Sunday 15 March 2015

Thou shalt not worship gilded idols


It's Mothering Sunday, so here's a picture of mine. Gawd bless you, you old bat.

Listening to all the Christian stuff on the radio this morning, I learned one thing and was reminded of another.

1 - 'Mother's Day' is, of course, a pagan Spring thing, hi-jacked by the Christians. 2 - 'Iconoclasm' is the physical destruction of pagan idols, just like ISIS are doing to all those Assyrian statues in museums right now.

There was a Christian theologist on today who has written a book about it, and although he took pains to let us know that he didn't approve of what ISIS are up to, he says that it is a perfectly understandable thing to do, and even justified in the Old Testament, as per instructions by Moses who - in turn - was only following orders. So there you are. Carry on ISIS, you seem to be doing a good job.

He did make one rather valid point though, and that was to do with the West only becoming insufferably angry when valuable and important historical artefacts are destroyed, never mind all the deaths and suffering of living human beings on a larger scale. It's a bit like, "We can always grow more humans, but those 3000 year-old objects can never be replaced."

Then there was the sermon which came live from Belfast, and the gist of it was that God loves each one of us as individuals, even before we are born. That rather follows on nicely from my post of last night, don't you think?

My sister is a Jehovah's Witness, so doesn't celebrate any of these festivals, and I often think that her birthday - December 25th - is the main reason why she became one. Her birthday was overshadowed by Christmas every year, and at some point in the festivities she would look a little left out until someone eventually said, "Oh my god! It's her birthday today. We totally forgot!"

When our mother died, J.W. sister took on the job of clearing out the house and chucking unwanted stuff away, or blindly giving it to a house-clearance vulture if she thought it was worth any money.

She showed me an 18th century Chinese, wooden and gilded statue of the goddess Quan Yin which I had given to my mother years before, and which had been sitting next to her bed right up to the point at which she died of a massive heart attack. Quan Yin represents earthly compassion.

"I'm going to throw this old thing in the bin," she said with obvious distain, "It's disgusting."

I now know that this was called 'iconoclasm'.

7 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. I managed to correct that by hanging off of them a few years later.

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    2. Always having the - most often hilarious - last word.

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    3. We let him as it's his own blog.

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    4. I'm glad it was John who noticed.

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  2. Ingrid Bergman is your mother? We must be related. I had an inkling.

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