Thanks for your email.
The Jesuit sign is a hoot - although I'm sure prissy people will fault its cavalier treatment of baptism.
It is no secret that I get grumpy - more so as I age.
It is also true that I really like to laugh and am unusually fond of absurdist humor that is not at anyone's expense. (When your email, below, arrived I was pouring over cartoons at a South American website.)
What do you think of my hypothesis that conservatives are not funny people?
Not only do a disproportionate number of conservatives drool over the damnation of others, they seem frozen in pissy punitiveness, eager to approve any act of vengeance that can be "justified" as God smiting His enemies.
I have begun to think that Christianity's unusual emphasis on "individual salvation" is a subtle -- and highly seductive -- appeal to selfishness.
Ironically, it seems that the quest for personal salvation is an obstacle to personal salvation.
There is something graspingly retentive (anally retentive?) about singleminded attempts to save one's own soul.
To me it seems more likely that salvation derives in roundabout fashion ("the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing") when we direct our energies to alleviating the sufferings of others, rather than struggling obsessively to prevent our own suffering "in the afterlife."
I realize that the aims of "self" and "other" can be blended - at least in theory. (I also realize that Buckminster Fuller once commented that "The most idealistic is the realistically most practical.")
As a practical matter, dedication to service seems the "only" certain guarantor of wholeness/holiness -- a guarantee so self-evidently true that targeting one's "personal salvation" (rather than contributing to the "salvation" of others) is like targeting one's own sexual satisfaction instead of "serving" your sexual partner and, in that service-relationship, experiencing ecstasy -- not as a direct "hit" like "masturbating inside a woman's vagina" -- but as a derivative epi-phenomenon.
To me it seems likely that "the best outcomes" are corollaries of service-oriented dedication-to-others, not the "automatic sequelae" of abandoning others to the vagaries of "personal responsibility," or the propriety of "social Darwinism," or the unfailing wisdom of "The Invisible Hand." In brief, joy can not be seized directly, but emerges derivatively from "right behavior" (to borrow a Buddhist term).
John Kenneth Galbraith rightly observed that: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercise in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
Similarly, Martin Luther King Jr. makes me wonder how many "good Christians" are "standing on the boot." http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/03/martin-luther-king-jr-it-is-cruel-jest.html
We have lost awareness -- common in our youth -- that "virtue is its own reward," and vice its own punishment. (This is certainly true for "ways of being" regardless the pleasurability of isolated voluptuary experiences.)
When we consider the nature of virtue-and-vice as "self-corrective mechanisms," I marvel at people who spend significant amounts of life time trying to identify The Damned.
Who the hell are they?!?
Fondness for fingering the damned, as I see it, is a relatively unique fixation of the Abrahamic religions, with the mirror images of Islamic Jihadis and Christian Fundamentalists at the forefront of Condemnation.
Pax
Alan
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 9:39 PM, Fred Owens <froghospital911@gmail.com> wrote:
I actually saw that sign in the parking lot -- it's at loyola marymount near where my sister lives in Venice
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