Science Needs A Reformation That It Is Probably Never Going To Get

I LIKE AND RESPECT JOHN HORGAN, the science journalist who works at Scientific American and quite often agree with what he says.  When this ten-year old article, his critique of Stephen Pinker's idiotic promotion of scientism in the New Republic, showed up as a link in an article on a different subject the other day I agreed with the main thrust and most of the detail of his criticism of Pinker.

Pinker faults Humists [Horgan's temporarily proposed name for those who work in the humanities] for accusing scientists of "scientism," which could be defined as excessive trust in science. Attempting rhetorical jujitsu, Pinker suggests that science, because it is such a uniquely self-critical and successful generator of knowledge, deserves all our trust. Hence scientism is justified and we should all embrace it!

While I wouldn't be surprised if a dolt like Pinker would be so stupid as to hold that to have "excessive trust" in something he approved of was a good idea, I think that mild definition of "scientism" doesn't get to the point. Pinker and his ilk actually hold science is exclusively trustworthy as the only legitimate source of knowledge.  Holding that while, as I noted the other day, having a career in the very science which was founded in, continued in, flourished in and still practices the most basic violations of every method of legitimate science since what it purports to study cannot be successfully and rigorously subjected to the methods developed for investigating physical phenomena with some measure of care, rigor and review.  

The frequently encountered demand of scientists that we merely trust the scientists and take their assertions as truth is, of course, to demand a violation of one of the claimed virtues of science, that there is no idea held in science which is above questioning. Of course, there is honest and informed questioning and there is a pose of questioning when we merely dislike what is asserted.  I'm certainly not advocating that dishonest pose of questioning, which, by the way, is endemic in Pinker's own ideological faction, the remnants of the 00's fad of ideological atheism, perhaps more so than most places outside of FOX style "news." 

If Pinker's kind of fundamentalist faith reigned, there would never be any kind of progress in scientific knowledge because so much of that came about through continued questioning and testing of established ideas.  It would be more static than scholastic theology of the middle ages is ignorantly held to have been.  Since physics is taken as the most basic of the sciences, how does someone like Pinker think the entire modern physics since 1900 came into being if not by some pretty radical questioning on the basis of things that didn't fit into the previously dominant physics which does so well to explain so much?  

That a professional psychologist could hold that is rather hilarious considering the history and literature of his very own field.  The sham that psychology is has been proven in the history of psychology as an alleged science, its generation of dominant schools (fads) which reign supreme for a period, become embedded in alleged treatments and are embedded into even legal procedures, are eventually criticized by those wanting to start a new school (fad),  discredited, junked and replaced by the next in a series of shabbily built and ephemeral schools only to be scrapped, themselves.  And in the still ongoing replicability crisis which is merely a very belated attempt at finally doing one of the most basic of alleged scientific requirements, proving the reported results could be found again through repeating the experiment and seeing if the results match the claims, its status as scientific fraud is what gets confirmed.  Why such a test has not been applied to psychology all along* is certainly relevant to its promotion as science and how psychology, as a supposed science has gotten away with what it has for more than a century is a signal that the general status of fact checking and rigorous replication of experiments as a means of judging claims - even some of those claims entirely bonkers or outrageous - which are published in reviewed journals and sold as science is in need of very serious general reform.  

I think the replication crisis in psychology and allied fields, even some of them in the more attenuated and complex fields of legitimate biochemistry, is a more general crisis in the practices and standards allowed in science as what has been called "science" has expanded through the hegemonic assumptions of ideological materialism.

The unstated idea is that if science is the legitimate study of material phenomena and all that is is held to be material, everything must, ultimately be explicable through science, even in those fields in which the rigorous application of replicable observation, measurement, rigorous analysis and rigorous professional review, then all humanly apprehended phenomena must be vulnerable to that methodology.  If everything is, on faith, to be taken as an expression of basic "physical laws" then, the assumption is that everything, even what we can't see or observe "objectively" is vulnerable to scientific methods.  That, plainly, is a leap of faith that most of us are imbued with by the habit of respect for anything that manages to get called "science," a leap which most of us don't realize we have taken.  If that leap is not taken unconsidered or by choice, those who don't are often pushed into leaping to it through some level of coercion. Often something on the order of being accused of having cooties.  The invective of the enforcers of scientism is generally of that level of sophistication.

What was quite successful in what was, early on, studied through science was quite simple and quite successfully discovered through that method, such as the mathematics of falling and moving objects, atoms and molecules considered singly and combining in chemical compounds.  But all hell started breaking loose when the methodology turned into an ideological stand and then a cultural attitude and universities started allowing stuff that so obviously could not be studied in the same way, allowing what was far less successful than contemporary experimental physics and chemistry in its discovery to be enthroned as science.

The legitimate study of living beings imitating the methods of physics and chemistry was, in most of what was studied, a partial success especially when well done and what was studied was sufficiently simple, falling rapidly off in many cases and often claims made turned out to be quite wrong. As one of my relatives who works in a field of biology likes to say, "It's not rocket science, it's a lot damned harder than rocket science."  What should have been a series of warning signals and Proceed With Caution signs was often discounted out of professional desires and necessity and, at times, practical necessity.  

But, insisting that what they do was as reliable as physics and inorganic chemistry and should enjoy the same status ruled the day. When biology insisted on studying what could not be observed directly and, honestly, not even indirectly, filling in with conjecture the tiny fragments of the fact of evolution and other things that were far more complex than its resources could deal with, it set the stage for the decay of science. The fact is that all but the tiniest fragments of the billions of years of evolving, changing life on Earth are lost forever and those things in the lives of living beings which leave no physical trace, behaviors, habits, chance events, minds, differences in minds and what those lead to which are directly relevant to the topic will never be had which has not kept those deputed to be scientists to just make that stuff up, it not being obtainable.  That is certainly not within scientific method.   The items available are so scares, so randomly spaced in time and location and it is certain that so much more which is never going to be known in anything but unverifiable conjecture, that its scientific characterization is unfounded.   And there is even worse.

Once they allowed eminent philosophers, such as William James and others to push the alleged study of psychology, the alleged study of minds, invisible to observation, accessed only through self-reporting of unknowable reliability and even more unknowable comprehension by second and third parties often on the look out for what they want those to be, enormously variable and often not operating with any perceivable order or predictability, allowing the "study" of minds into the universities as science things were bound to go even farther to hell.  I haven't looked to see what evidence there was to a push-back in the late 19th century by those who did genuine science to that invasion of the obviously unscientific, though I can't imagine some of them didn't look askance if not oppose that inclusion. If they read the papers and books that started being published, they certainly must have noticed that they were not actually doing science in most of their claims.  Horgan touches on that in his criticism of science as it really is:

Moreover, even a casual survey of modern science—and of this blog--reveals the degree to which science continues to serve the interests of powerful groups. The U.S. health care industry delivers lousy service at exorbitant prices, arguably because it is more concerned with profits than with patients. Modern psychiatry has become little more than a marketing branch of the pharmaceutical industry.

Neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence and other fields are increasingly dependent on military funding. Pinker himself has popularized the hypothesis that war is an instinct, rooted deeply in our evolutionary past, which civilization has helped us overcome. This notion serves as a convenient justification for modern U.S. militarism and imperialism.

I do actually quite agree with what he says about postmodernism and how it can be done well or badly, like everything else, including science.

Postmodernism is, in a sense, simply another expression of a truism of science journalism: If you want to understand modern debates about climate, energy, genetically modified food, economic equality or military policies, you should follow the money. Money certainly doesn't explain everything—and just because a group is rich and powerful doesn't mean that it's corrupt--but it explains a lot.

As a figure in that "science" which, along with its associated field in sociology has been the foremost venue of inserting ideological and other interests into science it's no wonder Pinker would object to an intellectual trend that calls that out. Which gets us immediately to my main objection to what was for the most part good commentary.

Pinker never seems to have understood postmodernism. Postmodern scholarship, like science itself, can be done well or badly, but its animating assumption is simple: All truth claims--whether scientific, religious or political—reflect the prejudices and desires of those who make them. Claims that become dominant in a culture often serve the interests of powerful groups.

Social Darwinism and eugenics are two especially egregious examples of pseudo-scientific ideologies that reflected the racism, sexism and classism of proponents. Pinker depicts Social Darwinism and eugenics as historical aberrations that had little or nothing to do with science--even though their central claims keep reappearing in modern scientific trappings.

Horgan puts his finger directly on the very act of promoting as scientific claims "the prejudices and desires of those who make them."  However, he, as is typical of English language college-educated people, fails to trace that back to its origin because to do that is taboo.  

What he said of eugenics and "Social Darwinism"** was and is true of THE most conventionally accepted scientific theory which was the origin of eugenics, natural selection, which is no less an assertion of class, ethnic, racial, etc. interests inserted directly into science, far more basically, far more successfully and which still is held up as a required framing of science and a required belief among those held to be educated.  The wealthy, aristocratic Darwin, himself, signaled that when he based his theory on the aristocracy reinforcing and enhancing-class based economic theory of Thomas Malthus.  That Galton used his and his cousin's, Darwin's wealthy combined families as his primary model of eugenic superiority in his original articles and Hereditary Genius, a book which Darwin wrote he approved of, entirely and endorsed as science, confirms that character was embedded to the very root of natural selection. When Darwin wrote his congratulatory letter to cousin Galton, he noted that he was, typically, infirm and he had had his wife (and cousin) read it to him and she, a member of the same family, had liked it a lot, too. Big surprise, huh?  Their son George (one of the earliest proponents of eugenic laws during his father's lifetime, and with his father's approval) had recommended it to his father.  The British class system made science, eugenics, was more than a removable part of the theory of natural selection, it was AND IS its very essence. In a book that Darwin himself said he agreed with entirely, Ernst Haeckel said that Darwinism supported an aristocratic system and was anti-democratic and, most of all anti-socialist. It should be remembered at this point that Darwin once said he was a better investor of money than he was a scientist.

More generally as a refutation of the idea that eugenics is separable from natural selection, as I've pointed out from before Horgan answered Pinker, eugenics was from the start a thoroughly scientific entity in exactly the same way that natural selection was, through the assertion OF EXACTLY THE SAME SCIENTISTS WHO SUPPORTED NATURAL SELECTION.  To make the claim about it that Horgan and virtually everyone else who has been credentialed by an English language university after WWII does he has to deny that eugenics was science and proposed applied science invented by one of the true scientific polymaths, Francis Galton, a man who was held to be one of the preeminent scientists in the history of science in many fields, would not be doing science while he said he was doing science.  To deny he was a scientist is as absurd as to deny Darwin or Huxley or Pearson or Fischer or Watson and Crick, or any credentialed biologist today  were or are scientists.   

As I've pointed out many times and as anyone who read The Descent of Man would have to know, it was Galton's very eugenics that was held up to be science of the highest reliability by Charles Darwin in that very book published as reliable science and built on by scientists of his time and after. His motive was that eugenics supported his theory of natural selection as much as anything, circular reasoning as that was.  He also upheld the eugenics of Ernst Haeckel, W.R. Greg and others in the very same book, he supported some of the most seriously bad assertions of them, promoting the alleged eugenic effects of infanticide, allowing the poor to die of starvation and neglect and even genocidal warfare and what the Nazis would promote as lebensraum, the "fitter" replacing those deemed "less fit."  He did it in his second most esteemed book supporting his theory of natural selection as it allegedly impacts the human species. A book which has, since it was written, been considered a part of the legitimate literature of science.

Eugenics was openly held to be science by most of the eminent figures in biology up to the Second World War, including such figures as Karl Pearson, Ronald Fischer, Julian Huxley, etc. the very founders of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis that still rules biology with an iron fist.  It was taught in schools of science in universities and departments of science in colleges and high schools and pervaded biology textbooks written by members of science faculties at respected colleges and universities.

And, perhaps more to the point, that includes everyone in German biology and related fields who created Nazi Rassenhygine, who were universally considered men and a few women of science at the time, who taught science at major universities and other academic institutions. Before America's entry into WWI, the eminent American biologist, Vernon Kellogg, reported that the German military elite, university grads, had been thoroughly indoctrinated in its most extreme beliefs.  It should never be forgotten that Germany was the first place where science was professionalized, what Thomas Huxley and others in Darwin's inner circle had as one of their primary goals for British science in later decades.

Eugenics itself had and has the support of many eminent post-war scientists, including both James Watson and Francis Crick and a man whose eugenics Crick actively supported, the psychologist Arthur Jensen.  To hold that it is some "aberration" is to deny the plain facts of eugenics in the past AND NOW.  Numerous other colleagues of Stephen Pinker in psychology have been major proponents of it, some of them more eminent than he is. To make the claim that science doesn't rightly have to own eugenics you have to misrepresent everything about its history and its present.  The very figures who created and expanded eugenics had the highest credentials in science, given to them by other scientists and university schools and departments of science.

While I really like and respect John Horgan, he's too good and honest a journalist to say what he did then, I wonder if ten years after, he'd still say that now.  I will admit to having no respect for Stephen Pinker at all and I never have.

To represent eugenics as an aberration in the history of science, distancing something which was considered science by all of those already mentioned and probably thousands of others who could be named, working, reviewed, published, acknowledged scientists, every one of them, is to tell one huge whopper of a lie because it has been a feature of science too long for it to comprise an aberration.  There is probably nothing taught today in psychology which has stood as long as the general assertions of eugenics and scientific racism which is still present in science.  Eugenics, by Galton's widely accepted assertion is a necessary conclusion from a belief in natural selection.  He credited his spark of creation of it in his reading of the first edition of On the Origin of Species, he documents his cousin, Darwin's support for his conclusions in that regard.  Darwin, himself, through his endorsement of Galton's early eugenics and the even more explicitly racist and genocidal eugenics of the eminent German scientist, Ernst Haeckel, certainly supported Galton's  conclusion as to what natural selection must mean for the human species.

There is no English language university department of psychology I'm aware of which is older as a distinct scientific claim and field of assertion than eugenics.  It is certainly present in the public understanding of science, eugenics has certainly been a feature of the very evolutionary psychology that Pinker hitched his wagon to and the Sociobiology that preceded it.  The 1976 declaration of the scientists, students of science, in the Sociobiology Study Group pointed out that it was eugenic in character. That's not any great shock, eugenics will always be found, acknowledged and explicitly or with a public-relations false front wherever natural selection is asserted as science.

The very evolutionary psychology that Pinker champions has had the most blatant scientific racism, including antisemitism publicly, as reviewed science! promoted in it by those with major positions in science at accredited, even very respected  universities.  Eugenics as an ongoing effort has come from what are unambiguously called departments of science from even the most august of institutions of higher learning, including the one Pinker works at. One of the most damaging pieces of eugenics in the post-WWII period, The Bell Curve, was co-authored by one of his colleagues, the psychologist Richard Herrnstein.  

I would not say that eugenics is a totally useless thing though it's as bad a theory as there is and generated horrors including a genocide that murdered millions.  I hold it is everything wrong that John Hogan said it was and think the theory is based on the imaginary instead of being founded in reality.

But the phenomenon of eugenics is useful for is as an example of how bad science, the theory of natural selection, can become as established and accepted in science, in academia, in the culture of those who are credentialed in learning, be taught as being perhaps as reliable as Newtonian physics (Stephen Jay Gould said it was the best idea a scientist has ever had), promote some of the worst of our moral defects, racism, class ranking, family snobbery, neglect of the least among us, etc.as being factually supported with the reliability of science,  be as massively discredited as it was when the Nazis did what many eugenicists started advocating almost from the beginning, eliminating those held to be a source of dangerous dysgenic pollution in order to improve the human species.  Eugenics, though not openly advocated, survived - since the source of eugenics, natural selection was, after the war even a more rigorously insisted on framing of biology - began to be promoted again in the 1970s, openly in the case of Arthur Jensen and covertly through the active soliciting of support from him by Francis Crick, etc. and is once again thriving even as the mere word "eugenics" dare not speak its name by the very people who are promoting it.

It's as much an example of how successful a blatantly dishonest PR campaign, such as was mounted to rescue Darwinism from what Darwin, himself, said it was and what must come from it, when its real meaning was shown to the world in the mass murders of the Nazis. It is most useful as a study in how science is no better, no more rigorously done, no more honestly done than the mere human beings who are doing it and their colleagues who are fully prepared to let them get away with everything up to the advocacy of murder and genocide.

Considering the complicity of science in the practice of eugenics, whether the violence of forced or uninformed sterilization of those targeted for elimination from the human future, as was still being done so very recently in the United States, Canada, etc. and the scientific genocides of the 20th century.  German scientists were fully on board with German eugenics as it turned from sterilization to mass murder and during the entire industrialized murder of them.  Scientists honored in science, granted Nobel prizes such as Konrad Lorenz was AFTER THE WAR AND FULL KNOWLEDGE OF THE COMPLICITY OF SCIENCE IN GENOCIDE, were writing scientific papers and books supporting it as it was happening.  Many scientists, university science departments, etc. were soliciting Mengele and other German men of science for biological samples taken from those murdered in the genocide, many of them would either retain or regain their position in science even as those crimes must have been known. Some of them had the support of colleagues in science in other countries. The status of such science has never really been resolved, if that kind of thing is consistent with the methods of science, though Mengele had his university credentials belatedly removed from him, at least partially, those he collaborated with often went right on being scientists, employed at eminent universities and without much in the way of shunning by their colleagues.

In the end, science is whatever scientists as a body say is science, since we know that the actual methodology of science can be so easily put aside when it is impossible or inconvenient, that has to be the actual definition of what science is.  That scientists have no kind of ethical disqualification for that, is certainly something that must be faced in the question of their right to automatic public trust. The problem that is for some of the most vitally important science facing us, environmental science, the science of global warming, science surrounding pandemics such as the ongoing Covid-19 virus could not be more dangerous or serious and scientists will not take the steps necessary to insert the requirements of morality or even basic integrity into its practices.  

No, the self-regulating features of science are no more dependable than the mere mortals who have, since pretty much the middle of the 19th century, proven they are quite fallible, especially in promotion of their ideological predilections, their professional, class, ethnic and racial and gender interests.  

Just as I pointed out to have anything like a rational claim or a moral right to be considered followers of Jesus, those deputed to be Christians had to follow his teachings.  They often fail to do that and the common received habit of disdaining and shunning anything to do with Christianity tars both those who do follow him and those who fake it.  Those deputed to be scientists, in order to be allowed to enjoy the often exaggerated esteem and privilege of being considered scientists  have to be held to the rigorous observations and practices alleged to constitute scientific method.  But that's not enough, that's not all we have a right to demand of them. No less than those who are held up as religious figures, we have a right to demand that they act out of moral responsibility to the good of life on Earth.  

Christians have a long history of calling out the sins committed in the name of Jesus, though the effectiveness of that in protecting the reputation of Christianity is very, very mixed.  Internally, within especially those denominations which are highly hierarchical, there is a problem very much like that of science, internally known problems are swept under the rug in public.  Often even great crimes are known of internally among those who hold power, as in the Catholic sexual abuse scandal, but the cover-up is held to be all important.  Someone once said the devil is a gentleman and human demons are often members of a gentlemen's club in which scandals are not to be revealed to those outside it.  Scientists and the fan base of "science" generally refuse to admit it has any problem, often relying on the obscurity and difficulty of its claims to shield its problems from the public. It insists that it be exempt from any criticism, pretending it has proven its internal criticism is fully effective when the history of science proves it seldom is as a general thing. Though that varies from field to field and whether or not what is published has the support of alleged observational verification or is merely theoretical. In much of published science, its methods of procedure, review and internal criticism can be something of a sham.   Psychology could never get away with being called a science if they were not.

I don't, by the way, take Pinker to be much of scientist, he's more of a huckster than anything. Pretty much the same for Richard Dawkins.  I put them more on the level of a Charles Murray.

* In his speech "Cargo Cult Science" the regular practice of never confirming claims in psychology because it was deemed "too hard" to regularly replicate alleged experiments, was one of Richard Feynman's reasons for impeaching the scientific identity of psychology.  

** As one always must point out due to the ubiquitous propaganda that claims they are not the same thing, that "Social Darwinism" is an aberration that he didn't hold with, Darwin, himself, said that natural selection was exactly the same thing as Herbert Spencer's formulation "survival of the fittest" on page 92 of the fifth edition he prepared of On the Origin of Species.  He had been requested to make that clear by his "co-discoverer" of natural selection, A.R. Wallace because "natural selection" seemed to imply some intelligent agency of nature and that was a violation of the holding of materialism that nature is non-teleological. Of course Darwinists have held that it is all along while also denying that's what they claimed.  Putting that admission by Darwin together with the fact the same idea, "selection," was used for what the man of science, Mengele did at the railroad siding at Auschwitz should always have evoked a terrible spark of understanding of what natural selection was.  But that was suppressed by the post-WWII cover up of what just about every conventional Darwinist would have recognized as the nature of natural selection before the Nazis showed what it meant in reality. Today's Neo-Nazis certainly recognize their fondest hopes to be expressed in Darwinism.

Who Wrote The Pentateuch? Prof. Konrad Schmid and Prof. Israel Knohl

 

I've been without electricity, as predicted. I just got it back and thought I'd post this very recent discussion by two eminent scholars on the Pentateuch, much of it relevant to a number of my recent posts.   Some of it was pretty surprising to me, some of it I wonder if it will stand in time but all of it is interesting.   I will be dipping into more of the interesting discussions and lectures from this source.

Newly Come Up On My Sidebar - Rupert Sheldrake and Jonas Atlas On Seven Myths About Religion

 

I haven't looked to see if Jonas Atlas' book is published in English and haven't been able to look for the article they talk about but the discussion is so good and filled with information that it's worth watching for itself.  

Rupert Sheldrake, as well as being a fine scientist and writer has really been a master of the substantial discussion.  He generally has them with people who match his skills in that format. 

Hans Kung's Why I Am Still A Christian - Post 5 With A Personal Note

 I could easily go on and talk, for example, about the use of public money without official controls;  or about financial scandals in Rome,  Chicago, and other places.  I could mention the nomination of bishops, contrary to ancient Catholic tradition, without the participation of clergy and people,or of priests and diocesan councils; or the continual disregard paid to the age limit of 75 for bishops, a principle solemnly laid down by Vatican II; and so on.

I mention all this so openly, not because it gives me any pleasure to do so,  but simply because it is the theologian's duty and responsibility to speak the truth, whether it is opportune or inopportune, even if punishments might follow.

To that you could add the destruction of the infrastructure of local parishes serving The People of the Church which is one of the direct results of the policies and practices and appointments of the last two popes.  

In addition to the general decline of Christianity in Europe, to some extent the contents of Kung's book indict the then growing scandals of John Paul II's papacy, a trend that reached its climax in the papacy of his hand-chosen successor Benedict XVI.  Benedict's most responsible act while in Rome was his resignation of the papacy.  A large part of the papacy of Good Pope Francis has been trying to clean up these and other scandals and crimes, some of which were of even longer standing than that.  His choice to try to work within the confines imposed by Benedict's decision to remain in the Vatican in his retirement, especially that his chief henchman Georg Ganswein (aka Gorgeous Georg) worked with some of the worst of the JPII Benedict XVI era cardinals and bishops and filthy rich Catholics to sandbag the reforms of Francis and him, kept some of those reforms from really taking hold.  A lot of the lingering problem is that Francis has had to deal with concerns of schismatic cults encouraged by, specially, some of the more foolish policies of Benedict, such as his perhaps unintended creation of a Latin mass cult as he sought to make overtures to the fascist schismatics of the Pius X cult who he should have known would never really accept the reforms of Vatican II.

I recently posted a link to an article which noted that when the Cardinal electors made Benedict pope, they thought they were voting for the smartest man in the room.  What their folly proved is that intellectual genius (especially when it's spent its entire life in the artificial grow-house of university life and then the even worse one of the Vatican) is often a far cry from wisdom.  I think that any positive inclination that Benedict had was more than matched by his complete cluelessness as to who to put his trust in and how to do things in the real world.  Not to mention his cowardice when he must have known how corrupt things were becoming, not only under John Paul II, who he served as chief henchman, but during his own disastrous papacy.  

But, although I am aware of the sinister nature of much of what is called Christian, and although I am aware also of the most important scientific, scholarly, or popular objections to Christianity   -historical, philosophical, psychological or sociological- I should nonetheless like to stay this:  that in this disorientated age I receive my essential values from Christianity, despite everything.  Not from what is called Christian, but from what is truly Christian;  from the Christian message itself, from a Christian faith that is not merely believed but actually lived,from being a  Christian.But here a question arises which must form the theme of our next section.

The Christian message is, ultimately, based in the reported words and acts of Jesus in the Gospels, in the reports of his followers in Acts and the Epistles, anything that is called "Christian" and especially which is claimed to be Christian that cannot be squared with the teachings of Jesus, his reported actions and the testimony of those who transmit those to us is legitimately rejected as, in fact, being Christian.  

One of the foremost facts of Western history is how much of the history of "Christendom" is a bald and blatant contradiction and rejection of the teachings of Jesus and the opposite of what we are told that Jesus did. As I've noted, that's hardly unique to Christianity or of religion, the entire history of the American republic, minus a few years of partial compliance with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts are not only a failure to live up to the promises of the Declaration of Independence, the preface to the United States Constitution, they are a conscious and purposeful rejection of those idealistic claims of intent, even in the very Constitution that follows the lofty claims of the purpose of government, the very things that possibly make a government legitimate, the rights asserted are an automatic, equal and permanent endowment on all People by God and their consent to be governed.  

The same can be said, over and over again in area after area, country after country. Hardly any government lives up to the lofty words of their most basic legal documents.  But it is only in the case of religion that it is held to be a capital crime against the Gospels, Paul, James, etc. for the violated foundation of Christianity that those who profess it don't act in accordance with it.  

Imagine if various rules and laws governing the profession of the law had to pass a similar test based in the conduct of lawyers, if the repute of "the law" had to live or die based on the behavior of those licensed to practice law and to act as judges and "justices."  Imagine if the profession of medicine had to depend on the behavior of those it licenses, and on down the entire edifice of secular, civic life.  Imagine if journalism was held to a rule that journalists only report the truth as it can be supported with factual evidence - that the ass end of "opinion journalism" that now wags the dog were abolished out of "journalistic ethics."  The same for the practices of scholars and intellectuals who, when you fact check them, are permitted to be incredibly lax considering the repute they are supposed to be held in.  Including scientists and the popularizers of science. Imagine if they really had to stand up to real, skeptical critical professional review. What would stand?  Little to nothing.

A Personal Note

I have spent most of my life from my adolesence as a socialist, I still have a high opinion of much of Christian and other religious socialism even as I have forced myself to face the sheer rottenness of most of what is considered socialism.  It's only since coming to understand that socialism, rightly, will never live down the association of the word with Marxism, Nazism, such vile things as Fabianism, various and many other socialisms that have earned both the skepticism of those who have been the victims of those things when they have power and those who have witnessed those gargantuan crimes and the frequently putrid assertions of those within Fabianism and other largely impotent ideological clubs.  George Bernard Shaw was only one of the brite-lites of Fabianism who were advocating mass murder in the very style of the Nazis more than thirty years before the Nazis started their scientific-technological mass murder machine, entertaining and exciting the "radicals" at Fabian meetings in London with advocacy of mass murder by gas chamber as early as 1910. H.G. Wells was advocating racist genocide in the same period.  And other socialists in other places were saying similiar things.  I ignored those associations until I realized that nothing about the actual core idea of socialism contained the refutation of that epic immorality, unlike the crimes of the Christians which were, in every way, a violation of the Gospels and Epistles which are the absolute essence of what any real Christianity is.  

I also ignored the fact that socialists I took to have clean hands, not infrequently, especially after 1917, were active apologists and, as hidden files became available, paid agents for some of the greatest criminals in the history of the human species exactly because they claimed to be instituting socialism where they violently held dictatorial power.  That their socialism was, in no way socialist, didn't seem to bother their supporters.  I can remember where I was and what I was reading the moment that I realized that anyone murdered under Stalin or Mao, etc. was as murdered as anyone murdered under Hitler or Mussolini or the various U.S. client-fascist states in Latin America and that my own socialism was implicated in it. Since then, especially as huge amounts of raw pdf and other files of old Marxist and socialist material became available to read online, I've been repeatedly shocked and disgusted with what people I used to admire actually advocated or tacitly supported in that regard.  It is always a mistake to rely on secondary, tertiary and other cleaned-up source materials to judge the actual character of those you are supposed to hold as heroes.  None of them stand up in the way Jesus does in the canonical Gospels, especially if you go back to the original Greek texts.

Since I found out what capitalism is supposed to be, I have never not believed that the ownership rights of investors under capitalism is legalized theft, that usury is evil. I have always believed that those who produce wealth rightfully earned the ownership of the means of production through producing any wealth that are generated with those means. I am, by strict definition a socialist because I believe those things but I don't consider myself a socialist anymore because I have come to see that, first, The Law of Moses, in regard to its economic justice, containing, among other things, a prohibition on usury which is the basis of capitalism, is vastly superior to and more radical any socialist scheme.  And, secondly, the Gospels, Acts, Paul, etc. build much farther on The Law in the radicalness of their charity. They are more radical than socialism is and, unlike socialism, what makes them far more radical are the actual religious foundations of them as contained in the texts that lay out their substance and the assertion of the source of their authority.

As it was from its beginning, secular socialism would have always failed because it lacked the religious faith that would be necessary for it not to devolve into abusive oppression, what deputed Christianity has to ignore to do that. That is the honest lesson of the scandalous history of Christendom, that without that basis in The Law and The Gospel, any government will become unjust and oppressive no matter its professed foundations.  That is how, for example, Ferdinand and Isabella could produce the horrors they did in the name of Christianity.  But you don't have to claim a religious foundation to ignore the Gospel.  If you deny The Law and The Gospel, it's far easier to do the same thing in even bigger ways.  The "enlightenment" could produce the Reign of Terror followed by Napoleon's imperial military despotism (which "enlightened" idiots all over Europe mistook for a force for good, till they couldn't deny it) and the often violent, turbulent and seldom democratic French governments after that.   Also a United States which didn't devolve into monarchy but which continued genocide and slavery and, after the Civil War, continued those under Jim Crow, which is being resurrected under Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court even as we watch. That they also had some marginal progressive features, especially when those were profitable or at no economic cost, doesn't mitigate their effects by as much as the propagandists of "enlightenment" would have you believe.

The secular republics of the late 18th and 19th and 20th centuries, the self-consciously and professed science-based regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries have proven to be even more dangerous and ruthless than the Christian deniers of what Jesus said of the middle-ages, those who did exactly the opposite of what he said should be done in his name. Though as monarchs such as the late 19th century Kings of Belgium had access to modern technology, their ability to do the evil they profited from, made them far more deadly.

It will always be a serious danger whether under a "most Christian monarch,"  in any scheme of democracy and every non-democratic so-called "republic" in which an effective majority of voters or The People don't share those radical religious ideas as determining their political choices especially as a basis for the economy.  Administrative secularism necessary for the even-handedness of governance is always going to be in tension with the rejection of the religious foundations of egalitarian democracy, especially the vulgar materialism that will result from that unless some religious faith acts as an effective counter-measure to it.  The dangers of cultural secularism and Republican-fascist style anti-Christianity in the West are something I predict will become a major topic because events will force that, as well as addressing  the decadence of Biblical Fundamentalism (turning, mostly, the KJV into an impotent idol) which was, as well, based largely in a racist-capitalist rejection of the justice of Moses and the universal Charity of Jesus with a large dose of plain dishonesty thrown in.

That those who hold religious titles such as the current Patriarch of Moscow, the apparent majority of those in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are in thick with thieves with the world-overlord billionaires shouldn't deceive anyone as to their entirely worldly motives and, clearly, their real beliefs  and their clear devotion to Mammon.  For now, since this is getting long, I will leave it to Muslims to criticize the corrupt rulers and clerics in majority Muslim countries and Jews to point out the corruption of the rulers and some of the chief Rabbis of Israel in this regard.

NOTE:  I expect to lose electricity in the storm they're predicting, under the foreign ownership of the electric grid in my area of Maine, things are worse than they used to be in that regard than in the 1950s. If you don't see anything posted here for a while, that's the reason.
 

The Real Presence Is So Simple And Still A Mystery

MARY  McGlone's commentary on the story of the Samaritan Woman at the well who Jesus asked for some water is a good example of why the ban on Women preaching in church has led to a partial and distorted Christianity, I'll give you what she says about that passage from John's Gospel beginning with the end of what she says about the first reading for today, Exodus 17:3-7, about God having Moses find water in the rock:

Water is a precious commodity in the desert. Sharing water symbolizes hospitality, openness to the stranger and respect for life. In an inside out image of the God who draws water from stone, the vulnerable Jesus must ask for life-giving water and acceptance, and he does it at the well that symbolizes her heritage of faith in the God of Abraham. Once they have begun their conversation, the tables turn again and Jesus reveals that the divine thirst is not for water, but for a life-giving relationship with humanity.

What happened in the interchange between Jesus and Photina (the name the Orthodox give the Samaritan) should have been more threatening to the guardians of Jewish and Samaritan religion than anything else Jesus preached. When Photina tried to pit the Jewish and Samaritan approaches to God against one another, Jesus led her beyond every expression of denominationalism and dependence on ritual. All that mattered to Jesus was that Photina (and by extension all people) would know God as he did; he thirsted for her to be moved by God’s own Spirit and to abide in the truth-generating relationships that flow from that.

This is exactly what happened. As Photina began to comprehend what Jesus was saying, her feistiness turned to curiosity and then to faith. As the representative of a people who had sought God through a series of shallow affiliations (five husbands), she found a truth and love worthy of her and was impelled to share it.

Too often, we focus on Photina's "five husbands," as if this story were about the conversion of a loose woman. That overlooks the astounding theology and universality of this Gospel message. Theologically, this Gospel story reminds us that our creator invites humanity into relationship, but never imposes. This paints a picture of God as both vulnerable and thirsty, ever waiting near some well to offer life to those who can listen, wonder and respond. The universality of today’s message comes through Jesus' proclamation that real worship and relationship with God does not depend on place or ritual, but on how the people become vulnerable to the Spirit's action in their lives.

Paul preaches this very same message in the Letter to the Romans when he assures us that our "justification" is based on faith.** If we were to put Paul's idea in the context of the interaction between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, we would say that salvation springs from relationship with God; it is never bound by any particular deed, creed or ritual. Salvation happens when we attend to God's thirst and respond with personal hospitality. Once we have been affected by a relationship with God, it automatically begins to flow into all our other relationships, making us not just believers, but almost irresistible evangelizers.

Today, Photina may appear to us in many guises. We will recognize her not by her name, geography or appearance, but rather by her enthusiastic love and the way she invites us to respond to God's thirst and enjoy living water forever. Like her, all we need do is respond. As a result, the world's thirst will begin to be quenched.

That is so good I didn't want to interrupt it to say that sharing clean, drinkable water is more than just symbolic, in the very act of providing someone else with it we enact what we are here for, as with the Eucharist of Jesus, the act of giving sustenance, water, food, drink, is the very thing, what comprises the body and blood, the life of Jesus, human enactment of God's sustaining of life.  It's such a profound act that it is always in danger of being treated as merely symbolic or caught up in some philosophical-theological abstraction*, though I'm sure that's not what Mary McGlone intended.  I like that she uses a name for her though, of course, it's probably not her name.   Maybe it's our reservation of the word "symbol" that is the problem, we don't generally deal with the fact that everything to do with our thinking deals in symbolism.

As this commentary notes, the typical focus on the story isn't the act of Jesus asking a Woman from an ethnic-religious group that his ethnic-religious group (Christians are so apt to forget he had an ethnic identity) weren't on the friendliest terms with.  Though I'd imagine that there were plenty of Jews and Samaritans who got along pretty well, as McGlone says, it would have been the leaders of both groups that found that kind of friendliness threatening.  Like those who in the United States promote racism and bigotry to empower themselves.  People just trying to live their lives aren't the biggest problem here.

Typically what some male preacher focuses on is that the woman was married so many times and the guy she's with now isn't her husband. That's something Jesus showed he knew to get her attention but it wasn't his focus.  He preach hell-fire at her, he didn't tell her she was a slut and should move out and stop "living in sin." He offered her nothing less than an eternal wellspring of "living water".  It would be good to know more of her story but that's not recorded, how she might have lived after that encounter, living as a Samaritan Woman living in what Jesus so notably does not call sin.  I do think it's one of the several incidents in the Gospels where Jesus indicates that, despite expectations, his teachings are not confined to "his people" but are for everyone.  Another thing we can be certain of, Jesus wasn't fixated on things like where was the right place to sacrifice, which city or mountain was the right one.  The kinds of things that led to the rift between Jesus's people and the Samaritans.  I'm sure he wouldn't be fixated on which language the mass was said in or the other things that the superficially pious fight about in Christianity.    It's remarkable what a hard time the ministers of religion who are most anti-sex have in not dwelling on sex.  Jesus didn't have that problem.

I think a lot of the passages in the Gospel like his encounter with her, the foreign woman who asked him to heal her daughter who answers him back when he says he'd be throwing the children's food to the dogs if he did what she asked him, some of the passages when he is flouting the expectations of exclusivity, lines that some priest or preacher reads piously and flatly and, frankly, making Jesus sound like a real dick, he probably said in a more sly and joking manner. Probably sounding more like Desmond Tutu could sound than like some stuck up, humorless archbishop.  He always did what they asked him to do, he certainly knew he was going to.  I think he was probably teasing his more exclusivist followers who would be taken aback at him even talking to such a woman or, perhaps, any woman at all. Cajoling them to give up being such snobs, to loosen up and be more giving and generous.

* I was intending to hold Thomas Reese's recent comment on Aquinas's philosophical gymnastics over the antiquated doctrine of transubstantiation for Holy Thursday, when I might revisit it.

Since my critics often accuse me of heresy, before I go further, let me affirm that I believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I just don't believe in transubstantiation because I don't believe in prime matter, substantial forms and accidents that are part of Aristotelian metaphysics.

Thomas Aquinas used Aristotelianism, the avant-garde philosophy of his time, to explain the Eucharist to his generation. What worked in the 13th century will not work today. If he were alive today, he would not use Aristotelianism because nobody grasps it in the 21st century.

So, first, forget transubstantiation. Better to admit that Christ's presence in the Eucharist is an unexplainable mystery that our little minds cannot comprehend.

I hope that any attempt to explain the real presence of Jesus in the "elements" of Eucharist will include the fact that when Jesus did what he did, he was giving food and drink to people, telling them to eat it and drink it, to feed their bodies as well as he fed their souls. That's what Jesus was all about, that's what as well as who he was. It's as if what he actually did is forgotten in the eagerness to abstract it from the very nature of what he did.  It was plainly a human imitation of God through practicing giving the necessities of life, of us as the conscious means of God's will being done, Jesus more than any other person,  is something I've never seen much mentioned in any theological or doctrinal assertions about the real presence of Jesus in the bread and cup.  I can't help but think that's because for the past two thousand years it's been almost exclusively men who probably never made bread in their lives doing that theologizing.

**  Having recently criticized what I think is Luther's distortion of Paul's idea about faith, I think that it's probably as wrong to think about "faith" as if it can be divorced from the physical manifestation of what you do if you have faith.  There is everything in the Gospels, even in Paul's own writing and certainly in James' letter to indicate that real faith will inevitably lead to actions, especially in the very acts of giving what is necessary for life but far more that I think is lost in all of the theological abstractions in regard to the Eucharist. In my understanding of that Jesus said that nothing less than his very body and blood was held within the act of giving food and drink to other people, Jesus breaking the bread, at the Last Supper, with the two disciples who recognized the risen Jesus only through his breaking of the bread on the road to Emmaus, was in the giving as much as in the food. I'm sure those two unnamed disciples ate the food he gave them before they rushed back to tell what happened.