Bad Theology

Text for today: Leviticus 19 xxviii

Amid various urgent moral exhortations concerning beards, necromancers, the fruit of trees in a strange land, and the priestly profits to be made from the rape of female slaves, God orders that His chosen people should not tattoo themselves, and should not commemorate the dead by cutting themselves.

God's dislike of self-harmers is doubtless rooted in His loathing for the prophets of Baal, who offered their own blood and pain to call their inattentive deity to action (I Kings 18 xxviii) before being murdered at the orders of the the prophet Elijah. The fact that Elijah lived some centuries after the laws of Moses were written would of course mean nothing from the Father's eternal perspective; the appearance of Moses and Elijah at the Saviour's transfiguration demonstrates the simultaneous existence of all three prophets, and the essential continuity of their violent and primitive doctrines.

God's prohibition against tattoos is a reaction against the over-civilised ways the Hebrews have learned during their captivity. In Egypt, as in many ancient and prehistoric societies, tattooing was used for medical purposes; God's jealousy reserves the treatment of the sick to Himself and His servants, just as He reserves the right to afflict His people with crippling illnesses for no better reason than to show off His own power.

Domestic Dispute

Will they never learn? Is there no end to these partisan outrages on the fringe of the struggle for Britain's lily-white soul? Yet another statue, whose subject's past indiscretions were clearly a price worth paying for the foundation of a Museum of the Home in Shoreditch, has fallen victim to the lynch-mob attitude of the woke and the wogs. Robert Geffrye, a seventeenth-century trader in tobacco and part-owner of a slave ship, propitiated God the Englishman by dedicating part of his legacy to fourteen almshouses for widows. Later the buildings were sold off, in accordance with Anglican principles concerning the use of widows' houses, and eventually became the Geffrye Museum. Not content with censorship of the name, the lesser breeds now demand that Geffrye's statue be taken down; and had their backbones not been Britished by a stiff letter from the culture war minister, the museum's trustees might have caved in just like the craven French on Haiti.

National Virtue

Some righteous persons who have taken pats on the head from the school bully are campaigning for the master's hand to be clothed in a more anodyne glove. A Bangladesh-born mental health campaigner, having received a bauble from a government whose insouciant callousness and open racism are exceeded only by those of the present administration, does not now feel that the imperial aspect of her OBE resonates with her sense of integrity. She and her fellow enthusiasts for an Order of British Excellence appear to think that an exchange of the outdated for the merely vacuous would constitute some sort of improvement. It could certainly be argued that accepting trinkets and testimonials from a vicious government, while quibbling about the letter of the rah-rah, requires a thoroughly British sense of integrity.

Still One of Our Boys

Astoundingly enough, it appears that membership of the Farage Falange and employment by the British armed services are not entirely incompatible with the sort of behaviour more readily associated with those beastly Muslims. A crown court jury convicted the patriot in question on ten terrorism-related counts, including possession of explosive substances and terrorism instruction manuals. In addition, the patriot openly broadcast racist propaganda and proclaimed that people from ethnic minorities should be killed off. This of course represented a morally deplorable failure to get behind a Government which believes that people from ethnic minorities should either be deported or else be granted every opportunity to perish of natural causes. Nevertheless, it remains as yet unclear whether the patriot will be treated with the same degree of British fair play as a groomed schoolgirl and citizen of nowhere of the non-Aryan persuasion.

Well Taught

British ideals of freedom and fair play appear as rampant as ever in our former colony of Uganda, where ID cards are being utilised in a manner almost worthy of the master race. On the mainland, the last Labour government to win the approval of Rupert Murdoch spent several years attempting to introduce an insanely elaborate biometric ID card scheme for the benefit of private companies; and the present administration has plans to throw out something or other to deter the lesser breeds from dirtying our democracy. In Uganda, where almost everyone is ethnically minor, it seems the emphasis has been more on the equally patriotic goal of depriving people of access to banking, social benefits and healthcare. Errors on the ID cards are nearly as widespread as one would expect from a firm chaired by a ministerial chum, and the registry of births and deaths has forgotten about eighty-seven per cent of births during the past year. Some of the money saved by refusing assistance to elderly people is contributed by none other than Her Majesty's Government, which will doubtless take pride in protecting the British taxpayer from financing anything that smacks of foreign efficiency.

Plumping Up the Cushion

Now that the British taxpayer has spent a dozen or so years repaying their gambling debts, British banks are poised to take a major step towards leaving us to deal with the climate emergency. The Bank of England will be submitting a questionnaire thingy to nineteen banks and insurance companies, asking about the likely effects on their operations in the event of three different climate scenarios. Individual businesses will not be named, let alone shamed, and the Bank of England's sole reaction to the results will be to spend the next eleven months anonymising them for publication. Surprisingly, one of the three scenarios is based on the premise that governments will emulate the foresight and prudence of wealth creators and do nothing at all, resulting in a number of dampened assets. However, no protective action will be expected, let alone enforced, as long as the British taxpayer is there to be soaked.

Goals and Balls

Now that the Sewell report has established the realm's utter innocence of institutional racism, it is of course only right and fair that British sportspeople desist from bringing the master race into disrepute by implying that more must be done. At least one Conservative MP has condemned the gesture of taking the knee as unnecessarily divisive because it alienates racists, and has compared the England team to one that gave the Nazi salute at a Berlin match in the nineteen-thirties. Liberal patriots will doubtless find much to nod sagely over in the National Haystack's more measured tone, ordering "the whole country" to aid the England football team in its thrashing of the beastly wogs, while emphasising that empty actions are more effective than meaningful gestures.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: I Bicuspid xxxvii-lxiii

On the contrary, when the Father of Teeth departed that district he left a memento behind, in the form of a seventeen-storey molar which erupted from the city's central square, upsetting three war memorials and discombobulating sundry traffic. It was varnished and glazed to a rich locust-carapace brown, and in the hollow of its crown were enough nutritious scrapings to stave off the famine for a month.

By means of hooks and grapples, and with the aid of numerous convenient cavities in the enamel of the miraculous molar, the boldest among the citizenry ascended to the heights and harvested the bounty for distribution. In payment for this entrepreneurial compassion, the climbers were granted the additional privilege of scraping at the varnish and glaze, and from these brown and brittle pickings they fashioned the brittle bracelets of their office, and also the brown blades with which they improved the genitals of their initiates. With the aid of the miraculous molar the city withstood the famine; the grateful citizens offered thanks to the Father of Teeth, and the climbers undertook to convey their gratitude when the time was right, in return for whatever humble considerations might be deemed appropriate to tide over the messengers in the meantime.

The seasons proceeded according to the Creator's implacable plan; the city was scalded by the sun, battered by the wind and spattered by the rain, and one day the crown of the miraculous molar was discovered to be barren of nutritious material, and in places even scraped down to an unhealthy calcium white. Anxious for their fragile blades and bracelets, which required frequent replacement, the climbers built a shelter around the miraculous molar, and a temple around the shelter, and a courtyard around the temple, and a wall around the courtyard, and a legend around the wall, which stipulated that the Father of Teeth himself had put all these amenities in place, and would himself chew out, most mercilessly and unhygienically, anyone who dared disturb so much as the dust on a single sacred stone. And so the miraculous molar remained unseen and untouched by any but the most privileged among the climbers, while the bulk of the citizenry grovelled from afar.

Again the seasons proceeded according to the Creator's implacable plan; the city was battered by the wind, spattered by the rain, and scalded by the sun. Famine came again, and people died off in a most unspiritual manner, despite the efforts of the climbers, who fashioned new blades and refashioned the genitals of the elect with more-than-carnivorous piety. Many of those who survived made preparations to depart the city, disrespectfully flicking dust from the courtyard wall as they passed by. The climbers denounced them fiercely for these perverse and wilful actions, which could have no other result than to perpetuate the famine unnecessarily; they called down the vengeance of the Father of Teeth, which miraculously materialised in the shape of some heavily-armed and prudently well-fed keepers of law and order. Though their admonishments were salutary in their sacrificial sharpness, the dust had been flicked from the wall and the famine went on much as before.

Once more the seasons proceeded according to the Creator's implacable plan; the city was spattered by the rain, scalded by the sun and battered by the wind, and soon very little remained except for a worn white stump, which throbbed and nagged dully until the Father of Teeth returned to that region, uprooted it with some pliers and a grunt, and hid it about his person and went muttering on his way.

Shadows With Claws

An extract

THE VALKYRIE
Bedroom; west wall.
Directly in the line of sight of anyone sitting up in the bed.

An apparent effort at a mythological variation, painted in the same glistening hyperreal style as the "Street Encounter." In the right-hand half of the picture a man is slumped against a pillar. His back is to the viewer and only his left side is visible. Darkness and mist obscure the background; the floor is smooth and polished, gleaming with a grey light; the ceiling, like the top of the pillar, is outside the composition. The man is evidently injured and possibly unconscious: his head hangs limply to the left while his arm is held stiffly across his body, apparently pressed against an abdominal wound. There are no overt signs that he has been involved in a battle, or even that he is a warrior; but the bulky angularity of his shoulder suggests a military greatcoat, and the gunmetal surface of the pillar is grazed and pitted as if by repeated violence extending far back in time. Some critics have also seen in the darkened area of the floor around the man a spreading pool of blood, rather than the indeterminate shadow which appears to the more conventional view.

Facing the man from the left side of the picture, at an equal distance from the centre, is an armoured female figure. She is crouching on her feet and hands, leaning slightly forward in an attitude suggesting mild curiosity. Her limbs are bare except for greaves on her lower legs and a bracelet above her right elbow; bracelet and greaves have the same blue-black colour and battered, ancient texture as the pillar. The rest of her armour consists of a similarly battered thigh-length mail shirt, belted at the waist; from the belt hang sundry items of equipment including a knife, a claw-hammer, a leather water-pouch, and what on casual inspection looks like a pistol; careful inspection shows that the weapon is a small electric drill. In contrast to the state of her armour, all the tools are well cared for and polished to a steely shine. She wears no helmet; her greenish grey hair falls in seaweed clots over her shoulders and forehead. Her arms and face are pallid, with a tinge of blue; possibly some unearthly effect of the light, possibly not.

Her head is thrust forward and held slightly to one side: an attitude that might almost be called quizzical were it not for the expression on her face. That expression has been much debated, but no-one has detected irony there, let alone humour. The face itself is unobjectionable, if a little angular; there is nothing unnatural in the shape and proportion of the features, and the means by which the artist achieves his effect have caused almost as much argument as the meaning of that effect. The posture of the head, the dead-straight gash of the mouth, the depth and flatness of the eyes, all contribute to its peculiar quality.

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Our Precious Market Forces Tromped

While Global Britain ushers in its new Golden Age by closing libraries, demanding greater respect for statues, and ordering universities to give racism a chance, certain lower realms are hastening their inevitable economic demise by distributing merchandise free of charge. Research by the International Institute of Social History has been compiled into a book called Amsterdam and the History of Slavery, which is being most un-entrepreneurially given away to the denizens of that city. Though one hates to judge before all the facts are known, it looks suspiciously like an attempt to educate people without charging them any fees, and thus a rather dangerous and irresponsible gamble. Of course, if a nation's prosperity is shown to be linked with racism and slavery, all plucky English patriots will demand more slavery and more racism; but it remains as yet unclear whether the city of Spinoza is culturally advanced enough to perform a similar feat of logic.