Sunday 11 November 2012

Daffy doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

It’s the gyneconomy, tonto.

In the end, the only thing Mitt Romney had going for him is that he was named after an item of baseball equipment.  And still he dropped the ball.

Evangelical pundits declared that Hurricane Sandy was God’s judgement on Obama’s liberalism/socialism. Then they declared that the storm helped win the election for Obama. As Cowper’s great hymn puts it:
Morons moves in mysterious ways
Their wonders to perform;
They plant their footsteps in the sea
And ride upon the – er, storm.
Hurricane Sandy was not God’s judgement on America, rather the gaggle of blowhards who declared that Hurricane Sandy was God’s judgement on America is God’s judgement on America.

For a quintessential oxymoron, “successful church” ranks right up there with “smartphone”.

Ours an age of individualism? More like branded bipedalism.

I’ve never written a sermon in my life. Hundreds of manuscripts – but no sermons.

The best cure I know for a Sunday morning hangover is having to preach at 11:00.

Sure, you can prepare for the event of revelation with a rigorous askesis. Like a swimmer can prepare for an encounter with a shark by doing laps.

The gay lobby in the UK has just unleashed its secret weapon. It is called George Carey.

There are only two books – the Good Book and the Bad Book (“I have written a wicked book”).  Your salvation is in doubt if you do not know the latter.

If Jesus were married, surely there would be evidence for it at Nag, Nag, Nag Hammadi.  Not to mention a scroll or ten of mother-in-law jokes.

The cover-to-cover coverage of the uncoverage of the Duchess of Kent? A storm in a 30C cup.

Warner Sallman’s uber-popular Head of Christ, with its “radiant, incandescent glow” – it’s a crappy white man’s worship-song in paint, isn’t it?  Game to Feuerbach.

What, in a word, is Jesus Christ to the principalities and powers? Kryptonite.

Rarum bellum jus in terris nigroque simillima cygno (to riff on Juvenal).

Look at Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. (And remember Grenada, the war to end the Vietnam “syndrome”?)  “Just war” turns out to be, er, just war.

Christian pacifism would be unintelligible without the resurrection of Jesus.  Conversely, the resurrection of Jesus would be unintelligible without Christian pacifists.

Alas, it is not always true that faith without works is dead. All too often it’s a zombie.

In the city centre of Swansea a man stands brandishing a Bible and shouting, “We want to make hell as empty as possible!” Not with that tone of voice, he doesn’t.

In my experience, there is only one kind of Christian more unbiblical than a liberal – a conservative evangelical.

Should there be an age of consent for becoming a Christian? Absolutely. No one should be allowed to commit to Christ before they have gotten laid, to exclude the confusion of faith with heightened adrenal hormone activity.

Dawkins is correct that religious people are bewitched by self-deceit. His error is his failure to universalise the observation. It is this half-truth that makes him a half-wit.

Who is the greatest contemporary writer of science fiction? Probably Richard Dawkins – he’s a more elegant stylist than Dennett or Pinker. Alternatively, you might call the New Atheism a non-fictional form of magical realism.

If Jesus played baseball, what would his batting average be? 1.000? No, .000. For with the bases empty, he would always draw an intentional walk; and with men on base, he would always lay down a sacrifice bunt.

“At the still point of the turning world…
… at the still point, there the dance is.” 
—T.S. Eliot, in “Burnt Norton” (Four Quartets) – on the shortstop. (cf. Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding, 2011)

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