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g the whole point seems to be that we should know that this world will pass away but we aren t supposed to know when i think it s a mistake to focus excessively on the coming of the end times but it s also a mistake to ignore the fact that the world will end some day and could end at any moment my impression is that most mainline christians don t really keep the transitory nature of the world in mind although they may recite in church that he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end they forget about it as soon as the service is over this isn t surprising when you re traveling first class you re not as anxious for the voyage to end as are those folks down in steerage christianity began among people whose lives were pretty rotten when you told them that the world they knew would pass away they took it as a promise not as a threat we comfortable middle class american christians most of us anyway aren t in that big of a hurry for our world to pass away i know that if it were up to me a couple of decades from now i d do everything possible to prevent apophis from wiping us all out but there are several reasons why we should remember that our world could end at any time and will end sometime and ultimately there s nothing we can do about it first it s true and it s always a good idea to remember the truth second remembering that this world won t last forever may help us to keep a sense of perspective about the importance of our own little affairs third we are promised that what comes after this world will be far better and we have that to look forward to here s how i think about this i went to ymca summer camp when i was a kid and from time to time we d get to take trips away from camp to hike or canoe somewhere we traveled in the back of a big open truck twenty or so boys sitting on wooden benches of course they d never allow anyone to travel this way today but this was the 1950 s as we drove along we sang camp songs as loud as we could green grow the rushes ho home home on the range big rock candy mountain we called out to the pretty girls as we drove through the towns we had a grand old time for awhile i would enjoy the trip so much i thought i didn t want it to end but that feeling didn t last because i knew that when the trip ended we d be canoeing on lake george or the connecticut river or hiking on mount monadnock or whatever and that was going to be even better than the trip posted by the godfather at 1 27 pm no comments saturday february 5 2011 father cutié s dilemma by eric von salzen shortly before we moved out of south florida a year and a half ago a big ecclesiastical scandal broke in the local press a popular roman catholic priest father albert cutié was caught by paparazzi necking on the beach with a young woman the son of exiles from castro s cuba father cutié was a well known figure in the spanish speaking community not only in south florida but throughout latin america as the host of religious themed radio and tv programs he was popular enough to have earned the nickname father oprah his celebrity made his transgression a public event his name didn t help although pronounced koo tea eh it was hard to resist calling him father cutie in short order the bishop of miami suspended cutié from his priestly and other duties and stopped his salary and benefits the episcopal bishop of southeast florida leo frade himself a native of cuba extended an invitation to cutié to continue his priestly vocation in the episcopal church and cutié accepted he was received as an episcopal priest and has been put in charge of a small parish in miami father cutié married the woman in the beach photos and they have recently had a child i have seen reports that he is soon to have his own tv show again this time on fox father cutié has now written a book about his experiences dilemma a priest s struggle with faith and love it is well worth reading for its depiction of one individual priest s experiences in the modern roman catholic church when i first read the news accounts about father cutié being caught with a woman and then about the speculation that he might join the episcopal church my reaction was that it would have been better if father cutié had changed churches on his own initiative instead of being forced to do so after he was caught in a compromising position his book helped me see this part of father cutié s dilemma from his own perspective by the time he was caught by the paparazzi father cutié was already deeply concerned about flaws in what he calls the ideology of the roman catholic church and he had been exploring the episcopal church as an institution that might be better suited to his views on religious matters as they had evolved since his ordination but he found it very hard to make the decision to leave the roman catholic church in which he had grown up and to which he had devoted his entire adult life i found this part of his story quite convincing for me the best parts of this book are father s cutié s stories about his experiences of the roman catholic church from the inside and his growing discomfort with certain aspects of the church never having been a roman catholic myself and certainly never having been a roman catholic priest i can t attest to whether what happened to father cutié was typical or aberrational but as one man s story it is compelling reading he describes living in a world in which priests are isolated from their supposed spiritual leaders and from each other a world in which violations of the vow of celibacy are commonplace but are tolerated so long as outsiders remain ignorant of them in which those who run the organization care about their own power more than anything spiritual this part of his story would make a good novel i m thinking more of a marquand or maugham novel than of sinclair lewis the last third of the book goes over these same issues but no longer as part of a biography rather we are given father cutié s critique of the roman catholic church today the chapter names are enough to give you the flavor of his thoughts the myth of celibacy disposable priests the church that time forgot to me this part of the book was not as interesting as the biographical part i guess because i don t really care much about what s wrong with a church to which i do not belong the people that ought to read these things are the roman catholic hierarchy but somehow i doubt that many of them will find father cutié a credible critic however any anglican that yearns for more centralized control in our communion who wants the archbishop of canterbury to become an anglican pope who proposes to give enforcement powers to the instruments of unity ought to read this book posted by the godfather at 8 21 am 3 comments thursday january 27 2011 dreamt of in your philosophy by eric von salzen i recently saw a story about keith parsons a college professor who announced that he will no longer teach his course on the philosophy of religion because he cannot take arguments in favor of theism seriously any more boy was this a shock i had no idea that there was such a thing as philosophy of religion or that you could actually get paid to teach it ok ok i m being facetious i have great respect for philosophy and for religion too or at least for some religions i took a whole course in philosophy my freshman year of college phil i plato aristotle and lucretius what i most remember is how plato wrote his socratic dialogues so that socrates always won the argument i don t mean just that we the reader ended up being persuaded even the guy socrates was arguing with ended up agreeing with him as you read along you came to a point where socrates would say alcibiades or whoever was socrates s victim in that particular dialogue don t you agree that and as the reader i wanted to call out to poor alcibiades no no it s a trick question don t agree with him but feckless alcibiades would agree and then sure enough a few pages later socrates would show that if you accepted that assertion you logically had to agree with socrates s conclusion so old alcibiades would sigh and agree that socrates was right yes socrates of course you re right how could it be otherwise this became a standing joke for a while in my crowd whenever some classmate would go overboard pontificating about something or other and believe me harvard freshmen pontificated a lot probably still do someone would say yes socrates of course you re right how could it be otherwise it didn t shut the pontificator up for long but even a few minutes were a gift so i found that philosophy could be useful later much later when i began to discover what my religion was all about i started to read or read about philosophers who dealt with religious issues or theologians who dealt with philosophical issues barth buber william james kierkegaard leibniz tillich etc so when i discovered from the article i just mentioned that there was an academic discipline called philosophy of religion i thought it would involve in depth consideration of the kinds of issues that these philosophers raised fear and loathing revisited i and thou in the 21st century terrific but i found it was not so according to the article about professor parson s resignation much of philosophy of religion consists in working out the logical implications of arguments such as the argument from evil and what is that argument it s the old chestnut about whether the existence of evil in the world proves that there cannot be a loving and omnipotent god please don t get me wrong i don t for a moment mean to minimize the agony of the person who cries from the heart how can a loving god permit this terrible thing to happen my child to die my home to be destroyed by a hurricane or whatever tragedy it is there is evil in the world and it does challenge our faith but the argument from evil is not a cri de coeur by someone whose faith is being challenged it s an intellectual exercise by philosophers who like to play games with ideas the article tells us in the 1970 s several leading philosophers of religion broke the argument from evil down into a logical version that any amount of evil is logically incompatible with such a god which most philosophers consider defeated and an evidential version that certain amounts or types of evil we observe in our world are evidence against such a god which remains a thorny problem this seems like a waste of intellect do these philosophers ask themselves whether perhaps god could have a different definition of or perspective on evil than they do have they considered genesis 1 3 and tried to understand how a religious tradition reconciles the reality of evil in the world with the existence of a loving god have they even read and attempted to understand fear and loathing these are rhetorical questions perhaps the philosophers of religion have considered all these things and satisfied themselves that their own approach is right but i doubt it we are told in this article that 73 of philosophers are atheists and i suspect that even those who are believers in their hearts know whose game they have to play i find this all depressing it s like learning that your professor of music is tone deaf there may be certain things that you can learn from such a teacher but it can only go so far i was thinking about this stuff the other day when i saw that turner classic movies was showing glory on martin luther king day i ve seen this great movie two or three times before and it is painful each time but worth the pain it tells the story of a regiment of black soldiers recruited by the union in the civil war near the end of the movie the night before the great battle in which most of them will die the soldiers gather around the camp fires and sing hymns pray and testify their faith in god gives them the ability to face the coming day i don t have words that can evoke what i felt when i saw that scene you can see most of the scene here this scene says more about the christian religion than any philosophical exercise can do our faith is a peculiar mixture of heart and head emotion and intellect on the one hand it has a mystical power that seems to plumb depths far more profound than mere intellect can reach on the other hand it is not a blind and foolish tooth fairy faith it depends on a confident knowledge of the fact that god so loved this real material world and us its real material inhabitants that he sent his only begotten son so that we could have eternal life isn t that more important that any philosopher s word games posted by the godfather at 9 24 am 2 comments wednesday january 5 2011 for we have seen his star in the east by eric von salzen some call it little christmas or twelfth night or epiphany the end of the christmas season traditionally it s the time when the three kings visited the christ child everyone who reads this blog probably knows that scripture doesn t call them kings doesn t even say there were three of them matthew s gospel the only one that mentions them says that wise men magi from the east came looking for the new born king of the jews the notes in the new oxford annotated bible say that the magi were a learned class in ancient persia and that they might be called astrologers the wise men told king herod that they had seen a star that signified the birth of a new king of the jews it s uncertain what the star might have been some have suggested that it might have been a comet or a nova or supernova i recently read that the star may have been the planet jupiter which passed close to the bright star regulus three times between september of 3 bce and may of 2 bce and for about three months during that period moved in a westerly retrograde direction i e toward judea from the perspective of observers in persia in june of 2 bce jupiter and venus the two brightest planets overlapped to appear as a single object astrologers might well have interpreted this unusual conjunction of stars as a sign of a portentous event if that s the correct explanation it solves one puzzle in matthew s gospel why nobody other than the wise men seems to have seen the star when the magi come to king herod s court with their story about the star this was apparently the first time that anyone there had heard about the phenomenon in fact herod asks the wise men when the star first appeared if the star was a comet everyone would have noticed it even a nova or supernova would have been widely remarked certainly by herod s chief priests and scribes by the way a 10 year old canadian girl recently became the youngest person to discover a supernova but an unusual conjunction of jupiter regulus and venus might have been noticed only by astrologers in most of the christmas pageants i ve seen or been in as i wrote here a couple of years ago you have mary and joseph and the babe the three kings and the star and shepherds their sheep and the angels who brought the tidings of ...