Weekly quote #32: D. Graham Burnett July 4, 2008
Posted by ocmpoma in : supernaturalism , trackbackThis week’s quote is a paragraph from “Funhouse Goddess” — an essay in the current issue of Lapham’s Quarterly (pp 183-189 of Vol I No 3). In the paragraph, which appears on page 188, Burnett explains a possible take on Charles Fourier’s reasoning behind a rather liberated philosophy, involving really loving thy neighbor:
“Assuming a loving God who’s trying to speak through nature, it followed that our desires are His very clearest instructions. And even if they are bizarre (Fourier briefly touched on foot fetishes, dress-up fantasies, and a variety of other unconventional appetites), they must all fit together somehow in that “divine order” that the theologians had been ratcheting on about since the age of the Church Fathers. You can sort of understand Fourier to be calling their patristic bluff: “Loving God? Divine Plan? Natue as Norm? Okay, my firends, let’s try to make this work, given what we know about life down here….” In view of his answer, Fourier was either a satirist of super-Swiftian proportions or one of the most devout men ever to live. That you can’t quite decide which is testimony to his uncanny literarty gifts.”
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