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Tag Archives: Law

New Law From Big Brother: No Plebeians In Parks on Warm Summer Nights.

02-Jul-12

Néa Filadélfeia In New York City this past weekend, I was at a Canada Day barbecue in Cooper Park yesterday which ended perfectly… a cop car drove onto one of the park paths and stopped a hundred feet from us so the cops could watch the thirty-odd people having a picnic.  After ten minutes of being watched […]

Law 2, Mind 0.

30-Jun-11

Gowurdak The landscaping crew gets a four-day weekend this weekend, and after a particularly grueling four days – we planted a tremendous number of plants – I stopped off at the supermarket on my way home.  I wanted to buy some beer.  Of course, I was asked for I.D.  Being thirty-five and sporting the gray hairs […]

Christopher Hitchens, Religions, and Life Without God.

14-Feb-11

I’ve been impressed recently by the intelligence, articulateness, and unapologetically rakish character of Christopher Hitchens, and curiosity about and respect for the man prompted me to take a look at the fashionable atheist books of the day, beginning with his God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  As is always the case with modern […]

Abraham, Our Father in Faith.

13-Jul-10

In the endless self-repeating Flows for ever more the Same; Myriad arches, springing, meeting, Hold at rest the mighty Frame; Streams from all things love of living, Grandest star and humblest clod; All the straining, all the striving, Is eternal rest in God. – GOETHE In any good religion, there should be something utterly unpalatable, […]

Jung on the Law versus Grace.

18-Apr-10

I was struck by the diocese of New York removing from the Easter Vigil the reading of Abraham sacrificing Isaac; presumably because the story scandalizes nice good people who want religion to look hunky-dory and sweet.  But obviously, if God cannot work through horror and crime and sin and cruelty then He can’t be terribly […]

Oh My… Stone Shamu???

04-Mar-10

Memory cannot really handle just how crazy the American Family Association – a huge organization, by the way, with 200 radio stations and all kinds of clout – really is.  You need to be reminded again and again.  One of their writers, Bryan Fischer, accused Seaworld of negligence by keeping a killer whale with a […]

Still an abuse of the law.

29-Dec-09

Attempts to make law enforcement a business just create stupidity, petty regulation, law for law’s sake, and injustice.  Even if it’s petty injustice. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/space_hogs_lapped_on_empty_subways_m7iRAd9b4E9alYPuGvy5OO

Those Who Live By the Law…

18-Oct-09

The man in the photo with the Leviticus quotation tattooed on his arm, who clearly sees it as a justification for violence against gays, got some great treatment from a pastor who reads Andrew Sullivan’s blog: Too bad the guy with the passage from Leviticus tattooed on his arm didn’t read the next chapter: “You […]

The Conservative Side of the Church.

05-Feb-09

      I was speaking with my mother about the most recent Church problems, when she referred to Benedict XVI as “your pope,” i.e. my pope, a pope of the more conservative Catholics, and the younger Catholics.  And there is no doubt that I was happy on the day Benedict was elected.  I watched the news […]