Reflections: More Gnostic Than Not

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Last night I finished my reading of Gnosticism in Modern Literature: A Study of the Selected Works of Camus, Sartre, Hesse, and Kafka by Josephine Donovan. I was led to this book, which was originally a Ph.D. thesis, by my rekindled interest in Gnosticism, about which I have been posting for some time now.


The portion of the selected bibliography of Donovan’s text devoted to readings on “Ancient Gnosticism” included a reference to Primitive Christianity, in its Contemporary Setting by Rudolf Bultmann. This sounded interesting. The title also suggested that it might well have resonance with The Exegesis of Phillip K. Dick, through which I have been making a laborious, but entertaining, trek for several weeks now. So I borrowed it from the library and have started reading it.

What follows here will not be a rigorous attempt to state and prove any kind of formal thesis. As is often the case when I post on large topics, it will merely point out some ideas of interest to me; ideas that (to me) seem to connect. I will be making no strenuous attempt to convince you, dear reader, to make those same connections. (I expect to be all over the ballpark with it.) But I do hope to interest you in the ideas embedded in what I’ve selected to write about.

Finally, I should point out that what prompted me to post just this, just now, was a piece that I read last night on the blog Vox Nova, with which I (in part) disagreed: i.e., I do not think that a “collective exorcism” is either desirable, or possible. I have expressed that opinion in more detail there; but as of this writing, my comment has yet to be approved and published.

So, to begin with an excerpt from Bultmann:

“The Divine Covenant”

God, according to the traditional view, exercises his power on behalf of Israel: for the prophets he can also exercise his power against Israel, and owing to the people’s wickedness will actually do so. Logically, this means the end of national religion. The more the prophets emphasize ethical obedience as opposed to the performance of the cultus as the sine qua non for the maintenance of the covenant, the more they abandon the old naïve sense of the latter. If the covenant depends primarily on loyalty to history, its maintenance is bound to be always in doubt. Thus, in the last resort, the past poses a question to the nation: the covenant can never be fully realized until the future. It can never have been concluded definitively in the past, nor can its permanence be secured by the performance of the cultus. If, as the naïve view supposed, the security of the individual rests on his membership of the elect nation, then conversely, according to the prophetic view, the election of the people depends on the individual’s obedience to the demands of God. And the less that is the case in the empirical course of history, the more the covenant develops into an eschatological concept. In other words, the covenant is not capable of realization in actual history: its realization is only conceivable in some mythical future of redemption.

Bultmann then goes on to quote Jeremiah. Part of the chosen selection reads:

After those days, saith the Lord,
I will put my law in their inward parts,
and write it in their hearts;
and will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor,
and every man his brother, saying,
Know the Lord:
for they shall all know me…

To my understanding, then, redemption and the possibility of salvation, comes of what the existentialist would call “authenticity” -- living truly according to one’s personal essence, rather than according to the prevailing “herd mentality.” That essence is the “law” that God has written on each man’s heart. If the man cannot read his own heart, he cannot live authentically. The world, the collective -- with all of its temptations and distractions -- blocks the individual from the kind of soul-searching necessary to achieve authenticity (or to be in compliance with God’s will, if looked at theistically.)

It is the thesis of Josephine Donovan that, as depicted in such classics of modern literature as Camus’ The Stranger, Sartre’s Nausea, and Hesse’s Demian and Steppenwolf, this achievement of authenticity comes to the “existential hero” in a flash of enlightenment, and that this sudden influx of reality is equivalent to the arrival of the “gnosis.” The characters of Kafka, by contrast, desperately seek the saving knowledge, but never reach their goal.

Gnosticism recognizes a category of individual known as the hylici. I understand these individuals to be characterized by Donovan as the equivalent of Heidegger’s das man. It occurs to me that this idea could also serve to support the Calvinist idea of the reprobate in the doctrine of predestination. Consider these excepts from the conclusion of Donovan’s text:

By means of the redemptive gnosis…the stranger learns that there is a truth beyond the lie of their world-order. It is a truth intuited within the Self. […]


We also found that in general the protagonists experience a fall into awareness of their alienation…[…]

For oneself then liberation from the propaganda and untruths of the crowd comes in the form of the saving knowledge. … In Existentialist terminology “evil” means that which tends to make a person machine-like; the hylici are the unenlightened robots who function like machines; the archons are the bureaucrats who run the machinery. The “way out” is a knowledge of one’s own authentic identity, one’s own divine self. To know this self is to liberate one’s spirit from the tyranny of objectification. […]

The one sure value in this life is that of the inner truth, the truth of being. Both the Gnostics and the Existentialists hold this as the one precious possession worth defending. To the moderns authenticity has achieved a rank once reserved for saintliness. [emphasis added by me]

As a biographical note, I began my philosophical quest for truth with my discovery of the French existentialists, when I was still in high school. It became immediately clear to me (as a baptized and confirmed Protestant Christian) that, despite the fact that a personal God had no place in Existentialist philosophy, the teachings of Jesus, centered on the individual as they clearly are, are fundamentally existentialist in nature. My subsequent discovery of Kierkegaard (and later other Christian existentialists) convinced me that my initial insight had merit.

While Existentialism posits an evil world into which man is “thrown” as an alienated “stranger,” it makes no attempt to reconcile this condition with a benevolent God. Christianity places the blame for evil on man himself, for having disobeyed that God. Neither of these approaches to the philosophical Problem of Evil is intellectually satisfying. Gnosticism, by relinquishing strict monotheism, does provide an approach to a reconciliation of evil with a good God which at least make sense. It has been gratifying to recently have come across both Josephine Donovan’s interesting thesis and Shlomo Giora Shoham’s indispensable The Bridge to Nothingness, each of which explores these issues and connections in satisfying depth. On the “religion” line of my Facebook profile, I have entered “More Gnostic than not.” I guess you can see why that is?
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Update: I can now report that the comment on Vox Nova referred to above has been published.
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Readings: Don't You Just Know It?

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In my last post, I linked to some comment threads where I had been arguing about, among other things, the nature of Truth, as contrasted to that of “belief.” My basic point was that capital “T” Truth cannot be known through the exercise of reason. Reason can help a thinker eliminate that which logically cannot be true. But reason alone can never provide even a glimpse of the Transcendent. That comes only via direct revelation, through divine providence. It follows from this that belief is as close as most of us can approach the Truth. But, have stalled-out, so to speak, at the level of belief, we have no way to prove to others (or even to ourselves) that what we believe actually partakes of Truth.


That which I have been reading recently, I have been reading with such thoughts on my mind.

One of my primary reads, since shortly before Christmas, has been The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. This book consists of Dick’s attempts to make formal sense of a pair of experiences he had on two separate occasions in 1974, and which he understood to have been direct revelations of the transcendent. In the course of his subsequent intellectual meanderings, Dick refers quite often to several of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. Because of this, I decided that it would be advantageous to my reading of Dick if I undertook a brief review of the pre-Socratics. In a little book entitled, A Presocratics Reader, I came across a citation of this fragment from Xenophanes:

No man has seen nor will anyone know the truth about the gods and all the things I speak of. For even if a person should in fact say what is absolutely the case, nevertheless he himself does not know, but belief is fashioned over all things [or, in the case of all persons].

Thank you, Xenophanes! A couple of pages further into this book, I came across a report that Heraclitus believed, “Of all those whose accounts (logoi) I have heard, no one reaches the point of recognizing that that which is wise is set apart from all.” And then, “Much learning (“polymathy”) does not teach insight.”

Right-on, Heraclitus.

I have also, for several months, been making my way through A Course in Miracles (ACIM)--both the text and the workbook. This teaching--which like The Exegesis purports to be a report of direct revelation--was brought to my attention by my Facebook friend, Janette Tingle. Although I was skeptical at the outset that it would consist of New Age psycho-babble, I have found nothing in it which does not ring true. Just yesterday I noted the following--from Lesson 43: “God is my Source. I cannot see apart from Him.”:

Perception is not an attribute of God. His is the realm of knowledge. Yet He has created the Holy Spirit as the Mediator between perception and knowledge. Without this link with God, perception would have replaced knowledge forever in your mind. With this link with God, perception will become so changed and purified that it will lead to knowledge. That is its function as the Holy Spirit sees it. Therefore, that is its function in truth.

So, there it is again, stated in a slightly different way.

In reading The Exegesis, I have been amazed at the correlations I’ve found there to both the teachings of ACIM, and the philosophical formulations in the book, The Bridge to Nothingness (BTN) by Sholomo Giora Shoham, of which I’ve written before.

The following, [from Folder 14:84] on page 326 of The Exegesis is very much in keeping with BTN. Dick writes:

My system states, “The Godhead is in difficulty. Evil is not the manifestation of an evil deity nor a sign of God’s vengeance, etc., but an analog in the lower or microcosm of the difficulty in the macrocosm or pleroma. The yin aspect has exceeded its proper limits, perhaps as an oscillation of a great supratemporal cycle, and rectification is already in progress.” [emphasis Dick’s]

In Folder 15:44, Dick writes:

Our very mechanisms have been taken advantage of. It was not intended that we discriminate false info from true. There was not supposed to be any false info in the first place. Strange that I, who believe everything I’m told, doubt the entire empirical world and stigmatize it as a product (in the form of spurious data) of evil. It is not an evil world; there is no real world at all! But there is something there, though: a vast bank of lights and sounds and colors flashing at us from all sides, to which we must react. We are enclosed by it -- it is what the ancients called ananke or fate, and it was the power of this that the savior broke.

This post is already quite lengthy. I had another fairly large excerpt from The Exegesis noted for inclusion here, but I think I’ll hold that one back for later. I hope that anybody reading this can see the correlations between the ideas expressed in the various works I’ve cited and begin to make the connections that I’m trying to highlight.

Addendum:  Here is a post from the archives which may shed addition light on the above.
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Readings: A Cause for Disputation

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Sometime later today I will have finished reading the sci-fi novel Deus Irae, a collaboration between Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny. Without going too deep into the plot, the story takes place after a nuclear holocaust and involves the goings-on of characters which are among a small remainder of Christians, and characters who worship the Deus Irae -- the God of Wrath -- who has wrought the rubble-strewn world in which these characters survive.


Just now, I was arrested by the following dialogue between a character named Schuld, who is (perhaps) a follower of the Deus Irae, and a character named Pete Sands, a Christian. Here, Schuld addresses Sands:

xxx“… Aquinas cleaned up the Greeks for you, so Plato is okay. Hell, you even baptized Aristotle’s bones, for that matter, once you found a use for his thoughts. Take away the Greek logicians and the Jewish mystics and you wouldn’t have much left.”
xxx“We count the Passion and the Resurrection for something,” Peter said.
xxx“Okay. I left out the Oriental mystery religions. And for that matter, the Crusades, the holy wars, the Inquisition.”
xxx“You’ve made your point,” Pete said. “I am weary of these things and have trouble enough with the way my own mind works. You want to argue, join a debating team.”

I have chosen to write on this excerpt in part because I loved the Plato/Aristotle/Aquinas observation--particularly the phrase “baptized Aristotle’s bones”. How apt! But I chose it more because I am not of Pete’s party; I want to argue about such things. And I do so often. As a man brought up with exposure to the Protestant traditions of both Luther and Calvin (but who is no longer a member of any congregation), I like to argue with Catholics about what I think should be meant by the word “Christian.”

In the past couple of days I have been arguing here and here with other readers -- almost all Catholic or ex-Catholic -- at the outstanding Catholic blog, Vox Nova. In the second of articles linked above, the argument is about the proper Christian attitude towards war. As a Conscientious Objector, who calls the killing of innocent non-combatants under American bombs on foreign soil, “murder,” I get roughed up pretty badly in the comment thread following that one. Have a look at it.

The first link is to a post about a friend of Kyle Cupp, a member of the Vox Nova stable of writers. Kyle’s friend no longer considers himself to be a Christian. I made the first comment on the article, based on a quoted sentence from Kyle’s text:

1. “Catholicism makes more sense than the alternatives to me, and so here I am.”


You seem to be saying, Kyle, that Catholicism appeals to you *aesthetically* more than do its alternatives. That is similar to the reason I usually give to professed atheists when they question the basis of my belief in the supernatural — that I *choose* to believe in a sentient universe, because the alternative universes all bore me.


If the Catholicism that fires your imagination were not exclusive in the ways that it is; inhospitable to visitors, as it is, I would perhaps be drawn to it for those reasons as well. But, as it is, I can only feel it most often as a condescending and antagonistic critic of that which existence has given me thus far. This makes me sad — another aesthetic reaction.

I call Catholicism “inhospitable to visitors” because non-Catholics are excluded from the communion service in Catholic churches. I argue in the thread that if I am excluded from taking communion with a Catholic congregation, I am on that basis excluded from the Christian religion, so far as the Catholic Church is concerned. I fear that if I am loved at all by Catholicism, then--like Willy Loman--I am loved, but not well-loved. It is my opinion that the sharing of communion is the very basis of Christian worship, which is founded on the shared belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ and on obedience to his instruction that His followers share the bread and wine in communal remembrance of the body and blood that He gave in order that we might live. It is my further opinion that true Christians will welcome guests in their churches and encourage them to share communion with them. If a congregation will not do that, then I don’t think that group is “Christian” at all. It seems that a Catholic is a Catholic: full stop. If you will not share communion with me and want to call yourself a “Christian,” very well then, I get the message -- fuck you, too.  (And this goes double for any Protestant sects with closed communion!)

That said, I will continue to argue the case for a universal communion so long as I can get anybody to listen. And when the day comes that all Christians--all disciples of Christ--are united in their worship, perhaps I will again become involved in organized religion.

But you’d better hurry up, you stiff-necked assholes. I’m not getting any younger!
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Reflections: It's Nearly Over

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When I read these days, I use bookmarkers salvaged at my job from trimming legal size file folders down to letter size. This yields an item 2 inches wide and 10 inches long, upon which I can note page numbers and the paragraphs on those pages in which words that I may later want to share here can be found. I currently have several books sitting on the table next to my recliner, the markers in each of which are heavily scored with notations yet to be used. That’s how it’s been, of late.


Today is the last day upon which I can post here in the year 2011. My output has fallen off precipitously. This will be my 89th post, the least number of posts I’ve put up in a year since 2007, the first year I had the blog. But in that year I didn’t begin posting until July. I blame Facebook, and my involvement in several writers’ groups there, for my neglect of this site. That is a convenient thing to blame. Last year I put up 235 posts. If I start to read into this, it scares me.

On the desktop of this computer, I have a file entitled “Ruth Stone” within which are words I clipped here and there with the intention of writing a post expressing my enthusiasm for Ruth Stone’s poetry. This enthusiasm came only as a result of a Facebook friend’s writing of her recent death, and his posting of a clip of her reciting one of her poems. That file has been sitting on my desktop, unused, for several weeks now.

Among the books on the table next to the chair in which I sit to do my reading, is a copy of Ruth Stone’s, What Love Comes To - New & Selected Poems. In that volume is one of those bookmarkers mentioned above. On it are listed the page numbers of poems to be considered for use in the Ruth Stone blog post which never got written. Looking back over these now, I find that they are each quite wonderful. But I don’t remember why I picked them, particularly, except for one of them, which would have significance for one of my friends (and, therefore, for me as well.) So that is the one I will use here:

Where I Am

I’m not in a stone dungeon
under the streets of some Roman city.
I’m only in darkest Binghamton,
a second-floor apartment
in the company of two cats.
I have a plastic bag of dates
that claim to be grown naturally.
But how else can dates grow?
I see them hanging in huge clusters
from date palms,
as I once saw them from a bus
in the foothills of Southern California;
the streets of a small town,
adobes, lounging Indians,
a trading post. Then the fields of irrigation
and the forced water
spraying the great furrowed squares.
But I am here, not in a stone dungeon,
but in Dungeon Stone--
darkest Binghamton.

*sigh* -- It’s been that kind of year for me, too; year through which I would not want to live again. I’m glad that it’s almost over. I hope that next year will be better. I hope that yours will be, too. The contents of the Ruth Stone folder on my desktop are yet to be used. Perhaps they never will be. Perhaps they will die with this computer one day, not too long from now, when it finally gives up the cyber-ghost? Or, maybe, I will decide to kick off 2012 with a Ruth Stone post yet to written?
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Reflections: Whose Money Is It, Anyway?

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Here’s the thing: what is being called the 1% is behaving intelligently, if it is intelligent to act in one’s own best interest, even at the expense of others. They are sitting on trillions of dollars that could be used to create jobs. But they won’t use it unless the government will give them a guarantee that the government will do nothing in the future to hurt their bottom lines. They have been raking in record profits and they want a guarantee that this will continue for them, regardless of how the rest of the country fares. This is what they refer to as “free market capitalism.” It would be funny, were it not so disgracefully cynical.


If, however, you are not a member of the 1% and are voting for politicians who are supporting “free market capitalism,” you will have been led ask yourself a question and to answer “Yes” to it, when you should have answered “No.” That question is this: “It’s MY money, isn’t it?”

No, it’s not. You should listen to Jesus, not to Ron Paul. When Jesus was asked if it was proper to pay taxes to Rome, he asked to be shown a coin. When the coin was produced, he asked “Whose picture is on that coin?” The reply, of course, was “Caesar’s.” You know the rest of what he said: "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's."

If you don't believe in God, fine: simply substitute "society" for God and proceed accordingly.

The money is not yours. When you answer “Yes” to the question, you sell yourself out. You might want to think about who it is that has made that purchase.
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Rodak's Writings: a Protestant Poem

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Consent: a Brief History



Idolized as consenting; much depends

on that notion. But what earthly woman

could say no to an angel? The lithe olive-toned

form of the maiden soon swollen, shaped

from within by the prodigy growing.

Consent, was it then, to the flesh-rending

pain? To blood, urine and feces?

To birthing the type of material creation?

Flesh formed of the Word and man’s fated future:

my mortal career. So, serpent or fish?

The loaf or the stone? The one without sin,

or the first one to throw? Rocky soil, shallow root,

barren branch, blasted tree. Second mile,

dusted shoe. The chaff and the wheat.

The eye of the needle. The dog eating scraps

down under the table. Gaudy lily, willful blindness,

dying seed, burning vine. The prodigal son and the

Gadarene swine. One taken up and one left behind.

Bushel and light; foolish lack of lamp oil.

The mustard seed sown. The better part taken.

The sheep and the goats. A foundation on sand.

The shirt after the coat. The imperial coin,

the last pfennig she had. The pearl of great price,

the house scoured for a shekel. The shepherd,

the wolf, the one pulled from the pit. The infinite

regression tracking back to the Garden and

the immaculate conception of Eve, who consented.

You horn-sounding viper! You whitewashed sepulcher!

My mother, a woman, not some pagan crop goddess!

Consent! Few are chosen! You know not the hour!

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX~ Rob Dakin, 12/9/11
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Reflections: Weblog Commentary

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I have been meaning to launch this blog post for some days now, but I’ve kept putting it off because I couldn’t decide how to frame it. Rather than continue not to get the words online that I wanted to share, therefore, I’m just going to go ahead and post them unframed and let them stand (or fall) for themselves.
This material consists of a comment made by Ron King, a valued sometime visitor to this blog, followed by several comments made by me, elsewhere. I asked Ron’s permission to share this comment because it will be made available to my Facebook friends, as well as to readers of this blog. Ron made the comment in response to this post. I will edit Ron’s comment only to the extent that his very first sentence has been moved to the end of the comment. I do this in order that it may segué into the rest of the material, all of which consists of comments I made on a couple of different strings, to a couple of different people, following posts on one of my favorite blogs, Vox Nova. These I will simply clean up to stand alone, if any such polishing is necessary. I will offer them without comment, while inviting comment on them here. Without further ado, Ron King:

The problem for introverts is the early emotional conditioning of fear and rage due to the pain of being aware of not being validated by the primary caretakers and then the educational system. Consequently, the introvert is constantly under the intrusion of forces trying to make her/him into something she/he is not. This will cause a further retreat into self along with an ever increasing suffering.

Once the introvert has an awareness that being created in this way has a distinct spiritual purpose of exploring the dynamics of human suffering and the loss of love as the cause of suffering, then introverts can begin healing the false identity that has formed in reaction to a world that does not know how to love.

Loneliness begins to fade when the introvert begins to educate others about what it means to be an introvert. They can begin to teach extroverts what it means to be more sensitive. Every introvert I have known in my life has a passionate desire to be free to express their truth. The freedom is to be found internally and not externally. It is to be found face to face with extroverts, regardless of what they may say or do.

xxxxx[and now the sentence I've moved]

Jesus is an introvert.

Vox Nova: excerpt 1

Another commenter said of Jesus,

“…if he were conversant in Greek philosophy to any extent why did he not lay things out ever in a similar style.”

I replied,

Jesus perhaps did just that, when speaking to learned Pharisees; or, perhaps, to learned Romans. It is unfortunate that in the Gospels we are usually only given the punch-lines of his dialogues with his intellectual opposition. But, in most of what we are given, he is preaching to peasants and fishermen and shopkeepers, etc. There is nothing to be gained by speaking over the heads of one’s audience.

Any time I am arguing with a Catholic and I quote a Bible verse in support of my central thesis, and that Catholic then visibly pales, frantically starts making the sign of the cross and backs away from me screaming “Sola scriptura! Sola scriptura!” I am reminded that this once had some validity. Pre-Gutenberg, people didn’t own Bibles. Most people weren’t literate. What they knew about the Bible had to be spoon-fed to them by clerics. The priests don’t want to relinquish that power, so they preach still today against the “proof-text,” as though the text shouldn’t be a source of proof. I have to either spit on the floor, or chuckle. Hopefully, I usually choose the latter course of action. Luther, to his credit, not only translated the Bible into German, but preached that people had a duty to read it, and to interpret its meaning (with a little help from above), each according to his special spiritual need at any given time. This is not to use the Book as an oracle, but rather to use it as a learning tool; as a workbook for the student of the spiritual connection between heaven and earth.

To sum up: Jesus knew what he was doing.


Vox Nova: excerpt 2

I don’t know what “go to heaven” means, because I can’t conceive of heaven as a place. I can only understand heaven as a state of being. The upshot of that would be that only saints would “go to heaven.” One would need to be in a state of being compatible with heaven, i.e. “heavenly.” And by “saint” I don’t mean what the Church routinely means. What the Church means, in most cases, is something like “Employee of Decade” or “Distinguished Professor” or “Father of the Year.” So, what happens to the rest of us, I don’t know. That sad alternative may be what’s happening to us now. Being Christ-like does not mean being a really big fan of Jesus. It doesn’t mean liking Jesus, it means imitating Him.

Vox Nova: excerpt 3

I’m not so interested in the theories such as that Jesus went to India during “the lost years,” or that Jesus was the iniate of a Greek mystery cult, etc. I think it enough to speculate that Jesus was very probably literate; that he grew up in a Hellenistic milieu; and that he may very well have had some acquaintance with, and instruction in, both Greek (Platonic) and Roman (Stoic) ideas and used some of those, tailored to the levels of sophistication of his audiences, in his teaching.

I also think it very telling that Jesus was apparently not a Jewish nationalist. Reading the New Testament, one would get the idea that Jesus and his followers were wandering about in tranquil, almost sleepy countryside. In fact, of course, the area was crawling with insurgents and a constant thorn in the side of Rome. Jesus seems to have been totally aloof from all of this, which makes him somewhat less than ultra-Jewish in his thinking.

Moreover, if he had been nothing more than an unusually witty freelancing Jewish rabbi, I doubt that we would be talking about him today.

Finally, Socrates had Plato, and Jesus had Saul of Tarsus: the rest is history.

Vox Nova: excerpt 4

The difference, of course, is that Socrates and Jesus had visionary interpreters of real genius, both of whom offered a set of ideas too grand to ever be exhausted by subsequent speculation, or completely co-opted by "the world," and which, therefore, endlessly spark the imaginations of intelligent and creative persons who come in contact with them.


This is to take nothing away from the mediation of Socrates or Jesus. In both cases, their teachings were worthy of such interpreters. I assume that this was a necessary condition for the production of those interpretative bodies of thought.


I see the institutions--the Church, the Academy--to be like globs of semen; millions of sperm sent forth to produce one fertilized egg; millions of the "faithful" assembled to produce one true saint. And only the saint transcends.

Vox Nova: excerpt 5

The very last thing that a saint would want to be, I should think, is innovative or original. A saint is simple. There is nothing novel in the truth. The saint is proof that the truth can be received from its source and that life can be lived in accordance to it–not merely read about and acquired by rote for recitation on command. Man would get redemptive brownie points for the latter only if Kafka is G-d and the path to “heaven” really does lead one through the corridors and the various official stages and offices of some vast bureaucracy, beginning in the kindergarten of the parochial school and ending before the throne of judgment.
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Your comments are welcome.
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