On Christian satire...
My new book, Proximal Birdflip, a satire of the Covid era, and a satire of the forthcoming Birdflu era as well, or whatever plandemic they’re planning for to inflict their measures on us now, is very much a Christian novel. The true hero of the book, Faustus’ driver, whose name Faustus does not even know, is a basic Christian man who lives a simple life (I think I’m not giving too much of a spoiler here) and his relationship with Faustus is the key to the story, in the end.
Christian satire is a long and venerable tradition: Dante is a great example. The Inferno is really a satirical outburst against church corruption and the enemies who banished him from the society and church of Florence. He puts the worst offenders in the lowest circles of hell, in his tour of the Inferno, guided by Virgil.
Jonathan Swift was himself a Church of England clergyman. Swift satirises the lack of rationality that he saw in the church and intellectual life of his own day, the lack of Christian rationality, in fact.. His essay, “An argument against the abolishment of Christianity” contains many gems of true prophecy, for he describes the ridiculous lack of rationality among the rational in our own day perfectly in many places:
And to urge another argument of a parallel nature: if Christianity were once abolished, how could the Freethinkers, the strong reasoners, and the men of profound learning be able to find another subject so calculated in all points whereon to display their abilities? What wonderful productions of wit should we be deprived of from those whose genius, by continual practice, hath been wholly turned upon raillery and invectives against religion, and would therefore never be able to shine or distinguish themselves upon any other subject? We are daily complaining of the great decline of wit among as, and would we take away the greatest, perhaps the only topic we have left? Who would ever have suspected Asgil for a wit, or Toland for a philosopher, if the inexhaustible stock of Christianity had not been at hand to provide them with materials? What other subject through all art or nature could have produced Tindal for a profound author, or furnished him with readers? It is the wise choice of the subject that alone adorns and distinguishes the writer. For had a hundred such pens as these been employed on the side of religion, they would have immediately sunk into silence and oblivion.
Without Christianity to rail against, the atheists, those who advocate various vices, and the progressives can only descend further and further into absurdity: Christianity keeps even the irrational rational.
Evelyn Waugh is another satirist whose dry, morbid wit predicted pet cemeteries and whose writing somehow encompassed theology and the deepest parts of human longing and suffering:
“I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.” Brideshead Revisited
In our own day, the success of the satirical site Babylon Bee is a marvellous example of truth-telling and prophecy through humour. So far down the rabbit-hole of darkened thoughts and darkened minds have the elites of this Alice-in-Wonderland world gone, that their behaviour is even more ridiculous than Babylon Bee could ever have predicted.
How do you fight people who cannot even see or believe the most elementary facts about human nature and biology? The obvious answer is, by mocking them.
Their latest headline is a perfect example of their droll satire: “Daniel Penny Judge Tells Jury To Go Back And Deliberate Again Until They Come Back With The Correct Verdict”
I wrote Proximal Birdflip before the misinformation legislation was squashed, when I could see little hope that we were going to escape the grip of the elites on our society. With Trump’s election, and the prospect of RFK Jr running the lettered health agencies in the USA, there is hope: the TGA in our own country did little of their own research, but slavishly did everything they were told to do, whether by the FDA or some other shadowy forces above — with an honest FDA perhaps there will be nowhere the TGA can hide from their own ridiculous evasions and dishonesties.
I submitted the novel to the Australian Fiction Prize: I didn’t win, I guess it was a small chance, I have no idea if the judges even read it. They haven’t published a short-list yet. But I think it’s a good novel — I can’t be sure — I hope it is. It is very much Christian satire: Faustus in the book is in a relationship with God - a very bad relationship! And this is perhaps one of the downfalls of the Protestant understanding of conversion, because every human being has a relationship with God, even atheists — rather than loving him, many people rail against him with rage and anger — their relationship is a bad relationship, not a relationship based on God’s mercy and the cross.
The seventh century BC leader Sennacherib had a relationship with God, and these were God’s thoughts about it:
But I know your sitting down, your going out and coming in, and your raging against Me. Because you rage against me and because your insolence has reached my ears, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I will make you return by the way you came. 2 Kings 19:27-28
The satirists mentioned on the back cover of Proximal Birdflip are all Christians, with the exception of Joseph Heller, a Jew, and Terry Pratchett, who is not really a satirist of any particular human but a satirist of human nature in general and Pratchett’s perceived lack of rationality in the universe — in this he is an inspiration like Job, before God spoke to him through the whirlwind, but there is no communication from God in Pratchett’s books — but his books are quite ridiculously funny.
It’s Pratchett’s footnotes that I love the most.
