The sexuality of Jesus
May 27, 2007 by Bill
“The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art” received rave reviews several years ago when it was first released. It was written by Leo Steinberg, who originally delivered the material at a Columbia University Seminar and was honored by the College Art Association of America with its annual award.
Those who find expressions of sexuality offensive will, no doubt, not want anyone to look at the pictures. Our ‘born again’ U.S. Attorney General recently had a nude statue covered with cloth so that her bare breasts would not be visible. The present Bush administration seems loaded with such psycho-ceramics (crack-pots). Out of 185 nations only the Bush administration and the Vatican recently blocked a world wide sex education program sponsored by the United Nations. The Vatican obviously does not want those sweet little choir boys sexually educated. The priests are available for their perverse instruction.
The sexuality of Jesus is very obvious in the paintings. Jesus was a Hebrew male, a man in the fullest sense and a sexual human being in the same sense that all men are sexual human beings.
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The sanitized life
May 20, 2007 by Bill
As usual, Mark Twain said it best: “There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way a shady reputation. They pay this horrible price for health. And health is all they get from it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.”
The knee-jerk and hysterical people who are on a never ending crusade to sanitize our lives are not only boring, but lose their case by hyperbolic obsession. It is almost impossible today to read a magazine or newspaper without being overwhelmed by the latest news on what is bad for us to do, eat, drink and smoke. We are told to stay clear of fat, milk, ice cream, butter, cream, sugar, coffee,alcohol, tobacco, red meat, white meat, shell fish…the list would take up the rest of this entire column of all that will destroy us. How I love Julia Child, the great goddess of cooking, who uses real butter and real sugar and when asked the secret of her energy at age 90 replied “red meat and gin.”
Perhaps I would change my habits for the better if only anyone was sure what “better” was, or is. I am told to “walk more”, and yet Arnold Palmer who has walked five miles a day all of his adult life came down with prostate cancer. I would give up my wine except that I remember “The French Paradox” and the fact that Bertrand Russell sipped about a fifth of bourbon daily and was still strong and productive in his mid-90′s, as was Winston Churchill, who not only sipped his bottle of brandy daily but went through a box of expensive cigars, daily.
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Arrogance and the moral high ground
May 13, 2007 by Bill
In a remarkable speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Salman Rushdie presented one of the great truths of our time. He said this:
“Special-interest groups, claiming the moral high-ground, now demand the protection of the censor. The fundamentalist Christian Right say we must “respect” their beliefs and agenda. Criticism is placed off limits, they say, as being “disrespectful”. Citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow citizens’ opinions. Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked. And it is the skepticism of journalists, their unwillingness to be impressed, that is their most important contribution to the freedom of the free world. It is the disrespect of journalists for power…for orthodoxy…for party lines…for ideologies…for vanity…for arrogance…for folly….for pretension….for corruption and for stupidity that I would like to celebrate…and that I urge you all, in the name of freedom to preserve…”
With that brilliant paragraph in mind I am writing today part two of my last column in the NewsPress on the arrogance…pretension and vanity of many of the Christian clergy who claim they speak for the “moral high ground.” The fantasy of the clergy is that they have the moral high ground due to their indoctrination..training and ideology. They forget that their is a vast chasm between indoctrination. training..and education. The vast majority of clergy have only been indoctrinated with what their particular denomination wanted them to propagate and sustain. And they have been “trained” as a minister to function at weddings..funerals..invocations and so forth. They enter the ministry “trained” and “indoctrinated” totally immune to what it means to be religiously “educated”.
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