Archetyping

Archetypes are species blueprints. I use the model of a constellation to think about them, especially the archetypal masculine. I think that pretty well any form of masculinity can be located somewhere with and within these twelve basic types, singly or in combination. They unfold from the primal four: father, warrior, hunter and friend. I have not listed their shadow forms, eg healer/charlatan, king/tyrant, etc.

The Culture bearers might be divided into two: the poet/singer and the teacher/mentor. One creates cultural forms, the other passes them on.

As I have noted before, homosexual men tend to cluster around the Culture and the Ornament "stars" in the constellation. They are not uncommon in the Sacred star, either...at least in Christian countries, where you get a confluence of culture and ornament with spirituality.

Cranky motives

When William F Buckley hired George Will to write a twice-weekly column for the National Review, Will was unsure he could turn out that much work on a regular basis. Where would his inspiration come from. Buckley told him that he'd be annoyed about something at least twice a week and that would provide his inspiration.

Truer words.

I do occasionally write about things that make me happy or smile. And my icons of the male form proceed solely from appreciation. No ranting there.

But the typical literary form of this blog is the rant. It's not elegant --though I think that (my overuse of parentheticals excepted) I am a good writer-- but truth, infallible truth in this case, need not be arrived at only through the high roads of rhetoric.

So, two and a half brief annoyances.

Anti-Christian. The Pope made some speech about the tyranny of finance and the poverty of the poor and the world financial system. As if he's some kind of expert. My usual complaint about clerics lecturing experts based on ideals they concoct. 

Pro-Christian. Or at least anti-anti-Christian. Media ignorance about Christianity, or wilful distortion of Christianity by media and entertainment types, almost as a badge of honor. An X Files episode where a Bible-based cult believed that Christ had returned to earth as a foot-long slug who needed human hosts... 

Anti-reactive/compulsive-inclusionism. In an otherwise laudable article about the revolting prayers of a Muslim imam at the funeral service for the dead Navy Seals in Afghanistan, a Jewish writer complains that they had been deprived of prayer to the Seals' "Judeo-Christian" God. I have complained about this before. Given the rarity of Jews in the Navy, much less the Seals, what's the likelihood of there being a Jew in the bunch? 

UnReformed

In my regular perusal of a religion news aggregator, I held my Catholic nose to watch a video about  currents in American Evangelicalism. I sorta see it like the Jesuits. Lots of words (read, spoken and sung) and lots of subject-based emoting. It's clearly compelling to some people, but I don't get it. As my friend the bishop of the Ecclesia Gnostic Sacramentorum says, I may be a Gnostic, but at least I'm not a Protestant.

Sola scriptura. Building your whole religion just on the Bible. On that library which masquerades as a book. As if it were the Betty Crocker Recipes of religion, that you could start from zero and build up a whole faith from it, just by itself.

Of course no one does that. They all have crypto-Traditions and crypto-Magisteriums. And Protestants pretty much start everything out from North and Western Europe in the 1500's.

Zzz.

I'd rather go to a Russian Orthodox liturgy in Old Slavonic where I couldn't understand more than a dozen words of it.

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More natural imbalance

The near-idolatrous reverence of liberals for The Ecosystem is well known. For the last thirty years at least, hardly any nature programming does not hold forth about the complex interconnectedness of the ecosystem and the disasters that can result --in often entirely unexpected ways-- when any part of it is tampered with.

I thought of this because of a brief discussion with a friend about bumble bees. It started out with sunglasses he was wearing. I'll spare you the details. I got curious and looked up Wiki and found a quote from Darwin. He noticed that a certain type of clover was visited solely by bumble bees and that it must rely on them for pollination. Bee nests were destroyed by field mice. And so where mice-eating cats abounded, so did bumblebees, on which the clover depended. He pointed out that cats were, further along the chain, the protectors of bees and of clover. Not an obvious link, but a real one. The idea of the ecosystem need not be worshiped in order to be true.

But liberals never seem to think of human communities as ecosystems, as natural systems. Because they don't really accept the idea of a human nature, preferring to think of our species as the one blank slate on the planet. They assume that society and society's laws lay hid in night/ Liberalism said, Let the Managerial State be!...and all was light. But the examples of disaster resulting from well-intentioned but compulsive and chronic tinkering with the human ecosystem are too numerous. All of Marxism is one long planned and disastrous tinkering with it. Liberalism, its not-often-enough acknowledged cousin, plays the same game and similar downstream miseries result.

Who would imagine, if they decided to cut down on the number of cats in a rural area --because, for example, they threaten birds' eggs-- that one day you could wind up with cloverless fields of mice? The human system may in fact be far more complex and interconnected, yet fiddling with it is the Liberals' daily bread.

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Starz

I do like Chad Allen as Donald Strachey. Can't think of a gay character in film or TV remotely like him. I even like the low-budget kinda semi-noir claustrophobic set style of the series.

Joshua Tree, 1951. A black-and-white art style film about James Dean. Not bad. (I liked The Roomate better.) I have two degrees of separation from the rebel without a cause. My sister --who died nine years ago today-- bought her house from a old New York actor who had a fling with him back in the 50's. My parents' place is right next door. So I got invited over for drinks one evening. That evening also gave me two degrees from Elizabeth Taylor. Eventful :)

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OBTW

Ariel Castro, a Puerto Rican Hispanic, kept three women as sex slaves for ten years. Two of them are clearly White.

Why is there not racial outrage?

Can you imagine if a White man kept two Hispanic women in that state for that time?

Whites: The Most Foolish People On The Planet.

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Obamanation continues

The Benghazi cover-up. The IRS attacks on the Right. The DOJ about AP phone records.

And to think that Richard Nixon resigned merely over a single political robbery...

And why did Alberto Gonzalez resign as AG?

Behind the Curtain: D.C. turns on Obama - POLITICO.com:

One can only hope.

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Yahwehs Behaving Badly, again

On Killing Canaanites: One Simple, Hardly Worth Mentioning (but I feel that I should) Thought:

I followed a link to a discussion --mostly among Bible-Only evangelical types, poor things-- about God's orders to the Israelites to commit what we currently call genocide and which we consider an atrocity and a crime against humanity. It's an old old old problem for Christians about the Old Testament.

Marcion simply decided to cut and run, dropping the Jewish scriptures entirely. The orthodox Church kept both Testaments and then proceeded to grapple with the perceived difference between Jesus' Father, the God of the Sermon on the Mount, and the fairly regular bloodletting which Jesus' Father mandated in his "earlier" life. And it's been grappling for two thousand years. In ancient times it was the question of how to contain both the very anthropomorphic deity of the Bible with the Uncaused Caused and Ultimate GoodTruthBeauty of Greek thinking. It's the conflict between Pascal's "God of the philosophers" and "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."

The farther I move away from the Liberal bubble in which most people live, the clearer its outlines and boundaries become. All these nice Christians are like fish in the waters of modernity, what I might call post-war UN moralism. All kinds of grand and highminded pronouncements about rights and such. The farther away I move, the thinner the discourse becomes. Although, as young Dr. Richwine can tell you, the liberal snake still packs a deadly venom if you cross him with taboo and heretical notions.

Part of what I have kept from my encounter with Gnosticism, and my earlier and more fundamentally transforming encounter with AIDS, is that God cannot be innocent of the structures of the universe which he has created. Sin did not create death. God did. I don't see any way around that. And that tells you something about God that you might not want to know.

One of my observations about Christianity's acceptance of scientific evolution is that it has, I think, failed to absorb the full shock not only how immense in time and space, but how violent is the structure of this created world. Think just of all the creatures, on this planet alone, who were engaged in the bloody and savage business of eating each other to death even before hominids appeared. And on this planet alone, how many die-offs were there before Homo Sapiens? Suffering and death are built in. And God did it.

Think again of all the ways in which human beings have died and continue to die every hour, even as I write this. About one every second of every minute. And think of the centrality in the Gospel of Love of one particular and central death, a gruesome episode of torture and crucifixion. Clearly, despite the plentiful goo in Christianity about love and peace and joy, etc., savagery is central to it. And to its God. After all, don't these pious evangelicals believe in Hell?

A couple of thousand murdered Canaanites is therefore hardly exceptional.

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More reasons to abandon universal suffrage

Americans Trust Actors Most | FrontPage Magazine:

Americans trust Tom Hanks.

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Some day

"All men are created equal" will seem as antique as The Divine Right of Kings.

HT to a rightwing traditionalist.

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