The Folly Of Trying To Come Up With A Rationalistic Framing To Reliably Produce Decency - Why I A Still A Christian Post 2

If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
and take up his cross daily and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
What profit is there for one to gain the whole world
yet lose or forfeit himself?  Luke 9: 23-25

Perhaps what is good is simply whatever is to my advantage, to the advantage of my group, party, class, race, or even to the advantage of my business or trade union.  It is not a question of individual or collective selfishness?  Some biologists and etnologists do in fact try to persuade us that for human beings, as for animals, any sort of altruism or love is merely the supreme form of biologically inherited self-interest.  And, after all, philosophers have continually asked where we are to find the criteria to judge the interests lying behind all knowledge -how we are to distinguish between what is true and what is illusory, what is objective and what is subjective, what is acceptable and what is reprehensible.

So the question remains:  How are we to lay down priorities and preferences on a purely rational basis?  Purely philosophical arguments to establish essential values have not come up with anything conclusive.  They have never got beyond problematical generalizations, which all tend to break down precisely in those exceptional circumstances where people do act in a way that is by no means to their own advantage or for their own personal happiness, but in a way which may involve a sacrifice: even, in an extreme case, the sacrifice of life itself.

I might have included this with the portion from Kung's Why I Am Still A Christian last time but I wanted to use it to illustrate the validity of the point that secularism, science, aka "natural philosophy" even generalized secular and quasi-religious philosophy cannot come up with what "we can rely on" to produce a decent society and world, what we can really, fully hold on to as durable, absolute moral positions that we can use in exactly those cases when we really don't want to act against our perceived self-interest for the benefit of others, or even the lives of others or, in the case of our controlling elite, the preservation of life on Earth itself.  Or in deciding when it is valid to legally force people to not just do what they figure is in their own best interest, individually or extended into their family or other wider grouping.  

Although Hans Kung didn't say it, one of the biggest problems with any quest to use rational philosophy to come up with such moral absolutes as revealed religion finds it no problem to assert is that their framing is ill chosen to find them.  That revealed religion has problems in that regard often founders on their failure to admit the inevitable imperfection of our view of revelation and insisting on that imperfect assertion of it no matter what evils come from it.  That is especially an issue in regard to institutional religion, but the rationalistic attempt to use reason, logic, most stupidly of all, some of our more imprecise branches of physical science, shows that as an intellectual holding, the attempt to use the worst tools instead of those that are just imperfect is sheer foolishness.

In regard to the incapacity of secular philosophy to do that, I've pointed out before, I. F. Stone observed when commenting on Socrates in Plato's set-up job ran circles around a shoe-maker, that the shoe maker could make a pair of shoes while the entire 2400 year tradition of Socratic philosophy had never come up with even one universal truth.  Adding scientific method to that has not seemed to improve their odds of getting to one. And morals are hardly the easiest aspect of philosophical inquiry to find them in.  

I will also point out that the various modern attempts to replace revealed religion with formal philosophy, the various and uniformly idiotic schemes of utilitarianism, the modern field of ethics which seems to have turned back to the eugenicist and Nazi projects of drawing up lists of those it is desirable to kill, something which you can do and not only keep but flourish in a modern, university based philosophy department almost eighty years after the largest of the modern scientifically conducted genocides was revealed to the world, only one of a myriad of the 20th centuries modern genocides that outdo past ones.

Yet science is to be considered sacrosanct even though it is among those fields which, by mutual agreement from the start, excludes any considerations of moral consequences in real life.  Similar points could be made about other areas of life which have, by mutual agreement, been freed from moral consequences but which do not suffer nearly as much as religion does when the not only predictable but permitted evils that come from them create catastrophes with huge pain and many dead.  Commerce, business, the law (where contracts, almighty and explicitly written or, as the judicial practice has it, by "implied consent" favors the liars and crooks and, in the fullness of time, those who get people killed in large numbers for their profit, something that allowed "justice" Gorsuch to say that a trucker owed it to his company to freeze to death on the job and then, with that on the Senate hearing record, to be elevated to the Supreme Court.

The critics of moral outrage are mighty peculiar when it comes to which institutions they declare worthy of death and those they have no problem with, especially those critics of moral outrage who have been credentialed by universities and colleges and have a financial stake in such science, such commerce, such business and such law. It is among the rarest things for an economist to note that truth which was made apparent to Paul that love of money is the root of all evil, something which the most devoted of all to his sayings about sex, women in churches, etc. never seem to much pay any mind to.  The love of money is certainly not discouraged by secularism any more than the most corrupt of ecclesiastical institutions, that secularism has no such sayings and its not only accommodation to professional amorality but its institution of all of those bastions banning moral consideration and its full and complete maintenance of them - the Churches, from the early modern era when it overcame the many Biblical condemnations of usury accommodated themselves to the secular world - the foremost forces of amorality never get the condemnation of academia or the scribblers, directors, producers of show-biz (our actual educators) even as the condemnation of organized religion - like shooting ducks in a gallery - is about as guaranteed a movie evergreen as the Blacklist.

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Back at perhaps was just past the high-water mark of the new atheist fad of the OO's one of the major scientific celebrities of that, Sean Carroll got some of the other brite lites of the new atheism together to, among other things, once and for all provide a rational, naturalistic basis for something like morality.  A number of those involved were exactly from that effort to come up with a biological, Darwinian explanation of what "morality" was and why we, you know, really should do to others at least what we might, kinda want them to do to us, if they were in a position to screw us or, maybe, others. I won't go far into the several philosophers present except that Dennett made a real ass of himself when he said they should just call things what they really weren't and figure that was good enough to fool the rubes.   He fell far after early in his career when he had the attention of someone like Jospeh Weizenbaum. The others, especially one author who, I guess, was let in on the philosophy ticket,  just mouthed the nonsense of evo-psy, weren't much more impressive.

The science Kung was talking about was that threadbare attempt to pretend the doctrine of natural selection didn't mean what the eugenicists and scientific racists and, yes, the Nazis said it meant, to kill the other so the killer survivors benefit from erasing them from society, from the Volk, from the future of the species. In the post-WWII era that is denied to be the case despite Darwin, himself, supporting such ideas within his scientific work and those ideas permeating the scientific as well as popular literature of natural selection.  Kung almost certainly meant the daffy idea of Hamiltonian "altruism" that attempted to dispose of the problem of extreme self-disadvantageous self-sacrifice which turned personal sacrifice for someone else into an act of genetic selfishness on behalf of genes.  

The claim was that the behavior was based in genes, there for the perpetuation and expansion of a specific gene or genes in the population.  Though if that's true you have to wonder why it is so rare in behavior, almost absent from view instead of being among the most typical behavior patterns in all species.  All species, this many billions of years into the evolution of current life having the same chance to exhibit such behavior instead of its most notable novelty even among human beings and our far more morals exhibiting fellow vertebrates. The idea is little more than a PR cover-job at the start and an attempt to rescue natural selection from anything that might indicate it doesn't really exist - true believers can't tolerate disconfirming evidence. If it is intellectually necessary to ameliorate the epic repudiation of the Golden Rule that Darwinism is, as an explanation of disconfirming observed behavior then, certainly, it must be more generally necessary to explain why we haven't all, all sentient, behaving creatures, not killed ourselves off in the Hobbesian war of all against all that Marx correctly noted was the intellectual foundation of natural selection, something you can imagine making Brit-imperialist aristocrats such as Darwin's primary audience somewhat tumescent.

And the biological effort at the atheist hootenanny turned out to be an easily defeated futility.  As the biologists at Camp Carroll fumbled and generally demonstrated their philosophical incompetence, Sean Carroll's fellow physicist, probably the most illustrious scientist present, Mr. "Bad Religion" himself, Steve Weinberg, using the atheist's own favorite tools tore their arguments to shreds saying that he could see no higher basis for morality than what he concluded was in the best interest of his family and his university department, that what he though was best for them (and so himself) was what he though determined his best course of action.  Of course HE didn't see any trouble with that, especially that late in his career, at the top of his professional life, he like your typical tenured university contented head of cattle, he had his and he was good with that. The others couldn't lay a glove on him over that.  Their framing had nothing in it that could overcome that most typical of all atheist lines, "why should I believe it?"  It isn't only religon that that line works on, it works with any proposals that atheists, even those alleged to be reliable science, come up with as well.  Indeed, as you get farther away from the directly observable of simplest of physical entities in science, what led Weinberg to quip "If you've seen one electron, you've seen them all," the more you'll find even what are to be taken as rigorously held scientific articles of faith are vulnerable to that refusal to believe if they don't want to.  That it was the "bad religion" guy who said it, a man who has worked all his life in a science which has produced nuclear weapons but who figures he knows from "bad" and his fellow rationalists had no answer for it reminds me of who Lucifer said he was in Paradise Lost, the one who says no.

There is absolutely no important or lesser aspect of moral behavior which is not entirely too complex to treat in that way.  It is the pretense of Western philosophy and the science of which it is merely a specialized method of, that we can arrive at ideas which will automatically and of necessity be universally adopted or at least which one with sufficient preparation must, of necessity automatically adopt. That is simply an illusory notion, there is nothing automatic about it, it relies on the most basic act of human will. You have to just say yes to something.

Even the most basic and universal of mathematical and, from there, even the most everyday of common occurrences, the act of believing them rests on choices made very early, most of the most crucial of those made so remotely in childhood we don't remember making the choice to believe our experience and the conclusions we drew from them. All further mathematical learning is built on that choice to believe the primitive ideas of numbers and measurement and which are accepted as true by necessity because they are in accord with what we have already accepted.  The farther we get in the lines of inferences from those, the less reliable our conclusions tend to get and the more vulnerable to non-acceptance by others. Mathematics has the most rigorous human methods of testing new claims made within it but those logical masterworks deal with the most abstract AND NON PYSICAL of all entities which knowably reside only in our minds.  The best methods of science mimic that but, dealing with far more complex realities, far more complex objects as even the simplest of physical objects are, they cannot match mathematics in that regard.  

It is an irony of the materialist-atheist faith of scientism that the most complete logical certainty is available only for non-physical, unobservable objects of no provable objective existence. Science merely buys us a little bit of safety in SOME of what scientists claim to have discovered EXCLUSIVELY ABOUT THE NATURAL WORLD, most reliably on the simplest and most observable of phenomena with rapidly decreasing certainty as the complexity of its treated phenomena increases.  And they do that in no small part by excluding many aspects of experienced phenomena and, infinitely more so, experienced life.  Most crucial to this argument, they exclude all moral considerations from their method and, especially, what you need to arrive at reliable moral absolutes, especially when those are going to be found hard or unwelcomed and so denied. Those are available no where except from a supernatural source.  And on them rest any hope for decent social interactions, decent communities, decent countries and a decent life for all of us or, as our science and technology increases our powers to do evil in a most imminent of truths, all of us.

I mentioned last time that I've specialized in skepticism over the secular notion of absolute speech and, especially, press freedom but I've also specialized in attacking the doctrine of natural selection. One of my more enjoyably written posts in that tearing Richard Dawkin's faux ethological presentation of Hamiltonian altruism to shreds, as well.  I've never had anyone, from blog rats, alleged science PhD's to professional biologists to neo-atheist mathematicians refute a single point in my attack. Yet it is probably the most famous of all such lines of bilge, I'm sure still taught as science in universities, the peppered-moth of the mid-1970s.  And I've also attacked its expression among others, Hamilton, himself, E.O. Wilson who, very late in his professional life repudiated the idea when his most public fame was based on his own extension of it, others in the evo-psy that was novel when Kung wrote his book but which has already passed the stage of putrescence that is entirely predictable when you try to mix the dodgy at best science of evolution with the even worse pseudo-science of psychology.

Perhaps what Kung lays out in his point about the epic indecisiveness of Western (and other) philosophies in morality can stand-in for the choice many have seen in whether or not you ultimately support a "Greek," that is Platonic Socratic procedure in thinking about things or if you admit what might be a more Hebrew religious conclusion that you are not going to get there out of reasoning, logic, even by formal empircal observation especially as that is hemmed in by the scientific restriction of what can be measured accurately and which must leave out such ideas as God and morality.

In the end what you end up believing you are to do and so have more of a chance of doing it is a choice to believe that you have to rise above your own self-interest.  Conventionally, in the typical academically taught crouch of ass covering, I'd usually say perhaps but I don't see any other choice in how you can frame the issues that can get you to that end on anything like a reliable basis.  

As seen above, even the secular, scientific ersatz and phony stand-in for absolute morality has to deform "altruism," so notably unselfish under an unbiased observation of the act, into "selfishness" it begs the Darwinian question that is at the basis of natural selection, from the start of the inquiry, that all is a matter of self-interest, if not on the part of organisms than in a just-so story about selfish-genes being behind it all. I am so disgusted with the pseudo-scientific attempt to replace revealed morality that I don't even particularly like the word "altruism" given its Comtean implications.  If modernism is a failed project, the entire effort to replace revealed morality with some ersatz, would be sociological-sciency-Millsian substitute is an even bigger flop.

And if having social, political, legal good instead of evil is the goal, it is all an intellectual fairy-tale.  All of that is at something taken as an intellectually elite level, hardly the level that your typical person with dangerously thuggish tendencies is likely to even try to start navigating.  Would the minor Ivy League product Trump do it?  Would his fellow major Ivy League product Peter Navarro?  To have an important impact within human societies, human politics and so law, the conduct of us as nations and as a world-wide species, a reliable basis from a far simpler framing is the only thing that will work.  Get that wrong, as, in fact, the secular U.S.Constitution did from the start, it won't produce what it needs to.  And that isn't merely the fault of the uneducated, the plebs, the "great unwashed" the "masses."  As the eugenicists, the scientific racists, the elite of fascist, Nazi and Communist criminal regimes and their pale shadows in the faltering liberal democracies prove, the educational and intellectual patina that such talk comprises masks only what is, at its basic level, the same thugishness.  

If Sean Carroll's weekend elite university-faculty, atheist camperee couldn't come up with something better, the skin-heads, MAGA's, those vulnerable to "Christian nationalism," etc. all around the world won't use anything that complex in coming up with a reason as to why they shouldn't do to others exactly what they don't want done to them, anyway.

They have to believe that they are to do to others as they would have done to them because God says so. If that isn't the predominant belief among People, if show-biz or hate-talk media (on behalf of their amoral sponsors) or the decadent ersatz-intellectuals, atheists who choose not to believe talk them out of that, then not only is egalitarian democracy doomed, so is even its shoddy imitation of liberal democracy.  Media liberals won't tell you that, academic liberals won't, would be "civil society" backer George Soros won't tell you that, but I just did.

What can we still rely on today?

From Why I Am Still A Christian by Hans Kung

What can we still rely on today?  What can we hold on to?  I am not a pessimist, but we scarcely need reminding that we are now in a "crisis" of values as profound as it is far-reaching. Ever since the youth and student revolts of the late 1960s,* there are no longer any institutions or guardians of values which are not in crisis or have not been radically challenged.  Where today is there any undisputed authority?  We used to be told: the pope, the bishop, the church says;  or the prime minister, the government, the party says; or the teacher, the professor, "your father" says.  Where nowadays could we even settle  discussion -let alone pacify a demonstration- with an appeal to such authorities? No; the state, church, courts, army, school, family -all seem to be insecure. They are no longer accepted without question -least of all by young people- as guardians of values.

With this critical questioning of accepted authorities, traditions and ways of life, the values associated with them seem to be called into question as well.  Liberalization** was necessary but often went further than had been foreseen or planned.  Elaborate processes designed to get rid of taboos frequently turned out to be more destructive than creative, with the result that for many people today, morality as a whole seems to have become relative.  The effects of all these developments have been anything but liberating.  The ground has been cut from under the feet of some people - especially the young - who now feel their lives have no meaning and turn to delinquency, or extreme religious sects, or to political fanaticism, even terrorism.

The large-scale crisis of values has thrown modern society into conflicts which have not yet by any means been resolved.  Indeed their full significance has probably not even been grasped.  For our grandfathers and grandmothers, religion, or Christianity, was still a matter of personal conviction.  For our fathers and mothers it was still at least a matter of tradition and "the done thing."  For their emancipated sons and daughters, however, it is becoming increasingly a thing of the past which is no longer binding, passed by and obsolete. And there are parents today who observe with perplexity that morality in general has vanished, along with religion, as Nietzsche predicted.  For -as is becoming increasingly clear- it is not so easy to justify any moral values purely rationally, by reason alone, as Sigmund Freud would have liked to do; to prove by reason alone why under any circumstances freedom is supposed to be better than oppression, justice better than self-interest, non-violence better than violence, love better than hate, peace better than war. Or, to put it more forcefully:  why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness, we should not just as well lie, steal, commit adultery and murder;  indeed, why should we be humane or even "fair"?


In response to a challenge about a statement about the impossibility of there being any kind of moral absolute based on a rationalistic-materialistic framing of reality, I had a vague recollection of this statement by the late ecumenical theologian Hans Kung in his book, titled in the authorized English translation, to tweak the nose of Bertrand Russell's fans (my guess), is "Why I Am Still A Christian."  The title of the original was Woran Man Sich Halten Kann, which is more or less the meaning of the first sentence in the text.  In the  preface to the book Kung specifically said he was attempting to summarize the most important points in his three large and fine books of rigorous testing of the bases of Christian faith, Does God Exist, On Being A Christian and Eternal Life?  I went back to the book and have decided to go through it during Lent as I once went through Walter Brueggemann's The Bible Makes Sense, a project that started one Advent and lasted pretty much through the extended Christmas season.  

Given Hans Kung's active and hard work on ecumenical union, not only with Christians but with colleagues from the other major monotheistic religions and with others from other traditions, quite universally,

- given his and his co-workers at his Global Ethics Institute, striving to promote the moral and humane conduct among adherents to all traditions

- and, given, the rigorous devil's advocacy he makes in those three mentioned books (he makes atheists' case better than any atheist I've ever read, and made a better one for belief)

I think you can be confident that if he could have found a convincing, rigorous, durable purely rationalistic origin for absolutes of moral conduct he would not only have admitted it, he'd have promoted it knowing that the atheist, the morally unreliable, we will always have with us.  At least in the present dispensation.

For a book not yet forty years old, his citation of "youth" and older generations might seem a little odd to those who can't remember the grandparents and parents he was talking about. The secularization he focuses on here is far more advanced as a general world trend. Certainly by the time of his death he realized that it was so general a trend that in many cases, such as the English speaking world, the churches were in many cases as fully secularized, in full pursuit of the kind of amorality, in some notable cases, as those without any pretenses of holding religious ideas or associating themselves with any identity. I think, it may be the case that the believed decline in "mainline Christianity" may be due more to their adherence to something more in line with the Gospel of Jesus than their concessions to secularism.  The "white evangelicals" the TV-night club "Christians" have made the most extreme of all concessions to a-Christian secularism and they have flourished in the secularized, media-saturated milieu.

The consequences of the loss of acceptance of any authority -the typically secularist, play-lefty American wet-dream of absolute freedom- is certainly represented as opposed to morality in his list of alternatives:

. . . why under any circumstances freedom is supposed to be better than oppression, justice better than self-interest, non-violence better than violence, love better than hate, peace better than war. Or, to put it more forcefully:  why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness, we should not just as well lie, steal, commit adultery and murder;  indeed, why should we be humane or even "fair"?

rejecting the alternatives of morality, the list of self-centered, selfishness left is an honest description of the morality of easily the large majority of "white evangelicals," "traditional Catholics" and the largest part of, really, what most of us do when we come up with a choice between the moral alternative and what we really want.  It has been that way through all of our history, though the chance to choose the selfish part was more restricted to those with wealth and power, the richer and more powerful the more obvious.  Whether the Tudor or Stuart kings, the various royal houses of Europe and beyond, the various scheming and amoral families that had control of the papacy for large stretches of early modernism, the Czars of Russia, their reproduction under would-be Marxism, the continuation of that under Putin, the Emperors of China, both those of feudalism and currently under Communism, etc.

The "freedom" that he opposes to "oppression" is freedom for the other, for the neighbor as well as to yourself.  No one I've ever met is against being free to do what they want to, human oppression is always in operation along with the oppressors being free to do what they want to do.  That is, certainly, an aspect of freedom with few if any secular-political-philosophical declarations of freedom that is seldom considered and is taken as a given only by those too stupid to have the slightest concept of such abstracted ideals as put into effect in real human societies and under real human governance.  The secular American left of my generation could, under that heading of "freedom" overlook Mao and Brezhnev and even Pol Pot (for a time) and the American right can with overlooking America's client fascists and their millions, even billions enslaved and millions murdered, the reason the Republican-fascists slob all over Putin and Orban and whoever else Murdoch or Trump,etc. want to do business with.

I think a lot of the crisis of faith in authorities is due to the growth of the middle-class allowing them to aspire to have, as Huey Long the would-be Trump well before Trump had it, "every man a king," a promotion of a fantasy to those with only a little relative power and at lower budget levels to maintain that as a delusion.  

I think also that Hans Kung may not have realized that with what may, sometimes, sometimes even rarely, legitimate authorities from those institutions he listed as now discredited, the most dangerously unregulated entities, media figures (such as on FOX or worse), show-biz figures (such as Reagan and Trump), billionaires with even a slight sense of how to mount phony PR (such as Elon Musk and Steve Jobs), Youtube and pod-cast hate-talk bigmouths (take your pick) etc. will fill in the gaps left by the discrediting of traditional authority.  Eating up so much of the conscious attention of most people with anything from a radio to the most sophisticated online connection, the modern media, the internet, the very ratfuckable algorithms (if there is artificial intelligence, it's got to be the stupidest intelligence, ever), has produced a nightmare version of authority.  

And it is almost always an authority which shares this with Satan, it will always be strongest when it is appealing to the worst things in us.  I think that every world danger we have, Putin in Russia, Republican-fascists in the United States, various smaller and very dangerous figures in Europe and North America, many of the dictatorships in the third world, the international gangster organizations, the extraction industries, the international cartels, etc. have their power or maintain it against the world and public good due to the power and secular amorality of the mass media.

That's as true of the remaining influential ink on paper New York Times as it is of FOX or Facebook or Youtube.  The part that the NYT played in putting Trump in power through its thirty years of lies about Hillary Clinton deserves to destroy its credibility as much as the priest-pedophile scandal has to destroy the credibility of the all-unmarried-male Catholic hierarchy.

The revelation of discredit and corruption that comes with the the pulling back of the curtain to expose the phony PR is hardly confined to traditional traditional or quasi-religious academic authority, it is as true of secular authority as well as religious, it extends well into what is taken to be secular virtue, as well. I have rather specialized in my skepticism of the most sacrosanct of those as is encapsulated in the American First Amendment.  

The most basic pseudo-moral absolute that imperils us today, one which is granted the most enormous privilege ever given to such dangerous immorality in the guise of virtue, the privilege for the mass media to intentionally lie to its highest profitability (as can be read in the internal e-mails from FOX during the attempted putsch) in the American "First Amendment."  When your profitability model relies on harnessing the power of mass-immorality and gullibility, as you immorally plan on using immorality to make you rich, your own sense of truth and reason will consciously, admittedly be thrown aside on behalf of making money.  That's as true of the New York Times in a little way, of NPR in a "non-profit" scheme, as it is of the most corrupt pod caster or Youtube channel schmuck.

Still, I think that Hans Kung's approach to the problem works very well on an individual and even a societal scale. And the importance of that can in no way be taken as inconsiderable.  The choice to choose what is right over what is wrong is not done on a corporate or even a club basis, it is an individual choice, it is, in the most true sense of it, a choice to believe something.  It is a choice to really, effectively believe:
 
freedom is better than oppression, justice is better than self-interest, non-violence is better than violence, love is better than hate, peace is better than war, we MUST be just,w MUST tell the truth, NOT steal, NOT commit adultery and Not murder WE MUST BE FAIR.

Kung almost gives in to the sin of relativizing even within his listing of absolutely essential moral absolutes when he says:

Or, to put it more forcefully:  why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness,

because the very trouble is that WE MUST HOLD THOSE MORAL VALUES AS SELF EVIDENT EVEN WHEN DOING THE OPPOSITE WILL GET US WHAT WE, generally stupidly, BELIEVE WE WANT. What we want for ourselves is the origin of all of the evil we are capable of when we don't take the moral alternative as being absolutely required of us.  Secularism, modernism, "enlightenment rationality" has nothing in it that will make that choice reliably taken by a majority of People in any society or in most places in the world without accepting a supernatural origin of that requirement.

That is what cannot be done on a purely rationalistic basis because it is always possible to rationalize doing what we want to no matter what the cost to others, other People, other living, sentient beings, the local and even world environment, etc. is.  

With modern technology, the products of amoral, secular science and technology (especially global warming), the extraction industries, the weapons industries (physicists and technologists evil gift of nuclear weapons), the organization of secular-clerical efficiency and now computerized technology, even down to the horrific use of Western provided facial recognition to make a place like China into a sci-fi dystopian dictatorship, we can't afford any widespread rejection of morality because the consequences of it are too high.  

Putin, the KGB man and so ultimate company man, the man who followed the Chinese Communists' business model of scrapping pretenses of socialism while keeping the political monopoly of Communism and outdoing the worst of the capitalists at their own game, is pulling out of the Nuclear Arms Treaty as a game of chicken with the West for opposing his imperial annexation of Ukraine.  America's Republican-fascists are in his pocket.  So is a considerable part of the American media and the tin pot "American left" the Greens, and dear old Noam Chomsky.  If I live long enough I think Chomsky, who I once regarded as a kind of intellectual, atheist, secular saint, turning out to be a latter day mid-20th century American Stalinist hack might become something of a milestone in my complete rejection of secularism.  Of course I'm not in favor of the establishment of religion, agreeing with Madison in one thing, that establishment of a state religion is a guarantee of its corruption, but a secularized society in which what you watch on the screen is what you mistake as true is even more dangerous and more bound to corruption.

I don't dream of retreating into a "Christian summer" of the kind that Karl Rahner imagined as he nostalgically declared that we are in a "winter season of Christianity " in which the full flower of Christian cultural, societal and political influence is felt.  The history of Christianity mixed with political power and institutional strength was, for the most part, a hot house profusion of unreliable and gaudy blossoms, more typically a hideous fake polyester stage set of phoniness. What admitted good it was over classical and European paganism was not enough to avoid scandalous corruption.  That is how it was so easily discredited as, in fact, the similar Wizard of Oz facade of liberal democracy and academic credibility has now fallen, too. The typical stereotype of ugly Americanism in the post-WWII period, now turning in on itself under the likes of Marjory T. Green and other MAGA fascists, is a similar thing.  

I think that one of the lesser discussed items of Christian faith, the idea that we are to pray for God's kingdom on Earth through God's will being done must mean the best days of Christianity must lie in that as of yet unrealized hope.  Rationally, I shouldn't believe that little evidenced possibility will come about, though the prophesy of Jesus that the meek will inherit the Earth leads me to start to think the idea has more credibility in it than the arrogance of modern secularism, the very thing that has provided us with the means to make the alternative impossible.  If those meek are the remnant of a nuclear apocalypse with seriously reduced life-span and a very high level of birth defects - we only have ourselves to blame for it and I hope any surviving of us will never forget that.

I will be going though at least more of Hans Kung's book if not the entire text.  I think it has as much potential for productively thinking about things as the excellent work of Brueggemann.  
 
* Finding out more about the personality of the late Benedict XVI, having known that after Kung got him, then Karl Ratzinger, a job teaching in the University of Tubingen, when the student revolts of 1968 happened and offended his sense of faculty status, his right to the respect of the students, he went to a more conservative university and took a sharp turn right when he'd become prominent as  a progressive during the Vatican II years, has given me more insight into why Benedict XVI was so uninterested in the pastoral welfare of lay Catholics.  

One of the stories I recently read was when one of his former grad students led a delegation in a visit to him, then the Pope, he made the mistake of saying he was his friend.  Benedict coldly corrected him that he was his student, not his friend. That Pope could be a real prick. I can't imagine Francis doing anything remotely as unfriendly or unkind.  It's especially remarkable as Jesus is recorded as calling his followers his friends. It is doubtful that Ratzinger, or Benedict, had many friends nor do I get the sense that he much missed them.  He was a disaster as Pope and as the chief enforcer of John Paul II, the second least pastoral Pope of the previous hundred sixty years, so far as I can discern.  

** Here, as so often when reading literate Europeans, it's necessary to point out that "liberalization" here is in line with the secularist, amoral meaning of the word popularized in France and England in the 18th century, meaning mostly freeing investors and businessmen, landowners, etc. to maximize profitability for the rising middle class and untitled wealthy, more to do with breaking down the remnants of feudalism than with much of anything else.

Such "freedoms" as promoted in the English revolution, the French Revolution" and the American revolution, with their various and never unalloyed benefits were secondary, such as freedoms for some and when those wouldn't endanger wealth accumulation, never in practice for all, certainly in their effects if not their promotion were incidental to the larger purpose.  A lot of that was more a matter of style, as can be seen in Jefferson's turn from "All men are created equal" to his mathematical analysis on the profitability TO HIM of slavery and Madison's late in life bitter skepticism about freedom.  There is nothing more telling than a 60s anti-war activist turned Republican-fascist once they were out of danger of being drafted(David Stockman to  Peter Navarro), an apostate Marxist (Horowitz is merely one of literally hundreds I could name), a cynical business monster ex-hippy (too many to choose a typical example of one), to show just how phony pseudo-morality under secularism really can get.

Remember You Are Dust . . . Or Reject It?

RMJ has posted an excellent Ash Wednesday liturgy, which is better than what I was thinking of posting. 

It might seem morbid to some but I always feel something's  when Lent starts late in the civil calendar.  There seems to be something more suited to late winter in Lent, a season for sober thoughts and experimenting with leaving excess in the past.   Though I've always detested carnival,  the disgusting celebration of excess, mostly among those who have no intention of conducting the experiment with simplicity and non-consuming.  Of course, given what I said a week and more back about America's imperial religious holiday and its commercially encouraged excess, you don't have to wait for Fat Tuesday for that.

The problem with using symbols as sacramentals is that they can be so easily emptied of their meaning as they become a thing in themselves.   Wearing the ashes after Mass as a show is directly contrary to the Gospel for the day - see RMJ's excellent post.

I always thought that the use of the "Remember you are dust. . . " line from Genesis 3 was scandalous because the Gospel of Jesus certainly sees us as far more than dust.  I think it's like the nasty old procedure of Last Rites, designed to scare someone, a form of psychological torture.  Guilt for real wrongdoing, a healthy sense of shame is something I'm all for,  needless morbidity and torture, not so much.   Even as a little kid getting palm ashes rubbed on my forehead that it seemed like a refutation of eternal life and perhaps that was the meaning of whoever put it in that glorious mess of a book.  As someone recently said to me, if there's no afterlife, why would anyone thing anything mattered?   As someone else has pointed out,  if you figure you can eat, drink and be merry, or rule as a totalitarian and murderous dictator and you'll end up in the same oblivion as the most self-denying saint then there's nothing to trouble you as you do what you want to.  

Whatever residual unbelief I may suffer from the generally overwhelming human urge to get away with as much as you figure you can get away with without feeling any consequences is something I not only believe, completely, but know empirically.  It is the history of human depravity expressed aphoristically.  But I'm going to get long if I keep this up.

I'll keep working on what I was working on, maybe it will come more together.  

Hate Mail - I Can Always Count On It When I Diss The ACLU

THE PREVALENT SUPERSTITION that there is some virtue in the idea that because the 100% of propertied white males,  from many states exclusively Protestant propertied white males who elected and comprised the First Congress, the legislatures of the various states and who were the only people of "We The People" who wrote, adopted and passed the First Amendment were too stupid to stipulate that there was a difference between malicious lies which have no right to be told and the straight forward truth which PEOPLE have a right to hear, so WE THE PEOPLE in perpetuity are NEVER EVER to learn the most harsh lessons of history,  slavery, genocide, insurrections, lynch-law,  the perpetual war against Women (3-4 women are routinely lynched every single day to little to no notice),  eco-cide, etc. and that those who want to perpetrate those are always, for eternity to have a second chance to impose those on the country and the world is probably the stupidest idea common among college-credentialed Americans, certainly among liberals.

I will never, ever say that white supremacy, male supremacy, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, other and assorted forms of bigotry,  . . . lies about man made global warming and other universal evils have any right to be promoted, to be foisted on gullible and ignorant people, that we must! must! allow those lies to be spread because "the First Amendment" is worded so stupidly.  It is exactly as stupid to hold that because those amateurs who drafted the "Bill of Rights" were too stupid to be explicit in the rational limits of speech and press freedom as the fascists outside of and on the goddamned Supreme Court use the 2nd Amendment those numbskulls wrote is similarly and vaguely dangerous. 

Nazis have no right to lie that I am obliged to recognize or which it is safe to allow the law to grant them, they abandoned even a presumption of a right to unlimited speech by the lesson of history about what they are able to do when they find enough stupid, vulnerable people to gain power.   Their intentions of depriving others of every right, up to and including the right to live annul that as a right and transforms it into an insanely granted privilege to lie with impunity no matter how dangerous that is.  The idea that once they have the power to take power by force then we then can stop them is one of the stupidest refusals to learn from observed history that is ubiquitous among the allegedly educated elite.

White supremacists have no right to lie, male supremacists have none (remember that FBI estimate of 3-4 women EVERY DAY! WHO ARE MURDERED BECAUSE THEY ARE WOMEN). 

The oil, coal and gas industries have no right to lie us into ecocide because the assinine Supreme Court says that they are "people" and so have the same rights that they stupidly allow Nazis, white supremacists, other malignant people. 

Anyone who claims  Nazis, etc. have those rights are saying they are to be allowed, forever, a chance to turn "Never Again" into X number of times again.   Anyone who belongs to any beleagured group who holds that First Amendementy nonsense is a complete chump.

The excuse that if we don't allow Nazis, etc. that chance then "someone may take away our right to tell the truth and promote equality and universal respect for all" is an idiot because it's exactly those they empower who will guarantee that happens.  It is worse than paradoxical, it is totally stupid!