OPINION
Harry Palmer
As I’m in my 80th year, I want to explore where I’ve landed at this stage of my life in my understanding of religion. My evolved personal philosophy is increasingly at variance with the new norms by which people are beginning to live their lives today. If any readers would like to disagree, I invite you to please let me know in the comments section in order that I might perhaps learn something.
I can’t remember when my Roman Catholic parents first took me to Sunday Mass but when I started primary school is when I really started to learn about religion. We had half an hour at the start of each day learning the story of Jesus and about his various adventures around the Holy Land before his persecution, death and resurrection. And we had to read and memorise the Catechism of the Catholic Church in order to quote in answer to a teacher’s question of “Who made you?” and so on.
I’m not aware, but then have not been schooled in these matters, of any attempt to reconcile the findings of psychoanalysts Freud and Jung as regards the ‘subconscious’ with the ideas the Christian churches have about ‘heart’, ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’; however, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, in the same area of the psyche as the churches, are looking at repairing something that has gone wrong in the ‘subconscious’ and which outwardly manifests in strange behaviour or beliefs. The churches, however, are trying to promote what they call ‘love’, which similarly I suspect comes from the subconscious, and which, the churches, the writers of the Bible, poets and playwrights like Shakespeare – Isaac taking Rebecca into his tent; the story of Odysseus and Penelope from Greek mythology – call “the heart”.
As I think both psychoanalysts and clerics would agree: the foundations of a well-lived, happy and eventually satisfying full life are laid in childhood. Both Aristotle and Saint Ignatius of Loyola would appear to agree, their having both said something like ‘give me the child by the age of seven and I’ll give you the man’. Even Adolf Hitler is reputed to have said, “He alone who owns the youth, gains the future.” Hence the reason governments and their employees, particularly in the teaching profession, are in modern times inundating their charges with propaganda of various kinds, including sexual perversion and climate change, etc. They’re doing what Bible thumpers would call ‘the Devil’s work’.
Along with this has followed the minimising or removing from the curriculum of subjects and matters that would permanently implant in a child’s brain the means and methods of introspection, self-awareness and critical analysis and thought. To my mind this is a very great sin.
It would seem that the modern system of education – inculcating the minds of pupils with lies and propaganda while denying them an opportunity to learn how to think for themselves and grow to feel secure in themselves as individuals – is being specifically aimed at producing compliant, unthinking functionaries who are obedient to the dictates of authority and are indeed condemned to remain members of Karl Marx’s lumpenproletariat.
For another view on the capabilities – or otherwise – of today’s young people, you might like to read the ZeroHedge article “Zero Critical Reasoning”: Employers Say GenZ “Toxic” for Companies. Gen Z represents ages 11 to 27: those born between 1997 and 2012.
Ever since Jesus said, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”, governments the world over have found advantage in working with the Catholic Church and have been granted cooperation by the church in wars (and in perhaps lesser matters, like the shutting down of the country for spurious inventions like Covid virus pandemic). So it’s perhaps not surprising that Western governments, or more precisely their “Nudge Units”, have themselves found advantage in adopting certain methods worked out by the Catholic Church over hundreds of years of experimentation. These methods have been proven to be successful in manipulating the minds of the masses so that they come to deny individualism and accept collectivisation: the preferred way for rogue and dictatorial governments to administer their fiefdoms; a fairly obvious example was the old Soviet Union.
Jesus was followed by his apostles and crowds of admirers because they believed he had something to offer them, as indeed he did: underlying all was Love. As a Christian I believe if you don’t know what love is, you can acquire that knowledge – and change your life – by adopting the permanent habit of prayer and contemplation, thinking for yourself, dissecting and analysing the basic knowledge of the life of Jesus and relating what you learn to the everyday events of your life, in order to arrive not only to belief, but to belief in an afterlife. That’s of course based on the assumption that you’ve been taught to think for yourself in the first place. An ability that is quite obviously lacking in those featherheads, as my dear father would call them: those who scream, “From the river to the sea”.
The Catholic Church, I contend, in keeping with the way Western governments now demand, prefer that you don’t think for yourself and that, in fact, you should avoid this dangerous activity. I say ‘prefer’ because unlike governments, the church can’t harass you with the ‘hate police’ and threaten you with fines and imprisonment for breaking laws they dream up out of thin air, or imaginary ‘laws’ they expect the police to enforce. No. The Catholic Church can only threaten you with having committed a mortal or venial sin – the former of which will send you to hell. You used to be able to get out of such punishments by slipping a priest a large bribe in exchange for an ‘indulgence’. This, for many reasons, raised the ire of Martin Luther.
A mortal sin, as defined by the institution of the Catholic Church, is to miss mass on a Sunday, to not go to ‘confession’ or not receive the Eucharist at least once a year, at Easter or thereabouts, etc. Did Jesus make any such demands on his followers? No. His and the apostle Paul’s successful methods were based on an appeal to the self discipline of the individual who realised it was worthwhile to have faith in Jesus Christ. Such individuals enjoyed the company of other believers and endeavoured to meet them on occasion to discuss common interests and, in troubled times, for purposes of mutual defense.
For me, the many scandals that have been exposed within the Catholic Church in recent times – the homosexual and sex-perverted priests and the financial shenanigans, which have always been there, one suspects (but started to feature more following the discovery of the body of Vatican banker Roberto Calvi hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982) and the present day hounding out of cardinals who protest the obfuscations and outrageous proclamations of the current pope – are indicative of a man-made, corrupt and Mafia-like organisation that has strayed from its cover purpose of representing God on Earth. This more than justifies the return of the care of one’s soul/spirit/heart/subconscious/id to oneself and the ability to meet in congregation with other like minds being retained.
To claim that ‘the church is the mystical body of Christ’, as Catholic prelates do, is – with all the church’s bulky load of scandals and corruption on its back – a load of bollocks, especially when we know that priests caught in their sex-perverted sinfulness (a quadruple mortal sin, at least) are merely transferred to another parish where they’re not known and are still apparently able to transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. You miss mass on a Sunday, though (unless the bishop has arbitrarily closed your church down to please scaremongering politicians), and you’re going to burn in the fires of Hell, damn you!
People can see the rampant hypocrisy in churches that claim to advocate the cause of its members to God – acting like a theatrical agent for their 10 per cent – and are demonstrating their disapproval by leaving in droves. However, churches, like politicians, know they will always have a hard core of followers ready to fight for the ‘cause’ and seem prepared to accept the whittling down in numbers as long as they can continue to get their way and remain trusted friends of government by continuing to promote the giving to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and respectfully tugging their forelock to him.
The ‘giving to Caesar’ ethos is stronger in the Anglican Church where the Archbishop of Canterbury is a political appointee, though his church would argue differently. A committee recommends three names to the British prime minister who selects one and suggests that the monarch sign off on it. (It could raise an interesting debate if their current Hindu PM becomes involved in this process for whatever reason.) And this can also be seen in the church’s desire to follow the most ridiculous of government-advocated causes like ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’, which has not only seen women – but lesbian women – ordained deacon, vicar and bishops for the first time in 2,000 years as well. One such woman vicar in South London has recently been publicly calling for reparation of one billion pounds to be made to the descendants of ‘victims’ of the ‘slave trade’. Another, an archdeacon from Liverpool, wants to “smash the patriarchy” and bring in anti-whiteness measures. How this is representing the love of God, of Jesus Christ to His followers, is a little hard to follow. Then, with a government inventing ‘hate’ speech laws to enable it to prosecute, fine and imprison those who criticise its policies which allow the country to be flooded with an alien culture from the Middle East, the Anglican Church in the UK has sprung dutifully into action to volunteer baptism into the church for any Muslim who’d like to claim Anglican as his religion on the application form for permanent residency and thus almost certainly guaranteeing acceptance (but which claim is immediately ditched thereafter).
As John Davidson says in his new book, “The future of the post-Christian West isn’t some secular liberal utopia, it’s a pagan empire in which might is always right.” Christian churches are fully complicit in this evolution.
Thank you for your patience in having read my bit of analysis all the way through. I believe my way is clear.