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Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 41 No. 7. April 10 1978

Quiet Confessional

Quiet Confessional

Dear Sir,

Reading last week's Salient, I came across a letter concerning the commonsense of Christianity. Now I am not at all a Christian, but although my Christian morals are incomplete, those I have are excellent, and so I am moved to defend a person attacked, even if it is an empty gesture. I mean, if faith is faith, as they say it is, even bad reasoning cannot touch it. I agree that the people often display a sentimentality that would make Isaiah writhe, but I cannot let fools berate fools for taking a good book to heart.

I know that I myself would rather be a good Kiwi than a bad Christian, yet I think that common sense is an inarticulate man's term for what we others would call mental foot-sloggery. True, it is always best to write easily verifiable sense in exams, marking-times being constricted nowadays but writers of those greater books took the best part of 1000 years to write those one thousand pages, since revelation comes at unexpected Ions-awaited moments. That is the difference between you and Isaiah.

I am glad to see the druids are coming-back again. I see they have attained a certain success, having their own little high-rise (I auspicious stories) on the corner or Woodward Street. The window area might be larger, yet I'm delighted [unclear: o] see that the druids have made it in a modern society. I have never been up to the board room but I do like to think that all those kind bearded old men congregate there every Wednesday, to brew magic potion which gives you the strength of ten men.

I was brought up to fear the tohunga, and would not wish to suffer the power of a makutu - but druids? Robert Graves pays you are men to fear, that in during training you must lie almost submerged in icy water, with a rock on your chest, for one night, and thus compose an epic poem and its tune. But I can't believe it.

Don't try to scare us with guff about controlling the weather; that rain was just a cold front from Antarctica way. All right, I admit it, who brought it here? Some power, I'll bet, but not a druid. You Druids are still Welsh in your hearts hearts, to control Southern Hemisphere weather, you have to perform all your old spells widder-shins, and as we all know, you won't do that.

So when you want rain you bring the sirocco and when you try to curse the summer and halt the solstices, you eclipsed the moon one night '(vertically too, and to see it emerge was beautiful) and brought us a decent summer. An inefficient evil is man's greatest delight. Good luck.

Yours etc,

Zurdo.

P.S. My first letter never came to its point directly but I did have a serious complaint. I see the TV is still burning away in the room on the top floor, and there's always an atmosphere of the most terrible abomination of cultural desolation there. It's bloody depressing, it reminds me of an old people's home I once had to visit, but the people there were dying anyway, and needed preparation for Purgatory.