"man's" commitment to the Torah as decisive for the well-being of the world

AT THE START of the third chapter of his book, Walter Brueggemann says:

The Old Testament yields a peculiar and important notion of humanness.  Scholarship, moreover, has used great energy in articulating what used to be called "an Old Testament understanding of man."  Furthermore, in contrast to the several ideologies of modernity, much that the Old Testament has to say about human personhood is strikingly odd.  There is a reason for the oddness of Israel's testimony about humanness, a reason that has not been noticed and appreciated often enough.   The oddity, I suggest, stems from the fact that the Old Testament has no interest in articulating an autonomous or universal notion of humanness.  Indeed, such a notion is, for the most part not even on the horizon of Old Testament witnesses."

I'll break in here to say that the modern superstition that we are capable of coming up with universally applicable policies or even notions of the enormously diverse human population, whether through the pseudo-sciences of psychology, sociology or anthropology or the semi-pseud-sciences that use the prefixes "neuro" or "cognitive" is just that, superstition.  If the alternative of  seeing human beings through the lens of a relationship with God seems to be absurd, it is no more absurd than the idea that science can provide something to focus on using the tools of science which, in any case, don't work on what it can't observe with any reliability.  That the Old Testament practice doesn't try that is, it seems to me, a step up in doing so with some honesty.  If you reject its method of using history and human experience and prophetic insight on the basis of those not being scientific, well, neither is the science that claims to substitute scientific method for that.  

But it goes farther than that and is more basic.  What right thinking person in the United States in 2023 could object to universal human autonomy?  That is the central argument for Women's ownership of their own bodies, of LGBTQ+ equality, of the dignity and rights of People of Color and other subjugated People.  But all of those political issues are dealing with People subjugated by other People, the unequal, all too human and so always at risk of injustice which is always present when that is arises from human choice. The need to assert autonomy is against human injustice and subjugation, whether by political powers or institutional powers or church hierarchies, etc.  The Jewish Scriptural conception of God is different.  The God who I find ever more credible as I look farther into Scripture and the kind of commentary I quote.  That God, not the all-too-human gods of classical paganism or modern "New Age" romantic recreation of those, can be trusted to be just and so considering personal rights and justice in even our flawed human perception of this God that is a huge step up in what we can depend on.  Issues of human autonomy at the very least will fall into the background when considering our life with such a God as Walter Brueggemann lays out in this book.  That may be why:

The Old Testament has no interest in such a notion , because its articulation of what it means to be human is characteristically situated in its own Yahwistic, covenantal, interactionist mode of reality, so that humanness is always Yahwistic humanness or, we may say, Jewish humanness.  The Old Testament, for the most part, is unable and unwilling - as well as uninterested - to think outside the categories and boundaries of its own sense of YHWH and YHWH's partner.  As a consequence, the primary categories of Israel's faith - sovereignty, fidelity, covenant, and obedience - pertain for this topic as well, Israel makes tis  claim for all human persons, including those well beyond its own community.  Thus Emmanuel Levinas is correct when he writes in his own mystical, lyrical way of the human person:

"But his soul, which Genesis 2:7 calls divine breath, remains near the Throne of God, around which are gathered all the souls of Israel, i.e., Iwe must accept this terminology!) all the souls of the authentically humna humanity, which is conceived in Hiam of Volozhen as being subsumed beneath the category of Israel. . . . Hence, there is a privileged relationship between the human soul, the soul of Israel, and God.  There is a connaturnalitly between man and the manifold entirety of the creature on the one hand, and a special intimacy between man and Elohim on the other."

Levinas goes on to speak of "man's" commitment to the Torah as decisive for the well-being of the world.

Such an odd linkage between the human and Israel does not mean  that the Old Testament yields nothing beyond Jewishness.  Nor does it mean that Jewish persons are superior human beings.  It means, rather, that in the Old Testament all human persons are understood as situated in the same transactional processes with the holiness of YHWH as is Israel,  so that in a general way the character and destiny of human persons replicates and reiterates the character and destiny of Israel.  This transactional process causes a biblical understanding of human persons to stand at a critical distance and as a critical protest against all modern notions of humanness that move in the direction of autonomy.  This means that when the Old Testament speaks of the human person, its primary and inescapable tendency is to think first of the Israelite human person, from which all others are extrapolated.  

How far does that go beyond any secular notion of human autonomy which can never find an explanation of its origin?  It's the ultimate justification of and legitimate articulation of it WITHIN THAT HUMAN AND GOD RELATIONSHIP.  I would go so far as to say any notion of it outside of that acknowledgement of our origin in God is a flimsy substitute for the real thing bound to prove more damaging than merely useless, in the end.   The presumptuous concept of humanism, the idea that "man is the measure of all things" especially in its modern secular (not to say antireligious) form is absurdly inadequate as compared to this Scriptural conception of what it is to be human in relationship with God. 

. . . its primary and inescapable tendency is to think first of the Israelite human person, from which all others are extrapolated, is something which so many who misread the conception of the "chosenness" of the Children of Israel in the Bible as it would be read outside of that context, the way that "American exceptionalism,"  French Chauvinism, and any other myriad expressions of vainglory and ranking of human beings on the basis of nationality would have it.  The idea from the first time that Scripture presents God as setting Abraham and his descendants apart gives them the responsibility of being an example of holiness to the world from whom "all nations" will learn the way.   There is all the difference between that and the "White man's burden," slogan of British imperialism, "making the world safe for democracy," under America's military hegemony, and many other such national myths which don't go through the pretenses of a pantomime of moral responsibility.

You can compare that to the foremost model of modernism which I have devoted so much time to exposing and attacking, the Darwinian-Malthusian separation of human beings on the basis of their "biological fitness," really their economic utility and the ranking of humans on an individual scale up to and including the ranking of entire "races" and other crude, unscientific and often entirely imaginary human groupings.  That would be on the basis of their autonomous existence as opposed to their relationship to God.  That notion of human beings is inevitably anti-egalitarian, inevitably hierarchical in ways that the Old Testament is generally not.  As I've mentioned in these posts, one of the things that brought me back to believing the Hebrew Scriptural monotheistic tradition was its acknowledgement that not only all humans. even nationalities who oppose, invade and colonize The Children of Israel and who hold them in captive exile but "all flesh" shares in that relationship to God which exceeds materialistic, atheistic notions of such autonomy and which has possibilities undreamed of by modernism with its idolization of science above other ideas.  

I have pointed out any number of times how when that supremely clever man, the young Thomas Jefferson was tasked with explaining the right of Americans to be free of the British monarchy, a man of current fashion who must have hated to have to make resort to our endowment of a right to such autonomy by God had no alternative but to make that argument that God was the source of human rights, the one who endowed human beings with rights.  Rights which he, one of the idols of our American secular piety, immediately denied to those he held in slavery, his devotion to slavery growing even as his United States became a reality.  The idols of secularism all have feet of clay.  

It is one of the ironies of late-stage, decadent modernism that the very thing which demands equal justice by People for all People and living beings, this very religious assertion of all life being related to God is presented as the foremost oppressor of People.  That use of Jewish-Christian-Islamic monotheism as an attack on the most vigorous asserted origin of the right to equal justice and environmental justice is complicated by the denial of that by various churches, right now the Southern Baptist cult which holds so much of the country under its political influence, insisting on the subjugation of Women, born in the rejection of racial equality and maintaining a wealthy, corrupt clergy is one such force.  Mike Johnson is merely emblematic of the complete hypocrisy and corruption of it.  You can say the same about other denominations especially those with political and social influence, the current make up of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and, especially, the media star bishops among them, who, ironically, are as opposed to the most Catholic president in our history, Joe Biden as Southern Baptists were to the previous one, JFK.  

A lot of the public vulnerability to the atheist and anti-Christian attack on Christianity is a direct result of the corrupt uses of the name of Jesus and the idea of "The Bible," that thing that Donald Trump was so unused to holding that he held it upside down, a man who, when visiting the church he was brought to as a child as a campaign stunt had to ask if Presbyterians were Christians.   The man who Mike Johnson and his fascist House caucus take instruction for on whose behalf no lie is beyond telling.  Such "Christianity" and, or more rarely,"Judaism" is a false-front fraud of religion.  Why would anyone be surprised that now when almost all Americans' minds are filled up with the smoke and mirror illusions of TV and movies and the internet would be unable to distinguish the fake from the real?  Such is another illusion of modern notions of freedom.  

The fact is that there is no alternative to this view of human beings in the world that will elevate them to the point where they believe that they can know the truth and the truth can make them free.  That that very status comes only with the assertion that God endowed human beings with an ability to be free and who has endowed us all with human rights, there is no scientific, mathematical or social-scientific articulation of it which is convincing and durable enough to overcome our weakness, our laziness, our feeling of being beleaguered and overwhelmed.  Our fear of violence if we assert our rights and our autonomy within the realm of our relationships with other human beings, especially those who hold superior power.   I've looked at the academically respectable alternatives, libertarianism, liberal democracy, anarchism, the double-speak of Marxism, etc. and none of those work.  I have not, once, found one of those which is not guaranteed to produce the same horrors of human history because of the human tendency to want a strong-man to make us feel safe and secure.  If liberal democracy really worked, here, in the United States, where we like to believe we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the most pathetic and ridiculous As Seen On TV strong man phony would never have gotten the traction he did, the power that the damned U.S. Constitution handed him as he lost an election.   The same can be seen in liberal democracies around the world, just now.  The "more speech" of an unregulated media free to tell any lie for the most profit, the thing that so many idiotic American liberals of my generation believed would be the great savior is just another empty idol.  That those things have failed is certainly evidence of what I've come to conclude that only that view of human beings in relationship with God has the strength to SOMETIMES, MORE OFTEN THAN ANY OTHER SYSTEM, result on something better.   I think America's and Europe's endangerment by media driven fascism as it wallows in freedom-fetishistic autonomy granted by "free speech-press" absolutism is certainly an indictment of those 18th century "enlightenment" idols.  I think the tragedy of modern Israel and Palestine is a part of that.  

I don't think that it is impossible for other religions to find the same substance in their own tradition but I have not found it in several of those I've looked at as an outsider.  Those forms of Hinduism that contain crushing inequality as a religious holding are guaranteed not to have it, though I've read there are streams of Hinduism that reject caste, especially in some regions of Southern India.  I have talked about how arguing for the reality of justice with some Western Buddists led me away from that path, though the Engaged Buddhism emerging in Asia and elsewhere seems to find something like it.  Scripture says God makes covenants with other Peoples, I don't think God leaves other People without the possibility to find what the Prophets of Israel, Moses being the first of those, found.  I think it's not impossible that other religious traditions might develop such ideas out of their own experiences of God in their lives, no tradition is static and uninfluenced by continuing human experience.  I think the more widespread that is among the religions, the better.  It can't be found without really living out moral obligations that are, in our wrongheaded human calculations, a negation of "autonomy."   Doing what's good for others which you feel is bad for yourself is the very basis of egalitarian human governance, democracy and the possibility of a decent life.  Materialism, atheism and scientism all eventually attack that.  Many other ideologies of the past, some of those religious ideologies, have been poison to those but modernism is probably the most poisonous of all and deceptively packaged for easy consumption by the gullible and weak.  

Going through this book during Advent I've come to the conclusion that it deserves a lot longer than forty days.  So I intend to go over it at length for myself during the coming year, going through as many of the cited materials as I can get access to.   I can honestly say that it has had an unusually deep impact on both my intellectual idea of God and far more deeply my life as a believer in the God of Moses, the Prophets and Jesus.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Paul Theroux - A Christmas Card

 

The card is both a map and a talisman which illuminates the meaning of CHRISTMAS for the children and their parents.

With Michael Maloney, Christopher Wright and Rachel Atkins.

Dramatised by Nick Warburton.

Director Marilyn Imrie.

BBC Radio 4 1997

 Well, there's a reason I call him "Stupy."   And "Simps."   Those ain't terms of endearment but they are accurate.

Simps Tells Me He Dissed Me At Duncan's Idea Of An Athenæum - A Bored Response

I'D BE SURPRISED if Rachel Maddow did the research and cited the numerous uses of Darwin's claimed science in Nazis racist scientific claims or their propaganda that I've done here and as many others have also done.   She's smart enough to know she would lose a major segment of her audience if she told the truth about that.  Having no money at stake or caring if people don't read me, I'm not going to avoid the topic.  This is The Thought Criminal, after all.  While what she produces about history is important and often very, very well researched, often finding things that others have not found, generally rising above the typical popular-history style, she is hardly in the business of creating a full view of the origins and motivations of Nazism.   I, like Stupy, have not read her recent book about a Nazi plot involving American collaborators and, so, don't know why she may not have dealt with the Darwinian aspects of their race science.   I have done that, over years here and I have produced the primary documentary evidence proving not only the connections of all of that Nazi science to the theory of natural selection, I have documented its continuation in post-war and current neo-Nazism, again, using what the neo-Nazis have said about what inspired their ideas.  

Simps is too stupid to take any of that in, he's the kind of college-credentialed idiot who had their sole and undeveloped and primitive conceptions of such things in the early 1960s when the post-war lie that Darwinism had nothing to do with eugenics was ubiquitous in that milieu,  I believed it, myself, for a long time until I undertook to do what almost no English language true believers in the plaster St. Darwin have ever done, ACTUALLY READ WHAT HE SAID.  And going on from there to read what his inner circle of supporters said - especially following up Darwin's own scientific citation of their writing - which proves beyond any doubt that natural selection was the motivation of eugenics in the English language and in Germany.   I have noted the articles and books by his own sons tying him to eugenics, people who knew him in person, unlike Rachel Maddow and anyone born after 1882 who never laid eyes on the man, never mind knew him as intimately as his own sons.  

I could go over it all again but I know Simps and his ilk will never look at the primary evidence, depending on secondary and, most likely tertiary and more remote sources that are as likely to lie about the primary record as any TV show about it will - probably where most of them got everything they know on the subject from.   I'm only interested in addressing those who will look at the real, primary record to see what Darwin, Galton, Schallmeyer, Haeckel, Baur, Fischer, Lenz, . . .  said and say about their conclusions from the theory of natural selection.  When I rarely cite secondary or later sources I always note that and always try to find primary source verification of what they say.  I have never found a single source from before WW2 who denied the link between Darwinism and natural selection or the theory of natural selection and Nazi eugenics, including Leonard Darwin who continually confirmed that his father's role in producing the Nazi eugenics of the 1930s that led, directly, into their genocides.   I've given the citations and often links to online publication of what they said.  

Update:   "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable."  Martin Bormann

Update 2:  See second stupid comment below.  

Simps, if you're not even going to try it's not worth it to give you even this level of attention.  I don't have all the leisure time of a member of "the Eschaton brain trust" (they really do believe that's what they are), I'm still in demand for my work.  

Update 3:  Apparently the ever graying geezers of my generation with nothing better to do with their too much leisure time are keeping Duncan's cash cow going.   I don't get regular reports of Simps bringing me into it anymore, apparently the person who used to tell me gave up on it.  It hasn't been interesting since about 2005.   It's more of a bad habit than a stimulant.

Three Answers For The Price Of One - Hate Mail

I'M DOING WHATEVER writing I'm doing these days standing up, trying to shift my position so the nerves feeding my leg aren't impinged on, so that has put a damper on writing long things.   As it is, the claim that widely held scientific knowledge is uniformly reliable is best answered by a recent video by Sabine Hossenfelder. 

You should listen to the video, there are lots of points that could be made, one of them is that the problem in the equation that led to this widespread faith in its claims were actually relatively simple to discover and understand - to the extent that physics on this level could be said to be simple to understand.   I wonder how many of the physicists and cosmologists who accepted the conclusion actually did understand it.   Considering how statements about the "singularity" and what it meant bled down into pop-scientific fandom and sci-fi, where there was nothing but materialist-atheist-scientistic faith and no understanding, you have to wonder how such ideas could ever be held to be reliable.   Indeed, even this refutation of the paper in question doesn't disprove the idea supported by the mistake, Hossenfelder gives ways in which both could be true.

More interesting than that is this except from a long discussion with the mathematician-critic of string-theory and its allies, Peter Woit about the crisis in physics.

And here's a recently posted video by Rupert Sheldrake on the reproducibility crisis in science.   Which  pretty much calls into question how science routinely practices "scientific method".   

 

I Didn't Have A St. Spinoza Statue On My Dashboard

I REALLY DON'T want to get into why I think Spinoza's philosophy was fundamentally wrong-headed, but here goes.

Spinoza's faith in the ability of mathematics to represent an absolute view of nature and that ideas are capable of presenting an absolute view of reality are certainly naive and, in one of the greatest achievements of 20th century physics, rightly viewed as being wrong on the evidence.  Those are two of the cornerstones of the rickety cathedral of materialist-atheist-sceintism without which that structure can't be propped up.  I think the extent to which science "works" for all too human purposes is often based as much on luck as it is on the efficacy of scientific method and mathematical correspondence to what is observed through science.   As I have been pointing out in writing online for going on twenty years, the boneyard of discontinued science is enormous and mentioning its contents is forbidden.  There are even huge bodies of formerly held to be reliable scientific truth long ago relegated to it which come back to life after the succeeding ideology within science is found to be inadequate.  The suppression of Lamarckian inheritance in the hegemony of the modern Darwinian synthesis of natural selection with an early, now quite naive view of genetics appended to it, has come somewhat back to life recently.  If the same turns out to be true in cosmology with the recent discovery of those very early galaxies that, according to what we were told was reliable cosmology and physics shouldn't have existed then overturning Big Bang cosmology, it's quite too early to know and the many materialist-atheist-scientistic declarations to that effect would seem to me to be rather premature.  If there's anything the history of science shows, it is how thoroughly caught up in atheist religous ideological campaigning it has been.   I would say that was true from the start, certainly as the 17th century wore on, in no small part due to the ideological claims of Spinoza and his admirers.  

I am skeptical of the holy card view of Spinoza that is the common received wisdom of college-credentialed People of my generation.  I remember it was with that ignorant and received feeling of sanctity that I opened a book by him, I think it was the Ethics, and was immediately skeptical of his Euclidean approach to the topic.  I also looked at his Tractatus and was put off by his approach in many ways.  Looking at that in preparation to answering this, I think he had definite issues with being Jewish - why his calls for the civil government of Holland to suppress the Jewish religion is better than the edicts of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain doing that, I'd like someone to explain to me.  I think he was too impressed with his own cleverness and too reliant on an uncritical use of the primitive science of his time, of what he had available as classical "history" and myriad other contents of his arguments to find him very useful, today.   He was certainly not stupid enough to realize that the suppression of the Jewish religion would have been accomplished with violence and killing when Jews resisted that, he, his family history with the expulsion from the Iberian peninsula would have informed him of that fact.

The presentation of him as a martyr to reason and science is even more overblown than the fictional presentation of Galileo as the same.  It's a romantic use of someone who obviously liked to piss people off and who didn't do that badly for himself, considering how he cut himself off from his family and community.  That he supported himself without difficulty and did his writing and corresponded widely with many eminent people shows he was hardly a martyr - he died of natural causes, one source I looked at suspected silicosis from his profession of lens grinding was at least a contributing factor in it.  If he died for science, it was a suicide.  

In the first part of his Theologico-Political Treatise he was quite willing to mock all kinds of people and their beliefs as baseless and a product of their imaginations when what he deified "reason," natural law, etc. were as much a product of human imagination as idol worship and the propitiation of gods as a means of getting what we want.  In looking at it again after so long it strikes me as being pretty naive.  One of the more incredible passages early in the book to anyone who lived through the last part of the 20th century contains a typical claim of materialistic-atheistic-scientism:

(16) This element of inconsistency has been the cause of many terrible wars and revolutions; for, as Curtius well says (lib. iv. chap. 10): "The mob has no ruler more potent than superstition," and is easily led, on the plea of religion, at one moment to adore its kings as gods, and anon to execrate and abjure them as humanity's common bane. (17) Immense pains have therefore been taken to counteract this evil by investing religion, whether true or false, with such pomp and ceremony, that it may rise superior to every shock, and be always observed with studious reverence by the whole people--a system which has been brought to great perfection by the Turks, for they consider even controversy impious, and so clog men's minds with dogmatic formulas, that they leave no room for sound reason, not even enough to doubt with.

First, I would guess that what he, sitting in Holland, knew of "the Turks" was hardly an uninterested and objective assessment of life so far away.  My guess is that it was about as reliable as what you'll hear from Republican-fascist sources right now.  The same could certainly be said of somewhat closer in location but even farther away in time classical history and biography.  When you make such articulations based on such flimsy material as "science" it certainly is more potentially dangerous than if you do the same in the inexact literature of the humanities.  I'll forego yet another long critique the use of "history" and "biography" by modern popular-science.  I will say when it's a Sagan or Degrasse Tyson who do it on TV, it's pretty much reliably taken as bull shit.  Only slightly less when it's a Bertrand Russell or Richard Dawkins doing it.  

The modern period in which wars in Europe and the Americas have not been waged on the basis of religious belief have been among the most brutal and murderous in the history of the human species.  The First World War, the Second World War, the revolutions in Russia, the wars of conquest waged by the Russian and Soviet Union, the internal warfare that solidified the terror driven, materialistic, officially atheist and opposed to religion Soviet government, the similar and perhaps even more brutal Chinese revolution, the various other Marxist regimes, the fascists in Italy with their invasion of Ethiopia, the biological genocidal regime of the Nazis, the secular United States in the Spanish American war, the various wars to gain territory and extend economic control over Latin America, in the Pacific, the war in Vietnam, the Bush II-Cheney disaster of  war in Iraq, etc. and so many others that could be named, all on the basis of some form of the very materialism and rational calculation that Spinoza deified is far better proof than any of the allegedly religious wars that Spinoza had in mind that materialism and rational calculation are, if anything, more deadly than religion.  The present Israeli fascist government doesn't strike me as being motivated by the Jewish religion whereas many of the Jewish critics of the conduct of the invasion of Gaza - likely a result of the direct result of the Netanyahu government's corruption, incompetence and irresponsibility and internal political calculation of his government's failure to address a coming attack they were warned of - are motivated by quite worldly and political and financial things. 

I will remind you that it was that arch-materialist-atheist true believe in scientism, Sam Harris who called for planning for the nuclear bombing of "tens of millions" of people in Muslim countries as a preventative for the use of the "Islamic bomb" and he was held up as a champion of such materialist-atheist-scientistic "reasoning" with that in the published record.   Christopher Hitches was another of the atheist crusaders who their admirers and allies and their basic ideological orientation are never called on to answer for.  

The same is true of most of the "religious wars" about which there is much primary historical evidence.  Most of those were motivated by economic motives, often the religious explanation secondary or an afterthought to justify what some monarch or the powerful gangster underlings wanted to do.  The Crusades were a series of "religious wars" that seem to have been motivated by the situations that feudal gangsters throughout Europe created, as were the "religious wars" that Spinoza would have been referring to.  Historically the motivation of "religion" in war is estimated to be less than ten percent.  It certainly is true that in the modern period materialism and overt atheism have proven to be even deadlier motives for killing lots of People.  

That religion can be used malignantly is no more of a shock than that science, from the start, was thoroughly involved with and mixed up with war making.  Galileo and other early scientists were fully involved with things like figuring out the trajectory of cannon balls, later ones on the creation of and improvement of armaments and the theory of war making.  I remember when my oldest sister went to university and, looking over the structure of it I was shocked to find out about the existence of "Military Science."  They call it that, not "military faith."  If that was the beginning of my skeptical, critical view of science and what gets away with calling itself science in universities and academia and the so-called intellectual class, I can't say but that skepticism certainly started when I first looked into psychology textbooks and immediately saw that it was, actually, pseudo-science.  I think that effort started with Spinoza's extension of Descarte's method into the realm of human minds and behavior, his ideological assumption that the math and science he, no doubt, was so proud of himself in mastering was applicable to consciousness and other entities that could not be observed or measured was neither scientific nor mathematical, it was sheer ideological assertion made because he liked the idea that math and science, what he abbreviates as "reason" was supreme in its abilities.  In that I think he was entirely wrong and the subsequent centuries of constructing the present day manifestations of his assumptions are no more reliable than his original hunch.  

Spinoza wrote a lot of stuff, some of it wrong, some of it seemingly plausible, maybe some of it even right, but he wrote lots of stuff.  All of it on the basis of his fundamental materialist-atheist-scientistic ideological preference.  If he was wrong about that, the chances of most of it being wrong are very high.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier - Judith sive Bethulia liberata

 

Judith, sive Bethulia Liberata, H.391 (1674-76)

Première partie: Stabat Holofernes super montes (Chorus Assyriorum) [00:00]
Première partie: Filii Israel (Tres duces Assyrii) [00:30]
Première partie: Et placuerunt (Historicus ex Assyriis, Historicus ex filiis Israel, Tres viri Israelitæ, Historicus ex Israel) [01:29]
Première partie: Peccavimus, Domine (Filiis Israel) [04:21]
Première partie: Et, cum his clamoribus (Historicus ex filiis Israel, Ozias) [06:26]
Première partie: Quod cum audisset (Historici ex filiis Israel) [08:17]
Première partie: Quod est hoc verbum (Judith) [08:45]
Première partie: Vera sunt omnia (Ozias, Judith, Chorus ex Israel, trois voix seules) [10:59]
Première partie: Nocte autem sequetem (Historicus ex Israel, Judith) [13:29]
Première partie: Post hæc Judith deposuit (Historicus ex Israel) [17:52]
Première partie: La nuict [18:44]

Seconde partie: Cum autem Judith descenderat montem (Ancilla, Duo exploratores ex Assyriis, Judith, Chorus Assyriorum) [21:40]
Seconde partie: Æquo animo esto (Holofernes, Judith) [24:17]
Seconde partie: Et ingressa Judith (Historici ex Assyriis) [30:19]
Seconde partie: Ut autem sero factum est (Ancilla) [31:07]
Seconde partie: Aperite portas, custodes fideles (Judith) [32:48]
Seconde partie: Et cum audissent filii Israel (Chorus filiorum Israel) [33:33]
Seconde partie: Laudate Dominum Deum nostrum (Judith, Chœur) [35:12]

Unfortunately the performers and venue aren't listed, but they do have the score.

Didn't know until recently the connection between latkes and the story of Judith slaying Holofernes, one of my favorite things in the Catholic Bible which is generally left out of Protestant Bibles.  Looking for some music to post I came across this oratorio by Charpentier, one of my favorite composers of Christmas music so I decided to post it.  

Watch the linked to video about the history and making of latkes, it's quite entertaining and he generally does his homework about the history. 

From Nine Years Ago

Friday, December 5, 2014

Their Insights Need To Be Noted Well By Those Of Us Who Live More Comfortably

On the other end of the spiritual-literal spectrum, no one is more attuned to the liberating implications of Mary's song than those actively engaged in struggling against their current situation of economic, political, ethnic or spiritual subjugation.  Groups as diverse as Western feminists and Latin American campesinos have recognized in this text a revolutionary strain that has inspired their own visions.  Their insights need to be noted, and noted well by all those of us who live more comfortably with our surrounding culture and thus seek to explain away that revolutionary strain.  As we proceed in our study of the Magnificat and its potential to encourage resistant negotiation of the reality of empire, the voices of people who experience a comparable domination in our own time must be considered.  Theologian Dorothee Sölle, for example, in the following poem reinterprets Mary's words in light of the feminist movement:

It is written that mary said
he hath shewed strength with his arm
he hath scattered the proud
he hath put down the mighty from their seats
and exalted them of low degree
Today we express that differently
we shall dispossess our owners and we shall laugh
at those who claim to understand feminine nature
the rule of males over females will end
objects will become subjects
they will achieve their own better right

Even more striking are the readings of Latin American and African interpreters, from farmers and laborere to theologians and professors.  They read ot of their own oppressive situations, from what Leonardo Boff calls "a privileged hermenutical locus for the reading of Mary's Magnificat and for becoming hearers of its message."  Such readers have perspectives that are much closer to the first-century experiences of a Galilean peasant or an urban artisan of Asia Minor than anything most Western scholars like myself can even imagine.  One source of such discussions is Ernesto Cardenal's transcription of the Sabbath conversations of the Solentiname congregation of Nicaragua.  Regarding the Magnificat, their conclusions are clear;  in the words of a woman named Andrea, "[Mary] recognizes liberation.... We have to do the same thing.  Liberation is from sin, that is, from selfishness, from injustice, from misery, from ignorance - from everything that's oppressive.  That liberation is in our wombs too, it seems to me."*   Especially intriguing for our study is these "uneducated" and "unofficial" interpreters' grasp of nuance, even in their most revolutionary ideas. In a discussion about whether "the proud" automatically equates to "the rich," some argue that even a poor person can become "an exploiter in his heart" if she or he years to be rich and acts in a correspondingly exploitative manner.  Others regard God's humbling of the arrogant, rich, and powerful; the exploiters must be liberated,according to Solentiname resident Olivia, "from their wealth.  Because they're more slaves than we are."

Amanda C. Miller Rumors of Resistance: Status Reversals and Hidden Transcripts in the Gospel of Luke

* Here is how that conversation continues from that point:

The last speaker was ANDREA, a young married woman, and now OSCAR, her young husband breaks in:  "God is selfish because he wants us to be his slaves. He wants our submission. Just him.  I don't see why Mary has to call herself a slave. We should be free!  Why just him?  That's selfishness."

ALEJANDRO, who is a bachelor:  "We have to be slaves of God, not of men."
Another young man:  "God is love.  To be a slave of love is to be free because God doesn't make us slaves.  He's the only thing we should be slaves of, love.  And then we don't make slaves of others.'
ALEJANDRO'S MOTHER says:  "To be a slave of God is to serve others.  That slavery is liberation."

I said that it's true that this selfish God Oscar spoke about does exist.  And it's a God invented by people.  People have often invented a god in their own image and likeness - not the true God, but idols, and those religions are alienating, an opium of the people.  But the God of the Bible does not teach religion, but rather he urges Moses to take Israel out of Egypt, where the Jews were working as slaves, He led them from colonialism to liberty.  And later God ordered that among those people no one could hold another as a slave, because they had been freed by him and belonged only to him, which means they were free...

From Contemporary Latin American Social and Political Thought:  An Anthology edited by Ivan Marquez

It goes on from there at the link and is all a lot more impressive and instructive than any blog conversation among bored, contented, first-world, college and grad school grads I've ever been involved in.

With the recent monitoring of what the first-world presents as liberal journalism, it's clear we are all distracted with frivolity to the extent we can't really understand something like this from our experience.  As the first passage said, these people have insights gotten from their daily experience that we can't begin to imagine which gives them understanding unavailable to us except through their telling us.  As Olivia said, you can be enslaved by wealth.

The US backed Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Samosa, bombed the Christian base community at Solentiname out of existence.  Its social gospel was such a danger to him and the oligarchs who ruled over the poor people of Nicaragua. And death is always a risk of following the law that the prophets articulated.  But the terrible history of that country and the support for the oligarchy and its dictatorship by The United States government would take longer to go through than I can today. As Niebuhr said "If a gospel is preached without opposition, it is simply not the gospel which resulted in the cross."

Whining About Walter - A Response

WHY WOULDN'T I want to make continual use of the things one of the finest Old Testament scholars in the English language wrote, someone who has earned world-wide respect for his scholarship and commentary on the Bible whose commentary and analysis includes a German language theologian's scope of external information, a writer who makes it relevant to the latest news.  And before going on I'll explain that he doesn't do so in the way that naive "evangelicals" or others do, by pretending he can turn Scripture into one big game of pop-Nostradamus predictions - would that what "journalism" has devolved into would cut that crap out, too.  His scholarship is pretty snark proof through not being done with any intention of being snark-proof

If I use Walter Brueggemann's writing and lectures and sermons a lot it is because I have found he often is the only one saying what he says or that he says it better than anyone else I'm aware of.   When I find a similar level of helpful speaking or writing from another person, I use that.   I have found a number of them.  And there is his own self-effacing humor in his lectures and, often his sermons.  He's either never found the praise he's given interesting or he got over himself well before I became aware of him.  I am also always impressed with his care to admit when what he's saying is his own or other scholars speculation and not based on "objective" evidence.  So much of what is contained in the Old Testament, especially, Scripture is the only evidence we have of what is claimed and, as is the way of all ancient writing, it was never intended to be taken as the same kind of "objective" information giving that the best of modern historical and biographical and some scientific writing is.  His acknowledgement that it is a literary text with the standards of artistic truth telling instead of mere expository writing is a given from the start.   

So I have no intention of not using Walter Brueggemann's writing when I find things in it that are seasonally or topically relevant or if I want to encourage the reading and study of one of his books by showing you some of what they've led me to think.   Merely on the basis of what's interesting, It beats the rote, repetitious reruns or rerun of pop-muzak or TV shows or movies or pulp rubbish or the typical college-credentialed received POV that comprises the typical replacement for thinking among the English language college-credentialed population.  It was going online and reading the unfiltered thinking of such people in such large numbers that led me to realize how truly futile and counter-productive all of that crap was.  

---------------------------

I think the elevation of pop-kulcha as an easier and lazier and stupider replacement for serious thinking and reading and reflection is one of the most dangerous things encouraged by the American media and the surrender of the great American aspiration of public education to it.  I might sympathize with teachers faced with the idiocy that those produce and gave up but it wasn't helpful.  Like the conventions of TV and radio commercials, appealing to the laziness and weaknesses of People, that effort was to get audience, not because it was ever a real replacement for it. And I think it has been intentionally done as a means of controlling We the People as a means of making American liberal-democracy a tool of the billionaire and millionaire media owners and their allies in thwarting the aspirations of egalitarian democracy and the universal provision of as decent a life for all as is possible.  That was, it is no coincidence, the goal of the Mosaic tradition of the Old Testament, the Prophetic protest against the billionaire-millionaire equivalent class in ancient Israel and Judea and of the Gospel of Jesus and the writings of Paul and James, etc. in the New Testament.  I think overcoming the laziness and stupidity and greed that modernism has corrupted us with is necessary if saving the aspiration of achieving egalitarian democracy.  If that isn't done, trying to do that is futile.

There is no secular mechanism for appealing to People to overcome their worst weaknesses and vices, certainly none that will reliably overcome the worst of those, greed, envy, . . . the sins laid out as sins of malign consequence in Scripture.   And without that, we are doomed.  I doubt anything but a belief in God will do that.  

That religious tradition has been a victim of both the academic and pop-kulcha attacks on it and the rejection of it by conservative merely nominal Christianity and similar efforts in Judaism.  That is no absolutely no accident or coincidence.  It is an overt, in the former and a covert campaign in the latter to destroy the radical egalitarianism that is at the heart of both religious families.  I am certainly not as conversant with the similar corruption of their fellow Abrahamic religion, Islam, but I suspect the same thing is evident in that.  I suspect anywhere at any time that the religious inspiration towards egalitarian provision of a decent life has arisen, there will be such an effort to render that ineffective and to destroy it.  That it survived and became a major if not the major theme of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures certainly sets them apart from most of the scriptures of most traditions.  At least of what survives in a written form.  If you read the book I'm going through now, Brueggemann's An Unsettling God, you would find that is an early and major focus of his mightily informed reading of Scripture.  

I find that much of theology in the past and today is a rejection of that corruption of the egalitarian Biblical tradition and am certain that that is entirely more important to producing the continued possibility of human and other life, today than the entire secular philosophical profession.  I don't disdain all of secular philosophy though I don't find anything in it that produces a durable program to confront the guaranteed enemies of equality and morally responsible freedom in an effective way.  I certainly find nothing in the philosophy based- pseudo-scientific schools of secular political philosophy that can do that.  I used to chafe at the evocations of "the Judeo-Christian tradition" by those who want to erect a theocracy which would certainly be or turn into yet another neo-feudalistic anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic cesspool, but the worst thing about that hypocritical citation is that it led to the rejection of what has, in fact, been the basis of egalitarian democratic struggle.  I've pointed out that when the early BLACK abolitionists were writing against the enslavement of Black People in the United States they turned to the Scripture, especially the emancipation of the Children of Israel from Egypt and not the Constitution.  Sometimes they cited the defaulted promises of the Declaration of Independence or the hypocritical slogans from Jefferson or other idols of secular America, but that was done mostly to demonstrate the hypocrisy of that secular legal fakery.  

Simps Says

 "What is revealed here is a Holy One who is undomesticatedly available for dialogic transaction; and because of dialogical transaction, what is revealed here, as well, is mature personhood that is commensurate with the undomesticated fidelity of the Holy One"

Man, that's a lapidary prose style if I've ever encountered one.

It was the phrase "mature personhood that threw you, isn't it.    And anything with more than fifteen words in a sentence, too. 

That's what a life in pursuit of being kew-el does to you. 

Short Bits - Sciatica Posting

TWO WEEKS ago I slipped, not on some real ice but on a little bit of frost on a ramp to my brother's barn and instantly knew that, though I didn't fall and didn't break something, I should have worn crampons.   I've never had sciatica before, my entire experience of it was when our mother had a particularly bad case of it  when she was in her seventies.  She had an unusually high pain threshold so when she reacted as she did, we knew it was serious.   Worse was that in several trips to the doctor, a couple of middle-of-the-night emergency room visits, they didn't diagnose what was causing her pain until my most assertive sister-in-law went with her and made them figure it out -  it took a physiotherapist to do it in the end. 

Well, I can report it's about the worst pain I've ever experienced, worse than the pain is the numbness along my left leg and into my hip.   Worse than an abscessed tooth.  I've sat less than I ever had in my life, it only doesn't hurt when I'm standing the right way and when I'm lying, oddly enough, in the affected side with my legs straight out.   Needless to say it's putting a crimp in my plans for this month.  

On the other side, it's made my decision to convert to using a standing desk mandatory.    It's going to force me to bite the bullet and put a strap button on my guitar if I want to play it.  I'm trying to figure out what to do about playing the piano.  Luckily, I've always stood while I taught so that's not a problem.  Yet.

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It's probably a bit picky but the use of the word "misnomer" to mean "misunderstanding" or "miscomprehension" drives me up the friggin' wall.

"It is not too much to conclude that the future of the world depends upon the continued performance of this dialogue that resolvedly refuses closeure and buoyantly offers newness.

MORE OF WALTER BREUGGEMANN'S An Unsettled God as an Advent thought.

Regulation via Imagination

What we have in the biblical text is a human document, a product of daring, evocative human imagination.  But serious readers of this text of human imagination regularly are recruited, in the process of being addressed, to the conviction that what is surely daring artistic human imagination is, at the same time, an act of divine revelation.  There is something different here that insists always on being "strange and new."  What is revealed here is a Holy One who is undomesticatedly available for dialogic transaction; and because of dialogical transaction, what is revealed here, as well, is mature personhood that is commensurate with the undomesticated fidelity of the Holy One: "until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13); "It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ (Collosians 1:28).  I cite these texts (with their use of the word "mature" [Greek telos] not to tilt the discussion in a christological direction, but to notice that the fully formed human person, in this relationship, is one who is engaged in the dialogical transaction of faith and obedience.  Well before this particular epistolary formulation, Israel had understood that "maturity" as a creature concerns life congruent with the creator God.  I judge, moreover, that Israel would further claim that the same "maturity" (completeness, Hebrew tam) may well pertain to every partner of YHWH, every creature - human, nonhuman, Isreal, nations - for the creator God summons all creatures to maturity.

The reason I stress that the biblical testimony is revelation-as-human-imagination is that the text tradition fully delivers on adequate partners for YHWH, partners who are capable of sustained dialogic transactions of fidelity.  Israel, in its formation and transmission of the text, found itself drawn out beyond itself into this always lively, redefining transaction.  And while the framers and transmitters of the textual tradition lived a quite concrete human life - of family, of sexuality, of money and property - they also understood that life in faithful intentionality was a performance of an ongoing transaction that caused it to be different in the world.  Beyond its own performance, moreover, it also imagined (was led by the spirit to imagine) that all other creatures are also partners in the same God and so recuited into the same dialogic transaction.  Thus Israel could construe the life of sea monsters and birds and creeping things as YHWH's creaturely partners (see Psalm 148:7-10).  And it could in like manner discern Nebuchadnezzar as "servant of YHWH" (Jeremiah 25:9; 27:6) and the unwitting Cyrus as "YHWH's messiah" (Isaiah 45:1).  It could imagine in the sweep of its performance that all of life is drawn into this dialogic transaction.

The commensurability between dialogic God and dialogic partner is well articulated by Jurgen Moltmann.  In his thoughtful discussion, Moltmann has contrasted the apathetic God and the God capable of pathos.  Then he extrapolates:

"In the sphere of the apathetic God man becomes a homo apatheticus.  In the situation of the pathos of God he becomes homo sympatheticus.   The divine pathos is reflected in man's participation, his hopes and his prayers.  Sympathy is the openness of a person to the present of another.  It has the structure of dialogue.  In the pathos of God, man is filled with the spirit of God.  He becomes the friend of God, feels sympathy with God and for God.  He does not enter into a mystical union but into a sympathetic union with God.  He is angry with God's wrath.  He suffers with God's suffering.  He loves with God's love.  He hopes with God's hope."

The human person stands alongside YHWH in engagement with the tribulation and wonder of the world.  In the exposition that follows in this volume, we dare to imagine as well that YHWH's other partners are also drawn into the same dialogic structure of friendship, wrath and hope.  There is of course a great deal at stake in this dialogic interaction of God with God's partners.  The religious temptation to dissolve the dialogue into an authoritarian monologue is matched by the temptation to self-authorizing autonomy.  Both authoritarianism and autonomy are temptations that are everywhere around us.  The offer of technological solutions to relational problems is an encompassing temptation among us.  Continuing attentiveness to this textual tradition is an affirmative reminder that our God-given, God-engaged creatureliness is of another ilk.  It is not too much to conclude that the future of the world depends upon the continued performance of this dialogue that resolvedly refuses closure and buoyantly offers newness.

The first paragraph of this made me think of how many proud and arrogant atheists have declared that they rejected belief in God at the age of 6 or 9 or 14 based on their thoughts or experiences reacted to at that age or, in one case I read in William James's Varieties of Religious Experiences, the expressed disdain of his older brother at one of those ages, not even on his own thinking.  In a seasonal vein, the sometimes heard disdain of belief in God as being the equivalent of a belief in Santa Clause, I remember someone asking how many adults the mocker knew who came to a belief in Santa Clause as a mature adult.  

What Walter Brueggemann and Jurgen Moltmann are talking about is an entirely higher level of mature engagement than that puerile polemical pubescents issue.  As can be seen in the specifics of what they're talking about, it's a serious and adult level call to the kind of maturity that is the topic in this passage.  

But modernism is nothing if not a call to immaturity, certainly as it has devolved in the 20th and 21st centuries that's the case, certainly that has accelerated since the advent of television and the largest part of the internet.  In writing my political thinking online I've several times referred to the passage in Brave New World in which the director of the institute dresses down one of his subordinates for acting too mature and serious.  It's one of the reasons I think Aldous Huxley got a good part of the popular culture of the modern world righter than Orwell did, though the Orwell vision seems to be coming as a result of what Huxley saw coming about.  I don't think either of them had any real way out of that, but I think the kind of thinking presented here does.  But being harder than that of modernist imagination, it will be harder to persuade those damaged by the ambient culture to adopt it.

Anyone who has read the Scriptures and thought about them as deeply as Brueggeman and Moltmann have will come to an understanding of them arriving at a wholly more important and serious ground than those who never actually read them can.  Though, as seen in the Republican-fascist caucus of the house and so much "white evangelical" and "traditional Catholic" discourse, just reading it can get you, if anything, wronger than the mockers.  What the mockers mock, after all, is generally exactly that "literal, fundamentalists" reading of Scripture.  Though, really, it's generally some later church based doctrinal or dogmatic assertion that they find so much use for in their mockery.

The radicality of this view of God is seen in how universal God's scope of concern and activity in making covenants is.  As I've also pointed out, the Scripture says explicitly that God makes covenants with "all flesh" that God has had covenantal relations with many nations, some of them enemies of Israel, even with those who conquer and drive Israel into exile and who rule over Israel as despotic colonial exploiters.  God specifically told them that they would have to wait hundreds of years before they could inhabit the land that was promised to Abraham because the People who were living there had a covenant with God which would not lapse to the point of default for that time.  God also warned Israel that the covenant with them was only good for as long as they honored their obligations under it.  That should be a warning to anyone who is tempted to practice "self-authorizing autonomy," a product of "an authoritarian monologue."  In the section between where I left off and where I started on the comments on An Unsettling God, Walter Brueggeman quotes George Steiner as saying, "It is the Hebraic intuition that God is capable of all speech-acts except that of monologue which has generated our arts of reply, of questioning and counter-creation."  Which leads me to wonder if idolatry is a peculiarly human act based on such "authoritarian monologue" in which we imagine our imaginations are capable of containing God but only is able to come up with a metaphor for God that we, then, mistake as the reality of God.  I don't recall ever getting into a brawl over religion in which such an imagined complete God wasn't the focus of the disagreement.  It's possible to have an open-ended imagination of God, such a God will never be swept aside like a pubescent atheist will, though such a God will never be fully grasped and anyone who tries to is foolish.  I think that's the God that these two theologians are talking about.

I also think it's the God that Luke quotes Mary as presenting in the Magnificat.  Of course, the God she conceived of was the same God, that conception being based in the Hebrew Scriptures.    

I'm finding that practically every page of Walter Brueggemann's book is good Advent reading.

Hate Mail 2 - And I can't understand why they did it because they didn't get anything for it. The pensions they were promised, they were never paid,

IT MIGHT BE useful to start with something I remembered listening to from the historian and biographer Joseph Ellis, which I think sums up the situation I was referring to when I said the soldiers who fought the American Revolution had been betrayed and cheated by the United States Constitution and, in fact, they'd started to be cheated almost as soon as the ink was dry on the treaty that ended that war.  Ellis's remarks are in bold italics, the interviewer's interjections in plain bold

Washington isn't that good a tactician but he comes to an elemental strategic insight.  He doesn't have to win, the British have to win.  And if he can sustain the Continental Army and avoid annihilation of the Continental Army, eventually the British will decide it's not worth continuing.  And that's pretty much what happens.  And that's an elemental insight, it's called a Fabian strategy, after the Roman General Lucius Quintatus Fabius in the Punic wars, it's quasi guerilla tactics, it's not quite guerilla because he's got a regular, conventional army there.  But it's a recognition  that the strategic center of the rebellion or what we might call the insurgency isn't a place it's not Boston, it's not Philadelphia, it's not Charleston, they capture all those places, not New York.  The strategic center of the rebellion is the Continental Army.  And if he can hold that intact and avoid fighting except when he's got superior numbers and a strategic, excuse me, tactical advantage, then ultimately the British will eventually give up.

You know, we don't really win the American Revolution, it's the British decide to go leave.  And they have a lot invested in this war and the war it's most comparable with is the Vietnam war.  Only the British are the Americans, in this particular case, and the Americans are like the Vietnamese.  

And the British really come to the conclusion early on that this war must be won for reasons akin to the domino theory.  If we lose North America we lose the Caribbean, if we lose the Caribbean we lose Ireland, if we lose Ireland we lose India. And it's this notion that everything's at stake and therefore you're willing to spend enormous amounts of money and resources.  And they have a delivery system, a banking system, a logistical system, a military profession that's much more sophisticated than anything the United States has.  

One of the things I got out of the research I did for this book is how unbelievably fortunate the United States was because the States often refused to meet their quotas in terms of money or troops.  There's a hard core of three to four thousand young men who served for the duration.  A significant portion of them are African American, about fifteen percent.  It's the last war in which African Americans serve alongside whites not in segregated units until the Korean War.  That's an amazing thing.  

- Somehow that's a fact that's been hidden in American history.

Right, right, and that's . . . and it's also one of the reasons Washington starts thinking differently about slavery.  He's commanding a lot of African American troops that are fighting bravely.  

But these three or four thousand guys aren't representative Americans.  They're ex-slaves, they're  indentured servants, they're recently arrived Irish and or Scottish immigrants, they're fourth-sons that don't have any inheritance, they're not yeoman farmer types. 

And they won the war.  It's as simple as. . . if they hadn't stayed together and been the nucleus the Continental Army would have probably dissolved.  And I can't understand why they did it because they didn't get anything for it.  The pensions they were promised, they were never paid, they starved through out most of the war because they weren't provided with food on a regular basis.  They were in rags.  When the British Army marched out of Yorktown, they laughed at the Continental Army because they looked like a bunch of ragamuffins.

- Didn't they call that The World Turned Upside Down?

They say that but we're not sure that really happened.   There's different sources on that. And the British commander didn't want to turn his sword over to Washington and wanted to give it to Rochambeau the French commander, instead because they were embarrassed losing to these people that looked like they were, you know, bums.  And yet this is the group that won the war. And that story hasn't been told.  I mean Washington won the war by being the Commander in Chief that stayed the course for seven and a half years.  But these guys, the core of the Army, what he calls "the soldiery." He said it, he said at the end of the war that if someone ever tries to write the history of this, they will be accused of writing fiction because no one will believe that a group of poor young men, ill clad, ill fed sustained themselves for this long against a much superior force.  And they did, so Washington gives them credit.  

So much to point out, though the point that the soldiers who fought the revolutionary war, the ones that Washington, himself credited with winning the war were, undoubtedly, cheated of the equality they were promised in the Declaration of Independence, most of all the Black soldiers but also the ones who, as well, were cheated out of the pensions they were promised and the equality they were led to believe was the intention of the aristocrats and slave-owners who declared independence intended to be the result.  

The Jeffersonian ideal which is, interestingly, identified by many Jefferson scholars is rule by "yeomen farmers" explicitly held up those who held ownership of land as the rightful rulers.  Certainly Black People, especially those held in slavery by many such "yeomen" were excluded, probably the majority of free Black People and free men of any ethnicity were excluded from the lauded Jeffersonian ideal, the ideal which was achieved in giving land owners and owners of sufficient property the vote but which was extended only with enormous struggle, sacrifice in work, lives and even generations of struggle.  As the U. S. Supreme Court is seeing to it, what progress that was made in the 20th century is being turned back on the basis of the Constitution and the Court's own self-granted powers to nullify laws such as the Voting Rights Act and, though not admitting to that, the Civil War Amendments.

I would love to know what percentage of those who fought the Revolution had any actual vote that led to the adoption of the Constitution, what is known is that in many, perhaps all of the states, in some locations, the tactic of limiting the vote on the representatives who would ratify the thing would tend to cut most of them out due to the property requirements to vote.  Not even all propertied white males of voting age participated in that, in many cases by the design of those who wanted to ram adoption through.   The thing was entirely short of what the Declaration of Independence promised, the document which the Reverend Martin Luther King jr. called a "promissory note" which has never been honored as of 1963, it still hasn't been honored.  It won't be without facing the history of the Constitution and its adoption, the slave-power and financier-power rigging of it that has never been amended out of the thing, the very things that Trump and the Republican-fascists as the overt segregationists, the Jim Crow Senate, the Plessy Supreme Court, etc. have used to forever cheat us out of what was promised and the lie that those things were fulfilled in the Constitution.  

Hate Mail 1 - Why I Don't Trust Materialists Especially Those Who Pretend To Be Lefties

IN STUDYING the American left of which I am arguably a part,  I have come to distrust the materialist-atheist-scientistic "left" which I now see as no left at all but a variant of the same anti-democratic gangerism that fascism is.  Hardly a week goes by when I don't hear an ideological materialist claim that free-will is impossible and, needless to say, materialists don't believe there is any such a thing as sin or moral obligation, except as some kind of social convention.  No leftist who holds any such beliefs can be anything but an anti-democratic thug waiting to mature into full depravity.  

That wasn't always the case, though I was never a Marxist I was a socialist and think the tragedy of socialism is that it so early was co-opted by materialist-atheist-scientism, anti-Christianity and other forces that never would do what any real socialism should have been based in, admit to the spiritual character of human beings and human life.  There were some early Christian socialists and even some who persist till today but socialism as a category of thought and in any productive political sense was certainly ruined for the present by that early takeover by ideological materialism, atheism and scientism.  I do respect some socialists, including some who started out as Marxists such as Victor Berger but who, in the necessities of human life, chose for practical reality over academic and journalistic fantasy.  I don't know, if he had lived longer than he did, what his socialism would have been though, like the Marxism of the great legal scholar Louis Boudin.  He was an early critic of Russian and then Soviet Communism.  I suspect that seeing Marxism in reality instead of theory, he gave it up.  I like to think gave it up in disgust.  His change of heart contrasts with that of the Trotskyites who, once Trotsky was murdered by Stalin's agents, saw no prospect of their ideology taking power and converted to American fascism, both the corporate-academic type and, in some cases, the indigenous racist form of that, as well.  American conservatism to one extent or another is an inevitable accommodation to white supremacy as that elsewhere is an accommodation to their own indigenous fascism.  And that is absolutely relevant to my response to the objection to what I said about materialist-atheist-scientism and its anti-democratic tendency.  

I simply don't trust people who believe human beings, living beings, are merely objects without any durable and consequential moral obligations and responsibilities owed them or inherent rights endowed equally on us by God.  I might, at times, find some of what they say on some things has some merit, though much less frequently what they do - in my observation and experience they're not very big on the doing part of that - but I can say that I don't trust them in the end.   I think the history of that secular left warrants that refusal to trust them, I hold them up to a very high level of skepticism, as high as that which I hold anyone else to.  As I recently pointed out, I hold two recent Popes I didn't like at all and trusted not very much to that same level of skepticism though, as I admitted, I agreed with them on some specific points such as the moral depravity of considering human beings as a means to an end.  

I especially distrust the self-identified media of the left, by and large, with a few, a very few, exceptions to that rule.  I especially distrust those tiny organs of the American left who, after witnessing and experiencing Trump, Republican-fascism, the Bush II regime and the Reagan and Bush I administrations before that are sandbagging Joe Biden and Democrats.  I totally distrust In These Times, TYT, and a myriad of other impotent organs who never produce anything but undermining Democrats' chances of winning elections and gaining and holding offices and making real change in real law.  Joe Biden and the Democrats in his first two years made more change than all of the lefty media and all of the lefty "third parties" have in their entire existence magnified by any large number.  And that was even with a Senate not in actual Democrats control but with that once darling of the play left, the atheist Sinema and the corporate gangster Manchin in it.  I can report that even as I support the Democratic Party, there are a number of Democrats who I have blasted and wished to burn in hell - I don't hold back my skepticism of anyone who does wrong.  There are even Democrats I once admired highly, such as Barney Frank who I don't much trust now.

About actually doing things and producing things, the highest achievement of any socialist office holder in American history is Bernie Sanders' committee chairmanship in the Senate under Democratic control from where he has done some actual things, making him probably the highest achieving socialist in American history, even as his former dead-end supporters turn on him as he actually does things that they may have claimed to want.  I don't think the American secular-left, at least in its very large play-left faction, really wants to do anything but whine and pose and compete for attention and, in those parts of it that are actually money making, suckering the gullible into sending them money.   I am fully confident that some of them are on the take from Republican-fascists and other billionaire ratfuckers of American democracy.  I think in that they are not markedly different from the Trump crime family operation, just far more penny-ante.  I think the Greens are one of the bigger of those minor con jobs as well as just about any other "third party" effort.  I think RFJ jr. is perhaps even more vile than the Putin asset, Jill Stein.   Though she is plenty vile in herself.

If you want evidence, I've given evidence in scads here.  I'd suggest looking for "Marxism" "Green Party" "The Left Forum" "third party" and other such seach terms, individual MAS lefties, too, Lillian Hellman among so many others.  Look for "The Nation Magazine,"  "In These Times,"  "The Progressive," "ACLU."  I seldom wrote about them without presenting evidence, citations and links.  Look for "the civil liberties industry".  

The American secular left has pretty much nothing good to show for it's existence and anything it may claim to have achieved it has more than taken back in its usefulness to Republican-fascist and the corporate media use of them to discredit the real left, which, by the way, is often overtly religious in its character and motivation.  As recently as 2006 I believed the secular even anti-religious "left" was a vitally important part of making any real change, I now think that any good change it had a pinky finger in would soon be endangered by them and their ideological program and posturing.  In many cases the struggle to make change had to contend with bad publicity from their claimed involvement, The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. had that problem.   I more than loathe them, now.  I hold them in the contempt that I do a Max Eastman or Whittaker Chambers (who both started out on the materialist left) and former Trot-neo-cons and the organized atheism that the trust-fund Stalinist Corliss Lamont mounted and financed.  That last one is still is in existence, though much of it has abandoned any political lefty pretensions to push ideological atheism, Lamont's first and true and, really, only love.   I don't trust atheists much, not until they've consistently earned my trust but never if they hold their religious ideology above their claimed devotion to rights and the common good.  I hold the same suspension of trust for white evangelicals and Catholics who, I have to say, sometimes have proven to me that they can be trusted.  Far more than hard core atheists have.

The fact is, the secular left just isn't left enough, it's not even really left at all, as I've pointed out repeatedly about the Left Forum and the lefty magazines, they have to be left behind by the real American left, the left of the Reverend MLK, the left of Dorothy Day and Pax Christi and a myriad of other religious  based People and organizations that are the real, effective, productive left.   I'm many degrees farther to the left now as a Christian leveler than I was as an agnostic socialist.   There is nothing more radical than The Gospel, nothing anywhere.

Women's Voices Chorus - "Magnificat," Christine Donkin

 

Women’s Voices Chorus – 

"Magnificat," Christine Donkin (b. 1976)
Conductor/Artistic Director: Allan Friedman
Pianist: Deborah Hollis
Soloist: Kim McCorkle

Magnificat – Joanna Forbes L'Estrange | St. Thomas Girl Chorister Course 2022

 

On Wednesday, July 27, the Choristers of the Saint Thomas Girl Chorister Course were joined by the Gentlemen of the Choir for Choral Evensong.

This setting of the ‘Magnificat’ by Joanna Forbes L’Estrange from her King’s College Service was a chorister favorite.

Joanna Forbes L’Estrange is a British singer, composer and choir director. Having graduated from Oxford University with an MA (Hons) music degree, she began her career touring the world as Soprano/Musical Director of the five-time Grammy® award-winning vocal group The Swingles. Since then, she has continued to perform, write and record music in a huge variety of genres.

the God of Israel is unlike the God of any scholastic theology and unlike any of the forces imagined in any of the vague spritualities available among us

AS IS TRUE EVERY YEAR RMJ does the best Advent posts.   I'll leave what I was writing aside with the recommendation to read his, today and go with a few provocative quotes from, who else, Walter Brueggemann's An Unsettled God - he quotes, Jurgen Moltmann in this place and I'll riff off of that with other passages from other things:

God in Pathos

We may take one further step in articulating the categories through which we will understand "God as partner."  The general dialogic, relational quality of covenantal faith was given special and focused attention by Abraham Heschel in his exposition of YHWH's pathos.  While the notion of pathos, especially lined out by Heschel, may be taken specifically in the capacity of God to suffer, in fact the implication of Heschel's work is much broader.  It concerns the engagement of YHWH with Israel and with the world, and therefore YHWH's vulnerability and readiness to be impinged upon.  The particular focus of Heschel on God's hurt in the traditions of Hosea and Jeremiah makes abundantly clear that the God of Israel is unlike the God of any scholastic theology and unlike any of the forces imagined in any of the vague spritualities available among us.  The particular character of this God is as available agent who is not only able to act but is available to be acted upon.

I may mention two derivative studies that are primally informed by the work of Heschel.  On the one hand, Kazo Kitamori has poignantly written of God's pain.  Special attention may be given to his appendix concerning Jeremiah 31:20 QNE Isaiah 63:15.  Kitamori notes how discerningly both Luther and Calvin, without any sentimentality, were able to take  notice of God's pain.  The articulation of that pain, moreover, required the poetic imagination of ancient Israel to speak in terms of bodily upset and consternation, resisting any attempt to permit this God to float off as an ephmeral spirit.  The God of dialogic engagement is fully exposed to the realities of life in the world that we might most readily term "creaturely,"  except that those reatlies are, on the lips of the poets, the realities of the Creator as well.

It is obvious that this line of reasoning, so characteristically Jewish, has immense implications for Christian theology.  Jurgen Moltmann, informed by the work of Heschel,  has forcefully carried the issue of God's vulnerability in Christian theology:

"It was Abraham Heschel who, in controversy with Hellenism and the Jewish philosophy of religion of Jehuda Malevi, Maimonides and Spinoza which was influenced by it, first described the prophets' proclamation of God as pathetic theology.  The prophets had no "idea" of God, but understood themselves and the people in the situation of God.  Heschel called this situation of God the pathos of God.  It has nothing to do with the irrational human emotions like desire, anger, anxiety, envy or sympathy, but describes the way in which God is affected by events and human actions and suffering in history.  He is affected by them because he is interested in his creation, his people and his right.  The pathos of God is intentional and transitive, not related to itself but to the history of the covenant people.  God already emerged from himself at the creation of the world "in the beginning."  In the covenant he enters into the world and the people of his choice.  The "history" of God cannot therefore be separated from the history of his people.  The history of the divine pathos is embedded in this history of men. . . .

Abraham Heschel has developed his theology of the divine pathos as a dipolar theology.  God is free in himself and at the same time interested in his covenant relationship and affected by human history.  In this covenant relationship he has spoken of the pathos of God and the sympatheia of man, and in doing so has introduced a second bipolarity."

Moltmann has considered the way in which classical Christian theology has asserted the apatheia of God.  It has done so by acknowledging the suffering of the Son in which the Father does not participate.  Moltmann has shown, against this propensity, that in Trinitarian thought the Father as well as the Son suffers:

"To understand what happened between Jesus and his God and Father on the cross, it is necessary to talk in trinitarian terms.  The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son.  The Fartherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father, and if God has constituted himself as the Father of Jesus Christ, then he also suffers the death of his Fatherhood in the death of the Son."

Moltmann's statement is completely congruent, in the categories of Christian theology, with what Heschel had already discerned in Israel's prophets.  The God of Christians, understood in the midst of God's revelation to ancient Israel, is a God deeply at risk in the drama of fidelity and infidelity in the world.  

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Which leads me to this passage from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James in which Spinoza's mathematical materialism as an assumed oracle of what it cannot be shown to be relevant to comes into play.  

The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. Spinoza says: “I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.” And elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written: “Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.” When we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel—quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to perform — menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life. Such cold‐blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul’s vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.

No doubt there are more to the point passages in Spinoza to oppose against the Scriptural presentation of the pathos of God and our more banal reality but that's what I had available here on this Sunday morning.  

This footnote by William James, though not attached to this part of his text comes to mind, as well.

When I read in a religious paper words like these: “Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_,” I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? Original religious men, like Saint Francis, Luther, Behmen, have usually been enemies of the intellect’s pretension to meddle with religious things. Yet the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect. See how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates under those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which every one should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne (The Christian Revelation, The Christian Life, The Atonement: Cincinnati and New York, 1898, 1899, 1900).

I attempted to read Bowne, struggling with his "Personalism" for a few weeks and found it to be entirely arid and pointless.   I had problems with the later and quite different personalism of the French Catholic tradition but it wasn't as bad as that.   That school of personalism is relevant to the theology of JPII and Benedict XVI which I touched on here last week, which might be why I remembered the footnote. 

There's probably more to be found in listening to any setting of the Canticle of Mary than in such religion under the yoke of philosophy.