Life's a beech.
Category: Aphorisms and Observations
Miniscule and Majuscule; catholic and Catholic
I am too catholic to be much of a Catholic.
But if one needs institutionalized religion, one could do far worse, assuming one can stomach the secular-humanist liberal namby-pambification and wussification that the post-Vatican II church can't seem to resist, the dilution of doctrine and tradition that empties into the nauseating Church of Nice.
There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order. Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents. Suppose all that.
Still, religion would have its immanent life-enhancing role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning. Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering. Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent. Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk. Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'
People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians. The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clienetele, the conservatives and traditionalists. The church should be a liberal-free zone.
Lot, Loot, and Light
It is in keeping with our lot that we should seek, not the loot of the lottery, but the light of the Lord.
A Christian Paradox
Man is godlike and therefore proud. He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself.
The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride of life that one ought at least to entertain the unlikelihood of its having a merely human origin. The thought is that God humbled himself to the point of entering the world in the miserably helpless and indigent way we in fact do, inter faeces et urinam, and to the point of leaving it in the most horrendous way the brutal Romans could devise, and from a most undistinguished spot, a hill in an obscure desert outpost of their empire.
More than an Animal
An animal that knows it's one is more than one.
Vain Yet Serious
The paradoxical tension between the vanity of life and its moral seriousness.
Related: Amiel on Duty
A Hell of (a) Pleasure
If hell is separation from God, why wouldn't a body held in thrall by sensuous pleasure do as well as a body wracked with pain? Absorbed in sensuous pleasure, one is arguably farther from God than when in pain.
Person and Potential
A person with undeveloped potential is not a potential person.
A Crass Measure of Autonomy
A crass measure of autonomy is the American measure: automobility.
Absence and Presence
If absence makes the heart grow fonder, as sometimes it does, it is equally true that sometimes presence makes the fickle look yonder.
It is in keeping with the chiaroscuro of our life here below that love and friendship thrive best on a blend of absence and presence.
No One Excluded
Everyone can make a contribution if the level of the conversation is low enough.
The Old Man
He fills up quickly, but empties slowly.
Reason and Rationalization
Reason in us is so weak that we often cannot tell what is reason and what rationalization.
On Spending Time
What will you buy with the time you spend? And will you be able to justify your purchases should you be called to account?
Dubious Compensation
Memory compensates us for the passage of time, but it also ensures that we will never forget that we are subject to it. Yet better to be a man than an animal held hostage to the passing moment but oblivious of the fact.