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16 Feb 06
Too cool
When Catholics alone are persecuted, maybe it’s
time for the rest of us to repent and join them in the arena.
Yesterday, two men stood up in the House of Representatives and
spoke about their position on abortion: Tony Abbott, a well-known Catholic, and Peter Costello, a well-known Baptist.
Guess which man used his precious conscience vote to speak out strongly
in defense of the helpless while the other took the easy way out
by personally decrying abortion while using his vote to support and extend access to it?
Ever since I helped to staff a pro-life society stall at a university
Societies Day last year and the Catholic/non-Catholic ratio of joining was about 9 to 2, I’ve been wondering where the
rest of the Christians are.
Then I realised: we’re too busy being cool.
Catholics are not cool. And, on the whole, they seem fairly
resigned to that fact.
Australian evangelical Christians, on the other hand (of which I
am one), frequently want to have their cake and eat it too. Meaning they want to be faithful, God-directed people while
appearing trendy, worldly-wise, mainstream, caring, fun, tolerant and normal. In short: cool.
I’m not saying we should do our best to appear unfashionable,
intolerant and weird (this comes easily to some of us), but God has a particular term for Christians who choose to live as
friends of the world instead of friends of God. It is found in James 4:4 and it is a harsh one: “You adulteresses,
do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward
God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”
This is a very confronting verse that demands prayerful and intelligent
study of its context in the book of James and the rest of the Bible (studying the Greek words used here for “friendship”
and “world” is very helpful), but friendship in the Greek is much more powerful than a polite friendliness.
It is about shared interests, goals, beliefs, values, mutual trust and a knowledge that you can depend on that friend.
If this sums up your relationship with the world system, then you
need to think about breaking up (see James 4:6-10). God views this kind of relationship as a betrayal, as spiritual
adultery.
Jesus made it clear that one sign of a healthy relationship with
Him is what we would regard as a dysfunctional one with the world:
“If the world hates you, you know it has hated Me before it
hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose
you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than
his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute
you…” John 15:18-20.
A wise man once said that whenever the Bible precedes a passage
with “remember”, we are being alerted to something we are likely to forget.
“A slave is not greater than his master.” Bizarrely,
we have a tendency to think that we can actually be greater than our Master; that we can be followers of Jesus without walking
in His footsteps.
Mr. Costello, it’s a lot easier to be on the sidelines with
the cool people than it is to be in the arena of public hatred and scorn, but I know where I’d rather be when Jesus
comes back.
Christina Sonnemann is a writer and musician living in rural Tasmania.
9 Jan 06
When Women Fight
Christina ponders a missing sentence in the new film The
Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe® and its continuing truth.
As we pulled up in front of the petrol station,
the enlarged headline Tassie Police Fears – Drunk Women Tassie’s Worst
did what it was intended to do: it sold a paper.
Here is a quote from Heather Low Chow’s reporting
in The Mercury of December 30th 2005:
Drunken young women are the most badly behaved people in Tasmania, police say. …New police officers are
being warned that a pint-sized girl in designer jeans…can be as dangerous and malevolent as a man, if not more so.
“The
most poorly behaved people we see are drunk young women,” Tasmanian Police Inspector Brett Smith said. “Drunk young women are more aggressive than drunk young men.”
Hang
on, more aggressive than drunk young men?
Certainly a woman can behave just as badly as a man, but here is a policeman making a statement about the misbehaviour
of young people in Tasmania and concluding that young women win hands down.
It
gets worse.
According
to The Mercury in recent altercations a young woman “tried to kick, punch,
scratch and spit on a group of police”, girls tried to attack men with beer bottles, and “a drunk 18-year-old
female was at the centre of one of the worst public assaults this year [2005]”. The latter involved a near-fatal stabbing
at Hobart’s popular shopping, dining and drinking spot Salamanca Place.
Of
course, the obvious problem here is the abuse of alcohol. But what I am examining
at the moment is what the alcohol abuse has brought into sharp focus: young women engaging in reckless aggressive violence.
Parents
of young men often note the fact that their sons seem to feel invincible, thinking that they can engage in highly dangerous
acts without any significant damage to themselves (or their cars). This has been
seen as a peculiarly male characteristic.
So
what have we done to communicate this delusion to young women?
This
comment from a Tasmanian Police Inspector gave me a clue. “Some of the worst damage is done by girls or young women
kicking with their stilettos.”
Flashback. Cameron Diaz, looking very “now” in hipsters and a one-shouldered top,
poised in kung fu grace, pinning a hapless male to the wall with one stiletto boot wedged against his throat.
The
potency of this image lies in its appeal to both young men and young women. For
young men (apologies, guys), their basest interests in sex and violence are united in the “hot” warrior women
of visual entertainment like Charlie’s Angels, Lara Croft, Mr and Mrs. Smith, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sin City.
For
young women, this image exploits the resentment we often feel about oppression and dependency.
It plays on the tension we sense between being feminine and being in control.
In
Charlie’s Angels, Cameron Diaz is gorgeous.
She is invincible. But the rest of us aren’t invincible. The article continues:
Doctors are also concerned, saying angry young women are not just a menace to society but to themselves, with
many ending up in emergency wards. “They get hit by cars. They fall down
stairs. For these young women, the consequences of intoxication can go from embarrassment
to serious physical injury.” [ - A Royal Hobart Hospital emergency medicine doctor.]
Can
you see any of this happening to Cameron Diaz? No doubt if it did, she would
continue to look gorgeous. The girls waking up in Hobart hospital wards on January
1st probably didn’t.
There
is a wonderful passage in Chapter 10 of C.S. Lewis’ novel, The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe, in which Lucy and Susan, the two brave young heroines of the story, are given gifts by Father Christmas. This scene is lovingly rendered in the current major film of the book (the best film
of 2005, in my opinion). However, there is a controversial bit of dialogue not
to be found in the film.
After
giving Susan a bow and quiver full of arrows (to be used “only in great need”), Father Christmas turns to Lucy:
“…the
dagger is to defend yourself at great need. For you also are not to be in the
battle.”
“Why, Sir,” said Lucy. “I think – I don’t know –
but I think I could be brave enough.”
“That is not the point,” he said. “But battles are ugly when women fight.”[i]
In the film this is replaced by the still-truthful “battles are ugly affairs” in a compromise between
director Andrew Adamson (who didn’t want to “dis-empower” women) and co-producer and representative of the
C.S. Lewis estate, Douglas Gresham (who championed Lewis’ text).
My point is, Lewis’ wisdom flies directly in the face of what young women are being told over and over
again by popular culture. Lewis (who fought in the inferno that was WWI) and
the Tasmanian police are telling us this: when women fight, it is ugly.
I’m not talking about self-defence. In that simple but nuanced
scene in Lewis’ novel, weapons are not withheld from the girls. The girls
are entrusted with weapons – for self-defence, for “great need”. Notice
also that Father Christmas does not scorn Lucy’s humble claim to bravery. He
doesn’t say women can’t fight.
Causing
your body and mind to malfunction with excess of alcohol and then attacking armed policemen is not smart. However, there is a state of being that is dreaded by most teenage girls as the worst of all by far, and
it isn’t stupidity (how could it be when young women have become rich and famous simply by acting stupid – e.g.
Paris Hilton?): it is ugliness.
Perhaps
if we told them the truth, there would be less fighting.
Girls, battles are ugly when women fight.
[i] Text copyright
C. S. Lewis Estate Pte Ltd 1950. The Chronicles of Narnia®, Narnia®, and all book titles, characters and locales original
to The Chronicles of Narnia are trademarks of the C. S. Lewis Estate Pte Ltd.
1/1/05
Picking the
Winners
The game of deciding who lives and dies is censorship of humanity.
Imagine what the reaction would be if a large group of presumed-dead survivors of the devastating tsunami were to be found,
sustaining crippling injuries but alive. Before rejoicing, would their relatives and the news-watching public first inquire
what their individual quality-of-life-outcomes might be?
Would we ask how much their medical fees might cost the taxpayer? How productive their future roles in society might be?
I pray to God we wouldn’t.
Yet parents and doctors of premature babies often face these very questions.
Terrible Outcomes?
On December 26, 2004, The Mercury newspaper ran a feature drawing attention to the fact that ventilator machines keeping premature
babies alive are “sometimes switched off”.
Royal Hobart Hospital neonatology director Peter Dargaville admitted that it was “standard practice” to allow
extremely premature babies to die.
Dargaville: "The decision is usually made [if] we think the baby is going to have a terrible outcome if it survives, and coming
to a common agreement with the parents."
But Dr. Dargaville is troubled by the fact that people are too quick to assume there will be “terrible outcomes”.
"There's a common misconception that a lot of premature infants end up with significant health problems and they're a burden
on the community, that's not true.”
In the same article, the journalist Simon Bevilacqua mentions that “the cost to the community for health services for
severely disabled people runs into the millions over a lifetime.”
Yet Dargaville says that babies who survive being born more than 8 weeks early have a major disability rate of less than 5
per cent.
But that’s not the point.
If we argue that someone should be kept alive on the off-chance that they may not be disabled, we are saying that it is better
to kill disabled people than to allow them to live out their lives.
"You can't pick the winners. It's impossible to say for any premature infant that that baby is definitely going to have a
terrible outcome, but there are a few you can be very confident of on the basis they have bad haemorrhages.”
What troubles Dr. Dargaville is the inaccuracy of gambling on this game of life and death. What should trouble us is the
fact that accuracy is a factor at all.
Censoring Humanity
“Censorship” means the suppression or attempted suppression of something regarded as objectionable (Encarta® World
English Dictionary).
When you know that God is powerful and loving, you can accept responsibility for caring for a life because it came from Him.
In a world without God, people are the judges. No sooner are people given the job of judging life, than they begin censoring
it – weeding out those they find objectionable. (Think Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Hussein, etc.)
Since writing a blog on Peter Singer a few weeks ago, I’ve been wondering: If Singer is “the most influential
ethicist alive”, who does he influence?
In his utilitarian ethics, a life is valued in terms of its productivity and functionality. Those who are less productive
or functional are less valued (or not valued at all). Thus, the censorship of humanity is carried out for the greater good.
When we hear of a new-born infant grasping at life on a ventilator and the vital question which springs to our lips is not
“Will she survive” but “Will she be disabled” then my question has been answered in the worst possible
way.
The most terrible outcome of all is not disability of the body, but of the conscience.
Christina Sonnemann
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