Notes from Bushwick

* Beauty Bar would be a hell of a lot more conducive to actually meeting people and having sex with them if the music was not always just loud enough to make conversation impossible. Am I supposed to dance up to a girl like a douchebag? Surely the proprietors can be made to understand that their male clientele does not consist of guidos.

* A neighborhood marijuana dealer of some stature recently had $1,000 in cash stolen from his house and came to accuse his brother-in-law of having taken it. When his brother-in-law arrived on the block, a fight promptly broke out. The two pugilists sort of danced back and forth for a minute or so and exchanged unimpressive blows; the dealer was struck in the ear at least once. Then they yelled at each other for a while, were separated by friends and family members, and yelled at each other again. They are now back on good terms, I believe. Another fight broke out a few days later just across the street from the scene of the original skirmish, this time between some large black fellow and a smaller Latina chick. The confusing thing was that another, apparently unrelated fight broke out just a few meters away at the same time, this one involving one Puerto Rican girl who decided to start slapping the other one. Then two dogs managed to get loose in the midst of all of this.

* Austin produces better music than does Bushwick.

* There’s a totally sweet outdoor pool to be found on Marcy in Bed-Stuy. Admission is free, though you’ll need to bring a padlock. The only drawback is that the city employees who run it are among the most malevolent people imaginable and take great pleasure in your pain. When I first stopped by with a friend, we were immediately challenged to produce a lock and swim trunks and to remove our shoes before even approaching the entrance; I assured the woman that we were willing to subject ourselves to her authority and meant no harm.

Notes from the Outside World

The universe has conspired to bring me a copy of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity through a series of very improbable circumstances with which I won’t bore you. It is the finest flower of Christian apologetics, far more readable than St. Augustine’s Confessions, itself a staple of Catholic meta-nonsense in which the North African protagonist confesses to having stolen some fruit and mated with a woman. For a summary of Confessions, simply read this Onion article.

C.S. Lewis was converted to Christianity in part through the efforts of J.R.R. Tolkien, who was soon miffed to see Lewis join the Church of England instead of his own wondrous Catholic Church. Their short-lived friendship ended altogether when Lewis married a divorcee, thereby further offending Tolkien’s delicate paternalist sensibilities. We need not imagine what the status of women would be should this crowd take back control of Western thought; we have been there before, and in the memory of many still living.

Having been written by a former non-believer and a particularly educated one at that, Mere Christianity is supposed to be very persuasive. Perhaps a recovering drug addict or middle-aged illiterate would find it to be so, but it would be hard for any smart-ass worth his weed to take the book seriously. Lewis notes early on that he’ll avoid the theological issues surrounding the Virgin Mary, but later takes it as a given that the Trinity is just what it was proclaimed to be by those Roman theologians who spent the 4th century poisoning and exiling each other until a consensus was reached on whether or not the Father and Son are of like substance and whether one created the other and other such nonsense; Lewis does not anticipate that an educated non-believer might not take this process as seriously as he presumably does. And like many theologians, he insists on establishing arbitrary categories without showing his work; there are, it is explained, four "Cardinal" virtues and three "Theological" ones. Make a note of it.

Lewis and his fellows have today been replaced by another set of university-oriented theologians, this time centered in Texas rather than England and led to some degree by professors William Dembski and Marvin Olasky. The latter coined the term "compassionate conservatism," which helped to win a crucial election; the former established the concept of "specified complexity," which he hopes will win a place for Christianity within the realm of science.

Being spiritual successors to Lewis in every sense, Dembski and his colleagues in the intelligent design movement are understandably fond of quoting him; responding to a point I made a few years back to the effect that Dembski’s efforts to locate prophecy within the Bible are probably misguided insomuch as that the Bible is filled with nonsense, Dembski seems to have replied that the Bible is not so nonsensical as I might think insomuch as that its wackier portions are to be taken metaphorically; those who fail to recognize this, say Dembski and Lewis, are not "grown-ups." In the midst of a more recent dust-up between myself and the Discovery Institute crowd, I have tried to discover if Dembski believes that the millions of his sympathizers who take the entirety of the Bible literally are as childish as I am for thinking that such people exist; I am now told that they do not exist at all. Presumably, the wild success of the Left Behind series is indicative of nothing whatsoever.

In conclusion, to hell with C.S. Lewis. He also wrote The Space Trilogy, which I made the mistake of reading as a child, thinking it was actual science fiction. It turned out to be more Christian apologetics. I didn’t figure this out until well into the third book; the disguise is very thorough.