Another reason

why Victor Davis Hanson is The Man.

The campaign speech Obama might have given...

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Mormons and Muslims

The HBO channel showed an episode of Big Love this past Sunday night in which a segment of the Mormon endowment ceremony was depicted. This is a very important ritual for Mormons and it is held within the precincts of a temple, where all but faithfully practicing Mormons are excluded. Although the details of the ceremony have been publicly available for some time, the LDS church holds the rites to be sacred and secret, not to be revealed to outsiders, much less witnessed or recreated.

HBO knew this, went ahead and showed the episode and then disingenuously apologized to any offended Mormons.

Mormon reaction has been to criticize HBO, some Mormons have cancelled their subscriptions. Angry, but entirely within the traditions of American civility.

I cannot help but wonder how HBO would act were the religious sensitivities at issue those of Islam.

And how Muslims would react were their now famously sensitive feelings offended? Would there be a higher level of enacted anger?

Would it be paranoid or cynical of me to opine that since the Mormons are a white, Christian and American religion, that they may be offended with impunity, but that nonwhite, foreign Muslims would have to be carefully kowtowed to?

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Irk

Two actors who really get on my nerves. A gruff masculine style is not something I have a problem with. On the contrary. But somehow these guys set my teeth on edge.

Wise words

The liberal school that attempts to fortify religion by minimizing its expression, both theoretic and devotional, seems to be merely impoverishing religious symbols and vulgarizing religious aims; it subtracts from faith that imagination by which faith becomes an interpretation and idealization of human life, and retains only a stark and superfluous principle of superstition.

For meagre and abstract as may be the content of such a religion, it contains all the venom of absolute pretensions; it is no less cursed than the more developed systems with a controversial unrest and with a consequent undertone of constraint and suspicion. It tortures itself with the same circular proofs in its mistaken ambition to enter the plane of vulgar reality and escape its native element of ideas. It casts a greater blight than would a civilized orthodoxy on any joyous freedom of thought.

For the respect exacted by an establishment is limited and external, and not greater than its traditional forms probably deserve, as normal expressions of human feeling and apt symbols of moral truth. A reasonable deference once shown to authority, the mind remains, under such an establishment, inwardly and happily free; the conscience is not intimidated, the imagination is not tied up.

But the preoccupations of a hungry and abstract fanaticism poison the liberty nominally allowed, bias all vision, and turn philosophy itself, which should be the purest of delights and consolations, into an obsession and a burden to the soul.

In such a spectral form religious illusion does not cease to be illusion. Mythology cannot become science by being reduced in bulk, but it may cease, as a mythology, to be worth having.

George Santayana
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
1957(?)
Preface, pp vii-viii

Made me smile

The natural outcome

of multiculturalism, hate speech laws and cunning Muslims. Bnai Brith in this instance is the victim of the very process it supported. This kind of stuff goes on at American universities. How long before it infects our legal system? It's evil, pure and simple. A secular inquisition.

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Slash

Watching Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Seann William Scott in a 2003 action flick, The Rundown. Bad boy Scott is being dragged from the jungles of Brazil back to LA by hired muscle Johnson. Mayhem ensues.

Pervert that I am, I began to muse on other possibilities. Although not a huge fan of intergenerational stuff, (these two guys are only four years apart in age), there is a big guy/smaller guy, older brother/younger brother thing there...

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Answered prayers

When I was in the seminary in Toronto, maybe 35 years ago, I was riding the subway one evening during the rush hour commute, surrounded by all kinds of people likewise wending their way back to their homes. I was feeling how separate I was from the ordinary life of the people I was supposed to be learning how to serve. I remember wanting to find a connection with them and not be one of those priests who can't imagine ordinary life.

Ordinary life.

Well, I got what I wanted.

I am approaching another birthday. More than two decades ago I left the ministry and set out on my own, with pretty well next to nothing. In the intervening years, I have had my struggles and my victories. I have done well and I have failed. I have prospered and I have been broke. I have learned what human love is and I have had my heart broken...more than once. I worry about all the things that ordinary people worry about, having become one of them.

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Holy Writ

An astonishingly prophetic piece, written in October 1923, by the famed American iconoclast and journalist from Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956.

Apropos, since I was chatting with a fellow non-practicing Catholic about faith, etc. We are both "religious, not spiritual." Ironically, since I used to be a preacher and a theologian, a man for whom words were paramount, it is words about religion which bore me. I could happily attend a well-done Catholic ritual, but it is when the priest opens his mouth to preach that I begin to look for drugs or an exit. The worst, and most common, tendency among preachers is cheerleading, the kind of folksy uplift which is endemic to American Protestantism and which has infected a couple of generations of the holders of the apostolic succession.

When I do go to religious ceremonies over the last several years, outside of family obligations, I go to a Gnostic temple in the South Bay. The woman who presides there, who has become a good friend of mine, has had the great sense to make her homiletic remarks before the liturgy. She can be informal, humorous, professorial, etc. as she is moved. The talk stands on its own. Then she retires, vests and returns to begins the ritual...and never bothers us again. Nor does she try to. She retires into the ceremony, allowing us to do the same.

The service, although it is deeply heretical in content, is very traditionally Catholic in form and although a lot of the music is certainly not to my taste, I can sink into the ancient archetypal stream of sacramental consciousness without fear of being offended by some joke or exhortation. Once the ritual commences, it is the Soul that speaks and responds, that moves and acts, not any individual. Balm for me. If only the orthodox clerics would learn a similar modesty and respect.

HOLY WRIT

H.L. Mencken

Whoever it was translated the Bible into excellent French prose is chiefly responsible for the collapse of Christianity in France. Contrariwise, the men who put the Bible into archaic, sonorous and often unintelligible English gave Christianity a new lease on life wherever English is spoken. They did their work at a time of great theological blather and turmoil, when men of all sorts, even the least intelligent, were beginning to take a vast and unhealthy interest in exegetics and apologetics. They were far too shrewd to feed this disconcerting thirst for ideas with a Bible in plain English; the language they used was deliberately artificial even when it was new. They thus dispersed the mob by appealing to its emotions, as a mother quiets a baby by crooning to it. The Bible that they produced was so beautiful that the great majority of men, in the face of it, could not fix their minds on the ideas in it. To this day it has enchanted the English-speaking peoples so effectively that, in the main, they remain Christians, at least sentimentally. Paine has assaulted them, Darwin and Huxley have assaulted them, and a multitude of other merchants of facts have assaulted them, but they still remember the twenty-third Psalm when the doctor begins to shake his head, they are still moved beyond compare (though not, alas, to acts!) by the Sermon on the Mount, and they still turn once a year from their sordid and degrading labors to immerse themselves unabashed in the story of the manger. It is not much, but it is something. I do not admire the general run of American Bible-searchers -- Methodists, United Brethren, Baptists and such vermin. But try to imagine what the average low-browed Methodist would be if he were not a Methodist but an atheist!

The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its frequent astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to the same extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous. Its toying with ideas, in the main, has been confined to its clergy, and they have commonly reduced the business to a harmless play of technicalities --- the awful concepts of Heaven and Hell brought down to the level of a dispute of doctors in long gowns, eager only to dazzle other doctors. Its greatest theologians remain unknown to 99% of its adherents. Rome, indeed, has not only preserved the original poetry in Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry -- for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass must be a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big-top by a Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone.

Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope.

This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the Mass, is a dignified spectacle, even though he may sweat freely; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable saloon-keeper in South Bend, Indiana. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

Liberalism finally explained

While Mr. Gutfeld tries to keep the show from idling too long on partisan territory (“They get that 23 hours a day”), his own politics are fairly at home on Fox. He dismisses liberalism as

“romantic notions that are false, based on the idea of making yourself look good to other people. That’s why most men—Bill Clinton is a good example—are liberal, because they need to get laid. If you look at most left-wing guys, they’ve made a deal with the devil. They don’t really believe that shit—they’re going against their own innate nature, because liberalism is anti-man. If you believe that peace and love work, you’re not a man, because this world works on war. The only people who respect you are people who are scared of you—and that’s why Reagan was a great President. And the idea that you can negotiate with people who want you dead is a complete lie. That’s why the left is the most self-absorbed, vanity-driven enterprise. These are people who would rather feel good about themselves at a cocktail party that actually protect people’s lives. If you’re at a party and you say, ‘The war on terror is the most important thing in the world’—you won’t get a nod. But if you say, ‘Global warming is the biggest threat,’ you will get laid.”

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