Saturday, March 6, 2010

Rants: Mary sí, Calvin no!

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At last look, an informal poll of the interests of readers at Vox Nova – Catholic Perspectives on Culture, Society and Politics, based on a tally of comments registered on concurrently active topics, renders these scores:

Transubstantiation: 13
Demonology: 20
Torture: 5
Gay Marriage: 106

The attitude of the Vox Nova readership towards demons is relatively laissez-faire (20); and more so for torturers (5). What, exactly, takes place with the Eucharist (it seems to be substantially a series of accidents) is mildly interesting (13). But a sizable percentage of them are damned-good-and-sure (106) that they don’t want those queers marrying and fucking up what has been, until now, a pristine-perfect institution. After all, what does the word “marriage” even mean, if it doesn’t mean compulsory breeding?

But what becomes apparent in an analysis the discussions cited above is that these folks generally don’t know what they mean. For example, the term “transubstantiation” dates from the 11th century and is still under dispute. The problem seems to be that Catholics are so good at scholastic finagling that they just can’t agree on the proper definition of any term: Bread? Wine? Body? Blood? Torture? Marriage? WTF?

That said, while it is quite clear that many of them are not too sure just exactly what they mean when they hold forth, many of them do know what they like. Or don’t like. (Mary , Calvin no!) Okay, then—whatever. Y’know?
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UPDATE: For the sake of accuracy, it should be noted that when I first wrote this piece I had apparently misread the total number of comments on Demonology as "2" when it had actually been--at that point--"20". Thus, uranists and demons have been firmly established as the Number One and (distant) Number Two category of critters preoccupying the minds of the interactive portion of the Vox Nova readership.
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