They say history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
An acquaintance, cosmopolitan in our characteristically insular American way, recently and grudgingly went on a cruise of Mediterranean islands. In some places like Santorini or Corfu, she saw wedding processions in the streets and other paraliturgical marvels.
Bear in mind: this is the 21st Century, and these weren’t third-world countries. But they were islands, and they were tight-knit communities, religiously homogenous.
I wonder if they do the same in the “parishes” in religiously homogenous big cities?
Is the internet how we suburbanites synthesize community today? If so, let’s party feast!
A highly-credentialed physician powerfully interrogates the “T” in “LGBT”. It’s a longish article, but well worth reading for what it tells us about how sexual autonomy has trumped everything else.
It never occurred to me that plastic surgeons might have deeply detested being conscripted to mutilate bodies, young and old, because they (or someone on their infant behalves) thought gender and sex were entirely different things and that it was meet and right to align genitals with perceived gender.
Consistent with my Sabbatical, I’ll not have a lot of comment on two Rod Dreher blog entries from Tuesday.
The first essentially postulates that we’re now to the point where no major lawfirm will even allow an attorney to take on the “wrong” side of the gay marriage issue. He appears to be correct about that, which is one of the reason why I’m looking forward to retiring in a few years from what once was an honorable and, yes, courageous profession, willing to defend the right of Nazi’s to march in Skokie, or to defend men accused of vile rapes just to make sure they weren’t railroaded. Now, states attorneys general are throwing cases, defaulting, refusing to defend state laws they say are indefensible. And courts say those laws have no rational basis.
Such is the historic and cultural amnesia of the ruling class. They really need to get out more.
Second, another story in a genre I know too well: Christian campus organizations blackballed for being Christian and expecting the same from their officers.
Also, some of the world’s great cheeses are being barred from import because agribiz has the lobbyists to drive out artisanal producers in the bullshit name of “food safety” an historic method of making cheese is suddenly found unsafe.
Did you know that the great contemporary composer, Arvo Pärt; the world’s best filmmaker, Terrence Malick; the brilliant American prose stylist and novelist, Marilynne Robinson; the former director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins; and even Stephen Colbert have all contracted a deadly and dangerous virus of the mind which according to Boghossian needs to be “contained and eradicated”?
…
Really, this guy is like the village atheist version of a Westboro Baptist Church pastor.
Those are the high points of an otherwise pedestrian blog about Peter Boghossian, the latest atheist author trying to say to religion, in letters twelve feet high, what America’s lawfirms have said in slammed doors to anyone who wants to defend what was axiomatic a few decades ago.
* * * * *
“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 