- Pope John Paul II used to like to flog himself with a belt, according to a new book.
It had long been rumoured that the Polish-born pontiff, who died five years ago, engaged in acts of penance and self-flagellation.
But the practice has now been confirmed by Monsignor Slawomir Oder, the Vatican “postulator” who has the task of reviewing John Paul’s life and preparing a case for him being made a saint.
Self-flagellation has been a rite of many religions since time immemorial, its ostensible purpose, in Christianity, being to remind the flagellant of the suffering of Jesus. I don’t buy it; as noted above, it is practiced in other religions as well. So far as I can tell, it’s nothing but degradation for the sake of degradation, an outward expression of the utter destruction of the individual that is the end ambition of virtually all religious thought.
- Apparently, there’s a problem with folk getting overly-friendly with their house pets up there in Alaska.
- That bunch of hot dogs who cooked-up a scheme to do something with Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones (all of them born post-Watergate, and apparently hopelessly ignorant of modern American history), seem to be what passes for promising young intellectuals in the modern Republican Party.
Four men accused of trying to tamper with Democratic U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office phones shared a common experience as young ideologues writing for conservative publications.
- Al Mohler, Holy Man and the Very Mightiest of the Southern Baptist theologians, pans The Shack as heretical for its theodicy and portrayal of the Doctrine of the Trinity.
Oh … ho-hum. Theodicy is a non-starter; the so-called problem of evil arises solely from the unsustainable assertions that drive it: God is all-powerful, God is all-knowing, God loves us — so why is there so much misery in the world? Hmmm … as Ayn Rand used to say, there is only one reality; contradictions cannot exist. If you encounter one — check your premises.
Holy Men, of course, can’t do that, because they are the keepers of the settled Eternal Truth. So they build ever more fanciful cotton-candy fairy castles in the sky.
As for the Doctrine of the Trinity, notice this remark:
While there is ample theological confusion to unpack there, suffice it to say that the Christian church has struggled for centuries to come to a faithful understanding of the Trinity in order to avoid just this kind of confusion — understanding that the Christian faith is itself at stake.
The Doctrine of the Trinity entered Christian thought as a political compromise at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. It wasn’t supposed to make sense; it was supposed to make peace between all the factions so that they could do the buffet line and go home.
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