j***@go.com
2006-08-09 03:42:08 UTC
I just finished reading Aldous Huxley's novel _Point Counter Point_.
It contains some most interesting commentary about Christianity.
I'll start off with a cynical comment by the character Spandrell:
"How do you know that the earth isn't some other planet's hell?"
But most of the juiciest comments are made by the character Mark
Rampion,
said to be based on D.H. Lawrence. Some samples follow.
The first sample well describes 2006 American right-wing evangelicals.
Not bad for a novel written in Britain in 1928.
"The world's full of ridiculous God-snobs. People who aren't really
alive, who've never done any vital act, who aren't in any living
relation with anything; people who haven't the slightest personal
or practical knowledge of what God is. But they moo away in
churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy
their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the
will of an arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose
to call God. Just a pack of God-snobs...grotesque and
contemptible.... But nobody has the sense to say so.
The God-snobs are admired for being so good and pious
and Christian. When they're merely dead and ought to be
having their bottoms kicked and their noses tweaked to
make them sit up and come to life."
The following echoes a comment I devised years before
I read the book...of course, that was still decades after
Huxley wrote it:
"Telling [people] to obey Jesus is telling them to be
more than human. And, in practice, trying to be more
than human always means succeeding in being less
than human. Telling [people] to obey Jesus
literally is telling them, indirectly, to behave like
idiots and, finally, like devils."
As an example, Rampion excoriates no less than
St. Francis of Assisi, as follows:
"Just a little stink-pot.... A silly, vain little man
trying to blow himself up into a Jesus and only
succeeding in killing whatever sense or decency
there was in him, only succeeding in turning
himself into the nasty smelly fragments of a
real human being. Going about getting thrills
of excitement out of licking lepers! Ugh! The
disgusting little pervert! He thinks himself
too good to kiss a woman; he wants to be
above anything so vulgar as natural, healthy
pleasure, and the only result is that he kills
whatever core of human decency he ever had
and becomes a smelly little pervert who can
only get a thrill out of licking lepers' ulcers.
Not curing the lepers, mind you. Just licking
them. For his own amusement. Not theirs.
It's revolting!"
Read the whole book. You may look at a
lot of things differently afterwards.
It contains some most interesting commentary about Christianity.
I'll start off with a cynical comment by the character Spandrell:
"How do you know that the earth isn't some other planet's hell?"
But most of the juiciest comments are made by the character Mark
Rampion,
said to be based on D.H. Lawrence. Some samples follow.
The first sample well describes 2006 American right-wing evangelicals.
Not bad for a novel written in Britain in 1928.
"The world's full of ridiculous God-snobs. People who aren't really
alive, who've never done any vital act, who aren't in any living
relation with anything; people who haven't the slightest personal
or practical knowledge of what God is. But they moo away in
churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy
their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the
will of an arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose
to call God. Just a pack of God-snobs...grotesque and
contemptible.... But nobody has the sense to say so.
The God-snobs are admired for being so good and pious
and Christian. When they're merely dead and ought to be
having their bottoms kicked and their noses tweaked to
make them sit up and come to life."
The following echoes a comment I devised years before
I read the book...of course, that was still decades after
Huxley wrote it:
"Telling [people] to obey Jesus is telling them to be
more than human. And, in practice, trying to be more
than human always means succeeding in being less
than human. Telling [people] to obey Jesus
literally is telling them, indirectly, to behave like
idiots and, finally, like devils."
As an example, Rampion excoriates no less than
St. Francis of Assisi, as follows:
"Just a little stink-pot.... A silly, vain little man
trying to blow himself up into a Jesus and only
succeeding in killing whatever sense or decency
there was in him, only succeeding in turning
himself into the nasty smelly fragments of a
real human being. Going about getting thrills
of excitement out of licking lepers! Ugh! The
disgusting little pervert! He thinks himself
too good to kiss a woman; he wants to be
above anything so vulgar as natural, healthy
pleasure, and the only result is that he kills
whatever core of human decency he ever had
and becomes a smelly little pervert who can
only get a thrill out of licking lepers' ulcers.
Not curing the lepers, mind you. Just licking
them. For his own amusement. Not theirs.
It's revolting!"
Read the whole book. You may look at a
lot of things differently afterwards.