Godding About the Voicinity

No, I'm not yet caught up with my work. Made some progress, but I still need more time to get my existential account out of the dread and into the slack.

For my own edification I've been trawling through the arkive, trying to see where the live bodies are buried. I'm only six month in, but the good news is that I haven't found much that's worthy of eternity prior to April 2006, so don't waste your time back there.

If memory serves, there was some point that I gave up trying, which is when the quality improved. Once out of my own way, I could express things more in my own way. Or, maybe each post is a new attempt to "get it right," so that anything before today is obsolete.

I did find one item of comedic value, when a diarrheist at Dailykos bestowed upon me the title of Most Obnoxious Man In America:

"No, it's not Bush and it's not Cheney. It's Robert Godwin. Not heard of him? Well, this man, a clinical psychologist, continually attacks the left and liberals as mentally ill, as having pathologies, of being sick in their soul. He does this in a beautiful way, as he is undoubtedly intelligent, just severely severely skewed.

"Go ahead and check out his latest post on his blog. Sample quotation:

Leftism continues to be a children's crusade against the adult world, and we are in desperate need of adults who will stand up to the children and not worry about trying to be their "friends." As a parent, you simply must do what you need to do, because children don't really know how to raise themselves. The spirit of rebellion that animates the Left is oedipal to the core, so to gratify it is to create a monster.

Here are some of the more articulate comments at Dailykos:

by gad
what a pompous twit.

by bumblebums
some people should never be educated
they just spew nonsense with fancy words and that fools the REALLY dumb people

by RumsfeldResign
how much does he get paid to say that filth? And by whom?
Follow the money!

by Tamifah
i think he does it from a sense of duty which is perhaps more worrying than doing it for $$$. it is a disorder.

by kingfelix
Are you sure it's not a sense of "doody"? He's a mean, mean, doody-head. Doody, doody, DOODY!!!

Seriously, even if he's sincere, the party of the rich always has enough money to see to it that their mouthy little spokesturds like him never have to eat ramen or worry about the rent. Follow the money, indeed. There's always enough to keep scumbags like him and Tucker Carlson in clean bowties.

by drewfromct
Thanks for highlighting the circus sideshow named Godwin.
Gads these guys are scary.

by Cool Blue
A sophmoric twit for sure, but the most obnoxious man in America, for the 18th consecutive year, is Pat Robertson.

by Olds88
given his professional capacity and his erudition, it makes him more a full blown obnoxious fascists than robertson , limbaugh, o'reilly, and falwell.

by kingfelix
This shrink guy is just an embarrassment to his profession.

by Olds88
yeah, but if the caysh was'nt there he'd be sellin some other snakeoil, or some line of bs. Ain't none of these guys doin any of that stuff for nothin'. I bet you he's into porno and hookers.....and wears women's lingerie when he's psychologizin'.

by Manix
We could temporarily revoke, uh, Godwin's Law, and compare this guy Godwin with members of a certain German political party.

by Manix
whenever I think about this guy, I can't help but do a Nazi salute.

by lazybum
This guy's bad. And Pat Robertson and his ilk are bad too, but I wouldn't say obnoxious. Awful pieces of dog shit who are dangerous to America, yes. But obnoxious implies that certain nails-on-the-blackboard kind off effect when you hear their voice and their comments.

by GUGA
That post has its historical basis in the way white southern men viewed themselves as Cavaliers, noble and pure in soul, as opposed to the debased and wretched northern Puritans. Opposition to slavery was the prime example of Puritan soullessness.

by YellowDogBlue
his hatred is obviously self-hatred directed outward at those he secretly admires.
Conservatives are mentally ill. He is a classic example.

by theyrereal
An egregiously bad writer.
Stick to your day job, Robert, whatever it is. And the next time you feel the compulsion to write, lie down until the feeling goes away.

*****

I also found the following, which I like:

I think it’s fair to say that on this side of manifestation, God in the cataphatic sense is a verb, whereas the apophatic God-beyond-being must be a noun. That latter "dimension" of God is called silent, still, unchanging, unqualified, etc., whereas the only God we can know must be “Godding” somewhere about the vicinity, or we couldn’t know about him.

In fact, the only way we ourselves can know about God is by religioning. A religion is not primarily something one “has” or “knows.” Rather, it must be something one does -- like playing a musical instrument in order to make music present.

I always say that one doesn't generally become religious after deciding with the mind or ego whether or not God exists. Rather, one becomes religious in order to find out for oneself. Just as science is the appropriate means with which to study the properties of the natural world, religion is the means with which we study the properties of Spirit.

Whatever the quantum world is in itself, science cannot say. Looked at this way, it’s a particle. Looked at that way, it’s a wave.

It is just so with religion. Religions are ways to look at (and even “through”) God in order to reveal different aspects and dimensions of him. But this doesn’t mean that the entire enterprise is subjective, any more than quantum physics is subjective just because knowledge of the subatomic realm depends upon the way we look at it.

So the question really isn’t whether or not God exists. The existence of God can easily be proven to someone who is inclined to believe the evidence. To someone not so inclined, no amount of evidence will suffice.

Being that God is real, how do we actually make him ex-ist? That is, the literal meaning of exist is to “stand out.” Thus, in this way of looking at things, something can be real but not exist.

While we cannot manufacture grace, we can do many things that interfere with its operation or which facilitate our awareness of its presence.

Which is why it is so helpful to associate with “men of ascending tendency.” Of course, there are many neutral or descending relationships we cannot avoid, which is all the more reason to be part of ascendiation of people who are serious about the spiritual life.