time makes ancient good uncouth,
They must upward still and onward,
who would keep abreast of truth.
-- James Russell Lowell --
Amidst all the horrible things going on in the world there are still those who see the fate of societies as determined by God's blessing or God's wrath and God's wrath usually stems from people engaging in what they were designed to do, or people looking at people clothed as God clothed them and doing what they have been doing since before they were really people: that's sex, of course, and sex which is not approved of by a group of people who exist for the purpose controlling other people's sex lives and warning them of God's wrath will lead to terrible things.
I only discovered the voice crying in the wilderness called Daniel Mark Cohen through an ad he probably ran himself in the February 19 & 26 issues of The New Republic titled Unhappy Anniversary.
"If the people of the United States collectively endorse a single prayer, one that, universal in its reach, transcends the necessary differences in faith and ethnicity that otherwise divide the nation, that prayer consists of three simple words: "God bless America."
In fact, prayer divides America and that prayer no less than others, but Cohen's assertion that God will no longer bless America since the Roth v. United States decision fifty years ago that had the audacity to determine that what is and what is not pornography is relative to community standards and not the eternal, immutable standards of self-appointed guardians and Biblical blowhards like Cohen. Only a truly magnificent idiot can forget that randy pagan societies have far outlasted empires steeped in sexual repression and have prospered. God seems to bless slavery, genocide, and bloody conquest equally with its absence, and just societies have come and gone in very short order. As the poet said, our standards change and some of those standards now make Cohen uncouth.
Only a truly arrogant idiot can insist on a recieved eternal standard about what parts of what bodies we may look at and at divine retribution for infringing upon it. Cohen is both kinds of idiot and more. He's an idiot that thinks he speaks for God and that God needs a spokesman.
Cohen, in the ad and in his book, insists that pornography is prostitution and part of a "culture of prostitution" mediated by the internet, cable television pornography, and photographic cameras. "And why should God bless America," asks Cohen, "when as a consequence, she insists on the free unregulated distribution via the internet of the most vile sexual images, so that hourly, such pictures reach and indelibly corrupt the otherwise innocent eyes and chaste minds of the country's millions of unsupervised children?"
Interesting that Cohen thinks we should be supervised as adults but that children, with their "chaste minds" need not be. I don't know whether I'm more offended by his contempt for freedom, his psychotic ideas about sex, or his insistence that children have chaste minds. I am of course angered beyond bounds by this voice from the sewer, this vox clamatis cloaco, from whose troglodytic viewpoint the world is covered in shit. I'm angry that his pathetic little God won't bless a sexually free America but isn't irritated by an America that kills children, letting them live in poverty and disease, by a world that looks the other way and feels righteous when they are hacked to bits in Africa and are forced to become killers of other children.
Cohen is too stupid, or too twisted and perverted, to dwell on the total lack of historical correlation between sexual openness and the fate of nations. God doesn't really give a damn from all evidence and from all evidence European countries that do not try to suppress pornography, that allow prostitution, and don't interfere with sex between consenting adults have less rape and murder than the lands of God-fearing, freedom-hating sexual deviates like Mark would force us to emulate.
God bless America? No, says Cohen. God damn Cohen and all miserable bastards like him? Yes, says Fogg.
Cross posted at The Reaction
4 comments:
I had to look up troglodytic. Stop using such big words. :-)
1. a prehistoric cave dweller.
2. a person of degraded, primitive, or brutal character.
3. a person living in seclusion.
4. a person unacquainted with affairs of the world.
5. an animal living underground.
sesquipedalianisms R us
I recently finished "Misquoting Jesus" by the biblical scholar and chair of Religious Studies at Univ. No. Carolina Bart D. Ehrman.
One of the interesting points he makes in his analysis of the origins of the NT: the greek words for evil and sexual immorality are very similar. So much so that in many instances, scribes mis-transcribed one word for the other. There are hundreds of examples of this error.
Briefly, it's likely that Jesus, Paul and the gang weren't as concerned with sex as you might think from reading the bible -- it's most likely due to "sloppy-copy" work.
I tend to ascribe it more to the "ecclesiastical ventriloquism" whereby the voices and opinions of men are put in the mouth of God.
Sex and fear (and fear of sex) seem to be great ways to control people.
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