December 2005

I have not sent Christmas cards this year, so I’ll take this opportunity to wish a happy Christmas to all my readers. 2006 promises to be a busy and exciting year for me. I’m looking forward to it.

There’s been some interesting stuff out there on the Intarweb over the past week or so.

Andrew Rilstone writes about whether C. S. Lewis was against his character Susan becoming sexually mature, as is often alleged by Philip Pullman. I don’t quite agree with Rilstone, for the reasons that some other people mention in the comments to his posting: at the very least, Lewis choice of the particular obsession which keeps Susan from Heaven shows that he had some odd attitudes to women. Abigail Nussbaum (whose blog I’d recommend) has some more thoughts on Susan. Meanwhile, atreic once again examines the God Hates Hair question in the light of Screwtape’s odd statement that the Devil wants beards to be unfashionable.

Metafilter had a piece on Howard Bloom, speaking about Jesus, Yahweh, whether the phrase “Judeo-Christian” is meaningful. I’m still meaning to listen to and read the linked material.

There was a brief but interesting discussion on mr_ricarno‘s journal about Christians and courtship. He later clarifies the intent of the original posting.

<lj-cut text=”Cut for discussion of the recent posts about rape”>There’s been much discussion on LJ recently about the Welsh rape case and the recent Amnesty survey where many respondants said that, in some cases, women were partly responsible if a man raped them. Much of that discussion has been internecine warfare between people who have far more in common with each other than with rapists, or indeed with those people who think that women who wear short skirts are asking for it. Those people, by and large, aren’t the ones having carefully worded discussions on LJ and don’t care if they’re regarded as anti-feminist or as apologists. The people on my friendslist are oases of sanity in the middle of all this (that’s why they’re the ones on my friendslist, right?).

shreena talks about the muddling of cause and responsibility which makes it difficult to know quite what the opinions of those questioned were. livredor argues against the notion that women can and should deter rapists by doing certain things. The comments on livredor‘s entry also discuss the Welsh case, so if you want to know what I think, my comments are there.