Breaking the Sabbath

with my heretical musings.

Bought a Macbook Air yesterday. I have finally had it with Microsoft and the PC. Been a user since day one and remained so because of the ease of getting software, the lower cost and the fact that I had learned so many tricks under the hood to fix things when they went south. As they did, all too often.

So far the thing is good, although the smaller screen takes getting used to. Fast, light, and since it has a solid state drive, no heat while it sits on my lap. Still a learning curve, --I will keep both systems in place for a while--but especially since I got a hardly-used "pre-owned" machine at half the retail price, I'm hopeful.



#Cuckservative Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer, who used to impress me a lot in my merely conservative days, is attacking Ben Carson's sane rejection of a Muslim for president. Do the Liberals go after each other in public as much as the Right does? I don't think so. Pas d'ennemis a gauche.

Calling Carson's idea "poisonous" and out of sync with the Constitution's "ethos," he commits the very common mistake of thinking the this document is a kind of Bible. It ain't. See my 2007 post. Extraordinary thought it be, the men who wrote it never intended it to be anything of that kind. Krauthammer even goes so far as to say that "it doesn’t just set limits to power; it expresses a national ethos. It doesn’t just tell you what you’re not allowed to do; it also suggests what you shouldn’t want to do.”

Are you kidding, Rabbi?

Ultra PC Salon magazine is thrilled, of course. Republicans are great at giving aid and comfort to th e enemy. Salon is shocked that anyone should think about "religious litmus tests." Sure, when there's a Muslim involved. But what about Mormon Romney? Well, that's different...



On FB, pics of my ex and his current BF having dinner with a couple that my ex and I had dinner with years ago. One of them is a Swiss faggot --yes, I know-- who thought it was both chic and ok to do his European contempt of America thing right at the table, in my country, in my face, sibilants and all. That was the last dinner.


And another FB friend is "liking" some sanctimoniously whiny article about how "the Black man in America" is doomed to death or prison. And of course that is "America's" fault. Nothing that ever happens to them is ever their fault, of course. Where she sees a Passion Play, I see parasites.


Finished Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions. I am sure that he has his reasons, but he sticks to the lingo of "those who hold the unconstrained vision" and "those who hold the constrained vision" throughout the book. Makes for clunky reading. He does not simply use shorthand such as  "the dreamers" and "the realists." Which is how I look at the two visions. An outline here.


Francis The Talking Pope clearly holds the unconstrained vision, which 2000 years of Christian theology says is a lie. And since Vatican II and the Church's sudden creation of this novel fulcrum for all Catholic thinking and acting --"the dignity of the human person"-- that poisonous vision has infected it at all levels. Original Sin anyone? The first of the seven principles which the ultraliberal Unitarian Universalists hold, by the way, is "the inherent worth and dignity of every human person."

Still marching through The Passion of the Western Mind. The tensions, which have sometimes become a dance, now seem quite split. And no one has come up with a way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I grit my teeth while he described the post-moderns as having given up belief in grand narratives. Bullshit. Their grand narrative is progressive socialism. Hicks' Explaining Post-Modernism makes that quite clear. Masquerading as "critical theory" open-minded non-dogmatists, they have greated the intellectual gulag of the modern university, where failure to be sufficiently enthusiastic about the naked Emperor gets your goose cooked.

The book does reveal to me, by my reactions along the way, my divided loyalties, making me, too, a modern Westerner.

As I continue to muse about a post-Christian religion for the Whites, I had the thought the other day that the figure of the Devil should be modeled on Saul Alinksy and the anti-Christ on Martin Luther King.

The basic mythic structure would, I think, be the Grail.

On theological basics, I think I come down on the side of pluralism, but not the "all religions are equally true" version. That makes little sense to me. Something more like Knitter's mutuality model, which sees both truth and falsehood in all religions. This make the claim to universal truth less important. In my current musings, under the metaphor of the light refracted through a spectrum, all religions --well, many-- have their necessary bias in the rainbow. Somewhat like language. We all speak our native tongues, our particular language, but no one speaks Language.

The truth claims of a religion should focus on internal consistency and on avoiding contradictions --not alternative views but contradictions-- to reason or, with caveats, science. After all, with centuries and centuries of debate between theologians and scholars, people's religious allegiances remain.
What makes for change is not correct argument but passionate conviction, cultural shifts, and the contigencies of history. At this point, a religion which tries to present itself as true in the same terms as science is barking up the wrong tree, I think. But how do you avoid that tree without simple consigning yourself to the prison of the subject?

Unless you and everyone else is already there.

Mr B just called from Genoa. I am very lucky to be in love with a happy man.


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