Hey, It's-a the Pope-a! He's-a Such-a the Nice Guy!
So the Pope died. And I saw Sin City. And I've been thinking about it. [gears click]. The thing about John Paul II is that I like him. I am an adherent of the faith he lead. I personally admire him. But that dude was just wrong about so much. And I think it comes back to the same things that every thing has always been about: Sin and Death. these negations are silmutaneously the supreme acts of self determination that any single human can engage in. All of which is to say that as humans are the children of some blind father, that which makes us such are those same things which we associate as against him.
The thing that strikes me is this: the pope held 2 PhDs from secular universities in Poland. He lectured at Ivy League univeristies in this country back whe he was just Archbishop of Cracow. This was a man of nuance and thought. A man with whom I disagree on some things (birth control, the ordination of women into the priesthood), but with whom I might have engaged in serious debate.
What Sin City shows us is, sadly, the stark reality in the face of the Johanes-Pauline idealism that religion and religious societies (as we surely describe ourselves) aspire to. Sin City is a world of infinite shades of gray on top of the blacks and whites; a place where blood isn't even always red. It is a place where whores, junkies, and convicts are as much forces for right (as God gives us to see the right) as Senators and Cardinals.
All this contributes to great unease. "Nausea" was what Sartre called it, but that guy was an asshole. To balance these things, Frank Miller verus a Pole named Karol, we must find not their differences but their profound similarity. And these similarities (nuance, desire to understand the world as it is and as it might be, through art and philosophy) should be set apart from the profound differences that exemply men like our president. For that man who would say that he knows the right from the wrong in this world by instinct and faith betrays both Miller and the Pope. To say that there is a right and wrong to be negotiated by men alone and not by the nuance inherent in the universe is to deny both the supreme author and the forces of the universe themselves.
Even the pope admitted that Darwin was right.
When I saw the Pope was to be laid in the sepulchre bellow St. Peter's Basilica, I saw the chthonic succession of humanity and the earth that gave us birth and subborned us our sin of life as it became death. When I see Bush smirk, I just get kind of sad.
The thing that strikes me is this: the pope held 2 PhDs from secular universities in Poland. He lectured at Ivy League univeristies in this country back whe he was just Archbishop of Cracow. This was a man of nuance and thought. A man with whom I disagree on some things (birth control, the ordination of women into the priesthood), but with whom I might have engaged in serious debate.
What Sin City shows us is, sadly, the stark reality in the face of the Johanes-Pauline idealism that religion and religious societies (as we surely describe ourselves) aspire to. Sin City is a world of infinite shades of gray on top of the blacks and whites; a place where blood isn't even always red. It is a place where whores, junkies, and convicts are as much forces for right (as God gives us to see the right) as Senators and Cardinals.
All this contributes to great unease. "Nausea" was what Sartre called it, but that guy was an asshole. To balance these things, Frank Miller verus a Pole named Karol, we must find not their differences but their profound similarity. And these similarities (nuance, desire to understand the world as it is and as it might be, through art and philosophy) should be set apart from the profound differences that exemply men like our president. For that man who would say that he knows the right from the wrong in this world by instinct and faith betrays both Miller and the Pope. To say that there is a right and wrong to be negotiated by men alone and not by the nuance inherent in the universe is to deny both the supreme author and the forces of the universe themselves.
Even the pope admitted that Darwin was right.
When I saw the Pope was to be laid in the sepulchre bellow St. Peter's Basilica, I saw the chthonic succession of humanity and the earth that gave us birth and subborned us our sin of life as it became death. When I see Bush smirk, I just get kind of sad.
posted by justin | 10:53 PM
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