The Problem with having refused and rejected Christianity, as I did, when I was eleven years old, as it was formally presented to me in the form of a Catechism,

is that I did not then realize, because the Christian catechism is far from being a complete summary of the faith it purports to inculcate, what a vast, peculiar and heterogeneous body of belief I was refusing to believe in.  I had, for example, no notion, as a polite, well-bred, middle class, American Protestant boy, of the rôle of Satan in most forms of Christianity, which are of a predominately lower-class (at least lower than self-consciously middle-class American); nor had I any idea that lower classes of Christianity, as such, actually existed outside of the fabled "white trash" of the semi-legendary "South," where I had never been and had no wish to go.  So, then and now, I had not even a vestigial belief in the Devil or his awful powers of Temptation.  The story of Adam and Eve (and the Serpent) in the Garden of Eden, and of Eve's eating of the Fruit of Knowledge, and of the subsequent punishment of all Mankind for it, of course I knew from Sunday School--and had already, as a pre-pubescent child, dismissed it as unworthy of belief. 

Likewise, Sin of the damning sort, and its horrific everlasting punishment, and of our need to be "saved" from it--is something that my mother would simply not have permitted anyone to have a long conversation about with me.  So I seldom thought about Sin:  I didn't steal, murder or bear false witness--and I certainly did not covet my neighbor's ox, or his wife.  And I decided early on that "the Apostle Paul" was a liar and a fraud, and, though I didn't know the word for it then, an hysteric.  As a ten-year-old, I saw nothing but puerile, self-serving fraudulence in Paul's supposed revelatory experience on the road to Damascus.

For Heaven's Sake...

Let us admit that we citizens of the Western World in the Third Millennium have arrived at Universal Consensus on at least three topics: (1) We are all of us, and each one of us, responsible for our own Salvation, or degree of Enlightenment.  And (2) we are none of us obliged to believe what our leaders or Princes believe.  And (3), such is the dominance of Individualism and Humanism among us, that we cannot, and do not, tolerate the least interference with the dictates of individual conscience by any Established Power, Political or Religious.  And (thus 4) whatever "Salvation" or "Enlightenment" may mean, they are not to be sought in the State (or its governance), which is, by definition, for each of us, subsidiary and secondary to them.  ¿Çlaro? Well, I've been listening to Professor Peterson, and I think so.

And I agree with Dr. Peterson that the New Testament of Christian Bible represents an important advance, over both the Ethos of the Old Testament and the Commonly Accepted Ethos of the Ancient Roman Empire, in the concept of individual dignity.  Seriously, I cannot read Horace's matter-of-fact accounts of his relations with his slaves, nor Piny the Younger's dispassionate report to the emperor about torturing a Christian woman in order to elicit information about Christianity, without a sinking feeling in my stomach--and a part of my brain crying out, "Can't he see this is wrong?"  And this, my gut and conscient reaction, I acknowledge, must be part of my Christian, or at least my Protestant Heritage.  Nor, Buddhist aesthete that I admit--in the light of M. Baudelaire's penetrating essay--that I am, do I refuse to grant acknowledgement or gratitude for it.  M. Baudelaire does me disservice if he thinks (that I do) so.   

OAN'S PEARSON SHARP REFUTES MSM REPORTS OF ALLEGED SYRIAN CHEMICAL ATTACK

In case there was any doubt about the utter fraudulence of the claim that Assad had attacked his own people with chlorine gas.  Of course, Macron, May and Trump should be hanged for their "retaliatory" air strike--which, "retaliatory" or not, constitutes a war crime--but what shall we do with the lie-mongering news media who manufactured it?  Perhaps condign amputations?

But how is abortion an issue? Does any woman not have the right in America to abort any foetus younger than six months?

What more could even the laziest and stupidest slut ask?

No one denies, and no one quite says explicitly,

that the two young black gentlemen recently arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks were offered service, which they declined, while continuing to occupy seating reserved for paying customers (and even asking to use the restroom).  Am I missing something?  When I go into a Starbucks, as I like sometimes to do, I quickly get into the Order Line and order a triple-shot venti (2%) latte with a (big) shot of hazlenut, just so's I may sit in one of their comfy little café chairs and watch the world go by--always a rewarding and interesting pastime at Starbucks.  I certainly wouldn't sit down before I'd bought my latte.  Nor would anyone else that I know.  So what's up with these two colored gentlemen from Philadelphia?  Why ever would they think that they could sit at a table in a Starbucks without first purchasing something?   [And if they didn't purchase something, being thrown out, and if they resisted being thrown out, arrested?]  Is Philadelphia full of eating or drinking establishments where people can just sit at the tables without purchasing anything?

Could it be that the two young colored gentleman--Philadelphians--don't know how business is conducted in a Starbucks (which is, after all, provenient from Seattle, and is in many ways. in its dealing with customers, imbued with a higher standard of courtesy and decorum, such as prevails in the Pacific Northwest, than black Philadelphians would be used to)?  Or are they couthless niggers incapable of going about their business anywhere in a civilized manner?  Their request to use the restroom seems to argue the latter.

Barbara Bush, cowardly slut, or whore, finally died yesterday, at age 92, her mind, as always, unblemished with casualty statistics.

Trump bombs three sites in Syria--How fucking dare he?

Let us hope that the Syrian people, and the Russians, will soon crush this obscene military adventure!

GOLDBERG VARIATIONS. ARIA. JSBACH. Ignacio Prego

But relax, Ladies.  As you can see, and hear, here, young Señor Prego's perfection's are only musical. Perfections they remain--beyond the reach, I daresay, even of Glenn Gould--Ma si vede qua che il giovane Signor Prego è troppo grasso.  

J.S. BACH: THE FRENCH SUITES (I) - Ignacio Prego, harpsichord

This Spanish gentleman, in his (ahem) person, and in his instrument and his technique, fairly sums up what women so  often complain of in those more beautiful and more accomplished than themselves: Perfection. How this must hurt them!  I wonder if he works out?

Three or Four or Five Things that Doctor Jordan Peterson has got Wrong:

(1) Not really wrong but distasteful (to me), is Peterson's "just folks," affectedly working-class dialect, and his putting a redundant "es" on the end of words like "anyway."  I don't mind his, or his countrymen's, inability to to pronounce the diphthong "ou"--or to pronounce it as anything but a long oo-sound as in "route" or "root"--but I do not hear in this distinctively Canadian phoneme an unpleasant or nauseous or gratuitous implicit reference to socioeconomic class of the sort which makes "anyways" intolerable.

(2)  Doctor Peterson's assertion that he need not automatically respect those whom he meets socially seems to me witlessly contentious and barbaric.  Yes, he must.  Yes, we all must grant one another whom we meet in the peculiar, general circumstance of "society" [where we are all (at least until we know better) upon terms of social and moral equality] the modicum of civility called respect, by which we acknowledge one another as social and moral equals.  A bit circular perhaps, but if you do not understand it, Dr. Peterson, or if you are determined to treat me in any other way than respectfully (with the same respect that I accord you), on meeting me or speaking with me, then I'm obliged to say Fuck You, Dr. Peterson, and if you open your mouth to me, I will slap you.

(3)  Our good doctor's assertion that he never minds offending people, without further qualification, in the interests of his freedom of speech, is irresponsibly sociopathic.  Had he said--when he is certain on his own grounds that he intends no offense, and that there is nothing in what he says, of an invidious or insulting nature, that might reasonably give offense--that then he does not concern himself with those who irrationally and unjustly persist in taking offense: Then we might congratulate him on his stalwart independence of good faith and honor, and agree with him that we owe those who are irrational and unjust no consideration whatsoever.

And, by the way, to speak particularly of those oftenest and most wrongly inclined to take offense at Dr. Peterson's upfront refusal to use "their" pronouns--i.e., of delusional and absurdly exigeant "trans folk" who imagine that they have a right to require other people refer to them and address them in terms of the genders they have chosen for themselves:  No such right exists.  You may not dictate how other people address you or refer to you, so long as they do so with no intent to demean, insult or vilify you.

(4 & 5)  Peterson's ruminations on Polyamory are pathetically shallow, ill-informed and erroneous. Likewise, his opinions about Christianity and its Big Book are worthless, dull and, frankly, stupid.


That said, Peterson's conversations with Camille Paglia (Notice, however, his Canadian Lumpenklass' inability to pronounce "Paglia") are among the most intelligent and worthwhile on YouTube.

Talking with Phil the better part of the last couple of hours...

We talked about all my late blog topics, going much further than I usually get into the relationship among Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Romain Rolland, and me at last explaining in detail the wrongness that I find in Mann's understanding of music (Vs. Hesse's rightness), and the similarity (of  insincere, formulaïc heterosexuality) that I find between Mann and Gide which, for me, makes them both similarly insufferably tedious and unreadable.  So much to explain, but Phil understands me--even when I say that Hesse's Steppenwolf, at bottom, is written from an irreducibly heterosexual/heteronormative viewpoint which, while decently tolerant, cannot really even conceive of homoeroticism (much less of father/son incest--Truly there was no one in Thomas Mann's universe who understood him).   Dark and long-lasting indeed was the night that descended on us with the Oath of Theodosius!

Think, but for one example, of Gregory of Tours' strange, dwarfish notion of what a human being is--It's there, implicit in his History of the Franks, like something seen from the wrong end of a telescope. Or think, if you will, of the curious bi-pedal, caste-bound talking creatures described in the funny little operetta of Aucassin et Nicolette--There's not a great deal of difference between them and the fools so genially described by Erasmus in his Praise of Folly. With Leibniz, Descartes and Hobbes and Locke, it seems like something is stirring; something that maybe with Shakespeare, Congreve, Goethe and Voltaire is coming awake.  But when we have arrived at Darwin and the Viennese "Depth Psychologists," yet again, we seem half asleep, strangers to ourselves. Only lately, maybe, with the Internet and "gay marriage," do we even approach to understanding ourselves, or to being aware of how much about ourselves there is yet to know.

Curiously now, almost vanished from the world, are the novels of Hermann Hesse,

which meant so much to me and my friends in the middle 60's, before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings swept the board.  Was a time when I read (and re-read) Magister Ludi--and Steppenwolf and Journey to the East) with the fervor of a newly converted apostle. Hesse, after all, understood Mozart (as only I had thought that I ever would), and music generally, and early German romantic writers like Hölderlin and Novalis just as I understood them (or thought I did).  My notion of Utopia is still, and will always be, Castalia, even though I call it, nowadays, Cascadia, and deep within I am, always,  always, Josef Knecht.

One thing you don't find any more, anywhere, is a dispassionate appraisal of mild misogyny...

Usually, I've noticed, that when things (ideas or propositions) are condemned out of hand, without reservation, the reason is an utter inability to refute them.  And, in this post post modern world, things like "Kleptomania is a peculiarly female vice," or "All women are born with a proclivity for dissembling,"  meet with irrational fury simply because they seem to be universally true, with no exceptions that anybody can think of.

And irrational fury (or furious unreason) usually begins with a denial that either of these otherwise quite dissimilar women were in fact kleptomaniacs--in the face of massive evidence that they were. That, of course, is the way of irrational fury.  Mind, I am not asserting that they were in any other way alike, or that I myself have an opinion on their Gazza ladra tendencies--though I find Queen Mary's determination to get away with, or to excuse, her pilferings on account of her royal status considerably more irritating than Hedy Lamarr's ridiculous "I was going to pay for them, but I forgot."  And, in sum, I like Hedy Lamarr a whole lot more than I do Mary of Teck, and I blame her far less for her bizarreries--considering how much more she accomplished in her life than simply having lain back and thought of England.

Sadhguru on snakes

I myself have never heard more than the first few words of this video, and God willing, I never shall hear more--such is my horror of snakes and snake-worship.  I have posted this video here only as an excuse to quote an occasional verse of Voltaire's: 

L'autre jour, au fond d'un vallon

Un serpent piqua Jean Fréron.

Que croyez-vous qu'il arriva?

Ce fut le serpent qui creva.

Apposite, don't you think?

Sadhguru on his wife's death, the Murderer speaks

But gently, gently, as  I watched this video, and listened to this overdressed, singularly venomous and intelligent creature explain, and explain, his late, poor, young wife's "mahasamadhi," the awareness crept upon me that he had murdered her, and, as murderers sometimes like to do (especially egotistical murderers), he was showing us (but, cleverly, not telling us) how he got away with it.  He doesn't mention, I think, how he bribed the police and the prosecutor's office--and that may be the way to drag the sordid truth to light. After all, the murdering of wives, is a favorite pastime in modern India, and very little opprobrium or risk is attached to it.  Let's hope he didn't tell her that he was going to murder her--or at least that he did promise her that he would not murder her daughter; but creep and sadist that he is,  we can imagine that he probably tried to frighten her to death before he strangled her.