Saturday Night Radio Drama - Louis Kornfeld - That's Democracy

 That's Democracy 

A teacher gives his students lesson about democracy that they'll never forget. Performed by Peter McNerney as Mr. Mohr, Russ Armstrong as Eric, and Alexis Lambright as Margaret, with Fiona Bradford, Teddy Shivers, Oscar Montoya, and Ben Jones as the principal. Written by Louis Kornfeld, produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

This one is pretty brutal and short but expands into a lot of hard thinking.  I don't necessarily agree with everything said about it but it is a good example of the inadequacy of representative democracy as opposed to the Mosaic Law and its foundation in morality instead of instrumental reasoning.   It deserves to gain the status of a classic and to be required listening and morally guided discussion in every classroom in the country. 

Here's more about the play from the source of it, the excellent audio drama source, The Truth.

The Making of That's Democracy 

Before Going Back To The Light Of Heschel Next Monday - Boldly Going Where Godel Proved You Never Could Go And Hitting A Wall Instead

ONE OF THE greatest achievements in logical thinking was Kurt Godel's (and others') arguments that there were truths of mathematics that could not be proven from any set of axioms.  And all mathematics, the area of human experience which has most successfully applied logic to arrive at universally accepted proofs - accepted by those who understand the proofs and even those who don't - are dependent on such axioms.  All of it depends on things which, themselves, must be believed without proof, an idea which is no kind of a novelty, it's been known since before Euclid that was the perhaps sad truth of things. 

Since that would seem to be about as hard a truth as we have, the idea that any ideological program could do better than that and prove or disprove all of the very complex phenomena of human experience and life is worse than unreasonable, it is an actively believed in absurdity.  The idea that materialist monism was capable of doing that is even stupider than the idea that idealist ideology could because idealism doesn't deny the reality of the material universe, it merely states the obvious that any human conception or knowledge of the material universe primarily depended on human minds.  Of course idealism as an ideological position is no less capable of coming up with an ultimate truth  in the complex areas it deals with, though I think it's clear it can explain more than materialism ever could or has explained and it probably has fallen into less of a discreditable Slough of Despond than materialism constantly inhabits.

Materialism, as it developed, had the need to deny the reality of human consciousness and turned minds from the entities that comprehended parts of material reality and achieved a shared understanding of it into an abacus made of meat that operated by unknown mechanisms (the solution of that problem promised in a never to be redeemed promissory note) and totally dependent on deterministically predestined physical causation.  That it explained nothing about what the minds that thought up that ruse and that refused to be suckered by it and those who did is a far larger problem for the claims of completeness made by material monism than it is for the far more modest claims of mathematics which obtains its certainty about far simpler objects which can only be reached through acts of imagination by minds.  The idealists, focusing on the minds that all of that must precede and conduct the thinking all of that rely on, aren't at anything like the disadvantage that the materialists have to resort to in their desperate dodges to keep their beloved ideology afloat. 

The truth is the basic motivation of that was that materialists hated the idea of God and the moral laws, mostly of the Jewish tradition, especially Christianity because that was the vehicle with which the moral obligation to the lesser and least among us, The Law, entered into the wider gentile culture.  I would guess that in places where Islam is the dominant force of that transmission that its overturning is the motive of their indigenous atheist-materialists but I admit I have a hard enough time understanding the United States and haven't had time to read about Islam rejecting atheists. 

I freely admit and condemn the fact that Christians have been the worst enemies of Christianity through the scandal of not following the Gospel of Jesus or the Law, if they had consistently done that in the past or started doing so today, they would be among the most beloved and respected group of humans on the planet.  The media has defined "Christianity" away from those who have tried to do that and use the term exclusively to mean those who are the very worst at doing what Jesus would do.  As a Woman I once heard said, "It's a lot easier to praise The Lord than to follow him."   Many would call themselves Christians, few would follow it up and back it up.

Dave Liebman, Steve Swallow, Adam Nussbaum - Up Too Late

 

Direct link to video 

 

I hate the twice a year clock change more every time it happens.   I don't care which one they choose, just stop the nonsense.  But I never get tired to these musicians. 

Merrick Garland is little different from Robert Mueller, both are establishment hacks who value their own ease of career more than they do government of by and for The People. The establishment hacks are not going to protect us. Congress should start arresting and jailing those in contempt of their subpoenas themselves because waiting for Garland is more futile than waiting for Godot.

Open Letter To The Atheist Tag Team I've Been Brawling With

 " The words "secular" and "secularism" appear nowhere in the United States Constitution."   That was the thing I pointed out that set off one of the atheists I was brawling with the last few days.  Secularism, the actual ideology that the atheists were claiming as the basis of our government could not have as the word apparently didn't exist until 1851.  Secularism is an ideology that adopted a much older word that didn't mean what secularists mean when they use it.

Trying to get to a deep understanding of the ideas they hold should lead someone into realizing the superficiality of their thinking before they did that.  It's been my experience that thinking hard about the downfall of egalitarian justice as the goal of not only the American left but America as a general project has been extremely humbling to me.  If you don't think when I come to heretical statements about things I formerly supported such as the superficial notions of free-speech absolutism, a  romanticized and lying version of leftist history, Darwinism, piously regarded secularism such as it exists in a majority of my fellow college-credentialed Americans that that was preceded by realizing how superficial my thinking had been and, in many instances feeling deep shame, well, I just told you differently.   An old man learning new ways of thinking is neither gratifying nor easy, it's necessary to stop being dishonest and to try to find out a way to stop repeating the ever recurring, repeating history of the failed, secular,  American left. 

That said, once thought out, I don't feel any need to hold back in vehemently  asserting what I've concluded.   I certainly didn't hold back when asserting things I held on the basis of far less research and reflection, back when I thought Darwinism was as anodyne and while stupidly and irresponsibly upholding "freedom of the press" and the rights of "even Nazis" because "the First Amendment."    Whining that I'm aggressive in refutation is no defense of your position.  It wasn't pleasant to overturn my own follies when I subjected them to criticism and fact checking.  If you don't do that you never get anywhere.  You have to stop believing you have the undying, unquestionable truth.  Ironic that a Christian would have to point that out to some "free thinkers."

The word "secularism" like so many other terms, slogans and buzz words that comprise the superficial construct that is that common received wisdom is, in fact, far more than the mere requirements of the commonly shared government being non-sectarian and not exclusive of participation by those of any religious character, it is an actual ideological program of excluding religious thought and behavior from not only political life but civic, public life as well.  It is an actual ideological position and campaign that aims to deligitimize religion.  In the English speaking Peoples the target of that in the post WWII period is Christianity in all its forms.  That is partly due to the profession of Christianity by a large majority of people in the West, partly due to the taboo of targeting Judaism, a taboo which has certainly been diminishing as the post-WWII period has worn on and as attacks on the Jewish religion have become more fashionable among the college credentialed. 

When I first came to the conclusion that secularism, with its elevation of the blasted trinity of scientism, atheism and materialism (especially the vulgar, most easily adopted forms of those) into fashionable and imaginary transgressions, was a serious danger to egalitarian, just government with their inevitable demotion of human beings into material objects and, in that credo of the now tarnished high priest of the SAM religion, Richard Dawkins, "We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes," I also realized that the word was hardly as neutral as it is generally presented as being.  And that such a view of human beings could not but be fatal to egalitarian justice and even the idea that majority rule was better than strong-man dictatorship.  Which explains the entire history of governments in the control of a faction of atheists from the Reign of Terror to today's North Korea.

I have looked a little into the real definition of "secularism"  and think that Webster's Dictionary has the most accurate definition of it,

 "indifference to or rejection or exclusion of religion and religious considerations."   

Far from being the mere efficient exclusion of religious considerations in official governmental affairs, which is a requirement of egalitarian justice in a pluralistic society, the practice and the attitude of secularism aims at the exclusion of religion from human life and affairs entirely.  That is the actual goal of secularism which is actually an ideological project.  The National Secular Society in the UK frames their ideological-political goals in dishonest terms, claiming that something they present as an actual entity "religion" is privileged and that something called "secularism" is the underdog that actually deserves to be privileged as some kind of default.  Which has been explicitly claimed as being its privileged status under the US Constitution by some atheists I've brawled with.  What they really mean is that atheism and atheists should hold the position of privilege they gin up resentment against religion for illegitimately holding. 

The principles of secularism which protect and underpin many of the freedoms we enjoy are: 

Separation of religious institutions from state institutions and a public sphere where religion may participate, but not dominate.

Freedom to practice one's faith or belief without harming others, or to change it or not have one, according to one's own conscience.

Equality so that our religious beliefs or lack of them doesn't put any of us at an advantage or a disadvantage.

I would point out that the first claim that secularism protects and underpins our freedoms is ahistorical garbage when you look at the history of official atheist governance which is most strongly associated with some of the most violent and oppressive, even murderous suppression of freedom in the modern period.  As could be seen in yesterdays' exchange, atheists given the chance (yet again) could not come up with an articulation of rights that was not dependent on the whims and desires of "people and governments" not even to explain how atheists whose rights are denied by "people and governments" could be said to not be deluded when they claimed that such had deprived them of rights that the atheist framing of those said exists only when they are granted.  

I would also point out that modern dictators of all sorts have actively sought to either subject religion to secular power or to destroy religion because they fear them as rivals in their struggle for absolute power.  There is no countervailing force in the secular order that could mount a comparable campaign of resistance to such a despot.  The Trump regime has shown how easy it is for corrupted religious figures to go along with a neo-Nero, Las Vegas-Hollywood strong man.  Imagine if they didn't claim to believe in the Golden Rule and the Beatitudes.

The three points after that are such generally accepted principles that I would challenge these atheists to demonstrate that the large majority of people who hold those beliefs today and in the past were not professed believers in religion, most of those in the West Christians and Jews.  

As the argument developed I'd certainly make recourse to passages in Scripture that support most if not all of them.  Especially in the Gospels and in the Epistles.  It has been when religion lost its focus on morality and concentrated on worldly power that it has acted oppressively, enforcing a rigid orthodoxy and violently suppressing dissent from that, something which is totally at odds with the very Gospel they claimed to promote. Atheism with worldly power has been even less restrained in oppression and murder than all but the most evil and power hungry of professed Christian governments.  

In thinking hard about the problem of equality and justice as the foundation of government and society it comes down to the problem of how you get an effective majority of People to give up things they want, to stop doing things they want to do to benefit everyone on an equal basis when they don't really want to do that.  In looking and thinking hard about history and the present I have come to the conclusion that there is no force that will effectively get people to do that except the belief that God wants that and that there are bad consequences that are guaranteed to come to us unless we do that.  The Jewish scriptures, the Law, the Prophets, the entirety of what can be considered Salvation History is a story of what happens when people don't act unselfishly in individual cases and when entire cities, societies, nations and even the entire population of the Earth are selfish and indifferent and hateful.  And the history of secularism, so-called "secular governments" proves that it's no less prone to the same things. The entire modern period has given support for the claim that officially non-sectarian governments are as susceptible to the evils of the worst of the Pharaohs and the kings of Judah and Israel and the results of that.  Secularism to be better than that is as dependent on an effective majority of People and their leaders following the same rules that comprise the heart of The Law, the Prophets and the Gospel, whether or not those scriptures are referenced.  And atheism has far less of a chance of doing that than those who are open to the idea that those are necessary because God says so. 

When The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. expressed his prophetic hope that the arc of history bends toward justice he was expressing a belief that God has arranged Creation in that direction.  His prophecy could have been seen as being as true of the material universe as the spiritual.  It is one of the things that scientistic materialist atheists don't seem to be capable of understanding that someone who believes in the Jewish conception of Creation believes God created the physical universe in ongoing creation into its culmination, whatever that is.  While I think the modern theological desire to stress the description of our ultimate fate as living beings in bodily terms in line with our present bodies is wrong, there is no separation of the material and what one of the atheists I'm arguing with derides as the "supernatural" as if that were a definitive discrediting of my points about their inability to support a durable idea of rights.  It isn't.  The Creation of God encompasses far more than we can conceive of, observe and experience, it doesn't consist of less than we can fathom.  When you cut out anything but what materialists claim to be the totality of existence, Carl Sagan's corseted view of "the Cosmos" you can't even account for the full reality of human experience and knowledge.  You can't find out why government and society should be governed on the basis of equality and justice.  You can't even say why atheists should be able to run for and hold public office as you whine about impotent, ineffective laws that claim that in seven states in the United States.  All you can do is come up with claims that support what you're whining about.

Carla Bley Trio 'Lawns

 

Direct link to video

Carla Bley, piano 

Andy Sheppard, saxophone

Steve Swallow, bass

More Brawl On A Slow Day

RuleofFive
7 minutes ago
 @Anthony McCarthy  
1.  I'm never mentioned the Code of Hammurabi.  I'm not responsible for someone else said to you.  I've read the Bible.  Stop generalizing.  

2.  No we don't know what Homo sapiens were thinking 450,000 years ago.  Thanks for making my point for me.  There wasn't divine inspiration given to them, they weren't handed something written in stone so "god" decided they weren't worth her time?  God couldn't beam a message to them the way Paul got his inspiration?  

Man had to invent stories, the written word and then concoct stories to control others like a religion....which favored the institution of slavery strangely.  If I was suspicious I'd say it was written to reenforce the economic models of the day by some of the educated class.🤔

3. I never said rights are a figment of imagination.  I said god is a figment of your imagination.  Stop putting words in my mouth.  Rights are really a series of agreements in a society just as governments are. They can represent a board group in society or just a favored few.  Atheists have the right to seek public office in 43 states.  We'll need to work on the last seven since christians like to deny others rights.  As I've said rights can be taken away.  Texas closed over 700 polling places since 2014 in an effort to control (read block) minority voting.  That's a government (mostly white christians) chipping away at the rights of others.

4.  Christians represent the Bible as the source of christianity not me.  No one is "whining" about a denial of rights.  There are organizations that fight to gain those rights like the Freedom From Religion Foundation.  I have to laugh when I hear people on Fox News complain about christian oppression  in a country were 78% of the population identifies as christian but will deny rights to atheists.
 

Anthony McCarthy
0 seconds ago
 @RuleofFive    I didn't say you had mentioned it, I was just warning you that I'd read it before you might have been tempted to.   "Stop generalizing"?   on a tread begun by another atheist who said, "Religion poisons everything.   Well, I did say atheists are clueless about what they say.
 
To further prove that, first you agree that we don't know what people thought before they left written records of what they thought then you pretend you know what they thought.  Jeesh, how about you continue to prove my point.

If "people and governments" are the source of rights and, as anyone with a smattering of a knowledge of human history knows, the denial of rights was a continuing and ubiquitous part of that history, denied to people by "people and governments" then before they were magically created by "people and governments" those rights didn't exist.  They had to be a figment of peoples' imaginations, if most Americans don't want to vote for atheists then atheists must not have a right to run for and hold elected office, an example you brought up to whine about even though those archaic laws are not in actual effect.  As to Texas and other would-be apartheid states, one of the greatest forces of resistance to that is to be found in the Black Churches, just about all of the Christian churches, one of the foremost means of the white supremacists rigging elections is preventing the Souls to the Polls practice of those churches.  

The Freedom From Religion foundation is a bunch of meatheads in Madison WI, founded by a bigoted numbskull, run by her daughter and son-in-law, it's a family business, not a civil rights organization. Their greatest effect is probably on helping Republican-fascists to gain office and destroy rights.   

--------------------------

I will add that I have suspected that the FFRF has been the source of a lot of the trolling I've gotten over the years.  They don't have much better to do since they don nothing but shake down suckers and bring stupid lawsuits that discredit the real left.

A Bit Of Fun For You - What's Keeping Me Awake Nights Apart From The World Going To Hell

LYING AWAKE in the disruption of my unreliable sleep patterns in the change back to Standard Time, I was thinking of the alboka and its apparent limit of a sixth and what could be done with it.

It occurred to me that the Anglo-Saxon style of lyre such as was famously found at Sutton-Hoo with its six strings and as represented elsewhere might have been played with similar musical strategies.  The medieval would-be reconstructor and, in my opinion, actual creative improvisor instead Benjamin Bagby, in trying to imagine an improvisational practice for the use of medieval harps interestingly pointed to the African thumb pianos and their amazingly varied and creative use of them both as solo instruments and, especially, as accompanying instruments.  His use of that kind of six-string lyre in his setting of medieval poetry, most famously Beowulf, is a good example.  I don't for a second believe it is "authentic medieval music" but it is an artistically interesting and creative use of the materials that we can reliably know were what whatever music they made was made with.  I'd love it if it led to a revival of live musical story telling in a language an audience can understand with that level of artistic creativity but that's not going to happen.   We'll continue to get pop music junk because that's what people are given.

When I was a music student thinking seriously of going the route of musicology, especially being interested in the music of the late 14th and 15th century we were all obsessed with a quest for something we could never have really gotten, getting back to the original intent of how the composers of the music could have imagined their music.  There is simply not enough information left for us to honestly determine that as being any one thing, any one authentic performance practice that can be reliably reproduced so as to give us the experience the composers intended.  We can know there were things that that couldn't be but we have little information as to what it definitely would have been.*   Nor do we know if most of the composers of that time had an expectation that their music would be performed and heard in any one way, if they, themselves may not have varied their music greatly on different occasions or times. 

I got sick and tired of the disagreements and arguments and pretense that we could reliably do what so obviously couldn't be done and decided to concentrate on other aspects of music for which we could have that information, the music of now instead of the lost past.   I still love the music of Francesco Landini, Guillaume Dufay and Josquin des Pres as I imagine them to be and there are performances of those composers pieces in the form they come down to us that I love quite a lot but I don't regret avoiding getting tangled farther than I did in the wars and brawls and pretenses of that time and the creation of bogus phony "medieval" music performances that were as bad.  Though it's been a while since anyone was suspected to have gotten into a duel to the death over such questions. 

I'm also glad that I didn't participate in something I might have unwittingly contributed to, the cult of the Latin language liturgy through a promotion of "Gregorian chant."   I love the Chant but the cult that grew up around that in the decades since I left college is a temptation to idolatry and absurdity and neo-fascist politics.   I'd go into why this is keeping me awake at night but that's an off-line project that I and one of my oldest musical friends are involved in.  I don't have his permission to discuss that. 

* Worse, we don't know how any particular composer might have felt about the practice of other composers and musicians of that time who left information about their performance practice and whether or not they'd have wanted their music treated that way.   I spent a lot of time with Conrad Paumann's examples of keyboard improvisational practice, Fundamentum  Organisandi but, in the end, had no idea how the evidence he left in it would have been applied to the music of other composers I'd have been interested in. 

In A Hurry So This Exchange From A Blog Brawl I'm Having

BEFORE THIS I'd pointed out that according to this anti-religious atheist that a. "Christians" deprived atheists of their rights and b. that rights aren't an endowment of God to all people but that "people and governments" create rights and, by this atheist's theory of rights then until "people and governments" created rights for a list of people then their belief they had rights was a delusion and that, for example, the Nazi government could extinguish any rights that Jews had in Nazi ruled territories, the Dred Scott was a correctly made decision and Black People had no rights and that if "people and governments" wanted it so, atheists had no rights they didn't want them to have.

 

RuleofFive 10 minutes ago

 @Anthony McCarthy  1. Unfortunately governments do take rights away from people. Look at how Israel treats Palestinians. As you said the Nazis took rights away from Jews. Christians took rights away from atheists here in the US. Seven states still have laws barring atheists from holding public office. Those "good" christians busy at work again! 😉 So who gives rights? If god is all powerful and all knowing then surely she can grant rights that cannot be taken away? Yet people take rights away from each other all the time throughout human history. The reason? Because god isn't real. If god is real and watches all the suffering injustice in our world and remains indifferent then god is evil. I think god is just part of the imagination of man.   People obtain rights by fighting for them. They can be taken away too should people take them for granted. Powerful people almost never give up power without struggle.

 

Anthony McCarthy

@RuleofFive  YOU are the one who said rights came from people and governments, if that's true until people and governments "give rights" to atheists to run for and hold office then atheists living there don't have a right to do that. THAT'S ACCORDING TO THE ATHEISTS' OWN THEORY OF RIGHTS AND WHERE THEY COME FROM, NOT MINE. I would hold that atheists have every right that everyone else does to run for office and hold office because they are endowed with that right by God whether or not people or governments choose to respect those rights.  According to you, rights exist only so long as "people and governments" want them to exist.  So, you see, my theory of rights is far more generous to atheists than your atheist, materialist theory of rights. Under your theory of rights then the Nazis could remove the rights of Jews, male chauvinist pigs could remove the rights of Women (if they got a few Women to go along with them and they did) white supremacists could deny the rights of Black People, as they did under the United States Constitution, that idol of your secularism which religious abolitionists, including almost all of the Black abolitionists and the White ones too fought. The Spirituals making veiled references to escaping slavery just about all use Jewish religious Scripture as their source of inspiration, not atheist polemics. And under YOUR theory of rights then if states choose to deny atheists the right to run for or hold office then atheists there have no right to do so and if they complain that they have a right to that they are delusional believers in something that doesn't exist. Ironic, isn't it but, then, I have not found atheists to be especially deep thinkers.

The January 6th fascists claimed they were fighting for their rights, the gun nut fascists claim to be fighting for their rights, the Confederate states and armies claimed to be fighting for their rights. Under your theory if they prevail they will have created their rights to overturn elections to put a fascist dictator into office, shoot up schools and nightclubs etc. and maintain slavery. No, the atheist theory of rights and where they come from is too stupid and dangerous to not fight against. 

Update:  The Brawl Continues:

 
RuleofFive
1 hour ago
 @Anthony McCarthy  Yes rights are granted by governments and people. I don't believe in god so of course I don't think rights come from her.  If human rights were "god given" we wouldn't need human documents providing and outlining what rights people have.  

Actually, as I just told you, atheists don't have the right to hold public office in seven US states right now and are denied those rights by christians who feel threatened by them.  

Maybe you believe everyone should have rights.  Good for you.  So do I.  In practice it doesn't work that way.  Black people organized under MLK to fight for the right to vote.  Women fought for the right to vote.  Some laws preventing atheists from running for public office in some places have been fought and overturned.  Are you understanding the key term here?  They "fought for their rights".  

Yes sometimes bad people prevail.  Sometimes bad people win.  You're under the delusion that there is a supernatural arbiter that jumps in and grants things to people universally or corrects wrongs.  I would say that is a figment of your imagination.  

Homo sapiens have been around for 450,000 years approximately.  So just in the last few thousand years god got around to establishing rights?  Please.  As I said even in the Bible slavery is okay, women are second class citizens, children have no rights.

As you said the US founding fathers were only okay with white men with property holding power or even voting.  Women, children, black slaves, native Americans had no rights under the original constitution.  So if "god" is granting rights but those "god given rights" can be taken away by mortal men then what good are "god given rights".?  If god can be ignored or her will thrown out then it's really not worth much to the person that's been disenfranchised.  That's why it's up to people to fight for the government that they want. The way you describe it god is more like an advocacy group instead of an all powerful being that makes declarative statements without the force or authority to make it reality.

Anthony McCarthy
 @RuleofFive  First,  what Homo Sapiens thought before there are actual, readable written records of what they thought is unknowable so any resort to making arguments about that period of humanity are specious at best.  I've had that argument with atheists before,just  to keep you from pulling the Code of Hammurabi on me because in that very early document it's claimed that the right to make the code was given to him by heaven.  Why atheists don't bother reading documents they cite so regularly is something I don't understand but it's my experience they seldom if ever do.  So you have no idea how rights may have been explained by our early ancestors.

I have explained to you that, given your atheist articulation of the origin of rights, you can't claim that atheists denied rights by governments or people really exist, under your framing those rights are mere figments of your imagination and, though you weren't honest enough to admit it, rights that cease to be a majority or consensus view of "people and governments" can disappear as magically as they appeared, wished into existence.  So atheists whining about the fact that large numbers of People wouldn't vote for a known atheist are making resort to a form of rights and, inevitably an origin of those, that many atheists will then refute as possible.  Either the right is there before "people and governments" create them or they are imaginary or originate in magical thinking.  

The actual text of the Jewish Bible is rather more an impressive examination and discussion of those issue than I've ever heard or read from any atheist, though as I mentioned above, it doesn't claim an exclusive right to be the source of that knowledge.  Atheists who like to whine about their denial of rights would do a lot better to adopt that framing than the one their ideology leaves them with.   They'd have a leg to stand on as they cut the other one off, themselves.

Oh, and, by the way,  you apparently don't know that "MLK" was THE REVEREND Martin Luther King jr. a Baptist minister who almost never gave a speech without framing the reality of rights that were denied by the secular governments of various states and the United States in terms similar to the RELIGIOUS ONES I am using here.  Not only him but the large majority of those who put themselves on the line during that dangerous and difficult non-violent struggle for equality, an equality that, as well, is impossible to find in any materialist articulation of things because equality is a right as well, one which must precede any consensus or majority view of "people or governments" which deny those rights.   Atheism is an entirely inadequate, unreliable and unsafe ideology for people who are denied equal rights and the even more elusive right to justice.

 

Mixel Ducau Plays The Alboka And More

 

Direct link to video

The online information about the instrument is minimal except that it's one of a number of such instruments played around Europe and Northern Africa.  For once I don't feel obligated to do a lot of research because so many of the notes are in Basque and I've got no idea what they say.  This one has notes in English as well as French. 

Love the music, for an instrument with such minimal range what's done with it is impressive.  Sort of anti-minimalist music. 

The alboka is a double single-reed hornpipe which is played by using circular breathing. The alboka is historically played in the Basque provinces of Biskaye and Alaba but is now played throughout the Basque Country. About Mixel Ducau : 

A native of the Basque Country (France) and founder of the very successful Basque contemporary rock group Errobi. Both musician and artistic director, Mixel decided to study traditional Basque music on the alboka, ttun-ttun and acoustic guitar.

His musical experience is forged through collaboration with the Compagnie Bernard Lubat and Joseba Tapia (diatonic accordion). His talent as a powerful vocalist, a tradition in the Basque Country, only enhances his appeal as a composer and excellent musician. 

Mixel is playing an alboka made by Osses in OTAZU, ARABA (Basque Country). His website is here : http://ossesalbokak.wordpress.com/sor...

 

This one is interesting because it has a transcript of the music that gives a good idea of what you're hearing.  Note the very small range of the instrument, a sixth up from a.   I suspected the name of the musician was Txilibrinen Porruek until, following that name online, I found out that it's the name of the piece, the Leeks of Txilibrinen on this website.  I'm dependent on Google translate which I don't trust so I won't go any farther expect to note there are a number of wonderful pieces posted there, some with transcriptions.

 Direct link to video

Here's one in which it accompanies a singer playing a tambourine, which the source online said is one of its most typical roles. 

Direct link to video

 judge Bruce Schroeder should be removed from the Rittenhouse trial because it's been clear from the start he's trying to let the little murderer off because he thinks his victims deserved to be murdered.  This is a good example of just what a lie it was when John Roberts declared the era of Jim Crow dead and so the Voting Rights Act was overturned.  

The American judiciary is well marbled with white supremacy from bottom to top. 

" the foolishness of believing that we have been triumphant while we have all been defeated" - Continuing With Abraham Joshua Heschel's No Religion Is An Island

We fail to realize that while different exponents of faith in the world of religion continue to be wary of the ecumenical movement, there is another ecumenical movement, worldwide in extent and influence : nihilism. We must choose between interfaith and inter-nihilism. Cynicism is not parochial. Should religions insist upon the illusion of complete isolation? Should we refuse to be on speaking terms with one another and hope for each others failure ? Or should we pray for each other's health, and help one another in preserving one's respective legacy, in preserving a common legacy? 

That was written almost fifty-five years ago when the program of the media making cynicism the common currency of the would-be sophisticates was far less of a success than it became as that continued and intensified.   In studying what has led the American left into the half a century in the political wilderness during the same period and helped greatly by the internet and unmoderated comments exposing the unedited thinking of thousands of would-be lefties, the power of amorality, nihilism and fashionable cynicism to both discredit the left and to lead it into self-chosen impotence became undeniable.  Added into that is something less welcome, discouragement which, without a powerful antidote or remedy has destroyed any prospects of changing that.   I have, of course, found sources of those in modernism and scientistic materialism, which is one of the reasons the contributing precursors of those have become major focuses here.  

I am enormously impressed that with what he could have seen from 1965 Abraham Joshua Heschel saw this so well.  Everything I'm reading and hearing from him leads me to believe his is one of the most important of prophetic voices during my lifetime.   I can only imagine what he would make of today's fashionable moral depravity, as fashionable on the right as on the left, tastes in moral depravity being the main difference.   The neo-fascist, Nazi friendly Republican-fascism, the complete cynicism of much if not most of popular entertainment and popular culture, the impotence of the left, even much of the religious left which cannot bring itself to separate itself from and condemn the tyranny of fashion and consumer cynicism and greed.  I wonder what he, one of the major and most important non-Catholic advisors to Vatican II would think of the billionaire financed attacks on the documents of that huge reform of Catholicism, even on the main document in the reconciliation of Judaism and Christianity, Noster Aetate.  Something a trad-Catholic railed against to me on a comment thread the other day, sounding like a Chick Publications comic book, more anti-Catholic than a Catholic-hatin' psychopath. 

The Jewish diaspora today, almost completely to be found in the Western world, is certainly not immune to the spiritual climate and the state of religious faith in the general society. We do not live in isolation, and the way in which non-Jews either relate or bid defiance to God has a profound impact on the minds and souls of the Jews. Even in the Middle Ages, when most Jews lived in relative isolation, such impact was acknowledged. To quote, "The usage of the Jews is in accordance with that of the non-Jews. If the non-Jews of a certain town are moral, the Jews born there will be so as well." Rabbi Joseph Yaabez, a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, in the midst of the Inquisition was able to say that "the Christians believe in Creation, the excellence of the Patriarchs, revelation, retribution and resurrection. Blessed is the Lord, God of Israel, who left this remnant after the destruction of the second Temple. But for these Christian nations we might ourselves become infirm in our faith.

As I have pointed out several times here, it is notable that conversion of Jews into atheists is more acceptable, with its entire rejection of the Jewish religion than their adoption of Christianity.   While that's to some extent understandable, a legacy of mainly European discrimination against and violence against Jews, it makes little sense.  Especially as that discrimination and violence were certainly contrary to the teachings of Jesus and Paul (both Jews) which, if they were followed by those who professed to believe what they said none of that discrimination of violence would have happened.   I would like to see more of that history of evil addressed honestly instead of in show-biz style because if there's one thing show-biz does not do well, at all, it's historical honesty. 

We are heirs to a long history of mutual contempt among religions and religious denominations, of religious coercion, strife and persecutions. Even in periods of peace, the relationship that obtains between representatives of different religions is not just reciprocity of ignorance; it is an abyss, a source of detraction and distrust, casting suspicion and undoing efforts of many an honest and noble expression of good will. 

That is, to a large extent, due to Christians gaining worldly power and amassing power in the way of a king or emperor or some lesser level of medieval feudal thuggery.  The modern period in which religions have been disempowered has led to an improvement in that, I don't think it would have been possible when the Popes were in possession of the Papal States or other worldly estates to start to be more in line with the teachings of the Jew, Jesus in regard to his religion, today.   It was always a turf battle over worldly power and wealth.  Perhaps "post-religion" is necessary for the Churches to gain more actual authenticity and, so, legitimacy.   That would certainly have been far more in like with the teachings of Jesus and Paul and, especially James than most of the history of the Christian churches.   Religion with worldly power is not a generally morality friendly situation.   It's remarkable how the Church of England has become more Christian as it has become less powerful and influential.  It is remarkable how the Chief Rabbinate of Israel has become mired in scandal as it has become ever more involved with right-wing politics in Israel and the Republican-fascist members of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops here, too. 

I will leave off, for now, with the question he asks here.

The Psalmist's great joy is in proclaiming : "Truth and mercy have met together" (Ps. 85:11). Yet so frequently faith and the lack of mercy enter a union, out of which bigotry is born, the presumption that my faith, my motivation, is pure and holy, while the faith of those who differ in creed - even those in my own community - is impure and unholy. How can we be cured of bigotry, presumption, and the foolishness of believing that we have been triumphant while we have all been defeated?

What Idiot Is Still Carrying The Torch For Stalin Era Five-Year Planning? - Please tell me you're not under 70.

MARXISM has had more than a century of real-life application and it is uniformly one of the most extreme forms of gangster governance in the history of modern government, in the worst cases comparable only to the worst fascist dictatorships, and not always merely at the same level of murderous oppression with those but worse, and Nazism.  In North Korea and in places and at times within those Marxist countries commonly believed to be less of a brutal oligarchic military dictatorship than that, as savagely brutal as any ancient, medieval, Renaissance or Baroque era realm under the total control of a criminally insane despot.  China, a thoroughly modern government, at times is as evilly brutal as the cruelest of medieval local potentates.  

We have seen communism given the test of time and what it leads to is gangster government with Victorian style capitalism on steroids and all the attendant evils of that only with scientific and engineering efficiencies that make it more effective.  At least the last part of that is true of China, Russia is more organizationally primitive but no less oppressive. It is no accident that the fascist thugs ruling in Russia and places like Belarus and other parts of the former Soviet Union were members of the Communist Party, some of them high placed back before that fell.  They are among the most accomplished fascist dictators in history.  That is the real outcome of communism.

The only legitimate government is bound to be a rare thing because it depends on The People knowing the truth and, at the same time, being of good will so the power of a majority is put behind government not only of and by but, most of all FOR ALL The People.   That our Constitution doesn't follow through on the promises made in the Declaration of Independence and as articulated by Lincoln is no accident.  Nor is it a coincidence that it was crafted by aristocrats, slave-owners and financiers, not anymore than the means devised by members of the Constitutional Convention immediately turning to rigging the system to gain unfair advantage and use the power that was locked into place, whether for the winner of a fair election or not, the Supreme Court making that steadily worse over the course of the past fifty years on behalf of Republican-fascism.  Communism wasn't the only thing being given a test of time, so was the modernist morality-free morally "neutral" view of government, the regime of ideological secularism.  It gave us Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and II and Trump.  And it gave us the Supreme Court and the Republican caucus in the Congress and the like of  Krysten Sinema to act as a roadblock to the good will of the majority of voters who are becoming discouraged and cynical as a result of this long stalemate of bad will and privilege.   Joe Manchin's obstruction is more old-fashioned robber-baron American style corruption.

So, you see, you expecting me to be less critical of the commies than I am my own government is absurd.  Communism was never an answer anymore than the total and childish absurdity of anarchism was.   I never realized what a total fraud anarchism was until I read Emma Goldman in full instead of lines taken out to be put on posters and buttons as advertised in old lefty magazines.  Do they still sell those things?   If you want to see what anarchism would lead to, look at the tragedy of any country where legitimate civil authority breaks down or a children's playground without responsible adult supervision is absent.  The bullies and the gangsters and thugs rule.  As they do under Marxism.  Marx was a great critic of other peoples' ideas, he was a terrible judge of his own.  He was a credulous believer in some of the stupidest ideas of both 18th and 19th century culture, especially materialism which is bound to always end in despotism because it rejects the possibility of morality.  Whatever moral or merely sentimental content in Marx's least cold and depraved work there is, it is there despite his ideological materialism.   His creation of an amoral system and misidentifying that with the supposed reliability of physical science would insure that what he made was an infernal engine of oppression and murder.  Darwin did the same thing, only he was less encumbered with an emotional connection to those he was fully prepared to see die for the greater glory of the powerful and wealthy.

Basque Txalaparta Music

 

Direct link to the video 

Juan Mari Beltran and Ander Barrenetxea

Needed something different, wondered what Basque music was like.  It's pretty different and fascinating. 

Recently, In A Blog Brawl Over The Existeince Of Free Thought On Sabine Hossenfelder's Youtube Denying The Possibility Of Free Thought

a "free thinker" who denies that their free thinking is possible due to them being a materialist-atheist posed this

If you think deeply about my questions, you can clearly see how different our thinking is. Materialists (like me) tend to think about the "How" , not the "What" or the "why". To give me something that really clicks, so that it can bring me some closure, you need some explaination as to HOW the transcendental and the material communicate with each other.

Passing up, for now, the chance to trash the pretense that materialists and even the most theoretical of theoretical physicists aren't as fully involved with "what" or "why" questions as anyone else, my response given too quickly was to point out that if the validity of the transcendental entities of truth, value, and the such, things that I'd already argued can't be produced by material causation which are as able to produce non-truth and can't be used to identify a value of truth over non-truth anymore than it could identify any truth of pure iron over any of its oxides or any other physical state over another one.  If science cannot identify why knowing something is real is better than believing what isn't real or pretending to believe something when you don't really believe in it that doesn't mean that even science can get by without actually making that a legal requirement of doing science.  Why should we believe scientists when they deny the reality of the very basis of what they do? 

Well, I guess I didn't pass that up, I'm just not going to go into it in the detail I'm tempted to because Tuesdays are my busiest day most weeks.

As to the old atheist standby of how an immaterial mind could interact with a material brain or body:

A. If the mind is immaterial it would have qualities that we cannot find in material substances and the forces we can observe working on them.  If they did not have other properties or qualities they would not be immaterial.  So whether or not we can understand them to the extent we can objects and their movements is immaterial to our inability to address that. 

B. The scientistic-materialist-atheists have no problem fully and totally accepting the relationship of entirely non-material mathematical "objects" to the physical entities that science was designed to study through mathematics and logical conclusions made using mathematics matched with observation.   The relationship of non-material mathematical objects and the material aspects of the universe is no less mysterious than the action of the mind on the physical brain that is in our body.  If you're going to debunk the one you certainly at least imply the other is of less than secure validity.   Which, in a linear line of thinking would lead to:

C. In the course of the brawl the scientistic materialist atheist seemed to want to deny the transcendence of the truth value of the correct answer to an equation over incorrect answers to the same problem - I used Eddington's example of a school boy getting the answer to 7x8 wrong, pointing out that he noted that nothing went wrong in the physical causal network in the schoolboy's brain as it produced the wrong answer.   It's clear that the identification of the right answer and its superiority over the wrong answers to that equation is not a product of physical causation but of the identification of the right answer having a value that the wrong answer doesn't have. 

I pointed out that unless you were ready to accept that the transcendent value of math being able to establish truth that surpassed the neutrality of scientific method you couldn't do that without discrediting the entirety of science.   Science absolutely depends on mathematics being something that can't be the mere product of physical causation, it depends on mathematics being able to discern the truth of, at least, the entirely non-physical, imaginary objects that mathematics is concerned with. 

I find that the longer I am forced to think about these things, both in addressing the ideological lunacy of scientistic materialist atheists and, especially, the political, social and other consequences for egalitarian, economic and social justice and the survival of life on Earth the more impressed I am that we delude ourselves if we don't admit that everything in all of this, from the most banal aspects of mathematics and science to the struggle for equal justice through the rights that God endowed us with on Earth, the immaterial mind is over all of the rest of it.  That is not a matter of scientific discernment, it is a product of observation and experience and a reading of the history of human experience in the light of good will.  That would probably be rejected with disdain by materialist atheists because they don't like that light, they'd rather remain in the egocentric dark.   They remind me of Milton's Satan.

The Inside Word Is Garland Wants To Wait Until A Judge Says The Congress Has A Legislative Goal In Investigating The Insurrection - That's His Excuse For His Nonfeasance

IT IS TIME FOR MERRICK GARLAND TO BE REPLACED WITH SOMEONE WHO WILL DO THE JOB.  He is not a fucking judge, he's in a prosecutorial position.  As I've pointed out when he was a judge he had the reputation of being tough on crime, I suspect mostly on unconnected, poor people, most likely, our legal system being what it is, disproportionately People of Color. 

With his cowardly refusal to prosecute the main players in the attempted coup that culminated on January 6th and the go-easy on so many of those who have been prosecuted and convicted in an actual insurrection against the government of the United States, the worst one conducted on the center of American government since the Brits in 1812 he has forfeited any claim he has to any kind of a position of power.  President Biden should face the fact that he made a huge mistake in naming the man who Obama wanted to put on the Supreme Court only to have him denied so much as a courtesy visit by Mitch and his caucus of Republican goons.  He was not due the position of Attorney General as a concession prize.   That's Aaron Sorkin fantasy, not real life.

In taking the office he swore as part of his official obligations to do exactly what he is not doing now, he swore:

 “I will support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

He didn't swear an oath to scrupulously cover his ass by not prosecuting someone as obviously breaking the law as Steve Bannon who is in open, obvious and total contempt of Congress, seriously endangering the investigation that the Congress is conducting into the plot to overturn the election of 2020.  There is no rational or even honestly irrational case to be made that Bannon is has not broken the law yet Merrick Garland and his team are letting him get away with it and with him getting away with it encouraging his fellow putschists to get away with it. 

Merrick Garland should be asked to give his resignation today.  He should be replaced by someone with the stomach and courage for the job before he can't be replaced.  He is in violation of his oath of office, something which we have become accustomed to in high court judges and "justices" members of Congress and, especially the Senate.  But he is in an especially dangerous position because his cowardly inaction prevents those who want to remain faithful to their oaths can't do their job since he won't do his. 

Monday Night Standards - The Shadow Of Your Smile - Beyond Elevator Music

THE MOVIE, THE SANDPIPER wasn't as big a hit as the song Johnny Mandel and Paul Webster wrote for it.   It's one of those standards most of the good and a lot of the bad singers and instrumentalists of the era performed but one I'd never much listened to before being reminded from the Jerome Kern songs posted a few Mondays ago of Dick Nash's trombone playing and I found a Youtube of him performing it.

Direct link to video

Which led to the song going on in my head, remembering a lot of different singers, some great, some not great and the original from the movie, maybe the most forgettable of those I remember.  It's the kind of song that suffered a lot from being as heard in dentist offices, elevators and supermarket aisles. 

I decided to post Rebecca Parris singing it with the verse, a rarity that almost no one sang.   She was compared well with Sarah Vaughn, I think this gives you some idea of why. 

Direct link to video

And if you want a change after that.

Ron Carter 

 

Direct link  

No time to look up credits tonight, sorry.  Wish they'd give them when they post videos.  It would make this a lot easier.

Parochialism has become untenable

CONTINUING ON with Abraham Joshua Heschel's essay, No Religion Is An Island starting with two paragraphs I gave yesterday because what follows depends on them.  Heschel's thinking and writing is such that you need to observe the meaning in overlapping ideas.

The supreme issue is today not the halacha for the Jew or the Church for the Christian-but the premise underlying both religions, namely, whether there is a pathos, a divine reality concerned with the destiny of man which mysteriously impinges upon history; the supreme issue is whether we are alive or dead to the challenge and the expectation of the living God. The crisis engulfs all of us. The misery and fear of alienation from God make Jew and Christian cry together.
 

Jews must realize that the spokesmen of the Enlightenment who attacked Christianity were no less negative in their attitude toward Judaism. They often blamed Judaism for the misdeeds of the daughter religion. The casualties of the devastation caused by the continuous onslaughts on biblical religion in modem times are to be found among Jews as well as among Christians.
 

On the other hand, the Community of Israel must always be mindful of the mystery of aloneness and uniqueness of its own being. "There is a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations" ( Num. 23:9 ), says the Gentile prophet Balaam. Is it not safer for us to remain in isolation and to refrain from sharing perplexities and certainties with Christians?

I have written before that one of the most disturbing things I've heard in this area in the post WWII era, with the most serious and sustained attempt to murder the entire Jewish population of Europe is how often Jewish People in the English speaking world, at least, say "we're Jewish but we aren't religious."   To me that sounds, first, like an apology for being Jewish and an assurance that they're not TOO Jewish, a requirement of admission into wider, upper-class, white-collar, academic, professional respectability.   I think it was always the deal that the post-religious "enlightnement" made with Jews, that they could give up their religion to become respectable members of secular society.*  I can't see how that doesn't directly relate to the perhaps still often discussed issue of assimilation, something I knew was very widely discussed during the 1960s and 70s, enough literature based on that theme or impinging on it was written that it was inescapable unless you never read contemporary writing.   

I cannot but think that the adoption of that reassurance is related directly to the coercive conformity to secularization among the white collar class in the 1950s till today.   Secularism and fashion seem to do the work of the antisemites more efficiently than overt discrimination did.  It has also had a devastating effect on authentic Christianity in much the same way.  The future of the two traditions are bound together and I believe their future status depends on what happens to either of them. 

Our era marks the end of complacency, the end of evasion, the end of self-reliance. Jews and Christians share the perils and the fears; we stand on the brink of the abyss together. Interdependence of political and economic conditions all over the world is a basic fact of our situation. Disorder in a small obscure country in any part of the world evokes anxiety in people all over the world.
 

Parochialism has become untenable. There was a time when you could not pry out of a Boston man that the Boston statehouse is not the hub of the solar system or that one's own denomination has not the monopoly of the holy spirit. Today we know that even the solar system is not the hub of the universe.

I am indulging myself to point out here that it was the odious father of Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. who coined the phrase, a  cold-blooded  19th century aristocrat as you might think of but whose son, the mistakenly lauded and revered Supreme Court Justice thought him overly sentimental.   I confess, I'm no fan of the Holmeses or the Supreme Court tradition that stems from jr.  
 

The religions of the world are no more self-sufficient, no more independent, no more isolated than individuals or nations. Energies, experiences and ideas that come to life outside the boundaries of a particular religion or all religions continue to challenge and to affect every religion.

Horizons are wider, dangers are greater ... No religion is an island. We are all involved with one another. Spiritual betrayal on the part of one of us affects the faith of all of us. Views adopted in one community have an impact on other communities. Today religious isolationism is a myth. For all the profound differences in perspective and substance, Judaism is sooner or later affected by the intellectual, moral and spiritual events within the Christian society, and vice versa. 

I would agree with this entirely, taking into account that much of religion, Christian, Jewish, etc. is in the hands of thugs and gangsters, with whom the opportunities of cooperation are often going to be non-existent or, if attempted, fruitless if not counter-productive.  The definition of that inauthenticity will well, I'd think, be able to be made on the basis of a willingness to cooperate for the common good and the sustainability of life and egalitarian common wealth.  It was one of the catastrophes of Christianity that it became mired in the European feudalism and the worldly politics of emperorers, kings, etc.   It is being recapitulated in the "white evangelical" and "traditional Catholic" service to Republican-fascism as embodied in the neo-pagan Hollywood idea of an emperor, Trump.  

That should be the definition of religious authenticity,  the pursuit of the common wealth, the common good, the pursuit of universal social and economic justice and the entirely important and vital goal of saving the biosphere on which all of us ultimately and first off depend.

This  truer than this section of the essay would seem to indicate because the problems the entire world faces today is the decisive choice that will be made between materialism and spiritual transcendence, vulgar materialistic indulgence and moral responsibility,  ruinous consumption or self-sacrificing sustainability,  illusions of parochial superiority and dominance or egalitarian common-wealth and that is a choice that will decide if the human species survives itself and its enlightenment delusion that nature can both be maximally exploited to our ends - and let's get this clear, that means the ends of a gangster elite of some kind which enforces its privilege with violence, oppression and death, first those it exploits uses up and disposes of and, in the not too distant future, the entire biosphere.  And that choice cannot be informed by the STEM subjects and fields alone, no matter what minor efforts are made in science to address the horrors materialist secularism and its more overt form in vulgar materialism inevitably leads to.  

That Abraham Joshua Heschel was writing this in 1966 strikes me as genuinely prophetic, as prophetic as what his friend and colleague Martin Luther King jr. was saying.   There were also a few environmentalists who had gone this far, a few religious figures who were horrified by the prospects of nuclear extinction and who were among the most seriously reformed by the witness of the genocides of WWII and the Stalinist and, then, Maoist regimes.  Secularists were more interested in keeping prayers out of public schools, keeping manger scenes off of town squares and generally making themselves obnoxious with trivia and invitations to talk shows on TV and radio.  Materialists tend to be trivial thinkers, in my experience, there, I said it.  Materialism is as anti-intellectual as it is anti-spiritual.

*  Which strikes me as a worse deal than they got through conversion to Christianity because Christians had at first retained the Jewish Scriptures (all most all of the first "Christians" being Jewish, including Paul and James and even some of the first Popes) or, if they were not Jewish to start with, through adoption of the Scriptures.   

Of course when science entered into it, Darwinism from the start of it, and being Jewish was decided to be a matter of biological inheritance, including immutable and inevitable "traits" "Jewishness" became just another sub-species and was as liable to the scientific superstition of eugenics and the programs of eradication so as to have an imaginary salubrious effect on the survivors.  The rise of Darwinism and the rise of eliminative antisemitism are  bound together by what was taken as the reliability of hard science.   While there was an unofficial precursor of that among a faction of the Spanish hierarchy of the 16th century, resentful of how some of the conversos had gained high office in the Catholic Church, it was not the official position of the Church as a whole and it was not expressed in the same eliminative, quickly developing to genocidal character that I've traced from the eminent British geneticist Karl Pearson, through his collegial contacts with Eugen Fischer directly into the very center of Nazi eugenics and race science as well as having influence elsewhere in science.  His work certainly would have informed the developing American and, almost as certainly Canadian, etc. scientific-legal laws to exclude "undesirables."  That cannot be separated from any of the other eugenics nor from the earlier death camps that the pre-Nazi German military set up in Africa, nor the body parts that a younger Eugen Fischer collected from victims of that genocidal campaign to be sent to his scientific colleagues in Europe.  When you look at human beings as material objects, you end up treating them like objects for use and disposal and to be mounted specimens, no more significant than the moths you find in scientific collections.

Roger Sessions - Symphony Number 4

 

Direct link to the video

Columbus Symphony Orchestra

Christian Badea, conductor

 

Reading Plays

I DIDN'T MEAN to demean the experience of reading a play as opposed to seeing or hearing a production of it, yesterday.  My experience of reading a play has frequently been better than seeing a production of one, bad productions being what they are and common.  My experience of reading a play has seldom produced an experience as bad and as far from the authors clear intent as some of the productions I've seen.  

As I once pointed out to a persistent troll, Edward Albee made the same point about the superior experience of reading plays you'll never see or hear produced and even sometimes those that you will get to go to.  Alas, I doubt I'll ever get to see a production of Flesh & Ghost or the complex Drumheller or Dangerous Times but I can read them several times and imagine them.  I've yet to imagine an actor who couldn't play the part unless that was the part. 

In The Beginning Of A Year I Hope To Spend Reading Heschel

ONE OF THE SECTION HEADINGS in Abraham Joshua Heschel's book Man's Quest For God has the provocative title, The Separation of Church and God.  Before starting on this first section from his essay No Religion is an Island originally published in the Union Seminary Quarterly Review, January 1966, I wanted to say that I think for a large part of Christianity and much of Judaism, that separation is a definite reality.  I am hardly an expert but I think it's as true for large parts of Islam and, in fact, all organized religion. "Religion" is hardly ever an easily addressed or coherent thing.  But, as I'm no expert, I will confine myself to what Heschel addressed, mostly Judaism and Christianity.

The Christianity of the Roman Catholic Latin mass fanatics, the billionaire financed neo-integralist reaction against Vatican II,  the Protestants of the  "prosperity gospel," white-supremacist materialist-As Seen On TV,  Hollywood "Christianity," the kind of "Orthodoxy" that nourishes cults of personality and dynasties of corrupt leaders, all of the above having influential gangsters having entirely more of an influence within them than Moses, The Law,  the Prophets, Jesus, Paul and, especially, James are excellent examples of religions separated from God, without the Prophets, without Jesus. 

If a Christian is someone who believes what Jesus said and tries  to live their life in light of those teachings, inevitably falling somewhat short - which were firmly established in The Law and, as if there's a difference, the Prophets - then Christianity is, in fact, a small minority religion whereas Mammonism, especially in its "Christian" sect, is the state religion of the American empire.   As you can, no doubt, see later today during the state religious gladiatorial events of NFL and big-time college football and the Christmas ads which are the real reason it's on TV. Mammon rules America's popular culture as certainly as it did in pagan Europe of the classical and medieval eras.

As I said the other day, I have become convinced that that separation, the rejection of the responsibility to act morally, to take moral responsibility, to even refuse to accept that the truth is true is what is at the very foundation of our political crisis, the basis of the attack on egalitarian democracy, and even more so  Mishpat or its equivalent in other religious traditions which is the actual true basis of government of, by and for ALL OF THE PEOPLE.  

It is the reason that the legal response to the insurrection of the sixth of January is impotent and willfully so on the part of the secular legal system, it is the reason that two lawyers in Georgia can rig a jury to try to get white jurors to acquit the cold blooded murderers of an unarmed black man they hunted down and killed like he was a hapless game animal and why another judge will allow the slander of murder victims on behalf of an illegally gun toting white-supremacist punk at the same time.  It is the reason that the mass media is permitted to lie us into fascism and violence and Covid-19 type hell for eternity with highly educated, high-price lawyers and judges and "justices" holding that is a right, indeed that it is a "right" for neo-Nazis to bring us close to the opposite of "Never Again" here, now, today in 2021.  That is another effect of the "enlightenment" which Heschel mentions too briefly in his essay.

But I think from now on in this series, I'll concentrate on what Heschel said. 

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Nazism in its very roots was a rebellion against the Bible, against the God of Abraham.  Realizing that it was Christianity that implanted attachment to the God of Abraham and involvement with the Hebrew Bible in the hearts of Western man, Nazism resolved that it must both exterminate the Jews and eliminate Christianity, and bring about instead a revival of Teutonic paganism.  

As I noted the other day, the WWII generation, those who fought in it, those who were alive to live through it are passing very fast now, and with them the direct and personal knowledge of that reality.  Clearly the succeeding generations have not learned even what those people learned from that hardest of learned experience.   Indeed, the lesson that Abraham Joshua Heschel lays out here is widely denied in the fashionable desire to use vague and often inaccurate notions of Nazism to attack religion in general, Christianity in particular and, largely flowing from a fashionable and lying play of a Marxist (now neo-Nazi apologist) playwright and as produced by anti-Catholic Brits and then in fashionable NYC, Catholics.   

Indeed, even as recently as the early 2000s, it was possible for people within science to publish, AS SCIENCE, the implication that Jews brought on their own targeting for genocide due to the things which have allowed them to remain a distinct population of people, even attributing to them genetic predispositions of what the Nazis gave as their excuse to murder them in their millions.  As recently as the late 20th and early 21st century, that could get you a tenured professorship in science at a reputable American university. 

The "enlightenment" was far less an excursion into the light than it was a plunge into the abyss that materialism is.  That is clear if you read the major figures of it at length instead of the clipped, cherry-picked, sanitized view of them which turned many a depraved racist and white supremacist, hater of the poor, the ill and the downtrodden into heroes of ideological modernism. 

Modernism, a few details of fashion and style sometimes excepted, has little to no problem with the most flagrantly unequal and unjust and even cruelly evil aspects of materialist paganism.

Nazism has suffered a defeat, but the process of eliminating the Bible from the Consciousness of the western world goes on.  It is on the issues of saving the radiance of the Hebrew Bible in the minds of man that Jews and Christians are called upon to work together.  None of us can do it alone.  Bot of us must realize that in our age anti-Semitism is anti-Chirisanity and anti-Christianity is anti-Semitism.

I do not know the extent to which Heschel knew that what he said was literally true, Wilhelm Marr, the man who invented the word "anti-Semitism" to give his ideological hatred of Jews the aroma of science said exactly that as did the later Nazis and, in fact, as was proved when some professional figures of religion, wanting to get along with the new regime, denied the very nature of Jesus and who found, when they tried to eliminate all Jewish content in the New Testament found that most of it would have to go.  Even those nominal Christians, and they were by no means a majority of German and Austrian Christians, found that to reject Judaism they had to reject Christianity.  Something which English language Christians have hardly realized nearly as much as some German speaking ones must have. 

Man is never as open to fellowship as he is in moments of misery and distress.  The people of New York City have never experienced such fellowship , such awareness of being one, as they did last night in the midst of darkness. [The great power grid failure and blackout of November 9, 1965.]

Indeed, there is a light in the midst of the darkness of this hour.  But, alas, most of us have no eyes.

Is Judaism, is Christianity, ready to face the challenge?  When I speak about the radiance of the Bible in the minds of man, I do not mean its being a theme for "Information, please" but rather an openness to God's presence in the Bible, the continuous ongoing effort for a breakthrough in the soul of man, the guarding of the precarious position of being human, even a little higher than human, despite defiance in in face of despair.

The supreme issue is today not the halacha for the Jew or the Church for the Christian - but the premise underlying both religions, namely, whether there is a pathos, a divine reality concerned with the destiny of man which mysteriously impinges upon history; the supreme issue is whether we are alive or dead to the challenge and the expectation of the living God.  The crisis engulfs all of us.  The misery and fear of alienation from God make Jew and Christian cry together. 

That reference the halacha, of course, jumped out at me given what I've recently said about Mishpat being a more reliable foundation for egalitarian, economically just, and socially just government than the entirely inadequate and incomplete "one person one vote" representative democracy under secular, law.  Given the dangerously rigged and inadequate law in the hands of a generations long scheme of manipulation by corporate oligarchic lawyers, our Constitution is certainly not up to the job.  I think the establishment of those rules by figures of the so-called enlighenment is not in any way irrelevant to those inadequacies.  

Heschel's identification of the central issue as one, not of fixed, permanent, laws but  "the challenge and the expectation of the living God" which we can only know in relationship to the ongoing experience of living People seems to me to be in opposition to the various "fundamentalisms" "originalisms" "literalisms" that govern our thinking today.   I think it is also a challenge to the academic "critical" method of reading the Bible and the quest for "the historical Jesus" that seems to me to miss the point of it all.

Jews must realize that the spokesmen of the Enlightenment who attacked Christianity were no less negative in their attitude toward Judaism.  They often blamed Judaism for the misdeeds of the daughter religion.  The causalities of the devastation caused by the continuous onslaughts on biblical religion in modern times are to be found among Jews as well as among Christians. 

That onslaught, both external, from the ideologies of secularism, modernism, scientism, materialism, atheism, and far more effectively fashion and popular culture and internally from those who wanted to benefit from and conform to the esteemed and fashionable aspects of all of those, is far more advanced than it was during Heschel's life.  They have swamped Catholicism even in the guise of neo-medieval disguise,  Protestantism in fundamentalism and pentacostalism, the prosperity gospel and "mainline churches" which have pretty much given up Christianity except as a feel-good and banal sentimentalism.