Why That Religious Commandment Is The Actual Basis of Any Legitimate Government - Beyond The Left Of The Left

THE FIRST BOOK of Walter Brueggemann that I read was The Bible Makes Sense in which he said that the entire Bible, both Testaments, the entire monotheistic tradition revolves around the Exodus story.  The Children of Israel enslaved under Pharaoh, their mistreatment, the attempted genocide, their crying out for deliverance, the commissioning of Moses and Aaron, the liberation, the long wandering in the wilderness as God, through their experience, makes a People of the escaped slaves, very significantly and certainly informed by that experience The People being given The Law through Moses, etc.  

Over the several years since I read the book and studied it, it's sometimes been hard to figure out how, especially things in the Christian Scriptures, went along with Brueggemann's claim about it all relating to the Exodus and Sinai experience.  

I was asked what I thought was political about the Golden Rule that made it the basis of Western democracy, why I thought that was the actual basis of the historical existence of democracy as a modern political entity and not some ill-defined "enlightenment rationality." Which is worth going through.  Though I'd specify I said it was the basis of the elusive, yet to be attained genuine form of that, EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.  I won't,for now, again go through why I don't believe in the authenticity or durability of any other kind of democracy except the egalitarian form.  Don't worry, I'm sure I'll repeat myself on that unless we happen, through some miracle, to suddenly attain it and I can finally die happy for having seen it.

In meditating on the Commandment in the form Jesus gave it, Do to others what you would want them to do to you, it first seemed that you could only be personally responsible for actively delivering on it by acting that way yourself.  You couldn't get the others to do the same to you, that was their choice and responsibility. That was better than the alternative, certainly, but it didn't really satisfy me as being as effective in producing a better life as The Law and the Prophets should be.

But there is something else that Brueggemann pointed out about the Exodus story, God doesn't even enter into it till many verses and a couple of chapters have set things up, the flourishing of numbers of the Children of Israel in Egypt, their enslavement as a means of disempowering them (establishing their unequal status), the grinding labor and oppression under Pharaoh, his paranoid decision (no doubt because he realized he'd given them good reason to hate him) to murder all the male children of them, the infancy story of Moses, his achieving a consciousness of his ethnicity - he killed an Egyptian who who he saw beating a Hebrew slave - etc.

Brueggmann points out that when Moses finally has his incredible mystical experience of God directly talking to him through the burning bush, God, God's-self tells him that what motivated God to act through Moses and Aaron were the cries for justice by the Children of Israel.  It's clear that the righteous act of the freeing of them from bondage originated in their own consciousness of their own oppression and their protest against that, crying out to God for justice.

I think that that's something that is certainly seen in the case of Black Americans who have gotten no justice without doing the same thing.  That's an experience that is literally the same for all identifiable groups who have suffered oppression, discimination and genocide.  

It's so obvious that even those of the privileged, straight-white-affluent-oppressors will launch complaints about the endangerment or limitations on their privilege will imitate it, that's certainly what is seen all through the media, from the totally fascist, through CNN and on to NPR, they carry the complaints of the comfortable and affluent while suppressing the cries of the really oppressed. And they promote the stupid non-consideration that there is a difference between rich-white-gangsters whining when they have limits put on their theft and oppression of workers and despoliation of the environment and the real oppression of minority groups, of the destitute, the poor and even the lower ranks of what are called the "middle class" by those the media and the law and the culture favor.  For anyone who has the faith that the "free press" is going to save us, have you seen CNN since it was sold to a right winger?  

Doing your part of doing unto others is an absolute moral obligation on which a decent life and society and egalitarian democracy depends.  

But it depends as much on those who are not beneficiaries of a reciprocation by those with more wealth, power, those given a privileged place above the unprivileged doing what the Children of Israel did in Egypt, crying out against their oppressors, against their oppression.  

One of the things that is symbolized in the Seven Plagues that Moses and Aaron administered as a means of persuasion is that inequality has real consequences and those consequences will strike against the richest as well as the poorest, eventually that will be the case no matter how long the richest among us can shield themselves from those consequences.  I think the Seven Plagues in the story are an excellent abbreviation for all of the consequences we see around us today AND THE BRILLIANCE OF THE STORY IS THAT IT PROVES THAT EVEN THE HARSHEST LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE WILL BE IGNORED OR DENIED BY THOSE WHO ARE PRIVILEGED.  As Jesus put it, it's harder than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for the rich to twig onto moral obligations and to carry through with them.  

Jesus and Hillel were right when they identified that Commandment as the condensation of The Law and the Prophets in one sentence. You could spend a lifetime in unfolding it to apply it to real life.  Remember that when Hillel said that to the wise-guy who demanded he recite the Torah to him while he stood on one foot then told him to go study.  That study is meaningless unless it is made a part of our lives, of our conduct, of our demands on our societies, on our governments, on our civil legal systems.  That is why so much of religious writing is hollow and merely annoying in the end.  

That it has so seldom been understood and practiced,  that that civil law is anything but egalitarian or just and that the profession of lawyer and judge, the all-sacred commandments of contract law are generally just enabling those who can pay the most getting away with breaking it,  is an indictment of liberal democracy and the secular republic.  That all allegedly Christian churches have not been at the forefront of demanding and pressuring and coercing and nagging and guilting the allegedly Christian people to do that, as is so excellently seen in, for example, many of the Black Churches, is an indictment of the pseudo-christianity that a disturbingly dangerous percentage of Christians give lip service to.  The kind of stuff you hear from the mammonists of the Republican-fascist party, the TV hallelujah peddlers, the majority of the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, etc.  And yet they wonder why young people reject Christianity in view of that florid hypocrisy.  Though, I wouldn't necessarily think a lot of those who reject Christianity are really interested in the costly justice of egalitarian democracy, they've been sold the opposite by the materialist-atheist-scientistic secularism that is as bad as the pseudo-Christian hypocrites.

We are, through myriads of academic and other modern writing used to the failure of deputed "Christians" in this regard being given to condemn Christianity to that most certain of deaths under modernism, being unfashionable.   But the same people never, ever make the far more obviously relevant criticism of secular, civil government, law and society when, if anything, they are worse because they never deal with the morality of it.  Academia's habits and norms are as willfully blind as the worst of theology and other official church talk.  Academia is as tied to Mammon as the civil law and secular government and the worst of ecclesiastical establishments.

Even if you see this it's a constant struggle to do it, it's especially hard for someone who is affluent and that accounts for even many of us in the lower-middle class, especially those of us who are white and can pass as straight.  It's hard to maintain but it is absolutely necessary to do more than that, it's necessary to do what the slaves in Exodus and in the American context have had to do and struggle against it. I wish I had read Brueggemann's book when it was first published in the 1970s, I'd have saved four decades of futility in the tail-chasing of secular political economics.  That's what happens when you consciously decide to exclude God from the problem, there is no absolute goal, there is no one to point the direction to that.  You have to choose to believe in order to stop going round in circles and move ahead.  That is one of the most important lessons of the Jewish monotheistic tradition, what makes it superior to all of the static systems, pagan and materialistic.  I'd rather "waste my life" trying than giving up in lazy, self-satisfied, wallowing in whatever measure of affluence I can hoard for myself.

I will add that though I think a lot of the story as written in Exodus may well have not happened like the narrative has it, that the numbers of the Children of Israel and many other things may have been exaggerated in the typical narrative practices of those cultures, that many of the passages may well be allegorical creations that encapsulate an experienced truth through an illustrative fiction, I have come to believe there was someone who corresponds to Moses whose flashes of insight and revelation produced the core of The Law and who well may have led a group of runaway slaves out of the oppression of Pharaoh.  I also am convinced that, as it comes down to us, even in the books of the Torah, that that core of insight has had many accretions added to it, some of them in concord with that original insight, some of them corruptions of it.  Like all of the Bible, especially the oldest books of it, trying to discern which is which is a risky endeavor.  That is why I have decided to make Hillel's and Jesus's key to it the hermenutic with which I will work that. That and the rule of thumb Jesus also gave for testing claims of holiness, "By their fruits you will know them."  

I think there was such a person as Moses and I think he had real mystical insights into these things which accounts for why his idea of God and of the moral nature of the universe is so different and why it has endured while none of the others - except areligious Mammonism - has.  Without independent verification of Moses and what really happened, that's a conjecture but it's one I believe in.  The best written evidence we have of that is the Hebrew Scriptures and the other versions of that, the Septuagint and the other versions of the story.  But the truth of it isn't written on paper or on clay, it's in the lived experience and observed experience of us, especially those who struggle against injustice, against inequality and for real democracy. Especially those closest to the experience of the Children of Israel under Pharaoh.  The only alternative is the gangsterism of Pharaoh or Trump or Putin or Xi or Bolsonaro or their pale imitators in gangster states and even secular democracies around the world.

I've never read an academic alternative to the Law, the Prophets, the Gospels which I don't now think would devolve into the same thing just under another name. I'm totally skeptical of that because of what I see all around us, too.  The history of the 20th and 21st century, the support of the secular left for Marxist gangsters, the "Long Detour" of the American left,  etc. Even now the support by the would-be moralists of the American secular left, the stinking Green Party, Noam Chomsky speaking up for Putin put the rotten cherry on top of it.

Betty Carter - Feed The Fire

 

Betty Carter, voice

Geri Allen, piano

Dave Holland, bass

Jack DeJohnette, drums 

". . . men can't be faithful . . . " Repetitive Hate Mail

IT IS ONE OF THE THINGS that I have found is ridiculously controversial whenever I write about it, the promotion of gay marital fidelity.  The first time I got into a brawl on that over at Echidne's sadly discontinued blog it was in response to some of the idiotic statements made by gay celebrity jerks like Dan Savage that gay men were biologically incapable of being faithful or something.  That's an excuse that straight guys had been using to excuse their cheating since some of the stupider ideas about "cave men" started distorting Western culture.    

I will insert here that the idea that we are not to learn from and consequentially change our behavior through even the hardest of experiences and the observation of human history has to count as one of the most absolutely stupid relics of modernism as an intellectual ideology. Modernism and the ideology that we are biologically programmed idiots is a rank superstition.  Realizing that and rejecting it for the alternative in Hebrew monotheistic religion was what led me to believe that the future could be better than the past. It's worth trying to change it than to just throw up your hands and figure we're lumbering robots programmed by "our genes" and there's nothing to do about it.

The quintessential example in my life was that I lived through the untreated AIDS slaughter of gay men in the late 20th century and know that if one such promiscuity spread disease can unexpectedly arise there's nothing to prevent another one arising and killing millions before there are any effective treatements.  I remember the long, far too long period before there was an all too temporary change of behavior for the better among many though certianly not all gay men as the means of transmission of HIV became known and the rate of infections slowed. I remember the fury of many of the 1980s gay male political celebrities resisting the scientific promotion of condoms and avoiding promiscuous sex, such "activists"  coming up with idiotic lines and slogans, paranoid accusations made against scientists that, in retrospect, sounded a lot like the Republican-fascist lies told about Covid-19 and Dr. Fauci. In fact, he got the same then, too.  God bless Dr. Fauci and the others who told the truth and got pilloried for it.  

The sex carnival of the 1970s was hard to close down even at the cost of many, many thousands of lives even at the height of the crisis.  Another such STD epidemic could be even worse and there is no guarantee that any effective treatment will be found for it. Closing down the one that flourishes now, even in the same kind of full-blown public health emergency will be harder.  I'm not surprised that warning of that in advance gets the hostility my comments did.  

I strongly suspect that during the period when the earliest Scriptures were being written that a knowledge of promiscuity spread disease as much as men being unwilling to support children of other men led the early moral theologians to figure out that marital fidelity was desirable, some of them even figured out it was morally superior.  They certainly didn't learn that from the examples of the earliest of the Biblical patriarchs who were a pretty shady lot when it came to sex. I suspect that knowledge hadn't really taken in the period when those folk-stories were made up.  I know we're not supposed to criticize Abraham and Issac, Lot, Judah, etc. but they were pigs when it came to sex. Sexual morality as it can be understood by human beings has been something in continuous development, the last word on that has certainly not been said, back then or later or even today. I don't think anything like that could exist except in the rarest of cases at any time when Women were not considered AND TREATED as equals to Men. I think a vast number if not the great majority of straight marriages, even those in which sexual fidelity was strictly observed by both partners, were far from moral covenants so long as inequality was part of their basis.  Equality may not guarantee morality in human interactions but it is a prerequisite that must be present for human relations to be moral. Straight marriage as a civil matter, when there was legal inequality was morally flawed, though I don't think many theologians or clergy ever noticed that.

I am absolutely in favor of marriage equality.  I'm so in favor of it that I want all LGBTQ+ marriages to be equal having equal legal rights in marriage as straight couples have. Until that equality is the law, such "rights" are privileges handed only to hetero-sexuals.  

But that's not enough, I want them to be equal to THE IDEALLY BEST MARRIAGES, I would like it if all straight marriages equaled those, many of my best friends and loved ones are in straight marriages. To the extent it might be possible to write laws promoting that it should be what the state's role in defining marriage should be.  

I have no desire for same-sex marriages being equal to bad or the worst straight marriages which no one should aspire to copy.  I want all same-sex  marriages to be equal to the best straight marriages, loving, mutually supportive, EQUAL AND FAITHFUL with full legal protection.  

Marriage should be a refuge against many of the harms of life to the extent that is possible, abandonment, lovelessness, loneliness, the absence of mutual support, including financial support. Promiscuity, divorce caused by promiscuity and faithlessness inevitably leads to those evils.  I am convinced that is why Jesus called remarriage after a divorce "adultery," abandonment of wives and children by men was probably what he was thinking about. He knew those listening to him would not understand the immorality of it in any terms other than the adultery they were so used to thinking of as the ultimate of evil in sexual relationships.*   And marriage should certainly be a refuge from one partner giving the other one sexually transmitted diseases of the kind which are also far more likely if one or both partners are sleeping around.  

And that does not even go into the role that faithful, durable marriage has in the responsible support, love and guidance of any children who are part of the family.  Promiscuity is not conducive to good parenting.  Anyone who by birth or by adoption takes on a responsibility to vulnerable children has made a covenant that is as serious, perhaps even more serious than anyone who chooses to get married to another adult who has already gone through the vulnerability of childhood. It is one of the major defects in the "institution of marriage" that that moral obligation is not seriously considered nearly as much as it should be.

The idiotic 1960s and 70s notion that modern antibiotics and scientific birth control had ended the physical dangers of promiscuity was always stupid, a consequence of that kind of biological ignorance that flourishes in the United States as something as unimportant as evolution takes up so much of public school science curricula and the media has a ban on such information being made universally known.  The media suppresses the facts about sex even as they use it to sell everything and as they actively promote sexual promiscuity.  It is one of the most serious of acts of immorality that condoms are not openly advertised and promoted in the media.  But, much as I favor their use to make sex safe, I'd certainly never want to rely on something so haphazardly used as condoms to be the only thing between gay men's marital well-being and something like HIV infection. And that isn't only an issue for gay men.  I knew a woman who never slept around who was given AIDS by her faithless husband, though I don't know who he got it from and neither did she.

The idea that "AIDS is over," a criminally irresponsible slogan pushed by one of the most irresponsible gay "journalists" through the free press, is a lie.  People in large numbers still contract HIV through needle exchange and through sex with infected people AND EVEN WITH THE MOST UP TO DATE MEDICATIONS AIDS STILL KILLS PEOPLE EVERY DAY.  

But the physical dangers of promiscuity are not the only ones, I think there are serious, even deadly moral, emotional and other non-physical consequences of marital infidelity.  

Even "open marriages" by agreement and plan diminish the value of marriage and inevitably lead to a devaluation of the lives and persons of other people and ourselves.  I think that marital fidelity, keeping true to the highest form of the marital covenant is honoring the image of God that is intrinsic to us all.  I think that is very much related to that moral absolute of "Do to others what you want them to do to you,"  I think it's other statements of loving your neighbor as yourself and the Commandment Jesus gave in John's Gospel, "Love one another as I have loved you," are also entirely relevant when we are discussing same-sex marriage.  

Marriage is a special kind of covenant, if you insist on a secular definition, a special kind of contract.  I think marital fidelity is a special and specialized instance of all of those Commandments listed above put together.  If that were not the case, then the only thing special about LGBTQ people having marriage equality would just be a cargo-cult contract about getting financial advantages.  I will never, ever say that that is good enough for same-sex marriages, it should never be enough for straight marriages.  I would never want just that for myself and another man, I would not want it for two women or any woman and a man.  

Lesbians and, especially, gay men were sold a huge lie by those who tried to sell us a degraded form of merely legalized marriage on the lie that, especially gay men, were biologically incapable of making an adult and moral decision for faithful marriage.  That idiots like Dan Savage promoted that crap and lots of immature jerks and those who aren't serious about same-sex marriages fall for it doesn't change that one bit.   

The marriage they asked for was an inferior, degraded contract, not anything higher than a car lease and one without even the obligations of care those would normally carry.  American law is far more concerned with financial matters, money than the most important things in Peoples' lives.

The proponents of infidelity never favored a marriage equality that demanded the best, they wanted to screw around like teenage boys with benefits that can only be sustained through adult responsibility. They wanted same sex marriages to be like those of Newt Gingrich, Republican-fascist pseudo-Christian politicians, Jerry Falwell jr., myriads of cheatin' adulterous celebrity preachers and their brats, right-wing celebrities and "journalists", etc.  I say screw that.  I look at such same-sex marriages and don't think I'd have ever bothered campaigning for them if that's all there is to marriage equality.  

As a gay man, gay men deserve better than that shit.  Lesbians do too.

We won't even be asking for marriage equality until we insist that the very idea of same-sex marriages means the best kind of marriages.  There's no reason to settle for anything less.  Considering they have had legalized marriage forever, it's amazing to me that hetero-sexuals have not done so.  You have to wonder what's wrong with them.

* Count the number of times hetero-sexual adultery is mentioned as opposed to those unequal and so unjust and immoral forms of same-sex sex in mentioned in Scripture.  And every time same-sex sex is talked about it is in an inherently immoral act based in inequality.  The gang-rape in Genesis and Judges mentioned was obviously immoral on the basis of inequality of numbers and violence, the pedophile rape and prostitution mentioned by Paul were inherently evil due to patriarchal inequality.  I am unconvinced Paul referred to Lesbian sex in his one instance that is sometimes interpreted as that. Despite what Luke Timothy Johnson has said about it, I think the scholars who make those distinctions are right that Paul never once conceived of equal, mutually loving and faithful same-sex love as a thing, I don't think he could imagine such a thing. What I'm talking about above is something that is not mentioned once in Scripture.
 

Stella Baltazar, FMM - Catholic Women Preach - Feast of the Ephiphany

 

Feast of the Epiphany

Stella Baltazar, FMM

Happy Feast of the Epiphany.

It is an experience of intercultural and collective bonding of the Magi.

Life is a manifestation of the waves of enthusiasm that inspires and impacts the shores of our thoughts and actions. The vision of the star by the Magi created an impacting contribution of opening up to  universal cosmic communion.

The liturgy of today is set at the backdrop of such meaningful and enriching symbols. The manger, the baby with his parents, the angels, and the shepherds play an enchanting role. Everything is interwoven into the tapestry of salvation.

The unfolding splendour of God and the ardently searching humanity comes alive in a cosmic splendour at the heart of today’s liturgy. Every movement is a “looking ahead” experience with new challenges. Yesterday’s success does not deserve today’s applause.

This feast is an invitation to march ahead and face  new challenges. The present must lead to a journey in community in search of a richer and fuller meaning. No hurdle can hinder the pursuit of our purpose towards the desired destination.

It is a call to humanity to  enter the circle of life and breathe as one. The journey of the wise men is an act of regeneration to a new existence. This is the discovery made by the Magi. Their keen observation of the natural signs and their sensitivity led them to the discovery of the divine manifestation on earth. At the same it unfolded the hidden  prejudices  and the fears of pharaoh. The strong king felt shaken by the birth of a child and his insecurity led him to go after the head of the child.

This experience of the Magi reveals the most interesting secrets of life. The stirring energy and the keen sensitivity of the kings propel them to rise and go in search of the extraordinary Child. Their focus on the purpose makes them forego their comfort and embrace the difficult path with readiness to face the risk. Life is built on letting go, embracing the cross, and moving toward the goal relentlessly. This experience prefigures the life of Jesus himself. It is an act of endurance and perseverance till the goal is attained.

The guiding star is the light in the depth of one’s heart. The clarity on the inner-directed purpose to build a humanity that embraces all humanity as a fraternal communion beyond caste, race, colour and continents. All children are world-class citizens, interwoven into one Humanity, interconnected and have the power of bonding as one human family.

The Epiphany is a prophetic time, a  gift of grace.  It unites the realities of  Nature, Human, and the Divine into a harmonious Unity.

I wish to share an experience: Trans-persons in our world are God’s gift to humanity. Yet, they are counted as abnormal and undesirable. For no fault of their own they are counted as misfits. It is time to be a healing presence, a comforting humanity, and a caring community.  This realization made us to go in search of them and create an ambience of fellowship and friendship holding hands.

On 8th Dec 2022, five trans-persons were invited to a fellowship meal with us. It was a moment of grace and an experience of God’s presence in our midst. It was overwhelming to dine with them in our community.  The sisters of our community were together and we felt that we were nurturing our communion together. That they are in no way different than us. Every human created by God is so unique and beautiful. They hold the image and likeness of God within them. Their loveliness, their care and concern are marvellous to see and enable us to appreciate and love them. In this context, we learn a new lesson that a caring and compassionate humanity that is in search of the truth: we must welcome and embrace.

The magi give us a lesson of multi-cultural communion, collective bonding, and risking one’s life to arrive at the desired destination.

From our settled foundations  we move in search of new meaning, new responses, and  new outcomes. This multicultural collaboration is our quest for the sacred revelation in the universe as spoken by the Prophet Isaiah that God’s Glory shines upon Jerusalem and that nations shall walk by Jerusalem’s light. The wealth of the nations shall be brought there with all proclaiming the praises of God. St. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, affirms that it was revealed to him that the gentiles are co-heirs, members of the same Body, and co-partners in the promise of Christ Jesus.  

This affirmation takes a step further to diagnose the place and role of women in the church which attains high importance since women are emerging from a silenced existence to a new active presence in the church and in the world.  The mine of undiscovered  treasure is found in this cave of silence. It is a new-found opportunity for women to express and validate their experiences.  Pope Francis’ call to synodality is a sign of newness that holds a great potential of innovation, articulation, and action. It is bound to turn the tide of a male-dominated church into an inclusive and complementary relationship. It affirms the giftedness of every culture and nation and recognises the newness that the Church can offer the world through women.            

The timely leadership of the women, like that of the Magi, coming from intercultural grounds opens a newness in the church that Christianity is an all-embracing communion. It opens the door to a combination of multicultural recognition, valuing every culture and gender as sacred and acknowledging the presence of the divine unfolding in the varied contexts of humanity. Therefore, the place for superiority, and favoured position are under suspicion.  The hermeneutic of suspicion could be applied in this regard. The church is in a continuous state of reformation. It is dynamic, active, and alive and therefore it is young.  It is hope-filled since the power of God is manifested and revealed irrespective of nationality or physical or cultural difference. All beings are sacred and are born of the God of love. They converge in that oneness.

The magi become ambassadors of the Gospel in distant lands. Today women realize this urgent mission of undoing patriarchal theology and to build an inclusive community of oneness. This was the revelation to St. Paul when he says that the gentiles are strengthened by the Word. One human being, Jesus, became a turning point to the rest of the world

Collective as bonding: another very important aspect of divine manifestations that the Good News is revealed and manifested to collectives of people. The three kings represent the continents of the earth.  The same message of God’s reign  of justice, human rights and equality - equal dignity of all persons -  is shared with all nations.  The kingdom pursuit is a collective enterprise. It is in togetherness we arrive at a celebrative community of oneness, a collective of differences that does not hinder our unity. They are co-partners in the promise of Christ Jesus.

The Synodal Process, initiated by Pope Francis, calls for a time of deep communion with humanity irrespective of origin, culture, diversity, and matter of faith. Every being is God’s design in this universe. No culture is superior nor inferior. All are God’s Children. Thus, no man-made difference can create neither superiority nor inferiority. In the pantheon of God’s creation every being is upheld as God’s gift.

In this sense, the male-female difference in the sacramental life of the Church stands questioned. The initiative of Vatican II has not been taken forward with vigour. The time is ripe that the church opens its portals for acknowledging the equality principle of the sexes and promote the practices which were prevalent in early Christianity, such as the Diaconate Ordination of Women as seen in Romans chapter 16 - St. Phoebe being the first Deacon in the Roman Church. It is high time that the church opens its doors to the active presence and participation of women in the Sacramental and liturgical life of the church.                  

Risking one’s life: The future that God offers is not security but the cross. It is an unexpected outpouring of the Spirit where the blind see, the lame walk;  it is a call to shed one’s secure foundation to a selfless gift. We are servants in the vineyard of the Lord.  The risk taken by the Magi is a great lesson of exploring the paths that cut across our paths. Along the journey of life we face these realities and are enabled to build on the strengths of each one as a community: self-knowledge is the basis of self-dignity. It enables the person to constantly move beyond the present to the attainment of the desired future.

May the new-born King, Jesus Christ, deign to grant us this blessing.  

Happy Feast of the Epiphany.

 

Oscar Levant - Sonatina

 

Raffi Besalyan -Piano

I wish I were feeling up to learning this.  I hadn't ever heard any of Levant's music before, he had a lot of talent. 

You Ask What I Think About Benedict's Death. I'll Tell You

NOW THAT HE HAS DIED there is a need to come to a real recognition that Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI was, administratively and intellectually a disastrous clericalist Vatican enforcer as the chief apparatchik under John Paul II and a pastoral disaster as Pope.  I answered some of the right-wing political praise of him at one of the putrid Bishop Barron's media sites that he was the most anti-pastoral Pope in living memory. I was unable to come up with one I thought was worse going back well into the 19th century. And that includes such as Pius X and XI.  

His stated intention of driving away Catholics who didn't agree with his narrow, rigid theological program, wanting a smaller "purer" Catholic Church was one of the few things he actually accomplished. The Catholic Church he filtered out was hardly pure, he had a way of keeping the crap and getting rid of the good. I don't think that, much as those who praised his theology might want it, you can segregate his life of action from his abstract thinking. I think the very abstraction of his theology was part of what made him such a disaster in pastoral terms.

In the Portland (Maine) dioceses, which I know best, he appointed a truly awful bishop who closed down the excellent diocesan newspaper in favor of a bland waste of ink on paper, shut down parishes, "consolidating" them into remote buildings that, at least in the cases I know of,  remote from the population they allegedly served and, in many cases, hardly counted as parishes at all.  

He closed the very active, very fully attended AND FULLY PAID OFF church here and sold the property.  I think it is because it served, largely, a blue-collar population instead of a more affluent coastal population.  He denied he did it to pay off the victims of child rapist priests, I doubt anyone believed him for a second.  The result is that Catholics in my town who want to attend mass regularly have to go to a neighboring parish, in another diocese where the priest isn't officially authorized to serve them and the one who is supposed to wouldn't know most of them from Adam or Eve.  I think one of the reasons Benedict wanted to drive away Catholics was that it was his solution to the acute shortage of priests, an alternative to opening up power to those who are called to be married.  

That bishop was later sent by Benedict to a larger diocese in Buffalo New York from which he was forced to resign when his role in the cover up of priest pedophiles, even his reinstating them to active ministry, became undeniable.  There are those who claim that started even before his appointment to Portland.  His criminality finally caught up with him and he was forced to resign under Good Pope Francis. In the mean time what he wrecked has certainly not be restored and won't be during any of our lifetimes.

I will say that what of Joseph Ratzingers' early theology I've read is interesting, though he shares the limits of the far better theologian Karl Rahner, that he was never willing to test established Catholic orthodoxy in a way that mattered, even when the knots of reasoning that forced are . . . forced.  While such theologians may come up with some interesting ideas about a number of things, there is a forced orthodoxy that makes those ideas less convincing than they may have been. The theologians attacked under Ratzinger (Benedict) who I have read, especially Hans Kung, are generally more convincing.   Though it reportedly upset him at the time, when Karl Rahner, in response to Kung's critique of the doctrine of papal infallibility said he was doing "liberal Protestant" theology instead of Catholic theology,  I think it was something of an unintended complement.

Most Catholics never read theology.   Benedict's theology is far from what is most important about his career, it will be him being the henchman of JPII and JP's cult of personality.  And JPII's re-centralization of power, the appointment of often corrupt and far too often incompetent. even corrupt yes-men as bishops .  And his own hypocritical and tragic papacy which, even as he attempted to correct some of the worst aspects of the papacy he served, especially JPII's horrific malfeasance in regard to priest child-rapists, he was too cowardly to either challenge or dismiss even some of the most corrupt Vatican criminals, clerical godfathers, many of them and their acolytes practitioners of the very sexual taboos that obsessed Benedict when it came to consenting, competent adults instead of involuntary victims.  From what I've read, there really was a hypocritical, closeted active gay clergy faction in both the JPII and Benedict XVI papacies as the leaked documents indicated.

One of the things I read this past week said Benedict as well as JPII had an absurdly  elevated and lofty concept of the Catholic priesthood. In my experience of priests, the good and the bad, you have to be willfully blind to hold such an unrealistic view of the priesthood.  Maybe I can thank my parish having a really awful priest while I was a teenager to thank for making that clear to me.  That is something that is too common among Catholics, especially priests and is something that is bound to come when all power is ultimately held by a clique of unmarried men who are ordained, a body which, in its effective majority, will always hold itself as superior.  The evidence against that is as overwhelming as the evidence for it is absent.  I have come to basically distrust any clergy which is solely unmarried and of one gender.  While there are good Catholic priests, the institution, itself, is rotten.

His most responsible act after JPII brought him to the Vatican was his decision to resign as Pope and even that he did in a damaging and half-assed way.  With the help of his physically beautiful Secretary Georg Gänswein (Gorgeous Georg) who Benedict was widely suspected of being in love with, he became a tool of the anti-Francis, overtly fascist opposition to the current Pope.  If it hadn't happened over so many years, so publicly, I might have suspected it was not something he consciously went along with.   He was not mentally incompetent and he was not isolated.  He could have stopped it at any time.  That reached a new depth when the aspiring Pius XIII, Cardinal Sarah, claimed a book he published to counter a key reform being contemplated by Pope Francis ordaining or reinstating married men to be allowed to serve as priests in ill served regions was co-written by the "Pope-Emeritus," something that Benedict denied.  Francis was forced by that stunt to remove Gänswein from his job in the Vatican (which he should never have had) which even Benedict understood was proof that Francis knew he couldn't trust him.  

As you can see, I'm not a great big fan of Benedict XVI, he did more to disillusion me with Catholicism than just about anyone other than John Paul II.  And, believe me, there were many before him, perhaps starting in my early childhood with that other infamous operator and center of a self-created personality cult, Cardinal Spellman .  I don't trust clergy who become the center of celebrity cults. The best ones don't.  

But I am a Catholic, officially I'm still counted as a member of the Catholic church, one of the estimated billion Catholics world-wide.  And as John Dominic Crossan, the heretical ex-priest said, to say he wasn't a Catholic made about as much sense as to say he wasn't Irish.  But I was never the kind of Catholic that the fans of the past two popes and such right-wing thugs as Raymond Burke and Robert Barron would approve.

When I first went online, for a number of years, I was very reluctant to discuss religion and was forced to do so primarily to criticize such people as I do above, on the other hand, and those who were enthusiastic about the atheism fad of the 00's.  

But as I learned more about why democracy was failing, as I understood that secular, liberal democracy is doomed by its materialistic ideological foundations, as I learned that equality, not some ill defined notion of "freedom" was the actual and only secure basis of democracy (freedom is equally AND RESPONSIBLY held or it is not free), I came to understand that even more basic to that was a specific RELIGIOUS foundation which had to be taken as surpassing any alleged scientific, rational, sociological, psychological or other ineffective and, ultimately, self-destructive framing of egalitarian democracy.  

In arguing with both the right wing religio-fascists and the secular materialist-atheist true believers in scientism, I came to understand that in the only place where such phenomena can be seen in nature, in human history, egalitarian democracy was intrinsically a development of Christian culture.   

I will also point out that in so far as "Christendom" has not been egalitarian and democratic, it has failed to be, in any way, worthy of the term "Christian."  That accounts for the majority of the history of "Christianity" with political power or de facto political influence. That rarity is no more discrediting of Christianity than the rarity and fragility of egalitarian democracy discredits it.

I came to be convinced that it may well be possible for egalitarian democracy to develop under other religious framings which held human equality as in intrinsic part of reality. I can think of a number which have the necessary prerequisite beliefs or which could develop those.  But it is a fact that in the United States, in Europe, the basic foundational ideas for egalitarian democracy are a product of the egalitarianism of the Golden Rule and other Scriptural statements which are its equivalent, in both the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures.  I have, through a large number of posts, traced that history going back to the earliest theologians, especially Gregory of Nyssa and even Paul and have traced the folly of the attempts by the secular left to establish and sustain them on the basis of scientism, secularism and atheism. I believe that other religious traditions have the potential to develop egalitarian democracy, I believe even more so that materialism, atheism is inevitably destructive of it.

I have especially shown that modernism has been a constant threat to egalitarian democracy.   Modernism is far more likely to produce what I call gangster government if pushed to its ideological ends.   I think the Catho-fascist condemnation of modernism is very ironic.

Right now, especially thinking of the things I've been writing about recently, the Scriptural basis of oppression and discrimination against the minority group I belong to, LGBTQ+ People, the double-standard and vile hetero-sexual injustice behind the very folk-tales that are cited in favor of that discrimination, blatant evil and injustice which has escaped moral discernment by Jewish and Christian, etc. theologians and clergy for millennia, the continued injustices of the Catholic and other churches, I wonder if maybe God sent us the neo-atheists and a period of the failure of faith - a sort of Christian destruction of the Temple and exile -  as a means of Christians and Jews and others, finally junking false lessons such as derived from the tales of Lot, the Levite who gave his concubine over to die by rape mob, the clear lack of understanding of moral and necessary same-sex sex degeneracy presented as morally, the subjugation of women, and a myriad of other things as a necessary correction of Christianity.  

I wonder if this might be God using godlessness to force us to choose the good in the Jewish and Christian traditions and to admit and renounce the bad in it.   I might, given time, find precedent in the Hebrew Prophets, maybe even in the very difficult and troubling letters of Paul.  

That isn't an idea I've worked and developed far but it is where my thinking is now, now that Benedict is finally removed as a focus of Catho-fascists rallying and organization.  I have read some of his apologists say that Benedict XVI was as confused and troubled by the American anti-Francis use of himself as he seemed to be whenever he faced right wing creeps.  One of his worst traits was his cowardice when he was faced with right-wing thugs and gangsters such as are still a majority in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and a number of Catholic billionaires here.  

It was noted by one of those he got fired from an editorship under him that he never acted decisively against the far right, even those who were clearly engaged in evil in the way that he never failed to do to even those who were moderately dissident in matters of theological abstraction.  I think that might be as good a real life model of what I'm thinking of as anything.  I used to say John Paul II was a good example of why it was a mistake to make someone with a theater background pope, I think Benedict might be a good example of why it might not be the best idea to put someone who spent the best part of their careers as an academic theologian in charge.  He was a bad Vatican power wielder, both as Cardinal and Pope, as much as others might want him remembered for his academic theology, that's not what was real about his career.

I hope God is merciful to him.  I say that because Francis has made reminding people of the virtue of mercy the center of his papacy.  I didn't feel moved to say it of any of the Vatican insiders any time during the papacies of JPII and Benedict XVI.  If being a good pastor is valued more than a media-created or billionaire astro-turf cult of personality, Francis will be more fondly regarded than either of his two predecessors.   He's had a positive influence on me, something that neither of them had.  That's what I think about it.

Charles Ives - Concord Sonata

 

 

Stephen Drury, piano; Jessi Rosinski, flute

I posted this several years ago saying it was the finest performance of this piece I've heard live or on recording and I still say that.  

I figure it's high time to start fulfilling my resolution to post more music again this year.   

And they get away with it.

I Said I Wouldn't Address Any More Hate Mail On This Till The New Year, Well, It's January 4th.

TRYING TO GET some grip on the subtle and detailed theology of Karl Rahner, sometimes it's clearer, or at least easier, to read what other theologians have written about it.  This passage from a paper, Karl Rahner and the Immortality of the Soul by Mark F. Fischer, has this interesting passage relevant to a bit of the hate mail that came in last month bridging what I said about religion and what I said about biology. The unadmitted similarity between the two is interesting to consider and fun to bring up.

The Immediate Creation of the Soul. This brings us to our second “catechetical” theme about the soul as created immediately by God, not produced by a child’s parents. This doctrine was taught in 1950 by Pope Pius XII but has a long history.  Scholastic theology held that God created each individual soul at the moment of its unification with the body, and rejected competing theories from antiquity, such as the teaching that the soul pre-existed, or emanated from the divine substance, or was generated by the child’s parents by means of “semen spirituale.”   The affirmation by Pius XII about the immediate creation of the soul took place in response to the polygenic theory of human evolution, that there were more than two “first parents.” Pius XII stated that faithful Catholics cannot accept the opinion that some human beings exist who did not trace their parentage back to Adam, or that the Biblical Adam merely represented a number of first parents.  Rahner proposed refinements to certain aspects of this teaching, and it is worthwhile to trace his thought.

The problem with polygenism is that it appears to undercut the doctrine of original sin. The Council of Trent taught that Adam’s first sin lost for him and his descendents both holiness and justice.  If there had been more than one first parent, then original sin would not have been transmitted to all, and human beings would exist who are untainted by Adam’s sin. To Pius XII, such speculation about polygenism seemed to erode the Church’s teaching.

I will point out that if Pius XII and, I'm guessing, the conservative German Jesuits who, it is reported, he regularly relied on to do his thinking for him had not considered that all human beings from shortly after speciation occurred (and there's really no good determination of when and what that would have been like) would almost certainly have been related to every other one of the new species. The population to mate with would have been very small and all of them would be interrelated to each other, before such a theorized speciation "event" and in the resulting new species.  That is certainly not something that is unknown as it's often asked by scoffers and believers alike where Cain's wife came from if she wasn't his sister. Not to mention Seth's. I sometimes wonder if that question being asked very early in the editing of the folk tales of Genesis might have led to the absurdly long life-spans claimed in the stories, to give the boys of later generations some cousins to marry instead of sisters.  Though it doesn't really work for that, either.  I will admit there are still fundamentalists and even "evangelicals" who choose to believe those life-spans are accurate reportage.  No honest believer believes that.  

This problem flowing from a misunderstanding that any of us is a result of a single line of inheritance might disappear if the idea of speciation wasn't so problematic, to start with. If you wanted there to have been a single human couple who were first ensouled by God, it couldn't have been more than a generation or several before the small number of their nephews and nieces mating with their children would have ensured that every subsequent human being would have such an Adam and Eve as ancestors.

That it may well have been German Jesuits educated in a naive 19th century conception of evolution who imagined up this problem wouldn't surprise me. The same naive conception of evolution born of British aristocratic snobbery was ubiquitous, it was the basis of eugenics and the Nazi's "racial hygiene" that had led to mass murder not five years before Pius laid down that doctrine.  That is a concept that didn't die even in science in the wake of the revelation of the Nazi genocides, it still is ubiquitous among college-credentialed people. I think it's probably something that is a given in the hegemony of the theory of natural selection.  It is rather stunning how shallow the thinking of the self-consciously truest of true believers can be about the very thing they will stake their respectability on.

It used to surprise me that that kind of cartoonish conception of evolution is ubiquitous among college credentialed folk, not only among some theologians but, also, many deputed scientists, some of them in topics in allegedly scientific evolutionary science.  What I have come to understand from my study of Dawinism is that it is not surprising if you look at how science really happens among actual, behaving human beings instead of the cartoonish idealized depiction of it which may, at times, be somewhat true in physics and chemistry when they deal strictly with what can be observed and measured. As soon as you get far from that, the idealized description of what science is becomes rapidly ever less true.

I suspect those scientists who consistently take that fact of interrelatedness as a basis of their thinking is a minority because it quickly becomes too complex to wrap your head around. It certainly fogs the idea of speciation which is legitimately plenty foggy to start with.  They certainly let that crude cartoonishness get taken as science without challenging it.  No doubt they'd save their derisive dismissal of the very same  idea when it is part of theological speculation.  

Theologically, I reject the problem because I reject the idea that only human beings have souls.  Jesus says that God is mindful of the lives and deaths of sparrows, even those hapless enough to fall into human's cruel hands and God is responsible for the splendor of wild flowers.  And what is in God's mind can be expected to be eternal. Jesus said that that is where human immortality lies, as well.  Human theologians might not believe that non-humans are significant enough to notice to start with but apparently Jesus thought they were, though he knew human beings weren't going to understand that. There are Old Testament citations that could be made as well.  And I absolutely reject the theory of inherited sin, which I'll get to in a while.  But first some more from the article:

Rahner never rejected monogenism in favor of polygenism.  But in his earliest article on the topic, published in 1954, he argued that monogenism is a metaphysical question. The concept of the “first man,” he wrote, “must not only be thought of as just temporally and numerically the first,” but must be understood metaphysically as “the transcendent humanity instituted by God.”  When the Church teaches that all human beings descended from Adam, it is not primarily making a natural-scientific argument. Rather, the claim pertains to metaphysics. Adamic descent means that the Biblical account of our first parents affirms the primacy of God as creator. The emergence of humanity was ultimately a divine act.

Twenty-seven years after his article of 1954, [and about sixteen years after the Second Vatican Council started the freeing of Catholic theology] Rahner returned to the doctrine of the “immediate” creation of the soul. He knew that Pius XII had insisted upon the soul’s immediate creation. The soul did not gradually evolve as primitive hominids became more human. No, said the pope, it was established in an immediate way, without the medium of human parents. This doctrine, Rahner suggested, is not meant to deny that human parents produce a human being. On the contrary, the doctrine must be understood metaphysically. God established a world, not in a one-time act of creation, but in a constant process of divine causality, that is, in a relationship that is being “continuously constituted” by God.  The divine causality, Rahner concluded, “can be identified with the ‘creation of the soul’ in the way in which Pius XII teaches.”  Rahner affirmed the teaching, showing that its deepest truth is not empirical but metaphysical.

I think Karl Rahner, who was always, self-consiciously, a CATHOLIC theologian, was struggling to make a papally set down doctrine cohere with what he knew as scientific knowledge and in the process he came to a useful distinction between things that can be understood on the basis of empirical, observed, knowledge and those things which can only be understood in a metaphysical manner, on the basis of thought,  but which frequently lack the possibility of observational confirmation.  

That is, of course, entirely related to my inconvenient observation about the fact that only the tiniest physical evidence of what and how evolution happened and what caused the myriads of later species to evolve will never, ever be available to inform our theories of it.

If you consider that "original sin," is a theory of human nature based on the fable of the forbidden fruit in Genesis 2 and given as an explanation of the Crucifixion of Jesus, it is a Just-so story told to explain human sinfulness and is taken as an explanation about the life and supposed fate of all of us, it's not that difficult to see that it's not only religious theologians who make the same mistake that Pius XII and his collaborators made, insisting on the nature of physical reality on the basis of an ideological theory, but, in fact, those deputed to be scientists in good standing make the same mistake.  But they call it "science."  And, having been ordained as scientists instead of ministers of religion, they get away with it.  

That's more true now than it ever was due to the Just-so storytelling  of, first, Darwinism and today's Darwinian fundamentalists (Stephen J. Gould's term)* currently among Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists who explain a myriad of allegedly typical human and animal behaviors based on fictional connections between us, through the vast and forever unknowable lines of common and divergent descent between us and radically remote species.  By "fictional" I don't mean known to be non-existent, I mean they are unevidenced except in the imaginations of those scientists and those who buy what they're selling. It is not unreasonable to theorize descent from a common ancestor for remote species on the basis of commonly held bits of our genomes, it is entirely unreasonable to believe that the expression of those does more than make certain proteins that have a far more complex expression in very different species which have little in common.  It's even more unreasonable to pretend that you can link those to such things as behavior which cannot be shown to have a genetic basis.  If you realize that "sin" is, in any human conception of it, just such a "behavior" the theory of "original sin" being inherited is not any different from what Richard Dawkins made his allegedly scientific career on, coming up with something not that dissimilar from what Pius XII did.  And with about as much physical evidence to base that in.

I think there's a lot more in common between the theologians wanting to uphold the theology of the Council of Trent and the Darwinisms of those who believe in natural selection as an all encompassing explanatory doctrine of biology.

To start with a popular pseudo-scientific assertion growing out of the popular (mis)understanding of science in evo-psy winch I've dealt with here before.

If you start with the realization that the theory of original sin is a biological theory of human evil doing, a propensity to act in certain ways inherited from our theorized first parents and an explanation of, other things, why we develop, live and die as we do, the similarity to materialist-atheist-scientistic theories allegedly finding the same kinds of things from the unobservable and undocumented past of our species (in evolutionary biology, that is extended far more ambitiously than in traditional theology, asserting far more tenuously and unfounded causes for that) becomes interestingly obvious.

In the past I've used the example of the emeritus professor of Psychology at the well-respected University of Toronto and latter day YouTube boy-cult quack Jordan Peterson, when he validated his sexist assumptions about the real right way that human males and females should act on the basis of how lobsters mate.  

I got into several online brawls on that where I was able to point out that if you wanted to look for such pseudo-evolutionary models for how human females were supposed to act, as well as human males, the common ancestor we share with lobsters we also share with preying mantises among whom it's not uncommon to observe females pull the heads off of males wanting to mate with them, which they will eat as the soon to be dead males' bodies copulate with them. No doubt a sociobiologist or evo-psych would notice such a dim witted male would not be selected out of the breeding population, no doubt they would say he was propagating his stupid genes which would have to be called "smart genes." Or would they be selfish-genes? In one of those brawls I also pointed out that that same common ancestor is shared with black widows in which females similarly kill males of the same species.  I could have mentioned such species as spiders in which the offspring devour their mothers.  I don't think most female biologists of my acquaintance would ever want to have the boys think that was a feature of sociobiology that should be followed, though I can imagine some of the boys being OK with that.

I will point out, to clarify, that I choose to believe there is such a common ancestor of us and our lobster cousins, I not only deny but am absolutely certain that we can't know anything more than that about them than that they may well have existed.  I am, in fact, more certain that we cannot actually know those details about that ancestor and what they may or may not have passed down on the divergent lines of their offspring than I am of its existence because we can know that there is no real evidence of those ancestors. For all any of us knows, if some future tit bits of remote evolutionary time are discovered, they may lead to a future scenario that we can't imagine based on what we do have available.

I am certain that Jordan Peterson's idiotic conception of the implications of common ancestry is ubiquitous among those in the pseudo-sciences but also among a lot of more genuine scientists who concentrate on the academic study of evolution than should make us feel comfortable.  Especially when it's a question of behavior and a naively materialistic conception of what behavior has to come from. I doubt that behavior is merely an epiphenomenon of our genes. I'd like to say real scientists are much better than the idiot psych profs but, really, when it comes to making up stories about what we can't see, they are his equal if not quite so stupid about it.  E. O. Wilson, a far closer to legitimate scientist wasn't really much more sophisticated when he asserted similarities among other species, including human beings, and the ants he studied.  That absurd extended, attenuated line of speculation became hegemonically influential since the rise of "evolutionary psychology" in the 1970s, growing out of some equally absurd theories of the 1960s.  It became influential because it provided an alleged scientific explanation of many things for which there is absolutely no evidence at all. It is based on seeming plausibility, not real physical evidence.  Plausibility is not the same thing as knowledge, horse feathers can seem plausible and still be entirely imaginary.  I'd guess there were those who really believed in Pegasus or in other flying horses of other pagan mythologies.

One of the things those all have in common, something they share with a literalist or fundamentalist reading of Genesis is that they rely on telling stories about an unobservable past and make up stories out of it so as to explain human behavior and human life now and to make assertions about that based on not only the unknown but the unknowable.  I will say this for the Catholic practice that Pius XII was engaged in, he didn't pretend what he was doing was science and even if he did, the likes of Karl Rahner quickly distinguished between what a Pope said on the basis of theological orthodoxy and science.  That is a correction which I have yet to see become influential in biological science.

In mocking the eminently mockable Jordan Peterson and his idiot boy-cultists, I pointed out that there is a general estimate that the ancestor we share with lobsters lived about a half-billion years ago.  If I'd had my wits more about me I'd have put it into the question of how many generations of our direct ancestors that would have been.  It would certainly be in the tens or hundreds of millions. It would be a certainty that no matter what imagined species each member of that line every one of the belonged to, every one of them would have reached reproductive age and successfully reproduced.  My computer calculator, dividing 500 million by the 33.3 years definition of a human generation leads me to believe that that number of generations at that ridiculously long  definition of an average generation length in this problem  would be 15,015,015 generations.  If you consider that it is quite likely most of those generations for most of those species would be quite a bit smaller the numbers of those generations is far higher. If the average length of those generations was three years (I'm guessing that's still very long as such an abstracted "average"), that would be 166,666,666+- generations between us and our common ancestor with the lobsters. 

Among other things, I think the commonly held belief that "natural selection" was the one thing responsible for and the ultimate explanatory framing for understanding the successful sustained lives and reproduction of all those spectacularly varied species, sub-species, smaller groupings and individuals of those spectacularly different variations is absurd. I don't think, even as a thought experiment, you could possibly maintain a believe that there was any one "thing" like natural selection that was the knowable "force" or "mechanism" that explains that success AND THE FAILURE AS WELL because it is implausible based on the certain stupendous variability of the reality of those lives, instead of the scientific cartoon simplification of the problem.  I think it is as grandiose a claim of science as even the most outlandish claims of some of the dodgier of fundamentalist religion.  

That is, of course, a number of generations that even the best of science cannot validly guesstimate, at least I can't find that anyone has made such a guess at it.  Since those generations would have included a myriad of members of different species with very different numbers of years or months or weeks of life expectancy and reproductive maturity, most of which have certainly not left a single resolvable fossil for scientists to make up stories about, we have absolutely no basis for judging how like or unlike that entirely unknown shared ancestor the bodies of those ancestors of all of us were like or, as much or ever more so, how they behaved, how they lived, their habits, their success or failure to succeed, how many "by the skin of their teeth (or mandibles)" narrow escapes our line of life must have had, now many innumerable random chance events in which their survival or reproductive success had absolutely nothing to do with biological inheritance in why their line of life continued past them as individuals.

And, it's worth pointing out that whichever enormous number of generations that would get us back to that common ancestor would be, there is another unknowable and almost certainly far different number of generations that produced on the other branch that produced modern lobsters, mantidae, etc.  I think it can be confidently said that the two numbers of generations wouldn't be nearly the same but they would certainly be large numbers of entirely unknowable species and individuals. I think it's very reasonable to expect that the number would be far more than twice the number of generations in the line that includes us.

That such a relatively reliably estimated biological trait as the number of months or years to reproductive maturity is so drastically different among those species is strong evidence that something so unreliable as reported or, really, imagined "behaviors" and grotesquely unevidenced and entirely not obvious speculations of how those were inherited as vaguely but confidently asserted "genetic traits" should be about the biggest warning sign in science.  The idea that science could possibly discern such a thing as a "common behavior" within that maze is far more absurd than the most absurd assertion made by Pope Pius XII in 1950, his metaphysical speculation being dealt with by a young theologian four years later and now of little to no influence in Catholicism.  I never heard of it in well over sixty years when I might have heard about or seen evidence of it. I doubt many Catholic theologians ever heard of it, either unless they read that part of Rahner's enormous oeuvre.

* Certainly it's an indication of the impossibility for an informed scientist to be a strict Darwinist by the time Gould flourished. It's certainly true that many, perhaps most Darwinists have been of the fundamentalist type, certainly within the popular understanding of science, that's the case.  It's perhaps appropriate that as a representative of the naive, fundamentalist Darwinism that Dawkins was given that seat of atheist atheology at Oxford funded by a cyber jillionaire, to promote just such a naive "public understanding of science."  I suspect the theory of natural selection will, eventually, if we live long enough as a species, be scrapped and the past hundred sixty years will be seen as a quaint and dangerous folly. Though many findings of biology not dependent on the unseeable, unknowable, forever lost past will stand far longer.  It's regrettable how atheist ideology has forced what should have been a minor interest area in biology into such a waste of time and effort.  
 

"you keep saying that" - Hate Mail

IT WOULD BE ridiculous to be going over Sodom and Gomorrah and Judges 19 repeatedly except that S&G is being brought up repeatedly to attack marriage equality.  I get the feeling they weren't aware of Judges 19 till I mentioned it.  The funny thing is that as soon as I bring up what Jesus had to say about remarriage after divorce being adultery, they don't want to take that passage to mean what it says.  It's always different when you're in the majority and can get theologians to revise those kinds of issues away.  Even the Catholic hierarchy does it without admitting it does it. 

Maybe I should do a series going through every one of the Scriptural passages used to condemn LGBTQ equality and note what else the books that contain them condemn because over and over again those things were changed to suit the straight, or wealthy or powerful as they insisted that the anti-LGBTQ passages were set in stone forever.  Of course that's been done before but it might be handy to have the list available to throw at the hypocrites.

It might help if I formally state as the only hermenutical position I am going to tolerate is one that takes the Golden Rule and the "by their fruits you will know them," methods of evaluation of the meaning of passages as the supreme means of judging Scripture from now on.  I take those as being absolute and eternal truths and they were as true during the period of Genesis as they are today and forever.  And I've got no reason, at all, to pretend I can't see when things in Scripture violate those absolute reference points because it's obvious that enormous parts of Scripture does.  No one in the entire period after the Scriptures were put into a fixed form and became canonical has not ignored parts of it on that basis of internal contradiction.  I have no reason to pretend it is all true.

Neither am I going to give up the good because it's considered impolite or scandalous to read Scripture as if it really is important enough to read critically and skeptically.   

For now, this is as far as I want to go with this because I'm hoping to get back to regular posting this month. 

What is really funny is that I'm in favor of all marriages being equal to the best of marriages, faithful, mutually supportive, enduring and based in love.  AND ANY CHILDREN BORN OF THEM TO BE FULLY AND RESPONSIBLY SUPPORTED AND RAISED.  I want Lesbian and gay marriages to be the best kind, something which straight people don't seem to much aspire to, these days.  I get flack for being old fashioned on that count.  Though there's nothing old fashioned about that, it never gets old.

Whole Lotta More Lot And An Even Bigger Asshole - How Scripture Will Have To Be Used If It Is To Survive

Still getting flack from those Sodom and Gomorrah posts

LOT HAD NO RIGHT to offer his two little girls to be gang-raped as an alternative to the two angels who were visiting him and who were about to rain fire and brimstone down on the town where Lot lived.  Lot had a right to offer himself to be gang raped, if he had any right to offer up victims to the mob of men at all.  You'll notice that neither he nor the unnamed Levite in the clear recycling of the folk-tale to give an excuse for a bloody civil war in Judges 19-20 are ever questioned as to why they saved their own asses by offering girls up to mobs of male rapists.  The Levite in Judges is even a bigger asshole than Lot because the crowd not only raped his concubine to death, when he woke up in the morning and saw her dead body lying on the door step, he ordered her to get up because he was ready to go on his way. Perhaps he'd enjoyed the hospitality he was offered so much to have it trouble his mind. According to Scripture, he slept away the night as his concubine was being raped to death outside.   No doubt the implication made at the start of the tale, that she had not been faithful to the Levite, is seen as her having deserved it.   If you didn't figure this story is told from a typical straight-guy POV.

I'll point out that when Lot offered up his little girls to suffer a similar fate the two angels don't point out to him that he's doing something wrong.  If nothing else in the story tells you there's something entirely screwy about using the tale as a guide to what "God's unchanging moral law is" for the purpose of forbidding the faithful marriage of two fully competent, consenting adult men or Women to marry, it is that the alleged agents of God's moral retribution fail to tell Lot that he shouldn't be offering his little girls to be raped to death, nor do they warn him that he shouldn't get plastered and rape them, himself, not many verses along in the story.  Some angels, huh? 

I'll also note that in the Sodom and Gomorrah stories, though it was gangs of men who committed the crimes, women and children were obliterated as a consequence, no doubt, if they thought about women and children at all, the scribes and editors and commentators would certainly have figured even children too young to have moral discernment or even language would have been obliterated as, in fact, Lot's wife was when she didn't offer anyone up to be raped and wouldn't share in her husbands crimes after her death.  From now on no hermeneutic that doesn't ask what happened to the Women and Girls who the men don't mention in the text should be considered to be legitimate.

Those two pieces of Scripture (and I only use the capital as a courtesy, not because I think those passages reveal the mind of God) are and always have been too immoral, themselves, to guide a Christian's moral judgement. It is a serious indictment of the process and character of "Scripture" that those questions have not figured decisively in the understanding of those stores.  

One of the greatest things that Christianity accomplished was the elevation of children, especially female children to the status of persons instead of chattels of their fathers.  The ubiquitous practices of infanticide, of child rape, of children being prostituted, etc. that characterize the pagan cultures of the Mediterranean regions and elsewhere being somewhat destroyed by Christianity is one of the most convincing arguments that can be made in favor of the truth of Christianity.  

Either it is a father's absolute moral duty to protect his children from, among other things, gang rape, now, in the future and in the past, or it is not moral duty today and no father has such an obligation.  Either it is and always has been wrong for a father to have sex with their daughters or it is not.  And if you entertain the idea that it wasn't then, you should not have access to children without court supervision by responsible adults. And that's just a tiny bit of what's wrong with that use of Sodom and Gomorrah and Judges 19 in any argument about morals for anyone. especially faithfully committed, consenting, adult gay men.  

That the idolatry of Scripture has not allowed such questioning of those passages, and similar ones, and their clear identification as morally depraved and of no use to determining how we should live now shows how with just how little seriousness the truth of the Law and the Prophets, do to others what you would have them do to you, is taken.  I think Jesus was speaking with divine authority when he said that, I think that a similar conclusion is attributed to the great exponent of Jewish law, Hillel, should lead to the conclusion that any part of Scripture that contradicts that is false.*  Either the Golden Rule is true for all time as the will of God, as I believe it is, or those parts of Scripture which don't promote that are a refutation of it as eternal Law.  

You put that together with "by their fruits you will know them," as the absolute standard of moral discernment in light of The Law and the Prophets and the entire case against faithful, committed, free and competently entered into gay and Lesbian marriage is demolished.  Even identifying those with the depravity of all-male rape mobs who don't appear to have been gay in Genesis and who were obviously not in Judges with faithful same-sex marriage is bearing false witness, another breach of a very serious Commandment.

I don't think that Scripture can retain that status without that critique AND WITHOUT THOSE CHOICES EXPLICITLY BEING MADE FROM NOW ON.  

I think we are going to have to choose on the basis of those Commandments which passages that were inserted into Scripture by the many, many hands that wrote down and edited and commented and assembled those written Scriptures that come down to us because without making those choices, the truth in them are going to be discredited by not only the presence of those but the evil results of them in history.  The Scriptural arguments for the subjugation and harm of Women, the Scriptures used to oppress, discriminate against and murder LGBTQ+ People, those which were used to establish chattel slavery even in its most evil forms,should be used to identify the false passages of Scripture which should be made infamous for their falseness.  That must be done no matter what the vintage and pedigree of those are because they clearly contradict the real Law and real Prophesy and the real Gospel.  

Clearly no one needs to take any argument that sets up what Lot and the unnamed Levite did as having anything to do with today's marriage equality seriously.   The asshole isn't even presented as having been married to the woman he threw to the wolves to save his own ass, he kept her as a concubine.   I wish those who have argued for marriage equality had gone through those to see just how morally corrupt they are.  Especially Lot and the unnamed Levite who seems to have been a totally asshole as well as a self-indulgent idiot.  I'll bet the reason his concubine fled to her father's house was because the asshole beat her.  Though, of course, that wouldn't have made it into the story.  

* In preparing this, I tried to find out how reliable the provenance of what Hillel is said to have said is and am left wondering why the same standards that are used in terms of Christian manuscripts aren't used to question the sources for him and the others recorded in the  Pirkei Avot .  

I wonder if anyone has ever wondered if the attribution of the negative statement of the Golden Rule to Hillel was due to it having been said earlier in the Christian Gospels.  I wouldn't be surprised if a great Rabbi had come to that conclusion, I'm not questioning its authenticity but I have read it claimed that the Gospel writers were cribbing Hillel in that attribution of the positive statement of The Golden Rule to Jesus, on those grounds.  I think fairness demands that the rules that are habitually applied to Christian sources as a means of debunking those must be applied to all other texts with a similar and, sometimes, even less well documented provenance.  That includes those which are pagan and secular (just how anachronistic is that category for that time?) as well as those which are religious.  

I think the mess that Scripture and its commentary are leaves us with no alternative but to choose what we believe is authoritative and what we are forced to reject on the basis of what we believe to be the Truth of God. I think that's how Scripture has always been used in practice, no matter what lip-service is paid to the daffy notion that it is a consistent and entirely true whole.

Coventry Carol 2 - Truth That's Deeper Than The Mere Facts

RMJ has written a very fine post on this.  

AN INTELLECTUAL RUCKUS IS MADE every year about the birth narratives of Jesus in Luke and Matthew being so different and pointing out that none of what is said in them can be confirmed to have happened. The census, the slaughter of the children, etc.  Though it's become so rote a ruckus that it should be considered untellectual by now.

Even those who are supposed to be academics don't much fact check themselves on the neo-pseudo-pagan anti-Christian liturgies these days. It's not as if there's any professional price to pay if they get that wrong.  I will mention in passing that most of the history of that period, earlier and later is similarly undocumented but no one will seriously question it.

While it might be reasonable to figure that something so profitable to rulers as a census for purposes of taxation as in Luke's narrative might have left evidence which survived, anyone who thinks something as routine as the Matthew Gospel's ordered massacre of a bunch of babies of poor people would survive in historical records has an extremely naive view of how power is still routinely wielded by the rich and so powerful and what they figure is worth keeping records of. Routine murder of poor children is still too routine to matter much.  The recording of history and what gets paid attention to is a question of what those in a position to do that really value and it's still mostly money.  The United States can't even manage to change the damned Constitution to prevent even the murder of middle-class children in their schools and it's become so routine as to have no effect, whatsoever.  And we're supposed to be a republic.

I think, though, the assertion that the slaughter of the innocents is undocumented so is merely a myth gets it wrong in what is the most important way.   I think that of all of the birth narratives, the slaughter of the innocents and the family fleeing into Egypt, the El Norte of that time and place, is absolutely documented and it isn't because we can be any more certain that the actual family of Jesus experienced it.  But, I will speak up for an even standard in academic proclamations and note that even the single attestation in the Gospel of Matthew lends weight to something like that having happened even if you don't believe in astrology or significant, prophetic dreaming.  There is certainly nothing unbelievable in the general outline of the story.  A known to be murderous king coming to believe an unspecified new born baby in a specific town is a danger to his rule and his dynasty ordering his thugs to kill all the babies in that district, a parent finding out the danger and fleeing with their children. The modern fashion in historical speculation says that the actual number of such babies in such a town wouldn't be the numbers imagined by renaissance and baroque painters, more like what the peasants of 1970s Nicaragua discussed  in The Gospel At Solentiame, as they could understand the Gospel on this better than almost any American or Brit academic expert could.*

Despite the vulgar significance at the heart of that academically trivial and pointless responsible, modern obsession, that exercise in scholarly responsibility doesn't get near the heart  of the two birth narratives.  As that sermon by Bishop Gene Robinson noted, not everything has to have happened for it to be true, that is if by "truth" you mean having a coherent and important  true meaning instead of being an objective report on something that had happened in pedestrian, abstract clerical reporting.

As I've said last week, my preferences tend to be with Luke's interpretation with frightening angels telling very low status shepherds about the most significant event in human history, the birth of the Son of God, of God choosing to become incarnated as a human being - no one understands the Incarnation - and them having the faith to go look for him in an animals shed, sleeping in the feed trough. I contrasted that to the wise men with their three Christmas presents, though Matthew doesn't specify that the child was a baby and may well have been more of a toddler by the time they caught up with what their astrology told them was going on with the Jews.  Too bad their astrology didn't tell them Herod was a complete rotter.

But there is an aspect of Matthew's account we can be certain was absolutely true in the Gene Robinson way, the attempt of Herod to kill him, showing that from the start the baby who was to have the future of Jesus would be a danger to earthly power and would be the object of their murderous violence as soon as they found out about him.  He could well have been the victim of their uninformed, routine violence, anyway.  The Crucifixion of Jesus under the Romans is the final proof of the truth of Matthew's perhaps symbolic nativity story of the three astrologers and their symbolically portentous gifts. The accounts in Matthew are true in the most important way.  Certainly it's more important for human experience.  That event has been  repeatedly reenacted and expanded on. How much truth would there have been in an accurate live-birth record as found all round the United State these days as compared to the perennial truth of Matthew's scary Christmas stories?   How much would the record of a live birth be an important truth as opposed to the life of the child that followed that birth?  Just what is truth supposed to be good for, in the end?

Herod is Trump putting babies in concentration camps to keep his power through appealing to racism and hate and his media and the Republican-fascist party supporting him, many of them those "evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics."  He is Trump denying Covid-19, advocating Darwinist "herd immunity" sacrificing so many more babies and children than Herod had available to murder.  Herod is the entire Republican-fascist caucus of the Congress and the majority on the Supreme Court. And that's just here in one country.  Herod has led most of the world for most of history, including the so-called Christian world.  Imagine how different things would have been if people had taken him more seriously.  The secular world hankers for a time when even fewer people will take him seriously. Even the alleged left.

That other story in Matthew 25 in which Jesus, himself, identifies the least among us as being enough of a of God so that what we do for them we do to God and what we neglect to do, we neglect to do for God. Poor children aren't in that list as given in Matthew 25 but they would certainly have been the least of the least as they are now and for every age in the past and will be into the future as it looks now.  Children are marked out for murder by oppressive worldly power, they are certainly marked out for the violence of poverty, for neglect, they are the targets of official and unofficial violence, for both the violence of the state and the other worldly powers of organized crime, some of that organized crime conducted by other children.  And just as the parents of Jesus, Mary and Joseph are so terrified for the life of their child, they were forced to leave their homeland to save his life, just as so many are fleeing from the Herods of Central America and Eastern Africa and the Middle East and Ukraine and in so many places that none of us could come up with an adequate list.

All of those "white evangelicals" (we aren't supposed to notice the ones who aren't fascists) and in many cases their fellow "traditional Catholics" who participated in Trump's and earlier Republican-fascists use of those fleeing violence in Central America were reenacting Herod's side of the story, they still do and for exactly the same reasons.  

The blasphemy of those who mouth "Jesus Christ" or "The Bible" as they worship Mammon and take on the mark of the antichrist is unremarked in the nice, polite Christianity of the mainline churches and Catholicism, indeed, the majority of those incumbent in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are fully in on the act as are those billionaires and millionaires who fund the "trad-catholic" corruption that is engaged in a hostile take-over of the Catholic Church.

And that doesn't get to the foremost murderers of Children, killers of their souls, their lives if they achieve adulthood, the specters terrorizing their parents, their physical and spiritual welfare, murderous, self-satisfied neglect, addiction, sex trafficking.  Poverty is its basis.

That truth is one that you won't read or hear any snark about but it is a far more important truth than whether or not Matthew would have gotten an A in a properly conducted history class while a critique of the historicity of the most pedestrian facts of his Gospel would get the top grade. We know it's accurate history of THIS child because what this child said about the Least among us and that what we do and neglect to do for it we do to God and the consequences of that action or inaction would be the gravest alternatives we will ever provoke in our lives.  But that is held to be less important than getting his hometown right and date of birth accurate.  The real truth is Jesus was born last week in the Congo, in North Korea, in El Salvador, in Ukraine, in Somalia.

If she were close enough, her or his single-mother will have to make the flight into America's Pharaonic regime maybe as soon as they can travel, maybe the baby's father will go with them but quite likely not.  Mary was lucky she had a husband who stuck by them and who could.  The Supreme Court and the Republican-fascists in Congress, FOX with its mythical war on Christmas are Herod.  So are the gangs they'll be fleeing. So is every member of the Republican-fascist party.  And what you can say about that incarnation of The Lord, you can also tell in stories of so many places it will make you weep. And you can even weep more for the children, infants, toddlers, older children and least among us adults who are the victims of the ever reincarnated Herod power among us.  It doesn't get any truer than the most significant of real history, a narrative that is continually re-happening right before our eyes and which is the only history that matters because we have some power to do something about it.

* I will point out how acceptable "ethics" talk about killing babies after birth is and generally has been since the second half of the 19th century.  I am unaware of any "ethics" professor, any biologist, any medical guy ever being fired for advocating the killing of babies.  In the ever widening game of "I can take an even more extreme stand," which is as much a part of competitive academics as it is in degenerate politics, there are perfectly respectable and respected "ethicists" who have toyed with the assertion that parents should get to have their children killed if they don't measure up to their standards.  I'm not aware of anyone ever getting canned for that.  I'll bet someone who asserted the accuracy of Matthew's accounts would be looked more askance at than even the most infanticidal "ethics" faculty would.  If I were online as much as I used to be I'd make up a faculty identity so I could access academic publications to see what the status of that issue is in academic scribblage is these days. 

Compare:

In ghetto settings, Jewish children died from starvation, disease, and a lack of adequate clothing and shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to the high death rates. They considered most of the younger ghetto children to be unproductive and hence “useless eaters.” Because children were generally too young to be used for forced labor, German authorities often selected them, the elderly, ill, and disabled, for the first deportations to killing centers, or as the first victims led to mass graves to be shot.

I am, of course, obliged to point out that I'm talking about post-partum murder of children, not access to abortion which is an entirely different matter which I've dealt with, favoring legal, accessible, medically safe abortion and universal education and availability of effective, scientific contraception. That and education in how to avoid STDs belongs in every school from earlier than kids are going to be screwing around.  Anyone who claims to be against abortion who isn't for that is a liar.  
 

Fats Navarro Move

 

Fats Navarro, trumpet; Don Lanphere, tenor sax; 

Linton Garner, piano; Jimmy Johnson, bass; Max Roach, drums.

My resolution for the new year is to post more music. 

Magnificat in C - George Dyson

 

Treble Choir of St. Paul's, Houston.

Noël, Grand Jeu et Duo n°10, Louis Claude Daquin

 

Olivier Latry organist

Noel Notre Dame de Paris - A babe is born William Mathias / Improvisation Olivier Latry

 

 

Noel à Notre-Dame de Paris
Maîtrise Notre-Dame de Paris
Henri Chalet Chef de Choeur
Yves Castagnet Orgue de Choeur
Olivier Latry Improvisation Grand-Orgue

Luke and Matthew Are More True Than Accurate History Could Be - Why I Choose To Be A Christian

It is not historical criticism, searching for the essential message, which has emptied the Christmas message and the Christmas feast of meaning, but on the one hand the trivialization of these things, reducing them to a romantic idyll, a cosy private affair, and on the other hand the superficial secularization and ruthless commercialization.  As if the "holy infant so tender and mild" - not indeed in Luke and Matthew, but in the holy pictures - were always smiling and never cried in his very human misery (which is indicated, without any social-critical protest, by the crib and the swaddling clothes).  As if the Savior of the needy, born in a stable, had not clearly revealed a partisanship for the nameless ones (shepherds) against the great ones who are named (Augustus, Quirinius).  As if the Magnificat of the grace-endowed maid, about the humiliation of the mighty and the exaltation of the humble, about satisfying the hungry and sending away the rich, were not a militant announcement of a revision of priorities.   As if the lovely night of the newborn child meant that we could ignore his work and his fate three decades later and as if the child in the crib did not already bear on his brow the mark of the cross.  As if already in the announcement scenes (the center of the Christmas story) before Mary and the Shepherds - as later in the process before the Jewish tribunal, the complete profession of faith of the community were not given expression by bringing together a number of the majestic titles (Son of God, Savior, Messiah, King, Lord) and by ascribing these titles to this child instead of the Roman emperor here named.  As if here instead of the illusory Pax Romana, brought by increased taxes, escalation of armaments, pressure on minorities and the pessimism of prosperity, the true peace of Christ were not announced with "great joy," founded on a new order of interpersonal relationships in the spirit of God's friendship for man and the brotherhood of men.

It is in fact obvious that the apparently idyllic Christmas story has had real social-critical (and, in the broadest sense, political) implications and consequences.  This is a peace opposed to the political savior and the political theology of the Imperium Romanum which provided ideological support for the imperial peace policy, it is a true peace which cannot be expected where divine honors are paid to a human being and an aristocrat, but only where God is glorified in the highest and he is well-pleased with man.  We need only to compare Luke's Christmas Gospel with the Gospel already mentioned of Augustus at Priene to see how the roles here are exchanged.  The end of wars, worthwhile life, common happiness, in a word complete well-being, man's "salvation" and the world's - are expected no longer from the over-powerful Roman Caesars but from the powerless, harmless child.

Within the scope of the present work, these few references must suffice to confirm the fact that these infancy stories correctly understood are anything but innocuous, edifying accounts of the child Jesus, based on profound theological reflection, to be used in a carefully planned proclamation, seeking to portray artistically, vividly and in a highly critical light the true significance of Jesus as Messiah for the salvation of all the nations of the world:  as Son of David, and the new Moses, as the commentator on the Old Covenant and the initiator of the New, as Savior of the poor and as true Son of God.  Here then is obviously not the first phase of a biography of Jesus or a precious family history.  It has much more the character of a Gospel;  a message of invitation, according to which the Old Testament promises are fulfilled in Jesus, the chosen one of God, who did not provide any detailed political prescriptions and programs, but in his very existence, in his speech, action and suffering, set up an absolutely concrete standard at which man in his individual and social action can confidently aim.  

Hans Kung: On Being Christian p 452-453