The sacred digital divide

FBook tried to get me to friend an old work colleague. The very straight guy who got all girly and gushy about Obama's smile. His profile included a link to this site:

Founded          2010

About              SacredAgent is the first interactive online source of personalized wisdom.

Company
Overview         Our intelligent software “Agent” learns about your troubles and hopes, and selects insights just for you from 5,000 years of the world’s most respected secular and spiritual sources--including psychology, literature, science, and sports, in addition to the major religious traditions.

Whether you’re a devout practitioner of a particular tradition, interested in an interfaith blend, or prefer exclusively secular wisdom, SacredAgent will deliver insights that meet your needs.

SacredAgent delivers wisdom as a unique multimedia experience within a stunning visual and auditory landscape. We invite you to explore this new path in your journey.

Description            NOTE (APRIL 28, 2011): The SacredAgent website cannot handle the traffic it's receiving. We've taken the site down while we upgrade the site architecture and server infrastructure. We plan to reactivate SacredAgent soon. To receive a notification when we're back up, please "Like" this Facebook page. Thank you!

So I went over to the website to get my shot of the interactive online source of personalized wisdom. And got this.

Now THAT's thinking outside the box

From Five Feet of Fury, theory meets an unspeakable reality. LOL.

Classic

Which great man of the West in the last two thousand years
--king, philosopher, warrior, statesman, you name it--
could this face not fit?

The Company of Men

Politics on the ground

Remarks and reflections from a bantering session with a friend this morning.

Aside from certain sexual and reproduction-related issues, can you name me any issues on which progressives/liberals do not require

1. more money out of my pocket in taxes
    and
2. more regulation of increasing areas of behavior?


They fulfill James Burnham's prediction of the managerial state. Not a socialism where private property is owned by the goverment, but --as with National Socialism in Germany,  btw-- private property is so heavily and closely regulated and controlled by the government as to make an actual takeover almost superfluous.

My friend was disgusted that certain members of the Christian Right --one of his personal betes noirs--have declared that regardless of Mitt Romney's politics, they cannot vote for him, because a Latter Day Saint in the White House would legitimate the religion of Mormonism. Because he is a dog lover, I asked him if he could vote for a politically compatible Muslim, given Islam's designation of pooches as unclean animals whose presence in a house drives out angels, deprives one of virtue and makes prayer impossible. Well, of course he would not vote for such a person with such a stupid religious view. I dubbed him the Canine Right.

Speaking of dogs and progressives, my friend expressed some very un-Christian wishes about progressive and dog-concerned SF supervisor Scott Weiner, one more of our secularist Calvins here in Geneva-by-the-Bay.

Did I say something about progressives, money and regulation?

Kimball on Burnham

 The wishful-thinking partisans of Catholic "social justice" teaching ought to take heed, but will not.

Published in 1943, The Machiavellians is ostensibly an exposition of, and homage to, some modern followers of Machiavelli. Its larger purpose is to distinguish between the sentimental and the realistic in politics. Dante (in De Monarchia), Rousseau, and the architects of the French Revolution are prime examples of the former: they represent “politics as wish”: noble, optimistic, ultimately futile (indeed, ultimately “reactionary and vicious” in Burnham’s judgment).

Machiavelli and his heirs belong to the latter camp. They saw things as they were and faced up to unpleasant facts about human nature. Because they saw humanity as it was—in its imperfection, its treachery, its unceasing desire for power—they were the true friends of liberty. They did not exchange real freedoms for pleasant-sounding but empty idealities. They understood that all political freedom is imperfect freedom, won through struggle, preserved with difficulty, constantly subject to assault and diminution.

From Kimball's essay.

Some too-close-to-home observations:

Being an ex-Catholic is not the same thing as being a non-Catholic, and an ex-Catholic with a taste for theological argumentation is a decidedly strange hybrid.

If he occasionally exaggerated the extent or imminence of the evils he described—Burnham was liberally endowed with what Henry James called “the imagination of disaster”—he was fearless in opposing and exposing the totalitarian temptation. Which is to say that he was fearless in opposing and exposing the most corrosive, most addictive, most murderous ideology of our time. 

Burnham’s essential intellectual failing, Orwell thought, was in “predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening.” Nazi power is on the rise, ergo it will continue irresistibly; American capitalism is in crisis, ergo it will necessarily disintegrate—except that the rude, unkempt force of reality intervenes, transforming those ergos into “might have beens.”

His “besetting sin,” Orwell said, is to overstate his case: “He is too fond of apocalyptic visions, too ready to believe that the muddled processes of history will happen suddenly and logically.” (Orwell makes the arresting observation that, during the Second World War, the smarter Brits were often the more pessimistic: “their morale was lower because their imaginations were stronger.”)

Burnham's Law

I find myself continually impressed with the insight in James Burham's statement that

the liberal, and the group, nation, or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself."

Morally disarmed. Without moral standing. At the complete beck and call of. Capitulating to.

Eric Holder's people

Affirmative Action Political Correctness in the military now. Doesn't that make you feel safe? After her, maybe they'll find a nice Muslim from, oh, say, Fort Hood, to run things.

From bad to WTF?

The baptismal font in the Sistine Chapel, modern 1996 version

and the brand new one just installed for use at Epiphany 2012

Designed by a priest-professor of liturgy in Rome, "the new font is presented as an olive tree, whose base is a stone taken from the Jordan River, and whose top is a shiny golden ball representing the sun, which, when opened becomes a shell containing the water for baptism."

Here it is with the top on...

This certainly calls for a caption contest...

The Beast Who Ate Cleveland?
A Space Ship Landed In My Olive Tree?

Representin'

Like "discriminatory" and "exclusionary", the word pair "overrepresented" and "underrepresented" are politically loaded rhetorical devices designed to block thinking and to serve a progressive agenda. Even the dictionary definition of underrepresented acknowledges that it describes "inadequate" representation rather than "disproportionate." Disproportion simply describes a mathematical difference, while inadequacy clearly inscribes a complaint and implies a need for remedy.

No one ever complains that Blacks are overrepresented in basketball or the civil service, only in prison or on death row. Jews are underrepresented in the military; when was the last time you heard a hue and cry about that? Blacks are underrepresented in the ranks of combat troops: where's the NAACP calling for more of them at the front lines? But to get more of them as firemen or cops, we have the Federal government preventing qualified Whites from taking those jobs.

This is part of the fraud in the diversity/inclusiveness game. Blacks are 13% of the US population. Jews are 2%. Shall we make a law requiring that their "representation" in every walk of life, profession and activity shall match that number?


The real issue is wanting to have historically less or un successful groups become numerous in positions of power, wealth and prestige. As if mere numbers granted this and the lack of same were due to some nefarious plot.

This whole paradigm is overrepresented in BS and underrepresented in reality.

Hell hath no fury

Ah, vox populi, vox populi. An empowered laywoman cheerleader, outraged and paying attention, having just seen a dinner theatre version of Les Miserables, takes her stand against priestcraft privilege and foreign oppression. In the spirit of Scarlett O'Hara she cries, "I'll never be kneeling again!"

Hang in there! We can overvome this ridiculous liturgical crackdown from the Rome. Let’s just keep praying that the next pope is a Vatican 2 pope. As an English speaking Catholic, I refuse to kneel at any part of the mass. When priests are required to kneel, then I’ll kneel. I knelt enough as a youngster and refuse to go there a again. We need to assert our baptismal rights at the table and stop walking on liturgical eggshells! WE are Church, NOT Rome! WE celebrate! WE believe!

People like her have been "praying that the next pope is a Vatican 2 pope" since John XXIII died in 1963. Howzat werkin outforya, sistah?