2015 archive

This is big.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) approved redefining marriage in the church constitution Tuesday to include a “commitment between two people,” becoming the largest Protestant group to formally recognize gay marriage as Christian and allow same-sex weddings in every congregation.

If you are going to practice a gospel of love, you must recognize love wherever it happens. I tip my hat to the Presbyterians (I do have Presbyterianism in my heritage). Given the hatred exuded by so many who call themselves “Christian” and pretend to practice the Gospel of Love while in actuality fomenting hate, this took some courage.

As I have mentioned before, nothing that ever happened in a same-sex bedroom has ever affected a marriage of mine.

I cannot say the same for other types of bedrooms.

Aside:

Ambrose Bierce once defined “Presbyterians” as those who believe that the fathers of the church should be referred to as “Presbyters.” One who understands Presbyterianism would understand that he was predestined to do so.

Writing at the Guardian, Jason Williams examines the “paleo diet” and finds it paleolithic in unexpected ways. A snippet:

The human diet, as evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk argues in her book Paleofantasies, is constantly changing. If we’re going to nominate a period to emulate, why not eat like a medieval peasant, or an ancestral tree shrew?

In my view, the answer to that has little to do with food. The paleolithic is a favoured era because of the way it answers to a desire to justify or reimpose certain social hierarchies, especially those concerning gender.

For John Durant, a paleo thought leader, feminism is a particular bête noire. He spends pages of his cash-in book, The Paleo Manifesto, railing against the feminist Carol Adams, who connected feminism with vegetarianism. At one point he writes that “Adams’s meat-hating, man-hating mantra – ‘Eat Rice Have Faith in Women’ – is intended to undermine the male culture of meat-eating, thus undermining male power, thus reducing rape”.

Missing from his analysis, but also noteworthy, is that the “Paleo Diet” is based on the imagined diet of paleolithic Europeans. THe “Paleo Diets” of persons in the various regions of the Americas (if there were any at the time), Africa, and Asia would have been much different, as they would have eaten foods native to their regions and their varying climates.

It is, ultimately, not only Euro-centric, but also an intellectually dishonest construction promoted by charlatans, as fad diets are wont to be.