Poor Urban Planning?

Pass with caution.

But can we trust her?

"Look! That unhappy one-armed girl knows where they went!"

On formerly recent girlfriends.

Is this love? It's not love.

"Hiroko!"

"But Miss Johnson! It's a skunk!"

Logical Consistency

Usually, it wouldn't make any sense for a fish to be able to breathe fire...

Born Again

"One day, one night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn't get bogged down on the kind of isolated approach of what you shouldn't do. Jesus didn't say, 'Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.' He didn't say, 'Nicodemus, now you must not commit adultery.' He didn't say, 'Now Nicodemus you must stop cheating if you are doing that.' He didn't say, 'Nicodemus, you must stop drinking if you are doing that excessively.' He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic: that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down on one thing, Jesus loooked at him and said, 'Nicodemus, you must be born again.'"
(Italics mine). Martin Luther King, Jr., "Where Do We Go From Here?" delivered August 16, 1967.

Friendship and Ignorance

And not in a half-ass way, like some posts. A significant connection.

First, two for ignorance, cause I like to find out who I was on the same page as.

"O atoms of a day! O my companions in infinite littleness, born like me to suffer everything and to be ignorant of everything, are there enough madmen among you to believe that they know all these things? No, there are not; no, at the bottom of your hearts you feel your nonentity as I render justice to mine. But you are arrogant enough to want people to embrace your vain systems; unable to be tyrants over our bodies, you claim to be tyrants over our souls." Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

"Oh, happy he who still hopes that he can
Emerge from Error's boundless sea!
What man knows not, is needed most by man,
And what man knows, for that no use has he."
Goethe, Faust

Error's boundless sea. I am caught in Error's boundless sea.

And two for friendship.

"Almost every man we meet requires some civility--requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part." Emerson, "Friendship"

"I set it down as a fact that if all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world." Pascal, "Pensees"

So, it's a good thing we're all so ignorant, or we wouldn't have any friends...

Aslan

I've been reading C.S. Lewis lately. I picked up The Screwtape Letters on a lark--from a 10-year old at a yardsale, no less. Also by chance, I happened to have taken Mere Christianity from my parents house years ago, and (chance heaped upon chance) to have kept it with me through various moves.

Reading it this morning, I came across the following passage: "People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bagain in which God says, 'If you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing.'" This is the most humorous reference to hell I've ever seen.

More important, though, is that it contradicts Christianity as generally presented (by crazy old men in subway stations with pamphlets) in that it assumes "keeping rules," or acting morally, will be sufficient to earn the fare for Charon's Ferry (or whatever). After all, I've been informed, ad nauseam, that salvation comes from "the gift of God— not by works." Ephesians 2:8-9.

So why not live like a bandit? The rub, at least as C.S. explains it, comes thusly: You can't accept this gift unless you have conditioned yourself to receive it. C.S. compares it to the creation of a statue out of stone. Each stroke of the hammer and chisel forms you into either a creature worthy of accepting the proffered gift, or ... not.

Which makes sense. Pretty obvious, really.

So why'd I have to go through two C.S. Lewis books and 27 years to grasp this basic tenet of Christian theology?

Dumbening

The level of public discourse in America has gotten disappointingly low. The response to such a realization, I suppose, must be to try to raise it through some personal contribution. That being more than somewhat beyond me, allow me to endeavor to prove the fact of its occurrence through someone who would presumably feel up to the challenge.

Today's Ann Coulter gives us this gem of a sentiment: "Conason's feeble litany of harebrained predictions reads like a haiku of bum steers." It's hard to imagine a more clumsy effort at invective, isn't it? And this from the Queen of Vitriol.

Compare: "That men should take up arms, and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke." Thomas Paine, commenting on an attack on the French Revolution by a member of the British Parliament.

It would be reassuring if I could say the issues facing us today were less weighty than in the past...

In A New York Minute

Addiction and escapism are not solely the province of alcoholism and heroin. And to prove this insightful and pithy statement, I give you West Wing Marathon Mondays. Untold numbers of Democrats watch, weekly, and they watch for reasons beyond mere entertainment: They watch for the dream of what could have been.

Alright. That's a bit unlikely.

But they watch in the hopes of what might be. If it weren't so divorced from reality it might be endearing. But Martin Sheen is not the President.

And you can't stand an egg on it's head during the equinox.