The funniest few minutes for a long time

The past few short minutes have seen my brother do something that one could hardly imagine him ever trying to do. After he had discussed his view that the apparently defunct Politically Incorrect Guides are basically a tool to increase the power and wealth of the ruling class and the Catholic Church – exactly the view Socialist Alternative would have but one I never noticed on the surface of PIGs which claims that they are about protecting ordinary people from an over-powerful “Daddy State” – my brother then did something remarkable:

Being still in bed because he often works very late at night in debating and/or travels to places like Geelong and Bendigo, my brother tried to imitate how he thought Thèrése Neumann would have actually been living. He said in the silliest imaginable fashion that he had blood on his hands – he thinks that Thèrése’s wounds were deliberately inflicted as a show of piety rather than, as Adalbert Albert Vogl says, a consequence of her extreme suffering from a barn fire in 1918.

He then went much further into trying to fit Thèrése’s story into his own utterly dogmatic rejection of any claim made by religion. Because, my brother says, previous so-called “fasting girls” had been found to eat donuts at night, my brother said with his very limited knowledge of German:

“Ich bin Thèrése Neumann”

“Ich habe keine Eucharistie gegessen”

“Ich möchte viele Krapfen”

“Ich möchte schlafen” (it is supposed Thèrése did not sleep after 1926)

He even imagined himself imitating Marthe Robin, but said he knew no French.

The whole way in which he trivialises how people observed these women live years with no evidence they could or were even able to eat or drink anything apart from the Eucharist is shocking to me. My mother even refers to it as “religious pornography”; given the graphic nature of the images of stigmatists, I actually tolerate this view but still steadfastly think it is nothing like so bad as Gail Dines shows ordinary pornography to be. According to Thèrése Neumann: Mystic and Stigmatist, even atheists actually observed her miraculous inedia without any kind of refutation.