Some lovely things:

Posted on January 27, 2010 | 7 Comments

• The whole Pat Robertson affair (I wrote about it here) has inspired some fantastic pieces from some wonderful writers. Do check them out:

• Richard Dawkins’s “Haiti and the hypocrisy of Christian theology” (published at The Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog) is superb, powerful, and completely spot-on:

Loathsome as Robertson’s views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. The agonized theodiceans who see suffering as an intractable ‘mystery’, or who ‘see God’ in the help, money and goodwill that is now flooding into Haiti , or (most nauseating of all) who claim to see God ‘suffering on the cross’ in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, those faux-anguished hypocrites are denying the centrepiece of their own theology. It is the obnoxious Pat Robertson who is the true Christian here.

• Paul‘s “Dodging theodicy: ‘On Faith’ panel stumbles over Haiti and God” dissects some of the ridiculous theodicy-babble used by so many of “On Faith”‘s religious contributors. I especially liked this delicious response to one of the theological-babblers:

I can’t imagine what God he is talking about. “The God of the Bible” he references is pretty demonstrably a maniac, an unbridled psychopath slaughtering entire civilizations, sanctioning slavery and rape, and that’s just the first book. And God is suffering today? I think the Haitian people need not weep for that. I would imagine that quake or no quake, sin or no sin, God’s going to come out of this just fine.

• Ophelia Benson‘s “The mystery of the providence of God” is excellent, especially this:

And the upshot of this contemptible enterprise is still to end up in the same place – God will work all things for our good even if we don’t understand – so it’s okay that God crushed a lot of people to death at once and let a lot of others die very slowly in pain and thirst and fear. Well fuck that. It’s not okay. If God exists and did that, God is a monster. Don’t explain away horrors

• Jerry Coyne, at the end of his excellent post, “New York Times readers respond to James Wood”, hits the nail on the head with:

What these letters prove, as if we need more proof, is that being smart doesn’t mean that you’re rational. There is no evil, no disaster, so great that the faithful can’t rationalize it as the plan of a loving God. Could some of them please tell us what circumstance would convince them that either there is no God, or that the one who exists isn’t so benevolent after all?

• I’m currently reading (and very much enjoying) Harold Bloom‘s How to Read and Why, and tonight I came across this beautiful passage:

Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure. I am not exactly an erotics-of-reading purveyor, and a pleasurable difficulty seems to me a plausible definition of the Sublime, but a higher pleasure remains the reader’s quest. There is a reader’s Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call “falling in love.” I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Oh, I love that!

• Another thing that I love: Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle, which is quite possibly the prettiest perfume that has ever existed. I received it as a Christmas present, and the bottle is so lovely that I’ve kept it on my bedside table ever since:

It’s delectably pretty and I am besotted with it at the moment. Also, I’m quite fond of its ad campaign, especially this:

Gorgeous! I want to live inside that commercial, in the land of pretty dresses, a land in which there’s no theodicy or apophatic theology…  Ah, well, a girl can dream! :)

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