Mark Evanier encounters what seems to be a trap street.
I wrote about trap streets a few years ago in “The Street That Wasn’t There.” Here’s the footnote from that post:
The disparity between map and terrain forced me to make that distinction, and to recognize the possibility of that distinction, which wasn’t something the fundamentalist church and school I attended were interested in recognizing.
But there I was, standing at the dead end of Glenwood Drive, looking at a line on a map that indicated a street that did not exist.
When forced, by a conflict between them, to choose between the text and the real world, I decided to go with the real world. I decided, in effect if not in these precise words, that this is what maps are for, this is what constitutes mapness. I didn’t throw away my county atlas — the vast majority of it remained trustworthy, reliable and indispensable — but I decided, from there on, to treat maps as maps and not to try riding down streets that weren’t really there.
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Pat Robertson is as nutty as … well, as nutty as Pat Robertson. But still, I can’t argue with this one statement from his kinda-sorta endorsement of Mitt Romney:
The question is if you have two candidates, you don’t have Jesus running against somebody else. You have Obama running against Romney.
Yes. Jesus isn’t on the ballot. Perfection is never an option in any election — the choice is always between two humans with two human political agendas. As Tony Kushner said, voting is “not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future.”
Pat Robertson seems almost to realize that. This makes Robertson slightly less nutty than Bill Keller — founder of “the most successful online Christian ministry in the history of the Internet” — who is urging his kind of Christians to “write in the name of Jesus for president.”
Says Keller:
“A Christian is faced with a difficult dilemma this November. It is literally Satan flipping a two-headed coin with his head on both sides. How can a Christian in good conscience vote for President Obama, who has proven to be the most pro-baby killing, pro-radical homosexual, pro-enemy of Israel President in our nation’s history.”
Keller continues, “On the other hand, how can a Christian in good conscience vote for Mitt Romney, a 5th generation member and priest in the satanic Mormon cult.”
This is a good example of why I enjoy that phrase I learned this morning: “a sense of contrived innocence.” The quest for such a sense seems to be the central purpose of life for people like Keller.
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When writing about our ideas of Heaven and Hell, I’ve often referred to our desire or need for some assurance of ultimate, eschatological justice.
Things just don’t work out in this life the way we want them to. Oppressors escape consequences. Poor people get screwed. It seems unsatisfying and wrong.
I’m guessing that my using phrases like “eschatological justice” or quoting Reinhold Niebuhr doesn’t always communicate this idea as well as I’d like. So let me quote here from the estimable TBogg, who neatly summarizes just what I mean by all that:
This should help them #vettheprez since it hasn’t gone so well since they showed Obama black-hugging a black man which is all that Big Daddy Breitbart left them in his will before Jesus called him home. Or reincarnated him as poor black baby whose mother is being evicted and there is no organization like ACORN around to help her out.
Because Jesus is funny that way …
I don’t believe in Dante’s Hell. And I don’t believe that Andrew Breitbart will literally be reincarnated as someone who will suffer the consequences of the cruel, hateful politics he perpetrated in this life. But I do believe in something like that. I believe in eschatological justice — that somehow, I don’t know how, but in some way, the liars who deprived the poor of their advocate will be accountable for that.
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Sun Sentinel: “Platinum Showgirls emerges as Evangelical Assembly of Christ”
Strippers at Platinum Showgirls sold cocaine and prescription drugs, danced on poles and performed sex acts, on-stage and privately, police said.
When the owner shut it down in 2009 — arrested on charges of racketeering and selling prostitution — the windowless building on North Federal Highway [in Boynton Beach, Fla.] became another abandoned property on a rundown commercial drag.
But now the Evangelical Assembly of Christ has made it a place to hold jubilant services, members said.
This is actually a happy story about a largely Haitian congregation finding a new home for worship. But it also seems like the set-up for at least a dozen jokes. Out of respect for this community’s joy in their new home, I’ll refrain from telling those here. Especially not the one about the offering plate.
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