It's a big holiday week here in the United States and if this year is like all of the Thanksgiving weeks I've had since I started doing this people won't be reading blogs much until a week from next Monday.
So I'm going to give you a link to the Stan Freberg Show so you can listen to it for your entertainment. Here's a sample
THE UNCONSIDERED BELIEF that there is such a thing as group knowledge of and understanding that is able to make up for the lack of knowledge of and understanding of some things is a rather obvious fiction. There may be knowledge or understanding found within a group that will not be shared by all members of a group but the group's composite understanding is a fiction. A group doesn't share one mind, understanding and knowledge is a condition that exists within a mind, it can't exist where it isn't present in a mind. There is no such thing as a group-mind.
Yet that superstition is widespread among the uneducated but probably far more among the educated. Having worked in a library from the period when card catalogs were the ultimate means of cataloging the holdings of the library, you might as well attribute such knowledge and understanding to the cards, drawers and cabinets as to a group of people or even the entire species of human beings. I wish someone understanding something was going to provide me with the knowledge without me deciding to get and accept that knowledge and making it an attribute to me but that's not reality, it's make believe. "Science" doesn't know anything, it doesn't do anything, scientists know and do things and they can't know and do it all. The personification of "science" is a ubiquitous practice of virtually all people with educational credentials. There is no such thing. That's just a way of talking that may generally be innocuous as it is stupid but sometimes it's dangerous.
IN MY NAIVETE I hadn't expected to find Abraham Joshua Heschel as tough to understand as I'd anticipated. I didn't expect him to be easy, he's proving a lot harder than I expected.
His language is not the problem, his reasoning and thinking aren't the problem, the problem for me is that in looking for background to understanding him better I find, once again, that the Jewish tradition he was based in is nothing like standardized or uniform or easy for a person not familiar with it to get a hold on. It is like a concentrated attempt to get hold of other very complex fields of thought. So my series is going to be more of a learning expedition for me than some of my other attempts to do this. I don't want to dishonor him by getting him wrong. Reading and listening to different scholars and Rabbis from different branches of Judaism and even within those branches is rather daunting. A lot of what I'm listening to this week are the Jews for Judaism lectures and videos, which are everything from very enlightening to, for a Christian, quite offensive. Not that I mind the offense because I don't think faith that isn't deeply challenged and tested can be very reliable. And Christianity, like Judaism and Islam and Buddhism etc. should be subjected to the points of view of non-believers. I think what that group does, to encourage Jews to remain Jews and even for some people to convert is good. I wouldn't want to live in a world without Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or believers in any number of religions who encourage good will and equality. I agree with A. J. Heschel that God wants there to be religious pluralism or it would not happen that there is diversity among People of good will.
I can take it.
The lecture by Rowan Williams I linked to earlier in the week has two relevant sections, one was during the lecture itself, the other an answer to a question. I've transcribed them (imperfectly, no doubt) but they are relevant not only to the kind of inter-religious engagement that is inevitable when someone who isn't a member of a religious tradition respectfully pays attention to what someone from that tradition says but, also, within religious traditions and within denominations. A lot of what I find difficult and confusing in the background reading and listening I'm doing to understand Heschel is as true for reading from other Christian traditions and, certainly, within the Catholic tradition I am most familiar with. If some of what I wrote about the long and hidden history of the Latin mass seemed odd to you, well, a lot of the claims of those, especially the young-uns among the Latin mass cult seems pretty weird to me, too.
So, do you not want everybody to be Christian, somebody will ask. And when faced with a question like that I will confess to total inarticulacy. Do I want every human being to know and love Jesus Christ as the incarnation of the everlasting word of the One who Jesus called Abba, Father. Yes. Would I like everybody to become members of the Church? [at this point Rowan Williams made a face and the audience laughed] Well, I'm prepared to spend some time reflecting on what that might mean and also reflecting on the fact that I don't have any model in my mind which would express what it could mean for all human beings to know and love Jesus as the incarnation of the Eternal Word. I don't know that yet and I need not know that yet. I know that the Church in its true form, which is a very question begging phrase but bear with me, the Church in its true form is the community of who have been overwhelmed by the gift of God in Jesus Christ and therefore have been overwhelmed by the gift of God in one another. And the crystalizing of that in the events of Baptism and the Eucharist is what the Church is fundamentally about. And how is that going to become a reality for those whose apprehension or perception of Jesus comes from such a different place that I can't begin to understand it. I don't know and I need not know.
As I'm coming to understand ever more, not only do I not need to understand all of this but that no one does and the entire body of human beings who think about this won't understand it anymore than they will have a comprehensive knowledge of the material universe, the pretenses of so many scientistic, atheist-materialist cosmologists notwithstanding. We are not equipped as individuals and, so, as a species to have a comprehensive comprehension of even the most observable and crude aspects of reality and we'd all do a lot better if we'd all admit that.
Questioner: Thank you very much and my question has to do in relation to acceptance. What role does acceptance play in this interfaith dialogue, in terms of, for instance, in acceptance of each other's understanding of divine revelation. So, for us Christians Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh, the Word incarnate. But for the Muslim he's just a mere prophet. How does acceptance of each other's understanding of revelation play a role in this conversation.
Rowan Williams: Thank you. Yes, a difficult question really and and a very practical one in context of dialogue.
There are moments in some Christian-Muslim dialogues I've been involved in where a Muslim will say, "Why can't you accept the Koran as the definitive revelation of God because all that you want to say about Jesus is there," at which point I have to say, well, actually, no it isn't and we can't take a short cut there. And the reason that I can't say that the Koran is the definitive Word of God is precisely that it sees the history of revelation after Jesus. Which I can't make sense of. But let's see how we've learned this, let's see how these claims work and, again, what kinds of habits they produce and the conversation can go on and the enrichment can go on. But for the foreseeable future the Muslim and I are going to disagree about this. There's no two ways about it. And part of the joy and the challenge a good dialogue is the capacity to say those things clearly and unambiguously while retaining the openness the eagerness that I talked about to say, the way in which you have received what there is of God in the Koran clearly has a transformative effect which speaks to me, which enriches me. I hope the same works the other way 'round. I'm always very fascinated by those Muslims . . . um, mostly not from mainstream Sunni tradition, who will say at times, "You know, there's something about what what we want to say about Jesus which is not quite catered to by the plain words of the Koran, although we don't want to be Christians, we want to explore exactly some of those unexpected depths in the narrative of Jesus which open up for us here." So I think acceptance is an interesting word here because it certainly doesn't mean a readiness to say, "Oh well, that's fine. That's what I mean, let's not bother." Real acceptance, again, I think, is to take the other seriously enough to say, "I think you're worth disagreeing with and I think it's worth pursuing that disagreement for [the] good of both of us."
I've got a commitment to do some physical labor this afternoon so I'm going to leave it at that.
MAGA JUDGE WITH MAGA JURY LETS OFF MAGA MURDERER.
That's what was bound to happen in this trial the way it was allowed to be conducted in Wisconsin with an elected judge who made racist jokes from the bench, bent over backwards to get his boy off for murder and who conducted himself in a way that if he had an Alabama accent and Rittenhouse were accused of the lynch murder of a Black Person would fit right into a black and white movie about the Jim Crow era. But Bruce Schroeder is an elected judge in one of the states that sent soldiers to fight against the Confederacy, at one time but that was a long, long time ago. There are many such states in the North where Jim Crow is about as alive as it is in any of the states of the old Confederacy and those are any of the states with large Republican-fascist populations.
As Elie Mystal said, there isn't any great surprise in this if you're a Person of Color, it's just one of the things that White People who are not Republican-fascists are beginning to understand, those rules have always been in place when it's Black victims of crimes committed by White criminals. Black defendants who survive a possible summary execution can not count on having a Bruce Schroeder bending everything getting them off even when they are obviously innocent.
White People, like me, should get used to this because under the Trumpzi Republican-fascist regime which is in place wherever Republican-fascists have power, legislative, executive, judicial, their political identity might serve to put them in the unaccustomed class that Black People and other People of Color are in now.
As Elie Mystal said, there is no justice, there will be no peace, there will be emboldened and armed fascists killing more and more people. I'm damned if I'm going to pretend that that fat little fascist is innocent as determined by the jury in this case. The sanctity of trial by jury is just one of those sacred myths that deserves a thorough laundering because it also stinks like the rest of the "justice" system does. Especially when it is so obviously rigged as in this case.
Text with German and Hebrew Translated
I cannot remember everything. I must have been unconscious most of the
time. I remember only the grandiose moment when they all started to
sing, as if prearranged, the old prayer they had neglected for so many
years - the forgotten creed! But I have no recollection how I got
underground to live in the sewers of Warsaw for so long a time.
The day began as usual: Reveille when it still was dark. Get out!
Whether you slept or whether worries kept you awake the whole night. You
had been separated from your children, from your wife, from your
parents; you don't know what happened to them - how could you sleep?
The trumpets again - Get out! The sergeant will be furious! They came
out: some very slow: the old ones, the sick ones; some with nervous
agility. They fear the sergeant. They hurry as much as they can. In
vain! Much too much noise, much too much commotion - and not fast
enough! The Feldwebel shouts: "Stand at attention! Hurry up! Or do you want to feel the butt of my gun? Okay, you've asked for it!"
The sergeant and his subordinates hit everybody: young or old, quiet or
nervous, guilty or innocent. It was painful to hear them groaning and
moaning. I heard it though I had been hit very hard, so hard that I
could not help falling down. We all on the ground who could not stand up
were then beaten over the head.
I must have been unconscious. The next I knew was a soldier saying:
"They are all dead," whereupon the sergeant ordered them to do away with
us. There I lay aside - half-conscious. It had become very still - fear
and pain. Then I heard the sergeant shouting: "Number off!" They started slowly and irregularly: one, two, three, four - "Stand at attention!" the sergeant shouted again, "Quicker! Start again! In one minute I want to know how many I'm going to deliver to the gas chamber. Number off!"
They began again, first slowly: one, two, three, four, became faster
and faster, so fast that it finally sounded like a stampede of wild
horses, and all of a sudden, in the middle of it, they began singing the
Sh'ma Yisrael.
Male chorus:
Hear, O Israel:
The Lord is God, the Lord is one.
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thine heart,
And with all thy soul,
And with all thy might.
And these words, which I command
thee this day,
Shall be in thine heart:
And thou shalt teach them diligently
unto thy children,
And shalt talk of them when thou sittest
in thine house,
And when thou walkest by the way,
And when thou liest down,
And when thou risest up.
After hearing the moving stories of some of the survivors from the Warsaw uprising, Schoenberg felt compelled to write this work, using text in English, some of which was drawn from the words of the survivors themselves, and Hebrew. The composition, set for Narrator, orchestra and chorus, tells of the German round-up of the residents of the Warsaw Jewish ghetto for transport to the gas chambers. Unhappy with the slowness of the process, the soldiers urge them to hurry before beating them. As the victims are led away they suddenly begin singing the hymn "Shema Yisroel" or "Hear, O Israel," a hymn to love God and for comfort and hope. Eyewitnesses have confirmed similar events in both the Treblinka and Auschwitz camps. Traditionally, the Shima Yisroel was chanted by Jewish martyrs and wise men as a final utterance, showing a trust in God's will in the face of devastation.
THE ABSURD AND WIDESPREAD SUPERSTITION among "traditional Catholics" is that the "Latin Mass" that their right-wing, turn his back on the People priest says is in any way "original" or, as one particularly ignorant online "expert" told me, "it's the mass that St. Francis said." To start with, St. Francis wasn't a priest so he never "said mass" and the mass that St. Francis knew was a far different liturgy than the "Latin Mass" as I might have hoped my generation would be the last to remember. I don't remember it with affection, not even when it was a priest I liked who I remember celebrating it. Dear old, rustic, Quebec peasant Fr. A, beloved by all. To be replaced by the terrible Jansenist, fire and brimstone Fr. D who I don't remember with any affection at all. It just so happened that the Jansenist was the one who had to live through the liturgical reforms of Vatican II which I can't imagine he liked one bit.
In arguing with these superstitious right-wing "traditionalists" I've looked at the development of and constantly changing Roman Catholic liturgy which has been more consistent in having a tradition of rather constant change, constant but changing at different rates at different times and in different places and was never really uniform.
The long history of reforming practices in place might have been invisible to almost all of the Catholic laity, or, rather, inaudible because up until the fairly recent time, you had to know Latin rather well to be aware of the changes that were made.
One of the things I found interesting in this recent dip into that history was the 1940s "reform" of the Latin Psalter under Pius XII which was almost immediately found to be a bad idea, removing the meaning of them by the "correcting" of the Latin into a school-room Ciceronian style. Urban VIII, the arch-villian in the the Galileo trails, infamously led a "reform" of the Gregorian hymns to make them match a then fashionable "improved" Latin style, as well. With regrettable results. Such stuff has been happening, almost all of it probably unknown to most of the Catholics of the day just as the online "experts" in the Latin Liturgy are stunned to discover that the 1962 mass their "originalist" priests were authorized to say was, itself, not the "original" Latin mass. The meaninglessness of what was being said making those constant changes incomprehensible.
The c. 1962 Latin Mass that Benedict XVI rather stupidly permitted to be said to please some far-right, fascists in schism with a promiscuity that even John Paul II knew wouldn't be a good idea, was hardly the mass that had been said a century earlier, it, itself, was the product of that constant change. Change which, since the 19th century was being pushed toward more vernacular language being used SO THE PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH COULD UNDERSTAND WHAT WAS BEING SAID AND WHAT THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO BE SAYING. It matters not at all if incomprehensible words are not understood or what those are, they may as well be listening to Latin translations of sit-com scripts as listening to whatever reformed Latin text authorized under this or that pope.
Since the retired Benedict is the center of the cult of the Latin mass, You might want to read this book, which, when he was JPII's enforcer, Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote a foreword to. It gives a short and abbreviated history of the constant change in the Latin mass liturgy which was under constant change because it was constantly found to be inadequate and anything but perfect. The pressure for The People to have the mass in a language they could understand it in started a lot earlier than I'd guessed. At least in the hierarchy. As I said a while back I was rather shocked to realize that the arch-conservative Pius X even played a role in liturgical reform, though he was mostly concerned with the incredible vulgarization of the liturgy in 19th century Italy under the influence of opera. Show biz directed liturgy doesn't seem to be a good idea.
Protestants, of course, will find this kind of odd if not funny because their criticism of the incomprehensibility of the liturgy and, especially, the availability of Scripture in the vernacular was among the central reforms of Christian worship they embarked on. With varying degrees of success, some quite good, often superior to Catholic practice, some regrettable (as with the Latin liturgy as noted above). Nothing anyone does in this area is going to be "perfect." When People approach this area the achievements are bound to fall short. In all areas, actually. Simple and sincere is better than impressive and impersonal.
I doubt People can ever achieve any such thing as a perfect liturgy, not if the actual meaning of what's being said matters which, if You don't understand what's being said, You can pretend doesn't matter because if You don't understand what's being said, it won't. It will be an empty spectacle, what most Latin mass fans want it to be, They don't want it to mean anything more than that.
HERE IS A TIMELY report about the Ivy Leaguers of the Supreme Court destroying Affirmative Action for groups who have enjoyed a long legacy of economic exploitation, racism, discrimination, slavery, Jim Crow, other forms of violence and perpetual economic injustice. It turns out, as the author of this article from the Guardian points out, that the real recipients of privileging are the 43% of white students who go to Harvard on the basis of the opposite of the merit and academic achievement.
Ever wondered what it takes to get into Harvard? Stellar grades, impressive extracurriculars and based on a recently published study, having deep pockets and a parent who either works or went there. Those last two are pretty important for Harvard’s white students because only about 57% of them were admitted to the school based on merit.
In reality, 43% of Harvard’s white students are either recruited athletes, legacy students, on the dean’s interest list (meaning their parents have donated to the school) or children of faculty and staff (students admitted based on these criteria are referred to as ‘ALDCs’, which stands for ‘athletes’, ‘legacies’, ‘dean’s interest list’ and ‘children’ of Harvard employees). The kicker? Roughly three-quarters of these applicants would have been rejected if it weren’t for having rich or Harvard-connected parents or being an athlete.
Don't wait up nights for this to become the kind of media phenomena that the lies about Affrimative Action and its recipients have been over decades of white-privilege attacking Affirmative Action in the media because a lot of those guys are not only legacy admitted white guys, they're legacy hires in the media when they aren't hired on the basis of their having gone to one of the Ivies or Ivy equivalents.
The media and elite educational institutions are essentially whore houses servicing the rich and powerful. That tax I proposed here the other day, a steep tax on these institutions and everything about them should be considered sin taxes on that basis. They are whore houses who will service anyone who adds money to their already obscene endowments and holdings. Tax then and put all of the money raised into the education of the children and adults who are the least among us. There's not a chance in hell that those institutions even with their piddling gestures in the other direction will ever do anything but continue dumping on them.
HATE MAIL whining about my experiments with showing respect for human beings by capitalization while not addressing the substance of what I said will be ignored after being mocked.
I reject the materialistic modernistic reduction of Human Beings and other sentient Creatures to the status of objects for use exploitation and disposal, one of the central pillars of modernism and materialism. It's a small thing but as People get into a swivet about such trifles, I don't mind using them to make the point. Keeps me on my toes to an extent to remember such things. Maybe it will improve my manners.
I did warn You I'm a criminal. If You're so fussy about the violation of the conventions of such such futile classicism as the mechanics of typed language, this ain't the place for Thee, Bub.
APPARENTLY SOMEONE read that I stated I was Irish Catholic and accused me elsewhere of, thus, again, being "anti-abortion" on the issue of Women's right to control their own body and the state having no overriding interest to regulate Women's bodies and lives that extends past their skin. The state having that overriding interest being something I reject. No one has a right superior to the right of A Woman to control HER BODY. No man has that right and no other Woman does, either. The state does not.
If that were just a matter of someone lying about me or someone else online, that's not worth a tenth of a 2021 penny, it's so common. So I thought I'd go into the concept of being "anti-abortion" which, itself isn't worth much until you ask what it would mean to be "pro-abortion."
To start with the position of the "pro-life" anti-abortion side that wants to outlaw abortions isn't anti-abortion, it won't do anything to prevent there being abortions because when abortion was illegal in almost if not all states there were many, many abortions of everything from modern safety available only to those who were rich or connected to a doctor or someone else who had means to provide that, down to to horrific and deadly with Women being killed, permanently injured, robbed, blackmailed, arrested, prosecuted, their lives destroyed, etc.
Ignorant of real history or aware of it, with full knowledge of what their legal aspiration will bring or in irresponsible ignorance or it, that's what they want to bring back by banning abortion and making it impossible to obtain in as safe a way as possible.
The choice then was only against legal, safe abortion, a choice prevented by the state which is not now as it was not then in the hands of the Woman, who are not making the law governing abortion in most cases. That is one of the most consequential truths of the side which is for making abortion illegal.
Though there were and, I'd guess, are situations when Women are coerced into having an abortion by those who don't have that right to control the bodies of the Women who have them.
It's an interesting convergence of practice if not in thought or result between the anti-choice side and those men or women who forced Women to have abortions they didn't want and it demonstrates that at bottom this is a matter of People getting to control their own bodies.
But I want to go farther because it defines what I think about the issue, which I hold men, who will not be governed by any laws made in regard to it, have no right to have a final say in. Believing that our rights to determine laws extend to laws that govern us and our lives are only legitimate with the consent of those so governed, Men have no legitimate right to make a determination of what laws solely governing Women's lives and bodies will be. There can be no just consent of the governed in Men determining whether or not Women can have a safe and legal abortion.
I'd go farther and wonder if you accept the proposition that laws are only legitimate with the just consent of those governed by them if Women who would not ever choose to have an abortion really have the right to make laws regarding what Women who choose abortion for themselves can legally do. Do anti-choice Women have any legitimate right to tell other Women how they should decide what goes on in their own bodies on the basis that they, too can become pregnant? Where is their overriding and legitimate interest in the issue that is stronger than any Man's interest in something that cannot happen to them because they don't become pregnant? And, as can be seen in the case of those women who either were "pro-life" but who had an abortion when the choice was theirs to make and even some "pro-choice" Women who may not have had an abortion but changed their mind about making that choice for other Women, there is no such thing as a guarantee that minds won't be changed on that issue. Is it really safe to allow them to determine what another Woman does with her body and live when they certainly cannot know what is her best choice at that time in her life?
If you can't tell me where any Man's or a Woman who will never face the issue of whether or not to have an abortion overrides the right of Women who decide to make that issue for their own body and life, I'm going to go with my conclusion that there is no legitimate interest and so no legitimate legal claim to be made that they do have such a right.
You might notice I have not said whether or not I'm "pro-abortion" which really boils down to whether or not I "like abortion" which is an odd concept but I'm sure that's what most people base their position on abortion on. It's about as meaningless as asking if I like a surgical procedure for myself.
Who likes a medical procedure which is not entirely painless, cannot ever be entirely safe from adverse consequences and cannot really be what anyone would like to be doing at any point in their life? I doubt any Woman has ever enthusiastically looked forward or planned to be in a position to choose to have an abortion.
The question of whether or not being "pro-abortion" wouldn't also mean being "pro" the conditions that lead Women to need or want to exercise their choice in favor of having an abortion. Unwanted pregnancy, unsafe pregnancy, pregnancy that is impossible in the life of the Woman with the right to decide to have an abortion, those are what lead to the choice to have an abortion.
The only real way to stop abortion is to stop unwanted, unsafe, or other pregnancies that lead to abortions. I can tell you I am entirely in favor of promoting and providing the information, the encouragement and means available to all Women to prevent unwanted, unsafe or practically difficult or impossible pregnancies. Tellingly, for the anti-choice side, huge percentages of the very same people are opposed to the promotion of effective contraception, the education in their use, the widespread and free availability of contraception. And "pro-choice" people generally are in favor of those abortion-prevention measures.
No one who is opposed to legal abortion who is also against the universal and free availability of effective contraception is really opposed to abortion, they are in favor of illegal, unsafe, dangerous abortions because that's what comes of their position. No one should ever be allowed to escape being answerable for the actual, knowable, known effects of their positions being adopted and turned into laws that govern real life, not the irreality of "legal theory" or moral theory.
The opponents of legal abortion and the universal promotion and availability of the most certain and known prevention of abortion, which isn't the law, it is effective contraception, don't get to divorce themselves from the known consequences of what they are asking to happen because we know what that will be. I would expect the US Catholic Conference of Bishops, other anti-choice men and women and groups have helped us to the point where the United States has a very high abortion rate for a developed country because they really don't mind that. They couldn't or they wouldn't prevent the only measures that prevent abortions from happening.
Scientistic-atheistic-materialists apparently find my position incomprehensible. Maybe because it doesn't fit into a slogan,ideological atheists, like trad-Catholics and fundamentalists never surprise me with their superficiality, anymore. I don't think my position is all that complex or difficult, it is based on a few basic principles that are not difficult to understand and extend.
Personnel: Peggy Lee (vocals), Lou Levy (piano), Max Bennett or Buddy Clark (bass), Nick Fatool (drums), Larry Bunker (percussion), Sy Oliver (arrange)
Why Don't You Do Right
Dave Barbour Quartet
SINCE THE ROBERTS court will dismantle the rest of affirmative action, probably using Harvard or the other Ivies to do it, I have a better idea of how the Harvards, Yales, Princetons, etc. can be made to serve the goal of equal opportunities for those who are still living with the generations long after effects of both legal, Constitutionally permitted and encouraged slavery, the second unofficial form of it in post-Reconstruction American apartheid, the revival of that after the passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights act and, now when the Rehnquist and Roberts courts are doing pretty much the same thing that Rutherford Hayes did when he, making his corrupt deal with the slave-power, began the long period when Jim Crow ruled a majority of the country.
There should be a sliding range of very high taxes put on elite educational institutions, universities, colleges, prep-schools, based on a. their obscenely huge endowments, b. their ownership of property, c. their tuition and other costs, d. the income of those they serve. The entirety of the funds raised from those very-high taxes should go to the public educational opportunities for least among us, pre-school through college. Not a cent of it should go to any school practicing exclusionary policies and all private schools do.
Especially high taxes should be placed on the self-aggrandizing gifts of billionaires and millionaires to elite institutions, especially those with the name of the donor attached. Living where I do I have seen how those have destroyed and enveloped neighborhoods where poor people and the working poor have lived at a terrible rate in Boston. The pretenses that all of that is for the good and that it contributes to the common good that includes its victims is a pious lie.
For more, listen to the Brueggemann lecture I linked to below.
THE PASSAGE from Abraham Joshua Heschel's essay, No Religion is an Island I took out for my first post on it begins where I left off, I've got some things to say about it.
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?
One thing that jumps out this morning is that Heschel pointed out that it isn't only between different denominations that give rise to a lack of mercy giving birth to bigotry, it is also found within denominations and within congregations. That gives lie to several of the commonly recited condemnations of religion, that it fosters and requires uniformity of belief, that it requires uniformity of expression and that it isn't open to that freedom of thought that so many of the opponents of religion assure us is a delusion of folk psychology.
Since I'm going down my own memory lane this morning, the time in the early 00's when some online self-styled village tap room atheist "free thinker" made the statement that "science had proved free will was a myth" was one of the turning points in my thinking on these things. What, I wondered, were we all doing there whining and complaining about the loss of democracy if it was all based on a myth. Within two years I became convinced that these questions are a lot more important and explained for more of the total failure and impotence of the secular left than they did about minds and consciousness. From that imitation of a bold barroom atheist one afternoon in the 00's, all of this started for me.
But Heschel as theologians and honestly concerned believers in The God talked about in the Scriptures do, he concentrates on things that are far more important than those entertaining academic questions that secularism demands are all important.
Is it not clear that in spite of fundamental disagreements there is a convergence of some of our commitments, of some of our views, tasks we have in common, evils we must fight together, goals we share, a predicament afflicting us all?
As clear as global warming, the obscene and growing wealth gap under the instrumental reasoning of modernism, the rise of neo-fascist, neo-Nazism under the reign of free speech, free press relieved of an obligation to not lie, let's not forget nuclear extinction and a thousand other ancient and modern depravities, it's inescapable that fight against evils and predicaments, the goals that Heschel points to not being fun or diverting or the kind of thing that those trained by modern education to not value more than their entertainment, religion is going to be the only thing that moves societies toward their solution, the only thing that contains the idea that there will be consequences and that other people are more important than our pleasures. Secularism can't even enforce a belief that our own posterity is more important than that, Mammon certainly doesn't contain it. Entertainment might present a false possibility of the kind of enlightened dictators, movie and novel saviors that in real life are rarer than Seaborgium. And as reliably durable. It's clear that many highly educated Americans believed in such enlightened dictatorship even as the evidence showed that wasn't only a lie but one of the biggest lies with the highest body counts in human history.
We seldom put modernism, secularism to the kinds of tests that religion is put to in terms of credibility of results and when that is done the issues are defined and the deck is stacked against religion and for modernism and secularism. Those are the rules of that game as played among the respectable and credentialed just as they were when the disreputable prophets made their critiques of the rulers of Judah and Israel. There is a lecture by Brueggemann on that which I'm very tempted to transcribe and turn into a series but which I'll link to for now.
That is the real heart of the matter, as real as the cry of the Children of Israel in their slavery and oppression which is the central core around which all of the Scripture, Jewish and Christian and, so Islamic, is built and against which all of the opposition to it is set.
I will try to post on Heschel's essay every day until I get to the end of it. I'm not as good at doing these series as I once was.
ASSUMING NO ONE BEFORE has thought the thoughts you have, which you can't remember getting from someone else is a shot in the dark. So many people have thought about these things before and you can't read or hear about all of what they wrote down that assuming it didn't occur to anyone else before is not a safe assumption.
That said, two of the things I thought of along the way that I don't remember reading from someone else are
a. the series of questions I raised so as to demonstrate that the scientistic-atheistic-materilalistically required model of "brain only" non-conciousness could not account for how ideas, insisted on as being mere epiphenomena of physical structures in the brain, could have their physical foundations built by a brain before the information contained in the idea could be present in a materialistically assumed brain to instruct it that it needed to make new structures not there, what those structures were to be like, how to make those structures, how to judge that those structures and not others had been made so as to be the right idea and to do it within the time it takes us to have new ideas that are right enough for us to function from the time we get out of bed till we've finished the particular cup of coffee we made that morning and the rest of our conscious lives. All of that has to be done before the idea is inside the brain to tell it all of those things. And it all has to work and work within the time limits of the human experience of having new ideas that work to get us through the day or the model cannot possibly be right and there is no rational reason for anyone to believe in it.
b. the problem of the materialist rejection of a non-material mind interacting with the physical universe being no more of a disproof of a non-material brain than the non-material mathematics that materialists universally accept as impinging on the physical universe in every aspect of the physical universe and which, if those mathematical objects did not impinge on the matter and energy studied by science then all of science would be null and void. It's clear that there is more going on with the physical world than the materialist conception of science can account for, some of it I suspect would be very ungratifyingly spooky to them on account of their materialism and, most of all, their old-fashioned 19th century atheism.
I do suspect some of my research on Darwinism might have found things not noticed before but as literally no one I read from before the wider revelation of the crimes of the Nazis denied the full and total dependence of eugenics in even their most extreme forms, all of them were derived directly from Darwinism, the theory of natural selection, it was more of a rediscovery of that from the rather complete and disturbingly impressive suppression of that among the college-credentialed in the 1950s until today. One group that didn't need to have that relationship newly pointed out to them are the neo-Nazis who pointed that out with pride way before I got involved with those questions. As all of my research on those things is founded in things that the Darwinists, English speaking, German speaking, American-conservative, progressive, and liberal Darwin idolizers as well as Nazi scientists published so as to comprise the primary documentation of my research, most of what I said on that certainly wasn't original, it was merely the evidence that should always have informed that area of research that is dominated by BBC- PBS style hagiographers and American academic liars pretending that research hasn't always been there to refute their lies.
I've been discussing those problems in the presence of materialists for far longer than a decade and have yet to have one of them make a dent in those fatal problems for their ideology. I do feel some gratification in being able to pose the problems, I don't feel smug about having originated them because I don't know if someone else didn't get there first. Well, maybe a little self-satisfied over it but not as much as you accuse me of. Not smug. Not like Sagan was or Degrasse Tyson is.
IN DOING SOME RESEARCH for my little series on addressing Abraham Joshua Heschel's essay No Religion Is An Island, I listened to an always fine and informed, well thought out and well articulated talk by The Reverend Rowan Williams on Revelation and Interreligious Dialogue. I wasn't expecting to hear something right off that impinged on the topics of my recent dialogues with the irreligious, especially about the limits of human understanding of the material world and its relationship with the human minds that are the only possible means of us knowing and addressing the material world OR OUR OWN MINDS, THEMSELVES, and that whatever the relationship of the one or the other was, the materialists trying to force their ideological view on that had the paradoxical effect of debunking, discrediting and destroying the very things they claimed to be doing that on behalf of, the science that they deify in their scientism, the material world that the insist is the limit of existence but which is knowable to them only through the mind they just got done debunking and the atheism which is the real motive for them doing both which, if honestly addressed is certainly not supported by what they claim.
One of the self-defeating tactics used by them is certainly their insistence on the foundations of science being able to address their task, logic, itself known to imperfectly mesh with that other foundation of science, mathematics. Logic can't even support their primary claims made about science because the claim that science is the only method of us knowing the truth cannot be demonstrated scientifically. Nor can the other members of their blasted trinity in the SAM religion be supported within the limits they set for reality.
I transcribed the first few minutes of Rowan Williams' talk because it is stunningly honest, stunningly modest and stunningly relevant to the brawl I'm having with the SAMians who are not honest, modest or prone to the kind of self-reflective rigor that is found entirely more often among theologians than it is among even materialist philosophers.
The paradox is this. To speak of a God who reveals God is certainly to speak of divine action, to speak of divine freedom. And, thus, what God does is both determinate and free. The God who acts out of freedom is also the God who cannot be contained in what God says or delivers. And there's the paradox.
If we're serious in talking about divine revelation, we are surely talking about the revelation of what cannot be completely and definitively possessed. The tightrope between those two poles of paradox has been walked with varying degrees of elegance by theologians, philosophers and contemplatives for quite a few thousand years. But it doesn't do to forget that tension is built-in as soon as we begin to associate revelation with the act of God.
The first thing to say is that this is the best explanation of something Walter Brueggemann constantly talks about and which I admit I hadn't much consider, the Freedom of God and its surpassing of our expectations of what God will do and has done. I have a far better idea of what he means by that now than I did before I listened to Rowan Williams, for which I am very grateful. I also understand now that it is impossible for any humanly understood revelation to be entirely satisfactory because it is a revelation of something far larger than human understanding can encompass. Just as I believe the material universe can never be anything like totally understood by even all of human beings considered as a mythical whole.
And if anyone knows of any scientistic, atheistic materialist who has been as honest about the central issues of their faith, let me know so I can read what that marvelous, completely atypical oddity has said on it.
As an Irish Catholic (now Catholic +) who in my late middle aged study of the English Poor Law and the English domination of the Irish and others became even more opposed to the BBC romantic view of the Tudor and Stuart crime families and the Anglican religion that started with them and such disreputable thugs as Thomas Cranmer, getting over my prejudices in that regard to come to a sheer and enormous respect and affection for Church of England members such as Rowan Williams has been a lot of hard work. I can't claim that it's the prejudice that was hardest to overcome but it's up there with the one against Calvinists and white evangelicalism and Catholic integralism. In light of what Rowan Williams said, modest self-reflection is always correct when dealing with the fragility of our grasp of revelation and its complete inadequacy in light of the Freedom of God.
IF MEMORY SERVES, it was Lawrence Wilkerson who made the suggestion that the Pentagon call up Micheal Flynn for active duty so he can be court-martialed, stripped of rank and the benefits he got from being elevated to a general while he was becoming a parody of a crack-pot military officer while a Lt. General. It's an excellent idea.
I don't know if he's technically committing sedition but if what he's doing isn't seditious the problem is with the law defining it, not the attribution. There must be a real cost to those who go that route, an especially dangerous one for someone with military credentials to take, the way the American media and the fascist thugs glorify the worst of those with military backgrounds. Someone who has done what he has should certainly not be eligible to hold public office or positions of trust.
With his declaration that the United States should have one religion, his heretical conception of Christianity, I'll call again for a huge, vigorously fought religious fight stated in biblical and theological terms because the Ameri"christian" heresy, the imperial state religion of Republican-fascist, Nazi-friendly white supremacy is extremely dangerous to us all and to the soul of Christianity in particular.
Without that fight Christianity will be discredited and there is nothing that is going to take its place that will be an effective counterweight to the gangsters who Michael Flynn in his coo-coo clock, comic book "christianity" serves like any dictator's henchman.
The time for playing nice by the rule against discussing religion is over because the vacuum that that rule of ettiquette and tamed, neutered church going niceness created has been filled by the fascists and the nut cases. I'd start with the mortal sin of bearing false witness which doesn't just mean lying about someone's personal life, it means lying about large numbers of people, races, ethnicities, etc. That is ubiquitous in the Republican-fascist, pseudo-Christian mob. The lies are the start of it and a lot of those lies are told by ordained clergy but it hardly ends there. All of their lavish hypocrisy is fair for discussion and exposure, including their sex lives and their money making schemes. The nexus between them and the porn merchant Murdochs and such underage sex traffickers as Jeffrey Epstein is to an extent known, certainly with more to be exposed.
Call him up, put him on trial, strip him of his rank, strip him of his pension and the benefits he got which, with the even greater disservice to American freedom and democracy, his sedition, he should certainly lose.
