I Give Thanks For The Commandment To Do To Others What We Want Them To Do To Us

the basis of a politics so radical that we don't believe it will ever be possible.

IN HIS COMMENTS on his translation of Genesis, Everett Fox says this:

It appears that the Mesopotamian origins of Israel are reflected in such narratives as the Creation, the Flood and the Tower of Babel, and are transformed or repudiated in the biblical versions.  What in the older culture appears arbitrary and chaotic has been changed in the Bible into stories that stress morality and order.  Further, human beings in Genesis Chapters 1-11, despite their failure to live up to God's expectations, are nevertheless considered capable of doing so, in contrast to the Mesopotamian view that humankind was created merely to be slaves to the gods.

I would certainly defer to such a deep scholar of the Hebrew text and its context  - of which I am not - in that assessment. I certainly agree with what he says about the Hebrew Bible in that statement. I would also note that the commentary on Genesis I've been reading both leads me to a far better appreciation of what those who complied the book were doing, the frequently brilliant Rabbinical and Christian theological reading of it and how related seemingly unrelated Scriptures are to what I consider important in the Monotheistic tradition I've chosen to put my trust in, equality, justice, the commandments to love even when I don't like those I'm commanded to love.  The Reverend Martin Luther King jr.'s observation that we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us isn't based in OUR liking of them but in the requirement that we love them because GOD LOVES THEM.  That is one of the most profound theological statements I know of and one which I cannot think is possible in materialism or secularism with any force or durability because under materialism, it has no credibility.

I am more convinced every time I look into it that those of us who live in some highly imperfect approximation of equality, some scheme of democracy have the Hebrew religious tradition to thank for the moral concepts that have allowed us to imagine such things which rarely, if ever, . . . probably safest to say never appeared in earlier history.  As the historical books of the Hebrew Bible attest, even the Children of Israel, with those concepts in their tradition, had a hell of a time holding on to something better than what God warned them against reverting to over and over again. Christian history proves it is as illusive closer to the modern period, the current Republican-fascists blasphemers like Green, Boebert, etc. are a lesson in that.  America proves that secularism, while diminishing the scourge of sectarianism, wasn't really any kind of guarantor of overcoming other inhibitions of evil governance - apropos of the passage from Everett Fox, slavery and racism were the origins of almost all of the greatest of durable defects in American democracy, the tool that the enemies of egalitarian democracy successfully have wielded against it from even before the inception of the country.

I think it was the Hebrew concept of God and God's creation that allowed those ideas to develop in human culture.  While some of it may not have been absent from other cultural traditions (the Hebrew Bible certainly doesn't present God being unconcerned with or not making covenants with other people and with animals) it is through the Hebrew Scriptures that such ideas came into the cultures that developed modern egalitarianism and egalitarian democracy as well as the corrupt and misguided attempts to secure the blessings of democracy without equality. That is the original sin of American Democracy that is still embedded in our Constitution and the clap trap erected over that by the Supreme Court which made that worse, etc.  

Another danger we have before us is that a similar line to what I just owned is often in the mouths of those who hate equality, hate democracy and, in fact, are gangsters and crooks.  I will note the observation of Jesus, by their fruits you will know what they're really up to.  Bad government is ALWAYS best understood as being motivated by the same motives as gangsters, from every monarchy to every fascist republic, every Marxist regime, unequal schemes that try to give a democracy to white men or other select groups while denying it to others - such as the original United States Constitution was and, under the lying gangster bought Supreme Court is becoming again - all of them are governments of, by and for gangsters.

The original Jewish Law, equal justice, and the development of Jewish thought in the Gospels and Epistles in an ethic of universal love is the only solid basis for egalitarian democracy, the only democracy worth the struggle to obtain, the only one without known glaring, fully demonstrated and fatal defects in it.  That was true of the supposed original anti-egalitarian democracy in ancient Athens** and it is of the one set up in the unammended United States Constitution, a document which is still dangerously, likely fatally defective in no small part due to the manipulations of the slavers and those who made corrupt deals with them for their own shady profit in the Constitutional Convention.  

The blather of political science that is based firmly on different ideas of how money should be moved around is insufficient to imagine a government of legitimacy and stability.  With inequality that guarantees that people left out, whether through racial, gender, ethnic, gender difference, CLASS INEQUALITY, SNOBBERY, etc. will not only have no reason to care about or support a decent government, they will be vulnerable to opposing one. Those of the American underclass who unthinkingly support some of the most evil manifestations of American politics, Trump but also the Bush I administration, his son's illegitimate Bush II regime, Reagan, Nixon, . . . are gulled into doing that by the mass media lies and social coercion.  That might get a pack of gangsters power but it is no reliable basis for a safe and stable governance.  It is no wonder that when they have power the Republican-fascists don't do much but transfer money to the billionaires and millionaires and throw bones of hate to their duped base.  It is not safe for us, as the Trumpian-Republican-fascist insurrection of January 6th showed, as the threats to use "Second Amendment remedies" when Republican-fascists lose (a threat encouraged by Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court, one made considerably before Trump gained the Republican-fascist nomination) various other minor manifestations of America's indigenous fascist tendencies, and the granddaddy of them all, the Confederacy and the Civil War it started are proof in reality and the history of the country that inequality, the gaming of privileges for some, the management of class conflict for the benefit of the elites is deadly.  Yet political-science doesn't seem to notice that.  "Economics as if People mattered," was a minor blip of the late 20th century, drowned in the mainstream of economics and poly-sci as done at elite universities.

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When I first started going online and reading the spontaneous and unedited and unselected thinking of other people, most of them either of the left or of the college-credentialed class, mostly vaguely lefty, my focus was entirely political. Thoroughly indoctrinated in mid-20th century notions of the virtues of secularism, I had no real intention of getting into religious matters.  In 2006 I started investigating why "the left" was so bad at winning in politics and what it could do to win. Still the official theme of my blogging.  

But the longer I read and seriously thought about politics, testing ideas, reading the babble of the then fashionable "new atheists" and the old ones who the new ones merely copied, the more I realized that, in the end, the primary problem of politics was people who wanted to do bad things to other people, the environment, etc. and what it would take for people who wanted to do bad things to restrain themselves or be restrained by society and the law from being able to do bad things, to motivate the indifferent to doing what had to be done, what should be done, it became obvious that what those were were religious problems.  

The secular American left, dating from the late 19th century till now, a thing of epic non-feasance, malfeasance and misfeasance when it wasn't being just plain stupid, was certainly not going to to it because it had bad habits such as attaching itself to some of the worst criminals in modern history and some of the stupidest ideas generated in the allegedly educated class.  The legal arm of that in the ACLU is emblematic of that, it was too busy fighting for the right to lie and promote Nazism and white supremacy and a whole host of other counter-productive causes, things that were guaranteed to destroy any progress made in their idiotic conception of "rights" and "freedoms."  The Republican-fascist ascendancy starting in 1968 is directly attributable to its and its allies "free speech-press" activities, the right to lie is what Republican-fascists and Trumpzis mean when they champion "freedom of speech."  And it is only one example of that, the lefty media, the magazines, the rare broadcast entities and personalities, etc. the scribbling class of the secular left usually had little to contribute.  

At the same time, largely through my mother's social justice work through her church reading what she brought home to read, and reading the liberation theology that I had access to, ESPECIALLY READING THE REVEREND Martin Luther King jr.  AND HIS ALLIES I knew there was a religious left which, while certainly not perfect actually had some success.  The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. was the most successful leftist in modern American history just as I would assert the Baptist minister Tommy Douglass in giving Canadians universal healthcare was probably the most successful leftist in the history of North America.  I would point out the role that the faithful Catholic, Nancy Pelosi had in making the greatest though far from last bit of progress toward that against all odds, including from resistance within the Obama administration.  Also, probably the most Catholic president we have had or are likely to have, Joe Biden trying to fix some of the greatest defects left in the system by the Obama administration.  Healthcare is far from a solved problem, in some ways it's as bad as it was as the insurance and hospital industries game the new rules to screw us as they profit.

Meanwhile the repetitious idiocy of the secular left thus exposed online forced me to fully face the fact that it was never going to amount to anything but self-defeat and they were more than fully prepared to take any effective left down with it.  The damned Green Party of the United States fully deserves to be the quintessential representative of that.

The problem of politics is inescapably a problem of moral behavior, a fact that one of the idiotic online commentators of the 00's brought home to me as she and those who agreed with her whined and complained about being sick and tired of "morality."  What the hell she thought everything that everyone on the online-left whined about didn't have to do with morality, I asked but got no answer. I came to wonder if the reason that observation got no response any time I pointed it out was because the secular, materialist, atheist, scientistic ideology of such "leftists" had absolutely nothing to generate a real and effective concept of morality from. And, unsurprisingly, it, like Nazism, like many forms of fascism, like Stalinism, etc. despised, more than anything, the Hebrew religious tradition and what it asserts. I would bet that in most of the secular, anti-religious allegedly leftist entities, it would be more detested to openly assert the radical justice of the Scriptures than to advocate the "right" of Nazis to promote their opposition to that.  Secular lefties are clueless as to their real motives and inclinations.  

We have had, in the modern period and, I would argue, throughout history the most ample regime of humanly conducted experiments into what happens when you base laws and customs on the opposite of that Hebrew tradition.  It has never been good and only not been a disaster for brief spans of time.  The historical books of the Old Testament and the New Testament are a record of the disaster that comes with injustice, economic injustice, inequality, indifference to the poor, the alien living among you, the sick, those in prison, etc.  

I've been reading Genesis so its stories are much on my mind. We don't have any real detailed knowledge of the destroyed polities or regimes described in Genesis, what the sins of Sodom were other than inhospitality and the story makes that morally problematic.  Especially as compared to the ways of Lot whose conduct, especially in relation to his daughters, doesn't exactly comport with our notions of fatherly sexual morality, offering them to be gang raped before getting drunk and committing incest with them.  Great host, a horror show of a father.  We are given some idea of the sins of those who were building the Tower of Babel, arrogance, self-importance, probably with heaps of injustice thrown in, the building project probably led many poor people to go hungry and be even more in need.  I will only call attention to the known character and obsession of Donald Trump in passing in regard to that story, him and the real billionaire master builders of the modern era.  

We do have the model of injustice in the new Pharaoh who grew up uninfluenced by the Hebrew tradition and his attempt to wipe out the Children of Israel by a combination of infanticide and, I'd guess it was to be understood, assimilation though Egyptian men siring any children the remnant female Israeli population would then have. But it was the injustice to the Children of Israel, their enslavement which is specifically mentioned as setting in motion the major events in what survives in the Jewish tradition and, Christians should never be allowed to forget, what leads up to Jesus and Christianity and through it the Western concepts of equality and egalitarian democracy.  

I should note here that the structure of the Torah invites a comparison of the Children of Israel in Egypt as given in the Joseph narrative at the end of Genesis and of them generations later in the first section of the Exodus and the contrast to The Law given to Moses.  Walter Brueggemann notes that Joseph, in becoming part of the Pharaonic regime as Pharaoh's food Czar during the famine years, is presented as administering first the debt impoverishment of the hungry people, who in successive years were forced to give up their wealth, their land and, finally, became the slaves of Pharaoh - and those were the Egyptians - which I never heard anyone discuss before hearing him make that observation in one of his lectures.  Brueggeamnn notes that it didn't occur to Pharaoh or Joseph to just give food to the hungry People.  The radicalism of the Mosaic Law in its context, what Jesus and Hillel sum up in their two versions of The Golden Rule,  The Law that won't pass away, a durable law of human nature BECAUSE IT IS A LAW OF GOD, is still the basis of a politics so radical that we don't believe it will ever be possible.  We are still committing the sin of Genesis in all its various forms.  

In that sermon by Fr. Dan Donovan I typed out for you the other day, he spoke of:

the future when the whole of created reality, including ourselves will be caught up and transformed by God

That is close to the best story ever told or at least that I know, the Orthodox concept of the end of creation, even that which is presently evil, in some Orthodox traditions, even the demons and Lucifer and Satan being fully reconciled to God and having their existence within God.  What you can get by giving up what I suspect is the remnant of the European version of that old Mesopotamian view of the gods,* the demotion of human beings (except, as always, the ruling political-priestly class) and their modern incarnations in the gods of materialism, things like a mythical conception of "DNA," natural selection, probability mathematics, random chance, etc.

Everett Fox's translation of the first line of Genesis is not typical and, so is provocative, implying that Creation is continuing.   

At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth,

Which implies to me, at least, that Creation is continuous. That it moves from the past, through us to the future and on from there.  That it has a direction in one way (perhaps why some materialist cosmologists have concluded that time travel to the past is impossible, though we certainly all experience normal travel into the future) that it is in a direction and that direction will arrive into eternity.  Or, perhaps there is no final arrival but continuing on.

This is a long answer to the assertion that the materialists are right, that there is no purpose in existence.  I would give you some of the partial answers I've given to that, noting that every single atheist-materialist I've ever seen getting into a lather about that proves they don't really believe it by trying to make other people believe their claims, as well as many of their claims about such things as evolution and the development of the semi-science that tries to study it but gets side-tracked into their atheist ideological struggles.  Jesus said, "By their fruits you will know them," and by their ideological struggles and claims about natural selection, such cosmological punching at God as multiverse sy-fi,  I know they don't really believe what they claim to believe.  

I tell you, if there is no purpose in existence, then that means everything that human beings conceive of as purposeful, of having a purpose, of having a direction toward an end, an end that is either temporary or of greater permanence must be illusory.  Think of how many statements in human culture, literature, even in science would have to go or be discredited by that ultimate devotion to the atheists' ideological tool of non-teleology.  It leads to the ultimate regime of intellectual assertion possible.  I suspect that, if it were taken seriously, it would have to debunk huge areas of science, I would suspect some of that science would include the gods of modern materialist atheism, natural selection and maybe even many of the schemes of cosmology.  This is similar to the problems that come with the insistence that there is no significance to minds and that there is no meaning to anything.   Killing off God comes with a huge price.  I don't think even Nietzsche really understood how much you would have to abandon to take his claim seriously.

As I looked more into the idiocy of the incorporated 20th century atheist religion "Humanism" it became ever more obvious to me it was one of the silliest labels ever given to a club promoting an ideological position.  It is as stupid as the fascist organizations that claim to promote "freedom" especially "free speech."  

If there is one thing that materiast-atheism has done, it is to demote the status of human beings, human thought, human capabilities, lowering them probably lower than any of those ancient Mesopotamian systems did.  The take-over of the Humanist club by Corliss Lamont (the sugar-daddy of most of today's organized English language atheist ideological struggle), the Last Stalinist, the trust-fund Communist, the author of 1950s (!) propaganda promoting Stalinism well past the time his Hitler level mass murders were exposed,  brought it into clearest focus because there is certainly no human regime which outdid Stalin's in demoting human beings to as low a state as they have, so far, been brought.  His only rivals for that position being, of course the Nazis and other Marxist regimes, from the the microcosmic example of Enver Hoxha in Albania or the larger one of the Kim regime in North Korea or the largest in the Communist Chinese dictatorship.  The other forms of fascism, including the indigenous American version of that, white supremacy, approximate, closer or somewhat removed, that degenerate view of humanity through practicing inequality, certainly of entire racial and ethnic groups of human beings while, like, I suspect, Stalin, the Nazi hierarchy, the present day dictators of North Korea and China, holding a higher view of themselves.  I find it ironic that that superiority is imagined to consist of superior intelligence in the modern era, something their ideology attempts to discredit in its discrediting of human minds and consciousness, which they rob of freedom. Their devotion to materialism, to atheism, require that demotion, it is never not going to be a feature of that ideology.

The key political understanding I came to since going online is that absolute equality of people is what makes any decent political system, regime of laws, and society possible.  Without equality, most of all economic equality and social equality, the decency of mutual respect and the often unpleasant, sometimes terribly difficult care for the least among us, it all goes to hell faster or slower.  The American attempt at unequal democracy is only a slower descent into hell, despite the attempts to remedy those original sins of our system. Embedded in the Constitution as those are but, more so, in the hearts of a dangerously large percentage of the population, those dangers will be there as long as those sins are.  Many of whom mistakenly regard themselves as faithful Christians. By their fruits you will know them, indeed.

If there is a human history on the other side of this age that extends as many thousands of years into the future as that from which Everett Fox is writing about the Mesopotamian thought that the Jewish view of reality differed with, I wonder if the modern "scientific" materialist regimes, including non-egalitarian democracy, will present a far better documented example of what we can more dimly view of the pagan Mediterranean and European regimes which the Hebrew tradition, including Christianity, is in radical opposition to.  The Hebrew conception of God as the God who blessed three times in the Creation story in Genesis, to conscious living beings, animals, to human beings and to the Sabbath (rest from labor, the chance to experience life's goodness, that experience dependent on consciousness) makes possible the conception of human lives and minds as significant and meaningful and important, even more important than things without minds, the mindless atom which is the symbol of ideological atheists, gold, money, status symbols.  Compared to that, materialism, atheism, scientism, have nothing with which to build an egalitarian democracy, any kind of durable and reliable decent life.  That's something I wouldn't have said twenty years ago though I suspect I was already beginning to suspect that.  Now I'm absolutely certain of it and, like some of my other investigations, it becomes clearer the more I test my hypothesis.  And I do look for disconfirmation, NO INVESTIGATION IS WORTH A THING IF YOU DON'T TEST YOUR PREFERRED CONCLUSIONS AT EVERY STEP.  I just don't find much if any.

* In the same short essay on The Primeval History, the beginning of Genesis, Everett Fox says:

The nature of God, as he will appear throughout the Hebrew Bible, is firmly established.  He is seen as a Creator who is beyond fate, nature, and sexuallity, as an all-powerful orderer and giver of meaning to history as a bestower of blessing to living creatures, as the giver of choice to human beings, as a just punisher of evil and, simultaneously, a merciful ruler, and as maker of covenants.  The one Quality of God which does not unfold until the Patriarchal Stories (Part II-IV) is his shaping of human destiny through focusing on the People of Israel.  It is portrayal of the logical outcome of the characteristics just mentioned.

I don't think a higher view of humanity is possible without belief in that character of the Creator, God, taking into account that no human description of God will ever be sufficient, certainly not comprehensive. Not even that, perhaps better, "those" contained in the Scriptures, not that contained in the minds of all of humanity combined, which, of course, can't exist.  There is no such a thing as the combined minds of human beings, it is an illusion not unrelated to bigotry which attributes characteristics to large groups of People.  

** I remember being puzzled at I. F. Stone, in his The Trial of Socrates having such an incomprehensible reverence for the Athenian democracy when it was, in fact, everything which any modern democracy worth anything would consider abhorent.  It was based on slavery, exclusively andro-centric, misogynistic, anti-egalitarian, bigoted, closed and exclusive.  I think it's a case in which even someone as generally open to reality as Stone could not get over the word and its connotative virtue to consider its consequential denotative complexities.  Without equality, non-egalitarian democracy is merely an extended oligarchy.

He had a similar problem when it came to the word  "imperialism" such as when he condemned the Vietnamese government for ending the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, a communist variant in which an elite of murderous thugs enslaved and was in the process of destroying the Cambodian People in ways not dissimilar to the plans of the Nazis for dominating Eastern Europe and whatever part of Asia they held. I'm sure the Vietnamese government didn't have the purest of intentions or operations as they carried it out but of the two alternatives, that was, by far, the lesser evil.  It took me a lot to face the shortcomings of someone like I. F. Stone who I had revered.  

I could write this post in the terms of my new proposed graph of political identity that takes the conditions of the lives of People and living beings as the basis of any honest assessment of political systems and regimes.  Instead of a continuing line from a center, I think an honest graph of politics would be a ray starting at the completely debased notion of human beings as determined objects such as is held by materialism, close to that the political regimes which reduced People to objects, well on the way to the last identified point away form that would be egalitarian democracy, perhaps the ray going on forever. There is egalitarian democracy as an ideal position and there is every other government which is, to one extent or another, the rule of gangsters and thugs lording it over those held under the boot of inequality.  I have never read or heard a Communist or a secular lefty who could face the fact that that's as true of Marxism as it is capitalism, fascism and Nazism.  The anarchists have such a scant knowledge of reality that they don't understand that when there is no civil government, the gangsters seize control immediately, some of them in the name of anarchy which as it really is, isn't an improvement over monarchy.

I could note that my conception of a ray starting with the debasement of living beings into non-living material objects mirrors the conception of evolution starting in inert matter, only to do that I'd have to be honest and say that I cannot help but think of it in terms of at least development of which we, at least by our lights, are more important than the many micro-organisms from which we are descended, I think our moral sensibilities and minds can honestly be considered progress over earlier mammals, though I think the early humanoids, those who we are descended from and their many cousins were probably far more intelligent and possessing a moral sensibility than the old-line of evolutionary blather hold them to have been.  I was greatly surprised when relatively recently old Noam Chomsky, on the basis of his theories of linguistic, I gather, asserted a very old fashioned view of the ancestors of many of us outside of Africa, the Neanderthals.  A view which recent discoveries of their cave art, made deep in caves, requiring planning and taking their paint stuff with them, seems to make highly unlikely.  I like thinking about what we firmly know about earlier life and what stories can be derived from it but I never forget, without first hand testimony of those living beings, we cannot really know what's in their minds.  Same with living animals.  

I love thinking about evolution and the often mistakenly related problem of the origin of life from non-living matter.  But that doesn't mean I think we can actually do science about most of it, we don't have the required observations and measurements to do that and, the facts of the decay of time and geology, the minuscule examples of the evidence which has been destroyed of forever hidden from us, most of evolutionary "science" is just the Just-so storytelling that Gould and Lewontin criticized when faced with the neo-eugenics of evolutionary-psychology and Sociobiology, even as they both endorsed the worst of that in the theory of natural selection, perhaps the worst story ever told. Natural selection will always, inevitably, lead to claims of eugenics and attempts to cut groups of People out of the human future.   Biology has more than enough that it can do science with to get ideologically fixated on what it can't do science about.

Holding What I Wrote For Today . . .

 you should read this post from rustypickup as posted at RMJ's. 

Turning Into Advent

Fr. Dan Donovan's sermon for the last Monday before Advent 2022

Yesterday's celebration of the feast of Christ The King brought the liturgical year to its climax and its conclusion.  Somewhat surprisingly the Gospel chosen for the mass of the feast has to do not with the triumphal return of Christ, the end of time, but with his Crucifixion. Jesus is King, the liturgy affirms, but in the most unexpected of ways. He reigns not from a great throne as a victorious warrior or a powerful sovereign but as someone who has freely given his life for us. The reading tells of how the crowd and the religious leaders mocked Jesus and how he promised to one of the brigands crucified with him that they would meet again in paradise.

Although very few people today have much of a sense of Advent it marks a crucial turning point in the liturgy and in our lives. It heralds the beginning of a new liturgical year with its hopes and fears, its promise of new life here and now and of a positive outcome of the journey on which we all presently find ourselves.  

The word "Advent" means a coming or an arrival of someone or something the liturgy refers to a three-fold coming of Christ in the past at his birth in Bethlehem, in the present in his coming into our lives and the life of the world, and in the future when the whole of created reality, including ourselves will be caught up and transformed by God.  

As interconnected as all these comings are, the most important one for us is his present coming into our lives here and now.  

God is revealed in the life and destiny of Jesus as a God who comes, in his coming he invites and urges us to a sense of the gift of life no matter how old or how young we might be. As the Living God, a God of life, he is a God who accompanies us on our journey strengthening and guiding us so we might arrive at our goal.  

This week we find ourselves between the climax of one liturgical year and the beginning of another. The liturgy invites us to look back at the past year. It has been a year marked by challenges of many kinds. Personal challenges that each one of us has had to deal with as well as challenges which face countries, continents and the world. These latter have included the war in Ukraine, the devastation wrought in many parts of the globe by climate change, the presence of Covid-19 and the financial crisis that is making life even more difficult than usual for many.  

For some it has been a truly difficult year. Let us hope that especially for them Advent will mark a new beginning. We look forward to it in hope and as we do we pray that God will be with us.

The Canticle of Zachariah puts it this way:

In the tender compassion of our God
The dawn from on high with break upon us  
And shine on those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death
And guide our feet in the way of peace.

The first reading at daily mass for the last two weeks of the liturgical year is taken from one of the most mysterious and haunting books of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation or the Apocalypse. Both titles suggest the removal of a veil which results in making manifest something which was formerly hidden.  The veil which is taken away in this case is one that separates earth and heaven, the present and the future. The Book of Revelation offers us a glimpse of the heavenly world, of the end of time and of the great struggle between good and evil that will precede it. Apocalyptic writing is marked by images, symbols as well as places and events that are not to be taken literally but which are of such a nature as to catch our attention and to provoke us to think about the fears and hopes that lie behind the text we're reading.  The vision to which we are treated in the passage we read a few moments ago includes an appearance of a central figure in the book, the Lamb the author describes as the Lamb who was slain and yet lives. The Lamb is the Risen Christ who stands with God and with all who have fallen.  He is accompanied by one hundred and forty four thousand individuals on whose forehead is written the Name of God and of the Lamb. The language here is poetic and invites us to allow ourselves to be caught up in it.  The text speaks of "a voice from heaven, like a voice of many waters, like the sound of loud thunder, like the sound of harps."  The one hundred and forty and four thousand stand for all those who have been brought to fulfillment in the heavenly world. They have been redeemed from humanity, we are told, as first fruits for God and for the Lamb.

There are other parts of the Apocalypse that are violent and involve conflicts between the forces of good and evil.  They suggest in highly symbolic language the nature of the great struggle between the forces of good and evil that will mark the beginning of the end of the world as we know it. The creation of a new heaven and a new earth and the triumph of the Lamb and of all those who followed him. To seek in the Book of Revelation for keys to specific things that are happening now is to misunderstand the book and its message, of what was written to encourage specific groups of Christians who were facing persecution, threats of various kinds.  Its basic message is as relevant today as when it was first written. Its message is one of hope.  No matter what we have to go through God is with us, encouraging us to trust in him and in the final triumph of good over evil, of God over all that would deny and reject him.

The brief passage from the Gospel of Luke which I read just a moment ago strikes a different note from the excerpt we heard from the Book of Revelation, it unfolded in heaven, whereas this one takes place in the Temple of Jerusalem, very much on earth.  The immediate context helps us understand what Jesus says about the poor widow.  He has just warned the people about some of the religious leaders of the time, beware of the scribes, he says, they like to walk around in long robes, love to be greeted with respect in the marketplace, they devour widows' houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. At this point Jesus looks up and sees rich people as well as a poor widow putting money into the receptacle for donations for religious social purposes.  The widow represents a dramatic contrast to those of whom Jesus had just been speaking.  They donate a great deal more than she does. But given their wealth it requires little generosity on their part. As Jesus puts it, they contribute out of their abundance but she out of her poverty has put in all she has to live on.

Some people have been struck by the statement that the woman put in all that she had to live on and wonder whether Jesus could possibly be approving such a thing. they say that he is not, they say that it is wrong to encourage people to make donations that they really cannot afford.  As reasonable as such a view is it seems to be at odds with what Jesus is saying. His emphasis is on the contrast between the relative significance of what the rich give out of their abundance and what the widow gives out of her poverty. Jesus is encouraging us to be generous in our gifts.  

Advent for many people is a time when they consider and make donations to healthcare or educational institutions, to food banks and other organizations and groups seeking to help the poor, both here and around the world. Whatever we are able to do let us do it freely and generously. As St. Paul once put it, "The Lord loves a cheerful giver."

Let us now in faith and trust present before God our needs . . . 

Note, I haven't proof read this transcript other than a quick read after I typed it out.  It may differ somewhat from his actual text.   Also note RMJ's excellent post for Sunday on the liturgy. 

 

Those Who Would Debunk The Significance Of Minds Prove They Don't Use Theirs For Much - Off Site Hate Mail

YOUR CHOICE OF WORDS "with the size of the empty universe, there is nothing significant about human thought" is one of the most unintentionally absurd comments anyone has ever made in my comments, though it is an absurdity which pervades materialism, atheism and scientism. If you look in a dictionary, and I've looked in several to check my premise, significance has no meaning apart from knowing or holding something to be important or of consequence.  All of those rely entirely on minds because there is no such a thing as significance absent the presence of minds, perhaps non-human minds as well as human minds but in regard to materialism, atheism and scientism, human minds are the only things that allow us to know anything of significance.  To talk of anything being "significant" apart from human minds, human thought, human experience and human judgement is absolutely absurd.  The idea that the universe judges the most enormous of events or entities in it to be more consequential than a single sub-atomic particle at its farthest most distance couldn't get the laugh that it deserves.  

I would like to go do some word searches of materialist-atheist-scientistic propaganda or review videos of the same to see what materialist-atheist- true-believers in scientism declare by fiat to be significant and insignificant, the ruse is certainly related to the absurd practice of the logical positivists, during their hey day and in their rotten remnant to declare questions that were inconvenient of uncongenial to them to be "meaningless" when to any sentient human being of sufficient intelligence, the questions had meaning and, so, were significant.  Of course, their very activity, their ideological kultur kampf, the swivet such as the one you seem to be in proves that they don't believe such a declaration for a single second as they assert it because they sure as hell believe their minds and ideas are significant.  You guys seem to lack the most vestigial remnants of self-awareness when it comes to your beloved ideology.

The declaration that "human thought" as a category is insignificant is evidence of several things, one is the linguistic incompetence of the person declaring that, another is the philosophical incompetence of those who would say such a thing. A big one is that those who do so while striking a pose on science are especially stupid because the entirety of science depends, absolutely, thoroughly and inescapably on the significance of human thought and consciousness as everything that science can hold or assert or assert to know about anything in the universe  is done through human thought and consciousness and science, itself, has no knowable or probable existence outside of human minds.  If it isn't there, where the hell is it?

Science is incapable of "proving" or demonstrating the insignificance of human minds, consciousness or thought because if it did the entirety of science would, as well, have to be held to be insignificant.  Of course, I don't hold our minds, our thoughts, our consciousness is insignificant so I can find significance in science, history, theology, art, etc.  And I can admit it without contradicting myself. 

I would have started by saying words have meanings but I guess for those who debunk the significance of thought the meaning of words has to go out the window along with it.   Along with meaning, itself.