Friday, July 23, 2010

Calvin and Baillie Circus

It appears that the Anglicans and Roman Catholics have nothing on the Presbyterians when it comes to liturgical ridiculity, paganism...and most important of all, liturgical puppets. And this isn't from some backwater church or a gathering of the church's Green gay-friendly feminist faction. This is from the opening ceremony of their General Assembly:
Perhaps YouTube commenter Throbert McGee said it all on this one:
"Pretty cool video, except it cuts off before the gory climax where they pour live bees on Nicholas Cage's face and then set him on fire... "
Lots of highlights in this one...the swirling "liturgical dance" straight out of the seventies, the giant Idol God with the mutant arms, the guy with a red T-shirt symbolizing nothing in particular tiredly waving his pennant, the skunks (Presbyterianism's answer to incense?), the embarrased looking adults leaders looking like delegates at some 4th-rate international conference, the dazed and imbecilic expressions on the faces of the kids....
Even beyond the offensive paganism of the display, I am impressed by its pure stupidity: can there be even one person with a triple-digit IQ, even one person of any aesthetic sense, who can find this, taken seriously, as anything but an abomination. Modern Liberal protestantism, despite its egotistical claims to be so much smarter than those snake-handling fundamentalists, is a stupid religion, pure and symbol, and does not appeal to intelligent people, as you can determine for yourself by reading anything written by its leaders.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Burke on Preachers and Politics

Preachers who talk about politics know less about the subject that they do about the subjects in which they were trained. Their uninformed opinionating on the subject can only make you wonder why you should trust what they say about God when they are willing to discourse from the same pulpit about matters about which they know little.

Edmund Burke puts it in 18th-century style:
...politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement....The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite.


(Reflections on the Revolution in France, Library of Liberal Arts edition, at 13)