I Hate Small Talk

“Yeah, er, I had to dismember that guy with a trowel. What have you been up to?”

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Small talk, get it? Because he’s a small child who is presumably talking on that telephone. It was the best I could come up with, OK?

There’s a video by Cracked: After Hours that asks what cliché features of television and film could make useful loophole superpowers – like knowing that whenever you turned on the news, the headline would be of great importance to your personal situation, or being able to recall any event with perfect clarity by means of a flashback.¹ Convenient as these would be, my favourite item on the list was knowing that every conversation you had was going to somehow advance the plot of your life, or be revealed later on to have been of some great significance. Wouldn’t it be nice to do away with all that pointless small talk?

The trouble is that I tend to just work my way through a set repertoire of questions and answers that keep the conversation rumbling along on a really very shallow level. I inquire after the nature of someone’s day, or weekend, or whatever the most recent holiday period was; he or she makes some vague comment to the effect that it was a reasonably positive experience, and inquires after mine, to which I offer a similarly banal reply. Conversations are so much more enjoyable and valuable when the subject matter is something of great interest or importance to at least one of the parties involved, and yet it’s such hard work pushing them onto that kind of territory; too often they never actually leave Small Talk Land before they are brought to an end.

Of course, an exit visa from Small Talk Land is theoretically very easily obtainable; all one has to do is put a bit of thought into answering such questions as, “How’s your week been?” and “Any plans for the weekend?” and “So how are you?” honestly. But such answers are unexpected, and transgress the parameters of what’s socially acceptable. Let me give some examples:

“How are you?”

“Currently, fairly thrilled to be having this conversation, because I secretly really fancy you.”

Hmm. Maybe not. Try this:

“How are you?”

“Kind of in pain. The second day of my period is always the worst for cramps.”²

That’s a fairly sure-fire way of making your addressee uncomfortable. Or what about this:

“How are you?”

“Sad. It occurs to me that you’re one of my favourite people in the world, and yet, as things stand, I’m forced to believe that you’re spiritually dead and destined for an eternity separated from God and everything that’s good in existence. Do you know how much that utterly breaks my heart? I was crying about it just now.”³

Yeah … somehow that’s not really an acceptable answer either. And so I don’t offer it, even when it’s true. In fact, usually when I answer the question, “How are you?” I’ve already said something positive without having really thought about it, and moved immediately on to echoing the question right back again, in an odd sort of determination not to be rude. And so neither of us breaks past this superficial level of conversation, unless one of us has the audacity to challenge the other on her answer: “Really? You don’t sound too sure you’re all right,” or similar.

And my request is this: please do. Please challenge me. Please make me think about what I’m saying and work up the energy to drag myself out of the dull, dissatisfying comfort of Small Talk Land. And please do your part too. Please ignore that advice someone once gave you, though I don’t doubt it was in good faith, that the way to create a good conversation is to do nothing but ask questions: how am I supposed to strengthen my connection with you if the traffic is only one way? Please tell me about the things you care about. I’m interested, because if you’re interested you make it interesting – and if I care enough to be having this conversation, I care enough to listen to what you really want to talk to me about.

I’m not suggesting that we all start responding to “How are you?” with the kinds of responses I gave above; that would be taking things a bit far. Nor am I criticising people for asking me how I am; there’s nothing wrong with the question itself, only the way I habitually give so little thought to my answer. What I am suggesting is that we all try to have deeper conversations more often. Those are, after all, the ones we remember. Those are the ones that advance the plotlines that tie our lives together. And I don’t think I can be the only person who craves something more substantial than small talk as social nourishment. The mindless asking and answering of the same typical questions will, I anticipate, be a difficult habit to break. But, all the same, shall we try?

Footnotes

¹ Here it is, and with a playlist of other episodes on the side too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pMvzYZx2h0&list=PL5CC44F2C10A8415C&index=9.

² I read once that bananas ease period pain, but, based on personal experience, I’m fairly sure they don’t. What you really want is a heated wheat bag, a comfy bed, and a sufficiently distracting film, but unfortunately you usually have Things To Do that prevent you from indulging in such. YouTube saimasmileslike is hilarious on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AehFZHkClTc.

³ Look, I dislike the doctrine of hell as much as the next twenty-first-century Christian, but honestly, Jesus goes on about it so much that I really don’t see a way round believing it. Try Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43; Luke 16:19-31; John 5:25-29; and Revelation 20:11-15, as a few random examples; here’s the Matthew chapter to get you started: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+13&version=ESVUK. And then recall John 3:16 or Romans 5:1-11 or whatever that passage is for you that never seems to lose its ability to push you to your knees in sheer amazement and thankfulness at the bewildering depth and brilliance of God’s mercy in placing his dearly beloved Son under the punishment you deserved. Jesus went through hell so we didn’t have to. God be praised.

Harry Plot-Flaw: The Permanent Sticking Charm

“We’ve been trying to get her down for a month but we think she put a Permanent Sticking Charm on the back of the canvas. Let’s get downstairs, quick, before they all wake up again.”

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003)

 

Look, I’ve started re-using pictures from previous posts. Not that you would most likely have noticed if I hadn’t pointed that out ... *ahem*.

As carefully and intricately crafted as the Harry Potter stories are, any series introducing a magic system as extensive as Rowling’s is bound to end up with a few inconsistencies and implausibilities – and any series as widely-read and well-beloved is bound to end up being scrutinised for such flaws to a phenomenally thorough degree. The possibilities offered by the Time-Turner are one particularly well-trodden field with regard to this,¹ though I feel obliged to point out that Rowling favours the time-travel system whereby the time traveller is unable to actually change the past² – so any attempt to pre-emptively kill Voldemort or even stop either of his reigns of terror would be doomed to fail from the start. Still, one problematic aspect of the Harry Potter magic system that I have not yet seen explored is the Permanent Sticking Charm.

The Charm is first mentioned in the fifth book, when Sirius explains to Harry that the team working on the refurbishment of number twelve, Grimmauld Place, has been unable to remove the portrait of his mother, who has a nasty habit of screaming pure-blood-supremacist abuse whenever she is disturbed, due to an assumed Permanent Sticking Charm on the back of the canvas. A brief while later in the same book, Fred and George Weasley offer to attach their brother Ron’s shiny new Prefect badge to his forehead using the same charm, in response to his undisguised revelling in his new position. The only other time the Charm is directly mentioned is in the seventh book, when Harry discovers that Sirius used the Charm to attach his posters and pictures to his bedroom walls so that his parents would not be able to remove them after he ran away. There is one further allusion in the sixth book, when it is revealed that the Muggle Prime Minister was unable to remove a certain painting in his office, despite employing the expertise of a builder.³

That’s all we get. And, I have to say, I feel it is an astonishingly undernourished corpus to work with, in view of the vast possibilities implied by such a thing as a Permanent Sticking Charm.

Firstly, the clue’s in the name: the Charm is permanent. It cannot be undone, by Muggle or magical methods. Considering the extreme inconvenience of having to put up with Mrs Black’s portrait, one tends to feel Sirius would have been prepared to go to pretty extreme lengths to remove it; he himself says he has no fondness for the house in Grimmauld Place, so he would presumably not object to, say, carving out the chunk of wall on which the portrait hung and disposing of it. It therefore seems as if the Charm prevents either of the objects stuck together with it from being destroyed in such a way as to separate them. This creates an array of fascinatingly problematic scenarios: what if, say, number twelve, Grimmauld Place, was burned down? Or what if it was demolished? Exactly how permanent does ‘Permanent’ mean?

Secondly, the Charm is evidently within the capabilities of your average underage wizard. Sirius successfully managed it several times before he ran away. Even Fred and George, who famously achieved only six Ordinary Wizarding Levels between them, had evidently been paying enough attention in class that Ron believed they would be able to follow through on their threat to Permanently Stick his prefect badge to his forehead, since he duly toned down his jubilation as a result of their making it.

And, if you stop and think about it, it’s really quite a threat. To never, for the rest of his whole life, be able to remove his prefect badge from his face, would undoubtedly cause Ron all sorts of problems. But this is a mild example. Imagine, for instance, being Permanently Stuck to the floor, or a piece of furniture, or another human being, even. All this makes me wonder why the Permanent Sticking Charm is even legal in the wizarding world. Surely as much damage could be done with it as with any of the Unforgivable Curses? Armed with the Permanent Sticking Charm alone, a wizard would be able to control (for instance, Permanently Sticking someone in one place, or to some item they would therefore have to follow everywhere), to torture (for instance, Permanently Sticking someone to something red-hot), and to kill (for instance, Permanently Sticking someone to a railway track, or simply a remote place with no friendly people about to provide such luxuries as food).

Now, there is some suggestion – on the Harry Potter Wikia, for instance – that there may be magical methods of actually reversing a Permanent Sticking Charm, on the basis that, if it really were irreversible, Sirius would have immediately given up trying to remove the portrait of his mother. However, noteworthy is the fact that Sirius never says he is certain that the portrait is attached with a Permanent Sticking Charm – it’s only a theory, in which case, the month of effort would presumably have been for the purpose of establishing that it genuinely was a Permanent Sticking Charm. Furthermore, with the talents of the whole of the Order of the Phoenix at his disposal, it seems unlikely that Sirius would not have been able to find someone capable of reversing the Charm, if such a thing were possible.

Thus, my argument stands: the Permanent Sticking Charm is an astonishingly powerful and apparently undifficult piece of magic, which ironically only ever seems to be employed for attaching pictures to walls. That it is capable of being used for other things is evident enough from Fred and George’s threat – unless this was another of their ruses, for which Ron was gullible enough to fall.

This might, in fact, be the neatest solution: yes, the Permanent Sticking Charm really is permanent, but it can only be used to attach pictures to walls, not, say, prefect badges to foreheads. It wouldn’t be the first time Fred and George perpetrated such a deception for the purpose of Ron’s humiliation – the spell to turn Scabbers yellow in …the Philosopher’s Stone springs to mind. Presumably nobody was kind enough to enlighten Ron about the true nature of a Permanent Sticking Charm, because they were all too much enjoying the effect the threat had on him.

Well, I set out with the intention of pointing out a plot flaw in the Harry Potter universe, and have ended up neatly explaining it away. You’re very welcome, J. K. Still, there remains the question of what would happen if the wall to which a picture was Permanently Stuck was destroyed.

At this point, you’re probably expecting me to make some kind of clever theological link. Well, terribly sorry, folks, but not this week: I am simply too tired for clever theological links right now. Although, with my brain in this state, it’s practically a certifiable miracle if the above made any kind of coherent sense at all, so maybe that counts…

Footnotes

¹ Try How It Should Have Ended’s take on the Harry Potter films for one particularly amusing example of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsYWT5Q_R_w.

² Charlie McDonnell offers a helpful explanation of the two main time-travel systems used in fiction using the example of baking cookies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Thry5mXld80. Time travel and baking – what more could one possibly want?

³ The article on the Permanent Sticking Charm on the Harry Potter Wikia, http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Permanent_Sticking_Charm, was a significant help in writing this paragraph, though the first two instances and the problems they present had already taken up determined residence in my long-term memory.

A Handy Hebrew Sing-Along Guide

“Deliver us; there’s a land you promised us. Deliver us out of bondage. Deliver us to the Promised Land.”

The Prince of Egypt (1998)

Thanks to the Dreamworks Wikia for the image. Such a dramatically striking poster...

I first encountered Dreamworks’ legendary early project The Prince of Egypt during a wet lunch break at infant school. I finished eating and left the hall at such a time as to cause me to enter the television-hosting classroom just as the Nile was turning to blood.¹ I remember finding the scene vaguely disconcerting. Then, at a later point in my infant school career, we watched the whole film in RE, and I remember finding that downright disturbing. The whole chucking-small-children-into-the-river-to-be-eaten-by-crocodiles thing, for some crazy reason, rather bothered my six-year-old self, and so I employed what was one of my favourite devices as a child, to stop engaging with what was in front of me and retreat into my own brain.

After that, I avoided The Prince of Egypt for years, but, on eventually re-watching it, came to the inevitable conclusion² that it is a wonderful, wonderful film, for many reasons, including a stunning soundtrack which is one of the few able to physically give me chills.³ (I’ll throw the opinion out there that the best track, and the biggest reason I would love to see the film converted into a stage musical with full choir, is ‘The Plagues’. Discuss.) On my church’s student week away at the start of this year, I genuinely remained in the kitchen holding a tea towel and pretending to be useful even though it wasn’t my turn to wash up because someone was playing the soundtrack on his or her phone and I couldn’t bear to leave the room before it finished. Yes. Really.

And, after said week away ended, I decided, because I’m a nerd and this is the kind of thing I do in my spare time, to take up my trusty Davidson’s Lexicon⁴ and work out what the Hebrew sections in the songs consisted of. The fruits of this endeavour I record below, so that, in the event, dear reader, that you find yourself thwarted by the language change while trying to sing along to ‘Deliver Us’ or ‘When You Believe’, you might in future not only be able to get the lyrics right but actually understand what they mean. You’re very welcome.

First, the short section sung by Moses’ mother during ‘Deliver Us’ – this is what it looks like in the Hebrew, including vowels:

יַלְדִי הַטּוֹב וְהָרַךְ

אַל־תִּירָא וְאַל־תִּפְחַד

A transliteration for pronunciation purposes:

Yaldī hatt͗ōv w’hārakh

Al-tīra w’al-tiphchad
 

A translation:

My good and tender child (literally, ‘my child, the good one and the tender one’),

Don’t be afraid and don’t tremble.

Now the far longer section from ‘When You Believe’. This is all lifted straight out of Exodus 15,⁵ so it was pretty easy to work out:

אָשִׁירָה לַיהוָה כִּי־גָאֹה גָּאָה

Transliteration:

Āshīrah ladōnaī kī gā’oh gā’āh

Translation:

I will sing to the Lord, because he has been greatly exalted (literally, ‘because being exalted he has been exalted’; the basic point is that he has been exalted very much indeed – Hebrew is quite a fan of the policy of repetition for emphasis).

This is found in Exodus 15:1. In the film, the line is sung twice.

מִי־כָמֹכָה בָּאֵלִים יְהוָה

מִי כָּמֹכָה נֶאְדָּר בַּקֹדֶשׁ

Transliteration:

Mī khāmokhāh bā’ēlīm adōnaī

Mī khāmokhāh ne’dar baqodesh

Translation:

Who (is) like you among the gods, Lord?

Who (is) like you, glorious in holiness?

(The verb ‘to be’ is usually left implied in Hebrew, as it is here, hence I have bracketed it in my translation.)

These lines are from Exodus 15:11.

נָחִיתָ בְחַסְדְּךָ עַם־זוּ גָּאָלְתָּ

Transliteration:

Nāchīthā v’chasd’khā am zū gā’āltā 

Translation:

You have led, in your kindness, a people which you have redeemed (literally, ‘a people, this you have redeemed’; use of a demonstrative in place of a relative pronoun is unusual, but I reckon something about it makes sense).

This is from Exodus 15:13. Again, in the film, the line is sung twice. 

אָשִׁרָה

Transliteration:

Āshīrah 

Translation:

I will sing.

This is that first word from the first line again. It’s repeated three times in the film.

Note that where I’ve used ‘ch’ in my transliterations, that’s not a nice English sound as in ‘chips’, but one of those gritty ones you make in the back your throat, as in ‘loch’ and ‘Bach’, although it’s a softer, less percussive sound than the ‘kh’. The lines over the vowels are to show that they’re long ones, although, in practical terms, it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference for pronunciation. Pronounce a ‘w’ as in ‘wonderful’ or as in ‘wunderbar’, and ‘th’ as in ‘three’ or as in ‘Thomas’; the decision is yours. (I take no responsibility for speakers of Modern Hebrew making fun of you because your pronunciation is dreadfully archaic.)

Well, there you go: you’re now all set for a Prince of Egypt karaoke session, and I even managed to restrain myself from talking about Hebrew grammar too much (which, as anyone who knows me well will tell you, is quite an achievement).

Footnotes

¹ Yeah, I’m not going to provide a spoiler warning. The book came out literally thousands of years ago, so if you haven’t got round to reading it yet, that’s your own fault.

² Why an inevitable conclusion, you ask? I subscribe to a theory suggested by a friend of mine: The Prince of Egypt is so irresistible because it’s the story of salvation – of God rescuing his people from slavery and oppression. (Said friend contrasts the shorter Joseph King of Dreams, also by Dreamworks, which, though excellent, lacks the strong salvation narrative.) Those of us who have seen the same story take place in our own lives are obsessed with it. We’ll happily be told it again and again in any format available – and, what do you know, ’90s animated musicals are one of the absolute favourite formats of my generation.

³ Here’s a playlist of which I approve because it misses out all the pop versions that nobody cares about (sorry, Mariah Carey): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WKN0XF8-3Q&list=PLrjhOUTfRro7ro9MjrNV_W5gwFCMbSxEu.

⁴ It’s this huge great wodge of a book that contains a grammatical analysis of every single word that exists in the Hebrew Bible. I’m awfully fond of my copy. I have, on occasion, caught myself stroking the cover. You can actually get it free in various electronic formats from the Open Library, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13507257M/The_analytical_Hebrew_and_Chaldee_lexicon, but it’s a nightmare trying to look things up on a screen, and, let’s be honest, we all know real books are better.

⁵ Don’t believe me? Check for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus+15&version=ESV. My translation differs slightly, but the gist is the same. And if you’re that fussed about details, you’d probably do better to go with the ESV people; I expect they put a lot more time, effort, and research into their translation than I did into mine.

Thoughts on Love 5: The Great Self-Love Paradox

Nathaniel:                   Sire, do you like yourself?

Prince Edward:          What’s not to like?

Enchanted (2007)

Well, I’ve talked about us loving God. I’ve talked about God loving us. I’ve talked about us loving one another. What am I missing?

Hint: self-love doesn’t literally come in cups. Just in case you weren’t sure.

A little while ago, I was browsing Icon for Hire’s videos on YouTube¹ and, through the power of the suggestions list on the right-hand side, ended up watching an episode of the REL Show (lead singer Ariel’s vlog channel) entitled ‘How to stop hating yourself: An honest conversation with Gala Darling’.² Less than a minute into the video, Ariel says to Gala, whom she is interviewing, “And one of the things that I am so excited about with you is you’re one of the only people I can find actively speaking about self-love.”

In terms of what Ariel meant by ‘actively speaking’, that may be true – but perhaps I just move in different online circles to her, because it seems to me as if people talk about self-love quite a lot. I have encountered quotations related to the theme plastered across vaguely inspirational-looking backgrounds; articles taking its importance for granted; even advertisements for such a thing as a ‘feminist self-love course’.³ The accepted position seems to be that self-love is a Good Thing. Indeed, Ariel and Gala spend the rest of their YouTube interview extolling its virtues and detailing how to attain to it.

Perhaps you’re picking up on a slightly cynical tone on my part. This is deliberate. I have long found the concept of self-love problematic, and, if you’ll give me a moment to explain before quitting this page in disgust, I’ll attempt to do so.

The trouble is that the way self-love seems to be understood is as a high opinion of oneself – liking one’s own characteristics. Prince Edward from Enchanted, as per my opening quote, would seem to be a veritable paragon of this kind of self-love – but surely he tips over into arrogance? He is, admittedly, rather endearing with it, and handles the loss of his hero/male lead role far better than, say, Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, as I discussed a few weeks ago – but nevertheless, he is kidding himself to think that every aspect of himself is entirely likeable. For all he is literally a fairy-tale prince, he is frequently elitist (referring to a group of bus passengers as ‘peasants’), violent (on the point of dispatching Robert with a sword until Giselle steps in), and self-obsessed (assuming the message Pip is trying to convey to him through elaborate mime must be some compliment to himself)⁴ – not, I think, qualities which many of us would perceive as likeable.

I simply don’t consider it an option to entertain that kind of self-love, a refusal to acknowledge anything bad about oneself. The Bible is clear beyond doubt that all of us as human beings are deeply flawed: Romans 3:9-20, for instance, contains a damning compendium of Old Testament remarks on how utterly godless and riddled with wrongdoing we all are.⁵ Indeed, to admit that one is a sinner in need of a saviour is very much key to being a follower of Jesus, who, you may well be aware, takes rather a dim view of people exalting themselves.⁶

Still, the way self-love tends to be talked about in the contexts in which I’ve encountered it, it’s not an attitude people are likely to already be abundant in, but rather one which must be determinedly cultivated. This actually raises another problem, because I really tend to feel that the last thing I need to be encouraged to do is spend more time focussing on myself, to the detriment of God and other people.

Focussing on myself, was the idea I was going for with this one. The selfie stick seems to me like a particularly pointless exercise in narcissism.

So what’s the solution? Simply not loving ourselves? I might, not too long ago, have been tempted to defend that position. And then, this summer, I was staying with some people in rural mid Devon while helping with a church holiday club, and happened one evening to pluck a book called The Teenage Survival Kit, clearly hailing from some point in the last couple of decades before the twenty-first century hit, off their shelves. Despite no longer being a teenager, I found a lot of really very helpful stuff in it, including a section where the author, Pete Gilbert, makes it quite clear that he had no time for lack of self-love in the name of piety – after all, God loves us, and who are we to think our judgement is somehow superior to his?⁷

And here we find the key. God loves us, but not, as I hope I have successfully established in previous weeks, based on any appealing attribute of ours. If we love ourselves because we like our own qualities, we’re only applying a peanut-butter-milkshake level of love to ourselves – in which case, it’s really no wonder, in view of the deep imperfection that characterises each of us, that it’s such a difficult thing to do. If, on the other hand, I’m trying to follow the way God does things, the kind of love I should have for myself is unconditional, and selfless, and based not on what I have done but what God has done for me.

This is, I think, a rather odd thing to get one’s head round: how does one love oneself selflessly? How can something as totally to do with myself as self-love find its basis in someone other than myself? But this is itself the trick. God’s love is infinitely better and stronger and more wonderful than ours can ever be, so the most loving thing we can do for ourselves is in fact to allow ourselves to be loved by him. And, since, loving us as he does, God is certain to have our best interests at heart, we can be sure that loving ourselves will also involve doing what he says we should – which, oddly enough, heavily involves loving him, and loving other people.⁸

And hence my cynicism about the kind of self-love that most conversations on the subject seem to advocate, including – sorry, Ariel; I’m still a huge fan of your work – the one between Ariel and Gala that I mentioned above. No kind of love that we generate within ourselves is going to have a fraction of the brilliance of that which God freely offers us. In a completely delightful paradox, the best, most effective form of self-love is to leave aside the self and pour all one’s energy into loving God and loving other people.

It sounds pretty radical. Counter-cultural. Counter-intuitive. And yes, it’s all those things, because sin is so deeply ingrained in us, and all sin is selfishness. But this kind of love is what God ultimately designed us for, and, though none of us will manage it perfectly this side of the end of the world, in the meantime, we are, with his help, to aim to get closer to it, and be more like him as a result.

Footnotes

¹ Icon for Hire is my favourite band. Not only do I find its songs melodically and instrumentally compelling, but the lyrics are incredibly clever and just say things that it doesn’t feel as if anyone else in music is saying. Take, for instance, ‘Iodine’, from the band’s first album, Scripted – “I say I want to be healthy, but I turn up the noise. / The IV drips a steady stream of poison. / I think I’m just in love with the feeling: / Break my bones so I can feel them healing” – or ‘Pop Culture’, from its second and most recent, self-titled, album, whose chorus begins: “Pop culture does nothing for me. / The American Dream, mainstream, just bores me, / ’Cause I’m not like you, I’m immune, I’m immune: / Say it over and over until it comes true.” I just think it’s utterly brilliant stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpR4KGjzlCA&index=6&list=PLMfa-IfzrufpAp8paxZSTqAY30eI9J3Rs. 

² Here’s the link if you’d like to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urF-bMJGhcM. 

³ I’m sorry not to be able to footnote any of the given examples properly, and would definitely scrawl ASSERTION in the margin if I were marking this post as an essay, but hopefully, dear reader, you’re prepared to forgive me for not spending hours tracking down such briefly-encountered items, and take this minor point on trust, or comparison with your own experience.

⁴ Not the best quality video, but it’s such a funny scene, it doesn’t really matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XyNkyHjqSY. 

⁵ Well, I say ‘damning’ – read the rest of the chapter beyond verse 21 and you’ll see that it turns out not to be damning at all: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+3&version=ESV. Still, ‘critical’ or the like seemed rather too flimsy an adjective for such a strongly-worded passage.

⁶ Try Luke 18:9-14: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2018&version=ESV.   

⁷ Again, I do apologise for being unable to cite properly. Still, if you fancied reading the book for yourself and determining whether my paraphrase is a reasonably remembered one, copies are available on Amazon for literally a penny: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0860653641/?tag=ecosia07-21. 

⁸ In fact, Jesus says these are the two most important commandments: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22&version=ESV.