The Jesus Potato
Nick Gillespie | January 25, 2008, 7:41am
And do you remember that time there was only one set of footprints in the kitchen?...
Pastor Renee Brewster and her husband Bishop Winston Brewster are a very spiritual couple. But the site of their savior in a potato has reinvigorated their faith and their desire to help others.
"That's Jesus on the Cross. Just looking at it I don't have to convince," said Renee.
Renee says she had been looking for an excuse to get out of making potato salad. "I was hesitant about making the potato salad because Sister Frankie makes the potato salad at church and I said lord if it's not for me to make potato salad then send me a sign."...
Let's cut to the chase: How was the potato salad?
Pastor Brewster froze the heart of that potato bearing Jesus. The rest was used to make the potato salad served during their weekly rescue mission.
How was that potato salad? "It was good. It was the best you ever made...it was almost as good as Sister Frankie's," said Bishop Brewster.
Whole thing here. Is it just me or do names like Sister Frankie and Bishop Brewster sound like something out of a Velvet Underground song?
Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese saga here.
hale | January 25, 2008, 12:31pm | #
Crimethink is right on this one.
All value judgments necessarily contain an element that is nonrational - the original or "ends" value from which the others follow. Hume established this with his observation that what is cannot by itself determine what ought to be.
Now, here's where things get tricky, because Hume's is-ought distinction is ultimately the source of the moral relativism that the right expends so much ink decrying. However, I contend that it is in error that this sort of relativism is connected with moral nihilism and "cultural relativism," themselves consisting ironically of moral statements - the former that social morality
ought to be disregarded; the latter that all social moralities
ought to be regarded as equally desirable to any given individual.
Anybody can tell you that's not true. Nihilism is silly for the same reason Luciferians are silly: they implicitly accept the idea that for morality to have validity or usefulness, it has to follow point-for-point from objective truths (e.g. central texts, established dogma, metaphysics, etc.). Having concluded that such bases do not exist, the nihilist takes the football and runs all the way to Mexico under the assumption that the only cure for intellectual overreach is more.
Cultural relativism's a more complex issue, because it deals with a lot more than ethnicity and in many ways cuts across contemporary American society, even among those who share English as a native language. It's also an issue of philosophical relevance to libertarians because of the way it sidelines questions of harm - for example, what is it apart from culture that makes male infant circumcision acceptable but female infant "circumcision" abhorrent? Still, proceed too far down the path that uncritically accepts cultural biases as absolutes and you're looking at essentially the current aims of our two major parties.
Okay, that may have been a digression. My point is, this shit is dangerous to try to simplify; past a point, it gets really easy to defend your own arbitrarily-chosen values as synonymous with reason, and that's an attitude that will insulate you from the real consequences of them.
