Jihad And Mulk

The problem with Jihad is that it is quite clearly a war to increase the border of Dar al Islam - the territory of Islam - at the expense of the unbelievers by pushing into Dar al Harb - the territory of War, that which has not yet made the profession of faith.
It is quite clear, all the talk about internal struggles of conscience to the contrary.

Our friend, Imam Musa Abu Tariq, has struggled with it for years.
Suddenly, as of last week, he has an answer:
Jihad as defined by God and Religion only lasted as long as Islam was governed by  khilaafat al nubuuwa

or the prophetic successorship. This line of succession started at the Prophet [saw] and ran through the Four Orthodox Caliphs: Abu Bakr, 'Umar, 'Uthman, and 'Ali.
It is not clear whether it ran through the times of the sons of 'Ali, Al Hasan and Al Hussein - opinions differ - but clearly the time of the theocracy ended when the Mulk,

or kingship, began with the Umayyid Dynasty, when Mu'awiya assumed power as the first Umayyaid ruler.
At this point, the government of Islam became a Mulk, or a kingship.

Once the caliphate turned to a mulk, according to Imam Musa abu Tariq, Jihad was just war - plain, old vanilla war.
A king could make war, but a king could not make Jihad. That could only be done in the lifetime of the Prophet [saw], and those who had been the closest and the most influenced by the Prophet [saw].
Certain countries maybe theocracies, but this merely means they are under the rule of religious leaders: there are none such as Abu Bakr, nor 'Umar, nor 'Uthman among them.

Therefore, Jihad as a religious war ended when Dar al Islam became a Mulk, according to the Imam, our friend. However, not too many agree with him, not because this idea is heretical, but because it is so new apparently.
I am no expert on such matters. They will argue it out among themselves.

The Tamm-inator

Tammi Petrocelli hangs out at Hanaan's Diner. She is only a girl in her mid 30's, so the only thing she has to say to the Greybeards at the table in the southwestern corner - where the afternoon sun spills over the window sill to warm us - is things like "Would youse mind passing me the salt?", or "Would ya's please pass the pepper?", or "Is somebody using this chair?"
We don't mind passing the spices, but the chair business is annoying. Usually the chair has just been vacated by one of the TYBALTs, The Young Bucks At Lunch Together...mortal enemies of the ROMEOs, Retired Old Men Eating Out. As I said, the chair was recently vacated, and the man who had been sitting there was usually just taking a jaunt to the Mens' Room. So it seems a bit premature to ask whether the chair had become superfluous. Unless there was some sort of infarction in the washroom, the old fellow should be back very soon. That's what we don't like about it: the implication of infarctions.

Infarction. Funny word. Sounds like something to do with flatulence, only more nasty: heart fart.  Hank Jacobowski spent one afternoon making similes between the TV and flatulence, sort of how loud some of the cable shows were, and how some of them were right in your face, and some were inflammatory - a references to BIC lighters and seat of the pants operations back in middle school; in short, a perfect symmetry between cable TV news shows and intestinal gas.
That's how we met Tammi. She liked the symmetry. Every time some one switched on FOX now, she said "Who cut tha cheese?" We laughed. She was cute, what can I say? She said other things for other shows:
Glenn Beck was Silent but Deadly, Anderson Cooper was One Cheek Sneak, various financial reports were Baaroooom, Squeak, Blitttt, and a whole variety of onomatopoetic names.
We still laughed, even though now we caught each others' eyes and rolled them heavenwards. She was a cutie. We admitted it was a shame that the only thing she had to talk about with men of our age and wisdom was potty humor, but people have settled for worse in their lives.

Tammi sells real estate. Rather, she sold real estate. Nowadays you give it away, as she says. The 7% of nothing is nothing, she adds. Wise beyond her years, we think, and nod our heads.

So the other day, she says "Ya know what the problem with people is?"
We look up, and by our looks, invite her response. It's like our eyes did not say "No. And we don't care! Buzz off!" with inverted daggers for exclamation points, rather they formed limpid pools of reflecting waters and softly said "We could not think of anything more precious than hearing you answer your own question."
She said "Religion."
She looks around. We sit there somewhat blankly. I mean, this may not be the first time we've heard this observation; we may have heard it once or twice before in our lives. How could such an innocent little tyke sell real estate? I suppose that explains her attempts at seeming a "tough guy"...or "tough broad", as the case may be.  She chewed gum...aggressively at times. She often seemed as if she had just come in from a date with Nathan Detroit.
On her business cards, she spelled her name:  Tammi  " the Tamm-inator " Petrocelli.
We supposed that she had spent a good deal of time agonizing over the choice between that or "Petro-zilla".
Then she pipes up "Ya know what the problem with religion today is?"
Again, brand new stuff. We were silent with stupefaction.
She extended her pause. Then, "I know you think I'm just a ditz..."
We were old and wise, and the one thing the old and wise owe to the young is that they should always tell them the truth...always! I mean, if you didn't tell them the truth, you may as well turn the whole country into a gigantic Ponzi scheme.
Hanaan sensed blood, and she was smiling as she stood perched like a buzzard next to the apple pies, a large knife dripping raisin and apple filling.
"Nawwww...!" we said as one. Each one of us made his own articulation of sincerity and his belief that she was a sharp cookie, best thing since slice bread, and out of the mouths of babes. Giant Ponzi scheme. Bunch of schnorrers!
She smiled, not a business-Hi-how-ya-doin'? smile, not a Pleased-ta-meetcha smile, but one of those smiles when you sense that all the tension of concealment, hiding, and subterfuge has left a person's body, allowing the most brilliant nova of a smile to burst forth, and you think it is the most beautiful smile that ever illuminated the most holy sanctuary of history.
She said "Religion today thinks the world is science and hard fact, and God is a choice..."
We stared...we stared like people stare just before something explosive happens; we were in that breezeway leading from Blessed Hum-Drum Elementary to the church of Saint-Blow-Us-Away...we stared with an anticipation that began to make our armpits moisten.
She went on "Actually, God is the hard reality, and the world is a choice..."

Everything was sort of hazy after that. She got incoming on her cellular, Hanaan told us to order something or get lost. When I was standing outside on the street with Levine, I began to come out of my fugue state.
"Levine! What was that all about?"
He shrugged. "Would you believe such a shikse sells real estate?"
I stared at him in unbelief, for he had said it  שיקסע
And he just meant she wasn't Jewish...and I think he meant that all of a sudden, he realized she was smart and intuitive, and he would have liked to have been able to tell people he had been at her Bas Mitvah...and something like why should a girl named The Tammi-nator sound like a rebbe? Levine was a businessman - owned the fish market - and there was an underlying motif of discord between what the modern world was, and what Levine used to think it was...or should be.
I'd heard all of it reverberating in my head, like he was Isaac Bashevis Singer...singing a tune, no less,  in the morning shower, and like I was Isaac Singer's echo...even though I felt more like Mr. Singer in The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter.
Infarction, I thought. Clearly an infarction of the rules.

Why I Lost Out To Sholem Aleichem

I had written that a community without Tradition ... Tra-a-a-DISH-unnn! ... such a community has no roots, and it is as unbalanced and as unstable as....as....

......as a cat on roller skates in the jungle!!

And the rest is history: instead of my hero, Teva the sandal maker, we had Aleichem's Tevye the milkman.

The Deep Blue Sea

Baysage remarked to me that "...the Path seems to be overlaid with all these extraneous detours, inferior materials, and poorly marked routes to nowhere. What we all need is something that glows in our darkness with the warmth of a encompassing Purpose. Can religion supply that?"

Good question.
So I thought about it for a week or so.

Religion cannot supply any such thing...unless we realize that the question should be cast as "Can we supply that?"

We are the fishers and we are the men; first we help ourselves, then we help others.
Life is the wide Ocean, the deep, blue sea, within whose vastness are mysteries available to us to support us all our days. There is enough to support all mankind,  if we are strong and bold enough to set forth upon its waters to fish.

We are already on its waters, we are already tossed by storms and winds, we have already thrown out the sea anchor to try and steady ourselves. But we have to go deep into the waters that remain calm while the surface storms, and we have to bring up those treasures new: new thoughts, new intentions, new ways of doing things, that will transform us.

If we are no longer recognizable as 21st century Americans, so be it. If we are no longer Europeans, nor Africans; if we no longer are Sunni versus Shi'a, so be it. Ancient ways are fine fishing boats day in and day out, until the storm breaks; then we find the hulls leak and the bilge pump can't keep up.

I spoke recently to a lady Christian. I said somethings critical of Mega-churches. This had something to do with Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. She replied that it was all right to prattle on about the lilies of the field, but even Jesus needed money to keep the ministry going, and how did I think it was done? Did He just shake the money tree?

My wrath was tempered considerably by the picture of Jesus sitting shaking a money tree. How nice that she could create such an improper icon for us to view.

So I prattled on about how much I admired her ability to take the more profound teachings of the gospels and render them inane. I went on about the story of the loaves and the fishes, another gospel thing ready to be illustrated by our modern day knowledge: I asked whether we are to envisage Jesus shaking his loaves and fishes tree? And so on. It was evil Montag day...thank heavens, at last!

Of course, lots of noise and chatter about ministries and the injunction to spread the word, and so on. I said that when the remark was made to spread the word, I did not read the words "by any means necessary" appended to it. Did it ever occur to you people that spreading the gospel by force - which the West did well up to World War I, at least - was not what was intended? Nor was the Mega-Ministry?

When Jesus said teach all the nations, He may have meant...and I am sticking my neck out here...He may have meant that we do it the way He did it: go forth, trusting in God to provide the food, the shelter, the safety. Where there is community fine; where there is none, you are pretty much on your own: you don't have the option to make an appeal to the tapped-out faithful to make up your $900,000 short-fall.

There is St. Francis of Assisi and St. Clare on the one hand, and there is Pastor Rick Warren and Pat Robertson and the others on the other hand: choose!

Choose whether it's you and God on that deep blue sea, or whether it's you and God in the Big Blue Meeting room on Missionary Sunday, after the meeting of the Ushers' Guild and the Political Action Committee. Choose!

(full disclosure: at this point, the lady said that Jesus had miracles to get peoples' interest, and the modern church doesn't. It was sort of as if spectacle took the place of miracle. Now I understand the miraculous a lot better: it's the way God shills to get peoples' attention, pehaps He shakes His money tree as He does it.)

Intelligent Design And Keen & Neat Animals

I came across a blog titled:

Art progress and Neat animal of the day
http://stonewaresnake.blogspot.com/

and I read the post for July 21 2009:


I saw a brown recluse in the attic and I managed to let it outside. Posts are going to be kind of irregular I'm moving.

Art
I'm not sure.

Animal
Photo by Peter Halasz

The goblin shark is a pinkish deep sea shark with a protrusible jaw that has been found in many places around the world. The large snout contains electro-sensitive organs which it uses to find prey. It was called a "tenguzame" by Japanese fishermen as their long snout resembled the long noses of certain tengu. They have no swim bladder like a basking shark. So far, they have not done well in captivity the longest one has survived in captive conditions being only a week.



and I thought, "How cool is that? The Intelligent Designer has his own blog, in which he ( or ' He '  depending on whether you pray to the Intelligent Designer or not ) discloses his thought processes about Intel & Design."
I mean, the only way I could grasp the title at first was to assume some sort of theologico-scientifico intent: the progress of the art of animal creation - hence, intel design - and the peachy-neato animal created thereby. I don't know why. Maybe I had been thinking about it. I had to force a connexion between the two notions - or more: moving, art, and animal - that were in front of my eyes.
Who else would take the trouble to keep a toxic pet in the attic, and then let it out to savage the neighborhood? I mean I know what it's like to have pet spiders; I have pet winter spiders who sit about the glare of the computer monitor and read the BBC with me early morning, but they are winter spiders - sort of translucent and thin - and are not arachnids beefed-up to madness by steroid toxins, my spiders being more spiritual and artsy....Dante Gabriel Rosetti comes to mind. I suppose that's why my spider was named Dante. I've often wondered about that.
Anyway, they are not foe of man and beast. They are like inhabitants of the spa of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, where everyone vogues like La Dame aux Camélias.

The last post was July 21 2009. I hope he is still with us. I hope he merely found that moving was a bigger and longer-lasting job than anticipated. He did have a poisonous spider in the attic, and where there is a brown recluse, you would hope not to find another poisonous pismire - giving the lie to the name "recluse", as they seem rather clubby - but one never knows. I hope the recluse was solitary and isolated, driven forth and marked like Cain, rather than being a social butterfly and a party hostess-with-the-mostest that had gathered a salon of spinners in the Rue de l'Attic.
I hope.

Happy Old Year!

The cartoon comes from Brazil. I think the point is the trunks of cut trees: deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.

pic: Drops Azul Anis S

Virtual Reality

I actually know people who dislike Virtual Reality and things like Second Life, saying such things are not real and are escapes and whatever.

Yet, they read People magazine, and follow the cult of celebrities!

What is worse: create an Avatar, or create a demi-god of Tiger Woods? And what is the morality of it all?

Fellini's 8 1/2

If you ever saw the film  8  1/2  by Fellini, you probably made the same mistake everyone in our society makes: you try to analyze the images and "figure out" what he "is saying".

Big mistake.

Just live it.

We rationalize things until there is nothing but dust; it's entirely before our eyes all the time. There is no hidden meaning. Everything is right there. Granted it can be rather Protean at times: shape-shifting before our amazed eyes, but that is Loaf....(did I say "loaf"?)
That is Life.

North Africa

These gazelles remind me of the rock paintings at Tasilli n'Ajjer in Algeria:

-----

pic: art of the luggage label

Parliamentary Procedure

I went to a meeting where they followed Roberts' Rules of Summer:

Correction

The post "In Which I Argue for the Arts" was seriously edited into an unintelligible form.
I have corrected it. Sorry.

In Which I Argue For The Arts

I was dreaming this morning at 4:00 AM. I know because I woke up as I finished my dream-speech, thrust my arm into the air, and fell onto the floor, having run out of mattress. I woke up, looked around, and remembered having thrust my arm into the air, recalling the Levi's commercial which runs "O, Pioneer, My Pioneer!" with cuts of young folks running, jumping, hiking...remembering that the advertisement originally had a shot with a young girl standing nearby a statue, the scene lit by fire light, and everyone raising their right arms in a salute redolent of the 1930's and 40's. (The most recent versions of the commercial have excised this portion.)

Ah, I said, I'm having a Hogan's Heroes moment. I am imagining myself as Werner Klemperer being an absolute toady in front of General Burckhalter. Then it came to me: I had been at a meeting about the Arts, and we had been discussing something along the lines of making the Arts relevant for our community, and I had made a point and finished my speech with a flourish of the radius & ulna...or...and here's where it gets a bit dicey...it may have not been a flourish at all; I could have punched a lady in the face: it wasn't quite clear.

Now it may strike you as odd that we here in this community would have a round table about the Arts and end up fighting like animals in the octagon cage, but that's why we love this town, as Ernie Hudson ( in Ghostbusters ) might say.

And it was a dream sequence. Don't forget that. That is an important point: dream sequence versus reality. The entire country forgot this distinction sometime back in the first decade of the 21st century, and imagine the egg on our faces when we couldn't even find a Christmas cracker bon-bons - one of those tubular constructs with pull tabs on the end you...pull, actually, and it goes...sort of poooof! crack!, and if you're lucky, you may get a small toy or fortune from inside it...
...couldn't even find a Christmas cracker in Saddam Hussein's pantry.

So - dream sequence, mind you: if anything profane or untoward happens, I am guiltless - there is a goodly number of us Art types thronged into what resembles The Shop Around the Corner in the You've Got Mail version - or possibly Gepetto's workshop...or Heidi's grandfather's house...all very cosy, very woodworky, very lots-a-booksy type things, as if Heidi's grandfather did a lot of reading, instead of rescuing stranded skiers from avalanches and giving tokes of brandy to lost pilgrims and what-not. (I think I may have mixed up Heidi's Opa with a St. Bernard, but it does not affect this story in the slightest.)

Anyway, in comes an artsy chick from the cold, layered with four layers of loveliness to protect her from the winter's chill, and she has a determined look on her face. She comes in and makes an intercept course right at me, looking a bit peeved, and I'm wondering what happened to the fair damsel I kissed in the summer boathouse (dream sequence, again! dream sequence). Well, it was the guy behind me she was coming full speed after, not me. He was an athletic chappie in a Norwegian sweater; an Arno Breker type that looked as if he could have posed for any number of monumental statues of the 20th century.

An Arno Breker Statue

She reduced her forward momentum cosiderably as she neared us; her eyes flashed warning shots across our bows. He handed her some sort of sign that had to do with the whole Artsy deal we were involved in, only it seemed to be about the size of an advert for the side of an autobus. She gave a look of "it's about time!", and secured it on her main deck (continuing the feeble metaphor of ships and vessels), did a 180, and strode off - not before sending the faintest Marconi wireless bit of electro-smile, a spark of white teeth flashing duh-duh-duh-daaaa!...and I heard Vera Lynn whispering that we'd meet again, and actually the time and place were quite well known: about midnight at her place...but it was all for Arno Breker, not for me.

I was getting light-headed from the exhalations off the warming bodies, when the meeting finally came to order...or, as much order as is possible in a meeting of the artsy folks. My cousin - who had somehow infiltrated the meeting, obviously to cause trouble - suggested that Montag tell the assembly his opinion on what the group should do to to promote Art.

I heard my name and jolted out of whatever reverie I was then engaged in. (It never ceases to amaze me that even in my dreams, I am usually wool-gathering or daydreaming somewhere. I mean, how many drams of Nepenthe does one need?!)

I rose to my feet slowly, whispering fervidly to my neighbors, "What the heck are we discussing?"

"Arts." they said. "Promotion of..."

They seemed to speak as if they were assembling a card catalog with entries sorted by last name, or pretending they talked like Yoda:

" arts, promotion of "

and

" yourself, don't make a fool of " .

It was one of those dreams of school where one has not studied for the exam and you struggle to remember exactly what the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram looks like, and your hangover keeps humming a Max Steiner motif from " A Star is Born ", and you know you always get Frederic March mixed up with Raymond Massey, and you know you are screwed royally.

I slowly stood up. I thanked my cousin, nay all the assembled worthies, verities, luminaries, heroes and heroines of the Arts...I kept it going while my brain spun like a Land Rover stuck in a mud wallow somewhere in Kenya. So while the tongue wagged, the extra addition I had had built onto my brain was working overtime to come up with a plausible statement of intent.

Finally, a runner from my extra brain rushed into the main hall of my intelligence - a structure that eerily resembled a Big Top right now - and thrust a couple sheets of paper into my sweating hands.

"That's it." the runner said.

I looked at the scribbles. "This...is it?!"

"That's it!" and he ran off.

I heard myself intone, "Now, to the main point of my remarks..."

I would like to say the room reverberated, but it was more of a rustling noise, bodies moving around, more layers of clothes being removed, and a distinct scent of eau de pissed-off was in the air, since everyone wanted to get their 2 cents in.

The lady in front of me popped up. She wore a Burberry scarf, and a brown leather coat. She wore black boots collared with fur over tight jeans painted on her legs, which themselves looked like two sharp stiletto blades pendant from her hips: she was an erotic scissors-Venus, used to cutting men in two with those mortal legs, and she was tired of waiting for me.

She spoke as if I did not exist. She held her head directly in front of me. Her hair was the artifice of time and expense. It settled like a carpet for the Muses, and she frequently had to give one of those twist things women do when their hair descends upon their eyes...exiting it all to the side of the proscenium arch of her lovely face with a managerial flip of the head and combed by an ushering hand.

The chairperson finally thanked her, even though she was not done, not by a long chalk. The chair mentioned that I had not spoken, at least had not spoken to the point, and it still was my turn to speak, and - by the by - would I be kind enough to wrap it all up in a timely manner?

She glared at me. She sat down, plotting some revenge.

I spoke.

I said that all mankind are artists by nature. ( That sounds good. They'll eat it up! )

The basics of living beings are the things they do, the crafts, things made, things found; what is Art but the transformation of craft and work and rote, things found and things made, into a higher level of life, the Aesthetic Level. ( There was a groundswell of approbation coming my way....it almost made me sway as I stood there. )

If we were to reform the educational system to inculcate into each and every child the fact that Art is transformation of Life by discipline and theory and imagination, we would not have need of constant meetings to ponder what one should do about promoting the Arts, for -indeed! - to paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge, Mankind and the Arts are my business! ( Everyone was smiling and beaming, except the lady in the Burberry scarf. She turned and glared at me. Her very long scarf had loosened and one end had drooped to the floor, where I had covertly affixed it with the toe of my shoe. Well done, for she decided to cut off my speech. She stood abruptly, only to be pulled back down, croaking, as her scarf pulled her back like an unruly mastiff on the business end of a leash. Sorry, I muttered, as I removed the offending toe from the choke-scarf. I was Bogart, "Sorry, sweetheart." )

I said that it is similar in this respect to religion; as St. Paul enjoins us to create within the spirit; put away the things of childhood, and transform yourselves!

At this point, some smiles sort of froze, as if someone had clobbered the individuals on the pate with a rolling pin. A dazed look unrolled over the room... Hastily, I dropped the religious stuff. Christmas had just passed, and everyone had had quite enough of that, thank you. Religion is a lot like cookies, food, and drink: one tends to overdo it during the holidays, and is, thus, forced to go on a rigorous fast after New Year's to try and get back into one's groove.

" The Arts are the business of mankind! I said. When this society realizes this, and teaches every child to live his life to its fullest potential, then the Arts will come into their own! " I said, not having a clue what any of this actually meant. I ended with my arm thrust out, saluting that brave, new world of the future.

It was at this point that I kissed the floor, O, Pioneer, My Pioneer!

Fear & Flying

http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/thesearch/pages/what-we-need-to-combat-the-culture-of-fear.aspx

What we need to combat the culture of fear

By Douglas Todd
11 May 2009

(This column was part of the five-column package for which Douglas Todd won the 2008 Jack Webster Foundation Award for Commentary.

Fear is natural and inescapable. It can come as we try to cross a car-jammed street, or come through a dream, bringing existential dread.
But some fears are unnecessary; some are promoted by public figures.
Religious leaders have been known to take advantage of people's fear of death and especially the prospect of hell to demand unquestioning loyalty... Opportunistic politicians also play the fear card -- raising, for instance, a spectre of escalating murder and mayhem to attract voters to their law-and-order platforms.

It's called the culture of fear.
It's the use of fear as a means of control....

...But facing fears requires not freaking out. It calls for recognizing that life is risky -- and no leader can offer us absolute protection.

Dealing effectively with dread requires remaining grounded even when things are difficult. In today's culture of fear, in other words, staying calm amounts to a political act.

(emphasis mine)

Something to read, fearful ones; the political rebellious act of remaining calm while all the while the intrusive Cable-Eye screams at us its Five Minute Hate every hour.

New Year?

I've always ignored New Year's Eve. Ditto New Year's. In fact, I usually put off writing the new and correct year on checks and things until February and March. Thus do I show my chronological freedom!

I went to bed at 11:32 PM last night.
I don't drink, so I have no toasting to do. I had earlier been at a restaurant, and had toasted something - A Happy New Year's To One and All, or Eternal Friendship, or Peace on Earth, some sort of impossible dream that turns up in the hony-tonk saloon where New Year's resolutions hang out - drunk and disillusioned with their pipedreams. I had toasted with Diet Coke...or Pepsi. Darn good soda it was, too. I told the waitstaff and commended the soda vending sommelier.
Many people, much body heat, surprisingly good food. Many elderly types sitting on bar stools and drinking like fishes!

I'm not much fun to have around on these festive occasions, mostly because I have a party going on in my head most of the time when the rest of the folks are dozing through the hours. While you are doing something rote and routine, I am running naked through the my mind's woodsy glens, giving the sun the glad eye, as well as any dryads or naiads I see.

So may the old year be committed to the bonfire of the inanities, and the New Year be everything you desire!

Cosmic Background Karma

Karma is cosmic background radiation from dukha; i.e., from suffering and pain.
It extends throughout the universe in all directions and is propagated to the deepest reaches of space in an instant.

Prayer cannot stop accumulated debt of suffering, but it will give us a road map from now on. Prayer is not an invocation to God; it is directions to where we are going.
So some brainy type is going to ask me, "Do you actually mean that when I stop and ask for directions, I actually already have the map with a big "X" marks the spot?"
Hmmm...yeah. I guess that's what I mean.

Night People

The old people come out at night. The have become feral and feline, sleeping during the day. Night is not a metaphor for the darkness of the soul anymore, not the evil of pitch black, but the silhouettes of night have become the archetypes of all things.

We, the old, stalk the shadows of the city on our quest for the Virgin Mary's bicycle parts.

The things of the earth lose their detail, the thorns of life that prick us, bleed us; the day people want to help - so they say; they want to minister to us, to provide medicals. We call them "leeches", like in old times; they want to leech us to whatever icon they have of old people should-being. They task us. They harry us like dogs chase the fox. Their old-age homes are dungeons run by their Ministry of Love.

They leech and suck our blood with their taxes, and their wars, and their guns and violence.

They speak in a cenobite tongue of the most profound profanity. We hear their blasphemous language, which they find comical, and it tears at us. All words are used: every vulgar profanity, every curse gets a laugh.

Discourse is invective.

The old word for conversation was "intercourse". Intercourse of days is now vile: it is either violent, or it is a graffitti on the walls for everyone to gaze at, hard colors on concrete drawing tears from the tender eyes of the day people...eyes used to Death and Cable.

We drive at night and see the blackwork buildings sentinel on silent streets. We watch the Sunset Channel with its documentaries of nightime streets, where you can actually see the streets and sidewalks; they are not obscured by the opprobrious burden of multitudes of people, walking like a living carpet of many-coloured knots, woven at random seeming along the night-time weft we inhabit. At night, the weft is empty...Penelope-like, the ragged carpet of care is unwoven every night, and we wait for the Master Weaver to come...

The day is the time of massacre of the two-year old boys, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed and busy with their toys.

Christmas was at night, our loves, our joys...

Night is the holy time, when we mend broken hearts with bicycle parts, straighten spokes, adjust the brakes, pump up the tires; night time, priapic with meaning and engorged with arts!

pics 1,3,4: arnold pouteau
pic 2: broken hearts & bicycle parts

Terrorism in the 21st Century...the 20th Century...and the 19th Century

The USA took over the Phillipines from Spain in 1898, after the end of the Spanish-American War. Instead of the freedom they expected, the Fillipinos who fought against Spain were treated to an American Empire over their country. Insurgency flared up. In particular, it flared in the southern island of Mindinao, an area which was heavily Muslim. When Spain had conquered the Phillipines, they called the inhabitants Moros, just as they had named the Moors whom they had recently finished dispossessing in Spain itself. In 1903, Captain John "Black Jack" Pershing reported that no more hostilities were anticipated, "All Moros know our friendship is valuable and is freely extended to all who deserve it." The next year, there were numerous reported outrages in Mindinao by bandits. http://msuans.blogspot.com/2008/03/lessons-from-mindanao-history-as-seen.html ...Mindanao saw decades of war against the colonizers. The Muslims had consistently resisted colonial attempts. The colonizers had to be unconventional and creative in order to overcome resistance. For instance, the Americans had to invent, among others, the Cal. 45 pistol with knocking down power in order to subdue the kris-swinging Maranao warriors who would continue to lunge at their attackers even if they were already bleeding by bullet wounds, and many other examples. and from TIME in 2003: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,423565,00.html ...Mindanao's Islamic rebels now seem to be after more than a home alone. TIME has learned that elements of these same separatist movements have become a nexus for Southeast Asian terrorists and are providing a training ground for operatives linked to Jemaah Islamiah (JI), the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist network widely blamed for last October's deadly Bali bombings. Officially, the army says it launched last week's operation to pursue a kidnap-for-ransom gang (called the Pentagon) that was being given sanctuary by the MILF. Another goal was to disperse a concentration of 1,000 MILF fighters on the edge of the Liguasan marshes, an expanse of waterways and islands that make up one of the group's few remaining strongholds. Philippine and Western military-intelligence sources are asserting, however, that in the past three months scores of Indonesian and Malaysian Islamic militants belonging to JI have slipped into MILF jungle camps, some of which are located in the very marshes bombarded last week... and it continues today, as militants recently escaped from jail. 100 years of war. That's what we want, that's what we create, that is what we will get.

Why Detroit?

Why are terrorists flying to Detroit? I suppose the reason has something to do with the fact that Detroit is the city whose maps and satellite images are used for Raccoon City in the film Resident Evil: Extinction. (This is the third film; the second film, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, featured Toronto City Hall as the city hall of Raccoon City.) I saw a vid from a guy who eliminated Michigan as the potential site of Raccoon City, because there were no mountains. He forgot the Iron Mountains. He eliminated it because there were no clear accents in the residents speech, forgetting that only the Yoopers ( Upper Peninsula folks ) have a distinct accent. I suppose the tax credits available determined where the filming was done.

The Surly Cob

I heard my daughter; this is where she and She-who-most-be-obeyed were headed: The Surly Cob. What could it be? A restaurant with nasty waitperson, such as were the rage some years ago in certain areas of limited self-respect? A store? What would they sell in The Surly Cob? I had visions of Popeye smoking his pipe, casting a squinky eye at Bluto, but since when were the fair ones so interested in E.C.Segar or Max Fleischer Studios? Goons and Jeeps, "Open, sez me!" and "Salami, salami, baloney!" I mean, I can perfectly understand why I might be interested in all such things Sweethavenish, but those two?! I could not help but wondering. It turns out it was something much more prosaic, although very nice: a store named "Sur la Table".

The Hoarder Of Desire

Christmas Angel

Black and Gold

(unfinished)

Early on the mornings of Christmas season, I record the events of this, my history: the intrusion and growth of the tree and lights, the viney garlands stretching the length of the balusters: Nature irruptive, overturning the fences of civilization, coming back with indifferent retaliation: bringing pine and thorn and bush and needle and scrub into our home; dispelling the bland concerto of our times, and bashing us with the harpsichords of religion: birth, salvation, suffering...what delight!

I try to get it all down with only natural light and the light of the ornamental evergreens. The scribes of my brain write "In dulci jubilo..." and "We three kings..." on parchment, and store it under "2009". My journal is a blister now, not of palimpsests & words, but fireworks! The pen leaps like the hart, and asterisk follows asterisk...all my writing is scratches without glitter, so I take the bottle of glitter and dowse the words with stars.
My camera obscura waits for dawn, the pinhole device records the brilliant tree, my digital cameras are busied by the endless detail of  morning.
"2009" I whisper to the video cam, "2009". Archived tapes and microfiche...

This edifice of memory is the tomb of the year's desires. How many may I record and thrust within? And my loved ones still sleep; they aren't yet awake. Their close-ups won't be scheduled for a bit. I feel like Max to the Old Year's Norma Desmond suddenly...as she descends the staircase...and this is all silhouette, dark and clean of detail, the outline of the material desire: a spiritual black-work of angelic choirs...and the unseen windows and doors of Advent calendars unopened!

 Garland & Balusters

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inspiration: http://littlelightreading.blogspot.com/2009/12/starlings.html
 I designed and executed the blackwork about 35 years ago.

Welcome To New Friends

This morning, the day after Christmas, I had that feeling again of eyes following me...or something else, something new, as I looked at the blog, seeing the xmas poem had scheduled and published on its own. There was a new friend, daryldarko, to welcome. He is an photographer and artist and quite mad, so I feel very much at ease. I had spent the previous two days, Xmas eve and Xmas day, with my own family - blood, you might say - and they were run-of-the-mill to the point of disaster. Things were only saved by my brother, who got amusingly drunk, and started to laugh at all the right spots, which was different from the rest of the perplexed multitude - laughing only when desperation seemed to set in.. We were at my parents', and I had to drive him home with my parents' old Hudson, and was then dependent on my other brother for a ride home myself - my daughter, visiting for the holidays, had stolen my car and driven off yelling "Ha-ha! So long, Dorks!" as I stood in my parents driveway, feeling despair creep up my pant legs...either that or snow was melting on the corduroy. My mother had come up with a brilliant idea for gifts this year: she cannot bear to throw anything away, keeping even the plastic domes once used to cover grocery store cakes. She says they come in handy. I have noticed in the past that this type of recycled container leaves a little to be desired in the areas of concern to the Department of Leak Prevention, however. These hard lessons had usually been taught by things such as gift dill pickles, briney things with perdurable odors, transported from her place to mine, and leaving one's automobile with the faint odor of a delicatessen for years to come. Anyway, it was to be a White Elephant Christmas, where we gift things we don't want anymore, and hope that it may end up half as funny as a Mad-Libs game among the dull and abstemious. Since the rest of the people involved had no particular fear of the Waste Collection and Recycling Industry, most of us had already disposed of the disposables, not having saved them for Xmas gifts like my mother had done, so she was one or two up on us already: the way she likes it. My wife and daughter received some used articles of clothing. I got a plastic coffee mug, wide in the keel for stability in one's car while driving into "the mixing bowl" or "malfunction junction" during "rush hour" while one "commuted" to the "rat race". I also received a handsome plastic carafe, about 3/4 liter in size, to presumably hold more of "the black" (coffee) in. All I needed was a container for "the white" (milk) and "the sweet" - I forget what the sweet refers to. I got a small, travellers' size container of tooth floss. I got some Altoids - new, not used. During the summer, we were cleaning the dining room in their summer cottage and came across an empty box from American Spoon Food jams, which seemed to have been behind a table for five years or more. It was black and dusty, and the top had a picture of an American primitive style painting, rather like Grandma Moses' watercolour of Nantucket harbor. She had just broached her White Elephant idea that morning, so now I suggested she give it to my niece. Well, I had a gift now, a box, a black box and obviously old, and I thought - irony of ironies, 'tis the American Spoon Food jam box back to haunt me! But it wasn't. It was merely another antique box, into which another item had been stuffed. I think it was a roll of toilet paper. I began to shut down the memory unit at this point, hardly even noticing the three used egg cups at the bottom of my gift bag; white and blank egg cups - not cute at all - no pictures of rabbits or bunnies or happy monks: the type of pictures one is used to seeing on the broadsides of egg cups; just white, and an egg-shell white, too, I may add. I had a brief nightmarish flash of Keir Dullea in 2001 eating some soft boiled numbers from these babies, in that scene where he is old, very old, and tottering towards whatever Bethlehem only Stanley Kubrick could imagine...old and in a white, white room of whiteness, eating white eggs in porcelain cups. I began to hum: I'll fly away, after egg cups, I'lll flyyy awayyy! I was trying to get things moving out of the slough of holiday despond we had excavated for ourselves in the front room. The brother I was to catch a ride with was drinking egg nogs, one after the other, and - as the song goes - showed "no signs of stopping". Since I spend more time with the folks, the complaints, grievances, and stories they were regalling him with were old and archival bits for me, but for him they were fresh and dewy, and he felt impelled to make commentary and adopt a "take the bull by the horns" type of "get 'er done" attitude towards Comcast and the Township and Disturbers of my father's peace & quiet, which everyone must have assumed I had not done, merely shuffling my feet and moaning and wondering when some intelligent go-getter - like my brother - might come along to help. Rain was promised, and once the sun has set, temperatures usually get colder...even on Christmas. So I drove the one brother home. He discovered all the smoke shops were closed, it being Xmas day. I gingerly looked around at the shuttered stores. Not an open shop in sight. We passed the SpeedyQ: he said he and his lady friend had stopped there last year after Xmas. "Really." I said. "Yeah" he said. "Who, pray tell, was hauling your backsides about town back then?" I asked. We thought, and it was clear I was hauling their backsides back then. "Yeah." I said, "It was open: a twenty and a sixer." recalling the cigarettes he had bought - 20 to a pack - and the beer - six to a pack. I escaped soon. I drove back, hoping coats would be laid out, ready to encumber shoulders, but only ran into a pile of indifference, nogs, and the dreary sisters Chit & Chat. The minutes limped by like the remnants of Pickett's Charge. At last, we left. On the way home, I discovered my brother had received a book I had given my father - new, not recycled - about 4 years ago. After driving for fifteen minutes, the hard rain started.

Nu, Noah?

I have meditated a lot on the story of Noah. I remember recently writing to my friend Ruth about Noah, that sometimes genius comes late in life, not early: Noah had children who were married, he was not young when the flood came.
I remember writing about Malamud's The Natural - starring Robert Redford, if you recall -about the same thing: lives that took a fork in the road early on, only to come back later and perform their miracles.

So I have been meditating on Noah. I remember this from Reb Brenner, and I do not agree.

Excerpt from:

http://rabbidanielbrenner.blogspot.com/2006/11/judea-pearl.html

The Zohar says: "When God said to Noah, 'The end of all flesh is come before Me,' Noah said: 'What will You do with me?'
But he did not pray for mercy for the world, as Abraham would pray for the city of Sodom.
This is why the Flood is called 'the waters of Noah' (Isaiah 54:9) — he is culpable for them, because he did not appeal for mercy on the world's behalf."

How can we understand this mystical teaching? In a world bloodied by terrorists — those who purposely kill the innocent to send a signal of their ruthlessness, we may have a tendency to be like Noah and simply worry about our own hides. Abraham calls us to ask, "What does this mean for humanity?" Abraham is not from Sodom. For him, the Sodomites are foreigners, strangers, other. Yet, he prays that they will be understood.

I disagree with this mishnah.
Before the Flood, the Law did not exist. There were individual instances of commands and directives, and obedience or disobedience, but no thing corresponding to the Law.

The covenant with Noah was the beginning of the Law: God had made a promise to do such and such, and mankind was to reciprocate.
An agreement, and if either side does not fulfill, then both sides may seek arbitration.

Abraham could argue against the destruction of Sodom, for there was a Law and there was a space within the soul of man where one could argue forensically with God, derived from the covenant of Noah with God.
The Law moved away from bloodletting by God - who would no more destroy mankind - and bloodletting for God - the Lord was moved by Noah's sacrifice of every clean animal and fowl to meditate on man's innate evil. The covenant with Noah established that hecatombs and holocausts would be done by man, not the Lord, henceforward.
Thus could barrister Abraham argue for Sodom, and secure its safety if but one good man be found therein.
The subsequent destruction of Sodom would seem to be anomalous in this view, indicating the Lord was never serious in giving up the right to slaughter. This is only apparent, and shows that our understanding of the Noahide covenant is incomplete, and we must study more; when one go to argue the Law, it is never as clear-cut as we think: if you read the story of the Cities on the Plain right up to the end, you get a lot more information about Lot and his family than you ever would have wanted.

Christmas 2009

Christmas Snow Shovel snow, hearty lads! shovel, pike, and broom!

This song we do sing when the solstice yawns and blows too much snow for man or beast... an over-measuring of snow... for free a cornucopia of ice! So much that old Man North, Boreas, a well-known Scrooge and miser, stingy and cold to the boney zero, is now acclaimed by all an open-handed and generous man: the Clement, the Giving, magnanimous! this the song of the scrapers, this the song of shovelers; little boys throw snowballs

at pompous men in top hats!

And all the world's gone

topsy-turvy, upside down,

at this our Christmas time! Come, truckers! come, pilers!

come sowers of salt! The drifts grow high, O, fathers! as high as grandfather Pine!

Sing ye no dirges now! sing joyful litanies in

this harvest-time of snow! the lamps of dawn are lit! Sing, ho! 'tis Christmas! ------- notes I am not sure what to say about this poem. It is what happens when one begins to think about Christmas and snow and presents and trees when one has been reading about ancient Greece: it is sort of an antique snow shovelling, snow harvesting type of poem Hesiod ( author of Works and Days and second in fame to Homer ) would have sung as he shoveled the snows of his homestead. Boreas is the North Wind, and instead of being a royal pain in the wedge, he is seen as sending a white Christmas and snowy gifts.

pike to push the ice with pointed staffs,

scrape to scrape ice, or to scrape snow off the surface of ice.

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painting: C A Jeffrey http://www.cajeffrey.blogspot.com/

C. A. Jeffrey Gets A Flat...

...then goes with her aunt to a Tim Horton's.

Her aunt tells her she should have waited

until the Boxing Day sale. pic: http://cajeffrey.blogspot.com/

Did You Hear The One About The Republicans Who...

How appalling is it when a fine man with a run-of-the-mill intelligence and a sort of an isinglass sense of humor tries to be funny?
Mike Huckabee: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35413_Huckabee-_Sen._Ben_Nelson_is_Judas_Iscariot  

But during his comments at the Omaha rally, Huckabee - a 2008 presidential candidate and potential White House hopeful in 2012 - likened Nelson’s deal to the biblical story in which Judas agreed to betray Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. “I don’t want [senators] to go up there…and then somehow go back and boast, ‘Here’s some money that I got for you.’ The last time we saw that kind of historic moment it was 30 pieces of silver and that didn’t work out too well for us either,” Huckabee said.

This is where I roll my eyes, whistle a little tune, and tap my foot for a while, waiting for the conservative element in the audience to "come up to speed". Actually, I was under the impression that Judas' 30 pieces worked out badly for him, and well for us, because we got salvation thereby; somebody had to get the crucifixion going, and it was Judas. Since this was part of the plan of salvation, it seems that Judas played a necessary part, and we got quite a bit for 30 pieces of silver. Perhaps Huckabee is saying that we, the people of the USA, are all Jesus Christs...and somebody sold us out for 30 pieces of silver; sort of a pantheism type thing going here, Mike. When the punch line is more important than the matter at hand, call for a Republican.

FDR & BHO

Baysage wrote me a comment, and the words FDR and Obama occurred in it; here's the point at which I diverge from other writers: they would go on and on giving you background details on what exactly was said about FDR and BHO, but I don't. It is enough to say the names were in close proximity. No one really reads these things anyway...

Anyway, there are many similarities shared by FDR and BHO, but what distinguishes them and separates them is their times: our time is illiterate and unread - except for vampire and zombie love stories, whereas FDR's time made a stab at literacy.

And back in FDR's time, the working folks actually believed they contributed to the greatness of this country, and that their opinions mattered and were heard in the halls of the mighty. For example, did you know back on December 23, 1940 - just less a year from Pearl Harbor - Walter Reuther, the president of the UAW, released his report: 500 Planes a Day—A Program for the Utilization of the Automobile Industry for the Mass Production of Defense Planes. about which one may read at http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3314reuther_1940.html Using the Machine-Tool Principle To Save the U.S. Industrial Republic by Richard Freeman ...Reuther discussed how the United States could retool its auto sector, 50% of whose capacity was underutilized—just as it is today. He had assembled a team of skilled machinists which had conducted a several-month, plant-by-plant, tool-and-die room by tool-and-die room survey/study of the shut-down capacity.

Back then, Walter Reuther wanted to use under-utilized auto manufacturing capacity, Kaiser built cars and turned on a dime to build Liberty ship, Ford could build planes, tanks, cars... It was a totally different world. Today's world is a world of schnorrers and goniffs and madoffs. School systems fall apart, the center cannot hold, and we lumber to a pseudo-Bethlehem as great illiterate beasts - and we take pride in the irredentism of our sublime know-nothingism and ignorance!
--

The Nature Of Religion

Religion is the attempt to optimize human life, by incorporating the Spiritual on the same footing as the Material; it overlooks no aspect of those human entities of whose lives it is a part. Religion is an optimal path, utilizing insights from the material world-as-fact, which is communicated and informational by nature, and insights from the world of unconsciousness, which by nature appears to be solitary and uncommunicated, and becomes informational only after some effort to transform it. Both worlds must be made moral: the world of Metropolis, the urban concentrations, and the world of Sanctuary, the desert vision quest. Consider the bloodier aspects of some ancient religions: the spiritual path was frozen into a bloody, sub-optimal process, in much the same way as the 2oth century saw the material path frozen into repeated bloodshed and genocides.

The preliminary attempts at optimality stopped - for some reason - at a decidedly sub-optimal stage, and enshrined monsters into history. The battle is joined both in consciousness and in unconsciousness. Religion proceeds to find an optimal path, or the optimal path if you prefer, among the complexities of human life, conscious and unconscious, and the various religions may be considered as analogous to strong and robust optimality algorithms. It is the Path.

pic: weblo real estate

Metropolis & Sanctuary 12/21/2009

Metropolis: the Cathedral

The powerful and rich of Metropolis met in Copenhagen to discuss Climate Change. Copenhagen shows that politicians will do nothing about climate change. I did not expect them to. I did not even think Mr. Obama would. He neither surprised, nor disappointed. So, where will Sanctuary be? I shall pray on it.

The Sanctuary

The Nature Of Evil

If we extract from Hatred & Suffering the obvious essences of color, race, creed, sex, and all the other pernicious accidents that make our souls coward, we are left with the irreducible principle of human misery - the inability of mankind to view each other - and themselves - as real human beings who spin the narratives that create the World; rather, we see ourselves created by our own narrations, stories, and philosophies. We spend our time in words and see God and the World as words, ideas, structures, and logical entities, which by their very artificial nature are not living and breathing flesh, are not sons and daughters of God, individual and free, but are mercenary words that serve all willing paymasters. The words of ideology and dogma fall from our lips like angels with black and broken wings.

Body Coverings

I was reading about Saudi Arabia, and how they now have tv shows with women presenters, who are wearing the niqab. It is interesting. What would FOX do if they could not prominently display blond women? Political commentary would suffer immeasurably. The fall-out might even go beyond News Corp. and afflict Anne Coulter and AC wanna-bees. One of the Saudi ladies say that there is more to the show than just pretty faces, and forcing viewers to concentrate on the substance, not the glamor, is rewarding. That is a radical approach; very radical. Wouldn't work here. We need pretty faces...and more, if possible...and all the accoutrements of eroticism to present important topics: it's just our way! Anyhow, I've decided to go Tuareg. Everyone I know thinks it would be a big plus for the neighborhood.

The Homeric Hymn To Hermes... And Secular Religion

Hermes 
 

There is a collection of poetry referred to as the Homeric Hymns. It is not the case, nor is it known whether Homer himself was the author of any of these, but they are all ancient, they are in hexameter, and follow the language and usages of the poems of Homer, yet without the heroic epithets so common in heroic poetry, nor with the extended similes: someone is not just "like" something in Homer's Iliad; they are "like" followed by 10 extensive lines of description.

Hermes is the Greek god who became Mercury in the ancient Roman version of the Greek pantheon. Hermes was polytropos - shifting, many faced, many sided, and cunning - and reminds one of Odysseus in the Iliad and Odyssey, who was an individual no longer the hero like Achilles, who in his literary essence was the hero and fighter who would live fast in war and die young.
A new breed of man became important, the skillful debater and negotiator, who did not have immediate recourse to arms to solve a problem, but rather inspected things and thought about them with cunning: turning the world and its paradoxes on the spit of Reason until they were ready to be consumed by his fertile mind!

Hermes was the son of Zeus and Maia, one of the Pleiades. He invented the lyre made from tortoise shell, he sang songs, and - pondering sheer trickery in his heart - he stole fifty head of cattle from the herds of the god Apollo, doing this when he was but a few days old and still slept in a cradle at night: Fear not, little swaddling baby, son of Zeus and Maia. I shall find the strong cattle presently by these omens, and you shall lead the way.'
In addition to being dolios - the schemer, a god of robbers, and those who profit by cunning, and those who profit by force and forceful persuasion, he was the messenger of the gods, the god of boundaries - keeping boundaries sacred - perhaps on the notion of setting a thief to catch a thief -and was also a god of roads: enodios, "on the road"; god of contests and sports" enagonios, "in the contest" or "having game"; and the leader of the souls to the underworld: psychopompos, "drum major of the soul".

 In the pagan pantheon, the gods take on many human characteristics, becoming icons of the areas of life which are under their control. Thus we see Hermes playing human roles, and read his biography as a mixture of what we consider the Holy and the Profane. We are amazed at the ancient pagans, and how they scandalously portrayed their gods, the symbols of their highest aspirations.
This was considered by some to be one of the aspects of Western Christianity and higher religion that separated the civilized man from the primitive: the fact that religion no longer turned gods into men and women, and religious rites no longer described their flaws and fights and shameful couplings outside the holy bonds of matrimony, as did the old paganism, which revelled in the liaisons of Zeus - whose devotion we see somewhat reflected in our inordinate love of sexual scandals even now today...in the midst of our Christian devotions: Bibles in the right hand, National Enquirer in the left.

We no longer do this, right? Wrong. Of course, wrong, else I wouldn't be here writing about it.

And here is where I define what "secular religion" is: secular = of this age, coming from saeculus= and age or century or time of life. I call the religion secular, because it is the religion of this age I speak of, not the eternal religion, not the essence of religion, but the Icon of religion we have created for our present generations, the Golden Calf we worship. What, indeed, is all that nonsense about WWJD - what would Jesus do? - if it is not a conscious effort to create scenarios about the humanity of Jesus? To create scenarios about things which are hidden, but using the logic that all humans are likely to experience similar situations, we create the scenario where Jesus is in the same situations we face today. Cute. In other words, we emphasize the humanity, not the divinity.

Our interpretation is guided by ourselves - we are setting thieves to pass judgement on thieves...or ourselves as children to judge the transgressions of our childlike innocent greed and guiltless lusts. Of course, the religious will say that by emphasizing the humanity, we see the script where Jesus knows what to do, makes the right moral choice, assisted by his divinity...that same divinity we should all pray to.
I say that such a procedure is a pagan myth-making machine. It is worse than pagan myth; it is an entirely new religion which humanizes and belittles the spiritual injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount into a mush of nothingness. If the intent of such a process is to bring the difficult spiritual regimen of Jesus into focus for people, it does not work.

When people wonder WWJD, they rarely come up with radical answers, answers that say leave everything behind, take up your cross, and follow me. When we ask WWJD???, do we ever jump out of the fishing boat of Zebedee?...leaving old Zebedee plumb out of luck, two of his fisher-sons jumping ship and gallivanting around Galilee with Jesus? Not often, if ever. What about films, like Mel Gibson's The Passion? Did not the ancients wail when Adonis died? Did they not weep for Attis? Scratch and claw your rosy cheeks, rend your garments, roll in the dust and ululate with grief...you are not doing anything the ancients did not do, and your unhealthy spectacle of torture and death - often shown at churches themselves! - is nothing different from the pageant presented by Nero in the Colosseum: miscreants and unfortunates dressed as the old gods that die and resurrect being cut down for the approbation of the slavering eyes of the Roman populace.

We have human gods. Our morality is human morality. When the leaders of our society decided to destroy the financial fabric of civilization - who was their master? and when will he return to reward their good and faithful service? (Or consider Islam: what will one say on the Day of Resurrection about jihad that seeks not to elevate man, but to feed the maw of death? ) "Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me," said the Lord. The cross is a symbol of death; not a simple death, a calm death in hospital, feeling no pain, surrounded by loved ones. The cross is a painful death, but symbolic of the painful transition from being a child within a religious community to being an adult who must bear witness to religion, and who must even pass it on to new generations: witness, teacher, worker, fighter, priest, scribe, and hero.

The saying tells us to let the old person in us die and wither away: do not weep for our youth and childhood. St. Paul tells us to put away the things of a child; he was not talking about tops and jacks. In all the Abrahamic religions, we have been called to do the most difficult things for mankind: to transcend its nature and become more. Time is running out on us. The dress rehearsal for our age was the victory of the USA-USSR not destroying each other in nuclear conflagration. That was a great moral victory. Indeed, the greater it is, the more we ignore it! There is going to be need for many more moral victories, great and small. Farewell, the peaceful mind; farewell, content! Our occupation is gone, and our new job is to transform the world.

---

quotes from Evelyn-White translation.

Xmas Greetings, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth...

I'm going to take this time to wish everyone a merry Christmas. You certainly make me feel humble. When I look at the list of followers, I think "What possible good do I do to warrant those entities'..."

(Sorry. I have a tendency to refer to brainy types as "conscious entities", or "entities" for short. I suppose this is one of the reasons I am so beloved by the Mechs and machines.) "...to warrant those entities' interest? I just seem to blather on, yet they all seem so much more interesting than I." Now I shall admit to being "interesting" in a sense, that sense being more clinical or forensic than emotional or magnetic. I have had friends tell me the only present they want for Christmas is the location of my "off" button. That would satisfy them for the next decade or so. Failing to locate said "off" button, they have invoked the cloak of distance, which works even better. I think I have demonstrated this with ample largesse over the autumn. As I recently wrote, unless one shows caution, I may turn into some sort of literate monstrosity: a Grendel's dam of conversation - affrighting even those people who don't read too much, and have no idea who Grendel is, nor his dam, but they do know when the moon is full, and to beware words and wolfmen. You are all so wonderful... There are such great things in God's world... Merry Christmas, wonderful Entities!

Who Let The Dogmas Out?!

As delegates from the world convene in Copenhagen to discuss Global Warming and to create a new global emissions pact, with two days left to go, things seem to have come to a standstill. Recently, Climate Change Deniers have brayed loudly over transcripts which seemed to indicate a fudging of climate data. This made them almost as happy as they would be were they to discover Darwin and his descendants had fudged Natural Selection, and Creationism could stand up to the experimental rigors imposed on it by modern science. As I've written elsewhere, I've been following the climate for 20 years or more. I remember back when the world of science was heralding the new Ice Age. That disappeared and became the Warming. It doesn't matter whether it is warming, globally or locally, or whether it is cooling; it all come down to the same point of treating our home - the Earth - with the respect due it. If we fail to do that, we shall pay a heavy price. God gave man dominion. This is responsibility, not license! Husbandry of the resources is what was committed to man: to use the gift intelligently, so when the master of the house returns, He will praise us as faithful and wise servants...not miserable destroyers who let everything go to wreck while we chased our profits and pleasures! Reason can only assist us in making sense of the data. It cannot indubitably prove, nor absolutely falsify: it is more like Voltaire's smile, rather than the Inquisitor's frown: it welcomes discussion and new things, but it cannot declare them dogma, nor can it thumbscrew you into believing scraps that the dogma left. That is the realm of present day Power-Religion and Power-Politics: the kingdoms of the Irrational. I told the story of the future when mankind was at the brink of war which would annihilate the world. Weapons were poised, and hair triggers set, yet a small hope remained: to feed as much information into the newest and most brilliant computer to see whether there existed an optimal solution - short of murder and annihilation - for world peace. After an extended period, the computer came back with the answer. The answer caused the Secretary-General of that future UN to weep. It said "Love one another." I suppose the Secretary-General wept, because he realized this was an impossible answer, for it was not what we think of a "reasonable", rather it was emotional or spiritual. Not is it Dogma, for no modern religion has ever expended time, money, and resources fighting for Love; they fight and kill for any and every jot and iota writ in their holy books, but not for Love. Love ain't worth fightin' for. It's a fool's game...the way we reckon it. Reason will lead us to the place where the Spirit must act. Reason is the Guide of the Spirit. So far, the greater part of the world has not acted according to the dictates of the Spirit. I am not saying confirm or deny the Warming; I am saying embrace the Spirit and follow it where it will lead. This is not obscure. The only thing obscure is our thinking. We think the Spirit to be hazy and mystical and hard to understand, because we want to ignore its demands. And the rest of mankind is our enabler in this. PS. How's that title, Baysage?

Lilies Of The Field Again

We believe too, too much that God has nothing to do but to be mindful of us and our foibles.

We have this incredible icon of the Omnipotent and All-Loving, so really, how could we go wrong? I mean, He's always there for us, right? Lilies of the field type of deal? Even if one neither toils nor spins, the Father has us on his divine dole.
Well, consider, then, that even in the days of Jesus, farmers still cut down the lilies; lilies were weeded or harvested; lilies did not run rampant over the globe, urged on by their exceptional natures.

What we do is kids' stuff, and it is not enough. It is constant work; it is not just a constant struggle to make oneself ok with present dogma, but dogma itself is a contradiction in the realm of the Holy, for the quest never stops: there is no such thing as a full and final orthodoxy. Jesus knew it. That's why he used stories that were so hard; imagine doing nothing and putting full trust and faith in your heavenly Father!!! Imagine! He knew that the story has no end, the journey has no earth-bound goal, and if we snooze in the sleep of dogma, we loose.
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