The Minority Report Found In The Bible - The Difference Between The Science of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Scott Atlas

We are seldom aware that a minority report may be found in the Bible, the vision of some fanatics who believe that the royal portrayal of history is not accurate because it does not do justice (sic) either to God or to these brothers and sisters.

In the imperial world of Pharaoh and Solomon the prophetic alternative is a bad joke either to be squelched by force or ignored in satiation. But we are a haunted people because we believe the bad joke is rooted in the character of God Himself, a God who is not the reflection of Pharaoh or of Solomon. He is a God with a name of his own which cannot be uttered by anyone but him. He is not the reflection of any, for he has his own person and retains that all to himself. He is a God uncredentialed in the empire, unknown in the courts, unwelcome in the temple. And his history begins in his attentiveness to the cries of the marginal ones. He, unlike his royal regents, is one whose person is presented as passion and pathos, the power to care, the capacity to weep, the energy to grieve and then to rejoice. The prophets after Moses know that his caring, weeping, grieving, and rejoicing will not be outflanked by royal hardware or royal immunity because this one is indeed God. And kings must face that.

The God of Moses is as unwelcomed to much of, perhaps most of "organized religion" which exists only to some extent even within most organized denominations as this God is, indeed, unwelcomed, root and branch, in the modern, materialist-secular enlightenment.

That is, of course, not to say that everyone who associates themselves with that organized opposition, its institutions, its denominations are opposed to this revelation of the character of God. Dorothy Day said, explicitly that if the worldly, corrupt Cardinal Spellman ordered her to stop her radical Christian activity she would obey, no doubt she would have if Pope Pius XII had, though she was probably well aware that they would never have done that because like Herod in his reluctance to silence John the baptist, Spellman knew there would be a furious backlash from the many who saw that she was a good and just woman.  Or at least bad publicity for him and his campaign to be the first American Pope.

This Mosaic revelation of God which I believe is a genuine inspiration, definitely awkwardly expressed through the limits of human minds and cultures and not plainly and clearly understood even in the part of God we can see and live, but a definite interaction with God is something that is not like other claims about God. It is in some crucial ways not like the humanly assigned attributes of the pagan gods or even all of the articulations of God in Jewish, Christian or Islamic discourse and theology. Whenever, as it so happened in Western, especially Catholic theology, that God is turned into the kind of immanent attachment to worldly power, be it worldly monarch or worldly papacy and Vatican power structure, they recapitulate the long history of falling away from the Mosaic vision that is told in the largest part of the Jewish scriptures. They are expressing the Pharoahnic conception of god. But, as can be seen in today's "white evangelicals" Protestantism is just as humanly liable to do that as Roman Catholics are.

So this is the paradigm I suggest for the prophetic imagination. A royal consciousness committed to achievable satiation. An alternative prophetic consciousness devoted to the pathos and passion of covenanting. The royal consciousness with its program of achievable satiation has redefined our notions of humanness and it has done that to all of us. It has created a subjective consciousnesses concerned only with self-satisfaction. It has denied the legitimacy of tradition that requires us to remember, of authority that expects us to answer, and of community that calls us to care. It has so enthroned the present that a promised furure, delayed but certain, is unthinkable.

The royal program of achievable satiation

(a) is fed by a management mentality which believes there are no mysteries to honor, only problems to be solved. This, the Solomonic evidence urges, was not a time of great leadership, heroic battles, or bold initiatives. It was a time governed by the cost-accounting of a management mentality;

(b) is legitimated by an "official religion of optimism." which believes God has no business other than to maintain our standard of living, ensuring his own place in his palace;

(c) requires the annulment of the neighbor as a life-giver in our history; it imagines that we can live outside history as self-made men and women.

It is mind-boggling to think that of the Mosaic novum only the prophetic word is mobilized against this compelling reality.

Again, Walter Brueggemann, in 1978 saw some of the greatest problems that lie in the heart of our secular, enlightenment, scientistic modernism through the lens of the Jewish scriptures. Everything from the tyranny of the bean counters, to the "don't worry be happy" nihilism of pop culture to that other icon of pop culture, the macho "rugged individualist" which in the anxious corruption and dissolution of the turn of the millenium and the organizing cults of every mental illness that the internet has exacerbated - not a little of it, I believe, an outgrowth of the "Whole Earth Catalogue" commercial hippy stuff of the early 70s - the batty "preppers" who hoard toilet paper and ammo for when their neighbors mount a raid on their supplies.

I don't think I've ever found another writer who combines so much spot-on criticism of our contemporary world in such concentration and I think the reason for that is that the Old Testament is so spookily, uncanny in its setting out this pattern of human folly and human weakness and human propensity for evil. It is as much a crime against the present that this record as understood in these stark, fearlessly honest critical terms has been kept from most people. Replaced by the lunatic, modern "evangelical" action comic cinematic treatment of it, on the one hand, and the outright rejection of it by the anti-religious, secular left, no doubt Jefferson would have cut it out if he'd gotten round to cutting up that part of the Bible too.

And look around us, right now, under Trump and Barr and McConnell and Murdoch, Sinclair and Putin - as intentionally permitted by the John Roberts court. Most of what is as seen on TV. Everything in those stories except the famous "wisdom" of Solomon is right here, right now. Only I think that "wisdom" isn't what Solomon really had, he was sly and crafty but a wiser person wouldn't have followed his course. In the beginnnig of his critique of the Solmonic regime Brueggemann said that he was among those who, in a different context, referred to the Solomonic regime as an "enlightenment," the same title given to the scientistic-industrial-secular habits of thought that we grow up under. But that light is dim at best and its best is not adequate. It might be to produce things we like but it is inadequate to save us from what we ourselves do to us and our world. That requires more than slyness and craftiness and our methods of getting what we want . Which is, after all, what science was invented for.  What we want so often conflicts with that product of science as amended by moral consideration of the kind Bureggemann talks of, what would be good for us in general, if we only knew it.  Which accounts for the differences between the scientific judgement of Dr. Fauci and that of Dr. Scott Atlas who serves Donald Trump and the the Pharaohs of the industrial-financial world.