The Banality Of Evil Starts In A Refusal To Choose To Make The Right Choice

It's Almost Always The Case That Those Who Mouth Arendt's Most Famous Phrase Have No Idea Of What She Meant

A COUPLE OF MONTHS ago I was thinking of reading more of Hanna Arendt's writing than I'd managed to read. I had never read all of the horrifying and wrenching Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is a serious defect in my education, unfortunately I don't yet own a copy of the book but I did go look up the original at the New Yorker yesterday, I'll order the book used, most of the articles are behind a pay wall.  Even the complete first section is a formidable piece, I don't think I've ever read such a complex piece of reporting and commentary, with such a depth of insightful observation and commentary and presentation of citation as journalism.  It's good to remember that today, in the degradation that journalism is that there were once such reporters.  And along with that almost every line of it is capable of opening up its own line of consideration and thought. Arendt was a great thinker and the model of what journalism should but almost never is, especially in the wake of All The Presidents Men and the rise of news as infotanement when the profession was filled with air-brushed air-heads without any background, intellectual or, most seriously of all, moral.

But the objection to my noting that the Nazi genocide was from start to finish a product of the theory of natural selection that motivated this post is that "the Holocaust was caused by Christian anti-semitism." That is something that I've dealt with exhaustively so I want to try a different angle from an author who certainly cannot be accused of having that particular axe to grind.  For which I'll present this paragraph from Arendt's article because it is so telling, not merely revealing of the putrid Eichmann but of the entire Nazi ethos.

Eichmann was born on March 19, 1906, in Solingen, in the Rhineland—a German city that is famous for its knives, scissors, and surgical instruments. Fifty-four years later, indulging in what had become his favorite pastime—writing his memoirs—he described this memorable event as follows: “Today, fifteen years and a day after May 7, 1945, I begin to lead my thoughts back to that 19th of March of the year 1906, when at five o’clock in the morning . . . I entered life on earth in the aspect of a human being.” According to his religious beliefs, which had not changed since the Nazi period (in Jerusalem, he declared himself to be a Gottgläubiger—literally, a believer, but the Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity—and he refused to take his oath on the Bible), this event was to be ascribed to a “Höheren Sinnesträger,” or “Higher Bearer of Meaning,” an entity somehow identical with “the movement of the universe,” to which human life, in itself devoid of “higher meaning,” is subject.

Excuse me for interrupting but, in answer to your objection, this reminds me of nothing so much as some of the neo-Nazi garbage of the professional physicist-atheist author of the American Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, William L. Pierce, specifically some of the similar stuff in his tax-haven "religion" Cosmotheism.  Which I've written about in those scores of posts mentioned in the post which you are whining about.  "The movement of the universe," is, of course, an exact description of the material universe as it is conceived of in merely human physics and chemistry and under materialist-atheist-scientism, the de facto religion of a large percentage of English-language and other materialist-atheists no matter what other ideological commitments that leads them to.  So if, for example Himmler thought of a god, it was nothing else but the god of Dawkins and Pinker and Dennett, of Russell and Ayer and Grayling, the material universe.  Keeping in mind the serious ideological boundaries mentioned above which they will consciously or unconsciously hold to in using the word, "nature."  There is nothing in the Nazi non-metaphysics that doesn't fully conform with the famous declaration by Dawkins that I witnessed so many online atheists pledge fidelity to during the atheism fad of the 00s

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Anyone holding such a view of the universe, when presented with even the most obvious moral reality has absolutely no reason to care about its morality or, conversely, the immorality of any act.  That is, I am quite convinced a necessary prerequisite for doing the most clearly evil things.

In that Dawkins parrots quite precisely what Ernst Haeckel said about things in The History of Creation, a book cited by Darwin as being a far superior statement of what he said in his second major book The Descent of Man, positively citing Haeckel on some of his most genocidal statements, advocating things the Nazis put into practice six decades later.

The line about human live being devoid of "higher meaning" is a direct and conscious rejection of Christianity and, in fact, the Jewish tradition of which Christianity must be a part if it is to have any coherent existence.  It is, in fact, the whole point of the monotheistic tradition.  Its negation  is, in short, an unavoidable consequence of believing in materialist-atheist-scientism if you go through what would be internally considered a meaningless logical necessity of following that ideology to its logical conclusion.  It was the in-house ideology of the inner-circle of Darwin, himself,(though typically he demurred when it came to admitting it, ol' Chuck was a moral coward),  his children, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel (who probably followed those futile logical conclusions farther than anyone of that generation and on into the Nazism that started within a year of his death. It was held by the next generation in direct intellectual descent from the Darwinians of the first generation who actually and who are documented as collaborating with and providing intellectual and even financial help to the Nazis as they developed their genocidal eugenics, Karl Pearson, Leonard Darwin, Alfred Ploetz, Eugen Fischer, and myriads of other then famous scientists and thinkers.  

Any professing Christian who was part of Nazism was certainly violating the most basic aspects of Christianity. Going over just the most serious part of Nazi ideology that was directly a repudiation and rejection of Christianity, Jesus was a Jew, Paul was a Jew, Peter, John, . . . even Judas Iscariot were Jews, the Romans mocked Jesus as "The King of the Jews" as they tortured him and as they killed him on the cross.  The High Priest and the Sanhedrin identified him as a Jew, Herod identified him as a Jew.  In the infancy narratives, Mary, his mother identifies herself and her son as Jews, the Magi identity him as a Jew, Herod (père) does.  He and his followers are repeatedly identified as Jews in even what is considered the source of "Christian antisemitism" the Gospel of John.  In one of the more misunderstood and disturbing stories in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus specifically tells a foreign woman that his mission is to the Jews, not gentiles (someday I'll go over that story because I think almost no one gets it). Acts presents it implies that Peter and the Apostles are those responsible for converting Jews, Paul is given the responsibility of converting the gentiles.  When Nazi collaborators in the Lutheran Church sought to cut out anything in the New Testament that was Jewish, they chopped about sixty-percent of the New Testament out. You could not be faithful to the Gospel and be a Nazi, you could be an atheist and be a Nazi, in fact much of the higher echelon were either overt atheists or they professed belief in a materialistic cult that was violently opposed to Christianity as Eichmann claimed allegiance to in 1963.  

Arendt's use of Eichmann's profession of belief in a Nazi articulation of that in her evaluation of Eichmann and how he did what he did, using him as an example of what was a very new class of crime and criminal, one for which the theory of law and its practice was and still is unprepared to identify and prevent, is an excellent example of what I started out with, that her thinking is rigorously intellectual, transcendently sharp, precise, unrelentingly honest and refusing to leave aside any detail as unimportant.  

The terminology is quite suggestive. To call God a Höheren Sinnesträger meant, linguistically, to give him some place in the military hierarchy, because the Nazis had changed the military “recipient of orders,” the Befehlsempfänger, into a Befehlsträger, “bearer of orders,” indicating, as in the ancient phrase “bearer of ill tidings,” the importance and the burden of responsibility that were supposedly conferred upon those who had to execute orders. Moreover, Eichmann, like everyone else connected with the Final Solution, was officially a Geheimnisträger, or “bearer of secrets,” as well, which in the way of catering to self-importance was certainly nothing to sneeze at. But Eichmann, not very much interested in metaphysics, remained silent on any more intimate relationship between the Bearer of Meaning and the bearer of orders, and proceeded to a consideration of the other possible source of his existence, his parents: “They would hardly have been so overjoyed at the arrival of their first-born had they been able to watch how in the hour of my birth the Norn of misfortune, to spite the Norn of good fortune, was already spinning threads of grief and sorrow into my life. But a kind, impenetrable veil kept my parents from seeing into the future.”

If you think he meant by that the complete evil his entire existence was to other people, don't worry, he had no such capacity of imagining others as he could himself, he was apparently mostly interested in pitying no one but himself.  Though, I think it was more his idea of literary artistry than of meaning.  

I do find that Arendt is such a complex and exhaustive analyst that even some of the major themes in her writing are more easily given in a condensed form from those who have read her in depth.  One of those is the American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler.  She's also a serious thinker so a lot of her text has to be cited to quote her responsibly:

Fifty years ago the writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt witnessed the end of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major figures in the organisation of the Holocaust. Covering the trial Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil", a phrase that has since become something of an intellectual cliche. But what did she really mean?

One thing Arendt certainly did not mean was that evil had become ordinary, or that Eichmann and his Nazi cohorts had committed an unexceptional crime. Indeed, she thought the crime was exceptional, if not unprecedented, and that as a result it demanded a new approach to legal judgment itself.

There were at least two challenges to legal judgment that she underscored, and then another to moral philosophy more generally. The first problem is that of legal intention. Did the courts have to prove that Eichmann intended to commit genocide in order to be convicted of the crime? Her argument was that Eichmann may well have lacked "intentions" insofar as he failed to think about the crime he was committing. She did not think he acted without conscious activity, but she insisted that the term "thinking" had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality.

Arendt wondered whether a new kind of historical subject had become possible with national socialism, one in which humans implemented policy, but no longer had "intentions" in any usual sense. To have "intentions" in her view was to think reflectively about one's own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others. So, in this first instance, she feared that what had become "banal" was non-thinking itself. This fact was not banal at all, but unprecedented, shocking, and wrong.

By writing about Eichmann, Arendt was trying to understand what was unprecedented in the Nazi genocide – not in order to establish the exceptional case for Israel, but in order to understand a crime against humanity, one that would acknowledge the destruction of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, communists, the disabled and the ill. Just as the failure to think was a failure to take into account the necessity and value that makes thinking possible, so the destruction and displacement of whole populations was an attack not only on those specific groups, but on humanity itself. As a result, Arendt objected to a specific nation-state conducting a trial of Eichmann exclusively in the name of its own population.

At this historical juncture, for Arendt, it became necessary to conceptualise and prepare for crimes against humanity, and this implied an obligation to devise new structures of international law. So if a crime against humanity had become in some sense "banal" it was precisely because it was committed in a daily way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed. In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.

If Arendt thought existing notions of legal intention and national criminal courts were inadequate to the task of grasping and adjudicating Nazi crimes, it was also because she thought that nazism performed an assault against thinking. Her view at once aggrandised the place and role of philosophy in the adjudication of genocide and called for a new mode of political and legal reflection that she believed would safeguard both thinking and the rights of an open-ended plural global population to protection against destruction.

What had become banal – and astonishingly so – was the failure to think. Indeed, at one point the failure to think is precisely the name of the crime that Eichmann commits. We might think at first that this is a scandalous way to describe his horrendous crime, but for Arendt the consequence of non-thinking is genocidal, or certainly can be.

Of course, the first reaction to such an apparently naive claim may be that Arendt overestimated the power of thinking or that she held on to a highly normative account of thinking that does not correspond to the various modes of reflection, self-muttering, and silent chatter that goes by that name.

Indeed, her indictment of Eichmann reached beyond the man to the historical world in which true thinking was vanishing and, as a result, crimes against humanity became increasingly "thinkable". The degradation of thinking worked hand in hand with the systematic destruction of populations.

Although Arendt focuses on Eichmann's failure to think as one way of naming his ultimate crime, it is clear that she thinks the Israeli courts did not think well enough, and sought to offer a set of corrections to their way of proceeding. Although Arendt agreed with the final verdict of the trial, namely, that Eichmann should be condemned to death, she quarreled with the reasoning put forward at the trial and with the spectacle of the trial itself. She thought the trial needed to focus on the acts that he committed, acts which included the making of a genocidal policy.

I would point out one thing that this doesn't state, that thought apart from truth is not functionally different from the kind of non-thinking Arendt attributes Eichmann's genocidalism to.

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If you aren't thinking about the American context today, Trump, Republican-fascism, the media, especially the most potent, electronic media which has trained two generations of Americans to not think, not think deeply, to make non-thinking of the kind that Arendt was disturbed to recognize in Eichmann, she was wasting her time and the terrible experience of reporting on the trial.  If you don't understand that what she saw in Eichmann is ubiquitous today as the "death of truth" that is the primary mode of operation in the Republican-fascist Party, in the Washington Press Corps, in many of our law courts, the Supreme Court, you're wasting your time.

If there is one thing that is important about the truth, the truth and telling it and realizing it being what is most important about thought, its role in human minds and human life is gained by people making, not an intellectual but a moral choice for the truth and for valuing it enough to pursue it through honest, evidenced, rigorous thought.  The very act of such thought relies on a choice that has to come before all of the rest of that, a choice for what is right and a rejection of what is wrong.

I have to break in here and point out that though she is considered as an important philosopher, at least at one point she eschewed that and said she was a political thinker, I think her political thought is some of the most important that I've ever read.  

But that's the problem with her approach. Politics inevitably is a creation of minds that are not and never will be prepared to deal with things at her level of thought. In a democracy, voters will not come to a reliable moral result on the basis of her impressive though impotent thinking.  No matter how great and important her thinking on these things is from a rational and logical point of view, politics will never effectively be conducted at that level of intellectual rigor and, given the disastrous results of most of her colleagues in philosophy, most of which is done far below her level,  when they deal with politics in that manner and those who pretend to (Victor Davis, to name one and only one of dozens I could off the top of my head) I don't really trust it as a general activity.

What that takes is a conscious and habitual choice to choose moral absolutes that are absent from the world of such rationalistic intellection.  

What she saw as the mode of mental activity that facilitated the greatest crimes of the 20th century and any inadequacy of the Israeli Court to appreciate and deal with that is rampant in the modern secular world - in case you wonder what's behind the resurgence of violent, determined fascism just now - AND THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION, JUDICIAL AND LEGAL SYSTEMS ARE NOT ONLY MORE INADEQUATE THAN THE COURT THAT SENTENCED EICHMANN TO DEATH BUT FAR, FAR MORE INADEQUATE.  I think that is a product of the de-religionizing of thought and life under American secularism being made more than just the formal impartiality of the state but as the de facto requirement of social secularism and intellectualism.   

The consequences of that for logical consistency are important and such rigorous, "impartial" intellection can lead to terrible places. I have pointed out to the horror of a number of secular liberals of my generation that no less a figure in that system than President Kennedy in his 1950s book "Profiles in Courage" praised the repulsive Republican Robert Taft for his opposition to the Nuremberg trials on the same defense that Eichmann would try to, that nothing he did was illegal in Nazi Germany, that Hitler's word was the highest law and that no external force, national or international could try the Nazi genocidalists because there was no legal mechanism for doing that.  To add more evidence to my late adult conclusion that John Kennedy was a lot less admirable than his PR machine sold him as being.  To demonstrate how that works in reality, the same man who praised the depravity of Robert Taft, Hannah Arendt points, out gave a very public thumbs up for the cameras to the Judges in Jerusalem for doing exactly what Robert Taft said was a violation of law, which he believed was laudable as "courage."  Don't get me wrong, I think that Arendt's obviously respectful treatment of the three Judges conduct even among her criticism of the conduct of the trial is a fascinating study in her attempt to be honest even as that conflicted with the official standards of trials. 

I also believe that even as she was thinking of and writing her reports that she knew she was saying things that would be deeply controversial and would land her in a lot of trouble outside and inside of Israel.

It is one of the more remarkable things about such discussion of the rightness or wrongness of putting some of the most obvious and most dangerous criminals in human history through a judicial process, a trial, is the extent to which putting things in a nice order and wrapping them up in a tidy package, as academic intellectualism and, especially the empty formalities of the law demand flies in the face of obvious, informal reality and the exigencies of punishing such criminals as a means of discouraging those who would imitate them.  Of course, that's especially dangerous because there are those with vast wealth and, so, power who like and profit (and with the rich those are one in the same) from what such criminals do and, so, they want to get them off.  And while that is going on the intellectuals and lawyers and, most pudding-headed of all, the journalists want to argue form and formal niceties. Trump, the least intellectual of all our presidents, is an absolute master at tying the courts and the law in knots by exploiting those forms and formalities.  He is a creation of the same entertainment industry that runs "the news."  That he can use both as he does is an indictment of the Constitutional system that is incapable of preventing that use of it.

I read the tortured writing of Arendt on this and I feel her heart being ripped open by the necessities of taking both sides of that, her obvious and near first-hand witness to the crimes of the Nazis, she came very close to being one of the victims of them, she knew many people who were murdered in the industry of death the Nazis mounted. She was, as well, fully capable of fully appreciating the same crimes being done by other regimes, in other places, at other times (such as in Vietnam).  I know that is always what is behind her writing as a highly trained thinker, a highly trained and extremely responsible intellectual, a moral thinker who feels they must uphold the established order of intellectual and legal procedure and who knows that to hold any credibility with such people as would read her writing, she could not violate those norms and procedures without it costing her credibility if she just stated the obvious.  It is obvious that Eichmann was guilty as charged, if anyone deserved the death penalty it was someone like him and that the Judges had a higher law to enact, one which was not written in legal codes and which was not taught in university law schools and, in the 20th century, is even hardly taken that seriously in secular moral philosophy and that degraded topic "ethics."  

I think one of the more telling things is her conflicted thinking about thinking, wondering how any thinking person could consciously think themselves into doing what Eichmann did.  As Judith Butler condenses it:

But more than this, she faults him as well for failing to realise that thinking implicates the subject in a socialit or plurality that cannot be divided or destroyed through genocidal aims. In her view, no thinking being can plot or commit genocide. Of course, they can have such thoughts, formulate and implement genocidal policy, as Eichmann clearly did, but such calculations cannot be called thinking, in her view. How, we might ask, does thinking implicates each thinking "I" as part of a "we" such that to destroy some part of the plurality of human life is to destroy not only one's self, understood as linked essentially to that plurality, but to destroy the very conditions of thinking itself.

Many questions abound: is thinking to be understood as a psychological process or, indeed, something that can be properly described, or is thinking in Arendt's sense always an exercise of judgment of some kind, and so implicated in a normative practice. If the "I" who thinks is part of a "we" and if the "I" who thinks is committed to sustaining that "we", how do we understand the relation between "I" and "we" and what specific implications does thinking imply for the norms that govern politics and, especially, the critical relation to positive law?

I would invite you to contrast that intricate web of logical analysis that seems to come up with nothing but questions and no answers on a topic in which the answers must be arrived at and there is no possible resonsible, moral conclusion as to what the right answer is. Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt went through those mazes before he decided to covertly, perhaps "illegally" go in on the side of those who opposed the Nazis.  In the end, unless you want to surrender to the worset, to  wallow in indecision, unless you want to leave all such questions suspended as the world of action chooses the most easy and depraved of answers, you have to make a deliberate choice and that choice cannot be based in scientific method or mathematically precise reasoning or abstracted logicality.  It has to be a choice made by a person and there is nothing in any of those aids listed in that last sentence that will lead to to the choice to believe The Law, the Prophets, the Gospels and Epistles, to believe that committing murder is wrong because Thou Shalt Not Kill is an absolute law imposed on human beings by God, that as soon as you start with mitigating that with "just war" theory or the one that is imposed on the most legitimate, the most necessary, the most egalitarian and democratic and impartial of police agencies, that they sometimes have to kill criminals to protect others, you are neck deep in trouble.  

But as Arendt's brilliant reporting on the Eichmann trial shows, as Judith Butler's insightful analysis of her reporting shows, unless you make that initial choice to believe you're neck deep in it already.  Darwinism isn't just neck-deep in it, it's way past the top of its head and so is a society in which it is the foremost formal framing of human and other life.  Nazism was a thoroughly Darwinist political ideology, that was the science that Hess meant when he said National Socialism was nothing but applied science.
 

I Will Throw It Back In Your Face As Many Times As You Misrepresent The Story - Hate Mail

I DON'T WANT to turn the topic of the Sodom and Gomorrah into a series such as the scores of posts I've done on the absolutely proven fact that eugenics, including the genocidal eugenics of the Nazis was a direct result of the theory of natural selection, a result which Charles Darwin, himself, approved at the beginning and as it developed during the rest of his life.  Though it seems those who take issue with what I pointed out about the story - that if the ambiguous references to the intentions of the mob of men of Sodom intended to gang rape the Angels that Lot was putting up for the night, the most remarkable thing about the use of the story to assert "eternal laws" against consensual sexual relations between adult men, especially in a faithful marriage is that the sexual conduct of Lot, offering up his two young daughters to be gang raped and, at the end of his story, him having sex with them and having children with them is never, ever mentioned and condemned.   Nor is the fact that God isn't presented as punishing his serious sins, certainly more serious than his poor wife looking back at what happened for which the story teller turns her to a pillar of salt.  Perhaps I'll be turned into one for looking back at what the story actually says, though it hasn't happened as of about 10:00 EST this morning.

The account in Genesis certainly doesn't present his sexual immorality NOT TO MENTION THE FAR GREATER SIN OF IMMORAL PARENTING as having the condemnation of God, Lot isn't turned to a pillar of salt (or shit, as I'd have thought would be appropriate) as requiring God's destruction of him.  The two angels, supposedly sent by God to punish the sexual immorality of the Cities of the Planes don't say, Hey, Lot you jerk, that's no way for a father to act!  

The fact is that the story is, from start to finish, an atrocious folk story to be trying to derive moral commandments from.  Especially, as you want to assert, eternal and unchanging Laws of God.  A. the rape mobs of the MEN of Sodom and the later one I mention in Judges' retelling of the folk tale are exactly to faithful gay marriage or even just consensual sex between consenting, responsible adult men as it is to straight marriage.  That's implied in Genesis as Lot clearly expects the men's lust will be satisfied by raping his little girls as it will be by raping the angels and explicitly laid out in Judges as the asshole Levite throws his poor concubine to them to be HETEROSEXUALLY RAPED TO DEATH by that rape mob.  

I have never, once, in more than sixty years of reading the thinking of queer-bashers on those two passages of Scripture ever once seen them address those issues, issues which make their use of those stories to promote their bigotry, hatred and violent intentions obviously illegitimate and by the "by their fruits you will know them rule," false teaching.

For example, look at this use of it in 2021 by Brad Miner, a right-wing Catholic gay-basher and reactionary straight sex crank

What Is Man? is a new book – new anyway in English, having been published at the end of 2019 in Italian as Che cosa è l’uomo? – from the Pontifical Biblical Commission. As such, it has no identified author or authors. (The English version was prepared by Fathers Fearghus O’Fearghail and Adrian Graffy.) It carries the subtitle, A Journey through Biblical Anthropology and is a defense of the Biblical roots of Catholicism’s view of human beings and our relationship to God.

When first published, there was a flurry of rumors in the press claiming that the book (either subtly or explicitly) suggested homosexuality should be considered normative. Fr. James Martin, for one, asserted that What Is Man? explains one of the Bible’s key condemnations of homosexual acts, the story of the destruction of Sodom in Genesis, as not really about sexual transgression at all but, rather, a lack of hospitality among the Sodomites. And there is a passage in What Is Man? that confirms the sins of the Sodomites were not exclusively, well, sodomy. But it’s also clear that the “men of Sodom” sought to “know” Lot and his angelic visitors, and that “to know” in the context “is a euphemism for sexual relations.”

As I pointed out, the sins of Lot, uncommented on, offering his little girls to be raped, probably raped to death as happens to the Levite's concubine (sex slave) in Judges, and his incestuous tendencies that grow into full blown rape of them, fathering children with them, are never, ever mentioned by these cherry pickers.

And, as you can see, I have to raise the question about how these "angels" who are a. not human beings, b. not male human beings, c. almost certainly not in the original Hebrew conception of them anything like Earthly creatures, came to be understood as having the same status as human males who are the opposite of all three of those.  Certainly the question of  how a mob wanting to rape "angels" can tell you anything about two human men in an adult, consensual relationship, especially in a faithful, committed, loving marriage, has figured far too little in the millennia of commentary on that bit of what I must call Scripture but wish some ancient Hebrew scribes had chosen to leave on the cutting room floor.  

And it works even worse as telling us anything about moral, just, egalitarian relationships between men and women.  That difference in how females are treated in these stories, their use by men, them being considered fungible -  "I'll trade you two angels for two little girls" - makes using that in an argument for the exclusivity of hetero-sexual marriage revealingly problematic.  I don't think anything in the Bible from that time until near the end of it presents hetero-sexual marriage as anything that should be considered a model for moral marriages - of any kind- today.   Though, perhaps, it is just one of the passages of Scripture that contributed heavily to the sin of the subjugation of Women.  It's certainly revelatory in regard to the patriarchal use of women and, especially, daughters in that period, even in places not showered with fire and brimstone.

Considering the fact that Lot clearly values the angels who I  would bet were never conceived of as anything but males as having more value than his own daughters, the way his wife is treated in the story (it's even more clear that the story teller thinks women are of no value), Miner's call for the typical use of another passage from Genesis is blatantly hypocritical and entirely anachronistic.

But back to What Is Man? and Chapter 3, which begins:
 

God said: “It is not good that ’ādām should be alone (Gen 2:18). That the Creator wished that ‘in the beginning’ humanity should be constituted by man and woman (Gen 1:27; 2:21-23) invites us to consider carefully this fundamental human difference and to explore its meaning.”

The text goes on to emphasize the equal dignity and complementarity of man and woman, or as it specifically has it, “the two sexes.” The authors also stress that it’s love that should govern us and cautions that the union of the sexes is not without difficulties, almost seeming to quote Shakespeare’s Lysander: “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Because What Is Man? is a book by Bible scholars acting as anthropologists, there is some interesting commentary on Creation, more likely to start debate rather than settle it, especially with regard to the literal interpretation of Adam, Eve, and the Fall. I’ll have to leave that to more capable debaters.

I’m concerned with what seems beyond debate, especially in terms of those rumors that the book opens the door to a new Catholic view of homosexuality.

The traditional use of this passage to promote hatred and inequality for LGBTQ People - as it has often been used -  has a number of its own problems for the queer-bashers.  I read it and it looks like a perfect example OF WHY MARRIAGE EQUALITY IS HIGHLY MORAL, but not because it tells us anything accurate about "Adam and Eve".

First, the best evidence is that the story of the creation of Women is an absurd folk tale, not how the human sexes were created.  Anyone who asserts the story is true deserves to be laughed out of the argument for any serious purpose.  Certainly as Catholics are not biblical fundamentalists, that's especially the case with him.  Second, taken more usefully as an allegory to teach moral lessons apart from the actual plot,  the motive of God doing it was that he saw it was not good for Adam to be alone GOD SAYS THAT IN THE STORY.   Clearly loneliness is an evil that God observed in the life of Adam and it is what God created a companion for Adam to end the evil of aloneness - I will point out that the story as it is often observed doesn't seem to think they had sex in the Garden of Eden, though that's certainly not clear in the telling.  God doesn't say,  "It's unhealthy for men to not have sex," so putting it solely in terms of sex as the traditional use of it to bash LGBTQ folk is unwarranted.   In the folk-tales Eve doesn't seem to have become pregnant in Eden but only after the expulsion.  So it's unclear that the issue of sex has anything to do with that passage.   

The use of the story as an assertion that  loneliness is an evil is far clearer, far less problematic and far more charitable than the typical orthodox use of it to bash others. 

It is certainly as much of an evil for gay men and Lesbians to be alone as for the asexual Adam.  To imagine him as heterosexual before there was a woman seems to be kind of bizarre.  What was he sexual about before then?  Loneliness is an experienced evil of life that many, I would say virtually all LGBTQ+ people know far more directly than that they should pay serious obedience to the glorious mess that is the Book of Genesis (or Judges) and it is certainly part of what must instruct our moral conscience in these matters.  

Of course, it's easy for straight guys and gals to brush that experience of Gay and Lesbian loneliness, lovelessness, etc. aside.  It's like Mark Twain's observation that sexual continence is something that's far easier for old moralists who have had theirs to command for the young living at the height of sexual desire.   Only more so.  I especially love to be preached chastity by guys and gals who never restrained their own sexual conduct, I don't know anything about Miner's sexual history and don't want to (I don't enjoy thinking about the sex lives of other people as such "moralist" voyeurs seem to) but there are myriads of adulterous, lecherous and even in the closet covert gay men on Miners team, many of them in the Catholic clergy.  

I'm not going through this to knock some sense into those who hate marriage equality, I'm afraid that no matter how much I point out the problematic use of that old and pretty putrid folk-tale of Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah and him raping his daughters and having children by them as a means of promoting hatred of Gay Men, Lesbians, etc. that the haters won't stop it.  Though they should never, ever be able to do it without having these problems with the story as a tale of sexual morality being thrown in their faces.

Brahms - Warum ist das Licht gegeben, Motet, Op 74 No 1

 

 

Mitglieder des NDR-Sinfonieorchesters

Why That Religious Commandment Is The Actual Basis of Any Legitimate Government - Beyond The Left Of The Left

THE FIRST BOOK of Walter Brueggemann that I read was The Bible Makes Sense in which he said that the entire Bible, both Testaments, the entire monotheistic tradition revolves around the Exodus story.  The Children of Israel enslaved under Pharaoh, their mistreatment, the attempted genocide, their crying out for deliverance, the commissioning of Moses and Aaron, the liberation, the long wandering in the wilderness as God, through their experience, makes a People of the escaped slaves, very significantly and certainly informed by that experience The People being given The Law through Moses, etc.  

Over the several years since I read the book and studied it, it's sometimes been hard to figure out how, especially things in the Christian Scriptures, went along with Brueggemann's claim about it all relating to the Exodus and Sinai experience.  

I was asked what I thought was political about the Golden Rule that made it the basis of Western democracy, why I thought that was the actual basis of the historical existence of democracy as a modern political entity and not some ill-defined "enlightenment rationality." Which is worth going through.  Though I'd specify I said it was the basis of the elusive, yet to be attained genuine form of that, EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.  I won't,for now, again go through why I don't believe in the authenticity or durability of any other kind of democracy except the egalitarian form.  Don't worry, I'm sure I'll repeat myself on that unless we happen, through some miracle, to suddenly attain it and I can finally die happy for having seen it.

In meditating on the Commandment in the form Jesus gave it, Do to others what you would want them to do to you, it first seemed that you could only be personally responsible for actively delivering on it by acting that way yourself.  You couldn't get the others to do the same to you, that was their choice and responsibility. That was better than the alternative, certainly, but it didn't really satisfy me as being as effective in producing a better life as The Law and the Prophets should be.

But there is something else that Brueggemann pointed out about the Exodus story, God doesn't even enter into it till many verses and a couple of chapters have set things up, the flourishing of numbers of the Children of Israel in Egypt, their enslavement as a means of disempowering them (establishing their unequal status), the grinding labor and oppression under Pharaoh, his paranoid decision (no doubt because he realized he'd given them good reason to hate him) to murder all the male children of them, the infancy story of Moses, his achieving a consciousness of his ethnicity - he killed an Egyptian who who he saw beating a Hebrew slave - etc.

Brueggmann points out that when Moses finally has his incredible mystical experience of God directly talking to him through the burning bush, God, God's-self tells him that what motivated God to act through Moses and Aaron were the cries for justice by the Children of Israel.  It's clear that the righteous act of the freeing of them from bondage originated in their own consciousness of their own oppression and their protest against that, crying out to God for justice.

I think that that's something that is certainly seen in the case of Black Americans who have gotten no justice without doing the same thing.  That's an experience that is literally the same for all identifiable groups who have suffered oppression, discimination and genocide.  

It's so obvious that even those of the privileged, straight-white-affluent-oppressors will launch complaints about the endangerment or limitations on their privilege will imitate it, that's certainly what is seen all through the media, from the totally fascist, through CNN and on to NPR, they carry the complaints of the comfortable and affluent while suppressing the cries of the really oppressed. And they promote the stupid non-consideration that there is a difference between rich-white-gangsters whining when they have limits put on their theft and oppression of workers and despoliation of the environment and the real oppression of minority groups, of the destitute, the poor and even the lower ranks of what are called the "middle class" by those the media and the law and the culture favor.  For anyone who has the faith that the "free press" is going to save us, have you seen CNN since it was sold to a right winger?  

Doing your part of doing unto others is an absolute moral obligation on which a decent life and society and egalitarian democracy depends.  

But it depends as much on those who are not beneficiaries of a reciprocation by those with more wealth, power, those given a privileged place above the unprivileged doing what the Children of Israel did in Egypt, crying out against their oppressors, against their oppression.  

One of the things that is symbolized in the Seven Plagues that Moses and Aaron administered as a means of persuasion is that inequality has real consequences and those consequences will strike against the richest as well as the poorest, eventually that will be the case no matter how long the richest among us can shield themselves from those consequences.  I think the Seven Plagues in the story are an excellent abbreviation for all of the consequences we see around us today AND THE BRILLIANCE OF THE STORY IS THAT IT PROVES THAT EVEN THE HARSHEST LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE WILL BE IGNORED OR DENIED BY THOSE WHO ARE PRIVILEGED.  As Jesus put it, it's harder than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for the rich to twig onto moral obligations and to carry through with them.  

Jesus and Hillel were right when they identified that Commandment as the condensation of The Law and the Prophets in one sentence. You could spend a lifetime in unfolding it to apply it to real life.  Remember that when Hillel said that to the wise-guy who demanded he recite the Torah to him while he stood on one foot then told him to go study.  That study is meaningless unless it is made a part of our lives, of our conduct, of our demands on our societies, on our governments, on our civil legal systems.  That is why so much of religious writing is hollow and merely annoying in the end.  

That it has so seldom been understood and practiced,  that that civil law is anything but egalitarian or just and that the profession of lawyer and judge, the all-sacred commandments of contract law are generally just enabling those who can pay the most getting away with breaking it,  is an indictment of liberal democracy and the secular republic.  That all allegedly Christian churches have not been at the forefront of demanding and pressuring and coercing and nagging and guilting the allegedly Christian people to do that, as is so excellently seen in, for example, many of the Black Churches, is an indictment of the pseudo-christianity that a disturbingly dangerous percentage of Christians give lip service to.  The kind of stuff you hear from the mammonists of the Republican-fascist party, the TV hallelujah peddlers, the majority of the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, etc.  And yet they wonder why young people reject Christianity in view of that florid hypocrisy.  Though, I wouldn't necessarily think a lot of those who reject Christianity are really interested in the costly justice of egalitarian democracy, they've been sold the opposite by the materialist-atheist-scientistic secularism that is as bad as the pseudo-Christian hypocrites.

We are, through myriads of academic and other modern writing used to the failure of deputed "Christians" in this regard being given to condemn Christianity to that most certain of deaths under modernism, being unfashionable.   But the same people never, ever make the far more obviously relevant criticism of secular, civil government, law and society when, if anything, they are worse because they never deal with the morality of it.  Academia's habits and norms are as willfully blind as the worst of theology and other official church talk.  Academia is as tied to Mammon as the civil law and secular government and the worst of ecclesiastical establishments.

Even if you see this it's a constant struggle to do it, it's especially hard for someone who is affluent and that accounts for even many of us in the lower-middle class, especially those of us who are white and can pass as straight.  It's hard to maintain but it is absolutely necessary to do more than that, it's necessary to do what the slaves in Exodus and in the American context have had to do and struggle against it. I wish I had read Brueggemann's book when it was first published in the 1970s, I'd have saved four decades of futility in the tail-chasing of secular political economics.  That's what happens when you consciously decide to exclude God from the problem, there is no absolute goal, there is no one to point the direction to that.  You have to choose to believe in order to stop going round in circles and move ahead.  That is one of the most important lessons of the Jewish monotheistic tradition, what makes it superior to all of the static systems, pagan and materialistic.  I'd rather "waste my life" trying than giving up in lazy, self-satisfied, wallowing in whatever measure of affluence I can hoard for myself.

I will add that though I think a lot of the story as written in Exodus may well have not happened like the narrative has it, that the numbers of the Children of Israel and many other things may have been exaggerated in the typical narrative practices of those cultures, that many of the passages may well be allegorical creations that encapsulate an experienced truth through an illustrative fiction, I have come to believe there was someone who corresponds to Moses whose flashes of insight and revelation produced the core of The Law and who well may have led a group of runaway slaves out of the oppression of Pharaoh.  I also am convinced that, as it comes down to us, even in the books of the Torah, that that core of insight has had many accretions added to it, some of them in concord with that original insight, some of them corruptions of it.  Like all of the Bible, especially the oldest books of it, trying to discern which is which is a risky endeavor.  That is why I have decided to make Hillel's and Jesus's key to it the hermenutic with which I will work that. That and the rule of thumb Jesus also gave for testing claims of holiness, "By their fruits you will know them."  

I think there was such a person as Moses and I think he had real mystical insights into these things which accounts for why his idea of God and of the moral nature of the universe is so different and why it has endured while none of the others - except areligious Mammonism - has.  Without independent verification of Moses and what really happened, that's a conjecture but it's one I believe in.  The best written evidence we have of that is the Hebrew Scriptures and the other versions of that, the Septuagint and the other versions of the story.  But the truth of it isn't written on paper or on clay, it's in the lived experience and observed experience of us, especially those who struggle against injustice, against inequality and for real democracy. Especially those closest to the experience of the Children of Israel under Pharaoh.  The only alternative is the gangsterism of Pharaoh or Trump or Putin or Xi or Bolsonaro or their pale imitators in gangster states and even secular democracies around the world.

I've never read an academic alternative to the Law, the Prophets, the Gospels which I don't now think would devolve into the same thing just under another name. I'm totally skeptical of that because of what I see all around us, too.  The history of the 20th and 21st century, the support of the secular left for Marxist gangsters, the "Long Detour" of the American left,  etc. Even now the support by the would-be moralists of the American secular left, the stinking Green Party, Noam Chomsky speaking up for Putin put the rotten cherry on top of it.

Betty Carter - Feed The Fire

 

Betty Carter, voice

Geri Allen, piano

Dave Holland, bass

Jack DeJohnette, drums 

". . . men can't be faithful . . . " Repetitive Hate Mail

IT IS ONE OF THE THINGS that I have found is ridiculously controversial whenever I write about it, the promotion of gay marital fidelity.  The first time I got into a brawl on that over at Echidne's sadly discontinued blog it was in response to some of the idiotic statements made by gay celebrity jerks like Dan Savage that gay men were biologically incapable of being faithful or something.  That's an excuse that straight guys had been using to excuse their cheating since some of the stupider ideas about "cave men" started distorting Western culture.    

I will insert here that the idea that we are not to learn from and consequentially change our behavior through even the hardest of experiences and the observation of human history has to count as one of the most absolutely stupid relics of modernism as an intellectual ideology. Modernism and the ideology that we are biologically programmed idiots is a rank superstition.  Realizing that and rejecting it for the alternative in Hebrew monotheistic religion was what led me to believe that the future could be better than the past. It's worth trying to change it than to just throw up your hands and figure we're lumbering robots programmed by "our genes" and there's nothing to do about it.

The quintessential example in my life was that I lived through the untreated AIDS slaughter of gay men in the late 20th century and know that if one such promiscuity spread disease can unexpectedly arise there's nothing to prevent another one arising and killing millions before there are any effective treatements.  I remember the long, far too long period before there was an all too temporary change of behavior for the better among many though certianly not all gay men as the means of transmission of HIV became known and the rate of infections slowed. I remember the fury of many of the 1980s gay male political celebrities resisting the scientific promotion of condoms and avoiding promiscuous sex, such "activists"  coming up with idiotic lines and slogans, paranoid accusations made against scientists that, in retrospect, sounded a lot like the Republican-fascist lies told about Covid-19 and Dr. Fauci. In fact, he got the same then, too.  God bless Dr. Fauci and the others who told the truth and got pilloried for it.  

The sex carnival of the 1970s was hard to close down even at the cost of many, many thousands of lives even at the height of the crisis.  Another such STD epidemic could be even worse and there is no guarantee that any effective treatment will be found for it. Closing down the one that flourishes now, even in the same kind of full-blown public health emergency will be harder.  I'm not surprised that warning of that in advance gets the hostility my comments did.  

I strongly suspect that during the period when the earliest Scriptures were being written that a knowledge of promiscuity spread disease as much as men being unwilling to support children of other men led the early moral theologians to figure out that marital fidelity was desirable, some of them even figured out it was morally superior.  They certainly didn't learn that from the examples of the earliest of the Biblical patriarchs who were a pretty shady lot when it came to sex. I suspect that knowledge hadn't really taken in the period when those folk-stories were made up.  I know we're not supposed to criticize Abraham and Issac, Lot, Judah, etc. but they were pigs when it came to sex. Sexual morality as it can be understood by human beings has been something in continuous development, the last word on that has certainly not been said, back then or later or even today. I don't think anything like that could exist except in the rarest of cases at any time when Women were not considered AND TREATED as equals to Men. I think a vast number if not the great majority of straight marriages, even those in which sexual fidelity was strictly observed by both partners, were far from moral covenants so long as inequality was part of their basis.  Equality may not guarantee morality in human interactions but it is a prerequisite that must be present for human relations to be moral. Straight marriage as a civil matter, when there was legal inequality was morally flawed, though I don't think many theologians or clergy ever noticed that.

I am absolutely in favor of marriage equality.  I'm so in favor of it that I want all LGBTQ+ marriages to be equal having equal legal rights in marriage as straight couples have. Until that equality is the law, such "rights" are privileges handed only to hetero-sexuals.  

But that's not enough, I want them to be equal to THE IDEALLY BEST MARRIAGES, I would like it if all straight marriages equaled those, many of my best friends and loved ones are in straight marriages. To the extent it might be possible to write laws promoting that it should be what the state's role in defining marriage should be.  

I have no desire for same-sex marriages being equal to bad or the worst straight marriages which no one should aspire to copy.  I want all same-sex  marriages to be equal to the best straight marriages, loving, mutually supportive, EQUAL AND FAITHFUL with full legal protection.  

Marriage should be a refuge against many of the harms of life to the extent that is possible, abandonment, lovelessness, loneliness, the absence of mutual support, including financial support. Promiscuity, divorce caused by promiscuity and faithlessness inevitably leads to those evils.  I am convinced that is why Jesus called remarriage after a divorce "adultery," abandonment of wives and children by men was probably what he was thinking about. He knew those listening to him would not understand the immorality of it in any terms other than the adultery they were so used to thinking of as the ultimate of evil in sexual relationships.*   And marriage should certainly be a refuge from one partner giving the other one sexually transmitted diseases of the kind which are also far more likely if one or both partners are sleeping around.  

And that does not even go into the role that faithful, durable marriage has in the responsible support, love and guidance of any children who are part of the family.  Promiscuity is not conducive to good parenting.  Anyone who by birth or by adoption takes on a responsibility to vulnerable children has made a covenant that is as serious, perhaps even more serious than anyone who chooses to get married to another adult who has already gone through the vulnerability of childhood. It is one of the major defects in the "institution of marriage" that that moral obligation is not seriously considered nearly as much as it should be.

The idiotic 1960s and 70s notion that modern antibiotics and scientific birth control had ended the physical dangers of promiscuity was always stupid, a consequence of that kind of biological ignorance that flourishes in the United States as something as unimportant as evolution takes up so much of public school science curricula and the media has a ban on such information being made universally known.  The media suppresses the facts about sex even as they use it to sell everything and as they actively promote sexual promiscuity.  It is one of the most serious of acts of immorality that condoms are not openly advertised and promoted in the media.  But, much as I favor their use to make sex safe, I'd certainly never want to rely on something so haphazardly used as condoms to be the only thing between gay men's marital well-being and something like HIV infection. And that isn't only an issue for gay men.  I knew a woman who never slept around who was given AIDS by her faithless husband, though I don't know who he got it from and neither did she.

The idea that "AIDS is over," a criminally irresponsible slogan pushed by one of the most irresponsible gay "journalists" through the free press, is a lie.  People in large numbers still contract HIV through needle exchange and through sex with infected people AND EVEN WITH THE MOST UP TO DATE MEDICATIONS AIDS STILL KILLS PEOPLE EVERY DAY.  

But the physical dangers of promiscuity are not the only ones, I think there are serious, even deadly moral, emotional and other non-physical consequences of marital infidelity.  

Even "open marriages" by agreement and plan diminish the value of marriage and inevitably lead to a devaluation of the lives and persons of other people and ourselves.  I think that marital fidelity, keeping true to the highest form of the marital covenant is honoring the image of God that is intrinsic to us all.  I think that is very much related to that moral absolute of "Do to others what you want them to do to you,"  I think it's other statements of loving your neighbor as yourself and the Commandment Jesus gave in John's Gospel, "Love one another as I have loved you," are also entirely relevant when we are discussing same-sex marriage.  

Marriage is a special kind of covenant, if you insist on a secular definition, a special kind of contract.  I think marital fidelity is a special and specialized instance of all of those Commandments listed above put together.  If that were not the case, then the only thing special about LGBTQ people having marriage equality would just be a cargo-cult contract about getting financial advantages.  I will never, ever say that that is good enough for same-sex marriages, it should never be enough for straight marriages.  I would never want just that for myself and another man, I would not want it for two women or any woman and a man.  

Lesbians and, especially, gay men were sold a huge lie by those who tried to sell us a degraded form of merely legalized marriage on the lie that, especially gay men, were biologically incapable of making an adult and moral decision for faithful marriage.  That idiots like Dan Savage promoted that crap and lots of immature jerks and those who aren't serious about same-sex marriages fall for it doesn't change that one bit.   

The marriage they asked for was an inferior, degraded contract, not anything higher than a car lease and one without even the obligations of care those would normally carry.  American law is far more concerned with financial matters, money than the most important things in Peoples' lives.

The proponents of infidelity never favored a marriage equality that demanded the best, they wanted to screw around like teenage boys with benefits that can only be sustained through adult responsibility. They wanted same sex marriages to be like those of Newt Gingrich, Republican-fascist pseudo-Christian politicians, Jerry Falwell jr., myriads of cheatin' adulterous celebrity preachers and their brats, right-wing celebrities and "journalists", etc.  I say screw that.  I look at such same-sex marriages and don't think I'd have ever bothered campaigning for them if that's all there is to marriage equality.  

As a gay man, gay men deserve better than that shit.  Lesbians do too.

We won't even be asking for marriage equality until we insist that the very idea of same-sex marriages means the best kind of marriages.  There's no reason to settle for anything less.  Considering they have had legalized marriage forever, it's amazing to me that hetero-sexuals have not done so.  You have to wonder what's wrong with them.

* Count the number of times hetero-sexual adultery is mentioned as opposed to those unequal and so unjust and immoral forms of same-sex sex in mentioned in Scripture.  And every time same-sex sex is talked about it is in an inherently immoral act based in inequality.  The gang-rape in Genesis and Judges mentioned was obviously immoral on the basis of inequality of numbers and violence, the pedophile rape and prostitution mentioned by Paul were inherently evil due to patriarchal inequality.  I am unconvinced Paul referred to Lesbian sex in his one instance that is sometimes interpreted as that. Despite what Luke Timothy Johnson has said about it, I think the scholars who make those distinctions are right that Paul never once conceived of equal, mutually loving and faithful same-sex love as a thing, I don't think he could imagine such a thing. What I'm talking about above is something that is not mentioned once in Scripture.
 

Stella Baltazar, FMM - Catholic Women Preach - Feast of the Ephiphany

 

Feast of the Epiphany

Stella Baltazar, FMM

Happy Feast of the Epiphany.

It is an experience of intercultural and collective bonding of the Magi.

Life is a manifestation of the waves of enthusiasm that inspires and impacts the shores of our thoughts and actions. The vision of the star by the Magi created an impacting contribution of opening up to  universal cosmic communion.

The liturgy of today is set at the backdrop of such meaningful and enriching symbols. The manger, the baby with his parents, the angels, and the shepherds play an enchanting role. Everything is interwoven into the tapestry of salvation.

The unfolding splendour of God and the ardently searching humanity comes alive in a cosmic splendour at the heart of today’s liturgy. Every movement is a “looking ahead” experience with new challenges. Yesterday’s success does not deserve today’s applause.

This feast is an invitation to march ahead and face  new challenges. The present must lead to a journey in community in search of a richer and fuller meaning. No hurdle can hinder the pursuit of our purpose towards the desired destination.

It is a call to humanity to  enter the circle of life and breathe as one. The journey of the wise men is an act of regeneration to a new existence. This is the discovery made by the Magi. Their keen observation of the natural signs and their sensitivity led them to the discovery of the divine manifestation on earth. At the same it unfolded the hidden  prejudices  and the fears of pharaoh. The strong king felt shaken by the birth of a child and his insecurity led him to go after the head of the child.

This experience of the Magi reveals the most interesting secrets of life. The stirring energy and the keen sensitivity of the kings propel them to rise and go in search of the extraordinary Child. Their focus on the purpose makes them forego their comfort and embrace the difficult path with readiness to face the risk. Life is built on letting go, embracing the cross, and moving toward the goal relentlessly. This experience prefigures the life of Jesus himself. It is an act of endurance and perseverance till the goal is attained.

The guiding star is the light in the depth of one’s heart. The clarity on the inner-directed purpose to build a humanity that embraces all humanity as a fraternal communion beyond caste, race, colour and continents. All children are world-class citizens, interwoven into one Humanity, interconnected and have the power of bonding as one human family.

The Epiphany is a prophetic time, a  gift of grace.  It unites the realities of  Nature, Human, and the Divine into a harmonious Unity.

I wish to share an experience: Trans-persons in our world are God’s gift to humanity. Yet, they are counted as abnormal and undesirable. For no fault of their own they are counted as misfits. It is time to be a healing presence, a comforting humanity, and a caring community.  This realization made us to go in search of them and create an ambience of fellowship and friendship holding hands.

On 8th Dec 2022, five trans-persons were invited to a fellowship meal with us. It was a moment of grace and an experience of God’s presence in our midst. It was overwhelming to dine with them in our community.  The sisters of our community were together and we felt that we were nurturing our communion together. That they are in no way different than us. Every human created by God is so unique and beautiful. They hold the image and likeness of God within them. Their loveliness, their care and concern are marvellous to see and enable us to appreciate and love them. In this context, we learn a new lesson that a caring and compassionate humanity that is in search of the truth: we must welcome and embrace.

The magi give us a lesson of multi-cultural communion, collective bonding, and risking one’s life to arrive at the desired destination.

From our settled foundations  we move in search of new meaning, new responses, and  new outcomes. This multicultural collaboration is our quest for the sacred revelation in the universe as spoken by the Prophet Isaiah that God’s Glory shines upon Jerusalem and that nations shall walk by Jerusalem’s light. The wealth of the nations shall be brought there with all proclaiming the praises of God. St. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, affirms that it was revealed to him that the gentiles are co-heirs, members of the same Body, and co-partners in the promise of Christ Jesus.  

This affirmation takes a step further to diagnose the place and role of women in the church which attains high importance since women are emerging from a silenced existence to a new active presence in the church and in the world.  The mine of undiscovered  treasure is found in this cave of silence. It is a new-found opportunity for women to express and validate their experiences.  Pope Francis’ call to synodality is a sign of newness that holds a great potential of innovation, articulation, and action. It is bound to turn the tide of a male-dominated church into an inclusive and complementary relationship. It affirms the giftedness of every culture and nation and recognises the newness that the Church can offer the world through women.            

The timely leadership of the women, like that of the Magi, coming from intercultural grounds opens a newness in the church that Christianity is an all-embracing communion. It opens the door to a combination of multicultural recognition, valuing every culture and gender as sacred and acknowledging the presence of the divine unfolding in the varied contexts of humanity. Therefore, the place for superiority, and favoured position are under suspicion.  The hermeneutic of suspicion could be applied in this regard. The church is in a continuous state of reformation. It is dynamic, active, and alive and therefore it is young.  It is hope-filled since the power of God is manifested and revealed irrespective of nationality or physical or cultural difference. All beings are sacred and are born of the God of love. They converge in that oneness.

The magi become ambassadors of the Gospel in distant lands. Today women realize this urgent mission of undoing patriarchal theology and to build an inclusive community of oneness. This was the revelation to St. Paul when he says that the gentiles are strengthened by the Word. One human being, Jesus, became a turning point to the rest of the world

Collective as bonding: another very important aspect of divine manifestations that the Good News is revealed and manifested to collectives of people. The three kings represent the continents of the earth.  The same message of God’s reign  of justice, human rights and equality - equal dignity of all persons -  is shared with all nations.  The kingdom pursuit is a collective enterprise. It is in togetherness we arrive at a celebrative community of oneness, a collective of differences that does not hinder our unity. They are co-partners in the promise of Christ Jesus.

The Synodal Process, initiated by Pope Francis, calls for a time of deep communion with humanity irrespective of origin, culture, diversity, and matter of faith. Every being is God’s design in this universe. No culture is superior nor inferior. All are God’s Children. Thus, no man-made difference can create neither superiority nor inferiority. In the pantheon of God’s creation every being is upheld as God’s gift.

In this sense, the male-female difference in the sacramental life of the Church stands questioned. The initiative of Vatican II has not been taken forward with vigour. The time is ripe that the church opens its portals for acknowledging the equality principle of the sexes and promote the practices which were prevalent in early Christianity, such as the Diaconate Ordination of Women as seen in Romans chapter 16 - St. Phoebe being the first Deacon in the Roman Church. It is high time that the church opens its doors to the active presence and participation of women in the Sacramental and liturgical life of the church.                  

Risking one’s life: The future that God offers is not security but the cross. It is an unexpected outpouring of the Spirit where the blind see, the lame walk;  it is a call to shed one’s secure foundation to a selfless gift. We are servants in the vineyard of the Lord.  The risk taken by the Magi is a great lesson of exploring the paths that cut across our paths. Along the journey of life we face these realities and are enabled to build on the strengths of each one as a community: self-knowledge is the basis of self-dignity. It enables the person to constantly move beyond the present to the attainment of the desired future.

May the new-born King, Jesus Christ, deign to grant us this blessing.  

Happy Feast of the Epiphany.

 

Oscar Levant - Sonatina

 

Raffi Besalyan -Piano

I wish I were feeling up to learning this.  I hadn't ever heard any of Levant's music before, he had a lot of talent. 

You Ask What I Think About Benedict's Death. I'll Tell You

NOW THAT HE HAS DIED there is a need to come to a real recognition that Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI was, administratively and intellectually a disastrous clericalist Vatican enforcer as the chief apparatchik under John Paul II and a pastoral disaster as Pope.  I answered some of the right-wing political praise of him at one of the putrid Bishop Barron's media sites that he was the most anti-pastoral Pope in living memory. I was unable to come up with one I thought was worse going back well into the 19th century. And that includes such as Pius X and XI.  

His stated intention of driving away Catholics who didn't agree with his narrow, rigid theological program, wanting a smaller "purer" Catholic Church was one of the few things he actually accomplished. The Catholic Church he filtered out was hardly pure, he had a way of keeping the crap and getting rid of the good. I don't think that, much as those who praised his theology might want it, you can segregate his life of action from his abstract thinking. I think the very abstraction of his theology was part of what made him such a disaster in pastoral terms.

In the Portland (Maine) dioceses, which I know best, he appointed a truly awful bishop who closed down the excellent diocesan newspaper in favor of a bland waste of ink on paper, shut down parishes, "consolidating" them into remote buildings that, at least in the cases I know of,  remote from the population they allegedly served and, in many cases, hardly counted as parishes at all.  

He closed the very active, very fully attended AND FULLY PAID OFF church here and sold the property.  I think it is because it served, largely, a blue-collar population instead of a more affluent coastal population.  He denied he did it to pay off the victims of child rapist priests, I doubt anyone believed him for a second.  The result is that Catholics in my town who want to attend mass regularly have to go to a neighboring parish, in another diocese where the priest isn't officially authorized to serve them and the one who is supposed to wouldn't know most of them from Adam or Eve.  I think one of the reasons Benedict wanted to drive away Catholics was that it was his solution to the acute shortage of priests, an alternative to opening up power to those who are called to be married.  

That bishop was later sent by Benedict to a larger diocese in Buffalo New York from which he was forced to resign when his role in the cover up of priest pedophiles, even his reinstating them to active ministry, became undeniable.  There are those who claim that started even before his appointment to Portland.  His criminality finally caught up with him and he was forced to resign under Good Pope Francis. In the mean time what he wrecked has certainly not be restored and won't be during any of our lifetimes.

I will say that what of Joseph Ratzingers' early theology I've read is interesting, though he shares the limits of the far better theologian Karl Rahner, that he was never willing to test established Catholic orthodoxy in a way that mattered, even when the knots of reasoning that forced are . . . forced.  While such theologians may come up with some interesting ideas about a number of things, there is a forced orthodoxy that makes those ideas less convincing than they may have been. The theologians attacked under Ratzinger (Benedict) who I have read, especially Hans Kung, are generally more convincing.   Though it reportedly upset him at the time, when Karl Rahner, in response to Kung's critique of the doctrine of papal infallibility said he was doing "liberal Protestant" theology instead of Catholic theology,  I think it was something of an unintended complement.

Most Catholics never read theology.   Benedict's theology is far from what is most important about his career, it will be him being the henchman of JPII and JP's cult of personality.  And JPII's re-centralization of power, the appointment of often corrupt and far too often incompetent. even corrupt yes-men as bishops .  And his own hypocritical and tragic papacy which, even as he attempted to correct some of the worst aspects of the papacy he served, especially JPII's horrific malfeasance in regard to priest child-rapists, he was too cowardly to either challenge or dismiss even some of the most corrupt Vatican criminals, clerical godfathers, many of them and their acolytes practitioners of the very sexual taboos that obsessed Benedict when it came to consenting, competent adults instead of involuntary victims.  From what I've read, there really was a hypocritical, closeted active gay clergy faction in both the JPII and Benedict XVI papacies as the leaked documents indicated.

One of the things I read this past week said Benedict as well as JPII had an absurdly  elevated and lofty concept of the Catholic priesthood. In my experience of priests, the good and the bad, you have to be willfully blind to hold such an unrealistic view of the priesthood.  Maybe I can thank my parish having a really awful priest while I was a teenager to thank for making that clear to me.  That is something that is too common among Catholics, especially priests and is something that is bound to come when all power is ultimately held by a clique of unmarried men who are ordained, a body which, in its effective majority, will always hold itself as superior.  The evidence against that is as overwhelming as the evidence for it is absent.  I have come to basically distrust any clergy which is solely unmarried and of one gender.  While there are good Catholic priests, the institution, itself, is rotten.

His most responsible act after JPII brought him to the Vatican was his decision to resign as Pope and even that he did in a damaging and half-assed way.  With the help of his physically beautiful Secretary Georg Gänswein (Gorgeous Georg) who Benedict was widely suspected of being in love with, he became a tool of the anti-Francis, overtly fascist opposition to the current Pope.  If it hadn't happened over so many years, so publicly, I might have suspected it was not something he consciously went along with.   He was not mentally incompetent and he was not isolated.  He could have stopped it at any time.  That reached a new depth when the aspiring Pius XIII, Cardinal Sarah, claimed a book he published to counter a key reform being contemplated by Pope Francis ordaining or reinstating married men to be allowed to serve as priests in ill served regions was co-written by the "Pope-Emeritus," something that Benedict denied.  Francis was forced by that stunt to remove Gänswein from his job in the Vatican (which he should never have had) which even Benedict understood was proof that Francis knew he couldn't trust him.  

As you can see, I'm not a great big fan of Benedict XVI, he did more to disillusion me with Catholicism than just about anyone other than John Paul II.  And, believe me, there were many before him, perhaps starting in my early childhood with that other infamous operator and center of a self-created personality cult, Cardinal Spellman .  I don't trust clergy who become the center of celebrity cults. The best ones don't.  

But I am a Catholic, officially I'm still counted as a member of the Catholic church, one of the estimated billion Catholics world-wide.  And as John Dominic Crossan, the heretical ex-priest said, to say he wasn't a Catholic made about as much sense as to say he wasn't Irish.  But I was never the kind of Catholic that the fans of the past two popes and such right-wing thugs as Raymond Burke and Robert Barron would approve.

When I first went online, for a number of years, I was very reluctant to discuss religion and was forced to do so primarily to criticize such people as I do above, on the other hand, and those who were enthusiastic about the atheism fad of the 00's.  

But as I learned more about why democracy was failing, as I understood that secular, liberal democracy is doomed by its materialistic ideological foundations, as I learned that equality, not some ill defined notion of "freedom" was the actual and only secure basis of democracy (freedom is equally AND RESPONSIBLY held or it is not free), I came to understand that even more basic to that was a specific RELIGIOUS foundation which had to be taken as surpassing any alleged scientific, rational, sociological, psychological or other ineffective and, ultimately, self-destructive framing of egalitarian democracy.  

In arguing with both the right wing religio-fascists and the secular materialist-atheist true believers in scientism, I came to understand that in the only place where such phenomena can be seen in nature, in human history, egalitarian democracy was intrinsically a development of Christian culture.   

I will also point out that in so far as "Christendom" has not been egalitarian and democratic, it has failed to be, in any way, worthy of the term "Christian."  That accounts for the majority of the history of "Christianity" with political power or de facto political influence. That rarity is no more discrediting of Christianity than the rarity and fragility of egalitarian democracy discredits it.

I came to be convinced that it may well be possible for egalitarian democracy to develop under other religious framings which held human equality as in intrinsic part of reality. I can think of a number which have the necessary prerequisite beliefs or which could develop those.  But it is a fact that in the United States, in Europe, the basic foundational ideas for egalitarian democracy are a product of the egalitarianism of the Golden Rule and other Scriptural statements which are its equivalent, in both the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures.  I have, through a large number of posts, traced that history going back to the earliest theologians, especially Gregory of Nyssa and even Paul and have traced the folly of the attempts by the secular left to establish and sustain them on the basis of scientism, secularism and atheism. I believe that other religious traditions have the potential to develop egalitarian democracy, I believe even more so that materialism, atheism is inevitably destructive of it.

I have especially shown that modernism has been a constant threat to egalitarian democracy.   Modernism is far more likely to produce what I call gangster government if pushed to its ideological ends.   I think the Catho-fascist condemnation of modernism is very ironic.

Right now, especially thinking of the things I've been writing about recently, the Scriptural basis of oppression and discrimination against the minority group I belong to, LGBTQ+ People, the double-standard and vile hetero-sexual injustice behind the very folk-tales that are cited in favor of that discrimination, blatant evil and injustice which has escaped moral discernment by Jewish and Christian, etc. theologians and clergy for millennia, the continued injustices of the Catholic and other churches, I wonder if maybe God sent us the neo-atheists and a period of the failure of faith - a sort of Christian destruction of the Temple and exile -  as a means of Christians and Jews and others, finally junking false lessons such as derived from the tales of Lot, the Levite who gave his concubine over to die by rape mob, the clear lack of understanding of moral and necessary same-sex sex degeneracy presented as morally, the subjugation of women, and a myriad of other things as a necessary correction of Christianity.  

I wonder if this might be God using godlessness to force us to choose the good in the Jewish and Christian traditions and to admit and renounce the bad in it.   I might, given time, find precedent in the Hebrew Prophets, maybe even in the very difficult and troubling letters of Paul.  

That isn't an idea I've worked and developed far but it is where my thinking is now, now that Benedict is finally removed as a focus of Catho-fascists rallying and organization.  I have read some of his apologists say that Benedict XVI was as confused and troubled by the American anti-Francis use of himself as he seemed to be whenever he faced right wing creeps.  One of his worst traits was his cowardice when he was faced with right-wing thugs and gangsters such as are still a majority in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and a number of Catholic billionaires here.  

It was noted by one of those he got fired from an editorship under him that he never acted decisively against the far right, even those who were clearly engaged in evil in the way that he never failed to do to even those who were moderately dissident in matters of theological abstraction.  I think that might be as good a real life model of what I'm thinking of as anything.  I used to say John Paul II was a good example of why it was a mistake to make someone with a theater background pope, I think Benedict might be a good example of why it might not be the best idea to put someone who spent the best part of their careers as an academic theologian in charge.  He was a bad Vatican power wielder, both as Cardinal and Pope, as much as others might want him remembered for his academic theology, that's not what was real about his career.

I hope God is merciful to him.  I say that because Francis has made reminding people of the virtue of mercy the center of his papacy.  I didn't feel moved to say it of any of the Vatican insiders any time during the papacies of JPII and Benedict XVI.  If being a good pastor is valued more than a media-created or billionaire astro-turf cult of personality, Francis will be more fondly regarded than either of his two predecessors.   He's had a positive influence on me, something that neither of them had.  That's what I think about it.