"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
David Harrison, organist
Master's Degree Recital
December 9, 2014
Listening to all of William Bolcom's Gospel Preludes the other day, they're such wonderful pieces that I'm going to post them, too. They are some of the most significant religious music composed in the last two centuries.
William Bolcom is the only white composer I know of who has, with total conviction, total respect and such great mastery learned from the black gospel tradition to this extent. That tradition, from the experience of people subjected to oppression and discrimination, disrespect and hatred, the same forces that informed just about the entire prophetic literature of the Bible, is so much of the life of Christianity today, That William Bolcom would seem to have known that going on thirty years ago might be show that heightened perception and thinking as well as an ability to make audacious choices with no fear are important components in what makes the difference between a great and a merely talented composer.
Update: I specified with total conviction, total respect and such great mastery, all of those you mention are disqualified on one of more of those criteria.
Update 2: The likes of you telling me I'm an idiot will go to my head if you don't stop it.
I'm not sure about my translation of the title. The original is, Regard des hauteurs, "hauteur" can have a number of meanings, the heights as in a high place or position, physically, high mindedness, spiritual elevation or its opposite, arrogance, conceit, etc. I'm not sure what meaning Messiaen meant but I am guessing from the context of the titles that he meant physical position or spiritual elevation.
Yesterday's run away dog episode with all its many vicissitudes reminded me of the kerfuffle over the New York Times misquoting Pope Francis about all dogs going to heaven and the fuss it caused among traditionalists who hold that animals don't have souls. Actually, Pope Francis didn't say that, it was Paul VI who more or less said that to comfort a child whose dog had died,
“One day we will see our animals in the eternity of Christ.”
I don't know why the idea that animals had no souls came about, the word "animal" implies that they have soul anima. I can't, offhand, think of any scripture which denies that animals have souls. That passage from Isaiah I noted last week certainly implies that animals, not just pets, will be in the Kingdom of God.
Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; The calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them. The cow and the bear shall be neighbors, together their young shall rest; the lion shall eat hay like the ox. The baby shall play by the cobra’s den, and the child lay his hand on the adder’s lair. There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the LORD, as water covers the sea.
Despite the joke Woody Allen made about "the lamb won't get much sleep" .Isaiah obviously wasn't talking about animals that needed to eat each other, though they apparently will all be vegetarians. So plants will also be a in heaven. Or whatever Isaiah envisioned. And elsewhere in the same book he said,
Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together;
He didn't specify human beings.
Looking at the book of Isaiah I think it's quite a useful book for the political upheavals we are at risk of experiencing, considering the risings and falling of kings, invasions, etc. his prophesies concern. His religious criticism of the highest level of the religious establishment and The Temple as well as the political rulers is always worth thinking about. There's a reason Isaiah was quoted by the most radical of all prophets, Jesus.
I don't think I've ever known a dog who wasn't the moral superior of many of the people I know, I've never known a dog as mean and base as, perhaps, most of the people I observe. I remember that when I was a kid and found out what this word that got thrown around "bitch" meant that I couldn't understand why it was used in a derogatory way to refer to women, female dogs being in nothing like that. It had more to do with people who devalued dogs as they did all animals, I'd guess. If anyone deserved to be excluded on the basis of species, it would be ours.
My old dog is just fine today. Wherever he went while he was missing, it doesn't seem to have caused any lasting damage. I suppose I'll get over it, even the horrendous blisters I got from walking several miles with the wrong socks on. If you ever have to go on a search like that, remember to take the two minutes it would take to put on the right foot gear.
Update: I don't care what Steve and the Eschatots say. They are the ever dwindling number of people who still go to Duncan's blog to hang out, as I was reminded again last week, the grownups who used to go there stopped going. Some of them write better stuff than Duncan ever wrote and say things that are more important and interesting than anything that gets said there today. It's a source of pocket change for Duncan, that's obvious from the amount of effort he doesn't put into it. I'm surprised a few of them are willing to put up with the coercion to not say what they want to say by the enforcers of the house ideology. It is it of no political importance.
Update 2: It would be easier to come up with a list of the few adults who still go there on anything like a regular basis, Derbes, Grommit, Um..... I suppose Moe when he's talking about what he knows, what's going on around Halifax. Maybe a few others are part time adults. When I had occasion to look at some of the comment threads from a couple of years ago there were many names of regulars which have disappeared, not including the ones who Duncan has banned.
I haven't looked lately, how many times has Duncan begged his regulars to buy stuff from Jeff Bezos' sweat shop so he can get some pocket change? He calls it "Bezos' money" well, it certainly isn't money he's paying to the peons who work in his awful warehouses instead of sending it to the rent boys who shill for him.
My dog is home, safe and is sleeping soundly on the couch. He was my mother's dog, a terrier she was given as a present but who I took in when she couldn't handle him anymore. He's 14 years old and had never, until this afternoon slipped out of the fenced in back yard. He almost got a mile away, we were afraid he'd gone off in the woods to die but he was down the road a mile. The man who lived down there brought him in and was going to take him to the police station when the dispatcher told him where he lived. The four hours he was missing were worrisome, prayers asking for the intercession of my patron saint were said. I don't know if that was a test of the kind discussed a few days ago but all I can report is he is back, looking a bit ashamed. He hasn't been scolded, he got fed extra. I nailed some chicken wire across the door we figured he slipped out of. He doesn't go out unsupervised anymore. There are some striking coincidences involved but I'm afraid my detractors would blow a gasket if I noted them. I'm feeling like I should make an effort to restrain my baser tendencies in light of the experience. Instead, here's the Gregorian Liturgy of St. Anthony
This is the family Christmas card of Nevada Assemblywoman, Republican Michele Fiore. This reminds me of nothing so much as this which I came across in my recent research into the Anti-Christianity of the Nazis, their program of replacing Christianity with "Positive Christianity" in which Jesus was an Aryan and to pretty much bury anything about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, what you do for the least among you you do unto me, the good Samaritan (the stranger among you, etc.) and, last but not least in their intention of NOT following the teachings of Jesus, turning the other cheek.
And other, such expressions of Anti-Christianity which seems, inevitably, to replace guns and the worship of violence for the Gospel of Jesus.
It is one of the worst things that real Christians do that they don't call this what it is, the Anti-Christianity that is so often on the tongues of those who worship that very Anti-Christ.
Some of our mother's heroines and heroes were the Martyrs of El Salvador. Still too early to write something myself. From aMaryknoll website:
Born: April 23, 1940 Entered: September 2, 1961 Died: December 2, 1980 "I never said, ‘Help, or save me, or I’m drowning’," Ita told her mother on a tape she sent home describing her close call with death on August 23rd in a flash flood which took her friend, Sister Carol Piette, M.M. "Something was happening and I said, ‘Receive me, Lord, I’m coming." The Lord made her wait for three more months before he accepted the offering of her life. Much of Ita’s life had been spent waiting. When she was a child, she, her brother Bill, and her sister, Irene often waited in hospital rooms to see their father who had tuberculosis. She missed his funeral in 1973 because she had to wait for a visa to leave Chile in the midst of a military coup. Her life in Maryknoll, too, was full of disappointments and years of waiting. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 23, 1940, Ita joined Maryknoll in 1961 after finishing college at Marymount, but was forced to leave after three years for health reasons. For the next seven years she worked as an editor with Sadlier Publishers while she searched for what she should do with her life. Her search brought her back to Maryknoll in 1971. Ita arrived in Chile in 1973 during the days of unrest just before the military coup, and stayed to minister to the people in years of great hardship and persecution. Chile had a profound impact on her. It was here that her commitment to the poor grew, and that she learned what this demands. As she reflected in 1977, "Am I willing to suffer with the people here, the suffering of the powerless, the feeling impotent? Can I say to my neighbors - I have no solutions to this situation; I don’t know the answers, but I will walk with you, search with you, be with you. Can I let myself be evangelized by this opportunity? Can I look at and accept my own poorness as I learn it from other poor ones?" What she learned from the poor in Chile challenged her to respond to Archbishop Romero's call for help in El Salvador. She arrived there shortly after Archbishop Romero’s death. The new beginning was not easy. She missed the Sisters and her friends in Chile; the new work was not immediately clear, and it took time to gain acceptance and trust from the people who were being terrorized by the political situation. But in June as she and Sister Carol began their work with the Emergency Refugee Committee in Chalatenango, Ita wrote, "I don’t know if it is in spite of, or because of the horror, terror, evil, confusion, lawlessness - but I do know that it is right to be here...to believe that we are gifted in and for Salvador now, that the answers to the questions will come when they are needed, to walk in faith one day at a time with the Salvadoreans along a road filled with obstacles, detours, and sometimes washouts...." The obstacles grew increasingly numerous as Ita and Carol responded to the needs of "the hurting, homeless, and hungry." They were conscious of the political implications of feeding the hungry in this repressive society which was in a state of "undeclared civil war", and of the potential for ever greater conflict and growing U.S. involvement. As they wrote to Sister Melinda Roper, Community President on June 11th, "Since the death of Mons. Romero the news coverage on Salvador has declined to almost nothing. The Committee fears that decisive action will be taken by our (U.S.) government under the guise of ‘stopping subversives’ or ‘containing communism’ - and that all of Central America will be involved if this happens. It’s a heavy scene - but if we have a preferential option for the poor as well as a commitment for justice as a basis for the coming of the Kingdom, we’re going to have to take sides in Salvador - correction - we have." In the midst of this already painful situation, Carol’s tragic death was a heavy blow to Ita. She questioned why she had been spared and grieved deeply for her friend and sister apostle. Ita still carried the burden of mourning with her when she went to the Regional Assembly in Nicaragua at Thanksgiving time. The Sisters there said that Ita seemed to undergo a profound healing during their five days together and at the closing liturgy Ita read a passage from one of Archbishop Romero’s final sermons which foretold what would befall Ita and Maura less than 24 hours after they had prayed. "Christ invites us not to fear persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, he who is committed to the poor must run the same fate as the poor, and in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, be tortured, to be captive - and to be found dead." Her fate, like that of the poor, was to follow in the footsteps of Christ to the bitter end. "This is how we know what love is: Christ gave his life for us. We too, then, ought to give our lives for our brothers." (1 John 3:16). And so she did with three others on December 2nd, 1980. Ita’s buoyant personality, her wit, and her sense of humor and fun were a striking contrast to the suffering and pain she experienced throughout her life. Her twinkling eyes and elfin grin would surface irrepressibly even in the midst of poverty and sorrow. Ita loved to sing and dance and was a welcome addition to any party. She had a gift with words which she probably inherited from her father whose letters were full of his own original words and phrases. Though Ita and Maura spent less than a year in El Salvador and accomplished little in human terms — in their powerlessness, suffering, and death they will be remembered forever. As a telegram from the leaders of the Democratic Revolutionary Front of San Salvador so eloquently stated, "Their outstanding lives and their unjustified deaths will be part of the history of our people's struggle for total liberation." In our Maryknoll history, too, these martyrs for justice will have a special place. Ita has touched all our lives with her many gifts and in death she leaves us the greatest gift of all - the witness of her life laid down in love. Ita found the purpose and meaning of life among God’s poor. Let us ask her to be with us as our guide and companion as we too search for that which she has found. We close with the words she wrote to her godchild and niece, Jennifer, on her 16th birthday this past August: "I hope you come to find that which gives life a deep meaning for you. Some thing worth living for — may be even worth dying for - some thing that energizes you, enthuses you, enables you to keep moving ahead. I can’t tell you what it might be - that’s for you to find, to choose, to love. I can just encourage you to start looking and support you in the search."
How come you don't post the hate mail that you answer? Because a. it generally contains a lot of stuff that is just stupid which is a waste of time, b. because it almost always contains misrepresentations of what was said that I'm not obligated to post and which I'd have to waste time by saying the same things again, c. other lies, d. because I choose to use what they give me on my instead of their terms. I do post some of it because it serves a purpose to do so, sometimes just to show how stupid the stuff I get generally is. You don't need to post every one to do that, the people who tend to send me hate mail are pretty much stupid in the same general way.
Mozart - From The Magic Flute, sung in Italian, - In diesen heil'gen Hallen
Charles Gounod - Faust - Final Trio
with Emma Eames and Charles Dalmores
The acoustics of this recording didn't favor Eames voice, there are recordings of her that show she was quite a spectacular singer in her own right. This is regarded as real bel canto style singing from the "golden age", if you want to hear it these recordings are as close as you're going to get. I would recommend the transfers that Nimbus Prima Voce did, though they're hard to find. They used a huge wooden horn to play the original discs back into a hall and used that recorded sound, after considerable research to find the right playback speed. It was a real labor of love and the results were there to be heard. I hope someone reissues the ones that have gone out of production.
Oh, so, I guess you guys have declared yourselves to know more about music than that Louis Armstrong guy. How unsurprising, that is for any musician who's familiar with you guys.
William Bolcom - Sweet Hour of Prayer from Gospel Preludes, Book 4
Marianne Kim Organ Recital at Boutell Memorial Concert Hall of Northern Illinois University
Update: Here is a Pipe Dreams program which contains most of the Gospel Preludes played by different, very fine organists, and William Bolcom's commentary on them, how he came to write them and many other things. It leads me to think that organ playing is a far more progressive force in music than most people would suspect. Here is the program website with additional links to information and to download the show.
Pipe Dreams is one of the few programs on American radio that I still listen to regularly.
Note: In the Youtubes with the score, this meditation is divided in two, I prefer to post it given as a single one.
Olivier Messiaen is a composer who has attracted a number of eminent detractors, some as respectable as the great American composer Elliot Carter who disdained what he regarded as "vulgarity" in the music. I think that's due to their having had vastly different aesthetics and agendas in their music. Carter's music is an extremely fine exploration of musical technique which transcends that though an extremely well refined sense of which material to explore. Messiaen's music is no less an exploration of technical resources but his music is always grounded in his religious, Christian, Catholic and I'd even say French Catholic mysticism.
Another American composer who disdained Messiaen's music was Virgil Thomson. Which is especially noteworthy as in the imaginary war between "German" and "French" music, Thomson posed as a champion of the French side. Though Thomson's France was of the flippant and nihilistic cafe society type. He once said that Eric Satie had invented the only thoroughly modern aesthetic which is as revealing of Thomson's ability to be one of the silliest as well as one of the best music critics of his time as it says anything about modern music. I don't think Virgil Thomson was capable of getting Messiaen's music because he was entirely unsympathetic to Messiaen's mysticism. That mysticism put him outside of the realm of fashion - is there anything that could have possibly been more unfashionable than writing twenty meditations on The Baby Jesus in the mid-20th century?
I think the title of his most famous work, his Quartet For The End of Time was another example to show that independence from time and fasion. Whereas Mahler dreamed of music that would be big enough to contain the whole universe, Messiaen's vision was larger. There is something in common with the Austrian composer Anton Webern, whose tiny compositions shared in Messiaen's Catholic mysticism, a mysticism which could see the entire universe and the mind of God in "the smallest bee hive", the heart (Cantata II). Messiaen's music has more in common with Charles Ives' in his mysticism - another composer Thomson disdained - and, though I have no idea if he would welcome the idea, Ives' finest and most expansive successor in American music, William Bolcom.
A week ago we were in the throes of a full fledged hating on all Christians because of the presumed motives of the terrorist who killed people, injured people and terrorized many more in Colorado Springs. As his ex-wives and present girlfriend and others described him what emerged was a violent, mean hypocrite who, as one of his ex wives truthfully said, didn't follow the Bible he pretended to.
This weekend we are listening to the family, members of the mosque he used to attend and others who can't explain the motives of the man who murdered even more people at a civil service agency in San Bernardino. From what most of them are saying, it seems likely that he was recruited to terrorism through the wife he met online and brought back from Saudi Arabia, the breeding ground of terrorist groups and the major banker of terrorists in the middle east and elsewhere.
Saudi Arabia is governed by some of of the worst human rights violators in the world where beheading and stoning and slavery and human trafficking is mixed with some of the most radical oppression of women found anywhere but those men who maintain that government also are jillionaires sitting on oil that is a vitally needed raw material in many places so that government is seen as untouchable. Needless to say if the West, somehow, chose to do without Saudi Arabia's oil, China would not be so fussy about the range of violation of rights - it being another of the major violators of human rights in the world - and back in the day not averse to funding a bit of terrorism. As the communists became commui-capitalists they would seem to have discovered other things are more profitable.
I heard a report on the radio about the possibility that terrorist groups are recruiting women to marry Muslim men in the United States and elsewhere as a means of radicalizing their husbands and others. I don't know how reliable those reports are but it seems to be a possible explanation of what happened in San Bernardino. Syed Rizwan Farook's family and his co-workers say he never seemed to have violent radicalized tendencies in the past, some of them are saying there were definite changes in him. He stopped, abruptly, going to his mainline mosque which wasn't supportive of that use of the label of Islam.
The news that his wife, Tashfeen Malik, had posted her allegiance to ISIS on her Facebook page poses a troubling issue. If we are going to make it illegal for American law enforcement to monitor such internet activity, we're going to find it impossible to prevent such under the radar terrorists from operating. I think we're going to be forced, eventually, to accept that such stuff will be monitored in other countries as they are less paranoid about such monitoring and it is stupid in the extreme to allow the United States to be an open opportunity for it. I've come to believe that the realistic option will be to have better law enforcement who are absolutely dedicated to democratic values who will be trusted to do that kind of monitoring or we're going to get one that is doing it anyway and which isn't dedicated to democratic values. To do nothing will hand victory to the right-wing paranoiacs because as there are more incidents like this they are going to use them to gain power. That is happening now. Liberals have to give up the paranoid-libertarian nonsense on those issues or they will be discredited by the results. Knowing that someone like Tashfeen Malik has done that on Facebook after she's killed lots of people doesn't cut it. Greenwald and Snoweden are not going to win that argument in the end, pretending they will is only going to guarantee that the fall out will be worse than it has to be.
The government of the United States and governments in Europe have to start cracking down on Saudi and other governments that allow their countries to fund terrorists. While I'm no expert, I can't help but wondering if factions of the Saudi government don't see such terror as their means of practicing hegemony in the Middle East, in Asia and in Africa. I would like to know what role it plays in things like the trafficking of slaves for the Saudi elite and in other features of their worse than medieval system. And, no doubt, the bankers who do business with that establishment, also need to be cracked down on. I can't imagine many of those aren't found outside of those regions, certainly some of them on North America or in some of the money laundering countries such as Switzerland and various island archipelagos.
I haven't had the stomach to look at the right wing websites but, no doubt, they are a mirror of Muslim bashing to last weekends' Christian bashing on the pseudo-left websites. The majority of the people who have been killed by the terror funded with Saudi money have been Muslims, though non-Muslims in the region are treated the full force of such barbarity. That isn't a shock considering how other religions and minorities are treated under the laws in Saudi Arabia. I can imagine lots of Muslims despise it as much as many non-Muslims do. That is one thing that can be said of the phenomenon of "Islamic" terrorism that can't be said of "Christian" terrorism, there is no vast source of wealth fueling it, today. It won't stop as long as that funding source is in place. That is what the West is at war with, not the Muslim people who are as terrorized and oppressed by it as anyone is. This isn't the secular, or even "Christian" west against the world population of Muslims anymore than it was the west against the people of Russia, this is the west against the wealthy elite who want to expand their control through pseudo-Islamic terror. Not realizing that will only enable them, I have to wonder who is benefiting here by pushing that guaranteed to fail framing of the issue.
Here's another singer I'd never heard before, or heard of. I don't know why, she was clearly one of the greatest singers of the 20th century from the recordings you can hear on Youtube. That she sang in Russia and opted to stay after the revolution might be why she wasn't as famous as some of her contemporaries. She proves the old line that Russian singers replace technique with gestures is just a line. For a recording made by singing into a horn in 1914 this is great. The several glitches on the Youtube are worth putting up with just to hear what you can of it. She was the singer Korsakov wrote his way too famous Vocalise for, from what they say.
Here she is singing Verdi, Sempre Libera from La Traviata in 1910. She must have been incredible in person. You hardly ever get this vivid a sense of a singer from the acoustic era of recording.
The recording was made on 23 November 1903 for the Victor Talking Machine & Co.
It's one of the fun things about Youtube, you read about a musician or music you've never heard before and it's possible you'll find something of it you can listen to.
I'd heard of Pol Plançon, one of the most renowned of singers from the "golden age" of opera, but hadn't heard him. When I came across this I realized that his life overlapped Adloph Adam's and both his teacher, Gilbert Duprez and his model in singing, Jean Baptiste Faure would have certainly been the kind of singers that Adam expected to sing his music. Faure had originated some of Adam's roles. And, once I had read that, I was curious to know what Faure's voice was like. Here he is when he was 70, an age when most of us would be lucky to croak out something in tune.
The style is not how you would expect to hear this music today but it is the best evidence we have for how the composers would have expected it to be sung.
Oh, you mistake my purpose, I don't want to create a new left in opposition to the 'secular left' as you put it, I want the real left that has always been there, the left that passed the most significant liberal legislation in the past century, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, etc. to realize that it can't afford the baggage that the anti-religious pseudo-left has been pretty much since the late 1960s. They and their agenda have created the conditions that have allowed the corporate fascists to destroy much of the progress that was achieved.
Probably as bad as anything they did was the promotion of a moral relativism that denied either the reality or the possibility of discerning an effective difference between the truth and lies in a political and legal context. The Sullivan ruling is one of the key events in that disaster, as I've mentioned a number of times, it was the product of that thinking. I don't think democracy is possible without people taking both the responsibility of identifying, absolutely, what truths can be known in opposition to what lies can be known and the chance of being wrong on that. Anything which doesn't make a decisive and effective difference favoring the truth over lies, is the death of representative democracy. I don't think we can merely allow the judiciary whose job is, after all, making those decisions, merely saying that either they can't do that easily with scientific precision or that - for whatever insane and irrational reason - that they are barred from doing so because of the desire for the writers of the Bill of Rights to be poetic instead of specific in what they meant by "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press".
It is one of the things I most disagree with Noam Chomsky about, his position formerly stated that those freedoms must be absolute is incompatible with democracy, it is incompatible with retaining anything like a decent government. When someone is given carte blanche to lie, any lie being permissible, it is a license to construct the most vicious and saleable of lies, the most facilely sold of lies. The evidence of that is abundant in the study of the propaganda of Nazis and fascists and gun nut cults and black helicopter paranoics and the fan base of FOX news and those who have elected a series of some of the worst presidents in our history in the wake of the Sullivan decision and its related ACLU supported rulings and the total absence of presidents and a congress such as the one which was elected in a segregated America but which managed to pass those two landmarks of human progress, both of which have been eviscerated by the governments elected in the wake of that intellectual regime.
The left which elected those members of congress and the president who passed and signed those into law did not do so under the influence of secular or anti-religious pseudo-liberals, they were elected by a mostly Christian electorate who were forced to act under the religiously motivated actions of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, figures such as The Reverends of that movement, others who overtly cited Christianity as their motivation, such as the great Diane Nash, and others who put their lives on the line to end segregation and voter suppression. It was not the atheists who did that, they were, in almost every case, of no importance, whatsoever, in the cultural context of the early 1960s, their taking a prominent role would have certainly been counterproductive in the effort. As, in fact, their presence in the left has been mostly counterproductive in terms of electing people and ballot measures and moving legislation. All you have to do is look at the use of their anti-religious talk by the Republican-fascists for the past fifty years to see that.
Flack was received over me criticizing Amanda Marcotte for being so dim as to express her bratty older sibling "SEND THAT BABY BACK!" rant as alleged feminism. The piece it was from was supposedly an argument for the right of women to determine the condition of their own bodies, a pro abortion piece. If you want to see just who that is of use to, try a web search to see who has made the most use of it, you will quickly discover that the anti-choice, anti-feminist side has made lots of hay with it. An argument made by an adult based on a hatred of babies is bound to have a negative effect on whatever it is that they are arguing for. I can't demonstrate it with the amount of time I have to do research these days but I will bet that the arguments about the plus side of infanticide in The Descent of Man and other scientific proponents for Darwinism has had a net negative effect for the public acceptance of evolution which the Darwinists have always wanted to equate with natural selection. Now, I doubt Marcotte had much of a goal in writing such a stupidly counterproductive tantrum other than to get attention for herself. Which is one of the reasons that these baby hating pieces get written, though there is certainly more than enough baby hating around than the subjects of that hatred merit, which is absolutely none. Babies are innocent of any offence which people take from them, unlike those who are taking offense.
You might give some leeway for the previous baby of the family for being a brat over their suddenly having their position usurped when they are three or, less so, if they are five when the new baby comes home. That someone has to make this point about people who have long since reached the age of majority should be incredible, especially since Marcotte and her admirers love to tell everyone that they represent the rational community. But that's another thing that bratty children like to tell themselves, though generally starting about the age of 9. Some grow out of it, clearly the Marcottes of the world don't.
In case anyone who reads this wants to turn it into a criticism of Marcotte's choice to not have children, no, I'd encourage someone who doesn't want children to not have children. Not having a child is a responsible position to take if you don't want a child or don't believe you could fulfill your moral responsibility to them. And by that I don't necessarily mean to bring them up in middle-class material security, lots of dirt poor parents are great parents who bring up children beautifully.
It is especially true that you should not produce a child if you hate babies and are so self-absorbed that you would probably neglect them, at best or abuse them, at worst. And the worst form of abuse a child can experience, short of actual violence, is for a selfish, self-centered parent to allow them to know that they are hated, that their very life is resented by the people who are responsible for them. I've known more affluent people, many of them with graduate degrees who give their children every material and social advantage but who don't give them the thing they are most responsible to give by virtue of their choice to have a child, the thing they need above all else, love. Normal people understand that, so many in the "reality community" don't. Politically, it might make you popular with them, most people will be rightly repelled by it. Needless to say, it is politically stupid to make your being a nasty adult brat one of your arguments for any position. It is the Ayn Randism of the alleged left.
1. It is impossible, even while giving instructions of what someone is to do while praying to know that any two people are doing the same thing as everyone's understanding of those instructions and their ability to carry them out consistently is of unknowable reliability. There is a vast range of meaning to what people call "prayer" and there is no way to cover the entire thing in any protocol. 2. It is impossible to observe what happens during prayer so there can be no observation of what is happening. 3. The biggest problem of praying for the intercession of God or some other imagined deity is that you cannot account for their part in it. Prayer is not like S&H Green Stamps, you don't automatically get to cash in so many prayers for a guaranteed result. There is an old saying that God always answers prayers but the answer is often "no". 4. The Bible says, "You will not put the Lord your God to a test," if that is true then it is irrational to believe God would cooperate with any such a test. You can't compel compliance from the deity. 5. There is no way to have a control group as you have no way to know if someone outside of the control group is being prayed for by someone else, by themselves, etc. And there is no way to know if for whatever reason God didn't just intend an outcome you didn't expect. There are lots of other problems with the idea of testing prayer, what if you get a result that you didn't ask for but which works better than what you asked for. How would you evaluate that is such a proposed test?
I think the problem is that atheists just don't understand what religion is and just don't get it. But, then, I don't think a lot of people who profess religion get it, either.
Me, I read Duncan's little post, looked at the post by Adrastos at First-Draft it is, I guess supposed to be based on. I didn't quite get Duncan's point. But, then, I looked at the piece by Athenae which Adrastos riffed off of. Now, her piece is well worth mentioning and it's nothing like the snark that Duncan elicited so predictably from his stable of regulars. I liked all of Athenae's piece but especially this part.
Every time something like this happens, I dread the platitudes, the “prayers up!” messages, the ways in which we’ve made faith into some kind of dodge that makes us good people. Like if we think and pray, that gets us out of something. Like that’s what we have to do. It’s insulting, and not just to people for whom prayer is talking to an imaginary, ridiculous friend. It’s insulting to people for whom prayer is a real act of faith. It’s insulting to people for whom prayer is critical, is active and purposeful and rooted in moving the world forward. Prayer is not mouthing of memorized words with hands folded before bedtime. Prayer is not “thank you for Grandma and my pony and my plastic rocket.” Prayer is not “please God let it not rain on circus day.” Prayer is not even “please God, let me live.” Prayer is not a never-ending, whiny wish list directed upward at an unknowable, unanswering deity. Prayer is directed at other people. Prayer is getting up every day before dawn, and baking bread. Prayer is delivering letters in the pre-dawn light of early winter. Prayer is lending a neighbor a shovel when there’s a blizzard. Prayer is bringing a snowed-in neighbor some food. Prayer is digging a well where there is no water. Prayer is planting a crop where there is no food. Prayer is doing the dishes. Prayer is holding the baby. Prayer is laundry. Prayer is standing on a factory line and repeating the same task over and over and over and over for 20 years, until your hands and your knees and your hearing are gone, and all you have left to pray for is the drive home, the lunchbox your spouse packed sitting full on the seat next to you because you didn’t have time for a break.
Now, I was raised a Catholic and we were big on both faith AND WORKS. My favorite epistle in the New Testament, James, says:
What good is it, my brethren, when someone claims to have faith, but he has no works? Is such a faith really able to save him? If a brother or sister has no coat and they are lacking daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go with peace, be warmed and fed," but you don't give to them the basic needs of the body, what good is it? So this kind of faith by itself, when not having works, is dead. Someone will indeed say, "You have faith, and I have works. Show me that faith of yours apart from works, and I will show you a faith by reason of my works." You believe that there is only one God. You are doing well. The demons also believe that, and tremble. But are you convinced, foolish person, that faith without works is useless? Our father Abraham, was he not justified by reason of works, when he offered his son Isaac up on the altar? See how faith was working together with his works, and through his works his faith was made complete? Thus also was completed the scripture which says, "And Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness." And he was called a friend of God. You should see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. And in the same way Rahab the prostitute, was she not justified also by works, when she sheltered the messengers and sent them out by another way? For just as a body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.
Update: Oh, the hell with it, if Duncan keeps allowing Simels to lie about what I said, I'm going to go over everything Duncan posts. It shouldn't take much time, he doesn't write much. I'll start with his equating Prince Charles trying to get BBC 4 to agree to 15 pages of conditions before they can interview him with Chelsea Clinton trying to talk to the media on her own terms. Apparently Duncan overlooks several facts. Whereas Prince Charles is a man who has lived as a, well, stinkin' rich prince at the public expense in a family which has lived at the public expense for generations immemorial, The British Monarchy is populated with parasites who have no purpose except to serve as the head of the British Class system, Chelsea Clinton is and always has been a private citizen. So, no, their situations are nothing alike. It's arguable that, as a public charge, Charles owes his patrons something, Chelsea Clinton owes no one anything that we don't all owe each other, putting yourself in a position to be set up in the national media isn't one of those. And whereas Charles pretty much had the press treat him with kid gloves till he started seriously slipping around on his wife, Chelsea Clinton has had her family under full attack from the media since she was a toddler. She not only owes the media nothing they want, she owes them her total and complete distrust because they have earned it, over and over again. I don't much care about the Brit monarchy or, for that matter, Brit TV but to equate Chelsea Clinton's position to Prince Charles is about as stupid as it gets.
I don't have any idea what brought this piece to mind, the only piece by Liszt I ever enjoyed playing. Well, other than the grey clouds I'm looking at.
What in the world would make you think that I'd feel envious about someone sending you some lame, moldy I Spy episodes as a Christmas present? After I made fun of it. You think I'm going to feel diminished by your watching a show I think was stupid? I'd think more highly of someone who watched old episodes of Grindl.
You know, if Derbes bought them, I'll bet that Cosby gets a percentage of the sale, since you were going on about him. I'll bet his agent negotiated such issues when they made the show or when they released it for sale. I only noted Cosby had never been prosecuted, I've never been responsible for adding to his income or promoting his career. Update: I doubt Tlazolteotl, aka the gal who is so dim that she named herself after the shit eating goddess, has ever read anything I wrote so I don't care what the coprophagous dolly regurgitates, crap in, crap out .
If I had the time I'd go collect comment threads from right wing and allegedly left wing blogs to compare the chatter over the two incidents, the attack on the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and yesterday's horrific attack on the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. From my fast, cursory look this morning, it might provide an interesting comparison of the hates of the two groups, the hatred of Christians and the hatred of Muslims. Though last night, before any of the murderers were identified, I did see some Christian bashing by those eager to restart the weekend's group hate session on some of the supposed left wing blogs. I think the comparatively subdued tone in the chatter as compared to the weekends' frenzy betrayed some disappointment on their part when the killers were identified. There is a post up at Religion Dispatches that asks Can Faith-Based Organizing for Gun Control Work? To which I say, considering that it took religious involvement to move every major reform which became fact in our society, we'd better hope it works on this issue or it will destroy democracy and turn the massively armed United States into one great big Afghanistan. The secular gun control movement has failed and I think it failed because it started up just as the pressure to suppress religious expression on the left was gaining hold. There is a reason that the high water mark of liberal effectiveness came with the passage of the civil rights laws in the mid-1960s. When the man who, in so many ways, embodied or symbolized that time, The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. was murdered, it was with a gun, when Robert Kennedy was gunned down a little over a month later, the secularized left couldn't mount an effective response and it hasn't been able to do it at all despite the staggering body count which has been the result of going on fifty years of failure. The experiment of the secular left has been run in the period since then, it has failed, utterly. And a good reason that it failed is that its replacements for religious morality, media libertarianism, foremost, the license to lie, massively, for pay instead of insisting on holding the media responsible when it lies, has been the foremost venue used by the gun industry to lead us into the terrible situation we are in today. It leads to conditions in which all rights are at risk. That is what I've come to conclude in the past fifteen years of reading the secularists and reviewing the history of their influence in politics and society. When morality is considered an ephemeral manifestation of physical causation and one set of morals or no morals at all is as good as any other, it's no wonder everything goes to hell.
Camerata Xara Young Women's Choir at l'Église St-Bernard in Church Point, NS
Given that it's a canticle sung by Mary when she would have been a teenager, it's kind of strange that there aren't more settings specifically for women's voices.
Snark about "baby Jesus" has been coming in since I started posting these, from predictable sources. It leads me to think about how often such people go out of their way to express their hatred of babies, which is a pretty telling hatred to have and to so obviously enjoy voicing. Afterall, they wouldn't be here to hate on babies if they'd never been babies. And if it is the habits of babies that lead them to hate babies, what do they think they're being?
When I've heard people mocking "baaaaby JeeeeSUS" they get a kind of sarcastic, disdainful inflection in their voice that they generally don't get when they are talking about adults, even adults they hate.
Having sort of specialized in reading the literature of Darwinism and eugenics, the early and scientifically voiced enthusiasm for infanticide as practiced in Pagan Europe and among what they presented as "savages" came to mind while thinking about this. While, in the Darwinist advocacy for their asserted benefits of infanticide, the murder of those who are disabled comes first to mind, the fact is that most of the infanticide that happened was probably on the basis of gender, most of the babies so murdered, females. And, as I've mentioned a number of times, that enthusiasm for the deaths of babies continued in the literature of cultural Darwinism up till today when advocacy of infanticide by such people as Peter Singer is compatible with a career in academia and on upper market magazine and upper brow talk media.
And then there is the infanticide story that is part of the Christmas season, Herod's slaughter of the innocents. Now, I know there is considerable skepticism about that story as history but I don't think it's necessary for it to have happened in order to think about how it would have been seen among the Jewish-Christians who were a considerable number of those in the early Jesus movement. The story would have been an example of Herod's irreligiosity, the Jewish people being what was likely either the only or among the few people who had a strong ban against infanticide in the Mediterranean basin. It would have been a sign of the extent to which the moral authority of those who ruled over Jerusalem and the Jewish people had become corrupted though association with Roman paganism.
Perhaps one of the strongest contrasts that could come to mind among the Jewish-Christians would be the story of Abraham and Issac, which so many ignorant people around these days seem to believe was an example of human sacrifice in the Jewish tradition. Which only proves, once again, how much of the common received unwisdom of those holding college degrees depends on never having read what they believe they know. The point of the story is exactly the opposite of that, it elevates the status of human beings, even children, those so powerless that they can't prevent their own murders. Through that story human beings are granted a status that few, if any Pagan cultures gave them, certainly not those familiar to the Hebrew people. And it certainly elevates people above the status of inanimate objects which naturalism assigns us, then and now.
In thinking about it in the past two weeks, I think it was the decisive lesson given to Abraham in his conversion from naturalistic thinking to the incredible advance over that which we, in the West, owe to the Jewish tradition. In the story, after a gradual series of lessons in which Abraham is taught a new way of thinking, after God has promised him that he will be the founder of a great people who will save the world, God tells him to sacrifice the son through whom that will happen. Abraham complies in one of the most dramatically structured stories in the Bible and is about to, literally, give everything he hopes for to God when, by God stopping him, he learns that, unlike the gods of Paganism, God isn't that kind of god, the gods that are the product of human projection of their own personality. And in doing that God also distinguishes people from being mere things to sacrifice because God reveals that God is ever so much more than people can conceive of.
In this week during this part of the modern Catholic liturgical cycle, there are readings from Isiah which presents a vision of the perfected world after it is redeemed.
On that day,
A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse,
and from his roots a bud shall blossom.
The Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him:
a Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
A Spirit of counsel and of strength,
a Spirit of knowledge and of fear of the LORD,
and his delight shall be the fear of the LORD.
Not by appearance shall he judge,
nor by hearsay shall he decide,
But he shall judge the poor with justice,
and decide aright for the land’s afflicted.
He shall strike the ruthless with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked.
Justice shall be the band around his waist,
and faithfulness a belt upon his hips.
Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
The calf and the young lion shall browse together,
with a little child to guide them.
The cow and the bear shall be neighbors,
together their young shall rest;
the lion shall eat hay like the ox.
The baby shall play by the cobra’s den,
and the child lay his hand on the adder’s lair.
There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the LORD,
as water covers the sea.
On that day,
The root of Jesse,
set up as a signal for the nations,
The Gentiles shall seek out,
for his dwelling shall be glorious.
That is the opposite to the world of of Darwinism, and, of course, fascism and Marxism. It's a lot closer to egalitarian democracy than those product of scientism and the Enlightenment. That is the difference between the heritage of Abraham and that of the atomists.
Update: 2 comments:
steve simelsDecember 2, 2015 at 10:49 AM
"Snark about "baby Jesus" has been coming in since I started posting these, from predictable sources. It leads me to think about how often such people go out of their way to express their hatred of babies,"
Okay, it's official -- you're completely bonkers.
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The Thought CriminalDecember 2, 2015 at 10:52 AM
I may make a long list of examples, for now, here, from Amanda Marcotte:
I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding. No matter how much free day care you throw at women, babies are still time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. No matter how flexible you make my work schedule, my entire life would be overturned by a baby. I like my life how it is, with my ability to do what I want when I want without having to arrange for a babysitter. I like being able to watch True Detective right now and not wait until baby is in bed. I like sex in any room of the house I please. I don’t want a baby. I’ve heard your pro-baby arguments. Glad those work for you, but they are unconvincing to me. Nothing will make me want a baby.
Any normal person would just say, "I don't want to have a baby."
And please shut the fuck up with the "not a real Christian" crap. Who the fuck do you think does this shit on a regular basis -- atheist rock and roll fans?
ReplyDelete
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The Thought CriminalDecember 1, 2015 at 6:27 PM
Were you never taught in, like the third grade that you need to read things before you know what they say? Here, from your own citation in the NYT
The man she had married professed to be deeply religious. But after more than seven years with Robert L. Dear Jr., Barbara Micheau had come to see life with him as a kind of hell on earth.
By January 1993, she had had enough. In a sworn affidavit as part of her divorce case, Ms. Micheau described Mr. Dear as a serial philanderer and a problem gambler, a man who kicked her, beat her head against the floor and fathered two children with other women while they were together. He found excuses for his transgressions, she said, in his idiosyncratic views on Christian eschatology and the nature of salvation.
“He claims to be a Christian and is extremely evangelistic, but does not follow the Bible in his actions,” Ms. Micheau said in the court document. “He says that as long as he believes he will be saved, he can do whatever he pleases. He is obsessed with the world coming to an end.”
I'll add, you guys claim to be a brain trust but you never read things that you pretend to know the contents of.
Update: I will say that reading the various stories purporting to tell what his ex-wives say, they aren't consistent. I wonder if the agenda of the person writing those stories doesn't have a lot to do with the discrepancies. I'm not going to believe anything, much, unless it's said under oath in a trial.
Update 2: I wish I could say that Simels is unique in embodying an unusual number of bad habits of thought among those whose educations are more dependent on TV than on using a library but there's a whole passel of them who are as bad and some who, if you can believe it, are probably stupider.
Don't bother telling me, I don't care. Their ballot box poison makes them politically irrelevant.
Duncan's alleged un-named mention in an old West Wing episode about ten years back was the political high point of his blog. Even his being one of the groovy bloggers who Obama called in to tell him why the young people didn't adore him sufficiently was on the downward slope. It's not as if Obama changed any policies as a result that that meeting, it was a pose, nothing else. And Duncan squandered whatever opportunity he had, like Obama did. Update: Yes, I read that New York Times piece with Robert Dear's ex wife, as I recall she said she'd seen him something like once in the past seven years and the guy she remembers isn't much like the guy who murdered at least three, injured more and terrorized the Planned Parenthood clinic and the general area where it was. What she has to say wouldn't appear to be exactly fresh intelligence. I don't know what part of we don't know why the guy did it you don't get. In the mean time, try reading my past several posts on the topic and tell me where he'd have gotten permission in the Gospels, the Acts, the epistles or even the Book of Revelations for doing what he did. If he'd followed the teachings in those, he'd never have done it. Your intelligence is stale.
My morning break is about to end and I'll point out that with all of the whining and complaining and outraged response to me pointing out the obvious encouragement to male entitlement and willful violence in rock songs, no one has yet pointed out anywhere in the Bible where someone doing what Robert Dear did is recommended or even excused.
I'll add that to the list of pending challenges I've made which atheists have not yet answered, beginning with this one, pending since last April. Update: If you think Hugh Hewitt or Ted Cruz are religious figures, it's no wonder you hate religion so much. Let me relieve your misconception, they are political hacks and liars who break the commandment against bearing false witness pretty much every day of their public lives. They are to Christians what ... well, no, actually, there is no prohibition against lying and bearing false witness and inciting violence and hatred for personal and political gain in atheism so there is no equivalent. What they're doing is not forbidden by atheism which you profess, it is forbidden by Christianity which they and those like them falsely claim to follow.
I am going to post Olivier Messiaen's Twenty Meditations on The Baby Jesus this Advent. I was thinking of renewing the posts of Magnificat settings I did last December with associated antiphons as those entered into the liturgical calendar, I will probably post some settings but I don't have the free time for research I did last year.
Messiaen was a Christian mystic, a Catholic mystic and his music is a product of his mysticism. If you would like to hear these played, all at once, the recording by his wife, Yvonne Loriod, a great pianist and, she being his closest and most intimate associate, as close to the composers' intent as you are likely to find. At just over two hours, it is a real challenge to sustain your attention. I'm not sure but taking one meditation at a time is likely to give you more.
Yeah, I really did mean that it is far more likely that Robert Dear got the feeling that he was entitled to attack people from listening to rock music than from reading the Bible. Where would you expect to be more at risk from being attacked, at a rock concert or at a religious service? Even his ex-wife who claimed that he was a devout Bible reader doesn't claim him as a church goer. And I'll make the same challenge that I made in comments the other night, show me anywhere in the Bible that anything would have authorized him to make the kind of attack that he did. I am pretty confident that you would have to stretch your evidence past the point where it made you look ridiculous to any rational witness to provide such an instance. As with the supposed Islamic terrorists who the Republican candidates are using to pander to anti-Muslim bigots, I don't think you can make an honest case that those who have killed and injured people in opposition to abortion could find their motives in the Bible.
On the other hand the genre of rock music glorifies willful, irrational violence, especially when women are the target of it. It promotes the domination and subjugation of women in ever so many more instances than it speaks of their empowerment. I gave an example in the music of the Rolling Stones, "Gunface" that would have given a Robert Dear all of the reasons he could possibly need to do what he did, some of the words to the song are rather creepily in line with what he did. And that is only one song. The glorification of male violence against women always was and, it's my impression, is ever more a feature of pop music. If male supremacy had a national anthem, it would be a rock song.
The political tool of those who want to pillage public education, blaming teachers for the ignorance of their students in the face of the barrage of distraction from TV and other electronic entertainment is one of the greatest and most hypocritical of logical disconnects. Most of that accusation is made on the media that is the reason for America's intellectual deficits. The time that the average student spends watching TV or engaged in similar commercial entertainments is time they are not spending in effective study. The schools are at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to those fun and, especially, easy things that compete with them for the time and, therefore, minds of students. If students aren't learning from schools it is because they're learning from TV, from the media they get online, from movies, pop songs, etc. Those are what inform more of the understanding of more Americans than even the best efforts of teachers and schools can hope to compete with. They have far more of an influence in the culture than what they get in a classroom does.
And what you can say of schools being at a disadvantage is ever so much more so for the churches, which a minority of Americans even attend for an hour a week. And one of the favorite canards of atheists, that Christians don't know much about Christianity would have to go out the window if you are to posit that the level of violence against women in the United States is based in a through indoctrination in what they imagine the Bible contains in that regard.
I have mentioned before that, as a gay man, I have been several times the victim of anti-gay violence and have been menaced with it more times than I could honestly estimate. Now, in popular anti-religious imagination, the motive for that is supposed to be religion, Christianity. I was never attacked, not even verbally harassed by someone I knew who was a faithful church goer, they're far more likely to try to persuade me through friendly engagement to agree with their belief than to attack, though, living in New England, we tend to be rather reticent about doing even that.
When I was attacked and threatened, it was never by a person who was anything but irreligious. The first proof of that fact that in every case the attacker broke the commandment about taking the Lord's name in vain, along with a stream of language that you wouldn't generally associate with a person of religious piety. And certainly the actions of being punched and kicked was nothing you'd associate with such folk. I can tell you that it was far more likely that the boys and young men who did that spent a lot more time listening to heavy metal or some other form of what used to be known as hard rock than they did listening to hymns. Since I knew several of them, I can say they'd fit in a lot better among the trash talkers of the atheist blogs than they would at a Bible Study.
While there are people who use religion as an excuse to attack people, to oppress people, to kill people, unless their religion specifically permits or encourages that, they aren't being honest about that being the real motivation of their violence. Not unless they're one of those massively ignorant Christians who the atheists always claim are so abundant. And if the person giving religion as an excuse is ignorant of the commandment to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, that those who live by the sword will die by the sword, the teaching that only those who are without sin have a right to cast a stone, and a host of other such prohibitions against what they are doing, it is hardly the fault of religion which has spent an enormous amount of time making that information available.
If there is something which would make any serious religious person happy it would be to have all people professing their religion to abide by its teachings in their lives. The idiots who croon John Lennon's dopey atheist dirge love to intone his idiotic panacea, "Imagine no religion". Such a world would be a world with no effective commandments of the kind I just listed, no effective means of convincing people to not kill, to not bear false witness, to not oppress, to treat people as they would like to be treated EVEN WHEN THEY REALLY WANT TO TREAT THEM ENTIRELY WORSE THAN THEY WOULD LIKE TO BE TREATED, THEMSELVES. And I'm afraid that is the world taught by so many pop songs, so many movies, so many of the most popular ones are all about imposing a man's will on women, on the world instead of that. If you want to start looking for where such men get their license to kill, look at what encourages that idea instead of the idea that they are violating the will of God to do it.
Update: Well, you ask for an example, Charles Manson got his inspiration from Helter Skelter, not How Firm a Foundation or Abide With Me.
Update 2: Imagine that, I, a person who avoids Mick and his old Stones whenever I can avoid them knows one of their songs which The All Knowing Oracle of all Rock doesn't. Uhgh! Don't tell me that that means I'm more hip than you! If it's any comfort to you, I wish I didn't know it.
