i'm thankful because there are 4 playoff baseball games on today and thanksgiving is over for me. i cooked a prime rib roast yesterday and i didn't fuck it up.
yesterday was a beautiful sunny day, possibly the last sunny warm day of the year for us and i took full advantage of it. i sat in the sun, on the old aluminum web lawn chair and read oscar wilde's de profundis for the 3rd time in a month. it's a beautiful piece of literature.
the second half of de profundis is about wilde's perception and relationship with christ, it's the tenderest and most sincere depiction of christ that i've ever come across. that's why i've read it 3 times recently and why i'll probably read it a few more times before the year ends. it fills me with contentment and a tiny bit of humility and has moved me to absorb more of the christian spirit.
i might have the spirit of christ but i didn't just fall off the turnip truck. i realize that the official new testament is a product of the council of nicea and is more of a political compromise than an accurate account of events that may or may not have taken place. in order to fill my thirst for all things christ i turned to the public library and made my selection, the complete idiots guide to the gnostic gospels.
you can call me doubting thomas.
can you not believe in god and still be a christian? me and oscar think it's not just possible, it's the logical thing to do. christians aren't into smiting those that give us pause.
Happy Thanksgiving my friend. Compassion and empathy are not the intellectual property of Christians only. Those are qualities of a civilized man trying to live in an uncivilized world. I admire your effort to be a better man. I have pretty much given up in that regard.
ReplyDeletei think the big question is how many people who consider themselves to be christians are really christains. if i'm a christian, i would be an accidental christain. and only a part time christain.
DeleteI have not read this, but I think I will give it a read. I’m not an organized religion person. Personally I believe in Christ’s teachings. Things get messed up when organized religion gets into it.
ReplyDeleteHappy Thanksgiving! Prime rib is tricky. It’s wonderful that you didn’t screw it up.
Back to the book, I’m glad you’ve found some peace and contentment. There’s much to be thankful in that.
it's not christ, but oscar wilde who has given me a wee bit of contentment. maybe oscar is just the vessel to convey christ's compassion.
Deletehow christ, i'm getting all sappy. better get back to baseball.
If I believed in the christians god I would hate the motherfucker, he is most often just a crutch they use when they are in deep shit and many of them always seem to be in deep shit they can't handle alone, or even shallow shit for that matter. As for jesus, I don't have any use for that little butt fucking cocksucker either.
ReplyDeleteThat is not to say that I don't believe in a god, and mine has great tits.
yer a nasty one mr grinch.
DeleteThe baseball playoffs have been pretty good. I think the media wants a Dodgers-Yankees World Series but I am pulling for the Astros. Billy always is full of wisdom. Please thank him for me, Mr. Rosewater.
ReplyDelete"the second half of de profundis is about wilde's perception and relationship with christ, it's the tenderest and most sincere depiction of christ that i've ever come across."
ReplyDeleteIf you don't believe in God, then, from your perspective, wouldn't it be true that the relationship of which you speak (that is Wilde's relationship with Christ) wasn't a relationship at all but rather the illusion of a relationship? I can well understand why you would appreciate what he wrote about Christ for its tenderness and sincerity, but it would surely be tinged with sadness. I'm sure Wilde benefited from what he believed to be a supremely real relationship with Christ, but, at its heart, I would see it as the equivalent of me imagining that I was having a relationship with, for example, Margaret Deland. You might recall that I have all of her books, most of them signed, along with some of her photos and letters, yet, to my considerable sadness, I can't have a friendship with her because she's dead, so if I started writing about my friendship with Margaret Deland, people would surely suspect that I had found myself in a sad and desperate situation indeed, and that it had led me to turn to the dead for support rather than to the living. My thoughts are very similar to that when I hear people talk about their relationship with Christ. You might recall--from my blog--that Deland lost her "faith." It happened pretty much out of the blue while she was in church in Boston one Sunday listening to her friend preach, her friend being a famous Episcopal priest named Phillips Brooks. She later went to Brooks with her angst over the loss of her faith and asked him how he knew that his religion was true. His answer was, "Because it would be too terrible were it not." I suppose that this very inability to accept the reality of Christ's non-existence constituted the horror that Wilde came up against as he languished in prison and that led him to imagine that he was having a relationship with Jesus.
"can you not believe in god and still be a christian? ...it's the logical thing to do. christians aren't into smiting those that give us pause."
I'm wondering if there might be a word or two missing from the final sentence. In any event, I can't tell what it means. As for being both a Christian and an atheist, I suppose that, for most believers and nonbelievers, belief is less of a 100% yes or a no as it is a point along a continuum. In other words, while one person might feel 80% one way or the other, another person be at 35%/65%. That aside, I would ask you what would be the point of being an atheistic Christian, especially in light of the fact that very few churches would welcome you with respect and affection? Why not instead be, for example, an atheistic Reformed Jew (a group that accepts atheists) or, perhaps, a Buddhist, since theism isn't central to the Buddha's teachings. Christ, on the other hand, hooked all that he was and all that he taught to an unshakable belief in a supreme deity, so if you attempted to be a Christian without such a belief, wouldn't your religion bring you misery rather than peace?