Yesterday I got into a Facebook conversation about anti-clericalism and Social Justice, driven by an article in the Age that points and shreaks. Because the early progressives saw the Aboriginal people are retrograde, to be weeded out of the community. Eugenics was progressive and fashionable, and the bastards in academia followed it.

I hate the idea of eugenics. That those who have a mixed race are suspect: that includes both of my sons, or those who have a family history with black marks cannot contribute: that includes not my birth mother, but her family. I see Asian families hiding their mad children because they consider the family may be tainted and their other children not marry, nor the name of the family continue. [1]

But un naming buildings built-in honour of these bastards, now, is a falsity. These things happened. It was a different period. And having those memorials should remind us of the errors of this age, and confront us with this: the next generation will not recall our good but our evil will also live on. To un name, to remove from history the crunchy and difficult bits, is to make myth.

And myth is but a series of useful lies.

And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”

And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant, and they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read, “‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?” And leaving them, he went out of the city to Bethany and lodged there.

In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once.

When the disciples saw it, they marveled, saying, “How did the fig tree wither at once?” And Jesus answered them, “Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen. And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.”

(Matthew 21:12-22 ESV)

For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

(2 Peter 1:16-21 ESV)

The gospels are difficult. Christ, simply, cannot be tamed by our ideologies or models. The “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” and the SJW Christ who is tolerant have to deal with the idea that Christ kicked the money changes out of the temple. The neoliberal economists cannot handle that passage at all. I read history: I have read the ancients, and even the histories of that time are propaganda, where the flaws of Caesar or Cicero are hidden. But Christ is shown in entire.

He is not myth. As Lewis said, he is more real than this earth: indeed our memories are more mythic than Christ, for we lie and deceive ourselves.

SO be wary of the philosopher who argues from reason. Diderot, who said that reason to a philosopher is akin to grace for a Christian, also said that one should plait the guts on the last cleric to strangle the last king — though that may be attributed to Meslier, a stormy cleric, found guilty of heresy, for be believed neither in God or Christ or salvation. For him, being a priest was about power and useful myth.

Akin to those liberal Christians, functional Unitarians, who talk about Church as community and reflecting the community. If Christ is to matter, if salvation is of importance, then it has to be far more than that. It has to preach truth.

Plain and raw. We are grown men: we can handle it.

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1. If you, as I did, marry across culture you better respect the culture you married into. The boys have an official Chinese name that continues the name of their mothers family: they are the only grand children on that family, and one has to give her parents honour and respect.