Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Kilts are Sinful

So saith this bloke.

Wreath-laying on a windy Anzac Day
This drongo has obviously never worn a kilt.  Or met Scotsmen.  Soft?  Pull the other one, it's got bells on.  Kilts are very hairy, made of a thick and oily wool so that men can stride through wet heather without getting the bottom half of their clothes wet.  (Socks can be dried in front of the fire).  Traditionally worn without underpants, they also rub in uncomfortable places.  Believe me, they are not 'soft'. 

Let's set that aside for a moment.  What if men had worn 'kilts' and women trousers in Biblical times?  Would the great and good of the Bible have instructed us that this was the natural order:  obviously men wore kilts and obviously women wore trousers?  It has always been so , and so obviously the Lord wanted it that way, and if you deviate from His word, Holy Macaroons, you are so going to hell.  Hell, if I go to Hell, you may depend on it: it will not be because of my attire.

Doubly Sinful
And why is a robe not a skirt?  What am I missing?  And is it OK for women to wear underpants, since they are pants not a skirt?  The Abbé de Somewhere-or-Other thought not, when  women's bloomers were first introduced.  He thought them immoral and a vile perversion.  So it always is:  the way we do things now (or in some mythical past) is the best way.

Roman and Greek men wore "skirts".  But then we all know that they were effete and immoral, unlike those manly Teutons and Celts, whose men wore trousers but also (like the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Indians, and everybody except the Jews -- oh, but wait, there was Jonathan and King David) slept with men.  An Irish wife could divorce her husband if he spent too much time with his (male) lover. The Teutonic tribal chiefs drove their chariots into battle with their young man beside them.

It's ningies like this who make religion look ludicrous.  Does anybody intelligent for one minute think that the Being who made the Universe cares about whether your nether garment has a dividing piece of cloth in it or not?  Somewhere between 100 and 200 billion stars in our own galaxy.  Billion.  Repeat after me:  our star is one of around 150 BILLION stars in this galaxy alone*. And as far as the Hubble telescope can see, for billions of light years in all directions, there are countless, literally countless, galaxies.  Each with billions of stars.  In the Amazon basin, there are, we are told, ten thousand species of beetle.  Why do these literal Christianists think God is so small?  He is Grand, Awesome, All-Powerful, Terrible, if He is anything at all.  He is Everywhere and in Everything, out in every direction, across limitless space.  He doesn't give a flying rat's clacker about kilts.  He's too busy contemplating the ineffable beauty of His creation.

Real men wear kilts.  With nothing on underneath.


[*Correction and update:  My tally of stars in our galaxy was from memory.  In fact there are at least 200 billion stars, and there may be as many as 400 billion.  Our close galactic neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, has one trillion stars.  And you can be sure, on every star system in both galaxies, God is having conniptions about men who wear skirts]

5 comments:

C. Zampa said...

Love it!! And I agree 100%!

NPT said...

Thanks! I did have fun writing it.

Hunter said...

The interesting thing is that pants arrived in the Middle East and Mediterranean with the Persians -- hardly friends to the Israelites. Pants were a garment worn by horsemen, for obvious reasons. And I guess the Japanese hakama is OK, since it's an outer skirt -- but men in hakama are sooo sexy!

It occurs to me that anyone who has to be that vehement about the outer trappings of masculinity has, shall we say, some insecurities?

Anonymous said...

I read the link and am giggling madly at it. I can imagine the author scarlet faced as he scoured the net for pictures of men in kilts. I wonder how many hours he spent making his selection?

Trousers are difficult to make. Skirts are easy. Men wore skirts, or whatever you want to call them, through most of prehistory and through quite a bit of history too.

Thanks for an amusing and interesting post.

NPT said...

Ellin, the Abrahamic religions drive gay-shaded men into vilely contorted feelings and philosophies, sadly. External homophobia >>> internalised homophobia and bizarre mental contortions.