"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
I posted links to this series several years ago, expecting that it would continue as an audio drama but they went to a TV series which I never watched. I was wondering if they ever continued it as a podcast, which they didn't.
I'd thought it was one of the best for-online drama series I have found and still think it was very good as produced and very promising for the future. So it's worth another listening.
THAT SHOW BIZ, HOLLYWOOD, fiction and comedy lie and misrepresent the reality of alcoholism was thrown forcefully in my face yesterday, as I had to face again what advanced alcoholism with liver disease is really like. It was through someone who hadn't seen a relative I've been sharing the care of in a long time drawn out death from drinking. She hadn't seen him in a while and was horrified by the skin lesions, the jaundice, the swollen abdomen, the advancing dementia. Like all of us, she'd seen the fictional representation of alcoholism for decades, comic drunks, good time guys and gals as inevitably set against stereotypically unattractive advocates of sobriety or even those who just don't drink. Even when alcoholism is presented as a problem, it's never an honest portrayal of the real consequences of drinking. She's older than I am and probably took in more of the completely false entertainment and media portrayal of alcoholism but nothing had prepared her for the reality right there before her. I have gotten so used to seeing that in two of my brothers and other alcoholics I've known that it doesn't shock me when I see it.
If I could do it, I'd force the media, show biz and alleged information programming, to show the consequences of alcohol use in their full reality. The consequences of sobriety are certainly preferable to those. Instead, they lie about the character of those who practice sobriety, turning sobriety into an unattractive personality trait.
In our discussion after she saw him, I mentioned having encouraged him to try AA, to which she gave the typical trained response of those with college-credentials, that "it doesn't work." The answer to that is that nothing they'd tried had, either. I told her about my brother who tried to get clean with psychiatry for eight years and only got an added addiction to pills out of it. And to have his shrink dump him when he lost his job and, with it, the ability to pay. My brother's rejection had used the excuse that "I don't believe in God or any other higher power," a line provided to him by enlightenment modernism. The reality was that he not only did recognize a higher power, the alcohol molecule, he'd sacrificed his family, his career, his safety and health and, after years of agonizing and dangerous living, he gave his life to it. I won't go into the alleged "secular alternative" to AA because when I looked into it hoping to get him to try it, it turned out to be a Potemkin village false front unavailable in almost every location in the United States while there are half a dozen AA meetings within ten miles of where he lived.
Thinking about our discussion last night, I remembered this passage from a conversation between Walter Brueggemann and S. Alan Ray and think it has probably the best thinking on that topic I can recall hearing. It takes a while to develop the conversation so I'll give you my attempt at a transcript starting a few minutes before the point is reached.
S. Alan Ray: . . . There is no one in this room that does not have the capacity at this instant to summon up very vivid images of Satan and demons, if I ask you do do that. Your pre-modern mind is working just fine, thank you. So, my question is what is it that leads us to do this? Is it a vestige of a pre-scientific era or is it some deeper component of ourselves?
Walter Brueggemann: Well, I think you're right, I think that language is mythic or it's poetic. But I think it's an awareness that the visceral sense we have of evil cannot be categorized in the categories of enlightenment rationality. And so I think that we fall back into pre-rational or pre-scientfic or pre-enlightenment categories because it's the only way that we know how to talk about this force that cannot be reduced to a logical principle or an empirical description. And I think it's viscerally much underneath that. And I think the language of the personal is the only language we know.
I suspect the same thing is true with our personal language of God, that we can't catch what we want to say about God in enlightenment rationality either, and so we revert to poetic pre-scientific language that drives people like Richard Dawkins crazy. But we are speaking in poetic language when we do that.
S. Alan Ray: I agree with you and I think . . . Another way to tackle this is to take the observation that Reinhold Niebuhr offered us about the mystery of evil and some of his reflection on evil. That, really, it is a mystery. And he says at one point, I think in The Nature and Destiny of Man, it's a mystery almost equal to the mystery of our redemption, of our being as people. It's very close to it. And reflecting on this existence of evil in the modern period that I think we're dissatisfied that evil is a mystery to be endured rather than a problem to be solved. I think we are now-a-days all about how we can reduce the mysteries of the world to problems and the tackle them with our various tool kits. Right? Our tool kit of solving problems. And it occurred to me that this tool kit's tools are rather broad. Once you reduce evil to a problem you can take up the tools of exorcism, if you have a tradition that uses that. You can take up tools for countries that are mired in poverty, for example. The evils of poverty and seek to eradicate it. I'm not advocating a quietism that does nothing, please understand me. But if we think that evil is a vestige or an accumulation of lots of bad deeds, then we put them in the category of phenomena and we can begin to know them and understand them according to our rules of understanding phenomena and then develop techniques for addressing them, trying to eliminate them. Part of our frustration, it seems to me, is . . . or shocked, perhaps, is a better word, for the Holocaust, for example. Or catastrophic events like 9-11 is that we're brought up short to again realize the mystery of evil, rather than just the prevalence of bad deeds.
I'll break in to note that the visitor to my relative was mystified about what she saw in front of her. She couldn't fit it into her thinking or her expectations about what was a not atypical consequence of decades of alcohol use. She kept trying to attribute it to other things and she couldn't understand why he couldn't just stop, why we hadn't been able to reason him out of it. The consequences, the predictable consequences carried on by an intelligent person for so long, didn't match her faith in the efficacious applications of reason to prevent such terrible, disturbing consequences. Brueggemann, rejecting the faith in the universal power of "enlightenment rationality" puts it better than anyone addressing it out of a secular viewpoint.
Breuggemann: Yeah. And I think that the theological tradition understands that evil is enormously seductive. To go all the way back to Genesis 3 and the serpent we are seduced and deceived so that when we do destructive things, it's not simply because we're stupid . . . we don't smoke because we're stupid, we don't engage in land wars in Asia because we're stupid, we do those kinds of things because we're seduced. And we are fooled into thinking that somehow we can get by with this and make it work. Which finally leads us to I think to Paul's dilemma in the book of Romans that "The good I want to do I don't do and the evil I don't want to do I do and I don't understand why I'm doing it and I'm doing that because I'm seduced in ways that are beyond my resistance. And I think what we know is that our modern rationality doesn't even begin to touch that. So, I'm thinking of C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters in which the seducer is always at work leading us into the very things about which we know better but we go there anyway. And it seems to me that the religious crisis which gets acted out in 12-step programs is when we finally arrive at the awareness that I do not on my own have the capacity to resist this. And then you get the appeal to the saving power of God or something like that.
Having had years and years of directly viewing serious addiction and interacting closely with hard core addicts, I think this is the most insightful thing I've heard about this in a very long time. I would bet that any accurate survey of those who succeed and those who fail at attaining sobriety that atheism would be a significant predictor of failure.
Is it possible for someone to stop a seriously addictive behavior without addressing the power of seduction and the help of someone more powerful than their addiction? I have profound doubts about that. I think that even in some secular contexts success in recovery depends on exactly that kind of orientation. Sometimes the higher power is a person, sometimes it's the leader of a recovery program. In some cases, someone who turns that into a cult of personality. The reality of cults around a charismatic psychiatrist or psychologist or, God help their victims, psychoanalyst is quite well documented. I remember a narcotics recovery cult that a large number of prominent jazz musicians were caught up in back in the 1970s. I don't think any of the AA meetings in the area here are rumored to have such a focus so maybe accepting God as the higher power is someone less likely to lead to that kind of thing.
I don't have the answers to anyone's particular addiction, I do have experience with what doesn't work and if there's one thing I've seen not work it starts in a puffed-up declaration that "I don't recognize any higher power." I'd put "AA doesn't work, as another candidate for something that's almost guaranteed to mean that someone is going to surrender their life to their addictive substance of choice or as a result of someone licensed to prescribe pills to them. The person in question has become addicted to opioids on top of his addiction as a result of the several accidents at home while they were drunk.
Someone pulled Richard Dawkins out in an online brawl I was involved with a few days back. I realized it was the first time someone had done that in years, it was kind of a surprise considering how his claim to fame is fallen into discredit these days. So I wrote this response. I'm tempted to post links to things I've written about most of these subjects here but if you're interested you can do a search of my archive. I generally gave full citations and links which may still work though I don't have enough online time these days to check that.
ATHEISM WOULD HAVE BEEN better off if the new atheist fad of the first decade of the 21st century hadn't happened, it was in every way a sign of intellectual decadence and often sank into grotesque stupidity. As any popular fad, its stupidity is bound to lead to intellectual discrediting and they gave the opposition to them the motivation to discredit them. Though their bullying and nagging probably led most people to just get tired of them. Especially the mean-boys who have always dominated ideological atheism and its false front, "skepticism." The necessity of responding to them has forced people who probably had other things they'd rather have been doing to confront their arguments and claims and citations which, in so far as I've dealt with them in depth, all pretty well fall apart when subjected to even the standards that the new atheists claimed to champion. There are, certainly, valid criticisms of the varied doctrinal, dogmatic and theological claims of the various sects and traditions of religion but materialistic atheism has turned out to be a pretty threadbare and tattered and raffish basis for making those criticisms. And atheists have their own doctrines and dogmas and faith holdings that are not less vulnerable.
The rigorous internal criticism of religion is more exigent and compelling than the general practice of throwing up what is generally either an ideologically motivated or popular level concept of science against those. That is why what is what should have been, for any practical purposes, a minor and esoteric semi-science, the general study of evolution, has gained such an absurd place in modern culture, because it could be thrown up against a naive, far from majoritarian, mostly Christian reading of the first chapters of Genesis and could shock naive literalists out of what was generally never a deep knowledge of Christianity or any kind of secure faith. Almost any other legitimate, observation-based aspect of biology is far more scientific and far more important for doing something to make life better or even possible. There is no helping the trillions of dead organisms that comprise the actual subject matter of any subject of evolution, all but the most vanishingly tiny percentage of them has even left physical traces that can be studied in any specificity and even those fossilized remains can only be known on the basis of what is left of their observable, measurable physical remains. All the rest is grossest speculation and, more frequently than will ever be admitted, frequently self-interested fantasy.
It seems to me that it is the weakest faith that is grasped onto most fanatically, leading to some of the greatest sins committed in the name of Christianity. It is an irony that that the Fundamentalism that is the foil of modern atheism is, itself, a product of the same modernism that modern science is, the oldest theological traditions in Christianity didn't read Genesis as if it was either science or a modern conception of history. The Cappadocians and even Augustine said taking those as stories as literally true was a misuse of them. So that was never news to the Christian tradition, no matter how many never got the message or suppressed it. I think Darwinism is enforced as the required framing of evolution - EVOLUTION which I have never doubted is the way in which the diversity of life on Earth came about - out of the knowledge of those who have thought most deeply about it, that it has never had much of any evidentiary or rational basis. It has been maintained on plausibility based on how little instead of how much is securely demonstrated in actual physical evidence. As I said to your objection, "natural selection" has no known material existence so it cannot reliably even be located within the material universe. You didn't tell me where it is when I asked you.
Other than as an object of curiosity, I don't think that much of practical importance has come out of the most rigorous and, perhaps, accurate claims about evolution. Certainly as compared to the study of diseases, their prevention and their cures, even the lines of early hominids and even far more remotely back into our ancestry is of vanishingly little importance. And that's not to count the most important of related science, the science into how to sustain life against human activity and, worst of all, the quest to amass and concentrate wealth, the fossil fuel industry.
I think the extent to which evolution has led to some real science about life, now, as it is, much of it could probably have been achieved more directly and probably more usefully. The bulk of scientific claims about evolution, especially on the basis of Darwinian natural selection and its drastically altered form in the "modern synthesis" a combination of something like Darwinism with that now 90 year old, and so quite naive, view of genetic inheritance, have been a disaster in human culture and history.
Eugenics, modern scientific racism, much of fascism, the foundation of Nazism, some of the worst law made in the modern period and tens of millions of murders, forced sterilization, neglect of the poor and destitute, untold economic privation, the obscene homicidal policy of "herd immunity" and the corrupt policy flowing out of the racist neo-eugenics such as is popularized in The Bell Curve, are all directly attributable to that one idolized aspect of the elevation of the semi-scientific study of evolution. I think someday someone should really ask what the world has paid to allow biologists to pretend they have had a central theory as compelling as Newtonian physics or the 20th century additions to that. Though the products of modern physics, atomic and nuclear weapons and nuclear power, may run up a body count that puts that of Darwinian eugenics as a distant runner up.
Which leads to my most important refutation of your contentions.
The most compelling criticism of a belief in God and the assertion that God is all good, the problem of suffering, is far more a problem for the attempt to replace God with science because science is, by common agreement, permitted to entirely ignore questions of morality and so is by definition amoral.
I will take a few seconds to point out that "amorality" is not a quality that is removable from the minds of People in which that "amorality" just sits there alone. Without positive moral restraint, "amorality" is just the precursor of immorality, indeed, when it is realized as an opportunity, it is often the certain precuror of the most appalling immorality that there has been in the human population. The modern self-consciously, self-defined scientific regimes have some of the most damningly huge body counts in human history. The Nazis considered their basis to be biological science and the pseudo-sciences of modern anthropology, linguistics, etc. The various Marxist regimes regarded their practically similar governance as being based in science. Other than, possibly, the bloody conquests of the Mongol Empire, they have the highest murder rates of human history. That is certainly not unrelated to the status of the science they claimed to uphold as being held apart from moral consideration. If it were to be taken as an ideological entity having different sectarian definitions and applications, materialist-atheist-scientism, probably counts as the most murderous ideology in human history.
The behavior of scientists has often been quite as terrible as any of the worst figures in the history of religion. Christianity - which I'll address because it's always the focus of attacks made on what I write - forbids its followers to commit that kind of evil. There has never been a murder committed by a Christian, an act of war committed by a Christian, the starvation or privation or discrimination against someone, violence against someone, which is not a violation of the Gospel of Jesus or the teachings in the books of the New Testament. The same cannot be said of the relation of murderous, racist, etc. scientists to the central holdings of science because science was invented to exclude any consideration of morality. Dr. Josef Mengele was faultless as a man of science and his scientific colleagues requested he send the parts of the bodies of those they knew he was murdering, he was an immoral monster by the most basic reading of The Gospel. I am unaware of any of them who lost so much as a faculty position in a major university for that. What criticism there was of their mass murder, torture and amorality cannot come from science, it can only come from outside of it. I look at the moral depravity of so many in so many of the sciences, the pseudo-sciences and that most putrid of philosophical specialties, "ethics" and am convinced that that self-granted permission to jettison all considerations of the morality of what is advocated has infected much of academic life.
I think it's because such questions are alive mostly within departments of theology accounts for not a little of the hostility of academic atheists to that area of study. What is true of biologists who invented and supported eugenics is true of Charles Darwin as he asserted that sustaining the least among us was a danger to the population as a whole and that the early deaths of the least among us would be a boon for the surviving, neglecting and murdering human population, the very basis of Nazi theory. Science has never honestly admitted what is so obvious in the written evidence of what Nazism was and its inventors motives. One of the most impressive campaigns of intellectual lying in modern life was the post-WWII campaign to sanitize the image of Darwin and Darwinism when even a reading of the later editions of On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man proves he, himself, asserted the "Social Darwinism" that most allegedly educated persons will assert he had nothing to do with. Virtually no one in the previous period, up till the crimes of the Nazis were exposed denied the connection of Charles Darwin to eugenics and scientific racism. His own sons, his closest colleagues all directly connected him to eugenics and what they didn't call but which was scientific racism. I have noted that five months before the start of World War II and the beginning of their genocides, his son, Leonard Darwin, proudly linked his father to Nazi eugenics as he had linked him to eugenics over and over again. If you think you know Charles Darwin's thinking better than his sons, than his colleagues whose eugenic writings Darwin cited as reliable science in support of natural selection, you have discredited yourself. That lie of post-WWII conventional thought is long, long due for discrediting and refuting because eugenics is alive and as dangerous as it's ever been.
The same point about the life consequences of the amorality of science is true of those physicists and chemists who worked on atomic and nuclear bombs, who work in other weaponry. I have noted before that even as it was being contemplated to bring Fritz Haber up on charges of war crimes for his part in inventing AND IMPLEMENTING the use of gas in warfare during the First World War, his colleagues in science gave him a Nobel prize in 1918. That it was one of his inventions, Zyklon, that was adapted and used in the gas chambers of the Nazis carries a lesson in the danger of that self-granted permission to ignore moral consequences even within science. I once encountered atheist-sci rangers online who argued that Haber had, on-balance, saved more lives than his chemistry caused to be murdered, so as to exonerate him of any moral culpability, such is the amoral calculation of materialist sci-amorality.
Materialism, atheism and scientism all lack the necessary foundation on which to mount an accusation of even the most evil acts in the recorded history of the human species. As an ideological position, all of them being radically monistic, no one who upholds those as the foundation of reality has any rationally consistent basis for even addressing questions of evil. In fact, all of them have proven far more of a basis for anything from the denial that such acts are evil to the actual claim that such evil is a force for "good" such as natural selection has been used to claim since the publication of the first edition of On the Origin of Species. I have mentioned the very early adopters of that theory, Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, etc. almost immediately championed what became, through political and legal policy in various places, some of the greatest evils of the 20th century. I have also pointed out that the atheism of Marxism has been a quite independent verification of the ability of another ideological formulation of materialist theory to generate huge numbers of murder, general enslavement and moral depravity. I'd say the current ideological claims of academic atheists, such as those in utilitarian "ethics" in what one used to hope is the post-Nazi period is the third strike against atheism as a force for good. It is striking how soon, within the first five years after On the Origin of Species was published, that Darwin's closest colleagues were applying the claims of it to contemplate genocide, wiping out future generations from the human species, by neglect of the least among us, imperialistic genocide, forced sterilization, other legal policies (as I've mentioned Charles Darwin supported such proposals made by his son, George) the opposition to mandatory vaccination of the poor, . . . Darwin even complained that the British death camps, the notorious work houses kept too many poor people alive to adulthood for it to be safe for the human species to even give that starvation level of sustenance to the British poor. Thomas Huxley claimed that his anticipated genocide of African-Americans would be a boon for their white murderers at the conclusion of the American civil war on the basis of his belief in natural selection.
I could and have gone on about all of these things, look for my citations in my archive, you can use the search engine on the left hand sidebar.
Getting back to the shoddy internal criticism of science.
I think it would probably be a much better world if science made a rigorous internal criticism of what has been successfully passed off as science since about 1860 which has little to no actual foundation in the rules of science, kicking out those things that couldn't be based in actual observation. But, given the power of entrenched establishments in academia, such as those of psychology or sociology or ethology or the grosser speculative aspects of the study of evolution, that house cleaning is hardly likely to happen. I think that much of the decadence of science that, for example, John Horgan bemoaned four years ago is due exactly to that ideological motivation. I could contrast the decadence which Bertrand Russell bemoaned about ninety four years ago, not on the basis of the legitimacy of the physics of relativity and quantum mechanics, but because he feared modern science undercut the ideological validation that Russell's 19th century style materialist, atheist, scientistic thinking so enjoyed.
Just last week I listened to a young physicist brilliantly dismantling the 30 year fad that dominated the popular understanding of physics and not a little of the academic establishment of science, string theory, (see below, I can't get the friggin' thing to post where I want it to) complaining that because of it the particle physicists are finding it hard to convince democratic governments to fund even bigger, niftier accelerators (we just need another two hundred jillion dollars! to find the next particle!). She also goes into that life-saver for materialist atheism in the face of Big Bang cosmology, multiverse fantasy, though not in as much depth.
Though I think that an even better criticism of scientists discrediting science (without the friggin' annoying video game she was playing while she talked, on the screen) was made by the late Richard Lewontin in that essay I've quoted so often here, Billions and Billions of Demons, in which he points to the absurdly elevated claims of scientists as inevitably leading the public to being skeptical of science. I'd have liked to discuss the issue with him because he, himself, in other writing, gave a good reason to be skeptical of Darwinism, which I've also quoted here before, you can't observe or measure the alleged "selective forces" that he claimed drove evolution because they happen over too long a period and were too weak a force to measure. Yet he put his faith in them. If you can't observe it and you can't measure the basis of natural selection, then any claim that it can enter into science needs to be explained fully because such stuff is exactly why science has become so decadent as so much money has been thrown at it. I think natural selection is an imaginary entity that can't be defined and can't be observed and can't be measured, so it may as well be admitted that it may well be as imaginary as those things that made Ptolemaic cosmology seem to work or any of a myriad of once widely held concepts within science which has now fallen into desuetude and the amnesia that is such a part of scientific culture.
I think that even as they allow the absurdity of academic psychology into science, the dominant forceful rejection by those working as scientists of the rigorously controlled research into those things bundled together as psychic phenomena, which has more than a century of rigorously proving those within the rules of science, even when they have implemented the critiques of their critics and still come up with highly significant confirmation of their hypotheses, is strong evidence in support of my contention that current science is ruled by a materialistic-atheistic, would-be scientistic ideology that may be the central driver of science into decadence.
It is certainly consistent with the organized "skepticism" industry such as can be seen in the alphabet soup entities started by Paul Kurtz and his fellow atheist ideologues, CSICOP (since the disgraceful sTARBABY scandal* - CSI, CFI, etc.) being, in fact, a front for the promotion of materialism, scientism, and the atheism which is, certainly, an obsessive interest of just about everyone involved with them. Even the few of those who demonstrated they could understand the mathematical basis of the research into psychic phenomena, lied and covered up the obvious validity of that as scientific research, an effort that is ongoing in that pseudo-scientific debunking propaganda. The efforts of the extraction industries in debunking legitimate climate change science and those who attacked the scientific response to the Covid-19 pandemic could certainly have been copying the "skeptics" in their tactics.
I think one of the things that's most obvious is that many, maybe most scientists in at least the English language are seriously stupid when it comes to thinking or arguing out of any philosophical rigor. It is one of the things which I have to admit shocked me when I decided to look at what the new atheists of the 00's were writing and saying. In looking into the history of such ideological atheism, it was certainly not something that was uncharacteristic of ideological scientists before the turn of the century. I was prepared to find it in Hitchens and Harris but was shocked at how bad Dawkins, Carroll, Coyne, etc. were in thinking. I think it's been a huge mistake and more than just implicated in the general decadence of the college-credentialed class that there were not rigorous requirements for at least dealing with how to make and sustain logical arguments and reasonable conjectures starting before college but certainly before they got a bachelors degree. But it's not as if current academic philosophy departments are without their own decadent tendencies. Some of the stupidest proponents of materialist-atheist-scientism have had careers in university based philosopy departments. Paul Kurtz was just such an ideologue. Dennett with his eliminative positivism is a true meat head.
* Do read about the sTARBABY scandal in which those champions of science such as Paul Kurtz proved he never bothered to master the mathematical basis of most of what he claimed about what he opposed, not to mention that scummy liar, the more popularly known (because he was a figure of show biz, like Trump) James Randi whose excuse was that he didn't understand statistics. It is remarkable how many of the biggest-fattest traders in that racket are far more ignorant of the scientific basis of what they champion and assert is the only reliable means of knowing anything than, in fact, those whose work they denigrate. But, then, the actual scientists, EVEN THOSE WHO HAD TO UNDERSTAND THE STATISTICAL CLAIMS THAT CAUSE CSICOP TO DISCREDIT ITSELF, didn't think it was important enough to correct Kurtz et al because they were afraid upholding the science they claimed to champion would harm their ideological campaign against scientists who did and do follow the rules, coming up with stuff they didn't want to be true. In the sTARBABY scandal, the professional statistician and planetary astronomer who collaborated with Kurtz on it proved to be worse mathematicians than the neo-astrologers were. I think organized "skepticism" is one of the most easily seen symptoms of the decadence of not only science but the ideology of modernism. If they'd followed the basic rules in science, it wouldn't have reached the stage of intellectual decadence it has, though it would probably be as morally attrocious as it has so often been. Perhaps the very neglect at applying the rules of mathematics in science depend on a moral committment to integrity and truth that is, as well, damaged by materialist, atheist, scientism.
We've mentioned here already how there were ways in which both Jesus and Paul changed their traditions. They rejected practices that had come before. And when I looked at them carefully I noticed that there were patterns to how that happened.
And the first one is that Jesus considered the impact of an interpretation or a practice on the marginalized, those who had ordinarily been ignored. (These are in your booklet and just to make sure I have enough time I won't focus on them as carefully as I might because you have them in your books.)
I assume she means the texts she shows in the slides so I will type those in.
Then he said to them, "You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! Mark 7:9-13
But the first - think of this question, what are the consequences of an interpretation or church policy. And that's a really important one, Jesus did over and over again. And this is a great text from Mark Chapter 7 where there's a practice of tithing to The Temple which means people of limited funds had a difficult time supporting their families and paying the tithe to The Temple. And Jesus rejects that, he says: You are rejecting a commandment in order to keep a tradition. So he's clearly saying it's far more important to keep these commandments but it means that he looked at the consequences on those who had less, those who would have had difficulty to do that.
Jesus's new interpretation is grounded in the Biblical tradition, itself. I think that someone has already posted this already, the Matthew 23
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! you strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!
Matthews 23:23-28
But he doesn't take this out just from the environment, he takes this, he grounds this in the Biblical tradition itself. And I'd like to remind you of these words from Amos:
I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . . But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Amos 5:21-24
[This] shows you the importance of justice instead of the tradition or practices that harm some in the community.
This is another point that Timothy Luke Johnson made in his talk which I've been referencing.
Fifth conviction: Obedience to the living God trumps Scripture. As a medieval author said, "They name is "Truth," or Lord, not tradition." If God is The Living God, if God's creative activity continues at every moment if God discloses God's-Self in the Resurrected Lord Jesus, discloses Himself in the fabric of our existence, in the stories that we live, then our obedience is to that Living God not to the words of Scripture or, heaven help us, of our previous understanding of those words of Scripture.
Though Cheryl Anderson quotes Jesus as referencing Scripture to overturn an embedded traditional practice of interpreting Scripture. I think that the failure to make that distinction, between what Scripture actually says and the traditional, often enforced sectarian traditional meaning imposed on it, is one of the things that has led to the discrediting of Christianity. It certainly has made it vulnerable to the opportunistic attacks by its enemies, fashionable and otherwise. Not that some of the academic revisions of that reading are much of an improvement on the actual texts when read on their own terms. I've become extremely skeptical of the historical-critical racket which wants to impose yet another sectarian filter on it, that of 18-21st century secularism and scientism.
In terms of politics, this being a political blog, it's as or more true in the right-wing reading of the United States Constitution by a majority on the Supreme Court that reigns us instead of what we've learned in the two hundred thirty years since that thing was written down, that that attempt, which always, dishonestly asserts that the wishes of the members of that Court are what the words as written means, is generally accompanied by a denial of the experiences and lives of those who are other than them and their sponsors. It is an absolute certainty that the Republicans on that court are there as servants to those who enjoy the benefits of that "mythical norm," the wealthy - most of all, the white - almost as much, the male and the straight. That the mindset of American secularism leaves us all as enslaved to that privileged minority and there is nothing in secular law to get us out of that should be seen as impeaching the established order we live under in secularism even more so than it does in the relatively disempowered churches, many of whom are far more flexible and far more able to break out of it and resist that established order. I think it is one of the major reasons we find ourselves in the trouble we are in that the moral conscience of America has either been corrupted or gulled or intimidated out of resistance to it through the general secularization and Mammonization of culture. As I said, listening to The Reformation Project and reading their material has given me some hope that nothing I'm reading in secular culture has.
I have mentioned a number of times the role an argument I had with some Buddhists over the reality of justice in my adult conversion to Christianity, I think any historical-critical assertions about the Christian and Jewish Scriptures that diminishes the practice of justice, especially the most radical justice as that asserted by Jesus and, in fact, James and Paul, etc. is far more discreditable than the texts as they have come down to us. Though many of the denominations still traffic in the same thing as they focus on the sexual and reproductive lives of People, even those who have never accepted to profess those sectarian programs. I think it was the focus on sexuality all along that has been the major distraction from the actual teachings of Jesus and those who were closest to him in proximity and time, those who knew him and who knew those who knew him.
If Christianity had focused on justice all along, it would have been far more credible and far more immune to attack on the basis of corruption and hypocrisy. And it's not as if the most nagging of sexual cops have proven to practice what they preach, as the previous two sexually repressive papacies proved in their permissiveness to priestly sexual abusers and the conservative hierarchs who shielded them from facing legal consequences. That was hardly a phenomenon limited to the right-wing Catholic hierarchy. Nor is it unknown in secular contexts, either. I would bet you that the Republican caucus in the House and Senate probably has more adultery and infidelity and sex criminals among them than the Progressive Caucus in the House. I would bet you anything that that is true in virtually every legislative body and governorship across the country, allegedly Christian or otherwise.
I think that anyone wanting to pretend that it's still 1953 in Catholicism or Evangelical style Protestantism (not to mention 1787 in U. S. law) should be suspected of just what Jesus warned the equivalent religious authorities and self-appointed experts of his day. It's no accident that The Reverend MLK referred to that passage in Amos more than once in his struggle against traditional racism and the amoral acceptance of it by those who didn't like to think of themselves as racists. I will confess, that all of that makes me suspect a range of moral depravities beneath the facade.