Accurate Scholarship & A Psychopathic God

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Cusanus, Our Gentle Inquisitor (route of finite-form)

It is common folk belief around the world that a camera can steal your soul. Photos are the Devil's Proof.
What sound do elk make in the wild? What sound do elk make in the American Legion Hall?

"You're Being So...Ordinary"

L'art atteste ce qu'il y a d'inhumain dans l'humain.
Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

-from "I'm Too Sad To Tell You" ISOTM

"Yeah, it's like-whutsit called- man's inhumanity to man. Isn't that, like, a pallumdrone[sic] or something?"

"That moment, if it comes, when one begins to move beyond the guise of the urbane world traveler who pens erudite letters from far-flung corners of the globe, into the pursuit of another identity; an identity that is not yet clearly defined, but one which, on the strengths of his new ideas/creations, might act as the critical conscience of contemporary [S]ociety,
- or as -
a Cosmonaut of human history"

anniversarius gauisus

"One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph"
--Annus Horribilis

Forever - Not For Better

Dillinger's final words of comfort for the lonely and weary of heart of this grate[sic] land:

"If you try to probe, I'll lie to you. Seventy-five percent of what I say in interviews is false. I'm like a hen protecting her eggs. I cannot talk. I must protect my work. Introspection is bad for me. I'm a medium, not an orator. Like certain oriental and Christian mystics, I think the 'self' is a kind of enemy. My work is what enables me to come out of myself. I like what I do, not what I am . . . Do you know the best service anyone could render to art? Destroy all biographies. Only art can explain the life of a man -- and not the contrary."

"You, Dear Reader, will take little note, nor long remember what was written here, but it can never be forgotten what has been un-done here. How it has all come to be undone?"

And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
A-06/S-02/F-06 [cliche]

-Simon Whitethatch Potentloins
aka Admiral Hoarce Teely Kneckbrawler
aka Alejandro "Baby" Penits
aka Charles Leopold Salamander
aka William Bixby Banner
aka "Slowit" Slipple T. Rentsman

Like Nails Through Velum...

Martin Luther ignited the Reformation of the 16th century by nailing to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517 the 95 Theses that he wished to debate. I will publish this challenge to Christianity, post my theses on the Internet, and send copies with invitations to debate them to the recognized Christian leaders of the world.
My theses are far smaller in number than were those of Martin Luther, but they are far more threatening theologically. The issues to which I now call the Christians of the world to debate are these:

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

This 'dehv-leesh'[sic] heresy brough to you by the great -Bishop Spong -