Mockery in tricky territory against hate
concepts of hell and a sort of halfway-house Catholics call purgatory. In purgatory you suffer, but joyously, because you know someday the pain will end.
The bar to reach heaven always seemed impossibly high to me, so, as a sensitive, fearful boy, I lived with the prospect that hell’s fires would one day swallow me up.
We all have our own versions of hell, a place only too easy to conjure up in our imaginations. Religious texts are often at their richest and most affecting in their depictions of the place we are sent, not to repent, but only to suffer.
Catholic church father Cyprian of Carthage, who lived around AD250, described how those being ‘‘devoured by living flames’’ could never have any respite.
‘‘Souls along with their bodies will be preserved for suffering in unlimited agonies . . . The grief at punishment will then be without the fruit of repentance; weeping will be useless, and prayer ineffectual.’’
The Koran, which provides seven levels of hell for the various grades of sinners, depicts hell as a blazing fire where ‘‘the wretched inhabitants sigh and wail, their scorched skins constantly exchanged for new ones so that they can taste the torment anew’’.
By warning us about hell, Folau has, I believe, our best interests at heart. Jesus loves us, he preaches, and wants to save us from the awful fate that awaits us. He just wants us to know that his loving and merciful God has something very nasty in store for us as our reward for going our own way and rejecting the salvation offered.
In a way, Folau’s post comes at a particularly injudicious time, given the recent shootings in Christchurch that claimed the lives of 50 Muslims.
The question of whether Folau can remain a salaried Wallaby while using that platform to pontificate has been decided by Rugby Australia, although Folau is challenging his sacking.
But the question we need to address is whether Folau’s condemnation of gays, and of fornicators and drunks for that matter, as morally suspect should carry some sanction of the law.
Gay people have long struggled and suffered for the right to live in freedom, safety and dignity. Branding their sexual expression as morally wrong invites further restriction, persecution and a return to a less enlightened age.
In other words it’s getting pretty close to the sort of language that could be banned under tighter free speech laws.
The debate is a bit meaningless without examples, and Folau gives us one. I don’t think his right to express what he genuinely believes
is a command from God should be curtailed, because dumb speech is best ignored or mocked.
Mocking is probably more effective, but it runs into a tricky area at a time when we are expected to respect the customs and beliefs of all.
Folau is not an outlier. His views and interpretations are very similar to those espoused by many other respectable faiths, including traditional Islam and Judaism. If we deride him for his views, we are also mocking a range of religious people who hold a similar stance.
American essayist and commentator H L Mencken is famous for saying that ‘‘one of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected . . . that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly’’.
So we now find ourselves in a situation where we must be careful to be respectful and inoffensive when a healthy dose of ridicule is just what is required, especially in Folau’s case.
We have some interesting times ahead of us as we negotiate our way through dealing with these issues. One of the most vexed questions will be just how far respect goes.
Imagine with me if you will, for a moment, that we’ve got it all wrong. Imagine the way we’ve become used to doing things isn’t the best way, and the overwhelming reason we’re in the mess we’re in as a species is that we keep doing it and somehow expecting different results.
As John Lennon might have said, ‘‘it isn’t hard to do’’. Imagine, that is.
Imagine the point of our presence on this spinning sphere isn’t simply to accumulate, to gather stuff. There used to be a bumper sticker along those lines: ‘‘He who dies with the most toys wins.’’ It’s not hard to imagine that as the poppycock it is, but to a significant chunk of the planet’s population – the gender is instructive – it’s more than just a bumper sticker gag.
Imagine the point of being here isn’t just to look after number one, without considering how achieving our individual wellbeing affects others.
I don’t struggle to imagine that at all, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out it’s not universally accepted. There’s a bloke in the most powerful seat in the world whose overwhelming life principle seems to be looking after number one.
This trip into the world of wistful fantasy wasn’t brought about by the Government’s announcement on Wednesday that a capital gains tax for New Zealand was dead in the water, but sometimes coincidence is more serendipitous than fiction, and of course that’s factored into my thinking.
It had started in the 24 hours before Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s announcement, with the devastating fire at the fabled Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.
Yes, I was as horrified as many were to see what had happened to that stunning edifice, an astonishing intergenerational building project begun way back in 1160. I haven’t been to see it, and I’m sure the sense of loss for those who have is far greater, but I share it based on what I’ve seen: an amazing piece of French Gothic architecture beloved by millions.
What was also amazing, though, was the nature of the financial response, with one billionaire immediately pledging 100 million euros to the rebuild and, within 48 hours, the value of pledges cresting the $US1 billion mark.
Remarkable. All going according to plan, the iconic cathedral will be rebuilt within a matter of a few years. Undoubtedly good news.
But it quickly dawned what the rush of readily available funds also meant. That there were plenty of people out there who could quite easily help to end far more wideranging and pressing global problems. There were more than adequate resources for those battles if there was simply the will to fight them.