The way that the nominal left loves to throw the real left on the sword over the most ephemeral and pointless issues would almost make you believe that they don't really care about taking power to put a real leftist agenda into effect. And there are few issues more clearly illustrative of that than the pandering to the tender feelings of the anti-religious fringe over issues such as the recent Greece v. Galloway ruling.
I certainly don't like it when a bunch of politicians get up and make a display of religiosity that their actions and private lives seldom live up to. There is something distasteful about the hypocritical use of religious display, especially in politics, there is every reason for a religious person to oppose it. But this is not an especially important issue as compared to what politicians do in the course of their official duties. The plaintiffs in the case said that they were "uncomfortable" with the prayers at the beginning of the town council meeting, which I get. But, really, this issue isn't what's important, what they do after that is what is important. If the price of avoiding Republicans in office is tolerating a minimal amount of that display, it is certainly worth it. If atheists are offended, well, join the club. I'm a lot more offended by cuts to general assistance, tax giveaways to the wealthy and just the other genuinely important actions of government than I am the thirty seconds of meaningless gesture at the start of the meeting. I care about that entirely more than I care about your or my discomfort for thirty seconds at the beginning of the meeting. For the record, the Pledge of Allegiance they say as they don't pray, around here, makes me uncomfortable but not enough to make me mistake the empty gesture as an important issue.
The ruling on allowing prayer at the beginning of a town council meeting has nothing, whatsoever, to do with religion as religion but, as with just about everything this court does, it has everything to do with the use of religion as a political tool. And, I'm sorry to have to point it out again, the right's use of religion has been far more effective than the dogmatism of the left has been. A lot of the blame for that success is due to the corporate media's reporting of those issues, but that will get me onto the fact that the left has been the media's sucker as well, even as it delivers the punches.
If the left had decided to spend its resources wasted on unimportant stuff like this on pushing economic justice, it would have a lot more success. We have not only wasted our time on marginal issues like this one, we have enabled the right to portray the left as being anti-religious. Which is a problem in a country where the vast majority of people are religious, religious belief pervades the country.
-------
If the five conservative Catholics on the Supreme Court are as influenced by what the Pope says as the anti-Catholic blog babblers claim, they would have abolished the death penalty instead of being its greatest supporters. They would have supported the right of effective collective bargaining and social justice, on which even the conservative Popes of the last century and a quarter are down right radical by the standards that prevail in the United States today. Only, that hasn't happened, has it. The sixth Catholic on the court, Justice Sotomayor, has been far more in tune with the Vatican in her decisions on those issues than the right wingers have but on issues of reproductive rights and GLBT rights, she hasn't been.
As I said, yesterday, I remember Catholic bashers complaining that Sotomayor would be another Catholic on the court. I have to say that reading comments at Eschaton, Hullabaloo, and other leftish blogs that sounded like Southern Baptists c. 1960 was another clue that they weren't the liberals they believed they were. It was about the same time I realized a lot of them were actually just a different variety of libertarians who really weren't much interested in the central agenda of the kind of liberalism that was once successful. I don't think people who focus on issues like this do, actually, care about that agenda, their ilk were the same kind who ruined the Democratic coalition in the 1960s.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Short Interview With Judi Dench On Being a Quaker and a Peacenik
The Genteel Bigotry Of the Fashionable Leftish Libertarains Is In Line With The Ass End of American History
Liberalish blogger Duncan Black's anti-Catholic scribble was the topic of a post I tossed off yesterday on my non-serious blog, but it needs to be gone into a bit more than I did. Here's his post, verbatim.
Freedum
It takes an atheist, or perhaps even a Protestant, to get why this stuff matters.
There are no Protestant supremos. In my experience even hard core US Protestants tend to have a greater understanding that even Christianity, let alone religion generally, isn't all the same thing.
I can't account for what Duncan Black's experience is but his idea of Catholicism is a throw back to the 19th century Knownothings and, as I pointed out yesterday, the Klu Klux Klan of the 1920s. I noted how the future justice Hugo Black participated in anti-Catholic activities as a member of the Klan, being paid by them to get off Edwin Roscoe Stephenson (a species of Episcopalian minister) for murdering Father James Coyle, whose great crime was officiating at the marriage of his daughter to a Puerto Rican man who she had fallen in love with. It being the Klan ridden Alabama of the 1920s, as anti-Catholic as the comment threads on Duncan's blog, you won't be anymore surprised to hear that Stephenson got off than you have been if he'd murdered Coyle for being black.
Or, if you want to talk about the proud history of anti-Catholicism on the Supreme Court, you could go right back to the start with John Jay, who advocated banning Catholics in New York from holding public office but had to settle for a provision that deprived Catholics from citizenship unless they renounced the authority of the Pope in, not only civil matters, but ecclesiastical matters, as well. That law stayed on the books until the 1820s.
I doubt Black has ever read much about the deeply embedded history of Protestant anti-Catholicism in the British colonies and the American states created out of them but it is a history full of murder, violence, attacks on institutions and even mob burning of churches and even convents and girl's schools by protestant nativists whose water he is still carrying as an atheist today. Here's a brief description of one of the better known incidents, the burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown Massachusetts.
August 11th was an oppressively hot night. An unruly, drunken mob of laborers, sailors, apprentices, and hoodlums gathered at the gates of the convent. They demanded to see one of the sisters who figured in a number of the rumors. When the Mother Superior refused, the men began to tear down the convent's fence and used the wood to feed a roaring bonfire. The fire alarm was sounded, but Charlestown's Protestant firefighters did nothing to fight the blaze.
The rioters shattered the convent's windows, broke down the front door, and burst into the building. They went on a rampage, destroying furniture, musical instruments, books, and religious items, and then set the building on fire. The nuns gathered their terrified students and barely escaped out the back, fleeing through a hole that the Mother Superior ripped in the back fence. Dressed only in their nightclothes, they ran through the fields to a farmhouse a half-mile away, where they watched the convent burning. By daybreak, it lay in smoldering ruins.
The next day, a committee of respected citizens was formed to investigate the rumors and the riot. The nuns were cleared of any illicit activities; 13 men were arrested for rioting. When the case came to trial, the jury convicted only one man, and the governor later pardoned him.
The convent was never rebuilt. Its charred remains stood for the next 40 years as a reminder of the virulent prejudice against Catholics. The site was leveled in 1875, and the bricks were incorporated into Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
Perhaps Duncan could rouse himself from his stylish ennui to look into another famous incident in the city he lives in, Philidelphia, where an anti-Catholic riot included the burning of St. Augustine's church.
A number of historians, including Arthur Schlesinger Sr. have noted that anti-Catholicism is one of the deepest entrenched and most potent of the bigotries that have afflicted the United States, “Anti-Catholicism is the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people.” While I'm not entirely in agreement that it is any deeper than the hatred of black people or the native population, it certainly runs deep. It can even survive and thrive when the nativist Protestantism, one of the diseases the new nation inherited from the British establishment, is abandoned for the fashionable atheism that Black tried to inoculate himself with. As I noted, he seemed to get cold feet in the comments.
i'm not asserting that protestants are more tolerant, just that they (broad brush) tend to have greater awarenesss that not all christianity is the same.
i wasn't raised with any religion. it's all weird to me.
I would recommend that the boy would like to do a tiny little bit of research into the topic of Catholicism, which contains a number of separate churches with quite distinct traditions and which recognizes the apostolic succession of any number of non-Catholic denominations, even some of those quite anti-Catholic in their history. But he doesn't seem to be able to be bothered to do much in the way of background research.
Maybe he could have noticed that in those dissenting to the ruling he complained about Justice Sotomayor is listed. As I recall some of his Eschatots complained that they were putting another Catholic on the court when Barack Obama nominated her. He might even discover previous rulings in the same line in which the quite protestant Rehnquist and O'Connor proposed that such prayer isn't really religious but constitutes some bizarre form of "civic religion". Which is an idea that my Catholic childhood would lead me to think was an institutionalized practice of taking God's name in vain. Or he might want to see how various protestant groups came down in the amicus briefs filed in the case. But that would be something like work, the results of which would not run up his flagging hit counts and which I'm sure his remaining readers would ignore as booorrrrring!.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Art Blakey Lee Morgan Theme For Stacy
I believe the musicians are
Lee Morgan - trumpet
John Gilmore - tenor sax
John Hicks - piano
Victor Sproles - bass
Art Blakey - drums
Though my eyes aren't what they used to be.
And this is incredible, Buhaina's Delight
Though I know there are those who don't think Blakey could hold a candle to Keith Moon. I know because I had a huge fight with a paid music scribbler on just that point.
Hate-Talk Doesn't Work For The Left The Way It Does For The Right
Even with a very long lifetime you have, at the most, only about 200,000 hours of time to accomplish your plans. Lothar Seiwert La Aboco de Temploplanado (my translation)
Just how much time does the left think it has to waste? In a recent Nation blog post by Reed Richardson (scroll down the page) he talks about the ubiquity of angry outrage as the predominant form of right-wing discourse by way of reviewing a book by Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj on that topic. I would recommend reading Richardson's post because he makes some important points about how democracy is, in fact, endangered by the promotion of hate-talk. He began with this:
Find out what a society gets angry about and you’ll find out what it thinks, who it cares about, and how fairly—or not—it functions. Does its anger dwell on isolated actions or does it challenge systemic ideas? Is it mostly directed at individuals or institutions? Is it driven from the bottom up or the top down? Does it seek change or simply retribution? Make no mistake, public anger is a necessary element of civil society and can be a public good, but not if it never does any good—if it’s only ever about settling scores, gathering scalps, documenting gaffes, and calling on others to apologize.
Richardson does criticize the authors who, presented with the oceans of right wing hate-talk media, concentrate far too much on the pint or so of left-wing hate talk in the broadcast and cabloid media. But if he had included leftish blogs and websites, he could have found quite a bit of angry hate talk.
It goes without saying, if he'd considered neo-atheism he would have been able to talk about the enormous amount of that which pours fourth as polluted waters from the would-be temple of reason, the alleged left. Curious to see what I might see on Alternet's front page after I read Richardson's blog, it was covered with the angry, unhinged hate talk of Valerie Tarico, Dan Arel, Katie Halper, C. J. Wereleman, Greta Christina and at that I decided to stop counting. And that is just on Alternet. The Nation and other old line leftish media regularly carries anti-religious invective and mockery, saying things about, almost exclusively, Christians that if they were said about Jews or Muslims or Hindus, Buddhists, animists by conservatives would make any honest list of hate talk.
Richardson is right that the anger the media sells to people does have a real life effect, a real life, POLITICAL effect. And he notes the reason that there is so much hate talk in the media, hate sells. I strongly suspect that anti-religious hate-talk accounts for most of Alernet's traffic. I strongly suspect that is true whenever a blog or online magazine spouts it. The choice by leftish media to do that means that they are not featuring other content that might have more of an effect than attracting the mighty 2.4% of atheists (less, actually, considering that many atheists are right-wingers) to badmouth the well over 90% who are either religious or don't share their addiction to several 2-minute-hates every day.
He quotes the Berry and Sobieraj to make that point:
Outrage discourse and programming may be effective at increasing advertising revenue and political support, but our research suggests that the mainstreaming of outrage in American political culture undermines some practices vital to healthy democratic life. […]
In this arena, issues of import to fans are used for maximum emotional impact, such that tiny niche issues are reshaped into scandals and significant developments that are less ideologically resonant are dismissed as trivial or ignored
The resources of the left, notably lacking lavish support from billionaires and ownership of the American media, are absurdly wasted on servicing the enthusiasm for conceited hatred and the eternal angry teenager music that is the lyric of neo-atheism.
If anti-religious invective were going to work for the left it would have reaped its greatest success in the former Soviet Union where entire generations grew up being constantly exposed to the neo-atheist line of propaganda with the full force of the state and the state media. But, as soon as that anti-democratic regime fell - neither a democratic-atheistic paradise nor a more democratic religious society resulted. The atheist paradise froze things in place, solidly in the past. The religion-based reform movements that rose in liberal Christianity in the 18th and 19th century, which were the force behind what liberal reform that has been accomplished, doesn't seem to have happened there. I know members of what are considered conservative denominations here who are decades ahead of the post-Soviet states and certainly far more morally obligated to respect democracy than any atheist state is. Considering how much of the allegedly leftist anti-religious impetus comes from the remnants of the absurd romanticization of Marxism*, in all of their hypocritical counterproductivity, the continuation of it, in the face of the century and a half of its failure, constitutes an enduring psychosis. Why would they expect it will produce anything else? It has always tried to power itself into a majority position on the assertions of its sciencyness, just as it does today. But the only thing it has ever really had was its impotent ridicule.
I think that the enormous amount of anti-religious hate-talk on the left is a symptom of why the left doesn't win, and it isn't merely because that hate-talk distracts from important things like wining elections and changing laws. Though it certainly has worked against the left and has been an enormous help for the right. I think it is a symptom of a fatal refusal of the left to actually be a real, egalitarian, left instead of a lazy, self-centered leftish libertarianism.
The gospel of Jesus is hated by the pseudo-left because it constitutes a far more powerful program of far more proven success than the various materialist contenders for what comprises a "real" left. It is hated on an individual basis because it imposes requirements of self-sacrifice on believers that are not welcome by the affluent on the would-be left anymore than a rigorous assertion of his gospel is to the pseudo-Christian right. It was no more welcomed by royalty and the nobility of the middle-ages, the oligarchic aristocrats of the later ages when the hereditary rule of them gave way to elected governments or the aspiring members of today's elites, not even in those just hanging on to the lower levels of that in academia.
The gospel of Jesus, based in the Jewish Law, in regard to how human beings are to act to each others, is radically egalitarian in a way that no proposed, allegedly scientific, successor is. If you treat others as you would have them treat you, you cannot enslave people, you cannot subjugate them, you cannot allow them to starve or linger in misery of material necessities. You can't even merely placate your conscience that you have made some theoretical provision of subsistence for the "deserving poor" in the manner of the aristocratic British socialists - who Marilynne Robinson noted were obsessed with reducing the poor to absolute destitution before they provided any assistance. You must provide them with what you would be provided with. Which is entirely more radical than anything Marx or any of his materialist colleagues require. And it is a requirement for believers because it is more than merely a position of intellectual ideology, it is a commandment of God.
* Isn't it time for the left to face the fact that Marx was not a democrat and that Marxism was merely a different kind of dictatorship, one that proved to be as capable of all the same corruptions of every other form of dictatorship, as anyone who had experienced even limited democracy, could have predicted a dictatorship would become? The absurd pursuit of Marxism by the anti-religious left should have long ago been considered a sign that they weren't really any alternative to the far right, they would just produce a different form of serfdom.
Just how much time does the left think it has to waste? In a recent Nation blog post by Reed Richardson (scroll down the page) he talks about the ubiquity of angry outrage as the predominant form of right-wing discourse by way of reviewing a book by Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj on that topic. I would recommend reading Richardson's post because he makes some important points about how democracy is, in fact, endangered by the promotion of hate-talk. He began with this:
Find out what a society gets angry about and you’ll find out what it thinks, who it cares about, and how fairly—or not—it functions. Does its anger dwell on isolated actions or does it challenge systemic ideas? Is it mostly directed at individuals or institutions? Is it driven from the bottom up or the top down? Does it seek change or simply retribution? Make no mistake, public anger is a necessary element of civil society and can be a public good, but not if it never does any good—if it’s only ever about settling scores, gathering scalps, documenting gaffes, and calling on others to apologize.
Richardson does criticize the authors who, presented with the oceans of right wing hate-talk media, concentrate far too much on the pint or so of left-wing hate talk in the broadcast and cabloid media. But if he had included leftish blogs and websites, he could have found quite a bit of angry hate talk.
It goes without saying, if he'd considered neo-atheism he would have been able to talk about the enormous amount of that which pours fourth as polluted waters from the would-be temple of reason, the alleged left. Curious to see what I might see on Alternet's front page after I read Richardson's blog, it was covered with the angry, unhinged hate talk of Valerie Tarico, Dan Arel, Katie Halper, C. J. Wereleman, Greta Christina and at that I decided to stop counting. And that is just on Alternet. The Nation and other old line leftish media regularly carries anti-religious invective and mockery, saying things about, almost exclusively, Christians that if they were said about Jews or Muslims or Hindus, Buddhists, animists by conservatives would make any honest list of hate talk.
Richardson is right that the anger the media sells to people does have a real life effect, a real life, POLITICAL effect. And he notes the reason that there is so much hate talk in the media, hate sells. I strongly suspect that anti-religious hate-talk accounts for most of Alernet's traffic. I strongly suspect that is true whenever a blog or online magazine spouts it. The choice by leftish media to do that means that they are not featuring other content that might have more of an effect than attracting the mighty 2.4% of atheists (less, actually, considering that many atheists are right-wingers) to badmouth the well over 90% who are either religious or don't share their addiction to several 2-minute-hates every day.
He quotes the Berry and Sobieraj to make that point:
Outrage discourse and programming may be effective at increasing advertising revenue and political support, but our research suggests that the mainstreaming of outrage in American political culture undermines some practices vital to healthy democratic life. […]
In this arena, issues of import to fans are used for maximum emotional impact, such that tiny niche issues are reshaped into scandals and significant developments that are less ideologically resonant are dismissed as trivial or ignored
The resources of the left, notably lacking lavish support from billionaires and ownership of the American media, are absurdly wasted on servicing the enthusiasm for conceited hatred and the eternal angry teenager music that is the lyric of neo-atheism.
If anti-religious invective were going to work for the left it would have reaped its greatest success in the former Soviet Union where entire generations grew up being constantly exposed to the neo-atheist line of propaganda with the full force of the state and the state media. But, as soon as that anti-democratic regime fell - neither a democratic-atheistic paradise nor a more democratic religious society resulted. The atheist paradise froze things in place, solidly in the past. The religion-based reform movements that rose in liberal Christianity in the 18th and 19th century, which were the force behind what liberal reform that has been accomplished, doesn't seem to have happened there. I know members of what are considered conservative denominations here who are decades ahead of the post-Soviet states and certainly far more morally obligated to respect democracy than any atheist state is. Considering how much of the allegedly leftist anti-religious impetus comes from the remnants of the absurd romanticization of Marxism*, in all of their hypocritical counterproductivity, the continuation of it, in the face of the century and a half of its failure, constitutes an enduring psychosis. Why would they expect it will produce anything else? It has always tried to power itself into a majority position on the assertions of its sciencyness, just as it does today. But the only thing it has ever really had was its impotent ridicule.
I think that the enormous amount of anti-religious hate-talk on the left is a symptom of why the left doesn't win, and it isn't merely because that hate-talk distracts from important things like wining elections and changing laws. Though it certainly has worked against the left and has been an enormous help for the right. I think it is a symptom of a fatal refusal of the left to actually be a real, egalitarian, left instead of a lazy, self-centered leftish libertarianism.
The gospel of Jesus is hated by the pseudo-left because it constitutes a far more powerful program of far more proven success than the various materialist contenders for what comprises a "real" left. It is hated on an individual basis because it imposes requirements of self-sacrifice on believers that are not welcome by the affluent on the would-be left anymore than a rigorous assertion of his gospel is to the pseudo-Christian right. It was no more welcomed by royalty and the nobility of the middle-ages, the oligarchic aristocrats of the later ages when the hereditary rule of them gave way to elected governments or the aspiring members of today's elites, not even in those just hanging on to the lower levels of that in academia.
The gospel of Jesus, based in the Jewish Law, in regard to how human beings are to act to each others, is radically egalitarian in a way that no proposed, allegedly scientific, successor is. If you treat others as you would have them treat you, you cannot enslave people, you cannot subjugate them, you cannot allow them to starve or linger in misery of material necessities. You can't even merely placate your conscience that you have made some theoretical provision of subsistence for the "deserving poor" in the manner of the aristocratic British socialists - who Marilynne Robinson noted were obsessed with reducing the poor to absolute destitution before they provided any assistance. You must provide them with what you would be provided with. Which is entirely more radical than anything Marx or any of his materialist colleagues require. And it is a requirement for believers because it is more than merely a position of intellectual ideology, it is a commandment of God.
* Isn't it time for the left to face the fact that Marx was not a democrat and that Marxism was merely a different kind of dictatorship, one that proved to be as capable of all the same corruptions of every other form of dictatorship, as anyone who had experienced even limited democracy, could have predicted a dictatorship would become? The absurd pursuit of Marxism by the anti-religious left should have long ago been considered a sign that they weren't really any alternative to the far right, they would just produce a different form of serfdom.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Art Blakey Jazz Messangers Yama
Tenor Saxophone - Wayne Shorter
Trumpet - Lee Morgan
Piano - Bobby Timmons
Bass - Jymie Merritt
Drums - Art Blakey
Incredible playing.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Dave Holland Quintet Free For All
Chris Potter - Tenor & Soprano
Robin Eubanks - Trombone
Steve Nelson - Vibes
Billy Kilson - Drums
Friday, May 2, 2014
Because I Missed Easter: Those Problematic Creeds
In the various bits of atheist propaganda I've run across, I recall one long piece claiming Franz Schubert for them, the evidence being one anti-religious brother and the relative paucity of choral music on a religious theme. As I recall their argument hinged on the various omissions from the Creeds of some of his masses. That they had to acknowledge that Schubert wrote a number of masses, quite fine works which are still performed, seems to be to present a rather steep hurdle for the argument for Schubert as an atheist, though I've never researched more into the issue than that. So much of Schubert's music is text based that it's possible to make all kinds of arguments as to what those show about the "real Schubert," whose supernatural genius for composing is a real life miracle that is there for anyone to hear. If the final three piano sonatas aren't a testament of inspired truth then they have no meaning that I can see. At random, here are some of the creeds from various masses
I also remember reading an analysis of Beethoven's great Missa Solemnis which claimed that he obscured part of the text because he disagreed with that particular part of the creed. Without an explanation by Beethoven, in his own words, that would seem to be an unwarranted assertion. Unlike an omission from the text, it could merely be him assuming that everyone who was listening would know the text and not need to hear it declaimed as if they'd never heard it before. Though I think the supposed obscurity might be the product of the conducting and not of Beethoven's intentions. There are certainly performances that concentrate on singing the words and those that ignore there are words.
But, that said, the text of The Creed has always been problematic because I doubt that much of anyone really understands all of the thorny theological and philosophical issues packed into the text. Afterall, they were often written to be a declaration to not believe in other ideas, some of which I don't really see much of a point in worrying about. I believe Jesus because of what he said not because of what people claimed about him. I believe that what is done to the least among us is done to God, I have no idea if the various ideas about the incarnation or The Trinity are true or which if any of the various expositions of those are true. Never considered setting the mass text to music, The Creed would have been the section that would have given me the most trouble. I'd probably just have left it out.
Here's an interesting passage from a recent Krista Tippett rebroadcast of an interview with the late Jaroslav Pelikan about his book, Credo, about many different Creeds.
Ms. Tippett: This is giving me a lovely and exalted way to think about a remark you make in your book, that one thing that someone who studies all these creeds, as you've done, is struck by is the sheer repetitiveness of them. Right?
Dr. Pelikan: You should try to proofread them all in the course of a few weeks, as we did, and then you discover just how — you wonder, didn't I read this one yesterday?
Ms. Tippett: No, and it — but it's so interesting, because I think that where someone goes when they hear that there are these thousands of creeds is that everybody's doing it differently all the time, and that's not really what you find. But I did want to dwell briefly on one that I sense is near and dear to your heart, which is this Maasai Creed…
Dr. Pelikan: Oh, yes.
Ms. Tippett: …the Maasai people of Africa, which was written around 1960, the Congregation of the Holy Ghost in east Nigeria. I don't know. Would you like to read some of your favorite…
Dr. Pelikan: Like most creeds, it is designed on a threefold pattern of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and comes out of the experience of Christians in Africa who were animists, fetishists who worshiped things in nature and the mystery of life and who then, upon receiving the Christian faith, began reciting the creeds as they had been taught, in this case by Roman Catholic missionaries, in other cases by Evangelical or Orthodox missionaries. But after a couple of generations of that, a Christian community gradually comes of age, achieves a level of maturation where you want to do it for yourself, do it your way, speaking in your context, using the images of your culture. And the question is can you do that without sacrificing the integrity of what you have received? It's easy just to repeat, but then it's not your own. It's easy to say what is your own as though nobody had ever said it before, but then the question is whether it's authentically Christian. And I think this one manages to do both of those in a remarkable way.
Dr. Pelikan: "We believe in one high God, who out of love created the beautiful world. We believe that God made good His promise by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, and showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by His people, tortured and nailed, hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch Him, and on the third day He rose from the grave."
Dr. Pelikan: Now for one thing, the Nicene Creed as well as the Apostles' Creed go directly from born of the Virgin Mary to suffered under Pontius Pilate. And the whole story in the Gospels…
Ms. Tippett: The life of Christ.
Dr. Pelikan: …yeah, is just leapt over.
Ms. Tippett: And that's what a lot of modern people have criticized in the creeds.
Dr. Pelikan: You go from Alpha to Omega. And here, see, He was born, as the creed said, He left His home — the creeds don't say that — and He was always on safari in Africa. When I read that the first time, a student of mine who'd been a member of a religious order, she was a sister, and she had been in a hospital in east Nigeria, and that's the creed they recited at their liturgy. And so she brought it to me, and I just got shivers, just the thought, you know, the hyenas did not touch Him and the act of defiance — God lives even in spite of the hyenas. But it's a good example of this model that I quoted earlier, that it is not enough to Christianize Africa. We have to Africanize Christianity. No, the dangers in there are enormous.
Ms. Tippett: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Pelikan: In the 1930s, under the Nazis, a movement that wanted to purify Germany of foreign — that is to say Jewish — influences and to affirm Aryanism — that is to say, we do not want to Christianize Germany, we want to Germanize Christianity — taking the same model, and they ended up…
Ms. Tippett: …completely destroying…
Dr. Pelikan: …denying that Jesus was Jewish, refusing to ordain as priest or minister anyone who had one-fourth Jewish blood. And so intuitively, one knows that this Maasai creed has the ring of authenticity and that that Nazi creed does not.
Ms. Tippett: Yes.
Dr. Pelikan: But specifying that, explaining what is the real difference between this kind of — as they use the technical word — acculturation and that kind, is not easy. And by the time you're done, you've got to be talking about the nature of creeds.
Ms. Tippett: OK. Oh, it's very exciting though. It's very exciting. So you are one of the great, religious historians, uh, I believe theological minds of our time and I can't not ask you about your conversion. In 1998 you converted from Lutheran tradition in which you had grown up to Eastern Orthodoxy. And I just wondered, I'm sure we could talk about that for hours.
Dr. Pelikan: I could but I won't.
Ms. Tippett: You could but you won't. But I wonder, just given what we've been talking about, about the Creeds, how does your reverence for and your knowledge of this kind of Christian expression, you know, how is that part of your reasons for this conversion?
Dr. Pelikan: The centrality of tradition as a force, as the bearer of the message, as what the Church believes even if I don’t believe anything at a particular moment and it — the capacity of tradition to sustain itself and to sustain the church is something with which I have been impressed, partly through my own studies and partly by my faith. And then realization that the, of course, there was tradition before there was a bible.
---------
And from my recent down time,
Fun With Pop-Atheism
"Bronze age goat herders"
Ha! I happened to hear part of the second Psalm the other day and went back to read the whole thing and came across this:
You shall break them with a rod of iron. Psalm 2:9
The first thing I thought was that old saw about "Bronze Age goat herders" and it made me curious to see where else those guys talked about iron in the earliest books of The Bible and found it all over the place.
Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. Tubal-Cain's sister was Naamah. Genesis 4:22
And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass: Leviticus 26:19
For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man. Deuteronomy 3:11
But the LORD hath taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt, to be unto him a people of inheritance, as ye are this day. 4:20
A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass. 8:7
And there shalt thou build an altar unto the LORD thy God, an altar of stones: thou shalt not lift up any iron tool upon them. 27:5
And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron. 28:23
Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be. 33:25
Bronze Age goat herders have nothing to answer for their ignorance of stuff that came far after they lived but conceited, post-literate, Plutonium Age professors and assistant professors who can't even bother to read the book that they're dismissing in such ignorance and arrogance have no excuse at all. And, note how often they do it while pushing their ACADEMIC standing to do so.
I also remember reading an analysis of Beethoven's great Missa Solemnis which claimed that he obscured part of the text because he disagreed with that particular part of the creed. Without an explanation by Beethoven, in his own words, that would seem to be an unwarranted assertion. Unlike an omission from the text, it could merely be him assuming that everyone who was listening would know the text and not need to hear it declaimed as if they'd never heard it before. Though I think the supposed obscurity might be the product of the conducting and not of Beethoven's intentions. There are certainly performances that concentrate on singing the words and those that ignore there are words.
But, that said, the text of The Creed has always been problematic because I doubt that much of anyone really understands all of the thorny theological and philosophical issues packed into the text. Afterall, they were often written to be a declaration to not believe in other ideas, some of which I don't really see much of a point in worrying about. I believe Jesus because of what he said not because of what people claimed about him. I believe that what is done to the least among us is done to God, I have no idea if the various ideas about the incarnation or The Trinity are true or which if any of the various expositions of those are true. Never considered setting the mass text to music, The Creed would have been the section that would have given me the most trouble. I'd probably just have left it out.
Here's an interesting passage from a recent Krista Tippett rebroadcast of an interview with the late Jaroslav Pelikan about his book, Credo, about many different Creeds.
Ms. Tippett: This is giving me a lovely and exalted way to think about a remark you make in your book, that one thing that someone who studies all these creeds, as you've done, is struck by is the sheer repetitiveness of them. Right?
Dr. Pelikan: You should try to proofread them all in the course of a few weeks, as we did, and then you discover just how — you wonder, didn't I read this one yesterday?
Ms. Tippett: No, and it — but it's so interesting, because I think that where someone goes when they hear that there are these thousands of creeds is that everybody's doing it differently all the time, and that's not really what you find. But I did want to dwell briefly on one that I sense is near and dear to your heart, which is this Maasai Creed…
Dr. Pelikan: Oh, yes.
Ms. Tippett: …the Maasai people of Africa, which was written around 1960, the Congregation of the Holy Ghost in east Nigeria. I don't know. Would you like to read some of your favorite…
Dr. Pelikan: Like most creeds, it is designed on a threefold pattern of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and comes out of the experience of Christians in Africa who were animists, fetishists who worshiped things in nature and the mystery of life and who then, upon receiving the Christian faith, began reciting the creeds as they had been taught, in this case by Roman Catholic missionaries, in other cases by Evangelical or Orthodox missionaries. But after a couple of generations of that, a Christian community gradually comes of age, achieves a level of maturation where you want to do it for yourself, do it your way, speaking in your context, using the images of your culture. And the question is can you do that without sacrificing the integrity of what you have received? It's easy just to repeat, but then it's not your own. It's easy to say what is your own as though nobody had ever said it before, but then the question is whether it's authentically Christian. And I think this one manages to do both of those in a remarkable way.
Dr. Pelikan: "We believe in one high God, who out of love created the beautiful world. We believe that God made good His promise by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, and showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by His people, tortured and nailed, hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch Him, and on the third day He rose from the grave."
Dr. Pelikan: Now for one thing, the Nicene Creed as well as the Apostles' Creed go directly from born of the Virgin Mary to suffered under Pontius Pilate. And the whole story in the Gospels…
Ms. Tippett: The life of Christ.
Dr. Pelikan: …yeah, is just leapt over.
Ms. Tippett: And that's what a lot of modern people have criticized in the creeds.
Dr. Pelikan: You go from Alpha to Omega. And here, see, He was born, as the creed said, He left His home — the creeds don't say that — and He was always on safari in Africa. When I read that the first time, a student of mine who'd been a member of a religious order, she was a sister, and she had been in a hospital in east Nigeria, and that's the creed they recited at their liturgy. And so she brought it to me, and I just got shivers, just the thought, you know, the hyenas did not touch Him and the act of defiance — God lives even in spite of the hyenas. But it's a good example of this model that I quoted earlier, that it is not enough to Christianize Africa. We have to Africanize Christianity. No, the dangers in there are enormous.
Ms. Tippett: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Pelikan: In the 1930s, under the Nazis, a movement that wanted to purify Germany of foreign — that is to say Jewish — influences and to affirm Aryanism — that is to say, we do not want to Christianize Germany, we want to Germanize Christianity — taking the same model, and they ended up…
Ms. Tippett: …completely destroying…
Dr. Pelikan: …denying that Jesus was Jewish, refusing to ordain as priest or minister anyone who had one-fourth Jewish blood. And so intuitively, one knows that this Maasai creed has the ring of authenticity and that that Nazi creed does not.
Ms. Tippett: Yes.
Dr. Pelikan: But specifying that, explaining what is the real difference between this kind of — as they use the technical word — acculturation and that kind, is not easy. And by the time you're done, you've got to be talking about the nature of creeds.
Ms. Tippett: OK. Oh, it's very exciting though. It's very exciting. So you are one of the great, religious historians, uh, I believe theological minds of our time and I can't not ask you about your conversion. In 1998 you converted from Lutheran tradition in which you had grown up to Eastern Orthodoxy. And I just wondered, I'm sure we could talk about that for hours.
Dr. Pelikan: I could but I won't.
Ms. Tippett: You could but you won't. But I wonder, just given what we've been talking about, about the Creeds, how does your reverence for and your knowledge of this kind of Christian expression, you know, how is that part of your reasons for this conversion?
Dr. Pelikan: The centrality of tradition as a force, as the bearer of the message, as what the Church believes even if I don’t believe anything at a particular moment and it — the capacity of tradition to sustain itself and to sustain the church is something with which I have been impressed, partly through my own studies and partly by my faith. And then realization that the, of course, there was tradition before there was a bible.
---------
And from my recent down time,
Fun With Pop-Atheism
"Bronze age goat herders"
Ha! I happened to hear part of the second Psalm the other day and went back to read the whole thing and came across this:
You shall break them with a rod of iron. Psalm 2:9
The first thing I thought was that old saw about "Bronze Age goat herders" and it made me curious to see where else those guys talked about iron in the earliest books of The Bible and found it all over the place.
Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. Tubal-Cain's sister was Naamah. Genesis 4:22
And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass: Leviticus 26:19
For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man. Deuteronomy 3:11
But the LORD hath taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt, to be unto him a people of inheritance, as ye are this day. 4:20
A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass. 8:7
And there shalt thou build an altar unto the LORD thy God, an altar of stones: thou shalt not lift up any iron tool upon them. 27:5
And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron. 28:23
Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be. 33:25
Bronze Age goat herders have nothing to answer for their ignorance of stuff that came far after they lived but conceited, post-literate, Plutonium Age professors and assistant professors who can't even bother to read the book that they're dismissing in such ignorance and arrogance have no excuse at all. And, note how often they do it while pushing their ACADEMIC standing to do so.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
I'm Back
but I'm not done being cranky about it. I'm beginning to think someone's trying to tell me I'm too old to do things I did when I was in my fifties. And it wasn't even something fun enough or scandalous enough to make talking about it worth while. You know you've gotten old when your follies aren't even interesting. Not even to you.
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