v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Religious Ethics

Some thoughts from Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy about religious ethics from the blog, Letters form a Librarian:

In fact, the logical or structural questions about religious ethics, like many questions about God, are interesting only if you believe in God. If God exists, then arguments about him are arguments about the cosmos and of cosmic importance, but if he does not, they are not about anything. In that case, the important questions must be about human beings, and why, for instance, they ever believed that God existed. The issues about religious ethics are issues about the human impulses that expressed themselves in it, and they should be faced in those terms. For those who do not believe in a religious ethics, there is some evasion in continuing to argue about its structure: it distracts attention from the significant question of what such outlooks tell us about humanity. Nietzsche's saying, God is dead, can be taken to mean that we should now treat God as a dead person: we should allocate his legacies and try to write an honest biography of him.

Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0

Murder American (style)

From The Guardian:

Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby's death – they charged her with the "depraved-heart murder" of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.

Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby. But her case is by no means isolated. Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.

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Nicholas Vreeland

Movie Poster and Bull

From La Lettre, Vreeland is quoted:

"I began studying Buddhism with a Tibetan lama, Khyongla Rato Rinpoche, in New York in the mid 70’s. After some years – about 32 years ago – I joined his monastery, Rato Dratsang, reestablished in a Tibetan refugee settlement in the south of India. I remained there for 14 years. At first I didn’t have a camera. Eventually I was given one and kept it locked up in a trunk which I thought of as Pandora’s box. The box was sometimes opened, and toward the end of my time in the monastery I was taking a few pictures each day, though usually in my room. I felt I was doing my scales.”

“Twelve years ago, at the request of my teacher, I returned to New York to help run his Center. In 2003 he was invited to visit his birthplace, in Kham, Eastern Tibet. He asked me to accompany him and to photograph the journey. These photographs are the result of that adventure. I have no idea whether they have any merit other than being a document of an extraordinary journey. I witnessed the return of a Tibetan incarnate lama to his birth place, to his nomads, to his monastery. We rode many hours a day to get to these places, and were welcomed by devotees who had for the most part, never seen their lama, as Rinpoche had not been home in fifty years.” Nicholas Vreeland

Nosso Senhor do Bonfim

From Wikepedia on the history of the church:

The veneration of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim (Our Lord of the Good End, represented by the crucified Jesus in the moment of his death) is an old tradition in Portugal that was imported to Brazil during colonial times. In 1740, in order to fulfill a vow, Portuguese captain Teodósio Rodrigues de Faria brought a statue of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim from Setúbal (Portugal) to Salvador. Some years later a religious brotherhood (irmandade) dedicated to Our Lord of Bonfim was founded and a church to house the statue - the current Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim - began being built on top of Montserrat hill, in the Itapagipe peninsula, in the lower town of Salvador. The church was inaugurated in 1754, with the towers being finished around 1772.

The façade of the church is two-dimensional, with a central body flanked by two towers. The windows and specially the elaborate volutes of the gable on top of the façade follow a Rococo (late Baroque) design. The lower parts of the façade were covered by Portuguese white tiles (azulejos) in 1873.

The veneration of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim (Our Lord of the Good End, represented by the crucified Jesus in the moment of his death) is an old tradition in Portugal that was imported to Brazil during colonial times. In 1740, in order to fulfill a vow, Portuguese captain Teodósio Rodrigues de Faria brought a statue of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim from Setúbal (Portugal) to Salvador. Some years later a religious brotherhood (irmandade) dedicated to Our Lord of Bonfim was founded and a church to house the statue - the current Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim - began being built on top of Montserrat hill, in the Itapagipe peninsula, in the lower town of Salvador. The church was inaugurated in 1754, with the towers being finished around 1772.

The façade of the church is two-dimensional, with a central body flanked by two towers. The windows and specially the elaborate volutes of the gable on top of the façade follow a Rococo (late Baroque) design. The lower parts of the façade were covered by Portuguese white tiles (azulejos) in 1873.

Real Christmas

Vallejo Nocturno 2009 - Nice

Adopting Liberals

From the Liberty Counsel, this is not a joke:

Liberty Counsel is proud to introduce -- and invite you to participate in -- a vital new prayer program solidly built upon St. Paul's admonition to pray for our national leaders:

Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior.

 -- 1 Timothy 2:1-3

Since the landmark 2008 general election, there can be no doubt that a very large percentage of our Nation's leaders have a liberal mindset. The undeniable fact is that the 111th Pelosi-Reid Congress and the Obama Administration demonstrate a far left political philosophy. And since the President nominates federal judges and Justices of the United States Supreme Court, the judicial branch of government could take on a decidedly more liberal bent as the Obama Administration wears on.

Liberty Counsel has therefore named this special new prayer-in-action program Adopt a Liberal. And that's exactly what we invite you to do -- adopt a liberal who is in authority for regular, intense prayer in accord with St. Paul's admonition to his disciple, Timothy. In fact, we expect that many of our friends and supporters will choose to adopt many liberals as subjects of regular prayer!

More Crazy Stuff

The Order of Things

Vallejo Nocturno 2009 - the way it is in Bangkok

At the Basilica

Vallejo Nocturno 2008 - saturday night at church

Sam Harris-10 Myths about Atheism

From EDGE-3rd Culture Sam Harris writes about 10 common myths about atheism:

Several polls indicate that the term "atheism" has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.          

Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.         

Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was "not at all to be tolerated" because, he said, "promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist."         

That  was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims "never to doubt" the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.

Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.         

1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.         

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that   life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.         

2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.         

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious    hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

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