For anyone who is just joining in, beginning last weekend I have been going through a long passage from Hans Kung's On Being A Christian dealing with the famous question of evil, or pain, or suffering, depending on which aspect of that is being focused on. You can access the previous posts from the sidebar.
Continuing where I left off:
In face of the overwhelming reality of suffering in the history of mankind and in the individual human life, for suffering, doubting, despairing man there is still an alternative to the rebellion, for instance, of an Ivan Karamazov against this world of God which he found unacceptable or to the revolt of an Albert Camus, who points like Dostoevsky to the suffering of the innocent creature. Instead of rising up defiantly against the power of the gods, like emancipated, autonomous Prometheus, or constantly rolling the rock up the mountain and seeing it roll down again, like Sisyphus, he can adopt the attitude of Job. Despite all the suffering of this world, he can place an absolute, unshakable trust in the incomprehensible God. Even for Job this had nothing to do with resignation and passivity. Certainly it is possible to say that we cannot believe in God when we see the immense suffering of the world. But can this not be reversed. It is only if there is a God that we can look at all at this immense suffering in the world. It is only in trusting faith in the incomprehensible, always greater God that man can stride in justifiable hope through that broad, deep river; conscious of the fact that a hand is stretched out to him across the dark gulf of suffering and evil.
I will break in here to point out something again, that the atheist alternatives to dealing with evil, pain and suffering, don't really deal with it at all, they sidestep it or in the political forms of it, they seek to use the suffering of those who suffer as a means of gaining power for the gang bosses who inevitably end up rising in power in any materialist scheme of governance. As we are finding in the United States, as Christianity turns to post-Christianity, that can happen in a nominal republic which gives up something as obvious as valuing the truth over lies in the mass media as part of the process of secularization under "no establishment".
The heroic figures of Soviet and Chinese Communism might suffer and struggle, even to the point of martyrdom, allegedly for the purpose of creating a better life for their loved ones or, in that most phonied up and cheap of substitutes for religion, patriotism, for their "country" but in reality everything they do by doing that benefits the dictator class. As the surviving members of the Bolshevik movement in the Stalinist USSR discovered, part of that struggle eventuated in their liquidation through the show trials widely approved of by Western intellectuals, though there were a few dissenters. Their pain, suffering, the evil they suffer and cause only ends up serving the evil that will create more pain and suffering for the intended beneficiaries of their martyrdom.
Needless to say, those who, struggled, suffered pain, risked martyrdom to bring Communism to the Soviet states didn't solve those issues we're looking into by their suffering. They didn't go a millimetre forward in dispelling pain or suffering or evil they benefited the atheist-materialist-scientistic dictatorship which brought unprecedented suffering to all but the upper elites of those atheist paradises. Indeed, it was in the atheist paradises that the most terrible mass murder and oppression not only happened but was intentionally committed. The Soviet Union, other Marxist states so much admired by so many Western intellectuals, most of them atheists, many of them university teachers, journalists, authors, poets, a few composers, some scientists, some of whom wrote their propaganda using the "question of evil" against religion in the west even as the lauded and supported the Soviet and later atheist regimes. Most ironic of the supporters of Soviet Communism were the unionists who did since one of the earliest things done as the Communists gained control was the abolition of real trade unions.
On the other side of the broad, deep river of struggle for the atheist Marxist isn't a hand stretched out to lift him out but a hand about to dump an anvil into his. Atheism always does that in the end.
The mention of Camus in this paragraph is particularly apt because he is a very good example of the ineffectiveness that comes of trying to treat these problems while rejecting God and ending up as an intellectual of absurdism who favors the absurdist political futility of anarchism. Camus is an especially frustrating intellectual because he has, sometimes, a moral core that I don't find in those most often associated with him, Sartre, especially. But, rejecting the moral confidence that faith in God can give, he seems to me to always be ineffective. All that writing and if anything has ever come of it, I'd like to know what it was. I especially get the mention of Sisyphus about and by Camus because that could be a very good symbol of that kind of intellectual activity. Activity, calling it an effort would seem to be granting it more direction than I see in it. Great writer but I can't say I respect his thinking except here and there.
I think to get beyond the kind of maze that modern thought inevitably leads you into you have no choice except to make a choice, you can't rely on some objective automatic algorithm that is going to do it for you, to make that choice for you, if you want to maintain the fictitious separation of the two, it can't come as "knowledge" it has to come from the choice to believe. It takes real work, the choice to believe and maintain belief, it isn't like learning your arithmetic facts. As pain is a profoundly personal and individual experience, the way out of it has to be through a profound and individual choice by the person.*
Of course the question constantly recurs, what sort of God is this incomprehensible, unconcerned, aloof from all suffering, who leaves man sitting, struggling, protesting, perishing in his immense desolation? But this question too can be reversed. Is God really so aloof from all suffering - as we imagine in our human way and assume in all our protests - as philosophers in particular think he is? Does not the very suffering and death of Jesus make God appear in a different light?
For Job all that had become clear was the incomprehensibility of the God who delivers men from suffering. Man is to place his believing trust i this incomprehensibility, even if he understands nothing and has to die anyway; an attitude which is so difficult to maintain in concrete suffering and which - to judge from the written records - found little support even in Israel. But in Jesus' suffering and death has there not been revealed by the incomprehensible God a definitive delivery from suffering which goes beyond all the incomprehensibility of God and which transforms suffering and death to life and to the fulfillment of longing? Does this not make possible a faith understanding reality in a very different way, even though this understanding faith always remains faith? The fact of the suffering of every man cannot be canceled even in the light of Jesus. Some remaining doubt is always possible. But from this standpoint the right attitude of man to suffering, the relative value and hidden meaning of suffering become clear.
Even Jesus did not explain suffering, but endured it as innocent in the sight of God, endured it however - unlike Job - to the bitter end. His story was different; real, not fictional. His end was different; not a "happy ending" not a restoration to a prosperous life. His suffering was different; the outcome of his life and definitive, up to death. In the light of Jesus' definitive Passion, his suffering and death, the passion of each and every man, the passion of mankind as a whole, could acquire a meaning which the story of Job - calling simply for absolute faith and trust - cannot convey.
What to believe is laid out for you but the choice to believe it is left up to you. You are totally free to do it or not, if you do not you cannot then blame what you rejected for the results your rejection got you. And you cannot, then, hold it against those who did choose it. But the choice has to be real, it can't only be the adoption of a word or the claim that you have gained a new status. There is a lot of profession of faith but a lot of that claim is betrayed by a life that demonstrates a lack of trust and a refusal to live the life required by that choice. I would say among the more convincing signs is that it would make the person who chooses this easier to live with, less willing to cause pain and suffering and to do evil. Few of us choose to go all the way with that, I certainly haven't yet. But imagine how awful I'd be if I wasn't trying.
Staying angry with God isn't going to get you much in the way of relief.
* That, of course, only is possible for someone who is old enough or mature enough or who is aware of that choice. Those who cant do those things suffer, sometimes unbearably. And it doesn't mean that even someone who makes that choice will never suffer pain, evil again in this life. I will address the last words of Jesus as he was dying later. It does, though, allow some understanding of both why it is necessary for us to not participate in creating pain, suffering and evil, something which absolutely no atheist ideology or philosophy gives, why it is necessary to perform, literally, all of the human commandments in The Law, The Prophets and the Gospel which command us to relieve the suffering of others and to understand that there is hope even for those for whom all of those have failed, completely in this life. Without that you can either be left with libertine cynicism and self-gain or if you are left in contact with the vestiges of a moral core, the resort to absurdism that Camus took. Neither of which work to lessen pain and evil. I doubt if Camus had lived he would have stuck with absurdism. He didn't stick with all that much in previous positions he took.
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
RMJ has written an excellent commentary on some of these posts. I have to admit, I didn't get the penguin allusion till I looked it up. I don't remember that skit though I know I must have seen it.
Bite Me, Baby, For I Have Sinned Against The Secular Order And Toxic Masculinity - Oh, Yeah, Hate Mail
Anyone who tells you that entertainment isn't the most influential and almost uniformly malignant form of religious observance in the United States (especially if you include sports and hate talk TV and radio) is certainly missing the predominant feature of not only the degenerated entity called our "intellectual life" but also the commonly believed degenerated entity of our "folk culture". I would bet that at least 50% of what is called "Christianity" in our country, at this time, would more honestly be considered an aspect of that church of Mammon.
I have sinned against the central authority of that in the United States, the neo-pagan Roman style Temple city of Hollywood, yet again. I delight in dissing the movies the way that a puerile pop-culture vulture or tenured university philosophy fop delights in repeating the rote-learned tropes of anti-Christian impiety but for what are more grown-up purposes. I figure like with my blasphemy against the cult of the Founders and the Constitution and even the holy of holies, the Bill of Rights, someone's got to try to jar that frozen but broken bolt loose.
There are rare, very, very rare exceptions to the nearly uniform awfulness that the movies are. I don't see the more recent ones because I don't go to the movies, I don't watch them on DVD very often, though I do see clips from time to time.
That video I posted about the now ubiquitous use of male rape, especially prison rape as a comedy trope EVEN IN CHILDRENS' CARTOONS, FOR FUCKSAKE! - which in a decent culture would be as vile as jokes about lynching or the Holocaust are (that both have been, in the case of the lynching of Black People and, as I'm equally horrified and enraged to discover, is currently being entered into the sad sack of "comedy" topics, the Shoah) led to me watching more on the channel of its creator. I was surprised to find that he also created the Buffy vs. Twilight video and the Donald Duck encounters Glenn Beck ones which are masterpieces of satire, the real thing, not the crap that gets called that.
One of his other longer commentaries is The Fantastic Masculinity of Newt Scamander, about a movie spinoff of the Harry Potter series which I hadn't known about since, apparently, the stories aren't in novels but only in screen plays so I had missed J. K. Rowling's invention of a character who might lead me to watch the movies. I watched two of the H.P. movies after having read the books and did not like the movies, at all though I quite liked the books. If she wrote them as books, I'd probably go out of my way to read them, though my nieces who I read the books to are too old for that now.
The excellent Jonathan Mcintosh who makes these points out that the movie critics largely disliked the character of Newt Scamander exactly because he wasn't the typical Hollywood type of manly man, pointing out that even the boy Harry Potter is more typical of the stereotypes that the movies love to recreate, endlessly, among the things that make the movies almost uniformly a deadening mind dulling waste of time and billions of dollars. I am generally allergic to Brit, especially English heroic types but what I saw of Newt Scamander as played by this actor was extremely appealing and the description of the plot sounded fresh and a welcomed relief. I think it's to Mcintosh's credit that he thought out his fresh take on these topics so well that it could make even a movie hater like me kind of think I might like to give this one a try.
His other cultural criticism is pretty good, what I've sampled of it.
I have sinned against the central authority of that in the United States, the neo-pagan Roman style Temple city of Hollywood, yet again. I delight in dissing the movies the way that a puerile pop-culture vulture or tenured university philosophy fop delights in repeating the rote-learned tropes of anti-Christian impiety but for what are more grown-up purposes. I figure like with my blasphemy against the cult of the Founders and the Constitution and even the holy of holies, the Bill of Rights, someone's got to try to jar that frozen but broken bolt loose.
There are rare, very, very rare exceptions to the nearly uniform awfulness that the movies are. I don't see the more recent ones because I don't go to the movies, I don't watch them on DVD very often, though I do see clips from time to time.
That video I posted about the now ubiquitous use of male rape, especially prison rape as a comedy trope EVEN IN CHILDRENS' CARTOONS, FOR FUCKSAKE! - which in a decent culture would be as vile as jokes about lynching or the Holocaust are (that both have been, in the case of the lynching of Black People and, as I'm equally horrified and enraged to discover, is currently being entered into the sad sack of "comedy" topics, the Shoah) led to me watching more on the channel of its creator. I was surprised to find that he also created the Buffy vs. Twilight video and the Donald Duck encounters Glenn Beck ones which are masterpieces of satire, the real thing, not the crap that gets called that.
One of his other longer commentaries is The Fantastic Masculinity of Newt Scamander, about a movie spinoff of the Harry Potter series which I hadn't known about since, apparently, the stories aren't in novels but only in screen plays so I had missed J. K. Rowling's invention of a character who might lead me to watch the movies. I watched two of the H.P. movies after having read the books and did not like the movies, at all though I quite liked the books. If she wrote them as books, I'd probably go out of my way to read them, though my nieces who I read the books to are too old for that now.
The excellent Jonathan Mcintosh who makes these points out that the movie critics largely disliked the character of Newt Scamander exactly because he wasn't the typical Hollywood type of manly man, pointing out that even the boy Harry Potter is more typical of the stereotypes that the movies love to recreate, endlessly, among the things that make the movies almost uniformly a deadening mind dulling waste of time and billions of dollars. I am generally allergic to Brit, especially English heroic types but what I saw of Newt Scamander as played by this actor was extremely appealing and the description of the plot sounded fresh and a welcomed relief. I think it's to Mcintosh's credit that he thought out his fresh take on these topics so well that it could make even a movie hater like me kind of think I might like to give this one a try.
His other cultural criticism is pretty good, what I've sampled of it.
Two Notes
Two notes. First, I inadvertently posted a piece intended for this morning last night - wish Blogger would separate those two buttons.
Second, I sloppily put a paragraph I'd written in bold italics yesterday, but didn't realize that till this morning. If I hadn't pointed out the other day I do that to make sure people can't blame what I write on those quoted here, I'd probably not point that out but thought it should be.
Oh, and third, I've got a lot of work in the garden so I may not get to write anything else till tonight.
Never say I've never delivered more than I promised.
Second, I sloppily put a paragraph I'd written in bold italics yesterday, but didn't realize that till this morning. If I hadn't pointed out the other day I do that to make sure people can't blame what I write on those quoted here, I'd probably not point that out but thought it should be.
Oh, and third, I've got a lot of work in the garden so I may not get to write anything else till tonight.
Never say I've never delivered more than I promised.
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
For many a person overwhelming suffering has been a stimulus to basic mistrust in regard to reality as a whole, but for many another a stimulus to basic truth.
"Why do I suffer? This is the rock of atheism. The slightest throb of pain even if it stirs merely in an atom, makes a rent in creation from top to bottom." Georg Buchner, in his play Danton's Death attributes these sentiments to Thomas Paine.* Our attitude to suffering is connected at the deepest level with our attitude to God and to reality as a whole. In suffering man reaches his extreme limit, the decisive question of his identity, of the sense and nonsense of his life, of reality as a whole. Suffering constantly proves to be the crucial test of trust in God and of basic trust, provoking decisions. Where is trust in God more challenged than in wholly concrete suffering? For many a person concrete suffering has been the occasion of his unbelief, for many another the occasion of his faith. And where is trust in reality as a whole more challenged than in face of all the suffering and evil in the world and in one's own life? For many a person overwhelming suffering has been a stimulus to basic mistrust in regard to reality as a whole, but for many another a stimulus to basic truth.
I will break in here to point out that this is not a romanticized view of pain as producing a superior personality, a superior character. It is no promotion of seeking pain as a fetish or a path to ennoblement or sainthood. It is a presentation as to some of the outcomes of suffering and pain. I don't think Hans Kung is judging the person for whom the shattering experience of this "extreme limit, the decisive question" of their identity leads to unbelief, a failure of belief.
I don't find anything judgmental in his statement of both options as a response to pain. I think the unbelief of someone who has reached it as a consequence of profound pain has to be respected. No one else could expect to be able to talk them out of it. The articulations, acting as later day Job's comforters, especially from someone who has not experienced the same kind of things, are not going to overturn their own conclusions based in their own experience.
In her book, Quest for the Living God, The Crucified God of Compassion, Elizabeth A. Johnson says:
I remember the day I took a train from Munich to the concentration camp at Dachau. The town of Dachau itself dates from the Middle Ages and lies only a few stops on the suburban line out of the big city. Having read extensively on the Holocaust I felt quasi-prepared for what I would encounter, although the impact of actually being in the presence of the bunkers and ovens was viscerally almost too powerful to bear. There was one unexpected moment, though, that stunned my thought. In the camp museum, amid the tools of torture and other paraphernalia, there hung a striped outfit worn by one inmate named Albert Mainslinger. Next to it were displayed two pieces of paper, documents filled out when he entered and left the camp. In 1939 his admission form listed his weight as 114kg (250 lbs) and, further down, his religion as Roman Catholic. In 1945 his discharge form, signed by the American administrator of the camp, contained different information. His weight was 41kg (90 lbs). On the line for religion was written Das Nichts, nothing. I stared, struck silent. Who can fathom the suffering - unjust imprisonment; years of slow starvation; morning, noon, and night trying to evade the terror meted out by the guards; unremitting hard labor in the cold and heat; people in agony all around; having no idea when this would ever end or if the next minute would bring his death. As his body withered so too did his soul, any trust in a good and gracious God evaporating away.
Herr Mainslinger was one of the lucky ones, insofar as he survived. Multiply his experience by three million other Gentiles who died in such places. And then focus specifically on the six million Jewish people who were systematically rounded up and barbarically killed in the camps simply because they were Jews. The force of this event's interruption to the religious project of speaking about God becomes clear. Theologians reflected that such evil is a surd, an irrational fore that cannot be made to fit meaningfully into a divine plan for the world. Even to try to make it fit would be to tame the evil, to dilute its terror, to give it, albeit unintentionally, a right to exist. Such attempts at realization drown out the voices of the victims. And to allow that this event is even part of an overall divine plan for the world would be to make God into a monster, no mater how much one talks about divine goodness and power. The "fissure" in the classical pattern of thought is so great that in questing for the living God some theologians began to change the question about suffering itself. The proper question is not why did god permit this to happen, or how can this be reconciled with divine governance of the world. Rather thinking o the far side of the break brought about by this experience, the proper question becomes the anguished question where is God, where is God now?
For good reason, Jewish religious thinkers have taken the lead in pursuing this question amid the shattering of faith's confidence. Taking different avenues of thought, various Jewish scholars have envisioned different answers. We do not know where God was. God was hidden, or silent or absent, or dead. God's face was turned away. God was there, suffering with the victims, weeping in their pain. Or most radically, the only rational way to think about God after Auschwitz is to admit that God does not exist. Whatever the theology, it leads to an ethical mandate; Never Again.
But "Never Again" never happened. The period between the end of WWII and now has never seen a letup in the slaughter. Looking for a listing of "agains" since the end of the Nazi death camps, there is no lack of documentation about the mass killing events. Wikipedia starts with the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe (half a million to 2.2 million estimated deaths) the partition of India and a long list of genocides which is hardly complete (it doesn't mention the up to 20 million some estimate died in the Chinese Cultural Revolution) and it leaves many other mass slaughters out. The 20th century was a century of genocides, many of the worst of them committed by entirely secular governments, some of the worst of those officially atheist, anti-religious dictatorships. Though the democracies, including the United States have sponsored or supported some of the worst of it, the very countries that conducted the war trials after WWII as well.
There is an enormous irony in that famous passage from Buchner's play, in that as a logical consequence of that claim, when asked what moral he drew from that, Payne says [in my very rough translation].
Mercier. Und die Moral?
And the moral of that?
Payne. Erst beweist ihr Gott aus der Moral und dann die Moral aus Gott! - Was wollt ihr denn mit eurer Moral?
First you prove God from morality and then morality from God! What do you want to do with morality?
Ich weiß nicht, ob es an und für sich was Böses oder was Gutes gibt, und habe deswegen doch nicht nötig, meine Handlungsweise zu ändern.
I don't know if there is something evil or good of itself, therefore I don't need to change my conduct.
Ich handle meiner Natur gemäß; was ihr angemessen, ist für mich gut und ich tue es, und was ihr zuwider, ist für mich bös und ich tue es nicht und verteidige mich dagegen, wenn es mir in den Weg kommt.
I do what it is in my nature to do, what is in that nature, is good for me and I do it, what is against that nature is evil for me and I don't do it and deflect it form me when it gets in my way.
Sie können, wie man so sagt, tugendhaft bleiben und sich gegen das sogenannte Laster wehren, ohne deswegen ihre Gegner verachten zu müssen, was ein gar trauriges Gefühl ist.
[more or less] You can maintain your personal integrity (do what comes naturally to you) and not bother other people who do what is in their nature, because that's bound to make you sad.
Which is, certainly something that is in line with a devotion to an 18th 19th early century libertarian notion of secular liberty.
The real Thomas Paine was attracted to violence, revolution (as was Buchner), which is why he almost got himself done in by his comrades during the French Revolution. Slated for execution, he was saved from the guillotine by merest chance a door being left open, hiding the chalked death mark - what some might call a miracle. He was, of course, an active part in that enlightenment revolution that sent so many tens of thousands to their deaths, including many for their religion. Though the lines are, of course, put in his mouth by a playwright who never knew him and who, perhaps, didn't understand the irony created by him using the real man to spout his ideas. In many cases their own explanations for what the did prove that the genocidalists, those who led it, the ones who carried it out were following their own nature. The Nazis considered their genocides to be them working out natural selection, their wars of imperial conquest, their gaining of "living space" in Poland and elsewhere, the working out of nature. Marxists explained their genocides in somewhat different ways, depending, as well, on explanations from the physical sciences extended theoretically.
I think one of the most important recent treatments of this topic is in the late James Cone's sermon which he gave in a number of forms, a number of times, The Cross And The Lynching Tree which I might go into, again. I have never encountered an atheist on this topic who can come near to the meaning he derives from pain and murder and genocidal oppression.
* Radio Drama - George Buchner - Danton's Death
Georg Buchner's radical retelling of the fallout of the French Revolution adapted by Simon Scardifield.
It's 1794, and a new France is being born from the reign of terror that characterised the worst of the Revolution. Charismatic hedonist Danton, still tormented by his role in the killing of 1400 aristocrats in a single night, is losing his grip on power, and he is so tired. His political rival, the sober and focused Robespierre, is in the ascendant, and - with his efficient sidekick St Just - has power now over Danton's fate. But can Danton care enough to fight the terror that he himself set in motion?
Cast
Georges DANTON ..... Joseph Millson
Maximilien ROBESPIERRE ..... Khalid Abdalla
CAMILLE Desmoulins ..... Patrick Kennedy
MARION ..... Claire Harry
HERAULT-SECHELLES ..... Laurence Mitchell
HERRMAN ..... Adeel Akhtar
Thomas PAYNE ..... Sean Baker
LACROIX ..... David Seddon
LEGENDRE ..... Lloyd Thomas
JULIE ..... Leah Brotherhead
ST JUST ..... Iain Batchelor
LUCILLE ..... Sally Orrock
Directed by Jessica Dromgoole
NOTES
Georg Buchner died in 1837 at the age of 23, by which time he had had only one play published, and none produced. His small legacy of work, remaining unproduced for nearly sixty years after his death, has come to represent some of the most exciting and radical theatre writing in the European Theatre canon.
I will break in here to point out that this is not a romanticized view of pain as producing a superior personality, a superior character. It is no promotion of seeking pain as a fetish or a path to ennoblement or sainthood. It is a presentation as to some of the outcomes of suffering and pain. I don't think Hans Kung is judging the person for whom the shattering experience of this "extreme limit, the decisive question" of their identity leads to unbelief, a failure of belief.
I don't find anything judgmental in his statement of both options as a response to pain. I think the unbelief of someone who has reached it as a consequence of profound pain has to be respected. No one else could expect to be able to talk them out of it. The articulations, acting as later day Job's comforters, especially from someone who has not experienced the same kind of things, are not going to overturn their own conclusions based in their own experience.
In her book, Quest for the Living God, The Crucified God of Compassion, Elizabeth A. Johnson says:
I remember the day I took a train from Munich to the concentration camp at Dachau. The town of Dachau itself dates from the Middle Ages and lies only a few stops on the suburban line out of the big city. Having read extensively on the Holocaust I felt quasi-prepared for what I would encounter, although the impact of actually being in the presence of the bunkers and ovens was viscerally almost too powerful to bear. There was one unexpected moment, though, that stunned my thought. In the camp museum, amid the tools of torture and other paraphernalia, there hung a striped outfit worn by one inmate named Albert Mainslinger. Next to it were displayed two pieces of paper, documents filled out when he entered and left the camp. In 1939 his admission form listed his weight as 114kg (250 lbs) and, further down, his religion as Roman Catholic. In 1945 his discharge form, signed by the American administrator of the camp, contained different information. His weight was 41kg (90 lbs). On the line for religion was written Das Nichts, nothing. I stared, struck silent. Who can fathom the suffering - unjust imprisonment; years of slow starvation; morning, noon, and night trying to evade the terror meted out by the guards; unremitting hard labor in the cold and heat; people in agony all around; having no idea when this would ever end or if the next minute would bring his death. As his body withered so too did his soul, any trust in a good and gracious God evaporating away.
Herr Mainslinger was one of the lucky ones, insofar as he survived. Multiply his experience by three million other Gentiles who died in such places. And then focus specifically on the six million Jewish people who were systematically rounded up and barbarically killed in the camps simply because they were Jews. The force of this event's interruption to the religious project of speaking about God becomes clear. Theologians reflected that such evil is a surd, an irrational fore that cannot be made to fit meaningfully into a divine plan for the world. Even to try to make it fit would be to tame the evil, to dilute its terror, to give it, albeit unintentionally, a right to exist. Such attempts at realization drown out the voices of the victims. And to allow that this event is even part of an overall divine plan for the world would be to make God into a monster, no mater how much one talks about divine goodness and power. The "fissure" in the classical pattern of thought is so great that in questing for the living God some theologians began to change the question about suffering itself. The proper question is not why did god permit this to happen, or how can this be reconciled with divine governance of the world. Rather thinking o the far side of the break brought about by this experience, the proper question becomes the anguished question where is God, where is God now?
For good reason, Jewish religious thinkers have taken the lead in pursuing this question amid the shattering of faith's confidence. Taking different avenues of thought, various Jewish scholars have envisioned different answers. We do not know where God was. God was hidden, or silent or absent, or dead. God's face was turned away. God was there, suffering with the victims, weeping in their pain. Or most radically, the only rational way to think about God after Auschwitz is to admit that God does not exist. Whatever the theology, it leads to an ethical mandate; Never Again.
But "Never Again" never happened. The period between the end of WWII and now has never seen a letup in the slaughter. Looking for a listing of "agains" since the end of the Nazi death camps, there is no lack of documentation about the mass killing events. Wikipedia starts with the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe (half a million to 2.2 million estimated deaths) the partition of India and a long list of genocides which is hardly complete (it doesn't mention the up to 20 million some estimate died in the Chinese Cultural Revolution) and it leaves many other mass slaughters out. The 20th century was a century of genocides, many of the worst of them committed by entirely secular governments, some of the worst of those officially atheist, anti-religious dictatorships. Though the democracies, including the United States have sponsored or supported some of the worst of it, the very countries that conducted the war trials after WWII as well.
There is an enormous irony in that famous passage from Buchner's play, in that as a logical consequence of that claim, when asked what moral he drew from that, Payne says [in my very rough translation].
Mercier. Und die Moral?
And the moral of that?
Payne. Erst beweist ihr Gott aus der Moral und dann die Moral aus Gott! - Was wollt ihr denn mit eurer Moral?
First you prove God from morality and then morality from God! What do you want to do with morality?
Ich weiß nicht, ob es an und für sich was Böses oder was Gutes gibt, und habe deswegen doch nicht nötig, meine Handlungsweise zu ändern.
I don't know if there is something evil or good of itself, therefore I don't need to change my conduct.
Ich handle meiner Natur gemäß; was ihr angemessen, ist für mich gut und ich tue es, und was ihr zuwider, ist für mich bös und ich tue es nicht und verteidige mich dagegen, wenn es mir in den Weg kommt.
I do what it is in my nature to do, what is in that nature, is good for me and I do it, what is against that nature is evil for me and I don't do it and deflect it form me when it gets in my way.
Sie können, wie man so sagt, tugendhaft bleiben und sich gegen das sogenannte Laster wehren, ohne deswegen ihre Gegner verachten zu müssen, was ein gar trauriges Gefühl ist.
[more or less] You can maintain your personal integrity (do what comes naturally to you) and not bother other people who do what is in their nature, because that's bound to make you sad.
Which is, certainly something that is in line with a devotion to an 18th 19th early century libertarian notion of secular liberty.
The real Thomas Paine was attracted to violence, revolution (as was Buchner), which is why he almost got himself done in by his comrades during the French Revolution. Slated for execution, he was saved from the guillotine by merest chance a door being left open, hiding the chalked death mark - what some might call a miracle. He was, of course, an active part in that enlightenment revolution that sent so many tens of thousands to their deaths, including many for their religion. Though the lines are, of course, put in his mouth by a playwright who never knew him and who, perhaps, didn't understand the irony created by him using the real man to spout his ideas. In many cases their own explanations for what the did prove that the genocidalists, those who led it, the ones who carried it out were following their own nature. The Nazis considered their genocides to be them working out natural selection, their wars of imperial conquest, their gaining of "living space" in Poland and elsewhere, the working out of nature. Marxists explained their genocides in somewhat different ways, depending, as well, on explanations from the physical sciences extended theoretically.
I think one of the most important recent treatments of this topic is in the late James Cone's sermon which he gave in a number of forms, a number of times, The Cross And The Lynching Tree which I might go into, again. I have never encountered an atheist on this topic who can come near to the meaning he derives from pain and murder and genocidal oppression.
* Radio Drama - George Buchner - Danton's Death
It's 1794, and a new France is being born from the reign of terror that characterised the worst of the Revolution. Charismatic hedonist Danton, still tormented by his role in the killing of 1400 aristocrats in a single night, is losing his grip on power, and he is so tired. His political rival, the sober and focused Robespierre, is in the ascendant, and - with his efficient sidekick St Just - has power now over Danton's fate. But can Danton care enough to fight the terror that he himself set in motion?
Cast
Georges DANTON ..... Joseph Millson
Maximilien ROBESPIERRE ..... Khalid Abdalla
CAMILLE Desmoulins ..... Patrick Kennedy
MARION ..... Claire Harry
HERAULT-SECHELLES ..... Laurence Mitchell
HERRMAN ..... Adeel Akhtar
Thomas PAYNE ..... Sean Baker
LACROIX ..... David Seddon
LEGENDRE ..... Lloyd Thomas
JULIE ..... Leah Brotherhead
ST JUST ..... Iain Batchelor
LUCILLE ..... Sally Orrock
Directed by Jessica Dromgoole
NOTES
Georg Buchner died in 1837 at the age of 23, by which time he had had only one play published, and none produced. His small legacy of work, remaining unproduced for nearly sixty years after his death, has come to represent some of the most exciting and radical theatre writing in the European Theatre canon.
A SPOONFUL OF CLOROX - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody
It's as sensible as anything I've heard from a Republican, one or two governors excepted.
Asking For An Egg And Being Given A Scorpion - Suffering Imposes A Limit To All Reasoning
People thought for a long time that the course of the history of suffering could be changed, in the modern process of emancipation, by man's assuming responsibility for his own fate. Self-redeeming, self-emancipating man was to take the place of the redeeming God; man instead of God was to direct the course of history. But, as we have seen, it is more questionable than ever today whether scientific-technological evolution or even political-social revolution could of themselves bring about a decisive turn in mankind's history of suffering. Certainly the suffering have changed but they have not thereby become less. And, instead of God, it is now man who is charged with being a perpetrator of misdeeds and thus compelled to justify himself; instead of a theo-dicy there has to be an anthropo-dicy. But, compelled to justify himself, emancipated man attempts to exonerate himself, to find an alibi and to shift the blame with the aid of a variety of excuse mechanisms. He practices the art of showing "that it was not him." As if he were responsible only for the successes and not for the failures of technological evolution. As if all blame, and all failure could be laid on the transcendental ego (Idealism) or on the reactionary, counterrevolutionary class enemy (Marxism). As if there were no one responsible for the suffering of history, but only man's environment or his genetic pre-programming, or his instinctive urges, or quite generally individual, social, linguistic structures.
But should not emancipated man, in view of the equivocal results of emancipation, face the question of his guilt and thus also the question of his real redemption - and not merely his emancipation? Redemption and emancipation both mean liberation. But emancipation means liberation of man by man, it means man's self-liberation. And redemption means liberation of man by God, not any self-redemption on man's part. As the word "redemption" was for a long time overtaxed and emotionally overburdened, so too is the word "emancipation' today.
Since the most common use of the "question of evil, pain, suffering" is to use the dissatisfying lack of an answer that is satisfying, an answer that answers the question and relives pain against the assertions of the Christian, Jewish and other religion I think it's fair and even mandatory to ask if the results of posing those questions under alternative farmings are at all satisfying in the way demanded of religion. If the answer does not do what is demanded an answer that might be given by religion also fails to do, the framing that delivered as little or less than the answers made on behalf of religion can't, then be held to have yielded a success. If those answers deliver less or far less or nothing, then they have certainly been demonstrated to be less successful than religion has.
Atheism, materialism, scientism are never subjected to the same rigorous standards that are commonly demanded of religion, they have a series of dodges, of claiming, for example, that atheism isn't a belief system when it certainly is, or an ideology when it couldn't be clearer that it is an ideological position and, in its aggressive forms, it is a program.
If atheism cannot give someone satisfaction on the question of evil it is certainly not recommended by that, even if it claims that it it never promised one. If religon is to be held to be contemptible and discredited because it not provide relief, an answer, a solution, to the question as posed, certainly those who pose it must be held to the same standard of judgement that they demand for their opponents. What matters in the end is whether or not the position held or, especially, demanded is valid provides the satisfaction which is the only useful thing in considering the question of pain or evil or suffering. If the person is left in pain and suffering, if the evil continues, then, as pointed out the last time, even looking for an answer, never mind never looking for one while asserting an ideological position is less than useless. If the atheist never intended to try to give an answer, bringing the question up for their own purposes certainly is nothing that someone who is in pain should be bothered with. They have enough to be getting on with without having someone who doesn't intend to help bothering them.
After the long attempt mentioned above, of trying to find various political or sociological, to make secular attempts to "solve" the problem of pain and evil are hardly great successes as compared to religious attempts to at least lessen those through the central value of the Jewish tradition, justice. Many if not all of those attempts in the West have been through ideas that are central to the Biblical tradition, especially under the influence of Darwinism, the atheists are far more likely to insist that inequality is salubrious and under Marxism that dictatorship is the answer. Those are certainly less than useless in answering the despair of a person in pain, suffering, they are a guarantee of the very evil that "the question of evil" is raised to address, or, more typically in the case of atheists, to use as a polemical weapon.
Religion offers the possibility of entirely more than atheism can hold out to someone in pain and despair, not an end to pain, not an end to suffering, not even a guarantee of an end of human created evil but the possibility that there is more than those.
Redemption alone makes man free at a depth which emancipation cannot reach. Redemption alone can lead a person liberated from sin aware that he is accepted for time and eternity, to a meaningful life, to an unreserved effort for his fellow man, for society, for the new men liberated from the misery of this world. For emancipation has by no means enabled man to escape his history of suffering sin and death. And if he still wants to find a meaning in meaningless suffering and dying, in the suffering even of the dead and vanquished, he is thrown back on the ultimate reality; confronted with God from whom he can certainly cannot demand an account, being himself no longer innocent but in need of justification. Emancipated man cannot bypass his substantial co-responsibility for the world and mankind as they are. In the light of this, his self-understanding is perhaps made easier today than it was for the non-emancipated Job, who apparently had nothing with which to reproach himself. Yet, in a fundamentally different situation from that of Job, he will never face God with his history of suffering. With intellectual arguments he gets no further than Job's friends. Suffering imposes a limit to all reasoning.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus asks his followers which of them, if their child asked for fish would give them a snake or if they asked bread who would give them a stone. In Luke the same account he includes the far more colorful request for an egg being answered with a scorpion. That is what the atheist discourse of the question of evil, the question of pain and suffering offers for the person in pain who cries out for help. It answers questions of pain with ineffective answers and, ultimately, no recourse. And that's when they aren't discounting the significance of pain and suffering and the minds who experience pain and suffering and the ability to identify the difference between good and evil.
Note: It should be pointed out that the story of Job, such an early and important part of the Jewish Bible, that the righteous, almost unbelievably good Job is not a Hebrew but was from Uz, most probably considered to be an Edomite, people who are certainly not treated very well in the later writings. Yet this story of the righteous Job is contained in the Jewish Scriptures and is important for both Christians and Muslims, as well. Job the non-Hebrew is made the very symbol of the question of evil, unearned pain, one of the most sympathetic figures in all of literature. I think its inclusion in the Scripture is something that adds enormously to the credibility of that that tradition.
But should not emancipated man, in view of the equivocal results of emancipation, face the question of his guilt and thus also the question of his real redemption - and not merely his emancipation? Redemption and emancipation both mean liberation. But emancipation means liberation of man by man, it means man's self-liberation. And redemption means liberation of man by God, not any self-redemption on man's part. As the word "redemption" was for a long time overtaxed and emotionally overburdened, so too is the word "emancipation' today.
Since the most common use of the "question of evil, pain, suffering" is to use the dissatisfying lack of an answer that is satisfying, an answer that answers the question and relives pain against the assertions of the Christian, Jewish and other religion I think it's fair and even mandatory to ask if the results of posing those questions under alternative farmings are at all satisfying in the way demanded of religion. If the answer does not do what is demanded an answer that might be given by religion also fails to do, the framing that delivered as little or less than the answers made on behalf of religion can't, then be held to have yielded a success. If those answers deliver less or far less or nothing, then they have certainly been demonstrated to be less successful than religion has.
Atheism, materialism, scientism are never subjected to the same rigorous standards that are commonly demanded of religion, they have a series of dodges, of claiming, for example, that atheism isn't a belief system when it certainly is, or an ideology when it couldn't be clearer that it is an ideological position and, in its aggressive forms, it is a program.
If atheism cannot give someone satisfaction on the question of evil it is certainly not recommended by that, even if it claims that it it never promised one. If religon is to be held to be contemptible and discredited because it not provide relief, an answer, a solution, to the question as posed, certainly those who pose it must be held to the same standard of judgement that they demand for their opponents. What matters in the end is whether or not the position held or, especially, demanded is valid provides the satisfaction which is the only useful thing in considering the question of pain or evil or suffering. If the person is left in pain and suffering, if the evil continues, then, as pointed out the last time, even looking for an answer, never mind never looking for one while asserting an ideological position is less than useless. If the atheist never intended to try to give an answer, bringing the question up for their own purposes certainly is nothing that someone who is in pain should be bothered with. They have enough to be getting on with without having someone who doesn't intend to help bothering them.
After the long attempt mentioned above, of trying to find various political or sociological, to make secular attempts to "solve" the problem of pain and evil are hardly great successes as compared to religious attempts to at least lessen those through the central value of the Jewish tradition, justice. Many if not all of those attempts in the West have been through ideas that are central to the Biblical tradition, especially under the influence of Darwinism, the atheists are far more likely to insist that inequality is salubrious and under Marxism that dictatorship is the answer. Those are certainly less than useless in answering the despair of a person in pain, suffering, they are a guarantee of the very evil that "the question of evil" is raised to address, or, more typically in the case of atheists, to use as a polemical weapon.
Religion offers the possibility of entirely more than atheism can hold out to someone in pain and despair, not an end to pain, not an end to suffering, not even a guarantee of an end of human created evil but the possibility that there is more than those.
Redemption alone makes man free at a depth which emancipation cannot reach. Redemption alone can lead a person liberated from sin aware that he is accepted for time and eternity, to a meaningful life, to an unreserved effort for his fellow man, for society, for the new men liberated from the misery of this world. For emancipation has by no means enabled man to escape his history of suffering sin and death. And if he still wants to find a meaning in meaningless suffering and dying, in the suffering even of the dead and vanquished, he is thrown back on the ultimate reality; confronted with God from whom he can certainly cannot demand an account, being himself no longer innocent but in need of justification. Emancipated man cannot bypass his substantial co-responsibility for the world and mankind as they are. In the light of this, his self-understanding is perhaps made easier today than it was for the non-emancipated Job, who apparently had nothing with which to reproach himself. Yet, in a fundamentally different situation from that of Job, he will never face God with his history of suffering. With intellectual arguments he gets no further than Job's friends. Suffering imposes a limit to all reasoning.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus asks his followers which of them, if their child asked for fish would give them a snake or if they asked bread who would give them a stone. In Luke the same account he includes the far more colorful request for an egg being answered with a scorpion. That is what the atheist discourse of the question of evil, the question of pain and suffering offers for the person in pain who cries out for help. It answers questions of pain with ineffective answers and, ultimately, no recourse. And that's when they aren't discounting the significance of pain and suffering and the minds who experience pain and suffering and the ability to identify the difference between good and evil.
Note: It should be pointed out that the story of Job, such an early and important part of the Jewish Bible, that the righteous, almost unbelievably good Job is not a Hebrew but was from Uz, most probably considered to be an Edomite, people who are certainly not treated very well in the later writings. Yet this story of the righteous Job is contained in the Jewish Scriptures and is important for both Christians and Muslims, as well. Job the non-Hebrew is made the very symbol of the question of evil, unearned pain, one of the most sympathetic figures in all of literature. I think its inclusion in the Scripture is something that adds enormously to the credibility of that that tradition.
Detroit Health Care Worker Dies After Hospital Where She Worked Denied Her Coronavirus Test 4 Times
For profit healthcare, the Trumpzian Republicans are killing health workers.
about as helpful to the sufferer as a lecture on the chemistry of foodstuffs to a starving man
Mythological attempts at a solution cannot help us here. Not the dualistic assumption of a good primal principle alongside an evil principle of equal rank, so that the good God cannot be the one sole God (as in the ancient Persian religion and Marcionism in the second century). Nor can pushing back man's guilt to the beginning, attributing it to angelic power fallen away from God; which merely means the question is to back to God again (as in early Jewish apocalyptic). Attempts at a solution in terms of the history of philosophy have not been lacking. K. Lowith traces a line backwards - Burckhardt-Marx-Hegel-Proudhorn, Compte, Turgot, Codorcet-Voltaire-Vico, Bossuet-Joachim of Flora-Augstine-Orosius- and points out: "that the modern philosophy of history corresponds to the biblical faith and fulfillment and that it ends in the secularization of its eschatological model.
I will break in here to say though I certainly am not conversant enough with those figures in the history of philosophy to the extent I would need to to understand that statement, I'm not an accomplished theologian who has had the excellent training in philosophy that you need to be a good theologian (I doubt that most PhDs in Philosophy in my generation or the next ones in the United States could follow that line without serious research) one of the earliest things I noticed in reading Marx and Marxists was that they seemed to me to be little more than a heretical form of Christianity gone seriously sideways.
In modern times the abundantly gifted and diversely occupied philosopher and theologian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz attempted in a systematic-philosophical way to answer rationally the difficulties which result from the existence of evil and wickedness opposed to God's dominion over the world. this he did, sustained by an unshakable trust in the good God, in a Justification of God or Theodicy (1710). But the optimism of the Enlightenment was followed in 1755 by the Lisbon earthquake and in 1789 the human upheaval of the French Revolution. In 1791 Immanuel Kant wrote "On the failure of all philosophical attempts in theodicy." Then Hegel in his Philosophy of World History again made the great attempt at a justification of God. He translated Leibniz's ontological-static theodicy into a historical-dialectic and tried to explain the contradictions of world history as the evolution of the divine world spirit itself: "True theodicy, the justification of God in history, lies in the fact that world history is this evolutionary course and the real coming-to-be of the spirit, under the changing spectacles of its histories." World history as God's justification and therefore as world judgement.
But can such rational or speculative arguments, such metaphysical systems or visions of the philosophy of history, can all the shrewd reasoning really give new heart to man, almost overwhelmed by suffering? Is it any help when someone he loves is taken from him through death or infidelity or when he himself becomes incurably ill or is faced with immanent death? To explain all this existential suffering all that is offered is merely cerebral argumentation or speculation, about as helpful to the sufferer as a lecture on the chemistry of foodstuffs to a starving man. And can such rational argument or speculation do anything to change the suffering world, to transform oppressive and repressive structures and, if not to abolish suffering, at any rate to reduce it to a tolerable scale?
In defense of what I said here the other day, that any answer to the questions of suffering, evil, pain that works it will have to work on an individual basis, all of these schemes of philosophy address something that is experienced as an intensely personal matter - pain is experienced by individuals in a way that touches and cuts to their most personal level of existence - it is not like the abstractions of mathematics or science which can be assented to on a cooler and more impersonal level. I think the refusal of Western intellectualism, obsessed with finding "universals" since the time of Socrates, its insistence that nothing that doesn't have that "universal" character is of ultimate importance goes a long way to explaining why these philosophical attempts have been a flop. It's using tools to do something that they not only don't do well, they can't do it at all.
The religious explanations in the beginning of this passage, the Zoroastrian type of two-fold reality explanation, its similar though not directly related story in Genesis about the revolt of Lucifer and the angels who are driven into hell and allowed free reign in the world (and in Eden, Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit under the devil's influence), seem to me to be related to the philosophical attempts to explain the existence of evil through abstraction. Those are bound to lead to nothing very useful for the same reasons.
As Kung says, those stories either demote God from being the Creator of all that is to either being only a big thing within existence (matched with the polar opposite in the evil entity such a scheme needs) or someone who brought evil into the universe through what to God must have been a complete act of knowing, creating the angels who would revolt against him, God having had to be all knowing about the future, as well.
It is bound to be unsatisfying in the way that can be had from a mathematical proof or the good guy in a crime drama coming up with the rock solid evidence that clinches the case, whether for innocence or guilt (admit it, the only "experience" of logical rigor that most TV-fiction addled modern people experience) but I think there is a very real possibility, one which I increasingly find convincing, that the solution to "the problem of pain, evil, suffering" has no answer that human beings are capable of comprehending. I think to look for an "evolutionary" answer in "history" (which, in that philosophical treatment is as artificial an artifact of human culture treated as a natural phenomenon as any other aspect of human culture) is seriously wrong headed.
I think in questions of pain, evil, suffering, no answer which is not the product of a person seriously and long and non-pathologically thinking of their own experience will ever satisfy anyone. In many cases there won't be the chance to do that in this life, people who die as a result of their pain may not have an answer in this life. In many cases people who are so damaged by pain continue it in a totally understandable and innocent self-victimization of obsessively damaging themselves with fruitless recapitulations of that experience. I think that's something that Freudian analysis encourages people to do for the profit of the "therapist," in a notably unsuccessful "treatment" in most cases. Many modern "scientific" therapies are as bad if not worse. Fiction, novels, TV scripts, movies, etc. encourage that kind of thing. It is a rare novel that will lead out of that maze of self-damage, especially those written under the influence of Freudian and other psychological theories.
For those who have the chance, I think there is a possibility to come to some understanding of our pain,the pain of those we love,those who we may not know but whose witnessed or heard of suffering moves us in Christianity of the kind that Hans Kung advocates. I certainly think it's more likely to have that effect than any of the philosophical, pseudo-scientific explanations or methods. I would say that I think it is almost matched by some other traditions, the Jewish tradition certainly contains the same substance that fed the Christian religion, there are many aspects of Buddhism that come close and the Buddhists' enormous research and practice of meditation *is extremely useful. I have found that mixing the method of walking and movement meditation with Jewish-Christian content has worked for me.
* BY WHICH I DON'T MEAN THE HOLLYWOOD-WALL STREET SCHOOL OF "MINDFULNESS" THAT IS, THANKFULLY, GOING OUT OF FASHION. Meditation practice divorced from the radical Jewish tradition of justice and the Christian ethic of universal love is as dangerous as indifference and evil. And by those I do not mean the sentimental view of those words which demote them to whims and notions. If they don't radically move you to change and action, they are meaningless. While many real Buddhists might speak meaningfully of "mindfulness" they don't mean the same thing as the as-seen-on-TV or heard on NPR huckster means by it. I may have rejected Buddhism on the basis of their lack of the Jewish tradition of justice, that doesn't mean I don't respect Buddhists, especially engaged Buddhism.
I will break in here to say though I certainly am not conversant enough with those figures in the history of philosophy to the extent I would need to to understand that statement, I'm not an accomplished theologian who has had the excellent training in philosophy that you need to be a good theologian (I doubt that most PhDs in Philosophy in my generation or the next ones in the United States could follow that line without serious research) one of the earliest things I noticed in reading Marx and Marxists was that they seemed to me to be little more than a heretical form of Christianity gone seriously sideways.
In modern times the abundantly gifted and diversely occupied philosopher and theologian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz attempted in a systematic-philosophical way to answer rationally the difficulties which result from the existence of evil and wickedness opposed to God's dominion over the world. this he did, sustained by an unshakable trust in the good God, in a Justification of God or Theodicy (1710). But the optimism of the Enlightenment was followed in 1755 by the Lisbon earthquake and in 1789 the human upheaval of the French Revolution. In 1791 Immanuel Kant wrote "On the failure of all philosophical attempts in theodicy." Then Hegel in his Philosophy of World History again made the great attempt at a justification of God. He translated Leibniz's ontological-static theodicy into a historical-dialectic and tried to explain the contradictions of world history as the evolution of the divine world spirit itself: "True theodicy, the justification of God in history, lies in the fact that world history is this evolutionary course and the real coming-to-be of the spirit, under the changing spectacles of its histories." World history as God's justification and therefore as world judgement.
But can such rational or speculative arguments, such metaphysical systems or visions of the philosophy of history, can all the shrewd reasoning really give new heart to man, almost overwhelmed by suffering? Is it any help when someone he loves is taken from him through death or infidelity or when he himself becomes incurably ill or is faced with immanent death? To explain all this existential suffering all that is offered is merely cerebral argumentation or speculation, about as helpful to the sufferer as a lecture on the chemistry of foodstuffs to a starving man. And can such rational argument or speculation do anything to change the suffering world, to transform oppressive and repressive structures and, if not to abolish suffering, at any rate to reduce it to a tolerable scale?
In defense of what I said here the other day, that any answer to the questions of suffering, evil, pain that works it will have to work on an individual basis, all of these schemes of philosophy address something that is experienced as an intensely personal matter - pain is experienced by individuals in a way that touches and cuts to their most personal level of existence - it is not like the abstractions of mathematics or science which can be assented to on a cooler and more impersonal level. I think the refusal of Western intellectualism, obsessed with finding "universals" since the time of Socrates, its insistence that nothing that doesn't have that "universal" character is of ultimate importance goes a long way to explaining why these philosophical attempts have been a flop. It's using tools to do something that they not only don't do well, they can't do it at all.
The religious explanations in the beginning of this passage, the Zoroastrian type of two-fold reality explanation, its similar though not directly related story in Genesis about the revolt of Lucifer and the angels who are driven into hell and allowed free reign in the world (and in Eden, Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit under the devil's influence), seem to me to be related to the philosophical attempts to explain the existence of evil through abstraction. Those are bound to lead to nothing very useful for the same reasons.
As Kung says, those stories either demote God from being the Creator of all that is to either being only a big thing within existence (matched with the polar opposite in the evil entity such a scheme needs) or someone who brought evil into the universe through what to God must have been a complete act of knowing, creating the angels who would revolt against him, God having had to be all knowing about the future, as well.
It is bound to be unsatisfying in the way that can be had from a mathematical proof or the good guy in a crime drama coming up with the rock solid evidence that clinches the case, whether for innocence or guilt (admit it, the only "experience" of logical rigor that most TV-fiction addled modern people experience) but I think there is a very real possibility, one which I increasingly find convincing, that the solution to "the problem of pain, evil, suffering" has no answer that human beings are capable of comprehending. I think to look for an "evolutionary" answer in "history" (which, in that philosophical treatment is as artificial an artifact of human culture treated as a natural phenomenon as any other aspect of human culture) is seriously wrong headed.
I think in questions of pain, evil, suffering, no answer which is not the product of a person seriously and long and non-pathologically thinking of their own experience will ever satisfy anyone. In many cases there won't be the chance to do that in this life, people who die as a result of their pain may not have an answer in this life. In many cases people who are so damaged by pain continue it in a totally understandable and innocent self-victimization of obsessively damaging themselves with fruitless recapitulations of that experience. I think that's something that Freudian analysis encourages people to do for the profit of the "therapist," in a notably unsuccessful "treatment" in most cases. Many modern "scientific" therapies are as bad if not worse. Fiction, novels, TV scripts, movies, etc. encourage that kind of thing. It is a rare novel that will lead out of that maze of self-damage, especially those written under the influence of Freudian and other psychological theories.
For those who have the chance, I think there is a possibility to come to some understanding of our pain,the pain of those we love,those who we may not know but whose witnessed or heard of suffering moves us in Christianity of the kind that Hans Kung advocates. I certainly think it's more likely to have that effect than any of the philosophical, pseudo-scientific explanations or methods. I would say that I think it is almost matched by some other traditions, the Jewish tradition certainly contains the same substance that fed the Christian religion, there are many aspects of Buddhism that come close and the Buddhists' enormous research and practice of meditation *is extremely useful. I have found that mixing the method of walking and movement meditation with Jewish-Christian content has worked for me.
* BY WHICH I DON'T MEAN THE HOLLYWOOD-WALL STREET SCHOOL OF "MINDFULNESS" THAT IS, THANKFULLY, GOING OUT OF FASHION. Meditation practice divorced from the radical Jewish tradition of justice and the Christian ethic of universal love is as dangerous as indifference and evil. And by those I do not mean the sentimental view of those words which demote them to whims and notions. If they don't radically move you to change and action, they are meaningless. While many real Buddhists might speak meaningfully of "mindfulness" they don't mean the same thing as the as-seen-on-TV or heard on NPR huckster means by it. I may have rejected Buddhism on the basis of their lack of the Jewish tradition of justice, that doesn't mean I don't respect Buddhists, especially engaged Buddhism.
Monday, April 27, 2020
"How come you hate Hollywood so much?"
Oh, let me count the ways:
This could turn into a very, very long series.
This could turn into a very, very long series.
Your ACLU-Supreme Court Created Free Speech-Press Absolutism At Work
Note: I haven't copied and pasted the entire article from CNN Business, I hope I have copied enough of it to violate the law because I would love to demonstrate that the courts and the law would call me doing that illegal and I could expect to get threatened with a lawsuit by a giant-rich corporation for violating the phony "rights" of CNN but the blasted, friggin' free-speech-press lovin' law won't do a single thing to protect these victims of free speech-press attack from known entities through a massive profit-making corporation.
Maatje Benassi, a US Army reservist and mother of two, has become the target of conspiracy theorists who falsely place her at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, saying she brought the disease to China.
The false claims are spreading across YouTube every day, so far racking up hundreds of thousands of apparent views, and have been embraced by Chinese Communist Party media. Despite never having tested positive for the coronavirus or experienced symptoms, Benassi and her husband are now subjects of discussion on Chinese social media about the outbreak, including among accounts that are known drivers of large-scale coordinated activities by their followers.
The claims have turned their lives upside down. The couple say their home address has been posted online and that, before they shut down their accounts, their social media inboxes were overrun with messages from believers of the conspiracy.
"It's like waking up from a bad dream going into a nightmare day after day," Maatje Benassi told CNN Business in an exclusive interview, the first time she has spoken publicly since being smeared online.
As the coronavirus has spread around the world, so has misinformation about the disease. Technology giants have touted the steps they are taking to combat coronavirus misinformation, but these efforts have failed to help the Benassis. The family's suffering highlights the potential for blatant falsehoods to be rewarded and amplified by social media platforms. It also serves as a powerful reminder that misinformation online, however wild or obviously untrue it may seem, can have real and lasting consequences offline.
Maajte and her husband Matt are still active in their government jobs. Maajte is a civilian employee at the US Army's Fort Belvoir in Virginia where she works as a security officer. Matt, a retired Air Force officer, is a civilian employee with the Air Force at the Pentagon.
Despite working for the US government, the couple are experiencing the same feelings of helplessness familiar to others who have been the target of harassment and misinformation. "I want everybody to stop harassing me, because this is cyberbullying to me and it's gone way out of hand," Maajte said while fighting back tears.
Matt has tried to get the videos taken down from YouTube and to prevent their spread online. The couple said they contacted an attorney, who told them there was little that could be done, and local police, who told them much the same.
Origins of a coronavirus conspiracy theory
Conspiracy theories are not dissimilar to viruses, in that they evolve and mutate to spread and survive. Before Maatje Benassi became the main protagonist in this conspiracy, variations had circulated online for months.
In the early weeks of the coronavirus, conspiracy theorists began claiming, without evidence, that it was a US biological weapon. Later one member of the Chinese government publicly promoted the notion that the US military brought the virus to China. US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said it was "completely ridiculous and it's irresponsible" for someone speaking on behalf of the Chinese government to promote such a claim.
It wasn't until March, months after the first reported coronavirus cases in China, that conspiracy theorists turned their focus to Maatje Benassi. The baseless theory began with her participation in October in the Military World Games, essentially the military Olympics, which was hosted by Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus outbreak began last year.
Maatje Benassi competed in the cycling competition there, suffering an accident on the final lap that left her with a fractured rib and a concussion. Despite the crash, Benassi still finished the race, but it turned out to be the start of something worse. While hundreds of athletes from the US military took part in the games, Maatje Benassi was plucked out of the group and given a starring role in the conspiracy theory.
Perhaps the most prominent cheerleader of the idea that Benassi had a role in the imaginary plot to infect the world is George Webb, a prolific 59-year-old American misinformation peddler. Webb has for years regularly streamed hours of diatribe live on YouTube, where he has amassed more than 27 million views and almost 100,000 followers.
In 2017, CNN revealed how Webb was part of a trio of conspiracy theorists that pushed a false rumor about a cargo ship with a "dirty bomb" that was set to arrive at the Port of Charleston in South Carolina. The bomb never materialized, but the claims did lead to parts of the port -- one of the biggest in America -- being shut down for a time as a safety precaution.
Until recently, Webb said, his YouTube videos included advertisements -- meaning the platform, which is owned by Google, was making money from Webb's misinformation, as was Webb himself.
Webb even claimed that the Italian DJ Benny Benassi, whose 2002 song "Satisfaction" became a worldwide sensation, had the coronavirus and that he, along with Maatje and Matt Benassi, were part of a Benassi plot connected to the virus. (Benny told CNN Business he has never met Maatje and Matt, and they said that as far as they know, they are not related. Benny pointed out that Benassi is a very common last name in Italy.)
Benny Benassi told CNN Business he has not been diagnosed with the coronavirus. Like artists around the world, he canceled his concerts because of social distancing and travel restrictions. (Webb previously claimed the DJ is Dutch, he is not.)
In a phone interview with CNN Business on Thursday, which he livestreamed to his followers on YouTube, Webb offered no substantive evidence to support his claims about the Benassis and said he considered himself an "investigative reporter," not a conspiracy theorist.
He also said that YouTube recently stopped running ads on his videos after he began talking about the coronavirus. Webb said he had normally made a few hundred dollars a month directly from YouTube.
YouTube confirmed to CNN that it was not currently running ads on Webb's channel, but it declined to say whether ads appeared there in the past or provide details on how much money his channel may have made. A company spokesperson said YouTube was committed to promoting accurate information about the coronavirus. The company removed some threatening comments about the Benassis that had been posted under Webb's videos when asked about them by CNN Business. YouTube also said it had removed some videos posted by Webb in the past.
False theories online spark real world concerns
While the allegations about the Benassis may be wildly untrue, the threats they face and the fear they feel are very real.
Matt Benassi said he fears this could "turn into another Pizzagate," referencing another baseless conspiracy theory that claimed a pedophilia ring that somehow involved Hillary Clinton, among others, was operating out of a Washington DC pizzeria. The fringe theory didn't receive much mainstream attention until a man showed up at the pizzeria in late 2016 and fired an assault weapon, saying he was there to investigate "Pizzagate."
"It's really hard to hold him [Webb] accountable," Matt Benassi said. "Law enforcement will tell you that there's nothing that we can do about it because we have free speech in this country. Then they say, 'Go talk to a civil attorney,' so we did. We talked to an attorney. You quickly realize that for folks like us, it's just too expensive to litigate something like this. We get no recourse from law enforcement. We get no recourse from the courts."
Matt Benassi said he has complained to YouTube but even when the company does take videos down it can take days for it to do so. By that time, a video can go viral, and the damage is done. Worse still: videos Webb has posted to YouTube that are removed are often re-uploaded to the platform.
In China, the YouTube videos attacking the Benassis are uploaded to popular platforms there such as WeChat, Weibo, and Xigua Video and are translated into Chinese, according to an analysis by Keenan Chen, a researcher at First Draft, a non-profit that researches disinformation.
Maatje Benassi, a US Army reservist and mother of two, has become the target of conspiracy theorists who falsely place her at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, saying she brought the disease to China.
The false claims are spreading across YouTube every day, so far racking up hundreds of thousands of apparent views, and have been embraced by Chinese Communist Party media. Despite never having tested positive for the coronavirus or experienced symptoms, Benassi and her husband are now subjects of discussion on Chinese social media about the outbreak, including among accounts that are known drivers of large-scale coordinated activities by their followers.
The claims have turned their lives upside down. The couple say their home address has been posted online and that, before they shut down their accounts, their social media inboxes were overrun with messages from believers of the conspiracy.
"It's like waking up from a bad dream going into a nightmare day after day," Maatje Benassi told CNN Business in an exclusive interview, the first time she has spoken publicly since being smeared online.
As the coronavirus has spread around the world, so has misinformation about the disease. Technology giants have touted the steps they are taking to combat coronavirus misinformation, but these efforts have failed to help the Benassis. The family's suffering highlights the potential for blatant falsehoods to be rewarded and amplified by social media platforms. It also serves as a powerful reminder that misinformation online, however wild or obviously untrue it may seem, can have real and lasting consequences offline.
Maajte and her husband Matt are still active in their government jobs. Maajte is a civilian employee at the US Army's Fort Belvoir in Virginia where she works as a security officer. Matt, a retired Air Force officer, is a civilian employee with the Air Force at the Pentagon.
Despite working for the US government, the couple are experiencing the same feelings of helplessness familiar to others who have been the target of harassment and misinformation. "I want everybody to stop harassing me, because this is cyberbullying to me and it's gone way out of hand," Maajte said while fighting back tears.
Matt has tried to get the videos taken down from YouTube and to prevent their spread online. The couple said they contacted an attorney, who told them there was little that could be done, and local police, who told them much the same.
Origins of a coronavirus conspiracy theory
Conspiracy theories are not dissimilar to viruses, in that they evolve and mutate to spread and survive. Before Maatje Benassi became the main protagonist in this conspiracy, variations had circulated online for months.
In the early weeks of the coronavirus, conspiracy theorists began claiming, without evidence, that it was a US biological weapon. Later one member of the Chinese government publicly promoted the notion that the US military brought the virus to China. US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said it was "completely ridiculous and it's irresponsible" for someone speaking on behalf of the Chinese government to promote such a claim.
It wasn't until March, months after the first reported coronavirus cases in China, that conspiracy theorists turned their focus to Maatje Benassi. The baseless theory began with her participation in October in the Military World Games, essentially the military Olympics, which was hosted by Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus outbreak began last year.
Maatje Benassi competed in the cycling competition there, suffering an accident on the final lap that left her with a fractured rib and a concussion. Despite the crash, Benassi still finished the race, but it turned out to be the start of something worse. While hundreds of athletes from the US military took part in the games, Maatje Benassi was plucked out of the group and given a starring role in the conspiracy theory.
Perhaps the most prominent cheerleader of the idea that Benassi had a role in the imaginary plot to infect the world is George Webb, a prolific 59-year-old American misinformation peddler. Webb has for years regularly streamed hours of diatribe live on YouTube, where he has amassed more than 27 million views and almost 100,000 followers.
In 2017, CNN revealed how Webb was part of a trio of conspiracy theorists that pushed a false rumor about a cargo ship with a "dirty bomb" that was set to arrive at the Port of Charleston in South Carolina. The bomb never materialized, but the claims did lead to parts of the port -- one of the biggest in America -- being shut down for a time as a safety precaution.
Until recently, Webb said, his YouTube videos included advertisements -- meaning the platform, which is owned by Google, was making money from Webb's misinformation, as was Webb himself.
Webb even claimed that the Italian DJ Benny Benassi, whose 2002 song "Satisfaction" became a worldwide sensation, had the coronavirus and that he, along with Maatje and Matt Benassi, were part of a Benassi plot connected to the virus. (Benny told CNN Business he has never met Maatje and Matt, and they said that as far as they know, they are not related. Benny pointed out that Benassi is a very common last name in Italy.)
Benny Benassi told CNN Business he has not been diagnosed with the coronavirus. Like artists around the world, he canceled his concerts because of social distancing and travel restrictions. (Webb previously claimed the DJ is Dutch, he is not.)
In a phone interview with CNN Business on Thursday, which he livestreamed to his followers on YouTube, Webb offered no substantive evidence to support his claims about the Benassis and said he considered himself an "investigative reporter," not a conspiracy theorist.
He also said that YouTube recently stopped running ads on his videos after he began talking about the coronavirus. Webb said he had normally made a few hundred dollars a month directly from YouTube.
YouTube confirmed to CNN that it was not currently running ads on Webb's channel, but it declined to say whether ads appeared there in the past or provide details on how much money his channel may have made. A company spokesperson said YouTube was committed to promoting accurate information about the coronavirus. The company removed some threatening comments about the Benassis that had been posted under Webb's videos when asked about them by CNN Business. YouTube also said it had removed some videos posted by Webb in the past.
False theories online spark real world concerns
While the allegations about the Benassis may be wildly untrue, the threats they face and the fear they feel are very real.
Matt Benassi said he fears this could "turn into another Pizzagate," referencing another baseless conspiracy theory that claimed a pedophilia ring that somehow involved Hillary Clinton, among others, was operating out of a Washington DC pizzeria. The fringe theory didn't receive much mainstream attention until a man showed up at the pizzeria in late 2016 and fired an assault weapon, saying he was there to investigate "Pizzagate."
"It's really hard to hold him [Webb] accountable," Matt Benassi said. "Law enforcement will tell you that there's nothing that we can do about it because we have free speech in this country. Then they say, 'Go talk to a civil attorney,' so we did. We talked to an attorney. You quickly realize that for folks like us, it's just too expensive to litigate something like this. We get no recourse from law enforcement. We get no recourse from the courts."
Matt Benassi said he has complained to YouTube but even when the company does take videos down it can take days for it to do so. By that time, a video can go viral, and the damage is done. Worse still: videos Webb has posted to YouTube that are removed are often re-uploaded to the platform.
In China, the YouTube videos attacking the Benassis are uploaded to popular platforms there such as WeChat, Weibo, and Xigua Video and are translated into Chinese, according to an analysis by Keenan Chen, a researcher at First Draft, a non-profit that researches disinformation.
Elizabeth Warren, Ro Khanna, Ayanna Pressley, Deb Haaland Launch Day of Action for Essential Workers
If someone whines about being boooorrrrrreed! being quarantined they need to get off their asses and do this!
Who Would Pay Attention To That?
I should have mentioned in yesterdays post introducing some days of going over what Hans Kung wrote about the question of pain, (also called the question of evil, the question of suffering, etc.) in his book On Being A Christian, that that section comes in the 6h unit of the book dealing with interpretations of the Resurrection, that unit begins:
The crucified and yet living Christ is the concrete summing up of the Christian message and the Christian faith. He is himself the wholly concrete truth of Christianity and it was the concrete, living reality of his historical person and his fate which gave early Christianity its superiority over contemporary philosophical theories of salvation, Gnostic visions, over the mystery cults and their comparatively abstract figures unmoved by fate. "The picture of Jesus as the Christ conquered them through the power of a concrete reality." [a quote from Paul Tillich in his Systematic Theology] And even today the individual historical concreteness of his person constitutes the strength of the Christian faith as opposed to universal religious world views, abstract philosophical systems and socio-political ideologies - which, however, for their own part have inclined to depend on a concrete hero in the person of a founder or leader (of the nation, of the party), of the head of a school, or the master of a mystagogue or guru.
But there are some who will then ask: what about the different Christian "truths," articles of faith, dogmas, which - unlike the concrete figure of Jesus - are so difficult to understand and assimilate? How are they related to this one concrete truth of Christianity, which is Jesus Christ himself? These "truths" are to be understood as attempts to interpret the one truth.
Years ago, I wrote about something I heard Dr. Mary Karr on Krista Tippet's program, On Being, who said:
Even just being in mass that you stand up and kneel down, that you move in unison, that I know a lot of cradle Catholics complain about how sheep-like you feel, or they’re like dumb cattle or something like that, but I sort of found it — it’s like being in hip hop class. [laughs] When you move like everybody, you kind of feel like you are like them. And the idea that we’re hunks of meat incarnate — in meat, that it’s not metaphorical, the idea of Jesus and the Eucharist. It’s not a metaphor that you’re going to be renewed. It’s not a metaphor of his body or his “teaching,” quote-unquote, or his love or whatever. It’s his body. It’s so lurid.
And I remember looking at the body on the cross and saying to my son that — I don’t even remember whether I ever wrote about this or not — but I remember looking at it before we were baptized and saying, “I don’t get this whole crucifixion thing. It’s so awful. I mean, the suffering, beaten critter nailed up there is just so gross. Why don’t they just have you say the jump rope rhymes, and then you’re redeemed?” And my kid, who was young, like, maybe, I don’t know, 8 or 9 said, “Who would pay attention to that?”
The answer to the question with the question "Who would pay attention to that?" seemed to me and still seems to be to be one of the more profound ones in regard to the Christian faith that Hans Kung and Paul Tillich and other profoundly intelligent and diligent and rigorous scholars have also addressed. It is related to what I said the other day about the futility of trying to answer the "question of pain, evil, suffering" for someone else, it is only something that you can find an answer to that will answer it for you for yourself. If someone hoped to give an answer to someone that would help them, it would certainly be necessary for them to engage with the person who was suffering, directly or through their love or sympathy with someone else or some other of our fellow sentient creatures in a way that would be convincing. It is unconvincing to be lectured on pain and suffering by someone who you are not convinced is talking out of their own, personal and most concrete experience. The experience of suffering being among the most concrete of human experiences, especially when that suffering irreparably alters a life or ends it.
Being lectured about such topics on the basis of utilitarianism or the more callous forms of what passes as modern philosophical discourse - generally by people who grew up in affluence who have often never suffered much or struggled with poverty or the more inconvenient forms of common suffering and who, even when those inevitable blows of losing loved ones come, have those blows softened by their affluence - is seldom held up to the winds of skepticism that it should be. It is, though, generally unaccepted by the large majority of humanity who are not affluent. Though some of the more clinging of adherents to those things are the near affluent or those who aspire to it or its trappings such as the theorist of affluent repute, Thorstein Veblen, may have been the most astute observer.
-----------
Hans Kung begins his section God and suffering with one of the most acute of modern examples of evil.
"Auschwitz": that one word sums it all up for T. W. Adorno, R. L. Rubenstein and others. But, looking around the world and over the course of history, many another name could be added. Human suffering, who can take in this history of human suffering, compared to which the millions of years of pre-human history of nature scarcely count? [says the human being, I'll interrupt in protest] This is a history of contradictions and conflicts, of injustice, inequality and social distress, all the incurable involvement in sickness and guilt, all the meaningless fate and senseless wickedness: an endless stream of blood, sweat and tears, pain, sorrow and fear, loneliness and death. It is a history of which all identity, significance and value of reality and human existence seem to be constantly radically called in question by non-identity, pointlessness and worthlessness. In this history of suffering the primal reason, primal meaning and primal value of reality and human existence also become constantly, radically questionable through chaos, absurdity and illusion.
Even the suffering of one person for a single day raises at once the question, why? Why should I be afflicted, just at this moment? What is the point of it? Why is there all this terrible individual and collective suffering, crying to heaven - even against heaven? Is it not to be charged against the Creator of mankind: mankind overburdened with suffering? God supposed to be the embodiment of all meaning and yet there is so much that is pointless in this world, so much meaningless suffering and senseless sin. Is this God perhaps what Nietzsche accused him of being; a despot, impostor, swindler, executioner? Are these blasphemies or provocations of God?
From Epicurus to the modern rationalist Pierre Bayle - whom Feuerbach regarded as his teacher - the answer of the skeptic to the question why God did not prevent evil has scarcely changed. Either God cannot prevent evil - and then is he really all-powerful? - or he will not - and then is he still holy, just and good. Or he cannot and will not - and then is he not both powerless and resentful? Or, finally, he can and will: but then why is there all the wickedness in this world?
That is just the beginning of Kung's presentation of the problem that evil presents, not only the Christian who believes that God is holy and good, the Creator of the universe as it is and as it will be. That creation, in one of the rare occasions when I can seriously disagree with Hans Kung, that we are merely the now living conscious parts of, includes those millions of years of pre-human suffering and the suffering of our fellow creatures now, many of whom endure their suffering at the hands of humans and our use of them.
I think it's necessary to note that in many cases when they deal with the question of pain, evil, suffering, that the atheists' the "skeptics" answers have been to discount not only the God they want to dispose of but any real meaning or importance of suffering except for their own and those they feel appertain to them. I have written about that as articulated by Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, the utter callousness of the Darwinists, of Nietzsche, who considered the use and suffering of the many by the Superman to be of unimportance. The price of materialist-atheist-scientism is far worse than the question of suffering for the believer in God, it not only dismisses the consideration of God, it renders suffering as a problem unintelligible.
Though the atheist who suffers, even those who discount the moral dimension of the problem or even the reality of the consciousness who experiences pain never really has that problem when its reality is made concrete in their own experience,* though in the worse cases, their intellectual articulation of it is some of the most dishonest nonsense peddled as intellectually respectable in the history of rewarding such stuff. I think their inability to link their own experience with suffering is a symptom of a highly respectable form of academic sociopathy that is also linked to the importance they place on their dishonest intellectual articulations of it. I think its respectability comes from the permission it gives to those who wish to be absolved of moral responsibility. Many of those being rich people of privilege, it is a well financed effort.
I think that is why such people, in history and today, have had such a profound hostility to the Hebrew tradition in its original Jewish articulation and in its later Christian one. That was one of the major projects of scientistic culture of the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries and one which continues. Such people would violate nothing about their atheism in creating and peopling an Auschwitz, any nominally Christian person who participated would have to break every single moral teaching of Jesus, Paul, James, as well as The Law and the Prophets.
* It is my experience that there are no more accomplished whiners about even their slight experience of personal pain and even a vague sense of unfairness than those who are ready to discount it for others. Trump is, certainly, the current best example of that.
The crucified and yet living Christ is the concrete summing up of the Christian message and the Christian faith. He is himself the wholly concrete truth of Christianity and it was the concrete, living reality of his historical person and his fate which gave early Christianity its superiority over contemporary philosophical theories of salvation, Gnostic visions, over the mystery cults and their comparatively abstract figures unmoved by fate. "The picture of Jesus as the Christ conquered them through the power of a concrete reality." [a quote from Paul Tillich in his Systematic Theology] And even today the individual historical concreteness of his person constitutes the strength of the Christian faith as opposed to universal religious world views, abstract philosophical systems and socio-political ideologies - which, however, for their own part have inclined to depend on a concrete hero in the person of a founder or leader (of the nation, of the party), of the head of a school, or the master of a mystagogue or guru.
But there are some who will then ask: what about the different Christian "truths," articles of faith, dogmas, which - unlike the concrete figure of Jesus - are so difficult to understand and assimilate? How are they related to this one concrete truth of Christianity, which is Jesus Christ himself? These "truths" are to be understood as attempts to interpret the one truth.
Years ago, I wrote about something I heard Dr. Mary Karr on Krista Tippet's program, On Being, who said:
Even just being in mass that you stand up and kneel down, that you move in unison, that I know a lot of cradle Catholics complain about how sheep-like you feel, or they’re like dumb cattle or something like that, but I sort of found it — it’s like being in hip hop class. [laughs] When you move like everybody, you kind of feel like you are like them. And the idea that we’re hunks of meat incarnate — in meat, that it’s not metaphorical, the idea of Jesus and the Eucharist. It’s not a metaphor that you’re going to be renewed. It’s not a metaphor of his body or his “teaching,” quote-unquote, or his love or whatever. It’s his body. It’s so lurid.
And I remember looking at the body on the cross and saying to my son that — I don’t even remember whether I ever wrote about this or not — but I remember looking at it before we were baptized and saying, “I don’t get this whole crucifixion thing. It’s so awful. I mean, the suffering, beaten critter nailed up there is just so gross. Why don’t they just have you say the jump rope rhymes, and then you’re redeemed?” And my kid, who was young, like, maybe, I don’t know, 8 or 9 said, “Who would pay attention to that?”
The answer to the question with the question "Who would pay attention to that?" seemed to me and still seems to be to be one of the more profound ones in regard to the Christian faith that Hans Kung and Paul Tillich and other profoundly intelligent and diligent and rigorous scholars have also addressed. It is related to what I said the other day about the futility of trying to answer the "question of pain, evil, suffering" for someone else, it is only something that you can find an answer to that will answer it for you for yourself. If someone hoped to give an answer to someone that would help them, it would certainly be necessary for them to engage with the person who was suffering, directly or through their love or sympathy with someone else or some other of our fellow sentient creatures in a way that would be convincing. It is unconvincing to be lectured on pain and suffering by someone who you are not convinced is talking out of their own, personal and most concrete experience. The experience of suffering being among the most concrete of human experiences, especially when that suffering irreparably alters a life or ends it.
Being lectured about such topics on the basis of utilitarianism or the more callous forms of what passes as modern philosophical discourse - generally by people who grew up in affluence who have often never suffered much or struggled with poverty or the more inconvenient forms of common suffering and who, even when those inevitable blows of losing loved ones come, have those blows softened by their affluence - is seldom held up to the winds of skepticism that it should be. It is, though, generally unaccepted by the large majority of humanity who are not affluent. Though some of the more clinging of adherents to those things are the near affluent or those who aspire to it or its trappings such as the theorist of affluent repute, Thorstein Veblen, may have been the most astute observer.
-----------
Hans Kung begins his section God and suffering with one of the most acute of modern examples of evil.
"Auschwitz": that one word sums it all up for T. W. Adorno, R. L. Rubenstein and others. But, looking around the world and over the course of history, many another name could be added. Human suffering, who can take in this history of human suffering, compared to which the millions of years of pre-human history of nature scarcely count? [says the human being, I'll interrupt in protest] This is a history of contradictions and conflicts, of injustice, inequality and social distress, all the incurable involvement in sickness and guilt, all the meaningless fate and senseless wickedness: an endless stream of blood, sweat and tears, pain, sorrow and fear, loneliness and death. It is a history of which all identity, significance and value of reality and human existence seem to be constantly radically called in question by non-identity, pointlessness and worthlessness. In this history of suffering the primal reason, primal meaning and primal value of reality and human existence also become constantly, radically questionable through chaos, absurdity and illusion.
Even the suffering of one person for a single day raises at once the question, why? Why should I be afflicted, just at this moment? What is the point of it? Why is there all this terrible individual and collective suffering, crying to heaven - even against heaven? Is it not to be charged against the Creator of mankind: mankind overburdened with suffering? God supposed to be the embodiment of all meaning and yet there is so much that is pointless in this world, so much meaningless suffering and senseless sin. Is this God perhaps what Nietzsche accused him of being; a despot, impostor, swindler, executioner? Are these blasphemies or provocations of God?
From Epicurus to the modern rationalist Pierre Bayle - whom Feuerbach regarded as his teacher - the answer of the skeptic to the question why God did not prevent evil has scarcely changed. Either God cannot prevent evil - and then is he really all-powerful? - or he will not - and then is he still holy, just and good. Or he cannot and will not - and then is he not both powerless and resentful? Or, finally, he can and will: but then why is there all the wickedness in this world?
That is just the beginning of Kung's presentation of the problem that evil presents, not only the Christian who believes that God is holy and good, the Creator of the universe as it is and as it will be. That creation, in one of the rare occasions when I can seriously disagree with Hans Kung, that we are merely the now living conscious parts of, includes those millions of years of pre-human suffering and the suffering of our fellow creatures now, many of whom endure their suffering at the hands of humans and our use of them.
I think it's necessary to note that in many cases when they deal with the question of pain, evil, suffering, that the atheists' the "skeptics" answers have been to discount not only the God they want to dispose of but any real meaning or importance of suffering except for their own and those they feel appertain to them. I have written about that as articulated by Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, the utter callousness of the Darwinists, of Nietzsche, who considered the use and suffering of the many by the Superman to be of unimportance. The price of materialist-atheist-scientism is far worse than the question of suffering for the believer in God, it not only dismisses the consideration of God, it renders suffering as a problem unintelligible.
Though the atheist who suffers, even those who discount the moral dimension of the problem or even the reality of the consciousness who experiences pain never really has that problem when its reality is made concrete in their own experience,* though in the worse cases, their intellectual articulation of it is some of the most dishonest nonsense peddled as intellectually respectable in the history of rewarding such stuff. I think their inability to link their own experience with suffering is a symptom of a highly respectable form of academic sociopathy that is also linked to the importance they place on their dishonest intellectual articulations of it. I think its respectability comes from the permission it gives to those who wish to be absolved of moral responsibility. Many of those being rich people of privilege, it is a well financed effort.
I think that is why such people, in history and today, have had such a profound hostility to the Hebrew tradition in its original Jewish articulation and in its later Christian one. That was one of the major projects of scientistic culture of the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries and one which continues. Such people would violate nothing about their atheism in creating and peopling an Auschwitz, any nominally Christian person who participated would have to break every single moral teaching of Jesus, Paul, James, as well as The Law and the Prophets.
* It is my experience that there are no more accomplished whiners about even their slight experience of personal pain and even a vague sense of unfairness than those who are ready to discount it for others. Trump is, certainly, the current best example of that.
Sunday, April 26, 2020
A Prelude Concerning The Question Of Pain
Having totally botched the forty days of Lent, due to politics and pandemic, I had thought that I'd make up for that during the fifty day between Western Christian Easter and Pentecost with posting about the Resurrection of Jesus, the resurrection from death and associated topics, concentrating this year on what the eminent Christian, Catholic theologian Hans Kung said about those in his book On Being A Christian.
But I will take some time to present some of what he had to say in the section of the book, "God and suffering," an especially fraught subject anytime but especially as the world faces this pandemic we are in the middle of and which might kill any of us by the time it's over. Those of us who live will certainly face losses and hardships.
Before getting into this, I should note two things, the first is that it is foreign to the culture I was raised in, what might be called Irish Catholicism, to ask "why me". I don't know how other Catholics might have been brought up but that question is one that has always seemed strange and wrong to me. Instead someone might ask "why not me". If pain and suffering are not only possible but as common as dirt, why not me too? The idea that comfort, prosperity and contentment are due to those who are good or, at least, like to think of them as good is, maybe, something that the Catholic habit of reading the lives of the saints prevents. Lots of the best people have had some of the worst pain and bad luck and persecution in history. That's what the lives of the saints show. Maybe that's what you get out of the cult of the saints. I don't know.
The second thing is that reading this section makes me think the common habit of modern Westerners to expect that things like moral or theological discernment "evolves" that there is some kind of progress from darkness into enlightenment is probably an illusion, a cultural habit drawn from the obsession of Westerners with evolution as it became a major feature of ideological warfare and opportunity for atheists desiring to convert people to atheism. No matter what the claims are, whenever anyone uses the metaphor of "evolution" they really mean, or at least include the feeling of progress to something or, more typically, themselves as "better than" what came before.
I think it's an especially arrogant and inapt metaphor when dealing with this question because intense suffering is not a solved or soluble issue, being a thing which people experience as an individual as a group, it is new every time it happens. Maybe the traditional Catholic way of talking about it, which is certainly no explanation, that it is a mystery is the best that we're going to get by way of explanation. Growing up an Irish Catholic accustoms you to accepting that there are things which are mysteries that are not going to be revealed in this life.
And, just saying, I will be provocative enough to bring up the reported experience of those who have survived "clinical death" and report their experience of "death" that there is an end to suffering. I have no idea if they are right or if that is what awaits all of us. I add it to be provocative and to violate the rules against bringing such testimonial evidence into this discussion. That rule is, itself, just a common habit enforced by ideological atheism. I don't have any intention of being intimidated by it.
Presidential Lists
Someone asked for my list of the five smartest presidents. In roughly descending, I'd say
Lyndon Johnson
Abraham Lincoln,
Barack Obama
Thomas Jefferson,
Bill Clinton
I know other people would have another list but that's mine.
There were other very smart presidents, the stupidest would certainly include in rapidly descending order
Franklin Pierce
Howard Taft
Ronald Reagan
George W. Bush
Donald Trump
The list of stupid presidents is a long one. The list of American Presidents isn't a list of great men, it's a list more characterized by mediocrity and political manipulation.
A moral ordering of the presidents would almost certainly be far harder to make though I think there is little question that Jimmy Carter would belong on it. I'd put him at the top of that list. He is certainly the most admirable person in their post-presidential life, a far rarer thing. I think the moral quality of a president, depending on the times of their presidency, is of greater importance than their brilliance as an intellect. Bill Clinton was brilliant intellectually, he was hardly a great figure of moral leadership. Jefferson was a genius in intellect and a slave-owning, slave-raping president who kept his own children in bondage, thwarted the aspirations of the Haitians in escaping bondage and establishing a republic, and a continent stealing and so Indian murdering moral cesspool. However, Donald Trump - though he has, as of yet, not gotten us into the kind of foreign war on behalf of billionaires that Bush II did - is certainly one of those sucking at the bottom of that list.
I wonder what your lists would look like.
Nancy Pelosi is the best Speaker of the House in its history. Certainly the farthest left, though wise enough to know that striking a political pose is not the same as winning and keeping the house so you can do the possible instead of the merely, never to be had because never in power aspirational stuff.
Lyndon Johnson
Abraham Lincoln,
Barack Obama
Thomas Jefferson,
Bill Clinton
I know other people would have another list but that's mine.
There were other very smart presidents, the stupidest would certainly include in rapidly descending order
Franklin Pierce
Howard Taft
Ronald Reagan
George W. Bush
Donald Trump
The list of stupid presidents is a long one. The list of American Presidents isn't a list of great men, it's a list more characterized by mediocrity and political manipulation.
A moral ordering of the presidents would almost certainly be far harder to make though I think there is little question that Jimmy Carter would belong on it. I'd put him at the top of that list. He is certainly the most admirable person in their post-presidential life, a far rarer thing. I think the moral quality of a president, depending on the times of their presidency, is of greater importance than their brilliance as an intellect. Bill Clinton was brilliant intellectually, he was hardly a great figure of moral leadership. Jefferson was a genius in intellect and a slave-owning, slave-raping president who kept his own children in bondage, thwarted the aspirations of the Haitians in escaping bondage and establishing a republic, and a continent stealing and so Indian murdering moral cesspool. However, Donald Trump - though he has, as of yet, not gotten us into the kind of foreign war on behalf of billionaires that Bush II did - is certainly one of those sucking at the bottom of that list.
I wonder what your lists would look like.
Nancy Pelosi is the best Speaker of the House in its history. Certainly the farthest left, though wise enough to know that striking a political pose is not the same as winning and keeping the house so you can do the possible instead of the merely, never to be had because never in power aspirational stuff.
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Philip Davison - Eureka Dunes
Family life is rarely a family show, thank God; yet, within the oddity of the Sparling household, perverseness has the politest table-manners. With a backstairs genealogy that's biblical in its mix of misfits and mountebanks, EUREKA DUNES focuses on a father-son relationship in which it's hard to tell who's the fugitive and who's the refugee.
With Nick Dunning as Magnus Sparling and Barry McGovern as the paterfamilas Edwin.Cast and Production CreditsNick Dunning (Magnus)
Ingrid Craigie (Stella)
Deirdre Donnelly (Charlotte)
Barry McGovern (Edwin)
Joe Taylor (New/Detective Richie)
Derbhle Crotty (Irene)Sound Supervision and Sound Design: Damian Chennells
Producer: Aidan Mathews
I've had no time to listen to radio drama this month, I'm going to make sure I have time to pre-hear these next month. Some good lines, not bad characters, kind of an odd plot line.
Hate Mail
"It's cruel to give people false hope."
I wonder why people who come up with that atheist cliche never ask themselves if it may not even be crueler to give people false despair. I could say that the despair of atheist materialism is guaranteed, it's guaranteed if it is believed for a lifetime, it is only guaranteed, perhaps, at the very end if not believed.
The atheist position is not the default one, the one which is to be assumed to be true as atheists demand, they're a really bossy lot, as bad as the worst fundamentalists.
Ideologically motivated negation is no more credibly assumed to be right than hope is known with certainty.
Hate Update: "bothsiderism" can be valid when both sides are comprised of bossy boots assholes and that's the issue asserted as it was above.
I wonder why people who come up with that atheist cliche never ask themselves if it may not even be crueler to give people false despair. I could say that the despair of atheist materialism is guaranteed, it's guaranteed if it is believed for a lifetime, it is only guaranteed, perhaps, at the very end if not believed.
The atheist position is not the default one, the one which is to be assumed to be true as atheists demand, they're a really bossy lot, as bad as the worst fundamentalists.
Ideologically motivated negation is no more credibly assumed to be right than hope is known with certainty.
Hate Update: "bothsiderism" can be valid when both sides are comprised of bossy boots assholes and that's the issue asserted as it was above.
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