms, and carrying a large supply of nuclear weapons on my Good Timeship Rectifier, I would head first for 5th century B.C. Persia and nuke it. Periclean Athens would have been saved. 

Babylon before the Jewish captivity - flat, black, and glowing in the dark, ditto Egypt of the Pharaohs, Rome in the days of its empire, the Anglo-Saxon homeland (keeping Britain Celtic) and the Vikings, who were a European plague and, as Normans, invaded Britain in 1066.

The Arabs would never have got to Spain, nor the Saracens to the Middle East. 18th Century Barbary pirates? Kaboom!

"Reformation"? Armed to the teeth, Rambo-footer would take care of Wycliffe, Luther, Huss, Henry VIII and succeeding Tudors.

Cromwell probably would have remained a nobody, but if not, Zapp - he's gone.

London and Liverpool nuked, probably several times to put and end to the slave trade, and Germany in 1800, so Napoleon could win and liberate Ireland, Scotland, and Poland.

Prussia nuked in 1869 (no Franco-Prussian war) and again in 1880 to get rid of the whole vile racist apparatus of Bismark and Falk.

Depending on the results of the previous actions, I might need to take out Marx, Engels, and a bunch of dingy fin-de-siecle anarchists.

Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, the Frankfurt School, Beria, and a few others whose names escape me, impaled on the Kremlin spires. No 1917 revolution. Hitler, or Germany, or both, rubbed out before they started killing anybody.

Have I missed anyone?

****************************

And on my return to Now, what would I find? Everyone speaking Gaelic, Greek, or Slavonic? No Latinate languages? No English? No Gothic architecture?

As I said, interesting.

And what would you do with your time-machine?

Imagine

+

I want you to imagine.

You live in the town where you were born, where you have family and friends, where everything is familiar. One of your friends or family is getting married, and you put on your best clothes, pick up the flowers you have bought, and catch a bus to the Church.

Or you are on your way to or from work, looking forward to a coffee  and a day or an evening with people you know and like - or perhaps love.

Or you are on your way to fetch children from school.

And then comes łapanka - the round-up. You are living somewhere in Central or Eastern Europe at some time between 1939 and 1945 and the German army is arresting hostages - anyone who is available. The hostages, normally between 50 to 100 of them for each German allegedly killed, will be driven to the forest and shot. Suddenly your life is over. There will be no Priest to confess to.

The wedding party will wonder where you are. They will find out, because the Germans will post on walls and telegraph poles a list of names of those they have murdered.

You will never work or see your loved-ones again.

Your children will wait and wait at the school. They will have to grow up without you.

And you stand in a queue, waiting to get on the bus or lorry which will take you the forest to be shot, like the two ladies to the left and right foreground, in your best clothes.

Thinking about it brings me to tears.

And prayers.

MAY WHOEVER READS THIS SPARE A PRAYER FOR THEIR SOULS AND FOR THEIR FAMILIES STILL LIVING.

Two wrongs don't make a right?

As every would-be wiseacre and cracker-barrel philosopher knows, two wrongs don't make a right.

Phooey! The second one is justice and retribution, and therefore not a 'wrong'.

Injuries done to me I must forgive, not because the state says so and not because some psychologist says that resentment is bad for my psyche, but because it is my Christian duty.

But unpunished, unavenged wrongs inflicted on the innocent I cannot forgive, particularly when the perpetrator tries to justify them, or claims that he has "paid his debt to 'society'", whatever 'society' may be.

To forgive such without adequate retribution is to insult the wronged.

The Soldiers of Westerplatte by Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński

The first battle of the Second World War took place at Westerplatte, near Gdańsk, September the first, 1939, and this poem commemorates the Polish soldiers who died (some were murdered by the Germans after capture) defending their country from barbarism.

They are in my prayers.

My translation, inadequate as always:


A Song About the Soldiers at Westerplatte

When their days had been fulfilled
And it was time to die with the summer
Straight to heaven, four by four,
Went the soldiers of Westerplatte 

And the summer was beautiful that year.

And so they sang – Ah it’s nothing
That the wounds hurt so 
For how sweet now to walk
In heavenly glades.

And on the ground that year, there was so much heather for bouquets.

At Gdańsk we stood just like a wall
Whistled at the Swabian cannon
Now we rise amongst the clouds
The soldiers of Westerplatte

And those who have good eyesight
And hearing are said to hear
How in Heaven, rumbles the steady tread
Of the coastal battalion.

But when the cold wind blows
And sorrow wraps the world
In the centre of Warsaw we will pour down,
The soldiers of Westerplatte.

Ruins of Westerplatte Barracks. Photo: Wikipedia