atheists/agnostics win one . . .

A new Pew research poll has found that of 3412 American people interviewed, atheists and agnostics outperformed Jews, Mormons, Protestants AND Catholics in general religious knowledge . . .
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the effect of death on culture . . .

 

This is a lyrical well-written documentary that explores the work of Ernest Becker and its sociological implications.

 

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lord, save us from your followers . . .

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quote of the day . . .

All the hair on the horse's tail has disappeared, but he must not be admitted to be tailless; the missing essence is not in the kitchen, the drawing room, or the attic, yet somewhere in the house it must be; and thus theology becomes an illogical suspense between the conclusion and the premises; the literalist relents, but the mystical spiritualist is firm, and the true "Word" in scripture remains unimpeached by literary and historical refutation. The husk is gone, but the invisible kernel maintains the position; although in the many pious platitudes passing current in the subject no real meaning be discernible except the broad inference of natural morality and providential superintendence, the general teleological purpose which we believe to be ever tending to good in its majestic passage through the ages, although ourselves far too limited in faculty to identify its action in special cases, or to make it directly responsible for particular occurrences or books.

[...] Strauss' great merit consists in the negative work contributed by him towards the reconstruction of theology; and it was the fitness of the "Leben Jesu" to accomplish the intellectual iconoclasm so often needed in the progress of science which provoked so much odium; since nothing irritates so much as to be convicted of ignorance as to matters confidently believed to be already sufficiently and fully known.

R.W. Mackay,

The Tübingen School and its Antecedents,

1863, pp. 172, 184–185

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making tangible the numinous . . .

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Though reportedly there was not a single cloud in sight, a thunderclap rang out in New York City at the moment of Charlie Parker's death. A few days later (three?) the words "Bird Lives" appeared graffiti'd on a nearby wall, then on others, then on more, and on and on. His fame as a true musical genius continued to spread through the decades and today he holds a distinguished place of honor in American mythology. A marginalized figure in his own lifetime, Charlie Parker was canonized as a kind of messianic symbol after his death. There's jazz before him, and jazz after; he is the zero point in that timeline. Needless to say, I see certain similarities with the Easter story (christological concerns aside) here.

A couple of posts back, I related one example from my own experience of how a particular artist or work of art (in this case, Lhasa de Sela's debut album, "La Llorona") could resonate with one's psyche to the point that one would imbue it with mystery and meaning that transcends our mundane experience. The human mind tends to see patterns and connections with this numinous aspect of existence. The sense that some of the phenomena that we experience are in a sense a kind of personalized portentous communication between some ultimate "ground of being" (Universe A) and a "being" (Human B) is strengthened by these strange synchronicities in our lives.

One of my favorite stories of this kind involves the death of Charles Mingus. After being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, Mingus and his wife Sue went down to Mexico, where they traveled in search of natural healing methods that would restore his health, to no avail. In January of 1979, at the age of 56, Mingus died at the little beach-front house that the couple was renting. On the day that he died, 56 grey whales are said to have beached themselves on the nearby beach. My spidey sense tells me that there's some storytelling going on here. Was it the exact day he died? Were there exactly 56 whales involved? How close was the beach? Did it really happen? Short of finding a yellowing copy of the small town newspaper that this story would have appeared in on the day in question , we have no way to verify the story as being factually accurate. But it's such a beautiful story that, even if not historically true, it is repeated as part of the legacy of a great artist. You see, these kind of mythologizing stories don't have to be true for them to serve as metaphors to meditate on, to edify us. Poetry and myth serve their purposes.

I think that Christianity went wrong the moment it started basing its soteriology on acceptance of the literal factualness of the events it purports to trace its roots to. I can't envisage a jazz aficionado making a statement like:
"Yeah, I know that Charles Mingus was a visionary who made contributions to the art and thought of his time, but what's really important is that 56 whales beached themselves on his front yard the day he died. That's the proof of his true worth."

When I compare this to its parallel in the kind of Jesus adoration which insists on a literal resurrection, I find the latter aficionados to be misguided, if not downright silly, really.

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a march on Washington ain't what it used to be . . .

What can I say about Glenn Beck?

Well, I can say (as I have done before) that Beck is a recovering cocaine addict (look it up) who has since projected that peculiar psychology onto his current doppelgänger obsession with alarmist, reactionary, eschatological (nay, scatological) entertainment. The more spectacular the better.
As any friend of a coke fiend can attest to, paranoiac rambling is a telltale sign.

Nuff said.

Below is some interview footage of some of the people who attended Beck's rally on the Washington D.C. Mall. It speaks for itself:

Watching stuff like this can really sap me of my hopefulness if i let it. There's nothing quite as painful to watch as a bunch of uninformed overfed North Americans pretending to have some modicum of political insight.

This footage in turn reminded me of a documentary I watched last year called Right America Feeling Wronged, which was written, directed and produced by none other than Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of the current Speaker of the House of Representatives. Pelosi the younger followed the M^cCain campaign filming as she went and managed to put together quite a poignant little film, one which unmasks and captures a side of our nation which we seldom get to see through the filters of etiquette, protocol and civility (not to mention common sense).

The first thing that struck me about this film was the realization that there were almost as many people crying on the republican side on election night as there were people crying tears of joy at Obama's victory. But these tears were different. These were the tears of people who don't want to let go of something that they see as theirs by right and tradition. Their passionate zeal is at heart nothing more than profoundly uninformed nationalism, it is flag waving for flag waving's sake— even a cursory look will show this to be so, yet they revere their distorted vision of an American Utopia-gone=by as though it was some divine keepsake to take back.
This kind of fanatical demagogic hyper-nationalism is nothing new, of course. What is particularly disturbing today, however, is the number of somnambulous adherents that it seems to have attracted lately.
Thousands of rotund zombie Americans attended the rally last week.

Is this overt willful ignorance really what we have to look forward to in this country?
How depressing.

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