Errands of the day

Today I went for a flu shot and visited the post office. When I got to the library I had a debate about evolution with the brother of someone who's my 'facebook friend,' and I gave him this link. Downloaded some Wretched podcasts with the aim of listening to them at home. It's been raining a lot, mostly in the evenings, so that when I walked the dog yesterday I actually needed to grab the umbrella.

The television lies to you. Nora O'Donnel is one of the anchorladies on CBS This Morning, and when they were interviewing a Republican congressman from Utah last week, he corrected her to say that many businesses are exempt from Obamacare, but she reiterated the lie, phrasing it thus: "businesses are already moving to comply with the law." If I didn't already know about the exemptions, I wouldn't have known that she was deceiving me.

And today I discovered that Baroque architecture is a Roman Catholic response to Protestant minimalism. Protestants, when they took over old Romanist cathedrals and chapels, did away with what they considered idolatrous decorations, and the passive-aggressive response of the Papists was to effectively say, "oh, so it bothers them that our churches are decorated with false deities? Let's really lay it on thick, then!" An excessively bombastic Eastern Orthodox person on my university's website justifies what I expect the mindset of those who commissioned the architects was. It's essentially 'short-man syndrome," where a person overcompensates with elaborate cars, houses, clothes etc to make up for something that is lacking in his life. The Roman Catholic Church decorated their churches to such a ludicrous ('baroque' means 'bizarre') extent because their physical edifices were all that they had. Their religion is empty, so they compensate with large cathedrals, acts of charity and take up offense when they feel that their religion has been disrespected. The protestants didn't have to boast in the ornamentation of their churches, because the focus of their worship and faith is their God, not any earthly thing. God doesn't need defending, so protestant worship centered on God-righteousness and not man's righteousness. There was no need to make a big show of things to impress people, because they had no insecurity--they were secure in God, and His grace was enough for them. 

~ Rak Chazak