Sunday, February 05, 2006

Dean's world talks about how Christianity is also a religion of submission. Good Catholic that I am, the rigidity of the Mass didn't appeal to me today; so I went to a Methodist Church. The celebrant used Mark 1: 29-39; in it "he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him." Mark says Christ had demons in so many words. Well, I can't say you heard it here first. That may be why it is so hard to read the New Testament. Passages can be taken with a hard stricture or in a more nuanced way, but it is just those passages that fall into a person's unconscious fears that will bind them painfully. George Orwell's 1984 and particularly the ending is an externalization of that phenomenon. The Catholic Church has an annually recurring set of Scriptures that go with Mass one of which is 'It is as easy for a rich man to get into heaven as a camel to get through the eye of a (the) needle.' Being bound by that stricture and imagining that Jews weren't has, I think, been the biggest cause of Catholic antisemitism. Thankfully, Leftism informs me though that it was the German Lutheran areas that voted for Hitler. Luther was a famous antisemite; perhaps the mechanism has in some way to do with what I am discussing. Also, I think that a reaction to an overly severe conscience, which the person associates with 'religion' or religious teaching is why there is the 'Piss Christ' and why The Boston Globe, among others, has defended it. Max Ernst's 'The Virgin spanking Christ' was done without goverment funding. I'll let you decide; I wish I could find a better link.

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