The Bizarre Intersections of Right-Wing Religion, Body Builders, Woman Abusers And Popular Atheists - Two Pieces

HAVING WRITTEN A response to a piece of hate mail the other day, I decided I probably wouldn't post it but this morning this piece about the interview the misogynist media bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota with an actor I'd never heard of before, Shia LeBeouf, which discusses the psycho-misogyinist masculinity as muscular Catholic integralism is the topic.  I'd thought that Pope Francis appointing the media darling Barron to what is a rather out of the way bishopric might mute his media presence and tone down his masculinity obsessed media operation (he's got a real thing about hiring body-builders who have lots of issues and get into trouble) but apparently not.  The Bish's got issues.

The hour-and-a-half conversation between actor Shia LaBeouf and Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, lasts only seven minutes before the tension surrounding the Latin Mass comes up.

While the motive of the interview is primarily to discuss LaBeouf's portrayal of the titular saint in the forthcoming feature film "Padre Pio", the major revelation of the dialogue is LaBeouf's conversion to Catholicism, which is first brought to light through the discussion of, essentially, the role of the secret within the sacred as it pertains to differences between the Catholic liturgy's ordinary and extraordinary forms.

LaBeouf's own words praising the Latin Mass are, for lack of understanding Latin: "I can't argue the word, because I don't know what the word means, so I'm just left with this feeling." Barron himself brings up that a secondary purpose of incense at Mass is that it obscures the action in the sanctuary.

"I don't know what the word means, so I'm just left with this feeling."  is actually a good summation as to what was so bad about the Latin Mass in the period after almost everyone except the ordained clergy (Women religious were not typically taught Latin for most of the history of Catholicism) understood what was going on.  It was useless for much more than giving vague or often pathologically twisted feelings.  Much, though not all, of the Protestant critique of that is far more valid than anything the Latin nostalgics have to say about it.   If they want a feeling without understanding, what else do they make crappy religio-sentimentalistic Hallmark equivalent movies for?   His religion doesn't even get to the levels of the cloying Going My Way or the Bells of St. Mary's.   Clearly both LeBeouf's and Barron's Catholicism has more in common with a Chick Publications style idea of The Book of Revelations.

LaBeouf also says, before his conversion, he did not initially feel compelled to have a relationship with Jesus because he only knew the "soft, fragile, all-loving, all-listening but no ferocity … meek" Jesus (Barron immediately offers the word "feminized"), and it was only when LaBeouf encountered what he considered to be "masculine" — "cape, dipped in blood, sword" — that Jesus felt "appealing."

We should be concerned about anyone who finds the Gospel most compelling in its violence or who is put off by the femininity of Jesus. If we are to understand Jesus as the savior of all, we must embrace his full divinity that has no gender, and we must confidently identify the goodness of both the masculine and feminine in the incarnation.

Throughout the interview, LaBeouf cites a number of tropes and returns to them often: cowboys, cavemen and gangsters. He repeatedly expresses gratitude for the men who accompanied him and "masculinized" his journey, "the hero's journey."

LaBeouf also discloses the heart of this pull to the masculine: He is drawn to those who treat him in a fatherly or grandfatherly way, and he is lonesome for friends. He finds all of these things in the Catholic world.

Someone's been watching too much Joseph Campbell.  I have more than just a suspicion that both the Bish and the guy who works in makeup and make believe have a conception of Catholicism which has little to no use for those who Jesus put at the center of his ministry,  perhaps their devotion of a liturgy in a language which the either understood not at all or not very well has something to do with that.  I have to say, every time I dip into the activities of Robert Barron I'm left without many good feelings and in the Latin mass cult of today's American Catholic-fascism, I've developed an almost Protestant level of hostility toward it, which is too bad because I really do love medieval and renaissance Latin language religious music.  

I'll leave it to you to read the rest of the disturbing article, here's what I have held back posting. 

 "Irish Catholic Fundamentalist" - Hate Mail

IN THE RECENT PACKING AND UNPACKING of my books, due to my moving to and back from my very little house, I can't find the book in which was noted that Biblical fundamentalism as an organized movement in Protestantism was intimately tied in with the 18th-to today Scottish "common sense" school of philosophy, which started that delusion called "the enlightenment."  If that is correct it is ironic because most of that so-called "enlightenment" thought was and is quite opposed to Christianity and religion in the atheist-materialist branch of that fashion which so influenced the framing of the U.S. Constitution.  The idea that you could just read the enormously complex, enormously varied, Scriptures, the product of an extremely long, very complex history and many, often not agreeing minds, many of them entirely unknowable to us as if it were a simple work of 18th century expository writing by a single author is and always has been ridiculous.  In the long history of serious consideration of Scripture in Christianity, it has often been considered to be extremely complex.  Even in the understanding of Scripture which I have gotten, mostly from Walter Brueggemann who notes that all of it revolves around the liberation of The Children of Israel from slavery, notes how extremely complex it is.

The idea it could be read in a "common sense" manner is so ridiculous that even some of those who were considered part of the "enlightenment" commented on the complexity of the least opaque and complex part of Scriptures, created in a very condensed period of time among a relatively related group of writers, the New Testament.*  The complexity of it was one of the things that the anti-Christian side of the "enlightenment" used as an argument against it, though they certainly didn't find that a problem with other things which were complex and far less productive of good like the English Common Law.  

Always beware of hidden motives and intents when people want to make such appeals to simplicity and "common sense."  I will set aside the temptation to go into a diatribe about Thomas Paine and the demonstrable lack of "common sense" in his biography at this point.  Scribbling is so much easier than living.

"Fundamentalist" is one of those words which began with a fairly limited range of meaning, in terms of Biblical fundamentalism, it named those Protestant denominations and individuals who signed on to a rigid, bigoted, and pretty awful set of claims published as The Fundamentals.  Unfortunately, largely at  the hands of some academics writing secondary, tertiary, etc. stuff about conservative Protestantism, the actual meaning of the word was expanded and distorted, often quite wrongly.  I would guess that it was from them that it filtered through those in "journalism" and even more popular writing and babbling, they having learned the word, first, from those secondary (etc.) sources and having further generalized its use into no more than something for "fundamentalists" to say yea to and those who didn't like conservative Christianity or real Christainty to slam.  It's expansion to cover Islam and Judaism and other things totally unrelated to any religious scripture reached the point where Stephen Jay Gould (from who I got it) talked of the pseudo-scientific fad of the 1970s-today of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as "Darwinian fundamentalism."   I've used that term quite a lot so, you see, I'm as much a sinner as anyone.  The inability of People to live up to their most definite professions is one of the reasons we should all practice mercy to others, they might get into the habit and return it on us.  But don't count on that as a sure thing.

I have gotten some use of the original meaning of the word when I mock people who talk about "Catholic fundamentalists" as you did because if there's one thing that is characteristic of The Fundamentals and many of those who pledged allegiance to that mock-scripture, it is its vicious anti-Catholicism.  The now billionaire-astro-turf bull shit of "traditional Catholicism" is more related to a particularly awful early 20th century phenomenon of "integralism" among right-wing Catholics.  It is now a neo-fascist-capitalist cult which, like all "Christianity" that makes common cause with the rich and hateful, has no real dedication to the Gospel, the Law or the Prophets, it has little to nothing to do with Scripture at all but feeds off of the detritus of the worst period of Catholic history when the Papacy and many local bishops held medieval type power in kingdoms of this world and alligned themselves with the degenerate feudal rulers of kingdoms of the Earth who, likewise, never intended to follow the teachings of Jesus, the Law or the Prophets. Though a lot of it is even more in line with the putrid cabloid network of "Mother Angelica" or, as I called her, "that Nazi-nun" and its cloying nostalgia for a Hollywood "religious picture" conception of what Catholicism is supposed to all be about.  Bing Crosby or Spencer Tracy playing a priest always made me gag.  They hate Francis because he thinks Catholicism should be about the Gospel, Acts and the Epistles.

There is nothing more radical than the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets a close second to that in a graph of radicalism.  And, with what has been done to the word "radical" I have to stipulate that as radical in a good way.

* It's telling how many of the atheist-fundamentalists insist that that the Fundamentalist style of Scripture reading is the only valid way to read them.  Of course, that's because "Fundamentalism" turns God into a series of idols which are easy to knock down in argument. The reason that reading so much of the pop-atheist lit reveals how shallow it is. Perhaps since the "common sense" philosophical school is intimately tied in with the extension of the method of science into an ideological framing of reality and its morally catastrophic results, that isn't any big surprise. I think modern atheism in the European style, especially the Brit-English-Language style is as much a product of that simplistic methodology of "common sense" philosophy as Biblical fundamentalism is.  Given enough time I might relate that to the degeneracy that pseudo-science and academia fell into in the "enlightenment" imposition of scientism as the only respectable intellectual position and its invasion of popular culture among the mid-brow, college-credentialed population, the ones who so futilely war with the "fundamentalists" who certainly have had a far greater success in terms of politics and influence.   

It's remarkable how dumbing stuff down is so much a part of that "enlightenment."  And if there's one thing that might be a truism, stupid sells when you scrap moral responsibility.

A Classic Example Of Why Ranked Choice Voting Is A Better Deal For The Majority Of Voters Of All Parties

AMERICAN APARTHEID future Presidential candidate Tom Cotton has been trying to make hay over the Alaskan election which the Democrat Mary Peltola won over the putrid carny show spectacle candidate of the kind Republican-fascists have been putting so much stock in, Sarah Palin, whining that a majority of those in the election voted for a Republican but the Democrat who "lost" will take the seat.

What happened under the great practice of ranked-choice voting is that the last choice of a majority, of those who voted for Peltola and for Nick Begich, the one who placed third would rather have had Peltola than the concussed Palin in Congress.

What happens in ranked-choice is that the majorities least favorite candidate loses,  which is certainly better than the majority having their least favorite candidate take office.  That is something that an American apartheid creep like Cotton can't live with because, given a choice to avoid the worst, most voters will opt for their second choice over the worst and Tom Cotton's Republican Part is the worst that wants the worst.  

I am certain that the second choice of those who voted for Mary Pelota put Begich as their second choice.  Though its conceivable some of them might have opted for the insane clown Palin.  A dangerous number of Alaskan voters seems to have wanted to send her to Washington to "represent" them.  Though she certainly would not have represented anyone but a small minority of the rich and corrupt, a  dangerous percentage of American voters are either too stupid or too full of hate to vote even their own best interest and ranked choice voting protects most of us from them and their gullibility.   Would that the damned Maine Supreme Court and the stupid Maine State Constitution had allowed us to have it in the election of the Maine governor because we are in real danger of having  the hating-stupid minority put Paul LePage back in office next year.

Rejecting "nostalgia for a sacralized world, a bygone society" As Well As "Secularism" As A Requirement Outside Of Governmental Administration

A BUSY DAY for me so I'll leave you with this passage from a piece by Michael Sean Winters which contains an excellent passage from Pope Francis on the difference between secularization and secularism which is certainly a useful refinement of ideas I've been giving in a cruder form.

The Spirit of God is at work not only in the lives of the faithful, but beyond the walls of the church as well. This is one of the Holy Father's most provocative and important themes, one he touched on in his address to the bishops, clergy and religious of Quebec. There, building on quotes from Pope Paul VI, he said:

    "Saint Paul VI distinguished secularization from secularism, a concept of life that totally separates a link with the Creator, so that God becomes "superfluous and an encumbrance", and generates subtle and diverse "new forms of atheism": "consumer society, the pursuit of pleasure set up as the supreme value, a desire for power and domination, and discrimination of every kind" (ibid). As Church, and above all as shepherds of God's People, as consecrated men and women, seminarians and pastoral workers, it is up to us to make these distinctions, to make this discernment. If we yield to the negative view and judge matters superficially, we risk sending the wrong message, as though the criticism of secularization masks on our part the nostalgia for a sacralized world, a bygone society in which the Church and her ministers had greater power and social relevance."

Instead of wringing our hands about the secularization of the ambient culture, a process that has been ongoing for centuries, Pope Francis invites us to accompany those outside the church, mindful that the Spirit is at work in their lives too, that our Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation demands we stipulate that God is at work in their lives.

I've made a cruder distinction between secularism as an entirely necessary formal practice within governments in an egalitarian democratic pluralistic country and the kind of cultural atheism that that secularism has been opportunistically distorted into and demanded by those who hate religion and, most of all, Christianity.  I think the distinction that Pope Francis and Paul VI made is compatible with the one I made, though it contains some important nuances missing from my idea of it.   I will note who Francis lays that responsibility on, the clergy and religious most of all.  I think a political blogger should try to, as well.

Christian Nationalism Is Not Christian And Why The Worship Of The Past Is Dangerous

THE SHORT ARTICLE, Why Christian nationalism is unchristian by Thomas Reese, SJ, a Jesuit, had a quote from a letter from John Adams I found interesting to think about, I'll give you the setting of it because it is relevant to things I posted recently.

Today, many Americans embrace Christian nationalism, arguing that the founders of our republic were Christians and they meant us to be a Christian nation. While it is historically true that most of our founding fathers were Christians, it is also true that they wanted a secular government, free of religion. They had seen how uniting politics and religion in Europe led to religious persecutions and wars. These wars and persecutions led many to flee Europe for America. The founders wanted a government that would treat people of all faiths equally.

For John Adams, that meant even allowing the Jesuits asylum.

"I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits," he wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1816. "Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gypsies can assume, dressed as printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters? If ever there was a body of men who merited damnation on earth and in Hell, it is this society of Loyola's. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum."  

I would like to know more about just what John Adams knew or believed he knew about the Jesuits and whether or not it had a factual basis in the activities of the Jesuits.  Since the article that quotes it, positively, was written by a Jesuit, it would be interesting to know what Reese knows about that. Considering the Protestant religious establishment by that time in Massachusetts, a state which Adams was deeply involved in, included from more than a century earlier, Protestant "printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters" it was pretty rich of him to say that as if it was sinister. Considering Harvard University which Adams and his children were educated at was founded by ministers of religion, he certainly should have seen the illiberal hypocrisy of his statement. And the Calvinist-Congregationalist complex in Massachusetts was matched with other Protestant establishments, including actually tax-payer establishment of religion even after the adoption of the Constitution.  We're still years seventeen years away from disestablishment in Massachusetts and more than several of the several states. It is especially rich considering if you translate that into the terms of a few centuries before, you would pretty much describe the entire means by which learning and education happened everywhere in the Western world, no doubt things which both Adams and Jefferson would have considered some of the actual best things about European culture.  I would also want to know what actual knowledge of "gypsies" Adams had to include them in his accusations.  And among the "founders" John Adams was among the most generously liberal in his point of view. John Jay certainly wasn't so liberally inclined toward Catholics, having been among those in the Continental Congress to more or less call for measures that would ban Catholics from having full citizenship.  

I think a lot of the animus toward the Jesuits tended to come from the fact that they tend to be very well educated and well trained at argument and debate.  Something you'd think a lawyer like Adams would be expected to admire.  Though I'd be ready to say there have been some really awful Jesuits and still are, just like any other category of human beings.

The article goes on in a way that fits right in with what I said about the discrepancy between the Golden Rule and the U.S. government as it is, my contention that Republican-fascism with its large "Christian nationalist" contingent is an appendage of the Mammonist anti-Christ.

Christian nationalism is also wrong theologically. True, as Christians we should love our country, but Jesus tells us that we must love everyone as our brothers and sisters, even those of other creeds. This includes our fellow citizens and those of other nations.

We cannot ignore the poverty, hunger and sickness that afflict people outside our country. We cannot ignore violations of human rights and the rights of workers that provide us with cheap goods from abroad. We cannot ignore global warming because we have air conditioning. We cannot ignore exploitation of the environment because it is not in our neighborhood.

As Christians we cannot turn our backs on refugees from Haiti, Africa, Mexico and Central America. All are our brothers and sisters.

I'd start by noting that by the time Adams wrote his letter, the man he wrote it to, Thomas Jefferson had begun the long campaign against Hatian democracy which has blighted what might have been a far more successful Black republic than that oppressed country has been. Jefferson certainly thwarting that because he and his fellow slave-holders would not want that as an example to those African-Americans they held in slavery here.  The legacy of that effort in all of the other places mentioned by Reese would take a library to document and comment on, as well as the treatment of People of Color and other minorities in the United States.  A pattern that would be repeated over and over as Latin American and Central American countries gained their independence and American slave owners dreamed of conquering them as a means of extending U.S. slavery to its ultimate protection and which has as recently as the Reagan and Bush I administrations characterized American foreign policy toward Central America. Those policies of the 1980s driving, among other things, the violence and economic crises that drive illegal immigration into the United States, you would require another vast library to document that.  The subsequent 19th and early 20th century history of, at times, violent hatred of Catholics would take a much smaller libarary but the matter was hardly settled by the time of Adams' 1816 letter. Anti-Catholicism was a serious factor in American politics in that period up to and including the election of Kennedy and, today, in a far more muted way, Joe Biden.

More generally consider the first sentence in the passage, "Today, many Americans embrace Christian nationalism, arguing that the founders of our republic were Christians and they meant us to be a Christian nation."  

I have to ask why what those often racist, often bigoted, often far from honest or entirely wise and certainly entirely inexperienced in 21st century life dead white men wanted should be of any more concern to us today than what a far wider group of Americans wanted in 1964 and 1965 in the high point Congressional egalitarian democracy was reached.  Why should what they wanted concern us any more than the enormous number of Americans who voted for Joe Biden and his campaign's stated intentions?  Any election ratifying the Constitution, those who elected the Congress and legislatures which adopted the Bill of Rights was no more a valid expression of the popular will of the American People than the far more inclusive election that overturned Trumpian fascism by putting Joe Biden in office.  If looked at objectively, the elections of the late 18th and early 19th centuries don't pass any kind of honest evaluation as an expression of the will of the American People.

A similar attitude among areligious or even anti-religious, devoted secularists among liberal or even lefties who hold themselves up as the biggest most devoted devotees of the Constitution is even more baffling.  Idolatry among those who are largely members of heretical pseudo-Christian cults such as abound among Republican-fascists might be more understandable then those who believe that all that remains of those long dead founding fathers is their constituent molecules who proclaim a similar form of idolatry.  I think that Luke Timothy Johnson's theory that the creation of idols is a intrinsic aspect of human thinking has some merit, something which even those who believe themselves to be materialist-atheist-scientific stalwarts inevitably and cluelessly do, something which it is a moral obligation of religious people to always review their thinking for.

Many more Americans of vastly different backgrounds and identities wanted what Joe Biden advocated, not much of what the white, exclusively male, almost exclusively Protestant, exclusively rich aristocrats who met in 1787 in Philadelpha wanted. Certainly Women and People of Color didn't want much of that.  It is absolutely bizarre that so many of us hold as an unquestionable article of faith that that group of most certainly non-democratically chosen rich white guys wanted MUST govern us today when none of them have wanted anything for a long time due to having been dead two centuries.  The way the Constitutional Convention was filled is everything from obviously not the choice of more than a tiny fraction of the population to even shadier than that should be more widely known. The popular conception of that today is about as dangerous a superstition as has ever been the focus of a mass delusion.  As I've said before the presence of a Hollywood-TV series conception of "1776" and junk like the Gadsden flag at American fascist rallies and the January 6th insurrection is more than just a symptom of that, those trappings of current American-fascism really expose the basis of the danger in that mystico-historical superstition.  

Now, that's something Adams might have taken as a serious danger to the country, it certainly worked out that way.  Other than running a number of the elite prep-Ivy Equivalent institutions which join the Harvards and Yales of post-Protestant Ivy elite education, credentialing the high end and not a little of the lowest end of establishment fascists (Cruz, Hawley, Kavanaugh, Alito, Roberts, etc.) lots of other Jesuits have been quite radical egalitarian democrats, far outdoing Adam's friends Jefferson and Madison in that regard.  And it is something which is the excuse for the Republican-fascists on the Roberts Court to overturn all of the progress of not only the civil rights struggles of the post-WWII period but even going back far into the 19th century.  

In contradiction to Adams, I remember the fine Congressman, the late Fr. Robert Drinan SJ OF MASSACHUSETTS with enormous respect, especially his notable calls for equality and justice in American foreign policy and in the United States.  I suspect his election in Adam's old stomping grounds would have made him turn over in his grave.   I should mention that after Pope JPII forced him to retire from electoral politics, Fr. Drinan taught at one of those Jesuit universities I've been most critical of, Georgetown.  Which doesn't much decrease my esteem for his memory though I'd never turn him into an idol.

 

Galileo Must Weep When He Sees What They Did To His Philosophy - Yeah, more of that

ONE OF THE MOST important events in my late-life reconversion to religion and guarded confidence in human reason was reading the statement of a Rabbi whose name I wish I remembered that "reality is real."  It was a response to some, probably, pop-Buddhist assertions but reading it it put into an aphorism kind of woke me up.  Having always realized that materialism was a road to complete nonsense, I might have gotten here by another route but reading that phrase put a lot of things together for me and led me out of the absurd and cowardly agnosticism I'd been stuck in.  

Another step was reading the atheist and early computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum who noted that all knowledge, even that of mathematics was, in the end, dependent on persuasion, on the choice to believe in early childhood what we go on to consider the basis of knowledge.*  Arthur Stanley Eddington's observation that the direct experience of our own consciousness is the primal educational act in our lives, all else being inference based on that may have completed the basis for most of what I've thought since I was in my early 50s.  

Mentioning eliminative materialism the other day, it is, actually, about the nadir of academic intellectualism in service to ideological scientism, as decadent as could possibly be imagined.  Since you don't seem to know what that is, here.

Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all [underlining by me] of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist and have no role to play in a mature science of the mind. Descartes famously challenged much of what we take for granted, but he insisted that, for the most part, we can be confident about the content of our own minds. Eliminative materialists go further than Descartes on this point, since they challenge the existence of various mental states that Descartes took for granted.

I will say in passing that it eliminates much of what one of the founders of modern science based his scientific philosophy on is significant in appreciating the decadent degeneracy of that ideological production.

That it is held as a respectable intellectual stance in modern universities, expensive, tax-exempted or supported educational institutions supposedly dedicated to the cultivation and elevation of and educations of the very minds that eliminative materialism wants to dismiss as either insignificant or really existing at all, should be held as discrediting them as honest brokers.  It is an intellectual position that means that the very activity of the university is meaningless, INCLUDING WHAT IS DONE IN THEIR SCHOOLS OF SCIENCE, THE VERY CLAIMED INTELLECTUAL BASIS OF ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM,  it sort of takes the cake in terms of intellectual absurdity.  Yet the holders of that position are well paid, even honored faculty members in some of our best universities and regularly presented in both academia and the media as having an honorable, even favored intellectual position.  Always suspect that behind a pose of respectability in such instances, there will only be more pose based on appearances. I attribute a lot of that to the gross ignorance of science among the college-credentialed who run those things.  Including many of those employed in those schools of alleged science who are, as well, philosophically inept.

You would have to give me a lot of evidence to convince me that anything in the most benighted aspects of medieval universities could begin to match it for the most absolute of intellectual decadence right now in the alleged enlightenment, modern period.  Materialism is the most absurd ideology which could only possibly be true if it were false, it is always bound to produce decadence.  Being amoral, empowered in human history, it produces oppressive violent amorality, whether fascist, national-socialist or Marxist or capitalist.  

And it is, actually, an intellectual position born of that displacement of the merely methodological rules of science done to observe and describe the motions of planets, later smaller objects, still later atoms and  their combination into molecules and, much later, subatomic particles, from being a method that isolated what was needed to efficiently describe those limited aspects of them, a displacement of that methodological efficiency into an all-encompassing ideology that claimed those methods, or, rather, what was increasingly turned into a parody of it was an all-encompassing explanatory framing that could not only explain everything but to also exclude from existence anything it could not explain.  Human consciousness escaping the nets of the methodology of science, it had to go even as the pseudo-scientific extension of that parodistic "methodology" in psychology and, even more irrationally, ethology, was a profitable business in university "science".  When you call it "science" it is granted a presumption of validity that even its history of catastrophic failure disguises for purposes of funding and mendacious utility to power.  If Galileo had foreseen his tool for seeing and describing the moons of Jupiter would be turned into an all-encompassing hegemonic ideology pretending to see what cannot be seen (even that producing some of the least valid and durable of any "science," though treated as if it were classical physics) and dismissing what it couldn't, of the sort science has been distorted into in the subsequent period, I am certain he would have been appalled.  

If you don't come up with something that says why that position and the several rest-areas of modern pseudo-science and modern degenerate philosophy in their way to it follows the actual methodology of science or why institutions that are allegedly in the business of elevating and improving what those degrade into a deterministic meaninglessness or non-existence, human minds, are not benightedly degenerate and, worse, dishonest, you got nuthin'.  

* The pretense that there is a hard line between what is believed and what is known is an illusion, as many of the imaginary bright lines dividing up our mental lives are.  Another of those is the idea that sincere belief is something that happens involuntarily to us which is unrelated to an act of choice, that what we "choose to believe" is different than what "we really believe." I think agnosticism is related to a choice to believe that what we "know" is some kind of natural process which has no element of volition involved, that it just happens without our intention being involved.  I think that is a delusion based in something like the choice to believe scientific methodology is an all encompassing tool for determining everything.  When you hear that said by someone like Bertrand Russell who certainly knew his scientism was intellectually unsupportable, the power of that elite delusion on some of the most acute of minds is quite impressive.
 
Update: The biologist and champion of classical scientific method, Rupert Sheldrake's challenge to debate the Harvard CSI(COP) champion of ideological pseudo-science, Steven Pinker, is worth reading in regard to the trashing of honest intellectualism and even scientific method by the "science" faculties of our most esteemed universities.

Someone Doesn't Like Me Calling America's Indigenous Tradition of Fascism What It Is

I'd Rather Live Under A Government Imperfectly Based On The Golden Rule Than Under Any Modern, Pseudo-Scientific Constitution - Hate Mail

I FEEL LIKE I HAVE gotten someplace with the idea that the scientism of modern thought following the merely clerical choice to exclude questions of moral responsibility as the equal if not the absolute prerequisite for wisdom and "rights" to assume the character of goodness and virtue instead of the characteristics of evil and harm, is one of the most serious of ways in which things have gone to hell.  

The scientific exclusion of moral responsibility is something that works well when you're talking about unconscious objects in space* which exhibit no understanding of moral responsibility or the value of consequences or even an ability to choose a different outcome, using that merely clerical exclusion and making up laws to describe their movements and combinations with other objects, laws which work very well, but an exclusion which doesn't work at all when you're trying to make laws to produce a decent, sustainable life among human beings which are far more complex and likely not ever susceptible to the successful making of similar laws.  

The elision of moral responsibility in science when it was taken as an ideological framing of reality has dangerously distorted modernism into something which cannot sustain a decent life and, in its worst manifestation, never had that intention to start with.  And many if not most of those who framed the American Constitution, at least in principle, did adopt that 18th century materialistic superstition.

I have been opposing that with the assertion that the formula of The Golden Rule is actually a sounder framing for creating a governing egalitarian democracy and a far more decent society, it seems to me that idea has a lot more potential for doing that than any of the approved theories of modern, academically authorized, pseudo-scientific political "science" or economic theories.   It should certainly not be an objectionable idea to those who profess one of the Abrahamic religions, as it is central to the moral holdings of all of their Scriptures and, since it is one of the long-standing and totally irrational barroom style atheists' refutation of Christianity that something similar has far more universal presence in different religio-philosophical traditions,** should be acceptable to the human population far beyond those of the Abrahamic faiths.

The extent to which "white evangelicals" hold with "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," in all aspects of politics and the law is the extent to which they are not Mammonist hypocrites, servants of the anti-Christ.  

It should certainly not be objectionable to anyone who wants others to do to them as those others would want them to do to them, which is, of course, anyone who is not pathologically masochistic.  What most people don't like is the reciprocal obligation that they do the same.  

While no one who tries to do that to others can be responsible for making more than their end of it happen, civil law can be written to require it of those who are reluctant or unwilling to or, in the end, refuse to do so.  Of course when those enlightenment 18th century figures. all white-men of property, most of whom were financiers or slave-holders, who wrote the Constitution and adopted the bill of rights were making the Constitution, they had absolutely no intention of holding up their end of the bargain, so they limited who they were required to do unto in that way and excluded all of those they certainly didn't intend to do right to.  That is absolutely clear in the language of the Constitution, the anti-democratic corruptions baked into it and still present, the permissions for courts and, especially Supreme Courts to go hog-wild in extending inequality.  I think the history of the "enlightenment" and pretty much the entire modern period could be written in the rejection of the Golden Rule on the basis of science and instrumental reasoning.  Of course, you could write the history of the entire medieval period on a similar theme, a theme that goes back in Western history to the treatment of the Children of Israel under the genocidal oppression of Pharaoh.  The "historical" books and the books of Prophesy contemplate the problems that come from refusing to do so and the refusal of those who rule the egalitarian reciprocation of that as a legal obligation.  

The campaign to discredit Christianity and, to some extent, Judaism and religion in general in the modern period is an attack on egalitarian democracy because that has been the foremost source of an effective assertion of that moral basis for egalitarian democracy.  The source which has had the greatest part in producing whatever success there has been in making something in that direction the law of the United States and other countries.  And I think that the source of that discrediting in either the economic elites and their scribes in academia and, even more so, entertainment writing is quite likely to have been motivated, in no small part, by a rejection of their obligations to do to others what they would have done unto them.  The material, Mammonist rewards for shafting other people certainly makes that rejection very seductive to those who love money.  It is matched in the overtly racist white-supremacist strain of American indigenous fascism with the same desire to exploit, rob and oppress People of Color for economic advantage - not a little of the common received racism of the American white underclass was at the encouragement of those who exploited them as well, taking advantage of their cowardice in opposing those who were really robbing and exploiting them.  I have come to believe cowardice of that kind is of far more explanatory power than other psychological theories of lower-class racism.  But I think there is always a motive of not wanting to treat people as you would want to be treated is at the bottom of it.  Though, in the corrosive effects of long-term racism, resentment of those oppressed and the reaction to that is another component of why things have gotten so bad.

The Golden Rule has certainly never been the basis of despotic, dictatorial governance any more than that it has been the law that governs organized crime gangs.  Such despots, dictators and gangsters have often been very smart, very knowledgeable, very rational and logical, they have sometimes made great use of science and other tools of might and wealth.  None of them could operate as they do if they suddenly adopted an intention of equality and insisting that all of the gangsters do to others what they would have done to them.  Religious establishments, sects, denominations, "most Christian kings" who don't hold to that law of reciprocal justice are little better than crime gangs, themselves.

The motivations behind the invention of science are intimately tied up with the "triad of control and pride" the Prophet Jeremiah came up with of might, wisdom and wealth, wisdom to more effectively exploit physical resources and power to enhance might and wealth.  Especially in the context of science as a social, political and legal entity, I don't think you can ever really cut it out of that triad. And while power and wealth could be distributed in a way that would produce material equality, that requires a morality that the method of science excludes from consideration. The moral responsibility that is necessary for producing and sustaining decent human life is an insoluble hard problem when you start by cutting that out and insisting that it is irrelevant.  When you pretend that science has all the answers, something that is not, itself, answerable through science, then you guarantee that inequality and an indecent, unsustainable hell will be the result.  Knowledge that doesn't make you free is incomplete knowledge.  Modernism insists on keeping it that way. I stand by what I said about the vulnerability of the idea of rights to be as wrongly used as wisdom in that context.

* Though the idea does have problems even for science as the factor of consciousness impinges on the activity of science. A product of the fact that science exists only in human minds and, therefore, the conditions of human thought are inevitably relevant to the results, especially the more subtle the objects of physical science get.  I have an enormous skepticism for the retreat of some of the, actually, somewhat more honest atheist-materialist philosophers into panpsychism, which tries to skirt the "hard problem" of consciousness, what it is, where it comes from, how something which materialism cannot account for or deal with arose as an aspect of life arising and evolving, the inevitable discrediting of minds by an assertion of materialist determinism of our minds.  What they're doing is just kicking the can down the road so they can pretend they've solved the problem.  I think the problem is that consciousness is quite a different thing from material objects and, so, it has qualities and abilities and conditions that physical science - developed under a set of assumptions about unconscious objects moving and combining - was never designed to address.  I think Roger Penrose's assertion that consciousness is an entirely different realm than physicalism just as mathematics is a different realm form matter makes more sense, though I doubt he'd agree with a lot of what I think.  I think eventually, even in the unlikely event that panpsychism is adopted as the hegemonic framing of science and, so materialistic scientism in the broader culture, problems like those panpsychism is resorted to to address will arise despite of that nifty idea that temporarily distracts clever people from that.  No human framing is going to avoid those problems, that's a real hard problem for scientism as it is for all of human culture.

** That line of thinking, that the assertion that "the Golden Rule" is some kind of humanly noticed universal moral truth discredits those religions which have made it the overt summation of "the Law and the Prophets," is far more rationally seen as discrediting the pop and elite atheism that makes such an assertion.  It is remarkable how the universal noticing of that central moral holding of Jewish and Christian Scripture is held to discredit the truth of Judaism or Christianity is such a central pillar of modern, scientistic anti-religion.  I'd like to see what other universally held truths are used to discredit those entities which hold with them.  

That Christans, for example, have had such a hard time following the Law and the Prophets in practice being used to discredit the truth of Christianity makes about as much sense to me as discrediting mathematics on the basis of how few people really master long division or basic algebra. I've known many materialists who were lousy at math, probably even more now in the calculator dependent generations.  [See discussion above of the differences between physical law created to describe unconscious objects and that which is invented to regulate human choices acted on without a single result.]  

I would say that if you are going to claim logic and reason as the basis of your ideological framing that failure to practice those to the extent to which you want to claim that Confucianism or ancient Babylonian legal codes noticed the same moral principles as the Mosaic Law and the Gospel of Jesus is to fatally discredit Christianity is a far more important and definitive discrediting of modern popular or would-be elite atheism.  I would cite such claims of ancient, universal, non-Abrahamic noticing of that principle of the governance of human life as support for my claim that it is a sounder basis of a Constitutional order than "enlightenment" scientistic, allegedly impartial and "even handed" amorality.

In the end I really don't find there is much of a difference in quality between elite and cheap and dirty pop atheism.  That of the Churchlands or that of The Amazing Randi.

Trump-appointed-judge Aileen Cannon grants Trump's demand for special master BEFORE DOJ weighs in

 

 

This stinking, rotten judge should be removed from the bench, if there is no legal means of doing that, the state of the law is extremely inadequate and dangerous. 

Dreams Of Violent Revolution Are The Milquetoast Fantasies Of The Scribbling, Tenured Class - Hate Mail

MARXISM IS NOT the most radical* form of socialism, the socialism that insists that the workers rightfully own the means of production and the profits of their work is entirely more radical.  So radical that something like that was Marx's dreamed of end of things in which even the state would disappear in an era of harmony and cooperation among People.  Some anarchists preach something similar, though anyone who expects human beings will ever live peaceful lives without some form of civil authority of some kind are unrealistic romantics.  There has never been such a thing in groups of people larger than a few dozen and I doubt there has ever been anything like it even in groups that small.

Marxist socialism in practice replaced the investor class with the gangsters who ran undemocratic governments, the history of Marxists with power is a history of worker oppression from the time when Lenin and Trotsky suppressed unions with bloodshed worse than the worst union suppressing atrocities that happened in the gangster gilded era in the United States and as they were beginning to take power in Russia.  It is remarkable how clueless those dear old American commies were as to why they couldn't gain a real toe-hold among "the masses" in the United States who, for some reason, passed up the chance to have what their heroes in the Soviet Union (later China) were giving The People in that imaginary worker's paradise and unimaginable oppression and terror. It's almost as remarkable how few of America's commies chose to flee this terrible place to live in Lenin's then Stalin's, etc. worker's paradise.  Of course, most of them were in the scribbling class, not the laboring class so it was all imaginary.  And not a few of them had tenure at American universities and colleges or good jobs on the movies, with a good package of benefits.

Imperfect as it is, as fraught with gangsterism as it is, the minimal democracy of the United States was always a better deal even for its beleaguered underclass than what communist rule brought virtually everywhere it was tried.  I will admit that Cuba, in some limited ways, did some good things there but at such a cost, I might not choose to live there but I would bet lots of Americans would, at times, like to access their medical system, ours given way to investors and managers and physician-gangsters.  Marxists are just more ruthless gangsters than those of the past in the United States, who had to contend to an extent with voters and who, some of them, retained some vestiges of Abrahamic religion either through family heritage or through even some of the more twisted forms of the Baptists, Calvinism or Catholicism.  That has certainly diminished in the succeeding generations of America's indigenous criminal classes, the old money rich, the new money rich, those in the white supremacist branch of America's indigenous fascism.  Now the modern sci-tech-age billionaires are, for the most part, inoculated with scientistic materialism and, so, are unbothered by Abrahamic morality as the worst of the Marxists were, even those who profess a religion or came from it like that poster boy for American gangster-billionaires, Peter Thiel, who came from an "evangelical" background.  I have no doubt that if our billionaire gangsters succeed in what they've partially achieved under Republican-fascism and in the Roberts Court, actual governance of the country, they will be as bad as the worst Marxists have been.

I don't think even the democratic-workers own the means- socialism I believed in is sufficient as more than a subsidiary tactic, in the end. I've had some experience of cooperatives and some of those who participate in them are pretty self-seeking and ruthless.  Some of them are as cold and stingy as the coldest tech-billionaires.  It takes more than some kind of nifty economic-legalistic scheme to produce a decent life for all.  I don't think there is any prospect of a decent life unless it is based on what The Law and the Prophets said, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, as both Jesus and Hillel confirmed was the basis of Abrahamic religion. That's my bottom line, that and the commandments to do to the least among us as we would do for The Lord.  You do that, you get equality, democracy and the possibility of as decent a life as it is possible for humans to produce, the only legitimate goal of all labor and wealth creation, the only legitimate goal of government and civil law.

* Re-reading this to edit it, I wonder if it isn't the extreme violence of Marxism that leads foolish People to mistake that for "radicalism" in that context.  From my considerations of Darwinism and the place that violence has in its imaginary force of progress and quite similarly in Marxism, I wonder if the bizarre notion that violence adds to that twisted sense of virtue, the delusion of of manly facing up to things doesn't have way too strong a hold on the imaginations of would-be radicals, so many of them buffalo-butted scholars whose only utility on a barricade would be to provide the enemy with a better target instead of someone who might fight.  If you took all of the actually productive work of all the academic Marxists put together, I'd bet it wouldn't buy lunch from them from a food cart.  There is nothing more radical in any political-economics than the teachings of Jesus, nothing more radical in its means or, especially, in its goals.

That Imaginary Purification Is Just That, Imaginary. So Is The "Purity" Of The Results - Hate Mail

JUST HOW DOES THAT WORK?  Please explain it.  Every single instance of "data collection" in sociology is fraught with subjectivity, either the subjective judgement of a person reporting their own alleged experience or situation - which the researcher almost never can check or goes to the bother of attempting to check for accuracy or honesty - or the subjective judgement and description of the researcher.  Since it is impossible to review just about any individual datum in that kind of "research" it is fraught with subjective inclusions, not least of which are the desires of the person or group of people conducting the research to achieve a publishable result - hopefully one that will create lots of media splash.  Or at least in the profession. I don't think it's even possible to measure the amount of such subjectivity or if it is of any predictable percentage of the raw material. You can't observe it like insect body parts in a batch of food in a factory or e-coli at the water-works.

How is that forest of subjectivity made to disappear from the results?  I'd really like to know and have identified the mechanism by which that element of subjectivity is supposed to disappear, what with the combined subjectivity of all of those involved in the process.  It would seem to me to be a far, far more likely thing that the subjectivity adds up if not increases by multiplication in the process, no matter the motives to ignore that.  Any claims that that process produces objectivity would certainly require identifying the magical means of sifting that out.  What that claim is, is a sort of meta-subjectivity based on the common interest in denying that.  That denial of the problem is what drives that along with the desire to pretend it disappears. Or the even greater shared goal of pretending what they are doing produces "objective knowledge."  If that were the case then their research should be verifiable at the same rate and in similar ways that traditional physics and chemistry could be verified and the results would be as durable and long lasting as reliable, workable knowledge.  Let's get it clear, though, I'm talking of the old days when physical theory was proven by careful observation and replication of experiments or from nature, not now when the theoreticians come up with stuff that not only can't be verified now, but for which there is no prospect of it ever being verified by human science and they claim a right, by assertion, that they don't need to follow scientific method for it to be science.

It's like the magical means with which the overt teleology in animal husbandry and plant breeding is used as "proof" that something claimed to be quite similar happens in nature with no planning and with a claim that there is no teleological component of it.  When Darwin used animal and plant breeding as support for a theory for a "force" of nature which explained how new species arise, a force which it was claimed had entirely different characteristics from human breeding, no planning, no goal, but was mere accidental happenstance, it was a logically inept claim.  Though a claim which gained favor and still holds hegemony in science even though the logical bases of it in both conducting experiments which are the result of intelligent design and the whole thing having the most overt of teleological goals.  And also with the far from disinterested, ideologically colored observations - often of a quite unnatural captive group of animals, many of which never experienced life in the wild for many generations under whatever vicissitudes wildness includes - claiming to demonstrate, even "prove" the validity of natural selection outside of the lab.  But if you're going to use those to "prove" that natural selection is a thing you don't get to claim that your research only includes those aspects of your examples you like while pretending the ones you don't like were no part of the results you cite in that argument. By the way, the human breeding which Darwin claimed as a model of how new species arose didn't produce new species - if by that you mean animals which can breed and produce a permanent line of animals or plants of a new species which is biologically stable, by some definitions the impossibility of interbreeding the definition of a different species.  So the claims for it are multiply inept and dishonest.

I don't think science knows now or likely will ever know the various means through which new species have arisen in nature. I very much doubt there is any one "force" that made that happen. Though it's obvious that new species did arise from old ones and it can be said that older species "went extinct."*  I doubt there is any one mechanism and I am absolutely convinced that "natural selection" as defined by Darwinism is not a real thing.

There's no reason for a reasoning person who doesn't choose to buy the snake oil of such "science" to ignore or deny the problems with it, I'm under no moral obligation to sociology or Darwinism both of which have records ranging from dubious benefit on one hand to being a producer of total evil and depravity on the other one.  I have demonstrated exhaustively the links between Darwinism and eugenics, including the genocidal Nazi eugenics through the most highly credentialed and even lauded scientists of the period between Darwin and 1945 - I've also shown that scientists since then have not only NOT given up eugenics and scientific racism based in the theory of natural selection, many of those who have promoted both have been and are still holders of honored faculty appointments and the editorship of journals and the leadership of professional organizations.  Many of them have been as supportive of both eugenics and scientific racism as anyone was in the 1920s or 30s and even as the Nazi genocides were happening.  Similar things could be said for those in sociology, psychology, anthropology and, perhaps most tellingly of all, the dismal "science," economics.  I have demonstrated through their own words the Darwinian origins of the cold-bloodedly eugenic "herd immunity" theory that got tens of thousands and not improbably hundreds of thousands of us killed by Covid-19 under Trumpism here and under allegedly socialist government in Sweden.  I have repeatedly given the quotes from Darwin that support such scientific claims.

I don't trust any of it, there is no logical or moral obligation for me to pretend not to see the problems with them I see and not to call intellectual dishonesty just that no matter what the pedigree or position of the claims and those claiming them.  I'm not worried about having your totally imaginary cooties.  For Pete-sake, I left 7th grade much more than a generation back.  Lots of you guys have hung around schools too long, you never get past acting like kids.  Grow up.

Since you claim to be a professor, I wonder if anyone has studied the infantalizing effects on college faculties of constantly dealing with immature near adults and trying to get their approval or liking or more.  Not that I'd trust such a study to tell us anything much about it.

* The idea of extinction of species is too inspecific because if a species gradually, through changing generations, produced a still living line, it's quite a different thing from a species all being killed off without any surviving line going on into the future. Those are two very different entities.  If "natural selection" is supposed to be an explanation of how biological diversity came about any lines of life that got cut off in the past or today are not a part of that production of new species.   The scientific ineptness in not distinguishing the two seems, to me at least, to account for some of the most depraved of murderous claims made under natural selection,  

An especially bad example of which was the lauded, even idolized biologist Karl Pearson and his fascination with "the death rate" which he gave as a definition of Darwinism.  Just one example is his criticism of the use of cesarean section to deliver babies because it kept too many babies with big heads born to women with pelvises too small to deliver them alive was about as depraved an idea as I've ever seen.  He certainly favored the deaths of the children and the women because of his favorite theory of natural selection and his entirely imaginary results which he was sure would "bring down the race." And especially bizarre considering the role that "big craniums" had in Darwinist assertions of human superiority, I may look for the possibility Pearson made such claims, which wouldn't surprise me.   

Given what was said about "herd immunity" above, I could have given Charles and Leonard Darwin's certainty that universal vaccination would bring down the race by keeping too many of the victims of smallpox alive, though I see no evidence that Charles Darwin kept his own brood from being vaccinated. Leonard died without issue, an irony in the most active eugenicist of Darwin's eugenicist children.  It was always other kinds who were to be eliminated, not the rich, the white, the "favored race."  It's remarkable how many totally imaginary crisis scenarios the Darwinists came up with to favor the elimination of this kind or that kind of person from the species, preferably in a particularly terrible way.  It's a symptom of the endemic mental depravity of the British upper class - who they never seemed to find at all in need of such pruning by eradication, not even a socialist like Pearson.  I think Darwinism was born of the attitudes of the Brit class system, a component of it from its conception and it has never developed immunity to it.  It's more than a viral infection, it's part of its DNA.

I'd like to go farther into that area of researching the real history of Darwinism but I'm not sure I've got the time for it.  The more I look into that "socialist," the fixture in British Fabianism,  Karl Pearson, the more sinister and depraved his mainstream science is. As someone who evolved out of the more radical end of socialism into the far more radical religious economics of charity, I'd recommend my socialist friends that they really consider the primary source claims of some of those they once held up as heros.  Lots of them were quite depraved.