h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Oh stick your Marxism, Ed

If you want a taste of what extreme presbyterianism is like and has been like in Scotland in the past, I recommend the brilliant film, Breaking the Waves, set on a Scottish island.

This trailer gives a taste

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=b_3Nio8P5gQ

The vicious way the passionate slightly mad woman is treated by those puritanical male elders, has to be seen to be believed. And they hate the passionate Scandy who marries her. She stands up to the lot of them though, and won't let their women and pleasure hating break her. And it has a great fantastical ending.......They are truly horrible in their extremism and bullying.

I was doing that yesterday, Ed, in, of all places, the canal.

TTRiG.

>Does your atheism produce any sort of existential angst for you?<

Yes Slapjack. I have a real terror of death, amongst other things, unlike some atheists here, Ed I think is one, who speaks about chemicals just reintegrating back into the system. I know that theoretically of course. But I'm more of a Dylan Thomas 'Go not gently into that good night, but rage, rage, at the dying of the light'.

The thought of the lonely eternity of nothingness, after feeling so intensely alive, being the excessively emotional sort that I am, sends me into total existential panic. Sometimes in my life when I felt really frightened and terrified in my feelings about something, I do start mumbling to God. It's instinctive. And I'm not thinking literally or rationally, just desperately.

As much as I enjoyed 'Crime and Punishment' I can't disagree more with Dostoevsky with this quote from, 'The Brothers Karamazov'

'If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world, would at once be dried up.'

For me, very much the opposite is true. If each other is all we have, this can only increase one's capacity to love.

Yeah...Karamazov is also superb. As is The Idiot. But Dusty Evsky was wrong about god.

Breaking The Waves - yeah - good film.

You're certainly right about religion, in it Calvinist variety, being a malign influence in Scotland. I have a friend who was dragged up in the Free Presbies...no Christmas...no TV on Sundays (but is dad said the racing results on Ceefax didn't count...etc. If you want an examplar of s amug, hypocritical, anti-human faith - the Wee Frees is it.

Technical note, though: 'Presbyterian' means something slightly different. The CofS are presbyterian but not necessarily quite so dour. All the schisms and rifts are damned hard to follow, mind. There's a chart in the Gairloch Museum that resembles a Rock Family Tree for The Fall.

Yeah I know Church of Scotland is less extreme, as is Church of Ireland, the more gentle form of protestant church covering the whole of Ireland, from when it was *all* part of the UK.

The Welsh had Church, (catholic), and Chapel (protestant). A friend of mine a few years ago attended a 'Chapel' funeral, and no women were allowed to attend the actual burial service.

Did they get to go to the wake? That's always the best part, and in Wales they might have had a Sin Eater!

Eh boyo, zoom You cannot be serious man.

Welsh Chapel is to Wake, like Bjorn Borg was to John McEnroe. (Yes I know Borg was a Scandy, but he was the Mr. Iceman type)

Chapel is strong Methodist. 'Food' and 'alcohol', being the main features of a Wake. These words can't even uttered in Chapel without an elder condemming you to an eternity of hellfire and damnation.

So no, there was no Wake. Just the womenfolk being told to go home to their beds whilst the menfolk went off and did the burying business.

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Sorry Edward, I just cannot agree. Reproductive 'rights' so often turn into reproductive wrongs, when parents are actively encouraged to abort children who even *might* have a disability (disability will *never* be wiped out that way, as I once tried to point out to someone here, who had a madly enthusiastic idea about aborting all children with a disability, (even a hare-lip!) and therefore ending up with a perfect society... It all seemed and seemsrather Hitlerian to me...
IMO, only a few Christians in the USA ever supported the invasion of Iraq. Absolutely *none* in NZ ever did.

As for speaking out against it, where has that got anyone? When Tone ignored even the Pope, who tried to tell him the war on Iraq was wrong, and demonstrations of millions of people in all major cities of the world, in 2003 were ignored - would you even have noticed Christians *also* trying to be heard against war? Would anyone?

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My mother's grandfather came from Scots Presbyterianism, and was in fact, an active preacher here in the goldfields of Central Otago where most of the gold miners were Scots and had the Gaelic and I gather, *only* the Gaelic! (My mother still had his hymnal and a few other books in Gaelic, I was looking at one of them just last night.)

It's funny that here in NZ, Presbyterianism has *become* what Anglicanism seems to be in the UK, just a social club, with a lot of secularity, and not much belief at all! I wonder what my ggf would have made of it? According to my mother, her father, the Rev JMF's son, was a sweet good-natured man who didn't have any Calvinism in him! (Thank God for that, I loathe Calvinism!)

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The Welsh had Church, (catholic), and Chapel (protestant)

Strangely enough...in Scotland, 'chapel' denotes a Catholic church. I have Welsh chapel in my ancestry, via my South Walian Grandma.

>As for speaking out against it, where has that got anyone?<

Well it would make me, and probably lots of others, feel a hell of a lot better to hear moderate Christians speak out against the extremists. if you count that as 'getting anywhere'?

Reproductive Rights:

Re the abortion of mal-formed, disables or potentially disabled foetuses...

Interestingly enough...I have a certain sympathy with the idea that a disabled child is as welcome as any. I have to say...I support abortion as a means of controlling fertility 2000%. This is a woman's right.

On (let's call them) 'medical abortions' - my personal position (and that of my wife's) is that we refused amnioscentesis* etc. during her pregnancies. We would not have wanted a disabled child aborted. So for my own part - I don't think I could be found guilty of the charge of being 'Hitlerian'. *However*...there are also, of course, many tragic cases where foetuses have such extreme malformations that they simply will not grow to be viable babies. Far more serious than cleft palates. If that had happened to us, it would have stretched our position.

*However*...I don't think 'Hitlerian' tag applies to parents who *do* ask for terminations on medical grounds, either. The decision to terminate is a difficult one. You talk about the *potential* for disability. Sure, tests have margins of errors. The level of disability (and the child's resultant quality of life) may be uncertain. Even cleft palate syndrome can be *very* serious. There is so much uncertainty in the decision process that all cases have to be considered according to their individual circumstances. Now - I know my *own* default position from experience, as outlined above. But what I don't know is other parents' circumstances. Accordingly - I simply don't know how to make their decision for them. So I have no right to impose - or even to *have* one.

The only ones who should have a say in whether their foetus is carried full term are the parents. Specifically - the mother.

Does that *really* sound Hitlerian? Or is that simplistic, propagandistic tosh?





* Moot point for the first two. They're unreliable for twins.

Vicky - in the spirit of positive feedback...I note your decorum transplant with approval. Since the SoRB spat (and I think he behaved disgracefully), your responses have been unhostile and unsnide. Keep it up! I reserve the right to disagree strongly with your opinions.

FULL DISCLOSURE:

My mother was an abortionist.

>IMO, only a few Christians in the USA ever supported the invasion of Iraq<

How have you arrived at that opinion?

I concur with Ed

Oh...and I meant to say...

I have a cfolleague who has a child with an extremely disabling genetic disorder. He has already lost one child to the same disorder. His surviving child will die within a couple of years. I've had the abortion debate with him also. He's a churchgoer. He believes that abortion 'Devalues the disabled'.

I respectfully differ. Abortion has been legal in the UK since 1968. ( David Steele.) Over that timescale, the progress we have made in disability rights and the integration of the disabled into the society that they and us share is reasonably impressive. When I was growing up - a person in a wheelchair was scary. We used to walk past a Mencap home and regarded it as a place of horror. Nowadays...my daughter has a friend in a wheelchair and is the official playtime buddy of a child with Down's Syndrome. So I reckon we're making progress on two fronts.

What *don't* we do now? Well...we don't force women to control their own fertility by seeking the assistance of unqualified people working in unhygienic conditions. Neither do we - as I've heard independently from two separate sources of women working in hospitals in the 1940's, one of them a Catholic hospital - feed severely disabled children full fat cow's milk to quietly hasten their demise.

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They do all the time in New Zealand! You want to come here, (no, really!)



Vicky

If it is found that a woman is pregnant with a severly disabled child, do they get get the full and honest information about the realities of caring for such a child? If not, that is unacceptable. It might well make the mother's and child's life a misery. I certainly wouldn't be able to cope, and would probably end up doing something......