Tuesday, December 07, 2004

The Six Foot Shelf

The Vatican has (allegedly) its secret library; I have the Six Foot Shelf of Bad Religion. It features such gems as

The Book of Mormon and The Pearl of Great Price
New World Translation of the Scriptures (by the JWs)
The Lost Years of Jesus by Elizabeth Clare Prophet
The Pictorial Key to the Tarot by Arthur Waite
The Desire of Ages by Ellen G. White
The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow by Constance Cumbey
Gyn/Ecology and The Wickedary by Mary Daly

...and many others. Why do I have these things? Well, partly because my wife absorbs books. But it's also because primary sources are important. If you're going to denounce something, it's more effective if you can refute it accurately. Inaccurate refutations are often enough tantamont to endorsement.

7 comments:

Ecgbert said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Ecgbert said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Jo said...

Mine contains many of the booklets put out by the JW's as well as the book of Mormon. Of course new age and tarot has its place as well.

And then there is my "not fully true, but has some good stuff to say" is THE MEANING OF THE KORAN, THE TAU TEH CHING, and THE LOST BOOKS OF THE BIBLE.

Joe Zollars

Ecgbert said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Ecgbert said...

Formatting edited and comments re-posted:

Mine has:

Fr Alexey/Hieromonk Ambrose (Young), The Rush to Embrace - quotes a lot of good RC traditionalists but...
Fr Theodore Pulcini, Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism - like Young a distorted anti-RC screed.
Paramahansa Yogananda, Metaphysical Meditations.
Alan Watts, The Supreme Identity.
Ram Dass, Journey of Awakening - to be fair it has a lot of natural religion in it that's true, but... it's New Age.
Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By - interestingly on an anthropological level he's sympathethic to Catholic traditionalism but he's a relativist and a bit Jungian; he didn't believe in anything.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - OVERRATED!

Got to give Elizabeth Clare Prophet some credit for that book because it introduced me to the Glastonbury legend, a part of English Catholicism.

I like the Tao Te Ching a lot, as did Fr Seraphim (Rose) BTW, Joe. It's in my library but not on the junk shelf!

Jo said...

Yes I was aware of Fr. Seraphim's interest in Dauism. Although I don't buy into the claims of the book "Christ the Eternal Dau," I do think that Lau Tzu was a very wise man with many, many good things to say. The world would be a much better place if people had half as much virtue as is aspired to in Dauism.

Joe Zollars

C. Wingate said...

Oh, how I had forgotten Joseph Campbell! Yep, he's definitely a resident!