Beauty Is In the Eye of the Beholder

beauty, punk, graffiti, disciples, nation, alliance, goth

The title of this post is a phrase that has been around so long it is a tattered cliche at this point, but it's so very true. What is beautiful to me may not at all be beautiful to you, and vice versa.

Case in point: the third bedroom in my house was decorated for a very small girl, with pale lavender walls and what I consider to be the most amazingly hideous curtains I have ever seen. I hate that room. I haven't redecorated it yet mostly because I don't use it, but also because my niece thinks it the most beautiful, wondrous room she has ever seen. She actually gasped with pure joy when she saw the curtains.

Is she right, and I'm wrong? Am I right, and she is wrong? No, and no. We're both right. Beauty is like that.

Most people understand this, but it seems a few do not.

Darrow L. Miller, in The Aesthetic: The Universe is Ultimately Beautiful proves that he doesn't understand the very personal nature of beauty at all.

We see ugliness manifest in the drabness of the buildings and cities build in the Soviet empire and in the decaying buildings, graffiti walls and streets of America’s inner cities. We see it in the dark, sometimes morbid, eroticized gothic fashion, in the lyrics of punk-rock and rap music, and the drug subculture of modern and postmodern youth.

I understand that not everyone sees graffiti as art, or dresses up goth or enjoys "punk-rock", but I can tell you that many people do see the beauty possible in graffiti, find goth fashion beautiful and attractive and would pontificate for hours on the beautiful nonperfection of punk.

When you envision a world that includes only your vision of beauty, you envision a world with no beauty at all for others. Why anyone would wish that world to be a reality is beyond me.

I guess, however, it must make sense to someone whose stated goal is:

In Discipling Nations, Darrow Miller builds a powerful and convincing thesis that God's truth not only breaks the spiritual bonds of sin and death but can free whole societies from deception and poverty.

The deception of personal notions of beauty, I guess.

Not a Christian Nation

christian, nation, christianity, religious, right, tripoli, treaty, us
The Religious Right is in love with the idea that the US is a "christian nation". Read any sufficiently fundamentalist blog/message board/"news" site, and you'll see that phrase more than once. In fact, you'll also see a great deal about "returning" the US to the "christian principals the country was founded upon".

The arguments are many, but mostly revolve around two ideas: (1) the Founding Fathers were Christians, and (2) many of the Ten Commandments are found in the US Criminal Code.

I could argue the above 2 points until somebody's cow comes home, but I don't need to. I have the US Treaty With Tripoli. Written in 1796, read aloud in its entirety to the Senate in 1797, and personally approved by John Adams, Article 11 clearly states:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion

So there you have it. We are not, nor were we ever, a "christian nation".