We had a humor thread wherein mock-pulpit lingo was used to joke about knife obsession. The complaint seems to be that this amounts to a profaning of sacred matters. Making jokes about religion, or using religious language to make jokes about other things is hardly a BladeForums innovation, so the complaint is as well directed against the public at large, both present and past, as it is at the participants in this thread. The same sort of humor could have come up in a discussion group of cat owners, car enthusiasts, or gourmet cooks.
This thread was rather mild stuff, compared to a commercial I heard this morning on the radio, wherein a mock sin-denouncing sort of preacher was confounded, and shown up as a phony, by the revelation that the sponsor's frozen fruit deserts could be so pleasurable to eat without being sinful.
These arguments go back a long long way.
There is constant tension between serious religion and levity in holidays. Christmas and Easter are both Christian holy days and party time, and what shall we say of the eve of All Saints Day - Halloween?
In another tradition, the Jewish holiday of Purim, which celebrates the events in the Book of Esther, has long been a rowdy holiday, on which the rabbi and anybody else is fair game for mocking, and prayers are sung to the conspicuously secular tunes, and it's a good idea to bring a designated driver. Passover is a serious holiday, but in some very traditional and religiously conservative middle eastern households a song of thanksgiving to God is sung during a food fight with green onions.
In many contexts, someone who believes he is a great authority on a subject may be said to "pontificate," and a well known exponant of some art may be called its "high priest."
Among knife makers, the late Bob Engnath did such amazing things with a Burr-King grinder, at such amazing speed, and taught so many other knifemakers the art, that he was called "the grinder god." But, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has actually prayed to him!
I belong to a major monotheistic religion, but my web page's section on Finnish knives has a quotation or two from the Kalevala on the smith-god Ilmarinen. I'm comfortable that I'm not dabbling in paganism by doing that. Now if I were to put up a shrine to him . . . .
So I, and a lot of other folks, blur the boundaries. A serious case can be made, in more than one tradition, for not bluring the boundaries. It happens that one seriously religious person has picked this place, perhaps among others, to argue against mixing levity with sacred matters. He has taken on an enormous task.
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- JKM
www.chaicutlery.com 
