Saturday Night Radio Drama - John Mortimer (?) - Rumpole And The Old Boy Net

Rumpole And The Old Boy Net

It's not uncommon for hit TV BBC series to have started out as a radio series first,  Rumpole of the Bailey seems to have gone the other direction, from the TV series, the prose versions of the stories published by John Mortimer and collected in the Rumpole Omnibi and then on to a number of different radio drama iterations. I don't now if the considerable liberties taken in this version of this story were done by John Mortimer or there was a different hand in it but it's kind of interesting for someone who is familiar with the original to hear it.  It's not great art so maybe that isn't as annoying as it would have been if it were.  It's a bit of fun during a week when I really haven't been thinking of radio drama. 

Rumpole Benedict Cumberbatch
Hilda Jasmine Hyde
Erskine-Brown Nigel Anthony
Sir Cuthbert Ewan Bailey
Mr Lee Ewan Bailey
Phillida Trant Cathy Sara
Judge Bullingham Stephen Critchlow
Stephen Lucas Stephen Critchlow

Director Marilyn Imrie

Update:  Here is an example of an earlier radio series.  

Rumpole And The Age of Retirement

My experience is that these on Youtube disappear fairly fast so you might want to try it soon. 

"but did not prevail" The Voluntary Mental Retardation of the Republican Money Grubbers Is Going To Get Potentially Thousands If Not Millions Killed.

Deaths per 1,000 soldiers each week during 1918–1919 in the U.S. Army

Source: Ayres LP. The war with Germany: a statistical summary. Washington: Government Printing Office; 1919. p. 127.

Looking into how criminally stupid the Republican-fascists, libertarians, FOX based fascist cultists, etc. of 2020 are being, I have been looking at the last similar pandemic to see what happened and parallels that made things worse.   This paper has this passage that shows even in 1918, before they had discovered the existence of viruses and how they operate, they know this.

Medical officers such as Chesney wanted clean barracks and also worried about crowding. Surgeon General Gorgas had recommended that Army housing provide 60 square feet per man, but did not often prevail. As Gorgas told one training camp commander, “We know perfectly well that we can control pneumonia absolutely if we could avoid crowding the men, but it is not practicable in military life to avoid this crowding.”14 The Medical Department even asserted that “there is to be expected a definite relation between the degree of crowding and the amount of respiratory infection.”2 (p. 111) But if it was difficult to control crowding in the training camps, it was impossible in the battlefields. 

Yet the Republican-fascists, etc. are urging an end to social-distancing here, a century and two years after that huge mistake was made.  Only in our case, there is nothing comparable to the war-time conditions that gave them an excuse.  

As they conducted their analyses, military medical officers soon understood that the wave of influenza that had run through many U.S. training camps during the spring of 1918 constituted a first wave of the pandemic. Fourteen of the largest training camps had reported influenza outbreaks in March, April, or May, and some of the infected troops carried the virus with them aboard ships to France.12 In the late spring and summer, influenza visited all of the armies of Europe, including the AEF, but because influenza was common in the military, and few patients became critically ill, medical officers were not alarmed. But by the late summer some saw the emergence of a new, lethal influenza.

Captain Alan M. Chesney, medical officer with an AEF hospital at Valdahon, an artillery training camp behind the front lines in France, documented the evolution of a more virulent influenza from his vantage point. A physician who was later dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, Chesney noted that three different infantry brigades of 4,000 men occupied the post in succession, “thus every three or four weeks there occurred a marked change in the population of the post.” He theorized that “the history of the epidemic, therefore, resolved itself into distinct periods corresponding to the various brigades which entered the post,” and “the frequent changes in the population of the post, brought about by the short stay of each brigade, exercised considerable influence upon the course of the epidemic of influenza.”

During Chesney's first documented period, the month of June to July 27, the 5th Artillery Brigade had 77 “relatively mild” cases of influenza. During the second phase, July 27 to August 23, 200 men of the 58th Artillery Brigade became ill, about 6.5%. None of them died, but the outbreak was serious enough that the next brigade cleaned out the barracks, even washing the walls, before they moved in. Despite this precaution, during Chesney's third phase, August 23 to November 8, more than one-third of the 6th Artillery Brigade, 1,636 soldiers, contracted influenza and 151 died. Chesney concluded that “…these successive outbreaks tended to be progressively more severe both in character and extent, which would speak for an increasing virulence of the causative agent.”13

Medical officers such as Chesney wanted clean barracks and also worried about crowding. Surgeon General Gorgas had recommended that Army housing provide 60 square feet per man, but did not often prevail. As Gorgas told one training camp commander, “We know perfectly well that we can control pneumonia absolutely if we could avoid crowding the men, but it is not practicable in military life to avoid this crowding.”14 The Medical Department even asserted that “there is to be expected a definite relation between the degree of crowding and the amount of respiratory infection.”2 (p. 111) But if it was difficult to control crowding in the training camps, it was impossible in the battlefields. Evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald has argued that trench warfare and its crowded conditions enabled an especially aggressive and deadly influenza virus to gain footing in humans.15 As soldiers in the trenches became sick, the military evacuated them from the front lines and replaced them with healthy men. This process continuously brought the virus into contact with new hosts—young, healthy soldiers in which it could adapt, reproduce, and become extremely virulent without danger of burning out. From there, according to a Navy report, “It is reasonable to suppose that late in August influenza of severe type was spread from French, Spanish, and Portuguese seaports to the Orient, South Africa, the United States, and South America.”5 (p. 2427) As Chesney and Ewald suggest, the influenza of 1918 was a product of trench warfare, and the influenza that attacked the 6th Artillery at Valdahon would travel the highways of war, circling the globe.

I don't know if the quote I saw online is true, that people grew tired of being quarantined in 1918 and that the celebrations at the end of the war spiked the deadlier wave among the general population, I don't know enough to know if that's the case.  What was clearly true is that the recommendations for social distancing as a means of preventing infections was made and not taken and the results were a far worse pandemic than might have been.   

I do know that if the brief period of far from complete social distancing is being promoted as being "too much" or "too long" or a "violation of civil liberties (libertarians match their emotional development of the "terrible twos" with an intellectual development of a stupid 12-year-old) then there is no prospect that they will give up eating the animals which have been the vectors of one after another pandemic virus.  If people aren't wised up by these experiences, we are doomed to this cycle of idiocy and irresponsibility continuing. 

The Danger Of The Necessity Of Metaphors Used To Talk About These Things

Exaltation?   In the older texts of the New Testament the "exaltation" or "taking up" of Jesus is simply a form of expression for Jesus' raising or resurrection, with a different emphasis. The fact that Jesus was raised meant in the New Testament nothing more than that he was elevated to God by the very fact of being raised:  exaltation as completion of the resurrection. 

But does not exaltation mean assumption into heaven?  At the same time it is clear that the blue firmament can no longer be understood as in biblical times as the external side of God's presence chamber.  But it can certainly be understood as the visible symbol or image for the real heaven, the invisible domain ("living space") of God.  The heaven of faith is not the heaven of the astronauts, even though the astronauts themselves expressed it that way when they recited in outer space the biblical account of creation.  [And didn't some of the atheists have a hissy fit when that innocuous event happened.]  The heaven of faith is the hidden invisible incomprehensible sphere of God which no journey into space ever reaches.  It is not a place but a mode of being;  not one beyond earth's confines, but bringing all to perfection in God and giving a share in the reign of God. 

Jesus then is taken up into the glory of the Father, Resurrection and exaltation, when linked in Old Testament phraseology, means ascension to power (enthronement) on the part of him who has conquered death; assumed into God's sphere of life, he shares God's rule and glory and so can excise his claims to universal dominion for men.  The Crucified is Lord and calls men to follow him.  He is thus installed in his heavenly, divine dignity, which again finds its traditional expression in a metaphor referring to the son or representative of the ruler:  "Sits at the right hand of the Father."  That is he is nearest to the Father in authority and exercises it vicariously with the same dignity and status.  In the earliest Christological formulas, as used for instance in the apostles' sermons in Acts, Jesus was indeed man in lowliness, but after raising him,  God made him Lord and Messiah.  It is only to the exalted and not to the earthly Jesus that Messiahship and divine sonship are ascribed. 

This is important for the Easter appearances, however they are ultimately to be understood.  It is from this heavenly state of divine power and glory that he "appears to those whom he will make his "instruments"; this is what Paul leart and what is quite naturally assumed in the appearances in Matthew John, and in Mark's supplement, where there is no mention of the whence and whither of the one who appears.  Easter appearances are manifestations of the already exalted Jesus.  It is always the exalted Jesus who appears, coming from God, whether it is Paul hearing the one who calls him from heaven or - as in Matthew and John - the risen Jesus appearing on earth. 

In the New Testament then - apart from an exception to be discussed immediately - raising from death and exaltation to God are one.  Whenever there is a mention only of the one, the other is implied. Easter faith is faith in Jesus as the Lord who is risen (=exalted to God).  He is both the Lord of his Church present in the Spirit, and the hidden Lord of the word (cosmocrator) with whose rule the definitive rule of God has already begun. 

I was tempted to leave this passage out except it was so interesting a demonstration of how the incomprehensible nature of the Resurrection, alien not only to human language but human experience of space and time, leaves us relying on metaphors to talk about what of it was experienced in the post-Resurrection passages of the New Testament, the experiences that explain the subsequent actions of those who had known Jesus and saw him put to death - by their own confession abandoning him, no doubt Peter standing in as the quintessential examples of his most devoted follower who, as soon as he was taken into custody denied he even knew him three times.  Something clearly caused him to go from someone who could have probably gone back to his boat and resumed his life as a married fisherman but who, instead, became one of the leaders of a tiny, beleaguered sect of religious non-conformists constantly under danger of being killed as his co-leader of it,  James, the brother of Jesus soon was and as others were being killed or at least persecuted by the likes of Saul who would, himself have experiences of the risen  Jesus that set him on an even more startling and otherwise unexplained turn-around. 

Hans Kung who is certainly a master of word-use, immediately after talking about how incomprehensible the experience of the Resurrection is in terms of humanly perceived reality is forced to talk about heaven as the "sphere of God " how the status of Jesus exalted is put in the crudest of human political terms of power and rule and terms invented to describe physical coercion.  Given that the Gospels and other New Testament books were written by people whose language and manner of thinking was bound up in their experience of their world, it is entirely understandable that they would use the language they did, even as, occasionally, they talked about the inadequacy of such descriptions, and that things would get worse as medieval writers and thinkers put it into terms of early European feudalism, the mystics more often than conventional writers breaking out of it in terms that strike a modern reader as more poetic, though no less reliant on metaphors when there is an attempt at specificity.

I think the rule of God is through the subtle forces, as was the experience of God to Elijah and that passage would have been known to the writers of the Gospels, acts and certainly was known by Paul and James.  The problem of human metaphors is that they are too crude and too blatant.  The passage in which Elijah experiences God is one of the best I know about and it's the opposite of the language describing the status of the risen Jesus.   God was not in the great wind, the earthquake or the fire but in silence.   It's worth considering what that passage from 1 Kings ends up with,  Elijah is told to anoint new Kings and a prophet who will do some pretty violent stuff.  But the new rule described in the New Testament, despite the same kind of metaphorical language used to describe it, quite conclusively won't be one of the sword.  It is not describable in human terms, certainly not in legalese. 

Christians, especially when they are a majority make all kinds of trouble and bring Christianity into complete disrepute when, for example, "most Christian" princes and kings, presidents and prime ministers, generals and Popes and inquisitors have set up all-too worldly kingdoms to exercise their own power for immoral purposes.  They choose to ignore that difference, it is in that lapse of meaning into the crudeness of the metaphors that has accounted for the scandalous history of Christianity as a constant and continual violation of just about everything Jesus, Paul, James, etc. said.  Which shows how dangerous it is to forget that these are metaphors. 

Duncan Black is the one responsible for what gets posted on his blog.  If caring less would make it stop and you could tell me how to care less than not at all,  I'd do you the favor of doing it.   Talk to Duncan about it, not me. 

If God is the ultimate reality, then death is not destruction but metamorphosis - not a diminishing, but a finishing.

Corporeal resurrection?  Yes and no, if I may recall a personal conversation with Rudolf Bultmann.  No if "body" simply means the physiologically identical body.  Yes, if  "body" means in the sense of the New Testament soma the identical personal reality, the same self with its whole history.   In other words, no continuity of the body; questions of natural science, like that of the persistence of the molecules, do not arise.   But an identity of the person;  the question does arise of the lasting significance of the person's whole life ad fate.  In any case therefore not a diminished but a finished being.  The view of Eastern thinkers, that the self does not survive death and that only the works live on, is certainly worth consideration in the sense that death means a transition into dimensions other than those of space and time.  But it is inadequate.  If God is the ultimate reality, then death is not destruction but metamorphosis - not a diminishing, but a finishing. 

If then the resurrection of Jesus was not an event in human space and human time, neither can it be regarded merely as a way of expressing the significance of his death. It was admittedly not an historical event (verifiable by means of historical research), but it was certainly (for faith) a real event.  Consequently the resurrection cannot mean merely that his "cause" goes on and remains historically linked to his name, while he himself no longer exists, no longer lives, but is and remains dead.   it is not like the "cause" of monsieur Eiffel, which lives on in the Eiffel Tower, though the man himself is dead;  nor is there any similarity to Goethe, who "speaks" even today,"  being remembered in his work.  With Jesus it is a question of the living person and therefore of the cause.  The reality of the risen Jesus therefore cannot be left out of consideration.  Jesus' cause - which his disciples had given up as lost - was decided at Easter by God, himself.  Jesus' cause makes sense and continues, because he himself did not remain - a failure - in death, but lives on completely justified by God.  

Easter therefore is not a happening merely for the disciples and their faith.  Jesus does not live through their faith.  The Easter faith is not a function of the disciples' faith.  He was not - as some think - simply too great to die;  he did die.  But Easter is an event primarily for Jesus himself;  Jesus lives again through God, - for their faith.  The precondition of the new life is God's action which is not chronologically but objectively prior to it, in advance of it.  Thus this faith is first made possible, established, in which the living Jesus himself proves to be alive.  Even according to Bultmann, the formula, "Jesus is risen into the kerygma (proclamation), is liable to be misunderstood.  Even according to Bultmann, it does not mean that Jesus lives because he is proclaimed;  he is proclaimed because he lives.  It is therefore a very different situation in Rodion Shchedrin's oratorio, Lenin in the Heart of the People, * where the Red Guardsman sings at Lenin's deathbed;  No, no, no!  That cannot be!  Lenin lives lives lives!  here it is only "Lenin's cause" that continues.  

This passage made me think of Thomas Jefferson's cut and paste job made of the Gospels, cutting out anything of any religious character from it which offended Jefferson's materialist-rationalist (atheist) scientism, and its entire and complete moral non-effect, not only on the many "freethinkers" who have made reference to it (as to their having read it, call me a skeptic), the many members of Congress in the past to whom a copy was given (when I was very young I believe hearing that a copy of the "Jefferson Bible" was given to every incoming member of Congress) but on Jefferson, himself who performed the exercise of making a new and improved Jesus much in the way of more recent efforts.  As he was doing so he was at the height of his activity as a slaver, having rationally turned the human beings he held in bondage into property for his use, including the children he had fathered with at least one of them, encouraging his fellow aristocratic land barons that they should do anything they could to hold people in slavery because every child they produced was property and an increase in their wealth, not a person having the very same rights that the young Jefferson had proclaimed were the gift of the Creator equally bestowed on humanity.   And that was aside from the very, many acts as a politician and president that were entirely at odds with the very words of Jesus that Jefferson chose to retain in his exercise in natural religion (I don't think I could honestly accuse Jefferson of doing theology or anything like what Kung and Niebuhr have done) .  I honestly think that Jefferson's naturalism is what led him to view people as their physical bodies,  rejecting any transcendent character that their whole persons (to use the phrase Kung does above) and which he so clearly did not hold that Jesus had.   

One thing he doesn't seem to have had any inclination of doing was selling all he had and giving the money to the poor.  Though an habitual profligate perhaps Jefferson might have been more inclined to want people to take the commandment to give your money away to those who won't pay it back, forgiving debts, more to heart. 

Jefferson scholars note that as he got older his materialistic-scientistic inclinations came to dominate his thinking and, I would assert, his actions.   As I had cause to point out last year, the radical doctor, public health expert, Catholic nun, Teresa Forscades pointed out that that modernism which made rationality the supreme value of people inevitably carried with that the idea of radical inequality because, even if someone had the intellectual capacity to do so, the economic and social reality was that not everyone would have equal access to education but that everyone had the capacity to be holy, to sanctity, and that if you made that the basis of valuation then it led to viewing people as being equal.  

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I think the view of Jesus IN THE RESURRECTION of the risen Jesus as not merely physical but radically more than merely physical is not the non-essential add-on that I had taken it to have been twenty-five or so years ago, a distraction from the moral content, the radical equality of his Gospel, I THINK IT IS ESSENTIAL TO HOW THAT RADICAL EQUALITY, THAT RADICAL MORAL CONTENT CAN BE UNDERSTANDABLE TO HUMAN BEINGS.  I think that without it the bland unitarian-deistic-mish-mosh that the Jeffersonian-Priestlyan view of Christianity that exhibited itself among the New England transcendentalists is probably what you can expect to happen.   There are certainly other problems with other traditions that take Jesus at all seriously, or pretend to, there are certainly enormous problems in the various churches - among those that one or another aspect of the teachings of Jesus are ignored or rationalized into nothing.  But Christianity dissolving into meaninglessness through natural theology, perhaps in line with the passage about Karl Barth given yesterday, or through 18th century enlightenment rejection of the Resurrection as a real thing with real consequences for how we are to consider people as more than their bodies, their brains, their genes (or, rather, the radically naive view of those which currently dominates the college-credentialed culture) is inadequate to bring about behavior which treats people and other living beings as more than objects for use or disposal.  

I am going to continue with this series of postings through the Easter season,  I think, because Kung addresses questions about the Resurrection very well and with far more of a regard for the actual texts of the New Testament than for later dogmas and doctrines of the various churches.  I have mentioned that one of the right-wing slams against him has been that he's more of a Protestant than a Catholic, though I think what he actually is is a good scholar and an honest thinker.  

*  It's impressive to me that Kung would know to make this comparison with such a minor work of music.  I wish I had access to a translation of the libretto.  But even more interesting than that was this interview with the composer (who is apparently still living) in 1990, as Soviet Communism was falling away, if you can overlook the stupid question about the serial music which is stupid.

RS:  Yeah, of course this new move is fantastic!  It's really something happened!  Something happened!  In the East Europe it's miracle!  It's miracle, but our tradition, we are 72 years of this meat grinder!  They had only 40.  It's not ended there, but for us, everything is ended.  I'm afraid that Russian Volk is absolutely crushed!  Morale crushed. 

BD:  Devastated?

RS:  Yes!  Absolutely!  Before, people believes in God.  Now they believe in communism idea.  This next generation everybody will be equal; everybody will have this.  Now, in the last 20 years, nobody believe in anything because everything is lie!  Everybody knows it!  Now they try religion again, but this is very difficult because this tradition has been interrupted.

BD:  Is there any connection, is there a parallel between communism in economics and atonality in music?

RS:  Atonality?  [Thinks for a moment, and takes a deep breath]  Mmmm.  I think that art is very connected with economics.

BD:  But I mean is the communist system, and its oppression, like the atonal, or the 12-tone system, oppressive in music?

RS:  Mmmm.  I think that the communism system, this is not only twelve-tone system, in music; this is also a twelve tone system in rhythm, timbre, color, every aspect of music.  Then is quite the same.  But it's not like in prison.  Communism system is a big, big prison for everybody.  Somebody a little top, somebody a little lower, but everybody's prisoners!  This includes winners who is the same with slaves!  It's everybody is all together!  Not one free people.  Nobody is free.  Now you are really free, spiritual free.  If you go on the street and say, [shouts]  "Gorbachev is shit!!!", nobody take you in prison.  Nobody take you to prison.  And this is absolutely miracle!  Absolutely miracle.

BD:  Is this not happening also in music?

RS:  In all place now there is absolutely freedom in music, too!  In one very curious work, they crushed a piano.  It's 25 years after Cage, and so on, but they think this is new!  Something like this!

What I thought was most interesting in this was what Shchedrin said in those heady days, before Yeltsen and then Putin reimposed gangster government in Russia and various Stalinists did in the about to be "freed" Republics.  when he talked about how the Russian people, after 72 years in the "meat grinder" were totally demoralized, totally crushed.  I can say that I came to see the same thing in the failure of Russian democracy and directly related it to the difficulties of even longer oppressed people,  Black People in the United States, the Native People here and elsewhere under genocide and colonization.  If the Russians people have found it impossible to rise above the conditions that lead them to be led by gangsters like Putin then it is no surprise that populations with a history of similar serfdom and slavery elsewhere have the same difficulty of getting free of it.  That takes a truly radical change in individuals and in societies, radical changes that the static view of life in materialism will never, ever make possible. 

I've Answered Enough Hate Mail Today, If You Think The Kind Of Things Kung Described Are Ridiculous Watch This

Only don't make the mistake of thinking that the models of multidimensional objects are more than a cartoon of them, the description of them by the mathematician sometimes admits that they are deceptive but he talks about them as if they're a lot more real than he, then, goes on to admit they are not what they look like in 2 and 3 dimensions. 

And these figures aren't known to be real in the way that people are.  They are complete abstractions that may be entirely imaginary. 

Hate Mail - I Won't Be Fair To Fascists, I Won't Be Nice To Nazis, I Won't Be The Sap of "Socialists"

I have apparently adopted a simple rule when it comes to whose "first amendment rights" I'm going to be bothered to defend.  The issue is egalitarian democracy, those who support it and its foundations are worth defending, those whose ideologies, from alleged left to all too real right, oppose and undermine egalitarian democracy are not only not worthy of being defended, it is a danger to egalitarian democracy and morality to give them a defense.  The Court has proven itself to be the enemy of egaltarian democracy far more reliably than it has proven to promote egalitarian democracy.  Even the Warren Court proved to be total chumps when it came to unintentionally, perhaps, undermining what was needed to protect, defend and promote equality and democracy.   There have been none stupider on that count than some of the smartest "liberals" on the court.  I would bet no more than two of the sitting "justices" might even be willing to entertain considering that reality of the past half-century. 

The only "socialism" that doesn't quickly turn bad is the socialism that holds that those who produce wealth are the rightful owners of the means of that production.  I believe in that.  All other so-called "socialism" appropriates the word as a false-front for some kind of gangsterism.  Marxists are some of the worst of those.  I don't ascribe positive meanings to the word, "socialism" anymore because it has been thoroughly  trashed by such jerks.  

Even many "socialists" of good will are suckered by ill considered collaboration with Marxists and other anti-democratic ideologues. 

The Roberts Court The Most Overtly Fascist Court In Modern Times Should Be Where Judicial Tyranny Ends

We have been or may well be about to get a crash course in the matter of how  The Congress adjourns and who adjourns it,  I will admit I am no expert in it but I am finding it interesting to think about what would happen if the Trumpian-Repubican-fascist Supreme Court majority wrote an order in regard to whether or not the Congress is adjourned if it wasn't the Congress, itself that determined that. 

Would the Roberts Court really risk the Congress telling them to take their decision and put it where the sun doesn't shine?   Wouldn't it be ironic if the Roberts Court were the one to finally have gone so far too far that the Congress or a Democratic executive had had enough and ended the Supreme Court created powers that mere custom have kept in place since the time of John Marshall, powers of review that until the 20th century were used only twice, in Marbury v Madison and the horrible Dred Scott decisions?   I am guessing that Roberts and his fellow Federalist fascist colleagues are that arrogant and would risk it in order to back up even the totally degraded Trump because he has an "R" after his name.  

The question then is if the Congress will acquiesce to the judicial tyranny in which the Supreme Court put itself in charge of the Congressional calendar.  I would say that a good way for them to resist would be to finally drive a stake through the extra-Constitutional powers the Court gave itself and to destroy a number of the Court created abominations such as coproprate "personhood," the equation of money with speech,  "rights" of corporations and the ability of the Supreme Court to inhibit the most legitimate level of government by participating in voting suppression schemes.  

It's time to face the fact that an enormous amount of the corruption that has resulted in Trump came directly from the Supreme Court, the least democratic of the three branches, the one which has given itself powers that were never ratified by any legislature elected by The People or The People, themselves. 

Neither sight nor imagination can help us here, they can only mislead us.

Back in 2007 when a consortium of mathematicians calculated the mathematical description of the object called "the exceptional Lie group E_8 (I can't get Blogger to do subscripts) and I read how big the calculations were, 60 gigabytes in 2007 terms,  I have to say that I was skeptical that any assertions of even the most gifted of those involved had an understanding of what they produced would be honest.  

Mathematicians Map E_8

Mathematicians have mapped the inner workings of one of the most complicated structures ever studied: the object known as the exceptional Lie group E_8. This achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge and because of the many connections between E_8 and other areas, including string theory and geometry. The magnitude of the calculation is staggering: the answer, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. Mathematicians are known for their solitary work style, but the assault on E_8 is part of a large project bringing together 18 mathematicians from the U.S. and Europe for an intensive four-year collaboration.

The article compared the size of the calculation to the representation of the human genome which, it notes, is less than one gigabyte in size.  I feel entirely comfortable in saying that any of those 18 mathematicians would only understand a small part of what they worked on and produced and that no human being, even if they made this project their sole and exclusive field of study would ever "know" more than a small part of it.  

And this mathematical object is not known to exist as a real entity in reality, not to mention as a material thing.  In so far as human beings can be concerned, there is no way of knowing if it might not be a product of human imagination having no other existence, anywhere.  It could be a human invention, the expression of which in absolute terms exceeds even the human minds which may be the only place where it resides.  

What that makes their accomplishment, I don't know but I'm pretty sure neither do those who understand anything about it.  One thing I'm confident in asserting is that its implications for even the simplest objects and entities within human perception may well lead a reasonable person to think that there is not a single one of those things which, addressed in similar terms as this E_8 object, would be comprehensible to even the most brilliant minds among us.  Another thing I am confident in asserting is that we, all of us, in every way, must live out our lives and make up our minds on a basis other than absolute knowledge and proof because such absolute knowledge and proof is not accessible by human minds and, in human terms, is merely a satisfying fantasy and an arrogantly and stupidly waved weapon of arrogant polemical assertion.  

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Resurrection imaginable?  People too easily forget that both "resurrection" and "raising" are metaphorical, visual terms.  The picture is taken from "awakening" and "rising" from sleep.  But, as an image, symbol, metaphor, for what is supposed to happen to the dead person, this can be both easily understood and easily misunderstood.  It is the very opposite of returning as from sleep to the previous state of things, to the former, earthly, mortal life.  It is a radical transformation into a wholly different state into another, new unparalleled, definitive, immortal life;  totalier aliter, utterly different. 

To the question that people are constantly inclined to ask - how are we to imagine this wholly different life? -  the answer is simple, not at all!   Here there is nothing to be depicted, imagined, objectified.  It would not be a wholly different life if we could illustrate it with concepts and ideas from our present life.  Neither sight nor imagination can help us here, they can only mislead us. The reality of the resurrection itself therefore is completely intangible and unimaginable, Resurrection and raising are pictorial-graphic expressions;  they are images, metaphors, symbols which correspond to the thought forms of that time and which could of course be augmented, for something which is itself intangible and unimaginable and of which - as of God himself- we have no sort of distinct knowledge

Certainly we can attempt to convey this intangible and unimaginable life,  not only graphically but also intellectually (as for instance physics attempts to convey by formulas the nature of light, which in the atomic field is both wave and corpuscule and as such intangible and unimaginable).  Here too we come up against the limitations of language.  But then there is nothing left for it but to speak in paradoxes:  to link together for this wholly different life concepts which in the present life are mutually exclusive.  That is what happens in a way in the Gospel accounts of the appearances, at the extreme limit of the imaginable; not a phantom and yet not palpable, perceptible-imperceptible, visible-invisible, comprehensible-incomprehensible, material-immaterial, within and beyond space and time.  

"Like the angels in heaven"  Jesus himself observed, using the language of the Jewish tradition.  Paul speaks of this new life in paradoxical terms, which themselves point to the limits of what can be said: an imperishable "spirit-body," a "body of glory,"  which has emerged through a radical "transformation" from the perishable body of flesh.  By this Paul simply does not mean a spirit-soul in the Greek sense (released from the prison of the body),  which modern anthropology can no longer conceive in isolation.  he means in the Jewish sense a whole corporal human being (transformed and permeated by God's life-creating Spirit), which corresponds much more closely to the modern integral conception of man and to the fundamental importance of his corporeality.  Man therefore is not - Platonically - released from his corporeality.  He is released with and in his now glorified, spritualized corporeality; a new creation, a new man. 

The first thing I thought of when I read this was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel saying,  "Death, then, is not simply man’s coming to an end. It is also entering a beginning."   The Christian religion is the younger brother of the Jewish tradition.   

The second thing, being a political blogger, was what such a conception of human beings would have to lead to if you accept that you have a moral responsibility to other people or other beings (I am not going to exclude our fellow living beings) who share in that same status as opposed to the materialist-atheist-scietistic view of human beings as objects or the vulgar, Trumpian, gangster view that other people have the same status that people generally hold of animals that they are objects to which people owe no moral obligations, a status consistent with modernism after the Cartesian fashion and all too consistent with how human beings from peasants to the most powerful and rich treat them.   I will forego the temptation to go on  at length at how pandemic viruses are only one result of that cruel utilitarian view of life while pointing out that slave labor and wage-slavery is another obvious result of it which Marxist materialism did absolutely nothing to mitigate or lessen.   

I recently asked the political question of Christianity, what you get from choosing to really believe it as opposed to what you get from choosing to disbelieve it.  I think that the difference you would get from someone having this view of human beings, of human potential and our mutual moral obligations to be good to each other and seeing people as objects to be used as you can get away with doing, of Darwinian objects of greater or lesser value, of greater or lesser "fitness" which really means whether or not their death will serve the purpose of those who can bring it about or prevent it, has the most profound moral and, so, political results. 

I started my investigations into the reason the American left failed so consistently and I have come to see that the ubiqutious materialism, Marxist or merely practical and unestablished in an ideological framing, is one of the most serious reasons that the American left fails.*  The moral framing required for egalitarian democracy, the very reason for any "left," so claimed to exist does not inhibit the opposite which, even when it calls itself "Christian" is fully consistent with and can prosper within the degraded view of humanity that real Christianity is in the most profound opposition.  Jesus is taken by Christianity as the first human to attain the status as indirectly represented by the paradoxes and reservations given by Kung.   The fact is that not everyone who claims to be Christian hold with the most basic definitions of Christianity, a large number may have been called, but they have not, so far, answered. 

*  In 2020, with the history that Marxism has had in reality instead of imaginary wet-dreams by academics and other fantasists, with the various attempts of non-Marxists to work with and defend Marxists (what we should have learned was not only impossible but a gurantee of getting stabbed in the back from Orwell in the 1940s) it is way, way past time to not only dump them but to drive them out and discredit them.  Getting past the romantic Hollywood presentation of them and their eternally regurgitated victim hood, the sum total that I would guess most college-credentialed Americans, those most prone to being suckered by them  piously believe they know about it, is probably the biggest hurdle to get over.  Hollywood, too, is one of the worst disabilities of the American left, it makes leftists stupid in a different way than it does those prone to want right-wing gangster government. 

After All These Years . . .

When I said "lazy and superficial" did you think I didn't mean you and your buddies?   I'm done with all that nonsense. 

Hate Mail - I'd Contrast Kung's Discourse Against Russell's Polemics Any Day But I Know Which Approach Wins Over The Lazy And Superficial

Before going on with the series I started on Easter . . . 

In Unit F, chapter II, section 1. of Kung's Does God Exist, Hans Kung goes through a passage from one of the most popular of Bertrand Russell's books - which is typical of his anti-religious polemics - Why I Am Not A Christian, it is as good an example of the contrast between even that, for English language atheist polemics, high market example and the approach of the high end of mainstream theology. I'll give you the beginning and a few of the highlights of Kung's treatment because it goes on for many pages whereas atheists, English language sones, especially, don't make such in depth investigations. 

Beginning on page 509 in the edition of the English language translation I have,  Kung starts with a quote from Russell:

"To come to this question of the existence of God, it is a large and serious  matter I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion."  

So "large and serious" that Russell signals his intention of not dealing with it.  This is Bertrand Russell trying to get himself off the hook before he even starts, which, for someone of his reputation as an intellectual, should discredit him, not excuse him.  It is the kind of pragmatic assertion of such vague modesty of intent that is so often found in popular polemics, especially, in my experience, when the polemicist is a self-declared rationalist, "freethinker" (which, of course no materialist can really be) and, typically, an atheist. 

Kung continues:

We certainly cannot deal with it as briefly as Bertrand Russel does in this lecture, but we must first hear a little more of what he says:  "You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the exitence of God can be proved by the unaided reason.  That is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas.  They had to introduce it because at one time the Freethinkers were in the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist.  The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it.  Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason, and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it."  Russell himself thought that these arguments did not prove it, ad this was a decisive reason why he would not become a Christian. But what is the dogma about which Russell speaks here so vaguely?  

Kung then goes on, not till "Kingdom Come" but for fifteen deeply informative, well cited and referenced pages, first on the actual declaration from the First Vatican Council which Russell distorts for his entirely more vulgar polemical method which declares it will not deal with issues he raises in depth - certainly in order to keep the attention of Russell's middle-brow audience who are interested in attacks, not ideas, least of all what is credible or even true.   He gives it, verbatim 

Basically, certainty comes from reason, to whcih of course the certaity of faith must be added.  This is the position quite clearly adopted by the First Vatican Council in 1870. "If anyone says that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from created things, h is to be condemned."  How did the Council come to produce such a harsh theological position?

And after that he goes into a full history of  why the First Vatican Council (which he criticizes,  in process, as largely a failure which didn't adopt any of the proposed reforms but did adopt such things that Kung so notably rejected, as a Catholic priest, including papal infallibility) adopted that language, the various movements in earlier 18-19th century theology, both would-be rationalist and fideist it was a reaction against, the actual meaning of the statement in context - which didn't mean what Russell characterized it as being. 

Against Russell it must be pointed out that Vatican I asserts not that every human being actually knows God but that knowledge of God is possible in principle for every human being.   Neither does it assert that God's existence can be proved, but only that it can be known from created things.  Nor, finally, does it assert that even natural knowledge of God is acquired in fact without God's grace;  only that natural knowledge of God comes about without divine revelation.  Does this seem a ingenious solution to the problem of reason and faith"  Is it bad or a fair compromise?  

I don't know if Kung meant to use language that could fairly be used to characterize Bertrand Russell's polemical writing and speaking in which wit and cleverness (what passes as "ingenious" in mid-brow discourse) but I certainly notice that you could turn Russell's statement back on him on that basis. 

After that Kung gives a Catholic critique of it, noting the enormous damage that it did within the Catholic church, before noting that the most intellectually rigorous criticism of it didn't come from a Catholic or a  materialist-rationalist-atheist but the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth, then the reaction to Barth and then a recapitulation in which Kung - who is an authoritative voice in matters concering Karl Barth's thinking (Barth, himself, endorsed Kung's understanding of his work) notes that BARTH, HIMSELF made a substantial criticism of his earlier position.  

It took others working within the fields of logic and mathematics to come up with the same kind of criticism of the academic work of Bertrand Russell.   In just dealing with this one accusation against Kung and his intellectual honesty, it would seem to me that the same reservations that Russell makes polemically against the claim that you could come to faith in God through unaided reason are not entirely unlike his attempt to explain mathematics through pure logic.  I wonder if anyone ever put that to him for consideration and if the ever abbreviating Bertrand Russell ever said anything about that. 

Update:  I should certainly have noted that Barth's criticism of it was a first rate intellectual criticism but that it was far more importantly a criticism that couldn't have been more timely and important for the moral and political consequences of the ideas he rejected.   

Free Lying Press Dooms Us To Disaster

If the study talked about in this article is even close to right, the United States is in a lot deeper trouble than we might think right now because the conditions that are given in the quote contained in it certainly will not happen, or if tried will not succeed, because Republicans will use any attempt by a Democratic administration and Congress to do the right thing against them politically.  Under the prevailing legal and media orthodoxy, their use of reason, science, moral responsibility against them would prevail. 

The United States may need to endure social distancing measures adopted during the coronavirus outbreak until 2022, according to researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health.

The study comes as more than 2,200 people died in the United States from the outbreak on Tuesday, a record, according to a Reuters tally, even as the country debated how to reopen its economy. The overall death toll in the U.S. from the virus stands at more than 28,300 as of Tuesday.

“Intermittent distancing may be required into 2022 unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available”, the Harvard researchers said in findings published Tuesday in the journal Science.

Giving examples of South Korea and Singapore, the researchers wrote that effective distancing could reduce the strain on healthcare systems and enable contact tracing and quarantine to be feasible.

The study acknowledged that prolonged distancing would most likely have profoundly negative economic, social, and educational consequences.

The study added that even in the case of “apparent elimination”, SARS-CoV-2 surveillance should still be maintained, as a resurgence in contagion may be possible as late as 2024.

"Unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available,"  Republicans with the aid of FOX, Sinclare, ABC, and the media that would follow their lead would savagely attack Democrats who tried to increase critical care capacity and fund treatment and vaccine programs.   If, as under our superstition promoting media and social-disease media would certainly mount an anti-vaccine crusade which the Republicans and the right-wing media would exploit for the 2022 elections and Democrats would know that that's what they could expect.  They know they could expect billionaires to fund another astro-turf campaign like the "tea-party" media circus mounted in opposition to the Affordable Care Act.  They could probably count on the Republican-fascist dominated federal courts and the Supreme Court to aid and promote the political interests that would do so.  

And they will certainly try to gin-up and exploit people getting tired of social distancing.  They're already doing that. 

Democrats certainly know this is what they can expect to happen, they know that because it is the pattern of what the media, Republicans in office and on the courts have done over and over again, using their morally responsible acts against them.  

And they know they can count on the same from the play-left which hate nothing so much as Democrats doing what is possible instead of delivering everything they can currently think to ask for and, as those are delivered, for ever more pie-in-the-never-to-be-reached-sky.   I can guarantee you that if Bernie Sanders had become president and AOC had succeeded him as vice president, In These Times, The Nation, Sam Seder and Cenk would all be going after her.  I don't trust any of them any more than I do the Republicans and the commercial media to do anything but stab us in the back. 

If There's Ever Been An Uninformed Accusation It Is That Hans Kung "Cherry Picks" and, He's Swiss, Not German, You Bigot

I have no special love of astrology and much that is written in this area bores me to tears.  But astrology is an excellent example of the way scientists deal with phenomena outside of their area of competence.  They don't study them, they simply curse them, insinuating that their curses are based on strong and straightforward arguments.

Paul Feyerabend

The posts I've done in which the eminent Swiss theologian, Hans Kung answers four of the most commonly made arguments against the reality of the Resurrection of Jesus shows, among other things, that Kung didn't go for the low hanging fruit, he went to the top level of anti-Christian discourse and that was just a very, very short passage of what he has done throughout his enormous body of writings in theology and other topics.  The three books often considered something of a trilogy,  Does God Exist?,  On Being a Christian and Eternal Life?  are a very deep engagement, not with the popular level of atheist and anti-Christian invective but with the very best they can put up against religion.  I think any fair person who reads them, really reading them in an engaged manner, looking up relevant citations, would find them to be excellent.*   I think his fellow theologian,  Elizabeth A. Johnson was correct, that Does God Exist? is if not the best one of the best responses to atheism in the literature. 

I referenced Paul Feyerabend who in that quote was answering critics of a paper he wrote twelve years earlier, The Strange Case of Astrology, in which he compared the famous, or rather deservedly infamous petition against astrology signed by almost two-hundred eminent scientists and other figures of would-be intellectual life, comparing their approach with the deservedly infamous 15th century book about supposed witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum.  Most interesting to me were the criticisms Feyerabend was making even as CSICOP was forming and the sTARBABY scandal incubating among its scientists and matematicians and philosophers.  Feyerabend saw the potential for something like that to happen in the scientists' slip-shod, sloppy, uninformed declarations which were to be sold on the power of their authority and fame, alone. I think it's extremely impressive that he was able to see that even before he could have heard about the sTARBABY scandal which was the one and only "scientific" investigation and totally botched and covered up by Paul Kurtz and his fellow ideological atheists.

And the same can be said about the general approach of, certainly popular level atheism, the kind that is written by Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennet, Krauss, Coyne, and their like online but also in almost all of the higher levels of atheist polemics and propaganda.  Bertrand Russell certainly could have done it on a higher level than he did but he didn't, his attacks on religion are kiddie stuff compared to what Kung addresses.  I think some of the same habits of intellectual engagement in that debate, on the two sides, were the ones that Paul Feyerabend exposed about half a century ago.  

Now what surprises the reader [of the Humanist anti-astrology statement] whose image of science has been formed by the customary eulogies which emphasize rationality, objectivity, impartiality and so on is the religious tone of the document, the illiteracy of the "arguments" and the authoritarian manner in which the arguments are being presented.  The learned gentlemen have strong convictions, they use their authority to spread these convictions (why 186 signatures if one has arguments?), they know a few phrases which sound like arguments, but they certainly do not know what they are talking about. 

Take the first sentence of the "Statement."  It reads:  "Scientists in a variety of fields have become concerned with the increased acceptance of astrology in many parts of the world."

In 1484 the Roman Catholic Church published the Malleus Maleficarum, the outstanding textbook on witchcraft.  The Malleus is a very interesting book.  It has four parts:  phenomena, aetiology, legal aspects, theological aspects of witchcraft.   The description of phenomena is sufficiently detailed to enable us to identify the mental disturbances that accompanied some cases.  The aetiology is pluralistic, there is not just the official explanation, there are other explanations as well, purely materialistic explanations included.  Of course, in the end only one of the offered explanations is accepted, but the alternatives are discussed and so one can judge the arguments that lead to their elimination.   This feature makes the Malleus superior to almost every physics, biology, chemistry textbook of today.   Even the theology is pluralistic, heretical views are not passed over in silence, nor are they ridiculed;  they are described, examined, and removed by argument.   The authors know the subject, they know their opponents, they give a correct account of the positions of their opponents, they argue against these positions and they use the best knowledge available at the time of their arguments.

The book has an introduction, a bull by Pope Innocent VIII, issued in 1484.   The bull reads:  "It has indeed come to our ears, not without afflicting us with bitter sorrow, that in ...."  - and now comes a long list of countries and counties - "many persons of both sexes unmindful of their own salvation have strayed from the Catholic Faith and have abandoned themselves to devils ..." and so on.  The words are almost the same as the words in the beginning of the "Statement,"  and so are the sentiments expressed.  Both the Pope and the "186 leading scientists"  deplore the increasing popularity of what they think are disreputable views.  But what a difference in literacy and scholarship!

Comparing the Malleus with accounts of contemporary knowledge the reader can easily verify that the Pope and his learned authors knew what they were talking about.  This cannot be said of our scientists.  they neither know the subject they attack, astrology, nor those parts of their own science that undermine the attack.

The accusation that Hans Kung set things up or otherwise rigged the evidence or "cherry picked" what he addressed is a blatant lie that anyone who bothered to read his books that I can only excerpt would see, immediately.  He has both read and studied and understood and SYMPATHETICALLY presents the arguments he addresses and refutes.  He is fair and respectful of the atheists' and anti-Christain arguments, I think in no small part because he wants to do what most atheists and just about all materialists and the rather low priesthood of scientism have no real interest in, finding the truth.  

His life-long habit of doing that hasn't been aimed at only atheism or anti-Christian literature, he has been one of the most exigent critics of the very Catholic church and tradition that he is a member of, indeed, under the JPII and Benedict XVI regimes, he had his credentials as a Catholic theologian removed in what was a blatant attempt to get him fired from his university teaching position.   He has remained one one of the most informed, essential and insightful critics of the Catholic church even as he remains a Catholic priest.  I have every confidence that if Hans Kung had had, on the basis of where the evidence led him,  no honest choice but to adopt atheism he would have done so and, with his life-long engagement with the topics at the level he has engaged them, I am impressed that he has, so far as I know, never found he had to. 

* I doubt anyone could possibly look up all of the citations he gives in just the first book, alone in less than a decade of heavy reading, those I've looked at are accurately represented by Kung.

This is an interesting article about Paul Feyerabend and the accusation that he was an enemy of science when what he was was the kind of critic that scientists not only are not used to facing, they are outraged that anyone would hold them up to criticism, especially those outside the fraternity.   That is a habit of entitlement that I doubt theologians ever much develop since if there's an easy target in modern society, it's religion.  Maybe I'll address some of what it says later. 

No, Anyone But Any Republican 2020

I don't watch or listen to Trump's daily Nuremberg style mini-rallies that get covered live on TV, from what they sound like he's doing what Nixon reportedly was doing to an audience of presidential portraits in the White House to the TV cameras.   And Nixon reportedly had to get drunk first before he got that soppily self-pitying, whiny and complaining about how no one gets his greatness. 

We were still not so degraded a country that we couldn't get rid of a Nixon, we haven't been able to get rid of Trump.  But, then, Republicans didn't control the Senate and the Supreme Court back then.  

The Straw Man Of Total Historical Agreement

Note:  I have decided that I will post an index of these pieces later because the list of them is going to get rather long to keep posting.  For those who want to read the earlier ones, they started on Easter Sunday.

Fourth difficulty.  A close analysis of the Easter accounts reveals insuperable discrepancies and inconsistencies.  Attempts have indeed been made constantly to combine and harmonize them into a uniform tradition.  But - to sum it up briefly - it is impossible to establish agreement about 1. the people involved:  Peter, Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, the disciples, the apostles, the twelve, the Emmaus disciples, five hundred brethren,  James, Paul; 2. the locality of the events;  Galilee, a mountain there or the lake of Tiberias;  Jerusalem, at Jesus' grave or a meeting place'  3.  the whole sequence of appearances;  morning and evening of Easter Sunday, eight days and forty days later.  At every point harmonization proves to be impossible, unless we are prepared to accept textual changes and to minimize the differences. 

The reverse side.  Obviously no one at the time needed or wanted a uniform scheme or a smooth harmony, still less any sort of biography of the risen Jesus.  The New Testament authors are not interested in any kind of  completeness nor in a definite sequence and least of all in a critical historical investigation of the different pieces of information.  From this it is clear that there is something more important to be stressed in the individual narratives;  for Paul and Mark the calling and mission of the disciples;  for Luke and John it is more the real identity of the risen with the pre-paschal Jesus (perception of the identity and ultimately proof of identity by the demonstration of his corporeality and his sharing food, with the constantly greater emphasis on conquering the doubts of his disciples).  At the same time it becomes clear that any how, when or where of the narratives is of secondary importance by comparison with the fact - of which there is no doubt in the different sources - of the resurrection which in every context is clearly not identical with the death and burial.  What is required is a concentration on the true content of the message and this in turn will make possible a renewed investigation into the historical discrepancies. 

If the rule that all accounts of an event must agree in all ways, in details small and even large, were to be made universal, the same point I made this morning would be true, a huge amount of human culture and experience would have to be disbelieved.  It is another special rule that is most applied in matters religious and in no part of that is that more true in contemporary academic and popular culture than it is for Christianity.  There is, literally, nothing to almost nothing about which there will be a uniform account of it except those things for which there is not multiple attestation.  

But we live with discrepancies even within what is supposed to be the hardest of science, certainly in 20th century physics the quest for a harmonization in a so-called theory of everything, our resting on the cusp of which is one of the most irrationally asserted and popular assertions very popular with ideological atheists in science.  Though the very science they assert leads the to that so-called inevitability is the science that rather more convincingly leads to the conclusion that such a theory is never going to be had.  And don't get me started on the discrepancies in the life sciences surrounding the origin if species.  

It was one of the things I was most critical of the Jesus Seminar and other historical-critical projects that their use of multiple attestation as evidence of the authenticity of the words of Jesus and the events of his life were not uniformly applied but it seems to have become a matter of double speak, at times not used to support authenticity but, especially when there was not total harmony among multiple attestations to use that, as desired, to discount authenticity.   When your goal is to support a desired conclusion, any way you can turn things would seem to be acceptable even within modern academic discourse.  

The desire to come up with a harmonization of the Gospels is a very old one, the earliest known one was the Diatessaron of Tatian from just after the middle of the second century.   That there was clearly no harmonized, uniform and self-consistent account placed into the canon of the Scriptures supports Kung's contention that that wasn't what the authors of the books wanted but, since it's clear that something like that was wanted, very much, that those with the authority to do that wanted to be honest about the texts they had received more than they wanted to avoid the refutations that would make use of discrepancies. 

The other day I pointed out that there is no such a thing as an objective witness or recorder of events, something which science has established as a truth about the most "objective" of observations about a hundred fifteen years ago.  There is certainly nothing objective in either believing in or disbelieving the Resurrection of Jesus, there is nothing that can be refuted on the evidence available and there is no direct physical evidence, the testimonies that have come down to us are the only available evidence to make a decision on.  It would be claimed that a CHOICE to believe is based in a subjective choice to buy the claims made in the New Testament.   But the choice to not believe is no less subjective, it is as fully fraught with aspects of choice on the basis of predisposition.  A religious believer - one who really believes - will probably admit that their belief is a matter of choice, it is a rare non-believer who will admit the same thing.  

Evidence, What It Is, What It Can Do, What It Can't Do, When It Can't Exist

Third difficulty.  There is no direct evidence of a resurrection.  There is no one in the whole New Testament who claims to have been a witness of the resurrection.  The resurrection is nowhere described.  The only exception to this is the unauthentic (apocryphal) Gospel of Peter which appeared about A.D. 150 and at the end gives an account of the resurrection in a naive, dramatic fashion with the aid of legendary details:  these -like so many apocryphal elements - entered into the Church's Easter texts,  Easter celebrations,  Easter hymns, Easter sermons, Easter pictures and were thus mingled in a variety of ways with popular belief about Easter.  Even such unique masterpieces of art as Gruenwald's unsurpassed depiction of the resurrection in the Isenheim altar can be misleading in this respect.  

The reverse side.  The very reserve of the New Testament Gospels and letters in regard to the resurrection creates trust.  The resurrection is neither depicted nor described.  The interest in exaggeration and the craving for demonstration, which are characteristic of the Apocrypha, make the latter incredible.  The New Testament Easter documents are not meant to be testimonies for the resurrection but testimonies to the raised and risen Jesus. 

One of the things that was most surprising to me since coming online is that so many of those whose minds are formed by what they see on crime shows on TV and movies don't seem to realize that humans' testimony of their own observation and experience constitute evidence, especially when that evidence can be tested as is supposed to happen in a law court.  That idiotic demotion of testimony contributed in the successful campaign to cover up the crimes of the Trump regime as the direct observational testimony of credible witnesses, in most cases corroborated by other witnesses and  even physical confirmation and confirmation in the chronology of events was claimed to be inadequate by those who lied about the guilt that was proved.  

Given how addled most people are by their addiction to entertainment, I can imagine a lot of reasons for the belief that evidence is something physical, testable in a laboratory, which some sexy plain-clothes cop happens to have fall into their laps in such abundance and is of such confirmatory strength as only happens in ridiculous Hollywood scripts, as written or as padded out by directors, actors and others.  Though I could certainly go at length into the uses of evidence in popular atheist debunkery as opposed to its use in science, honest and dishonest, there isn't time to get into that enormous chasm between integrity and sham.* 

But, in reality, often the only evidence that is available is testimonial, if we chose to withhold judgement, for or against, in those cases when only witness evidence could inform a decision, an enormous amount of what we consider to be true or even probable would be forever frozen in a state of indecision.  I would note that for anyone holding out for more than is available who opts for disbelief is, as well, making a choice to believe because disbelief is also a belief and if they support their disbelief on the lack of any but testimonial evidence, they are doing exactly what they would claim is not allowed when the decision is to believe the testimony given.  

Kung's proposal to test the claims by the modesty of what is contained in them seems to me to be a reasonable one to consider.  But one thing that all of the sources, all of the Gospels and letters in the New Testament would seem to agree on, there were no direct human witnesses to the actual raising of Jesus from the dead.  Kung gives a very long and detailed discussion of various points that are relevant to that later in this section.   One of them is that in dying into God, what Kung says is the resurrection, the event would have happened outside of time in eternity.  One thing that is clear about human testimony, it is only definable within the confines of temporality.   I don't think we could possibly even have the language to construct evidence with that wasn't related to time. 

This point seems to me to be somewhat like the point made yesterday about how Paul and the even earlier followers of Jesus who taught him made some of the hardest to believe aspects of Christianity, the crucifixion and Resurrection, the very centers of the faith when they could have made their job of converting people to their movement easier by making easier to believe claims.  And that seems to me to be related to the fact that so much that is used against the Jewish and Christian religions is based on the confessions of wrongdoing and faithlessness that are found nowhere in history except within the Scriptures.  

The point about the padding of the stories about Jesus in the later Apocryphal books is evidence that there was a hankering for more story than what would be chosen as the canonical books provided.  Subsequent centuries have continued that creation of extra-Scriptural invention and filling in details.  And that didn't end with the 18th century enlightenment but, especially in the Marioloatry of post-Baroque, romantic Catholicism  it expanded absurdly.   I may give Kung's short history of that which comes soon after this discussion in his book. 

In looking for seasonal music around Easter, one of the most interesting things I've found is that most, by a large percentage, of the music of the season deals with the crucifixion and almost none deals directly with the Resurrection.  Almost all of the Easter music deals with the encounters of the risen Jesus with his friends and followers, none with the event of his Resurrection.  That could be due to the complete lack of reporting on the actual event and what it was like - how could it, one of the few things that can be said about it as given it is unlike anything in human experience - or how it looked, what actually happened, etc.  But some of it is certainly a realization that any attempt to describe it will inevitably be as false as any fable or tall tale humans could construct.  

As presented, as claimed, it is like the virgin birth claims, unlike anything else, something not knowable by analogy with other human experiences.  Those who want to debunk it might not like that but it is clearly one of the claims that would be debunkers would have to get past in order to make a tidy case against it. 

The first time I read this in the list of difficulties I didn't think it was a particularly strong one but that was before I considered this matter of testimony and how it is considered and dealt with.  

Note:  As someone raised as a Catholic and who remembers the pre-Vatican II church rather well, I found Kung's short but full history of Marian devotion and its devolution into Mariolatry quite interesting.  Most of what I would bet most Catholics believe about that aspect of the Catholic tradition is based on very late and often openly political use of the very lightly documented life of the mother of Jesus.   While there are aspects of that I am very sympathetic to, the visions of Juan Diego and Juan Bernardino, Mary as the "Brown Lady" and their importance to the poor people of Latin America and elsewhere, I don't happen to have ever found the stories of apparitions important or interesting.  Many of the reported messages - an astonishing number of them in the form of "secrets" are so banal and so absurd and so self-aggrandizing that it is outrageous to believe they could come from someone in the state of beatitude that Mary is supposed to be in, especially after the dreadful and very likely mentally ill Pius IX embroidered the documented accounts of her out of all possible proportions.   

I hope to go through what Kung said in that regard later.  Maybe in May.  In the meantime, get his book On Being Christian and read it for yourself.  

* Also:  I could also go, at length, into how people often speak out of both sides of their mouths in matters such as the rules surrounding evidence and what evidence they like and that which they don't like and how seldom that is based in the actual difference in quality between the two.  The stupid slogan that Carl Sagan stole and distorted into a far worse form from the true skeptic Marcello Truzzi, that "extraordinary claims" require "extraordinary evidence" has been elevated, not only in popular stupidity but also in academic, even scientific ideology into a "rule of logic" or so the internet tells me.   

That can't possibly be true.  If you hold that standards of evidence are inadequate to support things you don't like, that you declare are invalid, they can't become valid merely because they are, also, applied to things you do like.  That slogan is merely an insistence on the part of the "skeptic" (you may more accurately say "atheist" in most cases) that their ideological preferences and prejudices be introduced as a "rule of logic".   Such is the degeneration of culture under materialist-atheistic-scientism and its PR methods that they have suckered a couple of generations of allegedly educated people into allowing them to do that and to call it "logic."   

Marcello Truzzi is reported by some of those who knew him. to have been on the verge of writing a disavowal of the idea when he died.  I don't know if that's true or not but the idea is obviously an ideological tool, not a rule of logical analysis that will lead to the truth.