NationStates Jolt Archive

The Cathedral of Burung-yang-membuat-dunia, a city whose very name -- the bird that crated the world -- bears testimony to the pagan roots of its people, now devoutly Catholic. The ancient city, on this third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, has been hit by a freak snowstorm. A mountain micro-climate has brought this strange miracle of weather to a tropical country.

In the Cathedral, as sun streams through its grand windows and into the domed church concentrated to Our Lady of Lourdes, Bishop F.X. Mangunvijaya is delivering his homily. His face glowing, his heart filled with the Holy Spirit. Listen a moment to the translation.

My sisters and brothers in Christ, I take as my text our second reading, penned by St. Paul to the church amongst the Philippians.

Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

So, rejoice! This snow you see about you, see how it brings people together to combat the cold and the hardship? From adversity, comes community. Rejoice in the Lord, and again I say, rejoice!

Today is the only day I appear before you in these pink robes. But let’s not call them pink. Let’s call them rose. And think about a pink rose. Really think about it a moment. If you stare long enough at that rose, you will know that there is a God, a God who knows only love. For he so loved the world that he sent his Son to dwell among us. And that is Advent, that is what we a re waiting for in joyful anticipation: the coming of Christ.

What a gift to us. Let us be fully present to receive this gift. Fully human, fully there in anticipation: not distracted by our worries, our anxieties, but hearing God’s call and responding to it with joy. Friends, the Church is not about rules and dogma, not at its hearts. It is about universal love, about denying gifts to no one. Especially in this time of Advent.

Listen to the words of John the Baptist in today’s Gospel reading. If you have two cloaks, John tells us, give one away to the poor. And Paul tells us, be gentle. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. Our faith is the faith of sacrificing ourselves as Christ sacrificed himself for us. Can we reach that selflessness? We can strive endlessly for it.

Our faith is one that does not tolerate poverty. it is one that calls the whole world, and rejects no one, and considers no one less than fully human. It is a faith of the gentle revolution. It is a faith that does not fall silent while there is injustice anywhere, but shouts out in joy: Rejoice! God is here, God is love, God calls us to be gentle and trust in him, with no defences.

My friends, the Church of Tanah Burung hereby renounces violence in any form. We are called to follow the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ. We are called by God to be a church of peace. We also renounce wealth, the sin of greed. The Church today turns over its land for the care of the poor, retaining only its buildings. And we throw those buildings open to all who would come and pray and organize for a world free of injustice.

May the peace and blessings of God be upon you, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Namaste.

http://www.amnesty.org.au/images/priest.jpg
Mangunvijaya in his study

Peace and Non-Violence are good things, things that Taligari once knew but now that the Senate has gone against the will of the people and passed the The Defense Force Act the Golden Age fo Peace in Taligari is over. Never again shall our once Pacifist Nation know Everlasting Peace, I have failed you Lady Yne Taimo, more than that I have failed Taligari.


http://www.scifi.com/dune/gallery/images/alia_lrg_05.jpg
President Alia Yia Atreus
”Don’t back people into a corner, not if you want them to remain peaceful.”- Alia Yia Atreus
The Most Serene Republic of Taligari

Decisions of the Tanah Burung Conference of Catholic Bishops:

1) Church lands shall be used solely for the residence of the homeless, the feeding of the poor, and other works of charity.
2) The Church shall hand over all excess funds beyond the cost of paying its bills to works of charity.
3) Church premises are opened to social justice organizations for office and meeting space.
4) The church shall speak up for human rights internationally, and speak against injustice even if committed in Catholic countries.
5) The church renounces the use of force or violence as a means to settle disputes between individuals and between nations. No war can be a just war.

bump for handy manifesto reference.

bump for handy manifesto reference.

Just out of curiosity, if the Church is THe Church of TB, then wouldn't you technically be a protestant Christian church, not a Catholic Church? Or is the Church of TB simply the order of monks?

Brother Francis Sanchez
Society of Jesus
Imitora

Hmm. *scrambles to cover sloppy error*

The Church in Tanah Burung (in and off are represented by the same word: Gereja di Tanah Burung) remains a Catholic church in communion with Rome. At least, it does for now.

Good words, and as is increasingly common with the Gereja di Tanah Burung they have our full support.
~Knootian Humanist Society

However, in the night following the Sunday, a leaflet is attached to the Cathedral of Burung-yang-membuat-dunia. It is addressed to the Bishop and his victims. It is in the local language, and it appears to be heavily inspired on Nietzsche’s ‘The Antichrist.’

((Message is also sent to the local press, anonymous))


To all who follow the words of Mangunvijaya,

No doubt you have heard this man speak yesterday of ‘gentleness’ and ‘selflessness.’ Now hear this. Christianity is called the religion of pity.-- Pity stands in opposition to all the passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness. It is not a virtue but a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Pity drains on strength, multiplying suffering by a thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy--a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (--the case of the death of the Nazarene).

Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue; going still further, it has been called the virtue, the source and foundation of all other virtues--but let us always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy upon whose shield the denial of life was inscribed. By means of pity, life is denied and made worthy of denial—pity is the technique of nihilism. This depressing and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of protector of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of decadence—pity persuades to extinction. Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the true life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness. This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Bishop Mangunvijaya is hostile to life: that is why pity appears to him as a virtue. Aristotle saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative: he regarded tragedy as that purgative. The instinct of life should prompt us to seek some means of puncturing any such pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity as that appearing in Mangunvijaya’s case, that it may burst and be discharged. Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be the doctors here, to be unmerciful here, to wield the knife here--all this is our business, all this is our sort of humanity, in the name of the Market!

Theologians and all who have any theological blood in their veins are enemies of Truth and enemies of the Market. One must have faced their menace at close hand or have had experience of it directly and almost succumbed to it, to realize that it is not to be taken lightly This poisoning goes a great deal further than most people think: the theologians, amongst all who regard themselves as "idealists", claim a right to rise above reality, and to look upon it with suspicion. Mangunvijaya, like all priests, carries all sorts of lofty concepts in his hand and launches them with benevolent contempt against "understanding," "Market" "good living,", "evolution", "science"; he sees such things as beneath him, as insidious and seductive forces, on which "the soul" soars as a pure thing-in-itself--as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word, holiness, have not already done much more damage to life than all imaginable horrors and vices. The pure soul is a pure lie.

So long as the priest, that professional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted as a higher variety of man, there can be no answer to the question, What is truth? Truth has already been stood on its head when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative.

Upon this theological instinct we make war. Whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and dishonourable in all things. The pathetic thing that grows out of their condition is called faith: in other words, closing one's eyes upon one's self once for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable falsehood. People erect a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness upon this false view of all things; they ground good conscience upon faulty vision; they argue that no other sort of vision has value any more, once they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of "God," "salvation" and "eternity." This theological instinct is the most widespread form of falsehood to be found on earth, even more widespread then the evils of communism. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth. His profound instinct of self-preservation stands against truth.

When theologians, working through the "consciences" of their rulers, stretch out their hands for power, there is never any doubt as to what will happen. Wherever the influence of theologians is felt the concepts of "true" and "false" are forced to change places. What is most damaging to life is there called "true," and whatever exalts it, intensifies it, approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is there called "false."
~The Order of the Invisible Hand

No war can be a just war.

HERESY!!!

There is such a thing as a just war (http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a5.htm#2309).

SIA Headquarters, Syskeyia

<be cruel, love market, rip off Nietzsche>

"D*mn," the SIA offical thought.

(Can't think of anything to post now.)

God bless,

The Republic of Syskeyia