Daily Office:
Tuesday
¶ Matins: Lord, how long: “Border Inspector Accused of Allowing 3,000 Pounds of Cocaine Into U.S. Over 5 Years.”
¶ Prime: Eric Patton posts an entry at Sore Afraid about once a week, and he makes that restraint work to his advantage — or at least to the advantage of the things that are on his mind, which tumble out in the most interesting ways. This week’s amble takes him from spirituality to narcissism — two sides of the same coin in more ways than one, if I may pile up the clichés. And there is usually a very funny cut-up segue.
Oremus…
§ Matins. And why not. Why should Mr Leija be the chump whose wife has to live without Swarovsky chandeliers in every room? What would you do, if you were unfortunate enough to be a “border inspector”?
Make drugs legal, and then worry about the problems. Cut the blood.
§ Prime. From Ezekiel 23.20, for instance, to the cover of the German Edition of Men’s Health.
Like Woody Allen (who makes an appearance at the end of the entry), Eric reaches through the absurd to something that feels like the sublime, even though neither man would be impolite enough to apply the word to his own thoughts.
The so-called New Atheists (like Richard Dawkins, or even the more accessible popularizers of atheism like Christopher Hitchens and Bill Maher) are ascendant at the moment, even though I feel that they are not asking the right questions. I still think it’s a problem with category mistakes: unsophisticated religious thinkers (of which there are many) make claims that should not be made by religion; the new atheists respond by pointing out how stupid these claims are. An example: the creationism museum in Kentucky that explains that animals at the time of the Great Flood were much smaller than they are now, since two of each had to fit on the ark, and the dimensions of the ark are clearly described in the Bible. Obviously, this is idiocy. But when the new atheists point this out, it doesn’t really advance our understanding of God and our role in the universe and why we have consciousness and how do I know I’m real? — it just points out that many people are morons.