Letters to Nineveh

Religion and Irreligion

2011-09-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

I keep wanting this blog to be funny, but I keep being seduced frommy purpose by well meaning people who seem determined to spoutmisinformation about stuff I really care about. The latest is a postby a wonderful, if misguided, blogger who passionately objects to theCatholic Church because she thinks that it hates gays, divorcees, andpeople who have had abortions. She calls herself a recoveringCatholic, and lately she is rankled anew by something one of herchildren learned in catechism class, where apparently she has senthim to prepare for the Sacrament of the Eucharist in spite of thefact that she herself does not attend church at all. Is it any wonderthat her child is conflicted by matters religious?

First to lay the misinformation to rest. The Catholic Church does nothate gays, divorcees, or women who have had abortions. The CatholicChurch was founded by Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ died for all of us.Jesus Christ died to expiate all our sins, including the ones we haveyet to commit. Jesus Christ is all about love and acceptance andinclusion. Anybody who thinks otherwise does not understand my Savioror my Church.

Now, there are people in the Catholic Church who hate other peopleincluding gays, divorcees and women who have had abortions. Thesepeople are also misguided and sinful, and they have no more idea whattheir church is about than the misguided souls who take what theyhave to say to heart and condemn the Church on that basis. Some ofthese people are priests and nuns.

Now God, and, by extension, His Church hate sin, but neither confusesthe sin with the sinner...ever. Only people do that, and they arewrong to do it. God hates sin, but loves sinners...all ofthem...equally. This is the reason He sent His Son to save them...allof them...equally. The Church exists to facilitate this process. Itmay not be indispensable, but it is very important.

In the grand scheme of things, all sin is the same. All sin involvesrejecting what God wants in favor of what the sinner wants. Seen inthis light, there is no moral difference between gay sex andheterosexual sex out of wedlock. There is no difference betweenhaving an abortion and skipping Mass on Sunday to play golf. There isno difference between spreading false stories about someone you don'tlike and stealing their retirement nest egg. God doesn't rank thesesins the way people seem to want to do, and that is why God reservesjudgment to Himself. We suck at it. He doesn't.

So when Catholics who ought to know better say that their Churchcondemns gays or divorcees or women who have had abortions, they aresaying in effect that the sins they commit are not as bad as the sinsthe gays or the divorcees or the women who have had abortions commit.This is just wrong.

It's wrong because it's not true, and it's wrong because it drives awedge between sinners who are more alike than they are different. Itis wrong because it separates sinners for whom God makes salvationavailable through Jesus Christ from the fullness of that salvation.If you are working to drive sinners away from God's Church then youare working at cross purposes with your God. Stop it.

Now, for the people who reject and condemn the Church because theyfeel like they've been excluded from it. It's your birthright. Goafter it. Don't give up what you know to be yours just because someignorant blowhard has tried to set himself up as better than you.

By the same token you owe it to yourself and your children not tobecome an ignorant blowhard in response to the blowhards. You have aduty to yourself at least to learn as much about your faith as youcan. When you have real knowledge and discernment you cannot besuckered by wrong-headed bullies, and you cannot have your faithundone by bad information.

If you have examined your faith and found it wanting, that'sanother matter. If you just can't accept the tenets of the Churchafter you've studied them long enough to know that you understandthem correctly, then by all means leave the Church. But once you'veleft, don't send your kids back alone to get the Sacraments. You'renot doing them any favors, and you're not giving them a leg up onworking out their salvation either. One of two things will happenwhen you send your kids to a church that you don't attend and don'tbelieve in. Either they will reject it as you have, in which case youwill just have wasted their time, or they will become half-formed andwholly conflicted Catholics, ignorant blowhards in other words, who are likely to drive away the sinnerswho most need the succor and support of God's Church. Stop it.

Reality Check

2011-08-19T05:57:00.000-07:00

I used to enjoy the Real Housewives of Orange County. This was back when they were merely clueless and pneumatic, and I watched even though they were, for the most part, neither housewives nor real. I found their vapid self-absorption fascinating, if a little scary. Their blond ambitions and their ability to overcome emotional setbacks with legendary shopping trips were astonishing. Then the franchise changed.

I think this happened when they added Atlanta and New Jersey to the mix. These new housewives weren't content with mere shallowness. They were the mean girls we all used to know in home room, only with way more money and snark. Their cluelessness borders on the criminal.

It would have been okay if this amped-up bad behavior had stayed in New Jersey and Atlanta, but it didn't. It got great ratings. People apparently like to watch women yell and curse and pull each others' hair. We like a good cat fight, and the more profane and ugly it is the better.

So rather than confine the carnage to the place where it began, Bravo decided to export it. They switched up the Orange County and New York shows to feature the cruelty like a new cast member. A show without tears and gnashing of teeth was a failed episode. I can imagine Andy Cohen calling Jill Zarin or Vicki Gunvalson and telling them they needed to step up their game or they'd be replaced by knife toting ex-cons.

Does anyone believe that Bethenny Frankel could have sold Skinny Girl Cocktails for $120 million if she hadn't spent two seasons trading insults at made-for-celebrity charity events with the other women of the New York franchise. I don't think so. She may have shaved the calories off a margarita, but she stripped out all the flavor as well. The only reason a woman would drink one of these is so that she could purse her lips and suck in her cheeks and look like she really meant the sarcastic remarks she was hurling at her frenemies.

These shows are not entertaining or astonishing to me any more. They are frightening. Truly bad behavior has become a norm. Snarky cruelty has become acceptable behavior. Bravo has made it so with its ubiquitous 'Real Housewives' shows. Now there are tons of reality shows trying to find slots in this televised parade of emotional abuse. Cohen's unreal reality shows have made me afraid to engage flashy women in conversation in the same way that the movie "Jaws" made me afraid to wade into the ocean any deeper than my knees.

What My Dogs Think

2010-11-17T15:30:00.000-08:00

I wondered if my dogs find it odd that I'm allowed to pee in the house. Then I wondered if they find it odd that I pee in their water bowl.

Smart Atheists

2010-11-16T08:38:00.000-08:00

Just because many of the atheists I know are smarter than I, doesn’t mean they’re right about God. Still I have to admire them. It takes more courage than I can muster to live a life of value without being rooted in a sense of belonging to the divine and thus having some access to eternal life.

Wisdom?

2010-11-15T05:19:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder how owls got the rep for being wise? Me too. I mean they stay up all night and eat rodents. Anybody think Ozzie Osbourne is wise? ...what I'm sayin'.

The Tech-Savvy Dog Walker

2010-11-07T17:35:00.000-08:00

In addition to being less than adept at multi-tasking, I'm kind of techno-phobic. Tonight though, I threw caution to the wind by calling my sister in Ohio while I was out walking one of the dogs. I figured I had it covered once I put my Bluetooth ear-piece in. All I had to do was thumb her number on my contacts list, and the whole operation would be hands free from then on - the phone piece at any rate. I'd still need both hands to manage the dog, our still uncivilized, straight-off-the-track greyhound.

Surprisingly, it actually worked out that way. The Bluetooth worked flawlessly, and I managed to get him to do his business while I talked. I even got back to the house and made his dinner while I finished up my conversation. In the end I felt like I had finally accomplished some bit of 21^st Century competence, and that I might soon be able to simultaneously listen to music and play online poker without going all in on a pair of Jacks because I get distracted by the peculiar quality of Casandra Wilson's voice, for instance, that sounds like polished stones falling through honey to the bottom of a tin pail.

Irony of Priesthood

2010-11-06T06:02:00.000-07:00

It has been the unfortunate history of priesthoods since the beginning of time to claim the village virgins to their own purposes.

The Ideology of Neo-Barbarism

2010-10-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

Get your own knuckles at the knuckle tattoo gun.

I had a visit yesterday from a couple of young women from Jehovah’s Witnesses. They caught me outside walking the dog. There was a group of about 10 of them canvassing our neighborhood. This happens quite often, at least every other month or so. I don’t mind that they do this. I only mind when they won’t take ‘no thanks’ for an answer.

I’m always polite. I had some very good friends in Oklahoma who were Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were pleasant and personable and content to let my Catholic peculiarities simmer away without comment. For some reason they didn’t feel compelled to get all up in my soul with arguments about the stuff they figured I had figured wrong. When they came over to my house, they didn’t bring Bibles and pamphlets and copies of the Watchtower. To my everlasting spiritual joy, they brought beer.

Like many of the others before them, these two young women out canvassing yesterday would not be easily dissuaded by my stated lack of interest in their literature or their interpretation of Scripture. I told them I was a devout Catholic, and that I was extremely unlikely to change my views.

The older of the two told me that she had been raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools. I guess this was to prove to me that I wasn’t as beyond redemption as I thought. She had seen the light, and so, presumably, could I.

The fact that she had been a Catholic once did not surprise me. I have witnessed this before. There is something about fallen-away Catholics that makes them love to out themselves, especially to still practicing Catholics. It’s like some badge of honor to them that they have managed to escape the sticky tentacles of Papism without bursting into flames. Maybe it’s just that they want to start from some shared bond in a traditional Catholic upbringing to move the practicing Catholic toward their newly adopted version of enlightenment.

Their reasons for outing themselves are easier to understand than their reasons for falling away in the first place. These I don’t understand. My first reaction—although I’ve learned not to be so confrontational—is to think, you must not have been paying very close attention in Catholic school, else you would still be a Catholic. If you say something like this out loud you always get a litany of fairly emotional reasons why they left the Church. Some of them are unassailable—I was molested by my pastor is one, or just bringing up the fact of pedophilia in the priesthood and the scandalous cover-up by our bishops. There’s not much I can say about that. I personally don’t believe that these are good reasons not to be Catholic anymore, but I can’t in good faith fault the reasoning of someone who believes otherwise.

I’m not judgmental anymore. I don’t make confrontational statements. Instead I ask, “Don’t you miss the sacraments?”

I know I would. The sacramental life is the center of the Catholic faith. The sacraments encompass ritual, worship, community, and access to the Divine all at once. I can’t imagine a religious existence without them. I think it’s a good question.

When I asked this of the young woman yesterday, she asked in return, “Which ones?”

This was proof to me that she had not been paying attention at all in Catholic school. If the nuns had not been so busy seeing to my spiritual development by rapping my knuckles with a ruler or making me kneel on a broomstick, they might have noticed that some of the girls weren’t getting it when we studied our catechisms. They might have prevented this little lost sheep from bolting out of the fold and wondering aimlessly over the religious landscape until she was snatched up by proselytizing wolves.

“Well all of them,” was my reply, “but especially the Eucharist.”

This is of course the only appropriate response. My new friend, the Jehovah’s Witness, wouldn’t have had to pay especially close attention in Catholic school to know that the Eucharist is central to Catholic worship. The Catechism puts it this way:

The Eucharist is 'the source and summit of the Christian life.’ The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it. For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself, our Pasch. … In brief, the Eucharist is the sum and summary of our faith: ‘Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking.’

I expected the former Catholic Jehovah’s Witness to know this much. I didn’t expect her to be able to articulate it, but I knew she knew it because everything I learned in Catholic school was directed to this distilled essence of our Faith. This is a universal precept of Catholicism. It is not different between one school and another or one parish and another. What is true at St. Ignacius is true at Mary Help of Christians, Sacred Heart, Corpus Christi, St. Mark, St. Clement, and Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. There is no escaping it. There is apparently slipping out of it, however, for that is what my young lady did.

“I encounter Christ every day in prayer and in the Scriptures,” she said.

The implication was that she encountered her Savior in reading and reflection, and that was for her the same or maybe better than encountering Him in bread and wine. She didn’t miss the Eucharist. She had replaced it with something that worked for her.

I’ve heard this kind of argument before, too. It is akin to the argument of people who say that they are spiritual but not religious—that they find the creative majesty of God manifest in nature rather than in church. They find the community of believers to be a distraction. Hell, I find a community of believers to be a distraction, but God didn’t give us mountains and valleys and streams and forests to lead us to eternal life. He gave us Church, and you have to get down amongst the warts and boils and farts, the petty banalities and self-centered posturing of the community of believers in order to appreciate the beauty of this plan. You have to overcome the distractions to get at the truth. It’s not supposed to be easy. If it were easy we wouldn’t have required salvation in the first place.

The same is true of the Eucharist. It’s not an easy tenet to embrace. Even His disciples were moved to declare, “this saying is hard; who can accept it?” when Jesus delivered his discourse on the Bread of Life. What He had just said that was hard for them and caused many of them to leave His company was this: “For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” (John 6:55-56)

This is a hard saying. Accepting it on its face is harder even than wallowing in the miasma of a community of believers. It doesn’t make any sense to us who are able to split atoms, bounce high-definition video signals off satellites, and map the human genome. We’re surely beyond this kind of self-affirming mysticism, this fettering superstition, unsupported as it is by the science we have perfected. Never mind that we are capable of believing all manner of concocted clap-trap, from the law of attraction to a karmic council of ascended masters that includes Mohammad, Buddha, and Mother Theresa, we want our science and our hard facts and a system of beliefs that doesn’t admit of Ecclesiastical Magic like Transubstantiation.

The problem for me has always been, once well-meaning believers have rejected the real presence of Christ—body, blood, soul, and divinity—in the Eucharist, they feel compelled to embrace the rest of Scripture piecemeal to justify their own notions of justification. So for example my new Jehovah’s Witness friend believes that Jesus was not crucified, that is hung up on a cross, but nailed rather to a single upright post. She believes that only 144,000 souls are going to be finally admitted into the beatific vision and that, in order to pare all creation down to that miniscule number of the truly saved, God is going to insist that our beliefs be absolutely correct. In other words, unless I believe exactly as the Jehovah’s Witnesses say I must, I have no hope whatsoever of attaining salvation, and damn little chance of making the final 144K even if I do. She also believes that Jesus is a fully created human, perfect and exemplary, but without any divine aspect. Surely Jesus will be first among the 144,000, so there are in effect only 143,999 spaces left on the heavenly roster.

It seems to me that in order to get to these tenets of belief the faithful Jehovah’s Witness has to ignore an awful lot of sublimely poetic scripture. John 1:1-3 comes immediately to mind:

In [the] beginning the Word was, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god. This one was in [the] beginning with God. All things came into existence through him, and apart from him not even one thing came into existence.

…along with almost the whole of Chapter 6. Of course they don’t expunge these passages. They just translate them and interpret them differently from the more mainstream Christian sects. The above translation is from the official Jehovah’s Witness translation—the New World Bible. The King James Version has it like this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

And the New American Version like this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.

Small differences perhaps in language, but the simple inclusion of the article “a” and the small case rendering of “god” make it an easy matter for the Jehovah’s Witnesses to reject the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and the miraculous efficacy of the Eucharist.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are not alone in their selective championing of the Bible as the inspired word of God. I once asked a Baptist friend of mine who taught Sunday School how his church interpreted Jesus’ insistence that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” His reply was that, since it (presumably communion) was not a requirement of salvation, it really didn’t matter what it meant. This is perhaps the most disingenuous reply to a religious question that I have ever received, but I interpreted it to mean that he really didn’t know how to answer my question. Perhaps he thought I was laying some kind of apologetic trap for him that he needed to escape. Escape he did, although I was merely curious in my questioning, and remain to this day even curiouser with respect to his answer.

I am not a theologian or a Bible scholar, but it seems to me that if you are going to regard scripture as the inspired revelation of God then you have to accept the whole thing and you have to interpret its bits in such a way that they are consistent with the entire document. This goes beyond reconciling the bloodthirsty, jealous, and often capricious ‘I Am’ of the Old Testament with the Paschal Lamb of the New. You also have to understand that, when St. Paul describes Christ as “the image of the invisible God” in Colossians 1, he gives depth to our understanding of Genesis, where we are told that God “formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life” to “make man in our image, after our likeness,” and that these passages together inform our understanding of John’s use of the word “Word” to posit Christ as, not just the embodiment, but the very personification of God’s own image of Himself from the very beginning.

So I guess what I am saying, ultimately, is that I don’t think that, if you understood all this the same way I do, you could possibly leave the Catholic Church to become a Jehovah’s Witness, or anything else for that matter. Not only would you have to give up the Sacraments, but the symmetry and poetry of quite a lot of Holy Scripture would be lost in the translation. (pun fully intended)

I’m not naive. I understand that my faith is the faith of my parents, and that if it weren’t for them I would be some other variety of believer. This much is true for most of us. Why then do so many of us run around insisting that everyone else change their beliefs to match ours? This is not just true of religion either. It also applies to politics and ideologies. The result never has been and probably never will be a shift toward consensus. Even though as humans we are quite capable of embracing all manner of lunacy where we don’t already have firm foundations in place, we do not easily give up notions we already hold dear. It has gotten to the point, all across the board of possible discourse, where we would rather argue what we believe than accomplish anything. Most evangelists, it seems, would rather beat me over the head with their interpretation of the Bible than to actually pray for my salvation. They would rather win a debate than win a soul.
This attitude carries over into other aspects of our existence. The approaching elections are a case in point. Attack ads are the norm. No seems capable of advancing considered solutions to the ills that plague us. Most Republicans would rather spout platitudes about balancing the budget than agree to redress the financial rape of the middle class by unregulated robber barons. Most Democrats would rather squander their political capital on favored causes than to actually fix the considerable problems that we face as a nation. Meanwhile nearly every discussion of politics and candidates devolves into a cacophony of accusations and name calling. Incivility and personal attacks are the order of the day, and likely will come to define the age that we live in as one of Neo-Barbarism. We all think we’re right, just ask us.

Howling Antiquities

2010-09-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

Seven hundred turned out in 1967 to see the Great Angry Poet. We came to hear him howl. We came to cheer as he banked coals of invective against the walls of the establishment. We came as a congregation to stand in the light of the conflagration. We meant to use the flames to melt our chains, to weld us together, to illuminate the dark hidey-holes of life as we knew it.

The Great Angry Poet had other ideas. He had shucked his black clothes, un-knit his black brow. He showed up in a flowing white robe—all-natural fibers. He floated in the middle of an all-natural entourage. He brought thumb cymbals, a tambourine, a squeeze box, for crying out loud! He glowed with the inner, hidden fire of brotherly love, the too-cool flame of nebulous mysticism. He just wasn't that angry anymore. He wasn't going to burn down anything. The pilot light was out. Seven hundred strong, we seethed in uncertainty. We stumbled in the dark.

The Great Angry Poet chanted mantras. He shook his tambourine, clanged his little cymbals, squeezed his squeeze box. The all-natural entourage, skinny boys and skinny girls, crawled around the stage like adoring cats, curled at his feet, purred a harmonious OMMM in rhythm with the cycles of the universe.

Somewhere in the middle, the Great Angry Poet read his Great Angry Poem to remind us what it was that made him Great in the first place. But, out of context, it didn't remind anyone what made him Angry, and so the multitude looked at one another furtively as if to say. How are we going to knock any walls down with these few little loaves and fishes? Or, man, you should have been there when he was really pissed.

When it was over, the Great Angry Poet took questions from the audience. Only no one asked the real questions like WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO NOW? or WHO'S THE NEW ENEMY THEN? IT'S NOT THE RUSSIANS AGAIN, IS IT? Or more succinctly, HUH?

We were rescued, finally—all of us: the multitude, the Great Angry Poet, the moment, the Age—by a cheerleader. She was blonde, naturally, maybe. She wore a plaid skirt, white blouse, green blazer, knee socks, penny loafers. She was the perfect prep-school perk-noid. She was impertinently pertinent.

"IS IT TRUE," she began. Her voice, clear and strident, ricocheted around the room, scraping bits of its flesh off on every surface until nothing was left of it except the bare bones of contention, the soul of censure. "IS IT TRUE THAT YOU ARE MARRIED TO A MAN?"

We all sucked in our breath. The Great Angry Poet dropped one end of his squeeze box, which sucked in its breath too, and noisily.

"WHOOSH," went our breath.

"WHEEZE," went the squeeze box.

"OMMM," went the all natural entourage.

"UHM," went the Great Angry Poet.

"WELL?" went the cheerleader.

"Yes," said the Great Angry Poet at last. "Yes that is true, but we don't fuck anymore."

Six hundred ninety nine of us took flight in a swarm, the way having been lit, finally, by the Great Angry Poet who wasn't getting any anymore. His flame rekindled by a perky spark, he shone like a beacon, lighting the hidden recesses of craggy convention. We flew in its face. We dive bombed. We strafed. We harried. We defoliated. The Great Angry Poet was a flare in the night. We picked our targets and fought and fought and fought.

Convention plodded on. Sure it stumbled a few times, seemed ready to go down once or twice, but convention was already thousands of years old. Convention had built up a lot of momentum. Even if we had distracted it, convention had only to look at its wake to see what direction it had been headed.

Bored, convention yawned and we were swallowed up. Some of us persisted, refusing to be assimilated. We were thorny roughage—fibrous and resilient. We would give convention a belly-ache. We would give convention gas pains. We would never break down.

And we didn't break down. Forty years later, nature having run its course, we came out the other end wearing steely grey pony tails and Birkenstock sandals, the uniform jack-boots of ancient hippies, our defiance emblazoned on silk-screened T-Shirts. Thank goodness for male pattern-baldness. You can finally tell the boys from the girls.

We're still plenty pissed, but maybe not so focused anymore. We need the T-Shirts to remind us of our agendas. We need the Birkenstocks so our tired feet don't distract us from our purpose. Instead we're distracted by our children and grandchildren.

We worry that they would rather watch Brady Bunch re-runs than fire bomb the administration building, rather play video games than picket, rather have a new iPod than a clue. We want to find them a pertinent cheerleader, but the cheerleaders are all drinking Jack Daniels and puking in the bathtub while skinny boys with earphones video the event and post the innocence lost on the Internet. Nobody's not getting any anymore, and that sure takes the edge off.

The Great Final Irony is that our children are angry at us. Of course the most they can bring themselves to do about it is to whine, but when they can manage to pry their consciousness out of Grand Theft Auto or Resident Evil and unplug themselves from whatever current alternative to music has been boiling their corpuscles, what they want to know is, how come we didn't get down to business when we had the chance and leave them a world that included a place for them to work... or at least a BMW?

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Technology We Can Live With

2010-05-12T18:25:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation with a kid who made my sandwich at Subway tonight. I’ve seen this kid working there before. He’s fairly new at his job. He was unusually chatty tonight. I guess it’s taken him some time to loosen up enough to initiate a conversation with an older patron. I wasn’t in a conversational frame of mind, but I didn’t want to seem rude.

Anyway he got going about the Lexus automobile model that parallel parks itself. He didn’t think that was a good idea. He was afraid the sensors that enable the car to park itself could malfunction and get him into an accident that wouldn’t be his fault, but for which he would get blamed. He didn’t seem to require any comment from me at that point so I just let him ramble on.

From there he launched into a discussion of the car that slams on the brakes if you are about to have a collision. He didn’t think that was a very good idea either. In fact he thought it was an even worse idea than the self parking thing because it was likely to malfunction at a higher rate of speed than one would be likely to use to park. I couldn’t offer him any argument there either.

Finally he latched on to a thing that’s apparently been reported in the news about a device that would allow the police to disable the cars of fleeing drivers. He thought that was a terrible idea, and stated emphatically that he would never, ever buy a car so equipped.

Here I had an argument because I think that is an excellent idea. It is an idea so good that it ought to be a required addition to the automobiles of everyone who thinks that it is a bad idea. The rest of us, the docile and compliant citizen drivers who think it is a good idea are going to stop when the police tell us to. We don’t need to be disabled. The drivers who think it is a bad idea on the other hand, are precisely the kind of scofflaws who need to be forcibly prevented from leading the police on high speed chases that endanger the lives and property of all the rest of us.

In fact I don’t think that it should be just the police who have the disabling device. Some of the rest of us should get one too. I know for a certainty that I should get one. I said so to the Subway kid. He looked at me like I was crazy. I didn’t care. I had an irrefutable argument.

“How many drivers have you seen just this week,” I asked him, “Where you really, really wanted to disable their ass?”

HOW THE LAW OF ATTRACTION REALLY WORKS

2010-02-20T12:37:00.000-08:00

In her best selling book on the law of attraction, The Secret, author Rhonda Byrne maintains that Jesus was a prosperity teacher and a millionaire. She came by this notion from reading, among other sources, Catherine Ponder’s series of prosperity texts called The Millionaires of the Bible. Oh my! Jesus Christ preaching prosperity and living a “…more affluent lifestyle[s] than many present-day millionaires could conceive of.”

Anyone remotely familiar with the New Testament will have heard many of Jesus’ pronouncements on the subjects of prosperity and poverty. I will list a few of the more famous of these here:

And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (Matthew 19:24)
Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. (Luke 17:22)
As he looked up, Jesus saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. "I tell you the truth," he said, "this poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on. (Luke 21:1-4)
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God… But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. (Luke 6:20,24)

That should be enough to give you the idea of Jesus' real take on riches and prosperity. Jesus was not a prosperity teacher. Jesus preached detachment from riches. He blessed the ‘poor in spirit’ and the poor in fact. Jesus was all about storing up riches in heaven as opposed to earthly treasure. Furthermore, anyone who believes Jesus lived a life of ease and comfort that modern day millionaires could scarcely conceive of is bringing an awful lot of spin to the life of someone who went to his death possessing a single homespun cloak and a pair of sandals. Honestly, this doesn’t sound to me like a guy who was furiously working the law of attraction to get what he wanted out of life. I think suggesting that Jesus was a prosperity teacher and a millionaire sounds rather more like a load of heretical claptrap.

This is how I think the law of attraction really works. Hucksters and charlatans cherry pick and misinterpret Bible verses to attract money from hapless saps who are too easily persuaded that Jesus wants them to have a big house and a new Mercedes when a thorough understanding of everything Jesus had to say on the subjects of prosperity and poverty would lead one to the exact opposite conclusion. Jesus wants us to spend eternity in heaven with Him. He clearly believes that riches are an impediment to that happy result. It's not that he wants you to be poor, but rather than His priorities are completely directed toward the Kingdom on Heaven and not our worldly comfort.

Getting a Good Martini Out Nearly Impossible

2010-01-24T09:42:00.000-08:00

I love martinis, but I almost never order one when I'm out because it's so difficult to get a good one. First of all the "dry" martini lobby has ruined the taste of a classic martini by causing the average bartender to believe that the appropriate amount of vermouth used in the drink is an amount insufficient to civilize the innate brutality of raw gin. Secondly, the extension of the appellation 'martini' beyond the ingredients indigenous to a classic martini—that is gin and vermouth—to include drinks made with vodka and a whole raft of peculiar and vaguely sissified beverages flavored with fruits and candies has eroded the integrity of the genre. Seriously, if you're going to drink one of those abominations you ought to at least have the decency to order it in a silly glass with an umbrella to warn passersby of the potential for noxious fruitiness. Worst of all to me though is the inability of modern bar staff to prepare a proper twist. The twists I see, and the twists I get when I'm moved to order one, are huge swatches of lemon containing virtual slabs of pith. These things do not impart any sophistication or subtlety to a proper martini. Instead they make for a bitter drink with a disagreeable appearance. Better to just build your own at home. Have a nice glass of wine when you're out. No one is likely to screw that up.

The little animation below is indicative of my experience. Enjoy.

Dear Achmed

2010-01-20T09:27:00.000-08:00

Achmed Fatwahd

Common sense advice for the Jihadist on a short fuse!

Q. Allah’s blessings be upon you, Achmed, and upon your sons and their sons to the twelfth generation. I am troubled Achmed, and seek your counsel. I am come late to the fight, and while I am ready to tape explosives around my middle, to light the fuse, and to embrace the infidel in public places, I fear that my reward may not be as great as I had once hoped. (Forgive me, Allah, for doubting.) So many of our faithful brothers have gone to their reward already, before I was of age, before I had the chance to serve our cause, that I begin to wonder (have mercy on your insignificant servant) whether there will be sufficient virgins left for me to get my allotted 6 dozen. Even worse I fear that even were sufficient numbers of virgins available to populate my heavenly domicile, the stocks may have been so severely depleted by the brave warriors before me that the ones left to my humble allotment may not be so comely to look upon as those whose fate it might have been to be possessed by me had I been able to blow myself and sundry infidels to kingdom come some years ago. Can you give me some assurance, Achmed, that my virgins will be beautiful enough under their burkahs to make my sacrifice worthwhile? – Moahmahr.

A. Moahmahr, you faithless pile of camel dung. Have you no shame? Is it not enough for you to have a noble cause for which to sacrifice your miserable life? Must you also insist that your heavenly virgins be comely? Be glad that you have been called to give your life for the cause, and that your glorious demise will bring honor to your family and death to the infidel. Knowing this should be reward enough for the faithful and committed brethren. But, as you are young and your faith yet imperfectly formed, I have some comfort for you. I myself, not wishing to tax Allah’s munificence have elected to trade my own celestial virgins for a single pole-dancing bimbo with with blond hair and enormous implants.

AIGee

2009-03-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

I for one am getting tired of the sanctimonious blather coming out of Washington about the AIG bonuses. First of all, and what no one seems to understand, is that these were not performance bonuses but retention bonuses. Retention bonuses aren’t pretty. They are incentives to keep existing executives on board as the ship is sinking, and as such are usually viewed with skepticism and bitterness by all the stakeholders who are not compensated for going down with the ship. They are however fairly common business practice and, arguably at least, a necessary evil. Even though the executives who get the bonuses are the self-same scoundrels who scuttled the business in the first place, their knowledge of the systems, processes, markets and other particulars of the business are seen to make them useful in forestalling the chaos that attends a catastrophic business failure.

Secondly, the contracts that put the bonus payments in place were dated March of 2008. Thus they predate not only the bailout agreements but any general public knowledge of the company’s imminent failure.

These two reasons alone explain why Secretary Geithner passed on the payments. They were and remain--all the commotion aside--standard business practice governed by legal contracts that had been in place for a year.

My guess is that Secretary Geithner in particular and the rest of the Obama administration in general thought--with blushing bride naïveté--that that is how the bonuses would be regarded by most reasonable and knowledgeable men. They were subsequently blindsided by Washington's stellar capacity for self-righteous indignation and woeful disregard for sensibility. Now the President himself, knowing that he is never ever going to be able to justify or even explain the bonuses--not even to an adoring public--in the face of the self-aggrandizing vitriol spewing out of Congress, is forced into the duplicitous role (he does seem to wear it comfortably though) of condemning the bonuses as morally objectionable on the one hand while defending the actions of his secretary and his administration on the other.

What galls is this. At the same time that AIG was spiraling down the toilet, at the same time they were facing a massive cash shortfall that they knew or could reasonably expect would require a taxpayer bailout, at the same time they were contracting to pay these allegedly immoral and irresponsible retention bonuses, they were also making substantial campaign contributions to the same lawmakers who are now shrieking on the nightly news.

If Congress wants the bonus money back, if the President wants to exhaust every means possible to recover the bonus payments, if all this is being done and championed in the name of the taxpayers, then we (the taxpayers) ought to get the campaign contributions back as well as the bonuses. Congress is at least as culpable as the AIG executives for our current economic turmoil. For them to keep the money given them by AIG is at least as arrogant and reprehensible as a bunch of incompetent insurance salesmen hanging on to their bonuses.

Business Ethics

2008-11-10T10:25:00.000-08:00

In days of old when men were bold and business was conducted
They carried swords and heavy boards as circumstance instructed.
So if a tempted lout exempted conscience from his dealings,
He’d think twice, or even thrice, before he set to stealing.
The loss of culture to these vultures was at times lamented,
But none denies were bald-faced lies and cheating thus prevented.

This day and age do we engage in commerce with civility
We make our deals o’er tasty meals with scruples and tranquillity.
We wouldn’t dare to fetch hardware or ordnance to meetings
For there’s no need to make men cleave to honesty by beatings.
The Golden Rule’s the best of rules as most of us were taught,
And rare’s the day it doesn’t pay - at least that’s what I thought.

There's some, I’ve learned, that rules have spurned, and put on pious faces,
Which are so false it really galls the righteous, and amazes
Holy prophets for whom profit’s not of God but come from mammon,
And fishy deals with Christian seals still smell like rancid salmon.
Who’d have guessed the con-men blessed with all the cash they’ve made
Because, I say, in church are they to canvass for our trade.

In suits and ties with sincere eyes these dastardly deceivers
Will quote the Book to be mistook for just-like-us believers.

The self-same Lord who gave His word that saints don’t stoop to anger
Got mad as spit and threw a fit and whipped the money clangers
Who’d come so low their greed to sew on the porch of God’s own house.
If He feels thus, it’s up to us to suffer not these louts.
But rid our midst of hypocrites while we can still afford
To guard against their grave offense once more with boards and swords.

IMMORTALITY

2008-10-27T10:30:00.000-07:00

If we could all decide our fate,
And name our time of death and date,
Most all of us would check out late,
And queue en-masse at Heaven’s gate—
Arriving at the same damn time,
Procrastinators in a line,
Who’d put off dying long’s we could,
But just the same in coffin’s wood
Would all be lying stiff as boards
Awaiting judgment from our lords.

Though this is what we’d all prefer,
Yet most believe we must defer
To higher powers this life-length choice.
Sing halleluiah! Let’s rejoice!
But some there are that what they think’s
Our span of life’s not writ in ink,
But penciled on our page of fate—
A mere suggestion to a date—
Just change the pattern’s warp and weft,
To raise the sum of days we’ve left.

The starting point is what to eat.
The fare is spare and short on meat.
Less sweet desserts, less this and that,
A pan-caloric tit for tat
Less fat or carbs—just take your pick.
What works for some makes others sick.
More fibrous greens, organic fruit,
Whole-kernel grains, and tofu suit
The longer, leaner lifetime mess
(Though much of it be flavorless.)

Then what’s required is discipline,
And going placidly within—
A regimen of proper diet,
Avoiding all excess and riot,
Restraint in all save exercise
(In working out we’ll agonize.)
For fitness is the way to stay
About a longer time than they
That shirks their time inside the gym
To journey fat through thick and thin.

Hard work and sweat must now align
To gobble up great gobs of time—
Running, rowing, dance aerobic,
Pumping iron, and skipping ropic,
Swimming climbing, step and stretching,
Jogging to the point of retching—
Till weary rapture of corpuscle
Coursing through sore, aching muscle
Signals that this hard persistence
May have lengthened our existence.

Then free from guilt but fraught with pain
We pause to calculate our gain,
And find when appetite’s denied
That all life’s fruits are froze and dried,
And though we may have added years,
They’ll have to be reviewed through tears.
Oh, we can choose long life to live,
Knowing we’ve but one to give,
But racking life out to its limit
Sadly leaves scant living in it.

Sister Mary Clarence: Keep your knees together, and pray for deliverance.

2008-10-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

Sister Mary Clarence - Advice you can believe in.

You may not like it, but you can believe in it.

Dear Sister,

All my friends are getting their belly buttons pierced. Some of them even have tattoos. My mom says this is a sin. What do you think?

Blingless in Birmingham.

Dear Blingless,

It is not a sin to get your belly button pierced, but it is asking for trouble. Your mother has conveniently forgotten her own misguided adventures in conformity to popular culture so now she can’t give you the direction you need. I don’t blame your mother though. It really started with your grandmother. Fortunately you have turned to Sr. Mary Clarence before it is too late.

Your grandmother used to roll her skirts at the waist so she could display her bony little knees for all the world to see. Her more adventurous contemporaries also wore patent leather shoes so the boys they knew could, upon reflection, glimpse higher up their legs than the Lord intended.

Never mind the sexual havoc that ensued, these girls, when they became mothers, were rendered incapable by their own shamelessness to instill moral values in their daughters. This was the unfortunate plight of your mother’s generation: to be brought up by mothers who thought their own modesty ought to be tempered by fashion. Oh what a slippery slope that is, my dear.

Your mother’s skirts were so short off the rack that they required neither rolling nor patent leather shoes in order for the boys of the age to discern the color of her underpants. Is it any wonder that she cannot rely on the sense of good example to guide her daughter’s choices, but must instead rely in desperation on her fabricated hope for the wisdom of Holy Mother Church to prevent your trumping her pathetic little micro-mini with a horrifically unimaginable adornment to your navel.

I have seen your little friends out and about in public. I know about bare mid-riffs, thongs, skin tight knit tops, underwear as outerwear, and every other manner of baring, sharing, displaying, teasing, and advertising a seeming indifference to modesty, decorum and chastity that your too experienced too fast generation is prey to. Because your clothing leaves nothing to the imagination, you now think you have to adorn your actual flesh with metal and ink in order to differentiate yourselves one from the other. One shudders to think to what lengths your daughters will go to be attractive when fashion will no doubt dictate the flagrant airing of their actual pudenda to public scrutiny. You will have even less ground to stand on than your mother, and Holy Mother Church will be hiding once again in catacombs.

No, child, getting you belly button pierced is not a sin, but inviting the sexual attention of boys is. Go finish your homework, and then write 500 times, “My body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and I will not defile it.”

Yours in Grace and Rectitude
Sister Mary Clarence, OPS

Chipped Nails are Chic??!

2008-10-23T10:36:00.000-07:00

According to New York Times writer, Melena Ryzik, chipped, streaked or "grotty" nail polish are now hip. To be sure in order for the grotty to pass as chic the look must be accessorized with expensive handbags and fabulous shoes. I guess you need to spend enough on the accoutrement to demonstrate that your otherwise slovenly appearance is the result of bad breeding, bad upbringing, and/or bad manners rather than anything so unsavory as say a lack of sufficient funds.

Should I care? No. It's just sour grapes on my part as I am slaving away for a pittance at a job I loathe while someone else somewhere else is getting good money to come up with inane trends like this and promote them. It won't be long until merely grotty will no longer suffice, and nails will have to be studiously grotty in order to pass fashion muster. Manicurists will have to specialize in designer chipping, and the deliberate chips will have to be protected against accidental chips. If you accidentally chip one of your manicured chips it will need to be repaired in such a way as to appear purposely chipped and just so.

In the grand scheme of things I guess this is not significantly different from buying your jeans already ripped or paying a stylist to tousle your hair until it looks like you just got out of bed, and lacquer it in place so that it doesn't accidentally rearrange itself into something attractive.