Two seasonal oldies but goodies that I've posted before. I'll depend on the announcer to give you the credits this week, I've got a book case to straighten out before I can get Christmas visits.
Saturday, December 21, 2019
Saturday after Advent 3
God of our future, forgive our yearning for cheap grace. Let us recognize your mighty promise and your stark expectation. In his name. Amen
Psalm 55
Zechariah 8:9-17
Revelation 6:1-17
Matthew 25:31-46
We have largely been narcotized in the church to expect that Jesus is unconditional love for us all. That shallow assurance is reinforced at Christmastime with an easy, casual disregard of the hard realities of the world and the hard realities of the gospel that meet the world. We should know better, because it is right there in front of us in one of the most familiar of Jesus' parables. We readily appeal to his parable when we want to champion social justice and compassion toward the needy. In doing so, however we do not recognize that the list of ministries to the "least" in the parable is not an imperative that commands action. Rather it is an occasion for judgment that reviews past action. The judgment is severe toward those who have not practiced a neighborly ethic. The hard part is that the coming one, the Son of Man, conducts a trial and implements a judicial sentence.
The teaching is, of course, only a parable, not to be heard literally. It is a declaration by Jesus that the rule of God operates with stark expectations that are uncompromising and come with severe sanctions. The disregard of this expectation issues in ominous prospects for the future, ominous even if and when we are protected by our narcotized illusions.
The parable has behind it a thick prophetic tradition. Zechariah anticipates a new well-being, a "sowing of peace," a "blessing," "good to Jerusalem." That good promise, however, requires truth speaking and judgments that make for peace. These are not heroic actions for an emergency. They are rather a new norm for which the Lamb was slain. They are, in the parable, the price of "eternal life."
Walter Brueggemann: Gift and Task
I am going to give the Gospel reading because it is one of the most important passages to me, it's what I read at my mother's funeral, at her suggestion. This is the Good News translation.
The Final Judgment
31 “When the Son of Man comes as King and all the angels with him, he will sit on his royal throne, 32 and the people of all the nations will be gathered before him. Then he will divide them into two groups, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the righteous people at his right and the others at his left. 34 Then the King will say to the people on his right, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father! Come and possess the kingdom which has been prepared for you ever since the creation of the world. 35 I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger and you received me in your homes, 36 naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me, in prison and you visited me.’ 37 The righteous will then answer him, ‘When, Lord, did we ever see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you a drink? 38 When did we ever see you a stranger and welcome you in our homes, or naked and clothe you? 39 When did we ever see you sick or in prison, and visit you?’ 40 The King will reply, ‘I tell you, whenever you did this for one of the least important of these followers of mine, you did it for me!’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Away from me, you that are under God's curse! Away to the eternal fire which has been prepared for the Devil and his angels! 42 I was hungry but you would not feed me, thirsty but you would not give me a drink; 43 I was a stranger but you would not welcome me in your homes, naked but you would not clothe me; I was sick and in prison but you would not take care of me.’ 44 Then they will answer him, ‘When, Lord, did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and we would not help you?’ 45 The King will reply, ‘I tell you, whenever you refused to help one of these least important ones, you refused to help me.’ 46 These, then, will be sent off to eternal punishment, but the righteous will go to eternal life.”
I will note that, from what Greek scholars I've read say, they say the word "eternal" as in "eternal flame" is mistranslated from the Greek which doesn't imply that the punishment would be eternal. They say the word was mistranslated because the Latin that was used in the Western Church and, so, persisted in Western culture, didn't have a word that expressed the same thing. I don't know, I'm not a Greek scholar - having wasted my time for the classical languages on Latin instead of Greek and Hebrew. I have read Gregory of Nyssa and am convinced that as much as it might disappoint me when I think of such people as Hitler and Trump and Putin and Stalin, even the punishments they so richly deserve don't deserve to be eternal.
Psalm 55
Zechariah 8:9-17
Revelation 6:1-17
Matthew 25:31-46
We have largely been narcotized in the church to expect that Jesus is unconditional love for us all. That shallow assurance is reinforced at Christmastime with an easy, casual disregard of the hard realities of the world and the hard realities of the gospel that meet the world. We should know better, because it is right there in front of us in one of the most familiar of Jesus' parables. We readily appeal to his parable when we want to champion social justice and compassion toward the needy. In doing so, however we do not recognize that the list of ministries to the "least" in the parable is not an imperative that commands action. Rather it is an occasion for judgment that reviews past action. The judgment is severe toward those who have not practiced a neighborly ethic. The hard part is that the coming one, the Son of Man, conducts a trial and implements a judicial sentence.
The teaching is, of course, only a parable, not to be heard literally. It is a declaration by Jesus that the rule of God operates with stark expectations that are uncompromising and come with severe sanctions. The disregard of this expectation issues in ominous prospects for the future, ominous even if and when we are protected by our narcotized illusions.
The parable has behind it a thick prophetic tradition. Zechariah anticipates a new well-being, a "sowing of peace," a "blessing," "good to Jerusalem." That good promise, however, requires truth speaking and judgments that make for peace. These are not heroic actions for an emergency. They are rather a new norm for which the Lamb was slain. They are, in the parable, the price of "eternal life."
Walter Brueggemann: Gift and Task
I am going to give the Gospel reading because it is one of the most important passages to me, it's what I read at my mother's funeral, at her suggestion. This is the Good News translation.
The Final Judgment
31 “When the Son of Man comes as King and all the angels with him, he will sit on his royal throne, 32 and the people of all the nations will be gathered before him. Then he will divide them into two groups, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the righteous people at his right and the others at his left. 34 Then the King will say to the people on his right, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father! Come and possess the kingdom which has been prepared for you ever since the creation of the world. 35 I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger and you received me in your homes, 36 naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me, in prison and you visited me.’ 37 The righteous will then answer him, ‘When, Lord, did we ever see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you a drink? 38 When did we ever see you a stranger and welcome you in our homes, or naked and clothe you? 39 When did we ever see you sick or in prison, and visit you?’ 40 The King will reply, ‘I tell you, whenever you did this for one of the least important of these followers of mine, you did it for me!’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Away from me, you that are under God's curse! Away to the eternal fire which has been prepared for the Devil and his angels! 42 I was hungry but you would not feed me, thirsty but you would not give me a drink; 43 I was a stranger but you would not welcome me in your homes, naked but you would not clothe me; I was sick and in prison but you would not take care of me.’ 44 Then they will answer him, ‘When, Lord, did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and we would not help you?’ 45 The King will reply, ‘I tell you, whenever you refused to help one of these least important ones, you refused to help me.’ 46 These, then, will be sent off to eternal punishment, but the righteous will go to eternal life.”
I will note that, from what Greek scholars I've read say, they say the word "eternal" as in "eternal flame" is mistranslated from the Greek which doesn't imply that the punishment would be eternal. They say the word was mistranslated because the Latin that was used in the Western Church and, so, persisted in Western culture, didn't have a word that expressed the same thing. I don't know, I'm not a Greek scholar - having wasted my time for the classical languages on Latin instead of Greek and Hebrew. I have read Gregory of Nyssa and am convinced that as much as it might disappoint me when I think of such people as Hitler and Trump and Putin and Stalin, even the punishments they so richly deserve don't deserve to be eternal.
Stupid Hate Mail
Not now. I'm listening to the Polka Party Christmas Program, as I do my housework. I consider listening to the Polka Party an act of anti-Nazism, the Poles being, as well, marked for genocide by the Nazi trio, Baur, Fischer, Lenz and by Hitler in 1939.
Update: Hey, all of the disc jockeys at WUNH are volunteers, it's a shoe-string operation. If someone wanted to do a good Klezmer show, I can't say how thrilled I'd be to listen to it, as well. I'm sure they'd love to host one. I often keep the radio on for Aegean Connection, right after Gary's show. It's when it goes to commercial pop that I turn it off. I also don't listen to the guy before Polka Party, his taste in music isn't mine. I am a supporter of WUNH, I'd never support an NPR affiliate, ever again.
Update 2: OK, I'll admit that I mentioned it to piss him off, he hates Polish people as he disrespects the Roma, that's how it all started, him telling a racist joke against the Roma. It pissed him off when I pointed out Hitler ordered his thugs to murder all of the Poles.
Update: Hey, all of the disc jockeys at WUNH are volunteers, it's a shoe-string operation. If someone wanted to do a good Klezmer show, I can't say how thrilled I'd be to listen to it, as well. I'm sure they'd love to host one. I often keep the radio on for Aegean Connection, right after Gary's show. It's when it goes to commercial pop that I turn it off. I also don't listen to the guy before Polka Party, his taste in music isn't mine. I am a supporter of WUNH, I'd never support an NPR affiliate, ever again.
Update 2: OK, I'll admit that I mentioned it to piss him off, he hates Polish people as he disrespects the Roma, that's how it all started, him telling a racist joke against the Roma. It pissed him off when I pointed out Hitler ordered his thugs to murder all of the Poles.
A Summary Of The Evidence - I may take a few days off before Christmas
Since I took up the challenge to "prove" that the Nazi's murder of about six-million Jews was a crime with the fingerprints of the Darwinists all over it, I have established, in primary documentation a number of things. A partial listing of which are:
- It is known that as Hitler and other Nazi leaders such as Rudolf Hess and Emil Maurice, as they were in Landsberg Prison, were provided with an influential, two-volume work of three eminent German biologists, Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz - a book, the title of which is translated in a number of ways into English and which, here, I will call by the often used nickname, "Baur, Fischer, Lenz".
- It is known that what Hitler, and it can be assumed, in so far as I've read the primary literature, Rudolf Hess were greatly influenced by what Baur, Fischer and Lenz wrote in that book which, during the entire period after its publication and through the Nazi period was the foremost German language scientific authority on the topics most relevant to the Nazi's eugenic and genocide policies. I have not been able to check the assertions I've read in the secondary literature that many of the things Hitler said in Mein Kampf and in subsequent documents either appropriate or closely paraphrase passages in the book. I am not familiar enough with whatever words or other traces Emil Maurice may have left to know the extent to which he may have been influenced by the book.
- I have established that Fritz Lenz, in a passage of the book he wrote, said that the biological framing of the work was that of natural selection, with which they interpreted genetic and other claims made in the book. He also, explicitly, named the scientific orientation they used in their book as Darwinism, explicitly tying their book and its claims to the foremost theory of Charles Darwin. I will note that Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer were the two members of the trio who officially joined the Nazi Party and enjoyed great scientific advancement and benefits from that, both directly participated in Nazi eugenics in both its scientific theory and political application, Fritz Lenz saying things, such as, " As important as the external features for their evaluation is the lineage of individuals, a blond Jew is also a Jew. Yes, there are Jews who have most of the external features of the Nordic race, but who nevertheless display Jewish mental tendencies. The legislation of the National Socialist state therefore properly defines a Jew not by external race characteristics, but by descent." which by his own scientific declaration must be taken to be a claim made out of his belief in natural selection.
I could come up with page after page of such statements made by him and the other two which would be of a similar nature and orientation that would show, in no uncertain terms, what flowed from their Darwism. I will later translate the one I've already given in German, now that I've broken my own rule against translating, I may as well give you that, too.
- I have established that among other things in the book taken from people who have, as well, in their own words, identified their biological framing as that of natural selection and, in most cases identifying natural selection by its other name, Darwinism, that one of the most explicitly relevant to proving my case was a 1925 paper by the eminent second-generation Darwinist, Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul (about whom I know very little) which is explicitly a work of scientific antisemitism. The Problem of Alien Immigration Into Great Britain, Illustrated By An Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children. I have given the passage in which Baur,Fischer, Lenz used that paper by Pearson and Moul to explicitly claim that "eastern" Jews were flowing into Germany and posing the same kind of "danger" to Germans and Germany and that it was a "now burning" - which might be also translated "most burning" - danger to the German people.
- I have, as well, in his own words proven that Karl Pearson said that his framing of biology was the same as that of Baur, Fischer, Lenz, natural selection which he, as well, explicitly identified with the person of Charles Darwin. I could and will, give example after example of that and the truly depraved and Nazi like assertions it led the British, English speaking gentleman Pearson, to make scientific claims that sound like the coldest, cruelest of Hollywood stock villain depraved Nazi, only he said it in the sterile language of Brit science, with a veneer of numbers so the superficial won't understand that that's what he's saying. No doubt, it sounded more anodyne to German speakers who could read Baur, Fischer, Lenz in the months and years before the Nazis cut to the meat of the matter and, with the help of, at least, Fischer and Lenz, made it as real as can be in military and genocidal terms.
I have proven my case, the scientific basis of the Nazi eugenics that rapidly turned to Nazi genocide was, in their own words, the product of their belief in natural selection, which they, in their own words, called what a belief in natural selection is, Darwinism. I have in numerous posts over the last seven or so years, established that such thinking permeates the writing of Charles Darwin and those scientific authorities he approved and cited positively in his scientific writing, especially Ernst Haeckel and the teacher of Karl Pearson, Francis Galton, including claims of the beneficial effects to the killers and their families and societies of genocide, the extermination of entire human populations as well as the internal "dangers" of allowing poor people and the disabled to live long enough to have children. What the Nazis found there had been there since, at least, the 1860s.
And about those numbers, in that Cavendish lecture that Pearson gave, the kind of stuff he used as "data" to make up his numbers is of the typical kind of dodgy observation that Darwin, himself, based his science in. Pearson relies on such things as police reports and police records of servant girls who were insufficiently docile and obedient to please their Victorian-Edwardian era masters and mistresses and what they got up to when not working to base his hard, scientific seeming science in. As I've made this long study which is now closing in on two decades, I have to say the standards of such crap being called and treated as hard science has been rather a shocking eye-opener. While I know that effort to turn what might be more honestly considered idle gossip as found through the framing of the mostly men, often quite conservative or reactionary gossipers into "data" in the way Karl Pearson and those who would make behavior the object of scientific study, it is no better than the source of such junk science. But as it is credentialed, published scientists who make those claims, it is seldom treated with the level of critical skepticism that such men of science pretend they always apply.
I will close by saying that the guy who made the challenge, a play-lefty American, college-credentialed and member of a self-styled "brain - trust" is about as open to the evidence as the House Republican caucus has been in the Impeachment of Donald Trump. As I have said, one of my greatest shocks since going online and interacting with what I once mistook as my fellow lefties of the college-credentialed type was how much so many of them had in common with the crudest, vilest, most reactionary right-wingers. And I don't just mean the blog-rat variety of "leftists" I mean some of those who have careers in journalism and in whatever you want to call online podcasting and Youtubing. I think, in the end, it comes down to the same thing, whether or not you value the truth as opposed to convenient, congenial lies. In the end, it's not even a question of information, it's a question of moral choice.
In a related though separate exchange I had with a blog-comment level racist this week, after I'd provided the "proof" he demanded, he parried by saying, "It's like my mother used to say, you can't fix stupid," to which I said I was certain he'd given his mother many an occasion to say that to him.
Update: Re-reading this, I see that, in the event that some defender of Darwin notes that the paper of Pearson comes two years after Hitler read the first edition of the book, that the book and, as I proved, its authors were of continuing influence on Nazi policy, the edition of the book I took that citation from was 1932, before the Nazis took power and before the man who wrote it, Fritz Lenz was helping to shape Nazi policy against the Jews, up to and including the earliest part of their genocide, the 1935 eugnics laws Lenz gave his scientific approval. As can be seen in the careers of Fischer and Lenz, after the Nazis took power, they relied on their science informed by the science of such people as Pearson, the explicitly Darwinist eugenics of Paul Popenoe and Leonard Darwin (both, as well, have numerous citations in" B.F.L") to make Nazi policy as enacted. When arguing with the champions of Darwin, it's essential to anticipate which of the several dodges they will use to distort or deny the evidence that proves the case.
- It is known that as Hitler and other Nazi leaders such as Rudolf Hess and Emil Maurice, as they were in Landsberg Prison, were provided with an influential, two-volume work of three eminent German biologists, Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz - a book, the title of which is translated in a number of ways into English and which, here, I will call by the often used nickname, "Baur, Fischer, Lenz".
- It is known that what Hitler, and it can be assumed, in so far as I've read the primary literature, Rudolf Hess were greatly influenced by what Baur, Fischer and Lenz wrote in that book which, during the entire period after its publication and through the Nazi period was the foremost German language scientific authority on the topics most relevant to the Nazi's eugenic and genocide policies. I have not been able to check the assertions I've read in the secondary literature that many of the things Hitler said in Mein Kampf and in subsequent documents either appropriate or closely paraphrase passages in the book. I am not familiar enough with whatever words or other traces Emil Maurice may have left to know the extent to which he may have been influenced by the book.
- I have established that Fritz Lenz, in a passage of the book he wrote, said that the biological framing of the work was that of natural selection, with which they interpreted genetic and other claims made in the book. He also, explicitly, named the scientific orientation they used in their book as Darwinism, explicitly tying their book and its claims to the foremost theory of Charles Darwin. I will note that Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer were the two members of the trio who officially joined the Nazi Party and enjoyed great scientific advancement and benefits from that, both directly participated in Nazi eugenics in both its scientific theory and political application, Fritz Lenz saying things, such as, " As important as the external features for their evaluation is the lineage of individuals, a blond Jew is also a Jew. Yes, there are Jews who have most of the external features of the Nordic race, but who nevertheless display Jewish mental tendencies. The legislation of the National Socialist state therefore properly defines a Jew not by external race characteristics, but by descent." which by his own scientific declaration must be taken to be a claim made out of his belief in natural selection.
I could come up with page after page of such statements made by him and the other two which would be of a similar nature and orientation that would show, in no uncertain terms, what flowed from their Darwism. I will later translate the one I've already given in German, now that I've broken my own rule against translating, I may as well give you that, too.
- I have established that among other things in the book taken from people who have, as well, in their own words, identified their biological framing as that of natural selection and, in most cases identifying natural selection by its other name, Darwinism, that one of the most explicitly relevant to proving my case was a 1925 paper by the eminent second-generation Darwinist, Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul (about whom I know very little) which is explicitly a work of scientific antisemitism. The Problem of Alien Immigration Into Great Britain, Illustrated By An Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children. I have given the passage in which Baur,Fischer, Lenz used that paper by Pearson and Moul to explicitly claim that "eastern" Jews were flowing into Germany and posing the same kind of "danger" to Germans and Germany and that it was a "now burning" - which might be also translated "most burning" - danger to the German people.
- I have, as well, in his own words proven that Karl Pearson said that his framing of biology was the same as that of Baur, Fischer, Lenz, natural selection which he, as well, explicitly identified with the person of Charles Darwin. I could and will, give example after example of that and the truly depraved and Nazi like assertions it led the British, English speaking gentleman Pearson, to make scientific claims that sound like the coldest, cruelest of Hollywood stock villain depraved Nazi, only he said it in the sterile language of Brit science, with a veneer of numbers so the superficial won't understand that that's what he's saying. No doubt, it sounded more anodyne to German speakers who could read Baur, Fischer, Lenz in the months and years before the Nazis cut to the meat of the matter and, with the help of, at least, Fischer and Lenz, made it as real as can be in military and genocidal terms.
I have proven my case, the scientific basis of the Nazi eugenics that rapidly turned to Nazi genocide was, in their own words, the product of their belief in natural selection, which they, in their own words, called what a belief in natural selection is, Darwinism. I have in numerous posts over the last seven or so years, established that such thinking permeates the writing of Charles Darwin and those scientific authorities he approved and cited positively in his scientific writing, especially Ernst Haeckel and the teacher of Karl Pearson, Francis Galton, including claims of the beneficial effects to the killers and their families and societies of genocide, the extermination of entire human populations as well as the internal "dangers" of allowing poor people and the disabled to live long enough to have children. What the Nazis found there had been there since, at least, the 1860s.
And about those numbers, in that Cavendish lecture that Pearson gave, the kind of stuff he used as "data" to make up his numbers is of the typical kind of dodgy observation that Darwin, himself, based his science in. Pearson relies on such things as police reports and police records of servant girls who were insufficiently docile and obedient to please their Victorian-Edwardian era masters and mistresses and what they got up to when not working to base his hard, scientific seeming science in. As I've made this long study which is now closing in on two decades, I have to say the standards of such crap being called and treated as hard science has been rather a shocking eye-opener. While I know that effort to turn what might be more honestly considered idle gossip as found through the framing of the mostly men, often quite conservative or reactionary gossipers into "data" in the way Karl Pearson and those who would make behavior the object of scientific study, it is no better than the source of such junk science. But as it is credentialed, published scientists who make those claims, it is seldom treated with the level of critical skepticism that such men of science pretend they always apply.
I will close by saying that the guy who made the challenge, a play-lefty American, college-credentialed and member of a self-styled "brain - trust" is about as open to the evidence as the House Republican caucus has been in the Impeachment of Donald Trump. As I have said, one of my greatest shocks since going online and interacting with what I once mistook as my fellow lefties of the college-credentialed type was how much so many of them had in common with the crudest, vilest, most reactionary right-wingers. And I don't just mean the blog-rat variety of "leftists" I mean some of those who have careers in journalism and in whatever you want to call online podcasting and Youtubing. I think, in the end, it comes down to the same thing, whether or not you value the truth as opposed to convenient, congenial lies. In the end, it's not even a question of information, it's a question of moral choice.
In a related though separate exchange I had with a blog-comment level racist this week, after I'd provided the "proof" he demanded, he parried by saying, "It's like my mother used to say, you can't fix stupid," to which I said I was certain he'd given his mother many an occasion to say that to him.
Update: Re-reading this, I see that, in the event that some defender of Darwin notes that the paper of Pearson comes two years after Hitler read the first edition of the book, that the book and, as I proved, its authors were of continuing influence on Nazi policy, the edition of the book I took that citation from was 1932, before the Nazis took power and before the man who wrote it, Fritz Lenz was helping to shape Nazi policy against the Jews, up to and including the earliest part of their genocide, the 1935 eugnics laws Lenz gave his scientific approval. As can be seen in the careers of Fischer and Lenz, after the Nazis took power, they relied on their science informed by the science of such people as Pearson, the explicitly Darwinist eugenics of Paul Popenoe and Leonard Darwin (both, as well, have numerous citations in" B.F.L") to make Nazi policy as enacted. When arguing with the champions of Darwin, it's essential to anticipate which of the several dodges they will use to distort or deny the evidence that proves the case.
Friday, December 20, 2019
Idle Gossip
I don't know, Shit-For-Brains hasn't said anything about these posts my guess is that he realizes that even his lying can't deny what those things mean and, believe me, there are lots more where those came from. I answered the challenge and it is indisputable, right from the Nazi scientists, themselves and their conventional and undeniably Darwinist collaborators in the English speaking peoples.
As to the thing you sent me, I couldn't possibly care less what DWD says about me. I did him a favor and read one of his pieces of fiction once. It wasn't even unimpressive. He's the kind of would-be writer who mistakes dyspepsia and the presentation of the world as unremittingly awful for profundity. It's what an English language writer does when he's got absolutely nothing to say. I don't know but it could be a habit they got from the Swedes.
What SFB says is even less interesting.
As to the thing you sent me, I couldn't possibly care less what DWD says about me. I did him a favor and read one of his pieces of fiction once. It wasn't even unimpressive. He's the kind of would-be writer who mistakes dyspepsia and the presentation of the world as unremittingly awful for profundity. It's what an English language writer does when he's got absolutely nothing to say. I don't know but it could be a habit they got from the Swedes.
What SFB says is even less interesting.
Friday after Advent 3
Lord Jesus who risked all for the future of the world, let us be your good disciples. In your name, Amen
Psalm 40
Zecharaiah 7
Revelation 5:6-14
Matthew 25:14-30
The oracle of Zechariah recites the "normative" history of ancient Israel in two familiar stages. First, Israel failed to obey the prophetic ethic of justice for the vulnerable. The result was a scattering in exile and displacement. But second, because of God's passionate love for Israel and for Jerusalem, there will be wondrous, joyous restoration of well-being in Jerusalem.
In the reading from Revelation, this "normative" narrative of ancient Israel is seen to be reperformed in the life of Jesus. It is Jesus who was slain, by whose death every "tribe and language and people and nation" is saved. That "slaughtered" Lamb is now "worthy" to receive power, wealth, wisdom, ight, honor, glory, and blessing; the words pile up in a doxological surplus of well-being and joy. This rhetoric of "slain" and "worthy" bespeaks crucifixion and resurrection that is a reperformance of Israel's exile and restoration. It is no wonder that all the saints praise the one who opens the scroll and enacts the future.
So what about our future? Shall we play it safe and hunker down in the status quo? The parable of Jesus is a celebration of risk in obedience to the master who risked his life for the future of the world. The parable is not about managing money or calculation of income or interest. It is about life risks that reperform the risk of our own life that Jesus has willingly undertaken. If risk is the order of the day, then Advent consists of breaking out of business as usual in order to receive God's future. The prophetic norm of mercy for the vulnerable (widows, orphans, immigrants, the poor) continues to be a starting point for the risk of glad obedience.
Psalm 40
Zecharaiah 7
Revelation 5:6-14
Matthew 25:14-30
The oracle of Zechariah recites the "normative" history of ancient Israel in two familiar stages. First, Israel failed to obey the prophetic ethic of justice for the vulnerable. The result was a scattering in exile and displacement. But second, because of God's passionate love for Israel and for Jerusalem, there will be wondrous, joyous restoration of well-being in Jerusalem.
In the reading from Revelation, this "normative" narrative of ancient Israel is seen to be reperformed in the life of Jesus. It is Jesus who was slain, by whose death every "tribe and language and people and nation" is saved. That "slaughtered" Lamb is now "worthy" to receive power, wealth, wisdom, ight, honor, glory, and blessing; the words pile up in a doxological surplus of well-being and joy. This rhetoric of "slain" and "worthy" bespeaks crucifixion and resurrection that is a reperformance of Israel's exile and restoration. It is no wonder that all the saints praise the one who opens the scroll and enacts the future.
So what about our future? Shall we play it safe and hunker down in the status quo? The parable of Jesus is a celebration of risk in obedience to the master who risked his life for the future of the world. The parable is not about managing money or calculation of income or interest. It is about life risks that reperform the risk of our own life that Jesus has willingly undertaken. If risk is the order of the day, then Advent consists of breaking out of business as usual in order to receive God's future. The prophetic norm of mercy for the vulnerable (widows, orphans, immigrants, the poor) continues to be a starting point for the risk of glad obedience.
Dave Holland Quintet - Looking up
Saxophone: Chris Potter
Trombone: Robin Eubanks
Vibraphone: Steve Nelson
Bass: Dave Holland
Drums: Billy Kilson
Hate Mail - There Are So Many Ways For A Dishonest Person To Republican-like Lie About What's Right There In Front Of Them
I cannot find an English translation of "Baur, Fischer, Lenz" online so I'm going to do something I've always been reluctant to do, first because I'm not a great translator and, second, because Darwin's champions quibbling over translations is one of their more often resorted to means of obfuscation. I'm going to translate a passage, from page 5-6 of Volume II, from the section Selection In Human Beings, The Concept and Form of Selection
From the facts established by modern biology it follows by logical necessity that natural selection also plays a decisive role in species arising. The leading geneticists of our time, Morgan, Baur and many others have been unequivocal in this matter. If there are nevertheless certain scholars who believe that they must reject "Darwinism", this only shows how the consideration of certain "foresight" leads to confusion. The socialist social-hygienist Grotjahn accused me and other racial hygienists of deducing our theories from the teachings of "Darwinism.
Now we hold that Darwin's natural selection theory is completely assured by the biological facts; but even if Darwin had never lived, the immediate experience gained from humans is still the most important way in which the meaning of natural selection is revealed. Compared to that objection raised by Grotjahn I am compelled to emphasize that the explanations in this book are directly found in the experience of human populations. Only those who ignore tangible facts or the most elementary laws of logic can fail to recognize that natural selection has an unmittigated influence on the character of the species.
I would note, in light of what I wrote about the discovery of epigenetic inheritance and genetic drift and chance and contingency any claims of the kind made by Darwinists from the start are logically incoherent. All of those factors and others which I'd bet you anything must be there, some of which Richard Lewontin has noted are the product of indeterminacy "on the level of quantum indetermincy" (if my memory is accurate) undermines the entire claim.
As an aside, I would like to know how indeterminacy can be a "force" of the kind these other mechanisms of evolutionary change are, how can something of indeterminate character and strength or frequency constitute a "force" though I am more than ready to believe it has a decisive role in leading to the forms of individuals and to the matter of the evolution of species. I don't think there is any way to do science around such indeterminate factors. Maybe as a theoretical problem of statistics. But who knows, they being indeterminate, if they've determined enough about them to assign numbers to them?
However, that's not my foremost purpose here, which is to demonstrate that the book which we know, beyond any dispute, Hitler and his Nazi colleagues were informed by* as they developed their racist, antisemtic eugenics and, then, genocide, was, by the declaration of the three eminent biologists who wrote it, a thoroughly Darwinist text.
That passage is from a part of the book authored by Fritz Lenz (as noted earlier today, someone Karl Pearson worked with and cited). You don't have to take my word for who he was, here's what it says at the Holocaust Museum about him.
Dr. Fritz Lenz
A medically trained geneticist, after 1933 Lenz headed the Department of Racial Hygiene at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and sat on the “Committee of Experts for Population and Racial Policy,” which endorsed Nazi eugenic laws. As early as 1917, Lenz had envisioned Germany’s future in expanded eastern territories. Viewing Slavs as an undesirable, racial element that threatened to “overrun the superior [German] Volk,” Lenz advised the SS in 1940: “The resettlement of the eastern zone is… the most consequential task of racial policy. It will determine the racial character of the population living there for centuries to come.”
[POSTWAR CAREER] From 1946 to1957, Lenz was Director of the Institute for Human Genetics, University of Göttingen. He continued to publish into the 1970s. Lenz died in 1976.
* Hitler read this book [Baur, Fischer, Lenz] while imprisoned in 1923 [where he composed Mein Kampf] and referred to it occasionally in his own publications and lectures on "racial purity." In 1933, Hitler appointed [Eugen] Fischer rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin (now Humbolt University). His theories about miscegenation influenced not only the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 but also the attitude of the Nazis toward "non-Aryans" in general.
Ingred L. Anderson, Ethics and Suffereing since the Holocaust: Making Ethics "First Philsopy" in Levinas, Wiesel and Rubenstein
Here's what the Holocaust Museum site says about Fischer:
Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics from 1927 to 1942, Fischer authored a 1913 study of the Mischlinge (racially mixed) children of Dutch men and Hottentot women in German southwest Africa. Fischer opposed “racial mixing,” arguing that “Negro blood” was of “lesser value” and that mixing it with “white blood” would bring about the demise of European culture. After 1933, Fischer adapted his institute’s activities to serve Nazi antisemitic policies. He taught courses for SS doctors, served as a judge on Berlin’s Hereditary Health Court, and provided hundreds of opinions on the paternity and “racial purity” of individuals, including the Mischlinge offspring of Jewish and non-Jewish German couples.
[POSTWAR CAREER] Fischer retired in 1942 as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. After the war he worked to secure university teaching positions for many of his former students (including Otmar von Verschuer). As professor emeritus at the university of Freiburg, Fischer continued to lecture and publish articles in anthropological journals. He died in 1967.
I haven't found anything to indicate that science ever imposed any sanction on him for his part in the Nazi genocides.
From the facts established by modern biology it follows by logical necessity that natural selection also plays a decisive role in species arising. The leading geneticists of our time, Morgan, Baur and many others have been unequivocal in this matter. If there are nevertheless certain scholars who believe that they must reject "Darwinism", this only shows how the consideration of certain "foresight" leads to confusion. The socialist social-hygienist Grotjahn accused me and other racial hygienists of deducing our theories from the teachings of "Darwinism.
Now we hold that Darwin's natural selection theory is completely assured by the biological facts; but even if Darwin had never lived, the immediate experience gained from humans is still the most important way in which the meaning of natural selection is revealed. Compared to that objection raised by Grotjahn I am compelled to emphasize that the explanations in this book are directly found in the experience of human populations. Only those who ignore tangible facts or the most elementary laws of logic can fail to recognize that natural selection has an unmittigated influence on the character of the species.
I would note, in light of what I wrote about the discovery of epigenetic inheritance and genetic drift and chance and contingency any claims of the kind made by Darwinists from the start are logically incoherent. All of those factors and others which I'd bet you anything must be there, some of which Richard Lewontin has noted are the product of indeterminacy "on the level of quantum indetermincy" (if my memory is accurate) undermines the entire claim.
As an aside, I would like to know how indeterminacy can be a "force" of the kind these other mechanisms of evolutionary change are, how can something of indeterminate character and strength or frequency constitute a "force" though I am more than ready to believe it has a decisive role in leading to the forms of individuals and to the matter of the evolution of species. I don't think there is any way to do science around such indeterminate factors. Maybe as a theoretical problem of statistics. But who knows, they being indeterminate, if they've determined enough about them to assign numbers to them?
However, that's not my foremost purpose here, which is to demonstrate that the book which we know, beyond any dispute, Hitler and his Nazi colleagues were informed by* as they developed their racist, antisemtic eugenics and, then, genocide, was, by the declaration of the three eminent biologists who wrote it, a thoroughly Darwinist text.
That passage is from a part of the book authored by Fritz Lenz (as noted earlier today, someone Karl Pearson worked with and cited). You don't have to take my word for who he was, here's what it says at the Holocaust Museum about him.
Dr. Fritz Lenz
A medically trained geneticist, after 1933 Lenz headed the Department of Racial Hygiene at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and sat on the “Committee of Experts for Population and Racial Policy,” which endorsed Nazi eugenic laws. As early as 1917, Lenz had envisioned Germany’s future in expanded eastern territories. Viewing Slavs as an undesirable, racial element that threatened to “overrun the superior [German] Volk,” Lenz advised the SS in 1940: “The resettlement of the eastern zone is… the most consequential task of racial policy. It will determine the racial character of the population living there for centuries to come.”
[POSTWAR CAREER] From 1946 to1957, Lenz was Director of the Institute for Human Genetics, University of Göttingen. He continued to publish into the 1970s. Lenz died in 1976.
Ingred L. Anderson, Ethics and Suffereing since the Holocaust: Making Ethics "First Philsopy" in Levinas, Wiesel and Rubenstein
Here's what the Holocaust Museum site says about Fischer:
Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics from 1927 to 1942, Fischer authored a 1913 study of the Mischlinge (racially mixed) children of Dutch men and Hottentot women in German southwest Africa. Fischer opposed “racial mixing,” arguing that “Negro blood” was of “lesser value” and that mixing it with “white blood” would bring about the demise of European culture. After 1933, Fischer adapted his institute’s activities to serve Nazi antisemitic policies. He taught courses for SS doctors, served as a judge on Berlin’s Hereditary Health Court, and provided hundreds of opinions on the paternity and “racial purity” of individuals, including the Mischlinge offspring of Jewish and non-Jewish German couples.
[POSTWAR CAREER] Fischer retired in 1942 as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. After the war he worked to secure university teaching positions for many of his former students (including Otmar von Verschuer). As professor emeritus at the university of Freiburg, Fischer continued to lecture and publish articles in anthropological journals. He died in 1967.
I haven't found anything to indicate that science ever imposed any sanction on him for his part in the Nazi genocides.
No, There's No Honestly Denying That Karl Pearson Was Darwinism Personified In All His Antisemtic, Nazi-Collaborating Scientific Self
Several days ago, in response to an objection, I pointed out that every single time I'd guessed where I would find a connection between Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection and eugenics, from deceptively anodyne to massively genocidal, I'd found it in the form of primary documentation. That is absolutely not surprising. Eugenics is a rather simple and logical conclusion to be drawn from the claims of Darwin, founded as they are, in turn, in the claims of Malthus, founded in turn, on the British class system. Eugenics, from the start, as soon as Francis Galton read On the Origin of Species- by his own declaration his inspiration in inventing eugenics* generated the idea that the existence of "inferior" people, individuals - the disabled, the poor and in groups - whichever group of whichever minority the always either affluent or aspiring to affluence and, in the beginning, always White early adopters of Darwinism held to be inferior to, inevitably, their own, was a danger to the "superior." I have never found a Darwinist express themselves on the biological inferiority of whatever group they believed themselves to be a member of. Odd, that.
When I took up the challenge made to me to "prove that there was a link between Charles Darwin and the Nazi genocide of the Jews" I knew where to look because I knew Hitler had used the infamous book that goes by the nickname "Baur, Fischer, Lenz" mentioned here the past two days, as his major source of scientific information. And I knew that it being, in its time, a "modern" book of science, that it was certain to stress the "latest findings" over older sources, though it is certain that the theory that Baur, Fischer and Lenz promulgated in that book was derived from the theory of natural selection.
I also knew about Pearson and Moul's antisemitic scientific paper of 1925 which, when I read it read like a more orderly presentation of the very ideas that Hitler and the other Nazis asserted in regard to Jews and, especially the biological, economic and national dangers that the British scientists Pearson and Moul claimed, as science, with numbers and with Eugen Fischer's contribution to their work. I knew that that paper must have been known to them in the later editions of the infamous book which continued to inform the Nazis as they were going from eugenics to genocide.
I also know the dishonest tactics of the champions of St. Charles Darwin, they will deny the most obvious and glaring facts in primary documentation, the words of Darwin, the words of those he cites such as Ernst Haeckel (a proto-Nazi of the most obvious kind) and Francis Galton - indisputably the inventor of Eugenics, and the likes of Thomas Huxley whose racist, gleefully genocidal predictions in his 1865 article written for popular consumption, Emancipation Black and White is so infamous that even the Darwinist hack Richard Dawkins has had to address its vileness in contemporary polite society.
So I anticipated it being denied that Karl Pearson was one of the foremost Darwinists of the second generation of Darwinists, the student of Francis Galton, a man whose eugenics writing Charles Darwin confirmed as science in his citations in The Descent of Man and by the glowing, effusively praising letter he sent his cousin on having his wife reading Hereditary Genius to him as he was too unwell to read it for himself. Darwin being such a great example of enhanced "fitness" that he spent much of his adulthood as a valetudinarian - some suspect he had a raging case of lactose intolerance that the man of science doesn't seem to have noticed the cause of even as he gorged himself on milk products. As someone who developed lactose intolerance in middle-age, you'd have to be especially dull to not notice what was making you sick in that way. In terms of his own claim to fame, his theory, it certainly didn't occur to him to voluntarily limit the number of offspring he'd pass his frequent ill health on to. Curbs on reproduction, that was for the poor and the officially disabled, not someone like him. Anyway, his cousin Galton had scientifically bestowed superiority on their shared family so that let him off the hook for practicing sexual continence. Odd, that.
Anyway, Karl Pearson certainly was considered to be an eminent Darwinist, as I noted yesterday, he was the fourth recipient of the Darwin Medal given by the Royal Society, a medal given to, among others, Francis Darwin, another of Darwin's eugenicist sons. We also know that in the period that Darwinism's many problems led to a slump in its accptance by scientists, Pearson saw himself as a keeper of the flame. Here from his truly putrid 1912 Cavendish lecture, Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics:
. . . But there is undoubtedly a fly in the amber, and if the alliance between eugenics and medicine, as a whole, is to be a real one, we cannot for a moment overlook a possible source of divergence between them.
I belong to a school which still believes that Darwin taught us the truth. I think it is rather the fashion nowadays to dismiss its views, not by meeting its arguments, but by describing it as "mid-Victorian." When in literature, science, and statemanship this twentieth century has produced minds which out-top the " mid- Victorians," then it will be time enough to reply to a mere nick- name. Let me, even at the risk of talking about the familiar, sketch for you the broad outlines of Darwin's theory of evolutionary progress. The individual better fitted to its environment lived longer than its fellows, had more offspring, and these, inheriting its better fitness, raised the type of the race. The environment against which the individual had to struggle here was not only formed by the other members of its species, not only by its physical surroundings, but by the germs of disease of all types. According to Darwin — and some of us still believe him to be right — the ascent of man, physical and mental, was brought about by this survival of the fitter. Now, if you are going lo take Darwinism as your theory of life and apply it to human problems, you must not only believe it to be true, but you must set to, and demonstrate that it actually applies.
If you are puzzled by the first sentence I excerpted, the "possible source of divergence" between, you should first read the definition of what he means by "eugenics".
Examine with me for a moment the definition of my science : " National eugenics is the study of those agencies under social control, which may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally."
That is what eugenics proposes to do, to control aspects of human socieity to make up for what Francis Galton and, agreeing with him, Charles Darwin held was the impediment of natural selection killing off the unfit by civilization, human morality and striving for well being. If you doubt that, read The Descent of Man where he says exactly that and read his citations, particularly the many he made of Galton and Haeckel.
What kinds of problems created by medical treatment does Karl Pearson see needed to be addressed because it kept people alive and healthy and able to have children. I think I'm going to write a few posts on this lecture by Pearson because it is such an exposition of the proto-Nazi thinking that was current in British science (not to mention American and other English language science) in such obvous depravity before the Nazis cited Pearson and other English language sources in the very scientific publications that the Nazis read and used as the basis of their genocidal policies. Not only did Nazis read them but when there was a Nazi party to join, so many eminent scientists joined up and contributed their science to the Nazi cause. It was certainly one of the main motives in the creation of the post-war coverup of the relationship of natural selection, Darwinism to Nazism to pretend that there were not English speaking scientists who were thinking the same things and providing them with the ideas they mixed with their own to produce the genocides and wars of the Nazi era. Pearson's lecture is also important to this matter in that it proves not only was he collaborating with the founders of Nazi eugenic theory, Fritz Lenz, Alfred Ploetz, he seems, when given the chance between taking a British researcher whose results disconfirms Darwin's theoretical claims to prefer the developing Nazi eugenics of the likes of Alfred Ploetz. But that's for later.
I will also note that I am still in the same habit I described governed my reading of Darwin, The Descent of Man and looking up citations, in this the citations of Pearson and Leonard Darwin, Paul Popenoe, and others in the book that taught biology to Hitler as he dictated Mein Kampf and its later editions that instructed the Nazis' genocide program, "Baur, Fischer, Lenz," It's rather hair raising, even to someone like me who isn't surprised at what I'm finding.
*Wilhelm Schallmeyer, often called the man who established eugenics in Germany, also credited his reading of On the Origin of Species as the source of his eugenics independent of Galton, as noted by Leonard Darwin in April 1939.
When I took up the challenge made to me to "prove that there was a link between Charles Darwin and the Nazi genocide of the Jews" I knew where to look because I knew Hitler had used the infamous book that goes by the nickname "Baur, Fischer, Lenz" mentioned here the past two days, as his major source of scientific information. And I knew that it being, in its time, a "modern" book of science, that it was certain to stress the "latest findings" over older sources, though it is certain that the theory that Baur, Fischer and Lenz promulgated in that book was derived from the theory of natural selection.
I also knew about Pearson and Moul's antisemitic scientific paper of 1925 which, when I read it read like a more orderly presentation of the very ideas that Hitler and the other Nazis asserted in regard to Jews and, especially the biological, economic and national dangers that the British scientists Pearson and Moul claimed, as science, with numbers and with Eugen Fischer's contribution to their work. I knew that that paper must have been known to them in the later editions of the infamous book which continued to inform the Nazis as they were going from eugenics to genocide.
I also know the dishonest tactics of the champions of St. Charles Darwin, they will deny the most obvious and glaring facts in primary documentation, the words of Darwin, the words of those he cites such as Ernst Haeckel (a proto-Nazi of the most obvious kind) and Francis Galton - indisputably the inventor of Eugenics, and the likes of Thomas Huxley whose racist, gleefully genocidal predictions in his 1865 article written for popular consumption, Emancipation Black and White is so infamous that even the Darwinist hack Richard Dawkins has had to address its vileness in contemporary polite society.
So I anticipated it being denied that Karl Pearson was one of the foremost Darwinists of the second generation of Darwinists, the student of Francis Galton, a man whose eugenics writing Charles Darwin confirmed as science in his citations in The Descent of Man and by the glowing, effusively praising letter he sent his cousin on having his wife reading Hereditary Genius to him as he was too unwell to read it for himself. Darwin being such a great example of enhanced "fitness" that he spent much of his adulthood as a valetudinarian - some suspect he had a raging case of lactose intolerance that the man of science doesn't seem to have noticed the cause of even as he gorged himself on milk products. As someone who developed lactose intolerance in middle-age, you'd have to be especially dull to not notice what was making you sick in that way. In terms of his own claim to fame, his theory, it certainly didn't occur to him to voluntarily limit the number of offspring he'd pass his frequent ill health on to. Curbs on reproduction, that was for the poor and the officially disabled, not someone like him. Anyway, his cousin Galton had scientifically bestowed superiority on their shared family so that let him off the hook for practicing sexual continence. Odd, that.
Anyway, Karl Pearson certainly was considered to be an eminent Darwinist, as I noted yesterday, he was the fourth recipient of the Darwin Medal given by the Royal Society, a medal given to, among others, Francis Darwin, another of Darwin's eugenicist sons. We also know that in the period that Darwinism's many problems led to a slump in its accptance by scientists, Pearson saw himself as a keeper of the flame. Here from his truly putrid 1912 Cavendish lecture, Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics:
. . . But there is undoubtedly a fly in the amber, and if the alliance between eugenics and medicine, as a whole, is to be a real one, we cannot for a moment overlook a possible source of divergence between them.
I belong to a school which still believes that Darwin taught us the truth. I think it is rather the fashion nowadays to dismiss its views, not by meeting its arguments, but by describing it as "mid-Victorian." When in literature, science, and statemanship this twentieth century has produced minds which out-top the " mid- Victorians," then it will be time enough to reply to a mere nick- name. Let me, even at the risk of talking about the familiar, sketch for you the broad outlines of Darwin's theory of evolutionary progress. The individual better fitted to its environment lived longer than its fellows, had more offspring, and these, inheriting its better fitness, raised the type of the race. The environment against which the individual had to struggle here was not only formed by the other members of its species, not only by its physical surroundings, but by the germs of disease of all types. According to Darwin — and some of us still believe him to be right — the ascent of man, physical and mental, was brought about by this survival of the fitter. Now, if you are going lo take Darwinism as your theory of life and apply it to human problems, you must not only believe it to be true, but you must set to, and demonstrate that it actually applies.
If you are puzzled by the first sentence I excerpted, the "possible source of divergence" between, you should first read the definition of what he means by "eugenics".
Examine with me for a moment the definition of my science : " National eugenics is the study of those agencies under social control, which may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally."
That is what eugenics proposes to do, to control aspects of human socieity to make up for what Francis Galton and, agreeing with him, Charles Darwin held was the impediment of natural selection killing off the unfit by civilization, human morality and striving for well being. If you doubt that, read The Descent of Man where he says exactly that and read his citations, particularly the many he made of Galton and Haeckel.
What kinds of problems created by medical treatment does Karl Pearson see needed to be addressed because it kept people alive and healthy and able to have children. I think I'm going to write a few posts on this lecture by Pearson because it is such an exposition of the proto-Nazi thinking that was current in British science (not to mention American and other English language science) in such obvous depravity before the Nazis cited Pearson and other English language sources in the very scientific publications that the Nazis read and used as the basis of their genocidal policies. Not only did Nazis read them but when there was a Nazi party to join, so many eminent scientists joined up and contributed their science to the Nazi cause. It was certainly one of the main motives in the creation of the post-war coverup of the relationship of natural selection, Darwinism to Nazism to pretend that there were not English speaking scientists who were thinking the same things and providing them with the ideas they mixed with their own to produce the genocides and wars of the Nazi era. Pearson's lecture is also important to this matter in that it proves not only was he collaborating with the founders of Nazi eugenic theory, Fritz Lenz, Alfred Ploetz, he seems, when given the chance between taking a British researcher whose results disconfirms Darwin's theoretical claims to prefer the developing Nazi eugenics of the likes of Alfred Ploetz. But that's for later.
I will also note that I am still in the same habit I described governed my reading of Darwin, The Descent of Man and looking up citations, in this the citations of Pearson and Leonard Darwin, Paul Popenoe, and others in the book that taught biology to Hitler as he dictated Mein Kampf and its later editions that instructed the Nazis' genocide program, "Baur, Fischer, Lenz," It's rather hair raising, even to someone like me who isn't surprised at what I'm finding.
*Wilhelm Schallmeyer, often called the man who established eugenics in Germany, also credited his reading of On the Origin of Species as the source of his eugenics independent of Galton, as noted by Leonard Darwin in April 1939.
Thursday, December 19, 2019
Thursday after Advent 3
God of our future, forgive our foolish lack of preparation for your newness. Let us be prepared for your future that undoes all the present tense. In his name, Amen.
Psalm 50
Zechariah 4:1-14
Revelation 4
Matthew 25:1-13
In these readings, God's future is hidden and unavailable. The oracle in Zechariah reflects a particular moment in the history of ancient Israel in the midst of exile. With the collapse of royal governance in Jerusalem, the small colony of Judah was jointly administered by a governor (Zerubbabel) and a priest (Joshua). It was "the day of small things," when historical possibility was modest indeed for God's people. But the two anointed (governor and priest) were nonetheless the carriers of God's possibility. The governor, moreover, was aliened to the house of David, thus keeping royal expectations alive.
That royal expectation, in Christian tradition, was assigned to Jesus, said to be of "the house of David." The reading in Revelation offers another vision of the divine throne room that is permeated with doxology. The Holy One, in this particular rhetoric, holds a scroll that is the clue to God's future in the world. And the croll can be opened only by "the Lion of the tribe of Judah," that is an heir to David, that is, Jesus. Only Jesus knows the clue to the future that God will surely enact. It is implicit in Christian confession that Jesus, as clue to our future, finds that future in obedience to crucifixion and in surprise in resurrection. That is the access point to the future that only the Lion (become the Lamb) knows.
The Gospel reading concerns readiness for the future that the "bridegroom" (Jesus) will disclose and perform. These lessons remind us that God's future is not a future of wealth, power or security. It is rather a future of costly obedience and inexplicable surprise. Without attentiveness to the "bridegroom" we are likely to be foolish and unprepared.
Walter Brueggemann: Gift and Task
Psalm 50
Zechariah 4:1-14
Revelation 4
Matthew 25:1-13
In these readings, God's future is hidden and unavailable. The oracle in Zechariah reflects a particular moment in the history of ancient Israel in the midst of exile. With the collapse of royal governance in Jerusalem, the small colony of Judah was jointly administered by a governor (Zerubbabel) and a priest (Joshua). It was "the day of small things," when historical possibility was modest indeed for God's people. But the two anointed (governor and priest) were nonetheless the carriers of God's possibility. The governor, moreover, was aliened to the house of David, thus keeping royal expectations alive.
That royal expectation, in Christian tradition, was assigned to Jesus, said to be of "the house of David." The reading in Revelation offers another vision of the divine throne room that is permeated with doxology. The Holy One, in this particular rhetoric, holds a scroll that is the clue to God's future in the world. And the croll can be opened only by "the Lion of the tribe of Judah," that is an heir to David, that is, Jesus. Only Jesus knows the clue to the future that God will surely enact. It is implicit in Christian confession that Jesus, as clue to our future, finds that future in obedience to crucifixion and in surprise in resurrection. That is the access point to the future that only the Lion (become the Lamb) knows.
The Gospel reading concerns readiness for the future that the "bridegroom" (Jesus) will disclose and perform. These lessons remind us that God's future is not a future of wealth, power or security. It is rather a future of costly obedience and inexplicable surprise. Without attentiveness to the "bridegroom" we are likely to be foolish and unprepared.
Walter Brueggemann: Gift and Task
George Mason Foresaw A Treasonous President Collaborating With A Corrupt Senate Of His Party
Nancy Pelosi is a brilliant politician, the greatest Speaker of the House during my lifetime and that goes back to back to Sam Rayburn, so she can be forgiven for not knowing in her weekly press briefing there was one of the founders who foresaw a corrupt president working fist and glove with a corrupt Senate as we see with Trump and the Senate Republicans, George Mason.
Mason had other objections to the Constitution. He disliked the commerce power, the treaty-making provisions, the continuation of the African slave trade for at least twenty years, and the power of the president to grant pardons especially "to those whom he had secretly instigated to commit" crimes and "thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt." These complaints about the Constitution were magnified by the lack of a Bill of Rights. Mason feared that the Senate and the President would combine "to accomplish what usurpations they pleased upon the rights and liberties of the people," while the federal judiciary would absorb and destroy the judiciaries of the several states."
Paul Finkelman: James Madison and the Bill of Rights: A Reluctant Paternity
Professor Finkelman wrote that a long time before Trump-McConnell came to power, anyone who read it must have it come to mind at least several times a week, now.
Mason had other objections to the Constitution. He disliked the commerce power, the treaty-making provisions, the continuation of the African slave trade for at least twenty years, and the power of the president to grant pardons especially "to those whom he had secretly instigated to commit" crimes and "thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt." These complaints about the Constitution were magnified by the lack of a Bill of Rights. Mason feared that the Senate and the President would combine "to accomplish what usurpations they pleased upon the rights and liberties of the people," while the federal judiciary would absorb and destroy the judiciaries of the several states."
Paul Finkelman: James Madison and the Bill of Rights: A Reluctant Paternity
Professor Finkelman wrote that a long time before Trump-McConnell came to power, anyone who read it must have it come to mind at least several times a week, now.
Update
This is an Update that is such a shameful omission on my part that it needs to be a separate post. Eugen Fischer, the Nazi scientist and colleague of the Darwinist Karl Pearson in the 1920s was, two decades earlier, a scientific member of the German genocidal policy in Africa in 1906, in what is, today Namibia. Scientific work in which he, personally, did experiments on Africans held in death camps and from which he shipped scientific samples of those killed back to European universities, many of those looted body parts from his victims, the focus of political and social pressure on the University science departments for them to send the back to the place their owners were murdered.
I would count it as a virtual certainty that Karl Pearson would have known about that as he wrote the 1925 paper, using the tool of racial classification he got from his scientific colleague, Fischer, to get results that the Nazi Fischer would cite in the book that I have been discussing. I will look to see if Pearson ever mentioned it in his papers, as I can find online or whatever evidence there might be of his awareness of Fischer's pre-Nazi genocidal activity for which he never paid a single bit of professional cost.
Eugen Fischer cites his own findings from the African genocide to assert, within science, that intermarriage of different racial groups led to a dangerous degeneration of the "superior" population. My scare quotes, not science's.
I would count it as a virtual certainty that Karl Pearson would have known about that as he wrote the 1925 paper, using the tool of racial classification he got from his scientific colleague, Fischer, to get results that the Nazi Fischer would cite in the book that I have been discussing. I will look to see if Pearson ever mentioned it in his papers, as I can find online or whatever evidence there might be of his awareness of Fischer's pre-Nazi genocidal activity for which he never paid a single bit of professional cost.
Eugen Fischer cites his own findings from the African genocide to assert, within science, that intermarriage of different racial groups led to a dangerous degeneration of the "superior" population. My scare quotes, not science's.
Hate Mail
Oh, no siree, baby. I nailed the argument yesterday when I produced the citation in Baur, Fischer, Lenz, THE NAZI SCIENTIFIC AUTHORITY IN THEIR RACIAL AND NOT LONG AFTER GENOCIDAL POLICY, citing the 1925 paper by Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul on their scientific assertion of a. the biological degeneracy of Polish and Russian Jews and, b. the biological necessity of keeping them out of Britain because of the alleged danger they posed to the biological soundness of the British population. I produced, in the original German them saying that what Pearson and Moul said in that paper couldn't be of more "burning concern" for German policy concerning "eastern" Jews in the very years the Nazis were using that book to inform their plans for genocide.
There was no one in the world in 1925 or 1932 who could be said to be more a Darwinist, a disciple of Darwin than Karl Pearson, except, possibly, Leonard Darwin, Darwin's own son.. And unlike Pearson, Leonard Darwin was not a scientist.
Karl Pearson, most famous as a statistical geneticist was, if memory serves, the fourth person awarded the Darwin Medal by the Royal Society, in 1899. He was honored for furthering the work of Charles Darwin. I will grant that, a student, not of Darwin but of his cousin Francis Galton, Pearson ranked his own teacher slightly higher than he did the mathematically ignorant Charles Darwin, but he was a committed Darwinist his entire life and in his eugenics. I recall struggling through reading a chuggy, slow posting of a hagiographic address he made to a bunch of Brit teachers in 1923 a mere two years before, using the principles of natural selection, he was producing his paper that the Nazis cited and, no doubt, found confirmation in for their developing policy to deal with "the Jewish question" and as they were developing their plans to invade Poland and other countries to the East, to dispose of the native population and replace them with Aryans.
I will note that, as I was listening to the Impeachment debate yesterday, working from memory, I mixed one thing up. It wasn't that Pearson provided the Nazis with the box of fake hair used to grade school children, assigning them a racial categorization - certainly the better to discriminate against those who were too dark - it was one of the trio of Nazi scientists who provided it to Pearson and his Brit colleague Moul, so they could make their own contribution to Nazi style science, as quoted from their 1925 paper, in my post on that.
Our results were obtained with Fischer's glass silk hair scale which has a large series of numbered patterns, and we have grouped them above into eight classes of fairly definite character for comparison with those of other observers. It is very difficult to grasp what other observers who have not worked with standard scales really mean by their colours. Thus Jacobs' 35.5 yo of black hair seems compatible with nothing else recorded, and must certainly include all the very dark brown hairs. For the final comparison it has not seemed possible to do more than divide the whole series into dark and light hair as given by the second percentages in each column. Under these circumstances Jacobs' adult Jews correspond reasonably with the Galician adult Jews. A large mass of material for the German Jewish boys is provided in Virchow's German pigmentation survey and is directly comparable with ours, both sets of boys being of school age. Now our boys were those on whom the special eye examination was made, and these were on the whole older than the general school population. Hence our boys are likely to be older than the German boys. Yet they are clearly a lighter haired population. Of course hair darkens with age, and if we were to suppose the German Jewish boys to become as dark as the Jewish adults in the first two columns in our table as they grow older, there is no reason to suppose that the alien Jewish boys (who start older) would catch them up. Here again it seems possible that there is some infusion of foreign blood.
No, it's only disputable by using the same tactics of lying through your fucking teeth that was so on display in the House Republican caucus, yesterday. Darwinism, was not only linked to Nazism, Darwinists worked hand in glove with them. Here's a picture of Eugen Fischer from 1934 at the University of Berlin, where he was a working scientist, he's the one with the creepy goatee
No, dear, you can't escape it, the Nazi genocide of the Jews, not to mention the disabled, the Roma, the Poles, etc. has a Darwinist imprimatur stamped on it. Darwinism had a brief period of covering up its contribution to eugenics and the most extreme form of that in the Nazi's genocides, but now all that primary documentation is available in easily searched form, online. The post-war cover-up that depended on the ink on paper world and the laziness of people too lazy to look up primary documentation is over, for good.
Update: I should note that Baur, Fischer, Lenz also had many citations of a. Leonard Darwin's eugenics assertions some of them making assertions before the Nazi party took power (or even existed) that the Nazis could be merely parroting. I will remind you, if you looked at my links, you would find that Leonard Darwin, repeatedly, over decades, including in a letter to Karl Pearson, asserted that his eugenics work was a continuation of his father, Charles Darwin's work and that he, HIS OWN SON, was sure his father would be pleased with his eugenics.
b. Francis Galton's use of the history of the Darwin-Wedgewood family as a prime example proving the heritable superiority of people, a major support of natural selection and its own criminal offspring, eugenics. They go farther and cite the careers of Leonard, George, Francis and Horace Darwin, as I mentioned four of Charles Darwin's sons who were prominent in the promotion of eugenics.
I would go into the particularly foul version of socialism that Karl Pearson pushed in Darwinian terms. I will note that his socialism was, he asserted, more likely to find it possible to implement eugenics than governments that concerned themselves with the rights of individuals. I suspect that the often cited socialism of Pearson, a friggin' Fabian, is a good example of why the word "socialism" should be scrapped. It is too mixed up with that kind of thing, through Marx AND THROUGH THE NAZIS and the friggin' Fabians to be useful to promote any democratic system that promotes economic justice. After reviewing the often lauded socialism of Karl Pearson - the scientist who, among other things, bemoaned Cesearan section saving the lives of too many babies and mothers, I understand how the Nazis adopted the word to describe what they did, as well as how the Soviet and other genocidal Marxist regimes did. What I can't account for is how anyone who held with egalitarian democracy and economic justice could possibly have pretended that wasn't a problem throughout the 20th and, now, into the 21st centuries.
Update 2: As a point of consideration in Pearson's socialism that would be so much more likely to overlook the rights of individuals to impose eugenics on them and in relation to his British socialism and that which was developing in the Nazi party, here is a passage and a footnote from his 1925 paper on proposing genetic inabilities in two of the very populations the Nazis targeted for genocide:
Such is the infusion of blood if it really exists is not definitely against the alien Jew as an immigrant, although an infusion of West European blood would have been a more suitable factor; neither Jews nor Slavs have hitherto shown in their historical records the ability to found a stable democratic community*.
* The racial origin of the present leaders of Soviet Russia still seems to be very obscure, but from the anthropological standpoint would form an undoubtedly interesting study.
After saying it's fucking rich for a Brit Fabian to cite other people for not having shown "in their historical records the ability to found a stable democratic community," something which hardly anyone, anywhere had or still today has done, his covert attribution of likely Jewish heritage to the Bolsheviks could have come right out of the mouth of an American or a Nazi antisemite as well as an upper-class Brit in class-ridden Britain. In her great essay-review of Richard Dawkins' idiotic The God Delusion, in citing John Hartung's and Kevin MacDonald's contemporary scientific antisemitism which Dawkins found credible to cite as reliable science, Marilynne Robinson notes that Darwinism is seldom far from dark waters. Darwinian eugenics is resurgent and as dangerous as it was in the early decades of the 20th century.
There was no one in the world in 1925 or 1932 who could be said to be more a Darwinist, a disciple of Darwin than Karl Pearson, except, possibly, Leonard Darwin, Darwin's own son.. And unlike Pearson, Leonard Darwin was not a scientist.
Karl Pearson, most famous as a statistical geneticist was, if memory serves, the fourth person awarded the Darwin Medal by the Royal Society, in 1899. He was honored for furthering the work of Charles Darwin. I will grant that, a student, not of Darwin but of his cousin Francis Galton, Pearson ranked his own teacher slightly higher than he did the mathematically ignorant Charles Darwin, but he was a committed Darwinist his entire life and in his eugenics. I recall struggling through reading a chuggy, slow posting of a hagiographic address he made to a bunch of Brit teachers in 1923 a mere two years before, using the principles of natural selection, he was producing his paper that the Nazis cited and, no doubt, found confirmation in for their developing policy to deal with "the Jewish question" and as they were developing their plans to invade Poland and other countries to the East, to dispose of the native population and replace them with Aryans.
I will note that, as I was listening to the Impeachment debate yesterday, working from memory, I mixed one thing up. It wasn't that Pearson provided the Nazis with the box of fake hair used to grade school children, assigning them a racial categorization - certainly the better to discriminate against those who were too dark - it was one of the trio of Nazi scientists who provided it to Pearson and his Brit colleague Moul, so they could make their own contribution to Nazi style science, as quoted from their 1925 paper, in my post on that.
Our results were obtained with Fischer's glass silk hair scale which has a large series of numbered patterns, and we have grouped them above into eight classes of fairly definite character for comparison with those of other observers. It is very difficult to grasp what other observers who have not worked with standard scales really mean by their colours. Thus Jacobs' 35.5 yo of black hair seems compatible with nothing else recorded, and must certainly include all the very dark brown hairs. For the final comparison it has not seemed possible to do more than divide the whole series into dark and light hair as given by the second percentages in each column. Under these circumstances Jacobs' adult Jews correspond reasonably with the Galician adult Jews. A large mass of material for the German Jewish boys is provided in Virchow's German pigmentation survey and is directly comparable with ours, both sets of boys being of school age. Now our boys were those on whom the special eye examination was made, and these were on the whole older than the general school population. Hence our boys are likely to be older than the German boys. Yet they are clearly a lighter haired population. Of course hair darkens with age, and if we were to suppose the German Jewish boys to become as dark as the Jewish adults in the first two columns in our table as they grow older, there is no reason to suppose that the alien Jewish boys (who start older) would catch them up. Here again it seems possible that there is some infusion of foreign blood.
No, it's only disputable by using the same tactics of lying through your fucking teeth that was so on display in the House Republican caucus, yesterday. Darwinism, was not only linked to Nazism, Darwinists worked hand in glove with them. Here's a picture of Eugen Fischer from 1934 at the University of Berlin, where he was a working scientist, he's the one with the creepy goatee
No, dear, you can't escape it, the Nazi genocide of the Jews, not to mention the disabled, the Roma, the Poles, etc. has a Darwinist imprimatur stamped on it. Darwinism had a brief period of covering up its contribution to eugenics and the most extreme form of that in the Nazi's genocides, but now all that primary documentation is available in easily searched form, online. The post-war cover-up that depended on the ink on paper world and the laziness of people too lazy to look up primary documentation is over, for good.
Update: I should note that Baur, Fischer, Lenz also had many citations of a. Leonard Darwin's eugenics assertions some of them making assertions before the Nazi party took power (or even existed) that the Nazis could be merely parroting. I will remind you, if you looked at my links, you would find that Leonard Darwin, repeatedly, over decades, including in a letter to Karl Pearson, asserted that his eugenics work was a continuation of his father, Charles Darwin's work and that he, HIS OWN SON, was sure his father would be pleased with his eugenics.
b. Francis Galton's use of the history of the Darwin-Wedgewood family as a prime example proving the heritable superiority of people, a major support of natural selection and its own criminal offspring, eugenics. They go farther and cite the careers of Leonard, George, Francis and Horace Darwin, as I mentioned four of Charles Darwin's sons who were prominent in the promotion of eugenics.
I would go into the particularly foul version of socialism that Karl Pearson pushed in Darwinian terms. I will note that his socialism was, he asserted, more likely to find it possible to implement eugenics than governments that concerned themselves with the rights of individuals. I suspect that the often cited socialism of Pearson, a friggin' Fabian, is a good example of why the word "socialism" should be scrapped. It is too mixed up with that kind of thing, through Marx AND THROUGH THE NAZIS and the friggin' Fabians to be useful to promote any democratic system that promotes economic justice. After reviewing the often lauded socialism of Karl Pearson - the scientist who, among other things, bemoaned Cesearan section saving the lives of too many babies and mothers, I understand how the Nazis adopted the word to describe what they did, as well as how the Soviet and other genocidal Marxist regimes did. What I can't account for is how anyone who held with egalitarian democracy and economic justice could possibly have pretended that wasn't a problem throughout the 20th and, now, into the 21st centuries.
Update 2: As a point of consideration in Pearson's socialism that would be so much more likely to overlook the rights of individuals to impose eugenics on them and in relation to his British socialism and that which was developing in the Nazi party, here is a passage and a footnote from his 1925 paper on proposing genetic inabilities in two of the very populations the Nazis targeted for genocide:
Such is the infusion of blood if it really exists is not definitely against the alien Jew as an immigrant, although an infusion of West European blood would have been a more suitable factor; neither Jews nor Slavs have hitherto shown in their historical records the ability to found a stable democratic community*.
* The racial origin of the present leaders of Soviet Russia still seems to be very obscure, but from the anthropological standpoint would form an undoubtedly interesting study.
After saying it's fucking rich for a Brit Fabian to cite other people for not having shown "in their historical records the ability to found a stable democratic community," something which hardly anyone, anywhere had or still today has done, his covert attribution of likely Jewish heritage to the Bolsheviks could have come right out of the mouth of an American or a Nazi antisemite as well as an upper-class Brit in class-ridden Britain. In her great essay-review of Richard Dawkins' idiotic The God Delusion, in citing John Hartung's and Kevin MacDonald's contemporary scientific antisemitism which Dawkins found credible to cite as reliable science, Marilynne Robinson notes that Darwinism is seldom far from dark waters. Darwinian eugenics is resurgent and as dangerous as it was in the early decades of the 20th century.
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
Jack Levine Was Like the Court Artist Reporting On The Republican Side
He even caught Trump in stripes
Well, You Don't Have To Take My Word For It " Baur Fischer Lenz" Literally Defined Nazi Eugenics
The standard textbook on racial hygiene by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz as viewed by the psychiatric and neurological communities from 1921 to 1940
Abstract
The textbook "Human heredity and Racial Hygiene" by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz went through five editions between 1921 and 1940. In contemporary journals, it received almost only positive review articles and was considered to be the standard textbook on racial hygiene in the Weimar Republic. After Hitler's takeover in 1933, it became the "scientific" basis for eugenic sterilization programs. In that year, the Nazis enacted a law allowing the involuntary sterilization of persons with diseases thought to be hereditary, mostly neurological and psychiatric disorders. Using review articles on the book, the position of neurologists and psychiatrists towards racial hygiene is analyzed. We describe how they prepared and maintained the acceptance of eugenic politics in the medical profession by praising the standard work on racial hygiene.
I will strongly object to only one thing in that description and that is the scare quotes around "scientific". All three of the authors were credentialed scientists working at major institutions. Erwin Baur worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research, Eugen Fischer was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, and was appointed by Hitler to be a rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin Fritz Lenz worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics and after WWII, though a major member of the very Nazi scientific establishment that gave the Nazis their excuses for murdering millions (as the head of his department during the time he was a Nazi) he continued right on at the University of Goettingen.
As the abstract indicates, there was widespread acceptance of their book by scientists for well over a decade, the book which was a main source of information for Hitler and his inner circle as he was ranting out Mein Kampf dictated Hitler to be written down by Rudolf Hess. I know for a fact that it was also widely and positively reviewed in English language science and it was, in fact, cited as scientific authority within science.
No, if bad religion is religion that religion has to answer for, even religion that rejected the bad religion from the start, Science doesn't get a different rule when it's bad science. Science becomes science through the acceptance of scientists in a way that is far less true for religion. Science, given its potency and acceptance by those who are in the habit of believing whatever scientists say, can't be allowed to escape its bad side.
Abstract
The textbook "Human heredity and Racial Hygiene" by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz went through five editions between 1921 and 1940. In contemporary journals, it received almost only positive review articles and was considered to be the standard textbook on racial hygiene in the Weimar Republic. After Hitler's takeover in 1933, it became the "scientific" basis for eugenic sterilization programs. In that year, the Nazis enacted a law allowing the involuntary sterilization of persons with diseases thought to be hereditary, mostly neurological and psychiatric disorders. Using review articles on the book, the position of neurologists and psychiatrists towards racial hygiene is analyzed. We describe how they prepared and maintained the acceptance of eugenic politics in the medical profession by praising the standard work on racial hygiene.
I will strongly object to only one thing in that description and that is the scare quotes around "scientific". All three of the authors were credentialed scientists working at major institutions. Erwin Baur worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research, Eugen Fischer was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, and was appointed by Hitler to be a rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin Fritz Lenz worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics and after WWII, though a major member of the very Nazi scientific establishment that gave the Nazis their excuses for murdering millions (as the head of his department during the time he was a Nazi) he continued right on at the University of Goettingen.
As the abstract indicates, there was widespread acceptance of their book by scientists for well over a decade, the book which was a main source of information for Hitler and his inner circle as he was ranting out Mein Kampf dictated Hitler to be written down by Rudolf Hess. I know for a fact that it was also widely and positively reviewed in English language science and it was, in fact, cited as scientific authority within science.
No, if bad religion is religion that religion has to answer for, even religion that rejected the bad religion from the start, Science doesn't get a different rule when it's bad science. Science becomes science through the acceptance of scientists in a way that is far less true for religion. Science, given its potency and acceptance by those who are in the habit of believing whatever scientists say, can't be allowed to escape its bad side.
Wednesday after Advent 3
Good God who comes soon, hear our pledge that we will be about the good work you expect of us at your coming. In his name, Amen.
Psalm 119:49-73
Zechariah 3:1-10
Revelation 4:1-8
Matthew 24:45-51
The reading in Revelation gives us a peek into the throne room of God. The one seated on the throne is beyond description in power, awe, majesty, and dominion. That awesomeness is acknowledge in the never-ending doxology, "Holy, holy, holy."
The wonder of that holiness is that from it is offered a derivative holiness for human creatures in the world. Thus Zechariah can contemplate Joshua, the high priest in the exilic period of ancient Israel. As representative of Israel in that difficult moment, the priest is unworthy and unclean and unqualified. That is, Israel cannot be in the presence of the holy God. But the promise is that the holy God will make Joshua (and so Israel) holy and qualified to be before God. That is divine holiness "making holy."
But notice that this overwhelming act of transformation comes with rigorous expectation: "if you walk in my ways and keep my requirements." Being made holy depends on obedience to the requirements of God, without which there will be no "holy making." That same requirement is voiced in the Gospel reading. When the master (the holy God in the form of the crucified and risen one) comes (as he surely will), the master will look for servants who are "faithful and wise." The measure of "faithful and wise" is to provide "food at the proper time" for the household. That is, the way to be ready for the coming of God is to be at work managing the life resources of creation in a wise way that will sustain all creatures. This requirement thus pertains to the political economy, the care of the neighbor, and protection of the environment. Such readiness is our work in Advent.
Walter Brueggemann: Gift and Task
Psalm 119:49-73
Zechariah 3:1-10
Revelation 4:1-8
Matthew 24:45-51
The reading in Revelation gives us a peek into the throne room of God. The one seated on the throne is beyond description in power, awe, majesty, and dominion. That awesomeness is acknowledge in the never-ending doxology, "Holy, holy, holy."
The wonder of that holiness is that from it is offered a derivative holiness for human creatures in the world. Thus Zechariah can contemplate Joshua, the high priest in the exilic period of ancient Israel. As representative of Israel in that difficult moment, the priest is unworthy and unclean and unqualified. That is, Israel cannot be in the presence of the holy God. But the promise is that the holy God will make Joshua (and so Israel) holy and qualified to be before God. That is divine holiness "making holy."
But notice that this overwhelming act of transformation comes with rigorous expectation: "if you walk in my ways and keep my requirements." Being made holy depends on obedience to the requirements of God, without which there will be no "holy making." That same requirement is voiced in the Gospel reading. When the master (the holy God in the form of the crucified and risen one) comes (as he surely will), the master will look for servants who are "faithful and wise." The measure of "faithful and wise" is to provide "food at the proper time" for the household. That is, the way to be ready for the coming of God is to be at work managing the life resources of creation in a wise way that will sustain all creatures. This requirement thus pertains to the political economy, the care of the neighbor, and protection of the environment. Such readiness is our work in Advent.
Walter Brueggemann: Gift and Task
Catholics Gave Up Keeping An Index Of Prohibited Books, Atheist-Scientistic-Materialism Has A Longer One
I am accused of the unpardonable sin among the college-credentialed class of the English speaking people of having read of the forbidden fruit, I'm accused of having read and been influenced by the historian Richard Weikart to which I answer, of course I have read him. That doesn't mean we agree on everything, we certainly don't. It doesn't necessarily mean we agree on much of anything. I treat Weikart the same way I do every single other secondary and tertiary source in polemical discourse - I CHECK THEIR CLAIMS AGAINST THE PRIMARY DOCUMENTATION THEY CITE and any I know they may not have cited.
I would note that if anyone could be discredited by what they've read maybe the rule should work in reverse and authors read by the disreputable, such as myself, should share in that disrepute, in which case count in Richard Weikart's sometimes foe Robert Richards of the Philosophy Department of the University of Chicago, would-be rehabilitator of that moral cess pool Ernst Hackel and defender of the faith in St. Charles Darwin. I've also read of him, though I am not as impressed with his handling of primary documentation as I am with Weikart, and that's not because I don't have disagreements with Weikart. I'm not sure he can read German as well as Weikart, can. I'm not even sure he reads English as well.
In this part of his long review of one of Richard's books, I would go a lot farther than Weikart has in attributing proto-Nazi concepts to Charles Darwin, though, except in one fleeting mention in one letter, I would not think a charge of antisemitism could be justified in what I've read (I doubt anyone has read every letter and essay and paper and book the interminable scribbler wrote) I am tempted to think that might be attributable to Benjamin Disraeli's heritage making it somewhat unfashionable in some circles to express that particular sentiment. I think that has more to do with social propriety in his Britain than any firm moral conviction. Darwin (and so his wife, Emma) seems to have switched his position on Irish home rule on the power of his having been honored by a visit from Gladstone. I've read that after her husband died, Emma felt free to revert to the anti-Irish position she and, apparently her husband, had held before. It certainly didn't stop Charles Darwin from expressing a rather disgusting claim of biological degeneracy in the Irish, a position he adopted from one of the most vulgar and putrid of the founding generation of eugenicists, W. R. Greg, though Darwin cherry picked and pruned Greg's original, an instance of convenient elision or distortion that isn't unique in Darwin's scientific writing.
I have noted that any such reticence in the British disciples of Darwin had certainly evaporated by the 1920s, the period of the rise of Nazism, as I've noted his biological grandson, as it were, Karl Pearson was writing papers warning about the dysgenisis that could come to Britain by letting what he scientifically asserted to be degenerate Polish and Russian jewery emmigrate to and live in Britain. I'd love to know if his 1925 paper appears as a citation or is quoted in Nazi literature, we know some of them were aware of Pearson's work, he helped some of them in excluding some from being "Aryans."
But as Weikart, rightly, points out that Darwin didn't express antisemitic racism and so Hitler's antisemitism is cannot be attributed directly to Darwin, Darwin did express some of the most vicious of racist-genocidalist claims as being founded in science, he did so repeatedly in The Descent of Man and in positively Hitlerean terms in letters such as his correspondence with Gaskell. That Darwin had a different list of which "races" their superiors were to murder, cutting them off from the future than Hitler did, doesn't improve his moral status. Every genocidalist has at least one group it leaves off their kill list, their own.* That doesn't change the fact that Hitler's conception of genocide rendering the survivors superior is an idea that Charles Darwin inserted into the mainstream of science. Anyone who denies that is either entirely ignorant of Darwin's own writing or they are lying about what he said, as science, with citations of his disciples such as Haeckel and Greg and in one case falsely claiming another eminent scientist of his time made supporting statements of the most appalling genocidal triumphalism.
As I pointed out, Rudolf Hess, Hitler's second in command, in many respects, defined Nazism as "applied biology." In Germany, in the 1920s and 30s, that biology was thoroughly Darwinian saturated in concepts of natural selection and its application in legal, social and military policy, something which has confirmation, among other places, in the findings of the eminent Darwinist biologist, the American, Vernon Kellogg as he talked to his fellow scientists who were also members of the German military during the First World War. We also know the one biology text that we know Hitler was relying on as he was in prison ranting out his Mein Kampf to be taken down in dictation by, guess who, RUDOLF HESS, the thoroughly Darwinist Grundrisses der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene.
Anyone in the post-war period who wants to distance Charles Darwin from the Nazi eugenics program (something I have yet to find done before WWII) also faces the daunting task of refuting those connections made by someone who knew Charles Darwin better than they ever will, no matter how much of him they read, his own son Leonard Darwin who repeatedly, over decades, and even up to the months before the start of World War Two, months before the start of Hitler's genocides in the T4 murders of the disabled linked his father to eugenics and, specifically, Nazi eugenics. No one today and probably no one else in April 1939 knew the thinking of Charles Darwin better than Leonard Darwin did. He had access, not only to what we have today, he knew the man as intimately as a child will know their own father, having heard his candid, off the record thoughts. Charles Darwin may have died seven years before Hitler was born but that doesn't mean Hitler wasn't following a Darwinian prescription, a rather conventional Darwinist.
* That is if you don't count their own poor, their own disabled, Hitler and Darwin were of one mind in the benefits that would come with the elimination of even their fellow Englishmen and Germans such as those people. I think that, especially in relation to the poor, the exact opposite in the Law of Moses and the Gospel was and is one of the primary motivations for the hostility to that religious orientation.
Update: I had a few minutes as the Republicans were lying in the House Impeachment debate, so I looked up online to find out if I could find Nazi science citing Karl Pearson's 1925 paper in which, using Darwinian arguments, he claimed the scientific determination of the inferiority of Polish and Russian Jews and the catestrophic results if they were allowed to live in Britain, and, wouldn't you know, I found it cited by no other than the trio of scientists who wrote the one book on biology we know Hitler was reading as he was codifying his theory.
I don't have time to find my program for easily typing out German and doing it so I'm copying from the automated text generation at Archive.org for Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene - Band 2 (1932)
Die Einwanderung fremder Rassenelemente nach England
sucht man natürlich möglichst zu verhindern. In Betracht kommt
hier hauptsächlich die Einwanderung von Ostjuden; man scheut
sich aber, diese bloß wegen ihrer Rassenfremdheit als uner-
wünscht zu bezeichnen. Pearson 1 ) hat daher versucht, durch
Untersuchungen an ostjüdischen Kindern zu zeigen, daß diese un-
günstiger veranlagt seien als die Kinder angelsächsischer Abstam-
mung; die Judenmädchen sollen danach auch intellektuell unter
dem Durchschnitt der englischen Bevölkerung stehen, was indes-
sen nicht gerade überzeugend ist. Jedenfalls aber hat Pearson
recht, wenn er sich auf den Standpunkt stellt, daß nur die Zu-
lassung von solchen Einwanderern in ein dichtbevölkertes Land
ratsam sei, die im Vergleich mit der eingesessenen Bevölkerung
überdurchschnittlich veranlagt seien.
Für Deutschland ist das Problem der östlichen Einwanderung . . noch brennender.
*) Pearson, K. und Moul, M. The problem of allen Immigration
into Great Britain etc. Annais of Eugenics. Bd. i. H. i. und 2. 1925. S. 5 ff
Imperfect as the transfer may be, if you can read that without being chilled, you are a Nazi.
I'll warn you that the Google translation of this is likely deceptive, though if you continue with it onto the next page, it confirms that the conventional British Darwinism of Karl Pearson, seven short years later, directly informed Nazi eugenics on the "Jewish Question" especially in regard to the Jews the Nazis first targeted for genocide, as part of their "Problem der östlichen Einwanderung," that they considered "noch brennender" their elucidation of their scientific conclusions dragging in exported American anti-Black racism as well as "eastern Jews". I wouldn't make too much of their claim that their warning off allowing them to "mix" with native German Jews as exculpation. The SS and the Einsaztz Gruppen found that their trained mass murderers found it easier to murder Jews who didn't appear to be too German, but they overcame that feeling rather fast.
I would note that if anyone could be discredited by what they've read maybe the rule should work in reverse and authors read by the disreputable, such as myself, should share in that disrepute, in which case count in Richard Weikart's sometimes foe Robert Richards of the Philosophy Department of the University of Chicago, would-be rehabilitator of that moral cess pool Ernst Hackel and defender of the faith in St. Charles Darwin. I've also read of him, though I am not as impressed with his handling of primary documentation as I am with Weikart, and that's not because I don't have disagreements with Weikart. I'm not sure he can read German as well as Weikart, can. I'm not even sure he reads English as well.
In this part of his long review of one of Richard's books, I would go a lot farther than Weikart has in attributing proto-Nazi concepts to Charles Darwin, though, except in one fleeting mention in one letter, I would not think a charge of antisemitism could be justified in what I've read (I doubt anyone has read every letter and essay and paper and book the interminable scribbler wrote) I am tempted to think that might be attributable to Benjamin Disraeli's heritage making it somewhat unfashionable in some circles to express that particular sentiment. I think that has more to do with social propriety in his Britain than any firm moral conviction. Darwin (and so his wife, Emma) seems to have switched his position on Irish home rule on the power of his having been honored by a visit from Gladstone. I've read that after her husband died, Emma felt free to revert to the anti-Irish position she and, apparently her husband, had held before. It certainly didn't stop Charles Darwin from expressing a rather disgusting claim of biological degeneracy in the Irish, a position he adopted from one of the most vulgar and putrid of the founding generation of eugenicists, W. R. Greg, though Darwin cherry picked and pruned Greg's original, an instance of convenient elision or distortion that isn't unique in Darwin's scientific writing.
I have noted that any such reticence in the British disciples of Darwin had certainly evaporated by the 1920s, the period of the rise of Nazism, as I've noted his biological grandson, as it were, Karl Pearson was writing papers warning about the dysgenisis that could come to Britain by letting what he scientifically asserted to be degenerate Polish and Russian jewery emmigrate to and live in Britain. I'd love to know if his 1925 paper appears as a citation or is quoted in Nazi literature, we know some of them were aware of Pearson's work, he helped some of them in excluding some from being "Aryans."
But as Weikart, rightly, points out that Darwin didn't express antisemitic racism and so Hitler's antisemitism is cannot be attributed directly to Darwin, Darwin did express some of the most vicious of racist-genocidalist claims as being founded in science, he did so repeatedly in The Descent of Man and in positively Hitlerean terms in letters such as his correspondence with Gaskell. That Darwin had a different list of which "races" their superiors were to murder, cutting them off from the future than Hitler did, doesn't improve his moral status. Every genocidalist has at least one group it leaves off their kill list, their own.* That doesn't change the fact that Hitler's conception of genocide rendering the survivors superior is an idea that Charles Darwin inserted into the mainstream of science. Anyone who denies that is either entirely ignorant of Darwin's own writing or they are lying about what he said, as science, with citations of his disciples such as Haeckel and Greg and in one case falsely claiming another eminent scientist of his time made supporting statements of the most appalling genocidal triumphalism.
As I pointed out, Rudolf Hess, Hitler's second in command, in many respects, defined Nazism as "applied biology." In Germany, in the 1920s and 30s, that biology was thoroughly Darwinian saturated in concepts of natural selection and its application in legal, social and military policy, something which has confirmation, among other places, in the findings of the eminent Darwinist biologist, the American, Vernon Kellogg as he talked to his fellow scientists who were also members of the German military during the First World War. We also know the one biology text that we know Hitler was relying on as he was in prison ranting out his Mein Kampf to be taken down in dictation by, guess who, RUDOLF HESS, the thoroughly Darwinist Grundrisses der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene.
Anyone in the post-war period who wants to distance Charles Darwin from the Nazi eugenics program (something I have yet to find done before WWII) also faces the daunting task of refuting those connections made by someone who knew Charles Darwin better than they ever will, no matter how much of him they read, his own son Leonard Darwin who repeatedly, over decades, and even up to the months before the start of World War Two, months before the start of Hitler's genocides in the T4 murders of the disabled linked his father to eugenics and, specifically, Nazi eugenics. No one today and probably no one else in April 1939 knew the thinking of Charles Darwin better than Leonard Darwin did. He had access, not only to what we have today, he knew the man as intimately as a child will know their own father, having heard his candid, off the record thoughts. Charles Darwin may have died seven years before Hitler was born but that doesn't mean Hitler wasn't following a Darwinian prescription, a rather conventional Darwinist.
* That is if you don't count their own poor, their own disabled, Hitler and Darwin were of one mind in the benefits that would come with the elimination of even their fellow Englishmen and Germans such as those people. I think that, especially in relation to the poor, the exact opposite in the Law of Moses and the Gospel was and is one of the primary motivations for the hostility to that religious orientation.
Update: I had a few minutes as the Republicans were lying in the House Impeachment debate, so I looked up online to find out if I could find Nazi science citing Karl Pearson's 1925 paper in which, using Darwinian arguments, he claimed the scientific determination of the inferiority of Polish and Russian Jews and the catestrophic results if they were allowed to live in Britain, and, wouldn't you know, I found it cited by no other than the trio of scientists who wrote the one book on biology we know Hitler was reading as he was codifying his theory.
I don't have time to find my program for easily typing out German and doing it so I'm copying from the automated text generation at Archive.org for Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene - Band 2 (1932)
Die Einwanderung fremder Rassenelemente nach England
sucht man natürlich möglichst zu verhindern. In Betracht kommt
hier hauptsächlich die Einwanderung von Ostjuden; man scheut
sich aber, diese bloß wegen ihrer Rassenfremdheit als uner-
wünscht zu bezeichnen. Pearson 1 ) hat daher versucht, durch
Untersuchungen an ostjüdischen Kindern zu zeigen, daß diese un-
günstiger veranlagt seien als die Kinder angelsächsischer Abstam-
mung; die Judenmädchen sollen danach auch intellektuell unter
dem Durchschnitt der englischen Bevölkerung stehen, was indes-
sen nicht gerade überzeugend ist. Jedenfalls aber hat Pearson
recht, wenn er sich auf den Standpunkt stellt, daß nur die Zu-
lassung von solchen Einwanderern in ein dichtbevölkertes Land
ratsam sei, die im Vergleich mit der eingesessenen Bevölkerung
überdurchschnittlich veranlagt seien.
Für Deutschland ist das Problem der östlichen Einwanderung . . noch brennender.
*) Pearson, K. und Moul, M. The problem of allen Immigration
into Great Britain etc. Annais of Eugenics. Bd. i. H. i. und 2. 1925. S. 5 ff
Imperfect as the transfer may be, if you can read that without being chilled, you are a Nazi.
I'll warn you that the Google translation of this is likely deceptive, though if you continue with it onto the next page, it confirms that the conventional British Darwinism of Karl Pearson, seven short years later, directly informed Nazi eugenics on the "Jewish Question" especially in regard to the Jews the Nazis first targeted for genocide, as part of their "Problem der östlichen Einwanderung," that they considered "noch brennender" their elucidation of their scientific conclusions dragging in exported American anti-Black racism as well as "eastern Jews". I wouldn't make too much of their claim that their warning off allowing them to "mix" with native German Jews as exculpation. The SS and the Einsaztz Gruppen found that their trained mass murderers found it easier to murder Jews who didn't appear to be too German, but they overcame that feeling rather fast.
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Patrick Cornelius - Christmas Gift 2 Performances
Live at the Jazz Gallery 2011, featuring Miles Okazaki, Aaron Goldberg, Peter Slavov, Obed Calvaire
From the CD Maybe Steps
Patrick Cornelius · Gerald Clayton · Peter Slavov · Kendrick Scott
I first found this while looking for Gerald Clayton performances. I was going to post that one and found the live performance which I also love.
Tuesday after Advent 3
God of newness, give us honesty about our present illusions. Give us readiness for your newness that eludes all our categories. In his name, Amen.
Psalm 47
Zechariah 2:1-13
Revelation 3:14-22
Matthew 24:32-41
The present world of modern morality, advanced technology, and uncompromising ideology feels like (and claims to be) a closed system in which all possibilities for the future are well in hand. It is an arrangement of power and resources that benefits some at the cruel expense of others.
Advent is the awareness that this seemingly closed, guaranteed system is rendered penultimate by the holy power of God We can see in the Gospel reading how the rhetoric strains to give voice to possibility of newness in the world that seems close to perpetuity. The Matthew tradition has Jesus appeal to the old imagery of a rescuer sent by God on the wings of a cloud, an agent of such awesome power that his entry will not be resisted.
According to Zechariah, a "man" will, in the opening for newness, make possible a new Jerusalem where God will dwell. That new city of justice and righteousness in Israel's imagination, will be the epicenter of a new heaven of presence and a new earth of justice. It will not be like the old, current, fractious Jerusalem of lethal political quarrels, but a metaphor for and embodiment of all things new.
The church in Laodicea is chided for being "lukewarm," refusing to decide. So it is with many of us, lukewarm about a choice between an old impenetrable system or a newness that centers in God's own presence. Advent is a time to break out of lukewarm indifference, to opt for the coming newness of God. Faithful witness is to recognize the illusions of well-being in present tense, to walk through the door into God's new world.
Walter Bruggemann: Gift and Task
I am finding that this book is indispensable for my daily practice. It's more edifying than concentrating on how it feels to breathe. As you can see from my more superficial posts, I need the practice, a lot.
Psalm 47
Zechariah 2:1-13
Revelation 3:14-22
Matthew 24:32-41
The present world of modern morality, advanced technology, and uncompromising ideology feels like (and claims to be) a closed system in which all possibilities for the future are well in hand. It is an arrangement of power and resources that benefits some at the cruel expense of others.
Advent is the awareness that this seemingly closed, guaranteed system is rendered penultimate by the holy power of God We can see in the Gospel reading how the rhetoric strains to give voice to possibility of newness in the world that seems close to perpetuity. The Matthew tradition has Jesus appeal to the old imagery of a rescuer sent by God on the wings of a cloud, an agent of such awesome power that his entry will not be resisted.
According to Zechariah, a "man" will, in the opening for newness, make possible a new Jerusalem where God will dwell. That new city of justice and righteousness in Israel's imagination, will be the epicenter of a new heaven of presence and a new earth of justice. It will not be like the old, current, fractious Jerusalem of lethal political quarrels, but a metaphor for and embodiment of all things new.
The church in Laodicea is chided for being "lukewarm," refusing to decide. So it is with many of us, lukewarm about a choice between an old impenetrable system or a newness that centers in God's own presence. Advent is a time to break out of lukewarm indifference, to opt for the coming newness of God. Faithful witness is to recognize the illusions of well-being in present tense, to walk through the door into God's new world.
Walter Bruggemann: Gift and Task
I am finding that this book is indispensable for my daily practice. It's more edifying than concentrating on how it feels to breathe. As you can see from my more superficial posts, I need the practice, a lot.
Snow Day Frolics
Wish I could remember fast enough to fit into the quick and dirty time-frame of blogging, who it was who noted that if Homer nodded, Tennyson sometimes snored. Often, actually, if you try reading more than the handful of often anthologized poems, his verse dramas, ugh! Don't get me started on what Kipling does.
I said Irving Berlin was a great songwriter, one who wrote both the words and music for all of the great songs of his I can think of. His lyrics were some of the wittiest in the genre, competing with Cole Porter and a few of the great straight lyricists. That doesn't mean that he didn't write songs that weren't so great. I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas is junk.
Remember, What'll I Do, Falling Out of Love Can Be Fun, Russian Lullaby (posted that one a couple of weeks back), Let Yourself Go, . . . White Christmas can't hold a candle to them.
He also had the good taste to like Fred Astaire's singing of his music, based not on the beauty of his voice but on his timing. Lets Face The Music And Dance, for example. Great song, crappy show.
I'd show the dance contest scene which proves Fred was the only man in history who really looked good in bell bottoms, but he doesn't sing in it.
I was supposed to be stacking wood but it's snowing. In case you're wondering what I'm doing.
Update:
Brilliant. I doubt anyone else ever used the word "marimba" in a song as well.
I said Irving Berlin was a great songwriter, one who wrote both the words and music for all of the great songs of his I can think of. His lyrics were some of the wittiest in the genre, competing with Cole Porter and a few of the great straight lyricists. That doesn't mean that he didn't write songs that weren't so great. I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas is junk.
Remember, What'll I Do, Falling Out of Love Can Be Fun, Russian Lullaby (posted that one a couple of weeks back), Let Yourself Go, . . . White Christmas can't hold a candle to them.
He also had the good taste to like Fred Astaire's singing of his music, based not on the beauty of his voice but on his timing. Lets Face The Music And Dance, for example. Great song, crappy show.
I'd show the dance contest scene which proves Fred was the only man in history who really looked good in bell bottoms, but he doesn't sing in it.
I was supposed to be stacking wood but it's snowing. In case you're wondering what I'm doing.
Update:
Brilliant. I doubt anyone else ever used the word "marimba" in a song as well.
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