Monday, July 12, 2010

Give Me Witch Doctors


Nate Wilson's Book Notes from a Tilt-a-Whirl is one of the best books I have recently read. It stirred up gratitude within me for the world God has made. He affirms God's sovereignty over all of creation, but not with a grim countenance. Rather he rejoices in all that God has done, is doing and will do. I am not going to comment much on the book, but I thought I would post some of my favorite quotes.
After discussing various philosophers and their failure to explain the world Wilson says this:
Give me priests. Give me men with feathers in their hair or tall domed hats, female oracles in caves, servants of the python, smoking weed and reading palms. A gypsy fortune teller with a foot-pedal Ouija board and a gold fishbowl for a crystal ball knows more about the world than many of the great thinkers of the West. Mumbling priests swinging stinking cans on their chains and even witch doctors conjuring up curses with a well buried elephant tooth have a better sense of their places in the world. They know this universe is brimming with magic, with life and riddles and ironies. They know the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it...Marx called religion an opiate, and all too often it is. But philosophy is an anesthetic, a shot to keep the wonder away.

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Let the saints be joyful in glory, let them sing aloud on their beds, let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two edged sword in their hand, to execute vengeance on the nations, and punishments on the peoples; to bind the kings with chains and their nobles with fetters of iron. Psalm 149:5-8