Hey Joel

[Totenkopf]

Luther was a rightist, a crony of the German aristocrats, a conservative, in favor of the executions of pagans and non-xtians. He makes Dick Cheney seem like a sunday school teacher. Preachers--or priests---or gurus---or rabbis-- don't do jack for anyone.

[joel]

On the contrary, all those preachers, priests and rabbis, gurus calling for the blood of faithless infidels...it seems they jack a lot of people up.

[Totenkopf]

That ain't the point.

Religious charity, while perhaps helpful to some destitute people, does little or nothing to solve economic and social problems. Preachers and clergymen are generally skilled rhetoricians, nothing more. Ghost Salesmen. Ghosts don't fill bellies. Some do-gooder preacher would help Les Miz much more by providing them with some good tips on how to rob millionaires, commit welfare fraud, ID theft, graft etc.

[stilltrucking]

(and life on an American plantation was often quite preferable to what a captured slave might have faced in Africa).

I guess you were making a little joke. You could not possibly be serious.

[joel]

Isn't that why people cling to Mother Teresa so dearly? Especially as it turns out she felt the emptiness of religious faith for so long, but through it all had no scruples about taking shady money to bring creature comfort to dying people?

I dunno... I can't speak for others' motivations.

[Totenkopf]

Isn't that why people cling to Mother Teresa so dearly? Especially as it turns out she felt the emptiness of religious faith for so long, but through it all had no scruples about taking shady money to bring creature comfort to dying people?

Did you see any defense of catholicism on my part, in this thread, or others? Hell no. They are mostly frauds as well. Read some of Hitchens' writing on catholic corruption, the supposed "miracles," and the controversy surrounding M.T. (google it) for some insight into that. However, I think the Heartland of America is far more protestant than catholic, and that the protestant "code" of "Onward Xtian Soldiers" results in at least as much damage as the catholic spook religion.

[e_dog]

Charity is simply the feelgood side of a rotten capitalyst systeme. Relgion isn't aboutsavin' souls but about killin' bodies.

Dick Cheney's crazier than Luthr, tho. Did Luther contemplate holy wars in MidEast?

[joel]

The Ottomans were advancing on German lands back in the early 1500s. They made it to Vienna and kicked major booty in Hungary--where Lutheranism had been taking strong root.

On the one hand, Luther went against conventional European wisdom and admitted that Muslims were actual human beings against whom rape and wanton murder commited by Christians still had to be considered sins. On the other hand, he whole-hearted supported any-and-all military measures to kick "Mohammedan" ass.

For Luther, Islam wasn't just an Abrahamic religion--it was a variant Christian heresy built on a denial of Jesus' divinity. Therefore, Islam wasn't just wrong in his eyes, it was a perversion of true Christian faith.

If Luther were alive today, he and Ahmedinijad (sp?) would probably make good polemical sparring buddies....

[hester_prynne]

Luther, the saints, swedenborg, (the religion I was born into), aren't they all just people who for some reason acquired audiences and let it go to their heads?

Believe me, as a Jazz singer with many gigs under her belt, an audience can give one big, and irrational ideas about having a "specialness." Audiences, if they like you enough, can make you fancy yourself as something you really aren't, if you aren't careful.

I would much prefer going to an event where no one spoke, where everyone just attended to do loving things for an hour, where it was about connecting with love, and expressing it, however it came out of you.
We are so out of touch with loving......

H

[Doreen Peri]

Believe me, as a Jazz singer with many gigs under her belt, an audience can give one big, and irrational ideas about having a "specialness." Audiences, if they like you enough, can make you fancy yourself as something you really aren't, if you aren't careful.

That's what's happened to Bush. (except it's all in his head that there are a lot of people who like him.)

hest, that's a very important truth you've just posted.

[stilltrucking]

Hey Joel {link not working yet}

A long and tedious section of Brown's book is devoted to "Studies in Anality" (179-304), linking the sublime to the base, money to feces, the Protestant Lutheran Devil to the body and death, and generally strengthens the claim that sublimation involves negation of the body. Worship of money is sublimated anality. And main's fascination with excrement (evidenced by the extent of anality) is really fascination with death (295). By denying the death aspect of life, we dialectically affirm it and our subconscious morbidity comes out in our cultural emphasizes on order, cleanliness, and money. Analytic is the result of maladjustment to have a body and a denial of one's ultimately organic nature.

Brown's "solution" to man's problem is "the resurrection of the body" (Chapter XXVI) as the seat of the natural body-ego (for Freud, "the mental projection of the surface o the body" (159) – symbolic-sensual activity that does not separate itself as a self from the body). Sublimation must end in the "dominion of death-in-life" and so does not offer us a solution. "The way out" is an alternative suggested by the distinction between Apollo and Dionysius (Chapter XII). Apollo is "the god of sublimation;" Apollonian form is "form as the negation of instinct"(174). And so we see that sublimation and civilization go back to the Greeks. The alternative is simply to deny or negate, but to affirm the reality of the unity of life and death (175). But as self is a self-separated symbolic construct, Dionysian consciousness is "drunken" unselfconsciousness in which the Apollonian ego (or soul-fantasy) ahs been dissolved. We must assume that symbolization, which is useful and perhaps necessary, is still possible when needed; but this does not necessitate a self-symbol, or at any rate a neurotic identification with one. I myself find this rather mystical solution to be completely satisfying logically, though it is a difficult one to achieve in actuality.



http://alangullette.com/essays/index.html

I don't know what all he is talking about makes much sense just some stuff the guy wrote while an undergraduate.

The Brown he is talking about is N. O. Brown he wrote a book called Life Against Death. It was the text book for one of the honor programs in the psych department at that cow college I went to.

The section on Anality was mostly from his reading of Swift.
The rest was freud.

I have been reading and rereading the book for 35 years