The Nature of Good Satire

My city has several “no-go” zones. People are literally banned from entering these neighborhoods and the government is complicit in arresting people that enter them without permission. The Arabic term for them is apparently “gated community.”

And they operate under Pariah Law, a strange set of rules unfamiliar to you and I. If you decorate your house the wrong way or become friendly with the wrong person, you become a pariah. The punishments for such breaches of the religion of wealth are severe and unforgiving.

They must always follow the great Profit, a piece of it be upon them always. According to their holy book, there are five pillars of their faith: (1) everyone must declare that there is no God but mammon, (2) everybody should do a line of coke five times a day facing the pool, (3) everyone should give to charity, provided the entire amount is tax-deductible and the bulk of it goes to pay friends and relatives as ’employees’ (4) all hired help should be paid a wage that encourages fasting and going without (5) everybody must make a pilgrimage to the plastic surgeon at least once in their lifetime.

I found the following script in the commentariat in an article by The Atlantic “Why the Muslim ‘No-Go-Zone’ Myth Won’t Die”. In three successive messages, a person with the label sweetjazz3 gave a pretty decent demonstration of apparently gentle, but derisively savage art of satire.

All hail sweetjazz3!

Should he/she ever wish to stand up, they are welcome to claim their prize, which is honorable mention in an obscure blog; because I believe in giving honour to whom honour is due.

Charlie Hebdo – 21st Century Sans-Culottes

 

The Zenith of French Glory –  The Pinnacle of Liberty

by James Gillray

Publisher: Hannah Humphrey (London)

Date: February 12, 1793

Red State v Blue State Philosophical Sectarianism

It has been a working hypothesis since the late 1980s, and a firm assertion since the mid 2000s; that, to paraphrase Lord Chesterfield’s assessment of the French

In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in History, previous to great Civic Conflagrations and Wars, now exist and daily increase in America.1

This certainly comes to mind in recent talk of state nullification of Federal Government edicts and decrees by its executive branch, but more so from its judiciary. Nullification reaches back to Vice President John C. Calhoun (1825-32) who spearheaded use of this principle for South Carolina in the North-South tariff wars; one of the causes of the American Civil War, which has largely been forgotten. As the writer states:

But if some states can pick and choose laws, others will surely do the same—and in such a polarized national landscape, they’ll start picking and choosing increasingly contradictory options. Liberals states will start refusing to enforce laws they don’t like. (This happened with the Fugitive Slave Act, in fact; Wisconsin ruled the law unconstitutional; southerners who otherwise championed states’ rights objected; and the Supreme Court overruled it.) It’s a ticket to dissolving the union, all in the name of preventing same-sex unions.

Charlie Hebdo and the Rank but Unconscious Hypocrisy of the Americans

The largest number of unthinking apologists for unlimited free speech and expression emanate from the United States; whose quasi-religious dogmatic devotion to a constitutional creed continues, despite widespread infractions of the principle sanctioned by their courts. For, in the minds of the adherents of these various religions, these Entities are real. But in America, corporations and corporate brands are knowingly fictional entities, constructs and concepts by their very creators and followers.

And yet the courts seem fit there and elsewhere to protect these alleged realities from defamation and libel, which are less scurrilous than those depicted of religious figures by Charlie Hebdo. Walmart does not actually exist as a flesh and blood, material and/or even conscious being. Yet the monkeys on the U.S. Supreme Court saw fit to classify these fictions as legal persons, just a few decades after denying that same designation to flesh and blood blacks (1857); a fairy tale, which continues to be aped  to this very day.

If a mere untruthful and untruthfully held published opinion, which is deemed to cause damage to the reputation of these fictional non-entities, with ensuing loss of customers and revenues, is liable to civic suits; how is untruthful and untruthfully held published opinion about entities, which some hold to be true, and which likewise causes damage to reputation and ensuing loss of congregants and tithes/offerings any different? If the CEOs of the various Churches can be subject to such blatant editorial and pictorial infamies, then only selectivist hypocrisy prevents a similar defamation of corporate CEOs. If Charlie Hebdo can gratuitously display nuns masturbating; rational consistency demands that we can likewise flood the zone with generic depictions of computer code writers in Silicon Valley or Seattle, engaging in various acts of zoophilia.

© Copyright Johnny Hutchinson

On the Matter of the Pictures: A Critique

I have respected Peggy Noonan in past, partly because, unlike other journalistic courtesans of the American elite, she sensed that the disturbing disquiet, which existed on the other side of her ideological and socioeconomic gated community, might threaten her community. But yet another talking head zombifies.

In her recent offering “On the Matter of the Pictures”, concerning those gratuitous cartoons against Mohammed, Muslims and other religions, she offers this gem of reasoning for their widespread release.

You kill to stop a cartoon? We flood the streets with cartoons.

The Inevitable Self-Contradiction of Charlie Hadbo

Nothing is sacred. Not even your own mother, not the Jewish martyrs, not even people starving of hunger. Laugh at everything, ferociously, bitterly, to exorcise the old monsters.

One knew that it was going to happen; but not this quickly. This motto of Charlie Hadbo has taken a deliciously ironic if macabre twist.

Patrick Charbonnier, an 80 year old founder of Charlie Hadbo, excoriated its slain editor for jeopardizing the staff of that magazine by excessive forays into

“I really hold it against you…What made him feel the need to drag the team into overdoing it,” he writes in the Left-leaning magazine Nouvel Obs.

Richard Malka, lawyer for the Charlie Hadbo magazine, complains about Patrick Charbonnier criticism of the slain editor:

Charb has not yet even been buried and Obs finds nothing better to do that to publish a polemical and venomous piece on him. My disappointment is immense.

I wonder if they get the irony. If Charlie and its supporters are true believers in the purported principles of that magazine, than the polemical and venomous piece on these corpses of Charlie Hadbo is quite consistent with its principles.

Let’s Just Stop Singing These Worship Songs

Corrie Mitchell from faithstreet complains about the superficial meaninglessness of modern worship songs; constructing her own Letterman Top Ten List. Terry Mattingly from GetReligion complains about the horrid quality of Christian movies. To which, one can only say, the vacuity of modern cultural products are a direct barometer of the vacuity of modern “believers”.

The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is no evangelical mind.
Mark Noll complained in “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” (1995) that an Evangelical mind is an oxymoron. Atheists and agnostics know more about religion than Evangelicals. Even the theologians are in on the act. Evangelical theological journals claim that “Evangelical theology has accepted the collapse of classical foundationalism—the notion that there are, or should be, logical or rational grounds for belief.” Surely, one cannot really blame the pupils, if they have idiots for teachers!

Itinerant preacher Paul Washer, made itinerant because most cannot bear his message more than once, complains of the flag waving and tee shirt brandishing level of commitment. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, once deemed heterodoxical, if not heretical, is now consequently celebrated for his “The Cost of Discipleship” (1937).

One observes in horrid amazement, that despite all the travesties and atrocities committed in the name of torture in the last decade or so, over 80% of self-identified Evangelicals still support the practice in the future, including that “reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the U.S.”, Southern Baptist Albert Mohler and the egghead of the New Calvinist movement, Wayne Grudem. The divorce rate amongst self-identified Evangelicals barely differs from those without religious identification.

Genie of the Cross preacher Joel Osteen is now the teeth of Evangelicalism.

What is the reason(s) why the heartland of Evangelicalism has become such a scandalous vacuity?

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The true Christian walk requires the use of both legs; one “rationalistic”, so to speak, concerned with truth and coherence; one “pietistic”, so to speak, concerned with ethics and ethos, principle and passion, in the outer and inner man. One needs both legs to briskly walk to the Celestial City. Most Christians have been prone historically to lean rather heavily on the one or the other leg; and thereby are either limping or hopping arduously on one leg.

So although most of my writings might come across as ‘rationalistic’, there exists another element in me, which has become too acquainted with the motions of the heart and mind and has often heard that small soft voice.

After escaping from decades in various degrees of spiritual warfare and psychosis, I grieved and raged at the bankruptcy of the counsel that could be found in Evangelical circles. I did know not then what I know now. It was not that the help was worthless. The help was worse than worthless.

Having come to some conclusions about how to approach my personal demons, I was dissuaded in the most kindest firmness that I was sadly mistaken by the most reputable preacher in the environs of Orangeville. I was crestfallen, to say the least. More so, it put enough doubt to prevent me from doing the right thing. And thus for another 2.5 years, I returned to an interminable, unmitigated psychic hell, until I found sufficient backing from Scriptures and Evangelical greats of the past to confirm my original conclusions.

Recollecting that deepest pall of horrid imagery, verbalizations and sensations, insanity, paralysis of will, grief and hopeless despair; I wailed on my regular walk to a small creek in Amaranth, how I despised the church. Although I might be the third worst of sinners after Apostle Paul and John Bunyan, I felt that hateful rage of the Four Horsemen of the Atheistic Apocalypse.

The still wee voice neither condemned nor rebuked me. Nay. As clear as the day was, I heard “they do not believe Me”. The third person response was spooky in itself. However, it was the perspicuity of the insightful response that confirmed its source. These flag wavers and tee shirt wavers do not actually believe.

They do not even know what the essence and nature of faith is; namely conducting oneself, internally and externally, upon the premises that one claims to believe. The premises are like passive routers. The person must will to be redirected by those routers.

Most do not even know what is contained in the Bible. And those who do, syncretize whatever assertions, promises, counsels and commands found therein with assertions and counsels found without. In this, they make their rational faculties their true God and arbitrator.

Others await for their psychological state of mind to conform with that which is written before acting on it. In this, they make their psychological and sensory faculties (a.k.a. instincts and moral sense) their true God and arbitrator.

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And they wonder why are the millennials leaving the Evangelical church?

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge;
because you have rejected knowledge,
I reject you from being a priest to me.
And since you have forgotten the law of your God,
I also will forget your children. (Hosea 4:6)

Evangelicals have lost their saltiness. And when the world rains down on them, what they will think as persecution and martyrdom, will be found to rightful judgment from Above through means of the Assyrians.

You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. (Matthew 5:13)

Reforming the songs sung in vacuous worship services is akin to deploying a Barbie doll’s nurse kit to perform heart surgery.

Southern Baptist Albert Mohler and Torture

A clever piece of American conservative propaganda, under the veil of Evangelical Christianity, was recently furnished by Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and “reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the U.S.”; at least according to Time Magazine. If I admire the ingenuity of the piece and its author; it is of the same order of admiration, I have for (St.) Jerome’s ingenuity in his treatise “Against Jovinianus” (393 A.D.) It furnishes an excellent artifact in the art of sophistry.

Blowing Purple Haze

Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie Hebdo – I Am Not Charlie Hebdo

 

Blessed is the man, who sits not in the company of mockers.
(Psalm 1:1 – parsed and paraphrased)

How repugnant is this thoughtless stampede to self-identify with those journalistic mongrels at Charlie Hebdo. Or these pompous European and North American scribes, pontificating their right to blasphemy and chafing at the bit that their corporate masters are pixelating these cartoon images of Muhammad or the Entities of other Faiths. Or even of obtuse Crusaders, whose antipathy to Islam drives them into the arms of their secularist adversaries. True Christianity ought to have no interest in choosing between radical Islamists and radical secularists; the equivalent of a Stalinist-Hitlerian choice.

Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie Hebdo.

The Gospel of the Kingdom

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel. (Mark 1:15)

To his credit, N.T. Wright is rightly restoring the ‘sociopolitical’ dimension of the Gospel to the Christian consciousness, even if his soteriology is ultimately incoherent and heretical. For, the first manner by which Christ proclaimed the Gospel (Matthew 4:23, Mark 1:15) is as the Gospel of the Kingdom. It is near about Christ’s last (Matthew 24:14). Indeed, the nature of the Kingdom was constant theme of Christ’s teachings.

It is by means of exploiting the atomistic impoverishment of the Americanized Gospel that NT. Wright establishes a greater credibility over the existing orthodoxy, which he thereupon extends into his perspective on the nature and meaning of Justification. For, to the American Evangelicals…

The gospel is the great news of what God has graciously done in Jesus Christ, especially in his atoning death and vindicating resurrection, his ascension, session, and high priestly ministry, to reconcile sinful human beings to himself, justifying them by the penal substitute of his Son, and regenerating and sanctifying them by the powerful work of the Holy Spirit, who is given to them as the down payment of their ultimate inheritance. God will save them if they repent and trust in Jesus.1

…the Gospel merely becomes a matter of “how to get saved”. And in the industrial strength commoditization of Christian conversion through such methodisms as the Altar Call and The Four Laws, salvation becomes a formalistic ritual equivalent of baptismal regeneration. “Take a little walk; say a little prayer; sign a little card; get saved tonight;” (to a modified chorus from K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s “Get Down Tonight” (1975)).