Robin's Readings and Reflections

Miracle on 34th Street and the problem of Postmodern epistemology

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:44:00 +0000

Every Christmas, each of us is a little bit older. Some of us show our age more than others. Not so with Santa Clause. He remains the same year after year. However, beneath the white beard and sparkling eyes, some changes may be apparent to the discerning eye. The Santa of Postmodernism is not quite the same as the Santa of Modernism.

The Modernist makes no pretenses about Santa’s ontology. Santa may be a useful lie for deceiving children into being good, just as Kant and the early Voltaire saw belief in God as a useful idea for motivating the masses in morality. But there was never any question, in the mind of the Modernist, about Santa being real. The Modernist is a rationalist and believes only those things which can be demonstratively proven.

Under Postmodern epistemology, truth is relative to the framework of the perceiver. Since the aim is “no longer truth but performativity” (Steven Connor, Postmodern Culture) it follows that Santa can actually be “real” for those who believe in him. This came across in an article I read last year in one of the British papers about a school where a substitute teacher had let slip that the old man didn’t really exist. After a number of parents complained, the school fired the teacher and brought in a man to address the class and put them right about Mr. Clause. He assured the distressed students that the other teacher had simply made a mistake: Santa is real, he said.

A Modernist might make such an audacious claim as a manipulative tool (and Santa belief has traditionally functioned as a manipulative tool, as in the song “Santa Clause is coming to town”), but he would know it was a lie. But the Postmodernist can tell his child that Santa is real and really mean it, because he can be real for you. This is because it is a centerpiece of Postmodern epistemology (grossly oversimplified) that there is no notion of truth external to the conceptual frameworks we choose to adopt.

The placidity of the Postmodernism epistemic paradigm has meant there is new freedom for having faith in God, although “faith” in this sense differs greatly from the objective Biblical concept. Whereas Modernist critics of the Christian faith would typically respond by asking for evidence and proof, those who have been thoroughly Postmodernized are quite happy to accommodate faith in God as long as that faith is understood in the subjective sense typlified in the 1994 Miracle on 34th Street (of which more will be said shortly). That is why critics of religion who are still working under a Modernist paradigm, such as the new atheists, have been generally greeted with ire from both the religious and the secular communities. Why get so worked up about attacking faith if it gives meaning and purpose to people's life, many have asked in response to Dawkin’s atheistic crusades, including his crusade to abolish Christmas? Similarly, why bother telling children that Santa doesn’t exist if it gives magic to their lives?

I am reminded of the play Nathan the Wise written by Lessing (pictured right) and published in 1779. (For background to the play, see my article "Mother State or Mother Church" in Christianity & Society, Volume XVIII, No. 1, Summer, 2008) Because Nathan the Wise takes place in Jerusalem at the time of the crusades, Lessing is able to have interplay between all three of the main religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The portion of the play that is most famous, as well as most significant, is a parable that the wise Nathan tells to the Sultan. The Islamic Sultan had asked the Jewish Nathan to tell him which religion was the true one. Suspicious of the Sultan’s motives, Nathan answers with the parable of the three rings.

In this parable, there was once a rich man who possessed a magic ring. This ring had secret power which caused the owner of the ring to gain favor in the sight of God and humankind. Now the owner of this ring took precautions to leave the ring in his family, ensuring that it was faithfully passed on from generation to generation, from son to son. Finally, the ring reached a man who had three sons, each of which he loved alike. As the father drew near his death, he was in a quandary as to which son to leave the ring to since he had promised the ring, in turn, to each.

As a solution, the father secretly contacted a craftsman who made two identical replicas of the ring. Not being able to distinguished the original, the father left each son with one of the three rings. Of course, when the father died, disputes immediately began to arise between the sons, each of whom believed he possessed the genuine ring.

At this point, Nathan pauses the story to say that just as it was impossible to distinguish which was the correct ring, so we cannot trust ourselves to distinguish the grounds on which the different religions rest.

The story continues with each of the three sons believing their ring to be the true one since each had received it directly from the hand of the father. In the end the brothers take their problem before a judge. The judge enjoins the brothers that what is more important than knowing the truth about their rings, is the motivation and inspiration each will achieve through believing that their ring is the genuine one. The judge enjoins each brother to pass his ring on to his descendents as the real ring.

Thus ends the parable that Nathan used to answer the Sultan’s question, namely, which religion is the correct one. The important thing is not what is true but what you believe.

There are many things we could say in response to this tale. We might point out that in actual fact the religions of Islam and Judaism are quite distinguishable from Christianity. Or we might say that since one of the rings actually was the correct ring, it follows that two of the brothers would have spent their life believing a false proposition. However, such observations miss the whole point Lessing was trying to convey. His point – from my understanding of the story at least – seems to be that there is something far more important than questions of truth and falsehood in the narrow, letter-of-the-law sense. Stop trying to defend what you believe is true, he is saying to us, and instead concentrate on letting your belief motivate and inspire you. There is no need for factual coherence to be antecedent to religious belief as it must be with scientific truth; rather, the nature of religious belief is such that it can exist on its own, without needing to appeal to historic grounds. In fact, Lessing saw the very attempt of Christians to defend the historical veracity of their faith as intolerant since it failed to recognize that all the major religions, if rightly understood, were equally valuable routes to God.

Lessing’s parable illustrates the Enlightenment commitment to relegating religious belief to the realm of the subjective, private and unverifiable.

This subjective epistemology invited people to view religion and worship of God as a personal matter - a solitary experience between the individual and God that had little relevance to the objective world. To seek objective verification about a matter of faith was now almost to commit a category mistake, since the ‘truth’ of religion had now become a personal truth discontinuous from the fixity of the external world of science, history and public life.

Postmodernism has taken Lessing’s subjective epistemology and applied it to more areas than merely religious belief. Under postmodernism, all fields become matters of “faith” to the extent that our perceptions of reality are conditioned by our expectations and subjective ideological paradigms. This was the view that was later articulated so eloquently by the Danish philosopher Soren Kirkegaard, who downplayed the relation between Christian faith and objective historical fact, even arguing that the latter is unnecessary.

As soon as Santa-belief becomes a matter of faith in this sense, we are committing a category mistake to speak of that belief as being true or false in the narrow objectivist sense. As in Lessing’s parable, we create our own truth by the belief structures we choose to adopt. Thus, the teacher referred to earlier can tell children that Santa is real just like the men in Lessing’s parable can tell their desendents that their family ring is the genuine article.

Many of these themes come to a head in the movie Miracle on 34th Street.

Imagination and Reality in Miracle on 34th Street

William Symington said that “imagination is one of the noblest faculties...the sound and proper use of which is not only necessary to the existence of sympathy....but also intimately connected those higher exercises of the soul, by which men are enabled to realize the things that are not seen and eternal.”

We live in an age that has lost the noble faculty to which Symington refers. The endemic scepticism, materialism and commercialism of Modernism has flattened out the sense of wonder, magic and imagination that not only makes life worth living, but orients towards the unseen world of spiritual intangibles.

That is why a film like Miracle on 34th Street is appealing. The film seems to offer a solution to the endemic scepticism of the modern world. In the beginning of the film, it is clear that 9-year old Susan Walker has been raised to despise anything make-believe. She looks down on children who pretend to be animals and she has never even heard of Jack and the Beanstalk, much to the consternation of Fred Gailey, her friendly neighbour who attempts to expand her horizons by introducing imagination into her life. Meanwhile, Susan’s mother Doris continues to instruct her daughter in a nuts-and-bolts approach to life, where the only things worth believing are tangible facts.

This epistemological conflict centres around the character of Kris Kringle, a curious old man who claims to be Santa Clause. Kris joins Fred in trying to awaken a sense of magic and imagination in the life of Susan and her mother. This attempt is connected with Kris’s goal of convincing the pair that he is indeed the real Santa Clause. These are not two separate goals, for Kris assumes that once Doris and Susan abandon their nuts-and-bolts empiricism, they will embrace his identity as Santa Clause. Santa-belief thus becomes a powerful metaphor for the human need to have faith in something beyond the tangible facts of the material world. The following dialogues from the film illustrates this:

Fred Gailey: No Santa Clause, no fairy tales, no fantasies of any kind - is that it?

Doris Wood: That’s right. I think we should be realistic and completely truthful with our children and not having them growing up believing in a lot of myths like Santa Clause.

Kris Kringle: You don’t believe then?

Doris Wood: By filling them full of fairy tales they grow up believing life to be a fantasy.

Throughout the film, all the main characters operate on the basis of a juxtaposition between a nuts-and-bolts, just-the-facts empiricism bereft of all magic, make-believe and sense of wonder, versus an imaginative orientation which recognizes that there is more to reality than meets the eye and appreciates the value of beautiful intangibles. Since Santa-belief becomes paradigmatic for the latter approach, the more Susan and Doris turn away from their sceptical empiricism the more they turn towards belief in Kris’ identity as Santa Clause. This culminates in Susan writing a letter to Kris expressing her belief in him, while Doris movingly adds “I believe in you too” at the bottom of the page.

Category Confusions in Miracle on 34th Street

The association of Santa-belief with an imaginative orientation sets up a number of confusing dilemmas at the heart of the film. Since Kris claims to really be Santa Clause in a tangible, factual sense, it is hard to understand in what sense believing in him represents an alternative to the just-the-facts scepticism of Doris and Susan. Confusingly, the film connects Santa-belief with “faith in lovely intangibles” even though Kris claims to be Santa in a tangible sense! Further, how can Santa-belief be wrapped up with an ability to enjoy what is make-believe, seeing as Kris’ makes very clear that his identity as Santa is not a matter of make-believe at all? For all Kris’s lip-service to the importance of imagination (which he defines to Susan as the ability to pretend impossible things), he makes it clear again and again throughout the film that when it comes to himself imagination isn’t good enough: he wants everyone to accept that he is not just a pretend Santa Clause (like Macy’s former Santa), but the real thing. Confusingly, Kris colludes with the very fact-based epistemology he claims to repudiate, insisting that in his own case make-believe is not sufficient: he expects people to actually believe in his identity as Santa Clause.

Modernism and the Problem of Imagination

The above may be a simple ambiguity for the sake of the narrative, but I suspect it is symptomatic of Modernism’s fundamental misunderstanding of imagination. It takes imagination to enjoy fairy tales precisely because we know that fairies do not exist. Once fairies begin to be treated as entities which really exist in a factual sense, it not only destroys their magic, but means that we no longer need imagination to enjoy them, just as Santa requires imagination precisely until we begin to treat him as someone who really exists in the same sense that you or I exist.

This may help to explain one of the primary reasons why so many parents lie to their children about Santa: in the modern age, belief in falsehood often acts as a substitute for true imagination.

I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’s comment that if Conan Doyle was correct in claiming to have seen a genuine photograph of a fairy, then fairies would lose their magic. Quite true, and that is why fantasies like Harry Potter which reduce magic to something mundane and prosaic ultimately require less imagination than a narrative like the Narnia Chronicles. Thomas Howard writes that ''what we encounter in the landscape of Narnia is true - not in the sense that we will come upon the ruins of Cair Paravel somewhere (there are none), but rather in the sense that Cair Paravel is a castle, and the man from whose imagination castles have disappeared is disastrously deprived, as is the man who has lost the capacity to appreciate how it can be that for a free man to bow in the presence of a great king, far from being demeaning, is ennobling.”

This highlights two different approaches to fantasy literature that have found expression in critical comparisons of the imaginary visions of J.K. Rowlings and C.S. Lewis. Steve D. Greydanus’ has argued convincingly that magic in both Lewis and Tolkien is always otherworldly, bearing little or no resemblance to the actuality of events in the real world. Magic in Lewis and Tolkien consists of obviously imaginary and fantastic phenomena that could never occur in the real world as opposed to Rowling’s more materialistic treatment of magic. Tolkien’s fantasy was intentionally non-realistic because he believed myths to be the best way of conveying truth that would otherwise be inexpressible. Something is lost when we try to translate myths into prosaic, materialistic fact since there are essences that can only be conveyed poetically. We see this dynamic at work in Miracle on 34th Street and the attempt to translate Santa into a realistic fact and to reduce the imagination to an approximation for believing in impossible things.

Miracle on 34th Street is symptomatic of a society that, because it has lost its sense of poetry and wonder, has reduced imagination to belief in fairies. Consider Fred’s treatment of Jack and the Beanstalk when he is talking to Susan. After she says that giants don’t exist, Fred responds that they used to in the old days, as if actual belief in giants was a necessary precondition for being able to appreciate the magic of Jack and the Beanstalk. As we have seen, this approach to magic ends up colluding with the very epistemology that the film tries to repudiate, since Kris asks people to believe that he is Santa in a factual, tangible sense which therefore has absolutely nothing to do with fantasy. The film thus invokes the dizzying paradox that those who think Kris is Santa in a make-believe sense (like Sawyer, Mr. Macy, New York County District Attorney Thomas Mara) don’t have any imagination, while those who believe Kris is Santa not in a make-believe sense, are learning to use their imaginations!

Faith and Reason in Miracle on 34th Street

Consider the following dialogue between Doris Wood and Fred Gailey, after the later decides to prove in a court of law that Kris is Santa.

Fred: You don’t have any faith in me, do you?

Doris: It’s not a question of faith, it’s just common sense.

Fred: Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to. Don’t you see, it’s not just Kris that’s on trial its everything he stands for: kindness and joy and love and all the other intangibles.

Doris: O Fred, you’re talking like a child. You’re living in a realistic world and all those lovely intangibles of yours are attractive but not worth very much. You don’t get ahead that way.

Fred: It depend on what you mean by getting ahead. Evidently you and I have different definitions.

Doris then accuses Fred of going on an “Idealistic binge”, whereupon Fred responds: “Someday you’re going to find that you’re way of facing this realistic world just doesn’t work, and when you do, don’t overlook those lovely intangibles. You’ll discover they’re the only things that are worthwhile.”
As the ice on Doris’s heart begins to melt, she begins to have faith in things which go against common sense. She says to Fred, “I never really doubted you. It was just my silly common sense.” She then tells her daughter that she was wrong to refer to Kris as just as nice old man with whiskers: “I was wrong when I told you that. You must believe in Mr. Kringle and keep right on doing it. You must have faith in him.” When Susan doesn’t get the present that she asked for on Christmas, she begins to doubt that Mr. Kringle is Santa. But her mother encourages her to believe against all evidence, saying, “Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.” Taking this advice, Susan keeps repeating to herself, “I believe, I believe. It’s silly but I believe.” She keeps repeating this phrase until they stumble upon the present that Susan asked for: a house.

Fall and Redemption in Miracle on 34th Street

All good stories are echoes of the One Story, telling the account of the fall and redemption. Jack and the Beanstalk is typical of a good fairy story: it begins with Jack and his mother impoverished, which we later learn was because of the giant’s cruelty to Jack’s father. This is a type of the fall, although in this case the enemy is not the serpent but the giant. Just as Adam and Eve were banished from paradise, so Jack and his mother are sent to live the life of paupers. Jack, who is a type of Christ, comes and plunders the giant’s castle and redeems is father’s lost fortune, just as Christ bruised the serpent’s head and redeemed us for His kingdom.

The reason Jack and the Beanstalk and similar tales are so enjoyable is because they echo themes at the very heart of our world and our humanity. All good stories follow this same basic pattern, telling a story of fall and redemption.

Miracle on 34th Street is no different. It begins with Doris and Susan in a fallen state, although in this case it is a fall into a rationalistic, restricted epistemology which the cold Doris adopted as a form of self-protection after her divorce. Kris revealingly refers to Doris and Susan as “a couple of lost souls.” By the end of the film they are no longer lost but have found redemption, metaphorically, through “faith.” However, unlike Biblical faith, this faith is an existential leap of irrationality.

The Enlightenment and Miracle on 34th Street

According to many thinkers of the Enlightenment, the only things we can really know objectively are those things that we can perceive tangibly through the senses. This is known as the philosophy of empiricism. Empiricism created a divide between those ideas that could be verified through empirical observation, vs. ideas derived by other means. Ideas belonging to the latter category (which included religious ideas) were necessarily personal and private, existing in a different sphere to that of normal objective phenomena. Since one could apply reason to the former but not the latter, it followed that religion could only be a matter of blind faith. Whereas the pre-Enlightenment worldview generally attempted to apply reason to both the tangible and intangible realms (so that you could apply reason to the content of faith just as easily as the content of sense perception), empiricism said that reason could only apply to the former. Anything intangible (such as the content of religious belief) was necessarily personal, private and subjective. Lessing’s parable of the 3 rings brings this out very clearly.

It is doubtful that the Enlightenment would have succeeded in achieving any long-term effect had it not been for the fact that most Christians were caught off guard by this change in categories. While rejecting the Enlightenment’s conclusions, few Christian thinkers took the challenge of offering a rational critique of the assumptions upon which those conclusions were derived, notably the divided epistemology. Like the Romantics in the 19th century, serious Christians at the time of the Enlightenment tended to emphasize the importance of religious truth, while still unconsciously accepting the epistemological package which kept that truth subjective and privatized. The Church tended to react to the new wave of secular philosophy by taking refuge in an emotional, devotional type of Christianity which, because it required no intellectual underpinning, fit nicely into the divided epistemology.

The “double-truth universe” bequeathed by the Enlightenment found renewed impetus in the increasing polarization between earth and heaven that was so characteristic of 20th century piety. If religion is about our personal and private experiences with God cut off from the objective realm of empirical fact, then true piety consists in having our minds fixed on heavenly realities instead of earthly concerns. In practice this meant getting as many people into heaven as possible. Once you were “saved” - that is, once your ticket to a happy afterlife was secured – Christian living was thought to involve little more than living by a pedestrian code of personal pietism. No longer was the Bible seen as giving us a worldview that structured the whole of public reality. It became instead a privatized faith that, as Roszak put it, was “socially irrelevant even if privately engaging.” It is hardly surprising that around this same time (late 19th early 20th century) hymnology began to be increasingly ‘feminized’, with the singing of robust psalms and hymns replaced by subjective sentiments (“he lives within my heart” or “now I am happy all the day” or “precious memories of everything Jesus has done for me”).

As the church became diluted by anti-intellectualism, feminization, pietism and cultural anorexia, the church as a whole was largely unprepared to combat the influx of liberal theology and deconstructionism that began to pour into England and America in the 19th and 20th century. In the early 20th century, three Christians tried to address this situation by writing a twelve volume work titled The Fundamentals. The Christians who affirmed the doctrines in this book soon came to be known as fundamentalists, a term which has subsequently come to carry pejorative connotations. As fundamentalism began to be a badge to distinguish true ‘Bible-believing-Christians’, the emphasis came to rest more on what you believed rather than why you should believe it.

The notion of ‘faith’, long since subjectivized, deteriorated further to become an approximation for anti-intellectualism, to the point where the word can now be used in movies like Miracle on 34th Street to indicate belief that goes against common sense. Being able to “just believe” and “have faith” against evidence and common sense has become a sign of fundamentalist piety, in contradistinction to Biblical belief which always appeals to the evidence (consider the opening of Luke’s gospel, for example, or Paul’s appeal to the evidences of the resurrection in the Corinthian correspondence).

The only time the Bible ever comes anywhere near to advocating faith that goes against reason is when the prophets enjoin the people to hold on to God’s promises in the light of contrary circumstances. Thus, even as Jerusalem is being plundered, the people are told the glories that will accompany the restoration. The heroes of faith mentioned in Hebrews 11 are praised for their ability to believe in God’s promises in the face of martyrdom and apparent defeat. Is this a case of faith as “believing in things when common sense tells you not to”? I don’t think so, for it is clear throughout the prophets and the Psalms that the ability to believe in God’s promises in the midst of trying circumstances is only because we first have evidence of God’s covenantal faithfulness and trustworthiness demonstrated over time, from the call of Abraham to the Exodus to the monarchical period, and so on. That is why the Psalmists and prophets respond to suffering and persecution by reminding God of the great victories of the past and the great victories promised in the future. Faith in the promises of a trustworthy God is not the irrational option for the believer; rather, it is the rational option. Irrationality (and the corollary dualism between faith and reason) is the tool of the father of lies. No where does the Bible instruct us to “just believe” without evidence, like Doris instructed Susan to believe that Kris was Santa even when the evidence seemed to suggest otherwise. Unfortunately, many Christians have bought into secular assumptions of the Enlightenment project and the subjective concept of faith that arose as a consequence and which permeates Miracle on 34th Street.
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Many modern films take this subjective epistemology one step further by suggesting that as long as you believe something to be true, then that can be true for you. Miracle on 34th Street anticipates this Postmodern epistemology by mixing the categories of truth and falsehood. When Doris and Fred are standing in the home that Susan believes Kris has provided, they talk about purchasing the house in order to preserve Susan’s illusion that it is a gift from Kris. In being willing to allow her to believe a lie, they reveal that truth does not matter for them. In this final scene, we find that Fred never really believed Kris was Santa after all, for when they spot Kris’ stick leaning against the wall of the house (an apparent vindication that he had actually provided it as a gift), Fred says that maybe he hadn’t done such a wonderful thing after all in proving that this old man was Santa Clause (the subtext being because he really is Santa Clause). We are then left to wonder in what sense Fred and Doris ever believed that Kris was Santa prior to this scene. If they only believed in him in the sense of believing in all the intangibles that Kris stood for, then that is accidental to his actual identity as Santa, thus rendering vacuous all the characters' statements about faith in Santa Clause. After all, I can affirm intangibles such as love and kindness without having to believe in the tooth fairy.

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Snopes and H1N1

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:13:00 +0000

Since my earlier warnings about the swine flu vaccine, a number of people have pointed to the Snopes site which apparently debunks the concerns that I and others have raised.

The irony is that Snopes is a propaganda site purporting to be a neutral fact checking site. It tends to reflect the same biases as the mainstream media. They are highly anti-creationist, pro-IRS, etc. Several Snopes articles have been flat out wrong even on mundane subjects. So, I don't trust Snopes or Quatloos.com, though some of their information is accurate.

I have read that the adjuvant is mixed into the vaccine at the distribution point - ie the doctor's office, so it might be technically true that the vaccine is shipped with no squalene, but the squalene is added before the injection. The nasal form has no squalene at all, because squalene only excites the immune system if injected.

You read the patent yourself. Squalene is a key ingredients what Snopes says, though it may be interchangeable with polysorbate.

The information on the CDC site (http://www.cdc.gov/) is equally suspect. Consider some of their claims:

1. "Getting the flu shot is the single best way to protect against the flu."

Actually, there have been absolutely zero double blind controlled studies to test that belief. The vaccine industry so strongly believe that flu vaccine is effective, they say it would be "unethical" to actually test the vaccine where you give half of the randomly selected test subjects a placebo shot and half the vaccine. This is begging the question.

They have found that people who take flu shots are half as likely to die from flu as people who don't. However, this doesn't mean the flu shot is preventing flu (ergo hoc post propter hoc). Because the people who take flu shots are self-selected volunteer group, it may very well mean that the kind of people who voluntarily take the flu vaccine are the same group of people who tend to be healthy in the first place. Ie, people who take care of their health (and take annual vaccines) may be half as likely to die from flu, regardless of whether they take the vaccine.

2. "Research has found that pregnant women who had a flu shot get sick less often with the flu than do pregnant women who did not get a flu shot."

The vaccine circular states that it has not been tested to see how it affects pregnancy or the reproductive system. So the CDC is making different claims than the actual vaccine manufacturers.

Additionally, in Canada it has been reported that people who take the seasonal flu shot are MORE likely to go into intensive care from Swine flu.

3. "Seasonal and 2009 H1N1 flu shots can be given on the same day but should be given at different sites."

No studies have been shown to determine if this is safe. Since flu shots contain adjuvants such as thimerosol and squalene, both of which have adverse effects that increase with dosage, it seems common sense to think that taking a double dose in the same day, when one has a fetus on board is not a good idea.

4. "Flu shots have not been shown to cause harm to pregnant women or their babies."

Has this even been tested? Quite a few women have been reporting micarriages after taking flu shots, especially 2009 H1N1. It certainly hasn't been tested on H1N1.

5. The patent is 2008.

The patent for the swine flu vaccine is 2008. Of course that raises questions, like, how did they patent the vaccine for a specific disease before the outbreak of that new virus occured? We'll not touch that question. Another question is, "If the seasonal flu shot is patented under a different process than the 2009 H1N1 vaccine, then how can you say that the two vaccines are equally safe? If no testing in people was done with the new vaccine until September 2009, how can you say that you know it is safe?"

The CDC is a government agency, which makes me wonder if it is more of a propaganda machine than anything else.

A music lesson from the Phillips' family

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:42:00 +0000

On October 31, our church had a Reformation Day party and our family gave the following presentation on the role that music played during the English reformation. Following is a copy of the script I wrote, together with some illustrations our children helped to create.

Daddy:

We want to share with you a bit about how the Protestant reformation affected music in England. First Matthew is going to explain about the important role that the church played in 16th century music

Matthew:

In the 16th century, musicians, including composers, were servants. They were regarded as craftsmen, not artists in the modern sense.

This meant that a musician’s livelihood, and therefore his ability to make music, depended entirely on pleasing his patrons.

The biggest patron was the church itself. This meant that developments in the church would inevitably have musical consequences.

Music was an important part of the Roman Catholic mass. Just as the metaphysics of the mass became increasingly complicated in the late middle ages, so the music that accompanied the mass began to get more and more elaborate and complex.

Furthermore, just as the mass was denied to the laity, who were only given access to the bread but not the wine, so the music of the mass was inaccessible to ordinary people who couldn’t understand the Latin text.

Mummy:

As an example of what Matthew has been talking about, we’re going to play you a Marian antiphon by the English composer John Browne. It is called “O Mary the mother of the savior.” It was written to be sung during the mass sometime during the late 15th or early 16th century.
Some things to notice in this work are:

· The complex rhythms
· Eight separate vocal parts
· Constantly changing vocal textures
· Melisma, which means one syllable of text spanning an entire group of notes. Not infrequently, individual syllables carry such lengthy melodic lines that consecutive syllables in a word become widely separated; the words thus lose their identity and significance and so cease to have any coherent meaning.

Play Example 1 (around two minutes of it)

Timothy:

King Henry the 8th was king of England from 1509 - 1547. He was part of the Tudor family.
King Henry was a bad king. He wasted the country’s money. He also didn’t have very much self-control.

Not only was King Henry a bad king, but he was also a bad husband. He even had two of his wives’ heads chopped off. A husband should never chop off his wife’s head.

When King Henry wanted to get rid of his first wife, he divorced her. In order to do this, Henry had to first get the Pope’s permission. When the pope (pictured right) wouldn’t agree, King Henry broke away from the Roman Catholic church and started the church of England. This happened in 1534 with the Act of Supremacy.

Esther:

Henry’s break from the Roman Catholic church is usually considered the beginning of the English reformation, even though England, Scotland and Wales had a long tradition of Protestantism going back to the early Celtic church. However, this was the beginning of an established Protestant church in England.

Bluff King Hal was full of beans
He married half a dozen queens
For three called Kate they cried the banns
And one called Jane, and a couple of Annes.

The first he asked to share his reign
Was Kate of Aragon, straight from Spain
But when his love for her was spent
He got a divorce, and out she went.

Anne Boleyn was his second wife.
He swore to cherish her all his life,
But seeing a third, he wished instead
He chopped off poor Anne Boleyn’s head.

He married the next afternoon
Jane Seymour, which was rather soon,
But after one year as his bride
She crept into her bed and died.

Anne of Cleves was number four.
Her portrait thrilled him to the core,
But when he met her face to face
Another royal divorce took place.

Catherine Howard, number five,
Billed and cooed to keep alive.
But one day Henry felt depressed,
The executioner did the rest.

Sixth and last was Catherine Parr
Sixth and last and luckiest far
For this time it was Henry who
Hopped the twig, and a good job too.

Timothy: Although Henry was a bad king and had selfish reasons for starting the Church of England, there were many godly men in England at the time and the Lord used their work to make the English reformation into something glorious. One of the most godly men was Henry’s Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer.

Miriam:
Among the many changes that came about because of the reformation was something called The Act of Uniformity which required one uniform prayer book in the English language to be used in the church. This was very important because for a long time worship in the English churches had only been conducted in Latin.

To meet this new need, the archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, put together the Book of Common Prayer. The prayer book had everyone at church, not merely the ministers, involved in the worship of God. It achieved this by putting worship in the English language and also by having a lot of congregational participation in the service.

This meant that people no longer come to church just as spectators while the priests and the musicians got on with the business of worshiping God. The people were now included in the worship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Naturally, this shift would have musical consequences. New music would be required with a text that could be understood by everybody. This aspect of reform did not come about until the reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI, who assumed his father’s throne in 1547.

Daddy: Thomas Tallis was an English composer who lived from 1505 to 1585. As a craftsman in the service of the church, Tallis produced whatever music was required of him and was prepared to adapt to the different religious and political circumstances. Because his career spanned four different English monarchs, he had quite a lot of practice adjusting his musical style to the theological demands of the moment.

The first ten years of Tallis’ career occurred before the English reformation. During these years Tallis was employed by different monastic establishments. Here is an example of the type of piece he composed during this period, although the precise date of this piece is unknown. It is a hymn to Mary called “Rejoice in the glorious mother of God.” Notice how it is similar to the Browne extract that we already played for you.

Play Example 2

Miriam:
Now we want you to compare that to a piece that Tallis wrote after England had become Protestant.

The piece you are about hear was written by Thomas Tallis during the reign of Edward VI. The words come from the gospel of John where Jesus said “If you love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever.”

Mummy:

When listening to this piece, notice that it is in the English language rather than Latin.
Notice that the parts are simple enough so that the words are understandable. Although there is some limited imitation, the work is has a simplicity about it that represents the Protestant emphasis.

Both Archbishop Cranmer and Edward VI are said to have asked musicians to only have one note per syllable, so that the meaning of the words wouldn’t be overshadowed by the music. Five years before the Act of Uniformity, archbishop Cranmer had written to the king saying, “in my opinion, the song that should be made thereunto would not be full of notes, but, as near as may be, for every syllable a note, so that it may be sung distinctly and devoutly.” Although Tallis doesn’t quite keep to that, you can see that he is trying to be a good servant to those who are paying him.

Play Example 3

Robin:

Thomas Tallis lived to see the English reformation overturned in England by Bloody Mary. This gave him a chance to write more complex music for the Latin mass

Because Tallis was such a masterful composer, he could make beautiful music that glorified God no matter who was on the throne and no matter what language he was writing in.

Tallis’ music is very valuable to us because the changes in his style parallel the developments of the English reformation. It is also valuable because it shows that simplicity can be just as beautiful as complexity. It also reminds us that the worship of God is something that includes everyone – men, woman and children – not just experts..

Guilty for existing?

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:07:00 +0000

Do you feel guilty for existing? If you do, click HERE.

Global warming and gender

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 02:31:00 +0000

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The United Nations Population Fund has urged us to consider "the gender dimension of climate change.” And just so we understand their terms, they tell us that “Gender refers to the differences in socially constructed roles and opportunities associated with being a man or a woman and the interactions and social relations between men and women.”
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Okay.
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Complete list of my Examiner articles so far

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 02:14:00 +0000

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Click HERE for a complete list of my articles with the Spokane Examiner.
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Copenhagen conference

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000

The following information about the Copenhagen conference is taken from the Christian Voice website.

It is the first time in an international treaty that the word 'government' has been used of an globalised enforcement agency

Page 18 of the treaty proclaims, "The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following: (a) The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. (b) The Convention's financial mechanism will include a multilateral climate change fund including five windows. (c) The Convention's facilitative mechanism will include..."

'COP' stands for Conference Of the Parties. It is the highest body of the United Nations Climate Change Convention, consisting of environment ministers of the various nations. The COP will have authority to extract and distribute the funds which the richer nations will pay to the poorer, and enforce the treaty amongst all the nations, bypassing national parliaments.

The payments to third world nations will flow through the World Bank, which establishes interest rates on loans it will issue to underdeveloped countries. The treaty discloses the World Bank's role on page 39 and again on pages 67 and 129. With this "front" of climate change, and saving the environment, the World Bank and the small group of the bank's private owners, will profit.

The President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, openly admitted its role in a plan to eliminate national sovereignty and impose a global government during a speech on the eve of the G20 summit at the end of March. He said, "If leaders are serious about creating new global responsibilities or governance, let them start by modernizing multilateralism to empower the WTO (World Trade Organization), the IMF (International Monetary Fund), and the World Bank Group to monitor national policies."

Last year, Henry Kissinger, who has held numerous positions in several administrations from Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush, told an interviewer last year, "There is a need for a new world order. I think that at the end of this administration, with all its turmoil, and at the beginning of the next, we might actually witness the creation of a new order."

In April, at the G20 Summit, Prime Minster Gordon Brown said, "From today we will together manage the process of globalisation." "Today's decisions, of course, will not immediately solve the crisis. But we have begun the process by which it will be solved," Mr Brown said. "I think a new world order is emerging with the foundation of a new progressive era of international co-operation..."

Spooky video on over population

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:35:00 +0000

Bill of Rights

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:21:00 +0000

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With today being the anniversary of the day when the first 10 amendments to the Constitution were adopted as a group in 1791, I have written an article for the Spokane Libertarian Examiner on the Bill of Rights, exploring some of the ways that this document is often misunderstood. Click HERE to read the article.
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Books I've finished reading this month

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 03:24:00 +0000

The Christmas season

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:28:00 +0000

The beginning and end of Christmas tends to be fuzzy for most people. It begins whenever you want it to - even though everyone complains that it starts earlier every year - and ends whenever you get around to taking down the tree and lights.

Not so in our family. Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before December 25 and is the time when we prepare for Christmas. This is a time to anticipate the coming of Jesus at Christmas, singing songs like "Oh come, oh come Emmanuel." Advent can also include putting up the Christmas decorations, although we choose to leave that for a week before Christmas day.

December 25 is the beginning, not the end, of the Christmas season. The season lasts all the way until Epiphany on January 6.

For more about why we structure things like this - which is the historic Christian way - and why it is important, see my article HERE.
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Spend first, pay later

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:46:00 +0000

I have just published an article for the Spokane Examiner, being a response to Demoncrats asking for Congress to increase the U.S. federal debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion. Click on the following link to go to the article.

Spend first, pay later

To read other political articles I have written, click HERE.
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The Messianic EU

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:31:00 +0000

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Now that the Lisbon Treaty has spelled an end to British sovereignty, making the Queen (God save her Majesty!) a vassal of the United States of Europe, it seems an appropriate time to review the Messianic, Utopian underpinings of the European project.
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See the section 'The Utopian Eschatology of the Maternal State' in my article 'The Maternal State'.
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The rise of the gender benders

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:40:00 +0000

Have you ever gone to bed and worried that you might wake up as a member of the opposite sex? Such is a very real possibility if some gender experts are to be believed. To read a semi-fictional account of my own personal struggles in this area, order the newly published Salvo 11 and turn straight to my article 'Gender Benders: Is My Sexual Identity an Accident Just Waiting to Happen?' Subscription information is available HERE.
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I'm sure there are all sorts of other great articles in this edition (there certainly was in Salvo 10, which I just finished reading yesterday) but I'm still waiting for Salvo 11 to arrive.
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Click here to read my political column in the Spokane Libertarian Examiner
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Lisbon Treaty spells end of UK sovereignty

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:51:00 +0000

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"To the liberalism they profess, I prefer the liberties we enjoy; to the Rights of Man, the rights of Englishmen." Disraeli

Philosophers love to isolate essences, distilling them from the concrete circumstances which alone can give them coherence. They love to talk about liberty, justice and human rights without mentioning persons and circumstances. But essences without people are like a bowl of white sugar without any food, and slightly more potent: the later will lead to a tummy ache, the former may lead to a revolution. If anyone doubts what I say, just pick up a copy of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and read the first section.

The corollary of praising liberty in the abstract, is that it becomes divorced from that sense of responsibility which alone can render liberty beneficial or obnoxious. The separation of liberty and responsibility, like the separation of sugar from food, breeds the idea that liberty is dangerous. This includes the liberties of nations as well as that of individuals. Enter post-nationalism.

As I have noted elsewhere, post-nationalism is the idea that nation states cannot be trusted with freedom, since they might abuse that freedom and produce another Hitler. This was the ideological underpining to the Lisbon Treaty. This treaty, which came into force on 1 December, 2009, removed the remaining vestiges of British sovereignty.

Read more

My WND article

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:26:00 +0000

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For those who missed the opportunity at the time, click HERE to read my World Net Daily article on the totalitarian implications of nationalized health service.
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Is certain music sinful?

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:22:00 +0000

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Click HERE to read my discussion on the question of whether certain music is sinful.
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Click here to read my political column in the Spokane Libertarian Examiner

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Marcelo Souza's class on the church

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:13:00 +0000

I was too ill to attend church this morning so I have been listening to some more of Marcelo Souza's Sunday school class on the meaning, marks and function of the church.

In addition to being an excellent communicator, Marcelo Souza's has a particular gift at being able to link together all the themes of redemption history, showing their culmination in the work of Christ and His church. The class, which is all available for download HERE addresses issues related to the Church – its marks, mission, nurture, gifts, government, structure, relation to the State, and more. What is the Church? How is it to glorify God? What distinctions need to be made, and what distortions should be corrected? What is its primary function – nurture or evangelism?

Souza also shows how unbiblical are the dispensational ideas about the Jews, as well as the popular notion that you can have God as your Father without having the Church as your Mother. Following are the different sessions:

The Identity of the Church: The Church in Relation to the Trinity
Rev. Marcelo Souza, Sunday 4/08/07: The 1st class in a series on Ecclesiology

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The Identity of the Church: Issues of Continuity and Discontinuity
Rev. Marcelo Souza, Sunday 4/15/07: The 2nd class in a series on Ecclesiology

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Definition of the Nicene Creed: "Apostolic"
Rev. Marcelo Souza, Sunday 4/22/07: The 3rd class in a series on Ecclesiology

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Definition of the Nicene Creed: "One"
Rev. Marcelo Souza, Sunday 4/29/07: The 4th class in a series on Ecclesiology

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Definition of the Nicene Creed: "Holy" and "Catholic"
Rev. Marcelo Souza, Sunday 5/13/07: The 5th class in a series on Ecclesiology

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Marks of the True Church: Preaching the Word, Proper Administration of Sacraments, Exercise of Discipline
Rev. Marcelo Souza, Sunday 5/20/07: The 6th class in a series on Ecclesiology

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Perspectives on the Church: Visible/Invisible, Local/Universal, Organization/Organism, Militant/Triumphant
Rev. Marcelo Souza, Sunday 5/27/07: The 7th class in a series on Ecclesiology

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Ministry of the Church: Worship, Nurture, and Witness
Rev. Marcelo Souza, Sunday 6/10/07: The 8th class in a series on Ecclesiology

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Ministry of the Church: The Pyramid
Rev. Marcelo Souza, Sunday 6/17/07: The 9th class in a series on Ecclesiology

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Synopsis of the Class
Rev. Marcelo Souza, Sunday 6/24/07: The 10th class in a series on Ecclesiology

Five Topics Reviewed:

Identity of the Church
One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church
Perspectives on the Church
Marks of the True Church
Ministry of the Church

Click here to read my political column in the Spokane Libertarian Examiner

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The Importance of Good Manners

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:58:00 +0000

I have just posted an article on Salvo's 'Signs of the Times' blog on the importance of good manners. Click HERE to read the article.

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Request

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:41:00 +0000

If any of my readers would like to do me a big favour or give me a Christmas present, I would like this entire blog put into a Word document so that I can eventually print it and have it as backup.

Questions about Homosexuality

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:35:00 +0000

Does the Bible really teach that homosexuality is a sin? If homosexuality was a very bad sin, why did Jesus never mention it? Why should we follow the Old Testament's prohibitions against homosexuality when we don't follow so much of the Old Testament's other commands? When Paul condemns homosexuality in Romans 1 and his other letters, isn’t it true that he was not addressing long-term stable homosexual partnerships? Wouldn’t he have just had in mind things like older men exploiting younger men, sexual pluralism and homosexuality as practiced in cult prostitution?

These and other questions I have answered HERE, as I attempted to make a convincing case that homosexuality is against clear Biblical teaching.

Catching the criminal before the crime

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:59:00 +0000

I've just posted the following article on the Signs of the Times blog:

Catching the criminal before the crime
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What I've just finished reading

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:57:00 +0000

The 1990’s Tetanus Scandal

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0000

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It is the early 1990’s. The World Health Organization, working under the control of the UN, has just launched a campaign to vaccinate millions of people in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines against tetanus.
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Tetanus is a potentially lethal infection caused by external wounds or cuts from things like rusty nails. There is nothing unusual in tetanus inochulations, which are routine in the Western World. But there is something that doesn’t quite add up about these particular vaccinations.
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For one thing, the WHO is choosing to only vaccinate females. For another thing, the girls they are choosing to vaccinate are primarily those between the ages of 15 and 45 (in Nicaragua the age range was 12-49.)
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It wasn’t just disease experts who noticed that something was a miss. After all, it doesn’t take a great deal of intelligence to know that men and boys are more prone to wounds from cuts and rusty nails than ladies. So why is the WHO only choosing to vaccinate girls of child-bearing age?
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To make matters more suspicious, the vaccination protocols are calling for multiple injections -- three within three months and a total of five altogether. However, tetanus vaccinations provide protection for ten years or more, so why this call for multiple inoculations?
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These were the questions that Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization, began asking and why they decided to have some vaccine samples tested.
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The tests revealed that the tetanus vaccine contained human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG). hCG is a natural hormone that is secreted during the initial stages of pregnancy. When this hormone is combined with the tetanus toxoid carrier, it tricks the body into thinking that hCG is an invading enemy, with the result that a woman’s body begins producing anti-hCG antibodies, making it impossible for her to ever maintain a pregnancy.
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After a number of labs exposed what the vaccine really was (a life-time birth control shot), WHO officials tried to keep things quiet and continue administering the anti-fertility injections. It was only after the courts intervened that the WHO was forced to stop administering the vaccine. Unfortunately, by then the damage had already been done and thousands of girls in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines had been rendered permanently infertile.
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Was the 1990s tetanus scandal simply a medical blunder? Hardly. For 20 years prior to the incident, WHO researchers had been actively involved in creating anti-fertility vaccines utilizing hCG tied to tetanus toxoid as a carrier. This was publically documented in medical journals from the 70s through to the 90s.
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What could possibly have motivated the World Health Organization to knowingly, but covertly, sterilize thousands of women in third world countries? Some suggested answers to that question are given in my article From Rousseau to the Swine Flu Vaccine.

For more information on the above, put "Nicaragua, Mexico, Philippines + tetanus. scandal" into a google search.
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From Rousseau to the swine flu vaccine

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Phillips) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:53:00 +0000

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Click HERE to read my warnings about the swine flu vaccine. The article, titled 'From Rousseau to the swine flu vaccine', considers the danger that the vaccine poses and how it might actually lead to the sterilization of a large percentage of the next generation.
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