Shame and transition.

I was talking to my Mum yesterday. Some bad family news, bad choices. I commented I was worried but I could not do anything: the people involved are grown up. Mum basically said, yes, just like when it happened to you. The mistakes we make echo, and that echo hurts.

THis is a time of winnowing, Of tranisiton. THings are changing, Vanessa has put her last post up at TC, which is NSFW the confidence that NZ had in its clean green image as a continuous marketing strategy has been destroyed.

International milk prices have fallen at the first Global Dairy Trade auction to be held in the aftermath of the Fonterra baby formula contamination scandal.

The Auckland-based dairy giant is at the centre of a global food safety scare since announcing on the weekend that a single raw ingredient it produces – a concentrated whey product – could contain bacteria linked to botulism.

Analysts have been waiting for the fortnightly GDT auction, which is the world’s biggest wholesale marketplace for milk powders and dairy products, to gauge the likely impact of the scare on prices and sentiment towards New Zealand dairy products.

While prices fell for the first time in six weeks at the overnight auction, the volumes traded increased.

Fonterra’s GDT Price Index dropped 2.4%, following a 5.3% rise at the previous sale. The fall was less than the 5% to 10% drop that some analysts had predicted.

However, whole milk powder prices were down 1.6% and skim milk powder fell 3%.

None of the Fonterra products connected with the botulism scare were offered at the auction.

Units in Fonterra’s Shareholders Fund, which offer outside investors exposure to the cooperative’s farmer shareholder dividends, closed up 1.3% yesterday at $6.95, erasing most of the previous day’s losses.

Now, the issues in my family had me alternately swearing and praying under my breath all yeserday, I was very aware that I was close to losing my temper and quite close to saying what I thought and what was going on. Fortunately, I have people in my family who I can talk to and smoe good friends, but this is one of those times when having a spouse who has your back is so useful. And I’m aware I am not the only person in this situation. For shame and guilt will make us silent.

And Jesus confronted this.

Mark 8:34-9:1

8:34He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

9:1And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”

The shame is real. Go read the snark at Charlie’s place.

Now for the adversaries. For some years I’d been watching the gathering popularity of fundamentalist Christian supremacists with considerable unease. Speaking as an atheist, from the outside, Christian evangelism looks a lot like Amway, only the product being sold is Jesus, a kind of proxy server for divine salvation by way of Jehovah 1.0 (with the inconvenient early genocidal injunctions and the stuff about not mixing polyester with thy cotton, or observing times, swept under the rug). Some of the doctrines of the Millenarian sects bear such a striking resemblance to the Technological singularity that I can only view the latter these days as a post-rationalist, post-enlightenment, secularized paint job on the body of the former. And I feel able to confess that the Quiverfull movement scares me shitless. There are large numbers of people out there who believe that The Handmaid’s Tale is a road-map rather than a warning (oh, and ditto for the NSA/GCHQ and “1984″, but that’s old news these days).

I recognize that my perspective on this belief system is not a universal one. But in writing a horror novel, it helps to have a concrete nugget of unease at the center of your big evil. Bait-and-switch scares everybody, so … why not pick a fundamentalist cult that scares me, and demonstrate that it’s a wrapper for something that scares everyone (at least, everyone who doesn’t want to have their tongue eaten and their brain possessed by an extradimensional parasite—which I assume can be approximated to everyone reading this essay)?

So I sat down (metaphorically: this was all done in email) with some friends who were either ex-fundamentalists or had fundamentalist family members, to try and make sure that the Golden Promise Ministries held to an outer doctrine that was within the spectrum of existing evangelical churches. Then I worked out what Ray Schiller’s inner doctrine might be (the inner/outer layered doctrinal split thing is common to many new model religions, such as a certain litigious organization founded by a former SF novelist). It’s easy enough to generate a new religion simply by messing with the Bible. Different Christian creeds, ones following the Nicean Creed, may vary some of the books: the Christian Bible’s Old Testament is substantially different from the Pentateuch and Haftorah, and there are plenty of apocrypha out there that got left out. In the Laundry universe, adding a bunch of extra relevations at the end is a no-brainer: and adding a character to interpret them (Pete the Vicar) goes with the territory—you will meet Pete again in future Laundry Files stories.

The trouble is that Charles Stross hit a kernel of truth that I have talked about before: the holiness doctrine and name it and claim it are raw heresies. The name it and claim it doctrine is particularly pernicious as they tend to consdire God bound by words and formulae they make up by taking texts out of context, and they consider material possessions as a sign of great righteousness, when they probably hold you back.

And as someone who has had to deal with hoarding at work, the extreme end of this is horrible to behold.

We should be reforming ourselves and dealing with our shame. And that hurts. Telling people you love the truth — when the truth is ugly — is actively unpleasant. And some of the cults that happen within the broader strands of Christendom — the crazies at both the Pentecostalist and Romanist ends of the spectrum dive deeply into the occult.

Which is fun to read about if it is a Stress horror novel. Charles Stross is worth reading. But in real life, let’s have a real God, who does not care about what car we drive, but what we do with what we have been given.