Category: Faith & Ideology

Daily Potpourri 7/17/12

  1. Paradigmatic case for discrimination?
  2. Toyota Solution.
  3. Guilty pleasure.
  4. Fastball shreds the Constitution
  5. Seduced and abandoned.

1

Hypothetical: Guy Philanderer from your Church walks into your restaurant with Bimbette The Pole Dancer, his girlfriend, hanging on his arm. Guy’s divorce isn’t final yet, but Guy says Bimbette’s his soulmate, that his wife was a youthful indiscretion, and that he’s checked with God, who’s cool with all this. The kids will be just fine. They’re better off without all the tension in the house.

That’s what he tells everyone about the situation. Guy’s pretty wealthy, by the way, and for some reason Pastor Billy Bob hasn’t yet gotten around to telling Guy he’s persona non grata until he repents.

May you “discriminate” against Guy and Bimbette? Mustn’t you discriminate?

Does that conclusion change if Guy comes in with “Fabio” on his arm, making the same “soulmate” and “God’s cool with this” argument?

Just askin’.

2

From Toyota, the greenest car ever. (HT Mercatornet.com)

(For my credulous friends who breathlessly pass along nonsense, be it noted that the car is not real. The Onion is satire/humor.)

3

My standing advice, linked below, disses television, but if I happen to notice that one’s coming up on ESPN or something, I’m a sucker for strongman competitions. Here’s your chance to grab a little guilty pleasure without touching that remote. (HT The Browser)

4

[O]f late come rumblings from the most august newspaper in the land that certain questions concerning LIBOR-fixing among American bank officials might soon be entertained in a federal courtroom. But isn’t it a fact that the US Department of Justice has its hands full – not to mention its dockets – with cases of alleged performance-doping by star athletes? Just think: all that effort (and expense!) at repeated prosecutions and Roger Clemens remains at large! His fastball might yet shred the constitution and dishonor all the combined sacrifices of our men in uniform in countless heroic wars.

IMHO, that’s all about Kunstler that’s worth reading this week, but here’s the link if you want to judge for yourself.

5

It’s an interesting thought that the health insurance industry – which went into the tank for Obamacare upon the promise of “a requirement to buy coverage backed with a penalty for violators” – now finds itself with no mandate and a nominal tax for those caught going bare, and thus may turn en masse for repeal.

I suppose it’s too much to hope that they’d destroy their seducer now that they’re abandoned.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Church history (according to the Mormons)

Thanks to fellow-Orthodox blogger John, I discovered this Mormon version of Church history, for which I explicitly claim “fair use” and provide the obligatory link to the original.

The basic storyline is this: “Regardless of the valiant efforts of Christ’s apostles and their faithful followers, the original church that Christ restored began to fade away.” Then along came Joseph Smith. Woohoo. (Italics are in the original. My comments are not italicized.) Continue reading “Church history (according to the Mormons)” →

Musings on Mitt’s Mormonism

Sunday’s Washington Post brings forth the latest establishment media hand-wringing on its own coverage of GOP Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney’s Mormonism.*

Of course, one cannot write about whether one should write about such things without discussing what LDS doctrines might make it divisive to write about such things. There is a resulting disingenuousness about the project, like making a “prayer request” for sister Suzy, who’s been gossiping again. Continue reading “Musings on Mitt’s Mormonism” →

G.K. Chesterton on Biblicism

Catholic writer/blogger Mark Shea today delivered up this Chestertonian gem, in response to a question about the Dan Brown-ish sort of “lost gospels” nonsense, and how Evangelicals who get a lot of book larnin’ are apt to throw over the Bible, as has pop scholar Bart Ehrsman:

Every great heretic had always exhibit three remarkable characteristics in combination. First, he picked out some mystical idea from the Church’s bundle or balance of mystical ideas. Second, he used that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas. Third (and most singular), he seems generally to have had no notion that his own favourite mystical idea was a mystical idea, at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea. With a queer uncanny innocence, he seems always to have taken this one thing for granted. He assumed it to be unassailable, even when he was using it to assail all sorts of similar things. The most popular and obvious example is the Bible. To an impartial pagan or sceptical observer, it must always seem the strangest story in the world; that men rushing in to wreck a temple, overturning the altar and driving out the priest, found there certain sacred volumes inscribed “Psalms” or “Gospels”; and (instead of throwing them on the fire with the rest) began to use them as infallible oracles rebuking all the other arrangements. If the sacred high altar was all wrong, why were the secondary sacred documents necessarily all right? If the priest had faked his Sacraments, why could he not have faked his Scriptures? Yet it was long before it even occurred to those who brandished this one piece of Church furniture to break up all the other Church furniture that anybody could be so profane as to examine this one fragment of furniture itself. People were quite surprised, and in some parts of the world are still surprised, that anybody should dare to do so.

This is one of many issues on which Catholic and Orthodox traditions (which were unified for the first millennium) are in substantial agreement. We would differ in emphasis if not in substance from Shea’s oversimplified version how the canon of Scripture came to be the canon (from which Protestant Bibles omit a number of books, by the way), but we agree on this:

  • The early Church had no canon other that the Old Testament, with lots of evidence that the Septuagint was favored.
  • The early Church had a vital Christianity before the first book of the New Testament had been written.
  • Gnosticism beset the Church early on, and many gnostic pseudo-Christian documents were written.
  • The Church rejected those writings in practice and eventually in precept.

I’m not foolish enough to try to top Chesterton’s colorful fable of how today’s “conservative Evangelicals” treat the Church which gave them the Bible they misuse to abuse the Church.

“To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant.”

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Standing advice on enduring themes.

Faiths, politics, prooftexts

D.G. Hart, one of the denizens of the Front Porch, has written a book “From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism.” He makes a pretty good case that Evangelicals persist in considering themselves “conservative” despite pervasively unconservative substance – a thesis that presumably sets off waves of incredulous giggles in secular leftist quarters.  Continue reading “Faiths, politics, prooftexts” →