Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! ... -- Allen Ginsberg, postscript to HOWL, writ in Berkeley 1955
Question: Can the asshole serve God?
Answer: Assholes have always served God. Every part of the body can serve God.
Question: But, traditionally, it is the soul that has served God. Why do you say that the asshole can serve God, and that the genitals can serve God?
Answer: The genitals are holy. My mouthpiece Allen Ginsberg said so. Repeat after me: Holy asshole! Holy asshole! It's not so bad, is it?
Question: So everything is holy. Is the number 666 holy?
Answer: The ELCA was overtaken by NAMBLA this week by the exact percentage of 66.6%. Therefore, yes, this much maligned number is now holy.
Question: Was Allen Ginsberg a member of NAMBLA?
Answer: Yes, as was William Burroughs. You have to get over the fact that NAMBLA now is in charge of not only large sections of the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, but also the Lutheran Church.
Question: Who's next?
Answer: The Presbyterians.
Question: Will the asshole have an increasingly large role to play in the Christian church?
Answer: Assholes have always played a large role in the church. Remember, even to ask that question shows that you're an asshole.
Question: While I'm speaking with you, can I ask you one more question?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Is it true that Altamont was the true face of Woodstock?
Answer: Yes. Woodstock caught me napping. By the time that Altamont rolled around, I had all my angels ready.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
190 comments:
if nambla has a foothold anywhere in the catholic church it is way underground...there's a clean house over here...there's a big door on the seminaries now and anyone claiming attraction to that sort of anatomical enjoyment is held at arms length
the asshole might be deemed holy only insofar as it is recognized in the context of natural law...understood and utilized in accord with it's design
grace builds upon nature
natural law was not something ginsberg knew about
the body is the form of the soul
even within the concept of kadosh there is the implied understanding of orderly design and use on the part of the creator
great post ever timely
always room for assholes
never did i dream that you would resort to scatological rhetoric
but all in the service of truth
incendiary
j
Kirby:
The Altamont "concert" occurred while I was stationed at Ft Ord, CA in 1969. One of my comrades wanted me to go with him to this event, but I demurred, in part because I mostly loathe the cultural sewage that the "Strolling Bones" extrude and because I prefer music (classical, opera, some folk) to sinister pulsating noise. I seem to recall that the Bones hired the Hell's Angels criminal gang as "security" for their august personages, and these motorcycle thugs beat a man to death with pool cues. Very 60s, right?
Kirby—
NAMBLA?! Give me a break. I might as well ask if they've taken the Nazi flag out of your church yet.
True, dumb, and embarrassing fact. Lutherans have ended up in the crosshairs of prejudice a couple times in this country, and both times have acted stupidly.
First, people confused us with the Catholics during the nativist era, so we went to infrequent communion. It took a century to sort that out.
Second, during the first world war, the large proportion of recent German immigrants in our churches (some of which offer German-language services even to this day) became a justification for placing US flags in our sanctuaries. Just like those Nazi churches. I'm sure JA will go all medieval on me, but the point is that no national flag belongs in the Lord's sanctuary. And its worse if you look at the flagpoles carefully. What's that on the top of the flag pole? It's an eagle. And where exactly does the tradition of putting eagles on the flagpole come from? Imperial Rome. All that's lacking is the bar under the eagle, the one with SPQR on it, and we'll be ready to stage our own crucifixion. It looks as this one is going to take a century too. Fortunately, it's coming up.
Flags in church creep me out.
GM—
Me too. It's been a long battle, and it's not over yet.
JA -- the Altamont concert did have a death in which the Hell's Angels beat a man to death with pool cues. However, the man who got beaten to death was a black man who had a gun, and had raised it toward a Hell's Angel's face. He was swiftly surrounded by angels and bludgeoned to death. In the trial, the judge decided that the Angels had acted in self-defense, and were exonerated.
Most concert footage leaves out that fact. I had posted about Altamont a couple summers ago when an actual Hell's Angel showed up online here to straight out my bemoaning the fact of the black man's death (I can't recall his name).
I had to wipe out the Angel's post because I had inadvertantly posted with my daughter's blog-link -- at the time she was only six, and I was afraid Angels would go to her blog.
So I wiped out all the comments.
I like your pun very much The Strolling Bones.
Stu -- you are the one who told me that every part of the body can serve God, so this post was partially a reaction to that, and remembering what Ginsberg had said in his most famous poem, gave me another run.
Ginsberg WAS a member of NAMBLA, and he IS a huge megastar for the Democratic left, they've never denounced him, and never denounced his relationship to NAMBLA.
Ginsberg always said that he would change this culture, as he profoundly and almost single-handedly has -- he told a colleague of his -- Norman Podhoretz -- that he would destroy the patriarchal country by seducing its children, and making them wild with LSD and sex.
He managed it.
In this post, I merely point to a key text of that changeover.
"When the poetry changes, the walls of the city shake." -- Plato
The city, of course, as Augustine knew, is as much a metaphysical thing, as it is an actual thing: it is the city of God.
Ginsberg stormed it, and tore down its walls, and now there's nothing left but the looting.
Kirby—
you are the one who told me that every part of the body can serve God, so this post was partially a reaction to that
This is what I was thinking of: (1 Corinthians 12:12-26) For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or freeand we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.
So your beef this time is with Paul.
Ginsberg WAS a member of NAMBLA, and he IS a huge megastar for the Democratic left, they've never denounced him, and never denounced his relationship to NAMBLA.
Ginsberg's off my radar. He may have been huge to some, but I wouldn't know of him if not for you. NAMBLA, though, is on my radar. Consider them denounced. I've been through the Marie Fortune class—I don't think there's much you can teach me about how power aspects of sexual abuse, and the abuse of power is what pedophilia is all about.
The city, of course, as Augustine knew, is as much a metaphysical thing, as it is an actual thing: it is the city of God.
Ginsberg stormed it, and tore down its walls, and now there's nothing left but the looting.
You give the man too much power. God is stronger than that.
God is stronger, and God will decide the fate of everything, but these institutions such as the ELCA are also made up of humans, who voted. But if they voted against God, God will leave their churches.
And then it's lights out for the ELCA.
I have to admit -- I'm in the midst of a metaphysical catastrophe.
I think that behind all this something lurks that isn't kosher.
The city is a spiritual thing.
We are forgetting this.
As the spirit goes, so goes our institutions.
I take your point with St. Paul, and see his point, too. But without the soul, what are the parts of the body? Once the soul has left the house, there is no getting it bad.
Once the soul has left, a body is dead, or a church is dead, and there are very few cases in recorded history of a reversal.
I just pray to God that that hasn't happened, but I'm terribly afraid. I could swear that it has.
And I put it at the foot of that asshole, Ginsberg.
I'm not surprised you don't know of him -- but poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe -- I think that that much is true, and that Ginsberg legislated the ruin of America all by himself, at his desk.
I just don't know if anybody can put the thing back together again.
(I'm feeling a bit like Cassandra and a bit like Laocoon -- but having come too late -- I never realized what a Trojan horse Ginsberg had built -- to bring his Greek values into a country that was founded on God.)
It's astonishing. It's all over but the raping and looting.
Question: So everything is holy. Is the number 666 holy?
Answer: The ELCA was overtaken by NAMBLA this week by the exact percentage of 66.6%. Therefore, yes, this much maligned number is now holy.
It's a really odd fact that the final vote was 676-338, an exact 2-1 proportion. So it's actually 66.66...%, not an exact 66.6%.
Since I like to calculate, I wondered—what are the odds of this happening? Let's suppose (and this is a reasonable approximation) that the odds that a given voter would vote for this was exactly 2/3. It's 2.66%. Not large, but not small enough to base a theological argument on, either.
Life goes on.
Kirby:
It's true that human slag like Ginsberg has had a dangerous and malignant influence on morays ("O tempora! O mores!") in the US during and after the dog-butt awful sixties. He's a poet only to those who have no ears--and poets as legislators?--well, Shelley can stick that one where the sun don't shine. Can't think of two more disgusting jerks--Ginsberg and Shelley, who fell upon the earth and bled (his "best" line, don't chu know? Perhaps someday, Kirby, you'd care to join us in St John's as well? We've already invited stu. . . .
JA
The thing is that gay people are ok, on their own, and if you can keep them off their hatred of the opposite sex. On a practical basis, they can often function, but the truth of gay men is that they absolutely loathed their mothers. This is true in every case in which I've personally known them (about a dozen, mostly poets). But if you go through the literature, it's abundant and rife with opposite sex hatred. Ginsberg's mom tried to sexually assault him, and he hated her guts, and couldn't stand the sight of her. She was insane. He tried to forgive her throughout his life but could never do it, completely, I think.
A similar situation exists for most gay women -- they despise their fathers. Again, the literature is abundant with androgyny (hatred of men by women).
It's true that churches have existed with haters hidden in them for long long periods (southern slave preachers, for instance).
But this is different -- it's hatred for the other sex. Which means hatred for families, which are the life of a church.
I don't know how any church is going to survive that.
However, deeper than that, is some other problem that I can't put my finger on. It's some kind of miasmic intuition that this isn't even about ordinary gay men and women but about NAMBLA and about its insidious assault on all our institutions.
JH -- whose post I liked by the way, believes that the Catholic church is now clean. But he's in Minnesota, and the real pedophile rings were in the northeast corridor with the richest churches. Those were the churches that the pedophiles doled out to one another.
I really doubt if that whole problem has faded without a lot more fire and storminess than we've seen. It may yes have gone underground, but we're talking about churches that were entirely pedophile -- not just one pedophile but hundreds and hundreds, like rats in the basement of medieval monasteries.
Endemic.
Now it may be that since they are no longer welcome in the Catholic they are moving into other church bodies.
And even welcomed with open arms by the good people of the ELCA. I shudder to think.
Ginsberg almost singlehandedly wrecked the nation, and he still had some notions of goodness, even if he was almost entirely evil in what he did to the country.
I shudder to think what will happen.
Has the world always been this awful, this spooky?
I think not...
Kirby—
God is stronger, and God will decide the fate of everything, but these institutions such as the ELCA are also made up of humans, who voted. But if they voted against God, God will leave their churches.
Why do you believe this? God will be where God wants to be. If we're wrong, I think he'll correct us, not leave us. Have you ever read the Old Testament? Israel screwed up again and again. God punished them, but took them back.
If the ELCA is wrong, God will let us know. We'll accept correction, and move on. And if we're right, he'll probably let us know that too. But the thing for you and jh to remember is that if this is our call, it does not necessarily follow that it will be your call too. Time will tell, in the meantime, we'll all pray for discernment.
Once the soul has left, a body is dead, or a church is dead, and there are very few cases in recorded history of a reversal.
Yet we both belong to a church (and here, I mean the Christian church writ large) that preaches resurrection, and which teaches that not only is resurrection a historical fact witnessed by Jesus, it is also our hope and expectation.
And I put it at the foot of that asshole, Ginsberg.
But I still say that you're giving Ginsberg way too much credit. Heck, he's been dead for twelve years!
Assholes may be holey, but not holy!
ZING!
All my gay friends love their mothers. I don't know if your hypothesis here is true. They also love the opposite sex, more than their own in lots of cases (the way straight men generally bond better with those they're not sexually attracted to than with those they are).
Maybe there's a line between literarily-inclined gay men and hatred of mothers, but not between gay men and hatred of mothers.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of hatred and anger at the base of a lot of people who want to be writers - the 'suffering artist' has been conflated with the 'offended' or 'hateful' artist, and this is a big part of the shallow doom that encircles our places uh' hi-er-lerning.
It's just not a big deal, since all dem neighsayers (especially poets) have such little impact on anyone.
I mean, Stu didn't know GINSBERG, the pinnacle of their kind. Almost nobody knows Ron Silliman, much less the hordes of creative-writing-seminar'd amateurs bumbling about in their lil' clubs and organeyezations ranting against 'the man' or this apparent slight or that one.
Sure, it's discouraging, but it's really not that big of a deal - there are enough universities and places of learning with a less 'woe is me' and/or 'i hate you' focus so that we'll be Just Fine. We just have Too Many writers. Probably have a normal number of 'good ones.' Just get shrouded in the filth...
At least the anti-Hollywood tilt has Some essence to it, since Hollywood (in a sense) matters.
But creative writing depots are flies! Stop beating the dead flies with your aluminum baseball bats. It's a waste of your intellectual energies.
Go into the DMV and throw a bouncy ball. You're bound to hit someone who goes to church, and I bet 10 to 1 you won't hit someone who goes to poetry readings (unless it ricochets and hits you in da face).
My understanding of the problem with the Catholics was that they Covered Up their abuses. From what I remember their percentages of abuse were just about the same as the general population. The problem was that they continued to let it happen, moving priests from one place to another instead of sending their assholes directly to jail.
Ginsberg was a necessary extreme - there were walls that needed breaking down, and while he tried to be a nuke, he didn't have enough of an impact to actually tear down everything, and was just the hand-grenade we needed.
Well, you may both be right. I've only known a few gay men. Was totally shocked to hear them talk about women. The section in the Job where Burroughs talks about decapitating women, and forcing them to breed like cows, was more or less what I thought the whole gay mentality was about. It did seem that way from my few experiences with it.
I don't know the women as well, partially because I'm a man, and they largely separate off. In Seattle, I had few opportunities to know them. Once at a party a gay woman I knew walked into a party, said, "There are too many penises in this room," and walked out.
I assumed from that and a few other interactions with gay women in Seattle that they hated men. One of them once threw the sports page at me in a breakfast place when I wanted to borrow the paper.
"That's all you want!"
In fact, I rarely if ever read the sports pages.
I read the arts pages.
Also, it's salutary to keep in mind how small our world is (poetry) and how NO ONE in their right mind would ever read Ron Silliman's writing.
I still think Ginsberg had a huge influence because he was taught, and probably everyone in Hollywood knows his top verses.
I've known more gay men. When they talk about women it's like they are describing women as they would be after two days in an acid bath. Grotesque descriptions that make me completely reel.
I assumed that that was the common thread for gay men wrt women.
I could be wrong. I hope I am. But I doubt if I am, unfortunately.
And I assume that the women feel MORE OR LESS the same way.
I think it would be difficult to pastor across the genders if that's how you feel.
Brett always hears something that makes everything seem all peaceful aND BELIEVE THAT. I tend to find the worst case scenarios and believe that that's the case.
So maybe we balance out.
Or maybe one of us is closer to the objective truth.
Kirby—
And I assume that the women feel MORE OR LESS the same way.
You think women think the same way as men? You think that gay women thing more or less the same way as gay men?!
And you think the ELCA is crazy?
So when Annie Dillard talks about teaching a stone to speak is it like a Buddhist disguise for a secret code she's using to get Ginsburg off the hook for associating with Burroughs?
Hey y'all,
Want to talk about poetry for a bit?
On another blog someone asked for a primer in poetry -- a "best of" list, as you will.
I gave him the following list, which I think moves well from "milk to meat" as an educated person's introduction to poetry:
"Blackberrying" by Sylvia Plath
"She Walks in Beauty" by George Gordon, Lord Byron
"Red Red Rose" by Robert Burns
"Since Feeling is First" by e.e. cummings
"Tame Cat" by Ezra Pound
"Sonnet 130" by William Shakespeare
"What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" by John Keats
"The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Sestina: Altaforte" by Ezra Pound
"Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Warming Her Pearls" by Carol Anne Duffy
"The Colonel" by Carolyn Forche
"The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot
"Gretel in Darkness" by Louise Gluck
"The Emperor of Ice Cream" by Wallace Stevens
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot
"In a Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound
"Mending Wall" by Robert Frost
"The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe
"Fever 103" by Sylvia Plath
"Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allen Poe
"The Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot
"Home Burial" by Robert Frost
"Lycidas" by John Milton
"Usura" (Canto LXV) by Ezra Pound
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"East Coker" by T.S. Eliot
Thoughts?
G.M. is probably right to move the topic back to an area where we have more interest.
Stu is probably right that the women think quite unlike men, and that -- I should add -- that temperament will determine a lot more than any huge generalization such as race, gender, or sexual orientation, which tell us really nothing.
Brett's right that someone like William Burroughs is a tortured individual, and maybe one of a kind.
Who knows?
Let's just see what happens. At any rate, it's not our synod (the ELCA) so who cares? It's their business.
Moreover, the ELCA is not like Myanmar in which nobody can leave.
Anybody can leave the ELCA if they don't like it. It's not even like the Episcopalian church in which the individual churches are owned by the bishopric. In the ELCA each church is owned by its individual congregation, and the congregations can vote to either secede, or they can withhold money from the Bishopric, or they can segue over to Missouri, or -- what will probably happen -- is that the 400 "Lutheran Core" churches will splinter and start their own synod.
At any rate, it's the business of the individuals involved, and I don't think we have to worry about them. Let's worry about poetry instead.
In the list, I don't see Marianne Moore. I have been slowly working on her poetry for a few years, and have been increasingly impressed by the beauty and stringency of her writing -- it takes a very long time to enter her work. At first to me it was like word salad. Then slowly I began to see what she was doing, and got an appreciation for the brilliance of her mind.
In poetry, the scholarship is sometimes a real help. I've been reading Bloom's Major Poets -- Marianne Moore -- and am finding it to be a real help. There are many critics who work exclusively on Moore, and some of them aren't bad at all -- esp. someone named John Slatin. I have to get his book.
His reading of The Steeple-Jack completely opened the universe of the poem, and allowed me entry into it -- it's very Christian -- about a church on the shore that has had its steeple broken due to an enormous storm. The steeple-jack oddly is a Satanic figure hanging like a spider from the steeple, pretending to fix it. The steeple-jack's name is C.J. Poole.
It's the weirdest thing. Meanwhile, St. Ambrose is sitting on a hill nearby, regarding the scene, and naming all the vegetation about (Moore was trained as a biologist). The Steeple-Jack is the first poem in Moore's Complete Poems.
I thought about Moore (and Hopkins) but wanted the list to be introductory, not exhaustive.
Glad to take suggestions, though. I'll probably suggest to my honors kids that they read these poems :)
M
Kirby Olson
Your comment about gay men loathing their mothers is really odd. I know many gay men and, trust me, most of them love their mothers dearly. So I am not sure why you are concluding that based only on the views of a few poets. I think you need a bigger sample before making the claim.
Also note that Ginsberg is not a hero of the left as much as you may think he is. At least not today. He is often a hero to young men [and women] who appreciated the Beat movement. Which isn't a whole lot of people and not necessarily Left. Often more libertarian than Left - although their is a socialist element there, which some young folks flirt with. [The pure kind of socialism - not Medicare, which is a socialism even the right wing appreciates].
Please note too that Michael Savage was a friend of Ginsbergs. Savage is about as far right as you can get.
Matt:
Although Savage doesn't hide his decades-ago association with Ginsberg, I think today he'd shun such a loathesome miscreant of no talent.
Matt, try to find a literary of scientific figure with a strong biography or autobiography from before this period that illustrates your point. Anyone from Nero forwards. Otherwise I'm left having to take your word for this on an anecdotal basis: but I don't know who you are, and I don't know who your friends are, so can't check this for myself.
Anyone can read The Job by Burroughs, and see what he felt about women, for instance.
Anybody can read the various bios of Ginsberg, and see how he was freaked out by his mom.
Find a figure that fits into an opposite trend, and then give me a text I can read -- preferably something a bit older so that it's not tendentious, and meant to spin the data.
At any rate -- find anyone from Nero forward that fits an opposite trend, and can be checked in a reasonably reliable source.
Thanks.
I don't really know who Michael Savage is, or when he was a friend of Ginsberg's. People change. Norman Podhoretz was an early friend of a lot of Trotskyites but later switched sides.
AGain, I need more data to determine your spin here.
Kirby, just face the fact that you are homophobic.
(And to my knowledge, Walt Whitman, Cole Porter, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Frank O'Hara, James Baldwin, and Tony Kushner all disprove your sophomoric pop-psychological understanding of gay male attitudes toward women and mothers.)
No, Frank O'Hara and his mother hated each other. Just read Joe LeSeuer's bio of O'Hara. He would lash out at his mother constantly.
You have to try to think through your dumb categories to the truth.
The main problem with the left is that they have these handy categories: racist, classist, homophobic, most of which don't even make any sense, and then they try to use these as a substitute for any kind of thinking.
It may be that the right does the same thing, but I have to live with the left, and I get tired of it.
In the book Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara, Joe Leseuer gives lots of daily details about O'Hara. One of the most repugnant, at least to me, was the way that O'Hara talked with his mother on the phone. He would simply lash out at her, venomously, ripping her to pieces. It was so hard to take that I had to stop reading the book. I didn't get far into the book -- certainly no more than fifty pages. I then sold the book cheap, because I couldn't stand the revelations in it between O'Hara and his mother. It saddened and sickened me, and nearly destroyed the reading of the poet for me.
I don't know any details about the other figures you name. Can you provide actual data, or are you just blowing smoke behind your pseudonym again?
Kirby, you are homophobic. Please accept that. If you think that being gay means being a child molester, you are homophobic. If you think gay men are more sexist than straight men, you are homophobic. If you think Burroughs or Ginsberg were representative models of homosexuality (and not simply men who thrived on being "freaky" and shocking in every possible way), you are homophobic. If you think there is one gay personality type, you are homophobic.
Lucretia Borgia,
Really, boyo
the labeling has got to go.
It's counterproductive, doncha know?
Ad hominems have got to go.
Your agnosy is plainly shown
your contention it ain't got no bones
your argument is lacking tone
all pharisaic on you drone
a kneejerk, nastly, tattling clone
this ain't no luther blisset show
don't hate on kirby he ain't yo ho.
Kirby:
Although I wouldn't offer a general remark about male inverts' relations with their mothers, I think the term "homophobic" quite silly--an irrational fear of homosexuals--really, do tell!
I seem to be quite comfortable around homosexuals--perhaps that has to do with being anything but. . . .
Jah: "homophobic" refers both to a fear as well as a hatred of homosexuals. Kirby's comments throughout display a hatred of homosexuals, although he'll simply reply, "Well, all the gay men I know hate their mothers, despise women, and want to molest little boys. And the gay women were really mean to me in Seattle."
I did really like the use of "invert." It's quaint, sort of like "darky" or "coon." It takes me back to the good ole days, when a white man knew where he stood: on the necks of women, brown folk, and gays.
LB:
Just doing a bit of a "sensitivity" test with you on "invert" (Jones's English translation of Freud's term Umkehren"?), and you showed yourself more than ready to sputter with righteous indignation with a fine pc spew at the end.
Now what might be a suitable term for a hater of one's self or kind? We've the Terence play "Heautontimoroumenos," or the "self-hater," and the sublime Catholic poet Baudelaire's poem by that same name, but for English pc language police that might sound a bit too zoological--how 'bout "autophobe," or idiophobe"? What do you think, LB?
PS, LB:
Remember that the opprobrious terms (haven't heard them for many years) used in your second paragraph are yours alone. And I remember my Muslim roommate from Singapore many yrs ago introduced me to the term "cameljock." And now if I'm afraid of fear (remember FDR's well-known "fear" remark) can I be called a "phobophobe"?
Jacques: It's not a matter of sensitivity training. I'm well aware that "invert" was used in the Freud translations.
What bugged me was that you were so clearly trying for anti-PC props that you seemed like a character out of South Park.
The irony is that by using the term invert, you simply confess that you think that homosexuality is a deviation or perversion of natural sexuality (as Freud did). And I sense an odd fear and hate of gay sex there.
Straight men do it right and natural. Gay men are weird and icky.
But of course, some of Jah's best friends are gay, so how could he ever fear and hate it? (Besides defending Kirby's disturbing beliefs that gay men hate their mothers, despise women, and hope to molest your children.)
LB,
Homosexuality is a deviation from the norm.
If it were the norm, more than 50% of the population would be homosexual.
As somewhere between 10% and 1% of the population actually is homosexual, I'm pretty sure one is on safe statistical and factual grounding when one refers to homosexual behavior as a deviation.
Even as deviant.
However, we all know that in the land of identity politics -- you know who else was into identity politics. . . ? -- facts and figures and observations mean nothing in the face of ad hominems, manipulations, and bullshit.
LB:
Now that you seem to be over your brief bout of hyperventilation, I just wanted to agree with you in part that as a personal libertarian and lifelong bohemian I find generalising about deviant (and this term can be quite non-judgemental) groups, whether homosexuals (Havelock Ellis's term?) or bohemian (Henri Murger's?) risky and at the least bound to set off someone's hair-trigger reaction.
Yet gays often deliberately set themselves off from so-called "straight" social groups by emphasising usually positive (clever, creative, artistic, sensitive, etc.), but sometimes negative (promiscuous, disloyal, moody, too "emo." etc.) traits of their kind. Proust had much to say about these things in his "A la Recherche . . ." (yes, I did read it in French, though I've also read the Scott-Moncrief translation), as you doubtless know, and not the least part about distinct kinds of cruelty and perversity practised by some homosexuals (especially lesbians), though Proust also knew well that cruelty and perversity can be found in all groups. Labelling, as social groups are particularly wont to do when characterising other groups seems just as common among gays as any other. Sometimes these labels can be incisive, sometimes not. And I find that it doesn't disqualify one from making observations about other groups simply because one isn't a member. But I certainly agree with Kirby's view of NABLA as a vicious and odious group as well as his disgust at the alacrity with which terms like "racist," etc. get flung about by those would-be cultural commissars affecting a certain ideological supremacy. It's also a rather seedy and threadbare rhetorical ploy.
I recall it was a libertarian right-winger and professor of psychiatry Thomas S Szasz MD who long opposed and ridiculed the American Psychiatric Assn's policy of designating homosexuality as a "mental illness" before delegates to its convention rescinded this view in 1973 (voting on a disease!?). The mental health industry and the APA went on to condemn "racism" as a "mental illness," and when the UN condemned "Zionism" as a form of "racism," those large numbers of Jewish "mental health" professionals who enthusiastically supported the UN AND Israel were left with the embarrassing prospect of diagnosing themselves as mentally diseased! What a hoot! (I'm for the most a non-believer in this form of scientific witchcraft and, mutatis mutandis, as with Karl Kraus's view on psychonanalysis--that it was just part of the disease of which it pretended to be the cure).
Well, off to the Renaissance Festival (it's Highland Games this weekend) in what amounts to a male skirt (a kilt Em picked out for me). Otherwise it was to be Greek, and I just couldn't manage what seemed to be a petticoat underneath--wonder what sort of "phobe" that makes me. . . . . Or my "Obama as the Socialist Joker" button I got working the Repub booths at regional fairs and festivals. . . .
GM:
The connotations of "deviation" and "deviant" imply not just a difference from the norm but a sort of freakish, unnatural or immoral break with the norm.
Luckily, straight sex is probably a deviation from the most common form of sex: masturbation or self-pleasuring. So in your sense, straights and gays are both deviants.
I think it's homophobic to not try to understand what makes people gay. I think it's because they frequently loathed their opposite sex parent. I don't know if this is true, but I don't see why it would make anyone afraid of anybody. It doesn't make any sense.
At a deeper level, we are talking about ordination -- and whether gays should be ordained. I don't know why this would interest someone who isn't Christian.
I see three possibilities discussed in our various threads.
One comes from the Sermon on the Mount. If love is the only criterion of a Christian (the requirement to love everybody in the agape sense), then my question is Can someone who hates the other gender really do this?
Luther says I'm homophobic to ask the question, but he hasn't provided a case that shows that it's not true. I asked him, and he can't, apparently, so we have to take his word for it. Why we should do this, is again something that isn't explained. He's an authority without any facts.
Personally, I'm intreested in getting at the truth of the situation.
I see very few people who are able to talk sensibly on this topic. If there is a reason to not ordain gays, then what is it?
If there is a reason to ordain gays, then what is it?
It seems too often that there is a kneejerk reaction both to the left and to the right, with the implication: you must be crazy to ask that question. And then you get a right full of dittos, and a left full of dittos, and lots of anger, but no clear sensible reasons. If we can't appeal to reason but must instead resort to Marxist namecalling ("homophobic" is not a CHRISTIAN category), then where have we arrived?
Nowhere. At the same impasse where we started.
But let's say that gay men hate their mothers, and that this is what turned them gay (aversion to the opposite sex). This is admittedly anecdotal, and is based on wide reading, and friendships with four or five gay men over the course of my life -- admittedly all poets.
Brett's objection -- is that poets are often tortured people. Perhaps many poets hate their parents, irregardless of orientation.
That might be true.
I'm a poet, and like my parents.
But perhaps I'm not a truly tortured poet. Or artist, or whatever. I've just been very shocked at the sheer level of hatred I've seen displayed.
But let's just posit that there's a lovey-dovey gay person out there somewhere who loves everybody equally.
Should they be ordained?
In the Catholic church and in most churches: no.
Why not?
What is the criteria for ordination?
Do you need a sound emotional foundation, or do you only need the brain to be able to understand Greek, Latin, and the verses of the Bible? You had to perhaps have the vague thing called the "calling" however that is conceived.
Most denominations did not allow women to be ordained until about the 1970s. Once that we achieved, then there have more recently been the openly actively gay.
If love and knowledge are all that is required, then presto, everybody can be ordained.
Is there also something about emotional equipment? I myself would make a lousy pastor.
I find the whole idea of it to be emotionally overwhelming. Especially having to deal with funerals, and marriages. You'd have to be extroverted, and I'm not.
At any rate, I guess I ought to confess that through this thread I was mostly trying to get Stu to question his sanguine acceptance of the ELCA vote, and was prodding.
That I pushed NAMBLA and the other sets into one, was certainly unfair (though I wonder to what extent they overlap), and that I made the claim that gays hate was also probably overstated.
I have seen this, but I don't know -- Brett made the case that this may be more true in poetry than in othe groups. Sylvia Plath for instance seems to have hated her father pretty intensively, and yet remained heterosexual (she loved Ted, I suppose).
How much of our reasoning is opposition to something, and to what degree are our oppositions reasonable?
Ted Kennedy himself admitted that had he gone along with Nixon's plan for health care reform it would all have been done by now. But he opposed it because it came from Nixon, and killed it.
Anything that comes out of the left is generally mixed in my mind with the left genocides of the 20th century, but there are probably some good things that come out of the left, too.
Whatever they are, I oppose them.
It's true that we don't know the size of NAMBLA -- or who belongs in it. No one knew that Ginsberg was a member until after his death.
How many others are? He was considered a fairly normal individual, and was in the highest literary institutions.
Perhaps he represents the tip of an enormous group of men -- perhaps millions and millions.
NAMBLA is a somewhat hidden set. We don't know how big it is: or whether it doesn't have tentacles into many other institutions, as Ginsberg did.
It COULD be the driving force behind the takeover at the ELCA. No one really knows.
If even Ginsberg wasn't willing to own up to his membership, who else isn't telling us?
And, Kirby, you Could be an alien (not the illegal kind, but the green big-eyed kind) come to destroy the planet with sparse yet affecting poetry and a ludic conservatism.
We just can't know.
In terms of phobias, I think I am more nervous and wary than most. This strange cupcake Garrido who kidnapped the 11-year old and kept her in his backyard in spite of the fact that he was on parole, and kept the woman (Dugan) until she was (is) 29, fathering two children with her. This is getting to be more or less the norm in the papers I'm reading.
Who wouldn't be phobic in such a world?
If you're not, you're a fool. But you shouldn't limit your phobia to one group. Suspect everyone equally, and never fear to peer over a hedge. It could be someone's life you're saving, even if you can't save a once noble denomination that has too many trusting souls in it.
I wouldn't trust my soul to the ELCA these days, as a result.
People should be nervous. Just read the papers.
The Virginia Tech decapitation last spring was barely even announced in the papers, so used are we to weirdos doing whatever.
3 things not generally understood wrt NAMBLA:
1. They're not after tiny children, but generally just want the age of consent lowered to include teens. (The age of consent in Holland is 11.)
2. Most of the pedophile cases in the Catholic church did not concern small children but teens aged 15-18.
3. Although God might forgive the Catholic church, parents generally didn't. Lawsuits were immense, and are ongoing. God may forgive the ELCA, but it's the parents who will bankrupt the ELCA when the lawsuits begin to emerge.
Kirby—
What is the criteria for ordination? ...
Is there also something about emotional equipment? I myself would make a lousy pastor.
The ELCA has a discernment process. I assume that most other church bodies do too. The basic idea here is that you need to have a specific call from God to become ordained. The discernment process is intended to weed out those who have an "inauthentic call." On the general principal that God provides to everyone gifts suitable for their calling, people who lack the appropriate attributes (pastoral ability, integrity, psychological resilience, etc.) shouldn't make the cut.
If love and knowledge are all that is required, then presto, everybody can be ordained.
They're not.
At any rate, I guess I ought to confess that through this thread I was mostly trying to get Stu to question his sanguine acceptance of the ELCA vote, and was prodding.
No kidding :-). Fortunately for my sanguinity, I am more fully acquainted with the Lutheran confessions than you appear to be.
In particular, Article VIII of the Augsburg Confession states in part, "Although the Church properly is the congregation of saints and true believers, nevertheless, since in this life many hypocrites and evil persons are mingled therewith, it is lawful to use Sacraments administered by evil men, according to the saying of Christ: 'The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat,' etc. (Matt. 23:2). Both the Sacraments and Word are effectual by reason of the institution and commandment of Christ, notwithstanding they be administered by evil men."
The point here is that, even if it is the case that practicing homosexuals are evil (which I do not grant, but even so), this in no way invalidates the efficacy of the sacraments they offer, or the word of God they preach. Thus, the threat, if any, of having a chaste homosexual pastor, does not come from divine sanctions that might attach to this fact, but rather, to the possibility that his example, acting through mere human means, might somehow make it more likely that people in his care will change from a heterosexual orientation to a homosexual orientation. Since the preponderance of scientific evidence is that sexual orientation is innate, this risk seems acceptably small.
Now, I don't expect the foregoing few paragraphs will be the least bit compelling to anyone who isn't Lutheran, but Kirby is. And Article VIII of the Augsburg Confession eats the heart out of his objection to the ELCA action.
Let me turn this around a bit. Recall what I said about the discernment process. Individuals present themselves to the church, claiming a valid call. Let's suppose that these individuals belong to a proscribed class (women, homosexuals, "having the wrong parents," etc.), yet to the discernment committee, their call seems valid in every other respect. It seems that they have to go against God's word (at least as some interpret it) no matter what they decide. Some churches (e.g., the Catholic Church, the LCMS and other more conservative Lutheran bodies) have drawn a very hard traditional line. Other bodies have reconsidered a few of these barriers, and have decided that they are not material after all, and that God's call of a particular individual to ministry should not be blocked because of it.
Wow, Kirby, your reasoning is terrible.
1. Even if every gay man hates his mother, that does not mean every gay man hates the opposite sex. Frank O'Hara might have despised his mama, but he had long friendships with women. Whitman had countless female followers by the end of his life.
2. Even if gay priests or ministers were not allowed to have partners -- even if we demanded they be celibate -- they could still still be priests and ministers, and then, by your logic, we'd have women-hating ministers. They'd just not be screwing other men. So the ELCA decision doesn't affect the already-existing beliefs of the clergy.
3. Child molestation is not the same as homosexuality. There is no clear evidence that the priests who molested children wanted, say, a lasting relationship with another man. (If anything, the priests might be like those Greeks who screwed women for family purposes but liked young boys for mere physical action and for the thrill of top/bottom power play. They weren't "gay" in anything like the modern sense.)
4. Chances are, NAMBLA is filled with straight people. Most cases of child molestation are "heterosexual."
5. Asking why people are gay is fine. Making stupid suppositions based on nothing more than anecdotal evidence is immoral.
I find it interesting that in, oh, all the time of the world prior to the decadent times of late Victorianism, homosexuals were the very same folks LB describes in his reference to Greeks and their "power plays."
And then -- hey presto! -- you're a bear.
Or rather, you get the modern conception of homosexuality as "normal" (which obviously it is not). Of course, you get this from the same folks who define masturbation as sex.
Of course, by sex, one generally means "intercourse," just as by "deviant" or "deviation" one generally means "not normal."
But because some folks realized that manipulation of language was the most powerful weapon in the world, we have love and sunshine and less violence and hate today than we had 120 years ago.
Oh wait, no we don't.
Hm. I wonder what happened?
Perhaps the subversion of the LOGOS is a "very bad thing"?
No, God didn't mean you would die -- he meant something else entirely -- see you haven't even died yet. Boy that God fellow must be an awful jerk, huh?
"most cases of child molestation are 'heterosexual'"
I will buy that most cases of male-on-female or female-on-male molestations (which are likely the largest group) are by definition heterosexual.
However, any case of male-on-male (or female-on-female) molestation is by definition heterosexual.
Since the MB in NAMBLA means MAN-BOY, I'm pretty sure homosexuality is what they have in mind.
But keep on lying. It's really, really good for you.
Palmer:
The Greeks who loved young boys also had wives and children. Socrates is a great example. So I find it odd that you think this was normative homosexuality until, say, the 1840s.
I think it's better to say that a simple binary between homosexuality and heterosexuality didn't make sense until more recently. (It's why the Israelites defined the sin in terms of the act -- sodomy -- and not in terms of the desire or a lifestyle.)
And yes, my bad about NAMBLA. In my thinking, I was including all the different groups and thinkers (like conservative icon Camille Paglia) who want to lower the age of consent. Statistically, most child molestors are still opposite sex, so even if you want to identify man-boy "love" with some normative homosexuality, you'd have a hard time making that argument stick across the vast swath of adult-child desire.
However, the point remains that just as rape is not the same as sex, so too is child molestation not the same as sex. The guy who twiddles little boys is not gay, anymore than the guy in prison who rapes other men is gay.
The main thing is to fear that this unleashes a whole group on boys aged 15-18. It is not just an actuarial problem (difficult to get insurance for churches that allow this kind of stuff), but hard to explain how a church that is supposed to help kids is instead harming them.
It's a puzzle.
We know from the Catholic self-study that the priests were after 15-17 year old boys. I'm not sure what's not clear about that.
Father Neuhaus was on EWTN talking about this a couple of years ago. It's not about little kids, it's about -- I think it's something that's not quite like what the Greeks were doing -- the upper class Greeks -- because they practiced something called intercrural sex (the boys on the bottom crossed their legs -- it wasn't anal penetration).
It's something new, and terrible, that wrecks a kid's life, and doesn't have in mind the good of the kid as I think Socrates has in mind when he socratized.
I guess I would drop the whole matter except that in twenty years I fear for these kids. It will be about twenty years before the pipeline is such that all the kids are getting wrecked as they were in the Catholic churches, which are now hip to all these facts.
I suppose the people with similar dispositions will now set upon Anglican and ELCA church boys.
Most of us will probably be dead by the time it becomes endemic, but it's a shame that nothing could have been done to stop it.
Timeline as I see it -- five years to get through seminary, five years to get going in a church, five years to fall off the wagon once trust is established, and five years before the public knows, and then five more years before the thing is stopped, and the (by then) endemic nature of the thing is discussed, and then five years of legal battles, and assessments.
Then the Lutherans decide against this, and it's time for some other denomination of nice people to decide to open their congregation to wolves in sheep's clothing.
LB,
I think we now have something to talk about --
that is, the definition of "gay."
Prior to Wildean activism and its children the term was generally sodomite or bugger or something that referenced the action.
After that we get the notion that the "love" is the strongest bond.
I don't necessarily have a problem with this
except
for the wholesale disregard that most of the "gay community" (and I realize what a loaded yet empty term that is) has for fidelity (Jesus, watch Harvey Milk to get an idea. . .).
Of course, faith in fidelity (winks to JA) is lacking in the "straight community" as well, though there are at least a large voice of folks who (half-assedly, since they sanction divorce for no reason) give some lip service to it.
Promiscuity is bad for people and promiscuity is bad for society.
I'll support Queers for Marriage if they're against promiscuity and pro-fidelity.
Problem is, I don't think there's anything about homosexuality that makes it prone to promiscuity. (Note that the bathhouse images are all men and not, say, lesbians.)
Truth is, the social ostracism of gay men probably helped construct a promiscuous lifestyle. It's tough to have a committed gay partner when you could lose your job or your life once your neighbors found out about your lifestyle. Far easier, then, to go underground, find a quick partner, and then return to the surface the next morning.
Kirby: Even if some the children molested by priests were on the teenage side, I still see it more in terms of rape/molestation. These were adults in power (with the power to transform bread into Flesh), with every bit of moral authority available to a person, using children in a subordinated position. Can you find any evidence that *any* of the priests accused of molestation ever had anything like adult homosexual experience?
LB
That was 30 years ago.
Why is the promiscuity still happening?
I know of many straight couples who do not engage in promiscuity (though many of them did prior to commitment).
I know of one gay couple (of the several gay folk I know -- including more than a few who have coupled) that does not engage in promiscuity
and again -- the problem is not only the promiscuity
but the brazen-ness of it.
ALL of my straight-couple friends could engage in crazy swingin parties and adultery from here to sunday, but they don't talk about it.
The gay ones do.
WHY?
GM—
Why is the promiscuity still happening?
Let's see.
Our churches reject them. Westboro Baptist says that God hates them, and Westboro is unique only in that it says publicly what many think privately. For homosexuals, their innermost desires, the ones that are hardwired into their brains and over which they have the least control, are for activities that we say are deeply sinful—not merely to do, but to think or desire.
And you wonder why many homosexuals forcefully reject our values? And yet...
There is a movement towards homosexual marriage. This movement is coming from the gay community itself. Contrary to what Kirby thinks, there are gays who look back at the lives their parents lead, and see something in that that they want. More than we want sex, we need love, which is by no means the weak word that Kirby wants to make of it, and we need commitment.
Yet what community is it that has taken the lead in trying to deny this? What community simultaneously condemns homosexuals for their promiscuity, and denies them the tools that the heterosexual community uses in our own, pathetically imperfect, search for fidelity?
G.M. - it takes a long time for the effects of intense discrimination to filter out of the discriminated against. (I won't say the obvious analogy so as to assuage the wrath of Jacques-0)
That, and it's Men with Men. They don't have the relatively-lesser sex drive of the female to calm things down.
So you combine the hyped-up sex drive of men with an environment/culture that disallows those men from being a)honest about their sexual selves and b)in a monogamous relationship, and you have a couple of big factors colluding to create a promiscuous culture.
And I hope you don't try to tell me that our culture is all accepting of homosexuality - it's not. 'gay' is still pretty much the most common insult among teenagers and foul-mouthed twenty-somethings (I know, being that I work with thousands of them a year).
I think a lot of y'all, too, need to recognize that the construction of these categories comes from the party doing the Discriminating, not from those who are being discriminated against.
It's a big flaw in a lot o' y'all's thinking... Gays didn't label themselves Gays, they were labeled as such by others and condemned for it, and thus had that identity forced upon them. Kudos to them for not giving into the shame-baiting and becoming 'proud' of who 'they are...'
Pro-Gay-Marriage means being pro-gay-fidelity.
As far as I can see it, If you're anti-gay-marriage, it means you're either generally anti-gay, or pro-promiscuity.
And if you're anti-gay-pastor, you're generally anti-gay. Which is your right, just admit it openly, and you can equate it to being anti-pre-marital sex, or anti-masturbation (the stance of my church-affiliations for most o' my life).
Words change meaning all the time GM - it's just the nature of life, not necessarily a devious plan by the evil-doers to undo all of society.
stop being so nice...
Words generally don't change meaning.
They tend instead to morph into new words.
Sometimes these are spelled the same (marry, for instance) or sometimes you get a word (like "bad") that picks up an opposing connotation for a time -- though that frequently represents a fad and not a redefinition (note, "bad" is rarely used to mean "awesome" any more).
Similarly, uses may become archaic (fear-as-respect is seldom heard outside of mobster-movies and church these days), but a word does not (or rarely does, I suppose we'd need to resurrect Dr. Tolkien for a full answer) shed a meaning (one can still use the Shakespearian "marry" if need and archaic desire call).
I still see, Brett, that you can't refrain from pouring your thoughts over people's heads.
And that you continue to live in a world colored by what you want the world to be.
You say the US is still super-mega-anti-buggers because kids use the word "gay" as an insult.
Note that they don't use any other term (faggot, queer, rump-ranger). Perhaps this is because the word itself is fun to say (possibly one of the reasons it enjoyed its original meaning [hey -- there's my exception to the rule -- gay now pretty much only means "one who enjoys buggery or tribadism" -- well, that and "sucky and lame"].
I don't see you making the argument that our country's users-of-slang (or MTV, for that matter) support prostitution because of the use of the word "pimp."
"Man that shirt is pimp" = you are wearing a nice shirt
"Man that shirt is gay" = you are wearing an ugly shirt in a non-ironic way
Maybe you missed Buggery Mountain or Handjob Milk. These were popular movies that made impressive bank.
Or maybe you missed the part where no one has burned down an Episcopal Church or an ECLA Church because of gay ministers.
Or that the country (until the push for civil-unions became the push for marriage) supported whole-heartedly the idea of civil unions -- for the very same pro-fidelity issues I raised.
I'm not sure how more pro-gay we can get other than to encourage gender role-play in schools and make sure each of our kids goes on at least one make-out date with a member of the same sex.
For the record I am pro
fidelity
decency
privacy
order
So gays: no bath houses, no leathermen in pride parades, no porn-gussied-up-as-art
straights: no swinging, no "hooking-up," no porn-gussied-up-as-art
everyone: no crimes
I am also pro
poetry
blues music
velvet underground
cane-sugar sweetened soda
steak
standard poodles
tube amps
breastfeeding
baby-wearing
home births
home schooling
trade employment
right-to-work
volvo
text messaging
Jesus
Florida
monarchy
limited suffrage
homeownership
urban chickens
raw milk
leather furniture
omnivorousness
dungeons & dragons
open communion
priesthood of all believers
foot massages
alcohol
Chuck Taylor All Stars
bow ties
responsibility
Brett couldn't be more wrong, I think, although there is an element of truth in what he says about people who don't want gays ordained being possibly also anti-gay.
The term "gay" -- where did it come from? Daniel Dennett in a recent issue of Philosophy Today argued that it was chosen from within the homosexual community.
And he argues that the secularists should call themselves "brights" to distinguish themselves from the dimwits who continue to believe in God.
Luther asks me a very hard question -- of all the molesting priests caught during the heyday of the Catholic pedophile situation, how many of them also had adult relationships (sex with men over 18, I think would be the legal definition).
Given that biographies of such individuals would be hard to come by, this might be hard info to get at -- it would take years of research to establish a clear pattern.
Stu brings up a good idea -- that many gay people may want marriage because they look back at what their parents had, and think, not so bad.
I think that that's much more common on the female side of the equation -- many lesbians joke about moving in together on the first date. And the promiscuity (and diseases, and rape rates) aren't there.
On an actuarial basis, what I'd be worried about in the ELCA is not that it isn't nice to give people a second chance, and a third, but rather, I'd think twice about the phrase, "It can't happen here."
If it does, the lawsuits will boom, and it will be nearly impossible for ELCA churches to get insurance.
That, as I see it, is the most likely scenario.
This creep Garrido got another chance and was out on parole. It's very nice to give people a second chance.
but a second chance at what? In this case -- kidnapping the little Dugan girl and raping her for twenty odd years, and keeping her captive in his backyard.
I believe in giving the best possible chance for a safe place for children. They are the innocent ones who deserve the chances.
Ginsberg himself wanted children (God knows what he would have done with them had he gotten them), an dhe wanted a long-term partner.
Meanwhile, he had thousands of partners, and ended up dying of complications from Hepatitus C.
Brett:
As with so much of the taurine excretion that you shovel onto this blogsite, it stinks of error if not of deliberate falsehood:
Brett:
"It's a big flaw in a lot o' y'all's thinking... Gays didn't label themselves Gays, they were labeled as such by others and condemned for it, and thus had that identity forced upon them."
Wikipedia entry on "homosexuality" (in a blantantly pro-gay entry):
"Conversely, gay, a word originally embraced by homosexual men and women as a positive, affirmative term (as in gay liberation and gay rights), has come into widespread pejorative use among young people."
Not that the hollow pleadings of stu or Blisset--that gays are promiscuous or that as a sexually active group they bear primary responsibility for the spread of AIDS because they've been adversely discriminated against--are any more convincing. Nietzsche's remark in his little self-help book, "The Will to Power," comes to mind:
"We are so wretched! Someone must be to blame! Otherwise, it would be intolerable!"
Likewise with your pedestrian comments about female sex drive. Are these the sorts of smoky excogitations that come rolled into "the way of the leaf" you've touted, apparently as a substitute for reading and study (see my questions to you at the end of the "What Are We Fighting For?" thread)?
The Blissett question might be answered by the Ginsberg data: he did go to Tangiers in order to screw children.
And yet he had many many many adult relationships, too -- even some with men his own age -- he had a spouse -- Peter Orlovsky -- who is now about 70 and in bad condition (too much usage of methamphetamines, people say).
So at least in his case there was a wide variation.
It's hard to get documentation on less famous people, people who prefer to remain in the shadows. Perhaps even the police documents wouldn't tell us for sure.
And it amy be that artistic types are different from others to the extent that they are not representative.
I used to think that artistic types were more likely to be morally inclined than say, business types.
I now am reversing that to think that the arts and morality show little or no correlation, and that the arts are just another cut-throat business esp. at the top.
Moral people are as unlikely as a good fellow in the city of Sodom.
They may exist, and probably do, and I would like to count myself among them, even with my many failings.
But you can't count on them.
You can count on people (in aggregate) to be immoral, and to follow their worst proclivities.
That's why we need checks and balances.
On gay promiscuity: the kids I went to high school with who had multiple sex partners before graduation were not gay.
On STIs: Samuel Johnson had them. 26% of teen girls today have one.
On *Brokeback Mountain*: *Guess Who's Coming to Dinner* was released in 1967. Clearly racism was dead by then.
On Ginsberg: He is no more representative of gay men than, say, Dan Savage or Morrissey. Savage is anti-promiscuity. Morrissey is supposedly celibate.
Blisset:
"On STIs: Samuel Johnson had them. 26% of teen girls today have one."
What's this supposed to mean, Blisset? (First, I had to look up the acronym and choose among the seventy-five given). Some sort of sassy rejoinder to the fact that sexually active gay men spread AIDS at an exponentially higher rate than any other source of the deadly infection?
And your stat about teen girls jumbles all categories of sexually-transmitted diseases (e.g., AIDS and genital warts indifferently) together, presumably to try in part to exculpate gay men from spreading this deadly affliction.
One case in point of someone known to us all: Michel Foucault (an expert, according to fatuous post-human partisans of "theory," of the "history of sexuality," among almost everything else), a dangerous and malignant miscreant who seems to have deliberately spread AIDS (with which he knew he was afflicted) during the last few yrs of his wretched life. In fact, homo or hetero, high profile post-structuralists cum Sartre have at least as thoroughly rotten a record of private behaviour as artists.
JA—
Not that the hollow pleadings of stu or Blisset--that gays are promiscuous or that as a sexually active group they bear primary responsibility for the spread of AIDS because they've been adversely discriminated against
I did not say this. What I said amounts to this: if we reject them, we should not be surprised that they reject us. And I believe that this is part of what's happening with the most radicalized (and most visible) part of the gay community—a very purposeful rejection of "mainstream straight" values. This is not "woe is me," it is "up yours!," and from folks who understand exactly what that means. This is a perfectly comprehensible mind set to me.
Both you and Kirby have exhibited an extreme tendency to overgeneralize in this debate. Are there promiscuous gays? Yes. Is there a gay subculture that places casual sexual encounters on a pedestal? Yes. Do there exist men who sexually exploit teens? Yes. But this is not what the debate is about, and these questions get raised to distract people from the real issues raised by the ELCA's recent decision permitting congregations to call individuals who are in mutually-faithful same-sex relationships.
The ELCA now is merely applying the same standard to rostered homosexuals that it has long applied to rostered heterosexuals—chastity—the reservation of sexual relationships to at most a single partner, in a life-long relationship.
This is offensive to the right, because it acknowledges a population whose existence is doubly inconvenient: faithful homosexuals, who have been called in ministry. It is much more convenient to the right if homosexuals are consistently outrageous, c.f., The Onion, as this makes them easier to demonize.
re: std rates in young women
the 1/4 rate is misleading, at best, as it mixes economic and racial categories.
if you'd like to be fully terrified (and appreciative of what's happened in our country in the last 40 years) look at the stats broken out by demographic.
Kirby:
Two weeks ago at my former Scrabble Club venue Em and I actually scored off a probable creepo pedophile, a thoroughly boorish, insulting (especially to women), and conniving filth who used to brag not infrequently about taking three or four trips to Thailand a yr (and gave no other reason--cultural, historical, commercial, etc. for these trips) while of late coyly hinting at the vile reason he travelled there (he also used to berate a crippled and diabetic old vet of eighty yrs at the club who was actually much less educated but a consistently better player than he). The week before he'd actually tried to grab some tiles off my board that he claimed belonged to his partner, and in the process sharply jostled the elderly woman I was playing against. I slapped his hand off the board and beckoned him to the alley behind the brewery we meet at to have a li'l "talk" about what he'd done, what my response was, and what further we could do to sort this disagreement--he wasn't very keen on this suggestion, and soon left.
Next week, he appeared again, and since it'd gotten round that he'd insulted Em behind her back at a party, we decided to take leave of the club once and for all (other players have left the club for this reason) to avoid bloodying my knuckles on his face. Em, who generally hates confrontations, told off the creepo to his face, for which we received the congrats from our only nationally-ranked player (and of the elderly woman the creepo jostled, who also walked out with us), who acted as a kind of coach to us all. Nevertheless, C---- spends most of his time at other clubs, so perhaps another and this time creepo-free one might suit us better. . . .
an article on Folk-Lockism and Folk-Marxism we'd all enjoy.
stu:
I liked your bit about the sexually active and promiscuous gay male response to critics being "Up Yours!", (henh, henh)which seems quite nicely to accord with their Saturnian practises. I remember reading a column by Bill Buckley back in the 80s (early on the AIDS epidemic) about the festive patrons at a fashionable gay club in New York, elegantly named the "Mine Shaft," who made great sport about jocularly refusing the prophylactics freely offered them by that worthy enterprise's management (though others less charitable couldn't really call the place a "cheap male hook-up club," well, at least because of the steep "cover").
I know you didn't say anything about promicuous gays spreading AIDS and didn't mean to imply you did (sorry if I unintentionally gave that impression).
On the ECLA, I've no opinion, for I'm not a member of the Lutheran faith (though you and other anti-Catholics on this blog do freely offer your opinions about my church). Suffice it to say that in spite of the horror of the recent-yrs revelations about pedophile priests (mostly homo, some hetero) and all too many in the hierarchy covering for them (in great part perhaps the ravages visited upon the church by permissivism since the 60s) this will never be an issue in the Catholic Church, just as female ordination is a closed and non-debatable issue within the church. It's an apostolic tradition in our view, and church tradition, along with the Bible, are the two pillars on which our doctrine is erected. Period.
Y'all needs to stop being so unnecessarily mean, GM and Jacques.
Fact of the matter is words Do change meaning (I had hoped you would pick up on my meanie use of the word 'nice'). They slip, slide, perish..
They will not stop moving, will not stay still.
I said nothing about the 'way of the leaf,' Jacques. I was making a self-deprecating joke about my being a 'producer' in that it means, in part, doing the random stuff that needs to be done. I thought you asked a sincere question, and I gave a sincere (though self-deprecating...it is my way) answer, and you turn it into a topic for insult.
I don't do drugs, mon frere, so don't accuse me of such sin.
This approach does not create an environment for honest debate or expression.
In certain cultures that y'all hate, being gay is seen as acceptable - Hollywood (for the most part) and academia (for the most part).
Outside of those(say, in our highschools) it's often something to be mocked and demonized.
And GM - they Do use the word 'faggot,[well, fag really]' but in fact coming up with creative ways of implying gayness is a big part of the new trend.
It is no small thing for someone in highschool to come out...
I don't know where y'all are from, but when I go out with my gay friends and the guy at the bar refers to them as 'less than human,' well, I just don't see such a rosy picture of how our culture views homosexuality.
And is Jacques arguing with me about women having lesser sex-drives than men? Weird. Generally speaking, men are hornier. That's a truth that is both self-evident and scientific.
And I was unclear - I didn't mean to be talking about the etymology of a specific word, but, rather, that the need for 'rising up' as an identity group comes from being oppressed and labeled as an identity group. You're right that they chose the term 'gay' from a number of options (like 'queer' and 'faggot.') And then 'gay' quickly became pejorative, because our culture is so accepting of homosexuality. oh wait...
And while they may have chosen the word 'gay,' they didn't Choose to be oppressed and discriminated against. Yes, we are getting better about this (thanks to those evil profs and self-righteous actors), but we're still a culture in which being gay is not only seen as abnormal (which by definition it is), but also as 'bad.' (not in the late-80s use o' the word, neither).
I do think these categories, while sometimes useful, have a lot of downfalls, but to place the blame solely at the feet of the oppressed, as opposed to including the oppressors, is tantamount to treason! Or maybe just intellectual dishonesty.
Jacques...are you on facebook? We should play some online scrabble...
JA—
One quibble. I think it is inaccurate to characterize me as being "anti-Catholic." I agree with the great majority of the doctrinal positions of the Catholic church, and indeed I am indebted to Catholic missions in many ways—my children were borne in a Catholic hospital, my son attended a Catholic High School.
There are a few points of disagreement, which tend to be overemphasized in this venue because of its particular concerns.
BTW, there was at least one female apostle, Junia, cf. Rom 16:7. The apostolic tradition ain't what it used to be :-).
HORF.
Seriously HORF.
Were I prone to puking I would be.
NO ONE CHOOSES TO BE "OPPRESSED."
What their choice is is how to behave under oppression.
Paul quite clearly gives instructions for such behavior in Colossians.
Acting like horny, gang-raping dolphins is noticeably absent from his list.
And yes, I do expect everyone to behave like a "good Christian" (as outlined in the Sermon on the Mount, Paul's letters, and the rest of the New Testament) and no, I won't tell you that you get an excuse or pass, no matter what your background is.
GM—
The question I have for you is why any homosexual should feel bound by the instructions of Paul. If you can't join the club, why should you feel bound by its rules?
To phrase this in ways that might influence your behavior, if you want them to follow Jesus's rules, you need to let them know that Jesus loves them too, and that they can be a part of his (your) church. Yes, there are expectations, and limitation on behavior that come with membership, but they're not sinful just because of who they are, Westboro, and similar voices in these comments, notwithstanding.
1)
They certainly can join the club. Any sinner can (indeed, only sinners can).
2)
Christian behavior (based upon service as outlined above) allows for the most enjoyment and fulfillment of life.
3)
I've not said anyone was sinful because of who they are -- though, honestly, everyone is sinful because of who they are.
It is our job as Christians to make them feel loved and welcome. I can be more sharp-elbowed with you and Brett (and JA when it comes to violence and JA & JH when it comes to Catholic stuff and Kirby and you when it comes to Luther's crazyness) because we're all sitting at the same table.
I often forget that with Loofa Basset and, while reading Colossians in church today was reminded that I ought to be nicer to him, even if he's not terribly nice to begin with.
Moreover, as Brett said to Wendy, online behavior is more of a pissing contest than IRL behavior -- I'm generally never quite so rude IRL (mostly because even when I am, my body language is definitely friendly) and, again, must remember that, as it's God's plan not that devils and sinners are burned forever (you guys seriously got that wrong, btw -- again check Colossians) but that all the universe returns to Him through Jesus. Being narsty to Loofa doesn't really help prepare him for God's inevitable call.
Another OT thing -- was it on here we were talking about how much of the world we'd have to cover with solar panels?
Here's the graphic:
http://imgur.com/j9wrB.jpg
GM—
I think that most churches exclude homosexuals, or describe their innermost desires as intrinsically (and especially reprehensibly) sinful. We all find ways to join the Pharisee in his prayer, Luke 18:10ff -- "God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income." We just differ a bit in our enumerated list. I'll admit that you've never said that homosexuals don't belong in church, but I'd argue that that's a minority opinion in Christianity in general, and possibly even on this blog.
The graphic was interesting. Does it take into account transmission loses? Are there enough rare earths (or manufacturing capability) to make that many solar panels? I'm thinking that solar panels on this scale would alter the earth's albeido, and so have global warming implications. I'm not opposed, just trying to make sure that we wouldn't be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Separately, I used to be big into D&D too. Long enough ago to have played using Chainmail rules. Long enough ago to have a mimeographed, boxed set of rules...
Nice with the D&D.
WRT poofs in church -- well, most Churches need the Jesus-in-the-temple treatment.
I think it does account for transmission losses (that's why they're spread out and not all in, say, Spain.
The rare-earth thing is an interesting issue -- seems we should work towards engineering that problem away.
The battery problem seems to have been recently solved (a company has made a deep-cycle battery that operates w/o hot sulfur [or hot sodium -- whichever, they both suck]).
I think the greenest answer is to build nuke plants now, and use the old coal plants to power the solar production.
If we really cared, we could do it in a decade.
I did figure out once (don't have the #s anymore) that JEA (our power monopoly) could spend either 1 or 2 years of its revenue and convert the entire city to solar (using rooftops, natch).
I think that's where the experiment will come first.
Easiest to do with a planned city, but it's hard to imagine those in a recession.
Perhaps one of Patri Friedman's seasteaders will add solar to their list of dreams.
re: more D&D -- this marks my 20th year as a player (nearly 2/3 of my life), playing almost continually (I think I did not game in 8th grade or for most of 2008). It's a great way to spend an evening with friends.
My daughters each have their own dice bags. As soon as Delia (the one in the pic) decides she wants to read (she can read, she just chooses not to), she'll want to start playing "for realz." As it is, they roll their dice and play with their Bella Sara cards while I'm at work, asking mommy if they made their saves and if they have enough mana to cast a spell.
w00t.
I know no one chooses to be oppressed, GM, but that seems to be the basic reasoning behind some of the comments on this board that are so anti-identity group.
The problem is that y'all sometimes tend to be anti-members-of-the-identity-group, as opposed to anti-idea-of-having-identity-groups.
When you condemn the former, you simply condemn the individuals who have certain characteristics by which they group themselves.
When you do condemn the latter, you should condemn those who are in the identity group And those who Helped Force the Creation of that identity group with their Discrimination and Oppression, but y'all act as if the latter had no say in the matter.
Which makes me mad as a...
It's like y'all think gay pride parades and the NAACP came out of nowhere, and weren't a response to any outside influence.
If our culture were to start saying that those whose feets was too big were in some way not full citizens, then there'd be an Alliance of Big Feeters.
And once those groups are created and defined, they tend to stick around, even once the oppression starts to wane (and perhaps they inflate offense so as to continue in the same vein).
We have dorks!
I never played D&D, but I did MUD in highschool.
And that is worse, I would say... Though it did help me learn to type fast, and it gives me a way of relating to kids who do dorky things, since being a MUDder pretty much insures you'll win an 'I'm dorkier than you' pissing match.
That is super true.
The I suppose you are familiar with the MIGHTY GAZE-BO -- the most famous MUD monster of all?
:)
M
:then:
Brett & stu (especially--though correction and instruction here be Herculean tasks numbers thirteen and fourteen and that perhaps only jh could undertake with full confidence):
First, this:
"I said nothing about the 'way of the leaf,' Jacques. I was making a self-deprecating joke about my being a 'producer' in that it means, in part, doing the random stuff that needs to be done. I thought you asked a sincere question, and I gave a sincere (though self-deprecating...it is my way) answer, and you turn it into a topic for insult.
I don't do drugs, mon frere, so don't accuse me of such sin."
[Brett, hypocrite lecteur (mon semblable, mon frere), my apologies for fancying when you said "leaf" out of the blue, i.e., as you claim, randomly, you assumed we would understand that to mean, um, "oak leaf" rather than "cannabis leaf," since in the past you've waxed so eloquently about "people" (comme moi, je pense que oui) supposedly and wrongly telling you what you can and can't smoke and put in the various orifices in your body (remember this, Brett, or do we really have to go to the trouble of exhuming these repeated statements of yours from Kirby's archives?). And I didn't know that you unconditionally condemn smoking marijuana as a sin--I assure you that my church is not so judgemental on the issue (see, e.g., the remarks of Vincentian Father Richard Benson, academic dean and professor of moral theology, St. John's Seminary, Camarillo, CA, et alii)--so what's your church, then, Brett?
And I AM interested in your and your buddy's films (aside from the aesthetic question of whether photography and film are true arts, for which you may profitably turn to the work of the illustrious Roger Scruton PhD [Cambridge], sometime Professor of Aesthetics, Birbeck College, U of London; Professor of Philosophy, Boston U; editor, "Salisbury Review"; author of numerous books on aesthetics [and, BTW, an accomplished poet and opera composer] and other philosophical subjects, including "Art and Imagination"; awarded Medal of Merit, First Class by the Czech Republic [2000]
--for his tireless championing of the cause of freedom there and elsewhere; opposed to intimidation of the religious by anti-Prop 8 zealots in California, etc., etc.--again, BTW, his short answer to the aesthetic question is, Brett, "no," film and photography are not real arts). Nevertheless, Em and I are avid movie fans (we just attended an independent film festival in St John's, Newfoundland two months ago), and I assure you their entertainment value IS--well, usually--above that of playing the slots at casinos (there!--I said it, however controversial it may be, but "fiat justitia dum caelum ruat---"let justice be done, though the heavens may fall"). At any rate, ahem, we'd like to watch your flicks, and are still looking for a substitute entertainment to match that of the (perhaps) inimitable genius of . . . Soupy Sales, Esq., ne Milton Supman, Master of Arts and US Navy vet. . . . Could you and your buddy's filmed entertainments possibly fill this niche?
(to be continued)
(continued)
Brett and stu (especially):
Brett, I don't play anything online--not even chess, which was my passion yrs back in my brief and so-so career in local chess tournaments (I only won a few cash prizes in the 80s--and hardly enough to keep me in even eye-level liquor). However, since you're a traveller (to India recently--bravo, mein Herr!), if you could make it to Ann Arbor sometime before we leave for St John's in spring (and other than the dates round the Toronto opera season--cum one Canadian National Ballet performance in which a St John's friend's daughter is performing), I'd be happy to go to it with you on the Scrabble board (in preference to the boxing and one-on-one basketball challenges I once delivered to you that were, alas, unanswered); I'll even promise you free use of our flat overlooking the Huron River for your convenience and comfort for three days--we can stay with me mum nearby during that time. . . . Just email me about this, entre nous, at: viveleroi88@yahoo.com. We'll take you to my VFW hall for the fish fry, and where my lovely girl Emmy and I were married by her father, the district judge, sometime professor of constitutional history, and my junior by eight yrs (if you can stay a Friday chez nous) as well as afterwards for a late rendez-vous for karaoke "nite" at the Hamburg Inn, where I, de temps en temps, deliver my coveted award for the "most interesting person" at the Inn that "nite," etc. (a randy-ass blonde bitch once thought she could influence my choice by throwing her arms round me from behind--Em is my witness!--and cooing in my ear, "I love your f-----g style!", but she fell to the overpowering allure of the hard, punked-out goth feminist bar-slag of a tidy fourteen stone or so (cum multiple "toos" 'n' facial piercings) who carried my prize away that night. . . . At any rate, you'd drink free that night, mon vieux, so let us know. . . . We've also planned a soiree for our friends and significant others (like our beloved protege and friend, a gay dancer, now member of a San Francisco dance troupe of late touring Russia and Poland) in honour of Em's and my glorious sixth anniversary together (All Saint's Eve, Oct 31st, known to children--and to the vulgar--as "Halloween"). If any "regular" on this blogsite would like to attend, please arrive in costume and send us--at my above email address--your intentions, and we'll give you the particulars about the event.
My apologies, stu, for my
heretofore neglect, but now I promise to deal with your statements directly. OK, here goes:
(to be continued)
There's this:
"We all find ways to join the Pharisee in his prayer, Luke 18:10ff --"God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income." An old chestnut, stu--Dickens of course uses it to great effect in "Great Expectations" somewhere, but yet one of the sweetest exposes of Christian doctrine in contrast to the Old Law (I'm not sure of Em's view of late, since she's taken to wearing "devil's horns" everywhere that she purchased at the Holly Renaissance Festival Saturday--our MSU med student friend J--- opted for her first corset she purchased there, which she insisted on wearing over her other clothes). On stu's opinion of the effects of solar panelling on the earth's albeido, I'll have to be guided by the schooled view of our St John's meteorologist friend and former classmate, E--------, who's naturally at present preoccupied with the strong low-pressure system crossing Newfoundland now). We'll ask her about it at a less-pressed moment, though.
As for your assault on the "apostolic tradition" of Roman Catholicism, stu, by the device of your controversial assertion that "Junia" was an "apostlos," and surely a woman, I can only say that this view (pro or con) depends on a degree of linguistic expertise that neither you nor I possess. One can cite both Catholic and Protestant biblical scholars on either side of the issue, though this little affects the Roman Catholic Church's authority in assigning the apostolic warrant for an all-male clergy. What concerns me is the certainty (naivete or attempted prevarication?) with which you proclaim the certainty of the pro view as well as its alleged implications on the female ordination question (which of course pertains only to SOME Protestant and a few breakaway traditions calling themselves "Catholic," not to my church at all). Vergogna, stu! I expected fairer of you. . . .
Kirby:
As we speak I'm listening to William Donahue (Ret. Lt General US Air Force) of the Catholic League treat of Sen Kennedy's bizarre and abhorrent letter defending his political legacy to the Pope (including his legislative championing of the grave Catholic moral sin of abortion), to which the Holy Father in his wisdom has not specifically responded. A Shakespeare teacher like myself can only think of the late Sen Kennedy as a Falstaff-like vice-figure on his deathbed "babbling o' green fields" to Mistress Quickly, procuress for the whore Doll Tearsheet and mistress of the Boar's Head thieves' den. If you think this unfair, stu, je m'en fous, for at least Sen Kennedy had a compliant media panting to lap up his last words, unlike the silent millions of babes (literally, "infants," or in Latin, "those without speech or a voice") slain by the federal legislative mandates of the likes of Sen Kennedy and his associates. I can only pray that he disowned these abhorrent views in his dying prayers. . . .
(BTW, we all watched a movie last night with a quite discernible Christian theme--surprise! "Phone Booth" (2003) with Kiefer Sutherland. . . .
I did some soul-searching on the topic of why I would have voted the other way had I been at the ELCA decision.
Part of it has to do with the fact that I think FAMILY is part of the business of the church. I recognize that the Catholic priests don't have families, and Eastern Orthodox generally don't either. Lutherans do, and it's one of the reasons I'm a Lutheran. I can relate.
In the Lutheran church there are 3 recognized Orders (these are gifts from God):
Family, church, and state.
Family is founded on marriage, and the idea is to have children. It is the central one, and the only superlapsarian order (existing before the fall), therefore it is the oldest and most important.
Church guides the moral life of the nation, and state takes care of the economic side (from a Smithian, not a Marxist, viewpoint).
And it occurred to me that one of my problems with gay pastors is that I don't think they are going to place the care-taking of children very high. For me, the care of children is the very highest priority. I think of myself in fact as existing almost solely with the purpose of getting my children on base, so to speak.
I recognize that there are gay people who contribute in all kinds of ways and have been discriminated against -- alan turing did something about computers that was conceivably like founding them, the way that Columbus found America; John Nash had some kind of gay notion or two, and thre are many others, evne a genius like da Vinci is said to have possibly been grounded in those lines.
But art, science, or whatever, are not very important to me compared to the care and growth of children. At least that's what I think the church should do, and should inculcate, and i feel like the state, too, should share this interest (instead of an interest in aborting them). I prefer the idea of NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND. It is one of the reasons that the right appeals to me, because of its focus on the family.
I think it's one of the reasons that Protestants like the Asians: they have a similar focus on the family (2% divorce rate).
I wouldn't want a heterosexual pastor who was like Mick Jagger, running from woman to woman. Or one who had funny ideas about what was appropriate with the other sex, even someone like Magic Johnson, who had 10,000 partners, supposedly. Or someone who was into S/M, even if it was heterosexual. I don't have time for this kind of nonsense, and it seems very self-absorbed, and crazy.
Or a pastor who thought anal sex with his wife was something to think about, or preach about from the pulpit, even if it was from the "Do unto others, as you would like them do unto you" viewpoint.
It's weird because I think that Jesus did ask us not to think too much about our families, and to think instead about the world to come (which he viewed as imminent). But it's turned out not to be so imminent.
And Luther said we should take care of THIS WORLD -- even going so far as to say we should plant a pear orchard on the morning of the Resurrection (there is an implication that Resurrection will in fact take place on this earth, rather than out in the stars somewhere).
I do like the few gay people I've known who are focused on their families and caring for their children (adopted or otherwise -- some people find out late that they're gay after having already had children, but continue to have deep relationships with their children -- I know two separate gay women who are like that, and I totally relate to them).
Meanwhile a new issue of the Cortland Review is out -- premier poetry magazine, and in it are these strange poems by Dimitrov something about wanting to eat his father's underwear or something -- it's like he's a cannibal cousin. I can't relate to this, at all, and I wonder if this anything but repulsive, or even meant to be repulsive, like writing a poem about putting poop into someone's ice cream and laughing while they ate it. There is a sound portion to this (he reads his own poem). Don't miss that. It just doesn't strike me as very hopeful for the future of the human race, or the future of any kind of family orientation that isn't at least very mutated. give it a try, and wonder with me about marriage and family. I realize that many gays think straight people are equally odd, or even more so (I was often screamed at in Seattle by gay people who said that I was a breeder, and therefore, filth -- so I do think there are two sides to this, but still, I wouldn't want this guy or anyone who thinks like him or could even relate to him as my pastor):
http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/44/dimitrov.html
This is my central beef with the Beats. None of them cared about their families. They mostly hated their own families, and none of them cared for their children in any kind of normal manner, even if some of them were heterosexual. They left disastrous situations behind.
JA—
I did not realize that there was anyone left who still held the Junias position. Certainly, my sources seem quite definite. I'm sure that you have no particular respect for Ehrman (I worry about someone who has so many popularizations, myself), but in "Misquoting Jesus," he cites this as an example of where textual changes were introduced to make the Epistle to the Romans conform to Roman Catholic theology.
The Hermeneia commentary on Romans, by Robert Jewett, says, in reference to Rom 16:7, "The names are revealing: Andronikos is a prestigious Greek name frequently given to slaves or freedmen during the Greco-Roman period. Junia is a Latin feminine name, ordinarily given to slaves or freedwomen of the Junia family, of which some 250 examples have been found in Roman evidence. The modern scholarly controversy over this name rests on the presumption that no woman could rank as an apostle, and thus that the accusative form must refer to a male by the name of Junias or Junianus. However, the evidence in favor of the feminine name 'Junia' is overwhelming. Not a single example of a masculine name 'Junias' has been found. The patristic evidence investigated by Fàbrega and Fitzmyer indicates that commentators down through the twelfth century refer to Junia as a woman, often commenting on the extraordinary gifts that ranked her among the apostles. The traditional feast of Saints Andronikos and Junia celebrates admirabilem feminam Juniam ('the admirable woman Junia'), which suggests that while some medieval copyists of Romans assumed a male name, the church as a whole had no difficulty on this point until later, particularly after Luther popularized the masculine option. Despite its impact on modern translations based on Nestle-Aland and the UBS, it [vol. 66. p. 962] appears that the name 'Junias' is a figment of chauvinistic imagination. Given the pairing with the male name first, it is likely that Andronikos and Junia are a married couple."
Admittedly, this would have clued me into the continuing nature of the controversy, had I consulted it earlier (I looked this up only in reaction to your remark).
But this points to another source, which is perhaps more in keeping with your preferences. St. Chrysostom, in Homily XXXI on the Epistle to the Romans, says, "Then another praise besides. 'Who are of note among the Apostles.' And indeed to be apostles at all is a great thing. But to be even amongst these of note, just consider what a great encomium this is! But they were of note owing to their works, to their achievements. Oh! how great is the devotion (φιλοσοφια) of this woman, that she should be even counted worthy of the appellation of apostle! But even here he does not stop, but adds another encomium besides, and says, 'Who were also in Christ before me.' " (The footnote "correcting" Chrysostom is as clear an indication of the role of doctrine in directing interpretation as any one might find.)
(continued)
I've searched the Ante- and Post-Nicene Fathers (so nice to have them in machine-readable form!), and the only cites to Junias (the hypothetical, otherwise unattested name that is used to avoid the clear implication of the text that a woman could have been considered by Paul to be an apostle) are in the footnotes, not in the Fathers.
It seems absolutely clear to me that women had a more extensive role in the leadership of the early Christian church than the Catholic church now allows. This was not merely something that happened in practice, it was a strong theoretical position of the earlier church (cf. Gal 3:28). I view the elevation of women in the early Christian church as one of its great virtues, and the subsequent re-subjugation of women as an artifact of the process of mutual compromise that make Christianity and the Roman Empire acceptable to one another.
I stand by what I said earlier, "The apostolic tradition ain't what it used to be."
Kirby—
And it occurred to me that one of my problems with gay pastors is that I don't think they are going to place the care-taking of children very high. For me, the care of children is the very highest priority. I think of myself in fact as existing almost solely with the purpose of getting my children on base, so to speak.
These are reasonable positions. I do have a few thoughts on the matter.
1. There are some homosexual couples who want children, and get them either by adoption or (in the case of lesbian couples) artificial insemination. And, of course, the not-uncommon case where the homosexual couple have custody of a natural child conceived in an earlier, heterosexual union. I suspect this is more common among female homosexuals, but lack actual evidence. I believe, BTW, that children who are raised by homosexual couples have essentially the same rates of sexual orientation as children raised by heterosexual couples, a further argument for innateness. So I wouldn't write homosexual clergy off entirely on this matter.
2. There is considerable variation in the gifts given to pastors generally. Some are great with kids, others are not. A big part of the call process is the congregational self-study. If a congregation needs a pastor to take leadership in its youth program, this should be revealed by the self-study, and getting someone with "youth skills" should be a high priority for the call committee. This is not always a priority, which may sound crazy to you, but it's actually fairly common in larger congregations which are served by multiple clergy for there to be a dedicated "youth pastor," with other pastors specializing in visitation, etc.
It occurred to me that I don't know how the "call" process works. I keep meaning to ask pastors, but they are too busy when I think of it, and I don't often think of it.
There is a passenger for every train, the Finns say.
I think my own reactions are probably fairly personal, and are not universal or objective, as we mostly think that our reactions are.
More and more, I realize that my reactions are almost arbitrary to some degree.
Twenty years ago, I would have been on the other side of this issue, I think, but I also wasn't going to church then. I started going again when I had my first child.
Which is apparently also a norm.
The difference between norms and the unusual is always interesting to me. I go to the church almost entirely because of having had kids.
I think other people go for other reasons.
I'm incredibly grateful to have a family, and can totally relate to other people who feel the same way.
stu:
Thanks for quoting at length a few of your preferred and selected sources on the "Junia" question; know that these are not theological scholars' last word on the matter (I'll try to collect a few contra sources listed in the Catholic Encyclopedia and elsewhere, but they are available if you search for them outside your preferred circle of sources), and, in any case, affects not the all-male original thirteen (with Matthias replacing Judas) apostles of Jesus. Nor, as I said, does this in the least affect the question of female ordination for the RC, Eastern Orthodox, or some Protestant faiths. And I'm well aware of the position of women in the early church, for I've consulted the original documents in the original languages in the course of my scholarly researches, thank you.
Jerome's extant letters alone (to, e.g., Eustochium, Laeta, Ageruchia, etc.) reveal at least seven female correspondents and patronesses (others are referred to en passant), among whom he encouraged their cultivation of letters and even the difficult study of Hebrew. Jerome's adversary in the Origenist controversy Rufinus relied on the support, financial and intellectual, of Melania, whose granddaughter--likewise named Melania, however, later became a friend to Jerome, etc., etc. These corresponences in the late 3rd-early 4th c. AD hardly fit with your notion (source?) about the supposed compromise between the early church and the Roman Empire. But I've to go for now. . . .
Cheers,
JA
Kirby,
I don't know how solid a source this is, but at
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
I get the sense that Catholic AND Lutheran divorce rates hover around 21%.
The site also claims that Atheists and Agnostics have an equal divorce rate versus Christians in general.
Could this possibly be true?
Why does Massachusetts have a comparatively low rate of divorce of 2.4/1000 while Texas has the highest divorce rate of 4.1/1000 (The South in general has a rate of about 5/1000)?
They think this might be linked to education, or it could be linked to the relative scarcity of Roman Catholics in parts of the South (our Faith does not accept divorce--while people may separate or even secure a legal dissolution, they are still married in God).
What do you think about all this, Kirby? GM? JH? I'm confused!
1) demographics
2) many folks retire to the south (but not the other way around) -- 2nd marriages famously don't work very well
3) education level
and yes 4) church choice -- since the 1960s Southern Baptists have had little to no problem with divorce (I really have no idea why, though I'm sure it would be there had I time to look) -- perhaps this has to do with the acceptance of Reagan as a figurehead.
5) younger marriage ages -- my father was married at 18 and divorced by 19 or 20 (from what his sisters can remember [he was born in '32]) -- and young marriage frequently are fraught with difficulty.
Also in a state like Texas (not Florida, by the way) divorce laws are so lax that a husband can dump his wife of 26 years without repercussions (ask me about my father-in-law). So I would have to say reason 6 is no-fault divorce law (one of the worst laws ever created).
Yes, I do believe that pot should be legal.
If ya can smoke a cig and down a marg at the same time, you should be able to smoke some weeeeeed.
It's part of my libertarian side.
So we don't have to go back through the records - though I'm sure if you did, you would see my comments that, while I don't Personally partake in the weed, I think others should be free to (kinda like how I think the gvmt. should allow gays to marry, even though I Probably won't be marrying any dudes any time soon).
And what's my church? My lifestyle and inclination (weird word here) have kept me from going anywhere with any regularity since college - but I went to a Bible Church in highschool, and was part of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (probably could be described as Fundagelical, or something) in college. So I've been involved with rather conservative, literalist approaches (that unfortunately also eschewed most tradition, and therefore tried to be heavy while feeling light as a balloon, something that eventually made my head swirl and I just couldn't take anymore 'just'-filled popcorn with the use of the word 'Lord' like it's a comma and acoustic-emo-pop 'worship' music led by my then-even-more-tone-deaf-than-I-am-now self).
You're being genial, Jacques, so I'll go ahead and email you the link to one of our five-minute ditties (well, the only one that's in any respectable form on the interweb).
I don't have any plans to head your way, but who knows? Maybe that'd happen some time, but I probably won't be going out of my way any time soon to do so (wallet's a bit thin, you see, to be gallivanting about to hang out with blog frienemies). Though it'd be fun, I'm sure, since my feeling is that our lives are uberly different.
But, if our paths Do cross, I'd be more than willing to ball with ya, (since I'm pretty confident I'd win that one), though the whole fighting thing isn't quite my bag (as I'm sure you had assumed, what with my weaksauce liberalism)... and to be honest your 'I don't play internet games' sounds like the words of a scaredy-cat. A frightened, thumbsucking little boy who doesn't have the sack to get his scrabble on. (actually, I would like to play you, but my guess is that you'd win, since I'm very much a leisure scrabbler and generally play those who are even more leisurely about it than I).
The South sucks more on most major indexes (divorce rates, pregnant teenager rates, education level) because more people down there have a less-nuanced faith that doesn't recognize Two Kindgoms (or the essential split between our divine aspirations and our sinful selves), expecting perfection and therefore creating a worldview that doesn't play well with reality, so there's a weird dissonance going on that festers unhealthy lifestyles. Also, there's a kneejerk dislike of 'elitism' and 'higher education,' so lots of people go under-educated, which is the most salient variable when considering divorce rates.
JA—
I find the notion of a "last word" in a theological debate to be a bit of an oxymoron :-).
I don't doubt that you'll be able to find sources for the contrary position (as indeed, I did, and so reported, in the footnote to Chrysostom). The question, of course, is whether or not these are reasonable positions. It seems to me that there is little behind the Junias position other than the doctrine that women could not be apostles. [And here, I was clearly using the word in the expanded sense that Paul used it, and not of the original 12/13. After all, Paul himself doesn't meet the 12/13 test!]. Do your sources rest their arguments on anything more?
My issue is that the doctrine of apostolic succession rests in part on the supposed all-male cast apostles and their successors. But it seems to me that the doctrine has been used to "game" the evidence upon which it is supposedly based (cf., the verse currently in dispute), and this is a problem.
Note that the well-respected papyrus P46 reads "Julia" rather than "Junia." The substitution of a female name by a (similar) female name is easy to understand, especially as Paul refers to a woman named Julia in Rom 16:15. It's very difficult, however, to understand that a man's name would have been mistranscribed as a woman's name. I've not seen this argued before, but it seems obvious enough not to be novel.
I appreciate that Jerome had female correspondents. I think you can even point to much later figures who corresponded with females too. That they were correspondents does not mean that they had leadership positions in the Christian church, as seems to have been the case in some (most?) of the Pauline churches. I don't see what you think you've contradicted.
I think there might also be some insight to be gained from the Montanist controversy. I tend to think of the Montanists as late 2nd century pentacostals. Ecstactic experiences, prophesy, and "gifts of the spirit" in general, were strongly emphasized in the Montanist churches. Montanus had two co-prophetesses, Pricilla and Maximilla, who worked with him, and who continued his ministry after he died. There are many writings by orthodox Catholics against the Montanists, but as far as I know, none cite the leadership role taken by Pricilla and Maximilla, either during Montanus's life, or afterwards, as especially problematic. This suggests that the doctrine of an all-male priesthood had not yet taken hold.
And I have a request for you. Please discuss the validity of Paul's apostleship in light of the Catholic theology of apostolic succession, accounting for Galatians 1:1. I'm sure there must be a stock solution. I don't know it, but I assume that you do.
Brett,
The south "sucks" because our demographics suck.
Stu, with the notion of the call, it used to be that a would-be pastor had to be 100% convinced that they were called by God.
The congregation has to also feel that the pastor was sent to them by God.
(It is recommended in a handbook of Lutheranism from 1899, that 66.6% of the congregation feel overwhelmingly in favor of a pastor.)
Is that pretty much still the case?
GM, I finally got around to reading your link to Folk-Lockism vs. Folk-Marxism. It was very very good. I give the link here again in case anybody missed it:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/Article.aspx?id=012206D
how do you make a link in the comments box? I finally looked up and figured out how to do it in blogger posts. Control shift a.
But I don't know how to do it in the comments boxes.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/Article.aspx?id=012206D
Whoever wrote the post is absolutely RIGHT ON. Arnold Klinger or something like that. Wonderful.
Emmy—
This is very suggestive data, thank you for finding it.
The site also claims that Atheists and Agnostics have an equal divorce rate versus Christians in general.
Actually, the site claims 21% for Atheists, Agnostics, Catholics, and Lutherans (each). But born-again Christians have a 27% divorce rate, and Jews 30%. So the message seems to be that we don't make things any worse.
But let's look at this a bit more closely. As a mathematician, I worry about numbers. The sample size of the Barna survey is an impressively large 3854, and they claim a margin of error of +/-2%. This corresponds to my quick and dirty computation, so it's clear that this +/-2% must refer to MOE estimates for the sample as a whole. The problem is that they're going to divide this sample into a bunch of subsamples, and this requires recomputing the error intervals. [What is most likely is that they did, but these recomputed MOEs were "lost in citation."]
Let me make this clearer via a few simple computations. Lutherans amount to 4.6% of the population, so presumably there were about 175 Lutherans in this sample. A seat-of-the-pants MOE calculation gives +/-10%. For Jews, the MOE is +/-17%. For Catholics, it's +/-4%. [Here, I'm using 1.2/sqrt(n).]
I'm doubtful that this data is sufficent to establish that Jews divorce more often than Catholics, given the limitations on subsample size.
What does seem likely to survive a routine significance test is the regional discrepancy. Here you should have ~1000 people per regional sample, which should be good for +/-3% estimates on sample probabilities. And the only take-home message there is that the divorce rate in the (more liberal, more educated, more Catholic, more Jewish, much less fundamentalistic) Northeast is a less than anywhere in the country.
We can also rule out some of the ridiculously small numbers that get cited, like 1-2% divorce rates for various groups.
Kirby—
To put links in comments, you actually have to type in XHTML. Let's work with the link that you're interested in.
What I'd type in would look like this:
<a href="http://www.tcsdaily.com/Article.aspx?id=012206D">Folk Beliefs Have Consequences</a>
What you'd see would look like this:
Folk Beliefs Have Consequences
Note that because blogger actually uses XHTML (not just vanilla HTML), the double quotes are mandatory syntax.
Kirby—
Stu, with the notion of the call, it used to be that a would-be pastor had to be 100% convinced that they were called by God.
The congregation has to also feel that the pastor was sent to them by God.
(It is recommended in a handbook of Lutheranism from 1899, that 66.6% of the congregation feel overwhelmingly in favor of a pastor.)
Is that pretty much still the case?
I don't know all of the details, but this has the right feel. Most pastors don't talk much about the personal part of the call, just that they're sure. They say that if you're called, you'll be sure too.
The ELCA (and I most other nationally constituted religious bodies) have a process for vetting the people who present themselves to the church as having a call. Assuming a person gets through the discernment process (as it is called) and seminary, they then are assigned to a synod.
Churches that are calling a pastor go through a lengthy self-study. Their synodical bishop (more likely the bishop's office) will send a few candidates (usually 3) for consideration. I believe that these days, it is possible for the call committee to bring in their own candidates, but I don't believe this is often done. All three of the bishop's candidates have to be interviewed before a call can be made.
Once the committee has a recommendation, the church council typically meets with the candidate, and confirms the committee's recommendation (note that I am not entirely certain about this part of the process). Assuming things move forward, the candidate then presented to the congregation. This often takes the form of distributing a bio, a "preaching trial," and a meet-and-greet reception afterwards. The congregation then votes. I believe that simple majority vote is the standard, but I may be mistaken here. In practice, the vote is usually nearly unanimous, but rarely unanimous. [Most Lutheran congregations seem to have at least one member who votes against anything.] Votes that are not nearly unanimous are often taken (and rightly so) as votes of no-confidence in the call committee, and this should (but doesn't always) result in reconstitution of the call committee.
Once a formal call is issued, negotiations ensue between the candidate and the council, usually (but not always) resulting in an accepted call.
I've only once seen significant controversy once things advanced to the point of a congregational vote. An ALC church that I belonged to in suburban Detroit was considering for call a candidate who had adopted a black child. In that time (early '70's) and place, overt racism was still extant, although most of the objections were politically rephrased as questions about whether or not the black child would be accepted by the community (which was all-white). The vote, IIRC, was roughly along 80-20 lines, and the call was issued and accepted. This happened just as I was heading off to college, and I have the sense that some people left, the great majority stayed, the called Pastor (and his family) did fine, but left for a senior call a half-dozen years later.
GM - that seems to be quite the fallaciously tautological statement, unless you get into more specifics about what you mean by demographics...
we have sucky demographics because we have sucky demographics...hrmmm
There was actually a great artical on Michael Savage a few weeks ago in the New Yorker. It's pretty fair considering the source. Jacques reminds me of Michael Savage.
Brett,
I mean the south has a far greater # of poorly educated, low SES, limited LEP folks than any other region.
My guess is that there are more low-skilled jobs here AND more semi-skilled jobs without union controls. Moreover, we are close to all the non-English speaking borders (Kebehkwah don't count) and so most of the immigration comes through us.
Finally, one can be homeless--poor in the South with a far greater chance of surviving the winter than say in the Midwest. Likewise we have more free/growing food yearround than in the rest of the US.
I think this simple reason is why the productivity/development of peoples tends to lower towards the equators and rise towards the poles -- adversity makes for a hardy, intelligent general population.
The possible argument against this would be the Egyptian/Fertile Crescent civilizations and the Meso-American civilizations -- though I would argue for the E/FCs the adversity was in scarcity of food/irrigation and for the MAs, they likely began/developed in the mountains (though that's a lot more speculation that I am usually comfortable with -- the MA cultures are a bit of a mystery to everyone, really).
Crap -- where were we talking about cops?
Anyway, reading about this incident led me to the following quote:
Michael, it seems like you also dont know the difference between a victim and a "perp". When they went to the address she supposedly was the victim, but when she decided to provide false information to the police (falsification), and being combative ( both against the law)now makes her a "perp", any questions?
Again, criminals and potential criminals -- "police force" and "police state" are simply too close for comfort.
stu:
Theological debate in general may not have a "last word," but the question of the ordination of women in the Catholic Church is settled so far as the Magisterium is concerned; and then again, each life DOES have its last word, and how to serve God and man according to His plan is incumbent upon all of us in this all-to-brief span we're given. Ars longa, vita brevis est.
As you can see below, if you even deign to sample any Catholic views on "Junia" and the "apostolos" question (toward which I haven't yet seen your slightest inclination), you'll find, as I said, even in the relatively middle-level sources cum authoritative apostolic letter "Ordo Sacerdotalis" of John Paul II (22 May 1994) a level of complication and sophistication that your arguments so far have not arrived at in leaping from the "Junia" question to a now-routine general attack on orthodox Catholic doctrine. This hardly the way to open a dialogue in the ecumenical spirit; it rather suitably belongs to the free-for-all forum of internet chatter or to the fever swamps of conspiracy theories. It also reminds one of the linguistic window-dressing given to fictional jeux d'esprit like those of the popular writer Dan Brown.
On the letters of Jerome, perhaps you might of an idle morning sample them--they're interesting for of course many aspects other than your quaint idee fixe about female ordination (especially Jerome's visionary dream in which he is brought to the Seat of Judgement and asked whether he is a Christian or a Ciceronian).
I didn't mention Ambrose in the earlier comments on this thread, but there is some material in my
2nd book on him in relation to Pope St Gregory the Great and translation. I hope you'll find at least some small occasion for learning what you might not already know (or think you know, as Nellie tells Lockwood in Emily Bronte's repellant masterpiece, "Wuthering Heights").
Below is a bare selection of Catholic fora and websites by which you might inform yourself better about complications on what seems from your earlier words on this subject sun-clear and endowed with a Euclid-like "QED."
http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/1996/9601fea3.asp
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=192643
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=192643
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=192643
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_22051994_ordinatio-sacerdotalis_en.html
JA
JA—
I suggest that you go back and re-read this particular discussion, and especially my contributions thereto. So far as I'm concerned, the issue of female ordination entered this thread here:
Suffice it ... this [the calling of sexually-active homosexuals] will never be an issue in the Catholic Church, just as female ordination is a closed and non-debatable issue within the church. It's an apostolic tradition in our view, and church tradition, along with the Bible, are the two pillars on which our doctrine is erected. Period.
My response, which so wound you up, was this:
"BTW, there was at least one female apostle, Junia, cf. Rom 16:7. The apostolic tradition ain't what it used to be :-)."
What concerns me is the certainty (naivete or attempted prevarication?) with which you proclaim the certainty of the pro view as well as its alleged implications on the female ordination question (which of course pertains only to SOME Protestant and a few breakaway traditions calling themselves "Catholic," not to my church at all). Vergogna, stu! I expected fairer of you.
You'll note the absence of any attack on the Catholic position regarding female ordination in this thread, although this is certainly an attack on one of the principal arguments that is used to justify that position.
Was my sin of certainty any greater than yours? I don't believe so. But then, projection has always been your primary rhetorical tool. You actually do better (in my opinion) when you actually include arguments.
In response, I quoted (not merely cited) both a modern source (Jewett, Hermeneia) and an ancient source (Chrysostom) in favor of the "Junia" reading, following up on the point made by the Fàbrega and Fitzmyer article about patristic readings of this verse.
I remarked also that "It seems absolutely clear to me that women had a more extensive role in the leadership of the early Christian church than the Catholic church now allows."
As for that, you say
And I'm well aware of the position of women in the early church, for I've consulted the original documents in the original languages in the course of my scholarly researches, thank you.
You're welcome. Now, having paraded your scholarship on the matter, do you care actually apply it? You cite yourself as an authority that women featured strongly in leadership roles in the early church. They do not now. Yet you argue that the Catholic position is justified by an apostolic tradition that goes back unchanged to the early church, and see no contradiction.
So now you throw up some URLs, without even bothering to say what arguments they contain, including three identical URLs to an eight page thread. Well, I took a quick look. The first article includes statements like this, "that individual theologians may disagree with the grounds the Church uses to explain the male-only clergy is another issue altogether," and "Catholic writer Michael Novak has written a moving and thoughtful article on the Church's need to further clarify and articulate the theology which maintains a male-only priesthood ( First Things, April 1993, 25-32)." I'll accept the concessions, but I'll be surprised if you do.
And a quick look at Ordinatio Sacerdotalis wasn't promising, as the reasons enumerated in the second paragraph amount to these: Jesus chose twelve male disciples, we've always done it that way, and we've always believed we should do it that way. The first I'll grant. The second and third seem to be contradicted by the practices of the early church. So I'm back to this as a compromise made to become acceptable to the Romans. I don't expect you to agree, now or ever. You've made it clear that in matters of doctrine, you see evidence as relevant only to the extent that it supports the Catholic position.
stu:
Profuse apologies for posting my rejoinder to you on the wrong thread. It goes something like . . . this:
I've taken your sage advice, mon vieux, and if we can back up a little earlier than you say from when you say I "introduced" the question of female ordination on this thread, we get this from you:
"Let's suppose that these individuals belong to a proscribed class (women, homosexuals, 'having the wrong parents,' etc.), yet to the discernment committee, their call seems valid in every other respect. It seems that they have to go against God's word (at least as some interpret it) no matter what they decide. Some churches (e.g., the Catholic Church, the LCMS and other more conservative Lutheran bodies) have drawn a very hard traditional line. Other bodies have reconsidered a few of these barriers, and have decided that they are not material after all, and that God's call of a particular individual to ministry should not be blocked because of it."
6:45 PM
(Need I make this even more explicit, sir?: "You'll note the absence of any attack on the Catholic position regarding female ordination in this thread, although this is certainly an attack on one of the principal arguments that is used to justify that position."--aside of course from your all-out assault on the US Catholic bishops as a pack of hypocrites on other threads on this blogsite).
And, stu, I'm disappointed that you find the 109 entries on the Junia question your "Junia=apostle=Paul=one of the original twelve=Catholic Church's error on apostleship=Catholics' fundamental error on women's ordination=Lutheran ECLA tolerance and rectitude [correct? even tho' abbreviated] on inhttp://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=192643) so tedious to your glazed-over "reformed" eyes that there seems nothing further to say on the issue, and that all entreaties, arguments, and suggestions to the contrary are to be consigned to eternal silence.
Pax et bonum,
JA
11:02 AM
JA—
Thank you for reposting in this thread. I think we do well when we avoid carrying our arguments from one thread to another unnecessarily, and I'm glad to be able to limit my replies to this thread.
1. I don't mind you backing this up another step. But I honestly can't see a thing in my earlier note that constitutes an attack. It simply lays out a common experience of our churches (women and homosexuals who feel a call to ministry), and notes that there is a division in how we handle this. Certainly, I expressed no adverse judgment of the Catholic position, unless you consider the phrase "a very hard traditional line" to have negative connotations. I do not, and indeed, I see tradition as positive, but not as dispositive.
2. What you characterized as an all-out assault on the Catholic Bishops was an accusation of hypocrisy—a sin common enough to anyone who is required to take nuanced positions—and it was in the specific context of abortion vs. the death penalty, and the "whole cloth" theology of life. This is, it seems to me, an explicitly limited assault.
3. You have a tendency to mistake the quantity of argument for quality. Citing 109 postings in a blog thread, subject to the common variation in quality and topicality of such forums, is not helpful. Especially there is no prior reason to expect that any of the writers have the necessary linguistic skills or background in Early Church or Roman history necessary to contend with Jewett or Chrysostom. If you can mine out particular participants whose background (or the quality of their argument) particularly recommends them, I'd be happy to consider them, but the mining is your responsibility, not mine. If you do so, I think my glazed-over eyes are capable of recovering the necessary clarity and focus.
I actually found the two other citations to be more material. Your first, because it casually admits that the Catholic theology of an all-male clergy is not sufficiently mature to cope with modern challenges. I think that's right, and I think it will be an interesting exercise for your side to develop such a theology. Your third, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, at least comes from a source that deserves the same sort of respect as Chrysostom, whom I cited. But the summary of the argument in the second paragraph makes it clear that the theoretical basis amounts to little more than a refusal to consider change in the present, implicitly because doing so might involve acknowledging errors in the past. And therefore, it becomes necessary to argue that the church's doctrine has never changed. This is a mighty brittle position to have to defend, and it shows what is really at stake in Junia/Junias controversy.
stu:
I think we've rentered the arena of opinion and commentary whereas you preferred earlier to invite me to attack your small, well-armed citadel (i.e., your small point on "Junia"), and that: Et priorem quidem qua lacessitus sum, petitionem, parva declinatione effugiam ("And I shall at least parry the first thrust by which I was attacked with a little turn to the side"--remember that we're writing these posts not just for each other, for there may be some competent Latinists who read our blogs).
As usual from your own earlier repetoire of reckless commentary you pick the least offensive statement to defend, rather than your statement that women (like homosexuals and even the poor) are a "proscribed category" in the Catholic Church (then follows more of the same sarcastic rhetoric with " . . . yet to the discernment committee, their call seems valid in every other respect. It seems that they have to go against God's word [at least as some interpret it] no matter what they decide").
I of course wasn't referring on the "Junia" question to the number of entries, but the various complications the thread's ebb-and-flow discussions (e.g., on different uses of "apostle" in the NT, Paul's status as apostle, why Mary is not considered an apostle--though in the RC Church she is often referred to a "Queen of the Apostles," why your point about "Junia" as "apostle" may be of little weight in RC theology, etc.) have for your formulaic "proof" (henh, henh) that the Catholic position on women's ordination is patently wrong.
stu:
And, as I said several times before (pardonne-moi, on other threads) that I see no inconsistency (as you see it) when the majority of these bishops--though not all--oppose BOTH abortion and capital punishment), though support of abortion or willing participation in the act be considered a grave moral sin and capital punishment less so (though, again, pardon, you started off by making the Catholic position on both issues of equal gravity).
Wikipedia has an article on Junia that is rather extensive about the gender-significance of the name, and the tradition of interpreting the name as either male or female (seems inconclusive, at least to me):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junia
I know Stu offered to show me how to import links, but I didn't understand a single word of what he wrote. Something about XHTML language, which I'd never even heard of before.
I have a Norton Critical Edition of The Writings of St. Paul, edited by Wayne A. Meeks, published by Norton Critical Editions.
On p. 93, 16:7 of Romans is translated thusly:
"Greet Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners; they are MEN of note among the apostles, and they were in Christ before me."
The gender is quite clear here, and there is no note below to indicate that the passage is controversial.
I wonder if this isn't another case of reading in what we would like to find, which you find so common among the left, as they look desperately for precedents that don't exist.
In a similar tradition, many have said that Lincoln had to be gay, because he shared a cot with a man (common practice then since beds were scarcer than they are now.
Or the desperate attempt to make President Buchanan gay, which turns out is not excepted by anyone outside of a certain coterie of gay activists.
Paul also says that Junias was a fellow prisoner. I don't know if the Romans would have thrown men and women into the same prisons. We don't, but those Romans were such barbarians that they just might have done it.
Please read "accepted" for "excepted."
In a mad rush, I guess!
The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary offers a fairly terse version of the Junia/Junias controversy. It claims that Romans 16:7 was read as "Junia," i.e., feminine, and as an apostle, through the patristic era. It attributes significance to a 9th century accented miniscule which accents the name as feminine.
Anchor claims that the "Junias" reading dates to the medieval period, and wiki names the 12th century in particular, i.e., in the early Scholastic era.
It occurred that if the Anchor history is correct, then Jerome ought to be a witness to the Junia reading. I've since found a source that claims that this is so, i.e., the Vulgate reads Junia (i.e., that "Iuniam" is feminine accusative). This is consistent with my reading of the Latin declension tables, but JA is our local expert on Latin, and here is an opportunity for him to apply that knowledge for our collective benefit. FWIW, the Lamsa translation of the Peshitta (an Syriac ancient witness) reads Junia.
The Junias (male) reading seems to have been solidified by Luther's Bible -- at least this is Jewett's claim, and it would be a odd for him to put Luther in a bad light (in a Lutheran Commentary series, no less) unless it were so. Jewett's claim seems plausible, as Luther's is one of the first translations of the Bible into the vernacular, and Tyndale (and the KJV) often followed Luther. This set the norm for English language readings for some time, and even RSV reads Junias, although NRSV reads Junia.
It is not immediately clear from these sources when the Junia reading came back into play. Anchor cites an article by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza dating from 1976, which clearly supports the Junia reading. Schüssler Fiorenza is a well-known Harvard theologian. JA will be quick to note that she is a feminist. In this light, it is not surprising the 1st edition of the Norton Critical works of St. Paul reads Junias, as this edition was published before Schüssler Fiorenza's work, and therefore may be assumed to predate this controversy. (I'm assuming that Kirby has the first edition, since he cites only Meeks as an author.) It would be interesting (but not dispositive) to see how this reads in the 2007 2nd edition (Fitzgerald & Meeks). I'm guessing that it still reads Junias, because the publisher's description on Amazon says that it generally follows the RSV (not NRSV).
My reading of various sources (including Catholic sources provided by JA) is that most theologians, and many Catholic theologians, now support the Junia reading, and I suspect a fresh look at the patristic and ancient textual witnesses had much to do with this.
Just as an exercise, I decided to check Amazon for commentaries on Romans that are searchable via the web.
1. The Epistle to the Romans (New International Commentary of the New Testament). Junia. 1012 pages(!), Eerdmans, 1996.
2. Romans (Baker Exegetical Commentary). Junia, "likely conclusion ... but certainty is impossible." Author is Professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. 1998.
3. Romans (New American Commentary). Notes both, doesn't make a call. Mounce, based on NIV. 1995.
4. Romans: A Shorter Commentary [Abridged]. Junia. Author appears to be Anglican. 1985.
5. Epistle to the Romans (Pillar New Testament Commentary). This one is interesting. It uses NIV as a base text, and so reads "Junias" in the running text. But the commentary on the verse comes down pretty hard on Junia, citing Chyrsostom. Eerdmans, 1988.
6. Romans (Life Application Bible Commentary). Junia. Tyndale, 1992.
7. Romans: Tyndale New Testament Commentaries. Notes both, but "Junia is to be preferred." 1986.
8. The Message of Romans: God's Good News for the World (The Bible Speaks Today). Like 5, cites "Junias" in the text, but comes down in favor of "Junia" in the commentary. InterVarsity Press, 2001.
9. Romans (IVP New Testament Commentary Series). "Feminine is most likely."
Intervarsity Press, 2004.
10. Word Bible Commentary, Vol 38B, Romans 9-16. "More naturally taken as" Junia. Nelson, 1988.
11. Romans (Interpretation, a Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching). Neither name occurs, but a citation to the verse has the RSV "men" reading, so I'll call this for Junias. Westminster John Knox, 1985.
That's it. If you guys can add any, that would be great. I was getting kind of worried that JA would be shut out altogether.
What I note is that these are overwhelmingly conservative Protestant commentaries. One of them mentioned that TNIV reads "Junia," which I find interesting, indeed. [I don't have a TNIV.] I don't think that this group represents a reasonable set of proxies for theologians write large, but even I was surprised by the near unanimity with which the "Junia" position is held.
Stu: Thanks for your mathumenical computations regarding the polling source I found in relation to divorce and denominations. It always helps to have someone interpret raw data, and I’m grateful for your help on this because numbers can be misleading.
GM: Please tell me about your father-in-law! I’m always interested in how the courts can be so biased these days—probably in contrast to your experience, but according to mine, how they’re balanced well on the side of favoring the woman in the proceedings.
Brett:
“That, and it's Men with Men. They don't have the relatively-lesser sex drive of the female to calm things down.”
You don’t have to answer, but have you had sex yet? I actually don’t want you to answer, but I think that you’ll find once you’re in a devoted relationship with a member of the female sex, and/or married to a woman, you might find that she’s a match for you, if not a bit MORE “motivated,” especially at certain times of the month. It is a bit of a phallacy that men are always more “driven” than women are. With a loving and devoted partner, women can feel comfortable making demands, even at unnatural times of the night.
Also, in connection to sexual congress, you haven’t met ME. I’ve broken ribs.
Emmy,
You're absolutely correct about the "timing" issue. Though I don't want to speculate about Brett, I will venture that most of the women he knows are either on chemical birth control or are very, very thin. Either of these situations lower sexual drive -- especially when it peaks (which, naturally, happens when a woman is fertile).
My father-in-law abandoned his wife and my twin brothers-in-law (who were 13 at the time) the Tuesday after he gave his daughter in marriage to me. He left to move in with his "high school sweetheart" who had found him through classmates.com.
When confronted, he maintained that the boys were "grown up now" and that his wife had "ruined his career and his life."
Prior to his leaving, he (and my mother in law) had built up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt (she bought crap at wal*mart and he bought things like Honda Goldwings -- that he crashed). He also encouraged her to get psychiatric medications -- and encouraged her to get more after he left -- so much so that during the divorce proceedings she was essentially a zombie (for instance, she doesn't remember Heather and I telling her to move from Texas to Florida and file for divorce first because of the laws -- and the better schools for the boys).
Texas does not have alimony, so even though my mother-in-law spent 20 some years of her life running a household and raising his children, as soon as my brothers turned 18 (not graduated from high school, mind you), he stopped providing any support.
That is a trend with him, by the way, he promises something (like he'd help us buy a used car) and then renegs on the deal. Generally after one has already spent said money. My brothers are currently experiencing this wrt college expenses. I generally refer to him as the parent who would indeed give his child a scorpion instead of a piece of bread. For instance, when Heather got a 1600 across 2 SATs, he asked her why she couldn't do it right the first time. . .
While I was working 3 jobs and going to graduate school, this man had the gall* to call me lazy. This was right after his hag of a wife told my brothers that if she had her way they would never have been born. *Should it be gaul? The French are rude, you know. . .
Anyway, he is a selfish and self-centered jerk. He is very nice to my daughters, and they love their granddaddy, so I tolerate him.
I hope that one day he'll realize that mean, solipsistic, and angry is no way to go through life. But I'm not holding my breath.
My Norton Critical Edition is from 1973.
All my Bibles at home -- King James, Methodist, and several others, have no mention of this, so it must be that someone went through it all with a fine-toothed comb, looking for a precedent. This doesn't surprise me.
People look for tiny clues among the presidents, and everywhere, to establish precedents.
Argument from precedent has a certain authority.
King James says simply
"Salute Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen, and my fellow-prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me"
It says that they were "of note" meaning the apostles took note of them, or that they were noted apostles? And it says they were "kinsMEN" rather than "kinfolk" or whatever the gender inclusive term would be, and it implies he knew them in prison.
But it might mean one was a woman, and he knew her to be in some other prison. I really doubt if they kept men and women together, although in some of the Bible movies you did have men and women in the dungeons just before they were brought out to the lions so that Nero and his ilk could have a staged chuckle.
He does seem to point out a few women in this litany of people he salutes in 16. There is a Mary, a Priscilla, and Phebe. And there he calls them she.
Why this would be different in the case of Junia, or Junias, or whatever it is, seems probably to be a contemporary kerfluffle along the lines of whether Buchanan was a raging homosexual or not (not).
Hrmm. Don't want to get into details about personal anecdotes (though I've already answered the tmi question Emmy just asked in earlier posts), especially as they apply to rib-breaking Unconcealed Emmy (not sure whose ribs are breaking, or why rib-breaking is something to recommend one)...
But there's this:
http://www.webmd.com/sex/features/sex-drive-how-do-men-women-compare
And then the fact that everything you mentioned: (having to be comfortable and in a committed relationship, variability with time of month) is supportive of my argument about the nature of male sex drive vs. female.
at the Least you are noting that females have 'timing' and 'comfort' issues that restrain them from farkin' all the time.
For young men, the only restraints are the availability/willingness/already-mentioned-natural-restraints of females And/Or having a moral compass.
The first doesn't apply to gay men, and the second is rarer in that demographic in part because of the things Stu has mentioned (I will note, however, that this does not take away from personal responsibility of the individual...just as one can say that poverty increases crime rates, yet in most cases being poor does not excuse the individual criminal).
And GM: if by very very thin, you mean in reasonable physical shape, then yes, most women I know happen to exercise more than the average blubberly bonbon biting American, and therefore can be described as relatively 'thin' perhaps. In a country of whales, the seal is skinny (though this doesn't apply to Colorado, where people do stuff besides eating and watchin' the tube...I forget how fat everyone in normal America is until I go back to Texas and take a step outside of the Austin City Limits and then I feel like I'm in a perpetual land of eating-contest champs).
GM:
That is a very sad tale. What struck me as particularly angrifying was the use of psychoactive chemicals to dull your mother-in-law's senses, and to make her a perpetual victim in her own life. I hate psych pills. I honestly do. I'm sure there are times when they do more good than harm, but I think they're vastly over-prescribed and can be a dangerous. There have been times in my life when it would have been the easy solution--dull all your senses so the pain doesn't hurt so much. Unfortunately, that means you'll never be elated just as you'll never be depressed. Like you say, zombified.
Your father-in-law sounds, unfortunately, rather like my mother. Always finding fault, not following through with promises, and cheating on her husband for 8 years, then abandoning her family for someone she met on the internet. She still complains that she's sorry she didn't go after my dad's pension even after she got the house, half his bank account, and a thousand dollars a month in support, plus her health insurance and all of her bills paid on time from his account. For three years.
In essence, my dad ended up supporting both of them and the guy's deadbeat son whose greatest aspiration in life is to work at McDonald's.
"If she had her way they'd never be born?"
This is one of the cruellest things I think I've ever heard. It broke my heart when my mum told me that she wished when she was pregnant with me, she'd of just had an abortion and gotten a dog or something. Why do people say things like that?
It takes gall (though, sometimes Gaul depending on whether or not you want to get medieval on their asses).
I'm glad the old jerk is at least good to your girls, and you're very good to tolerate him for their sakes.
By the way, why is everyone always talking about foot-washing? Is this such a strange thing? We have a foot-washing in Catholic Church once a year where the priest washes the feet of 12 parishioners. It represents Christ's humbleness as he went to the Cross during Holy Week.
Brett:
Rib-breaking is a past time out our way between sucking on sticks of butter, supersizing our french fries, and downing the whole thing with gallon-sized milk shake for good measure.
When we're waddling between our air-conditioned house and our air-conditioned car on the way to the air-conditioned store to get more full-fat milk and cream and preservative-laden frozen strawberries to make more milkshakes it helps to have a little something to pass the time.
Some of us of the lady persuasion, after we've squeezed in a double-wide shower to wash the cookie crumbs and chocolate bon bon smears from our pendulous bellies, find ourselves wanting a good ole fashioned rib-breaking, just like the kind grandma and grandpa used to make.
Now, let me just explain here the dynamics at play. We wide-hipped and cotton-clothed midwestern chubbos like big men. And when I say big men, I mean New Brunswick big. Not Texas big. Those Texas pudges just aren't enough for the whole-lotta-woman out our way. We're talking huge, bekilted caber-tossing man-beasts! We're talking great big man-hunks of hairy man-muscle and man-fat!
Ahh yes...(catches breath)
What was I saying? Oh, right! Skinny twerps who are so in love with their own bodies that they spend almost every waking hour in its maintenance are of very little interest to us. We want men with zest and gusto--a man who takes great relish in everything he turns his hand to. Sex included.
This is why rib-breaking is a part of our culture and why it deserves to be respected, much as public nudity and public anal sex is respected and esteemed among the great citizenry of the Castro district. All we are asking for is a bit of tolerance.
And, yes, I have broken ribs. Two of them, in fact. No doubt you've let your imagination run away with you, wondering how that lard-ass with the naked shoulders in her picture managed to find a husband in the first place, let alone one who finds her irresistable. It must really stick in your craw that those things which you find more disgusting than disgust itself are the very same things that set another man on teeth-grinding edge.
This is one chubby babe who isn't ashamed, and oh! how that burns you up, doesn't it? Oh! And she writes sci-fi porn in her spare time!
We big girls love our bodies, love eating, love drinking, love dancing, love sex, and love making superficial twerps vomit in disgust while we're having fun.
Furthermore, most of us could out-horn you any day. Not to say that any one of us would deign to be seen out in public with one of you thinnies, but if we were that desperate, you can be sure that any one of us could give that well-conditioned heart of yours an infarction.
Or a couple of broken ribs for your trouble.
No, Brett, I mean low BMI and high muscle-to-weight ratio (that is, not very much fat). These women tend to not have regular cycles which is, contrary to popular opinion, exceedingly unhealthy.
Also, I have found that anyone who is conscientiously thin (that is not gifted with a high metabolism but one who works at being skinny -- runs daily, etc) tends to ride the drama llama on a daily basis (probably due to solipsism). Way too much work for me.
Having said that, I find women of all shapes and sizes attractive, as long as they have excellent facial structure, flawless skin (freckles help), and are of above-average intelligence. Because it's genes I'm attracted to, not diet.
Paul banned female ordination in 1st Timothy. Many contemporary scholarship attempts therefore to ban 1st Timothy as being a non-authentic Pauline text, but most of the computer studies indicate that it is indeed a Pauline text (similar in structure and vocabulary to Paul's other letters):
"I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She must be quiet." (1 Timothy 2:12)
Kirby—
We're not debating female ordination on this thread, although we do have a debate going about Junia/Junias. Likewise, we're not debating the unicity of Pauline corpus, which I think would make an interesting discussion in its own right (needless to say, I think the notion that 1st Timothy is Pauline is laughable -- bishop's in Paul's time, are you serious??!). May I humbly suggest that we hold off on these questions until jh is back? I think his views are predictable, but his arguments are not, and I would greatly value his contributions.
In the meantime, what I find most interesting about the discussion we're having is that JA has entirely dropped the ball w.r.t. the Junia question in the Vulgate, and you're letting him get away with it. Here was have an absolutely clear-cut case where a look at the Latin witness has something to material offer in this discussion, and JA is mute. I can't believe that I'm the only person who finds this worth noting.
Emmy - the point I've made repeatedly is about lifestyle leading to athletic figures, not about those whose Goal is to be thin.
If people tend to eat small amounts of fatty foods and walk a lot, they'll have nice, soft, thin bodies like a lot o' Europeans.
The people in my own little world hike, bike, swim, ski, play basketball/ultimate/soccer, drink a lot, eat a lot, throw hay, ride horses, and dance wildly (usually to bluegrass). They don't 'punish' themselves for eating a cheesecake, or devote their entire lives to a perfectly sculpted body (an unhealthy approach to life). They enjoy life and having fun physical activity (work and play), and by doing so naturally tend to be within a certain body-type range. Yes, I have friends on either side of the spectrum, but the mean median And mode are of an athletic, healthy figure that is unfortunately rare in the U.S.
Unlike GM, I find it perfectly reasonable to be attracted to nurture as well as nature - a body that says 'I play soccer' is more appealing than one which says 'I watch soaps' (or one that says I don't eat enough and am addicted to running).
All of which is to say that, no, my friends aren't "very, very thin," per GM's snide presumption, though by our country's obese standards, they are. They Should be average, but because of the negative aspects of the American lifestyle, are exceptional when they should be the rule. And I'm tired of the false dichotomy of "if you're not overweight, you're an overly-health-conscious maniac or have an insane metabolism." No...you're healthy and living well.
That being said, Emmy, you're wrong about male vs. female sex drives, and the wrongness exists even within your own argument. (Your claim is that the sex drives are equivalent, But only when there are certain factors pertaining to the female... which by definition means they're not equivalent).
RE: Rib-Breaking... of course the vigorous are to be applauded, but the breaking of ribs does not seem to me to be a positive representation of this. It's like saying someone who consistently breaks their ankles playing basketball is to be commended - chances are, their footwork is bad, or they haven't exercised the right muscles to keep their bodies healthy during such strenuous activity.
Emmy Bee said:
"This is one chubby babe who isn't ashamed, and oh! how that burns you up, doesn't it?"
Although you were addressing Brett, I tell you what burns me up about overweight and obese women AND men:
Your health care costs far exceed those citizens who choose to eat well and stay active. You consume far more of the health care dollar for diabetes, hypertension, etc. Yet you don't pay a premium for your health insurance. And anyone who chooses to live an unhealthy lifestyle (I'll include smokers here) should pay more.
As your own post proudly points out: obesity is a lifestyle choice in only the fewest cases.
WW
Actually, Wendy, I am a payer into the healthcare system.
Though I have high blood pressure (which runs in my family), I have exceedingly low cholesterol (also runs in my family) and am at little to no risk of heart disease (no one in my family has heart attacks ever -- and most of us [on my mother's side] are overweight).
I would prefer to be able to purchase different & smaller clothing as it affords a wider variety of sartorial choices.
You know what I hate about people? That they're women. That's what you expect me to write, right?
Anyway, what I hate about people is when they make assumptions based on their prejudice and not their observations. It's clear that Brett & Wendy hate fat people. Whatever. I don't hate anyone -- I just point out that ladies with a low % of body fat have multiple reproductive/emotional health problems that are generally never addressed.
My comments have nothing to do with hating fat people. It's factual, as even reported by the liberal NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/health/policy/28obesity.html
I really don't care about your own personal statistics, which you could easily lie about on a blog. I'm referring to the larger picture. It's a lifestyle choice, and it's costing America money.
But Emmy Bee can continue to glorify chubbiness all she wants.
WW
And just to be clear, when I say that obese people don't pay a premium for their insurance, I don't mean they get their insurance for free.
They should be paying an additional premium based on their higher risk factors, especially since they consume more health care overall.
WW
So now I'm a lying misogynist?
Seriously?
G.M., Wendy didn't call you a liar, and didn't mention your being a misogynist in this post whatsoever. Is that from some ol' exchanges? Let sleeping dogs lie (and here's to the dogs of Toledo Ohio...ladies we bid you goodbye!)
No need to go around labeling those who cite unhealthy behaviors in our culture as Fatophobes.
I'm not fatophobic, you see, I am just aware of the consequences on our health-care system and on our culture in general if we lead unhealthy lifestyles that naturally tend toward obesity. It's a cultural problem - but there are certain subcultures in America that don't have this problem...I like to promote the principles of those subcultures, because they are examples of how to lead healthy, happy, unobese lives without having a harmful obsession with being 'thin.'
I don't hate fat people, any more than I hate promiscuous people (trust me, I know a lot). I just acknowledge that their lifestyles are unhealthy.
The problem is that these are behaviors, and behaviors are habitual - if you put yourself in a culture where ample physical activity is habit, you won't have to struggle to engage in it. (especially if you start at a young age, so you won't be behind the curve later trying to play catch up). You'll just be having fun and doing what you like to do!!!
If you're in a culture where being fit means 'swimming against the stream,' then you have to focus on it and define yourself by it and struggle for it and this can be unhealthy...
Unhealthy living is unhealthy living - few people out there actively promote and defend anorexia+extreme exercise (though some do on creepy internet sites, and we rightly call them 'sick.'). Why should we respond so much differently to the other side of the coin?
Wendy specifically said that she had no reason to believe my information as I could simply lie.
if you put yourself in a culture where ample physical activity is habit, you won't have to struggle to engage in it. (especially if you start at a young age, so you won't be behind the curve later trying to play catch up). You'll just be having fun and doing what you like to do!!!
I'm sorry, Brett, but this makes you sound either naive or selfish.
It would be great if I lived in a city where I could walk or bike to work.
I don't. Instead I have a 1.5 hour 2-way commute with no chance at work to exercise. During the week much my time is taken up with family and church activities. And all of those must be driven to, as I live in Jacksonville, which is a notoriously pro-car city.
Since most of my extended family lives either here or near here and my wife's women's health business is established here and I own a house it would be fairly pointless/impossible to move.
Sure I could have moved to NYC where I would walk every day, but then I would be separated from my family -- and I wouldn't be married with children.
Or I could choose the needs of others over my own needs.
stu decrees:
"We're not debating female ordination on this thread, although we do have a debate going about Junia/Junias."
[ . . . ]
"Likewise, we're not debating the unicity of Pauline corpus [sic], which I think would make an interesting discussion in its own right (needless to say, I think the notion that 1st Timothy is Pauline is laughable -- bishop's [sic] in Paul's time, are you serious??!). May I humbly suggest that we hold off on these questions until jh is back?"
After his initial (nearly, i.e., after his fit about flags in churches--he's obviously not familiar with the patriotic accommodations military chaplains make for their spititual charges during wartime) championing of gay clergy and homosexual marriage, which he took over from Blisset, and then on to his non-traditional bent on the apostolic tradition (in the ECLA controversy, about which I have no opinion, for "eess no' myee chorch"!), stu seems to have fixed on the Junia/Junias question (though introducing at every turn the wider implications of the alleged female "apostle" question--I introduced a few Catholic sources, including blogsites WITH links to more learned sources--if stu had only chosen to follow them--on the issue, which stu greeted with his customarily generous measure of condescension and smugness). That I haven't shown correspondingly great interest or polemical investment in this small specific issue (nor do I even have my BSV here at my disposal where we're caring for me mum) seems to be an irritant to him, though stu might give Kirby SOME small credit for picking up the question. For stu--remembering Mrs Elton's "fete champetre" and the strawberry
hunt--it seems Junia/Junias and only Junia/Junias could be talked of. . . . (as with Moliere's Sganarelle: "When I have had enough to eat and drink, everyone ought to be satisfied.").
(to be continued)
(continued)
Brett spins his usually self-congratulatory, self-touting "don't know much about his-to-ry," ("don't care neither"--"tha's fer bottom-heavy, spongy inna-lechulls" who somehow watch the soaps--OK, Brett, whatever!) human perpetual-motion machines who (running, hiking, swimming, dancing, jumping, yelling, etc.), as Pascal has it, simply can't sit still in a room quietly for an hour and really think (and their writing correspondinly suffers, however they may hug their scarecrow bodies with rushes of euphoria (remember the Pharisee in the tower and the medieval momento mori--yes Brett, you can't be whirling about constantly while you con your Latin grammar, and I don't think the "Rosetta Stone" programme can come to your rescue here--it reminds one of the fated "speed reading" crazes of yore). Gratuitous insults to those considered by Argus-eyed weight commissars to be overweight can hardly persuade. . . . Now it's said that ethnic groups like African-Americans and Samoans are overweight in larger proportions than other groups--have you words of wisdom for them, dear boy, or just your usual rash of gratuitous insults and fat jokes?
(Right!--didn't think so, dear boy! And BTW, sorry you chickened out on my challenge to you for a bit of one-on-one bb game--how 'bout if I threw tennis into the challenge, dear boy?--I said we'd put you up here free and even feed you with your preferred marque of kefir, nuts, roots, and berries during your stay, and then in addition you'd have the precious asset of insulting your hostess to her face for her
weight--'course then, the boxing thing between us would come back into play. . . .
Then there's the case of Wendy (ahem), who's heretofore been treated with pretty deferential kid gloves on this blogsite (though she's hissed an occasional fit about abandoning this site when she's fancied she's been offended--hey, Wendy, Tom's in the same late time zone and doesn't whine about it!--come spring Me n' Em'll be four and a half hours before you in Newfoundland--got a beef with that?). Well, WW, know that you and your cats may soon find that a rhetorical ducking stool is perhaps not entirely to your liking. . . . I already mentioned that Em has no health insurance (we pay in contante, or cash) and that we're removing to Canada, so she and I (BTW, are you, like the Obama crew, ready to suggest that we war vets just, um, sort of off ourselves just to save some pocket change for federal bureaucrats, most of whom never laid their privileged asses on the line for their country's defence?). But just think, Wendy, what taxpayer savings we could reap by "euthanising" those deemed mentally deficient, those violent criminals, those of us who are chronically ill war vets (irony alert!--in Vietnam we got 4 free cigs in our field packs--usually "Chesterfields"--and cigs were one dollar per carton--and now the gov't spends hundreds of millions to get us off fags--huh, wha'?). Sorry, Wendy, that you seem to have "bought into" the sort of thinking that goes somethind like this: "Everyone's personal business is everyone's else's as well," I thought better of you. . . .
JA—
You still have not spoken regarding Junia/Junias in the Vulgate. I assume this is because you know that answer is Junia, and you're unwilling to admit as much. I therefore take it as stipulated, unless you are willing to put your name and reputation to the contrary, that Jerome did say "Junia," and did attribute to her the office of apostle.
So at this point, we have the following ancient witnesses of the existence of a woman who was regarded by Paul (himself an apostle) as an apostle:
1) The original Greek text of Paul, modulo a tortuous reading that involves an otherwise unattested male name;
2) The Vulgate, which admits no plausible alternative reading;
3) The Peshitta, which admits no plausible alternative reading;
4) Chrysostom, op. cit., which is perfectly unambiguous.
Against this, there are no ancient sources prior to the tenth century whose reading of this text argues against a female interpretation for Junia with anything that approaches the definiteness of Chrysostom.
I trust that Kirby will note this stipulation.
Therefore, I consider it settled, on the basis of compelling and respected ancient witnesses, and that utter lack of relevant counterargument, that apostolic office was not closed to women during the first century.
This leaves us with a couple of follow-on questions.
When, and why, did the ancient understanding of this text change. There is weak evidence that points to the early scholastic period as "when." The "why" is certainly worth understanding better.
The problem is the lack of available, coherent history sources from the collapse of Western Rome to, what, the 1200s or so?
I think we can see in that time, though, an interesting shift in the attitude of historians of record towards women (and one would have to assume, then, the attitude of society as a whole towards women as well).
So "why" is certainly the pertinent question. What events between, say, 900-1200 created a shift (if there was one)? How does this jive with the rise of chivalry?
How does this work for the two of you?
According to la wik
in the 800s accents started being added to the Greek MSs of teh bible. Most of these reflected Junia becoming Junias (a posthumous sex change?)
All of the scribes, of course, were males -- most of whom had limited contact with women if at all (being like cloistered monks and shit, yo). It's natural to guess that they simply made the easier choice.
Of course, according to the "law of translation" (or whatever it's called), they should have made the more difficult choice, as that's the one likely to be correct.
I think that maxim may be where the controversy comes from -- there are also old Greek texts that refer to him/her as not Junia/Junias but Julia (which is always a feminine name). Perhaps someone copying thought a sloppy lambda was an nu -- all you need is that extra line.
Irrespective of all of this, what weight exactly does the Junia/Junias debate have on modern church policy?
Is she/he the sole reason the Catholic Church doesn't ordain women?
GM—
There are extant manuscripts dated to the ninth century (or so my sources claim) that are accented as Junia. I do not know if there are manuscripts from that century that are accented so as to be Junias. So I don't think the change in the interpretation of the text occurred quite as you've described—especially as the Vulgate witness is unambiguous. Indeed, I'd expect "errors of correction" during this period to generally favor the Vulgate's reading. It is perhaps a bit too trite, but I suspect that the Vulgate, to ninth century ears, seemed as familiar and comfortable as certain KJV readings are to us.
Irrespective of all of this, what weight exactly does the Junia/Junias debate have on modern church policy?
Good question. I tend to think this is a debate that we're better holding off on until jh gets back, but here's a short answer.
Consider Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. This letter from Pope John Paul II, in it's second paragraph, enumerates "very fundamental reasons" it opposes the ordination of women:
1) Jesus Christ chose only male apostles;
2) the church has only chosen women; and
3) the teaching authority of the Church, which has consistently held that God does not want women to be ordained.
A reading of "Junia (female) as apostle" seriously undermines this argument. If we accept the authority of Paul, and this reading, then John Paul II's arguments 2 and 3 fall: for there was a woman apostle (the contemporaneous predecessor to the office of bishop), and so recognized by competent apostolic authority.
I think it damages 2 far more than 3 -- but I think, if forced to re-cant, the Church would simply fall back on 1.
There's an interesting alternate reading that wik also referenced wherein Julia/Junia is "well-known TO the apostles" instead of "well-known OF the apostles." I think that's a fun one.
My take on the whole thing is that Jesus had women to finance everything & men to do the public work.
Um,
Just like most of Rome at the time.
GM—
The problem with (3) is theoretical and deep. "Teaching authority" is the Catholic Church's favorite "special magic argument" that it raises when things aren't going its way. It is fundamentally gnostic—that there is secret knowledge accessible only to an elite inner circle of Catholic Church.
The problem here is that the teaching authority has now been invoked to make a claim which is demonstrated to be false, specifically, that it itself has consistently held that God does not want women to be ordained. For it is now clear that in the 6th decade of the common era, valid apostolic authority enumerated a woman as being among the apostles.
The choices aren't pleasant. They could deny the apostolate of Paul. This would go against 2000 years of their own tradition. They can try to twist the text, but this requires undermining ancient voices upon which they depend for many things: Jerome and Chrysostom (and likely many others). They could accept the reading, and its implications, but this greatly weakens the argument against ordaining women, and would leave it uncomfortably clear just how arbitrary (and unscriptural) this position is. Or, they could follow JADL's example, put their fingers in their ears, and go "LA, LA, LA, LA, LA."
As for the alternate reading you suggest, it falls to the same argument. It's not quite as tortuous a reading of Paul's Greek as Junias, but it's an uncomfortable reading. Moreover, you still have the Vulgate, the Peshitta, and Chrysostom arrayed against the alternative, and no ancient support for it.
My take on the whole thing is that Jesus had women to finance everything & men to do the public work.
I think when we get into (1), it is important to note that the choice of 12 disciples was consciously made in order to reflect the 12 tribes of Israel. [It makes you wonder if there was an explicit correspondence, "O.K., James, you're 'Benjamin'," and if so, which tribe corresponded to Judas ... but anyway... Keep in mind that Jesus was trying to build an "anti-Rome," without ever explicitly saying so.
I also think that the ability of apostles to go off as independent witnesses was important (cf. Matthew 10, Luke 10). This is not something you could have unaccompanied woman do at that time and place.
re: unaccompanied women -- or ever really (cf the italian murdered in the middle east on her trip of love or whatever it was)
Moreover, the tradition of powerful, wealthy women as financiers was strong and evident in 1st century Rome.
Speaking of Rome, I don't think anti-Rome is the right term.
Not-Rome (or a-Roman) would be more correct.
GM:
Don't mind stu's expressions charged wirh zealotic heat about the term "apostle" too closely (there very well may be several senses of the Greek word used in the NT), for he hasn't but given the opinions (learned ,yes--here and there--of a few biblical scholars whose views stu appropriates to suit his own own speculations and political notions).
stu's quaint challenge would involve me not only in consulting the BSV, but in consulting the previous extant versions of the two main strains of the Vetus Latina (Old Latin Versions), "available" only to pre-paid subscribers to the Michigan SSR demands for money--like Washington--but unlike Jefferson's Virginia, where every resident of the state has borrowing privileges) that pre-dated Jerome's Vulgate--but stu either knows this (in which case his demand is a simple rhetorical ploy) or didn't (in which case he can be instructed, as in my 2nd book's notes). Well, stu, what is it?--schooled ignorance, or jes' of the pure "dog-butt" variety?
It seems stu's tipped his hand yet again in that his purposes are not so much to argue a small point (backed, he deludes himself, by his highly selective use of a few favoured Protestant biblical commentators, for as I said, he hasn't the linguistic or exegetical expertise hisself to make these points), but to polemicize for his anti-Catholic vision of scriptural interpretation and to avenge hisself for the rhetorical bull-whippings he's received of late. . . .
We speak in generalities, and then everyone gets all identity-group defensive.
If it doesn't apply, let it fly. Sorry y'alls is so sensitive.
Can't even take a little straight-forward proclamation accompanied by some colorful language...(better to be healthy than fat or unnaturally scrawny...).
I wasn't attacking Emmy- she got unnecessarily offended by comments I made about unhealthy lifestyles.
Tired o' y'alls victim stance on this end of this argument...
And Jacques, you've no business denouncing someone else for being 'self congratulatory' (and note that I was talking about friends, not me specifically).
That's your favorite subject, and constitutes roughly 53.27% of every comment you post.
And sorry if I don't take you up on your offers for athletic challenges.
I kinda don't live in the same state as you.
Jacques—
I asked about Jerome. If you want to bring in pre-Latin witnesses, that's fine—I'm aware that they exist, but don't know much about them. The Vulgate, though, is available on line.
Here's Romans 16:7, according to the site http://www.latinvulgate.com: "salutate Andronicum et Iuniam cognatos et concaptivos meos qui sunt nobiles in apostolis qui et ante me fuerunt in Christo."
How should this be rendered in English? Is "Iuniam" definitely feminine, or can you argue that it might be masculine? If it is masculine, what is the root? Does the construct imply that Junia/Junias is an apostle, or merely someone that the apostles have taken note of? I assume that you don't need borrowing privileges to figure this out, and moreover, you have access to a Vulgate Latin Bible, and can verify that I have copied this verse faithfully.
As for the word apostle, it may be that it is used in several senses. It hardly occurs at all in the new testament (about 10 occurrences, IIRC), but really picks up in Acts and some of the Epistles. The gospels mostly talk about disciples, a larger group whose precise membership is unclear. It's not clear to me though, how such an argument helps you, especially given that Acts refers unambiguously to Paul as an apostle.
As for the people to whom I referred, I included John Paul II, and discussed the argument he made in favor of a male apostolate—you seem to have missed this. You certainly haven't engaged the argument that I made, laying out the three arguments he made, and why I consider the Junia verse is problematic as regards two of the three.
And the only bull product that I've received from you is the kind that stinks, not the kind that stings.
"Yes, Emmy Bee can continue glorifying chubbiness if she wants to."
Yes, I do want to. Thank you for your permission, pert little Ms.
It seems, rather than a "lifestyle" choice that I've made for myself, W, my body was provided to me (like GM's body was provided to him) courtesy of a genetic choice made for me when dad's big n' sassy sperm found mom's egg.
Rather than beating up myself about it, I find that it is better to accept what one cannot change. I will never, for example, weigh 110 pounds and I am not only o.k. with that fact, but I am grateful for it. The chances of me getting osteoporosis is like 0.0001.
My future children will be happy for the little extra fat stored up so I can expend the extra 500 or 1000 (twins--fingers crossed!) calories a day to feed them without running myself into the ground. Besides, who wants to cuddle with a mummy who is all skin and protruding bones.
My body is hourglass and it is aesthetically pleasing. I have the world's most perfect nose.
What's not to like?
But if I were not quite as much in love with my body as Brett is with his, I might take offense when someone tells me I ought not to celebrate diversity in all shapes and sizes. That I ought to shrink back into a corner and be apologetic to the likes of W who seems to think I will come knocking on her door one day, beg her forgiveness for my personal tresspass, and then pass the hat for my quadruple by-pass fund is just on the far side of ridiculous.
I make no apologies for who I am--and just like other groups traditionally let down by the society they're a part of, I have become proud of my diversity. Ever heard of Gay Pride? Some would say it isn't a lifestyle choice, but an inborn preference.
Do any of you seriously think Brett or W would publically tell a homosexual on this blog, full of pride at his identity, that he was unhealthy, disgusting, and ought not to be seen with another gay man in public (rather like Brett's commandment that fat people ought not to go on picnics), and that he was going to cost W half her paycheck to pay for his inevitable AIDS treatment further down the line (as, inevitably, every overweight person is going to need heart surgery)?
And just a side note to Brett RE: ribs;
It happened once and I don't make it a habit. But, now that you mention it, Jacques is about due. And I do think, contrary to your opinion on the subject, that it proves quite a bit of zesty application of my, ehm, talents. I don't think you'll ever hear Jacques complain :)
Sigh. Corrections...
pre-Latin -> pre-Vulgate Latin
in the new testament -> in the Gospels.
OK stu, let's cut to the chase, ut ita dicam:
Could "Junia" be masculine in Latin? OF COURSE it could be masculine, like the common Latin adnomen "Testa" (as Caius Trebatius Testa, jurist and friend of Cicero), "Agricola," or even "Catalina," etc. (let's add for good measure some generic "a"-ending nouns as well, such as "poeta" ("poet"), "nauta," ("sailor"), "agricola" ("farmer"), "incola" ("inhabitant"), "auriga" ("charioteer"), etc. Though the singular forms follow the feminine first declension endings, the nouns are definitely masculine--savvy, O columen litterarum! ("O pillar of learning!"--from, BTW, stu, no other than Jerome in his agonistic exchanges with Rufinus the Origenist).
The reference to supposed "bull" seems to be from Alexander Pope's reference to the effeminate "pouffer" Lord Hervey, minion of the corrupt anti-Tory PM Sir Robert Walpole:
"Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,/
This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings."
Tu quoque, O homo stultissimus! (Get a Wheelock grammar, stu!--for, "Dimindium facti qui coepit habet: sapere aude" ("he who's begun has half of the job done: Dare to know").
Now I've no probs with the revised KJB version of Romans: 16:7: "Salute Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen, and my fellow-prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who were also in Christ before me" (follow salutations to many men and to several women followers of Christ).
JA—
So, it's "Junia" in Latin. As you point out—via the “boy named Sue” hypothesis—although a feminine name grammatically, it could denote a male person. I buy that.
But if it's Junia in Latin, it's Junia in Greek, and that can't be masculine. So the Vulgate witnesses the female name.
I've got no problem with that.
stu:
Pleased that you "bought" the a-ending masculine nouns in Latin, for, given your earlier scepticism, when we returned to our flat after caring for Mum I was primed and poised to rip those very pages out of my Gildersleeve's Latin reference grammar; now (gratias Deo) I can, with fulsome gratitude, leave it unmolested.
Still, as I suspected, you probably conceive your work not quite finished, for there is one righteous and mighty task for you as messenger or ambassador ("apostolos") of Luther yet undone: like a contemporary Samson, to pull down the rotten pillars of the Catholic temple of Doom, which, on the basis of your equation of all called "apostles," is after two millennia to fall under your righteous and mighty hands. No greater service could be performed than for you to consecrate this Satanic cult and all its devotees to eternal fire and ev-erlas-ting pain.
And yet, and yet, stu--yes!--I seemeth to hear the Voice: "extra ecclesia non salus est."
JA—
I'm sure you can't conceive of this, but I have no desire whatsoever to tear down the Catholic Church. I certainly lack the capacity, just as you lack the capacity to tear down the Lutheran Church. The Church of Jesus Christ will survive our divisions.
Cyprian talks to you?
For the record, I REALLY hate people with skinny thighs because they die sooner and make us all depressed and shit.
stu:
Perhaps, if you mean in "De unitate ecclesiae": "He can no longer have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother; . . . he who gathereth elsewhere than in the Church scatters the Church of Christ" (vi.); "nor is there any other home to believers but the one Church" (ix.).
Still, for now again, stu, the dexter hand of peace to you,
JA
I wonder how important it is to get the "who can be ordained" question right.
There is a wide diversity of opinions -- some are now ordaining women, some not. A few are ordaining active homosexuals, most not.
Does God care about this?
If He does, there must be one answer.
Therefore, it would seem that whoever has it right, is right, and whoever has it wrong, is wrong.
I think the notion of Adam's priority in Genesis is also important. That notion has been under attack for at least 500 years, if not longer, from within poetic circles.
(There are feminist poets even in the 1500s who make arguments that Eve was less wrong than Adam.)
I find the whole thing quite funny to watch.
Most of the arguments are from precedent -- so we have to watch each precedent, and pseudo-precedent, carefully.
I think that majority votes sets the opinion in the government. That's simple.
But in the church, it's the will of God that has to set the rules.
They are different institutions.
The problem is understanding the will of God. However, I don't think that God could be of two minds on this matter, or any other matter. There has to be one correct answer, and all others must therefore be wrong.
Without a clear order (I think First Timothy is clear enough), I don't know where you would be likely to turn for a simple command on this. First Timothy is clear.
Junia-Junias is far from clear, and could easily be a mistake. We just don't know for certain.
If God wanted Paul to say that everyone could be ordained, wouldn't he have just said that?
It's not in the commandments.
I think it depends on how much weight we give to each of the apostles, and whether the fact that Jesus chose 12 men is decisive.
If this Junias was a woman it allows in a discrepancy, and therefore a precedent, and all the left needs is the tiniest loophole, and they come streaming through, and suddenly chickens are getting ordained and then we'll be watching them strut around on stage, and suddenly Mick Jagger is the equivalent of Jesus, because he struts, too, like a rooster.
I do want to bring us back to the point that not everybody can be right. There has to be one right answer.
Unless we take the notion that God is all confused, and needs us to help him figure this out.
I don't think God can call different communities differently, and say, I want you to ordain, and you not to ordain, women.
It's got to be one answer.
Emmy - If someone came here and bragged about their promiscuous lifestyles, then yes, I would call them unhealthy.
I personally don't think the evidence stacks up that homosexuality is necessarily unhealthy.
I do, however, believe that reckless promiscuity is unhealthy, both emotionally and physically.
I don't want to see fat people gorging themselves, much like I don't like seeing anorexics running.
It's gross.
Of course, a chubby girl politely eating, or a fit girl going on a jog are both perfectly fine.
Gotta go
-Brett
It's got to be one answer.
Why? "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD." [Isaiah 55:8]
God has proven that he can work his will through flawed humanity.
Even you.
Even me.
Kirby:
One answer, yes, and a lion's, ("ena, alla leonta," as the Aesopean lion--whom the ancients believed sired only one issue at a time--answered the fox, who spawns a multitude of whelps) if we could nut hear Him roar clearly enough. . . . But striving and trying to determine this leonine command is preferable to stu's (perhaps) emphatically Laodicean and weakly adolescent "Whatever?"
"For Jehovah is Master of the two poles, and on these, He makes the world turn" [1 Samuel 2:8].
We may not be able to understand God's word, but it doesn't mean we can just invent anything. The Bible is a pretty good intro. We can't just tear out whole books of it that don't fit our viewpoint.
(Though I'd like to toss James.)
Kirby:
Which James, mon vieux, me or the apostle?--or both perhaps? (plaisantrie!) If the apostle's book is "of straw" as our man Luther has it, perhaps burning is neater?
Nevertheless, to be fair, Kirby, there's ample doctrine for both our faiths to chew and digest. . . . And I'm keen to glean pearls from the pious and sagacious "Book of Junia" next. . . .
Kirby—
The problem is that the Bible was written by many people over the course of many centuries, and edited by many more. It is inspired by God, but colored as well by the cultures and people who wrote and edited the texts. You can find support for diametrically opposed positions, if you're willing to mine for quotes, and especially if you're willing to take them out of context. To get the real message, you have to read the Bible broadly, and focus on messages and themes that are sustained through. Even so, disagreement, even among those of good faith who seek God's meaning, and are willing to submerge their own prior conceptions, happens.
I don't mean by this to say that you can justify anything on the basis of the Bible, quite the contrary. But it is naive to believe that we can approach every question about faith or life, and find a clearly stated, single answer.
Today, it was my privilege to hear our gifted pastoral intern preach on Mark. It was a great sermon, prepared in faith and with insight and delivered forcefully. Our intern was raised in the LCMS, but is now a member of the ELCA, because the LCMS does not recognize her gift and her calling. I'm glad that your loss is not Christianity's loss. It is certainly our gain.
As for James, is your lack of regard based on Luther's terse (and early) assessment, or is it based on the content? If the former, you're falling into the trap of proof by authority, and in this case an authority whose rhetorical style you seem to misunderstand. Knowing Luther, if he were alive today, he would decry the cheap grace, and the complacent pietism that masquerades for righteousness. He'd be calling us to works, not as a means of salvation, but because it is through works that we live in faith.
You characterize yourself as someone who was a leftist, and is now a rightist. And you see the group-think that sometimes pervades the left. But all that's happened is that you've exchanged one set of authorities for another: Glenn Beck and his ilk for Noam Chomsky and his ilk. You've not changed, and you've certainly not improved yourself by the change. It is time to put aside childish ways, and to learn to think for yourself.
I talked about Mark today, too.
And about how altering and misquoting the Bible is abuse to said Bible.
James is in there, Kirby -- as is the Revelation of St. John teh Diva. You betta rekonsile.
And G.M. - if you read that article about "skinny thighs," it's about how people with big thighs die less than people with fat tummies.
Doesn't really have much relevance here...
Brett -- it's about how people with big thighs die less than people with skinny thighs.
It also references fat tummies -- but you skinny nazis don't seem to differentiate between kinds of fatness.
I never had one lick of respect for Noam Chomsky.
I suspect that the ending of the book of James makes people want to make ladle soup for the downtrodden.
I'm against that -- because I think that whole smarmy way of looking at things leads to a sentimental notion that there is some easy way to fix things for the poor. But the poor have to organize THEMSELVES (get organized). They have to do a job search, and then do a competent job, stay off drugs, stay married, and get enough sleep. This requires personal organization.
I don't think that those who are well-organized need to pay tithes to the poor (the notion of tithing was created during the American Civil War to pay for the fantastic cost of munitions).
I like Luther's two kingdoms because it isn't as sloppy as the communist notions of share and share alike (share your diseases, share your dreams, share your hope) and hope the CDC and the people who have self-discipline will bail you out.
I was once in a lazy way on the left. It was easy to pretend to be on the left. I was always truly in the middle, and a bit to the right.
Where I still am.
I was always too a Lutheran -- but Missouri Synod. It's just that I had to keep a poker face for a couple of decades.
This is why I suspect that Obama on the other side is very much still a Marxist -- as he was in college. I was never once drawn to communism, not even for 15 minutes.
It always struck me as poppycock, and the history will bear me out.
But he was drawn to it, and his heart still burns red. Every sentence that comes out of him betrays him.
Kirby—
I suspect that the ending of the book of James makes people want to make ladle soup for the downtrodden.
I suspect?! You might try reading it. You should not be so lazy as to condemn books that our predecessors preserved in the Bible without actually reading them. At 2323 words (NRSV), it's comparable in length to your longer blog postings. You should be able to read it yourself, and form your own opinion.
James is wisdom literature—think Proverbs, with a thin veneer of Christianity. It does not "tell a story." Luther's objection wasn't so much to what it said about faith vs. works, but rather that it doesn't say anything about Jesus.
But James has some excellent material, its limitations as specifically Christian writing notwithstanding. Here are a few passages that I think are well worth remembering:
"Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves."
"If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless."
"You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder."
"How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell."
Kirby:
I'll agree with stu in characterising James as more homily and wisdom literature than a narrative or letter; it may or may not pre-date Paul's letters (it may even be a kind of rejoinder to Paul) and seems to be aimed at Jewish converts who well knew the OT.
Nevertheless, Luther hyperbolises (surprise, surprise!) by saying via stu, that James "doesn't say anything about Jesus." From the opening 1.1 James refers to himself as a "servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ" (KJV is below used). 5:7-8 speaks of the immanent "coming of the Lord" and of not judging "lest ye be condemned." In 2:1 James speaks against those who would combine "faith of our Lord Jesus Christ" with respect for class distictions. Et alia. . . .
JA—
Nevertheless, Luther hyperbolises (surprise, surprise!) by saying via stu, that James "doesn't say anything about Jesus." From the opening 1.1 James refers to himself as a "servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ" (KJV is below used). 5:7-8 speaks of the immanent "coming of the Lord" and of not judging "lest ye be condemned." In 2:1 James speaks against those who would combine "faith of our Lord Jesus Christ" with respect for class distictions.
Actually, I'll stand with Luther in his characterization of James. The passages you refer to constitute my "thin veneer of Christianity." If all knew about Christianity came from James, what would we know of Jesus Christ?
We would know that he was called Lord (1:1). We would know that his "servants" hoped to receive things from him (1:7), including possibly "the crown of life that he promised to those who love him" (1:12). We would learn that he is called "glorious," and that belief in him requires accepting an ethical system that does not grant extra consideration to the rich (2:1). We would see him paired with the Father (3:9), already introduced (1:27) as synonymous with God. We learn that he seems to have the power to exalt (4:10), and indeed, power over life and death (4:15). We learn that he is expected to come (5:7-8), and that the elders of the church should direct prayers for the sick to him (5:14).
[I'd argue that the references to "Lord" in 5:10-11 refer to the Father, and were likely appropriated whole into this letter from explicitly Jewish wisdom literature.]
We do not learn that Jesus was a human being. We do not learn that he had an earthly ministry, or when or where in history that ministry might have occurred. We do not learn that he suffered and died, nor that he rose again. We learn nothing of his preaching or teaching, beyond a promise of the crown life to those who love him. That his expected coming is actually an expected second coming we would have to learn from other sources. We do not learn of baptism or communion. All we learn of the church is that it has elders. We learn "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," but this is called the "royal law," (c.f., Leviticus 19:18) and it is not associated with Jesus at all. We do not learn that Jesus is considered to be the Son of God.
There is no mention of the Holy Spirit, merely as spirit in the sense of the animating force of life, created by God for us (4:5).
What we'd learn is basically a binary divinity, consisting of (God,Father) and (Jesus,Christ,Lord), and perhaps a sense that human interaction with the divine is primarily through the latter.
The notion that James is roughly contemporaneous with Paul relies on the indentification of James (the eponymous author of the epistle) with James (the brother of Jesus). There is nothing self-relevatory in the letter that supports this, nor is there anything in the content that hints that this might be so. The Hermeneia commentary says 80-130 C.E., and uncommonly large interval of uncertainty. The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary speaks in generalities, but seems to be indicating 70-120 C.E.
In my opinion, James was not written in reaction to Paul, as is often supposed. This is, instead, a projection of 16th century disputes back onto the early 2nd century, and so does disservice to both Paul and James. The whole "faith vs. works" discussion in James is limited to 2:14-24, is a minor part of the whole, and given the lack of narrative structure of James as a whole, cannot be construed as any sort of "climax." At worst, James was reacting to pro-pietism (i.e., an excessive emphasis on spirituality to the exclusion of earthly ministry). If James were writing from a Roman perspective in opposition to Paul explicitly, I'd have expected him to have something negative to say about the emphasis on charismata in the Pauline churches, but he is entirely mute on the issue.
I will note, just to make it clear how short James is, that this note is roughly 1/4 the length of the entire epistle.
I wasn't writing about the intent of James, but the effect on Christianity today, especially the very strange comparison that he makes at the end of chapter Two:
"For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also." 2:26
King James Version
It's an interesting and arresting reversal.
Roland Bainton comments on Luther's hierarchy of texts:
"Luther read the New Testament in the light of the Pauline message that the just shall live by faith and not by works of the law. ...
Yet he did not venture to reject James from the canon of Scripture, and on occasion earned his own beret by effecting a reconciliation [between Paul and James]....
"the conclusion was a hierarchy of values within the New Testament. First Luther would place the Gospel of John, then the Pauline epistles and First Peter, after them the three other Gospels, and in a subordinate place Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation. He mistrusted Revelation because of its obscurity. 'A Revelation,' said he, "should be revealing'
"There is the famous example where Luther rendered 'justification by faith' as 'justification by faith alone' -- When taken to task for this liberty, he replied that he was not translating words but ideas, and that the extra word was necessary in German in order to bring out the force of the original" (331-332).
from Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Abingdon 1950).
But in addition against the nature of "works" is the setniment that Jesus said that we shouldn't do good works openly -- I'll have to get up and look in a book to find the quote. This is getting long, so I will first post this.
There is obviously quite a lot of fighting over this, whether or not a person is compelled to do good works, or not, by dint of being Christian. I'm not sure where it is (and I have to zip), but Jesus himself says somewhere that doing good works out in the open is creepy. He says it somewhat more elegantly than that. I think the creepy thing is doubled by wanting to look loving in the eyes of other people. We should instead accept that we are sinners, rather than try to look good in the eyes of others. That's what's creepy about it, in short. I think we should always remain sorry and never heap up our pride with a list of accomplishments, especially on behalf of the poor. That's why I agree with christopher Hitchens that Mother Theresa was a bit mental. Here's some other verses from other chapters put together by someone named David J. Stewart that I found. I think we can keep talking about this, but I do think that people who openly do good works are generally monstrous. The better thing is to do something good quietly so that nobody knows about it, and we keep in mind to ourselves that having done a couple of good things doesn't make us any less sinful. Oddly, it might make us even more sinful. Some creeps even go so far as to try to outdo Jesus, by becoming a saint. To try to become a saint, is a sin.
“NOT BY WORKS of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:5). This Bible verse makes it plain and simple that good works will not save anyone. Listen to the message of Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: NOT OF WORKS, lest any man should boast.” How many Scriptures does God need to put in front of our face before we get the idea—salvation is not by merit. “Knowing that a man is NOT JUSTIFIED BY THE WORKS OF THE LAW, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and NOT BY THE WORKS OF THE LAW: for BY THE WORKS OF THE LAW SHALL NO FLESH BE JUSTIFIED” (Galatians 2:16).
Stewart comments: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions!!!
Nothing that we ever do is wholly good. To think so is in itself a sin: one of the seven deadlies: linked to pride.
Too many Christians are proud. The better attitude is one of shame.
Erasmus argued that if the Gospels cannot be fulfilled why even have them. Luther did believe there is free will, but it's not so perfect as the Pelagians would have liked. He countered along the lines that man is a donkey ridden now by God and now by the devil -- I'm quoting from memory --
At any rate, good works! Fat chance!
I think to some extent we can think about the ten commandments, and we can do our dead level best to fulfill them. But no one really ever does -- any more than a person can fly -- but it's a lot of fun to imagine flying, and why not dream of it -- alas, we are not angels, and the people who pretend to be are more than a little ridiculous.
Kirby—
But in addition against the nature of "works" is the setniment that Jesus said that we shouldn't do good works openly -- I'll have to get up and look in a book to find the quote. This is getting long, so I will first post this.
Matthew 6:1-6 NRSV
"Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
"So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
"And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you."
—
Note that I consider the NRSV's translation of "δικαιοσύνη" as "piety" to be a bit off. Righteousness is a better choice, IMHO.
I believe the message here is against ostentatious displays of righteousness, which tends to call attention to the person. It is not against the works per se.
Kirby—
I think you are right when you say that works should not be an occasion for pride. But I think you're even more right when you say that nothing we ever do is wholly good. Still, I think it is a great error to avoid good works, or to deny that a life of faith calls us to do good works, because of excessive concerns about works as an occasion for pride. Instead, concerns about pride should inform how we approach good works: in humility (for we are not God, but merely his servants) and joy (for it is our privilege to be so called).
And of course we don't do good works to be saved, we do good works because we're saved.
Stu, thanks for looking up the piece in Matthew where Jesus tells us to do the good we do IN SECRET.
I think it's hard to do that, but that's part of the injunction. Either do it secretly or don't do it at all.
It's wrong to practice piety in public, or to practice benevolence in public.
Jesus says so.
You're very helpful to find that.
But I don't think we're necessarily saved even if we plot to do good. We might be damned eternally for what we've done, and maybe God hates us, for all we know.
We should still in spite of that believe in God in spite of any reward we've either gotten, or might get.
(There's an old Calvinist phrase that they used to use when deciding whether or not someone has the calling to be a pastor -- if you are "damned to the Glory of God" that is- I think -- not caring whether or not you're saved, but are still willing to serve Christ -- then you are worthy of being a pastor -- Lutheran pastors also used to use this -- I don't know if they still do use it as a criterion).
Certainly no one will ever merit the RIGHT to be saved on account of something they've done.
But you do what you can, any way, and in secret, making as little a deal of it as you possible can (it's hard not to crow at all, but still, even if a little crowing is just plain sick -- to the extent that we even feel good when we do something good, we should be damned even for that!)
at any rate, when we try to do good for the country, or try to get our name on a bill that would help the poor, while using tax dollars that belong to other people, we really ought to be thoroughly ashamed.
While realizing that it's basically hubris that motivates us.
and yet we should do it anyway if we really think something needs doing, while being thoroughly ashamed of the darkness of our truer motives, because there can be NO PURE ACT.
Kirby—
I think it's hard to do that, but that's part of the injunction. Either do it secretly or don't do it at all.
I'm convinced this is wrong. Jesus does not object to our works being seen, he objects to us doing them in order that we might be seen. This is an important distinction. "In secret" is a kind of an ideal, set in antithesis to going with trumpets before you.
But I think it is worth noting that this emphasis on secrecy is unique to Matthew. There is no parallel to this in Mark, Luke, or John. I think you're misguided if you try to build a theology on a single passage. By way of contrast, consider the following discussion of alms (Luke 12:33): "Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Notice that there is no injunction for secrecy here.
But I don't think we're necessarily saved even if we plot to do good. We might be damned eternally for what we've done, and maybe God hates us, for all we know.
Believe in the promises. If you believe and are baptized, you will be saved. For we believe we are saved through faith by grace from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Plotting to do good does not save us. Doing good does not save us.
But knowing that we are saved, how do we chose to live? In relationship with the God who saves us? I think so. How do we live out that relationship. In prayer? Of course. But not in separation from the humanity that God loves, and of which we are a part.
Certainly no one will ever merit the RIGHT to be saved on account of something they've done.
Perfectly true.
at any rate, when we try to do good for the country, or try to get our name on a bill that would help the poor, while using tax dollars that belong to other people, we really ought to be thoroughly ashamed.
Our tax dollars belong to us collectively. This is another discussion. But yes, I think that getting something named for ourselves is prideful.
But I am a bit more optimistic about humanity than you are. Hubris is a common failing, but it is not quite a universal failing. I've known selfless people, and you probably have too. People who do good, and who are embarrassed to be called upon. People who would rather toil in the shadows.
And I have a different take on Mother Teresa than you do. I think for her, notoriety was a tool—a means to get the resources necessary to do good work—rather than an end to itself. I think if she'd have been able to work in the shadows, she'd have preferred that. But she realized that it would serve the work she was called to do if she stepped out of shadows. There is no shame in that.
I especially liked the last part about Mother Theresa using her notoriety as a way to get more money for the poor. I'll grant that it works in a two-kingdoms-ish way, and is therefore functional, and beneficial.
I think you're also right that I should take the other Gospels into mind. There are often two or three different takes on the same kind of situation, and the injunctions balance one another out.
It makes it harder to decide specific issues in specific situations, but at least we know we have free will, and have to give relative weight to relative statements.
I try to see the evil in everyone. It's usually not too enormous, and there's often usually good, too.
Again, they balance one another out, and it's just a question of free will and leaning a bit toward the good, but boasting about wipes out any kind of goodness, and puts us back on the dark side.
I think we're on the same page here, even if we're drawing our go-to passages from different Gospels.
Kirby—
I try to see the evil in everyone. It's usually not too enormous, and there's often usually good, too.
:-)
Matthew 10:16 "See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves."
It's ok to look for the evil in everyone, but don't let the evil you see come to define the people you encounter. Remember this:
1 John 3:1 "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are."
And also this,
John 15:9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.
We should try to see others as our Father and our Lord sees them. Fully aware of their faults and fears, but in love, and with understanding and mercy.
Stu -- why baptized?
Did the thief on the cross burn in Hell?
GM—
Stu -- why baptized?
Did the thief on the cross burn in Hell?
This is a great question, but easily answered. I'm honestly surprised that the answer seems to be so poorly known.
There are many, many promises in the bible. A fairly typical promise (made by God/Jesus to Israel/Humanity/an individual) takes the form: do X, and I'll do Y. Such promises are mute as to what will happen if you don't do X, and people seem to be mightily confused about this.
Mark 16:16. The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned.
John 3:16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
But also this (to Israel)
Jer. 7:23. But this command I gave them, "Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you."
The later promises do not invalidate the earlier promises.
Rom. 11:26 And so all Israel will be saved; as it is written, "Out of Zion will come the Deliverer; he will banish ungodliness from Jacob."
So my answer is simply this. Mark 16:16, and similar verses, set out sufficient conditions for salvation. The are not, however, proscriptive. There are other promises, and other ways to salvation.
As for the thieves, we have an interesting problem—the synoptic witnesses are inconsistent:
Matt. 27:44. The bandits who were crucified with him also taunted him in the same way.
Mark 15:32. "Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe." Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.
Luke 23:39-43. One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!" But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong." Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." He replied, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise."
If Luke is the faithful witness, then the criminal who asked Jesus to remember him is saved, because he has a promise from the Lord, for him as an individual.
But otherwise, we don't know. Maybe they are saved, maybe they are not. We don't know if they were covered under any of God's many promises. Or if, perhaps, they were not, but God chose to save them anyway. That is for God to decide.
But this is not the issue for us (or for Kirby). The issue for us is to get covered by a promise. We can choose to live under the law as a Jew, and to be judged as a part of that community. Or we can choose to be baptized, and to believe in Jesus as Lord. You, and Kirby, and I, have made this latter choice. Jews have made a different choice. If we believe in scripture, they will be saved along with us.
So to answer your first question last, why baptized? Because I was writing Kirby, who (I assume) has been baptized, and who is covered by the promise that accrues to those who are baptized and believe. To a Jew, I would say to follow God's ordinances, while pointing out that there is another way.
Stu, what you are explaining here has had a huge impact on me.
I love the line, "Be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves."
I loved it!
But John doesn't say be baptized. Mark does, but only condemns the non-believers.
That and Jesus was all about baptizing with the spirit.
My question is does your head have to get wet or not?
Kirby—
I love the line, "Be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves."
I loved it!
Jesus does have a way with aphorisms.
I think there's something here that really gets to the heart of what I think Lutheran Surrealism is all about, which is the intertwining of religion and politics (and sometimes culture) in unexpected ways.
So, let me propose what I believe is an essentially equivalent aphorism: "Have heard heads, but soft hearts."
I propose this because I think a common critique of the left by the right is that it has "soft heads," and the complementary critique of the right by the left is that it has "hard hearts." Jesus is pointing past this kind of division, which it seems has been around for a long time.
GM—
But John doesn't say be baptized. Mark does, but only condemns the non-believers.
Right.
That and Jesus was all about baptizing with the spirit.
I think water and spirit.
My question is does your head have to get wet or not?
God's call, not mine. I'm not sure why you see an issue here. Baptism is a vehicle of God's grace, but also a sign of the unity of the Church.
Ephesians 4:4-6 NRSV There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.
My feeling here is that we should worry about what we can change: ourselves, and perhaps our families. We can be baptized, and this brings us securely under one of God's many promises. There are all kinds of special cases and extraordinary circumstances that God will have to sort out. We don't need to aspire to being one of them.
"heard heads." Oy.
Have hard heads, and soft hearts.
Yes, I will think of it for the moment as an epitaph and as at least our first pure aphorism here at LS:
"Have hard heads and soft hearts."
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH THIS, especially with the first part, but I cannot deny the second half.
Have soft heads and hard hearts!
Somehow, that's what generally really happens to left and right alike especially in the fervors of fanaticism.
Jesus was also very good at looking for the good in the rotten -- the story of the good Samaritan.
It would be nice if left and right did this more often.
I will say this much: Obama dresses very well, as does his wife and kids.
He's much better in that one regard than McCain. McCain's wife is pretty, but John McCain was generally kinda rumply.
A president ought to be able to looked ironed.
Post a Comment