Lex Anteinternet: Mocking Christianity.

Lex Anteinternet: Mocking Christianity.: 

Mocking Christianity.

But understand this: there will be terrifying times in the last days.  People will be self-centered and lovers of money, proud, haughty, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, irreligious,callous, implacable, slanderous, licentious, brutal, hating what is good,traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,as they make a pretense of religion but deny its power. Reject them.

For some of these slip into homes and make captives of women weighed down by sins, led by various desires, always trying to learn but never able to reach a knowledge of the truth.

Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so they also oppose the truth—people of depraved mind, unqualified in the faith.

But they will not make further progress, for their foolishness will be plain to all, as it was with those two.

2 Timothy, Chapter 3.

A very interesting Canadian agriculturalist whom I follow on Twitter (I don't care with Elon Musk calls it), who is also an Eastern Rite Catholic, noted that he, like me, didn't watch the Olympic opener (as will be noted, I watched the very start of it, grew bored, and wondered off).  So he, like me, was left with the media accounts, of which there are plenty, including video, of a group of drag queens mocking Da Vinci's The Last Supper.  He goes on to make the  point that the sex laden transvestite portrayal was likely calculated to offend, but that The Last Supper is not an icon, which is quite correct.

But, with some exception, the Latin Rite lacks icons.  While not the same, the great Medieval and Renaissance works of art in the West tended to be commissioned by the Church, so they have an association with it.  Put another way, in order to offend to the  degree as denigrating an icon, there'd be little other choice. ¹  Again, it's not an icon, but part of a set of religious works of art commissioned by and associated with Christianity in the West.

It's hard to grasp why this would occur, but the outrage in the Catholic Church, and there is a lot of it, is justified.  So is the embarrassment in some French circles, particularly French conservative ones.  The French far right came with in a gnat's breath of taking over the French government two weeks ago and the ultimate makeup of the upcoming French government is still unknown.  Had this happened before the election, I have a strong feeling that the French far right would be forming a government now.

That provides a topic for another thread, which we will address, but we'll note here.  Part of the rise of National Conservatism and Christian Nationalism, and even just far right populism, is due to debauchery such as this.

The Olympics itself was quick to claim that the portrayal wasn't not of The Last Supper, which of course is an Italian, not a French, Renaissance work, noting on Twitter:

The interpretation of the Greek God Dionysus makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings.

Hmm. . . Dionysus is a Greek mythological figure, not a French one. . . 

Dionysus was the Greek god of  is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre.  His Roman equivalent was Bacchus.  While celebrated in Roman times, the Romans also restricted unofficial celebrations dedicated to Bacchus due to the excess he was associated with it.  

Whatever else Dionysus may stand for or have stood for, it certainly had nothing to do with being against violence between human beings.  He really had a lot more to do with booze, drunkenness, sex and insanity, and its interesting that the ancient Greeks linked all of them together.  Eirene or Irene was the divinity associated with peace, but she didn't engage in drunken excess.

Another Olympic official also reacted with a series of excuses that were fairly lame.  Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the Olympics Opening Ceremony, said the display was about "inclusion".

When we want to include everyone and not exclude anyone, questions are raised. Our subject was not to be subversive. We never wanted to be subversive. We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that.

Whatever diversity means, it doesn't mean "being together".  At least to some significant degree, it means being apart, and in the modern era, when this is being self defined in a way contrary to nature, it literally means being a Dionysus until one's self.

Jolly noted:

In France, we have freedom of creation, artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country. I didn’t have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.

Um, okay.

Le Filip, the winner of  Drag Race France season three, probably got it more accurate.

I thought it would be a five-minute drag event with queer representation. I was amazed.  It started with Lady Gaga, then we had drag queens, a huge rave, and a fire in the sky. It felt like a crowning all over again. I am proud to see my friends and queer people on the world stage.² 

Whatever a person thinks of it, Le Filip grasped it better than Jolly did, quite frankly.

For many, as I have often told you and now tell you even in tears, conduct themselves as enemies of the cross of Christ.

Their end is destruction. Their God is their stomach; their glory is in their “shame.” Their minds are occupied with earthly things.o

St. Paul to the Philippians, Chapter 3.

A portion of France, particularly urban France, has waged war with the Church and Christianity since the failed French Revolution.  Like all the revolutions that were conducted by populist mobs, their god was their belly and they turned on the Church. The same is true of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Mexican Revolution. The Church stands for the proposition that there is something greater, much greater, than us, where as populism of the left and right, at the end of the day, doesn't.  Modern "progressivism", heir to the extreme left that arose in 1798 and 1917 has the same ethos, rejecting anything outside of ourselves and rising each person to an individual Bacchus no matter how much a person's own nature may be corrupted in one fashion or another, as individual natures are the only thing that matters.  The portrayal at the Olympic opener celebrated that ethos shamefully mocking Christianity in favor of a world outlook that goes no deeper than a person's gentiles.  Their glory, is their shame.

The storms that are raging around you will turn out to be for God’s glory, your own merit, and the good of many souls. 

St. Padre Pio.

I'll be frank that I quit watching the opening ceremonies of Olympic games some time ago.  I think the last one I actually watched was the Moscow Olympics, which is now quite some time back. They've ceased to make sense to me. The Olympics are ostensibly about sports, not about the glorification of the country where they're held, or drag queens.  Indeed, I've frankly lost interest in the Olympics themselves for some reason.

This really reinforces that view, particularly as to this particular Olympics.

I feel they should just be permanently placed in Greece, for the summer games.

Make no mistake: God is not mocked, for a person will reap only what he sows, because the one who sows for his flesh will reap corruption from the flesh, but the one who sows for the spirit will reap eternal life from the spirit.

Galatians, Chapter 6.

I suspect most of the viewing audience will simply regard this attack on Catholicism as part of the show, shrug it off, and move on.  In doing so, they benefit from the liberal culture the Church created in the West and the fact that central to the Christian worldview is turning the other cheek.  In contrast, France has a very large Muslim population that nobody would dare attack in such a fashion, a cartoon depicting Mohammed for instance famously resulting in murder.  There will be no drag queens taking on an Islamic topic.  None.  Islam doesn't turn the other cheek.  Likewise, Hinduism, which of course would be completely foreign to France, can't be attacked in this fashion either without almost immediate retribution.³

Catholics aren't going to do that, nor will the rest of the Christian world.

Which doesn't mean that the offense should be ignored.

Footnotes:

1.  One religious image that has endured this is the tilmahtli associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe.  Back when there was a print Playboy magazine, the company issued a Mexican edition with a Mexican woman featured on the cover replicating the image in a pornographic fashion, which brought a firestorm of criticism.

That, and this, give credence to those who claim a diabolical origin to these events.

2.  Are there no French singers to do an Olympic opening?  Why Stefani Germanotta as the opening act?  That alone is embarrassing for France.

Having said that, the Marseilles was beautifully sung by Axelle Saint-Cirel. They should have just stopped right there.

In case anyone wonders, my watching of the show was basically bookended by those two acts.  I grew tired of the masked boofador running over roofs and wondered off to take a shower and watch something else.

3.  One religion that has endured something like this is the LDS, Mormon, faith.  Target of the satiric comedic The Book Of Mormon, it's basically shrugged it off, probably figuring, correctly, that as a minority religion, it might actually benefit from being mocked, as it at least puts a spotlight on it.  I'd guess, however, that Mormons aren't keen on the portrayal, and while I've never seen it, and I'm not a Mormon, I'm not either.  As noted, nobody would put on a Broadway satiric "The Koran", nor should they.

Lex Anteinternet: Turkey was once cited as an exception in the Islam...

Lex Anteinternet: Turkey was once cited as an exception in the Islam...:

Turkey was once cited as an exception in the Islamic world in that. . .

it seemed to have a stable, and highly secular, government.

Mosaic in the Hagia Sophia of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

In spite of the way headlines might cause people to believe otherwise, there are other Islamic nations that can make that claim now. At the same time, however, Islam has posed a challenge to political liberalization in areas in which it is strong.  Not all Middle Eastern nations with a Muslim majority, which is most of them, have Islamic or Islamic influenced governments by any means, indeed, not even a majority of them do, but contending with a faith that has seen no distinction between its religious laws and secular laws is a challenge for all of them.  This has brought about revolution in some, such as Iran, and civil war in others, such as Syria and Iraq.  The problem is never far below the surface.



Turkey was an exception as Ataturk aggressively secularized the nation, which he ran as a dictator, with the support of the Turkish Army.  That army, in turn, served to guard the political culture he created for decades after his death, stepping in to run the government whenever it regarded things as getting too far away from that legacy.  But with the election of Turkish Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the country has been moving more and more in the other direction.



And now the Turkish supreme court, in this new era of Islamization, has ruled that Ataturk's 1935 conversion of the Hagia Sophia from a mosque into a museum was illegal.

Codex depicting the Sophia Hagia under construction.

What was overarchingly illegal, of course, was the occupation of the Hagia Sophia by Islam.  It's a Christian church.



The Hagia Sophia was completed as a Catholic cathedral in 537, having first seen construction in 360.  That is what it was until the Great Schism left it in the Eastern part of Christendom and it served as an Orthodox cathedral from 1054 to 1204, when it reverted to being a Catholic cathedral.  It served as an Orthodox cathedral.  In 1439 a murky end to the Schism was negotiated but which failed to really solve it. That a story for elsewhere, but in its final years the cathedral was once again an Eastern Catholic cathedral but one which also saw Latin Rite masses said in it. The last mass at the Cathedral was in 1453 literally during the fall of Constantinople, when the Ottoman Turkish forces broke into the cathedral and killed the Priests celebrating Mass.



The Ottoman Turks admires much of Byzantium and pressed the cathedral into service as a mosque, but keeping its numerous Christian and Byzantine symbols.  It was used as a mosque from 1453 to 1935, which Ataturk converted its use, as noted, into a museum.



This would mean that the church served as a Christian church for 916 years.  It was used as an Islamic mosque for 482 years.  If we take into account its service as a focus of Christian efforts, it was a Christian site for 1093 years.

Ataturk and his wife in 1924.

Like a lot of the things we discuss here, this story is complicated by World War One.  Going into the Great War Turkey was the Ottoman Empire and claimed to be the caliphate.  Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had been an Ottoman officer who came to see the Ottoman government he served in as effete, ineffective and anti modern.  He became the leader in what amounted to a rebellion against the Ottoman government over the issue of peace as that peace proposed to carve away large sections of Anatolia in favor its its ethnic minorities. This soon lead to the Turkish War of Independence which pitted the Turkish forces first against the Allies but, as time went on, principally against the Greeks.



The overplaying of the Allied hand in Turkey caused one of the great tragedies of the immediate post World War One world.  The Allied powers were, by that time, too fatigued to bother with a long protracted war and occupation of Anatolia, which is what defeating the Turks would really have meant. Their presence as victors, however, gave real hope to ethnic minorities inside of Turkey, with those minorities uniformly being Christian.  Moreover, they gave hope to the Greek government of amazingly recovering a portion of Anatolia that Greeks had not governed since 1453.  Not only did the Greeks seek to do so, but they sought to expand their proposed territory in Anatolia far beyond those few areas that had sizable Greek populations and into areas where those populations were quite limited. Giving hope to those aspirations, moreover, caused the struggle for that goal to rapidly become genocidal on both sides.



The European Allies lost interest pretty quickly in shedding blood for Greek territorial aspirations and in October 1922 the war came to an end in a treaty which saw 1,000,000 ethnic Greeks depart Anatolia as refugees, bringing nearly to an end a presence there that stretched back into antiquity, and which at one time had defined Greek culture more than Greece itself.  Some Greeks remained, but it was a tiny minority.  It was a tiny minority, however that continued to be identified by its Christianity, with both Orthodox and Catholic Greeks remaining.

Ataturk and one of his twelve adopted children.

Ataturk's victory of the Allies did not prove to be a victory for Islam.  Taking an approach to governance that might be best compared to that of Napoleon Bonaparte, he was a modernizing and liberalizing force who sought to accomplish those goals effectively by force.  As part of that, he saw the influence of Islam as a retrograde force that needed to be dealt with.



Indeed, Ataturk's relationship with Islam has remained a source of debate and mystery, like much of his personal life in general.  He was born into an Islamic family and had received religious instruction, but its clear that he held a highly nuanced view of the faith.  He was not personally observant in at least some respects and was a life long heavy drinker, a fact which lead to his early death.  He spoke favorably of the role of religion in society but it was clear that role was not to extend to influencing government.  Comments he made about Islam suggest that he thought a reformed Islam needed to come about or even that he personally did not believe in its tenants.  He was quoted to a foreign correspondent to the effect that Turkish muslims didn't grasp what Islam really was because the Koran was in Arabic, and once they really were able to read it in Turkish, they'd reject it.



As part of all of this his approach to governance, therefore, was Napoleonic, being a liberalizer and modernizer by force.  Like Napoleon, his day ended short, although his rule was far more successful than Napoleon's and his Turkey became modern Turkey up until Turkey's current leadership, which seems intent to go backwards in time.



One of the things that Ataturk managed to do was to reach a treaty with Greece in 1930 in which Greece renounced its claims on  Turkish territory.  As Ataturk continued to advance modernization in the 1930s, the Hagia Sophia's occupation as a mosque came to an end in 1935.  It became a museum dedicated to the history of Anatolia and a spectacular example of Anatolia's history and culture.



Now that's coming to an end, along with what seems to be Turkey's long period of regional exceptionalism.



Hagia Sophia translates as Holy Wisdom. This move by the Turkish government is neither holy, nor wise.