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I kid YOU not - 2007-12-10 00:52:00
That primate looks like it's its honor-bound duty and that feline looks like it's its due.
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Greg - 2007-12-10 09:05:12
The Cathars were an interesting bunch. I learned about them initially while reading about the history of the Freemasons, and then a bit more shortly after reading Flicker (Theodore Roczak). After that I went on a complete Crusades binge and learned about this one which was quite shocking. Weird bit of European history..
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Mr Lojban - 2007-12-10 11:13:36
A few years back, Rene Weis's The yellow cross: The story of the last Cathars was in the window of every bookstore. Might be worth a look.
Also, Catharism is akin to Gnosticism, and if you're interested in the latter, you should get to know the Mandaeans, before they are utterly destroyed in the Iraq War.
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Paula - 2007-12-10 12:13:40
I had a brief flirtation with the Gnostics (like most people, via Elaine Pagels), but the Mandaeans are new to me--thanks!
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Bob - 2007-12-10 12:23:59
Don't get me (or the Beastie Boys) started on Schism, Greg.... Back when they were young punks (pre-rap), the Beasties used to make fun of their friends the Bad Brains' (or at any rate, HR's) pronouncements about what was bloodclot, and what was acceptable behavior, by billing themselves as the International Knights of Schism....
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Greggus The Elder - 2007-12-10 15:10:39
Thank you for the info Lojban!! I think I remember the KOS, Bob. I remember them pre-rap anyway. And nobody ever really paid attention to HR, fortunately. Bad Brains were the best live show ever though!
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Sharon - 2007-12-10 23:16:17
One of my pet fascinations is the shifting nature of the sacred and the profane. So I found all these references to kooky sects interesting and juicy. thanks. Some religion-related stream of conscious...Yeats: "I have a religious temperament without a religion".....When Pagels was talking about the discovery of some of the "missing" gospels, like The Gospel According to Fred or some such thing, it was jarring and delightful...As heretical and meaningful as The Teachings of Krusty.... In a great book "End of Faith" by Sam Harris, he descibes our bafflement in the West at the Islamic fundamentalist world as if a hole had been ripped in the fabric of time and all these people from the 13th century are now streaming through...people make fun of Willard Mitt Romney (he'd be awful as president!) for believing the Garden of Eden was in Missouri...is believing that it was in ancient Iraq any less silly?..P.S.Isn't one of the Beastie Boys a Buddhist?
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Sharon - 2007-12-10 23:36:16
oops,stream of consciousness
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