Overheard at Booth 3: Paul's School of Atheism

Guy Fox:  when some people get all up in my shit about Paul's letter to Timothy and they're all whiny about "Paul won't let women teach!  Paul won't let women teach!   burka burka burka!" I usually come back on them with this:

You gots to put it all into context.   Paul was speaking to a specific situation of the women of the day.   Look at it like this:

Say your name is Paul, and you are starting an atheist school.   Your job is to plant and start atheist schools, at least one in each state, before you die.   OK, you've just opened one in, say, Wyoming and then you get a call from your man Timothy from the school you started back in Alabama, and he says, 'yeah man everything's going great except for one little thing - all the men are on board with the project but the women keep telling the children about this Christ being the son of God and shit.'  What are you, Paul, then gonna say?  Let 'em keep on?   HELL NO!   You're gonna tell Timothy to fire those beeches and not let them anywhere NEAR the children.

That's what Paul was facing in this situation.   Did it mean women should stay shut up forever?  All time?  Nooooo . . . it was a specific instruction for a specific situation.

What's that?   Whoa, what's that?   Oh, now you tell me that Paul didn't even write the letter?   It was written by people centuries later?   Oh, you know what that tells me?   No, that doesn't tell me it was faked, that tells me you got so much time on your hands that you go researching the minute details of the origin of a book you don't even believe in, that's what that tells me.  

Let's break THAT down psychologically, Shakespearean-style "Methinks you doth protest too much."  Meaning, you secretly know it's true although you don't want it to be true but you keep going back to it because you just can't stay away.  

It's OK, Athy, we've all been there, trust me!

Overheard at Table Two: Henry's Crime

Keanu's lame - this was such a miss of a movie.  Keanu was not really all that likable as the dullwitted toll attendant who gets sent up for a few years for getting roped into a bank robbery, and Vera Farmiga just plays a total witch - a bad actress with dreams of stardumb . . . well, now that I think of it, maybe she meant to play the love interest as someone who you really had to be completely thick-headed to love, so maybe it works, I dunno

I do have to say that James Caan was great as doing what James Caan always does, which is being the wisecracking old crumudgeony survivor.  

All in all though, this one was something really without any spark.  Fairly dull, but you could tell that maybe if it had been done by somebody, say, the Coen brothers, it could have been really fantastic.

Overheard at Table 4: Atheists in the Hole

I can't really believe this atheist argument about God not being real because babies get abused, hurt, killed, tortured, whatever.   Now I can understand people wondering how God can allow that to happen, but what in the abuse of children means there is no God?   Man, all I see is evidence that people are shit.

and that's kind of what the Bible is trying to teach us.   I'm not going to back off it, no way.  People are shit - we are in the shithole, we worm around in the shithole, we wallow in the shithole, we eat from the shithole and we LOVE ourselves the shithole! 

That's why babies get killed, that's why the innocent get fucked, that's why people get raped and tortured and genocides happen.   God never said, I'm perfect so you're perfect too.   God said I love you, here's a world, go play in it and do whatever the hell you want to do, and guess what?

WE DO WHATEVER THE HELL WE WANT TO DO.

But that doesn't give any evidence that there is or is not no God.   All that is is evidence that we have free will and we use that free will for all kinds of sick shit.   Both atheists and Christians alike, along with everybody else.   

Now what really gets me is the people who think humanity is all that.   Like the top dog.   Seriously?   After all the sick shit we're capable of?   Get real, my friend.   Humanity ain't nothin.   Never will be.   Can - not - be.

and that is why Christians understand why people need Christ.    Cuz we just can't help ourselves.

Poem of the Day 2014-0204

If I drink warm milk in silence
and sleep through tomorrow,
will you then wake me on a Saturday?




for Song of the Day
Little People
"Moon"

Overheard from Booth 3: Some Scraggly Old Guy Who Recites Walt Whitman, Loudly.

He says TODAY'S POEM IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN!

To You

by Walt Whitman

 

 

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,

I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet 

and hands, 

Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, 

troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,

Your true soul and body appear before me, 

They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work,

farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying. 

 

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be 

my poem, 

I whisper with my lips close to your ear, 

I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than 

you. 

 

O I have been dilatory and dumb, 

I should have made my way straight to you long ago, 

I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted 

nothing but you. 

 

I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you, 

None has understood you, but I understand you, 

None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to 

yourself, 

None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in 

you, 

None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never 

consent to subordinate you, 

I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, 

God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself. 

 

Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre- 

figure of all, 

From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-

color'd light, 

But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its 

nimbus of gold-color'd light, 

From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it 

streams, effulgently flowing forever. 

 

O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! 

You have not known what you are, you have slumber'd upon 

yourself all your life, 

Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time,

What you have done returns already in mockeries, 

(Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in 

mockeries, what is their return?) 

 

The mockeries are not you, 

Underneath them and within them I see you lurk, 

I pursue you where none else has pursued you, 

Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the 

accustom'd routine, if these conceal you from others or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me, 

The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if 

these balk others they do not balk me, 

The pert apparel, the deform'd attitude, drunkenness, greed, 

premature death, all these I part aside. 

 

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in 

you, 

There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good is 

in you, 

No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you, 

No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for 

you. 

 

As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give the like 

carefully to you, 

I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I 

sing the songs of the glory of you. 

 

Whoever you are! claim your own at an hazard! 

These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you,

These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are 

immense and interminable as they, 

These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of 

apparent dissolution, you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, 

Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, 

pain, passion, dissolution. 

 

The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing 

sufficiency, 

Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, 

whatever you are promulges itself, 

Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, 

nothing is scanted, 

Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you 

are picks its way.

  

 

 

 

 

Overread at the Counter: "Manifest Destiny" by Cynthia Lowen

from Poem of the Day, sent daily by the Academy of American Poets

Manifest Destiny by Cynthia Lowen     The god I'd left behind sent one last email  before returning to his people.    That summer was sixty-five degrees and fluorescent.  I was working at a law firm.    The logical mind thinks,  You'll be paid for your suffering.    Paradise is of this earth  and it is yours,  said the copy-machine.    The impenetrable old growth of paper on my desk  begged to be made  irrelevant.    When I took off my skirt-suit I felt like my mother, or myself   done pretending  to be my mother.    I stood at the edge  of a New World.    I stared up the long rocky coast.   Whichever way was something to bump against  I pressed on in that direction.    It was like a sickness.  It was like the uncontrollable urge  to eat dirt.      Copyright © 2013 by Cynthia Lowen. Used with permission of the author.

 

About This Poem  "I've been exploring how the 19th century concept of manifest destiny--driving the westward expansion across North America in the 1800s--might play out in the context of a modern-day relationship. What frontiers in ourselves, our environments, and each other do we seek out and attempt to dominate? What motivates us to forge towards the unknown?" --Cynthia Lowen

Overread at Table 3: Talk to Me about Cinnamon

Don't you know how hard it is for me to talk to you?
the table between us, the space between the coffee and the croissants.
my fingers tracing the ridges of the bricks in the wall.
you, with your eyes on the black and white photograph of the Oregon coast,
you are lost in the somewhere faraway and inbetween
the silence is luminescent, it flavours our
many-rutted afternoons.

This morning I heard on the news new studies about cinnamon.
It can lower your standing bloodsugar.

It can save our lives.