Neanderpundit

To anyone on earth who thinks Crapblogging is a new thing, or that the sort of scatalogical language you hear on blogs these days is a recent phenomenon, let me point you to 1601, by Mark Twain.

Years ago, I worked at a little print shop, which had a small letterpress, an old kelsey. How I wish I had that Kelsey now!

Anyway, there’s a sort of an underground tradition of giving a printer’s devil (apprentice) the manuscript of 1601 to set, and giving him a drawer of pied type- that is, type that has come out of a set document that hasn’t been sorted into it’s proper drawers. Usually it’s an ornate or ugly typeface, like Goudy Stout.

Standing in front of the messed up drawer, digging around for letters, pushing the letters onto the stick while reading 1601 is usually how a devil sets his first type, and doing it while the Boss doesn’t find out (though the boss usually knows about the whole thing all along) is the first memory most apprentices have of their job- this is certainly true in my case. I remember tightening in the quoin on the last side of the frame and lifting the frame gingerly off the stone, not knowing if I had gotten the quoins tight enough, and carrying it to the Kelsey, where we printed a handful of copies on some scrap ‘Carnival Groove” that had been cut off another job.

Twain was a master. His language was far more colorful than you can imagine was possible for that time, and the piece is worth a read, unless you’re sensitive to language or scataology or crude sexal reference.

I wish I still had one of those proofsheets. Someday maybe I’ll find a small printshop that will let me reset it and print it, for old time’s sake.

Golf balls had cores of plutonium.

No! That’s another story. Golf balls, in my youth, were hard skins around cores wound of rubber. I have no idea how they;re made now because I haven’t carved one up in a hellofa long time.

Anyway, if you carved that cover off just right, the rubberband wrapped core would bounce around like a thing posessed, throwing strips of rubber and gook all over the place until it got to the creamy center.

I can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t look like that if Pelosi’s facelift sutures all failed at once.

I know I’ll be preaching to the choir on this but I have to get it out of my head and onto paper.

I am not a biblical scholar nor a theologian by profession, but that is where my roots were. Only accident and opportunity steered me in other directions, but once a theology geek, always a theology geek.

So here goes. This is a perhaps over simplistic approach, but it will hopefully illuminate.

Think of Christianity as a tree.

At the base of Christianity is Judaism. Judaism is the soil in which Christianity is planted. The rootstock is Jesus Christ.

The Church, in those early days, was a fragile tree; the leadership of Peter and the early popes was a difficult thing, likely to get you imprisoned or killed. Because the Popes were humans, dumbassery occurred. Because early Christians were humans, Dumbassery occurred. Each episode of dumbassery damaged the tree, and some of the damage took a while to heal over.

Let’s talk for a minute about the substance of the tree.

Christianity is not the pope, it’s not the priests, it’s not their doctrine or dogma or the ten commandments or the bible. Christianity, after all, does not exist in the physical world. Christianity is a concept that exists outside the people who practice it. Christianity is a way of behaving, based on the teachings of and actions of Jesus Christ. Christians are practitioners of Christianity.

Christianity is organized into The Church. The Church consists of the people. From the very beginning it was JUST ‘The Church” As the Church grew, it began to branch, and the first of these brances was the Schism, in 1054.

Now think of the tree as having a large trunk, with a fork to the east and another to the west. They are both firm and strong, and both ideologically well connected to the rootstock.

Other branchings occur. Luther branches off, Calvin. They branch away from the main trunk and head off some distance before again travelling skyward. The rootstock is always Jesus Christ, though the case can be made that many have been cut from the original and grafted onto other, more mundane rootstock. The fact is, that many who split away did so not becase- like Luther- they found fault with the Church, or Christianity, but because they had specific personal ambition. and that ambition was often worldly, and not otherworldly.

Even the worst of those offshoot churches, though, are capable of producing decent Christians. No matter how fucked up a leader is, his followers might just become decent people. I’m particularly fond of the Eastern Church, because they have held firmly to the traditions of the old Church, and they show no sign of changing anytime soon. I also like Mormons a lot, not for their practice of their religion, because that is cultish and weird, but for the fact that they tend to be decent people- the kind of example Christians should be watching carefully, and following.

As an RC, I like the Church in Rome, of course, and as that is the part of the tree closest to the rootstock, I feel it is the very closest connection to the Creator. The Vatican has a history of nastiness, and of corruption, and that is a source of some real contention among the religious. The bottomline is this: What some people have done in the name of Christianity has sullied the whole church in the mind of many people.

Those people are morons.

If you use a glock to commit a crime, that does not make all the people who own Glocks criminals. If you use a car to break the law, it does not make all drivers criminals. If someone does something evil under the umbrella of Christianity, it does not make Christians evil. If you don’t get this, you need some remedial training in reason. If you will overlook the actions of criminals compared with non criminals but paint all Christians with the same bloodstained brush because of the actions of Pope Boniface VIII or the creepy priest you knew in grade school, that is hypocrisy, pure and simple, and if you’re capable of that level of hypocrisy you don’t have any business commenting on the morality of others. Because someone calls themself a Christian, doesn’t make them a Christian. It is behavior that makes you a Christian. Bad behavior is inconsistent with Christianity. Anytime anyone accuses the Church, or it’s members of (Insert your favorite pecadillo here) they are missing the whole point: Un-christian behavior is not done by Christians.

Being a Christian is like walking down the median of a highway. You can wander off onto the pavement, you can even drift off onto the shoulder, or into the cornfield adjacent. But only on the Median are you On the Median. You can’t say you’re on the median when you’re laying in a field of cowpies; Only by following the path of Christianity are you actually a Christian; when you deviate from it, you are not acting as a Christian should act.

Trust me: I know from deviating. I am capable of some remarkably un-Christian behavior.

The good news is, we have the option of Forgiveness. When we stray as Christians, we can bring ourselves back to the Path.

Pitiably, when one person strays, there are those who are anxious to condemn ALL Christians for that straying. Don’t pay any attention to them; I don’t, because I understand they have a bucketload of their own problems. All I can do is to pray for them. And occasionally beat them senseless. See? Straying from Christianity again.

There seems to be a large contingent of self righteous assholes the further you get from the rootstock, as if the distance from the dirt makes the individual less humble. At some point, those people become what I think of as leaves. They break from the whole program, and fall to the ground. They left. Updated to add, the rest of the tree is evergreen, like a spruce, or maybe a live oak. So long as the leaves stay attached to the main, they never die.

No doubt I’ll beat this horse more as time goes on.