Religion of Contraception
German philosopher Nietzsche [1844-1900] declared the death of God. The God he wanted to kill was actually the Christian God. Nietzsche hated the God of Jesus as much as he found Jesus effeminate. The Christian God was against the human body and its passions, especially sexuality, according to Nietzsche.
But it was not really Jesus who made sexuality a loathsome aspect of human life; the later fathers of the Church did the trick. The second/third century African father, Tertullian, wrote thus about women:
Do you (woman) know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him [Adam] whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You so carelessly destroyed man, God’s image. [emphasis in the original]
Later, another father of the Church, Augustine of Hippo [354-430 CE] argued that God had condemned humanity to eternal damnation because of Adam’s sin. He declared that the guilt [original sin] was passed on to all human beings through the sexual act. For Augustine, the sexual act is polluted by “concupiscence.” Concupiscence, for Augustine, meant the desire to take pleasure in God’s creatures rather than in God himself.
A few days back, the New York Times reported how one Father Landry is repeating the words of the ancient fathers in 21st century. Father Landry was speaking about contraception. The Catholic Church is opposed to all forms of contraception except ‘natural family planning’; i.e., “using knowledge of a woman’s cycle to restrict intercourse to times when she is unlikely to conceive.” This method is so unreliable that it came to be known as ‘the Roman roulette’ even among the Catholic clergy. [I don’t know how many of the clergy actually lost out in that game of roulette and sired children without proper paternity.]
Why is the Church so vehemently opposed to contraceptives? The Church thinks that the sexual act is an expression of love between the couples and its explicit purpose is procreation of offspring who are, again, an expression of love. Contraceptives convert people into mere objects of pleasure. Sex becomes merely an entertainment.
There is something radically fallacious about this stand of the Church. If the Church advocates ‘natural family planning’, it means the Church is not theoretically opposed to birth control. You can make use of your knowledge of the feminine menstrual cycle in order to plan the number of children you may have. But you cannot use artificial birth control methods for the same purpose. So what is opposed in reality. Not the birth control, but the means. In other words, the Church is actually not opposed to birth control, but to artificial contraceptives. The logic behind such a stand is as mysterious as most doctrines in theology.
I can, however, accept the Church’s position that sex is not merely a form of entertainment. The sexual act is an expression of a relationship between two persons. It is not using each other’s body merely for pleasure. The sexual act is a union of two individuals in the tenderness of love. Without love, the act becomes frivolous and degraded.
The demand for banning contraceptives in order to remedy the contemporary degradation of sexuality is as ridiculous as asking to ban medicines in order to remove diseases. The degradation of sexuality is part of the many ills that plague contemporary civilisation. It is part of a whole complex social reality in which relationships have been rendered superficial, leisure is valued higher than meaningful activity, enjoyment is the motto of life, and people have been converted into objects (commodification).
What the world needs today is not a war against contraceptives, but a reorientation of values and principles. At any rate, asking parents today to bring up all the children they will have as a consequence of practising ‘the Roman roulette’ is a cruel joke. Parents are already struggling to bring up even one child, with everything from education to health becoming expensive commodities.
Woman in Black
It’s not as much the horror that draws me to movies on ghosts as the curiosity to know how the ghosts are presented. So I was not at all disappointed that the latest horror movie from Hollywood did not terrify me. In fact, no horror movies have horrified me in the least. Real people have!
This is not a review of the movie. Reviews are available aplenty in the internet. I’m just voicing some thoughts that struck me as I rode home after watching the movie this afternoon with my wife.
Why do we tend to view ghosts as incarnations of evil? Or, to put the question slightly differently, why do we seem to think that only evil people become ghosts? Whenever I imagined ghosts I could only view them as comical creatures who cared ludicrously to stay back on a planet of horrible creatures. Only once did I write a ghost story myself (in 2007). Here is it, in case you’re interested: The Death of a Vampire. It’s a farcical satire in which a blood-thirsty vampire gets killed after sucking the blood of a politician. The intellectuals in the satire turn out to be creatures as effete as the vampire. The solid men are the politician and the businessman. And a vampire should be wary of their blood.
What is the spirituality behind horror movies? This is another question that fascinates me. Woman in Black shows an evil ghost who is vindictive against children. Why children? There’s a motive, as made clear enough in the movie. But what happens to the children whom she lures to death mercilessly? Do they go to heaven as the conclusion of the movie seems to imply? Or do they stay behind on the earth as ghosts as the other parts of the movie seem to imply?
While most of the older ghost movies like Dracula make a bipolar division between good and evil, and impute all goodness to religion while all the evil is imputed to the ghosts or vampires, Woman in Black mercifully spares us of such a farce. There’s no holy priest wielding a crucifix in this movie. Arthur Kipps [Daniel Radcliffe] struggles with the wicked ghost mostly all by himself. There’s no touch of religious spirituality anywhere. But the conclusion throws an implicit hint at a different kind of religious spirituality, though not convincing in the least even as fiction.
Why does the colour black get associated with evil and white with goodness? I guess only the white people in Hollywood will be able to give us a convincing answer to that.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed Woman in Black for what it is. A good comedy. I mean, for me. [But I didn’t laugh out loud like quite many others in the movie hall did many times when the director of the movie meant it to be serious and full of suspense – Delhiites are really a funny lot, I should say.] I liked the setting too, a countryside scene in England with the isolated house beside a marsh and a long narrow stretch of road across the marsh. It’s no wonder a woman living in such a house is driven to the kingdom of ghosts.
A Train to India
I switched to flying because I began to dislike the Indian railways for many reasons. The lack of cleanliness, lack of hygienically prepared food, and the teeming crowd put me off. Was I becoming a filthy bourgeois? I don’t think so. I think I’m becoming old. The spirit is young but the body is old, to paraphrase Jesus. There was a time I tolerated the filth as part of the Indian mindset: India (with some exceptional areas) is a large spittoon, a stinking toilet and an immense garbage bin. It was also the time I treated the unhygienic food in the Indian railways with a dose of whisky. My young body probably thrived on the odd mix. I loved to watch the crowd and its absolutely irrational behaviour. It sustained my own irrationality.
Official assignments don’t entitle me to flights as I’m only a teacher – “the backbone of the nation,” as a friend of mine teases me unceasingly. One such official assignment obliged me to travel by train all the way from Delhi to Kochi by train. I was entitled to second class AC fare, according to my designation at my school. “Can you travel by 3 tier AC?” was the question put to me by the economically constrained boss. I had pre-empted the sleeper class offer by mentioning that the month of May was too hot for such a journey. I was supposed to attend the seminar from 21 to 24 May 2012.
There was no way I could get a reserved ticket however much I tried at the internet site of the Indian railways. The site seemed to have some ingenious ways of blocking all attempts to reserve a ticket until the available berths were exhausted. And the exhaustion came in the first ten minutes of the opening time. The booking begins at 8 am and the berths are sold out by 8.10 am. The stipulated booking period of 90 days before the journey, that is.
I’m speaking of the Kerala-bound trains from Delhi. In December 2011 I booked a train ticket for a colleague of mine by the Kerala Express using the Tatkal scheme. She had to make an unplanned journey. I booked the ticket. It took quite a while for the site to accept my order. Finally it condescended to give a confirmed ticket. But once the payment was made, it took five minutes for the ticket to come. And when it did, it was in the waiting list. The lady travelled with that waiting list ticket by making some arrangement with another passenger whom she knew, only to be told that her ticket had been cancelled by the Railways and she had to pay a fine for making an unauthorised journey. She called me up from the train. I said the cash had been charged to my credit card account in the name of the Indian Railways. She paid the fine, however, and continued her journey since she had no other option before the TTE. A day after she had completed her journey I received an SMS from the Indian Railways site on my mobile phone that my ticket was cancelled and that my money was refunded to my credit card account. I wasn’t surprised. Such things are part of India’s dimension as the spittoon, the toilet, and the garbage bin, all of which are most visible from the train.
When I couldn’t get a ticket for myself however much I tried, I decided to make a study of the situation. I went through the Railways reservation status. I discovered that all the AC class tickets were overbooked. It was in the waiting list every single day, whether it is Rajdhani or the lesser trains. But there were more than hundred tickets available in the sleeper class coaches.
The Malayalam newspapers have reported time and again about the thefts in Kerala bound trains, stating explicitly that most of them seem to be taking place in connivance with the Railway authorities. I can now connect the links, though I may be wrong. It has become clear to the Railway authorities that the Keralites are rich enough to travel in the AC class. So they decided to loot them.
I am leftist by political inclination. Yet I began to think if the railway was privatised would such a situation arise? Wouldn’t the private player simply increase the number of AC coaches in order to make greater profits and provide better services? Think of how the phone call rates came down beyond our imagination when the telecom services were privatised? [Just one example]
Well, I can still be leftist and argue that the government can itself do the same thing: increase the facilities and earn more money instead of looting the passengers. But looting is more natural to politicians, I guess.
Or, looting is more natural to the Indian mindset?
Visit a shop, for example. Even a Reliance outlet.
