Compendia Mobile

Aftermath

Acrimony and recrimination fill the air and spent shell cases litter the ground.  But now that the traditional democratic firing squad has formed (always in the shape of a circle, for some reason), we have to go about the business of washing the ashen taste of bitter defeat from our mouths.

The first step is to assess what went wrong. Teeming droves of commentators have spent the week spilling much ink on such matters as whether we hate our neighbors; whether we must secede; whether they must secede; whether the rapture will return our country to normal, or whether it isn’t as big a deal as it seems. Of all the competing analyses, I think a few are very cogent and point towards next steps.

Instant Library

Over the weekend, I started supplementing my reading of Augustine's City of God (Against the Pagans) with a book only tangentially related - The Origin of Satan, by Elaine Pagels. Ms. Pagels recently appeared on the Marc Steiner show on WYPR (yes, that's your public radio). This well spoken scholar defended herself coolly against some rather rancorous callers as she described her scholarly work, most of which deals with translating the Nag Hammadi scrolls.

Consulting Metaphysician

If the internet has facilitated anything, it is the mania for self-diagnosis by check-box, in other words, the quiz. Once confined only to magazines (the venerable Cosmo for women and Stuff or Maxim, for 13 year-old boys), the internet has abetted the proliferation of the genre. You can now check your predisposition toward eating disorders, heart disease, gender purity, and just about any self-help topic you want. It moves closer toward our national destiny: to defy the uncertainty principle: we will know our velocity and our location simultaneously.

The most interesting of these that I've encountered, is the perfectly named Belief-o-Matic. This handy-dandy survey allows you to compare a cross section of feelings and beliefs against those of major religions. The result is essentially a list of religious affinities, i.e. major religions ranked by how closely your expressed beliefs match those of the groups listed. My own results were not surprising. Unitarian Universalist (100%) with Secular Humanist (99%) coming in a close second. Frightening truth:51% affinity with Scientology embeds it throroughly in the middle of the spectrum, with most forms of Islam surpassing Catholicism which placed last with a lowly 19%. Minutes of fun. Hours of debate.