ATHEISTS ADMIT THAT ATHEISM IS A BELIEF SYSTEM. It is about time. Atheism is as much a faith-based system as any God-centered religion. The existence of God can neither be proven nor unproven, no matter all the effort expended on debate. Unbelievers assert their own beliefs as ardently as any church-goer. That is the single, dominant thread running through the law suit, filed by pious atheists, against the cross to be raised at Ground Zero. The cross, an accidental formation of steel beams left standing in the 9/11 rubble, is intended for display in the proposed 9/11 Memorial Museum designed for the site. // NBC covers the suit briefly here:

“This cross is now a part of the official WTC memorial.

The Art of Punishment?

Maureen Mullarkey

July 27, 2011

ONCE RADICAL EVIL SHRINKS TO PSYCHOLOGICAL PROPORTIONS, society’s ability to inflict hardship—including the psychological pain of deep remorse—diminishes. Restitution and rehabilitation become one and the same thing. That pulls the rug out from under an artist’s capacity to conceive anything close to the grand hellscapes, sublime in their gravity, that came freely to Hieronymous Bosch. When intuitions of the demonic are disarmed and superceded by a therapeutic culture, what images are left to draw upon? Bosch lived in age that made this plausible: //// Contemporary Norway appears to have progressed to, even surpassed, this: //What brought Bosch to mind—more precisely, the contemporary impossibility of his hellscapes—is the post that appeared on the blog of Foreign Policy: “The Not-So-Terrible Fate of Norway’s Alleged Killer.” Continue Reading

The Art of Swallowing

Maureen Mullarkey

July 15, 2011

The art of eating is one thing. The art of swallowing is quite something else. The first concerns the graces and pleasures of the table. The second is not about gobbling your dinner. It is a reference to credulity, an artless childlike trust—in this instance—in the romance of organic food. As in: “He swallowed the con, hook, line and sinker.” Or: “How can you swallow a fish story like that one?” // // For those of you who do not make it through comment sections, let me share a portion of Organic Food Myths, an article by Brian Dunning at Skeptoid.com. Continue Reading

Postscript

Maureen Mullarkey

July 13, 2011

WHEN A READER HAS TO MAKE MY POINT for me, I know I failed to do it myself. John_L, in his comment to the previous post, has it just right: The true target of that post was the prevailing preoccupation with forestalling, denying or outwitting our mortality. Obsession with hand sanitizer, organic food, and bottled water are just various manifestations of that preoccupation.buy Overnight Drugs generic https://buynoprescriptionrxxonline.net over the counter//// In themselves, there is nothing objectionable about any of these things. Continue Reading

Lavabo?

Maureen Mullarkey

July 10, 2011

I could not believe my eyes at Mass this morning. There in the sanctuary, just behind and to the right (stage left) of the altar, was a bottle of hand sanitizer. It was not tucked discreetly behind a vase of flowers. There were no flowers. Just an economy-sized dispenser of Purell. The Church has distributed the Eucharist for 2,000 years without benefit of ethyl alcohol. But now my parish has it, right up there in a sacred space. The ancient ritual of the priestly Lavabo (“I will wash my hands among the innocent, and will walk around Thy altar, O God.”) Continue Reading

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The Cross at Ground Zero

The Art of Punishment?

The Art of Swallowing

Postscript

Lavabo?

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