There is nothing more disagreeable than agreement.
No two people should ever agree on anything because to agree on something would argue that the two people in question were identical.
Like snowflakes, people are similar in ways but they are never identical.
It's wrong to assume that a race, gender, or class will have therefore a common identity.
It's profoundly evil when two people agree on anything.
It means that neither of them are thinking.
When a government such as China insists that everyone think alike, it is engaging in the most profound of all evils.
Nevertheless, there are also laws, which are principles upon which we must agree.
To the extent that China is suppressing dissent in Tibet, it is disagreeable.
To the extent that China is enforcing the laws, it is agreeable.
But if it is only enforcing laws lawfully, why the need for a news blackout?
Why the terror and fear among Tibetan monks?
Why is the DL expressing fear for his people?
The Cultural Revolution in China was the worst atrocity of the last millenium in terms of the numbers of people killed.
Estimates go as high as 80 million dead. That doesn't take into account the wounded, or the exiled. This dwarves what took place even at Auschwitz and forever condemns Red China as an illegal empire founded on the blood of those illegally executed.
How can such a state ever become lawful?
If the Nazis had lasted until now, and had become more lawful in terms of their mode of operation, would we now accept them?
Americans shriek about the 4000 Cherokee Indians lost on the trail of tears under Jackson's command some 170 years after their occurence. Most of the Cherokees died from illnesses.
American leftists continue to squeak about the illegality of Jackson's maneuver that undermines the American state's legitimacy, and they therefore insist we turn to a Maoist state under Cultural Studies (codeword for Cultural Revolution, of which Cultural Studies is the last gasp).
Lutheran Surrealism disagrees, and we see ourselves much like the anonymous man who stood up to the line of tanks in Tianamen Square in 1989. We spit in the face of the Cultural Revolution, which argues that Culture should be determined by the state. In culture, we are complete anarchists, and argue that culture can only be determined by the individual, and that no two individuals can agree. By nature, we are irremediably different, and this difference guarantees the lack of uniformity for cultural ideals.
We are at least 12, solidly in disagreement on almost everything, except for the very fact that there should be laws, of some kind, on which we can agree, and that culture is something upon which we will always disagree. Thank God!
Monday, March 31, 2008
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Go Tibet!
People all over Tibet are risking their lives to get the news of their oppression to the outside world.The least we can do is respond by refusing to buy Chinese products until the Maoist scum leave Tibet forever.
The central principles of the American Republic as founded in the 1st amendment: right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion are not principles of any Marxist system. In yesterday's Wall Street Journal an article by a Chinese dissident named Wang Lixiong, titled "The Cry of Tibet" appeared in the editorials. His conclusion:
"It follows -- even if this is a tall order -- that the ultimate solution to the Tibet problem must be democratization of the Chinese political system. True autonomy cannot come any other way."
Democratization means pluralism of factions by definition. Democratization means dismantling the one dominant and only official party -- the Communist party. Dismantling such a juggernaut can only come peacefully from within party ranks, as it was done in the USSR under Gorbachev. But pressure from outside by those who can herald a boycott against Chinese goods is perhaps our only goad toward that end. At any rate, buying the products of what amounts to a slave state should be considered morally reprehensible. I haven't bought anything from China for decades. It's a Communist country, and communism, by definition, is evil.
Perhaps in Tibet even the dimmest knuckleheads can sense this. The beatings and murders of Tibetan monks must stop.
Down with communist China!
Go Tibet!
Friday, March 28, 2008
BRETON CARED ABOUT SURREALISTS'S FEELINGS
I often argue that Bretonian surrealism didn't care about victims, and felt that a Nietzschean superman mentality was sufficient. Like Nietzsche, however, who hugged a horse that had been whipped shortly before the onset of his final madness, Breton too had his moments of lawfulness, but it was never in regard to horses, unless you can consider surrealist artists as horses.
Let's now consider surrealism in the light of the three orders. Breton did believe in marriage. He married three times, and the last marriage was monogamous. The first two I believe were not. But he often argued that it was possible to have a monogamous and yet loving marriage. He tried to protect Gorky's marriage from the predatory artist Matta and when Matta ruined Gorky's marriage and this led to Gorky's suicide, Breton excommunicated Matta. Breton clearly felt sorry for Gorky.
I don't know if there are precise descriptions of Breton's nuptial vows. Was he married in a Catholic church? If so, this would represent a kind of hypocrisy in reverse in which a THEORETICAL sadist and Nietzschean was in actual fact a family man, who believed in God.
Let's now consider surrealism in the light of the three orders. Breton did believe in marriage. He married three times, and the last marriage was monogamous. The first two I believe were not. But he often argued that it was possible to have a monogamous and yet loving marriage. He tried to protect Gorky's marriage from the predatory artist Matta and when Matta ruined Gorky's marriage and this led to Gorky's suicide, Breton excommunicated Matta. Breton clearly felt sorry for Gorky.
I don't know if there are precise descriptions of Breton's nuptial vows. Was he married in a Catholic church? If so, this would represent a kind of hypocrisy in reverse in which a THEORETICAL sadist and Nietzschean was in actual fact a family man, who believed in God.
Fia is 2 years old
Last Halloween we went to an elementary school dance with the kids. The baby was herself dolled up. I found this diary entry last night in the back of a notebook:
Sofia's first dance
She appeared as a firefly
Green body w/ wings
Elementary school Halloween
dance
Face so perfect
Tiny & good
Sofia's first dance
She appeared as a firefly
Green body w/ wings
Elementary school Halloween
dance
Face so perfect
Tiny & good
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Solidarity with the Dalai Lama
In a gesture of solidarity with the Dalai Lama (the first part of his name recalls the surrealist painter) we suggest that all of our readers boycott Chinese products until they call their attack dogs off of Tibet and allow that country Democratic procedures including autonomy and self-rule (that sounds redundant, but I was thinking of Finland before the fall of the Czar which had a measure of autonomy and even its own parliament, but it was still under the Czar).
If you are buying a coffee cup, look on the bottom. If it says, China, please don't buy it, because buying it means buying into slave labor conditions, into lack of human rights, and into the last vestiges of Marxist imperialism. Let's just not buy anything from China until they leave Tibet.
If we were not Lutheran Surrealists, we would be Tibetan stand-up comedians. Long live Tibet!
Long live the Dalai Lama!
Monday, March 24, 2008
THE SURREALIST CONCEPTION OF LAW
Insofar as there is any Surrealist conception of law whatsoever, it is based on Freud's conception of the ID (borrowed from Schopenhauer's conception of the universe as governed by a monstrous being that delights itself in any and every kind of destructive activity).
Nietzsche celebrated that delight in destruction, and surrealists took delight in those who partook in the law of destruction: bank robbers, sadists, fornicators, and the mad.
(Oddly, Breton did hold governments morally culpable for participating in destruction and spoke up against Mao's China as well as Stalin's Russia long before it was the norm to do so.)
Individual desire unleashed on the populace WAS surrealist law, and anyone who held back had broken that law and stood condemned before the Surrealist conception of what it means to be good.
If all Surrealists are criminals and idolaters, and all Lutherans are law-abiding and believe in the one true Father, can there be such a thing as a Lutheran Surrealist?
Nietzsche celebrated that delight in destruction, and surrealists took delight in those who partook in the law of destruction: bank robbers, sadists, fornicators, and the mad.
(Oddly, Breton did hold governments morally culpable for participating in destruction and spoke up against Mao's China as well as Stalin's Russia long before it was the norm to do so.)
Individual desire unleashed on the populace WAS surrealist law, and anyone who held back had broken that law and stood condemned before the Surrealist conception of what it means to be good.
If all Surrealists are criminals and idolaters, and all Lutherans are law-abiding and believe in the one true Father, can there be such a thing as a Lutheran Surrealist?
Friday, March 21, 2008
The Name of the Rose
Struggling through The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco with the Honors Course. It's a very tough and long book, and what's at stake in it isn't always clear. The book is set in 1327 in a Benedictine monastery set in northern Italy. A confrontation between the Franciscan and other orders is coming to a head. The Franciscans believe that Christ was poor, and that a vow of poverty should be the Christian ideal.
On the other side the Pope's men believe that if you give up wealth you will also give up political power.
Meanwhile, inside the monastery are all kinds of insane goings-on. Local women are prostituting themselves to the monks in exchange for victuals. There is rampant homosexuality between the monks, in which one monk will surrender his virtue to another in exchange for a coveted book. And an older monk is killing anyone who gets too interested in laughter.
On p. 396, an elderly monk named William is talking with the narrator of the novel, Adso. William is a scientist, and a Franciscan. William is explaining the difference between love and lust to his disciple. He says, "True love wants the good of the beloved."
Meanwhile, the book is also about the ways in which lust triumphs over love. Some of the scholarly monks don't care about their community but only about their reputations. Some of the Inquisitors care more about their power than about truth. These are different kinds of lust, William explains, as opposed to love.
The notion of a good father, as it is expressed in the laws, is part of what's at stake. Those who have joined the Dolcinites (a rampaging horde who has believed that to own anything at all is wrong, and so they go from village to village, raping and destroying everyone who owns anything, as they have proclaimed ownership itself to be evil) -- they are now getting caught up in the Inquisition after their armies have been largely dispersed or put to the sword, and they have sought refuge in the monasteries under the guise of being Franciscan mendicants.
They laugh at the notion that God is good. They are Gnostics of a bizarre puzzling stripe that recalls the nihilistic anarcho-Sadism of today's counterculture.
This floundering is of course the Dark Ages. It isn't until 1517 that someone turns the light on and ends the Dark Ages. This is Martin Luther.
What he does is to set off a legal revolution, which I am slowly tracing through Harold J. Berman's recuperation of the Lutheran legal revolution which accompanied the Reformation.
In the period of Papal predominance as much as 25% of Papal fortunes were spent on alms for the poor.
Luther forbade begging, but also developed the Community Chest of "Monopoly Board" fame. No one was permitted to beg. Luther believed in workfare rather than welfare. "The theology of the Church of Rome gave a sanctity to mendicancy which Lutheran theology sharply opposed" (195).
Laws regulating marriage, Berman writes, are crucial to the symbolic life of a community "because marriage ... is more closely connected with the ultimate values, the ultimate purposes, of human life... These laws touch what we hold most sacred in our relationships with others and in our nature and destiny as persons" (196).
Berman has still not shown his hand in regards to what he thinks about gay marriage.
Among the monks in Eco's Benedictine monastery, most of them have never been with a woman. However, Adso, the youthful monk, does sleep with a girl from the village. Eco seems to approve of this sexual bond without a marriage license. Meanwhile, the girl is caught prostituting herself with yet another man and is burned as a witch. Other monks caught in homosexual acts are tortured and put to death.
Eco doesn't approve of this. But he also appears to be putting the church to the torch in favor of science and comedy. Is this adequate?
Increasingly in the west lay authorities, Berman writes, have been authorized to define and protect our laws, whereas Berman seems to believe that when the spiritual aspect of our laws in relationship to "marriage, education, to morals, and to relief of poverty" is forgotten, so will the spirit of mercy that was once in them, as defined by the Christian tradition of Martin Luther. Martin Luther turned the lights on in 1517, and Berman appears to believe that we should keep that light on, rather than trust our civilization to legal positivism, or multiculturalism (two different things, that are nevertheless becoming intertwined and swiftly filling up the absence of values left by the torching of the church).
Postmodernism is an attempt to turn the lights of Luther off in favor of hilarity and bedlam. I was once for this. But now I believe that humor should only make up about 49% of the day.
The rest of the day should be devoted to trying to understand Martin Luther.
On the other side the Pope's men believe that if you give up wealth you will also give up political power.
Meanwhile, inside the monastery are all kinds of insane goings-on. Local women are prostituting themselves to the monks in exchange for victuals. There is rampant homosexuality between the monks, in which one monk will surrender his virtue to another in exchange for a coveted book. And an older monk is killing anyone who gets too interested in laughter.
On p. 396, an elderly monk named William is talking with the narrator of the novel, Adso. William is a scientist, and a Franciscan. William is explaining the difference between love and lust to his disciple. He says, "True love wants the good of the beloved."
Meanwhile, the book is also about the ways in which lust triumphs over love. Some of the scholarly monks don't care about their community but only about their reputations. Some of the Inquisitors care more about their power than about truth. These are different kinds of lust, William explains, as opposed to love.
The notion of a good father, as it is expressed in the laws, is part of what's at stake. Those who have joined the Dolcinites (a rampaging horde who has believed that to own anything at all is wrong, and so they go from village to village, raping and destroying everyone who owns anything, as they have proclaimed ownership itself to be evil) -- they are now getting caught up in the Inquisition after their armies have been largely dispersed or put to the sword, and they have sought refuge in the monasteries under the guise of being Franciscan mendicants.
They laugh at the notion that God is good. They are Gnostics of a bizarre puzzling stripe that recalls the nihilistic anarcho-Sadism of today's counterculture.
This floundering is of course the Dark Ages. It isn't until 1517 that someone turns the light on and ends the Dark Ages. This is Martin Luther.
What he does is to set off a legal revolution, which I am slowly tracing through Harold J. Berman's recuperation of the Lutheran legal revolution which accompanied the Reformation.
In the period of Papal predominance as much as 25% of Papal fortunes were spent on alms for the poor.
Luther forbade begging, but also developed the Community Chest of "Monopoly Board" fame. No one was permitted to beg. Luther believed in workfare rather than welfare. "The theology of the Church of Rome gave a sanctity to mendicancy which Lutheran theology sharply opposed" (195).
Laws regulating marriage, Berman writes, are crucial to the symbolic life of a community "because marriage ... is more closely connected with the ultimate values, the ultimate purposes, of human life... These laws touch what we hold most sacred in our relationships with others and in our nature and destiny as persons" (196).
Berman has still not shown his hand in regards to what he thinks about gay marriage.
Among the monks in Eco's Benedictine monastery, most of them have never been with a woman. However, Adso, the youthful monk, does sleep with a girl from the village. Eco seems to approve of this sexual bond without a marriage license. Meanwhile, the girl is caught prostituting herself with yet another man and is burned as a witch. Other monks caught in homosexual acts are tortured and put to death.
Eco doesn't approve of this. But he also appears to be putting the church to the torch in favor of science and comedy. Is this adequate?
Increasingly in the west lay authorities, Berman writes, have been authorized to define and protect our laws, whereas Berman seems to believe that when the spiritual aspect of our laws in relationship to "marriage, education, to morals, and to relief of poverty" is forgotten, so will the spirit of mercy that was once in them, as defined by the Christian tradition of Martin Luther. Martin Luther turned the lights on in 1517, and Berman appears to believe that we should keep that light on, rather than trust our civilization to legal positivism, or multiculturalism (two different things, that are nevertheless becoming intertwined and swiftly filling up the absence of values left by the torching of the church).
Postmodernism is an attempt to turn the lights of Luther off in favor of hilarity and bedlam. I was once for this. But now I believe that humor should only make up about 49% of the day.
The rest of the day should be devoted to trying to understand Martin Luther.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Postum Discontinued
About a month ago I was shopping in Wal-Mart. In the coffee aisle there were always two jars of Postum. I looked in the usual spot, and there were none. More alarming still, the sticker with the Postum name and price were missing.
I raced over to the Price Chopper grocery, and it was as if sirens were going off. No Postum on the shelf!
I've been drinking Postum steadily for 35 years. Come to think of it, I don't drink anything else. Now, suddenly, the company decided it was not popular enough. Not popular enough! Not popular enough!?
This is a disaster. It may not be on the order of the Black Plague or even global warming (a man was recently discovered in Antarctican ice with berries in his gut, so it must have been warmer there at one time?), but it was a disaster nevertheless.
This is a cold world where business decisions can destroy an entire lifestyle. At E-Bay there is a single jar of Postum on sale for seventy dollars. It used to cost $3.50 and it would get me through a month of satisfaction. I don't know what to do. Should I try to go on the Postum black market and remain supplied for another year or two? I can't afford a seventy dollar beverage, so it's not truly an option.
Postum was the official beverage of Lutheran Surrealism, and now it's gone. What are we to do? Can we soldier on without it?
There is no other drink quite like Postum. The "rich, full-bodied taste" that they advertize on the jar? It's all true! You could drink two cups of it and feel you had had a full and satisfying snack and the damage? 15 calories. It's practically all that was holding me at my weight level. Don't companies have responsibilities to the public waist line, rather than only to getting fat from profiteering? This drink had been around since 1895, and is now something as historic as the brothels of Pompeii, or Atlantis.
Goodbye, Postum. Lutheran Surrealism mourns you.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
ECONOMICS AND MORALITY
The whole community has a stake in the morality of individuals. If a person is untrustworthy or violent and is holding people up in your neighborhood it interrupts business because people don't dare to go into your neighborhood. Just one person in a thousand can cause economic blight in your neighborhood.
A morally sound community in which people are basically following the ten commandments creates an economically vibrant community.
I remember in Finland watching their equivalent of America's Most Wanted. While in America you get someone who walked into a 7-11 and shot several people before leading the police on a three-county chase, Finland's Most Wanted was a teenage girl with too much mascara, crying to a store manager to let her go for shoplifting a pencil.
One aspect of surrealism that I reject is the celebration of bank robbers, Sade, and other criminals (including murderers). People should have morals, and they should follow the law.
The surrealists sought to celebrate the Freudian id, having incorrectly read Freud to say that the release of the id from the clutches of the superego would be the revelation of utopia. Freud actually said that this is the nature of a holiday, but he also said that civilization is dependent on the superego.
Like Freud, we believe in the superego, and the notion that the Heavenly Father (rather than Satan) is what is worth celebrating!
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
LS AS REMEDY TO THE CULTURE WARS!
When I started the blog I was thinking about the culture wars. On one side an increasingly insolent secular left (Creon) wanted to wall up and destroy an increasingly transcendent and belligerent right (Antigone). I thought -- a house divided against itself cannot stand -- and set out to heal the nation.
The central premise of LS is that spirit and matter need one another.
Materialism and its rule in reason must befriend the religious realm.
Divided, as when Creon attacks Antigone, he attempts to do it in such a way that he has no blood on his hands. But at the end of the play it is seen that one kingdom is attached to another. And that if you destroy one kingdom, the other dies as well.
It is as if the flower is attacking its own roots. The west hacks away trying to destroy the ten commandments as the basis of western law, and then complains about increasing lawlessness. The west turns against God, and then wonders why all values are lost.
The secular left claims art as the basis of culture. The religious right claims God.
What is art without God? It is literally toilets (Duchamp) and turds (Finley).
What is God without the infinite beauty of the individual artist's vision?
It is sentimental mush. Hallmark Cards.
Just as we cannot live on poetry alone, neither can we live on prose alone.
Poetry was never a materialistic enterprise. Under the new secular regime it is increasingly neglected as it is thought to have no power. In the same way, Creon thought that Antigone had no power. Stalin thought that the Pope didn't have many divisions under his command.
But without the spiritual realm the flesh is nothing and crumbles.
And without flesh the spiritual realm is nothing.
LS is nothing more and nothing less than the linkage of two mighty kingdoms.
At present, the two sides of our culture are killing one another.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Either we rejoin these two sides or else a fratricidal war of worlds is upon us,
and we all be as dead as Antigone and Creon (at the end he has nothing left to live for,
having killed his daughter-in-law, and through her, his son, and his wife). Thebes lies in ruins.
Art without God is nothing.
God without Art is nothing.
They are two sides of the same coin: In God We Trust.
Separately coinage is counterfeit.
The diversity faction focuses on externals: race, gender, class. This is mistakenly to take the material reality of something for its essence.
Essence, however, cannot live without fair laws, and living within those laws, and without equitable distribution.
Law and grace are intertwined or else either one is dead.
As Lincoln said, and Jesus before him, A house divided cannot stand.
It's a perennial war that the poets must fight.
It matters, spiritually.
Art and God need one another as Creon and Antigone need one another, as poetry and prose need one another, as law and grace need one another, as the obvious needs mystery, and mystery must be grounded in the obvious.
The central premise of LS is that spirit and matter need one another.
Materialism and its rule in reason must befriend the religious realm.
Divided, as when Creon attacks Antigone, he attempts to do it in such a way that he has no blood on his hands. But at the end of the play it is seen that one kingdom is attached to another. And that if you destroy one kingdom, the other dies as well.
It is as if the flower is attacking its own roots. The west hacks away trying to destroy the ten commandments as the basis of western law, and then complains about increasing lawlessness. The west turns against God, and then wonders why all values are lost.
The secular left claims art as the basis of culture. The religious right claims God.
What is art without God? It is literally toilets (Duchamp) and turds (Finley).
What is God without the infinite beauty of the individual artist's vision?
It is sentimental mush. Hallmark Cards.
Just as we cannot live on poetry alone, neither can we live on prose alone.
Poetry was never a materialistic enterprise. Under the new secular regime it is increasingly neglected as it is thought to have no power. In the same way, Creon thought that Antigone had no power. Stalin thought that the Pope didn't have many divisions under his command.
But without the spiritual realm the flesh is nothing and crumbles.
And without flesh the spiritual realm is nothing.
LS is nothing more and nothing less than the linkage of two mighty kingdoms.
At present, the two sides of our culture are killing one another.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Either we rejoin these two sides or else a fratricidal war of worlds is upon us,
and we all be as dead as Antigone and Creon (at the end he has nothing left to live for,
having killed his daughter-in-law, and through her, his son, and his wife). Thebes lies in ruins.
Art without God is nothing.
God without Art is nothing.
They are two sides of the same coin: In God We Trust.
Separately coinage is counterfeit.
The diversity faction focuses on externals: race, gender, class. This is mistakenly to take the material reality of something for its essence.
Essence, however, cannot live without fair laws, and living within those laws, and without equitable distribution.
Law and grace are intertwined or else either one is dead.
As Lincoln said, and Jesus before him, A house divided cannot stand.
It's a perennial war that the poets must fight.
It matters, spiritually.
Art and God need one another as Creon and Antigone need one another, as poetry and prose need one another, as law and grace need one another, as the obvious needs mystery, and mystery must be grounded in the obvious.
The Idea of Evil
I ordered a book by Peter Dews called The Idea of Evil, published by Blackwell in 2008.
The first sentences of the book read, "There are plenty of reasons why no decent, thoughtful, progressive-minded person should have anything to do with the idea of evil. It is a notion, after all, that stands out in our modern moral lexicon by virtue of its potent, frequently dangerous, emotional charge. ... It seems to stand contrary to our widespread optimism that the behavior of our fellow human beings can be accounted for in social and psychological terms, and so made amenable to improvement" (1).
The last sentences of the book read, "Indeed, it would have to acknowledge -- with all due weight given to the pressure of society and history -- that, ultimately, 'we are what's wrong with the world.' And it would have to expose itself, without reserve, to the pain of that most desolate of questions: why the world, being good, is yet not good" (232).
Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Adorno, Levinas are the dream team that assess the notion of evil. Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil," is briefly mentioned as a pivotal point in western culture for the revival of the term.
A back cover blurb by Stephen Mulhall of the U. of Oxford goes, "Can the concept of evil be taken seriously without a resort to religion, and without losing all faith in emancipatory politics?"
Well, can it?
Here's a sentence chosen at random from the interior of the book. "In this way, Adorno seeks to rescue what he terms the 'anarchist' dimension of history -- a dimension which Marx and Engels were intent on eradicating, albeit for reasons which may have made political sense at the time" (197).
I had hoped there would be a few orthodox Christian thinkers in the bibliography who got as much page-time as the dream-team listed above. Peter Dews is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex.
I don't think this book is going to go into the most arresting areas of theodicy without a single reference to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, or Martin Luther. There is one tiny reference to Kierkegaard.
Oh well. Chronocentrism rules. I put the book on the stack labeled: For Carl Sachs.
Friday, March 07, 2008
THERE WILL BE BLOOD
A mini-epic, that illustrates some principles I've been meaning to stick a fork in. I'm leaning on something one of my pastors wrote to me recently. 1. I asked him if sin can always be forgiven. He writes: The "traditional" list of capital "deadly sins" is: pride, envy, greed, rage, sloth, lust and gluttony.
Applying this to the film, they all fit! Daniel Day-Lewis (henceforth DDL's) character Daniel Plainview, manifests all seven in abundance. Pride: he's proud of his skills as an oilman. He's envious of anyone doing better. He's greedy. He's full of rage, and lust. In the final scene we even see him descend into sloth and gluttony as he lies about his mansion sleeping, and over-eating.
2. My pastor writes: Murder is a violation of the 5th commandment. It is a sin before God and (as defined by statutory law) a crime. But a sin is not a crime.
This can be separated into 2 kingdoms: law vs. sin. While crime is forgivable, one sin is not.
3. The one unforgivable sin is the "sin against the Holy Spirit," i.e., despair of God's mercy. Matthew 12:31, Mark 3: 29, and Luke 12:10. My pastor writes, "Lutherans view sin as un-faith in God and sins as the fruit of un-faith."
This award-winning stretch of celluloid (are films still done on celluloid?) does manage to present Daniel Plainview as a sinner. Perhaps Sinclair is still banking on the older terminology. But the film's narration (based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil, but not dependent on it) offers no sense that God's mercy exists, and so is the film itself a sin?
The preacher in the film is too idiotic even to run away from the doofus who in plain view intends to murder him.
The film-maker's casuistry (false application of principles in regards to morality) is an IMPLICIT theory that Sinclair believes that there ought to be an alternative to capital.
In Lutheranism there are 3 separate orders: church, economy, state. But in communist thought they are all Pac-Manned by the State.
Thus the priesthood of the proletariat (wolves in sheeps' clothing) ascend to the Kremlin as botht the economy and the church falls apart. May I be forgiven for my Lutheran critique of the Oscars and the angels (wide angles) of the cinema.
Hell, DDL deserved an Oscar. He played a psychopath, just as if he was told to go and fetch. Fetch he did, and in a sense was fetching in his grin. He deserves a pat on the head by Satan (he got it, in the form of an Oscar). Have I been too unforgiving? May God (the Producer of everything) have mercy on me.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Christian Feet
In Christianity, feet are tender, and are washed. Christ bathed the feet of his disciples. There's a lot of love toward feet going on.
In Rome, the power of feet is displayed.
The tender side of feet are hallmarked within Christianity.
Feet have an otherworldly side, a warm and sweet side.
All praise feet!
In Rome, the power of feet is displayed.
The tender side of feet are hallmarked within Christianity.
Feet have an otherworldly side, a warm and sweet side.
All praise feet!
Monday, March 03, 2008
ROMAN FEET BEST
I asked a group of 20 famous artists from around the world which culture makes the best sculptures of feet.
Consensus: the Romans.
They got them right from an anatomical viewpoint. Feet are just as hard to do as hands. The Romans make the toe closest to the big toe a little longer.
What can be surmised from the basic fact of the high quality of Roman podiatric sculpture?
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