Continuing With Reading The Bible At The Margins Stragegies for Inclusive Biblican Interpretation

So yes, I'm questioning these traditions, I'm challenging these traditions because they simply aren't representative of all of humanity.

So, think of the groups that get constructed as "other."

White  leaves out Racial/ethnic
Heterosexual  "   LGBTQ+
Male          "   Female
Affluent      "   Poor

These are the groups that are on the other side.  So those who are racial/ethnic, those who are LGBTQ+/ those who are female, those who are poor.  And that is what I realized again with that teenager. It's interesting how my second book starts with that story of that teenager. I was so traumatized by her statement that I had to write a whole book to explain why.  Sometime I feel like I should track her down so I could say, "You need to read my book."  Because, you know, you really can bring who you are to your reading of the Bible.

And so my work involves reading the Bible in the context of HIV and AIDS and low and behold the same mythical norm appeared.  Because groups who are more disproportionately impacted by HIV are racial/ethnic groups, in this country they tend to be the African American population  and the LatinX population, LGBTQ+ persons, female - for instance globally there are more female, say in Sub-Saharan Africa, there are more females who are impacted than males - and they tend to be poor in the sense that they don't tend to have access to the various important drugs that medical care could, in fact, offer.  

But it gets more complicated than that because there are Christians who have been serving in the area of HIV but the policies that apply for prevention such as ABC, abstain, be faithful and, if all else fails, use a condom really haven't been very successful.  And it struck me that really it is a different kind of problem, again it's a systemic problem but it's one where the Christian approach represents the mythical norm.  So it makes sense that if it's sexually transmitted just abstain, I mean that's very logical, but it's not very practical.  That's basically what I'm saying.

So instead what really needs to happen is we need to take a more systemic approach and it means looking at these systemic issues that actually make People vulnerable to the HIV virus, itself.

I did not come up with this, it was posted on social media and I tried to track down who might have posted it in my feed and I couldn't but this gives you a sense of how you need to view HIV systemically.

If you fight racism, you fight HIV.
If you fight homophobia, you fight HIV.
If you fight sexism, you fight HIV.
If you fight poverty, you fight HIV.

Notice those mythical norm factors  track exactly.

But the problem is that the Christian approach very often doesn't take this kind of information into account because it's geared to the mythical norm.  The tradition is geared to the mythical norm but the People who are disproportionately impacted are not the ones who were developing   the Christian perspective.  And so we are caught in a very difficult situation and as a result there are 40,000 People in the United States each year who are still being infected and we need to be able to bridge that.

This is a perfect practical example of how something I first noticed almost twenty years ago happens, it was one of the topics of one of my first posts, online,* that the morality of any moral declaration and policy cannot honesty or morally be separated from the consequences of that moral policy.  That became apparent to me during the Bush II regime as his pretense of being a Christian became real and the policies around HIV-AIDS and that which the Republicans in his regime and in the Congress - and some on the Court were guaranteed to do nothing to decrease the numbers of those infected every year.  

There is nothing Christian about the consequences of that, as Cheryl Anderson points out so well, it is going to be those who pay for those policies so prissily and preeningly imposed and not the ones making the policy who will be infected, made ill, be left untreated and die.  A similar point could be made about the policy of the unmarried, presumably, mostly, non-sexually active (though we know and they know not all of them are) Catholic hierarchy who make some of the most immoral policies on this and who are a big part of why governments in many countries, including the United States, not taking the kind of effective measures that she indicates in her talk.  Taking the real life lives of those at greatest risk certainly is part of that but they are exactly the ones who have no say in developing any approach to the problem.  

That is especially true for Women who, though practicing fidelity, are infected by their unfaithful husbands or boyfriends, who are the victims of rape, prostitution, etc.  They have certainly not had a voice in the moral declarations of any of the Popes up to now, Francis may well be the first one who has ever taken what Women have to say about their lives as seriously as what unmarried men say about them.

I like how she notes that the same refusal to pay attention to those othered groups is a bigger thing than how the Bible has been read and traditionally interpreted.  I would also note, how it has been translated and the consequences of that.  Important though I think theology and Biblical studies are, those are not the thing that is pushing the band wagon of culture.  It is the cultural foundation of privilege that is in control of all of it.  The Reagan and Bush I administrations and the Bush II and Trump regimes** never took the Gospels or Epistles seriously about anything in anything they did, their invocation of religion, especially Christianity started and finished in political calculation just as the KGB man Putin plays the corrupt Patriarch of Moscow.  

* Incorporating The Outcome from olvlzl May 19, 2006
 

On first hearing that the "christian" right had come up with chastity rings, fingers weren't the first appendages to come to mind. Know what I mean? Then I heard about their even weirder sister. Ceremonies in which very little girls, indeed, symbolically give their reproductive organs to their daddy for safe keeping. He then is to hand them over to the groom at her wedding. I might not be the most financially savvy guy but this is sufficiently brazen as to glow like the sun. Electra becomes money. Keepin' it is a growth industry.

For those who might find this neo-folkway just too strange or the overhead too high there is the alternative of abstinence "education" carried out by private contractors at public expense. In this alternative, misinformation and all too temporary fear take the place of custom jewelry. The short history of this quaint idea is complete with evidence that it doesn't work very well. It also seems to have the unintended effect of leading young people who just can't keep it to engage in more dangerous activities than protected sex.

This evidence doesn't seem to bother proponents one little bit. They deny the evidence but I suspect that even if they did accept it they wouldn't mind much. If the recent stories about sexual moralists' opposition to the most recent vaccine which will prevent potentially fatal venereal disease is any indication it would seem that they might see it as another mark... ah, teaching opportunity. Making certain that the wages of sin are death would seem to be their goal.

Much as I'd like to turn this into a piece about the statistical evidence of their depravity, that will have to wait. My purpose is to investigate the morality of traditional sexual taboo from a different angle. Incorporating the outcome.

The traditional moralist holds that it is essential to issue a flat ban on prohibited activities, end of question. A flat ban with no exceptions. No alternative consideration is necessary for morality to be satisfied. In fact, to consider anything else would weaken the flat ban and thus be wicked in itself. That experience has shown throughout recorded history that the ban will not be followed doesn't matter. That enormous suffering and even death result from to impossibility of many, if not most people keepin' it within the confines of monogamous, heterosexual marriage is not a downside to the traditional sexual moralist. They just ignore it. Deaths of women who bear their eleventh child before they reach the age of thirty, venereal disease, children who can't be cared for, grinding poverty, ... all taken in stride by the traditional sexual moralist. Even those who don't find this suffering good in the sight of the Lord find it insufficiently awful to reconsider a single word of the flat ban.

Well, here's a thought. Any moral proclamation that causes suffering, disease and death is evil. Any moral teaching that willfully ignores the pain it causes is phony morality and should be junked. For those who think the left has no moral absolutes, there is one for you. Replacing scientifically based sex education with this kind of exercise in sadistic pseudo-morality is evil. No matter how longstanding, it is superstitious and evil and destructive of the public good. It should be prohibited for public money to go to this pseudo-religious clap trap. And a clap trap it is.

This kind of stuff isn't confined to sex education. Ending needle exchange programs is another clear example. Drug addicts exchanging HIV and hepatitis is a direct result of needle exchanges being made impossible by the War on Drugs industry and their moralist camp followers. We have ample evidence that needle exchange programs work to lessen the horrors of disease among drug addicts. Addictive drugs, and some which aren't addictive, are allegedly banned because they cause suffering and in the case of addictive drugs that is true. To assert that you are banning them to prevent suffering and then to ignore HIV transmission is to be the direct cause of suffering more awful than the addiction. Treating addiction as a moral failing punishable by death instead of a treatable disease has led us into the obscenity of the war on drugs we find ourselves in today.

Many children being born with HIV are a direct result of the lies of the chastity industry and the drug moralists. Their suffering is taken with remarkable equanimity by these protectors of public morals. Any feeling person with an intact brain can see that their suffering is morally unacceptable. Any person of good will can see the calm acceptance of children and adults dying of entirely preventable AIDS is absolute proof of the moral decay of traditional sexual moralists. These facts definitively impeach the moral pretensions of religious conservatives and it would be entirely immoral for the left to let them get away with it another minute without a fight.

How about this for some real sexual morality. Ignoring preventable suffering resulting from the inability of people to go without sex is evil. People who ignore suffering and so help more of it into the world are evil. Ignorance is a leading cause of suffering. So is discouraging the use of condoms.

** No presidency which is not the result of a majority vote by the voters should ever be considered and administration, it is an illegitimate regime.  

Scripture Is Authoritative But It Cannot Always Be Normative For The Decisions We Have To Take As To How We Live

I HAVE BEEN INTENDING to transcribe at least some of that talk by Cheryl Anderson I posted the Youtube of last weekend like I have other talks by other people.  That is because it is so full of ideas important to real, practical life and politics and Christianity as it will have to be to continue in service to The Living God acting through us.  For the Gospel of Jesus to survive even Christianity.  I also had been thinking of transcribing a talk that Luke Timothy Johnson gave in 2011 centering on six assumptions he made when dealing with Scripture which intersects with what Cheryl Anderson said on a number of points.  Both of them addressing LGBTQ+ life within the Church.

Over the past week, for some reason, I seem to be stumbling across exhortations about trusting in The Living God From Cheryl Anderson back to George MacDonald and even farther back into the New Testament.   The living God makes God's mind known to us not only in Scripture, the revelation of the Living God in the experience of People thousands of years ago, but in our own lived experience in our time.  I'm starting to wonder if someone's trying to tell me something.

Luke Timothy Johnson makes two points near the start of his talk, that if that idea of depending on our own experience instead of "Scripture alone" makes us nervous we should understand that we, as everyone else always has, does that. Especially Christians should already have fits of nerves because a. no one who read the Scriptures available to the earliest followers of Jesus, the Jewish Scriptures, would have expected the Messiah to be an executed criminal of the first century raised from the dead. b. he makes the point repeatedly that there was nothing less "Biblical" for the earliest followers of Jesus who were uniformly Jews to include gentiles in the community that started to become Christianity, especially gentiles who did not follow The Law of Moses.  That is something which almost certainly came before any of the books of the New Testament were written because in the earliest of those written by Paul and James comes after he and his colleagues started evangelizing gentiles and whatever is based on even earlier traditions that were written as the Gospels comments on the novelty of the idea that Jesus seems to have occasionally included or commented on the worthiness of non-Jews who believed him and in him.  I do have to wonder if that idea might be a bigger problem for Protestants with that "Scripture alone" normative standard standing over so many of them.

I have decided to start with Cheryl Anderson because she speaks more directly to my own experience and it's harder to find her books or other writing than those who I have already used in these posts.  I will probably dip into Johnson's talk where he commented on similar points as that occurs to me.

It all started when I was teaching a Bible Study class with high school students who were going to be seniors that fall. I was told to teach them what I teach at the seminary level, not to baby it down for them but to actually give them the kind of questions that seminary students have to grapple with.

So I was saying that there are problematic texts in the Bible.  For instance, the 10 Commandments that we love so much accept slavery, Judges 19 basically says it's better to rape a woman than a man.  And there was this one African American teenager sitting in that class who did not like the direction of the conversation. So she started to hum to kind of drown me out.  It's one of the reasons I never work with youth groups. You know. It's one of these things, I'm used to seminary students where the "Dr."' kind of makes them, you know, have some respect. For teenagers it's like, "Naw!"  So this teenager started to hum and I kept talking, you know, over her hum.  And finally she had just had enough and she said, "This is the Word of God.  If it says slavery is okay, slavery is okay.  If it says rape is okay, rape is okay."

I was shocked because I had always assumed that if you're African American you would question the Biblical support for slavery, I had assumed that if you're a female or a decent human being you would question the acceptance of rape.  I just assumed that would happen.

And then I realized that I had read Audrey Lorde in seminary, The Sister Outsider which I strongly recommend and her work has already been referred to here.   And she talks about the mythical norm. And it's the normative human experience and she argues that normative human experience doesn't really cover all human beings.  It basically covers white heterosexual males who are also privileged or affluent. There are other aspects to it but for my purposes I limit it to those four because those four really help me to put my own work into context.

Now, let me say at the outset that if you are a white heterosexual male and affluent, I ain't talking about you, specifically. I'm talking about systemically, historically, institutionally.  So that these things, these traditions stay in place whether or not there are even human beings involved because they become the ethos of a tradition or an approach.

And so what I realized from that young teenager is that she had been taught to read the Bible from a particular perspective. And it happened to be this perspective that sort of grounds this particular so-called normative experience.  

Now I say "so-called normative" because my question is, yes, it may be the church tradition to interpret texts in this way but I always ask how many  people were there when they were developing this tradition or this particular interpretation who look like me. And not only that but who were woke Black Women. Because that's not the same thing either.  So, yes, I'm challenging these traditions, I'm challenging these interpretations because they simply aren't representative of all of humanity.

I am more and more impressed with Cheryl Anderson's thinking and scholarship the more I listen and read. 

Years ago, I think it was when I wrote for Echidne of the Snakes, that I noticed that white males, middle-class or above were universally considered the "default" of human beings, males in general a world-cultural default,  and that any even notice of or regard or respect paid to anyone else was likely to be understood as some kind of privilege unfairly being granted to those others who were tacitly assumed to not deserve that.  More generally, that happens whenever someone with an expectation of privilege sees soemone else getting what they figure is theirs by default, what is generally miscalled "by right."  Women, of course, Black People and People of Color, of course, other minorities are held to be given respect or anything, really, unfairly.

Sometimes I included LGBTQ+ as falling outside that default, though I always admitted that many, probably most gay men who were white and had money could enjoy many of the privileges of that default, though not usually if they insisted on living honestly and authentically.  If Lindsay Graham suddenly admitted he was and always had been an active homosexual it would be interesting to see the extent to which he was allowed to retain the level of privilege he has been giving by queer-bashers.  Though affluence even for out of the closet white gay men can go a long way in the preservation of privilege.  I agree with Cheryl Anderson that there are many other factors involved in how that plays out in individual lives. Rich white women, rich Black People and other members not included in that default of privilege can, if they choose to or don't actively reject that, enjoy it to some extent.  Poor, marginalized members of subjugated and oppressed minority groups are certainly the least likely to escape the meaner aspects of that hierarchy.

She, of course, speaking to an admirably inclusive and conscious LGBTQ+ group which seems to largely be Christian Evangelical in its membership, focuses on the consequences of maintaining the authority of that "normative" reading AND I'LL INCLUDE WRITING of Scripture and in the Christian tradition which is still so influential in churches and in our thinking about these things. But it is no less true in any other aspect of our cultures, that of politics, academics, science, especially the life sciences and the pseudo-social sciences, and all aspects of popular culture, including journalism.  I think her thinking is extremely useful in understanding a lot about that, as well as about some of the most destructive things still present in Christianity.  

The statement by Luke Timothy Johnson I paraphrase in the title came from that talk he gave dealing with sex, the Bible and Christianity. He said in it.

So, Scripture is everywhere authoritative for me as a theologian.  I am liberal in the name of Scripture rather than liberal over/against Scripture. I take it as the plainest reading of the meaning of Scripture to hold positions that are liberative in our lives. But Scripture, although always authoritative, that is to say always speaking as the inspired Word of God and challenging us in our perceptions of the world is not always normative for what we do here and now. To pretend otherwise is simply to have false consciousness. It is to lie either to ourselves or to others.  

That was said before he noted that if the earliest Christians had not allowed their own experience of The Living God to override the letter of Scripture as they and probably all of the Hebrew traditional understanding of Scripture thought of it, they could never have held that Jesus rose from the dead and was Lord, they could never have felt moved to include gentiles as is so controversially presented in Acts - another of the coincidences mentioned above is that even as I randomly clicked on those two talks last weekend, that passage was in the lectionary read at Catholic masses over several days.  

I will interject that Jesus notably said he was not going to overturn a letter of The Law, that is the Mosaic Law AS HE, HIMSELF PRESENTED IT IN THE GOLDEN RULE, something that Hillel seems to have agreed with him on.  He certainly overturned a good deal of the previous interpretation and even the letter of Scripture, including things like the permission in The Law, allowing husbands to divorce their wives, the stoning of Women who committed adultery, violating the Sabbath to do good works, etc.  

Another of the things I started reading this week was George MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons.  I'd like to go into those as they relate to the overriding and authoritative experience of the Living God to but not until this project is complete.  It's going to take a while.  I seem to do a lot better when I'm doing a series these days, so that's what I'm sticking to.  Hate mail responses will have to wait, maybe indefinitely.

An Answer To An Angry Marxist At Another Place - equality is the only secure basis for the practice of freedom

SOME PEOPLE I TALK TO have become startled at the development in my thinking as I've  become extremely skeptical of the post-WWII notions of libertarian liberty as a general misconception of freedom in democratic society and law and government.  They seem to have an irrational belief that apostasy from the traditional American secular left means you've joined the right when the truth is I had to quit it to go farther left.   It is only superficially counter-intuitive that libertarianism is, in reality, a destroyer of freedom, when you think about it and observe it in reality instead of abstract modeling, it is not only sensible, it makes perfect sense. Rights are only just when they are limited by the rights of others on an equal basis. If that's not the limit of them they are not rights but privileges.  That's something I think I started learning when I went to college and had to live with upper middle class and more well off people who were accustomed to that kind of privilege.  In my experience, that's a lot of what the so-called "counter-culture" of the later 1960s was shot through with.  It is certainly what Marxism in reality instead of academic play-time make-believe turned out to be. Look at the dictators of Nicaragua, North Korea and other places where Marxism has reached its real-life conclusion in gangsterism and Victorian era capitalism on steroids.  Inequality is a guarantee of gangster government as equality is the absolute bedrock requirement of democracy.  

But a similar critique is also true of old-fashioned capitalism and earlier economic schemes.  The liberty of slave-owners to enslave and wealthy people to oppress the poor is the basis of "liberal democracy" as it has come to exist as that replaced feudalism. That is the basis of the 18th century European notion of "liberalism" as grew under such things as the Brit class system, other traditional, habitual habits of practicing and tolerating injustice.  That was among the most obvious motives of the United States Constitutional Convention and the results of that are still the foremost means of thwarting real democracy, egalitarian democracy in this, the self-promoted "birthplace" of modern democracy, in the popular misunderstanding of things.  It is the tragic history of the American left that it got detoured into Marxism and other academic theories that, in practice, turned into even more efficient and ruthless forms of gangsterism.

Any practice of what we foolishly consider to be the virtue of "liberty" which is not in every way conditioned by the moral responsibility to the truth and to the morally binding requirements of mutual reciprocity as expressed in the "Golden Rule" is false liberty, something which cannot generate freedom as it hoards privilege for a small number of People.  

I have repeatedly thrown the spectacle of that up against the mythology of the self-promoted birthplace of such idiotic notions of libertarian liberty, the United States.  

That in decadent, eutrophic Trump era America the biggest fattest promoters of "freedom of speech," "freedom of press," "The First Amendment" are, in fact, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, Republican-fascists, the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court, the native form of American fascism, white supremacists and other assorted passive promoters of casual to grindingly oppressive and violent would-be murderous "patriotism."  I throw that fact in the face of those who object to my critique of their mistaken notion of such things as genuine democracy.  It is certainly not an accident that it is among younger People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+ and others who are the targets of such libertarian liberty have been among the first to notice the discrepancy in the promise of the ACLU style libertarianism and what it produces. It is no surprise that it is among those who benefit from that discrepancy among alleged liberals who are the blindest to what their heroes have wrought in the lives of we who are targets of that libertarian liberty.

Today, when the slogans of the 1960s "civil liberties" industry mistaken as a manifestation of traditional American liberalism are most frequently on the lips of idiot-fascists such as Matt Gaetz, Marjory Taylor Green, other Republican-fascist icons, Proud-Boys [Why hasn't Gavin McInnes been deported yet?], incel losers, neo-Nazis, etc. should cause even the more meat-headed civil libertarians who disdain them to question their notions so useful to such complete rotters.  

Those who champion their "right" to SO SUCCESSFULLY lie and promote murderous, grinding inequality are their willing dupes who demonstrate that they really don't much care about the rights and freedom and lives of Black People, Native Americans, Women, LGBTQ+, etc.  They should look in the mirror because the typically white, straight male privileged face they see is who they are really in favor of privileging.  That's especially true of those who work in "journalism" and the legal and academic rackets.   As a gay, white, male, working-class traditional American liberal who has witnessed Republican-fascism rise and flourish under libertarian First Amendment absolutism, I don't trust it's promoters and passive supporters anymore.  

As with the secular left who championed the equivalent of the native American supporters of Nazism, in American Stalinists and Trotskyites and Maoists (despite what such "leftists" tacitly obviously believe, their mountains of murdered People, their enslaved People are no less dead and enslaved than those under Nazism), the "civil libertarians" of the secular and even religious left in the United States, are the saps and dupes of the enemies of real freedom, egalitarian freedom, equality being the only secure basis for the practice of freedoms.

Personal freedom is self-limited on the basis of not violating the rights and freedoms of others and not denying the truth or it is an engine of the tyranny of those with real or artificial power and strength over many others. That's as true if it's on the basis of some idiotically proclaimed scientific ideology as it is when enslaving, oppressing and murdering for personal profit is the motive.   

The United States, certainly under the Constitution and, perhaps especially, the badly written Bill of Rights gamed by corrupt Supreme Courts has always been just such a tyranny of the wealthy, the white, the male over Native Americans, Black People, Women, most of all those lower on the economic scale.  The wealthy and powerful have flourished at the expense of those consciously excluded in the Constitution from the beginning, that is the actual and real history of the United States, the reaction of those various groups in the still unfulfilled struggle AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION AND THE LEGAL ESTABLISHMENT is the actual best thing about us.  I have pointed out before that it is one of the greatest virtues of the Jewish Bible that it repeatedly admits the sins of the Children of Israel, especially the corrupt government and the generally corrupt Temple establishment.  The quasi-official "history" of the United States as is taught in schools - including the universities - and, even more so, promoted in the default school of post-literate times which is responsible for the miseducation of America, TV, the movies, hagiographic and falsely heroic ahistorical historical fiction and pop culture coercion, has little to none of that virtuous moral reflection and honesty, it is more like the stuff of the industrial producer of lies, advertising and public relations who have been among its worst promoters.  That was true even before the advent of movies, Broadway musicals are among the earliest venues of such lies.

I used to think that there was some alternative to that in "radical" criticism of the United States but even that falls far short.  Most of that is wedded to an alternative mythology that is based in a romantic reading of the Constitution and an idiotic elevation of such things as "the free press,"  "The First Amendment" when a real and unromantic reading of the results of that hagiography shows them to be a very mixed blessing and not infrequently, a deadly curse in effect.  The idiotic idea that those whose profession is supposed to be in judging differences, judges, are powerless to tell the difference is one of the foundations of that idiocy.  Judges who can make the most precisian of distinctions when it's a question of money and who it "rightly" belongs to play totally stupid when it comes to something typically of blinding obviousness.

Of course, most of that comes from affluent, or relatively affluent, safe, white men who write for establishment organs such as the New York Times, the networks, work at elite institutions fully wedded to the system of inequality, such as the elite universities or otherwise benefit or hope to benefit from the system, ever patient as it grinds up and destroys those mentioned above.  I picked up Anthony Lewis' "Gideon's Trumpet" a couple of years ago and re-read it in light of the Post Warren Burger Court rotting into the corruption of the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts and, for all my rose colored  view of it in my younger days, it read like a cheap and phony lie as to how things really are under the Constitution.  I think in almost no other way, the standard Warren Court era romantic liberal view of the Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights has to stand as among the most putrid and false propaganda during my lifetime.  Earl Warren is long dead, lots of his Court's landmarks have been turned round into tools of the privilege of wealth, white-supremacy and other gangsters.  Look what they did to the 14th Amendment to see that the Court can do that to anything.

I go back to one time listening to the silver-tongued racist, fascist William F. Buckley condemning equality as a violation of his right to enjoy his privilege as a wealthy, white male, which he explicitly called his "liberty."  That is something I remember as perhaps the beginning of my skepticism about such libertarian notions.  That was one of the unintended early steps in the direction I've taken even before I'd realized it.  Another was reading the truly idiotic book "In Defense of Anarchism," by Robert Wolfe which, when I discussed it with a teacher of language in college, she made me think by pointing out essentially it was an argument to jettison any kind of progress and go back to a lack of protection for the weak against the strong.  That was another step in my understanding of reality.  

I have to say again reading Emma Goldman's writing in full online instead of the typical cherry picked misrepresentation of her and finding that for anything appealing about her there was far more that was truly awful, and not just her political writing.  Reading about how, late in her life, seeing the rise of actual fascism and Nazism as well as the Soviet style of oppression that she early recognized during the Lenin years, she pathetically asked her friends if she and her colleagues had wasted their lives on anarchism.  The anwer to that was so obvious that she probably should have faced the fact and admitted it instead of asking the question. Reading her adoration of Nietzsche was another land mark of the final journey into my  disillusionment with that strain of American pseudo-radicalism.  And as I've said, when a far fuller record of primary documentation of the American secular left became available to me online, and those I could read in other languages, at every turn there was more than enough to persuade me that the whole thing is and was as phony and false as it could be.  I won't go into it right now but it was more intimately tied in with the primary documentation of both natural selection and the developments of fascism and Nazism than a good little college-credentialed liberal or leftist, or moderate or conservative of my pre-online generation would ever have suspected. Reading the primary record and noticing what was being said in it can be a real eye-opener.  I distrust Marxists and anarchists as much as I distrust capitalists, all along the way.

The Hollywood 10 were Stalinists, objectively, they were the moral equivalent of those who promoted fascism and doing business with Hitler.  I have mentioned a number of times here the brief period when American Communists were under order from Stalin to push that Republican-farm state-businessman line during the brief period of the Hitler Stalin pact.  And such heroes of us 60s era lefties as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and the other Almanac Singers followed that order from as accomplished a mass murderer and enslaver and imperialist as Hitler was.  

It is one of the great idiocies in the wake of their persecution and prosecution by American fascists in the anti-communist post-WWII period, the infamous HUAC hearings, the show hearings and trials, the degradation ceremonies, that the victims of that may have been victims but they were never anything like heroes.  Despite what Hollywood and copy-cat scribblers of novels and shows claim.  With few exceptions those in the role of inquisitor and those in the role of accused were merely two somewhat different kinds of villains.  Whatever habits of sympathy extended to those without power in those dramas is more than made up by the reality of what their heroes, the ideological system they wanted to reproduce in the United States did in the Soviet Union, those countries occupied by them after WWII, later among the Maoists of the 1960s and 1970s.  Marxism was in every way more oppressive and murderous than even the United States during the Truman and Eisenhower years.  That is unless you were a Black Person or other member of a subjugated race in the states under American Apartheid or lived in a country subject to a client fascist dictatorship.  Those were quite similar to the occupied countries under the control of Communist dictators.

I will bet you there was not a single sworn Communist who fell under the judgement or process or torture-execution without trial under communism, no Soviet or East German or Hungarian or Chinese Person tortured, imprisoned or murdered under their idea of a paradise on Earth who wouldn't have traded places with the Hollywood 10 or those who escaped prosecution but were blacklisted in the "free press" of Hollywood studios or other "free press" media, lied about under "freedom of speech" or otherwise victimized under the red scare here without any hesitation.   

No claims of rights by American Communists or their allies in that period should ever be allowed to pass without pointing out, for example, that a dissident writer or scribbler or speaker under the system they championed would likely have gotten out of it without a bullet in the head, mostly likely after torture into a false confession or a sentence at slave labor, perhaps worked to death in a way not at all different from what happened under Nazism just a few years earlier or under American apartheid.  Anyone murdered by a communist dictator is equal to anyone murdered by Hitler or under Mussolini or under Imperial Japan.  Or in the Jim Crow states or anywhere under American fascism such as flourished in many of the several states all along.  There's something truly sickening in hearing the "First Amendment" whining of American Stalinists in the era when his genocides and oppression had been accurately reported in the West and was known to all. It is even more revolting to hear a fascist mean girl like Marjorie Taylor Greene spew the same ACLU-Hollywood Blacklist drama style "First Amendment" "free speech"  bullshit to whine about the fascist Tucker Carlson being fired by his fascist employers, the third cabloid network that had hired the liar to lie his fat face of to start with.  From what I see the only thing that's going to silence him is the dirt Murdoch has to hold over him.

Marxism is, indeed, as fully discredited as fascism and Nazism, it had been by the 1930s.  You had to be a willing idiot or as morally depraved as a Nazi to deny that.  All those popular heroes of the period who were Marxists of that kind are and should be jettisoned by any real and genuine egalitarian left today.  The younger generation of American leftists and liberals should face that folly of my and previous generations, condemn the hypocrisy of it and go on with better heroes or, best of all, none who aren't subjected to a rigorous and honest and realistic inspection on the basis of an equality that faces that those murdered and oppressed under Marxism are as much victims as those under any fascism.  I have a short list of former Marxists from the past, who did reject the sins of Marxim and the folly of their earlier lives, maybe someday I'll go into it. And I certainly don't mean by that the Trotsyites who exchanged that so cynically for neo-consevatism or other forms of profitable American corporate fascism.  I especially distrust the Marxists who took that tiny baby step from Marxism to fascism.  

No one who doesn't start out with and stick with egalitarian democracy as their ultimate goal, one in which any liberties are tied to moral responsibility to all others no matter how unpretentious or favored, is to be trusted.  You're far more likely to find such People among the religious than the secular in my experience.

I've found a lot more of those who stand up to rigorous criticism on the religious left than the secular ones.  There are even rare ones who can make an honest and critical use of some of Marx's ideas.  You should always keep in mind while reading Marx or, more likely under the typical post-literacy, hear some crank professor or instructor claiming to represent his thinking, that he, himself, declared that he wasn't a Marxist.  Anyone who is tempted to become one should remember Marx, himself, rejected it.

Anyone who holds with Marxism in 2023 when its mountain range of murders has been exposed is the moral equivalent of a neo-Nazi or neo-fascist or, their native American form, white supremacists or male supremacists.*  Their presence on university faculties are as absurd as flat-earthers teaching geography or "young Earth creationists" teaching on science faculties or catho-fascist Integralists on elite law faculties.  They are lying cranks, young people gulled by them are idiots who need to learn some real history. I suspect everything they know about history is from the movies or TV or some other lie filled fiction.  A lot of that is called "history". The "free press" and "freedom of speech" that refuses to distinguish between the right to tell the truth and that there is no right to lie has cost us too much to stop making that distinction effective in reality instead of hair-brained theory.

* It should never be forgotten that world-wide Women have been and still are subjected to a terror campaign, including daily lynchings, that on top of any racial or class or other forms of oppression, that it is almost always worse for Women whose subjugation and oppression often cuts through even the most obvious substrate of privilege.

Make-up Saturday Night Radio Drama - Ceara Carney - Fizzy Lizzy

 Fizzy Lizzy 

Frizzy Lizzy is the story of a young woman's search for her mother. We follow Lizzy as she deceives her controlling father to journey to London. She traces the clues of her mother's London life with all the charm of a teenage detective, in a play that uses magical realism to convey the depth of love in the mother-daughter relationship. The play was recommended by the jury of the 2022 PJ O 'Connor Awards.

Kitty O'Sullivan (Lizzy)
Helen Norton (Mam)
Stephen Hogan (Dad/Gallery Receptionist/Dave)
Imogen Allen (Alana/Barista/Hostel Woman)
Lucy Miller (Karen/Woman in the Park/Hostel Woman)
Scott Smith (Child asking questions)
Ellie Brosnan Corkery (Young Lizzy)
Sam Buckett (Chris)
Extra Recordings by Emma Brosnan.
Sound Design & Supervision: Ciarán Dunne & Ruth Kennington
Three Little Birds performed by Ciarán Dunne
Dramaturg: Jessica Dromgoole
Director: Jessica Dromgoole
Producer for RTÉ: Kevin Brew

Sorry I didn't post this earlier.  It's been a weird weekend. 

Dr. Cheryl Anderson - Reading The Bible At The Margins: Strategies For Inclusive Biblical Interpretation

I'm having trouble with Blogger today so I'll put this here instead of on the bottom where I usually would.    I just found out about  Cheryl Anderson yesterday, there is so much here that adds to some of the things I've written about since December  and so much more.  More to come about what she says.