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A Blog, rather a IREM

Pagan Deities love fat kids

Pagan Deities love to eat fat kids, or something like that.
As Diogenes at Off the Record at Catholic World News reports scientists looking at the remains of the mummies of child sacrificial victims in Peru have found based on hair samples that the kids were fattened up for a whole year before being clubbed to death on a high mountain for the greater glory of some deity.

Sacrifice
I have an interest in the primitive theology of sacrifice, every religion before Islam was sacrificial, and Islam is only asacrificial out of a confused emulation of Christianity. (Of course Palestinian suicide bombers are quite similar to human sacrifice with the exception that the demand of the deity is passive and the action does not cause the deity to act. Allah's absolute power and capricious will makes him beyond the influence of sacrifice. The Chrisitian God is absolutely good, and then powerful in as much as the excercise of that power is consistent with the good. In Christianity God himself provides the one acceptable sacrifice, who is presented to the Father on behalf of all creation which is recapitulated, re-headed,  in Him in the Liturgy, both the eternal Liturgy and in time in the Mass.) Those not influenced by Christian metaphysics in the Americas moved in two different directions with regard to sacrifice during the Christian era. The migrant peoples developed systems focused more on spiritual sacrifice, physical pain inflicted on the self, and ritual merriment. These are often seen as directed to a sort of pantheistic self annihilation or union with nature. (Personally  I think the use of Eastern categories is totally foreign to the religions in the pre-Columbian era, but is a revisionist redaction of those who seek to reject Christian influence.) The urban civilizations developed complex mythologies of personal deities, and a complex fixed sacrificial system that focused on human sacrifice. Both groups drifted to human victims, because livestock was rare in the Americas. But also because ideally there is no better victim than a human. Sacrifice is a gift, and there is no better gift than the self, and no better replacement for the self than another human. Human sacrifice has always been something that seems to have captivated and horrified men.


Back to the fat kids
So why were they fattened? Well, they were likely treated well as either sacred to the gods, or possibly as the god's themselves. Or it was not uncommon in the ancient near East (ANE) to treat a sacrificial victim like a king so that the deity would take them in the place of the king. Still it was not uncommon to the early ANE or even to the Aztecs to understand the deities as eating the sacrificial victim. (Why else would one think that burning flesh in a sweet odor?)

So next time you notice yourself getting a little rotund, think about the hungry Incan gods.

posted by: nictitator at 00:53 | link | comments (1) |

Who is protecting pedophiles?

Read this story:

Between Archbishop Burke and Giuliani
who is married?
who is seeking publicity?
who is called by some an American hero?
who is America's get tough on crime mayor?
who gets paid large sums of money for public speaking engagements?
who is seeking power?
who is protecting the pedophile priest?
Answer Key: Giuiani to all of the above!

If we can not demand that the man who cleaned up Times Square, who bravely handled September 11, 2001, to leave his friend out to dry just because his is, as far as our culture is concerned, the lowest form of life on Earth, a person who would not only use his authority to help others abuse children, but would himself abuse children, how come every body got mad when old celibate men, did the same thing, just because they wore funny hats? I know that any Bishop who truely enabled a pedophile needs to make public penance for the sin of scandal, and possibly resign. I also not think that Giuliani needs to let his friend starve to death for his crimes, but the media needs to show him a little of the same love they showed Cardinal Law.

Well wait there is one more question.
Who was the article really attacking?
(Archbishop Burke!)

posted by: nictitator at 22:05 | link | comments |

Power and difficult task of the preacher

http://blog.ipsissima-verba.org/archives/277
So we did this video for Alumni day, and posted it online and now over 1000 page views on youtube. That is a lot of people.
But in some parishes, those likely to have associates, in St. Louis there are over 1000 communicants on a Sunday (contingent, of course, on the time of the Ram's game). So it is rather easy for a priest to reach 1000 people every week.
The video took a lot of work, a lot of planning. We carefully phrased some things to best present the ideas. We debated if there was too many sci-fi elements, too much or too little smoking,  to include a shoulder cape or not. There was a diverse audience, priests form classes dating to 1940 to 2007, formators, seminarians, and lay faculty. It was important to not offend anyone, some priests their wear a cassock in the parish, others despise it. We wanted them first to laugh but we also had a message. We, seminarians, while having a bi-monthly Mass according to the missal of John XXIII, can have fun, we are not robots, we love the same Church.
In the same way in which we antagonized over the video, we need to, in the future, God willing, carefully plan our homilies. The number of people we can touch is about the same as the, but the purpose is so much more important that laughter. While a homily is not a funny little video for alumni day, it needs to be just as clever. Not clever in the "boy, I am funny" way, but  clever as in "gentle as doves and clever as serpents" (MT 10:16) Every parish has a diversity of people much broader than that for alumni day. In a large parish today there are the simple, the ardent readers of America, and subscribers of the Wanderer,   the overly devotional, and those who proudly do not own a rosary, the sanitation engineer, and the stock broker, and the older pious looking couple who has a gay son and a daughter who has had multiple abortions who get upset when these topics are broached, and the tatooed young couple who want to teach NFP. To accomplish the work of pastoring this flock a shepherd has to be quite clever, and spend a lot of energy on preparing his homilies.

Oh why do my musing always mean more work after ordination! ;)
Dylan, I want you to note I directed the way to the video through your blog.

posted by: nictitator at 14:10 | link | comments (1) |