Fostering Lost To Posturing

...If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do? (Psalm 11:3)

As much as it grieves me to have to do so, I have to make a confession: I'm getting world-weary and fed up. I attribute my existential ennui to my excessive and morbid interest in the realms of human institutions and politics; there seems to be a flow of drivel coming from the Witangemot, its representatives and the soothsayers - and it's an unrelenting and toxic mixture of disinformation, dissimulation, hypocrisy and cant, with more than a fair share of random goalpost relocation. It's small wonder that humans are so apathetic about such things - unless, of course they become politicians themselves; when that happens, all sort of exciting vistas open up and the world suddenly takes on an unreal glow...

Let me give you a recent example of the cretinous world of human life in this lovely country of Northumbria. Some time ago a godly couple decided that they would like to extend their Christian charity and foster a foundling. (In our morally lax day and age, it's commonplace for loose-living young women to anonymously dump their newlyborn spawn onto the doorsteps of the Abbey or some church and expect some charitable soul to take the tiny mite in and give it a sound upbringing - if the poor bairn doesn't die first.) Since the time when the malevolent Northumbrian State was first involved, the whole process has been gradually and steadily politicised - in keeping with their idiotic social agendas. Because of this, the couple in question had been legally denied the right to foster the child they'd kindly taken to their home and hearts. Why? - Simply because they refused to compromise their Christian beliefs and principles and teach the child that it's perfectly natural and acceptable to lie, cheat, say that white is black, and wrong is right - and to pull wings off butterflies. (There are other issues that I won't go into - this is a family show...)

In other words, the Northumbrian State - ruled by our noble King Alhfrith and administered by the Witangemot government (headed up by Caedmeron - the Supreme Allied Commander-In-Chief and Chief Cock and Bluebottlewasher of the Tree/Liberationist Alliance factions) hates the values from the teachings of the Bible and the Holy Catholic Church and prefers to see generations of children grow up to be as twisted as he and his friends are. They must hate the Almighty as well. That's perilous ground to be on. You don't mess with Divinity - unless you don't give a rat's ass for your eternal soul...

Oh - and by the way - the child at the heart of this controversy is only an infant...

Caedmon is deeply unhappy about this, and so are the monks. So is the Abbess Hilda - she's furious: I could hear the explosion from a mile away. I reckon that the Bishop of Jarrow is going to get his ear bent imminently...

As for me, I'd much rather it were Caedmeron at the receiving end of the Abbess' verbal lashings. I'd love to help: I have a feline friend called Leo who would love to impart the fear of the Almighty into these secularising fools...

Census Working Overtime

 

Every ten years, Anglo-Saxons are required to fill in a census form to let the Northumbrian authorities know that they’re still alive – and that they know their own names and addresses. This year is Census Year. Hooray!

This piece of imbecility was devised by previous kings so that they could keep track of their loyal and happy subjects, thus enabling them to boast to their fellow monarchs about how many people they were exploiting, oppressing and patronising.

It was decided to impose the census upon the population despite the hard lessons that King David had to learn after he’d carried out a headcount of his own Israelite people in disobedience to the specific command of the Almighty. Some king lessons are never learned…

This year, our noble King Alhfrith and his aristocratic cronies have taken the decision to extend the scope of the census questionnaire this time. Predictably, their highly-paid lackeys in the Witangemot are reassuring the public through the soothsayers that there is no reason for alarm: everything will be simple and the information supplied is guaranteed to be safe. Whatever. My pal Feaxede the fox is safe with the chickens...

For the impressive number of illiterates in the lovely Kingdom of Northumbria, this census poses both a threat and a farce, since there are severe financial penalties for those who don’t fill the form and submit it; the result is that those blessed with the gift of literacy are burdened with the responsibility of asking the feckless idiots the questions they’re unable to read, and then to write the entries to the form on their behalf. Needless to say, a great deal of money is to be made by enterprising scribes. I’ll be helping Caedmon out when he does his bit for the hapless. He does it out of Christian charity, so he charges nothing; despite this, he’s rewarded by substantial draughts of mead and ale from the grateful parishioners. Things can get rather interesting after a couple of home visits…

What questions are they going to ask Northumbrians this time? Well, apart from the usual name, address and number of kids guff, they’ll be asking things like:

What do you eat for breakfast? (Sheer idle curiosity. Serves no useful purpose.)

How much do you weigh? (To find out those who are fat so that they can mock and shame them)

What colour is your skin? (Silly question, since most poverty-stricken Northumbrians don’t know how to wash, so they all look a dirty brown)

How many cats do you own? Are they licensed? (To raise more money through fines)

Do you spread butter or dripping on your bread? (To find out whom to bully and lecture about eating habits)

How many horses or donkeys do you possess? (To assess the means of transportation)

Do you ride them – or use them for work purposes? (To decide which tax to levy on the animals)

Have you eaten any rabbits in the last ten years? If so, how many? (To work out the number of bunnies consumed in the Northumbrian diet)

They’re also going to ask what each person’s religion is. In the future this will enable the King - when he’s in an oppressive mood – to round up all the Edda-reading Vikings and pen them up somewhere and beat the living daylights out of them. As you can imagine, the Vikings are writing “Atheist” on their forms.

Those who write “Christian” on their census forms are likely to be marked for persecution by the aggressively irreligious, fly agaric-chewing secularist psychotics who are working hard to eradicate the Christian Faith from the public consciousness.

So, why are there so many questions on the census? There are two simple answers.

First of all, the Northumbrian State is overbearingly intrusive, and thus wants to gather as much information as possible from its people by force so that it has more means by which to intimidate, patronise and bully the people.

Secondly, to create more non-jobs for the out-of work pigeon psychologists, fish quota accountants, cat license administrators and diversity co-ordinators that have been cast into the outer darkness of unemployment by the Tree/Liberationist Alliance government. What the State takes with one hand, it gives with another. In this way, the data can be assiduously collated by the mindless slaves. Some of them will certainly go mad as a result.

I can hardly contain my excitement...

A Parallel World

What's reality? - That is the question that some fly agaric-chewing sorcerers in the sacred portal of Beeby See were asking yesterday. They were talking the usual guff about parallel universes; they were telling us that our view of reality is by no means definitive; the dark arts of sorcery and the cranial somersaults of the wizards are producing strange numbers from which even more bizarre theories are now hatching. This is the kind of cleverness that strays into the fantasy land of the demented. To be honest, I wasn't taking too much notice of their ramblings; I've heard their sort of La-La Land claptrap before. Many times. In my book, reality is a cosy curl-up in front of a warm fire. It's singing feline shanties with my mates at full volume outside Beeby's mansion at dead of night. It's a mouse within striking distance of my paw - and a dish of cooked mackerel, bought fresh from the quayside of Streonaeshalch. Reality is certainly not the abstract and obscure ravings of the seers and sorcerers that Beeby See and her lickspittle friends favour so much.

Why does Beeby want to share this idiocy with us? Apart from the fact that Beeby is buddy-pal with the Witangemot, (who pay her vast numbers of groats, extracted by force from the unwilling vassals and fiefs of Northumbria), I suspect there's a more fundamental reason. It's become evident to all thinking humans beings - and to this cat - that the Northumbrian State is distancing itself from the influence of the Christian faith, which hitherto has shaped the way of life and the values of human - ahem - civilisation. I referred some time ago to a de-Christianised Christmas; this outburst of folly is to my feline reckoning just another manifestation of the same foolishness. It's also the same kind of  frothy-chops folly that Edweird the Milliner was spouting yesterday. It's an escape from the truth. The pedestrian facts, which are so boring and so wretchedly inconvenient.

In the parallel world of these overpaid fantasists, everything is moulded into contorted shapes, directed by their feverish imaginations. A bit like shamanism, I suppose. Chew the mushrooms and the special herbs, throw the bones, sing the same song for several hours and everything will look better. For a while..
Idiots.

History - Whose Story?

All this tormented feline brain wants to do is to switch into standby mode, relax and purr, stalk a few small rodents and birds - and have some semblance of normality.

Unfortunately there are so many things happening in the human realm that get my whiskers itchin' and my tail a-twitchin'. (And by the way, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the ways of the cat kingdom, a cat's twitching tail is generally a sign of hostility and annoyance - not the delirious expression of pleasure so beloved of the unreflective mutt community.)

Let me explain my unrest. Edweard the Milliner appeared in the sacred portal of the soothsayer Beeby See recently - a place that he and his ilk are known to haunt with monotonous regularity, given the more than evident sympathy that the allegedly impartial Beeby See displays for the Redistributionists. He was asked by Beeby's minor stooge Maerr whether the Redistributionist Faction accepted any responsibility for the state of the economy of Northumbria, since it was under the previous Red Witangemot administration that the financial collapse first manifested itself. An audible gasp was heard from all those humans who have a sense of perspective and aren't idiotised by the bread-and-circuses handouts of the ruling elite and the puerile knockabout of politics. Why were they shocked? Because Edweird the Milliner denied that the Red administration bore any responsibility for the mess of the Kingdom's finances.

As I recall (and Caedmon has confirmed this to me), the Red Faction held the Witangemot office for a full thirteen years. When they first took over from the Trees, who'd held office for years beforehand, the economy was thriving and the birds were singing. The good people of Streonaeshalch were going about their daily business, and life was comparatively good. This state of affairs continued for some time, and before long the Red chancellor - Guthmund the Brown - took the kudos for the stability of the Kingdom's finances. No more boom and bust. Whatever. In fact, he was simply claiming credit for the work of his predecessor, while selling off the Kingdom's gold to the Bulgars at bargain basement prices. After all - what did we need it for? Anyway, the money would come in handy for more diversity coordinators, pigeon psychiatrists and fish quota accountants. Full employment. Jobs for the pals. Big wages - loads of groats and fancy coats.

The moneylenders were given permission to do whatever they liked; life was good, and the living was easy. They started to take liberal doses of magic mushrooms, and consequently their collective judgement was impaired. They started to loan groats to goats and to sell debts to each other in an attempt to profit from these bizarre transactions. No. Really.  After a time, things started to unravel - as they always do when the fantasy bubble bursts.

And now Edweird the Milliner (I'll spell his name this way from now on - you don't mind, do you?) has denied that the Red administration had anything to do with the calamitous state of the economy. I'll tell you something: Feaxede the fox doesn't believe him. My big mate Leo doesn't, either.

But I'd bet my whiskers on the notion that there are human beings out there who do believe him. But can he just rewrite history like that? I don't think so. Truth has a nasty habit of catching up with those who repeatedly invent lies. The Creator defines truth - because He's the objective Truth behind everything. The likes of Ed Weird can fool other thinking humans, but they can't fool a cat, a fox or a big cat. And if they think they can fool the Creator, they're even bigger fools that I first thought.

Caedmon and the Atheist

Since there's a regular number of travellers to the area who lodge with Caedmon, we're privileged to see all kinds of wayfarers. Some of them come from the south of the country and have distinct Saxon accents. One such traveller passed our way the other day; he was a man in his late fifties, and from his appearance and his manner, even I - a mere cat - could tell that he was a friendly, prosperous and well-educated fellow. His name was Eormenwulf, and he certainly was talkative. Caedmon is also a keen conversationalist, so a variety of topics came and went in the stream of dialogue. Inevitably, the subject of religion arose. Now, that's hardly surprising, since we're in a land which was Christianised by the Romans when they ruled here, the Irish monks like Columba - and also by Saint Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury. Although vestiges of the old pagan ways remain in the Anglo-Saxon culture, by and large there's a general acceptance that there is one God, and that His Son Jesus Christ came into the world, was put to death by human beings, rose from the dead 3 days later, and then some weeks afterwards was taken up into Heaven. What took us by surprise was the vehemence with which Eormenwulf scoffed at the Christian faith. Even I pricked up my ears from my fireside dozing when he began to speak this way. I'm glad that the Abbess Hilda hadn't heard him - she would have forgotten her Christian charity..!

So, what was his argument? If I remember correctly, he put forward the idea that religion was the reason for the trouble with the world. People are rational, and by using their faculties of reasoning they can easily deduce that there's no God, and that there's no need for religion - it's just an emotional prop for men and women to support themselves with; they should stand on their own two feet. I was horrified - and Caedmon certainly hadn't been expecting the tirade of anti-Christian argument that proceeded to pour from Eormenwulf's lips.

Nevertheless, despite Caedmon's simple upbringing, he's a very thoughtful man, and he was able to ask the atheist the following questions:

If you believe that there is no God to have faith in, why should you then believe in reason? Haven't you simply swapped one God for another?

If reason is supreme, who then defines it? One man's reckoning is not the same as the next one's, no one has a claim to supremacy, so everything's on the table, but nothing can be agreed.

Since God is (and sets) the standard of moral behaviour because He is holy, what standard of right and wrong can an atheist live by? Eormenwulf can't expect anyone else to be trustworthy if it's no longer a moral imperative..

There were other points that Caedmon raised, but I've forgotten them; it was an intense conversation. Not surprisingly, Eormenwulf's answers didn't actually meet the questions, so the resulting conversation became circular and futile. I fell asleep.

When Eormenwulf left us the next morning to continue his journey, I noticed the following slogan embroidered in fancy script on his horse's blanket. It read: 'There probably is no God, so get on with your life'. Caedmon commented to me what a strange man he was - and what outlandish ideas he had. I suggested to Caedmon that Eormenwulf was actually a theist: he just wasn't an honest one...