Crystal Cathedral Declares Bankruptcy

But the true believers forge ahead positively nonetheless from their pile of (clear) rocks:

"Our announcement today to file for the protection of Chapter 11 is just one more chapter in the book that he is continuing to write -- and we know that God's plans are good -- we have no doubt his chapter will be good!"

CNN.com has the full story here.

The Launch of Real Clear Religion

What took them so long?

From Reason Magazine, here:

Real Clear Religion Launches

Brian Doherty | October 18, 2010

The Real Clear campaign of conquering all fields of human thought and endeavor continues apace, with the public launch of Real Clear Religion, edited by former Reason intern and sometime Reason contributor Jeremy Lott. Keep up with the news of all the Gods and all their sayings and all the human hugger-mugger that arises and froths around all that, daily.

Well, I Tried

I frequently hear people attributing a statement to Einstein which goes something like this: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting it to work when it never did even once. That's how I've come to feel about attending services at a congregation of the PCUSA in Forest Hills, MI, although I have posted about what might be considered at least one positive experience there.

But the first Sunday in October was the last straw. I'm never going back there again, not even in a box.

For what seems like the umpteenth time now, the service advertised as "traditional" was anything but. This is a TINO church, Traditional In Name Only, hoping to lure in some poor suckers so that they can enlighten the darkness of their hapless souls with a sentimental gospel of Christian unity, narcissism and multiculturalism.

I'll never forget the time I looked forward to "Holy! Holy! Holy!" as featured during this nine o'clock hour, thinking I'd hear the beautiful old-timey version with its full organ and worshipful, drawn-out tempo. I'd heard such hymns before. Instead we were treated to a staccato version accompanied by enormous African bongo drums. Gee, what would the contemporary rendition sound like at eleven, I wondered?

Or the time the men's chorus not once but twice in the same service performed numbers which would have been completely suited to their beautiful male voices, but NO! Someone decided they should sing arrangements which would have been possible only for Die Wiener Sangerknaben. They looked and sounded absolutely silly as they strained at the notes, which I'm now sure was the whole point. That they didn't understand the joke being played on them made the scene all the more pathetic.

On this most recent Sunday, for the traditional service, the choir sang hymns in untranslated foreign languages. Boy, was that edifying and meaningful.

The liturgy was a cut and paste affair from liturgies used by sister congregations from all over the world, including a benediction from South Africa, which acknowledged that God created us human. Was that ever in question, except perhaps in Winnie Mandela's necklacing neighborhood? The invocation was from Zaire, which asked God for strength to find that obedience which creates unity. I couldn't imagine that there's ever been an historical example of such obedience. Obedience always creates division. Just ask Korah. In point of fact, an obedience which creates unity is no obedience at all. Oh, at the last day there will be unity, yes there will, and every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. But close readers of the Apostle to the Gentiles know what follows after that.

The children's message featured a show and tell of examples of communion ware from Malawi and Nicaragua and two other countries I cannot now remember. There were fewer than eight children up there. Eight. The sanctuary must seat 300 if the day and night are 24 hours long. Where were the children?

And the sermon, celebrating something called World Communion Day, concluded that the church is really what it is supposed to be, more than at any other time, when it celebrates this sacrament and we all participate and mystically become the body of Christ manifested in the world. The Body of Christ! Was I in a protestant reformed church? Why not just join the Catholics and sacrifice the Mass each and every day?


Well, for just a moment there, I almost thought I was listening to President Obama saying "We are the ones we have been waiting for."

Ye shall be as gods!

There they stood, the celebrants male and female, intoning the words of institution and proceeding to feast first upon the elements like the fat cows of Bashan they are. At least in the Lutheran church the celebrants first served the congregation, and symbolically communed last, as servants and good shepherds might do.

Next they distributed communion to the secondary celebrants, one of whom, a single fellow, had hair which looked like he had just crawled out of bed, and another, a female in pants, who was dressed in an outfit reminiscent of a Federation officer from a Star Trek episode, flared capri pants, boots, and all. She even wore a sling for a tricorder. Whereupon the lowest orders of the hierarchy were reached and the cattle filed up and were fed, one after another receiving with hardly a pause and chewing away as they walked back to their seats.
Who-eee, can you feel the mystery!

Speaking of which, our irregular presence in this church was once the occasion for a member to come up and ask me as we were leaving "What brings you here?" ("A Honda," I answered). At the time I did not realize that the question was meant more rhetorically, as in "What are you doing here?"

Because you see, in nearly two years of albeit infrequent attendance at this church not one effort was ever made to contact us at our phone number or mailing address. There has not been even one word from a pastor or elder or any other representative. Nothing. We might as well have not ever attended.
We do not exist.

And the reason? I finally figured it out today. Call me slow. Although this congregation does not appear on a certain gay friendly church list with other PCUSA congregations in our area, you don't see many young people with kids there. And you don't see many young women either, sitting alone in the pews. But you do see a fair number of unattached young men. The Presbyterian Church USA, you see, welcomes sexually active gay people. 

But not us.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God, Almighty, I'm free at last!

Dummkopf Bill Frezza Blames Carnage on Christmas

 

Apparently unable to calculate the enormous numbers of people killed by modern Enlightenment ideologies in the last century, a supposed expert of the shop and till variety decides that monotheism is to blame for all our ills and that we should go back to the days of gods, goddesses, human sacrifice and free love:

For a movement sharing a common heritage claiming peace and love, monotheism seems to do a remarkable job stirring up hatred.

What is it about the business models of these institutions that foment such torrents of violence? What other large scale human endeavor, besides the nation-state, has so much blood on its hands? And not just lately. This has been going on for thousands of years.

"Besides the nation-state"? He must be kidding. Nevermind that the world's last bastion of Christianity interceded to bring an end to the worst war yet only after it was attacked.

Remind me to invest my money with someone who can count.

Of Druids and Fluids

One winter a fearless young Druid

dived into a rotating fluid.

But he was not ready

for such a fast eddy.

The poor fellow's head came unscruid.

-- author unknown (David Lesley, Organizer: The Literary Group Weekly departmental seminar, San Diego State University Department of Mathematical Sciences, since 1974?), 1994

To Infinity! And Beyond!

There was a young fellow from Trinity

Who took the square root of infinity.

But the number of digits

Gave him the fidgets;

He dropped Math and took up Divinity.

-- George Gamow, 1961

Some Religions Are More Equal Than Others in New York City

A Greek Orthodox Church was destroyed on 9/11 at Ground Zero. The official resistance to getting it rebuilt stands in stark contrast to the way officials are bending over backwards to allow a mosque on the site of a nearby coat store, also damaged by the 9/11 attack.

You can read all about it, here.

It Turns Out Glenn Beck is a Mormon

Which explains a lot.

According to CNN.com:

Beck's emerging role as a national leader for Christian conservatives is surprising not only because he has until recently stressed a libertarian ideology that is sometimes at odds with so-called family values conservatism, but also because Beck is a Mormon.

Many of the evangelicals who Beck is speaking to and organizing, including [Rev. Richard] Land [of the Southern Baptist Convention], don't believe he is a Christian. Mormons, who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, call themselves Christian.

"There's a long history of tensions between Mormons and evangelicals and some of that is flat-out theology," says John C. Green, an expert on religion and politics at the University of Akron. "Mormons have additional sacred texts (to the Bible) and a different conception of God."

"It's also competitive," Green said, "because evangelicals and Mormons are both proselytizing in the U.S. and around the world."

Don't miss the complete story, here, for which you will not need 3-d glasses.

Barely 3.2% of ELCA Congregations Vote to Separate Over Gay Clergy

Roughly 335 out of over 10,000 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America congregations are prepared to leave the denomination over the church's decision to allow practicing homosexuals to serve as pastors, according to this story.

Which tells you that the largest Lutheran body in America today doesn't really believe in one of its signature issues: sola scriptura.

Cold comfort to those who have rightly maintained that this Lutheran church left them long ago.

Rome Still Pink As The Day Is Long

The UK Daily Mail reports here on yet another embarrassment for the Roman Catholic Church right in its own backyard:

Catholic sex scandal as undercover reporter 'films priests at gay clubs and having casual flings'

By Nick Pisa

23rd July 2010

A gay priest sex scandal has rocked the Catholic Church in Italy today after a weekly news magazine released details of a shock investigation it had carried out.

Using hidden cameras, a journalist from Panorama magazine - owned by Italian Prime Minister and media baron Silvio Berlusconi - filmed three priests as they attended gay nightspots and had casual sex.

Today there was no immediate comment from the Italian Bishops Conference and the Vatican - which has been rocked by a series of sex scandals involving paedophile priests since the start of the year.

A preview of the Panorama article sent out by email last night added that video footage from the investigation would be made available.

The article describes how the reporter was assisted by a gay 'accomplice' as they 'gate-crashed the wild nights of a number of priests in Rome who live a surprising double-life.'

In its preview, Panorama added: 'By day they are regular priests, complete with dog collar, but, at night it's off with the cassock as they take their place as perfectly integrated members of the Italian capital's gay scene.'

Panorama described its investigation as 'deeply disturbing' as it detailed how three priests - two Italians and a Frenchman - happily took part in gay events and had casual sex.

The Catholic Church forbids priests to have sex and homosexuality is also seen as a 'sin' .

In 2008 the Vatican issued guidelines which said that any would be trainees should not join if they had 'deep-seated homosexual tendencies'.

In one part of the investigation Panorama said that one priest, named as Carlo, willingly put on his cassock to have sex with the reporter's gay accomplice, adding 'all of which was filmed by the hidden camera'.

The magazine also described how they had attended a Mass which was celebrated by Carlo.

In its preview Panorama insisted that it had carried out through checks and established that all three priests were bona fide but would not reveal their real names or any other details.

Panorama editor Giorgio Mule said: 'This was a two week investigation and was not aimed at creating a scandal but showing that a certain section of the clergy behaves very differently.'

HATRED AS SELF-ESTEEM

Shelby Steele cuts to the heart of the failure of nerve which now animates the post-Christian West, the cultural self-doubt which first spelled the end for our society when our parents could no longer bring themselves to say No to their children:

[T]he entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.

Read the rest here.

ON "NECESSITY"

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

BY ROBERT FROST

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923.

BAGHEERA DIDN'T FIT ON THE NAME TAG . . .

. . . and so I called her Mowgli.

This was her favorite spot, from which she could keep an eye on me in the kitchen, in the hope that I was working on a plate of food for her, and bask in the sun at the same time!

Mowgli was the runt of a litter, born under a backyard deck in Illinois in the spring of 1993. When we bought the house next door to it in the summer and the lady of the house discovered the existence of the kittens, it didn't take long for a trail of food left from the neighbors' deck to ours to produce a fast friendship between us and Mowgli and her remaining sister, Cal. They spent their first winter outside, spooning by night in a little Dogloo I retrofitted with a 100 watt light bulb and some cedar bedding.

Cal was quite inquisitive, a beautiful tortoise shell in greens and blacks and browns. But her curiosity got the better of her in May of 1994, and she didn't make it back across a road one fateful weekend. Mowgli, on the other hand, was a natural survivor. She always hung back, watching, evaluating. And when she was sure of us, it was only natural that she joined the family, even though Little Sheila wasn't too happy about it. They never did get along all that well. But that was ok, because Sheila, a classic cream and tan Turkish Angora, printed on the lady of the house, who is blonde. So Mowgli sort of became mine, and she and I spent many a happy evening together, usually in front of a fire.

When Sheila couldn't go on any longer almost two years ago, Mowgli became the undisputed queen of this castle, once and for all, and took to the role instantly. It was going so well I had forgotten how old she was getting. In truth I didn't want to think about it. It was 17+ years. We, like others, had lost so much in so small a space.

 

I tried to tell myself Mowgli had lots of time left, but she didn't.  

 

"There is no pleasure, no shape of good fortune, no form of glory in which death has not hid himself, and waited silently for his prey."  -- Alexander Smith, 1888

 

And so she is gone, buried next to Little Sheila on Saturday, the 29th of May.

I open the kitchen cupboard and am startled when I reach up to see so many plates stacked so high in the corner, the little ones from which she used to eat every evening, unused. From her spot Mowgli could observe this motion, repeated thousands of times, and be roused instantly from her leisure with every certainty that something good was about to happen. But now it is for me to consider how in this motion, so oft repeated, I . . .

 

"have passed weeks, months, and years which are now no longer in [my] power; that an end must in time be put to every thing great as to every thing little; that to life must come its last hour, and to this system of being its last day, the hour at which probation ceases, and repentance will be vain; the day in which every work of the hand, and imagination of the heart shall be brought to judgment, and an everlasting futurity shall be determined by the past." 

 

-- Samuel Johnson, 5 April, 1760

  

THE RELENTLESS MARCH OF HOMOSEXUALITY

In 1993, when President Clinton sought to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the U. S. military, there was an enormous upheaval in the country, a veritable firestorm of outrage which became an integral part of the reaction leading to the Republican takeover of the Congress in the elections of 1994.

Fast forward to today, the day after the U. S. House voted to repeal the Don't Ask, Don't Tell compromise of those years, and you'd hardly even know the measure is on its way to the Senate for a vote. There was nothing on the websites of Bill Bennett, Laura Ingraham or Rush Limbaugh to indicate any reaction to the vote, which represents nothing short of a repudiation of the agreement reached with conservatives on the issue at the time. CNBC.com had the story from about 01:04 AM EDT on its website until the mid-morning, when it disappeared altogether. The House passed the bill in the dead of night, just before the Memorial Day weekend. It seems as if no one, except for the far left, wants to talk about the historic vote.

In less than twenty years, the social conservatives have completely lost the war for traditional morality in America, whether it comes to the Hyde Amendment prohibiting the expenditure of federal funds for abortion or the acceptance of homosexual behavior. The reason for this is clear: a relentless effort by the left to insinuate homosexuality in every venue possible, from prime time television to public school sex education. Inured to the topic and themselves less religiously oriented over the period, the public can hardly muster the will to discuss the matter anymore, save for values interest groups like the Traditional Values Coalition. The Roman Catholic Church, whose seminaries are as pink as the day is long, is utterly incapable of standing against a tide which its own doctrine recognizes as the creation of God. You'd hardly believe it that not that long ago homosexuals discovered on U. S. Navy vessels at sea often didn't set foot on land again.

The Book of Kings informs us that good King Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord and drove out of the land of Israel all the male cult prostitutes. The only group left in the world with a similar moral mission, it seems, is radical Islam. And they say politics makes strange bedfellows.

Time Out

Not for him was there ever any waiting for that wisest of all counselors. The old gray head was always a fool, and could never wait for anything.

Not for him at the end of days will grief do its work now, and bring its gift.

Not for him will loss mean standing alone for once, in command of himself. Only now, after all these years, is it plain that he is not a man in full.

It teaches all things as it grows old, but not to this old goat. He changes women like a pair of too tight pants, like a bull answering the rut before the ashes have even grown cold. Like an ever rolling stream, it has born her away. She flies, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.

Some of him is passed on because of you, because you were the same way once, and made the same mistakes. You may yet learn from yours, but he will never really know he made any.

It is said that the truth is the kindest thing we can give another in the end, but it is a pearl as surely trampled on by a certain sort as it is by others redeemed, and treasured, in time.

Babies Know The Difference Between Good And Evil

So says the headline to the story, here.

An astonishing series of experiments is challenging the views of many psychologists and social scientists that human beings are born as 'blank slates'--and that our morality is shaped by our parents and experiences. . . . [T]hey suggest that the difference between good and bad may be hardwired into the brain at birth, 

says the article for the UK Daily Mail by David Derbyshire.

Neither conclusion is inconsistent with the Bible's understanding of the human predicament, however, that notwithstanding our first ancestors' willingly made affirmative answer to the invitation of evil (Genesis 3:5), evil has been ever after "biologically" transmitted to their progeny:

Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.

 -- Psalm 51:5

The Bible holds these antonyms together in tension. Those who cut one or the other loose inevitably veer off into utopianism of one kind or another or into assorted determinisms as the case may be. In its way, the Bible is a pragmatic, realistic, dare we say conservative, reflection on human experience which people with much of it continue to find compelling for these reasons.

Three Cheers for Tom Watson

This has needed saying for a very long time, quite apart from Tiger Woods' more recent shortcomings:

The 60-year-old Watson, one of golf's elder statesmen, also criticized Woods — a 14-time major winner — for bad language and other on-course behavior.

"I feel that he has not carried the same stature that other great players that have come along like Jack (Nicklaus), Arnold (Palmer), Byron Nelson, the Hogans, in the sense that there was language and club throwing on the golf course," Watson said. "You can grant that of a young person that has not been out here for a while. But I think he needs to clean up his act and show the respect for the game that other people before him have shown."

For more, go here.

To Be or Not To Be

On Fox News Sunday, January 3, 2010, Brit Hume made the following remarks about the Buddhism of Tiger Woods, remarks which have been the subject of much controversy for days:

Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person, I think is a very open question, and it’s a tragic situation with him. He’s lost his family, it’s not clear to me whether he’ll be able to have a relationship with his children, but the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal, the extent to which he can recover, it seems to me, depends on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist, I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith, so my message to Tiger would be 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.'

Since Hume is a self-professed Christian, is it reasonable to expect that Tiger's present record of misbehavior wouldn't call into question for such a person the character of Tiger's own religion? Indeed, Tiger's egregious misbehavior suggests that some awfully bad karma from a past life has been manifesting itself in this one just as much as his pre-eminence as an athlete suggests the opposite. What extremes these are. What was he in a past life that he should be what he is in this one?

Christianity explains reality very differently, in terms of tragedy, where human excellence derived from a divine spark becomes co-mingled with total depravity because of a choice taken to disobey, made freely. To the Buddhist, all of this is an illusion, both the good and the evil, along with the idea of personality, whether human or divine. Escaping from the great chain of being represents a rather different religious goal than forgiveness, redemption and eternal life. But Tiger's penchant for the procreative act seems like a strange, deep and willful entanglement in it.

The thing which jumps out at me about this spectacle is how incidental religion has seemed to the careers of the principals involved, and how avocational. Hume should feel as free to speak his mind as I feel to say that his chosen venue was unwise, if he sincerely had Tiger's eternal welfare foremost in his mind.

Advent: The Season of Eschatological Denial

For the First Sunday of Advent, Nov. 29, the text for the sermon in the Presbyterian Church came from 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, the last verse of which speaks of "the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints."

Nary a mention was made of the meaning of this text, even though the preacher carved it up into three's and expounded upon it at great length. He simply assumed that it was appropriate to the season of advent, of "coming," when we celebrate the coming of Jesus into the world. But the text, of course, does not refer to the birth of Jesus at all. It refers, instead, to the fervent expectation of the return of Jesus, that he would "be beside" us again soon, an expectation shared by Paul with most, if not all, Christians of the first century.

The underlying Greek word, parousia, in the Latin vulgate is adventu, which of course means "coming," but not the one we celebrate at Christmas. It is, rather, the final coming of the Lord to end history as we know it and commence the final judgment. It would be no babe, meek and mild, spreading peace on earth to men of good will, but a victorious king separating the wheat from the chaff, purifying the former and consuming the latter with the fire of divine justice.

The failure of Jesus to return "soon" caused a crisis for Christianity, the effects of which are detectable as much in the development of its practices and theology as they are in the development of the gospel texts themselves. It should not surprise us, however, that Christianity's devotees would fall back on more familiar conceptions and, for example, eventually co-opt the term advent for other purposes. In doing so they acquiesced to a very old idea of a seasonal round, in which the celebrating of the coming of Jesus into the world and his going out again was loosely made to coincide with the times of harvest and planting in the autumn and the spring. It was a concession to the rhythm of life going back millennia, and to the impulse of human beings to attach religious significance to these facts of existence. A paganus, a pagan, after all, was just a country boy, nothing more than a farmer who, like all his fellows, marked the times and the seasons with rites and rituals meant to enlist the blessing and deflect the displeasure of the gods on his efforts in the fields.

And so it is today. The typical Christian is a pagan with no more sense of urgency about the imminent return of Jesus than an audiophile has of the return of vinyl. Whether he celebrates a liturgical calendar or not, his life revolves around seasons just the same, more often than not "the kids are back in school," "spring break," and "summer vacation." He goes to church seeking God's blessings on his life all the same, so that he may excel at his career, place his children in good schools, take a nice trip somewhere in June, save for their college and his own retirement, and generally enjoy life, within limits if he is wise. There is no such thing today as a disciple, who leaves all and follows Jesus (Luke 14:33).

Some of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies and listened to Christian balladeers like Larry Norman or read The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey acquired a veneer of the expectation only to lose it again because we finally realized that almost every century since the first has seen such expectation frustrated, or we came to grips with the fact that just because the expectation was preserved on papyri doesn't necessarily make it true, or translatable to now.

If Christianity is to remain relevant to such-minded people, it must do better than yet one more celebration of the Savior's birth. Saved from what? And for what? More of the same, day after day, year upon year, only to "fly forgotten as a dream, dies at the opening day?"

Thanksgiving For Protestantism

The Protestant work ethic, that industry and frugality eventually lead to riches, was not by any means fully formed in the minds of the grateful at the first Thanksgiving. It took the struggles and failures of communalism and the specter of want in the years immediately following to cause a reassessment and reformulation of the Pilgrim economy.

The following article originally appeared here.

November 25, 2009

The Mayflower's Pilgrim Capitalists

By Steven Malanga

Reading Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower, an account of the voyage of the Pilgrims and the settling of Plymouth Colony, what strikes me most is not simply the extraordinary suffering of those who made the crossing, or how close to failure the entire venture teetered for years, or even the author's recounting of the first celebration we've since dubbed Thanksgiving.

What leaps out from the pages of the history, probably because it's so little a part of the common narrative of the Pilgrims, is a crucial decision by the colony's governor, William Bradford, to change the fundamental organization of Plymouth's economy, a move which secured the colony's future. As Philbrick describes it, after three years in America the Pilgrims "stumbled on the power of capitalism" and in the process ensured the colony's survival.

Of course, for many people, the particulars of an economic system hardly seem like the stuff out of which national myths are made. Instead, the popular retelling of the Pilgrims' tale this time of year typically focuses on their role as separatists who fled England seeking religious freedom, came to thrive in the Dutch city of Leiden but worried that their children would lose their English identity and language, and so determined instead to found a colony in America where they could practice their religion but otherwise govern themselves as Englishmen and women.

The Pilgrims got more than they bargained for in the journey. After a brutal 66-day voyage, the Mayflower reached Cape Cod in mid-November of 1620, too late to build a suitable settlement before the winter set in. Living largely aboard the ship while they built the first structures, the settlers were ravaged by disease that winter, and by early spring, only half of the original voyagers remained alive.

Through the spring and the summer the Pilgrims nursed each other back to health, built their settlement, made friends with local Indians, and planted both native English crops and American seeds provided them by the local natives. That fall, as Plymouth Harbor attracted hordes of migratory birds, the Pilgrims went hunting, accumulating enough meat for a big celebration. When a hundred or so Pokanokets Indians showed up with freshly killed deer to add to the plenty, what started as a traditional European harvest festival became a feast of mythic significance, especially after Bradford and Edward Winslow ended their account of the Pilgrim's first year at Plymouth with the story of that Thanksgiving..

But mythic celebrations aside, the Pilgrims would struggle at Plymouth for two more years, never quite securing their freedom from worry and want until Bradford reorganized their tiny economy. For three years Plymouth had operated like other English colonies such as Jamestown, on a communal system where everyone worked the land and shared the fruits of labor. Now instead, in 1623, Bradford decided that each family should have its own plot of land to cultivate and would get to keep what it produced. By rights, this shouldn't have mattered much to the God-fearing Pilgrims. After all, they were engaged in a heroic endeavor to create a new life for themselves in America and all of them were presumably working as hard as possible to achieve that.

Still, as Philbrick writes, under Bradford's new regime, "the change in attitude was stunning." While previously men had tended the fields while women cared for the children, Bradford wrote that now women and children took to the fields, too, and the colony's output increased sharply. "The inhabitants never again starved," Philbrick relates, and eventually Winslow described Plymouth as a place where "religion and profit jump together."

Despite their devout nature, the Pilgrims weren't abhorred by such comparisons because the nature of religion was changing, too. The Protestant reformer John Calvin had placed work and the pursuit of one's occupation in a new religious context. Whereas under the Catholic Church for more than a thousand years work was something one did to subsist, Calvin argued that work was what God willed the faithful to do, and the worldly success that one achieved through hard work was a sign that one was, perhaps, a member of the elect. So thoroughly did many Protestant sects adapt this ethic that more than 100 years after the founding of Plymouth the minister John Wesley, architect of Methodism in England, would observe that "religion cannot but produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches."

The Pilgrims were followed to New England by waves of Puritans who believed as the Pilgrims did that a man's occupation was his calling in life and that success in one's calling was not to be renounced. It was a very different view of work and prosperity which became, not surprisingly, the ethic that defined the new country where, as Alexis de Tocqueville would later observe, all "honest callings are honorable" and where "the notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural, and honest condition of human existence."

Not your typical Thanksgiving sentiment, but words nonetheless to contemplate this time of year.

Steven Malanga is an editor for RealClearMarkets and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute