Steven Parmenius

  “You” a very progressive person once told me “are not a progressive”! I suppose this is true if by progressive one means someone who has a grasp on the shape of the future and is busily working to bring it into existence. I don’t have any grasp on the future though if I were to guess I would say that following the convulsions we are likely to go through our social attitudes and practices will almost certainly be radically transformed. This is as likely to be ‘regress’ as anything else. We may become, in some ways, harder, crueler and more intolerant (than we are even now!) as we focus more and more on the basics of subsistence. We might, at the same time, become more generous and community minded towards those in the in-group yet correspondingly more suspicious and resentful of the outsider. Neo-liberal precarity gives us a glimpse of this in the resentful populist and I can’t see general breakdown producing anything but an intensification of this spirit. As scientific and educ...

  Among the people who despise Islam and its prophet perhaps no one does so as heartily as the Evangelical Christian. What then of Jenny who recounts for us her conversion, as an adult, from evangelical Christianity to Islam? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iiEDH8-upQ) This raises interesting issues broached in my last post and which I will expand on here. Firstly, Jenny shakes and is nearly in tears as she recounts her story and I can only imagine the courage it took to leave her childhood faith AND on top of that to leave it for the most hated ‘other’. I am sure many in her family would have been happier had she become a Catholic or even an atheist. They would even have been happier, I suspect, had she become a heroin addict and a prostitute. In fact, I think in her case becoming a Muslim might be a close second only to being a lesbian. Her reasons, though, shed light on the very thing I was talking about in my post about Melissa concerning the way sacred texts stand forth...

    Melissa is the anti-Kelly Marie. For one thing she has a last name she is confident enough to share: Dougherty. For another she is a rational apologist. This seems to be a whole other genre of You Tube preaching. One might say it is ‘facts and logic’ for evangelical Christians. Turning from Kelly Marie to Melissa one senses immediate relief for HERE is a person with whom one COULD converse at least in principle. This is because Melissa has not grunts and growls and movements of the spirit but principles and arguments. For reasons I will get into below I do not think they are adequate principles or persuasive arguments but that is only a relative difference for she and I are in the sphere of discourse and she might think MY principles and arguments are just as flawed. Melissa though, has a theory of reason: reason is positivity (in the philosophical sense of that term). It is the same theory You Tube atheists have. By this I mean that for Melisa, as for Telltale (say), trut...