Rollan's Censored Issues Blog

BEING BIBLICAL BY DEFAULT

One doesn’t exactly associate Kate Middleton with religion and things biblical. Early this year the bishop of London rushed through the confirmation ceremony she had never undergone ahead of a marriage to someone expected eventually to become Head of the Church of England (if laws and customs don’t change in that respect). However...

If you can believe what you read in glossy mags in supermarket queues it sounds as if - and this time I suspect it might actually be true – there have been domestic arguments, the first major round of them, between a tearful Kate Middleton and her prince. The subject is Kate’s resentment as a royal widely believed to be pregnant, or at least hoping soon to become so, that her prince seems set to be off early next year to the possible danger zone of the Falklands. The region is currently once again disputed by a sabre rattling Argentina. William is already doing dangerous and in the last few days recently heroic things in air-sea rescue. Quite simply Kate doesn’t want William into danger zones only months after the marriage.

If she hasn’t been biblical before, the new Duchess finally more or less is so however unbewares and unintentionally. According to Deuteronomy 25:6

“When a man is newly married, he shall not go out with the army or be charged with any related duty. He shall be free at home one year, to be happy with the wife he has married.”

I am not suggesting that Christians, who consider themselves unbound by Torah, must follow all of Deuteronomy’s sometimes archaic and difficult provisions. (Not even most Jews would reckon to do so). But it contains some useful and exemplary principles all the same, and ideally Christians should keep it somewhere at the back of their minds as a guide in evaluation of some affairs. The rule governing army and marriage is surely one such case.

And at another level I don’t anyway think William should court too much danger. I commented back in April on the chart for the marriage omitting what struck me as most potentially tricky. I don’t wish to go into that here either, but in Kate’s position I do think she would be justified in opposing too much unnecessary risk taking.

EVEREST AND THE IDOLATRY QUESTION

But at least it looks as though it’s Prince Harry rather than William who aspires to climb Everest. It is nonetheless controversial that any members of the royal family would engage in this adventure and certainly William should not, though if Harry goes ahead he might well to tempted to do so later. The problem is that - if we are to be biblical again - the project is surrounded by what for Torah and Christians has to be called idolatry. Bible and sherpas disagree over who owns the mountains. For sherpas it is certain gods and demons. Mountaineers normally join in appeasement puja ceremonies in order to have permission to climb the heights at all, or at least to insure devout and nervous Sherpas will guide and accompany them.

As a recent documentary which included a puja made clear, a lama beneath Everest warned Mallory and Irvine before their fatally unsuccessful attempt on Everest that the demons were hostile to them and only waiting to send them to hell. The heroes of Everest never appear to have been particularly heroic on the moral and spiritual plane if they merely acted for convenience with appeals to or appeasement of local gods. And if they considered themselves Christians at all, they don’t belong to the class of Christians who refused to throw incense to the worship of Caesar. Idolatry has long term effects upon individuals, families and societies which is why it is so strongly opposed in the Torah. Kate should keep her prince away from Everest whether for safety’s sake or more biblical reasons.