Fundamentalist Christian minister Jerry Falwell is dead at 73.
It's probably churlish to use the occasion of someone's death to point out that said person was a paranoid, avaricious, hate-spewing enabler of America's basest lizard-brain impulses, so I won't go there. I will, however, note that one of the proudest moments of my young career was being cited by name in the course of a rambling, delusional Falwell sermon on global warming, which apparently is "Satan's Attempt to Re-direct the Church's Primary Focus." Clever, Satan! Very clever.
Update [2007-5-15 15:0:8 by David Roberts]: Carpetbagger brings us Falwell's "greatest" hits.
Slideshow: Green dads we heart
Grist celebrates in D.C. with Thomas Friedman
A video interview with model Amber Valletta
Comments
View as Flat
caniscandida Posted 4:53 am
15 May 2007
"churlish"?
Oh, sure, DR, go ahead, why the hell bloody not?
I feel oddly sad -- and yet this was a person who believed everything contrary to what I believe as a Christian, and whom I hated for making his mission to convince other alleged, so-called Christians that it was God's will that they should hate people like me, and should hate the causes that I believe are founded in the Gospel.
Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!
Permalink
Baby Boomer Posted 4:54 am
15 May 2007
Never rejoice in death
I will not rejoice in Falwell's death although I noticed in his sermon, he took your comments out of context; but I do regret that his hate and viciousness will live on. He and his ilk make it difficult for Christians, just as radical Islamists make it hard for the majority of muslims.
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 5:02 am
15 May 2007
Wasn't he praying...
..And exhorting his followers to pray for liberal supreme court justices to get sick and/or die? Or was that just Robertson.
Quick flight to heaven oh captain of corpulent christian conservatism. According to Albert Brooks you can eat all you want and never gain weight. And in Larry David's heaven no need for bathrooms.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
Permalink
Billhook Posted 5:50 am
15 May 2007
Falwell under a sod at last.!
So who's selling tickets for the dance on his grave ?
Bill
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 6:09 am
15 May 2007
dancing, whooping it up
Well, there you are, Billhook.
News of every death ought to strike every one of us to the heart.
You are perhaps not old enough to think about these things ...
When a true enemy dies, a real committed foe, someone who might in certain circumstances like to put me to death, or otherwise persecute me bitterly, a gay man, professedly a Christian, married to a professedly Christian man, grace a` la belle et illumine'e province de Que'bec -- Je me souviens! -- , I naturally feel a certain joy, that a powerful enemy is out of the way.
And yet, we must never, never rejoice in the death of any of God's creatures.
We are all as one.
Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!
Permalink
wiscidea Posted 6:50 am
15 May 2007
death
For some Christians, death is a time of joy. The soul has been liberated to join God in the Kingdom of Heaven. At the age of 70-something, he likely died of natural causes. Surely, Mr. Falwell looked forward to meeting God and did not fear death. So dance and whoop it up. It is a great day for Mr. Falwell. He will finally know whether his life's work was worthwhile.
If there is indeed a Heaven, I sincerely hope God is more forgiving than the most vocal of His followers. If not, Mr. Falwell is probably quite uncomfortable at this time. Sometimes death's a bitch. Too bad it so difficult to figure out exactly what the rules are.
Forward!
Permalink
randino Posted 7:03 am
15 May 2007
I have to quote Clarence Darrow
who said he never wished a person dead, but had read more than a few obituaries with a great deal of pleasure.
Randy Cunningham
Randy Cunningham
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 8:23 am
15 May 2007
Amen, Brother Clarence!
Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!
Permalink
Billhook Posted 4:54 am
16 May 2007
Gladness at others' death.
Canis -
there are a number of circumstances where I'm really glad to have caused the death of other creatures, let alone many cases where I'm not involved.
I run a sheep & cattle farm (in the Cambrian mountains of Wales)
so animals get shot for the table, and get eaten with relish.
There is a special joy in eating meat that never left the farm.
Having kept 5 generations of dogs since the late '60s, I've had to face killing for love, when there is no other option that's fair -
while this is the hardest of tasks, it is very good to know that an dear old friend is at peace and is no longer suffering.
The local hunt here used to kill about 250 foxes each winter, saving a lot of lambs from being killed as their lunch, which gave a lot of joy to all (non-foxes) concerned.
Since the city prats banned the killing of foxes with hounds, not only have lamb losses risen, but also the use of shotguns on speeding-target foxes has increased,
which, together with car-casualty foxes means there are now far more injured foxes unable to hunt effectively, which are thus reduced to predating livestock.
They mostly get killed by gangrene, which is of course natural, but which usually takes a week or ten days of suffering.
So with respect I must differ with you over the matter of killing -
some killing does bring real joy and other benefits.
With regard to Falwell, I can honestly say that I never laid a finger on him,
but I'm very glad that something got him and silenced him for good,
as he was a skilled and influential propagandist for the coming genocide in Africa
by US-led climate destabilization.
Regards,
Bill
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 5:16 am
17 May 2007
"joy," really?
Billhook, I hear what you are saying, that the taking of a life can be the lesser of two evils, in a number of circumstances.
But I do not think "joy" is the right way to refer to the emotion that should properly attend such killing. Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of the earliest and most influential of ethicists theorizing on the requirements of a hypothetically "just" war, wrote that in such a war, while it may be justifiable and even correct to kill an enemy combatant, one should do it with regret and sorrow, caused by the unhappy death of one who truly deserves love.
As for the ecology of foxes in Britain, I know next to nothing about it. I would not have thought that the historic aristocratic hunts of foxes with hounds actually resulted in the wholesale slaughter of very many foxes at any one time. (Unlike the "shooting parties" intended to kill as many wild birds as possible, a tradition that Dick Cheney practices in this country.)
But you say 250 foxes would be killed in your vicinity (however big that may be) in a single winter? Well, I doubt Vulpes vulpes could be called "endangered" anywhere -- indeed, in Arctic regions, thanks to global warming it is spreading into the range of its more delicate and less resourceful cousin the Arctic fox, which is not good news at all for the latter. Still, going for 250 in a single winter would seem to resemble the crazy phobia of predators that led to the near elimination of the wolf and the grizzly in this country.
In the Middle English masterpiece "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Gawain's host goes out hunting with all his people and hounds on three successive days during Christmastide. On the first two days, the quarry are deer, then a great boar; and these are hunted to provide both sport and meat. But on the third day, the quarry is a fox, and the only purpose of that is to provide sport.
But not for nothing is the fox a sympathetic victim, unlike the deer and the boar. He represents Gawain's resort to guile in the face of almost certain death.
And then, the "sport" of the foxhunt seems so unsportsmanlike and bullying, that it is no wonder that popular stories generally come down on the side of the fox, e.g. "Mary Poppins," in which she and Bert help the fox to escape, and Disney's extremely ironic "The Fox and the Hound."
Of course the fox in beast fables is a more complex character, clearly a predator. The best known example is the fox-character in the medieval French tradition, where he is called Reynard. The Fox in "Pinocchio" is pretty undeniably evil. And the fox in D.H. Lawrence's powerful story, "The Fox," is a threatening presence, even while he is sympathetic in accord with Lawrence's idiosyncratic set of values.
Anyway, it is unclear that all your anti-foxhunt protesters were "city prats." Perhaps some were overly sentimental, and gave no thought to the moral complexities involved. But that is not likely to have been true of all of them.
It is interesting, by the way, but not really all that surprising, I guess, to observe your Old-Country example of a resentment on the part of people who live on the land, at the regulations imposed on them by people in urban centers of power, a difficult political and social dynamic that has always been an important part of US history.
I appreciate what you are saying about guarding your lambs. But is it not true that traditionally, British shepherds raise guard dogs with their sheep, and that these are effective in defending the flocks from predators? They are used in this country against coyotes.
More generally, though, I doubt that you and I are going to agree any time soon on the significance of killing animals, so let us let it go at that. And if you wish to call me a city prat, well, go right ahead.
Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!
Permalink
Billhook Posted 6:56 am
17 May 2007
Far from it !
Canis - no way would I wish to call you a city prat ! I enjoy and respect you writing.
I'm really sorry that my words could have been read that way.
I do assure you that I was referring to Blair et al, who needed to grant the left of his party something irrelevant,
and so forced through a ban on hunting as a demo of city control over rural life.
St Augustine was indeed seminal as an ethicist, but it seems unlikely that he was also experienced as a warrior; and the latter does indeed (to this day) tend to find a fierce joy in his chosen profession.
I should perhaps clarify my own position, which is that I'll never kill for sport -
killing for compassion or for food or for defence of another, (be it foxes re lambs or grey squirrels re young trees or whatever) is a matter of real respect which, on occasion, extends into love.
The idea of killing with love goes straight past most people, but I hope you'll twig it.
It came to me when many years ago I first felled a great Oak for its timber and firewood.
But then my experience is that sentience is not exclusively a charachteristic of animals -
Regards,
Bill
Permalink