They f– you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

…

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don’t have any kids yourself.

–Philip Larkin (This Be The Verse)

That poem (it’s short there’s only one other verse) is brutal and brilliant. It’s not true, of course, but it’s painfully honest. It cuts through whole libraries worth of modern verbiage and lays out one of the central theses of our times like a bloody human heart slapped down on a butcher’s shop counter.

Billions of people weep oceans over this simple misapprehension. That something happened to them to make them to make them sad. Because this psychic sadness is so universal, we conclude — logically but erroneously — that it must be a consequence of the experience all adult humans have shared; our childhood.

This lie — that our parents have ‘f–ed us up’ — ruins lives, it divides families, it murders the bond of love between parent and child. As the poem suggests, it drives people to agony, solitude and suicide.

Some bear this grudge inwardly, some proclaim it like a religion, but it’s all a lie. It’s just about the worst lie in the world.

I’m a born-again, fundamentalist Christian, but I’m also a terrible heretic, so I draw many of my conclusions about God and Man from other religions, none more so than the noble philosophy of Buddhism.

Before he became Buddha, ‘the one who has seen the light’, his name was Siddhattha Gotama and he was an Indian prince. He had everything, as you may know, palaces, pleasure gardens, a beautiful childhood. He had love, luxury and all the pleasures of family and court. Enough to guarantee happiness in any young man.

But he left it all behind and spent long years seeking he knew not what, because deep in his heart there was a great unfulfilled longing.

As it happens, a revelation regarding this aspect of human experience is one of the foundation stones of Christianity, the Story of the Garden of Eden. This is not a myth or folk tale, it is a mystical riddle of great philosophical and spiritual profundity.

And, as we fundamentalists will tell you, it’s pure literal truth.

We are all spiritual beings fallen from our heavenly Father’s side. We inherit pain and sadness in this world, but we don’t inherit from anyone. We don’t inherit it from our parents, our culture, from oppression by some other class or people, from capitalism, from religion, from advertising, from war, or from any other worldly thing.

We are beings who have tasted perfection and now we born flawed and ugly in a material universe defined by calamity and death.

We inherit our pain and sadness from a time before the world. From an event — if it was an event — that we are no longer perfect enough to comprehend.

Oh dear ones, cry for your lost innocence.

Just don’t blame Mummy and Daddy for it.

The word ‘fundamentalist’ has no meaning, and when the world starts accusing Christians on the basis of fundamentalism it merely shows they have run out of arguments.

There is no meaningful similarity between Born Again Christians and terrorists — they are evil, cruel, deluded, murdering monsters; we are righteous, loving, pro-life and enlightened. The number of terrorists and fanatics who claim to derive their motivation from Christian belief is so vanishingly small — vastly less than the percentage of the violently mentally ill (proof in itself of the healing power of Christ) — that not even the continuous glare of media spotlight can make it seem otherwise.

So, experts in deceit as they are, the Left coined the term ‘Christian fundamentalist’ and, over-accommodating as always, we find ourselves debating it.

What meaningful definition can fundamentalism have?

Does it mean people with a simplified understanding of their religion or philosophy? If so, given that half of the believers of any religion will be, by definition, people of below average intelligence, this is just ivory tower scorn, unfit for discussion.

Does it mean people who believe something deeply and sincerely, perhaps lacking sufficient modernist angst and post-modern irony? If so, it’s nothing but a trite fashion statement.

Christians and terrorists have nothing in common; but terrorists, Communists, militant atheists and such have much in common — they are all amoral, unrighteous and anti-life. To highlight this similarity no new words are required. There are familiar words — ‘evil’ for one — that describe it perfectly.

There’s a Sudanese family who come to the little church. They’re refugees from massacre and persecution by terrorist bandits. They certainly seem to be a long way from home.

So many people travel and migrate these days. My wife is from Japan. We get back there when we can, but she’s a long way from home, too.

I grew up in New Zealand. That’s not so very far from where I live now, but I’m a long way from home. In fact, even in the town I grew up in I sometimes felt like I was a long way from home.

The Vicar and his wife, in the little church, were both born and raised within a few miles of here. But the truth is they’re both an equally long way from home.

If you read this, you know I’m thinking of you. We may never meet again in this life, but we’ll have plenty of time to catch up when we all return home.

A third time he returned to Ravenna. Again he was captured, hacked with knives, had scalding water poured over his wounds, was beaten in the mouth with stones because he persisted in preaching, and then, loaded with chains, was flung into a horrible dungeon to starve to death;
…
Apollinaris was kept concealed for some time, but as he was passing out of the gates of the city, was set upon and savagely beaten, probably at Classis, a suburb, but he lived for seven days…
From Catholic Encyclopaedia, linked in ‘The Fury of the Pagans’ at fathersofthechurch.com

This is what the old pagans were like. Enraged by the preaching of the truth, they were possessed of a murderous fury and sought to destroy Christ’s followers with great cruelty and brutality.

We have an exact match for them in our time; the followers of the many cults of godless Materialism. They think and behave the same. They consider themselves sophisticated and enlightened, just as the citizens of Greece and Rome did, but the brutality committed by these cults, most obviously Socialism, perfectly corresponds to (and often vastly exceeds) the savagery of the idolators of the ancient world.

These are the pagans of our time, the enemies of God and Truth. Throughout the world, and the last several centuries, these cults have gone by many names. But in our time the most common are; Socialists, Feminists and Greens.

The Earth Worshipers want to define humans as a plague, the Darwinists want to define us as beasts, the Eugenicists want to eliminate the weak among us as if we were livestock, the Feminists want to break down family bonds and the Socialists to rebuild us all as New Socialist Man.

They hate God and they hate God’s followers. They can’t imprison, torture and murder Christians here as their ideological brethren do in China and North Korea. But they are nevertheless possessed by fury and hatred by the preaching of Christ’s truth. They oppose the truth at every turn, and devise strategies for the spreading of lies — the favourite strategy, just as it was in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, being the indoctrination of the young.

We shouldn’t blame them. Their ideas have led them into the arms of the great deceiver and the great seducer. And we shouldn’t fear them. The Paganism of Rome and Greece was overthrown by Christian truth, and the same will happen in our time.

However, we most definitely should not be seduced ourselves by these destructive cults.

One thing I’ve noticed recently, is Christians who will imply the great philosophies of the East are a form of Paganism that must be rejected, and yet they embrace the beliefs of the actual pagan cults right here among us. They lift Feminist, Green and Socialist idols onto the alter of Christ and into first place in their hearts.

Now, I don’t much understand the relationship between the Eastern philosophies — Confuncianism and Buddhism in particular — and God, but I know these great philosophies don’t support the death-dealing beliefs of the pagan cults. And I know the eternal enemy knows and fears God’s truth, And under the Socialist tyrannies of Asia, Buddhism is persecuted as aggressively as Christianity.

Christ commanded us to be guileless like little children, to judge the tree by its fruit. ‘Those who have eyes, let them see,’ he said. We must see things as they are, not as words would make them.

To condemn the followers of a noble truth-seeking philosophy — like Buddhism — because we call it by the name of religion, and yet to embrace an evil cult — such as Socialism or Feminism — because we call it by the name of science or philosophy, is not to see real things as they really are, but to be blinded by logical illusions of our own creation.

If you’ve read any of the gibberish I write on this Blog, you may have wondered what I look like (or at least you may have wanted a description to pass on to the men from the funny farm).

Well here I am, as rendered by my daughter, who turned three a few weeks ago. It’s actually quite a good likeness!

And while on the subject, have a look at this. These are some of her ‘omochi friends’ (that’s a song on one of her CDs). Pretty cool drawing for a three-year-old, isn’t it?

The ability now exists in a small way, and will probably increase significantly over time, for IVF doctors to select embryos based on the presence or absence of certain genes — ie. to select for genetic criteria. This is being compared by some to the ‘eugenics’ movement of the early 20th Century.

Based on the crude philosophies of Darwinism (not to be confused with Darwin’s scientific theories which are a different thing altogether), this profoundly misguided medical movement proposed that it was Man’s right role to weed out the genetically unfit. In the West, and the USA in particular, forced sterilisations were performed on women who were considered genetically unworthy — usually because they were poor, of low intelligence, or had been sentenced to prison — a horrible crime perpetrated against these women, and a dark chapter in medical science.

Subsequently, Eugenics was enthusiastically adopted by the Nazis who went one step further and began murdering the sick, the retarded, those with Down Syndrome, the mentally ill, as well some homosexuals (homosexuality was considered a mental illness in those days). As with all evil, having once embraced it, it was a short logical step for the cultured people of Germany to become the perpetrators of the most monstrous crime in all history, the attempted extermination of the entire Jewish race.

The history of the Eugenics movement thus raises a huge range of questions, and casts a dark shadow not just on Darwinism but upon all of Secular Rationalism. It also serves as a warning against giving too much power to welfare bureaucrats, as these were the people behind the selection of women to be sterilised.

And it quite rightly means that whenever anyone suggests undertaking genetic selection in any medical or social context, sensible people become concerned. This was the case when insurance companies suggested requiring their customers to pass genetic tests, and it is the case now that IVF doctors propose testing embryos for genetic conditions before implanting them.

I am troubled by selection of embryos for specific genetic characteristics, although I don’t reject the idea outright. It depends on the severity of the condition. Doctors have already begun selecting embryos of women who have difficulty carrying a pregancy to term due to miscarriage, with much success. This seems an ethically acceptable decision to me, as that human life would die anyway (the principle of triage).

Much more troubling is the selective abortion of certain unborn babies, for example if they have Down Syndrome. In my opinion this is wrong in almost all cases. Although, like many things that are wrong, it may be impossible to legislate against it.

And if genetic selection of IVF embryos were to become based on more trivial genetic factors (for example intelligence or eye colour), I think most people would be appalled. At its best this would mean treating humans like livestock, and at its worst, to be seeking ‘God-like powers’ to control human evolution.

There are other aspects of IVF that some lead some Christians to regard the whole field as morally wrong. The most usual objection is that destruction of human life — particularly innocent life — is wrong in all cases. In other words, it is wrong during abortion and so it must be wrong during IVF. This is a reasonable objection, but I don’t believe on closer examination it is justified.

Yes, most embryos will fail to implant and will die, as do many or most naturally conceived embryos, some others will be frozen, and if not used will eventually cease to be viable, at which point they are thawed, and die. Is this murder, or is it like switching off life support for a patient who will never recover, or neither, or both? People of Faith and good faith can ponder this question.

However, the idea that vast numbers of unused embryos need to be wantonly destroyed during IVF is not true. Almost all those that die, will do so in the process of trying to give them a life. Once pregnancy is acheived, not every couple will even have left over embryos, and for those who eventually do, usually by this time many more than this viable embryos have been implanted. The number unused will typically be quite small. In our own case, four ova were harvested, two of these successfully developed into embryos, both were implanted, and we were blessed with non-identical twins. What could be more life-affirming?

Furthermore, there have been moves recently (for example by President Bush) to promote the adoption of unused embryos, which is a good response to a valid ethical quandry, as well as an act of great kindness for infertile men and women who cannot produce embryos at all.

Note, too, the broader ethical questions that arise once a medical treatment becomes available. Deliberately withholding medical care from someone, who subsequently dies when they would have been expected to live had they been treated, is considered homocide. Could it not be argued that withholding fertility treatment from someone, who remain childless when they could reasonably have been expected to have children with treatment, is equivalent to sterilisation?

Getting back to the Eugenics movements, are there not similarities between condemning women to sterility who could readily be treated by modern medicine — for philosophical reasons — and the sterilisation of ‘undesirable’ women by the 20th Century Eugenicists — also for philosophical reasons.

In fact, I find blanket opposition to IVF to be a very strange sort of way to sanctify life — since it denies it.

Finally, there is an argument often used against IVF — particularly when it was a very new treatment, but which I believe is still the official position of the Catholic Church — that it is wrong simply because it is unnatural. It’s wonderful to sanctify natural human reproduction and relationships — the proper name for marriage is ‘Holy Matrimony’, after all — and I fully support the principle that children belong in families of a mother and father who share physical, emotional and spiritual bonds, and who have demonstrated their commitment to each other by making a binding contract of legal, spiritual and physical union, but to extend this principle so far that it results in the enforced barrenness of a proportion of these married couples is wrong.

It is applying the principle in a manner which could not be foreseen when the principle was laid down. It is adhering to the letter of the law but ignoring its spirit. In fact it reminds me strongly of the objections of the Pharisees when Christ healed on the Sabbath. Religious rules are a fine thing, but Jesus teaches us that sometimes we must follow a higher law. Just as Christ taught that healing ruined bodies superceded religious rules designed to protect the sanctity of the Sabbath, likewise healing couples so they can bring new life into the world — and life is the greatest thing any of us can give the world — must surely supercede religious rules put in place to protect the sanctity of the sexual act.

Furthermore, to some degree it can be seen as a variation on the argument that because things are a particular way, therefore it must be God’s will they should remain thus. I totally reject this simplistic point of view. In fact I find it not at all Christian, more fitting in fact to a fatalistic heathen religion. As Christians, don’t we accept that Satan has marred the world, and we are under instruction to ’subdue’ it — to use our abilities to do God’s work on earth? Where would we be otherwise?

On balance, there are some grave ethical questions are raised by infertility treatment — as indeed they are by very many areas of medicine and technology — but like most of the ills of modern life they are not central to the process. They can be ameliorated without robbing good women of the opportunity to be good mothers.

(Once again I’m recycling comments I made on another person’s Blog - this time in response to very good post at The Paragraph Farmer, arrived at via Julie at Happy Catholic on the similarities between Buddhism and Christianity, with reference to the to the Book ‘Living Buddha, Living Christ’.)

When scientists talk about wave-particles and warps in space-time and such. I understand what the words mean, I can understand and follow the concepts and I accept that as far as we can tell it’s ‘true’, but it’s all completely abstract, it has no grounding in anything I can truly comprehend from experience.

When people start talking about Buddhism — and my wife is a Buddhist — try as I might I get the same feeling. I understand the concepts philosophically, but — with a few exceptions — they don’t connect with me deep inside.

However, to be fair, when Christian theologians start philosophising about the nature of God, justification by Faith, the ransom and original sin and all that stuff, blow me down if I don’t get the same reaction. It’s a nice intellectual exercise, and I accept that it’s true and I should live my life accordingly, but in all honesty it doesn’t have meaning to me, at least not the sort of meaning I feel in my soul.

Yet when Christ says ‘Cast your burdens on me’, ‘Come to me all you who are heavy laden’, ‘I know my sheep and my sheep know me’ and all the many wonderful things he says in the Bible, my eyes well up and I understand. It means something, it’s real and true to me in the deepest sense.

I really feel like God is speaking right to us when I read the words of Christ. ‘My sheep know my voice’, to me holds more truth than a thousand tomes of theology.

Yet again, I look at the Dalai Lama, and the forgiveness and forbearance he shows, and I feel like, whatever he stands for in the abstract, in the here and now of this world he’s a true follower of Christ. Then I look over there, and I see the enemy — there’s no mistaking them. Perhaps we’re meant to leave perfect understanding to the next world. Maybe in the here and now it’s enough for us to stand shoulder to shoulder against the evil in the world and to let God do the rest.

And he came to Capernaum: and being in the house he asked them, What was it that ye disputed among yourselves by the way?

But they held their peace: for by the way they had disputed among themselves, who should be the greatest.

And he sat down, and called the twelve, and saith unto them, If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all.

–The Gospel of St Mark, 9:33-35

Have you ever wondered exactly what the disciples said to each other during that argument? Well, wonder no more, I can tell you!

One disciple said, “I and those like me will be first in the Kingdom, because Protestants are heretics, who are damned because they do not receive the sacraments.”

Another said, “I and those like me will be first in the Kingdom, because Catholics are damned because they do not understand Paul’s letter to the Galatians and the doctrine of justification by faith alone.”

Thus saith the LORD, After this manner will I mar the pride of Judah, and the great pride of Jerusalem. This evil people, which refuse to hear my words, which walk in the imagination of their heart… Hear ye, and give ear; be not proud: for the LORD hath spoken. … But if ye will not hear it, my soul shall weep in secret places for your pride; and mine eye shall weep sore, and run down with tears, because the LORD’S flock is carried away captive.

Jeremiah 13: 9,10,15,17

And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

The Gospel of St Luke 10: 31-32

Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.

The Gospel of St Luke 11: 52

And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes.

But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.

The Gospel of St Luke 12: 47-48

[T]he sheep follow him: for they know his voice. And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers.

The Gospel of St John 10: 4-5

The worst heresy

Why do we live in a world of sin that has fallen away from God? Because the churches are full of pride and iniquity.

Knowledge — including doctrinal knowledge — is like money. It’s not a bad thing in itself, used wisely it can do a lot of good. But you only need a mite of doctrine, and to know the Shepherd’s voice and follow Him, to be worthy in the Kingdom. And you could be as wise in doctrine as Caiaphas the high priest, but if you have a proud and cruel heart it will avail you nothing.

The Gnostics of the late Roman Empire (of ‘Judas Gospel’ infamy) were the true heretics in Christian history. Not because they followed a butchered form of Christianity — although they did — but because they believed in salvation by knowledge, that a soul was saved by a mind knowing the right magical secrets. This is an evil thing to teach and a destructive thing to believe.

It separates us from God, and imprisons us within our own minds.

How many Christians make the same mistake? They trust in the products of human thought — doctrine and philosophy — instead of the power of the Holy Spirit.

A good tree doesn’t produce evil fruit.

We hacked each other with halberds, and perced each other with pikes. Catholic monarchs conducted a 30 year massacre across what is now Germany that killed as many in that region as the Black Death. Protestants committed acts of similar wickedness in Ireland.

And as a consequence this, the people of the West turned away from God. We Christians drove the flock into the arms of the devourer. In the aftermath of this long period shameful behaviour, atheistic philosophies flourished.

Rationalism, Madame Guillotine, Slavery, Marxism, Communism, The Final Solution.

All these things follow from Christian wickedness — our wickedness.

God have mercy on us.

So God created man in his [own] image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Genesis 1:27-28

On the matter of IVF, some Christians are pitilessly cold-hearted.

There are undoubtedly serious moral questions raised by this medical miracle. Embryos are human, and I agree with the concerns Catholics and other Christians have about their destruction. IVF clinics and prospective parents should give deep thought to how they treat human embryos — embryo adoption has begun in America, that’s a great thing. Destroying embryos that might be genetically ill is also morally questionable. Raising these questions is necessary and I hope will lead to moral outcomes.

But if there are those who seriously see no difference between the miracle of IVF and the horror of the abortion industry, then I would suggest they know nothing about humanity, life or why life is sacred. There’s something cruelly legalistic (in the worst possible sense of that word) about manipulating the teachings of Jesus to reach an outcome that would deny life.

IVF clinics are bringing life to children who would not otherwise exist and they are helping to make happy loving families where before there was just barrenness and heartbreak.

There is no life in a barren womb. No life is not pro-life.

“That which I would not, that I do!”

Good medicines kill patients, good policemen and good soldiers kill innocents. Speeding ambulances kill pedestrians.

Often when we try to do good, harm comes as a side effect — people die. We walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Death is all around us, that’s why life is sacred.

That’s why doctors fight to give Granny a few hours of life. That’s why ten guilty men go free rather than we convict a single innocent one. That’s why hundreds of volunteers will search for one climber lost in the snow, why ships and helicopters scour the ocean for one lost sailor. That’s why a platoon of US Marines will go into battle to rescue one of their own, even if it means they will take greater casualties in the process!

We spend millions — the equivalent of lifetimes of work — and risk lives, for even the possibility of saving a single life, even of adding a single day to a single life.

We are moral people, that is the Lord’s work.

Replenish the earth, and subdue it

In the midst of the shadow stretching infinitely in every direction, here is this precious, fragile, little flame of life. That is why life, every moment of it, is sacred.

Bringing life to children, and children to families, is the Lord’s work. He commanded it.

And for some people, bringing life into the world is hard. The doctors counsel them not to, but they bond with every embryo, investing their hopes, praying to God to protect this tiny life. Most of the time, the embryos die — when they die, there’s blood. And the parents grieve and they weep, but they try again and again.

It’s excruciating.

But still they persist, because life is so very precious.

The quest to bring life into the world has consumed lives and fortunes. The parents learn bitterly what our ancient forbears knew, that life triumphs for but a moment and death is always at our shoulder.

And there are those Christians who would say ‘let there be no life here, it contradicts our philosophies.’

How are such cold hearts, who would deny life when it conflicts with their philosophies, any different from the utilitarians — the Peter Singers — who would destroy life when it conflicts with their philosophies? How is the philosophy that says you may not cultivate embryonic life, because the likelihood the embryo will die is high, different from the philosophy that says you must not allow a child to be born, because the likelihood it will suffer severe illness or loss of quality of life is high? Each philosophy results in life denied.

Which if us, if offered the option of ‘no life’ or ‘a chance of life’ would choose ‘no life’.