Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

No Justins, No Peace

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

You are here: Home / Pet Blogging / Cat Blogging / Saturday Morning Open Thread: Murphy Sanctifying the Weekend

Saturday Morning Open Thread: Murphy Sanctifying the Weekend

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It’s a major ceremonial weekend for all three of the Abrahamic faiths, and of course Murphy the Trickster God would never miss such ripe targets.

Most American possible version of a religious celebration: Hallelujah, the Muslims have *money*!

After two months of hard work assembling and painting devil-like cardboard figures popularly known as “Judas,” Mexican artisan Marcela Villarreal is eager to watch her creations burn.

Villarreal and dozens of fellow crafters created the figures ahead of the annual “Burning of Judas,” a celebration that takes place in Mexico every Holy Saturday, when people across the country gather in public plazas to light fireworks that will destroy these colorful figures made as symbolic embodiments of evil.

This festivity — filled with satirical humor — is not associated with the Holy Week celebrations led by the Catholic Church in this mostly Catholic country. The practice is common in several Latin American nations and in some parts of Greece.

Originally, the burning figures were effigies of Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Jesus, according to the Biblical account of the days leading up to Christ’s crucifixion. Nowadays, though, Mexican artisans shape their Judas like red, horned devils or other characters considered evil by society…

Researcher Abraham Domínguez, in an article published by the National Institute of Anthropology and History, wrote that this ritual originated in Europe during the Middle Ages and reached America with the Spanish conquest…

“They are burned because of what people are accusing them of,” Villarreal said. It is a way of expressing disagreement with humor, she said.

Villarreal has spent more than a decade working in “cartonería,” as the craft of creating papier-mache sculptures is known. Most notably, “cartonería” creations fill Mexican streets during the Day of the Dead celebrations in late October and early November.

Inside each figure lies a reed skeleton covered with newspaper and cardboard. Depending on weather conditions and how fast the glue dries, it can take several weeks of work to be ready…

A reed skeleton covered with newspapers & gaudily painted cardboard would be the perfect representation of SO MANY reprehensible American figures in this moment. Not just TFG and his political followers, but all his media enablers; the Apartheid Princeling; the (other) Silicon Valley jeeniuses like Sam Bankman-Fried…

(Of course, the MAGAts would demand their own ‘judases’, stuff the figures full of fireworks or black powder, and incinerate whole neighborhoods in their attempts to exorcise Dark Brandon and the Woke Monster. Bad news for first responders and innocent bystanders!)

Reader Interactions

117Comments

  3. 3.

    Brachiator

    During the “Burning of Judas” celebrations that take place every Holy Saturday in some Mexican neighborhoods, people gather to light fireworks that destroy colorful figures embodying evil.

    My sister and I were talking about the official designations of the days associated with Easter. We got Good Friday and of course Easter Sunday, but could not remember Holy Saturday.

    Also, growing up, The 10 Commandments seemed to be the official movie shown by one of the major broadcast networks during the holiday, even though this is more a Passover celebration movie.

  6. 6.

    Debbie(Aussie)

    T thought Judas was exiled. Some seem to be very retributive, for want of a better word.

  9. 9.

    LiminalOwl

    Wow, the “Judases” ritual brought up an old memory, and gave it context.

    The summer I was 16, I went to Mexico with Experiment in International Living, to improve my Spanish. At some point my host family asked a question about my own family, to which I replied that we were judios.

    Possibly coincidence, but thereafter the family pretty much ignored me. I stayed in my bedroom, reading when I could find books, and crying. After a couple of weeks I went home—early, long before the end of the summer, and my mother was Not Happy with me. But we never talked about why.

  11. 11.

    Steeplejack

    @Narya:

    Google: “The word ‘Maundy’ comes from the Latin word ‘mandatum,’ meaning “command.'” Maundy Thursday was the day of the Last Supper, when Jesus commanded his apostles to love one another.

    I don’t know anything about Ruby Tuesday, however.

  12. 12.

    LiminalOwl

    @eclare: Thanks.
    In a class, years later, I was told scholars of the Christian Bible believe “Judas” was not a proper name, but an archetypal one: the betrayer of Jesus was just “a Jew,” or representative of “the Jews.”  So rituals to destroy Judas, coupled with the ongoing name of the faith/ethnicity… have resonance.  And of course Mexico was colonized, and according to the above the ritual brought over, during the heyday of the Inquisition.

  13. 13.

    Anne Laurie

    @Debbie(Aussie): T thought Judas was exiled. Some seem to be very retributive, for want of a better word.

    I was taught in Catholic parochial school that Judas hanged himself when he saw what he’d done… and was rescued from hell (where all suicides go) into heaven when Jesus scoured the underworld on Holy Saturday.  If you check ‘Holy Saturday’ on twitter, there are many medieval representations of that story.

    There was also, in those post-Vatican II days, considerable scholarly debate suggesting that the Resurrection could not happen without Judas — his ‘false sacrifice’ (delivering Jesus to the Roman authorities) deliberately prefigured Jesus’ ‘true (self) sacrifice’.   This was very much connected to the Vatican’s desire to stop (if not actually apologize) blaming the Jews as a group for the death of ‘our Redeemer’.

    Don’t know if this is still accepted dogma, but that’s where the characterization of Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar came from.

  15. 15.

    OzarkHillbilly

    The “burning of Judas”… What better way to celebrate all the Saints?

  18. 18.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Anne Laurie: I guess they’d moved on from the view represented in Dante’s Bible fanfic, in which Judas is one of the three people at the very bottom of Hell being eternally chewed on by the three faces of Satan himself, along with… Brutus and Cassius? Always found it strange that betraying Julius Caesar was portrayed as on par with betraying Jesus himself, with priority over all the other betrayers in history.

  19. 19.

    OzarkHillbilly

    ‘Headed off the charts’: world’s ocean surface temperature hits record high

    The temperature of the world’s ocean surface has hit an all-time high since satellite records began, leading to marine heatwaves around the globe, according to US government data. Climate scientists said preliminary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) showed the average temperature at the ocean’s surface has been at 21.1C since the start of April – beating the previous high of 21C set in 2016.

    “The current trajectory looks like it’s headed off the charts, smashing previous records,” said Prof Matthew England, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales.
    ………………………….
    More than 90% of the extra heat caused by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and deforestation has been taken up by the ocean. A study last year said the amount of heat accumulating in the ocean was accelerating and penetrating deeper, providing fuel for extreme weather.

    England, a co-author of that study, said: “What we are seeing now [with the record sea surface temperatures] is the emergence of a warming signal that more clearly reveals the footprint of our increased interference with the climate system.”

    “Much ado about nothing.” -Today’s GOP

  21. 21.

    Brachiator

    @Narya:

    Maundy Thursday, but no clue what it signifies.

    Ah, another Easter related day! I never knew that this was the day of the Last Supper, but heard the term and would jokingly refer to it as Blue Maundy, as sung by Fats Domino.

  23. 23.

    satby

    Watching the sunrise over some small town in MN, heading home after two weeks of wandering around the country by rail and meeting wonderful people on and off the train. Great way to see the country, but I will be glad to be home tonight (or tomorrow, depends on how late I get to Chicago).

  24. 24.

    Geminid

    @Matt McIrvin: I wonder how Dante acquired this view of Julius Caesar. I think that Dante’s generation had access to some of the old histories of the Roman Republic.  Was Dante influenced by these histories? Even oral traditions? Why did he place Caesar’s betrayal on a par with Jesus’s?

    Maybe he saw the assassination as a momentus, downward inflection in Rome’s history. It may well have been. Here Dante sounds as much a Roman as a Christian.

  27. 27.

    Geminid

    @OzarkHillbilly: Yes, and Dante was very conscious of the Roman heritage that underlay his Italian identity. I guess this was what the Renaissance was about.

  28. 28.

    OzarkHillbilly

    As of Friday, Johnson and Jackson did not appear to have widely released their proof. The American Mathematical Society has only said it has encouraged the pair to submit their work to a peer-reviewed journal. But a YouTube account, MathTrain, reconstructed the proof using slides from Johnson and Jackson’s presentation visible in the WWL report. Lozano-Robledo reviewed MathTrain’s reconstruction, broke it down in his own video and concluded that the students had done what they said.

    In a follow-up video, he summarized how the proof involved “a fractal of similar triangles” as well as “infinite series” to compute the shapes’ sides. “It’s so ingenious,” Lozano-Robledo said. “The proof itself is just so beautiful and so elegant.”

    But Lozano-Robledo also said people who pointed to at least one other trigonometric, noncircular proof of Pythagoras’s theory were correct to do so. Jason Zimba, then at Bennington College in Vermont, established in 2009 that sin2x+cos2x=1 could be derived independently of the Pythagorean theorem, though he took a different route.

    In text under his video, Lozano-Robledo said it was not Johnson and Jackson’s fault that people had the impression they were claiming to have done something not done in more than 2,000 years. He said the students did not say that in their abstract. Johnson and Jackson’s abstract said: “In the 2,000 years since trigonometry was discovered, it’s always been assumed that any alleged proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem based on trigonometry must be circular.” St Mary’s Academy then issued a press release which led with that sentence, under a title containing the words “unprecedented research”.

    Nonetheless, Lozano-Robledo made clear that by all indications Johnson and Jackson had arrived at a valid new Pythagorean theorem proof, an accomplishment worthy of celebration. The eastern section of New Orleans often makes the news for reasons including deadly violence or political corruption, but now two children there have apparently made a discovery of which many researchers dream. Lozano-Robledo said new proofs occasionally give mathematicians insights that can be applied in other settings or equip researchers with a tool to prove other theorems previously thought unprovable. One of the main points of teaching established knowledge, he said, is to inspire new solutions.

    “It’s just so invigorating – it makes me so happy to see teenagers thinking about new math and coming up with something really important and something fantastic,” Lozano-Robledo said. “It’s just great.”

    So they weren’t the first.

    Even so, “It’s so ingenious, the proof itself is just so beautiful and so elegant.” and “It’s just so invigorating – it makes me so happy to see teenagers thinking about new math and coming up with something really important and something fantastic,” Indeed.

  29. 29.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Geminid: He put Julius Caesar himself in the top circle of Hell, the fairly pleasant afterlife reserved for virtuous non-Christians, but not harrowed by Jesus into Heaven. So he seems to have regarded Caesar as basically a good guy and a legitimate authority, and treason against legitimate authority as one of the worst things you could ever do.

  30. 30.

    lowtechcyclist

    @LiminalOwl: ​

    In a class, years later, I was told scholars of the Christian Bible believe “Judas” was not a proper name, but an archetypal one: the betrayer of Jesus was just “a Jew,” or representative of “the Jews.”

    But in the gospel of John, at the Last Supper, “Judas – the other Judas, not Iscariot” – asks Jesus a question. So with two Judases, only one of which is Jesus’ betrayer, that doesn’t seem to make sense.John 14:22 if you want to look it up.​

    Also, the reason some of you may have been taught in religious schools that Judas hanged himself is that Matthew 27:5 says exactly that.

  31. 31.

    prostratedragon

    @Anne Laurie: Similar in the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, where Judas (Harvey Keitel) encourages Jesus to see his sacrifice through to the end.

  32. 32.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    When wife was small, her dad was stationed at Clark AB in the Philippines (he was an officer assigned to monitor efficacy of Agent Orange, which required frequent classified forays into Vietnam) and they lived off-base in a neighborhood consisting of American style homes, each one a compound surrounded by a high wall topped with set-in shards of broken glass.

    For some reason, he decided he wanted to go see a local Good Friday procession, and she was the only kid available.

    Marchers were scourging themselves, blood was everywhere. Some were dragging large crosses, and at some point, getting nailed to them.

    Poor girl was scarred for life – to this day, I don’t know what he was thinking.

    She has other good stories – how the housekeeper cooked her pet chicken, how the mamba had slithered into the house to get after a litter of kittens (the house guard shot it with his omnipresent shotgun), etc. One of her most vivid memories was when the idiot base commander ordered everyone to bring their children to greet the returning POWs – how gaunt, haggard and kind of grasping they were. She had nightmares for years.

  34. 34.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Geminid: Some people take their history quite personal. If you go to the Hill in STL, you will find an Italian neighborhood chock full of people who take the fall of Rome personal.

    Me? Not so much. What happened in Slovenia 17 centuries ago has nothing to do with me.

  35. 35.

    Steeplejack

    Speaking of things ecumenical, I was listening to a news insert on Morning Joe yesterday, and the correspondent in Rome said that “Christians and Catholics” were celebrating Good Friday. Whut? Are Catholics not Christians? I admit I’m not up on the theological fine points as much as I should be.

    Then that correspondent threw to a guy covering Pope Francis’s speech and schedule for the day, noting that it was very soon after he was sick, but Francis had his “agenda” and would not be denied. This guy sounded slightly manic, as if he was covering breaking news on a politician who was down in the polls and struggling to stay relevant. Like if Francis didn’t show up there was some other faction ready to slide in. WTF.

    I was listening in the car, didn’t get any names.

    ETA: I was wondering if the “Christians and Catholics” phrase revealed the journalist’s possible evangelical background?

  36. 36.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Geminid:

    If you really want to have fun with an Evangelical, the next time one of them talks about how sin and licentiousness brought down the Roman Empire, point out that when Rome fell, it had been officially Christian with all other religions oppressed for over 150 years. They’ll literally shout over you to tell you you’re wrong.

  37. 37.

    satby

    @Steeplejack: Catholics not being Christian is an old but fervent belief of Evangelical and fundie Xtian congregations. Either the newscast was pandering or the announcers are adherents.

  38. 38.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Geminid: …Of course, our view of these figures is influenced heavily by Shakespeare’s play, framing Brutus as a kind of conflicted tragic hero, which was written later.

    (And then, hey, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice did the same thing with Judas, though I guess there was a lot of history behind that.)

  39. 39.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Steeplejack:

    Ah, the old “are you Christian or are you Catholic” question you get whenever you get more than 15 miles outside of Louisville.

  41. 41.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I remembered kind of liking the Judas song in Jesus Christ Superstar and pulled it up to listen to it last night.

    To my ear, it hasn’t aged well, either lyrically or musically.

  42. 42.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Steeplejack: Are Catholics not Christians?

    Not according to my neighbors.

    I was wondering if the “Christians and Catholics” phrase revealed the journalist’s possible evangelical background?

    Possibly. That belief has been around for a long, long, time. My mother’s mother threatened to disown her only daughter if she went thru with her planned nuptials to my papist father.

  45. 45.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @satby:

    They wouldn’t have liked Martin Luther too much – he was way too Catholic for their taste. Henry VIII, either.

    They REALLY don’t know how to grasp the entirety of the Orthodox world, although they seem to like the Russian Patriarchate for its naked assholishness and white Christian nationalism (the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul was right to break ties).

  46. 46.

    Matt McIrvin

    @OzarkHillbilly: “Teenager makes momentous discovery”-type human interest stories are usually at least a little overblown in their description of the world-shaking significance of the achievement. People like to see kids do great things and embody hope for the future, and the stories are pandering to that. But this one at least seems to be some clever mathematics.

  48. 48.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Steeplejack: ​
     

    I was wondering if the “Christians and Catholics” phrase revealed the journalist’s possible evangelical background?

    Maybe. I remember when the fundies all said the Pope (any Pope, whoever it happened to be at the time) was the Antichrist. But once they realized (decades ago, now) that they could make common cause with conservative Catholics on a bunch of their favorite political axes to grind, that didn’t get said much anymore.

  49. 49.

    Geminid

    @Matt McIrvin: Many people’s views of Julius Caesar are conditioned by Shakespeare’s play. I like to think my views of Caesar are based on sounder footings. Like Maureen McCullough novels.

  50. 50.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    There was a time when tongues would wag about a mixed marriage of a Methodist to a Baptist because “that’s just too big a difference”.

  51. 51.

    Steeplejack

    @satby:

    I don’t think it was live. It was a clip from earlier in the day. (One of the reporters referred to “this morning,” and it was already past 1:00 p.m. in Italy.)

  52. 52.

    Kay

    Yashar Ali 🐘 یاشار
    @yashar
    ·Apr 5
    Candace Owens tells Vanity Fair’s
    @emilyjanefox
    that when her husband reached out to interior designer David Netto to work on their home Netto responded by saying:
    “I’d rather get beat in the ass with a wooden plank than ever go near either of you. Kind regards, David.”

    Kind regards. lol.

  56. 56.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: The kinds of evangelicals who convert to hard-right Catholicism because they like the rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian aspects sometimes go Orthodox instead (or afterward, like Rod Dreher), because they see it as even more hardcore.

    An old online acquaintance of mine went that route, joined some ultraconservative Orthodox splinter group in the Carolinas and actually became a priest, and I remember his LiveJournal posts getting very, very weird after that. Insistently and earnestly homophobic in this really gullible way, and he’d also go on about all the physical miracles he’d been allowed to witness, which were only accessible to the Orthodox indicating that that was in fact God’s one true church. Lots of talk about the lost virtue of Obedience, which he had been teaching himself and that our libertine society had abandoned. At one point he said that he believed the lost ideal form of government was that of the Byzantine Empire, with a basilieus endorsed by God himself.

  59. 59.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: ​
     

    I remembered kind of liking the Judas song in Jesus Christ Superstar and pulled it up to listen to it last night.

    To my ear, it hasn’t aged well, either lyrically or musically.

    I think that song (“Heaven On Their Minds”) has held up OK, but JC Superstar as a whole really hasn’t, IMHO.

    Its main problem for me is that it portrays Jesus as such a whiny, self-pitying character that you find it hard to believe anyone would have bothered to follow him to begin with.

  62. 62.

    Wanderer

    @satby: So glad you’re having a wonderful trip.  I took a long railway trip a few years ago and thought it just a very pleasant and spacious way to get around.

  68. 68.

    kalakal

    @Matt McIrvin: If someone wants to go hardcore in the other direction there’s the Church of Scotland, founded by John Knox who considered Calvin to be a bit of a party animal. Beyond that there’s the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland aka “the Wee Wee Frees” * who embody the word dour.

    *So called for it’s miniscule membership, even in Aberdeen there’s only so many people determined no one  should have a good time

  70. 70.

    Suzanne

    @Steeplejack:

    Are Catholics not Christians? 

    Lots of Christians don’t think they are.
    Same with Mormons.

    There’s a lot of gate-keeping and it’s all bullshit.

  71. 71.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: ​
     

    If you really want to have fun with an Evangelical, the next time one of them talks about how sin and licentiousness brought down the Roman Empire, point out that when Rome fell, it had been officially Christian with all other religions oppressed for over 150 years. They’ll literally shout over you to tell you you’re wrong.

    Not to mention, if that first-century C.E. sin and licentiousness was responsible for the decay and ultimate fall of the Roman Empire, it took four centuries to accomplish that end. Must’ve been pretty weak tea as licentiousness goes.

  73. 73.

    Percysowner

    For the first time in 50 years, I do not have a cat. Last night my 20 year old cat, Speck, collapsed. He was paralyzed on one side. He kept trying to go somewhere and was able to scoot, but that was all. I spent some of the night on the floor next to him. This morning I took him to the vet and had him put to sleep. He was a good boy. He’s been going downhill for a while, his fur looked worse and worse, he was losing weight, he couldn’t always find his food and he was sundowning a lot. I know I did the right thing, but it’s hard.

    I’m cuddled up with my dog right now trying to take it all in. I know it’s the price of owning a pet, we outlive them. I’m glad I had him in my life.

  75. 75.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Matt McIrvin:

    One of those guys slithered his way into the episcopate in the Antiochian partriarchy. He was a nasty piece of work, loved the sound of his own voice (particularly at the tail end of midnight liturgies, like at Pascha and Nativity, rambling on for over an hour in his exhortations to an ascetic life). He crushed all the fun out of parish life throughout his diocese (Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan), and kinda turned some priests against their congregations. Him being educated at Oral Roberts and a convert, ethnic festivals with drinking and dancing weren’t in his wheelhouse.

    Anyway, big contributors from wealthy parishes in the larger cities reached out to the Metropolitan in New York, who promptly stripped territorial authority and made him a kind of “bishop at large”. Asshole made a countermove by reaching some of his brother bishops back in the Levant, who’d never heard of a bishop without a specific diocese, and in some conclave, they scolded the Metropolitan and said “undo it”.

    Now to the fun part – showing that you don’t mess with the guy who’s been doing a job for 50 years – the Metropolitan assigned him a new diocese, strictly by the book, in a brand new mission parish in the backwoods of Alaska. When asshole found out, he complained and said he has seasonal affective disorder and can’t do it; the Metropolitan said “it’ll be difficult, but I will pray for you”. At the same time, the Metroplitan was either reassigning, demoting or defrocking asshole’s allies in a scene reminiscent of the baptism in “The Godfather”. In the end the the Metroplitan decided he simply wanted asshole out of the archdiocese altogether and handed him over to the OCA around the time of  Metropolitan Jonah’s Paffhausen’s reign of error. Asshole actually managed to get somewhat involved in that jam with Dreher regarding the contentious removal of a very popular, well-loved priest in Dallas (something about unauthorized computer access).

  81. 81.

    Suzanne

    @Matt McIrvin:

    The kinds of evangelicals who convert to hard-right Catholicism because they like the rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian aspects sometimes go Orthodox instead (or afterward, like Rod Dreher), because they see it as even more hardcore. 

    I often say that lots of people are religious not because they really believe in things, but because they are drawn to the aesthetics. (The term aesthetics here being used as “how it looks/sounds/feels is what it means”, different from simple “art appreciation”.) Dreher and others need this sort of arcana, these minute theological distinctions, in order to feel a sense of journey and mastery. It’s kind of the same urge as playing Dungeons and Dragons, these very elaborate rule systems and world-building.

  82. 82.

    Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride

    Judas was a big problem for the scriptwriters of “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”  They tried to make all the major characters (aside from Jesus) into “real people” with motives that would seem understandable to 1950s audiences, but Scripture doesn’t give much help on that with Judas.  When they got to the point where Judas had to go into betrayal mode, they had him give a speech to Caiaphas that went (near-verbatim):  “Jesus is the purest, kindest man I know.  I have never seen him do anything but good.  His heart is so gentle.  Children adore him.  I love him.”  And he made his betrayal conditional on Caiaphas’s promise that no harm would come to Jesus (without explaining how he thought he could make that promise binding).  In other words, to avoid making him a villain, they turned him into a driveling idiot.

  83. 83.

    raven

    @Percysowner:

     

    We who choose to surround ourselves
    with lives even more temporary than our
    own, live within a fragile circle;
    easily and often breached.
    Unable to accept its awful gaps,
    we would still live no other way.
    We cherish memory as the only
    certain immortality, never fully
    understanding the necessary plan.
    — Irving Townsend

  86. 86.

    Steeplejack

    @Suzanne:

    I will note that my religious education was bland. My father was in the Air Force, and on military bases you got Catholic services, Jewish services and generic Protestant services (which is what we attended). Islamic now, I’m sure, and probably others, but 60 years ago that was not an issue.

    Both of my parents were from Tennessee and were raised in non-mainstream denominations, but neither was very “religious.”

  87. 87.

    Another Scott

    @Steeplejack:

    Are Catholics not Christians?

    Heh.

    Reminds me of an online conversation a couple of decades ago with a woman from somewhere in the Midwest. Somehow she mentioned that she was a member of a Christian church. We asked, what denomination? She said “Christian”.

    :-/

    I think it’s these guys.

    “We’re real Christians™ – it’s in our name. Not sure about those other guys…”

    I mean, man, talk about trying to grab the mantle and exclude everyone else…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  89. 89.

    Steeplejack

    @Percysowner:

    Condolences on Speck. 🌈🐾 It’s hard to let them go, but it has to be done.  I’m coming up on the third anniversary of the housecat’s death later this month, and I still miss her every day.

  90. 90.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Suzanne:

    I use the term meditative space – depending on your personal preferences, periods of contemplation are rejuvenating.

    My mark of a proper religious ritual is whether I’m comfortable enough and at enough piece to fall asleep if I’m neither hung over or otherwise exhausted. Even though I’m devoid of dogmatic belief, I still enjoy Antiochian or Greek Orthodox liturgies. Have felt much the same for Anglican worship as well as more traditional Catholic Mass forms. Felt really great at a couple of Conservative Jewish temple services, so it isn’t limited to Christianity with me.

    Mai realize I’m probably really idiosyncratic on all of this.

  91. 91.

    Suzanne

    @Steeplejack: I spent my “formative years” in Mesa, AZ, which was then and is still known as “the most conservative city in America”. It is also the 2nd-largest Mormon community in the world after Salt Lake, but has a very large Latino (mostly Mexican) population, who are largely Catholic. And the Protestant population has a lot of the evangelical megachurch types. As we were imports from the Northeast, we attended a mainline Presbyterian church, making us very much a minority.

    It was weird.

    Spending my adolescence among religious conservatives who think that women should get married and pump out babies….awakened me to sexism, let’s say.

  95. 95.

    Denali5

    One of my English teachers pointed out that in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Devil was a much more interesting character than Jesus. Evil is always fascinating, and I think that is one of the reason the endless adult action of TFG. The virtuous character somehow is a little boring.

  96. 96.

    geg6

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Could not possibly agree more.  ALW’s stuff pretty much all suck with the sole exception being Superstar.  Cats, Phantom and Starlight Express are abominations, IMHO.  And don’t get me started on Evita, with all its authoritarian ass kissing.  Haven’t seen School of Rock, so it might not completely suck due the excellent source material.

  97. 97.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Denali5: The villains in Dickens are so much more interesting than the heroes.  Sydney Carton is his only remotely heroic character who isn’t deathly dull.

  102. 102.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @lowtechcyclist: But the grooves and instrumentation are fire on just about every song!  So damn funky!!  And “Everything’s Alright” is the second best song in 5/4 ever written, second only to River Man by Nick Drake.  (Warning: I will immediately “pie” anyone who argues for Take Five, lol). I do agree about the whiny Jesus tone though as an atheist I always felt it did kinda capture the way I heard him in my mind any time someone forced me to read the Bible.

  112. 112.

    Torrey

    @Percysowner: ​ I am so sorry for your loss. I suspect in this group most have been in a similar place, and so grief is understood and shared. It’s clear that Speck was a very lucky cat, and that you made it so. I’m glad to hear that you have the dog to help right now. Warm thoughts.​

  114. 114.

    StringOnAStick

    @Percysowner: I’m sorry about the loss of Speck.  I’m sure he had his best possible life with you and you did right by him all 20 years, to the very last.  My condolences.

  116. 116.

    Geminid

    @rikyrah: I hope it’s good weather in Chicago. It is here, just a little cool for this time of year. Tomorrow should be sunnier and less windy.

  117. 117.

    Msb

    @Percysowner
    very sorry to hear this. Hope that the knowledge that you gave Speck the best life possible helps to ease the pain some.

    I love the video of the cat. Plainly the imam knows and loves him, and the cat knows and loves the imam well enough to know exactly when to jump back down.

    @Maundy Thursday – Catholics and other Christians often mimic Jesus’ action in washing the disciples’ feet (before holding the last supper).

     

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