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Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Politics and Religion

I pretty much consider political religious statements to be blasphemy: far too many Republicans have by now said that God has told them to run for the presidency, and if it is not blasphemous, it surely is idolatrous in that the candidates pray and hear their own voices bouncing back at them; it is as if they pray into a mirror and echo chamber.

I have said before that I consider the Intelligent Design hocus-pocus to be Idolatry and Polytheism.

These ideas seem to go well with a number of our cultural fascinations, things like the TV series The Walking Dead, a series about zombies. I mean, what are zombies really but sort of a diseased metaphor about the Resurrection? It all started with Bram Stoker's Dracula, which put a diseased form of metaphor of Life Eternal to the forefront, culminating in our later Interview With The Vampire.

I mean, we have our "religiousy" portion of life where we go to church and we pop out a few prayers and God bless gramma and grampa and then pray really, really hard for really important stuff... then we have our entertainments which seem to mock our beliefs: Andy Warhol's 15-minutes of fame has become Kim Kardashian's 10 weeks of marriage...
which would not be all that bad if divorce were not quite clearly forbidden in the New Testament...
so then we have our other entertainments where the profound Mystery of Life and Creation has become a virus that re-animates dead people and is passed on by noshing on body parts.
This is the "mysterioso" portion of life, where the grand effect of the immanence of the universe is reduced to overcoming one's fear and repulsion and making sure to shoot them zombies through the brain pan.

Well, entertainment is supposed to be easy on the IQ - or is it? Anyway what's wrong with a little Rabelesian mockery of the Resurrection? I suppose nothing, if we had actually worked hard at understanding in the first place. Since most of us had these concepts handed to us by adults when we were kids,  most of our religious ideas are not much different from chocolate milk, comix, and money to get into the movie.

There is mystery and understanding takes a life time.
God is not easy... ask Kim K.

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