Ecclesiastical Concerns

Fortuitous it may be, but I can empathize with Tarek Mehanna, although the Islamic faith is equivalent on my dung list along with the Church of Latter Day Saints. My disdain doesn't preclude an understanding of how a psyche can be drawn to radicalization and zealotry. If I woke up tomorrow cured of cerebral palsy, I'd leave the United States as a sheer act of equal opportunity hatred. And I mean clean, clear unbridled hate for it all, the millions trapped in public housing vectors, as I am, the elitism and disconnect of Romney, the pussy willow progressivism of Obama, with his bipolar inability to lower the temperature of Bush era paranoia, disability/LBGT activism and the African American seeming inability to see the end of history with the civil rights movement. Yet, terrorist acts, even when successful, or just, according to the beholder, simply carry too many costs, and I suspect this is the case even for Al Qaida jihadists at the end of the day. The scars of mass murder become unspeakable.

I may yet lose my mind, I don't know. I visualize my fault lines which may ultimately decelerate me into an old woman's delusional vat of aggression, forcibly constrained, but if it happens, its causation is a life of too much trauma and victimizing in the first place, leaving me in a rut of circumstances closing in on me, and from this vantage point, fanaticism's entry points are not strange, or alien. Violence is not kindled in vacuums.

Films like Bringing Out the Dead do not reinforce my conviction for an anthropomorphic god. I part company with Martin in terms of faith and belief, http://tinyurl.com/7r24z75, but rather, what he does here that works is the retention of elemental mystery about the human animal's self-awareness, the very process of an ontology. Steve Martin's 1992 Leap of Faith does the same thing in a less ambiguous fashion, suggesting that hucksterism can achieve positive social cohesion and resolution. It might have been a more complex testament if its climax did not lower its expectations to cater to Midwestern self-reliance, but it still represents an interesting examination of religious cynicism. More details may come in later posts.