Hmmm...

J. Jonah Jameson dumping on Spider-Man again? Well, yeah. But, as Bryan Preston points out, the ol' web-spinner gets about the same sort of press as your average conservative Christian: if it's at all positive, it's probably grudgingly so.

Note: I didn't write this. It was posted to Usenet many years ago and a copy has been sitting in my Temp folder all this time, and I figured I ought to do something with it.

***************

God would like to thank you for your belief and patronage. In order to better serve your needs, He asks that you take a few moments to answer the following questions.

1. How did you find out about your deity?
__ Newspaper
__ Bible
__ Torah
__ Television
__ Book of Mormon
__ Divine Inspiration
__ Dead Sea Scrolls
__ Near Death Experience
__ Near Life Experience
__ National Public Radio
__ Tabloid
__ Burning Shrubbery
__ Other (specify): _____________

2. Which model deity did you acquire?
__ Jehovah
__ Jesus
__ Krishna
__ Father, Son & Holy Ghost [Trinity Pak]
__ Zeus and entourage [Olympus Pak]
__ Odin and entourage [Valhalla Pak]
__ Allah
__ Satan
__ Gaia/Mother Earth/Mother Nature
__ God 1.0a (Hairy Thunderer)
__ God 1.0b (Cosmic Muffin)
__ None of the above, I was taken in by a false god

3. Did your God come to you undamaged, with all parts in good working order and with no obvious breakage or missing attributes?

__ Yes __ No

If no, please describe the problems you initially encountered here. Please indicate all that apply:

__ Not eternal
__ Finite in space/Does not occupy or inhabit the entire cosmos
__ Not omniscient
__ Not omnipotent
__ Permits sex outside of marriage
__ Prohibits sex outside of marriage
__ Makes mistakes
__ Makes or permits bad things to happen to good people
__ Makes or permits good things to happen to bad people
__ When beseeched, He doesn't stay beseeched

4. What factors were relevant in your decision to acquire a deity? Please check all that apply.

__ Indoctrinated by parents
__ Needed a reason to live
__ Indoctrinated by society
__ Needed focus in whom to despise
__ Imaginary friend grew up
__ Hate to think for myself
__ Wanted to meet girls/boys
__ Fear of death
__ Wanted to piss off parents
__ Needed a day away from work
__ Desperate need for certainty
__ Like organ music
__ Need to feel morally superior
__ Thought Jerry Falwell was cool
__ Shit was falling out of the sky
__ My shrubbery caught fire and told me to do it

5. Have you ever worshipped a deity before? If so, which false god were you fooled by? Please check all that apply.

__ Baal
__ The Almighty Dollar
__ Left Wing Liberalism
__ The Radical Right
__ Beelzebub
__ Bill Gates
__ Barney The Big Purple Dinosaur
__ The Great Spirit
__ The Great Pumpkin
__ The Sun
__ The Moon
__ Elvis
__ Other: ________________

6. Are you currently using any other source of inspiration in addition to God? Please check all that apply.

__ Tarot
__ Lottery
__ Astrology
__ Television
__ Fortune cookies
__ Ann Landers
__ Psychic Friends Network
__ Dianetics
__ Palmistry
__ Alcohol
__ Bill Clinton
__ Amway
__ CompuServe
__ Jimmy Swaggart
__ Wandering around a desert
__ Insurance policies
__ Barney T.B.P.D.
__ Other:_____________________

7. God attempts to maintain a balanced level of disasters and miracles. Please rate on a scale of 1 - 5 his handling of the following (1=unsatisfactory, 5 = excellent):

a. Disasters:
  1  2  3  4  5  flood
  1  2  3  4  5  famine
  1  2  3  4  5  earthquake
  1  2  3  4  5  war
  1  2  3  4  5  pestilence
  1  2  3  4  5  plague
  1  2  3  4  5  Spam
  1  2  3  4  5  AOLers

b. Miracles:
  1  2  3  4  5  rescues
  1  2  3  4  5  spontaneous remissions
  1  2  3  4  5  stars hovering over jerkwater towns
  1  2  3  4  5  crying statues
  1  2  3  4  5  water changing to wine
  1  2  3  4  5  walking on water
  1  2  3  4  5  getting any sex whatsoever

8. From time to time God makes available the names and addresses of His followers and devotees to selected divine personages who provide quality services and perform intercessions in His behalf. Are you interested in a compilation of listed offerings?

__ Yes, please deluge me with religious zealots for the benefit of my own mortal soul.

The embattled archdiocese of Boston, having been unable to settle some 450 claims of sexual abuse by its clergy, is now on the verge of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

There are distinct advantages to a Chapter 11 filing. Existing civil lawsuits will be suspended; no new suits can be filed. But there is also a downside: the filing will be widely construed as an admission of liability by the archdiocese, and their financial records will be opened to the public for the first time. Some church properties — notably, the chancery in Brighton, to include Cardinal Law's residence — are likely to be turned over to the court to pay claims against the church.

Cynics, of course, will scoff. "They're already morally bankrupt; this just takes care of the money."

(Muchas gracias: Bill Peschel.)

John Perazzo did a pretty good job of slicing and dicing Bishop Desmond Tutu in FrontPage last week, but as always these days, it takes a blogger to really finish someone off. In this case, it's Patty at Pdawwg.

Tutu is quoted thusly:

To which Patty says:

Once again, Tutu, as quoted in FrontPage:

Patty knows better than to buy into this one:

Desmond Tutu, man of God and Nobel Peace Prize winner, yet. Jeebus. How did he ever get out of pushing a barrow in the marketplace?

The Vatican has decreed that transsexuals suffer from "mental pathologies" and therefore should be barred from Catholic religious orders.

Yeah, they wouldn't fit in with the well-established straight-arrow image.

But what do I know? I don't have the emotional stability required to work for the U. S. Postal Service.

(Muchas gracias: Jesus Gil.)

If I'm reading Spiced Sass correctly, the problem with these proposed World Trade Center replacements is a lack of, well, divinity, something that's manifest elsewhere in society as well:

Not that a return to things churchly is necessarily the answer either:

The precise mechanism which determines the sense of transcendence in architecture (and elsewhere) is assuredly beyond my comprehension, but, to borrow a phrase, I know it when I see it.

John Paul II is still alive and kicking, but speculation as to his successor at the Holy See is rampant. One Spanish site has already winnowed down the 185 members of the College of Cardinals to an even dozen. (Who was that in the corner muttering about "March madness"?)

Meanwhile, Jesus Gil analyzes the results. What is perhaps most surprising is that five of the top seeds — um, perceived front-runners — come from Latin America. The Italians, of course, have four, but the balance of power has been shifting away from Italy ever since, well, the election of John Paul II.

It takes a two-thirds majority of the College to elect a Pope. Fortunately, they don't have to deal with things like butterfly ballots.

The ever-erudite David "Clubbeaux" Sims notes that the Netherlands, Europe's ostensible Party Capital, is likely to become the first European nation to adopt Islamic law, and explains exactly why:

A moral vacuum being filled. And just in case you missed the point:

Now you know how we got to be the Great Satan. "It's no wonder," says Sims, "Europe wants to sit this one out." Of course. They don't want to piss off their new masters.

Peppermint Patty was explaining how it is she came to embrace Catholicism — it's a good story, and probably should be read alongside Craig's account at MTPolitics — when she popped this bit of wisdom into the light:

Eighteen words. In a lifetime, I've spent probably eighteen thousand saying the same thing less precisely.

Two Romanian astronomers have announced that by reviewing astronomical data and Scriptural reportage, they have determined the dates and times of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Liviu Mircea and Tiberiu Oproiu, from the Astronomic Observatory Institute in Cluj, Romania, say Christ died at 3:00 pm (presumably local time) on Friday, 3 April, 33 AD, and rose again at 4:00 am on Sunday, 5 April. I'm guessing this was under the Julian calendar, proclaimed seventy-odd years earlier and still more or less in sync with the seasons.

The Gospels specify the resurrection to have taken place on the first day of the week and shortly after Passover, which is the first full moon after the vernal equinox. And in the spring of 33, there was a solar eclipse visible from the Middle East, which would account for the incredible darkness of that weekend.

(Muchas gracias: Jesus Gil.)

The road not taken, you say? If it's a spiritual path, SurlyPundit has either taken it or mapped it out:

Sterner sects would insist that you adapt to them: they're certainly not going to adapt to you. Probably why I subscribe to none of them. There's a lot to be said for the straight and narrow, so to speak, but if every time you turn around you're going to get busted, eventually you'll stop moving altogether.

Interestingly (familiarity? leftover childhood indoctrination? random selection?), she feels "more at ease" with the Judeo-Christian deity:

And one doesn't have to have the Dies irae ringing in one's ears to want to avoid disappointing the Big Guy, I think; if you're persuaded that there's something beyond merely a vague Something Beyond, it seems reasonable, or at least human, to want to personify that something, and it's a fairly small jump from there to wanting to stay on his/her/its good side. (Paybacks, be they purely karmic or incarnated as plagues, are a bitch.)

I don't sleep that well at night myself, but that's another issue entirely.

Rod Dreher at NRO's The Corner picked up on this letter to the editors of Crisis magazine by George W. Rutler, a clergyman from New York City. It's a gem from start to finish, and it provides, um, food for thought:

For the moment, I am enjoying a visual of PETA's sainted Ingrid Newkirk slow-roasting at 300 degrees for eternity, her own sanctimony for marinade — with just a dash of Lea & Perrins.

(Muchas gracias: The American Way!?)

It's just not a World Wide Rant without Andy going ballistic over what he perceives as the perversities of theists, and usually he's quite entertaining in the process.

I think, though, he's a couple degrees off plumb this time. For one thing, he insists on defining "eternity", following the lead of the Raving Atheist, as an "infinite number [of] years." I have just enough background in mathematics to point out that the notion of an "infinite number" is meaningless: if there is any number at all, it's not technically infinite. There are transfinite numbers — if you're so inclined, aleph-null is the total number of integers — but they aren't particularly useful in measuring time, which doesn't have an irreducibly-small integral unit to count. (On the other hand, the counter at Wendy's World has already hit aleph-null.)

More serious is his revival of the classic conflict between free will (do we have it?) and divine omniscience (does your friendly neighborhood deity have it?), which was analyzed in terms of game theory by physicist William Newcomb. Newcomb's Paradox presents the following situation:

(Thanks to Franz Kiekeben.)

The most sensible reconciliation between free will and divine omniscience I've seen was written up by theologian Dr William Lane Craig, and it's based on Newcomb with apparently just a dash of C.S. Lewis. Dr Craig's conclusion:

If you change your mind, God's knowledge changes right along with it.

Okay, not the easiest concept to swallow. But it's easier, at least for me, than a completely predestined world with all the options foreordained.

(Note: Minor changes in the last sentence for purposes of optic beam removal.)

In an op-ed in The Boston Globe, unfortunately titled Warring with God, James Carroll, in his haste to paint General William G. Boykin as some kind of religious extremist without actually saying so, reveals that he, Carroll, has only the vaguest idea of what Boykin's religion actually is.

In his effort to avoid implicitly insulting other religions, Carroll explicitly insults one. Those "exclusivist claims" are at the very heart of Christianity; you take them out and you have — what? Certainly nothing recognizable as Christianity. What Moses brought down from Mount Sinai did not read "I am the Lord thy God, one of a panoply of such, all interchangeable." And Jesus Christ's statement that "No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6) quite clearly doesn't allow for alternate paths.

But Carroll isn't interested in simple messages. Instead, he wallows in this multicultural mishmash:

This teeters perilously close to an insistence that It's All Good, a notion that comes only from extreme blinders or high doses of Prozac. I don't think you could even sell this package to the Unitarians.

Susanna Cornett disposes of this premise more eloquently than I, and I find it interesting that while she is far more devout than I've ever been, we're pretty much on the same page here.

Michele wonders, as I have from time to time:

Michele herself doesn't believe in God — at least, she doesn't believe she believes in God — but it's a puzzle that has perplexed many of us over the years. She's getting good answers in her comment section, but I wanted to single out this one by Analog Mouse:

I'm not entirely happy with this explanation — for one thing, it invites higher levels of mockery than usual from happy atheists — but as someone who has always tried to see a bigger picture than the one right in front of me, I find the concept appealing.

Christopher Johnson has been covering the Episcopalian schism in the making almost from day one, and in reviewing his most recent posts, I really can't blame him for wanting to cut his ties to the American church.

Generally I don't gnash my teeth over the elevation of gay folk into positions of power, but for the life of me, I can't understand why it was so important to make Gene Robinson a bishop when, as Greg Hlatky puts it:

Why, indeed? Scriptural justification for homosexuality is nebulous at best, but Scriptural justification for adultery is nonexistent.

Kelley wants to know, and really, so do I:

Quit laughing at "legitimate candidate" and answer the question, dammit.

Paul Emmons of West Chester University, on the split in Anglicanism following the ordination of a homosexual bishop:

(This was apparently floating around about a month ago, but this is the first I've seen of it; I caught it in Phil Proctor's column in Funny Times, January '04.)

Rod Dreher, on The Dallas Morning News blog (scroll down to 9 January, 4:49 pm), sees some inconsistencies in Howard Dean's sudden spirituality:

There are times when I suspect the only book of Scripture Dr. Dean has read is Numbers.

It's a popular game here in Soonerland; if for some reason (and there's always some reason) the state gets some derisive coverage in the pop press, well, it's all the fault of those wacky fundamentalists.

Over the years, I've demonstrated that I'm not above this sort of thing myself, which illustrates a truism: hardly anyone in the middle, and absolutely nobody on the left, ever has a kind word for Christian conservatives.

Like most truisms, this contains a fair amount of falsity. I commend to you the following example, from the March 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which isn't up on their Web site yet. According to Colonel Tom Wilhelm, defense attaché at the American embassy in Mongolia, a chap somewhat in Wesley Clark's political neighborhood who admits to voting for Al Gore in 2000, the "flowering of the middle ranks," as correspondent Robert D. Kaplan describes it, and the marked improvement in overall discipline since the days of Vietnam, are in no small part due to an influx of Christian evangelicals into the Armed Forces over the past decade or so. Says the colonel:

Inasmuch as Wilhelm was there, in Macedonia anyway, I'm inclined to take his word for it.

Religious conservatives, says Adam J. Bernay, are missing one obvious point in the gay-marriage debate:

Well, okay, if you say so. How is this power to be wrested from the State? Is there popular support for a referendum on the matter? Do religious non-conservatives — or the non-religious — have their own interests, their own reasons to want to preserve the status quo?

So simple, this solution, that it automatically sets off the Huh? detector in the back of my head.

Marriage is, or ought to be, something other than, in Dawn Eden's phrase, "governmental sanction of sexual practices." Does the answer lie in taking the government out of the equation altogether? I'm still pondering this one.

If nothing else, this debate should silence, at least for a while, that old saw about how you "can't legislate morality." Actually, it's one of the few things you can legislate — you don't hear anyone saying you can't legislate thermodynamics.

What would a Constitutional amendment defining marriage strictly according to Old Testament principles look like?

I suppose that depends on which principles you choose to read.

(Muchas gracias: JP LeCompte.)

Here's one for the theologians in our midst:

Is there any human act that can be said to violate all Ten Commandments at once?

Terence Jeffrey, editor of Human Events, says: Yes, there is.

(Via Hit & Run)

And the task falls to Dawn Eden, who was assigned duty on a two-page color section devoted to The Passion of the Christ that appeared in this morning's New York Post. (The paper's Web site, as of a couple minutes ago, contained only the intro.) Part of that duty was to determine how closely director Mel Gibson had hewn to the text of the Gospels.

Her conclusion: It's a mixed bag.

This might explain John Paul II's reported enthusiasm for the film, anyway.

Still, whatever Gibson's vision, give him credit for sticking to it, and for going outside The Industry to sell it. Had this been the usual Hollywood biopic, we'd probably be yawning at the prospect of Ashton Kutcher in Dude, Where's My Cross?

(Update, 23 February, 5:45 pm: Dawn, following up, turned up this Christianity Today interview with Gibson — and check out that title!)

No, I didn't go see Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ yesterday. As a general rule, I don't see anything the day it debuts, especially if there's a lot of buzz, and Passion, I suspect, now owns the world record for buzz.

Besides that buzz, there were plenty of church groups here who booked entire screenings — the Wednesday-evening service is de rigueur for many congregations — which means that even had I been inclined to go look for a seat after a ten-hour work day, I probably wouldn't have found one.

Still, it's a film I'll have to see at some point. Meanwhile, the first-night crowd seemed to respond with a combination of shock and awe, which strikes me as a good sign.

"As a non-believer," writes Michele, "I walk around with the knowledge that I just may be wrong."

For some reason this reminded me of a dream Isaac Asimov once described. It went like this:

Mysterious ways, as they say.

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, has been saying that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was getting a bad rap from the media, and apparently he was right:

As the phrase goes, read the whole thing.

("Protestants"? Does anyone outside Catholicism, or maybe the Armed Forces chaplain corps, use that term anymore?)

(Via Hit and Run)

The ever-curmudgeonly Francis W. Porretto outdoes the Baltimore Catechism by giving the real lowdown on papal infallibility:

This is not, so far as I know, what spurred Tom Lehrer to intone, "Do whatever steps you want if / You have cleared them with the Pontiff." And I'm reasonably certain Sister Mary Discipline never explained it quite this way.

Although actual pronouncements which were claimed to be infallible, says Porretto, have only been issued twice in two thousand years, certain aspects of the doctrine still provoke controversy. As a practical matter, though, if you ever have a run-in with an individual who is Never, Ever Wrong, it's far more likely to be someone at work than someone in the Vatican.

"Darn those Unitarians!" says the old joke. "They burned a question mark on my lawn!"

Suddenly it's not quite so funny. A Unitarian Universalist church in Denison, Texas has lost its tax-exempt status because, says Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, it does not have one system of belief.

Jesse Ancira, counsel for the Comptroller's office, says that the criterion for the tax exemption is simple: the group must have "a belief in God, or gods, or a higher power." Most of the groups turned down are distinctly outside the mainstream, but the Unitarians (who merged with the Univeralists in 1961) boast two US Presidents: John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams. Not that they'd ever boast, of course.

Notes Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

Name of said racket withheld for obvious reasons.

"Angels can fly," observed G. K. Chesterton, "because they can take themselves lightly."

As a rule, Dawn Eden takes the train, but she knows the joke is on us all:

One of my internal alarms goes off at the point where I cross the line into self-importance, which may be one reason why I am uncomfortable with many of our current crop of leftists, who strike me as a generally dour and humorless lot. This is not to say that there aren't nauseatingly-earnest people on the right — I swear, the Oklahoma GOP recruits candidates from a roster of the humor-impaired — but the liberal notion of Creating Utopia seems to lend itself more easily to unnecessary seriousness than does the conservative concept of Trust But Verify.

So in the unlikely event that I start acting like the second coming of Ozymandias, look upon my works, ye Mighty, and guffaw. The one inescapable fact about life is that we won't get out of it alive — at least, not in the physical sense.

The Cornerstone Baptist Church in Stafford, Virginia lacks something you'd think might be essential to a congregation of this denomination: a proper baptismal pool. Previously, they had been borrowing the facilities of other churches in the area. But Rev. Todd Pyle, ever-resourceful, hit upon a solution, and one with Biblical antecedent at that: hold baptisms in the Rappahannock River, at the Falmouth Waterfront Park.

Officials at the park were less than delighted, and tried to break up the ceremony, claiming it might be offensive to others using the park.

Perhaps surprised by the level of outrage their action generated — including objections from the Virginia-based Rutherford Institute and the state branch of the ACLU [link is to a Microsoft Word document] — park officials promised to reevaluate their policies. Meanwhile, Rev. Pyle is looking for another place to conduct the ceremony.

(Via Tongue Tied)

"Does God have a sense of humor?" asks Abigail at Lazy Reflections.

First thought out of my head was "Have you ever seen a platypus? Exhibit A."

But that really doesn't answer her question, nor is it particularly kind to the platypus. (I mean, if I need to see an ungainly creature which seems to be assembled from random parts, I need only pass by a mirror.)

And I think really she's already answered her own question, since she admits to being a fan of P. G. Wodehouse, who, in her words, "uses Biblical imagery in such a way as to make it humorous without a hint of mockery."

I'd also point her to this observation by Dawn Eden:

In the twenty-first century, when rapid-fire gags constitute most of what's considered "humor," this notion may seem almost quaint. Still, if you love paradoxes as much as I do, and I really, truly hate them sometimes, it makes perfect sense.

One last bit: Car and Driver once got a letter from a subscriber — perhaps, now that I think about it, a former subscriber — complaining that the magazine's studied irreverence had gone entirely too far this time. The aggrieved correspondent signed off with: "My God will not be mocked."

The editorial reply: "We wouldn't dream of mocking God. But we'll be damned if He can't take a joke."

Which, I think, pretty much says it all.

Abigail's been given one of those Teen Study Bibles, and she is not impressed with its approach:

It is automatically assumed these days that anyone in this age group is motivated most strongly by snarkiness; a spoonful of smartass, the publishers are sure, makes the eternal verities go down.

This strikes me as counterproductive. What teenagers want more than anything else is to finally get into adulthood, to be what they imagine is "grown up"; when a church is telling you to wallow in your adolescence, it dilutes any other message.

Abigail is smart enough to see this:

Not to mention the dignity of the teens trying to understand it; even if they're getting Scripture intact, the wrappings serve to dumb it down. Were I her age, I think I'd be insulted by a package like this.

Seventh grade at a Catholic school in Rhode Island, and Justin Katz is there. In fact, he's been there before, and something is now conspicuous by its absence:

Title I, says the Department of Education, is intended "to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments."

A marked absence of any references to wall decor, which prompts Katz to ask:

The knee-jerk (not to be confused with "genuflection") answer is "Separation of church and state, case closed, so there." This might make some small amount of sense if the school in question were being asked to give up its religious instruction, in which case I think it's a safe bet the school would have refused to accept any grant money, under Title I or any other Roman numeral you care to name.

And why is it just religion that is subjected to this sort of treatment, anyway?

And while it's certainly true that some parents are upset by religious imagery, it would seem logical to suggest that those parents refrain from enrolling their children in a school run by a church — unless, of course, you think a steakhouse should be required by law to cater to vegans first.

The Roman Catholic Church holds a "privileged position in society," says Spain's Socialist government, which has decided to take steps to reduce its influence, to cut state funding to the church and to remove crucifixes from government buildings.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has announced ambitious plans to turn Spain into more of a secular society by simplifying divorce laws, liberalizing abortion laws and sanctioning same-sex marriage.

But maybe "secular" isn't the right word, since Zapatero is also seeking greater rapprochement with Islam, which may include the teaching of Islam in Spanish schools and some funding of mosques. Which suggests that Zapatero has learned one thing from contemporary American politics: that "secular," a word which used to be neutral, is now often as not a synonym for "anti-Christian."

(Via The Penitent Blogger)

Everything I've read and heard tells me that John Kerry takes his religious faith seriously; he has, to be sure, some substantial differences with official Catholic doctrine, but I'm not inclined to accuse him of apostasy.

Still, Kerry's appearance at a predominantly-black Baptist church in Miami strikes me as at least somewhat cynical. As Susanna Cornett notes:

And "demonizing" is an important word here, says John Rosenberg:

There is, I submit, froth on both sides of the aisle.

(Update, 13 October, 7:30 am: La Shawn Barber looks at Kerry's pulpit pitch from a Biblical point of view.)

An observation from Greg over in Denmark:

Does this sound like the reaction of "self appointed stuck up assholes with crosses stuffed up [their] asses"?

Compare and contrast:

Actually, Falwell and Robertson, often as not, deserve that derision, owing to their prodigious, maybe even God-given talent for absurd pronouncements. Still, Christian evangelicals as a group are viewed with suspicion by the More Secular Than Thou crowd — but God forbid we should fail to understand and appreciate Muslims.

(Via Debbye Stratigacos, who has been much missed these many months.)

Let the record show that I was a quirky sort of child — and how surprising is that? — and that after three years of school, during which I was largely bored out of my misshapen skull, the parental units dispatched me to the distant city of Summerville, where I did two years at a compound for the allegedly gifted, emerging with certification through grade eight and no place to go and no idea of what I wanted to do once I got to wherever I was going.

The man who found a place for me was Father Robert J. Kelly, then recently installed as rector of Bishop England High School, the Catholic high school in Charleston. His terms were clear: some allowance would be made for my appalling youth, but I would be cut no academic slack whatsoever.

It was much later that I learned that Kelly had gone through some serious soul-searching of his own: while in the seminary in New England, he'd been spending his summers in the then-class A Eastern League, and big-league clubs were offering him bonuses to come pitch for them. In the end, a lifetime of service was more compelling than a career of uncertain length, and Kelly put on his collar and never looked back.

I'd like to say, now that he's gone, that everything I know I learned from Father Kelly, but obviously that isn't so: as a kid with a puckish sense of humor and a marked lack of maturity, I had to go to considerable effort to stay out of his office. I figured out quickly enough that he had a finely-tuned sense of humor of his own, but in the presence of an erring student he was all business, and that stuck. What I remember most, though, is that I was wandering in the desert, to the extent that you can wander in the desert at age twelve, and he was happy to take me in.

"If we are lucky," said Father Lawrence McInerny (also BE '69) in Father Kelly's funeral homily, about the same moment I was on the operating table last month, "we get to meet certain people who are simply 'larger than life'." The big Irish priest, I remember, was the very definition of the phrase; I am lucky indeed to have crossed paths with him.

Neither vivid red nor solid blue, my little corner of Oklahoma City is decidedly divided, as many Democrats as Republicans, with a salting of independents, third-party types, and, I suspect, a fair number of folks who are utterly indifferent to it all. Running just north is a street which contains five churches in the space of one mile; in the 49 weeks I've been here, while occasionally a flyer is left at the door, only one of them has contacted me personally through outreach, which is not at the level of what I'd consider annoying. Of the five churches, only one of them is what I think of as a conservative evangelical congregation in the present-day sense — I had attended one such church when I was younger and presumably less wicked — but that wasn't the one who sent the guy to ring my doorbell.

Proving that "your mileage may vary," the OkiePundit seems to be awash in evangelicals:

Now when I lived way out on the east side, I got more visits, largely from members of black churches, which given the population distribution in that quadrant is unsurprising, but none of their representatives ever struck me as being particularly insistent or coercive. And since I'm an irritable old cuss by nature, I have to conclude that they didn't go out of their way to bother me.

Obviously you can't extrapolate from here to a hundred miles up the turnpike, but something seems to be different around Alfalfa Bill's place. Speculation is welcomed.

Once upon a time, Christopher Hitchens asserted that he's an atheist, and then some:

He hasn't changed his mind on the subject, but he's persuaded that some of those beliefs are worse than others:

Score one for Jesusland. The American left will support damned near anything so long as it sounds sufficiently anti-American.

(Via Common Sense and Wonder.)

(Aside: This piece was completed long before it got a title, and when I finally came up with one, I reasoned, "Surely someone has used this term before." So I sent "dhimmicrats" to Google, and back comes this: "Did you mean: democrats"? Case closed, and thanks to Aaron.)

Jonah Goldberg digs deeply into the thought process:

They drop names to obtain street cred. Here in Oklahoma, the number of people who invoke the name of Ralph Ellison seems to exceed the number of people who have actually read anything Ellison wrote by a factor of two, maybe three.

Being the INTJ type myself, I obviously have no future as a postmodern metaphysician.

I might add that this disdain for the divine does not equal an insistence upon the concrete: it's perfectly respectable to concern oneself with, even to obsess over, the supernatural, so long as it's clearly divorced from that icky "religion" stuff.

This is not to say that no religion exists on the left, and I'm not about to say, for instance, that John Kerry's Catholicism is somehow bent and twisted because his official position on abortion is in opposition to that of the Vatican. I know not the man's heart; for all I know, he may be horrified by the very idea but suppresses that horror because it wouldn't sit well with the Democratic base. But another can of worms awaits an opening: whether voting against what you perceive as your spiritual interests constitutes hypocrisy, or something much worse.

(Poached from Justin Katz.)

The other day, I left this bit of small-scale snarkage at Andrea Harris' place:

Motivated by something other than that sentence — by this, in fact — Ms Harris has now expanded greatly on the premise therein:

A deity in its own right, even. With its own consequences:

And this is why, she says, that television spot for the United Church of Christ is not likely to produce any worthwhile results:

I reread John 8, in which Christ meets the woman charged with adultery, for context, and the scribes and Pharisees were saying: "Now Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned." I leave for the theologians the question of whether the forgiveness of this particular sin in this particular instant constitutes the invalidation of the whole of Mosaic law, but it seems pretty clear to me that the woman would never have been forgiven had Christ determined that she would go forth and do it all over again.

Now I don't buy the argument of various TV networks that the UCC spot is "too controversial"; it was run here as a test earlier this year and barely raised eyebrows. Nor do I believe that because almost everyone has had more sex than me, I have some claim to the moral high ground.

But one thing bugs me. The decision in Lawrence v. Texas effectively invalidated the nation's laws against "sodomy," and good riddance, say I. But while the Supreme Court has spoken, I missed any similar statement from the Supreme Being. Maybe I'm just out of the loop.

You think Christmas is overwrought? Let Eric Akawie tell you what's happened to Chanukah:

On the upside, Purim has got to be more fun than Lent.

The United Church of Christ has filed a petition with the FCC against two Miami-area television stations, WFOR-TV and WTVJ-TV, respectively CBS and NBC owned-and-operated stations, asserting that there is reason to question whether the stations' parent companies, Viacom (for WFOR) and General Electric (for WTVJ), were operating, in the FCC's catchphrase, "in the public interest." The petition stems from the networks' refusal to run the UCC's recent ad.

Andrea Harris is not impressed:

Then again, this is standard operating procedure for the UCC, which was formed through the merger of two smaller denominations in 1957; by 1964, they'd already set up an Office of Communication, and challenged the license of WLBT (Jackson, Mississippi) on the basis that it was racist. The FCC held that the church had no legal standing to challenge a broadcast license; the church took them to court, and the Supreme Court eventually overruled the FCC: "The broadcast industry," wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger, "does not seem to have grasped the simple fact that a broadcast license is a public trust subject to termination for breach of duty."

Of course, the Supremes' ruling in the WLBT affair made it possible for everyone up to and including Brent Bozell's boob-counters to get into the act. And in the 1960s, Jackson had a total of two television stations. Today, with half a dozen, plus cable and the Internet, it's difficult to argue with a straight face that any media operation is actually affecting the course of public discourse, let alone dominating it. The FCC answers to Congress, not to the Executive, so the President won't be taking a broom to the place any time soon; too bad, because I'd love to see a Commission with the temerity to laugh at both the UCC's "They should be forced to take our ads" stance and Fox's upcoming reality series "America's Scariest Brazilian Waxes."

(Update, 13 December, 3:45 pm: Fixed one set of call letters — see comments.)

This Sunday's Colorado Springs Gazette will come with a special section: a New Testament with some local flavor.

The International Bible Society, based in Colorado Springs, is planning similar inserts for other papers; they paid the Gazette $36,000 to distribute the 91,000 booklets.

Interestingly, the distribution was planned for last Sunday, but it was decided that handing out New Testaments in the middle of Chanukah might not have been the best possible public-relations move. The local Temple has a further objection: placing a Bible in a plastic bag and then pitching it onto the ground constitutes, well, desecration.

As for me, I'm waiting for a remark — any remark — from Andy at The World Wide Rant.

(Via Romenesko.)

We're at a flashpoint, says Bruce Prescott of the Oklahoma chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State:

Um, much more than what? Is there an established standard for militancy? If you drive downtown at night this week, you'll see two crosses in the sky, one on the Bank One tower, one at Kerr-McGee, and if you swing by the Oklahoma City National Memorial, "Jesus wept" is translated into stone. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think of any of these manifestations as being in my face.

Dr Prescott, I should point out, is not some blithering neo-Newdow; he's a Baptist theologian. His take on the infamous Mustang incident:

And they did get to sing "Silent Night" in Mustang, which is not exactly generic.

Where, however, is the line between "token mention" and running afoul of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause? Here's Mike Korenblit, co-founder of the Respect Diversity Foundation:

Hanukkah is certainly a legitimate Jewish celebration, albeit one which has been stretched almost beyond recognition, and certainly there's a good reason to go over the Muslim holidays which bracket the season. (There's something weirdly artificial about Kwanzaa.) But if the whole idea is to enhance the kids' self-esteem or some such business, then put me down for celebrating nobody.

Last word? I cede it to Dr Prescott, because I think this, at least, is one of the few inarguable points that can be made:

Sounds good to me.

When last we left the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, they were voting to change the official county seal in an effort to head off a lawsuit by the ACLU. Among the changes: the crosses over the Hollywood Bowl and the San Gabriel Mission were erased.

And they won't stay erased. The decals ordered by the county to be placed over the old seals don't seem to cover up the crosses at all; in fact, one cross shows up atop the Mission despite the fact that the image of the Mission was moved.

Wiser men than I might take this as a Sign.

(Via McGehee, a wise guy in his own right.)

The tale of a dog who never quite has his day, as told by Lileks:

A few ticks higher on the food chain, some of us have bought into the notion that there really aren't any rules; there is some antiquated stuff in old books on dusty shelves, yes, but how can that possibly be relevant today? And aren't we the Alpha, the top model in the product line, the biggest, the baddest, the most evolved? Forget the Hairy Thunderer and the Cosmic Muffin and all the gradations in between: we have no need to look anywhere beyond ourselves.

For most of us, this phase lasts maybe two and a half hours, until we do something prodigiously stupid and it dawns on us that the entire freaking universe is out there ready to fact-check our ass. Unless you were raised by wolves — and even then you're acutely aware of the pack order and the rights and responsibilities derived therefrom — you learn early on that there are rules, and that there are consequences for breaking them.

Or maybe not so early on. As JanJan notes:

Far be it from me to discourage anyone from pushing the envelope. But you should never be surprised if the envelope pushes back; we're not as Alpha as we think we are.

A sound: loudest at first, then softer, then softer still, then finally gone. In technical terms, the wave diminishes in amplitude until eventually it's lost, faded into the background noise, indistinguishable from any other random quantity of air.

My father has always believed, perhaps with a nod to Zeno, that "finally gone" is never finally achieved, that under the right set of circumstances, or with the right set of tools, that sound can be reclaimed, amplified, restored to its original loudness: it never really went away to begin with.

I live in what the city calls an Urban Conservation District: there exists a zoning overlay which prescribes that changes to properties must be consonant with the character of the district, if not necessarily the actual building materials, that existed when it was built. Ideally, you should be able to turn off the main road and fall right into post-World War II America.

All this is by way of saying that the past never goes away. We have a path, a timeline, from which we do not deviate, but so does everything else. What we see as the present is simply the intersection of all those timelines: our own, those of our friends and families, the homes in which we live, the forests that were supplanted by the cities that now contain most of those homes. I'm not saying it's possible to walk up my street and suddenly jump back into 1948 — the first Honda or Toyota you see would likely catch you in mid-jump and send you back where you came from — but I am saying that an awful lot of 1948 remains, even in 2005.

This is the premise behind Jack Finney's 1970 novel Time and Again, which Michele is discovering right about now. And she clearly grasps the concept:

And, in the other direction, that something will exist long after we do: when our own timeline is terminated, interrupted, rerouted, whatever, the world goes on. Two thousand five will still exist in 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive.

We may not think of ourselves as time travelers, yet truly we are, even though we seem to be limited to a single route at a specified speed (one day equals, well, one day). And the fact that we are moving means that each present, each intersection with all those other timelines, is necessarily different. It's this very multiplicity of intersections that makes it impossible, so far as we know, to alter the past, but it's that same multiplicity that makes it possible, in fact necessary, to alter the future.

Nobody bid on this early Bible on eBay, despite the seller's claim that it was "signed by jesus!"

I certainly wouldn't trust it without a corroborating statement from Dan Rather.

(Via Fritz Schranck.)

JunkYardBlog's Bryan Preston spotted this on a bumper sticker:

The quote is attributed generally to Napoleon Bonaparte; this sticker is sold by Northern Sun, a long-standing vendor of left-wing posters, buttons and tchotchkes. I get their catalog occasionally, probably by dint of having an actual Mother Jones subscription.

I'm at a loss, though, to figure out what Napoleon meant by this. It seems fairly obvious what Northern Sun means by it: Wall Street and evangelical Christians are supposed to be locked into an unholy alliance to smite the poor and downtrodden. This doesn't jibe with my experience, but then I am not especially poor, nor have I been trodden upon on a regular basis. (The question of whether I'm smitten can wait for another time.) It is certainly useful, though, to have all your designated demons on the same side.

The JYB analysis:

Same as the old boss, as Pete Townshend might have said. A cursory glance at some of our mean streets, though, would suggest that if the poor are inclined to murder anyone, it's each other.

My favorite Walt Whitman passage has always been this bit from Leaves of Grass:

Justin Katz finds multitudes inside Andrew Sullivan:

The passage that caught my eye is a quote from Sullivan's book Love Undetectable:

I don't have a particular problem with "otherness," even (especially?) if it's "essential and exhilarating," but it sounds to me like Sullivan is trying to have it both ways: he wants to be a wild and crazy guy and Ward Cleaver simultaneously. I had enough trouble with that when I was married, and I'm on the straight side of the aisle.

Is domestic bliss incompatible with, say, a Pride Parade? I don't know. I think that it probably isn't — but then there's this piece from Sullivan's Virtually Normal:

Maybe these contradictions can be resolved somewhere down the line. I hope Andrew Sullivan isn't holding his breath.

Note: This has made the email rounds several times; I wanted to see how well it works as a blog post.

In case anyone is interested, Saint Theresa is known as the Saint of the Little Ways. Meaning she believed in doing the little things in life well and with great love. She is also the patron Saint of flower growers and florists. She is represented by roses. May everyone be blessed who receives this message.

Theresa's Prayer cannot be deleted. REMEMBER to make a wish before you read the poem. That's all you have to do. There is nothing attached. Just send this to seven people and let me know what happens on the fourth day. Do not break this, please. Prayer is one of the best free gifts we receive.

There is no cost but a lot of reward. Suggestion: copy and paste rather than forward to protect email addresses and access to e-virus. (Did you make a wish?) If you don't make a wish, it won't come true. Last chance to make a wish!

St. Theresa's Prayer:

Now, send this to 7 people within the next 5 minutes and your wish will come true. And remember to send this back...you'll see why.

Can I get 84 visitors this hour? It could happen. It's not what I would wish for, though.

We are not wealthy, generally, in the flyover zone, but we do our part for those less privileged.

And sometimes we go beyond the call of duty. The OKPartisan has traveled to Peru on missionary work for her church in Edmond, and has come up with the notion of an International Mall, which would work something like this:

This does seem to go beyond the boundaries of what we think of as traditional missionary work, but for what it is — a classic hands-across-the-water operation — it's a heck of a good idea, if it could be gotten to work with a minimum of fuss and overhead.

And speaking of across the water, Julie Neidlinger is back home in North Dakota from Nicaragua, and is posting her journals from the eleven-day trip.

I have stayed away from the Creationist 2.0 Intelligent Design debate, largely because both sides of the argument have been pretty much beaten to death.

Well, except for this angle: Maybe the design isn't all that damn intelligent, you know?

(Via the very bright Chris Lawrence.)

I had just finished one year in a Catholic grade school when Pope John XXIII died, so you can be sure that we were steeped in the rules and regulations of replacing a Pontiff, at least to the extent it was possible to explain these things to someone just out of the fourth grade. And they've changed somewhat over the years — John Paul II himself made the last few alterations in 1996 — but given the Church's devotion to ritual, the basics are essentially unaltered.

One thing that's changed in the last forty years is the restriction of voting for the new Pope to cardinals under the age of 80. (Eleven of the 13 American cardinals meet this requirement.)

Father Thomas J. Reese explains the transition and election process here. Reese's prediction is interesting:

The Curia is the Vatican bureaucracy, which includes nearly a quarter of the cardinals.

And it's unseemly to make side bets on the outcome of the Conclave, but if I have a favorite, it's probably Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodriguez Maradiaga, archbishop of Tegucigalpa; he's fairly close to Father Reese's criteria (he's 62), and there is reportedly some substantial sentiment among the cardinals to pick someone outside Europe.

By and large, John Paul II's hard line against various "modernizations" of the church is just fine with The Glittering Eye:

Although there's one area, says the Eye, which needs further study:

While I agree with the Eye here, I think there's a greater risk of "doctrinal trauma"; I reread Humanae Vitae last night, and it's what you might call inflexible and adamantine. From section 23:

But from Populorum Progressio, a year earlier:

There's a fair amount of wiggle room in that last sentence, perhaps.

And it should be remembered that the fact that the Church hasn't changed doesn't invariably mean that it won't. I don't expect any changes in the female-ordination policy, for instance, or in the opposition to abortion, but the contraception restriction, as the Vatican surely knows, is more honored in the breach. Still, there will be no changes without a fight: while Paul VI didn't say so in so many words, there is still a belief that Humanae Vitae qualifies as ex cathedra and thus infallible.

Tom Lehrer, when he proposed "The Vatican Rag" as a means of making the Church more "commercial," was kidding. I think.

Meanwhile in England, the Norfolk County Council is revising the syllabus for religious education, and one of their revisions calls for the abandonment of the name "Old Testament" for the first thirty-nine books of Scripture; says the council, it makes this part of the Bible seem out of date.

Of course, the New Testament isn't all that new either, come to think of it, and if you ask me, there's only one way to resolve this issue: with a contest.

Your assignment, should you decide to accept it, is to come up with new names for both Old Testament and New Testament that will pass muster with the likes of the Council without being excessively irreverent or irrelevant. Feel free to request the assistance of the Holy Ghost Spirit. Entries will be taken in Comments through Friday evening.

(Suggested by this Tongue Tied item.)

A reader sent a link to an Irish site taking bets on the next Pope. As of this writing, Francis Arinze (Nigeria) is the favorite, at 3-1; Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga (Honduras) and Dionigi Testamanzi (Italy) are at 9-2, with Joseph Ratzinger (Germany) at 6-1. The American accorded the best chance is Sean Patrick O'Malley, Archbishop of Boston, at 33-1, which strikes me as overly generous.

They're also taking bets on the Pontiff's name; the favorite right now is Benedict XVIII (3-1), followed by John Paul III (7-2) and John XXIV (5-1). Peter II is a 20-1 shot, though I can't imagine anyone taking that name.

I will, of course, burn in hell for suggesting that Arinze be elected, becoming the first black Pope of modern times, and that he take the name "Urban IX."

A while back, I asked for updated nomenclature for the two main sections of Scripture, for the benefit of those desperately-trendy types who thought "Old Testament" sounded, well, old.

Lots of neat responses, but I'm inclined to give the nod to Matt Barr for both ingenuity and prosody: Commandments and Amendments.

Thanks to all who participated.

You cut a little here, you cut a little there, and sooner or later what's left won't hold together.

The Passing Parade applies this meatmanship to the Papacy:

And this experience was put to use in John Paul's spiritual leadership as well:

There's no way to know for sure, but this makes sense to me: what would they ask for next?