Sunday, March 13, 2016

In which the sanctimonious, righteous Jensenists at last return to pride of place at the pond to smite and smote the sanctimonious and righteous liberals and their pieties this meditative Sunday ...


Now the pond rarely visits the ABC alone, let alone The Drum, but this piece was recommended by the Bolter himself ... and so it had to be taken seriously ...


Because the convicted Bolter is a man of his convictions, and surely just the right sort of person to preach the difference between goodness and mere sanctimony ...

Never mind the rich, redolent irony of a sanctimonious, righteous angry Sydney Anglican denouncing others as sanctimonious televangelists, here was rich, righteous company for the Jensenists ...

Could self-loathing reach any greater heights or depths?

Now the Bolter rather ruins the fun, by quoting the Jensenist at great length, but the pond would like to draw your attention to this illustration to the piece ...



Yes, the ABC has left behind iView as its promotional standard and instead landed on YouTube.

Now let's leave the case of Pell and Minchin aside.

After all, being an Anglican, naturally the Jensenist would judge that the Pellist minion of the whore of Babylon was an easy target, and perhaps deserving of righteous rhyming doggerel, because after all, it isn't as if the angry Calvinist Sydney Anglicans haven't been heaping abuse on the Catholics these past few centuries, and without a hint of wit or rhythm or melody or a tune, such musical activities being a sure sign of the devil's work...

"To sing the praises of God upon the harp and psaltery," says Calvin, "unquestionably formed a part of the training of the law and of the service of God under that dispensation of shadows and figures, but they are not now to be used in public thanksgiving." He says again: "With respect to the tabret, harp, and psaltery, we have formerly observed, and will find it necessary afterwards to repeat the same remark, that the Levites, under the law, were justified in making use of instrumental music in the worship of God; it having been his will to train his people, while they were yet tender and like children, by such rudiments until the coming of Christ. But now, when the clear light of the gospel has dissipated the shadows of the law and taught us that God is to be served in a simpler form, it would be to act a foolish and mistaken part to imitate that which the prophet enjoined only upon those of his own time." He further observes: "We are to remember that the worship of God was never understood to consist in such outward services, which were only necessary to help forward a people as yet weak and rude in knowledge in the spiritual worship of God. A difference is to be observed in this respect between his people under the Old and under the New Testament; for now that Christ has appeared, and the church has reached full age, it were only to bury the light of the gospel should we introduce the shadows of a departed dispensation. From this it appears that the Papists, as I shall have occasion to show elsewhere, in employing instrumental music cannot be said so much to imitate the practice of God's ancient people as to ape it in a senseless and absurd manner, exhibiting a silly delight in that worship of the Old Testament which was figurative and terminated with the gospel." (here).

No wonder it was easy to judge Minchin scarcely radical, or courageous, or outlandish.

Why Timothy, the Angry Sydney Anglicans have been delivering that sort of strong righteous sanctimony from the pulpit for centuries. Call the Jensenists when you've got something new or stronger to offer ...

And so to the deplorable, pontificating Charlie Pickering ...

Why, this moralising, self-righteous, sermonising bastard is stealing the glory of the Angry Sydney Anglicans, and worse he has an adoring studio audience, while the Jensenists have been cast out in to the cold, and no longer infest the Sydney Anglican website, but must perforce infest the ABC, a hapless masochistic organisation which must play host to mind-numbingly righteous Calvinist folk rearing up in indignation, in a righteous humourless way, to deplore self-appointed prophets of liberal pieties ...

So who are the idiots that this Charlie cad mocks in his Charlie way? Who are the people that the Jensenist feels the need to defend? What are the activities the Jensenists feel have been traduced with liberal pieties?

Oh how the pond deplores the pietists and their pieties ...


Why there's a man who once held pride of place in the pond's banner, before Moorice triumphed over the Queensland wannabe blow fly ...

And there were others ...


Another who briefly made it into the banner, before being blown away by Mooorice ... and yet more, a veritable parade of idiots, worthy of a Jensenist defence (that'd begin f3 e5).







And so on and so forth, a conga line of genuine idiots saying genuinely idiotic things ... from North Korea to demonising a pub wherein a Nationals Senator could be spotted dancing ...

It was about this time that the pond understood Pickering's real crime.

He'd ignored the Jensenists ... no wonder their dander was up ...


Yes, Charlie, Dr Jensen is a dick too, and in your crash course of sweetly pious soft-liberal pieties, you neglected to call him a dick ... or at least mentioned the dickish angry Sydney Anglicans (please no complimentary women here, here no complimentary women).

Of course your average Calvinist Angry Anglican sermon is about as funny as as Calvin himself ...


And so on. Google that for a bundle of laughs!

Meanwhile, the pond was left to ponder those final few words offering wondrous insights into the self-loathing and anger of the Jensenists ...


Because, it should go without saying, being deeply conservative is wrong, and having a sense of the rights of other people is deeply offensive and having thoughts of justice is deeply unjust ...

As for it being universal, well, let's just say Daesh lives! And if they're right about teh gays, why that must make the diligent Sydney Anglicans birds flocking to the same feather ...

Because, it should go without saying, the homosexual agenda is now the establishment, and hapless Jensenists can now only shriek in outraged pain on the ABC, so persecuted have they become ...

And then there's the irony of the ironic veneer of a deeply righteous and solemn Jensensist accusing others of being deeply righteous ...

Could it get any funnier for a Sunday meditation, thanks be unto the Bolter and the ABC?

Well let the pond place on the record that it never watches Charlie, but that's not a judgmental issue.

Sure, it's problematic to admit to reading Jensenists rather than watching Charlie, but that's the only way to get a truly ironic veneer up there with the orange glow and cancer you pick up spending hours in a solarium ...

But for once the pond felt it was a little out of kilter, and thought it should play host to a genuine establishment conservative, as opposed to the angry Calvinists so agitated about the sins of the world, which, it goes without saying, are all that fault of that dreadful complimentary woman with her complimentary apple ...

Take it away Charlie, anyone who irritates the Jensenists and the Bolter (almost as good as seven flies in one blow) can't be all bad ...



4 comments:

  1. Why not Charlie P, DP ?

    He's not one of the greats, I grant you, and he's pretty much up the far end on a spectrum that includes, for example, 'Would I Lie to You ?' at the other end, but his heart is in the right place. And so long as he can attract that kind of plaintive whining from a senior Calvinista, then ....

    But I have to commend Jensen. There is a word that I encountered just a few days ago, and my alzhheimered promptly forgot, which means "ascribing your own failings to others", and surely Michael Jensen has that in spades (does anybody remember the word perchance ? It's a form of 'projection', BOC).

    As to Hastie (albeit from the previous thread) what he has, IMHO, is a severe case of 'ultra-righteous school prefect syndrome'. He knows what is right, and you'd better learn it too.

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    1. No prejudice GB, just no time and a drifting away from watching FTA and especially the ABC, which given the wasteland of commercial TV, was along with SBS, one of the last ports of call ... These days satire simply can't keep up with the Donald ... and I'm guessing that word you're looking for doesn't involve psychological projection, though Jensen gives every indication of the condition ...

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

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    2. Yair, I kinda know the feeling, DP: more is published per hour (and that's only dead tree stuff) than I can read in a year, and when the electronic stuff (including broadcast video) is added in then it's just way beyond me.

      Indeed, satire becomes all but impossible in a world full of Trumps and Cruzs and Tones and T'bull. And like I said, Charlie ain't one of the all-time greats ..

      Interesting article you linked, but I have deep epistemological difficulties with articles that are based on a lot of Jung and Freud and also include Rorschachs and Thematic Apperception Tests and suchlike.

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    3. With Jensen there is more than simply a parroting of the Christian Right’s de jour response to criticism - ‘help, help we’re being repressed!’ It’s personal. Calvinists of his ilk are prone to displacement defences against the terror of divine rejection. Jensen’s attack on the ‘cool’ guys has more than a whiff of the ambivalence of the nerdy kid who, as a defence against fear of rejection, ridicules the in-group whose acceptance they crave.

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