And if the Church gives in on this, they are willing to negotiate their other reasonable demands–growing chest hair and chawin’ manly tobaccer.

I have never prayed to God that He make my enemies ridiculous. It would be gilding the lily.

These poor nincompoops claim they this protest isn’t a protest. In the same spirit I disclaim any allegations that this post is mocking them for their childish scheming. No, sir. As a faithful, active feminist my intent is only to lovingly use them for a laughingstock.

They claim that this action shows that many Mormon women have untapped potential. At least for these girls, some of whom may be Mormon, I’d say that claim is amply proved. Whatever potential they have is pretty much going untapped.

We could sit around all day chucking at fat-heads (and probably ought to: being laughable should inspire laughter, because experience is a hard school, but necessary–only experience can teach submission to reality; submission to reality is the beginning of submission to God), but unfortunately there is a larger point to be made. Feminists didn’t get to be silly all on their own. Granted, most of them come from privileged backgrounds with little to fear from life’s vicissitudes, but even that cushioning from reality isn’t enough to make them so fatuous. The factor that does make them food for belly-laughs is worth exploring, because it applies to all of us. For some of us, it will be the factor that makes our damned souls jokes in the eyes of Heaven.

History repeats itself. First as tragedy, second as farce.

That was Karl Marx, and if the subsequent career of Marxism is any guide, what he didn’t know about tragic and farcical history wasn’t worth knowing.

Screwtape counseled his cherished nephew that the purpose of sexual temptation is to get the sinner to go to ever greater lengths for ever less payout. Likewise, in the Great Divorce, we meet one of the souls of the damned who has nursed a complaint so long that the sinner has become the complaint. Both scenarios seem plausible when we see evidence for them in every mirror. But why should they be plausible? There is no sense to redoing the same thing over and over with little to no result.

What that objection misses is the power of myth. If we choose a sexual release or a grievance as our personal myth, that myth drives us to reenact and reenact it. That is a likely definition of myth, in fact–stories we believe we ought to reenact. All those reenactments are not independent choices. They are part of the choice to adopt the myth. Even when those reenactments have no pleasure in themselves, they are not devoid of pleasure. They have the pleasure of association with the myth.

Sinful myths are damnably bad. So, surprisingly, are many myths that are not in themselves wicked, like the old handmill in the story.

Once upon a time there was a witch who had a magic handmill. On her command, it would crank out salt for use. Her servant boy overhead the command. He couldn’t wait until she left to try it himself. He snuck into the storeroom and ordered the handmill to start. It did. Out came a few grains of precious salt, then a few grains more. They made a little patch and finally a little pile. The boy watched with big eyes. “Stop,” he said. But the handmill kept cranking. That command he did not know. He fled, and the handmill kept cranking. It cranked until the storeroom was full and burst open and cranked until the house was a mound of salt and it cranked until the witch came back and was buried in a saltslide before she could open her mouth, and it cranked until salt ran through the streets and piled against the doors and the desperate king had to pay to dig out the handmill and sail it to sea, dribbling little grains of salt the whole while. It cranked when it was thrown overboard into the deep. It cranked until all the sweet seas of the world turned sour. Its cranking still.

The toxicity of myths, like medicines and poisons, depends on the dose.

Modernisn in art had vitality when it first got going. 100 years later, art is a wasteland.

Liberalism made serious strides in its day But now the equality and liberation narrative has grown so stale that it reduces to racial hoaxes at Oberlin College, defending a low-grade traitor’s right to call himself a woman, and trying to force a minority faith’s sermons on fatherhood and porn to have diverse gender audience for the cameras. The farce is farcical to the point of tragedy.

If it weren’t painful, I could gore my own ox too.

There is only one myth that doesn’t need limits. It is the myth of Christ and Adam that we reenact at the sacrament table and in the temple. All other myths are idols in potential.