And On Leveling Billionaires Out of Existence
WHAT IS THE RIGHT ROLE of Scripture in deciding how we conduct our lives, our relationships, our societies and our governments and legal systems?
How should we, as individuals, use Scripture to think about life, how we should act, how we should ask other people to act.
Those are the bases on which my questioning of Scripture here starts.
Should all of Scripture be given equal weight? - something which even those who pretend they believe it should never could possibly do in practice because Scripture is not always internally consistent and even the most second and third party precisian citers of Scripture are so frequently such notable insisters on first person indulgence. Since Scripture, by which I mean the canon of Scripture as adopted by churches and so forms the basis for our discussion of scripture, I'd include the books the Protestants leave out because I like some of the music written on texts from The Book of Wisdom.
RMJ has requested a discussion of some of the issues I proposed wrapping up in the January 31st post which I'd like to get into, though right now a combination of health issues, computer issues and my limited connection to the internet will impede that. I've got a sick cat, too. This is my fourth attempt to try to tighten up my response, every time I start that it grows and grows so I will just post this before I start on a fifth one. I will note that in this I am going far beyond the points raised by RMJ so as to explore one virtue, that of hospitality over what I say is a transcendent moral requirement of equality.
He rightly brings the issue of the ancient traditional (pre-Law) virtue of hospitality to guests into the discussion, certainly that is in relation to my critical commentary on the folk-tale of Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. That is often used to explain his actions, which it can, though it also risks brushing aside the immorality of Lot offering his two daughters to what is not specifically mentioned though is almost universally taken to be a rape mob who want to rape Lot's two guests to whom he has offered hospitality, who just happen to be the very angels who God has sent to destroy the cities.
It is Lot's mention of the virginity of his daughters that is the strongest implication that the mob were a rape mob instead of a lynch mob though it also is a strong indication that no one, not Lot, not those who copied the stories and commented on them over thousands of years, understood them in the terms that identify them as gay men. He didn't offer them males from his household to rape, he offered females to them. From the text, all anyone can know, he seems to know they were a straight men lynch mob who he was trying to turn into a straight rape mob.
When we, today, talk about gay marriage, gay equality, we are talking about something entirely different. Gay men, more to the point, in terms of the story, bi-sexual men who never do and never would act as part of such a violent mob are entirely innocent of the only identified sin of the men of the cities on the plane. Not that straight guys reading the stories have a clue as to that most obvious fact. It has nothing to do with any modern egalitarian conception of LGBTQ+ rights. It has far more in common with the notorious STRAIGHT gang rape scene in Last Exit To Brooklyn than it does to marriage equality. Yet its implications for strait sexual morality are not brought up no more than the directly corresponding sexual sins of straight men are ever attributed as being an intrinsic aspect of all straight sex even when the components of inequality and injustice are an obvious and customarily intrinsic aspect of permitted straight sex. I would bet if anyone tried to make the gang rape of Tra La La into a point about straight sex the very same people would howl in objection. They did object to Edward Albee's outside observer view of straight marriages in his work, which I'd certainly never use to characterize those in general.
I have nothing at all against making such mob behavior,straight or gay, a severely punished crime, nor do I the pedophile rape, temple prostitution, etc. which comprise most if not all of the other things condemned in most of scripture, not least of all because it is a complete violation of equal rights. American law, ESPECIALLY AS ADMINISTERED IN THE VERY AREAS OF THE COUNTRY MOST OPPOSED TO EQUALITY, has, in fact, traditionally protected such mobs as long as they were comprised of straight, white men, even when they murdered their victims. Anal sex between two consenting men is not an act without moral problems due to the increased likelihood of STDs and other harms arising from them but if it is consensual between adults it's no worse than the, by survey, far more common straight anal sex between men and women. Not everything which is morally problematic should be the target of criminal laws. Even when they were sworn officers of the law. In not a few cases even police officers get away with things like raping males with objects as a practical permission under the American legal system. Even more so in the long tradition of American lynch law. That is certainly not exclusive to the United States, though it is where I live so it is the primary focus of my comments. As is reported from the Iranian gangsters who run that theocracy that lynches gay men from cranes as spectacle, it's OK when straight thugs from the clerical army does rapes Women abducted on the pretext of their "immorality." But I'm not going to get into the use of such ancient stories and other Scripture under Islam because I haven't studied that though from what I gather it is even more of an active means of slandering gay men than in most of the West.
The fact is that even in other Scripture commenting on that story the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is not anything like consensual sex between two adult males, and is, in every way, the opposite of two adult males who want to live in a faithful, loving, marriage as equal partners. The fact is that such a marriage of equals which I assert is obviously morally superior to a marriage on the basis of gross, inevitably exploitative and almost as inevitably violent inequality, marriage inequality is explicitly presented as a model of straight marriage just about everywhere in human culture, even in Scripture. That is generally regarded in traditional understandings of scripture as unworthy of note, that is if the men who have had control of religion for so long were capable of noticing such injustice. In one respect the movement for marriage equality has that advantage for same-sex marriages, that in the milieu in which it arises ideas of marriage as an equal relationship based in mutual love, respect, honest consent and fidelity are there as a model. Without the equality of Women even considered as a possibility for the longest period of straight marriage, it has to overcome that custom and baggage to even be a moral undertaking.
Even Paul who may come closest in an explicit statement in Scripture to what I hold as the ideal straight marriage maintained it as an expression of inequality. Even as he laid down the requirement of husbands to love and respect their wives, he said wives must be obedient to their husbands without making that conditional on his instructions to husbands being fulfilled. But, then, Paul was talking as an outsider when it came to both kinds of relationships. He was unmarried. And, really, it wouldn't have been fair for him to have a husband or wife, he was always away on the road.
If, as those who explain Lot's behavior on the basis of the virtue of hospitality present it, that understanding of hospitality overrides the morality of NOT handing your daughters over to a rape mob and the decisively righteous Lot, later, their father having sex with them and fathering children with them, then why can't we use our moral sensibility to object to that excuse on the basis of our placing of equality above such notions of hospitality? Clearly, a better idea of hospitality would be contained within that virtue of equality while, it's clear from the stories, even subsidiary virtues such as hospitality founded on inequality leads to all hell breaking loose.
Perhaps it was that discreditable conception of hospitality in the general milieu of inequality that led to it becoming effectively discredited in those cities just as the discrediting hypocrisy of so much mainstream American Christianity has led to it being discredited in mainstream America. Christianity to be credible now, and I think such credibility being given to the Gospel of Jesus is of the utmost importance, it has to carefully discard much of what has been held to be credible in the past. And I think that a lot of the calls for that, such as those of the late John Shelby Spong are as bad if not worse than retaining such stuff as I object to.
I wonder how many times in the Bible it presents those on top providing hospitality to those below them other than in one of Jesus's more disturbingly ambiguous parables, the rather coerced hospitality of the rich guy forcibly requiring Street People to eat his feast when his rich friends snub him BUT THEY'D BETTER HAVE FASHIONABLE CLOTHES! Biblical hospitality generally seems to start with something like a husband telling his wife to get cooking because he'd brought some guys home.
It is not uncommon to turn Scripture into an idol, to put it in the place of The Living God. But the results of that are not good. We can't have a dialogical covenental relationship with Scripture. Scripture may be said to speak but it sure the hell doesn't listen and consider your life and your experience. Putting Scripture up as a substitute for the experience of the Living God who is our God as much as God was the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob is idolatrous. Abraham, Issac and Jacob had no Scripture that's mentioned in Scripture,* clearly their understanding of God was present in their experience of God, modified by their cultural backgrounds as that is reflected in Scripture, by the time it gets to us, no doubt modified to reflect changed cultural expectations of editors, compilers, copyists. The Old Testament is, in its entirety, a product of that process of transmission, far more so than the New Testament which had a far shorter period in which such a process was at work before it became canonized. That process, in some cases, may have been an enriching one, not necessarily one making the results worse than "the original" - the nebulous view of what that original experience of God expressed in it seems to me to be far more open to ambiguity and getting it wrong. Though, as another piece I'm working on about the New Testament and the issue of wealth shows, even the clearest messages in Scripture can be almost universally obviously willfully ignored.
Again, there is no pure, unfiltered written Scripture there is that human experience and observation which inevitably has human distortion built into it. That certainly doesn't make it worthless, no more than human science is worthless because, as modern physics discovered about a century ago and as is becoming ever more true as scientists test their previous assumptions about the "objectivity" of scientific method, all of science is inevitably a view of nature seen through the lens of human minds. That is so distorted that now, even from shortly after science became professionalized, "science" is often made about things that can't be seen at all or even observed through inference from things that can be seen and measured to things imagined up by those with a professional degree and a job. If that is true of what can be seen with the eye, it is certainly more true of the God who cannot be seen and who created it all, including us with our capacity to do science and write Scripture.
Later, of course, those who first assembled the Book of Genesis and the rest of the First Testament Scriptures, had Scripture as part of their cultural and intellectual background but their work certainly had other components worked into it based on their background and personal experience which influenced the choices that gave us the texts in the versions that still exist in old manuscripts and those of those which were used to assemble the canonical Scriptures in use today, the Masoretic Texts used by today's Rabbinical Judaism and, often quite differently used, by especially Protestant and some Catholic translators and the Old Testament of the Greek speaking tradition, the Septuagint so influential in the original compilations of Christian Scripture, Orthodox and Catholic.
The vision of God thousands of years ago which we can have any kind of access to today is not the Living God but the written accounts of their experience of the Living God as have come down to us often modified by many later hands. In that our own most honest attempts, our careful attempts, our highly self-questioning and critically evaluated attempts at that kind of dialogical relationship with God, based primarily in our own moral consciences and informed by what of Scripture we decide to take as applicable (often having to lay aside contradicting passages) is what we can have as a direct dialogical relationship with God. Putting Scripture ahead of that is as likely to lead to disaster as getting it wrong within that back and forth of consulting our consciences. You're taking chances, either way.
What we conclude on the basis of the witness of the evils of chattel slavery, wage slavery, destitution of those the economy can't profit from, the evils of Womens' subjugation, the Shoah and other modern, industrial genocides, environmental destruction as the way of death and overriding evils are certainly what led me and I hope others to see equality as the overriding moral position in so far as that is discernible to us, in our lives, with our experience, in view of human history, in social interactions, civil laws and government today.
It is certain from the texts that such a view and experience of human life doesn't much at all appear in Genesis, it starts appearing with the Mosaic Law but which, as Jesus said, was sometimes a presentation of justice in which hardness of human hearts could win out over justice. It was a monumental step ahead in perceiving absolute moral law, it was not the last step. I now understand why the Yigdal asserts that Moses was the greatest of the Prophets, twenty years ago I didn't get that at all. But I still believe Jesus was right in his far more radical view of things. It is his assertion of the Law and Prophets summed up in one rule that I put my entire faith in.
It's clear that whatever the absolute and eternal moral LAW of God is that human awareness of it is developing and human commission of that LAW is not soon going to accomplish it. Though the Lord's Prayer instructs us to always strive for it, a prerequisite for the Kingdom of God to appear on Earth. I hold that as the movements for equality have been developing, so slowly, too slowly developing till the present and beyond, it has become clear that acting equally is a fundamental Law of humanly performed morality.
Far from the secularly imaginary absolute "freedom" that my age cohort loved to imagine would lead us to heaven on Earth, it was the less popularly sought (at least among middle-class and affluent white lefties and hippies) equality that would get us farther and be far more effective in achieving a real freedom, a human covenant of the kind of dialogical freedom with moral responsibilities that Walter Brueggemann talked of in our relations with the Relational God of the Bible.
As an aside, the ease with which the language of the secular left has become the slogans of Trump-era Neo-fascism and Neo-Nazism, especially when "freedom" is one of the words shows that there was something dangerously wrong with that conception of boundless freedom, one which was nurtured by the decidedly secularist ACLU and secular liberals on earlier Supreme Courts. The consequences of that understanding of "freedom" has come home to roost in the ACLU with the conflicts of many lawyers, especially those of Color who see the consequences of the dogmatic "free speech-press" work of the older,far less endangered, mostly but not entirely white lawyers and leaders of that organization. The cowardly, irresponsible view of such "freedoms" in the abstract as comprising a virtue above and beyond the actual equality and lives of People of Color and other targets of Republican-fascism, the indigenous American fascism of white supremacy, should definitively discredit that conception of "freedom" as a self-destructing academic fantasy.
Lately I am thinking of how the all mighty secular sanctity placed on the legal notions of secular contract law, given as the basis of so much judicial blessing of grossly unjust inequality might help to understand the scrupulosity (as opposed to morality) of such things as hospitality in a medium of gross inequality but haven't gotten far in testing that suspicion I've had while looking critically at Genesis, Joshua, Judges,etc. I don't know if my never taking classes in Scripture or the civil law is a hindrance or not.
More directly on topic:
In our time the static injustice meted out to Women in the time of the Patriarchs has only started to give way on the way towards equality. In our time the even more difficult, taken for granted, inequality based on race and ethnicity and religion has merely started to be overturned in favor of equality with Republican-fascists, fascists in other lands, etc. in full backlash against that progress. And in our time the ancient injustice against LGBTQ+ people has also been questioned and fought against, I will say informed by and inspired by the experience of our often violent inequality, the fear we have lived in, the oppressive inequality we have legally suffered under and also inspired by the struggles of the other Civil Rights movements and the testimony of our fellow sufferers from inequality. The struggle for LGBTQ+ People would never have gotten as far as it has if it wasn't part of those more general movements demanding equality.
Behind all of that, for all of the many ironies that the source of those brings, is the basis of The Law and the Prophets, that we are to do to others what we would want them to do to us. That law reaches all the way down even into oppressed groups. That law is as binding; for example, on gay men in relationships and sexual encounters as it is for those who would like to treat us unequally.
It is a Law of God that, if applied as a basis of law, not only should govern legal and social oppression out of permitted existence but it should also govern the relationships of gay men, Lesbians, etc. even when full legal equality is achieved. For obvious reasons, If it isn't then all we will do is recreate the evils of inequality within gay life. I would assert that the moral requirement on gay men, those of us who accept that as the basis of our sexual, marital relationships AND OF OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER PEOPLE is a solid justification and vindication of our right to full equality. I am thinking of the quaint times forever ended when a Republican President, Nixon, instead of MLK style equality promoted some fantasy called "Black capitalism" which would have helped a small sub-overclass, not produced equality or democracy.
That equality is a sound hermenutical basis for reading the Scriptures which so often fall short of that moral absolute, the absolute articulated by Jesus and Hillel as constituting the entire basis of Scripture. The hospitality of Lot, of others, the abuse and use of Women in that framing of hospitality, Women, slaves etc. often being excluded from the protection of hospitality (neither hosts nor guests considered the daughters or the Levite's sex-slave as being protected by it EVEN BY THE TWO ANGELS!, though maybe they did tell Lot to stop being such a jerk and it didn't make it into the text) is a sound basis to impeach the use of those stories as written and so many others as setting the basis of our morality or the laws and social practices of us today. The moral failure of Lot and his guests, of Lot later in the story are as noteworthy as the implied immorality of the lynch mob WHOSE INTENTIONS ARE NEVER EXPLICITLY SPELLED OUT, though I have never read even a modern commentary that mentions the rules of hospitality as motivating the behavior of Lot have really considered the horror of what the good guys are prepared to do to uphold that custom. It makes you wonder what would have happened if the angels had spent the night on the town square instead of in Lot's house.
Let me remind you, I have said I think the story is a folk-tale retold, not anything like an actual crime report.
Other parts of Scripture, especially when taken as an aspiration to be achieved later, don't have those same problems attached to them. It's kind of funny how, due to its usefulness to materialists and atheists, the least difficult part of Genesis is the part that generates the most controversy, the 6-day Creation fable. That some of the worst statements in scripture are contained in some of the most valuable books of Scripture, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Romans, Corinthians, doesn't either validate those passages nor does it invalidate the good in those Books. If we conducted our societies on the egalitarian commandments in the Books of Moses and the Prophets we might mistake it as being heaven on Earth, instead the worst and most violent passages have been enforced with the power of law up to and including state murder while those demanding provision to the destitute, the abandoned woman, the orphan, the alien among us made illegal by law, are reversed to legally sanctify that inequality. Secular governments, even those led by "Most Christian Monarchs" seldom and never finally do much else but discredit Christianity when they dabble in Scripture to come up for religious justifications of what they'd have done if they never found that justification.
Though, even as that common elision of scripture is their actual practice, the absolutist modern mind holds such an absurd "all or nothing" notion of evaluation of Scripture, it is the very basis of the corrupt modern heresy of Biblical Fundamentalism. And Biblical Fundamentalists are among the most flagrant violators of The Law and the Prophets. In 2023 America, those who proclaim Christianity the loudest are the actual Antichrist on full display in our decadent city on the plain but which imagines it's on a hill.
Any attempt to substitute an impossible literalist reading of Scripture to represent the Living God in OUR current dialogical relationship with the Living God seems to me to turn sacred Scripture, itself, into an idol. Usually, except to pick out a sentence or two for that moral condemnation which is always second and third, never first person, their idol is a closed book, such as Trump held upside down in his photo-op publicity pose.
That idolatry is rampant in American Christianity, right-wing Protestant, trad-Catholic (they add an ahistorical and distorted assertion of the Magisteria into it,so long as someone says it in Latin which almost none of them can read). We have no honest choice but to fight these things out in our own informed, honestly questioned, honestly doubted and provisionally accepted moral consciences. We all have to wrestle with God, we all have to take chances of being wrong but the possibility of doing that on the basis of equal justice and how we would want others to treat us will probably get us more right than more wrong more often.
Trying to understand where Lot, Abraham,etc. were coming from is one thing, understanding their notions of hospitality can help us understand that, it can help us understand and evaluate the meaning of those texts. But Scripture is about more than that academic exercise. The grotesque inequality that was included in their conception of morality rightfully leads to the conclusion that what they thought is rightly suspect to be anything from inadequate to being entirely wrong when it comes to informing our judgment and our conduct. Any subsequent commentary or religious doctrine or dogma which does not contain an effective critique of that inequality and, so, injustice, is at best inadequate and, not infrequently, all-in on injustice.
I'm not interested in this as from an intellectual, anthropological view, I'm in it for what it can do to save our skins AND OUR SOULS. My experience as a gay white Irish Catholic man born in New England in the middle of one of the most violent centuries, the 20th century, was witness to the struggles for Women's equality, the Civil Rights struggles, the myriads of crimes of inequality and injustice, the struggle for economic justice, the violence of predatory capitalism and the monumental murder oppression and theft of gangster governments from the worst, Nazism, Maoism, Stalinism,... to the nominal, generally corrupt, liberal democracies, the addle-brained counter-productive, self-discrediting and so, the in-effect non-opposition to that of secular, materialist, "humanist" lefties and liberals, leads me to the kind of Christianity I have chosen to believe in, a Christianity that can question Scripture and even Saint Paul on the basis of the Golden Rule and the by their fruits you will know them test. For me, notably, the Jesus of the Gospels passes those tests, the testimony of James does, Paul usually does, much of The Law and the Prophets do. And those are exactly the parts that just about all of the Christian conservatives and so many Christian liberals have the least use for. And secularists are quite unreliable on them, as well.
I, as a gay man seeing and directly experiencing the fruits of even so much use of scripture know it has produced evil even as other parts of scripture has informed and inspired the effective opposition to that evil. I conclude from that the idea that all Scripture is valid, all Scripture is authentically inspired, all Scripture rightfully is given force to determine our conduct and laws is a lie.
I acknowledge that asserting that carries dangers of cutting out exactly that which I think is certainly inspired but not making those distinctions already has produced discrediting monumental evil. It hasn't been a frivolous or half-hearted effort to get to this position. It has been informed by what I know as intimately as I know my own experience as examined by my best efforts of critical moral conscience. I don't see the slightest indication that our opponents in favor of inequality and discrimination and oppression and, yes, murder have done anything like that, from the rankest, stupidest member of the Republican-fascist caucus in the McCarthy House to the most elevated members of clergies and legal priesthoods, they are not credible, they're a disgrace.
* I wonder if that's the reason that Scripture asserts that God appeared in person to the Patriarchs because there was an absence of written Scripture for them to get ideas from. For some reason they never include Sarah in that list of those said to have talked directly to God in person though Scripture said not only she but Hagar did, as well. Wonder why that might be the case. In Hagar's case, God promised her, directly something much like what he promised Abraham. Though that's probably just me imagining stuff that isn't explicitly said in the text. Such as centuries and millennia of such inserted imagination is imagined to be in the texts. I have to say, even my primitive level of deeper reading so as to translate Scripture has been a revelation of what it says and what it doesn't say. A lot of what it does say is extremely jarring and often disturbing, things I never noticed just reading the texts over and over again. I'd recommend everyone who can try it. It's a real help to forcing yourself to think more deeply about it.
NOTE: Putting It All Out There
In the secular aspect of the struggle for equality it has sometimes been claimed that the struggles for equal rights is "not a zero-sum game" in which those who were unprivileged getting equality would not take anything away from those on top of them in law, in society, in the economy but that isn't true and the opponents of equality know it. Thus nothing less than a command from God for the privileged to give up their excess of wealth and power, their superior position, will get us to it.
It is stupid to think the opposition to equality isn't highly motivated by the truth that equality will come with the economic, social and legal loss of privileges for those on the top, affluent, straight, white males and such Women as are an auxiliary part of their privileged class.
The anodyne claims made to the privileged by civil libertarians ignored that the very privilege enjoyed by them came at the expense of those on the bottom and, also those in the middle classes, costs unequally extracted from those not on top. The money today's billionaires have was extracted from those on the bottom, many of them held in virtual slavery in the Third World, in China, in such communist paradises as North Korea, etc. And right here in the United States.
The structure of inequality is fractile in nature, making sub hierarchies in which middle-class straight, white men were above middle-class straight white women and People of Color in the middle class, all of those above while in those lower levels being given some stake in maintaining the legal, social and governmental system that assigned them a lesser place. The evil genius of America used racism as one of it's most potent bribes to lower class White People so they would kick ever down, not up where their real oppressors were.
It's not easy to see who are the ones on bottom, though I would think that Transgender Women of Color, especially those in the underclass might be suspected of being very low in all such rankings. The murder rate of any identifiable group is probably an indicator of who is lower and who is higher. Even with all the determination to struggle for equality among us, Gay white men of affluence are certainly above LGBTQ+ people of less affluence, poverty and destitution. Money has the effect of putting one's status higher, protecting a Lindsay Graham even in that bastion of LGBTQ+ hatred, South Carolina and among the DC Press Corps who daintily maintain an in the closet code that protects such hypocrites. That is the true genius of the American system as set up under the Constitution in maintaining inequality and discrimination and the violent enforcement of inequality. And that is far from exclusively true of the United States, it is reproduced around the world.
The fact is that privilege at every level of possession cannot be retained under equality, a true egalitarian democracy would be had only to the extent that all of those privileges were leveled out of existence under an era of general equality of rights without privileges, each one having the same freedoms as the other because they respect the freedoms and rights of others. And those are not only inequalities of material possessions and physical status. I will recall, again, the time someone on a lefty blog slammed me as an elitist because I made a comment about "classical music" that my elitism consists of not being satisfied until everyone is elite. The needed equality will have to iron flat the attitudes of superiority that our academic institutions and media teach such as the false assumption that something mistaken to be "ritzy" as classical music is the rightful property of some elite. That is the depth of the poisons of privilege we are brought up in. These levelings are, I think, an absolute requirement before "Thy Kingdom come" because it is "Thy Will be done on Earth as it is in heaven." Heaven as can be understood in human terms must be an absolute leveling of all of us under the perfect Love of God for God's created creatures. Paul said that the Gospel was that "all flesh will see God." Which is certainly a vision that surpasses human understanding in this life but we are called to approximate that to the best of our abilities. Its theological consequences are far, far more general if you believe that is the true nature of reality.
Motivated by another thing that David Bentley Hart said in his commentary accompanying his translation of the New Testament I am working on another piece about the role of wealth in Scripture wishing that I had access to Walter Brueggemann's fairly recent work on that topic, no doubt he knows decades study worth more about what I'll get about it.
In regard to what we are to take from the earliest Scriptures in light of the Gospel, Paul, James, etc. in Genesis the wealth of the Patriarchs and their families, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc. is presented as morally unproblematic whereas Jesus, Paul, James, etc. are unambiguous in identifying wealth as if it were a deadly sin guaranteed to risk damnation. If you take Jesus seriously it is impossible not to address that difference and to take it to heart. I'll go with what Jesus said about that, not Genesis.
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