founding fathers, not christian

I sent him an email explaining that the founding fathers were in no way, shape, or form Christian. I included quotes in it from Jefferson, Madison, Paine, and Adams ("The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." - fucking argue with that!). I talked about how Jefferson even created his own version of the Bible by editing out the parts in the gospel where Jesus performs miracles. Just for good measure, I threw in a tidbit about Abraham Lincoln's destroyed manuscript challenging Christianity....

The fundamental Christian value is that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior, who died for our sins upon the cross, and gives salvation to those who love him. If ANY Christian values are adopted, they cannot be adopted without that fundamental belief. You are nice to people because Jesus tells you to turn the other cheek. If you do not believe in Jesus or the Bible, then you have a DIFFERENT reason for being a nice guy. It is no longer a Christian value, even if the end result is the same!...

There are some legitimate places in history where the role of Christianity was indeed important. Martin Luther King Jr, for example, was a minister. No doubt that his beliefs were influenced by his faith. That's fine. You can claim one for the team on that one. But in doing so, you've also got to admit that faith played some role in the crazy guy who bombs abortion clinics. You can't just claim all the good and then dismiss the bad as "not Christian enough." You have to realize that Christ made this guy every bit as bat shit insane as he became. That his faith was his downfall.

There's just no big picture at work here. Christians don't even know who they are. They have no concept of their own history, of their own existence. They realize that somewhere in the past, maybe Christianity was warped in a bad way and people got hurt. But that was a mistake. Could never happen again, right? They make such a huge effort to ignore their own darker side, that they never recognize it when it appears....

I mean, look at some of the most famous atheists, agnostics, and deists in history: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Sir Frances Bacon, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Ayn Rand, Thomas Paine, Albert Einstein, Voltaire, Galileo, Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas Edison, Stephen Hawking, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain - what do these guys all have in common? Well, they are some of the smartest mother fuckers in history. When atheists get to say, "We've got Stephen Hawking, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein" on our side," who wouldn't be jealous? Who wouldn't rather have these guys on their side?

Next thing you know, people are going to start saying Socrates was Christian.

From S. Howard's blog; his (correct) thoughts on America as a Christian nation.
And here is a website with non-Christian quotes from our Founding Fathers.

parable of a madman

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

* * *
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche, an excerpt from The Parable of a Madman

a poet's magical interpretation

Poetry was born from magic; it grew up with religion; it survived the age of reason; how is it to continue to be heard in the pandemonium of slogans, loud speakers, madhouse slanders, high explosive fears that seem to diffuse man in complexities of environment outrunning his capacity to grasp? The poet's magical interpretation of the universe is confronted by the vast impersonal rationalization of science, and once more, it is the poet, as I think Goethe says somewhere, who must take the risks. A poem is far more than a self expression. It is a strange compromise between the demands of self, the world, and Poetry. Rilke in his Archaic Torso of Apollo ends by saying, "You must change your life" and this, we know from many experiences, is what art does. It challenges the surface platitudes of existence. When complexities become dense, the poet may be said to snatch from memory, from sensation, the very seed of the future, by giving perceptions that might otherwise never be known.

Jean Garrigue

honorary python

i've got a bad feeling about this

"This is your pilot speaking. Welcome to flight one from here to there. We're going to be flying at a height of ten feet, going up to a height of twelve and a half feet... if wee see anything big. Your co-pilot today is a flask of coffee." I thought there was a rule that you had to have two pilots, in case one goes, "Oh, for fuck's sake."
* * *If you've been in a big aeroplane, no one's listening to the security announcements. Everyone's going, "Yeah, yeah. There, there. Lights flash. Put the thing on. Pull the thing and --" Death. It's kind of "Yeah, all right." So the pilots have been told to kick up the importance of these speeches.

They go, "Please do, please do listen to the safety announcements. We've changed everything around! You don't know. We're putting the life jacket on back-to-front. Some of the safety exits are false. They're not true. And... I've got a bad feeling about this flight. I don't think we're going to make it."

The ever-fabulous Eddie Izzard, Glorious

postmodern subjectivity

Edward Weston, Mushroom, 1940.
I realize of course that in raising the question of subjectivity I am reviving the central debate in photography's aesthetic history, that between the straight and manipulated print, or the many variations on that theme. But I do so here in order to point out that the recuperation of the aura for photography would in fact subsume under the banner of subjectivity all of photography, the photography whose source is the human mind and the photography whose source is the world around us, the most thoroughly manipulated photographic fictions and the most faithful transcriptions of the real, the directorial and the documentary, the mirrors and the windows, Camera Work in its infancy, Life in its heyday. [...] At the origin of everyone there is an Artist and therefore each can find its place on the spectrum of subjectivity. For is has long been a commonplace of art history that realism and expressionism are only matters of degree, matters, that is, of style.

Douglas Crimp, from the essay "The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism"

105: the theatre edition

Countdown to London: 105 days
A production of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

the office

Jim: Just have Dwight punch you.
Michael Scott: Oh, yeah! Well, that would be kinda worthless because I know a ton of 14-year-old girls who can kick his ass.
Jim: You know a ton of 14-year-old girls?
Dwight: What belt are they?

Dwight: Someone forged medical information, and that's a felony.
Jim: OK, Whoa, all right 'cause that's a pretty intense accusation. How do you know that they're fake?
Dwight: [reading from a sheet] Uh, Leprosy, Flesh Eating Bacteria, Hot Dog Fingers, Government Created Killer Nano Robot Infection.


Dwight: In the wild, there is no health care. In the wild, health care is, "Ow, I hurt my leg. I can't run. A lion eats me and I'm dead." Well, I'm not dead. I'm the lion, you're dead.

Dwight: I come from a long line of fighters, my maternal grandfather was the toughest guy I ever knew. World War II veteran. He killed twenty men and then spent the rest of the war in an Allied prison camp... My father battled blood pressure and obesity all his life... different kind of fight.


Michael Scott: You'll notice, I didn't have anybody being Arab. I thought that would be too explosive, uh, no pun intended. But I just thought, "too soon" for Arabs, maybe next year. You know, the ball's in their court.

Michael Scott: Would I rather be feared or loved? Um... Easy, both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.

Michael Scott: You may look around, and see two groups here. White collar, blue collar. But I don't see it that way. You know why not? Because I am collar-blind.


Michael Scott: Toby is in HR, which technically means he works for corporate, so he's really not a part of our family. Also, he's divorced, so he's really not a part of his family.

Pam: I suggested we flip a coin, but Angela said she doesn't like to gamble. Of course by saying that, she was gambling that I wouldn't smack her.


Michael Scott: Last week I would've given a kidney to anyone in this office. I would've reached right into my stomach and pulled it out for them. But now, no. I don't have the relationship with these people that I thought I did. I hope they ask, so they can hear me say, "Uh, no, I only give my organs to my real friends. Go get yourself a monkey kidney."

empty chairs at empty tables

There's a grief that can't be spoken.
There's a pain goes on and on.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Now my friends are dead and gone.

Here they talked of revolution.
Here it was they lit the flame.
Here they sang about `tomorrow'
And tomorrow never came.

From the table in the corner
They could see a world reborn
And they rose with voices ringing
I can hear them now!
The very words that they had sung
Became their last communion
On the lonely barricade at dawn.

Oh my friends, my friends forgive me
That I live and you are gone.
There's a grief that can't be spoken.
There's a pain goes on and on.

Phantom faces at the window.
Phantom shadows on the floor.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will meet no more.

Oh my friends, my friends, don't ask me
What your sacrifice was for.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will sing no more.
Empty Chairs at Empty Tables, from Les Miserables.
In respect.

thus spake zarathustra

Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth...

What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.

The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.' The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.' The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss...

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under...

"I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man."

"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.

"We have invented happiness," say the last men, and they blink.

Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

carlin's ten commandments

"The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post "Thou shalt not steal", Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "Thou shalt not lie" in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment."

George Carlin

the philadelphia story

Mike: I would sell my grandmother for a drink - and you know how I love my grandmother.

Mike: This is the Bridal Suite. Would you send up a couple of caviar sandwiches and a bottle of beer?
Margaret Lord: What? Who is this?
Mike: This is the Voice of Doom calling. Your days are numbered, to the seventh son of the seventh son.
Margaret Lord: Hello? Hello?
Tracy Lord: What's the matter?
Margaret Lord: One of the servants has been at the sherry again.


George: You're like some marvelous, distant, well, queen, I guess. You're so cool and fine and always so much your own. There's a kind of beautiful purity about you, Tracy, like, like a statue.
Tracy Lord: George...
George: Oh, it's grand, Tracy. It's what everybody feels about you. It's what I first worshipped you for from afar.
Tracy Lord: I don't want to be worshipped. I want to be loved.

Tracy Lord: [normal voice] Hello, Dexter. [lower voice] Hello, George. [high childish voice] Hello, Mike.


Mike: Tracy.
Tracy Lord: What do you want?
Mike: You're wonderful. There's a magnificence in you, Tracy.
Tracy Lord: Now I'm getting self-conscious. It's funny. I - Mike? Let's...
Mike: Yeah?
Tracy Lord: I don't know - go up, I guess, it's late.
Mike: A magnificence that comes out of your eyes, in your voice, in the way you stand there, in the way you walk. You're lit from within, Tracy. You've got fires banked down in you, hearth-fires and holocausts.
Tracy Lord: I don't seem to you made of bronze?
Mike: No, you're made out of flesh and blood. That's the blank, unholy surprise of it. You're the golden girl, Tracy. Full of life and warmth and delight. What goes on? You've got tears in your eyes.
Tracy Lord: Shut up, shut up. Oh, Mike. Keep talking, keep talking. Talk, will you?

Tracy Lord: Put me in your pocket, Mike.


Dinah: Nothing ever possibly in the least ever happens here. Mother, how do you get smallpox?

[Dexter has just proposed]
Tracy Lord: Oh Dexter you're not doing it just to soften the blow?
C. K. Dexter Haven: No.
Tracy Lord: Nor to save my face?
C. K. Dexter Haven: Oh, it's a nice little face.
Tracy Lord: Oh Dexter, I'll be yar now, I promise to be yar.
C. K. Dexter Haven: Be whatever you like, you're my redhead.

postsecret: vi

postsecret

happy easter!

Happy Easter!

passenger seat

I roll the window down
And then begin to breathe in
The darkest country road
And the strong scent of evergreen
From the passenger seat as you are driving me home.

Then looking upwards
I strain my eyes and try
To tell the difference between shooting stars and satellites
From the passenger seat as you are driving me home.

"Do they collide?"
I ask and you smile.
With my feet on the dash
The world doesn't matter.

When you feel embarrassed then i'll be your pride
When you need directions then i'll be the guide
For all time.
For all time.
Death Cab for Cutie, Passenger Seat,
my favorite song.

'the office' best moments

Greatest show. Ever.

childe harold's pilgrimage

In Venice, Tasso's echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier,
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear.
Those days are gone -- but Beauty is still here.
States fall, arts fade -- but Nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!

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

I loved her from my boyhood; she to me
Was as a fairy city of the heart,
Rising like water-columns from the sea,
Of joy the sojourn, and of wealth the mart;
And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakespeare's art,
Had stamp'd her image in me, and even so,
Although I found her thus, we did not part;
Perchance even dearer in her day of woe,
Than when she was a boast, a marvel, and a show.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,
both from the Fourth Canto.

remembering marie a.

It was a day in that blue month September
Silent beneath the plum trees' slender shade
I held her there
My love, so pale and silent
As if she were a dream that must not fade

Above us in the shining summer heaven
There was a cloud my eyes dwelled long upon
It was quite white and very high above us
Then I looked up
And found that it had gone

And since that day, so many moons in silence
Have swum across the sky and gone below
The plum trees surely have been chopped for firewood
And if you ask, how does that love seem now
I must admit, I really can't remember
And yet I know what you are trying to say
But what her face was like, I know no longer
I only know I kissed it on that day

As for the kiss, I long ago forgot it
But for the cloud that floated in the sky
I know that still and shall forever know it
It was quite white and moved in very high
It may be that the plum trees still are blooming
That woman's seventh child may now be there
And yet that cloud had only bloomed for minutes
When I looked up
It vanished on the air
Brecht, Remembering Marie A.,
the beginning of which is read in the fantastic film The Lives of Others.

the watchmen

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world. Was Rorschach.

Alan Moore, The Watchmen