The Last Postbag

Right …
They say "Never Blog Drunk" (unless of course it is National Drunk Blogging Day, something I shall never be foolish enough to try again - clicking on the link will enlighten you as to why); they should add - indeed I shall add it here: "Never Blog At Three In The Morning In The Middle Of A Raging Fever".

I'm still feeling pretty shitty and a bit feverish and shaky and I'm coughing and hacking like an eighty-a-day smoker. I think the Marlboro Man curled up and died in my lungs. I'm also producing industrial amounts of phlegm, but that's probably a little more than you want to know.
And I have a pounding headache. So talk quietly, please.

Anyhoo; the comments bag from my last post (written at three in the morning in the middle of a raging fever) threatens to burst and spill words out all over the room so I thought I'd carry on answering it up here.

First up: Lynn; waay too young to have ever heard "Listen With Mother".
Yup; you have fans.
And yup; Ray Mears is cute.
I never had a copy of Debretts; the only people I ever entertain are musicians and artists (the only people I KNOW), most of whom are happy to eat off the floor or out of a trough. In fact with musicians, dinner parties need not involve food at all; just scatter around a bunch of musical instruments and provide a LOT of alcohol. With today's "celeb" social climbers, perhaps that is a new chapter of Debretts that needs writing.

Pratchett is pure "non-book"; utter tosh, but hugely imaginative, very funny and very, very silly. Each book is a like a little parable, taking the piss out of some aspect of human behaviour (or Australia). The first book is rubbish; the rest are hilarious.
The character of DEATH (Mort to his pals) looms large (and indeed only talks in UPPER CASE). He rides a pale horse. It is called Binky. He also introduces us to what is probably my favourite thing about Pratchett; his idea of the afterlife.
Put simply: whatever you believe in when you're alive, that's what happens when you die; Vikings go to Valhalla, Buddhists get reincarnated, Christians go to Heaven, etc. and Mort sorts it all out for you. A splendid idea and much deeper than it seems on the surface, as are many things in his books.
The only trouble is, Lynn, that once you start you end up with all thirty-seven of the buggers on your shelves.

And my reading chair is a big, comfy, wing-back chair set up by the north window in the living room. I have a Tiffany lamp to one side of it but I also like to set up a huge old iron candelabra to read by candle-light at Christmas. Most people have a TV sofa; I don't. I have my reading chair. The picture (as with radio) is always so much better than TV.

As for reading aloud; try this, folks:
Sit down and quietly read a bit of Chaucer (in the original; NOT the crap modern versions … this is important!) or Dante or perhaps a passage from Waiting For Godot.
Now stand up, take a few deep breaths and read those same passages aloud.
You might find yourself "doing voices", but there's nothing wrong with that. What you WILL find is that things change from black and white to colour, that a previously unknown richness and intensity of meaning leaps from every line. That you are gesticulating and emoting and that it is indeed an absolutely marvelous thing to do!
Don't do it with non-books; that's just silly.

My little pieces on each of my blogpals' writing are not puff pieces, they're simply pointing out the truth, just in case anybody hasn't yet told you today how well you write.

Mme and Lynn: Yes, Sartre was indeed a cad and needed to be locked in a room with Germaine Greer for a few hours to put him right on a few things, but I can forgive him anything for the mantra of the long distance commuter: "L'enfer, c'est les autres."
Simone was a much better writer. A lot easier on the eyes, too!

Germaine Greer I always refer to as the GLA; the Greatest Living Australian. I know she lives just down the road from my office and writes for The Guardian, but she's still Australian at heart and my very favourite Aussie writer. I have many of her books and never miss her Guardian articles and she is one person I will turn on the TV to watch, especially on Newsnight Review, where a bunch of intellectuals sit around acting like tossers until she cuts through all the crap and lets rip. She is brilliant and funny and yes I am a bit in love with her. Germaine Greer and Stephen Fry would be my perfect desert island companions. Hey ho.

And so we come to Shan …
Whew! This is the biggie!
I sat from five-thirty this morning until gone nine, surrounded by a notepad and pens, The Bible, The Oxford History of Christianity, The Oxford Companion to The Bible, several early Christian histories, The Gnostic Gospels, The Qur'an, the Epics of Gilgamesh and of Atrahasis, a bunch of contemporary Roman and Greek histories and I had got as far as page eleven of my hastily scribbled notes (each one ready to expand to several pages in itself) before I realised that answering your comment would involve the two of us sitting down for a month or two in a theological library and that I was probably still a little feverish.
So that lot has been set aside to be replaced by a much shorter non-answer, which I hope won't offend too much.

Suffice to say:
- I am used to having "a Christian in the room" and do not find it at all annoying, but stimulating and exciting. My oldest and dearest blogpal, Robyn, is my original "Christian in the room", being not only a wonderful, smart, funny woman and great company, but also an American Christian from Bible College and we have come to know and respect one another's standpoints (through comments box debates going way back in the archives).

At the moment, I'm afraid I don't see any Old Testament prophesies coming to pass; I see simply a bunch of apes going to Hell in a handcart. I believe that were Christ to return to modern America He would be ridiculed and that it would be the fundamentalist church itself that would persecute, hound and lynch Him. Or more probably simply have Him put in an asylum to avoid making Him a martyr. A church that takes the contradictory and horrifically violent historical records of a militant Jewish desert tribe to be the only truth and seems to ignore Jesus' own teachings would never accept Him.
But that's just my current cynical and pessimistic view. Robyn has done much to soften my attitude toward American Evangelical Christian Churches though I am still wary of them.

Put very simply, I was raised a good Christian and I still remember (and wish I could regain) that wonderful sense of absolute faith; of not merely believing, but of "knowing" with complete certainty, the existence of God and His truth set out in The Bible.
Getting on for twenty years ago I suffered a crisis of faith. Big time. The reasons for which I will never reveal in my frankly silly little blog, written for fun, but suffice to say my faith was shattered, seemingly irreparably.

Oddly enough, before that point I rarely studied or even thought about the events described in scripture; I never looked at contemporary historical records to see things in a better perspective, even though they would have brought those events to life much more vividly. I simply believed, and that was enough.
It has only been since that moment that I have become obsessively fascinated with religion - and Christianity in particular. I know that subconsciously I am scrabbling for something that will restore my faith but I spend far more time now than I ever did as a believer, studying the Christian and pre-Christian era, searching out contemporary accounts and source documents, studying other world religions and early history, simply trying to understand …

I call it my "crisis of non-faith"; my so far fruitless search for a way back "in".

In the meantime, my alter ego, Dive continues to provoke and offend my Christian blogpals (check out the the posts under my "Godbothering" link if you want an excuse to come after me with a gun).
Do you remember Marcion's heretical (yet temptingly rational) interpretation of the Old and New Testament Gods? The OT God a vindictive, violent and vengeful thug and the God of Jesus a loving and compassionate deity?
I think that Dive and myself are kinda made that way.
Dive is deliberately confrontational and offensive and I just pick up the pieces and go round after him with a mop and bucket.
Hey ho.

I have a feeling this one will run and run.
I hope so because I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I wish I had more time to write about it. Perhaps that's what I'll do with my retirement.