Saturday Night Radio Drama Posted Early - Emily Labes - Love In The Time Of Corona

Love In The Time Of Corona 

I haven't listened to the whole thing yet, I have no idea how long it's going to be up so I decided to post it right now.   It's associated with the HearNow Festival of Radio Drama in progress, online and elsewhere.  

Doesn't come much more fresh than this, unless it's live while you hear it.  I hope we all enjoy it.   This is as close as I come to doing anything with Facebook.   I practice social distancing from it, generally. 

More later. 

What I suppose it comes down to is thanks President Truman, you made it far less likely that Trump and the Republican-fascists can get the military to overthrow American democracy on a military basis, even with all of those racist cops around.  I wouldn't count on the friggin' press to protect it. 

The Long And Uneven Arc Of History Before Our Eyes

Thinking about the remarkable fact that the Pentagon is talking about considering renaming military bases which now have the name of some of the worst Americans in our history, traitors, slavers, racists, who openly rebelled against the country, it's obvious that this is something that would never have come this far without Harry Truman issuing his epic, widely opposed order to integrate the military seventy two years ago this year.  Politics is generally the art of what's possible, it is rare that it is done with that anticipation of what was possible, if the military were not under the direct control of a president convinced of the rightness of integrating it, it would not have happened.  I doubt it would have happened if the military in 1948 got to vote on it, what is possible to order under that circumstance is certainly not going to be possible in a democracy, for good or evil.  The evil of it is apparent because now we have as racist a president as we have ever had, if he didn't have to contend with a military in which People of Color are a very large percentage in most ranks, he would certainly use the military in ways even more depraved than he has, which even his own appointees have balked at, now, too late but sooner than never.  And that he can't do that is thanks in large part to the foresight of Harry Truman.  

The arc of history is long, in this case taking more than two generations to have reached even this point.  And it's hardly finished with just that one, relatively minor issue.   

Reading the Old Testament this latest go round, informed by the commentary of Walter Brueggemann, those contained in various Bible translations,*  I see the same long arc described over and over again and have come to the conclusion that that time span has not changed in the modern period, despite the perceived speed of life, societies, cultures, the world changes at a far slower speed than an individual conscience can. 

We are all of us swimming in and moved by that flow of history.  And if that's a hard fact of life for an old, gay white, Irish man, it is so much more true of those who have not been privileged to the extent I have been.  Even as a life long member of the American lower middle-class, sometimes falling below that, I have had privileges, even as a gay man even in the period when my identity was illegal,  officially, legally illegal.  The speed of progress in LGBTQ rights has not been uniform,  it has certainly not been even, it has certainly not happened for transgender People of Color, people with the highest lynching rates of any in the country.   I think whatever progress there has been has been largely due to the fact that white gay men and Lesbians have been what those with the power to make change think of when they think of LGBTQ.   If we were uniformly not, those demands for equality would never have gotten anywhere for any of us.  The extent to which white gay men and Lesbians do not demand total equality is the extent to which we are merely replacing a position as people oppressed with that of people oppressing.  Neglect and indifference is some of the worst and hardest to overcome oppression.  

The idea of progress is good, the unrealistic expectation and demand of it happening on your terms or even as you need it is bound to lead to frustration, anger, disappointment and cynical impotence.  I'm not discouraging anyone in pointing this out,  I'm telling them what they can expect to happen.   

* I especially find the Christian Community Bible often criticized for being too much a reflection of Latin American liberation theology especially interesting from a Christian point of view as I find Everett Fox and other Jewish commentary always informative and, on some points,  I would think more authoritative.  Though they hardly agree anymore than the Christians do.  I love that the Scripture is contested, it is, after all, about God who will never be summed up in the entirety of human thought never mind one tradition or even one mind. 

Shelly Goldstein - MISS LADY G'S FOR TRUMP

R. Nathaniel Dett - Eight Bible Vignettes - V I Am The True Branch

Denver Oldham. piano

This fugue seems to be saturated with Trinitarian symbolism, three parts, 3/4 time.  And Dett seems to have acknowledged that was his intention in creating the structure.  It is quite a departure from the other movements in the suite and in the rest of Dett's music I've heard but I think he wrote a pretty good 3-part fugue.  The theme of the fugue makes it sound more modern to me than the material would lead you to expect.  

I found this very interesting doctoral dissertation The Six Piano Suites of R. Nathaniel Dett by Clipper Erickson which is worth reading through.  

You Do Wonder Why Those Atheists Love Their gods To Be Stupid

The modern, materialist, atheist, god of scientism, random-chance, unlike God is a stupid god who does nothing by intent but merely by chance and accident.  God wouldn't need an infinity of un demonstrated, unknown, very likely non-existent universes to create life in this one universe in which the cosmologists say that it is vanishingly unlikely that we should be here.  God would merely need to intend for us to be in this most unlikely of places for it to happen, something that is not knowable in any scientific terms, perhaps, but, then, neither are all those jillions of universes the scientistic atheist-materialist have invented to convince themselves that there is no God when they got scared by those improbabilities that modern physics and cosmology said were there.  We know that our being here is unlikely, in so far as we can know anything scientifically in regard to that.  Even one other of those jillions of necessary universes are not know to exist except in the very biased, very pre-disposed imaginations of the atheists.  

Ol' random-chance is too stupid to really believe in except by those who turn him into a god.   And God could, if God so intended, create an infinity of universes for purposes that we would have no ability to understand or even imagine.  I'll hold that as more probable than multi-verse theory. 

You have to wonder at the common psychology of atheists that make them so want their god to be a stupid one.  Maybe so they can feel superior to him?  I'm sure ol' random-chance must be male, though they might not admit to imagining him as such.  It's such a cowboy movie name.   Movies are a god of a whole different bunch of atheists, though not generally ones who do well with numbers. 

Hate Mail - Meh! Could Answer That In My Sleep

Your complaint about me pointing out that it wasn't Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett or their ilk who first talked about a physical coding for morality within our bodies but some of the Jewish prophets, those "bronze-age goat herders" they and their idiot boy-fans love to mock, led me to look for the first time I said something like that in this public writing and found this post from my first blog where I said exactly that in a somewhat different way, saying that if there was their idiotically conceived of  and much on the talk-shows "god gene" then that would reasonably lead a believer to to find that among the strongest possible physical evidence that the God of Avraham, Yitzhah, and Yaakov was the true God and much as described in the Scriptures (been reading the Everett Fox translation this week).

First, the proposition, most often associated with Daniel Dennett, is glaringly lacking in rigorous analysis. It assumes that a proposed creator god who created the entire universe, planets, solar systems, galaxies, clusters, dark matter, energy, the entire shebang, and who also keeps it in motion, wouldn’t have any say in what happens in the puny little molecules that make up our genetic inheritance. Perhaps they think that such a god would just have to grow forgetful under the burdens of considering the big picture.

Not only COULD such a creator god’s role be proposed in any such genetic basis of belief, but to leave out that possibility is entirely dishonest in a PHILOSOPHICAL* discussion of the matter. It is hard for me to believe that doing so could be just a rather astounding oversight for a philosopher to make. If you’re talking god, you don’t get to leave the possibility of god out of the picture just at a point when doing so best suits your conclusion. It certainly wouldn’t be by a careful philosopher who was thinking about the subject. When talking about “god”, god isn’t an unimportant detail in the argument.

Rather charmingly, Dennett and his cubs seem to not realize that even if they were to conclusively prove that faith was controlled by genetics that could lead someone so disposed to take that as the strongest physical evidence ever found that there was a god. Not only a god but a god who wished that people should know of his existence, or at least to have that option open to them as a recessive or latent possibility**. They could be handing the I.D. types, not their death sentence, but fulfilling their greatest desideratum***. I say charmingly only because Dennett, one of the proponents of that other PR disaster in the making, “The Brights” idea, seems to have a bad habit of handing ammo to the other side.

I don't remember why I spelled "god" with a lower-case "g",  I think I was trying to do the nice, non-committal, "objective" thing,  still figuring that we could make common cause with people who might have their feelings hurt by too much honesty. I don't know if my leaving out what Ezikiel Jeremiah and Paul said was my stupidity or a similar inclination to futile niceness and am inclined to think I just didn't think of it.  Oh, and "I.D."  means intelligent design as a formal theory, as I recall my intentions.  I have come to think that intelligent design, though not something that can be confirmed or refuted with science, is far more supported in actual evidence than the atheist-materialist faith in their unadmitted creator god, "random chance" because I don't think ol' random had the time to make all of those necessary things just happen at random, in the right sequence in the nick of time in which those would have all had to come together just right to create even one organism.  But that's not a scientific conclusion, it's a rational one and one which, unlike the atheist theory of it, is open to being wrong.  It is ironic that among most reasoning believers I know, that openness to being wrong is far stronger than even in the most moderate atheists of my experience.   Among the reason I was referring to them as "atheist fundamentalists" a lot back then, another was that I knew it would piss them off. 

Well, the intervening years have led to me thinking that non-commitment was a mistake so I don't make it anymore.  And I'm not feeling much like being nice and stupid about that. 

Came For The bell hooks, Listened To Them Both And Will Listen To It Again

There is much to listen to in this dialogue between bell hooks and Cornel West after yesterday's passage from Kung:  I decided to post it after hearing this part, early in it. 

Cornel West:  We come from a people who've been so hated. Who have been so despised, been so terrorized, and traumatized and  stigmatized.  How do you find some intellectual, moral resources to sustain yourself and try to both tell the truth and expose the lies but also to try to keep the love of truth and justice and neighbor. And, of course as a Christian, I try to love my enemy.

bell hooks:  And how's that coming? [audience laughs]

Cornel West:  (laughs)  That's a wonderful question.  As Samuel Beckett says, try again, fail again,  fail better. 

That resonates, though I don't know about the fail better part. 

I love bell hooks and always find her worth listening to and reading though I admit I haven't read her in a while that's who I was looking for when I listened to it.   Though I frequently find Cornel West infuriating (his support for Sanders, especially), he's always worth listening to as well.  It's good for a white man like me to have to hear things people who aren't white men say, ESPECIALLY MUCH OF WHAT I DON'T LIKE TO HEAR.   I've got to make it a point to listen to more of that.  What good is listening to stuff you know you already agree with?  What does that get anyone? 

Hell Of A Night

Another terrible night, not only with night thoughts but bad dreams of underground.  Claustrophobia is my worst phobia, so I'm indulging in my strongest weakness, right now, too much coffee.  It could be worse, I could have dreamed about what I foolishly read about the intimate life of Lindsay (apparently, at his request, "Lady Graham") Graham.  If you ever wanted to discourage a gay man from having sex, I can't think of anything more likely to have such an effect than thinking about Lindsay Graham's sex life. 

I owe it to Hans Kung to type him out better than I'm likely to this morning, and owe it to you as well, so I'm going to try to take a nap between working in the garden and start on the next installment of that when I'm awake.   Editing's bad too.  

Wonder if the idea of hell started with someone who has a fear of being confined underground.  It's  hell when I dream about it.  Never have fire in those dreams, or devils.  

Does It Not Perhaps Go Too Far? - If You Thought What Came Before Was Hard

Here we come to the thing I have to work on the hardest, not that any of what came before comes easily or reliably.  To continue with Hans Kung . . . 

Even enemies 

Does it not perhaps go too far?  If my neighbor is anyone who needs me here and now, can I stop at that?  According to Jesus, I certainly should not.  And, after our first two answers to the question on love, we must now make our third and final answer  even more pointed.  According to Jesus love is not merely love of neighbor but essential love of enemies.  And it is this love of enemies, not love of man or even love of neighbor, which is typical for Jesus. 

It is only with Jesus that we find the requirement of love of enemies set out as part of a program.  Even Confucius, though he does not speak of "love of neighbor," at least mentions "love of man,"  but means by this simply deference, magnanimity, sincerity, diligence, kindness. As we observed, there are sporadic references in the Old Testament also to love of neighbor.  Like most of the great religions,  Judaism too had its "golden rule,"  presumably derived from Graeco-Roman pagan sources both in a negative and - as in the Jewish diaspora - in a positive form. . . 

I will break in here and say that I don't understand why that derivation should be presumed, though such presumptions were and still are all the rage in modern, Western academic and journalistic assumption.   I do find it odd that that "presumption" of appropriation seems always to flow from outside, into the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition.  Though it's impossible to tell, especially when it is based on far later than original copies of parchment or paper texts, that assumption is made.  But even traces of such alleged influence as are founded in clay tablets doesn't demonstrate that what those document are original to those with the earliest recording of their thoughts.  And those are inevitably not the product of Graeco-Roman culture. 

As I mentioned the other day,  the Jewish-Christian scriptures are universal in attributing such "instinctive" moral awareness to everyone or at least others.  In the earliest Scriptures God says he has covenants with other peoples and even all flesh, animals.  

Like most of the great religions,  Judaism too had its "golden rule,"  presumably derived from Graeco-Roman pagan sources both in a negative and - as in the Jewish diaspora - in a positive form; to treat one's fellow men as one would wish to be treated oneself.  The great Rabbi Hillel (circa 20 B.C.) described this golden rule - admittedly in a negative form - as being almost the sum total of the written Law.  But this rule could also be understood in a shrewd, selfish adaptation, one's neighbor simply as a fellow national, as a member of the same party, and love of neighbor as a precept among a mass of other religious, moral and ritual precepts.  Even Confucius was aware of the golden rule in a negative form, but expressly rejected love of enemies as unfair;  we should repay goodness with goodness, but wrong must be repaid with justice, not with goodness.  And in Judaism hatred of enemies was considered more or less permissible.; personal enemies formed an exception to the obligation of love.  The devout monks of Qumran even expressly commanded hatred toward the outsiders, the sons of darkness. 

I don't know the what state of Dead Sea Scroll scholarship was when Kung wrote that description.  What I assume he meant was what the infamous War Scroll said.  I don't know if that description would be universally accepted among scholars now or if Kung would still agree with it.  Though the excerpts I've seen would fairly lead to the conclusion that the text wanted you to hate the "Sons of Darkness".  I don't know if it's true that that war image inspired the architecture of the Shrine of the Book as I've seen asserted online.  I know I don't trust that kind of division of people, it has a history of leading to no good, at all.  No light. 

Despite their age and the romantic stuff about them, I'm not really very inspired by the "Dead Sea Scrolls," to tell you the truth.  If the various interpretations of the community that those came from are true I think they're an example of what happens when fanatics concentrate on an eccentric, insular interpretation of the Scripture as has happened in so many a subsequent cult that is as prone to fantasies of violence as much as their focus is on asceticism and separatism more than neighborliness.  I would give the overtly pacifistic, egalitarian just barely surviving Shakers of the United States as a contrast.  

Does not all this show once more how the numerous parallels between statements in Jesus' proclamation on the one hand and the sayings of the Jewish wisdom literature and of the rabbis on the other must be seen within the total context of their respective understanding of law and salvation, of man and his fellow men?  The superiority of Jesus becomes apparent, not in the often completely comparable individual statements but in the unmistakable originality of the whole teaching.  The programmatic "love our enemy" is Jesus' own expression and is typical of his love of neighbor, which now really does know no bounds. 

It is totally understandable and, I think, entirely fair of Kung to credit Jesus with that radical interpretation of Jewish law, through which any Christian use of the Mosaic Law must come or it ceases to be Christian.  Though I think he was not as far from other, specifically Jewish lines of that same tradition.  I will mention the interpretation of the extra-Scriptural, Jewish story of God drowning Pharaoh and his army to save the Children of Israel in which he scolds the angels in Heaven for rejoicing as the Children of Israel did in Exodus, saying they should mourn that he had to destroy any of his human creatures.  I don't know the age of that tradition - I'm anything but a scholar of that incredible complex of intersecting, intertwining, often contradicting interpretation of scripture - but I think it must have been there, too, then. 

But that argument isn't important to me.   I'm a political blogger living in the United States, the priority of who came up with that most radical possible interpretation of the Mosaic law matters less to me than how it can be made real in political action, in society, among individuals, here, now, today, not two thousand years ago.   

I don't think there is any possibility that it will become sufficiently present without being sufficiently believed by a sufficient number of people and it is clear that will only happen in the context of Christianity.  I would say "for the foreseeable future" but then I would be lying.  I don't foresee it coming any other way.  I have come to totally doubt that without it having that Christian context that it will ever happen in any other framing.  It certainly has not been a common phenomenon for it to become even a general trend in any number of framings, traditions and belief systems.  

I would certainly like it to have a history of having happened in other contexts, there are other faith traditions on all continents in which it may well have that potential - read what I said about the long part of the Jewish tradition of which Christianity is a part of attribution of "instinctive" moral awareness among all people, those - to use Paul's language in Romans - the "uncircumcised" as well as "the circumcised.  Paul, who repeatedly and decisively numbered himself as among the Jews,  did note that without faith in the Mosaic Law (as he newly interpreted it through the context of Jesus) even the instinctive moral awareness that God had instilled in the "uncircumcised" with whom he made covenants wasn't sufficient to save them from depravity, sexual exploitation (as he understood it) and the entire range of pagan practice, up to and including human sacrifice.  I think whatever habitual universality, of "fairness" there is in my American tradition of liberalism comes directly from the Jewish tradition but it comes into it through Jesus and Paul, James etc. 

I have the traditional American liberal habit of even-handed fairness and would love it if that potential were as widely available and as potent (it's potency in Christianity as practiced is hardly sufficient, up till now) so as to produce egalitarian democracy except in isolated instances,  I don't see that they produce behavior which is any better than what the lack luster form of it among Christians, what most of it has produced.  The problem with Christians is that they so seldom act as Jesus taught, not that they're supposed to be inclined to act that way.  If they did, I doubt any of what I wrote here would be in any way controversial.  And that it is is entirely on Christians of that kind that Christianity does not have that good a reputation.  Which is on all of us. 

Why I Stopped Being A Sucker For Such Principle

Like so many others, I'm not sleeping well with the pandemic, the police-murders, the Trump-Barr fascist crackdown on demonstrated moral indignation, against those the police are murdering, the eager police participation in that fascist crackdown around the country - as I said,  I've been afraid that the fascism obvious in so many American police departments would become far more dangerous since the 60s.  

One of the results of those two of so hour of sleep nights is a decided decline in my editing and in my typing out passages from what I excerpt to comment on.  I've fixed a few of those in yesterday's post, a couple were in this paragraph:

The non-establishment language, like the "free speech" demand is even in its strictest legal sense A REQUIREMENT ON THE GOVERNMENT, NOT THE PEOPLE.   In the heady days of the new atheism of the 00s, yours was often the demand, that the religious, Christians easily 98 times out of a hundred, keep their religion to themselves and out of the public sphere.  Such restriction was looked to by those wanting to obliterate religion as a means of getting rid of religion, I know that because so many of them expressed such a naive and childlike faith.

The objection to that is made that it is a violation of "The First Amendment" even as I noted that non-establishment of religion IS REQUIRED OF THE GOVERNMENT.  THAT! is something I said not only in clear language but in all-caps.  I don't know how much more explicitly I could have said it. 

But, that is only the abstract principle, the abstract desire.  Like it or not, many people don't agree with the that as an absolute ban on the government accommodating or even giving money to or sponsoring religious groups on all occasions or other such clear violations of that language.  I don't happen to like that fact BUT IT IS A FACT.  And it is a fact that a very large number of everything from mildly favoring such establishment of religion to being full supporters of religious involvement by government VOTE FOR THE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT, STATE GOVERNORS AND LEGISLATORS AND, IN SOME STATES SUPREME COURT "JUSTICES".  

Such people, most of whom are hardly hard line theocrats have no problem with children singing Christmas songs in public schools, praying in public schools (one of the things I find most troubling, in fact is sectarian prayer as directed by teachers, administrators and coaches in schools) and  just about totally innocuous maintenance of public monuments like that ugly war-memorial cross that was the focus of a predictably counter-productive case brought up to the present court which, as any idiot could predict, used it to EXTEND, NOT END the Rehnquist-Roberts courts permission to insert the government into religion. 

My greatest objection to the ACLU, "Humanist" even some Jewish and other minority religion legal action which I may agree with in abstract principle is exactly that,  IT IS NOT PRODUCTIVE IT IS COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE IN THE REAL LIFE OF WHO GETS ELECTED AND WHO LOSES.   It does not convert more people to the cause of non-establishment than it angers and that anger has a reaction which has the most disastrous of all results of such lawsuits ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE SUCCESSFUL of leading to Republican-fascists winning elections.

My biggest problem with the ACLU, other than their clear collusion with the media to permit them to lie with impunity, to lie to get Republican-fascists and their ilk into office is their idiotic insistence on bringing cases they have every reason to know are futile and which will have counter-productive results.  I don't fucking care about the abstract "principle" I CARE ABOUT THE RESULTS IN REAL LIFE.   

The ACLU has a financial interest in bringing such cases because they can get donations from the fans of such stupidity, many of them with the means to make those donations, probably people who are least impinged on by the failure of those predictably counter-productive lawsuits and the inevitable loss in the increasingly fascist Supreme Court.   

They are one of the stupidest organization of smart people I can think of, they don't deserve the reputation they've got because they have such a knack for finding exactly the worst things to support,  Nazis, white supremacists, giant media corporations, the porn industry, stupidest atheist stunts.   The times they don't support the most counter-productive forces for egalitarian-democratic governments are are more than counter-balanced when the effect of their action has been to empower the worst and losing the case in the bargain.  

I know for a fact that some state ACLUs won't take cases they think they won't win, they won't even take cases that they have a chance of winning if they don't think it will change the law - they don't have the resources to fight every case brought to them.  So they don't choose to fight every case.  They do so have a knack for finding cases they will lose as well as those in which winning will have terrible effects for the general cause of egalitarian democracy. 

So, yeah, I do rather despise the ACLU and its phony, unreality based reputation and claim to fame.  It is one of the greatest demonstrations of Benjamin Franklin's statement that a government of the wisest would be a very stupid thing because the wise are so apt to get all caught up in their imaginary ponderings while entirely unconcerned with the hardest of realities in real life.  The ACLU isn't the only falsely denominated "leftist" group that does that but it has been one of the most damaging in real life. 

The idea that each and every instance of that, from the maintenance of old largely ignored public monuments to having a coach inappropriately  praying before a game (praying to win a sporting event, by the way, is a direct contradiction of The Golden Rule as taught by Jesus, which I will get to in tomorrow's posting) is always, in every case letting the camel get his nose under the tent is just stupid.  Especially that's true when the court has a majority of Republican-fascists who have every intention of destroying equality and democracy, they are just giving them help, not fighting against it effectively.  

The whole strategy of using the Supreme Court to further the cause was dicey as compared to winning elections and putting people in the Congress and the Executive.  The Supreme Court is the least democratic branch, the one with the most appalling record, even worse than the presidency, on balance.  Its famous good rulings are more than made up for by the bad ones.   I think it's especially stupid to let lawyers whose lives are  unconnected to the results of their cases to decide when it's counterproductive to bring a case.  In a lot of those cases I think the lawyers cared most about their own publicity, not the actual results in real life for real people.   We have been suckers for them. I stopped sending them money after they supported the Nazis First Amendment permission to terrorize Holocaust survivors in Skokie.  I stopped being a sucker for such principle. 

Too Much Information But Way Too Late

How am I?

I can honestly report I've heard more about intimate parts of Lindsay Graham than I ever wanted to hear about or think about.   If he hadn't been part of the most intimate revelations of the private life of Bill Clinton three decades ago, I'd say it was almost unfair.  But since he was in the thick of that as he was thick into the depths of DC area male prostitutes, I think it's got to count not only as fair but about a quarter of a century overdue.  

I just wish I didn't have to be informed of it. 

R. Nathaniel Dett - Other Sheep, from Eight Bible Vignettes

Denver Oldham, pinao

Every once in a while I look into a composer whose work I'm not very familiar with.  This month it's R.Nathaniel Dett who I'd been aware of but who I'd never listened to much.   I have the album of the fine, too young passed pianist Natalie Hinderas on which she plays his early rather conservatively styled suite In The Bottoms which, listening to it again, is entirely good listening, quite beautiful in many places.  Here's the Prelude from that:

Such beautiful playing. 

I was surprised to find out that in his later middle age, Dett started getting more progressive instead of staying where he'd always been.  That kind of change at that age is something I associate with good composers.  He, also, died too young while he was volunteering for the USO during World War Two.  It makes you wonder what he'd have done if he'd lived twenty more years.   I think I'll post more of his work here. 

I'd gone back to the Hinderas album to listen to George Walker but will save him for another time.  I'm kind of excited about Dett's music.  

Score (note, this is number 7 of the eight)

Score for In The Bottoms

Jesus does not answer with a definition or a more precise qualification, still less a law

The common denominator of love of God and love of neighbor therefore is the abandonment of selfishness and the will to self-sacrifice.  Only when I no longer live for myself can I be quite open for God and unreservedly open to my fellow man whom God accepts just as he accepts me.  Loving my fellow man does not complete my task of loving god.  I remain directly responsible to God and none of my fellow men can take this responsibility away from me.  God however encounters me, not exclusively, but - since I am myself human - primarily in my fellow man and expects myself-surrender at that point.   He does not call me out of the clouds, nor merely indirectly in conscience, but above all through my neighbor, a call which is never silenced, but reaches me afresh each day in the midst of my ordinary secular routine. 

The demand, flowing from the badly written non-establishment language of the United States Constitution, leads to the frequent, entirely irrational, entirely unjustified AND ENTIRELY UNENFORCEABLE  demand by the irreligious, even by some of the more naive members of minority religions that voters keep their religion out of the public sphere, out of politics.  That is one of the dumbest things that ever became a rallying cry on the American left in the 1960s and beyond, not only alienating the religious but failing to admit the actual nature of the rare occasions when the American left had produced real results.  I find it unsurprising that in that case, as in other self-defeating poses taken by the secular American left and too much of its duped religious side, that the language of the "civil liberties" industry was largely the source of it. 

The non-establishment language, like the "free speech" demand is even in its strictest legal sense A REQUIREMENT ON THE GOVERNMENT, NOT THE PEOPLE.   In the heady days of the new atheism of the 00s that was often the demand, that the religious, Christians, easily 98 times out of a hundred, keep their religion to themselves and out of the public sphere.  Such restriction was looked to by those wanting to obliterate religion as a means of getting rid of religion, I know that because so many of them expressed such a naive and childlike faith.

Of course the first response was that if the Civil Rights movement had done that its most successful campaigns would probably never have happened.   The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s was conducted largely through the Black Churches just as the abolition and subsequent campaigns for equality were heavily and intimately tied in to the Christianity of the major figures of those campaigns.  

Some, like the silver-tongued opportunist - ex Trotsyite, ex-Brit, ex-lefty, Bush II supporting apostate Christopher Hitchens lied about that, thrilling so many an atheist lefty who could't keep up with him joining the neo-cons.  Hitchens was one of the major figures in my conclusion that those who do not believe in sin have no problem with acting as if it is not a sin to tell a lie or bear false witness against others.   I don't think his facility to morph from a Trotskyite into a neo-con as treacherous as any of them was unrelated to his rejection of God, he was hardly the only one who trod that well worn path from Marxist gangsterism to capitalist fascist gangsterism.   I'd say that once they've obtained a sufficient level of wealth, that transformation is the general rule in that allegedly humanistic, idealistic ideological sham.  It is certainly as clear that that is the case as it is that when religious institutions become kingdoms of this world they tend to abandon the Gospel, the Law, the Prophets.  

I think it is also clear that without this sense of a moral obligation to love your neighbor - in the radically extended meaning of that term that Jesus gives when asked that question, in the parable of the Good Samaritan - egalitarian democracy is not only doomed, it is a non-starter.  And as even the best of stated intentions among human beings require the overcoming of selfishness and the starting of the will to self-sacrifice - I doubt with to the level of absolute certainty that that will ever be effective at the percentage of the human population that that has to be there for egalitarian democracy to exist without the conviction that no one less than God requires that  of us for our own good.   You might be able to get by with 40% of the population being selfish and beyond stingy when it comes to even sacrificing from their surplus - though not ever securely with the anti-democratically structured Electoral College - anti-Democratically constituted Senate -  but you'll certainly never, ever see it come to pass as a society or national system if fifty-percent plus one don't feel that as a binding obligation for them to even have a decent life here, in the world in which politics and the atrocities that can result from it - as well as the good which can - egalitarian democracy will never happen. 

I think one thing is obvious from those few major successes of the American left, without the power of Christians taking the teachings of Jesus, of his radical interpretation of  the Law of Moses very seriously,  the American left ALWAYS FAILS IN THE END.   

And as an aside, keep that in mind when you read the word "abolished" in the next passage, as when Jesus abolished the death penalty for the adulteress as I've talked about here recently.  

But who is my neighbor?  Jesus does not answer with a definition or a more precise qualification, still less a law, but - as so often - with a story, an exemplary narrative.  According to this, my neighbor is not merely someone who is close to me from the very beginning; a member of my family, my circle of friends, my class, my party, my people.  My neighbor can also be a stranger, a complee starnger, anyone who turns up t this particular juncture.  It is impossible to work out in advance who my neighbor will be.  This is the meaning of the story of the man fallen among thieves;  my neighbor is anyone who needs me here and now.  At the beginning of the parable the question is asked:  "Who is my neighbor?"  The important thing in the parable is not the definition of "neighbor",  but the urgency of the love required just from me, in the concrete case, in the concrete need, quite aside from the conventional rules of morality.  Nor are the needs lacking.  Matthew in the discourse on judgement repeats four times six of the works of love which are relevant then as they are now.  This does not mean that there is to be a new legal system.*  As in the case of the Samaritan, what is expected is an active creative approach, fertile imagination and the decisive action in each individual case in the light of the particular situation .  

What God really wants then becomes clear in love. What is involved in the commandments also becomes clear.  In any case, it is not only as in Islam, a question of an obedient "submission" (= Islam) to the will of God revealed in a law.  In the light of love the commandments acquire a uniform meaning, but they are also restricted and occasionally even abolished.  Anyone who understands the commandments legalistically and not in the light of love is constantly faced with a conflict of duties.   But love puts an end to casuistry;  man no longer observes precept or prohibition more or less mechanically, but adapts himself to what reality itself demands and makes possible.  Thus every precept or prohibition has its intrinsic criterion of love of neighbor.  The bold Augustinian saying, "Love and do what you will." has its basis here.  That is how far love of neighbor goes. 

*  I will point out here that Hans Kung doesn't mean that there is to be no new secular legal system as understood, police, lawyers, judges, prisons, he means as in The Law as set out in scriptures.   The present American legal system is certainly nothing in line with Matthew 25:31-46, in most ways it is the exact opposite.  How many of us visits the prisoner or cares about their welfare?  The "white evangelicals" clearly are in favor of even more barbarous treatment of them even as they pretend they believe that their behavior will get them driven out of the Kingdom.   If they really believed the book their Herod held upside down for his photo-shoot, they wouldn't vote for him. 

Phillip Atiba Goff On What Defunding The Police Should And What It Can't Mean

This too short interview from Rachel Maddow's show is the best one I've heard about the "defund the police" idea.   The slogan, like so many slogans, is more trouble than it helps because no matter what anyone who puts on a white collar and babbles on TV or the radio or on a podcast is telling people, there will be police in the future.  The problem in places with corrupt police departments now isn't going to be solved by not having police.  The idea of dissolving the police department so they can get rid of bad cops protected by the old system and corrupt police unions as they reform a new police force might be the most workable, as long as the corrupt cops that don't get rehired don't just go to be criminals somewhere else.  

But the problem is a lot bigger than just bad police and a corrupt system, as Mr. Goff points out, it is a problem of Black Communities having been cheated for decades and centuries - and other communities where there is a systematic system of inequality.   There are states and regions where the same thing happens to Native people,  Latinos, LGBT people, and others.

I don't see how this will ever be solved without getting rid of the corrupt police unions and the disgusting industry in encouraging cops to murder people such as John Oliver documented on his show the other night.   All of that should be ended, any police union that encourages police to murder people should be gotten rid of, if there is no law that allows a union that encourages police to murder people to be decertified, there has to be one. 

He wants practical and therefore concrete love

The person who needs me here and now

Jesus however is not interested in universal, theoretical or poetical love. For him love does not consist primarily in words, sentiments or feelings.  For him love means primarily the great, courageous deed.  He wants practical and therefore concrete love.  Hence our second answer to the question on love must be stated more precisely:  according to Jesus, love is not simply love of man but essentially love of neighbor.  It is a love, not of man in general, of someone remote, with whom we are not personally involved, but quite concretely of one's immediate neighbor.  Love of God is proved in love of neighbor, and in fact love of neighbor is the exact yardstick of love of God.  I love God only as much as I love my neighbor.  

And how much love shall I give my neighbor?  Jesus recalls an isolated formula from the Old Testament - referring however only to the members of one's own nation - and answers forthrightly, and without any qualification; as yourself.  It is an obvious answer and, for Jesus, at once covers everything without more ado:  it leaves no loopholes for excuses or subterfuges and at the same time lays down the direction and measure of love.  It is assumed that man loves himself.  And it is just this obvious attitude of man toward himself which should be the measure - in practice beyond measure - of love of neighbor.  I know only too well what I owe myself and I am no less aware of what others owe me.  In everything that we think say and feel, do and suffer, we tend quite naturally to protect, shield, advance ourselves, to cherish ourselves.  And now we are expected to give exactly the same care and attention to our neighbor.  With this all reserves are broken down.  For us, who are egoists by nature, it means a radical conversion;  to  accept the other person's standpoint;  to give the other exactly what we think is due to ourselves; to treat our fellow man as we wish to be treated by him.  As Jesus himself shows, this certainly does not mean any feebleness or softness, any renunciation of self-confidence, any annihilation of self in devout meditation or strenuous asceticism in the Buddhist or supposedly Christian sense.  But it certainly does mean the orientation of ourselves toward others;  an alertness, an openness, a receptivity to our fellow man, in readiness to to help without reserve.  It means living not for ourselves, but for others;  in this - from the standpoint of the person who loves - is rooted the indissoluble unity of undivided love of God and love of neighbor. 

Hans Kung:  On Being A Christian Man's Cause: Action

It is worth asking what the past two millennia would have been like if the words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels that sum that up had been the governing principle of the lives of Christians, what today would be like if it were, in fact, the governing principle of societies and the governments chosen by the people of such societies.  It is worth asking what the reputation of Christianity would be, today, if that had been the actual character of Christianity in history, if the "Christian churches" had held to that instead of the various other obsessions with creeds, dogmas, doctrines, power, adherence to other rules and the enforcement of those.  It would be worth asking if the conversion of others to belief in Christ would have been worth more if that had been based in an admiration of that conduct and character instead of political-military-fear-based conversion.  

One of the current debates within Christianity that interests me is the fury of many orthodox Christians in the West and in places where Western Christianity predominates at the resurgence of a belief in the universal salvation of all people, even the worst of us after a period of intensive correction, perhaps.  The rage is often, ironically, focused on those influenced by the Orthodox theologians of the late classical and later periods who have made convincing arguments for exactly that universal salvation being the teaching of Jesus.   The American philosopher-theologian David Bentley Hart is the focus of a lot of that rage, some of it among those who used to publish him - though he left those venues over political differences before this latest phase started.  Hart, a scholar of the ancient Greek language and literature, pagan as well as Christian, has translated the New Testament correcting some of the ancient Latin mis-translations that have persisted and intensified, especially as the Calvinist Reformed tradition  and the persistent Catholic heresy of Jansenism have valued the most appalling interpretations of those mis-translations in its infamous predestinarian-original-sin-eternal-damnation theology,  the obviously relished contemplation of even jillions of unbaptized, otherwise innocent babies roasting for an unlimited eternity in hell, not to mention we, the guilty, for the quite limited sins we are ignorantly and weakly capable of committing in our time on Earth.  Creating the god that is the entirely understandable focus of so many an atheists non-belief and their fundamentalists furious insistence that if you believe in God, that's the god you must believe in.  

I think the theory of Hart about this as the inadequate, all too human conception of God in terms of a European king has a lot of explanatory power,  attributing the worst of human character, of the means of exercising and demonstrating all too worldly human power as it is wielded by those most respected of gangsters.  

I think that discrepancy between the conception of God as the most ruthlessly cruel, all powerful, of all-too-human autocrat and the God who Jesus and the Jewish tradition says we are to love with all of our being may explain just about everything in why egalitarian democracy - the opposite political system to such monarchical- gangster autocracy - comes from the teachings of Jesus, the most radical of interpretations of the Jewish justice teachings which, as a Marxist-atheist philosopher has noted, has been nourished by no alternative substance thorough the modern even today in the post-modern periods.  It also explains how, even during the period of most strenuous profession of Christianity, actual egalitarian democracy is far, far more the exception than the rule.  You have to, as Kung notes, make that Christian requirement of love real in reality, not in words.  You have to do it and the all too human temptation is to find reasons to not do it, to ignore the most central teaching of the Gospels, the Epistles, Acts, the Law and the Prophets. 

Interlude Before Continuing

Thinking about the end of the passage from Hans Kung that I posted last night, it is no wonder that the most useful weapon which has been used against Democracy in the collaborative campaign of billionaire gangsters in the United States, in Canada, in Britain, in Europe and Australia to bring back overt fascism has been racism, bigotry, hatred of minorities, a sense of cowardly resentment by lower income members of the privileged races, ethnic groups which they can be easily convinced to turn on those beneath them in the power structure built to have ever increasing inequality, squeezing the cowards and those beneath them for the benefit of the billionaire gangsters.  It is no shock that they use the media, especially entertainment media to do that - if they used what people aren't obsessively paying attention to, it wouldn't work so well,  Trump, a product of entertainment media would be one of the lower level multi-millionaire grifter-grafter-crooks instead of the chief executive of the most powerful and once most influential government on Earth. 

The insight of Jurgen Habermas that egalitarian democracy is founded, not on the shifting sands of dialectical history - remarkable considering he is the last surviving member of the Marxist-Hegelian Frankfurt School - but that egalitarian democracy, indeed the concepts of personal integrity, personal autonomy are founded in and solely and directly nourished by the Christian interpretation of the Mosaic Law as it has had influence on societies in which that has influenced thinking and acting.   Democracy is entirely dependent on that conception of love as it is made real in human beings and human societies and governs the nature of human governments.    It has certainly not been the most powerful force, not in the late classical period in which the late Roman empire coopted Christianity and as it spread during the subsequent feudal period nor has it been after that but its influence has been crucial in the development of egalitarian democracy - much of the articulation of the abolition movement was the shaming of nominally professed Christians who did not live up to the profession of their faith.   

Even when that shaming used the secular documents of American history, it was the Jeffersonian formula of Christian egalitarianism, that it was the by act of The Creator who endowed people with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that slaves and former slaves used to make their claim of freedom and rights.   The alternative reading that some of the Founders wanted, replacing "happiness" with "property" was rejected - certainly if it had been adopted it would have been useless to assert that the "property" in the form of Black People had a right that overrode the liberty given by the secular documents of American Republicanism to rich white people to own them.  That was essentially the holding of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision made on purely secular law.   As must be mentioned, the author of that secular formula, it was the Priestlian- Unitarian-deist Jefferson who turned Jesus into a harmless figure even as he ignored his own formula so he could retain his many Black slaves and expand his wealth through them.  I have come to suspect that Jefferson's deistic "Christianity" was adopted, the better to not have to think about what his wealth was based on. 

The current events we see in the attack on and destruction of democracy is a direct result of the mass media, the general culture of materialist secularism, consumerism, are the product of that vital source of egalitarian democracy being replaced by cynicism and calculation and anger and resentment and the cowardly attacks on the even lower underclasses instead of realizing the real source of the pain of the margin to put a Trump or a majority to put a Putin into power.  It has put every one of the dictator replacements for democracy in power.  Any alleged Christian church or figure who has done that is as in on the workings of that Antichrist as Trump or Putin are. Whether they are a member of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, some white evangelical figure, some mass media Bible waver or the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, they are whited sepulchers and money changers in the temple.  They bring Christianity into a disrepute which, ironically, helps to empower the forces destroying egalitarian democracy, a sense of personal integrity and autonomy, a sense of decency and, as can be seen here and abroad, even any ability to discern reality instead of on-screen illusion. 

Hate Mail - Geesh, I Had To Refute That Accusation Within The Past Week Already

Sometime during the past days, watching the outrageous police-crime as documented in literally hundreds, and hundreds of videos over the past two weeks I wondered how many of the criminal-cops could recite lines that came out of Clint Eastwood's mouth in his fascist chic movie career as opposed to those who could or would be able to recite, with understanding, the prelude of the Declaration of Independence, the words of Lincoln of any codes of professional ethics which they are allegedly governed by as policemen. 

I have known policemen, I have had them in my extended family, as close as an uncle and cousins - Irish from New England, you doubt that I've got those in my family?  I know cops watch cop shows and cop movies and that the fascist chic flowing out of rich guys in Hollywood who make a living putting on makeup and dress up clothes to play pretend in front of cameras and whining about how hard their lives are are very popular with them.  It's hardly surprising that they model their behavior after Dirty Harry or others as pathological, modeling the fascist behavior of such popular movies as were mentioned by John Oliver in his show last night which you throw at me.  I've gotten whiny complaints before when I noted that this cop crime is encouraged in popular cop shows like, you know "Cops"  which started out on the racism, fascism promoting Murdoch network and migrated to the "real man" network Spike after that.   I think that was the plan, letting Murdoch in to turn the United States into a racist, fascist gang ruled paradise for his type and hell for everyone else.

Yeah, I did, I watched John Oliver's show from Sunday night,  I almost always watch John Oliver's show as it is posted online, I could probably match every point he made about the problems with the police with things I said  here and the other blogs I have written for.  Let me remind you as recently as on May 13, before the police murder of George Floyd and the world-wide Black Lives Matter demonstrations, I did that in a post which covered most of the points that John Oliver and his writing staff made.  And, I'll point out THAT WAS WHEN I WAS DEFENDING POLICE AGAINST IRRATIONAL, DOUBLE-SPEAK DEMANDS ON THEM.   I'M OFTEN FAR MORE CRITICAL OF THEM HERE QUITE OFTEN.  

I slammed the police unions, noting they are in many cases actual fascist-political entities.   I even pointed out that one of the biggest problems is that even as they are given military training and encouragement to act as warriors they are given a ridiculous range of responsibilities that should never have been given to them.

I've also said that making it more of a service profession than a para-military entity would make it a lot better and a lot safer.  Some of that might be inevitable, considering that the police, like the military, carry weapons and are expected to use them if they have to.  Otherwise, in 2020 the police still being modeled on the military is quite insane.   It's also insane that given what they're expected to do, that they are burdened with  non-essential responsibilities that pale in comparison to their public safety and crime prevention functions.  Like the public schools, the police are given an impossible range of things they're supposed to do.   If they had the resources and numbers of professionals that would be needed to really do everything that is demanded of them, the police force would have to be a lot bigger with far more resources than people want to support. 

I don't know when the first time I called for such police unions, often singling out the Boston Patrolman's Association to be abolished because they are not unions, they are promoters of police crime and impunity for it, of fascist politics, supporting some of the most racist, awful politicians. 

So, yeah, I watched John Oliver and most of what he said was familiar to me because I've been saying it for years and years.

The more distant our fellow men, the easier it is to profess our love in words

Das Christendom ist für das normative Selbstverständnis der Moderne nicht nur eine Vorläufergestalt oder ein Katalysator gewesen. Der egalitäre Universalismus, aus dem die Ideen von Freiheit und solidarischem Zusammenleben, von autonomer Lebensführung und Emanzipation, von individueller Gewissensmoral, Menschenrechten und Demokratie entsprungen sind, ist unmittelbar ein Erbe der jüdischen Gerechtigkeits- und der christlichen Liebesethik.

Jürgen Habermas - Zeit der Übergänge  [See my translation here.]


In the so-far far from fully successful attempt to reform my character, I'm going to start posting more from Hans Kung and other writers as I come across things I need to work on.  Maybe if I do it in public, eventually pride and fear of being found out for having a weak character will give me a push in a better direction.  And, I admit, I find it helps me to cope with the catastrophes facing us and shows me how I'm falling short in action.  

OK, enough of the public confessional.

From Hans Kung, On Being A Christian, Action

Apart from the formulation of the chief commandment, drawn from the Old Testament,  Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels uses the words "love" and "loving" in the sense of love of neighbor, like the word "neighbor" itself, very sparingly.  Nevertheless, love of one's fellow man is present everywhere in Jesus' proclamation.  Evidently, where love is concerned, actions speak louder than words.  It is not talk, but action, which makes clear the nature of love. Practice is the criterion.  What then is love according to Jesus?

Both God and Man

A first answer is that, according to Jesus,love is essentially love of both God and man.  Jesus came to fulfill the law by making God's will prevail, and God's will aims at man's well-being.  That is why he can say that all the commandments are summed up in this dual commandment of love.  Judaism had already spoken sporadically of love in this dual sense.  But Jesus achieves simply and concretely an unparalleled reduction and and concentration of all the commandments into this dual commandment and combines the love of God and the love of man in an indissoluble unity.  Since then it has been impossible to play off God and man against each other.  Then love becomes a requirement which can encompass without restriction the whole life of man and yet is involved in a distinctive way in each individual case.  It is typical of Jesus that love thus becomes the criterion of piety and of a person's whole conduct. 

For Jesus however love of God and love of man are not the same thing since for hi quite obviously God and man are not the same.  It is not God who loses, but man, when either God is humanized or man idolized.  God remains God.  God remains the one Lord of the world and of man.  He cannot be replaced by human fellowship.  Where is the man so free of limitations and faults that he could become God for me, the object of a complete and unconditional love?  The romanticism or mysticism of love can conjure up an idealized picture of the other person, can conceal or postpone but not eliminate conflicts.  In the light however of the unconditional love of God who embraces all, our fellow man too can be loved quite radically, as he is, with all his limitations and faults.  There is no doubt that Jesus gives to God the absolute primacy, precisely in man's interest. That is why he claims man as a whole, his whole will, his heart, his innermost core, the person himself.  And that is why, when someone is converted,  comes back to him in trustful faith, he expects no more and no less than love wholehearted, undivided love;  you must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul and your whole mind, his is the first and greatest commandment.

But this love does not mean a mystical union with God, in which someone tries to withdraw from the world, to be isolated from men and one with God.  In the last resort, a love of God without love of man is no love at all.  And if God must keep his inalienable primacy and God's love can never become a means or a symbol for love of man, neither can love of man ever become a means or a symbol for love of God.  It is not only for God's sake, but for his own sake, that I mus love my fellow man.  I must not keep looking over my shoulder at God when I turn to my fellow man, not indulge in pious talk when I am supposed to be helping somebody.  The Samaritan helps without dragging in religious reasons:  the need of the man fallen among thieves is sufficient for him and at that moment his whole attention is concentrated on the victim.  Those declared blessed at the last judgement had no idea that they had met the Lord himself in those whom they had fed, to whom they had given drink, whom they had sheltered, clothed and visited.  On the other hand those who are condemned show that, at best, they would have loved their fellow men for the Lord's sake.  This is not only false love of God, but also false love of men. 

Yet love of man is still too general a description. We are speaking uncertainly of universal humanity, but we must be more precise.  In Jesus' way of speaking there is not even a hint of "embracing millions," of a "kiss for the whole world,"  as in the poem of Schiller turned by Beethoven in the Ninth Symphony into a great hymn of joy.  A kiss of that kind costs nothing;  it is not like kissing this one sick, imprisoned, underprivileged, starving man.  Humanism costs so much less, the more it is directed to all mankind and the less it is open to the approach of the individual man with his needs.  It is easier to plead for peace in the Far East than for peace in one's own family or in one's own sphere of influence.  The humane Europeans can more easily identify with Black People in North American and in South Africa than the immigrant workers in his own country.  The more distant our fellow men, the easier it is to profess our love in words. 

That last sentence reminds me of the often repeated observation that in order to murder people in war, the warrior has to first be led to distance themselves, to alienate from themselves from the humanity of those they we sent to kill, which is what some of the Hollywood glamorization of military training during the Reagan era fascist chic movies did after the establishment became worried that the anti-war movement during the Vietnam war had made Americans unwilling to engage in foreign wars of economic interest.*   Perhaps such bigoted hate of an abstract other and that kind of abstracted "love" at a distance are a lot closer than they are supposed to be.  I would guess it is how so many of those idealistic American Commies and lefties were able to manifest in their idealized "love of man" a devotion to such mass murderers, enslavers, oppressors of such abstracted, romanticized, idealized people in those far away lands of the Soviet empire and China, even North Korea at some particular points of such degenerate humanism.  

This view of the obligation of Christians when they profess to be followers of Jesus is nothing sappy or easy,  it has to count as some of the hardest, most constantly challenging effort, generally unrewarded with edifying support.  And even as some rare people have come close to matching the conception of Jesus in the Gospels - as a general population of coming even as close as a less radical version of it as is typically asserted to comprise "The Law" of Moses - the temptations to turn it into something else is constant.**  I can only observe that at a distance, I have done nothing like approach either the lesser or the most radical interpretation of The Law that Jesus taught.   

As the quote from Habermass says, it is the thing which is not merely a preformation or catalyst of all of the good that is potentially and actually contained in modern democratic societies and countries, it is the one and only source that feeds the entire thing.   That is why anything that diverts people from it are not only a danger to other people, individually, they are a danger to egalitarian democracy, equal justice and the freedom of body, of life, of mind which are made possible through those.  That is exactly what has, so ironically, been the focus of sustained attack ever since the beginning of the modernist attack on Christianity and Judaism and religion in general.  The very freedoms enjoyed by those of the relatively liberated upper classes of Britain, of France, etc. and those of the United States, based in the liberation they felt from the diminution of the feudal orders, of the extension of that as the United States was forming, led them to reject those very things that fed that in favor of materialistic atheism, scientism, which cannot support the equality that is embodied in the commandments mentioned above.  You have to see someone else as equal to yourself, no matter what their condition in life is, before you reject your right to force their lives into your purpose,as possible or to leave them in abject misery so your own beautiful mind will not be troubled by leaving them there.  

The parable of the Samaritan as included by Kung in this pasage, structured as to who passes by on the other side of the road and who stops and helps the man fallen among thieves is,as all of the parables of Jesus, a supernatural understanding that requires pages and pages and pages of unpacking.  They aren't mere framings, they are windows that you get out of the frames through.  The best I can do is describe it abstractly in terms of entire societies in the context of egalitarian democracy and that would take me a lot longer than I have.  It's the kind of window by which I've seen my theme more clearly than by any other.   I can see how the "white evangelicals" have gone so far from what they profess, their devotion to the Bible inverter, the modern Herod, Trump in their choices to reject the central teaching of a man they claim to believe is God, I can see how the right-wing hierarchs of the Catholic Church make common cause and support him.   And I can see what I'm doing wrong, too through it.  


* And, I suppose to some extent, to oppose Communism, though the Communist rulers of China have certainly proven that American elites were fully able to accommodate Communist dictatorship if they did business with them. 

** It must not have done much for Mother Teresa's spiritual progress when the BBC's Malcolm Muggeridge "discovered" her and made her into the figure of sentimental, popular religious sentimentality that she was made into.  A sort of Catholic Princess Diana figure who, as coincidence showed in the timing of their deaths, couldn't eclipse the worldly Princess.   I doubt that even someone who was more devoted to making that radical form of love real in the slums of Britain or North America would have become that kind of figure in the West, they'd have been too dangerous to the governments and establishments of their countries, in whom the media have a vested, financial interest.   The media in the United States didn't turn  the public image of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. into a plaster saint until he had been murdered and safely silenced, lest he bring his campaign for the Beloved Community too close to them.  They knew they were in no such danger from Mother Teresa and her order impinging too closely on them. 

THE BUNKER BOY - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody

Night Late Radio Drama - Theater Five

I haven't had time to look for a new radio play to post so I decided to post the link to an archive of Theater Five,  I've listened to a number of them in the past and generally they go from good to very good, some of them crossing over into excellent.  They are vintage of their time.  I hope you find something you enjoy.

Theater Five

Theater Five was ABC's attempt to revive radio drama during the early 1960s. The series name was derived from its time slot, 5:00 PM. Running Monday through Friday, it was an anthology of short stories, each about 20 minutes long. News programs and commercials filled out the full 30 minutes. There was a good bit of science fiction and some of the plots seem to have been taken from the daily newspaper. Fred Foy, of The Lone Ranger fame, was an ABC staff announcer in the early 60s, who, among other duties, did Theater Five. From the Old Time Radio Researcher's Group. 

An Accusation of Cribbing And Its Refutation

In fact, I had not known, as I was writing that piece about the catastrophic results of placing "liberty" over the only guarantee for that not being dangerous, EQUALITY,  that Orlando Patterson seems to have been thinking somewhat along the same lines.  I was answering a complaint about a piece I started two days before, a complaint that reaches back to the one I wrote criticizing the naivete of George Soros' belief that an "open society" was sufficient to prevent the kind of depravity that we are seeing all over Europe, North America and elsewhere where the naive faith was that democracy had been secured securely.   So, no, I was not merely copying what I'd seen on Lawrence O'Donnell's program without attribution.* I don't do that as anyone who has read much of what I write would know,  I don't crib, I ALWAYS give an attribution where I borrow, if for no other reason than that I hope the ideas I want to promote will gain persuasive power by having a more distinguished adherent than I am.  

What we are seeing in these crises, these serious and damaging, perhaps fatal attacks on egalitarian democracy are the full failure of the framing of modernism.  Failing - as all human framings always do fail - due to the stupid and cowardly refusal to admit what is obvious, without elevating moral limits above "liberty" then equality won't only never be achieved, it will be stamped out.  When the law, the judicial system, the legal system insists on a "level playing field" as if democracy were a fucking football game, it refuses to acknowledge that the powerful will always accrue power and more power and all of the power, all of the privileges, all of the liberty to itself when that is allowed to happen through judges - mostly drawn from the privileged class - refusing to make judgments that deliver equal justice, when they refuse to raise the truth above lies, when they privilege lies and hate speech and speech calculated to gull and seduce people into evil using their moral weaknesses as tools to do that.  

That has been happening for our entire history as the lofty words in the first part of the Declaration of Independence were soon forgotten and replaced with the calculations of the slave-holders - many of whom were in the Northern states,  slavery being legal just about everywhere as the Constitution was written and adopted - and the wealthy founders whose fortunes were based in banking and mercantile interests made common cause to ensure that "equal justice" unhampered by a monarch was something they got to hoard for themselves.   The subsequent history of the United States is a constant struggle against that, the high point of which was reached with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts which the present Republican-fascists in elected offices and on the Supreme Court, those who are in charge of the media, have been trying to reverse since Nixon took office.  

There is a reason Trump is returning to slogans from some of the most racist and vicious figures of the Civil Rights era, why the Roberts court is nullifying the Voting Rights Act and crippling the Civil Rights Acts using slogans of "liberty" and "The First Amendment" to do that, it is because this is the history of the United States under the Constitution.  I do not remember who said it during the Civil War, a war which was a direct result of the slave-holder privileging Constitutional system that we are still under,  but he pointed out that Black People had been slaves under the Constitution for the entire period it, with the Bill or Rights, with all of the lofty language of it, for the entire time.  He, of course, didn't know that as soon as Rutherford Hayes made a corrupt deal with the unrehabilitated Confederate Traitors so he could become president, that they would reimpose a form of the same system on a de facto instead of a strictly de jure basis which the Supreme Court would codify in the disgusting Plessy v Ferguson decision.  That was made possible due to the Electoral College, due to the anti-democratically structured Senate, due to the corruptions intentionally put into the Constitution and which are still there.  

No, I didn't copy that from something I heard on TV the other night, it's been a long time learning that real history of the United States, overcoming the slogan and bromide based view of history which I, too, had been blinded by for most of my life.  It's not a popular idea but I think it's true.  I don't think this will be over under the present Constitutional system, including the absurdist poetry of the Bill of Rights which is unspecific enough to have encompassed the Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Sullivan Decision, Buckley v Valeo, Citizens United, . . . and the non-decision that made corporations "persons" to have put the privileges of the wealthy and privileged above equal justice under law.   The Bill of Rights should be a legal contract specifying moral positions essential for a decent, equal democracy to result come over the liberty of the rich and powerful to lord it over us and dupe us into the miserable system we have.  

I don't think Orlando Patterson would go as far as I have and if he did I'm pretty sure Lawrence O'Donnell wouldn't have him on to say it.   He'd probably get fired from Harvard and become a non-person.  I'm already one, so I am free to say it. 

* I haven't been able to find a reliable Youtube pirating of O'Donnell's show and those for Rachel Maddow have been more hard to find so I haven't watched much of them and O'Donnell's is on after my normal bed time.   I suspect Republican-fascists or their ally, Putin,  are trying to prevent a wider audience hearing them.