Private Made Up Lives Should Generally Remain Private

NO, I'D BE A TERRIBLE novelist.  When I do my therapeutic writing I make up minor characters who are problems for the major ones, then start to give them a back story and they start filling out too much.  And the more backstory they get the more sympathetic I get to them.  I heard one fine novelist say she couldn't write a character she didn't like.  She's a genius, with me, it'd be worse than a Hallmark movie and I won't inflict it on readers.  That's what TV's for.  My writing is 100% for my own use and entertainment.

There is one evil character I haven't done that to, I figure I need to try to make up real villains to understand that part of things, real evil.  His name is Steve at times and Roger other times.  For entirely personal reasons.  

I remember reading a newspaper story about that specifically Women invented, exclusively women practiced Chinese script that they were worried was going to die out.  They bemoaned the ancient practice of their manuscripts being burned when they died so they would go into the afterlife with them, as if that were some huge tragedy.  Perhaps some of it was a real loss but I think the world would have been better off if a lot of what survived in print hadn't.  

Which reminds me of this, which I'll post because I know it will offend the tender sensibilities of one of those who trolls me:

The Library of America’s new Hammett collection, “Crime Stories and Other Writings,” contains a poignant textual note explaining that one of the stories could not be taken from Hammett’s original version because no copies of the magazine it appeared in still exist. Few are likely to mourn the January, 1928, issue of Mystery Stories, one of about seventy “pulps” then on the market—“pulp” as a category denoted the low quality of the paper, and presumably also of the contents and the readership—but the contrast of this rough extinction with the smooth, acid-free immortality of the volume at hand does point up the cultural irony of Hammett’s career. (His first pulp story, actually called “Immortality,” has disappeared without a trace.) But the contrast also points up the irony of the sweeping cultural mandate of the Library of America, for, as it turns out, the salvaged story—“This King Business,” printed from a later version—is hardly worth the effort of reading once.

And it is far from the only disappointment here. Hammett produced about ninety stories (and five novels) in the dozen active years of his career, many of them for badly needed money—he was capable of knocking out five thousand words a day—and many clearly executed beneath the level of his engaged attention.

Tough Guy: The mystery of Dashiell Hammett.  Claudia Roth Pierpont February 3, 2002

I try not to churn it out and I try to test my own boundaries.  No one's offering a financial incentive to do so,  I hope I wouldn't impose that on the world.  That's important, trying to write what you don't feel comfortable with.  That's how I start feeling sympathy for the characters I started out not liking.  As the same author mentioned above said when discussing the notable unlovability of real People, "Maybe God understands us better than we understand ourselves."

There's No One Like Sanctimoneous ACLU Types For Telling Me I Shouldn't Exercise My Speech Rights That Way - Hate Mail

 “I got the sense it was more important for A.C.L.U. staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,”  he [The Nazi's Skokie Case Lawyer David Goldberger] said in a recent interview. “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.”

The New York Times,  The ACLU Faces An Identity Crisis; June 7, 2021

IN THE TYPICAL WAY OF "CIVIL LIBERTIES" lawyers, he essentially holds, screw the victims of hate speech and the hate actions those incite, we don't care about that, we care about a friggin' phrase adopted by the slave-owners, financiers and other members of the First Congress, not one of them put in office by members of the minority groups the ACLU has been ready to screw on such "principle" for its entire existence as they pretended to champion their rights. And the Supreme Court has seldom done anything to but screw them, this present Court getting ready to take its place beside the worst of those.

The lawyerly pretense that "identifying with clients and progressive causes" is what lawyers who don't want to enable Nazis, fascists, white supremacists (a tautology in the American context) are guilty of the sin of "identifying with clients" and "progressive causes" THAT CAUSE BEING NOT ENABLING NAZIS, ETC. TO GAIN POWER AND DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN! invite any rational person to say, well, a David Goldberger is either guilty of that same sin of identification with those he represents OR THE SIN OF BEING INDIFFERENT TO THE POSSIBLE, NOW, WE KNOW NOT AT ALL IMPOSSIBLE ACTIONS OF THOSE HE ENABLES AND THOSE THEY INFLUENCE.  The cases they argue remove any possible excuse that they are ignorant of the intent of those they enable.

Really, David Goldberger is a preening asshole who anyone who the Nazis he lawyered for target for everything bad up to and including murder has every right to figure couldn't give less of a fuck about as he preens in his and the old ACLU's amber-tinted cinematically august higher romance even as it dives into the sewer to enable those who would murder them.  As a gay man and an equality absolutist, I am one of those who his clients would murder if they gain the power there is now no denying they possibly could. They and the present Supreme Court he rests his faith in are certainly on the road to reimpose discrimination and denial of rights to LGBTQ as we as that long list of those who are the targets of his clients and the clients of his ilk.  If it happened once in history, it can again. The actual Jim Crow, American-apartheid system is being reconstructed even as we are alive and living under the First Amendment as the Supreme Court and the ACLU have made it real, a status quo which this asshole apparently favors over the actual lives and rights of their victims.

Anyone who wants to pretend he does care about the People his clients openly intend to victimize can explain why Black People, Jews, Latinos, Native Americans, LGBTQ, etc. should be counted among those who don't in any way really care a thing about them in reality as opposed to pretense and theory.  Theory is, so often, a cover for such pretense.  That includes the entire list of current donors to the ACLU.  No rational person can both aid Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, etc. and be allowed to pretend they care about the rights and lives of those their money is helping to attack.  The ACLU of Virginia aided the attacks of the Nazis etc. their actions got the permission to hold the infamous hate rally that resulted in attacks, injuries, maiming and death.   There is no lawyerly lying that can change that fact, anyone who pretends the opposite is lying.  Any Supreme Court or other Court which enables that, does so as an official government action.  The entire legal-judicial system that allows Nazis and Klansmen to try again is complicit, knowingly complicit and enthusiastically complicit in what those they benefit do.  To pretend that they could not distinguish between those genocidal thugs and Martin Luther King's various demonstrations is to claim on an opportunistic basis that they are addled in the head.  Our legal system is now based on that dishonest game of opportunistic, pretended judicial and lawyerly-liarly stupidity.

I don't pretend that anymore.  No "principle" is any higher than the results it brings in real life. Anyone who believes they can be more important than their results in reality when they are allowed to poison the minds of the susceptible is corrupt and cynical and very possibly too stupid to understand the meaning of their own words.  NOT THAT MANY LAWYERS REALLY DO CARE ABOUT THE ACTUAL MEANING OF THE WORDS THEY USE.  As I said, listening to the lawyers as opposed to the diplomats and military officers, etc. who testified in the first hearings leading to the first Trump impeachment, the lawyers covering their asses and that of their "institutions" while the diplomats and officers sacrificed themselves for the common good and morality was a real revelation as to the corrupt state of the legal system.

To hell with any "First Amendment" that demands we give Nazis another bite at the apple when their body count is many millions now, already.  And which has given our indigenous form of that, white supremacy, the upper hand for our entire history with the slightest of partial intermissions for a very few years right after the Civil War and during the all too brief period when the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act were actually being enforced.  That's less than four decades out of about two-hundred twenty years, by my estimate, and those decades are not concurrent. Not a single generation of Americans lived their entire lives under both that First Amendment and laws requiring actual legal equality in this country.  The ACLU can go fuck itself as it's fucked those it pretends to champion.  

No more after Skokie is how I used to put it and that was a long time ago now, not since, no more again, never.

Must Read And See And Hear

RMJ has a great post up on the Supreme Court putting its will and the will of their fellow Republican-fascists over Women's control of their own bodies.

Changes

Just to point out, I've edited my masthead, after the Jack Levine Quote:

 

LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE  

Assumptions Putting Us In The Hands Of Crooks, Swindlers And Exploiters: Continuing On With L. T. Johnson's Critique of Critical Historical Method

Two important assumptions remain implicit in this commitment.  The first is that the recovery of origins means the recovery of essence; the first realization of Christianity is naturally the best.  It follows from this premise that any "development" of Christianity must be seen as a decline.  The second assumption is that history can act as a theological norm for the reform of the church; the recovery of "original Christianity" made available through the recovery of the "original Scripture" should naturally serve as measure and critique for all subsequent forms of Christianity.

So widely are precisely these assumptions held - and taken for granted - that it is perhaps necessary to pause in order to assert that they are, in fact, assumptions rather than necessary truths.  Only a little thought is required to realize the problematic character of the first premise.  Indeed, in most matters, we now assume that earlier forms are perfected by later development. Likewise, it is by no means our automatic instinct in other matters to measure the adequacy or integrity of present behavior against the norm of earlier behavior. Rather, we tend to measure adequacy and integrity in terms of other criteria.

IF YOU might have wondered what attracted me so strongly about this passage from Luke Timothy Johnson's The Real Jesus, this is one of the passages which when I gave it "only a little thought" it kept expanding to cover not only the context he gives it here, his critique of Biblical critical-historical methods and the "quest for the historical Jesus" but has obvious applications in so many areas, some of them extremely important because the thinking becomes dishonest and powerful and their results are so universally taken for granted.

Of course my mind immediately went to the double-speak, double-standard, double-dealing duplicity of alleged Constitutionalism in the United States.  Especially such smokescreens as "textualism" and "originalism" in which something so very akin to Biblical fundamentalism, invented by and taken up by many of the same people of the same mindset, and the "founders" fetish is made the law of the land by a corrupt Court.  The Roberts Court and the Rehnquist Courts' reimposing American apartheid and the re-subjugation of Women and others through that. I think the unconsidered assumptions and opportunistic hypocrisy of that kind are taken for granted and the norms asserted are as striking and are at least as dangerous as they are in the "historical Jesus" racket.  Probably more so because most of the "Jesus" historizing is religiously and culturally damaging but politically and legally impotent.  

Dealing with ill considered and clearly flawed thinking about origins, original forms, developments, the perfecting of forms in later development (something both constantly asserted and constantly denied in what is said) of course my other immediate parallel area for thinking about this is the extremely dangerous modern fantasy of natural selection.  

When I noticed this in my first re-reading of the book I felt like it slapped me in the face because I didn't notice its applicability to two of the major themes that have occupied my time for the last twenty years.  

Enough of that, though.

A number of excellent questions can be abstracted from this short section:

Is it true that it is necessary to recover the origins of something in order to understand its essence?  Why would that be the case?  If the origins are so important for understanding and applying the later development of something, that should certainly mean that those are present in some form in the later thing that developed from it.  Though it isn't necessarily true that that later manifestation of the original would still exist as a form which is a. recognizable as the developed original form of it, b. that that remnant, changed in time and circumstance and subsequent, intervening forms, would still function as the original form of it did.  It is entirely possible that the reason for that change and development was due to the inadequacy of the original form and the survival of the entity containing it was dependent on its transformation into something very unlike what the original was.  In which case, for our purposes, that original might not only be unusable, its identity might more confuse us or lead us to folly.  It might, actually, be far better to focus on the developed entity,  what came from those origins, instead of engaging on a likely futile quest to retrieve those origins.  I'd far more like my doctor to study human anatomy in order to understand my body than the dim fossils of our certain ancestors in the so variably interpreted but still highly evolved species between us and the theorized "Original Organism" from which we are rationally believed to have evolved.

And that is not to take into consideration that we, as part of a very changed milieu, might be incapable of recognizing or imagining what that original form was or how it worked.  The assumption that we could do that is taken for granted when I don't think there is any real way to test it, not in specific instances, not as a general rule that can be assumed to work in all instances.

That leads to the second assumption that any subsequent change must represent a "decline."  Which is certainly an assumption we make, probably most often opportunistically, in a few, chosen instances but which, as Johnson points out, we certainly don't hold as a general view of life.  When you think about it, it's rather incredible that our modern world, in which the ideologies of modernism replace traditional morality, even among those who claim to be dedicated to retaining ancient wisdom an morality.  Biblical fundamentalism is saturated with the thinking of modernism as Luther's assertions were saturated with his then modern Renaissance thinking about the nature of original texts.  It is certainly the kind of assumption that is reserved in the United States when people with the basest and most vile of motives, hoarding of wealth, stealing wealth generated by the labor of others for the already rich, making use of the mental debility of racism, misogyny, hatred of LGBTQ, make recourse to the "original intent" of "the founders," often proving they don't care about that by lying about the legislative record that gave rise to both the original Constitution and its amendments.  No one in the 18th or 19th or early 20th century, who died long ago in the long past had access to the experience of life and thinking well after they died.  They had no prophetic powers, they had no divine source of insight into a future they couldn't see.  To insist that their thinking must rule us now, centuries after some of them died, a century after some of them laid down their judicial fiats, is not only a guarantee of injustice, it is a hypocritical absurdity used on a sometimes basis by quite contemporary crooks, swindlers, exploiters and the lawyers and judges and "justices" who are in their pockets.

It is especially obvious that this worshipful regard for past and any subsequent development as "decline" among us today is massively disproved by the predominant form of pious observation in our purchase and consumption of new products and models, our ease with which we will buy a new computer or phone or car as we throw the previous object of our devotion into the enormous waste stream, the monument of our impious junking of original forms.  That is not novel among us, that is the history of the human species, not only objects but texts, interpretations of texts, editions of texts, translations of texts, etc.  The business of not only the publishing and scribbling industry is full of that and it is, in fact, the very essence of what modern academic scholarship is all about.  If you want to have someone look down their nose at you, cite an old edition of something which has been superseded in academic esteem by the latest model.

If there is one thing you can count on, even among those who in the English Speaking Peoples worship the "King James Version" is that they'll come out with a "new edition" of that idolized text but new commentaries on it, coming up with quite different claims about it, even new claims about what the original form might have been.  If you want to see how true that is, go look online at The Bible Gateway or other sources to see how many interpretations as translations there are, and that's not to mention the multiplying commentary on even some of those individual editions.  

You can certainly see it in the long and twisted interpretations of what Charles Darwin is alleged to have thought, which, among other things, proves that you can have an academic, even a career as a historian of science specializing in that modern idol, without having really read what he wrote in the many editions he, himself produced. I believe he published six editions of On The Origin of Species between 1859 and the last one he produced before his death in 1882.  Six editions in twenty-three years!  And they contain some radical differences, one of which I've pointed out is that he, himself refuted the modern lie that natural selection was not the same thing as Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" in the 5th edition he pointed out, at the urging of A. R. Wallace, that when he said "natural selection" he meant EXACTLY the same thing as Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest."  And that's on top of what I said about Darwin and Lamarckian inheritance and its denial by alleged scholars of Darwin the other day.   You knew I couldn't just leave that aside back then, didn't you?

Considering the double-step academic and every-day life does around these issues raised in these two short paragraphs by Luke Timothy Johnson, I think that alone makes this trip worth it.  I am absolutely certain that as Johnson applies his questions and analysis to his professional focus and I apply it to the issues of my foremost fascination, there are probably hundreds of others.  You have to be really careful and work really hard to overcome such culturally implanted and accustomed lapses of coherent thinking as these.  It's so much easier to just ignore those lapses, even if you overcame those habits of thought, the extent you would need to to even notice that's what you're doing.

Back to Johnson on Luther next time.

Imagine This

 A Confused State of Scholarship

In a simple version of the culture war, hostile criticism would be pitted against belief, and each position would be located in the appropriate social settings.  Criticism would find its home in the academy, and belief in the Church.  But the reality is that the social locations of biblical scholarship are diverse,  and the question of its precise purpose very much an open one.   To properly locate the present situation, a rapid review of the development of critical scholarship within and outside the Church may be helpful.

Before the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, biblical scholarship was carried out exclusively in service of the Christian faith, within its framework in the canon (the official collection of biblical writings)  the teaching authority of the church, and the creed.  Much of patristic and monastic interpretation in fact, took the form of homilies to be delivered at worship.  Even when the medieval universities developed out of monastic schools as independent centers of learning, biblical scholarship was done within the framework of theology the "queen of the sciences," and the threefold norm of church, canon and creed held sway.

The Reformation, especially through the work of Martin Luther changed everything.  Luther opposed Catholicism's emphasis on tradition as norm for Scripture by elevating Scripture to the exclusive font of revelation (sola scriptura).  This made the key to right living dependent on the right reading of Scripture. The context of ecclesial interpretation was weakened further by the principle of individual interpretation,  for the first time made practical by translations from the original and above all the invention of printing, which made Bibles readily available to the laity.  Now the New Testament is not heard mostly in Latin within the liturgy and as expounded by clergy, but can be apprehended directly in one's native language and is open to private interpretation.  It was a combination filled with potential conflict.  Everything essential rested on the reading of a text, but that reading could be carried out by individuals!

Luther was from beginning to end not only an interpreter of the Bible but a passionate lover of the texts and of the One to whom those pointed.  Nevertheless, his approach to the New Testament (which was to prove overwhelmingly influential in the development of critical scholarship) was deeply if unconsciously affected by the intellectual climate of the Renaissance.  This can be seen not only in his preference for the recovered Greek text over the Latin Vulgate proclaimed in the Church (note here the implicit authority of the Greek reading scholar over the latin dependent clergy).  The recovery of the original text was the key to the recovery of original Christianity.  Just as Renaissance scholars, once classical texts were recovered, could measure the inadequacy of late-medieval society against the grandeur of Greece and Rome, so could the theologian measure the inadequacy of medieval Christianity against the norm of the primitive church, or even better, the figure of Jesus, himself.

Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus,  Chapter 3: Cultured Confusion and Collusion

IT IS A COMMON THEME OF FABLES that you should be careful what you wish for because you might get it and find it is not what you think it will be.  I'm sure Martin Luther never would have wanted to ignite the tinder that would burn up so much of what he believed he was restoring in his removal of later human experience (which is what "tradition" as artificially divided from "Scripture" is)* from being considered as the same significance as the published Biblical canon.  The ironies, of course, start with the question as to how the texts of the Bible can be separated from lost streams of tradition that were written down and became the canon.

He, himself, and Protestantism would help to significantly reduce the previous Christian canon of the Bible by rejecting some of the writings that , through the Greek Septuagint, find their ways into the Catholic and Orthodox canons.  He seems to have wanted to throw out the Epistle of James which I think would have been catastrophic because it is almost certainly one of those books closest to the time of Jesus and his closest followers. And it happens to be one of my favorite books in the New Testament.  And subsequent Protestants restored some but not all of the books Luther expunged from Scripture, some of them pretty significant Books.  Luther's deletions from the canon were based on his own theological prejudices, especially his insistence on "salvation by faith alone."  I think that what he could not easily square with that fixation had to go, no matter what.   In that, I think, there is another model for the subsequent modern practice of "historical-critical" criticism.  It is certainly typical of how that is practiced now.

I think it is very likely that Luke Timothy Johnson is justified in identifying the historical critical movement of the New Testament as a product of the Protestant Reformation which very quickly started generating separate and competing factions inspired by those individual readings of the Bible, coming to some very different interpretations of Scripture and "original Christianity" and, certainly enough, Jesus.  That was certainly not unknown during the previous centuries but the Reformation in which, if you lived in the right places, would free you to come to your own conclusions about those things and not have to worry so much about being oppressed or killed as a heretic.  But this isn't about that, this is about the origins of the historical-critical tradition.   By the way,  in this context, isn't tie idea of historical-criticism as a tradition rather supremely ironic?

You can read some of even the very early Reformation figures and justifiably suspect the one thing they were most in agreement on was that the Catholic Church is evil.   And, of course, much of it, like much of everything dependent on human minds and characters, was wrong and some of it evil. Even as the wickedness of many or the late medieval and Renaissance and baroque Popes and hierarchs is not honestly denied, the wickedness of some of the Protestant churches - I'm thinking especially of the Church of England, especially in its beginnings in the Tudor and Stuart periods - rivals that of the worst Catholic hierarchs and corrupt Popes of the time.  Especially those churches which sought political power (the King or Queen of England was the head of the English Church) and economic wealth for themselves (the dissolution of the monasteries and convents the destitution and murder of their members and the theft of their property), those corruptions in the Vatican and other power centers being the primary corruptions that Luther, himself, began the whole thing over.

How much of Luther is left in today's various Lutheran churches and denominations associated with Lutheranism is worth considering but it's hardly an apparent thing.  Like the often quite anti-Calvinist character today of Churches and denominations that began as orthodox bastions of adherence to Calvin's theology, much of today's Lutheranism is quite un-Lutherlike.  And much of Protestantism today is quite collegial with many Catholics and members of the hierarchy and vice-versa.  I'd never want to go back to the 1950s or earliest 60s when it was considered a mortal sin for a Catholic to attend Protestant worship and, on a popular level, reading Protestant theology would have been considered clandestine, though apparently Pope Pius XII read Karl Barth with a level of approval.  I would be almost no lay Catholics at the time would have been made aware of that.

For my purpose, the last paragraph of this section is the most interesting, so far, so I'll go over that a bit more.

Luther was from beginning to end not only an interpreter of the Bible but a passionate lover of the texts and of the One to whom those pointed.  Nevertheless, his approach to the New Testament (which was to prove overwhelmingly influential in the development of critical scholarship) was deeply if unconsciously affected by the intellectual climate of the Renaissance.  This can be seen not only in his preference for the recovered Greek text over the Latin Vulgate proclaimed in the Church (note here the implicit authority of the Greek reading scholar over the Latin dependent clergy.) The recovery of the original text was the key to the recovery of original Christianity.  Just as Renaissance scholars, once classical texts were recovered, could measure the inadequacy of late-medieval society against the grandeur of Greece and Rome, so could the theologian measure the inadequacy of medieval Christianity against the norm of the primitive church, or even better, the figure of Jesus, himself.

All of that, apart from imagining the Church in their own time, in the places they were familiar with, is a product of imagination.  The imagined classical Greek city states and Roman empire were certainly nothing much like what those were in real life, their imaginations being constructed of the surviving words of an elite minority of the wealthiest Greeks and Romans who were certainly biased and predisposed to tell a version of their societies based on their own prejudices and self-interest.  Almost all if it told by entitled males, almost none of it told by Women, the lower classes and, with the fewest of exceptions, the huge numbers of slaves and those violently occupied and lorded over by them.** 

I would guarantee you that every evil and wickedness of the late medieval Church was more than matched by entirely routine evils of those grand Greeks and Romans imagined clean and pure, rational and enlightened by the romantic view of them in the Renaissance.  The subjugation of Women and children under patriarchy, the huge and rampant slave economies in all of it, the brutal wars of conquest and the continuing wars of subjugation are generally either not taken into consideration or those are imagined with the evils of the side telling the tales translated into ersatz virtue in much the same way that American myths of white supremacy and celluloid tales turn the brutality of American history into virtue - I would contend the foremost corruption of Christianity in the United States, Catholic, Protestant and cargo-cult-night-club "churches".   The Republican-fascist imagination of American history is so tied up in racist violence and the "white evangelicals" apart from such as voted for Hillary Clinton and other democrats, mix that with a "Jesus" of their imaginations.  As a Catholic, I will point out that if Luther is responsible for the dangers of illicit reading or imagining of Scripture (and I doubt most of them actually spend much time in independent and serious reading of Scripture) the trad-Catholics are full blown Lutherans of a sort, today.

That reimagining of Scripture, of Jesus, I'd contend, did as much to perpetuate evils into the modern period as it did to improve on late-medieval Catholic Europe.  The evils embedded into the form of government under the U.S. Constitution, the anti-democratic Senate, for example, was based on a similar imagining of the Roman Republic.  

What little I know of it, the relationship of Lutheran and other Protestants to the Orthodox branch of Christianity which never was without the Greek texts of the New Testament, is not one of complete concord and harmony of viewpoint.  There might not have been the political-economic friction between them and the Orthodox as there was with Latin Catholicism, but they certainly rejected the Greek Old Testament as much as they did the Vulgate Latin translation.  It's a topic I don't know enough about to have very developed ideas about that but it might be something I try to investigate.  Also, I wish I knew more about the closeness of Lutheran and Calvinist and other Protestants view of the Old Testament with that of then contemporary Jewish scholars.  What little I know leads me to think Calvinism might have had a view of at least some of it that was closer to Jewish traditions.  Luther was, infamously, so infuriated with Jews who wouldn't accept his "purified Christianity" that he became an infamous hater of Jews who remained Jewish.

The Reformation view of "primitive Christianity" was hardly uniform, the pretense that that was what they were reestablishing was as true of those churches which more or less just translated Catholic practice into the vernacular with a different hierarchy and no Pope as it was the radicals such as the Quakers a little while later.  I'd love to be able to ask some of the earliest Quakers who held that their practice was close to it to explain the earliest documents we have which proves that the actual physical performance of the Eucharist was as central to their worship and lives as reading Scripture in a language they knew was.  The breaking of the bread and sharing the cup is so well established an act from the earliest documents - the Gospels, Acts, the early letters and the earliest surviving descriptions of Christian worship mention it as central to worship.

All of which shows that imagination of the past is the central act of even the most historical-critical, would be scientific, or consensus based scholarship and like all imagining of the past, what we get is not going to be without problems.  

The actual claim that they could get back to what would be known later as "the historical Jesus" is no less an act of total imagining.  A test of the accuracy of that would, certainly, be based on the degree of uniformity "their" historical Jesuses were to each other and there never was much of complete concord on that matter.  If anything, that lack of concord today, when competitive denominational interests and fixations have given way to the sharp elbows of academics, is likely even greater than that generated by faithful Protestantism.  

Instead of an "historical Jesus" it would probably have been better to try to find a core of what Christianity is.  I have given my two rocks on which any authentic Christianity must stand, Jewish justice and Jesus's commandments of love.  If I were to go through the exercise of making up an "historical Jesus" those would be my tests and I wouldn't base anything on a group of scholars or a synod of bishops and theologians in determining is further elaboration could be held to be authentic if those weren't decisive in identifying something as such.  Walter Brueggeman once was asked about what the bare minimum of Christianity was, he said loving god and loving your neighbor as yourself, which I think is pretty good, too.  If you're not doing that, you're not doing it.  I don't think anyone would be confused by such a state of affairs, no matter what frills and furbelows you attached to it.

As a political blogger who has, against every inclinations of my thinking going back to adolescence, come to the conclusion that the fate of egalitarian democracy is as tied to those two rocks as any authentic Christianity, I have to say that I don't think that's a mere coincidence. 

 I believe the nature of those two practices, justice and universal love, the consequences of performing or not performing those in real life, not only on an individual but a societal and universal basis, are what the Jewish Scriptures lay out as the way of life and the way of death.  

Believing on the basis of experience and observation that that is the case, it is absurd to think that any legitimate, beneficial, benevolent politics or government can ignore those no matter what the deists among the "Founders" and the fashions of late 18th century rich, white men claimed to the contrary.  

My reading of human history, my reading of the news, my experience of life and observation of the world around proves that matters as deeply as anything in human life, in human society, as anything in human history matters.  It certainly matters as much and more than anything in all of the STEM subjects put together. Their continuing practice of science, etc.  and their character as benevolent or evil depends on those pillars of morality as much as providing food for hungry children or equal access to voting rights or getting vaccinated so you don't pass on a life threatening virus.  Pretending that any human activity can ignore or deny those or practice their negation is without the most dire of consequences is the most benighted aspect of the "enlightenment" that generated the modern version of historical-critical practice.  That part of it was something you can't blame on Martin Luther.

* It's a question as to why the later bishops etc. who formed "the canon" stopped when they did and didn't include things like the Letter of Clement, I don't know if we have a real answer to that.  Marilynne Robinson once asked the interesting and fraught question of what the New Testament would be like if its canon included the subsequent history of Christianity as the Jewish Scriptures include many fraught centuries of the history of the Children of Israel.  What if "the canon" included the Crusades and the other horrors from when Christianity, against the stated words of Jesus, gained kingdoms of this world?  I think it's probably a good thing that they cut it off from well before that period.  Imagine if today's "white evangelicals" of the Repubican-fascist kind had resort to accounts of the Crusades as scripture.

** I don't think the use of the imagined classical Greece and Rome by the politicians and others in the modern period can honestly be removed from the slave economics they practiced enthusiastically, the genocidal conquests they engaged in, the male supremacy and racism that are as endemic to modernism as scientistic rationalism, nor the male supremacy that also is characteristic of secular modernism.  All of the opposition to those originated in and had their greatest power from the influence of the Jewish and Christian scriptures and those who took those seriously.  The modern myth that egalitarian democracy is a product of scientistic materialism is one of the main absurdities of a falsified history as told by the opponents of religion but one that is refuted by a close reading of the actual literature of abolition, of Women's' equality and what could be considered the scriptures of rationalism, the racism, sexism and imperialism of the likes of Voltaire and David Hume, Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton, etc.

Moldering, aging, decrepit modernism which didn't empower us with science but which is, itself, a product of science, is something that we will have to surpass to survive, due to the deadly products of science, even more than modernism had to surpass what came before it and as Protestantism had to surpass late medieval Catholicism.  As modern Catholicism had to, as well.  That isn't to say we can forget the past, we can't anymore than we can keep the future from happening.  

The current geological-biological period is not the age of dinosaurs but everything we are is dependent on our ancestors who survived that, we cannot ignore that and even if we did ignore it, it wouldn't change much.  We are not the end of history at any point, we are in the midst of it.  We can't regain the past and considering what we know of the past, we shouldn't want to.  

There is a reason that the character of Republican-fascist Constitutional "originalism" is reactionary, anti-egalitarian, oppressive and larcenous. The 18th century of their imaginings was, in fact and as enabled by intention in their Constitution, anti-egalitarian, oppressive and larcenous.  The "originalists" imagined and already partially achieved recreation of it even more intentionally evil.  That is typical of those who imagine a past golden age we are required to return to.  Classicism and its relation to 20th century modernism includes both fascism and Nazism as the various versions of that harking back to "the founders" has its own particular flavor of that.

Creation continues for a reason, if it were not to be different from the past the future would recreate some past and it never has yet.  All of us, in the past, the present, the future are all loved by the Creator all kept in the mind of God, flaws and shortcomings included or none of us would have ever existed. None of us are the ultimate but a part of the whole.

"Why do you hate the ACLU so much?" Let The Counting Of The Ways Continue - Yeah, More Hate Mail

JOY REID a few days back, had a long segment on about the history of Protestant "evangelicals" and the issue of abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade, showing what I remembered, after she reminded me, that right after Roe right-wing Protestants, who were still largely openly anti-Catholic, considered it a "Catholic issue" and they openly distanced themselves from it.  She pointed out back then, as their central organizing issue opposing school integration and, more specifically, the Carter era Department of Justice Civil Rights Division going after government funding that went to the segregation academies that sprang up in the wake of that earlier decision was becoming less popular among the general public, they decided on an alliance with conservative Catholics.  Though she didn't mention it, as I recall, at that time Catholics were the single largest denomination in the country. Also the reason, I fully believe, for the rise in such scum as William Barr's dad and other right-wingers joining the Catholic church, many of them openly embraced by right-wing priests, bishops and cardinals, even those with the marital-sexual history of a Newt Gingrich (just to show how sincere they are in their insistence on the traditional sexual morality they champion).  The Roberts-Alito court will likely get to giving them their hearts desire of that period (and today) gutting if not outright overturning the largely dead-letter Brown decision against racial discrimination in education.  They'll certainly adopt the Roberts tactic of destroying the decision while leaving its rotting carcass as a fiction to cover their shameless asses.  I mean, there have been TV movies made about it so they can hardly mount a full attack on that sacred myth.

Reid also pointed out that in those latter days of widespread and growing acceptance of racial equality when even Carter's far from radical DoJ was pursuing equal justice, the lucrative central command of racist white fundamentalist Protestantism was looking for issues to rally their base to gain political power - something which they had, previously, not been so much all about - it's one of those issues, porn and its allied forms of commercial sex that this is about because it's what the hate mail comment fixated on.  Maybe when my online presence is better I'll look more deeply at the pasties and g-string jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, which I would imagine could be seen as rather hilariously absurd, especially if the various amici curiae describing the "free speech right" to bump and grind in legalese can be found online.  

The present day court is a direct result of the ACLU successes in opening up the way for the American media to lie for the benefit of its owners, its highly paid on-air and in print hacks, etc.  Republican-fascism was born in the 1960s "free-speech-press" legal victories, freeing the media to lie to that effect. That alone is more than enough reason for me to despise a business I once contributed money to.  I was as big a sucker as anyone was.

I'll go at it by pointing out that the "liberals" and "left" were played massively for suckers on that issue, first by the porn industry and its legal arm, the ACLU-"civil liberties" industry of lawyers and fundraisers, on the basis of misplaced sentimentality.  The focus of that largely show-biz promoted sentimentality was "The First Amendment" and its absolutist language that "Congress shall pass no law" to tell a sleazy cigar chomping strip joint owner to tell his stable of for-show prostitutes they had to cover their nipples. Nor a city council.  And the loony, ahistorical notion that that had meant that all and everything from ink on paper to strippers on stage to every depraved sex act that could be filmed or simulated on celluloid and video was to always be allowed no matter what.  

I've gone into the stupendous and ignorant double-speak of that complete dope Phil Ochs both lamenting in the same song the terrible "injustice" done to the likes of Ralph Ginsburg on one hand and Kitty Genovese who was murdered by a man who admitted he was partly inspired to rape and kill by the porn the police found in his car, leading them to suspect him of that infamous but widely misrepresented murder.  Ochs, like most secular lefties and too many liberals, especially those in pop-kulcha, were such huge suckers for the "free speech" industry that has, as I've continually pointed out, a. carried messages that were not only at odds with equal rights but encouraged the most brutal of inequality, b. exploited the poor and vulnerable, leading them to have short and blighted lives, c. were largely in the hands of rich, white men who were politically reactionary and certainly opposed to equal rights for women and others, for those whose real equality was the superseding legitimate business of any "liberals" or "leftists."  Business that was swamped and drowned by such "free speech" and other lucrative "rights" pushed by the "civil liberties" industry.*

Worse than that, once the Republican-fascists decided they had a lot more to gain by using all of that free-speeciness" to corrupt the media to carry their propaganda than it could get by allying itself to the self-styled purity police, using the Supreme Court "free speech-press" rulings they threw them under the bus, imported the porn-merchant - fascist Rupert Murdoch to launch his fascist media here to do what it had done in Australia and Britain, etc. and Republican power, on the basis of the lies, the flagrant carrying of which the media had won for itself (and its largely white, male oligarch owners) to tell to its own financial benefit, the fascists and even neo-Nazis became the biggest fattest fans of "free speech-press" there are.

Which is why I have pointed out that the secular left and its "liberal" allies are the biggest fattest suckers in American history who got sold that line of self-defeating bullshit from the commercial media, show biz, the "civil liberties" industry who were largely financed by the big media and who financially benefited enormously from cutting the legs out from the real left, the real liberals who were all about equality, of real freedom which cannot be had except on the basis of responsible use of it so as not to impinge on the equality and legitimate freedom of others.  That article I linked to from the NYT, started out with one of the old lions of the free speech-press industry lamenting how the ACLU's younger lawyers were, in many cases sacrificing that stupid "principle" of the ersatz, faux replacement of real morality for those piddling little things like opposing fascism and Nazism as they gained real power and turned back the clock to the worst days of inequality, discrimination and violent suppression of  Women, Black People, People of other ethnic and religious identity, LGBTQ. Which equality those preening (well-paid) lawyers of "free speech-press" may mouth support for but whose actions and professional work has the effect of destroying and even killing.   

No more benefit of the doubt for the "civil liberties" industry, the ACTUAL RESULTS of what they advocate are in and apparent with every targeted mass shooting of which there have been literally hundreds directly attributed to the results they got in court.

The old ACLU line lawyers are perfect examples of the kind of "liberalish liberalism" which has every intention, in action, of there never being real equality, real justice (especially not economic justice), real freedom on the basis of mutually practiced responsibility, they are like the "socialists" of Fabianism which was a cynical, preening attack by the wealthy against the British poor and supporters of the Brit caste system, even including the proto-Nazis like George Bernard Shaw who openly advocated the mass gassing of the underclass nine years before the Nazi party was formed and twenty-nine years before the Nazis put his Edwardian era wet dream into reality - as he openly supported Hitler as well as Stalin.  I listen to some of the whining of the civil liberties hack lawyers and their media equivalent and I hear the echos of Shaw's witty advocacy of what the Nazis were tried and hanged for  in the 1910s.   Only without the . . . um. . "wit."

The left, here or anywhere, is all about a. equality, b. social and economic justice and equality, c. freedom in the context of MUTUALLY PRACTICED responsibility to use freedom equitably, or it is just another kind of oppressive  gangsterism.  The American left and some of those faux liberals has certainly had lots of phonies in it, especially in the media and show-biz.  I've got no more patience with them anymore than I do for Susan Sarandon's professional let's pretend, rich white Woman bull shit.

"Free speech - free press" is not immune from the limits of rights and freedoms in real life (though not in the fictions of the law) that they are practiced responsibly and in line with equal rights or they are oppressive of someone else.  And, peculiar to those particular areas of freedom and rights, TELLING THE TRUTH, or they are no more real than the fictitious "rights" erected by the gun industry, gun cultists and fanatics, duped hunters and Republican fascists elected and seated on judicial benches. Hate speech and lies are to free speech as selling semi-automatics is to "gun rights."  At times, as so many recent massacres have proved, they end up with the same body counts.   

To miss that while being alleged "liberals,"  "lefties," and merely allegedly rational professionals is rightly to be suspected as convenient pretense, none of them are as stupid as they pretend to be.  The fact is any old-style ACLU lawyer who doesn't understand who they were empowering with their advocacy for the "rights" of Nazis to proselytize and gain political power and influence, pornographers to profit off of promoting the rape and abuse of Women and Children and others, is lying through their teeth. The carefulness and . . . um, "reasoning" their work contains proves they had to knew and know what they were doing.  They just weren't honest about not caring about the results. No wonder it didn't bother them to get such a "right" for the media to do what they knew their clients and those who they wrote amici for openly intended to do, to destroy the real rights and lives of those they targeted.

I never would have suspected that I would look back fondly on the Attorney Generalship of Griffin Bell, that's how far this stuff has rotted.  Merrick Garland and those under Obama make him seem like a Democratic AG.  The bloom on the rose of the law industry dried up for me entirely in the first Judaical and Intelligence committees' hearings into the first Trump impeachment.  I'm no big fat fan of lawyers these days.

* "Gun rights," the "rights" of the hard-liquor industry to advertise on TV, the "smokers rights" smoke screen rightly seen as a co-production of the tobacco industry and "civil liberties" lawyers who got money from the, the prescription drug industry "right" to directly advertise even the most dangerous and addictive products which should never have been given FDA approval, and a myriad of other money-making judicial issues for the ACLU and their ilk could, if someone like the truly honorable Sheldon Whitehouse wanted to do a multiple series expose of it, open as many eyes as his masterful exposure of Court Capture and the fossil fuel industry prevention of real climate change legislation should open.  I am not capable of doing that series right now, perhaps I'll get around to it but someone with the resources of a Sheldon Whitehouse or a decent investigative journalist-lawyer could probably do far better than I could.

A New Series Because I'm Still Largely Off Line

 I am simply of Hebrew birth, a believer in humanity; but what can be more beautiful in the world than to follow completely the teachings of Jesus? 

L.L. Zamenhof

CONSIDERING WHAT I SAID about agreeing with Luke Timothy Johnson's statement from the from the Preface to his book The Real Jesus that as a Catholic he found "the quest for 'the historical Jesus'" to be more of a Protestant concern, wrapped up in the Protestant claim that it was solely reliant on Scripture as a means of revelation of God, I'll go into that a bit as a series.   

It is an irony that much of my introduction to the issues of historical-critical Scripture study originated in someone who had been, like Johnson, a Catholic monk and priest (a Servite) John Dominic Crossan, and a further irony that my decisive break with Crossan came through remarks from the great Protestant Scripture scholar, Walter Brueggemann critical of Crossan and the Jesus Seminar on the basis that their historical-critical method had misidentified what kinds of literature the Scriptures are and that he thought their conclusions wrong-headed.  In this case I think Crossan can be more identified with Protestant scholarly tradition, now, while I think Brueggemann's position, though quite compatible with most of the Catholics who are non-integralist right-wingers I know of, remains quite Protestant.  Luke Timothy Johnson, on the other hand, though politically opposed to much of the program of conservative Protestants - many of his positions on justice, charity and even morality would be considered radical by many of them - finds large areas of agreement on questions of the New Testament and the reliability of the Jesus and Paul presented in it.  

I will confess again that no one other than, possibly, Hans Kung and the various liberation theologians (Protestant and Catholic) has been as big an influence on me than the UCC - through the Evangelical Lutheran arm of that - scholar and minister, Walter Brueggemann.  Who, by the way, now worships with an Episcopal community.   Understanding that I'm including the various feminist, womanist and other women-originating movements in Scripture and theology are ever more of an influence on me as I read more.  Justice being one of the two rocks that all of this has to stand on to find any solid ground and the considered experience of all respected and heard and considered seriously.

The issue from some Catholic points of view (there is no more one Catholic or Protestant position on any of these things) relies on the conception of God as "the living God" whose manifestation in the universe is intimately involved in change and, if you will, development in history and in what we know as the physical character of the universe, a God who is quite present in the Scriptures - Brueggemann knows all of the passages in which God changes God's mind - and that human conditions are intimately tied up with change in the universe and continuing revelation.  

As an increasingly radical vegetarian and now vegan, the changes to The Law forbidding the eating of certain animals is interesting to me (I'll point out that there is no explicit permission given to eat animals in Scripture until after Noah's Arc comes to a landing) is overturned in Acts when Peter has a dream allowing him to eat what the gentiles eat, it was one of the lectionary readings a few days back so it's fresh in my mind.  I think, given the life endangering changes that human meat and dairy production have wrought, the contribution of that to global warming, deadly pandemics, other pollution, etc. not to mention the epic cruelty involved, it is quite clear that reading the signs of the times, it's time to reconsider those permissions.  

As mentioned, I think there are two rocks to stand on in that change, both of them necessary for bipedal stability, those are the central Jewish commandment of Justice (which extends to all People and even in the Scripture includes animals) and the New Commandment of Jesus to love others as he has loved us.  I don't think there is anything that can be valid in an claimed moral code now or forever unless it is an expression of those and unless it furthers those in the universe.  I completely believe that what we, as humans can think of these things, those are fundamental to the character of Creation.  In the context of human history and human experience, those might be considered as the means of bending the universe in the direction of God's intention, in so far as it is given to us mere human beings to do anything in that regard.  

To date, I see absolutely nothing in the secular, materialist, atheist, scientistic view of life that can match that, and much in it that is entirely destructive of that.  Any of that talk among the contented cattle of university and college faculties, their credentialed secularist product,  and secularist scribblers is a mere remnant of the cultural heritage of religion that they retain in a lukewarm manner as they reject the source of how those "ethical" positions can be considered real and gain the status as mandates for our behavior and even public policy made into secular law.   It is one of the ironies of the kind mentioned above that many secularists are stronger in that than those who spout religion the most loudly, SOME Protestant fundamentalists and white "evangelicals," SOME Catholic neo-integralists (among whom I would probably exclude the trad-Catholic cult which is more a billioniaire astro-turf As Seen On "Catholic" TV cult that has more to do with merchandising cults like AmWay and reminds me of nothing so much as Trekkies who can't tell the difference between a TV show and real life).*

This is an introduction to me going through a passage from Johnson's book that gives one view of the history of the historical-critical method and how it leads away from religion through what is a quite modernist view of texts, beginning with that man of the Renaissance (sharing in its limitations and biases), Martin Luther, another Catholic monk who went from fanatical Augustinian to the great heretic of Catholicism while founding one of the great Protestant traditions.  I will begin with that tomorrow.  I am having a hard time getting hold of more topical topics right now for purely mechanical reasons (haven't got my internet hooked back up and have to carry a laptop to my brother's if I want to go online, it's complicated).  

* I would include the sappy, sentimental side of Hollywood and the theater in that.  I was recently talking to another Catholic, an ex-catholic, about the terrible papacy of John Paul II and I told her I thought his election was due to the ridiculous movie The Shoes of the Fisherman in which a Russian Catholic Cardinal is acclaimed Pope and goes on to have a very non-JPII style or papacy in which he sells off all of the Churches wealth to feed the poor in Communist China.  To show you just how out of touch with reality show-biz is.  I think the trad-Catholic cult is largely a product of show-biz and other promotion that has more to do with infomercials than with anything remotely Christian.  Which is why they want to return the Roman-Catholic liturgy back into a show instead of meaningful worship where The People (and probably the priests) can now understand it.  I would bet that lots of the priests who pronounced the words on the page of the Missal during mass only had a vague idea of what they were saying.  There's a joke that the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist is that you can negotiate with a terrorist.  I would love it if while he still can Francis would overturn the damage to the Catholic liturgy in English that Benedict XVI's liturgist thugs did to it.  Though I'll bet the roadblock to that is the US Catholic Conference of Bishops which is still dominated by JPII-Benedict era political hacks.

The movies and other shows that get it right are so few, though it's possible.  

Correction

REREADING THE POST on E. O. Wilson's book as reviewed by H. Allen Orr, I made a statement that I confess I really don't believe at all:

I will say that E. O. Wilson was a pretty good scientist when he was talking within his narrow area of expertise which was describing ant behavior.

What I may have thought as I typed that was that his lore regarding ant behavior was fairly modestly expressed as compared to others in the pseudo-scientific business of peddling animal lore, of more or less careful observation and more or less modesty in claims about it.  

But I totally reject that alleged science surrounding human behavior can really meet the basic rules of what science is supposed to be - there is absolutely no way to verify the reported subjective experience of any person, not another person, not even ones self.  There is no way to verify that anyone's description of their experience is honest or accurate in the way that what the physical sciences study can do.  

And if that's true for members of the same species as an E. O. Wilson, it's infinitely more true when the only source of information on the experience of experience and internal thought is another species which cannot make even a very likely inaccurate report of what that internal experience is.  And he did it among so many different species, coming to entirely absurd and unevidenced claims of the same thing being present in wildly different orders of animals and, even worse,  than that, classes and phyla.  

I pointed out a number of times the ridiculous credulity of college-credentialed idiots such as the University of Toronto "Emeritus"  and, God help Canada, clinical psychologist, Professor Jordan Peterson making claims about the natural sex roles of human beings based on the alleged behaviors of lobsters, favoring, of course, male supremacy of the old patriarchal kind.  I pointed out that the exact same ancestor that links our species to lobsters also links us to preying mantis in which, at times, females will pull the heads off of males who want to mate with them, the decapitated bodies copulating with the females as she calmly eats the head she just pulled off.   Jordan Peterson is, lest anyone forget, in the same general racket that Wilson was in, the pseudo-science of behavior, and he was in what has the potential of being less dishonest about it than the alleged animal behavior science that he garbled and muddled to come out in exactly the same place he wanted to come out when he started his . . . um. . . thinking about things.  Something that Orr implied Wilson did.