This Is What Happens in the Eighth Decade When They Listened to Uncle Milty Instead Of Doing Their Homework In The 4th Grade

Simps Says:

 "I will exposit those nonnegotiable awarenesses in relation to Enlightenment liberalism and in relation to the standard claims of classical Christianity. Vis-a-vis the claims of Enlightenment liberalism, Israel's Yahwistic account of brokenness and restoration may yield several enormously important instances."

Wow, that's a seriously obnoxious example of academese/jargon.

Oh, and I should add that "Yahwistic" is perhaps the most hilariously awful coinage of this century so far.

Starting with the last bit of idiocy:

Yahwistic
adjective
Yah·​wis·​tic yä-ˈwi-stik -ˈvi-
1: characterized by the use of Yahweh as the name of God
2: of or relating to Yahwism

First Known Use

1874, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Merriam Websters online

Walter Breuggemann has published more than a hundred books, both scholarly and for a general audience, I'd guess he's probably one of the most seriously read authors in the English language today and in many languages his books have been translated into.  He's still publishing at about the age of 90 and still being widely read.  So I think the opinion of his writing from a washed up scribbler for a recording industry ad-flyer who is reduced to attention getting at a gradually fading out blog which had a little bit of buzz around 2004 counts for very little.  

You might try to learn to read something more challenging than the level that Readers Digest catered to but I'd think it's probably too little, too late.  Much, much too late.   Readers of serious theology get used to keeping things in mind for the length of a long sentence, paragraph and page, those whose formation was mostly sitting in front of a TV or movie screen don't get that.  It does make a difference. 

Update:  Simps goes on to say:

you got me on the currency of the word Yahwistic, although I must say it still gives me much pleasure to imagine you using it in casual conversation.

If I had a dollar for every time I got you on your lexicographic incompetence I'd be able to by the OED in hardback.   I've never used the word thought like so many others I know what it means.   You get that from reading and, you know, looking up words you don't know.   You just don't get that from TV and movies.

I Love That Republican Fascists Are Upset Over Eisenhower's Cultural Ambassador's Refreshing of That Over Cracked Chestnut

THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS are whipping up their patented pretend horror over Duke Ellington's arrangements of The Nutcracker being danced to by Black People at the White House.   They know their audience is based entirely in hatred of Black People and People of Color, so of course that's what they've been doing.  I heard one FOX Lies a-hole saying it was "Marxist" which is pretty hilarious considering the use of American Jazz in the cultural struggle against the Soviet Union as well as Nazi Germany.  And Duke Ellington?  I had to get over him going to the Nixon White House, you know the quintessential Red-baiter, the guy who had the kitchen debate with Khrushchev?  

Is there any better reason than to post some of what they hate?

They've got the whole thing at Youtube.   It's worth listening to.  I wish the Bidens would have that dance troop in to do the whole thing and really piss them off.  Maybe next year after Biden wins reelection by a landslide. 

Darkest Night - Patrick Cornelius - Music For The Night of Solstice

 

Patrick Cornelius - alto saxophone
Kristjan Randalu - piano
Michael Janisch - double bass
Paul Wiltgen - drums

This insistence on the reality of brokenness flies in the face of the Enlightenment practice of denial

CONTINUING ON with An Unsettling God:

Fissure at the Center of Reality

At the center of reality is a deep, radical, painful, costly fissure that will, soon or late, break every self-arranged pattern of well-being.  This claim is exposited in the texts of the Deuteronomic tradition, the prophetic lawsuits, the complaint psalms, and the theology of the book of Job.  In the Old Testament, no creatureley arrangement survives YHWH's governance unscathed - not mighty Babylon, not the temple of YHWH's presence in Jerusalem, not the beloved Davidic king to whom YHWH has made unconditional promises.   The chosen people are forced into exile, people suffer and die, nations and empires fall, and floods come to the earth.  It cannot be helped, and it cannot be avoided.

We have seen, moreover, that Israel's struggle to bear true witness about the reality is complicated and unresolved.  Much of the nullity besetting the partners of YHWH comes as a consequence of sin and defiance, as punishment of the sovereign, but there is more.  The partner who suffers is often perpetrator, but also sometimes victim.   Sometimes the partner is victim of YHWH's negligence, whereby the hosts of the Nihil run rampant in the earth; sometimes the partner is victim of YHWH's mean-spirited irascibility . . . sometimes.

In any case, as perpetrator or as victim of as both, the partner of YHWH must make claim against YHWH.  It is in this context that Israel voices its counter-testimony, Israel seizes the initiative against YWHW's protests YHWH's hiddenness, unreliability and negativity.  Sometimes - not always - these protests lead to restoration and rehabilitation of the resolve of YHWH.

This insistence on the reality of brokenness flies in the face of the Enlightenment practice of denial.  Enlightenment rationality, in its popular, uncritisized form, teaches that with enough reason and resources, brokenness can be avoided.  And so Enlightenment rationality, in its frenzied commercial advertising, hucksters the goods of denial and avoidance:  denial of headaches and perspiration and loneliness.  Impotence and poverty and shame, embarrassment and, finally, death.  In such ideology there are no genuinely broken people.  When brokenness intrudes into such an assembly of denial, as surely it must,  it comes as failure, stupidity, incompetence, and guilt.  The church, so wrapped in the narrative of denial, tends to collude in this.  When denial is transposed into guilt - into personal failure - the system of denial remains intact and uncriticized, in the way Job's friends defend the system.

The outcome for the isolated failure is that there can be no healing, for there has not been enough candor to permit it.  In the end, such denial is not only a denial of certain specifics - it is the rejection of the entire drama of brokenness and healing,  the denial that there is an incommensurate Power and Agent who comes in pathos into the brokenness, and who by coming there makes the brokenness a place of possibility.

The denial precludes participation in the candor that assaults the system and makes newness possible.  Israel, of course knew about the practice of denial.  Israel knows how to imagine its own immunity from threat and risk: "As for me, I said in my prosperity, 'I shall never be moved'" (Psalm 30:6).  In its honest embrace of YHWH, however, Israel did not freeze in its denial, but moved on in a way that made newness a possibility:

You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth
and clothed me with joy,
so that my soul may praise you
and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give
Thanks to you forever (Psalm 30:11-12)

"YHWH's hiddenness, unreliability and negativity," means, perhaps, God's ordering of reality as opposed to human preference or personal well-being - not counting those instances when such misfortune is a direct result of human choices made in opposition to God's commandments, certainly accounting for an enormous percentage of such human experience of those things.  It's one of the masterful points in the fable of Job that God's response to Job cites that ordering of the world and that that ordering is in place making, among other things, the existence of other animals possible.   It should also be noted that in the able, God doesn't step in to forbid The Accuser to cause all of Job's misfortunes, The Accuser, I'd guess, also being a part of God's ordering of reality.

"YHWH's negligence, whereby the hosts of the Nihil run rampant in the earth; sometimes the partner is victim of YHWH's mean-spirited irascibility . . . sometimes."  I'd say of the prophets' humanizing of God in the face of the pains and disasters of life.  How else could a human being understand that except as an all too human expression of meanness and irascibility?   Considering how we treat each other and other sentient beings.  

You need to remember that Scripture is a product of human imaginations based in human beings experience of the reality of God, it isn't a direct testimony from God about that reality.  It is an impressively complex and deep series of imaginings of that but it is certainly not "the word of God" in any literal sense.

The accusation of the Enlightenment as a serial denial of reality is certainly true, the very idea that human life is perfectible, that human cleverness will solve or could solve all difficulties even up to and including the insane ideas about tech millionaires and billionaires achieving immortality here in the physical realm by uploading themselves as a computer program,* is a pervasive delusion of both materialist-atheist-scientism and other schemes of utopian outcomes and Protestant fundamentalist misreadings of the book of Revelation.  As I've said, biblical fundamentalism and its reading of scripture is an expression of the same modern period simplification of reality, a serious misreading of Scripture.  Modernist habits of thought can't deal with this literature, though there are other ways to misread it, too.  

The passage that says:

When brokenness intrudes into such an assembly of denial, as surely it must,  it comes as failure, stupidity, incompetence, and guilt.  The church, so wrapped in the narrative of denial, tends to collude in this.  When denial is transposed into guilt - into personal failure - the system of denial remains intact and criticized, in the way Job's friends defend the system.

It describes the ordering into an underclass, the "undeserving poor," those who are "poor through no fault but their own," and a hundred other facile means of denying reality.   If that were not the truth, probably more than half of the commercials on TV wouldn't gain any traction and most of hate-talk media, radio, TV, internet and the vestiges of print on paper would lose their audience.  Manufactured outrage is largely dependent on it.  Both in choosing and focusing on targets and as the motive of those who become addicted to that.   That is what so much "First Amendment" advocacy promotes through its protection.  The United States political system is as indicted by this as ancient Israel was, so is every other human institution, to a huge to a small extent.

* In an earlier and more primitive form of the same thing, the idea was that you could have your corpse frozen and preserved until medical science could overcome whatever killed you.  That the true believers in science neglected to think of what I heard one person point out, that when meat is frozen most of the cell structures are destroyed as water crystalizes, shows how such a faith seems to regularly lead to the crudest of pseudo-science and sci-fi.  The sad saga of what happened to the flash-frozen head of Ted Williams, frozen by his sad, pathetic son should have ended that industry, though I doubt it did.  Such artifacts of the ideological-religious belief in science and its powers should be studied more because those are ubiquitous and dangerous.  The faith in the methods of sociology that leads to a stupid faith in opinion polling has a malignant effect on politics. 

Not Wishing To Engage In Reductionism

THESE LAST FEW DAYS of Advent, in my too few postings from An Unsettling God by Walter Brueggemann, I'm going to skip to the very end of the book.  Maybe in the coming Christmas season I'll go over some of what I left out.  I may not even get to give you all of the ending but only fragments of it.  The book, for me at least, is one of the most important ones I've read in the past thirty years and is really worth the reading on its own.

In the section "Materials for a Metanarrative, which Walter Bruggemann admits is an imposition he says:

 "I am profoundly ill at ease with the use of the term "metanarrative," by which I mean simply a more or less coherent perspective on reality.  I am ill at ease, first, because I am impressed with the plurality, diversity, and fragmented quality of the Old Testament text, and have no wish to engage in reductionism. . .

This is such a succinct summary of what makes Scripture so unsuited for a modern reading, a reading as if it were a systematic philosophical text, a scientific text, or even a coherent reporting of history.  Having praised the best sort of most recent modern historical writing so recently and reading this passage this week makes me realize that that level of historical writing faces the diversity and fragmented quality of the historical record in a way that either a fundamentalist reading of it as reliable on its face or a less honestly presented reductionist use of it in service to an a priori theme, something which is bound to tell us at least as much about the motives of the historian as it does about the actual past.  If you want a good example, look at the reaction to history that includes the experience of People of Color, Women, religious and ethnic minorities by American white supremacists, a white, elite metanarrative being what most Americans' view of our history consists of.  Considering the use of scripture by the part of our culture governed by our traditional form of fascism, nominally Christian white supremacists, I don't think the political analogy is irrelevant.  What can I say?  People tend to think in the same patterns out of habit, no matter what the subject matter.  That's why so many of the scientistic atheists insist that everyone reads Scripture and does religion like a fundamentalist, fundamentalism shares the same habits with their chosen framing of reality.*  In my case, perhaps, I am open that I am a political blogger and so a political analogy will be the first that comes to me.  I could come up with some others from science, too, though I won't just now.  

. . . Second, I am ill at ease with the term because I take seriously, along with my deconstructionist friends and colleagues, Jean- Francois Lyotard's suspicion of metanarrative, with its hegemonic potential.  For all that, however, I am impressed with the odd-Yawistically odd and Jewishly odd - offer of a perspective in these texts that clearly is in profound tension with the regnant metanarratives of our society.  I will settle for the judgment that the Old Testament is not a metanarrative, but offers materials out of which a metanarrative is to be constructed.  I will settle for that, so long as it is recognized that any metanarrative constructed out of these materials must include certain claims and awarenesses that cannot be compromised.  

I will exposit those nonnegotiable awarenesses in relation to Enlightenment liberalism and in relation to the standard claims of classical Christianity. Vis-a-vis the claims of Enlightenment liberalism, Israel's Yahwistic account of brokenness and restoration may yield several enormously important instances.  

Limitless Generosity at the Root of Reality

At the root of reality is a limitless generosity that intends an extravagant abundance.  This claim is exposited in Israel's creation texts, sapiential traditions, and hymnic exubranances.  This insistence flies in the face of the theory of scarcity on which the modern world is built.  An ideology of scarcity produces a competitiveness that issues in brutality, justifies policies of wars and aggression, authorizes an acute individualism, and provides endless anxiety about money, sexuality, physical fitness, beauty, work achievements, and finally morality.  It seems to me that, in the end, all of these anxieties are rooted in an ideology that resists a notion of limitless generosity and extravagant abundance.  

I can't resist pointing out that the truth of that statement in regard to Scripture in general and the Old Testament in particular would make that metaphysical totem of scientism and formal logic, Occam's razor, not only moot but counter productive.   That razor, used to trim down reality into a neat package, might work in some cases but using it on wider reality only produces illusions of completeness.   The extent to which that might negate modern approaches to Scripture should be considered more.

That statement, that notion of "limitless generosity and extravagant abundance" flies in the face of not only our own notions of common sense, it is in direct opposition to the ruling hegemonic framing of reality in the sciences, natural selection.**  I will mention, again, that my critique of Darwinism was, originally motivated by my having read the literature and knowing that the common received metanarrative of it, failure to accept which will result in your being expelled from the fellowship of "right thinking people, is based exactly in this modernist view of the world as a violent struggle for material sustenance and more.  That choice of science was made when Darwin chose Malthus as his framing of biological reality.  It is inevitably going to result in that list of woes and neurotic obsessions that Brueggemann lists above.  


It is a hard question how literally and how seriously to take Israel's lyrical claims, which Israel itself often did not take seriously.  Do these claims mean simply that all mankind should be nice and share, and we will all get along? [That's not a bad place to start, actually.] Do they mean that as we trust abundance, we will learn a kind of joy that does not need so much?  Or might they mean, in a venturesome antimodern stance , that the genuine practice of trust causes the earth to produce more, so that justice evokes the blessings of the earth?  That is the claim of the blessing theology of Leviticus 26:3-13 and Deuteronomy 28:1-14.  From the perspective of our several Enlightenment metanarratives, such a claim is outrageous and absurd.  But the outrage may at bottom signify nothing more than the totalizing power of the ideology of scarcity.  One must depart from the narrative of scarcity in order to host this lyrical affirmation of generosity and abundance, a departure to which Israel is summoned each time it engaged in worship and reflection.  

There are so many examples in Scripture and in the lives of the saints that could be mentioned here.  I remember once when my dear old materialist-atheist Latin teacher who in showing off his etymological erudition on the word "beatus" commented that the saints weren't very happy, I mentioned St. Francis in refutation.  He rather condescendingly remarked that he thought Francis was rather simple minded.  I learned a lot about the framing of materialist-atheist-scientism from my arguments with him, though I was still, officially an agnostic back then.  Agnosticism is a stance of cowardly laziness and the superstition that we don't choose to believe what we believe.  It awaits an revelation that is based on notional emotion instead of reasoning choice.   But I digress.  

That human beings are fallible, that the best of human beings is radically limited in our capacity to live faithfully to this tradition is to be expected - as I've mentioned over and over again, one of the most convincing things I find about the Hebrew Scriptures is that it is confessional about the consequences of its own sinfulness and weakness and folly.  I find the enduring moral protest of the Prophetic tradition to entirely outweigh the vainglorious claims and slanders against God in the "historical" books and some of the "wisdom" literature out of which so much conventional  religiosity favored by those with worldly power (including many a corrupt minister, priest, bishop, etc.).  The corruption of centers of religious power are as much confessed as the corruption of secular power and as often taken wrongly by those who create many theological metanarratives in service of that.  The pettiness of the power in many cases and cults doesn't matter anymore than it does in the most corrupt eras of the Western Papacy or the present Patriarchy of Moscow or the Islamic Republic in Iran or the High Priesthood in Israel.  As you can see, I can find myriads of political analogues to fill out a discussion of this passage, it's no wonder I took to this book so much.  

Since this exercise started in me deciding to read Brueggemann's book during Advent, I will ask you to consider the outrageous claims of the Magnificat, the Song of Mary which talks of God filling those with the least, with "good things" and the rich, those with the most, being deposed from their seats of power and being sent away empty.  It's something of a miracle that such a song could have withstood the millennia of even those who recited it daily not really believing that's the way reality was constructed.   If the Catholic hierarchy, all of whom, after some point in history, would have heard that and sung it or recited it hundreds of times a year had believed it, the obscene opulence of the Vatican would never have been built and the Reformation may never have happened, certainly not happened as it did.  The scandalous history of Christian churches, for the most part, would not have been what they were.  But I think even in the case of many of the most modest, often some of the less worldly churches would have been far different.  The competitive assertions of their particular lines of dogma and doctrine, their own peculiar theological certainties may not have arisen if they didn't buy into the narrative of scarcity.  One of the things that many Christian religions seem to think is in shortest supply it is God's love and God's mercy and God's forgiveness, especially God's patience with our own limited abilities and susceptibility to being wrong and weak.  If God didn't have those in mind he'd certainly not provide a special place for the least among us, the weak, many times weak on their being unable to navigate reality.  


* I have been thinking more and more as I read not only about the crisis in science from the failures replicability and peer review but in the most hegemonic of all scientific framings, physics, that what may be happening is that physicists are finding that the physical universe is far, far more complex than their ideological framing of their science has ever held it to be.  The arrogant, cocksure assurance that we are on the verge of them achieving a theory of everything when they know they have no such a theory of even one subatomic particle - and I really mean one single electron in the entire universe of them - is a good indication that the pride that idea is based in is sheer folly.  That's one of the reasons I think the idea that basing any belief in God on the current and almost certainly temporary claims of cosmology or biology is as much folly as basing a claim of disbelief of God on those.   That Sean Carroll, with whom I share that one brief interaction with, seems to base his science on the hope that cosmology will put the last nail in God's coffin is so sure of the ever impending theory of everything is, I think due to him buying into the common received narratives of "enlightenment" modernism and it being such a strong part of his emotional life and intellectual habits.  In doing so he must reject that there is the crisis in his kind of physics, as discussed by Peter Woit in that video I posted here.  Woit, as well, buys into that framing but he's honest enough to know a crisis when he sees one.  

I think it's interesting that the rigorous scientist who is regularly branded a heretic by conventional scientists, the eminent biologist Rupert Sheldrake, just gets on with things.  He noted in one of his more recent lectures that the most interesting scientific publications in Nature, in recent years, have been in the far less ideological and less systematically ambitious area of material physics.   Maybe since Sheldrake is a Christian and probably believes it really is a sin to lie about reality, he can roll with the ups and downs of science while so many others seen to be rather more febrile about it.  That isn't to say I agree with everything Sheldrake says, he still believes in natural selection, after all.  I think it's a habitually conditioned illusion based in Malthusian expressions of the ideology of scarcity, not much more sophisticated than the dreams of Pharaoh in the end of Genesis.  Brueggemann on the betrayal of the Hebrew tradition by Joseph as Pharaoh's food Czar is also interesting to think about.  I think biology is entirely more complex than can be dealt with in one theory and I think that particular theory is an especially bad one since it's impossible to observe or measure and consists entirely in imaginary impositions on what can be seen.  Even as much of that cannot be proven to be relevant to the evolution of life on the ancient Earth.

** See also: Marilynne Robinson's fine essay on "Austerity" reprinted in When I Was A Child I Read Books.  Come to think of it, her essay "Darwinism" from The Death of Adam is certainly relevant.  

The Earliest Account Of A Manger Scene

Now three years before his death it befell that he was minded, at the town of Greccio, to celebrate the memory of the Birth of the Child Jesus, with all the added solemnity that he might, for the kindling of devotion. That this might not seem an innovation, he sought and obtained license from the Supreme Pontiff, and then made ready a manger, and bade hay, together with an ox and an ass, be brought unto the spot. The Brethren were called together, the folk assembled, the wood echoed with their voices, and that august night was made radiant and solemn with many bright lights, and with tuneful and sonorous praises. The man of God, filled with tender love, stood before the manger, bathed m tears, and overflowing with joy. Solemn Masses were celebrated over the manger, Francis, the Levite of Christ, chanting the Holy Gospel. Then he preached unto the folk standing round of the Birth of the King in poverty, calling Him, when he wished to name Him, the Child of Bethlehem, by reason of his tender love for Him. A certain knight, valorous and true, Messer John of Greccio, who for the love of Christ had left the secular army, and was bound by closest friendship unto the man of God, declared that he beheld a little Child right fair to see sleeping in that manger. Who seemed to be awakened from sleep when the blessed Father Francis embraced Him in both arms. This vision of the devout knight is rendered worthy of belief, not alone through the holiness of him that beheld it, but is also confirmed by the truth that it set forth, and withal proven by the miracles that followed it. For the ensample of Francis, if meditated upon by the world, must needs stir up sluggish hearts unto the faith of Christ, and the hay that was kept back from the manger by the folk proved a marvellous remedy for sick beasts, and a prophylactic against divers other plagues, God magnifying by all means His servant, and making manifest by clear and miraculous portents the efficacy of his holy prayers. 

from The Life of St. Francis of Assisi by St. Bonaventure

Talk About Synchronicity

I DECIDED TO GO back online this afternoon after trying to deal with the Windows 8 on a rather nice and hardly used laptop my brother-in-law gave me - reminding me of why I gave up windows after one of its more disastrous mandated, involuntary updates that made all of our computers around here crash.   I decided to see if I could find a tutorial about my problem at Youtube University - I couldn't.  But I saw that an hour ago Mark Vernon posted a video exactly in line with my rather cranky post immediately below.  

On The Incarnation or The Real Meaning of Christmas 

I Wish You A Serious Christmas

A RELATIVE OF MINE told me about encountering a Republican-fascist, FOX Lies viewer who was ranting and raving irrelevantly about "not being allowed to say Merry Christmas!".     She challenged the dolt to say when someone told her she couldn't say Merry Christmas and the dim bulb couldn't even invent someone telling her that.   If you decorated a tree with Trumpzis I doubt it would add up to a watt in power draw. 

I don't say "Merry Christmas" because I don't like how people make merry at Christmas,  the commercialization, mostly.   I would bet you that if you asked a truly representative sample of Americans what their conception of the Incarnation was, a very large majority would think it had something to do with cars.  

I have never enjoyed Christmas as much as I have since I pulled out of American Christmas, no presents accepted or given, no merry making, no tree (though I like RMJ's dowel tree picture) minimal fuss with baking and cooking.  I go to my family party to see the people there, that's as much as I want of that. 

I've been thinking of how St. Francis, the person who did so much to a religious celebration of Christmas, would have celebrated Christmas.  One thing he did was more or less invent the manger scene, I prefer one with shepherds and animals and not so much the anachronistic three kings stuff.  I'm sure his manger scene was small and rudimentary.   Another thing that I make sure I do is follow his instruction to feed the birds and animals during Christmas season - something that the price of birdseed has made a more considerable expense than it used to be.  Considering the Rule of the earliest Franciscans, anything they did would have thought about the Incarnation, God made flesh, choosing to become one with us and all flesh through Jesus.   That's more than enough to deal with at Christmas.  

Have a thoughtful Christmas, a really thoughtful one. That's something FOX Lies would never be in favor of because they don't like thinking.    Give to those who won't ever gift you back.  Who you don't know, who you can't see.  Put some bird food down and don't get pissed off when the squirrels eat it.  They need to eat, too.   I think I'll order some tree seeds.  I've been thinking of trying to grow some of those mostly-American chestnut trees that might survive the ravages of liberal democracy in the stupidest form of free trade.  

Maginficat in c minor - George Dyson

 

 

Sung by the Choristers of Lichfield Cathedral.

"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.

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

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