Counseling Kevin

Was It Something I Said?

I had an e-mail correspondent, a woman steeped in the wisdom of this age, write me recently about her decision to leave her husband after over twenty years of marriage when she realized that the shackles of conventional marriage prevented her from unleashing and empowering "the inner goddess" that lay buried in her. A therapist helped her realize that she had unconsciously sabotaged the fulfillment of this "need" as the result of a twisted sense of self-punishment arising from the unspoken guilt she felt because her great grandfather had molested her when she was a young girl.

I'm no psychiatrist or psychologist, not even a therapist. I didn't know this woman well, and she corresponded with me initially because of her admiration for something I wrote on my professional blog (with which she did not agree, but with respect to which she liked the way I expressed myself). Proving the truth of the old adage "No good deed goes unpunished," I responded cordially and soon enough was rewarded with with too much information.

Drawing on my finely honed sense of the most appropriate bon mot for any occasion, I suggested that she read Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" for his insight about the efficacy of seeking "the inner light." As expected, it was the last I've heard from her.

Don't blame me, blame Gil.

From G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy":

Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.

Peace In The Bottom Of A Real Tall Cold Drink

Late at night in the summer of ’69, deep in the woods near Lebanon Reservoir in upstate New York (Google it), in a summer house nestled in a grove of birch and pine, Ed, Bobby, and I attend an impromptu party. With beer in hand, we enter a room lit only by three candles. Slumped against the wall opposite the candles, barely illuminated by the flickering light, are our classmates, Craig and Joyce.

“How’s it going? asks Ed.

Craig is silent, and slowly turns his head toward Joyce.

“I’m pregnant,” intones Joyce, without lifting her gaze from the candle flames opposite her.

“No shit?” exclaims Ed.

“No shit,” affirms Craig, his eyes also shifting back to the same candlelight.

The three of us are rendered nearly speechless. I say “nearly,” because I manage an irrelevant idiotic inquiry: “When did you find out?”

“Today,” says Craig, apparently becoming the voice of both of them, since Joyce appears to have become hypnotized by the candles, unable to respond to verbal commands, but still able to lift a beer can to her lips.

I manage another wholly inappropriate observation: “Should you be drinking beer?”

She rouses from her trance to stare at me with a look that conveys the essence of the phrase “Eat shit and die.”

I shut up.

Walking to Ed’s car after several more beers, Ed offers an observation.

“They are well and truly fucked.”

“Why?” I flare. “They created a human life. They may not have planned it, but making a baby isn’t the end of the world, it may be the start of it for them.”

Obviously, I’m still stuck in the tar pit of my faith.

We walk a few steps on in silence.

 “No,” Bobby pronounces, “They’re fucked.”

 As we complete our walk to the car, all three of us pull on our beers and contemplate the consequences of one girl being a boy’s tan-legged Juliet and that boy being that girl’s Redneck Romeo.

 You may not “find peace.” Instead, you may find “life.”

My Kinda Party - Jason Aldean - Jason Aldean Videos

 

Osama bin-Amish!

We may have a tough time securing our borders against terrorists. It may have taken us nearly a decade to track down Osama. But, by Yahweh, we're smackin' down those lawless Amish and their diabolical sharing of unpasteurized milk (hat tip to The American Princess via Twitter).

Federal agents watched the home closely for a year, gathering evidence. Then, in a pre-dawn raid, armed members from three agencies swooped in.

No, this is not a retelling of the lightning U.S. commando attack in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Rather, the target of the raid late last month by U.S. marshals, a state police trooper and inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was Amish farmer Dan Allgyer of Kinzers, Pa. His so-called “crime” involved nothing more than providing unpasteurized, or raw, dairy milk to eager consumers here in the Washington area.

[...]

What could possibly be the rationale behind this FDA action? The agency banned the interstate sale of raw milk in 1987. It says raw milk can contain harmful pathogens such as listeria and that pasteurized milk is safer.

[...]

Many critics question why the agency concerns itself with raw milk. After all, virtually any food can conceivably contain harmful pathogens - including beef, poultry, pork, seafood, fruits and vegetables. Yet the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) permit the overwhelming majority of these products to be sold in their raw forms. For example, the USDA, which regulates beef, pork and poultry, permits their sale in raw and cooked forms. The FDA, which regulates seafood and eggs, likewise permits those to be sold raw or cooked.

[...]

Even if consumers were unaware of the risk involved in consuming a raw agricultural product like raw milk or raw beef, FDA and USDA guidelines, along with many state and local health codes, typically require warnings about the potential dangers of consuming raw or undercooked foods. Where a warning will suffice, a ban is inappropriate. The FDA’s extraordinary message when it comes to raw milk, though, is that the American people are too dim to read the very labels the agency requires.

You give in on unpasteurized milk and the next thing you know these horse'n'buggy Amish gang-bangers will be sharing organic produce with the poor and starving. Then where would this country be?

I don't know about you, but I sleep better at night knowing that E. coli-hating bovine bureaucrats are slammin' down stings on these low-lives and watching over the health and welfare of you, me and every other homogenized, pasteurized, milk mustache-wearer in this great country I like to call "The Land of the Free."

Help keep the U.S. udderly free of foreign bacteria. Bust a Mennonite today.

Life Lived Humbly, In The Round

"Most men seem to live in a space of two dimensions," complained Theodore Roosevelt, who tended to live his life "in the round."

The hash that the main stream and "heterodox" media, and our political class, have made of "the lessons of Tuscon" give proof to his complaint. The greatest "blood libel" that has been uttered has nothing to do with anything Sarah Palin or Tea Partiers might or might not have uttered and who was or was not influenced by the same, and everything to do with the fact that every pundit making an assertion as to the lessons we should learn from this seemingly senseless act of horrific violence claims that his or her assertion is "the truth."

The truth? You can't HANDLE the truth!

Here's what I think may be approaching the truth, and I don't assert it as a fact or even as something as profound. It's merely something that, to me, sheds a little light in the darkness. Maybe that light is equivalent to that of a firefly flickering in the bowels of a deep, dark woods, and if you find it so, move along, because there's nothing to see here.

We're incapable of making sense of such senseless acts of violence, and it's hubris to claim otherwise. While we always must do the best we can to "police up the area" and take whatever actions we think -- with the application of our limited reason and with a conscious recognition that we are all flawed human beings who will never get it absolutely right -- we deem appropriate to preserve public order and minimize the risks, the ultimate "reason" that six people died and others were seriously wounded in a Safeway parking lot by a man who thinks that government is controlling our grammar and therefore a score or more of other human beings must die by his righteous hand, is beyond our ken. Not if you're a commentator on MSNBC, Fox News, or HBO, of course, but for most of the rest of us, most assuredly.

Writing of the death of his beloved wife from cancer, in his most personally anguished book ("A Grief Observed"), C.S. Lewis uttered a passage that's stayed with me through many a horror, public and personal.

The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness...But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't.

Either way, we're for it.

Yes, either way, we're for it. You "take your choice" about what to believe and in that choice lies all the difference in the world about how you respond to your inability to control the world around you and the bad things that happen to you. Some respond with a humility fit for a life lived in the round, others with the arrogance that a political or legal construct will assure us all that "it will never happen again."

Yours, Mine and Ours

Never one to tread where the timid dare not dip their toes, I usually shy away from controversial topics. I find that the prospect of offending some hothouse flower's refined sensibilities so horrifying that I almost always opt to take a middle course, steering between the rocky shoals of "hot opinions" and aiming for the tepid tapioca beach where no offense is given or received, where good feelings and glad tidings abound, and where ... MMMMMMMWWWWAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAA!!!

OK, I couldn't keep a straight face.

I usually dive into any issue bound to offend the politically correct and unleash my Gatling Gun of barbs, if for no other reason than to arouse the professionally aggrieved to spout and spew like harpooned whales on a final breach.

No, that's not "what Jesus would do." Then again, I see through a glass, darkly.

However, for a refreshing change of pace, on the third-rail topic of gay marriage, I'll let Lee Harris, a conservative gay writer, do my talking for me.

Writing an op-ed piece in The Dallas Morning News (free registration required), he called the entire issue a "tar baby."

Gay marriage is rapidly becoming our national tar baby – something that you cannot touch without getting tar all over you. Once you touch the tar baby, you can never quite get rid of it again.

Frankly, the gay-marriage tar baby perplexes me. I do not understand it. All I know is that I want to keep my distance from it.

The source of my confusion is this. For 18 years, I have shared my life with a member of my own sex, and I have been entirely satisfied with our domestic arrangements. Never once did it occur to me that there was something missing from our lives or that we were the oppressed victims of the heterosexual majority. Never once did I think our lives would be more complete, or more honorable, or more worthy, if only we had been able to get married.

My thought was not that marriage should be only between a man and a woman but, simply and matter-of-factly, that marriage was and had always been between a man and a woman. Marriage as an institution was theirs; it wasn't ours.

Once upon a not-so-distant time, all gay men and women instinctively made this distinction between "theirs" and "ours."

[...]

In the early and creative phase of the gay liberation movement, gays recognized that we were different from them; they recognized that they were different from us. We said, "Listen, we want to have our own turf, our own communities"; and they said back to us, "OK. You can have your own turf and your own communities. But, please, make sure you stay on your side of the line."

This sensible concordat was responsible for the immense progress that gay men and women made in the post-Stonewall era. But it was abruptly shattered with the proclamation of a radically new political agenda that was launched with the publication of Andrew Sullivan's 1996 book, Virtually Normal.

At the center of Mr. Sullivan's thesis was the notion that the distinction between "ours" and "theirs" was illegitimate. To me, this claim made no sense philosophically, psychologically or politically. Gay men are different from straight men; gay women are different from straight women. Nor is there anything demeaning or morally objectionable in our being different.

I see the world differently because I am gay, and I am heartily glad of this fact – not because I see it clearer or better, but because it allows me to see it from a different perspective and to discover things in that perspective that no straight man could be expected to notice.

No matter how I came to be the way I am, I am grateful that I have ended up as I have. I need no one else's confirmation or blessing to be equal to myself. I deeply love my partner, and I hope to die with him; but there is nothing in my fidelity that requires me to borrow the concept of marriage.

Is friendship a less sacred ideal than marriage? Perhaps it is for them, but it is not – or should not be – for us.

This is why I look with such great sadness at the national tar baby with which all of us will soon be smeared. It will needlessly divide straight from gay, gay from gay, straight from straight; it will sully everything that it comes into contact with it. We are no longer practicing the politics of compromise; we are now practicing the politics of Push comes to Shove. Only now we are no longer trying to shove them out of our communities; we are trying to shove our way into theirs.

Of course, to proponents of gay marriage, the issue is defined purely in terms of the language of virtual equality: moral rights, natural rights, legal rights. They see the matter exactly as I originally saw the question of flag-burning and, therefore, are utterly unable to grasp how the other side really feels about the question – or, when they do notice these feelings, they tend, as I did, to dismiss them as irrelevant to the issue.

But such a superior attitude ignores the heart of the problem: Who gets to define what the gay marriage controversy is really about? If the proponents do, then it is all about legal rights, but if, on the other hand, the opponents get to define it, then it is all about defending an ethical institution that they believe is theirs alone.

When men and women cannot even agree on what they are arguing about, argument is of no avail, and sheer force of will becomes the final arbiter of the controversy – if we are lucky.

This is not how the American gay community got where we are today, and it is almost a sure guarantee that we will not be where we are tomorrow.

Andrew Sullivan offers a contrary view, as Harris (and we) would expect. To Sullivan, there are, and should be, no differences between straight and gay couples as to the institution of marriage. Marriages between both types of couples should be legally recognized as being the identical institution. The Dallas Morning News "Points" page on which these contrary editorials originally appeared gave Sullivan's piece featured presentation, with Harris' opinion shunted to the side, with smaller font and, unlike Sullivan's, without bold face. Think the MSM might be biased?

For a more detailed analysis by Harris, in the context of a broad defense of traditional values, read Harris' article The Future of Tradition, from the June-July, 2005 issue of Policy Review.

And The Really Weird Thing: They Were All First Cousins

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) - Defense attorney Leslie Ballin called it the "jury pool from hell."

The group of prospective jurors was summoned to listen to a case of Tennessee trailer park violence.

Right after jury selection began last week, one man got up and left, announcing, "I'm on morphine and I'm higher than a kite."

When the prosecutor asked if anyone had been convicted of a crime, a prospective juror said that he had been arrested and taken to a mental hospital after he almost shot his nephew. He said he was provoked because his nephew just would not come out from under the bed.

Another would-be juror said he had had alcohol problems and was arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover officer. "I should have known something was up," he said. "She had all her teeth."

Another prospect volunteered he probably should not be on the jury: "In my neighborhood, everyone knows that if you get Mr. Ballin (as your lawyer), you're probably guilty." He was not chosen.

The case involved a woman accused of hitting her brother's girlfriend in the face with a brick. Ballin's client was found not guilty.

Who says Tennessee ain't a fun State?

I was walkin' in Memphis.
I was walkin' with my feet ten feet off of Beale.
I was walkin' in Memphis.
But do I really feel the way I feel?

"She's my sister." (SLAP)
"She's my daughter." (SLAP)
"She's my sister(SLAP); She's my daughter(SLAP); She's my sister AND my daughter. Get it?"
"Forget it, Jake, it's Memphis."

The Law Is A Jealous Mistress

One thing about having a professional career that's not a complete bust: the profession is a time vampire. Doctors, lawyers and accountants all understand how what they do for a living sucks minutes out of their lives that they can never recover. You'd better be doing it well and you'd better enjoy it, and there'd better be some overriding reason to do it other than for the money. There will never be enough money to justify the brain damage and the simple, irretrievable loss of time.

In the throes of another hectic week last week, I had to listen to the senior officer of a large client piss and moan about "those damn lawyers" again. The first 250,000 lawyer jokes I heard, I could tolerate. Once I hit 250,001, for some strange reason, I began to tune them out.

Lawyer bashing: It's rampant. It's reflexive. It's popular to honk to your neighbor that lawyers use "loopholes" in the law, or "courtroom tricks," to get the guilty off the hook. They twist words to help heartless businesses screw the common man. They're tools of greedy, selfish interests rather than paragons of virtue who fight for the rights of the "common man." 

In other words, they represent clients. Even clients like the idiots who complain about lawyers.

I suppose if my ultimate sense of self-worth depended upon the opinion of strangers, I'd be in deep dog do. Fortunately, I have enough self-love for any two people (another reason that I need all the help from God that "She" can spare), so I consider the disparagement of entire groups of professionals based upon prejudices (rather than knowledge) to be the ignorant blatherings of dunces.

Still, being a member of a despised profession becomes tiresome.

It's not just lawyers that people hate, however, it's the "system" in which they work. What kind of "justice" can be dispensed if it goes to the party with the best advocate that money can buy? Look at O.J. Look at Robert Blake. Look at the myriad of "truly guilty" people who get off because of "clever lawyering." It stinks!

I had a professor in law school who told his students that if we came to law school seeking knowledge of the means to absolute justice, we were in the wrong place. Instead, we should be seeking a PhD in Philosophy or Theology. For most of us, "justice" is the proper functioning of the legal system that human beings have erected to dispense it. If we don't like the system, then we should persuade enough voters to change the system, and "have at it." He'd been teaching at the law school for 50 years, and he hadn't been presented with a viable alternative yet. Eventually, he died waiting.

I agree that abuses by the malpractice bar and the class action bar enrage many people. I recognize that it "seems" unfair when an F. Lee Bailey outfoxes an underpaid, less experienced prosecution team. I'm open to any rational discussion of ways to curb these abuses (such as hiring F. Lee Bailey to proclaim "I come not to defend The Juice, but to bury him!"). However, at some point the ignorance of the average American Idiot about the purpose of the legal system we've adopted in this country and its superiority in preserving the freedoms we take for granted over other systems of "justice" that mankind has heretofore concocted becomes so overwhelming that I can no longer restrain the cry of my teenaged self and utter the ultimate epithet, "Eat My Shorts"!

Many Our Fathers and Hail Marys must then be said for my penance.

You want to live in Japan or England where there are fewer lawyers? Well go live there. Get out of my country, Clyde. If you have a better system in mind to dispense civil and criminal justice, then propose it to the legislators of your choice and "let's have at it." 1,000+ years of common law tradition be damned, let's hear YOUR brilliant idea for resolving civil and criminal disputes without those evil lawyers being involved.

[sound of crickets chirping]

Yeah, lawyers are assholes.

Life's a bitch.

Get over it.

And as long as I'm on a rant-roll: To all the folks I've chatted with over the last few years who think it's simply fine to trample on or ignore the law because they answer to a "higher power," did any of you who claim to be "righteous" ever take to heart the "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" passage of the New Testament? If you did, did you even understand it? Oh, you did and now you want to argue with me about its meaning. How utterly lawyer-like.

As my response, I'll let a passage from a "lay text," the play and movie "A Man for All Seasons," speak for me. In it, Sir Thomas More responds to demands by his daughter Margaret, her fiance, Roper, and More's wife, Alice, that Moore arrest Richard Rich (who will later betray Moore and bear false witness against him, sealing his doom):

MARGARET Father, that man's bad.

MORE There is no law against that.

ROPER There is! God's law!

MORE Then God can arrest him.

ROPER Sophistication upon sophistication!

MORE No, sheer simplicity. The law, Roper, the law. I know what's legal not what's right. And I'll stick to what's legal.

ROPER Then you set man's law above God's!

MORE No, far below; but let me draw your attention to a fact-I'm not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can't navigate. I'm no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I'm a forester. I doubt if there's a man alive who could follow me there, thank God . . . (He says this last to himself)

ALICE (Exasperated, pointing after RICH) While you talk, he's gone!

MORE And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

ROPER So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

MORE Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE (Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on ROPER) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you-where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast-man's laws, not God's-and if you cut them down-and you're just the man to do it-d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

ROPER I have long suspected this; this is the golden calf; the law's your god.

MORE (Wearily) Oh, Roper, you're a fool, God's my god . . . . (Rather bitterly) But I find him rather too (Very bitterly) subtle . . . I don't know where he is nor what he wants.

ROPER My god wants service, to the end and unremitting; nothing else!

MORE (Dryly) Are you sure that's God? He sounds like Moloch. But indeed it may be God- And whoever hunts for me, Roper, God or Devil, will find me hiding in the thickets of the law! And I'll hide my daughter with me! Not hoist her up the mainmast of your seagoing principles! They put about too nimbly!

Of course, More was put to death when the law (both man's AND God's) was ignored by the powerful. That's what happens when you render under to God what is Caesar's, and vice versa.

The Treadmill To Nowhere

The following is an excerpt from a homily given for Christmas mass four years ago by Father Timothy Heines(which I saved) when he was a parish priest. Prior to his bishop deciding to make him an academic, he saved my soul (or, more accurately, gave me a fighting chance of allowing Christ to save it) with words like these.

We need to accept the reality that much of the stress and anxiety we experience in our lives is the result of the hectic pace of our existence. Whether we realize it or not, whether we use the terminology of salvation or not, whether we intend or not, we need to realize that much of the busyness of our lives is an attempt to buy our own salvation.  If we can find the right mate, we will be happy.  If we can get the right job, we will be happy.   If we find the right house, the right neighborhood, the right schools, life will be good.  If we get that promotion, make that salary, whatever it may be—we will then be at peace. We will know love..  We will have security.

Those are all merely metaphors, expressions, symptoms of salvation.  Whether we realize it or not, we often are busy trying to save ourselves.  Perhaps not in the strictest, “going to heaven” kind of theological way, but in a very real way.

How much of our lives do we spend speeding down blind alleys with our headlights off, pedal to the metal, racing toward personal fulfillment via the "acquisition" of property and/or people, only to find that we hit a brick wall? Then, as soon as we think we've wised up, we're off to the races again, soon turning down another blind alley in the never-ending, never-realized "pursuit of happiness." "Stuff" and "More Stuff." A culture built on the anthem of Madonna's "Material Girl." But there's never enough "Stuff," is there?

Many never discover that the uneasiness, the exhaustion, the stress are caused by the fact that nothing of this earth is good enough. They're never happy, and yet they continue to seek "Love" in all the wrong places, over and over and over again. They become increasingly jaded and desperate in the search for something...anything...to fulfill them. For some, the search leads them to the "hour of the afternoon" described by Gil Chesterton.

There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of 'pretending'; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.
---G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

We've all seen such men and women. Turn on "Entertainment Tonight" and spend a half-hour in their world.

Some men realize late, some too late, that a lifetime spent in the acquisition of people and things was a lifetime spent on a fool's errand. Some men look back with regret, but with wisdom. Some men finally understand that we are not made for this world and that life's most profound truth will not be found in this Empire of Dirt.

Better late than never.

The Horror of the "Frankly Religious Element"

Some essays not only don't decrease in power as they age, they increase. Frank Furedi, a self-described "secular humanist who is instinctively uncomfortable with zealot-like moralism," had a concern that he expressed in an essay I saved from several years ago and occasionally re-read, a concern that was a bit different than concerns possessed by those of us who are "zealot-like" in our "moralism," yet one that might surprise you, coming from a heathen.

...I am suspicious of the motives behind these doctrinaire denunciations of films with a religious message. Such fervour reminds me of the way that reactionaries in the past policed Hollywood for hints of blasphemy or expressions of 'Un-American values'. Replacing the zealotry of religious intolerance with a secular version is hardly an enlightened alternative.

He was referring to the frothing-at-the-mouth bile spewing from liberal reviewers at that piece of disgusting propaganda, that screed of hatefulness, Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Among the enlightened quotations of MSM reviewers cited by Furedi are these gems:

The novelist Phillip Pullman has described CS Lewis' original book as 'one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read'. With the zeal of a veteran cultural crusader Polly Toynbee of the UK Guardian cut straight to the chase: 'Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion.'

What Toynbee seems to find most hateful about religion is that it is able to express a powerful sense of faith. 'US born-agains are using the movie', she warned. Many critics seem especially outraged by this prospect of religious organisations 'using' the film to promote their faith. The advocacy group Media Transparency warns that the film is based on a book that has a 'frankly religious element' - which is not really surprising when you consider that the author was a well-known publicist for Christianity. What is surprising, however, is that Christians promoting Christian propaganda should invite such bitter condemnation.

[...]

Until recently, cultural expressions of religious faith were simply considered old-fashioned and gauche. But over the past decade, scorn has turned into bigotry and hatred.

Furedi is not soft on Christians who use films to push their "agenda." However, he saves his real scorn for those on the Left who, today as then, are shopping for moral values to "adopt" in order to appeal to the unwashed masses; you know, those of us so simple that we seek meaning in our lives. Furedi thinks that the Left is doomed to fail.

The problem with politically motivated calls for the restoration of a moral dimension to public life is that they are driven by the instrumental purpose of gaining or retaining power. But a morality manufactured in response to the demands of political pragmatism is bound to lack any organic relationship to lived experience, and is thus unlikely to find resonance with the wider public. An unfocused and disconnected oligarchy is unlikely to possess sufficient sensitivity to the day-to-day problems confronting the public. That is why the pragmatic search for a ready-made moral purpose usually turns into an arbitrary exercise in picking and choosing some inoffensive values.

[...]

At the end of the day, politically motivated calls among liberals and the left for morality are not so far from the way in which Christians 'use' The March of the Penguins or The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Both are cynical gestures driven by political calculations rather than by a moral inspiration that comes from the soul. What is particularly cynical is that these attempts to construct a 'moral dimension' are always aimed at others: those who apparently need 'simple' answers and 'meaning'. Such a cynical view of the public was clearly spelled out by William Davies of the London-based Institute for Public Policy research. 'The liberal, secular left has somehow to find ways of supplying citizens with emotional and metaphysical comforts even when it does not itself believe in such things', he warned (6). This provision of so-called metaphysical comforts serves the same function that adult-invented cautionary tales play for children. Which takes us back to Narnia: clearly the problem is not the comforts provided by CS Lewis, but the way in which they're branded.

A final point. The very term 'metaphysical comforts' suggests values built by calculation, instrumentalism, manipulation and cynicism. Morality marketed by people who do not necessarily 'believe in such things' is unlikely to set the world on fire. That is why they resent and hate the Narnia film so much. For all its faults, the movie attempts to transmit a powerful sense of belief, bravery and sacrifice. Such sentiments are alien to a cultural elite that regards the expression of any sort of strong belief as another form of that dreaded fundamentalism. Envy, bad faith and instrumentalism: these are the raw materials that fuel today's anti-religious crusade.

Sound observations from someone who may not share my religious beliefs, but who sees the world with a cold, clear eye. Where I would argue that he misses the boat is with his contention that moral values will succeed if they are grounded in "day-to-day problems" of the "ordinary folk." True, the cultural elites are seldom in touch with the concerns of the unwashed proletariat, and, therefore, are unlikely to accurately discern ANY values that will resonate with the low-brow: people like C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, J.R. R. Tolkien. Whoops, I just named three intellectuals who were devout Christian apologists.  Sorry.

Christian values resonate with "the masses" because they are eternally true, not because they merely address the "day-to-day problems" of everyday people. Christianity addresses not the mundane but the ultimate problem of people both ordinary and extraordinary: how to live both in the here and now and eternally. It doesn't get much more profound than that. No purely secular construct will ever successfully compete with it for the allegiance of the "ordinary" American who seeks to stand on solid moral ground, no matter how much shoulder-rubbing with their inferiors the irreligious upper classes might perform.

Odds are, though, that the rubbing would do them some good. Some "Truth" might actually rub off on them.

And perhaps a few of them might actually recognize it when it does.

Bridges

I was tempted to post my thoughts about how disgusting both sides of the great debate over the mosque/community center near/two blocks from Ground Zero have been, but, then, where would one begin and where would one stop? The intellectual dishonesty on both sides of the issue has been astounding. Well, not actually "astounding," since intellectual dishonesty is the modus operandi of all sides of the political and social spectrum these days. The best comment I heard this week was George Will's on yesterday's This Week on ABC, to the effect that a month from now the American public will wonder what all the noise was about.

The condescension of the supporters of the community center was as amusing as it was annoying. The left always takes the stance that the right is composed of knuckle-draggers and mouth-breathers, because it makes them feel more comfortable with the fact that although they're a small fraction of the populace that surrounds them, they're "superior" in oh-so-many ways. As C.S. Lewis once observed, there's likely a special place in hell for those who feel they're a cut above the common man.

Strangely (or perhaps, not so strangely), in the course of this week I also thought of the reverse condescension that once assaulted Mary Chapin Carpenter when she first burst on the country music scene many years ago. Country music "purists" could never accept the fact that a graduate of an Ivy League school like Brown could feel and express the same deep sense of hurt, longing, regret, and battered-yet-persistent hope that the rest of us red-necked riff-raff felt in our bones. In a sense, many of the "common folk" believed that only they had the right to feel those feelings and that someone from a privileged background like Chapin was a pretender treading on their sacred ground. The irony of that reaction to Ms. Carpenter made me take her to heart right from the get-go.

When we should be building bridges, we build walls. We're all fools. Every damned single one of us.

Truth is truth, and no one has a monopoly on truth save God. Whatever He's revealed to us, we all see it through a glass, darkly.

I'm not running
I'm not hiding
I'm not reaching
I'm just resting in the arms of the great wide open
Gonna pull my soul in
And I'm almost home