Jesus, failed writer

I wasn’t sure what to make of Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure. Much of the essay is stories of writers down on their luck, the implication being that’s the standard situation. He stretches that to include famous and bestselling writers by suggesting they, too, often feel undervalued and ill-done-by. Marche digs back into history for the misfortunes of Herman Melville and Jane Austen, then much farther back to ancient China when Tu Fu and Li Po (or Du Fu and Li Bai, as Marche’s choice of transliteration spells them) wandered the nation trying to put together a living, or even back to Confucius who, it seems, couldn’t find a new patron and, one gets the sense, starved to death. The essay culminates with a paragraph on the Son of God:

Jesus Christ may be the most failed writer. He preached love as clearly and as evocatively as possible. In return, his friends betrayed him, his people turned against him, the authorities crucified him. After his death, his disciples gathered a bunch of his speeches into a handful of potted biographies that contradict one another and their world took to massacring his own people on the basis of what they thought he meant. Two thousand years later, Jesus has over a billion devoted fans. They get together, sometimes once a week or more, to read his stuff out loud* to each other. A career could not have gone much worse or better.

Well, that takes your thesis to the apex, Mr Marche. After reading the above I was even less sure what I was to take away. I don’t aspire to Jesus-level consequences for my work. I don’t even dream of paying the bills with my writing. I do suffer. Yeah. There’s that.

source:

On Writing and Failure

or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer

by Stephen Marche

2023. Biblioasis, Windsor ONT Canada

*update 10/10/23: David in a comment notes that I posted this as "out lout" -- perhaps Jesus fans were trying to out lout each other? It was merely I typo so I am correcting it. Funny tho.

unholy math

In medieval Europe the numerals we use today weren’t so much unknown as they were taboo. They were sinful, evil, because Christianity. 

Numbers were dangerous; at least these Indian [also known as Arabic] numbers were. They were contraband. The zero was the most unholy: a symbol for nothingness, a Hindu concept, influenced by Buddhism and transplanted to Christian Europe. It became a secret sign, a signal between fellow travelers. Sunyata was a well-established Buddhist practice of emptying the mind of all impressions, dating as far back as about 300 B.C. The Sanskirt term for zero was sunya, meaning ‘empty’ or ‘blank.’ Flashing a zero to another merchant let him know that you were a user of Hindu-Arabic numerals. In many principalities, Arabic numerals were banned from official documents. Math was sometimes exported to the West by ‘bootleggers’ in Hindu-Arabic numerals. There is plentiful evidence of such illicit number use in thirteenth-century archives in Italy, where merchants used Gwalior numbers as a secret code.

Hindu-Arabic numerals were so much easier to use in calculations than Roman numerals that they were even considered magical — which, of course, made them more verboten. 

I wonder how many mathematicians were burned at the stake. 

source:

Lost Discoveries: the ancient roots of modern science — from the Babylonians to the Maya

by Dick Teresi

2002. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY

“the extinction of the native race”

19th century Peruvian novelist Clorinda Matto de Turner deplored the treatment of the Indians. After describing a particularly horrendous usury trap which peasants got forced into, Matto de Turner, despairingly cries out:

Would that God, in the exercise of His goodness, might one day ordain the extinction of the native race, which, resplendent once in imperial greatness, now drinks the fetid cup of degradation! God grant it extinction, since it can never recover its dignity or exercise its rights!

This language sounded familiar to me. L. Frank Baum, a decade before he wrote The Wizard of Oz, published a weekly newspaper in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Upon the death of Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, Baum wrote an 1890 editorial in which he speaks admiringly of Sitting Bull, and angrily of “his conquerors [who] were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood and treachery.” Yet Baum also writes contemptuously of the Sioux still alive:

With [Sitting Bull’s] fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. … Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings, and speak, in later ages of the glory of these grand Kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroism.

Like Matto de Turner, Baum contrasted Indian days of glory with their present degraded state, and thought that the degraded remnant would best be put out of their misery. The writings are virtually simultaneous. Matto de Turner’s novel, Torn from the Nest, was published in 1889, Baum’s editorial just one year later. The writers were talking about Indians on different continents, but they were observing a similar fate. 

Baum’s call for the extinction of the Sioux went a step further than Matto de Turner, unfortunately. Matto de Turner left extinction to God. Baum invited the U.S. military to do the job. In an editorial of 1891 Baum says: 

The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.

Presumably, Baum felt personally threatened by the living Indians in a way Matto de Turner did not. His is a mixed message, it’s clear to say. Baum decries the injustices visited upon the Indians, yet calls for more “wrong” to be done. Rather than seek humane solutions to an intractable problem, Baum invokes Final-Solution-like rhetoric. 

I’ve never read anything about Frank Baum personally visiting violence upon anybody, or offering any kind of material support to killing. His children’s fantasies are notable for their tolerance and acceptance of the “queer” and the disenfranchised. I am saddened he so compromised his compassion and sense of justice in these editorials. He knew better.

sources:

Torn from the Nest

by Clorinda Matto de Turner

translated from the Spanish by John H. R. Polt

edited by Antonio Cornejo Polar

1998. Oxford University Press, New York

The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer editorials by L. Frank Baum are reproduced by the University of Warwick, Coventry UK here:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/second/en213/term1/l_frank_baum.pdf

“showering the parchments”

Having recently read the testimony of a contemporary Christian writer that you can’t have real faith without doubt (to think otherwise is “simplistic”), I was struck by the uncompromising nature of Dante’s profession of faith when asked about it by one of the blessed in Paradise:

“‘… The bountiful

     rain of the Holy Spirit showering

     the parchments, Old and New, is to my mind

unquestionable certainty of Faith,

     so accurate that any other proof

     compared to it would sound most unconvincing.’

I heard: ‘These premises, the Old and New,

     which you believe to be conclusive proof,

     how do you know they are God’s holy word?’

And I: ‘The proof that what I read is true 

     is in the works that followed: Nature’s hand

     could never heat or forge that kind of iron.’

Then the reply: ‘Tell me, how do you know

     that these works ever were? You use as proof,

     and nothing more, what still needs to be proved.’”

What is Dante’s trump card? Christ performed miracles! If Christ hadn’t performed miracles, nobody would have paid attention to him, or, at least, an unassailable empire of holiness would not have been built upon his teachings. And, presumably, Dante himself would doubt, rather than have a faith of “unquestionable certainty.” 

I have little doubt that Dante, a well-read man of the thirteenth century, was aware of other traditions of miracles, some as believably described as those of the Bible — Old and New parts. 

On the other hand, another Christian writer of our time wrote to the effect that the miracles Jesus performs are described with a unique realism, and have great power as evidence for being so. I’m sure he wants that to be true. Maybe Dante thought so too. I don’t recall the contemporary writer providing pages of documentation of miracleworkers (Jesus contemporaries) whose miracles were described in a manner so totally unlike Jesus’ that it was obvious how much Jesus’ stood out. The fragmentary nature of the historical record — both from the wear and tear of centuries and out of intentional purging — leaves one with only a certain amount to go on … an uncertain amount, I should say?

But back to Dante’s Paradiso. Dante’s logic is essentially circular. He has unshakable belief in his sources because he finds them believable. The parchments smell like God. Plus there were miracles. 

Oh, and, it’s not enough, according to the blessed interrogator in Heaven, but there is that part about Nature being unable to “forge that kind of iron.” What that means exactly, I’m not sure. But I’m going to guess it’s the idea that there must be a God because, look around, no way could this have all just happened. 

Which takes us back to — why is it the Bible that has the right answer to how everything came to be? Which takes us back to — because we believe it does. 

And around we go.

source:

The Portable Dante

edited & translated by Mark Musa

1995. Penguin Books, New York

when the poor are rich and the rich are poor

I’ve written some posts on religion lately. One on faith, one on the fruitlessness of arguing about religion, one on science and God. Now we move over to intraparty fights. A priest and a torturer are both Christians, and they each have a reading of scripture. Who’s right? Alberto Manguel takes us to the scene: 

In 1967, when I was in my fifth year of high school, a military coup took place in Argentina … What followed was a wave of human-rights abuses such as the country had never seen … Among the thousands kidnapped and tortured was a priest, Father Orland Virgilio Yorio. One day, Father Yorio’s interrogator told him that his reading of the Gospel was false. ‘You interpreted Christ’s doctrine in too literal a way,’ said the man. ‘Christ spoke of the poor , but when he spoke of the poor he spoke of the poor in spirit and you interpreted this in a literal way and went to live, literally, with poor people. In Argentina those who are poor in spirit are the rich and in the future you must spend your time helping the rich, who are those really in need of spiritual help.’

Before encountering the torturer’s gloss, I’d heard it before from American evangelicals, the sort of people who surround the rich and uncaring Donald Trump in the oval office and lay their approving hands on him. Is Donald Trump a Christian? He is if he says he is. Has he ever said he is? 

source:

A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

1996. Penguin Books, New York

“the most profound and menacing doubts”

Timothy Beal is a Christian. Yet he is also a critical thinker. Note my caveat. It is, Beal tells us, not only possible to be a Christian and a critical thinker, all the real Christians are. I am not qualified to debate who is and who is not a real Christian. No one is. Not even Christians. 

One thing that irks me about Christians is the way they have to have their own definitions of words. I was struck by a definition of “love,” for instance, that had the word’s meaning weirdly and horrifically different from everyday human affection in order to be able to declare that God loves us. Yes, he loves us even when he’s standing idly by during our torture or obliteration. That is part of God’s love, you idiot; how can you not understand that! No, I don’t remember who insisted this was love. In the paragraph below Beal does something similar with the word “faith”:

There is a widely held, simplistic definition of faith as firm belief. To many, especially nonreligious people, faith is seen as absolute certainty despite or without regard to observed facts or evidence. Yet, as anyone trying to live faithfully in this world knows full well, there is no faith without doubt. … The Bible … presumes faith in God, yet … it also often gives voice to the most profound and menacing doubts …

Let’s take a quick look at Merriam-Webster: “firm belief in something for which there is no proof.” 

Not among the shades of meaning: “doubt”

This is not to say I think Timothy Beal is being disingenuous. He can define religious faith however he wants to, so long as he is up front about it. He can define God. He can define Christianity. Everybody can have their own definitions — so long as they don’t hurt each other over disagreements. These are squishy terms. Not like oxygen, say. We better have a consensus definition for oxygen. If you buy an oxygen tank, it won’t be helpful to have something other than oxygen in it.

Still, the idea that it is “nonreligious people” who mainly think of faith as the absence of doubt, rather than the religious, seems to me wrong. The impression I’ve gotten from religious people, most especially the loudest spokespeople on the teevee, is that doubt is sacrilegious. Maybe they don’t read the same bible as Beal. 

source: The Rise and Fall of the Bible: the unexpected history of an accidental book 

by Timothy Beal

2011. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York

“putting a name to [the] lack of an answer”

In a discussion of the origins of religion, and what religion does for us, Jared Diamond remembers a professor:

[T]he great theologian Paul Tillich def[ied] his class of hyper-rational undergraduates to come up with a scientific answer to his simple question: ‘Why is there something, when there could have been nothing?’ None of my classmates majoring in the sciences could give Tillich any answer. But they in turn would have objected that Tillich’s own answer ‘God’ consisted merely of putting a name on his lack of an answer.

If there had been nothing, nobody could have asked any questions, not even why there was nothing rather than something. Thus, in order to ask the question, let alone come up with an answer, there has to be something.

Why is there God when there could have been no God? What would Paul Tillich have thought of someone asking students to answer that one scientifically? Or, why is there no God? And could there ever have been one? 

Silly stuff. But millions have been tortured and murdered in the name of God. So, not silly. 

source: The World Until Yesterday: what can we learn from traditional societies?

by Jared Diamond

2012. Viking / Penguin, New York

“is not faith enough?”

Surgeon Sherwin Nuland asks some questions about the way religious people use the tools of reason:

Why do [the religious] attempt logic and reason to prove matters which by their very nature are beyond any logic and higher than all reason? Why do so many of them feel that it is beholden on them to apply the rules of proof and evidence in arguments for which such rules were never intended? Is not faith enough?

I don’t think Nuland has this right. The tools of logic were not invented by atheists, nor are proof and evidence foreign to theology. Nuland seems exasperated because these tools fail the religious, so he wonders why they try to use tools that don’t work for them. After all, if whatever you say doesn’t really matter because you can’t actually ever lose an argument, your trump card being faith, which is impervious to all logic, fact, or evidence, why bother going through the motions? Your failure on the way to your success just makes you look bad. 

I rarely get into religious discussions with the actually religious. I don’t want to argue over this stuff. In fact, I have a policy against talking religion with people I don’t know well. I remember with some discomfort a discussion I failed to avoid. I was talking after class with another student in an American Sign Language course. The conversation might have gotten started innocuously with a question like, Why are you studying ASL? The other student seemed sweet and sincere, but she was “churchy” (as another classmate put it), and her communication goals had something to do with helping deaf people get with God. I soon found I was fending off her evangelical approach toward myself. Yes, she confronted me with arguments that seemed to offer proof and evidence, but when these arguments fell apart, and we were getting annoyed with each other, my churchy classmate pulled out her trump card, supposedly quoting scripture, “The faithful’s arguments will seem as nonsense to nonbelievers.” 

I bet my classmate asked me what my thoughts were and, seemingly friendly and sincere, overrode my policy against talking religion. She saw an opening to gain a convert. 

I am curious about faith, where it begins and ends, but I don’t want to get into an argument about it. I mean, I don’t get why one believes one thing without question while having no difficulty scoffing at something else. And organized religion is responsible for so much evil in the world … 

source: The Mysteries Within: a surgeon reflects on medical myths

by Sherwin B. Nuland

2000. Simon & Schuster, New York

answer to Yoruba riddle

answer to the Yoruba riddle (which posted yesterday):



humanity between heaven and earth



source: Yoruba Poetry: an anthology of traditional poems
compiled and edited by Ulli Beier
illustrations by Susanne Wenger
Cambridge University Press, London

Yoruba riddle

Riddle:


A pile of shit on a leaf, and covered with a leaf.



[answer]



source: Yoruba Poetry: an anthology of traditional poems
compiled and edited by Ulli Beier
illustrations by Susanne Wenger
Cambridge University Press, London

struggling against God

… his defenses against religious belief were going to crumble. And at about this time they started crumbling quickly. … the unbelief he had always thought his protection was in fact his prison.

I don’t think of myself as having defenses against religious belief. I haven’t built great walls, erected desperate barriers, locked doors, or armed myself against faith. Rather, faith puzzles and intrigues me. I wonder about it and look into it. Because I don’t get it.

I’ve heard this formulation before, that the unbeliever rejects God, struggles against the Lord’s intrusion into his life, fights not to believe. The easier thing would be relax and surrender. God will just come right in and take over.

This has not been my experience. Nothing about Christianity makes sense to me. I have to struggle to figure out what it’s trying to tell me. “Sin” is a piece of Christian jargon that doesn’t make any sense. An infant is born out of sin. It is sinful in the womb. Murder is also a sin. As is thinking. What, then, is “sin”? And that’s about as basic a piece of the Christian puzzle as exists. If sin is baffling, how am I supposed to get to God embodying himself as a mortal, then sacrificing himself to himself in order to absolve other mortals from sin?

C. S. Lewis, from Surprised by Joy:

You must picture me … feeling … the steady, unrelenting approach of Him Who I so earnestly desired not to meet. … I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed … the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England … kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting … eyes in every direction for a chance of escape.

The quote at the top of the post is from Alan Jacobs’ biography of C. S. Lewis. A couple pages later Jacobs quotes Lewis himself on the struggle to ward off God. The writing is certainly vivid. The “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting” body evokes a toddler in full-on temper tantrum. But what is it the toddler wants? What does keeping out this god do for him? Conversely, what does allowing this god in do for him? Well, I guess it allows him to stop struggling. Struggling is a lot of work; knocking that off would be a relief.

For me, all the struggling would be the other way. Every time I’ve tried to wrap my mind around the Christian equation it’s been a struggle. It’s a whole lot easier just to shrug my shoulders and say, “It seems to work for them. That’s nice. So long as it’s not hurting anybody. There are even some who say Jesus motivates them to do good in the world. I like good. People doing good is a good thing.” People do terrible things in the name of Jesus, too.

source: The Narnian: the life and imagination of C. S. Lewis by Alan Jacobs

“How does this even work?”

In a moment of deep despair, I grabbed a knife and toyed with ending my life. … I took the knife into the bathroom … I walked to the shower, slid the glass door open, and sat down inside, sliding the door shut behind me. … [T]he room just beyond was a blur, obscured by soap scum. … I ran the dull side [of the knife] along my left wrist, like I was taking it for a test drive. The metal, like the shower floor, was cold. … How does this even work? I asked, almost aloud … I couldn’t will myself to go through with it. I was too afraid - of the selfishness of this act and how my family would react to it; of the physical pain involved; of failing at this, too; but most of all of the fate I was sure would greet me after death.

That’s Chris Stedman’s low point, according to his memoir Faitheist, which recounts his spiritual journey, from culturally Christian as a child to his born-again experience as a teen to his accepting himself as a gay man and rejecting Christianity’s monstrous god.

Stedman says the main reason he didn’t kill himself in the shower that night was the expectation he would face the terrible tortures of hell, suicide being one of those sins that park a soul in that unfriendly place. In a post earlier this month I wondered if many people were dissuaded from killing themselves out of fear of the afterlife. In the above passage Chris Stedman says that fear was what, “most of all,” made him choose life.

Maybe so. Stedman lists other reasons, though. And by the time he crouches in the cold shower he is already convinced that his same sex desires have reserved him a boiling pot of torment in God’s ugly cellar. Stedman has prayed repeatedly over the Bible verses that supposedly condemn homosexuality, and God hasn’t piped up with any relief. He isolates himself from his family and his Christian friends. He is in pain and sees no way to alleviate it.

Considering the rest of the memoir, its testimony to Stedman’s need for social engagement, his sense of justice, I’m not convinced that imagining post-death torture is what stops the knife. I suspect it had more to do with the poverty of the Christian version. This Christianity is empty of love so his empty heart yearned for something beyond it.

I know I contemplated the permanent pain killer and hell was no factor. Nor, for that matter, was another of Stedman’s reasons for living - what he calls the “selfishness” of suicide. Rather, if I can come up with any particular reason why I’m yet alive, if one really can look into that tunnel-vision state of mind and say much coherent about it, I’d say I could imagine a better life. I could imagine not hurting so much. I could even imagine being happy. I didn’t know how or if a better life would be mine, but it was not out of the reach of my dreams.

source: Faitheist: how an atheist found common ground with the religious by Chris Stedman

“he can shuffle off his present”

The narrator of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon is a good Christian who discovers a hidden but European-like country where no one knows his religion. His efforts to evangelize are met more with bemusement than interest. In one argument the narrator quotes from Shakespeare to bolster his faith in an afterlife: “[I]t is the fear lest worse evils may befall us after death which alone prevents us from rushing into death’s arms.” As suicide is a terrible sin for Christians, when you kill yourself you condemn your soul to eternal torment in hell. Thus you might as well suffer a little longer in your mortal existence to save yourself from greater pain later. The Erewhonian scoffs:

If a man cuts his throat he is at bay, and thinks of nothing but escape, no matter whither, provided he can shuffle off his present. … Men are kept at their posts, not by the fear that if they quit them they may quit a frying-pan for a fire, but by the hope that if they hold on, the fire may burn less fiercely. [One hangs on with the hope] that though calamity may live long, the sufferer may live longer still.

Erewhon is often a sort of mirror-version of England and I suppose Samuel Butler is critiquing the conventions of England via his creation. I’m afraid I don’t always get it. In this instance I do think the Erewhonian gets the better part of the argument. Have many suicides been stopped out of fear of hell? Doesn’t seem likely to me. Christian opprobrium, rather, just comes across as mean-spirited, like beating a horse with a broken leg to make it pull an overloaded cart. The cart isn’t going anywhere and the beating isn’t doing anybody any good.

haole vs. aloha

This is a nice discussion of the Hawaiian word "haole":

"Haole"[,] some Hawaiians believe[,] is a sort of antonym of "aloha"[.] "Haole" is a word predating Western contact and can be used to describe nonnative plants and animals as well as people. Still, there's a popular myth that the derivation comes from the phrase for "without breath," ha being the word for breath. (As in "aloha," which can be used as a greeting or a farewell or to indicate love but literally means "the presence of breath" or "the breath of life.") This "without breath" interpretation of the word "haole" was supposedly applied to Western visitors because they refused to engage in the traditional Polynesian greeting in which two people touch noses and embrace while breathing each other in.

Breath is considered sacred in some cultures. I'm reminded of Joseph Campbell's discussion of the Hebrew word for God, which can be written YHWH; Campbell noted the resemblance of the name of God to that of an inbreath and outbreath.

In typing the quote I remembered that the "Western visitors" Sarah Vowell is talking about came to Hawaii from the East. White people came to the Americas from the East, too. In that sense all Europeans are Easterners to the New World and Polynesia. Europeans became "Westerners" by virtue of being West of China and India, the two civilizations greater than all of Europe after the collapse of Rome, at least until Europe discovered the New World and began to feed on it.

source: Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

a life story unlike mine

Let's say you came across this bio:

Ana Mendez: a Spanish woman from a Jewish family who became a voodoo priestess in Mexico City and converted to Christianity while in a mental asylum. Leader of identification repentances all over the world.

Would you know what to make of it?

source: A Voyage Long and Strange: rediscovering the new world by Tony Horwitz

“a death of fabricated personhood”

For Laci Lee Adams being called to ministry and coming out as bisexual are intertwined stories. In one of her sermons she uses death as a metaphor in a way that is exciting, transformative, and kind of creepy:

There can be no new life without a death of an old life. Coming out is a death. It is a death of an old way of living! It is a death of a life of lies! It is a death of unhealthy expectations! It is a death of fabricated personhood! And let me tell you, death is difficult! And we need to be able to sit with death because when we can really embrace death, we can more fully appreciate resurrection.

Lies do not die a quiet death.

I can imagine being stirred as this sermon is delivered. But there’s something about the metaphor that disturbs me. We do not die every day. We do not die, only to be reborn every year like a crop of barley. “When we … embrace death,” Adams says, “we … appreciate resurrection.” Are we really talking about death here? Death is permanent. Except when negated by resurrection. In which case death is not death. For death is permanent. Death-with-resurrection is death-as-temporary-thing. “What happened to you?” “Oh, I died.” “You died!” “Yeah, but I got better.”

The paragraph quoted is from “A Quietly Queer Revolution” by Laci Lee Adams in the anthology The Full Spectrum: a new generation of writing about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other identities edited by David Levithan and Billy Merrell

words of wisdom from the Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Travis Stanton remembers a life-changing encounter:

I had the good fortune to hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak to an arena full of students and faculty at my small private liberal arts college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Toward the end of the presentation, Tutu allowed for a brief question-and-answer period. One student stood up and addressed the archbishop. She noted the work he had done in his own country of South Africa to address the issue of gay and lesbian equality, and asked, “Isn’t that contradictory to what the Bible has to say about homosexuality?”

The archbishop paused for what seemed like an eternity. I remember naively thinking that his answer would change the world – either opening up the hearts and minds of the audience members, or forever slamming the door on my neatly appointed closet. Then he started to laugh. “The Bible says a lot of things I hope you don’t believe,” he chuckled.

quoted from “A Fairy’s Tale” by Travis Stanton in the anthology The Full Spectrum: a new generation of writing about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other identities edited by David Levithan and Billy Merrell

“cosmological principle”

“If a person innocently surveyed the Germans’ treatment of Jews … he might … conclude … that the Germans kept the Jews alive … to satisfy some unknown cosmological principle requiring Jews’ suffering akin to the Aztecs’ belief that daily human sacrifice was necessary to make the sun rise.”

source: Worse Than War: genocide, eliminationism, and the ongoing assault on humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Christianity in space

“[T]he vast astronomical distances … are God’s quarantine regulations …”

So says the narrator in C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra.

I’m really bogging down in this book. While the previous novel in Lewis’ space trilogy was a decent adventure story this one is turning into a theo-psychological argument. Not exactly boring because Lewis writes well. But I am wondering why I’m bothering. Oh yeah. Because for years as a teen I shopped at a comic store called Perelandra and I’m still curious what that was all about. I’m not convinced I’ll really have an answer when I get to the last page. It’s just Christianity in space?

I remember one of Perelandra’s owners had the last name: Christ. He insisted Christ rhymed with ‘wrist’ – rather than ‘priced’, say.

“He knew now why the old philosophers had said there is no such thing as chance,” says the Perelandra narrator referring to the main character’s name – Ransom. Christ was a ransom, too?

Plutarch's God

“To [Plutarch] a superstition was not a mistaken belief, a kind of religious stupidity; it was an unmitigated evil, far worse than absolute disbelief. Atheism, he says, denies God, but superstition wrongs Him. It makes God evil or silly. It uses the very worst of all weapons, terror. It fills the world after death with ‘flaming fires and awful shapes and inexorable judges and horrible torments’; in this world it teaches people to practice absurd penances and self-torturing. Better far not to see God at all than see Him like that. ‘I had rather have it said that there was not and never had been such a fellow as Plutarch, than that he was fickle and vindictive and would pay you out for not calling upon him.’”

source: The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton