Sunday, May 31, 2015

Out of character

I am actually thinking about ethics and morality this morning. Scary.

For a pleasant respite:


He has appeared before on ExC.

Now back to my ethical ruminations.

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Saturday, May 30, 2015

Echoes

Had my ex over for dinner last night. We were together for 8 years and that ended 14+ years ago and have seen each other regularly.

But occasionally a kind of disagreement happens which rings up emotional memories of all the crappy arguments we had when we were a couple. Happened last night. We got through it and past it but it's one of the cons of knowing someone a long time.

The same kind of familiarity, when pleasant, is comforting. But when a conflict today awakens feelings of older strings of such stuff, it has a particularly unpleasant echo, even years later.

It's one of the reasons that long-term relationships break up, when the latest conflict remains connected to a long history of them and there seems to be no hope of stopping the cycle. It can lead to relationship despair.

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Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Losing Her Religion

A girl describes her reasons for leaving a religious cult in these words:

“It is a religion that preaches love and acceptance, but the reality is everything is conditional. Love and acceptance is only extended as long as members practise absolute obedience and question nothing, ever,” 

And no, amazingly, it was not the Liberal Social Justice Faith she was talking about!


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Sunday, May 24, 2015

Thanks again, Rev King, for your legacy

In marking the 50th anniversary of the Moynihan report and engaging in the usual high-minded hand-wringing and fake causality memes, the liberal The Economist still can't hide the facts about "Black America":
If it were a separate country, it would have a worse life expectancy than Mexico, a worse homicide rate than Ivory Coast and a higher proportion of its citizens behind bars than anywhere on earth. This is despite the fact that, overall, America is home to the richest, most successful population of black African descent that the world has ever seen.

Read that again.


My thought experiments remain telling.

Imagine what a separate and independent country composed entirely of AfricansInAmerica would be like. (see above)

Imagine what the USA would be like if you raptured away all 40 million AfricansInAmerica.

As I've oft said, I do not at all in the slightest believe in Utopia, but I see no reason to embrace Catastrophe.

--

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Thursday, May 21, 2015

Esau and Jacob, continued

My trip to see my family was very sad. In the wake of my mother's death, old fissures have turned to enmities and new cracks have opened up that I fear may be a very long time healing, if ever. To take responsibility for my part in all this, my involvement was too little and too late.

This kind of family breakdown in the wake of a parent's death is one of the oldest stories in the book.
And also, in The Book. The whole Book of Genesis is just one long dysfunctional family disaster after another. As in my case, the feud is over the birthright of a dying parent.



Everyone feels that their position is just, their pain is unique, and the trouble is caused entirely by others with hidden agendas and unprovoked malice. How original. Well, really, how original sin.

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Monday, May 18, 2015

Fact Vs Narrative

Spent yesterday afternoon with a very old and dear friend and his wife and very smart teenage son. They are all drenched in East Coast liberalism...and live in a tony all-White suburb north of NYC.

It's a kind of game among us now when the Old Rightwinger shows up with his outlandish opinions. The boy, a powerhouse of a kid, whom I have known since he was an infant, tells me that he doesn't believe that I believe the things I say because I am way too smart for that.

I get that a lot. Of course, "smart" by itself has little to do with it. As I explained to him, perhaps I believe those things precisely because I am so smart. And anyway, we all live inside narratives far more than facts.

But my conversation with these folks, who are wonderful, makes me see how utterly drenched they are in the dogmas of liberalism, especially the absolute equality of the races and the sexes. Any suggestion that this is not so brings on a kind of momentary seizure.

And if you look at facts --at least within the narrative I now find most accurate!-- there is more reason to believe in the Holy Trinity than in these two utterly unfounded fantasies.

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Saturday, May 16, 2015

It's what Malcom wanted

The Only Antidote to the Oppression of Blacks in America - The Unz Review:

I have come to a very similar conclusion.
Both what is needed and why they will never ask for it:
they endlessly complain that The Man is keeping them down
when in fact he is the only thing holding them up.

'via Blog this'


Update: on a quiet Sunday morning in Manhattan's Chelsea district, I am on line at Starbucks for a cup of coffee. Then begins the minstrel show, where one of Obama's Sons, in his 40's, dressed all in yellow, starts up with semi-nonsense repetitive questions and statements to the staff behind the case, flashing his iphone at them, smiling all the time but with just enough hint of crazy to suggest that he could switch from grinning to chimpout in a nanosecond. He kept it up for five minutes. Everyone else in the crowded store made believe they didn't see it.

The staff in this store is almost totally Black, and, as with all Starbucks employees, chronically pleasant. I am sure they were mortified.

Or maybe not. Maybe they were pleased to see all the White and Whitish patrons do their polite make believe out of fear, putting up with crap that, in a Black environment, would have been met with vigorous response. Who knows?

Thanks again, Rev King, for your legacy.

----

Eternal recurrence

Traditional Bible-based end-of-the-world image:


Cool contemporary Gaia-based end-of-the-world image:


23rd St and Lex, Manhattan: "It's not warming, it's dying!"

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Mohammedan BS

Andrews University Prof Contract Ends After Conversion to Islam:

Typical Muslim convert BS. There's no contradiction between her Islam and her Seventh Day Adventist upbringing. "To be a Muslim you must embrace Christianity, since the Koran holds that Jesus is a prophet."

It's like a Catholic saying, "We're still Jews, because we recognize Moses as a prophet."

Reminds me of that Black Episcopalian priestess of a few years ago. "I'm a better Christian now that I'm a Muslim..." She also allowed as how worshipping in the mosque reminded her that people of color outnumbered Whites in the world and that was "a relief."


Why can't these twats just tell the truth?

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'via Blog this'

Tempus fugit

and does all sorts of other things, too.

A recent shot of famous neurology MD and writer Oliver Sacks, author of the fascinating The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, looking every bit the aging Jewish doctor.





The same fella in 1961...





Dr Sacks, I discover, has much preferred the male to the female. Who knew?

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Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Mass appeal

I went to Mass on last Saturday in my mother's parish church, a beautiful Tudor structure, where she was especially remembered on the first anniversary of her death.
Pedantic historical note: prior to Vatican II in the 60's, Masses were always said in the morning. But since liturgical days start on the evening beforehand (like Christmas Eve still does for us), the Sunday Mass, which remains obligatory, was allowed on the eve of Sunday to permit more people to find a service to attend. Now you will find Sunday Masses from Saturday afternoon to late Sunday night. 

It was a normal parish service, the church mostly filled with local people, a lot of grey hairs but a noticeable contingent of young families with children. The music was what you might expect as the soundtrack to an afternoon soap opera, testosterone-lowering but well sung. Aside from the priest and deacon, the whole thing was done by women. The sound of high heels clanging across the sanctuary floor was constant. What psychological effect does it have to see two older men in robes surrounded by eight women and girls? Given my sensitivities, they seemed more prisoners than presiders; it is a dead end for males.

The scripture readings were chocabloc with love talk this week. The priest, with his remnant Brooklyn accent, gave a clear and practical homily about what Christian love really meant: not a gushy feeling of warmth and benevolence but a readiness to be of service. He's a very Jesus guy, the pastor. Jesus, Jesus, all the time. He ignored the theology of the Gospel of John by misinterpreting "love one another" as "love everybody", which that Gospel clearly does not mean. It is a work which uses the word love but which is otherwise very dualistic and exclusive about who is Us and who is Them. The children of God are not the whole human race, but only the community of Jesus. It's repeated endlessly but Christian like to ignore that nowadays. Anyway, he played out the realistic circles and degrees of intimacy and enmity that we all live with and how to negotiate them with active, not emotional, love. Not bad at all, Father Joe.

The deacon read the intercessions. Here things crashed. These prayers have no fixed text in the modern rite and may be cooked up from scratch. Scratch abounds. Although gramatically well written, they contained the usual thinly-veiled positions on social issues, moral exhortations, etc. The one that irked me most was something about those who serve the poor and the sick and those who teach should know that they are "building the Kingdom of God on earth."

Nyah!!!!!!

I ain't no sola scriptura guy, but I have done a search and in no place whatever in the New Testament is the verb to build  οἰκοδομέω  and the phrase Kingdom of God   ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ  ever used together. The Kingdom of God is many things but it is definitely not something that humans build.
That utopian crapola, though, makes the phrase very common among contemporary groovy Christians, who want to identify their pet social projects with Jesus. My eyes rolled.

The Eucharistic Prayer he used was one I never heard before. No idea where it came from. Definitely some modern composition.

On leaving the building, all the women were given roses for Mothers' Day, including my 22 year old unmarried niece who is, I hope, not a mother. Non-discrimination ruled.

As I was pulling out of the parking lot, the recorded bells began to play one of the very many very bad Catholic hymns from olden times. The feminization of the Church is not a recent event, just worse now that feminism infects it all and men are on the run. The hymn is called "On This Day O Beautiful Mother" and even as a boy I thought it was embarrassing to have to sing this cooing love song to Jesus' Mommy. Being the intellectual/aesthetic type that I am,  Bhakti style religion has always put me off.  For the theo-musical masochists among you, I leave this link and depart.

Peace out.

PS Next day I visited the cemetary, where her ashes, my Dad's and my sister's are buried, all of whose remains I put in the ground with my own hands. There is one more spot left in the plot and one empty corner of the tombstone for another name one day: mine.

--

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Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Racism: The Most Destructive Idea In Western History

You know about racism. It's The Worstest Thing Ever. In like, all of, like, history and stuff.

And you know, as we all know, that the only kind of racism that counts is White Racism. Sure, Iranians may have a very dim view of Arabs and the Malays may envy and loathe the Overseas Chinese. Hell, Latinos are definitely not fond of Africans in America.

But the only thing "racism" really means is that White people's attitudes, beliefs and actions toward non-Whites, --Blacks most especially of all-- are both incorrect and immoral . So that any hint of racism in a White person --and after all, only Whites are really affected by it-- means that you are stupid and evil.

I mean, just try to make a case that giving someone a job because he's darker than you is racist and, well, they'll laugh you out of the room. Only Whites can be racist, you silly White wabbit.

So let's put it this way: if you, as a Person Living With Whiteness, accept that A. racism is a real thing and B. is in fact The Worstest Thing Ever, and that C. only you and your kind are infected with this Real and Worstest Thing Ever, what conclusion must you eventually draw about yourself and your kind?


If only You People are carriers of this Worst of All Evils, then your only option is suicide, no?
I mean, like, for the sake of the planet.

(Well, you can try to engage in a root and branch moral excavation of yourself and your people and your culture to kill off "racism," --as most White people have desperately tried to do--but it's obvious that after 50+ years of trying, that Black people are still a huge mess because of your "White privilege" and your "White supremacy". I mean, without that, they'd be just like, well Swiss people with dark skins who like dance. But that hasn't happened, therefore your attempt at self-cure is futile. So back to option A.)




#WhiteLivesClearlyShouldNotMatter



Unless you want to go on being stupid and bad and being, according to Jewish Lesbian Susan Sontag, "the cancer of humanity."

Conclusion: once Whites accepted that racism was both real* and terrible, they signed their own death warrant.

---

*PS. It's not.

Maxxed Out

On my bad days, the Fall of the US in a short paragraph:
Once the Blacks managed to convince White Men that the sorry state of Africans in America was because of their "Racism", they collapsed in a fit of moral self-indictment, and White women, combining the eternal resentments of females and their contempt for men who give in, rose up as a group and stabbed their men in the back. 
Example: White feminists join up with African-in-America feminist to trash White masculinity as the world's greatest problem. 



Especially with women, it is important to distinguish between
a. What they say they want
b. What they actually want but won't say (but expect you to guess)
c. What they really need but don't know (and will deny if you tell them)

As with all human things, pretend to be deaf and watch the action. There lies the truth.

To paraphrase Kate Hepburn's Elinor of Aquitaine in Lion In Winter, "Such, my angels, is the role of race and sex in history,"

Some of the Angry Young White Men that I read are angry about the upcoming Mad Max movie, which furthers the emasculation theme from Thunderdome, where Tina Turner ruled and the theme song was "We Don't Need Another Hero". In this latest overtly feminist flick, Charlize Theron plays "Imperator Furiosa" and is clearly the main character and dominant over Tom Hardy's secondary Max.

The Potemkin Village stretches out into eternity. Just as no White domain must be left unColored, so no Male domain must be free from vagina monologues.

--

---


Franciscan wave

Last night I dreamt I was in a huge crowd in St Peter's square  --how come they call it a square if it's round?-- at some kind of religious service and at one point the assembled multitude started doing something like a mix between The Wave and the kind of jump up and jump around from the old wigger House of Pain days in the 90's.

Guess who I spied up toward the front, doing the same freaky moves as the rest?

Francis The Talking Pope.

I guess this dream kinda encapsulates me feelings about him.

For all it matters.

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Monday, May 11, 2015

Perfidious Albion

Watching yet another Brit series, Penny Dreadful, I note their elites' loathing of Christianity (and their own country's past) and their utter lack of scruple about or even interest in the truth. Whatever story forwards their story is the truth.

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Thursday, May 07, 2015

Wassup, Blakkamerica?

Prospects for Black America | American Renaissance:

An AR report on a Manhattan Institute conference on the future of  Black America, specifically in light of the huge illegitimacy rate among them, almost 3/4, 50 years after the Moynihan Report predicted doom for them if the rate reached 25%...a rate which Whites have now surpassed on their own.

It was populated by conservatives, Black and White both, not White Nationalists

Almost completely ignored by the mainstream media. Why? The general feeling, regardless of race, is that only Blacks can fix what ails them. Apparently that kind of "empowerment" doesn't fit The Narrative.

Here's some excerpts from two Black speakers:

Poverty and racism did not destroy the black family, (Robert Woodson) said, because the black family was much stronger when those problems were worse. When welfare became a right, the result was “moral deregulation.” 
If illegitimacy rates suggest that 70 percent of black families are dysfunctional, it means 30 percent are functional. “We should study them and find out what their coping mechanisms are,” he said. “We need to stop studying failure; you learn nothing by studying failure. Find out who has a job and why.”
** 
Glenn Loury of Brown University pointed out that in any conversation about race, “facts don’t govern; the narrative governs,” and the narrative is one of white responsibility for the misbehavior of blacks.

Finally, he noted that “people get into leaky boats and come from all over the world to live in the United States, and they generally do pretty well.” This makes people turn to blacks and ask, “What’s up with you people?”


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'via Blog this'

Wednesday, May 06, 2015

Irked

Been stewing all morning about a comment in a friend's Facebook post. Yeah, what a waste of time, right? When one of my patients --shows you the power of the unconscious-- spontaneously told me that Facebook and e-mail and the internet were all evil and should be shut down, I could relate.

Rather than playing out the whole tiny cramped micro-event, I will just say that the woman who wrote it exemplifies the ethical self-adulation and condescendingly passive-aggressive contempt that lives within the "progressive" bubble and its high-mindedly suicidal narrative.  Were the bitch within arm's reach, I would have back-handed her across her smug mouth.

And when I become Consul of the Post-American Republic, she's gonna be parachuted right into the darkest African heart of the wall prison-city of Detroit. Then we'll see #Who'sLifeMatters.

Now back to my excellent salt bagel and coffee.

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Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Dis n Dat on Religions

Dipping into the world of Christian fundamentalists, you can see the regular style of rhetoric. Every sphere has its own, but theirs is pretty recognizable. The tricks and turns, the alternating combo of fire-breathing, co-conspiratorial winking, scripture verse quoting, and good ol' boy joshing. Black preachers are especially adept at this. I consider the flamboyant preaching tactics of evangelicals to be the verbal parallel to the formalist rituals of the High Church types.

Like White Nationalists, they spend a lot of time enthusiastically excommunicating each other as "false teachers." Calvinists vs Arminians, Christian Zionists vs Christian Supersessionists, King James Only vs New Translations, Dispensationalists vs Nons, etc.

The wacky world of sola scriptura. To my (admittedly fallen away but still very) Catholic ears, it all seems cramped and obsessive: predestination, etc. And narcoleptic. Trying to get me to care about these debates has about as much chance as attracting my moral anxiety over dancing, drinking and smoking.

But I will give it one thumbs up: it is an entirely male world focused on the truth of ideas, based on evidence and logic. Certainly not the mushy kindergarten victimfest of, say, the eco-fem LCWR and their post-menopausal bloviations.

It seems that, along with Universal Equality, the Churches --Rome included, Orthodoxy not-- have seemingly forgotten their bimillenial theological basic assumption that the New Covenant supercedes the Old. It is now suddenly called anti-semitic "supersessionism". (Do Muslims, I wonder, ever get accused of "supersessionism" or just Christians?) Sorta like the natural political and social order of human societies suddenly being turned into oppressively sexist "patriarchy."



One thing I note is that the relationship between Christian Zionists and American Jews is definitely a one-way affair. Along with Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro reminds us that the real "religion" of their fellow modern Jews is secularist Leftism and the Holocaust; only a minority practice actual historic Judaism. I wonder if the evangelicals waving their Israeli flags pay much attention to how unrequited their love is.



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Monday, May 04, 2015

Roddenberryism

I watched one of the original Star Trek episodes over the weekend. The groovy Roddenberry ethic in full flower from the beginning.


While no Chris Pine, or even Scott Bakula,
William Shatner when young was not bad at all.


Captured by an alien race that lives by conquest and a warrior honor code, but which has had to shift into humanoid bodies to achieve their dastardly ends, Jim Kirk and company use sex to turn these monsters into needy primates and wind up inviting them into the galaxy as "friends."

Sound like a plan, no? (Welcome to the Sixties. Again.)

---

PS. The fundamental ethic of Star Trek is The Prime Directive: non-intervention in less developed cultures. You can see here the self-loathing of the "colonialists."

And then we have another Numinous Negro, a more than brilliant Black who creates a supercomputer.  In real life, no Blacks have ever won a Nobel Prize in the sciences.



Memory

Later in the week I am returning to NY for the first anniversary of my mother's death. Things among my siblings have not been good in the interim and I am not looking forward to this visit.

Sign? While making coffee this morning I had a flashback to her cremation. Things were already tense and while we sat in folding chairs in front of her coffin, one of my sisters suggested naming a secular charity for people to donate to, while another mentioned the religious charity she had contributed to for almost fifty years.

One brother, normally a sensible guy, objected to that because he works with a lot of Jews and "they wouldn't want to contribute to a Catholic organization."

I said nothing, not because I had no opinion, but because what would have come out of my mouth would have created a rift that would have been pretty hard to fix. Although readers of ExC might be surprised by this, one of my gifts in real life, is shutting the hell up when what I want to blurt out is likely to create more trouble than the things I want to blurt out about.

This is true in my family, especially of late. One way I try not to contribute to the proffered hooks on which one could hang a variety of hurts and angers is simply to say nothing or to change the subject.

My anger at my brother was twofold. This was my mother's death, not his colleagues'. Second, the now common instinct for White Christian self-erasure in face of a privileged minority and its imagined sensibilities...that really pissed me off. Cause God knows, no Jewish family whose mother had contributed for a half century to a Jewish charity would have wiped that out to avoid discomfiting some Gentile strangers.

Yeah, it's gonna be a great trip.

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Sunday, May 03, 2015

AfroNegroKimeticism and Us

Wandering through YouTube, I came across some DNA testing info on Egyptian royal mummies. The comments --a global mosh pit as usual-- were full of claims and bile by AfricansInAmerica, claiming that Egypt was a Black African civilization and that this made them special or something.

Sigh.

But even if it were, what difference does it make now? Am I supposed to somehow think highly of Jawahn Antwan Khalid because of some imagined connection of 3000 years ago? My question would be, if you come from such great people, why are you so pathetic now?

If the population of the city of Rome in the 9th century AD could claim descent from Augustus and Diocletian, that would only make their 9th century weakness, poverty and squalor a source of shame for them.

Same with Guatemalans and the Maya, or the Mexican Indians and the Aztec, or the Peruvian Indians the Inca, etc.

And some day, if our devolution continues, our desperate White descendants can claim that their ancestors created one of the world's greatest civilizations. But compared to what their condition is likely to be, all that will do is condemn them.




Sunday morning Orthodoxy

Despite my deep disappointment, to put it mildly, with how the churches have capitulated to the rising religion of Universal Equality, and my transgressive interest in all kinds of heretical POVs, I retain a fundamentally positive --though not uncritical-- attitude toward Christian orthodoxy. Sort of a kinship thing: because I was raised in the Faith, I figure I can critique it, but I resent ignorant outsiders sticking their noses in.

I spent many years studying it. Two master's degrees and a doctorate in it. One of the patterns involved in its construction over time is that it never took the easy way out. Take the two doctrines on which Apostolic Christianity (Catholic/Orthodox) is built --and which the Protestants almost universally confirmed until recently: the Trinity and the Incarnation. Given the natural pathways of Jewish and Greek thinking, these are not the forms in which you'd expect Christianity to finally settle on the nature of God and of Christ.  The heresies are much more culturally congruent than what finally came to constitute orthodoxy. Although based on Jewish texts and expressed in Greek forms, it is offensive both to Hebrew piety and Hellenic rationality.

For a Jewish mind, committed to monotheism, Jesus could have been a unique prophet, even a new Moses with a new covenant. But an incarnate deity? And the idea of the holy spirit not as a power but as a co-equal divine personality...well, that kind of thinking came much later in emanationist Judaism and never really trespassed the Shema.

For the Greeks, the modalist versions of monotheism would have worked: a single godhead manifesting itself in a variety of forms. Or even outright tritheism. But to assert the astonishing co-existence of unity and plurality...not likely. And as for Jesus, the adoptionist view or the Arian view...or even the monophysite or docetic view...all fit much more comfortably in a Greek mind than than the Chalcedonian creation of a single divine person (one of three) both completely divine and completely human (though not sinful). As the definition negatively puts it: without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.


FYI for you non-nerds: 
Adoptionism: Jesus was an ordinary man who was adopted into divinity at some point in his life, usually located at his baptism, though some name his resurrection as that point. 
Arianism: Jesus was the incarnation of the godlike Word which the Father --the only true God-- birthed and then used to create the universe.  Extremely popular viewpoint for a long time. Held by Jehovah's Witnesses and the Iglesia Ni Cristo.
Monophysitism: Jesus' human nature was absorbed by his divine nature. 
Docetism: Jesus was an avatar of the divine, whose humanity was only a temporary appearance.


Even though orthodoxy, by virtue of 15 centuries of dominance, seems trite, in its origins it really was the path of most resistance to it surrounding culture, not what one would have expected. And it remains a stumbling-block to ordinary rationality even now.

All contemporary attacks on the classic doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation are attempts to soften the counter-cultural form and make them comfortable for modern Western minds. Joseph Smith, as usual, manages both to adapt and to shock at the same time: his deity evolves (very Darwinian) but is only one of many and not a true creator.

My criticisms of the unique intellectual creation which is orthodoxy are pretty well all psychological and center around the ideal of incarnate perfection and its depressing effect on what Jung called "the empirical human," which is imperfect by definition. My Gnostic issues with God are not specifically Trinitarian, but mostly the old problem of evil, and divine impassibility.

Now back to ExCathedra's blend: half espresso, half French roast. Boom!

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Saturday, May 02, 2015

Gay men and their moms

How I get from one site to another online is sometimes a mystery even to me while I'm doing it. I shouldn't be surprised, though. If I remember all the times in my life, during the dark ages before computers and the Net, when I'd go to the library (or a bookstore...remember those?) looking for a particular book and emerge blinking a couple of hours later, drawn hither and thither by one book, then another, sometimes forgetting the original goal of my visit. And the card catalogue...

Anyhow, an article by pornstar Jesse Jackman, an archetypal Daddy musclebear, about how his mother discovered what he was doing for a living reminded me of a moment with my mom.

I had already come out to my parents years before, but...well, you'll see what I mean.

It was about eight years ago and I was visiting for several days. We wound up one night watching the Sopranos together. It was the season when Vito Spatafore, the closeted homosexual gangster, was on the run and had started a relationship with a diner cook in some small New England town.




In this episode, they wound up in bed together. Buttfucking. It was under the covers, but it was perfectly clear what was happening.

We watched in silence, me becoming rapidly and deeply uncomfortable. I blurted out, not looking in her direction, "I don't think we should be watching this." Replied the matriarch, not looking in mine, "I'm more than 80 years old and I'll watch whatever I please."

The odd aftermath was, well, odd.

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Jots on Islam

Although the Koran --oh, sorry, the Qur'an-- is a very hard slog to read, one thing I do like about it is the chapter names. Quite poetic, some of them. Like the 99 Names of God.




The Quran is not really the Moslem --oh, sorry, Muslim-- Bible. Even actual conservative Christians accept as a matter of course that God inspired the many writers of this one-volume library, compiled over centuries, but that they spoke in their own voices. And the process of choosing and collecting which documents belonged was a combination of legal decision and spontaneous tradition.

But the Quran is considered by Muslims to be the direct Arabic words of Allah, with Muhammad merely being the channel. So while in Christianity, the Word of God becomes Flesh, in Jesus, in Islam, the Word of God becomes Text, in the Quran. Hence, the reaction of Muslims to Koran burning, etc. It's not that far different from how Catholics would respond to a desecration of the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist.

And oddly, Muhammad --though he functions much like Christ in actual Islam-- is really more like the Virgin Mary: one who, though not divine herself, gave birth to an incarnate divinity.

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Friday, May 01, 2015

Pope Echo

Pope echoes feminist anthem of equal pay for equal work:

And I can't wait for his teaching on Global Warming, uh, Climate Change, uh the weather, an area where the Church clearly has a divine mandate to enlighten and instruct us...

The Obama of Catholicism. What a clown.




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