Mummery
St. Michael, patron saint ofairborne, grocers, paratroopers
(but not "airborne grocers")
Get thee to a nunnery.
Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?
--Hamlet (III, i)
Sister Green came to me for my love recipe,
Said she'd heard about my miracle plan,
Sister Green is now okay,
Takes a treatment everyday,
From the Hi-De-Ho Miracle Man!
--Miracle Man, Cab Calloway
_______________
I searched for a patron st. of marriage, and could only find one for "unhappy marriages" (St. Rita of Cascia). That says all you need to know about the church's position on joy.
While the world falls down around our ears, some brilliant Floridians are thinking hard and voting on the issue of just what constitutes "marriage". Wisely, they decided not to let Governor Charlie Christ decide the matter for them. Seems fair enough of a question, as Ranger has struggled with the topic on more than one occasion.
In Catholicism, nuns are wedded to Jesus. They even wear gold rings to symbolize their holy vows. Marriage is, after all, a consecration. Well, if one man + one woman = a marriage, the Catholic church is in violation of this dogma big time.
Or maybe Jesus is a Mormon?
It gets even more complicated, as Ranger saw a Catholic priest today wearing a wedding ring. This is the other coast, mind you. Really more like a swamp. So WWJD?
Let us not even contemplate the Immaculate Conception, which would allow a pass to girls like Ms. Palin's daughter. Maybe that is the true lesson here, to wit: it is o.k. to be promiscuous, as long as it is with a deity.
You can see why Ranger had trouble with catechism.
--Jim and Lisa
Labels: church hypocrisy, florida amendment 2, floridians vote on marriage
posted by rangeragainstwar at 8:43 PM
19 Comments:
Loved this post!
Glad you liked it. People take their myths a little too seriously, eh?
St Joseph - Although not given the official title of patron saint of 'marriage', his position as protector of hearth and home has made him the patron of marriage in the hearts and minds of many of us cafeteria Catholics here in America.
Glad to see I was not the only one kicked out of catechism.
PS -Glad to hear that you paras venerate St Mike. But he is also the patron saint of chivalry, of police officers and of all soldiers (not just paratroopers). He has also been described as God's field commander.
Well said, Lisa. Thanks for putting it so well - and for a bit of snark.
Yeah...marriage as defined by a bunch of celibate men. Mmmmm...not so much.
I've always wondered - what the hell do our governments, by law above the clatter of dogmas, have to do with certifying or decertifying who gets married to whom. Consent? No problem regulating that. Beyond that...hey, you find a pyromancer who'll mary you to your three best friends? Knock yourself out, pal. Multnomah County will get you to sign a document certifying that the four of you are a "domestic partnership" so you can get sued when your wife #3 embezzles the church collection plate.
Legal partnerships? State business.
"Marriage"? Church business.
United States? Seperation of church and state.
So if I were dictator of Oregon, I'd:
1. Get the state out of the marriage business entirely. You show up at the courthouse to register as a domestic partnership. Purely civil deal. Get yer effing "marriage license" outta my face, I don't give a shit what some rabbi did to you.
Ground rules: No minors (no consent); no pets (also no consent). Closer than 1st cousins? Gotta show proof of medical sterility (no inbreeding). Need to prove that any prior domestic contract has been legally dissolved (no whatever-you-want-to-call "bigamy" i.e. false contract).
2. Decree that marriage can be whatever your religion tells you it is. Dealer's choice, my friend. Polygamy? Work it out. Polyandry? Sharing is caring, dude. Gays, lesbians, Republicans...do it to it, gang.
Bye. There is no reason to WASTE MY FUCKING TIME AND MONEY dragging my tax dollars into it.
Much as I appreciate the fact that it prompted a delightful post from you, Lisa, this whole issue gets on my wick. Friggin' people need to get a life and quit worrying about someone else's life.
Chief,
I couldn't agree with you more. Make it a civil ceremony, have the contractual rules met; what goes on with your church dogma is your own business.
Ah, Chief, I have such a small question: Why are people so crazy and stupid? How can waste their time and energy on such petty issues?
We should rejoice if a same-sex couple chooses to commit, for their union, if they do not intend to adopt (another good for society), is truly one of choice, and will not contribute to overpopulation. They are not doing it because one has been knocked up by the other, or some other. Why is that scenario more "acceptable"?
Their bible, like our Constitution, ought to have amendments to bring it up to date with environmental realities. Go forth and multiply is no longer such a great idea. We've already got enough Christians, thanks, and everyone else for that matter.
Surely the people so vociferously against the marriage bill have heard Charlie Rich's Behind Closed Doors, and should know it's none of their business.
Couples invest in their homes and their neighborhoods. It is a societal asset to allow people to declare their status as a couple. To disallow or force any legal bond seems primitive in our society, or it should be. It should disgust any civil person of sympathy to deny the right of marriage to two consenting adults.
(As you note, animal marriages are trayf. Since porcine falls under this category, there may be some annulments here in the Deep South, but it is all to the good.)
Mike,
Thank you for adding St. Michael's other purviews. I am often amused by the combinations of clientele served. "St. Insomnia: patron saint of toothpick holder collectors, people who occasional dye their hair orange and are interminably boring cocktail party guests."
mike,
My middle initial is M.-not milhous but michael. good catholic boy. jim
The temples of the gods will fall down in the end, and with them go the superstition of scared little men...in the meantime, I intend to give them a sharp stick in the eye. No government or religion will ever stop me from loving. I don't need their sanction or their certificates. They said it was fine for me to kill a man in the name of god and country...but I'd better not try to marry another one. Well, fuck them.
Peace and joy be upon you, Lisa and James Michael. Loving you both for love's sake...Dale
Right-on, dear friend, Dale. It is pure futility and insanity to attempt to legislate such matters, and very petty and mean. Only frightened little people would concern themselves with such matters.
"the immaculate conception was not the conception of jesus, but the conception of his mother, the virgin mary, who according to christians was conceived without sin. The conception of jesus without sin by the holy spirit would be illogical if his human mother had been born in original sin."
Here's where I flunked out of CCD. I remember vividly the sister explaining "original sin" and how that meant we were all born sinners and doomed to purgatory if we died at birth without Extreme Unction or before baptism.
I didn't get it. How could a tiny, just-born baby have "sinned"? How could a loving, caring God condemn a baby for something some lost-in-the-distant-past-Bible-guy did? IT seemed gratuitously cruel, the sort of petty, mean, shitty thing that the mean kids in school would have done.
Sister (who, admittedly, was probably herself pretty much a basket case trying to adjust to the changes in the Church since Vatican 2 - note the Purgatory thing, which the Church had officially abandoned by 1968) wasn't able to do any better than "well, that's just how it is."
Even at 11 I could call bullshit on THAT.
It went downhill from there.
So my fundamental position on religion is that I can leave it alone, but I understand that others enjoy it and generally I'm fine with that. My feeling about faith is it's like hair care products; many people use them and get pleasure fiddling with them. Taken in reasonable amounts it's harmless and probably even beneficial to the users. But it needs to stay in the shower. It can be toxic for small children, and when taken by those with serious emotional or mental problems - look out. I think Mark Twain said that the first thing a religion does, if it's the genuine article, is kill someone.
It's kind of too bad that social conservatives have managed to corral Jesus politically in the US. The ol' carpenter had some beautiful ideas, ideas that could, if they were honestly applied, make the world a less cruel, less arbitary place. To reduce the message of the Gospels into "God hates fags" is possibly the most ingenious and nastiest bit of business to come out of American politics since Prohibition.
Chief,
Wow -- so, Mary was conceived w/o "sin" (ahem!), and then Jesus, too?
So that lineage was kind of like parthenogenesis in Komodo Dragons, or something? Amazing. God, just thinking about this makes me wonder what it must be like to be male and born with an "organ of sin," I mean, not like a Wurlitzer or theramin, y'know.
I like your analogizing of religion to hair care products. Or like it says on the side of my toothpaste tube: "Don't swallow more than a pea-sized amount."
A nefarious bit of business "reduc(ing) the message of the Gospels into "God hates fags." Sickening, actually. What a perversion of the imperative to love.
I have always felt that, though the dogma itself may be lovely, humans are not, and will find a way to cleave off into scapegoating groups. It seems to be the human imperative to do the "Superior dance."
it's obvious that you are simply splitting hairs on this issue Ranger and Lisa...... these people know what is best for us all..... once we accept that, things are lot easier..... berlin.....
fdchief:
you described perfectly the approach that they use in the netherlands, and throughout most of scandanevia.
civil union = state business
marriage = church of your own choice
it's clean, and simple. the fundies however, are obsessed with blurring as many lines as they can.
one of my standard rants is when i hear motherfuckers spout that old "no atheists in the foxholes" bullshit. i tell them that that was the sure and certain foundation of my own lack of belief. when i saw that horrific carnage and senseless destruction i told myself: "if this is the perfect plan of a god, then that god is not worthy of worship or praise and will not get any of mine."
i always liked st. george, and most of the other saints that never really existed.
once, to thank them for some highly accurate and most certainly timely artillery cover we bought st. andrew's medals for a firebase crew. back when the big guns were one of the more dangerous jobs on the battlefield they took st. andrew for their patron.
the skill and accuracy of the american gunners saved my bacon more than once. for those guys, i'll pray with them to whatever or whomever they want.
ghost dansing,
[snicker ;)]
MB: St. Barbara has traditionally been the patron of cannoncockers (because she was supposed to have had something to do with explosions, I think). Her Wiki entry reads, in part:
"She was carefully guarded by her father who kept her shut up in a tower in order to preserve her from the outside world. Having secretly become a Christian, she rejected an offer of marriage that she received through him.
She acknowledged herself to be a Christian; upon this she was ill-treated by her father and dragged before the prefect of the province, Martinianus, who had her cruelly tortured and finally condemned her to death by beheading. The father himself carried out the death-sentence, but in punishment for this he was struck by lightning on the way home and his body consumed."
Sweet!
I especially like the part about being walled up in the tower. Between Daddy and God there was no chance this poor girl was ever going to be anything but a virgin martyr. Yikes.
Anyway, given the probably fictitious nature of most of the saits, Andrew is probably just as good as Barb for rubbing in hopes that the projos don't cook off in the tube...
And speaking of atheists in foxholes, the only expression of religious sentiment I remember occurring outside of organized chaplain services was right after one of my cannons fired the illumination part of a coordinated 'lume only the ammo handler cut the fuze for 1.7 seconds rather than 17 seconds.
It was always referred to later on as "Illumination Junior" after the technique discussed here: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/6-50/Appi.htm
My RTO was looking out through the cammie net when the thing went off about 400 meters out of the muzzle.
"HOLYFUCKINGBABYJESUSONASTICK!!!!"
Chief,
1.7 secs -- god that sounds scary.
As for the Electra Complex with Barbara, so many of the saints seemed to suffer a similar fate. St. Dymphna, for one, patroness of insanity and dementia (duh). But there was one whose name I forget now, whose tale was brilliant: her father gave her over to a nobleman whom she refused to marry (as she'd already wed Jesus), who kept her enslaved, with occasional releases in order to be throttled (so as to hopefully alter her position on the matter.)
Alas, arrows would fly back at the archers, flayings would heal overnight. Beheading was all that was left. Beatification awaited.
It's always a great pleasure to come here and find people who articulate their sensible ideas so well and write so clearly. Thank you!
Here in Minnesota we are subject to the insane ranting of Michelle freaking Bachmann. I happen to work with a friend of hers and some of the things she comes out with are either hilarious or terrifying, depending on my mood.
Lisa: Strange, strange sexual elements in these early Christian saint stories. Really makes you wonder how many of the elders of the early Church had happy, loving sex with someone? 'Cause if I didn't know any better I'd suspect that their outlook on the subject was pretty tangled up...
Chief,
I think the stories demonstrate a great deal of repression, projection and a litany of Freudian ills. I see a correlation with some of the sexually violent Manga: an outwardly polite society vent's its frustration on paper. And some pretty perverse stuff it all is.
The stories of the Saints often speak of their "ecstasies" during meditations, and it reads like orgasms to me. Even today, the only "happy" deeply pious Christians I know are a few older "widow women," and I shan't go into why that might be.
I used to listen the the FAMU Gospel Hour when I first moved up here -- something to entertain me on the way to ungodly early classes. I will always remember the ebulliant rendition of "Jesus is my Miracle Man."
Hi-de-hi-de-ho.
Post a Comment
<< Home