Prudence. Justice. Fortitude. Temperance.

These are the four cardinal virtues of "Classical" ethics, as expounded upon by Greek and Roman writers. Early Christians later picked up on them, adding to their number three more virtues, "theological virtues" derived from one of Paul's epistles:

Faith. Hope. Charity.

"Charity" is sometimes rendered as "Love". Now, when I was studying up on Christianity leading up to my conversion, reading all that apologetic writing from Jack Lewis and everyone, I was very keen on these virtues. They seemed important.

They are not. Even Jack Lewis did not think so, not really, because he wrote an entire novel, Perelandra, about the only Christian virtue that actually matters.

Obedience.

Obedience, you'll notice, isn't among any of the seven virtues named earlier, although I'm sure that if you looked hard enough you'd find some Christian apologist or other claiming to derive obedience from other virtues. Is obedience really a virtue?

I say it isn't. Christians themselves do not exercise it. The more extreme the Christian, the more likely they are to be willful and disobedient, claiming exemption from a higher power for breaking oaths and promises and so forth. And honestly? If there's been anything good about Christianity at all throughout the centuries, it's disobedience. There were genuine martyrs once, people who refused to honor Roman authority—soldiers who refused to kill, women who refused to marry the man their fathers pushed on them, and others whom the brutish Romans would then torture or kill.

Hence it's highly suggestive and significant that, at the end of its life, mainstream Christianity has decided that the only virtue of importance is a false virtue, and in fact not a Christian virtue at all, because obedience is a secular thing. Any mortal authority figure will tell you that nothing is more important than obedience.

And now I know why Perelandra, even though I think it's a fascinating novel, has been sitting wrong with me all these years, bothering me. At the time I felt merely irritated that Lewis was attempting to retread the story of the Fall, although I'll at least credit him for doing something a bit different with it. Now, though, the entire Christian preoccupation with the Fall (and with Genesis stuff in general) seems profoundly unhealthful. Wasn't the whole point of the Incarnation, if there was any point at all to an event which may never have happened, to show a new way forward? A new beginning? Plainly it's failed because Christians continue to gnaw away at the same old wounds.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Watching I Saw the TV Glow, with its highly unsettling lunar energy, prompted me to revisit "Cerebus".

I now clearly see a somewhat embarrassing tendency in myself—one of many—that's found expression in a number of ways, such as my curiosity about what happened to M. Night Shyamalan between The Village and Lady in the Water. Occasionally the arts furnish examples of creators who seem to be at the top of their form and then simply collapse. All the gas suddenly goes out of their career and they never recover. The great American comedy director, Preston Sturges, experienced a sudden career implosion like that. Shyamalan did. And so did Canadian indie comic star Dave Sim, who used to be one of my favorite artists of all time.

cw: lengthy discourse about Dave Sim's "Cerebus", his dabbling with the nature of godhood and gender in the comic, and its disintegration into a soup of bigotry)

I was reflecting earlier while washing dishes about the George W. Bush "Axis of Evil"—remember that? It was so awful. Plainly he was trying to outdo Ronald Reagan, who had pointed to one "focus of evil in the modern world". (Now there's a curse for you.) Bush Jr. proclaimed that some collection of evils, multiple foci of evil I suppose, was the "Axis of Evil". the points weren't collinear but never mind, they constituted an axis.

Now...that points to an awkward property of the original "Axis of Evil", i.e. the Axis Powers of World War II. They too were a collection of non-collinear points, pretending to be an axis. The Axis only made sense in terms of two partners, and the Third Reich was very unreliable when it came to equal partnerships. Germany and Japan, separated by great distance, were the obvious two points of the axis in reality, but...that's probably not how it was perceived at the time.

Why was George W. Bush copying a Third Reich slogan anyway?

~Chara of Pnictogen