Tommy used to work on the dock

Just in case anyone is still bothering with this seemingly-failed experiment in group blogging, I submit here for your perusal the text of what I told Mike about earlier tonight.

Disclaimer: I can't say I particularly like Tom Robbins much, but I was flipping through "the sexy part" of Skinny Legs and All last night and came across something worth ruminating on:

"Whenever a state or an individual cited 'Insufficient Funds' as an excuse for neglecting this important thing or that, it was indicative of the extent to which reality had been distorted by the abstract lens of wealth. During periods of so-called economic depression, for example, societies suffered for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation invariably disclosed that there were plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What was missing was not materials but an abstract unity of measurement called 'money.' It was akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she couldn't back a cake because she didn't have any ounces. She had butter, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, she just didn't have any ounces, any pinches, any pints. The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves."

Perhaps Tom Robbins should just go ahead and do nonfiction, instead of doing "nonfiction couched in fiction." He might just win me over yet.

We have the facts and we're voting yes

To start, I'm glad to be able to imitate D. Mike's LJ blog entry naming convention by choosing a Death Cab for Cutie phrase.

Statistics are ubiquitous. Institutions such as Gallup and USA Today release new results of major polls literally every day. These numbers are then added to the expanding ocean of information that contemporary Americans must attempt to navigate. Interestingly, poll numbers are less likely to dissolve into the mass and less likely to sink into the abyss than other sorts of information. Poll numbers are like flotsam and jetsam; they float on the surface above an incalculable depth of accumulated knowledge. They are easy to spot, easy to pick out, easy to go grab. They drift with the currents and roll with the waves.

Religion is a whole other catastrophe. Combining religion and statistics clouds the water furthermore, as not one but two disciplines of pseudo-knowing wash over the sediments of the truth. Plus, consider people's inclination to misunderstand and to distort, both knowingly and unknowingly, and say goodbye to the chance that any pithy stats about religion will tell you anything you really need to know. And, there are so very, very many. The maxim "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose" surely has a correlative concerning the prevalence of statistics.

Nevertheless, I encourage you follow this link:

gallup.com/catholics

The crux of thing is that Catholics are rather liberal compared to non-Catholics. (Nota bene: the make-up of the group labeled "non-Catholics" can be understood to largely consist of all manner of non-Catholic Christians (a.k.a. Protestants) and not just atheists and agnostics.)

For your review

It's nigh on 11PM, and I don't really have the motivation to write any thoughts of my own down here so instead I'm just going to post the articles I'm thinking of and see if anyone has any thoughts:

First, A girl grows up prostestant, but wants her Morrissey, too. Goes to New York and converts to Catholicism. 

[btw, I'm no relation to Carlene Bauer, so far as I'm aware]

Secondly, Bill McClellan tells of an OMI (that's the order of priests that runs Our Lady of the Snows over in Belleville) who's off to beat on nuclear missle silos with a sledgehammer, as if that will somehow do.... something.

Also, what exactly IS a "plowshare" anyway? Is it somehow different from just a plain ol' "plow"?

For the record, these both came across my radar today pretty independently as I was generally internettin' around. I don't intend to hijack my third of this blog to be "D. Mike's mouthpiece to the world for why Roman Catholicism is right and everybody else is wrong." I'm sure my thoughts will branch out as we go forward.

Officially Without a Religion

The other day, I cleared the 'Religious Views' field on my Facebook page. I've decided to stop calling myself Roman Catholic.