Beards

[nameandnature]

Beards are important. As any evangelical will know, the words of C.S. Lewis are god-breathed and useful for teaching and training in righteousness. Hear what St Jack says:

“It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual ‘taste’. This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females — and there is more in that than you might suppose….”
—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

This chap elaborates.

More importantly (from my point of view), scribb1e likes them too.

Links courtesy of andrewducker and robhu.

Comments

[simont]

I'm finding it amusing to compare and contrast that blogger's comment

And besides all these things, God gave to men (generally speaking) the ability to grow a beard.

with the passage from Cryptonomicon about beards:

She pulled down statistics on racial variation in beard growth. American Indians didn't grow beards, Asians hardly did, Africans were a special case because daily shaving gave them a painful skin condition. "The ability to grow heavy, full beards as a matter of choice appears to be a privilege accorded by nature solely to white males," she wrote.

I never quite managed to find out exactly how much of that latter paragraph was true in the real world and how much was a subtle – or unsubtle – twisting of the facts to better suit Charlene's argument. (Even if it's all completely untrue, of course, one shouldn't blame Stephenson for poor research; it would be perfectly in character for Charlene to have done her research in a biased way or not bothered to do it at all.) But in any case, part of my brain is itching to put Charlene and Jeff Moss in a room together and let them fight that one out.