Friday, January 20, A.D. 2012

Herchurch

I wish everyone a safe journey who will travel to Washington over the next few days for the March for Life on Monday.

And now for something completely different—Herchurch:

This next video is of higher quality but lacks the tribal authenticity of the first one that really helped me to connect with Gaia:

“Herchurch” used to be Ebenezer Lutheran Church in San Francisco. At some point since Western society lost its mind, this E.L.C.A. congregation morphed into something resembling a neopaganized, leftist, Protestant lesbian’s personal fantasy. The congregation’s web site is really something to behold; it is endlessly quotable. For instance, it teaches us:

DEFINITION OF CRONE: Crone is…the power, passion, and purpose of ancient female wisdom…the crowning triple phase of the ancient Triple Goddess: Maiden/Mother/Crone. Joyous, outrageous, real, and at ease, living from the inside out. The Crone’s title was related to the word crown and she represented the power of the ancient tribal matriarch who made the moral and legal decisions for her subjects and descendants. It was the medieval metamorphosis of the wise woman into the witch that changed the word Crone from a compliment to an insult and established the stereotype of malevolent old womanhood that continues to haunt elder women today.—Barbara Walker, The Crone (Women of Age, Wisdom and Power)

Verily, every other word on the site makes the femoronic bullometer buzz wildly. I learnt a new word—thealogian! And you may even order a “goddess rosary” from the organization’s gift shop. Do not forget to look at the pictures from Megan Rohrer’s “ordination.”

By the way, “Herchurch” is the embraced name of this particular community. It is not a slur by outsiders.

There is an endless stream of snarky commentary that one can make about these folks, but I wish to note only that narcissism, self absorption, self adulation, the obsession with the trivial—these must be natural vices for women. In sane societies, human beings recognize these shortcomings and seek to undermine such tendencies. In our culture, however, we encourage people to embrace the worst parts of their personalities and to celebrate them. And they do so, going so far as to fashion idols of their passions. There thereby worship themselves without realizing it as they dress up their demonic confusion with respectable words dignified by academic journals and conferences. It is nothing short of an abomination. What would Anne Bradstreet think of the lost souls at “Herchurch”?

Posted by Joseph on Friday, January 20, A.D. 2012
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Wednesday, June 15, A.D. 2011

Forgetting the City of Man

Last week, my father asked me why the Roman Catholic bishops supported open borders. Of course, the opportunism of such a position is obvious. The Roman Church in the United States has been hemorrhaging its white American membership for decades and needs a steady supply of Mexican immigrants to fill the emptying parishes in many parts of the country. There is also the religio-tribal reflex; Roman Catholics have natural sympathies for their coreligionists around the world. Besides, Mexico is our neighbor, and a large portion of the country has a long, intimate history with Mexico. For Americans in the Southwest, Mexico is about as alien to them as Old American Yankee life. If we were experiencing an invasion of Mohammedan Pakistanis, I doubt that there would be so much pro-immigrant cheerleading from the Roman bishops.

However, there is something much deeper underlying the bishops’ position. It is an ancient Christian problem; one may even call it an inherent tendency in our religion. Christians may easily forget the city of man. By that, I do not mean that they neglect the world in the Buddhist way. A doctrinal grounding of Christianity is the incarnation, and Christians enthusiastically care for the city of man as a way to manifest divine love. Rather, they forget that the city of man retains its own nature—its own set of ways and rules, some of which have resulted from what Christians call the fall. A common Christian response to this “alien” city of man is to pretend that the rules for the city of God have supplanted the laws of nature. Until the eschaton, such will not be the case.

Allow me to flesh out this theory. Christians rightly judge the soul and the state of the soul to be more important than the body and the state of the body. However, if they only considered this fact, they would jeopardize society. Indeed, pagans and anti-Christians have accused Christians of doing this since the apostolic age. Consider a barbarian attack on a city. If the Christians’ manning the city walls thought only about everlasting consequences for the soul, they would not kill the attacking barbarians. For then, they might rob the heathens’ chances of hearing and of accepting the gospel. Yet, if they refused to defend the city, they would be guilty of neglecting their earthly responsibilities, and the blood of the massacred population would be on their hands, albeit indirectly. The insane spiritualism to which Christianity can easily descend judges such a result acceptable. For this view holds that the innocent, Christian victims will happily enter the kingdom of God while the witness of the Christian soldiers who refused to fight testifies the mercy of God to the barbarians. That is madness. The barbarians would judge such an extreme form of irresponsibility as cowardice and foolishness, and the heathen would understandably spit upon the images of Christ in the city’s temples as the god of an idiotic populace.

This temptation to neglect the city of man is ancient, but rarely has it become widespread, notwithstanding the accusations of the pagans. Christian civilization developed, and Christian cities defended themselves from the forces of barbarism, both from within and from without. It is very telling that contemporary spiritualists point to the healthy, vigorous Christian societies of the past as examples of darkness and hypocrisy when they were functioning, strong, vibrant Christian communities that both knew what must be done to secure earthly order and what the higher aim of mortal life must be. Nietzsche criticizes Christianity as the new Buddhism, but historically, Christian civilization has not been a nihilistic, self destructing exemplar of social dysfunction.

Necessity is an incentive toward sober thinking, and most people throughout history have not had the luxury to ignore the standard perils of human life. The wealth and power of the modern West have allowed men to indulge in drunken thoughts. The naive assurance of permanent order allows for the spiritualism previously discussed and for the follies of leftist social fantasy. Both tendencies have likely influenced the Roman bishops’ support of unrestricted immigration. The hierarchs are so telescopically focused on spiritual matters that they forget or refuse to think about the city of man. Societies need social cohesion, unity, and shared loyalties. Large scale population displacements—invasions, really—disrupt those political needs and lead to disorder and disintegration. Yet, such mortal concerns do not interest those pious men of God who only gaze upon heaven. Theirs is another country; to hell with the land of their birth.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, June 15, A.D. 2011
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Thursday, February 17, A.D. 2011

Evil Christians

I plan to respond tomorrow to Kristor’s comments to my post, “Orthodoxy and Evolution,” the topic of which was continued in “Kristor on the Fall.” Today, though, I would like to consider the prevalence of evil in Christianity. No, not like that! This isn’t the New York Times. Rather, I think that Christians are more wont than others to think deeply about evil, and I suspect that we are best constituted intellectually to do so. Evil is a special problem for us. For almost all pagans, evil is just a fact of reality; it is not something that holds much interest. The problematic aspect of evil for pagans simply means that it is to be avoided when possible; there is no inherent metaphysical puzzle. For the Abrahamic traditions, however, evil becomes a metaphysical thorn in one’s theological side. For we monotheists believe that God is the really real and that God is entirely good. Creation, then, is the product of God, having no origin or constituent reality apart from God. Whence, then, comes evil? For we follow not Zoroaster or Mani; we do not interpret the history of being as a perennial war between the forces of light and darkness. For us, light is all that there is, and darkness is merely the absence of light. The metaphysical status of evil is entire parasitic, though such a metaphor only suggests what is truly unintelligible. To speak of evil is necessarily to bastardize language.

Given this Abrahamic legacy, why do I propose that Christians have the peculiar burden of conceiving evil? After all, are not rabbinical Jews also the heirs of Job’s lessons? I think that Christians have thought more about theodicy simply because Christianity is more hospitable to philosophy than rabbinical Judaism, wherein the legal emphasis saps mental and spiritual energy. Despite the fact that rabbinical Jews have a long tradition of educational achievement and notwithstanding the natural advantages in intelligence so prevalent in the rabbinical community, there were not many Jewish philosophers after antiquity. I doubt that the legalistic focus of the rabbinical community was fertile ground for spirits such as Philo. Maimonides and Spinoza come to mind as the exceptions, though Spinoza represents the beginning of the secular age. Following Jewish emancipation and the widespread rejection of rabbinical tradition, there has been an explosion of Jewish intellectual activity in every philosophical domain. I attribute the paucity of Jewish philosophical contribution during that long interim to the rather antiphilosophical training of rabbinical study. After Spinoza, rabbinical Jewish philosophers have philosophized in tension with their rabbinical heritage. Strauss comes to mind as the best and most self aware example of this tendency.

I suspect that a similar explanation holds for the Mohammedans. In the first centuries of the Crescent’s conquest, there were many formidable philosophers who continued the Greco-Roman tradition. Yet, as the theologians (really, legal scholars) gained control of intellectual activity, fields besides legal theory became barren in the Dar al-Islam. I do not understand this history, though. It is possible to have a legal focus and still to have a flourishing culture of inquiry. Averroes was a lawyer, and yet he was one of the greatest philosophers of his time. Then, again, we have Thomas More. I suppose that exceptions will always surface.

Christians, however, have always engaged philosophy, as we can see in every age from Paul’s speeches to the pagans to Benedict XVI’s addresses today. While there have always been intellectual anti-intellectuals like Tertullian, Athens has always had a place in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem. Christians have also faced legalistic temptations, but even the law of God for Christians has been more of an exercise in natural law thinking than an exposition of particular commandments. The general commands in the gospel invite broad reflection rather than casuistry. Furthermore, as a matter of history, Christians were absorbing and transforming Greco-Roman culture just as the rabbinical Jews were purging such from their scripture and tradition.

So, Christians have historically been more engaged in and open to philosophy. What does this have to do with the problem of evil? Well, let us contrast a philosophical discussion of the problem of evil with one that works within a legal framework. The philosophical approach will examine all aspects of the problem of evil, forcing a religion to deal with rather indelicate questions. For it is in the nature of a believer to fall before God and to submit to a higher wisdom. The problem of evil, though, requires God to be put on trial in a way. For it is an explicit inquiry into the justice of God that calls into question basic theological and metaphysical doctrines. By contrast, an inquiry into the problem of evil within the context of religious law does not impugn the goodness of God or of God’s law. Rather, it presupposes the goodness of the law to comment and act upon the human condition, where the problem of evil is one of human moral failing. The law’s reputation is only reinforced as the legal scholar notes the sagacity and justice of the divine legislation.

It is then no surprise that the profound treatment of the problem of evil has come from Christian thinkers, especially ones well acquainted with the philosophical tradition. Note that I previously mentioned that almost no pagans have an interest in the problem of evil. The Greek philosophical tradition shows some counterexamples. To see the problem of evil, one must have a Parmenidean understanding of the stakes involved. One must consider being as such rather than merely commenting on various phenomena that one witnesses. For only an attempt to get to the ultimate will make contradiction problematic. Oppositions (such as good and evil) as diverse elements of reality are not that interesting. Yet, when one tries to get to the really real, such oppositions become very important. For how do both opposites inhere in or come from the same source?

In addition to this Parmenidean concern, one must have an understanding of the good. Whether we attribute his awareness and love of the good to Diotima or to his daimon, we must admit that the pagan Socrates devoted his life to pursuing the good, even unto death. Providence combined Parmenidean metaphysical inquiry with the Socratic devotion to the good, and God thus created Plato. Beyond the Platonic legacy, I know of no other pagan for whom there really is a problem of evil. Evil just is. For Platonists and their heirs, evil is not. Christians knew the same truth, and they took the spoils of Egypt from philosophy.

Update: See “Unde Malum,” “Kristor Promotes Ignorance,” “Kristor Elucidates the Darkness,” “Before Choice,” and “Kristor Poses Evil Problems” for this post’s continuation.

Posted by Joseph on Thursday, February 17, A.D. 2011
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Monday, December 13, A.D. 2010

Episcopalian Pride

Last week, I noted how thugs vandalized a Glastonbury Thorn. Having the Thorn on my mind inspired me yesterday to seek out a clone that grows on the grounds of the National Cathedral. I have known that one grew in Washington for years, but I have never been able to find it.

I ended up going to Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral for the divine liturgy, which is next door to the Anglican campus. Saint Sophia’s is a very beautiful temple, and the choir they have excels in Byzantine singing. Still, I always find Greek American services a bit odd. I intensely dislike the pews and kneelers. I find the usher crowd control so foreign to the Orthodox ethos that it is both uncomfortable and amusing. There were also some announcements after the liturgy that involved unpleasant parish politics. Saint Sophia’s was the “republican” Greek church in the city, while Saints Constantine and Helen was the “royalist” parish (regarding politics in Greece last century). The political unruliness of the republicans must remain with them. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the homily. The sermon involved a lengthy but engaging and accessible exposition of the story of Daniel and his three friends. The advantage of pews must be in the increased time a priest is willing to preach. Some parishes in the O.C.A., Russian Synod, and the Antiochian Archdiocese get around this by having people sit on the floor during sermons, but such a practice must be too barbaric for the cultured Greeks. For they were quite well dressed, as they usually are.

After the liturgy, I wandered over to our Protestant brethren’s expansive estate. I decided to visit the Joseph of Arimathea Chapel in the crypt before venturing into the gardens to look for the hawthorn. Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan are both interred in the chapel. I am not that fond of the chapel’s altar imagery. It has that turn of the century look epitomized by Abbott Handerson Thayer. I do not mind the style, but it does not look appropriate in a church, suggesting, as it does, Belle Époque decadence. Still, I appreciate that one of the cathedral’s main chapels is dedicated to my patron.

I had to walk through the cathedral’s gift shop in the basement to get to the crypt. It is more of an Anglican cum New Age merchandise mall rather than a church gift shop. It is very big. In it, I encountered some rather obnoxious items in the midst of traditionally tasteful W.A.S.P. refinement. As I have mentioned before, the rowdy underlings are pushing out the well bred Episcopalians. One of these items was a t-shirt, Top Ten Reasons for Being an Episcopalian. I know that the shirt is supposed to be funny, but it is rather pretentious. Evidently, the ten reasons are from one of Robin Williams’ stand up acts. That is fine for a comedy routine, but should a church shop embrace it? Here are the ten reasons:

10. No snake handling.
9. You can believe in dinosaurs.
8. Male and female, God created them; male and female, we ordain them.
7. You don’t have to check your brains at the door.
6. Pew aerobics.
5. Church year is color coded!
4. Free wine on Sunday.
3. All of the pageantry, none of the guilt.
2. You don’t have to know how to swim to get baptized.
1. No matter what you believe, there’s bound to be at least one other Episcopalian who agrees with you.

Some of them are cute, but the list just strikes me as typically smug, cluelessly stupid liturgical Leftism. Aren’t they proud of themselves? They should not be:

As I wrote in “Boozette the Anglican Priestess,” “If the Anglicans had anything going for them, they had good taste and discretion. The Episcopalian sect in America has lost its good manners and mongrelized into a prayer gathering for self congratulatory Leftists who think highly of their brave transgressiveness of traditional forms. Their Protestantization has become complete, and with that, the good humored, open minded, and beautiful W.A.S.P.‘s that made America have at last become ugly and ridiculous. As in an old fairy tale, there is a painful twist of justice in the story.”

My own personal experience at the cathedral yesterday, however, reminded me of why the Anglicans still remain my favorite Protestants. I was on a quest to find the Thorn, and a small platoon of ushers, docents, boys from Saint Alban’s School, and a school worker assisted me in my task. It was clear that these folks were proud of their establishment and hospitable to visitors. Anyway, I finally found the Glastonbury Thorn down the hill from the cathedral on the grounds of Saint Alban’s School. Here is the low quality picture that I took with my phone camera:

It was cold and rainy, and I did not bother much with aesthetic framing. Still, the scene has a very English quality to it. I was also happy to find a few clouts on the tree, which are pieces of cloth that the British tie to sacred trees and wells. How old habits die hard.

If you wish to plant a cutting of the Thorn in your area, a nursery in California propagates them from a tree cutting that they received from the cathedral. Visit Greenmantle Nursery to purchase a tree.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, December 13, A.D. 2010
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Sunday, December 12, A.D. 2010

Development within the Church

One of the arguments that Protestants, papists, and the Orthodox have involves the way we see doctrinal, canonical, liturgical, and practical development in the Church. Certain extreme Protestants reject the whole Christian experience outside (and thus after) scripture. Protestants of another stripe wish to reinvent their religion in every generation by following the passing fads of the world. Papists accuse the Orthodox of being stuck in antiquity, late antiquity, the Middle Ages, or whenever it suits them to locate us, thinking that the Orthodox emphasis on continuity stifles the Spirit (and not only the Zeitgeist). The Orthodox accuse Westerners of casually disregarding precedent and of exalting contemporary authority over the consensus of our forefathers who, in the Orthodox view, inherited and passed along the apostolic faith.

These are broad accusations, and all of them are somewhat unfair—although I have met several Protestants who fit the “reinvent your own personal wheel” caricature rather well. Should they even qualify as Protestants, though? There cannot be Christianity without truth claims. Yet, the rest are not wholly accurate. Even the most ardent sola scripturist holds onto much of the Christian tradition without admitting as much. He makes many unprincipled exceptions to his model of authority, though he remains ignorant of his inconsistency. Were he aware, he would be forced to entertain heresies that he cannot stand or to give up his rather unscriptural doctrine of sola scriptura. Moreover, there are many riches of Western and Eastern reflection on the history of the Holy Spirit’s presence and activity among the people of God. Cardinal Newman was not the only man to wonder what development means in the Church.

Orthodox doctrine and practice are quite ancient, and yet there have been changes. Most of the interesting changes involved great controversies that were the defining theological and political issues of their time. They came about because the challenge of heresy or misunderstanding became acute and the Church had to make explicit what Christians before held latent. An in depth discussion of Trinitarian theology did not occupy Christians’ attention due to philosophical musings at churchmen’s leisure. Rather, it happened because Arius explored a possible way of thinking about the Trinity within a certain philosophical world view, and it struck a significant number of Christians as wrong. The controversy ensued, mutating often through the years into one of ecclesial and imperial politics and of narrow personal interests of some figures involved. The result, however, was a deeper intellectual understanding of what the deposit of faith entails.

Other changes happened slowly and sometimes unnoticed. The development of monasticism institutionalized the prophetic witness of individual ascetics—a change that profoundly influenced world history. Yet, one could argue that the monastic, ascetic ethos goes back to the Hebrew prophets and never departed the Abrahamic tradition. The rise of female monastics probably led to the disappearance of deaconesses. Monasticism’s growth in importance surely contributed to the celibate episcopacy.

There are some changes, though, that occurred due to what I call existential logic. Sometimes, life lived, and the resulting culture of a community wherein life is lived in a certain way, embrace countless principles and values that people hold without necessarily reflecting upon them. Human beings, despite all their fallacies and convenient exceptions to principles, remain logical agents who like consistency and intelligibility in life. Men tend toward undoing contradictions in their thought, values, and actions; they also tend to assimilate new ideas and experiences into their overall understanding and experience of the world. This is existential logic.

A Christian community lives—or aspires to live—the gospel, and as such it tends to develop a Christian culture. Diversity exists across Christendom, but there are certain themes that become dominant in a culture of a converted people. The existential logic of those who live their life in the Church transforms their pagan, pre-Christian ways and leads toward the “baptism” of many practices. A good deal of popular piety expresses this transformative aspect of the faith.

Last week in the “Paradox of the Hebrews,” I suggested that the increase in Hebraic obedience to God that Gibbon considered might be due to group maturation. Eventually, the lessons of the people are going to sink in. I think that existential logic might be responsible for this, as well. The longer the Hebrews lived under the Mosaic law, the more they absorbed the lessons of that law and developed a complete culture in harmony with that law. During the forty years in the wilderness, the Hebrews may have had Moses and the visible presence of the Lord with them night and day, but they were still a rather paganized people whose way of life had been shaped by living among the Egyptians for generations. Long after the age of the prophets, Pharisees preached to what seemed a much more obedient and observant population. One may ask if the impressive work of rabbinical legal scholarship could have come to be in the desert? It is unlikely. The Hebrews had to mature. Of course, men always sin, err, and transgress their own principles, but they fall short less often when there are strong communal supports that nourish the beliefs and practices of their people.

Anyway, I think of existential logic when I hear primitivist challenges from certain “Bible Protestants.” These folks dismiss anything that is not mentioned explicitly, at least to a clarity and full elaboration sufficient for their liking, in Holy Writ. If these chaps stopped and considered existential logic, a lot of what they find objectionable would make sense to them. Why do we honor the Theotokos in the particular ways that we do? It is simple. Consider who she is and what she does in salvation history. Then, traditional Christian practice through the ages makes sense. Why do we revere the holy vessels that are used for the Eucharistic service? I do not know the history of such practice, but I doubt that there were many canons in the first and second centuries about those vessels. Yet, when you consider what the Eucharist is, these practices make sense. It is for this reason that the apostolic age in the first century should not be the definitive model in all ways for Christians today. A community must live its way of life for some time, and then changes occur that reflect the fundamental truths and values of that community.

Posted by Joseph on Sunday, December 12, A.D. 2010
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Monday, May 3, A.D. 2010

Income by Religion

I found a fascinating graph that maps the average income of various religions’ adherents in America. See “The Almighty Dollar” from Good.

Predictably, a larger percentage of Jews (46%) make six digit incomes than other groups, though our Hindus (43%) are doing well, too. If only all our immigrants were upper caste types! Arizonans would not fret about Mexico’s exporting its best and brightest to us. On the poorer side, black Protestant sects and Jehovah’s Witnesses have the largest percentages of people who make under $30,000 a year (47% and 42%, respectively). The Mohammedans surprisingly show as the third poorest. I would like to see a distinction between immigrants and the Nation of Islam types. I imagine that the latter drag the former’s statistics down.

Interestingly, the Orthodox come in third behind the Jews and the Hindus in the six digit category. Greek businessmen and Russian scientists have done well in this land of mammon. Moreover, there is not really a lower class drag for the Orthodox. The laboring classes among Orthodox immigrant populations from the industrial age have, like Italians, moved firmly into the middle and upper classes. Among the recent immigrant waves, we find new Russians, Arabs, Indians, and Ethiopians doing very well materially. In D.C., the Ethiopian community has become the “new Greeks.” They are the omnipresent merchant class, who reportedly are buying many of the city’s groceries, restaurants, and night clubs.

Roman Catholics expectedly follow the national average. Their size and class diversity render them statistically normal. I would assume that the same would be true of the Orthodox if they were far more numerous. For these groups are largely the religions of entire peoples, while most Protestant sects in America have come to be associated with a certain class. While there are rich Pentecostals and poor Episcopalians (well, I suppose that there are poor Episcopalians, though I have never met one), Protestant identification tends to differentiate based on class. How many of you grew up with a Baptist who went to college, moved up the social ladder, and then started attending a “higher class” church?

The mainline churches have mostly all become upper class, leftwing S.W.P.L. social and political clubs that preach inclusion but do not offer much for the poorer, dumber, and less educated except a form of patronizing charity, bundled together with celebrating diversity rhetoric. However, the figures shown on Good’s graph do not show a large difference between the mainline churches and the national average. Perhaps, their staying power in poorer, rural, white communities along with their charitable urban missions account for this normalcy. Moreover, the ethnic Lutheran communities and the rural W.A.S.P. country folk in the Midwest likely approach the traditional Christian “whole people of God” inclusion of all the classes. Yet, the mainliest of the mainlines appear class based in most of the country.

I wonder if the current “evangelical movement” will curtail the tendency toward class differentiation among American Protestants. The evangelicals have a lower class background along with a few generations of vibrant intellectual life (those “Wheaton evangelicals”). I think that it is possible for American evangelicals to create a class diverse population. I expect their wealthier numbers to increase as they grow in numbers overall due to the hemorrhaging of mainline Protestants and white Roman Catholics. Soon, they may match up with the national average, too.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, May 3, A.D. 2010
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Tuesday, March 2, A.D. 2010

Coexist?

Jake from Wiser Time has a funny take on the “Coexist” bumper sticker of which self avowed tolerant and enlightened Americans are so fond. Here is the bumper sticker, the proceeds of which go to “help fight hunger, fascism, and social injustice.”

Jake observes:

You’ve seen these, right? They make me mad. Why? Because they don’t really mean what they say.

Let’s break it down. We’ll call each worldview by the letter it’s supposed to represent. So:

» C = Islam
» O = Pacifism
» E = “Gender equality” (=the LGBT agenda)
» X = Judaism
» I = Wicca / Pagan / Bah’ai
» S =Taoism / Confucianism
» T = Christianity

And let’s assume a very broad definition of “coexist”: living together without calling for the destruction of each other. Here are the problems with that:

» C wants to kill E, X, T, and (by implication) O. If they achieved the world they wanted, I and S would also no longer exist.

» O doesn’t allow for effective resistance or defeat of C.

» E stands in direct opposition to C, X, and T, and accuses those who speak against them of hate speech. Also, they’re trying to edge X and T out of public schools in favor of their own agenda. (They’re afraid C will be offended, so they get less trouble.) E is actually very, very intolerant.

» X’s existence is threatened not only by C but also by O, who invariably supports C over X.

» I and S are statistically insignificant and are mainly on there to complete the bumper sticker.

» T is who the bumper sticker is really arguing against, but poses no physical threat to any of the others.

Historically, T has brought about more tolerance– “coexistence” if you will– than any other movement. But the kind of “coexistence” the people who make this sticker envision is one where at least X and T are completely marginalized.

Do Leftists really find the courteous manners taught by school marms in elementary school the veritable apex of morality and insight into the human condition—facts and good sense be damned? Is it really true that they learnt all that they really know in Kindergarten?

They are either fools, cowards, or traitorous misanthropes—or at least the vast majority of them deserve such categorization.

Posted by Joseph on Tuesday, March 2, A.D. 2010
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Saturday, October 31, A.D. 2009

All Hallows’ Eve

Happy Halloween to you Western Christians who remember all the saints tomorrow and to you descendants of the pagan Celts who celebrated the autumn feast of Samhain.

There are aspects of the American celebration of Halloween that I really like. The holiday period preceding Halloween until the American feast of Thanksgiving marks our own cultural harvest festivities, and many Halloween customs feature this generic celebration of autumn and the harvest.

As a good Ohioan, I delight in everything pumpkin—actual pumpkins and all the goodies that are made from pumpkins. What Cincinnatian doesn’t relish the taste of Frisch’s pumpkin pie? Servatii’s pumpkin cookies do not even contain pumpkins, but their lemony goodness brings back memories. When I was home a couple of weeks ago, I made sure to buy some of these treats. United Dairy Farmers even had pumpkin ice cream as a seasonal flavor. Long live the commercialization of homey cultural tastes!

I also enjoy some of the traditional pagan practices that have survived. After extinguishing all the fires in their community, the Celts would build a large communal bonfire that burnt harvest offerings to their gods. The Celts carved gourds to transport this fire back to their hearths, which they would maintain for the entire year. The Christian Greeks and Arabs have a similar practice today with the holy fire of Pascha. The symbolism of new life and rebirth is quite powerful. Our tradition of jack o’ lanterns seems to have originated in this ancient pagan practice. I make sure to carve a pumpkin every year, preferably while watching the Peanuts’ It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and munching on candy corn. It’s my own Halloween season ritual.

There are, however, elements of the American celebration of Halloween that make me uneasy. I am fine with the cultural remnants of a superseded paganism, but the glorification of the occult and an aesthetic suggestive of satanism make the condemnations of Halloween by Christians pretty understandable. There might be something cathartic about the gore and horror of Halloween, where children overcome their fear of monsters and ghosts. In this, Halloween might serve some of the same psychological purposes as the day of the dead traditions in Latin America—though the secular power of American Protestantism has largely removed the religious dimension from a fundamentally religious holiday. Still, I find the proliferation of haunted houses and the celebration of witchcraft and demons a bit troubling.

I thus propose a middle way with a purified Halloween, where the focus is on the harvest festival aspects of the feast. Western Christians can focus on the traditional relation of the feast to the feasts of All Saints and of All Souls, as well. Furthermore, as children love to dress up and to receive and to eat goodies, let kids celebrate by dressing up as animals, fantasy characters, or pretend professions—and leave the goblins, witches, and monsters to the heathen. Take what is good from Egypt, and leave what is rotten.

Posted by Joseph on Saturday, October 31, A.D. 2009
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Monday, October 5, A.D. 2009

Paul on Mars Hill

Dr. Reynolds from Biola University wrote a fine post on the occasion of his class trip to Athens’ Areopagus in “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” In it, he discusses the philosophical controversy into which Saint Paul entered with his sermon to the Athenians. He points out how close the Platonists were to the gospel. Of all the intellectual currents in the Greco-Roman world, Platonism made the most receptive audience for Christianity. It is customary to hear Platonism contrasted with the earthy goodness of creation Christianity, but even our terrestrial doctrines exist within a celestial framework. The ancient Platonists were some of the few pagans who realized that God transcends the world and that the world is God’s creation. The ancient Platonists understood that God is good, eternal, and the source of all being. The ancient Platonists conceived of all being as an image of the beyond being. Given such, Porphyry rather than Origen becomes the philosophical mystery. What explains a man such as Porphyry, other than ancestral loyalty and cultural conservatism?

As my friend Andrew said, religion—or at least Christianity—only makes sense within a Platonic understanding of reality. I fully agree. I suspect that many of the intellectual ruptures of the modern West only became possible by its rejection of Platonism. When God becomes a being among beings, one must give up either his faith or his science. For God’s presence in the world will always be seen as a nullification of the world’s own order, integrity, and intelligibility. To assert such a God is to deny the possibility of scientific knowledge. To embrace philosophy likewise involves a rejection of the divine as superfluous superstition. Only ignorant regressives cling to religion to fill gaps in their ignorance, as the being God has no place in a scientifically understood cosmos. One must make this choice or cultivate bizarre confusions that attempt to carve a place for the divine and for science in the husk of our ignorance. Reason suffers terribly when forced to accept false choices. So does the human soul.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, October 5, A.D. 2009
Orthodoxy • Saints • Scripture • Paganism • (0) Comments • Permalink