This Was Going To Be "Friday Fun" But I Was Late

 

Someone recently didn't care for me pointing out that even mathematics so the science that it was dependent on isn't absolutely grounded in objective reasoning, Jeffrey Kaplan does a pretty good job of showing why the belief that is possible is truly naive and a denial of the best evidence.   If math cannot be entirely enclosed within logic then the idea that physics can ever be finally settled in a theory of everything is absurdly fraudulent. 

That is something that even as arrogant and insistent a materialist absolutist as Sean Carroll can be forced to admit, sort of, but it is like pulling hen's teeth to get him to do that.  

Taking A Chance On Taking A Chance On God And How This Matters

IT IS THANKS TO looking again into the late James Cone's theology that I went back to a book I bought years ago, stared reading, put down for what seemed like good reasons and picked up again last weekend,  the late John J. McNeill's 1988 book Taking a Chance On God, one of his books in LGBTQ+ theology.  The date of publications at the height of the AIDS crisis is important to the contents of the book and his thinking in it so I've noted it. I have to say right up front that there are some things he concluded from his experience that I don't agree with but that's the nature of reading LGBTQ+ literature and of reading theology.  One example that I feel compelled to point out is that the consequences of anonymous sex make it a rather obvious sin to engage in it.  McNeill was more of the idea that it might be the only experience of love available to some men and that influenced his judgement of it.  I don't think that's anything like a sufficient mitigation for the enormous potential for harm that is an inescapable consequence of it generally being engaged in. Anyone who engages in more than one sexual encounter with more than one person who engages in any kind of promiscuity opens not only himself but any other sexual partner to serious even deadly consequences by their behavior.  Though there are certainly worse sins, such as preventing the legalization and normalization of committed, faithful, loving sexual relationships, marriage equality, which is the larger sin which leads, inevitably to someone feeling the compulsion to engage in anonymous sex.  When he was writing and talking that was certainly a more serious sin that was ubiquitous among legal, political, religious, etc. figures.  Most of the habits of dangerous sexual encounters among LGBTQ+ people are a bad habit of the often violent discrimination against us.  Discrimination which has the blessing of the ironically hypocritical Roberts Court, the same court which narrowly and likely temporarily ended legal discrimination against us so very recently. Earlier courts nearly uniformly upheld that discrimination against us.

Getting back to McNeill.  I had put the book down due to my distaste for psychology and, especially, Freud's theories.  After he was pretty much kicked out of the Jesuits by JPII and his chief enforcer, Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) for his ministry to Gay Men and Lesbians, McNeill went into the practice of psychotherapy, probably as a professional extension of his helping people in pastoral counseling. Now, I've especially got issues with Freudian psychotherapy so his use of Freudian terminology put me off and I closed the book a number of years back.  Though I should have finished the book because his use of it is atypically harmless and a good opening into his thinking , though not as good for me as his use of Scripture and earlier theological texts. And he was decisively critical in at least one of the basic issues of Freudian dogma.*

It's kind of funny in my life of the past few months that from reading Chad Allen Lizzari's dissertation to reading Claude Piron's linguistic studies (he became a psychotherapist after working as a UN translator) and now McNeill, I'm being influenced by those who are and were much influenced by psychology and who all worked using psychotherapy to try to help people.  Perhaps it's only as a science that my distaste for psychology is valid and as a therapeutic art it can, sometimes, be practiced by People of discernment and good will as a good thing. Sort of like religion, in that.  I doubt that much of even effective physical medical treatment can be rigorously considered to be based in the best science because our organisms are far too complex and far too many illnesses are based on things we can't really study scientifically.

That is even more the case for mental problems which are entirely invisible to direct observation and tying down to an actual physical cause is probably not only impossible but conceptually mistaken. In the past and today one of the shadier things that psychologists and, perhaps even more psycholgists do is invent mental disorders to drum up business.  For a large part of my life being LGBTQ was labeled diseased, though the resistance of a financially interested "therapists" who specialized in "treating" mostly gay men and lesbians was overcome and those official "diagnoses" were officially dropped.

I think any helpful help for mental disorders has to be more a product of art and wisdom for all the dangers that vaguery brings. I really don't think there is any helping that. The same dangers are present when quackery or bad-faith in the guise of science is allowed to be done as it certainly has been. In fact, when they believe what they think has the reliability of gen-u-ine science, they're less likely to question what they do.  Especially when the legal and judicial systems collaborate with "experts" and two institutions of massive self-assured arrogance determine the outcome.  And more than a little of McNeill's theology is informed by his thousands of hours of talking to and trying to help LGBTQ+ clients and his attentive listening and consideration of their reported experience. The wisdom of that is found in his conclusions though I will confess, the experience of being gay in much of it is foreign to my experience.  Still, any acknowledgement of its potential to do good won't affect my rejection of psychology, even more so psychotherapy as science.

Despite having said that I don't find much of Queer Theology compelling, I have to say that I do find John J. McNeill's theology some of the most compelling I have read recently and it isn't just because so much of it compels me as a specifically Gay Christian. His explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity is the first one I have found really compelling, and I've read some pretty well regarded theologians on the topic.  I'll give you a big chunk of it.

A primary task of gay religious groups as they seek to foster the spiritual growth of their members is to teach us how to become self-centered in a healthy way, so that we are able to take responsibility before God and our fellow humans for our own choices and our own lives.  We must learn that we cannot live our lives simply to meet the expectations of others,  whether those others are parents or church officials.

Certainly that isn't something that is peculiar to LGBTQ+ People, the struggle with our inevitable focus of our attention on ourselves and the strong tendency to become self-fixated is nearly universal.

As lesbian women and gay men, we must prayerfully undertake a personal reevaluation of what we have inherited, because much of what has come down to us from the church has been contaminated by the evil of homophobia.  We must ask ourselves which of the church's values we continue to want, respect, and love;  in other words, which values are compatible with who we are and are not destructive of our dignity as persons.  As I mentioned earlier, whatever is psychologically destructive must be bad theology.  Thus our identification of the destructive elements will be a service to the church, helping it separate purely human traditions from the authentic word of God.

The self-centering and maturing process has been a basis in God's revelation in Scripture. Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, was the last in a series of epiphanies or revelations of God that had been going on for millennia.  When the followers of Moses began to worship God in the image of a golden calf - a worship that necessarily involved a dehumanization and depersonalization of the self, and a regression back into the subhuman,  God revealed him/herself as a person.  The central message of that revelation of God is a person and that we give God true worship primarily through the development of our specifically human capacities for work, joy, play and love.

The progressive revelation of God's self as Father, Son and Holy Spirit represents a progressive identification with and interiorization of the divine presence in our lives.  In the first stage God appears as a parent figure, one who establishes laws and demands obedience, and yet a parent who is also faithful,  compassionate, and forgiving.  In the second stage of this self-revelation,  God becomes present to us as a fellow human being in the figure of Jesus, our brother and fellow human being. At this stage God is still outside us, but is more accessible to us in the form of Jesus.  In the last stage God appears as the Holy Spirit of love who now dwells in us.  As the prophet Jeremiah stated, the old covenant of God was based on the law and the external authority of God: "I had to show them who was the master"(Jr. 31:32).  However the new covenant is essentially different.  In the new covenant, Jeremiah predicts, God will write the law deep within us, on our hearts.  As a result every human being, from the least to the greatest, will be able to find the will of God within him-or herself and his or her experience.

This is the covenant I will make with the House of Israel when those days arrive - it is YHWH who speaks.  Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts.  Then I will be their God and they shall be my people. There will be no further need for neighbor to try to teach neighbor, or brother to say to brother, "Learn to know YHWH!"  No, they will all know me, the least no less than the greatest - it is YHWH who speaks- since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind. (Jr 31:33-34)

At one point in his discourse at the Last Supper,  Jesus said to his disciples:  "It is for your own good that I am going, because unless I go, the Advocate will not come to you."(Jn 16:7). Why did Jesus have to disappear from our own midst that the Spirit of the new covenant could become present? As long as Jesus remained present among the apostles, they had their center of authority and guide outside themselves.  They were trying to meet the expectations of someone else. As long as they remained under the personal authority of Jesus, they were still children.  They had not yet become fully creative and responsible adults.

With the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit, however, the apostles received a challenge as well as an opportunity to mature. . .

Chapter 4: Spiritual Maturity: A Challenge for Lesbian and Gay Christians

Despite whatever risk of the typically Christian sin of presuming supersessionism is contained in McNeill's explanation of it - and he bases not a little of it on the words of Jeremiah, elsewhere noting that Jesus, himself said he had not come to overturn The Law but to fulfill it - that is an explanation of the Trinity I can see whereas all others I'd read had seemed off, to me.  The sin of supersessionism, the claim that the New Covenant overturns the Old one is, perhaps ironically, knowable from exactly the same thing that McNeill condemns much of the anti-LGBTQ+ baggage of the Christian churches with in this passage, the oppressive violence, even murder that resulted from it, the bad fruit of that theology.  Whatever else we know, that kind of fruit, that kind of result has to condemn any particular traditional holding of Christianity no matter what its provenance or its establishment in age because of the guarantee of Jesus that we could rely on that standard of judgement of such claims.  If that is not to be taken as a reliable standard of judgement then it calls into question everything else attributed to him or, rather, any particular denominational or theological interpretation of it, that is if rational consistency is important in theological considerations.

There is a lot for an outsider of any focused theological school to think about in reading its literature.  All theologies are an expression of the experiences and conclusions of particular groups of People, even individuals within those groups.  In metaphysical academic theology it's not, perhaps primarily the life experience of those which is expressed but their educational and professional orientation and which particular flavor of that kind of theological bias they have chosen to be associated with. Often it is a denominational bias as a more overall determination of what is concluded.  The difference in the Liberation theologies, Black Liberation, the various Latin American ones, the feminist, womanist, mujerista, LGBTQ+ ones, is that the lives of actual People outside of the academic elite are the actual testing ground of what those theologies propose.  

It is one of the most irritating things about huge swaths of Roman Catholic theology, especially that which deals with marriage, married life, sex, that it has mostly, in the past, come from an elite of unmarried, educated men who were supposed to not have normal committed, honestly conducted sexual relationships and, in some cases, nuns who had gotten academic credentials in academic, Catholic theology.  That isn't an annoying kind of thing that is restricted to this peculiarly Catholic case.  It is a fact that as James Cone said, most of the history of theology has been made by some narrow band of elite intellectuals and academics who have produced almost all of theology, in the case of Western theology, almost exclusively white and almost exclusively male and almost exclusively privileged economically or within some institution that sustained them in something like privilege.  Is it any wonder that so much of the resultant theology doesn't do anything for the large majority of People whose lives and experience are not considered at all.  Or, when those are the focus of it, such as in the official Catholic line on the use of contraception and what marriage is for, the mostly priests and bishops and popes and the academic theologians who know that if they don't please the hierarchy their work won't have any impact - and under such regressive papacies as those of JPII and Benedict XVI it might get them fired - the official teaching will not work at all for the majority of Catholics and so they will ignore and disobey that official teaching where they can access contraception.  It is more than a bit absurd that the Vatican, fifty-six years after Paul VI's upholding, against the conclusion of the large majority of the expert panel his predecessor and he called to study the issue, kept the absurd policy against the use of effective contraception in place for everyone but the celibate clergy to follow.  In no small part that is the reason that Republican-fascists in the United States Congress and Catholics on the damned Supreme Court are floating the idea of ending legal access to contraception.  What you can say about the arrogant and clueless isolation from and indifferenc to real lives of real People you can probably say even more for the vile secular hierarchy of the Supreme Court, the legal scholars who are traditionally more like those isolated traditional theologians than they'd like to have anyone pointed out and the Republican-fascist hacks who know their congressional districts are drawn to gather in suckers who will vote for any criminal or creep with an "R" after their name.  Which, do in no small part to the Roberts Court, is why it is in the control of such criminals and creeps today.

That kind of elite legalistic, academic analogy to my criticism of elite theology isn't restricted to the right, however, it is also the basis of my rejection of the ACLU-"civil liberties" line of lawyering that has played the American left for such suckers on the basis of their own Constitutional and First Amendementy purity. It's why their lawyers can be proud of themselves for enabling America's indigenous fascists, the white supremacists, the foreign imports of neo-Nazis, and others who can be counted on to attack, terrorize and kill mostly people under the lawyer's economic class and outside of their professional, social and family circles, people NOT like them, in other words.  An education in elite law is probably any number of times more dangerous than one in elite theology because under a secular, liberal democracy, they really do have the power to make their ideas have real power.

Being of the same mind toward one another, not loftily minded, but instead associating with the lowly

So you can imagine a catalog like Roman's 12 being a parallel to the 10 Commandments.  These are all formulations for a counter-obedience of which I mention only three items.  First of all that Paul enjoins the church to practice hospitality. We all know that. But imagine hospitality in Pharaoh's world. It's precluded by definition. Second Paul enjoins generosity, imagine generosity in Pharaoh's world.  And thirdly, Paul says you cannot practice vengeance. Now all of us knows that those three summons of hospitality, generosity and no vengeance are as radical as you can get in Pharaoh's world or in Cesar's world.

So my thought is that these are secrets that have been kept silent in the church in order that the church should not upset anybody.  But there is - you know this - there is a huge hunger in the church because People are asking is there any alternative way.  And the wonderful thing about Hospitality and Generosity and No vengeance - and Sabbath and No Coveting - is that it's not liberal and it's not conservative. Everybody can do it. We don't have to all do it the same way. Everybody can do it. These are marks of a unified church that no longer needs to argue about secondary issues. And if we did these primary marks of the church there's a fair chance that most of the secondary issues would evaporate. Because we wouldn't have any energy for them.

A Youtube of a clip of Walter Brueggemann saying this came up on my sidebar yesterday so I listened to it and I went back to Romans, which, as you can see below, I differed with slightly in a big way last time and I will point out that the masterpiece that Romans is can't really be seen in excerpting a couple of sentences from it.  I think Romans is like a massive psycho-spiritual therapeutic experience that, if taken to heart, brings anyone from points where they judge others for their presumed or alleged or obviously real sins and, if it is read honestly and with self-reflection and a healthy, informed conscience, they will find that the sinner they judge will turn out to be themselves is just as much called out by Paul in it. It's like one big meditation on Jesus's comparison of someone who criticizes someone with a speck of dirt in their eye while they have a log in theirs, at least in part.

The typical use of Scripture is to pick out the secondary aspects of it to focus on, especially those to do with that most sexy of obsessions, sex, and miss the entire point of it. That use of sex is certainly one of the things that has been most useful to those who want to turn Christianity into a sexual obsession instead of what the Gospels, almost all of Paul and most of the rest of the New Testament says about justice and economic justice and that most inconvenient obsession of Jesus, universal love.  I'll give you more of chapter 12:

1Therefore I implore you, brothers, by God’s mercies, to present your bodies as a living, holy, acceptable sacrifice to God, your rational worship; 2And do not be configured to this age, but be transformed by renewal of the intellect, so you may test the will of God, which is good and acceptable and perfect. 3For, by the grace given me, I say to everyone among you not to be more haughtily minded than your thinking ought to be, but rather let your thinking conduce to sober-mindedness, as God has apportioned a measure of faithfulness to each. 4For, just as we have many members in one body, yet the members do not all have the same function, 5So we who are many constitute one body in the Anointed, and are members each one of one another; 6And having different gracious gifts, according to the grace given us: if prophecy, according to the proportion of faithfulness; 7If service, in serving; if a teacher, in teaching; 8If one who exhorts, in exhortation; one who distributes, in liberality; one who directs, in diligence; one who engages in acts of mercy, in joyousness. 9Love is without dissemblance. Abhorring wickedness, clinging to the good, 10Devoted to one another in brotherly love, giving preference of honor to one another, 11Not slothful in zeal, fervent in spirit, slaving for the Lord, 12Rejoicing in hope, enduring in affliction, persevering in prayer, 13Providing for the needs of the holy ones, pursuing hospitality—14Bless those who persecute, bless and do not curse—15To rejoice with those rejoicing, to weep with those weeping—16Being of the same mind toward one another, not loftily minded, but instead associating with the lowly—do not fancy yourselves sages—17Repaying no one evil for evil, providing things in good countenance with all human beings. 18If possible for you, be at peace with all human beings. 19Do not exact justice for yourselves, beloved, but yield place before anger; for it has been written, “‘The exacting of justice is mine, I will requite,’ says the Lord.” 20But rather, “If your enemy hungers, feed him; if he thirsts, give him drink; for in doing this you will heap coals of fire on his head.” 21Do not be vanquished by evil, but vanquish the evil with the good.

David Bentley Hart translation

One of the good things about going back to a more Orthodox understanding of Scripture, assuming it is the universalist understanding of it, is that such startling ideas like heaping coals of fire on your hungry enemy's head by feeding them can make sense with the rest of the text.  It only makes sense if you assume the fire is there to cleanse instead of torture for eternity.  It makes no sense of you believe in eternal damnation, especially if you deny the concept of purgatorial suffering in favor of the more Western notion that God creates enormous numbers of human beings who he intends to torture into eternity.  Without that universalism, which I agree with Origen and Gregory of Nyssa and St. Macrina the Younger, is there lying as another "secret" in the text.  Augustine's and Calvin's and so many others' imposition of eternal damnation on the Gospel and the Epistles turns God and Paul and those who follow Paul into sadistic hypocrites and the act of charity to your enemies into an evil thing. a lot more evil than even the most irresponsible of adult consensual sex, never mind the most responsible.

I have a lot more respect for Paul and infinitely more for God than that.



 

A Man Who Acts As His Own Editor Has A Blogger For A Client

those who don't even do that comment or tweet.

THIS TURNED OUT TO BE A FLOOD OF IMPIETY on the foremost of Imperial American religious holidays even as it started as an answer to someone who doesn't like my writing.

I am pretty immune to being shamed as to the flaws in my posts. Certainly those I can prove are not flaws but, also, those that are a product of a combination of rapid typing and inadequate editing.  One that I had to go back to see if I was remembering correctly was when I typed "seven plagues" instead of the ten that are narrated in Exodus.  I've got no explanation for that one and it has stood uncorrected for weeks till I sort of remembered typing that as I've been reading another translation of Exodus.  Maybe I should be a little ashamed of that but I can't notice I am feeling it.

I am not a theologian. I am not a writer.  I am certainly not a very good editor.  Being so much offline as I wait to get reconnected, I can say that especially the fact checking I used to try to keep up on has suffered.  I, like most people of my age cohort who grew up fact-checking by ink on paper with its myriad of inconveniences and slowness have gotten rather lazy at the ease with which that can often be done online. It's so easy online that you wonder why as that ease came about its practice has almost disappeared.

Not that it's as important as getting facts right but I have long announced my indifference to standard English spelling and am almost as indifferent to the many and hardly uniform rules of punctuation. I'd guess that my use of commas is often more by ear as a rhythmic device than it is the memory and application of the many rules as to the real, right way to use them. My professional training and a lot of my education was in music, after all.  Sometimes the stray word or comma is a result of an incomplete edit that I don't catch.

As to the modern a-grammatical nonsense that came in with the stupid little book of Strunk and White that is so stupidly and incompetently promoted by college-credentialed idiots who are so ignorant of English grammar as to fall for those two frauds, as much so in the absurdly distilled and insisted on idiocy of those who once skimmed it and imperfectly recalled a few of their stupider rules, after a fashion, or, more likely heard some other mid-brow who skimmed it and pontificated from their memory of it. If I were going to write by rules those would come from something like the much thicker and so less amenable to the TV trained-mind Warriner's English Grammar and Composition, not that piece of shit.  I do have some standards and the first one is that Strunk-White is crap that I won't see cited without pointing that out.

I don't think it was any accident that it was just as TV was really beginning to make Americans really stupid that E. B. White wrote his stupid praise of his Cornell prof's self-published little book and his revision of it was successfully marketed to pretentious mid-brows.  And the lazy teachers who figured teaching a legitimate book on composition and style was too much like work. Though given how much mind-time TV took from their students, it would probably have been hopeless.  That book being picked up by a publisher whose motives were, first and foremost, making money and its widespread promotion  and the rise of the idiot-box making Americans stupid for profit happening at the same time is not a coincidence.  One more or less goes along with the other.  

It also gave rise to the bullshit of such as William Safire, Edwin Newman and other incompetent language cops who could rely on such for-profit corporations as the NYT and the publishers to never fact-check their ignorant and often baseless pontifications on the subject.  Any publication that figured the Nixon-hack William Safire could be trusted to fact-check himself shows that their professional standards weren't really any higher than those of your less-than average blogger.  And these days they aren't even much using copy-editors to check if they're doing anything more important than whether their hacks are following their own "book of style."

I'd meant to forego the temptation to impiously work in the concurrent rise of the American gladiatorial spectacle on its high holy day, perhaps I've said about all I've got to say on that moral atrocity. American football is the proof that America is a Christian nation with generally little use for the Gospel of Jesus. Sports are not compatible with the Golden Rule, the Golden-Rule is all about not having winners and losers and, especially, not trying to be winners. And it isn't about merely mouthing it as a rote saying, it's about doing that.  That is especially true of a sport in which fatal and permanently maiming violence is not incidental and outside the rules but the whole point of the thing.  A  sport invented by the indolent college-attending rich-boys of the late 19th century and which the morality of conventional, institutional Christianity has not much seen it fit to critisize.  Far from it, some of the earliest and most degenerate yet mawkishly pious manifestations of the degeneracy are with the sponsorship of Catholic priests and bishops and other clergies of other denominations. If the game were not bad enough, the cloying, amber-tinted, fuzzy-hallowed commercial-sanctimony of its cinematic and media presentation and publicity should be enough to make a real adult puke. That more don't is probably revelatory of the scarcity of real adulthood in a late-stage imperial culture.

The Christian colleges and universities are as in on it as the most -secular ones, getting money is their motive,  which is an indictment of their Christianity as well as their educational function.  That they would credential people with such a twisted view of an educational institution is proof that they are just handing out degrees to a lot of them.  I think it's entirely legitimate to judge churches' theological validity by its presence in their educational institutions and so many of them are castles built on sand in that regard.   American football is proof of a morally degenerate culture.  It can't be made anything else just as the Roman gladiatorial industry wasn't able to be anything else.  Its presence in the "Republican" period of Rome was a good indication that it would eventually turn into something far worse, which it did in Imperial Rome. It should be no great shock that football rises as America's imperfect democracy falls to Republican-fascism.  The extent to which institutional "Christianity" maintains schools with extensive football programs, Notre Dame, Boston College, etc. myriads of Protestant schools, too, they prove that they have transformed the Gospel of Jesus into something far more like the Roman paganism which was, for Jesus and his followers, what Pharonic Egypt was to Moses and the Children of Israel.  I would guess that easily 4/5ths of the time the words "Christian" "Christianity" are used in the media, even religious media, that it is to that imperial pagan "Christianity" that they are referring.

OK, so I didn't exactly forego it. I was trying to think of the most anti-Superbowl thing I could do today.  Maybe I'll dig out the old Warriner's and do a few exercises from it.  Though, as I recall, even its authors gave in and figure football is part of the American educational experience.

I know from my past criticisms of football that some college-credentialed dolt is going to say, "Sports is good exercise," to which the best answer is for exercising nothing beats intelligently  planned exercises.  Though that might be a novel thought for the seldom to never-exercising, chicken-wing guzzling couch-potatoes who watch them, even jocks know that.  Maybe I'll do my usual morning exercises again, maybe I'll take a long walk away from media.  Perhaps exercising is the most anti-football thing there is, it's the opposite of what the NFL promotes for its viewers to do, sitting there watching commercials and eating junk.