What, no pictures? In this not safe for work series, we see our hero being violated pleasured with a strap-on. Could the man look more bored? Is he already thinking of Christ?
Wow, yeah, he looks like he's thinking about the mystery of the trinity. Maybe that's the secret to having painless anal sex?
Ogged, don't take this the wrong way, but I thought of you when I read this:
At a shoot in a luxury suite at the hotel where the adult video convention was held, he watched a football game while a first-time performer, Gianna Ferrari, had sex with him. "My mind's not there," he said afterward.
That's pretty funny; before I saw this post, I was going to put up a post about the cute young lady who tried to chat me up today who I basically ignored. My mind's not there, man.
One of these days I'm going to find myself having to explain one of these links to PK as he wanders by my screen.
I was going to put up a post about the cute young lady who tried to chat me up today who I basically ignored. My mind's not there, man.
I was going to say that some have so little, and you're content to let people pass you by like that: but really, you don't have much either.
Ataraxia. It's real.
Giving up pornography is only one step on a long, difficult road to becoming a priest.
Ah, thanks. You needn't go into the others.
Ataraxia. It's real.
ogged, of all people, has attained nirvana?
Jesus didn't have cable or the intertubes.
// He has tired of performing in sex movies, but even now doesn't condemn it. "Not one time did Jesus refer to
// pornography, or homosexuality," he observed on the Internet show, which he began as a co-host in May.
// "Jesus could have commented. He didn't."
And how are Jim McGreevey priestly studies coming ?
I always thought the goal of Unfogged was to help the average Internet user attain ataraxia.
And I mean that in a good way, dammit!
6: I could use an Rx for some Ataraxia if my insurance plan covers it. How do you get your mind off a running wheel once it gets on?
Bostongirl:
I'll be in Boston in two weeks.
12, 13 -- I'm coming to a something of a crossroads: I'd thought to enroll my son in confirmation class at our local Episcopal church, but have been toying with the idea of checking out the UCC church just up the street. I'm not familiar with UCC, particularly. They're not going to weird me out, or anything, are they?
(I'm still in a state of disgruntlement, truth be told, about changing the BCP in 79. Not that this is sufficient reason to switch teams . . .)
The NYT story is apparently false (or at least surprisingly wrong?): see http://episcopalchurch.typepad.com/episcope/2007/07/stop-the-presse.html
Ouch! well caught, Parodie. It looks like a piece of skilful black propaganda to me -- on the lines of "They'll ordain gays, so why not unrepentant porn stars." I bet you anything that this is round the world in a week, and believed by millions.
16:
I was weirded out by the UCC but I was still able to get the negotiable instruments question correct oh so many years ago.
Charley:
Why didnt you switch to a church that stuck with the 1928 version?
My mother and father, who'd been Presbyterians, joined a UCC church when they moved to Wisconsin about 9 years ago. I was very pleased with it, and liked what I saw and heard.
Charley, don't want to sound weird or anything, but shouldn't you consider the theology, rather than just checking out the churches?
[S]houldn't you consider the theology?
In my understanding of their doctrine, the UCC holds that there is, at most, one God.
16: My church used eucharistic prayer C, aka the Star Wars prayer, yesterday, and I'm a little bit worried that they're planning to do it for the whole summer. I have to cover my ears during bits of it, and yesterday my reaction was unusually strong. It actually made me nauseous.
I think that if you miss the 1928 prayerbook, you'll probably find the United Church of Christ a bit unsettling.
Episcopalians generally accept a diversity of opinions. I realize that many churches do it but, outside of UUians, Episcopalians do it better than most.
For a child, the confirmation process educates them without totally indoctrinating them.
23: No, you're mixing them up with Unitarians, who they're socially very similar to, but doctrinally quite distinct from. UCC is absolutely standard mainline Protestantism doctrinally, and way way tolerant lefty socially (okay, I can't draw a hard distinction between doctrinal and social, but you know what I mean)-- any given UCC congregation should be somewhere between perfectly comfortable for a politically liberal Protestant, and maybe a little annoyingly hippie-dippie if you're prone to be annoyed by that sort of thing.
Unitarian Universalists aren't Christians, or at least while any individual Unitarian may be, the church isn't. They don't have a whole lot of doctrine of any sort.
My gf and I joke that we are members of the local UU church. We've never been, but I don't think that is required.
It's right there in the second 'U'.
aka the Star Wars prayer.
The what? Maybe this is one of those things that just isn't going to make sense to a heathen like me.
26: LB, but when I just looked at the UCC statement of faith, it made no mention of the Trinity or of the divinity of Christ, let alone the subtleties of the Athanasian creed. It's not for me to say, since I haven't been able to believe for decades, but if I was considering moving from a basically Nicene and Arminian congregation to one which had moved from a formal Calvinist theology to a sort of rock 'n' roll Arianism, I'd want to think quite deeply about it.
BG, my infidel heart goes out to you. The modern prayer books drove my mother away from the church in her last years.
Huh, then I'm wrong. I thought they were still a reasonably standard mainline Protestant church. Never mind.
Hrm. I see what you mean in that the word 'Trinity' isn't used.
On the other hand, this: "We believe in God, the Eternal Spirit, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and our Father, and to his deeds we testify.... In Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Lord,he has come to us and shared our common lot, conquering sin and death and reconciling the world to himself.
He bestows upon us his Holy Spirit, creating and renewing the church of Jesus Christ, binding in covenant faithful people of all ages, tongues, and races."
Reads like a description of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, close enough that I don't see much conflict. Historically, UCC is an offshoot of the Congregationalists, and you can't get more mainline Protestant than that.
And they've got the Nicene creed on their website under 'beliefs'.
re: 31
If you are a non-believer, why are you considering which church to attend and enrol your son in?
[Genuinely curious. BPhD does something similar, iirc, and I found that puzzling too.]
35: You're mixing up Charley, presumably a believer, who's church-shopping, with OFE, who's a non-believer like me giving theological advice.
re: 36
You're right, I am! Shit.
[I'll just slink off here into the corner and think about drinking more coffee]
If I go to a Christian bookstore, what it contains is dozens or even hundreds of books geared at someone like me explaining why worshipping Jesus is the right move from an evangelical point of view. I can't find a single book like that from a Reformed/Presbyterian point of view...or at least I don't know what to look for. You know, readable books, like the works of Philip Yancey. Come on, Presbyterian Church, why should I stay in you?
Come on, Presbyterian Church, why should I stay in you?
Scottish state religion. No more justification required, dude.
Ah, another reason to move to Glasgow.
re: 40
Plus lots of sectarian goodness!
29: Here's a link to the Rite II Eucharist. Just scroll down to the part under Alternative Forms of the Great Thanksgiving where it says Eucharistic Prayer C.
Here's a taste:
At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.
Not exactly poetry.
35: ttaM, I wasn't planning to go to any church. The discussion started when I expressed surprise that Charley @16 seemed to be thinking about changing his curch without putting the theology at the front of his list of considerations. For myself, I've been an Epicurean for 30 years, as far as religion is concerned.
33, 34: LB, OK, but they still seem to me to play down those aspects of their belief, which strikes me as odd. I have a lot of time for traditional Congregationalists - many of my political heroes were in that tradition, but they seem to have moved a long way towards the "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice" fallacy.
Ugh.
My church was pretty old-fashioned - the hymnal contains things like "God, You Spin the Whirling Planets", but we never sang the hymns whose words were written in 1972 or 1981. On the other hand we had an elderly mezzo soloist who loved to use her extremely vibrato-laden and dignified voice on the "negro spirituals".
43: Sure, there's a reason that people confuse UCC with the Unitarians, and it's not just sharing an initial. But it's still emphasis rather than theology, mostly.
This must be the thread to celebrate the giggling pre-adolescent practice of killing time in church by appending the phrase "between the bedsheets" to the titles of hymns.
(For the non-Christians among you, that would be titles such as "O What their Joy and their Glory Must Be" or "Thou Who Camest From Above".)
The secular among us do that with Chinese fortune cookies.
Also, sitting in a state courtroom waiting for your case to be called is a wonderful time to figure out exactly how many ways there are to anagram "In God We Trust."
I thought the "weird me out" comment was referring to their theology.
Dong User Twit...Dong Suet Writ...I Rust Wet Dong...
I'm afraid that I unconditionally love the whirling planets and fragile Earth stuff. Have you guys seen the Cosmic Jesus installation at the LDS Visitors' Center in Salt Lake? A marble statue in a rotunda painted to look like the Milky Way: pure awesomeness.
The business about God, JC, and the HS you cut and pasted from the UCC website, LB, doesn't really clarify their position on the Trinity. A Mormon could probably write something similiar, even though we're frankly heretical with our "three persons, one goal" tenet.
I always get confused. Are you a jackmormon or a good mormon?
Sorry to be so intermittent. I'm battling a vaguely flu-like thing -- mostly by sleeping.
22 is an important consideration. But I'm not really deeply enough into the weeds of any theology that I'd be aware of each and every subtlety. Indeed, my belief is light enough, and attendance infrequent enough, I'd expect to miss a lot of the differences. The point of the inquiry, though, is not about me, but about my son. His level of belief is not so light as mine, and I'd be pleased for him to have some sound (not indoctrinary) instruction. From the responses above -- thanks muchly folks -- it looks like it'll be Episcopal.
My daughter was essentially raised Catholic -- at her private school, you had to pick (a) Catholic, (b) Lutheran, or (c) atheist. We attended the local German Catholic church fairly regularly when she was little -- I'm not interested in going to a Catholic church if it's going to be in English -- but fell away after my son was born. My wife went through a period of attending St. Augustine's, in DC, but it never seemed like something I wanted to do. So I babysat.
On 20, I like the old words, but I'm afraid that a church that clings to the old words might cling to some unpleasant ideas as well. I'm not going to go for any of that Nigerian stuff, for example. (I'm a little scared off in this by my brother, who's become very active in the Epis church in Mpls, and is something of a Tancredo Republican.)
Yeah, but there's other stuff -- I cut and pasted that bit because the statement of faith was what OFE referenced, so it was the first thing I looked at. (And yes, it's ambiguous.)
But check out the Nicene creed, linked in 34, as well as the statement of the Council of Chalcedon ("We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one accord,
teach people to confess one and the same Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ,
at once complete in Godhead and complete in humanity,
truly God and truly human,
consisting of a rational soul and body;
of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead,
and at the same time of one substance with us
as regards his humanity;
like us in all respects, apart from sin;") on the website under the same heading.
Now, they do also say that "The UCC has roots in the "covenantal" tradition--meaning there is no centralized authority or hierarchy that can impose any doctrine or form of worship on its members. Christ alone is Head of the church. We seek a balance between freedom of conscience and accountability to the apostolic faith. The UCC therefore receives the historic creeds and confessions of our ancestors as testimonies, but not tests of the faith." So someone who didn't accept the Trinity, or the divinity of Christ, wouldn't be excommunicated or anything. But the tradition of the UCC is pretty standard Trinitarian Christianity.
54 to 51. (And not having been raised in any religious tradition, I kind of like the 'galaxies' bit too. What, they're too tacky to talk about just because they're sparkly?)
Will----Whatever else, I'm certainly not a good mormon.
LB----You're probably right. These carefully worded abstractions leave a LOT of wriggle room; who knows how any particular church will translate a given creed into sermons or prayers?
Returning to the beginning of this thread: a nice question of Californian ethics. I actually rang up the rector of the church in LA where Rod Fontana gets down on his knees in front of god the father worships with his family, and has done for three years now.
The Rector has known for all this time what Rod was doing for a living -- indeed, he knew that three or four other churches had turned him away when he began to feel strange stirrings in a soul he had not known he possessed. He had, quite deliberately, and for obvious reasons not told anyone else in congregation (What did they talk about at coffee afterwards, I wonder?)
So there he is, after the service one Sunday, with twenty or thirty members of his flock around him, and a woman comes up and introduces herself as "Sharon Waxman of the NYT". Could we talk about Ron's ministry, she asks. What kind of anodyne quote could you come up with then?
But what does the Californian readership think he should have said? How would the rest of the congregation have reacted? I have no feeling for the absurdity of this situation at all.
Fontana's just a churchgoer there, not yet in any particular position of authority? I'd think that would be a very easy answer for the priest, along the lines of "We're all sinners, Christ associated with publicans and so forth, are you actually asking me to say something negative about a member of my congregation because of a history of sinful behavior?" That's a softball.
But according to Nworb the congregation didn't know about Rod's history of sinful behavior, and the reporter was trying to ask him about it in the middle of his crowd of parishioners. (NOTE: the word "parishioners" may not be appropriate for non-Catholics)
Oh, true -- you mean just the scandal of the guy's history in a crowd of people who didn't know about it. "Pardon me, are you asking me to discuss the private life of one of my parishioners?" delivered with hauteur, would have worked fine, though. Not if the reporter was determined to make a fuss, "Hey Rev., how do you feel about having a porn star attending your church?" at which point there would have been nothing to do but go for the publicans and sinners line. But if the reporter didn't actively drop any bombs, there's no reason for the priest to.
59: "Parishioners" works for Episcopalians, too.
Well, I know. But the point is that the priest's non-committal reply was then printed as if he endorsed the (fictional) plan to turn Rod into the ordained apostle to the porn stars. (This is a story crying out for a stained glass window: "St Rod sets off on his mission, bearing his staff")
Sorry: above to LB's point that the priest should not have dropped bombs. Of course he shouldn't. He couldn't even suggest there were any bombs to be dropped. And so he couldn't really discuss the story in a grown-up way at all. That's what seems to me so unethical about the reporter's behaviour.
And I suspect that question was about Rod's "ministry", which is deliciously ambiguous...
Oh, if the question is how to avoid having a non-committal quote being taken out of context, I've got nothing.
Today I saw a car with one of those heinous "kneeling Calvin* before the cross" stickers in the back window. But underneath it also had a "give peace a chance" sticker with one of those 60s-style dove graphics. It helped remind me that maybe some southern California Christians might not suck.
*The cartoon character, not the wacked-out theologian.
Are there non-whacked-out theologians?
66: it was more "Hang on, here we are in crowd after the service and someone comes up and says she's from the NYT and would like to talk to the priest about the ministry of one of us: are we so Californian/British as not to be curious and ask 'wtf' afterwards"?
67: ask Kotsko