Steven Parmenius

  Let’s take another stab at this. People have theories and people have good enough for now theories. One good enough for now theory about religion states that religions may have a range of twenty or so attributes and a cultural system becomes a religion when it has, say, four or five of them. This is probably arbitrary at the end of the day but it is the kind of arbitrary judgment we employ with other fuzzy concepts and it is good enough for ordinary communication. Thus, religion may involve intense feelings of devotion. It need NOT involve this and lazily mumbling a prayer is still religious activity. Religion may involve a speculative search for the absolute but of course many religious people have no such concern and some are profoundly hostile to it. Religion may involve ritualized activity centered on a deity, ancestor, saint or paradigmatic human being like Siddartha Gautama or Jesus. It can also involve private meditation in a forest. As for deities they also seem optional as

  Religioso is a marking in music: it seems to call on the player to perform the piece in a hushed, meditative manner that evokes religious awe or deep contemplation. I suppose this is pars pro toto . We like to think that religion is at its best in things like deep contemplative awe even though much religious behavior is simply pro forma and other religious behavior is simply nasty. For the same reason we tend to associate religion with things like theism as religion, at its best, should put us in touch with the best and highest causes. It should make us conscious of the absolute because that is the best kind of consciousness. This is the case in spite of the fact that much religion puts us in contact which beings on much lower levels like saints and ancestors. We idealize certain moments of religion, abstract them from the embodied totality, and identify them as the essence or core. There is nothing wrong with this as it is absolutely one way to define things. A true dog is a dog a

Perhaps though I do not give Telltale the Atheist enough credit. While his discourse will produce no mass conversion of any kind and should not from its very thinness he is propounding a position and a position is something around which people can rally. And people do rally around his position and do so reasonably if they know nothing better. His discourse wins spot conversions among a certain demographic of the wavering and, of course, performs the function of enacting and sustaining in group solidarity centered around the like function and other social media metrics. Indeed, he has stated his thoughts in such a way that a kind of cult can crystallize around them. This cult may well be growing as its principles are direct and easy to con and have, still, a certain iconoclastic glow. Now Telltale will no doubt say that there is NOTHING so gauche and stupid as claiming that atheism so constructed is a religious movement and a cult. I’m afraid he is very wrong about this at least where

  I don’t just listen to wildly gesticulating pastors. I listen to the other fellows as well. I think the other fellows are also an object lesson in how not to do things. There is, for instance, a man who calls himself Telltale who recites in a dreary, nasal monotone all the things that are wrong with the tale of Noah’s ark and how prophets make predictions of things that don’t come to pass. Now I have no reason to think that Telltale is anything but a fine fellow. But, even he must wonder why, after having the fossil record explained to them for the millionth time, people STILL prefer the myths of the Hebrew Bible . Telltale and his fans must wonder if they are being too nice. Maybe they have not used irony, sarcasm, satire and contempt enough and they need to double down on these things to REALLY get their point across. Maybe their clear cut explanations of the problem of evil have not been clear cut enough and they need to refine them further. Perhaps SOCIETY has been too nice and p

Evangelical prophets, I’m going to assume, are sincere. I assume this because the line between sincerity and insincerity is not always clear. A concern with monetary advancement might be considered a manifest sign of insincerity in a religious figure except that for some of the people I have listened to money seems to have a sacramental aura about it. It seems an object of intense religious feeling. The same thing holds with sexuality. One might say that sexual scandal is another sign of ‘insincerity’ except that, as Harold Bloom once pointed out, libidinal energy (releasing and channeling it) is at the heart of American religious experience. American Christians seek divine eros and seeking divine eros they fall readily and easily into the other kind. The Word made flesh is a sexualized body and a homosexual encounter in a washroom is not a far step from an erotically charged Pentecostal service with gyrating dancers and ecstatic rock music. To be brief, sex and money are THE tempta

  As so many people who are, I strongly suspect, Patriot Christians, actually think they are Christian Patriots it must be the case that Jesus, who they follow with such devotion, had a great deal to say about patriotism and unconditional love of country. What a surprise then when we turn to the Gospels and find total silence on the subject. Christ enjoined love of God and of neighbor and self. Neighbor is NEVER defined in the New Testament as those who belong to the same nation as you. Nor is love of country EVER commanded in the Sermon on the Mount or in the discourses of John where Jesus lays out the demands of the Kingdom of God and the charity which is its founding principle. If patriotism is essential to God’s kingdom then Jesus does not belong to it. That might be just what some of his contemporaries thought and by contemporaries I mean the people who killed him. Zealots and others interpreted messianic hopes in terms of a worldly kingdom, a nation in the exact sense that Chris

  The thought has occurred to me in pessimistic moments that there are only so many stories and only so many basic ideas. This would mean we have had all the ideas we are going to have and have set the basic patterns for every story we are going to tell. Consider time: we can think of time as a turning wheel or as an arrow in flight. Two inventions alone determine how we think of one of the most fundamental ideas we possess! I don’t say this happily. No one would be as thrilled as I if a new tale were told or if someone had a genuinely novel thought. Unfortunately I don’t see it happening. Consider the Biblically themed ‘Jericho March’ transpiring in Washington. This is a Hebrew story that embodies the eschatological hope of certain Christians. This hope is embodied in the release of a Norse Kraken. This image, though, is taken (I kid you not!) from the remake of Clash of the Titans ! The hopes of Trumpists are now pinned on a mélange of the Christ myth and the story of Perseus and A

  Lately I have been listening to lunatic preachers. To be exact though, lunatic is the wrong word. The preachers I have been listening to, like the lady who ululates like a desert war-lord, may well be mad but that is irrelevant to their preaching or to our reaction to it. This is because their behavior is culturally coded. Flair and theatricality are part and parcel of American religion. This has zero to do with sincerity or insincerity either. They may, for all I know, be insincere to the core but the supposed distinction between sincerity and faking it is a false one as Oscar Wilde pointed out long ago. Their sincerest thoughts may well be braided with grandiosity and gaudy display as a style . In this sense I judge You Tube preachers no differently than I do a Cardi B  video. Thus, I must apologize to people like David Pakman who think children should not be exposed to fundamentalist preaching on the grounds that the spectacle of mental illness would distress them. I have a liter