But Judge Lurton, true to our judical tradition, established in recent years, "interprets" this passage by a method which is neither plain nor simple, but which does violence to ordinary common sense

The third day of going over Louis Boudin's 1911 article Government by Judicary

I  

In this inquiry we may take as a starting point the proposition, which is not disputed by Judge Lurton, that at the time of the American Revolution the power of the judiciary to annul legislation regularly enacted by the legislative department did not exist anywhere in the civilized world.  It did not exist in England, which we took as a model in framing our government.  Blackstone, who enjoyed in the United States great influence as a writer on all legal subjects during the years following the Revolution, in discussing the question whether "acts of parliament contrary to reason are void," said:

"If the parliament will positively enact a thing to be done which is unreasonable, I know of no power in the ordinary forms of the constitution that is vested with authority to control it; and the examples usually alleged in support of this sense of the rule do none of them prove that, where the main object of a statute is unreasonable, the judges are at liberty to reject it;  for that were to set the judical power above that of the legislature,  which would be subversive of all government . . . . 

There is no court that has power to defeat the intent of the legislature, when couched in such evident and express words as to leave no doubt whether it was the intent of the legisalture or no . . . So long therefore as the English constitution lasts, we may venture to affirm that the power of pariament is absolute and without control."

And Montesquieu, whose authority Judge Lurton invokes, gives no support to the judge's argument.  It is indeed one of the ironies of fate that Montesquieu should be cited as authority for the supremacy of the judiciary over the legislature, in view of that philosopher's well-known admiration for the English government system of that day, upon which he based his theory of the division of governmental powers.  A reading of his works will prove conclusively that nothing could have been further from his mind than the ideas imputed to him by Judge Lurton.  Judge Lurton himself quotes from Montesquieu the following passage,  which to the ordinary mind would seem to dispose of the matter very effectually:  "In republics," says the great French philosopher, "the very nature of the constitution requires the judges to follow the letter of the law; otherwise the law might be explained to the prejudice of citizens in cases where their honour, property or life is concerned."  But Judge Lurton, true to our judicial tradition, established in recent years, "interprets" this passage by a method which is neither plain nor simple, but which does violence to ordinary common sense;  and he certainly "explains it to prejudice" of its author.  Significantly enough, Judge Lurton is not able to quote a single line from Montesquieu which would in any way countenance his fanciful interpretation.  

In his appeal to American usage Judge Lurton fares no better than in his appeal to foreign authority.  He says on this point:

"From the beginning it [the power to declare legislation void for unconstitutionality] has been claimed by American Courts as a proper function of the Courts under our American constitutional system.  It is a doctrine which originated in the Courts of the States long before the adoption of the Federal Constitution.  Professor Thayer, in his Constitutional Cases, refers to no less than five decisions by State Courts prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, in which it is held that the power of the State legislation was limited by constitutional restrictions, and that it was the duty of the judicial power to declare legislation repugnant to such superior law void and unenforcable whenever necessary to determine the rights of parties in pending cases.  The earliest of reported cases is that of Commonwealth v Caton, decided by the Virginia Court of Appeals in 1782."

And then he adds, wonderingly;

"Neither that case, nor either of the decisions I refer to, are cited by Chief Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison,  although they afford a body of opinion of commanding influence which one cannot suppose the great Chief Justice to have been ingnorant of, especially as one of them was from his own State."

The fact that Chief Justice Marshall did not quote these cases should have warned Judge Lurton that they do not "afford a body of opinion of commanding influence."  In fact, they afford nothing of the sort.  They simply prove that, shortly before the time of the adoption of the Constitution, a few judges made isolated and timid attempts to exercise such powers.  These attempts aroused general indignation, and the judges were called to account for their conduct.  A brief statement of three of these cases will suffice to reproduce the historical atmosphere.  The first two cases which Judge Lurton finds in Professor Thayer's collection may be ignored, because they do not deal with legislative enactments which were in conflict with written constitutions.(1)  The three cases which require notice are:  Rutgers v. Waddington, (New York 1784); Trevette v. Weeden (Rhode Island, 1786); and Den v. Singleton, also known as Bayard v. Singleton (North Carolina, 1787).

Rutgers v. Waddington was decided by an inferior New York court, the mayor's court of new York City.  The law under consideration was a New York statute which was claimed to be in conflict with the law of nations and the treaty of peace with Great Britain.  The court specifically declared the power of the legislature to be supreme in all matters of legislation and not subject to any revisory power of the court;  but it disregarded the portion of the statute which was called into question on the theory that the legislature could not have intended to violate the law of nations and bring the United States into conflict with treaty obligations.

This decision brought forth a storm of protests.  Mass meetings were called to protest against the usurpation of power by the judiciary  and ringing resolutions denouncing it were adopted.  The New York Assembly took a hand in the matter, and passed the following resolution:

"Resolved, that the judgment aforesaid is, in its tendency, subversive of all law and good order and leads directly to anarchy and confusion;  because if a court instituted for the benefit and government of a corporation may take upon them to dispense with and act in direct violation of a plain and known law of the State, all other courts, either superior or inferior, may do the like'  and therefore will end all our dear-bought rights and privileges, and legislatures become useless."

The case was compromised and never went to the supreme court.  

That resolution of the New York Assembly certainly is confirmed  in the present-day and earlier claim of judicial supremacy.  They should take down the lie of "EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW" that hangs over the doors of the putrid Supreme Court building and replace it with "and therefore will end all our dear-bought rights and privileges, and legislatures become useless."  I would love to have a good measure of how much of the cynicism about government, courts and the law have been produced by the government by judiciary which has been the reality making the Congressional one the mere shadow government.

There is a long footnote disproving both Thayer and Lurton about two of those cases which I will give here instead of inserting it into the quoted text at the end of the article's page:

Paxton's case (Massachusetts Superior Court, 1761), is not in point, because the writ of assistance issued to Paxton, of whicih the validity was questioned, was not issued by the legislature of the colony but by the judges;  and its validity was questioned, not because its issue was alleged to be in conflict with any written constitution, for there was no such constitution in existence, but because its issue was alleged to be contrary to English law.  The justices were unanimously of the opinion that the writ might be granted.  Professor Thayer does not reproduce the case (which is briefly reported in Quincy, pp. 51-57); but from the appendix to Quincey';s Reports, p. 520, he reprints (Cases on Constitutional Law, vol. 1, p. 48) an abstract of the argument of counsel (Otis), to the effect that the act of Parliament under which the writ was issued was of no effect because contrary to the laws of nature.  Some English judges had expressed the same notion - that laws contrary to natural law were void - but no such doctrine was ever established in Great Britain,  nor does the decision in Paxton's case indicate that the Massachusetts judges accepted it.

Commonwealth v. Caton, (Virginia Court of Appeals, 1782;  4 Call, 5;  Thayer, Cases, vol.1, p. 55) - the only case which Judge Lurton names - is not in point, because the court had had before it nothing resembling a legislative enactment.  What was before the court was an attempt on the part of one house of the legislature to grant to certain persons, convicted of treason, a pardon, which could be granted only by the concurrent action of two houses.  On its face the alleged pardon was nothing but a bill which had failed to become law, and no court in the world would have treated it as possessing any force. Professor Thayer reprints the case because the judges declared obiter that they were competent to determine the validity of legislative cases alleged to be in conflict with the constitution of the state.

I am not familiar with "justice" Horace Lurton except to know the name so I never had much of an idea of him before.  Reading about him, one thing about him is clear, he fought for the Confederacy (and so was once a traitor) before he conveniently was captured and swore allegiance to the Constitution.   From that dodgy start, I wouldn't much trust him. 

From even just this much from a speech he made from two state legislatures combined (Virginia and Maryland) and the legal profession as might have been expected to notice the speech printed as an article we can know three or four things.

First is that Lurton wasn't an honest man, misrepresenting those he cited, carelessly citing cases that were certainly not supportive of his claims and, as Louis Boudin points out with full citations, his other claims  contradicted or at least failed to support his claims that an eminent eminent philosopher of politics agreed with him and that long passed judges and "justices" support his claims in specific cases that most certainly couldn't be used honestly to support his claims about the Constitutionality of the US Supreme Court created power for them to overturn duly adopted laws by the Congress and President. And it would appear that his authority in that,  Thayer wasn't much better.  

Second is that he was either a knowing liar or a very careless scholar, misrepresenting the cases in the very source he cites.  Boudin is obviously the superior scholar, apparently superior to Thayer as well - I'm extremely impressed with both his intelligence and diligence as a scholar and his clarity and honest reasoning as a writer.

Third is that many or most of those lawyers who either heard or read his claims either believed him about cases they were unfamiliar with without much fact checking or, if they were familiar with them and must have known he was misrepresenting them, were too cowardly or dishonest, themselves, to object.  I think all three habits are endemic to the legal profession and judiciary and I think it may be in no small part because the United States judiciary has created a dystopian reality that it, by fiat of a simple majority or even the unanimity of nine unelected, lifetime appointed, for all practical purposes impossible to remove "justices" what they say goes and, as I think we will find if Democrats manage to encode the right of Women to choose abortion into law or, even more so, to protect the rights of voters as in the great Voting Rights Act which the Roberts Court destroyed, the six Republican-fascists on the Court will knock it down by their expansions of the court-created power invented by the infamous Chief "justice" Roger Taney in the Dred Scott decision, not by colonial era judges as the liar Lurton claims.

I will give him this, in the passages Boudin quoted, his reliance on COURTS of the colonial period for the creation of the power he claims for the Supreme Court is clear:

From the beginning it [the power to declare legislation void for unconstitutionality] has been claimed by American Courts as a proper function of the Courts under our American constitutional system.  It is a doctrine which originated in the Courts of the States long before the adoption of the Federal Constitution.

He admits that it isn't something that was ever legislated by a legislature and signed into law by a chief executive, nor that it was a long-standing holding of English law in effect in the colonies (Boudin points out Lurton doesn't make that claim) he admits, or, rather claims, that it is a judge-made power which they granted themselves, exactly what the infamous Taney Court did in overturning the Missouri Compromise, the first time an American Supreme Court ever overturned a duly enacted, long in effect law adopted by Congress for the purpose of protecting and defending the institution of slavery and, in their decision taken as a whole, making it impossible for anyone or any state to prevent slave owners who move to free states from holding their slaves in slavery there. The actual birth of that power couldn't spring from a more evil motive - a number of the concurring "justices" in that case were slave owners or from families that benefited from slavery . And for a most mistakenly dishonest purpose, those meat-heads in black robes believing that by their fiat, they could "restore" the "peace and harmony" that was broken when a large number of Americans took the words of the Declaration of Independence seriously and turned against the violent evil that slavery was.  

Lurton presumably had gone to the bother to read the decision and the concurrent opinions and he must have noticed that among the effects of it was the election of one of our greatest presidents replacing one of our worst ones (who lobbied "justice" Grier to concurr with the appllling ruling that was leaked to him before it was issued), the secession of states in the hands of slavery gangsters, the Civil War and the passage of some of the most significant reforms of the slave-holder distorted Constitution of 1787 in its history - not that you'd guess that by the treatment by the Supreme Court of some of those Civil War Amendments to the thing.

"true to our judicial tradition"

I am a severe critic of the United States Constitution that forces on us such dangers as the anti-democratically constituted Senate (even worse originally, when it was appointed and not elected), the dangerous and anti-democratic Electoral College which Trump used to mount an attack on electorial democracy and came close to succeeding with an armed insurrection against the Congress and the Vice President as they presided over the goddamend, baroque, anti-democratic, unnecesary ritual, and a number of other things.  One thing that it can't be faulted for is granting permission to the Supreme Court to act as a super-legislature and presidency in making law, in annulling adopted laws and in issuing a veto of a duly enacted law such as the Voting Rights Act and the equally important Campaign Finance Reform laws it has knocked down, corrupting our elections to levels not seen since the worst days of the 19th century.  They have knocked down laws protecting the lives of United States Citizens from criminals and the criminally insane using automatic guns.

In their recent ruling overturning the long-standing Court made Roe v. Wade and in other long-standing court rulings upon which other important rights have been allowed by many more "justices" on previous Supreme Courts and other Courts, they acted as legislatures do when they overturn legitimately made laws of previous legislatures.  The "justices" such as Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett lied even more boldly than Lurton did during their confirmation hearings when they, in sworn testimony, claimed they accepted such decisions as settled law AND EVERYONE IN THE ROOM AND LISTENING ON TV OR RADIO KNEW THEY WERE LYING AS THEY LIED THAT.  Their actions prove that that conclusion I came to at the time I heard them was correct.  So even long-standing Supreme Court made law can be overturned even by those members of the court who claimed under oath before Congress that that was "settled law" or some such other equivalent turn of phrase.  Far from merely calling balls and stikes on the written law, the Suprem Court, under this usurpation of legislative and executive powers, literally, by fiat, makes even legitimately written law AND THE CONSTITUTION into whatever they say it is.  You may be right if you claim that isn't a legislative function nor even the function of an executive under a democratic republic it is far more royal and monarchical power as found in such tyrannies of the Tudors and some of the worst of the French monarchs ("l'état, c'est moi") familiar to those who wrote the Constitution.  The usurpation of power gives us sometimes 5 sometimes 6, 7, 8 or 9 absolute monarchs instead of one instead, replacing the Court for a representative democracy.

One of the things Coney Barrett, among others, cited as "settled law" of longstanding was Marbury v. Madison which is the case often lied into the role of producing the right of the Supreme Court in overturning duly enacted Congressional law when all it did was allow an appointed justice of the peace to take the office for a limited term.  She certainly did that because there is one non-Constitutional, court-made law that she never intends to vote against or see overturned and that is exactly the "right" of Supreme Courts that even the liar Lurton had to claim was an invention of judges in the colonial period and not the product of a duly made, carefully considered law, representing the best judgements of a far larger number of ELECTED OFFICE HOLDERS.  

But if they could overturn the Voting Rights Act and others of near or equal importance, if they can distort through lies the vitally important 14th Amendment (and others) to nullify important parts and complete texts of duly enacted laws and adopted amendments, why couldn't the Supreme Court nullify that long-standing Court-created innovation?  One protected by the myth of its creation and its sham legitimacy and the amber-filtered, piously articulated, piously spoken of Supreme Court and its "justices" when some of even the most highly considered have been more like gangsters and thugs in reality.

And if the Court could nullify the Court-created power to nullify duly enacted laws of even long standing, why can't the far larger, ELECTED, ANSWERABLE TO THE VOTERS AND REMOVABLE FROM OFFICE Congress and President nullify it?  The mythic foundation of the United States held that the only legitimacy of government comes from the consent of The People, something which this Roberts-Alito court as others in the past have certainly disregarded at their whim and will - often plainly for the profit of the rich, in this court, for all intents and purposes, the ones who bought them their place on it.  

WE, The People of the United States should demand that the Congress and President nullify the Court-created power to overturn even the most widely supported laws duly enacted by the Congress and signed into law by the President because if there's one thing we can count on even the good "justices" on the Supreme Court to be reluctant to do, it's give up that usurped power which has blighted this country since the Taney Court created it in one of the most putrid acts that Court ever committed.  It is poison fruit produced by a poison tree.  There is plenty in the previous and later history of that court which is in need of serious demythification, but none as important as the claim that the insipid, mundane in effect Marbury v. Madison was the origin of that power instead of the Dred Scott decision.

the epithet "revolutionary," applied by Judge Lurton to the demands of the progressives, could be more fitly applied to the latest actions of our courts

Continuing with the ever so timely 1911 article Government by Judiciary by Louis Boudin and overlapping what was already posted yesterday:

The Supreme Court of the United States decided by a majority of one that an income tax was constitutional.  Then one judge changed his mind and the Supreme Court decided that an income tax was unconstitutional.  it is now unquestioned, or at least unquestionable, that an income tax cannot constitutionally be levied by Congress upon the people of the United States. What makes such a tax unconstitutional is the Supreme Court's decision interpreting the written Constitution.  What made the Supreme Court's decision, interpreting this written Constitution, is the decision of one judge who changed his mind.

Of course that stare decisis of 1911 was, indeed, changed again and may change back, yet again.  In Supreme Court reality instead of fantasy, it could heave from one side to its opposite over and over again perpetually.

But this is by no means admitted by the other side. Indeed, it is emphatically denied, at least as far as the conclusions are concerned.

Some time after Mr [Theodore] Roosevelt delivered his famous speech at Denver, Mr. Justice Lurton, of the United States Supreme Court, delivered an address on the subject to the joint bar associations of Virginia and Maryland.  That address was subsequently published as the leading article in the January issue of the North American Review, under the title: "A Government of Law or a Government of Men?"  In that article the distinguished jurist states what may be termed the "conservative" position on the subject, which is diametrically opposed to that just stated.  Judge Lurton categorically denies that the courts now exercise any legislative powers, that is to say, powers involving the exercise of discretion or the following out of political policies.  He asserts heroically that, in declaring legislation unconstitutional, our courts merely apply the law as they find it plainly written in the Constitution, precisely as any court applies the law in any ordinary judgment.  He then proceeds to defend this power generally, and he closes with an appeal to his readers to

"rejoice that in standing by the institutions which have for more than a century made us the most law-abiding people on the earth, that we are walking in the footsteps of our fathers when we maintain in letter and spirit that division of the great functions of government which the men of Massachusetts and the men of Virginia and the men of Maryland declared with Montesquieu to be the best security of a government of laws and the only safeguard against a return to a government of men(2)"

2. The North American Review, vol 1. 193, p.25

Judge Lurton's appeal to American traditions puts his opponents in the awkward position of unpatriotic men, trying to undo the work of the great men who established this government, and of reactionaries, attempting to abolish one of the most effective safeguards of our free institutions against the tyranny of a mere "government of men."  It is therefore, but fair that we should inquire into the facts of the case, historical and contemporary, and compare them with the assertions on which Judge Lurton bases his conclusions, in an endeavor to arrive at an independent judgment as to whether or not his conclusions are warranted by the facts of the case.

(1) That the framers of the Constitution, owing to their philosophical training in the school of Montesquieu and the governmental usage of the states prior to the adoption of the United States Constitution, considered it necessary, or at least expedient, as part of the scheme of division of all government powers into three independent departments, to invest the judiciary with the power to annul legislation whenever the judges should find it to be unconstitutional.

(2) That by the Constitution framed by them, they intended to invest, and did in fact invest, the judiciary with such power.

(3) That the judiciary of this country has exercised that power ever since, in the manner in which the framers of the Constitution intended it to be exercised, without any change; and that the exercise of this power for "more than a century" has made us "the most law-abiding people on the earth." [The most law-abiding?  What was a whopper of a lie even then has grown, as proved by the US gun-murder rate,  like the Supreme Court's self-granted powers the liar was defending.]

(4) That the rules of "constitutional construction" applied by our courts in the exercise of this power are so plain and simple that their application does not, in fact, involve any element of discretion;  and that the courts, therefore, have never exercised, nor do they now exercise, any legislative powers in annulling legislative acts on the ground of alleged unconstitutionality.

On this last point, which is perhaps the most important, Judge Lurton says:

" There is nothing in the past century of either the National or State judiciary which gives sanction to any such abuse of power or supports an expectation that the function of interpreting will be tortured into an exercise of legislative power.  The rules of construction are plain and simple of application.  They are in substance identical, whether the instrument of interpretation be a statute or a contract." (1)

1. North American Review, vol. 193, p. 24

A careful examination of "the facts of the case" it seems to me, will show conclusively that each and every one of these propositions is erroneous.  Indeed, the evidence against some of them is so overwhelming that its complete presentation would require several volumes. [Which Boudin published in 1931]  It is my purpose in the following pages to take up Judge Lurton's position point by point, and to present as much of what I consider to be the evidence against it as may be compressed into the narrow limits of a magazine essay.  An examination of these points, in the order stated by me will also serve to present to the reader a historical picture of the growth of the power under consideration, showing its gradual development and the vast, indeed revolutionary, changes which have taken place in its application.  And this examination will, it seems to me, establish conclusively at least two points:  first, that the power under consideration did not emerge in its present form in the brains of the framers, as Minerva sprang, fully planoplied, from the head of Jupiter; and second, that the epithet "revolutionary," applied by Judge Lurton to the demands of the progressives, could be more fitly applied to the latest actions of our courts.


That last sentence should send a chill down the back of any thinking or vaguely moral person in the United States in July 2022 after the Roberts-Alito court has taken a wrecking ball to the 20th century of law, both that passed by Congress and signed into law by presidents of both parties and long standing Supreme Court precedence including some of the most intimately private of personal rights, deliberately overturned century old gun safety legislation in one of our most populous states DURING AN EPIDEMIC OF MASS SHOOTINGS AND A FLOOD OF INDIVIDUAL SHOOTING DEATHS AND MAIMING AS THE SUPREME COURT POTENTATES ARE SOME OF THE MOST PROTECTED PEOPLE IN THE COUNTRY.  That alone puts the Roberts-Alito majority of 6 in default of their Constitutional duty to protect the lives of the People of the United States. Putting the theoretical "rights" of those who will commit those murders under the Second Amendment before the very lives of their innocent victims, this is something conservative "justices" have continually done under that theory of Supreme Court power.

The judge, Lurton, was, in short, a damned liar who told the kinds of founder-fetish lies that remind me of that cynical line made in the same period by George Cohan, The flag has saved many a bum show. Especially today with the ACLU style deification of the First Amendment, there is nothing an American will so willfully suspend even the most blatant of horrific reality over as such "Constitution" and "Founding Fathers" lies.  It is the kind of mindless piety that, when it is wielded should raise the same kind of suspicions of con job that someone peddling luxury brand name junk on the sidewalk would in most people of any sense.  Only anyone who might be suspicious will, certainly, feel the kind of inhibition from expressing their skepticism or, in fact, their contradicting knowledge.  He was what so many of the members of the Supreme Court have been, oligarchic, aristocratic con men with an elite background and credentials.

I may go through the entire article which, being published in 1911, unusually for what I post, is certainly in the public domain and, so, there's no chance anyone will object to me typing it all out and posting it.  I hope to get an index of the pieces I did last winter and into spring from Boudin's large two-volume Government by Judiciary, especially the entire chapter dealing with the real origin of the Court's self-created power of annulling duly adopted and even long standing federal law in the Dred Scott decision.  I would love to go over the subsequent chapters of that book but I lost my access to Volume 2 and have yet to have the time to replace it and go over it.  I think Lincoln's practice of declaring he would not be bound by the Taney Court's interference in the Civil War is a model of a future president brave enough to refuse to go along with the continuance of that power.  If there are dire consequences for a future president doing that when a Republican-fascist might come to power, that only points out that such dangers are present in the United States Government right now as Trump and his backers and cronies and goons at the highest levels have yet to even be questioned never mind indicted.  The U. S. Constitution, whatever its original merits, has been thoroughly gamed by gangster lawyers and the judges made of such oligarchic, aristocratic thug lawyers by Republican-fascists and some idiots and villains appointed by Democratic Presidents.  It is going to prove impossible to live under for much longer without getting rid of much of it.  

No one I've heard on the January 6th Committee has pointed out that without the atrocity of the Electoral College, what Trump tried and may have successfully accomplished could not have happened if we scrapped that brilliant anti-democratic scheme of the friggin' founders for a clean and honest NATIONAL election for President.  Elections of the Congress and President that govern all of us should be a national eleciton by national rules, not the medieval feudal eminently corrupt and becoming more corrupt every month, now, state-by-state system we have now.

The founders fetish, such as the bum show "Hamilton" promotes, will lead us to fascism and is certainly embraced most eminently by the racists that the idiot who put that atrocity together believed he was opposing.  Never trust a maker of Broadway or movie musicals to teach history, a show is about the worst way to teach real history, theater about real history always lies about it.  Even among the best and most honest of them.  

Note how "the brains of the framers" and what those contained, was the subject of false claims then as it is now in the Roberts-Alito Court and the "justices" claiming to be able to discern that often prove to be the shittiest of historians.  

Perhaps the biggest lie in Lurton's statement is this complete nonesense:

"The rules of construction are plain and simple of application.  They are in substance identical, whether the insturment of interpretation be a statute or a contract."

If that were true there would never be any overturning of previous rulings, there would be no dissents, there would be no questionable decisions and there would be a complete unanimity that the Supreme Court, individually year by year and in its entire history has never demonstrated.  The boldness of that lie is so flagrant that it is Newt Gingrichean in its Baron Muchausen absurdity.  Only it is far from humrously innocuous, it is deadly and oppressive.

It is certainly a notable failure of the American Constitutional system that the Supreme Court has been getting away with this not only since 1911 but ever since 1857.  And, as Boudin noted a century and a decade ago, it has steadily gotten worse.  It is a failure which it is not considered nice or even permissible to point out, our Constitution is an object of veneration which is held to, in its noted free-speecyness, never to be criticized, the "founders" are never to be noted to be what they were, their amateur status in setting up things which, in some cases such as the election of president and vice-president, needed almost immediate and radical amendment and, of course, in its slavery enabling language required one of the truly horrific Civil Wars to force its amendment.  That is not a symptom of infallible wisdom and good will.  To claim it is a product of the disciples of Montesquieu is an insult to Montesquieu.  What is especially absurd for Lurton and others who use that "government of laws not of men" dodge to protect this usurpation of legislative power by the Supreme Court is that there is nothing that enhances "government by men" more than giving a tiny body of unelected, lifetime appointed lawyers the power that they have to, by a simple majority of the "justices" the power to annul the work of the elected, subject to voter approval Congress and the President and to twist and distort and turn even Constitutional amendments (the product of state legislatures as well as the Congress) on their head.  As mentioned the corrupted "interpretation" and use of the 14th and other amendment by 5-4 or 6-3 or even 9-0 rulings is a scandal that makes Lurton's lie obvious.  Making it even clearer than this, the Roberts-Alito court, by 6-3 has overturned large masses of SUPERME COURT RULINGS APPROVED BY FAR MORE AND OFTEN BETTER QUALIFIED "JUSTICES" OF THE COURT in repeatedly reinforced prior rulings.  

The Roberts-Alito 6 are a government of men and one woman, including some of the most corruptly confirmed "justices" in the modern or even ancient history of that generally other than honorable court. The rights and lives of hundreds of millions, of even the entire population of the planet are held in their dirty hands. We cannot live with that continuing, it's time for that Court to be restricted to the actual Constitutionally defined powers assigned to them, not those which prior and corrupt Courts gave themselves and extended and expanded over the last century and sixty-five years, five generations.  That is not a record of success for a government of laws and not men. It is not a record of success for an egalitarian democracy or even a workable republic. We don't have a monarch, we've got six of them, if not occasionally nine.

Update:  Reading this over, I think it's necessary to dispense with the lie that the United States Supreme Court doesn't "make law," that it doesn't regularly usurp the legislative function because it most regularly does.  Indeed, some of its own, created law is profound in its effects as merely legislative adopted laws often aren't.  

The Roberts-Alito overturning of Roe v Wade certainly is an abololition of the Supreme Court creation of a condition which has all of the features of a law, including support by far more "justices" than now sit on the Supreme Court, the ability of Women to decide for themselves whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term and access to safely ending a pregnancy.

That ruling overturned many state laws preventing that, it had the same effect of the legislatures and governors legislatively changing the law in those states, it had the same effect as the proposed federal legislation that would declare that the effects of Roe v Wade were reaffirmed on the federal level, doing what the Burger Court did - including Republican "justices" - in adopting the decision.  You can say that the recent Roberts-Alito atrocity overturning the gun carrying legislation of New York did exactly the same thing, doing what the elected legislative body could but did not do, overturning its previous law BY CREATING A "RIGHT" THAT WAS NEVER RECOGNIZED EVEN BY THE SUPREME COURT, BEFORE THIS ONE.  One of the very worst laws created by the Supreme Court created an enormous disparity in the possession of "free speech" rights by declaring money equals speech, giving billionaires billions of times more of it than the destitute and poor have.  A law that has, through the efforts of the Federalist fascist Society, created the present day court.  

The difference between what the Court does in such instances and what a legislature does is fictitious, the real life effects are what proves that.  But "justices" and judges are lawyers and one of the things that that profession is good at it is to invent false distinctions and differences that mean nothing in real life, often to cover up the bald exercise of illegitimate power by the Supreme Court.

I think if we ever do get to overturn the Court's self-granted, self-created powers making themselves super-legislators, we should look at those courts of other countries where the Supreme Courts have not been allowed to do that.  We should, also, look at what it was about the American Constitution and system which allowed such a terrible thing to be allowed and to grow for more than a century and a half like a cancer on even representative democracy, quashing the aspirations of making good on the Declaration of Independence that the government so created would be an egalitarian democracy, something the "framers" reneged on in that document.  Need I repeat what I said about the Electoral College at this point?

By Comparison To Such Pseudo-Science As Abiogensis, Honestly and Modestly Held Belief In Intelligent Design Is Actually Intelligent - Hate Mail

THE SCIENTIFIC RACIST, eugenicist, Nobel awarded stealer of other Peoples' work, would-be (failed)-solver of the "hard problem of consciousness" and part-time amateur abiogenetic researcher Francis Crick had a theory of the origin of life on Earth that, from what I can see, rather stupidly attributed it to the intelligent design of ancient lords of creation who sent life to the Earth, from where, for why and how by, totally unanswered and, of course, as the actual origin of life on Earth is, entirely unevidenced.  Atheists have never much been troubled by such a scheme of intelligent design as science, as seemingly absurd as it really is.

Of course, he being an ideological atheist and his theory being for the purposes of supporting materialist-atheism, he never suffered for his ideological implantation into the culture and the actual literature of science - the "literature of science" being, actually, a hell of a lot less sealed off from ideological and other extra-methodological naturalistic "faith pollution" than the materialistic, atheistic and scientistic or even just the scientific claims of that purity would lead you to believe.  At least that's the case in the highly contentious parts of science such as evolutionary science or cosmology.  There are huge swaths of science in which neither religious fundamentalists nor materialist-atheistic-scientistic are especially invested so those are probably quite free of that kind of ideological insertion.*  I would suspect climate-change science is quite pure science and the success of their horrifying predictions are made manifest in real life experience in a way that theories of evolution, cosmology and the semi to totally pseudo-scientific study of minds and "behavior" are rife with, and thus the short shelf-life of such scientific "truth." 

Since you rather badly cite it, I've gone over the Miller-Urey experiment before to point out a. Miller and Urey DIDN'T recreate the conditions of the early Earth, they didn't even create a little evidenced, speculative early-1950s imagination of what that was - I would suspect some of that imagination based in what they thought would get them the result they sought,  b. they, according to current scientific belief of what those conditions may have been, were quite wrong, c. they didn't "make life" they manufactured some amino acids and other molecules by subjecting very concentrated, isolated chemicals to some very powerful electrical forces and heat over a long time but not strong enough to destroy what they were making,  d. if their intent was to "prove that life isn't the design of God" abbreviated to "intelligent design" which I believe was behind what they did,  they proved the exact opposite because their experiment only proved that a couple of professionally and likely ideologically motivated scientists can create amino acids within a very specially planned and designed container under specially planned and designed conditions in an mixture planned and designed to recreate something they got wrong, in any case, proving that their intelligent design was an intrinsic part of what they proved could be done under conditions almost ideally planned to yield the result they got.

You cannot filter out the intelligent design of a scientist from what they create.  It is one of the key discoveries of 20th century physics that even physicists cannot filter out the effects and point of view of conscious observation of what they find from even a more passive scientific act.

That result was certainly not "life" and certainly not very far along in the production of a living being which, unless you are going to indulge in the sci-fi fantasies of Francis Crick and his like, according to the materialist-atheist of a probable scientistic bent, by their unadmitted gods of random chance, probability, trial and error and the like, arose by those in the very likely uncongenial to life atmosphere of the early Earth without the crucial element that Miller and Urey and so many another ideological atheist-scientist provide, intelligent design.

It is remarkable how basically and fundamentally philosophically inept so many even very accomplished and prestigiously employed scientists are.  Crick won the friggin' Nobel prize, for Pete's sake and he couldn't understand all he'd done is insert the intelligent design of imaginary extra-terrestrials for the appearance of life on Earth, merely putting off the even more unevidenced creation of the ETs who he wanted to put in place of God in another time and place long ago.  I believe both Miller and Urey were Nobel Laureates, too.  Stanley Miller was also considered to be an "expert" in "exo-biology" another "science" which is entirely without the first sample of what would be needed to study "other life."  

I will point out that their creation and, it being Crick I'd guess, imagined evolution into such highly sophisticated intelligent scientific ETs could be considered even more improbable because they would have had fewer billions of years than life on Earth did to assemble by chance and evolve thus, probably far longer than life on Earth because Earth scientists this many billions of years into the existence of the universe are not nearly able to do such stuff which may, actually, be impossible to accomplish. I'm entirely skeptical about our ability to get a human being to Mars alive and viable, nevermind anyone living on that very un-Earthlike planet close by.  And let's include the distances such a scheme would have to work through.  The time restraints for such a scenario may make Crick's imaginary ET scientists and technologists more highly improbable than whatever is the actual earliest organism on Earth far more difficult to explain by the atheists' unadmitted cast of creator gods, random chance, probability, etc.  

By comparison with that anti-scientific scientific POV, belief that life was created by the design of God is eminently more honest and, I hold, rational.  It is not and never should be mistaken to be a scientific idea, but, then, neither should so many of the claims of such ideological atheist-scientists, though those regularly are mistaken as such.  Many a bum scientific claim is saved by materialist-atheist-scientism.

If you want to find people who regularly insert such faith pollution into science, look at the interested, active, ideologically driven atheists among scientists because they're the ones who, like Crick and John Maddox and myriads of others get their stuff regularly published as science in scientific journals and who even more regularly are put on TV shows and podcasts to pretend what they claim about such things as disposing of the "necessity" of God for the origin of life or the creation of the universe.  Those are the kind who are almost always on TV and podcasts creating the popular understanding of "science" and not infrequently in the literature of science, implied or explicitly stated.  I doubt there is much of any science dealing with consciousness that isn't thoroughly shot through with atheist ideology and there are entire branches of science that originated in such ideology such as "abiogenesis," created by the ideological atheists Oparin and Haldane as a "scientific" demonstration that life could arise by spontaneous generation through random chance, etc.   By the way, abiogenesis has nothing to do with evolution, it is a totally different thing because if there's one thing we can be fairly certain of, the original organism so theorized, whether it arose here or on another planet billions of years before life arose here, didn't come about through biological evolution.  That misconception is as philosophically and logically inept as the idea that scientists today can really study the origin of life on Earth for which they have absolutely no evidence except that there is life now and has been for billions of ever less evidenced life the farther in the past you go.   You can't do science without physical evidence. 

They really should make people who major in science take rigorous courses in philosophical reasoning, certainly courses that would instruct them on the more idiotically clueless claims of eminent and some not so eminent scientists on the basis of their faith in materialism, atheism and scientism.  Even the accomplished mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell, one of the most popular atheist saints of my generation was quite capable of making such philosophically inept claims, he unequivocally stated the formula of scientism that anything that science can't show can't be known which, itself, is an unscientifcally made statement and so cannot be known to be true by its own definition.  He really did know better but his faith would not let him not make such an absurd claim.  He was far from the only one.  

* The quasi-scientific study of "evolution" is rife with the baldest of political-economic ideology and has been even before Darwin tied it perhaps for the rest of human science to that with his adoption and complete distortion of Malthus's elevation of the British class system to a law of economics.  As Marx pointed out, Darwin turned the non-scientific and philosophically inept Malthus on his head and applied it to the entirety of life.  

There are huge swaths of biological science that are quite non-ideological in their content and motives but those are usually solidly based in what can be seen and measured, especially when they are honest about the complexity and so, difficulty of what they study.  The scientific study of evolution is none of that except in rare cases.

The Holiness Of God As An Infallible Guide: Since I'm Challenged To Name Something I Disagree With William Lane Craig About

WHILE IT IS impressive as an intellectual contortion in regard to the legends of the Book of Joshua as to God commanding the genocide of Canaanite tribes, including babies,  the erudite William Lane Craig's excuses for it strike me as a consequence of a conservative Protestant idolatry of the written text of the Bible at the expense of reason and the meaning of words and the Holiness of God.  And over the real scripture of which the words on paper and parchment are a mere shadow.  Considering the contemporary archeological evidence (admittedly hardly complete in its amount or meaning) that gives little to no evidence to support such a supersession,  it's far easier to explain things that the story is largely legendary, probably made up or a gross exaggeration AND THE VICTORS AFTER THE FACT CLAIMING GOD COMMANDED THEM TO COMMIT AN ATROCITY than to twist meaning and morality into knots to show the literal claim is moral. 

I am impressed with WLC when he's talking about many things but when he comes to things like this, the self-imposed manacles of Biblical inerrancy or its like becomes very obvious.  I far prefer the results when things like a more than literalist  ideology is in control of the commentary, what more contemporary Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, practice.   If there is something important in the Jewish tradition it is the Holiness of God, of God, not of a book, not even one in THE BOOK.  I find I go back to the observation of the great Abraham Joshua Heschel that even the Torah is a midrash on the real Torah which is not a book but which God communicates even beyond words.  Craig and, really, John Lennox have too much of a devotion to the literal meaning of the words, someone like Walter Brueggemann, who knows more than both of them combined about the Books and their background is far closer and makes far better use of them.   

Maybe, since you ask what I am, I could say I'm a Heschel-Brueggemann Catholic Plus who wishes there was a renegade Woman Priest led Roman Catholic congregation near me.  One who loves Good Pope Francis and wishes his trip to Canada is a great, humiliating and crushingly painful confrontation of a genocide that may well have been excused by citing those texts from Joshua.  I don't know that's the case but I'd not be surprised.   As Brueggmann once pointed out,  Cotton Mather did, in fact, cite that to justify the genocide of Native Americans under Puritan rule.  John Wayne didn't cite Joshua but justified it in the economic racist terms that are inevitably behind such claims.  God is all Holy and there is no possibility of anyone comprehending God as such in line with the claims of the written words of Joshua.  

In his important work opposing pop-atheism, it was exactly that which gave Richard Dawkins his ass-covering excuse for why, when he challenged apologists to effectively refute him, he was a no-show when WLC challenged him to a debate.  It was a bogus excuse but Craig handed it to him. 

Our courts are, however, in a different position - or, at least, it is claimed that they are in a different position - with respect to their power to declare legislation void for alleged unconstitutionality.

 The most momentous question before the people of this country today is undoubtedly the question of the limits of the power of the judiciary to annul legislation for alleged unconstitutionality.  When Mr. Roosevelt opened his campaign for the so-called "new nationalism,"  he was forced to make what was called by his opponents "an attack upon the judiciary."  The general election that followed was largely fought, at least in the eastern part of the country, on the issue thus made;  and the fight against the new nationalism has since been largely a fight for the preservation of the powers of the judiciary as they exist today.

The fact that Mr. Roosevelt denied the allegation, claiming to have made no "attack" upon the judiciary, does not change the situation.  It is of course true that Mr. Roosevelt did not attack the judiciary as an institution;  he merely criticised some of the decisions of one of our courts.  But that court is the highest court in the land.  And criticism of courts must be admitted to stand on an entirely different footing from criticism of other public functionaries, notably from that directed against legislative assemblies.  Legislators - and, within certain circumscribed limits, executives - are vested with discretion to act as public interest may, in their opinion, from time to time require.  Criticism of their public acts does not necessarily involve anything more than the expression of a different opinion as to what is best calculated to promote the public good under certain circumstances.  It is different with judges.  They are not supposed to be vested with any discretion to act as they see fit in the interest of the public welfare.   They are supposed to find the law written down in former decisions or in statutes, in the making of which they have no share, and to apply the law which they find to the facts of the cases presented to them,  irrespective of their opinion of its wisdom or unwisdom.  Ordinarily,  therefore, criticism of the judgements of a court implies a reflection upon either the legal knowledge or the integrity of its members.  

"Our courts are, however, in a different position - or, at least, it is claimed that they are in a different position - with respect to their power to declare legislation void for alleged unconstitutionality.  It is claimed by those who criticise certain of the decisions of our courts on that subject that in dealing with constitutional questions our courts exercise legislative powers under the form of judicial decrees,  and that the canons of criticism which usually apply to acts of legislatures are therefore applicable to our courts with respect to such decisions.  It is in this that Mr. Roosevelt implied, when he said, in his Denver speech:

The Course occupy a position of importance in our government, because, instead of dealing only with the rights of one man face to face with his fellow- men, as is the case in other governments, they here pass upon the fundamental governmental rights of the people as exercised through their legislative and executive offers."

And it is in the same position that is expressed in the very forcible and striking manner in an editorial article on "The Flexibility of the Law,"  which appeared recently in The Outlook.  The editor of The Outlook said:

"In our judgment the real Constitution of the United States, the Constitution under which we are living, the Constitution to which the decisions of all our subordinate courts must conform, the Constitution to which all legislative acts, whether State or National, are subject is not the written Constitution which was formed in 1787.  Itg is the written Constitution plus the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States interpreting and applying it, and the habit of the Nation which has grown up under it.  The Outlook has been criticised for talking about the written Constitution as though there were any other.  There is another; and its binding force upon the American people this other Constitution is quite as important as the written document.

The Supreme Court of the United States decided by a majority of one that an income tax was constitutions,.  Then one judge changed his mind and the Supreme Court decided that an income tax was unconstitutional.  it is now unquestioned, or at leas unquestionable, that an income tax cannot constitutionally be levied by Congress upon the people of the United States. What makes such a tax unconstitutional is the Supreme Court's decision interpreting the written Constitution.  What made the Supreme Court's decision, in interpreting this written Constitution, is the decision of one judge who changed his mind.(1)"

1. The Outlook, December 17, 1910, vol. xcvi, p. 848*

 
This is the first several pages of Louis Boudin's superb 1911 article which he expanded into the great book on the topic of Judicial usurpation of legislative and executive power by the United States Supreme Court published one hundred eleven years ago last month.  The "Mr. Roosevelt" is not FDR but his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt, the first instance of the dangerous permission of the Court usurpation of power, the  constitutionality then unconstitutionality of an income tax was, of course, perhaps temporarily, switched back by the same Court to "constitutional" with a different cast of characters comprising that costume drama troupe. There is no telling if the current Roberts-Alito court will overturn it again, I wouldn't put anything past them, the present Republican-fascist majority has no restraint, they have no shame, they have no sense of honest dealing.  

As you can see, it is entirely relevant to the present day.  Under our impossible to reform Constitution, even the most glaring of dangerous problems it sets up or permits go unchanged for generations and, now, centuries.

I think it's most notable that even in Teddy Roosevelt's time there was a faction in favor of retaining government by the judiciary over and above representative democracy, itself a far cry from the alleged egalitarian democracy promised in the Declaration of Independence to those who fought the Founder's revolution for them.   That established, oligarchic, aristocracy has control of most of if not almost all of the legal industry, the engines of power and the organs of the mass media and the idiocy of the common received POV which dominates academic babbleage and scribbleage.   If there was a real move to put the damned Supreme Court in its place, you could count on PBS, NPR, the cabloids, etc. finding several academic voices of that same establishment, unchanged from a century and a decade ago except in their dress and names, probably from the same institutions and prostitutions to say why it can never be any other way.   The media, the corporate media is as invested in no-change as the oil and gas industry and the unillegalized criminal gangs such as the Federalist Society.

The Constitution is, of course, the reaction of the same class of "Founders" to the widespread rebellion when it became clear to many a revolutionary soldier that they intended to stiff them.  Though, perhaps, we can dispense with a rigorous critique of that document of 1787 because even it is of marginal import when it is an unprincipled and unscrupulous band of liars and overturners of even the most personal of rights who are declaring what the Constitution is.

A few years back I wrote about a commentary by a very good British Youtuber about the supposed benefits of Britain's unwritten Constitution as opposed to one which is written, such as the one in question whenever the Supreme Court is declaring its meaning by fiat.  "Phil" gave some very good reasons as to why it is safer to have an unwritten Constitution which can be interpreted over time to address changed circumstances, later courts and judges being able to move with the times instead of being dictated to by long, long, long dead minds who couldn't possibly understand the changed world we live in how and the world which, unless humans become extinct due to, among other things the Roberts-Alito Court's devotion to the wealth of those such as Amy Coney Barrett's family and the fossil fuel industry, may come well after us.  Louis Boudin, especially in writing about the career of the hapless and foolish genius among the early justices, Joseph Story who, along with Alito, cited "English common law" in the form of ancient rulings by English judges which, while it was cited by the American Supremes, had long ago become dead-letter law in England as they moved on from it.   As Boudin in his book latter pointed out, this can be seen in the case of the scrupulous upholder of ancient law and allegedly anti-slavery man, Joseph Story, what Alito did to destroy the rights of Women to ownership of their bodies citing such ancient law, has happened before with quite awful results.  Only as Boudin notes what may be a limited result of the deprivation of rights to single individuals, as in the deliberations of even many a more modernly constituted supreme court, under the usurped powers of ours can turn into a travesty effecting hundreds of millions if not more.

As can be seen in the century plus old observations of Louis Boudin, having a written Constitution doesn't really cement meaning into place, it merely makes the whimsicality - or rather whimsy masking bald power and economic advantage - more of a baroque word game pretending to give new life to the minds of late 18th century aristocratic, white almost all Protestant man only, as often as not, it is about as authentic as some of the more outlandish dress up and play that reenactors engage in.  

This would be highly amusing if it were not for the fact that under our entirely unformed, serially outrageous history in which little to nothing is ever fixed once a gaping and dangerous defect such as this is pointed out, through the impossible to do reformation by such radical Constitutional amendment, the Roberts-Alito court is getting Women and others injured and, I have no doubt, if not killed now, that body count will start within weeks.  It is getting People killed through their arming of the Republican-fascist militias that are forming and also organized criminals and, also, the insane. They are endangering us through the already mentioned fossil fuel industry and oligarch enablement which I have no doubt some if not all of the Republican-fascist majority OR THEIR SPONSORS AND PATRONS directly benefit from.

The Supreme Court is now, beyond doubt, the most corrupt branch of the government, that is until they rule to ensure anti-representaive Congresses and presidencies.  

I think it's time for Democrats in the presidency and the Congress to declare that that rule by judiciary is over and they should absolutely refuse to go along with the continued tyranny of a small number of men and one woman who whimsically declare what the constitution means with no regard for either the legisltaive record of those who wrote the Constitution (such as the 14th Amendment) or even the original document nor previous courts, often adding up to many times more "justices" than the 5 or 6 or even 9 who sit on it as they overturn long established rights and long needed changes.  

I think Democrats must take up the torch that has been too long put aside and campaign against this Court and, in fact, the extra-Constitutional power that was, in fact, invented by the not-unamous Taney Court in the most infamous of all rulings, the Dred Scott decision in which six slave owners and one "northern justice" who was certainly lobbied by one of our worst presidents tried to protect and extend slavery throughout the country even against the will of the majority of the citizens and residents of the country and the majority of those in the free states.  The judicial power to overturn duly adopted legislation is the Rosemary's Baby of the American government, the spawn of Satan by the rape of democracy by some of the worst members of the federal government in our history.  It is a power which should have been overturned in the Civil War amendments - I think they believed they had done that or, at least, with the infamy of the Taney Court had brought upon that institution they may have mistakenly believed future courts would not dare to repeat.  If that's the case, they were sadly and dangerously mistaken.  The Supreme Court is the most corruptible and most corrupt branch, very openly and boldly corrupted in league with Mitch McConnell and such other thugs as Grassley, Graham, Collins, etc. It is the most dangerous of all, in the long term.  

*  I had wanted to give a link to that cited article but haven't been able to find that particular issue of that magazine online.  I did, though, find a roughly contemporary article in La Follette's Magazine which cites the same article entitled, Why The People Distrust The Court which is well worth reading.  I will call your attention to the sections titled "A Shield For The Trusts, "  and " Throwing Laws On The Scrap Heap."   This is an abomination that has gone unchallenged for far too long.  If the typical lawyer-Democrat Presidents and leaders of Congress are too subservient to challenge the thugs on the high bench, maybe we need some non-lawyers to finally take the friggin' crowns off of their heads.  Nine despots are no better than one.

Even Before I Turn Off The Computer For The Day - Hate Mail

THE IDEA that you can come up with an immensely improbable estimate for God creating life only shows that you want to misuse a materialist set of condition for testing the probability of a religious proposition. 

If you saw a large, high, neatly stacked pile of wood,  the logs having been sawed to a uniform length and tried to come up with a materialistic explanation of it, the probabilities against it happening as it did would be enormous.  If you tried to come up with an explanation that a person cut the logs to a measured length and then stacked them, you wouldn't need to go through the gyrations and acts of imagination that the materialist would to come up with their explanation.  When you're talking about the theorized original organism from which all subsequent life descended, you're talking about something like that, you don't get aeons of time in which a jillion probablistic what-ifs could work themselves out, you don't get trial and error to explain that one success, you get something more like trying to figure out where a stack of wood comes from.  Only it's a far harder thing to figure out how it could have just happened by random chance than explaining how a stack of uniform length pieces of sawed logs came to be there. 

The original organism wouldn't have gotten second chances, never mind the number that your demi-god of trial-and-error would need, it was a living being that had to maintain its and its descendants lives as it did all of those things I noted were needed and, no doubt, many others and to have gotten them right the first time or it would have been the end of life on Earth as well as its beginning. 

You aren't required to believe God did it but the explanation that God did it is far more elegant and simple with far more explanatory power (things that those wanting to argue for seemingly scientific explanations always insist on as determinative) than the insistence that it must have happened by chance against an enormous improbability that it was done without intelligent design.  It's not surprising that so many people find it easier to imagine for that reason and there's nothing intellectually wrong with people believing that.   Without evidence of it happening by random chance, the improbability of it happening that way is a sound intellectual observation. 

I've got to do some weeding.  

Update:  You must be fairly new reading here.  I've dealt with the experimental artificial "DNA" that is self replicating by pointing out that it was created by the intelligent design of the scientists who manufactured it, what they showed was that it could be done with intelligent design, they can't prove by their experiment that it was done without that in the ancient past.  It is ironic that it was in thinking about that and the "RNA world" nonsense that was a recent fad in abiogenesis that I concluded it was irrational to believe the original organism would have had just found or had either of those molecules in it because of the complexity of the molecules, themselves, but, also that neither of them can work without a very complex intercellular chemistry allowing it to happen, which, if present in the original organism when it first reproduced would, I insist, make the attribution of it to divine intention far stronger.  The improbability of such complexity just happnin' by random chance is enormously greater than that God did it.

You Pretend To See What You Can't, It's Always The Way When Ideology Is Inserted Into Science And It Always Is Being Inserted

HAVING MENTIONED and praised the intellect and impressively commendable hard work of the philosopher and evangelical Christian apologist, with whom I have some very important differences, William Lane Craig, I will mention another brilliant mathematician and Christian apologist with whom I have some important differences, John Lennox.  I bring him up because I recall during one of his debates, I seem to remember it was the one he had with Peter Singer, he stated that he had some problems with evolutionary theory, very careful to reassure the audience he didn't mean with anything Darwin "discovered" and then went on to talk about the Achilles heel of scientistic-atheist-materialism (which I will shorten to SAM) of a materialistic explanation of the origin of life on Earth.*

I can understand the political expediency of a Christian apologist not taking on the popular atheist's saint, the Charles Darwin constructed by pop-science, the BBC and PBS and as venerated cluelessly in many a Christian church on "Darwin Sunday" but for a Christian apologist to not realize that by doing that they are venerating a man whose entire claim to fame overturns not only the Gospel of Jesus but the Law of Moses and, so, the entire reason for the existence of Abrahamic monotheism is something that not only should but must be admitted and dealt with because the consequences of it are quite capable of rotting out Christianity and Judaism and, I would bet, Islam AND EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY from within.  

You cannot hold both with "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and natural selection in the human species - an idea, which as I hold - which absolutely negates the moral basis of it.  Slavery such as that which begins the history of the Children of Israel, is certainly not discouraged by natural selection, Pharaoh, in the opening Chapter of Exodus declares his eugenic intent of wiping out the male line of the Hebrews by murder, infanticide (infanticide is given as a means of race improvement by Darwin in The Descent of Man and his cited colleagues), and it certainly doesn't think anything like social justice and economic justice, in fact, Darwin, in the strongest of terms, says that such things will be a catastrophe for the human species in the same book.

To accept the theory of natural selection means you not only fully embrace a theory of inequality, you fully embrace a theory in which it is a good for the strong to destroy the weak, the wealthy to destroy the poor, the good of the murder of the least among you and that the result of that undoing of creation would be good, in fact, better than good. It was the origin of eugenics including Nazi eugenics, it is the basis of Trumpian "herd immunity" which has so recently led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands here and in benighted enlightenment loci such as Sweden. It is the foundation of most of the scientific racism in the subsequent period, beginning almost as soon as people like Thomas Huxley read On the Origin of Species.   Natural selection was a boon for scientific racism and it still is, right now. 

The Christian idea that they can not only tolerate but cooperate with the theory of natural selection may have been a cowardly capitulation to the academic respectability which Darwinism was granted by the almost exclusively white, male, either wealthy or aspiring to be wealthy scientific, academic establishment. I will note that one of the earliest critics of the kind, the formidably intelligent  Victorian era radical Frances Cobbe, was far more insightful than the latter day opponents of Darwinism on the basis of its refutation of a naive reading of Genesis, so early that Darwin condescendingly and hypocritically brushed off her well-founded and informed objections on the basis of its destruction of morality in the most condescending of terms.  I believe she's the one and only Woman addressed in the book, though it's a while since I trudged through that book, again.   Today, I think "Darwin Sunday" is a product of the successful but false clean-up of Darwinism made in the post-WWII period when it was useful to natural selection's proponents to lie about its inventor and what he really said about it.  No one in the period before the exposure of the Nazi eugenic genocides ever denied what natural selection really meant.  That lie is the common received deception of the vast majority of college credentialed peoples in the English speaking world.

No, either one is right or the other one is, either we should provide food, clothing, housing, medical care, means of becoming educated, means of having a peaceful, decent, healthy life to the least among us or we keep them in destitution and poverty, allow them and their children to die of illness or starvation, let them get killed by those who are bigger and stronger and more psychopathic or, as the Supreme Court majority would maintain, those with an automatic rifle or other gun, or we do what Jesus most radically said we were to do and if not that then what Moses said was to be done for not only the poor but even to the slave held by members of The Children of Israel.  

I think that's a basic choice that cannot be left unaddressed by Christaims.  And it's not only controversial in regard to biology but within Christianity, itself.  The white-evangelicals and even evangelicals of color who are allied with Republican-fascism are, if anything, more slavish upholders of a version of Malthusian natural selection today than is currently acceptable in scientific talk (they let people like Charles Murray, the so-called social-sciences and economists do that for them).  The Republican-party is the home of that kind of parody-christianity which will rail against Darwin while putting his most dreamed of cruelties and injustices and indifference into practice, degrading and earning the hostility for the Gospel in ways that late 19th century Brit atheists could have only dreamed of doing. 

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Christianity will have to address the enormous heresy of the anti-egalitarian "evangelicals" who are so enthusiastic about Republican-fascism and its like.  They are heretics, certainly those members of evangelical churches, Catholics, etc. who really do take what Jesus said seriously feel if not admit that there is something extremely wrong with that parody of Christianity that is pushed by the media as "Christianity."  You cannot both vote for Trump or the Republican-fascists and believe what Jesus said was true anymore than you can that natural selection is true and believe in the Gospel.  That house, divided like that, cannot stand. 

* Once you have seen through the ruse of SAM, turning random chance-probability into their materialistic creator god,  the problems involved in imagining the random-chance assembling of  something so complex as even "very simple" life and trying to imagine the probabilities of that happening even once in the time available to it even in the billions of years the Earth is estimated to have had for that start, the harder it is to imagine it having happened without intelligent intent having caused it to happen.  

I doubt it is at all pausiable that it not only happened BUT THAT IT WOULD HAVE HAD TO HAPPEN PERFECTLY THE FIRST TIME or it could not have happened by mere random chance.  The entire thing, the life processes of the first organism maintaining itself as a living being, metabolizing, gaining what we would understand as nutrition, avoiding substances and forces in its environment that might kill it, perhaps dealing with any it took in by random chance (probably far more probable than anything else I'm describing in this paragraph) an organism which, for some unknown and unknowable reason, not only was capable of successfully replicating itself - BOTH ORGANISMS SURVIVING THE PROCESS but it and its progeny (how could you tell which was which?) going on to do all of that again and again and again before anything like mutation and evolution took place.  To imagine the plausible possibility of that first assembling, then mantaining itself, the successfully reproducing itself by random chance, things just happening to come together in some early-Earth pool, staying together in the form of an organism avoiding being obliterated by radiation, poisons, etc. and THEN REPRODUCING ITSELF (I'll just mention the absurdity of thinking a splittable, self-healing membrane covering it just happening) is far less seemingly plausibly simple and elegant than the idea that it happened because God intended it to.  Though, as I've pointed out innumerable times, nothing about the origin of life on Earth is susceptible to science because the evidence needed to do real science about it is not available and certainly never will be available to study.  You'd have to see it have happened to explain life on Earth now and you can't see it.  

The top scientists pretending they can do that are no better off than the people who wrote those chapters of Genesis.  They are worse off, they are violating the very thing they pretend to uphold by pretending to study something that they have no evidence to support their study with.  You can take the Gensis account any number of ways but it will be a product of the faith that the scientists deny they are practicing as they pretend they are doing science.

The one biggest clue as to origin of things we can know of in the past century, the Big Bang theory, doesn't tell you anything about the origin of life on Earth, though it gives some idea as to how long you might have for the atheist god, random-chance, to have done it and that doesn't help the atheists because it just means the probabilities against it happening as they claim rise enormously.  And that great milestone in current cosmology was despised by so many scientists because it reminded them too much of what those early scribes seemed to have gotten right in Genesis, that the universe had an origin and that it evolved over time.  Some of the most reputable atheist scientists railed and worked against the theory even as it gained support in physical evidence throughout the 20th century. I don't think Fred Hoyle gave up that effort even though he certainly knew what that evidence meant.  The editor of Nature magazine was railing against it till close to the end of the century on that count.  Imagine that, the editor of one of the most reputable scientific journals giving the game away by using his position to fight wars against religion.  

Only that's not an unusual thing, so much of such science is ideologically motivated, and so is not a disinterested search for truth.  Abiogenesis is little else but such an ideological game, pretending to do science about something which it has no evidence to work with.  And so philosophically stupid are they that they don't understand that every single thing they come up with will, as the product of their intelligent design, only demonstrate that such things CAN HAPPEN BY INTELLIGENT DESIGN.  They are incapable of demonstrating that such results could not be had without what they had to use to get it, INTELLIGENT DESIGN.  For that they would need to have seen it happen and they never can.  And even that would not prove that what they saw, and they would see what had never been seen by scientists before, did not happen through the intention of God.

They should require science majors to take rigorous courses in philosophical reasoning with special emphasis on its relation to science because so many of them are so clueless about even what they are doing.  Try getting a uniform definition of natural selection, you won't.  I doubt you could get a close to uniform listing of "the scientific method" from such scientists who reject the requirements of observation of what they claim to study.  Maybe they could understand that they've tried to extend scientific method way past where it could possibly go and the results are predictably unstable, even natural selection requiring constant patching and maintenance and, now, being insisted on as something like allegiance to the articles of Anglicanism used to be insisted on to teach at Oxford.  Irony is the constant companion of hypocrisy.

 De-Nazify The Secret Service

Explaning My Fragmented Life

INCREASINGLY over the last two decades I've discouraged more and more people from considering a career in music.  As a music teacher that's kind of like a butcher encouraging his customers to go vegan.  I have tried to talk several young people out of majoring in music, telling them they should only do it if a. they intended to major in Music Ed. in which case they have a chance at paid employment with benefits or, b. they absolutely couldn't stand not doing something else that would keep them from falling into musician destitution.  Trying to make a living as a private music teacher has become much harder than it used to be, few parents are willing to make their kids take lessons and practice (few used to insist on that, which is OK, I always figured it was their choice).

Unless lightning strikes and you're one of the few who hit it big, being a musician is a very bad job - not the job itself, the pay and the conditions and the total lack of benefits.   It is, for most of us, a guarantee of a bare-bones existence, with little to no security, constant struggles to get paid even what was agreed to, precarious health and dental care and, as you get older it only gets worse.  I know very few musicians who aren't faculty members who have all of their teeth.

I used to tell people I was a musician because it was cheaper and more effective than going to see a shrink, which is how it often functioned in my life.  Though I think a lot of the anxiety I suffered for was due to not having a reliable income and things like dental insurance.  I think I'd probably have been better off if I'd taken a permanent day-job that might have provided those things and kept the music as a private life - it would have taken another life to do it.  

All of this is by way of explaining what's been going on with me, a couple of health scares, one which, at least for now, is not the fatal condition I was led to expect late this spring, the other minor but pressing.  That along with having to take care of family responsibilities (an ailing, failing sibling who needs help) and having to rely on food I grow or gather (never seen so many blueberries as we have this year, at least something's good) not only for myself but for said sibling.  I'm certainly hoping to get back to something like the schedule I used to keep here.  I might try experimenting with posting three pieces a week, maybe more finished writing.  But even that is uncertain.  

Sorry for not writing, writing could have turned into a bad habit like music did, only sometimes people pay people to write.  Though the scribbling for pay business has certainly taken a hit with the demise of newspapers.  I'm habitually impractical, I guess.   I should have gone into non-profit management.  See what I mean? 

Don't feel sorry for me, I made his soup myself.  I'm just giving you an explanation and maybe a warning.

There Is Nothing Pie In The Sky About The Gospel, They're Always Eating And Worrying About Where The Next Meal Is Coming From

ONE OF THE THINGS which I value the most about Christianity is how down to Earth it is among those whose condition renders them the least among us.  Jesus, the central figure of Christianity is from the lowest class of laborers in the Roman and wider classical Mediterranean  world.  He doesn't rise higher as in an Horatio Alger story,  if anything he sinks lower in that he becomes a vagabond preacher of an order that actively opposes the higher and mightier and even the more reputable and is never far from a condition of destitution.  What Terry Eagleton called "a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents."   His close followers are reduced to picking heads of grain and eating them while passing by a field, often worrying about how they were going to feed themselves and those who followed Jesus. Often relying on the hospitality of, sometimes, less than reputable people who have a fixed address.  

Mary McClone's always worth while comments on the readings of the day are especially good and insightful, I'm going to risk going over a large part of it.

Why do we have such bitter disagreements about the Eucharist, over who should celebrate and who can receive? Are we betraying Christ? Perhaps. If it's any comfort, this is nothing new. St. Paul himself warned the Corinthians that their eucharistic celebrations did them more harm than good and that discrimination at the Communion table gave them membership in the company of those who crucified Christ (1 Corinthians 11:17-33). 

She, of course, is commenting on things like the Archbishop of San Francisco publicly humiliating Nancy Pelosi by barring her from receiving communion in his realm.  The common practice among the princes of the church who are largely political hacks in the United States.  That it is a male in a rampantly misogynistic hierarchy banning the most highly positioned Woman in the history of the United States government from the common meal is certainly relevant to any accurate understanding of what's going on and what it means.  And that is relevant to today's readings as Mary McClone masterfully connects.

Notice, in light of what follows, in today's hierarchy, it's a male bishop refusing bread to a woman.  Bread probably made by women.

The Martha and Mary story we hear today has been variously interpreted as a sign of women's discipleship, an affirmation of the value of the contemplative over the active life, as a critique of excessive busyness in the ministry, and — just about anything else you want to suggest.

Those who designed our lectionary placed this story in dialogue with that of Abraham, Sarah and their visitors. In that story, the Lord appeared to Abraham in the guise of three men. Abraham, the welcoming host, could hardly have gone further overboard in ordering their meal. The three measures of flour Sarah kneaded added up to about 60 pounds — before adding water. The steer, of course, was heavier — around 1,200 or 1,300 pounds. With those quantities, we might imagine that Abraham dug a swimming pool where they could bathe their feet!

Obviously, this story highlights Abraham's hospitality. . . 

It is certainly provocative to interpret the story as God taking the form of three persons though I think given the text, that's not an outlandish conclusion to be drawn to. That such a reading could be taken as supporting a trinitarian conception of God is what it is and,  I don't think beyond the pale. 

The key importance of hospitality in what is called the history of salvation, the act that sets the creation of  the People central to the entire book is something that affluent and even blue collar people, today, might not get as well as those who live in destitution or close to it.  The implication that God might need our hospitality is interesting to think about - any consideration of God impinging on human society certainly is done through human agency, acts which cannot be unrelated to faith, another provocation from a different emphasis.

Our lectionary relegates the rest of the story, Sarah's astounded and delighted laughter at the visitor's outlandish promise that she would bear a son, to be heard every other year on a Saturday.

Those who put together lectionaries seem to have a habit of marginalizing the central part that Women play in the key elements of religion.  The fact that the Gospels show Jesus commissioning Mary of Magdala to preach to the men has been similarly relegated to a little noticed weekday in the cycle in the United States.  Which is relevant to consider in McClone's commentary.

With the legend of Abraham as a background and the good Samaritan as its immediate Gospel predecessor, we hear of Jesus' visit to Martha and Mary. These sisters appear here and in John 12 as Jesus' friends and disciples.

As Luke tells the story, Martha appears to be the head of the household, the one who welcomed Jesus into their home. Then, as she goes about working, Mary sits in the position of a disciple at Jesus' feet.

Both Martha and Mary were stepping outside a woman's traditional role. In a home where there is no mention of a man — Luke mentions neither brother nor husband — Martha acts as the hostess, an alternative version of the hospitable Abraham. Then, while Martha works like Sarah, Mary takes the Abrahamic role of accompanying and listening to Jesus.

Martha asked Jesus to intervene because the work (daikoneo) was left to her while Mary took in Jesus' word (logos).

This story is unique to the Gospel of Luke. Its closest parallel in the New Testament comes from Acts 6, where we hear that as the number of disciples grew, the community chose seven "deacons," to do table service, freeing the apostolic leaders to preach the word.

Understanding the connection that Luke makes between the two incidents, we realize that he may be describing Martha's service as akin to that of a deacon. The community needed some to serve as hosts at the table doing diakoneo, leaving others free to be itinerant preachers of the word (logos).

As we listen to this story, we should realize that although our translation says that Mary chose the "better," Luke quoted Jesus as saying, "Mary has chosen the good part." After the story of the good Samaritan, it would seem unthinkable to suggest that preaching or studying the word takes absolute priority over direct service.

That tension between listening to Jesus and feeding Jesus is worth considering more seriously than it usually is by white-collar (so to speak) professionals of the type that liturgists and such who write up lectionaries and preach sermons and write rules are apt to consider them.  I think it's certain that the fact that until very recently none and even now very few of those who do that are Women is relevant.  And in the Catholic church, with the controversy over whether or not Women are going to be restored to the office of Deacon, this is also a subtext to the critique. 

I will interject that the other day someone told me of an ex-husband who revived a fifty-four year old story about his then young wife, who was also a working college student and a new mother at the time, not keeping their apartment clean and getting into trouble with the land lord for having a messy place, it occurred to no one to ask him why he didn't do some of the housework.  Certainly not then and not today in how I was told about it.

We should notice that in this story, both Martha and Mary step out of women's traditional roles. Martha's service is described as literally diaconal; she was serving like Jesus served. (See Luke 22:26-27.) Mary was sitting at the feet of her rabbi, a physical position and communal role traditionally restricted to men.

Perhaps the deepest conflict reflected here is not the difference between the sisters but the consternation of a community trying to adjust as Christian women assumed previously restricted roles of religious leadership.

To some extent I think you can extend that certainly important meaning behind the story to the general downgrading of what is considered menial labor, such as doing normal everyday things like what Sarah and Martha did which is not valued as highly as mental activity by so many.   Mary McClone points out that given the story's relationship to Jesus's parable of The Good Samaritan and the productive noticing the original meaning of the Greek being that Mary had taken the "good part" and not the "better part" and the "Good Samaritan" being good because of his physically expressing his love of a stranger, and relating that to the lectionary reading of Abraham's hospitality (his wife doing the labor of cooking) provides some very good things for consideration.   I'll point out that to conventional Christianity, what Sarah and Martha were doing was feeding God, giving God what God needed (to put it in human terms, which is all we can do or understand) to get on with creation.  

Update:  I've decided I should include the next paragraph of the commentary, in case some don't read the entire thing at the link because it is so important, especially in light of the Communion wars the US Catholic Conference of Bishops is waging against Democratic politicians and others.

In reality, almost any time that Jesus was a guest or shared a meal, conflict came to the table. He consistently stretched accepted limits. Jesus scandalized many of his contemporaries because he ignored rules that restricted anyone's full participation in God's reign. According to Jesus, that reign resembles a banquet as lavish as the spread Abraham offered his guests and remains open to anyone who desires it, no matter their social or religious status.