Arturo Vasquez, whose blog I admire, yesterday posted this video:
Commenting that he "found this guy’s approach oddly refreshing, in a masochistic sort of way. Hey, other people are thinking it, this guy just says it's allowed.."
I responded in the comments. I share the thread as is now stands, because I want to broach these themes sooner than later. I've been being chary, uncertain of how to begin. There's a lot to be said, and I want to say it as level and eloquently as I can.
No more hesitation, then. I'm just going to jump:
[The comments are ordered by time-stamp over the last 18 or so hours. The timestamps on Arturo's blog are 3 hours behind EST, so my initial post was 11 pm/2300 last night, and my last about a half hour ago, about 5pm/1700 EST. I've made a few small corrections here to mine and my interlocutors' prose. Click through to visit Arturo's site if you want to follow the discussion, assuming it continues..]
Charles Curtis (02:07:40) :
“I was head of the CIA’s Latin American Bureau and I had major role in overthrowing what’s his name.” British interviewer dude: “Salvadore Allende? That’s his name.”
Love it. God Bless America.
Just like I love it when the liberal (to clarify, nearly all of us are liberals, the libertarian capitalist is the arch-liberal) runs up against the scandalous reality that the state does in fact sacralize violence. That’s its entire raison d’etre. All the sanctimonious handwringing over abortion, war, capital punishment – all of it is effete decadent childishness. The Catholic Church has never shrunk from that reality, and that’s one of the reasons I am and will remain a Catholic. God has allowed it, it is thus. And he will finally judge babylon, not us.
Christ said give unto Ceasar, and then went willingly to Jerusalem to face judgment by the Sanhedrin, Herod and the Emperor’s duly appointed governor. Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas – not to mention our pope and all the current hierarchy, the Senhedrin’s heirs in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple cult – have all approved his act.
Christ’s submission in this, and rejection of satan’s offer of power after his fast, only highlight the fact that the state has every right to execute whomever ceasar wills.
Tomas de Torquemada, pray for us.
Deus vult. QED.
--
James O'Malley (04:31:12) :
“the state has every right to execute whomever ceasar wills.”
IMHO, that’s a pretty creepy (as well as false) statement. Even the Roman Catechism’s statement on capital punishment doesn’t say the government can kill whomever it pleases.
--
Charles Curtis (04:44:17) :
Hyperbolic excess. I’m amusing myself. Arturo always provokes me. Whatever I say is his fault.
It’s like when Cardinal Newman said it would be better for the whole universe to be destroyed than the least venial sin committed. Or when Luther said sin boldly.
Who’s right? God is. He let all this happen, and governments do indeed kill who they will. The bishops say abortion is homicide. Then we drop bombs on little brown people, salute the flag of a masonic republic, assassinate foreign heads of state, and then go back to our coffee.
It’s funny, is all I’m saying. Rock on.
--
The Singular Observer (20:06:13) :
Context:
Luther’s famous “sin boldly” quote is rarely given within context. The context was in a letter to Melanchthon, who was “hand wringing” over the question whether he’d be doing the wrong thing if he got married. So Luther advised him to “sin boldly”, i.e. make a decision and do it, and stop obsessing if it is sinful or not. Melanchthon was worried over the vow-breaking that marriage would entail.
Just thought I’d mention it.
Here’s the full quote:
“If you are a preacher of Grace, then preach a true, not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. For he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here we have to sin. This life in not the dwelling place of righteousness but, as Peter says [2 Pet 3:13], we look for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. . . . Pray boldly-you too are a mighty sinner.
--
Charles Curtis (20:28:25) :
Which is to say that Luther resorted to hyperbole, to make a point.
Just as what I wrote is ad absurdum, from a rational point of view. Even if the gist of what Christ did is pretty clear. What he said was clear, too: “My Kingdom is not of this world,” He also uses a lot of Semitic hyperbole, to get people’s attention. That’s one of the reasons scripture is so challenging, and we need tradition’s context to understand it.
I’ll put my own take unambiguously: we tend to warp our pieties together, and turn patriotism into a religion. “In God We Trust,” “One Nation Under God,” and all that nonsense. The god on the dollar bill is not Jesus. It’s mammon, and that’s anti-christ. I’m sick of this imbecilic self-satisfied tribalism, especially when it leads to these howling inconsistent standards when it comes to killing. 60 years ago people demonized Jews, even normal Catholics and Americans. Now, we’re doing it to Muslims, and that’s leading us to act in hideous ways. Why don’t we put images of all the children in Afghanistan and Iraq that we’ve blown to viscera up next to those obscene photos of abortion effluent? Why not? I’ll tell you: Because those shredded children condemn us all. Everyone one. Not just the fags and abortionists.
You howl when Obama speaks at Notre Dame, but stay silent when that masonic clown (“Jesus is my favorite philosopher”) Bush pretends to be “one of us” and “pro-life?” I’m nauseous. What a joke.
One of the reasons I love Arturo, is that all his intellectual pretensions aside, he knows how to write good satire, and for that I thank him. Thus spake Vasquez. Skewer away, Arturo. Keep slapping us in our bovine mugs.
Christ said something about reading the signs of the times. Feel the way the wind is blowing? Notice how the gnostics have overrun the culture, and even our bishops have fallen oddly silent?
Arturo isn’t half scathing enough.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment