I have no idea who most of the people who read my blog are, though the automatically gathered statistics blogger puts together, the once or twice a year I remember to notice those, say that anywhere from a couple of hundred to a few hundred unique hits a day happen, most of those on the more recent posts, so I think someone is reading it. Even if they don't, I still would do this.
The fact is I get a lot out of writing out what I'm thinking on these subjects, be they political or the more general reason for why politics matters and why egalitarian democracy matters and is worth struggling for, morality. That would include how morality is made real among us in how people, animals, the environment we depend on are treated and the only really durable motive of that strong enough to work, its source in the intentions of God, whether you call God that or Allah, or Bondye or The Dharma. That, in human history, in human society, among the nations has proven, over and over again to be the only reliably strong source of equality, justice, economic justice that extends over all three, people, animals, the environment, that is effective and is sustainable. I was certainly not brought to that conclusion easily or entirely gladly as a rather clueless, smug and contentedly dumb agnostic when I started to see that, oddly enough when going on thirty years ago, now, I read John Dominic Crossan whose work I value but whose view of the Gospels I don't find very convincing now.
I think the modernist model of morality which is, as Marxism is, at its least bad an hopeless attempt to recreate in scientistic-materialistic-atheist terms what the center of the Jewish scriptures, Old and New Testaments document in epic fashion - complete with its long series of confessions of failure to do that and its warnings of how they went wrong when they went against that morality and its source. I see that as an excellent way to see the history of the United States, founded on a combination of idealistic culmination of Mosaic justice but immediately doomed to disaster through rational accomodation with evil, imperial genocide, slavery, gender and class inequality. I think the history of the United States is, ironically, both a demonstration of what happens when people try to follow the morality as taught in the Jewish tradition of Moses, the Prophets, Jesus, Paul and James, but have made a pact with the devil and the struggle for egalitarian justice, especially in its most difficult aspects of egalitarian economic justice.
As I have been pointing out, materialism, the primary god of modernist atheism is a stupid god which can not only never produce a durable, life changing commitment to practice justice in a sufficent manner, it can't even explain human minds. I think the issue I dealt with the last two days is the quintessential and decisive proof of that in the materialist model of the mind that is fully enshrined in academia where the elimiative materialists like Paul and Patricia Churchland and other idiots of their kind hold faculty positions at universities to spout the most obvious of absurd nonsense that negates the entire purpose of a university, what its faculties are engaged in, what its students and their parents pay and go into enormous debt to achieve - those who aren't there merely to get credentialed or to make money by maybe playing a pro sport and the like.
Ours is an age of "enlightenment" decadence in the extreme and we were brought here through the scientistic-modernistic-materialistic-gods of atheism. That is so strong that, as the Trump evangelicals prove, whole loads of nominal Christians have fully bought into it while they deny that's what they've done. They've got their like in the Catholic church, as we have also seen this week, up to and, perhaps especially, in the College of Cardinals.
I don't know the extent to which I'd have figured this out if I didn't think about it so as to write about it. I'm sure I'd do the reading, that's so interesting on its own, right now Elizabeth Johnson's Creation and the Cross is showing me how Anselm led the West into a rather disastrous view of God which, I suspect, has been a great help to discredit Christianity and has contributed to our terrible situation. But I've got to think about it more.
I do know that unless people feel a sufficently strong reason to not be selfish in their deeds, their thoughts and words, they act as badly as the worst of Americans. And the only thing that has worked to fight that, in the American context, is taking that Jewish moral tradition as seriously as anything. There's a reason that the last great success of American egalitarian liberalism was pushed through in the early Johnson years, when the Civil Rights Movement was led by The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. and his colleagues, many of whom were either ministers or deeply religous, such as Diana Nash - one of my great heroes - was. And that its success ended when the secularists grabbed the spotlight. That's the meaning of my lifetime.
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