always thought it odd you'd invited me here, but i like that you like oddness. Your posting On Perception was a wonderfully sly attack on the preamble to the constitution of the United States, but it poses a real question whither are the progressives progressing.

Pleasure is an unsustainable divertissement, if i could sustain it, i'd take it. From my limited experience of falling in love (metanoia) happiness is far more closely linked to misery than it is to pleasure. Freud described the healthy functional state as common human unhappiness, Thoreau calls it quiet desperation. Both romantic visions, i find the reality more mundane, so like you I make up stories signifiers that do not attach to a signified, but truth is something different. The problem with progressives, so where did you come from and where are you heading or as Russell put it if everything is relative to what are they all relative. Conservatives believe in Eden. In the beginning the US had a perfect constitution but through a series of ages from Golden to silver to bronze we end up here in this age of clay and we must therefore return to. Liberals believe in the eschatological paradise, we must through positivism gradually increase wealth and prosperity until we live in a world fit for Captain Kirk and the Enterprise. Then we have bladerunner, terminator, and with the heavily analysed Matrix post-modern uncertainty hand in hand with neo-pragmatism Bergman's authentic knight. I think that means something, no really, no no really. You won't find bible stories told in the bible anymore.

An adult christian theological view is far better described by your friend's fantasy of fornicating with Christina Aguilerra than the indescribable blissful ... ecstasy (if they are going to start with indescribable why continue). Sex is not a sin, the body is not evil. And why else would God have made Christina Aguilerra? Your analysis of mediaeval and Koranic views of heaven back me up. There is no Christian teaching of the salvation of souls (the term is people not souls). Apart from smaller groups previously called heretics there is no elevation of the spiritual in contradistinction to the physical. So adult christians are called to value the things of the world for their eventual culmination in the world to come. What was termed original sin or structural sin, looks at the world and says yes the only way i can survive is to kill other things, creation evolved in that way but it need not have, but that is how creation evolved and i play my part. There is a hope that it need not always be that way, and that we can begin to create that new world here and now.

Do I believe in an afterlife, like you I think it irrelevant. Do churches teach a mercenary attitude to morality, possibly but it was supposed to be directed at children. If you play nicely I will reward you. When we grow up, we are supposed to go beyond that, people with money and power don't got to grow up at all. Rare is the religionist who has developed his religious thinking beyond puberty. Interestingly Disney takes up the challenge where Church services fail. I think of Ice Age, wonderful salvation history using the analogy of the economic trinity, and more simply the cartoon Hercules, if you try to save your life you will lose everything but if you lay down your life for love you will become God and that is how God is, not a wanton boy with unlimited power.

You made me consider what I really believe Nick, and perhaps as you view the myth of heaven, so i believe in radical optimism. Even when it flies in the face of all the evidence, as they come towards me killing, torturing, raping, and i can see the savouring of pleasure in their eyes, i repeat to myself, i know my goel lives and he will raise me up at the last, and radical optimism is about repeating the mantra even when it is clear there is no signfied towards which it signifies, and truth lies in the narrowest of gaps. and it it was all a lie i'll settle for a chance at Kill Bill, fuck pacifists give me happiness or give me revenge, i am who i am, ego frater servus non serviam.