Note the use of violence against financiers. It really brings out the glasses.

Via BB, here is an interview with Russell Brand in which he treats the same ideas:

Narrative is deeply spiritual. The archetypes we use to understand reality help, also, to construct it for each of us individually. The old gods have been made incarnate. Who is Brand if not Dionysus?

I don’t totally agree with Brand — celebrity isn’t necessarily glittered-up grey infosludge* — but it’s an interesting converstion nonetheless. Caveh Zahedi’s hyperreal self in The Waking Life makes the point that the celebrity system is actually deeply spiritual if you’re something like a monist physicalist pantheist because celebs transcend and link the characters they play and help to realize a photographic worship of the always-changing face of God — The Great Mandala.

We consume our artists, our celebs, our creatives, as a society. Not only are people down-rendered, or reified, into icons for easy digestion, but the drive to drink and drugs and self destruction is, I think (and so does Dr. Drew) to some extent externally motivated. Perhaps it’s the idea that Brand talks about, above — that celebs come to believe in their own reified media personas over their actual identities, and that vacuousness destroys their minds.

Gilbert’s TED on nurturing genius talks about our culture’s artist-grinding too.

But in short: celebs are our Greek gods (or, as a professor once extolled, gods were the Greek celebs). That’s why they can fight and die and fuck and love over and over again in infinite, immortal combinations. That, and the art of film.

It’s the same reason comic book structures work, and are so easy to move onto the screen.

When it comes to God-hatred, a collective blindness seems to settle on us. First, we lack a generally agreed-upon name to refer to this religious rebellion. And anything that doesn’t have a word associated with it doesn’t exist, right?

Um, no. Hell no! Is that actually an idea that people have? Both language and its limits are terribly important, especially for anyone trying to understand — well, anything.

I’ve run into this idea and some similar variants quite a lot. A director gave us an amazing lecture, and then asserted that anything could be conveyed through language. “OK,” I said, “orgasm.” That shut him up — if language could predictably convey orgasm (and I’m sure it can for some) then phone sex operators would be the highest-paid profession on Earth and radio would be illegal.

In this case, words don’t describe all of reality — ask anyone who’s invented anything. That would require that The English Language was handed down from on-high, full of words we now use for concepts that, at the time, were reserved for future definition. “No, Heinrich, don’t call that a ‘computer’. They’ll need that word in the 20th century.”

Last, language is woefully insufficient to describe the sensorium. Anyone who’s been blessed with mushroom poisoning or who has seen a photograph, or heard music, or smelled a flower, or tasted literally anything, could tell you that.

It’s supposed to be about fasting, about giving things up, which is why Fat Tuesday is such a big party: Ash Wednesday is the first day of the rest of your eternal life.

But the Lenten fast can contribute, I think, to a poverty of experience — and I’m not sure giving things up really works as a method of self improvement. That thinking implies that you’re already perfect and just need to shed some cruftybads. I prefer to work on building skills, on adding happiness to my life.

To that end, my Lenten jihad is against procrastination. No promises, but my Now Habit system is working swimmingly — after 40+ solid days I might have some nice stats to share.

Adam (who never existed) bequeathed his “sin” in his bodily semen (charming notion) to all of humanity. That sin, with which every newborn baby is hideously stained (another charming notion), was so terrible that it could be forgiven only through the blood sacrifice of a scapegoat. But no ordinary scapegoat would do. The sin of humanity was so great that the only adequate sacrificial victim was God himself.

That’s right. The creator of the universe, sublime inventor of mathematics, of relativistic space-time, of quarks and quanta, of life itself, Almighty God, who reads our every thought and hears our every prayer, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God couldn’t think of a better way to forgive us than to have himself tortured and executed. For heaven’s sake, if he wanted to forgive us, why didn’t he just forgive us? Who, after all, needed to be impressed by the blood and the agony? Nobody but himself.

I like the idea that Christianity contains within its key theology the death of God. I just finished The Name of the Rose which makes a similar point — believing in God’s omnipotence is tantamount to disbelieving his existence (through a fairly strong argument).

I hope my goddaughter won’t go there — hate and bigotry are spiritual death, and I’m responsible for her soul. I just emailed her bioparents to ask.

(Via Savage)

Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican’s chief exorcist for 25 years and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as “cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon”.

70,000 possessions / (25 years x 365 days) ~ 7 exorcisms per day. But let’s assume he’s done exorcisms since before he was in charge of them — that seems reasonable. In fact, in good Catholic style, let’s be conservative. Let’s assume he became a priest-and-exorcist at age ten and has been doing this for 75 years. That yields the more-reasonable-but-still-questionable figure of two exorcisms per day. Both figures assume no periods of rest as required by scripture.

Given that the Vatican now rightly prefers to use secular mental health treatment over exorcisms that seems like quite a few, to say the least.

But I guess that was an estimate. As, presumably, was this:

He said it sometimes took six or seven of his assistants to to [sic] hold down a possessed person. Those possessed often yelled and screamed and spat out nails or pieces of glass, which he kept in a bag. “Anything can come out of their mouths – finger-length pieces of iron, but also rose petals.”

… was one of those Mohammed cartoonists.