Holy Saturday - The Harrowing Of Hell

IT WAS ONE OF THE FIRST things that scandalized me about the faith I was being brought up on, was the line from the Apostles' creed "he descended into hell" because according to my infantile understanding of things,  hell was NO  place that God, Jesus would have gone to.   Unfortunately, the cleric-centered governance of the pre-Vatican II Catholic church was largely unconcerned about any kind of extensive or detailed instruction into what Scripture or even Catholic doctrine held about such things.   Such teaching was also done on the cheap so it was largely given over to teaching nuns who often, in those days, not now,  didn't have much of an education in such things, themselves.   

Though Protestants may, with some justification, note that Catholics of my generation, at that time, were not encouraged to read Scripture much or very deeply,  I haven't noticed that Protestantism on the popular level has done a much better job,  whether with Scripture reading or not.  

So it had to wait decades for me to read what I should have read then, what should have been pointed out to us, then, a fuller meaning of the Incarnation and how fully and completely that enfleshment had to be - half-measures and token embodiment wouldn't have been real and the real thing is required.   And as a consequence of that incomplete view of the Incarnation,  the full meaning of the death and Resurrection couldn't start to have any clarity.  But that's for tomorrow.   For now, here is what Luke Timothy Johnson says on this in his book The Creed:  What Christians Believe and Why It Matters 

AND WAS BURIED     

The final moment of Jesus' earthly existence noted by the creed is that he was buried.  Once more, we find the tradition of Jesus' burial both in Paul and in the Gospels.

I will break in here to note that a lot of the As Seen On TV and on the internet "historical Jesus" stuff typically doesn't deal with the Epistles, concentrating on the Gospels and their alleged omissions and disagreements.  The earliest expressions of such things are almost certainly found in the Pauline letters and much early material is also found in the other letters.  I am especially interested in why what is generally, these days, for now, at least, is claimed to be the earliest of the Gospels,  Mark, says so little about the death and entombment and Resurrection of Jesus.  The answer to that is, of course, we don't know why.   Whether it was an accident of the textual history of Mark's Gospel that left us with an incomplete version of the book or that being incomplete and vague was an intentional choice made by the Gospel writer can't be known.  It has been pointed out that in the available text of Mark, as is not subject to such speculation,  Jesus was not hesitant to predict something would happen very much like the accounts given by Paul and the other three Gospels,  details in those books differing somewhat.  As Luke Timothy Johnson points out, the fact of the burial is not among the points of difference among them. 

Writing to the Corinthians around the year 54, Paul provides a summary of the good news that he ha himself received and had handed on to them,  a "by which you are being saved if you held firmly to the message" (1 Cor 15:1-2).  It begins,  "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried."  Note that Paul reported this in an unadorned fashion.  It is simply one of the "facts" about Jesus that he received from the first believers,  therefore within some few years of Jesus' death  He does not suggest that,  like the death for sins and like the resurrection on the third day, these are matters predicted by scriptures.

The same matter-of-factness about the burial is found in the Gospel narratives, with several small variations (see Mark 15:43-47; Matt 27:55-66; Luke 25:50-55; John 19:58-42). More striking is the strong agreement on the basic characters and actions and above all on the fact of the burial itself.  That Jesus was buried and remained in the tomb for some length of time certainly serves to confirm the reality o his death.  Compare Martha's comment concerning her brother Lazarus,  "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days: (John 11:52), and the resurrection of a body so thoroughly dead must also be regarded as an act of God. 

But another dimension of the burial is equally ancient and important.   The burial symbolizes Jesus' descent into the realm that in ancient cosmology was most removed from heaven or the place of God's dwelling.  He goes "under the earth,"  which in the Psalms is called sheol, and in the Greek translation, hades.  In Peter's speech at Pentecost,  he quotes Psalm 16 in connection with Jesus' death:  "You will not abandon my soul to hades,  or let your Holy One see corruption" (acts 2:27).

I will break in here to note that one of the most important keys to understanding the meaning of the Scriptures is that, as human writing, human literature using human words, ideas, concepts and imagination (as in fact every bit of writing and scientific observation, calculation and analysis are) that, of course, such things would have to be presented in the human understanding of life, the world and the entire cosmos that was the common imaginative and intellectual understanding of their time.   

What reads to us as a hopelessly naive view of the physical universe was merely the common intellectual currency by which those trying to explain their experience of the living, the executed, the buried and the Resurrected Jesus to their contemporaries and, perhaps as an after thought, those of us living two thousand years later, used to say it.   

And we're just as bound by our current, entirely likely to be surpassed in the future conception of reality as they were. 

Any modern reader, thinker, non-thinker or scoffer who believes that we, in our high sciencyness have surpassed such parochial vicissitudes only marks themselves as being as  unsophisticated as those who believe you can read the Scriptures as you would a magazine article or newspaper journalism written at what used to be a 4th grade level of reading ability and taken as "objectively true."   That is something that the materialist-atheist-devotee of scientism has in common with so, so many of those white evangelicals who they love to believe are so different from themselves.  

This connection may help account for the conviction that Jesus, after his death, entered into the dungeons of the lower depths in order to free those most distant from the divine presence, a motif that was subsequently termed "the harrowing of hell" or, in the Apostles' Creed, "the descent into hell."  In Ephesians 4:5, Paul asks cryptically,  "When it says 'he ascended,' what does it mean but that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth?:  The conviction is stated more clearly by 1 Peter 3:18-20:

"He was put to death in the flesh  but made alive in the spirit,  in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison  who in former times did not obey when God waited patiently in the days of Noah."  

Peter continues, "For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead  so that even though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged,  they might live in the spirit as God does" (1 Pet 4-6).   

The descent of Jesus into hell is,  in this view, an expression of God's universal will for salvation and a part of his cosmic victory, so that every tongue even those "under the earth should proclaim that Jesus is Lord (Phil 2:10).  In terms of the movement of the creed, the burial represents the nadir of downward descent, the ultimate expression of Jesus' sharing the human condition  even to the depositing of the flesh in the soil like a seed (John 12:24; see 1 Cor 15:55-41).

It's important to note that the common conception of what is being claimed by the Resurrection of Jesus wasn't just that his corpse was reanimated like a Frankenstein experiment, the glorified body of Jesus as described in the accounts that People left us is certainly not like that.  His closest followers,  Mary Magdalene, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, didn't recognize him when they first saw him.  And his glorified body could appear and disappear, entering locked rooms, but also not what we'd consider to be a ghost or a spirit, he could cook and eat food.   I don't remember who it was I heard or read recently who said they though it would be better to talk about him as "Glorified" instead of "Resurrected" because of the limited imagination that so many have of a merely reanimated corpse when that was not what was being talked about from the start. 

As to today's theme,  here is Philippians 2: 10-11  

10 And so, in honor of the name of Jesus
    all beings in heaven, on earth, and in the world below
    will fall on their knees,
11 and all will openly proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

Good News Translation

I won't get into the problem such a passage of Scripture poses for those, Catholic, evangelical, etc. who favor the hideous theory of eternal damnation, at least not here on Holy Saturday.   But such an idea, that Jesus rescued those lingering in hades, hell, in the period before his earthly Resurrection produces a theory of God as loving and just that the infernalist theory of him cannot produce.   As David Bentley Hart has pointed out,  the God of the infernalists is a God who cannot be the focus of the primary Commandment that Jesus taught,  to love God because such a theory of God presents God as the most evil being of all.   I'll point out that such an infernalist view of God and Jesus also leads in the opposite direction of universal love of our fellow creatures, human and animal than what the second of those Jesus given Commandments requires.  

On the Theme from Julian's Chapter xx - Denise Levertov

Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,
hot wood, the nails, blood trickling
into the eyes, yes—
but the thieves on their neighbor crosses
survived till after the soldiers
had come to fracture their legs, or longer.
Why single out the agony? What’s
a mere six hours?
Torture then, torture now,
the same, the pain’s the same,
immemorial branding iron,
electric prod.
Hasn’t a child
dazed in the hospital ward they reserve
for the most abused, known worse?
The air we’re breathing,
these very clouds, ephemeral billows
languid upon the sky’s
moody ocean, we share
with women and men who’ve held out
days and weeks on the rack—
and in the ancient dust of the world
what particles
of the long tormented,
what ashes.

But Julian’s lucid spirit leaptto the difference:

perceived why no awe could measure
that brief day’s endless length,
why among all the tortured
One only is “King of Grief.”
The oneing, she saw, the oneing
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies
—sands of the sea, of the desert—
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, Infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when he took to Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:

within the mesh of the web, Himself

woven within it, yet seeing it,
seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.

Landon Reid Has Already Demonstrated Bryon Noem's Makeup Look

 And his commentary is the best I've heard on this so far. 

On Bryon Noem's Hobby Lobbys

HE SHOULD WATCH LANDON REID'S makeup videos,  he'd do it a lot more classy if he followed his advice.  

Hey, if Kristi took his advice she'd do it a lot classier than she does. 

I might have Hitler on the mind but I have yet to hear anyone point out that in the picture where he's in pink pants he's got a Hitler mustache.  

Landon is about the classiest drag queen I've ever seen.  And quite funny. 

Reese Waters speaks for me on most of the rest of it.

A drop on a hot stone that evaporates without purpose or success or failure or anything

SOMEONE WHO READ what I wrote the other day asked me if I'd ever seen the movie "Hannah Arendt" that was made in 2012 and sent me a link to it on Youtube.   Now, you may know that I have a severe allergy to movies made about real People and, especially, People with such fraught biographies as the great thinker,  so much more than just a philosopher, who was the subject of the movie.   Especially anything around the subject of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.   But I watched it and, a few somewhat minor liberties taken with some actual events in her life, it's very much worth watching, though no where near as much worth it as reading her or listening to the number of interviews and lectures you can read online.   Margarethe von Trotta made one fine film.  Barbara Sukowa,  Janet McTeer, Axel Milburg etc. gave extremely fine performances as Arendt, McCarthy and Heinrich Bluchner (Arendt's husband) and all of the smaller roles were well acted, as well.  

It was especially satisfying, if only in a movie,  to have her very close friend,  the novelist and intellectual Mary McCarthy tell off what I believe is supposed to be the putrid racist and what passed as an American intellectual, Norman Podhoretz, pointing out to him and some other so-called New York intellectuals deriding Arendt, that, unlike them, she had been in a concentration camp and had escaped from it as well as directly experiencing Nazism as a Jew.   There were a number of such satisfying occasions in the movie as well as some disturbing ones.   Especially effective was the use of actual footage from the Eichmann trial, using the actual words of witnesses,  the prosecutor, the judges and Eichmann instead of using actors saying their words.  The skillful use of that black and white film inter-cut with color reenactment of Hannah Arendt sitting in the courtroom, in the press room, was very effective.  

But I wouldn't be telling you about this without one real life exchange between one of the judges*and Eichmann in the actual footage,  in which the judge, Benjamin Halevi, asks him, in German, about his motive in carrying out the deportation of Jews to their deaths, which Eichmann said was his duty in wartime,  you should follow the  closed captions that translate it to English.  I've transcribed those here, with one change in emphasis I could catch (I really need more practice in listening to German). 

Judge: Did you experience any conflict between your duty and your conscience?

Eichmann: One could call it a state of being split.

Judge: Split?

Eichmann:  Yes.  A conscious split state where one could flee from one side to the other. 

Judge:  One's conscience was to be abandoned?

Eichmann:  Sorry? [I'd have translated that, "Excuse me."]

Judge:  One's personal conscience was to be abandoned?

Eichmann: You could say that.

Judge: If there had been more civil courage, things could have been different. Am I right?  Answer. 

Eichmann: If civic courage had been hierarchically organized,  then yes, absolutely. 

Judge:  So this was not destiny.  It was not inevitable. It was a question of human behavior. 

Eichmann: A question of human behavior  and, of course, it was wartime, upheaval.  Everyone thought, "It's useless to resist. . . "  Yes.  A drop on a hot stone that evaporates without purpose or success or failure or anything.  It was connected to the times, I think.  To the times, how children were raised, with ideological education, rigid discipline, that sort of thing. 

Hearing what Eichmann said to excuse himself in the murders of millions of People made my blood run cold because it almost exactly matches, almost verbatim,  something I've repeatedly warned of here about the total and absolutely guaranteed consequences of holding a materialistic, a scientistic view of human life.   Here is one of the times I said it:

Materialist-atheist-scientism is an ideology that can only be true if it is false, though that argument requires a few more steps dealing with the inevitable debunking of human minds, which, as mentioned, is one of the more vigorously pursued goals of materialist-atheist-scientists including many of the biggest names in it such as Francis Crick.  And with that any reason to believe in any of the work of such scientists evaporates.  And with it the very category of truth as opposed to error or falsity evaporates into a banal and meaningless chemical reaction like water evaporating or iron oxidizing.  Materialism is the one ideology that can only be true if it is false because it corrodes the meaning of the idea of truth.

Early in the movie, when Arendt and some others are listening to a news report that said Eichmann had escaped through the infamous "ratline" that was tied to the Vatican (I won't get into that right now, but there is certainly a lot that could be said about both the reality and the myths regarding that),  one of them snarks that they helped him due to his Catholicism, though what he said is not only antithetical to Catholicism and Christianity, it proved that his faith was not in revealed religion but in the ideology of materialist scientism.   The same materialist scientism which is, actually, the default ideology that is the ubiquitous ideology of the educated class, world-wide, so ubiquitous that many of those whose academic and professional life is in Christian and other theologies adhere to it.   

I don't recall if Arendt, the person and not the character in the movie, directly addressed that, alas, I don't own the book and would have to get a copy to look it up, but it is a key to understanding how he chose to do what he did, without any reference to the moral absolute that would have told him that, apart from being instrumentally "useless" for him to have refused to obey orders, even during wartime, that he had an absolute obligation to disobey them.    And if you think that is something relevant to only the crimes of the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s,  you are entirely discounting those who are reproducing Eichmann's crimes right now, today, Americans, Israelis, Iranians,  Russians, . . . 

I had thought at first, when I was so struck by that quote that I decided to write about this that it was a departure from what I should be writing about,  Holy Week, but now I can see that this is a Holy Week post.   Pilate washed his hands when he was modeling what Eichmann was claiming was his lack of responsibility for his crimes.   Materialists in the governments, judiciary, media, academia don't bother to even notice the blood on theirs.  

*  It is one of the criticisms of Hannah Arendt's famous book on the trial that she was scathing in her criticism of the prosecutors and the Israeli government under Ben Gurion but she had a lot more respect for the judges in their questioning of Eichmann.   When I finally read the entire book a few years back, it was clear that she hadn't made excuses for the Nazis or Eichmann while reaching what was a far deeper and more troubling view of the trial than just about everyone wanted.   The lies that were told about her in the American media, and elsewhere, have, unfortunately survived, especially for those who never read her to see what she really said.  And a lot of those who lied about that have come close to repeating the thinking of Eichmann, either as active participants in history or of commenting and approving of subsequent crimes in history.   

No More Make Believe When It Comes To Israel Or Any Other Country In The World

I DIDN'T MAKE ANY OF THAT UP.   Here's part of an article from The Guardian

American citizens have been at the forefront of the rise of settler violence in the occupied territories, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land, but as US passport holders they cannot be barred from their own country.

Many of the estimated 60,000 Americans living in the West Bank outside of occupied East Jerusalem moved to settlements for the lifestyle and have little to do with the Palestinians on whose land they live. But a core of ideologically driven US citizens were at the forefront of building religious settlements on land expropriated from Palestinians while others have led the rise of what has been described as “settler terrorism”.

The US announced the travel restrictions as settler violence against unarmed Palestinians escalated in the wake of the Hamas cross-border attack in October, including shootings, the destruction of Arab homes and entire communities driven out at gunpoint. The UN estimates that about 500 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank this year including dozens of children. While Israel claims many of the dead were associated with armed Palestinian groups, the UN said the army frequently works with settlers attacking Arab civilians.

Hadar Susskind, president of Americans for Peace Now, said these settlers militias draw inspiration from two Americans infamous as the godfathers of the campaign of violence against ordinary Palestinians.

An American doctor from Brooklyn, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Muslim worshippers in the West Bank city of Hebron in 1994. Goldstein was a follower of another American, Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the far-right religious Kach party that was eventually banned in Israel and the US under anti-terrorism laws.

“If you asked who are the most prominent examples of literally murderous violent settler extremism, the two answers are Goldstein and Kahane. Those people are the prophets of the settler movement,” said Susskind.

“Earlier this year I led a trip to Israel and Palestine. We went to Hebron and stopped in Meir Kahane park where they have a shrine to Baruch Goldstein. His grave is there. It’s shocking that they have a public park named after an American whose party was declared so racist that it was not allowed to be in the Knesset, a person who espoused violence and hatred. And then a shrine to Baruch Goldstein who took those lessons from Kahane and actualised them in murdering a group of people at prayer.”

The spokesperson for the Hebron settlers who maintain the memorials to Kahane and Goldstein was for many years an American from New Jersey, David Wilder.

A lot of that settler violence is as American as apple pie.  And it's increased in frequency and severity since that article was written,  yet the Israeli government has passed laws specifically targeting Palestinians with the death penalty.   Which defines it absolutely as an apartheid, racist, fascist government.   

As for the complaint that I mentioned Israel's part in bringing on this disastrous war with Iran and either suckering or bribing (DOES ANYONE BELIEVE FOR A SECOND TRUMP DOES ANYTHING WITHOUT SOMETHING IN IT FOR HIM?)  the Trump regime into bringing on,   you act as if there's something wrong WITH POINTING OUT A FACT THAT EVERYONE KNOWS AND THE TRUMP REGIME HAS CONFIRMED.  And we know that Israel was far from alone in that,  Saudi Arabia's ruling family and those of other autocratic governments in the region were, as well.   Paying money to Trump, his family and his cronies to get the war against Iran they thought they wanted but, for at least some of them, they are having some serious buyers remorse.  

The time to play let's pretend in regard to Israel OR ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD is over.   The stakes are too high to make exceptions.   They always have been.  

I've got a family member who joined the military last year, he'd almost certainly get sent to fight Trump's war of whim,  Israel, the Saudi's etc. to order war.   I haven't mentioned him yet but he's been on my mind even before the start of the war.   Send Eric (who would now be allowed to enlist under their changed age limits), send Tiffany and Baron and Little Donnie's brat, Kai,  who for some reason has Secret Service protection.  Let the military provide that for her.   

Someone Close To Me

 told me he lost five thousand dollars in the stock market last week,  someone who though financially secure is certainly not wealthy, just good at saving money.   I'd warned him that diasater was coming and that was only when it was the "AI" bubble bursting which I was sure was coming,  then came the Israeli-American war on Iran.   About which,  what will $200 per barrel oil do to the energy hogging "AI" bubble?    You know, what has been inflating the stock markets so irrationally up till now. 

Get ready for a depression.   It's coming and this one is going to be worse than the last one because back then lots and lots of People grew up on farms and in hard scrabble conditions and knew how to cope.  Americans brought up on media and lies are not going to cope well, especially that one third (at the best of times) who have violent, fascistic tendencies.   We're going to see some really, really hard times.  Biden almost saved us from it but the media sandbagged him and then Kamala Harris ran face on into America's indigenous fascists, the white supremacists and that other strain of native fascism, misogynists.   We're already finding out how expensive racism is, yet again.

Speaking of Israel,  they just imposed a death penalty on Palestinians exactly in the period when Palestinians are under some of the most intense and deadly attacks from the largely American born "settler movement,"  the fascist movement largely comprising Meir Kahane's fascists.   There is absolutely no doubt about it,  Israel which so many of us were suckered for so long into believing was some kind of idealistic socialist progressive movement is a fascist apartheid country which is even more extreme than South Africa's apartheid government was.   This was inevitable, as those such as Hannah Arendt predicted it would be in the early 1940s.   And they, along with such as the Saudis and some of the other Sunni governments in the region are the ones who bribed Trump into starting this war.   

The end result of fifty years of Zionist politics was embodied in the recent resolution of the largest and most influential section of the World Zionist Organization. American Zionists from left to right adopted unanimously, at their last annual convention held in Atlantic City in October, 1944, the demand for a “free and democratic Jewish commonwealth … [which] shall embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.” This is a turning point in Zionist history; for it means that the Revisionist program, so long bitterly repudiated, has finally proved victorious. The Atlantic City Resolution goes even a step further than the Biltmore Program (1942), in which the Jewish minority had granted minority rights to the Arab majority. This time the Arabs were simply not mentioned in the resolution, which obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship. It seems to admit that only opportunist reasons had previously prevented the Zionist movement from stating its final aims. These aims now appear to be completely identical with those of the extremists as far as the future political constitution of Palestine is concerned.

It is a deadly blow to those Jewish parties in Palestine itself that have tirelessly preached the need for an understanding between the Arab and the Jewish peoples. On the other hand, it will considerably strengthen the majority under the leadership of Ben-Gurion, which, through the pressure of many injustices in Palestine and the terrible catastrophes in Europe, have turned more than ever nationalistic.

I don't know if she would have welcomed me saying so but this passage strikes me as prophecy in line with anything in the Old Testament and as disturbingly topical right now. 

Nationalism is bad enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign nation is certainly worse. This is the threatened fate of Jewish nationalism and of the proposed Jewish State, surrounded inevitably by Arab states and Arab peoples. Even a Jewish majority in Palestine—nay, even a transfer of all Palestine Arabs, which is openly demanded by Revisionists — would not substantially change a situation in which Jews must either ask protection from an outside power against their neighbors or effect a working agreement with their neighbors.

I am absolutely certain that she, more fully informed than almost everyone about the politics of Europe and the world, knew that that outside force would certainly be the United States.   And she was right. 

You can read her entire essay,  Zionism Reconsidered here. 

There Can Be No Evidence If There's Nothing There

IT WASN'T WHO you probably suspect it was but someone didn't like me pointing out that what evidence there is on the question, it is that there is life after death.   

You don't have to believe that evidence, whether it is in the form of reports of near death experience,  veridical accounts of details in near death experiences unknowable to the one who had the experience, claims of communication with the dead by mediums - some of those, also giving veridical details almost certainly unknown to the medium*- or one of the most ubiquitious of reported human experiences,  seeing ghosts, but all of that is evidence.   What is entirely unevidenced is the claim that there is nothing after brain death because everything about our minds is a product of brain chemistry.   There is no possibility of that producing evidence.

In taking the last few days off because I've got another damned cold I thought about what I said that got a materialist, atheist of the would-be scientistic variety all annoyed,  it occured to me that the theologian I respect highly,  Hans Kung, dismissing the early reports of near death experience in his book-length study of the topic, translated into English as "Eternal Life?" it didn't surprise me that a 20th century academic theologian would choose to not deal with that evidence in what was, no doubt, an academic study - as always with Kung, the footnotes are an opus in themselves.    But, if I had had the chance to ask him,  I would point out what I pointed out above and ask why, since he deals at book-length with the non-evidence based argument that there is nothing after death, he would not at least acknowledge that complete lack of evidence while admitting that those reports of near death experiences and everything else listed above, including reports of seeing ghosts,  is, in fact, the only evidence there is to make any kind of evidenced, empirical case on the subject.  

If there is evidence that there is no life after death, what does that consist of?   Reports of near death non-experience?   Of no information being given about real life given in non-readings?   Of no ghosts seen?  

If you claim to base your beliefs on evidence, well, you can't base a disbelief in an afterlife on evidence because there quite plainly can be no such evidence.  

As for anyone thinking I'm nuts for what I wrote,  I left jr. high a long, long time ago.   I'm entirely unbothered by name calling.  I have no academic career to worry about, no one is going to be voting on me getting tenure or advancement.   I certainly don't care about it being declared that I've got cooties. 

* Some of that information comes from clients who concealed their identity, name, etc. from the medium before their session to prevent any access to information.   Again, you don't have to believe such clients as you don't know but when you know the person who had the reading and know they wouldn't want to take a chance on someone googling them to get information, that's evidence as credible as, in fact, the large majority of evidence which relies on such known credibility.